User talk:Abd/Archive 15

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Barnstar from PHG

		The Barnstar of Integrity
		For your thoughtful and highly sophisticated contributions to Wikipedia. Brillance may not always be acknowledged by all, but who cares? PHG Per Honor et Gloria 05:39, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Well-deserved. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 14:19, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, both of you, your support and encouragement has been appreciated. Your thoughtful criticism, likewise. --Abd (talk) 02:53, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

Enjoy your reprieve :-)

Don't know if you can respond on your talk, but just wanted to wish you well. I very much admire how you handled yourself as this decision came down hard on you. Your dignity stands in stark contrast to the abhorrent behavior of some of the other editors on those pages.

Note also, I do plan to respond to your points further up on this talk page, I just haven't had the energy to tackle it. ATren (talk) 01:04, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

I, too, wish you well, Abd. --Wfaxon (talk) 01:58, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, they haven't shut down talk and I doubt that they will, unless I somehow abuse it. Thanks for your thoughts. I thought of asking for the right to edit my user space (i.e., ban without actual block, which is pretty much what Carcharoth had suggested until a mentor was established), but then asked myself, "Why?"

ATren, be at ease, if you care to respond to anything, you may, but if you want to make sure I see it, please email me. I may not be checking regularly. Email is also welcome, in general. --Abd (talk) 02:50, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

Echoing ATren above, I hope you enjoy your reprieve and sorry to hear about your ban. I have not studied the debacle but I was very taken aback to read of your temporary ban - for 3 months. Given my level of cynicism and lack of trust in the authorities in this project, I am pre-disposed to viewing the arbcom outcome very dubiously -- nonetheless I will abstain from getting involved in casting my opinion on the matter (there's little point any way). Needless to say, from the outset I share others' admiration of your integrity and character. I hope for your own sake that you share your talents more in the real world where they may be better put to use (and appreciated) instead of on this funny playground - it seems like such a waste of your immense energies and talents. Rfwoolf (talk) 22:55, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

MfD nomination of User:Abd/Cabal

User:Abd/Cabal, a page you substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Abd/Cabal and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of User:Abd/Cabal during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. Guy (Help!) 09:09, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

Pants on fire. "Free to edit"? Hello? Did you unblock me? Talk about waste of time.... --Abd (talk) 13:18, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

If you propose changes here, or comments to the MfD, I'm sure someone will decide what to do with your comments. Verbal chat 13:26, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

Talk about waste of time.... Thanks, Verbal, I knew that. The community seems to be doing just fine without me. --Abd (talk) 13:30, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Abd-William M. Connolley

This arbitration case has been closed, and the final decision is available in full at the link above.

As a result of this case:

1. The cold fusion article, and parts of any other articles substantially about cold fusion, are placed under discretionary sanctions.
2. Abd (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) is banned for a period of three months from Wikipedia, and for a period of one year from the cold fusion article. These bans are to run concurrently. Additionally, Abd is prohibited from participating in discussions about disputes in which he is not one of the originating parties, including but not limited to article talk pages, user talk pages, administrator noticeboards, and any formal or informal dispute resolution, however not including votes or comments at polls. Abd is also admonished for edit-warring on Arbitration case pages, engaging in personal attacks, and failing to support allegations of misconduct.
3. William M. Connolley (talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA)'s administrator rights are revoked. He may apply for their reinstatement at any time via Requests for Adminship or appeal to the Committee. William M. Connolley is also admonished for edit warring on Arbitration case pages.
4. Mathsci (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) is reminded not to edit war and to avoid personal attacks.
5. The community is urged to engage in a policy discussion and clarify under what circumstances, if any, an administrator may issue topic or page bans without seeking consensus for them, and how such bans may be appealed. This discussion should come to a consensus within one month of this notice.

On behalf of the Arbitration Committee,

Hersfold ^(t/a/c) 22:58, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your service to the community, Hersfold. --Abd (talk) 02:42, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

I wish to notify you of this request for clarification. 99.27.133.215 (talk) 08:57, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, IP. I don't know who you are, but you cite what was apparently your comment on the Proposed Decision page, and it did raise the question that should have been half of RfAr/Abd and William M. Connolley, the part that didn't involve WMC. Instead, the Committee, without being explicit about what it was doing, accepted, by reference, highly partial evidence purporting to show tendentious editing -- see the finding on my tendentious editing --, which editing was precisely attempting to neutrally enforce RS standards, but gradually, with ample discussion, not abruptly. In doing this ArbComm in effect accepted denial of its affirmed principles at RfAr/Fringe science. While I referred to this at length and in commentary during the case, it seems to have not been noticed. Likewise, before, Pcarbonn was banned for the same effort; in his case, the deciding issue was a claim of external agenda, which was misleading. His attempt to realize that agenda, if it was actually that, was by working for the application of RS standards. Enough for me to say, for now, maybe even too much. Good luck. --Abd (talk) 13:19, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Evidence pages in userspace

You have one or more pages in your userspace that were used as evidence in the Abd-William M. Connolley arbitration case. All 23 of these pages are listed here. I'm proposing to move these pages to subpages of the case pages, and courtesy blank them (as has been done with the other pages in this case). Could you let me know if you object to this? I won't be doing this myself, but I will pass on any replies to whoever does deal with this. Thanks. Carcharoth (talk) 00:49, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

I have no objection to moving them. I consider blanking evidence pages unwise, but that isn't my decision to make. I was concerned to see a highly involved editor editing one of the pages.... but moving them to case subpages makes sense to me, providing that redirects are left in place and any double redirects are fixed, and may in some sense protect them. I'd do it myself if I could.... Thanks for asking. It is probably more reliable to ping me by email, but, you got me. --Abd (talk) 01:35, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

There's at the moment still a redirect in my userspace: User talk:Coppertwig/Connolley Abd involvement, which redirects to User:Abd/Connolley Abd involvement. Actually, if I click "what links here", I see that nothing links to the redirect, and the page history was moved, so I've just put a db-owner tag on it to request deletion.

I also had some material related to the case at User:Coppertwig/Sandbox3, a page I use for various purposes. I've blanked it, but I think I had only used page history links to link to it anyway (from the workshop page), so the material would still be visible through those links. I see the Workshop page has been courtesy-blanked anyway. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 23:03, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

A Gift For You

Thought you might find this useful. Seriously. ATren (talk) 02:00, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

I will treasure it forever and use it often, and always think of you. Thanks.

Please understand that my purposes and motives may be unknown to you, and that I'm not necessarily attached to any particular outcome. I make no assumptions about what is good, in the end, for me, nor for the wiki. Again, thanks, your good will is a treasure. --Abd (talk) 02:43, 20 August 2009 (UTC)
NOW THAT'S FUNNY!
:-)
--NBahn (talk) 05:05, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Abd, what is your motive? Editing restrictions? Wiki-martyrdom? Reasonable people on the arb case talk page are discussing forcibly limiting your text because you have posted 8 times the text of the next highest volume contributor. There is currently a statement in that case that specifically mentions the negative effects of your voluminous posts, and several respected committee members have voted to support that statement. It's reached the point where you are better off saying nothing in your defense, because absolutely cannot edit your thoughts to a reasonable length. So unless a ban is your motive (why?), maybe you should consider spending a little more time editing your thoughts, and if you can't do that, then say nothing at all. This unsolicited free advice brought to you by ATren (talk) 16:52, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Atren, thanks. This is long. It's for you, if you want to read it, or it is for anyone who wants to understand what I've been doing. By the way, I knew and understood your advice, and accepted it as sincere and intended to be helpful. Suppose this case were between two principal parties. How, then, would the balance of text look? Further, to make scurrilous charges can take a few words, to respond to them many; that is the original of the old saying (Lenin?) that if you throw enough mud, some will stick. I've faced with a relatively solid coalistion of editors, that's the whole point of the cabal thing, Without breaking a sweat, they can collectively assert a great deal, to respond to it takes, in turn, a great deal. Had more editors appeared to support me, I'd have remained more absent. For whatever reason, that has not happened; I did not canvass, I did not contact editors whom I knew would be supportive.

(added at the end of writing this before saving). I never know fully what my motive is, I depend on intuition. Perhaps my motive is to discover if I should spend, or waste, more time working on how Wikipedia resolves disputes, how we ensure that articles are truly NPOV, how we efficiently obtain stable text. Our process clearly not working with any tolerable level of efficiency, when controversy comes up, but if the problems are too deeply entrenched, at some point triage suggests working on something else where success is more likely. So my goal: a decision. I do not prejudge what decision is best for me or the wiki, but, I will say this: if I'm topic banned from cold fusion entirely, as distinct from focused restrictions that still allow me to work on it in ways that are minimally disruptive, I will likely conclude that I've been wasting my time, not because cold fusion was my goal here, it wasn't, but because it would be a sign to me of how deeply the problems are rooted. That might change if I can find another leverage point; however that point may be off-wiki. Pcarbonn, when banned, started working elsewhere, and I understand that he's currently working as a researcher in the field. I'm sure he's happier there! Wikipedia can be extraordinarily frustrating when one knows more about a topic than the average editor. I know how to solve the problems, but that takes time and is, long-term, too difficult when the toxicity of the environment becomes too high.

I'm facing a difficult problem. Indeed, I may be better off saying nothing, and that's been true for some time. I can edit my "thoughts" to a reasonable length, but ... it takes a lot of time, and just a bare expression of my thoughts takes more time than I really have. I do understand what happened, what I did wrong, what the community problems are, even how to resolve them. It's very possible that if I had filed the case, maybe put up several principles -- such as the one about consensus and NPOV, which is a fundamental issue never fully faced -- and then went on extended wikibreak, it would have been better.

(But, leaving it at that, WMC's very clear intention to act in ways that violate recusal policy would not have become sufficiently visible; it wasn't my writing that did that, though, it was a single bold action, highly efficient, in fact.)

With time, I could resolve all the problems with my own behavior. Remedies have been proposed that would work. Bainer was the original drafting admin, and, setting aside Carcharoth, who hasn't voted yet and appears to be taking a lot of time with study, bainer was at maybe 90% of what I'd have suggested. But I'm faced with a cabal, and not just any cabal, a Majority POV-pushing cabal. That is what would, from general organizational system theory, expected to be the most powerful, and, for a project aiming for NPOV, the most dangerous, because minority POV-pushing is easily resisted. It could almost be ignored, with only some simple measures, and be practically harmless. It causes a problem only when confronted by a majority POV-pushing faction, as distinct from editors who simply insist on RS standards and neutral presentation of fact.

Almost by definition, an MPOV-pushing cabal will be usually "right," that is the majority point of view is typically close to what a neutral examination would conclude. However, the problem is that MPOV is a POV. It is not NPOV, not without some shift to accommodate and fairly express and incorporate notable dissent. The MPOV cabal I'm facing can appear to be reasonable; I think it's best understood by examining the situation with Cold fusion, but the arguments are general.

Cold fusion was heavily rejected by the "scientific community" in 1989-1990. It came to the point, and there is RS on this, that major journals, which published some of the early research, such as [[Science (journal}|Science]], stopped even considering submitted papers, they would not be submitted to peer review.]] However, unlike the situation with Polywater or N rays, there never was an actual publication that showed the error, the artifact that caused the appearance of a new phenomenon. The sociologist Simon has examined what happened in serious detail, with Undead Science," Rutgers University Press, 2002. It was a battle of science-by-press release, and the nuclear physicists won, and it became extremely difficult to do cold fusion research, and no matter what was done in spite of the obstacles, papers could not get published in the major journals, for years. It was never true that publication stopped, though, it continued, in a few mainstream journals, particularly those concerned with electrochemistry. But the impression, especially among most physicists, was that the whole idea was thoroughly refuted, bogus, bad science, junk science, pathological science, and, even fraud was occasionally charged (but never proven with respect to the basic research, there have been con artists who tried to take advantage of the possibilities).

On the other side, hundreds of millions of dollars were poured into attempts to develop a commercial application, and these projects ended, creating an impression of even deeper bogosity. After all, if hundreds of millions of dollars couldn't show that cold fusion was real, isn't that a kind of proof?

However, the money was not spent on basic science, for the most part. Muon-catalyzed fusion is a low energy nuclear reactions catalyzed by muons. It's accepted, considered proven. But it is not considered commercially viable, because the catalysis isn't efficient enough, and the muons are gradually captured or decay and become incapable of further catalysis. Fleischmann, who was doing basic science -- not an attempt to solve the world's energy problems -- said that it would probably take a Manhattan project-scale effort to develop commercial applications. That has not been done. The Pons-Fleischmann effect is fragile, and still very poorly understood, though it is much better understood than it was in 1989.

Is the anomalous heat effect real or is it experimental artifact? This is the core science question, and the commercial research was aimed at trying to make the effect reliable and scalable, not simply provable. Much smaller research efforts have, indeed, found out how to make it reliable on a very small scale, there is peer-reviewed secondary source now that reports 100% success by 2007, "over the last year," every cell generates excess heat. But that does not at all translate to commercial viability. For example, the simplest technique that is reliable is co-deposition, which immediately creates, in a thin layer, the palladium lattice, loaded to maximum capacity, that is a necessary precondition for the effect to show. This is so simple that it could be mass-produced, and would be cheap, per cell. But useless for energy generation, probably, only useful for demonstrating the effect! It's generally of low interest for commercial application, and is not the technique being pursued by Energetics Techologies in Isreal.

Nobody knows, yet, how to create what Storms calls the Nuclear Active Environment on a scale large enough to be practical for energy generation, stable, able to be maintained, etc. It's also dangerous if scaled up. Fleischmann's early work was with bulk palladium, not the thin rods he later used. At one point, a block of palladium melted down, destroyed the experimental apparatus, melted through the lab bench and into the concrete floor. This kind of "heat after death" phenomenon -- seen, but only rarely, when the electrolysis current is turned off -- is unpredictable, so far, but other experimenters have seen similar things happen. The potential energy release if the unstable nuclear active environment unexpectedly expands more than normal is great. While it probably self-quenches should the palladium melt, that is very, very hot indeed! With a significant weight of palladium, well, if I had a home cold fusion water heater, and it used a certain amount of power for electrolysis, releasing additional energy as heat, more than the electrolysis power (which would also generate heat), and the power failed and it melted down, wouldn't that be a tad inconvenient?

I could go on with details, but the real point is that the excess heat effect was never shown to be artifact. Fleischmann made errors in his work, his report of neutron radiation was artifact, experimental error, never replicated except for a report from Texas A&M, issued by press release, retracted several days later when the detector was found to be malfunctioning. Fleischmann retracted fairly quickly on the neutron findings. Later work shows that whatever reaction is taking place, it does not emit significant neutrons. If fusion is taking place, though, a certain amount of neutrons would be expected from secondary reactions, and that was long reported at very low levels, just above background, in very careful work. It was not until 2008 (conference paper), published 2009 in Naturwissenschaften, that the SPAWAR group reported very strong evidence of energetic neutrons, at about ten times background, consistently. I'd say the report is conclusive, but it's too new to be covered that way, there is only media secondary source, so far.

What is the view of experts on cold fusion today? We don't know, all we know is two things: publication of secondary sources in peer reviewed journals (which has, for a long time, completely favored cold fusion) -- note that there is a kind of expert ratification involved in a peer-review process, peer-review should reject analysis of other work that is improper -- and the result of expert review panels.) "Expert" opinion is not the same as "the opinion of scientists," because most scientists, unless they are following the literature in a specialized field, only know about that field what they learned in school or read in media, and general media do not cover this topic in sufficient detail, the crucial facts one would need to know to come to a revised opinion on cold fusion have never been published in general media, to my knowledge, and much of what is still being published is regurgitation of what was mostly accepted as true almost twenty years ago, for example, claims that "nobody could reproduce Fleischmann's work," which wasn't true even in 1989, and which is preposterous now, there are 153 peer-reviewed paper confirming excess heat alone. That, by the way, is not a proof that it is real, to come to that conclusion one would have to rule out publication bias and other problems.

(There have been major media reports recently providing a clue as to the shift, such as the recent report by CBS Sixty Minutes where CBS retained a skeptical physicist, Robert Duncan (physicist) to evaluate the field; he caused a big flap when he came back with a conclusion that this was real. But that report did not provide sufficient detail to convince a random physicist, because the physicist may easily imagine a dozen apparently cogent reasons to reject the report, and, too often, will not investigate to see if those objections stand. I could list them. I won't.)

There was, in fact, an expert review panel convened in 2004 to re-examine the issue, by the U.S. Department of Energy. To understand the review, the purpose of it must be understood: it was not to determine the basic scientific facts, but rather to determine if funding for the work should be increased. That review panel came to, on its basic charge, "much the same conclusion" as the 1989 panel, which was no increased funding, funding under existing programs, and an encouragement of publication in peer-reviewed journals. However, that fact, reported in the final summary conclusion, has been used to claim that cold fusion was still totally rejected, because that was the general impression from 1989, where it was more true. That's not true if we look at the details.

In 1989, there were only two members of the review panel who were friendly to cold fusion: one of the co-chairs, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, and one unidentified panel member. The rest of the panel followed and agreed with the chair, Huizenga, who became a dedicated opponent of cold fusion, calling it the "scientific fiasco of the twentieth century." (That alone is a clue that our article is impoverished.) The 1989 report conclusion noted that it wasn't categorically rejecting cold fusion, but we have reliable reports that this result came from the threat of the co-chair to resign if that wasn't stated, and, given his prestige, that would have been quite embarrassing. Basically, the panel had an almost-consensus that there was no reason to think there was any new science here, and there was agreement on not increasing funding.

In 2004, however, we have a more thorough, from the horses-mouth, coverage of the panel's work. We have, available, the reports of the 18 individual reviewers, and we have an analysis by the summarizing bureaucrat of these comments, and the overall report was based on a "review document" written by a number of researchers, led by an MIT physicist who was one of the early theoreticians in the field. The panel agreed, and was unanimous, that special funding wasn't needed. But that's not a science issue, that's an allocation of funds issue. What did the experts think about the science, having spent a relatively short period of time reviewing the literature, and having met for a one-day seminar? (The kind of meeting that would be necessary to greatly expand consensus on this, most researchers in the field would agree, would be quite a bit deeper than can be done in one day. To a physicist whose understanding of what is possible and what is not in terms of nuclear reactions, "extraordinary conclusions require extraordinary evidence," But this does give us a snapshot of opinion among those at least reasonably informed as to the more recent work.)

On the crucial experimental issue, claimed anomalous heat, unexplained by known chemical process, the panel was evenly split, half thinking that evidence for this was not conclusive, and half considering that the evidence was convincing. I've pointed out that how you ask a question or frame a fact can be crucial. If the panel were asked the question, for example, "Is the excess heat clearly an experimental artifact," less than half, almost certainly, would say "Yes." If that is not true, then we would have a very deep division between two sets of experts! Otherwise, it's just a question of where one puts the balance point of "conclusive," and that is sensitive to the consequences of such a finding.

Then, it is reported that one-third of the panel considered the evidence for the original of the heat being nuclear as "somewhat convincing." Again, how facts are presented is important. If you think there is no evidence for excess heat, you certainly aren't going to think that evidence for it being nuclear is convincing! So another way to frame this result, same data, would be that "Of those who considered the excess heat to be real, two-thirds considered the original to be nuclear." What did the others think, the one-third that considered it to be real but not nuclear? There are other possibilities. One is that the excess heat is real, but due to an unknown cause. This would be a group that considers the evidence for nuclear origin to be weak. That position has become far less tenable today, but this is an example of where depth of investigation becomes important.

(One non-nuclear explanation has been proposed, hydrino theory, which is definitely fringe at this time, but which also may possibly be resolved over the next year or so, because the company working on it is claiming independent replication of their process, which is not cold fusion. The replication is not entirely independent yet, the whole thing is, in my view, up in the air. Theoretically, impossible. In reality, well, we have no right to claim that we completely understand reality. Things may be possible that we think are impossible. hydrino theory is notable, that's why we have an article on it. I've been accused of promoting fringe ideas because I barely touched that article, and because I added a section to the cold fusion article on hydrino theory as a "proposed explanation." Which it is, we have reliable secondary source on it, and media source covering it. That section was apparently accepted by consensus until it was taken out by WMC in his revert under protection. My POV? I don't really have one yet. Too little data.)

The bottom line: the 2004 panel did not treat cold fusion as fringe science, it treated it, its conclusions show, that the field is emerging science, still very controversial. The smoking gun might be found, some researcher might discover what causes the anomalous observations, explains them using no new physics, and with a non-nuclear explanation. But that work hasn't been done, I've seen no reports at all that reach to this level. Caltech had some cells show excess heat that disappeared when the electrolyte was stirred, so they speculated that this might be the cause of other reports. However, that's been conclusively ruled out by many reports, and some excess heat is reported from experiments where there is no input power and no electrolysis at all, such as the gas-loading work of Arata and others. Further, an artifact like this would not explain the observed nuclear phenomena that are correlated with excess heat, and that's a huge topic.

(The Caltech report, though, together with the erroneous neutron findings by Fleischmann, was conflated into the idea that, when more careful work was done, the effect was reduced or disappeared, still stated in some sources. That was true for the early findings of Caltech and for neutrons, but not for the overall excess heat findings, nor for other radiation findings, most notably findings of ionizing radiation, probably alpha, low-penetrating (i.e., harmless and also more difficult to detect, it doesn't escape the cell to any significant degree, and was only conclusively detected by putting CR-39 radiation detectors inside the cells), and, recently, low but significant levels of energetic neutrons. Solid work, in fact, and increasing accuracy produced increasing certainty.)

Here is the point: there is a pervasive opinion that cold fusion is pseudoscience, error, a field populated by cranks and die-hards. That's a popular opinion. Media sources reflect this to some degree, but there is opposite media source as well. On the other hand, the research literature, which, the first year, ran about 2:1 against cold fusion, ran about 1:1 the next year, and every year after that the balance was toward cold fusion. There have been thousands of papers written on this; publication declined (which is characteristic of pathological science), but has gone on longer than with any clear pathological science. And then publication started to increase again, with the publication being in increasingly mainstream journals. Naturwissenschaften is probably the most reputable journal to have recently published in the field. (Springer's "flagship multidisciplinary journal," impact factor, when I looked, number 50, just behind Scientific American. I have three papers in mind, and I understand from an editor working with peer-review there -- he reports it's the toughest he's seen, the reviewers are highly informed, and ask the important questions -- that there are more in preparation. The American Chemical Society, 2008, published the Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook, a peer-reviewed collection of original papers, except for one conference paper from Fleischmann considered to be of seminal significance, including some on original research, and others as reviews of aspects of the field. And I'm told by one of the editors that another volume is in preparation. The book is published by Oxford University Press.

This is mainstream. Yet the current draft RfAr decision clearly is being driven by arbitrators convinced that a fringe POV is being pushed. It's an error in this case. I've been "pushing" for following our guidelines, and RfAr/Fringe science, and encountering a resistance from the same group of editors who opposed that RfAr's conclusions. They are pushing "majority POV," and using consistent revert warring to do it.

When one has a POV on a topic, or some general impression about it, that the topic is fringe, bogus, rejected pathological science, then, if there is a shift that isn't yet visible to you, and if you don't investigate the sources, moving the article toward NPOV is going to look very much like POV-pushing, and the only way to tell the difference is to seek consensus by carefully investigating the sources and arguments. It cannot be done simply based on first impressions. For ArbComm to conclude that I was POV-pushing, as distinct from NPOV-pushing, i.e., attempting to bring the article into compliance with guidelines, ArbComm must make a content judgment.

