| Revision as of 10:36, 17 March 2010 view sourceQ Science (talk | contribs)1,498 edits →The beat goes on ...: I agree← Previous edit | Revision as of 14:51, 17 March 2010 view source MiszaBot III (talk | contribs)597,462 editsm Archiving 6 thread(s) (older than 1d) to User talk:Jimbo Wales/Archive 55.Next edit → | ||
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| == egregious abuse of Misplaced Pages in nearly all climate change BLPs == | |||
| Mr. Wales, | |||
| For the last year I have struggled in vain to balance the abuses of the rights of living climate scientists the world over to have a fair, neutral, accurate biography. A year later, it's safe to say that I have achieved practically nothing, and the reason I have achieved nothing is that your gang of mostly immature, often 20-something editors and admins have closed ranks in nearly all instances to obstruct and thwart all progress. | |||
| I am not the first to notice this. Lawrence Solomon has, of course, written about it in the ''Financial Post'' in Canada a few times, and has blamed the situation personally on two of your editors, William M. Connolley and Kim D. Petersen. I disagree with Lawrence Solomon in blaming these two editors. You created Misplaced Pages. You allow your editors to do what they do. You are the founder and by remaining neutral on flagrant NPOV and BLP abuses, you are responsible, and you should answer to the public. | |||
| Does the public understand that millions of dollars of charitable donations are spent by Misplaced Pages in funding the smearing of the professional reputations of great living scientists such as Richard Lindzen, Roger Pielke Sr., or S. Fred Singer each day? | |||
| I have spent countless hours of the last year defending in vain the biographies of ], ], ], ], and ]. I have even helped out the gang in defending the likes of ] and ] occasionally. I've cleaned up ]'s and ]'s biographies, but this has does little to soften the environmentalist, agenda-driven hatred your editors feel towards anyone perceived to be skeptical of anthropogenic climate change. | |||
| In the whole year, I have not received a single word of support from anyone in the Misplaced Pages Foundation, and practically none of the Misplaced Pages admins have ever helped either. A few skeptics in the admin community have helped, a bit, but most of those apparently see the fight as futile, and no one who simply cares about fairness and policy has ever stepped in to help. <small>This is wrong, I realise. An editor, ATren, did step in, but he seems to have been finally burnt out and driven away now. ] (]) 15:35, 9 March 2010 (UTC) </small> Meanwhile, my own talk page, unedited since I joined, testifies to the bullying I have received, instead, from your editors. | |||
| I should like to let you know that I have in principle approval to write up a first hand, insider's account of what goes on here, at the blog of a very prominent climate scientist. If published, my piece will not be written off as the rantings of a denier, because the scientist is well respected by the mainstream media, and he is not a skeptic. It will largely serve to independently confirm the observations of Mr. Solomon. Except, as I say, I disagree with Lawrence Solomon on one important point: I believe that you are personally responsible; it is wrong to blame all of this on the actions of two well-intentioned, fanatical volunteers. | |||
| Without an effective leader, it is my serious view that Misplaced Pages needs to be forcibly taken over either commercially or by government, for the good of the people. I will be leaving Misplaced Pages, and advocating for such a change, shortly. If, on the other hand, you would like to help me fix the BLPs of climate scientists, there is a small amount of energy left in me to continue. | |||
| Regards, | |||
| ] (]) 07:33, 9 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :Diffs would help. ] (]) 07:52, 9 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::Sole Soul, if you'd like to see this in recent context then go to Lindzen's talk page and start at the top. If you really want to understand the problem, I'd suggest reading all of the talk pages of all the above scientists. ] (]) 08:12, 9 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::Thank you. I'm starting to read Lindzen's talk page (just to understand). ] (]) 08:20, 9 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::I just took the challenge and had a look at ] where I see a recent and somewhat heated discussion concerning whether it is reasonable to use the term "]" in relation to Lindzen. In ] we find (and I confirmed the ) that a 2001 article in Newsweek includes "Lindzen clearly relishes the role of naysayer. He'll even expound on how weakly lung cancer is linked to cigarette smoking." My conclusion (from this and more references) is that Alex Harvey is misreading a very reasonable consensus. The article has plenty of positive information about Lindzen, but also properly records his contrarian position. ] (]) 09:37, 9 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| By which company or government does Alex propose Misplaced Pages be taken over? ] (] on one of those new fangled telephone thingies) 13:26, 9 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :I do think this is an issue worthy of attention, although whenever I have checked articles in the past, I have been mostly unimpressed with the claims that these articles are particularly problematic. Diffs would be helpful, because to assess and comment on a very broad array of edits is difficult. Particular examples give us a good opportunity to examine what is going on in light of our broader principles of NPOV and BLP.--] (]) 13:46, 9 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::The discussion at Lindzen have focused, since before Christmas, on whether or not it is appropriate for a great living scientist's biography to be given ~ 600 words for his career and accomplishments, and ~ 1400 words to discussions and refutations of his stance on global warming. That said, if you are claiming that you have actually looked at the climate change biographies, and found nothing much wrong there, then I'd say that's pretty much all I need to know. I'll probably quote you on this, if you don't mind. ] (]) 13:57, 9 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::I think it would be very easy to write something completely unfair to me by quoting that comment out of context - please do not do that. If you want to quote me, give me a specific diff so I can comment on something in particular.--] (]) 14:02, 9 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::"The discussion at Lindzen have focused, since before Christmas, on whether or not it is appropriate for a great living scientist's biography to be given ~ 600 words for his career and accomplishments, and ~ 1400 words to discussions and refutations of his stance on global warming." | |||
| :::I think Alex means and . I find the arguments in these diffs completely legitimate, though I agree with the general sentiment that Misplaced Pages articles tend to give undue wight to recent and controversial subjects. ] (]) 14:49, 9 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| {{unindent}} Mr. Wales, if you are concerned that I could quote you out of context, would you clarify the context of that remark then? I mean specifically, "...whenever I have checked articles in the past, I have been mostly unimpressed with the claims that articles are particularly problematic." Does it mean that you think it's fine for amateurs to write up sloppy, inaccurate biographies of living people and get it all wrong? Or do you mean that it's not fine, but it's just that other Misplaced Pages BLPs are even worse? (I wouldn't know about this, as I've focused exclusively on the climate change BLP pages.) Or do you mean that you think Misplaced Pages has largely got the climate change BLPs right? ] (]) 15:18, 9 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :Show me a specific diff or set of diffs, and I can comment accordingly.--] (]) 23:09, 9 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :If I may comment here as well, what it sounds like is that you have a point of view that is pretty much in the minority, and you are upset that this minority point of view is not given equal footing to the mainstream point of view. But, per ], we simply do not do that. And your characterization of other editors as "amateurs" whose work is "sloppy inaccurate" is not really doing much to contribute to a collegial editing environment. ] (]) 15:26, 9 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| *: I don't think that anyone is keeping ] from adding additional information to the article which may serve to flesh out our article on ], I suggest that he takes that route rather than trying to intimidate his way to having information removed of which he apparently does not approve. ] (]) 15:45, 9 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| Jimbo, as a previously uninvolved editor, I believe that I can shed some light on the situation. About 3 months ago, I began editing our ] article and inadvertently got caught up in a ] between two groups of warring factions. From what I've been able to gather, this battle has been going on for years. Both sides routinely ignore our policies on ], ] and ] and only seek to include content that advances their POV while simultaneously excluding content that is against their POV. I attempted in good faith to improve our ] article's ], and was routinely attacked and harassed by both warring factions. In my short time in this topic space, this war has been brought up at several venues including most of our noticeboards (BLP, OR, RS, NPOV, FRINGE, COI, Admin), not to mention ] and ArbCom but the community has consistently failed to resolve the situation. The issue is currently at ] where it also remains unresolved. | |||
| Neither side seems to care about the harm that they're doing to Misplaced Pages. My personal feeling is that editors who care more about advancing an agenda (rather than building an encyclopedia) are not an asset to this project but a detriment. | |||
| In any case, I gave up in frustration and no longer edit any articles in this topic space. Since someone else has brought the problem to your attention, I thought a neutral voice might help understand the situation. | |||
| BTW, sorry for the lack of diffs. The edit histories of all these pages are too long and complicated to sift through. ] (]) 17:03, 9 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| Dear Jimbo, | |||
| As a newcomer to Misplaced Pages I have followed these two factions battle it out on climate change issues since November last year. I completely support 'A Quest For Knowledge' frustration. | |||
| Here is my suggestions: Temporarily remove ALL Misplaced Pages pages related to Climate science as they now stand for a period of 6 months. If the kids are not playing nice then take the toys away! This will hopefully discourage the fanatical elements on both sides of the debate.] (]) 17:30, 9 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| All of the above boils down to ], occasioned by frustration that an article has not been slanted in favour of one POV. -- ] (]) 19:43, 9 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ---- | |||
| Mr. Wales: | |||
| '''Those saying that a cabal of extremely POV editors have hijacked the Climate articles are completely correct.''' Those denying it appear to be members of that very Cabal. They are assiduous in their pursuit of having WP represent their point of view and only their point of view. They are so determined that they hunt down any entry like this and jump on it to make sure it does not interfere with the party line. I think it would be instructive to follow a few conversations by those saying that people complaining to you are somehow fringe elements crying foul because their minority opinion is being trampled. They are correct that the complainers are (at any given point in time) in the minority. However, that is because '''they drive off and even have banned anyone with the temerity to voice a contrary opinion'''. You *will* see that (as above with Alex Harvey) eventually after many (many, many) incidents of baiting, badgering, bullying, etc, that '''people get frustrated and become intemperate. Alex should not have been so heavy handed, but he was surely driven to it by a level of frustration that no ordinary person would bear. Certainly, the ones doing the systematic baiting and banning show not nearly the temperance of their victims.''' | |||
| You should not be expected to personally intervene, even in things as shocking as this. However, I implore you to charge somebody with selecting a group of truly neutral editors with a background that allows them to judge a little science and logic to review all of the Climate articles (particularly the 'memory-holed' missing article on Climategate) and help to bring them back to some semblance of reality. | |||
| Like others, I took a stab at trying to cure the ills of the bogus thing attempting to make it appear that there is no such thing as Climategate. Like others, my work was quickly and surely sent to the memory hole. About two thirds of what I wrote has simply disappeared. | |||
| Here is something to ponder: those who have found that the Climate articles are POV and have attempted to make corrections have been bullied right out of Misplaced Pages -- many of them banned outright. Nobody, as far as I can tell, who has been a pro AGW POV pusher or sympathizer has been pushed out. There are a fair number of people who were baited and bullied out of the picture -- more, I would say, than the side that pushed them out. The side that pushed them out has the most annoying habit of saying that the majority supports their POV and pushing out anyone who disagrees. What is wrong with that picture? | |||
| Let's say, for the sake of argument that I am an egregious and disruptive POV pusher myself and/or a sock or whatever else they use to ride people out of town on a rail. Still, would you entertain what I feel is an idea that has some hope of restoring balance to this subject area and removing the terrible black eye that is the denial (ironic, no?) of the existence of Climategate? Here is my idea: anyone who has made more than a tiny number of edits to the body of Climate related articles, should recuse themselves or be recused forcibly from making any changes to these articles for a year. Any admin that is not clearly at arm's length from the subject should similarly be recused. There are a bunch of admins who clearly are involved and more who have participated in a way that makes them similarly unfit. | |||
| Allow the recused editors to help to identify the articles in question (there are a lot and about half should be removed IMO). Send the new admins and editors out on a mission to tag, hack, slash the obvious stuff and allow the clear interest in the community at large to bring new editors in to do the 'heavy lifting' of article re-write. | |||
| During this one-year hiatus, the WP community needs to find some way to prevent a long term campaign of subtle vandalism like this from happening again or at the least some effective and rapid mechanism for correcting it when it has been found out. This stain has existed in WP for years and the Climategate blot has existed for months and appears impossible to correct. Misplaced Pages in other languages generally have a proper 'Climategate' entry, for instance. I expect that is because they are not within reach of the community of gatekeepers that have hijacked the English version. | |||
| The above is an extreme prescriptive and this entire entry (my text included) is a cheeky intrusion on the time of someone in the public eye who is very busy. However, there appears to be no mechanism in place to allow an effective way to fix this and the problem, is severe. There is no question at all that the Climate articles have been manipulated by a group of editors with a clear point of view. There are even conflicts of interest that do not stop some editors. The articles reflect very badly on Misplaced Pages. They are inaccurate or misleading themselves and so taint what has become an import subject affecting the public. They also call into question the relative verity and fairness of the entire enterprise. If this subject area can be so thoroughly dominated, controlled and skewed in a way that decreases their quality, then why not others? There is no shortage of people in this world with axes to grind, of that you can be sure. | |||
| I *LOVE* this encyclopedia. It is a thing of great beauty, warts and all. It is one of my favorite things. Its system of governance (and/or lack thereof) has allowed it to grow and flourish in a spectacular way. I am sure you would be understandably reluctant to tinker with this formula for success. I am not asking you to intervene personally in the particulars, because I do not feel that would be appropriate. I am asking you to intervene to have trusted admins and editors bring order and balance to an area of Misplaced Pages, that despite its excellent systems of governance (and I particularly *like* the lack thereof part) has been injured by (perhaps well-meaning) zealots. | |||
