On 02/19/12 7:31 PM, Fred Bauder wrote:
Fred Bauder writes:
I think it probably seems to climate change deniers that excluding
political opinions from science-based articles on global warming is a
violation of neutral point of view, and of basic fairness. That is just
one example, but there are other similar situations.
This analogy is breathtakingly unpersuasive. Apart from the fact that
consensus about scientific theory is not analogous to consensus about
the historical records of particular events, climate-change-denial
theory is actually discussed quite thoroughly on Wikipedia. Plus, the
author of the op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education doesn't seem
at all like climate-change deniers.
If there is something specific you want to suggest about the author --
that he's agenda-driven, that his work is unreliable, or that the
journal in which he published the article is not a reliable source --
then I think equity requires that you declare why you doubt or dismiss
his article.
I read the article in the Chronicle pretty carefully. The author's
experience struck me as an example of a pattern that may account for
the flattening of the growth curve in new editors as well as for some
other phenomena. As you may rememember, Andrew Lih conducted a
presentation on "the policy thicket" at Wikimania almost five years
ago. The wielding of policy by long-term editors, plus the rewriting
of the policy so that it is used to undercut NPOV rather than preserve
it, strikes me as worth talking about. Dismissing it out of hand, or
analogizing it to climate-change denial, undercuts my trust in the
Wikipedian process rather than reinforces it.
We're talking past one another. It is obvious to me that the author of
the Chronicle article should have been able to add his research without
difficulty, at least after it was published.
We have material about climate change denial, but do not give political
viewpoints the status we give scientific opinion in articles on the
science, nor should we. What we would be looking for, and will not be
able to find, is substantial work showing that climate warming does not
result from an increase in greenhouse gases and other products of human
activity. We can't simply say, "According to Rick Santorum, there is no
scientific basis...."
Yes, please, lets discuss.
If we're ever going to get past these problems of Wiki epistemology it
won't be done by starting with such a heavily argued contemporary
problem as climate change. It has too many active vested interests. Too
many people accept political statements as fact. NPOV started off as a
great concept, but sometimes when we try to explain it we end up
expanding beyond recognition. Reliable sources are fine but deciding on
the reliability of a source itself requires a point of view. Calling
something original research ends up more a weapon than a valid criticism.
Ray
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