User:CutePeach/AESTATEMENT2

Response to Bakkster Man’s complaint: I very much respect Bakkster Man, as he was the one - after a year of nonstop protests from numerous editors - successfully untangle the lab leak hypothesis from the discredited conspiracy theories on the COVID-19 misinformation page.

On the other hand, Bakkster Man has often expressed a POV inconsistent with our reliable sources, making such claims as:


 * 1) The WHO DG’s widely reported criticism of the WHO-convened study isn’t actually criticism and thus WP:UNDUE for inclusion in COVID-19 Pandemic.
 * 2) The widely reported story of deleted virus sequences is a "nothingburger" and thus WP:UNDUE for inclusion in COVID-19 investigations.
 * 3) The widely reported apparent pre-adaption of SARS-COV-2 isn’t the "mainstream view" and thus WP:UNDUE for inclusion in COVID-19 lab leak.

In the first dispute back in April which was regarding the WHO DG’s criticism of the WHO-convened Study, my position was clearly consistent with the sources I provided, and I don’t think anyone here today - including Bakkster Man - would still maintain that the WHO DG’s hasn’t criticised the WHO-convened study quite heavily. In the second dispute on deleted sequences, even Colin agreed that the story reached a threshold of coverage by mainstream media for it to be included in the article, also debunking Bakkster Man’s WP:PREPRINT argument as a red-herring. In our third dispute on apparent pre-adaption, I added a few high quality secondary sources about several scientists who published preprints on the apparent pre-adaption as the virus as a possible sign of lab origins, but again Bakkster Man brought up the WP:PREPRINT argument, which was - again - a red-herring. Former CDC director Robert Redfield made the claim of apparent pre-adaption in an interview by Sanjay Gupta on CNN, which was very widely covered    , so regardless of whether it is true or not, it is WP:DUE. The WHO mission also observed this anomaly for its joint study with China (does Bakkster Man know which page this is on?).

It's important to note that in our first dispute - neither mine nor any of the other editors’ edit proposals were accepted by Bakkster Man - which was disheartening and I resigned from that discussion. At that time, an ANI was filed against me by RandomCanadian in which Bakkster Man - who mostly stayed out of it - made a comment which bothered me, and which I later asked him to clarify in relation to my earlier edit proposals, to which he replied that he didn’t find them "actionable". By this time, the RFC on WP:BMI had started, and Bakkster Man made a proposal to make WP:SCHOLARSHIP the new WP:MEDRS to get the same result - which seemed to me like another attempt at source restriction to censor the lab leak hypothesis. For anyone here not in the know WP:MEDRS has been abused as a sourcing restriction to WP:CENSOR the lab leak hypothesis from Wikipedia [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] []. I began to suspect that Bakkster Man was also abusing the WP:BRD process to "wear down the opposition", and as we got into our second dispute on Bloom et al, I dragged my feet writing my edit proposals, being weary of the outcome.

Despite my reservations, I believe that Bakkster Man is most reasonable of all the editors opposed to including the lab leak hypothesis in Wikipedia in a neutral fashion, so I regret that our dispute has escalated to this level. I don’t think WP:SCHOLARSHIP or WP:PREPRINT applies to this subject in the way Bakkster Man thinks it does, and I also don’t think WP:ARBPS/4A applies here either, as the lab leak hypothesis is - as the name suggests - just a hypothesis. I have never suggested for the rationale given for this hypothesis to be overstated as real evidence of an actual lab leak. I ask for admins to provide guidance for us to be able to return to normal editing.