ID Cabal Request for Comment Options

[Bob Boy]

Odd nature is asking that Giggy remove any references to actions of the Intelligent Design Cabal from off-wiki forums (including Wikipedia Review). Good luck with that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_tal...ersonal_attacks

[Rootology]

Is it just me or is 99% of that RFC just a rehash of battle lines drawn group by group, party by party, and not much else? This can't "end" any way except in front of an RFAR bloodbath.

That said, who DOES give a fuck what Ben Stein or some religious group has to say about science? Science articles = higher value on real scientific sourcing by real scientists with real support from the real scientific community. Religious nutjobbery is not the scientific community.

How is that not obvious?

[Bob Boy]

That said, who DOES give a fuck what Ben Stein or some religious group has to say about science? Science articles = higher value on real scientific sourcing by real scientists with real support from the real scientific community. Religious nutjobbery is not the scientific community.

How is that not obvious?

I don't think I've seen anyone complaining about the ID Cabal that is doing so from a viewpoint of advocating a straight-faced treatment of Intelligent Design. The problem is that this group of editors apparently adopted a set of group behaviors for driving off ID advocates from these articles - and then proceeded to apply this thug-like intimidation tactic to anyone who crossed any one of them, anywhere on the wiki.

This post has been edited by Bob Boy:

[Rootology]

I don't think I've seen anyone complaining about the ID Cabal that is doing so from a viewpoint of advocating a straight-faced treatment of Intelligent Design. The problem is that this group of editors apparently adopted a set of group behaviors for driving off ID advocates from these articles - and then proceeded to apply this thug-like intimidation tactic to anyone who crossed any one of them, anywhere on the wiki.

That stuff isn't cool, no, but I can see why one side may be upset. A straight NPOV treatmeant of ID would be to label it what the scientific community and mainstream global (we can safely ignore the irrelevant American Christian Fundamentalists who have no authority on anything outside their homes or certain Red States and are a faded minority whackadoodle group) community label ID: science fiction. ID is up there with Lord Xenu swooping out of the volcano to infect us with Vulcan brain herpes or whatever it is he does.

And this is speaking as a Christian.

Indulging fanatics is a problem that needs to be stamped out on there. I was following the Prem Rawat stuff the other day and it hurt my brain. Any and every even barely negative thing about the guy from any kind of mainstream media is stamped down and debated to the most absurd degree by people known to be church officers under his cult, or church, or whatever it is. Same thing with the ID stuff. Its ridiculous.

This post has been edited by Rootology:

[Proabivouac]

Indulging fanatics is a problem that needs to be stamped out on there. I was following the Prem Rawat stuff the other day and it hurt my brain. Any and every even barely negative thing about the guy from any kind of mainstream media is stamped down and debated to the most absurd degree by people known to be church officers under his cult, or church, or whatever it is. Same thing with the ID stuff. Its ridiculous.

Indulged? They're invited when they're promised that anyone can edit and that their beliefs and background are no barrier to having an equal say in article content, so long as they follow WP rules. "Neutral point of view", besides being wholly voluntary and rhetorical, clearly means different things to different people: to fanatics it means the fair shake they're elsewhere denied.

So having promised that, now what do we do? Break our promise, or live with its consequences?

Driving people off through the appearance of process is one answer, albeit a dishonest and unethical one. Wouldn't it be easier to state that Wikipedia presents science articles from a mainstream scientific point of view, if that's actually what we wish to achieve? Though by this time, there are enough people on Wikipedia who wouldn't agree with that change to make that unlikely.

And many with worldviews antithetical to science and reason are perfectly decent people - do they really deserve to be invited to participate on what seem like favorable terms, then personally abused?

All that said, and having read Science Apologists' comment to the RfC, which has much to recommend it, let's not forget that, even if mainstream experts were empowered and in charge, instead of being driven off by ignorant mobs, tenacious cranks or clueless admins, the Rosalind Picard article was a feature piece posing ("coatrack") as a biography. The experts here would not be scientists, even in her field (and no attempt was made to cover her actual work), but biographers and mainstream journalists.

Short of that, someone with enough sense about these things to realize when they're being unfair to someone might do.

This post has been edited by Proabivouac:

[Rootology]

Indulged? They're invited when they're promised that anyone can edit and that their beliefs and background are no barrier to having an equal say in article content, so long as they follow WP rules. "Neutral point of view", besides being wholly voluntary and rhetorical, clearly means different things to different people: to fanatics it means the fair shake they're elsewhere denied.

So having promised that, now what do we do? Break our promise, or live with its consequences?

