General background is here http://ocham.blogspot.com/2011/02/general-...l-nonsense.html . Same story - find something that is really and badly wrong, make a correction, and wait for some stupid c--t to reverse it. "HelloAnnyong (talk | contribs)" is the latest useful idiot.

I was asked by some linguists at the University of Sheffield (and some other places) to help out with this one.

I had an email from a member of Arbcom about that but all empty promises as usual. [blanked] Useful idiots or liars. Who can tell.

More nonsense here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Peter_Damian_VIII .

Damn, you are still a glutton for punishment.

Just give it up. (he said wearily)
Post it on your blog and tell others, leave it at that.

(Better yet, put out a book about your experiences on wiki.
That would be a major embarrassment for them.)

Why? I choose these battles carefully. As I said, there are a whole group of qualified linguists who are watching this with incredulity. I've said this again and again: people like you, Eric, know exactly how Wikipedia works. 99.999% of humanity believe otherwise. Why exactly give it up? Just fight the battle, one trench at a time. And don't shoot people in the back. My blog has a massive readership now, and there has to be a story. Am I wrong to bring the problems of Wikipedia to the world? Answer me.

[edit] There is a parallel business going on with the Arbcom and others right now. Desperate to stop this, and trying to persuade me to come back if only I'll agree to this and that. To which I say: fuck you. Keep fighting the fight. Who is with me?

It would be good for someone to write an academic article which critically analyses Wikipedia content. Criticism of Wikipedia has 190 citations, with only a few academic journal articles and conference publications. Is that all there is?

I'm building up all my material, together with other stuff, which eventually will end up in a book. As you know, John, I have another book on Scotus which I am working on. I need to get that out of the way before this project. Most books have a phase of collecting material, probably only 10% of which ends up outside the waste bin.

How are the lies coming on in the liars committee, John? Make no mistake, there is some interesting and nasty stuff you are all sitting on there, indeed.

[edit] Eh fuck me even more nonsense. Someone is bottom wiping my own page. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=413195672 .

Ah, that wasn't quite clear. Sorry.

By all means, use these battles to demonstrate to your colleagues how Wikipedia doesn't work.
That would be a good adjunct to publication on paper, although I don't think it would be quite a
replacement. Running it thru a printing press confers weight that anything posted on a website
doesn't have--still, even after 20 years of the web's existence.


Make certain your fellow academics see that--write up a timeline.

I undid the reversion. It was unfounded and the user didn't even leave an edit summary.

I'll see what else I can do.



Edit: Okay, I read the talk page and your comments. Here's what I have to say on them. I have no comment on the Overview and Summary section and whether it properly represents the views expressed in the book. I haven't read it, so I can't say anything about that.

However, I actively disagree with your opinion on what should be included in a criticism section. Criticism is criticism. As long as it is coming from reputable sources and not a blogger or a random individual, it doesn't matter if the critic is misrepresenting or misunderstanding the words of the author. That is the critic's fault, but we are not here to censor or pick and choose what words to say from the critic. We include it as a whole and if the critic is wrong, that is their issue.

So, my non-random news articles published on Examiner.com are reputable, right?

The Examiner is written, for the most part, by random people. You know that.

But see, now you have to prove that everyone else is not insane, which is clearly impossible to do, since everyone is insane.

I also have an interest in the coverage of fringe and pseudoscience topics at wp. To give you a little background... I'm a staff astronomer at an historic observatory where I am involved in public outreach and education. I'm also a visiting scholar in the dept. of physics at a major university where my research is in the history of science. I've also encountered a number of frustrations with editing at wp. See Astronomer vs Amateur for an idea of the kinds of intereactions that sometimes occur in my field, or take a look at the history of edits at Moon landing conspiracy theories for an example of just how ridiculous things can get. Today I've adopted Meteorological astrology, which despite the atrocious state of the page and the long standing crap that has been inserted, has a fascinating history. (cf. Kepler and Weather Prediction and A History and Test of Planetary Weather Forecasting)

I'd like to invite you to Wikiversity, a sister WMF project of WP, to discuss the coverage of topics such as these and document the problems that are frequently seen in the development of articles at wp.

