User talk:NightHeron/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

re talk:Ilhan Omar

I don't much follow U.S. politics. I think I saw the comments that Ilhan Omar made. Could you quote the problematic comment that Ilhan Omar said? I tried to search in Google and I didn't find the comment that mentions another group of people. AFAIK, all she said was criticizing the Israel lobby in the US. Is there a comment of her that I am not aware of? --SharabSalam (talk) 16:34, 29 December 2019 (UTC)

SharabSalam: Here is an excerpt from a National Public Radio discussion by their reporter Susan Davis:

SUSAN DAVIS: Congresswoman Ilhan Omar remained silent during a House Democratic meeting today, but she is the cause of much debate. It's about this comment she made at an event at a Washington D.C. coffee shop last week.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ILHAN OMAR: I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.

DAVIS: That country is Israel. And for many, her words smacked of the dual loyalty smear that has been used to persecute Jews throughout history. Democrats like California's Juan Vargas are deeply offended by Omar's words.

JUAN VARGAS: This dual loyalty charge has led to the mass murder of millions of Jews in history. I'm not sure that everyone understands how grave this issue is.

DAVIS: Top Jewish Democrats in Congress, like House Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel and House Appropriations Chairwoman Nita Lowey, are asking for an apology that Omar is refusing to give this time. Last month, Omar did apologize for a couple of tweets that also played on anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish money and influence in American politics. She's also privately reached out to Jewish colleagues like Illinois Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky.

JAN SCHAKOWSKY: Personally, for example, embraced me and expressed her apology for that. To me as a Jew, I accept that apology. I do not believe that she is an anti-Semite.

There's a discussion of the tropes about "dual loyalty" and "Jewish money and influence in American politics" in the articles Antisemitic canard and Antisemitism in the United States#Stereotypes. By the way, many American Jews strongly oppose the tendency among supporters of Israel of labeling any expression of strong opposition to Israeli policies (such as advocacy of BDS) as anti-semitic, because they believe that the term anti-semitic should be reserved for words and actions that are truly anti-semitic.

The "dual loyalty" trope is, of course, used against other groups besides Jews, such as Muslims and even Catholics. In the 1960 US presidential election, many Republicans claimed that the Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy couldn't be trusted because, as a Catholic, he might take orders from the Vatican.

By the way, just yesterday I reverted an edit on Talk:White privilege that was clearly anti-semitic. It stated that the notion of white privilege described in that article was a concoction of Jews. There's a long history in the US of anti-semitic attacks on Jews who support people of color. Many Jews are political progressives/leftists, and historically many supported the Civil Rights movement in the South. The Ku Klux Klan, in addition to being anti-Black was also anti-semitic. Of the three young civil rights workers they murdered in Mississippi in 1964, two were Jews from New York and one was an African American from Mississippi, see Murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner.

But my impression is that there's very little antisemitism on Wikipedia. Only once before did I encounter anti-semitic vandalism in an article, and of course promptly reverted it. NightHeron (talk) 19:27, 29 December 2019 (UTC)

I was not alone in support for the changes.

Elizirum agreed that I had a point about the paragraph in the lead. He said; "I think Edit5001 is on to something as regards this passage. It is, as it stands, rather a misrepresentation of the survey findings in the multiple reliable sources (although 100% of those sources have a demonstrable WP:BIAS for abortion, making their very interpretation suspect)."

So someone did agree with me about that paragraph. That makes things two to two in support vs opposition. Edit5001 (talk) 01:33, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

DS alert per request I give you one at Talk:Race and intelligence

This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.

You have shown interest in the intersection of race/ethnicity and human abilities and behaviour. Due to past disruption in this topic area, a more stringent set of rules called discretionary sanctions is in effect. Any administrator may impose sanctions on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic.

For additional information, please see the guidance on discretionary sanctions and the Arbitration Committee's decision here. If you have any questions, or any doubts regarding what edits are appropriate, you are welcome to discuss them with me or any other editor.

Doug Weller talk 10:18, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

About the Pro-Life Movement

User:NightHeron, I realize that perhaps my first reason for undoing the edit before was a little bit of sophistry, and I apologize. But to be perfectly frank, if I may be bold, the movement, to my knowledge, has always been called the pro-life movement. The March in Washington, D.C. is called the March for Life officially, and the marchers themselves are called, and call themselves, pro-life. Now I understand that it makes sense that it would seem more a compromise to call them anti-abortion as they are indeed against abortion. But with all due respect that would mean calling those on the other end of the spectrum pro-abortion. It would be the fair thing to do. Of course Wikipedia has renamed them abortion rights activists. But with all due respect that seems like perfect sophistry and paints those who have one argument look good and the ones with another argument look bad. And if Wikipedia is to be unbiased, it should, in all seriousness, really think of more unbiased terms to describe each side. The way I see it, and I could be wrong, just saying, is the following: if those against abortion cannot be called pro-life more often than anti-abortion, then those for abortion, or the choice of abortion, cannot be called abortion rights activists more than pro-choice. If my argument is flawed, please tell me. Thanks User:Milomit —Preceding undated comment added 17:36, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

@Milomit: This was discussed at length in June 2018, when the titles of both articles were changed to neutral titles: pro-life movement --> anti-abortion movement and pro-choice movement --> abortion-rights movement. As you say, the former group of people is unambiguously opposed to abortion, so there's nothing misleading about the name. It's a neutral name, which should not offend anyone who truly believes that abortion is wrong. The term pro-life is a political spin term that does not reflect reality. For example, the Catholic Church is anti-abortion even in cases (such as ectopic pregnancy or pregnancy of a child victim of rape or pregnancy of a woman with very high blood pressure) where continuation of the pregnancy would risk the death of the woman.

Similarly, pro-choice is political spin, because it disguises the fact that people are talking about abortion. They are not talking about your right to vote in an election. The most neutral term (according to consensus in 2018) is the abortion-rights movement, because its advocates unambiguously believe that a woman has a right to have an abortion, subject only to the usual restrictions based on trimester. It would be wrong to call it a pro-abortion movement, since typically the spokespeople for the movement strongly advocate for better availability of inexpensive contraceptives, along with sex education, in large part in order to reduce the number of abortions. Generally, abortion-rights people want to discourage women from using abortion as a routine method of birth control.

The fact that the two sides officially call themselves "pro-life" and "pro-choice" is not a reason for Wikipedia to prefer those terms, since neither is neutral. If you want to discuss this further, please use the article talk-page, so that other editors can participate, rather than my talk page. Thanks. NightHeron (talk) 01:36, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Oct13

Hmm I remember of various of their previous creations that often only cited primary biblical verses and of the lack of response when I pointed this out. I've not had time to follow their recent work, but maybe their editing history deserves some scrutiny, thanks for noticing the article you just AfD, —PaleoNeonate – 02:17, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Help please

Hi there Night Heron, I'm looking for another pair of eyes to look at an article that I have become involved with. I've followed your edits at the abortion article and I've been impressed with your knowledge and willingness to spend time countering false information suggested by editors, mostly new and single issue editors, to keep our abortion article accurate and free of bias. Just now reading your user page, I too have long stayed far away from all of "alt med" articles after soon learning that it was a total waste of my time to expect a fair and knowledgeable discussion of article improvements. Not that I actually use any alt meds, though I have no doubt that there are some useful ones out there, but due to the lack of oversight one has no idea what may or may not be in those little bottles labeled this or that ingredient. Not to mention the fact that without a profit incentive there is next to no recent research being done making it impossible to obtain current info. Etc.

OK, here's the problem. A few weeks ago the topic of Siddha medicine came up saying "watch out!!!", the WHO has OK'd it as useful, or however it was put. I chuckled to myself and just out of curiosity looked at the article. After a quick read I just rolled my eyes and thought oh perfect, now our quack medicine experts are calling the medicine that is fully licensed and accepted by government officials and practiced by the majority of Indians as fake quackery. But I couldn't get it off my mind because it reminded me so much of how Trumpian a good part of thinking in our country has become, and here it was right on WP as well. IMO. (For example, I no longer watch the alt med articles but out of curiosity looked at the acupuncture talk page and found editors bragging that WP is more of an expert than the NIH.)

What I'm asking is would you have the time and the interest in reading the Siddha article lead, especially the final para, and the sources that it provides. The decision has been made on the talk page that the lead is accurate and I'm wondering who I should believe, my own eyes or the group consensus. If you take an interest in this matter this article will give you a great deal of background information [1] which is helpful if you (like me) are new to Indian med. Let me know... Thanks for reading. Gandydancer (talk) 18:16, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

@Gandydancer: Thank you for your message and your kind comment on my abortion edits. I'm very sympathetic to your predicament running up against the group of editors who are determined to make sure that Wikipedia denies any validity to any form of folk/traditional medicine. Never mind that Tu Youyou received the Nobel Prize for having, as a result of her systematic study of traditional Chinese medicine, discovered artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin, used to treat malaria, a breakthrough in twentieth-century tropical medicine, saving millions of lives in South China, Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America (from the Wikipedia article).

I'm not the one to help on alt med, however, since I was badly burnt when I tried to improve alt-med related articles. After 6 months of being t-banned from anything remotely related to medicine, I tried to argue for keeping some material on herbal abortifacients that was well-sourced. I not only failed to do that, but was also threatened with a renewed ban by one of the same experienced editors who had gotten me banned before. When he went out of his way to trash John Riddle (one of the main authors I'd cited on herbal abortifacients) and I was unsuccessful in defending Riddle's reputation on the fringe page, out of frustration I became inactive on Wikipedia for a few months. Ultimately I decided to return to editing but self-ban from any alt-med-related topic. That has worked. I've been editing contentious articles. I was even threatened on this user talk-page by an extremist whose vandalism of Talk:White privilege I'd reverted (his vandalism involved implicit threats of violence, and records of it were removed by an admin). But the nice thing about a pseudonym is that the racist vandal does not know my true identity. In any case, since I've returned to regular editing, whatever my disagreements with other editors have been, I've never been in danger of being banned because of my efforts to improve articles. That happened only in connection with alt med. So at this point I feel that I have to avoid that topic entirely. But thank you for asking. NightHeron (talk) 19:36, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

I understand why you would rather not become involved and I was not expecting you to enter into the TP discussion. I was thinking that considering your interests in alt med that you may be willing to take a look at the discussion and do a quick assessment and give me an opinion about whether or not I am somehow just not seeing things properly... You could take a glance at the numerous links offered that supposedly back up the lead "quackery" position but I can tell you that none of them do - they rather all discuss unlicensed practitioners of any sort of medicine. I've actually learned a lot of interesting stuff in researching. India has many thousands of unlicensed "doctors" that have been trained in their family through information/skills/etc. being passed down, etc... They see themselves as every bit as qualified to practice as those licensed in Indian medicine (and they are the ones that the Indian gov't. are calling quacks). Add to that, India would like to let their licensed Indian traditional doctors prescribe 70 medications (after a three month course) and the Indian Medical Association (like our AMA) is adamant about refusing that... So I've learned all that... Gandydancer (talk) 20:20, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

@Gandydancer: I know very little about medicine in India, but your summary sounds accurate to me. There are many countries where forms of alt med have to some extent been incorporated into government approved medical systems. Even the Wikipedia alt med article admits that alternative medicine is taught in more than half of US medical schools and US health insurers are increasingly willing to provide reimbursement for alternative therapies; as you point out, the NIH has a fairly flexible viewpoint on it; and the widely used textbook Harrison's Internal Medicine summarizes alt med in a surprisingly positive way. The German and British medical services also incorporate alternative treatments. Cuba is an interesting case. There they've long had a shortage of pharmaceuticals because of the US embargo; meanwhile, in the general population alternative approaches have long been popular. The government decided to train the licensed doctors in alternative healing modalities so that they would better be able to monitor their patients' use, to combat the methods that are clearly fraudulent, and to use the alternative methods when more modern ones aren't available and when the folk treatments are deemed to be better than nothing.

Personally, I've never used alt med -- unless you count tiger balm on a cut or a moist teabag for an eye irritation -- and I'm generally a skeptic. However, I have good medical coverage, and most people in the world (even in the US) do not. Even though modern medicine is usually much better than the alternatives, it's a bit arrogant for privileged Wikipedia editors to decide that much of the world's population are gullible fools because when they are deprived of access to anything better, they resort to alt med. NightHeron (talk) 21:16, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. NightHeron, something about that article that really bothers me is that in the medical profession we learned what Flo said about if we can't help at least do no harm... I see that article as doing harm and it bothers me. In my learning I learned that India actually trains thousands of doctors in modern medicine but they almost all leave to earn more money. It leaves around 75% of the people with Indian traditional caregivers. Again, from what I learned they can do a pretty good job and a lot of what they do is teach healthy living practices, which we know are the cause of a lot of disease in the first place, diabetes and heart disease for example. And while I understand that the IMA is fighting allowing them to prescribe meds, it would be a helpful way to meet India's dire need for health professionals. At any rate, the lead ref they are using with the IMA statement does not call India traditional med quackery either. And then to have our article call anyone but those caregivers that are giving allopathic treatments quacks seems to be doing the harm that Flo said we should not do...to me..and it disturbs me to do nothing about it. Our words can cause harm and we need to take them seriously. I'm thinking I could ask WAID's help. As you might imagine, I'm hesitant about bringing it up with any of the editors that write our med articles and I don't want to waste my time and emotional energy on issues that are beyond my control. Gandydancer (talk) 22:24, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

@Gandydancer: I remember in mid-2018, when I was a newbie on Wikipedia, you advised me that trying to improve the alt med articles would be a waste of time. I didn't listen to you, and I ended up banned for 6 months. But now you seem to be considering ignoring your own advice, and getting into a conflict with the anti-alt-med warriors yourself. Your goal is laudable, but you'll likely find little support among other editors, just as I got virtually no support when they came after me on ANI.

On the subject of do no harm, Wikipedia, what bothers me more than the distortions on alt med is the article Race and intelligence, which I and several other editors have been trying to get either deleted or radically improved. The title already suggests the POV of the article, which is that some races are genetically more or less intelligent than others. That's a fringe theory, advanced by people like Jensen, Rushton, Lynn, Gottfredson, and Piffer, supported generously by the white supremacist Pioneer Fund. The article quotes Jensen/Rushton/Lynn positively several dozen times, and provides a FALSEBALANCE between the fringe theory and the consensus view of scientists that there is no evidence for any race being mentally inferior to another. The article gets over a thousand pageviews per day, and it was cited by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an example of the influence of the alt-right on Wikipedia. The article has been proposed for deletion 4 times, most recently this month. But the deletion failed (reversed on DRV, although a committee of admins has been appointed to reassess the original deletion discussion). The lack of diversity among Wikipedia editors clearly has a big effect on content. NightHeron (talk) 00:53, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

The difference in this India altmed article is that it touches on one of my core personality traits: my need to stick up for the underdog. In this case it is the lower class Indians who face such a struggle to survive that I feel I need to speak for them. Call it nuts but we all work as a hobby here so we need to feel some sort of fulfillment. OK, on that intelligence article. First off, I had no idea that it was still in question--I thought it was settled years ago that tests tend to be biased, etc. I am surprised that you are finding bias in the editors at that article - in the (many) political articles that I work on it is generally possible to work with others to keep them free of bias. Or, for instance our medical articles such as abortion, breastfeeding, etc., - they are just remarkably good (in no small measure due to the excellent lead taken by Doc James, even though he pisses me off to no end plenty of times). At the IQ article I read only the section re diet and IQ and it seemed like good information to me. I will read the article as time permits but I can't understand why you would want to remove it outright if there are misconceptions that need to be aired. I looked at the editors that work on the article and I've never worked with any of them. Is the larger WP med community aware of the article bias problems? Gandydancer (talk) 01:57, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

Oh, OK, I'm reading the SPLC article for starters and I can see how dumb I was. It's hard for me to read that sort of crap. I've never been involved with truly evil people though I know they are out there. To be forced to deal with that sort is a very difficult task indeed. This little battle that I am working with at the India article involves good people who disagree with me in this certain area. But they are good, decent people. But that article seems to be quite a different sort of thing - nasty and dirty. Just sickening. Now I can see why reason to delete it, perhaps. I'll keep reading. Gandydancer (talk) 02:38, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for looking at it. The recent AfD is at [2]. NightHeron (talk) 02:53, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

Interlocutor here and perhaps an erstwhile member of the "quack medicine experts" brigade here. I want to first say that I have appreciated NightHeron's excellent work on R&I, but I fear that there is something you two are missing in your approach to alternative medicine in this discussion. Namely, there is a difference between the way alternative medicine is expounded upon and promoted in the West and the way folk medicine and indigenous knowledge occurs in other contexts. The problem is that these two things can and do clash in general. Alternative medicine (which includes Siddha medicine) is a distinctly modern treatment of particular ideas that have been either co-opted, reinvented, or bastardized by promoting certain claims of traditional or folk medicines over others. Unfortunately, what has happened in a lot of these alt med contexts is that there has been an unholy mixture of arguments that says things like acupuncture, ayurveda and the like are "traditional knowledge" when, in fact, they are repackaged for capitalist consumption in a fairly goopy fashion, or as nationalist propaganda (if you care, take a gander at this article on "traditional Chinese medicine"). It would be great if Wikipedia could disentangle the indigenous knowledge and serious investigative work done by the likes of Tu Youyou from the co-opted stuff, but this is a difficult task. In India, the entire endeavor is not only an issue of poverty and access, it is also extremely politicized at the moment as the Hindu nationalists are promoting the repackaged versions as being chauvinistically ascendent. This is not just in medicine. Hindu astrology is essentially warmed-over literalist interpretations of the Vedas, but managed to win court judgements and government approval as a "science".

What I think Wikipedia could do a better job with is disentangling alternative medicine from indigenous medicine (unfortunately, "traditional medicine" as a term has been co-opted). This is a worthy goal. I would start not at the level of Siddha but instead at places which are being ignored by our WP:Systemic bias. We need more work done documenting indigenous knowledge and less hand-wringing over whether the multi-billion-dollar alt med industry is being given a fair shake, IMHO.

Happy to continue the conversation.

jps (talk) 21:54, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

Thank you, jps, for assuming good faith on our part. My own personal view on alt med is quite skeptical; I'm an admirer of Edzard Ernst and Marcia Angell; and I even did a small amount of anti-alt-med editing on the WebMD page (adding sourced criticism of WebMD for promoting dubious practices). I also am aware of the danger of the anti-science pro-pseudoscience alt-right, which we're seeing at the Race and intelligence TP/AfD/DRV.

But I don't think editors should be on a crusade against all forms of alt-med. The alt-med article cites Ernst as follows: in 2011 published his estimate that about 7.4% were based on "sound evidence", although he believes that may be an overestimate. That sounds reasonable to me. 7.4% is not 0%. IMHO Wikipedia should acknowledge the good side as well as the bad side, and should recognize, in line with WP:GLOBAL, that most people in the world have severely limited access to modern medicine, and many of them undoubtedly are being helped by certain forms of alt med.

Also, as Harrison's Internal Medicine points out, parts of modern medical practice have a very weak evidentiary basis. I believe that two clear examples are psychiatry, and the longstanding practice (especially in the US) of over-prescribing psychotropics for children and opioids for adults.

You're right that often alt-med just serves the interests of capitalist profiteers and right-wing nationalists. But not always. Cuba, for example, decided to incorporate some forms of alt med into their medical system -- or at least ensure that their physicians are well-informed about it and can properly advise patients who use it -- in large part because of the scarcities caused by the US embargo. Throughout much of history, folk knowledge about herbal medicines, most likely derived from informal experimentation and observation of animals, achieved certain health objectives. The evidence for this is not double-blind clinical studies, but rather the fact that cultures in different parts of the world and different time periods were often using the same herbals for the same purposes. For example, Queen Anne's Lace, rue, parsley/apiol, and juniper/sabin were used as abortifacients by women in different centuries and different places. That's not pseudoscience or superstition.

I know next to nothing about Siddha or most other non-Western belief systems. My impression is that the correct answer to the question: "Is it quackery or is it not quackery?" is: Yes to both. Large parts are quackery and large parts deserve respect. The same question can be asked about other belief systems, such as Catholicism, for example. Catholicism officially continues to support exorcisms and to "confirm miracles" in preparation for beatification. Definitely fringe. But another side of Catholicism is the declaration at the 1968 Catholic Bishops Conference in Medellin about preferential option for the poor, which inspired thousands of nuns and priests throughout the Americas to follow liberation theology, some of them sacrificing their lives in the struggle against the exploiters and death squads. So it would be misleading to say in the lede to Catholicism that the belief system and practice are just a bunch of quackery.

