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This is going to require me to address the conduct more thoroughly, and of more editors, because there were overlapping discussions involving more than one editor among those I've characterized as engaged in advocacy (whether adding promotional, primary source-based material or obstructing critical material from secondary sources) on the Sam Harris article.--Ubikwit_{見学/迷惑} 09:35, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

The Harris material looks to be very tangential, at best, to the scope of the case, which is American politics, as it seems primarily to relate to Harris' views on religion. Could you please explain how that's within scope here? This isn't meant to be a laundry list of every grievance people have against one another. Seraphimblade 13:19, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

The aspect of Harris's writings and speeches that has caused controversy with respect to its political implications seems to be twofold: first, he embraces a form of scientism and applies that to ethics in a manner that has resulted in him being criticized for espousing a (metaphisical, abstracted) form of positivism that is conducive to scientific racism and causes him to discount and/or misrepresent history; secondly, his singling out of Islam as the religion that evaluates most poorly based on those standards has resulted in his being criticized more directly with respect to his statements on Islam, with allegations of having a "right-wing worldview" comparable to his neoconservative supporters regarding Muslims and US policy in the Middle East, promoting "politically-useful bigotry", applying Huntington's "clash of civilizations" interpretation to current political problems, etc.

The conduct issues on that article related to editors seeking to prevent material on the political implications of Harris' views, as discussed by academics writing within the field of their specialization, primarily, into the article. Various arguments were made, with one being that religion and politics are the same in monotheismI quote the editor from this comment, so the material in the subsection on each religion corresponded to political views, making explicit mention of the secondary source commentary redundant he elaborates on his position, etc. As I indicated on his talk page, that seemed to be a strategy aimed at defining a scope excluding material explicitly having political import, which would have preemptively precluded the addition of the material specifically from scholarly sources I was trying to add.

Note that the reception of Harris' views has seen commentary addressing implications with respect to political topics such as US foreign policy, torture, the war on terror, ethnic/racial profiling, "the national security state", etc. A survey of some of the material can be seen in the removed "Political" subsection here.

I see the scenario as follows. Insofar as US politics is caught up in conflicts with Muslims, and insofar as Harris' writings and statements have caused controversy regarding US policy, etc., overlapping with those conflicts, the high-quality RS commentary on his political views is not tangential, and the manifold tendentious attempts to exclude it from Misplaced Pages is an editor conduct issue. If you'd like me to constrain the scope, I'd be happy to adjust my evidence submissions so as to accommodate input from the Committee on this situation in advance.

Here are a few more scholarly sources touching on these issues that haven't even been mentioned in the article yet.--Ubikwit_{見学/迷惑} 15:37, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

I'm afraid Harris is still rather out of scope here, as he's primarily notable for his religious (or anti-religious, as may be) work and views, and he's really not primarily a political figure. We'd rather keep this to political figures and issues than to people who are primarily notable for other things but happen to have talked about politics. The scope will get impossibly overbroad otherwise, as almost everything can be said to touch politics in some way or another, and many people express political views sometime or another. Seraphimblade 04:01, 27 March 2015 (UTC)