| I believe there has been impropriety. However, I am not asking that you act on that assumption. I am asking you to act because whether it exists or not there is a strong appearance of impropriety and, even if it is only that, it is stain on this grand enterprise that should be and can be removed. Just fixing the appearance of a problem will increase trust and confidence in the work as a whole and at the very least there is very definitely the appearance of a problem. ] (]) 22:44, 9 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| You wrote, among other things, that you "took a stab at trying to cure the ills of the bogus thing attempting to make it appear that there is no such thing as Climategate." Can you point me to more specifics? I just looked for the article, it is there, and does not seem to deny the existence of this incident at all. Not only does the event appear to be presented pretty comprehensively in the main article, we even have a separate article detailing the contents of the leaked emails: ]. Now, I'm sure many complaints could be made about how this has been written about at various times. Yet, I don't think it is particularly helpful to wildly overstate the case, as you appear to have done. How does English Misplaced Pages's coverage of this incident differ from other language versions? Please be detailed.--] (]) 00:30, 10 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :Major part of the dispute is about ]: Should the name of the article be Climategate? If not should ] redirect to ] or ]? Should ] be renamed to ]. ] (]) 01:21, 10 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::There are no so-called "gatekeepers". There are, on the other hand, a small but determined minority of people - many of them brand-new editors who have been urged to come here by anti-science blogs - who have wasted a huge amount of time complaining that their POV is not sufficiently covered, arguing that partisan nicknames should be used instead of neutral and descriptive article titles, citing the latest blog-promoted controversies as issues of earth-shattering importance that must be covered immediately, and so on and so forth. They are basically partisan campaigners, seeking to use Misplaced Pages as a soapbox and treating Misplaced Pages as a battleground. DeepNorth is a case in point, as his short shows - to date, he has ''not contributed to a single article'', instead spending all of his time arguing on talk pages and posting rants such as the one above. DeepNorth's complaint is essentially that his preferred POV does not dominate the article as he presumably wishes. As for Jimbo's question of how other language versions have treated the controversy: the quality of the coverage is very varied, to be honest. The English version is (as you would expect given the location of the controversy) the most comprehensive and the best-sourced version. Non-English versions are generally shorter, less well written and very variably sourced. NPOV, verifiability, undue weight and (especially) BLP have been continuous problems but the high degree of scrutiny of the English version has helped to tackle these problems reasonably well. -- ] (]) 01:55, 10 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::::I think there's a pretty strong case to be made for "Climategate" as the name for the article, as it is clearly the most common name in the press for this. I think it fairly obvious why people don't want it called that - but that call is not up to Misplaced Pages. We must call it what it is called, and what it is called, is climategate. (This is not a decree, but my point is that it is pretty obvious that - contrary to the wild claims of coverup and so on - we do have a well-sourced article that is comprehensive and informative and fair... but with a pretty silly title that no one uses. The scandal here is clearly not the "hacking incident" - about which virtually nothing is known. The scandal is the content of the emails, which has proven to be deeply embarrassing (whether fairly or unfairly) to certain people.) The result of the silly title is that there is traction (unfairly) for claims that Misplaced Pages is suppressing something.--] (]) 03:26, 10 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::::When people search for Climategate in google, the first result is "Climatic Research Unit hacking incident" from Misplaced Pages, which is really silly. I think a good compromise and the logical thing is to redirect ] to ]. ] (]) 05:27, 10 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::::::Or simply redirect to the article titled 'Climategate'. The 'documents' article was created (partly) to decrease the size of the article. So by the same logic we have 'Climategate documents'. I see a name change as a minor issue in relation to how we ended up here on Jimbo's talk page. I believe I was the one who first brought up the comment of how different language versions of WP carry a different title. My point was that other language versions have reached a different conclusion (consensus). Should we not try to learn from them in regards to both process and content?] (]) 07:01, 10 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::::Let's assume that "Climategate" is the natural name for the article in question. (I have no idea, since I don't follow American media.) Here is why the article is still not called "Climategate": Initially the term was not (or not widely) used, so that the article ''obviously'' started with a different name. Then there was a huge influx of new editors who were as clueless about Misplaced Pages as they were about the background of the debate (as opposed to the partisan information that they had just read on a blog). At times the talk page had to be archived several times a day because of the walls of text that were being produced. Naturally that produced a defence reflex in many established Wikipedians. | |||
| :::::At the time when it would have been reasonable to rename the article to "Climategate", the discussions had long ago deteriorated to the point that everything that one side proposed was rejected by the other side ''because'' they proposed it. That's a perfectly natural reaction (see ]) and occurs frequently on Misplaced Pages. That's why it's an exceptionally bad idea for a partisan blog to incite its readers to swarm to Misplaced Pages: It backfires. ] ] 07:07, 10 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::::::For the record, the article's name has been discussed to death on talk pages but the general upshot is that "Climategate" is a POV nickname, like "Rathergate" or "Attorneygate"; NPOV specifically requires neutrality of article names; ] specifically rejects ''-gate'' nicknames in favour of neutral descriptive names ("]", not "Attorneygate"); and ] also specifially deprecates ''-gate'' nicknames as they "imply wrongdoing or a point of view" to discredit the subject. The bottom line is that "Climategate" was coined by one political faction to ] the issue from a particular POV. The term is pejorative, partisan and non-descriptive, and its use here would go against NPOV and Misplaced Pages's long-standing avoidance of such terminology. It has been proposed repeatedly by a small minority of editors, but the majority of editors - from both sides of the dispute - have recognised that a POV nickname is either unacceptable or is unlikely to win consensus. -- ] (]) 08:58, 10 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::::::There was a case to be made at some point that Misplaced Pages could not and should not endorse the nickname, because it would be POV pushing to do so. However, that point has long since passed, and it is now overwhelmingly the name of the incident in all media. You can find examples of the use of the term by people in favor of the term and against the term. It is no longer POV pushing to call it that - the name was coined, and the name stuck. It is an abuse of the notion of NPOV to claim that no article can have a title that some people don't like, see for example ] for just one example of a political term that stuck.--] (]) 12:42, 10 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::::::What you say about the term's provenance seems clear to me. I think the real question is whether the coinage was successful: Whether basically everybody uses that term now. Writing from Vienna I can only say that it's certainly not the case in German-speaking countries. I have no opinion on this. ] ] 09:25, 10 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::::::::It is hardly unheard of either. Try Google with the words: climategate wissenschaft (ger. science), and select News. Hit #1. 10 March, Frankfurter Allgemeine (Newspaper). I think it depends on your chosen source of information. There are clearly sources both avoiding using Climategate and sources choosing to use it. A green blog will not use it while a critical blog will. The main concern should be that there are mainstream sources using it.] (]) 10:32, 10 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::::::::ChrisO, a thought has occurred to me: While "-gate" is indeed a word to avoid, ] is only a guideline. ] is a policy. When policies and guidelines conflict, policy always trumps guidelines. ] (]) 17:41, 13 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::Both warring factions are guilty of treating Misplaced Pages as a ]. ] (]) 02:12, 10 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| {{unindent}} Dear Mr. Wales, I am rather taken aback by your responses. I had supposed that you would either ignore me, or remain neutral, or have someone respond by proxy, or maybe say something that would weakly but without commitment acknowledge the problem. It was my hope, I must admit, although not my expectation, that you would actually take the matter seriously and investigate it before responding. I'll have to say that I didn't even consider that in the worst case you would get back in a few hours and just casually declare your sympathy with the editors who wrote these disgraceful climate change biographies. You say you don't want me to quote you out of context, but you said what you said. I have no intention of being unfair to you but the public has the right to know this. I realise that you're not a climate scientist and I can't expect you to already understand the full extent of the problem, but it seems inconceivable to me that you haven't looked at, say, S. Fred Singer's disgraceful article, after Lawrence Solomon has repeatedly pointed it out to you in the press. I just double-checked it, and it's still a disgrace. So I can only conclude that you think it's roughly what Singer deserves. Anyhow, here's some news for you: It's Not. It's not your right to allow juvenile, anonymous trolls to trash the lives of great living scientists -- even if you think they're bad people. If I type Fred Singer into Google, I am directed immediately to your site. I see two brief paragraphs about his life, and then it's just environmentalist propaganda all the way to the finish. It's not right. And you ask me for diffs, but I can't for the life of me understand why you would want diffs. How could you possibly think that my experiences can be communicated as a convenient set of diffs for you to review? I am talking about disputes that have lasted weeks, months, and in the Lindzen article case, years, and you ask me for diffs. I can't spoon feed this to you. If you want to understand what one must endure in order to fix this awful problem you have created, you will need to either read the talk pages from beginning to end, or read my publicly archived contribution history. It seems pretty clear to me, though, that you're really not very interested. I'd still like you to prove me wrong though... ] (]) 11:20, 10 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :If you want to understand my position on these matters, you're going to have to help me. This is a two way street. I can easily go through various articles and point out diffs that I think are good, and diffs that I think are awful. This is not unique to this area, of course. But me hand-picking things that I don't like or do like is not likely to help you understand my views. It will be better for you to show me specific problems and ask my opinion in particular. I went through a few of the articles you mentioned, yesterday, but not Fred Singer in particular. Why don't you walk me through your current objections to the article - I can try to look at it tonight. | |||
| :Yesterday I carefully read ] and so I am fully prepared to comment on that one. Can you point me to what you find objectionable about it, and then I can respond precisely with my views. | |||
| :Please understand that your attitude here is disturbing to me and makes it hard for me to engage you in a serious discussion - I feel that you've got an agenda, that you're looking to quote me out of context, and that you're unwilling to seriously engage me in a discussion of the real issues here.--] (]) 13:07, 10 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :Alex, it seems to me that your interest in these scientists is primarily for their role in the AGW debate, is that not so? What is it that you take objection to in that article? ] (]) 12:43, 10 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :(editconflict) Dear Alex. I'm an uninvolved editor. Let's get this clear. | |||
| :* A war is being fought. And this war is being fought over the backs of scientists, science organizations, newspapers and peer reviewed magazines and yes, Misplaced Pages. Any problems related to this war will always be visible in Misplaced Pages, as much as they are visible in the news, blogs and what not. To expect anything different is unrealistic. The only way to prevent this is to assign babysitters to each and every editor that touches one of the climate related articles. This is not possible of course. Time will produce the truth (or whatever will pass for it) for the future. It has always been that way and will always remain. And because Misplaced Pages only follows and never leads, it will always be a tad behind on what is the current 'truth'. But unlike your old history books in school, this 'book' gets corrected. | |||
| :*It is not Misplaced Pages's duty to investigate real world events. Misplaced Pages presents the 'truth' as it is presented by the world. If you want to change that, I advise you to hire a few authors and start writing books and editorials. Or get an investigative journalist and start bringing the truth. Anything but edit Misplaced Pages would be my advice. | |||
| :*You ask for support, but for any request of support, you will have to show that someone is bypassing the rules. You cannot just walk in and say: "This is the truth, now do as I say". So get diffs about editors not following the rules of Misplaced Pages and prepare your case. | |||
| :*I suggest you also take your cause up with some people that claim to have created the Internet as a whole. This 'thing' they have created has been feeding an 'awful problem' on Misplaced Pages, blogs and news websites around the world and they clearly don't care about it. And definitely do something about Gutenberg, I mean with all those books out there.. and 'awful problem'. Or perhaps you just need to change your expectations a bit. I don't know....<sarcasm definitely intended here> | |||
| :*Now please try again to state your case, and this time please with less rhetoric and more facts, news paper articles and diffs. Wales is listening I'm sure and when needed, necessary changes will be made. | |||
| :The factions will war, and from their ashes consensus will rise like a phoenix. —] (] • ]) 13:11, 10 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| Hans, if I'm not mistaken, the article started off as "Climategate". There is already a broad consensus to change the article name to something ], but the process was derailed after an editor started making false allegations of canvassing. Although that editor has been warned by the admins, the article still hasn't been renamed. ] (]) 13:39, 10 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :Jimbo, you should be more careful with what you say. If you were a newbie editor saying things like that, you'd risk being instantly attacked for being a "denier", "anti-science" and possibly called an "idiot" or a "yahoo". Even established editors such as myself are routinely attacked by the editors on these pages. The admins who are supposed to be monitoring the situation, for the most part, have done little to resolve the situation. ] (]) 15:39, 10 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::Unfortunately we are stuck in two middles, either they do entirely too much and assume powers they aren't granted or they sit on their thumbs. Wiki-Politics my friend. ] (]) 15:51, 10 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| * This is really an effect of something noted by Al Gore in ]; the scientific literature is dominated by near-total acceptance of anthropogenic global warming, with disputes at the edges around some issues not really shaking the core consensus, whereas over half the references he found in the non-scientific media were sceptical of global warming. The natural result is that the few climate sceptics in the scientific community receive massively disproportionate coverage of their views from the (largely political, not scientific) opponents of action to curb AGW. I don't know how this can be fixed. It's actually a fundamental question about Misplaced Pages and how we reflect topics where there is a significant difference between the scientific and the political debate - much the same as we find with evolution, in fact, where the creationists have been campaigning for years on a "teach the controversy" platform very much like the AGW sceptics like to "teach the controversy" about AGW by focusing on the limited areas of scientific difference and ignoring the fact that, for example, no scientific body of national or international standing denies AGW. <b>]</b> <small>(])</small> 17:22, 10 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| **Well, the issue of what is happening is scientific, but the issue of what to do about it is primarily political, does not have any consensus in the United States and in many other places, and is clouded by piss-poor amateurism on the part of scientists in the public arena (responding responsibly to opponents; responding to FOIA requests; being open in a way required to allow the public to trust them) and some scandalous behavior by scientists in the scientific arena . A string of very public scandalous behavior erodes the public's trust. In terms of the ''politics'' of climate-change issues, "teach the controversy" is the only course for Misplaced Pages to take. There is a consensus about global warming in general on the science among the reliable sources, but, as the UK government's chief science advisor says (first diff), there isn't a consensus on everything. There is absolutely no consensus on the politics among reliable sources. Misplaced Pages's main problem with this is a lack of a real commitment to adhere to NPOV because tempers are often high and conduct is often barely regulated. -- ] (]) 18:57, 11 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| Jimbo, I'm disappointed to see you expressing opinions supporting a partisan term used to promote fringe or pseudoscientific viewpoints in an area of contrived political controversy over a clear majority scientific view. Please note that while the partisan term "climategate" is common, it is by no means universal and is treated carefully by more reputable sources – for example, . . ], ] 17:21, 10 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :Dave, Jimbo said it doesn't matter what we think is "right". Misplaced Pages is not the judge, we just follow where the sources lead us. I don't know if the anyone really did anything wrong in Climategate or what effect, if any, it will have on climate science in the long run. However, I do know that there is currently a scandal and that it is widely called Climategate. To deny this is to deny the social phenomenom currently taking place. Describing and documenting is not advocacy or promotion! I was originally an uninvolved editor who searched for the term "Climategate" and found the controversy that had been stewing for months...and left the following ]. Remember, ] states that "the choice of title is not dependent on whether a name is "right" in a moral or political sense" and "Misplaced Pages describes current usage but cannot prescribe a particular usage or invent new names." ] (]) 06:58, 11 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::Sir: I agree with AH that there is a lack of even-handed treatment of climate scientists in Misplaced Pages, and it is a disgrace. I have been paying attention here only a short time, but I have seen contrarians with sound references driven out by a pack of harridans - Nightmote is one I recall. I have seen skepticism dismissed as the foundation of scientific method. Peremptory dismissal was all that was accorded a suggestion I made a month ago that "''Climategate'' should be reserved for an article discussing the perception of scientific scandal, its dimensions, and the denials of same. It will have the advantage of the ability to incorporate other events of similar nature such as the China UHI revelation, the pruning of world temperature stations from 6000 to 1500, the Darwin Australia homogenization, New Zealand’s National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA) data adjustments, NOAA's adjustments to Central Park data and others, and any further events that may transpire. The other article (the residual of this current) should preserve the discussion of the origin and compilation of the file and of the release of the documents and any legal proceedings or ramifications which may ensue." I hope it may now receive consideration. ] (]) 09:18, 11 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::With all due respect, Oiler, whether or not one is skeptical of AGW is really beside the point. One does not have to be at all skeptical of AGW to say 1) Some people believe that there was some serious wrongdoing in the UEA, and 2) everyone is calling it Climategate. Those are the only two things that matter. We just document what is happening. I personally think that the reason some pro-AGW editors reject this is because it damages or goes against their belief system, which in my mind is a serious ]. Calling the controversy ] instead of ] is akin to have an article titled ] instead of ]. It is inartful, POV (especially in that it focuses on a more minor aspect of the content, the hacking, instead of the overall controversy), and certainly not the common reference to that event or phenomenom. ] (]) 15:36, 11 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::::"everyone is calling it Climategate" – I find it hard to get an overview of how this is reported about in the English-speaking world, but this statement is simply false in its extreme form: http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&um=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=-climategate+global+warming+east+anglia+emails ] ] 17:26, 11 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::::When I said everyone, I meant in the colloquial sense, not ''reductio ad absurdum''. A good comparison would be between GNews results for - '''1213''' and the GNews results for (without quotes for maximum results) - '''10''' See what I mean? ] (]) 21:56, 11 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::::::I think these results are pretty compelling. Dave Souza, I notice that you used the example of an article in The Guardian of the UK as an example of what "more reputable" sources are saying - but although The Guardian is of course a high quality newspaper, I don't think it's clearly superior to, for example, the New York Times . Also, you may not want to use The Guardian as the bedrock of the argument that reputable sources don't use the term, since using that term on the site. One can firmly believe in science, the scientific method, the scientific consensus, etc., and still acknowledge the simple truth that the name of this incident which matches Misplaced Pages policy is "Climategate". I'm quite sure you wouldn't deny that this is, in fact, a scandal - and even some of the scientists involved have admitted that some of the emails were 'pretty awful', etc. If there's anything partisan here, it is the attempt to control political language by Misplaced Pages editors, no matter how well-intentioned. It is not up to Misplaced Pages to decide what it is called - it is up to the world at large, and they have - overwhelmingly - decided.--] (]) 22:17, 11 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::::::Jimbo, that was very impressive. Thank you for putting it so well. (As far as the title "Climategate" goes, that word is still spreading but I'm not sure it's spread far enough in the reliable sources to make it worth the fight, although I suspect it eventually will -- words like this spread over time, but right now, when major media uses it, including ''The Guardian'', I'm still seeing it in quotes.) | |||
