Bishop Hill Wicked Wikipedia
May 21, 2012 Climate: Sceptics Climate: other Media Alex Harvey takes a look at the 2010 banning of several Wikipedia editors and events since that time - William Connolley has apparently been unbanned, while a more sceptical editor, Cla68, has had his ban extended.
In the case of William Connolley, the [Arbitration] Committee is shown to be extremely lenient, compared to treatment of skeptical editors. William's ban was recently repealed despite obvious signs that nothing much had changed. In the case of Cla68, however, who was perceived to be a climate change skeptic, it is shown that he was banned on the basis of entirely fraudulent claims, and has just now had his ban extended by another six months on the basis of a single frank, out of context remark made in an internet forum.
This double standard - even in Wikipedia - has rarely been so stark. In my view, it challenges the image of Wikipedia as a neutral, dispassionate broker of facts. We see that Wikipedia is, in fact, run by activists who drive away the neutral, objective people who would otherwise contribute.
That should set the cat among the pigeons.
Reader Comments (63)
Sensational! Alex Harvey: "Banned"....
Brent
LOL! Why didn't I think of that!
'it challenges the image of Wikipedia as a neutral, dispassionate broker of facts'
Actual its never been that , although Connolley may be extreme for the number of enters his 'fixed' its not usual . There are a number of subjects were the wiki is the only one allowed if you what information to be seen , And reality has nothing to do with it.
Sensational! Alex Harvey: "Banned"....
May 21, 2012 at 9:06 PM | Unregistered CommenterBrent Hargreaves
He's been framed :)
Brent H - brilliant!
Made Oi larf, anyway!
'Brent
LOL! Why didn't I think of that!
May 21, 2012 at 9:10 PM | Bishop Hill'
If Cameron ever reads here, there may arise some misunderstanding!
p.s. Had to Google Alex Harvey to understand, myself.
For those who have read the Hockey Stick Illusion, the "Hockey stick controversy" entry is an illuminating piece on this bias. Read the whole thing, or try searching in vain for the words "Tiljander", "Yamal" or "Gaspe".
There are two references - Mann 2012 and Pearce 2010.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy
Under "See Also"
So "politically correct" language seems not to apply to Wikipedia in this area either. That is (from Wikipedia's relevant entry)
"it challenges the image of Wikipedia as a neutral, dispassionate broker of facts".
Now, I have to wipe the coffee off of my monitor!!!
Linking the 2 Peter Gleick stories (cleared and uncleared) with wiki we get:
from here
contex - away from greeny eco thingies, WIKI can be quite reliable...speaking as someone who has contributed to a few historical entries, with real references suppiied. Connolley is just a bad apple
Wikipedia is a truly mixed bag, thanks to the efforts of William Connelly and others who of a like mind; most teachers have deemed it wise to insist that students do not use or quote Wikipedia as a source for any enquiry. While searches on the Internet are dazzlingly fast, the practice of using reputable resource books with a properly attributed and annotated bibliography is slower and requires more effort but remains the 'gold standard' of student practice.
I wrote several of Wikipedia's first articles about scorpions. I was eventually banned for insisting on a line about how there is some evidence that arthropods feel pain, though others disagree. Both arguments were referenced to scientific publications.
I agree they have the occasional decent article but for the most part they're biased and very often factually incorrect or incomplete. I avoid Wikipedia like the plague if at all possible. It frightens me a little the extent to which people depend on it for knowledge nowadays.
@diogenes Even on non-climate topics I have found extreme bias throughout wiki especially regarding politics. Wiki is good because it is broad and you have the references provided. I am very appreciative for all those footnotes as it saves a lot of work finding sources on various topics. They are a pain in my text-to-speech reader though... :)
but guys...surely you ask your students to treat sources dispassionately...so that no source is authoritative unless there are clear grounds
Framed - Oslo, June 1974.
Here's an article from Wikipedia that is entirely trustworthy and full of extremely useful information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA
In the case of Cla68, however, who was perceived to be a climate change skeptic, it is shown that he was banned on the basis of entirely fraudulent claims...
Anyone and everyone making fraudulent claims about climate science (including Connolley), should be banned from editing Wikipedia entries, regardless of their bias. Period.
"contex - away from greeny eco thingies, WIKI can be quite reliable...speaking as someone who has contributed to a few historical entries, with real references suppiied. Connolley is just a bad apple"--diogenes
The trains in Italy were quite reliable when Mussolini was in charge. Everything else sucked, and that applies to Wankerpedia, too. I don't trust them as far as I can toss a bull up a silo.
