User:TenOfAllTrades

I became a Wikipedian in November of 2004. It is nothing short of miraculous what this project has accomplished, but some challenges remain.

Okrent's Law and editorial balance

“	The pursuit of balance can create imbalance because sometimes something is true.	”
—Daniel Okrent, first Public Editor of the New York Times

Apply and interpret WP:NPOV with due care and caution, please.

On helping troubled editors

“	Wikipedia editors are generally generous and helpful people, as one would expect from a volunteer-driven project. The average Wikipedian will bend over backwards to help — until he gets the impression that you're asking him to bend over forwards.	”
—TenOfAllTrades

On shenanigans and nonsense

“	Miss Tangerine was one of the faster-learning Auditors and had already formulated a group of things, events and situations that she categorized as 'bloody stupid'. Things that were 'bloody stupid' could be dismissed....	”
—Thief of Time, Terry Pratchett

On freedom of speech

“	...if you are here to treat Wikipedia like a country in need of a libertarian centered human-rights struggle, you're missing the point.	”
—User:Hiberniantears

On competence

Or, Wikipedia's Eternal September issue with weighing and evaluating medical and scientific sources.

This edit is an excellent example of the problems faced by Wikipedia when it addresses science- and medicine-related topics that happen to be the focus of social or political controversy and advocacy. Well-meaning individuals holding strong but misguided opinions attempt to edit articles, inserting text which endorses or emphasizes their preferred version of reality. Individuals who don't know the limits of their own competence mistake their ability to hold or argue a strong political opinion for an ability to hold an informed scientific opinion. They understand that content added to Wikipedia should be referenced, but they're unqualified to judge the appropriateness of the references that they rely upon.

The edit I've linked shows an anonymous editor who is unaware of – or unable to tell – the difference between a blurb about a scientific study reported in Scientific American and a study conducted by SciAm, managing to mischaracterize the former as the latter. He doesn't really know where the information he's quoting comes from or how information is disseminated within and beyond the scientific community. He just knows that this particular summary happens to agree with his opinion and therefore that it must be included in our article.

This is far from the most egregious example of this problem; it just happened to be the most convenient for me to find today.

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On a related note, I offer this talk page edit. (At least the editor didn't go directly to editing the article, but still....) We have an editor who believes a given footnote (Centers for Disease Control (CDC) (June 1981). "Campylobacter sepsis associated with "nutritional therapy"--California". MMWR Morb. Mortal. Wkly. Rep. 30 (24): 294–5. PMID 6789105) doesn't support the statement it follows; the note refers to an article in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report and includes a convenience link to the article's PubMed/Medline entry. What seems to have happened is that the editor followed the PubMed link, and found that the PubMed index entry only contained the article title. The editor concluded on this basis that the reference didn't contain any valid scientific information, apparently unaware that PubMed is just an index, and that the bulk of the citation (both in our footnote and on the PubMed page) provided information about where the full paper could be found in a genuine scientific publication. This is a basic issue of competence—editors who cannot identify a reference to a paper publication, or distinguish between a PubMed index entry and an actual paper, should not be trying to evaluate the quality of scientific sources. We can, and do, try to at least advise them of where they went wrong, but until these individuals go out and get at least a relevant undergraduate degree they're not going to have the minimum competence necessary to evaluate these sorts of sources.

Truth be told, the above example – while frustrating – isn't the most serious problem. The error that the editor made was sufficiently unsubtle that it could be explained to any Wikipedian with a basic understanding of academic citation practices. More difficult to deal with is the issue of low-quality sources that require some skill to evaluate and weigh, and which may well pass the competent-but-non-specialist Wikipedian's sniff test.

In a similar vein, here we see an editor who has mistaken PubMed for a peer-reviewed journal, using the edit summary "The source is PubMed, an acceptable secondary medical source."

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Today's example (and addition). The anonymous poster offers a quotation linking the preservative thiomersal in teething powders to instances of mercury poisoning of infants in the 1950's, and offers a couple of journal references to support the quote. What's wrong here?

