Talk:Terri Schiavo case

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The archives of the Terri Schiavo Talk page may be found here (currently 29 archives): Talk:Terri Schiavo/archives

Archive 29

The recent activity has made archiving some material absolutely necessary. Ann, I recall that you wished to comment further on the "Eventually" issue, and I held on for as long as possible, but Talk has grown impossibly long. As I'm loath to disturb the historical sequence of the archives of pages such as this one, I didn't remove that section and place it here. If you wish to comment on that, do feel free to start a section and link, or reproduce the relevant comments under your new section. Best.~ Neuroscientist | T | C → 21:55, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

Initial Medical Crisis

Just wanted to drop a note here to let folks know I've rewritten the above section. In case you've long dreamed that it would always have been left pristine and pure - sorry, ain't happening. Accept, edit, revert, delete - your choice. OK, gotta go.~ Neuroscientist | T | C July 9, 2005 00:59 (UTC)

Diagnosis dispute

Maybe it's just me, but I look through the article and see the improvements in organization, the strengthening of the narrative, and the addition of significant factual data and I feel as if the article has really come a long way. And then I look at the Diagnosis dispute section and it stands out like an ugly wart on the article's face. There are descriptions of at least five different issues, some of it irrelevant, much of it apparently pandering to our elsewhere desribed mythical reader. Does anyone have any thoughts on taking a blue pencil to this thing and ruthlessly paring it down? Duckecho (Talk) 9 July 2005 03:29 (UTC)

that section is where much of the people who didn't examine Terri, but gave their opinion anyway went. I wanted to keep the examining doctors separate from all the riff-raff. it could be broken up into chronological sections, I suppose. FuelWagon 9 July 2005 15:49 (UTC)

The Intro. Part troix.

1. On February 25, 1990, Schiavo (pronounced SHY-voh, IPA: ʃaɪvoʊ) experienced cardiac arrest and collapsed in her home. Despite heroic resuscitative measures, she suffered severe brain damage from the ensuing cerebral hypoxia, briefly lapsed into a coma, and spent the remaining 15 years of her life in a condition diagnosed as an irreversible persistent vegetative state (PVS).
2. Questions of rehabilitation, life-prolonging interventions, and custody were the focus of disputes between her parents (Robert and Mary Schindler) and her husband (Michael Schiavo, her court-appointed legal guardian). Litigation concerning the foregoing and—additionally—guardianship, level of care, potential treatments, state of consciousness, abuse, and determination of her wishes was extensive and on some issues reached the United States Supreme Court.
3. Authorization to remove her gastric feeding tube (which had been inserted to provide Mrs. Schiavo with artificial nutrition and hydration) was granted; the tube was twice removed and, pending appeal, reinserted. Appeals courts ultimately upheld each removal and the feeding tube was removed a third and final time on March 18 2005.
4. Considerable media coverage was given to the judicial and legislative iniatives in the case during the last few weeks of her life and sparked a fierce debate over bioethics, legal guardianship, federalism, and civil rights.
5. Mrs. Schiavo died on March 31, 2005 at around 9:05 a.m. EST. An autopsy report was released on 15 June, 2005.

Paragraph 1 is the best that its likely ever going to be. Personally I'm satisfied with it. Paras 2 & 3 need a lot of work. Please help to make them better. I suggest thinking deeply about precisely what broad, general ideas about this whole case do we want to express in an intro, and edit accordingly. I think it should look very different by the time we are "done." (To the extent a Wiki article is ever "done.") Para 4 might be consolidated in the new 2/ 2&3. Para 5 is good.~ Neuroscientist | T | C

Gulp. I guess I have to remove the mitre of pride here and try and be objective. One of the things I was happy about in the intro rewrite was the visual aspect. Now insofar as facts are concerned, esthetics have little to do with the product, and none at all in the main article. However, the intro is about salesmanship, and if it has a pleasing appearance it is more likely to attract readership and act as the hook (incentive to read further) that it should. I felt paragraphs 1 through 4 were generally visually balanced which was a significant improvement over the old version. The size of 5 seems to be just right for the dramatic denouement. Duckecho (Talk) 9 July 2005 16:47 (UTC)

I agonized over #3 (as I think I mentioned somewhere) because it begins to address specifics as opposed to the general concepts as were addressed in the other paragraphs, and it probably shouldn't be there. I wouldn't mind if it were either removed or significantly reduced (although that affects the visual balance). Combining 2 and 3 plus 4 doesn't strike me as a good idea solely for esthetic reasons and readability. Combining 3 and 4 would be okay for visual balance, but their subjects are totally unrelated. Duckecho (Talk) 9 July 2005 16:47 (UTC)

Getting the feeling I like it as is? Well, yeah, so I'll shut up. Except the em dashes around additionally must go. But I'll let someone else do that (please!). I'm too parochial about this already. Duckecho (Talk) 9 July 2005 16:47 (UTC)

Duck, sorry, I should have explained. It's not that I don't approve of the new intro, quite the opposite. As I said earlier, this is exactly the type of intro I think is best for the article, with broad, overarching themes. However, there is room for it to be refined. I suggested it when I did because in the last 24 hours there's been a real impetus for change, and three editors have managed to improve the article by quite a bit. Now, if you look at it closely, the intro now is the way it is because it evolved from the skeleton of the old one. Para three is talking about the PEG tube removal and proceedings. Para 2 concerns disputes about Schiavo's diagnosis and the dispute over that. Etc etc.

Maybe we could change that. One longish para could talk about the clashes over the peg removal, the surrogate decision making issues/ all other disputes. One short para could talk about the national effect this case had - both on ordinary people and even congress (maybe some interesting stats could come in handy here). Close with #5.

Just a thought.~ Neuroscientist | T | C 23:11, July 9, 2005 (UTC)

PVS, family relationship,

FuelWagon, I saw that you had moved my no dissent sentence to another area of the subject section. I placed it where I did to set the chronological tone that up until at least 1993 PVS was not an issue (in accordance with NS' observations above). By putting it at the head of the section which begins "From 1990 to 1993" it makes it seem that only in perhaps the first year was there no dissent. It should be made clear that there was no argument about PVS from the Schindlers until as late as the 2000 "Terri's wishes" trial ("...the unrebutted evidence remains that Terri Schiavo remains in a persistent vegetative state. " from Greer's order of that trial) when the Schindlers didn't even challenge it there. It wasn't until later that they remembered after ten years that, oh, yeah, we have to dispute this PVS stuff so that we can enjoin the beast from legally executing proxy for the ward. Duckecho (Talk) 9 July 2005 16:47 (UTC)

real life showed up. I was going ot post something to talk. catching up now. I agree with what you are saying, but I think there is a larger picture to paint here. I think the first PVS diagnosis should mention that it was not disputed at the time it was given. And then the article should say that the diagnosis was not disputed until (insert year). The section title of the first time the PVS diagnosis was actually disputed by the Schindlers ought to be changed to indicate as much, and the text for that year should call out the fact that this is the first instance of the Schindlers disputing the diagnosis of the previous (insert number of doctors up to this point that diagnosed Terri as PVS). I don't know what year they did this, so I can't do it myself. basically, I think this ought to be called out as an important part of the entire article, not just one subsection. FuelWagon 05:01, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

The Intro. Part quatre

1. Theresa Marie "Terri" Schiavo (3 December 1963–31 March 2005), was a St. Petersburg, Florida woman whose medical circumstances and attendant legal battles led to landmark court decisions, historical legislative initiatives, and intense media attention.
2. On 25 February 1990, Schiavo (pronounced SHY-voh, IPA: ?a?vo?) suffered severe brain damage from cerebral hypoxia after experiencing cardiac arrest from an undetermined cause. She briefly lapsed into a coma, then evolved into an irreversible persistent vegetative state (PVS) as determined by more than a half dozen neurologists, and so remained the last 15 years of her life.
3. Questions of rehabilitation, end-of-life wishes, and custody were the focus of disputes between her parents and her husband. Litigation concerning the foregoing and additionally: guardianship, level of care, potential treatments, state of consciousness, abuse, and substitute of judgment by proxy was extensive and on some issues reached the United States Supreme Court. During the last few weeks of her life heightened public awareness centered on the judicial and legislative initiatives in the case which sparked a fierce debate over bioethics, legal guardianship, federalism, and civil rights.
4. The most recognizable issue was her feeding tube, which was twice removed and, pending appeal, reinserted. The courts ultimately upheld each removal and the feeding tube was removed a third and final time on 18 March 2005. Mrs. Schiavo died on 31 March, 2005 at around 9:05 a.m. EST. An autopsy report was released on 15 June, 2005.

237 words (down from 260). This was painful, like carving up your own kid. But I think it's better. It also retains some visual balance for us artistes… Back to y'all. Duckecho (Talk) 01:34, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

The intro, paragraph 2 says:

Questions of rehabilitation, life-prolonging interventions, and custody were the focus of disputes between her parents and her husband. Litigation concerning the foregoing and additionally: guardianship, level of care, potential treatments, state of consciousness, abuse, and substituted judgment by proxy was extensive and on some issues reached the United States Supreme Court. During the last few weeks of her life heightened public awareness centered on the judicial and legislative initiatives in the case which sparked a fierce debate over bioethics, legal guardianship, federalism, and civil rights.

May I suggest that the paragraph stick to listing specific litigation questions and not list any subjective headings under "fierce debate". FuelWagon 15:25, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

"May I suggest that..." NO! ... Just kidding ... however, if you mention all those ancellary items, Euthanasia must stay, and if it goes, they must go too.--GordonWattsDotCom 16:01, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Gordon, you seriously need to chill out. FuelWagon 01:54, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

I'm suggesting something more like this:

disputes between her parents and her husband included questions of rehabilitation, life-prolonging interventions, guardianship, level of care, potential treatments, state of consciousness, and abuse. The legal battles were extensive and on some issues reached the United States Supreme Court. During the last few weeks of her life heightened public awareness centered on the judicial and legislative initiatives in the case which sparked a fierce public debate around the topics of dispute.

I'm not attached to the exact wording. My point, though, is that the article should list only the facts of the case, namely the disputes brought before the courts between Michael, the Schindlers, and whoever else brought a case. That it created a public debate is undeniable. What terms would legitimately describe those debates are completely subjective. Some called Michael a murderer, but I won't stand to see the article say this "generated a debate about murder of handicapped patients". The article should only report that it generated a fierce public debate, not call it "euthenasia" or whatever. That's the way I'm thinking right now. FuelWagon 02:02, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

well, not much of a response. I'll just try putting it in the article and see what happens. FuelWagon 13:20, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

It's okay. I thought the version of it I put up yesterday incorporated most if not all of what you suggest. I had edited it based on your earlier suggestion to not get involved listing all the subjects of the debate. I would like to see something about the substituted judgement by proxy in your list, though. That is kind of the biggie. Duckecho (Talk) 13:45, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

The phrase "substituted judgement by proxy" is not contained anywhere in the article. Isn't that the same as a guardian making a decision? If it's added to the list, the phrase ought to be contained somewhere in the article and explained, because laypeople like me don't know what it means. I also dropped the word "custody", because I don't think this was ever legally considered a custody battle. FuelWagon 14:56, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

Yes, that's the guardian making the decision. Actually, I think custody played a large role, although perhaps not in the strictly legal arena. NS laid out an excellent analysis somewhere here (I think in his ahistorical post) as to what the real issues were as they played out, which caused me to rethink the whole case, reanalyze the data, reread court orders, etc., and I've come to the conclusion that we have indeed been looking at this the wrong way. That's why I put in the bit about PVS not being in dispute to some point. I can't even find a reference all the way up until the 2002 evidentiary hearing in which PVS was in dispute. And there it was an issue only because some doctor's affidavit led the 2nd DCA to ask for it in Schiavo III—not because PVS was in dispute but because the affidavit made claims for treatment that would be contraindicated for a PVS patient (oddly, that doctor never testified, which puzzled the 2nd DCA in Schiavo IV). I also believe there's a nexus between Gibbs' arrival and when PVS became an actual dispute, (i.e. the Schindlers suddenly remembered after ten years that they needed to dispute the PVS diagnosis in order to take substituted judgement by proxy off the table) but I don't know what time frame that actually was. The control issue was that they wanted control of their daughter's destiny, either because they wanted a pity trophy or they truly believed she could recover. Or, in the case of the 1993 petition to remove Michael as guardian, they were probably just pissed off over the money, but it was a control issue, nonetheless. The 1994 battle over the DNR was about control. When the 1998 request for discontinuation of feeding came along, they fought it to keep their daughter alive—no mention of dispute of PVS, but the guardianship question (a control issue) was raised in GAL Pearse's appointment. In the 2000 Terri's wishes trial, they fought the wishes determination to keep their daughter alive—no mention of dispute of PVS, although there was a contemporary petition to remove MS as guardian again—control. In denial of PVS is not the same as in dispute of PVS, although the one allows the perpetuation of the other. Duckecho (Talk) 15:58, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

Duck, thanks for going to work over some worthwhile edits (Gordon, take notes. That's the way to better spend your time. Not by launching a revert war over the size of numbers in the bibliography. I still can't believe that happened).

The above version is much improved, although 2 was better the way it was, IMO. What I actually had in mind was something like this:

Lead sentence (unchanged): Theresa Marie "Terri" Schiavo (3 December 1963–31 March 2005), was a St. Petersburg, Florida woman whose medical circumstances and attendant legal battles led to landmark court decisions, historical legislative initiatives, and intense media attention.

1.On February 25, 1990, Schiavo (pronounced SHY-voh, IPA: ʃaɪvoʊ) experienced cardiac arrest and collapsed in her home. Despite heroic resuscitative measures, she suffered severe brain damage from the ensuing cerebral hypoxia, briefly lapsed into a coma, and spent the remaining 15 years of her life in a condition diagnosed as an irreversible persistent vegetative state (PVS).

2. During her final years, a major dispute broke out between her parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, and her husband and legal guardian, Michael Schiavo. Mr. Schiavo felt that his wife would not have wished to be maintained in an irreversible vegetative state through artificial means; the Schindlers disputed this. Their disagreement led to years of acrimonious court battles, and focused attention, in a very public way, on controversies over legal guardianship, substitute decision-making, civil rights, and end-of-life care. In the highly publicized court disputes that ensued, even the medical diagnosis of Schiavo's altered state of consciousness was questioned and litigated.

3.At its height, the dispute made its way into the chambers of the United States Congress, when a law was passed to transfer jurisdiction of the Schiavo case from the Florida state courts to federal courts.

4. The courts, at both state and federal levels, consistently ruled in favor of removing artificial nutrition that was being used to maintain Schiavo in an irreversible vegetative state. Terri Schiavo died on 31 March, 2005 at approximately 9:05 a.m. EST.

Thoughts? Best,~ Neuroscientist | T | C 22:08, July 10, 2005 (UTC)

Euthanasia

I have not spent time here in the Schiavo Universe much, as I've been called away on other duties, but the above, while pretty good (more good than not), has some naughty parts: Namely, first, you will certainly (trust me), "make the natives restless" with respect to the fact that you do not soon enough say that Terri was "diagnosed" as PVS; the mention of the fact it was "determined" later in the sentence is sub-par, and it probably won't be good enough; I thought we had that agreed upon in mediation -and here in talk. Regardless of what your views or my views were on the actual happenings with Terri (e.g., was she "euthanized?" -such views of us editors not being which important), let me remind you that this sparked a fierce debate over euthanasia. According to google (and, as mentioned in my 500-word mediation summary), "euthanasia" was much more prevalent in the debate as proven by web pages worldwide than the other items, namely "bioethics, legal guardianship, federalism, and civil rights." Be good kids and put euthanasia back where it belongs, and wikify it. ArbCom would be justified over this alone. There may be other problems, but I am not on a witch hunt. I'm just pointing out the obvious flaws here.--GordonWattsDotCom 02:05, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Gordon, you could probably find a lot of hits if you google "Terri Schiavo" and "murder", but I'll be damned if I'll let anyone put "murder" in the list. FuelWagon 05:03, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Now, hold on a second: both the Chinese Wiki (And I quote: "persisted 移除 itslife support programbehavior has caused a series of aboutthe biological ethics,the euthanasia,the guardiansystem,the federal systemas well asthe civil rightsserious argument.") ---and the Spanish Wiki (wherein I quote: "...debate sobre temas como la eutanasia, la bioética y los derechos civiles en su país.") seem to think that Euthanasia were in debate here. Now, the Chinese are well-known for their intelligence, and the Spanish people are both unbiased (not american) and also quite smart. Should WE be the odd ones out? (Besides the Chinese and Mexican Wikis, also Google and Myself - total four sources - say Euthanasia was debated. Period.) You're using a straw man argument, in murder, and i reject that; ALSO, what's up with making the "^and" tags to make the numbered links so small? You got a magnifying glass I can use?! ** Now, I know you were probably well-meaning on that edit, but unless you can give me some reason (or tantamount of consensus) on why those "grain-of-sand" link font sizes stay, then I shall revert that portion only.--GordonWattsDotCom 05:40, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

I took Chinese and Spanish in college, and while I'm not as good as C-3PO, "He never tires of mentioning that he is "fluent in over six million forms of communication," probably several thousand of them human languages. Besides, Babelfish Translations and I are quite smart together. Nin hau, ma? Nin ne? Wo bu dong, duibuchi! Tengan Usted un beun noche, hombre.--GordonWattsDotCom 05:47, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Gordon, how's it going? Your method of determining subjects that are worthy of inclusion in an encyclopedic entry fascinates me. So I searched google[1] for the "Big Bang Theory". 240,000 returns in 0.09 seconds. Which is pretty impressive. Until you search for "Flat Earth" - 317,000 in 0.07 seconds.