"And he is not the only professional climate scientist in there either"
Would suggest that "former" climate scientist is more accurate; he says he now makes radios for a living. He was previously in with the RealClimate crowd though so he certainly has a dog in the race.
I tried to post this on Klimazwiebel as two-parter but I am not sure if it's gone through or gone through correctly.
Two months ago the entire content of John Cook's Skeptical Science website's secret forum fell in public domain. The details of SkS's secret deliberations to manufacture a climate consensus was discussed extensively in two hilarious threads on Bishop Hill. See here and here.
What is of interest and relevance to this post is the 'organic' link between SkS climate warriors and Wikipedia.
David, a commenter at Bishop Hill, reported what he discovered towards the end of the second link above, on Mar 30, 2012 at 6:21 AM (Full comment in italics below. I've inserted SkS quotes in quote marks for clarity):
How to get your affiliated site into Wikipedia, a guide from SkS's Dawei:
(original bold not transferred)
"Guys,
After two days of fumbling with Wikipedia code, I have finished a draft of what will be Skeptical Science's entry into the world of Wiki. I've now gotten to a point where I'm ready to let people make suggestions for improvements. The site is not yet in Wikipedia's mainspace, but rather held as a sub-page of my user page, meaning for now only those who have the link are likely going to find it.
I have included as many outside resources as I could find, but a veteran at Wikipedia has already urged me to find more and "better" ones before letting it go live. I haven't been able to find too much else worthwhile on Google but suspect that some of the people who have been here longer will know of things that I couldn't find. Consider finding additional outside sources to be priority #1 for this article.
Since it is a Wikipedia article, feel free to make small changes direclty in the article as you see fit (careful not to use your name if you contribute to SkS regularly), but it may be a good idea to discuss big changes here beforehand. And please remember the article needs read like an unbiased contribution to Wikipedia, and not a plug for the site. Neutrality is extra important when creating an article from scratch, as articles that read like mere advertisements are quickly deleted.
For this reason, it includes some information that is less than flattering. I believe this will help the article's chances of being accepted as a new entry. After it has been firmly established as a valid article, negative passages can be toned down or removed completely without putting the entire article in as much danger of being removed. So for the moment, I encourage the loyal contributors to SkS to put on their denier hats and not be hesitant to include sources that are critical of SkS, even if you believe the criticism is factually inaccurate.
So, at this point I'll stop my pompous lecturing and see what you guys think. I'll be interested to hear all suggestions for changes/additions/deletions."
John Cook:
"To be precise, I *read* Inhofe's speech, not heard it but that's just nitpicking to the nth degree! :-)"
Dawei:
"Hah, alright, I'll make that correction later. I'd do it now but doing so might be seen as evidence that I am collaborating with you, which could be bad."
Noooo, you wouldn't collaborate with the site creator! That could be bad.
If you go to SkS's Wiki entry and look at the edit history you'll see Dawei's name all over it.
Stay tuned, the next one is a doosy!
(The next doosy one on the Bishop Hill thread that David mentions is a collaboration between climate warriors of SkS and a 'Clima-pscyhologist' Prof from University of Western Australia for "a psychological experiment with UWA cognitive scientists testing for the effects of blog comments on readers' comprehension." So that particular mendacity is not relevant to the Wikipedia issue currently at hand.)
I happen to have the full content of the SkS secret deliberations downloaded through a link in Bishop Hill (not sure if the link is still active). When I searched for "Wikipedia" I also came across this in a thread entitled "Wikipedia Wars". John Cook reports a mail he received from a climate scientist:
"Got this from a climate scientist on a group I'm on:
folks--just a heads up. for those of you looking for ways to help out in the online climate disinformation war, one thing to consider is getting involved in wikipedia. right now deniers seem to outnumber reasonable people in the wikipedia editing wars of climate change-themed wikipedia pages. many disputes are handled by a vote of active wikipedia participants, and the deniers have been winning many of these.
this is most evident in anything related to 'climategate', the "hockey stick', and the personal webpages of prominent players (both legitimate scientists and deniers/disinformers).
you might want to take a look yourself and see what I'm talking about. the discussions are *way* out of balance. Wikipedia is perhaps the most widely used resource on the web for getting basic, background information on a topic, and the deniers understand that. that is why they have put quite a bit of effort into distorting climate-change related content on the site, and to maintaining that distorted content in the face of efforts by reasonable people to restore some accuracy and balance.
the good news here is that it doesn't take a whole lot of people to make a difference. if you look at the "talk" pages, you'll see some familiar names, e.g. John Mashey (thanks to John for all of his efforts here!). But John alone can't do very much here. There needs to be a small army of do-gooders helping out.
so to any of you who think you might be willing to help out, I (and I think I speak for many of my climate scientist colleagues) would be very much obliged"
There is more than enough evidence here to prove that an organised campaign is afoot by catastrophist climate scientists and their acolytes to control and distort the information on Wikipedia pages towards an alarmist direction.