Another example is hula dancing, described in the article's lede as a complex art form, which it was traditionally. Later the article explains what happened in the 20th century, when it was drastically changed, corrupted and exploited for profit. Wikipedia can cover these things in a balanced manner, explaining the value of different parts of indigenous or traditional culture and also, when necessary, how they have become corrupted or misused in our day. NightHeron (talk) 23:21, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

Good stuff here. I think that the problem is, and I think there is a clear reading of Ernst that confirms this, that the 7.4% you reference is not easily identified (WP:CRYSTAL) when the ideas are embedded within the alternative medicine framework, essentially by definition. I don't think we're really empowered to make the case one way or another then. This does not mean we should argue for an ignorance of alternative medicine, and your point about the importance of at least documenting practice, as in your Cuba example, is well-taken. I still worry that you haven't quite made the distinction here which I think is important: there is a difference between indigenous knowledge and folk remedies and alternative medicine. I see this as being a very big difference, in fact, which I argue does align very closely with profiteering, chauvinism, and other overtly ideological approaches (whether they be explicitly religious, anti-mainstream, etc.). People who are struggling to provide medical care in places where there is scarcity are not involved in this juggernaut (how can they be?). Figuring out how to distinguish this in practice, however, can be hard because (a) there is systemic bias within research medicine, (b) there are charlatans who co-opt the situation to the point where it is hard to report on it accurately without bias, and (c) the research that exists is often not of high enough quality for us to say much of anything. Part of the problem I think Wikipedia has is that it is ill-equipped to deal with real pressing points of inquiry that have not been fully investigated. After all, Wikipedia has this strict WP:NOR rule. If the sources are of uneven quality for documenting which herbs are abortifacients and which are not, I think that Wikipedia simply is not set-up to expound upon this in any reasonable detail. It is why I think sometimes the best thing we can do is excise, even as this may perpetuate the inherent bias. What to do? I think in situations where this is a problem, the answer really is outside of this website: we should be encouraging the production of high-quality sources that can eventually be used in Wikipedia. jps (talk) 00:49, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

But it seems to me that in two respects the Wikipedia editors who apparently see themselves as anti-alt-med warriors (and display the banner "This user resists the POV pushing of lunatic charlatans" on their userpage -- which I was glad to see is not on yours) are not in keeping with core policies. First, they are quick to assume bad faith (and label as alt-medists) anyone who wants to see some recognition of the complexity of the alt med issue. This attitude is partly the fault of Wikipedia's guru Jimbo Wales, whose famous statement on the subject was interpreted by some as a license to embark on a crusade.

Secondly, those editors insist on MEDRS sources when writing about indigenous and traditional medicine. But as you say, those treatments have almost never been subjected to high-quality double-blind clinical trials. In many cases it would be almost impossible to do that. Herbs vary in potency and effectiveness. In a given locality knowledge about an appropriate dosage or means of use might be passed on from one generation to another through the informal healers (usually women). For example, Queen Anne's Lace (an emmenagogue or early abortifacient) can be made into a tea (in Appalachia) or its seeds are chewed (in Rajasthan). The types of scholars who write about this are not usually medical researchers, but rather historians and anthropologists. There is no justification in Wikipedia policy for rejecting the work of those scholars. Their work is RS, but not MEDRS.

Even in the US certain alternatives to pharmaceuticals called "home remedies" might work well and cost a lot less. I got into a long debate about this with CFCF in 2018. I said that I'd rather use a moist teabag for an eye irritation than go to the drugstore and buy an overpriced bottle of Visine. He warned me that the teabag might give me an eye infection! My use of a moist teabag does not support the multi-billion dollar alt-med industry, and it works.

A fallacy in the extreme anti-alt-med position is that it's ahistorical. Even Steven Novella acknowledges that certain treatments that were considered alt-med 20 or 30 years ago (he was referring to the use of physical therapy rather than surgery for severe back pain) are now routinely recommended by doctors and covered by insurance (and physical therapy is cheaper than surgery). It stands to reason that some of today's alt-med (part of Ernst's 7.4%) will likely be tomorrow's accepted mainstream medical practice. Perhaps in 10 or 20 years doctors will tell parents with hyperactive children, "No, I won't prescribe psychotropics for him, but I will give you a referral to a yoga class or rhythmic dancing for him, and it will be covered by insurance." In the future people might look back on the medical practice for hyperactivity in the early 21st century as primitive and dangerous, compared to a much better approach that was considered hokey and alternative. NightHeron (talk) 02:24, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

I believe there is more that we agree upon than disagree, so I'll just highlight a few things where we may be politely at a difference of opinion:

• It can both be true that teabags can reduce eye irritation and could also possibly give you an infection. It could also be true that eye drops have fewer side effects and might be overhyped by certain manufacturers. That's not going to be something we're going to disentangle without some excellent sourcing (which is why external solutions to this website are so important).
• Documenting what people are doing is different from documenting the efficacy of what people are doing.
• I agree that there are these few things that slither out of alternative medicine (as an enterprise), but to know what they are going to be before they do so is not possible.
• The case of back pain illustrates another issue with these subjects: It's not so much that physical therapy is more effective than back surgery. It's more-or-less similarly effective, but surgery has far more complications and expenses than physical therapy. The best literature admits we don't really have any treatment for back pain, but that doing nothing for it seems to be worse than doing something for it.

jps (talk) 10:16, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Those are not areas of disagreement; I largely agree with all four points. I only differ about a couple of things: I've never heard of any side effect from dabbing one's eyes with a moist teabag. Also, in some cases we have evidence not only that people have used the folk treatments for centuries, but also that their use is based on accumulated knowledge, not superstition or pseudoscience. As I said, there's strong reason to think that Queen Anne's Lace does act as an emmenagogue and early-stage abortifacient, but the academic sourcing for that comes from historians and anthropologists, not (as far as I know) from the Western medical literature. (There's a medical source from India, but I believe it not regarded, at least by Wikipedia editors, as reliable.)

I totally agree with the gist of your four points, which is that much is either unknown or inadequately sourced, and weighing and comparing different proposed treatments is a complex matter. That's exactly what's wrong with the alt-med article -- and also with Jimbo Wales' statement. Both give a false impression that Wikipedia knows a simple answer to the question: Is any of it any good? As always, the most important part of the article is the beginning, which summarizes the topic: Alternative medicine describes any practice that aims to achieve the healing effects of medicine, but which lacks biological plausibility and is untested, untestable or proven ineffective... Alternative therapies share in common that they reside outside medical science, and rely on pseudoscience. It's simply false that all alternative practices "lack biological plausibility" and "rely on pseudoscience." Most do, but many (7.4%?) do not lack plausibility or rely on pseudoscience.

The editors who write these things and get angry at any editor who wants to change them claim to be defending science against pseudoscience. But that's not how science works. It does not work by pretending to have certain knowledge and simple theories for things that are complex, multifaceted, and often unsettled. In my view a key ingredient in the scientific method is humility. Let the ad-men and politicians feign certainty -- exaggerating, misleading, and over-simplifying. A scientist -- or an encyclopedia -- should not do that. NightHeron (talk) 12:48, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Not to belabor the point too much but point any non-sterile water in/near your eye increases the risk of infection of, for example, acanthamoeba. I think also the context with which Jimmy Wales issues his statement is important. There has been a coordinated campaign on the part of industry alt med practitioners to get Wikipedia to allow them to have free reign over article subjects. There is even a petition (forgive me if I do not link to it) on change.org. Wales was responding directly to that set of complaints and if he did so in a less than gracious manner, well, I don't begrudge him that necessarily. In any case, I think we also judge the 7.4% proportion in a slightly different way. I judge it as the level to which modalities accepted in alternative medicine but not accepted in mainstream medicine eventually find their way into the mainstream. I do not see it as contradicting the point that alternative therapies lacking biological plausibility or relying on pseudoscience. As with any attempt to summarize, there may be issues with precise wording so as to be accurate and succinct as possible, but in these cases a failure rate of 7.4% in demarcation is pretty remarkable. Perhaps it's worth comparing to an article like scientific consensus on climate change where the failure rate of consensus is similarly below 10%, but is essentially in the noise in a similar fashion. jps (talk) 14:41, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Like any treatment, standard or alt, proper use is crucial. If you use a teabag on your eyes that has fallen on the floor, that's a bad idea. Otherwise the water is pretty sterile, since it's been boiled. It's not a valid analogy to compare alt med in its totality to climate change denial, Holocaust denial, moon landing denial, anti-vaccine, etc. Those fringe views are rejecting science and history. Not all alt med rejects modern medicine. Rejecting well-supported science is fringe. It is not fringe to use or to recommend a non-standard treatment because (1) you don't have access to the standard treatment, or (2) you can't afford the standard treatment, or (3) for a mild condition (e.g., eye irritation) there are informal sources that say that a non-standard treatment works. Actually, a 7.4% success rate is pretty high, in the sense that parts of alt med are helping millions of people and could be a source of improvement in standard medicine (other parts, of course, are harming millions of people and have nothing to contribute). Even in the modern history of medicine there have been a large proportion of failures (though it would be hard to give a percent). You point out that many Siddha practitioners prescribe mercury, which can be very harmful. In the US, doctors prescribed mercury for many things, notably syphilus, until into the 20th century. In the more recent past, some leading medical writers, such as Marcia Angell, have sharply criticized the over-prescription of psychotropics as having a terrible effect on the development of children's brains. She has also criticized the quality of much current medical research, which she relates to the COI of industry-funded research. NightHeron (talk) 16:11, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

I don't think that the whataboutism of modern medicine really is a good defense here. We are both in agreement that modern medicine has its problems. Where I think we differ is in our general outlook of how alternative medicine behaves in an epistemic sense. The alternative medicine movement, inasmuch as there is such a thing, is decidedly anti-scientific in ways that look very similar to me to the litany you named. However, it may be best to stop the discussion here as I suspect in practice our approaches on articles where we overlap may not diverge all that substantially. Good talk! jps (talk) 17:48, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

I'm just arguing for not lumping together all alt med as equally bad. We probably differ on how alt med related articles should be edited, but since I'm keeping away from all such articles (a self-t-ban), I agree with you that on articles we'd both be editing we'd almost certainly be in agreement. And thanks again for assuming good faith. NightHeron (talk) 20:48, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Could I interest you in this...?

I have just recently begun to work on the 2020 coronavirus outbreak in the United States article. I am ready to start to find information on the U.S. (rather pathetic) work on testing kits. See this link for example [3] So I next plan to break out a "Testing" section but first need to find the WHO info on kits and the CDC info as well. And then work the present info into that. The last time I worked on a pandemic article was with Ozzie and I can say for sure that it takes a minimum of two dedicated editors to handle such a large task. As you know I admire your work, could I interest you to help at that article? If you are interested I will get Ozzie's correct sig and ping him. Gandydancer (talk) 19:35, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

Thank you, Gandydancer, for your kind words about my editing. I'm not generally knowledgeable about medical sources, with the partial exception of abortion. And I know nothing about testing kits. However, a role I could play, if it would be useful, would be to style-edit for greater accessibility. I did that once with another editor in the medical field who put very good material into a medical article, but it had medical terms and jargon and did not conform to the wikipedia notion of being readable by a teenager. I did my best to fix that. I don't mean to say that your style won't be readable. It's just that you're in the medical field, and I'm not, so I could probably help with a limited type of editing (and maybe asking for clarification if something that is obvious to you might not be obvious to the average reader). Or maybe that wouldn't be necessary? It's up to you. NightHeron (talk) 00:16, 7 March 2020 (UTC)

No, the article requires no medical knowledge. What it needs is a mature person able to investigate and organize. This article will grow like crazy and will become long and sprawled with needs to decide what to add/delete, etc. I've worked on similar articles and it can be fun and exciting but it's important to get in on the article as it is being put together so one feels in control. But I'm a Nancy Drew at heart and you would need to be a Dick Tracy to enjoy that sort of article. One very nice thing is that in my experience there is little to no need to do endless arguing with outraged editors that are concerned about your POV, etc. Gandydancer (talk) 01:42, 7 March 2020 (UTC)

I'm willing to try it out with guidance from you. The most interesting news article I've read on coronavirus was not about the kits, but rather an interview in the New York Times with someone who's an expert in statistics with advice about how to be careful in interpreting statistics about rate of infection, mortality, etc. It was quite a level-headed article, I thought. NightHeron (talk) 01:48, 7 March 2020 (UTC)

That would be a good addition. I was an editor of that last flu, was it in 2009?, so I do know a little how these things go when panic sets in, as it may in this case only much worse due to not only the higher death rate but the strange way it can be spread by people without symptoms. And of course, that one was artificially hyped for profit while there was an attempt to cover this one up. What a crazy world we live in. We need to cover the problem of how are poor people supposed to pay for their tests, health care, unemployment, etc., costs. Add to that a president that will without question get more nuts by the hour if the stocks get even worse. That can go in the article as well. This Atlantic article is bewildering and I hardly know where to start...[4] Gandydancer (talk) 18:41, 7 March 2020 (UTC)

@Gandydancer: Thanks for the link to the Atlantic article. I see now that a big issue that needs to be emphasized in the Wikipedia article is the US failure to adequately prepare for testing large numbers of people, even though it should have been clear for the last 2 months that that needed to be done. A consequence is that there isn't yet reliable data on ease of transmission or fatality rate, at least not for the US. The NY Times article I mentioned interviews Adam Kucharski, a mathematician at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, who discusses data mainly from China. In the absence of US data right now, data from other countries would probably be worth including in the article, along with the information on how to interpret data carefully. For example, Kucharski mentions that the mortality rate has to be based on deaths compared to number of sick as of two weeks earlier (because in such cases the time from infection to death is 14 days on average). He also emphasizes that the mortality rate is much higher for the old than for the young, and of course much higher for people with serious prior medical conditions. But what I've found frustrating is that I can't find mortality rates for healthy people. For example, in any particular age group (especially the older age groups) the mortality rate for a healthy non-smoker is probably much lower than the overall rate, because the overall rate includes people who are much more vulnerable. The figure for the healthy population is what most readers would want to know, but I can't find it. Kucharski states that the fatality rate among people over 70 is probably about 5 or 10%. But he doesn't say what it is among people over 70 who have no serious prior medical condition. Almost all of the early fatalities in the US were people who were already sick. I also don't see statistics broken down by gender, although the NY Times reported that fatalities among men were higher than among women, both because women often have stronger immune systems and because in China most smokers are men. The average reader probably wants to know, "What's going on? How much risk is there for me and my family? To what extent should I curtail normal activities?" It would be good if the Wikipedia article could give reliable information to answer those questions, or at least information based on China's experience that is useful insofar as the disease has the same profile in the US as in China. It's a complicated and rapidly changing situation, and at this point I'm not sure what edits should be made about this. NightHeron (talk) 22:42, 7 March 2020 (UTC)

At this point since this article is about the U.S. disease I think you need to not get into age, male/female stuff, etc., (that would go into the main virus article) but more into how it has and will effect our country differently from other nations, for instance the fact that we have barely started testing and we may have thousands of people with undetected disease infecting others. Another problem we have is that unlike many countries we don't have universal free health care. Even if the gov't does pay for the kits with so many people that barely make it from paycheck to paycheck, how many of them are too afraid to get tested? As for room to fit it into the article, most of those detailed number charts that are bloating the article will need to be deleted or moved. Our medical articles all have "Fatality rate" sections. For this one it could be called U.S. fatality rate and (perhaps) show/explain why it may differ from other nations? And, keep in mind that you will be opening a section that will be added to as time goes along. Gandydancer (talk) 23:26, 7 March 2020 (UTC)

Okay, but it's far too early to write anything about fatality rates in the US, because, as the Atlantic article says, we have no idea of the total number infected, and the deaths so far were mainly in a cluster in a single nursing home in Washington State. Unless I'm mistaken, almost all the epidemiological data we have that has any reliability at all comes from China. NightHeron (talk) 23:36, 7 March 2020 (UTC)

Sorry, I was distracted and not thinking properly--a little too soon to be thinking of that! This article is helpful: [5] Gandydancer (talk) 00:18, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the link. We'll see how fast the testing goes. Even if they manage to determine the correct number of infected within a couple of weeks, we'll have to wait at least two more weeks after that before anyone has an accurate mortality rate for the US, since, as Kucharski says, the mortality rate has to be based on the total number of infected people as of about two weeks earlier. NightHeron (talk) 00:29, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

You said, "I see now that a big issue that needs to be emphasized in the Wikipedia article is the US failure to adequately prepare for testing large numbers of people, even though it should have been clear for the last 2 months that that needed to be done. A consequence is that there isn't yet reliable data on ease of transmission or fatality rate..." That is exactly where my thoughts are headed. I'm thinking of opening a section "Mismanagement" (or whatever). See this article as well [6] If I do open it feel free to change any and every thing I write as I'm not one of those editors that minds that when I'm aware of how capable the other editor is. Gandydancer (talk) 17:02, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

There's already some information on the page at [7], but it's not complete. That might be a place to put information about the serious consequences of mismanagement of testing. I'd be happy to look carefully at your edits and make or suggest changes. NightHeron (talk) 19:06, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

Yes, I'm aware of all that and the repeated information. When I came to the article a few days ago all of the info was grouped under "Federal" and I began to split it into sections rather than all lumped together. It still needs more refinement and additions/subtractions for improvement. BTW, I went through similar problems at the family separation at the Mexico border article where from day to day you never knew what lie Trump and his administration would be propagating to make Trump look good -- including the lies of Alex Azar, though that just barely skims the surface of those that were (and presently are) brown nosing. Gandydancer (talk) 20:13, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

@Gandydancer: Today there was an interesting podcast from the NY Times about the testing failure: [8]. NightHeron (talk) 20:09, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

Inappropriate uses of alternative accounts

Your userpage states that I have a second account under my true name that is compliant with WP:VALIDALT. While using an alternative account may indeed be allowed for privacy reasons if editing certain articles could cause real-life consequences, please also note WP:SCRUTINY:

Using alternative accounts that are not fully and openly disclosed to split your editing history means that other editors may not be able to detect patterns in your contributions. While this is permitted in certain circumstances (see legitimate uses), it is a violation of this policy to create alternative accounts to confuse or deceive editors who may have a legitimate interest in reviewing your contributions.

Given that you've had 6-month topic ban on this account and edit several discretionary topic areas (atleast abortion, race and intelligence, American politics 32-), I think you're very close to what's meant as an inappropriate use.

Have you considered getting an a'okay from a CheckUser or the ArbCom? Such a possibility is mentioned here: WP:ALTACCN. --Pudeo (talk) 11:33, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

Pudeo: As I say on my user-page, my real-name account is used only for edits related to my professional area of knowledge and this has no overlap with the areas edited under NightHeron. The reason for the NightHeron account is covered in WP:VALIDALT: editors who contribute using their real name may wish to use a pseudonym for contributions with which they do not want their real name to be associated. The t-ban had nothing to do with accusations of sockpuppetry, but rather was related to disputes over alt-med and an article I started that went through AfD and DRV. Since I started editing 2 years ago, I made many edits on abortion-related topics, and thought that off-wiki harassment would result if I did not use a pseudonym. That was probably unnecessary, but my edits on race are another matter. Earlier this year a vandal threatened violence on Talk:White privilege, and when I immediately reverted their two threatening edits, they came to my user-page and left another threatening message there. (I notified an admin who removed all three from view.) So because I edit on both abortion and race and have gotten several IP-editors angry at me (for example, when I voted and argued in favor of a proposal by another editor to ban IP-edits from Talk:Race and intelligence) and have been threatened once, it makes sense to use a pseudonym and to resist any attempt at outing. NightHeron (talk) 11:59, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

ANI

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Guy (help!) 23:42, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

Kudos

For a false-flag alt-right troll, you sure do have an impressive dedication to removing racist pseudoscience -- you almost had me fooled into thinking you were dedicated to improving Wikipedia's articles on sensitive topics through a methodical approach combining quality writing and sourcing, consensus-based editing, and an adherence to WP's core policies.

Anyhow, keep up the good work :). --JBL (talk) 13:17, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

JBL: Thanks a lot for your kind words and for your contributions in this area. During the long and tedious debates at the R&I talk-page, AfD, DRV, FTN, and AN, I had been hoping that they would overplay their hand and expose themselves as extreme POV-pushers. So I was perversely thrilled when two of the most persistent ones made fools of themselves at ArbCom, leading to one of them being banned from the R&I talk-page. Hopefully, many more editors will now be inclined to work on improving R&I and related pages since it'll no longer be such a time sink. NightHeron (talk) 14:49, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Indeed; civil POV pushing is a real hassle. I am cautiously optimistic that the RfC, plus your diligent work, will make a big difference! --JBL (talk) 16:35, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Barnstar of Diligence
	Wikipedia and the world owes you a big THANK YOU for your diligence to work to remove racial prejudice and to encourage all peoples of the world to see others as equals. Gandydancer (talk) 15:17, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Applause --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 10:04, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

More applause! - I'm very impressed by your diligence and the amount of time you are willing to spend in defense of science & proper balance on Wikipedia. It's a real commitment and you are doing a great deal of good on Wikipedia for taking it on. Ganesha811 (talk) 19:16, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

R+I Request

There is a version of this which is just about content not content and conduct. Coming as it does on a reply to a reminder to focus on content please consider striking the conduct pieces. Barkeep49 (talk) 02:29, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

Barkeep49: Done. Thanks. NightHeron (talk) 11:33, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

Thank You for Your Help!

	Thank You for Your Help!
	Thank you for the input about the abortion article. I will be mindful of that from now on. Milomit (talk) 13:28, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Rushton

Related to one of your editing interests: I assume you saw this, but passing it along just in case not. --JBL (talk) 13:13, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

@Joel B. Lewis: Thank you. No, I hadn't seen that. Prompted by the news of that retraction, I added a section to the Elsevier article, Elsevier#Scientific racism. NightHeron (talk) 18:28, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

GMO & pesticides

This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.

