Talk:Xiongnu

Factual accuracy of genetics section

User AsadalEditor has added a factual accuracy disclaimer to the genetics section, which is apparently in regards to the Gurianov et. al paper I left as a reference, which hypothesizes that the Q1b-haplotyped remains found in the high-status tombs of Heigouliang are of Yuezhi origin. However, AsadslEditor is unable to present any studies which critique this paper, which I did not present as a definitive proof that the Q1b came from the Yuezhi, but clearly as a hypothesis. I have searched extensively for alternate hypotheses on the Q1b presence at Heigouliang, and have found nothing. I have also searched extensively for other papers documenting Q1b among Xiongnu burials, and have come up with nothing. Heigouliang is the only Xiongnu tomb so far to yield Q1b members, and the original research had indeed indicated that there was genetic and social-status dissimilarity between them and the Q1a remains. Extensive examination of every paper on Q1b's spread out of central Asia in the late 2nd century identifies a consensus of its association with Indo-European migrations.

I see no legitimate reason for a factual accuracy disclaimer to be be plastered on to the Genetics section and I view this as AsadalEditor's passive-aggressive attempt to "get the last say" after it was revealed he had no actual papers of his own to dispute this specific hypothesis by Gurianov, which is based not just on genetic but historical and anthropological evidence.Hunan201p (talk) 01:12, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

I do. That a so-called journal received the Gurianov paper and accepted it within three days tells me they don't have a serious review process - a real journal will have a managing editor who has to receive it and add it to their data flow, select an editor to supervise its review and send it to that editor, who will then read over the paper to ensure that it meets the minimum standards of the journal, and then select reviewers, send it to them, they will have to read it and write a formal review that they will then send back to the editor, who will then have to read all of the reviews and reach her own conclusion and write a formal decision letter, then send it back to the managing editor to process the decision, which isn't all going to happen between Wednesday and Saturday, particularly given that neither the editor nor the reviewers are sitting at their computers just waiting for the next submission to arrive, plus the vast majority of papers sent to serious journals are not accepted outright, but require some level of revision by the submitting author before full acceptance. The suggestion that a three day period can encompass serious review is a laugh, and the suggestion that this is a reliable source is thus dubious. The whole article structure, with an addendum thrown on the end that has little at all to do with the body of the article, and even appears to have a completely different author, drawing conclusions that none of the main authors have the expertise to be able to draw, raises all kinds of red flags, as do some formatting and citation issues that should not have escaped a proper review process. This is not a serious 'journal', and its content should not be accepted as representative of an established scholarly consensus of the type that is supposed to underpin scientific articles on Wikipedia, so yes, as long as that material is included, it merits an accuracy tag - this material should be removed. Agricolae (talk) 05:50, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

It's usually hard to find studies critiquing a paper that no one in the field takes seriously... Agree with Agricolae.--Ermenrich (talk) 13:23, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

We don't get to decide what a real journal is based on peer review process duration. What you refer to as a "real journal" is more accurately described as an inefficient journal. The peer-review process should only take a few days:

https://phys.org/news/2017-03-inefficient-scientific-peer-months-average.html

Smits: "This poses a dilemma for science. The publication process based on peer review is vital for the quality of science, but in its present form it is largely based on good will. Consequently, a process that is effectively just a few days' work often takes several months or more in practice."

Infact, the RJGG has a publishing frequency that does indeed permit a 3 day peer review. The process you describe is more typical of journals with a lot of incoming traffic. Talk about "data flow": http://oaji.net/journal-detail.html?number=1865 The onus is on Ermenrich to prove no one in the field takes the paper seriously.Hunan201p (talk) 17:18, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

Wow, some news website says that science journals could publish things in a day. Guess it must be true then! Your assertion is laughable: no respected journal could perform a peer-review in three days.

