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Happy editing! Shot info (talk) 07:51, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

I got into a muddle with my first couple of edits on a talk page and ended up signing them twice, but I don't think I have forgotten to sign any. Could you show me an example that you think is me, please.OffTheFence (talk) 08:01, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Welcome to wikipedia. You and I may have different points of view on homeopathy, but I hope that we can be gentleman and follow wiki policies. I hope that we can also assume good faith WP:AGF. Because you've come on to the scene here at a similar time that some previous editors who followed me around were blocked for sockpuppetry, I hope that you have learned (or will learn) from their mistakes. DanaUllman 06:51, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

I have no idea what you are talking about. I do not edit under my real name, because my contact details are in the public realm and when I first started engaging with members of the alt.med. community under my real name a couple showed unpleasant stalking tendencies so I retreated behind pseudonym. I do not edit at Misplaced Pages under any name other than OffTheFence. As far as I can see you are not being pursued by one individual, but many different people challenge your views because they are wrong.OffTheFence (talk) 08:01, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

p.s. I restrict my comments to the discussion pages because I currently have no desire or time to get involved with the minutiae of the stylistic requirements for the articles themselves.OffTheFence (talk) 08:04, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Personal commentary and original research

You wrote: "Linde was not a competent judge." That is not for Misplaced Pages to decide, I hope you understand our policies on WP:OR do not allow us to make judgments on the competency of reliable sources. If you have other reliable sources that are critical of Linde, they should be supplied. I really think your demands upon Dana Ullman to engage in meta-analysis are unreasonable, Linde performed a meta-analysis, and you disparaging him as incompetent does not help matters. —Whig (talk) 17:16, 22 February 2008 (UTC) This meta-analysis is flawed. Linde also had to publish a correction to his 1997 clinical meta-analysis. We are interacting on a talk page not the article itself. I have no desire to include a formal comment on Linde in the Article.OffTheFence (talk) 17:41, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Is Linde's correction relevant and if so why should we not comment on it in the article? —Whig (talk) 20:18, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Again, I'm afraid I'm not getting the point you are making. I was making an off-the-cuff comment on Linde on the Talk page. If there was a wiki on Linde himself, doubtless this fact would be relevant. In the current context it is just an amusing sidelight.OffTheFence (talk) 21:04, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

By the way, I was so intent on the talk page http://en.wikipedia.org/Talk:Arsenicum_album of Ars alb, that I had not notice that Ullman had elected to make edits to the main article that are definitely not consensual though he claimed in the edit summary that this was the case. "23:52, 21 February 2008 DanaUllman (Talk | contribs) (6,182 bytes) (→Research studies: Changes per Talk page)" I have removed the tendentious material from his edit and made it more NPOV and verifiable. If he has a problem with this then I would suggest that he backs up what he has repeatedly claimed about the Cazin and Linde papers but has failed so far to do. OffTheFence (talk) 21:04, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

p.s. I find the royal plural pronoun a little nauseating "I hope you understand our policies on WP:OR do not allow us to make judgments on the competency of reliable sources". In wikipedia I am just as much "us" as you are. It is not a secret boys club. It's rules are just its rules, they are not god-given tablets of stone. Clearly in the handling of material from scientific journals they are hugely deficient. As I have said elsewhere, "peer-reviewed" does not equate with high-quality. If something is peer-reviewed but demonstrably rubbish then it is not "reliable" in any sense of the word. If wikipedia's rules cannot cope with that then it is the rules that are wrong not the assessment of the evidence.OffTheFence (talk) 22:24, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm sorry you don't like Misplaced Pages's rules. You are just as much an editor as I am, but you are a new editor and you do not know the policies very well, as you seem to think that the verifiability policy is optional. It is one of the three foundational policies of Misplaced Pages, the other two are NPOV and NOR. We (and this includes you if you choose to remain an editor and abide by the policies) do not make judgments about the competency of sources or the truth, these are matters for other secondary or tertiary sources which can be cited if they are reliable and verifiable.

