User talk:SJUPadin

Guillou
Hej, lämnade några rader till ang inflödet av material och knyckta kvällstidningsrykten kring Jan Guillou och KGB. Jag är också angelägen att artikeln förblir sansad och håller sig till kontrollerbara saker i stället för spekulationer och personangrepp, men jag skulle vilja uppmana dig att inte börja stryka ner allt *utanför* KGB-avsnittet bara för att det f n "saknas källor". Som det är nu är det KGB-storyn, möjligen också dess kopplingar till IB (den har inga, enligt mig, men somliga tycks anse att den har det), som många kommer att vilja rusa in och redigera. Det övriga kommer inte att vara lika laddat.

Det finns en princip här att det som skrivs ska vara verifierbart och källbelagt, men det är inte samma sak som att allt som inte är "exakt sourcat", oavsett vad det är, ska strykas omedelbart. Agerar man så gör man det omöjligt att åstadkomma något annat än "bare bones"-artiklar på tio rader så fort det handlar om historia, politik, sociala fenomen, litteratur, etc eftersom det inte går lika snabbt att källbelägga påståenden där som i t ex en artikel om kemi där du kan kompilera rubbet från "erkänt sanna" handböcker utan någon övrig kontroll - ingen kemist anser att t ex gasteorins teser behöver omprövas, det står samma sak i alla böcker, men utanför naturvetenskapen är det sällan lika enkelt att snabbt kompilera en begriplig och oomtvistligt sann artikel från den litteratur som finns.

Jag skriver det här därför att jag har mött en del "vaktmästardrakar" som satt sig på en artikel och omedelbart, dag efter dag, månad efter månad, stryker allt som inte passar dem under hänvisning till sin tolkning av WP:s regler. Inte speciellt förtroendeingivande och jag hoppas att du inte har tänkt dig ditåt. /Strausszek (talk) 21:58, 1 November 2009 (UTC)


 * You misunderstand WP:VERIFY. It has nothing to do with the verification process used in in natural science or attempts to establish "scientific truth". It is about the importance of attributing information that you enter into an article. Please note that Wikipedia has firm a rule against original research. Please also note that "bare-bones articles" are preferable to articles (especially biographies) consisting of unsourced speculation. There is no reason to make an exception in the case of the Jan Guillou article. If you have a problem sourcing contentious material, do not add it until you have verified the information in a reliable source. This is also advisable when it comes to specialized information that may not be familiar to a wider audience of international readers, such as the details surrounding the IB-affair. I will add a request for sources to that section so that people with better knowledge of the literature on the matter may notice the problem and assist with citations.


 * Also, I would like to ask you to please use English so that people do not have to use Google translate to understand your discussion page entries. Your complaint above that Wikipedia's "house-keeping dragons" are deleting your unsourced additions to different articles is best dealt with here. I'm afraid I won't be able to be of much help with that problem. SJUPadin (talk) 22:48, 1 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I permitted myself to write - and in a semi-formal tone - in Swedish here because 99% of the people who are or will be contributing to the Guillou article are Swedes, and working mostly from Swedish sources. You're clearly Scandinavian too. I was not implying I've personally had a big amount of trouble with territorial peeing from editors who have hijacked an article and are enforcing their own kind of policy. It's happened a few times, but above all I've noticed editors on articles I didn't work on myself who went to ridiculous lengths to keep out everything except bare-bones "brute facts", while pushing their own favourite ideas. You can push a POV by choosing what facts and quotes to include too, or what words to use. The word "spy" in the Guillou article for instance.


 * Plainly (and you may not have noticed it since you seem to have been gone for a long time and wasn't around much before then) the kind of praxis you find on WP is not consequent when it comes to how to judge issues like "what makes a good sourcing?", "what is reliable, and why?", "when is a person a good source for himself?" and so on. ¨There is no *single* praxis, though there are rules: those rules are interpreted in different ways by different editors and admins, actually. Many wikipedians seem to think certain newspapers, public agencies and high-profile universities are always reliable and could never be questioned, unless what they said has been contested by a majority of the other "good sources" - I think that's a primitive view, ultimately not even scientific, and I'm not exactly the only one thinking so here. It's like saying "It must be true because I read it in DN and they never lie".