| :::::::The fact is, editors at that article have been fighting so hard that the article ignored the considerable shocked reaction to the CRU unit scandal (what was put in the article was later removed; early last December I tried to get the simple statement that the emails involved potential violations of the UK's Freedom of Information Act -- sourced to ''Science'' magazine quoting a UK legal expert on the subject, and editors insisted that must be a BLP violation; even though it went to the BLP noticeboard, numerous news reports were cited saying the same thing and consensus at BLP was that there was no problem with it, the information never went back into the article -- subsequent investigation showed that FOIA had indeed been violated). Partisan editors who try to plug up Misplaced Pages, preventing it from covering information they don't like even when that information should be in the article, are only hurting Misplaced Pages. This is the Internet: If readers don't see the information here, they're still going to see it somewhere else, and when they check Misplaced Pages and find the information missing here, their esteem for Misplaced Pages is going to drop. This is exactly what happens sometimes with ''The New York Times'' when it looks like it isn't covering something because of bias. Anybody with a blog can criticize the Times or any news outlet or Misplaced Pages and link to the reliable sources themselves. Look at how ] slices, dices and fillets the ''Times''. It could happen here -- or rather, it could happen again, much worse. Unlike the ''Times'' internal decisionmaking, all the diffs are here of Misplaced Pages's internal POV pushing. Just substitute "Misplaced Pages" for "US media" here, and you can see how damaging this is for the encyclopedia: | |||
| ::::::::''The blogosphere has shamed some leading US newspapers into paying perfunctory attention to one of the biggest stories in several years. But there’s still no sign that the US press is ready to pursue this still unfolding story with anything like the determination it deserves. Until then, Americans will have to rely on the internet to watch this story unfold — and every day that goes on, the mainstream US media lose readers and respect.'' | |||
| :::::::For those who want the public to better understand the scientific reasons for global warming, this blogger over at the ''Washington Post'' has some ideas about the Internet's role in helping to do that: Take the high road and educate the public about the science. This journalist over at the ''New York Times'' agrees with him. And instead of having Walter Russell Mead pounding on the ''Times'', that blog post produced this praise. In a public debate, taking the high road is ultimately more productive because credibility needs to be maintained, and Misplaced Pages editors should remember that. -- ] (]) 01:42, 12 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| {{od}} @ Jimbo, thanks for your thoughtful response. As you suggest, I've had a look at the coverage in the NYT. Although a search shows considerable use of the term in their letters pages and blogs, as with the ''Guardian'', they too have been pretty careful, using it specifically regarding "The e-mail episode, dubbed 'climategate' by critics," or "a recent controversy surrounding e-mails stolen from climate scientists that some have dubbed 'Climategate.'" In other coverage of controversies referring to the e-mails, they've not used the term, and it's noticeably absent from an op-ed, and from an Associated Press story they ran. Less reliable sources have been more indiscriminate, using "climategate" as a catch-all for complaints about mainstream climate science completely unrelated to the e-mail issue. The scandal isn't confined to the behaviour of the scientists, as the ''Guardian'' noted in its , as in . Underlying issues include the extent to which data, preliminary calculations, and private e-mails should normally be provided for non-scientific criticism – this could mark a shift in the way science is done. The term "climategate" is indeed political language, and we're looking at adding a specific article about the term, but the background and issues raised by this incident go well beyond that particular political aspect of the science. . . ], ] 16:33, 15 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :Dave, a couple quick points for you, among several... we aren't looking at whether or not the controversy has merit, merely that it exists and is called Climategate. So saying the "'Climgategate' scandal is bogus" is barking up the wrong tree. It doesn't matter for the sake of documenting it if it has true merit or not. There is a difference between saying a scandal ''does'' exist and a scandal ''should'' exist. As far as title concerns go, besides looking at the , I think citing large hits/results showing widespread use of the Climategate term on Google News, etc. is more convincing than citing a couple articles/Op-Eds that don't happen use the Climategate term. ] (]) 16:55, 15 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ===Some diffs=== | |||
| :@] and Mr Wales, I've not been very active in many of the bios mentioned by Alex Harvey, but I've seen some disturbing patterns in at least the Lawerence Solomon article as I've noted earlier : | |||
| :'''Bio''' | |||
| <div class="toccolours"> | |||
| : I can examplifies it with this article ] and some of the diffs: , ] (]) 13:19, 21 February 2010 (UTC) | |||
| </div> | |||
| :'''Suppress ease of Navigation''' | |||
| :I've earlier pinpointed how some editors have done everything to keep the ](i.e. Climategate scandal) and/or the ] out of navigation template {{tl|Global warming}} | |||
| :See these diffs: | |||
| :'''Remove critical reactions to official reports with huge financial impacts''' | |||
| :Example: In the ] this section was twice removed on what I see as dubious grounds and . | |||
| :'''Removal of the {{tl|press}} template from articles talk page''' | |||
| :We have numerous instances of removal of commentary articles by ] and ] from a couple of talk pages. See ] (removed by many "well founded" comments), ] (and all the referenced underlying discussions). | |||
| :'''Removal of Climategate as a term''' | |||
| :The term was over and over again in the beginning totally removed from the article even if it had many well sourced references (See last part in ] for the first talk about it, and many more in the archive). In todays article the term has survived at least, but not bolded or in it's proper place right after the current naming of the article as an alternative name (and what most sources uses, see some at ]). Now even books has this title in use, see ) | |||
| :] (]) 17:52, 10 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| {{unindent}} Dear Mr. Wales, the Garth Paltridge article is the only article I was able to get into a stable, approximately sane state, and as it is not attracting internet trolls at the moment I'd say I've done a fair job. Which is not to say I am 100% happy with it. I think it probably should mention that since retirement Paltridge has declared himself a skeptic on CO2 caused climate change -- I think both Paltridge and the reader would be happy with that -- but not mentioning his skepticism at all was a compromise acceptable to both factions. But if you are interested in that article, I suggest you start with its very first revision, rather than the state it is in now, and then read through the talk page. If you read through the talk page, you will most likely be horrified by what you find. Regarding Fred Singer's article, there is a section called "consulting" but no section called "scientific work". Does that mean he was a scientist, or a consultant? After the career section, we find ourselves in the year 2007, then in 1994. Then we get to the 1980s, then to 1997, 2004, 2009, 2008, we stop by at 1991 for a bit of gossip, before we go back to 1960 just for one sentence, then to 1981, then 1994, and finally to 1991 again where the article concludes. Is the problem that Misplaced Pages's editors have no sense of chronology, or is it that they simply don't like Fred Singer? As the reader, I want to know what happened in the 1960s and 1970s? There are doubtlessly other problems with the article, but I haven't researched Singer's career at the moment so I'll leave you with the self-evident stuff. Finally, I am sorry if I have offended you. I am tired, so I will stop here. ] (]) 08:13, 11 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :Alex. When I looked at ], I found that one of the biggest disputes (may be the biggest) is whether to include the reference about "no statistically significant warming since 1995". What I did not understand is why you are assuming that removing that reference is "defending" Mr. Lindzen? how do you know? I mean... it is not obvious. One could argue that removing something he saide is an insult to him. Your opposition of including that info is a legitimate position, but implying that that is what the subject wants is at least questionable, IMO. ] (]) 09:19, 11 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::Sole Soul, the problem with a site run by volunteers is evident right here. You don't have time to read through 12 pages of archives (and I can't of course blame you for that) so you quickly conclude that what I'm saying is not obvious. And why would it be obvious? If it's not obvious, shouldn't you just reserve judgement for the moment? In this particular instance, I do know what I am talking about because I have read all of Dr. Lindzen's recent papers, and most of his op-eds. The text that we are fighting over, I am afraid, is just plainly wrong, and is completely distorting Lindzen's position, and there's ultimately no way the opposing editor will win this particular dispute. I didn't come here because of this statistical warming business. You need to read the whole talk page. Sorry, that means all 12 (or 13) pages of it. And I guess you need to know your Lindzen too. ] (]) 12:19, 11 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::What you are referring to as "the problem" is following exactly your advice of reading the talk page starting at the top. I would be happy to go through 12 pages if reading them would make it more obvious that removing the statistical warming info is "defending" Mr. Lindzen. We simply cannot base our editing on something a volunteer like you know or read. Your problem is not juvenile volunteers, your problem is a Misplaced Pages principal called verifiability. You want us to trust you without us being able to verify your claims, because you cannot prove your case to neutral people. ] (]) 15:11, 11 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::::Well spoken Sole Soul. If mr. lindzen has a problem, then he (or his representatives) can send and email to our system. The ] has the necessary information. —] (] • ]) 15:34, 11 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::::I think this conversation has run its course. I am truly sorry I was not able to help Misplaced Pages. If Mr. Wales would like to contact me privately, without these yes-men interrupting, I'd be happy to have a rational discussion about the problems. And just so that we're clear. Mr. Wales's quote above -- the one he pleads with me not to quote "out of context" -- is ] verifiable. That's the irony. Here you are lecturing to me that all that matters is Misplaced Pages's high ethic of so-called "verifiability", which allows anonymous volunteers to willfully distort the views of others without any regard to context, and you fail to note that Mr. Wales himself just pleaded with me not to be taken himself out of context. ] (]) 20:42, 11 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::::::This "yes-man" voted "oppose" on Jimbo's latest poll. While Jimbo's quote is verifiable if you provide link to it, taking it out of context is against the spirit of verifiability. Your claim that Mr. Lindzen's views were taken out of context may be true, but unless you provide proof, it is not verifiable. ] (]) 21:50, 11 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::::::: And how am I supposed to deductively "prove" that Lindzen is taken out of context, especially when you want it to be obvious? ] (]) 22:51, 11 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::::::: By providing the right context for his statement. ] (]) 23:10, 11 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::::::::: I see. Well Lindzen has written three books, 230 papers, and probably 20 op-eds. So how much context would you like with that? I already recommended in the talk page that to begin to see Lindzen's views on recent temperature trends in context, one could begin with the Lindzen 2007 Energy & Environment paper. I was told, E&E is not a real journal, therefore we should prefer a journalist's take on the matter from Newsweek. Is that your position too, or have you read the Lindzen 2007 paper already? ] (]) 23:49, 11 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::::::::: Alex, I've not been involved with the Lindzen article before now, but I've had a look at the talk page and I have to agree with Sole Soul and The DJ. I think the problem here is that you are approaching this article with the mindset of being some kind of defender or champion of Lindzen and other fringe commentators. That is not a useful approach for an encyclopedist. Part of the problem is clearly that you lack wider expertise in how Misplaced Pages works, which is evident from your lack of understanding of verifiability and your frankly ludicrous demand that Misplaced Pages be "forcibly taken over either commercially or by government". I see from your that you are pretty much a single-purpose account focusing almost entirely on climate change related articles. I have observed in the past that SPAs are often at a disadvantage, because they see Misplaced Pages only through the narrow prism of their particular focus. Rather than obsessing about this particular article, I suggest that it would be better for you to widen your editing to address other topic areas, work with a wider range of Wikipedians rather than the ones you are spending all your time arguing with, and in general improve your understanding of Misplaced Pages. It is a very different environment from the blogosphere. -- ] (]) 02:24, 12 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::::::::::: ChrisO, you may not be responsible for the disgraceful Lindzen article, but as you are responsible for quite a vast number of the other POV abuses in the climate change BLPs (e.g. the Lord Monckton incident), I kind of resent you turning up here and pretending to be a good little Wikipedian. ] (]) 05:19, 12 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::::::::::: Since I've only substantially edited a handful of articles in this topic area I think you're exaggerating. You can resent all you like, but the advice is sincerely offered. I've been a Wikipedian for a very long time, I have a very large number of contributions across thousands of articles in a wide range of topic areas and I think I have a pretty good idea by now about how it works. By contrast, you have only substantively edited a limited number of articles in a single topic area over the last year. That is inevitably going to give you a narrow perspective. You also appear to have adopted the hostile, conspiracy-minded attitudes of anti-science blogs, which you apparently frequent. It's revealing that you talk in martial terms - when you speak of "defending" fringe commentators' biographies, you show that you perceive them to be "under attack." But as I've said below, ]. You would do well to bear that in mind as it's clear that you haven't grasped that principle yet. -- ] (]) 10:01, 12 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::::::::::::Alex, ChrisO's advice is sound. It does not mean that you should completely stop editing in your current favourite subject area. ChrisO has told you how to gain credibility and friends in our community and how to make sure that when your character is under attack in the field that you are editing, editors who disagree with you will not assume the worst about you. I do some editing in the pseudoscience area. While everything I do is based strictly on encyclopedic concerns (IMHO – but of course everybody thinks that about themselves) I sometimes had to "defend" the accurate presentation of pseudoscience against a mainstream of editors that tried to turn the articles into pure debunking pieces. I survived in this area without any injuries for the following reasons: (1) I didn't treat the articles as battle grounds; I was on different sides of the debates depending on the strength of the merits. (2) I was uncontroversially and successfully active in completely unrelated areas. (3) I was active in some related areas where I was on the side of the mainstream trying to solve problems with disruptive editors. | |||
