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UofA

Persistent, arent they?

• diff

• "... whose authoritative command and expertise ensure curricular distinction in all degree programs offered ..."
• "... signal the breadth and scope of the university’s vision ..."
• "... its unwavering commitment to the high-pitched standards ..."
• "... of first-tier caliber ..."
• "... via the most progressive and effective modes of delivery..."

There is no end to blatant self promotion. I wonder what Uganda has to do with the University of Atlanta .. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 12:25, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes. I saw it and clipped it out and some more as well and I'm probably not done. The article needs some references, particularly for the accreditation, but it's not accredited by two agencies, only one. The other one mentioned doesn't accredit schools, it accredits accrediting agencies! The accreditation is legitimate. I took out the unaccredited category tag A.B. had added. We'll stop it. Watch. See,

"I'm just a small-time Wikipedia editor and I thought that UofA deserved an article and shouldn't be blacklisted, but if someone from your school doesn't stop adding non-encyclopedic promotional content, like [URL to diff] or hiring Search Engine Optimizers who add links to your school web site, I won't be able to stop the howling pack of Berserker spam fighters and they will tear your article to little tiny pieces and compost it, and you'll be blacklisted again. Please rein those people in, or I can't be responsible for the consequences." I'll get it in the mail today. Just in case you don't know what Berserker means, there is a nifty article on it at

[1]

Thanks for your prompt attention. The Berserkers are straining on the chain and it might break at any time.

Sincerely, Abd.

And if not, well, you guys are there for a reason. I'm just trying to make sure the library doesn't get torn up when you tear a spammer to shreds.

-) --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 19:24, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Actually, I phoned the school, got a receptionist and was transferred to someone who sounded a little more authoritative. Very polite, understood the problem right away, showed concern, and promised a call back from one of the top officials, by tomorrow. I'm bad with names off the phone, but one of them was number two in the list of officials ("Trustee") and the other was either top or third. Yes, that's bad, the names aren't at all alike! So that's that end of the stick.

In the other direction, I recommend immediate short-block of IP (24 hrs or 48) adding the promotional material, possible rangeblock (maybe they are on some reseller IP and the range is short, otherwise quite a coincidence that they all are 0.00x, and semiprotect the article because of the IP edit warring. If you decide not to act yourself, I'll request it. Remember, my position is that blacklisting and registered editor blocking without warning shouldn't be used to stop linkspam unless everything else has failed, absent massive ongoing addition of links, but I also recognize the value of immediate action if it doesn't get written in the stone.

Carrot and stick, Beetstra. You've got the stick, I've got the carrot. "You get to have an article, albeit short until you get some notice in independent reliable sources. Abuse it, it will be deleted History." That's not my threat, after all, I'm an inclusionist. It's a wikipolitical reality. What if someone from the school administration watches the article and immediately reverts promotional material, perhaps something added by a student who wants their school to be seen as fat stuff. --Abd (talk) 19:30, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

One more trite expression. Divide and conquer. There are two parties involved in the SEO problem. The SEO and their customer. If the customer web site gets globally blacklisted, if the Wikipedia article on the company gets deleted, the SEO has done a very poor job in serving the customer! The customer should know that, and the SEO isn't going to explain it to them! When we "punish" both of them, we keep them allied. I have no idea if the SEO has informed UofA as to what they have done. I'm not sure that an SEO is involved, the Uganda thing is a little mysterious. Adding the promotional fluff doesn't add links for search engine optimization. But if we can get the school on our side, which I think could be fairly easily done, there goes some of the funding for the SEO or web-promotional people. What remains would be a student wanting to promote their school, there will always be some level of that. Again, if the school is on our side, much easier to deal with. --Abd (talk) 19:36, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Squeaky clean. Referenced. Took out all the ugly tags at the top. It's notable, sufficiently. Accreditation pretty much seals it, and they truly are accredited. The UNESCO thing might be real or might be fluff, there is on-line chatter about it being misleading, but ... lots of on-line chatter is misleading, itself. UNESCO is somewhat associated with EADL, so there might be something there, but it didn't leap out at me. Maybe if the school administration calls me tomorrow they can clear it up and suggest a source. --Abd (talk) 04:13, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Comment about comments

Hi, Abd. Thanks for being open to disagreement; I agree that it's more fun that way.

Re the last sentence of this edit: I consider such comments inappropriate unless posted in an appropriate forum (see WP:DR) and accompanied by evidence. The same applies to some or all of the following: "JzG had rebuffed attempts at direct negotiation, and I had asked him to suggest an informal mediator; he did not respond." "...JzG escalated,..." "He was asking for something very dangerous, and he distorted, there, the history." "JzG views that through rose-colored glasses." "JzG continues to act outside of norms" [2] These are worded, not as objectively-verifiable facts, but as interpretations. To state these, and without evidence, and in an inappropriate forum for such, only weakens your case in my eyes.

"All of us need friends who will warn us and criticize our actions," yes, I agree! ☺Coppertwig (talk) 19:24, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

No problem, Coppertwig. Since it had not received any response in situ, I removed it. As to the other statements you cite, they are, in fact, more neutral. He did rebuff attempts at direct negotiation (though he also conceded one point out of many, so it wasn't total), I did ask him to suggest a mediator, and he didn't respond. He has no obligation to respond, by the way. I'm really only describing there, Coppertwig, the first steps in dispute resolution process. Going to ArbComm when he did was indeed escalation, since there was lots of prior process before ArbComm would be appropriate. Escalation can, again, be proper, where there is some clear reason for it. But there wasn't any dispute where prior process had been pursued and failed, my own attempts were just the beginning, ArbComm would normally want to see much more than that. Escalation isn't a perjorative term. It's accurate.

He was asking for something very dangerous indeed, that an ArbComm sanction be applied to an editor simply based on alleged similarity of POV. It's hard to imagine something much more dangerous than that, in fact. ArbComm rejected his request, unanimously. Some arbitrators made comments that he could take as supporting his position, but others very clearly made less positive comments. Taking a mixed ArbComm discussion and reporting it, as he does in the nomination, as some kind of whole-hearted support, is accurately described as that "he views through rose-colored glasses." That is, his report is selective and thus, even where accurate, misleading or distorted.

As to "acting outside of community norms," fine. I'll take that out, because I was establishing, for you, why this is of importance, not just ancient history. We are allowed to say things like this about administrators, though. We can get a whole lot more uncivil than this, unless, perhaps, it's JzG being criticized. Have you looked at the edit summaries on the evidence page being MfD'd? Anyway, it is almost certainly going to be an RfC, I predict. --Abd (talk) 19:43, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for deleting and striking some of the comments. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 00:20, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

You're welcome. I struck another comment, the mention of the evidence page in Talk:Martin Fleischmann, mentioned in the MfD. However, a Delete close on this MfD, unless the !votes change drastically, would be disruptive, because, being close, and with the issue of deletion of evidence used before ArbComm being so important, I would certainly go to DRV if someone else doesn't, and, likewise, this would be grounds for a direct RfAr, because the rights of ArbComm to the undamaged record of its own process are affected. Remember, JzG is regularly claiming that his denied RfAr was a resounding endorsement of his actions; without that page, while there is certainly contrary comment there, there isn't any evidence behind it. The RfAr would not be about JzG, but only about the issue of deletion of the page without clear consensus to do so. However, of course, I'll wait to see what the closing admin says; even though I've stated an intention to go to DRV if it closes Delete, a cogent argument by the closing admin could always convince me otherwise. --Abd (talk) 01:08, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Still with this? -.- How about you spend your time formatting it as a RFC and presenting it? The current page can be a redirect to the RFC, and the top of the RFC you can put a link to the old version used on the RFAR, or some similar solution. --Enric Naval (talk) 20:34, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

This is the problem with an RfC: it must be certified by two users who have attempted to resolve the dispute on the editor's Talk page or on Talk for involved articles. I tried to raise the issue of admin action while involved with JzG, and it was certainly raised in the RfAr JzG filed, but that RfAr wasn't about JzG, in itself; rather "it" needed to know about JzG's involvement to be more careful about confirming his ban of Jed Rothwell. So that's one. Has anyone else tried, in a focused way, to resolve this issue with JzG. It's been said to me off-wiki that some don't want to touch anything involving him with a ten-foot pole. So I want to identify the person before putting up the RfC, and, in fact, I really do want to see a preferably neutral editor try to resolve this. And I'm willing to risk the deletion of the file to respect that part of the process. It can always be undeleted if it's needed, and I have a copy. (Really, those editors! With some of them, I suspect, I was active on-line before they were born.) However, there are strong arguments not to delete in its prior usage before ArbComm.

(unindent) The evidence page is lengthy, and it is getting lengthier as I take the history back to first involvement with Cold fusion. It doesn't just show problem edits, and maybe most of the edits are fine. That's not what you show in an RfC, not the whole body of evidence, just selected evidence, with reference to a source; the user page is, of course, itself referenced to History. An RfC isn't just a pile of edits, it's a summary of what the edits *mean*. That can be done fairly briefly, but without the evidence file, it becomes just an assertion that would take hours to confirm. No, the proper way is for an extensive evidence file to be a separate file. I'll research more where it should live, it might go into RfC subspace, for example. But until it's finished, it should stay in my user space. Others are welcome to edit it, ab initio, but that freedom isn't license. The evidence file should be NPOV or reasonably close. I say some things in it, in the excerpts from JzG's logs, that are what I consider obvious conclusions from the record and Wikipedia guidelines, to make the record more intelligible.

For example,

• 20:51, 18 December 2008 JzG blocked 68.158.255.197 (anon. only, account creation blocked) with an expiry time of 1 month ‎ (Disruptive editor who states he has no interest in improving Wikipedia, only in causing annoyance.)

Rothwell IP. Rothwell had stated that he wasn't interested in editing articles. Note that as an SPA and COI editor, he would largely be confined to Talk, given all the controversy, so he was only confirming compliance with policy.

Did Rothwell state that he had "no interest in improving Wikipedia, only in causing annoyance." I'm not looking it up right now, but what I recall was that he said he wasn't interested in editing articles, when someone suggested he do that. As a COI editor, he'd be prohibited from editing the Cold fusion article with respect to anything involved with cold fusion, where he's an expert. (An expert from an arguably fringe POV, but that involves knowing the whole field, including standard science, all the arguments being made both ways, etc. He's a writer by profession, I think.)

I've asked that if anything added like that there was objectionable, to point it out. I think the statement above is about the worst of it. The first part, the list of edits, is almost purely taken from diffs, no comment, except I note edits to protected articles there as well as below in the admin action section. Some of his edits to protected articles seem quite appropriate, but others don't. Seeing all the edit summaries in one place, though, which can't so easily be done with ordinary tools, as far as I know, is very useful, I find it enlightening to look at the edit summaries. Sometimes his edit summaries are cryptic, not disclosing a major action, but other times they say a lot.

If the page is deleted, I think it likely that I or someone else -- better if it is someone else -- take it to DRV. And if DRV sustains deletion, then I'd have a basis to go directly to ArbComm with a request for a motion to undelete. JzG wouldn't be the issue, the issue would be simple: keeping a file used in an RfAr, with significant comment in the RfAr supported by it, or allowing it to be deleted. Were it an uncivil attack page, that would be one thing. But it isn't. The MfD was just more useless wikidrama, except for one thing: by thrashing about so much, JzG may be attracting sharks. He's offended quite a few people, apparently. I had no idea. I just saw this strange action, his blacklisting of lenr-canr.org and newenergytimes.com, done quite out-of-process, and started looking into it, and when I encountered improper actions, I asked him to reverse them. What do you think was his response?

You've seen what he did with the link to lenr-canr.org in Martin Fleischmann. As one argument didn't gain traction, another one would be introduced. At some point one begins to suspect that arguments are being manufactured to support a previous conclusion. It's from a fringe web site. Copyvio. Alteration of documents. Linkspam. (no links! so no linkspam! -- Rothwell signs edits with his title, which is a position with a web site, which he names but does not link to! so the blacklisting didn't prevent the "links" which supposedly it was based on.) Then, it's a BLP and we must have particularly reliable source. But, JzG, the paper is by the subject of the article, and it is preposterous that it's fraudulent.

No, we can't tolerate links to fringe kook linkspamming POV-pushing editor's biased web site full of copyright violations, and did I mention that he altered documents?

When there is an editor with a lot of adminstrative friends who assume that, okay, it's a little overblown, but those arguments couldn't all be wrong, they will support the conclusion without really assessing the individual arguments carefully. That is why I'm running that obsessively detailed process in Martin Fleischmann, and am resisting effort to link the issues, so that it becomes one big fuzzy pile again. Is there reason to believe that there is copyvio? I haven't seen anyone support it there, but I've sure seen JzG claim this, over and over, going way back. He lays out the evidence, which appears to be a personal experience he had with Elsevier. So if lenr-canr.org hosts papers from Elsevier, there *must* be copyvio, right?

However, the same argument really cuts the other way. Elsevier vigorously defends copyright, and lenr-canr.org is about as prominent for some of these papers as a web site can get. They wouldn't notice, and go after him? That's why editors who know copyright aren't supporting JzG's argument.

Alteration of documents? Well, I can take a public domain document, and republish it. When I do, I can add front matter, I can add an index or an appendix, I can change the type face, I can do all kinds of things that are routinely accepted. What JzG has confused is the fact that a paper with additional material added is deprecated for use here, compared to one without it, with fraudulent alteration, where the actual content of the paper is altered. You can see in the mini-RfC how some editors are trying to keep the issues linked, so that more than one will need to be decided at the same time. I don't blame them, Wikipedia hasn't done much to encourage good consensus process, which almost always involves this kind of deconstruction of issues.

It may not seem like we are making much progress, but I don't see it that way. We started out with a list of claims that had actually been made. Some of those claims can be set aside. That's progress. And there is some level of agreement on some of my proposed conclusions. That's progress. We may or may not get all the way to consensus, but what we will have done is to define the issues so that when we go to a broader forum, the issues are clear, and clearly organized. Wikipedia process fails when fuzzy presentation of issues, coupled with partisan fervor, allows !votes to be made that are really more actions on one side or another, than they are a reflection of agreement on a set of crisply defined points.

It's much harder to !vote Delete, for example, if you had to first, !vote on a set of specific points as evidence. Is this link reliable source? Why, specifically, or why not, specifically? Is there another such reliable source? Does the article meet *this* requirement of the notability guideline. Is there sufficient material for a stub? Would this text be a proper stub?

Instead, what may be several dozen issues get all mixed together, and !votes are proposed final results and don't indicate agreement with any specific point. Suppose that a set of editors are considering an array of arguments. The arguments, we will presume, are all false. However, for each editor, there is one argument that really pulls their chain. Everyone else considers it false. Most editors have some prejudice, essentially, in one direction, and what happens is that this prejudice can ride on some argument that seems plausible to the editor. An editor may think that Topic X is offensive, and may then place more weight on some argument for deletion. If we look at each argument in turn, we can find that all arguments are rejected by rough consensus. But the conclusion is in the contrary direction, if we are looking at appearance of consensus. That's why closes are supposed to be on the arguments, not on the !votes, but we don't organize AfDs, etc., around the arguments. That's what I tried to do on Martin Fleischmann. Discuss each argument first. See if we can find consensus on that particular one.

Now, what happens, of course, is that people will argue and even reason from conclusions. They will be aware of the implications of rejecting an argument that can be used on "their side." So, sometimes, they will argue past all reason that some argument is valid, or that an argument in the other direction is preposterous. However, going into specifics, details, can make this completely untenable, and people will abandon the effort, usually. If they don't have the power to toss you in jail! It's the Socratic method, actually. It takes patience, it takes time. But there is also a substantial body of knowledge about how to make it more efficient, which Wikipedia generally neglects, thinking, I suspect, that we are better than anything else.... --Abd (talk) 22:17, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

And now you are saying that you'll go to DRV and then to Arbcom to complain about the page being deleted.... You can solve all of this by simply presenting the RFC in 30 days.... (30 days since the closure of the MfD, so the limit day would be 24th March)

And you challenging the deletion closure because you don't agree on the cognitive process that editors follow to !vote..... really, I don't think that this argument can stand on DRV....

And I don't think that that evidence page was so vital for the RFAR. Every editor can put 500 words, you already put +1000 words on your RFAR statement. You need to learn to be way more brief, and let the diffs speak by themselves. --Enric Naval (talk) 18:31, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Enric, don't say what "I'm saying" unless you quote me. Yes, I can solve the problems by filing the RfC. The DRV request, if it ever happens, would be based on very narrow grounds, and what I write, here on my Talk page, may be dicta, I wouldn't repeat it there. As to brief, the limitation at RfAr is a suggestion, not a rule. And files are commonly used where the raw evidence would create excess. If I put too much there, it would be up to a clerk to refactor, it's happened. There is nothing happening with the file until and unless an RfC is filed or the thirty days lapses, so why are you debating it? The evidence was vital, it is possible (this I don't know) that it affected the outcome. I'm not at liberty to disclose all the reasons, but quite a few editors made comments there that would be without any basis if not for my claims and that file to back them up. And it is ultimately up to ArbComm what evidence it wants to keep. It isn't necessary for them to make any decision at all, at this point, that's why you aren't seeing any ArbComm process, and ArbComm would want the due process of DRV to be followed first. Then, if DRV is keep deleted, regardless of the arguments and !votes, unless I'm convinced or I'm told by ArbComm to shut up, ArbComm would be asked. Because I'd ask privately first, and would only go to actual RfAr if there are some positive noises, there may never be any further action. I'd probably do this (private inquiry) before even bothering with DRV. And DRV is not relevant yet, the file hasn't been deleted, and a delayed deletion is almost like a delayed close.

Where is disruption coming from on this? The evidence file, as it stands, is just a pile of diffs. If it is a "laundry list of grievances," something is strange. The file used to have my conclusions in it, but those conclusions were also repeated at RfAr, which is why I so easily consented to moving them out to Talk. This whole MfD was unnecessary, I'd have blanked the file on reasonable request, as I promised to do so in the MfD. Look at what has happened: JzG filed an RfAr request without following at all WP:DR, over a matter that is routinely handled at a much lower level with little fuss; but because this matter was one where he had acted while involved, it was important that the request not get a positive response from ArbComm unless it actually took the case up and deliberated it. ArbComm members might not even suspect that JzG was involved, and so they would have been sucked into confirming an action that was very much contrary to administrative policy. Filing RfAr, at the time and in the way he did, was disruptive. I had just begun, with him, the first steps in WP:DR, he escalated. Then he MfD'd the evidence file. He's quite obviously not getting serious support from other admins. You can't start an RfC without two editors signing on, and RfC is practically obligatory before going to ArbComm, in situations like his block/ban of Rothwell. And the norm for supposed "attack" files is that someone nominates who isn't the target. It's not prohibited, but JzG's nomination was replete with false and misleading statements, and some of them stick, they contaminated the discussion, it was obvious, because editors kept repeating blatantly false statements as the reason for their !Delete vote. Note that the !vote was 11 Delete and 10 Keep (including the Keep and Blank) option, even with all this. (An abusive nomination can be itself the reason for overturning; in that case sometimes the result is that new MfD is allowed by another editor.) --Abd (talk) 20:06, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

ok, I'll quote you instead: "I would certainly go to DRV if someone else doesn't, and, likewise, this would be grounds for a direct RfAr, because the rights of ArbComm to the undamaged record of its own process are affected."23th February "If the page is deleted, I think it likely that I or someone else -- better if it is someone else -- take it to DRV. And if DRV sustains deletion, then I'd have a basis to go directly to ArbComm with a request for a motion to undelete" 24th February.

About editors signing the RfC, you aren't required to have only editors that are involved in all the aspects of the dispute, and they don't need to agree with you in how it should be solved. I'll happily be one of the signers, since I have tried to resolve the dispute (I commented on Talk:Cold fusion, WP:AE, the RfAR page, MediaWiki_talk:Spam-whitelist and Talk:Martin Fleischmann), you will only need one more signer. You can also ask User:Beetstra for another signature, maybe also User:Coppertwig. User:Phil153 was involved on Jed's ban, and so was User:Kevin Baas, so you can also ask them for a signature. You don't need to get the signatures before placing the RfC, you can upload it and then ask people to sign. --Enric Naval (talk) 20:53, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Enric, I haven't noticed that you attempted to resolve the specific issue of use of tools while involved. People may have opined on the edit warring (not an admin tool issue), but not on involved tool use. I've seen editors provide statements about use of tools while involved with respect to JzG, but I don't read these as "attempts to resolve the dispute." It would mean going to JzG's Talk page (though there are other options, but this better be crystal clear or it will be quickly killed.

I think there is something that has been missed. I want a real effort to resolve the dispute without RfC. I'm not just trying to satisfy technical requirements. Now, if somebody has a dispute with JzG, related to use of admin tools while involved, I'd be willing to join with that person, it would be the same issue.

Once the RfC is put up, there are two days to get certification, or it's deleted, as I recall. So one better have one's ducks in a row. If JzG is as intransigent as he seems, if his friends don't intervene to encourage him to do what Arbcomm would eventually conclude he should have done, the RfC will happen, I'm sure about that. (Theoretically, someone might convince me that his use was justified under WP:IAR, though an arbitrator already specifically rejected that, as I recall.) --Abd (talk) 21:36, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

About signatures: well, I think that my signature would be accepted for the RfC to fullfill the technical requirement (and, indeed, I think that it's just a technical requirement to filter out one-man requests!). You can make "attempts to resolve the dispute" by simply posting on the article's talk page and on noticeboards, there is no requirement anywhere that you have edited the user's talk page. If you ask those editors I suggested, I think that you can probably get 2 or 3 signatures more on top of mine, or even some more, and, most probably, they will all be accepted as valid. For example, I think that Dan's signature would also be accepted, since he made commentaries and advice here, the RFar page, and on JzG's talk page, and he might be willing to sign it in order to make it valid.

About JzG: honestly, I doubt very much that he is going to change his posture on either lenr-canr's blacklisting or Jed's ban. Address him directly once more and make the RfC already if he refuses to find anything wrong on his behaviour. --Enric Naval (talk) 22:21, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

I don't need to go back to him, it would be purely disruptive. Suppose he simply has a personal reaction to my style? Now, I know that lots of users have or have had issues with JzG, it's not just me, and I might review some of this stuff in putting together the RfC, but it could be adequate if I post a comment to Cold fusion, since that is the subject article. Comment there may be sufficient to establish failure to resolve the dispute. Your comment there would, of course, be welcome, as would that of any user. "Majority," there, doesn't matter. Something that JzG consistently either doesn't understand or tries to cover up is that when an issue is not resolved at a low level, if one side "wins," (who determines that?) that isn't the end of the matter, necessarily. If any party thinks that the status quo is deficient, the user may escalate, which generally means bringing it to wider attention. JzG is calling this process "forum shopping," but it's simply WP:DR. Also confused with this is the use of AN and AN/I, which aren't really dispute resolution fora, rather, they are places to deal with matters where admin action may be appropriate, which does not include most content disputes. Use of tools while involved would be an issue that has, in the past, been taken there first; often it has next gone to RfC, and from there to ArbComm. Mediation is possible in some cases; however, what I've been doing is starting at the bottom level: simple request to JzG. When an administrator isn't so far gone as to be unable to see the problems with their own actions, this often works. But it didn't work with JzG. So, then, I was casting about for someone to mediate. Step two: involve a third party. In my dispute with Jehochman, he and I immediately settled on Carcharoth, who said, "Bother! Can't you guys work it out?" Given that I had my self-RfC fully developed by that time, the evidence was clear, and Jehochman essentially caved. All I was asking for was an acknowledgment that his rather extreme warning was an error. Not that it was in bad faith, not that he should be whacked with a wikitrout, just a simple acknowledgment. I would have, then, proceeded to the block itself, but it was getting old, and who cares, really? Except that Iridescent apparently is still holding on to the whole thing and has a radically distorted view of what that self-RfC was, and what I've been about. It didn't discuss her block, at all, but she called it a "laundry list of grievances" in the MfD for User:Abd/JzG.

Seriously, there are editors, with tools, who don't pay enough attention to use them wisely. They may have perfectly good excuses, they may be dealing with mountains of spam and vandalism, but ... if they can't stop and look at an error and make up for it, simply by acknowledging it, but simply hold on to old opinions that don't match the facts, the problem is real and it is dangerous.

JzG has been asserting that I've been "losing," over and over, and that I just keep making more fuss when my position isn't accepted. But I certainly don't see it that way. I'd say that, given the serious inertia I've been dealing with, I've been making remarkable progress. Consider Martin Fleischmann and the page you had whitelisted. JzG removed the entire reference to Fleischmann's "Searching" paper, numerous times, I went to AN/I over that. He kept repeating all the old arguments, and he's still using those same arguments (i.e., the alleged copyright problem with lyrikline.org). The copyright argument has been rather conclusively rejected; he gets away with it by asserting it in new fora and with new editors, who fall for it. You know, Enric, I can back all this up with diffs, but I won't bother now. What happened because I went to AN/I? Well, other editors looked at the article and started assisting. We have the reference now, without the lenr-canr.org link. We have a mini-RfC going on the lenr-canr.org link, and it is in the process of rejecting some of the more clearly spurious arguments, which is progress. Basically, his position wasn't supported by consensus, and consensus as to part of it is the other way. My AN/I notice wasn't a failure, it worked. I brought attention to a problem, edit warring. That wasn't actually addressed, so it remains an open issue. The close claimed that the report was over a content issue, which was incorrect. It was over edit warring and, in fact, in the discussion, I wrote, "Suppose JzG is correct about the content. Does this justify edit warring?"

A few comments said that it wasn't 3RR violation, therefore it wasn't edit warring. That, of course, is a serious misunderstanding of WP:3RR and WP:EDITWAR. If what JzG was doing wasn't edit warring, edit warring has become meaningless.

Most of my effort of late has to do with how the blacklist operates, and trying to apply this to lenr-canr.org, the original clue that I got that there were problems, involves some very complex issues, so I've been working on much simpler cases. Lyrikline.org, I've been calling a poster boy for problem blacklisting. Beetstra makes some reasonable arguments for maintaining global blacklisting, though I think they are rather easily set aside, given what I've learned through extensive study. However, I'm not confronting that. Nor was I confronting the effective local blacklisting of lyrikline.org on en.wikipedia, by not doing what de.wikipedia did: local whitelisting. See, most of lyrikline.org exists in German, since it's a German web site operated by Goethe Institut, the Berlin library system, and other nonprofits and governmental agencies. Beetstra argues that Lyrikline.org links are inappropriate for, say, the Polish Wikipedia. It's debatable. But that argument does not apply to en.wikipedia, because English is one of the interface languages for Lyrikline. In reality, the decision should be made for each poet hosted at Lyrikline.org.

Instead, I identified a poet with an article here, and proposed the link on the poet's talk page. I posted requests for comment on two portals and a WikiProject Poetry. (You can see all this in the current whitelisting request.) No response. The portals and wikiproject and pages are quite inactive. With a single whitelisted link, there is practically no concern about linkspam resulting.

I was teasing out the issues. And it's working. The lyrikline request was just denied by Stifle. Stifle is one of the active blacklist-maintaining administrators. One of the solutions I've come to is that blacklisters come to discard WP:AGF. Look at WP:WikiProject Spam, where they have an image of a battleship. Isn't that a tad odd, considering WP:BATTLE? Look at User:MER-C, with the nuclear detonation. An administrator told me that he spent some time fighting spam, he said that it gave him a warped and rather hostile perspective. Okay, I accept that we need the blacklist, and we need spam-fighters.