You have shown interest in genetically modified organisms, commercially produced agricultural chemicals and the companies that produce them, broadly construed. Due to past disruption in this topic area, a more stringent set of rules called discretionary sanctions is in effect. Any administrator may impose sanctions on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic.

For additional information, please see the guidance on discretionary sanctions and the Arbitration Committee's decision here. If you have any questions, or any doubts regarding what edits are appropriate, you are welcome to discuss them with me or any other editor. 

In addition to the discretionary sanctions described above the Arbitration Committee has also imposed a restriction which states that you cannot make more than one revert on the same page in the same 24 hour period on all pages relating to genetically modified organisms, agricultural biotechnology, or agricultural chemicals, broadly construed and subject to certain exemptions.

Kingofaces43 (talk) 19:30, 2 July 2020 (UTC)

Given your recent comments, it's unfortunate that you find repeatedly asking you to knock off your behavior issues a "threat". However, as linked in the necessary template above for anyone new to the topic, casting aspersions is not allowed. If you did not read the case's guidance, the specific section is here. At it's worst, calling someone a shill had to be specifically called out.

Your comment Some editors seem to think that all criticism of glyphosate is "in fringe territory" (as one editor put it), and that it's okay for GLP to shill for Monsanto was already getting into this territory. While you did not directly call an editor a shill there, middling language like has generally been considered a violation of the DS in the past. That is not a threat, it's just a reality you need to deal with in this subject. Otherwise, that's like saying "Don't threaten me" to someone warning you you'll get hit by a car when the intersection light is red.

Beyond that, you've been casting aspersions with embellishing comments like Example text or leading questions like Are you saying that the stub has to be completely positive about the GLP. . .. That's not ok in any topic, but especially not here given we had DS put in place to try to stop behavior issues editors doing that cause. That also seems to indicate a significant WP:POV issue on your part by lumping people together in the Monsanto=good-science, critics=fringe/bad-science comment. Please realize that when people are cautioned about these restrictions, it is expected to knock them off and just continue focusing on content, not continue using the talk page to continue the same behavior. Kingofaces43 (talk) 22:35, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

@Kingofaces43: Thank you for taking the time to explain your reasons for the warnings. I'd like to explain why the two comments of mine that you cite are not in violation of the DS. The section you referred to on casting aspersions states that accusing another editor of being paid by a company to promote a point of view (i.e., a shill) is unacceptable, and I have never done that. Rather, I have said that our sources indicate that Entine/GLP has as much a COI as USRTK has. If US Right To Know is shilling for the organic foods industry, then Entine/Genetic Literacy Project is shilling for Monsanto.

The comments about "entirely positive" are not embellishing comments at all. As I commented on the article talk-page, the current version is entirely positive about GLP. And Generalrelative's stub paragraph would be if he they omitted the last sentence because you believe his 3 sources (Le Monde, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The Chicago Tribute) to be unreliable. So my question is not rhetorical or exaggerated. I'd really like to know whether you think that WP's coverage of GLP should be entirely positive. It's an honest question.

Please be more careful about accusing other editors of bad behavior. NightHeron (talk) 23:55, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

@Kingofaces43: Since you've alleged that I have a problematic POV related to Monsanto and the GLP, let me clarify what my personal opinion is. I have no problem with GMOs, and would not hesitate to buy such a product. With respect to glyphosate, I'm bothered by the conclusions of the 2019 meta-analysis, described in the last paragraph of Glyphosate#Cancer. When I bought the large container of glyphosate that's in my shed, I was unaware of the evidence that it increases the risk of cancer for agricultural workers. After reading the Wikipedia page on glyphosate, I would not buy glyphosate again since, although apparently safe for consumers given the low exposure levels, it is thought by some reputable scientists to cause cancer in agricultural workers, and I wouldn't want to be complicitous with that. That's my personal opinion, for full disclosure. NightHeron (talk) 10:45, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

Hi NightHeron, I came here to ask how you feel about the idea of bringing this issue to the Dispute resolution noticeboard –– or rather, the issue of adding my suggested sentence on allegations against GLP with its three sources, rather than the side issue of GMO/pesticide science that some editors keep pulling us into –– since it seems to me that the discussion is caught in a perpetual loop. In particular I'd like to see an experienced editor who isn't heavily invested in GMO-related issues weigh in and help us all get onto the same page regarding basic policies like WP:RS and WP:CONSENSUS. With regard to the latter, I believe that a neutral observer would see my one sentence on the allegations as a real compromise between the various positions. It makes note of the allegations in a general way and cites the sources without taking sides on their veracity or dwelling on them in depth. But at least one editor clearly disagrees very strongly, and I don't see any hope for persuading them with reasoning if reasoning hasn't worked already. On a side note, I'll just point out that I haven't given any indication what my gender is! They/them for me please. And thanks. Generalrelative (talk) 07:33, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

@Generalrelative: Apologies for my carelessness; I struck the pronoun and replaced it with they.

You have a good point that it's important to get opinions from more editors. The last sentence of your paragraph is clearly neutral, but it's running into a roadblock -- just as my comments are well within the bounds of collegial content-oriented discourse but are being characterized in this thread as analogous to someone running a red light and risking being hit by a car.

I've never taken an issue to the Dispute Resolution noticeboard, although I've used WP:3O (which is when only 2 editors are involved) and RfC's. I guess the disadvantage of RfC's is that they don't always resolve the issue, particularly if few editors participate. So I'd support going to WP:DRN. NightHeron (talk) 10:20, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

Hi, I have been editing in the Agribusiness/agrichemical area for a while and have seen a number of conflicts arise where editors could not agree on content and start going after each other for behavior issues. My experience has been that in such conflicts, an RFC is an effective way to stay focused on content and get outside input, probably more effective than DRN. It only works, though, if your RFC is well-formed and concise, limited to a sentence or two. Doing an RFC on the entirety of the proposed stub text, in my opinion, would be too much text to discuss easily. A merge proposal to merge the GLP content to Jon Entine's article would likely get more involvement. The more editors involved the better, and DRN may have only one outside editor come in. Also, an unofficial word of caution, 10+ editors have been blocked from this area over the past 5 years for suggesting that other editors may have paid ties to agrichemical companies without evidence. I can't see either of you doing this, but you should know this if you don't already.Dialectric (talk) 15:15, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

@Dialectric and Generalrelative: Thank you for the suggestions and advice. Where would you suggest holding an RfC about the last sentence in the proposed stub? At the GLP talk-page, at WP:NPOVN, at WP:RSN, or somewhere else? NightHeron (talk) 16:18, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps the thing to do is proceed with the merger process as Dialectric suggests, since there's only weak opposition from one editor on that issue, and then continue the discussion on the Jon Entine talk page. We can go to the DRN or an RfC if the issue follows us there. Thoughts? Generalrelative (talk) 19:01, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

That sounds to me like a good plan. NightHeron (talk) 19:33, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

Cool, I went ahead and added a merger discussion tag to the article. Generalrelative (talk) 20:28, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

In that case, you have established you have a POV problem with your personal opinion. You need to step back from assertions doing that on the talk page. We can't cherry-pick individual studies like that. At the most extreme, that's how climate change denial works to ignore the consensus. In this case, pretty much every scientific agency agrees there isn't a significant risk, and the few studies that have alleged a risk have either been debunked or basically show that those who use many pesticides (i.e., confounding) have a slightly elevated risk for certain rarer cancers with no good way to say glyphosate is the cause. That falls back on standard correlation doesn't equal causation that anyone editing in a science topic should know. Kingofaces43 (talk) 21:39, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

Kingofaces43, this looks a lot like a classic case of WP:OWNBEHAVIOR. I'm sure you mean well but please try to imagine what it would look like for you to follow your own advice. Generalrelative (talk) 22:43, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

@Kingofaces43: I'm not "cherry-picking". I've acknowledged both the 2016 meta-analysis and the 2019 meta-analysis that are described in the Wikipedia article on glyphosate. I've said that my understanding is that the question of a cancer link is unsettled. The 2019 meta-analysis, written by reputable scientists in a reputable journal, states that there is a compelling link between high exposure to glyphosate and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. If they're right -- which I've acknowledged is still unsettled --that means that perhaps thousands of agricultural workers will die prematurely because of exposure to glyphosate. That is concerning, in my opinion. You seem to think that my opinion is unreasonable and I shouldn't edit on topics such as GLP/Entine. But I have done nothing wrong. I have not advocated fringe views or violated DS. It is your hostility toward editors you disagree with that's not reasonable. Please observe WP:AGF. Please also observe WP:NPA, and don't compare me to climate change deniers, which is insulting. NightHeron (talk) 00:03, 8 July 2020 (UTC)

Again, please do not take my comments way out of context like that. That's just creating a combative tone when that happens. I've only said you need to step back from personal POV and stick to the totality of sources, which is policy. Practically by definition, picking one or two studies against all the scientific agencies that contradict them to make it appear unsettled is cherry-picking regardless of intent. Climate change is just one of the most extreme example of that people are familiar with, so it's just a common example for what happens even when good-faith people misread what the science says (not all climate change deniers are nefarious if you've ever do science outreach). If you are offended by the reality sources are often misused that way, that is something you need to work on yourself, and that's exactly an example of something not to do we frequently have to walk students through in intro college-level science courses. Normally when someone sees that among a list of other examples of cherry-picking, they don't lash out at the lecturer for mistakenly doing something similar, but just learn that it wasn't an appropriate use of scientific sources.

Please also keep in mind that I am hostile towards no one here. There are other editors I disagree with at the page, but I came here because of the misrepresentative comments you have made towards me there and continue here. I haven't had to do that for anyone else. That is not hostility, that's just trying to get you to resolve behavior issues rather than me engaging in battleground behavior by immediately running off trying to request a sanction at the first sign of trouble (clarifying my mentality on how to handle things, not suggesting anyone has alluded that). That's as much as I'm going to continue this here though. Please remember to not misrepresent editor comments further. Kingofaces43 (talk) 01:00, 8 July 2020 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Generalrelative, please don't antagonize this further on someone else's talk page with comments like that. There's nothing wrong with saying to stick to the totality of sources that are conflicting with someone's personal opinion in my last post. You have been sniping on the sidelines when I've been trying to get NightHeron's behavior turned around so content can at least be focused on, and this is the appropriate venue for that to this degree (and my last post would have been the last if you didn't join in thread). Wikipedia is not a WP:BATTLEGROUND where you snipe at editors or project an image of hounding on them for them trying to get an initial behavior issue to stop. There's no need to escalate something that actually was at least to a degree maybe descalating finally, and I don't think NightHeron needs to keep getting pinged with this side conversation.

You have been cautioned by others about WP:BLUDGEON and combative behavior already, so you should not mistake editors who have been around the topic for awhile as WP:OWN when they are just terse when someone comes charging in with a just go ahead anyways mentality you have displayed. Keep in mind I and others came in as "outside mediation" from the FTN posting that alerted me to issues at the page. Multiple editors had issues with your comments on the talk page in turns of content, WP:NOTFORUM, lack of focus, or even getting into WP:RGW. No one gets special privileges whether they have been around for a little while like me or are somewhat newer like you, so please take the opportunity to slow down and review some of the other comments outside of myself, you, or NightHeron that aren't as simple as outright supportive. This is a topic that has a lot of nuance even without the DS, so that is why I've repeatedly said everyone needs to not rush and stay focused on specific sources and what they actually say. There is work to be done, but it's difficult at best trying to do it when the talk page is a mess as I mentioned at FTN before I got involved. Kingofaces43 (talk) 00:16, 8 July 2020 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) I would like to second Generalrelative's request that you please try to imagine what it would look like for you to follow your own advice. --JBL (talk) 01:08, 8 July 2020 (UTC)

I'll third that. Gandydancer (talk) 04:16, 8 July 2020 (UTC)

Response concerning cancer risk

@ජපස:: As suggested by Dialectric, I'm answering you here rather than on the GLP talk page. I have no medical expertise, but some version of a precautionary principle is just common sense. Before endorsing a medical treatment, the bar of evidence is very high, preferably multiple double-blind controlled studies by independent people (without COI). On the other hand, before pulling something from the market, the bar of evidence that it's deadly is much lower. The 2019 meta-analysis of glyphosate and cancer bothered me not because it's the last word on the subject, and not because its methodology is necessarily above reproach. The 2016 meta-analysis came to the opposite conclusion. A major study by reputable scientists who conclude that a product causes cancer (in this case among agricultural workers) is enough for me to stop buying the product, as I mention above in explaining my personal opinion to Kingofaces43, who alleged that I have a problematic POV. NightHeron (talk) 15:24, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

Thanks! I understand that is your opinion wrt to glyphosate. My question, however, is how this is applied to other chemicals? I wonder if it is unique to glyphosate, or are there comparable chemicals in this category? jps (talk) 15:40, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

I don't follow these controversies much. The only reason I read Glyphosate#Cancer was to learn what was behind the dispute between USRTK and GLP that came up in editing the GLP article. There are plenty of historical examples where the precautionary principle was not followed, leading to tragic results: DDT, Thalidomide, early birth control pills, psychotropic drugs for children's ADHD, asbestos, etc. NightHeron (talk) 16:13, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and there are also plenty of studies that have pointed to possible carcinogens which later turned out to be spurious associations. The question before us should be how Wikipedia needs to handle such claims given the complete history. jps (talk) 17:44, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

My perception is that in Glyphosate#Cancer Wikipedia handled the controversy over safety of glyphosate with proper balance. Do you agree? NightHeron (talk) 18:14, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

I'm not sure. It seems unduly weighted to WP:RECENTISM. The cited study has very few citations even still and not all of them are laudatory. jps (talk) 18:32, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

It's hard to be sure about any of this. The 2016 study was apparently funded by Monsanto. Marcia Angell, among others, has expressed dismay at the amount of conflict of interest in medical research. NightHeron (talk) 18:57, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

Questions of funding and independence are certainly relevant when the dots can be connected (such as in "studies" funded by the Heartland Institute which takes a "anything that is opposed to the scientific consensus on climate change is worth promoting" approach). My impression is that the copious journalism that has come out on the Monsanto Papers really functions more as innuendo rather than identifying specifically specious arguments. If Monsanto hadn't paid for safety studies (as is their duty in most regulatory environments), would the 2016 research have been done at all -- and would there be any follow-up? I guess, for me, the issue is that there have been a lot of dubious claims made other than the NHL attribution saying glyphosate was not safe. As far as I know, all of those claims have been shown to be incorrect. Will this latest round stick? Perhaps that's the wrong question because it's possible I'm being blinkered with respect to the WP:FRINGE politicization that has come before regarding all things Monsanto. It is possible that those who are publishing the meta-analysis are on to something... but I think it irresponsible not to notice that this kind of attribution of harm has been tried in the past and has come to naught specifically with respect to glyphosate. jps (talk) 20:10, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

Well, the charge of irresponsibility -- but I would prefer a less confrontational word -- cuts both ways. There's also a long history of industries continuing to promote harmful substances while claiming that there's no 100% certainty that they're harmful (DDT and tobacco might be the best known examples). Do we have to wait for 100% certainty -- gold-standard studies that have no critics -- before taking action to protect people? I know very little about Monsanto. I hope they're at least taking some actions to try to reduce workers' exposure (e.g., warning labels) as much as possible while we're waiting for scientists to achieve certainty one way or the other. I checked the instructions for the 10-liter container of herbicide (active ingredient 41% glyphosate) in my shed. It refers to a Workers Protection Standard that must be adhered to in agricultural use, and states that under the WPS it is not permitted to allow workers to enter treated areas within 4 hours. I bought that herbicide a while ago, so perhaps the labeling would give more details now. NightHeron (talk) 00:36, 8 July 2020 (UTC)

My apologies: I did not want "irresponsible" to be confrontational. I was trying to refer to the import that writing for this website which appears high in search results has. I am less concerned about certainties or ideals for when to take action than I am to adhere to a standard of care when summarizing what is known about a subject. We agree that it would be inappropriate to pretend that there was no controversy, but there is a danger in leaning too far into controversy to say that the position which has been championed by certain fringe elements is plainly not fringe. In this situation, the results of the latest meta-review may end up holding up, but I also know that Fox News correctly argued that Obama was wrong to order extrajudicial killings with drone strikes (stopped clock fallacy?). The problem is one, for me, of the rhetoric that swirls around the subject. To pretend that this is not there is something I am uncomfortable doing. jps (talk) 03:09, 8 July 2020 (UTC)

What I like about the treatment in Glyphosate#Cancer is that it starts out by acknowledging that the consensus of regulatory agencies and earlier studies has been that there is no solid evidence of a cancer connection. Then it goes on to acknowledge that in 2015 (the IACR) and 2019 (the second meta-analysis discussed) there were major mainstream sources that disputed that consensus. As you know, a consensus is not hardwired for all time. There was a time when consensus was that tobacco and DDT were safe, but now anyone who believes that either is safe is fringe. It seems that the earlier consensus on safety of glyphosate is a little shaky. At least that's the impression given by the glyphosate#cancer section.

Thanks for sending me the link to precautionary principle, a term I had not been familiar with. My basic point is that any mainstream statements by scientists that support a glyphosate-cancer connection are concerning, because of the number of agricultural workers whose lives will be tragically affected if those statements are correct and nothing is done about it (such as finding ways to further reduce exposure or providing PPE or developing safer alternatives). If we say that "the consensus is that glyphosate is safe" and leave it at that, there's no pressure on Monsanto and the agro industry to do anything at all. NightHeron (talk) 12:00, 8 July 2020 (UTC)

By the way, although I agree with much of what you say, I don't accept your excuse for the 2016 authors' accepting Monsanto funding: If Monsanto hadn't paid for safety studies (as is their duty in most regulatory environments), would the 2016 research have been done at all -- and would there be any follow-up? A meta-analysis summarizing and drawing conclusions for policy-makers and the general public should not be funded that way. Scientists have other sources of funding (government agencies and foundations) besides companies that stand to benefit if the meta-study comes out one way and lose large sums of money if it comes out the other way. I think Marcia Angell would say that there's no excuse for the current level of COI in health related research. I have no idea what she thinks about glyphosate, but I know that she has strongly criticized COI in research on psychotropics for ADHD.

In the same way, anything Entine/GLP says about glyphosate safety is tainted by the fact that Monsanto is a major client of Entine's company. NightHeron (talk) 12:43, 8 July 2020 (UTC)

Not sure how relevant y'all find the ongoing legal drama surrounding this issue, but this was just posted today: [[9]] TLDR, the judge makes a similar point to NightHeron's above: “In an area where the science may be evolving, how could it be appropriate to lock in a decision from a panel of scientists for all future cases?" Generalrelative (talk) 16:35, 8 July 2020 (UTC)

We are likely closer to each other than we may realize from the combative back-and-forth that the internet encourages. Be that as it may, let me indulge in a rejoinder for A meta-analysis summarizing and drawing conclusions for policy-makers and the general public should not be funded that way. Scientists have other sources of funding (government agencies and foundations) besides companies that stand to benefit if the meta-study comes out one way and lose large sums of money if it comes out the other way. The problem here is that different subfields are funded in different ways. Product safety testing is almost always funded by the companies who are doing the R&D and hoping to bring the product to market. Obviously, this is less than ideal: we agree on that. But where we disagree is on the claim that "scientists have other sources of funding. I've been funded by government agencies and foundations for my research. It is not straightforward and there is nothing like guaranteed work. Let's say you approach the USDA with a proposal to do longitudinal studies of the effect of a pesticide. The USDA is stretched so thin that perhaps one out of every ten proposals in a favorable year is funded. But you want to fund your study so you ask, I don't know, the Newman's Own Foundation. That's an even tighter gambit. Funding isn't a spigot that's easy to turn on or off. In an ideal world, well, , we wouldn't have the market capitalism that makes it easier to get money from the companies than it does from truly independent sources (and boy oh boy we are not going to solve that problem with our tinkering with GLP or the Entine article).

Is all lost? If the vast majority of food science testing is funded by agribusiness, is it necessarily the situation that we cannot trust anything that they say? I think that's somewhat fallacious reasoning. We can certainly be suspicious, but look at it from the perspective of exactly how companies that stand to benefit if the meta-study comes out one way and lose large sums of money if it comes out the other way. This is an ugly actuarial game, but in many circumstances a company is having board room conversations that look at risks such as the judgments Generalrelative is pointing out. "We do not want to be exposed like PG&E was." Now, for a product already on the market that may have long-term, high-exposure effects, there may be calculus which says, "fight and dissemble" in the spirit of Big Tobacco. No question. But look at it from the perspective of something like the the breast implants saga of the 1990s and it becomes a major trudge through the muck.

The courts are a venue of last resort for conflicts such as this and the settlements being proposed with panels that make "ONCE AND FOR ALL DETERMINATIONS" are the sorts of things you see out of a system that is not designed to update. Science, however, doesn't care about that. The determination is going to be made and, if it turns out to be incorrect, will be updated. In the meantime, we're stuck trying to describe this fairly to readers who just want to know, "will spraying my lawn with RoundUp every day give me lymphoma?"

