Cold fusion, Why not? Options

[Abd]

I'll just start this with a whimper, not a bang. JzG, the big meanie, just removed Yet Another Link to lenr-canr.org from Cold fusion. Waaa! Teacher told him not to do that! I'm going to take my marbles home! Now that I'm banned, I get to whine all I want! It's kinda fun!

No discussion, he gave the same argument that was discussed to death at Martin Fleischmann (T-H-L-K-D), that was discussed to death at MediaWiki talk:Whitelist, and always, in the end, rejected.

Pure wikilawyering: there is zero legal risk to Wikipedia from linking to that paper, the web site claims permission for all that it hosts, and if there is a defect with a couple of pages, it's basically irrelevant. (Very different situation with newenergytimes.com, they host under a claim of fair use, which they can get away with as a nonprofit until the publisher squawks.) The specific paper he delinked was approved by Beetstra at the whitelist page, after all the objections had been raised about copyright.

Ban the cat, the place is overrun with mice. Kind of cute, aren't they?

Wikipedia, you traded Abd and WMC's bit for JzG and Hipocrite. Enjoy.

[Abd]

Well, I was banned for a year, the Cold fusion article stagnated. When Pcarbonn came off his year ban at the beginning of this year, JzG went to AN and suggested that he was "pushing the same POV that got him banned before," and the claque obliged with a community extension of the topic ban, based on JzG pointing out talk page posts where he appeared to be pushing a fringe POV by pointing to relliable sources. JzG didn't mention that they were talk page posts, didn't mention that Pcarbonn was completely not making article edits, and didn't mention that ArbComm had sanctioned JzG for his activities with Cold fusion. They just saw their friend JzG proposing something, so "Yeah!" "Yeah" "Off with his head!"

JzG, as he'd done many times, claimed that Pcarbonn was banned because of his POV. Maybe, but ArbComm certainly wouldn't have said that, it would be so obviously a policy violation. What ArbComm actually banned him for was for writing an article complimentary of Wikipedia, in New Energy Times, a cold fusion publication, where Pcarbonn described using Wikipedia guidelines and careful and civil process to "correct media imbalance."

It was completely taken out of context as presented by JzG to ArbComm. The field is an unusual one, where, for quite some time, there has been a gap between what is in peer-reviewed reliable source, and what was in popular media (the popular media didn't begin to shift until after Pcarbonn was banned.) In other words, Pcarbonn was arranging for the article to follow policy for science articles!

The usual. Pcarbonn was assassinated by JzG's framing of what he'd done.

I'm off my ban and now and made an edit to the article, incorporating what had been removed by WMC, in his edit under protection that ArbComm actually dinged him for. Then I self-reverted because I'm COI now, and went to Talk and proposed the edit, explaining the history. And, of course, they came out of the woodwork to argue a pile of irrelevancies. The usual, the usual, so what else is new?

Rlevse took time out of his busy day to ding me for "walls of text." I wasn't banned from walls of text, though that may have been the real complaint of some arbs. They really don't like to read anything, it's too much work if it's longer than a sentence or two.

And Tony Sidaway, of course, because I'd commented in some threads on Cold fusion where I didn't start the discussion, invoked the MYOB ban. I'm not sure what the "dispute" was that was a Wikipedia dispute, it was mostly off-topic rambling, but one of these actually mentioned my "company," and so I commented briefly.

I'm reminded of why I came to have such a low opinion of the non-recusing arbs and of people like TS. Pure wikilawyer, Tony is. He'd helped me get dinged earlier this year by editing a poll on AN to remove the bolding so that he and Future Perfect could claim it wasn't a "poll," because I was allowed to comment in polls but not to "intervene in disputes."

They really want me Gone, and they will do about anything to accomplish that. And I WP:DGAF. I do have a lot better stuff to do, and if their article on Cold fusion is about one percent of what could be written from reliable sources -- and that's probably about right --, so what?

They don't want people to revert war, they want people to discuss. Except they don't want people to discuss, if they actually discuss, with depth and sources, it's a "wall of text" and "Go Away! You're "dominating the discussion."

In other words, they are acting to prevent the only method of real dispute resolution that works to find true consensus: discussion in depth. That discussion can be moved to some other page, there are lots of devices that can be used, but they aren't interested, really. It is not necessary that everyone read that discussion. Discussion will find some level of agreement, perhaps, between those discussing, who will then present it to the larger group. It is standard, basic, deliberative process, which Wikipedia actually uses but which it has never generally understood, so it doesn't use it when it is most needed.

On Martin Fleischmann I managed a difficult discussion over the use of a paper from Martin himself. JzG had been revert warring over it. I kept refactoring that discussion to summarize agreements and keep the focus on what remained to be resolved. It worked. The consensus was real, and it was stable. Anyone could come and see the summary of the process on the top level, and could look at whatever detail they wanted. JzG really didn't like that, but he tried to neglect it and was reverted by other admins.