But they shouldn't be the ones to decide on whitelisting requests. And that is exactly what is happening. It's a very small group of administrators and, not surprisingly, they back each other up. And once something has been blacklisted, they tend to be rather tenacious. The original cause for blacklisting, usually, is the large-scale addition of links to a particular web site. (Lenr-canr.org is unusual because there wasn't any linkspamming, what JzG asserted as links weren't, they were exactly this, in an IP editor's signature: "librarian, lenr-canr.org." Not a link. The blacklist leaves it alone.

But JzG knows how editors think. He asserts a laundry list of reasons why what he wants should be done. "Linkspam." "Copyvio." "Fringe." Some of them stick, sometimes, but not in a deliberative context, when he's as far out on a limb as he is now. --Abd (talk) 00:20, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

(unindent) raising again user behaviour at Talk:Cold fusion? It was already done and it was removed as off-topic, see Talk:Cold_fusion/Archive_23#Irrelevant_thread_blanked. Honestly, you have dragged this issue all over the place, there is no need for further discussion, even if you think so, bring the goddamned thing to RfC, which is the proper next step in WP:DR, instead of insisting again and again that more discussion is needed. There is no such need, I'm tired of this and I get even more tired just thinking of yet another dramafest at another talk page, this needs a centralized organized discussion at a RfC. --Enric Naval (talk) 04:13, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

The RfC will be written. Filing RfCs is far from obligatory. Want to see an RfC in a hurry, file one yourself. Or answer this question: if I file an RfC claiming use of admin tools while involved, based on the evidence in the file, will you certify it? If your answer is "yes," then I'll rely on that. If you aren't willing, then, please, you stop making demands. This is my Talk page, it is not "all over the place." Links to the file are not continuing to be added. I'm now looking for another editor to certify an RfC, based on the evidence and a simple claim, as stated in User:Abd/Notices. I am, so far, not asking editors off-line, what you see is what you get. But I could. One step at a time, Enric.

Here is the problem with the discussion at Talk:Cold fusion. I raised the issue. Did anyone else "make an effort to resolve the problem?" If you can point to it, and if that user is willing to certify, fine. But I don't recall that. For someone to decide that the problem was off-topic there is not necessarily an "attempt to resolve the problem," rather, it is participating, perhaps, in one side. The issue of use of tools, to my memory, wasn't addressed in a manner that I'd describe as an attempt to resolve the problem. Absolutely, I might get away with an RfC with a defective certification, but I have in the past challenged an RfC based on defective certification. The RfC should have been dismissed, promptly, based on that. But it wasn't. This is, after all, Wikipedia. "Wikilawyering." And then the RfC, which developed evidence that gained broad support, that the user being RfC'd was no worse in the affair than those who filed it or those they were supporting (this latter group included administrators, who are supposedly held to a higher standard of behavior), ended with a kind of topic ban, as I recall, for the target editor. And, since the RfC "wasn't about them," nothing for the editors and admins who had been uncivil, had edit warred, and who had blocked when involved (in one case, the involvement, as I recall, there, consisted of regularly supporting a POV with blocks). The point here is not that RfC, but that effort to resolve should be made in good faith and with reasonable diligence, not merely dropping a warning template, accompanied with incivility, on the editor's Talk page and if the editor doesn't "surrender," considering that a done attempt. We have some well-designed processes on Wikipedia, and one of the problems is that they aren't respected by those whose duty is to support them, administrators. --Abd (talk) 14:56, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes, Abd, you can count me as one sure signature for the RfC. I will certify the RfC, as an user that "contacted the user (...) and tried but failed to resolve the problem", see Wikipedia:RFC#Request_comment_on_users, users certifying the RfC don't need to agree with your evidence or with your interpretation of it and they can even oppose it. The signers (just like anyone else) can later make statements inside the RfC providing their own interpretation (I might even write one, who knows).

Personally, I find that you are asking too much to certifiers, but that's my interpretation of the RfC process. I already listed some users who more than probably qualify as certifiers in order to help you. I hope you can find another signer. --Enric Naval (talk) 19:13, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

(unindent) Well, it's not a demand, an "asking," rather, I really do believe in trying to resolve an issue at the lowest possible level. However, I have now commitment to support an RfC from multiple editors, the above being the only on-wiki acknowledgement so far. I only need one, there is more than that now. Expect it to take a few days, up to a week or so. I will draft the RfC in my user space, the two-day clock doesn't start ticking until it's moved to RfC space. When the RfC is being drafted, Talk page comments will be welcome from all parties. Thanks for your support. Note that at any time, this RfC process could be halted by civil engagement with JzG. If any of his supporters read this, please consider mediating this dispute, he's not going to listen to me, but he might listen to you. Otherwise, the evidence in the File That Shall Not Be Named -- yet -- (it's the one that he attempted to get deleted, and it is presently courtesy blanked, an outcome I thought just fine) is quite clear: admin action while involved, and possibly more (i.e, justification for a topic ban on cold-fusion related matters). Unrepentant action while involved and absent emergency, is clear grounds for the loss of an admin bit. --Abd (talk) 04:24, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

OK. Please leave me a note on my talk page after you put up the RFC, so I can go and sign it promptly. --Enric Naval (talk) 13:10, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

close of Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Abd/JzG

I assume that there will be multiple comments on this so I have replied on my talk page rather than here. Enter CambridgeBayWeather, waits for audience applause, not a sausage 22:51, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

I normally assume response there, and assume it. Newbies may not, hence your general practice of responding on a user page also makes sense. Best, in my opinion, is the common practice of responding in situ, plus adding a note to the user page that you have responded with a link to your talk and the section header. Anyway, thanks again for your close. I think it is not technically correct, but that it is, in fact, the least disruptive action at this time, and is therefore quite sensible. If the RfC is filed, the MfD becomes moot. If not, and it is deleted, DRV might then be pursued. Hence your close is efficient, and shows good judgment, which is sometimes in short supply around here.

There has been some continued discussion on Wikipedia talk:Requests for arbitration, 13 hours after your close, activated by JzG responding gratuitously to a neutral (or pro-Jzg! -- it included his nomination text) MfD notice I'd placed there. I suggested that the section be closed, and it was. I will be working on the RfC, but I'd really prefer to see someone neutral attempt to resolve the dispute. (Anyone who sees this and wants to know what the dispute is, see User:Abd/Notices#Request for mediation/intervention/warning for JzG re admin action while involved with article.)--Abd (talk) 17:56, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

External Link Spamming

Please don't reintroduce external link spamming into Wikipedia, as you did here. The comment did not in any way belong onthe talk page, and it's been added inappropriately on several pages by that user. It's hard enough to fight spam without good users endorsing it. Cheers. Phil153 (talk) 18:02, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Well, I was in the middle of editing that addition to poke out the link. I certainly didn't "endorse it," stop that nonsense, please. I'll check out the other additions, and if this is accurate (it certainly may be), I'll leave it out. The editor (and web site) talk about the experiment as "cold fusion," but the web page says "Sonoluminescence Cold Fusion," which is an oxymoron, and I pointed that prolem out in an edit, besides the fact that if there was enough helium generated that the experimenter experienced "asphyxia," the editor wouldn't, in fact, have any difficulty breathing, because there is no breathing problem when one is vaporized. I certainly wasn't going to edit war over this! But I prefer to treat new editors, even if they reek of POV and spam, with AGF. I'll check it out. Thanks for your attention to Cold fusion. --Abd (talk) 18:13, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

The editor has a history of adding external numerous external links inappropriately, he even added that link to the cold fusion article. Such behavior should be discouraged rather than reintroduced after another editor removes it. I understand that you may have a more lenient view. Phil153 (talk) 18:25, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

The plot thickens, perhaps. The user is the web site owner, see the name at the bottom of the web page, and see the editor's first edit. So definitely the editor shouldn't be adding the link or coverage of what's on the site to any article, that's a violation of WP:COI. However, COI does allow editors to make suggestions or place queries on Talk pages. I'd disagree that the comment "didn't belong." The editor is under the illusion that the experiment has something to do with Cold fusion, an error that is easily corrected, but not if discussion isn't allowed. Removing comments from Talk pages, so quickly, chills discussion, damages the necessary sense of a welcoming community, and needlessly alienates editors and the public, there should be strong reason for it, and as soon as one other editor objected, let alone two, that should have been the end of it. As it stands now, I'm weighing whether it's worth pursuing this. If I follow WP:DR for every problem I see, I'd be doing nothing but DR process, and it's bad enough already. I will comment on User talk:Minhducthandan and let the editor know about WP:COI.

Your comment here explicitly indicated that this link had been added. There were no edits from this account in 2008, so you are presenting ancient history as if it indicated present behavior. Phil, you jumped to conclusions, reverted, and complained about my behavior, without taking the time to become accurately informed. We need less of that, not more. Please consider taking a deep breath before you jump in and revert and accuse me of "endorsing" linkspam. --Abd (talk) 18:37, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

for references, first edit, in 2006, gives real name, and the web site (see reverted edit linked above by Phil) shows name at bottom of page. I have warned the editor about COI. --Abd (talk) 19:01, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Abd, generally it's true that other user's comments shouldn't be removed. But WP:TALK makes it very clear that comments unrelated to improving the article on an article's talk page can be removed by anyone. It's even posted prominently at the top of pages. Now, even I agree that it shouldn't generally be done for off topic comments either. But all that goes out the window when the user's post is clear and obvious spam containing external links, AND the user has a history of repetitively spamming external links [3][4][5][6] (I checked before reverting you). I think your interpration of policy in this instance is wrong, hence the post here. To my way of thinking we have to discourage such spamming as much as possible, and use a little clue in the process. I can't see any possible "chilling effect" arising out of removing posts from drive by editors containing external links, with no discussion of the article and no possibility of improving it. Spammers have it easy enough as it is without us helping them. Nice job on the website sleuthing! Phil153 (talk) 19:35, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Phil, just because you can't see something doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There was no "help" to a spammer here, I was in the middle of removing the http:// when you reverted me. Your description of the history doesn't seem to notice that I looked at the history. Those were all very old edits, and it's not clear at all that the old edits were spamming. Inappropriate, they may have been -- I haven't checked. But new editors -- and old, clearly inexperienced editors should be considered as new -- shouldn't be treated as "spammers" and rudely rejected. A simple, brief, civil, and helpful answer to the post -- with the link left as a domain name but not actually a link, hence no search engine effect -- would have been in order. Now, for most purposes, leaving the note on the user's Talk page, where it serves as a warning, but a gentle and non-threatening one, and which also addresses the users possible legitimate concerns, does no harm, doesn't encourage spamming, but, from my perspective, builds a reputation of the project as a welcoming place, where cooperation is offered and expected.

Now, good chance the user doesn't respond positively, even with this approach. In which case, you know what will happen. The user's Talk page is now watched by me. I get busy and might miss it, but if the user starts up true linkspamming -- which would be more than one edit to a single article and it's Talk page! -- it will not be missed, and the prior gentle warning will speed up the process, not slow it down. Nothing has been lost. Except one thing. If the post had been left in Talk, the error the user made, confusing sonofusion with cold fusion, is a common one. (Same thing with piezofusion, or other fusion that involves generating a high potential field that accelerates deuterons. It's high-energy fusion, not cold fusion, which, if it works, characteristically takes place at low energies. Hence "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions." But, note, it is not impossible that some process inside the lattice gives deuterons high energy. I think, though, that the radiation signature, in that case, would match that of hot fusion. --Abd (talk) 21:21, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

leaving those comments can actually do harm, as people also learns by imitation: new visitors will see those comments and assume that it's ok to add them, so they will add their own. --Enric Naval (talk) 23:43, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

There was no "help" to a spammer here, I was in the middle of removing the http:// when you reverted me.

For anyone reading this, I reverted 24 minutes [7] after Abd's reversion of LeadSongDog. It's a remarkable coincidence that I reverted when you were "in the middle" of a 20 second removal of the link 24 minutes after your reinsertion of the spam link. Phil153 (talk) 21:45, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

I have kids, two very active girls, 5 and 7, and I was (and still am) taking care of them. They have a tendency to demand attention when I'm "in the middle" of something. I was not merely removing the link, I was replying to the editor, with a comment similar to what I eventually put on the editor's Talk page.

Phil, you have two choices: apologize for implying a deceptive comment on my part, or leave my Talk page and don't come back. --Abd (talk) 01:25, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

One more point. "Can be removed" isn't the same as "should be removed." When there are two editors involved, consenting to the comment, and even more if there are three, insisting on removal can become disruptive. No problem with the original removal by Enric Naval. A little bit of a problem with the insistent removal by LSD. And much more problem with your removal. Much more time was wasted than would have been involved in simply leaving it there with, yes, the link spiked, so that editors could find it, but not so that it accomplishes any linkspamming motive. --Abd (talk) 21:25, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

It's pretty simple, spam should be removed. Drive by spamming of an article and then the talk page, with no discussion of content, to a site that editor controls is something 90% of editors would consider obvious and desirable removal. We can do a straw poll if you'd like. Phil153 (talk) 21:45, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

I consider the comment in question to be discussion of article content, as I think I explained already on the talk page. I've replied to it on that basis. I think it's far better to explain to new editors why their material is not being accepted than to just delete it. Just deleting it could give them the impression that Wikipedia is a battleground, possibly leading to their using sockpuppets and whatever other methods they can think up to carry out their side of the battle, or going away and telling all their friends how biassed Wikipedia is. I think a comment like that on the talk page, plus a reply explaining why the comment is out of place, would tend to discourage rather than encourage others from posting similar comments. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 23:56, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Ah, good point there. Pointing them to WP:RS and maybe WP:NOTFORUM would have been a better move. The combination of adding the link also to article + posting in a totally incorrect section (as opposed to posting at the top of the page or at the end of the last section like most new editors do) must have made me delete it directly. Indeed, I didn't even post an explanation on his talk page :( ) --Enric Naval (talk) 01:05, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Right, Enric. One of the things I was doing when I found it had been taken out again by Phil was moving it to a new section of its own that referred as well to the (properly) removed link from the article. I'm not thrilled that the other editor who put it back in didn't attend to that, but perhaps he also was distracted. It happens. --Abd (talk) 01:29, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Copper, if the editor didn't have a contrib history involving multiple spam additions which he edit warred over, or had previously said anything at all at the cold fusion page, or had mentioned the article at all in his post, I'd agree. As it is this is textbook spam. Phil153 (talk) 01:10, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

The editor assumed that his experiment was about cold fusion. The editor also put the same link in the article, and was reasonably -- if incorrectly -- attempting to explain why he thought it relevant, i.e, he's tried what he thought was "cold fusion" and, supposedly, "it worked." Sure, it was ... off, in more ways than one. But every person who edits here should be assumed, at first, to have a motive of assisting with the project. I haven't reviewed the detailed edit history, but I've seen enough to know that the description above by Phil is biased. Does Phil mention that the edit history was in 2007? That there were no actual warnings for edit warring, only a very gentle notice about him "keeping adding a link to an article"? I'll say this, the profile is not that of a true spammer.

(ec; to Enric Naval:) Understandable. Plus, the user speaks English as a second language, which added to the overall oddness of the comment.

to Phil153: And how do we respond to textbook spam? I'm not arguing that it was or was not spam; I'm saying that it's better to explain to the user why the material is inappropriate, i.e. tell them what the rules are. First very polite warning; second firmer warning and so on, similarly as for vandalism. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 01:15, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Of course, and Abd has graciously taken care of that. How do we respond to spam, even well intentioned spam? We remove it, and then inform the user. Not warn the user and leave it there. Phil153 (talk) 01:30, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

"Spam" on a talk page is a bit different than spam in an article. Spam can be delinked easily while still allowing discussion. Ironically, as an example, lenr-canr.org was blacklisted partly due to alleged linkspam which consisted of text that wasn't links )Rothwell's title, "librarian, lenr-canr.org." I can point to lenr-canr.org or pages on lenr-canr.org, and the blacklist has no effect. It only detects and prevents actual linking, which requires http://.

The link on the article page was completely removed, properly so, and the associated text was clearly irrelevant there. But reverting an editor without discussion on a Talk page is a tad rude, unless you are going to ABF, which used to be a policy violation, and I think we lost something when we decided it was unenforceable. --Abd (talk) 01:46, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Phil153, you stated in your warning to Abd at the beginning of this thread that "The comment did not in any way belong on the talk page". Sorry if I'm repeating myself, but I disagree with that statement: I believe the comment was intended as an argument about why certain material should be included in the article, and as such was quite relevant on that talk page. It follows that Abd's re-adding of the comment was, in my opinion, perfectly reasonable. In general, mentioning a link on an article talk page as part of an argument as to why that link should be included in the article is normal and not usually considered spam, and an opinion that the link is inappropriate for inclusion in the article doesn't transform it into spam, but into a comment to be argued against.

Furthermore, I don't think anyone had mentioned "spamming" nor presented evidence of such until after Abd had reverted the comment back onto the talk page. All Abd did was revert the removal of a talk page comment when the removal had cited a guideline re personal attacks and the comment didn't look at all like a personal attack: a perfectly reasonable action which doesn't require one to "endorse" the comment in any way. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 02:59, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

regarding the whitelisting.

You are right, we could have whitelisted the one link as a token, I focussed a bit too much there on the 'it is just an external link, there is no hurry, and it is better to see if we can whitelist the whole domain'. As you can see, I have whitelisted all English language pages (the whitelisting may be a bit pointy in this way, but I hope/assume that it is a intermediate solution!). I think this will be a step forward, and again, sorry for the delay. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 16:19, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Beetstra. From the beginning of our discussions, I've noticed that you do turn around, given a little time and cogent argument. I still think your description of the history of the unfortunate Lyrik/User:Lyriker is warped. The user responded to warnings. At first, he attempted to satisfy the concerns in the warnings. You should realize that our guidelines do not clearly spell out what process is to be followed. On nl, Lyrik did provide argument. Not an expert user, he added comment to the wikitext, assuming that this would be seen by the editor who had removed a few links. Warned, yes. But his response was ignored. The IP edited last on 24th Jan 2008 to remove a link. It was a link that he had added, it had been removed by User:MER-C editing as IP, restored by another editor, and removed by Lyrik, who was starting that day to remove links from de.wikipedia, as I recall, and I don't know about other wikis. Warned, complied with warning with discussion, made one revert, I think, because the removing editor was not engaging in discussion, was warned again, added no more links after second warning. And was blocked five days later.

On en.wikipedia, the user stopped adding links upon warning, but was blocked anyway based on the name.

On de.wikipedia, user responded to warning -- which was far friendlier than I've seen elsewhere, actually helpful -- stopped adding links, as I recall, removed a whole pile of them, and was never blocked. But also stopped editing entirely, not from the de.wikipedia contact, but from, clearly, the response on en.wikipedia and at meta. The last contact from Lyriker was a plaintive request that lyrikline not be blocked because of his mistakes. "Nothing to discuss" was the admin's response. Beetstra, it may not have been intended, as such, but only because working with linkspam tends to foster a battleground mentality, with an "enemy." The needs of the work mean that discussing matters at length is impossible. The error here is in assuming that this discussion should be the responsibility of those working with the blacklist. The user may not have understood the suggestions about using the unblock template, or may have been so discouraged by that time, believing (with quite some good reason, perhaps) that it was hopeless, but still hoping for some MER-C for the web site he clearly considered very, very useful and appropriate.

The blacklist template should eventually be modified when it blocks a site to provide very clear instructions to how to appeal, usable by newbies. And that appeal process should be content-focused, toward restoring normal editorial process with just an extra step or so for links to sites which have been blacklisted for linkspam.

This would mean that blacklisting could become a bit faster, perhaps, because undoing the damage from inappropriate blacklisting would become more efficient as well. Less work for blacklist admins and volunteers, not more.

I have seen no evidence of COI from this user, the name does not indicate it. The editor is from Berlin, I think. Editor is an SPA on poetry. Unless he acknowledged connection with the site, however, the record doesn't show COI, simply an interest in poetry, hence the user name and the articles edited and the links added. COI, by itself, is not normally a reason to block, in any case, it is a reason to warn against COI edits to articles without support from other editors, and a block is only appropriate if the behavior continues. An emergency blacklist block, though, is fine. It might have been reasonable to short-block Lyriker, but indef was not proper. (Except that the admin thought the user name inappropriate. While I understand that, again, the problem is that when the error was pointed out to the admin, he refused to unblock. Linkage. I.e., this may have been weak, okay, but that means that my action was right. Point to that and the problems with it, and my guess is that another reason would be given. As I've written, this is very, very human. There is a basic principle operating, "I was right," even if the reason I gave wasn't the best.)

There are reasons you assert that could indicate continued global blacklisting for Lyrikline.org. However, I'd say, if inappropriate links do appear, they are not likely to appear in large numbers, and global blacklisting could always be restored if they do. My guess is that the blacklisting is preventing many more appropriate additions than it is preventing inappropriate ones. The only way to know is to delist and see what happens. Given that lyrikline.org is now effectively delisted (I'm not sure of the extent of it, exactly, until I look more closely; external links do not have to be in the language of the 'pedia, see WP:EL, it's merely preferred and procedure is given for linking to other languages.), we now have a basis for moving forward efficiently. The global issue can be addressed when we have a little more experience. As I recall, the copyright issue was raised and given as a reason for denying delisting, so the result might be different if we go back. However, I'd rather find consensus here first. One step at a time.

Thanks also for acknowledging that your not whitelisting the single link was an error. I did ask for it when you raised the larger issue. As you know, my tentative intention is to more clearly separate the whitelisting process from blacklisting/delisting, because, in theory, whitelisting should be much easier than delisting. Again and again, I've seen it said, when a blacklisting was questioned, "this isn't a problem because you can always request whitelisting." I've now followed a few such requests, and it is quite often far from easy. Consider the Stifle decline. I've seen many declines that were just as off. How many users would have been as persistent as I, and would have known how to proceed beyond a denial? Blacklist admins should really be hands-off whitelist requests except to grant them. If not for your argument on AN, it's quite possible that some admin would have just popped in to add the whitelist. Your argument, as I wrote, made it appear that there was some serious disagreement. But you have now totally made up for all that, and I'm quite grateful. Could hardly be better.

As to the "hands off to decline" proposal, if we can't get admin volunteers to "staff it," it's pretty harmless. Non-admins could close such discussions if they sit there for too long. Or they can just sit there and be defacto declined. All that a requestor then would have to do is find any established editor to close the discussion. Part of the close would be a request to an admin who agrees to look at such closures and normally implement them. That's much easier than getting an admin to watch all the traffic! I am talking about specific link whitelistings, site whitelistings are more dangerous, and it's even possible that this should be a separate page, so that appropriate caution is followed.

What I see for the process is that whitelisting a link would require a request from an autoconfirmed editor. I.e., the page would be semiprotected. The Talk page for the project page would not be protected, that's where IP editors, etc., could make a request. Then it would require at least one support comment. If considered noncontroversial, the supporting editor could close it and made the request of an admin, if not an admin. If in doubt, or if there is contention, then there would be a close as normal. If there is a backlog, non-admins might be allowed to close: for an non admin to effectively close would require the cooperation of an admin willing to implement it. Admin close would be marked "Done." Non-admin close would be marked "Recommended," and then "Done" either by the admin implementing, or by any other editor with a link to the actual whitelist entry. --Abd (talk) 17:04, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

No longer would blacklist admins be presented with regular temptations to merely confirm earlier blacklist actions without unbiased consideration of the specific whitelisting requested. There is a very human tendency to make up arguments, or to accept weak arguments, that confirm prior actions, even where the actions previously didn't depend on those arguments. The whitelist page could also recommend delisting or site-wide whitelisting, but because this can interfere with blacklist work, I'd see that a close with those conclusions would then go to the blacklist page for review, as some kind of community recommendation, unless the closer is an admin and knowledgeable about the needs of the blacklist, in which case it could be implemented immediately. (It's still undoable, of course.) Sound good?

Requiring that a link be necessary is too high a standard for a specific link. It should be enough that it is reasonable to propose as a link in an specific article, the whitelisting discussion should merely reject links for which there is no reasonable basis. People send me mail that I don't need, and I don't consider it spam unless it's mass-mailed and without regard for my needs. I.e., is Spam! I may delete it immediately, but I don't add it to my spam filter. (I get about 600 spams a day.) What has happened is that, with existing practice, some of the blacklist admins end up making content decisions. But admins aren't supposed to make content decisions, they are not supposed to have any superior powers in that regard, except for certain exceptions: BLP, clear copyvio, article deletions, etc. When an article deletion is contested, then the community decides, not simply a single admin without community process, and even the decision of the single closing admin can be challenged at DRV and, rarely, beyond that.

And thanks again.--Abd (talk) 17:04, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Some points of response:

• The editor is connected to the site, it is not only true he is from Berlin, he is connected to "Literaturbruecke Berlin", (translation: "Literature bridge Berlin"), that in combination with the username Lyrik/Lyriker makes the connection only stronger. The proof is not in where the editor is from, or his username, but the combination. As I pointed out, our proof sometimes comes also from off-wiki information. It can range to a whole set of things, users using IPs connected to a company or organisation (this case), users who use usernames clearly linking them to the organisation (we had a museum like this, the user was also hard-stopped but continued to discuss), users using usernames which are mentioned on the pages linked to (we had a (web)marketing and communications worker from a library who never got it), people who start adding strange sets of links in a purely promotional way (and often can't resist to also promote their own SEO company), editors jumping through loopholes using only open proxy IPs, etc. etc. That you don't see the proof does not mean that it is there, and not been looked at. Here the username is just a hint, but it may be mistaken, but the rest of the proof ties it more to the user. Believe me, he is connected in this case, and the block is then indeed based on the name (but not only on the name). And there the blocking policy is clear about promotional usernames, {{spamusernameblock}} is a standard built-in block in the settings because of that. And the block template left on his talkpage, if read properly, is also clear there. I again note, that we can't always publish the link on-wiki (that would be a violation of WP:BLP), and if the link is NOT true when the username strongly suggests it, then the block is even more appropriate, as it suggests impersonation. There is a post on my talkpage at the moment for a website where the owner says 'we certainly did not do it ..', still it happened).
• Opening the whitelist to autoconfirmed editors is not a perfect plan (it would be nice), there are spam accounts who do 2 edits which are appropriate, wait for months, and then start spamming. They know what we look for and just escape it, spammers are not stupid. It might however be a 'controllable problem', as soon as you see such an edit to the whitelist, one could revert it. If it becomes vandalism, you just block it up for a couple of hours to admin level.
• As I said, complete detachement from blacklisting would only get my support if there are sufficient editors active there who realy know why things get blacklisted (and also follow off-wiki tracks). But help, also from non-admins, is there welcome. And the new abuse-filter may make it better to open up things (or even, maybe we don't have to blacklist). XLinkBot also does quite some good work here.

I am glad this is resolved now, let us move on. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 09:54, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

The overall issues are not resolved. Now, as to "opening the whitelist to autoconfirmed editors," it may not have been understood. It was an opening to them simply to propose whitelisting. Not to grant it! That would still be an admin function. Admins surely could look at the "credentials" of editors who support a whitelisting; I'd think it would be routine. Admins would know regulars who work the request page, and wouldn't need to look up credentials for requests approved by a known, responsible editor.

