User:Thanksforhelping/sandbox

Essay Draft: Many Other People Have a Problem with This Article
An argument or piece of evidence often provided on Wikipedia Talk pages for the conclusion that there is something that is overall wrong, bad, faulty, non-NPOV, biased, misrepresentative, incorrect, or otherwise subpar about the related article is that some or many other people have previously posted on the Talk page saying that there is something that is overall wrong, bad, faulty, non-NPOV, biased, misrepresentative, incorrect, or otherwise subpar about the related article. This style of argument or evidence will be called “Many Other People Have a Problem with This Article,” or “MOPHAP.”

While consensus is at the heart of the Wikipedia editing process, and so editors must take care to consider what “many other people” think, when those “many other people” are also editors of the relevant article, MOPHAP is not, by itself, any reason to change an article, and introducing MOPHAP into a Talk page discussion or appealing to MOPHAP almost always is, at best, ignored by other editors, and is, at worst, a quick way to completely derail what might otherwise have been a productive discussion.

Why care at all about MOPHAP? Isn’t it enough that Wikipedia appeals to reliable sources + editor consensus in constructing its articles?

The central problem with MOPHAP is that it relies on a faulty inductive syllogism that is faulty because of its reliance on a non-representative collection of evidence in order to draw a general conclusion. This type of faulty inductive syllogism is a kind of selection bias called “sampling bias.” By both Wikipedia guidelines (specifically the Talk Page Guidelines) and human psychological proclivities, the only people who should, and the only people who do, post to article Talk pages are people who think (correctly or incorrectly) that there is a problem with the relevant article. While people occasionally do post a Talk page to say something along the lines of “this is a great article,” such posts are discouraged, are oftentimes deleted as being against WP:TPG, and are not the sorts of posts most people feel inclined to make.

Essay Draft: What an Ad Hominem Is Not (NOTADHOM)
And editor who has spent significant time participating in, or even simply reading, discussions on Wikipedia Talk pages (especially Talk pages for articles whose subjects are contentious) has encountered charges from other editors that such-and-such claim is an “ad hominem.” The charge of “ad hominem” is, at different times, leveled both against other editors and against the verifiable claims found in sources. In my own experience, however, it exceedingly rare that the statement(s) claimed by an editor to be ad hominem are, in fact, ad hominem. The purpose of this essay is to briefly explain what an ad hominem is, and, by contrast, what an ad hominem is not.

An ad hominem (shorthand for “argumentum ad hominem,” which is Latin for “argument to/about the person”) is a type of informal fallacy in which an attack on a person’s character, motive, personality, virtue, etc. is used as a premise in an argument for the conclusion that the person’s argument is faulty or that their argument’s conclusion is false. The general structure of an ad hominem is as follows:

1. Person X gives argument A for conclusion C. 2. Person X is personally bad or deficient in way W. Therefore, 3. Argument A is faulty or conclusion C is false.

As noted, an ad hominem is an informal fallacy. A fallacy is a type of reasoning that initially appears cogent, valid, or otherwise acceptable, but that is faulty in some way such that the argument’s premises do not actually provide the support for the argument’s conclusion that, at first blush, those premises appear to provide. An informal fallacy is a fallacy that is faulty not merely because of the for (or structure) of the argument, but, instead, because of contextual features of the argument, e.g., semantic issues such as the meanings of words used, or pragmatic issues, such as the relevance of the premises to the conclusion.

The important takeaway here is that an ad hominem is a type of faulty argument. No statement or mere collection of statements is an ad hominem, since no statement or mere collection of statements is an argument.

The three most prominent ways in which the term “ad hominem” is misapplied on Talk pages (at least in my experience) are:

1. Calling an insult leveled by one editor against another editor or group of editors an “ad hominem” 2. Calling an insult leveled by one editor against some component of the subject of the relevant article an “ad hominem” 3. Calling a verifiable criticism or negative characterization leveled by a source against some component of the subject of the relevant article an “ad hominem”