Talk:Wegman Report

Orphaned references in Wegman Report
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Wegman Report's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "revkin August 5, 2003": From Soon and Baliunas controversy:  From Hockey stick controversy: (NYT). 

Reference named "Monastersky": From Hockey stick controversy: . From Soon and Baliunas controversy:  

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT ⚡ 00:21, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Misc additional facts
These may or may not be RS, as they are based on primary sources, such as FOIAs and GMU documents.

On disciplinary procedures:

'George Mason University provost Peter Stearns announced on 22 February 2012 that charges of scientific misconduct had been investigated by two separate faculty committees, and that the one investigating the 2006 Wegman Report gave a unanimous finding that "no misconduct was involved".'

By FOIA, this was a factually false statement by Stearns. For context, see the (non-RS) PDF pp.11-14 analyzes GMU's replies to FOIA requests by Dan Vergano, and links to the actual FOIA replies, 04/09/12 and 04/26/12. Quite simply, one inquiry committee handled everything, recommended investigation and there was exactly one investigation committee with 3 members from the School of Public Policy, Provost Office and Physics Department. Either it managed to admit plagiarism (1.5 pages) in the already-retracted paper while simultaneously ignoring the 5.5page superset in the Wegman Report, or Stearns wrote an additional misrepresentation. The (only) 9-page investigation report, 08/11/11, was not made public.

In Fall 2012, Wegman was appointed to a 3-year term on the GMU College of Science Promotion and Tenure Committee. That is not necessarily an honor or reward, but is certainly a clear indication that GMU was happy to have Wegman in a position of influence over the prospects of younger faculty.JohnMashey (talk) 20:48, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

Of some of those mentioned: Wegman and Said are no longer editors of WIREs: COmputational Statistics. Said is no longer affiliated with George Mason. Stanley Azen is no longer the Editor-in_Chief of CSDA. Such changes might be coincidence or not.JohnMashey (talk) 00:10, 8 May 2013 (UTC)


 * JohnMashey??? Seriously wikipedia is letting the guy who brought the alligations agaisnt Wegman edit the page? This is disgraceful. 74.124.124.66 (talk) 21:50, 2 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Why should an editor be disqualified from a talk page? — TPX 22:16, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Actually, the first batch of formal allegations came from Professor Ray Bradley. In any case, I don't edit the main pages, I just point out information.  Here, "with social network analysis partly copied from Wikipedia." is pretty misleading, as most of the 5.5 pages of SNA text in the Wegman Report was taken from DeNooy, Mirvar, Bateglj(2005) or Wasserman and Faust(1994). Although "Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report" is not RS  see pp.118-128, which does the 3-way compare of [SAI2008] from Wegman Report from antecedents.  They used copyrighted material from textbooks, not jsut Wikipedia.  The Wasserman and Faust chunk contributed the amusing "statues" typo that propagated through dissertations. JohnMashey (talk) 05:49, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

08/21/15 Following is some additional information, as usual, no claim is made that blog posts are RS, but they usually cite in-context relevant sources, at least in the real world, if not necessarily by Wikipedia rules. Wikipedia may not want to state something that comes from a primary source (like FOIA document), but should at least avoid stating things contradicted by it.

"Barton was given support by global warming sceptic Myron Ebell" ...

if Ebell is mentioned, it may be worth noting that he had access to the letters before they were received by all the scientists. See CCC - Crescendo to Climategate Cacophony p.166. That cites Email from Ebell to William Perhach in Bush White House.

"on 1 September 2005 statistician Edward Wegman was contacted about giving testimony"

The source for that must surely be Yasmin Said's 2007 presentation, which is annotated in SSWR - Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report pp.89-95. The original file disappeared in August 2010, various people had made copies, including Internet Archive in 2010

Her file, p.3 stated: "Dr. Edward Wegman was approached by Dr. Jerry Coffey on 1 September 2005" and "– After the initial contact, Dr. Wegman received materials and a visit from Congressional Staffer Peter Spencer." Spencer worked for Barton, p.38 of SSWR for Coffey's views.

The rest of her talk is worth reviewing, such as:

p.7 "We agreed to serve Pro Bono" Actually, by FOIAs published in 2013 they both claimed the Wegman Report for credit against Federal Army grant and alcoholism modeling fellowship, whose peer-reviewed publications were rather minimal.

p.8 has an image claimed to be from 1990 IPCC report, but that was a false citation, since the real image is slightly different. See some history of this  It is however, identical to the image used by Steve McIntyre in The Significance of the Hockey Stick and in McIntyre + McKitrick May 11, 2005 PPT that Peter Spencer gave to Wegman.

