Talk:Ghost/Archive 8

Lack of coverage of various cultures noted

After skimming the article, it seems very biased towards European culture. There is no mention of Middle Eastern, African, Austronesian etc. beliefs, and minimal coverage of pre-Colombian beliefs in the Americas, all of which are rich and interesting aspects of the subject. There is too much, in my view, on spiritualism, which has its own article and just needs a short summary. The intro definitely needs a rework to cover the main topics discussed. But this seems as bad as Global Warming for controversy. Think I will avoid it! Aymatth2 (talk) 15:29, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

Aymatth2: please, feel free to add anything from other cultures that you have sources for. Just be a little careful not to accidentally impose a Western bias as you're trying to remove it: e.g. east Asian cultures have mythological entities that Westerners have labeled ghosts that aren't really anything like disembodied spirits (traditional east Asian religious philosophy doesn't have a conception of the human soul that lends itself to disembodied existence). And don't mind brangifer - he can't seem to make a post without it turning into an attack on me. The personal crap isn't something you want to get involved in. --Ludwigs2 17:04, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

There will always be differences in meaning between different cultures, but the idea of someone who has died but stays around in some sort of disembodied form and remains involved with the living seems fairly universal. Part of the interest in a more complete article would be differences and similarities between ghosts in different cultures. It is huge subject. Lafcadio Hearn wrote a lot about Japan (e.g. In Ghostly Japan), and obviously many other writers did too. See this excerpt for an example of just one aspect in another of the many cultures (Igbo) that are not discussed. Navajos, Polynesians, every culture has them ... A huge subject. Aymatth2 (talk) 17:50, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

Well, I can certainly see the sense in that. It might require a major restructuring of the article, though. maybe start with a discussion of cross-cultural differences and move the terminology/typology bits down to subsections of the European context... You seem to be much better read on this than I am, so I'm happy to let you take the lead - what would you like to see happen? --Ludwigs2 17:59, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

I am no expert. Just making one of those annoying drive-by comments of the "someone should do something about it" class. I may add some material if I come across it, but at present am working through a list of other articles that I want to get done. I would not worry too much about structure. Easy enough to rearrange as part of expanding. Aymatth2 (talk) 19:25, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

By all means do what you can to improve coverage. This is a large subject. -- Brangifer (talk) 08:08, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

The problem with the {{globalize}} complaints is that either nobody can be bothered to do the research, or else somebody goes out of their way to emphasize the "equality" of cultures for which there are only extremely marginal references, resulting in tocs like "1. Aztecs; 2. Kalahari Bushmen; 3. Western world".

I think we begin to learn that this article needs to be split and cut down into WP:SS shape. Already the paranormal cruft hogs far too much attention here on talk. It is a marginal concern of the main article and should be exported to a dedicated sub-article. Ghost (paranormal research) will finally be in a position to claim with justification that it discusses a topic of pseudoscience. Detailed breakdowns "By culture" and "By period" should also be delegated to sub-articles. --dab (𒁳) 12:43, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

I made a start on arranging by culture and adding some snippets of content on different cultures. The problem is that it could evolve into an enormous article, even if there is just a paragraph or so for each group. I think the sources are there, for example on ghosts in the different Australian aboriginal cultures, if someone wanted to do the research. But there are hundreds of groups that would have to covered to make it balanced, and that could take a long time. So the WP:SS suggestion makes sense. I fully agree that the paranormal stuff could use its own article, briefly referenced from this one, and think popular culture could too. Then there is the question of splitting out the articles on specific cultures. I suppose a geographical breakdown could work: North America, Central America, Caribbean etc. My guess is that a cultural anthropologist would recommend some different breakdown. I am sure there are books comparing ghost beliefs in different places and times. I recommend splitting out the paranormal and the pop culture right away, maybe just with "For" links at the top of the article, then seeing how the cultural part evolves. Do we need a vote on it? Aymatth2 (talk) 13:18, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

Dbachmann, you are proposing forking the article. There are circumstances when that is legitimate, and if this article were large enough you'd have a point, but it's a very small article, and the only reason the paranormal part is so small is that you are preventing it's inclusion, which violates our rules for article development. Articles are supposed to cover all aspects of a subject. If an article then becomes too large, a split is warranted. -- Brangifer (talk) 14:50, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

I excuse myself from reacting to any of Brangifer's comments due to excessive Randy-in-Boise-ism. --dab (𒁳) 12:17, 12 March 2010 (UTC)

The "Western Spiritualism and Skeptics" section is a bit of a fork anyway. When there are sub-articles like Spiritualism and Spiritism, it is best to basically just reproduce the summary at the start of each sub-article in the overview article, since the sub-article summaries should cover all the main points. Then only change the main article as needed to reflect changes in the sub-article summaries. That avoids forking. Before doing that, any content that is in this article but not in those should be moved over to the sub-articles, with an edit summary that gives a link back to this article to leave an attribution chain. Aymatth2 (talk) 16:05, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

• I split out Ghosts in European culture into a separate main article. Think this works well: more balanced coverage here and a more focused discussion in the new article. Aymatth2 (talk) 15:30, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

• • should probably be "Western culture", since Spiritualism and ghost hunting etc. is very much a phenomenon in North America. Probably traditional folklore and modern crackpottery should be treated as distinct. --dab (𒁳) 12:17, 12 March 2010 (UTC)
• There are articles on Spiritualism, Spiritism and Ghost hunting, probably others on recent beliefs and skepticism in western culture. Perhaps there should be an umbrella article to pull them together: "Modern beliefs in ghosts"? Maybe "in European culture" should be moved to "in European folklore", cutting out the very short "Modern Spiritualism" section. But I find the Western ghosts, both traditional and modern, rather boring. They just seem to vaguely hang around in a passively spooky sort of way. I just started Ghosts in Polynesian culture and may expand that - much more interesting to me since the ghosts are so much more active and the legends are so rich in detail. Aymatth2 (talk) 14:03, 12 March 2010 (UTC)

Ghost hunters lack scientific judgement

Google search results. QuackGuru (talk) 19:12, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

No less than three problematic lead sentences on ghost "research" and pseudoscience

This is excessive for the lead:

Beginning with 19th century spiritism, various attempts have been made to investigate ghosts through scientific methods, but such efforts are generally held to be pseudoscientific. In a 2006 National Science Foundation (NSF) report on a recent Gallup Poll survey of public opinion in the US, the NSF referred to belief in the existence of ghosts as a "pseudoscientific belief." A 2004 report by the NSF used somewhat similar language.

Obviously there are people who believe in ghosts and want to research them to find out more about them. I have no doubt that most of them are doing pseudoscience. It is also possible to research why people believe in ghosts: What are the mechanisms? Are people with specific mental diseases / mental dispositions more or less likely than average to believe in ghosts? How about cultural factors? Obviously there is a lot of potential for genuine research he. I have no idea whether this genuine research actually happens or not.

Now here is the problem: If you want to do ghost-related pseudoscience, you will think you are doing genuine research. If you claim to be doing some of the things I mentioned above as genuinely scientific, you even might get funding from reputable sources and be printed in reputable journals, if you are lucky. On the other hand, if you are doing genuine research in this area, you will have to (pretend to) take the object of your studies at least somewhat seriously, or they won't want to be studied by you. Add to that the fact that good scholars and scientists always sort of fall in love with their research field, and it becomes clear that it will be very hard to distinguish pseudoscience and proper science in this area.

Given these difficulties, it takes a lot more than the 3 references in the lead to convince me that "such efforts are generally held to be pseudoscientific". We must require certain minimal standards for such claims; otherwise we risk that one day the lead of evolution will say: "evolution is generally held to be just a theory". The first reference simply doesn't support the claim.

Here is the passage from the first source which apparently somebody thought supports the first sentence:

The supposed links between ghosts and electromagnetic fields, low temperatures, radiation, odd photographic images, and so on are based on nothing more than guesses, unproven theories, and wild conjecture. If a device could reliably determine the presence or absence of ghosts, then by definition, ghosts would be proven to exist. I own an EMF meter, but since it's useless for ghost investigations—it finds not spirits but red herrings—I use it in my lectures and seminars as an example of pseudoscience. The most important tools in this or any investigation are a questioning mind and a solid understanding of scientific principles.

The ghost hunters' anti-scientific illogic is clear: if one area of a home is colder than another, that may indicate a ghost; if an EMF meter detects a field, that too may be a ghost; if dowsing rods cross, that might be a ghost. Just about any "anomaly," anything that anyone considers odd for any reason, from an undetermined sound to a "bad feeling" to a blurry photo, can be (and has been) considered evidence of ghosts.