I have my POV, but where did it come from? January, I was on the skeptical side! I worked for balance at Global warming, and I remain on the majority side there. I worked for balance in the lead at Cold reading, on an issue which is ultimately a stand on Psychic, and I'm very skeptical of any ordinary understanding of "psychic powers," my opinion being that we simply have a shallow understanding of what is "ordinary," and "cold reading" can be based on depth of perception that is far beyond what most people recognized in their own experience. As an example, there are claims that some people can read subvocalization, where, when people think, their vocal musculature moves in ways below speech, but sometimes readable. This would seem to be "mind-reading," but not really, it would simply be perceptiveness and attentiveness to subtle signs more common than usual. (Milton H. Erickson is reported, one time, to have fooled a psychic by subvocalizing a bogus name of a relative.)

So, basically, a skeptical editor arrived at Cold fusion, read the sources, read sources connected with the sources, bought the books (half skeptical, which includes some very, very useful sources), discussed the topic for six months, established communication with experts off-wiki, and came to the conclusion that the effect is real. No known accepted explanation, but some possible ones. And, believing in our policies regarding reliable source and balance, started to try to improve the article, which was, and remains, a mess, seen from the vantage point of one who has become familiar with the literature (on all sides). To someone with a fixed opinion that cold fusion is pathological science, this is going to look like POV-pushing. But if we follow our processes designed to resolve content issues -- content issues are not resolved at AN/I and even at ArbComm -- we can find NPOV.

My POV, such as it is, was formed by a relatively deep review of the sources.

If I'm topic banned, this represents a major victory for those who do not believe in finding consensus, they believe in simple power: if a majority of editors, supported by some administrators, think that an idea is fringe, well, it's fringe, and get over it. That works for majority rule, that is majority rule, but it will never find stability, and it will be continually faced with interlopers who will see the article as biased, and, even where the article is "true," it can be biased in such a way as to repress notable dissent, to submerge it and make it invisible. In the case of cold fusion, it's remarkable to see the opinions expressed in the RfAr. Raul654 sees the article as being full of pseudoscientific nonsense, and he blames me for it. Yet I have had no power to insist on anything being in the article. I've been outnumbered, and some of the editors on the other side don't go away if I put up walls of text on Talk, they ignore them, and that is quite a proper response!

The idea that experts have been driven away by walls of text on a talk page is preposterous. Expert editors are driven away by being reverted by ignorant editors, and especially when those reversions stand and the expert is banned. And that is the reality of what has happened at Cold fusion. Experts have been banned, those less qualified to understand the field remain and push their own POV. It affects both sides. ScienceApologist is highly skeptical about cold fusion. This is no surprise at all, he appears to be a particle physicist, and cold fusion is largely a turf battle between the electrochemists and the nuclear physicists. If cold fusion is real, a huge number of nuclear physicists might be out of a job! Major programs, involving hundreds of millions of dollars a year, may be cancelled. Cold fusion, if a commercial technique is found, wouldn't need many nuclear physicists, it would need materials scientists, chemists, and the like. Does this affect how a scientist would view things? Maybe, maybe not. We consider that when someone's occupation depends on it, in some way, an editor is COI, but COI should not prevent participation on Talk pages, and, indeed, COI expertise should be highly desirable there. SA was not banned from Talk, but, because of how Wikipedia works, the most efficient way to propose an edit is to make it, not to describe it on talk, often discussion just goes around and around, and telling SA that he should propose spelling corrections on Talk was preposterous, WMC was correct to call that "stupid." Self-reverted edits would work, and are very easy, and it's sad that SA was banned, without better guidance as to how he could remain an active participant, valued for his expertise in physics.

Experts have POVs, typically strong ones. There are, however, with cold fusion, few experts on the topic, i.e., those who know the literature, who think it's a totally bogus field. (I can only think of one, in fact, Dieter Britz, who maintains a database of articles on the topic, a good one, he cooperates extensively with our "banned" Jed Rothwell.) That's natural and could be true even for any fringe science, because mainstream experts may not bother to become familiar with the narrow field. That's why I cite the 2004 DOE review, because, there, we get an impression of what happens when one takes a convened panel of general experts, takes steps to see that they are at least partially informed, and then assesses the resulting opinions. If we exclude anyone who "pushes a POV," we will almost by necessity, exclude experts. Instead, we should channel and use expert opinion, and, with fringe fields, we should make sure that experts from the fringe side are represented in discussion, and that discussion goes deep enough to find expanded consensus. Fringe theorists are quite aware that their theories are fringe, they often put a lot of energy into decrying that.

Jimbo was right: with proper attribution and neutral framing, we can present fringe opinion without losing balance, and fringe editors will sign onto it, the reasonable ones. The process will expose the unreasonable ones; my experience has been that most initially unreasonable people will give up before that point, accept consensus, being content with a reasonable accommodation.

The cabal, characteristically, rejects this, and that is why they rejected my proposed principle re consensus and NPOV. They also reject, and one of the characteristics I used to tag editors as "cabal" was this, RfAr/Fringe science. ArbComm passed that, but, in fact, some arbitrators currently seem to not understand the implications. That is such a serious problem that I may suspend my participation on-wiki entirely, because, until that changes -- I know that a shift had been occurring, but I didn't know how far it had gone, and I still don't know, because of the incompleteness of voting at this point -- I'd be wasting my time here, and I'm dying, I have only so much time left, and much to do.

This post took three hours to write. To edit it down would take another three or more. I have kids to take care of, very little time before I have to take that up again.

Here is what I ask of those who read this far, and who can recognize the problem. Pick it up and use it. Summarize it. Restate what is important about it, leaving out what doesn't seem important to you, and take it to the attention of ArbComm. Cite me as a source, i.e. As I read what was written by Abd at .... but make sure that you are presenting your own understanding, not necessarily mine.

If I'm site banned, it's obvious. But if I'm crudely topic banned, the result may be, at least on the surface, quite similar; this is not a threat, but a psychological assessment. After having worked so hard to understand a topic, buying the books at very high cost, given my subsistence on social security income that is already inadequate for ordinary expenses, after having worked very carefully to implement the decision at RfAr/Fringe science, i.e., fair representation of fringe views according to the balance of reliable sources, and all the other guidelines, having worked so consistently to expand consensus, I am topic banned, I will quite likely give up. Mentorship, fine. I truly can use help, the finding that some editors have a problem with my work or style is undeniable. Some sort of focused restriction that allays fears of endless walls of text, fine, I don't need to do that on-wiki or outside my user space, where it is certainly allowed.

If you think my early retirement would be a loss, tell ArbComm that. If you want me gone, by all means, you can tell them that as well, but I think that this view has already been amply expressed to them. Voting is almost over on some aspects of the case, but not others, and arbitrators can and do sometimes change their votes. --Abd (talk) 20:08, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Warm greetings to you, Abd.

From my perspective, it seems to me that you're running an experiment with the wrong parameters, so that any results won't tell you anything of interest. By analogy with cold fusion: if someone runs a cold fusion experiment using palladium which contains the wrong impurities, doesn't load it with the recommended concentration of deuterium, etc., and doesn't measure any excess heat, then that proves nothing. Similarly, if you edit Wikipedia while continuing to post long messages (etc.) after having been asked not to and you are topic-banned, it doesn't prove that there's anything fundamentally wrong with Wikipedia nor that Wikipedia has a bias against a pro-CF POV. I suggest running the experiment again, if you have time: following accepted standards of behaviour while attempting to make the article NPOV, and seeing what happens in that case. At least, I suggest not claiming unwarranted conclusions if you're topic-banned.

I realize that it's impossible, difficult or unfeasible for you to shorten many of your posts. However, you do have options. People with ADHD can learn new habits (so I've read) provided the behaviours are within what's feasible for the condition. I think you can get in the habit of clicking "preview" instead of "save page", and if you notice your post is long, you can copy-paste it to elsewhere (your userspace perhaps, or off-wiki) and post only a link to it in the discussion forum, as I've done a few times on the workshop page where I said "I've replied here". Other alternatives include posting fewer messages in total, or posting only the first couple of hundred words and perhaps posting another part the next day, or posting it elsewhere with a link, or only posting the rest if asked for it. It would be nice if the software would make things easy, automatically collapsing all long posts or something. See also my essay section Responding to requests.

Whether you're topic-banned yourself or not probably seems a lot more important to you than it does to anyone else, but actually (although I think it would be a great loss for the CF articles, given all the research you've done) I don't think it proves anything in particular about Wikipedia any more than many other decisions to ban or not to ban that occur about other people from time to time. I encourage you not to exaggerate its importance in terms of conclusions about Wikipedia in general.

You're a special person with great talents and I think you can contribute a lot to Wikipedia. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 14:26, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Coppertwig. My position, and it applies to everyone, not just to me, is that long posts, per se, are not offensive. Anyone can (1) not read them, (2) collapse them as distracting to others, (3) fast-archive them, or (4) delete them. Sure, I've gotten a lot of flack for long posts, but .... the judgment that posts are too long largely depends on a number of factors, some of which are quite problematic. I did greatly restrict my post lengths, and used collapse extensively. When editors counted up length, they lumped in collapse with the rest, and I don't know how they treated subpages, I think some counted those as well. The situation as it stands is that a great deal of claim has been made about me that I have not answered, and some arbitrators are making decisions based on an apparent acceptance, in some cases, of false claims.

I have not had a problem with appropriate sanctions based on post length; the most flexible solution was mentorship, yet mentorship was largely rejected based on a belief that mentorship always fails. Coppertwig, you know me. Do you think I would continue to post with excessive length if restricted, and specifically if I had a mentor whose advice I would follow even where I disagreed?

The conclusions I have been reaching -- the book is open because of incomplete voting by arbitrators -- are not based solely on my experience. NYScholar was banned largely because of long Talk posts, and a serious mentorship, voluntarily assumed, wasn't tried. (NYScholar had two previous mentors, one mentorship failed because of serious problems of the mentor, the other, Shell, failed apparently because Shell abandoned NYScholar.

Pcarbonn was banned because of his POV. Because he was happy that he had been able to bring the article into closer compliance with guidelines, and he wrote about that off-wiki, in a very good article in which he explained how Wikipedia works, which was accurate as to what happens when Wikipedia works, he was essentially assassinated by JzG, who framed that article as showing a battlefield approach to Wikipedia, trying to right real-world wrongs, because Pcarbonn had mentioned "media bias."

Media bias existed, and still exists, similar to general editor bias on Wikipedia, particularly among "scientists," but our guidelines for science articles handle that easily, if followed. Pcarbonn, while he may not have been perfect, was generally attempting to "push" for following our own guidelines.

Some arbitrators are finding for POV-pushing on my part, which is dependent on a complex content behavioral judgment re POV vs NPOV. As you know, I was skeptical in January and only developed the opinion that cold fusion was real after deep reading of the sources. I understand thoroughly why people would be skeptical. Media sources are now mixed. However, as you know, there have been editors active with the article, and will continue to be, who have removed reliably sourced material on the argument that it is "fringe," when RfAr/Fringe science requires using RS balance to handle that. The issue of relative reliability (i.e., impact factor and the like), only arises when there is conflict of sources, and there was no conflict of sources involved, unless you think that, for example, a reliable source from 1989 saying there is "no evidence" is considered to contradict later sources which show evidence! If those edits are reviewed by someone not familiar with the field and the arguments, it is very, very easy for it to look like POV-pushing. I did not organize and coherently put up evidence showing this problem, and I did not with many assertions. (I answered them in the Responses part of my evidence, but to prove this with diffs is very difficult if the assertions are vague, and, in fact, I think that there may be some specific assertions, and I may not have responded to all of them. From my point of view, Coppertwig, I was overwhelmed, and much of my excess verbiage represented a true inability to cope with all that was going on.)

It is extremely difficult to respond to dozens of highly critical editors, and remain brief. It can be hard for me, as you know, to do it with one editor! Further, the case raised a whole series of very important issues, and, I'm disappointed to see, the most important have been neglected, misunderstood, or set aside by ArbComm, guaranteeing, I can say, that there will be further disruption that has nothing to do with me. Consensus and NPOV is a crucial issue; it was an unstated assumption behind the early wiki vision, and, because of the difficulties of negotiating consensus on a large scale, the problem was never faced. This was an opportunity to at least begin to address it.

Likewise the problem of cabals was completely misrepresented and understood, except by a few arbitrators -- maybe -- and others who did see at least part of what I've been asserting. The finding is that I did not prove that there was reprehensible collusion. But I did not claim that there was reprehensible collusion, I was completely explicit about that! Therefore turning this into a finding that I made claims attacking editors without evidence is an utter perversion of what happened. I presented evidence re patterns of behavior, focused interest, and I only presented a fraction of what could be presented and, remember, I'm faulted for writing too much. "Cabal" was shorthand, and effective shorthand, for "routine bias," and bias is not an offense, it's natural.

Psychologically, it was impossible for me to handle this in the best way. However, under routine conditions, those deficiencies are remediable, and easily. The edit I made during the case to Talk:Cold fusion, was brief and inoffensive, and the attack on it, and the edit warring to keep it out, should have been a clear sign to ArbComm; it was behavior, during the case, which was just as offensive as mine and WMC's. If Enric Naval had had buttons, he'd have used them, but he used the tool available to him: revert.

Some of the edits I made to the mediation were judged by Cryptic as being too long. He simply removed them, but he allowed refactored comments. Simple, very simple. I never edit warred over the removal of my long comments or collapse of them; rather, I responded with compromise, such as return of a link, collapse, or refactored collapse as was the case with that problem with Hipocrite's massive collapse (utterly inappropriate).

Had cold fusion been under discretionary sanctions in January, I believe that all this would have been easy to handle.

In other words, the original proposals from arbitrators, mentorship as to me, with the mentor having rapid access to ArbComm if needed, and with a non-admin mentor having access to Arbitration Enforcement, with support for blocks in required, plus discretionary sanctions WRT the article, allowing any admin to intervene; i.e., to ban if the admin sees fit, would have resolved every other issue, quickly, or would have forced dispute resolution process.

Given this, if ArbComm site-bans or blocks, it is punitive. The idea that I could continue to "POV-push" with both an active mentor and discretionary sanctions is preposterous, or, more accurately, if I did, I'd be toast immediately. And if ArbComm participates in such, yes, I conclude that the wiki is in very, very serious trouble, as I knew it was more than two years ago. It cannot realize its mission and the forces that prevent it are too entrenched.

Note that if some miracle happens and the remaining arbitrators prevent a majority finding, it would indicate that the sample of the community that ArbComm represents is divided, and that's true even if there is a majority finding with significant dissent. If there is a failing here, it is not actually ArbComm's failing, it is the community's failing, I think you know that this is my position. It's a "sin of omission." By doing nothing, people permit what is in theory consensus process to be corrupted, and FA/DP is designed to address the root of the problem.

It is very significant, Coppertwig, that my proposed principle that consensus was essential to NPOV was so thoroughly trashed. This was a set of editors trashing the basic concept that would allow the project to be actually NPOV instead of merely MPOV. Democracies learned, long ago, to set up deliberative process so that minorities have the ability to convince the majority through careful consideration of evidence and arguments, through resolution of one small issue at a time, until the accumulation resolves larger issues.

The "cabal" is nothing but what I've called in FA/DP theory a "caucus." It is not illegtimate, and it is only a problem when it is not recognized, because a caucus with a large number of members that can rapidly assemble can appear to be "the community." Because of very natural participation bias, in an open process before the community, RfC/JzG showed, I might expect to be opposed by 2:1. But break that down so that the evidence is considered in detail, as happened with RfAr/Abd and JzG, the balance shifts in the other direction.

The antifringe global warming cabal, we might call it, is not the only cabal. There is a bigger one which also causes damage. The administrative cabal. It's well-known. Until we can recognize the damaging effects of natural bias, we cannot develop a stable NPOV wiki, we will, at best, say with flagged revisions, develop a stable, moderately reliable, biased wiki. Cold fusion is the test case, because it is a situation where "majority POV" is skeptical, matching the predominance of media sources twenty years ago, with the media impression continued to the present, though it has now shifted to something in the middle. But the balance of reliable source is in the other direction, and is only resisted by firm MPOV pushing. Take away the MPOV-pushing, and replace it with a majority interested in finding consensus, valuing broadened consensus, there would be no problem: the article would reflect the widespread skepticism, and what we have in reliable source of its origin and basis, and would also reflect the reliably sourced evidence in the other direction. Wikipedia should not make conclusions; the claim that cold fusion is "rejected by mainstream science," or language similar to that, implies a present state when what can be shown, fairly easily, is that there was a strong majority rejection in 1989, but that cold fusion was in the middle, with no consensus for rejection, in 2004, and it is easy to show significant progress in acceptance since then.

You and GoRight attempted to make the case, but the current ArbComm process is still deeply flawed. I've written that is the best we have, and I still think that is true. But sometimes the best is not good enough. Have you seen what I did with the lenr-canr.org link at Martin Fleischmann? It was a lot of work for one bloody link, but it did work, and that kind of process gets easier, and especially it gets easier if the faciliator is not one of the participants. Arbitrators should actively facilitate a case, working to bring out the evidence, first, making sure that evidence is complete before it even allows the community to extract principles and propose findings of fact and remedies. The process is biased toward conclusion-driven presentation of evidence. Yes, individuals have motives, goals, and those should be disclosed, but .... the process should ensure that evidence is solid and uncontested and complete, and filtered for relevance, before starting to draw conclusions. ArbComm should not allow the incompetence of a party to warp its conclusions; if it does, it is simply favoring competence at wikilawyering, political skill, and the presentation of evidence from history, over actual events, motives, and implications.

I'm not abandoning the cause, Coppertwig. I accept the authority of ArbComm, which is restricted on certain ways. I will not challenge ArbComm through any illegitimate means, I will not cause disruption. I will, instead, move on, using whatever resources remain available to me. I'm dedicated to the purpose of Wikipedia, and on-wiki work is only a piece of that. I've neglected other projects in order to work on Wikipedia, I may turn back to them, and that may be more fruitful. I meant what I said. If support for my on-wiki work does not become more visible, it won't take sanctions to get me to leave. I'm becoming averse to even checking my watchlist, holding one's breath in a toxic environment gets old after a while.

As to ADHD and my posts and your suggestions, sure. However I already routinely check preview. Occasionally, I don't. Or I do and I miss something. This is not helpful, Coppertwig. Understand that this post here, I might or might not reread, but more likely I'll read it later or only as someone asks me about it. I don't have the time for more than that, and there isn't sufficient value generated. But my posts on RfAr Talk pages or evidence or proposal pages have been read and reread, boiled down or collapsed in part, already. Even the "response" posts, which were in some cases pretty raw -- with a request for correction!, and nobody ever made such a request -- were read before being saved. I did, last night, finish the Bilby response, you might look at it.

My position has been that anyone could take the ideas in my posts and refactor it and present it as their own, if they agreed with it. If nobody is reading them, well, that says it, I should not waste my time, unless I want to write polemic only, and I don't. It is not my job to tell others what to do, it gets very boring, and that would presume that I know better than they.

Newyorkbrad commented that my writing on Wikipedia Review was clearer, at least in one post. He didn't say what post there, some of them were very long. But one post, to the Scibaby thread, was long and I acknowledged that at the top and invivted anyone who read it and thought that it was worth repeating, to edit it down, and one editor did. It's quite possible that this is what NYB read. In any case, I think it is significant that a post to WR, where I could be much more free to just say what I like, was considered more disclosing, more explanatory. It is a sign that something has gone awry with our process. (In fact, it hasn't "gone awry," it is that our process works with small groups sharing a common goal, and breaks down when the scale is larger and the common goal has become elusive.)

By the way, Fritzpoll seemed to have been offering himself as a mentor. He is not allergic to long text, but he also is (1) a scientist, and (2) an administrator, and (3) not easily categorized as my meat puppet, since he put up quite a bit of negative analysis and comment about my actions. Fritzpoll could be an excellent choice. What I see, instead, is a move toward punishment, toward fixed conclusion that a person's behavior is so heavily disruptive that exclusion or severe restriction is appropriate. And that is self-fulfilling, because with severe restrictions, beyond what are necessary to prevent recurrence of disruption, any sane editor would simply leave, it is, after all, only a wiki. So if the editor stays, it would be a symptom of a kind of insanity, which will break out in other ways. The concept that mentorship must be an imposed thing, that the editor should have no say, is a fundamentally wrong-headed concept, a punitive model, the mentor, for those pushing this, is a probation officer, not a guide and helper.

Look, I've suggested that even with a site ban, if I were (1) allowed to edit my user space freely, within normal restrictions, and (2) required to self-revert elsewhere, but otherwise strictly banned, I could do my work with practically no hindrance, because my work depends on consensus. That's what is so ironic about all this.....

My conclusion: there are powerful forces -- which need not be consciously organized -- which do not want consensus, because, it is believed and unquestioned, editors think that they know better than the great unwashed masses. It is the old fear of ochlocracy, mob rule. But that's a drastic misunderstanding of what I'm trying to do, practically the opposite of it, but the fear is generally not conscious and does not know itself, it manifests in certainty of being right, with no room for negotiation and expansion of agreement, as has been so clearly shown in the RfAr by a certain highly privileged administrator, whose conduct before ArbComm has been so embarrassing that continued tolerance of it, all by itself, forget about me and my case, shows a deep systemic problem that must be addressed before substantial improvement can come about.

Nobody mentioned it, but how did the Wikipedia Review "incivility" come here? It was cherry-picked by this administrator and presented as another piece of mud tossed at me, while, I believe, a neutral review of the thread there, and considering the context of Wikipedia Review, would show much more "personal attack," i.e., attempts to attack the very person, not merely the behavior, than on my part. It was correct to toss this out, but what was remarkable to me was that this charge even made it to the proposed decision page. NYB properly pointed out the limits of consideration of off-wiki behavior. What he may not have noticed was that there were attempts, by the other editor, to "out" me by giving my legal name (though it's not concealed), and my location (lots of IP evidence exists, it's easy to figure out roughly where I live), and by referring to plenty of personal details. But I wasn't complaining about this, and, in fact, it should be up to me to claim harassment, not for someone else to assert it, just as it would have been up to the other editor to make a claim of incivility, an offense that does not exist if the affected editor is not offended (there is, here, an addition question of decorum which does not exist on WR.) -Abd (talk) 16:11, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your response, Abd. RAE. Sorry for unhelpful remarks. I did notice many short, concise messages you posted. Ne swik thu naver nu.[1] 22:43, 23 August 2009 (UTC) By that Middle English exhortation, I mean: I hope you won't retire from Wikipedia if you're topic-banned, but more importantly: I hope you'll continue your good work whether on Wikipedia or elsewhere; may you live forever; and may the ideas you've described in various places on how to find and express the common will continue to inspire people through the centuries to come. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 13:24, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Discussion with MastCell

Could I play devil's advocate here, or at least offer a somewhat different perspective? I'll say upfront that I'm posting here in the interest of continuing an interesting and thought-provoking discussion, and I don't wish to cause distress or inflame the situation. Abd, if you find anything in the post objectionable, please feel free to remove it without further comment, and I won't trouble you on your talk page any further.