Once again, Dirk, you seem to be confusing the blacklisting requirements with whitelisting requirements, particularly for specific-page whitelists. If there is concern about specific pages, obviously, those with the experience in blacklisting evidence may want to comment. However, linkspamming adds content. Linkspamming properly triggers blacklist ops, and you have quite correctly noted that good links can be linkspammed. But we do not exclude good content based on the legitimacy of its original addition. That text was inserted by a banned user is irrelevant in process to determine inclusion. I.e., banned user edits article. Edit is properly reverted on recognition. Another editor puts it back. The new editor is now responsible for it, as if it had never been inserted by the banned editor. I've been through this one, there was a very good editor who was also erratic in certain ways and who got banned (I'd argue that this was unfair, but the guy also made it easy for it to happen). He'd make edits with various sock puppets, and the edits in article space were often quite good and useful, and so I'd put them back in, and I was dragged to AN/I over it. Precedent is clear, however.

For purposes of determining the legitimacy of a specific link in a specific article, linkspam and COI evidence is moot, and this point seems to be consistently overlooked in these discussions.

I would much rather see bot-reversion of certain links, with a ready "appeal" process for specific articles.

Basically, Dirk, content should be King, not spamfighting; it's fine to make fighting spam efficient, but not at the expense of legitimate content, and the possible COI of Lyrik is truly irrelevant to legitimacy of content, once the edits have been reviewed by independent editors. --Abd (talk) 06:46, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

I started adding links to lyrikline.org in articles where (1) I'd proposed it with no negative comment appearing, or (2) there was already a reference to lyrikline.org but not a link. What I found were two or three articles where Lyrikline was the source for the material in the article, or at least some of it. In other words, Dirk, the blacklisting was interfering with links necessary for satisfying WP:RS. My guess is that many more such links were attempted, and abandoned because of the blacklisting. This is making the point about blacklisting interfering with content, about the need for balance. Right now I'm giving personal priority to establishing an accepted body of links or references to Lyrikline.org, and where I will move next isn't clear to me. I'm finding that the whitelisting is actually quite thorough, so far every link I've tried works. I may next proceed to articles where the link was inserted by User:Lyriker and then removed. I'll review each of these for appropriateness, and will place notice on the Talk page for the article if I decide I want to insert the link. Thanks again. --Abd (talk) 16:50, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

European Association for Distance Learning

Can you come up with anything to establish this organization's notability. I tried but had no luck -- see my comments on the talk page. --A. B. ^{(talk • contribs)} 05:13, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Like A.B., I can't find evidence of notability for EADL. --Orlady (talk) 15:33, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

My discussion is there. --Abd (talk) 16:40, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Abd, could you please sign your comments at Talk:European Association for Distance Learning? I think it would look better for you to sign them than for someone else to add an "unsigned" template. ;-) --Orlady (talk) 16:30, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Done, sorry for the inconvenience. However, I don't give a fig about how it looks if someone else signs for me. I make mistakes, forget to sign. In other words, I don't mind if someone else adds the sig, but I also don't like that this causes them inconvenience, so it's fine to remind me. --Abd (talk) 16:40, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

University of Atlanta

I appreciate your positive message on my talk page, but I have serious misgivings about the article. The DETC accreditation provides some validation and that short article in DETC's newsletter does provide some 3rd-party sourcing. However, I have concluded that there is a far more complicated story that is not documented, and that leads me to think that the current article is seriously flawed. --Orlady (talk) 15:33, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

The current article is very short, and, to my knowledge, the fluff has been removed. If there is something problematic there, you are welcome to take it out per WP:BRD. Please be specific about "flawed." I'm quite aware of controversy (or defamatory comment) about this school; however, my opinion is that we should have a solid article, even if it is a stub. UofA exists, and A.B.'s claims that it isn't accredited may be based on a biased view of regional vs. national accreditation, or was simply a mistake. If there isn't enough left after stubbing, then the article could be AfD'd, but please don't AfD an article with "serious flaws," i.e., unverifiable content. Remove it first.

I am aware of one possible flaw. The material in the DETC newsletter was obviously contributed by UofA. However, that doesn't change the fact that DETC would be responsible for any serious errors in that coverage, and that it is thus reasonably neutral and independent. There is also the history of the article, it was clearly begun by someone from UofA (though it might have been a student) and there may be SEO involvement (perhaps with the IP edit warring recently?). But that's irrelevant to the present content. Thanks for your work on the article.

As to notability, you are aware that my position is that accreditation by a recognized accrediting agency like DETC establishes notability, on the face of it. Because of A.B.'s claims of lack of accreditation, I reviewed DETC to verify that it was, indeed, recognized, by CHEA. Also, as a result of this, I took out the mention of CHEA from the article, since it was really redundant, i.e., made UofA look like it had two accreditations instead of one.

One possible source is hinted. CHEA apparently maintains information on accreditation applications of schools pending at its recognized agencies. Internet archives of that site might show when and by whom accreditation was requested. --Abd (talk) 15:56, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

It's almost spooky how little third-party information exists about this university. It's not even listed in directories. That, coupled with the fact that a fundamental topic such as its history cannot be documented through reliable sources, makes me uncomfortable about the existence of the article. (BTW, CHEA is not a source for details regarding individual schools.) --Orlady (talk) 13:50, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

I've looked over their staff "selected publications", and at least for my field, its nearly all resume filler material - "forthcoming", WSEAS, World Multiconf, "Ph.D. Proposals" - nothing that would be accepted for a real academic evaluation. This is not a serious education facility - either it's a degree mill, or its a complete scam, or, possibly, both. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 14:12, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

The paucity of information is almost certainly due to the newness, 2008. It is apparently a continuation of Barrington University (or represents a purchase of assets and enrollments, etc., from Barrington, it's not clear to me which it is). Yes, CHEA isn't a source for information about individual schools, I only mentioned it to establish the credibility of the accrediting agency, DETC. Now, Stephan, calling a school a "degree mill,... or complete scam,... or both" is libel, isn't it? It's accredited, Stephan, so you are also impugning the accrediting agency, DETC? Is your purpose here improvement of the project? How? What, specifically, do you propose, or is this just a drive-by nasty comment without any foundation? Orlady was involved in improving the article, what's your purpose? If Orlady thinks the school non-notable, AfD would be the standard process, though I've stated my position above.

Just to warn against jumping to conclusions from shallow research, I found UofA listed on a Michigan government page of "Colleges and Universities not accredited by CHEA," document dated June 16, 2008. I'm not sure what the accreditation date was, but it was in 2008. It's "accredited by CHEA," so to speak: as noted above, CHEA does not accredit, but recognizes accreditation agencies, and so you can find UofA on the CHEA web site. I removed the National Advisory Board material from the article, indeed, I removed most material from the article; in the case of the Board, it was because I found not one notable expert there. That doesn't make them not a legitimate university, merely a minor one. I checked all this stuff, with probably more thoroughness than the article deserved.

Note that the DETC web site says that UofA was "founded in 1991." This would refer to Barrington University, which apparently began the accreditation process. For the accrediting procedure, see http://www.detc.org/theaccrediting.html), see also http://www.detc.org/downloads/2007%20DETC%20Accreditation%20Overview.pdf

From http://www.detc.org/downloads/2007_facts_about_detc.pdf

How Difficult is it to Earn the DETC Seal?

Approximately 1 out of 3 applicants eventually earns DETC accreditation. In the period 2001-2006, out of more than 100 new applications, only 36 new institutions were accredited; 3 institutions had accreditation withdrawn by DETC and 13 others resigned.

It appears that what commonly happens is an initial application is denied, but DETC describes the process as "collegial." I.e., when they deny an application, they say why it was denied, and the goal is to help an institution meet the standards. There are actually substantial requirements that must be met before the application will even be accepted for review. --Abd (talk) 15:53, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Initimidation

I read "ArbComm is watching, Phil" as a nasty attempt at intimidation. This is not worthy of you. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 07:54, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

ArbComm is watching me. It's a basic, and very old principle. Assume it. And if it is uncivil to remind editors of that in a situation where POV-pushing has resulted in topic bans, well, ArbComm is watching. I'm quite aware of it.

"Intimidation"? This is an experienced user. If what he's doing is fine, where is the intimidation? AGF, Stephan. It is just as you said, you "read" it as a "nasty attempt at intimidation." My comment doesn't threaten any action, it notes a passive situation. --Abd (talk) 15:00, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

One quick comment: don't make references to "arbcomm is watching"[8] or "note the result for ScienceApologist"[9] (who was just topic-banned by Arbcomm). They will be invariably understood as veiled menaces, never mind how much you insist in that they aren't, so please stop doing them. --Enric Naval (talk) 04:38, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

UofA.edu

I have blocked the 4 IPs that previously also turned UofA into an advertisement. I also blacklisted uofa.edu again, whitelisting and using the about page as the link. I would suggest that further links needed on this site should be whitelisted. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 11:15, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

I don't see any need for further links at this time. I'll review the situation regarding the blacklisting, but it's certainly not urgent. The article needs the link to the school web site, I'm unaware of any other need. All I'd ask is that if a reasonable request for specific page linking appears, from a legitimate editor apparently interested in improving the project, that it be given friendly consideration. That is probably the least disruptive approach. And thanks for the notice. --Abd (talk) 15:03, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

I looked at what happened. Unless there was linkspamming to other articles, I don't agree that blacklisting was necessary, but I'd put this way on the back burner. Blacklisting would not have prevented the fluff from being added to the article by that IP from Uganda, so it looks a tad punitive to me. If there is continual problem with this, semiprotection would be what I'd recommend. I any case, you noticed the problem editing before I did, and I do support the blocks, not to mention the removal of totally inappropriate material. I contacted the school by phone, I was told I'd get a call. No call came. Hence, I'm certainly not exercised to defend UofA against the blacklisting! I don't see much harm done by it at this time, but it could be revisited later, if there comes to be something worthy of note at the UofA web site. For now, I have better things to do, I'm lining up the ducks to add, perhaps, a few hundred links to lyrikline.org. Consulting the Wikiproject, of course! --Abd (talk) 16:04, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

It is indeed not widescale, but the persistence is there. I considered protecting the page, but that does quite some harm as many editors can't help and improve the article (and as it is a stub, improvement is still needed!). Also, protecting this article may just force them to go somewhere else (will not stuff beans ..). Blocking the IPs does help a bit (blocking a /30 should not be too bad), though I expect, seen the persistence (XLinkBot did not help enough), that soon other IPs will pop up. Blacklisting is harsh, but hey, I did not hire the SEO, and as you contacted them and the vandalism persisted, maybe this does get the message through. Whatever we do, it disrupts process, and it is sometimes a difficult choice between us disrupting editing or them disrupting it. I think that this is the least disruptive solution. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 16:43, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure what the blacklist message says (where is it kept? I'd like to know anyway, if you do), but if an article is semiprotected because of this kind of nonsense, the semiprotection notice should inform IP editors that they can make suggestions on the Talk page, assuming that is not protected. I don't see a lot of activity on this page coming from other than this IP, and us, and when other articles are vandalized by IP, semiprotection is often used. As to "stub," there isn't a lot more RS out there on this school, people have been looking. A. B. has dug up some dirt about Barrington University, but I haven't actually seen RS connecting the two. (Though it's pretty obvious, and lots of substandard source for it.) --Abd (talk) 16:53, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

The text is here MediaWiki:Spamprotectiontext. Also protection needs quite some abuse, and I made an evaluation which would in my opinion give the least disruption. In my opinion, this IP should not have much business editing this page (if we had the abuse filter, I would have used that .. but that is still future), but local IPs might be of help here. I expect that the IP will shift, but also that is waiting to be seen. Somehow, seen what gets dug up, what we have seen with this organisation (and the other organisations which triggered the first blacklisting), I don't think it will stop easily (but I indeed have no proof for that).

I left a note about notability on the talkpage. If this is all there is to tell, then the stub mark can go (it looks like a 'start' class to me anyway). Still not sure if it is notable enough for inclusion, though. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 17:17, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Question

Thank you for your advice. In regard to the web site. It's purely informative you will not see an adds nor anything that self promotion. The reason I post is . . . it works. And it benefits to MAN if the people know it. again thank you for your advice (with the right combination I got my hand burned by the hot water).

Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Minhducthandan (talk • contribs) 21:53, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Sure. But "self promotion" here includes linking to your own web site. You can do it on a Talk page as a suggestion. However, you are dumping a lot of power into your cell, so of course it gets hot. What makes you think that this has anything to do with fusion? I have hot water in my basement. Not caused by fusion. I touch a car battery with a screwdriver across the terminals. Very hot. You put electrodes in water with something added to make it conduct, you dump additional power into it with ultrasound. To show fusion, you would have to show that the power generated was greater than the power put in. In any case, your web site is incorrect. Sonofusion, bubble fusion, isn't cold fusion, it's hot fusion. The idea is that it gets very hot in those collaping bubbles, like millions of degrees, allegedly, hot enough to cause deuterium to fuse.

I've seen youtube videos showing what is supposedly a cold fusion experiment. The experimenter cranks up the voltage on a cell until the cell is lit up with the heat generated. So? That is not a demonstration of cold fusion at all. It's a demonsration of the heat you can generate using electricity.

If you are genuinely interested in cold fusion, it's possible to run the latest experiments at home, and they allegedly produce some heat plus radiation (short-range but detectable). Look for the SPAWAR work, look for web pages by Kowalski, who reproduced the experiment, he's a physics instructor without a heavy-duty lab, and it doesn't require much equipment to reproduce the results. If it works (I think it does, and I might even bet on it, but that's another story. It's certainly not generally accepted yet.). But this work is nowhere near practical heat generation, even though parts of it have been patented (patent actually issued) for that. Look also for the Galileo project, where the editor of newenergytimes.com attempted to coordinate experimenters to verify the SPAWAR results with a uniform experiment. --Abd (talk) 22:23, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Abd, I know you call it hot fusion, but I'm not convinced that that's either a fact or a generally accepted definition. Fast-moving particles don't necessarily have to be described as hot. They have energy, but it doesn't have to be called heat energy: it could be called kinetic energy. What if you have a glass of water on a very-fast-moving spaceship: would you call it hot just because of the velocity? Would it be seen as being at different temperatures from different frames of reference? ☺Coppertwig (talk) 23:37, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

When we are talking particles, indeed, heat is only a measure of the average kinetic energy of the particles. Fast particles are, in this sense, hot. Sonofusion is hot, which was the point. The point is relative velocity. That is, you have two deuterons. Do they have a relative velocity? Low velocity = low temperature fusion, if they fuse. High velocity = they can fuse, if it is high enough. Could be two particles, could be many. Temperature is of concern only as much as it represents the average maximum approach velocity in the gas (if it's hot enough for hot fusion, it's a gas or a plasma).

There are other forms of hot fusion that are sometimes called "cold" because they can be done with small devices, desktop. But they aren't cold fusion, not even close. They involve accelerating deuterons to high velocities. That's the exact same mechanism as the rest of what we call hot fusion. Brute force, kinetic energy, overcomes the Coulomb barrier. Cold fusion has to involve something completely different. --Abd (talk) 23:51, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Explain, please

Please explain why you are referring to ScienceApologist in this edit, Please. Hipocrite (talk) 00:59, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Actually, you should just explain it at Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Arbitration_enforcement#User:Abd. Hipocrite (talk) 01:13, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict, thanks for the notice.) Sure. Science Apologist was very active in controversy with Cold fusion, taking a consistent position, i.e., a POV. I see similar activity taking place with another editor, which is highly selective approval of sources on one side of an issue, while disapproving sources of similar reliability or even higher reliability on the other side. The old battles are still going on. We need to start finding consensus, and part of that is going to involve using consistent standards for sourcing; what is thoroughly offensive is dismissing sources because they seem to support something other than a particular POV. In the instant case, it was going on before any edit was proposed, the source was being impeached based on, apparently, a few words from the abstract and the first page. The apparent conclusions of the paper are different from an alleged scientific consensus, but there aren't any recent reviews confirming that consensus, and the older sources, particularly the review panel results, left the door open for something to change, and encouraged further research and publication. This is not really a fringe science topic, it's something similar, but different. When a third of a governmental panel consider that something anomalous is going on, and when the majority (or more) agree that further research is warranted, the topic isn't fringe. It is, in fact, cutting edge science, where prior consensus might be overturned.

I mentioned SA's name. I didn't attack him. Nor was that an attack on the other editor. I'd say that it was a relatively gentle, warranted warning. (i.e., "Don't go down that road.") Thanks for asking. --Abd (talk) 01:18, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Please copy your comment to WP:AE. I suggest you do not ask editors to harass other editors. Hipocrite (talk) 01:19, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

I have no idea what you are talking about. Whom did I ask to harass whom? --Abd (talk) 01:24, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

You ask whomever you are writing the cited diff to "note the result for ScienceApologist." I have no idea why you are asking other people to go note things for ScienceApologist. Do not suggest that people harass ScienceApologist again. Additionally, in reviewing your recent comments, you state ScienceApologist is prohibited from editing talk pages of Fringe Science Articles. You are wrong in this assumption - "ScienceApologist is free to edit the talk pages of such articles." Do not make it, or insinuate it, again. Your consistent low-level harassment of ScienceApologist is disruptive, and it must stop. If you cannot behave with restraint towards ScienceApologist, consider not invoking his name where he is not involved. Hipocrite (talk) 01:29, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Hipocrite, it seems you are having difficulty understanding what is going on in front of you. I wasn't asking that anyone "go note things for ScienceApologist." I was suggesting that one particular user look at the arbitration and for that user's own benefit, review the result for SA. This is not an attack on SA, nor is it a suggestion for any editor to do anything to or about SA. As to your advice about not "invoking his name when he's not involved," if you look back over the history of this article, you will see constant mention of editors when they were not involved, most particularly Pcarbonn, as well as Jed Rothwell. What I've done here, if offensive at all, was extremely mild. There is no harassment of SA involved here, you seem to have a very strange definition. Further, you are disregarding WP:DR right and left, disrupting WP:AN/AE with a WP:POINT violation, reverting SA's harmless and helpful spelling correction and reporting him to AN/AE over it, when you acknowledge that you do not support his ban. This could not be clearer as a POINT violation. Above, Hipocrite, you misquote me. I didn't say that SA was prohibited from editing the Talk page. I said he should stay away, per ArbComm, which meant stay away from contentious, disruptive actions, like reverting Talk page comments. Not his job. It appears that he, also, misunderstood the comment, perhaps. I really found this whole incident to be totally puzzling, at first, until I figured out that it really was "disrupting Wikipedia to make a point." Hipocrite, not SA. SA, if you were offended by my remark, and if you read this, I apologize. It was not aimed at you, it was really a reminder to another user to not go down the same road, and it did not intend to add any opprobrium to your reputation, nor to bait you. I was very surprised to see you appear as an editor to remove my comment. --Abd (talk) 02:01, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes, Hipocrite, you really misunderstood. To my understanding, the only interpretation that can be done is that Abd was telling Phil that he would get himself topic banned like SA if he didn't stop (in particular, if he didn't stop discarding a certain type of sources). --Enric Naval (talk) 02:58, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

That's correct. "Type of source" means a source that would be considered reliable for most articles, by its nature (peer-reviewed, substantial publisher), but which is automatically rejected because of what it says. And, by the way, I can't "topic ban" anyone, and I have no magic power to call down the forces of nature and ArbComm. --Abd (talk) 04:26, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that's what I thought Abd meant, too, and I was surprised that the comment was interpreted as an attack against SA and deleted. Arbcom decisions are like case law: they're looked at as examples of what might happen in other cases. Abd was recommending that someone read some particular Arbcom decision in order to learn something from it; the fact that a certain editor was involved in the decision was irrelevant: that was more like a way of telling the person which section of the decision to read.

Re the spelling mistake: Here's my opinion. SA should not have corrected that spelling mistake, but^{(20:53, 7 March 2009 (UTC))} could have put a request on the talk page that another editor correct it. However, once it was done, the best response was probably to do nothing. It was a spelling mistake. Nothing worth wasting time over. Another reasonable response might have been to warn SA.^{(20:53, 7 March 2009 (UTC))} Starting a thread about it at AE would seem like unnecessary wikidrama to me; and reverting the edit is counterproductive. Just because an edit shouldn't have been done doesn't necessarily mean it's OK to revert it. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 03:09, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Striking out some of my words after reading the threads at AE. I apologize to ScienceApologist. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 20:53, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Actually, I came up with a suggestion at User talk:Durova. The problem with these little spelling corrections (there is more than one of them) is that it complicates Arbitration enforcement. If "spelling corrections" are allowed, then AE is no longer a matter of just noting edits. The content of the edits must be reviewed, which takes far longer. There is some possibility that SA is deliberately finding spelling mistakes to correct in order to make a WP:point, to express his contempt for the ArbComm topic ban. What I suggested is that, if his motivation is truly to help the project, that he revert his own "harmless corrections." He might, if he wishes, note this in talk for the article, or tell anyone else about it, but with a well-watched article, this should be unnecessary. A small extra nuisance for himself; but then, attention has been called to the spelling correction and it is easily implemented by anyone in seconds. Unless it's disruptive in some special way, a promptly self-reverted edit (and the self-reversion edit summary should probably call attention to the ban) should not be considered ban evasion, and I'd be prepared to argue that deeply if it's necessary. While the small extra inconvenience to SA would be minor, he'd be self-policing, which would stand in his favor, and the project would clearly benefit (and this practice could stand as a precedent). Generally, self-reversion is advised, under some circumstances, for possibly controversial edits; in fact, it gives me some ideas for myself. One can see self-reversion, documented as I suggested, in contribution history, and it would also be fast to confirm that the edit was harmless and whoever is patrolling the user's edits could quickly undo the reversion so patrolling becomes less of a suspicious exercise possibly motivated by punishment, and more cooperation.

This self-reversion process should only be used for non-controversial edits. If an edit is reasonably expected to be controversial, for a topic-banned editor, the edit should be proposed in Talk.

The edit summaries could look like this:

(sp) will revert per topic ban

(rv self, undo to fix spelling)

The intention to revert should be stated in the first edit so that somebody doesn't get trigger happy. Yes, it's a little more trouble (not a lot). That's what happens when you get yourself topic banned. (And the inconvenience to the rest of the project is why a topic ban is a last resort before blocking.) --Abd (talk) 12:55, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

(<<outdent) Hipocrite, the thread you started at AE about SA's spelling correction looks like a POINT violation to me, although it may not be a POINT violation because there may be some other explanation for your behaviour. Here's one possible explanation: maybe it wasn't a POINT violation, but an IAR violation (if there can be such a thing). Maybe you forgot momentarily that the ultimate purpose of Wikipedia is not the following of rules, but the production of an encyclopedia. Maybe you felt that it was your duty to report ScienceApologist for violating the letter of the ban, and referred to the ban as ridiculous in protest at feeling forced to do so. I don't know what your actual motivation was. If you ask me I can explain why it looks like a POINT violation to me. Wait: after writing the preceding, I found this edit, which supports the hypothesis I just described. Therefore, I think it was not a POINT violation; however, it may be an IAR violation or something. Hipocrite, please note that starting a thread at AE (or anywhere; some places more so than others) has a cost in other editors' time and that judgement should always be used before doing so; the predicted benefit of such a thread should outweigh its cost. I suggest re-reading WP:WIARM, e.g. "The spirit of the rule trumps the letter of the rule." and "A rule-ignorer must justify how their actions improve the encyclopedia if challenged. Actually, everyone should be able to do that at all times." and maybe WP:CONSENSUS, WP:BOLD and WP:Wikilawyering. Can you justify how your decision to report every violation of every sanction, including trivial violations such as correction of spelling mistakes, improves the encyclopedia? An arbitrator has clarified that "correction of typos, for example, can be ignored" [10]. I take the fact that no administrator has blocked ScienceApologist for correcting a spelling mistake as a sign that RfA, contrary to common belief, is not broken. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 21:19, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

AGF

You appear to be assuming that I am somehow acting in cahoots with ScienceApologist. I am not. I think that his violation of his valid ban is wrong. The appropriate action to oppose a ban is not to violate it, but to seek redress. I am reporting SA's violations of his bans because I think that what he is doing should result in sanction. You have now stated as fact on three different pages that I am "cooperating" with ScienceApologist. Treating people you disagree with civily is not colusion, or an agreement to cooperate. It's civil behavior. If you continue to assume bad faith or untoward motives in my action, I will seek adminstrative sanction to make you stop. Hipocrite (talk) 18:07, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Already, once, Hipocrite, you warned me against an action that you totally misunderstood, and then, without waiting for any response from me (and actually while I was writing a response), you took the matter to AE. That is disruptive. I did not assume bad faith at the outset, and I would still treat your protest with AGF. There is a possible matter on which SA might be subject to AE sanction, but only if he continues certain behavior. Your actions reverting spelling corrections (which violate, quite as SA has claimed, WP:IAR, since your reverts damaged the project, are clearly disruptive, in spite of your protests. It could be argued that his edits are also disruptive, but in a different way, and he should properly be warned before being sanctioned if he continues; to my knowledge, he has not properly been warned unless it happened since earlier today. You have not warned him, yet you have taken his actions to AE. The effect of your actions is cooperation in disruptive activity; initially, I assumed that you were merely being a pedantic enforcer, just as you claim to be. Given the behavior in more than one instance, I've been unable to maintain the assumption with any strength. And I'm not the judge. The community will be. If you want to take this to AN/I, you are welcome, but I'm not aware of any continuing activity that needs correction, at least not on my part. If you disagree, please cite specific edits. Certainly I make mistakes and I attempt to fix them when I do. But general, nonspecific complaints about past action, I'm not going to investigate my own edits, though I will certainly take your protest into consideration in future ones. Thanks. --Abd (talk) 00:46, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Cold fusion

How does your last post on cold fusion advance the article. Weighting sources is an important subject that comes up over and over on the cold page. Not all journals are equal. I trust you understand the point made concerning parapsychology and I also trust you are aware most scientists don't consider parapsychology a science. You can pick a philosophical fight over this conclusion some place other than the cold fusion page. The talk page has enough relevant controversy as it is. Thanks.--OMCV (talk) 00:10, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

I didn't bring up parapsychology, Phil153 did. The article on the face appears to be a history of the field of Parapsychology, which exists and is of interest to psychologists, obviously. My point was that to dismiss an entire publisher (Springer-Verlag) based on an article appearing with parapsychology in the name is a bit extreme. Surely it depends on what the article actually says! Further, peer-reviewed journals are free to publish papers that contradict general consensus; if they were not, general consensus could never change, could it?

Absolutely, all journals aren't equal. However, when we get into the business of deciding which journal is better than which other one, when they both qualify as reliable source, we are entering dangerous territory, infested with opportunities for POV to fester. In the present case, without even seeing the article, without researching the journal or the publisher, it was dismissed as unreliable. The topic of Cold fusion has suffered from a shortage of review articles ("Secondary sources") in peer-reviewed science journals. Okay, here is a review article, in a general physics journal, with a reputable publisher (largest publisher in China, and the Frontier series is apparently supported by the Chinese government, and I'm quite sure that their goal is to do it right, to establish a reputation for China for serious science research and publishing, but ... problem is, from the abstract, it looks like it might support the existence of Cold fusion. But, we should note, the DOE 2004 report encouraged further research and publication. It's happening. But the primary sources, such as the SPAWAR research, haven't been much reviewed. The journal in which they appear has been similarly denigrated as not being sufficiently capable of reviewing an article on cold fusion. Except that this is actually nonsense, the journal in question is published by the Max Planck Society, which has ample resources, without question.

It's a long-term pattern, OMCV, of tenaciously challenging sources which don't support the conclusions of some editors. Those conclusions happen to match the "general scientific consensus," which is actually not defined. (That's a problem with the Fringe Science Arbitration. There is no body that issues "General Scientific Consensus.") What is the consensus of physicists who have been following the recent literature? It might be quite different from the "general consensus."