Even if we knew the results of the statistical studies with certainty, we still won't really know the answer to that question.

jps (talk) 19:57, 9 July 2020 (UTC)

@ජපස: I agree that funding is often difficult for much science that's in the public interest. In the case of glyphosate, there are several reasons why Monsanto would not be likely to prioritize the long-range risk from high exposure. First, as you mention was true for tobacco, it's a long-term risk (increased chance of dying from non-Hodgkin lymphona many years after prolonged exposure). In the second place, shareholders are notoriously uninterested in long-term problems and notoriously greedy about short-term returns. In the third place, the main group whose health is affected is not middle-class consumers of RoundUp (whose exposure is low), but rather agricultural workers, who are poor, voiceless, and (in many regions of the US) largely Hispanic.

There's also the precautionary principle which for those of us who are not big fans of capitalist value systems says that if there's mainstream evidence of a health threat to a large number of people, something should be done about that (greatly restricting exposure, PPE, looking for a safer alternative, etc.), even if it means that a company's profits will be adversely affected and agro business will have to incur some additional expenses as well. NightHeron (talk) 21:27, 9 July 2020 (UTC)

By the way, if we're going to show flexibility and understanding toward researchers who get funding from a COI source like Monsanto (e.g., the 2016 meta-analysis), then we have to be evenhanded and show the same understanding toward USRTK for getting funding from a COI source (the organic foods industry). After all, consumer advocacy groups have as much difficulty as scientific labs in finding funding sources. NightHeron (talk) 22:05, 9 July 2020 (UTC)

Just one small point: USRTK does not fund scientific research. It would be nice if they did, I suppose. jps (talk) 01:22, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

Yes, I know. But even an advocacy group needs funding (to pay staff, etc.). And fundraising from small donors is usually difficult, even in the days of online crowdfunding. NightHeron (talk) 11:23, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, I'll chime in from the science education perspective separate from everything else going on since jps is also commenting on us all not being so different than it may seem. I'm a scientist that actually mostly deals in biological control to avoid pesticide use. What you just commented on though isn't really an equivalency and is an extremely common point of confusion for the general public not familiar with how funding and research works in this area. Generally when you're looking at studies we use on Wikipedia (and scientists consider reliable to cite), they are distanced from the funding source in terms of authorship. That's why papers that say they were funded by X in one section, but the conflict of interest section shows no conflicts, are the norm. The key is that the funding source does not have any say in study design, analysis, etc. The independent researchers have final say, and there are whole processes behind the scenes the act as checks that most people never see. University researchers are set up in agricultural science specifically to act as judges in a sense. They get paid regardless of the findings, kind of like court fees. That's usually done through unrestricted grants that basically mean it can't have stipulations on results.

As jps mentioned, that is a gamble for the companies, but they generally know problems will come out one way or another if they exist. They also need that independent verification that often catches things they don't in-house. I've lost track of how many times I've seen researchers down the hall that do the industry field trials (usually multiple company products head to head), have to tell the company their product was basically shit this year (efficacy, non-target effects, poor crop quality, etc.). Right now, that funding still happens even though faculty are even grilling Bayer about dicamba, an actual problematic pesticide. Public perception is often very different than reality on that subject (or many ag. topics like GMOs).

What is a red flag is if an employee of the funding source was a co-author or something similar. Consultants are a gray area you need to check affiliations on, but normally the journal is supposed to take care of that for us in the conflict of interest statement. That's the best way in the wiki-world to check that. If that wasn't done, but should have been included, that is grounds for retraction or erratum by the journal. Second-guessing that process is out of our hands until that happens if we have our Wikipedia hats on though and not our real-life hat. That's in part why we can't use funding source alone as a proxy for reliability on Wikipedia; affiliation is what matters to us. In a similar vein, we don't use funding source as a proxy for whether a study is real-life reliable (due weight). What determines that is what goes on during peer-review: checking experimental design, statistical methods, and conclusions that match results. That's where you'll find out if a study (industry-funded or not) is poor. For us editors to engage in that would be WP:OR though.

There's a lot of real-life caution (e.g., caution about the precautionary principle) and Wiki navigating that needs to go on to get through science topics in this area, so I occasionally do like to drop in and make it clear (hence the length) where I'm approaching from. Sometimes it might look like I'm butting heads with people when it's more people butting heads with the reality of this high difficultly subject. Add in the DS that we are bound by, and it's really a challenge for new people to the topic. That's as much as I'll chime in on your page now. Kingofaces43 (talk) 05:31, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

@Kingofaces43: Thank you for your explanation and cordial tone. Perhaps we have a disagreement about how broadly to define COI. For example, I acknowledged that USRTK has a COI because it received funding from the organic foods industry. That doesn't mean that anyone in USRTK is affiliated with the industry -- only that it's in their interest (for future funding) to be supportive of the POV of that industry. Even if the industry does nothing to pressure USRTK -- and even if there were formal procedures in place to supposedly guarantee independence (which probably there aren't) -- it's clear that they'll find another group to fund rather than USRTK if USRTK's conclusions are seen as damaging to the industry. In medical research, as I've mentioned, Marcia Angell has sounded the alarm about COI. As far as I know, she doesn't claim that the researchers are affiliated with the makers of (for example) psychotropics for ADHD. Rather, the researchers "know where their bread is buttered", as the expression goes. So I think concerns about COI are broader than just issues of formal affiliation and formal rules and procedures. NightHeron (talk) 11:23, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

To be brief, USRTK actually is essentially a political lobbying group for the industry when it was founded directly by organic trade groups (and there are some groups on the "pro"-gmo side that can fit that bill we haven't discussed despite them generally not being too out of line with the science). That's very different than peer-reviewed literature from legitimate groups though, and I don't see USRTK publishing anything there.

When it comes to university research in this area though, the "know where their bread is buttered" comment doesn't really work as I discussed above. Otherwise, you could say home inspectors are just taking your money to automatically give an all clear during a sale to parallel the judge comment. That mistakes what the inspector's (i.e., researcher) job actually is as it's doing something wrong, not failing to give a positive result, that harms the inspector. There are actual cases where a university researcher had extreme industry ties and was let go for it (ironically the organic side of things)[10], so it's not so easy to do that in the subject as many think. Sometimes it's subject dependent, but a lot of the issue is personal assumption about what researchers do vs. reality. Kingofaces43 (talk) 23:32, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

You seem to be confusing two quite different things. Of course, it's in a company's interest to do as good a job as they can investigating the safety of a product before they bring it to market. They might have this done by their own scientists (paid employees) or by outside scientists (paid non-employees). That's fine. Now suppose that after they bring it to market a controversy subsequently arises over its safety. At that point the public is entitled to have studies and recommendations carried out by independent scientists, which means scientists who are not only unaffiliated with the company, but are also not dependent upon the company for funding. NightHeron (talk) 08:59, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

We are entering into is-ought territory here. I think I agree with your idealized picture of what should happen. However, we live in an imperfect world and Wikipedia is not equipped to fix that. So it is not really fair for us to complain that things aren't the way we want them to be as a justification for, say, giving equal validity to one study that shows a correlative risk that explicitly contradicts one earlier study and runs against the tide of many other mechanism studies prior to this. "This is the only independent study," isn't the way we are equipped to determine reliability. What is possible for a WP:TERTIARY source like Wikipedia to responsibly do is to mention the study and wait... but I think the WP:WEIGHT needs to be on what has come before until there is more corroboration. Incidentally, this is also the problem with the way IARC works when it comes to whether and how we should use its listings on Wikipedia. They are so (pre-)cautious compared to all other agencies with similar remits in the world that they will tend to foreground initial studies in a way that runs the risk of whiplash. Not to be a broken record or anything, but take aspartame, for example. I just don't think we have a strong tilting of the scales of evidence here which is where I think our primary differences of opinion lie. jps (talk) 18:28, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

@ජපස: I'm not saying that because the 2019 meta-study is more recent than the 2016 one, and because it was independently funded rather than industry-funded like the earlier one, that means that it's right and the earlier one is wrong. I'm not saying that, and certainly Wikipedia should not say that. All I'm saying is that the cancer issue with glyphosate is unsettled. My own opinion is that unsettled means that glyphosate should be used with caution, i.e., greatly reducing unnecessary exposure, as I've discussed before. And in the event that future studies back up the conclusions of the 2019 meta-study and not those of the 2016 one, it will have been wise for the industry to prioritize developing a safe alternative. NightHeron (talk) 19:05, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

Right. The question I have is what does "unsettled" mean? Metaphorically, it's like how balanced is the scale? Unsettled in my mind means "the scale is close to balanced between two sides". Maybe not 50/50, but observably not fully one way or fully the other. Wikipedia is set up to really preference snapshot views. In this situation, I see the scale as unbalanced but *weighted* towards the side of null hypotheses right now. In the context of Wikipedia, that looks like different coverage than something more uncertain. jps (talk) 20:51, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

@ජපස: Unless you know of some basic fallacy in the 2019 meta-study, I'd say it's closer to 50/50. But even if the odds are 2 to 1 in favor of the null hypothesis, that's not very reassuring. In this context, if, say, there's a 2 out of 3 chance that agricultural workers have nothing to worry about and a 1 out of 3 chance that they'll be dying by the thousands of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, then that's a concern. NightHeron (talk) 21:37, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

Assigning odds is not something I'm prepared to do (I'm reminded of the people who sued the Large Hadron Collider because they thought the odds of it destroying the universe were 50/50 since either it would or it wouldn't), but Wikipedia, in practice, is biased towards null hypotheses. I would say that this is how it should be. Wikipedia should be behind the curve. The IARC admits to being ahead of the curve, and I think there are situations where this is reasonable. Tertiary references, however, simply cannot be, in my estimation -- even in the sense of assigning only probabilistic odds. jps (talk) 13:56, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

jps, I can see your point. Do you have any ideas on how to word this? Gandydancer (talk) 17:12, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

I think it's not about wording as much as it's about making sure we don't dwell on novel hypotheses too soon. I guess that's a new form of WP:TOOSOON, even? jps (talk) 03:10, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

@ජපස: Just as I argued when we were discussing alt med earlier, we should not lump everything together. Yes, the fears about safety of the Large Hadron Collider (like the anti-vaccine movement and the opposition to the telescopes on Mauna Kea) are foolish, anti-science, and in the case of anti-vaxx very dangerous. But the 2019 meta-study about glyphosate is not the same. There's nothing anti-science about thinking that it's fairly likely that glyphosate is causing and will cause many cases of non-Hodgkin lymphoma among agricultural workers. The safety of glyphosate is unsettled, and Wikipedia should not take a position one way or the other. NightHeron (talk) 10:04, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

I have not written anything about "foolish", "anti-science", or "very dangerous" ideas. My parenthetical about the LHC is only to point out that attribution of probabilities is dependent on certain prior probabilities and not just an enumeration of outcomes. In particular, preferencing the null hypothesis is fairly common. When a claim is as extravagant as THE END OF THE WORLD, it is a clear object lesson, but obviously this is not the same weighting necessarily. It's just in the same direction as I see it. jps (talk) 03:09, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

The words foolish, anti-science, and very dangerous were mine, and I was not attributing them to you. I think they're apt in the case of anti-vaxx. In some cases a preference against the null hypothesis is dangerous, such as anti-vaxx. In other cases a preference for the null hypothesis could be dangerous, such as for agricultural workers exposed to high levels of glyphosate. Another difference between the two is that the only "evidence" on the vaccine issue was a study that turned out to be fraudulent and was retracted by The Lancet, while there have been studies by reputable scientists and reviews by reputable organizations that have concluded that there's a health risk from glyphosate at high exposure levels. Even if there's only a 1 out of 3 or 1 out of 4 chance that they're right, it's still concerning. I'm not aware of any WP policy that says that we always have to favor the null hypothesis until a complete consensus is reached to the contrary. Many matters in science are unsettled, and I don't see anything wrong with frankly admitting that they're unsettled. NightHeron (talk) 09:57, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

WP:EXTRAORDINARY is the relevant "null hypothesis" discussion. In terms of scientific attribution, "unsettled" is a judgment call that I have found is best left up to literature reviews rather than editorial perspective. jps (talk) 23:20, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

But what constitutes an "extraordinary" claim is also a judgment call, particularly when there are highly respected scientists and scientific institutions on both sides of the question and when an old consensus on the issue has been disputed in recent mainstream sources. NightHeron (talk) 23:40, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

The criteria are explained there. It is ultimately an editorial judgement call, but surely a change in scientific consensus is an extraordinary claim. Note that just because something is an extraordinary claim does not mean it is incorrect. As I've tried to emphasize, the group claiming a link could very well be correct, but Wikipedia has to be patient to see if other work verifies this. jps (talk) 00:31, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

There's nothing extraordinary about changing scientific consensus, especially in health-related areas. Changing consensus is the way science works. Recommendations concerning medical practice in many areas have changed hugely just in the course of a couple of decades (recommendations on surgery, physical therapy, drug prescriptions, many areas). It is wrong to label as "fringe" or "an extraordinary claim" emerging data reported in a recent meta-study that questions the safety of a chemical to which thousand of people are exposed daily at high levels. (I know you didn't use the term "fringe", but I'm thinking of another editor's comment claiming that discussions of safety of glyphosate are in "fringe territory", whatever that means.) NightHeron (talk) 01:01, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

No, this is where we disagree. The whiplash of changes to consensus or newly emerging data is not "the way science works" when we are talking about assertions of attribution, correlation, and causation. Recommendations are an entirely different matter (and not something Wikipedia does anyway). Wikipedia can be behind the curve when it comes to the emergence of new ideas/data/evidence and by doing so not fall victim to health-related claims that recommend this or that. (Oat bran, anyone?) For our purposes, the research needs to be corroborated before there is any movement from the status quo whether that be a null hypothesis, a staid appraisal from decades ago, or whatever else. That's the only way I can see ourselves to any sort of consistency. I think the thing we need is patience. jps (talk) 01:49, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

As I said before, I'm not defending fringe challenges to scientific consensus. The 2019 meta-study was a review of studies, not a primary source, and was certainly not by fringe authors. Similarly, the IACR is an important agency of the UN. I know you don't think much of the IACR, but is there a consensus of reliable sources that the IACR should be disregarded? Wikipedia should report on what conflicting RS say in a neutral manner. The reader will then understand that the glyphosate matter is unsettled. NightHeron (talk) 10:23, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Actually, the 2019 study is not a meta-review for what matters to us. Its conclusion that there was a correlative increase in NHL for workers with longterm exposure invoked novel statistical sampling to tease out the effect. I am not saying that the IACR should be "disregarded". The fact is, Wikipedia doesn't consider the IACR's evaluations when looking at attribution. We don't preference their approach on aspartame, for example. IACR is all about a (pre)cautious risk assessment that's meant to point to any and all evidence not consistent with null results. This is a different remit from what Wikipedia generally does. To say that a reader should understand that "the glyphosate matter is unsettled" is to make a judgement between a false binary: either a matter is settled or it is unsettled. The "glyphosate matter" is a controversy in the courts and among a (small) subset of environmental health experts. This is not the same thing as, for example, the unsettled matter as to whether SARS-CoV-2 is transmitted via aerosols. jps (talk) 13:50, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Your words invoked novel statistical sampling to tease out sounds like criticism of the methodology of the meta-study, which it is not Wikipedia's job to engage in. Of course, you could be correct in your criticism, and people who disagree with the conclusions of the meta-study would probably agree with you about its methodology.

Who decided that a correlative increase in NHL for workers with longterm exposure is not what matters to us? Of course, correlation is not causality, and it is possible that the two groups (those with long-term exposure and those without) had other differences that fully account for the higher NHL rate in the former group. Apparently some mainstream scientists think that that is unlikely. The early evidence that smoking causes cancer was also largely correlation and didn't prove causality (as the tobacco companies and their shills were happy to point out). I don't mean to exaggerate the glyphosate issue. It's not smoking. My point is just that the conclusions of the IACR and the 2019 meta-study cannot be simply discounted as fringe or unreliable or not what matters to us.

By the way, I find this discussion very interesting, respect your views, and appreciate your AGF about my viewpoint. NightHeron (talk) 15:31, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

The idea that the study invokes novel statistical sampling was not meant to be a criticism. It could very well be correct and that novel approach might be just what was necessary. But novel approaches also fail quite frequently which is why caution might be warranted in terms of how/whether we describe the study in the context of Wikipedia.

The fact that the team reports finding a "correlative increase" only matters to us in the sense that we should be thinking about how best to WP:WEIGHT that finding. What I meant in my previous comment is that recommendations are not what matter to Wikipedia as that seems rather WP:NOT what this website is for. Wikipedia should be in the business of reporting those things which are best representative of what the full consideration of all reliable sources. IACR recommends on the basis of any study at all. They acknowledge this; the committee considers this to be their job.

I thank you for reminding me of the analogy to smoking which I think is instructive. In spite of their limitations, the Bradford Hill criteria, I think, can serve as a good starting point as any here. Unfortunately, as of right now, I've not seen a source which goes through and does the painstaking work of seeing whether these criteria are met or not, so all I have is my own original research. As I see it, temporality and plausibility (in terms of the specific type of cancer being considered and the noted effects that the chemical has exhibited in in vitro experimentation) are the two criteria which are satisfied. I can also see arguments for specificity, biological gradient, and coherence being met, but I am not yet 100% convinced of those. The rest of the criteria I do not see as being met. Note that meeting all the criteria is not required, nor is it guaranteed that just because the criteria are met you have a convincing causal argument. It's just a starting point.

jps (talk) 16:48, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing out the Bradford Hill criteria, which I had not known about. When some of those criteria are met, others are not met, and a few are disputed, I'd call that unsettled.

Consensus and recommendations are closely related, even though one is a wikiword and the other is not. Wikipedia does not, strictly speaking, make recommendations, but it is often consulted by people when they make decisions, and so identifying a viewpoint as scientific consensus functions as a recommendation in such cases. Physicians' recommendations are presumably based on consensus, and when there is no consensus (such as with HRT for women or PSA tests for men) they're normally supposed to present both sides to patients in a neutral way (sounding like a well-edited Wikipedia article) and let the patients decide for themselves. That's also what I mean by unsettled. NightHeron (talk) 21:01, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

When some of those criteria are met, others are not met, and a few are disputed, I'd call that unsettled. Again, I see the problem here as the false binary between "settled" and "unsettled". Because the criteria are not hard-and-fast, it only paints a picture of what ideas are likely clear considerations and which are not; it doesn't make a strong declarative point. The problem is that on Wikipedia it can look very much like an "either/or" painting that looks like a 50/50 debate to the reader when that's not what is going on. jps (talk) 23:25, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Can't that be handled by giving space to the two (or more) sides in proportion to coverage in RS? Balanced coverage is not the same as equal coverage. NightHeron (talk) 23:29, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

I think that's the right way forward. It dawns on me that we might be playing mostly at semantics here at this point. Having been on this site for 15 years now, I might have become oversensitive. In the past, most of the time when I saw the word "balance" invoked, I saw it being used to imply something like equal validity. It seems to me that this is, fortunately, not where I think we are. Anyway, maybe it's perhaps best to end this discussion now and see how it might play out in the actual encyclopedia. jps (talk) 13:32, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Agreed. NightHeron (talk) 13:35, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Hmm, I have closely followed this discussion and am so perplexed by it all that I believe you both need to reflect on the dangers of great harm you may be doing to the Wikipedia community to just close this off right here. Please see this guidance suggestion and reconsider. [11] Gandydancer (talk) 15:20, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Bringing others into the discussion on the sentence on allegations

Congrats and thanks, btw, for the super helpful RfC. Wondering now if you have any ideas for how to neutrally draw in a more diverse group of editors without resorting to another RfC prematurely, but before the section turns into another prohibitively convoluted debate that may deter others from wading in. Generalrelative (talk) 21:04, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, Generalrelative, I'm glad the RfC was resolved quickly and with overwhelming consensus. Yes, it's frustrating. KOA43 lodged a rambling complaint about my conduct at FTN, which of course is not the right place for it; as I expected, no one has responded or shown any interest in investigating me. I'm ignoring it (except to check every now and then whether anyone responds), since KOA43's hostility is just a distraction from our efforts to improve content.

Maybe it's time to try to have the merger question resolved. If GLP is included in the BLP and we're no longer paying WP:UNDUE attention to GLP (which is, after all, just a one-man show), then maybe we can compromise by removing all COI allegations toward both USRTK and GLP. I don't see that detail as necessary if it's merged. I note that the tally is 4 to 1 in favor of a merger, and no one has commented in that discussion since July 8. I gather there are 3 ways to close a merger discussion (a participant, an uninvolved editor, an uninvolved admin) depending on how controversial it is. I'm not sure which applies here.

By the way, I realized that in my comment on your talk-page by focusing on the issue of problematic experienced editors, I perhaps gave the wrong impression of my own experiences. I've had excellent interactions with the vast majority of experienced (and inexperienced) editors, with relatively few exceptions. NightHeron (talk) 00:58, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

I just saw your thorough summary of the sources on the allegations against GLP, and I'm impressed. There are thus two alternatives to a merger: (1) a stub, (2) an expansion of the article to include a detailed summary of the case against GLP along with Entine's lame denials. Personally, I still prefer a merger. NightHeron (talk) 01:05, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

Thanks! I agree that the merger should proceed. Good points on how that might make things easier. It's 5 to 1 by the way, including me. But I suspect that the one holdout will not consent to a participant closure (since they claim that policy dictates that other arguments don't count). If we can get an admin to do it that seems optimal to me. But I think first someone should respond to the policy claim.