—Whig (talk) 04:25, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

It's not that I don't like the rules, but they are ill-suited to the job in this circumstance. If something that is obviously and objectively false can be cited verifiably from a "reliable source" where Misplaced Pages's narrow definition of reliable means merely that it needs to have been peer-reviewed AND where that obvious falsehood is has not been pointed out by another verifiable reliable source then that falsehood cannot be balanced within he article pages. To put it in Misplaced Pages's language: an objective falsehood can be both WP:RS and WP:VERIFIABLE, but require WP:OR to demonstrate that it is false. In the instance we have been discussing, no one in the mainstream scientific community would waste their time debunking a trivial paper like Cazin's so it just sits there ignored until someone with a specific agenda picks it up, disregards the normal processes of assessment of study quality and tendentiously exploits it. Misplaced Pages is simply a bad source from which to derive information in contentious areas, but its rules can be used to minimise the problem through interactive editing and discussion amongst editors. But this does "assume good faith". If an editor wants to deliberately engineer the inclusion of objective falsehoods then the rules are weak at preventing this.OffTheFence (talk) 07:43, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

p.s. " you seem to think that the verifiability policy is optional". You have confused necessity and sufficiency. Verifiability is a necessity and rightly so. But, it is not sufficient and it can be made to seem sufficient and this is a problem. "do not make judgments about the competency of sources or the truth" Huh? In an article one would not do this unless a verifiable and reliable source could be found for it, but you are getting very close to demanding that we come to these discussions having put all ability to judge the quality of evidence to one side. I would not include material that was not verifiable nor from a reliable source, but I would not deliberately put in anything that I had been shown was unreliable in the normal sense because that is a matter of simple human ethics. Would you add something that you knew to be false in an article by exploiting the verifiability, reliable source rules?OffTheFence (talk) 07:51, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Homeopathy article probation notification

You should be aware that Homeopathy and related articles are under probation - Editors making disruptive edits to these pages may be banned by an administrator from homeopathy and related articles or project pages. Editors of such articles should be especially mindful of content policies, such as WP:NPOV, and interaction policies, such as WP:CIVIL, WP:NPA, WP:3RR, and WP:POINT. Editors must be individually notified of article probation before being banned. All resulting blocks and bans shall be logged at Talk:Homeopathy/Article probation#Log of blocks and bans, and may be appealed to the Administrators' noticeboard. —Whig (talk) 23:43, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

I am well aware of that, thank you. I was very surprised to find that Dana had inserted the references to Cazin and Linde into the article although no consensus had been reached on them. Have you taken the trouble to warn him that he should not have done this? That is not a rhetorical question. I'd appreciate an answer.OffTheFence (talk) 01:55, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

I find your implicit accusation that my edits have been disruptive deeply offensive. I replaced the word "found" with "claimed". I acknowledged that this was not ideal and told you I had worked that out for myself with you needing to make snippy little comments in the history page. I have inserted the word "reported". You have not come up with any valid argument with that word is not suitable whereas I have produced valid argument that neither "found" nor "observed" is suitable. We have established that your point of view is biased in favour of homeopathy, so please do not pretend that you are an impartial arbiter. If you think I have made a disruptive edit please specify it.OffTheFence (talk) 01:55, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

With respect to all the interaction policies, I am maintaining my temper with yourself and Dana and have remained civil. I'll apologise for making some jokes if you want. Dana has directly accused me of lying. Have you warned him about that? That is also not a rhetorical question. Particularly in regard to WP:POINT and disruption, I have been carefully treading around these issues: "Cannot satisfy Misplaced Pages:Verifiability; fails to cite sources, cites unencyclopedic sources, misrepresents reliable sources" and WP:POINT of which there was very obvious evidence already in existence in what was being attempted at that article when I first arrived. I have explained very simply and politely to Dana that his version of what Linde says is not supported by the actual text of the paper and I have given him the opportunity to retract without making these accusations. Forgive me, Whig, but you do not have the Linde article and are not in a position to judge its content. However I have quoted from it so extensively that you can see Dana is not representing its content accurately. It is more than a little ironic that you are criticising me when I have been trying very long-windedly and gently to explain why he should not use the papers that he has been wanting to use and I have been trying to give him the opportunity to retract.OffTheFence (talk) 01:55, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