Don't want to hijack the thread but just want to say that there's all kinds of stuff like that in Economics related articles as well. The "mild fringe" consists of stuff like supply-side economics or the peak-oil folks and their derivatives. Then you get into the folks who think the Fed Res is a global conspiracy to keep somebody down (they don't always agree who), then you have high school kids writing stuff they half-remembered from their basic econ classes and fighting to keep it in the articles, etc. (note that most of these do have some kernel of truth to them but then that's how pseudo science usually works).

Off the top of my head I give you Binary Economics for your viewing pleasure. The tags are mine, and recent (and I just had to put them back after some fan removed them). At one point an effort was made to make something decent of the article but it went down in spectacular flames. Basically, keeping it tagged is the best outcome one can hope for. Make sure to check out the talk page for more hilarious insanity.

If you had read the talk page carefully you would have seen that the source was not reliable. So the criticism was both seriously misplaced, and from an unreliable and biased source http://www.generalsemantics.org/store/37-kodish-books (basically self-published).



And that is just the problem with Wikipedia, and amateurs like you who are writing it. You can easily cherry-pick even reliable sources to make it seem as though some reputable scholar is wrong. That is exactly what the Wikipedia junk scientists do. To write properly about a subject you need to take a balanced view that involves both a wide and deep knowledge of it, and an understanding of what matters. A mere list of quotes to prove ‘boo’ or ‘hurray’ is not the right way.



You're not hijacking the thread this is exactly what it should be about.



Isn't Wikiversity also a bit mad? I maintain a page here http://www.wikipediareview.com/Directory:The_Wik...a_Point_of_View documenting some of the stuff - the only problem is that it doesn't allow shared accounts.

Something to think about. For a long time I've thought the only way to do this is to carefully document the whole thing.

That is truly excellent, and the talk page is a gem.

Perhaps take a subject and blog about it. Introduce the subject in such a way that it is obvious the average reader that it is bunkum, without patronising them. Then a permalink to the Wikipedia article about it, then some gentle fun at the expense of the main characters. E.g. who is Comrade Marek?

[edit] Another possible way. Create another parallel wiki that only contains articles about the weird stuff, but with enlightenment. Do it in an amusing and entertaining way, and you will get many readers. Perhaps Wikipedia will end up linking to it.

Volunteer Marek is me. Or actually I took my name after him.

Mad as a hatter. (Don't get me started on cold fusion...)

But, it is environment where we could pursue such a project,. I'm an admin and 'crat there.

Also, you might be interested in participating in the new wikimedia Expert involvement survey.

But they're about the best people on ArbCom; surely everyone else is worse ... oh ...

You have Ottava and Abd popping round to your talk page? How nice. I must pop in for a cup of tea.

Well, after this thread reminded me of the Binary Economics article, I made the mistake of trying to do something about it which led to the usual run in with a "normal crazy Wikipedia person" (that should be a standardized term by now, NCraWP) . Apparently I really hate "original thought" (in a very fundamental way)

The sad thing is that this article has been total crap for something like 4+ years now, anyone who's ever tried to do something about it has just given up and I'm about to do the same. All in all, this particular article is sooooo bad that anyone reading it that has an ounce of intelligence will see it for what it is. I'd sort of like for there to be at least some tags on it to worn of the dumber readers off (yes, yes, I do care about the dumber Wikipedia readers) but given the camping that this Rodney Shakespear does on it it ain't gonna happen.

In other words, the binary thing is that you pay attention as wealth is created, or not?

Why is everybody obscessed with labor, anyway? (Mental, physical...) Is it defined as something you're rather not be doing, and thus should be paid for?

That's actually not a trivial question. Sort of goes back to Marx but really back to Ricardo (from whom Marx essentially lifted anything of value that is actually there in Marxist theory (along with a bit of Smith, Malthus and the Physiocrats) - hence Paul Samuelson's description of Marx as a "minor post-Ricardian"). If you want to take it a step further than you go back to John Locke and the idea that fundamentally the only thing that a person owns (should own/has a "natural right to own") is her "labor". Then, some crazy mental flip flops and a bit of metaphysics later on, you get the labor theory of value (amazingly, that's actually a rare instance of a pretty good Wikipedia article on an essentially outdated/discarded theory - my own opinion on the matter is that a lot of the old-school Marxist economists were wrong but they did develop "scientific" and logically coherent theories. You can have an intelligent conversation here. Stuff like this "Binary economics" junk is just pure gibberish).