An editor who is very much anti-cold fusion, part of the problem last year, went to NYB and complained about my "walls of text." He'd seen a comment by NYB in the case last year and thought that NYB would be supportive. Didn't complain to me! just to an arb he thought would be supportive. These guys only know opposition and battle, the idea of asking someone, of discussing it, is completely foreign to them, and they see everything through the lens of victory and loss. Seeing the comments arrive on Talk:Cold fusion, Keven Bass was reminded why he'd been so disgusted last year.

Me too.

ArbComm doesn't care if admins or "productive editors" are abusive. It is terrified that if it reprimands or -- horrors! -- suspends tool use until an admin agrees to follow recusal policy or other policies, the admin and his friends will Go Away and leave the project hanging without all that free skilled volunteer labor. That's the real reason, I believe, that admin abuse is tolerated. Fear that the great hordes of uninitiated editors will take over.

It's essentially stupid, because abuse is driving away editors every day. But that's what it is.

I was accused of driving away editors at Cold fusion, though no actual example was presented. Yet I'm aware of real scientists who have been driven away from that article, whether by ban or by sheer frustration. One of them funded my "company."

Most of the scientists I know, and I now know many in the field, wouldn't even think of trying to edit Wikipedia in any fashion. And that's what I've encountered from academics in many fields. Bad Situation, and not getting any better, because ArbComm has been unwilling to confront blatant abuse, happening even on its own Arbitration pages.

Meanwhile, I really do need to do some cell fabrication, the design is nailed down, greatly improved, I believe, over my first concepts. I'm just slow as hell. But I hope to be running the cell for the first time within two months. So far, all I've sold is LR-115 solid state radiation detector material. Cool stuff, way cool. Cheap. Much easier to use than the more common CR-39.

[Herschelkrustofsky]

Rlevse took time out of his busy day to ding me for "walls of text." I wasn't banned from walls of text, though that may have been the real complaint of some arbs. They really don't like to read anything, it's too much work if it's longer than a sentence or two.

I like cold fusion and I like you, but if there's a 12-step program for "walls of text," you should join it.

[Milton Roe]

Rlevse took time out of his busy day to ding me for "walls of text." I wasn't banned from walls of text, though that may have been the real complaint of some arbs. They really don't like to read anything, it's too much work if it's longer than a sentence or two.

I like cold fusion and I like you, but if there's a 12-step program for "walls of text," you should join it.

You can see such a program in A River Runs Through It, both in novel and film. Its in the bits where Tom Skerritt plays the stern Scottish-American teacher of his sons about spare writing:

As a Presbyterian, my father believed that man by nature was a damn mess. And that only by picking up God's rhythms, were we able to regain power and beauty. To him, all good things, trout as well as eternal salvation, come by Grace. And Grace comes by art. And art does not come easy.

That is Norman Maclean also talking about his own father, the Rev. John Maclean, who flensed his sermons mercilessly of fat. The father would make his sons write an essay, then have them rewrite and reduce it in length by half, but still keep all the content. Then do it yet again.

The newspapers they later worked for, taught both Maclean and his contemporary Ernest Hemingway (whose summer childhoods fishing on the great river of the north in the early years of the 20th century were much like those in this book), to continue the same reduction. Maclean suggests Hemingway without ever naming him. Eventually, the more famous author would go on to reach the zen point where he began cutting out even "essential" information about emotion, relying on event description to reliably evoke feelings from the reader's common human experience, by suggestion only. It is the ultimate human-experience data-compression. Hemingway alludes to an iceberg-- the idea being that only 1/9th of an iceberg is above the water, but the rest can be reliably deduced and thus needs no description, if you can evoke only what one sees when seeing the visible part of an iceberg.

Allusion and metaphor also help in this struggle for minimalism. Abd, are you listening? Possibly you don't trust the reader to read you closely enough, to also get what you're NOT directly saying? But by expostulating at that length, you ironically guarantee what you fear.

[Herschelkrustofsky]

Allusion and metaphor also help in this struggle for minimalism.

This is more to the point. You can be both more concise, and more persuasive, if you can find a way to communicate an idea rather than mere "information."

[Zoloft]

Allusion and metaphor also help in this struggle for minimalism.

This is more to the point. You can be both more concise, and more persuasive, if you can find a way to communicate an idea rather than mere "information."

Abd needs to be a hummingbird in the rainforest, flitting from flower to flower, getting only the nectar, not a tapir crunching aimlessly through the underbrush of verbiage.

Also heartily approve of Elements of Style. The little book is a sharp tool.