Talk:L. Ron Hubbard

LRH

Saying Hubbard is frequently referred to as LRH is hard to support. Outside the Church of Scientology this is hardly the case. This isn't JFK, RFK or LBJ.

The church has an estimated 25,000 active members. What a small group chooses to refer to someone as is hardly worth mentioning. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 161.181.53.35 (talk) 18:17, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

Second that. The LRH-reference should be removed. 116.239.84.91 (talk) 06:47, 22 November 2018 (UTC)

 Not done: please establish a consensus for this alteration before using the {{edit semi-protected}} template.

I don't see a problem that needs to be fixed. This is a manual of style issue, since LRH is a disambiguation which links here. It's plausible that someone trying to make sense of Scientology's cryptic and confusing documents would use Wikipedia to try and decipher this acronym. It's not hard to guess for someone even passingly familiar with the topic, but we shouldn't assume prior familiarity. That's the purpose of an encyclopedia, after all.

This article itself quotes people who use the acronym, and not in a particularly flattering way, so explaining it in the lede is necessary for clarity. It's not an endorsement.

As an encyclopedia, we should take a long view. Scientology is a small (and shrinking) group, but the group is still central to the article. Few people talk about Hubbard at all (how often do A. Bertram Chandler or L. Sprague de Camp come up?) If 25,000 members frequently use an acronym, that's going to be a substantial percentage, and even if they stopped talking about him completely, Scientology documents would still exist. Grayfell (talk) 07:07, 22 November 2018 (UTC)

Missing word in Initial success of Dianetics

Hubbard himself large sums with no explanation of what he was doing with it

Should probably be changed to "Hubbard himself took large sums with no explanation of what he was doing with it" or have the whole sentence changed to be less clunky. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.175.99.91 (talk) 14:43, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

 Done —comrade waddie96 ★ (talk) 10:57, 11 October 2019 (UTC)

Sea Org

"During the late 1960s and early 1970s, he spent much of his time at sea on his personal fleet of ships as "Commodore" of the Sea Organization, an elite, paramilitary group of Scientologists.[8][9] Some ex-members and scholars have described the Sea Org as a totalitarian organization marked by intensive surveillance and a lack of freedom.[10] It came to an end in 1975."

The Sea Org did not come to an end in 1975 and is still ongoing.144.17.113.77 (talk) 16:49, 23 May 2019 (UTC)

 Not done I don't see what needs to be edited. —comrade waddie96 ★ (talk) 10:58, 11 October 2019 (UTC)

CESNUR as a reliable source

I don't believe that CESNUR has ever been found to be a reliable source. Links to CESNUR's site have been allowed, where they have copies of material from reliable sources. AndroidCat (talk) 03:54, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

Sorry, but on what basis is CESNUR considered unreliable? Even the Wikipedia page for CESNUR does not indicate that it is unreliable. It seems that people disagree with its conclusions but no actual evidence for such a claim is backed up. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Iamsnag12 (talk • contribs) 15:04, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

At first glance, CESNUR does seem to appear reliable insofar as it evidently has editorial oversight and the articles seem to be well-cited. That's just based on my cursory reading. At some point I'll have to sit down and actually read a CESNUR publication. Cosmic Sans (talk) 14:17, 26 August 2019 (UTC)

As AndroidCat alluded, Wikipedia namespace archives hold some past discussions about CENSUR's RS issues, which extend beyond the Scientology topic area to the general promotion of fringe. In this specific case, a significant red flag was novel/revisionist scholarship hinging in part upon documents provided to the authors by Church of Scientology. Long established consensus among both scholars and Wikipedia holds that that CoS is not a reliable historical source. Feoffer (talk) 00:58, 27 August 2019 (UTC)

There's definitely bias in anything that the Church of Scientology produces or says, but at the same time, a CESNUR article is not presumptively unreliable just because it references those statements. A reliable source can cover potentially unreliable material as long as it's properly attributed - which CESNUR does. In fact, I'd imagine that it would be near impossible to cover any Scientology concept in-depth without eventually referring back to Scientology.

But let's look at this situation specifically. Iamsnag12 added some references to a CESNUR article that discussed the reveal of Dianetics back in 1950. This material does not, in itself, seem biased. The CESNUR article is a source for two tidbits about the event: one attendee who called the reveal a "fiasco", and Hubbard's agent who disputed that claim. The disputed claim was made before the BBC, which is a reliable source.

