Apparently not, since you’ve just written two pages of ill-informed blather.
The highlight:
You look at the evidence.
This isn’t just how Wikipedia works, but also how science works. Not by voting, or by seniority, or by qualifications, or by a clandestine inner circle, but by evidence. This is such a foreign concept to you that you didn’t even think to mention it in the above polemic.
And you’re supposed to have a PhD. Sheesh.
And a nugget from the 2nd deletion discusion:
There are plenty of scientists with orthodox views who have discovered multiple species who don’t have Wikipedia pages. They haven’t had their pages deleted because they didn’t have one of their buddies try to create a page about them:
“The article was created by a colleague at our museum and subsequently expanded by myself” --Dr. Günter Bechly 11:06, 21 August 2012 (UTC)
Okay, sorry about strewing this thread with multiple near-duplicate posts, but I keep messing up my quotes, but (i) this stupid Slo-Mo posting system won’t let me edit to correct them & (ii) I cannot seem to get the forum to delete my messed-up posts in a timely manner. Talk about the Law of Unintended Consequences.
This is indeed how AfD discussions on Wikipedia are meant to work – the winner is not meant to be the viewpoint that gets most votes (which is why the expressed viewpoints are frequently referred to as “not votes”, or “!votes”, in Wikipedia’s shorthand), nor by seniority (in which case you’d see it prominently-displayed whether an opinion comes from an admin or not), but rather on which side does a better job of summarising the sources, and analysing them according to Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines, as to issues like (i) how reliable and prominent they are, (ii) how independent they are of the subject, and (iii) what depth of coverage the give to the topic. (Of course Wikipedia being run by humans, and thus fallible, it doesn’t always work out that way.)
Obviously, you don’t understand the argument that I made.
What if the editors don’t agree on how to weigh the evidence?
[allowing a generous amount of processing time…]
Any of the undergrads I used to teach in Great Books would have thought of that question. Why didn’t you? What did you say your academic degrees were again?
Not “supposed to have.” Do have. Which is why I understand how real scholarship works, how an encyclopedia ought to be constructed. In fact, I wrote an extensive article for a major encyclopedia of philosophy published in Britain. I was invited to do so, based on my expertise (the section editor, himself with a PhD in philosophy, had seen my published work on the topic). I showed a draft of the article to another PhD with expertise on the subject, and made adjustments based on his comments, before submitting it to the section editor. At no point was the opinion of pseudonymous yahoos without philosophical training consulted. At no point was my article subject to rancorous debate among people who didn’t know anything but had the power to change my words against my wishes. The section editor thought my article was exemplary, and it was published as it was in my final draft. The result is an article which I’m proud of, and is still, years later, the longest article on the subject in any academic reference book. The principle of expertise, not the principle of debate among non-experts, is the right principle for an encyclopedia dealing with academic subjects.
And if there isn’t agreement among the editors on “which side does a better job,” what then?
We saw, from the talk page cited, that after thousands of words exchanged, there was no agreement and not even any clear path to obtaining agreement; the page ended without resolution. Yet a decision was made. By whom? And how? Wikipedia will keep that process secret, of course, because to fully reveal how it was made would reveal how arbitrary and unprincipled the process is. Cowards and bullies never want their activities to be brought into the light.
@Eddie, for reasons I have already explained, I have little stomach for interacting with you, so I will attempt to keep this brief.
This is in fact the norm, rather than the exception. In these cases an uninvolved Administrator, the “closing Admin”, typically one who has experience in such matters, adjudicates, and it is their adjudication that gets placed at the top of the AfD. If this adjudication is disputed (less common, but hardly an extreme exception), then a “Deletion Review” is conducted. There may be further specialist appeals above this, I cannot remember. The ultimate appeal would be to the Arbitration Committee (“ArbComm”), but I don’t know how frequently, if ever, they would deal with a simple deletion.
If, after the appropriate length of time, there is unanimity about the decision, then a “Non-administrative closure” may be initiated by an ordinary editor – however if the decision is to delete, an Admin would still be needed to delete the article.
Which of course confirms the point I was making to Roy, i.e., that arguments about who has best argument, who has the best evidence, etc., at some point have to come to an end, because a decision has to be made. And in principle there are only two ways of rendering a decision: (1) a vote by those who have been working on the article (or by some wider group of Wikipedians); (2) a decision by an arbitrator, whether that arbitrator be one of the editors who has been working on the article, or someone called in from outside.
