User:Peter Damian/WPFLAT

10 REASONS WHY WIKIPEDIA CANNOT CLAIM THE EARTH IS FLAT

The Flat Earth model.

The threshold for including material in Wikipedia is that it is verifiable, not that we think it is true. That is, readers must be able to check that the material has already been published by a reliable source. Editors should provide a reliable source for quotations and for any material that is challenged or likely to be challenged, or the material may be removed. Verifiability is one of Wikipedia's core content policies.

Therefore, Wikipedia is not worried per se about whether the theory that the earth is flat is true, but whether the theory is verifiable. There must be current, reliable and independent sources substantiating claims that the earth is flat. But there are no such sources. No such sources are current (almost no scientists have thought the earth was flat since about the fourth century BC), not reliable (reliable sources are peer-reviewed) nor independent (a journal published by the Flat earth society would necessarily be partisan - an independent publication is one that has no interest, ideological financial or otherwise, in preferring one view over another). If Wikipedia had been available around the fourth century B.C., it would have reported the view that the Earth is flat as a fact and without qualification. And it would have reported the views of Eratosthenes (who correctly determined the earth's circumference in 240BC) either as controversial, or a fringe view. Similarly if available in Galileo's time, it would have reported the view that the sun goes round the earth as a fact, and Galileo's view would have been rejected as 'original research'. Of course, if there is a popularly held or notable view that the earth is flat, Wikipedia reports this view. But it does not report it as true. It reports only on what its adherents believe, the history of the view, and its notable or prominent adherents. Wikipedia is inherently a non-innovative reference work: it stifles creativity and free-thought.

Thus sometimes civic-minded Wikipedia editors must act to mitigate, redesign, and occasionally destroy the offerings of users who think that a particular 'breakthrough' or 'notable' or 'controversial' idea or theory deserves more consideration than it has received in the academic world. Unfortunately, Wikipedia is an open project that 'anyone can edit' and there is a generous supply of volunteers desirous of promoting pseudoscience, crankery, conspiracy theories, marginal nationalist or historic viewpoints, and the like (PCCTL for short), together with other theories entirely unrecognised by the academic establishment. These enthusiasts often edit primarily or entirely on one topic or theme, and attempt to water down language, unreasonably exclude, marginalize or push views beyond the requirements of WP:NPOV, or give undue weight to their preferred theories.

Such grandstanding is forbidden by a variety of Wikipedia policies and guidelines (WP:V, WP:SOAP, WP:NOR, WP:FRINGE, WP:WEIGHT, WP:NOT, and WP:REDFLAG to name just a few). These policies, correctly understood and correctly used, will successfully exclude non-notable or fringe views. But many fringe editors are familiar with these policies, and have become expert at gaming them, and even using them against neutrally-minded but inexpert editors. Thus the latter often find their efforts subverted at every step by editors who revert war over edits, frivolously request citations for obvious or well known information, argue endlessly about the neutral-point-of-view policy and particularly try to undermine the undue weight clause. They will try to add information that is (at best) peripherally relevant on the grounds that 'it is verifiable, so it should be in'. They repeatedly use the talk page for soapboxing, or to re-raise the same issues that have already been discussed numerous times. They hang around forever wearing down more serious editors and become expert in an odd kind of way on their niche POV.

This is likely exhaust the patience of any reasonable person who naturally prefers not to reason with the unreasonable, and who, unlike the advocate has no special interest or passion other than striving to maintain neutrality. This is (some argue) the main flaw of Wikipedia - that unlike with proper encyclopedias, experts and idiots have equal say, and fanatics (no matter how amateur or idiotic) can always get their way if they stay up late enough and make enough edits and reversions. Wikipedia's 'committment to amateurism' does not always work for the best interests of the project.

Fortunately, the arguments used to support inclusion of marginal viewpoints against official policies fall into a small number of classes. The purpose of this essay is to provide discuss ten commonly-used argument types, to give examples of such arguments, and to show how the neutrally-minded editor (or administrator) can easily defuse such arguments.

