User talk:AndyTheGrump/Archives/2011/March

Julian Assange

• moved to Talk:Julian Assange#Lord Chief Justic electronic recording

Apologies, Andy; we appear to have reverted almost simultaneously on the Assange article; wiki is a bit sluggish for me tonight. I don't think any harm was done, and I added a second ref seeing as the wikileaks ref that was originally there is now dead. Kaini (talk) 00:35, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

agreed. and israel shamir as a source? sheesh. i try and stay away from editing the article as much as possible (too much wiki-stress, that talk page sees some rather... vigorous discussion) but i keep an eye and try and revert anything blatantly BLPvio/ridiculous/tin foil hat. Kaini (talk) 00:48, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the dialogue, however, I can't agree with either of you. I removed the alleged victims name from my entry, but I think that is completely ridiculous because her name is been published numerous times all over the world. So why are we hiding it now? I don't see the point. As far as Assange being the founder, I don't think that this topic has been clarified. The Wikileaks website does not identify Assange as the founder. It says various people from around the world founded Wikileaks. I have read the discussion and I don't think any of it addresses my concern. THC Loadee (talk) 02:08, 2 MARCH 2011 (UTC)

Edit summaries

Please be more specific with you language. Using something like "poor wording" is not adequate justification for a reversion. I need reasons why it is poor wording so that I can attempt to find a compromise. Also, please try to find compromise yourself rather than lazily resorting to a reversion. Gregcaletta (talk) 03:01, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Arctic Convoys

Many thanks for your thoughtful comments at Wikipedia:Reference desk/Humanities#Continuation of Arctic Convoys when alternatives existed. I've left a further comment with a few additional thoughts of my own. If I get time, I may try to expand the relevant articles with the additional references that came up during the discussion. I've certainly learned a few things! --Demiurge1000 (talk) 04:01, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Mediation

Andy, I've never been in a mediation here, but I have seen it work in real life. I respect a lot of your work but you and I are not as friendly and respectful towards each other as we should be.

• 2 questions;
• 1:Do you think the mediation process here could be helpful for our wikipedia editing relationship?
• 2:Would you want to give it a try? Mr.Grantevans2 (talk) 12:13, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Assange

Your edits seem to be consistently biased against Assange. Please reconsidered your principles or refrain from editing articles in which you are emotionally invested. Gregcaletta (talk) 22:27, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

'Swedish Judicial Authority v Julian Assange' article

I have renominated the article for deletion, mostly in the hope to get the article out of the POV rut it seems to be suffering from. I have listed some alternatives to deletion, because I think that written properly, there is some potential in it, but it concerns me that each day we end up coming back to an article that is barely holding the line against a lot of gossip that is more geared for the 24-hour news cycle than an encyclopedia. -- Avanu (talk) 05:17, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

N****

No problem with your redacting at Jimbo's talk page... Though I think you'd be interested in this link, to John Lennon singing a song using the word the way I believe it was intended by the poster today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5lMxWWK218 . Cheers, Ocaasi (talk) 20:22, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

There are clearly places where the word is appropriate, as Lennon argues - I think all the evidence points to the (blocked) poster using it to provoke a reaction - as indeed was the essay itself. AndyTheGrump (talk) 20:35, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

Reverting large amounts separate unrelated edits

Your reversions of large amounts separate edits, such as [Reverting large amounts separate unrelated edits this one], are very upsetting to me. It took me a long time do do all those changes. Much of it was mere copy-editing, wikilinking etc which is tedious work. You need to give justifications for each change you make to the encyclopaedia and if you do not restore this material I may have to report you for vandalism. Thank you. Gregcaletta (talk) 05:30, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I realize this is not a complaint toward me, but I was curious of you, Greg, if the revert you are referring to is the latest one? I noticed Andy's revert earlier, and it seems to include more material that, in this editor's opinion, is skewed in nature.

