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Posted by: Grep

Some of the more hilarious rhetoric, most but not all in the pot-kettle department

WMC

• "my attention was drawn to CF"
  (we used to call it stalking)
• admits to protecting a page version for amusement value
• "A often seemed confused about the terms of the ban"
  (that would be "an indeterminate period of approximately a month" which "remains, to be reviewed in approximately another month" )

Enric Naval

• "Abd believes that he knows better than other users"
  (of course, it's Enric itself who knows best)
• "Abd says that hoaxes should not be deleted, and hoaxers tolerated"
  (Abd said that hoaxes should be blanked by any user instead of deleted by admins)
• "Abd assumes the existance of bad-faith cabals"
  (I wonder where he gets that idea from?)
• "Abd performs experiments with democracy"
  (outrageous)
• "Abd sees no problem at all with his very long posts"
  (subheading 25 out of 27 total in Enric's evidence)

Mathsci

• "Abd has made unfounded statements about William M. Connolley" / "WMC is part of some covert off-wiki conspiracy." / "Since this case began he has written that WMC has been "coddling" me."
  (Such as by blocking people who annoy Mathsci, whom WMC meets for drinks IRL)
• "Abd claims to have scientific expertise"
  (Mathsci claims to be a scientist but his expertise is in pure mathematics)
• "Abd appears to be supported by a small tag team"
  (Mathsci's being a little larger)
• "My brief involvement on Talk:Cold fusion has been minimal and constructive"
  (16 edits, including "Abd's contributions here seem to be extremely skewed." "In view of his poor namespace editing record, my advice to Abd is to attempt to edit a non-controversial article on science in order to get more experience in handling scientific sourcing in a completely neutral context. That might be a valuable eye-opener." "Abd is not the person to lead discussions here.")

Posted by: Mathsci

Possibly also theoretical physics - there was a Seminaire Bourbaki on my work in the 1990s.

What about the paper of Eric Sheldon that started my comments?

Feel free to go on picking cherries ... bravo !

I should also add that I forgot William's birthday on April 6. If he were alive today, Anthony Blunt would probably have given me a good spanking for that.

Posted by: Cla68

Mathsci, do you think that William M. Connolley is an exemplary admin?

Posted by: dtobias

Is WMC anything like the WMDs they didn't find in Iraq?

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

WMC is another acronym for STD. Anyone who crosses him gets f**ked.

Posted by: Mathsci

Not particularly: he clearly has his own style.

I think that MastCell and Alison are or were exemplary admins. They both have regrettably suffered from varying degrees of burn-out. Either of them would have got my vote for ArbCom last time round had they stood. I have no complaints at all about Casliber or Newyorkbrad, who again seem exemplary.

I also admire both Dbachmann and Slrubenstein, even though they're often diametrically opposed and both have strong personalities. No different from the real world really.

Posted by: Mathsci

Well one wildy protesting sock - Arkady Renkov - has just had his posts removed from this ArbCom case and been indef blocked.

It'll be interesting to see who his puppetmaster is.

Any ideas who it might be Grep?

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

Ah, but Anthony Blunt is one of SlimVirgin's ego ideals, and I'm sure she would be happy to oblige you.

Posted by: Mathsci

Can I bring a friend along?

Posted by: Grep

The Mathsci team doing the standard good-hand bad-hand thing to discredit the opposition?

Posted by: Mathsci

Of course you're right.

And what's more the team involves the acting clerk Hersfold.

We already made a wax doll of Grep in the early hours of the morning and are taking turns with pins. Some are more impatient than others. I'm not quite sure how accurate the effigy was - two eyes or one, we couldn't quite decide.

Posted by: The Adversary

Heh, didn´t they tell you when you joined? This is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mos_Eisley_Cantina.

One eye.

Oh, and a late welcome to the Review. You are giving Obesity competition here!

Posted by: Mathsci

He he he.

That reminds me - I still have to go to the new Harry Potter film here in France.

Finding it in VO (i.e. English) could be a problem. Having seen Woody Allen's Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy dubbed into French I have learnt to be careful.

On the other hand I might learn the French for "git". I don't even know what it is in US English, although I could easily provide a string of examples.

Posted by: The Adversary

Going totally off-topic here (Sorry, Somey!) ..but living in a tiny little non-English-speaking country (like I do) has its advantages: we never dub movies..with the possible exception of children-movies (read:Disney). And nobody has ever wanted to see films dubbed. What, miss a language-lesson!

Eh, but what is "git"? (They didn´t teach me that!)

Posted by: Mathsci

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(British_slang)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Molesworth

I hope I'm not permbanned for this ...

Posted by: The Adversary

Ah.... now I feel like a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twit

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Don't apologize -- I tend to think of it as "streams of consciousness" conversation.

Posted by: The Adversary

Ah, but whenever I see any of horseys post, my "streams of consciousness" goes to how to..... make http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelding

And I don't apologize for this, at all

We all have our dreams

Posted by: dtobias

Perhaps there could be a rather ruder version of the "Freaks & Geeks" TV show from a few years ago, called "Twits & Gits".

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

What are you talking about? I am calm and well-behaved in these forums -- you should see me in the real world!

Posted by: The Adversary

Oh, so you already are castrated? Splendid!

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Ha ha...not. But that's why this Horsey likes to run with Malleus, Giano and Kohs -- stallions with balls of thunder to shake things up in the Wiki-stable.

Posted by: The Adversary

You forgot a tiny issue (for you): those guys have http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain. You, running around making the same old "joke" for the 222nd time; not so. At least you have yet to show it.

So therefore; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelding Knives!

Time for a role-change?

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Well, I don't want to overshadow them, of course.

Besides, we are distracting from Abd and WMC -- balls, brains, what? I put my oats on Abd. He's a classic screwball and I gotta love him for being so much fun.

Posted by: Abd

How incredibly boring, I come here looking for some real poop and nothing but Mathsci Math****ing, which, frankly, is of low interest. Nothing to inspire me to my usual walls-o-text. Wasted a few minutes. Here people complain about WMC for months or years, and when someone does something about it, like take a case to ArbComm that gets accepted, and has the -- ahem, well I do have five bio kids, which implies something -- to actually say the secret word, CABAL, in full view of the community, and this is all you can come up with? I'm ashamed. Mathsci, you have some weird inversion here. On-WP, you are dense with incivility, here, you are all pleasantries and smileys. Far out. People are more complicated than cartoons, or perhaps merely devious.

By the way, I do not consider posting of anonymous evidence and proposals at RfAr to be any kind of support. If nobody is willing to risk their "real" wikineck to say it, it's worthless, politically, and just makes the natives restless for no good cause.

Posted by: Somey

Low interest? About 75 percent of this thread is of no interest whatsoever.

Maybe someone could summarize what the point of all this is? For the benefit of people who don't spend most of their time monitoring WP:ANI and the ArbCom pages? If not, I'm sorely tempted to just delete everything after the first post, so we can all start over.

Posted by: The Adversary

Absolutely.
The problem is that a general dislike of Horsey´s sexist comments have been building up over these last weeks/months. At least in me! Just by chance it happend that this thread was were things exploded....you should probably delete it, or better: send Horsey and me to the tarpit: I am NOT finished with him yet... Grrr.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

Mr. Horse seems to make a good number of comments working in reference to how attractive he finds certain female participants (and actually a couple of male ones also.) I've pondered if this was "harassment" or not, especially when the comments are repeated into a pattern. But the comments are not at all graphic and AFAIK no one on the receiving end has complained. If I received such a complaint I would argue with other mods/staff that this should be somehow formally discouraged. Otherwise I'll just sit on my concerns.

Posted by: The Adversary

Oh, I don´t want you to ban him, I just would like an arena where I can deal with him, if you see what I mean.

Posted by: sbrown

Yes its highly irritating. Fortunately he hasnt noticed me yet so I shant make a formal protest.

Posted by: Lar

Doesn't sound like a fair fight to me. Poor horsey would be SO outclassed.

Posted by: Cla68

ABD, what do you want from the RfAR? For WMC to be banned or desysopped? Or neither? I personally feel that WMC shouldn't be an admin, because he's rude, condescending, arbitrary, and pushes POV. I don't, however, at this moment have the DIFFS to back this up because I haven't put in the hours to dig them up. If you want WMC's behavior to be corrected, you're going to need to put in the hours and present the evidence. It will probably take you a few days of work, but that's how it goes. Some participants here may help you out a little by posting incidents and diffs that they remember as they watch you work, but you'll need to get the ball rolling if this is important to you.

Also, if you're going to say that there is a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Abd-William_M._Connolley/Evidence#There_is_a_cabal at work, you'll need to build your case with evidence.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Ah, come on, loosen up. Come here, ya big Adversary, you deserve a Horsey kiss.



Hey Abd, nice to see you standing up for NYScholar. I think you are the only friend that she has left on Wikipedia.

Posted by: tarantino

Horsey is a http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-one-trick-pony.htm. He really needs to take some lessons from Obesity or bottled spider to get out of his rut, but he's probably intellectually incapable of learning from those masters.

Posted by: Mathsci

During an ArbCom case where everything is pure invention, how refreshing to come to WR where the real truth can be spoken.

The smileys here are indeed mega-brilliant, even wicked.

Here's one to use on the workshop page when a clerk claims you're telling leetle porkies.

Naughty, naughty clerk.

Posted by: Mathsci

Isn't the case a little more restricted than you're implying? It's not an RfC on William M. Connolley.

Posted by: Lar

I couldn't have http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=25370&st=0&p=184810&#entry184810 myself.


I think you're selling him a bit short. What I can't figure out is whether there's one user or two inside the horse costume, though.

Posted by: Milton Roe

If there's two, one has his face in the others' bum. This would explain 50% of posts!

Posted by: Malleus

Speaking only for myself, of course, I would be rather upset if anything I said was considered to be sexist. I pride myself on being even-handedly obnoxious to both males and females.

Posted by: Abd

Okay, finally, something to chew on.

Are those the only choices. Let me think?

Neither. Both would be rude, don't you think?

Fortunately, it's not up to me. My job is just to make clear what happened on my watch.



Unlike anyone else, right? The problem with WMC isn't exactly WMC, he's just who he is, pretty transparent. The problem is a community that isn't paying attention and isn't capable of figuring out how to pay attention because it's too distracted with whatever, and can't be bothered to read explanations of what, indeed, might be done. Guess what? It might take more discussion than trading clever sound bites.



No shit! You mean I can't just state what I know and everyone will AGF and they will check it out for themselves? Why not? Don't people fucking care? Maybe I could reconsider. Can I revert the entire RfAr back to the beginning? All those cabal editors have been reverting, why can't I have fun too?

Did you see the amazing sequence today with Short Brigade Harvester Boris? He is the best proof that, if "cabal" means "organized conspiracy," it doesn't exist or is toothless and with no discipline at all. He takes my list of editors who voted a certain way in certain discussions, and notifies them all that they have been "mentioned" at ArbComm, never mind numerous disclaimers that these are just lists and don't constitute accusations of misbehavior. The clerk supports it. So I asked, does this mean that if I put the names of the opposing voters in those discussions, I can notify them too?

It might seem even funnier if you look at the original discussions and notice the names on the other side. Two sitting arbitrators. Durova. And quite a few other interesting names.... Basically Boris set it up so that I can canvass, or the clerks are going to have some serious egg-on-face, one or the other.

And it gets funnier. I tried to add Hipocrite as a party, and notified him. WMC edit warred to remove Hipocrites' name from the case, same as Mathsci previously removed his own name. The clerks have issued several last-warning, we will block anyone who removes content from the RfAr. Until the next incident, where they then give another strict warning.

So Raul654 removes an alleged sock's evidence and proposals. The clerk "warns" Raul654, but it was a whole lot wimpier than the word "warn" implies. And, certainly, the clerk wants to make it clear, Raul should continue with "happy editing." The arbs knew that this case would be messy, but apparently, they didn't fortify the clerks....

Anyway, WMC also removed my notice to Hipocrite. Rootology reverted him. He reverted Rootology. Rootology retired. So here comes Boris, notifying everyone on the alleged cabal lists. Boris notifies Hipocrite, thus effectively undoing WMC's quite BOLD revert warring. Stay tuned: Will WMC revert Boris? Will Boris revert himself, thus undermining his argument that all these people should be notified? Will Abd continue to bury himself with claims of cabal cabal cabal, without a shred of evidence?

I wish I knew, myself. But, then again, that would be boring, wouldn't it? Really, WMC is the only admin who has had the guts to block someone for being "boring." I kid you not. We need more like him, not less.

However, he should not be allowed to block for more than 24 hours, and he should not be allowed near heavy machinery, and his testimony should be placed only a few notches above that of Raul654 as to reliability.

Back to Advice I Did Not Need



[Seriously, for a moment, real evidence is welcome, but I'd rather it be presented directly by editors. Have some guts. Raul654 only has power because hardly anyone stands up to him. And, please, be careful, try to stay focused on, I'd suggest, evidence of failure to recuse, or of preferential treatment of favored editors, and only pick clear cases and recent ones. Otherwise it will be worse than useless.]

Obviously Cla68 is not a serious student of Abd Thought, my favorite essay is WP:DGAF.



With evidence? Didn't you already say that? I'd rather build a case with treacle and bread-and-butterflies. And store useless junk in it. Look, everyone here knows that there is a cabal, except Mathsci pretends not to. Or maybe he actually is that dumb. It's all over the media. All I did was to say it.

Yeah, and if I don't prove it, I'm history, though in the MfD for WP:JURY the other day, I wrote that we should have an essay titled WP:Pull Your Pants Up. It would be about what to do when you realize you've mooned the jury. Think fast! Sorry, I ran out of bupropion, I don't know what I was thinking, there is no cabal, no siree! What a huge mistake! Here, Raul, let me clean your boots or something. Sorry sorry sorry.

Nah, I'll just let if fall where it falls. If I mooned the jury, I will pull up my pants as soon as I realize they are down. But that's about it. I have a history of pulling tricks out of the fire, but, I never know exactly how it will happen. It will or it won't. I used to say, when I'd be on stage and didn't have the foggiest idea what to do, "If I'm a fool, God, I'm your fool." And then something would happen. Usually! I don't own it.

It's called "improv" folks. WMC does the same, only he is, perhaps, a little less considerate, and not a lot more than half my age. And probably not as smart, nor as deep. But so what? It takes all kinds.

Damn d-amphetamine, here it is 2 AM and I didn't even notice.

Posted by: Abd

It isn't? Damn! I must be really confused. RfC RfAr, they both begin with Rf. But, yeah, the second has four letters. You're right, Mathsci! It's not an RfC, a toothless proceeding in itself.

It's an RfAr, which is the only process on Wikipedia which has the authority to remove the privileges of an administrator, and if it is found that WMC has acted while involved, and the claim of that is central to the RfAr, one of the options that ArbComm will consider is, indeed, desysopping. He's been warned for it before. And he continued to insist on his right to act, whereas JzG actually disconnected and abstained, mostly, with only a little sock he had for lunch in the middle of his RfC, after all, dragons do need to eat occasionally, and the sock surely asked for it by openly criticizing JzG.

I'm probably not going to be suggesting desysopping, though I might change my mind, I suppose. But do realize, Mathsci, that one of the arbitrators recused, suggesting he might comment. Take a look at which one, and then look at the RfC for GoRight. It might give you some clue, something which you apparently didn't pick up at the university. That's okay, for sure, hardly anyone does.

Posted by: Cla68

Well, there does appear to be a content dispute going on also. The thing is, WMC is the admin who responded to it, so the effectiveness of his remedial actions I would think would be one of the areas of scrutiny. That's why I'm asking ABD what he wants. He appears to be saying that he just wants someone to intervene in the situation. ArbCom can't resolve content disputes, so unless ABD is looking for some corrective action for the other involved people, then I don't think he should have requested a case.

ABD, the reason I keep repeating myself about evidence, is because, from what I've observed, you often use reason and rhetoric as evidence. That's usually not enough. You need diffs, links, quotes, that kind of thing. I see that you say that you are aware of this. OK, fine, I won't say anymore about it.

Posted by: Mathsci

Grandad, I never left university, you silly oid codger. Did you forget your bran flakes this morning? Mind you, the kids these days do seem much brighter than all those loopy 60s Pasadena freshmen.

Too much dope I suppose. I blame it all on Princess Margaret. And John Profumo. And Yoko Ono.

I'd stick to gardening, dominos and bowls. They all work a treat in easing down that unwanted chip on the shoulder. It looks as if it's playing up again, doesn't it?

Camomile lotion might also help.

Posted by: EricBarbour

Keep talking, asshole. Keep making snark about your critics.
Your bullshit blatherings are among the best features of WR.

Thanks for the un-encyclopedic drama.

Whilst you're about it, send Connolley and Raul over here so we can laugh at their
always-pompous snivelling.

Posted by: Mathsci

Your directness is refreshing.

And thanks for the compliment. I shall frame it.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

There's just one Horsey.

Oh, by the way, Lar...is Rock's Anne single? If so, I'll be happy to trot on over later to make her acquaintance.

Posted by: Viridae

WR members are usually interested in this sort of thing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Abd-William_M._Connolley/Evidence&curid=23614114&diff=303322290&oldid=303320021

Posted by: Cla68

Mathsci, do you think that WMC was correct in removing his adversary's comments from the case Workshop page?

Posted by: Mathsci

My views:

- your of the use "adversary" begs too many questions - think about it a little

- I gave WMC advice on his talk page - possibly there was too much whiskey in his porridge this morning

- Abd has restored his meandering comments in one of his famous collapse boxes -far better than any sleeping pills

- Viridae's edits were dramamongering, just like Abd's attempts to manufacture incidents during the setting up of the ArbCom case

- Hersfold polices the case pages, not WMC or Viridae

- the clerk can handle the rest - the whole ArbCom case is unusually volatile which I very much regret

- if you think there's a case to be made against WMC, make it yourself

But why discuss this here Cla68? Why don't you do it on wikipedia itself?

Posted by: Grep

I had been planning to answer that Mathsci had obviously decided that humour and the light touch would be more effective in this forum than aggression and insults -- giving the impression that any allegations against him are just part of one big joke, couldn't possibly be serious. OTOH he seems to have thought better of it during the course of the day.

However, a much more hilarious explanation is that this Mathsci is not the WP Mathsci at all. In fact, it makes much more sense to suggest that WR:Mathsci must be A.K.Noll, amusing herself by discrediting WP:Mathsci, while I must really be WP:Mathsci, drawing attention to WP:Mathsci's antics to show off how much I'm getting away with.

But as usual, real life is not as much fun as that. I expect it just depends on which member of the team is operating the account at any given moment.

Posted by: Abd

Ah, that explains it! I did. Boy, did I leave. In good standing, I could have gone back, but .... there is a lot in the world that isn't very accessible in academia. Understatement.



No, very low-carb diet. Coffee and cream, mostly, heavy cream. Amazing fuel, very efficient.



Yeah, we were really ruined by hanging out with Pauling, Feynmann, Mossbauer, et al. Those guys were iconoclasts, unlike too many academics these days.



Too much dope? Oxymoron! Or is it oxy, moron? I'm a Muslim, you might never guess, but -- no dope, no alcohol. Coffee and prescription drugs, under supervision, allowed. Aren't I lucky? Paid for by Medicare. Great stuff, actually. Both.



Nah. Look, young pipsqueaks like you imagine that they can understand someone with some depth, project all their own crap on others. You're making a idiot of yourself on Wikipedia, and, believe me, that's the part where I give you good advice. You deserve what you have wished for others, that's how the world works, and how it should work. It's perfect.



Nah. Don't need it. I'm not feeling what you think I'm feeling, you are living in your own fantasy world, a world I left many decades ago. Damn! I'm lucky. Lots of people never escape. In any case, if any of you are familiar with the Qur'an, not necessarily common here, I'm fulfilling my religious obligation, which is only to convey what I see, not to demand that anyone follow it. I'm sure that I'm often quite unskillful, but those who actually have some AGF in their hearts will get past that with some patience. As to the rest, I'm not responsible.

Thanks for sharing.




No, I don't "want someone to intervene." Many editors have complained about WMC -- or the cabal. Okay, here is a chance to do something about it. Take it or leave it.

I can say this: a bunch of incoherent rants about WMC will not help. I'm not seeking to have WMC desysopped, but if others want to suggest that as a remedy, they may, but, then, it should be based on evidence of a continued pattern, not just the present case, probably, and I may not present that evidence, depends on whether I have time or not.

As to the cabal, relevance is tricky. They are going to try to crucify me over the cabal claim, which is only narrowly important so far, so it might be helpful to have testimony on that.

It's really up to anyone who reads this. Intervene or don't. Do what's right for the project. WP:IAR , however, is not just for WMC. It's policy, one of our best, properly understood.

Posted by: Mathsci

Two things.

One frivolous - Cla68 has always had ambitions in the circus - that is why he's been doing clown impressions on WR.

The other is far more serious and worrying - it probably demands immediate attention.

When you bend down, do you notice a grey amorphous liquid streaming out of your ears?

Posted by: Milton Roe

No, its a grey morphous liquid. Amorphous liquids disturb me, as you never know where they might have been.

Posted by: Mathsci

OMG, Grandad, not another lecture on your crackpot views of the number http://bahai-library.com/essays/nineteen.html.

Please spare us, oh verbose one, and lead us not into your walls of life-draining prose.

Remember that today is the holy day of Mary Magdalen,
She that in a boat, with neither rudder nor sail,
Came to these shores from the Holy Land
To end her days in a mountain cave,
After which she was conveyed thence
By flights of angels in the skies to
31 rue Gaston Saporta, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, Bouches-du-Rhone, CEDEX 9.

Lest we forget.

Posted by: Cla68

The clerks do need to sleep sometimes. Some of them might even have jobs which require their attention from time to time, so it's up to others to help police the case pages when necessary. Police action shouldn't be necessary, but WMC doesn't appear to feel that the rules apply to him.

Right here is a fine place to discuss the case. In fact, this is a better place to discuss it than in Wikipedia, because we can talk more freely. For one thing, if one of us criticizes WMC here, we don't have to worry about him deleting our comments.

Posted by: Mathsci

Too few clerks there are.

Are you not, Sir, the most pretentious, snivelling, fawning, digging, flattering creature, that
ever upon this earth did walk, that ask such trifling questions with curled lip, furrowed
brow and false heart ...

What, Sir, is this Monstrous Lie you tell?

Posted by: Cla68

I think you just yelled "Balls!" at me, but with a little more style.

Posted by: Abd

wow! Mathsci must be a follower of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashad_Khalifa, because who else would call an essay debunking Khalifa's theory of 0 modulo 19 patterns in the Qur'an "crackpot views"? Martin Gardner ended up using some of my work.

Thanks for the link, Mathsci, I haven't seen that essay for one very long time. Notice the post office box address. San Quentin is a tiny community of a few houses and a post office and a very large state prison. I spent a lot of time with lifers and various inmates. For a while we had a Saudi prince there, little mixup with an unpaid hotel bill. A very large unpaid hotel bill.

Nice people, compared to certain Wikipedia editors and administrators. Much nicer. Then again, there, I had a captive audience. But I listened a lot more than I spoke.



Granted. Reading what I write has been, by decree of the Universal Benefit Council, prohibited for you. If you are tempted to violate this commandment, designed only for your blessing and welfare, contemplate the dog-vomit slime mold image at the top of my Talk page. Did you imagine that this was a joke?

From your behavior at RfAr, I suspect that you have read much more than the safe limit. Immediately, draw a bath and immerse your head in it for as long as you can.

If you can't draw a bath, then use a photo.

Here is what I've been seeing: we have editors who can't describe accurately what has just happened in full view, with a complete record available in history, but they imagine that they can write neutral encyclopedia articles. I've been reading a series of ArbComm decisions to identify cabal editors, it's been much clearer than I expected.

Very, very predictable opinions, but not just on, say, science, where similarities of views might be expected. On behavior, on Wikipedia principles and policies, and on opinions about the good faith or bad faith of other editors, it's like they are all being programmed from the same source. Zombies can march together without any leader, or, more accurately, anyone of them can function as a leader. One of them says something and the others go "Yeah!" "Me too!" "That's right!"

But what they agree on has been thoroughly rejected by ArbComm and the community, and they only get away with their crap because they mass together here and there. It's a losing battle, because someone like Raul654 creates sock masters right and left, which justifies his job. All it took was WMC, Raul654, and another admin who seems to be gone, in 2006, and presto! over 300 Scibaby socks, keeping Raul654 busy playing whack-a-mole. It's finally being confronted, arbitrators and others are realizing that the range blocks are playing havoc with the "encyclopedia anyone can edit," and it's actually being said, louder than a whisper, that Scibaby socks aren't that disruptive.

Mathsci, if you have read this far, you are not following instructions.

You are on the side of the losers, the cabal is defined by its anti-Arbcomm position, its firm belief in its own rightness, and its ruthlessness in dealing with dissent, and, in spite of all your work, you will find that you are unable to maintain it, you will be blocked and banned, sputtering all the while about those excellent articles. Much better editors than you, experts, have been banned. They may have known their topic, but they did not know people.

I'd like to fix that, retaining experts is a project, but you probably would not let me help you, and it may take some years before what I'm doing to become visible and effective. For you, I see no open doors, no windows, nothing penetrating the terrifying vacuum at the center of your psyche. Now, *I* need to stop reading or the dog vomit slime mold will eat *me*! It's a great pet to have in the corner, but it's a little dangerous.

Posted by: Mathsci

I will use this material for a BLP of Dennis Lomax on wikipedia.

Didn't they try to convert San Quentin into a luxury hotel?



Monsieur, it would be "couilles" and I do thank you not to be putting these things into my mouth ! Putain.

Posted by: EricBarbour

a) this thread belongs in the tarpit;
b) it's getting dull and repetitive anyway, so nevermind.

Posted by: Mathsci

Wasn't there somebody in this thread asking when the British slang word "git" could be applied?

Posted by: Somey

Look, folks, I've been trying to be nice about it, but the fact is none of you are addressing the underlying issues involved, and the result is a thread that makes no sense to anyone but the participants - and probably not even them. I'm not saying this is some sort of offense or rule-violation or anything silly like that, but as Mr. Barbour says, if nobody is going to address those issues, then he's right, the thread belongs in the tarpit, where people won't run the risk of accidentally trying to read it and having their heads explode.

I could take a crack at it, I suppose - it looks like Abd (T-C-L-K-R-D) , whose name might be the acronym for "All But Dissertation," heartily supports Cold Fusion (T-H-L-K-D) research and considers it a viable and worthy concept. WP admin William B. Connelley (T-C-L-K-R-D) (WBC) is one of WP's self-appointed "protectors of scientific content," and takes a dim view of the work that's been done on Cold Fusion so far, and Mathsci (T-C-L-K-R-D) and Hipocrite (T-C-L-K-R-D) agree with him - though they claim to be more ambivalent on the issue than Abd believes them to be.

Abd's contention seems to be that WBC and Mathsci have edit-warred to make the Cold Fusion article more negative with respect to existing research efforts, and their opposing contention is that Abd has edit-warred to make it more positive, i.e., more like an advertisement for Cold Fusion "hucksters." Abd and Hipocrite were "topic-banned" for a month on the article, and WBC claimed that Abd violated this ban, and blocked him for it. Both sides have come up with a dizzying array of arguments to support the idea that their actions were justified, as is often the case in such matters...

Am I close? I realize it's all very complicated, but without a relatively clear statement of the background to this dispute, I see no reason to keep this thread going at all.

Posted by: Grep

There are certainly a number of serious issues here, as well as all the hilarity. There are several issues over Cold Fusion which seem to me to be obviously separate, but which get persistently confused. One question is: "Is Cold Fusion a real phenomenon in the physical world?" -- "Is the science of Cold Fusion as currently practiced good science or bad science?" -- "What is the nature of the sociological phenomenon underlying the Cold Fusion debate?".

There is a party whose beliefs go something like "Cold Fusion is not a real phenomenon" -- "Cold Fusion science is bad science" -- "The only sociological phenomenon consists of people refusing to take the word of the experts who know best"

There is a party whose beliefs go something like "Cold Fusion is probably real, and I really wish it were true" -- "Cold Fusion science is about trying to make a free energy source" -- "So-called experts are at best blinkered stick-in-the-muds and at worst stooges of the oil companies".

Each party is arguing past the other on all three questions.

Posted by: Abd

I can tell before I write this that it's going to be long. I'm just going to make some statements, I'm not going to try to prove them. If you are inclined to believe me, I'd encourage you to verify the statements or ask me to come up with proof. But don't ask here, ask on Wikipedia, and help me get the evidence into the RfAr. And, if it's cogent, support it and confirm it. And if you don't have the balls for that, go away, you are worse than the cabal. Disinterest is normal, but pretend interest wastes everyone's time.

And if you are inclined not to believe me, if that basic trust isn't there, it's unlikely that any evidence I would present would change your mind. It happens, but it's rare, something has to bridge the gap. So if you don't want to know, I'm not writing for you, I'm writing for others, and tl;dr is just an arrogant and unnecessary comment unless you are a friend. If you aren't a friend, I don't give a fuck if you read it and I'm certainly not going to edit it down for you, waste of time.

On Wikipedia, I'll take the time to edit it down, but it's not for the cabal, it's for the neutral editors and especially the arbitrators, it's rude to present them with an undigested and unorganized mess.

That risk is always present when I'm involved. When I was younger, a few overly blunt words, and a friend committed suicide. On-line, I saw a writer delete many months, easily hundreds of hours or more, of her own work when she realized that she couldn't go back and delete my posts and every reference to them without making it an unintelligible mess. I've learned some, but tiger/stripes. I only eat those who eat others, now. Mathsci gets to be told the truth about himself because he's dripping with contempt and arrogance, and he doesn't mind if others are rejected and abused. I would never do this to someone merely because they made a mistake, and when I discover that an editor can't take criticism, I back off, generally. I only persist when they persist or there is some critical interest.



Not very accurate, though not entirely wrong, either.

In January, I came across JzG's abusive blacklistings of the two major cold fusion information web sites. Both of them are quite notable; as a result of my efforts, one now has an article. It's quite possible the other one should have one too. (These might not necessarily survive as independent articles, they might be sections in the cold fusion article, but right now, that would go over like a lead balloon.)

So I began working on the blacklistings. As part of that, I had to look at the content, and I only looked at some narrow sources, at first, and I saw that the sources were being misrepresented. When I tried to fix that, so that it was balanced, I was reverted. I did more research.

For background, I don't have any college degree; however, I first studied nuclear physics when I was twelve, and I assumed I would be a nuclear physicist until several years into Caltech, where I had Linus Pauling for chemistry and Richard P. Feynman for physics. I sat there for the lectures that became the standard physics text for many years. But I didn't continue in science; I dropped out and became, first, a musician, then I led communities, delivered babies, my own and others, started a school of midwifery, taught myself electronics and became a kind of electronics engineer, raised five kids and I'm working on two more, and developed some theories of how "free associations" can become efficient at finding consensus. I.e., the Wikipedia problem.

In 1989 I followed the cold fusion story. I bought $10,000 worth of palladium, not because I was convinced that cold fusion was real -- it hadn't been confirmed, after all -- but because, if it was confirmed, the price of palladium, then about $130 per ounce, would have skyrocketed. Certainly not the worst investment I ever made, and I was a little slow getting in; I ended up, I think, about breaking even. (Palladium later went over $1000 per ounce because of use with catalytic converters, and has now dropped to about $200 because of the suffering in the auto industry.)

I came to believe, like nearly everyone else, that cold fusion was a mistake, bad science, an error, unrecognized experimental artifact. And that is where I was at in January.

However, I started reading the recent work. Contrary to much propaganda, there is a great deal of work that has been published in peer-reviewed journals on the topic, and recent publications have been in high-quality journals, not just less respected ones. When I started to review the evidence, not for cold fusion but for scientific opinion about it, I found plenty to convince me that this was emerging science, certainly not pseudoscience, the original basic finding, excess heat, had never been shown to be artifact; on the contrary , there are 153 peer-reviewed papers that report excess heat, and it is often way above possible experimental error. The effect turns out to be quite fragile; it was very difficult to reproduce Fleischmann's work, but better techniques have been developed; still, it wasn't until 2007 that research groups started reporting 100% excess heat, i.e., every cell shows it. That, by the way, is from a review in a peer-reviewed journal. Try to get that into the article and see what you meet!

It will be there, I predict, but, when the cabal is involved, the wheels of wikijustice grind slowly.

Now, I have indeed become convinced that low-energy nuclear reactions exist. In fact, that was never really in doubt, there were known examples, such as muon-catalyzed fusion and shifts in radioisotope half-life from the chemical environment. But Fleischmann himself, though his recognition of the difference between quantum field theory (largely multibody and thus necessary in the condensed matter environment) and quantum mechanics (largely two-body, simplified and useful in the plasma environment where most interactions are between two particles) led him to think that there might be some difference between reality and what quantum mechanics predicted, did expect that the differences would be below the level of what experiments would detect. But why not try? And that's what he did. And he found heat way above detectable levels, and he was one of the world's foremost electrochemists, and measurement of heat was his forte. He also tried to measure neutrons, and blew it, his reports were experimental error. Later consensus is that the reactions he discovered don't produce neutrons, except as a rare effect, possibly from secondary reactions.

That these reactions exist means almost nothing about solving the world's energy problems, necessarily. The reactions found by the researchers are largely quite fragile and nobody has been able to scale them up to provide reliable excess heat on a useful scale. The same is true of muon-catalyzed fusion, but nobody claims it doesn't exist because it's impractical to brew a cup of tea with it, but that is exactly the claim of one of the most notable critics of cold fusion, Richard Garwin. He said, in a recent interview, that he'll only be convinced when they brew him a cup of tea with it, he drinks it, and then they brew another.

This wasn't science, it was polemic.

However, I'm a Wikipedia editor, and I believe in NPOV, strongly, and, while I'm an inclusionist and would have a far wider range of content than we presently allow -- but with hierarchical structure, where the top level would be stricter than what he presently have, and the bottom level would be wild and wooly, and anyone reading it would be aware of that -- we do *not* have such an inclusionist project and so we depend on notability guidelines, and for science articles, that's peer-reviewed secondary source as the gold standard. And that's all we need.

What's been happening is systematic exclusion of reliably sourced text, based on a synthesis that this text is "fringe." I do believe that whatever is in reliable source, no matter how old or even mistaken, should be in the project, properly framed and balanced, but balanced with sources of equal quality, where possible. I also believe that there is great flexibility and if it improves consensus to claim that some recent research "hasn't been accepted by the scientific community," I'll accept that text unless I can prove otherwise. Even though that is often synthesis. And "scientific community" or "mainstream science" is actually undefined.

Yes, WMC is a cabal administrator. The "cabal" I'm referring to was originally visible in articles about global warming. Ironically, I'm in general agreement with the cabal *on global warming*, but not with the incivility and tag-team reversion that they use to exclude reliably sourced material from skeptical POV. The cabal became quite visible in the flap over ScienceApologist, a cabal editor, and JzG was definitely aligned with the cabal. So when I RfC'd JzG over his abuse of tools with relation to cold fusion -- which was originally without any involvement or POV on my part -- I faced two-thirds of commenting editors calling for me to be banned for disruption, walls of text, and POV-pushing. There were no walls of text in that RfC. ArbComm confirmed every important point that I'd made in the RfC. So that RfC is an example of how the cabal can appear to represent consensus when, in fact, they have an isolated position that fails when subject to careful deliberation, which, while ArbComm is certainly not perfect, is much more likely to happen at ArbComm because of the more highly structured process.

Which they are now trying to disrupt. This RfAr has brought out the cabal in force, I've never before seen them assemble in one place in such numbers, though RfAr/Fringe science got close. And that, I believe, is highly useful.