• The "cabal" thing. If your goal was to identify and constructively address a natural if counterproductive social phenomenon, then I think you shot yourself in the foot with your choice of words. The connotations of the word "cabal" in general, and on Wikipedia specifically, are clear, and your earlier writings (more so on Wikipedia Review than here) suggest that you are aware of those connotations and perhaps even chose the word advisedly, because of those connotations. Be that as it may, for better or worse, "cabal" is a fightin' word. It produces acrimony, not constructive, rational debate. For the same reasons, I wouldn't label you a "POV-pusher" (though I know others have, repeatedly) - because sticking someone with an inflammatory label is a good way to ensure they won't listen to any valid, rational points you might make later on. I'm not convinced that "cabal" is the only feasible shorthand for the phenomenon you describe - in fact, you yourself produced several better phrasings just in the one post above.
• I know it's hard to resist the urge to respond to every accusation against oneself. I fall victim to this urge myself at times. But particularly at the level of ArbCom, I've found that it's not necessary to rebut unreasonable accusations at length, if at all. Their irrationality and lack of substance is usually self-evident. It's probably worth identifying the concerns (or attacks, if you like) that you think might actually contain a grain of substance - surely we can agree there is at least some grounds for concern that a reasonable editor might have? - and respond to those. This particular ArbCom case, even more than most, has been a contest where "victory" will go to the person who shoots himself in the foot the least. Most of the damage, on all sides, has been self-inflicted. I know it's too late for this particular process, probably, but in general I'd urge you to be selective about responding to criticism or attacks, if possible. It's not easy - I fail all the time - but it's worth it for your own enjoyment if nothing else. It's just not a good use of free time to spend it constantly typing up self-justifications.
• Let's take as given that "MPOV pushing" is a problem. There will always be zealots on both sides of a controversy. The trick is, as always, to appeal to the reasonable middle. There exists on Wikipedia, as in any political environment, a middle ground of reasonable people who will listen to solid, rational argument. They tend to decide most issues of importance on Wikipedia, though this is not always evident. Create an environment that appeals to them - calm, concise, and policy/source-based posts - and you'll convince them. Create (or contribute to) an environment that pits one "side" against another with no breathing room and no middel ground, and they'll probably pick sides. Most often, they'll pick the "majority" side, because if one has to choose, it seems better supported by reliable sources and expert opinion. Right now, cold fusion is in the latter state. It's a battlefield. I don't know whether you consider me among the zealots or the reasonable middle, but I can tell you that as someone without a strong opinion on the subject, and with general scientific literacy but a lack of expertise in physics, you've lost me. Consider distilling your argument down to its essence - specific content points, specific sources, and links between the two - and dropping anything extraneous. I understand that a topic ban looks likely to pass, but consider this general advice which I find useful across the board, and feel free to take it or leave it.

Anyhow, thanks for the thought-provoking post. MastCell ^Talk 18:26, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks from me, MastCell, for an excellent post. I agree with much or all of what you say here and I think you've said it very well and raised some important points I might not have thought of. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 23:23, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

Summary of the comment by Abd which follows; some unchanged passages are in quotation marks.

"Thanks, MastCell. Even though you have sometimes expressed opinions with which I have strongly disagreed, I have also been very aware that you aren't just a knee-jerk "affiliated" editor, you do take neutral positions, or unpredictable ones."

When I said "cabal", I was referring to partiality, not conspiracy. I've been struggling to find the optimal choice of words. The term has been hijacked to include the meaning "conspiracy", which I didn't allege; what I really mean is "a relatively exclusive group which has a power differential, some ability to control." "Cabal" had to be said, and saying it may turn out to be the most useful thing I've done on Wikipedia. Saying some other phrase just wouldn't have had the effect. I'm now calling it a "Cab", which removes the negative part of the meaning that I didn't intend to include.

A Cab is both positive and negative: cooperation among editors is positive, and the only negative part is when we fail to recognize that being in a Cab can make one effectively "involved" in a situation, due to social relationships, just as much as having previously edited an article can do so; it was on that basis that I claim that WMC was "involved" when banning me. "I was simply asking ArbComm to review the issue of WMC's involvement in continuing to assert the ban." But the Cab piled in with complaints against me.

I know how to do efficient dispute resolution. Suppose there's a rough consensus that cold fusion is fringe science only believed by fanatics and nut cases. What can someone who disagrees with this do? Suppose the majority thinks it's a waste of time to discuss it. Someone who raises a point can be shown an in-depth FAQ, maintained by all the editors, (not just by the Cab), which describes the previously-established consensus. A fully-developed FAQ could be much longer than the article, arranged in hypertext, representing strong consensus in WP space developed on a set of associated talk pages. It's a mistake to restrict discussion of the subject as much as we do; such discussion can inform article editing.

Banning editors for prolixity is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I've found that self-reverted edits foster cooperation between the banned editor and the very editors who supported the ban. Self-reverted edits can probably simplify ban enforcement and still allow useful participation.

If we don't respect the opinions and feelings of banned editors, we get Scibabies. Instead, my vision is that such editors would be allowed to participate, but restrained by other editors who also hold the same minority opinions, in whose interests it is to avoid irritating the majority. This arrangement is very important for reducing the battleground aspect.

"I'm quite gratified to see a very good discussion going on at WT:BAN about "proxying" for banned users". There, and on the RfAr, members of the Cab are starting to take differing positions. Minority editors can first come to agreement among themselves, then incorporate middle-ground editors, then Cab outliers, etc.; meanwhile the position is modified to include legitimate parts of the majority position.

I believe I can successfully make the case that cold fusion is not fringe science, but emerging science. The Wikipedian majority POV is equivalent to the old scientific consensus in 1989-90, not to what the 2004 DOE review says about the science as opposed to its conclusions about funding.

In evidence in a point that currently has Arb majority support, Enric Naval stated that I refused to accept consensus that cold fusion is "pathological science"; but he extrapolated from what I said. What we have are sources that might support a statement in the article that the majority of scientists in 1989-90 considered it pathological science; not evidence of a current scientific consensus. This opinion that it's "pathological science" may be strongest among SPOV editors and particle physicists.

People point out that no commercial applications have been developed, but Fleischmann was working on pure science. Quantum mechanics is normally done with two-body problems, which greatly simplifies the math; he was exploring what happens in more complex situations, and was surprised by the results.

When I first started editing, I was only just starting to lose my skeptical opinion, but I saw that the 2004 DOE report was misrepresented and edited in what the report says about the science. I later learned that this same edit had been previously done and was contentious.

I was criticized as a POV-pusher for removing "life science journal" as a qualification for Naturwissenschaften, but later consensus upheld this removal. Abd as summarized by Coppertwig 00:55, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

(unindent) Thanks, MastCell. Even though you have sometimes expressed opinions with which I have strongly disagreed, I have also been very aware that you aren't just a knee-jerk "affiliated" editor, you do take neutral positions, or unpredictable ones. If your intention in posting here is to be inflammatory, well, you have successfully fooled me. Unfortunately, you raise issues on which I have a lot to say, and, practically speaking, there is no way for me to say it without first writing an uncensored response, which I can show to you, thus fulfilling all the wall-o-text claims, or I could wait until I have time to edit it down, in which case you probably would never see a response. It would take time that I don't have and, while, theoretically, I could come back to it later, in practice whatever is in front of my face will take priority, that's ADHD. So I'm putting up the complete response. It's quite long. If Coopertwig has time -- often not -- CT might be able to extract some important points; but this is written as a personal response to you, and you can scan it in far less time that it would take me to edit it down. Feel free to ignore it, and, in fact, if it doesn't interest you, please ignore it, it will only irritate you.

So, to your points:

• You wrote: I'm not convinced that "cabal" is the only feasible shorthand for the phenomenon you describe - in fact, you yourself produced several better phrasings just in the one post above. Yes, I'm aware of the negative connotations of "cabal." I've spent some serious effort trying to come up with a word that has the positive utility of the term, without the unintended connotations. Part of the problem is that the term was hijacked. I don't know much of the history, but it is obvious to me that serious damage has been done by firm definition of the term as "conspiracy." When outsiders see the situation at Wikipedia, they have been known to use the term "cabal." That should be a sign to us that there is the appearance of a cabal. When Jimbo was establishing the administrative community as a privileged group of editors, he called it the "cabal." Sure, it was jocular, but it was also real: it refers to a relatively exclusive group which has a power differential, some ability to control. While there were checks and balances built into the system, it was all done pretty haphazardly, jerry-built, the "house" grew like Topsy. The social formation that I described in the RfAr cabal evidence exists, and if the objection were only to the term, rather than to the assertion of a reality, the social phenomenon, then the response to it was highly dysfunctional. Instead of rejecting the claim as preposterous, why didn't editors read the explicit definition and the caveats I added, and respond to the reality, instead of the straw many of a conspiracy allegation? The current FoF states that I didn't present evidence to show a conspiracy, and that's correct! I didn't present such evidence because I don't believe there is one, to any significant degree. There is a problem, and it takes place and operates openly, but often invisibly; like many things, it's visible only to those who have sufficient information and a lack of strong denial. Open secret.

• It may be that my direct usage of "cabal" turns out to be the most useful thing I've done on Wikipedia, when we look back. It had to be said, and it had to be said directly. I could have written "habitually mutually-confirming and mutually-supporting polarized faction, with sufficient membership and power (tools) to bias decisions contrary to policy" a hundred times with less effect than using the term "cabal." I'm now calling it a Cab. It's a cabal, all right, but with part of the word, and part of the possible meaing, excised. A neologism (horrors!). What's taken out is the secret conspiracy part.

• As you know, AGF is policy, it's been downgraded at times because of the difficulty of enforcement, but that was an error. Failure to assume good faith is probably the number one most common behavioral policy violation; it's quite predictable with on-line communities, because of the impoverishment of bandwidth. In any case, at one point on talk:Proposed decision, my special definition of cabal was noted by an editor, who then claimed that, nevertheless, my intention was to imply a secret conspiracy, that is what, this editor claimed, was my real intention. AGF failure, blatant. Perhaps when I used the word, I meant what I said the word meant?
• Yes, it has a negative connotation, but the negativity is actually over the effect. Cabs are not entirely negative, the positive aspect is simple cooperation, and the negative part is only when we fail to recognize and consider social involvement in addition to special article involvement. When I claimed that WMC was "involved" and therefore should not block or threaten to block me (and an administrative page ban is a threat to block), I wasn't referring to a history of specific article involvement; as far as I knew, he had never edited the article before. I was referring to two things: a history of unresolved conflict between us, ironically, disagreement over recusal policy, and a "general" anti-fringe content position. Because WMC gave no basis for this ban, it was an intuitive action, I'd suspect, his intuition would likely be contaminated by his opinion, previously expressed, that the project would be better off without me, hence the article would be better off without me, and I'm sure it was helped along by the very easy assumption that I was fringe POV-pushing.

• To return to this: I'm not convinced that "cabal" is the only feasible shorthand for the phenomenon you describe. What's needed is awareness of and discussion of and development of community response to the phenomenon. The language used must facilitate that. In the future, when someone cries "cabal," we must be able to reframe this without losing meaning. Reframing as "secret melevolent conspiracy" is a very bad reframe that loses meaning and adds meaning that may not be there. But, remember, to a newcomer or even to some old-timers, what the editor actually experiences and is responding to can appear to be such a conspiracy. A successful reframe will leave in place and foster discussion of the real problem, which is a cab. This is not a problem which is addressible through blame, blocks, and bans for either "cabal membership" or for crying "cabal." It is addressible through dispute resolution process, if that process becomes efficient enough and good enough. What I'd hope for is that when someone cries "cabal," we have a well-understood and honed process for resolving the underlying dispute. And I mean "resolving," not merely "deciding." ArbComm has an unfortunate penchant, sometimes, for becoming a court of judgment, and for making, as part of that, findings of fact that would never survive long on an article page, because of insufficient source and consensus. A finding of fact should be solidly based in evidence, and should be a judgment that will withstand scrutiny. "Preponderance of the evidence" is the standard in civil law, because some decision must be made; basically, majority rule applies. However, a legislature may decide that pi equals 22/7, perhaps for even a good reason. But it still is not a "fact." It's a decision, a "determination." It's very dangerous to consider such a thing closed, but it is also dangerous to consider it open! The resolution of this paradox is really the same resolution as for all "fact" (read "content") decisions: process must be provided to challenge consensus or majority decisions that is non-disruptive. I know very well how to do this, but to explain it will take a lot more words, it's easier to demonstrate it, if I'm allowed. But the summary is in the concept of breaking down community decisions into one-to-one discussions, directly or facilitated (third editor involved whose agenda is agreement between the first two), between willing participants. And I'll try to lay this out.

• Suppose there is some rough consensus (majority POV) that Cold fusion is Fringe science (with a general vague opinion that it's really pathological die-hardism, only believed by fanatics and nut cases, and equivalent to N-rays and Polywater). What can someone who disagrees with this do? It is obvious that editing the article to remove, say, cat:Fringe science, isn't appropriate, not yet. The process would start with discussion on Talk:Cold fusion. And this is what I did. It's one of the claims made against me, and it is cited in the proposed decision with reference to Enric Naval's evidence, as "tendentious editing." However, none of the points I raised on Talk were actually discussed to a consensus; rather, they were, by some editors, accepted, and by others, rejected out of hand. The ones who rejected it out of hand are persistent editors of the article, the ones who accepted it, by and large, if they edit the article, do so with some sense of despair. This is a sign of Majority POV-pushing. But, remember, I believe that the majority does have the right of decision. The majority doesn't want to discuss the issue, to them, it's clear and it's a waste of time to go over and over it. Remember, all of what I'm saying is actually generic, and the majority may be "right." It doesn't matter! ("Right," to me, must be glossed as "what would be consensus if the entire community could become informed on this issue and discuss it until consensus is found." I do not push for positions that I do not beleive would be sustained under those conditions. And I also believe, that while a literal fulfillment of those conditions isn't possible, an equivalent is.)

• So, suppose, I'm allowed to discuss this to my heart's content. If I wax prolix, and it gunks up the Talk page, anyone can object, effectively, by any of various means. If one believes that a discussion is inappropriate, that the matter is closed, it is quite disruptive, in fact, to respond with counterargument, because that merely encourages more response and debate. If a negative response is to be made to an "against consensus" talk comment, it should be on the user's talk page, and should be an explanation, not an argument; ideally, it would point to a FAQ that explains the consensus, and how it was obtained, and what the arguments and positions were, and what editors supported it (and what editors continued to dissent after discussion.) And then the task of an "interloper" would be to identify the exact problem with the FAQ, if there is one, and discussion would be with the FAQ, over it.

• We don't do that very often. There is a global warming FAQ, but it is maintained by the Cab, not by all the editors.

• We need the FAQ for all sides. In the RfAr, there was comment calling Cold fusion "pseudoscience." There is consensus that it is not, but it's not documented to be easily found. A fully developed FAQ will be a deep exploration of the topic, which includes all common assertions about Cold fusion, approaches that a new editor might take, and it would be an excellent resource, in itself, for someone who wants to research the topic more deeply. I call this the "backstory," and it could grow, wherever there is any controversy, to be much larger than the articles involved, and would be organized as hypertext. It should probably be in WP space, not Talk space (because the project pages would represent high consensus, often unanimity, there is therefore needed discussion, which would be on the attached talk page.) Developing the backstory is where, with developed articles and some level of settled consensus, most of new editorial participation might move.

• My long posts considered contentious or circular or whatever would be (1) deleted if truly off-topic or uncivil or clearly disruptive, with possible sanctions for incivility, clear disruption, or repeated and blatantly off-topic); however, when discussion is deleted, and other than unanswered posts by banned editors, there should be a link placed to what was deleted, (2) collapsed, (3) fast-archived, or (4) closed with archive template. In standard deliberative process, there is a motion, "Objection to consideration of the question." Deletion of a comment is such an objection. That motion is subject to summary decision; it's voted on immediately, no debate, for debate would defeat the purpose of the motion. We don't vote, but we can and should understand a revert of talk page discussion as such a motion. What's required, then, is that someone else who does want to discuss the issue "second" the original comment by bringing it back, undeleting, uncollapsing, bringing back from archive, etc. We now have two editors considering the discussion as worthy. Okay, if that is all there is, the discussion really should take place in user space, perhaps, assuming that there are more editors than this who don't want it on the talk page. In making the decision, editors on the "sides" may be identified. There is now a dispute that can be subject to dispute resolution, which doesn't mean some complicated bureaucratic system, rather that a path to resolution can become clear. If the "sides" are polarized, i.e., they don't really talk to each other well and one side doesn't want to discuss it (that's almost always the "majority" side), neutral editors can be brought in. If the minority can't identify such neutral editors, either directly or by solicitation at a wikiproject or the like, the minority cause is probably either lost or premature.

• It's essential that I be able to make my case on the article Talk page. It is not essential that this "brief" (hah!) stay there as anything more than a subject header and a note as to where it or the discussion can be found.

• The article talk template that prohibits discussion of the topic is probably a bad idea, or at least one that is overapplied. The issue is the ultimate purpose of the discussion, if it is background for editing the article, it may belong, or it may be appropriate for user space or a subpage, linked from article talk. I would hope that Wikipedia editors who edit articles on a topic would want to become informed about it, so, as an example, a notice that a documentary is about to appear on CBS Sixty minutes on Cold fusion (this happened in March, and then discussion of the documentary and what was found in reliable source about it ensued), is quite appropriate, because it will possibly -- or should, possibly -- inform the editing of the article.

• I believe that I can make the case, successfully given the opportunity, that Cold fusion is no longer fringe science, but has moved up to "emerging science," it's actually not difficult, if editors will read the 2004 DoE panel report and the 18 individual reviewer comments (which are available on the web). The treatment is clearly that of an emerging science, still controversial, but without any rejecting consensus, but evenly split on the original discovery (half:real, half:not proven) and a two-thirds majority that considers nuclear origin not yet proven. But unanimous opinion is that more research, consideration of funding for specific projects, and consideration of the results for peer-reviewed publication, was needed, which would not be the case with true rejected fringe (according to the summary, from the individual reviewer reports, I read one of the eighteen reviews that matches what most of our editors seem to consider the scientific consensus: rejected properly in 1989, what is this nonsense? In other words, it seems that a majority of our active editors are holding on to a broad scientific consensus from 1989-1990 that obviously no longer exists among experts.) Now, when I've said this on Talk, I've been dinged for Original Research. Yup. Guilty. But we can present original research on a talk page, where the results and reasoning are clear and verifiable. I wasn't claiming we should put in the article, "The 2004 DoE panel concluded Cold fusion is real science, not fringe." We'd need a secondary source for that! I'm not aware of one.

• All this affects, though, how we present the 2004 review. And this has been the subject of much discussion, the majority view being that we should emphasize, in the lede, that the 2004 conclusions were "much the same as with the 1989 panel." We have an actual quote from the report summary to that effect.

• In context, though, this conveys a very misleading impression. The 1989 panel was highly negative. The report didn't give "votes" but we do have lots of reliable source on it, and it appears that only one panel member, plus the Nobel Prize-winning co-chair, were favorable to cold fusion. It was close to a consensus that the whole field was bogus, a mistake, poor experimentation, but, nevertheless, due to the threat of the supporting chair to noisily resign, the report language recommended almost *exactly the same* as the 2004 report: further research needed, narrow funding. When the 2004 report concludes "much the same," it must be referring to the actual funding and research recommendation. Because the content of the reviews is radically different, we can see, in the strong divergence of opinion from the reviewers, that there is a live scientific debate going on among the experts.

• What I "pushed" for at one point (not with edit warring) was that the lede report a little more about the 2004 DoE report, without synthesis, to avoid setting up what is easily seen, given the massive rejection of cold fusion in 1989-1990, much of which was based on that report, as a confirmation by the 2004 panel of this rejection.

• As to selectivity of response. I hope you never have to face a significant cab, MastCell. In RfAr/Abd and JzG, I wasn't personally "on trial," and I did, in fact, sit back for the most part, since the evidence was so clear and the case was so simple. I tried to do that with this case; I was not asking for a review of the ban, i.e., for ArbComm to lift the ban, because I firmly believed that the ban had expired (and I had accepted it precisely to get that expiration date, as well as to avoid unnecessary disruption). I was simply asking ArbComm to review the issue of WMC's involvement in continuing to assert the ban. For that purpose, it was not necessary to adjudicate a claim that I should be banned, for I could easily be worthy of ban and still WMC would have made the situation worse by doing it personally instead of doing what most admins would do when they have formed an opinion that a ban is useful, taking it to a noticeboard. (I think that response actually isn't the best, but it's better than unilaterally declaring a strict ban; prohibiting specific disruptive behavior by warning about it, of course, is not a problem, the problem is when an admin blocks to enforce his own strict ban, for a nondisruptive edit, and that problem, itself, is rather easily resolved once the block has come down. "I blocked him for tendentious editing, see [diff][diff][diff]" is much more likely to stand than "I blocked him because I told him not to edit the article, and he did [diff to spelling correction]."

• What happened, however, was that the Cab piled in, with laundry lists of complaints about me. They had mostly not done this with the JzG arbitration. I knew how damaging it can be when many editors apparently neutral pile in endorsing some position. As I later wrote, if what ArbComm is finding about there being no "cabal," or even no evidence for a cab, is true, then I should be banned, and not just topic banned, site banned, because if I'm upsetting so many neutral editors, I'm obviously disruptive and the only hope for my continued participation would be that I recognize this can change my disruptive ways. Unfortunately, an FoF, not based on evidence and clear argument, but only result-oriented, has practically no force as to changing my opinion, and once I'm in a situation where it is prohibited to express my opinion, it's impossible to maintain. I'll blow it.

• However, I was prepared to accept a site-wide ban, provided I had freedom in my user space, and can make self-reverted edits anywhere, and, further -- I didn't state this part -- that no "topic ban" is involved, and that my edits aren't considered *inherently* disruptive, which means that any editor can, taking responsibility for their appropriateness, revert them back in.

• If you have followed my discussion of process above, you'd see that this is a special restriction that requires anything I do outside my user space to be "seconded" by a responsible editor. I could do stuff like this: discussion taking place at AN on a matter where I have something to say. I write an essay on the topic in my user space, which might start out being long. I then go to AN, write a brief summary with a link to my user essay, and self-revert. There is no way for this to disrupt or "dominate the discussion." If there is something valuable there, other editors can pick up on it. They can repeat the ideas. They can link to the essay. They can restore my comment, effectively endorsing or seconding it. The essay itself might be further developed with participation by other editors, and might see other usage. Or not. Depends, eh? But the work that is wasted, if there is nothing there, is only my own, an editor who thinks that I write nothing of value has no obligation to read it at all, and would properly be enjoined, if necessary, against disruptive argument against it. (Reverting my AN post back just to refute it, or to attack me for it, when nobody had seconded it, would be pure useless and disruptive argument, and very visible as that.)

• MastCell, this kind of procedure and remedy, I would accept, because it is, in itself, of value as a process to test for use with other editors. Prolixity should never be a reason for banning an editor: rather, very specific remedies can be designed that don't dump the baby with the bathwater, that address the real problem. What I saw with self-reverted edits, in the few examples that were tried, (myself and PJHaseldine) were that it worked, and it fostered cooperation between a banned editor and the very editors who had supported the ban.