For example, you open in the lead paragraph with a quote from Assange, yet there is no balance for that quote. In the next part, you add that he continues to deny the allegations right after it is said he is appealing the decision. What other logical reason would he have to appeal except that he is denying the charges? So it just seems to be a need to strengthen the claim and push a little bias into the article. Next you add that Assange has not been formally charged yet, which only strengthens the POV argument about the overall changes. I do agree that the first sentence might need some minor clarification to indicate that formally, the Swedes say he is only being remanded for questioning and potentially will charge him, but that is a different discussion. The final edit I see is where you indicate that she gave "consent" to Assange, but if full consent was given, why would the police have a problem with it? The word consent really triggers another alert in my head that this is adding more bias. I don't want to seem like I'm not appreciative of your efforts, and I know that your comment above was directed to Andy, not me, but I do feel that the revert he made above is a good revert. Just my 2 1/2 cents. -- Avanu (talk) 06:06, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

All of these arguments are perfectly valid points, but AndyTheGrump did not make any such points and simply reverted all of my edits, including many that were not controversial, rather than just reverting the specific edits he disagrees with. He seems to just revert everything out of being too lazy to work out the individual changes I have made and which parts he actually disagrees with, which is extremely frustrating and verging on vandalism. 95% of what I did was uncontroversial copyediting like these edits: [1], [2], [3]. Reverting so much of my uncontroversial hard work just because he disagrees with a few of the changes and is too lazy to go through and make the changes manually is verging on vandalism. Gregcaletta (talk) 08:39, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Avanu, I will reply to some of your objections on your talk page. Gregcaletta (talk) 09:06, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Gregcaletta, if you continue to push your controversial and totally biased edits into the article, I will chose to remove them as I see fit, and any further accusations of 'vandalism' will be reported. Your endless pushing of the most blatant POV agenda is totally contrary to Wikipedia policy. If you wish to prove to the world that Assange is innocent, Wikipedia isn't the place to do it. We report verifiable facts, not your interpretation of events. The verifiable facts are that allegations of serious sexual offences have been made, and that such allegations have been denied. While the investigations and legal case(s) continue, everything else we could report has almost certainly been spun by one side or another, and none of it is evidence given under oath. As I understand it, it is normal for suspects in alleged sexual offences cases in Sweden to remain anonymous, and I thing it is clear why - this endless going over details does nobody any good whatsoever. What is written in Wikipedia isn't going to affect the outcome in any case, so all this serves to do is to titillate the casual reader, and allow those with a dubious POV to spin away. A clearly-biased Wikipedia article would only serve to harm our reputation, and I'm sure that most readers can see an agenda when they see one. If you can't conform to expected NPOV standards in the article, I suggest you cease editing it before you are prevented from doing so. AndyTheGrump (talk) 13:46, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

[4], [5], [6]: So these three edits that you reverted were POV pushing? Gregcaletta (talk) 07:45, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Ethnicity discussion

Could you please keep things a little less personal? Calling other editors "obsessive" and accusing them of being SPA accounts[7] is unlikely to lead to agreement in discussion. Thanks, - Wikidemon (talk) 15:38, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Unfortunately that's exactly what Bus Stop is. Be it personal or not, it's pretty much a fact. His discussions are circular and only there to confuse and cause disruption. Bulldog123 18:17, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm not saying he isn't but calling him that probably won't help. Well, thanks![8] And no worry about Godwin's Law. There's probably an implicit exception when discussing external definitions of Jewish identity. - Wikidemon (talk) 08:08, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

The thing is that Bus Stop and I have had a long-running debate on this issue, and he has a habit of falling back on his 'reliable sources' argument when he runs out of other things to say - we've been over this so many times that it just looks like a refusal to engage in debate, combined with an insistence on getting 'the last word' in. As for Godwin's law, I knew then I was being controversial, if not outright obnoxious in the context, but it seemed to be the only way to get the point across, and may actually have sunk in for once. On the broader issue of the way ethnicity is handled on Wikipedia, I don't expect to change this significantly in the short term - it is really a question of getting contributors to accept that (a) the academic world has a much more subtle understanding of the topic than say the 'reliable sources' often used do, (b) The version presented on Wikipedia is too closely tied to an US-centric 'racial' perception of ethnicity, overlaid with some enthusiastic ethno-boosting from other quarters - all of which tends to over-exaggerate the significance (and meaningfullness) of the topic. It is always likely to be a controversial issue, and the debates on Wikipedia are largely a reflection of those in the outside world (as indeed they should be), but I think there are reasons to suggest that there is a systematic bias introduced into the topic, due to the structure of Wikipedia, and one of the root causes of this is the misuse of 'lists' and 'categories' as ideological tools. Personally, I'd like to make it a rule that the only lists/categories into which people (living or dead - the dead have ideological uses too) can be placed are those of a clearly-defined legal/contractual status - nationality, (relevant) qualifications, (relevant) awards and the like. If issues of ethnicity (or sexuality, or other subjective personal matters) are to be discussed, this should only be done in a biographic article, only where relevant, and with due weight. Until we agree to this, the potential for systematic bias remains. AndyTheGrump (talk) 17:14, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Very interesting, and thanks for explaining. The Holocaust is an extremely important guidepost, so the counterpart to not bringing it up lightly is not to ignore it either. I'll do my best not to get into any long-running debates with anyone here. The question of Wikipedia's conception of ethnicity (and perhaps other things) being US-centric is a curious one. I hope to think this one through more in the future. I see Wikipedia's task here is a subtle one. - Wikidemon (talk) 20:03, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Copyright

