This essay accurately covers one of the top 10 problems of Wikipedia, in my view:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Civil_POV_pushing

I agree. Intelligent Design is an example, of course. FM/OM/et al are really civil, but sometimes the point of condescension. I sometimes wonder if they realise that NPOV is not equivalent to Scientific POV (but it is close regardless; just not exact).

On the ID note: Wikipedia:Featured article review/Intelligent design (note who started it).

There is no such thing as a Scientific point of view. Otherwise you fall into the error of supposing that there is a religious point of view, a chiropractic POV, a Neurolinguistic programming point of view and so on, all opposed in some way to what scientists think.

Science is simply the application of principles and methodologies similar to the NPOV principles used in Wikipedia.

One of my pet hates on the news is "scientists think that" which has the unwritten assumption that scientists are superior beings of infallibility. As was shown with MMR, an overly deferential approach to "the scientist" leads into all sorts of messes. Last time I looked, scientists were people - and on that basis they shouldn't really command that much respect

Another irritation is the assumption that only 'scientists' have this problem. My background is in the humanities, and similar problems apply there. E.g. there are formal methods of doing history, Biblical criticism, philosophy, literary criticism, which in general you would call 'scholarly'. And you get cranks in that area just as much as in science. The difference is that the sciences tend to be quantitative or mathematical or highly formalised. But the same principals, and the same problems apply.

Funny you say that. This essay was written with those on the other side in mind.

By covers, do you mean "is an example of"?

Did you see this thread at the time?

As I read it, this essay was trying to establish a basis to kick out opponents of the Scientism mob without the bother of waiting for them to turn nasty. In other words, its a gaming tool. Are you seeing it differently?

That's always been the wonderful contradiction of the ID Cabal - they are allowed to game the system to defeat the forces of evil who they say are gaming the system. Unfortunately, they got gamed themselves.

It's a very good tool for getting rid of idiots, yes.




Clearly we are on very different sides of the same fence.

Like WP:SPADE, WP:Civil POV pushing sounds good on the surface, but those who like citing the essay use it to justify detestable behavior.

It's just some junk written by Raul654 to justify banning people who don't agree with him when he can't find instances of incivility to exploit.

By this, I mean the scientific majority point of view; I'm well aware quacks appear everywhere. In the SMPOV, Creationism and ID would be described as bogus viewpoints. In Wikipedia's NPOV model, Creationism (at least) should be discussed as an alternative and prevalent viewpoint (I'd be willing to guess that around a few hundred million to a billion people believe in Creationism), with a brief mention on other viewpoints in either article (i.e. people weren't too fond of Darwin when he published The Origin of Species, and the scientific majority viewpoint of creationism is that it's incompatible by evolutionary theory). The Evolution and Creationism articles are fine in this regard, but most of the sub-articles, especially ID, tend to be too scientifically minded.

A scientifically-minded piece in an encyclopedia? Detestable.

To be fair, it is not that as much that scientists are thought of as less fallible, so much as the fact their SUBJECT is thought to be less fallable, due to its conclusions (of various degrees of certainty) being checkable. All good science theories predict the future and are thus (by definition) testable. Even archeological theories about the past and astronomical theories about things you can't change, predict the the nature of future artifact finds, or the results of future observations that have yet to be done. If they don't, consistantly and with corroboration by many groups, the theories go out the window. And for physical theories about simple phenomena which can be checked at any time, anywhere, by nearly anyone, that applies doubly.

By contrast, there's no way to check or compare various religous outlooks and theories. Ergo, they're NOT EVEN WRONG. And they're certainly nothing like natural science. So they get less respect, and sometimes, so do the people working on them. When religion A argues with religion B about how many gods there are, are we really supposed to think this is as worth of respect as an argument over the mass of the hydrogen atom?

Historical research, if done vary carefully, begins to look something like the natural sciences, as a good historical narrative demands that further documents, which have yet to be discovered, will be found to support the narrative, or at least modify it in a non-important way, and certainly not contradict it. If you think General A. did such and such during the civil war, and you come across the diary of his adjutant which says something completely different about what he was thinking and doing, then your theory is sunk. On the other hand, if your theory is so nebulous that it can easily accomodate ANY future evidence that comes up from good sources, then IT'S NOT EVEN WRONG. It's more of a religious or philosophical view. In that case, you're welcome to it, but please don't compare it to the conservation of momentum.

As I understand it, charges of "scientism" are when people in the nonsciences charge scientists of trying to make EVERY field of academic study into something rigorous, which is capable of being tested and proven or disproven by future evidence. And which is unworthy of respect, if not. I have some sympathy for this! But I have to admit that there are many areas of traditional philosophy, such as aesthetics or ethics or theology, where this approach isn't likely to work in toto, and perhaps not even in part. None of which makes these unworthy subjects-- it's just that the mode of discourse must change when talking about them. For example, we may see a lot of deductive logic used in ethical debates, if we can agree on premises and proper metaphors (as for example the checkuser discussion here recently). Thus, it's worthwhile, like doing ordinary mathematics, or settling court cases with legalistic arguments about law and case law-- but it's not inductive, and it's not natural science. So, if I recognize this, perhaps I can escape the label of scientism myself.

Applications of all these things to Wikipedia are left as exercise for the student. WP:LAEFS.

I've got to agree with Peter Damian here: whatever you want to say about the "ID cabal", their actions usually result in more credible articles (not always - Rosalind Picard, for example, is an exception). But while you can debate the ethics of quick-banning people with what might charitably be called "alternative viewpoints", it's definitely the way to go from a purely quality-interested standpoint.