I'll be enjoying your undoubted forthcoming excursions to the Big Bang page, when you make the case for putting the flat earth theory "back where it belongs." No, don't thank me. The joy of gratitude of those editors as they see your coming will be thanks enough.~ Neuroscientist | T | C 07:10, July 10, 2005 (UTC)

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? Oh, well; nothing ventured, nothing gained. It's up. No donuts for you! One year! Duckecho (Talk) 13:22, 10 July 2005 (UTC). Sincere apologies, Mr. Taylor. What Fuel said: there's this thing that keeps popping up that disrupts my constant presence on Wikipedia. My thoughts on the intro are in The Intro. Part quatre.~ Neuroscientist | T | C 22:08, July 10, 2005 (UTC)

(Grr... Just when I started to edit, Duck quacked; what coincidence.) Your point is well taken, NS -and quite fascinating too, as Spock would have said. However, I wonder if we are comparing apples and oranges: Let me see what happens if I look for the ACTUAL item in the same subject (e.g., "Big Bang Theory" would be in the same subject as "Intelligent design" that is in the "Creation" category; "Flat earth" is NOT about creation, because it could be flat from either evolution OR creation, depending on which theory is right: Apples and Oranges.) So, what happens: "Intelligent Design" is in google.com about 829,000 times and took a whooping 0.11 seconds, an eternity in "dog years," uh, I mean "computing years."

OK, but I have THREE other points that support inclusion of the "euthanasia" into the article as one of the items: One, the Mexicans think it belongs; Two, I think it belongs, because in fact it WAS "hotly debated," among with the other things; and three, the Chinese think it belongs. When you can't win one argument, just address the one you can win, like #4: Google thinks it belongs, when properly compared, as an apple, not an orange.

It is so obvious, in fact, that the article may not even need to mention it, but this strong case gives me a bully pulpit, and a free ticked to ArbCom, if i get itchy trigger fingers, but maybe y'all can keep things smooth so I can fly back to my own planet and chill, lol. Anyhow, comparing apples & oranges NS is: But, which one is the Flat Earth?--GordonWattsDotCom 13:37, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Gordon, you can't seem to get the point. What you've done so far is produce the following "arguments" for why euthanasia, of all things, deserves mention in an article about Terri Schiavo:

1. The Chinese Wiki mentions it (so you claim)

2. The Mexican/Spanish Wiki says it (ditto)

3.Google "thinks" it deserves a mention

4. You think it deserves a mention.

These aren't, by any standard, in even the remotest sense, "arguments," Gordon. Google doesn't "think" anything: it's a search engine. If you type in garbage, it can spit out garbage. That is simply no basis at all for sticking something into an encyclopaedic article. There are sites out there which say that the Schindlers' are evil. Shall we include that too? I'm sure you could even find a couple that claimed they were aliens. That there are websites talking about stuff is no indication of the appropriateness of said stuff for an article - how is this not obvious to you? By the way, you have misunderstood my intent in listing search results for the "Big Bang theory" and "flat earth." That they are apples and oranges is exactly the point. There will always be clowns who insist they can see a connection where none exists. "Terri Schiavo was euthanized" is in fact the product of one such brainfart.

If you really think something needs to be incorporated, provide an argument. What is it exactly about euthanasia that you think is relevant? Would you just like to pepper the article randomly with the word "euthanasia"? If not, what do you have in mind? Do you want to say Schiavo was put down like a sick pet? If so, what are your arguments that she was? Make them. Don't parrot that you've found fify million god-freakin-quintillion sites that mention the words euthanasia and Schiavo. That doesn't mean jack.~ Neuroscientist | T | C 23:06, July 10, 2005 (UTC)

"May I suggest that..." NO! ... Just kidding ... however, if you mention all those ancellary items, Euthanasia must stay, and if it goes, they must go too.--GordonWattsDotCom 16:01, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

You, sir, are not in a position to dictate what must stay or what must go. Just because you learned a new word, ArbCom, and have beat us over the head with it five or so times today (so far), does not mean you carry any bigger stick than anyone else. I suggest you power down and approach the subject without the hubris. Propose euthanasia. If it survives the discussion (it hasn't so far, and for good reason), then, and only then it might go in. But not on your say so and not on your terms. Duckecho (Talk) 21:12, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

I'm not telling you what to do; you will do what you want, now won't you? I'm telling you what should be. Also, whether it survives or not is not necessarily dependant or a function of "good reason," as you seem to suggest: Just because something happens, that does not always make it right. However, I will take no position on your recent edit, making the intro more general here in this 20:58, 10 July 2005 diff. If your experiment survives, it will either be because someone's trying to teach me a lesson, or maybe your edit was good? Or both... Hmm... (quoting you) "Propose euthanasia. If it survives the discussion (it hasn't so far..." It sure HAS survived over on Chinese and Spanish wikis... But, I wouldn't call the edit style used by the Chinese and Spanish-based wikis stupid, if I were you, as you indicate by rejecting the tried and true tact THEY took on mentioning euthanasia. I'M sure not going to call them stupid.--GordonWattsDotCom 21:53, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Size doesn't matter

I apologize, Fuel Wagon; I see it was Duck who did the pin-head size-down edit, not you. Instead of reverting, I may just do what they did in Operation Desert Kick butt: Precision editing. Be right back.--GordonWattsDotCom 05:51, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Duck, what's with this edit, in which you make the links into these little small texts? Did you secretly check with several editors and get consensus? If so, please enlighten me. I don't have to remove them: My text editor can remove all the "^{" and "}" tags by simply telling it to "replace" them with null spaces. It's a feature of Microsoft works, and most likely Word also. I removed those tags previously; don't you recall having to put them back in? What's the utility? If it's needed, I'm all for it.--GordonWattsDotCom 13:46, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

• Dude! You decided to make your edits without consensus or discussion or a logical reason; I'm reporting this to our mediator, and it appears to be a "sustentative" if not "technical" 3RR; I'm now asking for ArbCom on the issues mentioned in my message to our mediator. (I add that you might have expected me to be baited into 3RR myself, but not so.)--GordonWattsDotCom 14:32, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Chinese Gordon, after failing to convince anyone that the blogoshpere's argument concerning euthanasia needs attention in the article, despite its alleged appearance in the Mexican and Chinese versions of the article (Mexican? and anyone have any donuts to bet on how it got there?), now decides that his considerable talents are needed to fight a size war over the link markers (not the link, mind you, nor the text) in the Articles section. Ignoring the utterly obvious fact that I didn't initiate the size convention, only the superscript, he has proceeded to revert the baby with the bathwater three times. Notice hereby officially given. Duckecho (Talk) 15:10, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Please NOTE: You have now reverted four times, and you have been reported. If check the diffs and see who put in the small tags and when, and who did what, you will find I am justified, but I did paint you in good light. Notice hereby officially given.--GordonWattsDotCom 16:05, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

I guess if you count an original edit which subtracted nothing as a revert then you might be right. Of course that's not a Wiki definition and no one will buy that convoluted thinking, so I have nothing to fear. I suggest you check the diffs and see who put in the <small> tags and when. You will find that the <small> tags have been in the article for >1000 edits dating back at least as far as 23 April. I didn't check any further back since 1000 edits and 2½ months were more than adequate to impeach you. I await your short apology here and your retraction of the 3RR complaint on the appropriate page, where, in any event, I've posted a thorough rebuttal. Twit. Duckecho (Talk) 20:05, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

(quoting Duck)"I await your short apology here..." I will apologize -AGAIN, as I had on 3RR, but it will be short, as the only point mistaken was the amount of stuff you reverted; I overlooked thru human error the facts of the small tags having been in the original versions, but the sup tags weren't, and when you changed them, it "reverted" to a different version, which utilized manual edits instead of the revert tool. Nice try, but you didn't fool me: The "spirit of the law" is that we don't continue edit-warring, and that's what you did. If you have a case for the smaller text, lay it out in talk -and convince us. I'm big enough to admit my mistake, but I'll let you walk your own path. You always do, don't you?--GordonWattsDotCom 21:43, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

…but the sup tags weren't [in the original version], and when you changed them, it "reverted" to a different version… So let me see if I have this straight. In the version before my first edit (under discussion) there were no <sup> tags. I edited that version by adding <sup> tags (not changing them). When I did that, it "reverted" to a different version, which now even I can't understand. It appears by your definition, every edit is a reversion. That is one magic concept. Please cite this exciting, omnibus new definition so we can all be enlightened. Duckecho (Talk) 23:22, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

(quoting Duck in italics) "It appears by your definition, every edit is a reversion." Bingo! You got it. "Please cite this exciting, omnibus new definition so we can all be enlightened." OK: "This can also apply to those that try to "game" the rule on a regular basis, such as by making fourth reversions just outside of the 24-hour time period, or by making complex reverts which attempt to disguise the restoration of the editor's preferred wording." Cite: 3RR#Enforcement, 4th Paragraph, 2nd Sentence. Trying to make a complex revert like you did almost fooled SlimVirgin, but thanks to your smart remark to me, I looked up the exact cite, and I shall bring this to her attention. While I don't think that you will get blocked this time, I am certain that you tried to "game the system."--GordonWattsDotCom 01:57, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

I stipulated to #'s 2, 3, and 4 of your complaint as reverts on the 3RR page. No, they did not take the form of reverts as often used in reverting. I wasn't particularly hiding, either. However, try as you might, until you start using that magnificent, double honors, trade school valedictorian, Supreme Court petitioner brain of yours, you are not going to grasp that you cannot define the simple edit of #1 as a revert. How many people pointing that out to you will it take for you to grasp it? Use your brain. This concludes my discussion with you. Go elsewhere with your mindless ramblings. Duckecho (Talk) 02:18, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

What do you do all day? Edit Wiki? Don't let it eat up your time. Besides, ArbCom now has a solid basis for intervention, since mediation is not working (or if it is, it's not working fast enough), and the various other violations creeping up. ArbCom is the Arbitration committee, and is binding, unlike mediation. Let's avoid that, if we can, but if you want to play...--GordonWattsDotCom 16:11, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Bring it on, señorita. Your paper trail will sink you faster than the Hood. Duckecho (Talk) 20:05, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

...burp!--GordonWattsDotCom 21:43, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Gordon: Re the revert war. Contrary to what you've claimed here and elsewhere (including Ghost's page [2]) you are indeed the one who started the recent revert war, Gordon. The evidence is sitting in the histories. Duck made an edit. You reverted, and continued to revert once it became clear Duck wanted his edit to stay. I understand that you thought you couldn't see the font, but you should have stopped, started a discussion on Talk, and asked Duck why he edited it that way. Try it some time - we're all reasonable people. By being hasty, you jumped to the conclusion that it was he who made some changes that were apparently already there for months, you reverted, and you actually pushed this to Ed's attention and the administrator's 3RR page. Another thing you might want to consider is not all of us see the page the same way. It depends on the size of the monitor, the OS type, the skin you use for Wikipedia - all sorts of things. For instance, to me the numbers were perfectly legible after his edit. I don't understand myself why Duck wanted the numbers in superscript, but the thing to do then is to freakin ask him.~ Neuroscientist | T | C 23:01, July 10, 2005 (UTC)

..."you are indeed the one who started the recent revert war, Gordon" OH? Let's look at the evidence. You're comments first: "Duck made an edit. You reverted" ~ Actually, neither one of us "reverted" in the classic sense, because we didn't revert to a previous version. However, Duck's edit reverted to a version of his choosing, although it was technically a regular edit, as he rightly points out. By the same token, I didn't "revert" to a previous version; I merely edited out some of his changes, manually, I add, leaving everything else the same. It depends on your definition of "revert." "...but you should have stopped, started a discussion on Talk, and asked Duck...but the thing to do then is to freakin ask him." But I did ask him: first by speaking about him, in plain sight, to get his attention in talk, then by making comments in the edit summaries TO him, repeatedly, if you'll notice. (Will you?) Then, in this edit, I directly asked him what was up. That last edit was on 13:46, 10 July 2005, which in Eastern Standard Time, was 9:46am! I probably asked him more times too, and I know i did in all the edit summaries. The Great Duck Echo chose not to answer me in talk. He simply reverted with, and I quote all four tags from more recent to most ancient:

• (NOTE: You have now reverted three times. You will be reported if you do it again. You might also want to check the diffs and see who put in the small tags and when.)
• (Where's YOUR justification and consensus? The link markers have been small in that area for quite a while. I didn't do that. All I did was superscript them. There's nothing to read except a number.)
• In the 2nd edit, here, the great Duck explainer explained NOTHING!
• "Sources - Added article to "Articles" section." in 1st edit.

In short, he did not answer me anywhere, choosing, instead to "pass the buck," that is, shift the burden of responsibility to me. In reality, the only thing I "reverted" or changed were the "small" markers that were originally there, but not only did I need to do so for readability, but I explained myself in talk. Lastly, I did not know that they were originally there, but that was of no import: They did not belong, and I excised them. "By being hasty, you jumped to the conclusion that it was he who made some changes that were apparently already there for months..." I was man enough to admit this oversight, which, even HAD I known the tags were there, would not have changed the need I felt to remove them. "Another thing you might want to consider is not all of us see the page the same way. It depends on the size of the monitor, the OS type, the skin you use for Wikipedia..." Well, I don't know about the skins, but, yes, I considered that. In fact, my monitor resolution is set to maximum, so I see a lot but with smaller text. I can understand why you might have been able to see it better at something less, like maybe 800x600. However, YOU should be bright enough to know that OTHERS might have 1600x1200 rez or such. Do you not care about them? Don't you think that they should be able to read the links?

Neuroscientist, I have answered you with info that was plainly available, and I know you aren't stupid. Your handle has "scientist" as part of its name! That really peeves me. #1) I DID ask him about it (#2-to no avail), #3) SOME PEOPLE DO have small text settings, as you rightly guessed; #4) I early-on admitted that duck didn't "revert" in classical senses, but merely changed the content manually, but achieving the same thing. So, WHAT if I overlooked a minor detail of what he changed? He DID change sustentatively, HARMFULLY, and without any consensus; He violated the spirit and meaning of the writers of the 3RR, if not the letter of the law; You CAN be blocked for violating the spirit of the law, if the admins think it is disruptive, and he missed it, and your bright brain missed it, and apparently (?) falsely claimed you addressed my concern "below" as you said at one point, above a section wherein you didn't address said question. #5-Lastly, I was as fair as possible to Duck in my explanation of events, and you know that. Use your brain.--GordonWattsDotCom 01:38, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

I never realized superscript could be so dramatic. - RoyBoy ⁸⁰⁰ 02:46, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

It's not the size of the dog in the fight. It's the size of the fight in the dog.~ Neuroscientist | T | C 04:56, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

Gordon: 1. This is an incredibly stupid, idiotic thing to waste so much time over. I kept out of it at the start, and only posted when I felt it had gotten out of hand and was subsuming all other discussions; I made an honest attempt to stop it. I failed. I am not going to answer further, after this. If you wish to have the last word, go ahead; I'd ask you to kindly stop afterward.

2. No one who knows anything about Wiki editing can fail to see that it was you who initiated the revert war battle. There is simply no way to deny this, Gordon. The sequence is clear:

• 03:52, 10 July 2005. This was an edit, in which a change that was thought to be useful was introduced for the first time.
• 05:57, July 10, 2005. This was you reverting Duck's edit. That is to say, you removed the edit he introduced, apparently because you felt it was not a good edit.