• I wouldn't drop a tome on AN because that would reduce the utility, I'd be wasting my time. Rather, I'd follow my normal writing procedure: write freely, in my user space, pulling up what I know and think that is related, then I would write a brief summary and drop that, with the link. Without the ban, I've started doing something more or less like this, such as writing a long post, saving it, giving it a subhead of its own, and then deleting it and replacing it with a summary and reference to history. The only difference is that I'm not necessarily self-reverting (I actually did self-revert on Proposed decision talk the other day, but that's not the norm, it was special conditions). The self reversion would be necessary to satisfy a ban that was considered necessary because of alleged pov-pushing or disruptive prolixity. And given that the community position on harmless edits (not self reverted) by the topic-banned ScienceApologist was to ignore them, I've concluded that all the later fuss about "a ban is a ban is a ban, no editing, period, no exceptions, IAR be damned," was, shall we say, a tad editor-specific. Self-reverted edits don't complicate ban enforcement; indeed, they will probably make it easier, because if the editor is allowed self-reverted edits, socking is probably much less likely. Indeed, I claim that self-reversion might conserve enough value for editors that some that we currently ban could be on voluntary bans that still allow useful participation. I'm sure that NYScholar would have accepted this. I know that it made his community ban more acceptable to User:PJHaseldine.

• There has been an attitude that the opinions and feelings of banned editors don't count. They count. When we unnecessarily fail to consider them, we get Scibabies. My guess is that if we put a small effort into it, we could rehabilitate Scibaby by rehabilitating the community response to him. I'm sure that GoRight, for example, would help keep Scibaby in line were Scibaby allowed to return. This is part of my vision, to recruit minority editors to restrain minority editors, because if minority editors are not restrained, carefully negotiated consensus, maximized consensus, thus maximally NPOV, can be upset, and, by the conditions, if push comes to shove, the majority wins and the minmority loses. The tradeoff is that minority POV is fully respected, according to guidelines. And opinion that is even below sufficient notability to make it into articles would be fairly covered in the backstory.

• This concept of the restraint of POV-pushing by editors with similar POV is very important for functional social structure. It is how we will be able to reduce the battleground aspect of Wikipedia. I wrote in one place that this is how prison gangs function, the gang-based prison riots that we hear about are examples of breakdown, not of normal function. (I was a prison chaplain, San Quentin State Prison, MastCell.)

• I'm quite gratified to see a very good discussion going on at WT:BAN about "proxying" for banned users, and that has been stimulated by the RfAr. One of the charges against me was "proxying" for JedRothwell, because (twice?) I reverted back in Talk discussion from him as worthy of consideration (in one case, there was some gratuitous comment about biased editors or something like that, and I did not restore that part). This was the subject of warnings from Enric Naval on my Talk page, and my insistence that it was proper (not backed by edit warring on Talk, though there was revert warring on the other side, as there was a few days ago over my own recent edit), together with a few other matters like this, is what led to his opinion that I didn't "listen to good faith feedback." And then his opinion has been picked up by some arbitrators. Yet I was apparently anticipating a consensus (and which I had thought was established already).

• Nice thing about that discussion. It's the first time I've seen some Cab editors making sense, in a while. The lines are no longer clearly drawn. The difference, on the very issue under discussion, is striking, compared to previous discussions. Cab editors, previously, may have remained silent when they disagreed with their fellow Cab editors.... Or, just maybe, some are reconsidering positions, I haven't analyzed it in detail. My general belief is that when we can narrow down discussions to very specific issues, in an environment where the payoff is agreement rather than victory for one side, Cab solidarity can become irrelevant. In a number of ways, during the RfAr, the Cab began to disintegrate, at least for moments. From a point where no Cab editor would criticize any decision of WMC's, suddently, when WMC actually blocked me during the RfAr, several prominent Cab editors, while perhaps excusing WMC's action as having been "provoked," acknowledged for the first time that I'd seen, that it was "wrong."

• On dealing with an MPOV-pushing cab, you are right, there is always a middle, which is one place where consensus-building can begin. It can start by the minority finding unity among its own editors, then expanding into the middle, and then to the outliers in the cab, the ones most willing to listen to something that might revise their opinion. What happens, in practice, when a change is going to happen, is that the cab solidarity is eroded, until the outliers are the extreme cab members. Along the way, the new consensus has evolved so that it is no longer -- usually -- exactly what the minority was originally proposing. In order to overcome a majority, the minority must incorporate whatever is legitimate about the majority position.

• One of the problems is that sometimes a majority doesn't recognize what a minority editor is proposing. Example here would be that Enric Naval, in evidence accepted by and cited by ArbComm in a proposal that currently has a majority, claimed that I refused to accept consensus about cold fusion being "pathological science." When we look closely at this, Enric synthesized my supposed claim from what I'd written. Cold fusion was called pathological science in a number of reliable sources in 1989-1990 and later. So we can reliable source that so-and-so, or maybe "many scientists," thought that cold fusion was pathological science. We might even be able to justify "most scientists concluded in 1989-1990, that cold fusion was pathological science," though that may be synthetic. But to make that as text that implies a present scientific consensus -- which is subtly different from "most scientists" at some earlier time -- that cold fusion is pathological science, is POV, reflecting what may be a majority POV among Wikipedia editors who are aware of the topic.

As it happens, this opinion about cold fusion may, in fact, be strongest among the SPOV editors, just as opinion against cold fusion is apparently strongest among the hot-fusion nuclear or particle physicists. Who actually, when we look at it, have only theoretical expertise in the field, i.e., they have learned theory, going way back, that implied cold fusion was impossible. When we look more closely, it was never "impossible," rather, conditions that allowed it weren't known; and an early erosion of this position would be with muon-catalyzed fusion, which is certainly cold fusion linguistically, and which was originally called that. What Fleischmann discovered was something else, and he certainly didn't know what it was, nor is there any any certainty about it to this day. It is an edge, developing science, highly controversial, and very complicated. The math is ridiculous, applying quantum mechanics to the condensed matter environment is one possible as an approximation.

• Much fuss has been made about commercial practicality, and, since there may have been spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to find a way to scale up cold fusion, with failure (so far), it's easy to assume that therefore it's bogus. However, Fleischmann wasn't searching for "free energy" or the like. He was doing basic science. I hope you can understand this, MastCell, you could ask if you don't. Quantum mechanics was developed from the study of two-body problems, from what happens with two particles encountering each other in an environment where we can neglect everything else. This keeps the math simple. When more bodies are involved, the math becomes seriously difficult; however, nuclear behavior, because of the very small size of the nucleus compared to the size of atoms as a whole, was considered to be well-approximated by two-body quantum mechanics, and the approximation that this involves, when we are dealing with a condensed matter environment, was considered to be reasonably accurate. The question that Fleischmann asked and attempted to answer was "how accurate"? He's written extensively about this, and one of the papers I got whitelisted from lenr-canr.org was a conference paper that he wrote about it, plus that paper was recently republished by the American Chemical Society. So he set up conditions that might test the limits; he packed deuterium into palladium lattice, which creates very high deuterium concentrations, for palladium absorbs hydrogen or deuterium to the point that there is one hydrogen atom for each palladium atom, it's effectively an alloy, "palladium deuteride." His expectation was that there would be a difference in nuclear behavior, but that it would be below what could be detected, so his research was apparently aimed at setting an upper bound for the difference between the predictions of quantum mechanics and those of the more complex quantum field theory, or quantum electrodynamics. His results violated his expectations, and he worked on this for five years before it was announced. It was basic science, not some wild-eyed "free energy" invention.

• What Enric did was confuse my discussion of the situation with cold fusion for what I'd propose as edits, or, where an edit was involved, what I meant by the edit. When I began editing the cold fusion article, with a few exploratory edits (reverted promptly by JzG!) I was only beginning to lose my general skeptical opinion on cold fusion, but I had already moved to a position where I understood that there was a present scientific dispute, one of the first things I had done was to read the 2004 DoE report, and I saw that it was being misrepresented in our article. When I added more of the core of the report, instead of just the bare and easily misleading conclusion, it was called "cherry-picking." I was, in fact, duplicating what had happened many times in the article, without knowing all that history. What I'd put in was practically direct quote from the report, and fundamental to it, just not the funding conclusion in isolation, it was what the report had to say about the science. This omission had been, I later learned, the largest concern of Pcarbonn about our article. I also found that JzG's involvement with cold fusion had begun over this exact bit of text; he'd reverted Pcarbonn (in 2006?) claiming that Pcarbonn had contradicted the source, and was skewered over it (he'd been sarcastic and basically deserved it), and I suspect he never forgot it; he may have held on to the idea that a fringe POV was being pushed by distorting the sources.) (This was covered in my full evidence about JzG involvement in cold fusion).

• When the mediation started, one editor, LeadSongDog, gave, as an example of the ridiculous lengths that this POV-pusher Abd would go to, that I'd removed the text "life science journal" as a qualification of Naturwissenschaften when the journal was mentioned as having published the recent (and very significant) finding of energetic neutrons coming from cold fusion cells. The reason for putting that text in was obvious: to discredit the source as being a journal that would not have proper peer-review resources, and this was explicitly stated in discussion. Since you can go to the home page of Naturwissenschaften, and see that Springer classifies it as a Life Sciences journal, it would seem quite solid, eh? Until you look deeper. And when this was discussed in the mediation, the resulting consensus was to keep the "life sciences journal" comment out. The reason is that Naturwissenschaften is, according to Springer, their "flagship multidisciplinary journal," it's editorially supervised by the Max Planck Institute, which would have all the expertise needed; Nw is rated, by impact factor, number 50 in the multidisciplinary category; for comparison Scientific American is number 49. Why is the journal in Springer's "Life Sciences" category? Well, the journal prefers articles which cross disciplines, and most articles do involve the life sciences, and they had to classify it somewhere, for publishing efficiency, they didn't want to set up journal staff to cover just one journal! It's a nice little example of how majority POV-pushing could warp our content and imagine that it was simply reporting, neutrally, what is in sources. In fact, "life sciences journal" and especially the implied claim that Nw wouldn't be able to adequately review the article, was synthesis, pure imagination and, if I can trust what Jed Rothwell claims (I've never caught him in a lie), very wrong. Rothwell is editing more papers for publication in Nw, and has said that the peer review there was very strong, that the reviewers clearly were very familiar with the literature and the issues, and they were asking tough questions. --Abd (talk) 16:56, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Response of Atren

Original response is at [2], the following is interspersed, I have italicised Atren's original comment where quoted below (It is entirely quoted).

Original response:

Thanks. Sure, I can see that, and, in fact, I did. I'm writing at length here because, and only because, it is my Talk page, and if we were to sit down at my kitchen table and have a conversation about the wiki, this is it. Yes, here, it is stream of consciousness. That's how I write. That is not how I edit. Editing is, for me, a separate process, applied after writing, and to the extent that I censor my writing, it gets incapable of finding depth. In a real conversation, face to face, there would be high-bandwidth feedback, even if you did not say a word, I'd be able to tell, more or less, if I'm paying attention, what you are thinking, at least roughly. Cold reading is based, often, on that kind of attention.

Communication through text is primitive and highly prone to misunderstanding, that's been clear to me -- and to practically everyone else -- since I started working with on-line conferencing with the WELL in the 1980s. However, as to on-line forms, the quotation-response style used often on mailing lists is the best. It's often not used here, people complain about chopping up their posts but this, then, requires response to be written all at once, in one stream, to many ideas. But, here, I'm going to use comment-response. I will refactor this to remove ATren's comment above and cite it from history so it can be read intact, and then replace it here as quotation and response, one piece or section at a time. This makes it more like a conversation. (Response continued after the above comment is archived with reference to page history.) --Abd (talk) 19:34, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Extended response, interspersed, by Abd unless otherwise shown:

Abd, I've read a good portion of this so far (not all), and I'd like to make a few comments:

Thanks for reading it, what you did. Skimming is fine, and even not reading all, especially if you tell me nicely, as you did. When I write at length, I have no right to demand that anyone read it. If I really want you to read it, personally, and now, I'll put what I want you to see at the top. I may also bold it, which you'll see scanning down quickly. Top and bold, if I'm really determined!

• Not everything needs to be said. At one point in this long response you say you have no time to edit, and not even enough time to say everything you need to say - well, maybe you are trying to say too much in the first place. Your writing is basically an unfiltered stream of consciousness, and it's almost impossible for others to follow without devoting an incredible amount of energy and time.

For some, not for all. The response above was not stream of consciousness, if the seas were ink and the trees were pens, it would not suffice, but it was largely unedited, except that I did read it over at least once. To actually boil it down would take even more. Atren, I write what I think in response to what you wrote and the situation present. To then go over it and figure out what is most significant and what I should cut, not to mention actually finding more concise explanation, would take me far more time.

In fact, if you are finding that it takes an "incredible amount of time," this could mean a number of things. Years ago, I found, certain classical texts in tasawwuf were so dense that I could only read a paragraph at a time, if that. So it might be diffcult to read my writing because of density of that kind. It might be difficult to read because of lack of development of certain concepts that are referred to. Length, however, also results from the very attempts to explain those concepts. In a face-to-face conversation, especially a lively one, I'd be interrupted a lot, both by you when you don't get something right away, and by myself when I can perceive that you don't get it. I'd ask you questions, for example.

Understand that while it may take you an "incredible amount of time" to read it carefully with a presumption that there is some meaing there that you must extract or you will miss it, to just read it over and then respond with comments and questions would be far more efficient. Instead of trying to puzzle out something that is not clear, you can just say, "I don't get this." This is why I like quote/response writing, because, if you use it in your response, you can comment on what you understand and question what you don't, and you don't have to hold it all in your mind at once.

So basically, when you say "I don't have time to edit", the implication is "so you readers better find the time to decode my stream of consciousness".

But I'm not saying that, this is an assumption. Rather, I'm giving you, personally -- this is a response to you -- a glimpse of my thought process, which brings up what experience and understanding I have of the topic. If I believe that you should know something specific, that you don't understand and you must or some harm will befall you or others, it is then incumbent on me to craft my text to effectively communicate that, and I can and do. But, imagine we were sitting down together. If I were required to craft my communication to match some language of yours that I understand only poorly, I would be paralyzed. We might get through it, with snippets that gradually expand understanding, but it would take a long time, and trying to do that with written communication on a wiki, so inefficient that we might never reach understanding.

Sure. It can be done, but it's a special skill. I see an editor who can do it, very well, but what I don't see is how long that editor takes to write the short and highly insightful comments that I recognize. And, I suspect, there is much, much more that this person has to say that is not being said because of the "strong editing" requirement.

In person, it is often my experience that the equivalent of a book, an entire understanding of an important concept, can be apparently transmitted in a glance. In fact, that's an illusion, probably, what happened is that there was a complex transfer through the preceding conversation, including all the high-bandwidth channels.

I do know that when people simply allow themselves to read what I write, without demanding that it make sense, after a period it does start to make sense, increasing sense, until practically all of it becomes clear. Some people are incapable of tolerating that process, which is why there is the dog vomit slime mold warning at the top of the page, though part of that warning is about people who read what I write, only understand part of it, and rush off to change the world based on that incomplete understanding.

It's a selfish position on your part, and I think that is part of the reason for the hostility toward you.

This assumes (does it not?), that the other people will benefit from what I have to say, and that I am depriving them of benefit, and keeping the benefit to myself, by not saying it clearly. The assumption behind this would be that there is some way for me to communicate what I have to say, that I know what needs to be said to you (let's make it specific), and that I'm simply being lazy. I'm not. I could spend three times as much time on this response and it would not be any more effective than if I simply leave this alone and let you filter it. You can filter it far more rapidly than I, you should be able to read this whole thing over once and respond much more quickly than for me to try to perfect it.

Can you imagine how rude it would be if in a conversation between peers, in a kitchen, where either can interrupt the other if they don't get something, if one were to listen for a long time and then tell the other, "I didn't understand what you were saying the last ten minutes, you are being selfish by not saying it more concisely so I can understand"?

Yet this is what is demanded by this "selfish" position. Yes, it is a common and understandable response, to which I reply, "What I'm writing is not yet for you. You are welcome to read it over and to question it, to ask for clarification, or if it all seems stupid and meandering and pointless to you, perhaps you are right, but, please, don't try to prevent others from reading it who will not react that way.

Communication takes rapport, which assumes a certain level of shared experience. Atren, you have raised an extraordinarily difficult issue, and if it seems simple to you, I'd say, you've never tried to communicate complex and out-of-the-box visions, or even simple but extraordinary insights, or you haven't tried enough!

I've been through this myself. I used to say too much, because I thought that everything needed to be said, but once I discovered the negative effects of long rambling comments, I forced myself to limit my comments to only the key points.

Sure. Rational response; however, by doing this, you start to confine yourself to what you already believe to be key points. Absolutely, when I write a book, this has to be done, and usually it will be done with the aid of an editor. An independent editor. But I'm not writing a book here, I'm discussing, which is a process used to discover consensus. I can extract key points, but it can take so much longer, compared to allowing the other person to extract them by picking up on them, that I often don't do it. And when my own coping systems have been overwhelmed, I may be reduced to blathering, because that is, simply, all I can do, and I'm in an environment so complex that I can't figure out where to go first.

Another way to frame this is that, when what I think is important to say becomes so complex, beyond a certain point, I become incapable in real-time of determining which point to address first, so practically all I can do is dump. Sure, perhaps I should go away, stop, at that point, do something else entirely. But that leads to a different problem. What if this is in the middle of a time-bound process? I suggested that ArbComm partition cases. Whether I'm a useless editor or a highly disruptive one is a completely different question from whether WMC violated recusal policy and would be likely to do so again. ArbComm should have selected the more urgent one to handle first, which might develop evidence relevant to the second question.

When someone comes to ArbComm with a complaint, the complaint should be addressed, and admin recusal is highly damaging. If WMC did not violate recusal policy, then my complaint itself can be seen as disruptive, or at least that should be considered. But if he did, to allow claims of my disruptiveness to interrupt a relatively urgent process is quite foolish, and chilling.

You call 911, because a police officer, who believes you are having an affair with his wife, is trying to break into your house. "Are you sure, Sir, that he doesn't have a warrant?" BANG! BANG! "He hung up. Well, there was already an officer there, I'm sure he's handling it."

It is arguable that an admin accused reasonably -- ArbComm takes the case! -- of violating recusal policy should be suspended, or, at least, restricted as how where and how tools could be used. It is also arguable that an editor accused of disruption, ArbComm takes the case, should be suspended, i.e., perhaps even site-banned, but allowed to edit under specific restrictions, which would vary with the nature of the case. (as is done, editors are unblocked so that they may edit arbitration pages, and they would be blocked again if they violate this restriction).

I should then have had all the time I need to prepare my defense, and my defense would have been entirely separate from the WMC case. Process. Don't leave home without it.

Then, with a more limited focal point, you can spend a little more time delivering that point in a concise way, i.e. "editing". The "other" points which you filtered out are not lost; you can store them away, either mentally or in a private document, and retrieve them if needed.

You have no idea, Atren. I'm 65 years old. Twenty years ago, sure, I could just remember it. Maybe. In fact, probably, a lot was lost. Private document? Again, you have no idea how much material I have. No, if I don't say it now, it is probably lost. So if it is important, I'll say it. Lately, I've started to write a piece, say a Response in the RfAr evidence, then collapse most of it, thus layering it into what was considered important, being inclusive, to the major points, which are at the top level. I did this a lot in the case. And guess what? It's likely that important points were lost in the reduced-significance hypertext.

(And the hidden text was still counted in all that evidence about how voluminously I wrote.)

No, I know what I need. I need communication and cooperation with others, people who will read what I write (and there are some who actually enjoy it and value it) and then pass it on, and through this process, what is important for now is extracted, and sometimes what is important for later is disovered later. I not infrequently review stuff I wrote years ago and I'm often surprised by how much I knew back then. I think to myself, "I didn't think that I'd figured that aspect out until much later, but there it is, all laid out, and clearly, too." But, typically, not as clearly as what I'd write later. I learn by writing, Atren, and especially I learn how to communicate an idea. I'm not alone in that.

Maybe you won't even need all the other points - the original thrust, presented concisely, might be sufficient.

Presuming specific purpose. What was my purpose in the RfAr? Was it to get WMC desysopped? No. Was it to get the cabal editors blocked, banned, or otherwise sanctioned? Definitely not! Was it to ask ArbComm to lift a community ban? No. That ban had expired. Was it to prove that a cabal existed? No: any editor who doesn't realize that there are cabals, as I defined them, which is a highly useful definition, isn't looking, has their eyes, so to speak, closed, they are reacting to something else, something I did not write.

It was simple: to raise community consciousness about the existence of certain unresolved problems, so that the community can begin to solve them. In the presence of a cabal, that is extremely difficult unless the existence of the cabal is recognized. It is not that the cabal is the problem, it isn't. The problem is with the community, and that the community process doesn't encourage the community to wake up, it is as if the community is dreaming, with only low-level mental process, practically automatic, taking place. What it would mean for the community to wake up is something that it could take a year of conversation to communicate, Atren, it will, in fact, be easier to demonstrate it.

I went beyond mere text in the RfAr, Atren, did you notice? I knew, with certainty, that WMC had been using tools where he was involved for a long time, it was blatant, and common knowledge. How is it that he hadn't been sanctioned? Well, he had been reprimanded for one incident at RfAr, where he wheel-warred with an admin. Who wheel-warred back. That "wheel-warring back" was, in fact, about the only way that the community would pay attention. Otherwise it would be dropped, as the cabal would intercede, all without reprehensible collusion, to prevent a consensus to censure.

WMC had been threatening to block me for two months, as I'd been claiming that his right to ban only allowed him to block me for actually disruptive edits. His first block was possible to cover under the community ban, though, if you read his comments carefully, he considered the community ban moot. We were in an extended dispute, there was no doubt about that, could anyone claim that there was not, at least, the appearance of a dispute? Yet he continued to claim that his ban was "real" and that he could prove it. That was pure ego, pure "I'm in charge and you must do as I say or I'll block you." This is what he had been doing for years, I did not create his position by provoking him.

Now, I act through intuition. What I saw was that I was enabling WMC by voluntarily complying with his ban. So, as I had before, I announced that I would no longer voluntarily comply with the ban. Nobody said or did anything about that. And then, when a question presented itself that I had a more thorough answer for, I answered it, on Talk:Cold fusion.

I was naturally accused of disrupting Wikipedia to make a point. In fact, I was doing something quite different. I was allowing WMC to demonstrate his position in a way that would not be missed. It was the very opposite of disruption. What was harmed by the demonstration? I was blocked, and, obviously, I was willing to accept that. No editors were harmed by the making of this movie. Even more good could have come from this, if the community and ArbComm were paying attention. Enric Naval edit warred over that comment, showing exactly what he'd been doing before. Verbal didn't edit war, just promised that he would if needed. It made the situation crystal clear, but.... who is watching? It really took a block to get their attention!

One picture is worth a thousand words, right. Suddenly the opposition to the very idea that there was anything wrong with WMC's actions vanished, momentarily. That was possibly the most effective action I ever took on Wikipedia, a harmless edit, not disruptive in itself, that allowed WMC to demonstrate what he was made of. ArbComm could not miss it. But they are still, largely, in denial. "Well, this one incident....."

