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Meagan Francis Salon Magazine Article

This article by Meagan Francis was introduced as as source by Venado on July 3, here.

I corrected the syntax and used it as a source for another point in the article. Thebee has now dismissed and deleted the source as an "Unreliable, libelous citation". I've since reverted Thebee's edits.

I'm not about to go down the rabbit hole of assigning motives just yet. So I'll start by asking the more moderate editors for their opinion of the Salon article vs. the Atlantic article. - Wikiwag 14:00, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Some of the assertions in this article (e.g., Waldorf/anthroposophy has a "basis in racial and religious discrimination," is inflammatory and certainly not verifiable) make me very uncomfortable. However I do see that efforts were made to provide a balanced view of those who are "pro" and "con". I think this would be an OK reference as an example of parental concerns or criticisms, but I don't think it would not be appropriate to back up anything factual. Henitsirk 15:24, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

The Salon.com article is unreliable and libelous on the points described in detail here. That it was unreliable from the first time it was published is shown by the fact that it had to be corrected/clarified not one but two times after its first publication, partly because it was based on one of the unreliable sources it continues to refer to in the article. The notes describing this are not accessible from the links given at the end of the article, but are found here and here.
It shows the unreliable carelessness of both the author, her unreliable source and Salon.com with regard to parts of what was found and still is found in the article, disqualifying it as source for an encyclopedic article on WE. Thebee 15:59, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
Due to the poorly sourced and inflamatory nature of the article, I would rather we didn't use it at all. I can see Henitsirk's point on using it for parental concerns. When I first read the article, years ago, I thought it was a crap piece that was more about fear, than about explaining concerns. I appreciate the time bee has taken to summarize the problems with the article on his own site, and that he's able to link it here. Makes the talk page actually readable. Thank you. --Rocksanddirt 16:14, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
I have to agree that this is a polemical piece and should not be included. The very fact that it had to have corrections and clarifications of the sort that Thebee has cited shows that the author did not bother too much with checking facts or getting a balanced view. One more point: the correction and clarifications that were posted on Salon.com are no longer available from the article: the statement at the end says This story has been corrected and clarified since it was originally published. but the links no longer work. So the citation presents the article without the correction and clarifications that Salon itself thought were needed. Not a very good reference. --EPadmirateur 16:29, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
The reaction to Meagan Francis' article neatly illustrates the problems that we have being having on this page. We would be hard pushed to find a more reasonable weighing-up of the pros and cons of Waldorf education from a more respected source yet certain individuals get itchy revert fingers, start screaming that it is 'inflammatory' and 'libelous' and encourage more cerebral contributers to just give up. Are we really going to say that Meagan Francis' article must be removed?--Fergie 18:17, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
I do take the point about the unavailability of the correction though- that should really be remedied--Fergie 18:18, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Fergie, I would say that this article might be a "reasonable weighing-up of the pros and cons" of people's opinions of Waldorf education. I agree as I said before that the author did seek out a balance of pro- and anti-Waldorf opinions, but the overall tone of the article is not neutral but negative (maybe inflammatory reveals some of my bias). I still think it would be OK to include as a reference for examples of parental concerns/responses to Waldorf. But the fact that salon.com does not have better editorial control over its articles (e.g., fact-checking something as simple as the date of Steiner's death almost 10 years prior to the rise of the Nazi party) disqualifies this source for me as a factual reference. Henitsirk 18:42, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

In looking, the Salon article is referenced twice, and both times it is a second reference to the statement in the text. (side note: The cerebral editors are the ones who are quick on the revert button. I do not have the tenditious enough nature to be a cerebral person.) --Rocksanddirt 18:52, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

