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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Magic9mushroom (talk | contribs) at 07:10, 15 February 2021 (punctuation fix in my own comment). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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COVID-19 lab leak user and draft space POVFORKs

Not a voteIf you came here because someone asked you to, or you read a message on another website, please note that this is not a majority vote, but instead a discussion among Misplaced Pages contributors. Misplaced Pages has policies and guidelines regarding the encyclopedia's content, and consensus (agreement) is gauged based on the merits of the arguments, not by counting votes.

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Draft:COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)
User talk:50.201.195.170/COVID-19 lab leak theory (edit | subject | history | links | watch | logs)
User:Arcturus/Lab leak (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)
Note to closer: I have added two pages to this nomination afterwards; I think that if this is deleted then both of these pages should equally be deleted for the same reasons as the content is also substantially similar in nature and in intent (in the case of the IP page, it is per the edit summary attribution an older but exact copy of the draft nominated). Feel free to extend the discussion if you believe that there was insufficient time to discuss these additional nominations. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 03:29, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
Additional note: User:Arcturus has expressed their wish for the relevant page to be deleted here. The closing admin is free to handle this information however they think appropriate. Cheers, RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 23:19, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Delete, is a POV fork of here; the existing article has many eyes on it, whereas this draft fork has been edited by an editor that had to be topic-baned. Maybe in a few years, we will know what happened (or maybe not), but at the moment, there is no evidence to support this, and there is a lot of conspiratorial and fringe theories circulating looking for Misplaced Pages to help validate them. Britishfinance (talk) 17:24, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Delete, I agree with RandomCanadian and BritishFinance. The World Health Organization debunked the lab leak theory this week , so this content is becoming unambiguously fringe. –Novem Linguae (talk) 22:53, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Delete as a WP:POVFORK about a fringe topic by a topic-banned user blocked for violation of said topic ban. — csc 01:35, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
Just as a note, this was created before the imposition of the topic ban, and I don't know if it had any implication in the imposition of said topic ban, though it clearly is a sign... RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 02:20, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Keep As this page is the subject of some ongoing controversy it would be better to keep it as stands given that there are also ongoing state and NGO investigations into the possibility of a laboratory leak. The topic definitely deserves a page of its own and it highlights Misplaced Pages's impartiality and lack of bias, so Keep. The statement by Novem Linguae "The World Health Organization debunked the lab leak theory this week" is not correct, they merely shifted the onus to Wuhan Institute of Virology to answer the as yet many unanswered questions (just 50 there alone) and some members said they would not be pursuing the investigation themselves. However, yesterday Dr. Tedros clarified that no hypotheses would be discarded and all would be investigated:

    “Some questions have been raised as to whether some hypotheses have been discarded, I want to clarify that all hypotheses remain open and require further study"

    Billybostickson (talk) 07:45, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
    We already have COVID-19 misinformation, Investigations into the origin of COVID-19, —PaleoNeonate – 08:56, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
  • weak keep & rename to Accidental Lab Leak Hypothesis controversy. I disagree that this is a conspiracy theory or dis/mis-information. Intentional leak hypothesis would fall under conspiracy. Accidental leak would be a controversial position but not a conspiracy or misinformation. It is relevant article because a natural outbreak is yet to be established. The virus seems to have mysteriously appeared in Wuhan, in the middle of China, with no clue or trace about where it came from, & is surprisingly well adapted for human to human transmission unlike other bat viruses when they make a direct jump from bats to humans J mareeswaran (talk) 17:19, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Delete as POV-fork cruft cluttering up the Draft space. We cover this adequately in COVID-19 misinformation. XOR'easter (talk) 14:33, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

References

  1. https://keeb.uk/50-transparency-questions-we-should-be-asking
  2. "WHO says all hypotheses still open in probe into coronavirus origins". Straits Times. 2021-02-13. Retrieved 2021-02-13. {{cite news}}: Text "Straits Times" ignored (help)
  3. "WHO Director-General's opening remarks at the Member States briefing on COVID-19 - 11 February 2021". WHO. 2021-02-13. Retrieved 2021-02-13.