I don't follow FTN so haven't seen the complaint. Sorry to hear about the continued hostility. I suppose this kind of annoyance is to be expected in any online community, where there's bound to be a whole range of levels of social skill and capacity for circumspection. Generalrelative (talk) 02:26, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

Generalrelative, I wrote a brief response to the claim that WP:Notability (media) requires us to have a separate page on the GLP. I assume that's what you're referring to as the "policy" argument (but WP:Notability (media) is not a policy). NightHeron (talk) 10:33, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

Great, that's quite succinct and persuasive. I was thrown off by the editor's use of language like "how notability works" being "violated". Next time I'll take a more critical look at the guidelines / explanations before buying into that kind of framing. Do you think one of us should close the discussion and perform the merge? Or should we post it to WP:PROPMERGE with a brief explanation of the expectation of opposition despite the 5 to 1 poll? Generalrelative (talk) 14:48, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

For the merge issue, a posting to Wikipedia:Proposed article mergers#Awaiting consensus might be best, even though it is unlikely to generate much additional input. There is a good chance that if you just go ahead with the merge, even though consensus is going in that direction, you will be reverted and we will all have to go through another one-sided rfc.Dialectric (talk) 15:31, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

@Generalrelative and Dialectric: How about posting a question at the end of the discussion section on merging asking if anyone objects to closing as a consensus for merging? We could also say that if anyone disputes that there's a consensus for merging, we'll ask at WP:ANRFC for an uninvolved editor to close (and in the request there cite the fact that an objection was raised to a participant closing). If Dialectric doesn't mind, I think they'd be the best one to post this question and to close if there's no objection, since KOA43 has made vociferous conduct complaints against Generalrelative and me and only a mild one against Dialectric. It seems best to keep my interaction with KOA43 to a minimum. NightHeron (talk) 15:47, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

Agreed. Generalrelative (talk) 16:34, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

Any further thoughts on how to move forward with this at this point? Generalrelative (talk) 17:23, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

@Generalrelative: I just left a message at the end of the merger discussion asking if anyone objects to a participant closing (without specifying who the participant might be, since I don't know that yet). NightHeron (talk) 17:58, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Great, thanks! Generalrelative (talk) 18:52, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Request an uninvolved administrator close the discussion. Ask at WP:AN. In situations where there is controversy like this, it's best to just get someone else to make the call. jps (talk) 13:57, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

An uninvolved editor just closed it. NightHeron (talk) 19:48, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Your user page

Hi, NightHeron. It has been (indirectly) brought to my attention that you're hosting a personal attack against me on your user page. You claim that you were "t-banned for 6 months by an involved administrator, in violation of WP:INVOLVED", in reference to this. I have to say, I'm not sure why you would make such an allegation, and I'm wondering how you could possibly think that. My edits at the time clearly show that I was strictly engaged in routine administrative patrolling in various areas of the project, including AN/I, and your TBAN discussion was obviously one of the many threads I closed or participated in while patrolling AN/I as an uninvolved administrator. I did not TBAN you, the community did, by an overwhelming consensus. I simply closed the discussion accordingly. Looking at my notification and our subsequent exchange, we appeared to have a brief but friendly conversation in which I showed no hostility towards you and you showed no indication that you thought my closure was problematic in any way. I don't believe I had ever had any involvement with you, with any related dispute, or even the content area as a whole. In fact, at the time I had an extremely negative opinion about the user who proposed the TBAN. I was clearly just an uninvolved administrator who was doing routine admin work. I had no dog in that fight. I had nothing against you. I just can't comprehend why you would say such a thing. Would you care to explain? ~Swarm~ ^{sting} 00:28, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

@Swarm: Yes, it was nothing personal, and my comment on my user-page is also nothing personal (I don't mention your username or make any personal comment). It's a procedural observation about the tban. All I say is that there was a procedural irregularity; I had no illusion that the outcome would have been any different with an uninvolved admin. Just to recall the situation, I was a naive newbie. I created an article on criticisms of mainstream medicine, which was nominated for AfD. The AfD closing was to delete, but I thought there was really no consensus, and I appealed. The DRV reversed the delete and changed it to no consensus. I assumed that meant I and others could work to improve the article, so that maybe next time it would be a clearcut keep. Within a half-hour of the DRV decision, the OP of the original AfD made 18 drastic edits to the article, reducing it to a stub, and then immediately renominated it for AfD. I complained about the OP's conduct at ANI. Initially you were surprised at the OP's conduct (Wow that was messed up you said), but then you decided that the 2nd AfD was procedurally sound anyway. We had some disagreement about this. The OP also put a warning on my user-page, which (because of the timing) seemed to me to be retaliation for my complaining about him at ANI. So I made another complaint at ANI about that. (As I said, I was very naive, and didn't realize what was likely to happen to a newbie who makes two complaints in succession at ANI.) Then came the boomerang, where I was nominated by a troll who laced his accusation with obscenities. (I believe that a few months later he was site-banned.) You closed the boomerang, and then closed my original complaint as moot. Your involvement was that you had participated in the discussion of the initial ANI complaint I brought that eventually led to the boomerang complaint against me. Your comments during that discussion were mostly friendly, but you did accuse me of acting "grandiose" and you referred to the article that had been deleted as an "anti-science" article (perhaps you hadn't read it -- by no stretch of the imagination was it "anti-science").

Soon after, I realized that if I formally complained about the WP:UNINVOLVED issue (or anything else that was irregular or abusive), it would be seen by many as whining, wikilawyering, and borderline disruption. Also, as I said, I didn't at all believe that the outcome would have been different with a different admin.

I've learned a lot about Wikipedia since then, most of it good, and I try to be careful. After my tban was over, I decided to self-ban from articles related to alt med. If you choose to investigate what KOA43 (in his rambling complaint about me at FTN) wants you to investigate, I doubt you'll find that his accusations have substance. NightHeron (talk) 02:44, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

Let me just add that the article on criticisms of medicine that was deleted had no alt-med sources, did not in any way support alt med, and cited, among others, Marcia Angell, Edzard Ernst, John Ioannidis. It included a criticism of The Lancet for having published Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent anti-vaccine study. For that reason I thought that accusing me of writing an "anti-science" article showed bias. On occasion I've made anti-alt-med edits, e.g. [12].

The accusation (of KOA43) that I dislike editors from the fringe noticeboard is totally false. I recently went to FTN to start an RfC about whether scientific racism (specifically, the claim that races differ genetically in intelligence) is fringe, and I thought the RfC went very well, despite the contentious nature of the topic. NightHeron (talk) 10:59, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

The simple fact of the matter is that I cannot reply without you providing links demonstrating my prior involvement. You have made multiple claims about stances I took from years ago, which I do not even remember. This is very problematic because at this point you're making new accusations without evidence. You have even more blanks to fill in at this point. Please do not delay in supplying your evidence. Thanks, ~Swarm~ ^{sting} 08:44, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

@Swarm: All my assertions about your involvement relate to this discussion at ANI: [13]. If you just glance through it (it's not very long) and read the comments you signed, that's my "evidence". The only other possibly relevant evidence is the deleted article Criticisms of medicine, which, if you look at it now, should clarify why I viewed the accusation that I'd written an "anti-science" article as false and insulting, and hence indicating bias. I don't know how to access that (but I was told at the time that it was "userfied"); I think that you as an admin could find it if you want.

I want to emphasize that I have absolutely no negative feelings about you. I'm aware that you're a very experienced and hard-working admin, and that Wikipedia badly needs more editors like you. The involved/uninvolved issue was a minor one, but I noted it as an example of procedural irregularities. A matter that bothered me more was that no one seemed troubled by the fact that the nominator (Tarage), in proposing me for sanctions, addessed me with all-caps (i.e., shouting) and obscenities. NightHeron (talk) 11:39, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Hey, just stalking here and thought I might be able to offer a minor clarification. I was curious about the ANI process so clicked the link in NightHeron's previous comment, which led me to "Retaliation for a complaint made here", which Swarm closed but didn't comment in. It seems to me that NightHeron had meant rather to link to the previous one, "Disruptive editing following AfD appeal decision"[[14]], in which Swarm's comments appear. I hope that clears up any confusion... if there was any. Generalrelative (talk) 02:05, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the attempt at possible clarification. However if that is what you're referring to, NightHeron, then your accusation misrepresents WP:INVOLVED, which specifically states that "an administrator who has interacted with an editor or topic area purely in an administrative role ... is not involved and is not prevented from acting in an administrative capacity in relation to that editor". In both the TBAN discussion and the preceding report that you filed, I strictly participated as an uninvolved administrator. Never did I become involved in any underlying conflict. You claim that my comments speak for themselves, and it's clear they do: they clearly show that I had no involvement or personal bias with either you nor any disputes that you have been involved in. I was simply some random nobody who just so happened to be reviewing the discussions as an uninvolved admin. If this is a good faith misunderstanding of "INVOLVED", I can forgive that. I can see how you might think that me participating in a previous administrative discussion makes me "involved". However "involvement" is actually a serious allegation of bad faith, that an admin is personally involved in a dispute or has an obvious bias that they're also taking admin actions regarding. It does not mean that uninvolved admins cannot participate in subsequent incidents after having administratively responded to an initial one. I'm sure you can see that this is the case, and that your allegations, even if not made with ill will, are not only personal attacks, accusations of bad faith, and aspersions, but are, at the end of the day, quite simply not true. "Involved" means personally invested, and reviewing my comments, in all interactions, I appear to be downright friendly towards you. It's clear on both sides that there's no personal feelings involved, which you yourself seem to admit. And, given that the "involvement" you refer to is nothing but a mistaken notion of a "procedural irregularity", and one which I hope has been cleared up, I hope that you feel comfortable removing the statement from your userpage. I understand that human nature is to be defensive, and you may not feel good about removing a percieved mitigating factor regarding your TBAN, but it contains an unfair and incorrect allegation that hurts another person who has nothing against you and never did anything wrong or unfair to you. What you say on your userpage is about the most serious accusation you can make against an admin. When true, it is something that should be submitted to Arbcom for an immediate and merciless desysopping. However, it is not true, and as such you should not be making it. Please do the right thing here. ~Swarm~ ^{sting} 05:11, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

@Swarm: According to WP:INVOLVED, Involvement is generally construed very broadly by the community, to include current or past conflicts with an editor (or editors), and disputes on topics, regardless of the nature, age, or outcome of the dispute. Your charge in the ANI discussion that I had written an "anti-science" article was taking a side in a content dispute. You clearly view "anti-science" as a strong accusation, since you have Jimmy Wales' "lunatic charlatan" quote on your user page. Like you, I also strongly oppose charlatanism and pseudoscience, and regard "anti-science" as very bad. As I said, I have no personal feelings against you because of this, and I understand that the charge was made in good faith. As a busy admin, you probably did not have time to read the Criticisms of medicine article for yourself, and so you presumably trusted the judgment of certain experienced editors who had decided, despite lack of evidence, that I'm an alt-medist who wrote an anti-science article. You were just backing them up.

I also agreed that, as a practical matter, your involvement made no difference, because the consensus of participating editors at ANI was against me. How serious it is for an involved admin to close a discussion depends on the context. If the editor who's adversely affected by the close decides not to appeal it, acknowledges that the admin's involvement did not change the outcome, and understands that an appeal of the tban on that basis would be perceived as wikilawyering and wasting everyone's time, then there's no chance whatsoever that the Arb Com or anyone else will take an interest in it. And there's also WP:IAR. What happened two years ago is water under the bridge.

I am concerned, however, with your current accusation against me - made repeatedly - of having made a "personal attack" on you on my user page. If true, that would be a violation of WP:NPA, and an admin could sanction me for that. I've read WP:No_personal_attacks#What_is_considered_to_be_a_personal_attack?, and I can't see how a statement (without even mentioning the admin's username) that an involved admin had closed a discussion constitutes a "personal attack" on the admin. If an admin believes that any criticism of an administrative action constitutes a "personal attack," then that means they're immune to criticism.

After my experiences at ANI, I wrote some comments criticizing the process and, more generally, the way Wikipedia sometimes functions, especially with regard to new editors. I speculated that that might be part of the reason for under-representation of women and people from the Global South among editors. I also commented that most veteran editors and administrators are truly helpful to newcomers. I believe that I have the right to make such comments on my user page, and I should not be pressured into removing them. NightHeron (talk) 10:47, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, may I (as someone who is not in any way involved in the dispute) request that you remove the parenthetical that links to WP:INVOLVED? I would be happy to explain further at some other time or in some other venue. --JBL (talk) 11:59, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

@Joel B. Lewis: What parenthetical are you referring to, the reference to WP:INVOLVED in this thread (my previous comment) or on my user-page? I very much respect your opinion on the matter. NightHeron (talk) 12:43, 18 July 2020 (UTC) I see that you presumably mean the latter, and to remove rather than strike through. Thank you for your advice. NightHeron (talk) 19:23, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Yes, I'm terribly sorry -- I wrote my comment several hours after last reading your userpage, and in the interim I became confused and mis-remembered the comment was a parenthetical. But you managed to figure out what I mean, despite my unclarity. Thank you for the kind words, and for your continuing general excellence as a WP editor :). --JBL (talk) 21:54, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

It was no problem, JBL. When I thought more, I realized that it wasn't unclear, since a parenthetical comment can be a side comment (not necessarily in parentheses) that's not essential to the sentence, and this would apply to the reference to WP:INVOLVED on my user-page. Also, I realized that "removed" could apply only to my user-page, which does not contain replies, whereas my comments above, if that's what you had meant, would have had to be struck through, not removed. So it was clear. Thanks again for reminding me of the need to resolve disagreements amicably whenever possible. NightHeron (talk) 22:30, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

@Swarm: Out of respect for you as a dedicated and experienced editor, I complied with your request. At the same time, I hope you can understand why I found the "anti-science" comment at ANI to be insulting. NightHeron (talk) 19:23, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

I see how you were insulted, and I apologize for the implication. Reviewing my comment, it appears to be a misunderstanding. I was not calling you or the article "anti-science" from a personal bias perspective. I did not suggest that the article or its topic was invalid, indeed I directly opined that the article could continue to exist. My use of "anti-science" referred to the objective subject matter; it was an article about criticism of a scientific field. I can hardly say that calling negative opinions about science an "anti-science" topic is wrong. I was simply trying to describe the situation in the context of "censorship". You had claimed that the article was being "censored", and that it would be problematic if the word got out. I was merely pointing out that the deletion of an article about negative critiques of a science is not likely to damage the reputation of a project that is unambiguously and unapologetically pro-science. However, I can see why my use of the term "anti-science" made you feel that I was making a personal judgment call against you. I was unaware that you felt that way, and if I had known, I certainly would have clarified better. However rest assured that I was not trying to make any characterizations against you as a person. I thank you very kindly for removing the remarks against me. I do appreciate your willingness to talk this out, come to an understanding, and reach a reasonable solution. ~Swarm~ ^{sting} 02:41, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

Re

I have to run and will not comment any more, but you are very welcome to improve this page after coming to consensus with other participants. Good luck! My very best wishes (talk) 18:55, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

I am just curious, "lower races to fill that gap", is it exact wording by Darwin, rather than wording by authors of the book? I am not sure this is good book. According to authors, Darwin believed in "inalterable racial differences". Believing in this would be nonsense completely incompatible with the very theory of evolution by Darwin. My very best wishes (talk) 02:19, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

@My very best wishes: Judging by the long quotation from Descent that we had in an earlier version of Scientific racism, Darwin believed that the human species would evolve in various ways, and one way would be that the "inferior races" would eventually die out (and even the "superior" Caucasion race might be replaced by a race that was fitter). In other words, he didn't think that Black people would be around a thousand or so years later. Here are the words of Darwin I'm referring to: At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla. This is consistent with social Darwinist thinking. In Darwin's time many believed that "survival of the fittest" in human society occurred much faster than biological evolution. For example, large parts of the world became subjugated and non-white people were colonized by Europeans in a matter of decades. Biologically evolving -- for example to have better brains -- would take many thousands of years. Apparently Darwin didn't think that the non-white races would have time to evolve much biologically before they would die out. I'm no expert in this area, and one thing I don't at all understand is why Darwin and Professor Schaaffhausen thought that the most intelligent simians (the gorillas), which are closest to humans, would also die out. Why wouldn't they become dominant over the less human-like simians? NightHeron (talk) 10:41, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Thank you! That clarifies things. The question is what did he mean by "civilised races" and "savage races"? The latter are obviously indigenous peoples who have indeed been exterminated (to some degree) by the "civilized people": one could remember the history of Native Americans, etc. So this is not really about "black" and "white", but something else. I think Hanna Arendt get this right here (page 153): why the European killing of Africans in 19th century? "It's not at all the color of their skin, but the fact that they behave as a part of nature... [one need read whole passage]". Back to this quotation of Darwin, here is the question: is it something that Darwin advocated or something that he simply predicted by analyzing facts as a scientist? I think this is probably the latter, and the prediction seems to be correct, even about the gorillas who are very close to extermination, along with a lot of other species. My very best wishes (talk) 16:08, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

@My very best wishes: I don't know what Hanna Arendt meant by behaving as a part of nature, but it sounds patronizing and stereotypical (and inaccurate) to me. I think the real reason why white Americans all but exterminated the Native Americans and why white Europeans colonized Africa was that they wanted their land and resources. The Africans and Native Americans had complex and highly evolved social and economic systems, but they were technologically far behind and so could not resist the onslaught from the white colonists. Concerning Darwin, I think that he, like most 19th century British intellectuals and especially the social Darwinists, considered colonialism to be "natural" and not morally wrong (as long as it avoided excessive cruelty, such as slavery). An international consensus against colonialism really emerged only after World War II, and even then it did not prevent France from fighting hard to retain Algeria and Vietnam, and did not prevent the US from aiding France in its attempt to recapture Vietnam (in 1950-54).

Concerning the gorillas, their near extinction at present is not the result of long-term natural evolution, as Darwin predicted, but rather (like that of polar bears, rhinos, etc.) is anthropogenic -- it comes from human-caused habitat destruction, poaching, and climate change. NightHeron (talk) 16:49, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

OK. Using the wording by Darwin, let's just hope that "the civilised races of man" will achieve the "more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian" without exterminating everyone and everything around. My very best wishes (talk) 20:58, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

One of my fellow colleagues in Biophysics (not me) did took a course of TM, long time ago in Russia, and it was quite an experience. First, she was able to self-induce the state of meditation/self-hypnosis (something similar to sleep, but not sleep) for a period of time, and it did help her to quickly relax, I saw it. Then these guys promised to teach "more advanced techniques". To make it short, no one levitated of course, but some heavy people were able to jump in the Lotus position while trying to "levitate", which is incredibly difficult to do. My very best wishes (talk) 21:07, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

Well, from what I understand the Russians have been super-credulous about fringe theories for a long time. The Tarkovskii film "The Mirror" (1975) has a woman levitating (although I believe it was in a dream sequence). The Western media report that the Russians make it a habit to spread fake news, weird theories, and conspiracy theories in the West, which is true, but they also do it in their own country. This comes up from time to time on WP:FTN, most recently here [15]. NightHeron (talk) 21:25, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

The guys who taught it in Moscow were not from Russia, but from the US. This is not our culture. Speaking of levitation, what comes to my mind is the witch flying on a coffin from Viy (1967 film). I do like stories by Nikolai Gogol. My very best wishes (talk) 21:39, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't mean to disparage Russian culture. And I'm sure it's true that some of the worst parts of the culture over there consists of imports from the US. I much admire the Russian thinkers of the 19th century, most obviously Dostoevskii and Kropotkin. Kropotkin had a more egalitarian outlook than Darwin, and in many ways was ahead of his time. NightHeron (talk) 22:01, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

Link to Fomenko - I completely agree: in the area of fabricating fake History "we are ahead of the entire planet" (words from an old Soviet song). My very best wishes (talk) 00:28, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

Apology for Acting in Bad Faith

Hello, after consulting with another user, I realized that I have, in fact, acted in bad faith when I accused you of acting "suspiciously." I apologize for that remark, and I have since struck that word out on the talk page. I hope we can continue having a civil discussion. Dr.Swag Lord, Ph.d (talk) 23:35, 5 October 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for striking that word. Of course I accept your apology, and we can continue the discussion on the Ilhan Omar talk page, if you wish. NightHeron (talk) 23:40, 5 October 2020 (UTC)

ANI post about R&I IP

Hello. I have started a discussion at WP:ANI which mentions the Verizon race and intelligence IP's recent behavior towards you: Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Race and intelligence block and ban issue. Thanks. Grayfell (talk) 00:32, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

Spot-check something for me?

Hi NightHeron,

If you have a moment, could you take a look at this edit and see if you think it's ok?

