Smatprt (T-C-L-K-R-D) , otherwise known as Stephen Moorer (T-H-L-K-D) at Pacific Repertory Theatre (T-H-L-K-D), has one main purpose for being on Wikipedia and it isn't to create his autobiography or an article on his company.

He is one of those nutters who believes that Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare. Instead he is one of those snobs who think that a middle-class grammar school boy couldn't possibly be able to create some decent plays. Instead it must have been some nob, (specifically the Earl of Oxford in Smatprt's case,) who must have done it. Moorer is now starting his second one year topic ban from the subject.

A while ago, Dumbo, on one of his periodic interventions into topics he knows nothing about, said something which Smartpratt liked. Moorer is now trying to recruit Dumbo to help him.

I think that dispute is definitely one for the book. Unlike the Israeli-Palestine issue or global warming, it is not inherently 'difficult', i.e. it is pretty clear who are the nutters. It occupies masses of hot air and stupid argument, and it has miles of comedic potential. Bookmarked.

I'm not going to comment on whether or not Smartprt is a nutter, but he certainly did not know how to deal with opposition, and played directly into the hands of those opposing him by revert warring on the Shakespeare authorship question article. Given his history, he should have handled the situation as if he were COI, i.e, confined himself to non-controversial edits of related articles, and to talk pages for modest suggestions of improvements where it might be controversial.

Wikipedia tends toward black-and-white sanctions, and doesn't provide assistance to editors who have trouble understanding the boundaries. My guess is that the man is knowledgeable, whether nutty or not. A full topic ban is probably overkill, unless lesser sanctions were tried with support (i.e, guidance, as distinct from being warned by people who obviously think you are a nut case and should be blocked).

Same old same old.

It's ridiculous that Stephen Moorer is totally banned from a topic where he's obviously an expert.

What happens is that an expert may not show "proper respect" for those who don't know the topic, this interferes with the "collegial atmosphere" that is considered desirable. And it is desirable, but bans are not the best way to get collegiality. Facilitating cooperation would be.

I wonder if Future Perfect ever thinks about how the events will look to someone who knows the material. I know that in fields where I'm knowledgeable, and have extensive communication with leading experts, the opinion of Wikipedia is somewhere between awful and abusively offensive. Many experts have been burned.

But I didn't review the behavior of Smatprt from the point of view of the possibility of compromise, of engaging with him and soliciting his cooperation, as distinct from his control. Nor, it seems, did ArbComm, nor "the community," nor Future Perfect. Future Perfect doesn't do that. He just issues bans and blocks.

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Interesting contention.

While I see that there are "behavior" problems and related concerns about defamation associated with certain users who supported a sane accounting of climate science to the exclusion of denialist canards, I have yet to see an example of a Wikipedia user who was sympathetic to the idea that the scientific consensus on global warming was incorrect who was also not pretty clearly a nutter. Can you point one out?

GoRight (T-C-L-K-R-D)

There is no doubt that global warming skeptics, nutters and otherwise, both users and scientists who were known for this or that allegedly "denialist" work or comment, were abused on Wikipedia. "Nutter" is an opinion, obviously, entirely distinct from what is in reliable secondary sources, which is what should determine coverage of science on Wikipedia. The statement of the controversy by iii is that of the pseudo-skeptics and cabal editors. Interesting, indeed.

However, on the Shakespeare Authorship Question, at least one anti-Stratfordian is Looney.

Shakespeare_Identified_cover.jpg

Me.

Although I never mixed it up on Wikipedia itself. Not worth the time.

This rather begs the question. How many nutters admit to being nutters?

Indeed.

The basic Wikipedia problem is seen here in a nutshell. The process is radically inefficient, so to "mix it up" does require that one be unusual in some way. Often, obsessed. People do it for various motives, I don't want to overgeneralize, but a sane process would not be like this. It would accumulate knowledge and analysis, refactoring it, so that discussions would grow smarter, not merely longer, divided and split and buried in archives that nobody looks at any more.

Sure, there would be stuff that nobody would look at any more, in the form of original discussions, unfiltered.