I disagree with the comment by XOR'easter as the COVID-19 misinformation article seems to conflate the bio-weapon theory with the lab leak theory in quite a devious way. Not sure how this happened but in the meantime we should definitely *Keep this draft page as it helps shed light on the issue in a much clearer way than the current bizarre section on the redirect page.Billybostickson (talk) 21:38, 12 February 2021 (UTC) (You already !voted Keep once. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 21:45, 12 February 2021 (UTC)) Dear Boing! said Zebedee If you came here because someone asked you to, please note that this is not a majority vote, but instead a discussion among Misplaced Pages contributors. Misplaced Pages has policies and guidelines regarding the encyclopedia's content, and consensus (agreement) is gauged based on the merits of the arguments, not by counting votes. Thank you for your attention!

  • Keep

The fact this is even in question only demonstrates that Misplaced Pages is completely compromised and has no scientific integrity at all.

Awhile ago one of the authors involved with these papers contacted me but I didn't look too hard since everyone at the time was saying the same thing; however, this Washington Post editorial over the weekend

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/05/coronavirus-origins-mystery-china/?arc404=true

reminded me of the fact there are several peer reviewed papers arguing for the viability of a lab origin that are not mentioned here. When the author first wrote me, he mentioned Misplaced Pages's clear and inarguable censorship of scientific research, and talked about working with reporters to expose Misplaced Pages's collusion with the CCCP to suppress the peer reviewed research.

Looking over Misplaced Pages's guidelines, it is beyond argument that passing peer review is the gold standard for inclusion in a Misplaced Pages page. Why have all of these articles below been excluded from Misplaced Pages entirely?

If it is not pressure from the Chinese government, what reason does Misplaced Pages have for excluding research that has past peer review in sound scientific publications?

These are the papers, in order of publication. They have all been peer reviewed, this is Misplaced Pages's gold standard, is it not? What is being missed here? I'm going to have the author send the reporters working on stories about Misplaced Pages doing direct censorship for the Chinese government to this page now, let's see how long it takes for these papers to be added to Misplaced Pages.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7435492/

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jmv.26478

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.202000240

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-020-01151-1

https://www.futuremedicine.com/doi/full/10.2217/fvl-2020-0390

Please link where "other factors" than passing peer review are weighed, where is that in writing? That first paper is then cited by several other of the peer reviewed papers. Lots of peer review, but Misplaced Pages editors are getting too much money to ignore them or what?

Because that's exactly something someone doing censorship for the CCCP would just make up. Like I just got here, and Misplaced Pages is not vague: " An appropriate secondary source is one that is published by a reputable publisher, is written by one or more experts in the field, and is peer reviewed."

https://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources_(science)

Where on that page is your reasoning coming from?

All of those papers I linked have been peer reviewed. They are all published in respected science journals. Do you want to debate whether or not the authors are qualified? Okay, then what are your qualifications Mr. Anonymous Editor?

Right now Misplaced Pages is very obviously actively censoring the peer reviewed literature. Also the opinion of the Washington Post's Editorial Board? You guys have better judgement than them?

So what exactly are the credentials of the editors who are censoring all of these papers about gain of function research from Misplaced Pages?

Tedros has said everything is on the table: https://www.euronews.com/2021/02/12/all-hypotheses-still-on-the-table-over-covid-19-s-origins-who-chief-says . So again, what is the criteria the editors are using to exclude all of this peer reviewed research, if it is not their own personal bias and corruption? Driftwood1300 (talk) 18:34, 12 February 2021 (UTC) — Driftwood1300 (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.

The problems with the sources you list were already explained to you in another discussion. I would advise taking the feedback you have already received to heart, rather than retreading old ground. XOR'easter (talk) 19:38, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
This article is about the conclusions of the WHO investigation: https://apnews.com/article/who-coronavirus-experts-learned-in-wuhan-86549d1189f3d174273a26e39d177d05 . Also, I have pointed at an obvious example of misrepresentation on this page before and have recently deleted from the draft some parts only supported by unreliable sources (in case the recent history can also serve as example). —PaleoNeonate – 01:22, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Keep

Our technology has gotten to the point where we can '3D print' any virus we want by the bucket load. Here is a link to a Galveston Labs paper documenting how they literally fabricated an infectious virus from nothing more than an email. It's easy to do and common these days.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32289263/

I've personally worked with millions of synthetic viruses. They are cheap enough that I don't even ask how much they cost to synthesize. Every single one of them was created synthetically.