That there are arbitrators who will take that kind of position points out to me that there is another cabal. A bigger one and possibly even more dangerous. We could do something about it, easily, and yet, I won't be surprised to find that we do nothing. It is, again, common knowledge, but who says it on-wiki that doesn't get banned?

Tell you what. I won't say it here, though I've said it elsewhere. What is this cabal? What defines it, what drives it, why is it partially a good thing and partially the reverse? Why is it a necessary consequence of our structure and only harmful if we don't recognize it?

And then you will have saved yourself a lot of typing. :-)

No. It does not work that way for me, period. To write more concisely takes me much more time. I can write very quickly. Lots of keystrokes, yes, but to write more concisely, well, I can only do it when I am so familiar with a particular issue that I have, already, highly fixed conclusions and I have a lot of experience expressing them. I can become very concise under those conditions. They don't usually obtain.

The problem I have is a classic ADHD problem, in fact, and ADHD symptoms are frequently expressed by others as moral condemnation, it has been a major advance to start to consider ADHD has a result of different forms of brain function. Basically, things that are easy for others may be very difficult for me, and difficult for others easy for me. I do understand the Wikipedia problem, very, very well. That understanding is not enough, because it will take a community to solve the problem, I can't do it by myself; if you think about it, the very idea that I could is preposterous. Jimbo might be able to do something, but I wouldn't bet on it; it's an untested possibility and I've never seen the necessary changes take place in a community the size of Wikipedia. As I said, I know how to to it, but it's theory, untested. The pieces are all known to work, but they have never been all put together in one place.

And the concepts contradict a whole series of common assumptions. It is very difficult, Atren. I worked on developing the concepts for over twenty years, and only began seriously attempting to communicate them in about 2002-2003. It took me about two years of intense writing, on mailing lists, to find one person who understood, but once he did, he could actually write about it better than I. He got it. How did he get it? He watched my writing for about a year and finally decided to ask me some questions. I answered the questions, he created a FAQ, and it went from there. There are now a handful of people who more or less understand it. My friend is about fifteen years younger than I, an excellent writer, very succinct. But he also tells me that it takes him three times as much time to write a piece on a topic as it takes me. And, yes, he has ADHD.

At the very least, even if you need to present those other points later, you will have more time to formulate the arguments in a more concise form.

But to continue in your present stream-of-consciousness mode is selfish and possibly even abusive - I don't know how I can put it in stronger terms than that. It must stop, and you are intelligent enough to do so.

A proposed remedy by bainer, mentorship, would actually work. But that's being largely rejected!

• There is no hurry. You just finished a case with JzG, and you followed up immediately with a case against WMC.

Actually, not. You want the real history? Before the case with JzG was finished, cabal harassment began. I could prove that, but ... won't. I did not go looking for WMC, he came after me. ArbComm had asked me to escalate when it was apparent that lower-level attempts to resolve a dispute aren't working. (That part of the decision isn't quoted!). So I did. Once it became apparent that the community, per se, would not be able to actually resolve the dispute, but, under the best of conditions, to merely stop much damage (i.e., had I left the AN/I report open, enough support might have appeared that a neutral admin would close with no consensus, or there would be no close. But, remember, during RfC/JzG 3, which was open for weeks, two-thirds of commenting editors took that position that JzG was just fine, the problem was Abd, so he should be banned. With that kind of majority, many admins would close with a ban. It would have been iffy.

That is a hell of a task, two major cases in succession.

Yes, I was aware. However, I did not believe I had much of a choice. I'd done six months of work to prepare to edit Cold fusion, and when I started in earnest, being able to put together reliably-sourced text to start to address the article imbalance, I was, in fairly short order, banned by an admin famous for blocking based on his POV, whether or not he had a specific POV there. (I think he did, but it was a general anti-fringe POV.)

In this latest case, you made allegations of a cabal, which is an incredibly difficult assertion to prove.

That it is so difficult shows the nature of the problem. "Cabal" means nothing more or less than a faction, a group of editors, who may not be in specific collusion but whose actions are similar in effect, sometimes, to coordinated actions, who collectively frustrate the intention of guidelines and policy. I believe that, in fact, I presented sufficient evidence to prove that.

The problem was that the cabal was able to frame the assertion as being one of individual misconduct, of reprehensible collusion, which, very explicitly, I denied from the beginning. ArbComm is rejecting a charge that I did not level. How did that happen? Was it that I wrote too much?

Perhaps. But I'd say that it happened for different reasons:

• The cabal over and over repeated the false claim about my claim. Many editors saying it, instinctively, it must be true. And even if Abd didn't say it, we know that he must mean it, since that is what we would mean, and do mean, when we charge "meat puppetry."
• ArbComm is distracted, and only a few arbitrators do deep investigation on their own. If one does not investigate on one's own, one will be very vulnerable to noise. ArbComm findings of fact should be rigorous, because, after all, the history is all there.
• There have been many outside charges of a cabal, including media mention of this speciric cabal. We have defended against those charges with an argument which is true but highly misleading; that argument makes us feel good about ourselves, but does not address the actual problem, which is "natural cabals." Communities of affiliation that become biased against outsiders, people who think differently.
• "incredibly difficult to prove?" Only if one doesn't read the actual claim, but instead projects on it assumptions about it. "Cabal" is a very negative term on-wiki, is what has been said. Sure. I could say, deliberately so! A remarkable number of the cabal administrators have the Cabal Rouge flag.... on the talk pages, there is lots of joking about the cabal and those stupid editors who claim that there is one and we are part of it .... they just don't understand that they are wrong and we are just trying to correct them. This, Atren, is how a cabal thinks. A collection of editors who simply happen to agree would not respond like this, they would, instead, say, "They think there is a cabal? Why would they think that? Let's ask them!"

It is very difficult for biased POV to see itself; typically it takes some outside force to make our own biases visible. That's why we need consensus process, not merely majority rule or the application of power. It was only recently that the concept of "tag-team" edit warring was even accepted. Cabals tag-team, they do it naturally. We cannot possibly begin to address the real level of tag teaming with controversial articles, where a group of editors massed, figuratively, through watchlists, can keep an article how they like it, or make it how they like, and any interloper who tries to change it, they can defeat, and even more so if the group includes administrators. WMC talks about this, in the last bit of evidence I added about him. It's blatant, in fact, once you know what to look for. "Us" vs. "them." That's practically the core of "cabal." If we have that, we will see the negative effects, which then justify the usages of a negative term.

But membership in a cabal is normal, we all belong to cabals, unless we are very, very unusual, and I'm not sure I know anyone who fits that. Maybe I do, I can think of one candidate among Wikipedia editors. Maybe more than one, hard to say, not enough evidence.....

In the middle of it all you are trying to fight the overly-skeptical POV on CF and trying to mediate GW.

Trying to mediate GW? Don't know what you mean. I wasn't trying to "fight" the overly-skeptical POV with Cold fusion, but rather was patiently negotiating with it, one piece at a time, until Hipocrite arrived, who, with Verbal, was a strong cabal editor. Enric Naval was, without them, much more reasonable, but reactive, a different problem. In any case, since I was banned by WMC, I wasn't working on cold fusion beyond the mediation, which is slow, not taking much time. By banning me, my energy was channeled into dealing with the ban and the issues it raised, which ArbComm is acknowledging are important issues.

You'd think they'd be happy that someone is raising important issues! but it doesn't necessarily work that way. Squeaky wheels get grease, maybe, or they get pulled off and junked.

How could anyone find the time to do all that, especially someone like you who immerses himself in every task fully?

I couldn't, bottom line. Insufficient support appeared from the community, from history I expected more. Don't know why. Perhaps the cold fusion red herring?

You took on too much here, and I think the last straw was trying to prove a cabal.

That may turn out to be the most important thing I did. Atren, there is a cabal, or at least it's easy to show that lots of knowledgeable people think so, and, as was quite correctly noticed in the workship, proclaiming that there isn't one, or even that it hasn't been proven, has no ultimate effect except to expose a committee so deciding, when seen from the future, as obtuse. "I can't believe that they couldn't see it!" (And I do believe that they don't see it, I have no reason to think that they are being dishonest.) What ArbComm has largely rejected is not what I "tried to prove." I tried to prove that the assemblies of editors in various places, as I documented, were not "uninvolved."

Being involved is not an offense, but someone making a judgment about a decision, as ArbComm may be deciding thtat "the community supported the ban," or "the community had no problem with the ban," needs to know about involvements that are based on editor affiliation, not just a specific article content.

Tell me, I'm not involved in any content dispute with Raul654. Does this mean that he is a neutral administrator and could block me? What if he had, as he has before, remained silent during this RfAr, so we didn't have the blatant bias? If we look back, we can find many examples of "mutual support," between him and WMC. There are other administrators who are similarly involved with each other, and sensible administrators routinely recuse when a good friend is involved. Cabal admins don't. When that starts to change, the cabal will have, in its negative effects, been largely broken.

You should have focused purely on WMC and the specifics of his administrator transgressions (there is plenty of evidence of that).

I started that way, and perhaps I should have left it at that. But you do realize what the result would have been? The "cabal" evidence was initially about the massive pour-in of cabal editors to the RfAr. Had my goal been to pin down the cabal, there would have been a different set of editors named; I might even have focused only on administrators and arguable cabal adminstrative abuse, there is plenty on that, starting with a crackerjack case, Scibaby. Admin abuse from start to the present, and it's not over.

For some reason, the cabal only showed up in numbers in RfC/JzG 3, but not in the ensuing RfAr. This may have been because that case was so open and shut, and there wasn't at that point, much of a way that they could credibly impeach me, only minor efforts were made. This time, they had much more to run with. And they did.

The cabal is not nearly as smart as a truly organized cabal would be. One could negotiate with an organized cabal, assuming that they did have as their goal the benefit of the wiki. Before RfAr/Abd and JzG, I think they really believed their own propaganda: that I was a dead-horse-beating loser. That RfAr woke them up a little. I was actually a danger.

But hindsight is 20/20 and what's done is done, so cut your losses and move on. Even though this case has not turned out the way you liked, it's done a great deal of good by shining the light on abuses that occur regularly on these articles.

That would, indeed, have been my goal, and "turned out the way" I "liked" presumes that I have a fixed goal. I don't. Sure. I can get a bit obsessed when people I trust turn against me, and I did trust ArbComm. (And now I'm responding to an impression that based on incomplete evidence, it could be that the trust is still warranted). But I have no opinion that Wikipedia benefits more, and that I benefit more, if I still edit here. I have some reasons to think that it might even be better if I'm site banned, because that might divert my activities into what could be more effective. While I edit here, I get involved with all kinds of article issues, mediating disputes, and, yes, editing articles, such as bringing in the lyrikline.org material. It is entirely possible that I'm more useful in other ways,.

• Things are better than they used to be. You think it's bad now, imagine when the committee was the cabal, with Raul crafting proposed decisions without fully reading the case pages (he admitted he didn't even look at the Workshop), and the rest rubber-stamping his words.

Uh, Atren, did I just notice you treating the cabal as a reality? I'd better watch your Talk page for warnings....

Look, it is blatantly obvious. Yes, it may be better now; in fact, were it not for a confidence that it was better, I wouldn't have bothered, and I probably would have abandoned Wikipedia before now. I could do the needed demonstrations of the concepts elsewhere, it might be more effective. "The concepts," by the way, are how Wikipedia could solve the problem of scale while retaining the system of distributed responsibility that is the core of how we work.

It was a mess. Now we have a much better committee with people such as NYB, CHL and bainer, who actually take pains to make the right decision. Do they make mistakes? Yes, of course - the allegation that you are pushing a POV is proof of that - but it's much better than it was. If this case came up 2 years ago, you'd already be banned.

Yes. Now, you know this. What makes you special?

• Cold Fusion - I cannot stress how much I agree with your position on this. I could probably take your block of text above and post it as my own view on CF: I'm somewhat skeptical but I want to know what's happening in those beakers before I make a final decision.

Right. I am not conclusion-driven. I do not conclude that cold fusion is real and then try to craft text to show this in the article. Thanks. I'm glad someone sees this. Now, why is this not being said, and said clearly, in the RfAr?

What CF proves is that there are too many dogmatists in the scientific world - scientists who confuse close-mindedness with skepticism. To many scientists, anyone outside of the mainstream is a crackpot. It's really no different than fundamentalists calling non-believers "blasphemers". The point when scientists stop searching for answers and resort to hurling insults, is the point when science becomes no different than theology.

Unfortunately, Abd, you pushed too hard on CF, and with the wrong audience.

Perhaps. But what I was pushing for was always, not CF, but RS guidelines. Nevertheless, having been a skeptic who was "converted" by reading the sources, including the skeptical ones, I do disclose my POV, and the main point I've been "pushing" is that there is no longer a clear basis for asserting that cold fusion is "rejected by mainstream science," and that assumptions behind this are not based in reliable sources and balance of sources. I've pushed the idea that this is complex, not obvious, and that we can only address this through editorial consensus, not an imposed position.

In fact, discretionary sanctions, implemented by neutral administrators (even if they have some skeptical bias ,that is natural, as I'm sure you understand), should be enough. In December, ArbComm basically concluded that Pcarbonn was the problem, and topic banned him. Pcarbonn was not the problem. The problem, in fact, was the cabal, imposing a majority POV without allowing room for expanded consensus. Pcarboon, by patient reliance on guidelines, was able to expand the article, but only to a very limited degree. The result is an article that is, at best, impoverished. I could write ten articles with the material I have, this is a very complex topic, with the history and the known science and the techniques used, etc.

Trying to promote an open-minded view to those on the CF page who have already made their decision, lack of evidence be damned, would be like reading Darwin to a fundamentalist Christian group - no matter what you say or how reasonably you say it, you will be labelled a heretic.

That's right. However, an "open-minded view" is essential to Wikipedia. Editors who do not allow that view are violating fundamental, non-negotiable policy, on neutrality. The answer to fundamentalism was science, and deliberative process, i.e., democracy, as well as protections against the tyranny of the majority. Those protections can only go so far, but, as society recognizes that consensus is truly powerful, that united we stand and divided we fall, the protections get stronger and more widely understood.

What CF demanded was more patience and secondary input, but even then, the "pro-science" power structure is aligned against you - again, think of the Darwin to the fundamentalists analogy: you could make an appeal to the local police and appear before the local judge, but in all cases, you'd be appearing before people who are Christian themselves and basically sympathetic to their position.

Yes, that is why it took time, and reliance on higher-level processes where process was more careful. Even then, it took lots of time.

Even a reasonable judge who doesn't share the extremist views of the fundamentalists themselves, might be swayed to making a poor decision based on greater affinity with the locals. You can call this a "cabal", but it's really just human nature to align oneself with people who appear to share the same values, even if it's just a surface alignment.

One more thing about CF: the article is not that bad.

"Cabals" are human nature. In FA/DP theory I call them "caucuses," and FA/DP empowers them by making them explicit, which gives them energetic advantages, they become more efficient; but because this is done with a neutral structure, all cabals become more efficient, including the biggest cabal, the one that has had no way of expressing itself coherently, the EC. The Editor Cabal. The one that has, too often, been getting the short end of the stick.

But it's not a matter of giving everyone a vote. That wouldn't work, except for certain very narrow purposes. It's much more sophisticated than that, it's about networking and collective intelligence, so that smarter decisions are made, so that advice is reliable because it is made with the assistance of a structure that is designed specifically for trustworthiness (and practically with no other purpose, as I said, the structure is neutral).

I read it a while back and it seemed OK -- maybe swaying a little too much to the skeptical, but not significantly enough to be overly concerned. Certainly there could be more balance there, but I don't necessarily believe it's worth all the effort you've expended in this. Maybe I'm wrong - can you point out the specifics of the article which you consider wrong so I can evaluate for myself?

With time, yes. I'll write you off-wiki, but you might take a look, for starters, at the situation with "proposed explanations." Very simple: look at what is in the article, look at what was accepted on May 21, and look at what was put in by me that started the edit war of June 1, after having been discussed. You can even find the diffs in my poll, which is now archived, it was live in the beginning of June.

I still haven't read your entire response, but that's my take so far. I may add more later. I truly hope you don't leave - you've had a tremendous impact on this project in the short time you've been here, despite Raul's insults. In fact, I think Raul insulting you is the best indication that you are making a real difference here. :-) Good luck with the case. ATren (talk) 15:11, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks again. To proceed, though, I'm going to need a lot more open support. I listen to people, I did understand your backspace button, but that's not enough. If there had been more active and coherent support, from others besides the overworked GoRight and Coppertwig, I'd have been far more able to sit back.

Here is a somewhat challenging way to put it. No cabal, eh? That means that what all these editors did is just fine, so the rest of us can do it too, right?

Believe me, if it were up to me, I would still not do anything like what the cabal has done. My goal is to include, not exclude, and that means including the cabal and respecting the cabal positions, but what is going to be necessary that the true "inclusionists," -- those who want to include as many people as possible, cooperating in this project -- start to become active, to stand up for consensus and neutrality, real consensus and real neutrality. Thanks again for the time you took to respond.

If the time comes when I can't write long responses on my Talk page, I'll take up something else, for sure. I'd be quite willing to accept a site-ban, if (1) I can make self-reverted edits anywhere, as long as they are not intrinsically disruptive, but merely proposals for edits to articles or to discussions, null edits, in effect, unless brought in by someone who will take responsibility for their usefulnes, and (2) they are not considered "ban violations," and therefore there is no idea that someone bringing them back in is assisting with ban violation; a person bringing such an edit back in would be responsible only for actual disruptiveness in the edit, and, as well (3), I have normal freedom in my user space, to work on pages or process there, subject to normal limitations.

That should, in fact, address every arguably legitimate objection that has been raised to my "style." But I'm not holding my breath. --Abd (talk) 19:34, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Abd, I do plan to respond on this thread (I too prefer this threaded style of conversation) but it'll probably have to wait until the weekend as I am very busy this week. ATren (talk) 14:03, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

I read and enjoyed the exchange above. Sitting around a kitchen table discussing stuff sounds nice. However, I guess many people don't think of article talk pages as being like kitchen tables, but more like meeting rooms with efficient agendas and tired people hoping to get home soon. I expect you would respond to this, Abd, by pointing out that with a text medium, people can easily ignore comments they don't want to read. I have answers to that, and can go into it if you're interested. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 23:43, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Lucky guess. More than twenty years ago, I got pretty excited about the possibilities of on-line consensus process, because the old bugaboo of how much discussion it would take was -- I thought -- missing from the new form; people could, indeed, skip what was not interesting to them, which is much more difficult in face-to-face meetings.

The problem on Wikipedia is that article consensus process isn't layered. There is basically action with minimal explanation through article edits, and then discussion on one Talk page, one size fits all. So, yes, people could easily ignore what doesn't interest them ... but they don't want to.

Refactoring with collapse and archiving, etc., and summarization, would allow the single-page model to continue, but single-page is an artificial constraint. The actual article talk page should be reserved for a summary of consensus on a page, or documentation of remaining disputes, with reference, then, to actual "committee" pages where particular problems were solved. It would be more flexible for "committees" to form in WP space, under a relevant project, or even a special article project, because, then, the project page becomes a document summarizing the consensus, and the the consensus is worked out on the attached talk page. When consensus is found in a "committee," it's taken back to the article talk page and reported in summary form, before or accompanying edits to the article, if changes were agreed upon, and with reference to the committee page. Someone who disagrees can still oppose the edit ... but might, rather than edit warring, read the discussion that took place, at least the consensus summary part, and then comment and see if anyone else agrees. If those who participated were representative, though, there shouldn't be much opposition. Unless, of course, those who might have represented a faction were blocked or prevented from participating! Carcharoth's suggestions about FAQs are similar thinking; where I've seen article FAQs fail is where they were simply prepared by a dominant faction rather than as a matter of consensus. It should be possible to have 100% consensus on such a FAQ, because *all* points of view would be reported there. Undue weight isn't an issue on such a page; rather the goal would be complete coverage of all the issues that arise and cause conflict. --Abd (talk) 00:27, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

By the way, I'm sorry if my comment above was irritating to you. I guess you feel insulted by criticisms of the length of your posts. I guess it's a matter of different people having different expectations about how to use these newish electronic fora. The length of your posts doesn't bother me. You're right that software (or ways of organizing things within current software) should be able to make this moot. I'm not convinced that your theory ("they don't want to") is a correct, or the only, explanation for peoples' reactions, nor that saying so would tend to be perceived as respectful by the people so described. I could go on ... ☺Coppertwig (talk) 21:40, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

It's not merely software, Coppertwig. "Newish electronic fora"? I've seen the same basic problems with the earliest on-line fora, that's since roughly 1986 on The WELL. The problems also exist in face-to-face meetings, where someone going on at length is truly offensive. In the kind of structures I see as necessary to make Wikipedia viable in the long term, everything would be layered, and in-depth discussion would be underneath summaries underneath reviews of an entire topic.

There are situations where obligation to read exists, indeed. However, attacking a person because they write too much is, for me, beyond the pale, given how easy it is to refactor, ask for summary or clarification, or, indeed, ignore. The problem on Wikipedia is not too much communication, it is too little, dealing with specifics, and too much, overall, i.e., too much that is not narrowly contained and organized. Short communications work under certain conditions, not under others. If someone is checking in once a day, to create the necessary information transfer for a complex subject in a few days.... impossible unless the communications are lengthy or somehow well-organized in advance.

Bottom line, Coppertwig, the way Wikipedia is structured is abusive, too often, and it has become highly resistant to change. The present model is not sustainable, and it appears from the numbers that it is beginning to collapse. --Abd (talk) 02:04, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

When someone feels offended it's hard for them to understand the other's POV. I think this applies both to you, and to those who (I believe) feel offended when you continue to post long comments in places where you've been asked not to. Again, layers, links etc. can (I hope) solve this problem, though maybe not as easily as you think. (I'm supposed to be on wikibreak, too, by the way.) Perhaps Wikipedia is the worst system that's been devised except for all the other ones. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 15:13, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

The original of that is attributed to Winston Churchill, and it was about democracy. It's a profoundly cynical statement, and it made the assumption that democracy was a known and fixed thing. In fact, Churchill's experience of democracy was highly limited and constrained to highly centralized systems that have, from my perspective, poor communication between the center and the periphery, with good communication only happening near the center, and often in spite of the system. I.e., when legislators sit down and try to find consensus, instead of merely posturing for their constituents, democracy works. The only reason it doesn't collapse is that this seeking of consensus is probably the norm except for highly visible decisions. I'm afraid, Coppertwig, that I understand the objections all too well. There are aspects to them which are legitimate, but those are overwhelmed, in practice, by the illegitimate aspects. People who agree with the stands I've taken on various issues don't try to get me blocked for writing too much, they may object to it sometimes, largely for political reasons ("ineffective"), but don't want to exclude it and see me sanctioned. When it reaches the point of effort to exclude, it's not for length, that is only an excuse or a rationalization. It is that it is long and offensive (to them), not that it is offensive because it is long. Long posts may indeed be impolitic, i.e., may end up not being read and supported by others who might have supported the position were they short. But they don't create opposition, in themselves.

