Wikipedia:Mediation Cabal/Cases/04 June 2012/Occupy Wall Street

Where is the dispute?
Occupy Wall Street

Who is involved?

 * User:Factchecker_atyourservice (editor initiating request)
 * User:Amadscientist
 * User:Becritical
 * User:Gandydancer

What is the dispute?
This is a content dispute. I believe that the inclusion of a particular sentence, supported by the three other editors named above, reflects a substantial violation of WP:V as the sentence currently written. The disputed sentence is as follows:

"Formation of the New York General Assembly (NYGA) began in June and July when a group called New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts (NYAB), began promoting a “People’s General Assembly” to “Oppose Cutbacks And Austerity Of Any Kind”."

The problem, as I see it, is that this claim is not verifiable from the cited source. It's almost as if the claim above depends on SYNTH -- but actually, it's considerably worse than SYNTH. Rather than synthesizing material from one source with material from another source to yield a novel conclusion, the above sentence reflects a synthesis of material from one source with personal knowledge of editors, as well as considerable speculation.

In a nutshell, the argument seems to be, "we WP editors know that this is the truth, so our article should say it even if the source does not". Even were this not an unacceptable rationale, we don't actually know that it's the truth. I don't know it, and neither do any of the other editors involved. Two of the three editors supporting inclusion of this prose have acknowledged that the above conclusion is not directly supported by the source, but the "consensus" seems to be that we can simply ignore this. The result flies in the face of both the letter and spirit of WP policy on verifiability.

The source in question is a piece by a Bloomberg Businessweek staff writer. It is an in-depth piece detailing anthropologist David Graeber's organizing role in the early days of OWS.

The article says that Graeber attended an advertised "People's General Assembly" in the summer of 2011, but was disappointed to find that this turned out to be a traditional protest movement with a traditional hierarchical leadership, whereas in anarchist parlance (Graeber is an anarchist), a "general assembly" implies an assembly of peers lacking any formal leadership structure. According to the article, this disappointment led Graeber to break away from that assembly and start his own competing group at the other end of the park. By the end of the day, it says, all 50 of the people who were still in the park had joined Graeber's offshoot group.

Next comes the crucial source text that is acknowledged not to directly support the WP prose, but which has apparently been deemed "good enough" by editors desiring that we say something firm and authoritative about OWS organizational history even if we don't happen to have a source for what we want to say. The source text reads as follows:

"While there were weeks of planning yet to go, the important battle had been won. The show would be run by horizontals, and the choices that would follow—the decision not to have leaders or even designated police liaisons, the daily GAs and myriad working-group meetings that still form the heart of the protests in Zuccotti Park—all flowed from that."

Were you waiting until we got to the part where the source talks about the specific, named group of living people and substantiates the claim that the events described above were the genesis of that specific group? Don't hold your breath. The group is never mentioned, either by name or in general terms. And the source article itself never really says more than that the events described above set the tone for much of what was to come. Neither the identity of any particular group, nor the circumstances of its formation, can be discerned from the source text.

So in a nutshell the source is telling us that Graeber showed some early OWS-precursor participants what a real "general assembly" looked like, and that the movement's leaderless structure, "and the choices that would follow", "all flowed from that". We could fashion WP article prose that would accurately reflect this claim, without saying anything unsubstantiated. But that's apparently not good enough for our editors. The source doesn't say what they want it to say. So they go out on a limb and say much more than the source says. Even if OWS weren't a controversial topic inviting a variety of disputes, this would be an inappropriate lack of sourcing.

It might actually take some time to identify and catalogue all the unstated, unsubstantiated assumptions on which this conclusion relies. But the only one that really matters is this: ''We don't know how the NYCGA was formed, or by who, or under what circumstances, or under whose leadership, or as a result of whose example. We simply don't have a source telling us, and in absence of that, we're speculating.'' All we have is a couple of WP editors that seem to think *they* know the *real* scoop and don't mind filling readers in on subjects that are (perhaps) not adequately discussed by the sources. But that is emphatically not how WP is supposed to work—in fact, WP is explicitly structured to protect readers from the unsubstantiated speculation of WP editors.

What steps have you already taken to try and resolve the dispute?
The issue has only been discussed, albeit at length, at the article talk page. By requesting assistance from MEDCAB, I am attempting to bypass the noticeboards and WQA because the dispute involves (in my opinion) a somewhat subtle violation of WP:V, because the involved editors all have a relatively sophisticated understanding of policy, and because I suspect that contributions by random lurkers at the noticeboards would introduce more noise than signal.

What issues needs to be addressed to help resolve the dispute
We are talking past each other. I see a clear violation of WP:V which could be easily avoided by a simple, less contentious paraphrasing of the source, and don't see any valid reason for having our WP article say more than our source says. Opposing editors seem to think that our article needs to say something specific, and are unconcerned that we don't actually have sources to substantiate what "needs" to be said.

What can we do to help resolve this issue?
Render an opinion as to whether the above WP-article-text paraphrase violates WP:V by distorting or exaggerating what the source says.

Mediator notes
Mediators are not here to make a "ruling" one way or another. We are here to help parties have an open discussion, and work collaboraitvely to a solution. I am not sure if mediation is the required outcome here - the dispute resolution noticeboard is the one for this to go. However, if a statement in an article is not supported by a citation, then its inclusion needs to be looked into. You can't just add something to an article because you know it's true. This consituites original research. But, DRN is probably the way to go here.

Regards, Steven  Zhang  Get involved in DR! 02:15, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

Discussion
I like and respect all of the editors involved in this dispute. I believe that Centrify has presented a fair description of the dispute and I admire his willingness to work for what he believes to be good for the OWS article. That said, I have no idea of why he is holding the position that he is though I've read the source and the talk page posts several times. I also believe that he has been hasty in bringing this dispute here because I believe that we can work towards a solution on the OWS talk page. I see no reason that we can't agree to disagree on the Graeber source and work around it. Please see MadSci and my recent talk page edits. Gandydancer (talk) 23:36, 9 June 2012 (UTC)