Ah, but who would do the filtering? That's easy. Two kinds of filtering would be done, one being editing of argument by those trying to make a point, i.e, advocates, and filtering by factions in reaction to an argument; the result would be multiple discussions in which factions each attempt to present their evidence in the best way. And then there would be a record of decisions, with reference to accepted arguments.

That's a round outline. It would be work. But that work is necessary work, if a maintainable project actually finding consensus is to be built.

Basically, if your brilliant contributions to a discussion are to be buried in history, they would have been filtered by people whom you had explicitly trusted to be *your* editors.

Someone who doesn't trust *anyone* is probably not trustworthy.

The request was not, "Name a global warming denialist who defended Abd."



I know you are, but what am I?

Seriously, the claim I question is that there are or were global warming denialists editing on Wikipedia who exhibited the competence that would be requisite to contribute to a serious reference work about the general topic of climate science. I contend that there have been none who have demonstrated such. What I have seen is a lot of Randies in Boise have fun arguing on the internet.

The true nutter will never admit it.

The Shakespeare squabble in Wikipedia exactly reflects the idiotic "debate" over this non-issue in real academic circles. The people pushing it tend to be, um, well, crazy. And the fact that Wikipedia is reflecting this dispute much as it occurs in real life, makes a joke of the popular Wiki-fanboy idea that Wikipedia doesn't suffer from the harsh realities of academia. Indeed, it's all warm and fuzzy and utopian. Ha ha ha. Pathetic.

And just in passing: fuck you, Mr. Wales. This is your doing, and you are inadequate.

To my understanding, the debate isn't happening within academia.

That's right. Stephen Moorer, pace Abd above, is not an expert. He's a fringe theorist who believes that the real academic circles are suppressing the truth that must be told.

I don't know what Moorer believes. However, fringe theorists are usually expert, in the way I'm using the term.

Eppur is displaying a common error, that "fringe" means "wrong." Genuine fringe views (and Moorer may hold them) are *usually* wrong. Sometimes they aren't. We treat "fringe" as "wrong" for reasons of efficiency, when we must make decisions without extensive review.

Wikipedia, on Fringe Science, came to a better position, that fringe views should not be suppressed, but should be reflected in articles according to their representation in reliable sources, and, with science, in peer-reviewed and academic sources. The anti-fringe contingent, that treats fringe as a synonym for "little short of insane," has consistently tried to insure that fringe views are presented in ways that make them look silly, naive, "woo," etc.

Moorer is *obviously* a subject matter expert. That doesn't mean "unbiased." He might be heavily favoring some subset of the evidence, being personally convinced by it, while most experts reject it. He's still an expert.

Here, by expert, again, I mean someone who has far more knowledge of a subject than the average person, or than someone who simply reads an article on the topic.

Fringe theorists in general are experts. If Eppur thinks I'm proposing that Moorer's views be accepted because "he's an expert," he's gone beyond fringe, he's gone into la-la land. No, experts should, on Wikipedia, be given a hearing, an opportunity to show, through verifiable comment, what they seek to show. Remember, I've claimed that experts should, in general, be considered COI. All of them. Not just "fringe theorists," for sure!

But Wikipedians tend toward an assumption that a fringe theorist will be a "fringe POV-pusher," and they sanction argument for fringe theories. They believe that the fringe theorist will try to use Wikipedia to "right great wrongs," and I saw that argument just the other day, maybe it was about Moorer. I've seen that argument used when it was pure speculation about motivation, and accepted by ArbComm as the foundation of a decision (Pcarbonn, RfAr/Cold fusion).

