Talk:Edward McSweegan

comment 1
Hi. This is the talk page for.... Please advise as to how to format the footnotes that I have included for some of his many publications. I have verified that there is one living in Maryland.

As to whether there is a different authoring papers on similar topics-- I leave this to be answered through debate and facts. Thank you Freyfaxi 12:44, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

comment 2
This entry was not authorized or authored by Edward McSweegan. The writer of this error-filled page is identified as freyfaxi@...deleted..., a self-described Lyme disease [http://groups.google.com/group/sci.med.diseases.lyme/msg/ff941b0703b26b41? Activist] obsessed with the notion that Lyme disease—caused by the tick-borne bacterium, ‘’Borrelia burgdorferi’’—is actually some kind of engineered bioweapon. Lyme activists have a long history of propagating fantastic fantasies and conspiracy theories through the Internet, and harassing scientists and physicians who disagree with their opinions and delusions (NYT Magazine, June 17, 2001). Some of these activists have been jailed; others apparently have been placed in psychiatric hospitals for a time, though obviously not long enough.

In any case, the information below is inaccurate. This should not come as a surprise when an online encyclopedia allows vandals, children, conspiracy nuts and the mentally ill to write and edit entries. Until this entry can be removed completely, I have made some corrections to illustrate just how farcical are this page and its author. Emcsweegan 17:41, 1 July 2007 (UTC)emcsweegan

comment 3
What the hell is wrong with you people? Bored? Unemployed? Can't afford enough medication? Emcsweegan 23:28, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

material removed from article
I've removed the following rant from the article:

’’’Edward McSweegan’’’ did not approve or author this entry. He has no interest in being part of an online source of transient, inaccurate gossip compiled by anonymous and irresponsible vandals, adolescents, and busybodies.

In keeping with the Wikipedia tradition, some of material below is dated and therefore inaccurate. In addition, all of the material was lifted, without permission, from the IOM and NIAID websites. Yet, this is a huge improvement over the original entry, which was so full of inaccuracies and distortions that every sentence had to be corrected and referenced. That edited entry has since been removed by Wikipedia’s nameless guardians of digital fluff.

Like the guy standing before a firing squad who says, “I’m flattered by the attention,” I have similar feelings about Wikipedia’s insistence that I be included in their compilation of junk information authored by high schoolers, pseudo-intellectuals, fake experts, crackpots, and online stalkers.

You can only be put before a firing squad once, but Wikipedia offers endless rounds of entries, edits, revisions, rewrites, updates, clarifications, addendums, supplements and postscripts, on and on, into the endless future. At least they spelled my name right.

Studerby 04:14, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

comment 4
Why? It's true. None of this online crap was approved or authored by me (EMS). Why do I have to be listed on this site? I did, however, send copies of these latest Wiki entries to various friendly reporters trying to get them interested in doing another story on Wiki as a source of mis- and disinformation and all around junk data. I also included Wikipedia in a note to the Institute of Medicine suggesting the IOM Forum explore the topic of online disinformation related to infectious disease. Emcsweegan 13:25, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

coment 5
Hey! Who keeps editing this crap! What's wrong with you??? Do you really care so much about me? Who are you? You keep writing false information about me and its got to stop. You don't know a goddamn thing about me, about NIH policies, about Lyme disease or anything else. If I want a Wiki entry I'll write one. Not some anonymous asshole.

Emcsweegan 17:25, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Dr. McSweegan, I'm not the same person who wrote that article--I was actually trying to bring it up to our standards. Please work with us here. Blueboy96 17:41, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

comment 6
I can keep adding a disclaimer to my unauthorized entry until the effort attracts the attention of the media and lawyers. I've already contacted the Wiki Comm office asking for a call back about his juvenile nonsense. If Wikipedia thinks I merit an entry in its pages then Wikipedia has yet another thing wrong with it: an inability to discern the important and the notable from the trivial and boring. EMS


 * I've notified the Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard hoping to attract more experienced editors to this article to help us figure what, if anything, should be done. --ElKevbo 19:13, 21 July 2007 (UTC)
 * I noticed your Wiki page "is deliberately blank." I want only the same thing.  A blank page.  EMS Emcsweegan 20:04, 21 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Your user page is blank. I think you have confused my user page with an encyclopedia article about me.  I do not warrant an article.  I'm very sorry that you feel that we are "out to get you" and I assure you that I am not (I can't speak for other editors but I'm pretty sure about them, too).  But, as Studerby points out below, you have been the subject of multiple, non-trivial articles, interviews, and similar incidents.  Therefore you meet our criteria for being the subject of an encyclopedia article.
 * We welcome your comments and suggestions on how to improve this article. You're even welcome to participate in the current discussion regarding the possible deletion of this article.  But please keep in mind our goal to make a free encyclopedia; we simply can't have an editor, even a very passionate one, disrupting the project due to a difference in opinion and a refusal to allow publicly-available information to be cited and referenced.  --ElKevbo 20:54, 21 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Dr. McSweegan: you've been the subject of public comment by a United States Senator, a subject of national news, and you regularly inject your opinions into public debate on health issues of national significance, beyond the scope of any employment at NIH or wherever you're working now. All of that is rather incompatible with being a "nobody". Studerby 20:35, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Who are you? A somebody or a nobody? One news story and the demented ravings of one woman in Ct. (jailed for internet harassment, by the way) makes me a "somebody"? By that standard only the dead are nobodies. And no I don't inject my opinions. I write a monthly column about infectious diseases for a small town newspaper. Only you and the Internet make it out to be more than it is. But I guess this struggle to prevent Wikipedia from defining who and what I am is going to end up making me a somebody. I guess then I'll really need a Wiki bio. I suppose there's some irony in there somewhere. EMS


