Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard#Cold_fusion

JzG repeats arguments that he gave a year ago, and, as I found typical when I started, as a neutral editor, investigating his blacklistings and blocks and various admin actions around cold fusion, he alleges a pile of assertions that fall apart when examined and compared with what actually happened.

What's he claiming? He cites the FoF from RfAr/Cold fusion, which found that Pcarbonn had an agenda, based on an off-wiki article he wrote which, in fact, was a Wikipedia-praising piece, he was praising the reliable source policies, and what he was "pushing" was that Wikipedia follow guidelines, and the Fringe science arbitration which JzG cites as evidence of dead-horse beating actually confirmed Pcarbonn's position. But you'd never know that from what's stated on AN now by JzG and the chorus.

Pcarbonn is an expert on the topic, apparently. He may be COI, I'm not sure, but he's refrained from editing the article, he only was making suggestions on Talk. That's "advocating." And that's exactly what we want experts to do, if we want a reliable project.

There is no neutral close. I think it likely that there will be claims of canvassing because of this notice here, but ... I'm asking for neutral administrators to look at this. I hope that it is noticed that what JzG is doing, he did before, before ArbComm, and it was rejected. He's banning or attempting to ban an editor based purely on the editor's POV, based on his own very contrary and firmly established POV, which he edit warred, in the past, to maintain. JzG has a history of making spurious arguments that sound good at first, they can attract neutral editors to agree, not to mention the chorus, those who join him in his POV and crusade against "fringe."

But Pcarbonn isn't advocating fringe science, he's advocating that the article reflect what is in reliable source, with only an occasional mention of less reliable sources for background. There is, lately, a veritable deluge of mainstream media and mainstream academic publication on cold fusion, but the resident skeptics who own the article reject it all as "fringe."

The evidence that it's fringe? Well, cold fusion is fringe, right? And the articles, even if published in a mainstream publication, are about cold fusion, so the articles are fringe and the authors are fringe, because they are "advocating" cold fusion. Anybody who "advocates" cold fusion is fringe, it's a tautology. And so any editor who tries to put material in the article from these "fringe" sources, published by, say, Oxford University Press, the American Chemical Society, or Elsevier's recent Encyclopedia of Electrochemistry, is a "fringe POV-pusher," and should be banned.

It became truly and amazingly blatant. Pcarbonn, seeing the discussion and the claim of Future Perfect that he'd been banned, offered help to Dual Use, who may be an SPA also, a returning user. So ... without any guideline violations being even alleged, Dual Use was banned as well.

It is banning of a POV.

Disclosure: I was skeptical about cold fusion in January of last year, when I discovered the situation at the article. My interest was and remains consensus and neutrality, which are interlinked, and if you ban half of a dispute, you can't find neutrality. However, I did then start reading in the field and was amazed by what I found. Solid evidence for the reality of low energy nuclear reactions was in the literature as primary sources by the mid 1990s. It's now in peer-reviewed secondary sources, but you'd never know this from the Wikipedia article. Not just one secondary source. Dozens. The only reasonably clear indication of overall consensus we have is from the 2004 DoE report, which clearly showed that a massive shift had taken place since 1989, when the DoE issued a report with similar conclusions but a very different basis. The conclusion in 1989 was that more research should be done, but no big federal program, but we know from RS that this conclusion was politically forced by the Nobel Prize-winning co-chair, who insisted on it or he'd resign. There probably wouldn't have been more than two members of the committee who actually thought it worth pursuing. (Maybe about fifteen members to the committee, it's not clear)

But in 2004, half the18-member panel considered the critical excess heat claims were convincing. If you think that excess heat is not convincing, you won't think it is nuclear in origin, so I state the other major opinion as "two thirds of those who support excess heat considered that the evidence that it was nuclear was "somewhat convincing." These were experts, gathered by the DoE. They included some who were, from their comments, obviously not willing to give cold fusion a moment's thought, they thought the whole thing was fraud and shoddy work, a conclusion they came to fifteen years earlier. Since 2004, there has been a great deal of publication in the field, 2004 was roughly the nadir. There is now a torrent. In spite of what was now stated as the unanimous recommendation of the panel, the DoE didn't fund any research. But the U.S. Department of Defense has been funding it, the Italian government has been funding it, and there are many other research groups working on it, and papers are being published in much larger numbers.

I'm not advocating a WP:CRYSTAL violation. I'm suggesting that it's time to start, in an alleged fringe science topic, using the reliable sources, following reliable source guidelines, and the principles enunciated in RfAr/Fringe science, and not some pseudo-skeptical agenda to exclude this stuff. Let the article fall where it may, the article should not advocate for or against cold fusion, and should reflect the balance that's in the sources.

But if one looks, the negative sources have almost entirely disappeared, whereas the positive sources are blossoming. This isn't about free energy or the like, it's about science. Are low energy nuclear reactions possible? It was never actually theoretically impossible, and there are known examples, and all that happened in 1989, apparently, was that an unexpected mechanism was discovered. There is now substantial theoretical work that explains this using classical quantum field theory, it's not actually new physics, simply overlooked possibilities, if the theories are correct. It's still true that nobody really knows, from theory confirmed by predictions and experiment, solidly, what's happening. But that may change.... I don't have a crystal ball, either.