It should be noted that neither of those claims came from a Church of Scientology source, as far as I can tell. And the fact that the CESNUR article presents the claim that the Dianetics reveal was a "fiasco" indicates that the CESNUR article is far from a mouthpiece for Scientology propaganda. A pro-Scientology source would never, in a million years, claim the Dianetics reveal was a fiasco. The disputer is Hubbard's agent, which discloses a probable bias, so the CESNUR article doesn't hide the ball on that. Overall, it seems like balanced coverage supported by sources and therefore reliable. Cosmic Sans (talk) 13:30, 27 August 2019 (UTC)

Good morning - as a follow-up, I did a search on our RS noticeboard and found this prior discussion: [[1]]. That discussion noted that CESNUR has been cited by hundreds of scholarly articles as of 2008 and certainly that number has only grown in the past ten years. I would say that's probably one of the best indicia of reliablility. Apparently the owner of CESNUR used to self-publish what some users called "flames" but I don't see any on the site now, so it looks as if that's a practice that has stopped. I think CESNUR falls into the category of "probably reliable as long as the article is well-sourced and itself appears reliable." (P.S. This is Cosmic Sans, post name change.) May His Shadow Fall Upon You ^Talk 14:13, 29 August 2019 (UTC)

The heart is that we cannot trust Church of Scientology or CENSUR scholarship in isolation, as they have a history of self-publishing, aren't peer reviewed, seem to represent minority views, and generally promote fringe. Aside from the general objection, there's also the specific changes [2].[3][4]

"Dianetics lost public credibility in August 1950 when a presentation by Hubbard before an audience of 6,000 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles failed disastrously." is a mainstream historical position, featured in widely lauded sources like Russell Miller, Lawrence Wright, even Hubbard's agent Ackerman. It'd be WP:UNDUE to remove it due to a lone dissenting paper of dubious origin that depends upon suspect sources like CoS-provided transcripts.

"Cox's and Gardner's claims which were made two years after the event" and "Hubbard's agent Forrest J. Ackerman contradicted the walkout claims"; It would be undue/fringe for WP to favor Hubbard's agent Ackerman and his recollections after 45 years over contemporary eyewitnesses and mainstream scholarship. Two positive quotes are included but they do not actually contradict the contemporary eyewitness claims that the event went poorly. Journalist Martin Gardner is relegated to the title of Skeptic. COS transcripts are used to contradict historic witnesses, but CoS transcripts are devoid of trustworthiness. Van Vogt is cited as the true origin of the "Now" explanation for the failure instead of Hubbard, but Van Vogt having offered the explanation does nothing to contradict the claim that Hubbard offered the explanation as well. It is claimed that "news outlets had only published positive remarks in the ensuing months", but to know this is true, we have to be able to trust CENSUR's historical research; Except, we don't trust their scholarship.

Ultimately, at this point our readers can learn nothing from CENSUR that they don't already know without it. Their claims may or may not have historic validity, it's not really for us to say. Until they are picked up by mainstream historians, rather than fringe self-published ones know as NRM revisionists, we cannot say for certain one way or the other. Once CENSUR's minority views are discussed in more mainstream scholarship, perhaps genuinely RSes will cover the issues raised by these new claims and thus merit inclusion. To justify the above edits at this time, however, we'd be forced to rely upon a month-old publication by unreliable authors in a publication of dubious reputation that itself relies upon witnesses and transcripts which are known to be untrustworthy, while at the same time discounting the scholarly consensus of mainstream scholars like Miller and Wright who have undergone extensive review and whose conclusions have widespread acceptance. Feoffer (talk) 02:31, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

@Feoffer: - I don't think it's fair to lump the Church of Scientology and CESNUR into the same category, as you do in your first sentence. CESNUR does not seem to have a pro-Scientology agenda, or at the very least, the relevant article doesn't. No Scientology source would describe the launch of Dianetics as a fiasco, as the CESNUR article did. Anyway, I'm not sure where the general objections to CESNUR come from. Past discussions on the RS noticeboard seem generally favorable to CESNUR. In any event, CESNUR is in fact peer reviewed. [[5]]. Also, covering minority views does not affect the reliability of the source as per WP:RS. This article is not self-published, so that criticism doesn't apply either.