So here comes notice, from me, that I found a review paper meeting, on the face, WP:RS. Immediately, before we have even seen a copy of the paper, it's impeached, "it's not even a clean drinking vessel." I haven't asserted any edits from it, just brought it to the attention of editors of this article. How can it be said that the article contradicts what is in "better" journals, when no text has been asserted that would show contradiction? I don't think that there are any journals out there that have said that what is reported in Frontiers of Physics in China is impossible; the DOE said, in 1989 and in 2004, that evidence for cold fusion "was not conclusive." But those reviews definitely did not consider all the evidence. Here comes a review that may consider, more thoroughly, recent research. I don't know yet, and certainly Phil153 doesn't know. I'm not claiming that we should erase the article and information about general scientific consensus, but that we should at least report what is in reliable sources, and how we balance them is another matter. I am not arguing any "conclusion" about parapsychology, except the implied conclusion that a publisher is impeached and a journal impeached because a journal article has the word "parapsychology" in the name.

Can anything neutral and acceptable by scientific consensus be written about "parapsychology?" If not, why do we have an article on Parapsychology? And if so, how could one promote an assumption of unreliability based on the name in the title of a paper? --Abd (talk) 00:44, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

I'll remind you that both peer-review material and Wikipedia cover many topics that aren't subject to scientific interest and/or consensus; such as parapsychology. Furthermore parapsychology was used to make the point that a peer-reviewed Springer journal does not automatically equal a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Springer is interested in making money any place they can and publishes on a LOT of stuff. It may be true that the article you mentioned should be considered. But I strongly disagree that we should not get into the business of deciding which journals are better and which are worse. This is a paramount concern in academic research and I would hope that Wikipedia approaches academic quality. Weighting sources does not subject us to POV, rather its necessary to find the best NPOV otherwise all POV will be rendered equal and fringe junk will flourish. I had no intent to challenge your review; based on your post I had no idea that was what you were concerned about. Your are correct that interest in sources is a long-term pattern. It directly reflects the scientific status of cold fusion. Many scientists consider cold fusion a pseudoscience or at the very least a pathological science. Even if they aren't pathological much of the publishing by the cold fusion faction has speciated itself form the mainstream. So any source that isn't published in a well respected main stream journal (which includes many Springer journals) is subject to skepticism. You would do better to try to learn from Phil post than attack him ignorantly. Finally defending parapsychology will make you look like nothing more than a crank.--OMCV (talk) 13:11, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia is edited by people who don't know the field, and unless we create and use an expert review board, or actually start implementing the implications of WP:CONSENSUS (which would require respect for expert opinion), it won't "approach academic quality.". "Many scientists," unfortunately, includes many who concluded that cold fusion was bunk twenty years ago, and they stopped looking at the newer evidence. and there is reliable source on this phenomenon, i.e., that "pathological science" in this field is not limited to one side. Further, the alleged "consensus" on cold fusion is mostly determined from reports that arent in peer-reviewed literature. I called the 2007 review in FPC the "Holy Grail," because it is likely what has been needed for quite a while, a review in a mainstream peer-reviewed journal (as distinct from a specialty journal like Condensed Matter Nuclear Science). The conclusions of that review, we shouldn't prejudge. Absent contradiction with other mainstream peer-reviewed journals, we don't need to determine which journal is "best."

No one is suggesting that skepticism isn't appropriate. However, a priori rejection of sources based on a highly jaundiced view of the *conclusions* of a review paper is circular. It would entrench and institutionalize, in this case, a position formed twenty years ago, and would run quite contrary to the conclusions of the 2004 DOE review, which really should be read in detail, rather than only in biased summaries. This field is not fringe science; fringe science doesn't have the kind of support from among DOE reviewers that this field has. DOE concluded that "evidence was not conclusive." That is a far cry from rejecting the field as fringe, and given the entrenched attitudes, well documented as such, it is entirely possible that this third consisted of the reviewers who actually investigated the recent evidence. (Note, I'm not impeaching the reviewers, simply noting that given the heavy prejudice in the field, well-known, that level of consideration is high.)

Now, if you are not willing to read what I write carefully, OMCV, please stay away from my Talk page. Claiming that I was "attacking him ignorantly," was uncivil, in itself. I wasn't attacking him, I was warning him. He is heading down a road that has produced topic bans, and ArbComm is watching. What I'm insisting on is that we follow consensus process, not that we favor one side or another, and that we review and use sources without regard to the conclusions that someone might make from them. We determine reliable source using WP:RS, and not as wikilawyers to exclude, but as guides to notability and for balance. If a source is reliable, even if it isn't as "reputable" as another, it is usable, and if what it shows is of importance, excluding it because some of us conclude that there is a contradiction is making a judgment that should be left to the readers instead of being made by us.

I'm not ignorant on this subject, and I didn't defend parapsychology. It's fairly clear that you are reading what I've written with a conclusion already in your mind.

Phil made the point that the involvement of Springer didn't automatically equal a "peer-reviewed scientific journal." No claim had been made that it did. However, the evidence that Phil presented for the point was the existence of articles returned on a search for "parapsychology," without any regard for the actual content. That is a totally unwarranted conclusion, and is an example of conclusions first, evidence later. He was looking for a way to discredit a source before any specific citation was introduced. The journal in question, Frontiers of Physics in China, is peer-reviewed. There is no reasonable doubt about that. It's mainstream, i.e., a general physics journal, we have sources saying "the best in China." If we have two reviews, covering the same material, that come to contradictory conclusions, we would have to determine how to balance that. However, we don't have that, at least not yet.

When there is conflict in reliable sources, and my claim is that FPC is a reliable source, then we don't normally exclude either one, we balance them, reporting both with attribution and appropriate context. What is necessary for NPOV is that all -- or at least a large majority of -- reasonable editors will agree that the text is neutral. Consensus is the proof of NPOV, and this has been too little understood. When one side insists that its views are NPOV, tenaciously, refusing to compromise, to find ways to also satisfy the other sides, we have a "situation."

There is another issue lurking here. What is the article Cold fusion about? Is it a science article? Above, you seem to claim that Parapsychology isn't a "science" article. Okay, why, then, would we consider Cold fusion a science article? In fact, there are at least two subjects involved: the science, that is, the chemistry and physics involved, and the social history. There are reliable sources on both; the former would generally be peer-reviewed scientific journals, the latter would generally involve newspapers, magazines, and books, often books by nonscientists, i.e., reporters and other writers. Trying to stuff it all into one article, then, invites debates over the science to afflict our reporting of the social history. Cold fusion is a popular name, it's not what the field is called by those doing research in it. It's an appropriate name for the social history article. --Abd (talk) 15:25, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm surprised you confused my well intentioned observations and warning with incivility. Oh well. I think you have a very good point that cold fusion deals with both scientific information and historical information. In most science articles we ignore most of the history since its not very important. In the case of cold fusion there is more history than scientific information at the moment. I also think you might want to reconsider exactly how much credit the DOE is giving cold fusion. They aren't exactly pouring funds into cold fusion research even if they are leaving the door cracked. P&F were taken so seriously because cold fusion is a really reasonable idea. It seems that we just haven't found the right conditions. But cold fusion also attracts con artists, the delusional, and cranks like nothing else. P&F, Rusi Taleyarkhan, and John Bockris are good examples of the sort of people who have made the field more difficult for the well intentioned researches.

I don't really have a problem with most of what you said. But I still think its important to weight sources. The "Brunswick Times Record" and "The New York Times" are both newspapers but I would trust each newspaper with different information. Journals are similar. "Frontiers of Physics in China" is young, not listed in ISI web, whether it turns out to be a serious journal remains to be seen. I won't bet heavily on it. My original critique was based off the assumption you support most fringe positions with respect to things like cold fusion, parapsychology... If thats not who you are good luck.--OMCV (talk) 03:31, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

I would bet heavily on the journal. Do you realize who is behind this journal? It's part of a series of "Frontiers of [topic] in China," published by the largest publisher in China, the 45th largest in the world. The intention is clearly for it to be world-class, the government is involved, and when the Chinese go for world-class, they have the resources to do it. They are working with Thomson Reuters, which is the largest publisher in the world. Which, by the way, owns ISI web.

I find it fascinating that you'd assumed I'd support "most fringe positions."

You are surprised that a comment which incorporates "ignorant" would be taken as uncivil? Thanks, however, for backing off sufficiently to notice that I might actually be saying something. Some people aren't capable of that, once these "assumptions" are in play.

How much credit the DOE is giving cold fusion? Sufficient credit to hold another review in 2004. Clearly, the majority were not convinced, but there is quite a distance between categorical rejection, which some skeptics would have us read the DOE report as being, and "pouring funds into cold fusion research."

Cold fusion attracts cranks for lots of reasons. It's possible to do cold fusion research in a basement or garage, and the potential for enormous return on investment is there; con artists can pretend this or that, attract funding, and disappear. Nobody reputable, publishing in peer-reviewed journals, is claiming enough power output to make it a commercial application, it's entirely possible that it's more efficient than muon-catalyzed fusion but still not practical, the conditions under which it occurs could be entirely too sensitive. What does it cost to fabricate a palladium electrode, mangle it thoroughly with the electrolyis, then recover the palladium to fabricate a new one? And would such recycled palladium still work? Apparently the P-F effect is sensitive to production batch for the palladium; some experimenters have run series of experiments with different production batches and some batches show the effect far more than others. However, co-electrolysis seems to bypass this problem, i.e, the palladium starts out in solution and is plated on the cathode at the same time as deuterium gas is being generated, so the palladium is immediately saturated with deuterium.

Once again, the question of comparison of journals is a red herring, at this point. If you have two reviews on the same subject and they appear to conflict, then some consideration of prestige may well be in order, but it's tricky. My point is that this is a place where POV bias can thrive. I would not go to the other extreme and argue that we should "teach the controversy," as if the sides were equal. But the CF field is tricky. It's a place where the "scientific consensus" we allege may consist of people not involved in the field, not aware of the recent research and the pitfalls involved. In any case, we will be looking at the reports, and where there are multiple reliable sources on a topic, the effort should be made to harmonize them, i.e., to see if it is possible that they are both right.... --Abd (talk) 04:18, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

If you have two reviews on the same subject and they appear to conflict, then some consideration of prestige may well be in order the question of which was published on the most reliable source is what is going to solve the question. See also WP:UNDUE. --Enric Naval (talk) 04:33, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Basic legal principle: "Testimony is presumed true unless controverted." I was involved in tenacious religious debates for years as a usenet group moderator. One of the techniques that I used was to presume that both "sides" were right. What could we come up with if we make that assumption? When we have two reliable sources that "appear to conflict," it's quite possible that the conflict isn't in the source, but in us. We are drawing conclusions, and we draw different conclusions from the two sources. Now, clearly, sometimes there is genuine conflict, that is, one source controverts the other. But that is not what we should assume from the outset. Usually, when reliable sources appear to conflict, they are actually reporting on different things. This will become more clear, I suspect, when material from the Frontiers article starts to show up in the article. But I haven't seen anything more than an abstract and the first page, so far. The abstract was enough to raise alarms from the skeptical side, but the devil is in the details. --Abd (talk) 04:48, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Just email me a copy when you get a hold of the study. I want to see if they making some reasonable claim on some small studies that have been done since the DOE 2004 review in research related to detecting the effect, or if they are making some extraordinary claim about what was already reviewed. --Enric Naval (talk) 05:05, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

That's not the only situation in which the source may be useful. The DOE review is based on a series of individual contributions which are documented. The 2004 DOE review concluded much the same, the review claims, as the 1989 review, and I think this is accurate. The scientists who worked on both knew that there was no proof that, for example, the Pons-Fleischmann effect was bogus. I.e., can electrolysis under the P-F conditions produce true excess heat, heat without a classical chemical explanation. Rather, various hypotheses were advanced as to what might explain the heat without new physics. The general conclusion was that the evidence for truly anomalous excess heat was "not conclusive," and that, therefore, we could not and should not assume new physics; however, sane science at that point suggests further research, hence the DOE reviews suggested this. They don't, for example, suggest further research in parapsychology or other true fringe fields. In order to determine if there is conflict between the two sources, the DOE report and the FPC paper, we would need to look deeper than conclusions. A good review paper will point to the evidence for conclusions, not merely make conclusions. The DOE report isn't a peer-reviewed paper, it is, rather, the product of a review panel that works in a different way; it is a largely political effort, focused on determining the appropriateness of large-scale funding, because of the obvious implications if CF works. They concluded that it was not, but, in 2004 in particular, and I think in 1989, they did encourage specific funding consideration under existing programs. This was not a "fringe science" determination. I'd agree with it, in fact, and my suspicion is that at this point, were a new review to be done, the DOE conclusion would be shifted toward some kind of acceptibility for the field, and especially for acceptance of the F-P effect as being real. It was already close to being there in 2004. "Real F-P effect" doesn't necessarily translate into new physics, perhaps there is still some classically acceptable explanation (and the F-P effect does not contradict established physics. Conservation of energy isn't violated. The Coulomb barrier isn't absolute, i.e., besides high energy, there are other ways known to get around it, such as with muon-catalyzed fusion. The lack of gamma rays or high neutron flux negates only the hypothesis that the fusion, if it is taking place, is classical fusion of the kind seen otherwise at high energies, or even as takes place in muon-catalyzed fusion. Now, if the two reviews, the 2007 paper in FPC and the 2004 DOE review, covered the same material, and drew contradictory conclusions, then we would have a true conflict, and we would be juxtaposing the solitary opinion of a single author and analyst, with the opinion of an editorial board that the paper was reasonably sound, sufficient for publication in a journal that is clearly aiming for high standards, with the opinion of a presumably competent review panel. At the very least, this would still suggest, possibly, citing both sources, and making the differences explicit. I.e., something like "A review panel composed of blah blah experts, convened by the DOE for the purpose of blah blah, concluded blah blah, however, a review paper published in Frontiers of Physics in China, a new journal founded ... and supported by blah blah editorial board, concluded that blah blah." What such a statement does is to expose the basis on which we, as editors, might conclude that one source was more reliable than the other. This kind of reporting is exactly how we convert POV debates into better text. What some POV pushers seem to assume, though, is that readers are dumb and easily misled, that such text would be "excess detail." However, the only way to avoid "excess detail" is to decide on which detail is important, and, when a subject is complex, that means a determination to support on POV over another, which is only justifiable when the rejected POV is truly fringe, which cold fusion does not approach. I.e., there have been and are reputable scientists, knowledgeable in the field, who accept it, and many more who think that it hasn't been established but is worthy of further investigation. That phenomenon is absent with true fringe fields. --Abd (talk) 16:02, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

We don't give the same space and/or prominence to minority views, and very minoritary views may not get any space at all, see WP:UNDUE, and that's compared by its prominence in reliable sources. If you compare the prominence of the DOE review with the prominence of that journal.... well.... there is simply no comparison... The DOE review was very very VERY prominent (see this Washington Post article written in 2004 before it had released its results, and see the expectation and how everyone agrees on the tremendous importance of getting a positive review).

Of course we don't, Enric. Did I claim we should? However, what is a "minority view?" How is it defined? By votes in a review panel in 2004, compared to RS publications in the next five years? I'm not assuming some particular answer, but you do appear to be assuming one, I would guess. And now you seem to be judging a scientific matter by what appears in the media. This is actually what we have RS on, decrying this happening in 1989. I have no doubt about the prominence of the DOE review. I make no assertion about the prominence of the Frontiers of Physics in China paper, it seems to have mostly escaped notice here. Rothwell of lenr-canr.org was completely unaware of it. But that doesn't make it unimportant, it merely means that it has been overlooked, and possible that what has been said many times is true: current research and review in the field is being ignored. That's a fact that we can and should have in the article, because we have RS for it (at least we have sources for that being the case in the past, this example merely shows that the situation continues). Etc. --Abd (talk) 00:53, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

It was already discussed at Talk:Cold fusion that the 2004 DOE review was a damned good and relevant reliable source, and that it was an aceptable source for the mainstream view on cold fusion. I'm not going to enter that discussion again. --Enric Naval (talk) 21:47, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Enric, Wikipedia does not revolve around what discussions I am willing to enter, you are willing to enter, or discussions any individual is unwilling to enter. Decisions are made and supported here by consensus, ideally genuine consensus, or, short of that and provisionally, by rough consensus. I have not suggested that the DOE report isn't an "acceptable source for the mainstream view," at all, though there are details which might need further examination. The DOE report is generally reliable as a report of the mainstream view in 2004. It's five years later! What is the mainstream view now? The DOE report was based on receiving reports from the cold fusion community and review of these reports by independent experts. If we have a new review, published in reliable source, that fills in the cracks, so to speak, that is not necessarily a contradiction of the DOE report. When that report stated that the evidence "was not convincing," and it also suggested that there were anomalies remaining, worthy of investigation, it was referring to the situation at the time of the compilation of the report. We should be very careful about assuming contradiction when it is possible to harmonize sources. The problem comes when a reliable source is excluded because it allegedly contradicts another reliable source, perhaps considered more reliable, but this "contradiction" is simply the opinion of some editors here, itself unsupported by reliable source.

We have the first page of the FPC review. It's been asserted that this is contradictory, but I saw no specific contradiction there. It's apparent to me that we have editors reasoning from conclusions. We need to explore the basis of our various views, not merely assert them tendentiously. --Abd (talk) 22:04, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm saying that there was already discussion on the DOE reliability, and that consensus was already reached, so I'm not going to enter it again when I strongly suspect that a) there are no new arguments b) it's going to end with the same conclusion.

And saying "It's five years later" is totally useless unless you can show evidence that the consensus has changed since then (notice that the consensus stayed the same between 1989 and 2004, and that's 15 years!) --Enric Naval (talk) 23:05, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

And it only gets worse when it also contradicts the other sources that I listed above. --Enric Naval (talk) 22:26, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Suppose that the FPC paper analyzes the continuing research, as well as the old research, and shows, by a preponderance of the evidence, that the F-P effect is real, there is anomalous heat, not explainable by the various proposed explanations used in the past to dismiss it. Would this "contradict the other sources?" If so, how? Please be very specific. --Abd (talk) 00:58, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

I will judge it when I can read it, and probably after asking some knowledgeable user to comment on it. --Enric Naval (talk) 21:47, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Great. Not a bad idea, postponing judgment until the evidence is available! As to "knowledgeable user," whom do you have in mind? --Abd (talk) 22:06, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

I had no one specific in mind, I would probably first wait to see what the usual suspects say on the talk page. --Enric Naval (talk) 23:05, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

(Reindent.) I had the opportunity to look at the offending paper. I won't comment on the content because I don't feel I'm qualified even though I've actively worked in closely related fields. I did think I would be worth including this paper's reference list. For anyone who is unfamiliar with review papers most have between 200 and 500 references. This list references would never fly for a review in an ACS or RSC journal. I also expect that APS includes more references in their reviews. Not to mentions more than half the citations are from talks or websites. This is very bad academic practice and is probably worse than many self publications produced by cranks. If it was related to my research I wouldn't waste my time reading the review. (In interest of full disclosure; I thought I remembered there being 10 references so I might have cut one off when I copied and pasted them into an e-mail. In addition I've removed portions of the website addresses to get this through the spam filters.)--OMCV (talk) 04:49, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

References

1. Toni Feder, Physics Today, January 2005: 31 [Cold Fusion Gets Chilly Encore]

2. Peter L. Hagelstein, Michael C. H. McKubre, David J. Nagel, Talbot A. Chubb, and J. Hekman, New physical effect in metal deuterides, in Eleventh International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science. 2004. Marseille, France.
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Hagelsteinnewphysica.pdf

3. Brian D Josephson, Pathological Disbelief, http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk
http://newenergytimes.com/Library/2004JosephsonB-LindauLecture.pdf

4. Jones S. E., Keerey F. W., Johnson A. C., et al., Neutron Emissions from Metal Deuterides, 10th International Conference on Cold Fusion, 2003, Cambridge, MA, USA
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/JonesSEneutronemi.pdf

5. Jones S. E., Keerey F. W., Johnson A.C., et al., Charged-Particle Emissions from Metal Deuterides, 10th International Conference on Cold Fusion, 2003, Cambridge, MA, USA

6. Kasagi J., Ohtsuki T., Ishi K., et al., J. Phys. Soc. Japan, 1995, 64 (3): 777−783

7. Takahashi A., M.Maruta, Ochiai K., et al., Phys. Lett., 1999, A255 (1): 89−97

8. Arata Y. and Zhang Y. C., Proc. Acad. Ser. B., 1999, 75: 281−290

9. Arata Y. and Zhang Y. C., 10th International Conference on Cold Fusion, 2003, Cambridge, MA, USA

thanks, OCMV. I'm not satisfied; you have established the this may not be a comprehensive review, but I'll still want to see the paper myself. Do you know how I could see a copy? As to blacklisted sites, just remove the http:// from them and you can put up everything else; any reader can then just paste the URL into a browser and normally it will supply the http://. This is the complete set of references? It's a bit strange, for sure. By the way, I see references in RS papers and other RS, not uncommonly, to sources we would not allow here; it's within the discretion of an author; as an even more extreme example, "unpublished communication from so-and-so" are not uncommon. I'm still convinced that the paper is RS, indeed, but your report, if accurate, does cast doubt on the quality. --Abd (talk) 05:11, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

I commend you for doubting the reliability of my report. I agree there are exception to the citation rules but they are usually a small fraction of the total citations. Perhaps 1-3 odd citations in a paper with +30 citations. I don't have a good recommendation on how you can get the paper without access to a campus computer network/library or equivalent. As a rule I don't do anything wiki related at work nor do I e-mail. This is to maintain my anonymity, I wouldn't want to damage my reputation/career/funding opportunities by having my writing correlated with CF. Those outside of science are free to question to what extent CF is fringe, for me its a practical reality. I wish you luck in getting a copy of the review.--OMCV (talk) 05:28, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. A question: Doesn't it disturb you that you couldn't participate in discussions of CF, with appropriate caution, without damaging your career? I've seen this reported many times, and it strikes me as absolutely chilling, and generally lowers my trust in the scientific process, and leads me to think that Wikipedia should be very careful about assumptions about "scientific consensus." Once that kind of effective censorship has arisen, whatever consensus appears to exist is a false one, and it would take extraordinary measures, such as secret ballot, to discover true consensus. As you know, no mechanism is in place for this.

Now, I know it would involve a small investment, but a copy of the paper could be mailed to me, Abd ulRahman Lomax, 40 Fort St., Northampton, MA 01040. I would remove the copy, discard the envelope, and make a small donation to a charity of your choice. Your anonymity would not be compromised, I have a terrible memory (it's age-related) so even if I notice where the postmark is, my memory, if any, would be unreliable. In any case, thanks for your time already, it's valuable and appreciated.

I've seen this happen in another field, with low carbohydrate diet and the contradiction to it, the hypothesis that fat causes heart disease, (for years, it was about all fat, but which became saturated fat with a little more sophistication) all without adequate experimental support and, in fact, the contrary. Butter consumption, for example, was not correlated with increased heart disease. It's a bit ironic that the Bad Science here has been exposed by Gary Taubes considering his prior writing with respect to Cold fusion. For twenty years, it was practically impossible to write an article in a peer-reviewed journal that questioned the low-fat diet concept; public policy reasons were cited: allegedly, lowering fat would be, at worst, harmless, and, at best, would save millions of lives. So questioning the alleged scientific consensus -- which never was a scientific consensus, but was a political one that became generally accepted -- was considered dangerous and fringe, and diets based on drastic lowering of carbohydrates were labeled "fad diets." Even though there was, in fact, some very solid science behind them and they weren't new. (Classic treatment for diabetes, type two, before insulin: very low carb diet. Yet until this year, the American Diabetes Association was still recommending against low-carb diets because they were allegedly risk to heart health. Could the fact that diabetics on low carb diets need less insulin, and sometimes none, have anything to do with this, considering that the major supporter of the ADA has been the drug industry?) Taubes doesn't claim this, but it is quite possible that the bad science cost millions of premature deaths. Low fat diets, in practice, become high carbohydrate diets, and Taubes convincingly argues that high carb diets are generally behind the "diseases of civilization," which include obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer. (Cancer is not exclusively caused by carbs in the diet, but precancerous cells require copious glucose and insulin, I understand, and high carb diets supply plenty of these -- i.e., glucose levels spike, insulin is produced to keep the glucose levels below toxicity, insulin then continues to act, taking glucose levels too low, causing hunger and ... thus goes the cycle -- ; the cells can then multiply more rapidly, increasing the opportunities for the mutations to occur that result in cancer.)

The tide began to rise with low-carb diets at the beginning of this century. Simultaneously with increased adoption of low-carb diets by millions of people, the research started to break through. For example, in spite of claims made for twenty years to the contrary, high-fat diets don't produce blood lipid levels that would cause heart risk to be increased, when they are examined in more detail than the old total cholesterol measure (i.e., considering HDL and HDL/LDL ratio, triglycerides, etc). When compared, the Atkins diet (low carb, moderate protein, high fat) produced better blood lipids than low-fat diets. Plus the whole cholesterol connection with heart disease is problematic. It's still a mess, with public advice being maintained that is contrary to the latest evidence, and, of course, there is a truly enormous business based on giving expensive statins with serious side effects, routinely, to people who may have, in fact, no increased risk of heart disease -- or who could be more effectively and more cheaply treated with diet -- and who don't live longer as a result of the drug..... Ah, don't get me started, you ain't seen nothing yet!

Back to CF, it seems to me that the FPC article isn't a general review article, given the sources cited, it is more likely a narrow review, possibly just reporting some common conditions in a few experiments that reported high reproduction of the F-P effect. They don't cite the SPAWAR work, which is remarkable in itself, since to my knowledge, the SPAWAR technique of co-deposition has the highest reported rates of reliability, and excess heat begins immediately. I have my own questions about the SPAWAR work, oddities. For example, they show massively damaged CR-39. Fine. Why did they leave it in there so long? Massively damaged CR-39 looks more like chemical damage. However, they've redeemed it with the work showing clear signs of neutrons on the back side of the CR-39. That's not chemical damage. It's not background radiation, it's associated with the cathode. It's not corona burning, which wouldn't happen on the back side, besides the other problems with assuming corona discharge in a conductive liquid! WTF is it, if not nuclear radiation? (And there are also experiments where the CR-39 was outside the cell, behind a mylar window, or in the cell and protected by mylar, and these show the lowered level of radiation expected from the intervening plastic, but still there, clearly, way above background. There was older work with CR-39 and electrolysis, showing CR-39 damage when suspended in the cell above the electrolysis, in the gas flow, shielded from the actual cell. Shanahan, in our Talk page, provided a link to this research as if it showed a problem with the CR-39 (since it wasn't next to the cathode), but, in fact, what it showed, most likely, was emission of radionucleotides at low levels, produced by transmutations in the cell.

It's starting to fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, if anyone is looking. But I am personally dedicated to NPOV above any personal opinions, and I don't generally let my opinions become beliefs. Until I came across a suspicious blacklisting, of lenr-canr.org, two months ago, I had practically no opinion about Cold Fusion except a general concept that it had been rejected twenty years ago, when I'd been very interested for a short time, and lost interest when, it seemed from what I was reading, there was far too little replication. So in the last two months or so I've been coming up to speed, and the field looks very different now. I'm not about to assert unreliable sources or to do anything other than insist, probably, that reliable source is reliable source, and generally what can be shown by reliable source should not be excluded from articles. There is a problem with undue weight, sometimes, but I've much more often seen undue weight as an argument advanced by editors with a POV, some kind of "majority opinion," but it is quite possible to be clear about the general weight of scientific opinion without excluding what's in reliable sources.