That's the best I could find in the source. Some problems:

• The source does not talk about "attempts [...] to investigate ghosts through scientific methods", which would include legitimate scientific research about the nature of belief in ghosts (if such research exists). No, it talks just about the American "ghost hunting" scene.
• The source does not say that such efforts are "generally held to be pseudoscientific". No, it just says that these "ghost hunters" are doing pseudoscience, and that the author uses their abuse of EMF meters as an example when teaching about pseudoscience.

Basically the source just verifies that one person holds one specific culture of "investigat[ing] ghosts" to be pseudoscience. This is of course way too weak to be worth mentioning in the lead in this form, so we need either a different source or a better formulation.

Currently there are widespread discussions about the second sentence elsewhere, so I am not going into details about that. However, I believe this is a misquotation. Maybe it could be corrected by saying the NSF "casually referred" to belief in ghosts in this way.

The second and third references give the claim in the first sentence a bit more credibility, but only if you ignore that they are implicitly about belief in ghosts, whereas the first sentence is formulated so widely that it would include scientific research into the belief in ghosts by scientists who don't share this belief (and might even think it's a symptom of a mental disease).

And here is the main problem: What are these two and a half sentences about pseudoscientific ghost "research" doing in the lead, giving no information beyond its existence and our disapproval of it? This kind of repetition with next to no content is certainly not encyclopedic brevity.

I was going to propose an alternative formulation that takes care of the distinction between actual, pseudoscientific research of ghosts and (potential) scientific research of belief in ghosts and can be properly sourced. But there is a problem: I find it hard to formulate it so that it doesn't make suggestions one way or the other about research into whether ghosts exist. That is problematic because research whether something for which there is plenty of anecdotal evidence is not a priori unscientific, but people trying to do it are most likely doing pseudoscience. (I expect protest here, but think of this: If Randy, say, does an experiment to prove that some claimed ghost is just nonsense – would that be pseudoscience? I don't think so. Would it only become science if he does it without the open mind w.r.t. results that is otherwise characteristic of science? Nope.) So in the absence of sources discussing specifically this aspect, we should avoid all statements about existence research, but not in such a way as to draw attention to this avoidance.

The following is not a definitive proposal, but perhaps something like it would work:

Beginning with 19th century spiritism, various attempts have been made to investigate ghosts through scientific methods, mostly under the assumption that ghosts exist. Such efforts often involve pseudoscientific methods and are generally held to be pseudoscientific.

The last part of the first sentence here suggests that "such efforts" in the second sentence is in some way restricted, short of us saying it explicitly. The construction of the second sentence further suggests, again short of saying it, that it is the pseudoscientific methods that make such investigations pseudoscience.

I guess a better solution would be to replace "investigate ghosts" by a natural formulation that cannot be misunderstood as covering investigations of the (non-)existence of ghosts or, most importantly, investigations into the belief in ghosts. The problem is finding such a formulation. Hans Adler 11:59, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

Remove the last sentense and remove the number 2006 to cut it down in size. One could even change it too "Beginning with 19th century spiritism, various attempts have been made to investigate ghosts using scientific methods. These attempts and the resulting belief in ghosts are held to be pseudoscientific by the scientific community."Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 12:04, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

Excellent idea. The "resulting belief in ghosts" is a bit surprising at first since most belief in ghosts is unrelated to the experiments, but in the interest of brevity this seems acceptable for the lead. "These attempts" also gives a strong idea that we are talking about the 19th century attempts and similar things that followed, not about research into seeing ghosts as a mental condition. Hans Adler 12:15, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

I am currently waiting for somebody to come here and say: "But I want to say that everything remotely connected to ghosts or belief in them is pseudoscience, including literary research into the status of ghost stories among the Romans. Therefore I object to the new version." If this (or a more reasonable objection) doesn't happen in the next couple of hours I propose putting your version in the lead to solve the current serious problem. Hans Adler 14:38, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

I'm sure you are. In the mean time, the supposed study of ghosts remains pseudoscience. Guy (Help!) 14:42, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

If that is supposed to be an objection to Doc James' text you need to be more clear. Supposed "study of ghosts" is pseudoscience, no question. This cannot be misunderstood. If you don't like Doc James' version we may find an alternative one using your formulation. Hans Adler 14:54, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

Quibbles: Spiritualism seems to predate Spiritism. I don't see belief in ghosts as pseudoscience, but as religion (e.g. Buddhism). No need for double footnotes from the same source. How about a modified version of the Doc James suggestion: "In the Western world, beginning with 19th century spiritualism, attempts have been made to investigate ghosts using scientific methods. The experiments are widely held to be pseudoscientific."

This is not an article on pseudoscience. The NSF 2006 report did not make the claim about investigation of ghosts, it treated "belief in ghosts" as "pseudoscientific," which may or many not be in plain contradiction to the meaning of the term, and the NSF report was based on Gallup surveys about "beliefs" with not much descrimination between "belief" and "scientific belief." The reason why it would be in plain contradiction is that belief in ghosts is not a "scientific belief," in general, and I have not seen it justified as scientific with any frequency. That someone might have, somewhere, investigated ghosts using scientific methods would not make belief in ghosts "pseudoscience." It would be scientific investigation of ghosts! And it would only be pseudoscience if it met the characteristics of pseudoscience. The topic doesn't make it pseudoscientific, it would be the nature of the investigation and the methods and evidence used that could do this. "Pseudoscience" does not mean "things that most scientists don't believe."

Okay, how might it not be in contradiction? Apparently, the Gallup poll asked people if they thought certain things were "scientific." That's a trick of language, it's entirely unclear what it means. Some people would use "scientific" as a synonym for "true," and so they might be answering that they think something is true. This is thin material to hang a lede on. I removed that whole paragraph as out of balance and poorly supported by the article. Agree on the article, first, I suggest.

I don't see that anything is added to this article by dwelling on this incautious and transient labelling by the NSF of "belief in ghosts" as "pseudoscience." The article presents ghosts as a belief, not as a science or scientific reality, nor as anything claimed to be "scientific." It hints at some attempts at scientific investigation of ghosts, but is remarkably thin on that. That, indeed, could possibly qualify as "pseudoscientific," depending how it was done and reported, but is far from central to this article. How about working on providing more sourced information about that, before trying to give it such prominence? struck as inadvertent ban violation, I wrote this edit and did not sign it and may have accidentally saved it --Abd (talk) 16:49, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

I'm tempted to suggest a revision along these lines:

Beginning with 19th century spiritism, various pseudoscientific attempts have been made to demonstrate the existence of ghosts. A significant percentage of the population continues to believe that there is a scientific basis for ghosts despite the lack of valid research or evidence.

there are several advantages to this approach, to my mind. (1) it avoids the confusion of claiming that they were scientific methods first and then reframing it as pseudoscience. (2) it clings more closely to what the Science and Technology indicators actually say - with this passage we could cite S&TI directly, rather than relying on the wording of specific years, since it is true of every year I have read, up through 2010. (3) it distinguishes better between belief and pseudoscience (i.e., it makes it clear that people believe in scientific validation for ghosts because of pseudoscience, without any of the weird assertions about pseudoscientific beliefs). what do you think? --Ludwigs2 02:49, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

I'm getting really bored of this, but that might be an acceptable compromise, I'm not hugely happy with the wording A significant percentage of the population which sounds like a wordy way of saying "many people", and does not specify which population or which kind of ghosts, but I think is right in spirit. As I said previously, the NSF clearly believe that in some sense "ghost belief" is pseudoscientific. I do not think that the original formulation of the cite was that bad, but I'd be prepared to back a tidied up version of this in order move on! --212.188.161.10 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 18:38, 15 March 2010 (UTC).

Balance, Bias and Summary Style

I have been trying to make this article more balanced, but am still not at all satisfied. The basic idea is that the article should cover all aspects of the subject, but give most emphasis to the most important. Presumably importance in this case is based on some balance between how widespread each form of belief is, how complex and evolved the belief is, and what our readers will be most interested in. A vague sort of belief in ghosts seems fairly common in the west, but ghosts play a much more fundamental role in Buddhism and other non-Christian religions, with much more elaborate conceptual structures. English is something of a global second language, and in several non-western countries is the official language, notably India and African countries such as Nigeria and South Africa. We should not assume that the primary audience is in the UK and US, or that the primary interest is in western-style ghosts.