(Pcarbonn had simply noted, in an off-wiki article, some *facts* about media coverage of cold fusion. Verifiable facts. He was praising Wikipedia's process, because Wikipedia had -- for a time -- provided better coverage of cold fusion than major media, because it was relying on peer-reviewed secondary sources, whereas major media was most relying on old stuff in their files, old errors that became "authoritative" through repetition. So a major media article related to cold fusion would start, naturally, with a brief history of the field, a history that would make statements that were just plain wrong, such as "Pons and Fleischmann claimed ... but nobody could replicate this." Which is just plain wrong, drastically wrong, and that statement would never make it through peer review today. It was something that was right for a few months in 1989. Beyond that, wrong, very wrong. And obviously so, from the peer-reviewed literature. Is there a "great wrong"? Maybe. So? That has nothing to do with my motives for editing, nor did it for Pcarbonn, we were just trying to make the article conform to guidelines. JzG turned this into evidence of WP:BATTLE, and ArbComm bought it. Pcarbonn was what has been called a "civil POV-pusher," at worst. That's the kind who should be retained, if the project is to be neutral. Instead, there are piles of uncivil POV-pushers, but the POV is "majority." That is, "majority of Wikipedians," not "majority of experts.")

1,392,603, including me. Your point?

How many people who make claims that everyone with a certain POV is a nutter admit to being nutters?

The argument being made here boils down to "my story, my judgment of people, is the truth." It's essentially irrefutable, because it is neither true nor false. It's just a story.

And believing that stories, interpretations, are truth is the essence of nuttery.

Notice, the central claim: "I have yet to see...." and then "pretty clearly a nutter." There is a lost performative there, glossing over that the judgment, including the claim that the judgment is "pretty clear," is just that of the person, unless he could point to the Authoritative List of Nutters. Which would still be a collection of opinions, merely some that were, perhaps, shared by whoever compiled that list.

There are pop-agnotological ways to measure a crackpot index.

That's irrelevant. I saw that GoRight was working for fairness in the global warming articles, and was attacked by WMC and Raul654. Take a look at RfC/GoRight. It was appalling. I helped with the certification of that RfC -- GoRight was trying to wikilawyer it out of existence -- and then I read it and was horrified. That was my first contact with WMC and Raul654. I then researched the history. GoRight originally assumed that I was aligned with the cabal, but he quickly got that I was interested in fair process, and he was grateful. So when I was blocked as part of a misunderstanding with Fritzpoll, and a little demonstration of the ability of a certain sock master, Fredrick day, to fire up the crowd -- he was really good at it, he'd drop an IP comment and editors would rush in with pitchforks, he could manipulate them like puppets. He claimed to have a number of "respectable" accounts, and to be an admin, and I saw some evidence that he was. I lost interest, though, never completed the study of evidence that would have been required to file an SSP report, and, of course, it would have been extraordinarily disruptive. Aw, geez, sorry about that run-on, broken down sentence...

GoRight took over my defense of Wilhelmina Will, showing great ability as a researcher and presenter of evidence. He was under constant attack by the cabal, however, and they finally stirred up enough reaction that he was blocked and banned. In any case, he did think that anthropogenic global warming was a crock, though I'm probably not fairly presenting his case. He wasn't a nutter. He might be wrong, that's different.

There are scientists who are "denialist" -- or considered such by the cabal. Scientists are scientists, you know, and someone who, as a scientist, attaches to a position has lost their character as a scientist and has become an advocate. The cabal attacks them because the scientist reports something that, in the cabal's judgment, conflicts with the cabal's own conclusions. "Attack" means BLP violations.

I'm not aware of any climate scientists who were editing Wikipedia, beyond WMC himself, who really was peripheral and no longer involved in climate research. So if the questioner was insisting on a scientist, no, I don't know of any. There might be some, though, it's just that I don't know. I don't think GoRight is a scientist.
Seems unintelligible to me. I could make an attempt. I won't. Not worth the effort.
there are lots of those, and yourself?

Wikipedia isn't a "serious reference work on the general topic of climate science." It's a tertiary source, created through it's own bizarre process that sort-of works sometimes. In my view, such a crowd-sourced project could be highly competent, with appropriate structure. As I'd see it, experts would comment and contribute, but would not control; rather, the job of the experts would be to educate interested non-expert editors on the topic, in two ways: they would suggest and help arrange material from reliable sources, and they would review article product for errors and misunderstandings.