In this case, can you tell me exactly where on the page cited (or some other page) we can all look at the Administrator’s ruling on the case? It would be interesting to know whether the ruling is simply a ruling, without explanation, or if justification is given.
In any event, it’s unclear why calling in an uninvolved Administrator would automatically produce a better result than simply a majority vote. It might, in some cases. For example, if on one article the majority of editors are heavily ideologically biased, and an uninvolved Administrator had no ideological axe to grind, and simply rules on the basis of existing Wikipedia rules, the result might be fairer. On the other hand, the uninvolved Administrator might have ideological biases of his own, and they might go into his decision.
Regarding the narrower question of “notability”, the only rational solution is to make use of expert scientists (who know the difference between someone with real contributions to a field and someone without) to define the criteria for “notable scientist.” The criteria would have to be crystal-clear so as not to allow for debate about their meaning by the non-academically trained thugs and incompetents who edit most of the articles. Then all the thugs and incompetents would have to do is perform the much lower-level intellectual task of applying clear criteria to each proposed article.
If, for example (and I’m not insisting on these specifics, it’s just an example), the criteria for “notability” for biologists/biochemists/medical scientists specifies the following minimum standard for inclusion: (1) Must have at least X peer-reviewed publications, (2) Must have an H-index of at least Y; (3) Must have either a species named after him or a biological patent; (4) Does not need any of the above if he is the winner of a Nobel Prize-- then even editors with no training in science would be able to mechanically apply those criteria and see whether minimum standard is met. Had that system been in place, it would have been easy to see whether or not Bechly met the criteria. If he didn’t, then the article would never have gone up in the first place. And I wouldn’t have complained; I couldn’t care less whether or not Bechly gets an article. But if he did meet the criteria, then an attempt to later remove the article coinciding with the revelation that he had embraced ID would obviously be politically motivated. It is nebulous standards, allowing for a very wide range of subjectivity in interpretation, that give self-appointed editors, especially ones with ideological axes to grind, room to manipulate the encyclopedia for their ends.
Obviously you’re back-pedalling. You didn’t even mention ‘evidence’, only ‘arguments’.
What makes you think I didn’t?
You didn’t ask about evaluating evidence, only about evaluating arguments. So I pointed out that you’d omitted the main way in which Wikipedia (and scientific) arguments were evaluated.
Supposed to have. It can’t be verified, because you are the “pseudonymous yahoo”.
@Tim has already dealt with the rest of your scurrility.
I will answer this one question, though the answer should be obvious to anybody who had read my above comment, “and it is their adjudication that gets placed at the top of the AfD.”
The result was **delete**. With a bunch of considerations:
- I’ve opted to disregard a bunch of single-purpose IPs and accounts because of the canvassing concerns and because most of them are merely making assertions without offering evidence that WP:PROF or WP:GNG are met. I did factor in the opinion of the account that shares its name with the article topic, though. A neutral post on the fringe noticeboard does not per se constitute improper WP:CANVASSING.
- It does not seem like “having a number of species named after one self” is considered a reason to keep, probably because while it does indicate “notability” it does not necessarily indicate “notability”.
- That the nominator of an AfD did not start a discussion first on the talk page or add maintenance tags does not demerit the AfD nomination; for one thing, there is a difference between the present state of the article and the amount of information available on a topic (which is what AfD ultimately adjudicates)
- Accusations of anti-creationism bias are not germane to the purpose of AfD, and we don’t consider the stances of an article subject on a contentious topic in judging notability.
- All that said, it seems like the sources provided in the discussion are considered to be too tangential - they mention the article topic in passing rather than being specifically about the topic. Other sources have issues like being primary or unreliable or not independent.