• The introduction stills says too much about Spiritualism / paranormal research and skepticism. This is a fringe topic even in the western world, despite the widespread vague belief.
• The section on Typology seems to have a strongly western orientation, and a slightly condescending view that ghost belief is sort of primitive. Buddhists would disagree. I can't fit the abstract and highly sophisticated Australian dreamtime concepts into this framework anywhere.
• Ghosts in different cultures is probably o.k. now, as a sampling, although much could be added to expand and cover other belief systems
• Western Spiritualism and Skeptics seems much too long for such a fringe topic. I have tried to move forking material to the relevant sub-articles and replace by the shortest possible summary, but the sub-section on Scientific skepticism is surely a fork of content in other articles such as Parapsychology#Criticism and controversy. Still needs clean-up
• Depiction in the arts is hopelessly unbalanced. Surely ghost stories have been written in languages other than English. And surely Bollywood and Hollywood do not have a monopoly on ghost movies.

Comments on the above? Aymatth2 (talk) 15:43, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

Seems like your aim behind changes is to discuss less relevant topics and avoid far more common and important topics based upon some idea that discussion the most common topics is somehow biased. I think your stated goals are the exact opposite of what should be done here. The ghosts in other cultures section, for example, is already ridiculously detailed for minor cultures in such a way that it because trivial and gives no real educational value. We need more summaries of the overall topic and beliefs throughout history and less sheer random facts without context. The !Kung belief in ghosts, for example, is so ridiculously specific for a general topic that it's absurd. All that sort of thing should be branched off to separate articles, where there's enough information to do so, or deleted, where there isn't. DreamGuy (talk) 16:45, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

I went back and looked at the overall nature of the edits and found them to move the article backward quite dramatically. You removed the terminology section and gutted the history section, two of the most important parts of any article on a broad topic like this, and filled it up with nonnotable details that gave no overall context for topic. Ir everted back to a more stable version of the article. DreamGuy (talk) 16:52, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

See Ghosts in European folklore. All the information is preserved, summarized in the previous version of the article, which attempts to give a broader perspective than the highly western-oriented version. You have removed a great deal of well-sourced and relevant information on the subject, and introduced massive duplication. Aymatth2 (talk) 17:06, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

DreamGuy, I have no idea to what version exactly you reverted the article, and I suspect others have the same problem. Please tell us.

You didn't just revert the treatment of ghosts in various cultures from an excessively detailed version that could simply have been pruned to a poor and embryonic one, you also caused massive regressions elsewhere and an overall very unpleasant situation.

In my opinion a re-revert is in order. Hans Adler 00:04, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

OK, I found the answer to my question now. It was a version from 4 days ago. [1] (I had to turn off JavaScript in order to get a display of page sizes. I am using an extension that only shows me the difference in page sizes for successive edits instead of total page sizes.) Hans Adler 12:10, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

Brown lady ghost photo

I've re-added this image temporarily to preserve it from being deleted (it has ambiguous sourcing, so it has to be listed as non-free). It's one of the more famous ghost images around, so it has a place in this article if we choose to use it. the question is: do we want to use it? --Ludwigs2 16:39, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

Spiritism and Science

Vide this extract from the article:

"Beginning with 19th century spiritism, various attempts have been made to investigate ghosts through scientific methods".

The refs given do not support the idea that "spiritists" conducted scientific experiments about ghosts. Believing in ghosts or whatever is not the same as conducting scientific experiments. In fact neither of the refs so much as mention "spiritism". If some Viking believed in Thor that is not the same as the said Viking conducting scientific experiments into Thor's existence. This bit is also not supported by refs given:

"in a National Science Foundation report on a recent survey of public opinion in the US, the existence of ghosts is referred to as a "pseudoscientific belief.""

As far as I can see nowhere in the ref given - http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind04/c7/c7s2.htm#c7s2l5 - is the existence of ghosts referred to as a "pseudoscientific belief". Statements in the wikipedia need to be backed up by refs.Colin4C (talk) 17:14, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

Unnecessary and counter-productive nit-picking

The pseudo-science debate here seems to have gone down a rabbit hole. Ghosts, leprachauns, spirits, gods, nymphs, angels and the like all normally involve claims to a causal relationship with detectable phenomena in the real world, and that's pseudo-science. Religion and spirituality cease to be an excuse just as soon as the believer makes a claim about the real world. Which is usually some time around Genesis 1. Tasty monster (=TS ) 09:00, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

They weren't much better after Phil Collins joined either, but they did drop a lot of the New Age stuff. Verbal chat 09:06, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

the pseudo-science debate has indeed derailed completely. Which is entirely the fault of the pushers of pseudoscience-debunking. Your "usual" claims of "detectable phenomena in the real world" are a WP:FRINGE topic. A "belief" is not the same as a "claim". By "real world", you mean the material world. For a believer (in ghosts, or in God), the "real world" is spiritual, or both spiritual and material. It is only when claims about the material world are made that "pseudoscience" begins to be a topic. Ghosts are by definition part of the spiritual world. Attempts to link them with theories regarding the material world are a very marginal topic to this article. Any detail on that would belong on ghost hunting and paranormal, with only a brief summary here. This is simple WP:DUE.

case in point: the Pirahã people have an approach to "spirits", which does include spirits of deceased members of the tribe, which involves a living member of the tribe speaking as a ghost. The claim that this persion "is" a spirit at the time they speak is entirely spiritual. From a material perspective, you just have a living person speaking in a funny voice. No pseudoscience is required to explain where the voice was coming from, it was simply the vocal tract of the living person in question. That person will, however, deny categorically that they were present and everyone will insist that the entity that had spoken was a spirit. This isn't a pseudoscientific claim, it is a spiritual claim, or if you like a neurological claim of consciousness and identity. --dab (𒁳) 11:55, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

This is a silly opinion. There is a reason pseudoscience is called pseudo-science and not pseudo-reality. If you were right, a huge part of human culture would fall under pseudoscience, including most if not all of religion, but also for example Homer's writings. Put a pseudoscience tag on the talk pages of Christianity and Odyssey and make sure it sticks for a week. Then I will take you seriously.

It is possible to produce pure works of pseudoscience that don't even say anything wrong. This is a good example. I read only the first five pages or so before it became too painful. They contain a painfully tortuous proof of a mathematical fact that is so trivial that most lecturers just expect their students to see it on their own in the first session of an introductory lecture on the topic – no need to even mention it. The same author has also mathematically "proved the existence" of a Grand Unified Theory by an argument that is no more sophisticated than "Well, you see, we have these different theories. One tells us some things, and another tells us other things. So now we just look at what we can prove when we assume them all at the same time."

That is what the term pseudoscience is for. Ghosts, gods, and other stuff like this belong in different categories of nonsense. It's not OK to try to fit everything into the label "pseudoscience" just because we have an old Arbcom ruling for that and none for the other topics. The right way to solve the problem is to work on getting Arbcom rulings for the other topics as well, or simply to argue by analogy. Hans Adler 12:00, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

PS: Pseudoscience needs special treatment in Wikipedia because of the danger that we give it credibility: People reading an uncritical article about pseudoscience may easily be misled into believing that they are reading valid scientific arguments which they merely don't understand. Only those parts of this article which present such a danger fall under pseudoscience and need this treatment. Hans Adler 12:04, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

It's not silly, Hans, it's simple, and there's a difference because a lot of people are making this unnecessarily complicated.

• You say much of human culture, such as religion, would be pseudo-science under my description? Fine, what's the the problem?
• You say Homer's works would be pseudo-science? No, they're stories with a possible historical basis, just as much of the bible is.
• You say only purported science can be pseudo-scientific? Wrong. The NSF itself lists ghosts, telepathy, reincarnation and all manner of nonsense as pseudoscientific.

Dbachmann, you correctly say that "It is only when claims about the material world are made that "pseudoscience" begins to be a topic."

But then, crucially, you spoil it.

You go on to say "Ghosts are by definition part of the spiritual world." If that were wholly true, then they would not be associated with real places, people wouldn't claim to have seen them and there wouldn't be a whole host of physical phenomena associated with ghosts. That purported collision between the real (or material) world and the imaginary (or spiritual, if you prefer) world is what makes ghosts pseudoscientific.