All that got superseded by the marginal utility theory, or it's more modern formulation "choice theory" where, more or less, yes, labor is defined as an "input" that produces an "output". Meaning, that yes in mainstream economics - even in much of modern Marxian economics - labor is defined as something that you'd rather not be doing (hence, you will require a payment for it) which ALSO produces something useful (hence someone will be WILLING to pay you for it). Some special cases where for example you produce something useful but you also enjoy doing it can be covered by a more general formulation of "joint production" (i.e. equivalent to a situation where you have some inputs which produce two+ kinds of output, like milk and natural fertilizer, or research papers and "fun of writing research papers") which raises some funky mathematical issues but is still more or less tractable (essentially the results become very sensitive to how exactly the model is specified - which means those situations tend to be pretty idiosyncratic).

If you wanna go back further than that in terms of what "labor" means, then we're talking St. Thomas Aquinas. If you wanna be less euro-centric and bit more generous in your interpretations of old school writings then Ibn Khaldun. Also Suetonius, though that one's a bit more of a stretch. And of course Aristotle though that's really getting so general that we've gotten away from the specific topic of "labor".

It's actually a question that a lot of economic work still struggles with. You want to measure "labor input". What units? How? Well, let's say "labor hours" which are observable. Ok, but then what about the differences in quality of labor (person digging a ditch and then filling it back up is "labor" but in terms of productivity, not of very high quality). So you got to adjust for that. But how do you measure differences in quality of labor? Well, you could do it by looking at the wages paid for it. But that's assuming a lot already - that labor is remunerated according to its quality. But let's grant that assumption. Worse, the remuneration of a unit of labor of a particular quality is not going to depend just on its quality, but IF there are diminishing (non-constant) returns to it, also on it's quantity. Hence, in order to calculate the amount of labor you need to know its quality. In order to know its quality you need to know it's renumeration. In order to know it's renumeration per unit you need to know the amount of it in the first place. Oh shit, that's what we were trying to calculate in the first place! So the problem is ill-defined.

The above is basically the basis of the so called Cambridge Capital Controversy (another decent Wiki econ article on an essentially esoteric topic) though there, because it was back in the old days where everybody was arguing under the shadow of Marx, they were obsessed with the idea of "what is capital" rather than "what is labor", but it's the same issue.

There's some clever and sneaky ways that people tried to get around this problem, in order just to be able to say SOMETHING about how economies function but at the end of the day it's a pretty fundamental dilemma.

Ok, I went off all econ geek on that. Apologies.

You and Abd, together forever.......

we should probably take up a collection to buy you WV guys some straitjackets.

Can I take you up on that, as someone who has an interest in economics, in the sense of talking about it in the pub or to cab drivers, who are a fund of information on the subject.

I'll apply a few of the tests I use. The introduction starts off with a reference to 'heterodox' economics, which has its own page. This rings an alarm bell, because cranks normally characterise their subject this way. It's controversial or not yet accepted by the mainstream (but perhaps one day will be). The Heterodox article mentions feminist and ecological economics, which sound dodgy (sorry feminists). But also Austrian economics, which I thought was not mainstream but was certainly 'respectable' (Mises and Hayek). But that's only an alarm bell.

The second sentence is not very clear. One of my tests is that if people can't write clearly, then they can't think clearly, and so are writing nonsense. It refers to an 'independent capital estate' without explaining what this is. It refers to interest free loans by a central bank. It sounds like a circuitous method of giving free money to everyone. I'm all for that (so long as it's not to everyone, just to me and my family and friends).

The third sentence lists a set of benefits from this scheme. Not necessarily a problem, but the benefits sound so implausible even to someone untutored in economics that alarm bells are getting louder. It goes on to say that "The interest-free loans proposed by binary economics are compatible with the traditional opposition of the Abrahamic religions to usury". Even I know that there is something wrong with that.

The rest of the introduction is more benefits, without any explanation of why they are not implausible. The introduction should not normally be for that. Rather, for explaining the origins of the theory, mentioning names and notable proponents where necessary, and for placing it in the context of 'normal' economics. E.g. notable objections to the theory, and so on.