Speaking of David... :)
Hi sHx. The second half of your post described stuff I wasn't aware of. So it doesn't say which climate scientist it came from? (sent to JC)
Hey they deleted the whole update history for Skeptical Science!
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Skeptical_Science&action=history
It used to be long and the same very user who suggested the shenanigans (at Sks) was identified in most edits.
Hey David. The climate scientist who asked for John Cook's help in 'Wikipedia Wars' is not named unfortunately. Maybe we should ask Cook who it was. :-)
Scratch my comment above, now the history is back.
I can see the history page, David. Not through your link though.
I looked into the Wiki stuff too when the skepticalscience forum leaked out. The whole thing is in fatal violation of multiple Wikipedia regulations. A classic conspiracy if there was ever. ( " ... after it has been firmly established as a valid article, negative passages can be toned down or removed completely without putting the entire article in as much danger ... " )
"Hah, alright, I'll make that correction later. I'd do it now but doing so might be seen as evidence that I am collaborating with you, which could be bad."
Yes a big "haaaah" alright, we wouldn't want anyone to know about this kind of secretive collaboration which would be such an embarrassment if known. What would people think of our "integrity" then?? [I know a lot of people say as some reflex "I don't believe in conspiracy theories" but sometimes there really are conspiracies, often small and squalid and inept as this one was, but still meeting the definition of "conspiracy"]
Shub, lol, we cross-posted on the "conspiracy" aspect..... of course many/most conspiracy allegations may be unfounded, especially the more elaborate kinds, but that does not mean that real people do not engage in conspiratorial behaviors all the time, from a variety of motivations.
Now I know, I was looking at History of the Talk page, not the article. Doh!
yeah, looks like a handful of us posted at the same time!
Check this out (emphasis mine):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest_editing_on_Wikipedia
In the skepsci case, we have direct evidence - no need of wikiscanner or anything.
One can even understand the conundrum a bit. After all, one of 'them' albeit a commenter/contributor to the website is putting together the article and that puts them in a spot. But 'dawei' and Cook are so transparent about the whole affair that there is virtually no room for any sympathy. The effort to put in negative stuff into the article is pre-meditated solely to pass quality filters and not set off any alarms, and their subsequent extirpation is planned out as well.
May 21, 2012 at 9:06 PM | Brent Hargreaves
Brilliant Sir. Top class.
sHx: "just a heads up" is used a lot by Michael Mann in his FOIA- e-mails.
Can I download these SkS-chats somewhere?
Vieras
I searched for the phrase "just a heads up" in the treehut docs and found seven instances in six separate threads. None could be attributed to Mann.
However, at least one of those is definitely from a scientist, according to John Cook:
John Cook is an Australian, so he gets to sleep mostly with Australian climate scientists. I have not yet come across any communication from Micheal Mann to SkS or any evidence of Mann's involvement with the trehutters. Perhaps he is there too. The treehut docs is a huge dossier.
They do love the Mann though, and they re-enacted '300' (with Cook as King Leonidas sans rippling abs) during a successful astro-turfing operation to promote Mann's book in Amazon.
The old link to SkS files is dead.
Long live the new link!
http://www.crocko.com/B22ABA8582304F48A9C6FEA2DD7B97B0/sks(1).zip
Grubby, dirty little affair isn't it.
Mailman
I just assume Wiki is a toilet wall where anyone can just walk in and write on it, if you start from here you can't go wrong.
sHx,
Your search engine may need some oil:
An interesting view of how strict William Connolly enforces censorship at Wikipedia is given in the link below.
Andrew Judd, a more thoughtful exponent of IPCC science, tried to get the climate zealots to at least stick to conventional thermodynamics in their presentations.
However his entirely correct thermodynamics fell outside the world view of Connolly and so he was banned from contributing to Wikipedia .
Here Andrew Judd, is patiently explaining the difference between radiation,energy,heat and work.
In the course of the tread Andrew refers to the Connolly censorship.
Andrew is in fact stating the “bleedin obvious” as any graduate from a Physics thermodynamics 101 course will affirm.