Many labs have printed live viruses using a wide variety of techniques. Here is another paper documenting how a Swiss lab did it:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2294-9

Synthetic viruses are easy to make.

More than 2 million people have died and Misplaced Pages won't give the large group of famous scientists below a voice? Whether or not this virus is lab made, the world needs to understand the debate to prevent future pandemics. This pandemic has already killed more people than nuclear weapons and more people are capable of making pandemic level viruses than nuclear weapons. This deserves a thorough discussion.

The journal of medical virology is ran by a very famous virologist. How many countries and world famous scientists are on the author list? Will Misplaced Pages suppress them? Adam Brufsky M.D. Ph.D., the author of one of the papers below, has an h-index of 75. You can't get much better than that!

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jmv.26478

Then there is Sirotkin, the creator of dbSNP. Anyone that works with genetics knows what dbSNP is. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bies.202000091 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.202100017

Misplaced Pages previously said peer review is the barrier to entry. Well you have not only peer review, but peer review articles written by famous authors from around the world. If that isn't good enough for acceptance, what unbiased metric is? If you reject their work, you might as well change your name to "Wiki-torial". It is no longer an encyclopedia, but an opinion piece. You are not only rejecting peer review journals, but you are rejecting titans in the field. These are household names.

NW Science (talk) 20:11, 12 February 2021 (UTC) — NW Science (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.

  • Keep

It is abnormal that very important and reliable information regarding the origin of the SARS-COV-2 has been redirected to "misinformation"; classifying this as misinformation is incorrect; it is not misinformation but reliable information, reviewed by serious people and peer reviewed journals, about a possible lab leak. the world has to know the type of biological experiments that are done nowadays, and in particular that were done in Wuhan with viruses, and the risks they imply. the severity of theses risks is very important, (as the consequences of the pandemic shows), and as such, these risks need to be investigated and treated. Please reput the information, and don't class it as misinformation — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ertsia (talk • contribs) 21:34, 12 February 2021 (UTC) — Ertsia (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.

