Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 10:31, 22 April 2007

Please make a section for your evidence and add evidence only in your own section. Please limit your evidence to a maximum 1000 words and 100 diffs; a shorter, concise presentation is more likely to be effective. Please focus on the issues raised in the complaint and on diffs which illustrate behavior which relates to the issues. If you disagree with some evidence you see here, please cite the evidence in your own section and provide counter-evidence, or an explanation of why the evidence is misleading. Do not edit within the evidence section of any other user.

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Evidence presented by Nealparr

The term pseudoscience is often applied to parapsychology without a source matching the claim

I should start by saying that I don't have the time to go through all the histories of all the articles to find examples of individual editors applying the term pseudoscience to parapsychology without sourcing. Since I'm just looking for a statement from the committee that can be referred to in the future (saying hopefully something along the lines of "when applying the term pseudoscience to parapsychology, the statement should be well attributed and well sourced"), I hope that elaborate evidence isn't needed. Hopefully the following examples that it has happened will suffice. Please let me know if it doesn't.

The worse example that I've seen of unsourced labeling of pseudoscience on parapsychology would be this edit by an anonymous user.

The article I've recently worked on where the term pseudoscience was improperly attached to parapsychology is the List_of_pseudosciences_and_pseudoscientific_concepts where I pretty much had to beg for a source to be added that actually said "parapsychology".

The category of pseudoscience is sometimes applied to parapsychology without a source matching the claim

An example of the pseudoscience category being applied to parapsychology unsourced: There's numerous other examples, but they all look pretty much like this for the category addition.

Categories are difficult to source. I'm well aware of that. But I believe that an association to pseudoscience should be sourced in the article itself. There was a straw poll on the talk page of parapsychology discussing this very thing. At the time, I also mistakenly thought that adding the category as related to the topic was alright. This is before I read the guidelines on how the term pseudoscience should be used at Misplaced Pages. I now feel that in order for the pseudoscience category to be applied to an article, there should be a sourced statement about pseudoscience in the article itself (there sometimes are, but not always).

At the time of the category debates, and to this date, the statement in the second paragraph of the article, "The field is regarded by critics as a pseudoscience," goes unsourced.

Parapsychology is not an obvious pseudoscience

Still writing this.

Evidence presented by User:JzG

Inappropriate advocacy

In the originalo request, Tom Butler says this: "This is not about an editor misbehaving in Misplaced Pages. This is just a turf war between people who think these subjects should be honestly presented and people who are offended by any suggestion of something outside of mainstream science."

This exemplifies the problem perfectly. To represent this as a turf war is factually wrong - WP:NPOV is canonical policy, and pro-science editors have repeatedly referenced this policy. Moreover, to represent the dispute in terms which imply that sympathetic portrayal of paranormal subjects is "honest" and scientific realism is some kind of religious doctrine which is "offended" by that is both grossly offensive to the other parties in the dispute, and an implicit repudiation of WP:NPOV. It is akin to portraying the Biblical inerrantist view as "honest" in creationism and the scientific rationalist perspective as being offended by this "truth".

WP:NPOV allows for minority and fringe views to be described, but not in terms which obscures the fact that they are minority or finrge views, per Misplaced Pages:Requests for arbitration/Pseudoscience. We are al aware that some people believe Elvis was abducted by aliens, that does not mean we should document that theory as fact and discount scientific rationalist dissent as simply editors who are "offended" by the notion that it goes against science.

Butler describes this edit as "disgusting". it was an autobiographical edit, and the subject changed "his contract was not renewed" to "he left". The cited source, an interview with the subject, says this:

Dean: Well, I was expecting to get a continuation contract. Every six months you'd get a new contract. Then one day I got a separation contract, and I said, what is that? They said that the university has decided it no longer wants to engage in the research you're doing.

I listened, looked at my boss, and I said, they can't be serious. You can't not renew somebody's contract because you don't happen to like the topic of the research-- because that's a violation of rule number one of academic freedom, which is not just the principle, it's actually written down as part of the rule. You can't do this. So when I protested they immediately changed their tune. And every time they raised another issue I challenged that, and they kept changing it, over and over and over. Finally it became very clear that they wanted me out no matter what. So I figured, well, they don't want me here, I don't want to stay, and so I left.

In other words, he didn't leave, his contract was not renewed, precisely as the article suggests. The language used to describe Minderbinder's conduct here, which appears entirely in line with WP:ATT, WP:NPOV and WP:BLP, suggests a level of emotional investment in the content by Butler at least which is not conducive to neutrality.

Evidence presented by {your user name}

before using the last evidence template, please make a copy for the next person

{Write your assertion here}

Place argument and diffs which support your assertion; for example, your first assertion might be "So-and-so engages in edit warring", which should be the title of this section. Here you would show specific edits to specific articles which show So-and-so engaging in edit warring.

{Write your assertion here}

Place argument and diffs which support the second assertion; for example, your second assertion might be "So-and-so makes personal attacks", which should be the title of this section. Here you would show specific edits where So-and-so made personal attacks.