The failure to acknowledge the simplicity of this situation will make it harder to edit the article into something that makes sense. --TS 17:47, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

You are talking complete nonsense. There is an entire philosophical debate about what to apply the label pseudoscience to and what not to apply it to. See demarcation problem. I did some research on this a while ago (it never went into the article, unfortunately) and I don't remember anyone proposing a definition that doesn't make sure to exclude the more standard religions and other parts of culture that don't pretend to be scientific. The very fact that everybody agrees one has to do this is one of the reasons it's such a hard problem. The only way to "prove" that the NSF claims ghosts are pseudoscientific is by quoting them out of context. Which is pseudoscholarship, if one goes about it as obviously as you are doing. To quote the NSF from the very paragraph before the misquoted one:

Pseudoscience has been defined as "claims presented so that they appear [to be] scientific even though they lack supporting evidence and plausibility" (Shermer 1997, p. 33).[28] In contrast, science is "a set of methods designed to describe and interpret observed and inferred phenomena, past or present, and aimed at building a testable body of knowledge open to rejection or confirmation" (Shermer 1997, p. 17).

This unambiguously defines the entire context as things pretending to be scientific.

What is funny is that we probably agree about the intellectual value of all these things that you want to call pseudoscience (0 or negative). The only thing we disagree about is which label to use. Why call it pseudoscience if the question of science isn't even raised? Why not just call everything you don't like pseudochemistry to be even more specific? Or pseudoarchitecture for a nice change? Hans Adler 18:07, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

the truly funny thing is that the advocates like brangifer and TS use what is clearly identifiable as pseudoscientific reasoning to make their points (i.e. claims that science somehow refutes things that have never been examined, tested, or researched scientifically). what does one do when the skeptics use the same logic as the pseudoscientists? I remember once talking with some people about a (perfectly valid) sociological theory that angels and visitations filled the same sociological utility in medieval society that UFO sightings fill in modern society. Then the others got into a debate about whether angels were actually space aliens misinterpreted as religious figures, or whether UFOs are religious visitations misinterpreted in scientific terms. Reminds me a lot of the arguments here, and it still makes my head spin. --Ludwigs2 18:51, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

See also: User talk:Hans Adler § Ghost

Hans Adler 19:29, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

Straw poll on revert

DreamGuy has made a huge revert to a version from 4 days ago to address a specific problem, but also changing a lot of other things in the process. [2] I have mixed feelings about the difference between the two versions. But there is one thing I am sure about: Such long-distance reverts can cause a climate in which editors who want to improve the article feel intimidated. They can expect their work to simply go poof! any moment. I am not going to work on this article before I have an idea of whether the revert is going to stick or not. The two versions are simply too different. There has been no real discussion of the revert, and I don't know whether this means that most people are content with it, or whether it means that most people are, like me, simply left scratching their heads.

This is not about a decision or anything like that. I just want to know where everybody stands so that I can go back to thinking about improvements of this article or not, depending on whether the current situation looks stable or not. Please everybody just say whether you support the revert, oppose it or are neutral (because you don't care either way, or because you haven't made up your mind yet). Please don't start arguing here, or it will defeat the purpose of the straw poll. If you are still undecided, just say so. Hans Adler 12:23, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

• Neutral. Hans Adler 12:23, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

• Oppose revert. Aymatth2 (talk) 12:27, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

• Support. Introduce changes after discussion. Verbal chat 12:35, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

• Oppose. The main difference was the shift to a worldwide survey of beliefs, rather than an emphasis on European folklore, which was put in a sub-article [3]; obviously objections could be made to that but I think overall the article was going in the right direction. Xanthoxyl ^< 17:40, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

• Support revert. Such large changes, including deleting/moving/creating new fork articles, need to be discussed thoroughly first. This article is small enough to include a lot more than it does before it would be justified to split or fork it. -- Brangifer (talk) 06:29, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

removal of properly sourced material

this and this were removed by brangifer, despite being properly source and clearly both accurate and relevant. the sourcing here is just as adequate as the sourcing used to add the quote (if not more so), and it is a necessary balance on a claim that would otherwise appear as though it has consistent and universal support by the NSF (a fact for which is opposed by available evidence). If we are going to use this quote, it is important to note that the quote is only used in an isolated minority of revisions of this document, and that other revisions do not use it. brangifer, please self-revert. --Ludwigs2 05:36, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

The sourcing is accurate, but it's unencyclopedic to use sources to add editorial comments that are OR and designed to denigrate. I don't think that's allowed. You can try the WP:RS/N to see what they say. I don't think it's relevant, since each report stands on its own merits, and in the absence of any RS to the contrary, such changes don't reflect any change in opinion. The opinions in each version are still accurate. If they made a scientific statement that was later proven to be wrong, that would be a different matter, but this is a different type of subject. They just emphasize different things and it is OR to speculate why they didn't include something. -- Brangifer (talk) 06:25, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

it's a simple factual statement intended to balance an inappropriately generalized statement that is currently presented. what's the problem? --Ludwigs2 07:09, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

It's a very obvious attempt to make a novel synthesis from primary sources. Guy (Help!) 15:44, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

actually, no, as I can show. we have two (fairly indisputable) facts:

1. in 2004 and 2006 (AFAIK) the NSF used the phrase 'pseudoscientific belief' in this document.
2. in other years (AFAIK), and particularly in the most current revision of the document, the NSF did not use the phrase 'pseudoscientific belief'

The current way the quote is being handled on this page - The scientific consensus, as expressed by the National Science Foundation, has identified belief in ten subjects... - is implying that the NSF uses this phrasing consistently and continuously, which is a lie (per reference to those two indisputable facts above). Under wp:NPOV and wp:V we must attribute sources properly and in proper balance, therefore we need to specify that the language is inconsistent, otherwise we are giving the wrong impression.

If you have a valid problem with using proper attribution in this case, please state it now, otherwise I will be forced to re-enter my additions (and tag the phrase as failed verification and original research if my additions are reverted). --Ludwigs2 17:34, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

I think the other years (besides 2004 and 2006) are a bit of a red herring. They are circumstantial evidence that the misquotation from the 2006 text is a misquotation, nothing more. Since this fact is already obvious in the first place we don't need them. What if we suddenly find the following in introduced species:

In 1983, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave its support to the idea that aliens live among us on Earth. [Footnote to news story about E.T. getting an Oscar]

Do we then add another sentence like the following?

However, in the following years they did no such thing.

Obviously not. The right thing to do is to remove the original misquotation. If it served any useful purpose it should be replaced by something that makes sense. Hans Adler 17:48, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

well, I agree with you, obviously, but that implies we have the conditions for reasoned discussion. Since reasoned discussion is currently impossible - i.e., proponents are going to continue battling for the inclusion of this misrepresentation regardless of what gets said - the next best thing is to insist on clear, proper and specific attribution. We can't dispose of the misrepresentation that way, but at least we can put it in some kind of proper perspective which minimizes the schlockiness of it. --Ludwigs2 18:02, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

I think you are too pessimistic. We just need to implement the text proposed by Doc James. I wasn't pushing it because I first wanted to know whether DreamGuy's huge revert would stick. Apparently almost nobody cares, and so it does. Let's just propose the Doc James text formally. Hans Adler 18:06, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

lol - you're probably right. ok, I'm fine with Doc James' wording. what's the best approach for implementing it?

Useful cat

There is harm in removing the cat. The cat is a guide for the readers. QuackGuru (talk) 20:12, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

I clicked on your link because I expected that it would take me to a place where someone explains how categorising this article under Category:Pseudoscience can be useful to the reader. That is not the case. So please explain why you took part in the edit war. Hans Adler 20:26, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

I'm also confused about how a category that doesn't apply is useful to any reader. please explain that as well. --Ludwigs2 20:30, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

This cat does apply to this article. The belief in ghosts is pseudoscience. It is the case that a cat can be useful for the reader. A reader might want to read other similar subjects. That is why there are cats in most articles on Wikipedia. QuackGuru (talk) 20:34, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

The belief in ghosts is no more a pseudoscience than the belief in trolls or unicorns. Some people have built a pseudoscience around ghosts, but they don't dominate the topic. Using categories to label an article disparagingly is not acceptable anyway. Hans Adler 20:44, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

A cat is not used to label an article disparagingly. I previously explained the purpose for the cat and how it is helpful for the reader. QuackGuru (talk) 20:51, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

I clicked on your link because I expected that it would take me to a place where someone explains how categorising this article under Category:Pseudoscience can be useful to the reader. That is not the case. So please explain why you took part in the edit war. Hans Adler 20:26, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

This article is categorised in Category:Ghosts, which itself is in Category:Paranormal, which is in Category:Pseudoscience. Given the general context of some editors here trying to turn this article about a basic topic that has/had some prominence in all known human cultures throughout the ages, has been extremely influential on the arts, etc. into an article that talks almost exclusively about hocus pocus such as spiritism and "ghost hunting", this seems to fit the general pattern.

