At 04:48 PM 9/13/2012, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Alan J Fletcher <<mailto:a...@well.com>a...@well.com> wrote:
Thanks to AK for the correct link (which I'd already fixed on the
wiki -- though even my comments in talk have been "collapsed" -- and
I'm being threatened with arbitration.)
'Dat's how it woiks at Wikipedia. First 'dey collapse you. 'Den they
arbitrate you. You know: arbitrate! By sticking your feet in
concrete, and taking you down to the docks for on a long walk on a short pier.
Metaphorically. But it is based on what ya' might call Prohibition
era rum-runners' best practices, 6-sigma-like, such as how to deal
with smart alecs who got no business in this neighborhood, askin'
questions what ain't none of your business, see?!?
Well, very funny, Jed. However, Mr. Fletcher is essentially clueless
as to what would be acceptable as a source for Wikipedia. I looked
about and didn't see where he was "threatened with arbitration,"
which is weird. The last thing that the cabal wants is for their
antics to go to arbitration, but, here, they'd win. Essentially, this
would just go to Arbitration Enforcement -- which is not arbitration,
it is where the "community" enforces arbitration decisions, in theis
case Article Probation for cold fusion topics.
Of course, is the E-cat "cold fusion"? Wikipedia is a total mess in
this area, and the people who knew how to clean it up, following
policies and guidelines, mostly have been banned. (Pcarboon, myself,
and, sort of, Jed, but Jed, you didn't ever really give a fig about
Wikipedia policies. You were simply right most of the time, and blunt
about it. Very irritating to the cabal.)
There is no way that anonymously published information can be
reliable source for anything on Wikipedia, except for its own
content. I.e., if there is some newpaper article, say, about some
document that is anonymously published, and somehow it could be
established that some particular page showed the document itself, and
nobody was contesting that, then the document could be used to show
the actual document text. However, *interpreting* that text would be
prohibited. That's what ordinary reliable sources do. The document,
at best, is a primary source. For the same reason, when push comes to
shove, primary research is ordinarily not RS. Secondary sources are,
if independently published, with the gold standard being
peer-reviewed reviews of a matter, or academically published secondary sources.
That's what's truly hilarious about the Wikipedia cold fusion
article. There is one truly major review of the field in recent
years, Storms' paper in Naturwissenschaften, "Review of cold fusion
(2010)" That was a *solicited* review, published by a mainstream and
highly reputable publisher. There are many other reviews of cold
fusion published since 2005 or so, I counted sixteen. All agree that
cold fusion is a real phenomenon. There is nothing in the mainstream
journals to contradict this.
The skeptical position essentially died, as to any living scientific
advocacy. It's all students of the "I know better than you" or
die-hard pseudoskeptic variety mouthing off, at this point, on the internet.
The sad thing, though, is that Wired just said a bunch of things
about LENR that, though technically correct in some way or other,
will reinforce the impression that cold fusion was "never
reproduced." Which is total BS. What has happened is that variability
of results, a known characteristic of the electrolytic PdD approach,
has been confused with reproducibility. Lots of natural phenomena are
chaotic, i.e., either the conditions are not known well enough to
create exact replication, or some critical variable is not controlled.
With the FPHE, this is the palladium material, which shifts in
nanostructure as it is loaded with deuterium, and which continues to
shift with time.
But the heat/helium ratio is reproducible, and has been confirmed.
The variation in palladium structure does not affect that, it only
affects the magnitude of the results, not the ratio.
If editors cannot get the conclusions of the Storms review into the
Wikipedia cold fusion article, Wikipedia policies and guidelines are
being violated. And I attempted to confront this, I was essentially
topic-banned for it. (By an administrator, violating a series of what
I thought were established principles.) I was later site-banned, but
only after completely giving up on due process on Wikipedia. The
Arbitration Committee had refused to take the case.
Wikipedia process is impossibly cumbersome. One could work for months
on getting a single source into an article, and even be supported by
an RfC or other process, and then it's removed next month, using the
same bankrupt arguments rejected in formal process. And nobody cares,
and if you insist, why, obviously, you are POV-pushing. Never mind
that a POV-pushing faction has been sitting on the article for years.
In a way, they are right. Someone who would persist at Wikipedia is a
bit crazy.
