User talk:SPECIFICO

Nomination of Clinton Foundation-State Department controversy for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Clinton Foundation-State Department controversy is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Clinton Foundation-State Department controversy until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article.

Allan Lichtman Webpage

The current wording on Allan Lichtman's web page: "Based on his model, Lichtman correctly predicted Donald Trump's shock victory in the 2016 Presidential Election" is highly misleading. Lichtman has always maintained that he does not predict winners of presidential elections. Rather, his model only predicts the outcome of the popular vote. The previous version of this page (13:25, 10 November 2016) is actually accurate. I'm wondering why you changed the wording. The public already has a poor understanding of statistical models and predication and this exacerbates the problem. You can't change the metric by which you measure success of a model after you see the result.Sting52 (talk) 22:20, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

Could you copy here the link to the source that says his model is designed to predict the popular vote? I will have a look. At any rate, there should be a secondary RS, not his own web page. Thanks. SPECIFICO talk 22:46, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

I've now reviewed the Washington Post article about his model and it says nothing about "only the popular vote" so I am not seeing confirmation of your concern. I am, however, flattered that you chose to celebrate your Wikipedia editing debut with a visit to my humble talk page. SPECIFICO talk 23:02, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

Happy to contribute! Just by way of background, I've been teaching Lichtman's model in my statistics class at the University of Texas for about 20 years. I have also personally seen Lichtman talk about his model at academic conferences. It is not surprising that the Washington Post doesn't mention what the model is supposed to predict. NPR also writes incorrectly about the model, as do many other sources. The problem is that, in most cases, scientists are not writing the articles. In statistics, this is known as the "sharpshooter's fallacy" (you shoot the barn first, then draw the bull's eye). Lichtman claims he correctly predicted the Bush v. Gore election, because he predicted Gore would "win" (i.e., get a plurality of the votes). But now, he (or at least the media) say he correctly predicted this election, using a different criterion! If I get to shift the target after the fact, I can predict lots of things correctly.

In any case, there are multiple sources to see that his model only intended to predict the popular vote. The main one is his original paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: http://www.pnas.org/content/78/11/7230.full.pdf. See the bottom left-hand column of page 7230 in that article. Furthermore, Lichtman wrote multiple books about the subject (basically, he writes another one every four years). The latest one is "Predicting the Next President" (2016) Rowan & Littlefield, publishers. Page x of the introduction mentions that only the popular vote is being predicted and it is stated even more explicitly on page xi: "Thus they predict only the national popular vote and not the vote within individual states." This point is repeated throughout the book, and every book he has written on the subject. I hope this is convincing.Sting52 (talk) 03:46, 12 November 2016 (UTC)

Just curious?

You did a fair amount of editing at the article on Value Walk and expressed doubts about the notability but haven't participated in the AfD. I was just wondering if there was any sort of reasoning, like that you avoid AfD's or something? Not that you need to explain, just idle curiosity on my part. Niteshift36 (talk) 05:23, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

Hi. Just scheduling. SPECIFICO talk 14:32, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

• Ok. I once ran across an editor that avoided AfD's for some reason. Just curious. Niteshift36 (talk) 16:29, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

Well, I didn't think I'd be adding anything by jumping on the AfD alongside the article's author after I had made my views clear on the article talk page. Anyway, thanks for the reminder. I left a note on the AfD page this morning. SPECIFICO talk 17:06, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

ArbCom Elections 2016: Voting now open!

Hello, SPECIFICO. Voting in the 2016 Arbitration Committee elections is open from Monday, 00:00, 21 November through Sunday, 23:59, 4 December to all unblocked users who have registered an account before Wednesday, 00:00, 28 October 2016 and have made at least 150 mainspace edits before Sunday, 00:00, 1 November 2016.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2016 election, please review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:08, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

Wrong diff?

Hello. You mentioned me at WP:AE, but the accompanying diff doesn't appear to have anything to do with me. Perhaps you had another edit in mind? ​—DoRD (talk)​ 12:43, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

Hi. Fixed. Thank you! SPECIFICO talk 14:05, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

America: Imagine the World Without Her

{{ Please do not add or change content, as you did at America: Imagine the World Without Her, without citing a reliable source. Please review the guidelines at Wikipedia:Citing sources and take this opportunity to add references to the article. Thank you. Erik (talk | contrib) ^{(ping me)} 04:47, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for the lovely template. I will treasure it. Since the article has very few page views, I am not inclined to work on it any more right now. If you are, you should note, first, that you are the lone editor dissenting from the opinion of several others who have asked you to stop the repeated deletions and POV tilts of content there. In the case of this particular edit, I believe that you have made an error of logic. What I attempted to do was to address the specific comment you made, to wit, that we had no basis to assert that "most opinions are X" without defining the universe and taking count of the number that are X. In the formulation you just reverted, my language avoids that problem by saying that "few opinions are Y". We can state that because we do not see many Y opinions, and we can be confident of no misrepresentation because if any editor disagrees with my version, the remedy is simply to find more than a few Y opinions, in which case no reasonable person would continue to feel my words are correct. Please confine any further discussion of this matter or the movie to the article talk page. SPECIFICO talk 21:58, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

