At 08:24 AM 11/19/2009, froarty...@comcast.net wrote:
They have been trumped by a government document and know their
previous positions are now all compromised. They built a house of
cards and here comes the wind :_)
They have been trumped by a government document and know their
previous positions are now all compromised. They built a house of
cards and here comes the wind :_)
Hard to say. The editor aptly known as Hipocrite was, of course,
going to first look for how he could exclude the material. True to
form for this faction of editors, they will raise one argument, then,
when that argument is demolished, another comes, then another. At
some point it becomes way too obvious what's going on and they will
lose credibility, but it takes a lot of work to get the matter to that point.
Jed may have watched what happened when we got a page on
lenr-canr.org whitelisted so it could be used as a reference in the
Martin Fleischmann article. JzG, the admin who had blacklisted
lenr-canr.org, of course, removed it, with argument A. Well, problem
with argument A, just not true. Removed it again with argument B, and
this went on through several iterations. Okay, I started an
examination of all the arguments, made it as complete as I could, on
the Talk page, and then went over each argument in detail, and sought
consensus, not on the overall conclusion -- they had too many
arguments -- but on the argument itself. Eventually, they were all
accepted by consensus as invalid or not controlling that situation.
So we got the convenience link to lenr-canr.org. Later, Hipocrite --
or was it Mathsci? -- yanked it on the grounds that Jed didn't want
it used (a wishful-thinking interpretation of something Jed wrote).
Of course, Jed doesn't get to decide what Wikipedia uses, they should
have known that, and Jed didn't really mind! An administrator, this
time, put it back.
It's possible to get things done on Wikipedia, but the cost is huge.
Probably not worth it, at least not worth it for anything other than
fairly disinterested tweaks. Write better articles elsewhere. The
Wikipedia article will change, there are quite a few editors there
who realized the problems but who aren't sufficiently motivated to
slog through the muck with people like Hipocrite.
So, first objection: source not reliable. That, of course, is based
on an opinion that the source is New Energy Times. Not reliable? Not
reliable for *what*? NET isn't routinely considered a "reliable
source" for Wikipedia because of an alleged fringe point of view, but
that doesn't mean that it's not reliable for *anything.* NET has no
reputation at all for forging documents. JzG tried to claim this
about lenr-canr.org, that's one of the arguments that got utterly
demolished, it was based on deceptive reporting. Really, if the
Arbitration Committee ever looks close enough at the editing of these
jokers, they'd be banned. Except that the Arbitration Committee
doesn't have the means or inclination to actually look. Too much work.
No, NET is not the source, the Defense Intelligence Agency is, and
specifically the named office, I forget.
So ... then it's claimed that this is a primary source. Nope.
Secondary source, published by a reputable publisher, that tries to
get the facts right. They either don't really know Wikipedia policy,
or are just wikilawyering with it, finding any excuse they can to
exclude what they don't like.
They will also try to impeach it by claiming that the authors or
sources are "fringe." Again, a misunderstanding. The reliability of a
source depends on the publisher, not the author. ("Reliable" in
wikispeak doesn't mean "reliable" in ordinary language. It really
means "notable." Something in "reliable source" can be very
unreliable, in fact, but it should not be *excluded*. Rather, it
should be balanced, and if it can't be balanced with source of
adequate quality, tough. One of the tricks of the anti-CF contingent
is to demand the highest possible quality for sources that seem to
support cold fusion, while accepting weak off-hand comments in
tertiary sources, or articles on other topics where an author, not an
expert in the field, tosses in a comment.
With the Fleischmann paper I mentioned above, it was his paper
presented to an ICCF, published by Tsinghua University. Eventually,
the question was raised, was the paper hosted at lenr-canr.org a true
copy? Basically, the argument prevailed that the likelihood of any
significant difference was so low that it could be disregarded. To
satisfy a stickler, a note was added to the reference that it was an
unverified copy, because nobody participating there could testify
that they'd seen the article and it was the same.
Of course, tons of genuine crap exist in sources all over the wiki.
I've seen peer-reviewed articles cited as evidence for the exact
opposite of what the paper actually said.... straining at a gnat and
swallowing a fly. Horse? Camel? Never mind....
The Cold Fusion article is under discretionary sanctions, declared so
by the Arbitration Committee as a result of my case. That means that
administrators can ban individuals from the article, and block them
if they don't respect the ban. The Committee was quite aware that
there had been lots of problems with the article, but they basically
had no clue as to what to do about it, which is a common situation.
My original interest wasn't cold fusion, it was consensus process and
how large organizations could find consensus. They need that, but
they don't want it. Kind of an impossible situation.