The background section mentions the noted economists Pope Leo XIII, Chesterton and Belloc, which is not encouraging. Then Louis Kelso. Who he? The article about him says he was the inventor of the Employee Stock Ownership Plan. Is that true? Isn't that a Good Thing? Was Kelso a nut, or was he an orthodox economist who was nothing to do with Binary Economics, but was linked to by the article to give the appearance of respectability? Junk science is actually quite difficult to detect on Wikipedia, because of the ease of creating links. Wikipedia makes it easy to construct a soup out of some wholesome and delicious elements while slipping in a bit of cyanide and other poisons.

[OK a bit more work demonstrates that Kelso did talk about 'Binary Economics'. However, the phrase 'Employee Stock Ownership Plan' refers to something different than you would think. It redirects to 'Employee ownership' which Kelso I am sure did not invent. Another trick in the junk science arsenal is the use of terms which are similar to orthodox terms, and so have the patina of respectability, but which have a different use].

Moving on. The ESOPS section contains a link to Keslo and Company http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelso_%26_Company , which looks very like an advertisement. Why is it not in Wikipedia Review?

The 'Comparison with conventional economics' section contrasts 'positive economics' with 'normative economics'. Are these accepted subjects? The ignorant person like myself cannot tell. The second para begins "Conventional economics upholds productivity which is not a direct analysis of physical reality" which is nonsense, whoever is reading it.

The fifth paragraph contains the interesting observation that "starvation is primarily due to lack of money in the hands of the starving and not the absence of food". We can't deny that. But is this obvious problem something that Binary Economics can successfully address? (Connvetional economics and common sense suggests that if you try and solve the problem of poverty by printing money and giving it to poor people, i.e. without taking it from the better off or redistributing it, then bad things will happen).

The rest of the paragraphy is a series of statements without any form of explanation or argument.

I only skimmed the rest, boredom having taken over. In general, the whole article reads like a series of slogans or a pamphlet, and not something that really belongs in an encyclopedia whose purpose is to appeal to and inform moderately intelligent persons without a background in the subject (such as, ahem, myself).




I had a quick look and applied my tests. It looks much better written but was rather boring, I'm afraid. This is essentially the whole problem of economics.



However, it does contain the sentence.



Was there no way of expressing that idea in a clearer and less parenthetical way? The use of emphasis to clarify syntax is always a bad sign. (The emboldened 'value' is there in the article itself).

No problem. I have to admit that I already knew most of that, so the question was both socratic and rhetorical. I knew that there's no getting around a market-value definition of the value of labor, which pretty much makes labor-only theories of value worthless (even assuming you can quantitate labor on some OTHER basis than market value). Thus, you might as well have a market-only theory of value (at least for the things that are traded on the open market). I was hoping that somebody (like you, VM) would chime in and just say that everybody had decided there was no point to talking about "labor" any more in economics, and that would end it. I take it that this hasn't happened? A shame.

Damned Marxists.

I think it finally comes down to envy, actually, which preceded Ricardo and Marx by some time. People naturally get pissed off when they see other people get more money for doing less of what they themselves would rather not be doing (i.e., work = labor). Being human, whenever we get envious, or see something we don't like, we look for somebody (a witch, if you will) to BLAME for it. Hence, Marxian econ where so-called "capitalists" are the witches, stealing surplus value = other people's labor. And of course, in the same way, here I am, blaming Marx!

So called "Heterodox economics" is a motley collection of approaches and criticisms, some of them essentially legit though not widely accepted because of their own limitations, incomplete empirical support or different research agenda, and outright kookery.

For examples,
"feminist economics" does some decent and even good empirical work but theoretically it tends to be goofy because of too much post-modernist mumbo jumbo. It's also a fairly broad area so there's a legit-to-kooky range within it. "ecological economics" on the other hand tends to be weak on empirical work and also contains a bunch of "world will end tomorrow" weirdos but it can also produce some interesting though highly specialized formal models.

Main "heterodox schools" would be something like the Post Keynesians (who are different from New-Keynesians who are part of, if not THE, mainstream)/Neo-Ricardians. Those schools make some important and legitimate criticisms of mainstream economics but have (IMO) been unable to develop a viable alternative of their own.