What's more "jaw dropping" is the part where he admitted to "baiting you" (his words) in tthe subject heading of his rv when removing your good faith warning on his talk. Also, he is using the AE by the other banned editor to passive aggressively canvass the community for his own AE.There is no need for him to bring up his AE in another AE. Clearly he is trying to influence uninvolved admins with his statements there so that when they come to his AE they will be left with a better impression, like when he changed his intro page into a milder version so no one would notice. This is a straight forward violation of sanctions and rather than apologize he is accusing the system of being rigged and admins of being part of a liberal conspiracy to censor alt-right editors like him, hence his "the fix is in" attack against admins. He refuses to back down on that accusation against Wikipedia authority because he's convinced the system is a loss cause for him. So he shouldn't be upset then at an indefinite topic ban on political pages, which is the only practical solution for an out-of-their-mind WP:NOWHERE editor. Maybe a few weeks off to cool off would do him some good too. His big thing is other banned editors calling a political figure "corrupt"? Well, then... calling the President the founder of ISIS certainly is as big a BLP violation as any, and no, he doesn't get to pass it off advance a joke if other banned users putting mug shots up of convicted felons is beyond the pail for him. By his own logic he should be banned. Also, dont respond to me here since we don't want to be guilty of gossip. Rather, bring these concerns to the AE if anything here that U brought to your attention warrants discussion there. After awhile crocodile ;)

Notice

Pretty sure those have to be given out by a previously uninvolved admin. Sagecandor (talk) 17:31, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

No. Please read it. It's not an accusation, just housekeeping that we all have the notice. All editors on these articles should routinely be given them. Here's the template you can use to notify others: {{subst:Ds/alert|topic=ap}} SPECIFICO talk 17:34, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

Source please ? This means involved parties can notify each other even at same time as potentially in conflict and edit warring with each other ? Sagecandor (talk) 17:38, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

@SPECIFICO:Do you intend to take me to WP:AE for something in particular, or was this just a neutral notification due to general editing on the topic ? Sagecandor (talk) 18:07, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

Can you please answer this question ? Sagecandor (talk) 19:00, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

Question

Had you ever specifically been given notice in the past about specific case Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/American politics 2 ? Sagecandor (talk) 18:59, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

SPECIFICO, we may be getting off on the wrong foot here. I checked your logs and saw you had not been notified before about this particular case, unless I am mistaken ? Sagecandor (talk) 19:12, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

My apologies

Sorry, I checked your talk page archives, now I see the log shows [1] by Coffee.

I see it is not in your talk page archives but is in the logs.

Please accept my apologies. Sagecandor (talk) 19:15, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

I don't know anything about you or your edits. As I said, you were a new face to me on these articles, so I didn't want you to violate these restrictions inadvertently. The only other thing I'll say is that from time to time, experienced editors will snare relatively new editors into defending disingenuous and rule-bending edits that promote a non-mainstream point of view. Disruptive editors can be quite persistent at trying to conceal this behavior. It's not an easy area in which to edit. Good luck. SPECIFICO talk 19:22, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

Understood. Duly noted. Thank you. Again, I'm quite sorry about all this and I hope you can accept my apology. Sagecandor (talk) 19:23, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks no need to apologize, but I will accept it and file it alongside my other WP memorabilia. WP is a worthwhile and important project, so we all need to work together. Sad to say that these politics-related articles attract disproportionate participation by ideologues and ill-informed editors. SPECIFICO talk 19:31, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

Agreed, thank you. My main goal at that particular article is for it to be able to be read easily, cut down on quotations and make the writing style more concise. And especially not have people adding new info directly into the intro, and instead first add it into the article body. Sagecandor (talk) 19:34, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

Glass houses

Unlike me, you actually have (by your own admission) violated 1RR at 2016 United States election interference by Russia with these reverts. (Keep stalking and reverting only my edits, and "TTAAC needs to blocked or banned" is going to come back to haunt you.) Unlike you, I'm going to give you a chance to self-revert before crying to a drama board. I hope you take it.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 20:49, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

I'm assuming this is connected as well, but it's a bit disingenuous to claim on one hand that a DS notice is not an accusation, just housekeeping that we all have the notice. All editors on these articles should routinely be given them.([2]), and in the same breath when you yourself are given the same, reply that I am going to file a complaint if you don't remove that sanctions notice from my talk page. It's clearly a violation of WP:POINT and I have no idea what constructive purpose you could claim it accomplished.([3]). Just a friendly reminder. TimothyJosephWood 20:56, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

I don't know whether the page is up, because it's somewhat sexist and not all that witty, but "Don't be a dick" applies to your message, TJ Wood. I had previously received that notice, as is evident from the "My Apologies" thread above. If you're trying to stir up trouble, that's a violation of ARBAP2 and you might be surprised one day to be called on the carpet. Do be careful. SPECIFICO talk 21:46, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

That was pretty much my message as well. If you'll look at my talk, I was given the same by the same user, which completely makes sense, if it is indeed housekeeping we should be routinely reminded of. Unlike yourself, I attempted to explain why it was not the best use of the template rather than threatening to take them to ANI.

The fact that you in turn threatened to take me to AE over the issue, probably means that you need to take a good hard look at your assumptions of bad faith, and fix yourself. TimothyJosephWood 22:43, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

Not only have I not threatened you, but you've disregarded my observation that you are speaking without first checking the context that would address whatever concerns you may have. Don't post any more on this thread. Please read all the context on all the related pages. Thanks. SPECIFICO talk 22:51, 14 December 2016 (UTC)