 * There have been discussions on this WP about whether it's okay to edit out a statement on the spot simply because it's not yet sourced, even when no one is contesting that it's true. I've seen articles getting edited down that way and they mostly end up as trivial aggregates of second-hand info junk that don't answer most of the questions people legitimately want an article on a person, a place, a book, a movement or a historical event to answer when they turn to an encyclopaedia. /Strausszek (talk) 23:37, 1 November 2009 (UTC)
 * POV-pushing can be dealt with by balancing sources, rather than censoring news reports. The problem I have noticed in the article under discussion is that material is presented in contentious ways, not because of the type of facts introduced, but because no sources are used to attribute various wide-ranging claims made, such as the claim that something is a general truth although the claim is not specific enough to be verifiable. It is a problem especially related to additions such as "a publication was "influential", most of this has been proven true", something was "vital", "important", "the most popular", the "accepted truth", or other types of essay-style attributes previously added to this article, such as the claim that something was "flatly denied", "wryly said", etc etc. Unfortunately, these types of unsourced additions often introduce POV-problems as well, not just verification problems. I am therefore inclined to agree with those who argue that unencyclopedic additions should be deleted on sight, rather than simply marked with a fact request tag. SJUPadin (talk) 00:41, 2 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Palme was obviously not going to say, after the fact, "I flatly denied what Guillou and those guys had claimed" (and nor would any of his ministers, they wanted to forget the entire affair). Instead he had said - even before the arrest - "Those boys have read too many indian books" and went on to effectively deny all the content of what FIB/K had printed on the issue. Anyone can see that he denied it, and actually it's an established truth today, after thirty years of paper searching and interviews, that IB did provide intelligence for the Social Democrat party and that it was at least partly outside of the frames of the legit intelligence agencies. That's hard-won and established truth whether you agree with it or not, but the research is too recent to have made it in a broad way into "History of Sweden"-type books or university textbooks on Swedish cold-war history (you can find it in a number of public commission reports, book-length journalistic investigations and memoirs though). The bones of much of the IB structure was admitted - and stated with rich quotes - already by Carl Persson and P-G Vinge, heads of the police and secret police at that time, and they would know what they were talking about. But of course they have been contested by some cyphers.
 * Palme was obviously not going to say, after the fact, "I flatly denied what Guillou and those guys had claimed" (and nor would any of his ministers, they wanted to forget the entire affair). Instead he had said - even before the arrest - "Those boys have read too many indian books" and went on to effectively deny all the content of what FIB/K had printed on the issue. Anyone can see that he denied it, and actually it's an established truth today, after thirty years of paper searching and interviews, that IB did provide intelligence for the Social Democrat party and that it was at least partly outside of the frames of the legit intelligence agencies. That's hard-won and established truth whether you agree with it or not, but the research is too recent to have made it in a broad way into "History of Sweden"-type books or university textbooks on Swedish cold-war history (you can find it in a number of public commission reports, book-length journalistic investigations and memoirs though). The bones of much of the IB structure was admitted - and stated with rich quotes - already by Carl Persson and P-G Vinge, heads of the police and secret police at that time, and they would know what they were talking about. But of course they have been contested by some cyphers.


 * Any "third-part reliable sources" that would say Palme denied the whole thing and that he was essentially covering up might be called "partisan", "unreliable" or "written by FIB/K cronies" if you really want to call somebody that. So as long as you don't go to archive research or resolve to take a Ph.D. in history it would be very hard - maybe impossible - to give a final "wiki verification" that cannot be contested by some dogged editor that Palme denied it. Lots of statements that you need to produce intelligible texts are like that, they can't be verified in a fail safe way just from other printed texts, bereft of analysis, because any such verification would only be partial: how do you prove (from books vs other books) that Beethoven is an influential composer? Most people in India have never heard of him and composers oday rarely write in the forms he developed. How do you prove that George W Bush was a controversial president and that he was heavily criticized by many people without limiting this claim to a hundred smaller groups of people to be judged one by one? Which would make it a totally bland statement, likely useless in an encyclopedia. /Strausszek (talk) 01:43, 2 November 2009 (UTC)
 * It's not that difficult to avoid essay-style value judgments in an article. There is no reason to use expressions indicating that you consider something "influential", "wryly said", "flatly refused", "most important", "vital", "an accepted truth", etc. It's a pretty straightforward rule actually: "Assert facts, including facts about opinions—but do not assert the opinions themselves". Best, SJUPadin (talk) 05:13, 2 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Seems to me there is a failure to understand a few things here:
 * 1.Many statements in human sciences, political science, social sciences and so on are not just grabbed from the raw facts in the lab. They are about facts, sure, and they're not random, but they can't logically be made as statements without analysis, without a time structure or without some interpretation of what X meant by saying Y (people don't always talk like lab scientists or talk-show guys, you know!) Those steps of analysis and putting together can be straightforward, safe as milk, but they are rarely spelled out to full length, one by one every time it happens, even in academic literature, because that would be impossibly tedious and blur the text. So if you lift those statements to WP and integrate them into a text here, it could always be claimed they do not work as intelligible verifications ("the supposed source does not really say this"). Hey, we're wikipedians so we're not supposed to be able to use our brains to actually understand what is being said in a text, right?


