Talk:Occupy Melbourne/Archive 1

Non-NPOV Discussion
I have placed a Non-Neutral Language warning, I take this paragraph as an example: "... if the Lord Mayor, Robert Doyle, thinks we've already made our point then he doesn't understand what the point of the Occupy Together movement is". Which is not surprising as interviews with several of the protest spopkespeople gave completely conflicting views. (Uncited) Eventually, as the protestors had gone back on their word to move on, the Police were asked to carry out the wishes of the people of Melbourne and move the unclean fools on"

Bolded are examples of loaded language that cast the protestors in a negative light and the police positively. Garaiavu (talk) 04:43, 25 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Calling it a 'Peaceful protest' is also biased - I changed it to 'Protest' and it has been changed back - given that in addition to the one person cited to have been taken to hospital, two Police officers were also injured (another fact that has been edited out)it can hardly be called peaceful!Aozlawman (talk) 11:00, 25 October 2011 (UTC)


 * If you have a reference for the two injured Police officers please add it to the article. Peter Campbell 23:41, 7 November 2011 (UTC)


 * It appears to me that the article has been cleaned up. Most statements are attributed. The only remaining concern I would have is the first sentence of the article. Whether or not the protest has a clear target has been a point of discussion in the media. It may be appropriate to acknowledge this point of contention. Matt73 (talk) 06:08, 26 October 2011 (UTC)

BoingBoing article
I noticed this article mentioned on BB. I think some issues need to be recognised here - while the involvement of employees from the MCC is unfortunate, let's be realistic: quite likely the article has also been edited by interested parties from Occupy Melbourne. So, the fact that an edit was made by a MCC employee does not directly invalidate it. What is actually important is the adherence of the article to wikipedia guidelines and codes of practice. In this editor's opinion, the edits made are justified: the factual question about whether the various incidents involved protestors being peaceful or not seems directly to be disputed. While many authors, including me myself, am tempted to sympathise with Occupy, as an encyclopedia wikipedia cannot make a statement that the protestors were peaceful without backing from an appropriate source. Similar, the line about 'aimed at highlighting the absurdity' is unsourced and seems excessively speculative. Let's try and avoid an edit war, honestly this entire article seems kinda poor on a citations point of view. The chronology section seems wholly unsourced.

And no, I don't work for MCC.--212.219.57.228 (talk) 12:21, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
 * This has now been picked up by The Age. But the word "peacefully" was unsourced personal opinion, and should indeed have been removed. StAnselm (talk) 04:41, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I just saw The Age article and I agree: words like "peacefully" and "absurdity" were POV and it was correct to remove them. Adpete (talk) 08:52, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I was there (at the protest) and part of the "mock and awe" operation, and it was indeed aimed at highlighting the extent MCC was prepared to go to shut down the protest, to the point where it was absurd. Looking through the IP history of the original edit, it *could* have come from a library computer, and the Robert Doyle page was left untouched. Nevertheless, I will find some citation to back this claim (peaceful, absurdity) or, failing that, re-word the statements with more neutral language. ~Jase~ 00:39, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Occupy Melbourne has issued an ultimatum for this article to be changed
http://occupymelbourne.net/2013/02/20/editgate-cyberwar-continuesthe-same-occupy-melbourne-wikipedia-page-edits-redone-but-now-from-biomathematics-and-statistics-scotland/


 * Wow. The other people on that blog just have no idea how Wikipedia works. Don't let them bully you mate. Adpete (talk) 03:54, 22 February 2013 (UTC)


 * If the Occupy Melbourne people have a complaint, the correct place to complain is on this page. Adpete (talk) 04:35, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Unsourced content removed
I have reduced the article to a stub and will be checking to make sure all claims are sourced moving forward.--Amadscientist (talk) 03:16, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I have also watchlisted the article, and shall be doing the same. I find it disturbingly disappointingly inappropriate that someone was threatened with real life consequences for removing unsourced information from this page. Kevin Gorman (talk) 06:02, 22 February 2013 (UTC)