Thanks, JBL (talk) 21:52, 11 October 2020 (UTC)

Hi JBL: It's a very bad edit. I hadn't seen it, since I don't have that article watchlisted. The source is an article in Intelligence (journal), which has been criticized for being a major outlet for racist pseudoscience (the journal's Wikipedia page has citations for that). The article itself is titled "On Arthur Jensen's Integrity", and its abstract claims that "Art Jensen set a standard for an honest psychological science." Such a statement about one of the leading white supremacist academics of the 20th century shows that the author has a fringe POV on the subject. I see from the user talk page of the editor who put that in that they've inserted edits claiming race differences in intelligence before, and you've had to revert some of their edits. I'll watchlist that page, in case a debate ensues on its talk page. Thanks for the heads-up. NightHeron (talk) 22:22, 11 October 2020 (UTC)

Thanks very much for your insight -- that's what I was afraid of (based on my previous interactions with that editor). All the best, JBL (talk) 00:55, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

Race and intelligence

Hey there. Can you explain why you reverted this? I thought this would be completely uncontroversial. As it is now, the lead is overly complicated. Thanks. Onetwothreeip (talk) 23:39, 17 October 2020 (UTC)

First, the "In particular" sentence is of central importance, and belongs where it was at the conclusion of the lead paragraph. Secondly, the earlier wording flowed smoothly and logically. In contrast, the wording "topic...has appeared" is awkward and unclear word usage, and that should be avoided in the lead sentence. NightHeron (talk) 23:55, 17 October 2020 (UTC)

ArbCom 2020 Elections voter message

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Discretionary Sanctions Notice

This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.

You have shown interest in post-1932 politics of the United States and closely related people. Due to past disruption in this topic area, a more stringent set of rules called discretionary sanctions is in effect. Any administrator may impose sanctions on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic.

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Taumata994 (talk) 23:27, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Wondering if you think Volkmar Weiss is notable?

Recent edits at Nations and intelligence quotient led me down a rabbit hole of apparent WP:SPAM for this ultra-fringe "scientist" (and apparently neo-Nazi sci-fi novelist). None of his articles or books appear to be from reputable publishers, and I can't find any English-language secondary sources that even mention him. I understand if you don't have time or interest for this, but I thought I'd ask your opinion in case you do. Thanks! Generalrelative (talk) 21:37, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

Generalrelative, I think not. The only thing potentially notable that's mentioned in the BLP is that he's co-founder of the right-wing German Social Union. But the Wikipedia article on the German Social Union doesn't mention him. Even as a promoter of scientific racism he seems to be relatively unknown, compared to his countryman Rindermann, for example. Since you've gone to some trouble to investigate his notability or lack thereof, you might have success taking this article to AfD. I'd certainly support delete. NightHeron (talk) 22:09, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

Much appreciate! I've created the AfD. Generalrelative (talk) 22:53, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

On Omar's personal life

Copying commentary on revert: Undid revision 993714285 by NightHeron (talk)- it is a fact that the allegation was made; that she denied the relationship; that she refused to speak further about her personal life; and that she subsequently married Mynett. Relevant as to her credibility and questions surrounding her background. Reverted-

All those statements after your talk link were made in the article. They are fact as far as ABC News is concerned. I understand you guys are leftist on here, and that you probably want to defend Omar, but facts are facts. Let's get them out there. She was rumored (yep) to have been involved with someone while still married. Such behavior is fair game to comment on as regards a public servant in such a high position. It goes to her history of being involved with possible (not proven, but still newsworthy) immigration and other violations involving her own brother, to a potential pattern of conduct. Where there's smoke, there's usually fire, you know? The facts need to be out there for the people to read.

The information is notable. Lets the facts be known. You guys would do yourselves a huge favor if you just put up a major "stet" to properly-cited material, even if it doesn't fit Wikipedia's political views. Word. And yes, I'm right-wing. Stet stet stet-! Veryproicelandic (talk) 02:50, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) If you want to discuss the article, you should do it on the article talk page. --JBL (talk) 02:58, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

		The Barnstar of Diplomacy
		To both you and Reesorville, for your exemplary collaboration at Christianity and abortion despite differences of perspective. Generalrelative (talk) 01:03, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Happy New Year

Happy New Year 2021 I hope your New Year holiday is enjoyable and the coming year is much better than the one we are leaving behind. Best wishes from Los Angeles.   // Timothy :: talk

Your decision on what kind of races should be included on a paragraph claiming Black Africans are doing better in school in UK

Have you seen or read the previous edit which includes Indians, Bangladeshi and two other groups unrelated to the Black Africans? If so are they related? Abedidos (talk) 04:54, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

I reverted your edit for the reason stated in the edit summary. Any further discussion should be on the article's talk page, where other interested editors will see it. It doesn't belong here. NightHeron (talk) 12:34, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

Discussion at Talk:United States abortion-rights movement § Description added

 You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:United States abortion-rights movement § Description added. Elizium23 (talk) 22:18, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

Christianity and Abortion

Excuse me the sources are the proof and they are as relevant as anything written in the prevalence of abortion among christians section. Why should i have to go the the talk page and how are you the arbiter of truth?

Russia, where Orthodox and Protestant outnumber Catholics, has the highest abortion rate in the world while Mexico has the lowest. China and India, where Protestants outnumber Catholics, are the countries with the highest annual estimated abortions. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Danielbr11 (talk • contribs) 21:20, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

References

Rindermann again

I'm sure you will see when you're next active that one of the recent problem SPAs is back at it on Talk:Race and intelligence, this time launching an RfC on Rindermann despite being aware of existing consensus. Might be worth noting that they've also posted at Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#RfC:_Should_this_article_by_Professor_Rindermann_et_al._be_included,_and_if_so_in_what_context? (and been shot down as an SPA). Thoughts on how to handle this? I'm reticent to engage because I wouldn't want to appear to legitimize an illegitimate process. But then again I wonder if it might be worth settling the issue more definitively than before. Generalrelative (talk) 02:19, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

Yes, I'm also hesitant to re-litigate Rindermann. I'll use RR to stand for "race realist" POV-pushers, since RR is what they call themselves and we're not allowed to use the more direct term in reference to those editors. The problem with them is that they're willing to resort to all sorts of underhanded techniques. During an AfD for Race and Intelligence there was considerable off-wiki canvassing. For the first few days it had looked like it was headed for deletion. Then very quickly that reversed, coinciding with the canvassing and a big jump in pageviews. However, the closing admins decided not to take that into consideration. In the RfC that I started we were luckier. A lot of editors participated, and the main RR debater (an IP editor) was unsuccessful in their attempts to recruit admins who they believed to be sympathetic; the RfC was closed by an uninvolved admin. The IP-editor then went to ArbCom and spun out a truly nutty conspiracy theory about me, which of course backfired, and the IP got sanctioned. When they're afraid of losing they'll stop at nothing. I also wonder whether this particular SPA who wants the RfC on Rindermann is either the same IP person or a sock for someone else who participated before.

We could of course make a strong case that Rindermann is on the far right fringe, that Intelligence is not an RS journal, that the ISIR that the journal represents is an RR organization, and that the survey itself (with 5% response rate, and circulated mainly to ISIR members) is low-quality. But it could be a long battle (as the RfC certainly was), and the RR POV-pushers are likely to fight dirty. NightHeron (talk) 03:18, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

And.... SPA indef blocked for sockpuppetry! Looks like your instinct was correct. Hopefully we can catch a break before the next one shows up. Generalrelative (talk) 04:11, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

Great news! Thanks. NightHeron (talk) 09:22, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

A source in the School discipline article

A source from the Journal of Criminal Justice (JCJ) was recently added to the article School discipline in the section on racial disparities. The study claims to refute the conclusions of previous studies that racial bias plays a large role in the disparity between the number of African American students and the number of white students who get suspended from school. The editor who added this source did so with clearly POV-pushing language, endorsing the JCJ article in wikivoice. Another editor rewrote the sentence to remove the poor wording. Here I want to summarize the JCJ article and suggest that it has a methodological failure that explains why its conclusion contradicts those of almost every other study.

The JCJ article gives an extensive review of the literature as of 2014, acknowledging the numerous studies that found racial disparities in suspensions. It even acknowledges research that shows that the disparities are not removed if one controls for the infraction that leads to the suspension. The authors' main thesis and their claim of originality rely on also controlling for "prior behavior" in the sense of a much earlier history of reported bad behavior. The authors make this point using (A) data regarding suspensions at the 8th grade level and (B) reports on the same students' discipline problems in kindergarten, 1st, and 3rd grades. They assert that racial disparities in (B) (along with racial disparities that had been controlled for by other authors) account fully for the racial disparities in (A). They claim that (as in punishment for crimes) it's a history of bad behavior and not race that increases the likelihood of more severe punishment. In other words, they completely reject the notion that the high suspension rate of African American students is exacerbated by teacher/staff bias.

Here's their description of the (B) data: "These scales tap a wide range of behaviors such as controlling one's temper, responding appropriately to pressure from peers, expressing thoughts and feelings appropriately, attentiveness, impulsivity, unnecessary arguing, disturbing ongoing classroom activities, and fighting." Clearly evaluations of these behaviors are highly subjective. Nevertheless, the JCJ authors claim that the measures used in (B) are "comprehensive, valid, and reliable" and cite three sources to back that up. One of them, a 1994 book by Cairns and Cairns titled Lifelines and Risks: Pathways of Youth in Our Times, does not seem to contain anything related to the presence or absence of racial disparities in evaluating behaviors. (I don't have the book, but I searched in Google books and also read two reviews of the book to get a summary of what's in it.) The second source (Demaray, Michelle K., et al. "Social skills assessment: A comparative evaluation of six published rating scales." School Psychology Review 24.4 (1995): 648-671) uses the terms "reliability" and "validity" to mean the following: "With regard to the reviewed instruments' reliabilities, we evaluated internal consistency, test-retest, and interrater reliabilities." But those measures of consistency cannot rule out widespread bias. The third source (Lyon, Mark A., et al. "A validity study of the social skills rating system-teacher version with disabled and nondisabled preschool children." Perceptual and Motor Skills 83.1 (1996): 307-316) states in its abstract: "This study examined the differences among social skills and problem behaviors of disabled (n=22) and nondisabled (n=27) preschoolers on Social Skills Rating System–Teacher Version... correlations with a measure of social competence and S teachers' ratings strongly supported the validity of this measure of social skills for preschool children." Nothing in these sources supports the JCJ authors' assumption that the "prior behavior" reports from grades K,1,3 are free of racial bias. The authors of the JCJ study assert the validity of the prior behavior reports, but without any evidence of the absence of racial bias. NightHeron (talk) 00:16, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

Hey, just thought I'd let you know that the editor who originally sought to add the content in question is now edit warring it back in. As we have witnessed with this editor in the past, there is no sign that they acknowledge consensus as a limitation on their behavior. Still I don't want to revert more than once. It may have to be a community effort to keep this editor from becoming a permanent disruption. Generalrelative (talk) 05:54, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

A barnstar for you

		The Defender of the Wiki Barnstar
		For tireless defence against pseudoscience John Maynard Friedman (talk) 18:20, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

There isn't a barnstar for infinite patience, you deserve that too. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 18:20, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Personal attacks

Hi, I'm sorry if I offended you on the Race and Intelligence talk page, that was never my intention. I would like to stay on-topic on the talk page, so if you want to discuss any perceived personal attacks on my part could we do it here instead? (And I really didn't intend for my "inflammatory" comment to be a personal attack towards you, so again I'm sorry if I offended you.) Lastly, just a friendly reminder of a few pointers from WP:NPA:

• Accusing someone of making personal attacks without providing a justification for your accusation is also considered a form of personal attack.
• The appropriate response to an inflammatory statement is to address the issues of content rather than to accuse the other person of violating this policy.
• If you feel that a response is necessary and desirable, you can leave a polite message on the other user's talk page. Avoid responding on a talk page of an article, as this tends to escalate matters.

I hope we can continue to collaborate and improve the article together. Stonkaments (talk) 23:01, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Lol, "sorry if I offended you". We even have an article about this: Non-apology apology. Generalrelative (talk) 23:26, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

@Stonkaments: What I found disappointing is that by now I'm sure you're well aware of the pattern of certain editors who disagreed with the outcome of the RfC then attacking me by accusing me of disruption and in a few cases asking for sanctions. You have the links to the RfC, to the AN review of the RfC, and to the complaint to ArbCom, all of which give you examples of that tactic. You also must have been aware of Spork Wielder's accusations yesterday against Generalrelative. Against that backdrop your accusation that I was being "disruptive" and "inflammatory" seemed to be a continuation of this pattern of groundless attacks.

In reality, I was making a good faith effort to work with other editors to find a wording that would satisfy you and at the same time be consistent with what the RfC and the most up-to-date sources say. As we all acknowledge, scientists cannot prove that the genetic contribution is zero. Nor can they prove that it's nonzero. Nor can they prove that, if it's nonzero, it is positive. Nor that it's negative. (Positive means that if it weren't for environment blacks would still score below whites on average; negative means that they'd score higher.) This is the point that's made in the source that Aquillion, Generalrelative, and I have cited. It's a reliable source, published in the journal of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Nothing in recent reliable sources contradicts that.

Please keep in mind that the RfC is settled. You have the links to the debates last year about it. Wikipedia works by consensus, which means that attempting to continually relitigate settled questions is viewed as unconstructive. NightHeron (talk) 00:22, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Could you please stop assuming bad faith and attacking the motives of me and other editors in this discussion. It is hurtful and wrong to make false accusations that my "only purpose here is to try to overturn the consensus and promote racialist hereditarianism", and that I "dislike the conclusion of the RfC on race and intelligence and want to undermine it". Stonkaments (talk) 16:28, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

My comment was not a personal attack. If we just look at the top of the current Race and intelligence talk-page, we'll see that, despite knowing full well about the RfC on race and intelligence, you wanted to insert material claiming genetic superiority in intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews. You and two other editors have consistently argued for language that conflicts with the result of the RfC. You and the others have made no secret of your opposition to that RfC and your desire to have material and wording added to the article that contradict the consensus achieved in the RfC. Pointing this out is not a personal attack. NightHeron (talk) 19:40, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

"Without clear evidence that the action of another editor is actually in bad faith or harassment, repeatedly alleging bad faith motives could be construed as a personal attack."[16] Stonkaments (talk) 21:21, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

I didn't say it was "in bad faith". You (and the other two) clearly believe sincerely in what you are doing. I've never said it's disruptive, although as a general rule refusing to accept consensus is frowned upon. The reason why is not that it's in bad faith, but rather that it's a huge unnecessary expenditure of editors' time to have to reargue matters that were already settled in the RfC just because some individual editors disagreed with the outcome of the RfC, have very different opinions about which sources are reliable, and are trying to find a way to get their opinions into the article. NightHeron (talk) 21:28, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

NightHeron: I commend you for your patience here. While you haven't yet called this user's behavior disruptive, I'm tempted to agree with the admin at an ANI discussion last year who noted that they say all the right things-- for me to consider them WP:Nothere. [17] Indeed, this user seems to have escaped sanctions in that instance only because a separate report on their behavior was never filed; a number of admins on that thread appear to have found their style of argumentation to be completely out of bounds. We have a norm prohibiting WP:SEALIONing for a reason, and I would argue that this user has amply demonstrated that they exemplify that reason. I'm not sure what the next steps should be if they don't stop POV-pushing against consensus (WP:AE as MrOllie appears to have suggested? Or is that better reserved for POV-pushing in the article rather than on the talk page? MrOllie, your guidance here would be super helpful.), but it seems to me that the time for a conversation about that may be approaching. Generalrelative (talk) 22:53, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

@Generalrelative: Thanks for the link to the ANI discussion initiated by this user. I hadn't been aware of it. Based on my impression of ANI, I'm a bit surprised that it didn't WP:BOOMERANG. Concerning our recent experience with them, I was struck by how hostile they became toward me when I mentioned possibly adding a paraphrase of the source from the Journal of Physical Anthro that said that any genetic group difference in intelligence, if there were one, could as likely be in favor of people of African descent rather than those of European descent. I'd also noticed in the RfC discussion that the promoters of racial hereditarianism get angry when anyone suggests that science doesn't preclude the possibility that Blacks are genetically more intelligent than whites.

In the same vein, I was amused by Hunt's gut-feeling speculation that maybe 3% of the Black/white IQ gap has a genetic explanation (and 97% comes from external conditions). Since there's no evidence to support this, and he'd presumably agree that there could be, say, a 6% error in his gut feeling, why doesn't he mention the possibility that it might be -3% genetic and 103% environment? That is, assuming a 15 point gap, he's saying that if it weren't for all the brutality, inferior schooling, etc., 14.5 points would disappear but Blacks would still score lower by 0.5 points because of their genes. How does he know that in this hypothetical situation one wouldn't find that 15.5 points disappear and Blacks score 0.5 points higher? It strikes me as scientifically absurd to speculate that one of these possibilities is likely and not the other. A salient feature of people associated with ISIR seems to be their gut feeling that there must be Black inferiority. Strangely, I'm not surprised. NightHeron (talk) 01:00, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Agreed. These are the contortions of someone who desperately wants to believe. Though I would argue that Hunt's obvious sympathy for the hereditarian cause actually makes him an especially good source for the "no evidence" statement, since even he had to admit that there was no real evidence to support his preferred explanation. Generalrelative (talk) 02:23, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Claiming that I "want to undermine" the RfC and that my "only purpose here is to...promote racialist hereditarianism" certainly seems to imply bad faith. But if that was not your intent, then I will accept an apology and let it go. And I wasn't offended by your speculation about the black/white IQ gap being reversed, I simply said it was unfounded and not productive to the conversation. Stonkaments (talk) 01:09, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

The issue is not bad faith, a term that implies insincerity. I did not intend to imply that you're insincere, and I'm sorry if you took it that way. Problems do arise, however, when a relatively small number of editors promote fringe POVs, whether it's racial difference pseudoscience, homeopathy, creationism, etc. Hundreds of millions of people sincerely believe in those things. I try not to get emotionally upset about other people's belief systems, although there are many Wikipedia editors who are much less tolerant than I am of those who promote fringe views. NightHeron (talk) 01:23, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

I've never understood bad faith to imply insincerity. I was using the meaning found here[18]: "the deliberate attempt to be unconstructive". Stonkaments (talk) 01:39, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

To my reading the word "deliberate" implies insincerity. If someone thinks they're being constructive, then that's not bad faith, even if other editors find their edits to be unconstructive. NightHeron (talk) 01:43, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Generalrelative, It is always a challenge to get any noticeboard to address civil POV pushing. Obvious edit warring or the repeated personal attacks I've been seeing on the talk page should be a recipe for a quick topic ban, though. MrOllie (talk) 03:41, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice, MrOllie. Hopefully we can all now drop the stick, as NightHeron helpfully suggested on the article talk page, and there will be no reason to take this further. Best regards, Generalrelative (talk) 04:16, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Notice of No Original Research Noticeboard discussion

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:No original research/Noticeboard regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. Stonkaments (talk) 22:49, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

A good idea

On the positive side, most veteran editors and administrators are truly helpful to newcomers. In my opinion it would be nice if new editors were given a convenient forum to write reviews or ratings of how veteran editors are treating them. Veteran editors who get a certain number of very positive reviews could then get a ribbon or barnstar, whereas those who get repeated negative reviews could get some kind of sanction. - from your user page.

I just wanted to echo this. Even if it failed colossally out-of-the-gate, it could be tweaked overtime to be useful. I have mixed views on the teleology of "fringe" as a category for articles on Wikipedia. I've said before, in the balance between skepticism and wonder, it makes sense for Wikipedia to be on the side of skepticism (see also here and here). But...

My hypothesis is that the good intentions of people working to frame and topics they deem as fringe on Wikipedia as fringe-sounding as possible in the articles on them is creating a cognitive backlash similar to negative partisanship in many readers. If you're in a variety of social circles you know how people often discuss Wikipedia when they do discuss Wikipedia, and my hunch is that much of this comes from the tone of articles. If this hypothesis is true, then a lot of people walk away from reading a Wikipedia article with more strongly held incorrect beliefs than they would have had they not read the article, even (and maybe especially) if the article contains verifiable and factually correct information but is framed adversarially (for lack of a better term)... and that's the opposite of what an encyclopedia should do. put another way, veteran editors in the area of "fringe topics" seem anosognotic when it comes to the falsification of the information hypothesis.

I believe there may be something to learn going back to the roots of skepticism. I think of Carl Sagan's gentle refutation of the Barney and Betty Hill abduction in episode 12 of Cosmos. The Science of Science Communication may also have something to offer. I also think of Neil deGrasse Tyson's words regarding on bringing a sensitivity to the state of mind of your audience in writing and exposition. When it comes to fringe topics, "wikivoice" may have once had that sensitivity, but has lost it to the detriment of Wikipedia's readers, I suspect.