However Eli and co are just as confused at the end of the tread as at the beginning.
Eli is dedicated to some ’cause’ which certainly has nothing to do with science.
http://rabett.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/mice-sinking-ship-etc.html
Also at the start of the thread Eli prints
..................................................................
Floating across the Etransom comes this comment from S. Fred
You may recall that i resigned from the Editorial Board after Env Geol published the paper
All i can say is: Kramm-Gerlich-Tscheutschner is worse
....................................................................
This gives the impression that Fred Singer said
"All i can say is: Kramm-Gerlich-Tscheutschner is worse"
Whereas in reality it should read
Floating across the Etransom comes this comment from S. Fred
"You may recall that i resigned from the Editorial Board after Env Geol published the paper"
Eli Rabett (aka Josh Halpern) then adds his own comment
All i can say is: Kramm-Gerlich-Tscheutschner is worse.
....................................................................
This attempt to give a false impression is because Kramm-Gerlich-Tscheutschner made poor Eli (Halpern) look like a fool.
Patagon,
I was referring to a search of the phrase "just a heads up" in Skeptical Science's secret files on my computer not in Climategate emails on the web. The idea was to see whether Micheal Mann would pop up with that phrase. I could directly search for Mann, of course, but I reckon there will be dozens of threads with his name in it which I am not inclined to go through.
Sorry for straying off the wikitopic again.
The 'new' link I gave above for the treehut docs is stillborn unfortunately. I opened up an account -for the first time!- to one of those file-sharing websites, Crocko, and uploaded the sks.zip (18.5 MB) three times now. Each time it confirms upload and gives an URL but neither the link works nor my uploads appear in the online folders. Can't figure out why.
Apologies to Vieras above who asked for a working link.
sHx, John Cook does speak directly with Mann. Sorry don't have the evidence right now but it's in there in the treehut logs somewhere.
"the image of Wikipedia as a neutral, dispassionate broker of facts"
When was that, then?
It's a shame, but Stoat and his chums have effectively destroyed WP's credibility in factual areas (one can expect some bias in politics and biogs) in much the same way that 'climate science' has undermined the other sort.
sHx,
Sorry, I didn't get it right. Anyway, if they have put some much effort in controlling the academic journals, it is no surprise that they try to control more popular sources of information. All churches are very keen on censorship.
I put Mann in the search box of the tree-huts documents and as expected there were hundreds of threads with his name. Mann is a god among them.
I looked at the list and clicked on the first one that aroused my curiosity with its title: "Mike Mann's hockey stick book on Amazon next Tuesday Jan 31 - reviews on the ready!"
It is a single-message-thread. There are many like this in the treehut log book. Let's see what this one says:
John Cook
The fish jump at you.
"To all SkSers who I emailed a copy of the book, can I suggest you read the book and have your book review ready in the holster by early/mid February ready to go at a moment's notice...."
-from John Cook to his treehut members, about Michael Mann's book
"review ready in the holster". ... Everything is staged.
"read the book and have your book review ready"
I wonder how many did both..?
sHx quoted:
Just got this from Mike Mann:
it now sounds as if Amazon.com could go live w/ kindle version as soon as Jan 31st, so Amazon reviewers should be lined up and ready to go then if at all possible. WIll provide any further updates when I have more info. My publisher is urging reviewer-writers not to write blog reviews then (they have a later rollout schedule in mind for blog reviews), but it is ok to submit Amazon reviews then---and as we know, it will be important to do this quickly once Amazon opens their reviews to offset efforts of deniers. Again, its looking like this will be *Jan 31st* and we should operate under that assumption!
So everyone who I sent that copy to, be sure to have your reviews ready - deniers will be trolling this book for sure on Amazon.
------------------------------------------------------------------
And yet he claims to be the victim of well funded, well orchestrated campaigns? Can anyone produce evidence of such orchestrated campaigns, including 'have your reviews ready' for the Bish or Donna Laframboise's books?
My gast is flabbered.
A year or two back I found on my screen a message from Jimmy Wales with the appearance of being a personal message to me signed by him, asking for funds.
I wrote back saying how I thought that the harm done by Wikipaedia with its CAGW bias outweighed the good it did in other areas, so I would not be donating and asking for my message to be forwarded to Jimmy Wales.
I got a message back saying:
- Jimmy Wales is not involved in day-to-day management so my letter would not be forwarded to him.
-If there had been any problem with climate related subjects, this had now been sorted out; Also Connolly's privilege had been curtailed.