On balance, it seems like the case that the sources do not establish GNG notability is more thoroughly argued than the case that they do (which is mostly assertions) and there is no indication that any other PROF notability criterium is met. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:09, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
&
The result was delete. As accurately noted by a participant this is indeed an edge case of notability. Those who suggest that Bechly is notable advance several arguments for this position including GNG coverage and his academic achievements being enough to meet one (or more) notability of academics criteria. Particular attention and emphasis was paid to Bechly’s contribution to the identification of various species in regards to his academic notability. However, the evidence and reasoning of those suggesting Bechly is notable did not resonate with editors. These editors offer their own policy and guideline supported reasons for deletion and for why the evidence of notability is not enough to satisfy our guidelines and policies.While consensus on Wikipedia is not found by counting votes, neither can the roughly 70% of editors who feel deletion is merited be ignored, especially when those participants base their reasoning in our practices, guidelines, and policies. To ignore, even for a no consensus close, such an overwhelming consensus of editors would require an extraordinary level of support from policies. One such claim was made: accusations of a failure to keep a neutral point of view by those who do not find Bechly notable. While there may, or may not, be bias towards academics who believe in Intelligent Design, such a consensus will not be reached here where the focus is on Bechly. Those who support deletion of this article offer their own evidence to refute this accusation of bias. As such there is no policy basis to weight keep participants in such a way to override those editors who favored deletion.
[Hidden comment on “On altering this discussion after closing” omitted]
For the rest of your rant, you have repeatedly proven yourself to be somebody whose opinion I would not consider at all valuable, nor are you likely to be somebody whose opinion would intrude on Wikipedia’s deliberations on how they might refine their policies, nor are you somebody whose conversation I find even remotely salubrious, so I will sum my reaction up as follows:
Please feel free to direct your future rants at somebody who has shown the least interest in what you have to say.
Oh God I can’t stop laughing.
Your hair-splitting evasiveness makes you almost impossible to converse with in an educated way. “Evidence” is not self-interpreting; it needs to interpreted and weighed, and processed by human judgment, and therefore it has exactly the same problem as “arguments.” People in fact differ over whether X counts as evidence for something, whether it counts as strong or weak evidence, etc. Therefore, in the end, all decisions over who has the best evidence, like all decisions over who has the best argument, have to be made either by vote or by arbitration. There is no way around this.
See the above. What you pointed out makes no difference at all to the situation. In the end, Wikipedia either must give in and “vote” or it must submit quarrels to an arbitrator. There is no other way.
The difference between me and the Wikipedians is this: I am offering my views here as mere opinion. I don’t expect people reading this site to regard me as a source of facts, but as an interpreter of facts. And they don’t need to know my real identity in order to decide whether my opinion is useful or useless. But Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia. And people rely on encyclopedias to give them facts. They put more trust in encyclopedias than they do in opinion columns and blog sites. They assume that encyclopedia articles won’t lie to them, or deliberately exaggerate, or leave out relevant information, or make sloppy stupid errors due to incompetent research. So they are much less on their guard when consulting an encyclopedia than when reading opinion columns and blog sites. So there is a personal responsibility that goes with producing an encyclopedia that doesn’t attach to people sounding off on a blog site.
That is why serious academic encyclopedias usually tell you who the authors of the individual articles are (usually right on the page, at least with initials, but in any case determinable from somewhere within the encyclopedia). Those authors take personal responsibility for what they report as facts, and if they blow it, their good names (as scientists, scholars, professors, teachers, writers) suffer. But the Wikipedians take no such responsibility. They can produce careless research, they can lie, they can exaggerate, they can delete pages for ideological reasons, and their good name is never called into question, because no one knows who they are.
Will we ever know the name of the person who made the decision to pull the Bechly page? Will we ever see a list of that person’s reasons for doing so? And the next time that person, in his real life outside of Wikipedia, applies for a job at, say, a government office that deals with assembling and reporting facts (about hospitals or the economy or mining or whatever), will the employer be able to look up the kind of editorial decisions he made at Wikipedia, to determine if he is a responsible person who keeps his personal ideology out of the way he reports the facts? The answer is no, the employer won’t know what decisions the person made at Wikipedia, and probably won’t even know that the person was ever involved at Wikipedia.
And of course, the Wikipedia people want it that way. They want a zone in their life where they can be as prejudiced and ideological and as unfair as they please, and never to have to answer to anyone for it, never to have to suffer any real-life consequences for it. They want to be able to manipulate “the facts” that the public sees so that the public, on all controversial issues, will adopt the slant on things that the editors like. And this will never change, so long as pseudonymity is permitted.