| ::::::::::::You can do the same, you can give up, or you can become a martyr. It's your choice. ] ] 10:42, 12 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::::::::::::: Dr. Adler, with due respect I will believe it when I see you get this to work in the climate change pages. I have little to offer outside of the area of biographies and it is only the climate change problem that interests me at the moment. I can assure you that I am always willing to defend the same principles in the climate change pages regardless of my feelings for the subject, e.g. Rajendra Pachauri. But it makes no difference. At Pachauri's page I was beaten down by the skeptical faction and I might have stayed for longer were it not for the fact that it was (and still is) completely coverage of breaking news and I have no interest in that. I also realised then that ''both'' of these factions care far more about taking revenge against the other side than they do about defending or adding anything positive. I suppose it is true that Misplaced Pages's climate change pages are a microcosm of the climate change debate itself. Voices on the left want to see beaten down those voices on the right and vice versa -- with just a tiny few in the middle curious enough to listen to both sides. My communication skills are not perfect, and I agree that I am too aggressive. Thank you for your advice though, and I'll be interested to have a look at these pseudoscience pages. ] (]) 13:09, 12 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| {{unindent}} Jimbo, I came here to warn you that the climate change BLPs are truly awful things and to remind you that, unfortunately, in any organisation, whether business, government or NGO, accountability rests ulimately with the executive. You seem to opted for a sort of figurehead role here but it is not clear to me that you have actually delegated any responsibility. So it seems to me that you must remain personally accountable for the abuses of this system. (If that is wrong then let me know who I should talk to.) If I seem nasty, or ill-tempered, I still mean you well. I came here to your talk page because there was nowhere else to go. Will you act? If you wish to do something, I am willing to continue to help. I should like to assure you that I have no intention to quote you or misquote you or in any way attack you personally but it does remain clear to me that something has to be done. You need neutral, mature, strong people to step in to fix the climate change pages. ] (]) 13:09, 12 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| I can't believe I came across this page (for a totally unrelated reason) and found this issue being addressed. It doesn't surprise me that Alex's initial concerns have spilled over to involve many of the other issues surrounding this subject matter. For too long, these articles have been manipulated by a small group of frighteningly coordinated activists with endless patience for subverting the efforts of well-meaning editors, many of whom quickly find their patience in fighting for what's right and good for the encyclopedia simply cannot match that of those fighting to protect an agenda. Those who do risk sinister repercussions.<br /> | |||
| I only became aware of the struggles with this subject a few months ago. Finding the base global warming article a bit off, I opted to assess it. As with anything I do here (including this post, which took over an hour to write), I was thorough, objective, and meticulous in ].<br /> | |||
| I've always considered the time and effort I apply to even the most mundane tasks at wikipedia very valuable and well-spent. And recently, it has bothered me to have to make every effort to ignore the ]. In fact, I do my best to avoid them altogether because, despite having met several editors with similar concerns, I never feel more alone, or that my effort is more wasted, than when I make suggestions for improving them (actually ''editing'' them has essentially been rendered unconscionable).<br /> | |||
| That the encyclopedia has been subversively denied a proper '']'' article simply breaks my heart every time I think about it. Even if it doesn't mean it will be immediately resolved, seeing Jimbo is now actually aware of it has done wonders for my morale. I have the utmost faith in his objectivity.<br /> | |||
| What I saw in my research for the aforementioned assessment (and then the response to it), was extremely disheartening. And I guess having borne witness to the organization, duration, and extent of manipulation, I could not muster the wherewithal to oppose it. Like other well-intentioned editors before me, I simply could not find it within me to take up the sword and fight the good fight. | |||
| And that makes me sad.<br />--] (]) 21:12, 12 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| Just for the record: the english wikipedia had at some time an article about the Roman Warm Period. It's gone. The german wikipedia still has one: Optimum_der_R%C3%B6merzeit | |||
| How about deleting that as well for consistency? Have fun. ] (]) 00:21, 13 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :That's unhelpful and unfair. That article was . With such variable terminology, I wouldn't be surprised if the intended content survived somewhere, but then the converse would not surprise me either. It's probably very unwise to read conspiracy theories into mundane functional edits. ]] 00:29, 13 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| I disagree. The absence of an article on ''Roman Warm Period'' is unconscionable, particularly in view of its previous existence. If not due to conspiracy, what, I beg you? The link you provide ] is unavailable except to administrators. Wonder why... What's next - Holocene Climatic Optimum? Medieval Warm Period? Little Ice Age? ] (]) 05:36, 13 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| : I just googled 'roman warm period' and the top ranking page is ... our page ], which is an orphaned stub level page that indexes all the geologically recent warm periods. In passing, I'm trying to get my head around why Google is ranking this page first. Anyhow, the earliest revision of the page is dated 11th December 2008 and in that first revision of the page there was already a link to the ]. So it appears to be true that Misplaced Pages deleted the page? The second ranking page on google is the CO2 science page on the Roman Warm Period, and all subsequent ranking google pages in the top 10 seem to be pages that assert that the Roman Warm Period was warmer than the present. Can an admin tell us who deleted this page and why? ] (]) 15:07, 13 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :: Moreover, I find in the ] article no reference to a Roman Warm Period and then the following simplistic assertion: ''Short term (104 to 106 years): Geologically short-term (<120,000 year) temperatures are believed to be driven by orbital factors (see Milankovitch cycles) amplified by changes in greenhouse gases. The arrangements of land masses on the Earth's surface are believed to influence the effectiveness of these orbital forcing effects.'' This is a gross dumbing down of the truth that borders on deliberate disinformation. We would not, for instance, find such a simplistic picture presented at RealClimate. The little ice age for instance is thought to be correlated with reduced sunspot activity. The Little Ice Age is not thought to be caused by changes in greenhouse gases. I would really like to know what is going on here. ] (]) 15:47, 13 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| *Jimbo, as I'm sure you're well aware, there are several areas of WP that have been bad battlegrounds involving POV-pushing editors on opposite sides, including the Palestine/Israel articles and the Irish troubles, among several others. The global warming (AGW) articles are probably the worst ones at the moment, as far as I can tell. This is a job for the ArbCom. I'm confident that the Arbcom members can look at five years worth of diffs, make judgement calls on whose edits appear to be more NPOV than others, and topic ban those editors (like they did last year with the Palestine/Israel conflict articles), who don't appear to be here to build an encyclopedia. I don't think any action is required on your part, other than telling the press, if they ask, "Some unethical climate change advocates and skeptics have tried to hijack the wiki to promote their own agendas. But, the system worked to send them packing.". ] (]) 16:12, 13 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| *::: @Alex Harvey - ] was created as a redirect to ] on 2008-12-11, and {{tl|db-author}} seven minutes later. The latter page appears never to have been created. - ] <small>(])</small> 17:34, 13 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::: 2/0, thanks for this but I'm afraid I don't really know what it means. Was a Misplaced Pages page about the RWP deleted or are you saying it was just never created. If it was deleted, was it deleted via an AfD procedure or by some other consensus to have the page renamed? It'd be nice to hear that this was an accident or something. Your reference to {{tl|db-author}} makes it sound like one of the database administors deleted it, but that's possibly just because I have no idea what 'db-author' means. ] (]) 23:36, 14 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::::: Further to this, the deletion of the RWP period page was apparently noted in the discussions at Anthony Watts' blog . It says it was deleted by "Andrew C", whoever that is. Is that plausible? ] (]) 01:49, 15 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::::: There was never any content on either ] or ]. The former was created as a ] to the latter, which was itself never created. {{tl|db-author}} is shorthand for ]. As the template indicates, this is the criterion for uncontroversial deletion of pages that have had only one non-trivial author who requests deletion. As the only edits ever made to ] were its creation as a redirect and a request by the same editor for deletion seven minutes later, ] appropriately deleted the page. The username of the deleting administrator is recorded publicly if you click on the redlink ]. Presumably he found it by checking ], but as it was over a year ago I would not expect him to remember. There are absolutely no barriers to anyone creating a well-referenced article about this topic. Feel free to share any and all of this information at the wattsupwiththat blog if you are participating in that discussion. - ] <small>(])</small> 16:28, 15 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::::::: I am not participating in that discussion; I found this by googling. But I'll do you all a favour and respond there anyway. Thank you for clarifying this, 2/0. ] (]) 00:44, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::::::: Any time, and thank you :). - ] <small>(])</small> 04:41, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| Hi folks, I just stumbled upon this discussion. I'm new to Misplaced Pages and only just discovered that there even was a "Jimbo Wales" page, and I haven't been involved in any of these climate issues. My two cents is that neither "Climategate" nor the current mouthful of a title is adequate. "Climategate" is the term critics use, and seems to be used by the Times in scare quotes. The "hacking incident" title, I agree, just won't work either. Why not "Global warming email interception"? "Hacking" is prejudicial, and the "-gate" suffice is prejudicial too. Both take sides. ] (]) 22:05, 13 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| : Hacking is a term of art generally taken to mean unauthorised access to data. That's what happened. Next case. <b>]</b> <small>(])</small> 00:02, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| == Long comment by DeepNorth == | == Long comment by DeepNorth == | ||
| Line 315: | Line 118: | ||
| :I agree 100%, the tag should have stayed. However, because of the "probation", I know that if anyone from the "wrong side of the argument" restores it, they face a permanent ban from wikipedia. I have already been warned (actually '''threatened''') that . ] (]) 10:36, 17 March 2010 (UTC) | :I agree 100%, the tag should have stayed. However, because of the "probation", I know that if anyone from the "wrong side of the argument" restores it, they face a permanent ban from wikipedia. I have already been warned (actually '''threatened''') that . ] (]) 10:36, 17 March 2010 (UTC) | ||
| == Disrupting Wikimedia == | |||
| Dear Jimbo, although not a member myself, I would cordially like to invite you to a workshop where you can learn all about disrupting and decieving Wikimedia with experiments in practice. This workshop is being organised on a website you may be familiar with, ]. There is no doubt that you would be welcome to participate. Just leave your name on the page Who knows, they might even design a few barnstars for exceptional graduates. If they plant an operative on the permanent staff they might even be able to pinch the petty kitty. There are many such possibilities for reward so get yourself over there before the list fills up. <font size="2" face="Impact">~ ].].]</font> 21:18, 12 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :I have deleted the page as being outside the scope of Wikiversity.--] (]) 00:37, 13 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::It's not outside the scope, I'm afraid. See ] for further discussion. I know you don't go there much (and thus missed the upheaval you caused last time you did something like this), but the results of a Community Review discussion ], so please make your case there if you want to pursue this further. --] | <sup>]</sup> 13:23, 13 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| {| style="border: 1px solid gray; background-color: #fdffe7;" | |||
| |rowspan="2" valign="middle" | ] | |||
| |rowspan="2" | | |||
| |style="font-size: x-large; padding: 0; vertical-align: middle; height: 1.1em;" | '''The Barnstar of Integrity''' | |||
| |- | |||
| |style="vertical-align: middle; border-top: 1px solid gray;" | When the rest sat around for three months talking about a project designed to attack Wikimedia, Jimbo no sooner heard about it and it was gone. <font size="2" face="Impact">~ ].].]</font> 02:13, 13 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| |} | |||
| Except that it's back now replete with ] in its parameters: | |||
| ;Possible areas of research | |||
| Feel free to make suggestions below - you may even be able to make a point while you're at it! (see no.s 5 and 6 below ;-) | |||
| #Comparing classes of articles - eg. how is unsourced information treated when added by editors of similar reputation in different classes of articles | |||
| #Copyright concerns | |||
| #Academic honesty / plagiarism | |||
| #"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." -Isaac Asimov | |||
| ##from Larry Sanger to Moulton: Wikimedia's war against academic scholars | |||
| ##the destruction of content by Wikimedia's deletionists | |||
| ##censorship, bad blocks and bad bans imposed by Wikimedia's abusive administrators | |||
| #Studying the effect on Wikiversity/Wikipedia relations - are experimental pursuits into Misplaced Pages space, amid possible claims that this workshop encouraged, which it certainly did for some time in its initial months, going to result in a polaristation from which participants in Wikiversity are seen as experimental saboteurs, sneaking into the encyclopaedia to damage? Will Wikiversity seem as a hideaway which cannot be reached in which disruptions are plotted and recruits employed? Will Misplaced Pages editors find themselves imposed upon as unwilling test subjects by this workshop? | |||
| And I have to say that "censorship" is one of the no. 1 red flag terms used by POV-pushers (the other being "suppression") to describe situations where policy overrules their attempts to reflect the world as they would like it to be rather than as it is. <b>]</b> <small>(])</small> 13:26, 15 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| == BLP Abuse by activists complaint opened at AN/I == | |||
| A discussion on the topics raised on this page regarding BLP abuse by activists has been opened here. It is specifically a discussion documenting activity in which two Wiki editors engage in extended off-wiki wars and then edit their opponents BLP's here. ] (]) 23:12, 13 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :... where it is largely discounted as nonsense. <b>]</b> <small>(])</small> 14:15, 14 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::It is unacceptable to ''write'' the BLP's of your enemies, and it's not just one edit but most often near complete control through dozens of edits and reversions over the course of years in articles - as in this textbook example that states that the BLP subject ''was involved in a conspiracy with the shadowy international tobacco industry to use ] in order to divert the ] from reducing smoking.'' That's a delusional conspiracy theory which never should have entered a BLP at the hands of an attack blogger using Misplaced Pages to further his vendetta.. | |||
| ::Here you'll find Quiggin extolling on the virtues of''' explicitly using Misplaced Pages to write the BLP's of enemies'''. Quiggin states, ''"Winning the debate will require scientists to learn new and unfamiliar ways of communicating" "Now, anyone who performs a basic check can discover, with little effort, the full history of his efforts as tobacco lobbyist and hired gun for polluting industries" "where scientists have mounted a concerted response to their intellectual enemies"'' he goes on to state, 'they win'... I'll suggest here that character assassination is not a traditional part of the ], nor the point of ]'s. | |||
| ::Misplaced Pages does not exist as a vehicle for activists to engage in character assassination no matter how worthy their cause is. Misplaced Pages is weakened by such activity on so many levels in ways both small and large. _] (]) 16:43, 14 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::I have commented over there, and hope that others will take a deeper look at this issue as well.--] (]) 17:38, 14 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::TY for the consideration, I'll step back now as discussion begins to unfold.] (]) 17:58, 14 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::: That edit was in '''2007'''. It is simply not actionable. Neither party has edited that article in the last six months with the exception of reverting the removal of the name of one-co-author of a document. Not that it makes the edit defensible but we typically do not act on diffs that are months stale let alone years. <b>]</b> <small>(])</small> 20:51, 14 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::::If the edits are in violation of ], they still have to be removed. ] (]) 21:04, 14 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::: Quiggin has made, I think, 14 edits to the article on Bate over three years, I have listed them all on the noticeboard thread. I can't remember if the offending text is still there, the sources i the article right now look OK but I have not got as far as line-by-line checking yet. I also read the link that the IP posts as evidence Quiggin advocates using Misplaced Pages to write biographies of your enemies. He grossly misrepresents the source. The full quote is: | |||
| ::::{{quotation|The rise of the internet has been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it has generated an almost hermetically-sealed echo chamber, in which science warriors can circulate, adapt and modify the factoids, talking points and bogus quotations that are the stock in trade of opinion pieces like those mentioned above.<br />On the other hand, for anyone who is aware of the general strategy adopted by the advocates of ‘sound science’, resources like Google and Misplaced Pages provide immediate confirmation in particular instances. In the past, an opinion piece by, say, Steven Milloy, would appear with an uninformative or misleading byline, and would be given the benefit of the doubt by most readers. Now, anyone who performs a basic check can discover, with little effort, the full history of his efforts as tobacco lobbyist and hired gun for polluting industries.}} | |||