WMC doesn't seem to have much opinion about Cold fusion, I think he's sincere about that, I haven't claimed he was involved in the article, as such; rather his involvement was with long-term dispute with me, starting with that original global-warming related RfC from more than a year ago, where I basically dismantled the claims of Raul654, certified by WMC, one of the worst-written RfC's I've seen, pure polemic, blatantly POV and uncivil, full of obvious ABF, etc. The basic cabal argument is that an editor has a POV and pushes it, and therefore should be banned.

In reality, we all have POVs, and we all push them; some of us learn how to find consensus beyond that, some don't. Usually, though it takes discussion, and sometimes a lot of discussion, and WMC has no patience at all for discussion. He's impulsive and intuitive, which can be good qualities, but he's unable to recognize when his gonads have taken over and he's simply aggressive.

Hipocrite doesn't give a fig about cold fusion. He somehow came to think that I was an enemy of ScienceApologist because, possibly, some evidence I gave may have helped ArbComm decide to block him. But I supported SA, in fact, in some of his work, including his work on the optics article while he was blocked. I'd have allowed him to edit the article with self-reversion, like I suggested at the time. It would have saved a huge amount of trouble. And then editors could have compared the two versions, and then decided which one they preferred. But because I advocated self-reversion as a technique for banned editors to use to make contributions without making ban enforcement difficult, the cabal editors who argued that harmless edits should not result in blocks -- when it was SA making them and when his actual declared intention was to disrupt arbitration enforcement -- now argue that a ban is a ban and Abd is just wikilawyering.

So Hipocrite showed up at Cold fusion at the beginning of May and began a dedicated campaign of bald reversion, at about the same time as I'd stopped major discussion and started serious work on the article. I'd do hours of research and writing to provide reliably sourced text for the article, to remedy obvious deficiencies, and he would simply revert it, sometimes with little or no explanation, or simply a claim that the peer-reviewed or academic sources were "fringe." With no proof of that. He ran these reverts for some weeks, and started adding and insisting on very weakly sourced negative material, not peer-reviewed secondary source, just off-hand opinions without evidence behind them in various publications, where you can find the "junk science" claim and all the rest.

Hipocrite, in fact, was trolling for the kinds of responses that cabal editors are accustomed to seeing from "fringe POV-pushers," he was trying to provoke me to edit war. On one day, May 21, I finally confronted his editing and did use a few reverts. If you add up all the "partial reverts" -- I would almost never use a bald revert, instead I'll edit the text to try to satisfy the stated objections -- and if you include an edit that was a reassertion of reverted text from weeks before, but with double the sourcing, -- I hit 4RR. That is about unique in my entire editing history. WMC protected the article, and, in fact, I thanked him. The article had been improved a bit, and, in fact, those improvements stuck. Apparently, I'd been supporting improved consensus with my edits. In his last edits before protection, as I recall, Hipocrite had done what he should have done all along: balanced my RS text with other RS text criticizing it. Why hadn't I done that myself? I would have, except that the balancing RS text was not as accessible to me, and it wasn't as strong, but I don't care about that. If it's in RS, it belongs, and at this point, even beginning to get some balance was a great improvement. Progress, not perfection.

To summarize: Neither WMC nor Hipocrite have any particularly strong position on Cold fusion, they were more concerned with the ScienceApologist anti-pseudoscience agenda and about me as a perceived enemy, one able to be effective with the presentation of evidence and the negotiation of consensus, which I am, when conditions allow it.



No. Not that at all. Hipocrite edit-warred, long term, at 3RR on May 21, and again at 3RR on June 1, though when he made that third revert, he undid it, went to RfPP, requested protection because "Abd was edit warring again" -- though I'd done no reversion at all --, and then promptly edited the article to add grossly POV material to the lede. Not a revert, right? Simply text that even Hipocrite knew wouldn't be accepted. But he knew that protection was coming, quite likely, as long as the admins didn't look too closely. They really should be more careful when the one requesting protection has been edit warring, alone, against a series of registered editors.

WMC only made one controversial edit to the article, while it was protected, and that was, indeed, an improvement, it went back to the version of May 14. However, the version of May 14 was a result of continued POV-pushing with reversion by Hipocrite, but he hadn't been nearly as bold as on June 1, which resulted in a truly intolerable version. There were polls running; I'd started one, and, as could be predicted from prior disruption, Hipocrite started another. However, from looking at both polls, it was clear that there was consensus approving, most of all, the May 31 version (every editor !voting approved that), or, slightly below that, or even the same, depending on how one interprets the comparison of the two polls, the version of May 21.

So why did WMC revert to May 14, instead? He writes about why: basically, it was fun to do what GoRight had suggested, since they are supposedly enemies. However, GoRight had no clue about the content, he simply looked and saw that May 14 had been stable for a few days, which was true. I'd was trying to figure out a minimally disruptive way to deal with Hipocrite and, remember, I already know there is a cabal and what will happen if this goes to AN/I. Sometimes, luck of the draw, but odds are, cabal members will see it and pile in.

I protested. So WMC and I were involved in a content dispute. This was in addition to long-term contempt that he'd expressed about my work, and his prior support of me being banned over the JzG affair. No way should he have touched me; if he'd wanted me banned or blocked, he knows what he could do. Except that WMC never does that. If he thinks someone should be blocked, he just does it. Old-style. Rejected style, in fact, but WMC has nothing but contempt for those ArbComm decisions.

(In some ways, I'm in agreement with WMC. If he thinks an editor should be blocked, maybe he should block, but, then, he should also notify the community at AN/I or AN, and he should recuse. The cabal editors, so far, have tried to feed the community loads of bullshit about how recusal rules will make enforcement of guidelines by administrators impossible, but the fact is that recusal does not mean automatic unblock. It means that the admin is only an "arresting officer" and doesn't make the decision about whether to "hold the suspect." IAR is not negated, but contained. WMC's error is in holding on, not in acting intuitively. He may also be dangerous, his intuition may be too heavily contaminated, but that's another issue.)



Well, it's really pretty simple. It's only dizzying if you try to understand it all at once, without absorbing the evidence first. That's what we want, right? We want a nice neat clear little analysis that we can sign on to. Problem is that the faculties by which we decide to accept or reject those analyses can be heavily influenced by some very subjective factors. But, okay:

WMC decided that the problem at the article wasn't Hipocrite edit warring, it was Abd Talking too much. That has been his opinion for at least a year. But he certainly couldn't ban me and leave the very obvious problem of edit warring of Hipocrite alone. Most don't yet realize that I had proposed to Hipocrite a mutual topic ban from editing the article, and Hipocrite had jumped for it. The cabal doesn't understand consensus process; I don't need to be able to edit the article to do my work, which is the forming of consensus. Once there is consensus, anyone can make the edit. Hipocrite's goal was to keep me from editing the article, so here was his chance. But that agreement was ignored, the admins at RfPP still wouldn't unprotect.

WMC then declared the double ban. However, he extended it to Talk. After all, that's where *my* offenses had taken place. I objected, but he insisted. After trying to negotiate directly, I went to TenOfAllTrades, by email, and asked him to suggest out to WMC that this would end up at ArbComm if he insisted, and that, from precedent, this wouldn't go well for WMC. At least there would be that risk! TOAT, however, reacted, shall we say, rather negatively, that will all be in evidence at the RfAr. While all I was doing was suggesting to TOAT that he point out to WMC what recusal policy would require, it was called a "threat." Okay, I suppose you could say that I was threatening to take a unlaterally declared ban by an admin who was involved to ArbComm. Not just a threat. A promise, and ArbComm, in some good advice that the cabal seems to not notice, suggested I escalate more quickly. It took me about four months to go from discovery of the problem with JzG to RfAr, and not much more than one month to do it this time.

Taking this to AN would bring out the cabal, and, whatever happened, it would be disruptive. From history, the cabal can assemble about twice as many editors as the People of NPOV and Consensus. (This is a rough translation from Arabic, by the way, it's a religious term.....) With additional time, the balance would shift, but it would likely not find consensus; nothing would change, except a lot more text would have been created to no good end.)

So I decided the fastest and most efficient way to bring the matter to resolution was to deny that the ban existed. I notified WMC of this, but didn't actually make any violating edits. Enric Naval, who, in spite of his claims that my big offense is walls of text, is quite capable of generating huge volumes when he's fired up, as he has done, fortunately, at RfAr, even though there wasn't any actual cause but two contesting claims, took this to AN/I, and, as predicted, cabal editors poured in. Not all editors can be identified as being cabal editors; when the cabal assembles and makes its claims, it almost always brings in some neutral editors who don't investigate carefully. It takes time and patience to understand what's going on. In any case, while I started to defend there, I realized that was a mistake. It was probably going to be closed as no consensus -- or not closed at all -- if I allowed defense to continue, or alternatively as a community ban, and probably a one-month ban. I didn't care enough about it to be worth the disruption of contesting the matter there, so I asked for a speedy close.

Okay, now I was community page-banned, one month. However, contrary to the assumptions of many who subsequently commented, I wasn't topic-banned, and I continued to participate in a glacially-paced mediation, hence I had plenty of reason to review the article and the Talk page. And I noticed what seemed to me to be a simple one character error. Because of the prior history with SA, and because of WMC's very clear opinion, expressed then, that to block someone for a harmless edit under ban would be "stupid," I made the edit with a summary that I would, per ban, revert, and then I reverted. WMC blocked me. I explained, and he even at one point realized what he'd done that he'd, as he said it, "nailed his colors to the mast," he didn't unblock or apologize or annotate the block record. I did not put up a unblock template; again, not worth it for a 24-hour block, since this was all going to end up at ArbComm anyway.

Sure, Hipocrite didn't violate the ban. The ban fully served his purpose. He had started the mediation, and stacked it with cabal editors, but most of them aren't really interested, and neither was he, in fact.



You know, people here have complained for a long time about WMC and Raul654. WMC is now before ArbComm, and Raul654 has come out from under cover far more obviously than ever before. There is actually an opportunity to do something about a situation which has been causing damage for a long time. Consider Scibaby. On my Talk page, where Raul threatens to club me for "meat puppeting" for Scibaby, I decide that, since this was so important to Raul that he'd himself write extensively about it, I'd check it out. From maybe an hour's research, which I consider far short of what would be definitive, I saw that this was a global warming cabal action. Scibaby was faced with the cabal, which operates by being uncivil to a new editor whose POV they dislike, and then if the editor tries to insist on, say, some reliably-sourced criticism of global warming, the editor is met with tag-team reversion. Most editors simply get blocked fairly quickly, but this one was a bit more persistent. It seems he had what may have been a sleeper sock, though if that was the intention, it was extraordinarily clumsy. I tend more to the explanation that Obedium was a role account, which Obedium actually claimed when he was later blocked, claiming that the use of the account by multiple people had stopped.

Anyway, when Obedium showed up, Scibaby was immediately indef blocked for use of socks. By WMC, who had been reverting him at the article. Action while involved. Obedium continued, but was harassed, to make it brief. Eventually, at the end of December, Obedium was blocked for sock puppetry, and apparently had created a series of socks starting in mid-December. As of last count, Scibaby has created perhaps 300 socks. The range blocks are causing much collateral damage, there used to be several requests a day for help with an account creation; and, as has been pointed out, most people, met with a block message, would probably do nothing. It may be down to one a day.

Huge disruption, long-term, caused by ... WMC originally, then the final block was by Raul654.

Yes. There is a cabal. We might call it a "faction" or there are other more neutral words, but I want to imply that the group, collectively, violates policy and guidelines and is thus harmful.

But what's this case about? WMC continues to claim that he has the right to maintain the ban, even though a different admin closed the community ban and when he was asked -- by an editor apparently hostile to me -- about the duration, he said it was one month. That's expired. I'm not banned. But WMC says I am, so we are back to the beginning. He's involved, clearly, deeply, now if he wasn't before. So, first of all, is he involved? Is it allowed for him to continue to threaten to block me if I edit one of those pages? Or should he recuse? I'm not pushing for him to lose his bit, but others who are more aware of the many other situations that I've heard about, and that I've seen fragments of, certainly could argue for it. I'm not attached either way.

Secondly, should I be sanctioned and for what? WMC was asked about the reason for the ban, and he pointed to a reference to WP:TRIFECTA, which only makes sense as IAR. He didn't provide a reason except post-facto, a claim that the article was nice and quiet since. Sure it is! Graveyards are quiet, too!

In any case, every aspect of my behavior for the last two years is being dredged up. It's quite improper, and by the time we are done with evidence, a lot of that may disappear. Or not. I don't mind, personally. In summary, should Abd be commended, advised, reprimanded, sanctioned, banned?

But there is more: the behavior of other editors both before and during the case may have raised some important secondary issues, and I'll be listing them. I've only made a couple of motions on the Workshop page, and only one proposed principle: Consensus is crucial to NPOV, by which I don't mean that NPOV is defined by consensus, but that we measure the attained level of NPOV by the degree of consensus found. This is based on many years of debate in highly contentious contexts. If we imagine that there is NPOV that is contrary to consensus, we will be setting up conditions where there will be continual disruption and need to defend against "POV-pushing" and vandalism. Full employment for checkuser Raul654.

In fact, having a strong POV makes one an excellent detector for contrary POV. That's why we need all POVs represented in discussions, and assuming reliable source exists, respected by the text. People who hold true fringe opinions know and accept they they are fringe; indeed, that is often their complaint. If you read the cold fusion secondary sources, many of them quite clearly describe the rejection of cold fusion by, say, nuclear physicists. They will say things like "In spite of widespread opinion, ...." However, of late, that has been shifting, and it's being recognized that there is widening acceptance, which I won't argue here.... My point is totally general. I made this argument long before I was involved with cold fusion, and before I was aware that Jimbo had made precisely the same argument in 2003.

Posted by: Abd

The cabal wants Wikipedia to take a stand in favor of the "mainstream" view, but they don't define what that means. Those questions involve POV, and we are properly quite limited. We cannot answer those questions, and, in fact, the questions aren't even well defined enough to answer, and there is no one answer. What is "cold fusion?" The name implies that there is nuclear fusion, but nobody really knows for sure what's going on. The theories are a mess; it's quite possible that one of the proposed explanations is more or less accurate, but, so far, most theories explain only part of the experimental phenomena. There have been, indeed, theories that made predictions before experiment verified them. Preparata predicted, using quantum field theory, that helium would be found correlated with excess heat measured, and then it was. That correlation, by the way, is pretty solid as a confirmation that fusion explains the excess heat, but it does not prove that the reaction is straight deuterium-deuterium fusion, there are other possibilities that were mostly overlooked in the early days.

"Cold Fusion" is an idea, a hypothesis. What's real is the experimental results. What are they? What's been covered by peer-reviewed secondary source? We can start to assert that as real, and, I can assure you, we would not from those sources state that "Cold fusion is a real phenomenon in the physical world." We would state, at this point, that "Unexplained heat from high packing of deuterium into palladium, under some conditions, is a real phenomenon." In 2004, the DoE panel that re-examined the issue came up 9:9 on the issue of excess heat, half believing that evidence was "convincing" that the heat was real, and the other half that it wasn't "conclusive." ("Not conclusive," in my book, is a middle position, not equivalent to "false.") And they only had a day meeting to consider it, and there is no way that the vast body of evidence could be fully addressed and understood in a day. Nuclear physicists, in general, have been inclined to believe that, since it's impossible from accepted theory (though there is no fundamental problem, merely no expected mechanism), there must be artifact, but that is simply a belief, not something demonstrated. Electrochemists, the competing specialty here, are well-convinced that the heat is real. The other result from that review was that one-third of the reviewers felt that evidence for the heat being of nuclear origin was "somewhat convincing." Now, if you don't believe that the evidence for the heat is strong, you certainly aren't going to believe that nuclear origin is likely! So the way I parse this is that two-thirds of those who accept the excess heat consider the origin to be, quite possibly, nuclear, and it's the simplest explanation. Exact mechanism unknown.

I follow physics blogs on this, and it's amazing how ignorant most of those commenting are. They will say, referring to Fleischmann's work, "it wasn't confirmed." It was. They will say it wasn't reproducible. It was, or, more accurately the original experimental design wasn't optimal, in fact, it was practically a miracle that it worked at all. But there are techniques now that work 100% of the time, and they have been replicated and published in high-quality peer-reviewed journals. They will say, "If it was fusion, the neutrons would have killed the researchers," which assumes -- doesn't it? -- that there is only one kind of fusion. Takahashi's theory is that under fortunately unusual conditions of confinement in the palladium lattice, two deuterium molecules can form a Tetrahedral pattern (one deuteron at each corner of a tetrahedron) and that this collapses to form a "condensate," which seems to be a Bose-Einstein condensate, which, within a femtosecond or so, he calculates using quantum field theory, fuses to form Be-8, which then decays immediately into two alpha particles, 23.8 MeV of energy each. No neutrons are emitted from the four-body fusion. The idea that fusion must necessarily produce copious neutrons is just that, an idea, an expectation, based on a narrow view of what might be happening. Whatever is happening in "cold fusion" cells, it does not produce many neutrons.

However, neutrons have been conclusively shown to be generated within the cells, at about ten times background, and consistently. It used to be said by the critics that if neutrons were conclusively demonstrated, that was proof, it was fusion. Well, they have been shown, published in Naturwissenschaften in January 2009, paper by Mosier-Boss, working for the U.S. Navy SPAWAR group, called "Triple tracks...." And there are other papers. The levels are way below what would be expected from simple deuterium-deuterium fusion, and they speculate that what is happening is perhaps the Be-8 theory of Takahashi, and then those energetic alpha particles cause a few secondary reactions, hot fusion, which generate neutrons. But nobody knows, except that the evidence for nuclear reactions, since 2004, has become overwhelming. Fusion? Some think so, some don't.



There is such a party, that's easy to show from reliable source. However, there is a lot of contrary source as well! We shouldn't confuse the opinions of scientists who aren't informed about recent research, who depend on memories of their opinions twenty years ago, or on media sources, with "scientific consensus." Science means knowledge, and old knowledge is still valid, if the age is considered. But recent knowledge trumps it, because it includes the old knowledge and more.



Yeah, those people exist too. But that's not the view of the serious researchers and analysts. Who, by the way, are also experts, many of them highly-credentialed. Several Nobel Prize winners have supported cold fusion and worked on theoretical explanations.

First of all, I'm convinced that low-energy nuclear reactions are real. But that doesn't automatically mean "cheap" energy, and certainly not "free" energy. There is a technique used in Japan by Arata, a very well-respected physicist, who loads nanoparticle palladium with deuterium gas. It works 100% of the time. A cell with 7 grams of palladium in it, pressurized with the gas and sealed, heats up initially (heat is generated from the formation of palladium deuteride), but then the temperature rapidly declines to a constant level, it maintains its temperature at four degrees C. above ambient, for thousands of hours, with no sign of decline; I've seen the charts out to 3000 hours, when they terminate the experiment and open the cell to analyze for helium. (I haven't seen the helium results.) (When hydrogen is used, same initial heat, but the temperature rapidly declines, the same at first, but it settles to ambient within a few hours). Okay, suppose this works. I figured that with a modest investment of about $100,000, mostly for the palladium, I could run a cold fusion hot water heater in my house. Is that "free"?

Maybe more efficient methods can be found; there is work with nickel electrodes. But there have been quite a few companies working on the problem over the last twenty years, and most of those efforts terminated. The reason? Not that there were no results, but there was no progress toward commercial levels of heat generation. (There are other companies now, and some claims of possible progress, and much skepticism. No public proof of commercial application yet; one company, claiming generation of heat, not from cold fusion, but from hydrino theory, which is either the most brilliant scientific work in a long time, or totally bogus, has claimed a reactor which generates significant heat, and there is a claim of a confirmation, and enough media source on this that it belongs somewhere in the project, but ... it's nothing conclusive yet and it could be one very sophisticated scam.)



Look again. You are assuming what the arguments are. You've got the negative arguments fairly right, but, in fact, that's all irrelevant. What matters for Wikipedia purposes is what is in reliable source, and for the science, what is in peer-reviewed reliable secondary sources. If we followed the RS guidelines and the principles made clear in RfAr/Fringe science, we'd be fine, and we would have a much better article, but the cabal, through a few active editors, has made sure that most of the story available isn't being told. It's pretty stupid, actually.

Give you an example. The triple-track paper on neutrons was published in Naturwissenschaften. In the RfAr on Cold fusion, that was called a "biology journal." Serious error. Because the recent paper on neutrons was amply covered in the media -- it was pretty big news in March -- we have a reference to the paper now, in the article. An editor inserted "life sciences journal." Naturw. is Springers "flagship multidisciplinary journal," it's rated just below Scientific American for impact factor in the multidisciplinary category. (I think SciAm was number 49, Naturw. was number 50.) Anyway, that question was the first one resolved at the mediation. Basically, if you can get editors to sit down and discuss something with sufficient thoroughness, consensus can be quite different from the original "majority opinion." It was decided that calling this a "life sciences" journal was misleading. The implication was that they wouldn't know a neutron from a bacillus. However, Naturw. is produced by the Max Planck Society, which is highly reputable and which has access to the best possible expertise for any scientific field. This is mainstream.

Cold fusion was called "pathological science" in 1989. By nuclear physicists, facing the possibility that much of what they had believed was obsolete, and who didn't have the expertise to reproduce experiments in a few months that took Pons and Fleischmann five years to develop. And the effect was very poorly understood, Pons and Fleischmann didn't think it was ready for publication, but the University of Utah, for patent reasons, pushed them to announce it, there was worry that competing work by Stephen Jones was going to outflank them. Later, when Pons and Fleischmann ran out of the batch of palladium that they had been using, they couldn't reproduce it either, until techniques of preparation of the palladium were found that worked. They'd been lucky. (In other words, you can't blame those physicists for failing, they didn't have enough information.) On the other hand, the Caltech work that resulted in the famous meeting of the American Physical Society where there was practically a riot of derision against Fleischmann, has later been more carefully analyzed. There was, apparently, excess heat shown, but missed. The experimental data was good, though the levels of excess heat were lower than expected from the Fleischmann results, probably because of the palladium quality, and thus this experiment was reported as negative. Same with MIT results, there was apparently some monkeying with the baseline in a chart that, from the raw data, shows modest excess heat; the baseline was shifted to make that appear to be zero excess heat. It's a mess, and much of this is in reliable source, there is material for many articles, if we simply start using the sources that exist without pushing an anti-CF -- or pro-CF -- agenda. Tell it like it is, and "is" doesn't refer to "reality" or Truth ™ but to what is in reliable sources. Where there is conflict of sources, we show that, but the cabal asserts conflict when, in fact, there is none. A negative result in one experiment does not negate a positive result in another. Something was different. An unresolved mystery is not a conflict. In any case, experimental reports are primary sources and only useful as historical documents, proof of their own existence, certainly not for conclusions!

Does a peer reviewed secondary source from, say, 2007, showing the results of research over the last decade, contradict an editorial or media source from 1990, say, that says "it hasn't been confirmed"? I say no. The 1990 source was reporting the situation in 1990 and the 2007 source, the situation in 2007. And this is what they want me banned for. I've been "pushing" for us to follow guidelines. That, in fact, is what Pcarbonn did, before he was essentially framed.

He should have been restricted, and it's quite possible I should be restricted, it's my position that experts, in general, should only edit articles when it isn't controversial. Experts are almost always not neutral! (I'm not an expert, compared to someone who has studied the field for twenty years) but I now have a strong POV, from my research over the last six months.) Experts, however, should be able, like any COI editor, to edit Talk pages. That's where they screwed up with Pcarbonn.

Posted by: Somey

I guess I should be more careful what I ask for, eh?

Nevertheless, I did read the whole thing, and while I (naturally) would tend to disagree with Takahashi in that the palladium lattice tends to form an octahedral pattern which collapses to form a really bad cheese soufflé, which then fuses to the pan (and becomes very difficult to clean off even with a Brillo pad) and ultimately decays to the point where it's so moldy even the ants won't touch it, scientifically speaking I don't (personally) see your assertions as unreasonable.

What's important from our perspective here would be the issue of whether or not Connelley's and Raul's treatment of you, and by extension that of the entire "anti-pseudoscience cabal," is based at least partially on revenge (over the JzG business?), or perhaps a general attempt to "pick off" the skeptics over time, since they clearly feel threatened by such people. I take it they've refused to accept your sources as "reliable"...? And it sounds like most of their efforts have amounted to little more than "wikilawyering" and novel interpretations of rules, or simply ignoring the rules altogether?

All that would certainly tally with the previous experiences some of our members have had with Connelley and Raul654. As for Mr. Hipocrite, well... he's a difficult one to figure out, I'm afraid. He seems to be a classic case of the "obnoxious idealist," assuming there actually are "classic" cases of that around. Some of us would probably also describe him as "misguided" too, though some of us would describe just about anyone who's pro-WP that way, of course...

Anyway, this just reinforces my earlier reasoning behind my preference for iceberg, romaine, and butter lattice.

Posted by: Mathsci

The problem is that Abd is wasting everybody's time by posting his verbal diarrhea here and not preparing his "evidence" for the ArbCom case.

I wouldn't be surprised if Abd asked for one year's sabbatical leave to prepare his evidence about WMC, while all proceedings are frozen. Perhaps Jimbo and the WMF could shut down wikipedia for a year.

Meanwhile, Somey, why would anybody discuss this case here, except for light-hearted froth and self-parody?

Posted by: Somey

Obviously because we're much more likely to look at the situation objectively, and not bog down the process of getting to the actual point with a lot of hot air about incomprehensible rules and procedure? Assuming we know the basics of what's actually going on, of course.

Besides, you would say that, since you're on the side of the ones with the administrative rights in this case. I'm not saying you're wrong, but to simply dismiss what Abd is saying as "verbal diarrhea" is really just a form of chicanery. Sure, it's way too lengthy for most people, but it seems clear enough that he's not as unreasonable as he's being made out to be. And either way, one could just as easily say that he'd be "wasting everyone's time" more by concentrating on the ArbCom case exclusively, since that's likely to be a foregone conclusion.

In most cases like this, the controlling forces eventually get frustrated, give up on "consensus" and "NPOV," and just do whatever they have to to make the "tendentious editors" go away. And what are they protecting, really? Personally, I'd rather see WP show a bit more tolerance for various "pseudoscience" agendas, if there's a chance that by not doing so, they'd be helping to suppress the small number of alternative ideas and approaches that actually have some merit. It's not like the site has a reputation for accuracy to defend, after all.

Posted by: EricBarbour

Thanks--well put. That is the whole thing about this so-called dispute. These boys are
enjoying typing at each other too much to actually address the original issue. They typed
like hell at each other on WP, and now they're dragging their perversely long-winded
micturitions to WR, where they can be less "civil", or so they think.

And still, there is no quarter, no one is convinced of anything (least of all the witnesses
to this utter bullshit), and nothing is accomplished. Ya know, it seems to me that 50
years from now, if the contents of this forum survive, people will be amazed and/or
horrified at how Wikipedia's dispute over cold fusion was "debated".

Yes, little men: instead of carrying this on forever, like the Hatfield-McCoy feud,
why don't you come to some kind of compromise? You can ignore me, and return
to sniping at each other. (And these new witnesses you have, on WR, will sit here
and chuckle at your highly erudite cluelessness.) Or you could come to some kind
of mutual agreement, and implement it on-wiki.

Posted by: Robert Roberts

As a "witness" my eyes glaze over everytime I try and read it and find out what the problem is. The thing is already much longer than my PhD thesis!

Posted by: Abd

And this is a fundamental Wikipedia problem. When issues get complex, the complex get issued.

Yes. It might take some attention, study, and applied intelligence. Ask a simple question, you might get a simple answer. Ask a question that involves complexity, you will get one of two kinds of answers: a complex answer, or polemic, designed to convince you of something.

Simple answer to what the problem is:

A cabal of editors have been blocking sourced text supporting minority opinion. WMC is one. He was exposed by Abd. He "nailed his colors to the mast." Abd has pointed it out. WMC struck back.

Hipocrite is hiding. Mathsi is an arrogant asshole. Raul654 is an arrogant highly privileged asshole. Abd is verbose and believes he understands stuff. Enric Naval can't stand opposition. WMC gives no shit about consensus, just enforces NPOV. His NPOV, not yours.

Why can't Abd just say that in the first place? Because he's Abd, not WMC. WMC would say it straight out, if he managed to understand the situation without discussion. He never discusses. Abd needs to discuss before he understands. Take your pick.

Posted by: Abd

You could call it that. Or more frank, you could call it that as well. Eric, I'm addressing the "original issue." However, curious, what *is* the original issue in your opinion? To me, it's the cabal, which speaks with a dozen tongues, so each one can seem nice and concise. Cogent? No, but who cares about that?



Quarter? Who has the buttons to push? Who's been banning editors for disagreeing?



Well, I've been involved with on-line debate for well over twenty years, and I've read back quite a bit. What I see is that the facts were typically plain, positions were plain, but the witnesses were lazy. The evidence was all there, anyone who would, instead of asking for the opinion of others, actually investigate, would get what happened. Instead, people take the easy road: the obsessed editor must be the problem, get rid of him, things will be fine. Never thinking, for a moment that they are the problem, the editor is obsessed because they won't listen. So they ban the victim, and the actual cause continues, encouraged.



Compromise was tried. With JzG, I tried for about three months. With WMC, much less, because it was quickly plain that WMC wasn't interested in any compromise at all. What compromise? Got one to suggest?

Take a look at the RfAr in a week or two. You will see me suggesting compromise. It might surprise you. However, you want my summary of the Wikipedia problem. It's you, Eric, and everyone else like you, quick to judge, slow to investigate, unwilling to work to find compromise, blaming everyone else for "feuding." And unwilling to consider how that problem could be addressed, because, of course, it would involve looking at ourselves.

Posted by: Abd

Brilliant, Somey, thanks. Yes, that's what happens. It's not new with Wikipedia.

"POV-pushing" should be no offense at all, if it's confined to Talk. And if not so confined, the penalty should be confinement to Talk. There are simple solutions to "verbal diarrhea" that do not involve quarantine. It's a wiki, not a public, face-to-face meeting where verbosity is a serious problem. tl;dr? Great! Perfect solution. Then those who want to, read it and, if anything is important, they repeat it.

Classic deliberative rule: do not debate what has not been seconded. Wikipedia violates this all the time, which is one reason it is so incredibly inefficient. If I make some long-winded comment in Talk, and nobody reads it, what, exactly, is the problem? Anyone who thinks it off-topic can delete it in a matter of seconds. (Or they can ignore it even more efficiently.) If I restore it without respecting that opinion, I'd be edit warring. So if I restore it -- sometimes I will, sometimes I won't, I'll usually restore it in collapse, sometimes with a brief summary.

The real problem? There are editors who do not want actual discussion. They want only conclusions, which they can agree with or not.

I have made one proposed principle in the Workshop. Consensus is fundamental to NPOV. That doesn't mean that NPOV is a matter of vote, not at all. It means that the more neutral text is, the more widely it will be accepted. "[Your minority opinion] is junk." You won't accept that. "According to so-and-so, published in the New York Times, [your minority opinion] is junk," you might accept, if you can balance it, or even if you can't, since the reported fact is true, and you know it. You will want that opinion attributed and framed properly. NPOV is not a single point of view, that should be obvious.

With a given superset of sourced material, there are an infinite number of ways it could be expressed that are true to source. Some of these will imply a POV, because we cannot express all sources at once. How do we know when we have found NPOV.

We can't know, individually. We can only know if the text offends our own POV or not. In other words, we can recognize, rather easily, POV that conflicts with our own. We are POV detectors, and when we detect no POV, we think the text is NPOV. But it's very hard to recognize our own POV as such. That's why we need others.

My radical proposal is that we measure NPOV (not determine it as an absolute) by the proportion of editors who accept the text as neutral or acceptable. If everyone signs on, obviously the text is to be considered NPOV. That may not be attainable, but, for sure, we won't attain it if we keep excluding editors with minority POV!

What do you get when you see with more than one point of view at a time?

Depth perception.

At any given time, the minimum measure of acceptability, and only the minimum, unstable if that is where it sits, is 50% plus one. Majority rule, folks. Basic principle of democracy, and only a problem when a majority faction insists on no compromise, since, after they, they can win. But the battle to maintain a position with a bare majority can be endless, disruptive, bloody. Efficiency, overall, increases with consensus percentage. At some point, it may not be worth the effort to satisfy the last holdout, but good process can always keep the door open.

Yes, that means endless discussion, but not necessarily discussion that involves more than two editors. And if a holdout can't find anyone willing to discuss, that seals it, doesn't it.

A motion is not debated unless seconded. Think about it!

In large organizations, it can take a higher threshold to get something on the "floor." Basically, the majority will table it or refer it to committee. Discussion is confined, in good democratic process. It can be done on Wikipedia, easily, it requires no new guidelines.

But it does require experimentation, trying new approaches. Notice one of the charges against me. "Experiments with new process." Guilty as charged. If that charge doesn't demonstrate what is going on, nothing will!

Posted by: Abd

Well, I suppose that, as a thoughtful individual, if you asked, there was some obligation to read the reply. Only if you had time! Or when you found time. There is no rush, so the impatience of some editors continues to amaze me.



I do not claim that cold fusion exists, at least I wouldn't put that in text. I do claim that the Takahashi theory exists and is described in reliable source; before the last removal (by WMC in his revert back to May 14), I had sourced it to Storms (2007), He Jing-Tang (2007), and to a Takahashi paper as a primary source, not as a proof of notability, the first two sources, reviews, do that. There are many other theories, one just published in May in Naturwissenschaften, by Kim, which resembles the Takahashi theory in being about Bose-Eiinstein condensates.

JedRothwell, famous and allegedly banned editor and probably the foremost expert in the world on the overall literature, says he can't understand the theory papers, which involve very high math. Quantum field theory is about as complex as it gets. He doesn't care about theory. He does care about excess heat and a bit less about neutrons, alpha radiation, helium measurements, and other easily understood and much more objective signs of nuclear reactions.

All I'm pushing for is that we follow RS guidelines. That's what Pcarbonn did, in fact, but he was framed by JzG, quite effectively, it convinced ArbComm. I understand why. Without understanding the field, what Pcarbonn was doing looked bad. This was the peak, I hope, of the attack on "Civil POV-pushing," one of the most pernicious concepts to gain currency on Wikipedia. I.e., that it's Bad.



Yes. And they've been doing it for a long time, and it's documentable. But by its nature, it requires much more evidence than establishing misbehavior by a single editor. And, in fact, if you look at editor behavior singly, it can look to be within bounds. Cabal editors don't need to go beyond 1RR. They don't need to discuss.



That's very correct. But because there are a number of them, they can make it look like they are consensus, personified. What I've found is that when a particular point is discussed, they lose. But they can make this so tedious that it often isn't done. They also lose when ArbComm discusses the actual issues. They strongly support ScienceApologist, but when push comes to shove, most of them back off and leave him swinging, while they, more privately, say what a shame it was that SA was provoked into incivility and that ArbComm couldn't see what a valuable defender of the wiki he was.



Yes.



Lattice pray.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Abd, can you believe that we are soon arriving at the first anniversary of that drama fest when Iridescent stupidly indef blocked you for “repeated posting of untrue attacks on another editor after multiple warnings,” while Xeno did his Mighty Mouse routine and unblocked you because “consensus seems to be that the block has served its purpose.” What are your thoughts on that piece of ancient history? And do you think Xeno deserves a big Horsey kiss for unblocking you?

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

This saga seems to encapsulate all of the worst and most insidious features of WikiMMORPGism. It also illustrates, in an ironic way, one of the worst features of encylopedism (let's assume, for argument's sake, that WP is an encyclopedia.)

