At 10:47 AM 11/19/2009, OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson wrote:
I certainly do not dispute this. However, and as I'm sure you know, many skeptics use circuitous reasoning. They will refuse to accept the basis of such information because they have already banned the original sources of these reports from Wikipedia. It makes life "easier" for them.
Actually, the situation is a little more complex than that. Lenr-canr.org was originally blacklisted on Wikipedia. The "original sources" weren't banned. Lenr-canr.org isn't (generally) an original source. When I challenged the blacklisting -- I got involved in this as pure process, I was neutral on cold fusion -- JzG, a highly and very personally involved administrator who had made the blacklist entry entirely on his own -- very unusual -- went to Meta (meta.wikipedia.org) where the global blacklist is maintained. Wikimedia projects use this list, which was designed mostly to prevent spam from being added to projects.
Any local project can have its own blacklist, and can also have a whitelist, which lists exceptions, all the way from individual page exceptions to entire site exceptions (i.e., meta has blacklisted, but the local project wants to allow links to the site.)
Now, JzG ended up, in my first sojourn before the Arbitration Committee, being admonished for his blacklisting, and the Committee decided -- properly, in my view -- that the blacklist wasn't to be used to ban web sites based on their point of view.
However, the Arbitration Committee has no authority over meta, it is only concerned with the English Wikipedia. In any case, the Arbitration Committee doesn't make specific content decisions, it only rules on process and editor behavior. So the meta blacklisting of lenr-canr.org still stands.
The administrators at meta can be quite obstinate, they dislike reversing themselves. The decision to grant the blacklisting requested by JzG was an error; the evidence he presented was preposterous. However, there is a path to delisting: if pages from the site are locally whitelisted, enough of them, and actually used, the meta administrators may consider delisting. So ... I requested whitelisting for a series of pages on lenr-canr.org, for use for "convenience links," so that people can find copies to read easily. And nearly all these requests were granted. Some are being used. However, at about this point, I was banned from the article as a result of Hipocrite's behavior, which created a situation which was used by the administrator William M. Connolley to ban me. He didn't give a reason. He also ended up losing his administrative privileges over it.
But, meanwhile, maybe two dozen editors, largely loosely affiliated with a group of anti-fringe-science and anti-pseudoscience editors, piled in to complain about my behavior. ArbComm bought it. After all, if I'd made so many editors upset, I must be doing something wrong. It's a convenient way to avoid doing much actual research. There was one arbitrator who actually read the evidence, and he was assigned to start drafting decisions. I thought at that point that it was about pure victory. But ... then the, er, rest of the committee, a certain faction, showed up and completely disregarded what he'd done. Hence I'm site-banned for three months, topic-banned from cold fusion for a year, joining the good company of Pcarbonn, who comes off his ban next month, and prohibited from intervening in disputes where I'm not a primary party. I'm still trying to figure that one out. They are trying to save me some time? It had nothing to do with the case! I'd done a bit of mediation, and it had been successful.
I'm lucky. There are others still caught in that multiplayer on-line role-playing game. Instead of searching for secondary sources to write a tertiary source, I'm doing some research myself, from a bit of a new angle. I might get my first cell cooking this month, almost everything is here, enough to start testing stuff.
