User:Roy McCoy/experiment


 * As to the first of your cited edits, you did indeed call for editorial opinions, but questioning the necessity of the disambiguating parenthesis and suggesting it be removed. As to the second, I notice you edited your initial claim that you were only reverting content removal. You also added "author and speaker" exactly as I said, which had nothing to do with reverting a WP:FRINGE addition. You say, furthermore, that I should read the article; what you mean, I think, is I should check the references, which I've already done at least in the case of Barcun. Rather than doing further research on which eminent scholar called Ms. O'Brien a conspiracy theorist, I'm going to read the rest of her book and say nothing else here for the time being, unless perhaps someone has something more interesting to say than that Cathy O'Brien is a conspiracy theorist because some high-quality source says so.
 * Speaking of sources, Wikipedia's are often duplicitous and in fact unreliable, so one can keep regurgitating the RS policy till the cows come home, and it will still fall flat with anyone aware of the dubiousness of the WP-approved sources and of the frequent acceptable quality of the disapproved – for example the Gateway Pundit, indispensable on the 2020 Election. The graphic at Investment Watch provides a picture of the ideologically motivated division and "explains a lot of the bias". If the purpose of Wikipedia is to serve as a propaganda rag, the childish "conspiracy theorist!" finger-pointing may make some sense. Otherwise I'd say that what the encyclopedia actually needs fewer tired reiterations of the policy of aping often-discreditable sources. I think it could use less of that even if propagandizing is the purpose, since the policy shouldn't be over-advertised given current public disillusionment with "the lying media" – a phrase today yielding over a million estimated Google finds.
 * Since the subtopic here is page-move consensus, we can examine the history of the article in this regard. It was initiated on 17 February 2006 as "Cathy O'Brien", who was, "with Mark Phillips, the author of TranceFormation of America and Access Denied: For Reasons of National Security. I'd say WP had it right the first time, but in any event the title "Cathy O'Brien" apparently stood for over nine years until June 2015, indicating a consensus on it at least during that period. There was no consensus for the change to "(conspiracy theorist)", which User:Sol1 made without having said anything on the talk page. It was a more controversial change than its recent reversion by me (not that there necessarily haven't been others), since – aside from the inappropriateness of the tag (you can call her a madwoman if you like, but not a "theorist") – O'Brien is in fact a primary subject the same as Alex Jones. I did a couple of searches confirming this and even took notes, but I don't feel like going into it now. Like I said, I'm going to finish reading the book. –Roy McCoy (talk) 18:02, 15 December 2020 (UTC)