No amount of twisting and turning is going to change Duck's edit into a revert, Gordon. It simply defies common sense. If that was a revert, then every single edit that every single editor introduces to every single article is a revert. This is absurd. Your taking this to the 3RR admin forum and trying to twist the evidence to fit your accusations appalled me. The contortions you went through there make it seem to reasonable people that you were willfully lying. It was a new low, Gordon, whatever your intentions. That's what made me post; I hoped, foolish me, to stop the spiral.

I'm sorry I disappointed you, NS; In my initial post to the 3RR column, I was clear that the "revert" by Duck was NOT a "technical" revert; I never tried to deceive; As far as your concern that I redefined "revert" to include "every single edit," I answered Duck in the affirmative when he asked the same type question: YES, I did loosely define that term, but I felt that he (morally) violated the spirit of the rule, which I (later) found to be "gaming the system."--GordonWattsDotCom 12:39, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

3. As to your contention that you made attempts to communicate, in the early stages, with Duck — I wholeheartedly agree. However, you're being disingenuous by suggesting you acted completely in good faith, because you kept reverting. You didn't stand down until you guys had a chance to talk things out. Wiki policy is slanted towards encouraging "bold editing". If you don't like someone's edits, you ought to demonstrate good-faith by being willing to discuss it first; reverting before talking things over is bad form (unless you're dealing with vandals or people who are breaking previously agreed-upon conventions).

You are right in all you say in this paragraph -especially about my impatience to edit without waiting a day or so for a reply; I would like to have talked it over with Duck a little more, but his edit was REAL BAD, and I was merely impatient. Since I did not harm him (annoyed him is *hopefully* the worst thing), I feel good about my actions, but I am sorry if I were too impatient, and may be more patient in future disputes; I really thought his edit was bad.--GordonWattsDotCom 12:39, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Why did you revert, and only then ask a question — not a particularly nice one, incidentally? Why did you charge Fuel with making the edits, before you checked the history and found out it wasn't him? Why did you revert and impute that Duck started the small tags, and only then think to check your facts — and find out it wasn't him either?

I never meant to offend Duck by asking him to explain his edit; Also, I made a human mistake, and apologized to FuelWagon; I am human & make mistakes. With regard to the "sup" & "Small" tags, I admitted (and apologized to Duck) about accusing him of putting in "small" tags that I thought were BAD; however, he DID put in the "Sup" tags de novo, that is, for the first time in recent memory! (I was only half-wrong, and I apologized for that half for which I was wrong.)--GordonWattsDotCom 12:39, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Why do you shoot first, ask questions later, and think never?

"...and think never?" ~ I think a LOT, so a few mistakes here and there is still a small percentage; plus, I will be glad to apologize (and make restitution for) any harm I cause, if within my powers.

I do not know why Duck didn't respond to you immediately, but I can hazard a guess from his responses. You reverted his edit, without bothering to discuss it with him first and obtain an answer, and you accused him of doing something he hadn't done. The guy's a smart bloke who's been around the block more often than you or I: he probably knew he could stop your reverts using 3RR, because Wiki policy (and the 3RR rule) favor the bold — the editor who introduces the edit. That should be pretty clear to you now, if nothing else is: if you start the revert war, you most likely won't end it.~ Neuroscientist | T | C 04:56, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

"If you wish to have the last word, go ahead; I'd ask you to kindly stop afterward." I interpret that top include that my replies be BRIEF and also polite (and hopefully correct). I hope I filled the bill & answered your questions well.--GordonWattsDotCom 12:39, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Apology to the group

This unfortunate exercise has gone on far too long. And it's partly my fault. I acknowledge my part in it and apologize for it. I will make every sincere effort to avoid it in the future.

I have avoided this kind of drama for many weeks by simply not responding to Gordon Watts. When he first came aboard I tried to calm some of his rhetoric by pointing out the errors in his thinking. I quickly learned that it is impossible to have a dialogue with him. I made a conscious decision to shun him. What he did this morning, however, irritated me, both in process and description. I reverted his revert. I broke my own counsel.

I could have taken the high road and let it go. Frankly, I don't even care about the damn superscripts. It was an experiment that I tried when I saw the <small> tags in the articles links that have been there since before mid-April. I might have even edited them back out myself later in the day. But I took a visceral reaction that was nevertheless within my means to control.

I can't abide playing fast and loose with facts. That also fueled my endeavor. It was still within my means to control and I didn't. If there's any solace for me in the process it's that an easily tracable pattern of deception and duplicitous behavior has been chronicled that will ill serve the perpetrator.

My vow to the group is I will re-enact my shun and will respond no further to Gordon Watts. That will quell at least a small part of the reams of nonsense we are so often forced to endure, save what will likely be a voluminous response to this post.

I reiterate—I am sorry for my part in this childish drama. I hope to not put myself in this position again. Thank you to those who figured out the truth and supported me—rightly in the abstract, and gently in my behavior. I didn't deserve support for that.

Now, may we pleae return to crafting quality edits for this article. Duckecho (Talk) 05:19, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

NS eloquently defended you, and I feel bad that I too was impatient; however, it is inherently wrong of you to ignore responding, and you were right the first time (where you admitted you could and/or should have responded to me in your post here: "I have avoided this kind of drama for many weeks by simply not responding to Gordon Watts.") ~ you were wrong (in your later dialogue above) in stating that ignoring certain others' concerns is good. As far as playing fast and loose with the facts (read: Gordon lied!!), I did not intentionally try to deceive anyone, as I pointed out above and in my 3RR postings. I am sorry if you misunderstood me; ask me if you don't understand something: While I don't always have time to respond as much as I'd like, to the limited amount of my mortal life, I will be glad to answer dissenting concerns.--GordonWattsDotCom 12:52, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Intro and query

I added to the intro what the autopsy report said about PVS, about her brain size, and about her blindess, as these are the key points, and belong in the intro, in my view. I also added that one neurologist who examined her dissented and called her condition a "minimally conscious state," as that's needed for NPOV and accuracy.

A query: the intro says the other seven neurologists diagnosed an "irreversible persistent vegetative state." Did they all say it was irreversible, or did they merely say PVS? Is there a good source we could link to after that sentence, briefly summing up what each neurologist said? SlimVirgin ^(talk) 15:18, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

Did I miss a meeting?

Was there consensus by the active editors (or anyone else) to submit the article to a massive edit despite the CONTROVERSIAL TOPIC - please read the talk page discussion before making substantial changes tag at the top of the edit page and despite the fact that we are in mediation? If so, I didn't get the memo. Duckecho (Talk) 19:00, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

There has been no massive edit, just a copy edit, and an insertion into the intro of the autopsy report, which I mentioned above. I appreciate your paying close attention to this page, and I understand the reasons for it, but people have to be allowed to edit it. I have tried to do so carefully. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 19:16, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

this is not a massive edit? what world do you live in? FuelWagon 19:45, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

It isn't a massive edit, and if you'd actually read the diffs, you'd see that. The only reason a lot of it is showing up in red is that the edits caused some sections to shift, and these show up in red even though they're unchanged. The only substantive change I made, apart from copy editing, was to the intro, where I introduced material from the autopsy, and added that one neurologist said she was in a minimally conscious state. You haven't yet explained why you want to exclude that information. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 20:45, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

Reverting

Whoa Fuelwagon, you just reverted a couple of hours of copy editing. Please say what your specific objections are, rather than reverting. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 19:16, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

Fuelwagon, you're well out of order here. Stop reverting and please discuss your objections on talk. You're reintroducing errors. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 19:19, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, madam, it is you who are out of line. I only got through two of your edits before toting up fully a dozen problematic changes. Many of the things you are copy editing represent the introduction of errors to material that has been laboriously worked over by dozens of conscientious editors over a period of >three months. It is simply beyond chutzpah to imagine someone can come in and conduct four hours of changes to that months of work that aren't at the very least damaging to the product. Many of the errors you have introduced have already been tried, discussed, exposed for the problems they are, and rightfully discarded. If you had done a scintilla of research into the archives you would have been aware of that. For the record, you have now reverted at least three times, and I now notify you that you will be held accountable for any 3RR violations you commit. I will also put you on notice that there are two apparent reverts attributed to my sig two minutes apart. That was a Wiki-software malfunction over which I had no control and do not acknowledge nor accept responsibility for more than one revert as the identical diffs will disclose. Duckecho (Talk) 20:09, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

Madam??

If you feel I've introduced errors, please list them on talk, and I will go through them with you. But do list them. Don't make unsubstantiated claims. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 20:15, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

I'm going to go to a random wiki article and perform a massive rewrite of it... blind. I'm going to hit the "edit this page" and then I'm going to just start typing text that feels good. And when people who've been working on the article revert me, I'll demand that they keep every single change I've made and that they must list every single issue they have with my edits so that we can talk through them and then perhaps I'll concede that they can revert them. Yeah. That'll go over real good. FuelWagon 20:50, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

I suppose the message at the top of this page that says:

This is a controversial topic, which may be disputed. Please read this talk page discussion before making substantial changes.

is really just window dressing? Or do such things simply not apply to you? FuelWagon 19:25, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

Oh, and this: [3]

Recovery of awareness is unprecedented after two years. <--Is this true? I seem to recall a case in England where a man woke up after a long time in PVS.-->

Just rubs of arrogance. That line that says recovery of awareness is unprecedented is from the American Neurological Association. And you embed a note that casts doubt on the ANA because of unsourced urban legend? FuelWagon 19:27, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

First, the hidden notes telling people not to edit have no validity. This is a wiki, and people are allowed to edit it. As I said above, I appreciate and respect the reasons you're watching this page closely, but it can't be watched so closely that only a select group of editors is allowed to touch it.

Secondly, if your edit "recovery of awareness is unprecedented after two years," is from the ANA, it should be clearly attributed to them, as in "According to ...". I will try to find a source for the man in the UK that I mentioned in an invisible comment. However, please note Wikipedia:No personal attacks and don't accuse me of arrogance because I question an unsourced edit.

As you reverted all my edits, I'm assuming the above can't be your only objection, so please lay them out here so I can go through them with you. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 19:33, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

don't accuse me of arrogance because I question an unsourced edit.

It is not an "unsourced edit". The entire paragraph is the ANA's position on PVS recovery. The "source" is clearly included at the end of the paragraph as a standard URL link. FuelWagon 19:54, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

It is not sourced correctly or clearly. You should say "According to ...", for an edit like this, because it's extremely unlikely that this is accepted by all neurologists everywhere in the world, and if it is, that would need a source too. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 20:15, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

And yet you feel it perfectly acceptable to embed what amounts to urban legend into the article without an "according to" in front of it or a URL after it? Give me a break. FuelWagon 20:22, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

You're making no sense. I didn't delete the edit you're referring to. All I did was make an invisible comment which said something like "Are you sure this is correct?" I did not add it to the article. I repeat: your edit is not properly sourced. There are sourcing problems throughout this article, with (a) claims not clearly attributed, or not attributed at all; (b) quotes without citations; (c) sentences in quotation marks though they appear not to be actual quotes; and (d) sources used to support certain sentences when the sources don't say what the sentence says. The page needs a thorough copy edit: first, to tidy the writing, and second, to go through every claim that needs to be sourced and find a reputable source for it. Why would you want to stand in the way of someone willing to do that work? SlimVirgin ^(talk) 20:42, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

---

I want you to take a look at your diff here. The embedded note that USED to be there said:

<-- This paragraph is a direct quote from Dr. Bernat's testimony before the U.S. Senate in April 2005. Dr. Bernat's testimony was approved by the AAN Executive Committee. The two links provided document the testimony and the AAN approval.-->

YOU DELETED THAT NOTE. And then you inserted THIS little gem in the same paragraph further up:

<--Is this true? I seem to recall a case in England where a man woke up after a long time in PVS.--><--What levels of "prognostic certainty"?:

And you tell me you didn't know where this "unsourced" paragraph came from? You go and wipe out an embedded note that gives the source of an entire paragraph, and then you insert your own embedded note questioning the accuracy of the entire paragraph based on some urban legend you HEARD SOMEWHERE? AND I"M SUPPOSED TO READ YOUR EDIT AS ANYTHING OTHER THAN RECKLESS/CLUELESS EDITING AND/OR VANDALISM? FuelWagon 21:06, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

---

I ask you again to change your tone and stop the personal attacks. And there's no need to SHOUT. You must attribute challenged edits to sources in the article, not invisibly, but visibly, and preferably as part of the sentence in the case of a claim like the one we're discussing: for example, "According to X ..." then linking, if a link is available, or offering a regular citation in brackets after the sentence if it isn't; or a footnote if you don't like inline citations. There are too many invisible instructions and invisible sources in this article. The "instructions" need to be made in the form of requests on the talk page, and the sources need to be visible. You also need to make sure that the sources actually say what you're claiming they said, because in some of the cases I checked they didn't. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 21:19, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, I meant to add: the paragraph you're referring to made little sense. If it's a quote, it should be in quotation marks with a full citation. If it's not a quote, what the doctor said may have been paraphrased by an editor who left something out. Go back and read it and you'll see what I mean. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 21:24, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

Alright, that did it. You are the one who screwed up on this one. not me. The paragraph had a note that clearly gave the source. You deleted it FOR NO REASON. And then you lecture me that "sources need to be visible". But you didn't take the embedded note and turn it into a visible source, YOU DELETED IT. On top of that, you REPLACE it with your own embedded note consisting of nothing more than urban legend, no source, no URL, and while questioning the accuracy of the paragraph. And then you lecture me AGAIN about how the article must have visible sources and somehow that explains why you deleted the only reference to the source of that material, visible or otherwise. Well, if it has to be visible, why did you delete it completely? Then, you post some rant at the bottom of the talk page about how I've taken "ownership" of the Terri Schiavo page. And after that little slander, you tell me "no personal attacks". Let me just get something straight here. You screwed up. Do you read me? And you continue to hide behind "I'm just COPYEDITING" and "they're taking ownership of the page". No. Sorry. That ain't how this is going down. You messed up. Not me. Deleting that embedded note had nothing to do with "copyediting", it was a stupid edit. And me reverting it back it had nothing to do with "owning" the page. You deleted good information. And hiding behind "well, sources should be visible" ain't gonna cut it. You could have made it visible, but you deleted it instead, and in it's place inserted doubt on the ANA's position and forwarded some urban legend. FuelWagon 21:43, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

6RR ?

I don't know what the heck is going on, but there are now SIX edits in the history that say

Reverted edits by Duckecho to last version by SlimVirgin

FuelWagon 20:07, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

I would assume it's vandalism reversion. Jtkiefer 20:08, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

Server problems. It keeps saying "server not responding" when in fact it has saved the edit. I've been getting it all morning. Why on earth would you assume it was vandalism? SlimVirgin ^(talk) 20:09, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

Mediation

May I suggest that parties to the mediation avoid making any "reversions"? Moreover, an Edit Summary like revert to last version by Stanselmdoc doesn't really sum anything up.

Our mediation seems to have stalled. Your choices at this point are (1) fire me, or (2) return to the Mediation. I've never failed yet, but if you feel I have failed you, say so. Don't just sneak away. Uncle Ed 20:58, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

Ed, I don't think at all that you have failed, nor that mediation has failed. I do think the process has, as you say, stalled. A group of editors have worked hard over this article (in part or in whole) and contributed immensely to bringing it to where it is today; when one compares it to where it was even a few months ago (if you've a sturdy heart, see for example [4]), the improvement is very encouraging. However, part of this group of hard-working aditors have not been able to contribute more actively to Mediation, for reasons that have probably to do with personal commitments. I note in particular the absence of Ann Heneghan, who I feel has very valuable points of view to contribute.

While this has stalled the Mediation process temporarily, it need not fail. It would have to move more slowly, by necessity, but a lot can still be accomplished. I proposed once before, privately, to Ghost (another sterling editor), that the medication may work best if each point of contention is addressed in turn, one at a time. You could table the topic to be discussed, the editors could discuss it, and a decision can finally be made - it may not fully satisfy everyone, but perhaps it might be understood that that is the best decision.

Writing 500 word summaries is an excellent way to begin getting a feel for everyone's broad POV, and identify some of the issues that need mediation and discussion. But further progress is unlikely to occur unless the precise points of contention are considered in turn. In line with this, I seem to remember your request from a few days back where you suggested something similar, on the mediation page.