I note that several other editors have also added the same category without any convincing explanation today:

• [4] BullRangifer (talk · contribs · logs · block log) "per Psi ArbCom and NPOV guideline 2"
• [5] Guyonthesubway (talk · contribs · logs · block log) "Undid revision 350182503 by Hans Adler (talk) Easy to understand... if hunting them is pseuodscience, so is defining them."
• [6] Verbal (talk · contribs · logs · block log) "Undid revision 350234607 by Hans Adler (talk) until the category system is fixed, no harm in making it explicit"
• [7] QuackGuru (talk · contribs · logs · block log) "The cat is to help readers."

The revert by Verbal was probably the most frivolous. When you push a borderline appropriate category into an article, one that is already implied through the category tree, and you do it after it has twice been removed on the same day, then "no harm in making it explicit" is just about the most inane justification I can imagine.

This is transparent category pushing by a tag team that apparently tries to extend the scope of the Arbcom decision on pseudoscience to this entire article, rather than just to the small fractions to which it rightfully applies.

As a result of this ruthless warring, the article is now protected (on the wrong version, obviously), making it harder than necessary to replace BullRangifer's misleading NSF quotation by a sane consensus version. Hans Adler 20:44, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

And furthermore, that quotation is US-centric and we should adopt a global point of view as well as a historical one. In any case, we should not allow a pseudoscientific viewpoint of our folklore and tradition to develop per WP:NPOV. Cenarium (talk) 14:28, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

KFC

I am going to launch one. First time I have done it, so bear with me if I screw up. Aymatth2 (talk) 20:48, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

Is this a pseudoscience topic?

1. Should this article should be categorized as a pseudo-science topic?
{{collapse top|original second question}}2. How much emphasis should be given to the spiritualist / skeptic debate as opposed to other aspects of the subject? <small>collapsed because mixing two questions in one RfC can confuse results, and there is no pollable answer to this second question. --Abd (talk) 03:23, 17 March 2010 (UTC) </small>

I concur with the above comment by Adb, so am withdrawing the request for comment on the second question. Aymatth2 (talk) 12:59, 17 March 2010 (UTC) {{collapse bottom}} Aymatth2 (talk) 20:58, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

{{collapse}} hid everything beneath it at wp:Requests for comment/Religion and philosophy. As User:Abd might be taking a break, I've gone ahead and "fixed" it.—Machine Elf 1735 (talk) 14:50, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

• This article is obviously not primarily a fringe article. Ghosts (not necessarily belief in ghosts) are part of mainstream culture, have been so since practically forever, and that in practically all cultures throughout the world. There is some fringe going on around ghosts, probably most of it pseudoscience (some of it is religious fringe). I am a strong supporter of WP:UNDUE and WP:ONEWAY. There is some ghost-related fringe that is sufficiently notable to be mentioned here, but I reject all attempts by the pseudoscience group (BullRangifer, Verbal, QuackGuru and some others) to make the fringe aspects take over this article. I also reject the categorisation of this article as pseudoscience. Via Category:Ghosts it is already categorised in Category:Paranormal. Most of paranormal stuff is pseudoscience, which is why the paranormal category is a subcategory of Category:Pseudoscience. Therefore this article is already in a sub-subcategory of the pseudoscience category. Given how marginal the pseudoscience aspects are in relation to the entire vast topic of ghosts (for most of history and in most cultures there is simply no relation), this is just the right level of indirection. Hans Adler 21:46, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

1. Hans, I agree with most of what you've said in this volumous debate, but I don't agree that most of the "paranormal" is "pseudoscience" unless you define it that way. Any physical manifestation of spiritual power or godly power, including all miracles (all the miracles in the bible, for example, and all the miracles associated with saints in the Roman church) are "paranormal" by definition. But none are testable, none claim to be scientific, and the idea that they are thereby "false-science" (pseudoscience) is just wrong. Read the wiki on science for the best definition of what things are claimed to be sciences (meaning natural sciences in this context), but are not. The power of prayer is not inherently scientifically testable (though some have attempted it) because there's no guarantee that God Almighty will cooperate. Basically it's the same with ghosts (they don't have to cooperate). The fact that they are claimed to affect the physical world is therefore not inherently a "scientific claim" unless they are claimed to effect the physically world reproducably, which I don't think is claimed by anyone! If not, they become like miracles and prayer. Sometimes you see them, othertimes not. But seeing them is not claimed by anyone to be gotten down to a "science." SBHarris 23:21, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

Well, I am far from an expert on paranormal (as I mentioned above I didn't even know that's a noun), so I would be prepared to believe you. But it seems to me that quite a lot, quite possibly most, of the stuff in Category:Paranormal is in fact pseudoscience. Of course this may be due to accidents in our coverage or in the category structure. In any case this doesn't seem to affect my argument. Hans Adler 23:38, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

In that case, I'm not sure what your argument is. The words "paranormal" and "supernatural" are not used rigorously and perfectly (however much WP wants them to be), but the usual sense of them is that the supernatural is stuff that goes beyond physics: god, religous miracles/effects of prayer, spirits, and ghosts. It's not testable with scientific methods, sort of by definition, because these methods are based on physics, and also the supernatural entities are presumed to have the power to appear/work, or not (both of these fouling up reproducibility). In this sense, "ghost" on Wikipedia should be part of the supernatural.

As for paranormal, it basically has to do with the unexpected, but it's sometimes used to include all the supernatural, and sometimes reserved for all the unexpected BUT the supernatural. Poor definition! And not easily fixed! In the latter sense of "paranormal" we get all the scientifically-possible and physical, but not supernatural, stuff-- like aliens in saucers, ESP, Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. Most of this has problems with reproducibility also, since you can't just see Bigfoot or Gray Aliens, on demand.

However, beware of trying to use Wikipedia to define the English language (look at the article on matter and its TALK page, if you think you use Wikipedia this way). Beware of even using categories if you can't define the dang word!

Anyway, regardless of which of the possible definitions of paranormal you use, almost NONE of it is "pseudoscience." We reserve that to a small group of things that the proponents claim will work reliably (if it's not reproducible, it's not science), but which on testing, we find do not work (ala the James Randi tests). Like some claims of dowsing, homeopathy, and acupuncture. I don't even think astrology makes hard and fast and testable claims-- it's too wishy-washy. SBHarris 01:05, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Actually, there was a scientific test of astrology back in the 1980s. They got astrologers recommended by the American Astrological Association (or whatever) & agreed the arrangements with them. The whole thing was supervised by someone both sides trusted. The procedure was that the astrologers would be given a horoscope & 3 personality profiles, or vice versa. 1 was the correct one, the other 2 random. The astrologers predicted, modestly, that they'd identify the correct 1 about 1/2 the time. The scientists of course predicted 1/3. They actually got a little over 1/3, not statistically significant. This was reported in Nature, or Scientific American, I think. Peter jackson (talk) 10:40, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Request from nominator I strongly suggest to all who have been involved in debates on this page (I am included) to take a break, maybe take this page off their watchlist for a week, refrain from comment, and quietly learn what the broader community has to say on the issue. I should have put this request in before I launched the RFC. It is my first - a learning process. Let's get fresh views rather than rehash the stale arguments. Aymatth2 (talk) 23:54, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

• Comment Bad idea to present two questions in one RfC. Suggest withdrawing the second question, people aren't responding to it anyway, and it's not designed to get a crisp answer. In fact, since it hasn't seen clear response, I'm going to collapse it with this edit. Aymatth2 is welcome to revert me, but if people start commenting on it, it can't then be deleted. As to arguments that have been presented before, arguments relevant to an RfC should be presented at the top of the RfC, or in it, as soon as possible, so that editors commenting are adequately informed as to the nature of the issue. At this point, the Not Pseudoscience side may have been adequately presented (if not, someone should add more), the Pseudoscience side hasn't shown up yet. They should not be discouraged from briefly making the case here. What's a problem is arguing back and forth, over and over. Thanks for starting the RfC. --Abd (talk) 03:23, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Thanks Abd. Agreed. Aymatth2 (talk) 12:59, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Comments

