Velikovsky and Wikipedia

Or, perhaps, the title of this page might should be Wikipedia and Controversies. Velikovsky is just one example; every other controversy you read about on Wikipedia is handled pretty much the same way. That is, you, the customer, see a totally one-sided depiction of it.

It’s not as if Wikipedia is totally worthless, it’s not. It is a hugely valuable reference for any sort of thing for which no controversy of any sort either exists or is conceivable. Examples would be “How does a diesel engine work?”, “How does a sewing machine work?”, “Where/what exactly is the city of Gdansk?” and that sort of thing. But for any sort of a controversial topic such as Immanuel Velikovsky, Wikipedia is totally worthless.

Wikipedia is in fact the basic answer to the burning question which is on everybody’s lips and which you hear wherever you go, at bars, at PTA meetings, at the gym, at halftime during football games… The question is this:

What would the people who burned Joan of Arc be doing for a living or as an avocation if they were alive today?

The answer of course is, they would be Wiki-Weenies. In other words, members of the little Borg of late teen and twenty-something grad student wiki-moderators and super editors and whatever else who mob, block, and ban everybody who ever tries to present any sort of an alternative view on any controversial topic on Wikipedia.

Again, the Wiki page on Immanuel Velikovsky is only one example of this; others would comprise a very long list, i.e. this is not just a case of sour grapes coming from the one old bear here. Interested readers might want to check the Wikipedia “Discussion” pages for the first two or three controversy topics which come to mind and by that, I mean that all Wiki pages are tabbed near the top, the tabs being Article, Discussion, Edit-This-Page, and History.

Take the Wiki page for “Intelligent Design” for instance and turn to the Discussion tab. One of the first things you notice is this:

[edit] Ownership of Article

Why are certain editors reverting ALL edits that come along to the article? This smacks of WP:Own, which is not allowed. Wikipedia's strength is its changability, and edits should NOT be reverted merely because they occur. What is this, a protected page? You guys appear to be making it a de facto protected page through your heavy reversionism. 68.36.214.143 18:19, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

And the Borg’s reply:

Good edits to the article don't get reverted. (Example: [2]) The problem is that the vast, vast majority of the edits to this article - including non-vandalisms - are detrimental. Raul654 18:21, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Kind of like the signs you see on certain kinds of urban thoroughfares:

Or take the case of EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) and Tom Butler’s description of Wikipedia’s treatment of that topic. Better yet, this from one of the teenage Borg Wiki-Weenies to Tom Butler, who is probably America’s foremost expert on the topic:

Conflict of interest

Please do not edit Electronic voice phenomenon - since you are mentioned in the article and run a site mentioned, it is a conflict of interest for you to edit the article per WP:COI. Feel free to participate on the talk page. --Milo H Minderbinder 00:05, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Which is precisely like forbidding Albert Einstein to edit any of Wiki’s physics pages due to a possible “conflict of interest™”.

Article discussion pages are one place to look at feedback on Wikipedia, the other two are user talk pages and then what I would term the star chamber page on which the dirty business of the Wiki Borg itself is conducted. Tom and Lisa Butler ( The Electronic Voice Phenomena aaevp website) are about as straight up and honest a pair of people as you would ever hope to come across. Looking at Tom’s Wiki-talk page however you’d get the impression he was the next incarnation of Al Capone or Bugs Moran:

COI

You should make yourself familiar with conflict of interest and proceed accordingly. Your edits at electronic voice phenomena especially should be carefully considered in light of this. --ScienceApologist 02:51, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Threat reported

I reported your threat here. --ScienceApologist 03:34, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

“ScienceApologist” of course is Joshua Schroeder, a known quantity on the internet who has even had Amazon.com book reviews removed with prejudice after it became obvious he’d not so much as looked at the books which he was flaming. The link provided takes you to the Wiki:Borg starchamber/dirty business page I’d mentioned above and a description of the “dire threat™” referred to above:

Threat made at EVP

[172] User:Tom Butler has made a very bizarre threat at Talk: Electronic voice phenomenon regarding Wikipedia in general. I don't know if it rises to the level of a legal threat, but he was very clear that it was a threat. Can an administrator look at this? --ScienceApologist 03:32, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

The 2nd from the last paragraph seems to be saying "Don't annoy me or I'll tell all my friends this site sux!". Don't think that's a legal threat, but it's definately lame and disruptive. 68.39.174.238 04:49, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

For context: It was in response to a perceived COI blocking threat from SA. ---J.S (T/C/WRE) 04:58, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Yup. Tom's "telling all his friends" - http://etheric-studies.aaevp.com/articles/articles_wikipedia.htm --- LuckyLouie

In other words the big criminal act Schroeder refers to amounts to a simple exercise of the first amendment. Typical…

Tom’s description of the basic problem at Wikipedia is worth reading.

Then again, there’s the case of the recent news report of secret Wiki-Borg mailing lists….

