At 10:30 AM 9/6/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:
The Wikipedia Review has a lot Wikipedia jargon I do not understand
and references to people and events I am unfamiliar with. But there
are some good essays there, especially this one:
<http://wikipediareview.com/blog/20081106/181/>http://wikipediareview.com/blog/20081106/181/
Some good in that, some blindness.
This seems right on the mark to me.
I long ago concluded that if I ran into someone who was perfect, and
who wrote an essay about something where I had some knowledge -- even
a great deal of knowledge -- I'd surely disagree with some of it.
It discusses some issues that I have never understood about the
Wikipedia philosophy, especially the notion that there can be a
single "neutral point of view" (NPOV) or that if there were one, it
would a good idea if everyone went along with it.
Actually, that's not exactly the idea.
This seems to deny that conflict and real differences of opinion
can exist, and that there are many unanswered questions out there,
such as whether cold fusion produces neutrons or whether the
neutrons have any connection to the heat.
And since that's silly, that isn't what is meant. Good principle: if
what someone believes seems completely silly, you probably don't
understand it! It's only when you can understand why the person
believes it that it becomes possible to truly criticize.
It seems clear to me that the best way to deal with disagreements
is to let both sides state their case separately, and let the
reader decide. In the case of the cold fusion article, I would let
the people who think the effect is real write one paragraph, and
the people who disagree write another paragraph. The formulation of
both arguments should satisfy those who make the arguments, not
those who disagree with them.
That's the fallacy of "equal time." First of all, you should
understand that Wikipedia is trying to create an "encyclopedia," in
quite the traditional sense. This is not what we'd expect of, say,
the Encyclopedia Britannica, so why would you expect it of Wikipedia?
Lots of newcomers or casual editors of Wikipedia don't get this. It's
very understandable. Wikipedia bills itself as "the encyclopedia that
anyone can edit, the sum of all human knowledge." It's a little
misleading until the particular meanings placed on the words are
understood. "Sum" means "summary," and that implies some level of
exclusion. What's the standard for inclusion? There are two answers:
In theory, if a fact is found in "reliable source," it is thus
"verifiable," and can -- and should -- be included. For science
articles the RS guidelines suggest that peer-reviewed secondary
sources are the gold standard, as well as academic publications.
Basically, if it's found in a review in a peer-reviewed journal, it's
reported. That does *not* mean that it's presented as a pure fact.
That's where we need to understand NPOV. Nevertheless, the problem
here is not the theory, the theory is fine. The problem is practice, so:
In practice, editors with some axe to grind, especially if they are
in the majority, where knee-jerk majority opinion will support them,
can bias articles and keep them that way.
The latter problem is the problem with the cold fusion article. The
wikitheory is just fine, except that structure to resolve disputes
was inadequate and not widely understood. (It's adequate, were it
followed, but because it is not widely understood, it is not
followed. The noticeboard that the essay talks about, Administrators'
Noticeboard/Incidents, isn't part of dispute resolution process, it's
where you go when someone is being disruptive to get them blocked, or
an article protected, or the like. Obviously, you don't find
consensus by blocking people, you create bias. Sometimes blocking is
necessary, but it's highly undesirable.
Jimbo Wales did have the right idea, but that idea depends on good
consensus process being in place, and these were not people very much
experienced with that kind of process outside of, say, the open
source software community, where there is a very strong uniting
ideal. What's known is that in small groups, you can almost always
find consensus, but it takes a lot of discussion. And the community
as it is has little patience for the kind of careful discussion necessary.
The goal of the discussion must be agreement, not victory for one POV
or the other. My contention in the current Request for Arbitration
was that we only can be certain of NPOV if everyone agrees with the
text. That's possible if there is a good shared understanding of the
guidelines on sourcing, so we would know, at the outset, what sources
are usable. Then it is just a matter of framing. Do we say that
"excess heat is highly correlated with helium,[ref]" or do we say
that "According to Storms (2007), excess heat is highly correlated
with helium.[ref]" Both are true, in fact, but the second will be
more acceptable to a skeptic.
The Cab, however, doesn't want to say it at all, because they reject
Storms as "fringe," which is not part of the reliable source
guidelines at all. It's their POV. They are actually losing on this,
don't be fooled by my being banned; that's a complex political issue.
They will not be able to continue what they did, I more or less set
off a bomb in the middle of it; right now it looks like the
administrator who banned me from cold fusion, WMC, will lose his
admin privileges for his actions in this case, and, Jed, you are a
little less likely to have all your IP contributions edited out and
kept out. You may still be immediately reverted, but, then, others
may be able to bring them back in, in whole or in part, because of
the fallout of this case.
I wouldn't have started the whole thing if I expected to lose. And if
I'd been attached to my personal role as an editor, I'd not have been
able to be bold enough to pull this off. The cold fusion article will
now be, once this case closes, covered by discretionary sanctions,
which the people who don't believe in cold fusion think will make it
easier to keep CF stuff out, but the reality is that the neutral
editors and administrators will recognize reliable source according
to the guidelines. It's already happened, someone took the ACS
Sourcebook to the Reliable Source Noticeboard and it was
overwhelmingly considered reliable source. That contains reviews,
Jed. It's not going to be possible to keep the cold fusion
resurrection out. They got rid of me, for a while or maybe forever,
doesn't matter, but I was just the tip of the iceberg, it would be
like the Titanic blowing off the top of the approaching berg with a
cannon. There! Fixed that problem! (Crash!).