• Not Pseudoscience. The topic of this article is not pseudoscience, as clearly defined in the pseudoscience article, the ArbComm finding, and the NSF reference. The NSF, interested in the prevalence of superstition and other nonscientific belief, in 2006 listed belief in ghosts as a "pseudoscientific belief," that was dicta; a single document cannot revise the English language, in particular when it defines the word itself in the standard way, which does not cover mere superstition or nonscientific belief! The NSF report neither intended nor took any pains to discover the consensus of scientists about pseudoscience and ghosts, it did not report on that; the survey was about public belief. By the loosest standard defined by ArbComm, allowing the use of the pseudoscience category, only a, strong, reliably reported consensus of scientists that "Ghosts" were "pseudoscience," i.e., non-science pretending to be science, as described in the definitions, would allow use. In spite of claims, the 2006 NSF report is a primary source on the "pseudoscience" issue, at most; and as to the Gallup poll, commissioned by the NSF, it's not independent, so the NSF report remains technically primary. I have, however, no objection to the use of noncontroversial statistics from the poll, primary sources may be used with caution. --Abd (talk) 00:08, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
• Not usually pseudoscience I think the general topic of ghosts is not pseudoscientific. It doesn't purport to rely on scientific principles; it doesn't use scientific topics in a non-standard way to explain things. It's the same reason the Bible isn't pseudoscience, since it's not relying on a claimed scientific foundation. However, I think that certain subtopics related to ghosts are pseudoscience... specifically "ghost hunter" type stuff where people go around with gaussmeters and laser thermometers and purport to produce empirical evidence of ghost presence. Gigs (talk) 03:57, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
  • I was asked to comment by Aymatth2. I agree with Gigs: I think the topics is so far removed from science that it cannot be labeled pseudoscience. It's mysticism/religion/superstition or some such thing, none of which have any relation to science at all. Pseudoscience refers to things that pretend to be science. Some aspects of psychic research involving ghosts can conceivably be pseudoscience, like an attempt to design an experiment to prove them real, but that's not usually the way the subject is discussed. DGG ( talk ) 04:16, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
• Mostly not pseudoscience - my views would align with Gigs and DGG. I did edit this page a bit before but have ducked for cover with the torrent of words preceding this. Casliber (talk · contribs) 04:56, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
• Not Pseudoscience. While ghost "hunting", etc., might be pseudoscience, ghosts are not. The label better applies to that article, not to this one. This is folklore. Today is St. Patrick's Day, so I wonder when the Leprechaun article will be labelled as pseudoscience. Eastcote (talk) 11:43, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
• The RfC above addressed this issue, we should follow the WP:RS. Verbal chat 12:24, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
• Not Pseudoscience. I remember dipping my toe in this article a few years back. The article itself is much better now, but I'm amazed to see that this debate is still going on! I think it's a mistake to see Wikipedia as a project to determine which things "really exist in the real world" by categorising them into things we have scientific evidence for and things which either don't claim to really exist or that make claims which have been described as "pseudoscience". It's just not an appropriate medium (haha). I don't personally believe in ghosts, but neither do I think that the history of how people have tried to study them somehow stains them with this "pseudoscience" label. The methods of investigating something should not be confused with the thing itself. Applying this label would also distract from the way in which ghosts most certainly DO exist, as an idea with a rich history in many cultures. RadioElectric (talk) 12:38, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
• Leaning towards Pseudoscience  : The article is full of references to 'Ghost Huntling' like tools. How is ritual binding, reburial, and the Spiritualist movement any different, except with the tools of the period? All are attemtpts to reconcile the mystical with physical tools. Is a seance really any different than EVP? Guyonthesubway (talk) 15:01, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
  • "The article is full of" such references? Really? I can see such references only in the following two sections: "Spiritualist movement" and "Scientific skepticism". That's precisely where they belong. The rest seems to be perfectly fine in this respect. The two pseudoscience sections (4 and 2 paragraphs, respectively) are a bit too long in comparison to the rest of the article, but that doesn't mean the entire article is contaminated with the topic. Hans Adler 16:40, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
• Depends - If the main article is refactored along the lines of Ghost (belief) then pseudoscience doesn't apply. But if it broadly includes concepts such as Ghost train (spiritual entity) ("recorded events of ghost trains appearing in places where no tracks ever existed") and Spirit photography ("attempts to record images of ghosts") then pseudoscience certainly applies. - LuckyLouie (talk) 15:15, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
• As somebody pointed out, the article is ultimately in a subcategory of the pseudoscience category, so adding the pseudoscience category itself would be superfluous. On the broader issue, I've already expressed the opinion that a broad interpretation of the term "pseudoscience" is less artificial and creates fewer problems, but I can live with a more parsimonious interpretation. --TS 19:33, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

• Do not put in Category:Pseudoscience, and remove the giant box about it from the talk page. First, the subject matter of this article has little to do with science. Attempts to use supposedly scientific tools to address the subject (such as modern Ghost hunting) could be accurately described as pseudoscience, but this article is overwhelmingly about the history and varieties of folk belief. Pre-scientific beliefs of the ancients are not "pseudoscience" and it is an abuse of language to call them such. Second, the category system has a hierarchy. To the extent that ghosts are related to pseudoscience, it is as an example of paranormal phenomena, for which there is a distinct sub-category. We don't shove individual articles into a parent category when they belong in a sub-category instead. Finally, a footnote in a single report from a single body (however respected) is not the source of "scientific consensus", especially when the focus of the report was not defining what is or is not pseudoscience. The NSF was reporting on social trends related to science, and the report should be used for that information, not for classifications so incidental that they weren't even in the main text. Discussion of belief in ghosts being considered pseudoscientific belongs in the article, but with sources that discuss that more explicitly, not just one seemingly chosen for the prestige of the publisher rather than for substantial relevance. Note that ArbCom did not cite the NSF article, but the box placed above earlier this month (long after the ArbCom ruling, and not by anyone associated with ArbCom) makes it sound like ArbCom has endorsed the particular designation of topics from that article. (The unmodified version of the box can be viewed at Talk:Pseudoscience.) It is inappropriate to put up a non-standard talk page notice in an attempt to sway a content dispute. (Side note: The recent addition of the category to Witchcraft should also be removed. It is even more ridiculous there than it is here.) --RL0919 (talk) 21:16, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

• • It will still be in the PS category even if the PS category tag isn't on the page. The box isn't about the category, but about covering pseudoscience, and this article covers pseudoscience in relation to Ghosts quite clearly. Verbal chat 22:08, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

• Not Pseudoscience By all means, there is plenty of scope for articles which relate to ghosts which would fall under pseudoscience, such as ghost hunting. Pseudoscience has a particular meaning which we should not maintain an understanding of which departs from establishedusage. Unomi (talk) 01:27, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

• Mostly not pseudoscience the "spiritualism" and "scientific skepticism" sections deal with pseudoscience-related aspects of the subject. The rest is spiritual or superstitious, mythological, literary, etc. The stuff about the NSF study could be moved to the scientific skepticism section. I find Kim D. Petersen's conclusion that the "religious" argument "fails, since there is a claim of interaction between the physical and spiritual world" unpersuasive. The assertion that Jesus walked on water also describes such an interaction, but IMO most people would nonetheless consider such a belief to be religious. 66.127.52.47 (talk) 01:35, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

• some parts of it, specifically Ghost#Scientific_skepticism and Ghost#Spiritualist_movement. I'll support Hans in that the arbitration case does not cover the whole article, just the parts that deal with actual pseudoscience (and, of course, any edits that deal with pseudoscientific stuff anywhere in the article). Come on, this is common sense. --Enric Naval (talk) 01:16, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Enric, the question is whether or not the entire article should be categorized as pseudo-science. We can't categorize just the bit that deal with a few hundred ghost-hunting cranks and skeptics, but have to categorize the whole article, which could be a bit insulting to the 1.5 billion or so Hindus and Buddhists who believe in ghosts as a basic part of their religion (admittedly their views at present get less coverage than the cranks and skeptics). What is your recommendation? Aymatth2 (talk) 01:48, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Here is what I suggest, we spin off the pseudoscience bits into child articles. This would ensure there is a more clearcut demarcation. Unomi (talk) 04:01, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

If any of them don't define ghosts as the disembodied spirits or souls of the dead, they should be exempted from the category. (Casper the Ghost, little children at Halloween, etc.) Others which use the regular definition of ghost deserve the categorization per NPOV Guideline 2 and NSF. It is those aspects that are classed as "pseudoscientific beliefs" by NSF. -- Brangifer (talk) 04:32, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

BR, the stuff about disembodied spirits of the dead is not pseudoscience either, when it's presented as a supernatural phenomenon and not a scientific one. My grandmother believed in ghosts because (she told me) she had personally seen one, of my deceased grandfather, sometime after he died. She was not a scientific person, she didn't care at all about science or whether her "ghost" had a scientific explanation, she was somewhat religious, and it's just ordinary common sense to understand her "ghost" belief as having been spiritual and/or religious rather than as pseudoscientific. That is the type of ghost most of the article is about. I wish you would stop overreaching with your push poll about the NSF study. The NSF calls something pseudoscience to distinguish it from science when it claims to be science. It doesn't attempt to distinguish pseudoscience from something that makes no claim at all to being scientific.