So much for other people’s problems, again, you can find innumerable such examples on your own easily enough. The remainder of this web page is for the benefit of the Velikovsky estate or anybody else who might some day be inclined to sue Wikipedia over the manner in which the page dealing with Immanuel Velikovsky is managed.

In theory, Wikipedia articles are supposed to be neutral as to “point of view”; Wikipedia has a page devoted to the topic.

In particular the follow note is supposed to apply to situations in which facts are not in dispute but interpretations are:

Talking with other contributors is a great way to find out why there is a dispute over an article's neutrality. Ideas and POV's can be shared and ultimately the disputed fact or point can be fixed if it is incorrect or, when dealing with a controversial issue, various legitimate sources can be cited in the article.

Historians commonly cite many sources in books because there are and will always be disputes over history. Contributors on Wikipedia can do the same thing, thus giving readers a broad spectrum of POVs and opinions."

In other words, Wikipedia is supposed to be big enough to accommodate differing opinions. Believe me, it isn’t.

Wikipedia software uses a mechanism like the LINUX/UNIX diff/patch function to maintain history for all of its pages so that you can easily reconstruct any date’s version of the page while viewing the history section. If you go to the Velikovsky page and click on the History tab and reset for August 26, you will note a NPOV challenge which had been there for some time:

The neutrality of this article is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the talk page.
Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved.

As well as a section near the bottom titled “Defenses of Velikovsky” which had been agreed to as a sort of a rough compromise between myself and two or three of the Wiki-Weenies who watch the page:

Defenses of Velikovsky

· Scientists Confront Scientists Who Confront Velikovsky Kronos Vol. IV No 2 Winter 1978

· Carl Sagan and Immanuel Velikovsky Overview of Ginenthal, Charles (1990) Carl Sagan and Immanuel Velikovsky, Ivy Press, New York (ISBN0963975900)

· Stephen J. Gould and Immanuel Velikovsky, Stephen J. Gould and Immanuel Velikovsky, Forest Hills 1995, Large compendium of published articles

· "Minds in Denial" Charles Ginenthal's response to a number of criticisms from MeWhinney and Ellenberger.

This was underneath a section titled “Critiques of Velikovsky” which has always been there and is still there:

Critiques of Velikovsky

· Jerry Pournelle's commentaries on Sagan's arguments at the AAAS meeting.

· Velikovsky in Collision - Stephen Jay Gould

· Minds in Ablation Sean Mewhinney responds to Ice Core Evidence

· Worlds Still Colliding letter from C.Leroy Ellenberger^[^{unreliable source?}^]

· Ellenberger, Leroy (1995), "An Antidote to Velikovskian Delusions", Skeptic 3 (4), <http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/velidelu.html>. Retrieved on 2007-07-19 (Linked on-line copy has some additions by Ellenberger to the article as originally published.)

· A lesson from Velikovsky - Leroy Ellenberger

· Top Ten Reasons why Velikovsky is wrong about Worlds in Collision - Leroy Ellenberger^[^{unreliable source?}^]

· Mewhinney, Sean (1986), "El-Arish Revisited", Kronos XI (2): 41–61, <http://www.pibburns.com/smelaris.htm>

· Abraham Sachs' address at Brown University 1965 on cuneiform sources

Of course, the thing I’d really wanted to put on that Wiki-Velikovsky page was any sort of reference to the thing about thermal balance on Venus. The simplest such item would be a link to the pdf file on my own site, i.e. http://www.bearfabrique.org/Catastrophism/venus/venus2007.pdf. You can follow some of the flammage that caused on the Discussion tab from the Velikovsky page. It started thus:

Welcome to Wikipedia, Icebear1946. You would clearly like to insert into the article a link to a paper by Ted Holden on Venus. The paper is Holden, Ted, The Question of Thermal Balance on Venus, <http://www.bearfabrique.org/Catastrophism/venus/new_venus.pdf>. You have added this now three times, presuming you are also the anonymous editor. It has been removed twice, and will be removed again shortly. However, I'm explaining why it is being removed. You should have discussed this proposed addition when you saw that it was being deleted. The reasons this is being deleted are:

· It is not notable. It is on a private web page of Ted Holden. That will kill the additional right off the bat. See WP:NOTABLE.

· It is self promotion. I am pretty sure you are Ted. See WP:COI.

· It is in the wrong section. The paper is not a critique; but that is where you are putting it.

· The paper says very little about Velikovsky, and deals only with temperatures on Venus.

· The paper is physically nonsensical and relies on data that is long out of date, and on badly incorrect physics. Since this is going to be removed again, and your restorations are reverts, you should check the 3-revert rule.

The most major idea in that is that including the link to the bearfabrique page was spam or promotion of my own web system. Fine, far as I’m concerned I don’t care who gets credit for this information being out there, it should be out there and the student or common man reading this article should be able to learn about this. Aside from that I’ve never made a dime with any of the catastrophism materials on bearfabrique.org and never intend to.