When was I originally banned? Not when I was writing the very long posts to Talk:Cold fusion, but when I started writing much less, but acting with actual article edits. It's obvious, Coppertwig.... As to those posts, I now have occasion to refer to them, certain critical issues were examined there which haven't been examined anywhere else, and I'm personally glad I didn't censor myself by turning it into pure polemic. OR? Sure, though the kind that is immediately and easily verified. Not to be used as source for article text, but fine as background for understanding the status of a field.

Look, I'm happy to be blocked, it really saves me a lot of trouble! It takes a lot of time to write those detailed posts, time that I can now spend more productively. --Abd (talk) 17:54, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

"Newish electronic fora", yes. People new to Wikipedia may not know how user talk pages are supposed to be used, for example, or may have different ideas about how they ought to be used. Not the same as fora where customs have been hammered out for years, decades, centuries or millenia. "Don't template the regulars" is one example of a custom that would be new to people who hadn't previously edited Wikipedia or something extremely similar.

I have the impression that you're making the assumption that people can't possibly be (or shouldn't be) offended by something that only takes up a few seconds of their time (each time). That's simply not true that they can't: I've often been offended or angered by things that take up a few seconds of my time. (Believe it or not.) Many of those are on the computer, but perhaps the best example is when I'm a pedestrian and a car goes first at an intersection where I have the right of way (unless I've specifically decided to wave them through).

All the best to you. I hope you're enjoying your wikibreak. I just got back from a wikibreak myself. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 14:15, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Been down so long...

...it looks like up to me. The following was copied from User:Abd/IP:

Ever since the Quick imbroglio, it's been an interesting wait for the arbitration decision. And...it was pretty much as anticipated, based on my own short time interacting with both you gentlemen.

User:William M. Connolley approached his duties as if he were in a MASH unit. Only he performed more like Frank Burns rather than Hawkeye Pierce. It was only a matter of time before his haste would damage his standing.

You, sir, were a stand-up guy in my situation. But...you tend to contribute a buck when your two cents would do.

I edit-warred somewhat sportingly and, due to my inexperience, couldn't comprehend that a "community" of procedure and people (other than User:William M. Connolley) would support a nincompoop (for a while).

I have no doubt you were wronged by the other party in your arbitration. But if your contributions in my situation were added up, a significant number of your assertions were not only inaccurate, but also came across as facts!

All in all, you're a good dude. Let pursuit of the facts channel your passion. Then you'll be OK!

162.6.97.3 (talk) 16:50, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. While I tend to write assertively, I don't believe I ever stated as fact my speculation about the identity of the party(s) supporting inclusion of sourced marital information at Becky Quick, nor was the speculation as to the motive of the other editor strongly involved represented as an established fact, there are other and sillier possibilities. The evidence for the other comment about RL identity, involving the new husband, was strong. The former were merely organizing thoughts, that made sense of behavior, but not intended as conclusive.

Sure, I wrote a great deal about the situation that was, perhaps, dicta. However, I also acted effectively and with minimal fuss with respect to the article. Those who don't seek consensus detest detailed discussion, for them, it's a waste of time. I've seen this for at least three times as long, on-line, as Wikipedia has been in existence. Face-to-face, the situation was previously worse, but there, at least, discussion takes up the time of those who are forced to sit through it at meetings. Where reading is voluntary, the idea that discussion is disruptive is, shall we say, interesting. It takes far longer to write than to read, and longer to read than to skim, and it takes even less time to skip based on lack of interest. Arbitrators are not required to read the evidence, though some of them do consider it a personal necessity, and these are the best, but even they will skim, and that's a necessity. If arbitrators are not required to read the evidence, how would one imagine that editors are required to read allegedly excessive discussion on Talk? Nah, it's a red herring. And too many are like hungry dolphins; they grab the herring and wolf it down, never thinking about the consequences for consensus.

Not my problem any more. --Abd (talk) 14:44, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

AfD nomination of Stephan Schulz

{{AfDM| page=Stephan Schulz|logdate=2009 December 10}}

I thought you might be interested in this vote. Vanity Pages for Admins really have no place on Wikipedia and it is high time to clear this detritus. ~ Rameses (talk) 11:15, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Abd may or may not respond to your note. He is, after all still blocked until the 13th. By the way, I have taken the liberty of slightly modifying your post. I hope you don't mind!<br. />--NBahn (talk) 11:35, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Apart from being canvassing (why me?), I'm not thrilled by AfDs filed by an editor as his or her first edit. It's funny, though. I'm an inclusionist, though, generally, and don't change that position based on "vanity." It's really irrelevant. By the way, I highly prefer Merge to Delete. It leaves the work in place in case later evidence pops up that expands notability. Delete is S T U P I D, unless it's pure garbage. It's a W I K I, after all. Were I to be interested in editing Wikipedia and participating in AfD's I might vote Merge with some of my old friends there, the ones who railed on and on until ArbComm decided I must indeed be a troublemaker if so many editors were upset with me.

I'm having more fun elsewhere. Some of you may read about it elsewhere, maybe even eventually on Wikipedia. --Abd (talk) 03:30, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Ping

I have sent you an e-mail. --Tenmei (talk) 17:03, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Greetings!

It is good to see you posting. Will you be spending time here after your ban is lifted? I am heading to bed now but ping me back here and let me know how it has been going. Thanks.

--GoRight (talk) 04:21, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Predicting the future is not my forte, except in very broad and impersonal outlines. I rather doubt I'll be doing much here. I'm topic banned as to cold fusion, which I've spent almost a year learning about ... and it was reading reliable sources (as well as stuff that researchers cite in peer-reviewed papers but which may be disallowed on Wikipedia) that brought me to the position that seems to have resulted in my ban. So the whole experience settled me into a view of Wikipedia that was possible from the outset, I was aware that it had been like this in places and at times. I already knew that to substantial segments of the core "cabal" -- as it was called from the beginning by Jimbo! -- I was unwelcome. ArbComm is far too aligned with that cabal, there are individual arbitrators who are independent, and they clearly find themselves outnumbered and outvoted, with little freedom. ArbComm makes good decisions on a good day, but it is entirely too much, as it has been put, "the Arbitrary Committee." That's what happens when you disavow precedent and place no value in it, when every situation is examined anew and highly personal considerations are applied, by people with little accountability. ArbComm decisions aren't predictable, which makes sense when a situation is new, but not when it has come up over and over!

All this means that ArbComm is very much part of the problem instead of part of the solution. Yet ArbComm itself seems to view itself as unsupported, beseiged, arbitrators have resigned at a hint of controversy instead of simply acknowledging error and moving on, meaning that some of the best have left. I do understand potential solutions to some of the problems, I detailed some of them during my case, and that very effort was viewed as part of the problem, I'm sure it looked to the Arbitration Bored as if this was some POV-pusher trying to make the system favor him. I was bending over backwards to avoid that.

All of this is understandable, given the system or lack of system. It was predictable, though not to a level of certainty. If I'd been certain, I'd not even have tried. Reading Wikipedia Review, there are many editors who have gone through the same wringer. Wikipedia cannot fulfill its mission until the community establishes process that actually resolves disputes instead of trying to bury them by banning people and, through that, effectively, positions. I was a Wikipedia editor, first of all, dedicated to NPOV and consensus as to the "sum of all human knowledge." I was following WP:RS and WP:NOTE and WP:DR, practically religiously. However, consensus requires that positions be asserted clearly until consensus is found. Restricting this without clear guidance on behavioral limits, as distinct from arbitrary post-facto and ad hoc rulings, is fatal to consensus. Consensus does not arise merely from AGF, and WP:AGF is the most violated guideline, though absolutely necessary as a practice. (i.e., "assume" means "appear to assume," "behave as if one assumes," otherwise AGF would be requiring naivete or even thought control).

ArbComm seems to assume that if N editors are upset with M editors, and if N >> M, then the least disruptive process is to ban the minority editors. It could look that way. It doesn't work, because sometimes the M editors are the ones following policy and the N editors are just following their own opinions on the topic, which are then justified by cherry-picking the sources, refusing to allow complete presentation of what is available in reliable source. As I wrote before, this problem is common with Majority POV-pushing, where the POV being pushed is held by most editors ab initio or by predilection. If Arbitrators don't understand this problem, then editors asserting what appears to be minority POV -- even if they are simply asserting what is in reliable sources, and seeking consensus -- can easily be seen as disruptive. Thus insisting on full dispute resolution process before coming to that conclusion about an editor would be important, the full process would document and reveal the problem.

Continuing to assert a position, seeking consensus through discussion, when faced with tag-team or even individual revert-warring, looks like tendentious editing to someone who does not take the time to understand the issues. If a minority editor follows WP:DR, it can be called "forum shopping." There was an active cold fusion mediation under way when I was banned from the page and talk, and that mediation was -- slowly -- making progress. It wasn't finished. ArbComm has essentially blown it out of the water, because, while there are other editors who understand some of the issues, I was the most broadly informed and the most able to collect the necessary arguments for neutral decisions to be made, and I'm now topic-banned for a year. It's difficult to see this as anything other than punitive, since I'd previously accepted an article page ban, was willing to accept reversion of even my Talk page material unless it was "seconded," in which case I'd still not participate in any edit warring over it, I was willing and even happy to accept a mentor who would have been able to advise me against being too wordy (which is the only issue of substance raised against my editing), but, underneath it all, in the proposed decisions in my case, the real issue can be seen: it was considered desirable to get me out of and away from WP dispute resolution process, where I'd been effective, with many examples, including your old RfC. It's hard to understand, apart from this, why some considered it desirable that I be banned from "intervening in any dispute" where I was not a "primary party." What behavior of mine would have been prevented by this?

I can only think of some examples where I'd successfully raised issues of administrative error or abuse. I pointed out that an administrator had improperly blacklisted sites where he was in personal dispute with the site owners and had clear content involvement, and ArbComm accepted this position. I was improperly banned by an administrator from cold fusion, an administrator who had a long history of involved blocks. When it appeared that this ban was no longer enforceable by the admin, I announced my intention to ignore it, and when I edited the article a day later, I was blocked by the admin, during the case, where he and I were primary parties. It was blatantly inappropriate, and he almost lost his bit immediately. But he didn't. Nevertheless, when he showed no understanding at all of the problem, he did lose his bit as part of that decision. And that ban was the basis for my filing the case in the first case (and my case became complicated only because of a piling in of editors who were, as I showed, highly involved mutually). In other words, I was confirmed. So ... what exactly justified the restrictions?

In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I must assume that it was successfully arguing against a substantial group of editors, perhaps two dozen, including a few administrators (at the time, at least two are no longer administrators), who really didn't like that. Add to that, then and now, showing that arbitrators had accepted and presented preposterous evidence, evidence that contradicted their own prior decisions, literally. Some people really don't like it when their ignorance and errors are exposed, and if they have power, they tend to use it to discourage such. I am not the first person to notice all this.

Some Arbitrators are not restrained, and the others are obviously unwilling to confront this, perhaps in the name of "unity." But this is a false unity. A real unity would be based on real consensus, not suppression of differences in the name of not making waves. There *must* be process for raising and resolving issues, and it needs to be much simpler and more accessible than what is in place, which is largely unmanageable even by very experienced editors. And this is just one of many problems that flow out of the lack of structure for resolving disputes. The DR guidelines are pretty good, but without structure and respect for the process -- which can be tedious -- it's useless.

ArbComm insists upon others following dispute resolution process, but ArbComm itself doesn't know how to resolve disputes. Rather, it makes majority-rule decisions, often without a clear basis, hence those impacted by the decisions frequently don't respect them. And the general assumption seems to be that those negatively impacted by a decision would, of course, not respect it. That is a sign that knowledge of and reliance upon consensus process is missing. It is not inevitable that people adversely affected, in some way, by a decision, will not respect it. People who have worked with parliamentary procedure, standard deliberative decision-making process, have learned that you win votes and lose votes, and that taking it personally is silly, and that the right of the majority to make decisions is worthy of respect. However, standard process provides that it takes a supermajority to close debate, to determine that continued discussion toward the end of finding solutions that enjoy broader support than a mere majority -- which are essential for decisions to be broadly respected, if there is serious conflict involved -- and ArbComm has not adopted standard process, which has stood the test of centuries. It is running a far more ad hoc and ochlocratic process without the protections that make majority rule tolerable.

(As one considered expert on voting systems and election science, I often have a dispute with people who dislike majority rule, who favor, on one side, consensus decision-making, and, on the other, social utility maximization using aggregational methods like Range voting. My conclusion from long experience with both majority rule (standard deliberative process, i.e., Robert's Rules of Order or the like) and consensus process is that:

1. A consensus requirement favors the status quo, which then gives oligarchies that naturally form too much power. "Consensus" then becomes, when the status quo favors a minority, and in effect, minority rule, which is clearly undesirable.
2. The majority has the right of decision (assuming they are peers.)
3. It wisely exercises that right with caution and respect for the rights of minorities on any issue.
4. If one is involved in a society where the majority isn't wise and is willing to suppress minority views and disallow minorities the opportunity to fully present their case (which is required under standard deliberative process, through many traditional mechanisms), leave if you can, for the situation is hopeless unless outside intervention comes. Even if you are in the majority now, your turn will come.
5. If the majority is wise but asleep, be aware that waking up the majority can be very difficult, and some don't like to be awakened and will lash out at anyone who disturbs their comfortable nap. If you are making noise, you are the problem, for these. This is quite natural, and solutions involve setting up process for nondisruptive consideration of minority opinion, so that disputes can be resolved without a huge fuss, unless it comes to the point that a huge fuss is truly necessary. Usually it is not, if direct process is adequate. [[WP:DR] is designed to work, probably with this in mind. And it is widely ignored, and ArbComm frequently fails to notice this.

I wrote more, but it could be interpreted as violating my editing restrictions, something which didn't occur to me until I was ready to save it. I will clarify this before proceeding. If I'm going to violate editing restrictions, I don't want it to be over something as stupid as not understanding them.... Thanks for your interest, GoRight. I do appreciate all you did, trying to stave off the tide of insanity, I will not forget it.

Does ArbComm imagine that its non-evidenced decisions will be convincing? It seems to have some tendency to punish those who are not contrite; for someone to be contrite they must understand that they did something wrong. Thus it's important to at least attempt to convince ostensible offenders with evidence, and in a sane system, your friends would help convince you. You are not going to be convinced by an arbitrator presenting, without explanation, undigested and highly biased or even false or misleading evidence presented by someone, a party to the case, who had been attempting to get you banned for months, and who was himself violating policies and guidelines and disregarding Arbitration Committee rulings on the relevant topic, and who edit warred during the case over Talk page content. What would we call someone who imagined that this would work?

Except, of course, they don't care if they don't establish the basis for a ruling, it is of no substantial consequence. --Abd (talk) 20:41, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Climate change arbitration statement removed

Hello Abd. I've removed your arbitration statement about climate change because you're under a restriction which stops you commenting on disputes you're not involved in and you're clearly not involved in this one as far as arbitration is concerned. I'm not going to issue a block, but please refrain from doing so in the future. Ryan Postlethwaite^{See the mess I've created or let's have banter} 01:28, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

That's your privilege, Ryan. Thanks. I disagree. I'm very involved, with the specific dispute, just not as a named party. I assume that some arbitrators will see the statement if they want to, others won't care, and, in fact, neither do I, I've done my duty by testifying, I have no investment in any outcome, I believe that I discharged my responsibility by posting the comment. If arbitrators want to consider it, they may, and if they don't, they won't.

It's odd that Rlevse thought the claim of involvement was post hoc, when, in fact, this is quite what the statement itself was saying. Just goes to show. --Abd (talk) 01:40, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Contravention of editing restrictions

If you do not wish to be blocked, you should probably remove your contribution to the present RfAr which is in direct contravention of your editing restrictions here. Here is a reminder of what they say in case you have forgotten:

Abd is prohibited from participating in discussion of any dispute in which he is not one of the originating parties, unless approved by his mentor(s). This includes, but is not limited to, article talk and user talk pages, the administrator noticeboards, and any formal or informal dispute resolution. He would be allowed to vote or comment at polls.

Mathsci (talk) 00:10, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Well, I'll leave it to an arbitrator to make that call, or possibly a clerk. I was indeed aware of that restriction, but there are two problems with it. First, I don't have a mentor, formally, that remedy was written when a mentorship proposal was on the table. However, I do have informal mentors and I can and will ask. I don't expect that they will disapprove. But, second, I am already involved in the topic. Very involved, just not at the article itself, recently. I've been thinking of asking ArbComm to clarify the purpose of the remedy, so that it's easier to interpret. It wasn't based on any findings of fact, which makes interpretation difficult. I.e., had it been based on a finding of fact, there would be, then, some example of a violation to avoid repeating!

Thanks for the friendly warning. No, I didn't forget. My conclusion was that it didn't apply to this specific case, before ArbComm. While the remedy is explicitly general, had ArbComm intended to prevent me from commenting when I was already involved, as I am, it could have been more specific, and perhaps, if someone files an AE case, it will be. I have no intention of defying ArbComm. And, ultimately, I don't think that my comment there was disruptive in any way. Do you think that it was? I'm very much not calling for anyone to be sanctioned, I would merely want, as do others, ArbComm to clarify the situation, sanctions would be down the road and only if editors or administrators persist in improper behavior. --Abd (talk) 00:28, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

(ec) It might be an idea to clarify this with the arbitrators by email. A reasonable interpretation of "formal and informal dispute resolution" would probably include ArbCom cases concerning areas in which you have not previously been involved, like climate change. Mathsci (talk) 00:39, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

It might be a good idea, and it might be a bad one. Asking useless questions is disruptive, at least mildly so. I'm not going to bother an arbitrator with this, their time is precious. However, it appears you didn't read my response. I'm involved in the dispute, across the family of climate change articles, it began with my assistance in certifying Wikipedia:Requests for comment/GoRight and the research I did for that RfC, which shocked me. And I reported it. --Abd (talk) 00:51, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for this reply. Any further statements by you should now be made at WP:AE. Mathsci (talk) 00:59, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

If I recall there was discussion at the time of my possibly being your mentor, Abd. Until you have a more formal arrangement in place, should you even require one, I hereby agree to fill that role and approve your participation in this important case. --GoRight (talk) 00:33, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

(ec with below):Well, I was actually going to your Talk page to request this, when I got the messages notice, so, thanks. I will accept and respect your mentorship, pending a more formal appointment of mentor. If ArbComm wants to specify "mentor" more specifically, it is welcome to do so. Heh! Perhaps you recall who else openly offered to be my mentor. I don't intend to make trouble for you, beyond an occasional tome dropped in your email inbox, it shouldn't take you more than a day or two to read. Okay?

Seriously, I'm not planning on being particularly active, many of my interests having been banned by ArbComm, and being insanely busy off-wiki But here, with that interesting filing, I have special experience to report, and so I did. --Abd (talk) 00:47, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

It's highly dubious with your very weak editing record that ArbCom would you approve as a mentor. What you have written appears to be trolling. Mathsci (talk) 00:41, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Dubious or not, what does Arbcom approval have to do with anything? That provision was never passed. Why would you consider a conversation between myself and my mentee to be trolling? You do know what that word means, write? (You can reply on my talk page if you like since you seem to be no longer welcome here.) --GoRight (talk) 01:53, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Mathsci, this is my Talk page, you have insulted my guest. Go away, you are not welcome here now, further posts here will be considered disruptive and reported as such. It didn't even occur to me to ban you like this until you made that gratuitous comment. However, if you wish to respond to this, you may do so on your own Talk page, dropping a link here with no disruptive comment, and I'll read it. --Abd (talk) 00:47, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Long, painful experience teaches that this needs to be nipped in the bud. See Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement#Abd. You may remove this notification if you like. MastCell ^Talk 00:49, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Nah, let it stand in all its dubious glory. MastCell, this was over, I believe. But suit yourself, I believe I'm done here. As I wrote at the AE page, no disruption was intended, and any editor who considers my original comment in the RfAr to be disruptive may remove it, on the theory that it would be the post of a banned editor. And then another editor, not banned, may reinstate it if desired, on personal responsibility of relevance, and perhaps a clerk or arbitrator might choose to take an interest. I'm taking the minimally disruptive course consistent with my obligation to testify in a case where I am, in fact, involved. Very involved.

If I am blocked over that statement before ArbComm, which would seem to me silly, I will not request unblock unless so advised by my mentor. I'll let the community decide what to do without my advice. Which may be absolutely nothing, often that's what the community does. This tempest in a teapot reminds me of why I'm generally avoiding editing Wikipedia. --Abd (talk) 01:10, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Abd, I suggest you avoid the arbcom pages, because it's bound to cause more drama. But if you like, feel free to keep evidence in your user directory, and if I see something that I believe can be used as evidence, I will incorporate it into my evidence. ATren (talk) 16:41, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, ATren. Your intentions are appreciated. However, the remedy in question prohibits me from intervening in any way, which is part of what is so problematic about it. I can, of course, email wikitext to be placed by someone else on a user page at their personal discretion. It appears that the only intervention prohibited is on-wiki. But the meaning and interpretation of that ban is quite unclear to me. I can see, among the comments of various editors, quite contradictory interpretations (all leading to 'Abd, don't participate,' but on quite different theories. "Named party," for example, cited by some, isn't a part of the restriction, and given that the restriction is general, the reference to "originating parties" must refer to a party involved in a dispute, since many DR processes don't have literal named parties.

Suppose I'm editing an article, perhaps I take a break for a while. I come back, and find that an RfAr has been filed over this article, over issues with which I'm intimately familiar. Is commenting in such a case prohibited by the remedy?

Maybe. But that's why there is the mentor exception. If my mentor permits it. Now, may I correctly anticipate the response of a mentor, i.e., if I make a non-disruptive edit, someone complains -- not about the edit itself, but that I was the one to make it -- and the mentor then comments that it's permitted. The substance here is compliance.

Am I required to get ArbComm approval for my mentor? That was proposed and rejected! I'll let the cat out of the bag, though it was already out for anyone who has paid attention to my case. Fritzpoll offered to mentor me. I'm not about secrecy and concealment, though I will exercise discretion. My guess is that Fritzpoll would recuse in any case involving me centrally. So I suppose I might as well ask him and we can confirm it. I'm tired of all the wikilawyering, though. The debate over my statement was almost all about the technicality, not the substance of it. And then I'm accused of wikilawyering! The objection to the statement was pure wikilawyering, and argument for technical non-compliance, based on unclear "legality," and not at all on the actual edit. There is long tradition for lack of response to technical ban violations that aren't substantial.

The point of bans is to simplify and avoid disruption. In this case, a narrow interpretation of the ban caused way, way more disruption than the supposed violation itself could possibly have caused. The initial intervention, the complaint, was by an editor who clearly has an agenda with respect to me, already admonished for incivility, but who is not, himself, involved in the subject case.

Atren, you are correct. My comments will be disruptive, no matter how clear, civil, to-the-point, and relevant they are. But the disruption is coming from a set of highly disruptive editors, disruptive long-term, causing massive and ongoing disruption. And you know it, and it appears from the comments in the RfAr, the community is finally crystallizing its knowledge of this and coming out of the closet with it. The "clique" -- these are the same set of editors I called a "cabal" in my case, making no charge at all of secret collaboration, because the collaboration was quite open, not hidden -- has long wikilawyered and disrupted and obfuscated the situation, and I began to expose that with my evidence in RfC/GoRight. Truth will out. But it comes out faster if those with knowledge are at least allowed to comment! And those who are dependent upon the collective inattention of the community will do everything they can to prevent this, when they can find an excuse.

