Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/John Hagelin/1

John Hagelin

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Result pending

Here is the GA version of the article: [1].

• This article passed a good article review despite a number of clear neutrality issues. These raise concerns that the review was inadequate. The article uses fringe sources to make the reception of his fringe theories look positive in this section, and subtly misrepresents sources like Nature (journal)

This sentence: "Anderson says Hagelin's investigations into how the extension of grand unified theories of physics to human consciousness could explain the way Transcendental Meditation is said to influence world events "disturbs many researchers" and "infuriates his former collaborators." is a misrepresentation of the source [2]. What the scientists were infuriated by was his lectures "lectures on SU(5) and other unified field theories to both scientific and nonscientific audiences, mixed in with a lengthy discussion of TM." i.e mixing of fringe with real work. The Nature source is cherry picked and used out of context to provide a more positive portrayal in stark comparison to the actual source. The section also includes a fringe rebuttal to a mainstream perspective with an article from a fringe/pseudoscientific journal: Journal of Scientific Exploration. The sentence about the pro-fringe movies is a clear SYNTH: "Hagelin was a featured scientist in the movies, What the Bleep Do We Know!?[74], What the Bleep? Down the Rabbit Hole (2006)[75] and The Secret[76], which renewed interest in the quantum mind paradigm.[77]" is a cobbled together synthesis. The "which renewed interest in the quantum mind paradigm" part is sourced to [3], which does not mention "the secret". It's a remarkably close paragraph of the title, but again takes a seemingly positive statement from a rather negative article (which doesn't mention John hagelin).

The subsection [4] acts as though "Noetic Field Theory", a fringe theory (google it) is academic. The book "Complex solutions to the Einstein, Maxwell, Schrödinger and Dirac equation", by Elizabeth Rauscher, who believes in ghosts, faith healing telepathy and the paranormal and Richard Amoroso of the "Noetic Advanced Studies Institute", which appears to be a rather normal book except for a very weird chapter at the end with tonnes fringe claims about conciousness etc (have a flick through on google books) is treated as an academic source. The same section then uses the fringe publication Neuroquantology, and represents it as academic. The section also has a paragraph simply listing places he was cited; it constructs a paragraph from original research. Again, to give the appearance of scienciness to a fringe theory.

The article also used primary sources to make claims that they aren't reliable for here: [5], including claims about the existing of paranormal effects (an extraordinary claim about a fringe subject sourced to a non-independent source, contrary to WP:EXTRAORDINARY and Wikipedia:Fringe_theories#Independent sources.

The article puts his work as a physicist alongside his fringe work, putting them both under "Scientist and academic" in his professional career.

The article also covers his "Invincible America" uncritically, and uses press releases, tongue-in-cheek and light-hearted articles as RS.

At least one of the editors has a COI: [6], which was not disclosed during the review. In summary, I think the article needs an actually thorough review before being called a good article. IRWolfie- (talk) 21:36, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

• I have notified the GA editors: Keithbob, TimidGuy and Little Olive (olive), and the latest GA reviewer: Tomcat7, formerly GreatOrangePumpkin. IRWolfie- (talk) 21:52, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

Comments

I'll reiterate that this article was written by multiple editors over a long period of time including Olive, Will Beback, Fladrif, Timid Guy, and others. IRWolfie recently brought this article to a NB [7]. I welcome a uninvolved editor review of the article and I am happy to help implement changes to improve the article.(olive (talk) 22:37, 5 April 2013 (UTC))

Add Note: This article itself is not about a fringe topic, its a BLP, that contains content about a topic that is fringe to mainstream science. The subject of the article, John Hagelin, attempted to look at more mainstream physics and a fringe idea together, and the sources discuss this significant, albeit unusual aspect of his career. We cannot insert our own opinion on what he did or use our opinion of what he did as a reason to remove RS content. Please note that this article falls under TM arbitration discretionary sanctions. (olive (talk) 17:41, 8 April 2013 (UTC))

This article is totally unsuitable for Good Article status. It is deceptive and misleading as it attempts to meld the fringe ideas of TM into mainstream physics, thereby giving the former a spurious respectability. I have no objection to articles on fringe science or even GAs on fringe science but this BLP is seriously lacking. In fact, it is so full of fringe advocacy that to even be retained as a standard BLP it should be pruned by 75%. Xxanthippe (talk) 04:54, 8 April 2013 (UTC).

Can you give an example of the article attempting to meld a fringe idea into mainstream science? Thanks. TimidGuy (talk) 09:40, 8 April 2013 (UTC)