For an encyclopedia to pose as authoritative, it has to present itself as the "last word" on any given subject (in the case of WP, this gets transmogrified to "the last word as of 18:35, 22 July 2009 (UTC).") But science, by its very nature, makes advances by exposing flaws in the existing body of theory (Horrors! Original Research!) Thus, any account of science that presents a given matter as "settled" is the enemy of science.

The Anthropogenic Global Warming gang is going to have to explain the present decline in global temperatures. As for Cold Fusion, it is an extremely important area of research, not because it is fusion, but because it is anomalous: it is a repeatable physical phenomenon that defies the existing body of theory, and therefore it is like an open door to progress, with a red carpet rolled out. But for the super-constipated WMC types that are so prevalent at Wikipedia, it is a nightmare come true.

Posted by: Milton Roe

No, but suppose this works. It requires us to now believe in human beings acting stupidly or crazily. Any non-crazy physicist who could do this, would make up a dozen or so preps in inert material cylinders (like little CO2 gas cartridges) and just send them to skeptics with a note:



Now, I'm sure there are stories about why this isn't happening. The guy isn't sending them out because he's about to commercialize it (I've heard this one for nearly 20 years). Or he claims he sends them out and the warm cylinders are returned by scientists who have their fingers in their ears and eyes tightly closed (but no names are given of people who've returned samples). All very conspiratorial, and with nobody acting like *I* would act, no matter which side of this debate I was on (whether I could make these things, or whether I was to be the recipient).

That is how you know this is a crazy story.

Would this Arata guy send ME one of these things? No. There will be all kinds of complicated reasons why not. But ultimately, I predict, no. Perhaps it has to be in a special glass and is specially fragile and they can't move it. Whatever. For some reason, no.

I'll take one. I have access to a calorimeter. I have the perfect right to call "bullshit" until he's willing to send me one. Pass this along, and if he agrees, I'll send contact info.

Milton

Posted by: Grep

He was politely asked to post and did so in a rather sensible and interesting way. Why would you think that a problem?



Maybe, maybe not. Wikipedia Review isn't the place to decide the Cold Fusion issue. Neither is Wikipedia, actually. The issue is, how badly is Wikipedia failing to resolve the issues arising on-wiki from that fact? So far, very badly indeed.

Posted by: Milton Roe

The Wikipedia isn't the place to decide ANY issue, if you take that attitude. The problem in every debate comes down to epistemology. And in any issue where there are (if you're lucky) a 99% to 1% split on some matter, if it's a popular one, you can always get 100 cites from the 1%.

So what to do. This problem has no answer, as I've pointed out here many times. NPOV says viewpoints have to be given space and citation in proportion to the fraction of knowledgable people who hold them. But who decides if this is true? You've just gone up a level and you're now polling people on whether or not they believe 1% of scientists don't believe in global warming or do believe in cold fusion, or if the figure is higher or lower. And what people are you going to poll? Are you going to poll at all, or are you going to make an estimate of the major views in the field, all by yourself (as an original research idea of your own). No? Then you have to find a cite from somebody who has an opinion on what the major views are and the fraction of "experts" who hold them, and who qualifies as an "expert." But how do you know his or her opinion on this is good? Now you have to take a poll of the people who take polls to see if the polls fairly represent the views in the field. And are you going to do this yourself? No. You have to find somebody who has already done of poll of the pollsters of the opinions in the field....

There is no way out. At some point, you (and everybody else) simply says "Fuck it, I'm going to do my own original estimate of the state of this knowledge, or otherwise I wouldn't be able to write this article". And that's what they do, violating NOR.

NPOV and NOR, you see, contradict each other. At some point on your way down the epistemological rabbit hole, you have to give up NPOV in favor of your own judgement. All you can do is hope that somebody at that point doesn't disagree with you too badly, and if they do, that they won't use a superior position to squelch you.

Posted by: Grep

Quite so. It is a fundamentally misguided project.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Yes, and all could have been avoided if somebody at WMF had just sat down and had a college student philosophy bull session for an hour.

"This is really great idea. We have non-experts do a lot of editing, but we keep them in line because we don't let them put in original research, but make them cite only published stuff."

"Okay, how do we tell, or how do they tell, what published stuff to cite on WP?"

"We have our volunteer non-expert people represent the viewpoints on subjects in proportion to number of citations in the literature. Jimbo thought of that."

"Fine, but you have to know the literature to figure that out! How are these guys supposed to know what that proportion is? Even experts argue about that, and you aready said these wouldn't all be experts. And without identifying anybody, you have no way to know who is a subject-matter-expert, who knows 'the literature' and can fairly make this judgement, and who isn't."

"Uhhhh......."







"Are there any other items on the agenda....?"

Posted by: Abd

Yes, next month. Some little known facts about that block, my first true block.

(1) Iridescent was in error to block me, but it was not "stupid." I understood the appearance, and for me to describe the nature of the error would be a waste of time. Given her good-faith opinion, she was correct to block me. Administrators do not have the time to figure out the nuances, often. She did it right, she wrote "indef" as in until we sort this out and not as in "infinite," and she immediately recused herself from further consideration. This is why I raised no fuss at all about her.

(2) The target of my alleged incivility was Fritzpoll. Check my user rights log and see who granted me rollback. Fritzpoll later wrote that it was all a misunderstanding. Fritzpoll eventually did what I'd been asking him to do, lift the ban on Wilhelmina Will. You might notice that some charges in the RfAr have used long posts on Fritzpoll Talk, but he explicitly welcomed that and apparently actually reads them.

(3) The warning preceding the block was issued by Jehochman. Jehochman's view of me was much the same as WMC's current opinion, only perhaps even more extreme. However, I went through DR with Jehochman, very efficiently and very effectively, and Jehochman became an ally, generally. And then he invited me to meet him in RL, which happened once, hence his comments in the filing of this RfAr.

I didn't put up an unblock template for quite some time, I wanted to see what would happen. When I did, it was immediately denied, and then, with no further action on my part, I was unblocked.

As to Xeno, it could have been any of a number of administrators. Certainly I didn't blame him, even though the unblock didn't exonerate me! I'd say Xeno made the right decision. Isn't that normal for adminstrators?

Consider the difference with the unfortunate case of Bishonen.

Posted by: Abd

Lots of WP problems could be resolved, quickly, this way. Then the participants would go back and convince the rest of the community. We might call that a cabal, but if it's open, and if some other discussions can take place that present any POVs that were missing at the start, it can be very efficient.



There is a fundamental misunderstanding here. If a fact is present in RS, which is, in itself, reasonably objective, it belongs in the project. It is to be included. The cabal relies, instead, on arguments about source quality to exclude, making it black-and-white. The key is consensus, based on thorough and careful consensus-building, which happens best in small groups of people who are relatively congenial, at first. Then it expands through the most trusted of these editors, who are able to expand the consensus.

When editors understand consensus process, editors who even strongly disagree can work it out, given that the debate, once it is RS, is over framing and attribution, not over inclusion.

What happened at Cold fusion is that sources which by any reasonable standard were RS (independent publisher is the basic requirement, and in many cases, the publisher was actually highly reputable) would be excluded because the views expressed were "fringe." That's circular.

If there is a reliable source that says that Cold fusion is "pseudoscience," we don't decide that it is or that it is not, we include the opinion if there is no notable dispute, as a fact. If there is dispute, we include it as a position, generally with attribution.

It is far simpler than some think, because the matter is clouded by some entrenched Majority POV-pushers who do not agree with the inclusiveness of the RS guidelines. They want to including only material from sources they consider strong, but that turns, indeed, every disputed subject into a battleground over what "strong" means.

Posted by: Mathsci

Act I, Scene V,

An American suburban home in Springfield, Massachusetts.
It is early afternoon. Dennis is nibbling a Hershey bar on a stool in the corner
Enter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Grenfell

Oh dear, Dennis, are you upset again?

No I didn't say have you spilt your tea, I said, ARE YOU UPSET AGAIN?

Have you been tinkering around with that boxy thing in the corner - next to your zimmer frame?

You know nursey told you not to touch it.

Have you been typing those horrible naughty things on it that we talked about yesterday?

We'll have to to put you back down in the basement like last time.

Well yes, we know, Adolf and Genghis are down there, but you'll just have to make do.

Posted by: EricBarbour

Sorry, but I have looked at various WP pages and WR threads on this, so blaming me for "the Wikipedia problem" doesn't wash. In fact, I'm sick of reading about Connelley going around slapping people for pressing something he considers "unscientific". It's been going on for years.

Yes, I agree, they are pigheaded and unreasonable. But then, your long, long rants aren't helping. If you can't secure a compromise from Connelley and friends, ask someone who outranks them for help. You might (okay, will) have to modify some of what you want from cold-fusion articles.

Go back and do some research on Connelley's history of abuse. Try http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=3850, http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=17981, http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=19501.
Work with other people who have had disputes with Connelley. Plenty of them fought with him over global warming. He's a total bastard, has enemies all over the world, and you cannot reason with him. Do you have a solid idea of http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/05/03/who-is-william-connolley-solomon.aspx?

Learn to be a proper victim, it garners more sympathy.

Posted by: Abd

Mmmm... I don't have figures on the heat output off the top of my head, and I don't do research into sources for Wikipedia Review, but I do know that there are sufficient reports showing energy output greater than known chemical processes can explain. According to the chemists who are experts in measuring heat. The Arata experiments are not intended as commercial applications and what they show doesn't show commercial application. From the heat of formation of palladium deuteride, and the heat profile, assuming the initial heat is from p-d formation, one could estimate the conductivity of the capsule to the environment. The photographs show the capsule insulated with styrofoam, but the heat of formation and the capsule construction (double layer, three temperatures are recorded: inner chamber, isolating chamber, and ambient; basically the two temperature differentials are about equal, 2 degrees C each).

Your theory as to what the physicist would do assumes that he gives a fuck about other's opinions. You don't know this guy. He's the grand old man of Japanese physics, about 86 years old. Everything he does is being published under peer review in Japan. Yoshiaka Arata, small Wikipedia article on him.

The work described is recent, something like 2008. I wouldn't necessarily put this in a Wikipedia article, but, there are other gas-loading reports. One of the problems with cold fusion research is that there is little exact replication. Most researchers are trying to figure out how to get reliable heat output, or some new and conclusive finding, there is no money and no glory in doing what someone else did. To change that would require substantial academic funding, which was almost completely cut off by 1990. The U.S. Navy continued working quietly on cold fusion, publishing papers under peer review, with very little funding, the researchers worked on their own time, but they did get departmental support, and it appears that funding through the Navy is being ramped up, probably because of some of the recent relatively spectacular findings.

What's much more interesting to me is correlation between excess heat and helium. There is plenty of confirmation that measurement of helium is correlated with excess heat at what Storms (2007) reports as 25 +/- 5 MeV/He-4. That's a magic number, Milton, as I'm sure you might recognize. It's what you get if deuterium is converted to helium, mechanism unknown (23.8 MeV, actually).



No, it's not crazy, it's simply pure speculation posing as sensible analysis, and is possibly a little higher quality than the usual I see on physics blogs. I have no idea what it costs him to produce that 7 grams of nanoparticle palladium. But I do know someone who knows Arata, and basically the guy just does his work and publishes it, and when I said he doesn't give a fuck what others think, that wasn't just speculation. Lots of people in the cold fusion community would like more details, for sure. Remember, this is recent work. What he does is to send the cylinders off for helium analysis when he's done. He hasn't published those results, AFAIK, but he's known for earlier helium results, using other CF techniques.



You imagine I have influence with Arata? In a few months, I have developed enough trust with the people in the field that I can ask questions and get answers from experts, but .... Arata is in a category of his own.

You have the right to call anything bullshit, but ... that means nothing on Wikipedia, if we were following the sourcing guidelines. Perhaps you should watch the recent CBS Sixty Minutes documentary, if you haven't, and check out the seminar Robert Duncan ran at the U. Michigan, I think it was April or so.

The documentary featured the work of Energetics Technologies in Israel, where Duncan, a skeptic, was sent to study what was being done. Duncan turned around. The American Chemical Society published a peer-reviewed Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook in 2008, and in it is Michael McKubre's paper on an exact replication of some ET work. Apparently it works. Reliable source, Milton.

Sure, bullshit. Peer-reviewed, independently published, carefully researched and written, bullshit. Published by the well-known fringe lunatic publishers, the American Chemical Society and Oxford University Press. At this point, I'd say, we start looking how to use this bullshit.

If we look at the overall body of research, it's starting to look like the skeptical position is becoming fringe, with the weird situation that the "fringe opinion" is quite possibly the opinion of the "majority of scientists." Not the majority opinion of the peer reviewers, nor of experts who have actually gone over the research in detail, instead of just sitting back and

bullshitting.

I'm telling you what I know, not what I'd put in an article, what I know is, as usual, when I've spent some time with a field, ahead of what is in RS. This is the case with many subjects, sometimes it takes the peer-reviewed publications years to catch up with what is common knowledge in on-line discussion among experts. And that's the breaks. Wikipedia as it is depends on reliable sources for notability decisions; the basic non-negotiable policy, WP:V, is actually much more easily satisfied, but not notability.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Wow, you recalled that incident with grace and charm. I am impressed. You're a good guy, Abd.

Posted by: Abd

Quite an imagination, the imagination of an asshole, with his vision only able to see his own interior, and make guesses about what's outside. Bad guesses.

My legal name is Dennis. Nobody knows me by that name except the state and the police.
Springfield? Nah, that's just the data center. Suburban home? Definitely not. Hershey bar? Absolutely not. With the prostate cancer, no carbs for me, VLC diet, great stuff. You could call it a vegetarian diet, because I only eat vegetarians. With coffee and heavy cream. Upset? Well, with over twenty years of on-line flame war experience, and with successful meditation on WP:DGAF, it takes quite a bit to get me upset. I get angry, different thing. I get angry when I see good-faith editors being abused by people like Mathsci and his enablers and the rest of the cabal. But it's still just a fucking wiki. I do what I do because it's there. And if it isn't there, I'll do something else.

Adolf and Genghis, eh? Is Mathsci trying to imply that I'm a ... bad person? Shocked, I'm shocked.

If he only knew how visible he is.

I've used my real name on my user page because what you see is what you get. I don't hide. Mathsci, care to let us know more about your real self?

Let's see what I know already, let me put on my psychic hat, the one with the propeller.

Hmmm..... I can see an academic who may know his field in a narrow sort of way, but whose knowledge of life is shallow, and who is disliked by most of those who have to work closely with him, in person; some of them pretend to like him because they want something from him. He believes that he is a person of high culture, and he certainly has the trappings of it, but he does not have the fundamental humility that is necessary to approach true depth, either in culture or in science. He's contemptuous of others and full of praise for himself and his accomplishments, which he will tell you at the slightest excuse. He has no concept of how to communicate with ordinary people, he writes for himself and a small circle, and he will be soon forgotten, and nobody will miss him.

And if not for the grace of God, dear readers, there go you and I.

Posted by: Abd

Obviously not sick enough to do something about it, though the links you provided could be useful, I'm still weighing how much to go on the offensive with. See, problem. If it's just me, it's not likely to succeed. By raising the cabal issue, I bit off quite a lot, but it's done, I can't stuff the cat back in the bag. You know it's true, many others know it too, but only only a few have had the courage to confront the lies. But many will complain about it here. Did I whine here about how WMC was abusing me?



I am asking "someone who outranks them for help." Or, more accurately, I've opened the door so that the community can, if it chooses, deal with the problem. If it doesn't, well, it's not time for it.

Every so often, I drop a seed crystal in the pond, to see if the concentration of connectivity has become high enough for intelligence to crystalize. Pouring yoghurt in the lake is the Nasrudin story.

Thanks for the links. I was aware of the media coverage of WMC, I needed to research much of this more than a year ago for RfC/GoRight.



Sympathy is nice, but it's not what I'm seeking. Don't cry for me, I'm not a victim, I am fully blessed in my life, I could die tomorrow and that would be the sum of it.

I win, regardless of the outcome, and I lose only if I violate my own guidance and forget my position as a servant.

^abdun min ^ibaadur-Rahmaan.

one servant among the servants of the merciful.

Posted by: Mathsci

Somey knows my identity already but I trust him not to disclose private emails here (I had to disclose my identity to register because the address mathsci@free.fr was disallowed).

Now in response to your question.

My favourite colour is blue.

My operating system is kubuntu.

Timmy the cat used to sleep on my bed when I was little.

Yesterday I ate a salade italienne and two boules of sorbet - citron and fruit de la passion - for lunch, washed down by a carafe of excellent Aix water and a café glacé. After a performance of suites 1, 3 and 5 for solo violoncello by Heinrich Schiff in the Jeu de Paumes (constructed 1660) I had a small plate of cheese with a glass of red wine. In the afternoon I played movements from the Handel organ concertos Op.4 HWV 289, 292 and 294 with a friend. She also accompanied me on the digital harpsichord in two Bach sonatas for flute in the version for alto recorder. Afterwards on my terrasse we each had a little tartelette aux framboises, a confection made in Celony on the outskirts of Aix, washed down with a glass of orange juice.

Update: write email to Victoria and Albert Museum checking on uploading a second image of Roubiliac sculpture of Handel showing his left arm resting on a leather bound copy of Alexander's Feast.

I'll stop here

Posted by: Enric_Naval

Reading this thread in its enterity ranges among the stupidiest wastes of time that I have had in my life. Now I'm gonna write some evidence for the case.

P.D.: Well, I need to clarify that:

* I have nothing against the people posting here
* I have a problem with WR becoming a place to export petty disputes so you can insult each other, instead of being a meaningful insightful review of wikipedia
* Somey tried to inject some sense, but it got diluted quickly

Posted by: Grep

I think we have a candidate for the third member of the Mathsci team ...

Posted by: Mathsci

What team?

Posted by: Milton Roe

The Bourbaki Mathsci team. We're trying to improve it by replacing all parts. We asked Alain Connes who we figured could handle the French and math part (non-commutating differential geometry ), but he was busy on a theory of everything. Egyptology and cold fusion skepticism should be easier to find people for.

Did you once know there was once a WP user:Aconnes who appeared just long enough to upload the Alain Connes photo on his bio, then was made to disappear (apparently oversighted)? Shocking. That photo has no attribution. The photographer Jérôme Chatin never released it to Commons formally. We don't know who uploaded it. But we can take guesses.

Probably it's headed for deletion. More interesting is what happened to user:Aconnes who exercised his right to disappear. Apparently. At some time....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alain_Connes_in_2004.jpg

Here's your chance if you know the man. Put up a snapshot. Now, back to your Aix water.

Posted by: Enric_Naval

I clarified my message above. I was a bit angry when I wrote that.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Don't knock it until you've tried it.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Yes. Wikipedia itself perhaps needs an uncivil maladiction page. Where you can say to some pestiferous and pretentious functionary:

You know, you might PRETEND you're a feared and respected tenured professor of canon law at a university, but your behavior suggests that in real life you're more of a nervous lagomorphic little cecotrope-eating hindgut-fementer who needs to go back to the bottom of the social food-chain where you actually came from...

Some things just need to be pointed out. Saves on red-faces later, when the emperor is found to have no clothes in a much larger auditorium. Run, rabbit, run.

Posted by: EricBarbour

KDE is for Euro-trash.


I'll drink to that. Tommy Gavin will drink to that, also.

Posted by: Grep

To be honest, the hilarity value is certainly on the wane, but it looks to me as if Hersfold is getting a little involved for a supposedly neutral clerk.

Posted by: Enric_Naval

So, back to reviewing wikipedia. Is there really an anti Cold Fusion cabal in wikipedia that purposefully wants to paint CF in a bad light? Or is it all in Abd's mind? And what the arbs will do about this one?

Posted by: Grep

I thought the gist of the case was WMC failing to handle the various CF issues adequately. I noticed you didn't address that point at all ...

Posted by: Mathsci

I thought it was about Abd fatigue syndrome.

He's got himself caught in a very tricky spot with his loony statements about a cabal. Perhaps "cabal" in this context is really an acronym for Crossdressing Antidisestablishmentarianist Bodyparts Assessment Lobby. That might get ol' Abd off the hook.

What really got me though is that, after billing and cooing with the sweet and lovely Jonathan Hochman, Abd never showed up for the New York wiki conference. He is not on the list of attendees. I looked at the photos - he wasn't even sitting on Newyorkbrad's knee, feeding him grapes.

As for Eric Barbour, is anybody interested in the ravings of a shameless self-publicist? They seem to be a little brainless. It is exactly these sad people whom the Crossdressing Antidisestablishmentarianist Bodyparts Assessment Lobby seeks to help. The medical editors of wikipedia usually give advice on cases involving neurological surgery although it has happened their help comes too late. There again, it's a voluntary organisation and accidents will happen. Membership is by initiation ritual (in my case voting for FT2 did the trick).

Posted by: Grep

I liked the group photo with the Mathsci team as the front row and the Cabal standing behind them.

Posted by: EricBarbour

Is that the best you can do? Try again. Dweeb.


You just condemned yourself. Now nobody on this forum will take you seriously,
unless FT2 himself shows up.


Linky?

Posted by: Grep

It's a post-modern sort of thing: a theory that involves a radical reappraisal of modern assumptions about culture, identity, history, or language. Or to put it another way, it doesn't matter what's actually there, just what you say about it. Sort of like, er, Wikipedia, really.

Posted by: Mathsci

These initiation ceremonies are not designed to be easy, that's the whole point. They often require great courage.

I should add that at this present moment in time there are two things that CABAL cannot offer any assistance with:

(a) baldness

(b) being or appearing to be a native Californian.

These have been the subject of long drawn out debates by the governing body of the CABAL, but all have been inconclusive. There is still a faint glimmer of hope that something can be done, but we're talking years, if not decades.

Posted by: Grep

I mentioned earlier that Hersfold seemed to be getting a little involved for a supposedly neutral clerk. (Don't you just love the way that ArbComm apes the terminology of a real court? I bet they wear black gowns to type their verdicts.) Recently Hersfold issued anhttp://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Abd-William_M._Connolley/Workshop&diff=303434687&oldid=303299245 enjoining civility on all parties. Hilariously a discussion ensued as to whether comments here at WR were actionable, although by a strange coindence only Abd, out of all the involved parties who have been here, was singled out for criticism (thanks Raul654). Hersfold's http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Abd-William_M._Connolley/Workshop&diff=303845698&oldid=303820708 was revealing: Unfortunately, as it's off wiki, I can't do anything about it here. Why exactly was it "unfortunate" I wonder.

Meanwhile "uninvolved" TotientDragooned (T-C-L-K-R-D) decided to stick an oar in. For daring to suggest that now-blocked Arkady Renkov might have had a point, he was declared a sock-puppet and forbidden to participate until ArbComm have finished a CheckUser on him. I predict the CU decision will be handed down about an minute before the case is closed (his fault if he misses the opportunity then). There's a pretty clear message for anyone else who dares to criticise WMC now. I wonder if that was the whole point of Renko's intervention?

Obviously the ArbComm have decided to get rid of Abd once and for all and don't care how blatantly they do it.

Posted by: Mathsci

The http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&limit=500&target=TotientDragooned of TotientDragooned had a bizarre spurt on 29 December 2008. If he hadn't contributed then, with all the skill of a highly experienced wikipedian, he'd hardly have any contributions.

You must be looking at a wikipedia in a parallel universe. I hope you haven't been swallowed into a wormhole.

In the universe that I belong to, Abd is not a member of ArbComm.

Posted by: Grep

So if he hadn't increased his number of contributions, he'd have fewer contributions.

It's certainly correct that in my universe I did not write that Abd was a member of ArbComm.

Posted by: Mathsci

In my universe Abd seems to be the only person that, to quote you, has "decided to get rid of Abd once and for all and don't care how blatantly they do it." Or am I missing something? (gallic shrug)

Posted by: Grep

Well, one of them is clearly Hersfold, who finds it so "unfortunate" that he can't do anything about the fact that Abd is posting here. However, perhaps in your universe you don't have access to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Abd-William_M._Connolley/Workshop with the proposed remedy "Abd is banned from Wikipedia" proposed by Raul654 (T-C-L-K-R-D) and with supporting comments by WMC, Enric Naval, Raul654, Spartaz, Mathsci, Olorinish, ChronieGal. I can see how you would find it http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Abd-William_M._Connolley/Workshop&diff=302843883&oldid=302843530.

Posted by: Kelly Martin

The stupid level in this thread is beginning to endanger the fabric of spacetime. Please exercise caution.

Posted by: Mathsci

Yes it's very easy to miss, many thanks for pointing it out. There are all sorts of interesting things to read there.

But didn't you say somewhere else that there are at least three different Mathsci's?
I think the edit you've mentioned was probably made by the girl that walks Charles Matthews' neighbour's dog on Coldham Common on Wednesday mornings.
I'd have to check my records.

Posted by: Grep

Evidently from three parallel universes.

Posted by: Abd

Damn! I knew that this might happen if I said C A B A ..... (This post was completed by Abd's neighbor, the sky had apparently fallen on him as he tried to type. Thought you might like to know. Terribly tragic. As we are sending this, Google news has a report that the Wikimedia servers disappeared, falling to a mysterious and huge hole in the ground, and other very strange events have occurred. Apparently there is some sort of serious damage to the ground of being by mentioning caba j;lvhte A

Posted by: Abd

Look, the relief I felt when I could finally write the C word, which meant that I could actually describe stuff coherently, was worth all the risk. It was really cool, because my allegedly uncivil post was quoted there. What I wrote was SOP here, and no more uncivil than Mathsci's comments, (which would you rather be called, "asshole", i.e., uncivil person, or "git," translated to "bastard" for the rest of you. I'd prefer the former, myself, not that I expect any courtesy on this.

By quoting my full post there, they meat puppeted for me to do something that I couldn't do by myself: call a spade a space on Wikipedia. T O T A L L Y cool. I can imagine cheering. Maybe it's my imagination, but, hey, you've got to have something!

The best work on the RfAr is being done by Raul654; he seems to think that ArbComm is a bunch of idiots. Maybe. I don't think so. Maybe he's just assuming that it's the way he was when he was on it. Really, the guy can't put together a button and a hole to keep up his pants, when he's dealing with easily verifiable stuff -- we know how to read history! -- he's completely off, so, should we trust him with unbiased interpretation of checkuser evidence? He's impeaching himself.

Mathsci writes some nice articles, but is completely clueless about how to deal with controversy. He's the new ScienceApologist, though not as experienced, by far. SA is at loose ends. He didn't like some edits to List of Pseudosciences, but he can't revert there, he's topic banned, so what does he do? He's accustomed, from the old days, to snapping his fingers and one of his admin friends would block. So, instead of, like, communicating with the editor whose edits he disagrees with, he goes to AN/I and complains, looking for some admin to take care of .... what? A content problem! His thinking is stuck in several years ago, but that idea, that the job of admins is to enforce NPOV, has lost, it's dead, rejected, even though lots of admins still cling to it. It's an issue in this RfAr.

I don't try to get editors blocked, I'm highly averse to it, but ScienceApologist could get himself there again. It's pretty disruptive to go to a noticeboard over a minor dispute on a topic you've been banned for causing disruption in the articles themselves! I tried to warn him.... friendly, kinda, not on his talk page with a big excxlamation mark.

They've really exposed themselves with this RfAr. It seems they really don't get how dangerous it is for them to pile in with the same predictable assumptions of bad faith, extrapolation from single incidents of maybe questionable actions to a statement of full-on repeated bad stuff. I.e., once, I revert the King, er, Raul654 when he reverts an edit to Talk:GoRight, one with no edit summary, and I looks at it and says, GoRight would want to see this, I don't know why Raul is reverting it, and I undo it -- and Raul jumps up and down on my Talk page, frothing at the mouth, that he is going to block me if I "meat puppet" for Scibaby again.

Really, Scibaby? What happened? Sol I looks. Very, very interesting. Cabal tag team reverts Scibaby. Approaching 4RR, another account appears, Obdeium and makes some reverts. Scibaby and Obedium have coincident article edit histories, i.e., it seems Obdeium has only edited articles that Scibaby has edited, but over many months. Sleeper account? If so, a singularly stupid one! Anyway, Scibaby is blocked for sock puppetry, in September 2007. By WMC. Oh, did I mention that the article was Global warming? What else? WMC and Raul's favorite duck blind. Obedium isn't blocked, isn't even notified of the sock charges, but the SSP report does say that Scibaby is an Obdeium sock or vice-versa. Warning about using two accounts, requirement to just use one? No. Indef block on one and no block or warning on the other, except that Obedium is short-blocked by another admin, I don't know the history of, for edit warring. Obedium continues, is eventually blocked at the end of December, 2007. For sock puppetry. By Raul654.

Obedium claims that the account was used by multiple users at one point but that had stopped. That doesn't seem very likely, but neither do the alternate explanations. Terribly stupid if you want to start socking, to have an alternate account with no article partition! There was enough time from the block of Scibaby to the checkuser attention on Obedium that the evidence wouldn't have expired and apparently Scibaby was never checkusered, so there wouldn't have been records. (It was a looks/walks/quacks ID.)

Raul654 actually blocked Obedium twice, once before the final one, but that middle block was somehow overturned -- I think. The implication in the records is one of long-term sock puppetry, but, in fact, the small sock farm that was found was all created beginning the middle of December, 2007. It was, I'm pretty sure, a response to tag team reversion, typical story at Global warming, they suck in new editors all the time, I'm sure it's great fun. Insult them and revert them, it gets them fired up and they revert back and since you've got as many editors watching that article as you need, at least two or three at a time, you often don't have to break 1RR, while the poor intruder thinks he's defending Reliable Source and NPOV policy. Whack!

Scibaby, though, didn't just die quietly, like a good mole. 300 socks and counting. The admins who handle the list that deals with IP editors who can't get in because of range blocks, at one point were handling a half dozen requests a day based on Scibaby range blocks. Huge disruption, and many editors -- at WikiConference New York, I was definitely there, I spoke and Jimbo and NewYorkBrad listened for about twenty minutes, and I did sign a list of attendees, but it was all very, shall we say, casual -- do see that Raul654 is burned out, beyond his time, to be retired into something where he will do less damage. Will these editors (these are editors about as highly placed as they come) do anything about it. I don't know, I don't know them. But I do know that they are aware of the problem, and tired of dealing with the messes Raul654 creates. He's set up full employment for himself, by creating sock masters.

Posted by: Abd

What's really cool is that these editors, I think all of them, previously voted to ban me, a huge number of these votes are just repeats of what was proposed when I RfC'd JzG. Predictable. They couldn't pull of a community ban with this if I resisted. Not if ban policy were followed, which on alternate Tuesdays in December actually happens. If ArbComm falls for this, please, block me so I don't waste more time! These dimwits think I actually care about my personal editing privileges! Nope, I'm a stupid idealist, I care more about the project than about my own privileges, and I make no assumption that it's better off with me there, or that the world is better off for it. and *the world* is my real project. I'm editing it.

So: I was banned by WMC, no actual reason given except his expectation that things would be better if he did it. He doesn't need reasons. He's WMC, after all. WMC almost never gives reasons, or thinks up whatever comes into his internal conceptual device on the spot. He was asked why he banned me, and he made a reference to WP:TRIFECTA on the inquiring editor's page, which is basically IAR. I'm a great fan of IAR, I was asked in my RfA, when I narrowly escaped being sysopped, all it would have taken is another 20-25%, what I thought the most important policy was. IAR, I replied, after all, it's Rule Number One. It's amazing how many editors disliked that response. But it *is* Rule Number One.

Actually, it's nearly certain that if I'd had twice as many edits, I'd have gotten the bit, I only had about 1300 edits then, and most opposes cited that, saying, come back when you have more edits. Sure. Except that I don't self-nom, and I was only there because a certain editor wanted me to see how it worked and introduce me to the community, and then he got himself banned for other japes. I'm the only one that stuck. Okay, that and the article on the Easter Bunny Hotline that he was finally banned for.

Just don't try to follow IAR unless you are WMC or Raul654. Anyway, later, when I wrote that his justification was IAR, he denied it. Pinned down with what he'd written, he wrote, and I think this is in the RfAr, that he was just getting rid of a troll, he didn't actually *mean* it. That is so totally cool. WMC is almost my favorite admin, nobody else is this open about what they do. He'll be much less fun without the bit, though, I expect, and might get himself blocked quickly. Ah, well. Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

(There are truly excellent admins who are also open about what they do, but it's much easier to be open when you are seriously trying to be fair, recuse at the drop of a hat, etc. What's cool about WMC is that he's a cowboy, and openly admits it. He does whatever he thinks.)

Another excellent piece of business in this RfAr is all the highly experienced editors committing themselves to opposing the maximization of consensus. They are really acknowledging things about themselves that I could never get away with saying. They've got themselves into such a paroxysm of "oppose whatever Abd says" that I could probably say, "all editors on the cabal list should get barnstars" -- which I'm seriously considering -- and they would demand, immediately, No! Ban Them All!

It's better to not debate proposals that nobody has supported (except the proposer).

No! We should always correct any stupid proposals, how could we just let them lie there?

These are editors who complain about the waste of space involved in my trademarked Wall-o-Text style. Where I actually do discuss the topic of the article, with a view toward developing proposed changes. And where it's enough for me that *one* editor read it and pick up on it. I'm not writing for everyone, most editors aren't going to agree at the beginning if it's something that I need to write much about, if it's that obvious, someone would simply have done it already. So why waste time boiling it down for editors who aren't going to read it or accept it anyway? I'll boil it down when there is a need, or I'm asked, "Could you say that more succinctly, please?"

No, that's too much to write. Tl;dr is a lot faster, isn't it? It's a signature: Tiny little dick brain. Please, 'splain this thing to me shorter, I can't be bothered to read the long version, my head will explode.

Probably would, too, not enough room in there. Look, seriously, nobody *ever* has to read anything I write. You are all volunteers, unless you are a moderator who feels it necessary to read everything, in which case maybe I should send you a check. Some people like what I write, some don't, and it doesn't really change much when I boil it down. In fact, they get *more* pissed off the less I actually post.

When Raul654 said that for me to speak on expert retention was asking the fox about guarding the henhouse, I replied something like:

Wouldn't you want to know what the fox thinks? Besides, I don't eat hens, I eat roosters, I love the eggs. Entrusting Raul with checkuser is like .... what? Appointing Josef Stalin Commissioner of Elections? Or what? I can say what it isn't! It's not inspiring to confidence.

Naturally, there was a complaint about my incivility, but it was, in fact, quite a decent and balanced parallel. Fox guarding henhouse, Stalin counting the votes. Apparently they didn't recognize the reference to that quote from Stalin about it not being important who votes, but who counts the votes.

It *is* a little fun. But, in fact, I'd rather be editing an article. Very little time for that now. Bye.

Posted by: Mathsci

Act III, Scene 6

An attic of a suburban house in Springfield, Massachusetts
Dennis is hanging from the rafters like a bat

Enter Joyce Grenfell

Now Dennis we've talked about this before.

No, we will not play that game -you know very well that Cecily did not like what happened when you made her put on that burka.

Well, if you don't come down from there, your insides will fall out and then who'll be the stupid one?

No I will not ruminate on what you said - I am not a herbivore.

No I will not take him a cup of vodka. Ghengis is in the hallway cupboard, not Joseph. You know what happens when you start telling these little porkies.

And, Dennis, please stop putting that pencil in your ear.

Yes, even if it does come out the other side.

Posted by: Mathsci

Hmm, and the moon is made of green cheese ...

Posted by: Sarcasticidealist

I will confine my participation in this thread to noting that "brain" starts with a B.