The technicalities of the process - whether the article needs to be locked or not, etc - are better commented on by wiser heads than mine. FWIW, I'm sceptical that that is ideal.

The Terri Schiavo article is old, and it has always been controversial. It will likely stay this way for some time. But we should be able to make some progress, if we work at it.~ Neuroscientist | T | C → 21:50, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

I have just noticed that the revert war may begin once more, this time with Ann starting it. Ed, I think the most productive way of moving this forward is to discuss specific points of contention. The state of the article and the version it should remain in (if any one in particular) during this period is something I think you'll have to decide, as Mediator. If there are daily revert wars going on, with each editor keeping score of their revert "opportunities," while Mediation proceeds in the next page, I wonder how it will be possible to make much progress.~ Neuroscientist | T | C → 22:21, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

Hello, Uncle Ed, my recent silence on the mediation page has been partly because I was busy, but also partly because I wasn't sure what you wanted us to do. I understood that we each had 500 words. I provided my summary, and then I waited. Another editor commented. I disagreed with some of his comments. He seemed to imply that it was slighty petty to worry about whether or not it's true that Michael Schiavo was woken by a noise in the night. I feel strongly that things should not be asserted as facts when they have not been proved. They should be clearly identified as "he said", "she said", etc. I can only imagine the fury that would be provoked if I inserted into the article that Michael Schiavo used to ask "when is that bitch gonna die?", rather than stating the Nurse Iyer claimed that he used to say that. I might add that I wouldn't dream of making such an edit. I do not deny that my personal sympathies lie with the Schindlers. However, I do not support the insertion of any uncorroborated statements in support of either party, without clearly identifying them as hearsay. When one editor made a long comment on another editor's summary, and the other editor then claimed that that gave him the right to a second turn, the first editor responded offensively (in my view), and the whole mediation seemed to fall apart. I didn't want to get involved. I'm very happy to continue with the meditation (although I have to do a project proposal before next Wednesday), if I know that I'm supposed to continue adding comments.

And hello, Neuroscientist. Thank you for your kind remarks above. No, I certainly will not get into a revert war, unless I feel that another editor's dignity is being deliberately attacked (as has, unfortunately, happened in the past). If you look at my contributions, [5] you'll find that my proportion of reverts is very low. I reverted once last night, because I felt that the reverting of SlimVirgin's edits and the comments on the talk page were not in keeping with Wikipedia policy, which encourages a welcoming attitude, the avoidance of aggressive comments, and discussion before reverting. Of course, that would not apply to vandalism. But SlimVirgin's edits, while they certainly went against the POV of FuelWagon and Duckecho, were not vandalism, nonsense, or POV pushing. If I remember correctly (I haven't looked it up recently), Wikipedia policy suggests that editors should try to improve an edit, rather than revert it, and that if they disagree with an edit, they should discuss it on the talk page before reverting, in the hope that the other editor may agree, and may even make the change himself. I don't always follow that myself, but I do not think that SlimVirgin's edits should have been treated as vandalism. The main point about those edits, in my opinion, was that they annoyed two editors who adhere to the majority POV, and who have therefore been left largely unopposed in their edits. I didn't go straight to bed after reverting last night, so I saw that Duckecho had reverted to what he called "the last stable version before the attacks", but I left it like that. I don't think it was appropriate to call SlimVirgin's edits "attacks". You may not agree - in fact, you probably won't - but that's okay. I just want to explain my edit. And by the way - this is to everyone - if ever I fail to explain an edit properly, please understand that it's simply because I don't have time. Ann Heneghan 17:31, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Ownership of this page

It appears that a small group of editors, currently consisting of User:FuelWagon and User:Duckecho have taken ownership of this page and won't allow others to edit without their consent. This isn't allowed.

I completely understand the motivation to keep the page free of nonsense, and I also understand the urge to assume ownership of articles where you've worked on them a lot. But this is a wiki. You can't insert invisible instructions telling people not to make certain changes and expect others to obey them.

This is in many ways a well-written, comprehensive, careful article. But there are areas with awkward English (as there are in all articles, no matter how carefully written); some grammatical errors; and some inconsistencies in the way terms are used. Above all, there are problems with the sources. Some quotes have no citations; some sections are attributed to sources that don't support them, and so on. The page would benefit from a thorough copy edit. I had started to do that, and meant to continue today, but have now had to stop because of the reverting. I reverted back to my version three times so I could continue, but can't revert again, so the two of you have stymied work for the day, which is senseless.

As for my changes to the intro, which were not just copy editing, neither of you has said what your objection is. Seven neurologists said PVS, but one (who examined her) said minimally conscious state. That needs to be in the intro. Something from the autopsy also needs to go in the intro, as it's a key document, and it needs to be made clear that (a) the pathologists found massive brain damage, and a brain around half the weight it ought to be, and (b) that they were unable to confirm, or comment on, the diagnosis on PVS, because that's a clinical diagnosis based largely on behavior, which you need a living patient for. I put that part in quotes so that I wasn't interpreting or re-phrasing what the pathologists actually wrote. Please state your objections.

Also note that when you glance at the diffs, it looks as though I made a lot of major changes only because some of my edits caused the text to move, and displaced text comes up red, even though it's unchanged. If you read the diffs, you'll see that, apart from the intro, my changes were not substantive. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 21:11, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

User:FuelWagon and User:Duckecho have taken ownership of this page and won't allow others to edit without their consent. Thank you for that bit of personal slander. Please have a look at No Personal Attacks when you have some free time. FuelWagon 21:46, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

I have reverted back to SlimVirgin's version. I don't like making reversions, and I do it very seldom. In fact I try to reserve reversions for edits that were abusive or scornful towards other Wikipedians. But I think that disagreements should be discussed on the talk page. And I also feel that invisible "do not change this" comments should be used very sparingly. I would prefer to reserve them for cases where anonymous (I.P. editors) are likely to come along in good faith, without even knowing that there is a talk page, and re-introduce some error which has already been thoroughly discussed. Anyway, I'm tired after the weekend in London, so I'm not going to stick around tonight. Ann Heneghan 21:58, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

I'll tell you what my objections to your changes in the intro are:

• You can't insert invisible instructions telling people not to make certain changes and expect others to obey them. If you'd had a little more experience on this article you would understand the necessity. For example, I am personally aware of at least five times that someone has changed Terri's name at the top of the article to Schindler-Schiavo despite the fact that it is POV and that there is no record whatsoever of her ever using that name. Once we (I believe it was Ann Henneghan who put it there) put the invisible note speaking to that we've had no further problems in that regard. There are a dozen or more instances of invisible notes in the article for precisely the same reason. Well meaning (but ignorant of the history of the article) editors, such as yourself, often see something in the article that they feel doesn't fit their understanding of events, and being wiki, they jump in and edit their version in, despite the fact that on the Talk Page that very issue and its veracity has been thoroughly resolved. It's lost in the history of the archives so someone even trying to do research before editing would have difficulty finding it, but an invisible note in the article makes it abundantly clear to all but the most intransigent.
• …so the two of you have stymied work for the day, which is senseless. What was senseless was expending >3½ hours in seven + edits (that doesn't count your revert warring or inserting your "don't bother me, I'm important" tag) without having spent more than a minute to compose a single note concerning an edit you had already made and still had a question as to the accuaracy.
• …but one (who examined her) said minimally conscious state. That needs to be in the intro. Why? In Judge Greer's order from the 2002 evidentiary hearing he excoriated that doctor and lent him no credibility whatsoever. In Ronald Cranford's "Facts, Lies, &amp Videotapes" he's even less kind. That sort of nonsense can be introduced in the article and properly dispensed with (and is) but it absolutely does not belong in the intro.
• Something from the autopsy also needs to go in the intro… Well, yes, the autopsy is mentioned and it has its own section in the article. That's all that's necessary. A 77 word regurgitation does nothing but add bloat to an introduction we're trying to pare down to a reasonably sized four paragraphs (your invocation).

So, those are some specifics for you. Where are your specifics for us? General claims that the article needs copy editing isn't good enough when you're either excising significant material or adding spurious material. And without an awareness of how difficult it's been to come to what we have over the months, imperfect though it may be, between vandal attacks, flat earthers with conspiracy theories, well intentioned but misinformed editors whose main source of information was from the blogosphere, and conscientious people who albeit with POV difficulties of their own nevertheless held our feet to fire on POV issues, you want to waltz in without so much as a by your leave and scorch the earth with your uninformed ideas. Ownership? No. I'm proud of my contribution here, and I recognize that it's an open forum, collaborative work. But I'm somewhat parochial about our good work and more than a little defensive when someone ignorantly undoes (whether intentional or not) significant quality work. Moreover, if you'd been here more than a day you'd know that there are far more contributors than just FuelWagon and me. Good faith is welcome; ignorance is not. Duckecho (Talk) 22:18, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply. I disagree with you about the autopsy material in the intro. It speaks directly to the issues being debated, and it's the most up-to-date solid piece of information there is. It seems obtuse not to mention its key findings in the intro.

Regardless of who has criticized the neurologist who diagnosed minimally conscious state, he did make that diagnosis, and you have no right to pretend it doesn't exist, no matter how strongly you disagree with it. A neurologist counts as a reputable source for WP in matters of neurology, particularly as he examined her. The way I introduced the information made it clear that his was the minority, dissenting view.

Regardless of your reasons for wanting so many invisible "instructions" - and I accept that you have good reason for wanting them - you can't expect anyone to heed them. This is a wiki.

If these are your only objections, I don't know why you reverted all my edits.

Finally, I'm a little confused about your references to the months of work you've put in. Your user account was opened mid-May and has only made 213 edits to articles. Are you editing under another account? SlimVirgin ^(talk) 22:44, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

Is there some sort of plebe time we have to do before we're accorded legitimacy? If there is, include me out. I'm far too old to play those sort of seniority games. I was winning prizes for my writing before you were born, so that should be the end of that particular tack. I did edit as an anon for a while, but none of that is germane. See my remarks elsewhere as to 213 edits. I'd much rather make 213 substantive, quality edits that receive acclaim than thousands of poor ones, so I believe that will be the end of that tack, as well. Are there any other questions you wish to raise about how long I've done what and how many times I've done it? If there are, please put them in some sort of context of importance to the task at hand. Duckecho (Talk) 01:25, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

In any event, perhaps you'll point me to the wiki page that tells what what the standards for an intro are. I'm ignorant in that area, but I can tell you what I believe an intro should do. It should be short (you said four paragraphs—is that a style rule somewhere or did you make it up?) and its structure should be to describe generally what things took place. Its purpose should be to give the reader enough information to have an idea what the subject is and what attendant issues there were. It's a précis. What it should not do is make a case for anything. That's what the article is for. She lived, she was injured, people argued about her, there were trials, there was other judicial action, there was media attention, there was legislative drama, she died, there's a report. The introduction is not the place to lay out the details of one of the trials. The introduction is not the place to explain how a diagnosis is made. The introduction is not the place to cite the cause of death when it's known that removing a feeding tube was a central issue. The introduction should be written to entice the reader to go read further, not bog him down with 615 grams of mass. The body of the article is where all those details are fleshed out. There is a perfectly good discussion of the autopsy report replete with cites and agonizing minutia, including the manner of death, in the body of the article. There is a perfectly good discussion replete with cites for the Terri's wishes trial in 2000 in the body of the article. There is a perfectly good discussion replete with cites for the evidentiary hearing in 2002 in the body of the article. There is a perfectly good discussion replete with cites for the special therapy hearing in 2003 in the body of the article. Get the idea? That's where to find out the details, not in the intro. Why in the name of succinct editorship would we want to bloat the intro and discourage people from reading the article? Duckecho (Talk) 01:25, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

natural ferilizer

natural fertilizer is having someone do a lousy, massive, edit on an article, and then rather than reverting them en total and telling them to RTFA and RTF-talk page and RTF-talk archives, I instead have to tell them why each and every one of their edits are lousy. FuelWagon 22:54, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

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"During this time, the Schindlers allegedly encouraged Mr. Schiavo to get on with his life, and he introduced them to women he was dating."

Well, inserting the word "allegedly" might be technically not untrue, it casts a whole lot of doubt without any context. This statement about dating was reported by a guardian ad litem to the court. It is the guy's job to get the facts right, not present one pov. I can't recall, but I'm prety sure the guardian ad litem did not use the word "allegedly" in his report. and as far as I know, the Schindlers never challenged that statement at the time, either. Though I believe they may have challenged it much (years?) later, when they were willing to challenge anything possible. FuelWagon 22:33, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

There's a URL right by that line with an embedded note saying [6]<-- quoting from page 11 of 38 of Wolfson report -->, in case anyone was wondering where the "alleged" statement came from. FuelWagon 22:37, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

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"The noise awoke Michael Schiavo, and he called 911 emergency services. <--I'm deleting "immediately" wherever I find it, because it's journalese and usually unverifiable, not because I think it wasn't immediate.-->"

Ya know, Govorner Bush launched an investigation specifically into whether or not Michael called 911 "immediately" or whether there was foul play on his part. The DA recently dropped the investigation saying Michael's story was consistent and that the cause of Terri's collapse was probably cardiac arrest. but hey, it's unverifiable. FuelWagon 22:41, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

---

Then provide sources for your edits, and not invisible ones. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 22:47, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

That's a little bit ungracious. This is explained in the talk archives, which you would have seen had you read them. -- Grace Note

It is of zero use having material hidden in the archives. The sources need to be on the page, making clear which sentences they're acting as sources for, and not invisible. The sources are there for the readers, not just for other editors. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 02:36, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

It's unreasonable to expect all the archives to remain on the main talk page. There's 28 pages, averaging around 300k in size. I make that 9.6 Mb of discussion about a 70 k article. So I appreciate that the archives are way too big to wade through and find one point; this makes referring to the archives more than a little difficult, particularly for an editor who hasn't been keeping up to date with everyone day in day out. Probably not the point you're trying to make, but I think it needs to be said. Proto t c 08:30, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

"(PVS), according to seven neurologists who examined her, or a minimally conscious state (MCS), according to one other."

This compares 7 to 1 as if they were equals. What you fail to mention is that the one dissenting neurologist was a nutjob who used the "National Enquirer" as a reference. FuelWagon 22:45, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

Are you saying he wasn't a real neurologist? SlimVirgin ^(talk) 22:47, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

Get real. The guy is a quack. The JUDGE said nearly as much when he said the neuro's "therapies" were, what was the word, "spurious", I believe. You can't count him alongside the others as equals. Attempting to do so introduces POV and slants the article far away from the truth. If you want to include him, you need to include his background, his quackery, and the fact that he was specifically hired by the Schindlers to oppose the PVS diagnosis in court. Rather than sit there and demand that we "provide sources for our edits" like a broken record, you need to do a little bit of research before you take that machete to an article, and then we wouldn't have this problem. FuelWagon 23:01, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

This point was discussed at great length in the archives, I believe. The point is that this guy didn't actually examine her and SlimVirgin's version makes it seem that he did. Some guy saying that she was MCS, regardless of his professional qualifications, is not something that should be included up front. Lots of people have an opinion. The point, Slim, was that he did not make a diagnosis. -- Grace Note

Why do you say he didn't examine her, and imply that he's not a neurologist? He did and he is, unless you're using the word "examine" in a very particular way. He cast doubt on the PVS diagnosis and made the reasonable point that when the previous neurologists had looked at her, the term MCS was not in frequent use, as it's relatively new. I've found references to it in the literature back to 1997, but most of them are from 2003 onwards. There's no reason at all to exclude the dissenting opinion from the introduction. We're not here to uphold any particular POV, though we must make clear which is majority and which minority POV, and the majority POV should be given priority - but the majority POV can't take up the whole of the intro. You won't find that in any other well-written Wikipedia article. The intro should briefly refer to the opposing medical POVs. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 02:43, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

Actually Grace, I believe you're confusing Hammesfahr and Cheshire. Hammesfahr was one of the Schindlers' witnesses in the 2002 evidentiary hearing. He's a neurologist and a quack and he did examine Terri and he claimed MCS. Greer virtually laughed him out of court. Cranford called him a charlatan on national TV and completely ripped him up in his article. You wouldn't think he could get away with that if Hammesfahr had any defense for it. Cheshire, according to Neuroscientist, is a quality, board certified neurologist. However he didn't examine Terri. He did a walk through, but it was by no means a neurological examination and thus his opinion of MCS isn't a diagnosis. Duckecho (Talk) 03:12, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

God yes, I was lost in the bickering here. Hammesfahr! He claimed she was practically up and about and dancing a jig. I think describing what he produced as a "diagnosis" is an astonishing stretch of the word, but fair enough, if Slim thinks a guy almost universally derided, not least by the presiding judge, is reputable, then she should be allowed to add that he dissented. The problem with all this discussion is that the intro has been distorted by POV pushers who insist that we cannot just say she was in PVS but must make out that there was a real doubt. This is a bit like suggesting that one may not write articles about geology without their mentioning in their opening paragraph that there's some guy in Arkansas who has written a book saying the earth is only 6000 years old. --Grace Note

Nevertheless, he also cast doubt on the PVS diagnosis, even though he'd met her too. I think you see these diagnoses as way too concrete. They're not at all like that. They represent opinions about what her internal experience was, which is something that no one can know. People can only make degrees of educated guesses. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 03:48, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

Stop being so abusive. There is no need for it.