And, of course, there is the approach of forking the article into two articles, and one would cover the history, with sources being newspapers, magazine articles, as well as scientific reviews, and an article on the science, which would be based on peer-reviewed journals. What science? In the field it is called Condensed Matter Nuclear Science, not Cold Fusion, and that isn't merely an attempt to cover up the connection. The reference to Condensed Matter was there, as I recall, in the first Jones paper.

And I just blather on; it's part of how I learn. I stick my foot in my mouth, and that's how I learn quickly. Feet taste different. --Abd (talk) 19:40, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

I think you have good points especially when it comes to the subjects of diet. I prefer minimally processed and traditionally prepared food. I think its a crime that US cows eat things other than grass. More importantly I avoid new drugs and chemical additives. I know the science isn't there to prove they're dangerous but I don't consume fake sugars. Science is intended to replace tradition but it can take science a while to offer better solutions.

In terms of your level of trust in the scientific process its likely warranted. It is important to have science represented accurately as a human affair. Since its a human affair we have to do the best we can. This means judging material on limited information and general reputation. As I've said CF is tainted for very good reason. The next big piece to the puzzle is public resources. When ever I consider public resources I remind myself that they didn't have to be collected in the first place; but once collected they could be used for anything ranging from feeding the poor, to building our nations infrastructure, to providing bonuses for bankers. If we use those resources for science they should go to research that has the potential to result in something of value for the society that finances. This doesn't mean we don't do basic research but we do it with the knowledge that it will likely result in technology. I know many projects that I would prefer to see funded before CF (including my own). In a world of infinite resources people could work on whatever interests them. But... As far as your critique of scientific consensus goes I don't think ballots would help the problem. The truth is not something to vote over. I think the concept of "consensus" has some intrinsic flaws that becomes apparent whenever there's a controversy. The biggest problem with the idea of "consensus" might be that 95% of individuals don't care either way about most issues. Even with these flaws I think "consensus" is a valuable idea.

It terms of protecting my own identity/reputation. It doesn't bother me. This is a hobby for me something well outside my professional activities. I split my time on Wikipedia between reading the science reference desk, adding some technical content related to electrochemisty/catalysis/inorganic chemistry, climbing subject matters, and science fraud (extra-scientific controversy). I count CF little better than a water fuelled car. A diligent scientist is committed to discourse with other scientists of similar training through peer-review process. This is what I'm paid to do. Once a scientists interest drifts to debating the public its easy to assume they have lost interest in serious science. For example, even though Dawkins defends science and explains scientific information to the public, I question how much OR he contributed to science after writing "The blind watchmaker". He could have done some substantial work, I don't know his field, but my instinct is that his time for original research was over. Just as I fault Dawkins I risk being faulted if I'm connected with CF. I'm sympathetic to this since it would be hard for one of my peers to differentiate this hobby from my professional activity without personal interactions.

Be careful that you don't want to conduct OR on Wikipedia. It looks like your pretty serious about the subject and it might be best if you took your interest to a venue that welcomed OR. I have yet to read anything that makes me think the bulk of individuals in mainstream science see CF as much more than a pariah. I think the article should reflect this even if it has to be altered in the years to come. E-mail me something through Wikipedia and I'll reply with a non-standard e-mail address.--OMCV (talk) 22:18, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your concern, OMCV. I'm quite aware of WP:OR. There is no clear dividing line between searching for information and sources, analyzing these, and doing original research (i.e., original analysis of sources and the topic). My view is that in Talk, we can do this, we can report personal experiences, all that, we may express opinions, and we are not limited to what can go into articles. Further, my editorial behavior may be affected by my personal judgment, and my claim is that we generally have a better encyclopedia where people do this, while at the same time fully respecting community behavioral norms such as civility, avoidance of edit warring, seeking consensus, etc. As an example, if I know, from personal experience, that a fact is true, I'm not likely to take it out of an article. However, if I put it in an article myself, I may cn tag it myself if I don't have a source (but I'm still confident it's true, and particularly if it is well-known in a field).

You have erred in one thing. I'm quite interested in cold fusion, yes, but I don't expect to satisfy that interest on or with Wikipedia. I place NPOV above my personal interests, it's essential to me. NPOV can be very difficult to judge by oneself, for we all have biases; but a sign of true NPOV is that reasonable editors holding quite diverse points of view will agree on it. To people without much experience with consensus process, this can seem crazy, but it's been demonstrated again and again in environments where people share some common goal and where unity of purpose is important. We assume good faith, and much of the bad behavior on the project is not a result of bad faith, though it is often the result of failing to assume it for others.

Your opinion about "the bulk of individuals in mainstream science" may be true, but it should be qualified, or it is misleading. One of the defects of present social structures in many fields, and in the sciences in particular, is the lack of means of dynamically measuring consensus. The closest thing I know to a measure of consensus re cold fusion is the 2004 DOE report. 18 experts, anonymous, were chosen by the DOE to review the topic. There was far more support for cold fusion there than is typical for a supposedly fringe science. Further, when we represent a field on Wikipedia, where the field has shifted due to recent research, if we only report old reviews and rejections, but exclude more recent work and analysis that exists in reliable source, we do our readers a disservice, just as we would to them a disservice by biasing the article toward claims not yet generally accepted. We handle this with attribution and balance.

Now, what about Iwamura? What about the SPAWAR work? In each case it is possible to concoct some possible explanation that doesn't involve fusion, but what I've seen is that the explanations don't consider all the experimental data. For example, there are claims that Iwamura was misled by contaminants which just happen to show the same X-ray peaks. Fine, that's possible, though it appears rather unlikely. (I understand there is a conference paper on this, I'll be interested to see it. But why did the effect disappear when the diffusing gas was hydrogen instead of deuterium? Why did the same "mistakes" get made with both analysis techniques? Why was the Molybdenum isotopically anomalous, radically different from natural abundance, precisely as would appear if it were formed through fusion? At a certain point it becomes fairly obvious that the conclusion is driving the analysis. The "conclusion" is that fusion is impossible, and therefore there must be experimental error. It's an assumption, the bane of genuine science. What's clear to me is that the evidence is strong enough that there should be serious efforts to confirm or rule out fusion, expanding as necessary to discover a true consensus. There are now experiments with clear enough conditions, reliable results, and some confirmations. Iwamura's technique is difficult, but not something impossible to reproduce in labs that handle semiconductor fabrication.

As to SPAWAR, sure, the pitting of the CR-39 plastic can be attributed to chemical damage, perhaps some kind of chemical reaction or activity or the formation of dendrites or whatever at the electrode surface is causing the changes. Except: there is damage characteristic of radiation on the back side of the plastic (and it appears to be particularly characteristic of proton recoil from interaction with neutrons). There is radiation on the front side of plastic placed outside the electrolyte bath behind a plastic window, at reduced levels commensurate with the plastic thickness. And more. Oriani found radiation marks in the plastic when it was suspended above the reaction vessel with a shield between it and the other components. Many of these experiments have been run with ordinary water instead of heavy water: the results are either no signs of radiation, or low levels of radiation consistent with the percentage of D2O in ordinary water. And it goes on and on, OMCV. SPAWAR's work can be and has been confirmed without special equipment, it's relatively cheap. Instead of bulk palladium, it uses a little palladium salt (chloride?) There has been, as I recall reading, some problems with some batches or sources for CR-39, which certainly raises my hackles, but there are other means of detecting radiation that can and should be used as well.

For Wikipedia, we are dependent on how material is published as a guide to notability and reliability. We mostly avoid self-published material because of conflict of interest; when a publisher publishes someone else's material, and the publisher is in the business of selling books, or, if nonprofit, isn't just publishing that one book or one very narrow class of books, it shows investment and an expectation by the publisher that the material is of interest. We have clearly reliable source for some of the current research, we have conference papers (presentations) for much more, which is problematic because it isn't peer-reviewed, but it can be used under some circumstances. Now, if we look at recent published work, almost all of it favors cold fusion! There is a conundrum that I won't attempt to solve tonight, though there is, certainly, an obvious objection. But this obvious objection has a problem: it's not based on reliable source, it is synthesis or speculation (even if somewhat reasonable).

In the end, OMCV, we have one clear standard: consensus. With consensus or something approaching it, we can do almost anything here. Hence the importance of thorough consensus process, such that we don't just have someone repeating the antiCF mantras against others repeating the proCF mantras, but we go painstakingly through each detail to find agreement. It can be done, it just takes time. If NPOV is what we want, it must be done. --Abd (talk) 01:35, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

"...if we look at recent published work, almost all of it favors cold fusion!" Let me know when an upper tier research university produces a result that isn't mired in controversy. An even better demonstration would be a technology based on this science. When I read a scientific paper I don't assume the author knows what they are talking about I consider the evidence from my frame of reference. Iwamura might have something but I don't know his/her reputation, I don't even know their institutions reputation, so I doubt the validity of their data. There are only a few places on Wikipedia that we report result observed by a single lab. With that said I'm ok with it being in the CF page but it should be qualified. As far as national labs go, they produce some pretty wacky results sometimes. In many ways the national labs are far intellectually isolated than academics and I think they can go a little crazy. The scientific consensus is that CF is bunk. If you read pro-CF papers (I've thumbed through a couple) they often admit that this is the prevailing opinion. Now if you can produce a Science, Nature, PNAS, Chem Review, JACS, or equivalent paper that says CF is happening I'll reconsider my opinion. Have a good one.--OMCV (talk) 03:29, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

This is going in circles, OMCV. The standard for us is WP:RS, which does not mention "upper tier research university," rather it allows many different kinds of reliable sources that can be a basis for content. When there is conflict, questions of relative source quality can certainly arise, but they are usually best addressed by "reporting the controversy," with care not to present a minority report or unconfirmed one as if it were a majority or confirmed report. Obviously, everyone would like to have a "technology based on this science." It might be quite difficult. The conditions under which cold fusion appears to be occurring are fragile, it seems. It's been found how to get reliable excess heat, apparently, but that is still a far cry from practical energy generation or even from using it for heating! (But that is what the SPAWAR researchers patented, by the way.) Iwamura has been quoted here and there, the work is notable, but, as I've noted, there is a shortage of critical examination; Shanahan claimed in Talk for Cold fusion, back in December, that there is a paper presented at a conference that asserts problems with Iwamura's work, but it seems unlikely to me that it's going to actually impeach the work; but without seeing it, I obviously can't be sure. Shanahan's report, though, by itself, would be utterly inadequate. Too many coincidences involved.

Look, OMCV, there isn't any doubt that rejection of cold fusion is the "prevailing opinion." But that is not the same as saying that "The scientific consensus is that CF is bunk." There is a serious semantic error here. "Scientific consensus" is not the "consensus of all scientists." It is the general agreement of all who consider a topic with review of the evidence, and with sufficient background to understand it, otherwise it is not "scientific," it's just the ordinary opinion of people who might happen to be scientists. As I wrote, there is only one relatively recent general review that we know of, where we have some idea of the numbers involved, and that is the 2004 DOE review. That review did not dismiss the research as "bunk." Some reviewers did. But a very substantial percentage of them were much more favorable. If, for example, two out of three think it's bunk, and one out of three think it is a worthy field of investigation, with something quite possible real about it, is that "scientific consensus"? I wouldn't call it that, I'd call it a field in flux, it might go one way or it might go another. --Abd (talk) 03:51, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Barnstar!

		The Barnstar of tl;dr
		For consistently writing at length about shiite nobody cares about.Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum! 74.10.198.243 (talk) 21:17, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Thank you, 198.243. I ran this through a Latin translator, which came up with this:

Lorem itself pain he is amet consectetur adipisicing elit , but to give her transitory incididunt when to sink and pain magna some. When in fact to in the least degree grace , anyone our work at ullamco labor if not when some out of this to make fit according to reason. Duis but irure pain upon reprehenderit upon pleasant skirmish to be cillum pain good to flee nulla to pay. To take out sint occaecat cupidatat not proident , are upon fault quae workshop to leave gently breath this is laborum.Lorem itself pain he is amet consectetur adipisicing elit , but to give her transitory incididunt when to sink and pain magna some. When in fact to in the least degree grace , anyone our work at ullamco labor if not when some out of this to make fit according to reason. Duis but irure pain upon reprehenderit upon pleasant skirmish to be cillum pain good to flee nulla to pay. To take out sint occaecat cupidatat not proident , are upon fault quae workshop to leave gently breath this is to sink

I'm deeply honored, especially the parts about grace, reason, making fit according to reason, and pleasant skirmish, which is particularly appropriate to much of what goes on here. To leave gentle breathing is, indeed, surely to sink.

As to those who reverted vandalism on my page, which includes the above, I very much appreciate it, and as to the editor who restored it, on the basis that I could make my own decision, I can make my own decision in either case. Do not restore any edit by an anonymous and particularly an uncivil editor, unless you are willing to take personal responsibility for it as if it were your own, or the edit is needed for evidence, etc. The page has once again been semiprotected, as it has been for a long time, due to frequent vandalism. --Abd (talk) 22:26, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure if you know about Lorem ipsum. The IP was comparing your comments to garbage text that means nothing and that is used only for filling space. Excuses if you already knew this and you were just mocking the IP. --Enric Naval (talk) 23:09, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Let's put it this way. I may know what the IP editor was doing better than he knows it himself. In the words of God in Time Bandits, I'm not entirely dim. --Abd (talk) 02:48, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Happy to know that :D --Enric Naval (talk) 03:33, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm sorry I didn't revert it. I wasn't completely sure you would have wanted it reverted. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 01:43, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Normally, this isn't necessary, normally, my Talk page is semiprotected, but it had expired, and I hadn't noticed. Nice to know they still love me, though. I know I'm doing something right when I get this kind of response, bad editors don't get vandalism like this. Instead, they are the ones who do it. Nobody is obligated to revert vandalism against my Talk page or elsewhere, but it's appreciated. There is no harm in reversion of apparent vandalism either way, I'll still see it. Hey, just thought of something. If someone warns me about some bullshit alleged offense, please just revert it as vandalism. That way, I can claim I didn't see it! Okay?

Seriously, the vandalism was reverted by three different editors, the IP kept insisting. I decided to put it back because I kind of liked the barnstar, I don't get many. The barnstar of tl;dr, not bad, eh? And the Latin, well, it's poetry, or, more accurately, interpreting nonsense to find meaning is an activity of the poetic mind. But I also requested semiprotection, which saves those people the trouble of reverting. Nice to know I can get it in minutes. Some things do work around here. --Abd (talk) 02:52, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Your continued incivility on cold fusion

I've given you a warning here: Talk:Cold_fusion#Notice_to_Abd_about_battling_and_tendentious_editing. Please stop it. We can discuss the sources on an article talk page without making it personal, accusing other editors of POV pushing[11][12](here you imply that Enric is also POV pushing), rudely dissing another editor's thoughts and dramatically claiming the skeptical wall around cold fusion is crumbling [13],. I've let it slide up until now but the last comment is the last straw. Please stop, you've been around long enough to know better. It only makes you enemies instead of friends in your campaign to get lenr-canr unblacklisted. Phil153 (talk) 14:30, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

I've posted a related comment at User talk:Phil153#Part of comment had been struck out. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 15:59, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, thanks, Coppertwig. I'm responding in situ; admins, if it matters to you, please consider that I've been fully warned as if the original post on Talk had been posted here, and, yes, I'm not a newbie. However, also please consider that charges of POV-pushing have been routine at Talk:Cold fusion and in edit summaries for the article, for a long time. I redacted the "rudely dissing" comment independently, prior to seeing Phil's warning about it, precisely because I concluded it was rude, and even though similar comments have been made by many with regard to the comments of others, including mine. Desperately, we need to establish a collegial atmosphere with Cold fusion, with deep and careful consideration of sourcing, and what my comments were about was an appearance of preferential judgment of sources according to the POV that they might seem to support, even before edits were asserted using them, even before we had actual text (and I still don't have it and I think Phil doesn't, either). (This is about a paper in Frontiers of Physics in China, published by Higher Education Press, with the cooperation of Thomson Reuters. HEP is the largest publisher in China, the 45th largest in the world, while Thomson Reuters is the largest.) --Abd (talk) 16:19, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

With all that said the journal still doesn't have an impact factor.--OMCV (talk) 04:11, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Sure, that's fairly obvious. However, WP:RS doesn't depend on impact factor. Such considerations apply to questions of conflict in sources, and for reviews of a topic where there is ongoing research, freshness may outweigh relative reputation of journals. The question of conflict in sources is tricky. I will assert, not necessarily as a deeply considered position, that conflict in sources is our problem, not a problem with sources, and that we cannot assert and depend on apparent conflict and deep analysis of source reputation in order to exclude material from one reliable source, favoring another. We are faced with a record which may have apparent conflicts; we report what we find in the record. To assert conflict as a conclusion, we would need reliable source on that. So if a review appears in a reliable source, in 2007, and it appears to contradict a review made in 2004 by the DOE, we may not exclude the 2007 report in favor of the 2004 DOE report unless conflict is so clear that consensus will find true contradiction. In 2004, the DOE found that "evidence was not conclusive." Evidence can become conclusive, as more evidence is considered. Further, the DOE report itself isn't "peer-reviewed," there are problems with it and the process which produced it. I do consider it reliable source, however, but I'm not quite sure which should come out on top if there is conflict. In true NPOV, by the way, there is no conflict, because every assertion is verifiable, and no notable and relevant verifiable fact has been excluded, and there will be consensus on this.

I think I'm beginning to find my sea legs here. --Abd (talk) 14:16, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

My point is that you are dressing up dog doo and hiding behind WP:RS technicality. The vast majority of WP readers don't understand the peer-review process, at least not well. They don't know the significance of impact factor or importance of publishing in appropriate locations. Generally speaking the DOE report is a peer-review of the field even if it wasn't peer-reviewed. All and all more people worked on the DOE report than a peer-reviewed paper thus raising its significance. I'm beginning to sound like you. Knowing more about the literature and how its created means that we are responsible for presenting it fairly. Your grasping at sophomoric philosophy when a practical approach is warranted.--OMCV (talk) 02:12, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Oh, darn, my fuses blew. Please go away, OMCV, I'm busy. --Abd (talk) 02:27, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Cold fusion and Jed Rothewell

Please do not enable this editor, or assist editors in evading blocks or bans. Thanks, Verbal chat

Well, Verbal, consider this a level 0 warning. Do not revert Talk page contributions of legitimate editors, no matter whom the content originally came from. You will have another opportunity. Do it again, you will get a level 1 warning on your Talk page. Unless, of course, I'm blocked first.

But be aware that I've been around the block on this. I know what I'm doing, and if I were to be blocked over this (it seems quite unlikely, I've done nothing wrong, nothing against policy or guidelines, and am fully prepared to support what I did), it would escalate per WP:DR and would be, I'd predict, disruptive, if the conflict persisted. Please review the content of the edit before reverting it. Phil had the right to remove the material, as you'd see in my edit summary. But I also had the right to restore it, taking responsibility for any possible disruption from the content. Was that content uncivil? Was it inflammatory? Was it misleading? POV? Fringe? Was it anything that Rothwell couldn't have put there if he weren't banned?

Verbal, it was a rather negative review of the paper I'd proposed as being a useful work. If anything, the review could be consider contrary to the supposed POV bias of Rothwell, because the paper supports cold fusion, and it was purely useful. We are here to build an encyclopedia, not to pursue or maintain vendettas or campaigns, and blocks exist to protect the project, not punish editors.

There was no "assistance in evading blocks or bans." I'd suggest learning a little about policy in this area, Verbal. Rothwell can edit any time he likes, ban or not, and just about all that we can do about it is to revert him. But there is no policy that prevents another editor from bringing his contributions back in, provided the user is willing to take responsibility for them. Now, Verbal, did you recently argue that ScienceApologist could make harmless edits to where he'd been banned from? See [14], and I think there is more.

We already know Jed's opinion. Enric, if you already knew Jed's opinion, that he expressed in that edit, please, how much would you take for your WP:CRYSTALBALL? It could be very, very useful. Even more useful than Cold fusion might be if it's real. The question was for his opinion on the FPC paper, which he wasn't even aware of, and his report was rather negative, even though the paper could be quite useful as a "pro-CF peer-reviewed paper. I think, Enric, that you didn't read the comment, nor did you read my argument in the text that I'd written as to why my restoration was legitimate. Therefore you are edit warring, making a bald reversion without discussion, with no necessity. It's just a Talk page comment! --Abd (talk) 18:26, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Watch. --Abd (talk) 17:46, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Not only you restored his post, but he made it because you asked him about something? I reverted it, he can send you an email to answer you, no need to violate his ban. (hint: the opinion of banned users might be welcome if it's relevant, unless, of course, they were banned in the first place because of soapboxing their opinions, like Jed was. Also, we already know Jed's opinion, and we already know that he's not interested on any NPOV presentation of them) --Enric Naval (talk) 18:02, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Certainly he could have responded by email. But Rothwell doesn't care one fig about what Wikipedia thinks. He's banned, that's quite clear, and that fact is not at issue here. Now, given that he is banned, what if he had sent me an email? What would I have done with it? I can tell you, very easily. I'd have posted it to Talk:Cold fusion, if the content were what he put here himself. The post is not soapboxing. Talk page posts are not required to be NPOV, and, in fact, attempting to require that is chilling of the discussion that is necessary to find NPOV. However, that particular post was quite civil and reasonably NPOV, given that it was giving his opinion, which seemed quite a balanced one to me. Now, you reverted me? You reverted my post, not his, quoting him, just as if I'd received the email. I'm going to your talk page to request that you revert yourself. Be aware that I know how to call the attention of a wider community to editor actions, and that if we cannot resolve this between us, it will escalate, so please be careful. Don't dig in your heels regarding an action that you could not defend if, say, it went before ArbComm. See you on your Talk. (I presume that you read the warning above to Verbal, so it therefore applies to you.)

Storm's paper can be a RS, but Jed's opinion is unpublished, is the opinion of an unreliable source, banned editor, known POV pusher and COI'ed person. Tell him to reply on your talk page and not on the page he has been topic banned from. (or copy it here and put a link on Talk:Cold fusion for people interested on Jed's opinions) --Enric Naval (talk) 18:44, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Enric, your response here is dense with errors and misinterpretations. It's moot who and what Jed is. "Tell him to reply on my Talk page?" I don't ask people to waste their time with useless actions. He replied. I suspect he forgot who asked him, I'm sure he's inundated with email. So he replied in the article, with a harmless edit. He was properly reverted by Phil. The rest of this has nothing to do with him. It has to do with you and me (as well as Verbal, though I responded to Verbal and I'm sure he's pretty busy right now.) I consider what was in his response to be very relevant and useful. I restored it on that basis, originally, and then began to compose a comment on it. I have the absolute right to do this, and only if the material itself were disruptive would there be a possible issue with my behavior over it.

When I tried to save the comment, I ran into edit conflict. Verbal had reverted again. Now, this already crossed the line, it wasn't proper, but it's a bit marginal. I don't push marginal. So I finished my response, framed Rothwell's edit as a quotation from him, added argument why it was legitimate for me to quote it, and posted it. I did not revert. This was a new edit, with new material, and the old material that it contained was now framed as a quotation.

It's been suggested by Verbal that Rothwell could send me an email, except that this would have required Rothwell to figure out who I was. He might have be able to do that, but it could also have been significant trouble for him. Then you suggested that Rothwell could post it to my Talk page? This has to take the cake. Enric, Rothwell is blocked, he edits with IP (by the way, he was quite legitimately editing when he was blocked, with the only problem being a certain level of incivility that is very common with opinionated experts. And he wasn't spamming, period, and that will all come out. You are joining the wrong crowd, Phil. Please be careful. My Talk page is semiprotected, IP cannot edit here. But it would be silly to ask him to post here, because I'm fully capable of reading his response in Talk.)

So with this silly argument about posting on my Talk, you reverted me. You are not reverting Rothwell, you are reverting my discussion, which quoted a communication with an expert in the field (whatever else we might say about Rothwell, he knows the literature very, very well). The communication was relevant, on point, show no fringiness, and useful. I'm composing a more formal post for your Talk page. I'll check here to see if you have reverted before putting it there.

And, meanwhile, the substance will go back to the Talk page in a way that, if it's reverted again, will make it totally clear what is going on. I'm using the Talk page to discuss a source, this is directly and immediately relevant. Why, Enric, are you attempting to suppress discussion with wikilawyering about a banned editor? The principle you are asserting is corrupt, I've faced it many times, there isn't any doubt. Look at the recent fuss with ScienceApologist. Everyone agreed that any editor may revert back in removed edits from banned editors, provided the editor is willing to take responsibility for it, it is not even controversial. I reverted SA's spelling correction to Cold fusion back in after it was reverted out by Hipocrite as an edit by a banned editor. The issue with SA had to do with declared intention to ignore the ArbComm sanctions, which was a whole other kettle of fish. This is pretty much SOP for me, I do know what I'm doing. --Abd (talk) 19:12, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Fix his mistake and copy his answer to your talk page. Jed is not an "expert on the field", and asking for his opinion is like asking the fox to take care of the hen house.

This all smacks of making a point to show that Jed is not disruptive and eventually contest his ban. Indeed, when you quoted Jed[15], the first half of your comment was an argument about how Jed's ban was wrong, and the second half was justification of why you bring those sources to the talk page and vague references to how an editor opposing you was going to get blocked for 3 months. You were already warned about that type of intimidation.

Finally, you keep talking about the next step on WP:DR but you keep posting on the same places. I don't want to hear any more "level 0" warnings, vague menacing references to Arbcomm and to banned editors, or see the topic brought yet again to the same places. WP:ANI and WP:RFC/U are thataway. --Enric Naval (talk) 20:42, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

If you repost any more material from banned or blocked editors, or act as a proxy for them in any way, you will be reported to AE and/or ANI, where I fully expect you to be blocked to prevent further disruption. Verbal chat 21:13, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

(unindent) Verbal, don't you know that everything you do here is visible? Ahem! Level 0 refers to a warning issued in a place where the editor is not responsible for seeing it. It indicates lack of intention to seek sanctions. A level 1 warning, which is more what people usually think of as warnings, can preceded a block and be the basis for it. The "next step" in DR is user Talk page discussion, and this side of it is only half, there is the other side, which began with Enric Naval, whose reversion was more serious and offensive than yours. Beyond that, I'd attempt to involve a mediator of some kind. There is an arbitratable disagreement here, so don't imagine that threatening me with AN/I or AE does anything more than cause me to notice how people bring their own fate down on themselves. You've referred to this affair on User talk:ScienceApologist page. Do you imagine that this is helping his or your cause? Apparently, you, or someone, is spreading disruption over this, see the Jehochman comment below, and the community just might take a dim view of that. You are creating all this flap over one reversion, and then one original edit, not a reversion, both of them removed, standing as such, without any edit warring from my side and no bald reverts except for one that I fully expected to stand, the first, which was explained, I thought adequately. What's that called?

Verbal, it is well established that reverted edits of a banned editor may be restored by any editor willing to take responsibility for their propriety. As I wrote above, I've been down this road, I've been dragged to AN/I over it, and, as I recall, the one who dragged it there ended up being banned. Or am I confused about that? In any case, at least two editors who have made complaints about me to AN/I did end up being banned. I've been blocked once, over a complete misunderstanding, as Jehochman later acknowledged. I'd supposedly attacked User:Fritzpoll, and he also later acknowledged the misunderstanding. Take a look at my privilege log and see who granted me rollback.