Another one would be Analytical Marxism (or what John Roemer called "Non-bullshit Marxism").

The Austrians are a unique case (and on Wikipedia they tend to be way overrepresented) because at one point they WERE one of the main schools of economics. However, back in the day, in the face of the Keynesian Revolution their response was essentially to lock themselves up in their towers and converse among themselves only. So over time they lost touch with the mainstream of the profession, and as all the "useful" stuff from Austrian theory got absorbed into mainstream economics they became marginalized and now occupy a fringe. One exception I can think of off the top of my head, and going back to 1950's would be Oskar Morgenstern who wrote THE book on use of game theory in economics, together with von Neumann (of Dr. Strangelove fame - and of course all the mind blowing maths)

Behavioral economics used to be considered more or less heterodox but now it's very much in the mainstream to the extent that if you look at articles published in the top journals more than half of them have some "behavioral" twist or aspect in'em and people have gotten Noble prizes for the work.

So yes, while there's legitimate "heterodox" schools out there, when someone claims the mantle of "heterodox economics" it does tend to set off alarm bells.




Yeah the whole thing does sound like some kind of get rich quick ponzi scheme, or a "if only they listen to me we'll all be living in a utopia" cult.
The stuff on Abrahamic religions and usury is sort of funny. Even funnier is the discussion on talk that Rodney had either with himself or one of his buddies about how important this was.

(snip)




As far as I can tell this Keslo guy wrote one of those books that one can find a plethora of in any thrift store for .25 cents a piece about "how the economy really works, and how you can make money". Or something like that. Basically the equivalent of a late night infomercial.

And yes, Employee Ownership is the "kernel of truth" that the kooky theory appears to be based on.


Yea that whole section is just junk per my comments on the talk page.

(snip)




Hmm, yeah, now that I look at it again it used to be better but obviously deteriorated since the last time I looked at it.

Was it really that difficult to add positive reviews? Now both sides are represented in the article, though I think the Kodish and other review should be summarized, we really don't need block quotes.

Wikiversity allows deep exploration of topics, where "fringe science" and even "pseudoscience" aren't shut out by MPOV and pseudoskeptics as they can be at Wikipedia. There is an essay at meta, Adrignola pointed me to it, that suggests Wikiversity is the future of the WMF, for a number of reasons, and I agree.

Wikiversity has many problems, and suffers from some of the same structural defects as the other WMF wikis, but ... it also has a leg up on solving them, which can be predicted to produce some ... mess. There are people who like things just the way they are, especially when they have Extra Powerz.

Mostly, though, editors are free to develop resources on Wikiversity without constant flack. Maybe it's like China, you can do what you want as long as you don't criticize the government. Criticizing the government on Wikiversity is also permitted, sort of. But using WV as a host for massive ridicule and bitter criticism of Wikipedia editors ... probably beyond the pale at this point. Moulton is again testing this, with chorus by JWSchmidt.

Ottava is still free to edit Wikiversity, a clue as to how hard it is to get blocked there. He's toast at meta, now, I'd say. Unless the leopard changes his spots, and displays the spot-free coat for a while.

Popcorn?

Tea? Coffee?

Stay away from the mercury, Mike.

As to cold fusion, you did make some comments on one of the subpages, with some sensible questions, but I responded and you never followed up.

Just so you understand the "start" of cold fusion.

1989: Pons and Fleischmann announced the finding of anomalous heat from highly loaded palladium deuteride.
1989:Massive attempts to replicate, based on inadequate information, mostly failed.
1989:The U.S. Department of Energy ERAB panel concludes that evidence for cold fusion was "not convincing," and that more research was needed.
1990-2010:Research continues, with over 150 reports in peer-reviewed mainstream journals and thousands of conference papers, confirming excess heat in PdD. The "ash" was conclusively identified as helium. Helium was found to be correlated with the anomalous heat, at the value identical to that for deuterium fusion.
2010:A review of the field by Storms is featured in Naturwissenschaften "Status of cold fusion (2010)," covering the research, confirming that evidence for "fusion" is conclusive, but that no theory as to mechanism is satisfactory, so far. In other words, "fusion" is the result, not the process. Nobody knows how deuterium is being converted to helium in these experiments.