  • Comment Suspected WP:SPA have been identified through appropriate process and templates. Your characterization here is both inappropriate and redundant. Please refrain from personal attacks on editors that disagree with your POV. You have already made an unsourced complaint about an editor whose ban was reversed due to the assumption that your complaint had merit. Maybe it is time you constrain your edits to areas you have less emotional involvement. Dinglelingy (talk) 15:05, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
"Unsourced complaint?" Ha. My point of view? Misplaced Pages is about representing consensus not personal opinions, why editors must rely on the best sources and properly summarize them. But yes, I did file a complaint earlier, related to disruption on this page. —PaleoNeonate – 01:42, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
Context: Disruption is in the page history of this discussion, complaint, admin comment after their erroneous action (due to an assumption a COVID-19 GS/Alert had been posted before or that a previous topic ban existed, something I didn't suggest in my complaint but I mentioned a previous block) and the requested warning about edit warring. —PaleoNeonate – 05:00, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Delete. POV fork that has enjoyed extensive disruption encouraged by several of the BioEssays authors on Twitter. A few of those Twitter threads even suggest harassment of specific editors... JoelleJay (talk) 04:50, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Keep The draft is well sourced and almost nothing indicates a non NPOV. It's actually a pretty good example of a productive fork in line with Misplaced Pages policy and labeling this a 'POV fork' is a clear misunderstanding of the well established principles of WP:SPINOUT.
The draft content would be inappropriate for COVID-19_misinformation#Wuhan_lab_leak_story (as proposed by multiple commenter PaleoNeoNatal) as consensus has clearly moved this out of the realm of 'fringe' according to RS in both the political and scientific community.
Merging into Investigations into the origin of COVID-19 could possibly be appropriate but that would require serial natural origin POV pushers here or legitimate editors to source actual MEDRS in sufficient quantity. Even then, this draft content would probably dwarf available natural origin RS and MEDRS so that would give undue weight to the lab leak hypothesis which I don't think is appropriate. This is best resolved with the fork under debate until the scientific community proves otherwise. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dinglelingy (talk • contribs) 14:18, 13 February 2021 (UTC) Dinglelingy (talk) 14:19, 13 February 2021 (UTC) — Dinglelingy (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.
And have you considered the fact that this is already merged at the appropriate target, and that the sources in the draft (as already evidenced above) might be misrepresented, as well as being actually not-reliable? And, no, consensus has definitively not "moved this out of the realm of 'fringe'"... RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 14:23, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
Huh? I realize this is your own deletion proposal but best practices dictate you make your case and then let the community decide. Regardless, what the hell are you talking about?
"already merged at the appropriate target"
"sources in the draft (as already evidenced above) might be misrepresented"
"as well as being actually not-reliable?"
I don't see anything in your proposal that substantiates this claim. Sorry.
With respect to your 'fringe' claim, I don't know your expertise and I don't really care. According to WHO Director General Tedros, "“Some questions have been raised as to whether some hypotheses have been discarded. Having spoken with some members of the team, I wish to confirm that all hypotheses remain open and require further analysis and studies,”
Take it up with the WHO if you have a problem, leave your conspiracy theories about conspiracy theories out of Misplaced Pages.
Dinglelingy (talk) 15:38, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
How many times do people have to tell you that MEDRS all but requires secondary biomedical sources aka EXPERT REVIEWS, which the BioEssays papers are not? JoelleJay (talk) 00:07, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
How many times? Based on your comment history you seem to have an obsession for BioEssays . If your opinion is valid you should pursue options under WP:RS, your attorney, or maybe the Human Resources Dept. In the mean time I suggest you avoid complaints directed at peer reviewed scientific journals and focus on princes and princesses. Thanks. Dinglelingy (talk) 05:16, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Speedy Delete All These are all duplicates of a previous version of COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis. The page is now a redirect, and the topic is covered sufficiently at the target. –dlthewave ☎ 05:37, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Delete. It is not Misplaced Pages's purpose to provide a hosting service for conspiracy theories. Alexbrn (talk) 06:10, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Strong delete. Misplaced Pages is not a site to spread conspiracy theories. —pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 22:01, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Keep: Subject is sufficiently notable and has many top RS to source it. There have been content issues but they can easily be discussed at the relevant talk page, and even if they escalate it is preferable to resort to methods of dispute resolution such as RFCs, first. I have myself conducted a RFC that stopped POV pushes from one of the top 3 covid articles, and it worked like a charm. Finally, the WHO team leader, Peter Ben Embarek just did an interview with Sciencemag denying that the lab leak theory is ruled out, and explaining why the press conference had the wording "extremely unlikely" by mistake, so please refrain from using that statemente from the WHO press conference in your argumentation. Forich (talk) 23:25, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
    I don't think anyone who voted delete claim that it's completely ruled out, —PaleoNeonate – 00:10, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
    Great article Forich. Thanks for mentioning. I do not agree that it contradicts the wording "extremely unlikely" though. Sounds to me like he is saying that phrase was meticulously chosen, and he stands behind it. –Novem Linguae (talk) 00:19, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Keep Even though there is a lot of crazy that feeds into the the umbrella of "Covid-19 lab leak", the idea is not unscientific.
    • There are many scientists who have described the conjectured event of a leak as improbable, but not so many who say it is impossible.
    • The question of the furin cleavage site is one factor that is described as having arisen in coronaviruses many times. This removes any necessity for it to have been inserted by genetic engineering as claimed by some. However we know that the virus existed in a post-bat reservoir (where the furin site would have been useful) before coming to attention in Wuhan. This reservoir may have been in a lab, or may have been in the wild, or in livestock.
    • Another argument given is that "no-one" was working on this type of project, in the Wuhan labs. It's by no means clear that we know what everyone in these labs was working on.
    • The RaTG-13 published datasets appear to be contaminated with both hoseshoe bat and Malayan pangolin DNA, implying that pangolins were involved in the science at some point, which has not been disclosed.
    • It should be noted that there are also ideas that the outbreak may have originated in Guandong or elsewhere, and only become widespread in Wuhan.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough 02:04, 15 February 2021 (UTC).