This discussion is unmitigated nonsense. I am sorry I cannot be more polite about this. If we dismiss a source that sometimes later prints corrections or retractions, this has devolved below absurdity. The most respected journalistic sources in the universe print corrections and retractions every day, year in, year out - some serious, some trivial. See last Sunday's New York Times, for instance, for an article specifically on how many mistakes this most renowned newspaper in the world prints - thousands. So I guess the New York Times is out as a source here, folks? Correcting mistakes is basic. As usual, the merry band of Steiner followers here have stood the basic issues regarding knowledge and integrity on their heads. Correcting errors makes a source more legitimate and respected, not less. D'oh!DianaW 20:52, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Thebee wrote: "The Salon.com article is unreliable and libelous on the points described in detail here." Maybe, guys, I could stop howling at the wind about this if some of the rest of you would bother to take him in hand. He gets away with this day after day after day after day and you THANK him. Please take another look! He states, with a straight face, that it is documented that the salon article is unreliable and libelous and he points "here." "Here," is as usual, his own web site. He offers his own web sites day after day after day after day as an authoritative source "documenting" this, that, and the other thing and NO ONE CRIES FOUL. The discussion proceeds as if the man had actually said something cogent and relevant. As if, in fact, it has now been documented that the salon article is unreliable and libelous. What is wrong with this picture?DianaW 20:57, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Your argument regarding respectability, errors and retractions is not relevant in this case. In news articles, written based on a tight time schedule, errors are bound to occur and then be corrected. The article discussed here is not a news article, but a featured article, not written based on such a tight time schedule. It should not contain such elementary errors as it did from the start, and continues to publish. Thebee 21:27, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Trying for some clarity. The Salon article, as originally published had some major factual errors. These errors were pointed out and some sort of correction was posted, however, the article, as currently linked, does not include any of these corrections. In other words, it still contains some major factual errors. Diana, are you saying that this is okay, to link to an article that includes major factual errors? Am I understanding you correctly? Puzzled. MinorityView 21:39, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Response to DianaW's concern of bee putting his point by point discussion of the article on an outside page. I like it. I didn't like the article when I first read it, and am glad that he's gone to the trouble to review it (regardless of my aggrement or not of all his points), and I'm glad that he didn't clutter up this discussion with it. Would you be happy if he'd made the page as a sub of this talk page and linked to it? --Rocksanddirt 22:21, 21 August 2007 (UTC) See this Talk:Waldorf_education/Salon_Article, please delete if it doesn't seem be helping. --Rocksanddirt 22:30, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
Actually, it's WaldorfAnswers that has the copyright to the article you republish, and anyone can read it at its original place of publication. I'd suggest you remove it. As for Diana, she does not like anything I write. Anywhere, I'd presume. Thanks, Thebee 22:44, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
well...I deleted it. --Rocksanddirt 22:51, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
The article was corrected on one obvious point, that the author and editors should have checked before publishing the article. Except for that, Salon/the article continues to publish what it knows not are facts, but just the views of some "critics", as if they are facts, and without making this clear to the readers that the journal know this. Not very good editing policy or sign of seriousness of its editors. They don't care THAT much about if what they publish is true or not. Thebee 22:28, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
To be fair, no magazine actually cares much about facts or truth. They care about advertising and subscriptions. --Rocksanddirt 22:32, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

In or out?

Since the Salon article is only a secondary source for items in the main article can we decide in or out or would we like a bit more discussion?--Rocksanddirt 22:54, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

thebee: "Your argument regarding respectability, errors and retractions is not relevant in this case. In news articles, written based on a tight time schedule, errors are bound to occur and then be corrected. The article discussed here is not a news article, but a featured article, not written based on such a tight time schedule. It should not contain such elementary errors as it did from the start, and continues to publish." You are grasping at straws. Every respectable publication makes gazillions of errors of all types. Every piece is written under tight time pressure. I work in publishing and I assure you there is nothing published on a leisurely schedule,whether it's for-profit or nonprofit, there is no publication where people have all the time in the world to check and re-check facts and fuss over names and dates, the way we would probably all like to if time were no obstacle.