I think you believe I'm out to lunch on cold fusion, Mike, but ... I'm representing the view held by the peer reviewers at all mainstream publications which have published in this field over the last six years. There are no negative reviews. It's over. But a lot of people haven't heard the news. Supposedly peer reviewed reviews in independent journals is the gold standard for Wikipedia, but you'd never know what I just covered from the Wikipedia article. Any editor who tries to fix that gets slammed.

Mike, you are absolutely welcome to criticize anything at the WV resource on cold fusion. I know it's massive, it's a massive topic, but you can pick one small thing. Moulton massively dove in, with typical Moulton problems, but it doesn't have to be that way. The top level resource should be rigorously neutral. If it's not, help make it so!

You really are a twit, aren't you? I have written about your interesting talk page comments here http://ocham.blogspot.com/2011/02/more-fad...-fallacies.html

Some of us had a fear that if we commented on article problems here, you would improve them. Unfounded.





Abd, I am writing something about science in Wikipedia for a journal - would you be available for comment. My email is edward at logicmuseum.com .

I'm sorry, but that would hand a very unfair advantage to people who understand the subjects they are writing about. This would make it very difficult for ignorant editors fully to participate in the drafting process.

(I have a headache...)

Mercury is rather important in my work with temperature compensated precision pendulum clocks, but fear not - I take adequate precautions to not inhale the fumes.



If I ever feel a burning desire to waste copious amounts of my free time on a worthless endeavor...



Oh, I have numerous sources to help me understand that.



Well, tbh, I believe that you are out to lunch in a number of respects. It is not just limited to cold fusion.

Sure is worthless if you learn nothing. Looks like you have already spent some time. With obsolete tertiary sources, at least one.
Great. Thanks. As to those sources: Undead science was the first book I read when I came across the abusive blacklisting of lenr-canr.org that got me started on cold fusion. It was also the first time I bought a book to research a Wikipedia topic. See, I had the technical background to understand the field, I'd seen it come down in 1989, and had assumed, with about everyone else, that it had been shown to be artifact, error.

I was wrong. That never happened. Try to find the "smoking gun," which happened with N-rays and polywater. This is why both DoE reviews, in 1989 and 2004, recommended more research. The mystery remained.

The most recent source you have listed is Ackerman (2006), which was published shortly after the nadir of cold fusion publishing frequency (in mainstream journals). Since the nadir, publication rate has quadrupled. Since 2005, there have been nineteen positive reviews, secondary sources, on cold fusion, in mainstream peer-reviewed journals. See Cold fusion/Recent sources on WV. I've bolded the reviews.

You'll note I listed Ackerman. Ackerman assumes CF as a "failed information epidemic," see the Britz comment on Ackerman (first on the page) (Britz is a skeptical electrochemist who has maintained an independent bibliography of the field.) The WV page I cite also uses the Britz database.
Indeed you do. One lunch at a time, okay?

On the subject of cold fusion as "pathological science," and to balance Ackerman, see Bauer (2002).

Looking at Pathological science, a mistake, I see a beautiful piece of ad hominem argument, Bauer is identified as a "controversial advocate of AIDS denialism,." Gee, if I'd known that, I'd never have read anything written by him, and I'd have disinfected my computer. Unsourced. In the lede. Inserted by IP editor, 24 July, 2010. People who should have known better have edited the article since then. Yes, Bauer has written a book about AIDS, and might reasonably be classified as a "denialist," but .... it's an ad hominem argument, impeaching his work where he might better know what he's talking about, because of stuff he's written, outside his field, when he's long retired.... Typical Wikipediocy.

Anyway, the definitive review at this point is Storms, "Review of Cold fusion (2010)," Naturwissenschaften (October, 2010). Any questions? Preprint copy. I'm mentioned in it (I helped edit it), which brings me a surprising amount of joy.

For wikipedia studies, CF is interesting because it's a great example of how the policies and guidelines were ignored by a powerful faction of editors, and how the damage from that continues. Supposedly, recent secondary sources of equal quality supersede older sources, and supposedly, in science, secondary source reviews published in mainstream journals are the gold standard. Not if a Wikipedia editor thinks the author is "fringe"! Publisher? Who cares about the publisher?