Sorry for butting in, just think it's a topic that deserves more discussion. - Scarpy (talk) 06:34, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

@Scarpy: Thanks. I see you're a much more experienced editor than I am and undoubtedly know the ins and outs of Wikipedia better than I do. If you propose this somewhere, I'd be happy to support it. I mentioned the idea on my user-page and in a message to Signposts a couple of years ago when I was a new user who'd been tbanned for 6 months from anything related to medicine very broadly defined. My experience at ANI was toxic enough so that I felt I could not in good conscience encourage friends to become editors, even though Wikipedia badly needs more editors. I also thought that this experience gave me a better understanding of why women and minorities are very underrepresented among editors. Your analysis of why a small number of veteran editors would behave that way is close to what I thought. They're well-intentioned, but there's no excuse for blatant violation of WP:BITE, in my opinion. NightHeron (talk) 11:04, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

Would you consider starting the new RfC at R&I yourself?

I'm thinking it might be best if you do it for a couple reasons. 1) You started the last one so it would be a good-faith gesture to concede that the point can be legitimately debated. 2) Opponents of the previous consensus are almost certain to either fuck up the wording once again or take it to a sub-optimal forum like WP:NPOV. Thoughts?

Also: I very much appreciate all your thoughtful contributions to the now-thankfully-closed shit show over at RSN. Generalrelative (talk) 19:18, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

@Generalrelative: Our messages crossed, but we're clearing thinking along much the same lines. My only hesitation is whether your point 1) would really be true, or whether I'd be accused of ownership, bludgeoning, etc. I don't care if the POV-pushers make accusations against me. They did last year, and they didn't go anywhere. But I'm concerned about how it will look to outside observers, that is, whether it will seem as if I'm trying to run the show. That's definitely not a rhetorical question. I'm finding it hard to visualize how my starting the new RfC would look to the typical editor/admin. What do you think? NightHeron (talk) 19:34, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

@Generalrelative: On second thought, I'm not sure what I was afraid of, and so decided to go ahead. Thanks for your encouragement. NightHeron (talk) 21:34, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

Well I think you formulated it perfectly. Thanks for stepping up, as always. Generalrelative (talk) 22:10, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

FYI, if we do see more disruption from Andew in the future, be aware of this clarifying comment from Mackensen: User talk:Mackensen#Please reconsider. Pretty decisive stuff. And from the latest comment over at User talk:DGG#RfC/Arbitration on R&I, it appears that Stonk is ready to drop the stick now too if we can refrain from poking them further. Hopefully both will find productive ways to contribute to the project –– though we should probably keep an eye on more minor pages related to R&I since it's unclear how DGG's advice to work on peripheral related subjects will be interpreted.

Thanks again for stepping up to launch the current RfC, and doing all the work of informing stakeholders, responding to critics, etc. It's actually really refreshing to see how rational and informed the discussion has been, at least when compared with last year's. Hopefully we can maintain that level of discourse as the new normal. Generalrelative (talk) 00:26, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

@Generalrelative: Thanks for the thoughtful comments and the two links (I hadn't seen the one from Mackensen's talk page). I agree with everything you say. By mentioning the disruptive nature of Andew's recent activities, I didn't mean that I wanted to pursue any conduct issue. I'll be very happy to peacefully coexist with them, if they stop the relentless POV-pushing on race and intelligence. I also agree that the discussion in this RfC was far pleasanter and much less of a time sink than last year's. I assume it'll be closed soon; last year it lasted 5 weeks. Of course, last year the no-!voters were more numerous and more voluble, reinforced by SPAs, socks, and IPs. When this is all over, I'd like to thank the admin (Dennis Brown) at WP:AE who supported EC-protection and then implemented it. NightHeron (talk) 01:27, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

Congrats, BTW, on a job very well done. You were instrumental in getting us from a highly contested decision last year to a nearly unanimous WP:SNOW close this time. Ultimately worth the trouble I'd say. Generalrelative (talk) 18:41, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

@Generalrelative: Thank you. And thanks for your encouragement when I was unsure. You did much of the work, especially supplying sources. I had an easy time of it, especially compared with last year. NightHeron (talk) 19:00, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

Small point re. Wade RfC

Thanks very much for your helpful comments on that RfC. One small point: my suggested text does not include the statement by Charles Murray. The rationale is that I've included only responses to Wade's book from subject-matter experts (i.e. geneticists and population biologists). Just thought that should be clear, since opponents appear keen to grasp at any straw(men) they can. Generalrelative (talk) 14:34, 19 May 2021 (UTC)

@Generalrelative: Sorry. I was thinking of the current version of the article and hadn't noticed that difference between the current version and the proposed text. The omission of Murray of course is fine with me, although the current mention is also more or less okay. (I'm not sure libertarian is an adequate description of Murray, who's squarely in the racial hereditarian camp.) NightHeron (talk) 14:51, 19 May 2021 (UTC)

No worries, and thanks again for your thoughtful engagement. Generalrelative (talk) 14:59, 19 May 2021 (UTC)

ANI notice

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. Benevolent human (talk) 03:29, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

Your conspiracy theorist is apparently at it again

...despite being topic banned. They haven't mentioned you explicitly this time, thankfully, but it's the same conspiracy theory. See User talk:Stonkaments#The R&I parody material. Just thought you'd like to know. Generalrelative (talk) 19:38, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

@Generalrelative: Thanks! That's really entertaining! It turns out that Mr. IP2600+ has uncovered our true motive in working on R&I articles to implement WP:FRINGE for racist pseudoscience. You and I are just pretending to be "far, far, off-the-cliff leftists" (in the words of another of our troll-friends), while our true aim is to discredit Wikipedia by showing how biased Wikipedia is in favor of the anti-white-supremacist scientific consensus. The result of our devious plot will be that not a single ISIR member will have a high opinion of Wikipedia. Wikipedia won't survive such a setback! 20:43, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

Pardon me while I cackle maniacally.... BWAHAHAHA!!!! Generalrelative (talk) 22:05, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

All fun and games I suppose but some other usual suspects are apparently taking this shit seriously on that talk page. Just a heads-up that the aspersion-casting is dialed up to 11 over there, and the conspiratorial engine is revving. Generalrelative (talk) 14:25, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

@Generalrelative: Thank you for the heads up (I don't have Stonk's page watchlisted). NightHeron (talk) 14:33, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

Yeah me neither. I just peep now and then when they become disruptive, as has recently been the case over at Nicholas Wade again. Generalrelative (talk) 14:37, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

Second opinion

Greetings! I just wanted to give you a heads up that I'm about to ask for a second opinion on the RFC issue on ANI. Again, this isn't mean to put you in a tough spot or in a mean-spirited way or anything like that. I'd just rather not get into an edit war with you, and it's probably better for an admin to make this call. Obviously, if an admin agrees with you, I'll let the matter drop. Benevolent human (talk) 13:29, 12 June 2021 (UTC)

Your feedback

You mentioned you are starting to lose patience with me. I'm trying to figure out if this is due to behavioral issues on my part or other dynamics of our relationship (such as my erroneously bringing your comment to ANI without discussing it with you first), so I thought I would seek clarification with you directly. In that paragraph you mentioned:

• Concerns about how I structured the RfC prompt (in retrospect I think you were right)

• Timing for achieving extended confirmed state (I'm not sure if I agree, but in retrospect I should have waited a few weeks to avoid unnecessary conflict)

• We disagree about the scope of ARBPIA, as discussed on my talk page, which we failed to get clarification on at the Teahouse.

I only like to get in contentious editing discussions a few times a year, and the RfC is clearly going to fail, so I don't anticipate being in conflict with you again for a long while. But if there's anything else you think I should reflect on, feel free to {ping} and let me know. Benevolent human (talk) 03:33, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

I'm happy to clarify what I said. I said that editors have limited patience, not specifically that I was getting impatient. I don't generally bring other editors to ANI, no matter what, largely because of my own horrible experience there when I was a new user (described on my user-page). I had made some mistakes (I thought minor ones), certainly fewer and less clear-cut ones than the ones you made. But I got topic-banned for 6 months from anything related to medicine, broadly understood. I was essentially inactive on Wikipedia for those 6 months. So I was simply giving you a warning based on my own experience. Editors were far less patient with me than they have been with you (of course they were entirely different editors).

The main problems with your editing have been (1) ignoring consensus and acting as if just repeating RfCs will lead to a different result (even before the first one was closed on procedural grounds it was clear the majority opinion was going against what you wanted, and the matter had been discussed several times before [before you were editing] with the same result), (2) ignoring what other editors had told you about policy (that ARBPIA clearly applies, that RfC statements must be short and neutral), (3) causing other editors to have to spend time repeating themselves because you didn't familiarize yourself with policy before acting, and (4) using ANI inappropriately (this would have been an issue if you'd done it twice, rather than changing your mind the second time and going to the Teahouse instead). Common advice to new editors (which I did not take) is to spend a few months doing more-or-less routine editing, avoiding contentious areas until you're familiar with the most important policies and the general workings of Wikipedia. It's also a good idea to work in several areas, so that you don't look like an SPA (special-purpose account, that is, someone who came to Wikipedia mainly in order to push for a certain point of view on a topic). That's just common advice, not a policy.

On the positive side, you're civil, responsive to other editors (in words, not always in deeds), and don't lose your temper.

Please understand that the fact that you have a minority opinion on a highly contentious issue is not a problem on Wikipedia. I'm pretty sure that the majority of editors (like the majority of people in the world who have opinions on the subject) are highly critical of Israel for its treatment of Palestinians. On the other hand, anti-semitism, which is a very different thing from criticism of Israel, seems to be almost absent on Wikipedia, in my experience. I've encountered it twice, both times from vandals. (There's nothing Jewish about my username, but in one case I'd cited two books on abortion by authors with Jewish names, and in the other case the vandal assumed that the editors who were working on the White privilege article were part of a Jewish conspiracy and threatened violence.) You might be interested in section 1 of this talk-page (re talk:Ilhan Omar), where I answered a question from another editor who expressed that he didn't really understand the issue being debated on that talk-page. NightHeron (talk) 09:56, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

Thank you very much, I really do appreciate you taking the time to respond. My view of the RfCs is that it was as if none of them happened since none of them concluded, but I understand your point that there was a clear trend in the first RfC and maybe you're right. It's interesting that both on and off wiki people are giving me feedback that I need to more carefully consider others' advice, I am noting that and going to try to apply it. You might be encouraged to know that American Jewish families are starting to see more nuance on the issue. Anecdotally, a family member was recently teaching her young children about the founding of Israel and read them both Israeli and Palestinian accounts. My going straight to ANI without talking to you first clearly wasn't proper, I'm sorry it probably landed really badly with you given your past traumatic experiences (I hadn't read your userpage). Benevolent human (talk) 14:23, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

No need to apologize. The ANI business was not upsetting to me, since you're a new editor and new editors are rarely successful in complaining at ANI. I knew that the admins would not regard what I'd written as a personal attack on you (it was at most a personal attack on Trump, which I later struck as inconsistent with policy, but that's not nearly as bad as personally attacking another editor). I'm very much aware that American Jewish opinion is divided on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and that Jews both in America and elsewhere have a tradition of opposing injustice and the oppression of minorities. For example, there were many Jews who worked with Martin Luther King in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. So it's no surprise that many Jews today are as troubled as non-Jews by Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. NightHeron (talk) 14:55, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement § Normchou

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement § Normchou. Shibbolethink ^{(♔ ♕)} 00:05, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

You've got mail

Hello, NightHeron. Please check your email; you've got mail!
It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.Doug Weller talk 15:33, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

@Doug Weller: I doubt it. I was also mystified. NightHeron (talk) 17:25, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

Ok. I don't have time until at least tomorrow afternoon, but even though they say they've retired I think it's topic ban time. Doug Weller talk 18:39, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

@Doug Weller: Yes, it seems that a common element among POV-pushers is a refusal to accept consensus. Bh, an inexperienced user, appealed to ArbCom when he was literally the only editor who thought that ARBPIA doesn't apply to the Israel-related controversies on the Ilhan Omar page. NightHeron (talk) 20:14, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

@Doug Weller: @NightHeron: As described on my user page, I don't really have the energy for another fight right now. I know I've had trouble recognizing where to stop, but I've shown at least some personal growth on that front [19]. If I voluntarily recuse myself from articles related to US politics and anti-Semitism for one year or two years, will you leave me alone? Cheerful Squirrel (talk) 14:00, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

@Doug Weller: @NightHeron: I went ahead and did it. [20] Cheerful Squirrel (talk) 15:51, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Stephen Jay Gould

What do you think about reference 74? (My first reaction was that it's undue.) --JBL (talk) 02:05, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

@JBL: I agree. It was inserted by an SPA in Dec 2019. As you know, subsequent discussions of the source in different forums reached the consensus that Rindermann's survey is not reliable. I reverted that edit and put Stephen Jay Gould on my watchlist. Thanks for catching this. NightHeron (talk) 09:24, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

Lovely, thanks for taking a look! --JBL (talk) 12:55, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

Migration

Hello NightHeron,

At Nicholas Wade, I changed the text "Wade immigrated to the United States" to "Wade migrated to the United States", and you reverted with the edit comment 'the word "Immigrated" is accurate, and not a POV word'. Yes, it's accurate, as is "migrated". But from the PoV of a Brit, he emigrated, and from the PoV of an American, he immigrated. Why not use the neutral word "migrated"? Maproom (talk) 19:35, 7 August 2021 (UTC)

@Maproom: Before "from Great Britain" the word emigrated would have been correct, but before "to the United States" immigrated is proper word usage. The word migrated sounds wrong, because that's usually used for "migrants" (such as migrant workers who move from place to place depending on where there's work). NightHeron (talk) 20:39, 7 August 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for your explanation, which I accept.

I live in the UK, where people who dislike foreigners revile them as "immigrants", while the word "migrant" has no negative connotation. I now realise that in the US, the word used by xenophobes to abuse, say, Mexicans, is "migrant". Maproom (talk) 07:40, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

Hopefully, the words "immigrated to the US" doesn't provoke the same emotional reaction in the UK as the noun "immigrant". Thanks for the explanation. NightHeron (talk) 10:04, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

Stereotype threat

Hi NightHeron, I'm back after an eventful summer. Hoping you're doing well and that you've been managing to have some fun despite this frustratingly persistent pandemic!

Posting now just to give you a heads-up that another pair of eyes would be useful at Stereotype threat if you have time. Please let me know if you think I'm off base, but I think I'm hearing the familiar calls of a sealion there. Generalrelative (talk) 14:26, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

Welcome back, Generalrelative! What's especially frustrating about the pandemic is that it wouldn't have been nearly so catastrophic if it weren't for the extent of anti-science nonsense among the public and the irresponsible behavior of certain key political leaders.

I made a minor edit to Stereotype threat and have it watchlisted. Concerning the issue that you were worried about when you left (chatter on Stonk's talk-page about escalating their R&I POV-pushing), as I'm sure you've noticed, nothing has happened. They were counting on DGG, but it seems he's lost his taste for it. NightHeron (talk) 21:16, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks very much for taking a look, and for the update. Glad to hear that the race and intelligence horse has been left to rest in peace for the time being. It's quite refreshing to see how Wikipedia's consensus & verifiability policies work to shut down even the most convinced pseudoscience promoters eventually, given enough exposure to the light of day. Generalrelative (talk) 23:47, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

Catholic Charismatic Renewal

Hello NightHeron I am a relatively new and very inexperienced contributor, so please bear with me and my limited understanding of Wikipedia. On 2 July you undid the whole of my lengthy addition to this topic but I need your help to understand why this was necessary and how I could improve my edit. The background is that I originally drafted a new article on Catholic Charismatic Renewal in England, but was advised by Simon 1292 that this content would be better suited as a section of the main article. He made no objections to the content, so I was confident to go ahead and added it into the main article.I look forward to your comments and advice on what I should do next.Johneagle24 (talk) 11:24, 26 August 2021 (UTC).

Hello Johneagle24. I reverted your edit because it was far too long and detailed relative to the rest of the article (see WP:UNDUE) and because it was promotional (see WP:PROMO). From the beginning of your proposed new section, you give a detailed narrative, even including a sentence about the intention to start an ecumenical center that never materialized. It's perfectly reasonable to add a section on the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in England (and other countries), but it needs to be much shorter, with basic information rather than a long narrative.

In addition, you include statements in wikivoice that reflect controversial viewpoints of the movement. For example, you dismiss criticisms that liken the movement to Pentacostal Protestantism by saying in wikivoice that many priests have benefited from it. Such statements need to be attributed ("According to...") and they need to be balanced. For example, you could say "According to name of critic, the Catholic charismatic movement has too many features in common with Pentacostal Protestantism. In response, name of movement person stated that many priests..." (I'm not proposing that text, but only illustrating how neutral coverage would work.)

If you intend to rewrite the section so as to comply with WP:NPOV and WP:UNDUE, it would be helpful if you could find sources written by journalists or academics from outside the movement, not just sources that promote the movement.

If any of this is not clear, we can continue this discussion. Thanks. NightHeron (talk) 11:56, 26 August 2021 (UTC)

Russell Warne

Thoughts on whether Russell Warne fails WP:GNG / WP:PROF? There are a pile of references on his page but only a few really constitute coverage: #1, #15, #16 (this one is by Noah Carl so one could hardly call it "independent") and #21. A quick google search didn't land any more. As a side note, the article is almost entirely written by a single user who's contributed little else to the encyclopedia: [21]. I'd hate to sink time into a failed AfD but I wonder if others would agree that this article is rather promotional, and whether a consensus could be reached that the subject falls short of our notability standards. Generalrelative (talk) 16:37, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

FYI, I opened up a discussion on the Noah Carl ref at RSN. Generalrelative (talk) 19:31, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

@Generalrelative: That's certainly worth considering. I don't think the "promotional" argument will count for much, because (1) many BLP's of academics are rather promotional, and no one seems to mind, and (2) a common response to a complaint about an unbalanced article is "that can be fixed by editing rather than deleting the article" (that was essentially the response to unsuccessful attempts to get R&I deleted). The key argument has to be lack of notability. You've made a start by bringing the Noah Carl reference to RSN. There's also the question of Warne's three "honors" (two from some association for the gifted and one from Mensa). Presumably any academic knows that Mensa is a joke, and those awards aren't significant. But they might seem impressive to non-academics. The tight group of racial hereditarians tend to build one another up, praise one another, and give one another awards, as we see here. If you decide to open an AfD, perhaps notices placed at FTN, perhaps some WikiProjects such as WP:WikiProject Anthropology, and the R&I and Scientific racism talk-pages would attract knowledgeable editors. NightHeron (talk) 20:53, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

Great advice, thanks! I'll give it some more thought and see what happens over at RSN. Cheers, Generalrelative (talk) 21:11, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

Discretionary sanctions alert - American politics

This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.

You have shown interest in post-1992 politics of the United States and closely related people. Due to past disruption in this topic area, a more stringent set of rules called discretionary sanctions is in effect. Any administrator may impose sanctions on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic.

For additional information, please see the guidance on discretionary sanctions and the Arbitration Committee's decision here. If you have any questions, or any doubts regarding what edits are appropriate, you are welcome to discuss them with me or any other editor.

Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 10:51, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

Just wanted to make sure you're aware...

DGG has launched his long-awaited arbitration request. So far it doesn't seem to have been met with much support. I made a very brief statement pointing to the discussion at Stonkaments' talk page since there was some confusion about the motivation for the request.

Hope you're doing well. Generalrelative (talk) 00:06, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

@Generalrelative: Thanks. Yes, I saw DGG's announcement at FTN, and I'm following it. I also get the impression that it's not going anywhere. I'm curious to see if they get to specifics related to R&I. NightHeron (talk) 00:19, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

While DGG has withdrawn the request it looks like at least two arbs have been persuaded by Ferahgo's accusations that there is an underlying conduct issue at race and intelligence. Of course each of her accusations can be shown to be false, but demonstrating that to those who are not yet intimately familiar with the talk archives will take a lot of words and a lot of diffs. It seems that the arbs have invited comment on this before closing the thread. I would be happy to give this my time and attention but unfortunately will be quite busy for the next few days, and after that the damage may already be done (or compounded, as the case may be). If you have the time, it may be really helpful to provide a calm, careful, point-by-point rebuttal. Among the most pernicious misrepresentations, it seems to me, is the impression she gives that you, JzG and I have been acting alone, so just documenting all the experienced, well respected editors who have pushed back against the interpretation of content she is trying to advance over the past year or so would be an excellent start. Showing that this group of intractable denialists has always been in the minority also undercuts her bizarre claim that you have somehow conspired to prevent the community from enforcing policy. Generalrelative (talk) 22:31, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

On giving this some more thought, now I'm second-guessing whether this would really be helpful. For one, any thorough refutation would inevitably appear as a wall of text. An alternative would be to sit back and allow the process to unfold, trusting that eventually the arbs will take the time to examine the record in full, and that those of us who have worked hard to improve the way we discuss race and intelligence in both article space and on talk pages will be vindicated by that process in the end. What do you think? Generalrelative (talk) 23:22, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

@Generalrelative: Silly me. I'd thought that the opinions expressed by the arbcom members were going so strongly against DGG's case that his ploy would go nowhere. It's so easy to be over-optimistic these days. I don't know anything about CptE, but BK49 has had much involvement with R&I and is certainly aware of its history. My early involvement in R&I (I think in late 2019) was to support a (4th) nomination of the R&I article for deletion (I was not the OP of the AfD). It was closed as keep by a committee of 3 admins, including BK49. I later realized that the keep decision was reasonable. Even though R&I was an absolutely terrible article at the time (it had been singled out by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a key example of the influence of the alt-right on Wikipedia), the topic is certainly notable, and the usual response to an AfD in that situation is to say that bad content can be corrected by editing if the topic is notable. But what I thought was really unfortunate in the closing statement by the three admins was the claim that the voting was not substantially affected by off-wiki canvassing, SPAs, and socks. Overwhelming evidence of canvassing was brought up during the discussion. In any case, BK49 and one other admin were then cultivated by the POV-pushers as admins who were open to their lobbying and possibly sympathetic to their POV. During the 2020 RfC on R&I, an IP who was very active in the RfC went to both admins' user-pages to make conduct complaints about me. I was not informed by the IP (of course) or by either admin (which was more surprising). I learned by chance of the accusations against me that were being discussed on BK49's user-page and went there and defended myself successfully. (The most serious allegation was that I'd committed a BLP violation by using the term "racist" in reference to Davide Piffer. When I showed BK49 a tweet by Piffer calling African immigrants "gorillas", he agreed that the term was correct and not a BLP violation.) Later the OP canvassed the same two admins, urging them to form a committee to close the RfC on R&I. They apparently did not object to the canvassing. At the end of the RfC, I urged both admins not to do the closing and to leave it to an uninvolved admin or committee, which they graciously agreed to do. I think Ferahgo and the other R&I POV-pushers have realized that they can be much more effective going behind people's backs and complaining or canvassing if they do it by private email rather than on user-pages or anyplace else that's visible to others. In order for their case against us to appear strong to the admins, the presentation has to be one-sided without an opportunity for a rebuttal. Although I have no reason to doubt BK49's competence and integrity as an admin, I'm puzzled that they permit this kind of sleazy circumventing of Wikipedia policy to continue.