Posted by: Abd

Amazing. Come on, Steve, you do know that I can spell, and even do a little more than that, sometimes. I'd have sworn, though, that I cancelled that post. Just goes to show. Don't swear. I can say this: I didn't cancel it because brain begins with a B. Tell me, should I go back and edit it so that it reads Tl;db? So many difficulties, too little time.

Actually, couldn't think of any zingy word for the context that begins with R. And since its a totally silly comment anyway, why make it "accurate?" Contest officially declared.

Best word phrase covering tl;dr that communicates the smallness of mind involved when it's a dismissive comment.

Tl;dr among friends is simply a notice, a warning that a message was not read, not a claim that there was something wrong with the message. Tl;dr as a response when, if the message were shortened, it still wouldn't be read -- or it would be otherwise useless -- is uncivil, which is perfectly okay here, most of the time. This is all actually on-topic for the RfAr, it seems the big charge against me is TL. That's a smokescreen, for sure, but it's an argument that sometimes sticks.

Tiny little divisive response.

Too civil.

Tiny little dick-brain response.

Closer.

I've been seeing this for decades, of course, but it still amazes me how someone who truly isn't interested in what I write will complain about how long it is, and imagines that I care whether they read it or not. When I want a dick-brain to read the post, I try to make it even shorter than the dick. That doesn't mean that short posts are intended for people with short dicks, they are also intended for busy people who don't have time for longer stuff, where I have the time for it. Lost posts are intended for people who want to sit down and reflect on a topic with me. That's only a few, and that's whom I write for, in those long posts.

Steve, I write for people like you. I know that sometimes you might not read it, and I trust that you will tell me if you don't. I should create an official tl;dr-Approved list, editors who are allowed to respond with tl;dr to a post on my Talk page, with all others it will be considered harassment, five characters beyond the limit. Plus any other signature and time stamp. And it will be deleted, or, if it's on another talk page, I will respond with a Wall-o-Text™ in a collapse box and a summary "Didn't Read Should Not Read This. Warning: Reading this may result in Dog Vomit Slime Mold Syndrome, Exercise Caution. Excessive reading of Abd Thought may cause Cabal Immune Response and Check-User Block (CIRCUS) in susceptible individuals. If you read this and it starts to make sense, immediately see your physician.

Posted by: Abd

Warning. Serious discussion of meta-issues. Please cover your head with a bag so that, if it explodes, the mess is confined. Be considerate of those who would have to clean up. Do not read if vulnerable to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Abd, but ask someone who is immune or resistant to tell you about it.

Nah, that's my cabal, not Mathsci's. Mathsci's cabal is a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Abd/Majority_POV-pushing cabal. "Majority" doesn't mean "majority of all editors," it means that the members are pushing a content POV which they view as being that of the "majority of scientists," when it is usually, more accurately, an easy opinion of the most editors who take interest in a topic, but who don't rely on review of the overall body of reliable source; an MPOV-pushing cabal is dangerous because it can easily drag along other editors who don't review the sources in detail. That's why it's not "courageous."

We all have difficulty distinguishing our own biases. That's why we need "fringe editors." Absolutely, they should not be allowed to control articles, but if we ban them for "Fringe POV-pushing," which often happens, we lose the ability to detect NPOV failure that favors a majority POV. For those who read carefully, these issues are coming out in the Workshop discussions, and, together with other evidence, it can be seen that the cabal doesn't trust the editorial community, it is opposed to determining NPOV by consensus. Instead, they believe, it's a job for administrators to enforce it. It's a rejected position, but there are enough editors holding this view, with enough administrators sticking to that position, that the cabal is very dangerous.

There are solutions to the structural problems that allow cabals (fringe or majority or even single editors, sometimes) to control articles, and the cabal vigorously opposes them, because they are able, with the status quo, to effectively control articles of interest to them, like Global warming. I tried editing "Cold reading" to make it NPOV. Immediately, cabal reversion. What I was doing with Cold reading was what had been hammered out as a consensus at "Psychic", a much more heavily watched article. The cabal loses when it's confronted patiently. We win when we take the time, which can only happen sometimes.

(I don't lose, in the end, because I don't pick conflicts that I'll lose on, though there is always a first time. Or, more accurately, I don't lose lately, I did have to test the limits, to see how far I could go with what I understand. And those early "losses," where I believe that the community simply wasn't ready yet, will lead to later work that will be successful. Am I arrogant? No, merely confident and assertive. I'm wrong, sometimes, and I drop those initiatives. Indeed, the fastest way to learn, I figured out long ago, was to be very publicly wrong, stick my foot in my mouth deeply enough that someone will actually drop the politeness and instead be truly helpful by pointing it out.)



Not my problem, not yet, anyway. As normal for may age, the front hairline has receded pretty far, but it's still on my forehead. Perhaps if they do solve that baldness problem, I'll consider asking the cabal for assistance, assuming that hair made that much difference to me. The cabal is likely to solve this problem because they get a lot of practice with bald reverts. In addition, they have Mathsci, who may be a bald revert.



And proud of it. I left California, though, because it had gotten completely insane (before, it was merely crazy), way too expensive to live there, and I moved to Western Massachusetts, which is the California of the East Coast; an open, tolerant, highly educated, beautiful area, with rich cultural resources, world-class, far more affordable. And snow and a five-month winter. I haven't figured out of that's the good news or the bad news, but to this native Californian, it's certainly beautiful.



There is no governing body for the cabal, the collective intelligence of the cabal is the equivalent of slime mold. Its' dumber than its members.

You could reduce the "long-drawn out debates" by adopting some of the principles I've been proposing, you know, the ones you knee-jerk reject because you have two knees and are a jerk, like not debating proposals that haven't been seconded. That's for when you are trying to make a decision, not for mere open discussion. Or delegating discussion to a committee, which, on Wikipedia, simply would mean that an unpopular proposal doesn't get attention until, at least, two editors support it, and this really works if one of those editors is a supporter of the status quo. That way there isn't extensive debate over maintaining the status quo when there is only one challenger: the challenger is asked to find one editor who was part of the original consensus (or even one who wasn't a part of it) before it starts to get serious attention.

(And these are proposed in the RfAr as advice, not as regulation of behavior, which is what the cabal is trying to make out of it so that it will be rejected as obviously "not the way we do things." Damn straight it's not the way we do things, and we will never solve the existing problems if we are limited to "the way we do things." The cabal position is pretty much that the solution to existing problems is to ban those who cause them, not realizing that they are the cause of much, not all, of the existing problems. If we banned everyone whose behavior was a problem, we'd simply be left with a smaller set, among which some would then be the problem. It would be a collapsing fractal.)

Because there is no way to channel debate like this, and when there is a status quo to be maintained, irritation at long posts is understandable. In fact, with good process, there would be no problem. A long wild-hair post will get moved to a subpage for discussion, quickly, and only those willing to discuss it will join that page; when there are at least two editors in agreement on something new, they might bring it back to the main article talk page and explain what they agreed upon, briefly, with reference to the full discussion. So time isn't wasted reviewing stuff that isn't ready, doesn't have adequate source, etc.

This is, by the way, informal delegable proxy, the formal proposal, made in WP:PRX, which was just about a mechanism, not about how it would be used, simply sets up default, documented communications structures that allow natural caucuses to form rapidly in a more reliable way. (A natural caucus is like a cabal, but without the negative connotation; if a natural caucus functions to repress others, it's a true cabal.)

The cabal editors want to make it appear that the charges are ridiculous and, as well, uncivil, when "cabal," by itself is little more than an assertion that there is a faction that, acting collectively -- and simply following their natural opinions and friendships -- is violating policy an damaging the project. The individuals may not appear to be violating policy, considered individually. For example, cabals can easily tag-team revert, and that's how I first identified the cabal. (The cabal needs a specific name, so I'll name it after the original involved article, in the discovery, it's the Global warming cabal, and I think there might even be reliable source on this, WMC and Global warming have been discussed in the media. But it could also be named after ScienceApologist, consistently supported by the cabal, but I'd prefer to allow him to develop in peace, and naming it after an editor could allow us to imagine that if we simply control that editor, no more problem, which is how the cabal thinks, not me. Or the anti-Fringe cabal, but it's also anti-pseudoscience. Or the Holy Inquisition Cabal, because SA said that, if he were alive then, he'd be on their side, supporting majority point of view against heretics. That's telling, I think! (Is that still on his User page?)

The Holy Inquisition wasn't supporting NPOV, it was supporting Official Point of View against that of a tiny fringe, heretics. HIC. Maybe. But I'm sure some cabal members would be horrified. They do support Global warming (i.e., believe it's real -- as do I), but would certainly not support SA's view, explicitly stated. Another reason why I like SA. You know, I think some here, when I say I like WMC or, now, SA, think I'm being sarcastic. I'm not.

There is also the Keystone Cops Cabal, to reflect the fact that this cabal is not organized, which is obvious. They can act collectively, but only in a primitive and uncoordinated and unreliable way. Poor Woonpton cited the control of minor pseudoscience articles by fringe POV pushers as proof that there was no cabal. Nope. Not proof. Subtlety of thought is not a cabal trait, in general.

If the cabal were organized, there would have been no confrontation at ArbComm. It would be too smart to allow that, and if it saw an initiative coming that would have brought it before ArbComm, it would have headed it off. Risking exposure just to get rid of Abd, not worth it. "Let him edit Cold fusion, the cabal doesn't care enough about it, and where it matters, all it needs is for Enric Naval to let us know he needs help, and one or two editors will show up. In fact, Enric will contact those editors or put up someting on a noticeboard, no need to use the SuperSekriCabal communications channels, and we don't trust Enric to give him that information anyway. He's been known to cooperate with Abd." Instead, because of how the cabal exists and functions, they are diving in and expressing undisciplined opinions that reveal exactly what the problem is.

What's really amazing, because he's avoided it before, is how self-exposed Raul654 is. Does he really believe that ArbComm won't see what he's doing? He doesn't appear to be paying attention, he's provided evidence that is *blatantly* false, he's missed that there is already an unrecused arbitrator complaining about the Scibaby range blocks, so what does he do? Make a big fuss about a *single revert* of mine, restoring an edit, and legitimately, of an alleged Scibaby sock. And then he makes a big noise about it before ArbComm. It's like he's waving a big red flag, defying ArbComm to do something about it. I wasn't kidding about what happened at WikiConference New York. Raul654 is visible, but, when an editor is as deeply involved as Raul654 is, the project moves very, very slowly, and, in the meantime, the admin is burning out, becoming more and more likely to just do what he thinks with no consideration of consensus or policy, pure IAR. And highly biased IAR, which is the kind that if you are an ordinary editor, you are history almost immediately. I have no idea if ArbComm will take this on with anyone but WMC, but they might. If I have time, I'll be trying to make some simple proposals. It's not an easy problem, to be sure.

I'm actually quite conservative about the wiki. What I'm supporting is pretty much the original vision, very much as expressed early on by Jimbo. It's reflected in the policies, where they represent the best thinking of a consensus, not necessarily where they merely reflect actual practice, which not uncommonly sucks where procedure sucks. This conflict between intent of the policies and actual practice is also an issue in this RfAr. There are a lot of issues there, for people who look. And, yes, it's getting very complex. That's what happens when a cabal is exercised to comment; the few editors involved on the other side are surrounded by comments from one source ("they are wrong"), developed by many writers, and this tends to trigger complex defensive responses. However, I have some tricks in mind. I get to redact everything I 've put up there, even if there has been response to it. I just hide it in collapse or even delete it, leaving a reference to history. No concealment, but, ... a change in appearance.

They will complain, they already are complaining. They do not want me to be "concise and clear." They just want me to be sanctioned for not being concise and clear. Heh! Raul is concise and totally stupid. Is stupidity sanctionable? No. Loss of an admin bit is not a sanction, it does not punish an editor (if that's all it is, it shouldn't happen); however, a stupid admin is dangerous to the project, therefore should not ba allowed to continue. On the other hand, ArbComm could set up procedures, easily, which would allow WMC and Raul, for example, to keep their admin bits, and this would be a generic solution to a difficult problem: admin burnout and retirement.

I am not about punishing WMC or Raul or anyone for what came before. I'm very exactly and precisely about protecting the project so that it can make decisions in a non-disruptive and neutral way, by consensus. Maximized consensus. Quite a trick, if we can pull it off. If we do, we will be the largest active consensus organization on the planet that makes organization-wide decisions directly, and that could, indeed, have some real-world implications. (Alcoholics Anonymous is huge, millions of active members, but .. it makes very few organization-wide decisions, and it does so very slowly, through a super-majority elected Conference, which works just fine for them. Working decisions at the local level are made in face-to-face meetings by members deciding what they will do, not anyone else, each meeting is a bit like a Wikipedia article, when WP process is working.)

Along the way, I might be able to undo some of the damage WMC and other cabal admins have done. Maybe. Not easy. However, if others join in this, it could all be done. I can do very little alone.

Posted by: RMHED

BOLLOCKS

Posted by: EricBarbour

Posted by: Abd

Long again! If anyone reads this and thinks any of it worthwhile, please let me know, you can email me from my Wikipedia user page or write abd who receives mail at lomaxdesign point com. If you read it and thought it a waste of space and time, you can say that as well. I'll trust email responses more, and the reason is that, to respond by email, a writer has to make a minor commitment to identity. I'm who I claim to be and, while I have other names, they all can be connected, easily.

Yeah, if it were a real court, they'd fire him. But it isn't. I don't know how many members of ArbComm are watching what's going on. If it were me, I'd not bother to read any of it until it's settled. Waste of time, and the best evidence will often come last, coming from neutral editors who stumble across it and either present a little new -- and unbiased -- evidence or at least some unbiased comment. It's a problem, though, when a cabal is involved, because people will tend to support what appears to be the majority. That's why I had to visible identify the cabal. And I'll need to extend it. For example, I didn't name Spartaz, not because I didn't see likely involvement, but because he hadn't been active in the case, why name a lot of editors who are not immediately relevant. I don't know how many editors would be in a full cabal list, but it's certainly a bit larger than those I named. It could be done neutrally, but that would take a lot of time.
They should, actually. There is a lot they could learn from real court procedure and principles, developed over a long timie to increase efficiency and justice.
Not strange at all. That is exactly what the cabal has done over and over, present cherry-picked evidence. Have I thanked Raul for that quotation? He allowed me to call Mathsci an asshole -- and to accurately describe him as well -- on-wiki, while insulated from some of the response, at least. Clever? Not, but sometimes the raw and direct cunning of primitive organisms can be dangerous. We'll see. I suspect that Raul thinks ArbComm is like it was when he was on it.
No point in wondering. Look, some people won't like that. I certainly wouldn't call Mathsci an asshole on Wikipedia. Context is everything. And, in fact, if I thought there was a snowball's chance of working things out with him directly, I wouldn't say that about him here either. He's acting like an asshole, it's a word with a meaning. It's not the anatomical part, it's a behavioral term. I can be an asshole, too, sometimes. I do try to apologize, though, when I realize it! It's not necessarily easy to see our own asshole-ness, though. He implied that I'm a "git," i.e., a bastard. He's right. Again, not in the literal meaning, but in the figurative one, I can be stubborn as hell, faced with an asshole like him. I don't fall down and start crying. "How could he be so mean to me?" Most men won't, it's pretty stupid, his behavior, but I've seen this on-line for decades. Perhaps at some point, somebody did start crying, and withdrew, so the asshole learned that it worked (then) but continues it when it doesn't (among hardened on-line writers, accustomed to being flamed by far better writers than Mathsci). The power of intermittent reinforcement.

One phenomenon, seen for years: in spite of everyone knowing how to use History, people still behave as if it didn't exist. For many years, I've written as if I see History looking over my shoulder. I'm certainly not perfect, I make mistakes, but that's the general attitude. As a result, I look back at what I wrote long ago, and I'm usually happy with it. It would be good for some of these editors, like Mathsci, if, after the dust has settled and they could possibly have some perspective, they go back and read what they wrote in the heat of it. Occasionally, I've seen editors who have looked back and have recognized that they were a little extreme! Or worse, that they were actually uncivil, when they thought they were just being honest and frank. What I've seen in looking back at earlier Wikipedia writing, such as when I confronted Fritzpoll, was that I was a bit more reliant on what I thought Wikipedia should be rather than what it was. That was fairly natural, because to find out what it actually was, I pretty much had to experience it. In the end, no harm was done to any of the participants in that movie. (Being blocked isn't harmful if the editor isn't attached, WP:DGAF works. But it looked arrogant. It wasn't uncivil, in fact, just unskillful.
It did demonstrate that. But I'd have to be careful about raising the point. I'm convinced, now, that it may be a good idea to bring up detail about Scibaby, but there is already a lot of community discontent about that situation. I have no idea of whatever is behind the Arkady Renkov situation. I don't trust Raul's checkuser analysis at all, but a stopped clock is right twice a day, and if I make some stupid comments about it, well, I do get to make a couple of mistakes, probably, but I'd rather reserve them for necessities. I'm going to allow ArbComm to do something about Raul, by putting up some evidence and maybe some proposals, but certainly not push it.
We'll see, but I certainly don't see it that way. Hersfold is a volunteer. I think he's a bit naive. By the way, so does the cabal. Consensus. Ain't it beautiful? Anyway, I believe Hersfold is trying to do his best in a difficult situation. He simply didn't understand the importance of remaining rigorously neutral, of keeping his opinions to himself. He's made quite a few mistakes, but I don't see it as intentional, and I certainly don't see it as any indication at all of ArbComm intention. If ArbComm had wanted to get rid of me, they'd have rejected the case, suggesting that it be dealt with, say, at RfC.

You know what would happen. I'm dealing with a cabal, after all. I'd deal with it, and I might win; the cabal doesn't understand that I believe in IAR, which would allow me to disregard certain rules in the service of true consensus, and I know how to do it. Or if I'm wrong, I'd lose. To be right, by the way, would be very disruptive, that's why I shut down the community ban at AN/I. I've been describing my motivations and purposes very openly and accurately.

If they could reasonably claim a consensus at the RfC -- probably neglecting involvement, and at that point, if the RfAr hadn't been open with the blatantly biased cabal participation visible, raising the cabal issue would be suicidal -- they would then go to ANI and, over some excuse they would find, they would propose site-ban. Again, they'd very quickly get a majority unless steps were taken. And I'd be community banned. I could then appeal to ArbComm. And remember, the premise here is that ArbComm has decided to get rid of me. They'd simply refuse the case, saying that there was no reason to review it.

But that's not what happened. No, ArbComm is not out to get me. The cabal does not control ArbComm. One arbitrator is very aware of the cabal; he recused. I was worried that others would. But they didn't.

I trust ArbComm, not to always get it right, but to try to do that. ArbComm is the surest guide to how the community would decide if it had good deliberative mechanisms in place. (Iin other words, if my proposals are adopted!). "Consensus" has two meanings: one is "aggregation," i.e., a snapshot of opinion at some time, regardless of how informed the people are, the other implies deliberation, that the opinion is based on knowledge and full discussion and argument. In standard process, aggregation (voting) is not done until there is a two-thirds decision that no more evidence or argument need be collected, the matter is ready for decision. That's an obvious protection against knee-jerk majority rule. The minority gets to express its evidence and arguments first.

ArbComm process is not only that of a supermajority-elected representative body, which is the next best thing to the kinds of structures I'd build, but it has the closest thing to deliberative process on Wikipedia. The idea that ArbComm has strayed from consensus is tricky; because its opinion is the best measure we have of deliberated consensus. When there is a leadership failure, it may be contrary to knee-jerk majority opinion; but, in fact, the appearance of deviation from consensus may just be a matter of participation bias. That's why I want to set up delegable proxy. It's not about voting. It's about assessing a level of expressed consensus, not to make decisions, per se, but to understand how widely decisions are supported. If a sound decision is not widely supported, perhaps it needs to be reconsidered more deeply, or perhaps effort should be made to educate the community about it. And delegable proxy provides a network structure that can be used to educate, where your proxy, whom you chose as relatively trustworthy, comes to you to explain why a decision that your proxy signed on to was a sound one. Maximum rapport, we can expect, and therefore maximum reason to think that the !vote of a proxy is likely (not guaranteed!) to represent the settled opinion of the clients, after education.

Whew! Watch out for the Dog Vomit Slime Mold. If you don't understand this, be patient. It will become obvious, it takes time. If you do understand this, be patient. It takes time to change established structures non-disruptively, which is what's being proposed. Nothing is actually changed, decisions are still made in the same way (distributed autonomous individual authority with appeal, quite sophisticated), but more information is available connecting this with the community as a whole. Most people will have to see it in operation to understand it; but it will be easier if we understand that this is only a formalization of what we already have in an unreliable and chaotic way. The cabal is an undocumented "natural caucus" with no focused representative. What would change with DP is that in order for the cabal to maximize its power in an Assembly, it would need to identify itself, to provide structural information in the proxy table. Unfortunately for the cabal, the assembly would represent all editors, once it's realized how easy it is to participate in a DP structure. The cabal would no longer be able to dominate through participation bias. But it would not lose its truly natural power, and its natural power is a good thing, in fact. We need more of it, not less. What the cabal does illegitimately is what would legitimately clean up Wikipedia process. Ironic, eh?

The goal is not to crush the cabal, the goal is to replicate it broadly, very broadly, so broadly that access to cabal-like power is for everyone. And then it will be realized that if numbers don't count, rather consensus does, and if numbers don't count, canvassing becomes a non-issue (or even positive), if spam is disallowed, and if spamming to broad non-consenting groups is forbidden, but notifying consenting editors would be allowed (on or off-wiki), and bias isn't an issue. So what happens then is that the best arguments get presented and considered, and me-too !votes disappear, for they are going to be ignored except as a raw, singular opinion presented without evidence or arguments. A proxy designation essentially can do it automatically, if proxies are considered. (That's the option of the closer, and the closer can use any kind of information the closer thinks relevant, such as experience of editors, signs of socking, administrative status, etc. As it is now, analysis of !votes and arguments would remain the prerogative of the closer.) (The "automatic me-to" opinion that might be assumed is just an estimate, nothing binding, and if an editor actually votes, such "me-toos" would be void.) I hasten to add and emphasize that this doesn't mean that proxies vote for anyone; they vote for themselves only, and a decider may choose to use such information or not. I dislike that a closer makes any decision based on votes, unless the actual issue is based on an estimate of community support. If we can make small-scale estimates of community support for a decision, and if the means of making these estimates are open and usable by anyone, and, say, I opposed an article deletion, I can look at those votes, do my own proxy analysis (it's easy even without tools), and decide if it is worth appealing it. The result: much higher efficiency. My freedom has not been curtailed, but I'm more likely to use it where it will be effective, not where it will be a waste of time.

That's the vision anyway. If we are careful and patient, we will get this or something better, not worse, that's what I predict. But if I'm wrong, I'd rather learn sooner than later. I have a short time left to live and I've got plenty of stuff I'd rather do than push Wikipedia to do what it's not ready to do. I'm moving one step at a time. I have no opinion that I'm better off not being banned. It's my job, my obligation, to say what I see, the outcome is up to the community and ArbComm as its representative. I know how to bypass ArbComm, and I won't do it, it would be contrary to everything I just wrote. Abd means "servant" or "lover," and when the Master says "Stop!" I don't say "I know better than you," no matter what I think. I stop.

Posted by: Lifebaka

Abd, I assume you wrote down your proposed delegable proxy system somewhere? Would you mind linking it, so I (and others, maybe) can read over it in full?

Also, I think I'm at least resistant to Dog Vomit Slime Mold, 'cuz I feel fine.

Posted by: Sarcasticidealist

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Delegable_proxy!

Posted by: Tennis expert

Abd, you are completely naive if you believe for a minute that Arbcom is above board. Individual arbitrators contact people accused of misbehavior in secret and without notice of any kind to other parties to work out deals with them, especially when the "misbehaviorists" are prominent Wikipedians (like The Rambling Man, a former bureaucrat). The objective is to treat those misbehaviorists more leniently than regular editors and avoid public embarrassment. I've got proof of this from the horse's mouth if you're interested.

Posted by: Mathsci

Goodness, all this verbal diarrhea.

I thought I was responding to my friend Eric "Scrotum Smasher" Barbour, not old Grumpie-Jaws, who seems to have gone off the deep end here

I recommend Andrews Liver Salts - they might provide a new direction for all of this stuff

Posted by: Abd

Like Mathsci later, RHMED quoted my entire essay in order to call it "bullocks." Now, suppose it's bullocks. Therefore it should be repeated? It should be spread all over this page and into the email inboxes of people who get notifications? Brilliant. If you are right, you are a stupid and rude idiot, and if you are wrong, you have just done the cause of spreading good sense a favor. Or perhaps you are both a stupid idiot and it was bullocks. But if anyone was offended by seeing a second and third copy of my rant, it wasn't my fault! This is actually a lesson I'm trying to teach: if you think it's bullshit, don't waste your own and everyone else's time with it! While it doesn't add much to a conversation, you could have done what I did here, only with "complete bullocks" in place of "pearls before swine," and you would simply be stating your demented opinion, not filling the air with tossed shit, doubled and tripled. It's as if you ate my essay, along with the rest of the bullshit you believe without questioning, then threw it up and mailed it in a bag to everyone else. Brilliant.

Posted by: Milton Roe

This post begs to be made EVEN larger in quotation. Begs, I tell you.

Posted by: Mathsci

Remember we discussed that nice home for you, Grandad - lots of people of your own age to chat to, bingo on Fridays, the hokey-cokey on Wednesday afternoons .... no horrible, nasty computery thingies to get you all upset.

Posted by: Abd

When you throw up it is customary to try to avoid spewing it all over the room and the guests.That explains it. Mathsci thought he was sending an email, and he was providing Barbour with a copy. But this is a public form, albeit rowdy, not a private email, so he was a bit confused. And I'd think that friends wouldn't send friends bags of diarrhea. Maybe some do. I can imagine that we might have done that to a friend on Senior Ditch Day at Caltech. But only a rather nasty one, who'd done stuff like that to others. Remind me never to allow Mathsci to think I'm a friend, I shudder to think of the mail I might get.Here! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb7sxVh7Es0&NR=1)
Thanks! That's much better! I knew you were good for something.

Posted by: Abd

Nope. Don't remember. One of the benefits of getting older. Uh, did the nice suggestion have anything to do with what he quoted, or is he getting early senility? It's bad enough when we start wandering, but when there isn't any connection between one idea and the next, that's eXtreme, man.

Ah! I see it. He thinks I got upset. That's Mathsci, all right. He might understand some equations, but not people. If I got upset at meeting assholes, I wouldn't do Wikipedia. There are parts of it that seem to collect these people until somebody turns on the lights. Crap and Bullocks Allied against Light. Thanks again, Mathsci, you get me thinking about crap and bullocks; from there on, it all falls into place. I need to put up an evidence section on Mathsci, maybe it should just be http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?limit=500&tagfilter=&title=Special%3AContributions&contribs=user&target=Mathsci&namespace=4&tagfilter=&year=&month=-1 Mathsci. What do you think? Will Hersfold allow it? Evidence, you know. The cabal evidence is far from neutrally presented, so why should I keep up careful civility?

Okay, because that's Wikipedia and this is Wikipedia Review, and, in fact, I have not confused them. Not quite that old yet.

Posted by: Mathsci

In the rare event that Andrews Liver Salt proves ineffective, there are various different mouthwashes on the market.
Ivory soap might be a place to start.

Inspired by you, I looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?limit=500&tagfilter=&title=Special%3AContributions&contribs=user&target=Abd&namespace=0&tagfilter=&year=&month=-1 and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?limit=500&tagfilter=&title=Special%3AContributions&contribs=user&target=Mathsci&namespace=0&tagfilter=&year=&month=-1. Can you spot the difference?

Curiously enough I wasn't actually thinking of you when I uploaded Hogarth's picture of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Francis-Matthew-Schutz-in-his-bed.jpg this morning.

Posted by: Abd

ArbComm, like any floating object, is part above-board and part underwater.

Insofar as it is governance for Wikipedia, and like all governance in any society I'd want to live in, it considers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_policy. In a nutshell, in WPspeak, IAR, ignore all rules. If it serves the project, set aside rules. ArbComm members are experienced community members in a community which requires massive and continual volunteer labor, and some of the tasks are tedious and time-consuming. When an editor has paid these dues, they are very reluctant to sanction the editor. So, yes, that's right, just as you said, when a prominent Wikipedian misbehaves, they are reluctant to sanction. As I've written, only when the misbehavior passes beyond limits do they sanction.

It's an error, in fact, and highly inefficient, and by the time ArbComm addresses the problem, the editor is up to his neck in commitment to the misbehavior, and it can get very ugly. I have ideas about how to solve the problem -- it's not easy under current conditions -- but that will take time. If I survive.

Let's say that lower-level processes need to be built that function more like ArbComm functions, and ArbComm itself needs to become better structured so that smaller issues can be raised quickly. Look at this RfAr. ArbComm wanted it to stay focused, but the efforts at discipline on focus were utterly ineffective, toothless, and the cabal poured in with piles of crap irrelevant to the basic issue: a conflict between me and WMC, on a fairly narrow issue. That's common. The conflict could be construed narrowly: was there a dispute between WMC and Abd? Did this dispute require WMC recuse from use of tools? If so, should WMC be warned, reprimanded, or desysopped?

And, on the other side, my misbehavior should be limited to one issue: was it disruptive of Abd to raise this claim?

ArbComm should not allow situations to get mixed together. Yes, there is the issue of the cabal. And that meant that there are broader issues to address. However, if there was going to be a case against me, it should be its own case; likewise a claim that it's necessary to identify the cabal and perhaps to warn administrative members of it. (I do not believe that there should be general sanctions against the cabal, just warnings about tag-teaming, use of admin tools while involved, and ArbComm would decide whom to list specifically for those warnings.)

ArbComm should set up procedures to work on one issue at a time, down to one Yes/No question at a time. This is how to avoid endless and useless debate. There is no interaction with the arbitrators during the early part of the case, and by the time that interaction happens, it's highly likely that arbs have conclusions and now their own axes to grind. Bad process.

I made several motions. Essentially, no response. A procedural motion should generally not be debated, particularly when the purpose of the motion is to avoid useless debate! Deliberative bodies learn to set up rules for "undebatable questions," such as motions to table (my motion to freeze the Workshop until the evidence was complete was just that), to dismiss, or that debate is complete and it's time to vote. ArbComm process, while it's better than anything else on Wikipedia, is still very primitive and invites, on a controversial issues, the kind of mess we see.

BURO is cited, Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy. That's right. There are reasons why bureaucracies are set up! No bureaucracy means efficiency only for those in power, and even for them, it soon becomes obvious that they need filters. Bureaucracy. Delegated responsibilities. Wikipedia functions, but with very high inefficiency, and it has gotten away with it because, it seemed, there was no need to value labor, there was an endless pool of it. In fact, it's a Ponzi scheme. And it burns out the most experienced and valuable editors, they become impatient and uncivil and oppressive.

We actually could do better than any bureaucracy in the history of governance. We could do very open structure, transparent as to how actual decisions are made. We could routinely have levels of consensus far higher than what normally happens with controversies. We could make decisions within weeks that now take years, and have these decisions be rapidly accepted -- or modified. That's the vision I have. I do understand how to do it, in round outlines.

But by its nature, no one person can accomplish this. We already did Jimbo. This will only happen if a core of editors understands the vision and begins to implement it, at the bottom. This cannot be built from the top, probably. Though that's never been tried, maybe. It's possible it could be encouraged.

How many editors? Not one, for sure. Maybe two, still very difficult. Three, four, I don't know what the critical tipping point would be. A hundred, it would be all over.

Cabal. Only this time a cabal that is working to maximize the intelligence of the process, not to push a POV. It does start with two, however. There were two a year and a half ago, but the other was young, impulsive, and impatient, and immediately got himself blocked and very quickly banned.

Sarsaparilla/Ron Duvall/Absidy/Obuibo Mbstpo/and I forget the last name. Socks? Well, not in the old internet sense. Serial accounts. He'd spike a password, then create a new account. They were openly connected. He also created, while blocked, various socks, but that was the only illegitimate socking he did, and those socks actually weren't disruptive. Still, he made himself a very easy target, that was part of his own disorder, a disorder that also allowed him to see what others couldn't so easily see. He got delegable proxy immediately; he'd been sent to stop my "agenda" by an outside organization. He was a dedicated Wikipedian and he believed in Wikipedia; what they told him would have been violations of policy if true. So he warned me. And then read my response. And wrote, "I've been on the wrong side." He proposed WP:PRX, and, when it was being rejected out of total ignorance of what it even was -- I can't understand this and I'm sure I'm against it -- he committed wikisuicide by dropping a suggestion on every arb Talk page that they name a proxy. It was called canvassing though no process was underway and he wasn't soliciting them to name *him* as a proxy! And then when Jehochman warned him, he wrote "Too late! Done!" and put up an image of a finger. Mid-twenties, and very impulsive.

That was the first block. Clean block record (and I've look back more than a year before with a prior account. Clean.) Indef block, of course, of a kind that is now routinely considered action while involved, you don't block an editor for insulting you. He wasn't going to repeat the action!

So I had a conversation with Jehochman, sat down to tea, so to speak, and Jehochman unblocked him. But he was marked from then on as disruptive. Wikipedia has become viciously conservative, remarkable in such a short time with such an open structure, eh? Sarsaparilla was a rare bird. Very bright. Erratic. Not vicious, he apologized to Jehochman, he actually created and sacrificed a sock to do it. We had almost no tolerance for him, we have very little tolerance for what we don't understand.

The "cabal," the big one, not the little one that is being confronted in this RfAr, developed and maintains power because we don't sidestep the fundamental laws of how organizations function by naive enthusiasm. Many organizations have gone down this road and the way Wikipedia was set up, it was highly vulnerable to certain pathologies. It may still be fixable. And maybe not.

And please note: the big cabal is necessary under current conditions. Oligarchies develop power because they are functional. Destruction is not the way out of this, it will be pure construction, easily framed as assisting the cabal, because that is what it will do. Assisting it in making more efficient, more intelligent decisions. Eventually, it will replace the cabal, and the cabal will retire in relief, confident that the wiki is in good hands. Very good hands.

Not my hands.

Posted by: Peter Damian

From my very limited reading of your contributions here it seems that is one of the few sensible things that Connolley did.




You seem like a very intelligent person, and very amusing (except for the fact that I suspect you have a beard). Why then do you bother with this shit?

Posted by: Mathsci

No comment.



For me WR is for loonie conduct and WP for sensible conduct (apart from the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handel_House_Museum).

I think it might sometimes be slightly the other way round for you.

Anyway, now that Hersfold has gone swanning off to Mustique, Capri or wherever, who knows what will happen next in this ArbCom case? WR provides an antedote to the drama there.

Posted by: Grep

At least one person who claims to be at least one member of the Mathsci team had at at least one time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CambridgeMeetup02a.JPG (but at least one moustache).

Posted by: Mathsci

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#Peter_Damian

Posted by: EricBarbour

I nominate this thread for the official title of:
The Most Tedious, Fucked-Up Thread in WR History.

Posted by: Abd

There is a wiki, but it's been very badly neglected since I started working on Wikipedia. There was a web site before that at http://beyondpolitics.org, you might get more old stuff from the wayback machine that isn't on the wiki. Big mess. But the current wiki is linked from the old URL. The best thing to do, whatever you read, to approach this, is to ask questions. You'll get answers. A FAQ was written from questions and answers on the election methods mailing list; there are a handful of people who understand most of the FA/DP concepts.

My talk on Wikipedia is a reasonable place to ask, or I'm thinking of starting a working page in my user space on the concepts that could ultimately be moved to WP space. Sarsaparilla was way premature, but he wanted to try it. He ran headlong into the Brick Wall. We Don't Do Things That Way. That's right. It's obvious that we don't!

