Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 20:45, 2 February 2006

/Archive

Re: vandal

He's on the watchlist. If he vandalises after 4th warning list it at WP:AIV --Winter 21:22, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

69.231.204.185 Spammer

Thanks for the reversion of the User:69.231.204.185 linkspammer. If you get tired of writing out messages to linkspammers, some templates could be useful for you. Add {{Spam}} (or {{Spam2}} or {{Spam3}} as appropriate) to the user's talk page for spamming. Usually the users are just new to wikipedia and the warnings are reminders of policy. It also documents that they have been warned, so they can be blocked if it becomes necessary. More stuff at Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Spam. Thanks and great work! --Hansnesse 07:24, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

PRT mediation

Thank you for mediating this dispute.

Things have settled down somewhat in the last day or so. Avidor has stopped re-applying the neutrality tag every time we removed it, so it may have resolved itself.

But it could also be just a temporary cease fire, so your assistance is still desired and much appreciated.

A Transportation Enthusiast 12:38, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for contacting me, KrazyCaley,

I don't expect this article to read like what I've written about PRT. I am a critic of PRT. I'm not sure I want to have a part in writing this PRT Misplaced Pages page.

Contributors are welcome to quote and link to anything I've written about PRT.

Misplaced Pages contributors do not have my permission to twist my words. It is okay to describe me as "a cartoonist", but it may be more informative to readers to mention that I am a transit advocate and that I have written about transportation for several publications. I am also the Transportation Editor for the new Twin Cities Daily Planet:

]

I do expect that every claim be linked to relevent web sites so that readers can see for themselves if the claim is backed up by the facts.

I want to see plain, easy to understand language used in the introduction.

I expect that that opinion be labled as such.

If critics are mentioned, I want to see them treated with respect. Quotes and links. There can be no good reason to mention me and not Professor Vukan Vuchic who is a professor of transportation at Penn State.

Information should be as up-to-date as possible. Skyloop for instance was rejected by Cincinatti back in 2001. Ford's "Prism" is also history.

PRT is an unproven concept... I would like to see the present tense removed..."it may", "it could" instead of "it is".

Most of all I want it to look like a wiki, lots of links...links...links.

Thanks,

Ken Avidor Avidor 05:26, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

KrazyCaley,

Let me put it bluntly: Avidor is an extremist. I don't know why or how he became that way (I don't know him personally) but make no mistake: he is completely irrational about this topic. He spends his days writing letters to editors all over the world, and infiltrating PRT forums everywhere with anti-PRT propaganda (sometimes even using multiple usernames so it appears there are multiple people saying the same things on the forum).

On two occasions now, he has vandalized this Misplaced Pages page. The first time (in April 2005), he replaced the entire text with a paranoid political rant. The second time was a few days ago, when he deleted 90% of it.

He will not (cannot) rest until PRT has been eradicated from the planet, and the more it spreads (now in Korea, UK, Sweden, etc), the more desperate he becomes. He is convinced that this technology is a tool of the highway industry, which uses PRT to "divide and conquer" transit proposals in order to kill his beloved light rail projects.

Take a look at just how much letter writing this man has done:

Every one of these letters make the same argument: PRT is a hoax and a fraud, a tool of the auto/highway industry.

Let's take a step back and analyze this. PRT started in the 1960s. It has been researched and studied by literally hundreds (likely thousands) of researchers in the last forty years. Very intelligent men have made this technology their life work. There are now companies investing billions of dollars in at least 5 different countries on 3 continents, in various forms of personal rapid transit.

All of the above are verifyable facts. Most of it is documented in the links section, and in the books listed in the references section. There is no denying that this technology exists.

Now, given all that, do you really believe that this technology is nothing but a hoax created by the highway industry to stall light rail projects? Can you really trust the motives, the neutrality, of someone who has such a paranoid, ridiculous viewpoint?

Certainly, the article has a few issues. Sdedeo identified a few suspect words and removed them. He also complained about the lack of links. But the references are there! Those books (which are not online) cover just about everything that is in this article. This is a real emerging technology. Now, this doesn't mean it's guaranteed not to fail when it's deployed; of course every new technology has its own stumbling blocks (especially something as complex as this). But that doesn't mean it's not real.

Avidor will not quit. Despite Sdedeo's comments today, the NPOV is back up there again, and he has a new set of complaints. This will not end. He will continue to do this because wants to be able to point to some piece of evidence that PRT is a fraud. He is using this endless neutrality challenge to further his extremist cause.

Please don't facilitate this mockery any longer.

A Transportation Enthusiast 06:33, 2 February 2006 (UTC)