Proxy posting

Hi, Abd. How are you doing? I hope you are well. A few editors brought to my attention this edit. It is established that users should not proxy post for a banned (or topic banned) editor such as Jed Rothwell. In the way of friendly advice, I'd ask you to respect that norm, even if you disagee with it. Thank you. Best regards, Jehochman ^Talk 21:53, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

To make this clear, I disagree that the norm applies to what I did. I don't disagree with the norm. I was not asked to make this edit. It was not "proxying," and many or most of the edits I've seen from Rothwell I would not have reverted back in. However, I'm also taking the warnings seriously. Without lying down and playing dead. --Abd (talk) 00:00, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Jehochman. I'd be careful about what edits you look at, i.e., if you only look at what was cherry-picked for you. I reverted Rothwell's edit back in based on well-established precedent; however the edit you showed was reverted and I did not revert it back. Instead, I framed the comment and added my own; the reason is that Jed Rothwell is an expert in the field (fringe or not), published, well-known, trusted to edit conference papers, etc., and the opinion of an expert is of interest. This particular opinion was very much on point, and, I'll note, not at all POV-pushing or uncivil. I was willing to take responsibility for it, and, obviously, since I restored it, I am responsible. So if that edit was disruptive, I should be whacked with a wikitrout or more. But it wasn't. I know you have been following some of the SA flap. What was very clear in all that was that those who restored SA's helpful edits, even though he was topic banned, because they were useful, were not doing anything wrong, they were not "proxying" for him; rather, they were making independent judgments that the edit was good. This was a Talk page edit, and the discussion is useful, directly connected to a source being considered for the article. I personally found it informative.

The edit you should look at, then, is this. In it, I framed the Rothwell post and explained the situation, making it very clear that this was my edit, not his. I'm not banned. And the edit wasn't disruptive, except for people disregarding Talk page guidelines, now: it was also reverted. The precedent on this is actually quite clear, but in case it isn't, this is an issue worth escalating if necessary.

Is it necessary? I mentioned in the edits around this issue that I would be moving up the WP:DR ladder on this. You know me and how I approach conflict, it is one step at a time, starting with discussion between involved editors, usually two. Then, if that fails to find agreement or compromise, I'd try to involve a third. Going to AN/I or calling in administrators for support, when there is no emergency, is quite a bit down the road. But sometimes it gets escalated quickly by the other side, and the track record of these escalations has not been good for those who jumped ahead like that. I can think of at least two of those editors who have been banned.

Jehochman, as you may know, I do all that I do as if ArbComm were watching over my shoulder. I'm fully prepared, if necessary, to defend my actions in this all the way up to ArbComm, though always I seek resolution far below that level.

Your warning here boils down to reminding me about rules against "proxying for banned editors." Perhaps you are not aware that I've been taken to AN/I before for allegedly doing this, and the claim was rejected. I'm nobody's meat puppet, I looked at the edit and made an independent judgment that the material in it was worthy of review. This is not proxying. If the edit was disruptive, i.e., uncivil or perhaps POV-pushing in some tendentious way, I would be responsible for that.

Again, I don't edit war when opposed, I attempt to gather and find consensus. I have not reverted the contribution back in, but I will be responding with a new edit that should accomplish my purpose as far as the article is concerned, without "proxying," even under the incorrect standard proposed. --Abd (talk) 00:00, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

User talk:ScienceApologist

I'm concerned that your comments on User talk:ScienceApologist are causing ScienceApologist grief with little to no benefit. Here are all of your edits to SA's talk page:

1. initial&cleanup
2. response to ChildofMidnight
3. response to Ronnotel
4. response to incivility by Short Brigade Harvester Boris
5. response to Verbal

Here are all of ScienceApologist's responses to you

1. removing Abd's first comment

What could I do to convince you to let the wheels of justice turn without your assistance and get you to leave SA alone while SA is blocked and staring down the barrel of a gun? Please note that soapboxing on ScienceApologist's talk page has in the past led to extremely bad results, as I assume you are well aware, and please additionally note Principle #7 - Baiting - at the Fringe Science case - Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Fringe_science#Baiting. Please consider just leaving him alone. Thanks. Hipocrite (talk) 14:52, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

It's moot now, because SA has blanked the page, which, as he is off his block for a few minutes or however long it takes ArbComm to close that block motion, he not only has a right to do, it removes the need for any response there; my response there was only necessary because (1) he was making deceptive comments about why he was blocked, (2) some editors were falling for it, and (3) his friends weren't correcting the situation. With friends like his, who needs enemies? William Connolley and another editor tried to convince him to back down, but he has been dead set on getting banned even more deeply.

No, I am not aware of the history you refer to. I've seen his history with Cold fusion, that's all, and it wasn't pretty, but he and I had not tangled before, nor was there anything serious except his strange comment on Talk:Cold fusion a few days ago. As you know, I reverted his spelling correction back in, the one you reverted out. He imagines that I am a "cold fusion promoter," which is just more fantasy on his part, he seems to see Wikipedia as being divided into the good guys and the fringe POV-pushers, and anyone who confronts his massive incivility and his edit warring must be one of "them." And, of course, since such people are the enemies of all that is good and true, deep-set enmity is perfectly okay. It's a poisonous approach, just as harmful to him as it is to the project, and he will be better off elsewhere for a while, quite probably, and I'm sure we will muddle by. --Abd (talk) 03:57, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Stay off my talkpage

Make NO MORE EDITS to my talkpage. ScienceApologist (talk) 03:27, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

No problem, since you ask so nicely. I see you blanked the page. Smart move, I approve. Otherwise all the deceptive anti-ArbComm propaganda you were writing there was trolling for responses to correct the record.

And for the record, I'm not a "cold fusion promoter." I've been doing a lot of reading in the field and it is an extremely complex situation. What I "promote" is NPOV and Wikipedia guidelines and policy, which are generally excellent, if editors would try to understand and follow them. SA, you have been damaging the project for a long time by demolishing the civility which is essential to consensus, and consensus is essential to the discovery and expression of true NPOV. It appears that you will be given a nice long time to think about it. That wasn't necessary, you have forced it, practically demanding it. You know perfectly well that this wasn't about spelling corrections. --Abd (talk) 03:46, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Please keep your distance from SA

Engaging with SA and his supporters on his talk page can only end badly for all concerned. Please stay away. I understand you don't appreciate the characterizations he is making, but you have more to lose than gain by your actions. Ronnotel (talk) 03:27, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Ronnotel. I was about to notify him of my filing of a notice on AE, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration_enforcement#ScienceApologist_abusively_editing_his_Talk_page, but I'll trust that you will do it. I don't anticipate any further need to edit his Talk page; but if he continues the abuse, I can and will take other action. Sad situation, actually. --Abd (talk) 03:33, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

To be honest, I think it's best to walk away. There is ample precedent that AE and ArbCom take a dim view of those who carry-on disputes onto SA's talk page. My $0.02, but probably worth somewhat less on the open market. Ronnotel (talk) 03:52, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

I did walk away, of course, not only because you asked, though the "thanks" above was genuine, but because it had become unnecessary. Here is how it worked: SA had set up a situation where it was likely he'd get blocked, and then he'd be able to claim that the blocks were ridiculous, and the ban was ridiculous, and, my assumption, he saw it as win-win. If he's blocked, his supporters rise up in rage over him being blocked for "spelling corrections," and if he's not blocked, or is unblocked, he has eroded the edge of the ban sufficiently to make it much more difficult to enforce. What's puzzling to me, though, is how open he was about his intentions, for the traps -- and they were traps -- were easily seen through, since he quite openly announced what he was doing.

This has to be realized: SA was laying a series of traps. There are many, many administrators. If he's editing on an edge, some of them will interpret is as being over the edge, and will block him. Then he can argue that this definition of the edge was stupid, foolish, rule-bound, and all the rest. However, I tested his intention. I realized there was a way that he could make those marginal edits without causing problems with ban enforcement. I cleared it with Carcharoth. And I placed it in many different places where he would see it, including on his Talk page as part of a clarification that he had not been blocked for "spelling corrections." I felt that clarification was necessary because many editors were repeating that falsehood.

What actually happened was that he made spelling corrections, and practically nobody complained, and certainly he wasn't blocked for them. Until User:Hipocrite, an ardent defender of SA, reverted them and went to AE. Hipocrite was quite likely cooperating with the plan to make the AC ban look ridiculous. When SA went off his 24-hour block, he promptly tested the edge again, in quite the same way, and he was blocked. Now, the argument made in his defense was that the article, N ray wasn't "fringe science," it was about a fraud. And then the distinction was made that N ray, wasn't fringe science, but pseudoscience. Ryan, who blocked him, wasn't about to accept this argument, though it's reasonable on the face but certainly not clear, but then it developed that SA had AC permission for the edit. Okay, he had permission. Why didn't he disclose that?

It's quite likely that he got the permission, then deliberately did not disclose it. It was just one more trap. He could have placed, in his first edit to that article, in the summary, "with permission from the AC, ...." He could have pointed to this permission on his Talk page.

No, the pattern is very clear, and it's sad that his friends seem to be unwilling to recognize it. The only hope for AC to have remained a useful editor would have been for his friends to restrain him. When he comes back, if they act like SA can do no harm, if they excuse his rampant incivility, if they jump in to protect him from response every time he insults someone and they react normally, he will be permanent history and nothing else, here. And some of them will go down with him.

I was not involved with SA up until a few days ago. I had no POV pushing agenda here. I would have preferred SA's positive participation in the article I'm currently working on, Cold fusion, it's important to have his POV represented. But it's also important that it be represented by editors who realize the importance of finding consensus and working collaboratively.

The last admin to !vote on the ban cited what happened with me on SA's Talk page as the last straw. Absolutely, provoking SA gratuitously would be offensive and disruptive. But what I was doing wasn't gratuitous, I saw it as necessary, to a point. I did not take it beyond that point. I'm not convinced that my last two edits to his Talk page were necessary, but they were truly minor. At a certain point, the community has to realize that protecting a disruptive editor because of all the "useful contributions" may be costing much more than the value of those contributions. It was expensive to keep SA around. I did not arrive with that as a conclusion, a few days ago, I wouldn't have dreamed of saying this. It's based on what I saw him doing in the last few days, and only a little on what little I know of his prior history.

My kids have a dog. The youngest, 5 years old, provokes the dog all the time, it's difficult to stop her. The dog is pretty patient, but does, sometimes growl at her and snap in her direction. However, if the dog were to savagely attack her and injure her, having been provoked, we'd still have to get rid of the dog, no matter how much we (including my daughter) love her. Editors should not savage other editors whom they don't like or see as POV-pushers, fringe fanatics, or administrators and editors with a different view of how the project works, or even who in some way "provoke" them. SA was highly provocative, trolling for incivility in general and for administrative response, specifically.

And if SA would promise to cooperate, I'd still support his return. --Abd (talk) 15:26, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

I haven't tracked all of Abd's comments to SA and therefore can't comment on whether they have been excessive (maybe a bit on the excessive side, not sure -- Ronnotel is certainly right that less is better when things are really hot). However, I fully endorse Abd's general take on the situation above as well as this comment. It's too bad that the situation is so polarized, but that's evidently what SA wanted; as Abd notes, SA telegraphed his intentions with great clarity. He was really unhappy with WP, and rather than disengage chose to act out and push preexisting bad behavior even further. (See FaysallF's perceptive comments.) It shouldn't be so surprising that a ban resulted. Double standards like the one WP was nurturing toward SA are metastable and can only withstand so much scrutiny, in practice. Any editor acting as SA did, even one whose content edits I totally agreed with, would need a break from WP and vice versa. --Middle 8 (talk) 17:02, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Middle 8, welcome to my Talk page. I make mistakes, for sure, but have often made good wikifriends through them, because I strongly believe that Wikipedia should be a collaborative project, for NPOV is dependent upon the collaboration of people with many different POVs, there really is no good way to judge NPOV except by consensus; we may need to make compromises at times, to be sure, but the only guarantee of true NPOV is complete consensus. It's attainable, iff the participants are willing to engage with mutual respect and civility, seeking it, which can take lots of discussion sometimes. Editors who cannot listen to the other POVs and attempt to figure out what could be legitimate about them, and then make reasonable compromises to extend consensus, who dig in their heels and edit war and flame, can demolish our very mechanism for grounding the project, and those who are skilled at innuendo and arguments that appeal to factions can do damage that will take years to undo.

Because I believe in collaboration, when an admin arrives here and asks me to stop doing something, I will usually stop it, or will at least modify it, because collaboration involves making reasonable compromises, and usually, single-editor actions are dispensible on Wikipedia. I.e., that I edit may not be necessary, even if it's allowed. On the other hand, I should mention, I have a religious obligation, when I'm aware of something that is important and which isn't general knowledge, to disclose it, and this obligation can apply even if disclosure risks my life (besides which my WP account pales in significance). That's disclosure, though, and doesn't give me the right to barge into someone's living room and start shouting. --Abd (talk) 17:59, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Final request

Science Apologist will return from his ban in approximately 3 months. When he does, I'd very much appreciate you not reviewing his edits. It is not helpful. Please confirm that this is acceptable to you. Thanks. Hipocrite (talk) 14:24, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

No, for several reasons. However, I will say that I do not ordinarily track editors, i.e., watch their contributions looking for problems, and, in fact, I did not do this with SA. I dealt with what was in front of me. When it became appropriate to present evidence, I did, then, look over SA's contributions to verify what was being said by others: he had made a series of provocative edits, and he had been very open about his intentions to defy ArbComm and to show how foolish the ban was.

Tell you what, Hipocrite. Mind your own business. Your role in this affair was far less than helpful. You are the one who caused me to become involved with ScienceApologist, by how you responded to an edit which mentioned him as an example of an ArbComm action, and which did not attack him. SA also directly attacked me, on Talk:Cold fusion, suggesting I should be banned, with utterly insufficient cause. (I pointed to a paper which used the term "cold fusion" to refer to what is ordinarily called "hot fusion," and this was easily seen as an error. I should be banned for what was, at worst, a misinterpretation of a word, thinking it meant what everyone else seems to think it means, such that my attempts to make the distinction clear have so far been reverted, and with no POV agenda whatsoever involved?). I had seen problematic editing previously in reviewing the history of Cold fusion, but I see problematic editing all the time, and I wasn't watching him. You brought him to me, and he came to me. Do that again, I'd respond in the same way, only next time, if this happens again, it will be your actions which will be the focus.

SA is blocked today because of your "help." As I've written elsewhere, with friends like this, who needs enemies?

On the other hand, thanks for asking. Much better than taking it to AN/I first! Do try to read WP:DR, and follow it. --Abd (talk) 14:40, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Would you mind waiving the 2 certifier requirement for an RFC? Hipocrite (talk)15:07, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Hang on there - local admin here - what's the rush to an RfC? Fritzpoll (talk) 15:07, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

I'd like to know what the community thinks about Abd reviewing SA across multiple pages. Hipocrite (talk) 15:08, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Not a good use of time IMHO. Rfc has the potential for generating more heat than light. Abd is free to look at anyone's contributions. It's a wiki for pete's sake. What he chooses to do about what he reads is the only relevant topic for an RFC. Ronnotel (talk) 15:15, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Well, obviously. It's what he's choosing to do that's the problem here. Perhaps he could choose not to needle people any more. Perhaps the community would tell him that if someone wrote an RFC about it. Hipocrite (talk) 15:16, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

(unindent) Hipocrite, I didn't "needle" anyone. I haven't tracked SA looking for trouble, I described what I did above. Now, there may be some trouble happening in the reverse direction. In commenting in another place on the edit to N ray that led to SA's most recent block before the AC 3-month block kicked in, I described my review of the edit itself, concluding that it was, in itself, harmless. Then I noticed, as an external link for the article, Cold fusion. A fringe science topic. Why is a fringe science topic being linked from a pseudoscience article? Fringe science is radically different from pseudoscience. Except not in the mind of SA. That edit was, in fact, a violation of the ban, but in quite a subtle way. There is a sizable contingent of people, including some scientists, who consider Cold fusion to be a fraud, complete bunk. This is not the view of the U.S. Department of Energy, nor of any recent reviews of the field; rather, opinion is seriously divided on whether there is any fusion taking place, and there is general support for further research to figure out what the hell is going on, and serious research taking place, with frequent publication in peer-reviewed journals. This kind of activity is completely missing with pseudosciences. Cold fusion is one of the articles behind the Fringe science arbitration.

So in editing that article, SA was working on an attack piece, a piece used to attack Cold fusion as a pseudoscience and fraud. He didn't do it directly. He didn't put that link in, it was done almost a year ago by another editor whose history I haven't looked at much but who did have an interest in fusion. In any case, the link doesn't belong there, and that is very clear. There are links in the article to the general articles, and it's possible that one of these or more to refer to Cold fusion, but, hopefully in a less offensive way.

Hipocrite reverted my removal. Hipocrite has been acting in collusion with SA, with high probability. I'm not taking him to a noticeboard; quite simply, this is, at this point, a tempest in a teapot. However, this is my Talk page. It's the kitchen. It gets hot here.

I will not waive certification, because there is a very good reason for it. Two users must certify an RfC that they have attempted to resolve a dispute and failed. I take that requirement further. They must have made more than one attempt at resolution, escalating one step at a time under WP:DR. RfC is disruptive, it can take up enormous amounts of time and energy. If Hipocrite cannot get another editor to try to resolve this, to try to convince me that I should (what? it's not clear), to take responsibility for a possibly disruptive process, there should be no further consideration of this.

Hipocrite is maintaining the disruption, extending it; here, he tried to extract a promise from me regarding behavior three months from now, purely hypothetical. He was immediately hostile from the beginning, and his taking me to AE over a harmless comment began my involvement with SA. Hipocrite is, in fact, over the last few days, about as disruptive as SA. I'm not going to do anything about it because it's being noticed by many editors, and I doubt that he'll be able to continue it for long, and I have better things to do. But I will, especially here, call a spade a WP:SPADE, and sometimes people notice the spade, and put it away where it belongs. --Abd (talk) 17:44, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Edit ban on User:PJHaseldine

A permanent ban on my editing Lockerbie-related articles was imposed on 11 March 2009.

At the COI discussion, you advocated a temporary ban pending closer review as well as cautionary notices going to Socrates2008 and his partner Deon Steyn.

I raised these matters with Ed Johnston, which he dismissed saying they were simply your opinion (implying they were not to be taken seriously since "Administrators who enforce the ban are expected to use common sense"). It occurs to me that you might have something to say in response.

There seemed to be no support for a permanent ban when the issue was raised at the Adminstrators' noticeboard.

You might be interested to know how amazingly successful the concerted attack by Socrates and Deon Steyn has turned out to be. Two years ago, Deon added the Category:Conspiracy theories to the Alternative theories of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 article. Deon's move allowed Socrates to add the Category:Conspiracy theorists to my biography in January 2008. Then, less than three months ago, the title of the title of the Alternative theories article was converted to conspiracy theories without discussion.

Since the COI discussion on the two editors remains open, there's still time for you to help clip their wings.---PJHaseldine (talk) 12:05, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

I'll look, PJH, and I take what you have written here as done in good faith, I intend to look at the situation. Because of my review of another topic ban, I've come to the conclusion that, pending review of your ban, it isn't utterly absolute, provided that you respect not only it, but the enforcement process as well, so if you are interested in making truly non-controversial edits to the article or the attached Talk page, ask me. However, you should abstain from any direct conflict. Asking someone else to review a situation, and to intervene on their own responsibility is, in my opinion, reasonable and not a ban violation. In fact, it may be better for such a request to take place on-wiki, because it could happen off-wiki through email without even being visible. However, extensive requests like this would be a violation of WP:CANVASS. Generally, I'd recommend only asking one or two editors to look at a situation, and probably only one at a time.

My goal generally is not to clip anyone's wings, but to help editors to fly right. As I'm sure you recognize, it's hard to fly right with your wings clipped. The fastest way for you to regain your editing privileges, assuming they have been restricted -- I haven't checked yet -- is to demonstrate cooperation with the community, and, if possible, with the other involved editors as well. I know that can be difficult, but it can also be well worth the effort. If you had been meticulous in this respect from the beginning, usually efforts to topic-ban a cautious and cooperative editor fail, and, indeed, the community's attention will be focused on any editor who proposes it, since such proposals often come from POV-pushers who are, themselves, not interested in cooperation. I assume I will comment more after investigation. Involving a neutral editor is, in fact, the next step in WP:DR whenever a conflict cannot be directly resolved.

As an SPA, you are vulnerable, and need take special care. SPAs are sometimes effectively topic banned as to the article, there is no clear boundary between WP:SPA and WP:COI. From the other side, experts in a field are often SPA or COI, so my view is that, while the community should set and maintain strict behavioral boundaries for such editors, we should also actively invite their participation in Talk pages, and attempt to moderate the disputes which arise. In my view, much damage has been done to the project and its reputation because of a lack of understanding of this, and experts have been rather badly treated. Many or most experts have, as a result of their extensive knowledge, a strong POV, as viewed from a general perspective, though not necessarily from within field. (When I've special knowledge in a field, I've been accused of POV-pushing when I've simply expressed what is well-known in the field, as I know through extensive off-wiki communication with others even more knowledgeable than myself, but which is not necessarily easy to prove from reliable source; without supporting RS, I can't incorporate such knowledge into articles, generally, but I should definitely be able to mention it on a Talk page without sanction.)--Abd (talk) 16:11, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

This is a revelation to me, Abd. I'd never heard of an SPA before or, at least, didn't know what it meant. I first came across SPA in Wikipedia Review in relation, funnily enough, to Socrates2008: "What I alluded to in the following post has been brought to the attention of WP:COIN by the S. African editor Socrates2008, who's turned into something of an SPA."

I'm digesting all your good advice. Many thanks.---PJHaseldine (talk) 17:32, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

SUCI Page regarding

Dear Admins, another puppet of User:Kuntan has appeared. It is User:59.91.254.3. Please check the discussion page of User:William M. Connolley. This puppet has challenged every one to go for another range block. I don't know what a range block is, but it seems that he is going to continue his miscreant efforts. --Radhakrishnansk (talk) 08:40, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Dear Admin, can I then remove those edits made by this IP range user from the articles that he has edited? Many have expressed concern that those edits are to mutilate the image of this organization for what ever reason he has for it. --Radhakrishnansk (talk) 12:12, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm not an administrator. However, yes, you may revert edits from the range to the articles of interest, unless they could reasonably be considered to be from someone else. I suggest you not remove good edits, in your judgment, but you do not have to review edits for quality; and note that if any registered editor reverts them back in, you should leave them alone (and engage civilly and with assumption of good faith with the registered editor if you think the edits are a problem). If there are many such IP edits or other vandalism or clearly inappropriate edits to an article, you can request page semiprotection at WP:RfPP. Do not argue or debate with the editor, remove the edits with a comment like "rv banned User:Kuntan." Be careful about one thing. If anyone warns you about 3RR violation (making more than 3 reverts in 24 hours to a single article is a "bright line," and you might be blocked for it), stop and engage in discussion -- not with the IP editor, you may ignore warnings from that IP range), do not continue. Ask for help. I removed some edits from this IP to your Talk page, as I assume you know. You can remove edits from anyone to your Talk page, with few exceptions, but avoid insulting anyone, including this IP editor. I did not remove edits where a registered editor had responded. That's one reason not to respond to a banned editor.

If this editor were sincere in wanting to improve the encyclopedia, he or she would register an account and make useful edits and follow guidelines and policy, avoiding the articles where there has been a problem. After a lapse of time, the editor could return to the article, and, as long as the edits don't show the kind of disruption that was involved with this IP, it would be fine. In other words, even leopards can return, if they will change their spots. --Abd (talk) 13:29, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Good advice, Abd. Very thorough. (I'm not an admin either.) Except does this user also need advice on where to get the attention of admins for a problem like this? (e.g. WP:AN/I, Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations) Or maybe that's already being taken care of for this case. I don't know. by the way, User:William M. Connolley is an admin. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 15:04, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Of course, well aware of it. He's famous for it, in fact, with notice in media. The user has been to AN/I already. Good start, given his position, but not really necessary any more. Thanks, Coppertwig. --Abd (talk) 15:14, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

I have reverted the edits made by User:Kuntan puppets as per the direction.--Radhakrishnansk (talk) 16:26, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

If you find yourself likely to go over 1-2 reverts per 24 hour period, ask for help. You can ask me or anyone who is familiar with the situation. Blocking the specific IP is probably a waste of time, except that it creates a record of admin support for enforcing the ban. There may be a page where reports of IP being used by this banned editor can be accumulated, if I have time, I'll look for it, it will make it all easier and less risky to you. If you ask William M. Connolley or any other admin familiar with the situation, they can decide to block, and they can also semiprotect the page, which prevents edits from IP and newly-registered editors, which will reduce the ability of the banned editor to edit. You can also go at any time to WP:RfPP and report the edits. Be very careful not to assert content issues or to attack the editor. The editor is banned, not condemned, by reverting edits you are simply assisting the community in enforcing what it has already decided.

If you make a mistake and remove edits from someone who, possibly, is not the editor, apologize immediately. (There is no harm in apologizing to Kuntan, should that happen, Kuntan quite likely would be much happier if you insist on some weak identification and get blocked for edit warring or incivility if for some reason a decision goes against you. Administrators make mistakes, as does anyone.) Do not edit war with anyone reasonably asserting that they are not Kuntan, but ask for help and independent judgment.

Do not treat an edit by this editor as an emergency, Wikipedia is constantly vandalized and sometimes vandalism isn't noticed for a while. Just deal with it as efficiently and with as little fuss as you can; I'll watch the article and if I miss it (my watchlist can get a tad busy) you can always point a situation out to me here or by email. A banned editor will probably relish any disruption created and especially any criticism of your work, so don't feed the monster, be careful, and share the burden.

When you see an edit by IP that is probably Kuntan, look at the contributions of this IP. Sometimes you will see old contributions, or occasionally even a recent one, that isn't Kuntan, that's because these IP addresses are shared. That's why admins will be reluctant to simply block the whole IP range that Kuntan has access to, it will cause collateral damage; but sometimes if there is enough disruption, they will indeed block the range, it's a question of balancing the one harm against the other. So do glance at the edits and I'd suggest leaving in anything that seems harmless. Banning is to protect the project from vandalism, incivility, and other problems, not to punish the editor, and not to prevent helpful edits. You may revert without examination any edit which is clearly this editor's. An example would be if the editor makes many edits in a row from the same IP. If the first and last edits are Kuntan, from content, you can assume that all the others in between are also Kuntan, and quickly undo them. Installing a semi-automated editor, the kind used on vandalism patrol, can make this very efficient, such that you -- or anyone -- can remove the edits of this editor faster than they can be made.