And actually we do get to decide whether a journal is real or not, by using Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard, where I have just asked for input.--Ermenrich (talk) 18:35, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

Anyone can put the word 'Journal' in the title of their online publication, but this word does not have a special power to imbue what appears below it with inherent reliability. What does this is the process of expert review the content undergoes. The actual work involved does indeed take just a few days, nobody is sitting at their computer avidly awaiting the next paper to review - and this is a feature, not a bug. A reviewer who is worth having as a reviewer is busy pursuing the activities that give them their qualifying expertise, and reviewing a paper for the Russian Journal of Genetic Genealogy should not be on the top of their priority list. There is a big difference between a stringent scholarly review and the type of superficial review you are bound to get in a three-day process, and this makes a big difference with regard to reliability. There are several of these genetic genealogy pseudo-journals, run by amateurs or as pet projects of single scholars, and catering to both amateurs and scholars that want to bulk up their resume with impressive-looking entries without having to undergo the ordinary stringency of actual scholarly journals. In general, these so-called journals are ignored by the at-large scholarly community.

This paper clearly did not undergo a stringent review process, as is evident not only from the rapid turnaround time but from the flawed structure of the paper, with this randomly affixed addendum from a different author (at least that appears to be the case) written for some other venue (at least that appears to be the case) stuck at the end of an article that is only extremely remotely related, written by authors with no basis for expertise in archaeology that the claims made would seem to require.

Setting aside the flawed demand that someone prove a negative, it is not a legitimate or reasonable standard that anything that appears online (even on the site of a so-called journal) is presumed an accurate representation of scholarly consensus unless or until an actual expert wastes her time refuting it. Papers are shown to be taken seriously by their citation and the repetition of their results by other scientists, not by dead silence. This should be deleted. Full stop. Agricolae (talk) 18:43, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

As the noticeboard is being very slow: there is a clear consensus against this article being included and I'm removing it, unless the reliable source noticeboard tells us its reliable.--Ermenrich (talk) 22:30, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

I have reverted the previous edit and removed the dispute tag. No consensus was offered at the Noticeboard nor was there any input other than Ermenrich and Agricolae's echo chamber, in which they said nothing of merit. The reference comes from a paper authored by a respected geneticist (Vladimir Gurianov) with international fellowship, whose research (including the paper at hand) has been cited at least twice in BMC Evolutionary Biology. This paper is considered the definitive phylogeny of Y-DNA hg Q. More to the point, the reference is clearly presented as a hypothesis and not a discovery. Bias is the primary motivation for the obstruction by Ermenrich and Agricolae. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5333174/ (citation 47)

https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-018-0622-4 https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vladimir_M_GurianovHunan201p (talk) 17:05, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

There is clear consensus here from several editors against the inclusion of this paper. You are editing against consensus by including it, and your assertions about reliability of a paper accepted three days after submission are absolutely absurd. I have no idea why no one has posted anything at the reliable sources board - apparently Xiongnu genetics doesn't attract as much attention as whether or not Fox News is a reliable source - but it's absolutely obvious that this journal is a sham.

Furthermore, if you're going to include this sham paper, the reliability tag is absolutely going to remain there.

Lastly: what is the point of those three links? It doesn't matter if he has a job or published papers elsewhere or has "international fellowship". If the paper isn't peer-reviewed by a respected journal, it isn't a reliable source, end of story. I have no idea what "bias" my insisting on this WP:SCIRS guideline is supposed to represent.--Ermenrich (talk) 21:49, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

Every time I have taken something to RSN, the response has been similar - silence, to the degree that telling someone 'if you want to challenge a source, go get a consensus at RSN' pretty much equates with 'go pound sand and leave my content alone'. Agricolae (talk) 23:07, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

There is no justification for calling editors who have never interacted with each other 'clanish' simply because they both happen to disagree with you, nor is it an 'echo chamber' when two people express similar opinions. Ermenrich merits no credit whatsoever for helping me form my conclusions, and had Ermenrich concluded differently, I would have disagreed with Ermenrich just as much as I am disagreeing with Hunan. My position in not based on bias, but an understanding from decades of experience of what makes a scientific paper (and its journal) more reliable and what makes it less reliable. Neither appeals to authority ('he is a famous scientist' - Kery Mullis had a Nobel Prize when he made some lamentable ill-considered statements about HIV) or self-citation improve a paper's standing. It is valueless to claim that the Gurianov paper is reliable because another Gurianov paper cites it, particularly when it is cited solely to support the statement, "Our study was initiated by a citizen researcher", not for any of the scientific findings of the paper. As to the other citation, there is no follow-through effect such that citing one paper makes the conclusions of another paper reliable.