By the way, I keep ignoring your comments about referring the contentious material over Linde and Cazin to Misplaced Pages's arbitration mechanisms because unless others have access to the papers then there is no way for them to have a valid opinion as to their content. As I keep saying, Misplaced Pages's rules are singularly ill-suited to resolving matters such as this. Much better to debate as grown-ups and reach a consensus. That would have been helped considerably if Dana had condescended to answer any of the various simple questions about the content of the papers he wants to cite.OffTheFence (talk) 02:00, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages dispute resolution is an integral part of our editing process, arbitration is only the last step in that process when other steps have been exhausted. Your disapproval of Misplaced Pages policies and mechanisms will not serve you well if you wish to continue as an editor. —Whig (talk) 02:12, 24 February 2008

(UTC)

Thank you for your reply. Please consider the following hypothetical situation. Suppose that a "reliable" source contains statements that are demonstrably false. Misplaced Pages is non-judgmental about truth and falsehood, but it does require balancing of viewpoints so that falsehoods are set against their alternative. Overall, this does tend to amplify the apparent significance of minority false opinion, but those are Misplaced Pages's rules and I don't have an alternative set hidden up my sleeve. But, what if their falsity requires careful reading and interpretation of the source material AND that no other "reliable" source is available which clearly comments on that falsity, probably because the mainstream view has paid no attention to the source and its content? There is thus no balancing view available from the world outside that "reliable" source. If the "reliable" source is proven in discussion to contain falsehoods, but it satisfies the requirements of "verifiability" "notability" "reliability", do you maintain it should be allowed to be cited in the Article space without comment as to its incorrectness or should the Talk page discussion be the place where consensus is reached that it should not enter the Article?OffTheFence (talk) 08:16, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Consider further the situation where an editor may vexatiously persist in submitting falsely based material via the mechanism above but because of the effort and time involved to reveal the deception ultimately the opponents may become exhausted and stop making the effort. I don't see a mechanism whereby this tendentious and determined editor will ultimately be restrained. Do you?OffTheFence (talk) 08:16, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Furthermore, I probably don't want to continue as an editor for exactly the reasons I have described. Balance is a problem where a minority persists in advocating incorrect ideas in the teeth of the evidence. I can do no better than to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes "Do you think I don't understand what my friend, the Professor, long

ago called THE HYDROSTATIC PARADOX OF CONTROVERSY? Don't know what that means?--Well, I will tell you. You know, that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way,--AND THE FOOLS KNOW IT." And no I don't have an original copy of the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" sitting by my keyboard, but even if Holmes were fictitious and even if that book didn't exist, the point being made is valid. A bit like that Aztec thing.OffTheFence (talk) 08:29, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

I am going to answer you once. I will not engage in an ongoing discussion about this here, because I have explained it before. If you believe that there is false information that is being presented, find a verifiable, reliable source that criticizes it. We cannot decide what is true or false in many parts of the encyclopedia, for instance is it true that cannabis is an ingredient in the holy anointing oil? I believe so, but many people disagree, and calamus is the more usual translation. As you can see, this is an article that I have had involvement in, and I would invite you to take a look at it in order to understand how I view policy. I treat homeopathy in the same way. I believe it works, many people do not. Both views should be represented by verifiable, reliable sources. Truth does not enter into it. —Whig (talk) 08:24, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but you have not answered the direct question. I have told you the reasons why no wiki:verifiable or wiki:reliable source may exist to confront some kinds of false information. Are you really saying that if there is false information being presented but no wiki:verifiable or wiki:reliable source to set against it then that information can enter the Article space unchallenged?OffTheFence (talk) 08:32, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

If it will make it easier. let me work through an example that does not involve the currently contentious issues. Let us say that a "reliable" source is being relied upon to present information about the heights of 5 mountains. Say the source reports that the average height is 10,000ft and for some reason this information is vital to the point than an editor thinks it is essential to make. But say there is information in the source that allows it to be calculated by the reader and the average height is 5,000ft. No one else has ever commented on this, but for some reason inclusion in an article of this 10,000ft figure has become essential in the opinion of one editor. What happens now??OffTheFence (talk) 08:39, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

WP:DR. —Whig (talk) 09:27, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/User:Raymond_arritt/Expert_withdrawalOffTheFence (talk) 09:52, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

I am not the only one!

It's nice to have one's prejudices confirmed, but sad that they should be confirmed in this way. http://en.wikipedia.org/User:Raymond_arritt/Expert_withdrawal OffTheFence (talk) 09:10, 24 February 2008 (UTC)