I'm happy to add that he was hired by her family. And his diagnosis is not being equated with the PVS diagnosis. I made it clear that seven said PVS, and one said MCS. To add that is not to introduce a POV.

You seem to have strong feelings about the Schiavo case. I don't. I have no reason to want to introduce a POV in either direction. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 23:07, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

---

At this time, Schiavo's weight was 120 pounds. She had also stopped menstruating. <--A weight of 120 pounds for a woman her height is not light; in fact, many would say it's slightly overweight, so it's not in itself indicative of the cause of her menstrual-cycle problems. Needs a good source if we're going to claim it is. In the meantime, I've separated the two issues. -->

Thank you doctor SlimVirgin. Where exactly does the article say that her 120 pound weight is the "cause" of her menstrual cycle problem? This is a embedded note addressing a non-problem. FuelWagon 22:52, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

The way it was written, the sentence appeared to link the two issues - her weight had dropped and her menstrual cycle had ceased - so I unlinked them. You're scraping the barrel if these are your objections. Also, would you mind addressing previous issues before introducing others? Was the neurologist I referred to in the intro (a) a qualified, practising neurologist and (b) did he examine her? If yes to both, no matter who has criticized him, his dissenting opinion ought to be included in the introduction. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 22:59, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

Was the neurologist I referred to.. Ya know, that is the problem right there. You just edited BLIND. Didn't you? And you keep squawking "provide sources for our edits". Why don't YOU provide sources for YOUR edits? I am NOT your research department. Go find answers for your own questions. Next time you make a change like that, feel free to follow your own advice and "provide sources for your edits". This is complete and absolute, hypocritical. FuelWagon 23:09, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

I know the answer. It seems that you don't. If he was a practising neurologist, his diagnosis belongs with the others. You're showing a fundamental ignorance about the difference between PVS and MCS, as though one group of neurologists said black and another said white. It's not as simple as that, and bear in mind that there isn't a neurologist alive who can define consciousness. You're writing as though these are clear-cut issues, and that everyone who supports your POV is absolutely right, while the others are devils. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 23:21, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

If you already know the answer then go trolling for responses somewhere else. FuelWagon 23:24, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

---

Before: In March 1994, guardian ad litem John H. Pecarek was appointed by the court to determine if there had been any abuse by Michael Schiavo. Pecarek's report found no evidence for any inappropriate actions, and indicated that Michael had been very attentive to his wife. <--Do not remove Pecarek's statement. It is quoted in several court orders and GAL reports, however Pecarek's report is unavailable on the internet. -->

SlimVirgin's Edit: In March 1994, guardian ad litem John H. Pecarek was appointed by the court to determine whether there had been any abuse by Mr. Schiavo. Pecarek's report found no evidence of any inappropriate acts, and indicated that Mr. Schiavo had been attentive to his wife. <--attentive? did he actually use this word?-->Mr. Schiavo remained his wife's guardian.<--Might it be worth explaining the sense in which he remained her guardian when there were court-appointed guardians?-->

So, once again, an informative embedded note is deleted (the one saying the statement from Pecarek is QUOTED in several court orders but NOT available directly on the internet). And it is replaced by a question of accuracy "Did he really use that word?" Yes, this is "copyediting". FuelWagon 23:23, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

You're missing the point of that edit. One sentence began: "Pecarek's report found no evidence for any inappropriate actions .." which is poor English. I tidied it to: "Pecarek's report found no evidence of any inappropriate acts .." which is better (though still not what I'd have written). There is awkward English of that kind all the way through the article.

The reason I had to ask the invisible question is that the claim is unsourced. That you mention invisibly that a source exists, but you won't cite it is unhelpful. "Attentive" is a POV term. If it's to be used, it has to be a quote, and if it's quoted, it needs to be attributed and accompanied by a proper citation. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 23:34, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

Sure, and that PERFECTLY explains why you HAD to delete the embedded note explaining the source of that material. It is so clear to me now. The phrase you're looking for, though I doubt will ever cross your fingertips are "I, SlimVirgin, made a mistake. I was wrong. I made a bad edit." All I'm hearing thus far is nothing but lame excuses and hypocrical advice to "source my edits". FuelWagon 23:37, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

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the low potassium could very well have been a spurious result caused by the intravascular administration of fluids during the attempt to resuscitate her. <--argumentative; needs a source-->

"argumentative"??? all this says is that Terri might have had low potassium because they didn't measure her blood until AFTER they gave her a liter or two of intravenous fluids at the emergency room. This explanation is given in the autopsy. This embedded note reflects zero research into the topic by the editor. FuelWagon 23:35, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

Then link to the autopsy if that's your source, or better still, quote from it! This is all about your poor use of sources. You're not writing this article for editors who have researched it. You're writing it for readers who have not. So write it accordingly, and use scholarly and encyclopedic standards of writing and sourcing material. And stop being so insulting. You are way out of line. I blocked you last month for 3RR after exactly this same kind of irrational intransigence, blind reverting, and abuse of another editor because he dared to disagree with you. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 23:42, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

Nope. This has nothing to do with what I did a month ago, on another page, with another editor. This is all about you, SlimVirgin, and a massively bad edit on your part. At a minimum, you deleted two important embedded notes containing pertinent source information. Yet you chastize us with "source your edits". When that little diversion of blame doesn't work, you invoke your administrator priviledge and reference something that happened a month ago on another page with another editor. Nice. As far as I can see, this is an abuse of your administrator status. You made a bad edit and you'll blame anyone but yourself. FuelWagon 23:57, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

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Before: Other neurologists — Drs. Jeffery M. Karp, James H. Barnhill, and Thomas H. Harrison — also examined Mrs. Schiavo over the years and made the same diagnosis; they also shared a very poor opinion about her chances for recovery.

SlimVirgin Version: Other neurologists — Dr. Jeffery M. Karp, Dr. James H. Barnhill, and Dr. Thomas H. Harrison — also examined Schiavo over the years and made the same diagnosis, which entailed a poor prognosis.

Apparently you like the word "prognosis", because you scattered it throughout the article. "chances for recovery" is fine by me, but then I kind of like putting things in plain language so everyone can understand a sentence without having to link every other word. Besides that little annoyance, you changed the emphasis on the second half of the sentence from "all shared the opinion of poor chance for recovery" to "Terri's chances for recovery were poor", but it's no longer clear that this is something that all the doctor's believed. FuelWagon 23:47, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

I wonder whether you know what PVS is. You wouldn't find a doctor alive who would make a diagnosis of PVS but add that the prognosis was good. The diagnosis entails a poor prognosis, and the longer the state lasts, the worse the prognosis becomes. To say that "they also shared a very poor opinion about her chances for recovery" - apart from being bad writing - adds no meaning to the sentence. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 00:06, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

I have a pretty fair idea what PVS is. During the time I've been working on this article (since early April, thank you very much, and I would have thought 213 edits was a lot when they're substantive edits, not just changing from to for—I'm quite sure that doesn't include the Talk Page edits—see that's what we've done here—discussed the topics a lot before we massage the narrative). I've learned a lot. However, I hope that the person that wrote that particular passage (and several others that relate to PVS) identifies himself and verifies the correctness of the narrative. He knows something about the subject that you are clearly guessing at. Duckecho (Talk) 00:56, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Thank you once again, Doctor SlimVirgin, I didn't know you were also a neurologist. I am a simple editor, so all I can do is quote the ANA regarding PVS, which says

The prognosis for recovery of awareness in PVS has been quantified, and, in general, the prognosis depends on the cause and duration of PVS. It is worse after cardiac arrest and after a long duration of PVS. Patients remaining in PVS for greater than three months after cardiac arrest have only a slight chance of recovery of awareness. Recovery of awareness is unprecedented after two years. With head injury causing PVS, the times necessary to show these levels of prognostic certainty are one year and five years, respectively.

So, apparently, there are some varying levels of prognosis, depending on whether it was caused by a head injury or not, and depending on how long the patient is in PVS. The doctors the article is referring to at this point in the article have diagnosed Terri sometime early in her condition. I'm not certain of dates, so I can't place whether it was greater than or less than 5 years. Also, some people have accused michael of attacking Terri which caused her collapse, so some could argue that a head injury might be the cause of her PVS. so, some might argue that Terri could have had a "slight" chance for recovery, based on the ANA definition of PVS and based on their interpretation of events. This seems markedly different than all the doctors saying her chance of recovery was "poor". FuelWagon 00:17, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

NPOV problem

This has to stop. I'm asking FuelWagon and Duckecho to read Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, Wikipedia:No original research, Wikipedia:Cite sources, and Wikipedia:No personal attacks, and to start editing in accordance with them. A key point in NPOV is that debates should be described, not engaged in. You two are engaging in, not describing, the Schiavo dispute on this page, and effectively holding this article hostage, which can't be allowed to continue, because you've been doing it for too long, and the result is a POV and poorly cited article. The effect of that is that the "other side" comes charging in to make what they see as NPOV corrections, but goes too far in the other direction, leading you two to become even more possessive. The dynamic has to stop.

Thank you Fuelwagon, I know what PVS is. The prognosis is always poor, but at the beginning it's more hopeful than after months and years. You're arguing now for the sake of it. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 01:30, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

POV article? Cite the POV issues you have with it. You claimed you were copy editing for style and readability, now you're claiming there are POV problems? I suggest you read this: [7]. The article has already been peer reviewed and the general consensus was that it was "about as NPOV as it can get" (as I recall the quote). I wish you would make up your mind what your problem with this article is. In any event, I'm not interested in your personal advice although I'd suggest you start in at home, first. Duckecho (Talk) 02:57, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Don't exaggerate about the peer review. One editor said it was NPOV; one said it was not. The article is POV as it stands, and if it isn't cleared up, I intend to tag it. The most pressing issue is the intro: it needs to include the dissenting neurological opinion. Regarding my problems with this article, I have told you ad nauseam today already: (a) the writing is poor in places, (b) in some places, the sourcing is poor to non-existent, with quotes unsourced, and sometimes phrases in quotation marks that I think may be acting as scare quotes rather than quotation marks, (c) the intro is POV because it excludes dissenting opinion, and (d) there are some POV turns of phrase in it, which a good copy edit would get rid of. Here's one way to look at the problem. It's very obvious by your attitude that you support the POV of Michael Schiavo. But it shouldn't be obvious. Ideally, I should have no idea which position you support. So let me ask you this. You saw the copy edit I did, the material I added to the intro, and the arguments I've made on this talk page. Which position do I support? SlimVirgin ^(talk) 06:53, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

errors

SlimVirgin posted If you feel I've introduced errors, please list them on talk, and I will go through them with you. But do list them. Don't make unsubstantiated claims.

Several alleged errors were listed on talk, including two that entailed the deletion of important information in embedded notes. As SlimVirgin went "through them" with us, it apparently came down to every single one of his edits were perfectly fine, and it is really a matter of us needing to source our edits (never mind that SlimVirgin doesn't source SlimVirgin's own edits, an advantage, apparently of being an administrator).

Not a single error in SlimVirgin's edits. Not one jot. Not one whit.

Amazing. FuelWagon 00:29, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Show me one error I made in the article, either factual or grammatical. Your invisible comments are inappropriate and shouldn't be there in the first place in such numbers, so quit complaining that some were deleted, because most of them should be deleted. And you must stop the personal attacks and the pointless sarcasm. Your contribs show that almost all your edits have been to just three articles: Terri Schiavo, Nuclear option (filibuster), and Intelligent Design, but particularly this one, and on all their talk pages, there's evidence of you abusing any editor who stands up to you. It's not on. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 01:16, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

Well, I have a question: why did you change the text in this diff [8] from never exhibited awareness of her self to appeared not to exhibit awareness of herself? What was your basis for that? Cite? Actually, I have another question: If you have so much time to research how many edits I've made and where all FuelWagon has edited, how come you couldn't take the time to find out what some of the compromises were that had been crafted among many editors in the development of the article? Duckecho (Talk) 01:54, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

I'm not a party to any of the agreements between previous editors. There's poor writing, poor sourcing, and POV in the article, and they need to be fixed. Fixing them will not introduce a POV; it will just make the piece slightly more encyclopedic. If you read my edits, you'll see I was tweaking, not rewriting, and I was nowhere near finished. If you had allowed the edits to stand, you might have started to see the sense of them, and you would almost certainly have agreed with how I intended to improve the sourcing.

Second, I wrote "appeared not to exhibit awareness of herself" because the judgement that a person exhibits awareness is a subjective one and the word "appeared" stresses that. No cite is needed for an edit like that. A cite is needed, however, if you want to state it as a fact that she failed to show awareness; in that case, you'd need to say something like: "Dr X stated that ..." then link to where he stated it, or offer a citation if there's no link.

If this is the only issue you can find with my copy edit, why did you revert it? SlimVirgin ^(talk) 02:10, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

I'm waiting for an answer from FuelWagon or Duckecho that might explain the blind reverts. Show me one factual or grammatical error that I edited into the article. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 06:55, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

You already got my answer. I listed SEVERAL problems with your massive revert and NOT ONE concession from you. NOT ONE. You DELETE two embedded references to the source of material, and then you INSERT your own embedded note saying "Is this accurate?", and then when I point out your edit, you say "Well, you should have sourced it properly." No, YOU SHOULD HAVE READ THE EMBEDDED NOTE AND SOURCED IT YOURSELF, not delete the only reference to the source of the material. And yet, you have NOT ONCE said anythign to the effect of "Yeah, maybe I could have read that note" or "Yeah, maybe I could have written that better." NOT ONCE. Instead, your only response has been "source your edits", but NOT ONCE DID YOU SOURCE YOURS. And when that fails, you DREDGE UP something that happened a month ago on another page and make vague inuendo that you blocked me before and may have to do it again. You start a whole new section in the talk page saying I'm taking "ownership" of the article and that isn't allowed. You made a bad edit and you don't CONCEED EVEN A SINGLE POINT. Source your edits. Squawk! Ownership, Ownership, Squawk! Remember what you did last month, SQUAWK! What we have here is a Fonzi scenario, ala Happy Days. We've got an editor by the name of SlimVirgin who made a massive edit on the article that has a laundry list of problems. And NOT ONCE has SlimVirgin conceeded a single error, a single overstep, a single mistake. Fonzi could never say the phrase "I'm sorry". And SlimVirgin will do ANYTHING, include slinging mud, to avoid saying "Yeah, I did a bad edit there. I'm sorry." FuelWagon 14:05, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Schiavo as a term

Perhaps I should have put the information about the term "schaivo" in a seperate article with a disambiguation page for just "Schaivo" (to prevent confusion of Schaivo family members and "schaivo"). What do you people think? BTW, this article is kind of long and maybe should be broken down into several parts. Just putting in my 2 cents. --Uthar Wynn 01 05:59, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Oh, and I don't really want to hear any complaints about how "insensitive" my addition was or any crap like that. The article mentions that the terminology can be considered offensive and my addition is totally NPOV, so just keep those kind of comments to yourselves if you were thinking about flaming me. --Uthar Wynn 01 05:59, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

I think this section is unencyclopedic. I'm sure there have been bad-taste Schiavo jokes, and this is an example of them, but they'll die fairly quickly. So there are my 2 cents to balance yours, and I suggest the next person who comes along feel free to remove the section.-gadfium 06:35, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Yup, I did indeed feel free to do that. Proto t c 08:50, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

I'm not going to say it's offensive, because I don't care, but it is unencyclopedic. You have the barest shred of a case for inclusion of slang terms based on the name (a shred... or, to paraphrase, "no"), but the section of examples is crap, this isn't a humor site. You've got about 5 minutes to post a reeeally compelling counter, than I revert. I guarantee you'll hit your 3RR rule before your opponents do.