 * "One news story?" Your name appears in roughly a dozen articles in the Washington Post on several different topics. That "small town newspaper" happens to publish everything on the Internet, so it's not exactly a "small town newspaper" anymore; the material is available to anyone in the world interested in the topic. In terms of distribution, there's almost no such thing as a "small town paper" anymore. It appears that you've even been quoted as an expert in National Geographic (though I don't have the actual quote, just an index entry suggesting it exists). Studerby 23:37, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Oversight requested
I have requested that all versions of this article prior to today be oversighted. The original version is, in my opinion, the definition of an attack page, and there seems to be merit to Dr. McSweegan's complaint that this version is still visible. Blueboy96 01:28, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Done ... faster than I expected. Hopefully this fixes things.  Blueboy96 01:49, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Good call, I would have done that, but was unaware that there was a formal process for it (should've guessed and gone hunting for it, mea culpa, mea culpa); it looks like all the revisions before ThuranX's stub version are gone, which is a good thing. Studerby 01:55, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

follow up
I would also, honestly like to know why much of the history of this talk page has been deleted, and why the original page created in April was obliterated from the legal record in spite of that fact that there was clearly no copyright infringement.

For example, there was a long conversation here in which Mr. McSweegan claimed NOT to be the author of the many bioweapons related papers that I cited in the original article. His authorship was since verified by several others here at Wiki-- proving that the original information was correct and in no way attacking of Dr. McSweegan, and that Mr. McSweegan himself had not been forthcoming about his own publications in the bioweapons arena.

Please provide me with an appropriate answer on these deletions. As you know, there is a legal reason to properly maintain the history of pages.

As your lawyers have probably confirmed, NIH bios are in the public domain and not subject to copyright law, a former government lawyer confirms for me. I have reinserted the NIH bio information in the original.

If you are going to selectively delete pages, then I would appreciate it if you would delete Mr. McSweegan's many defamatory statements about me, and other chronic Lyme victims in the talk page.

Also, I have reinserted the following references that provide insight into Dr. McSweegan's interest in biowarfare topics:

"Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease," by Edward McSweegan, Volume 71, Number 12, 2005, ASM News, page 148.

"Lyme Disease: a Potential Polymicrobial Infection," by Edward McSweegan

The above articles are important facts about Dr. McSweegan because they shed light on Mr. McSweegan's career expertise in both Lyme disease and in bioweapons of varying sorts, and repudiate his many defamatory and I might add libelous assertions about "Lyme disease conspiracy whackos....."

Thank you

Removal of NIH BIO
(Note: Section heading was "Removal of NIH BIO on McSweegan violates Wikipedia guideline below. Thanks.  Please explain why the BIO information was removed.... I will continue to re-insert it until an explanation is given.. thanks" but I changed it as that's entirely too long a section heading.  --ElKevbo 19:41, 10 August 2007 (UTC))

Taken off Wikipedia info on copyright U.S. government works

For the U.S., federal government works are not eligible for copyright protection (17 USC 105). It stands to reason that this applies world-wide, for it is not evident how the U.S. government could assert copyright in some other country over a work that cannot be copyrighted by its own laws in the originating country (the U.S.). Still, there are differing opinions, see the CENDI Copyright FAQ list, 3.1.7 and a discussion on that at the LibraryLaw Blog. For all practical purposes, however, we can assume works produced by the U.S. government or its employees in the course of their duties to be copyright-free and in the public domain world-wide.

In practice, this means that much material on *.gov and *.mil, as well as material on some *.us web sites (such as the sites of the U.S. Forest Service), are in the public domain. Please note that not all such material is in the public domain, though:

Also, plagiarism would only apply if I were a named author, which I am not. So It is not plagiarism, besides the info is in quotes and cited. -- I don't see what your problem is. Freyfaxi 17:17, 10 August 2007 (UTC)


 * To whom are you talking and what are you talking about? --ElKevbo 19:41, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

Hi El Kevbo-- Im talking to blueboy about the brief biographical information that I retrieved off NIH when I wrote this original draft in april of 2007 which now has "disappeared," along with many citations for article that Dr. McSweegan wrote on biowarfare topics, and a discussion in the talk page where Dr. McSweegan denied to another wiki editor that he was the author of the biowarfare and Lyme related articles I cited in my original draft.

I guess Dr. McSweegan was embarrased that he was caught in an untruth.....hence everything original has been deleted in the history.... including my original page-- which I admit was a rough draft, although its sources were confirmed and correct.... and there was absolutely nothing "attacking" about the page... it was simply a list of McSweegan's biowarfare publications and his bio as listed by the NIH web site, a public domain, uncopyrighted source.

I am mystified.....

-freyfaxi

69.120.212.35 20:43, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
 * My only comment related to the NIH bio is that it's not at all integrated into the article and just tacked onto the end. The information in the bio should be extracted and placed in the appropriate places in the article with the NIH page cited as a reference.  Otherwise it may be deleted simply as an editorial decision.  --ElKevbo 20:47, 10 August 2007 (UTC)