Personalisation

Examples

• Your bias against the earth being flat is too strong to be objective.
• Your arguments against the flat earth theory so resemble the arguments of editor X that you must be their sockpuppet.
• The flat earth article is being degraded by those who don't like the flat earth theory.
• Ignoring users with differing opinions does nothing to help the further development of this page.

How to recognise

Personalisation is easily the most common form of attack on neutrally-minded editors. Personalisation is ignoring the basis for inclusion altogether, and making the argument personal. For example, they argue that an editor is biased towards the mainstream, or that editors are ganging up because their arguments are so similar (even though they would be similar - the main argument against the earth being flat is topographical, and it is hard to argue against it without repeating the argument). Or they may claim that to disagree with an editor with a FRINGE agenda is claimed to be unCIVIL, a personal attack (violation of WP:NPA), a violation of [[WP:BITE] or a violation of WP:AGF. It may even be claimed that sources that disagree with the FRINGE POV cannot be used if they reflect poorly on any living people that are proponents of the FRINGE POV (such as critical book reviews, etc)

How to reply

The solution is to ignore any personal attack altogether - and particularly not to make a personal attack yourself, however tempting it may be. Also try to ignore the arguments and reasons used by mainstream science itself. Your opponents will love this and turn the talk page into a battlefield of competing claims and counterclaims. Simply stick to the principles: if mainstream science holds that the earth is round, and there are reliable sources establishing this as a fact, that is sufficient.

Sourcing

Examples

• Essex local authorities trained employees in flat earth theory in 1993
• The statement that the earth is flat is reliably sourced from Flat Earth magazine, which is peer-reviewed.
• There are published POVs (including in PubMed) that back up the view that people use Flat Earth theory as an adjunct to their existing qualifications and businesses.
• How do you explain the EXCELLANT results which the US Army gets by using techniques which are talked about in Flat Earth literature? If it's a bunch of hogwash, then the TRADOC's results should be in shambles. Instead, we have the most successful, motivated force on the planet.
• Since established scientists attended a flat-earth conference, it follows they take the theory seriously.

How to recognise

After you have insisted on the use of reliable sources, suppports of the marginal view will then try and exploit the definition of 'reliable source'. They will argue for the inclusion of material of dubious reliability; for example, using commentary from partisan think tanks rather than from the scientific literature. Occasionally, they will discover that they can get more attention if they make appeals to authority by presenting supporters who have academic credentials. Typical pseudoscience sources include:

• Dedicated websites (normally registered under a .com or .org -- rarely under .edu though there are occasions where this may be possible)
• Dedicated periodicals
• Self-published sources
• Publications made outside the typical scientific presses
• In-house journals (not to be confused with academic journals)
• Occasional peer-reviewed articles -- often in more obscure journals

How to reply

Attention to such detail is only warranted if there is third-party mention of this. Pseudoscientific groups making a to-do over a person's academic degrees or honorification should be treated as promotionalism.

Balance

Examples

• You must not say 'the earth is not flat' but 'according to critics of the flat-earth theory, the earth is not flat'.
• There should be no criticism of the flat earth theory in the introduction to the article. There is already criticism of the theory in the article, section 94.
• So what if the article on flat earth theory is 250k, and the round earth article only 8k? The answer is not to fix the balance by writing less about the flat earth, that only makes Wikipedia worse, but to add more information about the earth being round.
• Is this an encyclopedia for academics or for the general public?
• Criticism of the flat earth theory should be balanced by criticism of the round earth theory.

How to recognise

Even when supporters of fringe viewpoints recognise the mainstream view as mainstream and established, and agree that Wikipedia may state the mainstream view without qualification, they will still challenge the relative prominence accorded to the mainstream over the fringe viewpoint, and make all sorts of arguments about balance. It is often seriously claimed that the "N" in NPOV means that no negative or critical or mainstream material can appear at all in the article, since it is not neutral, or that Wikipedia is not for advocacy, and so advocates of 'scientific points of view' should not overstate their case.