Fox1 18:50, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Fox1. User:Uthar Wynn 01 has made some strange edits, including adding Terri Schiavo to List of sex symbols. --Viriditas | Talk 19:40, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Fox1, Proto, and gadfium.~ Neuroscientist | T | C → 19:48, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

I was referring to how Terri Schaivo is a "sex symbol" to people with a PVS fetish, but I can't really back up that classification of Schaivo, so I'll let your removal of her from the list stand. --Uthar Wynn 01 21:00, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Please read No original research. --Viriditas | Talk 21:03, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

I said I wasn't going to put her back on the list. --Uthar Wynn 01 21:09, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia totally got bugged for me. No joke, I had a response right away but I tried to submit my reply and Wikipedia was totally inacessible.

You could argue that perhaps the section on the slang usage of "schaivo" should be in an separate article, and merely linked to from the Terri Schaivo page, but to claim that my contributions are altogether without encyclopedic merit is absurd. My section on the usage of "schaivo" was completely NPOV and I attempted to present the information in a professional manner. On the "George Bush" page, one can learn about "Bushisms", tell me, how is this any different? As far as the examples go, they aren't just there to be funny, usually when explaining uncommon terms one should attempt to provide examples of their proper usage, and the examples I provided depicted how the slang terms are used in an informative, if not entirely realistic (I had to give some context, I couldn't just put "Man, I'm so schaivo") manner (how the kind of person who would use these terms might say it). The only reason I can think of that someone could object to my contribution is that the find the terms offensive, and if you are easily offended Wikipedia is not the place for you. Besides, I mentioned that the terms were, indeed, offensive and that their usage is “not recommended in polite conversation”.

Sorry for responding past your “deadline”, but due to technical problems I actually lost my first response while trying to submit it, this is my second write. Can’t we just agree to disagree on this? Maybe you should read the parts in the guide about leaving things in “even if you don’t think they make the article any better”, and also the section where they tell you to “give people the benefit of the doubt”. --Uthar Wynn 01 20:42, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Please cite reputable sources demonstrating common usage. Wikipedia has a strict plicy about no original research. --Viriditas | Talk 20:47, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

I don't need sources for this. Take a look at the various pages listing slang. It's hard to find a "reputable source" demonstrating usage, and a term hardly has to be "common" to be listed. Also, this isn't "original research". --Uthar Wynn 01 20:56, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Unverified claims require sources. Please consult the relevant policy pages, including No original research, Cite sources, Wikipedia:Verifiability, and NPOV. --Viriditas | Talk 21:02, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

NPOV? How is it not NPOV? Cite all the policy pages you want, I don't care. The defenition of a policy violation is more or less determined by precedent, and if you delete this section, you'll have to delete hundreds of "unverified" slang terms on Wikipedia. --Uthar Wynn 01 21:08, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Here, I'll quote policy at you. Assume good faith

I found a source, this is indeed real slang. It's at the bottom of the page, there you go. http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=11699524&postID=111627648979419840 --Uthar Wynn 01 21:30, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

1. The comment section of an anonymous, abandoned blog is not an authoritative source for an encyclopaedia.

2. The content of your proposed addition is "unencyclopaedic" and of little value.

3. Why not make more substantive contributions? You're most welcome too.~ Neuroscientist | T | C → 22:29, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

A space alien (see eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Terri_Schiavo#Scoring ) just told me that you posted your own comment to prove your statement. Is that circular reasoning? Besides, I can get away with it: I have an "inside line" to the little green men...

• Viriditas, yo da man! ~ With all due respect to the newcomer, Uthar Wynn 01 (interesting name; how'd you chose it, Uthar? Is that your real name?), I DO have a good sense of humor, and had a good laugh, but really, you've got to find sources, or it's all made up, that is, "Original Research," which is not permitted; just look around the Internet -I'm sure you can find some links to back up your suspicions that we've got some interesting new "Schiavo" terms, just like "Bork" became a verb -remember that? (That judge was BORKED!) eg not allowed a vote, like judge Robert Bork... look around for some links that back you up, but really, the server overload happens when too many people post, and we've got serious business pending, so please give us a little space, ok. Take care,--GordonWattsDotCom 21:09, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Please keep this neologism out of the article. Thanks. Rhobite 21:47, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

Uthar Wynn 01 has been blocked from editing for 24 hours for vandalising the user page of Veriditas and can no longer comment here. I predict that soon he will have something to say to those involved in this discussion on his talk page soon. And in case you were wondering, I am NOT a sock puppet, though I just might be a sock monkey. --216.183.184.253 00:34, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

Suggestion for SlimVirgin

I have a suggestion (yes, just like the title says) - SlimVirgin, perhaps you could reach a compromise by creating a reworking of the article on a temp page. Your amendments could then be discussed, we could all see how you think the article should read, and things may become a little more civil on both sides.

Now, whilst Fuel and Duckecho are noticeably being unwelcoming to people involving themselves with the article (entirely against the ethos of Wikipedia), you have to understand that there have been countless, countless trolls and POV-pushers who have carried out mass editing, reverted anyone who tries to amend them, and argued the case retrospectively. I am positive you're not of that ilk, but there is more than an air of paranoia about regular editors on the Schiavo page.

As I'm sure you're aware, the article is currently under mediation; perhaps you could read the issues detailed there to gain some understanding of the point I'm trying to make.

One more point, I don't think the implied threats to FuelWagon about blocking him (again?) for 24 hours were helpful; to me, as someone who doesn't know the history of that, it looks as though you're waving that around as a threat purely because he vehemently disagrees with you on copyediting. You're an administrator, rise above it.

But yeah, my main point is perhaps make a temp version (either here or in your own namespace) illustrating your changes. Save the current article there first so we can use the edit history to see exactly how you perceive the changes should go. Proto t c 08:50, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for that suggestion, Proto. I was thinking of continuing with the copy edit on a user subpage tomorrow, and then putting bits up as and when I'd finished them. But I could certainly compromise, complete the first copy edit, and show it to editors here first. I have two concerns about that, which perhaps the others can help to alleviate: (1) I'm not prepared to do this only to have each and every point disputed and turned over, creating more archive pages. Many of the disputes I've seen in the archives have been frivolous. I noticed today that minor edits I made that were perfectly straightforward and correct (e.g. improvements to sentence structure) were being questioned as though I'd rewritten the whole page. That way lies madness. (2) There can't be any sense in which editors on this page are requiring people to seek consent before they make an edit. So long as I hear an acknowledgement from Duckecho and FuelWagon that they will allow other editors to make edits unmolested (vandalism and rampant POV pushing apart), then I'm happy to compromise.

The point about FuelWagon: I wasn't threatening to block him. I can't take admin action over pages I'm editing. I was reminding both of them about policy and asking that the personal attacks stop. For making a copy edit, I was yesterday called ignorant, arrogant, stupid, a troll, and referred to as Madam by two editors I'd had no previous editorial dealings with, and therefore no pre-existing baggage that might explain it. It's unacceptable.

Finally, I take your point about the POV pushing and vandalism this article has seen, and I understand why editors act protectively toward it. But I feel that FuelWagon and Duckecho are POV pushing too by insisting, for example, that no dissenting voice be heard in the intro. That attitude causes POV pushers on the other side to try to introduce their POV whenever they can, which makes FuelWagon and Duckecho even more protective, and on it goes, until you end up with 10MB of archives and a toxic talk page. NPOV doesn't mean this POV should be pushed, then that one. It means trying to take a disinterested view, write in an encyclopedic style, stick to decent sources, cite them properly whenever you make a contentious edit, and give due space to all majority- and significant-minority views, according to how widely those views are held by reputable published sources, not according to how dearly the views are held by editors here. That's the essence of WP:NOR and WP:NPOV. I find most disputes melt away when editors stick to them rigidly. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 09:30, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

But I feel that FuelWagon and Duckecho are POV pushing too by insisting, for example, that no dissenting voice be heard in the intro.

Unless you can QUOTE a DIFF from me that shows me EVER saying "no dissenting voice in the intro", then you are officially a liar. SHOW ME ONE DIFF WHERE I EVER SAID THAT. Could you be any more misleading? Could you twist my words around any possibly MORE? I said if you include Hammerhead, you need to include that his "treatment" was practically laughed out of court as quackery, I said that it misrepresents the facts to compare Hammerhead on equal footing with the other seven neurologists. I NEVER said anything as assinine as "no dissent in the intro", and you're mounting a rabid STRAWMAN against me. FuelWagon 14:15, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Oh, and in case you're wondering, the words you're looking for at this point would be something along the lines of "FuelWagon, it was an unfair of me to misrepresent your words and then attack you for something you never said. I am sorry. SlimVirgin" Just in case that Fonzi brain-lock kicks in and you can't actually type it, you could just cut and paste it and then sign it yourself. FuelWagon 14:22, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Scoring

I hate to do this, but it looks like there is more controversy, but before anyone starts squawking, let me assure you, I'm NPOV: I won't take ANYONE's side: I find some faults (and merits) on both (all) sides. So, as Grandmaster Flash once said:

• Pull up your seats, class is in session
• The master’s gonna teach you all a good lesson
• It’s an open invitation despite what you’ve heard
• And the first to come will be the first served

You're a little bite weird, aren't you, Gordon? If it works for you carry on, by all means, but it needed to be said.

Fox1 20:16, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

And the spacecraft just landed to drop ME off here to FIX this problem. But just remember ONE thing, El Primo Zorro: If We look weird to you Native Earthlings ...Y'all look weird to US too.!.--GordonWattsDotCom 20:24, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Anyhow, here's the scorecard: SCORECARD:

• SlimVirgin: 2 1/2
• FuelWagon: 2 1/2
• Duck: (Scoring is complicated: I may let this proceed between Slim & FW so no mobbing advantage accrues to either side) "0" tentative points (see math below)
• others...

Let's begin:

CAVEAT / Disclaimer: SlimVirgin did not discipline Duck for gaming the system as much as she could have, so some comments below which defend her (I oppose her on some issues) should not be understood as bias; Also, I will never forget how Duck helped me out by putting a link in the article page two days before my birthday linking my court case, which almost saved Terri's life.

1) Regarding SlimVirgin’s edit at (Revision as of 18:38, 11 July 2005), she asks for a source on a claim that PVS is unprecedented after two (2) years. Comments: -the source, a big-fat PDF file did in fact claim that recovery from PVS after 2 years is unprecedented, but that is factually false, as SlimVirgin correctly pointed out (and citing an example, for which she later promises a link) -she doesn't need the link: I'm sure I could find a LOT of cases diagnosed as PVS which were recovered after much longer. (PVS is misdiagnosed almost 50% of the time, so such a claim is false on its face.) She asks for a source, but in fact there was a source given in the article, but the article made the claim carte blanch, not "according to such-and-such" doctors, PVS recovery after two years is unprecedented. (Duck has pointed out in the past that any recovery proves the person was never PVS, but this strawman is moot: Since PVS is so often misdiagnosed, statements about PVS are not relevant because they are unprovable; We need to concern ourselves with the "diagnoses" of the doctors: Claims a doctor made certain diagnoses are provable; claims the diagnoses are correct is not.)

• Scoring:
• 1 point for slim: the article wasn't correct in its claim: It should have said "according to so-and-so doctor..."
• 0 (zero) points each for slim and FuelWagon: Both could have (but didn't) edit the article to make this correction; this is BAD because the link was there, you could have opened the file, and done a keyword search in the PDF using the binoculars icon, like I did.
• 1/2 point for FW because the doctor really did say this false claim, but slim missed it; half a point only as this doctor's claim is false: "Unprecedented" means "it didn't happen previously," but it has several times, Terri Wallis being one such example.

2) Duck (19:00, 11 July 2005 (UTC)) calls slim virgin's edits "massive" at 19:45, 11 July 2005 (UTC), Fuelwagon concurs. I looked at ALL the diffs this morning (headache), and noticed LOTS of red, but I saw that the paragraphs were misaligned, and upon closer inspection, I saw that very little had been edited. It's a "wiki" software problem. I never saw FW or Duck apologize, admit they were wrong, etc., and I read all the comments up to a few minutes ago.

• Scoring:
• 1 point for Slim Virgin. (Although she had two critics, she only gets ONE point; "mobbing" is unfair, even if it's in defensive scoring, like it is in "offensive" attacks where several editors revert one person, pushing the lone opponent past the 3RR. Sorry, Slim: only one point for you, lol.)

Comment: I had not read her comment about the "red" coloring misalignment, and yet had figured it out; I don't see why the "brains" on the other side missed it...?

This is helpful. FuelWagon 17:46, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

What's more, you rack up some major points on points you made, FW, but I don't know if it will be enough for a clear victory. We'll find out when scoring is complete.--GordonWattsDotCom 17:54, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

(Also, her problems with the computers making multiple edits is reasonable, but, sorry, a freak mistake: Sorry SlimVirgin: No points for you, as it was not Duck's or FuelWagon's fault -even tho I believe it wasn't your fault either. Freak computer happening.)

3) FW and Duck take major issue (by reverting) her edits. This is beyond merely calling them massive. I looked at ALL the edits, one by one, and find no major problem. Ann Heneghan, another educated editor, has made comments that concur with me, and she reverted. This is one of my few subjective calls (not objective fact), so scoring will not be a full point. There are enough dissenting views, indicating mediation, arbitration, etc. would be more of a solution to this complex problem, as Proto rightly hints, when he explicitly suggest a sandbox test.

• Scoring: 1/2 point for Slim

BREAK: "::I would assume it's vandalism reversion. Jtkiefer 20:08, July 11, 2005 (UTC)" He/she didn’t check to find out the SlimVirgin is an admin in good standing. Virgin's explanation was reasonable: The new wiki software has had some bugs recently. (No points for slim, because that would introduce a "mobbing" advantage, as mentioned above: Jtkiefer was not one of her principal critics in the present dispute. Sorry, Slim. Take solace in being ahead on points for the time being.)

WIKI Break part 2: Uncle Ed, the talking horse, and quoting Uncle Ed in a copy and paste below --in italics to indicate Uncle Ed didn't post it here:

May I suggest that parties to the mediation avoid making any "reversions"? Moreover, an Edit Summary like revert to last version by Stanselmdoc doesn't really sum anything up.

Our mediation seems to have stalled. Your choices at this point are (1) fire me, or (2) return to the Mediation. I've never failed yet, but if you feel I have failed you, say so. Don't just sneak away. Uncle Ed 20:58, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

Gordon comments: I think Uncle Ed’s doing ok -and told as much to Jimbo, but Ed’s got two problems:

• a) He’s got to deal with lack of screening of editors (like employees do with prospective employees), and this allows crap vandalism that uses up resources (finical, computing, time, stress, etc)
• b) We editors aren’t paid, and neither is Uncle Ed (as far as I know), so it makes it harder to do a good job; I add that these aren’t Uncle Ed’s fault.

4) Fuel Wagon (hereinafter abbreviated FW) takes issue with two times Slim removed hidden comments in reference to links (and replaces them with questions or the like). In one instance, SlimVirgin removed a comment referencing the quote about PVS recovery beyond two years being unprecedented; in the other, she removed a hidden comment about a certain document being unavailable. Comments: In one case, she was right to remove the comment because the link should have been quoted verbatim, and cited as that doctor's opinion; her question was appropriate because the article made a claim instead of saying "such and such" doctor said. However, she also failed to read the PDF, so no points for anyone here: All were wrong. The second hidden comment that was removed was this: "--Do not remove Pecarek's statement. It is quoted in several court orders and GAL reports, however Pecarek's report is unavailable on the internet. --" While it might be good to remove (or blank out & make hidden) the statement that needs this source or link, it is not right to remove a factual statement in the article's hidden comments: Maybe this item WILL become available in the future; we need reference available.) point for FW.

• Scoring:
• 1 point for FW

Another FW concern: “You could have made it visible, but you deleted it instead, and in it's place inserted doubt on the ANA's position and forwarded some urban legend.” True, but FW would have probably reverted her work; she messed up here (and that's why FW got a point above, lol), but this was one small error. Most of her edit was good, and should have been challenged in talk -point by point -or left alone; the large "red" areas in the diffs made her edits look larger than they were, so I understand why others over-reacted. THEREFORE, no points for SlimVirgin. Sorry, but I must be fair. However, I must say that addressing FW's (and Duck's) concerns would probably NOT have helped: Since they reverted en masse, when most of it is good, and refuse to accept any of her good edits (great in number), adding one more good element would probably not help, but I might be wrong: Let's see...

• Scoring:
• A nullity: No points. Premature at this point to speculate, but good points to see the trend and address concerns.