(There is no conflict between the scientific secondary sources, because CF was never actually debunked in such sources. Rather, there were failed replications, later well-explained as due to uncontrolled variables, that became very well known. Predictable.)

And ArbComm rulings were simply ignored. And I simply got tired of the incredible complexity it took to challenge this stuff. About the last thing I did was to get lenr-canr.org finally delisted from the global blacklist, the action that was part of what got me involved in the first place. For writing "too much" there (on meta!) -- if I'd left the request as a short one, well, it had been denied again, per Moulton's Law -- I was determined to somehow be violating the article probation on Cold fusion, and so a kindly admin renewed my topic ban.

Getting it delisted didn't help Wikipedia, because JzG continued to remove all links to lenr-canr.org, in spite of being troutslapped for his involvement before. He continued to give the same arguments that had been rejected by, not only ArbComm, but consensus, ever time they were carefully considered. And rejected by the meta administrator who delisted it. But it makes it easier for the other wikis.

Article probation for Cold fusion was intended to apply to all sides. I believe I was the only application of it, at JzG's instigation, and, being the only editor, interested in cold fusion, with the skill to take a case to ArbComm, or AE, there it went!

Why did you reveal yourself, Peter? You knew what was going to happen if you did.

Two different administrators have suggested by email that I make improvements anonymously. If you knew who one of them was, you would have a big laugh. Clue: he was one of this gang of ruffians http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...72#Peter_Damian who originally ganged up on me with the obnoxious drug addict 'Chillum' to propose a so-called community ban, which they rushed through and closed as quickly as they could.

I reply, why? If I am going to help their poxy project, why should I do it anonymously? And how on earth is it OK to break the rule without telling anyone, but not OK to reveal your identity?

By the way SS you haven't addressed the points I make here. http://ocham.blogspot.com/2011/02/more-fad...-fallacies.html

And while you are considering that, could you undo Sandstein's stupid reverts, thanks.

That brings back memories.



Peter - for fun, look at the responses. Jennavecia mentions that Law/The undertow block should have been left alone. Cute, huh? Then notice Pastor Theo/A Horse. I like how Jennavecia is with her close friend bullzeye (i.e. boyfriend) and Ironholds (who was friends with Law and Jennavecia and later outed Law).

Then you have the list of winners: Rodhullandemu, Will Beback, Mythdon, Roux, etc. There is also a strong IRC presence: Until It Sleeps, Jenni, iMatthew, etc.

You have a lot to be bothered about. Hell, me being your strongest supporter would make anyone fall into despair.

Let's not forget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tenant23

How many sockpuppets are in on these absurd 'community bans'?

When socks are used to ban someone I like to call them 'sackpuppets' - but that's just me.

I would use the argument that, if you're going to go into someone else's home, then you should follow their rules, but I know you probably wouldn't as it is.

I see at as a home country currently occupied by an some foreign power. You are telling those of us who have been evicted from our homeland, that we should follow the rules of the Occupation. Really?



You really don't have the faintest idea. If you are going to include criticism from unreliable sources, you need reliable sources to represent the criticism for what it is. You are the Occupying Power, and you don't even understand your own laws.



Ah the crank reveals himself. No matter, I am writing this all up for a journal, and all will be revealed.

Silver Seren, would you like to be interviewed to put your side of the story? You will have to give your real name, if you don't mind.

How is Colin Wilson (T-H-L-K-D) an unreliable source? I've already agreed that Kodish shouldn't be in there, but Wilson has a notable criticism.

Wilson is a complete crank, everyone knows that. Well I suppose you wouldn't. This is the stuff he writes. http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/w/colin-...-and-aliens.htm .And if you had read the comment that Sandstein deleted, you would understand that it is a straw man. Wilson claims that Gardner says "that the scientist does his best to remain open-minded ''. Actually Gardner never says that. He actually says the opposite. He says



Why don't you Wikipedians actually read the fucking books are you trying to write about.

Those books are too long. You know, "tl;dr" and all that.

Wikipedians don't read. It takes too much time out of their busy schedules.

Home country? I see it as a place far more akin to Ulster; a place my ancestors were induced to settle in under false pretenses. Past time to cleer oof to Amerikee, I'm a-thinkin.

Very apt.