| :::: This is absolutely not an exhortation to edit the biographies of your enemies, only an exhortation to be aware of the power of Misplaced Pages and Google. And I absolutely agree: anyone who is aiming to combat attempts by politicians to undermine science in areas such as tobacco, global warming, evolution and so on very definitely should know about these things, because those political activists sure as hell are. In fact the quotation is a neat summation of about half the work of the arbitration committee over the last couple of years! | |||
| :::: What is completely clear here is that we have a partisan attempting to recruit support based on a highly misleading presentation of events, such as citing 2007 diffs as evidence of a current problem. But this is not the venue for this any more, it's at the noticeboard where the behaviour of ''all'' parties can be investigated, as usual. <b>]</b> <small>(])</small> 22:20, 14 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::::::Quiggin's instructions are clear, identify your enemy and then write their biography. When people are going about their business interacting normally they read a name and look it up, Google will find it and the enemies of that person can reach from beyond and shape perceptions. NOTHING good comes from using Misplaced Pages as that vehicle for attack. Try it for yourself and look up whomever it is you are reading on Google. Attack bloggers, no matter how good they believe their cause, have no place writing their enemies BLP's on Misplaced Pages. Quiggin & Lambert have been identified by multiple respectable third parties on three continents as attack bloggers and heavily criticized for what has been referred to from this source as "web activists who practice brown-shirt tactics on any who question". Misplaced Pages should not be used to further their political objectives and devolve into an attack vehicle - even for "good" causes.] (]) 14:57, 15 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::::: Before we go any further, I should make it clear to all concerned that the complainant is a serial disruptive editor who has been repeatedly blocked and is only just recently off a three-month block. See ]. This is not a complainant who has clean hands. I suggest that any further discussion be directed to AN/I, as Guy requests. -- ] (]) 00:14, 15 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::::: Has anyone looked at the revision history of ]'s own Misplaced Pages biography? I'm sorry, but I've read his blog posts about Lindzen, spelling errors and all, and I'm reluctant to believe a word of it. He writes against Lindzen at his , "As has been widely noted , confusing not statistically significant’ with ‘not significant; in the ordinary sense indicates either deliberate dishonesty or ignorance of a point covered in excruciating detail in every introductory stats course." What point is that? That a "''lack of statistical rise in temperature''" might still be a "''significant rise in temperature''"? Or does the sentence just not parse? This is gibberish. And then I find in this diff -- made by an editor who mysteriously only ever made a single edit -- ''Quiggin has frequently been awarded and recognised for his research, including twice receiving Federation Fellowships from the Australian Research Council.'' Frequently recognised? That links (now anyway) to a nonexistent page. And I find plenty of other editors, too, in the edit history, chipping away at Quiggin's flattering biography (at one point he was one of the greatest economists in the world), who also mysteriously made nothing but a few edits to to this bio and then disappeared. And of course, there are his own edits to his own biography... I'd suggest someone check this out too... ] (]) 14:45, 15 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::::::Since you've pointed out the "nonexistent" link, another editor has . As to {{user|Dpanell}}, whom you darkly describe as making only a single "mysterious" edit... based on the list of , I would bet that it's Professor David Pannell, a widely recognized expert in applied economics and a co-awardee of John Quiggin's. We would be fortunate to have him volunteer his time to edit Misplaced Pages. I'm not clear on what, exactly, your post is meant to accomplish. I understand that you dislike one of his blog posts, but I'm not clear on the relevance of that dislike to Misplaced Pages. The broken link has been fixed. The cited source, from the , supports the language used in our biography of John Quiggin. What else needs doing? ''']''' <sup>]</sup> 22:26, 15 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::::::: One might just as well single out and the edits of the delightful {{userlinks|Kerang123}}. All articles on anyone with an opinion on climate change are subject to constant attack and defence. There's not much we can do about that other than watch them - unless, of course, somebody finally gets round to turning on flagged revisions. <b>]</b> <small>(])</small> 00:06, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| == Partly sourced articles == | |||
| There is some "featured articles" (and other articles) with missing source refs in many paragraphs of the article. Administrators and ArbCom of Russian Misplaced Pages believes, that mass source requesting in articles - is "destructive behavior", "harrasment of authors" and "bring to the absurd". They rollbacks source requests (at example, in Russian articles , ), indefinitely blocks users (for example, ] was indefinitely blocked for source in Russian article Sikkim) and protects articles. In this case admins and arbiters refer to the part of rule ] which is called "". But it part of rule is absent in the English section of Misplaced Pages. It is long conflict (I was indefinite blocked in Russian Misplaced Pages 1 year ago for source requesting in the controversial articles too). In the blog we found a lot of mistakes in "featured articles" written by administrators and arbiters (for example, article ] (Sea otter) , article Sikkim ). I think that many errors in Misplaced Pages caused by lack of sources. '''What do you think about partly-sourced articles, when many paragraphs did not contain references to the source? Can it have a "featured articles" state? Can be user blocked for source requesting at the end of all non-trivial paragraphs in "featured article"?''' Thank. ] (]) 10:22, 14 March 2010 (UTC) P.S. The motive for such activity (mass stamped query on links to "featured" articles written by "party of administrators") is not a private persecution, but an attempt to improve the situation with links and reliability of the information in the Russian Misplaced Pages. ] (]) 11:07, 14 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| Additionally, I propose a templates to verify text of the article: | |||
| * {{passed}} - part of text is verified and consistent with sources. | |||
| * {{not passed}} - part of text is verified and NOT consistent with sources. | |||
| Careful inspection reveals many inconsistencies with sources in articles written by different people. But testing and marking text as unsourced or not presented in source is perceived as a personal attack, adherence to stalinism, lysenkoism etc. by some users and admins. There is need to rule for checking articles and marking all paragraphs of text as "passed checking" (especially in "featured" articles of Misplaced Pages, where is so many errors, paragraphs with no any sources and inconsistencies with sources by the "ref" tag). ] (]) 12:52, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| == == | == == | ||
| Line 407: | Line 143: | ||
| ::: David, you have mounted one of the most spectacularly counter-productive campaigns I've ever seen outside the area of link spamming - just as I predicted. Look at my talk page right now if you don't believe me. And if it's not obvious to you why I watch the admin noticeboards and Jimbo's talk page then there's not much I can do to help you, just as there's apparently not much I can do to help you understand why your constant agitation is having the precise opposite of the desired effect. The advice I gave you was and remains sound, you are of course free to continue to ignore it, and in the process you are more than likely to earn a topic ban because I'm provably not the only one who thinks you're actively making things worse. <b>]</b> <small>(])</small> 14:22, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | ::: David, you have mounted one of the most spectacularly counter-productive campaigns I've ever seen outside the area of link spamming - just as I predicted. Look at my talk page right now if you don't believe me. And if it's not obvious to you why I watch the admin noticeboards and Jimbo's talk page then there's not much I can do to help you, just as there's apparently not much I can do to help you understand why your constant agitation is having the precise opposite of the desired effect. The advice I gave you was and remains sound, you are of course free to continue to ignore it, and in the process you are more than likely to earn a topic ban because I'm provably not the only one who thinks you're actively making things worse. <b>]</b> <small>(])</small> 14:22, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | ||
| *Bloody hell! Hell in a Bucket, David Tombe and Brews ohare: your lives must really be shallow if you spend time bitching about Misplaced Pages. Go forth and find a new hobby - flower arranging or something.... Jeez! Where is that rolling eyes emoticon when you need it? Jon 22:21, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | *Bloody hell! Hell in a Bucket, David Tombe and Brews ohare: your lives must really be shallow if you spend time bitching about Misplaced Pages. Go forth and find a new hobby - flower arranging or something.... Jeez! Where is that rolling eyes emoticon when you need it? Jon 22:21, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | ||
| == Online Textbooks that comply with National curriculum standards == | |||
| I am from Texas and I am amazed by the machinations of both sides of the debate over content of the public school textbooks. The problem is not at all that one group or another yearns for their world view to be mirrored in the standards for Texas textbooks (and from there a plurality of state's adopted textbooks) | |||
| No. The problem is that the debate centers on bound volumes, printed at great expense that are out of date before they appear on the shelves. The obvious solution is an open source textbook projects. | |||
| Is Wiki-world interested in this project? I would appreciate any feedback on this. | |||
| Thanks, | |||
| Kirk Holden | |||
| <e-mail address redacted> <small><span class="autosigned">—Preceding ] comment added by ] (] • ]) 22:31, 15 March 2010 (UTC)</span></small><!-- Template:Unsigned --> <!--Autosigned by SineBot--> | |||
| :. – <font color="#E45E05">]</font><font color="#C1118C">]</font> 12:03, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| == Ongoing discussion on "Climategate" as a title == | |||
| There seems to be a general impression that the large majority of sources in English-speaking media use the term "Climategate", that a few avoid it, and that many (less than a majority) use it in inverted commas. (The results of my Google News searches confirm this.) In other words: Most media use it as a name, but a significant minority use it as a non-neutral description, clearly marked as such, or not at all. | |||
| There is also the earlier precedent of ], which, as you will note, is also a redirect. This is explicitly mentioned in ] since at least November. ] also links to ], which has been saying explicitly for more than a year that titles ending in ''-gate'' are not admissible unless they refer to historical scandals. | |||
| I think that your very clear statement that the article should be titled "Climategate" has not been helpful for finding consensus. | |||
| See ] and the section followed by it for further information. If you meant to override established, nuanced policies that speak almost specifically about this case even though they predate it, then you should say so very clearly. ] ] 00:01, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :No offense, Hans, but you're completely missing the point that ] requires that we, as Misplaced Pages editors, remain '''editorially neutral'''. That means we don't get to overrule what reliable sources have to say about the matter. Article names which incorporate non-neutral terms such as ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ] are legitimate article titles if those are the common names in English. We're supposed to use the world's terminology. We are not supposed to introduce bias to counter the bias of reliable sources. ] (]) 11:45, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::I have addressed this argument on the article talk page. I don't think it makes much sense to open yet another battlefield here. ] ] 12:34, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::No, you still don't get that ] is about '''editorial bias'''. Since you failed to mention the counter-argument, I decided to do it for you. In addition to what I said about, you should also be reminded that ] is only a guideline. ] is a policy. When policies and guidelines conflict (such as in this case), we're supposed to follow policy. ] (]) 12:58, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::::I said I have addressed this argument on the article talk page and I think it doesn't make much sense to open yet another battlefield here. But do help yourself to the last word. You are welcome. ] ] 13:05, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::::It's not about who gets the last word, but the fact that you explained your position without mentioning opposing positions, and pointed Jimbo to your analysis without also pointing him to or or anyone else's for that matter. I doubt that my post or your post will be the last one on this subject so your point is moot and nothing more than grandstanding. ] (]) 13:20, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| The purpose of this post was to alert Jimbo to a specific exchange at the article talk page that should interest him. (I just noticed that I forgot the links originally.) Sorry for having formulated it in a way that you could understand as an invitation to fork our ongoing discussion. I don't think this would improve its quality. Just do not pretend that I am not responding to your arguments elsewhere. Thank you. (Perhaps I should use email next time.) | |||
| This is definitely my last word here unless Jimbo decides to react. ] ] 13:30, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :I don't even think this is a close call. Policy is clear. Let's be blunt about it: some people don't like what this is called, and are pushing an agenda by trying to make up an original title that no one else uses.--] (]) 13:50, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::Thanks, very interesting. You wouldn't be interested in joining the discussion about the details of policy interpretation, perhaps? It so happens that I am under the impression that policy is clear and says the opposite. I think ] is important enough that it should be clarified if two intelligent people can come to opposite "clear" interpretations in good faith, after diligently trying to understand it. ] ] 14:09, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::I have additionally offered a compromise which may be a useful way to get past this. Please comment over there, rather than here, so others can follow along with our discussion more easily.--] (]) 14:35, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :: Not really, this is just another incident in Gategate, the ongoing scandal of the news media trying to pretend that every incident is as significant as Watergate in the hope that someone will believe they are still relevant, respectable and motivated by the public good despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary. <b>]</b> <small>(])</small> 14:14, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| :::The issue of whether the controversy is legit or not is besides the point. We're supposed to use whatever the common name in English is. ] (]) 14:18, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| ::::Hans does have a valid point that there can be reasons to avoid the common name in English. None of those exceptions applies here, I think, but his objection to the move does need to be answered.--] (]) 14:35, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | |||
| == Concerns about recent events related to discussion here == | == Concerns about recent events related to discussion here == | ||
| Line 485: | Line 176: | ||
| :::: Even so, all that matters are good intentions. Show that you want to edit constructively, and people will accept and forgive quite a bit. I think the main problem here is that the discussion soured, words were said and bans were issued. If i may again offer my humble advice: Always ] when editing, as hard as it sometimes is (There are a few examples in my edit history where i didn't). It really, REALLY helps in heated or controversial discussions, and remember, sometimes things will not turn out as you want. Second, remember the basic policies, such as not editing while banned. As Jimbo already pointed out, this screams bad faith and most users will not accept it lightly. As for an account: Some users prefer IP, some accounts. Both have their advantages, and both have their drawbacks. Even so, i have seen both accounts and IP's that were as valuable editors. (Only drawback for me: IP's are really hard to track\contact as they have different user pages all the time :) ). ]</font><sup> (],])</sup> 23:07, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | :::: Even so, all that matters are good intentions. Show that you want to edit constructively, and people will accept and forgive quite a bit. I think the main problem here is that the discussion soured, words were said and bans were issued. If i may again offer my humble advice: Always ] when editing, as hard as it sometimes is (There are a few examples in my edit history where i didn't). It really, REALLY helps in heated or controversial discussions, and remember, sometimes things will not turn out as you want. Second, remember the basic policies, such as not editing while banned. As Jimbo already pointed out, this screams bad faith and most users will not accept it lightly. As for an account: Some users prefer IP, some accounts. Both have their advantages, and both have their drawbacks. Even so, i have seen both accounts and IP's that were as valuable editors. (Only drawback for me: IP's are really hard to track\contact as they have different user pages all the time :) ). ]</font><sup> (],])</sup> 23:07, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | ||
| ==Your input is requested== | == Your input is requested == | ||
| Can I respectfully ask you to review this decision ]? It seems to have been make rather hastily (less than 48 hours after discussion was opened) and does not reflect the consensus of the discussion. It also seems to fly in the face of providing free access to all human knowledge, which I greatly support. How does one appeal such a decision? Thanks. ] (]) 19:51, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | Can I respectfully ask you to review this decision ]? It seems to have been make rather hastily (less than 48 hours after discussion was opened) and does not reflect the consensus of the discussion. It also seems to fly in the face of providing free access to all human knowledge, which I greatly support. How does one appeal such a decision? Thanks. ] (]) 19:51, 16 March 2010 (UTC) | ||
Revision as of 14:51, 17 March 2010
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Long comment by DeepNorth
Sorry about this. Your talk page has been busy, busy, busy while I was doing this. Cheers!