Gordon, scoring, and using words such as 'battle' and 'combatants' is really, really, really, really, really not helping. Also, I don't think Duck 'gamed' anything ... you're picking up neat terms from scrolling through Arbitration decisions again, aren't you? Proto t c 19:29, 12 July 2005 (UTC) Thank you very much for that display of sense, Proto. Gordon, this is absolutely not helpful — at all. You've set up shop on the Talk page scoring the argument, in the pose of some sort of judge; no one, however, appointed you to do this — certainly not on the Talk page. If you must amuse yourself with these scores, please place them on your own page. They don't belong here.~ Neuroscientist | T | C → 19:45, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

• NS, if you can't be part of the solution, the don't be part of the problem: Either follow -lead -or get the hack out of the way. The "talk page" IS the proper place for talk about the article page. Chill out. If you disagree on a particular point, you can weigh in -respectfully. I will respect your viewpoint, but not asking you to shut up; Should you not do that for others -even if they're dumber than a stump?--GordonWattsDotCom 19:50, 12 July 2005 (UTC)Gordon, I am not asking anybody to "shut up." In fact, I'm certain that you are capable of adding very productively to the discussion. Please post your thoughts on the content of SlimVirgin's and Fuel's and anyone else's comments. But I think setting up shop here to "score" "combatants" is not helpful.~ Neuroscientist | T | C → 19:58, July 12, 2005 (UTC) I don't think "combatants" really hurt thing,s but I see y'alls' point, and I allowed Slim to change my title per Proto's request and your subsequent support; OK, now also: Thx for your giving me room, however, without scoring, there's no way to see who's doing what. Yes, I am sure there will be a winner & a loser, and this may seem insulting, but it must be objective, so we can get a feel for the overall trend; but, let me assure you that even the "loser" will probably be able to add productively. If schools didn't score, how would we know if we passed? And, aren't we supposed to learn here? You see my point, but thanks for your opinion.--GordonWattsDotCom 20:08, 12 July 2005 (UTC) I give up.~ Neuroscientist | T | C → 20:11, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

I didn't mean to use combative words: That is only the "title" to get the attention of the people who need it most (the opposing sides), ...good point, Proto, but don't judge the "book" by its cover: You'll see I'm being fair & accurate! As to your other question: Good guess, but no, I don't have time to look into the ArbCom or 3RR decisions. Sorry to disappoint. I'm not quite a super-fast robot, yet. As far as your opinion to Duck, I think I myself gamed the system a little, but it was necessary to put a BAD EDIT in check. I "gamed the system" by only giving Duck minimal notice about his revert problems, but notice was given, and he admits this. Next time, I hope to be more patient and give more notice, but his edit was bad, especially for those with high screen resolution, where things ALREADY look small. "Neat terms?" Yes, I'll agree there. Thx for your suggestions, ...now, I have to get back to work.--GordonWattsDotCom 19:39, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

"Gordon, scoring, and...is really, really, really, really, really not helping." Scoring IS going to help, because it is more objective to look at and analyze (read: add up points) all the facts. I really don't know who's more wrong, so I'm scoring them. What could be more fair than that!? "Also, I don't think Duck 'gamed' anything..." Yes, he did: He used creative editing to get around the 3RR; I myself admitted (see above) that I gamed the system, so I'm not playing favorites.--GordonWattsDotCom 19:44, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

• Apology: I didn't mean to put the title header back in, but had saved a version in a word processor, and accidentally copied and pasted -regarding Proto's request and SlimVirgin's subsequent edit change. Sorry about that. OK, it's real crowded in this room, but I'm back to work. Let's pray to the great "Wiki Gods" that we somehow wait in turn so there isn't any "edit conflict" when posting.--GordonWattsDotCom 19:57, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

5) SlimVirgin’s concerns: “It appears that a small group of editors, currently consisting of User:FuelWagon and User:Duckecho have taken ownership of this page…There are too many invisible instructions and invisible sources in this article. The "instructions" need to be made in the form of requests on the talk page, and the sources need to be visible. You also need to make sure that the sources actually say what you're claiming they said, because in some of the cases I checked they didn't.” Comments: "taking ownership" is an opinion, and while I agree mostly, sorry, Slim: No points. As to invis. instructions, some of those are needed, but, again, it's subjective, and while I agree that it might stymie or hinder future editors, I'm sure they will "be bold" if they've go a point. No point: Opinion, case by case. As far as the sources really supporting the assertions: I found MANY factual errors, unsupported, but this is only one claim you made, unrebutted, so sorry, only one point. (My 500-word summary and the overflow that didn't make the 1st 500 word cu support the factual inaccuracy claims you made.)

• Scoring:
• 1 point for SlimVirgin

6) Like a "Duck" in water, the Echo has some comment posted at 22:18, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

• He challenges Slim's objection to invisible comments. Since I didn't give slim a point for her claims here, Duck doesn't get one either: No harm, no foul (points that is)
• Slim said her work was stymied, and Duck replied that she's only been working on the page for a few hours vs several months. If FW had made this comment, I would have given Slim a 1/2 a point: "prejudice" against one who has not edited here much recently; The merits of her edits is not necessarily dependant on the length of time she's edited, as we're finding out (very few sustentative criticisms), 1/2 "negative" point: We assume that Duck agrees with FW on most all points, and then add or subtract from FW's total depending on Duck's unique contributions to the discussion; this is the only way to be fair to Duck & score him in this 2-on-1 situation. (Only 1/2 point, as this BAD logic is prejudice, but still opinion.)
• Duck opposes the intro being balanced re the Neurologists being mentioned. POV violation EASILY worth 1 point: We must mention all the facts, and what doctors said what is FACT.
• Duck objects to the autopsy being in the intro: He is wrong, I think, because it is a MAJOR document in this case, but he loses no points because it is in fact mentioned later in the article, and also, this is a subjective opinion-based edit decision.
  • Scoring: Negative 1 1/2 points applied to Duck's tentative score

7) FW questions SlimVirgin's use of word "allegedly" earlier today or yesterday in talk regarding the claims that Terri's parents told Mike Schiavo to get on with his life, get a girlfriend, etc. Since the GAL, Jay Wolfson said this in his report, and since I vaguely recall Terri's parents (eventually) telling Mike Schiavo all they wanted was their daughter and making no requests for Mike to dump his girlfriend, FW is correct that "allegedly" would introduce POV by unnecessarily calling into question a known fact.

• Scoring:
• 1 point for FW

Comment: FW pointed out that the embedded "hidden" comment pointed out the page number of the GAL report where Guardian ad litem made this claim, and some PDF docs ARE searchable, thus SlimVirgin should have looked at it, as has suggested, but no points awarded: No "double jeopardy," thank you. The score is tied right now.

Personal attacks

FuelWagon, I can no longer deal with you regarding editing this article. In the last 24 hours, you have called me an arrogant cuss, a jerkoff, a f**%!ng jerk, arrogant, ignorant, a troll, and a f**%!ng *$$s0le. I've seen language like this on WP only from the very worst offenders and vandals, and you can't be allowed to continue doing it, whether to me or to anyone else. I'm therefore withdrawing from editing this article, I hope only temporarily, until I decide whether it's appropriate to approach this as an admin, or whether to pursue dispute resolution as an editor. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 18:06, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

All personal attacks should be removed on sight. --Viriditas | Talk 19:43, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

other diversions

I find it just hilarious that a website that has an article dedicated to a topic such as this can't handle cussing. But hey, anything to divert attention away from the real issue. To me, the real issue is whether the article is made better or worse by an edit. And while SlimVirgin may have fixed a verb tense or two in his massive edit, the overall result, including the deletion of important embedded notes being replaced by unfounded questions of accuracy and urban legend, made the article far worse than it was. Several other problems have been listed as well. None of which, apparently are problems in SlimVirgin's mind. Apparently they all make the article better.

What we have is one massive diversion here. The article was made worse. But SlimVirgin can't admit it. Instead he will divert attention by saying his change was simply "copyediting", that I and another editor are trying to "own" this page, that it all comes down to editors like me inserting unsourced edits, that I'm POV, and finally that I swear too much. SlimVirgin, you have acted as nothing but a victim of your circumstances. You have not taken responsibility for a SINGLE thing you have typed on the article or the talk page. It is ALWAYS someone else's fault.

This is what I'll admit to doing: I admit I broke wikipedia's rules and swore on the talk page. I'm not particularly sorry about it, but I'll take down the language if people have that much of a problem with it. Every single other accusation you, SlimVirgin, have leveled against me is false. I have not violated NPOV on the article. I have not attempted to own the page. I mounted a personal attack by calling you an explitive, but I won't apologize since it was in direct response to you completely distorting my words into something I would never say. I would never say something as moronic as "no dissent in the intro". Yet I've noticed you have neither "sourced your edit" to show where you are quoting me, nor have you apologized for what would be a strawman attack. (out of curiosity, does wikipedia: no personal attacks include strawman attacks and otherwise completely misquoting another editor? will have to look that one up.)

But hey, lets not talk about that. Let's focus on the bad words that FuelWagon used on the talk page.

Whatever. FuelWagon 20:30, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Let's remove all the personal attack stuff and just leave the comments that only discuss the page. I think the both of you are great editors and will accomplish more by working together than against each other. Of course, sometimes that's not possible but in this case it is. I'm asking both parties to take the higher ground and assume good faith. --Viriditas | Talk 20:54, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Fuel has been blocked. What a sorry mess.~ Neuroscientist | T | C → 22:09, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

Article's main photo should be as recent as possible.

Whereas the 1990 photo is more suited for its "early life" section. Shem^(talk) 21:54, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

The SlimVirgin edits (on the Introduction)

The new contributor has asked a number of questions, edited a number of sections, and made a number of charges.

I would like to address some of them. I have made the assumption that SlimVirgin is a woman.

The Introduction

The edited paragraphs may be seen here: [9].

In justifying the changes, she wrote:

I added to the intro what the autopsy report said about PVS, about her brain size, and about her blindess, as these are the key points, and belong in the intro, in my view. I also added that one neurologist who examined her dissented and called her condition a "minimally conscious state," as that's needed for NPOV and accuracy.[10]

[The autopsy report] speaks directly to the issues being debated, and it's the most up-to-date solid piece of information there is. It seems obtuse not to mention its key findings in the intro. Regardless of who has criticized the neurologist who diagnosed minimally conscious state, he did make that diagnosis, and you have no right to pretend it doesn't exist, no matter how strongly you disagree with it. A neurologist counts as a reputable source for WP in matters of neurology, particularly as he examined her. The way I introduced the information made it clear that his was the minority, dissenting view.[11]

She has made similar points elsewhere. There are a number of problems with this.

Firstly — and without prejudice to the substance of her edits — she has a different belief about the purposes of an introduction than many of the regular editors here do. I understand the introduction to a work of non-fiction to be those opening sentences that offer a broad overview of the subject that is being dealt with. It is factual — but does not encumber the reader with factoids. It is informative - but is not stuffed with trivia. It is graceful and inviting — and it cannot be if it is struggling to be clear and concise. It tells the reader the various topics he may expect to read about — but it will not if it focuses on one or two topics alone.

If I were commissioned to write an article about the solar system, I will not litter its introduction entirely with references to Saturn and Jupiter. These are important subjects in their own right, and they are crucial to an essay on the solar system — no one disputes that. But if my introduction to the solar system spoke ponderously about the mass of Jupiter and the nature of Saturnian rings, it fails.

Exactly as SlimVirgin's version of the Schiavo introduction fails.

The regular editors have been trying to craft a good introduction for quite some time, and recently there has been much progress. Prior to recent versions, the introduction essentially told the whole story from beginning to end, and was therefore quite large. There was a recent move to make it clearer and more concise, yet fair and accurate. We essentially want to say, simply, that this is the story of a young lady who had a devastating brain injury, whose loved ones had disagreements over what to do after that, that these disagreements happened over issues of great significance to all of us (such as end-of-life care, guardianship of the incompetent, etc), that at its height the story involved the highest levels of the executive and judicial branches of government, and that finally, a decision was made, and the young lady died.

That she had multifocal cortical laminar necrosis was fine and all, and true, no doubt, but these are matters that properly belong in the body proper, not the introductory remarks of an article.

Or so we thought.

Neuropathology

Secondly, I find difficulty with the substance of some of SlimVirgin's claims. For example, she claims that "the key points" are the "size" [sic] of Schiavo's brain, and "[Schiavo's] blindness" [sic].

This is incorrect. These were interesting findings that were made post-mortem, certainly; lay individuals without any education in neurology, neuropathology or neuroscience jumped at them. However, they are far from "the key points." If we generously take SlimVirgin's meaning of this phrase to be "the most important findings of the autopsy," then she is badly mistaken about them. The critical findings of the autopsy were the pathological condition of her cerebral cortex, in particular the profound, total loss of large pyramidal neurons and accompanying multifocal laminar necrosis; the pattern of gradient antero-posterior loss of cortical neurons; the damage to the thalami bilaterally; and the total loss of Purkinje cells from her cerebellum. I would also regard the relative sparing of her lower brainstem as very important.

The mass of Schiavo's brain on the other hand is simply a crude indication of the extent of damage that her nervous system endured. It has little, if any, intrinsic discriminatory value as a clinico-pathologic feature. In fact, focus on this aside has actually been misleading: witness the uninformed but all too common riposte that many people who underwent epilepsy surgery as children have lighter brains. This is true, but of course it has absolutely nothing to do with the functional capability of an adult brain wrecked by an anoxic insult that destroyed very many specialized regions. But the confusion persists. SlimVirgin seems to have been misguided by a similar confusion.

In fact, the comments that SlimVirgin has made elsewhere conclusively indicate that she has an exceptionally poor understanding of elementary neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and neuropathology. On the Talk page of Grace Note, she writes, [12]

However, if you read my intro, I also added the brain size from the autopsy report. I did that in order to make it clear that any diagnosis of reversible minimal consciousness was unlikely to have been correct. In controversial articles like this, and particularly in the intros, the facts have to be allowed to speak for themselves in a subtle way.

And further,

Sure, when you know the person only has a half a brain, consciousness in any meaningful sense — what we would call a subjective experience or perception of I — becomes increasingly unlikely. But they didn't know she only had half a brain at the time. It was all guesswork, some of it educated and probably right, some of it less so.

Now, I’d like to put this very gently, but I do not know how else to accurately convey it except to say that this person has absolutely, totally, completely, no idea of what she’s talking about. This is an example of the worst in Wikipedia, when complete, arrant nonsense serves as the basis for editorial decisions.

Brain size, per se, has no direct correlation with consciousness. At all. As I’ve just mentioned, there are children walking around after hemispherectomies who’re perfectly conscious and self-aware, and whom you’d never think had so much as sore thumb wrong with them. Yet, a person can lose a tiny amount of brain in the right spot, and simply die.

If we imagine a hypothetical (and horridly bizarre) situation in which SlimVirgin demands a craniotomy and has me remove parts of her brain just to see what happens, I can cause her to become completely paralyzed on one side of the body by removing a portion of brain not much larger than a quarter; I can cause her to go blind by nicking 3cm³ worth of nerves; I can cause her to be incapable of balance and always walk like a drunk by snipping of some fibers at the back of her brain; I could render her comatose by destroying a small bit of brain just above her pons; and I could stop her heart from beating and her lungs breathing by removing just a couple of cm³ worth of her medulla oblongata. I could also remove much larger portions of her brain elsewhere, and she’d hardly feel a difference.

The brain is not like the liver, where every cell is exactly like every other cell. The brain is exquisitely complex — and the clinical manifestation of any damage that occurs depends on precisely where the damage occurred, how fast it occurred, what cells were involved, and sometimes how old the patient was when it happened.

So if SlimVirgin insists that specific details from the autopsy must be provided in the introduction, then she would have to include the following, which are far, far more "key" than a crude and passing indication of cerebral injury:

1. total loss of large pyramidal neurons throughout the cortex; 2. multifocal cortical laminar necrosis; 3. gradient antero-posterior loss of cortical neurons; 4. damage to the thalami bilaterally; 5. total loss of Purkinje cells from her cerebellum; and 6. relative sparing of her lower brainstem.

These are the set of findings that speak to Schiavo's neurological condition, and the diagnosis that was central to the entire Schiavo story. If an editor insists that the introduction must contain details of the autopsy — and these by necessity have to be the most crucial details — then I will insist that the above details are included, for if other, minor details are included in their place I can only conclude that bias and “POV editing” are at play.

