User talk:Prop9

Yes, I saved all of the work for my Wikipedia articles on Ed's work. If you could privately contact me, that could work. Otherwise, you can contact me through Project Avalon. I don't want to put my email address on Wikipedia, for reasons that you can imagine.


 * If you could put the work (after paraphrasing the copyrighted material) on the talk page as an Edit Request I would be happy to work with you on this. Prop9 (talk) 00:02, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Well, if I understand all of the legalese that I saw today, everything that I wrote was a copyright infringement or plagiarism of myself, even though I have given away the rights to all writings on my site. So, it looks like none of it is going to be acceptable. I don't mind giving the work to somebody, but it looks like the Wikipedia admins will run anything posted at Ed's bio against the bio on my site, and will call it plagiarism if any two words match. Believe me, I don't need to get any credit for any of this. Happy to give it to somebody else to take further. And frankly, I am a little exhausted right now, and have other pressing needs. Writing the Wikipedia articles took well over 100 hours, I would guess. I don't plan to check in to Wikipedia, but it looks like you can send me a message through Wikipedia. Not sure how that works here, but I imagine that you know how to. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wadefrazier (talk • contribs) 00:12, 15 July 2018 (UTC)


 * Wade, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Plagiarism "Plagiarism is taking credit for someone else's writing as your own, including their language and ideas, without providing adequate credit.The University of Cambridge defines plagiarism as: "submitting as one's own work, irrespective of intent to deceive, that which derives in part or in its entirety from the work of others without due acknowledgement." " What you did is not plagiarism. The whole copyright violation accusation is false too in a biographical article one has to quote, summarizing and citing is not enough. But you know this is wikipedia and they have their biases. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Krishna Pagadala (talk • contribs) 00:23, 15 July 2018 (UTC)


 * How about we start like this, just drop your proposed structure and references on the Talk page and we'll go from there. This is just a matter of deletion rather than addition, then we can fill out the sections from there. One nice thing about this is that doing it as a proposal gives protection from various charges of bad faith. Prop9 (talk) 00:28, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

OK, I have to do this in Word first and paste, because my direct writings are somehow getting zapped.

First, thanks Krishna:

As you may know, I have been plagiarized and impersonated on the Internet – the real thing, not the legalistic construction that I saw today. That admin’s definition is not like anything I ever heard of before, and the idea of plagiarizing myself was my Twilight Zone moment today, and as you know well, it was a long time ago (7 years? More?) that I put that legalese on my home page, renouncing all rights to my writings. You may have seen it at Avalon, where I wrote that a company was actually selling recordings of one of my interviews. I don’t have the heart to complain. So, this is certainly not entirely new terrain for me.

But wacky legal interpretations or not, it looks like Wikipedia is not going to allow any language on my site to be posted at Wikipedia, and frankly, the Wikipedia version that I published, across several Ed-related articles today, was largely a Frankensteined version of my bio of Ed on my site. So, I am not sure what to do, which leads me to Prop9’s latest.

Prop9, sorry for being such a Wikipedia greenhorn, but I don’t even know what this statement means:

“just drop your proposed structure and references on the Talk page”

Do you mean this user talk page? What do you mean by “proposed structure and references”? You need to dumb it down for me.

Thanks,

Wade — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wadefrazier (talk • contribs) 00:49, 15 July 2018 (UTC)
 * What I mean by "Drop in to the talk page" is to make an edit request, but starting with just the structure (e.g. subject headings and references). Start here for a way to do this within Wikipedia's guidelines. You'll need to add a COI tag that explicitly states your conflict of interest. Does that help? Prop9 (talk) 00:54, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Have you seen what that admin is writing about me, the careless plagiarist who deserves a good riddance? I am not going to play their game anymore. If anybody wants what I have created so far, they are welcome to it, but I am not going to petition Wikipedia for anything. I hate to say it, after all the work I put in, but not too surprising what happened. My essay on what happened to my massacre list additions is more than ten years old, and hasn’t aged a day! :)  The admins were among the worst offenders back in 2008, so nothing has changed.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wadefrazier (talk • contribs) 01:02, 15 July 2018 (UTC)
 * I find Ian's behavior quite toxic, but in fairness to Wikipedia there are bureaucratic mechanisms to limit the effects of this behavior, just as there are ways of dealing with the issues that Ian (uncivilly) posed. Working within ways of dealing with conflicts of interest and how to do copyright "the wikipedia way". I hope toxic behavior by one administrator doesn't discourage you from that. Prop9 (talk) 01:09, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Prop 9, I really appreciate your attempt to help, but as I wrote, I had a virtually identical experience in 2008, which I wrote an essay about, and the admins were actually worse than the jingoistic “editors” back then, so today’s toxic editor is all that I know at Wikipedia, and I really don’t need to bang my head against the wall anymore. That Brian’s bio got largely zapped too is just icing on the cake. Now there is not a word about free energy in his bio, which he thought was the most important part of his life. Being asked/ordered to go to Mars was just an amusing footnote.