I have noticed that you warned other users about copyright issues at the Argentines of European descent article. I think you're not informed well on this. The important thing is that the "history" tab lists all the people that edited the article and what did they add to it. It is wrong to "copy & paste" from a page somewhere else, because the history is lost, but there is no problem in doing so between revisions of a same article, because it is all stored toguether. Even if a vandal replaces all content with a "hi mom" message, and I copied and pasted the previous revision over it to restore the article, there would be no breach of copyright by neither the vandal nor me. MBelgrano (talk) 22:23, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

As I understand it, to do what Pablozeta is doing, you have to explicitly state in the edit summary that you are copying from an earlier version of the article - otherwise it looks as if all the insertions are his own work. See also Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia. There is no good reason that I can think of not to use the correct tools for reversion in any case. AndyTheGrump (talk) 22:32, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

I have asked a question about this here: Wikipedia_talk:Copyright_problems#Copy-pasting_an_old_version_of_an_article.2C_rather_than_reverting_using_the_normal_tools AndyTheGrump (talk) 22:53, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

Inclusive fitness, evolutionary psychology and refutation: wither falsifiability?

hi Andy. I'm trying to contribute a small, verifiable and important edit to the evolutionary psychology article, but it keeps being shot down by Leadwind. I have outlined my justification on the EP talk page, and a discussion is starting there. I would appreciate it of you could add your opinion to the discussion there. Many thanks Maximilianholland (talk) 17:19, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Hi Andy - Thanks for being here. Don't go away.·Maunus·ƛ· 16:03, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

ANI reply

Hi. We, or at least I, seemed to be getting a little OT and lengthy on Noleander, so I'm replying to your latest post here, hope that's all right. A little strangely, you accuse me of arguing by "guilt by association". That is "an inductive informal fallacy of the type hasty generalization or red herring which asserts that qualities of one thing are inherently qualities of another, merely by an irrelevant association." (Wikipedia: Guilt by association.) See how that's not what we have in my remarks on Noleander? In using material from Stormfront etc, Noleander sets up a relevant association. Do you really not think so? That way, qualities of the source become inherently qualities of the article.

As I said, the Stormfront and Radio Islam plagiarism issues were brought up in one of the threads Slrubenstein linked to at the top; I wasn't offering them as part of the current thread, as you seemed to think. That's why I gave a diff to the relevant post, and talked about the interest of those threads. Sorry it wasn't clear. In case you want to see the post in context, it was in this thread, right at the top.

"Allegedly" goes comfortably anywhere, doesn't it? If you click on my first diff, you'll see Noleander admitting the "allegation" that he'd plagiarised Stormfront.

I was a bit disappointed to read your posts (which struck me as deaf to arguments and links, and rather free with attacks), as I've noticed your editing around the place and always liked it. Oh well, there's an ebb and flow in those things, I suppose. Bishonen | talk 16:48, 26 March 2011 (UTC).

The AN/I discussion you link to is a long one, but from a quick look I can't see Neolander admitting to plagiarising Stormfront anywhere. He says the text in question came from the Rasio Islam site. While this isn't my idea of WP:RS, it isn't Stormfront. If I have missed Neolander's admission, can you please indicate where it is? He is now stating that he hasn't even visited the Stormfront site, so this is clearly important. AndyTheGrump (talk) 17:29, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

Troublesome to read those long threads, isn't it? I didn't mean Noleander said "I took that from the Stormfront site"; I was referring to his remark that there was no telling whether his unacknowledged quotes came originally from Stormfront or Radio Islam (the implication being that one of them plagiarised the other, and he doesn't know which). "I have no idea who originally assembled Medved's quotes in that manner: RadioIslam? Stormfront? There is probably no way of ever knowing." [9]

Did you notice Noleander's declaration of intent in the same post? "My perception is that Wikipedia is censored in regards to some topics that reflect negatively on Jews, and I'm attempting to reverse that censorship." A worthy purpose. Bishonen | talk 01:22, 27 March 2011 (UTC).