- Mr. Wales: Thanks for your time. I deal with the issues in more (ranty) length/detail here: http://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&action=edit§ion=5
Re: You wrote, among other things, that you "took a stab at trying to cure the ills of the bogus thing attempting to make it appear that there is no such thing as Climategate." Can you point me to more specifics? I just looked for the article, it is there, and does not seem to deny the existence of this incident at all.
Here is the Misplaced Pages page, for those who are interested on Climategate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Climategate&redirect=no
It is just a stub that redirects you to a discussion that might as well be about something else.
We do not have an entry proper for Climategate. We have a redirect that points to something different. In fact, it points to something you rightly describe as 'this incident'. Climategate should have its own article and it should take its proper name. Since it is not 'an incident', 'incident' should not be part of the name. I deal with that naming issue and how it relates to (nominal) policy here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/User:DeepNorth/Drafts
Misplaced Pages's guidelines for naming an article are very clear and the only name that satisfies them is 'Climategate'. The current name is misleading, prejudicial and just plain wrong.
Instead of the umbrella name for a sweeping scandal (tons of items in link above) -- misbehavior and alleged misbehavior spanning decades, we redirect someone searching for 'Climategate' to 'Climatic Research Unit hacking incident' -- as if Climategate is merely about a smallish crime ('incident') directed *against* people at UAE and the thing that is immediately known and important about this is that somebody illegally hacked into the UAE system and that the hacking event was being taken very seriously and being investigated by the police.
Except on 'opposite day' the 'persons of interest' in a crime here are the authors of some of the Emails, not the (IMO whistleblower) person who let them out into the wild. In the real world, what is germane is the content of that FOAI.zip data file and what it may mean for the integrity of Climate Science in particular and now even the governance of mainstream Science in general.
I deal with the Article as I found it at the time in the link below. I attempted to get a balanced view, based on what was actually known, similar to that given at 'Watergate Scandal' by using that page (Watergate) as a template. I used the prior version in these diffs: http://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Watergate_scandal&action=historysubmit&diff=348617087&oldid=331864938
Here is what I wrote. It was widely referenced prior to being pitched into oblivion here at WP:
I didn't sign it (my bad), but at the time I really was just an uninvolved editor. There are about 50 web pages properly referencing my modest comment, even though it was quickly disappeared from the discussion.
There are about 70 pages properly referencing the title of the article replacing Climategate even though it has been Ranked number one in a Google search for months.
There are anywhere from 1 to 50 million pages properly referencing 'Climategate' (as such, by name) depending upon how you look at it.
The current article title is about as wrong as an article title could be and still have some relation to its subject matter. It goes down from there. The opening paragraph is misleading to the point of being an effective falsehood. Climategate is not 'about' a hacking incident. This article is, but it has no business pretending to stand in for the real thing.
UEA itself is not notable enough for a security breach (if it even was one) to merit an article.
I took a look just prior to saving this and the article does not look much better 'spin-wise' than usual. It looks like it was written by an AGW apologist who had no choice but to address things gone too far public, but everything gets a spin and at the end, they refer you to only two pages:
See also:
* Global warming conspiracy theory * Global warming controversy
I am not, by any stretch of the imagination the only person who has complained that Climategate and the rest of the climate articles have been manipulated. If you follow the links through all of this you will find links to various skeptics and in their article they seem to be only all about 'denialism'. If you are skeptical and vocal, you can expect your biography to be a hatchet job. If you have a high profile like Richard Lindzen they will take care, but you are still not likely to get fair treatment. If you are pro AGW, you can expect to get spun nicely. Phil Jones is, essentially, the bad guy in the Climategate Emails. He is the one who was cheered at the news of a colleagues death. He was the one that said he would 'hide behind that' and 'destroy data' rater than release it and redefine the peer reviewed literature. He is the one who said the infamous 'hide the decline', which although it does not mean what people think it does is still not good. Phil Jone's entry looks like an apologia written by his publicist. It includes the howler about the prima facie evidence by UEA shill-meisters and the entry trails off with a list of four of his publications.
The main part of the article on Lindzen ends thus:
"Lindzen clearly relishes the role of naysayer. He'll even expound on how weakly lung cancer is linked to cigarette smoking. He speaks in full, impeccably logical paragraphs, and he punctuates his measured cadences with thoughtful drags on a cigarette"
They don't list any publications of Lindzen's, though they do link to a list of his many hundreds of publications.
The 'push' of the POV is crafty and can be subtle, but it is there in spades and the poster-child for this mangling of Misplaced Pages is the pre-emption of the article on Climategate.
I am recusing myself for now. This is so vexatious! Thank you very much for your attention. I am happy that you listened and though I would be delighted if you could fix this I am not expecting you to and I do not believe you have any obligation to do so.
Great job fostering and watching over WP, which is still a thing of wonderment, warts and all! DeepNorth (talk) 21:06, 10 March 2010 (UTC)
- DeepNorth, your proposals and opinions are misinformed, and possibly libellous. It's understandable in a context of widespread contrarian battering of the science, as disussed in Nature here. There are genuine issues of how scientists should respond to vexatious misuse of FOI requests to demand emails and intermediate workings, coming from people with no intention of working on the science of the subject. These issues are being examined in several enquiries, but in the interim simply repeating misinformation is irresponsible and inappropriate in Misplaced Pages. . . dave souza, talk 11:13, 11 March 2010 (UTC)
Shorter comment by DeepNorth
- Dave souza, misinformed? Inform them then, by all means. ... libellous (sic)? Not sure to what you refer, but its a stretch for Jones/UEA/Posters, etc. This is a talk page for goodness sake. "...widespread contrarian battering of the science...". Give me a break. People are suggesting we take extreme actions based on faulty data and little to no reasoning. This is an attack on *bad* science or *pseudo science* pretending to a level of quality and accuracy that it does not have. As for the Nature article. Isn't that the one whose editor had to resign from one of the investigative panels because he was a little less than forthcoming about his partiality WRT to AGW? I very strongly encourage anyone who is at all on the fence to read that article Dave has so kindly pointed out for us. Especially if you have a background in science or know anything about sound argumentation or the presumptive role of a publication like Nature, you will be amazed, shocked and appalled, but not for the reasons Dave is thinking. That is some piece of work. I am not being sarcastic here. Thanks for the link. It speaks much more eloquently to the distortion of the AGW debate than I ever could -- and with significant authority. Beautiful!
Re: "There are genuine issues of how scientists should respond to vexatious misuse of FOI requests ... coming from people with no intention of working on the science of the subject ... These issues are being examined in several enquiries (sic), but in the interim simply repeating misinformation is irresponsible and inappropriate in Misplaced Pages."
OMG. I hardly know what to say about the above. It is as if I am shilling for myself ... It should be easy enough to find the link. McKitrick's (sp?) submission to one of them shows clearly (from the record that is already public) that Phil Jones' resolve to withhold data *precedes* the two or three (!) requests that came his way from Mckintyre (sp?) and company. I would say that M&M deserve significant credit for doing some of the best work on climate data thus far. Again, as I say, pretty much everything I say is already part of the public record. It ain't goin' nowhere. DeepNorth (talk) 21:11, 11 March 2010 (UTC)
- "This is an attack on *bad* science or *pseudo science*" and there is your problem. If people come to Misplaced Pages with that kind of attitude then they are almost sure to make problems worse than better. Please refrain from it if you want people to listen to you. We (and then i mean your fellow editors) are not a platform/vehicle for your "attack". It is for agenda's as these that we have to deal with such a problem in the first place. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 02:42, 12 March 2010 (UTC)
- Short version, Misplaced Pages is not a battleground. -- ChrisO (talk) 02:51, 12 March 2010 (UTC)
- I strongly agree that WP should *not* be a battleground. Clearly we have a situation. I have recommended that participants with clear POV (vous et moi) should recuse and allow a pool of editors who have not (thus far) demonstrated such POV. If your POV (or, if you insist, NPOV) carries the day with a set of editors who have not (again, thus far, it's all we can guarantee) been involved, then likely they will invite you all back and chastise or even ban ostensible miscreants such as myself. If truly NPOV editors can be found and are content to carry on, then I will be quite pleased. If the new editors find both sides were out of line, then we are still good. If we take my suggestion, it's all upside. This is a sort of 'wisdom of Solomon' situation here. To save the baby, I am willing to give it up. Are you?
I agree that I have been prickly. I don't think I started out that way. I surely did not come here because some part of the blogosphere suggested I do so. I was here long before even my screen name was registered. Whatever I have done here (on WP generally) has largely been anonymous. The only reason I registered the screen name was to put up stuff on programming. the only reason that there are no articles in evidence is because some well meaning but over-zealous editor kept deleting my graphics (created and owned by me) and exhausted my time before I could get the articles up. On sober second thought, when I had the time again, I was unsure (still am) if this would be more 'original research' and so elected to publish elsewhere. That's about it for my original presence here (which goes back a lot longer than my screen name). Climategate was in the news and a Google search brings the WP page (such as it is) up as the top ranked hit on a search. I came here and was appalled at what I found. I still am. It is shocking. My initial impression was maybe you had a point and I went looking. The more I looked the more gruesome it looked. The while AGW thing was a scandal long before Climategate hit. I will absolutely own being a 'skeptic'. There is nothing at all wrong with skepticism. It is healthy. It is just about mandatory when doing research. My stuff especially (not climate -- data stuff). To be honest, though, having done a little research into Climate many years ago at school, I never thought the AGW POV had enough merit even to argue about. I had no idea it had gained such traction. I still, I swear, have no idea what the chain of evidence is supposed to be that links CO2 to Global Warming (causally, of any net additional significance) or Global Warming to catastrophe or catastrophe to something we can mitigate at a cost that is less than adapting. All of the 'pro AGW' camp seems to be able to present is arguments that cast naysayers in a negative light, previously debunked evidence, non-sequitors like experiments with CO2 in the lab (this goes back forever, before I was in University, nobody has argued with that experiment, it just isn't relevant), etc. I think it was McKitrick (sp?) who said somewhere that he found that every single argument or set of data that was presented by the pro AGW crowd, when peeled back layer by layer either ended up with nothing or something demonstrably false. That has been my experience. None of the people on this page or elsewhere has presented evidence of anything that supports AGW or demonstrates bad faith on the part of people like me. There is an 'opportunity cost' for taking premature action on the unproven chain mentioned above. A part of that cost will cause people in the third world to have to bury their children. That is neither a metaphor nor is it hyperbole. They are burying them now and more will perish as we allocate resources to managing the brokering of carbon credits that could have been spent on clean water, medicine, education and industrialization in the third world. I am a dad and I truly feel for those people. If we must, to save the many, sacrifice the few, then so be it. It would be a bitter pill, but I can face up to it. What I can't abide is the notion that carnage and tragedy will result from knee-jerk public policy actions based on very shaky evidence.
Though prickly, I don't think I have targeted anybody's person. I have disagreed with some of their utterances and actions. In the case of suppressing Climategate and the endless juvenile sophistry that passes for arguments in favor of AGW alarmism, I find it hard to bite my tongue. Believe me, I think that whether this is a road to hell paved with good intentions or not, it is still a road to hell. It is easy to step off of this road and strike a better course and I dearly wish the community at WP would do so.
I do, actually, assume good faith on the part of some (maybe most or all, who knows?) of the pro AGW people. I confess that part of my apathy to the AGW nonsense was a naive notion that the ends justified the means. That is, I have never thought there was a scrap of evidence that CO2 was anything but net beneficial, but since it mobilized people to clean up otherwise (because even though CO2 is not a pollutant, plenty of other things clearly are), I looked the other way. What, I thought, is the harm in it? Who cares if they do the right thing for the wrong reasons? Sadly, it is with that line of thinking that I joined you on the road to hell.
Perhaps like you, I feel a duty to speak up because the issue is important. I think this is, broadly, an important issue outside of WP. However, it is inside that concerns me here. Regardless of who is good, who is bad, who is right and who is wrong, the net effect of the warring is detrimental to WP, and as I mentioned before the most egregious example of this is the ridiculous situation where there is, effectively, no real article on Climategate. It should make Wikipedians blush. DeepNorth (talk) 04:28, 12 March 2010 (UTC)
Oh yeah -- likely tl;dr, but that may be what is wrong with this whole thing. Maybe if people had more tenacity for reading and cogitating on things there would not be so much disagreement here.