Whoever has to fit that into a readable introduction has both my very best wishes and my heartfelt sympathies.

Does everyone now understand why some things are better said in the body of an article rather than in the introduction?

Cortical blindness

SlimVirgin is also wrong when she writes,"The pathologists found massive celebral[sic] atrophy with a brain weight[sic] of 615 grams, roughly half that[sic] of the expected weight, and cortical blindness, indicating she had been unable to see."

This is nonsense, of course. Dr. Nelson did not "find" cortical blindness. He found that Schiavo's visual cortex had been severely damaged, such that it was exceedingly unlikely that Schiavo was capable of sight. Cortical blindness is the clinical correlate of severe destruction of the visual cortex. One does not "find" cortical blindness in an autopsy. One either finds it in life through clinical examination, or deduces it in death upon finding a destroyed visual cortex.

To conclude this section:

1. There are a number of factual errors in SlimVirgin's writings on the neuropathology of the Schiavo case.

2. She makes a logical error of the form:

A. Details X and Y are true about a subject P.

B. Details X and Y are important about a subject P.

C. Therefore, details X and Y must be mentioned in an introduction to an article on subject P.

C unfortunately does not follow A and B, and she has yet to show us why it must — especially when

I. in truth, she is very wrong about the details themselves,

II. Subject P in our case (Schiavo) has important details n → ∞

~ Neuroscientist | T | C → 05:41, July 13, 2005 (UTC)

The SlimVirgin edits (on Hammesfahr)

The new contributor's version of the introduction includes a reference to Hammesfahr's contention that Schiavo was in the MCS prior to her death.[13]

There seems to be a little confusion about Hammesfahr, so I'll just paint a quick picture (no references here, but they are widely available on the net and in the Talk archives).

1. Did Hammesfahr examine Schiavo?

Yes, he certainly did. He also videotaped his examination, and the video was available to Judge Greer to scrutinize.

2. Is Hammesfahr a "real" neurologist? (Does she imagine we imagine he's imaginary?)

He is a board-certified neurologist (yes, I know, unbelievable, but there you go). He is however not a member in good standing of the American Academy of Neurology, and is the only one of the eight neurologists who examined Schiavo who isn't.

3. Is this guy a quack?

Many in the neurological community have, for years — and well before his involvement in the Schiavo case — considered Hammesfahr to be, er, highly unorthodox. In private conversation the term charlatan is often bandied about (although some have no qualms even on national broadcasts). For years, he has been claiming to treat patients with a diverse variety of ailments with completely unscientific treatments, with no evidentiary basis in the literature. He has never formally published the results in peer-reviewed journals¹, although he has managed to successfully get published in the National Enquirer as well as a journal magazine called Lifelines on whose board of editors he sits (and whose address, I believe, is his). It must be a matter of some regret to him that these prestigious works have not garnered him the applause of the people he thinks of as his professional colleagues.

¹A search of the entire electronic bibliographic database of the US National Library of Medicine, which contains a record of virtually every biomedical paper ever written in any indexed peer-reviewed journal in the past 50 years, discloses not one single paper by Hammesfahr, on any subject. Not one single one.

4. Is he a Nobel laureate?

He has claimed, for many years, to be a "nominee" for the Noble Prize "in Medicine" (the title varies: sometimes it's "Nobel Peace Prize in Medicine," whatever that means - both titles are bogus). This is an enormous load of pure, unadulterated horseshit. Charlatanism in the truest sense. I have elaborated on this elsewhere; more details are easily found online.

5. Is he a practising neurologist?

Unfortunately, I believe he is, yes.

6. Is what he says trustworthy?

Now, this is less straightforward. Just because he's blatantly lied in the past, and appears to continue to deceive people, does not mean he always lies. All claims must be examined on judged on their merits. In re Schiavo, Judge Greer had complete access to this guy's examination, and he did an excellent job as a judge - he studied everything first hand to determine its veracity. From his judgement,

"Dr. Hammesfahr testified... he gave 105 commands... Mrs. Schindler gave an additional 6 commands... he asked her 61 questions and Mrs. Schindler, at his direction, asked her an additional 11 questions. [total 183]. The court saw few actions that could be considered responsive to either these commands or those questions. While Dr. Hammesfahr testified that she squeezed his finger on command, the video would not appear to support that and his reaction on the video likewise would not appear to support that testimony."

"...It is clear that this therapy (vasodilatation therapy) is not recognized in the medical community. ...What undermines his [Hammesfahr's] credibility is that he does not present to this court any evidence... he offered no names, no case studies, no videos, and no tests [sic] results to support his claim that he had success in all but one of them. If his therapy is as effective as he would lead this court to believe, it is inconceivable that he would not produce clinical results of these patients that he has treated. And surely the medical literature would be replete with this new, now patented, procedure. Yet, he has only published one article and that was in 1995 involving some 63 patients, 60% of whom were suffering from whiplash. (Note: I believe this to be a publication of the infamous Lifelines journal.)

"It is clear from the evidence that these therapies [hyperbaric oxygen and vasodilatation] are experimental insofar as the medical community is concerned with regard to patients like Terry [sic] Schiavo which is borne out by the total absence of supporting case studies or medical literature. ...The other doctors, by[sic] contrast, all testified there was no treatment available to improve her quality of life. They were also able to credibly testify that neither hyperbaric therapy nor vasodilatation therapy was an effective treatment for this sort of injury."

So there you go. The Judge decided he wasn't credible. Note that this is not the same as deciding that Hammesfahr had a valid point of view, but the others' view was more sound; this decision impeached the credibility of Hammersfahr's findings.

This issue is a lamentable part of the Schindler story. I will never understand how, with all that external funding and advice, they managed to pick him. (I have said before that I wished they'd chosen Cheshire or someone like him from the start; although I disagree with them, they deserved their day in court and this charlatan screwed up any hope they had).

Hammesfahr's credibility issues add a layer of difficulty for others (like us) who're trying to maintain a NPOV. If the disagreement was legitimate, then the solution is clear: include the legitimate "minority opinion," as SlimVirgin puts it, in the introduction. However, no legitimate alternative diagnosis was made here: as Greer's example illustrates, Hammesfahr gave Schiavo something like 180+ commands, and she seemed to make some sort of response, that was not clearly non-reflexive, in a very small handful (IIRC from other sources, approx 5); with this and similar observations, Hammy said she was MCS.

Greer did not simply say that Hammesfhar had no evidentiary support for his methods in the literature. He threw out the credibility of Hammersfahr's clinical observations, and since a diagnosis, PVS or MCS, rests on the integrity of those observations, Greer in effect has shown that no clinically sound, legitimate alternative diagnosis has ever been made.

Now, this is very different from finding that one clinician made observations that were legitimate and consistent with a suspicion of the MCS, but that since 7 other physicians didn't, and the MCS diagnosis requires reproducibility, then the opinion of the 7 is more likely to be true than the opinion of the one. That is not what happened in Schiavo: Greer found one physician's clinical observations to be not credible.

So I understand Fuel's and Duckecho's reticence to include reference to Hammesfahr in the introduction. They were not opposing divergent points of view in the introduction, and anyone who has been involved with this article for any length of time would know that they’ve supported versions of the introduction in the past that included many divergent PsOV. But they are opposed to this particular fellow, and as I’ve shown there are excellent, fair reasons to hold that view.

Having said that, I would now like to enter a defense — of SlimVirgin.

SlimVirgin on Hammesfahr: a defense

We must bear in mind the version of the introduction SlimVirgin happened upon. In part, it went like this:

(December 3, 1963–March 31, 2005), was a St. Petersburg, Florida woman whose medical circumstances and attendant legal battles led to landmark court decisions, historic legislative initiatives, and intense media attention.

On February 25, 1990, Schiavo (pronounced SHY-voh, International Phonetic Alphabet: ʃaɪvoʊ) suffered severe brain damage from cerebral hypoxia, after experiencing cardiac arrest from an undetermined cause. She briefly lapsed into a coma, then passed into an irreversible persistent vegetative state (PVS) as determined by more than a half dozen neurologists, and so remained the last 15 years of her life.

It is easy to see why some contend this violates the NPOV. The sentence in bold goes to quite a bit of effort to enter into details, but seems to present details that are "in favor" only of one side of the dispute.

I can understand SlimVirgin's attack on the introduction (in a way I cannot with some of her other editing efforts). She was trying to introduce what she perceives to be the NPOV - and it is a view that will likely be shared by many, many others.

Now, objection to SlimVirgin's editing of the introduction has thus far centered mainly on its undesirability from a literary and stylistic standpoint. I concur with this criticism, as my first post above will make clear. However, by that same standard, I suggest that the version she came upon was really not much better.

Seriously guys, don't you think this is clunky?

She briefly lapsed into a coma, then passed into an irreversible persistent vegetative state (PVS) as determined by more than a half dozen neurologists, and so remained the last 15 years of her life.

It does exactly what we say we've been trying to avoid. It has detail that is best dealt with in the body of the article. It has unnecessary numbers. How is numbering the neurologists different from numbering the brain mass? If you feel mention of Purkinje fibers is out of place in the introduction, why is mention of the number of neurologists relevant?

A proposed solution

I think there is a way out of this. Ann and I demonstrated it a few days ago, as a matter of fact.[14]

We can all find a way to agree on a version of an article, without agreeing on our reasons for it.

I am going to ask Fuel and Duck and Ghost and Proto and every one of the other regular editors to agree to work on creating a better introduction. A few days ago, there was a version of the sentence now under dispute that had been chiseled from the hard stone of many arguments, and had come to stand the test of time (for a Wiki). It avoided the "POV issue" by simply being simple, and not getting into numbers or unnecessary detail. I really like that sentence for my own reasons. Ann likes it for hers. Duck and Fuel and some others may prefer another version, but I think they can live with that one, and maybe even like it. A bit.

If I'm reading SlimVirgin's attack on the intro correctly, she moved because she perceived the introduction to violate the NPOV. Most of her assumptions were wrong. But not all of them. If we move around a fair objection by writing a sentence that cannot be seen as biased, I sincerely believe she will lay down her sword.

Please consider this:[15]

Despite heroic resuscitative measures, she suffered severe brain damage from the ensuing cerebral hypoxia, briefly lapsed into a coma, and spent the remaining 15 years of her life in a condition diagnosed as an irreversible persistent vegetative state (PVS).

What say thee?

~ Neuroscientist | T | C → 05:41, July 13, 2005 (UTC)

The SlimVirgin edits: Actions & Intentions

I have addressed in the preceding posts the SlimVirgin edits to the introduction.

It is possible to go through each further edit in turn, methodically, and to show that they are in some instances excellent, and in others woefully ill-informed, or weak.

I do not have the time to do this.

I will address only some issues in this post, and mainly confine the following questions and remarks to certain events that I do not yet fully understand.

We have lost one exceptionally valuable, bold, hardworking editor in this absurd flare-up. I hope there aren't anymore blocks, including of the new contributor (can admins nevertheless get blocked?). There are however a few observations to be made about this incident.

Firstly, I would like to say that I think SlimVirgin was well within her rights to edit the page in the manner she did. Wiki policy is slanted toward encouraging bold editing, and the nature of the Wiki is such that edits are to be expected — they are inevitable.

However, I do not think the manner SlimVirgin went about this was wise, nor fruitful. The same page that promotes boldness also says:

But please note: be bold in updating pages does not mean that you should make large changes or deletions to long articles on complex, controversial subjects with long histories, such as Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Abortion. In many such cases, the text as you find it has come into being after long and arduous negotiations between Wikipedians of diverse backgrounds and points of view. An incautious edit to such an article can be akin to stirring up a hornet's nest, and other users who are involved in the page may react angrily. Even so, the editing of glaring grammatical errors is welcome.

If you encounter an article on a controversial subject that you would like to edit, it's a good idea to first read the article in its entirety, read the comments on the talk page, and view the Page history to get a sense of how the article came into being and what its current status is.

If you are an experienced Wikipedian, you will probably have a good sense of which edits will be accepted, and which should be discussed first.

(all emphases mine)

Now, some background first. User:SlimVirgin is not new to Wikipedia. If the boast on her user page is to be believed (and I see no reason it shouldn't be), she is in fact an extremely experienced Wikipedian, with some 12,000 edits to her name.[16] A look at the subjects she's been involved with discloses wide experience with a slew of highly controversial articles.

She is also an administrator.

At the time SlimVirgin edited the Schiavo article, she was perfectly aware of its controversial nature.[17]

She was perfectly aware that it was so controversial it was in an ongoing Mediation.[18] In fact, just before she began her work on Schiavo, she was involved in adjudicating a dispute between two regular Schiavo editors over, of all things, a revert war.

She then came over, and did this.

Now, I completely and totally agree with SlimVirgin that that picture gives the misleading impression that more words were changed than was really the case, because of paragraph movements. However, I also think it's absurd to suggest this wasn't in fact a major edit. In an article like Terri Schiavo, where almost every single sentence and paragraph has been passionately argued over, waltzing in and rewriting the entire introduction is itself a major edit — especially since even a cursory look at the Talk page and archives would have disclosed it was actually undergoing active editing and discussion at the time.

It was not in any way wrong to go right ahead and edit, but would it not have been more sensible (and courteous) to simply join the discussion first? Rewriting the entire introduction that other editors have worked on is not a minor edit. No one should have to tell a 12,000-edit veteran this.

But even so, I know that this was not what provoked the revert war. When SlimVirgin had completed editing the introduction, Duckecho was online, and he posted a bemused remark on my Talk page. It was a parenthetical afterthought:

(by the way, take a look at the intro edit made just a few minutes ago. It'll make you want to cry.) Duckecho (Talk) 16:25, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

I seriously doubt he was going to revert it, especially since random Wikipedians have even in recent days made "drive-by" changes to the introduction that he found absolutely silly, but nevertheless didn't even touch.

But then SlimVirgin did something rather extraordinary. She "locked" the page with a "Major Edit" tag (irony) for 1 hour, 31 minutes, while she went through the page "copy editing."

This was incredible.

Many of the changes were minor, and involved removing embedded notes within the article. However, fantastically, even as she removed embedded notes — and she has since decried their use on the Talk page — she actually placed many embedded notes into the article herself. What gives?

Worse, her notes, criticisms, and suggestions — and some of them, I thought, were excellent — could more easily, more clearly, and more effectively been placed in Talk. Why did she go through her extraordinary “copy edit,” instead of simply setting up a nice post in Talk enumerating her concerns? We could all have had a jolly good go at them, accepted the excellent suggestions, talked about the rest, and referred the genuinely disputed to the mediation page. It would have been swell. What happened?

I do not know, and faced with the standing of this individual on Wikipedia, I’m unable to explain it.

One reason that occurred to me was simply principle. That is to say, she was determined to push the principle that Wiki is open to bold editing, no matter how controversial the article. Fair enough. However, when the very wise Proto suggested a very similar action to posting in Talk, she readily agreed. This is mystifying — was this really so inapparent a solution on July 11?

SlimVirgin claims the "copy edits" she made were all free of error (of both fact and grammar), with the implication that they should simply have been accepted. After one of the first reverts, she said "you are reintroducing all the errors." Leaving aside the hubris it must take to say that, the claim of course was simply untrue. I have already shown that her assumptions of fact in her version of the introduction are riddled with error; further, there are constructions of hers that are most aptly described with one of her favored phrases: "awkward English."

But the problems are not limited to the introduction. Many of the further edits are problematic (and, as I’ve also repeatedly said, others are very good — if she’d done this smartly, she’d have gotten support not only from me and many of the others, but probably also from Duck and Fuel).

I have already said I have no time at the moment to write out a response to each and every one of her edits. If fellow editors would like my thoughts, I may be able to get back to this later in the week, but this is unlikely. This episode has taken a lot out of my enthusiasm for Wikipedia.

My final impressions here are that this User demonstrated very, very, very poor judgment by doing what she did. She had a right to do it, but there are some things which are very dumb to do, even when one has the right to do them. A simple post on Talk, a simple gesture of courtesy to the regular editors, could have prevented this whole mess. Now there is ill-feeling between her and the two editors who reverted her, and at least one of them — an excellent, bold, intelligent, and hardworking editor — is blocked.

He was blocked for some of his actions which are indefensible, yes. And he bears full responsibility for those actions.

But great responsibility for this occurence falls on the shoulders of the 12,000-edit administrator who doesn’t seem to have learned the corollary to the Wiki call to be bold: do not be reckless. ~ Neuroscientist | T | C → 05:52, July 13, 2005 (UTC)