Not content with harassing people who write about unfavorable points of view, your friendly admin, ex-Arbcom, sysop, beaurocrat, and oversighter, Raul654, has begun a private discussion: User:Raul654/Civil POV pushing

To summarize, you don't have to actually push a point of view, only have to have characteristics that may plausibly be shared with a POV pushing. Other asked to discuss include MastCell‎, Raymond arritt‎, Filll‎, ScienceApologist‎, Stephan Schulz‎, JoshuaZ‎, William M. Connolley‎, Dave souza‎, Hrafn‎, and Orangemarlin‎.

The discussion is equally interesting, not least because those posting unwelcome ideas are quickly dispatched unilaterally on the pretence of harassment, ... and Raul654 removes a record of the block from his contributions page.

What's the solution Civil dissent? Anything you bloody well want, you don't have to be civil in return!

To that list, I would also note that Baegis and KillerChihuahua are also participants in Raul's Roundtable.

Of that list of 12 names, 8 of them were involved in the RfC leading up to my being blocked for promoting a pro-science POV that emphasized the core journalistic ideas of accuracy, excellence, and ethics in online media. (KillerChihuahua and MastCell concluded the RfC and summarily executed the block).


I tried civil dissent. It didn't work with that particular crowd.

The irony.

• Raul654 is a student in Electrical and computer engineering
• ScienceApologist (Joshua Schroeder) is a student in astronomy
• Raymond Arrit claims to be a geoscientist
• MastCell claims no expertise
• KillerChihuahua claims no expertise
• William_M._Connolley does math and likes stoats & weasels

KillerChihuahua claimed expertise in knowing my areas of interest and non-interest.

This is all somehow related to the ScienceApologist & JzG arbitration case, is it not? User:John254 (no relation to Raul654) apparently wanted to remove some content about Eric_Lerner's book "The Big Bang Never Happened" from Lerner's BLP article, and User:ScienceApologist vehemently opposed the idea. There was some talk (from JzG, who was on ScienceApologist's side) about splitting the material in question out into a separate article... I think that case is one vote away from being rejected at the moment.

Anyway, looks like the edit Raul654 removed was a list of all the not-so-civil things ScienceApologist had been posting to various talk pages over the last several weeks.

Long story short, it looks like what Raul & Co. are brewing up here is a set of sweeping changes to the civility rules to prevent fringe-science and conspiracy-theory types from using them (the rules, that is) to game the system, in order to get their views more prominently represented in mainspace articles...

Will they succeed? I doubt it - I'd say it's too late for "consensus"-based proposals like this to be accepted. The fringe/conspiracy types have had too much power on WP for too long, and while they might not be the majority (yet), there's probably more than enough of them to prevent this type of change.

Isn't that something we'd approve of?

Yes, but he was a physics instructor at a community college - not much of a credential in itself, but more than just "a student" - and perhaps more to the point, his work centered on the areas of cosmology he was disputing with Mr. Tresman.

William Connelley is a climate modeller at the British Antarctic Survey. That is, when he's not running multiple blogs, "moderating" more than one mailing list and more importantly, being a Green Party candidate. As far as I am aware, he's never collected a data sample nor been nearer to Antarctica than the Costa del Sol on his holidays.

He's not that civil. The last time I put a question to him on why he had deleted a key fact, he simply deleted the question on the ground that this (Wikipedia) wasn't CA (Climate Audit). He's also blocked my IP address from "vandalism" when I kept adding inconvenient truths to his troll article "The science is settled" and then gave the weakest keep even seen to the AFD for the article having given up trying to block clear well-sourced evidence that his proposition was false.

As a Wikipedia admin he is famous for his conflicts of interest in protecting the BLPs of his friends and most importantly, blocking all edits from his own extraordinarily detailed biography despite the fact that he is a low-level civil servant who has no track record of note in sciences. Occasional forays into being published are usually so undetailed that no-one can reproduce his work in any case.

Its amazing to me that Connelley is allowed to edit Wikipedia and his multiple blogs from work while being paid by the British taxpayer.

...and less than a professor, which is what he claimed to be. Other editors don't boast their qualifications.

I see that Eric Lerner's name has come up. I see he has a physics degree from Columbia University, which is mocked by ScienceApologist who probably has the same degree (see the irony?). Unlike ScienceApologist, Lerner has had published several peer-reviewed papers on cosmology. Perhaps this is why ScienceApologist has had to claim to be a mainstream expert. ScienceApologist has also

• Removed Lerner's refereed papers from his article
• removed his patents
• Removed his film credits

ScienceApologist is no better academically qualified than Lerner (but claims otherwise), falls far short of Lerner's 600+ published articles (he's a science writer), short of his peer-reviewed article (on cosmology and plasma physics), and experience as an independent researcher which has included work for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

That's not to say that ScienceApologist is not knowledgeable on physics and astronomy, but this is not the way to deal with fringe science.

Bad editing and pushing points of view is not determined by whether the subject matter is mainstream or pseudoscience. No-one should game the system.

Tsk tsk. When someone else inquired if ScienceApologist was a professor, a user coincidentally called Proabivouac "verified ScienceApologist's credentials".

Eric Lerner was at one time a member of the LaRouche organization. He expropriated a bunch of LaRouche's ideas and set off on his own, hoping to garner a modest amount of fame and fortune without inheriting all of LaRouche's enemies (I've never known this strategem to work.) This issue came up tangentially on the talk page of the Lerner bio. I'm sure it would be well-nigh impossible to document using Reliable Sourcesâ„¢.