It is claimed that the reader will not understand the idea unless it is described without criticism, since Wikipedia is an article for the general public, not a technical journal. Reversting this argument, they will state that readers are smart enough to know that FRINGE ideas are nonsense without including any negative or critical material or sources. They will propose that negative material be forked off into another article, or relegated into a "criticism ghetto" or criticism section or removed from the lead. It is argued that one must always state the idea first before criticizing it, or that any sources that disagree with the fringe POV cannot be used since they violate NPOV.

It is claimed that any critical or negative material cannot appear in an article since it is biased. It is claimed that any negative or critical material is unusable since it is just opinion and not fact (of course the sympathetic material in sources is usable since that is not opinion and is factual).

Some of them will even claim that there are no facts. If a fringe minority, not present in any reliable sources, disagrees with a widely accepted fact it violates NPOV to state it as a fact in the article. Every statement of fact should be attributed, no matter how universally accepted.

Conspiracy

Examples

• The flat earth theory has been marginalised by the scientific establishment in order to protect its interests.
• Any scientist who tried to study flat-earth theory would lose his research funding. Dissent is being suppressed by the scientific establishment. (Mastcell)
• Rosencratz was tremendously rude about scientists who claimed the earth was round. If the scientific establishment has marginalized him this is not really surprising.
• As a professional astronomer you have a clear conflict of interest
• X Y and Z are hard-line skeptics about flat-earthism. They often publish in skeptics magazines and take a hard line with any approach to any theory which is not empirically verified.

How to recognise

The next tactic is to appeal to your ideas about free speech and distrust of censorship and the establishment. It is claimed that trying to balance positive content with negative content for WP:UNDUE is censorship. It is claimed that there is a conspiracy against the FRINGE position and anyone who opposes an uncritical article about the FRINGE position is in on the conspiracy, has been bought off, is breaking the rules of Wikipedia, is just plain evil, etc.

It is claimed that any source that has not written articles that are supportive and uncritical of FRINGE positions are not suitable as tertiary sources. For example, recently at a controversial article, it was once argued 'Actually, those really shouldn't be used as sources on this topic because (to my knowledge) they haven't written anything pro-X, and hence really can't be considered third party.'

Reversed burden of proof

Examples

• X's paper on 'scientific fallacies' contains only passing reference to the 'flat earth fallacy'. WP:NPOV says "Even with well-sourced material ... if you use it out of context or to advance a position that is not directly and explicitly supported by the source used, you as an editor are engaging in original research."
• You are taking lack of discussion of whether the earth is flat as evidence an author picks a side on the issue.... The evidence we should consider are those who consider the earth is flat, and those who explicitly reject this view. Sources that remain silent on the issue should be discarded." (recently from Ayn Rand)
• There is no reliable source for the statement that 'flat-earthism has entirely been ignored by reliable sources'
• The statement 'there is no scientific consensus for the flat-earth view' has no scientific consensus.
• There has been no serious study of whether the earth is flat since 1493. Therefore we cannot claim in Wikipedia that earth is not flat, only that a study in 1493 came to this conclusion.
• X's statement "Informal soundings amongst scientists revealed an almost total absence of awareness of the flat earth theory" is mere opinion. X is using personal experience as evidence. This is not a scientific evidence and is therefore mere opinion.

How to recognise

We move to the most powerful weapon in the fringe armoury: the argument from reversed burden of proof. Instead of them having to prove that their view is supported by reliable and independent sources, they will shift the burden of proof over to you, so that you have to prove that their view is not supported by reliable and independent sources. This is difficult for two reasons. First, it is always difficult to prove a negative existential statement (which is in effect a claim about everything there is). Second, because science generally ignores pseudoscience, it is often very difficult to find reliable sources that describe some pseudoscientific view as pseudoscientific.