Delegable proxy is much more than a voting method, the important thing it does is to create a network of members. If we do vote, some election methods experts think that delegable proxy is the most advanced, practically ideal method (but it isn't actually a voting method in itself, merely a tweak on how poll results might be analyzed). There is now a little more reliable source than existed when the Wikipedia article on delegable proxy was deleted, there has been a tiny bit of academic work done on it. It's still not up to the level where I'd be willing to tolerate the disruption that would be caused by trying to restore that article. Delegable proxy is only half my work, the other half is the Free Association concept, which is a codification, if you will, of what voluntary free associations look like and how they function before oligarchy sets in. The principles were derived from Alcoholics Anonymous, which was rapidly successful precisely because Bill Wilson codified the concepts. There is a little published source on that. Keep Coming Back, It Works. AA has so little central control that we might as well say there is none. The active membership of AA, my guess, is comparable to the registered membership of Wikipedia, or higher, maybe much higher. Easily three orders of magnitude higher than the active editorship of Wikipedia, and, like Wikipedia, all over the world. Yet there is an astonishing level of consensus. To be sure, it's a very narrow field, but, in fact, was a highly contentious one (and still is, outside of AA).

Nobody is excluded for disagreeing with the consensus; in fact, if someone at an AA meeting says, "I'm an alcoholic, but my problem is just that I drink too much. I just need to control it," they will be told, "Many of us would like to do that, let us know if it works and how you did it. Meanwhile, why don't you listen to a few stories... and tell us yours?"

Posted by: The Adversary

Well, thank you. As if we hadn´t noticed that you have only been dancing can-can on the tables since you joined here
..but don´t you ever tire of that? (Hint: we migh tire of watching )

Posted by: Abd

What makes this stand out above the rest of the steaming pile?

Posted by: Abd

Of course, it is. At least the most sensible. The really, really stupid thing was his insistence, afterwards, that he has the right to deny "involvement," which includes personal conflict with an editor, and continue to stand as judge over my contributions outside Cold fusion, and if I will just stay away from process stuff and commenting about him, why, he might allow me to edit the article again.

I didn't do any of this for that purpose, but this will be serving as a nice test of ArbComm. If, as some here claim, they ignore WMC and, perhaps, ban me, they will be doing me a favor, and the won't really be harming the project, because they will be showing that it is already beyond harm, it's gone. An admin can block and continue to threaten to block even if conflict with the editor has gone way beyond marginal.

However, I don't quite think that is what will happen. Raul654 is doing an excellent job of mooning the jury. Basically, I might even yank the cabal evidence because it's so obvious in the RfAr itself.

I don't give a fuck if dozens of cabal editors and supporters ridicule the proposals, it's fully expected. It's not my job to convince, and especially not to convince them, it's my job to present what I see, I'm just a witness.

I do intend to set up the principles and findings and proposed remedies that would desysop WMC and Raul654, and troutslap all the admins who argue against recusal policy, and the cabal editors who went beyond limits (not the merely stupid ones).

I don't see how the community can trust admins who openly defy recusal policy, this is much worse than JzG. JzG actually stopped it almost completely, and certainly didn't insist on the right to continue, as these bullies are doing. (Well, he did block an IP editor in the middle of his RfC, for having the temerity to criticize him, but, hey, reflexes are hard to change, and IP editors aren't actual human beings, they are just trolls, right? If they were real, they would register an account so they could be properly blocked by name.)

Had JzG been participating in RfAr/Abd and JzG, claiming that he not only could block JedRothwell again, and again blacklist the two most significant web sites for information on cold fusion research, mentioned as such many times in reliable source, and he could block me for criticizing him, he would not have been let off with a reprimand, I'm quite sure, no matter how much service he'd provided in the past.

I'm writing here, mixed in with some ... direct expression of feelings ... about what is really going on, what my strategy and purposes are, what I really think. I actually like WMC for his plain honesty, it's not his fault he's so stupid about recognizing his own limitations. He needs some guidance from ArbComm, that's all. Will he accept it? Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of Fishing for Fools.

Posted by: Mathsci

You cut the next lines of the quote which actually answered your own question.

Posted by: jayvdb

The length of the posts make this pile bigger than most.

Posted by: Grep

I'm honoured. I would like to thank everyone at WP who made this possible (sob).

Posted by: RMHED

I really quite like you Abd, I just can't help thinking you really need to get drunk once in a while.

Posted by: Abd

Really. I got permanently drunk years ago. Can't you tell?

I'm a Muslim, don't drink alcohol, but ... I've actually spoken at an AA meeting (which is quite rare for a non-alcoholic). I introduced myself as a dry drunk who never did become an alcoholic, it got a good laugh. I can talk to people, real people, anyway. I also said, "The only requirement for AA membership is a desire to stop drinking. I want to stop you from drinking, so I qualify." They liked that, too, because, as well, they knew that I wasn't there to "stop them from drinking," I was just "qualifying." And I said, "Now, my primary program, where I deal with my real issues, I'm not going to tell you because of anonymity, but you can find it listed in the Marin County phone book under Sex."

See. Totally drunk. Would anyone who wasn't drunk brag like this?





The RfAr is really somethin'. More fun than a barrel of monkeys throwing shit.

Posted by: GoRight

I'm insulted! You guys are having a party and you didn't invite me? How rude!

Posted by: Milton Roe

Hey, Mel. If you're looking for the dystopian future that features a violent warlordish gang slowly running out of gas, that would be over at Wikipedia, not here.

Posted by: GoRight

Ha! I hadn't thought of it like that but your characterization of the environment there DOES seem to fit. Perhaps that is why I subconsciously chose this avatar! It seems a particularly apt reflection of my on wiki persona.

Mel --> GoRight
Warlordish Gangs --> [Fill in you favorite Cabal]

Posted by: Mathsci

No, no, no, no, the dastardly duo looks more like this.

Posted by: GoRight

OK, I see the dastardly duo of AGW fame but where are you? Are you the flea there on the dog's behind?

Posted by: GoRight

The Plot Thickens:

Having seen the hero in our little drama, Hipocrite, take an exit out of view to stage right we now see another bit player, one Tony Sidaway, entering the fray from stage left.

Tony is a complex character http://en.wikichecker.com/user/?t=Tony+Sidaway&l=5000. It is almost as if he were on both sides of the Atlantic simultaneously. He also has a curious propensity for showing up in a variety of AGW discussions with Cabal aligned viewpoints.

Let's watch how this develops, shall we ...

Posted by: Somey

He's probably been reading this thread (though I don't see how that's possible, having tried myself), and must have decided that the controversy has finally reached his arbitrary "drama threshold."

So far, he just wants to "community ban" Abd indefinitely:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Abd-William_M._Connolley/Workshop#Proposals_by_User:Tony_Sidaway

In effect, he's acting as a surrogate for Connelley and Co., who presumably want to continue maintaining the pretense that they're "uninvolved" in the underlying content dispute(s). I could be wrong, though - Mr. Sidaway has a way of just showing up and doing things that he believes will keep him in good graces with the high mucky-mucks, and there's always been some question as to whether he does this on his own volition or at the behest of others.

Posted by: Kelly Martin

In my experience, Tony (and I've known him for fifteen years now) doesn't really care a whole lot about staying in anyone's good graces. He enjoys poking at people just to see what will happen. Tony is drawn to drama, enjoys being involved in it, and enjoys stirring the pot. He's a decent person otherwise, and can be rather insightful when he stops to think, but his insatiable need to be "on the stage" makes him as much a detriment as an asset. At any given time, there's no way of knowing whether an idea of his represents an honest, valuable insight or just some silly nonsense that he decided to throw out to see who, if anyone, would salute it.

Posted by: GoRight

True to form, our new player seems to have stuck his nose firmly up the collective behinds of the Cabal members with his proposals and they are showing intense interest in his advances. And so soon after his arrival on stage, almost as if they anticipated it.

As is all too common in these sorts of plays, I think we can anticipate an artificial snowfall to begin any time.

Note to the director: Please show more imagination. !votes are only symbolic in this act.

Note to WR administrators: We need an emoticon for eating popcorn.

Back to the show ...

Posted by: Moulton

I agree.

Posted by: GoRight

Ahh, well this explains his chosen profession as the chief sniffer of Cabal behinds. That helps to insure that his lines make it past the director's cut.

Ah, thanks for directing me to the concession stand. Much better.

Posted by: GoRight

I note that one of the director's favorite actors, KDP, is strangely absent from this act. I have yet to discern the significance of that, if there is any. Perhaps the director plans a dramatic entrance near the end to save the day? Or possibly just a small Cameo appearance this time around to avoid too much media exposure.

Posted by: Abd

If an editor wisely decides to stay out of a fracas, perhaps it's best to let it stay that way?

Unless ArbComm decides to block the whole lot of them -- and to express the the odds on that I have to start using metaphors like grains of sand on the beach, we'll have to end up cooperating with the remnants of the cabal. I reserve "asshole" for ... assholes, people who are grossly uncivil and who have power, and who use it to bully and intimidate. It has a very clear technical meaning, it's much stronger than "dickhead" or other lightweight comments.

One might notice that I only named cabal members who had played some active role in this mess and what led up to it, not everyone who might be reasonably part of it.

One of the problems with entrenched power is that good people, more or less, will cooperate with it. That's why destroying all the vestiges of the old guard, as happens too often in violent revolutions, is a very, very bad idea. To me, the problem isn't the people, it is the system, that brings out the worst in people and perhaps suppresses the best. Give people a chance, even assholes will do better.

Usually. Not necessarily always, but we never know unless we try. This is not the way the cabal thinks. To them, once a bad editor, always a bad editor, ban them and keep them banned, even if we have to block half the internet.

My devious plot is to enable consensus. It will take some time, but it can be done, and consensus is more powerful than even a much better organized cabal, not to mention this Keystone Cops assembly.

Posted by: GoRight

Reading through some of the earlier posts, one of grep's initial comments:

Somehow brought this to mind:



Creepy similarity.


On this first part, I am merely noting the fact and wondering why. From the looks of things he seems to be playing the role of the kindly storekeeper in this episode.

On the second part, this is clearly understood but it then goes back to the first part.

Back to the play ...

Posted by: Milton Roe

Yes, we ourselves refer to it as the Connolley Lidless Eye (CLE). Do not question the warming of Mount Doom, or the Nazgûl of Science will be visiting you shortly.

Posted by: Mathsci

Poor old grandad must have forgotten to take his pills.

On-wiki he has declared in an edit summary on the talk page of his very own ArbCom workshop:

I withdraw my voluntary acceptance of the ban from cold fusion

He edited the talk cold fusion page this morning and has been blocked for 24 hours by WMC.

We'll have to see what he's up to off-wiki - I hope he's not trying to annex the Sudetenland again.

Posted by: Mathsci

OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!!!

Posted by: Grep

So WMC thinks it a good idea to block Abd while they're in the middle of an ArbComm case? A case about an allegedly improper block of Abd by WMC?? A pretty clear two-fingered salute to the whole concept of Arbitration, then.

Posted by: Mathsci

It was neither a good idea for Abd to edit the talk page during the case nor was it a good idea for WMC to block him.

It's now Rlevse that seems to have tied himself up in knots . Then again that's what boy scouts are trained to do.

Carcharoth and Cool Hand Luke are acting as the voices of reason.

It's turning into Alice in Wonderland a little bit.

Who's the mad hatter?

Posted by: Grep

mathsci = misc hat

Posted by: Milton Roe

Godwin.

Posted by: Mathsci

For reasons that you can all work out, Abd and I will probably stop commenting here.

Please ban us! We have committed the ultimate wikipedia crime.



The off-wiki venue that dares not speaks it name.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Wilde allusion! (Almost as bad as Godwin).

Actually the purpose of WR is so that the people on WP will have someplace "off Wiki" to escape the danger of becoming totally insular anal self-inspectors. Which is what happens to the people who stay on WP and never see themselves from the outside. Aren't you glad, Mathsci, that you've been saved?

Posted by: One

...

Posted by: Mathsci

What's wrong with this 2004 Oberwolfach picture?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/Alain_Connes.jpg

Posted by: Abd

Happens. I know they are here somewhere....



Yes. Brilliant, eh?

I must say it was a bit like shooting a fish in a bucket. No, bad metaphor. You realize you need to demonstrate that a bull is dangerous. Nobody believes you because, after all, he's sitting there placidly smiling and joking. So you wave a red flag and he charges at you, breaking the furniture as you, ready for it, leap out of the way.

Did I make the edit to "wave a red flag." Not exactly. I made the edit because it was there. The question was asked, I had an answer, and I gave it, as I would normally. The edit was not disruptive and the only thing that made it disruptive was WMC's threats. So I ignored the threats. Carefully. No wall-of-text. No tendentious argument. Not even any incivility.

And ignoring the threats of a bully is sometimes the one thing guaranteed to make him act. He's committed, he's got to prove he was right and that he has the power and to hell with everything else.

This time, I didn't even know I was blocked. Boy, was that one painless! I was prepared to have to deal with the rest of the RfAr, if needed, with a common unblock based on "don't edit anything but the case," or even something more cumbersome, and, of course, I wouldn't have begun this thing if I were not prepared for the possibility that the cabal would win.

It's not over yet, as I write this, though the decision is starting to appear in round outlines. Let's just say that, so far, I'm thrilled. It could hardly be better. I get admonished for errors, which is absolutely fine with me. I get a mentor, which sounds wonderful. WMC may get desysopped, which is sad, but which certainly was what he asked for, effectively, and his supporters, by not warning him, have helped bring this about. WMC may be site-banned for a while, which is more than I imagined, I don't think I support it, I'll have to think about that.

I do not, in fact, consider his behavior the most egregious in this case. But maybe I'm wrong. He certainly did defy ArbComm.

(To an editor heavily committed to a high opinion of himself, being required to have a mentor could seem humiliating. But what I'm trying to do is difficult, I'm trying to change the way the community functions, and, believe me, it's not only difficult, it's impossible to do it alone. My whole theory of delegable proxy could be construed as "routine mentorship.")

So far, it's looking very good indeed. I was, indeed, worried, because the cabal had piled in, it was attracting peripheral supporters, and the sensible neutral editors weren't appearing, and I'm not sure why. (Obviously, it could be because I was Wrong .... but I don't think so, I'm not just running on a few weak inferences ... the biggest worry was Big Silence from the arbitrators. WMC's block, totally outrageous and effectively defiant, mooning the jury, was sufficient to bring several out. It may have been a complete coincidence that Bainer started drafting the same day, but what Bainer drafted was certainly affected. Misbehavior during an RfAr is the surest path to sanctions.

(It's possible I'll see some consequence to that single edit to Talk:Cold fusion; I think I can defend it adequately, but I can also be wrong... I did announce my intention to disregard WMC's ban, and nobody of weight said boo!)



That plan depended on nobody noticing, I guess I'll just have to do something else. I've got it! I will allow the Sudetenland to annex me. Hand them the keys.

The result is the same.

Mathsci, my plan involves enabling consensus to function. It does not involve my personal power or POV. That's why, in my second RfA, I mentioned that, while I had ideas, an agenda if you will, admin tools would be useless in furthering that agenda. My agenda depends on convincing people, not on coercing them, and it takes place one person at a time, until that's happening in parallel, one person at a time becoming many.

You are invited to annex me. Need help? Ask. I'll do what I can.




Great minds think alike.

Actually, the "salute" had been going on throughout the case, with the edit warring in the request and the Workshop page. I do think I understand what was happening then.

Essentially, nothing. The arbitrators weren't paying attention to the case. Would you bother reading all that crap until it was time to actually work on it? I wouldn't! The cabal, though, imagined that the silence meant that they were being favorably received. The cabal is not an organized conspiracy, collaborating with secret collusion. It happens right out in the open -- mostly.

Posted by: Abd

I know Godwin from the W.E.L.L., by the way. My introduction to on-line community, much of Abd Thought comes out of that experience.



Speak for yourself. I trust the Committee; the finding of fact is accurate, we were uncivil to each other here. They haven't yet proposed making anything of that. And even if they did, I value my freedom of speech in RL, and compared to Wikipedia this is RL, more than I do my participation in Wikipedia. When in Rome, do as the Romans do; I used the local idiom; on Wikipedia, if necessary, I'd call an editor "uncivil." Here, I'll call him an "asshole." Those words mean the same thing, in fact.

Consensus process requires setting that crap aside, hence Wikipedia has rules, and eventually we will see the incivility policy enforced even more tightly; it will be, outside of necessity, just as prohibited to call an editor uncivil as to call him an asshole. I don't mind being admonished even for outside incivility, I'm not going to wikilawyer it away with "but that's outside and rule 237 says that editors can't be sanctioned for outside actions." Besides, see, I like it that Raul quoted what I said about you and him.

The really crazy thing is that Raul seems to believe that the community would immediately be shocked! shocked! at this.

I've learned a trick from ScienceApologist. It's a dangerous one, I won't use it often. Say what people are thinking but they have been afraid to say.



Oh, it will be mentioned and linked. My action will be to ask that the link be to the full discussion, not just to a piece abstracted from it. The specific posts can be shown, that's fine, but anyone who's worth his or her salt as a critic will want to see the context. In spite of claims that this is the highest pile of bullshit ever on Wikipedia Review, I did, last night, reread the whole thing. There is lot here, this discussion actually lays out and exposes a great deal.

Yes, if someone wants to understand what is actually going on with the complex ad-hoc structure that is Wikipedia, it might take some serious study, some serious time. My perspective is just one, I'd suggest noticing what got some traction here and what didn't.

Posted by: Mathsci

The link was already in my evidence when you posted this.

On WR everybody is made fun of, that is par for the course. I can live with simultaneously being Charles Matthews, William Connolley and myself. On Mondays I can be clean shaven, on Tuesdays have a moustache and on Wednesdays have a funny beardy thing. In all cases I can retain my spectacles and be some kind of Cambridgey mathematician. This can be repeated for Thursday, Friday and Saturday. On Sundays I can choose to be any member of the cabal or the mathsci team. Since I have now enrolled ChildofMidnight (he is not aware of the perforated underpant initiation ritual which he passed with flying colours on his talk page), I can also assume the identity of younger wikipedians. Multiple body piercings and green hair are optional.

How liberating and refreshing.

Although of course not in thebainer's book, that book in which there is no rubbing out.

Posted by: privatemusings

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Geogre&diff=304996224&oldid=304992977 - I'm thinking of auctioning the honor of me wearing a tag with someone's name on it.... any takers?

Posted by: Moulton

And this is the interesting original research that emerges from the phenomenon of Wikipedia. Most observers agree that what is going on is a lot of drama and gaming the system.

Which begs the question: Can the "system" be modeled with enough analytical precision to characterize it with scientific accuracy yielding useful insights?

I credit Kelly Martin with proposing and advancing the model of Wikipedia as an ad hoc ochlocracy, comparable to tribalistic strongholds that arose in the days before the advent of functional systems of governance.


If nobody takes you up on the offer, you can channel me for a day and see if anyone buys it.

Posted by: GoRight

Yesterday's episode was action filled and full of surprises. Typical of the material we expect from this director. It takes a careful eye to follow all the nuances of this little play. For example, amid all the confusion it may have escaped the notice of many that one of the chief antagonists in this drama, Raul654, went silent after being rebuffed in his attempts to paint GoRight as a meat puppet. (Note that this was his last post as of the time of this writing: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/Scibaby&diff=prev&oldid=305942234.

This raises another interesting question regarding the arrival of our bit player, Tony Sidaway, who entered the stage with this edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Abd-William_M._Connolley/Workshop&diff=prev&oldid=306583168. So it appears that a couple of days after Raul654 fades into oblivion Tony suddenly pops to the forefront eager to enter the fray.

Now we see him diving straight into the heart of the case, keyboard afire, as he attempts a rescue of our misunderstood patriarchal figure, WMC, by boldly asking why the Aribters are even considering something like desysopping WMC. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Abd-William_M._Connolley/Proposed_decision&diff=prev&oldid=307016048.) This seems the type of thing usually reserved for Raul654 who is nowhere to be found. And as part of the exchange Tony offers up this curious question: "It is really worrying to me that, without public evidence, at least three of the arbitrators are treating William M. Connolley as an involved editor. Is there some hidden evidence suggesting socking?" (See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Abd-William_M._Connolley/Proposed_decision&diff=prev&oldid=307023309.)

This is a very curious question from our bit player, again, more reminiscent of Raul654 but without the caustic verbiage. Sort of makes me say hmmm. Actually it's a rather ironic query for this bit player to make under the circumstances. Why, exactly, might Tony (who never sleeps and seems to edit from both sides of the Atlantic) care to know if there is hidden evidence of socking?

[Aside: I've been analyzing the timing of our bit player's editing. Most of the edits would suggest he resides in Western Europe, perhaps Britain. But every so often, every few days or so, he seems to edit straight through the night. His edits during these times seem quite innocuous. Just enough to keep any statistical measures of his editing habits within the plausible deniability range. No hard evidence, mind you, but there is much to be researched so who knows what might turn up?]

So let us review the plot thus far at a high level.

First we have our hero, Hipocrite, who swoops in from nowhere to do battle with the villain, Abd, by calling him out into an edit war. A bold plan, and one that might have worked on a lesser villain. At first it seemed as if it might be working and who should appear? Why the patriarch, WMC, who sternly wags a finger at the two edit warriors and valiantly protects the page.

Some time later, Hipocrite again tries to draw our villain into an edit war only this time Abd refuses the bait. Still, not to be dissuaded, our hero fights on with whomever he can find until the page is once again protected, completing his mission.

Then, curiously, our patriarch reappears from the shadows having long forgotten his previous actions there and, taking a fortuitous cue from the hapless GoRight, boldly restores the page to a version that just happens to give our hero everything he wanted while denying the villain his spoils. Being a man of good character, our patriarch knows that he cannot punish just one of his wayward editors as that would show bias, a bad thing all around for any kindly patriarch, so he bans them both. (Cheers from the peanut gallery).

(Time passes)

Our hero, Hipocrite, having duly gone on about his business with nary a care to the world stops by out of the blue to ask our patriarch to suspend his sentence for good behavior, and thus clearing his good name. Our patriarch agrees, leaving our hero unharmed and leaving only the villain with his justly deserved punishment. (Again, cheers from the peanut gallery!)

(Time passes)

Having served his purpose our hero suddenly and mysteriously decides to commit wikisuicide and retires over some lame argument never to be heard from again (at least not any time soon). Why does he do this? Does he wish to lie low for a while for some hidden reason? But our dastardly villain shall have none of this, and he tries to add him to the ArbCom case so that he can further besmirch his good name. Oh, whatever shall we do? Our hero is already dead and gone.

But wait, there is still the kindly patriarch. Let him do battle to clear our hero's name, again, and in full view of ArbCom. Surely a risky move to be avoided except under the more dire of circumstances. But what could those circumstances be? And do they have anything to do with Raul's later disappearance or the sudden appearance of our new bit player, Tony? And what of Tony's curious question about hidden sock evidence when the Arbiters have made no such indications?

Oh what IS this tangled web that has been woven before us?

Stay tuned as the saga continues to unfold before our very eyes ...

Posted by: Kelly Martin

Tony is known to live in the UK and has in the past freely admitted having a girlfriend in Florida who he travels frequently to see. I don't know what, if anything, he does for a living; to be honest his behavior is consistent with having enough wealth to not have to work.

He is also known to have traveled to multiple locations in order to picket Scientology, often dolled up as his drag persona, "Sherilyn". Tony's a true drama queen in every possible way.

Posted by: One

Wow, TS. Tony sez: "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Abd-William_M._Connolley/Proposed_decision#Evidential_basis"

Uh, well, these two users have had a significant dispute with each other. In fact it was so significant that ArbCom took a freaking case about it and they're both named parties. Then in the middle of this acrimonious case, one of the named parties blocked the other one. I think that's at least arguably involved!


Oh, GoRight: I think there's zero chance that Raul654 and Tony Sidaway are socks, share accounts, or any such thing--I don't recommend you continue that line of thought. You might think Tony is a "bit player" in global warming, but he's not a bit player on ArbCom pages. He's attracted to controversy and drama, and he usually comes down on the side of the older elite on Wikipedia.

Posted by: GoRight

Well perhaps you can understand why I found the query a bit, shall we say, suspicious? Is there any other user would would typically be making such bold statements in defense of WMC which are so obviously counter to, umm, reality? I know that I can certainly think of one, your assessment of the probabilities aside.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Some things in the world really do make sense.

Posted by: One

I understand. Many people know both of these individuals. Tony Sidaway was a clerk for a while when Raul was arbitrator. They're both unreasonable, but they are certainly different people.

For what it's worth, Raul's style is more patronizing, and Tony is more likely to ask ridiculous questions where you would swear he's trolling you, but he is apparently sincere. They've both gone to meetups on their respective continents. Tony has deep roots in USENET. Different people.

Posted by: Kelly Martin

Gee, thanks for giving me the image of Mark Pellegrini in drag.

Posted by: Mathsci

The voice of reason.

These kind and thoughtful people are not members of the mathsci team as far as I know.

They are fine upstanding wikireviewians.

Posted by: Grep

Interesting to see that Mathsci have apparently withdrawn their evidence.

Posted by: Milton Roe

And long fingernails in Wikipedia.

Posted by: Mathsci

"Please click here for evidence"

It's that grey amorphous/morphous liquid again, isn't it.. Have you thought of buying a mop?

A nematode worm could have done better than you.

Posted by: Grep

It seems to have confused the clerks as well -- I'm sure they'll appreciate being compared to worms. Still, there now seems to be no limit on the length, or relevance, of the evidence, which should make the ArbComm's task a lot more hilarious.

Posted by: Mathsci

If you could navigate wikipedia better - the temporary clerk's talk page for example or for that matter edit histories - there might still be a little hope left for you.

At the moment I'm not overly optimistic.

In reptrospect, in comparing you with the nematode worm, I was doing that organism a great disservice.

After all Caenorhabditis elegans did help in gaining http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sulston a Nobel prize and a knighthood.

Another Cambridgey person.

Probably part of the mathsci team - his wife does know me, he has spectacles and sports interesting facial hair.

Posted by: Grep

An interesting contribution from BozMo (T-C-L-K-R-D) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Abd-William_M._Connolley/Evidence&diff=307142167&oldid=307102201. In the section where Mathsci try to have the evidence from Ikip (T-C-L-K-R-D) struck on the grounds that they don't like it, Bozo argues that it's a good thing that WMC throws blocks around at random because otherwise WP would be overrun by vandals. Since Andrew Cates is yet another Cambridge Maths Ph.D. (so he says) it's possible that he is trying to support the Mathsci line. But I prefer to think that it's a clever ploy to undermine WMC by comparing his judgement as an admin to a batty old lady's gooseberry bush. Double-bluff or performance art? Hilarious anyway.

Posted by: Abd

Wow! My respect for Mathsci just went up a few notches. He actually gave a reason? I thought that cabal editors didn't give reasons. When you are in charge, you don't have to give reasons. WMC doesn't give reasons, except cool ones like "boring." Or "let's stir them up," for his nice, noncontroversial edit under protection. The comment that this was like shooting fish in a bucket has been considered serious evidence of my bad faith. I'm not sure why. Something wrong with shooting fish in buckets? Should I take them out of the bucket first? I do warn them before shooting them.

Is WMC a helpless fish?

Whatever, the splash from that immediately transformed the case. Mathsci is starting to make sense, among other amazing phenomena. Looks like he might get troutslapped, something he thought entirely preposterous. I might get banned from this or that, who knows? If I were attached, I'd never have been able to confront the cabal. Other editors have told me that they wanted to present evidence, but they were afraid it would harm their future on the project.

That's okay. It takes all kinds.

Posted by: Mathsci

Written by Abd to the clerk on his talk page just yesterday. Promises, promises ...

Posted by: TungstenCarbide

Ikip puts on a http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Abd-William_M._Connolley/Evidence&oldid=307779156#Evidence_presented_by_Ikip.

Posted by: Grep

Indeed, to the extent that Mathsci were reduced to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Hersfold&diff=prev&oldid=307714886 to have it removed. It probably didn't help that they had compared the clerks unfavourably to a nematode worm, but it was also a mistake to refer to the way the A.K.Noll case ended up in the Mathsci parallel universe. In http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/IncidentArchive550#Block_review_-_uninvolved_admin_request, it was a review of a bad block by WMC, there was no conclusion either way and the discussion degenerated into a first-rate display of personal attacks, lies, outing, horse-flogging and general hilarity. In the http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Abd-William_M._Connolley/Workshop&diff=prev&oldid=307720776, it was a case against Noll in which she was found guilty while WMC and Mathsci were triumphantly vindicated. Mathsci wisely didn't trouble themselves to give a link to the actual text of the discussion, I suppose diffs don't work through the trans-dimensional wormhole. As it happens Hersfold's non-admin twin http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AMathsci&diff=307748821&oldid=307653719 -- probably still annoyed by the worm thing.

Posted by: Mathsci

The clerk suggested that I add evidence about what Ikip has claimed. Feel free to read it. I've just added direct quotes since all the diffs come from the same thread.

Oh yes and here's the http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw-cesPhcHk I mentioned to Hersfold - might this help satisfy your insatiable appetite as a stalker?

Posted by: Kato

Mathsci, if you are a professional mathematician as you say, then why on earth are you still at Wikipedia bickering with all manner of kooks?

Give it up. Move on. You know you can't win.

Do a statistical analysis on that.

Posted by: Grep

I don't think this can be the mathematical member of the team -- a Berkeley mathematician would have understood the reference to the characteristic of a field.

Posted by: Moulton

Ah yes. Rings, Fields, Groups, and Cabals.

All part of Modern Mathematics.

Posted by: Grep

I did a rough edit count for the various pages for this case. I see that WMC has made about 135 edits while Abd has made 362. Mathsci (who worked hard to promote themselves as "uninvolved") has made 345 and Raul654 has made 145. That's surprisingly little for WMC as one of the two participants and an awful lot for Mathsci as onlookers to a case they don't think they're involved in. Is there a meat-puppetry case to be made here?

Posted by: Mathsci

What was Kato saying? It's on WR that we have the kooks. Grep apparently has difficulties in eliminating one variable from the simultaneous equations x_1 + ... + x_n=0 and x_1^k + ... + x_n^k = 0. Poor Grep.

Posted by: Abd

No. There has to be meat for meat puppetry, and there is no real meat there. Just a skinny, standard my-side-is-right and the-other-side-is-evil beef.

This is normal cabal stuff. So many have been denying "cabal" for so long that it can come up and punch them in the nose and they will wonder "Where did that come from? Did you see anything? I don't see anything?"

It was truly necessary that I defy the ban, because as long as I didn't, they wouldn't see that WMC was continuously threatening to block me, and contiinuing the threat during the case. At least some of the onlookers, including arbitrators, got it.

Oh! He would actually block. I didn't realize that! How wildly inappropriate! We will have to ask him not to do that again. But not too harshly, he might take offense like JzG and vanish.

I really meant it, I can't keep writing about this, but it takes me a couple of minutes to write this here. To cover the same basic content translating it into what can be said on Wikipedia, filtering out any implications that would sprout legs and trample the flowers, I'd have to spend ten times as much time.

WMC has claimed that the AN/I close was irrelevant. Isn't that interesting? Because if it was irrelevant, then he had no right to block me the first time. Admin bans cannot be strictly imposed, otherwise an admin could arbitrarily block an editor, just tell the editor not to edit the article first. Most self-respecting editors would say "Why?" And when the admin wouldn't tell them, probably more than half would blow it off. And rightly so. An admin cannot demand that an editor not edit non-disruptively, and it is edits which can be disruptive, not editors.

Community and ArbComm bans are different. In order to avoid contention over every single edit, the default is that any edit by any banned editor may be reverted and the editor blocked.

Massive confusion over this is totally normal on Wikipedia. Which has no means of resolving such confusion, because try to make it explicit in policy, the discussion gets disrupted, and ArbComm can't address stuff like this very easily. This was an opportunity, but ArbComm let the cabal rule the roost, I tried, but one editor can't stop a cabal, he can only challenge it and hope that the community gets it. Maybe someday it will. And maybe not.

When a real person says "the emperor has no clothes," with a real emperor, they toss him in jail or worse. Only if it is a child can it be said, because everyone can laugh it off. "Silly child, what does he know?" An adult who says it must be a revolutionary.

It's a classic ADHD thing, actually. Look, the emperor has no clothes. Literally, it doesn't occur to me that I shouldn't say it, can't everyone see it? Sure, I understand, but later. In this case, of course, I knew it would cause a flap, but .... can't everyone see it? Really, I could prove this in a court, but on Wikipedia, not so easy. Proof matters little if a crowd, shouting, can successfully distract.

It is possible with most of WMC's blocks to assert some reasonable basis. But he does it when he's involved. And every time someone challenges it, and points out the involvement, the cabal piles in and asserts that the block was reasonable, and there are enough of them that it can disrupt any consensus, until and unless closing admins start to look for cabal involvement, i.e., habitual affiliation between editors !voting or commenting.

The cabal has used the argument of "but he's not involved in the article, how could he be biased?"

Missing the whole point. Blocks while involved are a problem, even if the block is very reasonable.
It is such a stupid argument that I'm lucky my walls are soft. Padded, they really should be.

Only if it is an emergency, serious damage will be done if the admin waits, is it justified, and then there is an obligation to request review. Has WMC ever done this? I.e., "I had to block an editor for being boring today, is this okay?"

Wikipedia is harder on my sanity than was having five teenage kids at one time, as a single parent.

Posted by: Grep

Well, I assume that that was Noll's point. Perhaps the Mathsci team could put their mighty heads together and show us how to eliminate t from x+y+z+t = 0 and x^3+y^3+z^3+t^3 over a field of characteristic 3: that is a field in which 3=0 (for example, over the finite field with three elements). [Aside for the non-mathematicians: This is of course impossible, and Mathsci's failure to realise this is what they themselves call a "howling error"] What was it that Charles Matthews said? Ah yes, Mathsci's comment here is "either ill-considered or faux naif". Of course this is all quite irrelevant to the WMC issue as this point related only to Mathsci's harassment of Noll. Perhaps Mathsci have forgotten that in our universe this AN/I case was closed as Original issue is now moot and the acrimony is now feeding on itself. How true! what a pity Mathsci didn't get to see that comment in their universe before trying to flog this very dead horse.

Meanwhile in another part of the forest, it will be recalled that TotientDragooned (T-C-L-K-R-D) was forbidden from commenting because he agreed with, and so was obviously a sock of, Arkady Renko. Totient appealed and was told by Hersfold to wait until ArbComm had ruled on the socking issue. That was two weeks ago. Funny how quickly a CheckUser can be done when it's a case of getting rid of someone (some people think that the answers seem to come back even before the check is started), and how slow it is when the results aren't coming out right

Posted by: Mathsci

Charles Matthews made those remarks about A.K.Nole and were addressed to him:



Is this the kind of game you play when you're losing an argument? Well, I suppose we knew you lived in a different universe - now we know it's a warped universe.

Have you ever edited wikipedia? There are plenty of articles on video games and teenage comic strips out there for you to edit. But just one small piece of advice: stay clear of mathematics - you'll make a complete fool of yourself.

Posted by: Grep

Meanwhile, back at the case, I note the inspired proposal that Raul654 (T-C-L-K-R-D) be put under mentoring. Brilliant! At 170 kilobytes of evidence, and 1,090 kilobytes of workshop, the hilarity level is consistently high. We can only hope that the proposed decision lives up to the standard of the first two volumes of this epic trilogy.

Posted by: Moulton

WP has a lot more than five teenage kids running amock.

In any event, it's a crazy-making culture because it embraces the single most idiotic belief and practice ever devised by humankind.

For extra credit, you and EK can team up to write the definitive encyclopedic article on Humankind's Original Logic Error (of which Wikipedia is a prime exemplar).

Posted by: Cedric

If you mean to reference the Wikipedia dogma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view#Neutral_point_of_view, then I must agree. Wikipedia excels at making the sane crazy, and the crazy even crazier.

Posted by: Grep

Poor old Hersfold doesn't seem to be doing too well at clerking this case. Going on holiday in the middle didn't help of course. The word limit on evidence got completely out of hand, for example. There's a proposal to improve case management on the table, hardly surprising, really, which Hersfold has seen fit to comment on. Not what one would expect from an impartial clerk.

Posted by: GoRight

I'm not quite sure how you meant this but I shall take it as an actual compliment rather than simple sarcasm. I will admit that the proposal was indeed devised and suggested because of it's likely targeted effect on Raul under the circumstances.

UPDATE: After rereading this I guess I better clarify that "likely targeted effect" can be interpreted as "likely to reign in Raul's excesses while allowing him to continue his work as an administrator and checkuser". I guess trying to be terse can sometimes be a problem in terms of giving a misleading impression.

Posted by: Mathsci

GoRight has just been blockedfor 48 hours for trolling on/about ArbCom pages by Hersfold.

Posted by: Grep

Yes, Hersfold has indeed lost control of the case. Ordering GoRight to remove part of his comment ("There is no deadline, except possibly for those who wish to turn out the lights as quickly as possible to avoid having them directed into the shadows."), but to leave in the part with compliments about the clerks is hardly impartial.

Anyway, we need to look forward. What drama comes next? The sock/meat puppetry case against WMC or the case for declerking Hersfold?

Posted by: GoRight

Sadly, true. I suppose I forced this upon him by giving him a public compliment. He does need to be seen as being impartial in such matters. Does 48 hours seem a tad excessive for such a minor comment?

Posted by: Cla68

Congratulations, I think all of you are turning this case into one of the biggest circuses in ArbCom history, although I'm sure some other participants in this board might take issue with that.

Posted by: Mathsci

Splendid stuff, Cla68. You lead by example.

Posted by: Moulton

Actually, I was referring to an even deeper and more profound erroneous belief, but the one you cite can be thought of as a derivative of the one I have in mind.


The erroneous belief and practice I have in mind is the one that generates the biggest and bloodiest circuses in all of human history.

Posted by: InkBlot

I don't know why, but seeing comments on Hersfeld and "impartiality" seems a lot like someone watching People's Court and complaining that Rusty the Bailiff is smirking too much.

Posted by: Cla68

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Global_warming&diff=prev&oldid=46205203 (scroll down to WMC's last comment). There he's biting a newbie, namely, me. As you can see from his actions in this case, such as deleting or altering other editor's comments, he seems to be unable to adjust his attitude.

Posted by: Kato

What they need to do for Global Warming articles is state very clearly what Climate Scientists say, and make it clear that it is Climate Scientists who are saying it.

For example, rather than saying, "The remainder is due to a human-induced intensification of the greenhouse effect", they'd be better saying "Climate scientists determined that the remainder is due to a human-induced intensification of the greenhouse effect". This actually gives it more credibility.

Be clear though Cla68, when you are talking about Climate Change, it isn't really a case of "two sides of the debate". There is a discussion among climate scientists, almost all of whom have rejected the various scientific theories against anthropological Climate Change, and they can explain why. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52KLGqDSAjo&feature=channel_page (and accompanying videos) is the best guide to the Climate Change situation we are likely to see. Essential viewing for anyone writing on those articles - forget Al Gore.

Posted by: Mathsci

Good gracious, March 2006! And you've been keeping it to yourself all this time.

Posted by: Cla68

Me and a family friend who works for a Tokyo think tank which has given some free advice to Japan's government on its response to climate change initiatives had a discussion on this topic this past weekend. His think tank's advice to Japan's current leaders was to hold off on spending too much money trying to reduce CO2 levels until more scientific evidence could be produced to show that CO2 and warming were directly related. As you say, it's a complex issue.

Posted by: Cla68

It was treatment like that from him and a few other editors in that article, the same ones who are still "protecting" it now, that made me give up on it for a few years. I saw several other editors who tried to make good faith changes to the article then and since then who were driven away by the rudeness of Wikipedia's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Climate_Change patrol. The arrogance that WMC still shows in his on-wiki behavior, such as using his admin privileges in content disputes that he is involved in, is indicative that his attitude has not changed.

Posted by: Apathetic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Abd-William_M._Connolley/Proposed_decision

Posted by: Grep

Ooh, we're officially recognised at last! Abd and Mathsci have engaged in personal attacks upon each other during public discussion of this case in an off-wiki venue.

Posted by: Abd

You know, that actually had not occurred to me (slaps forehead).



Nah. There is no "original logic error." Logic did not appear in a formed state, such that "original error" is applicable. I would like to cooperate on essays about what Wikipedia is, however. As well as on what it could be, which is much more than what it is. My prior work led me to expect that Wikipedia would be as successful as it is, and that it would also fail as it has. In other words, I do have a vision of how it works and how it does not work, as well as a vision, in round outlines, of how to improve its function to a point where it truly does exceed in functional decision-making intelligence what is possible for any individual or faction or even elected committee. Where Wikipedia will go, though, in any detail, I cannot predict, it is far too chaotic, a butterfly flapping here, a typhoon there. So to speak, too many unknowns, too many individual decisions by too many different editors and "functionaries."

The Wikipedia core generally has an inflated concept of itself and what it does, trying to control a tiger by tugging on the tail. Oddly enough, at the "top," i.e., among most functionaries, there is a detachment, a sense of not taking it all very seriously, which is a good sign in one way and not good in another.... To me, the most fascinating part of this has been watching a tribe of editors claim that there is no such thing as a tribe. After all, look at us! No tribe here, no siree, and we all agree on that, except for you and your pitifully small band of meat puppets, so you must believe that 2 plus 2 equals 5. Literally, that's what was just written!

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Impossible! Conservation of editorial units! Insane fantasy! Heresy!

Posted by: Abd

I do think Hersfold is trying to be neutral. Difficult task. He has repeated on particular error. As a clerk, he's like a bailiff, his job is to keep order. Part of that job is dealing with uncivil edits. But he's faced with a fucking landslide of uncivil edits.

The error is in demanding that editors refactor their own edits. He should simply remove what he considers uncivil, and the simplest level of this would be that he simply says that in the edit summary: (removed uncivil comment. Discuss with me before replacing.) Very fast, very efficient, and just what a bailiff would do. Blocking is the equivalent of putting an offender in jail, when a real bailiff would act as simply as possible to stop the disruption, immediately.

Hersfold asked GoRight to remove the comment, and when GoRight didn't respond right away, he blocked GoRight. Bad idea. Not editing should never be a blockable offense, I can't think of an exception. Hersfold had the authority to remove the offending edit, and he ended up doing that. If GoRight continued a pattern of offending edits, then, yes, a block would become appropriate. That does not seem to have been the case, there was not a series of Hersfold complaints, I don't see any prior.

Yes, 48 hours was excessive, and given that voting has begun, quite possibly damaging. Clerk action should always be minimally disruptive. Clerking is a very sensitive position; ArbComm should provide better guidance for clerks. One thing that all sides on this case seem to agree upon: better clerking would have improved it. This is not, from my POV, to criticize the clerks personally, as should be clear, I think they were overwhelmed. The responsibility is with ArbComm, and it is a failure of omission, not of commission. ArbComm needs to blaze the trail for new process, the existing process, to use technical language, sucks. Even though it is the best Wikipedia has for careful decision-making.




(blush) (bowing, as the curtain comes back up after the performances)

Let me bring on those without whom this show would have been impossible. Come on out guys!

Give them a big round of applause folks, this is the Cabal!

Now, after the jury presents the awards for performances tonight, you are all invited to the afterparty.




I proposed, in the case, that NPOV can be a measured quantity, not an absolute. It can be constructed, but only by the cooperation of all -- or most -- POVs. We measure NPOV by the level of real consensus obtained, and if we ban for POV, we make NPOV impossible.

It's obvious: if we have 100% consensus, while this is not an absolute guarantee of NPOV (because there may remain some problem yet to be discovered), it's the best we could obtain. With a large community, 100% may not be attainable, but would remain as a desirable goal. To deal with the inefficiency of continuing discussion beyond a rough consensus, that discussion should take place in small consenting groups, as small as two editors, and possibly off-wiki initially.

The cabal is firmly opposed to this, it was amazing to see the arguments in the case. They are generally determined POV-pushers, often for a "majority POV," and they only "win" because they can quickly assemble a local "rough consensus" in their direction, mostly by very simple and instinctive tactics -- it takes no conscious coordination --, with tag team reversion as well as incivility toward interlopers, followed by block for uncivil response (i.e., normal human reaction).

Posted by: Abd

Attribution is a common solution to make text NPOV. It always improves accuracy, so the question becomes whether or not a fact is controversial enough to require attribution. If the various sides were to set up a goal of consensus, and work toward that, the individual editorial problems could be solved, and fairly rapidly. But the problem with Majority POV-pushing is that the majority may feel that discussion is a waste of time, and I can understand that it seems that way. In the long run, though, higher levels of consensus are more efficient, because the group working to maintain article stability becomes larger.

In the field that I adopted when I discovered admin abuse and investigated -- I was originally skeptical --, Cold fusion, anyone working in the field, anyone with knowledge of the literature, which is vast and active, including recent sources of the highest quality, will read our article and see it as full of bloopers and serious imbalance, compared to the actual balance of publication in reliable source. If you aren't familiar, it can look pretty ordinary and sensible, stuff seems like it's reliably sourced, etc.

It's kind of a test bed for how to open up consensus process to minority views. It takes time, and a lot of discussion, to shift consensus. There are many ways to do it, and I'm learning still. Watch, if you care.

(The cabal believes I'm trying to warp consensus by overwhelming opposition. There is a truth to this, though it is not "warping," it is the opposite. What happens in real consensus process is that the final result -- which is unpredictable in detail -- overwhelms unreasonable opposition, which disappears, because it would expose itself if it continued.)

Note that if it were merely a matter of wearing out opposition by endless discussion, the result would be unstable, it would, in fact, be impossible to maintain the alleged "consensus."

Posted by: TungstenCarbide

Wow, Ikiphttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Abd-William_M._Connolley/Evidence#Evidence_presented_by_Ikip, and if I'm not mistaken he was instrumental in the desysopping of Mongo too (under another account).

Posted by: Abd

Ikip did a good job. I initially confined myself to the particular example where I was involved. I did later put up evidence regarding one incident, where WMC had unprotected Global warming (T-H-L-K-D) after Jennavecia had protected it, and she had expressed, in the discussion on WMC talk, despair over ever being able to do anything about WMC's behavior. I had that in mind when I was deciding how to proceed with WMC's page ban. Maybe it was time that someone stand up to WMC. But if I was alone in this, forget about it. Ikip helped. It's still unclear what remedy ArbComm will determine, but A/C has a profound reluctance to desysop; I've been arguing that ArbComm should suspend admin privilege when there is an appearance of impropriety, that it should then restore it when the appearance has been dispelled, thus avoiding issues of "guilt" and "punishment." Purely protective, against the appearance of admin bias as well as against the reality. Standard operating procedure in real life with police.

Feels like a voice crying in the wilderness, sometimes.

This thread was titled "The Cabal strikes back." Did anyone here have any difficulty understanding "Cabal"? I.e., "Cabal, what cabal?"

I mentioned a larger cabal, and was promptly attacked for it. The larger cabal has been called that, by name, by others. It's a "cabal," not merely a faction, because there is some harm when the cabal bias is not recognized. In response to the ridicule, I mentioned that less than 0.1% of registered editors belong to it, all arbitrators belong to it, and only about 1% of its members are arbitrators. It holds views, generally, which are at variance from editors in general, and it can and does impose those views, and where the cabal bias is not recognized, damage is sometimes done, hence "cabal" instead of merely some defined interest group.

Anyone here have any difficulty in figuring out what this cabal is? Anyone who thinks that the cabal bias is not harmful in some ways? (It may be beneficial in others.)

I have been criticized by my friends for mentioning the cabal, not to mention not-friends. I bit off more than I could chew. Perhaps. But there was this big thing in my mouth, and it was about time someone took a bite. Definitely, it was bigger than I could handle on my lonesome, and only with a few valiant and brave editors, was any progress possible. Thanks, Ikip, for your service to the wiki. A few more like you, there might be some hope.

Depending on the outcome, which is still unclear, I might be shifting my work off-wiki, which, from more than two years ago, I understood might eventually be necessary, Wikipedia has a tendency to crush and salt reform efforts, i.e., Esperanza and the Association of Mediation Advocates. ArbComm has operating authority over the wiki, not the community and not me, and the wiki itself is merely one of the ways, albeit the default and currently most powerful way, that the community meets and finds consensus. Wikipedia will not progress toward stability and reliability until off-wiki connections, human connections, become much more consistent and effective.

It looks like the attempt to sanction editors based on comments here on WR is falling more-or-less flat, as it should, though arbitrator votes are a bit inconsistent at this point. (I.e., Mathsci should not be admonished for his very personal attacks here, but I should, apparently for using the word "asshole" instead of the word "uncivil," which is what it means? Weird.)

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

Same account, twice renamed Travb → Inclusionist → Ikip, but otherwise you are correct.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

That is an excellent proposal.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

Darn it, if Connelley gets de-sysopped, it will spoil his chances in next year's http://wikipediareview.com/blog/20081117/the-wikipedia-review-awards-pageants/#more-191 Otherwise, I think he could be a contender.

Posted by: Abd

Thanks. I'll put it in my freezer with the other "excellent proposals." Snowballs don't last long without that.

Posted by: Abd

Right now, it looks like he may escape with only an admonishment, which is an astonishment, given how blatant some of the evidence is. Besides, I move that the award be given to the admin who has admin status at the time of decision, and a temporary desysop would not disqualify. Last years winner, JzG, wasn't desysopped, but stopped editing almost entirely in May. Unstated reason.

I operate largely by intuition, sometimes I don't fully realize why I did something until much later. My revocation of my voluntary compliance with the topic ban during the RfAr was like that. I didn't think it all the way through, but if I had, I might have done it anyway. I'm famous for prolixity, but, in fact, I prefer a single quick demonstration to a sea of ink, or extensive characters clogging a page display.

WMC had been threatening to block me, up to and during the RfAr, but nobody was noticing., and a threat of block, while involved, is as offensive as an actual block.

Ah, WMC, isn't he cute? He wouldn't actually do it, of course, that would be so ... obviously improper.

But with WMC, WYSIWYG, that's what is actually appealing about him. He would, and he did. It was totally predictable. I did not actually know if he'd do it, but.... shouldn't ArbComm know the answer to that question? And I could have argued the point with any number of words, but one small, harmless edit, and, poof! like magic, the bunny popped out of the hat! Amazing! Never saw anything before like it, a party to an arbitration blocking another party! Unheard of!

Suddenly the cabal solidarity, for a moment, was broken. "He shouldn't have done that." Of course, but, er, why didn't you tell him before he did it? I'd been begging for that for two months! TenOfAllTrades (T-C-L-K-R-D) , I asked you, as his friend, to warn him. You interpreted that as "conveying a threat." Okay, what if it was a threat? If he enforces his ban, in spite of such an obvious and extended dispute, and given my "threat" to take it to ArbComm, is there a risk to his admin bit? Or not? I begged JzG's friends to warn him for months, before filing the RfC. Nobody did, the only people who warned him, being myself and Durova and a few others whom he did not consider friends, were blown off. Same with WMC, when he blew off warnings, when he wheel-warred with Jennavecia, the cabal laughed with him about how silly these blowhards were. Don't worry, WMC, they will lose interest when they don't get the attention they crave, and, of course, you can always count on our support, and we never lose.

Meanwhile, this morning I woke up realizing why it was essential that I raise the cabal issue. And I posted it to the arbitration proposed decision talk page.

Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Abd-William_M._Connolley/Proposed_decision#If_There_is_No_Cabal.2C_please_site-ban_me. (T-H-L-K-D)

Comments there may be in order for some of you. Be nice, but be clear.

If there is no cabal, then, it follows with inevitable precision, I should be site banned. If WP:TINC (T-H-L-K-D), I've been opposing, not a set of mutually-involved editors, acting as if they were a cabal, but a collection of uninvolved editors, who properly banned me, and, if I oppose, in content, so many uninvolved editors, I'm POV-pushing and should be topic banned. But because this conflict has spanned many topics and process issues, I should be, if the editors are uninvolved, site-banned.

If there is no cabal, I had no case at all, WMC was simply acting properly under IAR, and was, as usual, confirmed by a consensus of uninvolved editors, in every case, or at least was not determined to have acted wrongly, some discussions were about half positive and half negative, and thus WMC's action was, at least, reasonable.

Thus, rejecting the cabal accusation and setting it aside, the administrators had no choice but to conclude, about me, POV-pushing, disruption, unwillingness to accept good faith advice, offered by so many uninvolved editors, that I should take a flying leap and go away and please, please shut up. Consensus.

TINC, TINC, TINC, repeated three times every morning, will keep Wikipedia safe and avoid the tendency to disruptive thinking. Certain drugs can also be effective, and the combination of drugs and affirmations is never known to fail, it will keep you happy for your entire wikicareer.

WHAM! What was that? My nose is bloody! What hit me? TINC, TINC, TINC. I must have stumbled over a rock, I'd better be more careful. La, la, la!

WHAM! WHAM! TINC, TINC, TINC. How did my edit get reverted, it was sourced! I must have overlooked something, AGF. I'd better be more careful! La, la, la!

WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! My, my, I seem to have been blocked. All I did was disagree with an editor. TINC, TINC, TINC. There, I feel better now, all I need to do is be more careful and never, ever oppose consensus when it is affirmed by such a reputable editor. I feel so good, I'm learning how to handle conflict so well. Just give up when opposed! That's so simple, why didn't I think of it before? Now that I'm off the block, I'll go do Recent Changes patrol, no problem. Make myself useful, that's my motto.

TINC, TINC, TINC.

On the other hand, how about WP:TIAC (T-H-L-K-D)? Nah, that is far too unsettling. If there is a cabal, it might actually be difficult to solve the Wikipedia structural problems. There is only one deep solution which has been proposed, and we all know what happened to that, WP:PRX (T-H-L-K-D), which was crushed even before it was tried, and the crazy editor (literally crazy, that's why he could recognize PRX so quickly) who proposed it was blocked and banned. PRX would institutionalize cabals, give them incentive to identify themselves, allow them to function efficiently, but, even more important, enable the largest possible cabal, the largest faction in the community of editors, or even the entire community that chooses to take a small step to connect with others, to communicate and express consensus on a truly large scale.

That's way too outside the box, too uncomfortable. Wouldn't that be a paradise for sock puppets? TINC, TINC, TINC.

I've asked ArbComm to definitively rule on the issue of the cabal, as raised, not as re-interpreted to make it into a preposterous claim, affirming, if it will, that the editors who have long called for my ban are not "involved editors," that there is no cabal, i.e., no mutual involvement through affiliation that would lead these calls to not be "independent," and, thus, the confirmation of my page ban was perfectly legitimate, a consensus of "uninvolved editors" as required by WP:BAN. And thus my work is obviously disruptive because it is upsetting so many uninvolved and unrelated editors. And thus, please, site-ban me, don't agonize over detailed sanctions, Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Or, otherwise, reconsider the whole affair. The idea that WMC has support is rooted in the idea that the support shown is unbiased, representative of the community as a whole, not merely of a faction. The idea that Abd is disruptive wasn't based on evidence -- bainer had it right, and he seems to have spent more time studying the evidence, as original drafting arb, than any of the rest, even Carcharoth, who can be spectacular. If Carcharoth persists in concluding that I should be banned, I'm history, I'll absolutely shut up, probably permanently. Unless I'm shown a great deal more support than has been manifest, it would take that.

When all that was visible was bainer's proposals, I thought we might actually get a good decision, even if I didn't agree with every detail. Nobody's perfect, including me. I concluded long ago that if someone appeared who was perfect, I would surely disagree with this person, the only question is how extensive that disagreement would be.

I've gone on wikibreak, and, for my personal sanity at this point, and my personal life, this will include posting here for a time, I have to stop peeking. If I'm site-banned, I may return here and participate. In the meantime, if anyone wishes to communicate with me, please use my Wikipedia email or, directly abd, lomaxdesign.com.

Posted by: Mathsci

Ave atque vale.

Posted by: Mathsci

Not one of Cla68's greatest moments on wikipedia. He was trolling on ArbCom case pages.

Posted by: Mathsci

Cla68 , the wikipedia troll, seems to have lost his tongue here. His own namespace contributions on wikiedia are narrow and boring. Yet he feels in a position to criticize others. Might he possibly have a chip on his shoulder? He seems limited and shallow. In Britain he would be called a http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wally. Just my two centimes worth.

Posted by: One

I don't find his contributions boring.

He might have something better to do that search his own username every 12 hours on Wikipedia Review. He probably doesn't look at threads that have been bumped three times consecutively by the same axe-grinder. Good for him.

Posted by: Guido den Broeder

Centime is the correct value here. Very little trolling there from any side, surprisingly, but if I were to name someone guilty of it that would be you, not Cla68.


Not counting Mr. Connolley himself, of course.

Posted by: Moulton

Boredom is the name of an emotion, and thus characterizes the current state of the person expressing some degree of boredom along the continuous axis ranging from ennui to fascination.

If subject X bores observer Y, the obvious question for observer Y is: What fascinates you?

Other than participating in W-R threads, that is.

Posted by: Lar

Not worth even 2 centimes. Trashing Cla68 shows a distinct lack of class, and a very large lack of clue. I'm surprised at you, Mathsci, I'd expected better.

Posted by: Cla68

Actually, after leaving that comment on the case talk page, I had forgotten to go back and look at the responses to it, so I appreciate Mathsci bringing it up. When I get around to it one of these days I'll start a thread here on what I think is wrong currently with the climate change related articles.

In a nutshell, I don't have any problem with those articles concentrating on the IPCC's stance on the issue, because that does seem to be the prevailing belief by most in the scientific community. The problem is the ruthless suppression of minority, but notable, contrary views on the topic by a small group of editors who currently control those articles in Wikipedia.

If a notable scientist like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson believes that warming is localized, not global, in nature, then it shouldn't be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming#Dyson_.28again_again.29 to make note of it in the related article. The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Lawrence_Solomon#Environmentalist Lawrence Solomon from being labled as an environmentalist is another example. I won't say any more until there is a dedicated thread on it.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

This is part of what appears to be a big, complicated story. First of all, you have http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard&curid=5149102&diff=310576888&oldid=310576122#Raul654.2C_William_M_Connolley.2C_and_KimDabelsteinPetersen_on_the_Lawrence_Solomon_BLP about the edit warring at the Solomon BLP. It includes (gasp) allegations that Connolley has a tag team. This discussion is in turn http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Banning_policy&diff=prev&oldid=310786288#Reinstating_edits_of_banned_users.3F for an interesting http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Banning_policy&diff=310578052&oldid=308058977 causing major distress to Will Beback, who was hoping to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Banning_policy&diff=prev&oldid=310786288#Reinstating_edits_of_banned_users.3F The focus of the debate is on whether it is permissible to restore deleted material that was added by banned users if there is nothing intrinsically wrong with it. Recently joined WR member GoRight is one of the principals in the discussion, as are our in-house ArbCom twin experts, One and No One.

I think that all of this may have far-reaching implications.

Posted by: Jay

Trouble is, it's way outside his field of expertise. To my certain knowledge, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Peston,_Baron_Peston strongly believes in global warming but nobody would cite him as an expert in the area.

Posted by: Mathsci

Ahem, this is the only WR thread on the current ArbCom case, one in which Cla68 just tried to put a cat among the pigeons at the last minute. So its not exactly a needle in a haystack. But yes, the internet is asynchronous. In my case some article space contributions (audio links) take hours of time, sometimes even a week, to produce for youtube and a few seconds to add to wikipedia. The images do or will produce spin-off in other WP articles.

Yes, I agree, "boring" was the wrong word to use for his editing. He writes extremely well in military articles. The same applies to PGH.

However, despite the busy schedule you refer to, Cla68 must presumably have had time (hours, days?) to read all three case pages and their talk pages on wikipedia. He then chose to group together all science articles and a large and disparate set of editors in an ill-judged statement. As of now that's almost the last thing he did on WP. I don't have an axe to grind with him - I'm just a bit surprised. Presumably, if he really thinks he's right, he'll be opening a fresh ArbCom case with detailed diffs to back up his extraordinary claims. A brilliant choice for the advisory committee.

Posted by: Moulton

For reasons that I am at a loss to understand or explain, disagreements over ideas seem to morph into antagonisms between personalities. One of the remarkable characteristics about the late Senator Kennedy is that he had genuine (and reciprocated) love for those with whom he vigorously disagreed on ideological grounds.

Benjamin Franklin put it this way: "Gentlemen, we can disagree without being disagreeable."

Posted by: Mathsci

I already replied to CHL and must agree with you here. Cla68's namespace editing record speaks for itself. However, to clarify what I wrote in the heat of the moment, the possibly isolated incident of edits to the talk pages of the PD was completely out of line there. If Cla68 suggests that a whole group of disparate editors should be banned from all science articles without a shred of evidence, that is effectively a trashing on wikipedia which is quite ill-judged. Hence my reaction here. As you say totally OTT - but isn't that what WR is all about?

Cla68 is probably correct that some thinking has to go into what's going on with GW or AGW articles, but that is tangential to this ArbCom case. It's a completely separate problem on WP and quite outside my wiki-universe.

Anyway it's more fun writing wikipedia articles. From day one this ArbCom case has been very odd. The number of bizarre interventions by sockpuppets has been one symptom of that.

Posted by: Cla68

The IPCCab editors are making the same mistake the IDCab editors made, which is making it way too obvious to everyone that they're editing with a coordinated POV agenda.

Posted by: Moulton

FT2 take note. While Cla68 doesn't invoke Girard's Model by name, he observes the phenomenon of mimesis, whereby unsustainable and unwise practices are blithely adopted and reprised without consideration of their long-term consequences. In terms of the modern academic models of a learning organization, the largely unstructured and uncoordinated community of Wikipedians fail to learn from their mistakes, repeating them anew from one bailiwick to the next.

Posted by: Cla68

Ironically, the Wikipedia article on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_organization is actually a fairly well-written, referenced article.

Posted by: Moulton

Wikipedia exemplifies the kind of http://knol.google.com/k/barry-kort/cognition-affect-and-learning/3iyoslgwsp412/2#Basic_Concepts_and_Terms, full of dramaturgical sturm und drang arising from ill-advised practices grounded in tragic misconceptions and woefully incomplete mastery of appropriate managerial ethics and organizational principles.

Posted by: Abd

It is not a roller coaster, it's a tilt-a-whirl.

I just finished writing a response to Carcharoth's question about what I'd do differently. Setting aside the obvious answer of not editing Wikipedia, which would certainly save a lot of trouble, I looked at the decision, commented once again on it, then buried that under specific responses of change. In the process, I looked at the references that had been cited in the finding of fact that I had edited cold fusion tendentiously. They were all pointers to evidence by Enric Naval, who had started with a laundry list of everything and the kitchen sink, including lots of stuff like "proxies for banned users" which has finally been thoroughly rejected. I'd thought it obvious! Anyway, I'd responded to Enric's original evidence, but then he had changed it all, and the new evidence is what ArbComm cited. It was all quite bad, but one pointer was totally outrageous. Remember, this is evidence presented to show that I was editing tendentiously:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Abd-William_M._Connolley/Proposed_decision#Abd_tendentious_editing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Abd-William_M._Connolley/Evidence#We_can.27t_take_every_peer-reviewed_source_seriously, which, under the header of "We can't take every peer-reviewed source seriously," points to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Fringe_science/Evidence#We_can.27t_take_every_peer-reviewed_source_seriously in RfAr/Fringe science.

Did the arbitrators actually read this? This was evidence presented before I had touched the article. Enric (like the rest of the Cab) was taking a position rejected by ArbComm in that arbitration; my subsequent editing was intended to fulfill the principles of that decision, which was sound, as far as it went.

I'm suspecting that the arbs voting for that finding didn't read it, they just read the header, and assumed that it was my position Enric was describing. Or I don't know what, but it makes no sense that this would be evidence about tendentious editing. I've now described this on the Proposed decision talk, but we'll see if anyone picks up on it beyond the IP editor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Abd-William_M._Connolley/Proposed_decision#What_does_.22adhere_to_the_purpose_of_Wikipedia.22_mean_under_discretionary_sanctions.3F on the arbitration proposed decision talk page.

Cab. I've removed the "al" from the end to match the removal of the conspiracy theory from the claim of social involvement.

Will ArbComm realize that it cannot decide fact by vote? That what it rejected as unsupported by evidence wasn't what I claimed, and that what I claimed is common knowledge and was supported? Will Abd wake up and realize that none of this matters at all?

Maybe.

Hey, Mathsci! You've claimed I don't know beans about cold fusion. I've stated on the proposed decision talk page that the recent peer-reviewed sources entirely assume the reality of LENR (colloquially, "cold fusion"), and that that the bulk of peer-reviewed publication, overall, since 1989, favors the positive, i.e., there is a real anomaly, unexplained still (but with new major publications proposing theories). Can you contradict this?

Posted by: Moulton

I really don't get this bogus charge of "tendentiousness". People everywhere argue for their position on and off the Internet and have done so since the dawn of civilization. Only in Wikipedia would that be defined as a bannable offense.

Posted by: Mathsci

Nobody becomes an expert on a fringe science topic by four months of home reading. Abd seems to be trying to "reinvent" himself on wikipedia. On his own admission, he is not a trained university-level research scientist in real life. No matter how much he wishes it were so, not even his favourite tooth fairy could make it happen. Anyway, as he is well aware, it doesn't matter on wikipedia.

Meanwhile back on wikipedia, amongst other things, Abd wrote this as a future promise:



This is a record that seems to have beome stuck in the same groove.

Posted by: No one of consequence

My view (FWIW) is that people are expected to advocated for their own position, but in doing so to respect others and their positions, and to eventually settle down to a compromise. Wikipedia:Tendentious editing, to me, means things like denegrating the editor as a tactic to devalue his edits, refusing to give a fair hearing to other people's positions, reopening old disputes that have previously been settled, trying to win by attrition or by out-shouting the other side, not respecting your co-workers, and so on.

There are tendentious people where I work in real life, who won't forgive old grudges, who argue their point incessantly, who belittle people lower than them on the ladder. It's not just a wikipedia thing, but it's harder to deal with on wikipedia.

Posted by: Moulton

Incivility is not the same thing as vigorously arguing for one's point of view. I don't know if they still have Debate Clubs in high school, but one can vigorously debate on a position without ridiculing one's opponent.

Posted by: No one of consequence

I know that and you know that. If we were the only two Wikipedia editors I'm sure we'd get along famously.

Posted by: Moulton

The point is that if they can't silence or marginalize you for a valid infraction, they will make one up. Among the bogus reasons I ran into, "tendentiousness" was the first and "having no interest in writing an encyclopedia" was the second. The third was having the temerity to develop course materials on managerial ethics, which Jimbo then declared "beyond the scope of the project."

Posted by: Abd

I agree. But what I see on Wikipedia is that these qualities are projected onto people who aren't naturally inclined that way. How, by the way, does one "out-shout" someone else, in an on-line forum? Yes, one could literally overwhelm all comment with tons of scattershot response, but when comments are linear, in blocks, it's easy to skip them. I prefer mailing list discussion, myself, and I've thought that we should, perhaps, start up article mailing lists. And if you don't want to read what an editor writes, you just skip it, delete it, or even filter it out.

What I've been able to do, with enough time, is to negotiate compromises that stick. From initial positions that seemed impossible. But some editors really didn't like this. They were certain that lenr-canr.org should be blacklisted, after all, they claimed, it is fringe, POV-pushing, spammed, fraudulent, violating copyright, and completely useless and unusable.

However, when the issues were dismantled and examined one by one, they vanished. Lenr-canr.org is a library of information on cold fusion, much of which is peer-reviewed papers republished with permission. The site operators would prefer that it be complete and unbiased, but there is some bias due to difficulties in obtaining permissions. It's just an on-line library, really, not an advocacy site, though it does contain advocacy material. It also contains skeptical material. It contains whatever is of any notability and they can get permission.

So a paper was whitelisted for use at the article on Martin Fleischmann. I put it in. JzG edit warred to keep it out. I stopped, so it was out for a time. But I ran a process on the talk page to examine the issues in detail, and the result was consensus, complete consensus of all participating editors; an arbitrator popped by and checked it out, it was okay. Later, Hipocrite, operating on some excuse, removed the link again. It was restored by an administrator, I didn't have to touch it.

Consensus is self-maintaining, once it is established on a firm footing, without arbitrary exclusion, and is sufficiently broad. And it's possible to keep consensus open to change, without having everyone struggle over every new proposal.

But it won't happen if the community keeps banning editors who can see beyond the present limitations of our process or our articles. Or even editors who simply have an unpopular POV. It's known how to run effective consensus process, but we have avoided it because editors believe that (1) they must be personally involved and (2) it's a lot of work and they don't want to do that.

The solution is obvious, in fact.

Posted by: Abd

I'd layer this, but I can't do that here. Let those read who will enjoy, let those skip who will not.

Shocked, I'm shocked.

My interest was actually very similar. My history is with consensus organizations, and, as I've been proposing for some time, NPOV depends on consensus. It's not that NPOV is a vote -- we use "consensus" in a weird way on Wikipedia -- it is that the only objective standard for NPOV is that all editors accept it. That's a measure, not a decision-maker, because it may be unattainable; still, we can maximize consensus, and text enjoying maximized consensus is more likely to be neutral.

Anyway, my long-term work is with how to scale up the kinds of consensus process that are known -- by professionals and others -- to work on a small scale, when the scale increases. You'd think that Wikipedians would be interested in this! But, in fact, per the Iron Law of Oligarchy, oligarchies always develop, and, in what's been called the Lomax effect where I've written about it elsewhere, when a collection of members of an organization have excess power, they will resist reforms that would even out the power, because they will see it as a loss, and, generally, they believe in themselves as better qualified to exercise power. They might be right, by the way, but a good system will actually preserve the better part of the oligarchy while reducing the abuse. In the end, everyone benefits from broad consensus because it then requires much less work to maintain cooperation.

It was touch and go for a while, there were lots of "we don't need your kind around here" noises.

The irony in the present RfAr is that I finally settled down to some serious work on an article. Contrary to Mathsci's blathering, I have the background to understand the issues at cold fusion. Just no degrees, because I went in a different direction. I've asked Mathsci to make himself useful, look at the math in a theoretical paper on Takahashi's Tetrahedral Symmetric Condensate, my favorite cold fusion theory, because, definitely, the math is beyond me. He didn't. I have no idea if he actually understands quantum field theory, but I do know that it's an extraordinarily difficult field; what Mathsci claims to know is the much simpler approximation, quantum mechanics.

Cold fusion, though, isn't a field where theory counts for much. That will change, but what's been done over the last twenty years is to establish, in round outlines and with some specificity as well, what conditions are necessary to see the Pons-Fleischmann effect (excess heat) and then what other phenomena accompany it. Briefly, helium, at the right levels correlated with excess heat based on an idea that deuterium fusion is taking place (i.e., two deuterium nuclei fusing to form helium). But it's unlikely that this is the actual reaction. There are other pathways which would accomplish that result. And radiation.

What fooled everyone for years is that whatever reaction is taking place, there are few neutrons emitted. Which is a great thing, in fact, if a way to commercially apply this is ever found (it might not be!). There is apparently plenty of alpha radiation emitted (which is another way of saying that the reaction produces helium....) but also some very low level of neutrons, so low that recent paper published in Naturwissenschaften ascribes them to secondary reactions. The primary reaction doesn't produce them. Everyone thought that it would have to be ordinary fusion, and if it was fusion,there would have to be neutrons, and if there were no neutrons, it must not be fusion.

Probably a bad assumption. There is more than one way to skin a cat, and there is more than one way to get from deuterium to helium. Such as Takahashi's theory, which predicts, on quantum theoretical grounds, that a TSC occasionally forms from two deuterium molecules, which collapse as a "condensate," which seems to be a Bose-Einstein condensate on a very small scale, i.e., two molecules, and he predicts that it immediately fuses into Beryllium-8, which immediately fissions to two helium nuclei. No neutrons emitted. But the now very hot helium nuclei can cause secondary reactions that can do all kinds of stuff.

But it's not an accepted theory yet, just a rather appealing one. Ahem.

Basically, the want to ban me because I write too much. That's the bottom line. Too much discussion. At the same time, there was a remedy that, in a burst of total silliness, demanded that I discuss changes before reverting. It's almost like the remedy-writing machine got stuck.

(Has anyone else noticed that there does seem to be some kind of split at ArbComm? So many findings and remedies are sitting close to majority, just below or just over. Bad sign, or good, I suppose, depending on your perspective. WMC blocked me during the case, some arbs claimed it was the most outrageous thing they'd seen. Others think, ho hum, I don't see what was such a problem. Didn't the community decide he should be banned from editing that page? Yet they all signed on to the principle that the appearance of bias was to be avoided, not just actual bias, while the Cab screamed that this was going to cramp their style, it was ridiculous. ArbComm, or at least part of it, is badly confused.)

Discussion is essential to finding consensus. Lots and lots of discussion, if it's a difficult problem. But if it is mass discussion, it's impossible, it gets more and more tedious. So discussion has to be broken down, with a few discussing at a time, with consensus building from there. Some people read what I write and like it and understand it. Some don't. Those who don't, don't want it to exist. Old problem.

Their solution is to ban me. I've been banned before, from mailing lists. The lists died. Not necessarily as cause and effect, rather as common cause: if they would ban me, they would ban anyone who knew how to make it through the next stages of their development.

I begged the arbs that, if they were really going to find that I had "attacked editors" and failed to substantiate my "charges," and if this referred to, as it practically must, my claims that a "cabal" exists, and they have a finding that I failed to show this, please, please, site ban me, because if there is no cabal, as I very carefully defined it, then this mass of editors who have long been calling for me to be banned, with new excuses or reasons developed for each occasion, is just a collection of independent editors, a sample of the community, a fair sample, and if I'm really pissing everyone off, it doesn't matter who is right, I'd be disruptive. QED.

But it seems they want their denial and something else. Or not. I may have finally gotten the attention of several arbs, who now want to jack up the originally proposed, and not passing, one month site ban to three months. I don't know why they bother with limits, I'm 65 and not likely to change a great deal. I can handle restrictions, that's a different matter, but change my spots, no.

To me, it's a bit reversed. Do I really want to continue to expose myself to this collection of narrow-minded self-righteous puritans, so ready and quick to judge and condemn? I see some good stuff going on, but .... really, should I stumble across AN/I, it practically makes me throw up, the manifest hatred, the assumptions of evil intent (bad faith doesn't capture it). Cla68 is right, ban discussions often feel like lynchings.

Do I really want to support a project that does this to people?

And the corruption rubs off. I see administrators burning out, admins who were once thoughtful, patient, and wise, becoming other than that.

Some wikifriends are asking me to tone it down, they want me around, but ... I'm not really sure that it's good for me, for my family, for my work, or, for that matter, for Wikipedia. I do know how to solve the so-called "governance" problem, the solutions are much simpler than most think, but there is such a barrier of assumption and ignorance to overcome, on the one hand, and, on the other, such despair even from those who might want something different, that it may be completely impossible. At least from the inside. There are other possibilities.

Posted by: Moulton

I haven't followed the cold fusion story since it first came out in the late 1980s. At that time, I recall a nuclear physicist from MIT published the definitive rebuttal, offering a plausible explanation for the otherwise unexplained reaction products. As I recall, it had to do with the release of gases that had been adsorbed onto the matrix when the experiment was set up.

Posted by: Cla68

Mathsci, what's up with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#User:Mathsci_and_User:Slrubenstein

Posted by: Mathsci

Do you mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#Ethnic_groups_in_Europe

Posted by: Abd

Thanks. Your impression would be the same as the impression of many. However, there never was a "definitive rebuttal."

My, my, where to begin?

First of all, the original report by Fleischmann only provided evidence for two reaction products: heat and neutrons. The neutron finding was bogus, experimental error.

The excess heat was never refuted; there was, in the Caltech negative replication, a speculation that they had failed to stir their cell, causing a calorimetry error. Media claims are still common that "nobody could replicate the experiment," but that is a tad deceptive, given that there are 153 peer-reviewed reports finding excess heat in the palladium deuteride system. Some of these use techniques that don't involve energy input, just gas-loading of nanoparticle palladium with deuterium or hydrogen gas (the latter as a form of control). With both gases, there is initial heat release from the heat of formation of palladium deuteride or hydride. With hydrogen, the closed cell readily settles to ambient temperature within a few hours. With deuterium, the cell settles to, in the Arata experiment widely reported and confirmed, 4 degrees C above ambient, and stays there for 3000 hours until they terminate the experiment and open the cell for helium analysis.

The MIT experiment? This would be the report of Albagli et al, "Measurement and analysis of neutron and gamma-ray emission rates, other fusion products, and power in electrochemical cells havin gPd cathodes., J. Fusion Energy 9, 133 (1990).

http://www.psfc.mit.edu/library1/catalog/reports/1980/89ja/89ja034/89ja034_full.pdf

There are two major considerations about that report (and some applies to all the "negative replications"). The effect was not nearly as simple and easy to find as the original press conference implied. Groups rushed to confirm, and most groups found nothing. And they reported finding nothing. Let's suppose that there was a real effect, but it occurred only under rare conditions. Were these negative replications exact replications? No. They were begun at a time when there was insufficient information available, and they were rushed. It's been estimated that a major chunk of the U.S. national research effort was diverted, for a short time, into attempts to replicate cold fusion. Most of these attempts failed, many were not published at all. (Some positive replications were also not published.)

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that most replication efforts were doomed. Later, the conditions necessary to show the effect were characterized, and a 2008 Bayesian analysis of the early reseach reports accurately predicts, from the experimental descriptions, which replications would succeed and which would fail. What Albagli et al did was to report no effect, and then speculate about what might have caused Fleischmann to err. "Other reaction products" weren't being asserted until later, but they would have looked for tritium and He-3, and, big surprise, either didn't find any, or did, and were then able to show it was from contamination.

Simon, a sociologist, in Undead Science, published by Rutgers University Press in 2002, writes, about the American Physical Society meeting where Pons and Fleischmann were roundly bashed to the cheers of the audience:


The MIT report abstract:


Anyone familiar with successful replications would look at this and say that they would find what they found: nothing. "10 days." To show the effect, it's necessary to get very high loading of the palladium with deuterium, better than 90% (i.e., 9 atoms of deuterium for every 10 of palladium). It takes months to get a Fleischmann-type cell to that loading ratio. Secondly, most commercial off-the-shelf palladium rods have microcracks, and won't load to such a high ratio. The replication was doomed. And if they didn't set up the reaction conditions, of course they didn't find helium or tritium or other reaction products

However, there may be another problem as well. That they were unlikely to see an effect doesn't mean that there would be no effect at all. They were looking for substantial heat. In the abstract they state "no excess power ... was detected."

I'm not going to try to prove it here -- because, ultimately, it's moot -- but their published data, it has been claimed, was altered from the raw data, which did show a modest level of excess heat. Jed Rothwell calls it a "blatant forgery." Eugene Mallove apparently resigned as the MIT Press Officer over this study. Claims of misconduct were filed, and stonewalled. It's a mess. I've seen some of the evidence of alteration, and it seems credible. The substance of their report -- finding nothing -- is correct and expected, as long as "nothing" isn't taken absolutely literally.

Basically, the MIT report, like all the negative replications, simply showed that, doing what they did, you don't get excess heat and other reaction products, because you didn't get a reaction.

Two cells? 10 days? Off-the-shelf palladium? Loading ratio below 80% (it's in the report).

Now, below is a summary from the peer-reviewed Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook, published in 2008 by the American Chemical Society, the largest scientific society in the world, through Oxford University Press. It's a collection of papers, all but one original, including papers that are reviews of the field. Secondary source, peer-reviewed, academic publisher. That should be the gold standard for reliable source, mainstream.

But not against a wall of opinion like that which you expressed, Moulton, but firmly held and pushed, not merely remembered. RS standards? Piffle!


I wrote on WP talk:Proposed decision that there isn't any recent published research that is negative on cold fusion, and there is continued publication of confidently positive research and secondary source analysis. ArbComm has roundly ignored this. Sure, looking at that would be looking at content, making a content decision.

But the only way to tell the difference between POV-pushing and tendentious editing, and working for the application of reliable source guidelines and neutral content is to look at the sources asserted. My big sin appears to have been excessive discussion. In place of edit warring. I.e., instead of tendentious editing of the article. And I was faced with firm opposition, from roughly half of the editors, the most active half, excluding sources like what I quoted above, out of hand, simply by claiming that the authors were "fringe."

That's circular.

Yesterday, I posted answers to Carcharoth's questions about what I'd do differently. I didn't sugar-coat anything. And two arbitrators immediately put up a proposal for a three-month ban. That's fine with me, really, because I don't want to waste any more of my time dealing with a project that has become so totally dysfunctional, with the few sane voices on ArbComm crying in the wilderness.

I'm not tendentious, I'm persistent, I persevere through opposition, when I can see consensus behind it. It was asserted that Storms (2007) wasn't usable as a source. When there was a poll, in fact, there was no consensus, but later, the editors who considered Storms unusuable asserted, again, that I was editing "against a consensus to not use this source." It's quite what the Cab has long done: claim consensus when all that happened was that no consensus appeared against them. Raul654 pulled this trick during the arbitration, claiming confirmation in an AN/I discussion where, in fact, half the editors opposed his position. And the other half were the Cab regulars.

What I'd been able to do was persist, and present, eventually, sufficient evidence and argument, boiled down and honed through extensive discussion, that a true consensus formed. Then, later, the complexity of the process, the volume of discussion required to reach high consensus, was used as evidence that I talk too much. Cool, eh?

I'm fascinated, I'm just as fascinated by how things go wrong as how they go right; and, in fact, the only way to progress is to do more of what works, and less of what doesn't, with it being very important to understand the latter. Understanding the former is important, but ... if it's working, don't fix it. We may never understand why things work, because to find out would involve doing it wrong in some way. But if we look enough at what failed, we can infer why what works, works.

So I'm happy if I'm banned, because I can turn to better possibilities, some of which involve Wikipedia, some not. My two years as an active editor, pouring in perhaps 5000 hours, won't be wasted, but I did neglect many other projects and studies, my family, and my business.

Cold fusion may be a part of it. At the beginning of January, Moulton, I was quite like you. I was familiar with the 1989 work and the rejection, and I believed that if cold fusion was real, we'd know about it. After all, wouldn't the journals publish the positive results? And if they did, surely the media would pick up on it!

No. Not until March of this year, when the ACS held a press conference to announce their four-day seminar on cold fusion, at which the neutron findings of the U. S. Navy SPAWAR group were discussed, having been published in Naturwissenschaften, was there major penetration of popular media.

There had always been publication in peer-reviewed journals, but some major journals blacklisted the topic, totally, most notably -- with public announcement -- Science. An editorial decision, not a scientific one.

The 2004 DoE review gave no weight at all to the MIT results. By 2004, there was enough evidence that half of the 18 reviewers the DoE picked as experts considered the evidence for excess heat to be conclusive. One-third of the reviewers considered the evidence for nuclear origin to be "somewhat convincing." That finding alone is enough to redefine cold fusion as emerging science, still very controversial. However, if we look closer at the 2004 report, into the actual individual anonymous reviewer reports, we can see what happened. Some reviewers very clearly had their minds made up even before seeing the newer evidence. Bogus. Impossible. Couldn't be happening, there for it must not have happened, therefore it must be experimental error, artifact, pathological science, or fraud. Yes, fraud was alleged by one reviewer, in spite of the fact that no major cold fusion report has been successfully impeached on the basis of fraud. It's the holdover from the very strong rhetoric of 1989-1990.

And ArbComm fell for that, and refused to consider that just maybe I was standing up for core principles, not my POV on cold fusion. However, if the article were to be improved according to guidelines, it would largely be my POV, I suspect, which always includes the negative, it subsumes and absorbs it, and tries to find synthesis. I never consider any particular POV to be proven, there is always room for change and expansion.

I trust consensus process and real consensus. ArbComm and the Cab don't, they imagine that it will involve endless, tedious discussion, wearing out the majority, until the majority gives up and goes away and lets the fringe POV-pushers have their way with the article.

A serious error. What happens in reality isn't that. It couldn't, because the majority can sit back and do nothing but just revert edits, and, if it is still the majority, it can always prevail. The idea that a majority POV editor has to read all the discussion is where the problem lies. It comes from a whole series of dysfunctional habits, including the idea that one must refute every bad proposal, immediately. Or else it will take over the universe. There is a belief that silence is consent.

Not.

Posted by: Abd

A "trained university level-research scientist in real life" would almost certainly have a conflict of interest, a point which has escaped Mathsci, if the scientist had specialized knowledge. If it's in another field, sure. But, then, what, exactly is the point? Mathsci is a mathematician. He may have some knowledge of quantum mechanics, which is ''theory," an approximation, not necessarily accurate in the complex environment of condensed matter, which requires the far more difficult techniques of quantum field theory.

Notice how Mathsci deflects the question into one about my personal qualifications. I'd say that he has shown no familiarity with the literature at all. He's an ignoramus when it comes to the actual experimental reports, and probably on the theoretical analyses as well, except as would relate to the theoretical rejection based on behavior in a plasma, where the two-body application of quantum mechanics is accurate. Basically, useless. The whole purpose of Fleischmann's research was to test the boundary between quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. He expected the difference would be below measurement accuracy. He was wrong, and from being wrong is how science advances.

But some people are constitutionally incapable of recognizing their own error. It's unfortunate, because it makes them incapable of learning. I asked Mathsci if he knew of any counterexamples to my claim about the literature. He doesn't know any, so he blows smoke. Typical. He could try doing some research.. Go to the WP article and look at the sources. When are the negative peer-reviewed sources from?

The most recent negative paper actually isn't an experimental paper, it is merely a claim that there might be a calorimetry error from what Kirk Shanahan, a Wikipedia editor, calls a calibration constant shift. What Mathsci and others are likely to miss is that Shanahan asserts that there is a real anomaly, unexplained excess heat, and that this causes calorimetry error by generating heat at the electrode where none is expected. Okay, what's the anomay? What is the cause? Can it be verified? Is his theory falsifiable? This was, I think, 2005. His work has received no positive notice in secondary sources. He is fringe about fringe. Many different methods have been used for calorimetry and his theory would only explain some of the results, and would completely fail to explain the found helium/excess heat correlation. Unless, of course, the "anomaly" is fusion to form helium!

HIs explanation also completely fails to explain the radiation results, and especially the neutrons recently confirmed. Basically, by raising some doubt about each of the findings, skeptics have claimed that it's not been proven. However, even though doubt can always be raised about an individual finding, the weight of them becomes, at some point, overwhelming. "Some unknown artifact" gets old when there are many independent findings all converging on the same point.

And, of course, there is this tiny problem of our reliable source guidelines. If we were following them, there would have been no problem with the article. Instead, weak sources appearing to confirm what editors like Mathsci believe is the "mainstream," are allowed, and strong sources that appear to contradict it are disallowed.

The contradiction, however, is not with the primary sources, or early secondary sources, but with a synthesis in the minds of the editors. The basic assumption, rebuttable, is that all sources are valid, if they can be harmonized by interpretation. So an early negative replication is actually harmonious with later positive replications, where the conditions can be shown to be different, which is the case with the early replication failures. We know why they failed, that's what secondary reliable sources now claim.



Yup. Persistent. And I *still* promise that, even if I'm banned. It just moves off-wiki. Don't worry, I 'm not talking about sock puppetry, which is on-wiki, but rather about setting up the off-wiki structures that are necessary if Wikipedia is to change, given the power of the oligarchical control that will, my theory predicted long ago, block all efforts to become truly neutral.

My goal is neutrality, not some cold fusion POV. My POV isn't fixed, anyway. While I've seen enough that I find it unlikely to reverse again (Hopeful in 1989, though aware of the theoretical problems. Skeptical from 1990-2009, then convinced.)

No, my goal is process that can overcome participation bias, that can overcome the iron law of oligarchy. It's quite a trick if it can be done, most political scientists think it impossible. Persistent little cuss, eh, Mathsci? But what I find is that when I actually meet a political scientist and discuss it, they respond differently. Maybe it could work, they start to say and think.

This is very general. It wasn't developed with Wikipedia in mind, it's a generic organizational solution. Small efforts have been started here and there, but in most informal organizations, where it's been tried, the largest problem is that there isn't a recognition of the problem, much less the solution. There is, in fact, high recognition of a problem on Wikipedia, but no process for developing a coherent description of it, not to mention solving it. Hence the process must be set up; it's a communication and discussion process that increases efficiency. In theory it increases it vastly. We don't know in practice, because it's never been tried on the necessary scale. However, all the pieces have been tried, some on a large scale, and they do work.

So we will see. Anyone who wants to know about the project, email me; you can leave a message for me here, or use the Wikipedia email interface, as long as that works!

I have no idea how far the Cab will go. Once they have been able to get a user banned, Talk pages and other user pages tend to disappear, without MfD, usually, but sometimes with.

I'm not sure what part of the "promise" was what triggered the rapid appearance of the longer-term ban proposal. From Risker's comment, it would seem that it was that I talked about writing at length when I had a lot to say, but then covering the problem with length by various techniques that address the wall-of-text issue. And behind it all was something that Risker missed: mentor advice.

What I conclude is that there is a Rule 0 violation, because the explanations aren't sufficient to justify the remedy. Characteristic of Rule 0 violations is that vague charges are used: Trolling, disruption, tendentious editing. What's Rule 0? If I tell you, I'm violating it!

Clearly, Risker et al want me to shut up, stop writing and expressing my observations and ideas. I'm now accused of being long-term disruptive, in one conflict after another, without evidence; in prior conflicts, my position was sustained. So the crime: raising fundamental issues and finding consensus on them. A consensus which some don't like. Very much don't like. So it all accumulates as a general impression which can then be poured into a vague category. It's how the Cab works, it's not conscious coordination, it is merely natural factional agreement, back with some measure of coercive power.

Rule 0 is the set of unwritten rules that govern human social interaction. In particular, it's the rules that can't be written, because to do so would reveal too much about the parts of ourselves that we don't want to face. See User:Abd/Rule 0. It might not be there much longer unless someone moves it to WP space. It's been popular enough, but I'm sure not going to do it!

Posted by: One

The ACS conference was at the University of Utah this year (a fact I'm proud of as a Utah chemistry alumnus). I can't believe they timed their presentation http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16820-is-roomtemperature-fusion-in-from-the-cold.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=physics-math after that infamous press conference.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Well, this whole thing is screwy. First you have to accept that some physical process other than simple D+D fusion is going on, because we already know from H-bombs that that produces a lot more ionizing radiation than is seen. The first H-bomb that really worked well just a dewar of liquid deuterium, and it produced lots and lots of neutrons and gammas.

Worse still, now the cold fusion people are claiming ionizing radiation, but at the lower limits of detectability. Of course.

But if there are indeed cold fusion experiments that run unattended for months as soon as they light off, like the loaded nano-palladium ones descrbed here, they should be portable. Which means you should be able to take them down in a mine or someplace with a low background muon flux and measure high energy fusion neutrons (14 Mev, etc) quite directly. Detection of such stuff clearly coming from a tube of palladium (1/r^2 distance dependence), which is unconnected to anything else, could mean only one thing. High energy neutrons are just too hard to make, otherwise. I don't even know how you could fake such a thing. You could rig it to be contaminated with isotopes that give you spallation or fission neutrons, like an alpha+Be source, but none of these would give the hot neutrons of deuterium fusion.

Posted by: One

I have a simpler skepticism about it: if there's excess heat, they should be able to make an engine out of it. The alleged heat generated always seems to be dwarfed by the input. I find that at best useless, and at worst nothing more than experimental error.

By the way, that link has a link to a google video of the Pons & Fleischmann press conference, which I had never seen before. It makes me sad; would have been a great event for the school. At any rate, Abd, in the original conference they also claim the detection of Tritium. The whole thing was a fiasco. Attorneys dictating science. *gag*

Posted by: Moulton

I was skeptical of the claims when I first heard them.

The definitive review from MIT confirmed my initial skepticism and nothing that I have read in the intervening 20 years has lessened my skepticism one iota.

Posted by: Abd

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. To move beyond that, you might have to do a little reading. I expect Milton can handle this, though.

That's right. Almost certainly (some possibilities still remain, it hasn't been completely ruled out), the process isn't "simple D+D fusion." You just gave the primary argument: lack of "lots of neutrons" and gammas. There was a "triple miracle," the famous criticism. For the others, since I assume you know this, Milton, these are the problems

(1) Extrapolating from reaction rates at high energies, the reaction rate at room temperature would be fifty orders of magnitude too small to explain the reported heat. No mechanism was known or postulated that could overcome the repulsion between deuterium nuclei to allow them to fuse. At least this is the way it has been said. In fact, a mechanism is known: muon catalysis, which I see below that Milton is also aware of. This objection, then, might be overcome, with some other kind of catalysis, (such as electrons, maybe some way that muons behave in palladium that allows them to be more effective, an unknown particle -- as Edward Teller proposed, or something else, such as hydrinos, if they exist) but then we have the other two problems.

(2) The branching ratio. With known fusion reactions including cold muon-catalyzed fusion, half the fusions result in Helium-3 and a neutron, and half in tritium and a proton. The reaction resulting in Helium-4 is rare, one in a million, and accompanied by gamma emission. The neutrons aren't seen (Fleischmann's neutron report was way below what would have been expected if this were ordinary fusion, it's been called the "dead graduate student effect," because the neutron flux would have been fatal to the researchers)

(3) Conservation of momentum. If somehow the branching ratio were different from expected, such that helium was the predominant product, the gamma rays are missing. It was proposed that some Mossbauer-like effect allowed direct transfer of momentum to the palladium lattice, instead of through the emission of gamma rays, but the energies involved are vastly greater than the energies that allow the Mossbauer effect.

It was easy to see why the results were considered impossible. But something was overlooked. What if the reaction wasn't D-D fusion? The plot thickened in the 1990s when Takahashi reported seeing increased fusion cross-section with bombardment of deuterium-loaded palladium with energetic deuterons, with evidence of multibody fusion. I.e., more than two deuterons fusing in a single reaction. Which would seem impossible. After all, if two deuterons fusing is rare, at low energies, surely three or more would be even more rare. It may have been a failure of the imagination. Physicists were used to thinking of these particles as functioning in a vacuum, unconstrained by the environment. And apparently that's a good approximation, most of the time. "Most" does not mean "always."
No. I'd recommend reading the peer-reviewed literature, including the Naturwissenschaften report (Mosier-Boss), and prior publications from the same group in one of the European physics journals. What you've done, Milton, is confuse some of the early reports with the recent ones. Early reports, confirmed over the years, showed neutron flux above background, but close to background, close enough that skepticism was quite warranted. Some kinds of ionizing radiation are easy to detect, some not so easy. In fact, the Chinese found, in 1990, that CR-39 plastic radiation detectors, placed in a cold fusion cell, accumulated tracks characteristic of ionizing radiation. Eventually researchers started pursuing this in earnest. The SPAWAR group shows copious ionizing radiation, probably alpha particles, so much that in the areas next to the electrode, the damaged plastic is continuous, it's only away from the electrode that one starts to see individual tracks. They've been publishing this for several years, now, peer-reviewed journals. There are a lot of details, but ionizing radiation from the cells is firmly established. It's just that alpha radiation is very low-penetration, very little of the radiation escapes from the cells.

What is at low levels is neutrons. I think this was first noticed when they looked at the back of the radiation detector, and found "triple tracks," characteristic of proton recoil from energetic neutrons. The level is low. I don't have the specific figures in front of me, but they see about ten of these triple tracks on a chip, I think over a run of several weeks. They see only occasional tracks in controls (various kinds of controls have been studied). They have run these experiments many times, the results are reproducible and consistent.

Neutrons were considered the smoking gun of fusion reactions. Well, they've found neutrons, all right, but only a few. Significant, not due to background radiation. The neutrons cannot possibly explain the primary reaction; what they indicate, in fact, is a confirmation of the energetic charged particles that were first found. If there are hot alpha particles, we'd expect to see some secondary reactions. That's what the neutrons are probably from. Rare secondary reactions caused from primary reactions that produce energetic alpha particles, perhaps.
The neutrons are at too low a level. Those measurements were done earlier, down in mines, and they found neutrons in bursts, close to background. The CR-39 results, in fact, confirm these earlier measurements, but because CR-39 is an integrating detector, a low flux can be distinguished from background bursts caused by cosmic rays. Remember, the basic reaction doesn't generate neutrons! They are rare.

The nanoparticle palladium results are still a bit tricky. Arata, according to Jed Rothwell, is the grand old man of Japanese physics. He doesn't give a fig what anyone thinks; he does his work the way he wants, publishes it, then does something else. There are some confirmations of his work, but the problem is that the material he uses that is especially active is a palladium alloy, specially produced. I may be working on trying to obtain some, actually. But that's another story I'll tell later. In Japan, Arata's reputation is very high. He's done public demonstrations, ran a little Sterling engine with one of his cells. Sorry, Garwin, no tea yet. Cold fusion researchers are, shall we say, dissatisfied with the data Arata provides. I think I figured out a way to calibrate his calorimetry, though. A little original research isn't a problem for personal use! (He doesn't provide any absolute energy generation numbers, and he seems to be mostly interested in the helium, and I haven't seen his helium results.... the research is mostly published in Japanese. I should ask Rothwell about that, he's fluent in Japanese.)

What's much more readily available and reproducible is the co-deposition technique that the SPAWAR group perfected. They don't start with metallic palladium, rather they immerse a platinum cathode in a solution of palladium chloride in heavy water, and then electroplate palladium onto the cathode. At the same time as the palladium deposits, deuterium gas is evolved and trapped; what forms on the surface is basically 100% palladium deuteride, fully loaded. Excess heat and other phenomena are immediately seen.
Correct. That's why there was such a flap this year over the neutron findings. I don't know why the alpha radiation findings didn't cause a flap, but they didn't. I guess physicists could imagine things like contamination, though, really, these guys do all the right controls! I recommend reading the paper on neutrons. You might find a copy at http://newenergytimes.com, they have a number of Mosier-Boss papers under Selected Papers in the frame.

You could also look at another more recent paper: http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MosierBosscharacteri.pdf . From that paper:
Read that carefully and see if you can still say "at the lower limits of detectability" with a straight face...

Milton, I suppose I could be fooled. But I don't think so. My guess from what you wrote is that you will have the background to understand this stuff. Check it out! If I've overlooked something important, please, put me out of my misery!

Just remember, though. Jed Rothwell is currently editing some more papers for Naturwissenschaften by authors who need the support in English. He says the peer reviewers there are the most knowledgeable he's encountered, they ask tough questions. It's been fascinating to read physics blogs, responding, say, to the CBS special on Cold fusion (March?) where the blogger shoots off his mouth and clearly hasn't read the literature, and just repeats the old canards from 1990 as if he's really smart and CBS was really, really stupid, and this Robert Duncan fellow was obviously sold a load of goods, because, blah, blah, blah. How embarrassing!

Like, "Where is the ash, eh? If this much fusion was happening, there would be detectable ash? How come there isn't any ash?" Etc. Of course, if you read what I put up before, there is ash. Helium, at the right amount for deuterium fusion. Multiple reports, careful research.

Except it isn't deuterium fusion, but it ends up in the same place.... at least that's my favorite theory, Takahashi went on to develop a coherent theory, backed with quantum field theory. It's over my head in details, but the general idea seems to be that two deuterium molecules (D2) transiently pack into a cubic cell; this can only happen at the surface, deuterium is dissociated inside the lattice. These molecules will naturally assume a tetrahedral configuration, i.e., the four deuterons will be in a tetrahedron. He hypothesizes what seems to be the formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate; if that happens, he predicts immediate fusion to form Beryllium-8, which immediately fissions to form two alpha particles with 23.8 MeV each. Same as if it had been d-d fusion. But because of the different pathway, the triple miracle is bypassed.

I was suspicious when I was editing Oppenheimer-Phillips process (T-H-L-K-D), and ScienceApologist, fresh off his block, made that the first article that he requested ArbComm permission to edit. Enric Naval had mangled the article, that was how I noticed it, from some discussion on his Talk page. I fixed it, and Enric reverted me because my editing didn't match his misunderstanding of the source..... and Mathsci had apparently convinced him that I didn't know any physics. Anyway, SA is apparently a particle physicists and came in and made further edits to the article. It was largely unintelligible to a lay person, so we went back and forth a bit and found consensus, and, in fact, it was good, because Enric Naval then edited it some and showed that he now understood it. But why was this crucial to SA? I think he imagined that I was going to try to warp that article into some kind of pro-cold fusion piece. But I hadn't even thought of that. Until now.

What does this have to do with Tetrahedral Symmetric Condensate? Well, the deuterons would assume, in the tetrahedron, a polarization, neutrons in, protons out. Under those conditions, they can approach more closely....and understanding the effect of four deuterons approaching simultaneously is ... not simple. I've not done the math, and I'm not going to... but this may help to understand that the special conditions in condensed matter (this configuration would be essentially impossible in a plasma) just might cause something previously unseen to happen. In addition to that polarization, the electrons involved would tend to shield the nuclei. It's a very complex problem, and standard quantum mechanics, definitely, doesn't cut it. Takahashi claims that three deuterons do nothing. It has to be four.

But cold fusion researchers, in general, are skeptical of Takahashi's theory. (I've asked.) They think that more Bremsstrahlung radiation would be seen. Still, it's got some peer-reviewed publication and is covered in secondary source. Including, by the way, the Mosier-Boss neutron triple-track paper, they cite Takahashi as an explanation for what the primary reaction might be, and there could also be other reactions; the TSC is neutrally charged and during its transient existence could possibly fuse directly with palladium to produce some of the other reported effects, such as Iwamura's transmutations (at the same time explaining why the transmutations involved +4 atomic number and +8 mass).

This is really cool stuff, and I'd be an idiot to trade this for editing Wikipedia! I've figured out, I think, how to make a little money from this, providing an educational service as well, with possibly more impact than anything I could do on Wikipedia, at least under current conditions. And I'd be damned if I'm going to waste the money I spent on the books....

It's making me COI, you read it here first (though you'd have had a few hours jump-start if you'd been following the Vortex list, where cold fusion researchers congregate.)

So thanks, ArbComm, for helping me to move on to something more interesting. Should I be banned, whether or not it's your loss, it's my gain. If and when I'm allowed to return, I'll not be able to edit the article, probably, because of a conflict of interest.

Posted by: Abd

Goes to show. That was in no way a "definitive review." If you look at it and still think so, show me, okay? It took Pons and Fleischmann five years to get up to some significant percentage of cells that showed excess heat; they were experts at calorimetry, among the world's best. And they were lucky. Albagli tried to do it in ten days.

Later, Pons and Fleischmann ran out of the original batch of palladium that they had been using. When they bought more, they couldn't get the cells to produce excess heat. Eventually, the materials scientists figured it out.

I was reading comments on the CBS special, about the mention that Energetics Technologies and SRI were using special palladium from Italy, and someone was offended. Isn't there high-quality palladium made in the U.S.?

It's not the palladium, as such, it's how it's been processed. For bulk palladium to work, it must be free of microcracks that apparently allow too much deuterium flow, the rod won't sustain high loading. P&F didn't know this, there is a lot they didn't know. They thought that it was a bulk effect, probably because of the famous meltdown. Apparently it's not, it's a surface effect. That's why codeposition is such a reliable technique, it creates surface, fully loaded, immediately. Doing it with rods, all kinds of things happen. The rods crack, for example. I believe there are now some groups reporting 100% success with rods, but I don't know much in the way of details.

And that's why the nanoparticle work, probably. Very high surface to volume ratio.

Let me say I'm not terrible impressed with knowledgeable people -- ostensibly -- who simply say that they are skeptical without showing that they've seen and understood the literature. Sure you are skeptical. Until you have seen the evidence, you'd be an idiot not to be skeptical!

But one thing should be understood, and it's behind a lot of continued skepticism. If this is real, how come after twenty years of research, there isn't a home cold fusion hot water heater? The Japanese put a huge investment into cold fusion, and abandoned it because "the results weren't what they expected." Sounds bad, eh?

Fleischmann thought that it would take a Manhattan-project scale initiative to develop this to commercial scale. My opinion is that this might be spent and it would still fail. There is no intrinsic reason why this can be practically scaled up. It's a surface effect and it is apparently fragile.

Take the Arata work. I did some rough calculations and figured that with $100,000 worth of palladium, I could have a home hot water heater. It might still require refueling, of a sort, not because it is really going to consume much deuterium gas, but because the nanoparticles get gunked up, one would have to take the palladium and reprocess it periodically. Now, think about it. A $100,000 hot water heater? Shall we rush out and buy stock in a venture to make one? And if people know I have a cold fusion hot water heater, with $100,000 of palladium in it, well, I'd better have good locks and a security system!

I'm interested in the science, not in dreams of free energy. Maybe someone will figure out how to scale this effect up and make it reliable and sustainable. Maybe someone will figure out how to do this with nickel, or in what may not be such a wild idea as it seems, with proteins. But it could be many years, the science is primitive at this point. If it were easy to scale this up, it would probably have been done. But that has nothing to do with the science. Muon-catalyzed fusion is totally impractical. But it is accepted, and it works.

Proteins? Yeah, proteins. There is evidence, credible, peer-review published and covered in reliable secondary source, so it's notable, but unconfirmed, no independent reports, that certain bacteria or yeasts can accomplish nuclear transmutations, specifically Mn-55 has been added to a culture of deinococcus radiodurans, and then Fe-57 was found, using Mossbauer spectroscopy, where there had been none. http://www.usuhs.mil/pat/deinococcus/index_20.htm The transmutation work is by Vyosotskii, and he has written a review of his own work published in the American Chemical Society Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook (Oxford University Press, 2008). He's been publishing this stuff for years. I've been unable to find any reports of positive or negative replications. Shame. Mossbauer spectroscopy using a Co-57 source is insanely specific for Fe-57, natural abundance 2.2%. If prior to culturing the bacterium, Fe-57 was absent at levels detectable through Mossbauer spectroscopy, and it shows up, as it reportedly does, it's difficult to think of any explanation other than transmutation -- or some contamination during the experiment..

Good thing I don't care if anyone thinks I'm a nut case....

Posted by: Abd

Yes. Arata ran a Sterling engine from the heat. "Useless"? Sure. Except as a demonstration. So is muon-catalyzed fusion, a known form of cold fusion, but it's accepted.

You can say "the alleged heat generated always seems to be dwarfed by the input," and it's just not true. You really should read the literature, if you care, and if you don't care, you shouldn't make claims that are contradicted by what's in the peer-reviewed literature, and blatantly so.

I just gave an example, One, where the heat output dwarfs the input. There are many others, but suppose it was only, say, 10% over input, but way above the calorimetry resolution, and suppose the excess heat is then found to be well-correlated with helium detected in the cell. And suppose that radiation is found coming from these cells, also correlated with the excess heat. No excess heat, no radiation. Excess heat, radiation.

And those suppositions are found in the peer-reviewed experimental reports. One, you have some idea of the quality of my work, you saw it early on. Do you think I'd go so deeply into this, risking so much on it, if it wasn't solid?

As I said, if I've made a mistake, show me, please. So far, all I've seen is presumptions and suppositions and no knowledge of the actual work, the actual reports, the actual confirmations, the actual peer reviewed literature.

Did you know that Fleischmann and Pons were asked about light water controls? They were evasive, apparently. Later, they said that they had, indeed, run light water controls, but the results weren't what they expected. It wasn't a "clean baseline."

Why not? Well, for starters, ordinary water does contain some deuterium.
Tritium has been confirmed at low levels. Fleischmann has said many times that he regretted that conference; they didn't think they were ready. On the other hand, I do understand why the attorneys thought it necessary, even though it was a mistake.

Yes, science by press conference is a Bad Idea. On the other hand, what Simon points out is that both sides of this played that game. The hot fusion physicists played it better; they had the connections and they had the money, and, when they found that they (mostly) couldn't reproduce the experiment, they were seriously pissed. Which also makes for bad science!

Jed Rothwell has written http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJtallyofcol.pdf on the topic, based on the Dieter Britz bibliography, which classifies papers as positive, negative, and "undecided." In 1989, there were almost twice as many negative papers as positive. But in 1990, the numbers were about even, with increased total publications. After that, the total numbers of publications declined, but positive publications always exceeded negative, running roughly 20 per year, positive, during the 1990s, with few negative papers. After 2000, publication started to decline, but steady publication has continued and begun to increase again -- a little -- after the nadir in about 2005. Those charts don't reflect, for example, the ACS Sourcebook (2008), which contains 16 papers. There is another Sourcebook coming out, I understand. And it doesn't reflect where most of the work has been, conference papers.

Overall, the balance of what has been published under peer review strongly favors cold fusion. The rejection was early and not sustained in the literature. Lots of excuses have been given for this, but, in the end, that's what they are, excuses. It was a very bad idea to essentially blackball CF research and publication; while publication wasn't ever locked out, that the major journals wouldn't publish -- not even followups to what they had previously published, even though there was not any secondary source review (under peer review) of the field rejecting it -- was totally a perversion of how science works. With polywater and N-rays, there were definitive studies that explained the original findings. That happened with cold fusion with neutrons, and that's all. Not with the excess heat. Considering a replication failure as a proof of nonexistence is simply bad science.

If it is any clue, I was given a copy of the Sourcebook by the publisher, Oxford University Press. The retail price is $175, but you could get it on Amazon for $150 at one point. Later, I found used copies selling for upwards of $300. Apparently it was selling out, and demand was high. I think they have reprinted now.

Posted by: Moulton

In science, when one is contemplating a novel hypothesis, the normative procedure is to try like the dickens to falsify it. The proponents of cold fusion have done just the opposite. That's not doing science. That's doing faith-based wishful thinking.

Posted by: Guido den Broeder

Has anyone ever tried to use buckyballs to facilitate cold fusion?

Posted by: No one of consequence

Just like anthropogenic global warming!


Erm...

Posted by: One

You claimed that it takes months to load the cells, which is also my understanding. They run this glorified voltaic cell for months, and then maybe--maybe--it produces like 50% more energy than they're continuing to pump into it (but only if they roll doubles and use the right brand of super special palladium). Useless at best, and insignificant enough to make one wonder whether something besides "cold fusion" is actually going on.

You can at least understand why most scientists think that cold fusion practitioners are chasing ghosts? Twenty years later, and they're still charging up palladium rods hoping for water to heat up slightly; sorry, but I'm very skeptical. Need something more repeatable (less "fragile," as you put it) to overturn reliable theories.

Maybe they're suppressing the newer studies on Wikipedia, and maybe these studies do describe actual rigorous results (the coincidence of heat and helium, for example). But at the end of the day, do I believe in cold fusion? No.


It's my understanding that physicists always hated cold fusionists, even before it was considered discredited, and even at Utah. Seeing these chemists run mere electronic cells and claiming to fuse deuterium apparently stroked them the wrong way.

Posted by: Abd

You are correct about falsification. And that's been done, over and over, but there are a lot of people who simply make statements like yours and believe them without any evidence at all.

You've missed the point. Experimental data. Forget hypothesis for a second. What experimental data is there? Maybe it isn't fusion. What is it? Come up with a hypothesis, then try to refute it. Exactly the right procedure. What is the confirmed data?

(1) Excess heat, many experimenters, well above known measurement error. Also above known chemical reaction possibilities, under some conditions. (The common statement that the excess heat is only a few percent of input power is false as a generalization.) (Excess heat is the basic phenomenon. All published negative replications have been shown to be a result of protocol failure. No effect set up, no heat, no wonder!)

(2) Helium measurements correlated with excess heat at a Q factor consistent with deuterium -> helium fusion. No significant negative reports. (Anomalous individual cell findings exist, at least one attributed to calorimetry error). Note: a negative replication, such as MIT, finding no heat and no helium confirms this observation.

(3) Charged particle radiation. Many reports. No negative reports (i.e., finding of excess heat, if heat was measured, perhaps from calorimetric artifact, but no radiation of the kind reliably reported).

(4) Energetic neutrons at very low levels, but clearly above background, correlated with excess heat or charged particle radiation. Moulton, the MIT study you mentioned is often cited as the death knell for cold fusion, because of the decisive rejection of Fleischmann's neutron findings (an 1999 APS article on this explicitly states this). But Fleischmann retracted the neutron findings, nobody finds neutrons at those levels, the remaining debate was over very low levels. The MIT report, in fact, didn't prove there were no neutrons, it wasn't an experimental report observing excess heat and no radiation. No excess heat, no Fleischmann effect, no neutrons, no surprise.)

(5) Elemental transmutations, many reports. But if you don't accept the above as experimental reports, you aren't likely to accept the transmutations!

Okay, what are the hypotheses?

Start with: experimental error. Bad calorimetry. Deluded wishful-thinking fanatics. Nothing abnormal here, just ordinary human frailty. How would you go about trying to refute this hypothesis?

And is it normal to start with this one? Yes, individually, that is what a scientist does with his or her own work. But not with published, peer-reviewed research; the first presumption is normally that the report is accurate, and then falsification attempts begin, not of the experimental report, but of the suggested conclusions. In fact, cold fusion phenomena were seen and dismissed before, because the results were so unexpected. Mizuno reports that he was working with a grad student, creating a target for a neutron generation machine by loading palladium with deuterium, using electrolysis.
Every day I care less and less what Wikipedia says about cold fusion. The article is a joke to anyone who knows the research and the history. When I started researching this in January, I bought a pile of books and actually read them (the other major editor remaining, Enric Naval, has made noises about buying Simon, but, so far, just cherry-picks skeptical support from it, and rejects positive reports as cherry-picking). I didn't just buy books by "believers," in fact, I only bought two such books: Mizuno and Storms (2007), which was the most expensive ($50). The ACS Sourcebook was out of reach at $150, I'm subsisting on social security.

Storms is a very solid source, independent publisher (World Scientific), very positive mainstream review by Sheldon. Sure, under present conditions, what is in it should be attributed, but this clearly satisfied RS guidelines. And trying to put sourced -- and non-controversial -- material from Storms is what triggered the edit warring and the article protection and page ban and probably the later finding of "tendentious editing."

But I also bought two of the three major critical books: Taubes and Huizenga, I bought the sociological study on the fiasco by Simon (2002), and also Hoffman, 1995, American Nuclear Society, A Dialogue on Chemically Induced Nuclear Effects, a guide for the perplexed. Hoffman is a true skeptic, not a pseudoskeptic who is skeptical of affirmations and not of negations. Some cold fusion believers think Hoffman is practically the devil incarnate (Rothwell and I have argued about this at length, I won't repeat what he's said about Hoffman. Rothwell knows the science very well, i.e., the experimental work -- he doesn't care about theory -- but he's very biased, I'd say, about the people.) But skeptics have also dismissed Hoffman, because he points out holes in the skeptical position, in fact, he skewers some of them.

What was wrong with Hoffman according to the believers? He doesn't examine the calorimetry in depth, he focuses on the nuclear effects.

I first learned about the Chinese CR-39 charged particle radiation work from Hoffman. Also I learned about a known condensed matter effect on nuclear behavior, Beryllium-7, which is stable when ionized in free space, has a finite half-life when it is absorbed on the surface of a satellite or meteor. We had, for a little while, an article on Condensed matter nuclear science, where this would be appropriate, until SA edit warred it into an indirect and JzG protected it there (and deleted the Talk page....). The skeptical position is that there is no "condensed matter nuclear science," chemical or solid states have no effect on nuclear reactions, on the theoretical ground that the distances are too far for the electronic environment to have noticeable effects. That's a belief, a hypothesis derived from theory and from negative observation, and, Moulton, Fleischmann believed it but tried to falsify it. That's what caused the whole flap. He falsified it. He was doing basic science. And you think that this is about failure to falsify? You have it backwards. The skeptics came up with hypotheses of "pathological science" and failed to try to falsify it.

Sure, some "believers" have been trying to "prove" that cold fusion exists. But the published research is full of controls, which are attempts to falsify. You ought to try reading some of it, Moulton. You might learn something.

"Cold fusion" is just a hypothesis, and currently appears to be the Occam's razor theory. Some kind of nuclear reaction. Fusion? There is some evidence that may also have other explanations. Release of energy from collapse of electrons below the assumed ground state, i.e., hydrino theory, perhaps? I don't think so, but WTF do I know? All I know is that there is are a series of unexplained anomalies if we discard something like fusion as a hypothesis. The real point is that this is science, it's not dead, far from it, and it has substantial mainstream support, contrary to knee-jerk belief.

On the calorimetry, Hoffman says this: after examining possible heat artifacts, he writes, "in general, these heat measurements are being done by very knowledgeable experimenters who know how to avoid artifacts." This is RS, Moulton. Try to put it in the article! Hoffman is not convinced the effect is nuclear in origin, in 1994, but his ultimate answer is "We don't know."

There is a wealth of material in the last three books, written by skeptics, independently published, authoritative in certain respects. And we don't cover it except with a few sentences that really don't tell the story. That's because the cold fusion article has been a battleground, and it affects all sides. If we start to tell the positive side, based on what's in reliable source, the skeptics remove it because of "undue weight." And if we start to tell the negative side, others remove it because it is also out of balance, or uninteresting, "too much detail."

Why report the details of how this massive rejection came about, what Huizenga calls the "scientific fiasco of the century," if it was all a big mistake, stupid and sloppy work? It only takes two words to say "pathological science." Besides, if we tell the real story, what is actually found in Huizenga and Taubes, and what other source exists on them and what they did, the can of worms is opened, and it will start to cast doubt on the skeptical position held by the majority of editors who have any clue at all, plus some others who don't know beans but know what they like. Like us, eh? And then there are the transient editors who actually know the research, the experts. Fanatics, die-hard believers, POV-pushers, get rid of them.

Posted by: Abd

Remember, what was being done was science, not engineering. So "useless" is problematic.

What if the calorimetry is accurate? These were experts in calorimetry, the world's best. In a reply to Moulton, above, I cite what Hoffman wrote about it. Excess heat was significant. You've sarcastically dismissed what is actually in the literature. The SPAWAR group uses co-deposition, which produces excess heat immediately and reliably, and because it is such a simple (and cheap) technique, they could run many different experiments with many different variables. Come on, One, you should know enough to recognize the significance of correlation between excess heat and helium. Each measurement, independently, can be dismissed, the heat as calorimetry error, the helium as due to leakage from ambient or other contamination. But both together, quantitatively correlated? And reliably so?

In Miles' work at China Lake (US Naval laboratory), they were using Fleischmann cells, and they were getting 12/33 cells, in the series that Storms reports, with no heat. Those become the controls! They measured helium in all the cells, and they found no helium in the 12 control cells. Of the 21 remaining, they found helium in 18. It's a stunning result, One, if anyone is paying attention. It validates both the heat and helium measurements, in fact, leading us to suspect some artifact or error in three experiments; in one of those three, there was apparently reason to suspect the calorimetry. With the other two, there was a different type of electrode being used, and there are a number of possible explanations, but that doesn't matter, in fact. Even not discarding those experiments, the statistical significance is overwhelming.

Fragile is not a synonym for not repeatable. The early techniques were fragile in both senses, replication was effing difficult. I'm now starting to work to set up a company to engineer and manufacture cold fusion demonstration kits (it's never been done), and the first thing Rothwell tells me is forget about it, it's too difficult. Amateurs always fail. Rothwell is pretty cynical, having dealt with twenty years of derision. He's wrong. Amateurs have been able to replicate some of the experiments, and the company I'm designing will not depend on amateurs for design, it will, instead, nail down the protocols to some which work, reliably, guaranteed (or I lose my shirt).

The SPAWAR codeposition technique is 100% reliable. What you are doing, One, is only allowing yourself to recognize part of the evidence. The part that confirms the reasons for skepticism. I understand it very, very well. You've missed about half of what I've written. Not surprising, that's normal. You overstate the situation with Fleischmann cells. There are groups reporting high replication with them, too. They have figured out how to do it with reasonable reliability. Given that, the "fragility" I report applies to what might happen when attempts are made to scale it up. Personally, I suspect that the Fleischmann technique is an engineering dead-end; but Energetics Technologies in Israel is working on it. Michael McKubre of SRI has published (In the ACS Sourcebook), reports on exact replication of the ET work, being his own and the work of ENEA, Frascati, in Italy. That paper quotes an ET paper. For "the most pronounced excess heat results," he summarizes:
McKubre summarizes the results: "Of the fifteen experiments [using the ET protocol], eleven produced excess heat at or above the three-sigma experimental uncertainty. As far as we are aware, this level of reproducibility is hitherto unprecedented ...." And here we see what may be a political phenomenon. McKubre seems to be ignoring the work of other research groups. He Jing-Tang, in a review published in 2007 in Frontiers of Physics in China (Springer-Verlag), reports a number of research groups reaching, over the previous year, 100% success. I There are turf battles within the cold fusion community. The idea that they knee-jerk support each other is not confirmed by my observation of discussions and reports within that communityl
The issue is not whether you believe it or I believe it, you know that. As to "newer results," the Miles work was published in the 1990s. Storms reviews the literature in his book, The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction, 2007, and Miles' work was debated in peer-reviewed journals extensively in the 1990s. Storms also covers the work of Bush and Lagowski (1998), Gozzi (many publications, 1993, 1995, 1998), McKubre (2000), Hagelstein (2004) , and he cites fifteen additional studies finding unexpected helium, without a report of the helium-energy relationship. And then he states what is now obvious:

"If the data are accepted, we also need to accept that somehow helium and energy are apparently being created at the same time without generating gamma emission. Or this information can be simply ignored, as it was by many members of the DoE panel convened in 2004 to evaluate cold fusion."

He's right. That panel report actually establishes clearly that cold fusion has reasonable acceptance among the mainstream (one third of reviewers considered evidence for nuclear origin of excess heat to be "somewhat convincing," at least, one-half of reviewers considered evidence for excess heat to be "convincing"), but it also shows that most of the extreme skepticism remaining isn't based on evidence, but on continued attachment to theory. The helium results were clearly ignored by many of the reviewers (examining their individual reports), and thus they ignored the single most powerful collection of evidence not only for excess heat but also for a nuclear origin of some kind. "Fiasco of the century," Huizenga's term, is accurate, but Huizenga was, as the very hostile co-chair of the 1989 panel, part of it. Cold fusion was never rejected through scientific process, it was politically rejected, and very effectively (consider yourself, and consider me up until January!) not on the basis of conclusive evidence, but only a theory of experimental artifact that has become increasingly difficult to sustain. The basic protocols of science were massively violated, and the U. Utah press conference was only the beginning of it. Scientists were pissed about that conference, but, in fact, it should have been irrelevant, it was no reason to reject Fleischmann's work, only to suspect that it was prematurely announced. Which was accurate. I doubt that the neutron findings would have made it into a mature report. Instead, we'd have had better reporting of the heat, we'd not have had the massive and totally premature efforts to replicate what people didn't even have clear reports on, rushed to publication based totally on failure, etc., etc.

The skeptics are just as responsible for this as the attorneys at U. Utah. They also had axes to grind. If cold fusion had been accepted, there would go, probably, their careers, their entire expertise, particle physics, would lose massive funding, hot fusion has been a huge money sink, with most of the money then being diverted into materials science, about which they know little.

Talk about poor payback for input energy! So far, no hot fusion experiment has generated energy payback, to my recollection. Yet billions of dollars have been and are being poured into it, sustaining entire facilities and careers. This is not without effect on opinion, One! It's like the Cab on Wikipedia, it doesn't take a "secret conspiracy," just a common POV and interest.

On the other hand, there are elements of conspiracy involved, if we read the sources, though. Suppose you are a patent examiner who has views favorable to cold fusion and you talk to the single examiner who reviews the "cold fusion" applications? You organize a conference in Washington on the topic, on your own time? There goes your job, based on very heavy lobbying from Park, then of the APS, who bragged about it. The examiner, after years of appeals, was sustained. And many more incidents show a very, very unscientific agenda being pursued with vigor, scientists impeached without cause, losing prestige, funding, and access to the crucial resource of grad student labor. And on and on. And documented in reliable source, academically published.

Really, One, I think you and some others, while very sympathetic in some ways, sometimes, have still had blinders on. I've asked for evidence showing me my errors. No evidence, just repetition of assumptions without evidence.

On-wiki, I examined the evidence presented for tendentious editing, I spent hours and hours. That evidence is preposterous, but was approved by a majority of arbs. The evidence actually included one citation that is ultimately to evidence presented by Enric Naval where he basically opposed what became the decision in RfAr/Fringe science. Literally. Enric's opinion, given before I had touched the cold fusion article, is cited as proof of my tendentious editing. In fact, it shows what I was faced with: consistent and persistent rejection of quality reliable sources based on nothing more than editorial opinion that they are "fringe." Exactly what ArbComm rejected. ArbComm should, in fact, if it were awake, be commending me, not topic banning me or worse.

I understand the argument about working with others; however, you know very well that if a group of editors has taken hold of an article, and are biasing it, and an editor arrives who tries to balance the article, and grow it, using quality sources, the group is going to reject and possibly even harass this editor. It happens. It really happens, in many places -- only the tip of the iceberg has been explored in this case -- with the Cab named, who can back it up with admin tools, and have, not just once, but many times.

People will believe what they believe, without evidence, and it can be extraordinarily persistent, I've seen this for many, many years. It's possible to punch through this (Or, more accurately, sidestep it), but it is not easy. And it has practically nothing to do, initially, with Wikipedia guidelines.
Yes. They were totally outraged, immediately. What upstarts! However, Fleischmann was world-class, a very respected electrochemist, probably the best. They couldn't just deride him from the start, they had to have a basis. So many rushed out to (dis)confirm. P&F had spent five years working on this, developing techniques, trying to figure out how to make the effect reliably appear, and with larger excess heat percentages, and weren't ready to publish. The physicists -- the APS 1999 review notes this -- had no expertise in calorimetry, Fleischmann's long suit. (The review says that part of the problem was that chemists were playing at physics and physicists were playing at chemistry.) As I noted in an earlier response, the MIT report, considered by many a conclusive refutation of cold fusion, was based on 10 days of electrolysis, and a reported loading ratio that is now known to be inadequate (below 80%; my theory is that the effect only appears, actually, at something like 200% or 400%, which is utterly impossible except as a transient state, very locally, at the surface.) The early negative replications were very sloppy science, but were featured and promoted, and then, publication in the same journals was shut down. Fleischmann was not allowed to respond.

This is the summary I've given: the chemists say this is not chemistry, it must be nuclear physics, and the physicists say that this is not nuclear physics, it must be chemistry.

Once we realize that "nuclear physics" is a field entirely based on plasma physics and an assumption that approximations that work well in plasma physics don't ever break down in the condensed matter environment, and so we gloss "nuclear physicists" as "plasma, particle physicists," what they studied and have experience and expertise with, we can see the possible solution that makes both sides right.

It's not chemistry and it's not plasma physics, it's condensed matter nuclear science. A new field. A disruptive new field, long on experiment and short on theory, as yet, that might destabilize established institutions and careers. Very hot stuff, for sure.

I'm not asking you, One, to "believe in cold fusion." Just to recognize that I'm not blowing smoke, that there are sound reasons, in the sources, for my opinions, and that, until someone actually addresses real problems with the sources, I'm justified in persisting in considering that opinion reasonable (I don't actually "hold" opinions, that is, cling to them, I merely allow opinions with a certain level of support in experience to be an operating assumption. A rebuttable one. I'm actually a skeptic, believing in nothing you can nail down.)

Posted by: Abd

Exactly. The difference, of course, is that with AGW, the majority is right and with Cold fusion, it's wrong!

Let me restate this: if I make a stand for what I believe is an important truth that humanity must recognize, or it is in danger of great loss, it's prudence and responsibility and common sense.

If you take a stand for what you think is prudence, responsibility and common sense, it is "faith-based wishful thinking." There is no contradiction, because you and I are different. I am an informed, intelligent, editor and you are a POV-pusher, an ignorant fanatic.

Is this clear? Or do I have it reversed?

Seriously, we need good process which can dismantle these disputes, allowing them to be compartmentalized into resolvable questions. It's known how to do this, but what works is largely rejected on Wikipedia in favor of blocks and bans to exclude minority POV, and those who push it, whereas those who push majority POV are rewarded or at least tolerated. Wherever I've become familiar with a controversial topic, I've seen damage, ongoing damage, so I infer that it's happening in many other places as well.

And if I say that I'm intending to confront it -- which merely means stand up to it and allow the community to judge, through careful process -- this is when the calls for me to be completely banned rise to a crescendo. It's pretty normal in human society, and Wikipedia is no exception: the majority does not like its opinions to be questioned, see the article on Socrates. The problem has become totally clear, at least to me!

Posted by: Moulton

Whether or not you believe any of the theories about global warming, the evidence that the polar ice caps are melting is irrefutable. In the case of cold fusion, the reaction vessels don't become hot. Nuclear fusion releases a lot of heat (as we saw in the mushroom clouds).

Posted by: Abd

No, AFAIK. Doubt it would work. No way to get the high packing. C nanotubes might work, maybe, creating a confinement channel. Don't hold your breath.

Posted by: No one of consequence

The problem is with the "anthropogenic" part, and with scientists trying to stifle criticism and dissent by shouting "consensus, now shut up", which is not very scientific, and which was my real point.

As far as cold fusion is concerned, if the palladium electroplating method works so well, I'd like to see the excess heat converted into electricity to power the cell. Then we'll have something to talk about.

Posted by: Abd

I can see why you'd think that, but it's off-point. It depends, not merely on the reality of the effect, but on scalability and continuity as well. I'm talking about a science problem, you are looking for an engineering demonstration. Given that not all cold fusion cells have continuous power input, the whole concept is off. There are nuclear reactions that cannot be used for power generation, for practical reasons, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

Co-dep works well in terms of repeatability, but probably not for the application suggested. The question is a mirror to Free Energy. If it isn't free energy, why bother? That's a practical question, not a science question.

As to AGW, yes, same problem, failure to understand the importance of open (and efficient) process for challenging consensus, real or apparent.

Posted by: Mathsci

MastCell seems far more expert in science topics than Thatcher.

Posted by: GoRight

Regarding the discussion of the policy changes to WP:BAN at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Banning_policy#Reinstating_edits_of_banned_users.3F, what is the probably that we will get any momentum going again? Has Ottava Rima just handed Will Beback everything he wanted by derailing the entire discussion?

Is she a real person or is she under the control of someone with a vested interest in all of this? She is also the one that originally suggested that I was a sock master to Raul654 back in the discussion regarding my editing sanction with respect to the real life WMC. Now she may have given Raul654 exactly what he (presumably) wants in terms of keeping the policy language as it is because he can use it to ban AGW skeptic POV via Scibaby. Ironically also protecting Will Beback's apparent desire to use it for similar purposes even though she claims to oppose him on that front.

Can someone truly be that naive or stupid?

Posted by: Abd

In some cold fusion experiments, the reaction vessels become hot. Sure, nuclear fusion releases a lot of heat. If you have a lot of reaction taking place, all at once.

In an operating cold fusion cell, with heat being generated (which happens, by the way, with the electrolysis current switched off, these things keep running for a time, more time than could be maintained with chemical storage), the heat is apparently coming from very small regions, tiny hot spots, at or very near the surface of the palladium. That's what's normal.

But sometimes bulk palladium cells have melted down; early in Fleischmann's work, he's reported, a cube of palladium melted, the apparatus melted, and burned a hole through the lab bench and down into the concrete floor. I wrote here about Mizuno's work. Those cells became hot.

This is the part of the work that has been very difficult to reproduce. Getting small amounts of excess heat, clearly excess heat, is simple. Or, more accurately, it's known how to do it. Massive heat, no, but because of so many reports of it happening, researchers are obviously tantalized and keep looking for how to make it happen more often. Without losing the lab. By the way, the explosions that have happened aren't from this. A researcher died at SRI when a recombiner failed and unrecombined deuterium and oxygen built up inside the cell. The researcher picked up the cell and apparently jarred it. The recombiner then did its job all at once. Bang. But that was a chemical explosion. It wouldn't have melted palladium.

Posted by: Abd

Stupid, yes, you proved it. Naive, I reserve for foolish assumptions of good faith, which isn't what you were doing.

Ottava Rima isn't part of the Cab, for sure. Naive? Maybe, don't know and don't care. There's so much naivete floating around, among otherwise intelligent administrators and arbitrators, that a little extra in some editor would hardly be noticeable.

It was a comment I made to Ottava Rima when the editor was blocked for trying to help Wilhelmina Will that brought my attention to that whole can of worms. I was attacked for saying something kind to Ottava. Really? There must be something weird going on here, so I checked it out.... and there was.

The problem isn't bad editors, the problem isn't even Raul654, GoRight, though that's certainly a tempting hypothesis. The problem is the structure, or, more accurately, what is missing from the structure. It could be supplied, but it will take ...

off-wiki work. Don't hold your breath. But sometimes pigs fly and wishes are horses. How about we find out?

It is necessary for me to be banned for me to start working off-wiki. I'm not likely to do it if I'm not banned, too much trouble, too easy to get distracted by working on articles.

Posted by: dtobias

I think the proper "irregular conjugation" is:

I'm taking a stand for prudence, responsibility, and common sense.

You are engaged in faith-based wishful thinking.

He/she is a POV-pusher and an ignorant fanatic.

Posted by: One

And now we've jumped to the realm of urban legend and positively unverifiable work. Golly, that could have been a cold fusion China syndrome! Plus Mizuno's ridiculous assumption that his student accidentally caused electrolyte to boil away via cold fusion in 1978 (never mind that the effect isn't replicated when they're actually trying--and only after "months" of loading). Few are so credulous, Abd.



Ottava seems concerned about this change being used against Peter Damian (even though everyone agrees that the purpose is to codify the more lenient standards that actually exist). I'm particularly confused because he supported my change early on, but I'm very much on the same page as Thatcher, Nathan, and others he attacks. Maybe Peter could weigh in on this change himself to defuse this?

Posted by: Moulton

The problem with these improbable stories from the annals of cold fusion is that they are not as entertaining as the ones published in the satirical Journal of Irreproducible Results.

Posted by: No one of consequence

Really? Has MastCell ever publicly stated his scientific credentials? More importantly, have I?

I first began to question AGW when I heard about 6 journal editors being http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/13423/ for publishing a study that questioned the received wisdom of the Mann hockey stick (that's not a link to some "denier" site, that's MIT). I don't have to be William M. Connolley's dissertation advisor to see that the AGW crowd was acting more like Pope Urban VIII than Galileo*. Nor does it take a PhD in climatology to understand that when scientists publish studies based on complex analysis of large data sets, and then refuse to provide a copy of the data or details of their analytical methods to their peers, they are not acting like scientists should.

I'll admit that I would need a PhD in climatology to accurately determine for myself whether Mann's bristlecone pine tree ring series records temperature, as he claims, or rainfall, as some others claim. But I don't have to be an expert to know that forcing people to resign for publishing a paper that raises the issue is just not good science.

*Ottava explains that my view of the Pope Urban/Galileo relationship is incorrect. So consider the analogy in the loose, pop-cult sense only.

Posted by: GoRight

Hear, hear! 100% on the mark correct. If your facts and your conclusions are correct, they will speak for themselves and you won't need to resort to political tactics in a science debate. More importantly this whole secret data meme is 100% counter to good, reproducible science.

Posted by: Mathsci

Thatcher has switched from CF to GW - I don't quite know why. Isn't MastCell a trained doctor?

I want to know about the company Abd is currently creating that possibly might be able to send monkeys to Jupiter for the price of a milk shake. The future of our planet is apparently in Abd's hands. I hope he has remembered the bananas.

Posted by: Abd

And thus we see one of the basic problems. It's a principle of common law that testimony is presumed true unless controverted, and when experimental scientists, who are, more than anything else, rained reporters, report something, it's a hazardous undertaking to deny the very report, which is different from skepticism or even denial of conclusions.

The phenomena of unusually high heat output has been reported by many researchers; the extremes like the one Fleischmann reported are very rare. Sure, there is possibly another explanation than cold fusion, though it's hard to imagine, but.... Moulton was saying that "hot" doesn't happen, and it does, and, in fact, "hot" has become fairly common with some types of cells, just not so hot as to melt everything.

The Journal of Irreproducible Results may be entertaining, but the cold fusion field is replete with reproducible and reproduced results, and even better, correlations between independent measurements, which is golden, because it validates both sets of measurements. (Explain why excess heat measurements, allegedly unreliable, would correlate very strongly with helium measurements, also allegedly unreliable!)

Essentially, Moulton, I conclude you are blowing smoke, and it's not worth responding further. I do assume good faith, at the beginning, but when a writer demonstrates total imperviousness, making up new objections and potshots instead of addressing the previous ones, acknowledging what can be acknowledged and making the basis for any continued disagreement clear, I drop it and move on. Now I know why you were blocked, Moulton. It's obvious.

Right. It's safer to push the worst accusations out to people who are not present, "them." You know, the trouble-makers, cause of all that is wrong with the world, unlike you and me, of course, we might disagree, but that's among friends, right?

Moving beyond this can be done, and it is standard practice among professional facilitators.

Remarkable incident today. I dropped a friendly note welcoming JzG back, since he's started editing again. He did not take it well, at least that is how it seems. I thought he might laugh! Apparently, he's holding on to something. It's sad, because holding on to negative stuff is how we poison ourselves. It's his right, I'm not going to hold it against him, but ... it's still sad. In any case, I can leave Wikipedia knowing that I'm not holding on to that old stuff; I've still got stuff to process from the recent matters, but I will.

Posted by: Abd

These are not urban legends, they are published by scientists, trained observers and reporters. Testimony from named witnesses, "urban legends" is blowing polemical smoke.

Summary: you're an idiot, One, so to speak. I'm not credulous, I've seen many reports of runaway heat, so it's reasonable as an operating assumption that it happens. Remember, difficulty of reproduction of excess heat was one of the biggest reasons for the wave of rejection in 1989-1990, and excess heat is now firmly established in peer-reviewed secondary source. Firmly. Yet the level of excess heat in Fleischmann-type cells is highly variable. So that sometimes it is way excess isn't terribly surprising. If we knew how to get that large excursion, it would be all over. Cold fusion would be commercially practical. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent in the effort, so far, and one of the reasons the effort was abandoned was that quantitative reliability wasn't attained with high heat generation. It has been with low heat, without that major energy input, indeed, with hardly any input at all.

You didn't read carefully, One. Mizuno did not assume what you stated. He, in fact, found both explanations unreasonable, but this often happens in experimental science: there are mysterious results that are never explained. Only a few actually get tracked down and confirmed. In this case, very good chance, had Mizuno tried to reproduce the effect he saw, he would very likely have failed, unless he was lucky. Fleischmann wasn't only doing basic science, the right way, trying to falsify a theory that he accepted, he was also very lucky, just a small variation of something, slightly different palladium, and he'd have found nothing.

It took over twenty years of effort (if we count the first five by Fleischmann) to bring his technique to the point where most or all cells, depending on exact technique, show the effects.

And you have, again, been missing most of what I've written. That's okay, but don't imagine that you are rejecting it, because you don't know what "it" is. Let me repeat one statement: codeposition cells show excess heat immediately, without lengthy loading. The lengthy loading really has nothing to do with excess heat, though it raises obvious suspicions because of the energy input. It's necessary with bulk palladium because that's how long it takes to get high loading factors under those conditions. In a codeposition cell, the palladium plating is built up simultaneously with the generation of deuterium gas, so it is immediately fully loaded and it immediately -- within a few minutes -- shows the effect.

Arata cells show immediate heat. They consist of a little nanoparticle palladium, i.e., very high surface area per gram, and the cell is loaded with deuterium gas under pressure. The cells get very hot immediately, but that is heat of formation of the deuteride. Same with hydrogen and the hydride. By the way, Arata was just independently confirmed in a peer-reviewed publication, there is discussion of it on Talk:Cold fusion, and it's misguided, of course. If this were a purely primary report, the claim there that this is undigested news would be on point. But it is, in fact, a confirmation of earlier Arata publication under peer review in Japan, so it's a notch up.

Anyway, when the cell containing 7 grams of palladium is loaded with hydrogen, there is the initial heat release from forming the hydride, and then the cell settles to ambient within a few hours. When it is loaded with deuterium, there is the initial heat release, and then the cell settles to four degrees C. above ambient. And stays there. For the full run, which has been 3000 hours.

So take that "months of loading" and smoke it, if it gets you high to keep repeating it, as you have. Enjoy. I'm not directly working on Wikipedia consensus any more, so my approach is changing, as you might have noticed. My goal isn't consensus any more, it's process to allow others to find consensus.

Posted by: Abd

I do live my life as if the future of the planet is in my hands, and I wish others would also do it. Because, collectively, it is. Well, maybe not the "planet," but certainly human society and the environment we live in.

Monkeys to Jupiter? The company is only about reproducing well-known effects, published already in peer-reviewed literature, at least the projects I'd personally be working on would involve that. So if there is peer-reviewed literature about sending monkeys to Jupiter so cheaply, I'd be all ears.

On second thought, I'd leave that to someone else. Sending monkeys to Jupiter, even if it can be done, has nothing to do with cold fusion, it merely demonstrates the shallow bankruptcy of Mathsci's thinking.

Posted by: JohnA

The trouble is that the physics of fluids which is modelled by GCMs is smack bang in the middle of Freeman Dyson's expertise. Which is why his criticisms of climate modelling have so much weight and why Wikipedia's eco-extremist tag team doesn't want their nice consensus troubled by an extremely qualified outsider.

Even though Michael Mann, of the notoriously broken Hockey Stick fame, admitted to a scientific committee that he was not a statistician (a point that all of us can agree on), nevertheless he continues to teach courses on statistics and continue to make statistical howlers in "peer reviewed" (ie by people as clueless as he is) literature.

One might wonder how Mann can be simultaneously outside of his expertise and yet allowed to pontificate within it, while Freeman Dyson is completely within his area of expertise and yet somehow outside of it.

Its amazing how far logic and reality can stretch when you're trying to defend the indefensible.

Posted by: Mathsci

http://www.mail-archive.com/vortex-l%40eskimo.com/msg34220.html

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