As for your specific objections. I think it's important to separate out Iamsnag12's edits from the reliability of CESNUR. For example, your first diff involves Iamsnag removing a citation and re-wording the previously cited sentence. It has nothing to do with CESNUR and isn't really relevant to whether CESNUR is a reliable source. The same goes for the question of whether it would be undue/fringe to include comments by Hubbard's agent. (The short answer is that no, it's not undue or fringe - WP:UNDUE does not require that minority viewpoints are never discussed, but that they're given appropriate weight and couching. In this case, there's no problem with relating the position of Hubbard's agent as he was an eyewitness and any bias is appropriately disclosed.)

I don't see any particular reason why this source should not be considered reliable. May His Shadow Fall Upon You ^Talk 12:42, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

CENSUR's reputation is far worse than was previously known, with finances tied to the objects of their study. After receiving funding from Aum Shinrikyo (Tokyo Sarin Gas attack group), the co-founder and colleagues publicly claimed the Aum could not have manufactured Sarin gas based upon documents provided to them by Aum, and they falsely accused Japanese authorities of religious persecution of the group. This is a coffin nail in any pretensions to their group being a scholarly RS. Feoffer (talk) 22:22, 5 September 2019 (UTC)

@Feoffer: That doesn't address anything I've said. But even so, your example is irrelevant to their reliability as a published source. Even if I assume that all of the above is true (which I have my doubts about - as I'll explain later), such a statement never published in CESNUR. A co-founder making a remark at a press conference almost 25 years ago does not inform us to whether the CESNUR journal is, itself, reliable. The co-founder is not CESNUR. This is purely a "guilt by association" argument, and it's not even a very good one because it deals with an event many years ago that is poorly substantiated. I've reviewed the segment for this event on the CESNUR article and it seems chiefly supported by a broken link to the Wayback Machine and "ApologeticsIndex.org", which is a self-published website that describes itself as an "online Christian ministry." The irony of using a self-published Christian apologetics website to refute CESNUR (a peer reviewed publication)'s reliability is not lost on me. So I have my doubts about this claim given the absolutely poor sourcing, but even if it were true, it has no bearing on CESNUR as a publication. Other than "this guy associated with CESNUR did something bad a couple decades ago so clearly this article published in 2019 by someone entirely different is unreliable", which makes no sense. May His Shadow Fall Upon You ^Talk 13:30, 6 September 2019 (UTC)

No conclusions were based in any way upon ApologeticsIndex. Feoffer (talk) 08:07, 7 September 2019 (UTC)

This has been my sequence of events:

• First, AndroidCat spoke up to say that CESNUR isn't RS.
• Then, talk archives confirmed that AndroidCat's claim that CESNUR is controversial.
• Upon inspection, I noted the source made novel claims contradicting existing scholarly consensus; I noticed with suspicion that it relied upon documentation provided to them by the objects of their study.
• One admin removed the source as non-RS, another admin provides a sanity check confirming CESNUR is non-RS.
• Finally, I learn CESNUR fell into disrepute for having financial entanglements with the objects of their study and for falsely accusing Japanese law enforcement of religious persecution after relying upon documentation provided to them by the objects of their study, who were, by the way, responsible for the Tokyo subway sarin attack. LA TimesNova Religio
• At that juncture, I conclude AndroidCat, David Gerard are correct. Wikipedia is a tertiary source and we don't do original research, we rely upon trusted secondary sources. CESNUR doesn't have our community's trust. Feoffer (talk) 07:48, 7 September 2019 (UTC)

The problem is that none of this really matters. WP:RS does not say that AndroidCat or David Gerard decide what sources are reliable and which are not. As I described above, a poorly-sourced incident from about 25 years ago involving a CESNUR contributor outside of the CESNUR publication does not bear on whether the publication is reliable in 2019. You previously stated that CESNUR was not peer reviewed, which was incorrect.

You also seem to have the belief that because CENSUR discusses some Scientology materials, that they themselves are biased or unreliable for doing it. That's incorrect. Please see WP:BIAS for the reason why. All the Scientology materials are properly attributed to the point where no reader could be confused as to where that's coming from. May His Shadow Fall Upon You ^Talk 13:42, 7 September 2019 (UTC)

And indeed, Iamsnag12 aka Smoothquandary aka Burningfern has been blocked for sockpuppetry. Feoffer (talk) 01:10, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

I think we should continue to discuss it because I perhaps might like to use the CESNUR source in this article. May His Shadow Fall Upon You ^Talk 13:40, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Consensus here and at RSN is that it's not. Guy (help!) 14:09, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