The irony here is that WMC is probably one of the more reasonable of these editors, he actually did, when I worked on Global warming, support reasonable compromises. That was then, I'm not sure about now. But he clearly supported the ownership of the article by his faction, and he was explicit about this on his Talk page, I presented that evidence in my case. Unfortunately, it was, like much, ignored, in favor of a simplistic interpretation: if many editors are upset with Abd, it must be true that Abd is disruptive. If we ban Abd, maybe the problem will go away. Well, four months later, the problem hasn't gone away, and it is now a public scandal once again. It's about time that Wikipedia discriminate between useless and obfuscatory disruption, pure time-wasting, and necessary disruption caused by confronting problems.

I'm not trying to get anyone banned or desysopped, I simply want ArbComm to make a clear stand for neutrality policy and the processes that are necessary to support it.

Thanks for commenting. --Abd (talk) 17:08, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Ban violations continue

I cut this from ANI:

::(ec with below) Speak of the devil. I'm guessing if I'm going to be accused of wikilawyering, I get to respond. Was this wikilawyering? Or was it an attempt to testify before the Committee on a matter where I'd been involved? I do plan to ask the Committee to clear up the confusion, mine or others or both. --Abd (talk) 14:03, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Your terms above are clear - you're not allowed to participate unless you're an originating party. Merely being mentionned doesn't permit you to comment. Repeated violation of this will get you blocked William M. Connolley (talk) 18:01, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

The facts of this matter, as to the precise interpretation of my ban, will be determined, quite likely, by ArbComm, either on-wiki, or, better, by email, so that disruption to the community is minimized.

The mention of me on AN was disruptive and unnecessary. But if you are going to accuse me of an offense, I have the right to respond, for this would establish a dispute in which I'm involved. The interpretation that I'm prohibited when brought into a case by a party is pure wikilawyering, practically by definition.

Go away, WMC, do not post to my Talk page unless it is a sincere attempt to resolve a dispute instead of to inflame one. Your comment here is disruptive and provocative, and you should know that. Stop it, or you will be blocked. Be aware of something: if I'm blocked, that can create a dispute where I'm a clear party, it would provide me with the right to take the matter to ArbComm, without any doubt, so, my advice to any admin considering blocking me over technical details: make sure you are neutral, and that you are protecting the wiki. If you are careful about this, you will be safe, even if you should err.

Note that I would not raise an on-wiki protest over a short block, because this would do little damage to the project. But others might.

The flap over the RfAr statement is probably passing. That flap itself was a police riot, creating far more disruption than simply leaving the comment, or, alternatively, removing it on an interpretation that it was a ban violation. If permitted by ArbComm or an approved mentor, I will probably submit evidence in the case. This was a tempest in a teapot, over a purely technical detail of ban interpretation, in my opinion, not over actual disruption through the statement edit itself. If it had been left alone, what damage would have been done? Surely if my intention is to push the edge, there will be more incidents and a clearer approach to the edge, without provocation like yours. But responding to a scurrilous allegation isn't pushing an edge; my involvement at AN was created by that comment of yours. If you disagree, try to find a neutral editor to approach me. I'll respond. Or take it to AE, if you think the comment was also a violation. It really doesn't matter to me, except that unnecessary AE reports waste a lot of community time. Think about the project, WMC, and act accordingly, wise up. We might even end up working together. --Abd (talk) 18:41, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Mentor

Happy new year, and welcome back. Do you think you could persuade Durova to be your mentor? She seems to be good at that stuff. Best of luck putting the past behind you. Guy (Help!) 14:46, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Sure. Thanks. But did you read her comment? She's right. ArbComm is making mentorship impossible, or, more accurately, mentorship that will work. Thanks, Guy, but ... I like my past, I keep it in front of me. Good luck yourself, don't take any wooden nickels, and you might consider avoiding expressing strong opinions on topics where backsides and holes in the ground are difficult to distinguish, such as emerging sciences that require noticing a thousand peer-reviewed journal articles, recognition in a mainstream scientific encyclopedia, increasing governmental support, and the total disappearance of serious published expert criticism, to Get a Clue. --Abd (talk) 19:49, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

Revision of your editing restrictions

As you may know, they have been revised and 3.2 now reads "Abd is indefinitely prohibited from discussing any dispute in which he is not an originating party. This includes, but is not limited to, article talk and user talk pages, the administrator noticeboards, and any formal or informal dispute resolution pages. He may, however, vote or comment at polls." Dougweller (talk) 16:19, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. I asked for quite a bit more clarification than that. Oh, well. I'll have to ask again by email. For the future, pending, should I find that IAR requires me to comment somewhere, perhaps I'll file an ArbComm case as an originating party, instead of messing around with minor comments as an unwanted "meddler." Or, alternatively, simply start editing in the problem area, no "disputes" for me, no sirree.... Why discuss disputes anyway? Why not just investigate and support what needs support on articles themselves? Can't lick 'em, join 'em!

I thank ArbComm for improving my efficiency, so that I'm now wasting far less time. It's been quite useful. Truly. I'm also grateful to the Community for going ahead and fixing stuff I'd noticed and commented on without my participation, examples are legion. At least it's been without my on-wiki participation. I may be behind, directly or through various forms of meat puppetry, many improvements to wiki process for the last few months. Some of my meat puppets are totally unaware of it, others may know. Happy New Year, and thanks for the notice. And thanks to the many editors who have made themselves useful to the project.

Wikipedia Rule Number One: If a rule prevents you from improving the project, ignore it.

Abd's Corollary to Rule Number One: If you haven't been blocked yet, you aren't trying hard enough to improve the project.

(The Corollary was written before I was ever seriously blocked, and is why I wrote to Iridescent, when I was actually indeffed, "You don't know how happy you have made me." One might notice the outcome of all this: the warning administrator in that situation was Jehochman, who became a close wiki-friend. I cited Iridescent many times as an example of good administrator behavior. I was blocked for supposedly attacking Fritzpoll, who also became a good wikifriend, granted me Rollback, and who has apparently been prevented by ArbComm from becoming my formal mentor; it appears that ArbComm now is attempting to control and coerce its own members, not just the great unwashed. Sometimes it has to get worse before it can get better.) --Abd (talk) 20:07, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

Tylman AfD

Hi Abd, I noticed that your comment here. Previously you have said said that you have joined the WP:EEML, and another member has confirmed this. Was this AfD brought up on the mailing list, and if so, what was said about it? Offliner (talk) 01:49, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Offliner, it is my policy not to reveal private email content without the permission of the author, and it would have been better if Wikipedia and ArbComm had followed this policy strictly with respect to the EEML, using illicit evidence only as a clue privately followed to discover actual on-wiki abuse, but never to establish or prove such abuse. Mailing list mail is not fully private, but does carry with it an expectation of privacy which should be respected, unless a list has been announced as open.

I will acknowledge being a member of the EEML list, but I cannot respond to your question otherwise. I will state, however, that the opinion I gave in my AfD comment was my own opinion, based on review of the evidence and principles involved, and the comments in the 2nd AfD, which I did follow though I was blocked at the time, and it's up to the closer to determine the outcome, based, not on the numbers of votes, but on the cogency of arguments, and closes that are based on numbers of votes are defective, in my opinion. Canvassing should actually be irrelevant unless it creates so many !votes that it becomes impossible to read the damn thing.

Now, my questions for you. Are you planning to harass anyone who interferes with your agenda, or is this just a coincidence? If you want to know what goes on with the list, why don't you ask to join? At the very least, it might cause some smiles, but, at best, it might do much more good than that. If you don't know how to ask, ask me for assistance and I'll make the suggestion for you. I do not know what the response will be. --Abd (talk) 02:35, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

I'm sorry if my post sounded offensive, as this was not my intention. I was simply being curious, but probably should have worded my post in another way. It is not my intention to harass anyone. I understand that you cannot answer my question for privacy reasons, and I also understand that simply discussing the AfD on the list may not be inapproriate and may not be canvassing. As for the article itself, I don't feel too strongly about it and I have nothing against keeping it if this is indeed the consensus. But, you've got to admit, that an article about Poeticbent, written by Poeticbent and defended by several editos with whom Poeticbent is having discussions with on the mailing list, is curious and interesting, even though there is no evidence that foul play is involved. I can honestly imagine that the discussion about the article on the mailing list is being innocent and maybe has a casual or humorous tone. Anyway, let's not start thinking of each other as "opponents", as I don't have anything against you personally. I wish you luck in whatever you are doing and I apologize for my post and I will try to avoid offensive tone in the future. Offliner (talk) 02:56, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

No problem, Offliner, no harm done. I'll strike out the comment in the AfD about this. Good luck. Uh, what about the suggestion that you ask to join the EEML? Are you declining my offer to assist with that? No harm in being explicit, is there? --Abd (talk) 03:03, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

I might be interested in joining (out of curiousity) if you can first assure me that there is nothing suspicious going on on the list, as I'd never want to be affiliated with a similar group like the old EEML was. In other words, the first post I see should *not* be good old Poeticbent asking other members to rescue his article ;) Anyway, I suppose the new EEML is quite quiet now as many members have indicated that they have left. Offliner (talk) 03:12, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

The list is a collection of editors of varying conditions. People are open about their positions, I think I can say that. I haven't seen anything "suspicious," as such. To my recollection, the editor you mention isn't a participant on the list and longer. But what if he did rejoin and asked for that? How would this in any way harm you? Do you imagine that you would be somehow poisoned by the information? You know, because this comment appeared here, it's likely that Mathsci went to that AfD and voted Delete. If not, it would be quite a coincidence in a series of such. There are a number of hostile editors who watch my Talk pages and show up to present something in opposition. And it's all silly. WP:CANVASS is, as it has been interpreted, one of the stupidest guidelines. We should encourage informed comment, and, supposedly we don't vote, eh? So why would anyone imagine that canvassing does harm other than by, in the extreme, creating a pile of votes that supposedly don't count. Ah, but votes do count to some closing admins, who don't do their own investigation. And that is the problem. Same problem as with arbitrators who don't investigate for themselves, but act like "judges" in the American system who depend on combatants to organize the arguments and information for them, and then they decide which gladiator they like the most. It's a breakdown of what made WP process work, independent judgment. If it were operating, if, indeed, we didn't vote, canvassing would be irrelevant or at most irritating and stupid. At best, however, it would consist of inviting people with knowledge of a subject to comment on it. Is there something wrong with that? In any case, Offliner, I offered to assist you with a request to join the EEML. I have reasons to think they might accept and reasons to think they might not. I'll say this much: most of them are reasonable people, and thoughtful. Some aren't. Human beings, they are. Your call. --Abd (talk) 14:38, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Hello, Abd. I think you are right about WP:CANVASS. Yes, we should encourage the informed comment and do not punish people for doing this, no matter how they inform each other. That's why the sanctions were wrong. As about private mailing lists, one should be always ready that all his presumably private comments will be publicly posted by hostile members of the same list or by someone else who intercepts emails. Are you ready? I am not and therefore will never be involved in such lists. Indeed, this list made more harm than good, and this is just a matter of fact. Rephrasing one philosopher, if the list did not exist, it had to be invented. Indeed, one user at ruwiki created a similar list only to report himself all other unsuspecting members to ruwiki administration. Biophys (talk) 16:43, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

In a sense, that's really cool! In another, it's a horrific abuse of trust. When ArbComm was handed the archive of the EEML, it should have done nothing but note it, until someone filed a case alleging misbehavior, and the behavior alleged should have been based solely on on-wiki evidence, and off-wiki evidence should not have been allowed at all, not to mention evidence the disclosure of which was probably illegal. If there is on-wiki disruption, it's all clear and easily documented, and if it can't be, there was no disruption, even if the editors promised each other on blood oaths, privately, when they were drunk, to absolutely destroy the place.

So on ru.wiki, the revelation of some possible involvement could cause an admin to look more closely at the actual on-wiki situation. Flapping our lips outside should be completely irrelevant. But ArbComm, way too often, has taken a different position, in fact, and has sanctioned an editor, as an example, for writing an opinion piece in an outside publication about how great Wikipedia was, how the editor had been effective in moving an article toward neutrality and compliance with its RS guidelines. Aha! WP:BATTLE violation by an WP:SPA! Topic ban! Even though the editor had not violated behavioral guidelines in any way as seriously as was routine for the other side of the dispute (and which behavior, of course, continued). It was his alleged thinking that was considered reprehensible. And, of course, his POV, and, sure enough, the decision was used by admins to sanction or attempt to sanction other editors, based purely on their POV. That's the mess we have, and this isn't uncommon at all, it is practically routine, which is why my editing has slowed to a serious crawl. --Abd (talk) 18:00, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict with above being modified by Biophys) I've always been quite open as to what I'm about. Not always here on WP itself, because of rules and conditions, but on Wikipedia Review, lately, or in private mail. Yes, we should consider that whatever we say can become publicly known, within limits. However, private mailing lists are, in my view, part of the solution to the WP governance problem, because they can allow people to internally negotiate a factional consensus without flak. The WP oligarchy doesn't want to allow factional consensus to develop, but, of course, it does anyway, with or without explicit process. So by prohibiting factional consensus process, it prohibits factions from acting coherently and on an even playing field. Such structures as the EEML scare the hell out of those who are trying to stop the tide by finding and sticking their fingers in the holes that keep popping through. But, in fact, intelligent factions will restrain their own members. Instead of banning EEML members by placing the most negative possible ABF construction on what they were doing, ArbComm should have recognized that these editors were working for what they saw as WP policy -- and, generally, from what I've seen, they were correct. But the very fact that they cooperated was seen as conspiratorial and harmful. Think about it: cooperation is harmful. Eh? By focusing on "secret conspiracy" instead of on-wiki behavior, actual effect on the project, ArbComm has attempted to enforce and continue a highly defective understanding of how Wikipedia works and could work. And, at the same time, it ignores blatant harmful cooperation, simply because there is no evidence of "improper collaboration." If a mob beats me up, does it matter if they agreed beforehand to do so, or just spontaneously cooperated because they were watching the same spot, the spot I happened to stumble across. The articles that they own.

Factional consensus then allows representatives of factions to negotiate and find deep consensus that will stick without anything other than natural enforcement, and such hard-won consensus -- it's work! -- will be defended by the participants, who will deal with their own offenders, which will be much more effective than enforcement by either involved administrators -- subtle involvement arises rather easily, all you have to do is be an admin and dislike a user or POV, and act accordingly -- or uninvolved but clueless administrators, which is almost as bad. Thanks, Biophys, sorry about the sanctions, but, hey, I know what it's like to be doing your darndest to help a project, seeking neutrality and consensus, and it spits you out because the powerful are too lazy or too overworked to actually understand what's going on.

And, by the way, an alternate interpretation is that ArbComm does understand, but doesn't know how to explain that understanding, or doesn't care enough to do so. People are free, editors are free, and have no intrinsic moral obligation to follow ArbComm decisions, and if ArbComm doesn't respect that, it will continually be perplexed as editors become disruptive when sanctioned with sanctions that were not negotiated with them, that were merely imposed. Nobody likes to be bullied, and some fight back. I'm a parent, seven kids, five of which are grown, and I have five grandchildren. ArbComm is like a very dysfunctional parent who imagines that the kids will simply do what they say. (Too often, it's minus the caring part, a dysfunctional parent will still care about the kids). The approach that the ArbComm majority has long been taking is known to fail, it doesn't create order and discipline, it creates rebellion and chaos. More and more, ArbComm is becoming explicitly punitive.

ArbComm should be both the last opportunity for dispute resolution and a decider of specifics as to behavior. But it should always work on dispute resolution first, which doesn't mean deciding outcomes, it means encouraging -- or even demanding -- that the parties come to agreement, in a supervised and mandatory process (mandatory in the sense that absent cooperation, an editor may remain under injunction to prevent disruption), with preliminary injunctions issued as needed, it will see what it needs to see, should it then need to make specific decisions or impose sanctions. What I see instead, again and again, is ArbComm simply imposing its opinion, often formed without independent investigation and careful deliberation, effectively becoming a party to the dispute by agreeing with one side, and when it does this, it frequently ignores outrageous misbehavior, taking place in the ArbComm process itself, highly visible, and then it sanctions the side it dislikes, for the most part, which implies blaming a party for misbehavior of another party. ("If we get rid of party A, party B who has been made very angry by A, will settle down and return to normal usefulness for the project." Naive. You do not know who is causing disruption unless you seriously attempt to resolve the dispute through consensus process. Appearances can be deceiving.) --Abd (talk) 17:59, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

← I can't say I'm especially familiar with the WP:EEML case, but... my understanding is that the editors in question engaged in behaviors that were directly disruptive, including coordinating to circumvent 3RR and targeting specific opponents for vexatious litigation and baiting. Those behaviors were cited by ArbCom, who had reviewed the emails. They're poor form in and of themselves, but when off-wiki coordination of such behavior is apparent, then it seems reasonable to treat it as an aggravating factor. The problem wasn't that they cooperated per se, but that they cooperated to undermine other editors and the site's behavioral standards.

As an experiment in critical thought, suppose it became clear that a group of editors was coordinating off-wiki to combat what they saw as excessively promotional "fringe" content on Wikipedia (cold fusion, global-warming skepticism, etc). Let's say they're working from their understanding of Wikipedia policy - after all, it brings this site into disrepute and undermines its goal of becoming a serious, respectable reference work when it extends excessive credulity to minoritarian or tiny-fringe viewpoints. And let's say these editors operated by coordinating around 3RR and by targeting "problem" editors for baiting and vexatious litigation.

Would you dismiss such coordination as merely a way to "internally negotiate a factional consensus without flak"? Would you defend their actions as "part of the solution to the WP governance problem"? Would you refrain from "placing the most negative possible ABF construction on what they were doing"? MastCell ^Talk 18:34, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Your "understanding" isn't accurate, MastCell. I did not review all the evidence in the case, only the early evidence presented by an arbitrator, and it was inadequate to establish on-wiki disruption. It was even cherry-picked, i.e., a comment from Piotrus was quoted that looked bad, but then what was further down in the same email completely contradicted the impression that the cherry-picked quote presented. The problem you cite, MastCell, confuses the development of a group consensus -- which generally wasn't complete with EEML, there are and were various POVs represented on the list, and quite varying degrees of possible disruptiveness -- with reprehensible attempt to inflict that consensus on the wiki without negotiation with the broader community. Generally, it's impossible to tell if there is off-wiki coordination, and there certainly is, often involving editors of high reputation. Enforcement of policy has unfortunately been based on such a thing as the equivalent of someone concealing a tape recorder in a bar visited by two editors, and then revealing the conversation they have as proof of "coordination," when they may have only been blowing off steam or fantasizing or blustering. Allowing this evidence, then, rewards snooping and hacking and the "team" with the greatest skill in this regard. I don't know about this specific case, but in some cases, governmental-level assistance may be available to a faction, consider that, please.

I saw Piotrus, in the case, accused of improper use of tools for an action which was relatively harmless (temporary semiprotection to deal with obvious tag-team editing from IP and SPAs), and which was confirmed by practically immediate full protection by a completely uninvolved admin. The problem? He learned about the situation on the mailing list, he took a look at it, and took a moderate action. Should he have refrained? Yes, and I think he acknowledged that. But, MastCell, I see worse, much worse, all the time. Basically, as an admin, he jaywalked, it was a technical violation and not a violation in substance. And violations in substance are happening all the time, often in full view of ArbComm, if it paid attention to what happens in its own process.

Further, you are seriously incorrect to confuse my elucidation of principles with the specific case. I'm not allowed to intervene in the EEML situation, per se, except to vote in polls, unless somehow I become an "originating party," and I'm not planning on testing the limits of that freedom. On the substance of what you wrote, again, I saw, recently, the wiki come into serious disrepute through the actions of a faction of editors who routinely cooperate. Do they have off-wiki means of communicating? Individually, I'm sure, and I've seen evidence of emails, but a list? No evidence. But, MastCell, list cooperation when there are a few responsible editors involved -- and Piotrus was responsible, he believed in wikipedia process and was published, under peer-review I believe, as a sociologist, with a naive view of how well the process worked -- is less dangerous than individual collaboration, the latter can be just as damaging, as can cooperation simply through shared POV and watchlist targets.

Hey, MastCell, do we have a dispute here? --Abd (talk) 19:00, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Re to MastCell: Four editors in the list were seriously sanctioned exclusively for canvassing - according to the Fofs. They where not guilty of anything else. As about the group of editors you imagined, this is known as editorial board. But they do not need to use baiting and litigation. Biophys (talk) 19:06, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, I'd have investigated the evidence mentioned and come up with a report, which I would drop in the appropriate place. Because I did this with as much neutrality as I could muster, and with thoroughness, it was often effective at helping the community come up with better results. But I was blocked during the EEML case, for the most part, and now, because of the MYOB sanction, I cannot intervene except under certain narrow circumstances. Perhaps I'll do it anyway and put it up on Wikipedia Review, or perhaps not. It's really a pain in the ass to do that work, and it isn't wanted, quite apparently, for reasons I must guess, because they haven't been made explicit. But if someone else wants to do it, I'd assist, that's a lot easier. Off-wiki, please, until it's done and some editor here, not under and ban, takes responsibility for reviewing it and providing it. --Abd (talk) 19:15, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, Abd, I did not know about your unusual editing restriction. You must be a really strong polemist. Please do not comment anywhere on the EEML case. This is last thing you and others need.Biophys (talk) 19:42, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your kind advice, Biophys. I'm not gratuitously commenting, but only either doing what my restrictions allow or responding to others who involve me in disputes in some way. That is likewise allowed, it appears. Actually, I'm lousy at polemic, polemic generally needs to be concise to be effective. I comment, that's all, or present evidence, and I was indeed quite effective at it, within certain limits. Not all editors like this kind of deeper reflection and report. Some do.

Don't worry about me, I'm not attached to anything other than honesty, and it's up to Wikipedia if it wants my participation. What happened today was simply that I commented in an AfD, not on the EEML case, and then all these people piled in to bring up EEML or related issues.... it was just a damn AfD! -- and the few editors making a fuss definitely have axes to grind and have wanted to see me blocked for a long time, and unless ArbComm does something about it, they will continue to waste everyone's time with disruptive process, claiming that I'm the one being disruptive. It will all come out in the wash.

See, Biophys, I've lived my life -- all of it since I reached adulthood 45 years ago -- knowing that everything I do comes out in the end. There is a record of all this, and I trust in that and the ultimate judgment, much more than the transient croaking of frogs or the bleating of sheep who haven't got a clue but sure know who the bad guys are.... (Unfortunately, they get it wrong and miss the wolves hiding among them.) Meanwhile, we have an Arbitration Committee that can make definitive rulings, and I'm following whatever is reasonably clear from the Committee, and asking for clarification for what is not. My action yesterday was, to me, clearly permitted; if I'm wrong, a neutral admin will warn me, I assume, or block me, and the Committee will clarify what is needed, or my mentor will. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Abd (talk • contribs)

To answer your earlier bolded question, no, I don't think we have a dispute. We're on your talk page, where as far as I know you can talk about anything you like. I was simply probing you about some of the implications of something you'd said, mostly because I was curious about your thought process. About the AfD, I didn't see a problem with you commenting there. MastCell ^Talk 00:27, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, MastCell. Glad you don't think we have a dispute! Yeah, I've come to expect seriously contentious examination of my every move, but this AfD thing really surprised me. One point: you wrote, at AE:

I don't think the intent of the restriction was to bar Abd from participating in AfDs across the board; it was focused on abuse of dispute resolution, and AfD isn't part of dispute resolution.