I don't know that Sceptre's wording is the best, but I think there's a valid point there. The ID article is pushing a particular POV, rather than simply describing the movement. Just look at the article's lead. It's absurdly repetitive, with the second paragraph consisting entirely of four sentences that say the exact same thing in different wording from different sources, and then it repeats again in the fourth paragraph.

How many people consider that level of redundancy good writing?

...and the warring has left the lead of the article is also cited to death - a typical result of edit wars rather than cooperative editing.

There's another example on the Bin Laden article after I contested the use of the word "terrorist" in the lead. I'm not saying he isn't a terrorist, but all the same, BLP has the legal and ethical requirement to be neutral in all biographies. At the very least, it gives us (i.e. the West) the moral high ground. There are now ten citations for the statement:



I can make a much more policy-abiding and encyclopedic statement with only one citation:



Unfortunately, it's one editor's pig-headedness which has resulted in that unwieldly quote. I don't know why he thinks that his version is encyclopedic.

Actually you are right it's complete shite. As though they had a large hammer and kept hitting it against a soft table. Festooned with quotes like headlice.

I give up.

I've mostly dropped WP for now, too. I'd consider trying to clean up the ID article's lead a little, but I know what would happen. I'd be accused of Civil POV pushing, and possibly destroying the article's "delicate consensus" (maybe even called "anti-science"). I just don't care enough to put myself through dealing with those guys for an article on ID. When it was BLP issues on Rosalind Picard, it was a relatively significant issue, but not this.

I can recall JzG expressing a viewpoint similar to that of the essay in question as well... it amounts to "I hate it when there's somebody that I don't like and wish I could ban, but he has the unholy gall to insist on being civil all the time, so I never get an excuse to ban him for incivility!"

I can empathize - quite often I'll see somebody who's clearly there to slant an article in one direction (I'm not talking about the significant room for disagreement among reasonable people; I'm talking about a clear desire to make an article into a puff piece or hatchet job), but they always respond politely to warnings, refrain from out-and-out edit-warring, discuss issues on the talk page, etc. Eventually I just think to myself "Man, I'd really appreciate it if you'd go on a page blanking spree, or something."

This is one of several reasons that I work mostly on articles that nobody else does (apparently Premiers of Alberta, Canada from the 1920s are a pretty non-contentious topic among typical Wikipedia editors) - it leaves me out of the dispute resolution process.

...as long as none of them is from Swalwell, the article on which was the subject of some BADSITES-related warring.

The Premiers of that era weren't even from Alberta.

As for Swalwell, yes, there's no question that by Wikipedia's policies it should have an article, and I'm glad that it now does. But in fairness, the people who kept creating it weren't exactly doing so out of a desire to have Alberta's unincorporated communities properly covered.

it was created long before this Linda Mack bullshit and the guy who did it was dumbfounded when he suddenly had a black hole hamlet in his series of articles he created.

it was absurd to delete the article and protect it from re-creation. it made things worse, not better, in the absurd brandt vs the virgin wars. and brandt hasn't been the one being absurd about the situation. slimmy and a couple of her self-promotional yet still obscure middle aged punk chums that have a two decade feud with brandt are the problem.

slimmy specialised in fanning the flames of feuds, and patrick byrne with brandt put a stop to that horseshit here. good on them.

Unless that initial creation has been oversighted (which I find extremely unlikely), you're mistaken. It was first created on April 20, 2007, by an editor whose username makes it clear that he/she was trolling.

I agree; I'm just pointing out that it was an silly response to trolling, not the oppression of good faith contributors and the unprovoked deletion of their work.

No, but even if they weren't, if the information is sourced and reliable, what reason is there to keep it out of WP, except WP:IDONTLIKEIT? Maybe WP:TOCLOSETOWHEREILIVE? How about a WP:PRIVACY? Wups, we don't have that, do we? There are a lot of BLP things that violate all kinds of things done by WP that none of us would like to see done to us. But a double-standard applies everywhere, there. At some point, when somebody finally barbecues them for it, they are still not going to be understand it

Oh, I know. WP:POINT. That's the specific WP rule invented so that people don't have to live by their own rules.

As I've pointed out before, something like WP:POINT rules far outside WP. If, for example, some autotelephone dialer company calls me 10 times a week saying that the warranty on my car is about to exprire (that would be my 30 year-old Volvo, I suppose), it would actually violate a lot of laws for me to identify the company and its employees and owners, and call them 10 times a week to complain. But I know the basic reason for this: in my capitalistic society, the spam marketers have bought the legislators. POINT.

In WP, a different kind of capital rules: a sort of social or game-capital. But it's just as hypocritical, and it's just as basically evil. That firehose needs be re-directed to the people who use it on the world. Perhaps they won't understand (just as Slimy never did). But others will. Some criminals never understand why they're being locked up, for being carjackers or muggers or whatever. But some do. And don't call the people who do that "kidnappers", and say they're just as bad for employing "violence" against "violence." Sorry, it doesn't work that way. Justice is all about who throws the first punch.

no, you're mistaken. it's all still on WR somewhere, and on the userpage of the original swalwell article creator. i'm sure someone here with either the motivation to search W-R pages, or an admin who can look at the real history of that article will see that its creator also created several other regional hamlet articles and has nothing to do with any of this mack thing.