User talk:LeadSongDog/Archives/2009/March

Input request on interpreting WP:SPS
Howdy. I came across a discussion you contributed to on the WP:V discussion page. Hope you don't mind me quoting you in one I'm involved in here. We're discussing something similar to what you were involved with regarding different ways of leveraging SPS for and against content in that article. It's an article about a religious leader who's sorely lacking in WP:RS to begin with due to the fact that the main group ex-communicated him early on. I'm one of his supporters, and believe a couple of the self-published sources written by some of his followers warrant inclusion per how me and the contributors to my RFC have interpreted WP:SPS and/or WP:QS. In a nutshell this biography, and a selfpub'd bio called Charles Mason Remey and the Baha'i Faith have been deemed "OUT" by the interpretations of two editors on the article (who consider him an enemy of their religious beliefs). My RFC brought forward 7 impartial editors who said basically it is relevant "about itself". Those two opposers claim it's not a majority rules situation, and that policy doesn't allow the biographies usage, as Remey himself didn't write them. Is that how you interpret SPS and QS? Hope I'm not bogging you down on the details, but I would be forever grateful if you might share your thoughts on the discussion unfolding (and unfolding) either there, or even on my talk page if it's more than you're interested in getting involved in. DisarrayGeneral 10:13, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Busy right now, I'll have a look later.LeadSongDog (talk) 15:42, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure I accept the assertion that there aren't ample sources available on Remey. this search seems to indicate otherwise. In any case, I'd advise against ascribing motives to other editors unles they've stated those motives themselves, in which case those statements should be presented as diffs. It has the odor of assuming bad faith.LeadSongDog (talk) 18:23, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks; I actually have most of those books, and there are but mere mentions of him in each. The most extensive comes from the second listing "A Concise Encyclopedia of the Baha'i Faith" by Smith which amounts to one column on one page. He's being used in the article already. You're right I should have provided diffs. My conclusions of their motives are resultant of the ensuing discussion that is now quite extensive and can't imagine combing through it all. That aside, I started a discussion on the policy talk page in pursuit of resolution and clarity. If you have a minute to weigh in that would be great. Thanks again. DisarrayGeneral  20:14, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

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Re: Hibernia GBS
Your comment on the talk page did not indicate that you were in the process of recreating Hibernia Gravity Bearing Structure. As far as I could see, the redirect pointed to a non-existent article, so I deleted it. ... disco spinster   talk  20:18, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Expanding references
Why are you so into expanding references? I find that it makes editing an article even more tedious because often a paragraph won't fit on the same page, and one will have to do a lot more scrolling. Also, have you considered marking such edits minor? II | (t - c) 23:06, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
 * It's a temporary thing to make it feasible to fix them. When they're all crammed together it's almost impossible to find errors and omissions. Once they're correct and complete I've got no problem with recollapsing them.LeadSongDog (talk) 03:05, 14 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Glad to hear that and thanks for the reply. II  | (t - c) 16:49, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Best sources, WP:MEDRS
Regarding this, the dispute at MDD is not about what sources to use, we're already using metaanalyses of placebo-controlled RCTs, which generally are the best level of evidence, but rather what to make of not so clear statistics that different metaanalyses spin slightly differently, and whose authors criticize each other's methodology. Xasodfuih (talk) 16:18, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
 * As I said, I wasn't wading into the dispute at MDD. When it spilled off that article's talk page to other places and started to look like a campaign against one of the most useful content editors on WP I had to speak up. LeadSongDog (talk) 17:20, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I assure you I'm not campaigning against OM. The only other disagreement he and I had was over MSG, where he removed a peer-reviewed study I added, which was showing that rats fed MSG ad lib actually lost fat (as opposed to gaining fat, which happens in overfeeding conditions). Other than that we were on the same side on the talk page where various editors try to argue that MSG as food additive causes (non-substantiated) health concerns. Xasodfuih (talk) 15:43, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I wish that was believable, but your edit history from yesterday reveals a flurry of ugliness that appears to derive mainly from this edit. Clearly there were other players involved, but this assumption of bad faith is breathtaking. In future please explore the possibility of nicely asking for an explanation before trash-talking or templating established editors.LeadSongDog (talk) 16:08, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Request + Thanks
for reverting that horrendously biased and unRS source in the lead. Holding off the ultranationalists in the rewrite of this is going to be difficult. Incidentally, I've finished the rewrite of the "background" section of the WWI article, and thus far have received no response to it. I'm planning to load the background section into the article sometime late this week. Before I do, could you take a look to make sure that there's no glaring errors or major fixes that need to be made? Cam (Chat) 04:53, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Sikorsky S-61N G-BEID
Thanks for fixing the typo in the title. I cringed when I saw what I'd done without realizing!. Salmanazar (talk) 12:25, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Typos happen. The article has promise and made a nice change from working Cougar Helicopters Flight 91. Striking parallels and contrast between the two.LeadSongDog (talk) 12:28, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

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Intelligent Design
I was unable to find the phrase "term used for" in any of the archives of the talk page, nor on ongoing discussions that have not yet been archived. Where has it been discussed? --rtc (talk) 20:48, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
 * The discussion was at Talk:Intelligent_design. Suggest you propose your alternative there.
 * That discussion does not discuss at all about the part of the introduction that I removed. --rtc (talk) 09:21, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
 * My apologies, I had confused two discussions. Nonetheless, substantive changes to the opening sentence of a controversial article it is always prudent to go to talk first. WP:BOLD is just part of WP:BRD and not always helpful.LeadSongDog (talk) 03:19, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Citation format
Could you please respond to Talk:Homeopathy, either here or there. I am working on the script, and if you have valid information that puts a constraint on how the script may operate, I need it as soon as possible. Unfortunately your allusion to pmid is very cryptic. In what respect is "| author=Smith JD, Jones AB" better than, say, "|last1=Smith |first1=JD |last2=Jones |first2=AB"? Or did I misunderstand you? --Hans Adler (talk) 22:00, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Your zero-information revert of purely technical changes to the Homeopathy article
After the many hours that I spent on getting this right, and after carefully checking that apart from very minor formatting issues the appearance of the article was absolutely unchanged after my edit, I consider a revert with no more information than "not right yet" unhelpful to the point of rude. Now I have to guess what you found that you object to. Or whether you found anything or are just objecting based on the principle that I can't be trusted to have been diligent before making the change. (Note the edit summary about the diff possibly crashing browsers? That was because I had to switch from Firefox to Internet Explorer for "Show changes" to work for me.)