I have better things to do with my time than beseech the gods at Wikipedia on bended knee. Again, anybody can contact me and get what I wrote, but I have this feeling that the vigilance is going to be extreme against anybody posting anything that looks remotely like what I wrote. Call me paranoid or cynical, but I don’t believe for an instant the statement: “The content does not matter to me, I am just trying to prevent plagiarism.” I have heard that kind of song too many times. Heck, Ed heard it for his entire media analysis career, so this is not surprising. Maybe you or somebody else will sally forth and somehow navigate the maze, and I will be pleasantly surprised if you do, but I think the game is rigged and it is time for me to move on, and, of course, I won’t be missed. :) I have been through “selective enforcement” experiences that make all of this pale to insignificance, and I’ll be over it soon.

Best,

Wade — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wadefrazier (talk • contribs) 01:30, 15 July 2018 (UTC)


 * Hey Prop9 Wade is referring to his edits on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_events_named_massacres you can find them at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Wadefrazier&offset=20081015030531&limit=100&target=Wadefrazier I see the erasure as a clear abuse of power, if you can atleast get it back into history I would be happy, that is if you know how to handle the bureaucracy. I actually understand COI, on such a controversial figure everybody has a COI whether or not they agree that they have one Krishna Pagadala (talk) 03:25, 15 July 2018 (UTC)


 * COI is much more narrowly defined in Wikipedia speak. In this case, Wade admitted a direct COI (correspondence and potential friendship with Herman) that disqualified him from directly editing the page by the Wikipedia rules. This is quite a bit different from COIs due to bias, which are actually allowed but are supposed to be mitigated by consensus and dispute resolution. Prop9 (talk) 04:13, 15 July 2018 (UTC)


 * Wikipedia actually does have ways to deal with bad faith editing, but they're slow and you need to be persistent. I went back and looked at your massacres article and --while I agree with your arguments about biased editing-- I disagree with your conclusion that this is somehow an intractable problem to solve. Wikipedia editing rewards both persistence and willingness to use bureaucratic and procedural knowledge to get what you want. I'd argue that in both cases you made good faith edits that got subsumed in the minutiae of bureaucratic wrangling and --not knowing the rules yet yourself-- you weren't able to muster enough political capital to "establish consensus" on the talk page. If you're willing to bear with me, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised but not 100% happy. Prop9 (talk) 04:09, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Prop9, you are fighting the good fight, but I think that your efforts are doomed, as you can see by the initial disparaging reply to your proposal to make Ed’s bio more like a normal Wikipedia article. I am making some posts today (not at Wikipedia, of course) on what happened yesterday. I may add more to the Wikiquote page that I made (which seems to not be a copyright infringement, although putting those same quotes at Wikipedia somehow is – I don’t pretend to understand that “logic”, as well as the logic that I plagiarized my public-domain self), but that is it. I am also going to publish the code that I wrote for my edits to those articles relating to Ed, for anybody to use how they see fit, but that is going to be the end of my involvement. Thanks for trying. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wadefrazier (talk • contribs) 14:22, 15 July 2018 (UTC)


 * I don't think it's impossible. Chomsky's page is at least passable. I'd argue that the central problem with Herman's page is that it's less well known than Chomsky's so it lends itself more to agenda pushing. Wikipedia has mechanisms for fixing these problems, they just take time and bureaucratic persistence. Prop9 (talk) 15:39, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

I agree with you, Prop9, that there is some faint hope, but I am not going to be the person to run that gauntlet. Too many interests are gunning for me, for one thing, and don’t think that they don’t lurk at Wikipedia, performing their duties. I have had my own Internet stalkers, and some were likely CIA assets or hailed from higher levels of the game. My arrival just brings too much baggage with it. Better that I withdraw, but I’ll publish my Wikipedia code one day, and people can use it however they want. I just published, not at Wikipedia, of course, my reflections on yesterday. I don’t plan to post at Wikipedia again. Maybe Ed’s Wikiquote page one day, but not at Wikipedia again. I learned my lesson in no uncertain terms, but I appreciate your optimism. :) Keep it up.