• The quote is lifted out of context. The naive reader might assume that it comes from one of the cited sources, but it actually is drawn from an unqualified blogger's post. (The blog post appears to have been circulated on a number of forums since its original publication.) The origin of the quote isn't acknowledged by the poster.
• The first supporting source is unreliable in any event: a fringe journal not indexed by PubMed.
• Neither source actually supports the statement in question, as they both deal with a different chemical. The teething powders in question contained calomel, which is quite a different animal from thiomersal. (Calomel is inorganic, thiomersal is organometallic. Calomel was administered orally and repeatedly in relatively high doses; thiomersal was administered intramuscularly in trace amounts with immunizations.)
• Neither source mentions autism.
• The poster seeks to emphasize an extraordinary number of Google hits, but it's not clear what query is being used, nor why Google hits ought to be an important measure for the accuracy of a scientific statement.

Did the poster see the sources cited by a blogger or other advocate and simply repeat them without reading them? Did the poster read but not understand the sources? Did the poster start with the quotation (that happened to agree with their preconceived notion of "The Truth") and just look for sources containing relevant-looking keywords? Does the poster not understand the importance of properly attributing quotations, or was the omission of the actual source of the quotation a deliberate attempt to circumvent Wikipedia's reliable sourcing requirements?

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This edit to Talk:Vaccine controversies, advocates for the review (and possible inclusion) of the articles on this list; we are told that the list "shows that not only can many vaccines be considered to be subtly lethal, but also a source for the proliferation of new diseases". A truly remarkable claim. (The editor also copy-pasted the entire list in here, at Talk:Alternative medicine, as evidence that Wikipedia is inherently unreliable because medical consensus is "entirely malicious".)

In reality, the list falls down on a number of levels. It isn't categorized in any obvious way. Letters to the editor are jumbled in with case reports and hypotheses. Animal and human studies are intermixed. Unlike a real peer-reviewed literature review article, it seems that the list hasn't been vetted by any competent or reliable medical expert. While the author doesn't discuss how he selected the articles, I wouldn't be surprised if it had been as simple (and naive) as feeding "vaccine" and negative outcome keywords into PubMed (or some other search engine) and copying out the results.

It is apparent that the author (and the editor here) made no serious effort to review the contents of his list; they obviously failed to read all of the articles cited, and I am left wondering if they read or understood any of them. A very cursory examination finds, for example, the following two entries: Lindley and Milla, and Bedford et al., both appearing in 1998 as letters to the editor of The Lancet. Far from illustrating the 'subtle lethality' of vaccines, these two letters are actually expressing harsh criticism of Andrew Wakefield's critically flawed study purporting to link the MMR vaccine to autism. (Wakefield's study has since been withdrawn by The Lancet, and Wakefield's medical licence was revoked because of the gross breaches of medical and research ethics he engaged in in the course of producing his paper.)

On interactions with anonymous individuals in a public forum

See John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory (primary source).

On public versus private discussion in an online setting

“	The real world affords us many ways of keeping public, private, and secret utterances separate from one another, starting with the fact that groups have until recently largely been limited to meeting in the real world, and things you say in the real world are heard only by the people you are talking to and only while you are talking to them. Online, by contrast, the default mode for many forms of communication is instant, global, and nearly permanent.	”
—Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations p. 89

There are ways to have private online conversations with other individuals or groups (likeminded or otherwise, depending on your tastes). Posting your opinions – of Wikipedia, of its practices and policies, and of its other editors – in online forums and under identities easily linked to your Wikipedia persona is not one of those ways. Posting those opinions and comments on sites which exist explicitly to criticize and comment on Wikipedia (and thereby, perhaps, to influence it) is certainly not private.

In the offline world, if you decide to post insults, 'evaluation', attacks, or criticism of your co-workers in the window of the shop across the street from your office, you shouldn't be surprised if they read what you've written. You also shouldn't be surprised that your coworkers allow your publicly-posted writings about them to color their relationship with you — no matter how superficially (and hypocritically) polite a person you pretend to be to their faces. Making permanent, public, globally-accessible statements about people is very different from bitching about your coworkers privately, over beers, at home.