No one who is in the business of presenting supposedly objective facts to the public, whether that person works for an encyclopedia, or for the government, or for the army, or for a corporation, or for a union, or for the media, should be allowed to remain pseudonymous. Being put in charge of the facts which millions of readers will believe is a sacred trust, and the people in those positions are no more entitled to pseudonymity than are judges or elected politicians.
I’ll put my money where my mouth is on this. I will donate $1,000 dollars to Wikipedia, and provide verification that I have done so, when it institutes and enforces the policy that all writers and editors in the organization, all the way up to the owner of the company, must use their verified real names at all times, and must provide a list of their degrees and professional skills and experience (with verifiability) when they first sign on as editors. If Wikipedia adopts this policy, I will give them $1,000 once the policy is in force, and $500 every year afterwards as long as that the policy continues in force. They’re always whining and begging for money; well, I’m offering to give them some. But I won’t give a penny to a group of arrogant, barbaric, uneducated or half-educated autodidacts, until I know who they are, what their qualifications are, and where they live.
And nothing he said contradicted my main argument.
Let’s cease talking about this odious organization and its mostly odious personnel.
Another example of @Eddie’s complete lack of research skills, on a par with being unable to find Pubmed, the oldest post on Pharyngula or Nicholas Angel.
Yep, I was involved in attempting to correct his self-inflicted ignorance on the Pharyngula issue. 
I don’t mind doing such occasional public services – as long as I can keep my distance from him otherwise.
You did not define “AfD” so I was not sure what Wikipedia page you were talking about. I have since found the adjudication you are talking about. If it weren’t for the slow-motion here, I might have got your reply in time to delete one paragraph of my latest long reply, where I complained that the reasons for the adjudication could not be found. That complaint was unwarranted. But other than that one paragraph, I stand by the rest of what I wrote.
Your natural, automatic use of abbreviations like “AfD” as if you are used to talking to people who will automatically know them, and don’t instinctively define them, suggest that you spend a lot of time behind the scenes at Wikipedia. And if that’s true, I don’t see how you could honestly say you had never seen any bias at all in any article on origins whatsoever. I know it was Roy who said that, not you, but you haven’t contradicted him. So is that your view, that never once has any anti-ID or anti-creationist editor made a biased edit (of even a phrase or two) on articles on ID, creationism, etc.? If so, how do you account for the judgment of the man who founded Wikipedia’s neutral point of view policy, when he said the main article on ID was “appallingly” biased? Can you not even make an intelligent guess about the sort of things in the article that might have struck him as biased?
One more point: following up behind the scenes to the page on “Notability”, I see that Wikipedia does in fact try to set forth some criteria (as I had said in should). And I don’t completely object to those criteria. But I come back to the process re Bechly. Those criteria were fully in place long before the Bechly article was written. So let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that aside from any prejudice against Bechly for his ID associations, there were good reasons why Bechly should not count as “notable”. Fine; as I said, couldn’t care less whether he has an article or not. The question is, given that in the end it was decided that he was not “notable” enough to be included, how did the original article get put up in the first place?
In any well-run publishing organization, a new article would not be put up before it was checked. As soon as it was proposed, a draft should have been sent to several experienced editors to go over it and make sure it met the criteria for notability. And if those editors knew the criteria, and had experience with other biographical articles, they should have detected right away that Bechly did not meet the standard. In that case, the article never should have gone up in the first place.
So even if I were to completely reverse my position and say that the Bechly article was not pulled because of anti-ID bias, but because it was discovered that it never should have been up there in the first place, because he wasn’t notable enough, I would still say that the editing process regarding new articles at Wikipedia is incompetent.
You have now used up your quota for corrections of self-inflicted ignorance on this thread, so please curtail your tediously-verbose rantings. I am not interested in your opinions.
Of course it does. In your lengthy polemic on possible ways to evaluate arguments you completely neglected to mention that arguments can be resolved by examining evidence.
Bovine faeces. Here are just some of the times you have offered ‘facts’ in this thread alone:
I doubt anyone reading this thread regards you as a source of facts.
This is a good time to point out that you have yet to identify a single thing on Wikipedia that is not factual.
This is a good time to point out that you have yet to identify a single lie or exaggeration on Wikipedia.
You’ve already seen that list.
It’s not the Wikipedia editors who are the odious ones here.
…interacting with people who are competent enough to either remember or find their meanings, neither if which applies to @Eddie.