The fact that the idea is not unscientific doesn't mean we should have a separate article on it (a sub-section seems valid enough); and these drafts in their current form would require WP:TNT in any case, as they are mostly attempts to justify such a theory by convoluted reasoning... RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 02:23, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
Repeating what I already said above: we already have COVID-19 misinformation, Investigations into the origin of COVID-19, —PaleoNeonate – 02:35, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Rich, I'd have to point you to WP:FALSEBALANCE. Particularly: Conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, speculative history, or plausible but currently unaccepted theories should not be legitimized through comparison to accepted academic scholarship. This seems to fit squarely within. Even if one believes it isn't a conspiracy theory (which is well sourced), it is, at best, a plausible but currently unaccepted theor No peer-reviewed article in a decent journal gives legitimacy to this conspiracy, but there are countless pieces on its natural origins, and multiple pieces on this being a unscientific. There is nothing neutral about this article. Not in the slightest. There's a reason why the writer is tbanned. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 04:36, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Keep - it was/still is a world-wide topic, and is definitely notable. WP needs to publish a well-written article about this topic in order to properly inform our readers from a neutral, academic perspective. I don't see a valid reason to delete the draft. Atsme 💬 📧 04:38, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Keep. This has been discussed to death on multiple talk pages and noticeboards, so I will try to keep it short:
  • First of all: "this is a conspiracy theory" does not seem like a good deletion argument; is this to be followed by AfDs for Moon landing conspiracy theories, Bigfoot and Sightings of Elvis Presley? The existence of an article about some hypothesis does not, to a reasonable person, constitute a claim that it is true. The fact that a bunch of reliable sources talked about this thing is reason enough to have an article about it.
  • Second of all: WP:IDONTLIKEIT does not seem like a good deletion argument. Having an article about something does not mean endorsing specific views on it, so the argument is whether it should be mentioned at all, to which I think the answer is "yes". There are plenty of politicians I think are liars and cheats; I am not nominating their articles for deletion on this basis. Not only does it fly in the face of the basic principles of the project, even if I was trying to pwn them, it's not even clear how that this would accomplish that (if they're so rotten, wouldn't it be better for people to read a neutrally written description of the times they lied and cheated about stuff?)
  • Third of all: "even if it only says true stuff, it could cause people to believe false stuff" does not seem like a good deletion argument. There are some people who believe Freemasons control the world's governments, yet we have an article on Freemasonry. Refusing to have one, on the basis that some guy I made up in my head might use it as a justification to be stupid, doesn't really make sense. The article on Freemasons shouldn't falsely imply that they control the world's governments; beyond that, it's never been our role as an encyclopedia to prevent people from accessing knowledge which we imagine could potentially cause some unspecified bad thing to happen, and I don't understand why we would start now.
I am probably not going to edit this article much, because I am not an expert on coronavirus proteomics, and I don't want to get into nonstop politics arguments, but I recommend that people who have issues with the article's neutrality edit it themselves. jp×g 06:39, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
You rightfully pointing out that the article may never reach a proper state seems like a WP:TNT argument. As for WP:IDONTLIKEIT Misplaced Pages cares about consensus views, reported by reputable bodies, not collections of baseless speculation (WP:GEVAL, WP:FRINGE). That's policy, not user opinion. None of the delete arguments are about IDONTLIKEIT. WP:POVFORK applies and is also policy. —PaleoNeonate – 06:53, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Strong keep for userspace, abstain for draftspace - Wiping people's userspace stuff is pretty serious overkill. I haven't been in this topic for a while (somebody emailed me about this due to my discussion contributions months and months ago), so I'd need current-state-of-evidence on a couple of points before I could vote on the draftspace one. Specifically:
    • Has there been evidence making the "natural virus that got into circulation via a lab studying it" hypothesis seem remote?

That's the only hypothesis that the draft presents as plausible, and last I heard (which was a long time ago) it was. If this is ruled out, that hypothesis can be put into "misinformation". If it remains plausible, lumping it into "misinformation" is not accurate (things of unknown truth value definitionally cannot be misinformation) and it needs to go somewhere else (i.e. this draft could be useful). The hypothesis itself is notable and while there could be undue-weight issues, those are not a valid motive for deleting a draft (they're a motive for fixing it before it's put into mainspace). The draft specifically notes that "escaped bioweapon" is implausible, so while that one definitely is misinformation, it doesn't bear on the draft. Magic9mushroom (talk) 07:08, 15 February 2021 (UTC)