Going

William Connolley has been topic banned by Wikipedia. Climate change is now off-limits for WC.

Comments

[John Shade]

A step forward, or just a temporary pause? The Royal Society and the BBC have both recently back-tracked a tiny bit from their previously shameless advocacy of one side of a complex topic. Is Wikipedia trying to do the same, or are they merely exasperated by an editor who has been a source of much strife for them? From the Wikipedia link given at the top of this thread:

'However, the "enough is enough" consensus of the committee is clear, and given the entire record here I can hardly say that the overall structure and outcome of the final decision is an outlandish one. Given the result, I hope that William M. Connolley can refocus his dedication to the project in other ways, while addressing the concerns that have been expressed so that he can return to this topic area in due course.'

Not a lifetime ban then, more a smack of the fingers.

[James P]

"BBC too broke for live coverage of Cancún climate talks"

There is a God!

[Pogo]

I think that the above sorry tale points conclusively to why Wikipaedia should be treated as a source of entertainment, and nothing else.

I have colleagues in several university science departments who tell their students on day one of their undergraduate courses that any piece of work submitted that uses Wikipaedia as a source or reference will be automatically failed.

[joe p]

{snip} I hope he's in a lot of pain as a result. Let's see how the rest of that gaggle of losers like Gavin Schmidt last.

[Jane Coles]

pat: "jane, why presume that paul hudson 'probably received no more than a "strand of CRU emails' when he received enough for him to be the first person to state they were 'authentic' when other MSM gatekeepers were attempting to cast doubt:?"

Pat, I'm not clear why you have thread-hopped here. Hudson has, so far as I know, never been fully explicit about exactly what he received. But the quote from his blog that you provide is entirely consistent with the hypothesis that I reported from (somewhat exhaustive) blog discussion at the time of his revelation. Nothing that Hudson has said implies that the BBC had an advance copy of the complete 64MB FOI2009.zip file. Nor has any other evidence of such an advance copy emerged.

I agree with you that there are still questions about this episode that the BBC should answer, including (i) Exactly what did Hudson receive? (ii) Who forwarded it to him? (iii) Was Hudson advised or instructed not to report on the matter in October?

[Bishop Hill]

I think I'm right in saying that only a fraction of the emails were sent to Hudson.

[PaulM]

I am very grateful to 'Billy' Connolley, because it was his blatant exaggeration, deletion of anything that didn't fit his agenda, bullying of anyone who disagreed with him, etc, that first raised my suspicions about AGW. I expect I am not alone in this.
Although it is good to see him banned, it is sad to see that many of the honest editors, whistleblowers who drew attention to Connolley's repeated breaking of the rules, have themselves been banned (ATren, Minor4th and others) in a rather childish tit-for-tat action by the administrators.

[Barry Woods]

I iamgine it was the just 6 or so emails that were sent to Hudson, which were discussing it his article

BUT boy were they the explosive ones..lots of the lead characters)

Michael Mann, saying he'd give richard Black (BBC) a call, to see what was going on..

as Richard did a GOOD JOB at the BBC

we might do something about it at RealClimate

Trenberth, we just had some inches of global warming (ie snow!).

etc

Dig them out, they are fun.

[MikeN]

Looking at that link, you get the feeling Wikipedia is a bit full of itself.

[Suramantine]

WMC shows his class on his Wikipedia Talk page. There he lists some of his insights into the Arbitration Committee decision.

Of the decision:

* the "scorched earth" idea is unthinking and stupid.
* arbcomm demonstrate again an inability to distinguish the valuable from the valueless; indeed, they appear to be too lazy to even try.
* in pursuit of their atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant they have failed to notice that peace has already broken out. For two reasons: the worst of the "skeptics" (MN, M4th, Cla, ATren, TGL) are all gone; and the external forcing (Climatic Research Unit email controversy‎) has been resolved in favour of Climate Science. So all the disruption was for nothing.

About the only good thing about the PD is that it is so obviously bad, it is likely to rebound more to the discredit of arbcomm than anyone else.

....

Of the arbs [arbitrators]:

* none of them emerge with any credit.

And people say that he is unreasonable, bullying, and arrogant! Ha!!--that'll show 'em.

[john]

Similar behaviour would be called delusional by the uncharitable.

[Dreadnought]

WMC quotes Tacitus but is obviously unfamiliar with this passage:

“Rara temporum felicitate ubi sentare quae velis et quae sentias dicere licet"

(These times have the rare good fortune that you may think what you like and say what you think.)

[Pete Ridley]

RoyFOMR, ref your comment of Oct 15th at 2:31 AM, you are not alone with this concern about what is going on in our schools. It is a very serious problem. Al Gore and his disciples are leading the charge to bombard our children with climate change propaganda. I am presently looking into the background and activities of Saci Lloyd, writer of the teens novels Climate Diaries 2015 and 2017. Saci was "born .. in Manchester. .. returned to Manchester as an undergraduate, but soon left for a life of glamour. At various points in the glitz she worked as a very bad cartoonist, toured the States in a straightedge band, ran an interactive media team at an advertising agency, co-founded a film company and finally wound up as head of media at NewVIc” (Sixth Form College in Newham, East London).