- Let's start from the beginning. Is there any reason that a wikipedia entry "Climategate" should redirect to this page, with no opportunity to create a page by that name? Climategate scandal redirects here also. Climategate science offers Climatic Research Unit documents, as well as this, but does not discuss the perceptions of scientific scandal. This controversy may or may not rival Cyril Burt's peccadillo, or perhaps even the Piltdown Man, but there is no option to deny the possibility. Let's start from the beginning, and create an NPOV page entitled Climategate - which, after all, refers only to a perception, and a real perception, but not to a reality - which can provide links to the hacking/leaking of emails, and to the documents themselves. Dave Souza's comment 11:13, 11 March 2010 is tendentious, and the Nature editorial ] is contrary to fact: "The core science supporting anthropogenic global warming has not changed. This needs to be stated again and again ... climate legislation had hit a wall in the US Senate, where the poorly informed public debate often leaves one wondering whether science has any role at all." In fact, shouting anything again and again is characteristic of Goebbels rather than Galileo. Those who presume to be promoting "science" are in fact fighting a rear guard action, retreating from inch after inch of furiously defended territory. The Null Hypothesis has not been falsified. Scientific Method trumps "science". Let's have no more cross-burnings on the lawns of scientific skeptics (or, more simply, scientists). Oiler99 (talk) 07:36, 13 March 2010 (UTC)
Since you are discussing the article name, on 17 February, 2010, there was an attempt to have "hacking" removed from the title Climatic Research Unit hacking incident. 27 people supported the change and 8 opposed it. Therefore, the name change failed. Normally, I would have thought that 77% would have been considered a pass. This is one of the reasons that some people claim that there is a cabal. BTW, there is still heated discussion of the term "hacked". Q Science (talk) 09:52, 14 March 2010 (UTC)
The beat goes on ...
The Climategate fiasco on WP has overflowed to JW's talk page. JW expressed puzzlement at the strange title masking Climategate and even the opinion (with which many concur) that it should be called Climategate as per WP policy. People came out of the woodwork to express their displeasure with things. They provided diffs of edits to show how the climate articles have been injured. Clearly, there is more than a little controvery here. So ... somebody figured it was time to remove the tag saying the neutrality of the fake Climategate page is in dispute. As far as anyone looking for Climategate on WP is concerned, it is *not* called Climategate. It is called the Climatic Research Unit hacking incident. Apparently, it involves primarily a department at school, was a confirmed hacking and was merely an 'incident' at a moment in time. That is apparently what is fair and germane to say about the thing the rest of the world calls Climategate. Hence, here at WP, we present the article as if it has all been agreed upon and there is no effective dissent with respect to that point of view. I dissent and I think that both the title and the article itself are grotesque stains upon the reputation of Misplaced Pages as a reasonable source of information.
The above removes the tag from (what should be Climategate) that says the neutrality is in dispute. The person who did this added the following summary: "(Rm POV tag. There is no more neutral title than this and I don't see any disputed material.)"
It should be noted that the neutrality of that title *and* the content of that article is not only in dispute, it is POV by any definition on its face. The tag should never have been removed. This is the second time I have noticed this happen to this article. There are plenty of people with a less than neutral point of view who are watching this article constantly. I wonder how long it will take for the POV tag to go back up and who will do it. DeepNorth (talk) 14:21, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- I agree 100%, the tag should have stayed. However, because of the "probation", I know that if anyone from the "wrong side of the argument" restores it, they face a permanent ban from wikipedia. I have already been warned (actually threatened) that even discussing the emails will get me banned. Q Science (talk) 10:36, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
De-sysop of Trusilver
Arbcom has now voted to desysop User:Trusilver. This highlights the need for reform and overhaul. They agreed that the wording regarding the enforcement was wanting and decided to clarify that as well. Unfortunately this shows why Argumentum ad populum are generally no-no's, we have Arbcom noting that there is a problem with the block and the process yet they then decide to string him up as a example anyways. How does that make any sense? There's a problem with the block, there is a problem with the blocking administrator who did the blocking. There was a lack of clarity in how the AE was being set up, Trusilver was forthcoming with a reasonable defense that addressed the problem. My point is that they took 5+5 and came up with negative 2. Consider the statement by a arbcom member, User:Steve Smith, where he claims Trusilver was too principled to have the mop. In effect they are saying you have to be corrupt and malleable to be admin here, hence the repeated posting to your pages by multiple good faith editors to help clean that type of attitude out. That type of attitude has no place in a environment like ours! Hell In A Bucket (talk) 15:08, 15 March 2010 (UTC)
- "Too principled" is a polite was of saying "too stubborn", IMO. It was simply not an admin's place to invoke IAR and overturn an arbcom-sanctioned block, and the refusal to reconsider once this was pointed out led to the desysop. Tarc (talk) 15:13, 15 March 2010 (UTC)
- Quote specifically commending him and condemning him? Hell In A Bucket (talk) 15:14, 15 March 2010 (UTC)
This is admirable (really): refusing to adhere to the rules when they go against one's conscience is noble and commendable. My vote at this point is not punishment, but rather an acknowledgement that Trusilver's scruples are not consistent with the expectations of an administrator, and that he is too principled to suppress his principles for the sake of retaining the bit. Steve Smith (talk) 16:37, 10 March 2010 (UTC)
TO make sure there is no confusioin the above was posted at Arbcom and the bluelink in the title links to the specific diffs.Hell In A Bucket (talk) 15:49, 15 March 2010 (UTC)
Steve: Your remarks simply amplify H in B's concern over conflict between good sense and arbitration. In any event, the interpretation of this case as a disciplinary action to enforce "order" was a miscall. There was no need to make this a disciplinary action at all: it was a matter for interpretation of a murky sanction further obscured by Tznkai. Brews ohare (talk) 15:31, 15 March 2010 (UTC)
- Oh FFS are you guys ever going to learn? Every single time anything related to Brews comes up for discussion it's right back to refighting the arbitration case. What happened in my opinion was that you caused ArbCom to believe that this was an action taken in furtherance of a campaign to subvert the findings and outcomes of the case, which it wasn't, with the result that Trusilver got desysopped for a defensible call given the ambiguities of the situation. Your posturing and bluster obscured that to the point that most of the arbs didn't see it for what it was. You are so lacking in political astuteness that it hurts to watch! Please just drop the bloody stick and leave it for the dust to settle, the chances of your causing anything other than your own banning for being a monstrous pain in the arse are rapidly diminishing. Seriously. Guy (Help!) 00:00, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
If vague threats are all you can muster, I strongly suggest you yourself to drop the bloody stick. Hell In A Bucket (talk) 00:25, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- WP:IDIDNTHEARTHAT describes your behaviour perfectly. Goodbye. Guy (Help!) 09:34, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- Are you going somewhere? Hell In A Bucket (talk) 20:35, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- Mr. Wales, Something will have to be done about these people like Guy(JzG) who hang about noticeboards poking their nose into matters that don't concern them. Hell in a Bucket came to your talk page to seek your views on a matter of importance. He has drawn attention to the fact that an administrator has been desysoped by ARBCOM and that arbitrator Steve Smith has stated that the administrator in question is too principled to be an administrator. Something is seriously wrong when an arbitrator can make a satement like that. It tends to suggest that it is necessary that somebody should be somewhat corrupt in order to make an effective administrator. Do you agree with Steve Smith's statement?
- Anyway, no sooner has Hell in a Bucket brought this important matter to your attention in good faith when the likes of Tarc and Guy(JzG) turn up and try to tamper with the evidence. Tarc gives us a new meaning to the word 'principled'. He tells us that 'principled' means 'stubborn'. Well that's the first time that I have ever heard that, and I'm a native English speaker. Guy(JzG) then tries to make out that ARBCOM made a wrong decision only because of the likes of myself having obscured the facts by speaking up in defence of the victim. Guy is one of these people who tries to pull the wool over our eyes and have us all believe that speaking up in defence of someone actually does them harm, whereas the harm is never done by those who do the blocking, or by those who bear the false witness. Guy uses that line of sophism in an attempt to eliminate benevolent witnesses from the picture. It's true that when corruption is abounding that benevolent witnesses have no beneficial effect. But let's end all this sophism about benevolent witnesses being the actual cause of the problem. David Tombe (talk) 11:18, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- "poking their nose into matters that don't concern them", "the likes of Tarc and Guy(JzG) turn up and try to tamper with the evidence", "those who bear the false witness", "Guy uses that line of sophism in an attempt to eliminate benevolent witnesses from the picture", "corruption is abounding"... What happened with wp:NPA and wp:AGF? DVdm (talk) 11:51, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- David, Pot, Kettle, Black. I.e. surely something needs to be done about people like yourself repeatedly raising a matter that has nothing to do with you, in an inappropriate manner in a completely inappropriate location? Of course you will ignore this like you ignore everything that doesn't correspond to your special view of how WP should be run. How this doesn't violate your ban I don't know.--JohnBlackburnedeeds 12:16, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- David, you have mounted one of the most spectacularly counter-productive campaigns I've ever seen outside the area of link spamming - just as I predicted. Look at my talk page right now if you don't believe me. And if it's not obvious to you why I watch the admin noticeboards and Jimbo's talk page then there's not much I can do to help you, just as there's apparently not much I can do to help you understand why your constant agitation is having the precise opposite of the desired effect. The advice I gave you was and remains sound, you are of course free to continue to ignore it, and in the process you are more than likely to earn a topic ban because I'm provably not the only one who thinks you're actively making things worse. Guy (Help!) 14:22, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- Bloody hell! Hell in a Bucket, David Tombe and Brews ohare: your lives must really be shallow if you spend time bitching about Misplaced Pages. Go forth and find a new hobby - flower arranging or something.... Jeez! Where is that rolling eyes emoticon when you need it? Jon 22:21, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
Concerns about recent events related to discussion here
I recently brought up a matter of concern here, you supported discussion and participated in it at AN/I. It gained little to no interest, one subject engaged in some reflection and the topic is now really just waiting for auto-archival.
However - my bringing the subject up has led to a pronounced move to ban me specifically for discussing the topic. Now, after adding this edit which was immediately deleted, not one, but two editors opposing the concept have gone to AN/I to demand my immediate banning. I don't think banning is the appropriate method to settle content disputes, and I also like to think that somewhere in the attempt an actual violation of something could be stated and a supporting reference of a diff presented. As it stands now, I am to be banned for a discussion you supported and participated in.99.142.1.101 (talk) 17:49, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
Why don't you log in?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:36, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- Up until the last few years I never felt the need, now that IP editing has become let's say somewhat less common as community attitudes shift, I've considered it. At this point the fear of being tarred, feathered and branded the moment I log in keeps me away from it. Originally I never did it because I was on multiple computers over the course of the day and often in different countries, in that environment no logon was desirable. That hasn't been an issue for awhile now.99.142.1.101 (talk) 20:49, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- You open yourself up to a useless vector of attack, the claim that you're sockpuppeting or being dishonest. If you aren't, then a login provides you with the means to establish an identity. Nevertheless, rest assured, you can't be banned from Misplaced Pages without a ruling of ArbCom or a universal unwillingness of anyone to unblock you - once you have a login. As an IP, people (including me) are much less likely to intervene to help.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:54, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- What's the policy regarding an IP opening an account? Does life here begin then? Or must I dig up and claim what may well be my over 25,000 edits since summer 2001?99.142.1.101 (talk) 20:59, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- You open yourself up to a useless vector of attack, the claim that you're sockpuppeting or being dishonest. If you aren't, then a login provides you with the means to establish an identity. Nevertheless, rest assured, you can't be banned from Misplaced Pages without a ruling of ArbCom or a universal unwillingness of anyone to unblock you - once you have a login. As an IP, people (including me) are much less likely to intervene to help.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:54, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- Edit count is not important, nor an argument in any discussion. As a vandalism patrol i get tons of edits, but each edit only helps Misplaced Pages a little bit. On comparison User:Storye book was completely new when i came across an article he wrote, and his first article was absolutely stunning. Even now his edit count is not even a tenth of mine, but he isn't any less an editor then i am, not now and not on his first edit. I might actually argue that his added value is worth more then the retaining value my vandalism patrol brings in.
- As for an account: All that matters is behavior and conduct. Using an account allows other people to identity you, which will eventually be beneficial. For one you will not be accused of sock-puppetry as easily if you switch IP's dynamically, and if your conduct is good people might even cut you a bit more slack when engaged in a heated discussion. One note though: If you have an account you should not combine it with IP editing on the same page, or to evade scrutiny on your account. And remember, Don't give the impression of sockpuppeting and be reasonable when debating. As said before, your edits are a bit aggressive and non constructive at times - in my humble opinion that is! :) Excirial 21:44, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- (EC) As an uninvolved editor who happened to come across this edit while working on vandalism patrol, i think i might be able offer some more or less unbiased input here.
- As for the IP user, i can honestly say that i deem your debating style a little offensive, if not disruptive. Comments such as "I will endeavor to speed the decline of anti-intellectual Misplaced Pages by contributing (and not resisting) to the rot at the core. This will be easy to game simply by bending with the prevailing wind and pushing hard with the wind while leaving behind piles of crap quietly weaved into every facet I can touch. :) Hello brothers, I'm home. " are absolutely not constructive towards ANY decision making proces. Similary, accusations of canvassing and harrasment will not create a pleasant editing sphere for either party.
- Furthermore, i deem your IP allocation scheme really odd. Every IP you used is owned by AT&T, and even in the same netblock. Dynamic IP's are most likely to be refreshed after the end of a session or after a given amount of time. You had for 3 days, but after it was banned you suddenly moved to 99.151.166.95. After that one was banned as well, you appeared as 99.144.192.74. Seeing these are all in the same netblock, and seeing the IP changes right after a block this reeks of intentional block evasion / sockpupperty. Therefor, im not surprised that people immediately run to ANI once you returned and resumed.
- As a closing comment, i would advice you to analyze your own editing behavior. If multiple people report you, and three different admins banned you, there is quite a high chance that the problem might at least partially originate with yourself. Excirial 21:27, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- Your criticism is sound, there is nothing in that edit but frustration expressed poorly and "pointy". Not a moment I'm at all proud of. Again, at this point my only concern is whether selective scarlet letter's as above will be sewn to my chest should I create an account.99.142.1.101 (talk) 22:04, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- The question is more whether you have any intention of editing beyond your apparent vendetta against a couple of people. If not, you are not welcome (the block evasion, incidentally, is also something you will need to ensure you never do again). If you would like to edit and can do so without continuing your vendetta then fair enough, but don't expect us to stand by and let you engage in precisely the sort of behaviour you allege against others, which is effectively what's been happening thus far. Guy (Help!) 23:05, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- Your criticism is sound, there is nothing in that edit but frustration expressed poorly and "pointy". Not a moment I'm at all proud of. Again, at this point my only concern is whether selective scarlet letter's as above will be sewn to my chest should I create an account.99.142.1.101 (talk) 22:04, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- In part, letters might be sown. Just search trough my history, and you will undoubtedly find questionable edits as well, which sound even worse out of context. Yet at the same time i can point to an even larger set of edits that are of good quality. At the same time there are quite a few editors that only work on fringe topics with a lot of heated debate, and still they manage to be respected editors. Sure, It is always possible you meet resistance, but you should keep in mind you cannot win every battle, even if you are certain you are right.