Now, this is my problem with this, and it could possibly lead to further problems in the future. The restriction was termed an MYOB restriction, however, there was no example presented as evidence, anywhere that I saw, of "abuse of dispute resolution." JzG has recently asserted dead-horse-beating, but, in fact, the situations where I was earlier accused of that (by him and others) are ones where ArbComm or the community ultimately came, in general, to the position I was asserting; JzG was admonished for abuse of tools, and it was blatant, and likewise WMC was desysopped for doing stuff, in front of ArbComm, like he'd done before, he'd done it so many times and had been supported by his faction so many times that apparently he thought he was bulletproof. I blame the faction more than him, by the way, they led him down the rosy path.

There was a cold fusion mediation in process, and it was coming up with decisions that were either what I'd advocated, or which were fully compatible with what I'd advocated. It was interrupted by the RfAr and my subsequent site ban, and the one who asked for it wasn't really interested in mediation, it was a political move, but it was proving useful anyway without him. (I only mention the CF mediation as an example of DR process, not as an attempt to raise any cold fusion issues, where I'm clearly topic banned.)

Abuse of DR process? I went to great lengths to minimize disruption, eventually, having learned from prior experience. When the motion was made to topic ban me at AN or AN/I, I forget which, I initially responded but then realized that contesting it would cause a huge fuss with no resolution, so I accepted the ban and didn't challenge it. (The single self-reverted edit to Cold fusion during the ban was just what I fully expected would be accepted by the community and even by WMC, since he had argued that blocking someone for a harmless edit was "stupid" even though the person was banned. "Self-reverted" went further to guarantee harmlessness, allowing anyone to check out the edit quickly if they wanted to, or to ignore it if they wanted to. But when I was blocked for 24 hours by WMC, I didn't even put up an unblock template, to avoid disruption. I only took the matter to ArbComm when the community ban expired and WMC still insisted that he, personally, was the sole arbiter of my editing future, and I went to ArbComm directly because it was obvious that lower process would simply produce more heat than light.

So, what abuse? There was no clear finding of fact on this. And all I can do is imagine that the real reason isn't being stated. Which, then, means what? If my intent is compliance, as it is, and not wikilawyering, should I imagine the real reason and then self-censor my own behavior to avoid violating an unstated purpose? It looks to me, though, like part of the unstated purpose is to set up conditions to make me go away completely.... Is it?

One more comment: "pin drop" at AfD if we ban everyone who makes a contentious comment. Yeah, that made me laugh. True, too true. But you are also right about AfD and DR. AfD is not dispute resolution process, though it is a place where many disputes arise. I just made my damn comment and would have left it at that if others had left it at that. As it is, contention didn't escalate and pretty rapidly quieted down. I struck the AfD comment about harassment because Offliner apologized, you can see the discussion above in this section. --Abd (talk) 01:43, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Related question

Does anybody know what "originating party" actually means? Is Abd barred from initiating his own line of WP:DR on matters such as this? If other editors wished to seek out Abd's assistance in these types of matters and they ask him to initiate such WP:DR is that a violation? --GoRight (talk) 01:58, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Well, I did ask for clarification on this, but ArbComm was too busy yanking the mentor possibility while, behind the scenes, I suspect, an arbitrator was offering and attempting to become my mentor. It's pretty bad when ArbComm can't trust even one of its own members to mentor! But it's obvious that some are afraid I'd be given permission! And that I'd be effective.

Here is how I interpret it at this point: if there is a dispute between other editors that appears, at an article or with some other process where I'm not already -- and apparently, currently -- involved, I'm not to insert myself or comment, nor in ensuing process unless I'm named as a party. On-wiki. They obviously can't prevent me from commenting off-wiki, as long as I don't harass anyone. I don't think that the sanction was actually thought through, though, it was unsupported by FoF, so the intention is a tad obscure and might vary from arbitrator to arbitrator. It's still unclear, as to what ArbComm stated, if my comment in the Climate Change RfAr was a violation, but I'm tentatively assuming that it was, even though it wasn't intended to be.

I'd prefer, if ArbComm is going to decline to answer a request for clarification, as they did partially in the one I filed, if they explicitly state this. The RfAr/Clarification was closed without questions being answered, as if the removal of the mentorship clause was a full answer. But it wasn't. As I wrote, I'd have made the edit even if I had a mentor, because I was involved in the situation. You know that, for sure. But I wasn't an "originating party" for the RfAr, nor was I mentioned except later at AN by WMC, and while WMC tried to make hay from my response to him, it was pretty roundly ignored except by Mathsci.

To answer your specific question, my understanding is that if I have a dispute with another editor, my dispute, I can initiate process. (I can respond to someone making a statement about me, personally, except for pure neutral process.) Can I respond to an editor request for intervention? Good question. My sense is, no, not on-wiki, but that is problematic, for sure. However, I'd simply respond and advise the editor how to do it, off-wiki, and this kind of thing happens all the time, it happened when I was blocked and would continue if I was blocked again. ArbComm and the community have only very limited control over what I do, my compliance is voluntary. You know and I know what happens when an editor is pushed beyond the possibility of voluntary compliance.... An alternative is that I'd ask ArbComm for permission. They'd be better off, for efficiency, allowing a respected editor to be my mentor. Lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. --Abd (talk) 02:16, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Well, consider the following PURELY hypothetical scenario ...

1. You are off going about your business and you come across some heated discussion on some topic, and your interest is thereby piqued.
2. You go to the article on that topic, investigate the content there, and begin to participate by contributing to the content of that article.
3. Some editor there objects to your content changes.
4. You disagree and dispute that editor's position.
5. Are you now able to file your own line of WP:DR as an originating party?
6. If there was an existing WP:DR related to your content changes are you now able to join it rather than redundantly pursuing your own WP:DR?

Or how about this alternate purely hypothetical scenario ...

1. You decide in good faith to take everyone's advice to MYOB and begin contributing to mainspace more.
2. At some article you discover, much to your surprise and amazement, that some other editor disagrees with your content changes.
3. You disagree and dispute that editor's position.
4. As happenstance would have it, this particular content dispute had already been raised in the past.
5. Are you now able to file your own line of WP:DR as an originating party?

--GoRight (talk) 02:26, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Again, my interpretation as it stands. Yes to both examples. In other words, if disruption were my intention, I could easily get around the sanction. What is stopping me at this point is serious lack of interest in disruption and, indeed, in much of what I'd otherwise be doing with Wikipedia.

I commented in the Climate Change RfAr because I knew the situation well, you know that, and have waited a long time for ArbComm to start actually dealing with it.

I commented in the AfD because I'd seen the previous one while blocked, and was thus familiar with the issues. My comment was only mildly contentious, as AfDs go, I'm an inclusionist and made a general inclusionist argument, an important one, I thought, but also encouraged the closer to consider the issues and not the !votes. I have no idea what decision the closer will make and I don't care and I certainly wouldn't harass anyone over it, or haul an admin before DR process if I disagreed. If I voted in an AfD, and the admin made a clear error, in my opinion, I'd go to the admin's Talk page and request reconsideration, perhaps, and I'd certainly do that before going to DRV, DRV is often rudely abused, when a polite request to an admin can avoid it. But if the admin were rude, again, that would be the end of it, and I'd decide to go to DRV or not. I'd have the right, but I avoid more contentious process than I engage in. Much more. Is a marginal article, as that one is, worth the effort? Probably not!

Look at what it took to get me to initiate process with WMC, beyond talking with him and responding to process initiated by others! I even tried to get one of his friends, before filing the case, to talk some sense into him, perhaps you recall what happened with that. If his friend had listened instead of attacking me for pointing out that, in the end, ArbComm is watching (from the future), WMC might still be an admin.

Having been prepared by my basic education, with Richard P. Feynman and Linus Pauling as my first and second-year professors at California Institute of Technology, I spent a year becoming relatively expert in a topic, buying books, reading all the sources, on all sides, communicating and gaining the respect and cooperation of established scientists and other experts, and very carefully and patiently negotiating consensus on this topic, a difficult and unusual one, where misunderstanding is common, but recent (last five years) reliable sources are clear, putting in perhaps a thousand hours, and what did I get? A topic ban. From people who have no clue, who wouldn't spend a few minutes to read what I wrote and check it out or ask questions.

Not encouraging, eh? If it were just my story, that would be one thing, but go to Wikipedia Review and look around. It's a common story. Experts get banned, and it doesn't matter, in fact, if they have PhDs and credentials (which I don't have, just the respect of experts as perhaps an "advanced amateur"), if they aren't understood, and they do what experts normally do, explain the topic and expose errors and misunderstandings in the text, which often means the errors and misunderstandings of editors, they get banned. If, however, they agree with privileged editors, they don't get banned and they are even protected when they become seriously abusive to others. Who are sometimes themselves experts who disagree. And that is how Wikipedia bias is built, one block at a time.--Abd (talk) 04:24, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Feynman and Pauling at Caltech... You were lucky! When did I read them last time? Pauling. That was excellent explanation of entropy of fusion in hix textbook of inorganic chemistry. Feynman. Funny thing, but it were his memories. In particular, he explained how he picked up locks, just for fun, at a secret facility during the Manhatten project.Biophys (talk) 15:04, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Pauling. Feynman. Yes, I heard those stories, later published, in person from him. He was really a very funny guy. The story was that he could drum 6 beats against 7. I was never able to do better than 4 to 5. His wife supposedly divorced him because he'd play the bongo drums at 3 AM. My sympathies to both of them.... One important thing that I learned from Feynman, in the physics lectures. Quantum mechanics is a beautiful theory, extremely accurate, but the math becomes impossible when moving beyond very simple two-body problems. Applying it to the solid state, where many bodies are involved, is at the edge of what we can do. By "we" I mean true experts, certainly not me, and the results are shaky. Feynman was very aware of the limits of our knowledge. --Abd (talk) 17:03, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Yes, that may be precisely the point. Did you notice that some of the most stubborn and dogmatic people are scientists? People like William are the rule, and people like Richard are exception. A lot of ordinary folks think they know something because they read about this in newspapers. A typical science student thinks he knows something because he read about this in a textbook. But in fact people know very little because they do not have predictive theories in almost all areas of knowledge except math and physics (just as Richard said). People can not reliably predict climate changes (beyond noticing something that already exist like the cycles), but they talk about global warming. They can not predict the consequences of global nuclear war, but invent propaganda "theories" like nuclear winter. People can not predict changes in society but invent pseudoscience like Marxism. They can not predict 3D structure of proteins but use molecular dynamics, which is only good to create a cartoon about a molecular Mickey Mouse. And they started to believe that Mickey Mouse actually exists because they saw his image. There is nothing you can fix here. All it takes is a couple of guys who believe that your opponent is right because they saw Mickey Mouse or read about him. That would not matter if they followed wikipedia policies. But they do not. Biophys (talk) 16:23, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

Finally I understand where my bias for anthropogenic global warming comes from: I have been running molecular dynamics simulations of proteins for the past 5 years... :-) SPLETTE :] ^{How's my driving?} 16:33, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

Bias for anthropogenic global warming? Splette, does this mean that you won't touch global warming articles? By the way, I'm also biased in favor of "anthropogenic global warming," i.e., my sense is that we are causing the current warming, and that it's very dangerous, but so what? This is an encyclopedia and neutrality is a fundamental policy. Almost all of us, and especially the knowledgeable, are very biased, so ... how can we determine neutrality? Hint: it's called consensus. And that doesn't mean "scientific consensus," though where that can be shown, we report it. It means that we seek consensus among editors and don't exclude anyone because of their POV. We can't reach article stability by banning one side. Banning the minority side is almost as bad as banning the majority, and I can show examples where both have happened. Both were a Bad Idea. Bans do not find consensus. They may reduce conflict, but editors capable of civil interactions and following behavioral guidelines, either directly or with personal guidance, shouldn't be banned if there is anyone capable and willing to provide the necessary guidance. Normally, a mediator supported by the administrative cabal could accomplish this, easily, if the mediator is sufficiently skilled. But, in fact, we've banned some skilled mediators, too! So there you go! --Abd (talk) 04:38, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

Well, this has the potential for a looong discussion, I rather don't want to get into. In short: I believe the answer is WP:WEIGHT and my opinion is that in the global warming debate here on WP both sides are given due weight. When I say weight, I do mean the weight of the scientific positions, not the opinions of the general population who often have little clue about specific subjects ("hey, how can we have global warming if this is the coldest winter in decades...bla bla") and/or are often biased by the media (this is true in both directions: For example the prediction of an ice-free north pole by 2013 that got much media attention is also an extreme view and not consensus). Seeking consensus just among editors is problematic. Take the evolution article as an example. Many editors here are from the US where opinions about whether humans developed from earlier species or animals is split about 50/50[3]. If this was reflected by editors here, who try to form a consensus, how would the evolution article look like? For me this is the Randy in Boise problem and this is why I say an encyclopedia should reflect the state of scientific consensus.... SPLETTE :] ^{How's my driving?} 03:55, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

I am not telling that human activities do not lead to the warming. They do. But no one can reliably predict how exactly these activities, in combination with other factors, will affect temperature in city X in 2015. This is known as lack of predictive theories. Yes, a lot of people are doing MD. But can you reproduce the 3D structure of protein A starting from his homologue B, simply by MD simulations? According to my best knowledge, the answer is definitely "no". But then, what is the value of your research? Should you waste you time doing the simulations or better do something else? What exactly new did you learn by doing these particular simulations? If you want, we can debate it on my talk page. BTW, that is what some "scientists" do. Biophys (talk) 21:22, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

I didn't want to get into one of these long global warming debates here and I didn't mean to say that you do not believe in anthropogenic global warming. I just found it funny, that you mention this (the topic I edit most here at WP) and molecular dynamics in the same sentence. So, I couldn't resist to comment... :). I don't use MD for protein folding. I agree, there are many problems, though it is constantly improving and the main problem is still the limited time span you can simulate. Some small proteins have been successfully folded with MD, though as far as I can see, in these cases the aim wasn't to predict the structure (though that is the ultimate goal) but rather to better understand how protein folding works. Among other things I use MD as a quality check to test different atomistic models of proteins that have been proposed because no X-ray crystal structure could be obtained. Without MD it is very difficult to say, how stable/good such a model is. I do find MD very useful, though I understand and am very familiar with the skepticism of experimentalists about these computer simulations. But I think it completes the experimental techniques well, and just like any other method, it can be very useful if you are aware of its limits and know how to interpret your results... Anyway, I am afraid, I won't get into a longer chat here. I am at the end of my PhD and the deadline for handing in my thesis is in just a few weeks. So, I shouldn't even be here editing :) @Adb, sorry for spamming your talk page. SPLETTE :] ^{How's my driving?} 04:12, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

BTW, where is article Criticism of global warming theory? 22:37, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

Global warming controversy, List of scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming, Climate change denial SPLETTE :] ^{How's my driving?} 04:15, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Notification

Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Clarification#Request_for_clarification:_Abd-William_M._Connolley William M. Connolley (talk) 09:12, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Why, thanks, Bill. Kind of you to think of me and to give me an opportunity to address our Beloved ArbComm, though, gee, if I wasn't involved in a dispute with you, am I an "Originating Party"? I guess I am because you made me one. Why are you concerned? Do you have some kind of Agenda here? Are you shooting yourself in the foot again? Is this the best thing you can do with your time? If so, my condolences. Should I drop a tome on that page? Do you think that August Assembly will appreciate the opportunity to read more of my cogent, insightful, and, in fact, concise comment? (Concise is a relative term.) Do I have the time for this crap? So many questions, indeed, and so little time. --Abd (talk) 14:24, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Notification

Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement#Request_concerning_Abd William M. Connolley (talk) 22:20, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Two in a day? My, my, if I'd known that I could stir up such a fuss from a harmless comment in a poll, as I'm allowed to make, it seems, maybe I'd have had more fun before. Except that it is actually a waste of time and most of us have better things to do, here or elsewhere.

WMC, has it occurred to you that you are shooting yourself in the foot? You have nothing to gain here; on the other hand, if you goal is to be blocked, which I've suspected for some time, carry on. You may be doing an excellent job of setting up the conditions, demolishing whatever reputation you still had. Don't say, however, that you were not warned, just as you can't say I didn't warn you about the administrative bit loss thing.

Note: I'm not asking for sanctions against you, my suggestion that ArbComm advise you to stop harassing me is for your protection as well as the wiki's. You had no business with the AfD, and there is no ongoing disruption coming from my comment there except for what you have created. --Abd (talk) 23:29, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

I hate to be a bother, but your comment on AN about GoRight seems to be a violation of your ban.--Tznkai (talk) 06:50, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks,Tznkai. I'm seriously involved in the situation, it's central. It's all pretty moot, though, because I don't see any effort to actually resolve the situation, which is causing one RfAr after another, blocks, bans, desysopings or resignations, and which will continue to do so until faced and resolved. --Abd (talk) 14:41, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Reminder of editing restriction

Abd, I have removed your contribution from the GoRight ban discussion here. I am reminding you of your editing restriction, which states you are "prohibited from discussing any dispute in which he is not an originating party. This includes, but is not limited to, article talk and user talk pages, the administrator noticeboards, and any formal or informal dispute resolution pages. He may, however, vote or comment at polls." You were neither an "originating party" of this block discussion, nor is a block discussion a "poll" (it's a consensus discussion; the mere fact that some people opt to prefix their opinion statements with a bolded word doesn't make it a poll). It therefore clearly falls under your restriction. I am, however, refraining from blocking you for this infraction for the moment. Fut.Perf. ☼ 08:45, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Wikilawyering, it appears, is only allowed by members of a smug local majority. Go away, Future Perfect. Your attempt to bully me is a waste of time. Read what I wrote that you removed. You are not neutral. --Abd (talk) 14:30, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

I've restored it. His comment was not abusive, and he's actually been involved in the GoRight case for a while now (back when Raul654 tried to ban GoRight as part of his anti-GW-skeptic purge), long before any of the arbcom stuff happened. So his opinion is relevant here.

Abd: in the future, if you would like to make a point in a debate, feel free to leave it on my talk, and if I believe it to be relevant, I will add it. ATren (talk) 14:57, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Problem is, ATren, the ban applies to user talk pages, everything on-wiki. So I'd have to email you. You are free to report what email you have received from me, if you think it will benefit the wiki (unless I *explicitly* request privacy). I trust your judgment. As to the removal, you know the rule. Don't revert war. One reversion of an allegedly improper removal isn't edit warring, it's simply and arguably the correction of what may be an inadvertent error. But repeated assertion of an editorial action, especially by the same editor, is indeed edit warring, and particularly pernicious on a noticeboard page.

That would be proxying for a banned user to circumvent an Arbcom restriction, so I would not recommend trying it. I would block you, and I will also block you if you reinstate Abd's posting once more in this case. Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:01, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

No it would not be proxying. I am not banned, and I will evaluate the claim myself. Proxying doesn't ban ideas, only the expression of those ideas by certain editors.

Fut Per, you are involved here, and action on your part would not be appropriate. I restored the comment because it was relevant. Jeez, what is so bad about that comment that it must be suppressed? Do you ever take a step back and look at what you're doing? You aren't thought police, for goodness sake.

And for the record, Fut Per, I am now disengaging from this. You win. Abd's harmless comment has been successfully repressed. ATren (talk) 15:09, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Winning is losing and losing is winning. Above, Future Perfect promises to violate recusal rules, and if he did it, he would be rapidly desysopped. Prediction. Watch. I've made these predictions before, remember.

What has been described is not "proxying for a banned user," and that's been established and confirmed. The proxying claim is a pernicious form of wikilawyering, frequently used in these cases. Look at the ban arguments for Pcarbonn and GoRight. Notice claims of proxying for Jed Rothwell, whose behavior, right or wrong, is completely irrelevant, but he was, indeed, improperly blocked by JzG, highly involved, (and later by MastCell) but I didn't seriously dispute moot actions. In fact, there is almost certainly no suggestion for editing of Wikipedia coming from JR, rather there is a presumed similarity of point of view, as has been common in these bans. POV is being banned, and it's quite clear, and, Future Perfect, you could even lose your sysop bit just from the threat you just made here and your repeated removal action, added to what you have done before, if you don't act rapidly to prevent it. Hint: the quick action needed doesn't involve blocking someone. And I've advised it before. And those who blew off the warning are no longer sysops. You are welcome to be the first exception if you prefer. --Abd (talk) 18:39, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Remind me again, why would I have to recuse from dealing with you? Fut.Perf. ☼ 19:01, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Didn't say you did. However, it seems that you are thinking of my reference as being to me as the relevant editor and actions with me as the relevant actions, and you seem to be understanding very little of what is being said, so I'm not surprised you didn't understand it.

Nope. I was referring to your threat to block Atren after your repeated removal of the comment after he'd restored it. There are analogous cases that have been decided over this. You'd be lucky to escape with a reprimand, and you'd only get that little of a response if you clearly admitted the error. At this point, however, you have probably become way too involved to deal with me, personally, and any sensible administrator would know that.

I'm under an ArbComm sanction, so if you think that I've done something wrong, AE is open, you would only personally block me, properly, if I were engaged in some ongoing disruptive activity, such as arguing at the AN report involved, more than a single comment, if it were something that required immediate action to avoid further disruption. The single comment creates no emergency allowing you more freedom to act; but because of the deeper nature of the dispute here, and especially your comments on my Talk page, any action at all would probably require full disclosure on a noticeboard. --Abd (talk) 19:21, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Fun and Games

I'll disclose that I advised GoRight, off-wiki, to disengage, and he did. But that isn't enough. Offenders must be pursued and brought to "justice." And the result of that, when people start to pay attention, as is often eventually caused by the generated fuss, is that the truth comes out, and the crusading vigilantes, those not content with mere cessation of (claimed) disruption, find their privileges restricted. Usually.

Basic rules: have fun, do no harm, be careful with the rights of others, warn when you see someone sawing off the tree limb they are sitting on. Defend Each Other.

Following this and IAR and with my natural freedoms, I cannot be blocked, I can only be prevented from splashing in a small pond, so to speak. I can still contact, if I choose, each frog in that pond who has revealed their email address to me or who has enabled email, within the guidelines. And they will do, with what I write, what they choose. I have only very rarely emailed an editor who didn't welcome the mail, and I'd certainly not repeat that under present conditions.

Here, of course, I am only disclosing what ought to be obvious without my saying anything at all. It's my Talk space, writing about myself and my wiki privileges and intentions and what I believe will benefit the project.

Blocking me, of course, would give me a fast track to ArbComm. But I don't believe I've done anything blockworthy. If you think so, that's fine, I'll ask ArbComm about it. ArbComm elected not to allow a highly respected editor to become my mentor; if they'd done so, there would be an automatic default mediator of disagreements over this. Apparently ArbComm wants to be asked directly, which is okay with me.

Within ArbComm's remit, I respect ArbComm decisions to the best of my ability and within reason. Outside that remit, all bets are off and I'm guided exclusively by IAR. Get the picture? --Abd (talk) 19:10, 18 January 2010 (UTC)