@JzG: Only Feoffer and I have been discussing it. I don't think there's enough material to determine consensus. I'm also not aware of any consensus on RSN about this. May His Shadow Fall Upon You ^Talk 14:11, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

CESNUR is not a reliable outlet in general, and this specific source doesn't appear to be WP:DUE even if it were reliable. The last thing this article needs is more minutia. Grayfell (talk) 18:33, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Well... why, though? I haven't seen any particularly good reason why, although there has been numerous references to consensus here and elsewhere that nobody can direct me to. May His Shadow Fall Upon You ^Talk 18:59, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

You are free to ask people to walk you through things that have already been explained, but do not mistake a lack of response for a change of opinion.

Multiple editors are skeptical of this specific source. When you say something vague like "...perhaps might like to use the CESNUR source in this article" it suggests you are tying to keep this source in your back pocket for future use. "Perhaps" you might, and perhaps not, but that's not how this works. We're not interested in creating loopholes to be abused later, we're interested in discussing specific, actionable ways to improve this article. So far, you appear to be the only non-blocked editor to be defending this specific source, and you haven't actually explained what you would do with it. It's starting to look like a sticky situation.

Obscure and selective quotes from CESNUR have been crammed into to multiple Scientology articles by multiple sock puppet farms, and this is behaviorally connected to long-term, high profile manipulation of the site for non-neutral purposes. Despite this widespread attention, these articles are often cluttered with this overly-detailed and subjective filler, to a degree which makes them significantly less pleasant to read. I do not think this is an accident. Even if the specific details might be accurate, these obscure, sympathetic comparative religion sources do a very poor job of explaining why this trivia improves the articles. I've noticed this problem for years now, and I'm not the only one. We are not obligated to play stupid to these games. Experienced editors will see the repeated abuse of a source as an additional strike against its reputation. You don't have to agree with this, but you cannot discount it without understanding it.

Consensus starts with editors. I have shared my assessment of this source, and so have several other experienced editors. Grayfell (talk) 22:31, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

@Greyfell: A number of editors, including one who is topic banned and shouldn't be commenting at all (AndroidCat), have made the conclusory statement that CESNUR is not reliable. So believe me, I understand that multiple editors are skeptical of the source. But consensus is not built by saying "CESNUR is not reliable, I won't discuss why, just accept it or else you're causing a sticky situation." I guess I'll start a thread on WP:RSN about it since Feoffer seems to be the only editor here who wants to discuss it, and that interest seems to have completely faded now that snag was banned. May His Shadow Fall Upon You ^Talk 13:36, 13 September 2019 (UTC)

Or, to put it another way, you and some sockpuppets have made the conclusory statement that CESNUR is reliable and won't hear anything to the contrary. Guy (help!) 14:07, 13 September 2019 (UTC)

@JzG: If you scroll up, you'll see that I have advanced some really concrete points as to why there is reliability - peer reviewed, well-sourced, does not seem to have a pro-Scientology or anti-Scientology agenda. My statement was far from conclusory. May His Shadow Fall Upon You ^Talk 14:17, 13 September 2019 (UTC)

Topic ban claim by May His Shadow Fall Upon You

May His Shadow Fall Upon You raised the claim that ~11 year-old topic ban against myself is still in effect. I've followed the secession of ArbCom decisions that the original actions were folded into, and that's far from clear. If May His Shadow Fall Upon You can point to something definitive, I will step away from pointing out occasional problematic issues. Otherwise it seems like a bad-faith attempt to shoot the messenger. (Note: I don't interact with Wikipedia in anything like real time.) AndroidCat (talk) 03:58, 5 October 2019 (UTC)

@AndroidCat: - This is inappropriate for a couple reasons. The first is that this is a talk page for L. Ron Hubbard and not a clearing house for airing grievances against other editors that have nothing to do with a discussion of content. The second is that you are topic-banned from Scientology and should not be commenting on a Scientology-related page. Your topic ban is clearly stated on WP:RESTRICT. If you have a problem with that topic ban, then you should contact ArbCom. May His Shadow Fall Upon You ● 📧 18:51, 5 October 2019 (UTC)

"...a brief stop-over in a couple of Chinese."

Quoted from the Early Life section. There is clearly a word missing here, and looking back at the article history, it seems to be 'ports', though I'm not sure exactly where the change was made. 86.143.228.144 (talk) 20:15, 9 November 2019 (UTC)