See for instance: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/opinion/12pubed.html?ex=1344571200&en=6ff90a5b75d0cea0&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink This is the New York Times. Should they spell important peoples' names wrong - repeatedly? Of course they shouldn't, but they do. This happens all the time, in every publication, big or small, daily, monthly or whatever. As to the retraction not being readily available later. All kinds of atrociously wrong nonsense is published about Waldorf education and the retractions and corrections are very few. School web sites are full of absurd claims, and that didn't trouble the Waldorf supporters here until the arbitration declared them off limits. That's the breaks. A friend of mine just had an article published in a local publication and was very distressed, furious in fact, to read the print version and find that an editor had inserted some very wrong information. "Fact checkers" insert wrong facts as often as right ones. The publication will print an online correction, but the print version is what it is forever, and now he feels he can't use the piece as a clip, and it's a real shame because it's a great article except for this embarrassing error. This happens. As to the salon article, the obvious solution is not to quote or mention the part where Steiner's dates are incorrectly given and wrongly imply he was writing at the time of Nazi atrocities. I suspect you recall, mr. bee, that at the time this occurred I personally raked John Holland over the coals very thoroughly for this pretty bad mistake. I am not personally in favor of spreading wrong information about Steiner or Waldorf. I also agree the mistake casts a poor light on salon's fact checking.

Does this mean the entire piece is irrelevant or unreliable regarding Waldorf? No, obviously. And that's all there is to this issue. The "spin" as usual is from the Waldorf zealots who will find any excuse to delete or fight about any source that says anything whatsoever unfavorable regarding Waldorf/anthroposophy. These moral arguments are transparent and hypocritical.DianaW 01:21, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

EPAdmirateur: "It's just a badly researched and biased source." If that's your view then I'm sure you'll be promptly removing most of the references, external links and "further sources" on waldorf education that appear in this article, as most if not all of them are full of egregious errors of all types. We'd need only start reading them to pinpoint errors and then you'll be all right with it if I start taking them out? Would you like me to believe all the Waldorf-flattering sources listed in this article are not, um, "biased"?DianaW 01:26, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Au contraire, Wikipedia references need to be neutral, reliable, verifiable, published sources. This excludes Waldorf "puff pieces", Waldorf- or anthroposophical-published sources, and anti-Waldorf polemical sources. Let's please work with sources that are reliable (trustworthy or authoritative in relation to the subject) and neutral (balanced, neither sympathetic nor in opposition to its subject). In my opinion, the Salon article fails in both cases, reliability and neutrality: badly researched and biased. --EPadmirateur 04:21, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Actually this is all really right on topic and relevant here. Steiner's is a system of revealed truths; a complex system of not just beliefs but real-world institutions that are based on the doctrines revealed by a guru. There is not an iota of concern for "fact checking" among anthroposophists in regard to Steiner's many preposterous pronouncements, and very little of what Steiner actually taught could stand up to "fact checking" (by wikipedia's or any other criteria). Concern that articles in the mainstream press on Steiner and his followers' antics are not sufficiently "fact checked" in this context is comical.

Nevertheless, here's a commentary from slate on the Times' story about its own errors:

http://www.slate.com/id/2172283/

A commentator points out (correctly in my view) that "it's more likely that the number of misspelled names the Times corrects—which Hoyt claims hit 269 for the year as of early August—reflects rigor rather than negligence at the paper." Another comment: "Published Corrections Represent Two Percent of Factual Errors in Newspapers." The errors we never learn about are the problematic ones, not the ones we do learn about. And the people who *do* print a lot of retractions and corrections are probably the people to trust - not the people who don't.DianaW 02:01, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Regardless of the editorial process at salon.com (I'm a professional copy editor: it's true that not all errors are caught and fixed prior to publication, especially in a daily newspaper like the NY Times.), the article IMO only serves as a reference for parental concerns or opinions. It does not serve as a reference for anything factual. I'm not prepared to say the article is "biased" simply because it is critical of Waldorf, however I do think it is fairly polemical in some of its statements. And if the corrections are not available in the link, then it should not be used at all.