I tried to reduce the thing to one or two paragraphs and include it in the basic article with no reference to any web page or myself, thus:

Usenet and other forum discussions have noted the claim that in several instances, raw data involved in phenomena bearing on Velikovsky's theories actually support Velikovsky but that by the time the stories are published, there are invariably explanations of how the experiments in question must have failed, and the data published is that shich would have coincided with standard theories since those are always assumed to be correct. The most major such case is the question of albedo (reflectivity) values for Venus as described in an article by F.W. Taylor of the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford in an article on "VENUS", Hunton, Colin, Donahue, Moroz, Univ. of Ariz. Press, 1983, ISBN 0-8165-0788-0. Taylor notes that the observed albedo value of .080 would require the planet to be massively out of thermal balance (as Velikovsky predicted) and that, therefore the value .076 which would produce thermal balance, required by the conventional theory for explaining the surface temperature of the planet, is the "most probable value"

Other such phenomena include ancient motion charte for the planet Venus, and infrared flux measurements associated with the Pioneer Venus mission.

In other words, I tried to include those two paragraphs in the base article.

This was shot down by the Wiki-Weenie moderators and super editors on the basis that it constituted “Original Research™”. Again you can follow some of the flammage that caused on the Velikovsky page Discussion tab.

I'm sorry, Icebear1946, but your addition to the article is excluded by Wikipedia's policy on original research, in particular on the basis that "it introduces an analysis or synthesis of established facts, ideas, opinions, or arguments in a way that builds a particular case favored by the editor, without attributing that analysis or synthesis to a reputable source". Find a reputable source to which you can attribute your addition and it can stand. In the interim, I'm removing it, and from previous discussions, I believe other editors will support this removal.

And on and on and on in such vein. In other words, I was totally prohibited from including the most major piece of evidence bearing on the Velikovsky controversy from the Velikovsky page on Wikipedia, and this was justified by the Wiki-Weenies by recourse to petty legalistic arguments.

The two paragraphs I tried to insert represent a simple observation and not original research; original research in such a case would amount to me putting together my own Venus probe with my own instruments at my own expense, and conducting my own experiments. I hope to be in financial shape to afford that sort of hobby some day, but so far it hasn’t happened.

More recently I started looking at the Velikovsky page again after a couple of months and both the Neutral POV challenge and the Defenses of Velikovsky section had been taken down with nothing in the way of justification to be found on the Discussion page. Attempts to reinsert the Defenses section quickly led to my being permanently blocked from editing Wiki pages:

On the Velikovsky Discussion page at the bottom (at least currently):

Far as I'm concerned, what I'm seeing here is blatant censorship. 208.253.65.26 (talk) 17:56, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Far as I'm concerned, This conversation is over. ScienceApologist (talk) 18:19, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

On my own talk page:

Requested community ban

I have requested that you be banned from the Wikipedia community for continued disruptive editing. You may respond here. ScienceApologist (talk) 18:18, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

I.e. from Joshua Schroeder (psych-lockup at the physics department) again. The link he supplied was to this on the Wiki-Starchamber page:

Please show this user the door

Resolved

Icebear1946 (talk · contribs)

This disruptive editor has shown no remorse in continuing to disruptively edit Immanuel Velikovsky. He's been given enough second chances. Please community ban him and remove the headache.

ScienceApologist (talk) 18:14, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Support ban. Editor has removed sections of links regarding criticism of the subject, and instead replaced them repeatedly with two links from the same dubious group. Such repeated reversion and replacement of content cannot be permitted. John Carter (talk) 18:29, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Support ban per the above and evidence of behaviour on Immanuel Velikovsky and its talk page. --Folantin (talk) 18:42, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Done. Sarsaparilla (talk) 18:55, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Very funny but this is a serious matter. --Folantin (talk) 19:04, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

There's never a matter that's too serious to be laughed at at some point. --WebHamster 19:40, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

True, but I LOL'ed. Loudly. Tarc (talk) 19:05, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Indef blocked. Flagrantly disruptive SPA. Moreschi ^{If you've written a quality article...} 19:38, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

I.E. the Wiki-Borg determined to remove the bear from Wikipedia on a permanent basis. Final stroke was this on my own Wiki talk page:

The door

Someone requested that I show this to you: Image:Backdoor of Kew Gardens.jpg

—Preceding unsigned comment added by Sarsaparilla (talk • contribs)

It would be one thing if Wikipedia were some sort of a boy scout troop’s website; the problem is that for many topics, the Wikipedia article is the first hit you see on any sort of a google or other engine search. It’s the first thing which the common man sees and the first thing which a student trying to learn something about a particular topic sees. If I knew any of the owners of Wikipedia, I would warn them that their teenage and twenty-something low and mid management echelon is setting them up for lawsuits.

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