Unsurprisingly, I didn’t say that.
Bechly and one of his colleagues created it.
If you spent more time reading and less time ranting you’d already know that.
Maybe Keith Whitaker can help:
“Dr. Turner is a retired professor of biology at the State University of New York, though he continues his research on ecology, evolution, and (in particular) termite colonies in Namibia. He is well-positioned to help NAS take on what he has termed the “zombie parasite” of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” afflicting American universities.”
I am not trying to make any connections between “science subjects” and “The Arts”. The connection is between indirect costs and “The Arts”. And the irony that Turner seems willing to toss out the baby with the bathwater, as it were.
Readers still following this discussion who are not willing to pay for the National review article can find most (perhaps all - I haven’t done a side-by-side) NR piece as part of a larger report for the Heritage Foundation. Turner has, let’s say, a curious view of things.
Nor I in yours. I almost uniformly disregard anything you write to me here. And you’re not obliged to read any of my posts at all. But I have no intention of curtailing any of them, so if you don’t like them, don’t read them. Read stuff you find more interesting, such as the scintillating wit on Wikipedia Talk and AfD pages.
The point still hasn’t penetrated, and I don’t suppose it ever will, but I’ll make one more try: Of course in principle arguments can be resolved by examining evidence, and sometimes that happens. But many arguments are not resolved even when everybody is presented with the same evidence, because different people weigh the evidence differently. And if you’ve been paying attention at all, you’d remember that we are here talking about Wikipedia articles where the editors disagree. And they sometimes disagree even after they all have the same evidence. So there has to be a mechanism for resolving the disagreement. Why is this hard for you to understand?
“ID is a form of creationism”
This error has been many times corrected here, and I don’t intend to repeat the arguments again; I’m just answering your question. The statement is false. “Most ID proponents are creationists” would be true. “There is overlap between the ideas of ID and the ideas of creationism” would be true. “Almost all creationists are openly sympathetic with ID” would be true. “Some school board creationists have tried to use ID as a cover to sneak creationism into their schools” would be true. But “ID is a form of creationism” is false. It’s one of the “appallingly biased” statements in the article on ID that the co-founder of Wikipedia probably had in mind.
Because of the slow motion here, I hadn’t actually looked at the list until after I wrote that comment, even though it was on a page I had seen. I hadn’t noticed it. Then I found it.
They’re not odious here; they’re odious on Wikipedia. (Although if some of them are here incognito, which is not unlikely, that would account for the odiousness of many of the posts here.)
I agree that this quotation, if accurately attributed to Turner, is relevant to understanding his view of the Arts subjects at universities. However, note that you did not get that point from the article we were discussing. You had to pull it in from somewhere else. And I’m not quarreling with it, but you were quite insistent that I could find what you were telling me in the passage about indirect costs in the article we were discussing, not in some statement from outside the article.
But again, the precise passage in Turner’s article about indirect costs that you highlighted did not mention the Arts in general, or any arts department in particular, or any subject-matter studied in the Arts. It mentioned only the misdeeds of “the administration.” It is unreasonable for you to expect a reader to mystically divine the connection with “the Arts” from that passage.
Again, I find nothing in the article that tells me what “the baby” you are talking about it. You seem to be saying that “the baby” is something to do with the Arts, but what that is, I cannot fathom.
There is a strange reversal here, in that you, the science person, are attempting to make an argument about the meaning of an article the way some “arts” people (especially sociologists, feminist theorists, etc.) would, i.e., by means of hint, suggestion, loose association etc., whereas I, the arts person, am asking for something very empirical – where does he say that? – the way a science person would. We might get further if you would go back to your usual science mode!
Yet you are perpetually unable to cite any evidence that you are capable of analyzing, reflected in your repeated attempts to assert legitimacy by pointing to mere citation of it.
You can’t cite a single datum that convinced you that Michael Denton has a point. It’s all about rhetoric, all the time.
I wonder where Turner gets his 50% figure from. The Council on Govermental Relations puts them at less than 28% and says that they have been stable for the last two decades. The document was written in 2017 but Turner also refers to 2017 figures as if his 50% rate applied then.
Also Turner seems unable to understand that an expanding field of inquiry would naturally attract expanded funding as opposed to a more mature field.