NPOV isn't an invitation to go nuts to push your views, though, and never has been. NPOV isn't a fair shake, it's not a 1:1 for pro/con, or a 4:3, or a 10:1, or anything else like that. It's a reflection of what the mainstream authorities say. I have contacts and friends in certain entertainment media circles, I could get (and have in the past) published work in both online and print media that could count as "RS" for articles. But what if my published work were part of the fringe, for whatever it was? Even if I'm an authority on a given topic (I could be considered an authority for some things, believe it or not). Should it have the same weight as the mainstream for some elusive NPOV standard that is utterly subjective? Should each individual article be a stand-alone oasis per NPOV? If the Evolution main article describes it as what it is per accepted science--the singularly most accepted, acceptable, and plausible theory of the origin of life under modern widely accepted understanding? If that's the case, and thats wholly contrary with what Intellegient Design stands for, should the ID article one click away say "ID is the truth"?

NPOV is an amazing idea for a populist, communal product like Wikipedia. The problem is that when you get into super controversial or adversarial areas, what then? Whose POV is more neutral/accepted? Were the Irish fighters that worked to throw off the British seizure and occupation of their lands in the early 1900s patriots and freedom fighters, or criminals and terrorists? What do the Northern Irish say? The southern Irish? The Catholics, the Protestants? What about the British? Who has more authority there? Ditty for Israel & Palestine, the people trying to drive the US out of Iraq, and other gentle topics like abortion. Or heck, the one that got me in trouble, for just arguing that the stupid 9/11 articles stay totally neutral and not totally or absolutely minimize and disenfranchise the conspiracy nuts.

So, while it's an amazing idea, for NPOV, it scales for shit on these articles. Theres no answer for the political ones, or the crazy ones, but for the science articles? Totally, totally easy. Science sources > all other sources, full stop, the end. NPOV doesn't supercede reality.

Driving people off through the appearance of process is one answer, albeit a dishonest and unethical one. Wouldn't it be easier to state that Wikipedia presents science articles from a mainstream scientific point of view, if that's actually what we wish to achieve? Though by this time, there are enough people on Wikipedia who wouldn't agree with that change to make that unlikely.

This IS exactly what Wikipedia needs to do. The problem is that any time someone tries to push some small or big change through, theres like 5-10 vocal people that scream their irrelevant minority heads off because they don't like it for whatever reason, people get sick of fighting with them, and bang, the idea is dead when everyone gives up to not fight the maniacs. How do you fix this? Get rid of the maniacs. Unethical? Today. Fuck 'em. Tomorrow is more important in this case.

And many with worldviews antithetical to science and reason are perfectly decent people - do they really deserve to be invited to participate on what seem like favorable terms, then personally abused?

No, that's not right, but the maniacs (on all sides) need to be neutered forcibly.

This post has been edited by Rootology:

[Milton Roe]

NPOV is an amazing idea for a populist, communal product like Wikipedia.

Nah. First of all, why have a bad and totally undescriptive name for something? NPOV really is meant to mean something like "junior journalistic representation and synthesis of major reliable-source expert POVs" JJRSMRS-POV. "Aha," lightbulbs flash on over the heads of Newbies. "It doesn't mean neutral POV for the sources, it just means neutral for ME-- except that I'm supposed to cover the sources in proportion to their reliability and popularity with experts in the field!" And just about when somebody finally figures this out, they wonder how somebody who isn't themselves an expert on a subject can possibly DO that.

And (so sorry) the answer is: they can't. It's a dictim which is designed so that it cannot possibly be even approximately fulfilled. The writer, of course, must select and boil down sources (that's called "writing"), and that ACT cannot (in good use of language) be called anything but "synthesis." So some kind of synthesis is required and expected, but not synthesis in support of an original conclusion of the article-writer. Okay...

But you're not out of the woods. For one reason, the article being produced by the writer is not supposed to be copied from some other encyclopedia, so it must be an original synthesis of the writer in some sense. The POV it advances is this: "This is a reasonable survey of this subject, according to what is accepted by those who think about it a lot" (addendum: in the opinion of the guy writing it-- which goes without saying, but on Wikipedia, not without denying). Naturally, anybody else who surveys the field, will come to a different POV about what consitutes a proper survey. Clearly, none of these can be a neutral POV in any sense of the world "neutral". And that includes the meta-sense of just being the messenger. The editor-messenger in Wikipedia heavily selects, edits, stitches together, explains, and presents the message. He or she is NOT a neutral conduit.

There is NO sense in which the writing of an encyclopedia article can be "neutral." Even the WP-orthodox attempt at mere summary of major expert points of view, gets immediately into epistemological problems which have no good solution. And in which people committed to neutrality are doomed to end up hopelessly at war with people committed to figuring out "What is academic reality?" That question cannot be neutrally asked or answered, because even though it is a question about the objective reality of a subjective body of literature, it's still a question about an objective reality. At the least, it asks (and attempts to answer) the objective question of: What DO the experts REALLY say in print on this issue? On any question about subjective reality, there are bound to be varying opinions. The writer has only his own. If other people try to help him/her, then he still has to choose. But there is no escape from thinking, and thinking is bound to produce a result and that's by definition a POV.

M

This post has been edited by Milton Roe: