Abd-William M. Connolley, The Cabal strikes back Options

[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.")

[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.

[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?

[Grep]

The problem is that Abd is wasting everybody's time by posting

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

That is how you know this is a crazy story.

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.

[Milton Roe]

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.

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.