So you acknowledge that Neolander hasn't admitted to plagiarising Stormfront? It may well be that Neolander's behaviour has been questionable, but this doesn't justify attempting to associate him with a neo-nazi website there is no evidence he has even seen. Regarding his 'worthy purpose', if he genuinely believes that there is a systematic bias against "topics that reflect negatively on Jews", and his actions are intended to correct this supposed bias, are there actually valid reasons to suggest his intentions aren't worthy? If you wish to suggest that Neolander's intentions are actually to introduce bias rather than to correct it, then clearly this is a different matter, but this needs evidence.

Frankly, the entire debate at AN/I is a mess, and should have been jumped on right from the start, when the allegation of anti-Semitism was put into the section header. That is no way to encourage a rational discussion. Frankly, I can't see the issue being resolved this way, and it doesn't reflect well on anyone. AndyTheGrump (talk) 01:49, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Astrology edit

With respect to this edit we have an article about him and his master class is listed by the Government of India, Department of Education http://www.education.nic.in/circulars/astrologycurriculum.htm#List%20of%20Foreign User:Fred Bauder Talk 20:31, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes, we have a stub article about Noel Tyl, with no real references indicating any notability, and no mention of this 'course'. I'll probably AfD the Tyl article soon, unless meaningful evidence about this course is provided. The Indian DoE list is just that - a "List of Foreign Institutions where Astrology is Beong [sic] Taught". It tells us precisely nothing about whether Tyl's course is recognised by anyone but himself. Basically, it looks like second-hand spamlinking. AndyTheGrump (talk) 20:42, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

It does, and is, but it is published by a reliable source, The Government of India. As to Tyl, he is clearly notable if you research a bit, as an opera singer, if nothing else. User:Fred Bauder Talk 20:48, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

There is no point in discussing this in two places at once - please keep discussions to the astrology talk page, where others can see what we are debating. AndyTheGrump (talk) 20:51, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

21 published books on astrology listed on Amazon. User:Fred Bauder Talk 20:52, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up re the deletion

Not sure how that happened. It is restore now. Thanks. Memills (talk) 23:30, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

Sarah Douglas/Margaret Pilleau

I am new to this: I can't actually 'cite' anything, but I do not like to see information that is wrong!

I know that she is one and the same person as she gave me a photograph of herself after we left school and signed the back with 'stage name - Sarah Douglas'.

As Margaret Pilleau she appeared in Blakes 7. There is quite a lot of information about her on Google, eg http://www.tv.com/margaret-pilleau/person/209458/appearances.html

For some time she lived in Southwater,Horsham Sussex. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Estelle65 (talk • contribs) 15:18, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

Are you saying that the woman in our Sarah Douglas article is the woman you went to school with? If so, is there anything else in the biography (other than her parent's names) that you think is incorrect? If they are one and the same person, perhaps she has been using two different stage names (not unknown in the acting profession). In any case, to revise the article, we'd need proof. I'll do a bit of checking myself, to see if I can find anything further. AndyTheGrump (talk) 15:33, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

In 1951 an Edward Douglas married Beryl C Borg in Stratford upon Avon. I can tell you Margaret went to the Weber Douglas Acting School and she also worked with Hayley Mills in "The Chalk Garden". This was in a letter she wrote in the 1960s. I have not seen the film. In the Wiki article it said she married Richard Leparmentier in 1981. A Sarah Douglas married Edgar F Le Parmenter in Warwickshire in 1981. Margaret Pilleau married the following, 1967 Norman Taylor, 1991 Leonard Holdstock and 1998 David Young. That is on www.ancestry.co.uk

I was born in 1946 and Margaret is 2 or 3 years older than I, her birthday being in May. I realise that in the acting profession things are never quite what they seem!!

I cannot provide any proof, in my many moves Margaret's letters (and other correspondence) were mislaid. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Estelle65 (talk • contribs) 15:54, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

All rather strange. We can really only go by what the sources we have tell us though. I'll carry on looking, anyway. AndyTheGrump (talk) 16:10, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

Merging Israel and the apartheid analogy

I answered your question.I.Casaubon (talk) 00:48, 30 March 2011 (UTC)