An October 8, 2012 question by Tom Curtis on McIntyre's source for that image got the answer "I don’t recall where I picked up the version used in the post." It may have come from Western Fuels Association "science advisor" John Daly, who had used it in 2001. Daly, McIntyre, McKitrick (and others) claimed the image to be from IPCC 1995 ... obviously without actually looking at it. Sooner or later somebody noticed the wrong year, but the not-quite-right image false citation persisted. Since Wegman admitted they didn't have access to IPCC 1990, they may have scanned the M+M PPT, although the vertical seemed amplified - see SSWR p.137.

"The team included Wegman, his graduate student Yasmin H. Said" This is slightly ambiguous. She had been his grad student, got her PhD, was a lecturer at Johns Hopkins for a few semesters, then finally got a long-sought NIAAA fellowship, and had returned to George Mason U.

"They were assisted by two others." The fact sheet said "Dr. Yasmin Said of The Johns Hopkins University. Also contributing were Denise Reeves of MITRE Corp. and John T. Rigsby of the Naval Surface Warfare Center." Said had returned to GMU, and Reeves' and Rigsby's contributions had nothing to do with MITRE and NSWC, but instead with fact they were at the time Wegman's grad students. There is fairly strong evidence that Reeves actually wrote more text than Scott, and that Said did much of the work. Hence, had the fact sheet been accurate, and normal authorship given, it would have said: Wegman, Said, Reeves, Scott (with help from Rigsby.) More accurate affiliations would have been: Wegman - GMU, Said - GMU, Reeves- GMU, Scott - Rice, Rigsby - GMU.

"He defined the social network as peer reviewers that had "actively collaborated with him in writing research papers" and answered that none of his peer reviewers had."

That was a very restrictive view of a social network, but was false anyway, as he had coauthored a paper with Amy Braverman. See SSWR pp.52 and p.79, which shows her long involvement with Wegman's Interface Foundation of North America. This is not a complaint against her, just a note that Wegman somehow forgot a close associate.

"The paper based on this social network analysis, published by Wegman and his former student Said," ... Part of that paper was a subset of the SNA section of the Wegman Report, and its retraction was forced for plagiarism. That is mentioned later. Strange Tales and Emails cites various RS descriptions.

"On 15 September Waxman wrote formally to Wegman asking for this information, and commenting that the Wegman report had said that methodology had to be fully disclosed to allow independent verification."

See Ed Wegman Promised Data to Rep. Henry Waxman Six Years Ago - Where Is It?. FOIAs showed that Wegman gave a false reason for delay, and then of course never provided anything.

"with social network analysis partly copied from Wikipedia." That is true, but much more of the text came from copyrighted textbooks by Wasserman and Faust(1994) and especially de Nooy, Mrvar, Bateglj(2005). SSWR pp.118-128 does the 3-way comparison among original sources, the Wegman Report, and the later article.

"The investigation reports were to be sent on to federal authorities" Federal rules require reports at specific times, starting in 2010. FOIA requests in 2013 showed that no such reports had been supplied by then, long after required. JohnMashey (talk) 00:56, 22 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Due to other pressures have only just got round to looking at this: have tried to meet these points where we've got reliable sources. On the minor issue of "referees", that's the term used by Gerry North so think we should use that word. There are probably some other points which can be reviewed. Thanks for the comments, . dave souza, talk 19:07, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

A tidbit on Fig 4.5 p.34 of the Wegman Report, image shown here, of which "When questioned about the WR Figure 4.5, Wegman said he "had not been able to obtain a copy of the 1990 report", but believed that the figure "was related to the European temperatures and was a cartoon– essentially a cartoon" which they were simply using as an example." It is an exaggerated version of Fig 7.1(c) of IPCC FAR, but where did they get it? Unfortunately no one asked, but the likely answer is McIntyre & McKitrick talk for GMI+CEI, May 11, 2005 The image on p.10 is not exactly Fig 7.1(c), although the curves are the same. The same image variant appears in Yasmin Said's 2007 talk. As shown in Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report, they must have digitized some image, but then shifted it horizontally and stretched it vertically so that it gyrates more.JohnMashey (talk) 06:14, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

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