The meme that obnoxious comments publicly posted in non-Wikipedia venues somehow shouldn't be held against their writers here is nothing more than selfish rationalization for otherwise inexcusable petty, cruel, nasty, cowardly behavior. It's arguing that giving someone the finger isn't rude as long as there's a pane of glass between the two of you. Briefly, it's bollocks.

On the (in)numeracy of the mainstream press

A colleague recently drew my attention to this article, which appeared in the Toronto Star on 5 July 2010. Our article identifies the Star as Canada's highest-circulation daily newspaper. The article, titled "One in three Ontario criminal verdicts overturned", deals with a recent report examining the success rate of appellants at the Ontario Court of Appeals. The centerpiece of the story is the fact(oid) that in appeals of criminal cases, the court apparently granted 35% of appeals in 2009. Right off the top, the title is misleading — the vast majority of verdicts are never appealed, so far fewer than one in three are overturned. (The court heard only 446 appeals; I don't know how many lower court cases took place, but Ontario has a population of more than 13 million: bigger than the U.S. state of Illinois or the entire country of Greece.) Worrying in a more subtle way, however, is the following quotation about a third of the way into the article.

“	"Thirty-five per cent means for every 20 people, seven are successful," said Paul McNicholas, an associate professor at the University of Guelph’s department of mathematics and statistics. "That’s an awful lot...better than one-in-three."	”
—Tracey Tyler (Legal Affairs Reporter), "One in three Ontario criminal verdicts overturned", Toronto Star, 5 July 2010

What does this mean? Is the Toronto Star – one of a major Western nation's premier daily newspapers – so fearful of its own (in)numeracy that they call on a university professor to offer a quote, rather than write a short statement of their own about percentages and fractions? Is it more credible to have a professor of mathematics and statistics perform basic arithmetic? Is this a healthy precedent?

A more subtly insidious point is the editorial commentary implied, where the professor is quoted as saying "That's an awful lot". Is it? It's about a third of appealed cases, true — but does that mean that the trial courts are incompetent, or just that appellants and their lawyers are being sensible about what cases that they bring to appeal in the first place? Should a professor of mathematics' comments be used to offer implicit evaluations of the criminal justice system? Is this statement being (mis-?)presented as an argument from unqualified authority?

As Wikipedia editors, we must be extraordinarily careful to evaluate the use and context of 'expert testimony' as reported by the mainstream media. While newspapers tend to be extremely cautious about accurately reproducing the words spoken by people, they are much more poorly qualified to weigh and evaluate those statements in areas like science and mathematics which require highly-specialized, technical expertise.

Useful Wikilinks

sandbox 1 sandbox 2 sandbox 3 sandbox 4 Shustov cleanup spamhunt Post mortem

Tim Ryan articles

Why shouldn't I give medical advice on the Reference Desk?, an essay

You'll look like a crank if... — editing strategies which will weaken your perceived credibility

Wikipedia:De-adminship proposal checklist

The Policy Reform treadmill...an incomplete essay.

Spam tools

• Special:Linksearch
• Unlinkspammer
• Find all articles created by a user

Betacommand's tools

From the useful summary here.

• tools:~betacommand/user_stats.htm a unique edit counter
• tools:~betacommand/AfD_parser.html a tool to parse AfD's (just a basic breakdown do not use it as a basis for closing AfDs)
• tools:~betacommand/cgi-bin/fix_refs?ip= requires a pagename to be placed in the ip= part but converts articles to the new reference system (named refs are extracted and placed in the ref section. has some known bugs)
• tools:~betacommand/User_compare.htm my poor mans checkuser requires an access key (if you want one please email me) those saved reports are available at tools:~betacommand/UserCompare/ it also runs reports on all open SPI cases ever 6 hours.
• and the two new tools that people have shown great interest in:
• tools:~betacommand/block_prefix.html searches the block log for any username/ip starting with the search term.
• tools:~betacommand/ipblock_prefix.html is the same as above but is limited to active blocks only.
• tools:~betacommand/SIL.html Single IP lookup is a very through lookup on a IP.
• tools:~betacommand/reports/CATCSD.html is a listing of CAT:CSD sorted by tag time, updated every 10 minutes.