 * They've published a whole lot of the guy's personal information now. Perhaps a violation of wordpress.com's ToS? I'm not going to dignify it with a URL, but follow the link in the section above and then go to the latest blog update. Adpete (talk) 06:08, 22 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Also watching the article. Not too sure how accurate the claims are that Melbourne City Council initially edited the article, but the article was terrible anyway and now the stubs that are left don't shine too brightly for MCC (how's that for irony) so I guess everyone wins. This is probably the best shape I've ever seen this article in.
 * The guy who I *think* is making the threats is a fringe member of OM who left the group 2 years ago who OM hasn't really heard from since and, IMO, is a complete $#@&ing fruitloop. ~Jase~ 13:44, 22 February 2013 (UTC)


 * I have no idea what's up with the IP, but the overall deletion of the article's content is not a good thing. For example,, justified by "no context to OWS"?  Say what?  This article is about something in Melbourne, and I'd say that protests about its treatment, sourced to the Herald Sun, are pretty damn relevant.  Such major editing deserves some actual discussion here, and we should preserve the material that isn't actually unsourced.  I would further say that material that is unsourced should be kept pending verification unless we have some iota of suspicion it's actually wrong, provided it's not BLP-related. Wnt (talk) 21:48, 9 March 2013 (UTC)


 * "material that is unsourced should be kept pending verification" - No, that is against WP policy. Take a look at WP:V. Adpete (talk) 11:57, 10 March 2013 (UTC)


 * It says "challenged or likely to be challenged". It doesn't say that everything unsourced should be challenged for challenging's sake.  I don't demand a lot of suspicion.  I don't demand proof for suspicion.  But I do think that when material looks like a good faith effort, when we see no obvious reason for it to be wrong, when it "smells right", when there's no BLP issue involved (not all of what was removed passes these), that for such material it would be better to leave it for a while than to do anything else with it. Wnt (talk) 03:25, 13 March 2013 (UTC)


 * Two comments. First, some of the removed stuff reads like someone's personal recollections. I don't doubt good faith, but it's pretty well unverifiable, as well as possibly unintentionally biased. Wikipedia isn't the place for first hand reporting (WP:PRIMARY). The correct way to do it would be for someone to keep a blog and we link to that. Second, this article has been the subject of some pretty serious politicking, with allegations of political interference, and someone harassing and intimidating a WP editor by publishing his personal details. Given that history, I think we need to keep close to the rule book on this article. Adpete (talk) 01:23, 15 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Just a note to say I've edited the above comment, replacing "someone complaining to the press" (which is unproven) with "allegations of political interference" (which I omitted before). Adpete (talk) 12:10, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

Including the editing of this page in the article
I have reverted an addition to the article that discusses this page, but it probably needs to be discussed here. Some of the addition was original synthesis, and some was inappropriate self-reference, but the question still stands, is the incident worthy of inclusion in the article? StAnselm (talk) 11:09, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

I wrote that. the "inappropriate self-reference" you mention was cheeky just to see if it would pass. I think the line after the two news article reference needs to be included in some part tho due to apparent bias of edits. -edit- scratch that, it's commentary. wipe out what's after the first two news article references Jeff pyrotek (talk) 11:14, 22 March 2013 (UTC)


 * These edits aren't really about Occupy Melbourne per se. The "real world" relevance is (a) political fallout for Robert Doyle, (b) the general public perception of Wikipedia. Therefore I believe that if the edits belong anywhere, there are at Robert Doyle and/or Conflict of interest editing on Wikipedia. Though I'm not sure the story is big enough for either. Wherever they go, there is only one reference which can be used (The Age article), the other references are not WP:Reliable Sources. Adpete (talk) 01:17, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

Fixed somewhat
The article was close to 2 years out of date and some parts were written in the present tense, so I pretty much rewrote the lead para and fixed the infobox. Orderinchaos 07:40, 24 January 2014 (UTC)