Good luck,

Wade — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wadefrazier (talk • contribs) 16:38, 15 July 2018 (UTC)


 * We've started a discussion on how to restructure the page. If consensus can't be reached in a reasonable amount of time (or the discussion is ignored) I'm going to escalate to the dispute resolution process. Feel free to follow along on the talk page every once in a while, if you'd like to participate in spirit if not body. Prop9 (talk) 16:43, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Summary of the abuse and violations of wikipedia policies seen on Ed Herman's page
Appreciate your thoughts about COI. No matter how COI is defined in wikipedia we all have a COI. I dont approach wikipedia from its rules. I approach it from the spirit. Which is an encyclopedia for the world. It is a disservice when wikpedia sends important and careful contributions down memory hole. I fully expected the contributions to be reverted but being erased is straight out of Nineteen Eighty-Four. One of the wikipedia five pillars is "Wikipedia has no firm rules" it says further "Be bold but not reckless in updating articles. And do not agonize over making mistakes: every past version of a page is saved, so mistakes can be easily corrected" I have said as much, there was an abuse of power and Wade's contribution needs to be reinstated and visible for people like me who know they have to go through the edits. I expect that it will be reverted and new content will come in its place, removing it from the edits though is amazing. I did not think that wikipedia stooped that low. The genius of deletion is that the mistakes cannot even be corrected.


 * Wikipedia actually has mechanisms to deal with its specific definition of COI. Wade's contributions didn't do that (e.g. use the talk page for an edit request). Likewise, his edits also had copyrighted material with no specific assignment to Wikipedia's license. Bureaucracies can be annoying, but I understand what Wikipedia is trying to achieve in both cases even if it feels unfair. Prop9 (talk) 18:10, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons Wikipedia's sourcing policy, Verifiability, says that all quotations and any material challenged or likely to be challenged must be attributed to a reliable, published source using an inline citation;" the implication being that quotations will be used, and that they must be properly cited.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_violations#Dealing_with_copyright_violations Copyright violations policy says "If you have strong reason to suspect a violation of copyright policy and some, but not all, of the content of a page appears to be a copyright infringement, then the infringing content should be removed with the source url in the edit summary if possible." In other words dont send it down the memory hole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy Deletion Policy says "If in doubt as to whether there is consensus to delete a page, administrators normally will not delete it." In short the sending Wade's contribution down memory hole was a violation of wikipedia's own policies and guidelines. It was a clear abuse of power.


 * Keeping copyrighted material in the diff history makes Wikipedia liable for the violations. I'm thankful that Wade kept his edits offsite but I don't really have any problems with the deletion because it limits Wikipedia's liability. Prop9 (talk) 18:10, 15 July 2018 (UTC)


 * First there has to be proof of copyright violation. I have already linked to Wade essay on his site http://ahealedplanet.net/herman.htm Do you see any copyright violations there? As u can see from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons expects "quotations" from "reliable, published source using an inline citation" so quotations are OK. I am repeating myself "Except for nytimes obit all of the other articles you cited for copyvio are authored by Edward Herman. I doubt that he would have considered it copyvio. Regarding the nytimes article why is it not fair use?" and also I asked "Why is it not Fair Use?" with respect to Ed Herman's own work. I also gave my reasons for why use of NYT material was FAIR USE, quoting myself "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Non-free_content#Implementation Says it has to meet 6.1 Meeting the no free equivalent criterion     --- CHECK NYT is one of the most important papers, there is no free equivalent 6.2 Meeting the previous publication criterion    --- CHECK 6.3 Meeting the contextual significance criterion --- CHECK This is from NYT obituary of Ed Herman" Liability is not a concern with respect to Ed Herman's own work, he explicitly gave permission to Wade to fix up his wikipedia biography. So that leaves NYT obit as the sole remaining concern for COPYVIO, if you assume that NYT obit was copyvio (which IMO it is not). Why was that not removed? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_violations#Dealing_with_copyright_violations says "some, but not all, of the content of a page appears to be a copyright infringement, then the infringing content should be removed" There was no reason to delete everything from history. Sending Wade's contribution down memory hole was an abuse of power. Krishna Pagadala (talk) 17:17, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

I just published my work files for my Ed-related articles (and Brian's bio, at least when I last worked on it). At my forum or Avalon should work. That ends my involvement. Good luck! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wadefrazier (talk • contribs) 18:52, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

I am following your efforts and making my comments in forums that I participate in, which are easy to find, especially my own. I won't join the fray at Wikipedia again, but good luck! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wadefrazier (talk • contribs) 15:28, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

Prop9, wherever you are, the erasure of my work was reversed, thanks to Krishna's persistence, and he got banned for his trouble, but you now have some raw material to work with, and no legal issues with using my Wikipedia contributions how you see fit. Good luck, should you choose to carry on. Wadefrazier (talk) 04:32, 6 December 2018 (UTC)Wade Frazier