Now the other side. Kuntan, if you read this and you think you got a raw deal, back when, I'm willing to look at it. If you think that there is a specific problem with editors you've been complaining about, you won't fix it by doing what you have been doing. I have a page, User talk:Abd/IP that is kept open and unprotected for use by IP editors, and if you make a civil complaint there, I will investigate it and see if I can help. If you charge other editors with misconduct, include specific evidence that I can verify. Don't worry if you are reverted there, by anyone (including me), I will read whatever is put there from History. I don't always see it immediately, so be patient. I have been advising R based on general principles, and not with any decision about content or other editors or even R. You are banned, and thus expected to refrain from editing, period. The more you defy this, the more firmly your ban becomes cemented in place. If you really believe what you have been saying, you've been going about it in a seriously mistaken way. Change your attitude, and you might be much more effective. Bans can be reversed if the editor reverses their attitude and becomes cooperative. --Abd (talk) 19:16, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Dear User:Abd thankyou for the clear advice. I will follow the same and refrain from doing edits on the same page more than twice in a day. I was also adviced by some experienced editors through email that I need not respond to the comments of User: Kuntan. So here after I will not respond to him, but will intimate other concerned editors the moment that I see him creating more trouble. He simply is not civilised. I checked his history and the history of his puppets. He has over years (at least since 2006) abused a number of other editors. Unfortunate that these people cannot be stopped completely from Wiki editing. Thankyou once again. --Radhakrishnansk (talk) 22:24, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

As an example of what you should avoid: "He simply is not civilised." It doesn't matter if he's civilized or not. He's banned, end of question. Civilized, banned, revert edits. Uncivilized, banned, revert edits. You may do more than two reverts in a day, but by the time it's two, you should be asking for help with WP:RfPP or another editor to do some of the reverting, etc. Suppose he makes ten edits to an article before you find it. I have rollbacker privilege; for this kind of application I could revert those 10 edits with a single click. If you do it and you don't have rollback, you'd have to make 10 undos. (Note that consecutive reverts count as one for the purposes of WP:3RR). (You could also install Twinkle, which simulates rollback but which is harder on the servers and takes longer.) Just be careful. (One of the nice things about Twinkle is that you can request page protection with one click and entering a few options, very fast.) --Abd (talk) 22:40, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Edits by Kuntan

I was just tracing the edits made by Kuntan and his puppets. I kept on removing all that where ever it seemed that he was using abusive language or was dragging IPs of institutions into conflict. Sorry if it is inappropriate. --Radhakrishnansk (talk) 00:20, 16 March 2009 (UTC) I will change it all back to the previous state.--Radhakrishnansk (talk) 00:21, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

No. STOP NOW!. --Abd (talk) 00:23, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Okay...as you suggest. I was waiting for your reply--Radhakrishnansk (talk) 00:25, 16 March 2009 (UTC) Sure...I will then not search any further into the history of this User:Kuntan--Radhakrishnansk (talk) 00:27, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Cold fusion

I posted a message [16] at Talk:Cold fusion with a link to a comment of yours which was deleted from that talk page. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 20:26, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Coppertwig. How did you like my self-revert, eh? Look below at the comment from Verbal. Just imagine, we could have been savaging each other at AN/I! Would that have been more fun? hmmmm....

No. --Abd (talk) 22:15, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Cold fusion talk

Thanks for understanding my edits to the talk page, and by further helping by collapsing a section. What do you think of the subpage idea? I personally, and I think generally, it is usually considered better to be more concise in posting than is your style. You can post as you wish, but I would ask you to try and cut down on the length a bit - sometimes this does mean ignoring a meta-meta discussion, or focusing on only one thing, but you can always return to the other topics later. For example, you don't need to keep defending other editors - if you find yourself repeating just note a diff ("See here for why I think you're wrong about X") or a section or subpage of your userspace. Sometimes meaning can get lost in excessive verbiage, a la Sir Humphrey. However, you can edit as you wish (within reason!) I hope you take this in the constructive way it is intended and as an olive branch. Yours, Verbal chat 20:35, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Verbal. No problem. You should understand that I have a problem: to condense what I write -- I have a lot to say on these topics -- takes me much longer. I can condense it, and I do when it's polemic, but normally I don't have time. You are certainly welcome to help us all stay focused. Indeed, that's what I'm trying to do there right now. This field, though, has suffered from a long period of tendentious editing and there are lots of issues to be faced. It will settle down, I predict. --Abd (talk) 20:44, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Haseldine

Thanks for the note on his talk page. Yes, you're right, I do want to do what's best for the project, hence the reason I initiated the two COI cases against him. This is also why I supported a CheckUser against the SPA account that's been harassing him. However he's been openly abusive towards me throughout, and I think I've endured this longer than many others would have. I'm finding it difficult right now to go out of my way for him while he's directing insults back at me, and while he has the impression that it's all personal. So for now, I'd prefer to take a passive role in monitoring these articles and make a contribution to the project in another way by getting on with the articles I've submitted for GA and FA. Socrates2008 (Talk) 03:15, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Certainly I understand. His behavior is quirky, I'll say I don't understand it yet. However, my goal is solutions, and I highly recommend letting go of what has passed, it may make it easier for him to let go as well. Hence the suggestion that, if you see a self-reverted edit, know that it is an attempt to cooperate with the community. You can help by encouraging that. The edit in question was slightly more complicated than a spelling correction, so if something is too much for you to deal with in the time you have, just ignore it. But if it's simple, is my point, why not just say, "Okay, this is good." Click. Done. Agreeing with people when they are right is an aspect of civility, very important in restoring civility when it has broken down.

As you can tell, I'm not about to tolerate incivility from Haseldine. As I wrote, if that is maintained, the positive contributions he can make are outweighed, and he'll be blocked. By all means, do what is of most interest to you. He asked you to look at his edit. I got to it first, I got the edit count increment.... not that this matters. A better answer than rejection would have been no answer at all. "If you can't say anything good, don't say anything at all."

Good luck with your articles. --Abd (talk) 03:25, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Fair enough, point taken. Socrates2008 (Talk) 07:30, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Stimulating discussion on open source notability

Hi there, I'm back after a Wiki-vacation! I've added some meaningful suggestions to User:Abd/Open_Source_notability I'm looking for a forum on Wikipedia to attract people to the subject (e.g., A request for comments on tech articles) -- LirazSiri (talk) 01:28, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Your edit-summary at [17]

Please consider a retraction of your edit summary, even if it was intended as humour.LeadSongDog (talk) 14:08, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

I've wanted to know for a long time how to fix an edit summary. Please help me with that. How would I do it?

I considered it, on your request, and I'd strike it if I could, simply because you requested it, but I rather doubt that this would be worth having an admin remove the edit from history. Uh, I take "mood-altering drugs" -- legally, of course -- and I suggest it to someone? It wasn't humor. It was straight. Quite a few of us might benefit! Please look at the context, see what I was responding to. --Abd (talk) 16:46, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

Accusation of incivility

Perhaps you missed it, but Kirk Shanahan has politely requested that you explain your claim that his edits were uncivil. (You also claimed he was making "gratuitous inflammatory remarks".) Given the seriousness of the accusations you made, I would hope that you would respond to his request for clarification.--Noren (talk) 07:47, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

There seems to be some mistake here, Noren. Please read the edit. It describes the collective behavior of two editors who were going back and forth. It did not make the specific allegation you mention against one of them. When you have two people going back and forth like that, and say that one of them is being uncivil, there is a good chance the other is, as well, only possibly more subtly. This was not a "serious" accusation, in that I didn't seek any action against either of them, and then I suggested that there might be value in their discussion, so, please, would they refactor their comments under a new section, this time taking care to avoid gratuitous inflammatory remarks. Consider this an informal warming regarding civility. An informal warning is not "serious." If I warned one of the editors on their Talk page, that's serious, because it can be the last stop before a block.

This was not a claim that Shanahan had made gratuitous inflammatory remarks. It was a claim that such remarks had been made in their discussion, and I'm trying to encourage both of them to participate in a more useful process.

I could easily make a judgment that one of them behaved more badly than the other, but, then, I'd be less effective trying to calm things down.

I did say that the editors had been exchanging "derisive comments." I have that impression. It might have been inaccurate. I make mistakes. I can say that if someone says something like this about a debate I've been involved in, I generally consider it moot. I want Wikipedia to become a friendlier place, and that would include improving my own behavior. Many, many things, far, far more serious, have been said about what I've done and am doing and nothing came of it. I'll take edit warring to a noticeboard, but not incivility directed against me. Sometimes when it's directed at someone else, I might, if I think it's doing damage.

Now, is it worthwhile, my going back over that debate to find why I considered Shanahan's comments to be part of the problem, not exclusively the other editor? Does it matter? What if he isn't? What would we do differently? The section was collapsed. Nobody challenged that. Why, Noren, are you asking me to waste time like this? If Shanahan remains exercised, he knows where my Talk page is and he is more than welcome here, I have no problem with him, personally, and I've been assisting him, I'd say. I had planned to respond to him. What, exactly, is the rush?

In any case, I responded there. The next step is up to Kirk. --Abd (talk) 17:14, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

There seems to be some mistake here, Abd. Please read the edit. It describes the behavior of two editors who were going back and forth. It makes the specific allegation I mentioned against both of them. When you have two people going back and forth like that, and say that one of them starts to be particularly uncivil, there is a good chance the other may be provoked as well, even if only so far as frankly describing the uncivil behavior of the other. Instead of analyzing the issue and giving a measured response, or declining to respond accusations, you flatly accused both of them of wrongdoing and collapsed the discussion. Though he has asked you to explain your accusation, you seem to want to make him jump through your hoops before you answer the question he posed to you.

I didn't find your accusations to be convincing, but of course I also could have been mistaken about that- perhaps you saw something there that I did not, or perhaps you thought one or more of his more confrontational later statements had crossed the line rather stopping just short. I would have hoped that you would have responded if you had been aware of his request, so I pointed it out to you. Rather than giving a direct response to his simple question, you instead chose to dodge his question entirely and go off on a tangent justifying your own behavior.

If you were serious in your civility complaint, I would have thought that you would have had a specific behavior of his in mind and that you would have been pleased to explain in response to his direct question. That would be the civil response to a request that you clarify a criticism- indeed, clarifying an unclear criticism may be the only way to make the process worthwhile. Vague, unexplained accusations shed smoke and heat but no light.

This is not the only recent instance of your incivility toward Kirk Shanahan, your recent accusation of wikilawyering against him for what was a straightforward objection based on the quality of the source. While he should perhaps no longer be considered a new user, it may be a bit premature to start tossing accusations of wikilawyering at someone with a few hundred edits.

Please tone down your accusatory tone and assume good faith about Kirk. I would hope not to lose his input on this topic. More generally, it would also be helpful if you were to tone down rhetoric portraying the situation as being adversarial and of particular editors being on one 'side' or the other. --Noren (talk) 06:35, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Noren, in the absence of complaint from Shanahan, bug off. I did not make a "civility complaint." You did, about me, but only here, which I don't mind in itself. I took action to defuse a disruptive or potentially disruptive interchange, I did not "complain" about it, I described it in terms that deliberately avoided specific allegations. As to the "wikilawyering," this was a friendly comment, pointing out that a technical argument was being used to exclude one source, and I could go on, but, frankly, this is probably all moot and not worth discussing. If Shanahan has a problem, he is very, very welcome here. However, absent evidence of that, your intervention here is suspect. He asked a question, true, but doesn't seem to be exercised about it, and answering that question could do more harm than good, especially if his question wasn't more than a transient response. WTF are you doing?

Absolutely, if Shanahan wants an answer to that question, all he has to do is repeat it, here, or ask again in the article Talk page and I will answer on his Talk page. I should fill up Cold fusion Talk discussing his behavior? --Abd (talk) 00:29, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Now, I did respond, briefly, on the Talk page. I cited it above, based on your request. What more would you expect? --Abd (talk) 00:34, 21 March 2009

Mail

Go check your e-mail. :) Fritzpoll (talk) 15:50, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

Ping Fritzpoll (talk) 09:40, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Gotcha. --Abd (talk) 21:37, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Request feedback on article

Dear Abd. I've rewritten the article at User:Abd/TurnKey Linux and added reliable sources (the non-english sources are in the talk page). I also opened a RfC but so far no one has commented. Could you take a look and give me some feedback? Thanks! LirazSiri (talk) 08:51, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

I will when I can. I did make a comment on the Talk page, but that was more about process. As to RfCs, be patient. You can also request comment from specific editors, if it is only a couple of them. Don't violate WP:CAVASS; in this case, it's more about not "spamming," rather than about possible undue influence. If you decide to do this, choose experienced editors, high edit count, good apparent reputation (you should be able to tell from the Talk page), and, in this case, knowledge of Linux would be a plus. I have very little; on the other hand, knowing little may allow me to simulate an evil, fangs dripping with blood, rabid deletionist position, i.e., "devil's advocate." If the article is solid, various creatures like that (who serve a useful purpose in the overall scheme of things) will not be attracted. --Abd (talk) 21:42, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Category:Suspected Wikipedia sockpuppets of Suciindia

For every category you create, you should specify parent categories to which it belongs. In the case of a category like this one, parent categories are provided automatically when you include a {{Sockpuppet category}} template.

I am a human being, not a bot, so you can contact me if you have questions about this. Best regards, --Stepheng3 (talk) 17:19, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Ditto Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of Suciindia. --Stepheng3 (talk) 17:22, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Since you request that I reply on your talk page. But for reference here, I'll say that the above message, while potentially helpful, doesn't tell me if anything needs to be done, or exactly how to do it, at least not quickly. For future categories I create, I'll be careful to follow the FAQ, assuming that it is intelligible to me. If not, now I know who to ask! --Abd (talk) 20:30, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

There's nothing you need to do for the categories right now. If you study how I amended them, you'll quickly see what you should do if you ever create sockpuppet categories in the future. --Stepheng3 (talk) 20:38, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, your comment above didn't refer to your corrections, but when I looked at my Watchlist, there they were, and they made clear what was needed, and that you had fixed it. So I reverted my talkback on your Talk page. Thanks again. --Abd (talk) 21:35, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Strike 3?

(archived early)

Abd, would you care explaining, carefully:

• Why am I responsible for blacklisting newenergytimes.com?
• Which arguments I have presented are new to you?

Thanks. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 08:54, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Beetstra, don't be silly. Strike 3? You'd really be ready to declare me "Out!"? Over some unclear communication? However, I'll answer your questions.

* Why am I responsible for blacklisting newenergytimes.com?

Because you closed the most recent consideration of it as declined. I've mentioned that, and you didn't deny it. I'll check now to confirm. Yes, I got it right. It's cited in the first paragraph of the present request. MediaWiki_talk:Spam-blacklist/archives/February_2009#newenergytimes.com Your decline is near the end. When a decision is made to close a discussion or decide on an action, there is a responsible editor, usually an admin (and always an admin if tools are required for the decision to be implemented), and that editor is the go-to person for review, "responsible." Had we not already discussed the issue, I'd not have raised it anew at the Blacklist talk page, but rather would have gone to you to ask you to reverse your decision, first. You have, however, recused yourself. You are still the responsible administrator, there is no other, because you could reverse your decision to recuse unilaterally, and then delist. What you can't do is to close the new discussion as a decline, that requires a new neutral administrator, and by your recusal you explicitly acknowledge you aren't going to do that. Clear?

Your decline confirmed the blacklisting as proper. That was *your* decision, not the community's decision, though you were informed by the community.

Brilliant deduction of making me responsible, I see several editors giving problems, I summarise part of that data and decline. The decline does not confirm that, that is a total misunderstanding, my decline confirms that I see problems with the site, which I describe. It says NOTHING about the original blacklisting. Your deduction if totally rediculous. Clear? --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 18:57, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

* Which arguments I have presented are new to you?

When I referred to new arguments, I was referring to arguments newly introduced in the discussions on the Blacklist page. There is a phenomenon I see on the blacklist. A site is blacklisted with practically no discussion, based on arguments of linkspam. Then comes a delisting request. If the linkspam arguments aren't challenged, then site usability can be an issue, there is, there, a balance of needs: the prevention of linkspam and the usability of site pages.

However, if the linkspam arguments are challenged, if there is no credible evidence of actual linkspamming, which is quite different from arguably appropriate usage of links by various editors, even if those links turn out to violate WP:UNDUE or even other sourcing requirements, the blacklist shouldn't be used to make content decisions, because there is no balancing necessity.

So I was referring to new arguments, not a part of the original blacklisting reasons, and not a part of any reason given for your decline of the first delisting request. And my judgment is, at present, that the argument you raised that the site may have an imbalance of sources represented, due to differential ability to gain permissions, and that this may end up creating some imbalance in the article, is just such a new argument, it wasn't made before the present request and I can say for sure that it's the first time I noticed it (maybe I missed it!). I consider it a novel argument, and one which the community will reject, because, in fact, it applies to the entire body of sources available on the internet; however, that's moot to our dispute here, which is about representations of what happened before. "Debate about debate."

If you presented this argument re differential permissions before and WP:UNDUE, or if it was presented before by others, and you considered it in your close, please point to it, otherwise please stop accusing me of distorting what you have said. I wasn't quoting you, I was describing an argument of yours as new. I can be wrong about that without engaging in any distortion at all. Stop it, Beetstra, you are inflaming a debate over next to nothing --Abd (talk) 15:58, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Well, and now we go to the same thread: "Has next to the focus for the above mentioned lenr-carn.org also a focus for this link (59 additions of lenr-carn.com, 54 of this link, making it a good second). User has a topic ban on Cold Fusion articles. Like lenr-carn.org, Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_14#www.newenergytimes.com this was not deemed a reliable source (for this link "only good for sourcing opinions they themselves espouse").". What am I saying here, that there are users who push UNDUE weight? Is this different, NO, this is exactly the same. You missed it! Completely! My current discussion has further elaborated on it, but it is certainly not new. That is an absurd deduction. Clear? --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 18:57, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Abd, I am not accusing you, you have said it yourself: "I agreed with the rest, or didn't understand it, or didn't care, and it did not seem important to disagree or to question you about it." You agree that the link was abused, you don't understand the link was abused, you don't care the link was abused, or you don't think it is important that the link was abused. But it is exactly what I say, the link is deemed an unreliable source, see the thread linked, and the mentioned users, and some others, have a HUGE preference for that site. WP:UNDUE .. Do I have to write it out further? --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 19:02, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Beetstra. I don't agree that the link was abused. Perhaps I should be more explicit about that. This site is one of the top two web sites to be linked to for further research, which further research links often include links to sites that favor one side of a controversy. I can say that those links are invaluable to me as a reader, and it's fine if the link warns me that the site may be biased. Because sources are easiest to find there, it is no wonder that some editors, particularly the editor in question, would "prefer" this site. The topic ban of that editor is problematic here, because there was no finding that his actual behavior was outside guidelines. Big issue, not to be resolved here (and settled for the moment). If you really want to make this content argument, you would have to show what you are claiming with specific links, and the collection of them; I think you might have the tools to make that easy. But I believe it is moot, in fact; you have elsewhere acknowledged that this kind of problem wasn't linkspam. Was the evidence of such usage ever presented? If not, and you used it to make your decline decision, you are relying on "secret evidence," a problem on a whole other dimension, if not disclosed.

Let's see where the discussion goes, okay? I imagined, silly me, that this would be quick. The majority opinion is clear, but no close yet.... --Abd (talk) 19:20, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

There is no secret evidence, all can be found on wiki. If there is 'secret evidence', then it is OTRS stuff, and they will overrule decisions with an OTRS ticket (and then it ends for us mortals here). Abd, I don't think that Pcarbonn was only adding these sites as an external link, he was using them as references. And adding up 'banned from the subject because of massive POV', and 'having a huge preference for copy and non-peer reviewed research sites'... but I'll go through some revids. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 20:08, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Quick question: What happened with these links: http://newenergytimes.com/Bockris/StormsLetterToScience.htm and http://www.newenergytimes.com/reports/start.htm#tritium http://newenergytimes.com/library2/2008/2008krivits-acs-lenr-sourcebook-intro.pdf (and I can find many more 404's who have been added to Wikipedia .. is it what I expect it is)?? --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 20:43, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

NET has evidently done a site redesign. They also use a robots.txt file that prevents the Wayback machine from archiving them.LeadSongDog come howl 21:09, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

I noticed that, but where are the documents now? I can't find them either. Not sure what to do with the robots.txt info, I wasn't using a bot on them. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 21:12, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

There's a searchbox that comes up on the 404. Plug in the filename (not the whole URL) and it should give you the new URL. For some reason they switched from htm to shtml too. The point about the robots.txt file is that it keeps archive.org and google from crawling the site, rendering the page far less visible to search engines. I won't surmise why they did that.LeadSongDog come howl 21:50, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Disputed speedy deletes automatically should go to AfD

If I understand them properly, I agree wholeheartedly with your comments that any disputed speedy deletes ought to go to AfD. I was involved in the TurnKey Linux thing in VPP and it absolutely blew my mind that those involved did not appear to understand how incredibly corrupt it looks for a bunch of administrators to repeatedly force an article into the speedy delete process bypassing AfD.

So is there anything we can do to try to inculcate a guideline / policy along those lines - that disputed speedy deletes need to go AfD automatically? Is there already a discussion of that underway somewhere? I haven't even searched, I wanted to hear your thoughts.

P.S. Am I correctly interpreting hints in your user page indicating that you're a Sufi? If so, Sufism is awesome, as is Islam in general. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 10:09, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Okay, I'll get myself into trouble. I don't call myself a Sufi, but some Sufis are awesome because they are like me. I do call myself a muslim because I meet the technical requirements; we have from the tradition, "Do not say that you are mu'min, but that you are muslim." "Mu'min" is usually translated as "believer," but it really meant someone who trusts in God, or Reality, or Truth, whatever name you want to use for it. Do I trust? I can look at my life and say, "Here I didn't, there I didn't. Sometimes I want to trust, sometimes I did. Times when I clearly trusted when it was tested have been the peak experiences of my life." To trust in Reality, and trust is a condition of the heart, not a profession or credo, is a goal, often difficult for us. "Muslim" means only that one has accepted certain things when they became clear, or even that one accepted for other reasons. End of khutbah. I used to be a Muslim chaplain at San Quentin State Prison; with only a few exceptions, that was the only congregation foolish enough to let me handle that ritual. Captive audience. --Abd (talk) 15:13, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Greetings, Struth. I disagree that disputed speedies necessarily have to go to AfD. The Wikipedian "consensus" system doesn't necessarily mean unanimity. If a speedy is contested by someone who seems to misunderstand the CSD criteria, and if the article appears to be an obvious speedy candidate, it can be speedy-deleted. Articles can be speedied during AfD: if they meet the speedy criteria, an admin can decide to speedy them, and this often happens. WP:Deletion says "Administrators can delete such pages on sight, even if contested as below." I believe articles can be speedied during an AfD even if there have been some "keep" votes; however, WP:CSD says that if an article has survived a deletion discussion it can't be speedied.

A lot of users spend a lot of time judging articles at AfD, and there's a shortage of users doing that: some articles get too few comments. Getting the obvious speedies out of the way helps save time and concentrate effort on the other AfD discussions. According to WP:Deletion, approximately 5,000 pages are deleted per day. It could be overwhelming if all contested speedy deletions were sent to AfD. However, it says that contested speedies can be taken to DRV.

In the end, though, it's the consensus of the community that decides. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 11:58, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Coppertwig. SB, I agree with Coppertwig that it shouldn't be automatic, however, the only question on a DRV for a speedy deletion would be whether or not the article meets speedy deletion criteria. If not, then the speedy should be reversed. I do not agree, again, that it should then automatically go to AfD. Rather, anyone who wants to file the AfD can then do so. Basically, the principle I operate under is for discussion to not take place on a scale beyond a handful of editors at most, with community process (such as XfD, RfC, AN or AN/I, etc.) only taking place when such small-scale discussion is inadequate to find consensus, and the matter is considered sufficiently important to open it to the community. Right now, that means one user willing to go to the hassle of filing an AfD. In the long term, I suggest, XfD should be like RfC/User: two editors would be required to sign on that they attempted to deal with an issue through WP:DR and that was either impossible or failed to find consensus.

Using DRV to determine consensus on notability, beyond the basic speedy criterion on that, is the wrong forum. That should be AfD. --Abd (talk) 14:59, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Coppertwig: I understand the concerns about the shortage of users hanging around AfD. But it seems to me that if there are enough users paying attention to collaborate in forcing something into the speedy delete process there ought to be enough users to comment on the same issue in an AfD.

The problem is, if an article has already been deleted and there's a DRV on it or there was a DRV on it for a few hours then in all likelihood only admins have actually been able to examine it. I had to look at the TurnKey Linux article through the Google cache of it that LirazSiri found. That is NOT the outcome being decided by the consensus of the community - it's the rest of us being forced to trust the judgment of the admin part of the community, coincidentally forced to do so through the use of admin tools.

It just does not make any sense at all why something would have to be repeatedly forced into a speedy deletion. I don't see any reason why the admins who would spend all their effort on the speedy delete and DRVs of speedy deletion couldn't simply spend the same effort within an AfD, except that they want to get their way and they don't want to have to be patient. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 08:41, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

I like the heading of this section. Generally correct, with a few exceptions, such as apparent bad faith objections. For instance, if somebody creates an obvious attack page against a living person, they don't get to dispute its speedy deletion at AfD. Jehochman ^Talk 09:56, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict with below edit by Coppertwig)Well, except for "automatic," I agree. Essentially, admin speedy deletes. Editor objects at DRV. Okay, did the article fit speedy criteria? That should be the discussion. "Not sufficiently notable," quite simply, should be a disregarded argument. "Sources not reliable" is stronger, but as long as there are sources that might be usable or sufficiently reliable, as long as the material appears roughly verifiable, it's out of the speedy category and into AfD. It's very difficult to debate the notability of a topic without seeing the article! What happens, if the article remains deleted during discussion, is that people !vote based on inadquate knowledge, far too often. They !vote because they trust the deleting admin. They !vote because they are inclusionist or deletionist. They! vote because they do a shallow search and don't find anything. These ones, at least, tried! Once someone is contesting it, it should be deletion for clear speedy-satisfying reasons. Speedy deletion criteria deliberately avoid marginal notability.

However, this is insufficient process, still. I think that DRV should be like RfC/User: A DRV should be made as a proposal, perhaps on a page for that, and it should not be opened unless certified by a user in good standing, probably an autoconfirmed user, perhaps with some edit count restrictions. The user certifies that (1) the undeletion request is reasonable, and (2) a good-faith attempt has been made to resolve the dispute directly with the deleting admin and the deleting admin has refused to undelete or, alternatively, to recuse (i.e., to not oppose undeletion by another admin). In a speedy deletion by JzG, I requested undeletion, and he refused, but he also stepped out of the way, so a request to another admin did the trick. I would also interpret lack of response by an admin to a reasonable request from an editor, maintained for a week, to be recusal.

In all this, we may need better "hierarchy." We currently have three basic levels: IP or newly-registered editors, auto-confirmed editors, administrators. (Higher privilege levels aren't relevant here). We need a level between autoconfirmed and admin. There could be several ways to create this level, I won't go into it here, but suffice it to say that it should not be difficult to obtain the privilege, unless there is major opposition, and it should also not be difficult to lose it. Frivolous requests or actions. This level could be the same as having the ability to modify Flags (which is just such an intermediate level), but it might also have different requirements, simplicity might argue for identity of the two, I haven't been following the latest on that.

Bottom line, this level is a more restricted group, designed to have a large active membership, but also having privileges that can be lost if abused.

If the consent of an editor with this privilege is necessary, then editors who don't have the privilege merely face the task of finding one with it to agree and take responsibility for a desired action.

In a purely peer structure, in traditional deliberative environments, a motion must be seconded before debate opens.

The article that started this was a subject of marginal notability. To my mind, it didn't meet speedy criteria.

Here is the evidence:

• User:Abd/TurnKey Linux
• speedy nomination as 'spam' by IP editor

Editor locates to Portugal. Also tagged NUbuntu.