 * 2.No one is interested in spending a week, without pay, putting together a complicated chain of "proof citations" and pointers to exactly why those lines hang together water-tight, and support each other according to the methods of established science - for just a few sentences in the article, sentences which in themselves may not be very controversial at all. Statements like "After 1945, for many years the Soviet Union denied any knowledge of the destiny of Raoul Wallenberg and simply said there was no indication he had entered Soviet territory" or "Following the sudden crisis of Nyckeln, in 1990-91 the Swedish real estate investment market went into a downward spin". The truth of those is obvious to anyone who's lived in Sweden in recent times, but the statements are aggregated from many local facts from many different places, and so they could be contested at WP, but hardly in serious historical literature. Or "Palme denied that any such agency /as IB, described by Bratt and Guillou/ existed" - no one will make that effort if the result will be edited out on the fly, without even a "source needed" alert, by an over-ambitious guardian editor saying "tut tut, this is not the real WP Verify proof as I demand it to be". I have seen cases like that, even if I have rarely been the target.


 * 3.No one is interested in reading an article which essentially would just state that Jan Guillou, a journalist and writer, was born in 1944, list his books, and say he was sentenced to prison for espionage in 1973 and in 2009 it turned out he had indeed been spying for the KGB. That's where you land if you demand that every atom of an article, even the detailed logical and critical underpinnings behind what is said, must have a separate verification and that any kind of narrative or contextual statements are out of bounds as long as they are not lifted in those exact same words from an incontrovertibly reliable third-party source. Besides, that kind of policy opens the gate for people to throw in anything they find in the tabloids because tabloids, unlike scholars, like to make direct and blatant claims and leave analysis aside.
 * Having just returned here, are you training to be a bureaucrat or something? /Strausszek (talk) 10:25, 2 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Whatever your problem is, please bring it to the appropriate discussion pages. As I have already told you, I'm not able to help you further with the issue you seem to have with policy. All I have asked is that you do not add unsourced and contentious material to the article. No amount of personal attacks will change the need for citations and fact checking here, I'm afraid. SJUPadin (talk) 16:34, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Ett anspråkslöst förslag
SJUPadin, jag har ett förslag. Skriv några artikeltexter om Jan Guillou, Informationsbyrån eller valfri kung eller politisk ledare så som du skulle vilja ha dem, och med det innehåll och det slags hänvisningar som du anser är WP-fähigt (listan på hänvisningar behöver så klart inte vara fullständig, bara den ger en bild av ungefär var du anser att WP ska lägga ribban). Välj ämnen som inbegriper en del nyare diskussion eller forskning, så att inte alla hänvisngar kan göras till ett par standardverk. Lägg ut dem på ditt sandbox-utrymme (området för nya artiklar under arbete; det kan läsas av andra om du ger en länk). Vilken bredd tycker du att artiklar ska ha och vilka slags påståenden anser du dig kunna källbelägga direkt utan att tillföra någon slags "original synthesis" eller kritisk bedömning? Då skulle det finnas någonting konkret att diskutera snarare än att du sitter och gör in blanco-hänvisningar till Wikipedias principer och låtsas som om du satt på hur dessa ska tolkas. Det senare är ungefär som att säga att "jaa, polisen griper ju alla brottslingar" till en familj som fått sitt hem tömt på allt värdefullt medan de var på semester i Spanien. Som sagt, WP:s praxis är i praktiken lokal, den skiftar från artikel till artikel och beror på vilka personer som råkar vara inblandade och hur källäget ser ut.

Du kanske har haft ett annat användarkonto förr men vad jag kan se av din lista på bidrag har du ju återkommit hit helt nyligen efter några få redigeringar för ett och ett halvt år sen, och har knappt gjort några bidrag alls till sajten utom den här diskussionen mellan oss. Jag har själv varit aktiv medlem här (och på svenska WP) i över fyra år och är inte känd för att ställa till med krig om småsaker eller att posta opålitligt innehåll. Däremot har jag låg tolerans för personer som håller fast vid att "allting som står i vissa böcker är utan vidare sant ifall boken, enligt mig, är en tillförlitlig källa".

PS.Jag återgår till svenska eftersom jag uppfattar att du förstår det språket utmärkt väl och jag tänker inte bjussa på några soundbites om du skulle springa till någon engelskspråkig sheriff./Strausszek (talk) 15:24, 2 November 2009 (UTC)


 * If you have a problem with a particular edit of mine, you're welcome to discuss it here. However, your personal and general views on policy, your speculations about me personally and your editing history in other languages are of no interest to me. Furthermore, your long essays on the subject are getting tiresome. Any further foreign language additions by you here on my user discussion page will be deleted. Please use your own user page to present yourself and your feelings to the community. SJUPadin (talk) 16:34, 2 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Mörön. /Strausszek (talk) 17:13, 2 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Attempts at humor are always a wälcome counter-weight to a litany of whining. Especially if it comes as a short final drum roll after a long exercise in essay writing in somebody else's user space. :) SJUPadin (talk) 18:40, 2 November 2009 (UTC)