In that position she is ideally placed to spread the propaganda about our continuing use of fossil fuels leading to catastrophic global climate change and influence our vulnerable youngsters.

She is closely involved with Graham Land and others at the Greenfudge blog which also pushes the propaganda. Saci claims that "My aim is to write big, rich stories about characters battling with reality. .. We have to look at the reality around us. ..” but does she understand anything about the processes and drivers of global climates? She and Graham have also produced several audio presentations and this quote from one of them gives a hint as to how much they understand.

Talking to Saci about her spring trip to Egypt (Note 1) they discussed the Icelandic volcano. Graham said “Obviously ash and carbon – soot- from these volcanoes It is a kind of a greenhouse gas and its visible”. Saci interjected with a “yes” and they followed up with more nonsense on the subject. Here we have a musician and a teacher and writer of fiction stories for impressionable teenagers pontificating on the effects of our emissions of greenhouse gases when they don’t even know the difference between a greenhouse gas and an aerosil.

I’m researching who is funding the Greenfudge blog because at least one of the contributors to it, singer Joanna Papaj, claimed to be a Greenfudge employee. If any of you have any ideas on this I’d appreciate your help.

NOTES:
1) see http://www.archive.org/details/TheGodsOfTravel

Best regards, Pete Ridley

[Andrew Judd]

William M Connolley is definately not topic banned on Wiki

Re: My experiences when attempting to make changes on Wiki by Andrew Judd

Wiki is preventing a true description of the 'greenhouse effect' being shown on Wiki.

Wiki wants you to believe that the atmosphere heats the Surface. Anybody attempting to show that the surface heats the atmosphere will be banned.

As required by Wiki my comments were supported by the references already on the page.

I went as far as to phone up the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory Senior Scientist, Yochanan Kushnir Ph.d, who wrote reference 9 and he confirmed that the surface heats the atmosphere, and the surface is warmer because the atmosphere slows down the heat loss from the surface and the colder atmosphere cannot heat the hotter surface. That was the main point that I wanted to get onto the Wiki page.

Wiki administrator Dave Souza who may well be Connolley since Souza cannot possibly be the ten year retired local authority architect he claims to be with the energy of a fifteen year year old to prevent changes, said I had an odd unsupported opinion that the atmosphere heats the surface and was always intrumental in getting me sanctioned.

After I was banned my wife informed the editors that Dr Kushnir fully supported what I had said and even after this editor Dave Souza kept up the obfuscation that Kushnirs telephone comments were not valid for Wiki. Souza referred to my wife as das Weib when he reported her. Obviously he knew the abusive content of that expression when used to describe another mans wife. My wife was banned.

Connolley appears to be the chief abuser of anybody who attempts to make unapproved changes, but he has other names he can use to ensure no disputing editor can make changes.

Connolley did a write up of his behaviour with me on his blog where he kept up the insulting behaviour in the comments continually saying i did not know what i was talking about.

Fairly well known climate scientist James Annan called me a loon, and on his blog when i asked for an explanation he deleted the comment and said 'do go away silly troll'. He followed up with more comments on Connolleys blog that if he told me what he did on the internet he would have to kill me. Connolley thought this was all a big joke.

http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2012/03/how_not_to_edit_wikipedia.php

These people behave like children but evidently they have some power to alter our reality.

Other editors have tried to make similar changes and been banned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:William_M._Connolley&diff=next&oldid=337450239

The whole experience was very odd and it was only later that i found out this had all happened before and Connolley was a well known activist.

Please feel free to use this information as you wish

Regards

Andrew Judd

[Dave Burton]

Unfortunately, Mr. Connolley is still up to his old tricks, relentlessly enforcing his extreme bias in climate-related articles, as you will immediately notice if you view his edits.

Here's a tiny example, where he inserted Scare Quotes around the word "skeptics," and deleted the word "leading," to reflect his Point Of View that climate skepticism is illegitimate, in minor but blatant & customary defiance of official Wikipedia policy.

That just happens to be the first example I noticed when I glanced at his edits a few weeks ago. Today I looked again, and there are plenty of additional examples. A few days ago he deleted ("reverted") a reliably sourced newspaper reference, when someone attempted to add a bit of balance to the GWPF article, and about a week ago he deleted someone's attempt to add to the "Global warming controversy" article a reference to organisations which have non-committal positions on climate change.

Worse yet, he also deleted the entire contents of a >5 year old article entitled, "Greenhouse and icehouse Earth." On the associated Talk page, he wrote, "lets[sic] see who squeals". (How's that for "consensus building?")

Wikipedia czar Jimbo Wales presumably still loves Connolley. He's not currently an official "administrator," but he has administrator-like rights called "autopatrol," "review," and "rollback."