Edits to List of Ubuntu-based distributions from this range: [18][19]

Related IP with second edit above was a vandal same day as editing Ubuntu-related articles. IP contributions

• revision as of speedy.
• logs for page
• There was a first DRV, withdrawn by the nominator (the page creator).
• page log showing deletion of user copy of page (this is mentioned later). Admin is not only speedying article, but prevents user work on the page in user space.
• last edit in a problematic exchange on JzG Talk
• 2nd deletion review
• [20] Closure by Spartaz. * TurnKey Linux – Deletion Endorsed Once nominators resort to personal attacks on good faith users contributing to the discussion we close them because DRV is not a platform to attack other users. There is a clear consensus supporting this deletion and, if you want to bring this back, you will need much better sourcing then what you have come up with here. – Spartaz Humbug! 18:08, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Head-scratching. The DRV is dense with bad arguments, including notability arguments not at the speedy criterion level. Speaking as an uninvolved user, I am surprised at the incivility of a number of the people arguing for deletion. This thing appears to have some valid sources and references that could be used, and thus, cannot be deleted under CSD. Thus, Overturn and list at AFD. Jtrainor (talk) 18:03, 10 February 2009 (UTC) The close by Spartaz was clearly improper: it made article survival dependent on the alleged behavior of a user, and it confirmed a speedy deletion based on a need for "better sourcing," when some editors clearly believed sourcing was at least marginal. The purpose of speedy deletion is to avoid debate over clear deletions. The assumption of some editors appeared to be that a review of a speedy deletion should address the ultimate notability question, which is a fundamental error. However, having said that, the best way forward is not, at this point, another DRV or further dispute resolution process. Rather, it is to find consensus that the article is ready for a return to mainspace, among those actually working on the article as it sits, userfied.

• Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_61#Notability_criteria_for_entries_on_free_software_projects.3F is how I noticed the situation, and I commented there on the IP edits as the basis for the speedy deletion by the admin.
• The more I look into this, the more worms are crawling out of the can. Must stop for the moment! --Abd (talk) 13:31, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Struth, I suggest that before taking an article to DRV that you ask an admin to userfy it. That way it can be seen by everyone during the DRV. If it's an attack page or something then that might not be possible, but in most cases I think an admin would userfy it, especially if you tell them it's so that it can be viewed (and edited) during DRV. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 13:02, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Sure. In fact, even though it had become clear to me that there was a problem with the DRV, I had the article userfied to my space. It should be realized that, before the second DRV, the one filed by SB, the article was userfied, but was speedy deleted from the user space of the creating editor. There was extensive abuse of process here. Speedy is designed for non-contentious deletions. Using it to pursue personal opinions is a problem. --Abd (talk) 13:37, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

That's why I didn't bother asking for it to be userfied again: the people who wanted it deleted were speedy-deleting userfied copies of it too and I have no interest in facing off with someone using admin tools in that situation. Why should I have to be patient, careful, and thorough and follow process at all if the admins don't feel they need to?

This whole sort of thing just needs to go into AfD or some other process where there are specified time durations and everything doesn't depend on the judgment of impatient, bitchy admins with questionable degrees of impartiality. Same amount of effort on everyone's part (perhaps even less, actually), just delayed by five days and process and propriety can be followed. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 23:55, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

I see. Yeah, it looks like there were problems with process there. And I guess admins have to be careful doing speedy deletions, because it's a lot of power in the hands of one individual. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 00:16, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

On what grounds were they deleting the userfied copies? Were they deleting the page as a routine administrative action or is there evidence that they were "involved"? ☺Coppertwig (talk) 00:48, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

I've seen no evidence of involvement. My comment would be that the issue is, here, not one of involvement, per se, but rather of approach and style, and, further, a habit of, once a decision has been made, continuing to discover reasons why it was the right decision, while being unable to see reasons why it wasn't. This is a fairly common human dysfunction, it is one which often afflicts Wikipeida, and it's particularly pernicious where power is concentrated into the hands of a person prone to that, even more so when the person is persuasive and habitually trusted without independent investigation. --Abd (talk) 04:58, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

If I recall correctly (I haven't gone and checked), the person who deleted it from LirazSiri's user space was that JzG fellow, also the one who speedy deleted the mainspace article for the 2nd time. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 01:34, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

That's correct. However, my strong suggestion is to stay away from the person thing. However, if it interests you, watch User:Abd/Notices, as well as my Talk page.

Heh heh, well I must say that's not surprising.

But it wasn't just him, though: this is something that was openly discussed in VPP. I was staggered by the apparent number of admins who either didn't understand the ethics and process problems involved, or were straight-up endorsing the violation of process - all just for the sake of denying LirazSiri a procedural deletion of his article.

I always assumed that the bad admins I'd encountered were few and far between but this experience has made me seriously question that... I think in the future I'm just going to assume that admins are ready and willing to use underhanded tactics until proven otherwise. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 11:25, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

[outdented comment by Coppertwig moved to outdented position below.]

There are, what, 1600 administrators? Your conclusion above would be warped. Most admins will approach a topic fairly if it comes to their attention and they have time to consider it, they are not fed misleading evidence that appears conclusive, and they do not, in error, trust another administrator or editor (perhaps based on a history of positive interactions). Not as many administrators are "misbehaving" as you might think. Individually, they might be or they might not be. My operating assumption, with even the "worst," is assume good faith but also allow for error or personal bias -- if any of us think they are free from such, and if that person is an administrator, the person should be desysopped immediately and leave Wikipedia behavioral management to imperfect human beings, and I'm sure that a perfect person, in this respect, would have much more important things to do --- etc. Wikipedia discussions typically involve on a few editors, and typically no administrators or only a few at most. Participation bias is thus a risk. However, dispute resolution process allows for this, by gradually expanding the circle of involved editors until a broader consensus is clear. While it only takes one editor, theoretically, to escalate, when a consensus is truly snowing, appeal will be shut down quickly; for a single editor to move beyond that takes more than one editor, and even two can be shaky.

Behind all of the policies and guidelines is WP:IAR, which must be interpreted in the light of WP:CONSENSUS. The subject article was deleted, and I agree that the some aspects of the deletion (and especially of the userfied copy) were improper. But what will be raised in review of this, contrary to what I've stated above as what should be process, is the question of notability. I.e., the community will address this question: "Suppose the deletion was improper, that it should have gone to AfD instead. Is there any reason to believe that it might survive AfD?" Your expressed position, Struthious, is that the topic is insufficiently supported by reliable source, i.e., you have claimed that it would properly not survive AfD. Thus, in closing with a confirmation, your nomination would have been read that way. Requesting undeletion because of process wonkery (I.e., "right result, but bad process, therefore let's start over") is reasonably rejected.

I've seen horrible process confirmed at AfD, i.e., the nomination was abusive, the nominator edit warred with an administrator over the admin's speedy close for rapid renomination, the nominator was a sock puppet of a banned editor, under simultaneous discussion at the time over that, etc., but AN/I is so dysfunctional that when the admin asked for support (he can't block an editor with whom he's engaged in a dispute, so he properly went to AN/I), AN/I started, instead, to debate the notability of the topic. (The puppet master was a master at this kind of diversion.) This kept the discussion open long enough to attract enough comments that closure was considered inappropriate. The discussion, which became massive because of the wide attention attracted by the AN/I report, was divided between Delete based on notability (which was marginal, some very long-term editors !voted to keep) and Keep, the large majority of which was based on process violation. The closing admin closed as Delete, based on the proponderance of the arguments issue. See, process error isn't an argument for Keep or Delete! I was involved (not with the article, but over concern about process), I could have gone to DRV, but what would be the outcome there? Likely the same. So the article was userfied at my request so work could continue. I haven't looked at it for a while, but at some point, it could be reasserted in mainspace or someone could take it to DRV. My opinion, last time I looked, was that it was still likely to generate more heat than light. Consider the overall welfare of the project! Articles that are marginally notable can be highly disruptive at AfD. It's better to work on them to improve them, if possible, to give them the best shot. If the article is in mainspace at that point, every improvement can be a battle, as sources are challenged, POVs asserted and removed and the rest. In user space, a consensus of those who support keeping the article can develop, and, if it includes experienced editors who know what's likely to happen at AfD, the article will then have the best possible chance at free breathing again. Meanwhile, in user space, it's not "free" in some senses, but it is more free in others. Cooperative work can continue without disruption and contentious debate, the only debate being over how to best improve it. Want to cite a mailing list post? You know, they are not always unusable, under some narrow circumstances they can be cited. With the article in user space, it can be done. In mainspace, someone who really wants the article gone will revert such a citation in a flash.

Another feature of the article being in user space. I can solicit the participation of friendly editors. As long as I respect the limits of WP:CANVASS, there is no open question, so biased solicitation isn't an issue. There were long-term editors who !voted Keep, among the few !votes based on assertion of notability. At some point, I could ask each one of them to look at the article and help if they can. When the article goes back into mainspace, if they have contributed, the AfD notice, if it is filed, would pop up on their Watchlists. Further, it's legitimate to notify all the editors of an article under AfD. See, the process is, in fact, as it should be, somewhat biased toward Keep, when experienced editors are involved; that, however, is balanced, routinely, by deletionist editors, who, big surprise, follow Articles for deletion, many other experienced editors having decided to stay away, AfD is hazardous for their wikihealth. There is no WP:Articles for inclusion to follow!

Look to the ultimate goal, Struthious, and factor in some realistic understanding of how human beings and human societies function, you will find it much easier to understand what goes on here. And maybe even to tolerate it enough to have the patience required to make long-term changes for the better. --Abd (talk) 17:22, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

(<<<outdent) Admins are human beings and need to be treated as such. I think that when an article is at DRV, deletion rules should be interpreted more leniently for userfied copies (or even mainspace copies) during the DRV, so that people have a chance to see the page during the discussion, and I'm under the impression that this is usually done; and the rules for userspace also allow more freedom than for article space. (although e.g. clear BLP violations still need to be deleted immediately even from userspace). Abd, you're right: there's no point pointing fingers and worrying about what happened in the past. For the future, one idea might be, when userfying a page for discussion during DRV, to put a message at the top like "Please don't delete this page during the DRV discussion" and having a link to both the DRV discussion, and to a section of the talk page devoted specifically to the question of whether to delete the page before the DRV is over, i.e. "if you're thinking of deleting the page before the DRV is over, please discuss here first". I would hope that people would tend not to delete pages (especially in userspace) during a DRV anyway (except... etc.) but it doesn't hurt to make a polite request or reminder. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 17:16, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

A proper DRV could have been (could still be) for the speedy deletion of the userfied copy (But I oppose this, for reasons given here). That would properly have avoided, for the most part, notability issues, as long as there was some reasonable assertion that reliable source might be found. But, in fact, we did an end run around this, since the article is userfied, but to my space, and there is no credible assertion (or fact) indicating that I have an advertising motive, the basis for the speedy, as I recall. General rule: if there is a less disruptive way to get done what you want to get done, pick that way. If I wanted to embarrass the deleting editor, then, quite possibly, I'd have gone for DRV to show him who's boss. Sooner or later, this kind of attitude would backfire. Liraz Siri is now quite free to work on the article, without worrying about it quickly disappearing, and subject only to my general laissez-faire attitude, as long as serious contention doesn't break out, and I tend to bring along with me a contingent of experienced editors who notice what's going on here. I will let go of what can now be considered a draft with history, either upon my personal judgment that it's ready for mainspace, or a consensus of those working on it, in my judgment, or an outside consensus, which, note, would have to be a consensus to return! (As well, obviously, if I abuse my position as user-space manager, I could lose my custodianship, and if too much time passes, the draft would be vulnerable to MfD.)

There are admins who will routinely, absent specific objection, such as BLP violation (which they will then review and decide upon personally), userfy a deleted article. Sometimes if there is a violation or problem, they will userfy it in fixed condition. Before going to DRV, an editor should, I'd suggest, always userfy. Let me point out that if they cannot get an admin to userfy the article, it is totally useless and a waste of time to go to DRV. Then, at DRV, the commenting editors have an article to look at! Some of them might even improve it. What's sensible, though, is to not rush to DRV, if there were reasonably cogent objections involved in the original deletion or any review. Rather, fix those problems, if possible. If a perfectly good article is deleted, doesn't need fixing, still try to satisfy the objections. Does some problem section really need to be there? It could always be put back later, when the decision would be far less disruptive and more likely to be made using regular editorial judgment.

Think in terms of maximizing consensus. This requires considering the objections of that useless band of no-gooders, abusers of newbies, POV-pushers aligned against Truth, obviously careless and ignorant and mean, or, at least, not, without necessity, tossing a piece of meat in front of them! There are only two reasonable alternatives to this first one, really: second, go away, find something better to do with your time, which should always be there as an option (if it's not an option, you probably need to develop it as one!), or, second, exterminate them, get them banned. Which does pose a few problems, and even if you succeed, you will merely have reproduced them in yourself. --Abd (talk) 17:52, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

One more point, which I thought of several times in writing the above, and it escaped. Always provide opposing editors with a face-saving escape. If possible, of course. People who have !voted for Delete, say, may vote that way again because of normal inertia and will disregard new arguments. After all, if they were smart, wouldn't they have thought of these arguments themselves? By giving them new arguments without new substance, aren't you implying that they aren't smart? But if you present them with an article that has been changed, they now can say, "Keep. Great job! (I was right to !vote for Deletion but) Now it's ready." Even if their original !vote was thoughtless, based on no review of what was actually in the article and sources, etc. Or, more often, they won't be motivated to come back and !vote the same way, they simply won't show up.

Plus, of course, you may, at the same time, find new support or genuine conversion of editors who actually did know what they were doing when they !voted Delete. --Abd (talk) 18:03, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

I guess that's pretty close to what I mean. If by default you have to manipulate others in such a way, instead of just clearly communicating with them - if they need help or special inducement to make the hard decisions EVERY TIME - to me that's the same as assuming they're really in pursuit of the ego-carrots you're going to dangle in front of their noses rather than seeking honest and egalitarian purposes.

I'm not saying that every admin is Ratso Rizzo but it appears to me that for most of them the standards they hold themselves to are pretty low. I'm noticing how few members of the admin community are really doing what's right every time I encounter them (and consequently I value such individuals all the more.) --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 18:48, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Also - Requesting undeletion because of process wonkery (I.e., "right result, but bad process, therefore let's start over") is reasonably rejected. - I didn't request undeletion in my DRV, I specifically requested only that the article be listed in AfD for discussion and that everyone pour their vitriol against LirazSiri's article in there, for an above-the-board, WP-policy managed discussion. I specifically said I wasn't asking for undeletion (in VPP I said so, at least.) The "deletion confirmed" outcome of the DRV didn't even make sense since the deletion wasn't challenged by it - people wanted the article deleted so badly that they focused on answering a question that wasn't even asked. It's seeing that kind of thing as reasonable that I don't think I'll manage. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 19:02, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I know what you asked for. If you felt you needed to say this, please reread what I wrote above, which was based in having read your nomination. I haven't suggested that you take on some polyanna view of people as reasonable, nor that any given comment was necessarily reasonable, but consider this: you believe the article should have been deleted, and that would have been your !vote in the AfD you wanted to see started. While in theory, DRV for a speedy should be confined to reviewing whether or not speedy criteria were followed -- which would make these reviews less contentious -- that is my theory and hasn't become a guideline (or has it?). Many editors believe that the function of DRV is to make a fresh decision on keep/delete, which is often accurate as to what DRV actually does, sometimes. They don't want Yet Another Debate that will come up with the same result. You really must understand this. Your nomination was taken as evidence for Deletion, which in this case meant Confirm. The confirmation is of the deletion, not of the admin's action, which, in the end, is properly irrelevant to the Confirm/Overturn decision.

You noticed the vitriol at the DRV. If this surprised you, you've been naive. Try to understand what I'm saying: AfD and DRV are frequently, practically inherently disruptive, leading to vitriol and incivility. I won't explain why, if you want my view on it, ask. It was noticed, comments referred to it, on both sides. It's not necessary for me, here, to take a side on that, though it's fairly obvious to me what happened. Politics, Struthious, wikipolitics. Wikisociety behaves like other societies, should this be surprising?

Avoid AfD and DRV if you can. It is usually possible to avoid DRV, there are easier ways to get an article back, provided that the advice I've given above is understood and followed. DRV is still there as a backup, and if you've done the preparatory work, DRV is only reasonably likely under three situations: you are faced with an intransigent closing admin who insists on deletion no matter what, or who believes that his or her job is simply to measure and follow consensus without taking personal responsibility for the decision, which will also lead to intransigence, or, alternatively, you are being intransigent, or third case, there is an unresolved, unclear issue over the notability of the article, which may be worth wider attention.

If you are attached to any part of this, whether to the notability or non-notability of the article, or to "correct" process that neglects the ultimate questions as to content, you will have difficulty with viewing others as reasonable, and thus in responding with civility and effective presentation of arguments and evidence.

Struthious, I have a natural advantage here, I have Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder which, while it is a true disorder causing some dysfunction, also gives me certain unusual abilities, one of which is to look at a situation from more than one perspective simultaneously. Sure, you can read what I've written as suggesting skillful manipulation. However, there are many ways to manipulate, some of which are beneficial to all parties, some of which are beneficial only to the manipulator, and some of which are just plain stupid. What I've done is to suggest a reframe of behavior that is designed to seek consensus. That is, want to get something done? Find consensus for it. But the fact is that to do this, one must be willing to modify the goal, unless one is so lucky as to start out with what will enjoy consensus naturally (or one is a highly skilled manipulator of people contrary to their natural interests, which can ultimately backfire). In the end, the behavior I described is a selfish way of looking at seeking consensus, but, you should note, it works even if you are wrong to start with. And, since I've been suggesting general rules for sane wiki behavior, here is another:

Always maintain in your mind the possibility that you are wrong, and that jerk who's been rudely getting in your way is right. Whether he's rude or not. You could be wrong about that too.

What do you do when someone rudely demands that you do the right thing? Simple answer, least likely to cause personal mental distress. Do it with as little fuss as possible, and as quickly as possible consistent with doing it right. If what is demanded is relatively harmless, it can also be quite useful to do it, even if it might not seem optimal, also without fuss. Remember the judo, it leaves the one who tries to harm you flat, perhaps having difficulty understanding what hit him. At the very least, it doesn't feed enmity.

Personal example, from my experience here: When I became seriously involved as an editor, it was because of a situation I found where an article was being controlled by a COI editor supported by sock puppets. Nasty situation. I managed to dismantle it. Then, pursuing a long-term interest in wikis and similar process (dating way probably something like thirty years), I started to work on Wikipedia structure. This is often not taken well, I'm not the first person to run into hostility. Ultimately, when I confronted what looked to me like a particular administrative and procedural error, to make a long story short, I was blocked. Part of the block justification was my focus on the structure, which almost necessarily involves dealing with conflict, which looks like a seeking of WP:WIKIDRAMA. In the flap that ensued, I was told that I should really be editing articles, like a good little Drone, though without the D word. Now, I could easily have dismissed that. After all, I have over thirty years experience with consensus organizations, anarchic structures, and study of how to make them durable and efficient. Surely my work on structure is more important than the few edits I could make to articles. Consider the affair for which I was blocked. While I was blocked, another editor took up the cause, and it was successful, and the result was that a very young and very productive editor was returned to function; the likelihood that this editor's contributions, eventually, would overshadow anything I could personally do with article edits is great; and, in fact, I think that she was already there before I began working on the case.

However, old judo trick: accept the opponent's movement, do not resist it, move with it. Join it. In judo, this ends up with the opponent flat on the ground, having thrown himself there, albeit with a little help. (That only works if the "opponent" is trying to harm you. Otherwise, you just do a nice little dance....)

So, hey, why not? I installed Twinkle and off I went, doing Recent Changes patrol. It's like a video game: be the first to recognize a piece of vandalism and revert it and welcome/warn/threaten the editor. At some times of day, you've got to be quick! But at those times of day, you can look further down the RC listings and find stuff that was missed, sometimes.

Now, what did this do? Well, the first salutary effect, besides fixing some articles (nothing says I can't improve an article I come across because a vandal hit it.... or sometimes, vandalism isn't obvious, and sources need to be checked, and if the sources weren't there in the first place, it's a great opportunity to add one or more. Besides some of these articles are interesting and, my, isn't she beautiful and smart and talented? .... etc.): the admin whom I had supposedly attacked, the basis for my block, noticed what I was doing and spontaneously offered me the rollback privilege. And is now a reliable partner.

Probably because I didn't attack him, but instead went through a patient process of a self-RfC, a process which I've more or less invented, the admin who warned me, which set a precondition for my block, has also become quite helpful. I didn't move on to deal with the block itself, and I'm not sure it would be worthwhile. Originally, I put in the effort to address the block because I knew that once blocked, next block happens more easily; but now, I feel very little risk of being blocked more than transiently, and even that seems unlikely day-to-day, even though I'm now addressing some fairly large systemic issues, such as blacklisting/whitelisting process, which definitely needs some attention, I played a role in making sure that the ban of a certain editor was not as widely misunderstood as certain propaganda would have promoted -- you can see some warnings generated by that, still on this page --, and have challenged the use-of-tools while involved by an admin, as well as a series of the involved actions. The latter situation is set to produce my first user RfC, I'd been trying to avoid it, but it's practically been forced.

I also ran up, I don't know, maybe a few thousand edits fairly quickly, I didn't really keep track. My name was then in front of many editors and administrators, doing regular cleanup work. So next time they see my name on a noticeboard or whatever, the response has been shifted.

My own attitude also shifted, in subtle ways. I knew about consensus and its value, of course, already. But something deepened.

Recently, I became aware of a whole can of worms, the admin abuse I mention above, which led to discovering the blacklist/whitelist problems, and it got in the way of my Recent Changes patrolling. I'm hoping to finish working on the problem soon, so I can return to playing Whack-a-Mole, it's definitely more fun in the short term. Or editing articles more seriously, which has also started again. Studying the blacklist led me to finding a blacklisted source that is actually RS, I proposed local whitelisting which was ultimately accepted even though I had to go to WP:AN to break the logjam, and we may end up with a few hundred new articles, possibly, or at least a few hundred other articles improved. But one step at a time. Try to do any of this quickly, and .... resistance appears, and the more you push the more the resistance. Classic problem with a classic solution. --Abd (talk) 20:42, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

I have ADD too. (hand shake, high five)

I apologize if I've misunderstood you at some points but the way you phrase things is such that they can often be interpreted multiple ways.

But I do appreciate the advice you've laid out here as well as the work you've put in on Wikipedia. You definitely seem like the sort of person who should be doing Recent Changes patrolling, moreso than many of the individuals I've met doing it. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 22:07, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Imagine what it's like when I try to be brief without being polemic! (Polemic is speech designed to influence opinion in a specific, desired way. I can write polemic, but it's not what I usually do.) But don't worry about those other people doing RC patrolling. They contribute, some of them contribute monumentally. It doesn't have to all be right, as long as most of it is right, we can fix the rest. IP editors are in a shaky position. We want them, because a great deal of content improvement comes from them, but if they have variable IP, they won't really know what hit them, so to speak. ADHD, yes. The good news and the bad news. I wouldn't trade my life for "normal" for anything. But ... it can be hard on people in relationship with me, and it can even be hard on me. It's essential for me to understand how I'm different from others and how others are different from me and to factor for it. One of the big hazards of having ADHD, of the variety I have, is that an attitude that others are stupid can easily develop. It gets a lot of us. The truth is that we are different, we are better at some things and worse at others. If everyone were like me, well, the subways wouldn't run. On the other hand, if people like me didn't exist, society would become rigid and unable to adapt to new circumstances. I.e., the variation is functional. Athens condemned Socrates to death. Contrary to their expectations, he didn't flee, he drank the hemlock. And Athens' power was destroyed, because it could not adapt to changing circumstances. See User:Abd/Rule 0 --Abd (talk) 22:33, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Some very good thoughts in this section. However here's something I disagree quite strongly with:

"Suppose the deletion was improper, that it should have gone to AfD instead. Is there any reason to believe that it might survive AfD?" Your expressed position, Struthious, is that the topic is insufficiently supported by reliable source, i.e., you have claimed that it would properly not survive AfD. Thus, in closing with a confirmation, your nomination would have been read that way. Requesting undeletion because of process wonkery (I.e., "right result, but bad process, therefore let's start over") is reasonably rejected.

I disagree; the deletion was not necessarily black and white, and in theory in cases where there is a large gray area, the incorrect process only clouds whatever would be the just result - in other words spending a discussion on BOTH the speedy issue AND the merits of deletion leads to a dissonance of logic. Do I really need to give the merits of following process? What about offending the editors, or getting people's backs up? What if Liraz Sari would have been content with a normal AfD outcome but instead is scourned by a blatant lack of process? Its inciteful. And after many hours working on her article she is entitled to a solid discussion not clouded by abuse of process. However, one could say that a Speedy-Deletion should not get challenged in a deletion-review, because the purpose of a Deletion Review is not to judge admin actions and their rightfulness; that is the job of AN/I. So if a speedy-deletion is challenged in AN/I, then I strongly feel their mandate is to correct the process here: the speedy-delete should have been overturned and moved to AfD for proper discussion where users that are (allegedly) experienced at judging articles for deletion can assess an outcome. Again, in theory the AN/I people are good at understanding admin tasks, the people in AfD (which include non-admins) are good at understanding deletion guidelines. We have the processes in place, and if the deletionists are going to be so beaurocratic with their deletions, they can be beurocratic about their @#$#ing processes. :p Rfwoolf (talk) 08:07, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm not claiming there is no merit in following process. What I'm claiming is that there is very substantial opinion, perhaps a majority of those who participate in these things, that content issues trump process. See the section heading here, and substantial agreement -- including more specified agreement from me -- that speedy deletions that did not clearly meet speedy conditions should be quickly reversed. They should not automatically go to AfD, that's up to whoever wants to delete the article to decide and to file. I would actually take these decisions out of DRV itself into a special page where this is clearly specified. WP:Speedy deletion review. At that page, the only debate that is in order is the applicability of speedy deletion criteria. The existence of substantial dissent to the deletion should result in speedy close of the discussion with reversal. New criteria should not be invented during the debate. (That's to avoid the confusion of arguments that happens in these things. However, any admin could decide to close the original discussion as insufficiently, but, for the record, undelete and redelete specifying a criterion the admin considers valid, and this should not be the original deleting admin.) The goal is not a decision on keep/delete, the goal is to prevent useless unfocused discussion. If a speedy discussion is quickly closed, there has been little or no wasted editor time. On the other hand, if there is little or no cogent argument for overturn, besides the nominator, and the discussion is open for a week, that should be it. Deletion remains. The guideline would be worked out on the page.

However, once again, there are some troubling assumptions here. "If a speedy-deletion is challenged in AN/I...." Such a challenge should be limited to administrative abuse. I am aware that there may be a reasonable claim of such in the present case, but AN/I will tend, my observation, to turn the report there into a debate over notability, and possible admin abuse will be pushed aside and disregarded. The final part of your comment, R, shows that you have bought into the conflict of inclusionism vs. deletionism, and this leads you to an imbalanced view. It's not "us" vs "them." It's just "us." Want to deal with the problem? Change the guidelines and process, which will require finding consensus. It's not easy, but it is exactly what needs to be done. You won't succeed if you maintain the "us vs. them" attitude, because those who disagree with you will dig in their heels.

So, I named a proposed page above. If you create it and notify me, I'll participate. Consider this: if deletionists waste their time battling over marginal issues, they will be less able to find and delete or nominate the thousands upon thousands of inappropriate pages. I'm an inclusionist, but I also understand the important task that deletionists perform, and, in fact, most "deletionists" are more nuanced or balanced than the term implies, and it's only a few dedicated, perhaps even fanatic, editors who make for the bad reputation. How about User:Killerofcruft? The name itself was confrontational. It means "I destroy what you love." If there was ever a clear violation of WP:BATTLE, there it was. After some time, he requested a name change, but the fact is that the original name was exactly appropriate for what he was doing, and you can get an idea of the scope of strong deletionist perspective by looking at those who supported him and encouraged him. He openly said and did what they thought but wouldn't say because ... it could get them blocked. --Abd (talk) 13:37, 23 March 2009 (UTC)