Unomi, I think completely splitting out the pseudoscience bits into a separate article isn't going to work--a top-level article has to address all the relevant aspects. However, the pseudoscience stuff is possibly overrepresented in the current version and could be scaled back a bit. 66.127.52.47 (talk) 07:02, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Note that the NSF statement doesn't claim that ghosts (or any of the other in the list of ten) are pseudoscience. I don't know why people keep getting confused over this. Everything gets twisted into a discussion of pseudo-science, when the NSF statement under discussion is about "pseudoscientific beliefs", not about pseudo-science. Of course they're related, but when we use a source, we must not misquote it. The NSF was concerned about how people come to hold pseudoscientific beliefs and described why. Then they listed ten examples of pseudoscientific beliefs, not ten items that are "obvious pseudoscience", to use the NPOV and ArbCom wording in Guideline 1. I even have a thread on my talk page where you are welcome to come and discuss this in a casual and friendly manner. There I have described in detail my understanding of this matter. In fact, it's entirely possible to hold a pseudoscientific belief in something that isn't strictly a pseudoscience. Now doesn't that make you curious? BTW, please sign in. Using an IP in this manner is against policy. It also lessens your credibility. IPs aren't taken seriously here. -- Brangifer (talk) 07:29, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

IPs aren't taken seriously here?! When did that happen? Unomi (talk) 08:17, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Wow. Didn't you lecture me about AGF recently? Something about enforcing it? If you believe this IP has an account and simply doesn't log in for some reason, WP:SPI is the place to go. If you on't have sufficient evidence for that, you are supposed to shut up. Character assassination is not an acceptable alternative. Hans Adler 09:15, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

"Character assassination"??? I only admonished the IP to sign in. I didn't say anything incivil or about the IPs character, and I still replied to the IP's comments. Me thinks you are overreacting. -- Brangifer (talk) 14:36, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

How is an IP user who does not have, and does not want to have, a user name, supposed to sign in? You could have told the IP to create an account, but you simply assumed that the IP already has one. Perhaps you thought the IP is a user who doesn't want to act under their usual name, i.e. basically a sock? In any case that wasn't OK. Hans Adler 18:28, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

BR, belief in ghosts (or in anything else) can only be pseudoscientific if the belief is presented as a scientific belief. It's an overreach when you claim that the NSF "pseudoscience" label applies to any beliefs when they are not presented as scientific, and that's why you're having such disagreements with various other editors. 66.127.52.47 (talk) 08:48, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Mere belief in an idea like time cube or parapsychology cannot be pseudoscience UNLESS you claim it is a science - that's why "pseudoscience" category tags should be removed from ghost hunting, ghost hunters don't claim it is a sceince. Oh wait a minute the tags are removed anyway. Never mind. Thank you!!24.91.158.85 (talk) 14:23, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

66.., that's too simplistic an understanding of my POV on the subject. Go to my talk page where I detail my view. If it's not a falsifiable statement, it doesn't qualify for accusations of pseudoscience, and even if it does, it doesn't necessarily qualify. It is the falsifiability aspect which makes a statement a potentially scientific statement. There isn't any black or white thinking here. -- Brangifer (talk) 14:36, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

In this case I agree with BullRangifer about the result, for a change. (I don't agree with the argument. That doesn't seem to make sense.) There is no one generally accepted definition of pseudoscience, only many reasonable ones, and they are generally up to interpretation. But there seems to be general agreement that ghost hunting is normally practice of pseudoscience. Whether we have sufficiently strong sources for this is another matter. I didn't immediately find something that would have allowed me to put ghost hunting on List of topics characterized as pseudoscience. Hans Adler 14:44, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Guys, it's already on category "Paranormal", which is a subcategory of "Pseudoscience". It's already categorized as pseudoscience. If you don't like that, then make separate articles for Ghost (belief) and Ghost (paranormal). --Enric Naval (talk) 12:24, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

The more I look at the Category:Paranormal the more it seems as though it shouldn't be a child of Category:Pseudoscience. There are a great number of articles that inappropriately become grandchildren of Pseudoscience for that reason. Witness Afterlife, Dragon, Xian_(Taoism), Category:Fictional_ghosts, Category:Ghost films and many many more. Category:Pseudoscience seems to have been neglected badly and lacks proper subcategories which the truly pseudoscientific articles could be attached to, but this overly broad inheritance of Category:Paranormal seems to be in error. Unomi (talk) 12:47, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Category:Fictional_ghosts and Category:Ghost films aren't paranormal subjects. They don't belong in the Psi category. -- Brangifer (talk) 14:36, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

That's normal, we have that with many subcategories and trying to fix is hopeless. It's not really clear what categories are, but they certainly don't define a hierarchical ontology or anything like that. Except for the few categories that are primarily perceived as labelling (e.g. pseudoscience, murderer, terrorist), they are really no more than a navigation tool. E.g. CBM's tools that maintain the mathematics articles rely on categories because the mathematics project traditionally doesn't apply its project banner to unrated articles. This only works because it cuts off subcategories of subcategories etc. at some point and CBM manually excludes certain sub-subcategories that lead very far outside mathematics. Hans Adler 13:12, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Irrelevant and frivolous comment: I wonder what the Dalai Lama would have to say? He is, after all, a leading expert on the subject. I suspect he would just laugh and shake his head, and agree that attempts to use machines to detect ghosts are indeed pseudo-science. Aymatth2 (talk) 14:22, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

We could create Category:Paranormal pseudoscience (subcategory of both Pseudoscience and Paranormal), and remove Paranormal from Pseudoscience. (of course, since the current Ghost article contains both kinds of paranormal, it would be listed at both categories :P ) --Enric Naval (talk) 14:35, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Not Pseudoscience. The arguments posted against the pseudo classification above are coherent, even if they all seem to be rooted in an agnostic perception that while intelligent isnt really up to date with the research conducted in this field.

Approaching this from a scientific perspective, the article would not even be partially pseudo science if it were much more positive about the scientifically demonstrable existence of ghosts or at least ghost like incarnate spirits. Scientists have been able to verify their existence with repeatable experiments. Researchers have consistently found positive results for over a century now. But only in the past decade or so has the methodology been refined to the point where no room is left for sceptics to plausibly argue for non supernatural natural explanations; the triple blind protocol pioneered by Archie Roy is especially impressive in this regard. You can read a summary of the recent quantitative work in the first couple of pages of this paper over at the Windbridge Institute. You're need journal or at least Scopus access to read most of the actual research papers, but you can see at least the abstract of one of the triple blind studies here at ScienceDirect

Im not proposing we distress wiki skeptics by integrating the actual science into the article. The Holy Bible does in several places imply that the sprits mediums contact arent really the souls of dead folk but deceptive entities, possibly fallen angels. But one has to question whether its encyclopaedic to allow a skeptic source to verify the claim in the articles lede that "such efforts are generally held to be pseudoscientific". It would be more NPOV to omit the problem sentence or if we dont mind a litle tautology to qualify it as "...held to be pseudoscientific by skeptics." FeydHuxtable (talk) 15:17, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

• Comment + Oppose: I would like to remind everyone that this question is about categorizing the topic. Categories are not labels we apply to topics because we believe they deserve to be labeled that way. Categories are labels we apply to topics because they are helpful to the reader. Would someone interested in learning about ghosts find it helpful to look at a category page that contains things like magnetic healing bracelets, rife machines and orgone boxes, AIDS denialism, phrenology...? Unlikely. Compare that with Category:Spiritualism, which someone interested in ghosts would find very apros pos. This isn't about labeling the concept of ghosts as pseudoscientific (which is the main purpose of the proponents); this is about creating a proper category structure that readers will find helpful and appropriate. --Ludwigs2 15:41, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

I support Ludwigs2's view. See Creationism, Evolution and Creation–evolution controversy. The first is in religious categories, the second in scientific categories, and the one in between, mentioned by both parents, is under "Creationism", "Evolution and religion" and "Intelligent design controversies". We seem to be missing an article such as Ghost research that discusses the research mentioned by FeydHuxtable and the skeptics view of such research. Maybe if we had that, with a short summary in Ghosts, we could shift the pseudo-science war over to that one, and free up this one for badly needed expansion to cover Ghost concepts in non-western cultures, religions, books, movies etc. Aymatth2 (talk) 15:58, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Good points – from that point of view the pseudo cat would be useful to some if the article ever includes significant coverage of the science, as some do admittedly reject it. But as well stated by others the existing article is much more about the cultural / historical aspect etc. Im not sure whether its worth the possible drama to start the ghost research article however as skeptic wikipedians may object to a fair and neautral presentation of the very strong science in this area. FeydHuxtable (talk) 16:10, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Actually, I was thinking of starting one, checked and found Paranormal#Paranormal research. The content in this article is a fork. Material that is not in Paranormal#Paranormal research should be moved there, and content in this article reduced to a short summary. That fixes the problem, as far as I am concerned. Aymatth2 (talk) 16:24, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

• A technical trick: it is quite easy to automatically include the summary of a sub-article in the main article. That discourages forking. Example from Indian ghost movie:

Indian ghost movies are popular not just in India but in the Middle East, Africa, South East Asia and other parts of the world. Generally the movies are based on the experiences of modern people who are unexpectedly exposed to ghosts. Some Indian ghost movies, such as the comedy horror film Chandramukhi, have been great hits, dubbed into several languages. They usually draw on traditional Indian literature or folklore, but in some cases are remakes of Western movies, such as Anjaane, based on Alejandro Amenábar's ghost story The Others.