Take a look at the discussion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RSN#Low_Energy_Nuclear_Reactions_Sourcebook
(Because that will be arhcived, I'll give a permanent link to today's
state:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard&oldid=312265882#Low_Energy_Nuclear_Reactions_Sourcebook
It's still possible that the Cab will appear and try to disrupt this,
and they are reading this list, but when you are working for
large-scale consensus, you don't sweat the little skirmishes. They
will exhaust themselves trying to fight overall consensus. They are
losing, Jed, because you have reality on your side. Eventually,
society figures that out, it's only frustrating because of how slow it is.
For example, going back to the first controversy in the field (which
lives on today) If cold fusion researchers think that the heat
proves there is a nuclear reaction despite the lack neutrons, a
paragraph in the article should say this, explicitly. And if
skeptics believe the heat must be an experimental artifact because
there are no neutrons (Huizenga's thesis), another paragraph should
say so. Neither side should erase the other, or restate the other
side's arguments. People should agree to disagree. The Wikipedia
method appears to be to find middle ground that expresses opposing
ideas in a single paragraph.
That's true where an article has become a battleground. Wikipedia
process, compared to what it could be, and to use technical language,
sucks. They wanted me banned because I was beginning to be effective.
With JzG, they laughed and joked about how I was beating a dead
horse. Well, the horse woke up and bit JzG's head off. So to speak.
So they started taking the danger more seriously. Still not seriously
enough, they failed to warn WMC.
I'm still pretty involved, because I've spent the last two years
working intensively on Wikipedia. But I have, in fact, moved on, my
planning is going in two directions: the cold fusion kit project,
about which there are some encouraging signs, and facilitating -- not
controlling! -- the kind of off-wiki structures that will be
necessary for the community to wake up and make Wikipedia what the
original vision contemplated, which is much, much better than the
reality. Jed, you ran into the reality.
As the critic who wrote the above essay said:
". . . it would appear that the central policy of WP requires WP
editors to construct a "neutral" viewpoint that somehow through some
wiki-magic absorbs bits from the various contending viewpoints,
giving no 'undue weight' to any of the contending views, but still
manages to be a viewpoint all its own. This way madness lies."
The essayist didn't understand. There is a construction project, all
right, but what is constructed is text, not a POV. To the degree that
the text enjoys consensus, to that degree we can be certain it is
"NPOV." That is, the POVs remain in place, but the *editors* who hold
these POVs all agree that the text is fair and balanced, *according
to what is found in reliable sources.*
It's possible to accomplish this or at least to approach it. Is 90%
enough? The percentage must be high enough that it is easy to defend
the article; the reasonable editors from the minority POV will take
care of their own extreme editors, because they will not want to
destabilize the consensus, negotiated with such effort. They will
channel these editors into ways of constructive contribution. Without
this kind of community consensus, every controversial article becomes
a battleground, and burns out editors and administrators.
Jimbo in 2003 pointed out that people who hold minority positions,
such as fringe science POVs, know that their opinions are fringe. One
of the easiest things for the Cab to do has been to put text in the
article saying that cold fusion is rejected by the mainstream. How?
Well, believers in cold fusion have said this over and over, in
reviews! One of the things I was doing was challenging this, because
the 2004 DoE review clearly established that there was no scientific
consensus that cold fusion is pathological science. And, I suspect, a
review like that today, especially if done more carefully, would be,
I'm sure, majority "nuclear in origin." (after all, this could be
huge, isn't it worth at least a week or longer, with committees that
seek consensus, like the IPCC global warming stuff, when they say
"likely," they actually mean (97% likely), it's defined.)
The Cab has been -- not just with cold fusion, but in many places --
keeping any kind of fringe opinion or peer-reviewed research out of
the encyclopedia, or framing it all in offensive ways. They don't
care about consensus, because they have administrators who will block
an editor for edit warring, and they can suck most editors into edit
warring by tag-teaming. (I.e., getting around the edit warring
restrictions by having multiple friends watching an article so that
anything contrary to the Cab position gets reverted out.
Cold fusion was really a backwater for these people, the center of
the Cab I identified was the Global warming article, where they
steadfastly denigrate or exclude any criticism of the politically
correct view. And I happen to agree with the PC view! But I also know
that you harm public discussion and science by repressing dissent.
It's an old story.
Anyways, this is getting seriously off topic, since this is not a
Wikipedia discussion forum.
Yeah. But we've had some interesting events relating to cold fusion
-- and it affects other topics of interest to this gorup, such as
BlackLight Power or hydrino theory, or any wild ideas. I certainly
don't intend to keep discussing Wikipedia here, but, as a bit of an
expert on the topic ....