Essentially, the editors would be a stand-in for the public. (Alternatively, they could be considered volunteers working for the management of Wikipedia. Problem is that the WMF relies upon the trope that the community runs Wikipedia; it does, but "the community" has no reliable decision-making process, it's chaotic, not rule-of-law, so it's largely unpredictable, especially in the outer reaches, where editorial activity is largely unnoticed, as long as it doesn't look like vandalism, and even then....)

I've seen what happens when experts write articles on Wikipedia, they are frequently unintelligible. They may be perfectly correct, but are effectively useless, the experts are talking to themselves. Examples can be shown from Mathsci, who is, apparently, an expert mathematician. Problem arose when another mathematician showed up who had a different point of view on how to present the subject.... Mathsci, being connected with the cabal, blasted the guy.

No, experts are properly treated as COI. One has to be careful about leaving some of them alone in a room with others, they tend to savage each other. Adult supervision is required.

Experts are the editors most likely to fall into the newbie error of repeatedly reverting what is to them an obvious error. After all, they *know* it's an error.

"Pop" is the key word here. Mispells "Feynman." Maybe confusing it with "Fleischmann." Look, I sat with Feynman, in his two-year physics course, 1961-63. This fact gives me +5, just by itself. Brilliant.

There is a problem with the procedure. It's highly subjective, in actual application. This is a device for coming to a personal conclusion, but it is based on personal judgments, way too much. And what isn't based on judgment is based on assumptions of the test author, such as mention of Feynman. The value of the test would be as a list of markers that can raise suspicion, and I agree that many of the characteristics reasonably do that. However, at some point, it would be interesting to see an actual application. Otherwise, what happens is that people will internally nod and say, "Yeah," having in mind an application that, in fact, exists only in their own fantasy.

However, most of the tests are just common sense. And the mispelling of Feynman may be deliberate, because he also misspelled Einstein in the same test and later, then, awards twenty points for someone who emails him to tell him about the misspelling. Here's what I think: he's arrogant and unsympathetic, and he's trolling for suckers.

I was there when he gave those lectures. (I have no clue that Feynman would be an opponent of special relativity, which is extremely well established, albeit being obviously incomplete and not, without modification, applicable to the more general case of accelerated frames of reference and the effect of gravity. That would be general relativity, and I will not pretend to anything more than the most superficial understanding of general relativity. Einstein didn't think it was complete, AFAIK. I'll agree that there is a ton of what I'd call unfounded nuttery out there. I'm not sure how useful the term is, though. It just irritates people, while doing no good other than providing some kind of emotional dump for the one using it.
I don't claim that, for sure, the people who have opposed my own personal work are not part of the scientific establishment, but they imagine themselves to be aligned with it. I also know people whose work has been suppressed, unduly, and I could show this from academic reliable source, but those people would not make a claim like the one quoted. They are actually scientists, and behave as such, they are generally dispassionate. In the face of some situations easily considered malevolent, so blatant is the misbehavior.

I hate to break it to you, but there is a "scientific establishment," and it sometimes acts in dysfunctional ways, making decisions that are not based on science, but on politics, self-interest, and other human motives. There is suppression of contrary views, on occasion. There is peer review and panel review based on a priori judgments, and obviously so, sometimes a direct refusal to look at evidence, baldly stated -- because the reviewers believe that their position is so solid, so sound, and so much a matter of scientific consensus that they don't fear any consequence from saying "I'm not even going to waste my time to look at the evidence here, since this is so obviously bogus."

And they, when they have the power, act to prevent contrary publication because "It will be dangerous, the public will be misled, waste of time and money, people will die, etc."

Scientific organizations are human organizations and, not surprising, display the general characteristics of human organizations.

Q.E.D.

You're a poster-child for the Dunning–Kruger effect. I'd say you are on the same level as Ottava Rima in terms of an over-inflated ego with nothing but hot air to show for it.

The contempt you exhibit toward experts fits you right in with the Wikipedia crowd. You could have really gone places there if you weren't so fucking supercilious. Don't kid yourself, they kicked you out just because you're annoying, not because of "your ideas".

Tell me, have you shed tears at your keyboard thinking about how great it would have been if Wikipedia had made you their king?



Well, you saw wrong.