Diana: I'm really trying hard here not to be biased against sources that are critical of Waldorf. I am trying to apply editorial standards based on the spirit of WP policy/guidelines on secondary sources. If we are saying that Peter Staudenmaier's unpublished dissertation is not an allowable source because it has not been properly vetted by an editorial process typical for secondary sources, then perhaps we should be similarly wary of online publications. Maybe that's my bias against online vs. hardcopy sources, but I'm trying to be appropriately stringent here. Henitsirk 14:40, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

This has probably already driven thebee smack out of his mind, but I was a professional copy editor for years, too, and so let's just hope for the sake of mr bee's sanity that you don't also live anywhere near Philadelphia. I am not sure what you are saying about "Peter Staudenmaier's dissertation" not being allowed here; I don't think he's written a dissertation yet, published or otherwise. There was an attempt to remove his *published* works because they are "polemical" (a concept anthroposophists, in my experience, have considerable difficulty understanding; most seem to have never heard the word before and to conclude it is a simple synonym for "anything Peter Staudenmaier writes" which is also a synonym for "evil"). There is definitely no wikipedia policy against using "online" sources (I mean, come on, surely you know that, and surely if you are a professional copy editor you've had to get past viewing online sources as unacceptable, or else what the heck do you copy edit these days?) I do appreciate, though, that you make a real attempt here to be fair, Henitsirk.DianaW 01:09, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Actually I'm a book editor, so I only use online references for fact-checking, and then only in a casual way. My comment about Staudenmaier's dissertation was based on my memory of a long-ago argument about using him as a reference either here or on the Steiner page, where someone disallowed one of his publications (and I believe it was his dissertation) because it had not been formally published yet and therefore was not subject to editorial control. I would be happy to include any scholarly publications, critical of Waldorf as they may be, if they are reliable. And I'm not saying we can't use online source, I just said perhaps we need to be wary. In many cases like the salon.com "feature" article, it seems there is little difference between them and a blog entry, in terms of fact-checking and editorial oversight. Henitsirk 19:55, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Wikiwag, you are the one who originally inserted the article. What do you think at this point? MinorityView 01:31, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

As argument for the credibility of Salon.com, Diana refers to two articles discussing the very common occurrence of mis-spelling of names, later at times corrected, and errors in large daily newspapers in general. None of the examples is relevant in this case. Salon.com as far as I understand is a monthly publication with a much longer publication cycle, not a daily paper, and the serious errors it published in the first place were not spelling errors, but errors of basic facts, very easy to check on the net in few minutes, and the erroneous description of false statements as statements of facts.

They seem to partly originate from the same source as the errors actually corrected post-publication in the online article. When the main source of the errors has been criticized as being an ignorant poser, he has told that he never has claimed to be anything else. And even if Salon.com at first in the online publication of the article has added link to a "clarification" telling it knows that what are stated as a number of facts in the article are not facts, but just the views of some "critics" of WE, with the "clarification" now not even accessible in the present used version of the article, they have chosen not to correct them in the article, but continues to consciously publish them as statements of facts. That makes the article into an unreliable source as citation in the WP article on WE. A closer look at the clearly inflammatory statements shows that they are also libelous. This makes the article into an unacceptable citation in the WP article, and was the reason I removed it. Thebee 07:38, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

After reading Venado's comment on the length of the reference list, I checked out a few featured articles for comparison: Evolution has 168, Demosthenes has 157, Bahá'í Faith has 77, Søren Kierkegaard has 52, and Swedish Language has 18!. So at 89 references, we're right in the middle ground. Not that I don't think we could still trim things and be vigilant about redundancy, but it's a good comparison I think. Henitsirk 00:22, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I'm not worried about the number only that they are helpful to the article. --Rocksanddirt 00:56, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
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