Now what's your problem? The differences I found: my script corrected one instance each of pmcid to pmc, volumes to volume, original-year to origyear as expected, because I instructed it specifically to do so. It normalised some parameters that have synonyms, such as surname -> last. And it translated some others where necessary, initially based on WP:Citation templates, but also based on a careful reading of the source code of the templates involved since the information there was insufficient. And of course what I described on the article talk page.

There are many problems in the citations that are still there because I didn't touch them. E.g. the WHO report was incorrectly cited using "cite web", obviously leading to funny parameters being used in the "citation" template. I was going to address these issues next, but right now I am not in the mood to contribute to Wikipedia anymore. These issues are more visible in the source code now, which I would consider to be an improvement.

Or don't you like the formatting?

By not giving any information other than "you are wrong", you are forcing me to read your mind, and I strongly object to that. This would have been a chance to reduce tensions at the article by working together on an aspect that cannot possibly be contentious, at least not along the usual lines.
 * Sorry for the missing article talk page entry, I would normally have done that if it hadn't been so late when I came across your massive change. I will respond on article talk.LeadSongDog (talk) 13:18, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

Good work on the Agaricus blazei Page!
Big thanks - JAtlas —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jatlas (talk • contribs) 17:11, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Puzzled
I am puzzled by this. Apparently you are referring to my characterisation of this edit of yours as an "emotional appeal to morals"? Let me be more precise, so that we have a chance to find out whether we actually disagree or not:
 * "It appears that there are still editors here who fail to acknowledge the obvious fact that diverting sick people from getting real medical attention is a deadly serious business."

This is several cheap rhetorical tricks in a single sentence. You are making at least two tacit assumptions that are incorrect: 1) that it's impossible to get "real medical attention" from a homeopath (wrong: many homeopaths, in some countries almost all, are also regularly trained physicians); and 2) that diverting sick people from regular medicine is a defining element of homeopathy (a half-truth: homeopathy can also be the last resort when regular medicine didn't help, e.g. for purely psychosomatic diseases; also at least in Germany homeopaths who are not physicians must be Heilpraktikers, and an important part of their training is to know when they must send a patient to a regular physician). Based on this, you seem to deny that there can be reasonable disagreement about whether homeopathy is quackery or not, and from this you seem to conclude that there is an obligation to say it is quackery in the lede. (This last step makes no sense because if you want to warn people against homeopathy, you can't afford sounding to zealous in one of the first paragraphs. This is a matter of effective communication.) I felt that what you wrote could be paraphrased as: "Editors like you [it's not entirely clear who is being addressed, probably NootherIDAvailable] are trying to kill people by omitting a necessary word in the lede."

This is wrong on so many levels that I don't know where to begin. But I guess the main point is that it looks like, being right, you feel entitled to shut down discussion altogether.


 * "Why should we continue to justify this behaviour?"

Frankly, I don't understand this sentence, because I have no idea what behaviour you feel you have hitherto "justified". But it sounds like a call for summary judgement of those editors who are disruptive because they don't agree with you and won't go away.

Overall, this did not look like a constructive contribution at all, more like an attempt to discuss editors rather than the article. Sometimes this is necessary, but clearly not in this case. I was particularly annoyed because I felt I had made a good point which I expected to be taken seriously. If my impression that negative statements about homeopathy are being cherry-picked for the lede is wrong, it shouldn't be so hard to prove that. As a mathematician I have had ample training in detecting when I am wrong, and it's routine for me to change my mind in this case. But emotionally loaded statements are not going to change my opinion.

OK, this was the long version of what I said, and I don't expect you to like it any more than the short version. But perhaps it makes it easier for you to explain what, exactly, you disagree with. --Hans Adler (talk) 01:34, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
 * You've largely misinterpreted the comment, which admittedly was too cryptic. I'll have to assume that your "several cheap retorical tricks" comment was meant as humour, as I've never been mistaken for an adept of retoric. Re your 1: my point isn't that it's impossible to get qualified care, but rather that it is less likely, particularly in developing countries. Re your 2, of course it is not a "defining element", but it is nonetheless a certain effect. When the placebo even temporarily delays real treatment, it presents a problem for a wide variety of critical conditions. Among poor people the choice is sometimes either one or the other, not one then the other. And yes, there is a strong positive corelation between poverty and ignorance that quacks of all flavours prey upon. Clearly there is an established, documented place for the use of placebos in medicine. But there is no excuse for a wikipedia article treating any practice that uses placebos (in preference to or in lieu of evidence based medicine) as respectable. This includes treating homeopathy advocacy and marketing sources as reliable. As far as any "emotional loading" in the statement (well, question actually), it got there in the reading, not the writing. I'm sure that none of the editors here think that they're harming anyone by their efforts, but that most certainly would be the effect if reading the article lends credence to the quacks. Bear in mind that someone running a google search for "homeopath" finds the WP article as the very first result. What we (collectively) say matters. LeadSongDog come howl  07:07, 30 March 2009 (UTC)