Click on "Edit" to see how this is done. Not difficult. Any changes to the intro to the Indian ghost movie essay will be automatically included on the parent pages. With an article like Ghost that seems so controversial and with so much risk of forking, this is a good approach. Fight the wars in the sub-articles, and let the main article automatically reflect the current position on each topic. Aymatth2 (talk) 01:40, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

damn. I have to say, that's super-cool. does the colon restrict the transclusion to the first section or the first paragraph? --Ludwigs2 02:11, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

The sub-article brackets the content that goes in the main article with <onlyinclude> and </onlyinclude> markup. That is, the sub-article says what should be included when it it treated like a template. Check the sub-article source. This approach does not exactly conform to general policy on summary articles, but I think is useful for ones like this that somehow have become controversial. Aymatth2 (talk) 02:41, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

This is in fact a very bad practice, mainly because it gives a misleading impression of what previous versions of the article are saying. Imagine that you transcluded a summary into an article on January 2009, and that summary got completely rewritten a year later (January 2010). People looking at the old version of the article as it looked on January 2009 will see the summary from January 2010, which may completely contradict other parts of the article! This is also true for templates such as infoboxes and navboxes, but this is not so much of a problem. But when people start transcluding actual text, then things rapidly fall apart in terms of being able to trace the history and development of an article (unless you cross-reference with the history of the template, but how do you cross-reference with the history of a summary transcluded from the lead of another article?). Carcharoth (talk) 17:32, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

• Not pseudoscience, and Category:Pseudoscience should be removed. Ghosts (in the sense relevant to this article) are folklore/mythical beings, like witches, gnomes and so on (although they have a more important role in modern culture). There ain't no such thing as a 'pseudoscientific being' per se, as pseudoscientific refers to the claim that a concept is scientific or supported by scientific findings contrary to the scientific consensus. While beings are just beings, in themselves they can't be characterized as pseudoscientific, even though some considerations on them are. It would be unacceptable for us, on the basis that a concept has been studied/analyzed/considered in a pseudoscientific manner, to characterize or even categorize it as such; we should do so only if it has been considered only or most notably and massively in a pseudoscientific context (by extension) - which is clearly not the case for either ghosts, reincarnation, haunted houses or witches. Although I reckon this paper (subject of discord) is a bit misleading in this respect, it restates the definition of pseudoscience as "claims presented so that they appear [to be] scientific even though they lack supporting evidence and plausibility", so it is evidently not directly applicable to beings, a being is not a claim ! and per above, neither by extension. Nonetheless they indeed refer to beliefs in those as pseudoscientific, but it is not clear what they mean by 'pseudoscientific belief'. If they meant by that, belief in pseudoscience, then it would be too much a shortcut especially for ghosts, reincarnation, haunted houses, witches, as they're not purely pseudoscientific concepts and believing in them doesn't imply believing in them as scientifically valid; and indeed that (pseudo)scientific aspect was quasi-irrelevant hundreds of years ago (while not relevant to the paper, it is to us as we must take a historical perspective). So I don't consider the source to be valid for this, as plenty of other sources consider those subjects without any reference to pseudoscience, and don't refer to them or categorize them as such. To put it in another way, pseudo-scientific does not mean extra-scientific. Ghosts, reincarnation, haunted houses, witches, are extra-scientific concepts (in their physical reality), but can't be described as pseudo-scientific on their own. Actually scientific research has been done on those subjects (most obviously historical research, social research, etc), and it's clear the cultural impact is massively more important than any pseudoscientific consideration of them. So those are in no way essentially pseudoscientific concepts; they originated in folklore/tradition from hundreds or thousands of years ago, and science, if existent, was irrelevant to them; pseudoscience developed around them in modern times and are only a small aspect of it. We need to put things into perspective, per our policy of neutral point of view, and it would be incompatible with it to push those subjects as pseudoscientific or the pseudoscientific aspects or them (which appeared very recently on a historical scale and are ridiculously unimportant compared to the cultural significance). As an illustration of why we shouldn't classify 'targets' of pseudoscience as pseudoscience themselves, consider that some people believe that the earth is flat, should we then categorize earth in pseudoscience ? and TVs, because they allow communication with dead people ? Obviously no, and the same goes with respectively, fictional, (genuinely) scientific or cultural concepts (examples in order: Parallel universe (fiction), Wormhole, Will-o'-the-wisp, all subject of pseudoscientific considerations). On the other hand, modern views of telepathy and astrology, channeling, extrasensory perception, clairvoyance and communication with dead, are considered pseudoscientific theories, though they also have a historical and cultural significance that needs to be covered with due weight. Cenarium (talk) 05:06, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

Further comment in the section #Lead, on the question of belief in particular. Cenarium (talk) 20:52, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

• Not Pseudoscience per points made by Cenarium and others above. --EPadmirateur (talk) 16:21, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

• Not pseudoscience. See my post below, which I wrote before I saw this. Beliefs in ghosts and lucky numbers and the power of black cats are superstitions. Nothing to do with science or pseudoscience. Pseudoscience concerns the alleged subversion of scientific method. It's not about fearing seven years bad luck when you break a mirror. SlimVirgin ^{TALK contribs} 11:27, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

• Ugh I didn't even realize that the Pseudoscience wars were still ongoing... everyone who is on the pro or anti pseudoscience crusade should be permanently banned from the project. Dlabtot (talk) 04:59, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
  • BullRangifer moved my response to a new section #Resumption of discussion about NSF and RfC without even the basic decency of leaving a pointer here. Hans Adler 07:46, 7 April 2010 (UTC)
  • In addition, this way of expressing your disapproval of the mere fact that there is a conflict is not acceptable because it is in no way constructive and treats an asymmetric situation as if it were symmetric. A small number of editors are on an obvious crusade to spread the word "pseudoscience" all over Wikipedia, including to articles where it simply doesn't fit. Unfortunately they are being enabled by a large number of editors who don't look at the matters at hand – presumably because they are thinking in terms of a "pro-science, anti-pseudoscience" camp and a "pro-pseudoscience, anti-science" camp and make incorrect assumptions about which is which. Pushing indiscriminate inflammatory terminology for irrational beliefs into an encyclopedia is not pro-science/anti-pseudoscience. It is anti-science, because it denies the basic premise of science to stick to precise language and to give reality precedence over one's own wishes about reality. (Such as: "I want everything I don't like to be called 'pseudoscience' because I am emotionally attached to the term.") It is neither pro- nor anti-pseudoscience. And if you think that trying to contain this nonsense is banworthy, I must ask you to pursue one of the appropriate avenues. Hans Adler 08:02, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

I stand by my comment. Whether you think it is 'not acceptable' is unimportant to me. Dlabtot (talk) 13:35, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

• Not pseudoscience I don't see how this article can be considered pseudoscience when there is little science in it, good or bad. The article stats off by saying 'according to traditional belief' which sets the tone for the rest of the article. It isn't an article about a fringe view of science or a poor scientific method, it's an article about various belief systems, legends and stories. Calling it pseudoscience elevates the discussion beyond it's stature. Weakopedia (talk) 08:41, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

• Not pseudoscience in general (if I shudder in the dark because I think there's a scary monster under the bed, am I being pseudoscientific?). There may be some purported methods of ghost-hunting that could be called pseudoscience if the reliable sources do, but I suppose the question then becomes: who cares? People aren't going to think it's good or bad or true or false because someone somewhere has called it pseudoscience. SlimVirgin ^{talk contribs} 02:18, 14 April 2010 (UTC)