Reliable sources claims to know certain facts which I believe are impossible to know. Thus, they are not reliable sources.

How to reply

This argument is often difficult to address. However, you should always recognise the shifting of the burden of proof for what it is. Insist that the burden is theirs. Also, there are non-promotional descriptions of pseudoscience can only be had from second- and third-party sources. Although most of these sources will not be peer-reviewed simply because science tends to ignore pseudoscience, you can still insist that they are independent. Also, the following are reliable sources for describing pseudoscience:

• Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
• Encyclopedia of pseudoscience
• An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural
• Skeptic's Dictionary
• Skeptical Inquirer
• talk.origins archive
• Bad Astronomy
• Quackwatch
• Mainstream media reports
• Skeptical scientists speaking extemporaneously (whether it be in person, letters, personal websites, blogs, etc.)
• Statements from scientific societies

Gaming

Examples

• The statement 'The earth is round' has reliable sources in scientific literature. The statement 'If the X is round, X is not flat' is a valid inference that can be sourced from any reliable logic textbook. But 'The earth is not flat', while a conclusion validly yielded by these two reliably-sourced premisses, is a violation of WP:SYNTH: "Even if published by reliable sources, material must not be connected together in such a way that it constitutes original research".
• One should use only primary sources. Relying on secondary sources is POV.

How to recognise

You have kept the marginal and fringe viewpoint at bay for some months or years. But now they have got wise, and expert in the ways of Wikipedia. They have read the policies carefully, and have worked out the various loopholes in it, and the endless games they can play with it.

They now claimed that only the proponents of the FRINGE position understand NPOV or NOR or RS, not the experienced editors with tens of thousands of edits, and FAs and GAs to their credit. They will 'wikilawyer' to try to redefine a FRINGE position as nonFRINGE, or the mainstream position as the FRINGE position instead. They will attempt to to use mainly primary sources and to reject secondary and tertiary sources, or to redefine the preferences for secondary and tertiary sources in policy.

Worst of all, it is now many months since you tidied up the article. You have no inherent interest in the Flat Earth theory, and you have moved on to another area of pseudoscience (let's say the Geocentric theory). But the Flat Earth supporters are interested in nothing else than their pet theory. They will come back when you are gone and revert when you do not notice. The arguments that you successfully rebutted and dismissed, sometimes with extensive references, will be repeated over and over and over, sometimes just with a cut and paste approach. Sometimes they will be presented by the same person dozens and dozens of times over days and weeks and months.

They will make a series of silly and time wasting requests for comment, mediation or arbitration again to try to wear you down. They will add tags repeatedly to well-known material, or material that is fully referenced on wikilinked articles that discuss that point in more detail. Assorted templates branding the article are thrown on the article repeatedly, such as the claim that an NPOV dispute is going on, when it is more accurate to describe the discussion as revolving around some editor's idiosyncratic interpretation of NPOV to satisfy their own personal agenda. Accusations that a group editing the article own the article since they will not change the consensus to satisfy one malcontent are common.

Amenability

Examples

• The flat-earth theory is not amenable to scientific approaches and methods.
• Flat-earth theorists are pragmatic. They are not interested in what is 'true', they are interested in 'what works'.
• Rosenkratz never claimed nor explicitly stated that the Flat Earth Theory is a 'science'

How to recognise

Another way of evading NPOV is to avoid the requirement for reliable sourcing altogether. They will claim that the view in question is simply not amenable to scientific treatment. Source X was from a scientific journal, it attempted to address the Flat Earth theory in a way that science could deal with it. But Flat Earth theory is not amenable to scientific treatment. Source X misunderstood what the theory was really saying. The Flat Earth theory is not something that is really a 'fact' in the scientific sense. (See the archived talk pages of the article Neurolinguistic programming for endless repetitions and varieties of this argument).

