Talk:Marc Hauser

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Article withdrawn, author under investigation.

Expert on Morality Is on Leave After Research Inquiry

Inquiry on Harvard Lab Threatens Ripple Effect

I mention these news articles about Marc Hauser, with links, on this talk page solely to alert other editors to the need to check for reliable sources for this article. If an article is withdrawn from a published journal, it is no longer a reliable source. I visited talk pages of articles that cite Hauser after doing a Google search restricted to Wikipedia. You can find news articles about the current investigation of Hauser by doing a Google news search. That's all. I make no conclusions about Hauser, but thought that editors who work on articles who cite his writings might want to be aware of this. Reliable sources are always important on Wikipedia. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk) 14:29, 13 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Additional Allegations Section

On the editing page, I've noticed there is an all-out war in the "Additional Allegations" section. There are anonymous (IP-logged) editors repeatedly adding in words like "alleged" and "unconfirmed" and deleting information that is actually available in the quoted sources. Just for reference, the news sources that are being quoted are The NY Times, The Boston Globe, USA Today and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Even if the sources are anonymous and the reports are second-hand, any newspaper of that stature will have done major fact checking for stories like this. By the time a story hits the news stands, the information reported is no longer "alleged." These newspapers will have checked whether the anonymous source they're quoting was actually involved as he/she claims to have been and whether a second-hand source actually has credibility. I think that anonymous editing should be disabled for this page and that edits in this vein should be deleted.Salthizar (talk) 06:48, 23 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm loathe to request semiprotection for this page over what is essentially a content dispute by well-informed editors, even if they're new to Wikipedia and adopt an overly polemical tone in their writing. I do agree with you that repeatedly harping on "alleged" is unseemly - we put it in a section on allegations, which should be sufficient. Repeated use of the word implies prejudice on our part against the allegations. Ray^Talk 03:10, 23 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That sounds completely reasonable.Salthizar (talk) 06:48, 23 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I've done some cleanup, mostly for style - as I stated above, it's not necessary to harp on the unofficial nature of the information in this section; doing so implies prejudice on our part. It is not necessary to state the source of each news article so long as such things are recorded in the citations. I made, I believe, two substantive changes: the first is that as the characterization of Tomasello as a competitor of Hauser's is unsourced and potentially prejudicial, and thus I've struck it. The second is regarding the Chronicle of Higher Education article - there is no qualification there in identifying their source as a former research assistant of Hauser's, and so I've struck such qualifications as "allegedly" from our characterization of him. The ability of the Chronicle to check the identity of their source is not, I feel, subject to question. Ray^Talk 22:40, 23 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not opposed to cleaning up the Unconfirmed allegations section for style, but it seems striking that the only persons who are interviewed in the Hauser case are those who have never worked with him at all and who are potentially in competition with him. As the Harvard Crimson reports, all of his students and former and current collaborators refused to be interviewed, which makes the reporting less than balanced. In contrast to what Salthizar states above, I don't see how journals, even if they are reputable, can check their facts under these conditions, and, in fact, the conclusion of Wade in the NY Times (i.e., that nobody knows what Hauser actually did) seem to stand in striking contrast to the allegations by Tomasello and others, although Wade quotes them himself.

There are also other things that are less than balanced, like the statements by Gallup. There is no report on the methodology he used to assess Hauser's tape except for a claim that he did, and if you are used to working with rhesus monkeys and chimps, you don't necessarily know what to do with the much smaller cotton-top tamarins. So either somebody accepts to look up the original reference of what he actually did, and what his criticisms were, as well as how Hauser responded to them, or a balanced presentation would require to point to the fact that his criticism involved a species that is very different from the species he usually works with. However, I still don't see how the controversy involving two research - Gallup and Hauser - is relevant to the allegations of unspecified misconduct.