Only one person wants material retained, and more than one want it removed. That may not be a strong consensus for removal, but it certainly can't be rationally viewed as favoring retention. Agricolae (talk) 23:07, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

Per above, the Gurianov reference needs to be removed and to stay removed. Additionally, the entire genetics section is, at best, so ill-written as to be useless to the typical encyclopaedic reader. How many of our readers know what Q-MEH2 (Q1a) or Q-M378 (Q1b) are? Let alone what they mean - what might these findings mean for our understanding of the Xiongnu? The sources are happy to speculate but do not provide good evidence for these speculations. Until these questions can be answered from good sources - based on more than a trivial number of genomes - we should not make more than a passing remark on these preliminary findings. Richard Keatinge (talk) 21:09, 20 April 2019 (UTC)

I also agree that the section about "Genetics" should be rewritten with accurate references, I hope I have time to look into this.--AsadalEditor (talk) 17:45, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

As the degree of consensus seems to be a matter of dispute, I add my *vote - while thusfar I have been most critical of the Gurianov result's inclusion, I agree that the whole genetics section needs rewritten with less jargon and less attention paid to speculation. Agricolae (talk) 21:08, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

I believe the whole genetics section currently violates WP:SCIRS anyway, as "However, primary sources describing genetic or genomic research into human ancestry, ancient populations, ethnicity, race, and the like, should not be used to generate content about those subjects, which are controversial. High quality secondary sources as described above should be used instead."--Ermenrich (talk) 13:28, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

Indeed, I don't think that was there the last time I looked through SCIRS, which admittedly was many moons ago. That couldn't be more clear. Agricolae (talk) 17:04, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

By policy, I think the section should just be removed unless someone can find sources satisfying WP:SCIRS.--Ermenrich (talk) 23:28, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

Thanks to Ermenrich for doing that. Long overdue. Richard Keatinge (talk) 06:44, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

Xiongnu is Turkic

Why admins deleted Harvard source about Xiongnu? Is Harvard bad source? PapazaTaklaAttıranİmam (talk) 07:38, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Because of WP:WEIGHT & WP:POV. You didn't read the 3rd paragraph of lead section and Xiongnu#Ethnolinguistic origins, do you? You better become familiar with WP rules and guidelines. --Wario-Man (talk) 12:33, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Damgaard 2018

I recently removed sentences from this article which included the following statement: "The authors of the study suggested that the Huns emerged through a westward expansion of the Xiongnu which led the disappearance of the Sakas and Scythians and an increase of East Asian paternal ancestry in Central Asia."

In fact Damgaard. et al. say nothing about "East Asian paternal ancestry". What they refer to is an increase in autosomal ancestry in Central Saka which was, according to their calculations, male-mediated. There's a huge difference between "East Asian paternal ancestry" (such as haplogroups) and autosomal ancestry. - Hunan201p (talk) 03:51, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

I have gone farther. These are all primary sources, and as discussed above, the Wikipedia policy WP:SCIRS says "However, primary sources describing genetic or genomic research into human ancestry, ancient populations, ethnicity, race, and the like, should not be used to generate content about those subjects, which are controversial. High quality secondary sources as described above should be used instead." Separately, if we are going to summarize genetics for a peoples we should present a synthesis of the current understanding, not a timeline of individual papers that address the subject, each in its own paragraph beginning with the same formulaic "A genetic study published in the {journal name} in {date year}. . . ." Such a presentation makes it about papers, not about knowledge. Agricolae (talk) 04:31, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

WP:SCIRS is an essay, not a policy. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 05:59, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

The statements in WP:SCIRS were endorsed by an RfC supermajority, so they are consensus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard&oldid=862831707#RfC:Genetics_references - Hunan201p (talk) 12:13, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

That doesn't change the status of an essay to policy, let alone a guideline. A few editors don't get to make that decision. You'll have to go thru the appropriate process.

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