Wikipedia:Mediation Cabal/Cases/2008-06-01 Lynn Conway

Wikipedia Mediation Cabal
Article	Lynn Conway
Status	Open
Request date	16:32, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
Requesting party	Unknown
Parties involved	Dicklyon Andrea Parton BarbaraSue
Mediator(s)	BrownHornet21 (talk · contribs)

[[Category:Wikipedia Medcab active cases|Lynn Conway]][[Category:Wikipedia medcab maintenance|Lynn Conway]]

Request details

MarionTheLibrarian added to the Lynn Conway page information about Lynn Conway's participation in a controverisal issue. The sources included information published in peer-reviewed journal, the Archives of Sexual Behavior. Dicklyon believes that Archives ought not be considered a useable source, which produced an edit war; Dicklyon believes that the Archives is not neutral and therefore, not useable. The Conway page was protected by Dreadstar. On the talk page, Marion came to what Marion believed was a compromise solution. When the protection expired, Marion edited the page as per the apparent agreement.

Dick changed the content of the text that was suggested and discussed, reverting edits made by the three other editors who were entering information on the Conway page. Marion appealed to Dreadstar, who re-protected the page and recommended mediation processes.

BarbaraSue, a new editor, joined with Marion in similar edits here and at other biographies and related pages.

Who are the involved parties?

• Dicklyon (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)
• MarionTheLibrarian (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)
• Andrea Parton (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)
• BarbaraSue (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

What's going on?

The central issue is whether the Archives of Sexual Behavior, and in particular Dreger's article in it, can be treated as appropriate and/or "neutral" in the way it is presented and cited.

What would you like to change about that?

That an outside opinion be provided and that the Conway page be edited accordingly.

Mediator notes

Hi, I am the BrownHornet and I have taken this case. Let's keep the discussion on this mediation page. I have a few ground rules:

• Refrain from engaging in personal attacks;
• Always assume everyone is acting in good faith;
• No personal attacks are allowed;
• Keep an open mind and a willingness to compromise to a reasonable solution;
• Comments by any and all are welcome;
• Did I mention that no personal attacks are allowed?;
• Don't make assumptions about the person(s) on the other side of the coin, such as "I like your proposal, but the other side will reject it"; too often this starts going down the path to the Dark Side; and you may be surprised by what is an acceptable solution to the other side; and
• I reserve the right to strike out personal attacks and any other general nastiness. BrownHornet21 (talk) 00:24, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Discussion

It's a pleasure to meet you, and your ground rules sound good to me.
—MarionTheLibrarian (talk) 00:31, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

(Gosh, I'm slow! Marion beat me here.) I'd like to invite all the parties above to provide their thoughts and comments.BrownHornet21 (talk) 00:41, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

• • Before I saw this mediation, I made a comment of the quality of Archives of Sexual Behavior. Its on the article talk page. DGG (talk) 02:22, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Well, I stumbled upon the big BBL controversy mess via the Lynn Conway article, and tried to temper things there a bit, but gave up. Now I'm just trying to prevent that controversy from spilling over too much onto the Conway bio; I'm into articles on technology and technologists, and care little about all this sexology stuff. It started on May 7, when I removed a weasel-worded allegation from the Conway bio, an item not supported by the cited New York Times article, that had been modified here to turn it into an attack on Conway, when it previously did not appear to be one. After I corrected this I found similar misrepresentations and biases on other pages, and started finding increasingly biased small changes by 99.231.67.224 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log), apparently an IP that then became WriteMakesRight (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) and then MarionTheLibrarian (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log). From the editing behavior, the POV was very clear, so I alerted the editor that having a POV is OK, but that in articles it is important to suppress it a bit and leave articles more balanced and neutral. I have not had any luck getting such a behavior change. Now, to the current issue: in the bio, Marion wants to cite the Dreger history of the controversy as if it is neutral or unbiased. I have no problem with citing it, but if we provide what Conway's attackers are saying, then we need to give at least equal space to what she is saying about them. I really didn't want to see the article expand in that direction, so I recommended a "main link" to the BBL controversy page, where everyone's views are well represented, and editors with strong POV on both sides are fighting it out. For the bio page of a technologist, trying to cover this messy controversy would require undue weight. I'd rather work on fleshing out her technical history, which I do have more info on if I ever get editing time without the article being locked. I got a bit done in the last few days, working around the repeated addition and removal of Dreger's side of the controversy. If it's not clear to anyone that Dreger is fully aligned with one side of the fight, and can not be used as the only source in a summary, I'll address that later. I've suggested that a short summary based on the New York Times article be included, with a link to the BBL controversy page, but Marian and Barbara seem to think that adding Dreger's rather negative take on Conway improves the article. I disagree. Dicklyon (talk) 04:08, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

It might be appropriate to extend this mediation to Andrea James and Deirdre McCloskey as well, as these are two other bios of participants in the BBL controversy that Marion is putting personal attacks into. For example, this diff, which I recently cleaned up after, includes Some scholars have likened James to "the Al Sharpton rather than the ML King sort" of activist and The New York Times reported that Bailey engaged in no wrong-doing, despite James' continuing accusations, both with citations to articles that do not in any way support these statements. In the same edit, we again get the famous Dreger citation, cited as if not biased: A comprehensive, documented history of James' role in the controversy concluded that James participated in generating false allegations against Bailey. In this diff and this, she does similarly on the Deirdre McCloskey bio (and had a bit of slip when doing it to Lynn Conway). The violations of WP:BLP to advance one side of a controversial argument by misrepresenting sources seems like way too much to me. Dicklyon (talk) 06:26, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Dicklyon has not provided one iota of evidence that Dreger is actually biased in the meaningful sense of inaccurate in one direction. If Dreger conducted a good investigation and found that Conway, McCloskey, James et al. conspired to manufacture charges against Bailey, then this is clearly a huge revelation that deserves exposure on all their pages. I think she has conducted such an investigation with such conclusions. The conclusion that Dreger found against Conway et al., by itself, is irrelevant to the accusation of bias. I think that MarionTheLibrarian was being generous by referring to the critical commentaries of Dreger's article. In my opinion, these (including McCloskey's response) are of very low quality. However, it would probably be beyond Wikipedia's mandate to resolve that, so it's a good idea. Referencing the fact that a historian came to the conclusion that Conway et al., manufactured bogus charges (but that others have disputed this) certainly does not entail accepting that this is true. Leaving it out seems like censoring something very important.BarbaraSue (talk) 22:19, 2 June 2008 (UTC)