Or they claim that writing material using facts in the same context as reliable sources do violates NPOV since they are following a "narrative". We must instead choose facts which no source describes as relevant to allow our readers to decide which "narrative" should be chosen.

How to reply

Stick to your guns. This is merely a philosophically naive means of evading justification and substantiation. All theories make claims of some sort, otherwise they would not have 'proponents' (a proponent literally 'puts forward' a certain view that is susceptible of truth or falsity). The Flat Earth theory claims that earth is flat, not round. That is a statement with a binary truth-value. And it is capable of confirmation or refutation, it is verifiable. For example, topography (measuring the distances between defined points on the Earth's surface) shows the shape of the earth. Therefore, the theory is amenable to scientific treatment.

Special pleading

Examples

• Scientist X, who claimed the flat-earth theory was nonsense, clearly had not read the literature on the flat-earth theory.
• Scientist X was not trained in flat-earth theory, and therefore could not make an expert judgment.
• The criticisms made by scientist X were valid only against Rosencrantz' version of the flat-earth theory, long since outmoded. They fail to address Guildernstein's improved version of the theory.
• You arguments assume there is a mainstream flat earth view. There is no mainstream 'flat earth' view, therefore your criticisms are misplaced.

How to recognise

Special pleading is when the advocates of a fringe viewpoint argue that you have no expertise in the theory (which may, they argue, take years to fully master). You do not understand the theory, and therefore you cannot make your claims. Another version of this argument is to claim there are many different types of the theory, and that while version X and version Y are clearly nonsense, the most recent version Z (which of course you have never heard of) is scientifically impeccable. They may even claim there is no 'version' of the theory as such, that you are attacking a straw man.

How to reply

Stick to your guns.

Controversy

Examples

• The flat earth theory is clearly controversial. This is proof that scientists take it seriously.

How to recognise

You have defeated your fringe and crackpot opponents once and for all - you think. But although they cannot defeat your arguments, they will try and distort and alter your language in a way that represents the view as less marginal. The most well-known and often-used tactic is to claim that their viewpoint is 'controversial', as though there were a minority but substantial view held by serious scientists or academics, that is actively engaging the mainstream, and which is reported as controversial by reliable sources.

They will try to exploit equivocation in the description of pseudoscience. For example, instead of simply stating: "the Flat Earth theory violates the known laws of geometry", a proponent may argue for the equivocal statement: "some geometers claim that the Flat Earth theory violates the known laws of geometry", perhaps adding "but there is considerable controversy over the matter."

How to reply

Pseudoscience should not be described on its own terms. The goal of writing an article on pseudoscience should be to present the ideas that are most commonly seen in relation to that pseudoscientific idea. This means that when writing an article on pseudoscience, popularity of ideas is a major rationale for inclusion or exclusion. Obscure iterations of pseudoscience should be eliminated, even if so-called "experts" in the subject believe such ideas to be of the utmost importance. The best way to write an article on pseudoscience is to approach it from the perspective of what topics are most prevalent in the popular culture about the subject.

All claims that are made about observable reality which are directly contradicted by mainstream science must be represented as such. Per the rules of reliable sourcing and not unduly weighting fringe opinions, an article about a mainstream topic should marginalize all related pseudoscience topics relative to the prominence seen in secondary and tertiary sources about the mainstream topic. A pseudoscientific topic should not be mentioned in an article about a mainstream topic unless there are independent mainstream sources that connect the topics. For example, there are plenty of mainstream sources which describe how astronomy is not astrology, and so a decent article on the former may mention the latter. However, there are no mainstream sources about special relativity which also mention autodynamics, and so a decent article on the former should not mention the latter.

If pseudoscience is deemed necessary to exclude in a certain article, there should not even be a link through a see also section.

Often pseudoscience articles must link to science articles. Rarely will science articles link to pseudoscience articles. This is the principle of one-way linking.