User talk:BF (purple grafitti)

I did say that I was coming up to the end of my semester. At the moment, I have several papers to finish up, and I don't have enough time to do major article work. --Stephen Gilbert

No problem. when you got time.

Sure Stephen when you can do it, always welcome. I revised some of New Age already. Nobody altered it as of this writing.

Ive managed to work on New Age some more without anyone over-writing, removing, or revamping. Your opinions are welcome, as always on my graffiti page. If you think the article is close to a done state, maybe Vicki could do some editing to polish it.~BF

1. In my opinion, you have way too much personally invested in that article. It isn't your article. Can you get that through your skull??? It is Wikipedia's article. This means that other people should feel free to overwrite, remove, and revamp your text, it isn't necessarily a bad thing. Often, I think, it's a very good thing, because you sometimes (not always) insist on formulations that just aren't very clear, or that are very far from being neutral point of view.
2. The article is now generally informative and considerably better than at least many of the earlier versions, and it has a lot more content, but it still needs a lot of work.
3. The article still tends toward obfuscation and making it an idiosyncratic reflection of your views about the New Age movement, rather than a report about the movement about which everyone can agree. You say, for example, that the New Age (or the New Age movement--I'm not sure which is your subject) is "that which results from the interaction of pre-existing ideologies with mystical experiential phenomena." I don't know what that means; I'd be more apt to understand what "New Age" means before I understood this explanation of it. It sounds, in any case, like a contentious theory about what the New Age is (has been) about, not a definition of "New Age." Movements are better described and introduced historically, I think: you understand where the New Age stuff came from, and who its main proponents are and what sort of stuff they talk about, and you pretty much understand what the New Age movement is about. Anyway, back to the point: just because the subject invites fuzzy-headedness and "in" jargon and generally weird manners of expression, there's no requirement that the description of the topic indulge in such literary vices. Bear in mind, the article is not nearly as bad as it could be, in this regard, but it still needs work!
4. More minor points: replace all "NA" with "New Age." Why use an abbreviation? It's very jarring to me.
5. Since Wikipedia's software indicates links with underlines, don't use underlines for emphasis; use italics for emphasis (usually).

Some edits were done again on New_Age, Larry. The definition looks ok in paragraph 1. "New Age" replaced NA. The special permission copyrighted sections, which I obtained, were completely messed up by others, who apparently couldn't see quotation marks. Nor do these people, who, as you have said, have "every right to edit any article", even the one done by an MD, SE, understand the effort involved in researching an article and obtaining permissions from well-written sources. What these people do do is take a cursory inspection, remove content, and change the developing context to enhance their inward biases on the subject in general! I may not be a good writer by Wikipedia standards, but I certainly have worked enough, trying to show the actual flavor of the fruit from within its sweet sections. You or others call that bias and non-NPOV. I call it experiential. How do you describe the taste of an orange ? The terms are too vague-- one must taste the orange, and many will say "sweet, slightly burning, juicy." Each orange eater's experience is correct and factual. This is why New Age is a difficult topic; I repeatedly stated in all the talk sections that it is an experiential article. Most of the changes were done by people who never bothered to taste the orange. Another example might be people blind from birth who suddenly recover their eyesight! The analogy suggests people who have never seen the truth, and now do. New Age spirituality is the drastic wake-up call alikened to the blind who now see the light.