As for what to do, I think it's best to wait until some accusations are made on Wikipedia (as Stonk foolishly did against you at ANI) rather than in private email that we don't have access to, and then respond vigorously.

The broader issue is that a group of promoters of racialist pseudoscience is systematically violating WP:Consensus, WP:FORUMSHOP, WP:ADMINSHOP, etc. with inpunity. NightHeron (talk) 02:07, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for this context. In the end I couldn't rest until I composed a response: [22]. I'm hoping that this will be perceived as constructive, as it was intended. Thanks as always for your thoughtful engagement, Generalrelative (talk) 06:00, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

@Generalrelative: I also felt the need to comment on Ferahgo's devious tactics and my unclarity about why BK49 is encouraging that, see [23]. NightHeron (talk) 12:22, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

@Generalrelative: WP:ARCA has been quiescent for a while, and I'm hopeful that DGG's attempted end-run around R&I consensus is coming to a dead end. I'd be surprised if anyone on ArbCom, including the two members who broached the possibility, wants to wade into R&I and relitigate a contentious content issue that recently had a snow-close in favor of the present consensus. My impression is that the ArbCom members are experienced and intelligent enough to realize that no credible evidence has been given of policy violations by you, me, or any of the other editors who oppose the racial hereditarian POV-pushers. Ideally, ArbCom would sanction the POV-pushers for refusal to accept consensus, forum-shopping, using off-wiki communications to make charges against other editors, etc. But I doubt that they would want to do that either. NightHeron (talk) 12:03, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

Yep, that's my impression as well. Generalrelative (talk) 14:28, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

Gah, the irony of the worst BLUDGEON offender in the topic area projecting all over the ArbCom talk page.... I don't even read their comments anymore except when I think it's probably absolutely necessary. Here I'm so tempted to reply by dropping the new vocab term I learned from Enterprisey's candidate statement, DARVO ("deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender"), since that's so clearly what's going on there, but instead of course it's better to let others make the determination for themselves if possible. If anything, we're seeing that "put up or shut up" may be an effective way to engage with disruption of this kind in the future. Hope you're doing well, Generalrelative (talk) 15:18, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

Yes, I'm doing fine, thanks. I'm again optimistic that the POV-pushers are running out of steam, at least for the time being. Did you see Stonk's latest comment on his user-page, actually discouraging Ferahgo from persisting in her nonsense (nonsense is my word, not Stonk's)? Stonk's confidence that "truth" will win out despite everything sounds more like a statement of religious faith than an expression of confidence that they'll find a way to get around consensus. Meanwhile, DGG is someone who, despite his ignorance about race and genetics, is very knowledgeable about the workings of Wikipedia, and he seems to have lost a taste for being the frontman for them. So I'm once again an optimist. Hope you're not letting the racial hereditarian bludgeoning get you down. NightHeron (talk) 15:51, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, yeah it never gets me down thankfully. It gets me frustrated from time to time, even a bit existential sometimes about the nature of evil, but I've never lost optimism that we're improving the project, and the mission of the project, through the work we do. And that feels good. Generalrelative (talk) 16:12, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

Re. your recent comment at ArbCom: 100% correct of course. And good that you kept the response briefer than the accusation. I think the best way forward from here, though, will be if we can follow Levivich's advice as far as possible and avoid engaging with POV pushers unless absolutely necessary. It's unfortunate that he came away from the discussion at The Bell Curve talk page with the false impression that those of us resisting the POV pushers were also guilty of wall-of-texting, but thems the breaks. If we have to stay twice as clean in order to avoid being tarred with the same brush as them, that's how we have to stay. Generalrelative (talk) 21:32, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

Yes, I didn't want to comment again at the ArbCom talk-page, but I felt I couldn't let the false attack and personal accusation go unanswered. In those situations my fear is that people who don't follow the issue closely will assume that if a personal accusation stands unrefuted, there might be some truth in it. NightHeron (talk) 21:37, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

That makes sense. I definitely felt the same way about my last comment noting that Mackensen had endorsed the existence of a consensus on sourcing. Though given the thoroughly off-putting way in which Gardenofaleph and Sesquivalent present themselves, I'm confident we can mostly trust that WP:PETARD applies, at least eventually. But you're right, it can be a tough call. What I'd hate to see happen is that people become so put off by the ugliness that they say "a pox on both your houses".

Btw did you know that Sesquivalent, in IP form, has already been subjected to a 72-hour block for trolling? [24] Something to keep in mind should a future filing be necessary. Generalrelative (talk) 21:53, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

No, I hadn't seen that. I have no plans myself to file any misconduct complaint against the POV-pushers. I wouldn't be the right editor to do that. Also, as a newbie 3 years ago I had a very bad experience at ANI that got me tbanned for 6 months (it had nothing to do with R&I) after a misconduct complaint I filed boomeranged against me. (I was so naive at the time that I hadn't anticipated the consequences of a newbie filing a complaint against a veteran editor.) My feelings about Wikipedia hit a low point then. Since then, I've learned more about other parts of Wikipedia, and I have a much higher opinion of the project. For example, the coverage of Covid-19 on Wikipedia has gotten a lot of well-deserved off-wiki praise, and in most of the areas where I'm likely to consult Wikipedia, the information is surprisingly reliable. Once one gets used to Wikipedia's alphabet-soup policies and the norms for interaction among editors, which are very different from the academic or scientific world, one sees that they mostly make sense. NightHeron (talk) 22:25, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

I hear and respect that. In any case, just saw over at ArbCom that Gardenofaleph appears to have fully jumped the PETARD, so to speak (to completely mangle my metaphors). Hopefully an admin will now step up and do the right thing without either of us having to point out that it's the right thing to do. Generalrelative (talk) 23:11, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

Crazy stuff. That's what the IP got sanctioned for after making a similar cockamamie attack on me at ArbCom in 2020. My normal inclination would be to respond, at least briefly. But I'll wait and see what happens. NightHeron (talk) 23:47, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

@Generalrelative: Did you see the latest proposal at Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee, coming from Sesquivalent, DGG, and Ferahgo? Sounds like they're planning for a POVFORK off of the R&I page. I wonder how long the admins will permit this to fester. NightHeron (talk) 00:08, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

Hmm, it definitely looks like an attempt to avoid dropping the stick, but I'd hesitate to call it a POVFORK. My understanding is that that term refers to a new page in article space, whereas what's being proposed appears to be a new talk page extension like the FAQ. Of course, yes, it does appear they're planning to use it as a space to continue their battleground behavior. But they can't do that if we refuse to engage, and since the vast majority of sources have already been scrutinized, we can simply restate any arguments that need to be restated in the RfCs which will need to take place before any article-space content is substantively changed. Personally I'm happy to take Levivich and Tryptofish's advice (similar to that of Alexbrn over at FTN) and let the POV pushers do their worst so long as it's just in talk space, and DENY any attempts to suck us down to their level of discourse. Generalrelative (talk) 03:11, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. Those are good points. NightHeron (talk) 10:01, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

This edit by Gardenofaleph [25] appears to serve no other possible purpose other than to goad you into losing your temper. I'd suggest that no good can come of responding at this point, since you've already said all that can be said to counter such an absurd allegation. Let's both just hold firm for now and trust that the process will eventually deal with misbehavior like this in the appropriate way. Generalrelative (talk) 03:37, 23 November 2021 (UTC)

Yes, I agree. Thanks. NightHeron (talk) 10:16, 23 November 2021 (UTC)

At least JBL has now commented [26]. If nothing happens on its own I'll ask them for advice on how best to proceed. Generalrelative (talk) 17:54, 23 November 2021 (UTC)

Yes, I was very glad to see JBL's comment. NightHeron (talk) 19:40, 23 November 2021 (UTC)

FYI, I raised the issue at JBL's talk page and received a very thoughtful reply (before also drawing comment from the offending IP). Food for thought. Generalrelative (talk) 05:06, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

Christianity and abortion talk page

I have initiated one with you.Foorgood (talk) 02:32, 13 November 2021 (UTC) NightHeron I responded to you in the talk page trying to reach agreement.Foorgood (talk) 05:48, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

Racial bias on Wikipedia

Hi, - I'm here because the above article was mentioned her by a blocked editor who has been promoting fringe. You've got a big quote from someone called Peter Reynosa, who is a painter and author who lives in San Francisco andself-published an e-book called “The Vulgarist.” I don't see why we are using him, as interesting as the piece he wrote might be, he's no expert and for such a strong statement about "white males", which of course might well be true, I'd normally prefer to use something more evidence based. I'm not going to edit the article, just wondered if you still feel the quote is appropriate. I'll also admit I don't often like large block quotes, they can overemphasize something much more than it deserves because the readers eye is drawn to them and they are in some ways easier to read than the more dense text around them. Doug Weller talk 10:17, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

@Doug Weller: I shortened the quote. I didn't remove it entirely, because it's the only mention of anti-Latino bias in the article. BTW, on the subject of racial bias on Wikipedia, thanks for helping the SPLC with their article on the subject a few years ago. That's what caused me to be aware of the terrible R&I article and of the importance of fixing it. NightHeron (talk) 10:51, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

Thank you, that looks much better. I'm really pleased that my work with the SPLC article led to that terrible article. It's a never-ending mess it seems. Doug Weller talk 10:56, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

"moved" comment

Your edit summary [27] complains of a "moved comment". You posted two signed comments, one under the other, so as I saw it I simply replied in the correct position to the upper comment of the two, which is also thematically correct (your second comment changes direction a bit). I see no reason why other respondents might not reasonably do the same now that you have moved my comment. If you want your pair of comments treated as a single block the way to do it is to remove the signature after the first one. Sesquivalent (talk) 19:55, 18 November 2021 (UTC)

@Sesquivalent: Okay, I'll do that. I realized later that I should have done it that way at first. After you inserted your comment between the two comments of mine, I was concerned that it would look like my second comment was a response to your comment. Sorry for the hassle. NightHeron (talk) 20:43, 18 November 2021 (UTC)

No problem. A minor thing either way but I did not want you to think I was improperly editing your posts. Sesquivalent (talk) 21:05, 18 November 2021 (UTC)

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Male Privilege article

I removed the opening text as its wording is pointed not neutral and doesn’t include a citation and text without inline citations should no be added.ChefBear01 (talk)

@ChefBear01: I disagree. But please let's conduct this discussion on the article talk-page, where other interested editors can see it and participate. That way we'll see whether or not there's a consensus for your edit. Thank you. NightHeron (talk) 02:50, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

NightHeron. If you're going to revert all edits, the least you could do is engage with me on the talk page and explain why. Please don't make me escalate this. Tiggy The Terrible (talk) 17:47, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

@TiggyTheTerrible: You should be aware that Please don't make me escalate this appears to be a threat. I'll assume that this wasn't intentional, and that perhaps you meant to say Please don't make me bring this to conflict resolution or start an RfC, which may be time consuming or something like that. But even given this charitable reading, the appeal falls flat once one checks in on the way you've been engaging on the relevant talk page, which appears to be entirely devoid of reference to WP:RS or WP:PAG. It would be expected that you'd try to engage constructively before resorting to higher-level methods for consensus-building. In any case, best learn how Wikipedia works before laying blame at the doorstep of a more experienced editor like NightHeron. Generalrelative (talk) 20:16, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

I'm sorry if that sounded like a threat, but Nightherron seems to be avoiding addressing any of my concerns with the page. All I really want to do right now is add a criticism section, but he seems to be ignoring attempts to engage with him about it. instead, he simply reverts everything I do. It's a bit frustrating. I'm not sure why you might think my sources are unreliable as I've cited several major organisations & a political scientist, but if you would like to tell me what is wrong with them that would be a big help. Tiggy The Terrible (talk) 20:26, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

With apologies to NightHeron for bogarting his talk page, what I would suggest you do is present your suggested text on the article talk page, including references, just as you'd like it to appear in the article. Others can then weigh in on whether it is well supported by WP:RS, WP:DUE for inclusion, etc. Please note that the WP:ONUS to achieve consensus is always on the one who is seeking to add disputed content. That means you'll have to genuinely persuade people, not just WP:BLUDGEON them into submission. Generalrelative (talk) 20:33, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

Well, I've been trying to engage with Nightherron - but while they are very quick to revert changes, they don't seem to have responded to any of the issues I've tried to raise since the 27th of December. As far as consensus goes, I think they may be enforcing a consensus of one. I will post my citations on the talk page again and tag them in directly. However, I've had little response. Tiggy The Terrible (talk) 21:16, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

Dysgenics

If you get time, I'd appreciate any feedback or engagement you might have to give regarding the changes I've made to Dysgenics (cf. previous version: [28]). Hope you're having a fantastic 2022 so far. Generalrelative (talk) 17:17, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Your edits look very good to me. I've put Dysgenics on my watchlist, in case you get pushback.

Best wishes to you for the New Year! NightHeron (talk) 18:50, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Much appreciated. Generalrelative (talk) 19:12, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

That section is not soapboxing

There are numerous citations, and it does not conform to any of the definitions of soapboxing. If it is soapboxing, then so is the entire article. Tiggy The Terrible (talk) 21:48, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

You really ought to slow down and listen to other editors. See WP:IDHT. The policy WP:SOAPBOX clearly says that editors are not supposed to change articles or sections of articles into advocacy pieces. If you continue this disruption and continue wasting other editors' time, you're likely to be sanctioned. NightHeron (talk) 22:14, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Please just tell me why you are so against criticism, or I'll assume that your real goal here is preserving the narrative. Tiggy The Terrible (talk) 12:17, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

As usual, you're misrepresenting what I've said and failing to listen to what other editors are really saying. No one has opposed criticism. But I'm sure you'll find that the consensus of editors is opposed to your attempts to skew the article in the direction of a male-grievance screed. NightHeron (talk) 12:34, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Tiggy, this will be my final piece of advice until I see a more collaborative approach from you: 1) Read the essay WP:CRITICISM, which explains why we generally avoid criticism sections in article space. 2) Telling other editors "do X or I'll assume Y" is immature and disruptive behavior which will very likely lead to sanctions if you do not change course. Editing Wikipedia is open to everyone until such time as they reveal themselves to be a net negative to the project. I very much hope that you will find ways to contribute positively in the future. It looks like the way to do that for you will be to stay away from the gender and sexuality topic area for a good long while. Probably all controversial topics (i.e. those covered by discretionary sanctions). Just my 2¢ of course. Take care, Generalrelative (talk) 16:58, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Just a heads-up

...that the newly active SPA has branched out to adding large amounts of content based on blatantly unreliable sources to Gynocentrism. Might be worth putting that article on your watchlist if it isn't already. Thanks for all you do, Generalrelative (talk) 15:04, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads-up. I've added it to my watchlist. This SPA seems like an extreme case of WP:IDHT. NightHeron (talk) 15:51, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

After-birth abortion

Hello again NightHeron. I noticed that your approach on the topic is reasonable to me. When I first saw After-birth abortion earlier it was in this state and I couldn't believe it, it seemed like a hoax to foment controversy and equate abortion to murder. My initial intention was to open a thread at WT:MED but after reading the primary source my impression was that it was simply misrepresented. It may also have been by secondary sources but I've admitedly not read them all. I reoriented it and left comments on the talk page, I think that it's no longer necessary to notify a board. But I thought I'd ask one or few editors to audit my changes and revert/fix/comment as necessary. I'll also ping Roscelese who's active and also !voted at a recent redirect discussion. I don't think the article ever went at AfD yet, it's quite possible that it also was a WP:1E news sensation, I didn't look for more recent sources. Thanks, —PaleoNeonate – 17:03, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

@PaleoNeonate: I hadn't noticed that article or any discussions about it. Thanks for the heads-up. I agree that the article is problematic, especially the title. Your comment on the talk page concerning point 3 is a crucial observation. The neologism "post-birth abortion" is a departure from standard use of the word abortion for aborting a pregnancy, and could have been an attempt to lump abortion together with infanticide, which, unlike abortion, is illegal and considered immoral pretty much everywhere. So the term in the title sounds like a political-spin term. I agree with your comment that the correct term is "child euthanasia". I don't see why one article deserves its own Wikipedia page. The page presents the argument for only one side of the debate. As a viewpoint of a small minority it should be subject to WP:FRINGE and WP:UNDUE, which would indicate that it should be briefly covered (along with refutations) in child euthanasia and become a redirect to that article. That would be a merge proposal, which I would support. NightHeron (talk) 18:16, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

So a very important change was to specify that it was for cases like unbearably suffering, in relation to #3. I forgot to include that I found another mention here that also suggested infanticide. Also, the article used to be a redirect there (Special:Permalink/485897078) although also to infanticide before that, once CSD tagged as a hoax. If restored as a redirect or merge, it should probably be to child euthanasia although as you can see on the talk page there were a few previous redirect discussions. So yeah a new merge discussion is likely the best way forward if a bold redirect/merge doesn't stick (I think that I'll first try that, then). There's already a mention in the target article but I'm not 100% certain it's well presented, since I saw mention of suffering in the paper... In any case, I'll wait until tomorrow before the bold attempt. Thanks, —PaleoNeonate – 18:47, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

I guess what makes the outline of the argument in post-birth abortion on the fringe is that it rejects the notion of a clear demarcation between abortion and infanticide/child euthanasia. Even the few places that have legalized child euthanasia in extreme cases have far more restrictions on it than on abortions (even late-term abortions). The article child euthanasia emphasizes that the basis for legality in those cases is unbearable suffering of the newborn. I don't believe there's any country where infanticide because the infant "would be an intolerable burden to its mother/family" is permitted. The views in the Minerva-Giubilini article are notable for being at one end of the spectrum; apparently almost all of the reactions to the article were negative. NightHeron (talk) 20:40, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the context, it's then very possible that my edits at the article do not represent the source correctly for #3... —PaleoNeonate – 02:28, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Question about your RfC on the Abortion Talk page

Thanks again for starting that RfC!! (Talk:Abortion#RfC_on_use_of_the_words_safe_and_safety) I was thinking I should collapse the discussion leaving only your question and the consensus statement and then "pin" it so that it doesn't get archived, because so many other editors come to the article and try to change/complain about how the article represents safety. Alternatively, we could add another FAQ question to the 6 questions we currently have, and include a link in that FAQ question to the RfC...I was wondering which approach you thought would be better. Thanks again!!---Avatar317^(talk) 01:11, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

@Avatar317: Thanks for your kind words, and for your many contributions to abortion-related discussions. Either of the two approaches would be fine with me; perhaps adding an FAQ question with a link to the RfC would be the simpler alternative. NightHeron (talk) 02:13, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

Good to see a user document their experience with hostile editors

I hate to say it, but I'm glad to read your list of battles with hostile Wiki-forces. Good to find documented cases. Sadly, Wikipedia has become a more hostile place to edit. There is less collegiality and respect. There are people who think they are Cerberus, guarding their favorite articles and viewpoints. Thanks for championing civility, even when we disagree with other, even disagree strongly. Looking forward to a kinder, more peaceful, more respectful Wiki-world. Pete unseth (talk) 19:36, 26 March 2022 (UTC)

@Pete unseth: Thank you for the message. Note that I don't say that the abusive treatment I was subjected to as a newbie is at all typical of Wikipedia. Rather, I came to realize that I had just "walked into a bad neighborhood", and if I avoid that neighborhood, I should be okay. Almost all the interaction with Wikipedia editors since that time has been mutually respectful, even though I've continued to edit in controversial areas. NightHeron (talk) 21:41, 26 March 2022 (UTC)