- Even so, all that matters are good intentions. Show that you want to edit constructively, and people will accept and forgive quite a bit. I think the main problem here is that the discussion soured, words were said and bans were issued. If i may again offer my humble advice: Always keep cool when editing, as hard as it sometimes is (There are a few examples in my edit history where i didn't). It really, REALLY helps in heated or controversial discussions, and remember, sometimes things will not turn out as you want. Second, remember the basic policies, such as not editing while banned. As Jimbo already pointed out, this screams bad faith and most users will not accept it lightly. As for an account: Some users prefer IP, some accounts. Both have their advantages, and both have their drawbacks. Even so, i have seen both accounts and IP's that were as valuable editors. (Only drawback for me: IP's are really hard to track\contact as they have different user pages all the time :) ). Excirial 23:07, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
Your input is requested
Can I respectfully ask you to review this decision ]? It seems to have been make rather hastily (less than 48 hours after discussion was opened) and does not reflect the consensus of the discussion. It also seems to fly in the face of providing free access to all human knowledge, which I greatly support. How does one appeal such a decision? Thanks. Smatprt (talk) 19:51, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- Don't bother - this is a matter for community consensus, not for Jimbo. – ukexpat (talk) 19:58, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- Since community consensus is not being observed here, what is the process to appeal? (I still think Jimbo might be interested in this, though). Thanks. Smatprt (talk) 20:03, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- It looks like a pretty strong consensus. But, as was said, this isn't really a matter for me.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:02, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- Wow - thanks for answering. I've asked several places where to find out about appealing, since the majority of comments were "oppose" and yet the decision went the other way (13 oppose, 8 support - yet support called the consensus?). So where does one appeal?Smatprt (talk) 21:20, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- It looks like a pretty strong consensus. But, as was said, this isn't really a matter for me.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:02, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- Per Jimbo himself: Consensus is a partnership between interested parties working positively for a common goal. It is not a "vote count", see WP:Consensus. – ukexpat (talk) 21:30, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- Oh, yes, of course. But since no partnership was formed and nothing resolved between the "supports" and "opposes", no consensus was even attempted. Several suggestions were made, but the reviewer didn't respond to any of them. I should have been more clear about that. So where does one appeal this? Just answer me that and I'll go there. Thanks. Smatprt (talk) 21:42, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- Per Jimbo himself: Consensus is a partnership between interested parties working positively for a common goal. It is not a "vote count", see WP:Consensus. – ukexpat (talk) 21:30, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
Start with User:Peter cohen who "closed" the discussion. – ukexpat (talk) 21:44, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- Yes, that's a good idea. For what it is worth, I misread the close. What I meant is that there seems to be a consensus against undertaking a merge. I see that the close says the opposite, perhaps Peter just mistyped? It happens. :) --Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:56, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- It was myself who made the close in the interests of moving the process forward. The resolution is to start sandboxing an article to replace the current one with an eye toward Misplaced Pages guidelines and policies especially WP:NPOV, WP:V, WP:RS, WP:FRINGE, and WP:PSTS. It is requested that those upset with this close work constructively in the sandbox to try to develop the best article possible. ScienceApologist (talk) 22:38, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- I don't understand. You closed it opposite of community consensus (13 oppose, 8 support, with what look to be sensible comments in either direction) in order to "move things forward"? Shouldn't the resolution be in the other direction? And those who aren't happy with the existing community consensus to work to sandbox something that will answer the objections?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:43, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- I'm not sure what your last question is supposed to mean, but there is evidence of meatpuppetry action in the enumeration. I take Misplaced Pages:What is consensus?#Not a majority vote seriously. The quality of the argumentation seemed to me to be very lopsided toward the "mergists" in the discussion. It seems clear to me that the arguments being made by those requesting a merge or a partial merge were more tied to reliable sources and legitimate content objections. The other side seemed to be appealing to vague notions of fair play and censorship that are not really germane to this discussion. In any case, I'm hoping that everyone will be involved in sandboxing a solution. If this fails, then it fails, but after wasting megabytes of text on this conflict we absolutely must move forward. The status quo is going to lead us to an arbitration. It is my opinion that this may be a way to forestall that seeming inevitability. ScienceApologist (talk) 23:07, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- Yes, that was my concern precisely. I'm hoping ScienceApologist will re-factor his remarks accordingly. Smatprt (talk) 22:53, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- I have attempted to clarify, but I would like you to collaborate rather than forum shop, Smatprt. For example, I would like to see you find some independent secondary sources that outline what the most important Shakespearean authorship ideas are. That would be incredibly useful to Misplaced Pages. ScienceApologist (talk) 23:07, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- I don't understand. You closed it opposite of community consensus (13 oppose, 8 support, with what look to be sensible comments in either direction) in order to "move things forward"? Shouldn't the resolution be in the other direction? And those who aren't happy with the existing community consensus to work to sandbox something that will answer the objections?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:43, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- It was myself who made the close in the interests of moving the process forward. The resolution is to start sandboxing an article to replace the current one with an eye toward Misplaced Pages guidelines and policies especially WP:NPOV, WP:V, WP:RS, WP:FRINGE, and WP:PSTS. It is requested that those upset with this close work constructively in the sandbox to try to develop the best article possible. ScienceApologist (talk) 22:38, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- I have done so on numerous occasions and supplied them for the article. Smatprt (talk) 23:51, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- Then it's time to use those to sandbox a good summary style article in the sandbox. I look forward to seeing your contribution. ScienceApologist (talk) 00:09, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
- I have done so on numerous occasions and supplied them for the article. Smatprt (talk) 23:51, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- Jimbo, since my name has been introduced into this, I should like to point out the following.
- I started the merge thread in response to the consensus among experienced editors at WP:ANI#Shakespearian fringe theory and some awful articles that the articles should be merged
- There are a number of pretty obvious sockpuppets voting in that discussion
- When I contacted people offline for their suggestions as to who the puppetmasters were, I was informed that there is a record of off-wikipedia canvassing by some of those who argue that Shakespeare did not write his own plays.
- Discussions are not votes. The closer should consider the strength of the arguments in the light of Misplaced Pages policy. This can mean that the apparent minority wins.
- I did actually post at Misplaced Pages:Fringe theories/Noticeboard an invitation for admin intervention in light of the puppetry and arguments that misrepresent WP:NPOV. I didn't expect a non-admin to arrive, but there was an awful lot of crap to cut through and the views of those at the AN/I thread needed to be taken into account.--Peter cohen (talk) 23:22, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- This allegation of sock puppetry is just that - an allegation. And an unproven and uninvestigated one at that. If someone merely checks the IP's and approximate locations, I am pretty darn sure Peter's allegation will be found to be in error.
- As someone who has hunted down a number of puppets, I can find no evidence for such an allegation, much less anything "pretty obvious", as Peter notes.
- For the record, I asked Peter for any evidence of Sockpuppetry and was provided none.
- I certainly was not contacted off-line to ask about Sockpuppetry, but I am aware that mainstream editors are being canvassed offline.
- User:Tom Reedy even admits that he was approached to come to the article in the first place, for example.
- Tom and user:Nishidani have exchanged personal e-mails for reasons I can only guess at. But since that time, they seem to have an organized strategy between them. Smatprt (talk) 23:51, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- Stop the sniping back-and-forth Get back to writing the encyclopedia. There's a sandbox to play in where progress is waiting to be made. ScienceApologist (talk) 00:08, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
- I have already made a large contribution there. (I am the only one who has). But I did feel it important to address these allegations of SockPuppetry. I hope you agree that they really need to stop Smatprt (talk) 00:23, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
Comment. In looking at ScienceApologist's further explanation of his ruling I don't think he has actually ruled in favor of either party of this debate. He's merely suspended judgement and directed everyone to create the sort of changes that need to be made. He hasn't made a ruling on any mergers or article deletions at all...yet. It's a "let's see the alternative first before deciding" approach. I think this is very smart and exactly what needs to be done in this contentious climate. Bravo!4meter4 (talk) 00:31, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
Bullying
Jimbo, I think this kind of bullying is not acceptable. Please don't do this, or we may need an RfC/U. Hans Adler 22:03, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- How is that bullying? I asked him not to go and start editing long-settled articles in order to make a point about a completely unrelated article. There's nothing bullying about that at all. People should not disrupt Misplaced Pages to make a point.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:08, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- This matter was inconsequential, but this is very aggressive editing, I think. --Pete Tillman (talk) 22:38, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- It's disappointing.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:41, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- And as for Jimbo's comment, my own reaction is that it is both correct and proper. An RfC/U over it? Sheesh! Jusdafax 22:45, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- What's disappointing is the amount of bad-faith assumptions being thrown around, particularly by people who should know better. Jimbo, if you had bothered to look at what I am actually doing, I am tidying up some long-standing terminological, sourcing and POV problems. This isn't "making a point", it's simple good practice. Take a look, for example, at the list of unsourced POV allegations against living persons I just deleted from Bandargate scandal. Do you think I should have left that alone? Fixing problem articles is certainly a lot more productive than bickering on talk pages. -- ChrisO (talk) 23:19, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- And as for Jimbo's comment, my own reaction is that it is both correct and proper. An RfC/U over it? Sheesh! Jusdafax 22:45, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- It's disappointing.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:41, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- This matter was inconsequential, but this is very aggressive editing, I think. --Pete Tillman (talk) 22:38, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- (ec with various people) It is perfectly normal to address problems with long-settled articles as soon as they become apparent. After all, this is a wiki, and "it has always been like that", while still somewhat convincing, doesn't have the same force as in real life.
- What I found really concerning is this: "You are making up policy that doesn't exist." You are simply claiming this. I challenged you to discuss interpretation of policy. You chose to propose a compromise title instead, which is fine. But then please don't act as if you had already won the dispute about policy interpretation.
- WP:NPOV#Article titles sets a high standard for the use of inherently non-neutral titles:
- Where proper nouns such as names are concerned, disputes may arise over whether a particular name should be used as (or in) an article title. Misplaced Pages takes a descriptive rather than prescriptive approach in such cases, by using the common English language name as found in verifiable reliable sources; proper names for people or events which incorporate non-neutral terms - e.g. Boston massacre, Tea Pot Dome scandal, Edward the Confessor, Jack the Ripper - are legitimate article titles when they are used by a consensus of the sources.
- This seems to be the only passage that allows exceptions from the principle that we only use neutral titles. The term "Climategate" appears to be used by a majority of sources, and mentioned (in inverted commas or qualified with "so-called") by many but not all others. It is at least arguable (and in my opinion true) that that's not a consensus of the sources using the term.
- I think as founder of this project you should be a bit more careful not to push a specific interpretation of technical points of policy in a matter in which you seem to be emotionally invested. Hans Adler 22:49, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- I'm not emotionally invested in anything other than the neutrality of Misplaced Pages. The current name is manifestly not neutral. Please help me work towards consensus on a proper title.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:55, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- There seems to be some support (I'm not sure how much) for adding "controversy" to the title. Does that satisfy your concerns or do you prefer "scandal"? Viriditas (talk) 22:58, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- Help you work towards consensus on a proper title? You mean like this? Or by supporting one of the extremes, the one that you favour and that in my opinion is against policy? Hans Adler 23:02, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- As I've already said, consensus requires both sides to find a middle ground, and I'm glad that you have at least (if somewhat grudgingly) endorsed the proposal that GoRight and I put forward, Climatic Research Unit email and document controversy. -- ChrisO (talk) 23:21, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- I'm not emotionally invested in anything other than the neutrality of Misplaced Pages. The current name is manifestly not neutral. Please help me work towards consensus on a proper title.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:55, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- Oh noes! Now we have Gategategate! :-o Guy (Help!) 22:59, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- The possibility of improving on the current title by focussing on the controversy has been put forward before, but as I recall commonly derailed by those demanding the less neutral "climategate" title refusing to compromise. Consensus is more likely to be achieved by ruling that term out, and pressing for a change from "hacking incident" to "controversy". The option of "scandal" appears problematic, a dreadful email talking of deleting one's own private emails is possibly a criminal offence under post 2005 legislation but is hardly an assault on the principles of science. . . dave souza, talk 23:07, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- I've been following this from the beginning, and we do seem to keep coming back to some variation of Climatic Research Unit email and document controversy as a title that everyone can live with. It's not my preference, but it works. Viriditas (talk) 23:09, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
- So what does it take to make that change? As for me, I will drop all objections if we can get that change. Climatic Research Unit email and document controversy will be fine. The main point for me is that it eliminates the false notion that the scandal is primarily about the emails being leaked/hacked... this isn't news because it is a "hacking incident" but because of the content of the emails and documents. That's the key point for neutrality.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 08:36, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
- I'm really mystified. A lot of people have been defending an article on "the hack". Is this no longer a topic notable enough to have its own article? Why not have two articles, one on the hack and one on the controversy. These are two different subjects, not two different titles for the same subject. So when you say that this is a compromise, I don't quite understand. They are 2 discrete topics. Moogwrench (talk) 07:48, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
- I have no very strong opinion on where the "hack" is sufficiently notable as a standalone. I currently would be inclined to say no. However if, as seems highly unlikely, there are further developments and this turns out to have been a sophisticated and well-funded hacking incident with much interesting to be said about it, then of course a separate article would be warranted. If, as I think more likely than that but still unlikely, it is eventually revealed that someone with access to the servers released the emails because they were either politically motivated or simply horrified at the ethical breaches evident in the emails, then depending on the circumstances that might or might not warrant a separate entry. And finally, in the most likely case of all, the investigation never turns up anything, then unless I've overlooked something noteworthy, we simply don't seem to have enough standalone to write about. But those are just my musings, and as I say, I have no very strong opinion about it.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 08:36, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
Mr. Wales - Wikiversity Alternative
I have started a Wikiversity alternative, a link can be found on my "user" page here. It seems to me that different wikis with similar scopes will ultimately be better for all stakeholders. I am currently and repeatedly banned from Wikiversity, however, you would be welcome to promote my wiki there or most anywhere else as an alternative for those who would appreciate a different management style in a research oriented/collaborative learning wiki. Good job on this wiki, though. It appears it is #6 on Alexa now. Have we cured poverty yet? Has Wikiversity already cured cancer? Probably not yet, but maybe eventually. Maybe. :) EME44