Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-01-31/Opinion


 * Great article, thank you for writing it. I agree with many of your points. Ganesha811 (talk) 20:20, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Lead might be odorless and tasteless itself, but our TEL article states with cite that this specific compound of it is "odor: pleasant, sweet". Many lead-containing chemicals are sweetish. DMacks (talk) 20:47, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
 * You're exactly right, : the element lead is odorless and tasteless; TEL tastes sweet. Mary Mark Ockerbloom (talk) 04:32, 1 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Wonderful article, I do think our articles on popular mass produced food products could do with more scientific objectivity on their typically unhealthiness. No Swan So Fine (talk) 21:10, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you, . It's amazing how much information -- and how much history -- there can be behind something you take for granted.  A while back I rewrote the baking powder article.  I had had no idea that there were different types of it, much less the conflicts that were part of its history.  Mary Mark Ockerbloom (talk) 04:32, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
 * As a biotechnology dropout currently studying business, I've recently gone in conflict on the ethics of products and corporate actions; one of my recent assignments involved mediate between companies as Olympic sponsors and environmentalist and health groups, citing the London 2012 Olympics as background I still haven't done this assignment -Gouleg🛋️ (Stalk • Hound) 16:03, 2 February 2021 (UTC)


 * We need more editors with scientific expertise. Why should they join? Fighting misinformation in science on here can be an utter time sink. Such scientists probably don’t have the time or energy to engage in lengthy circular discussions on poor sourcing attempting to introduce disinformation, unlike people whose sole agenda is disinformation. And we don’t topic ban in the name of ‘free speech’ / ‘legitimate content debate’ etc. COVID misinformation is ripe, at talk:Ivermectin for example, and it took too long for topic bans there. It’s just boring. There’s legitimate content debate, and there’s misrepresenting sources and quoting crappy sources to push a pseudoscientific POV. We should start treating editors’ time with respect, if we want editors with expert scientific expertise to contribute. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 21:13, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
 * There's likely a couple things to do, e.g. realizing that POV pushing occurs in science articles too and more strictly enforcing our rules.
 * We can invite in scientists (or their grad students or even Wikipedians-in-residence) or bring them into edit-a-thons or other methods more familiar to them.
 * What we can't do however is tell them that they'll be immune from the usual back and forth of Wikipedia editing
 * Perhaps set up a freely licensed "teaching journal" where they can get some academic credit towards tenure in a fairly normal (but speedier) peer review process, but that material can then be imported into Wikipedia more easily.
 * I'm not sure any of the above are *the answer*, but I certainly hope that nobody is giving up! Smallbones( smalltalk ) 01:22, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
 * It is a huge challenge, and I thank you for your hard work. Groups like WikiEdu do good work bringing in students and teaching them to write. I'd love to see more outreach with working scientists and scientific organizations. My personal opinion is that we need to look for ways to collaborate with scientists and get them to share their expertise without requiring that they jump through all the bells and whistles of becoming full-fledged editors. We need to find ways to meet them halfway. Current talk pages are fine if you already have expertise with Wikipedia, but not if you're a scientist reading an article and going "but that's wrong". Mind you, would a scientist who knows it's wrong be reading the article? Maybe someday we'll have an interface that will make it easy for readers to highlight what they think is wrong or confusing on a Wikipedia page and flag it or tell us more about it. Then we could ask a group of scientists to review articles for us, in the same way I've sometimes asked an expert to read a Wikipedia page printout and mark what's dodgy with a highlighter pen. Knowing where the problems are goes a long way to getting them fixed; in a two-stage process experienced editors could vet those reports. Applying more of a "bug-reporting" mentality to content is just one idea; I'd love to hear what other people would suggest. Mary Mark Ockerbloom (talk) 04:32, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
 * OK I'll bite on your bait and list some of the above ideas and a few more just to see if something strikes a chord with other people
 * encourage WikkiEdu to get more science students (and teachers) involved with them
 * get a freely licensed journal where scientists can "quickly" publish peer-reviewed Wiki-relevant material.
 * similarly, help set up some freely licensed science-wikis where scientists could limit participant to, say PhDs, so they could avoid some of the trolls around here.
 * There are actually lots of advanced degree holders around here who have been very successful editors. comes to mind  immediately. Just ask them in a survey what works and what hasn't.
 * There are lots of academics in some of the softer sciences who love to publish about Wikipedia or use Wikipedia data (see any Recent research column in The Signpost). Get some of them to write in Wikipedia about Wikipedia, or to get the "hard scientists" you seem to be talking about involved in some of the things that they like to do. Actually I just ran into a chemist this month who published a paper in Nature about Wikipedia. It's not like they are not interested.
 * And, of course, ask anybody reading this for their ideas. Smallbones( smalltalk ) 18:46, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
 * It's also worth adding a plug for the current WikiJournals at this point. It may address the 'freely licensed journal' point above, through peer review times vary widely, which is a pretty universal limitation in academic publishing. Coincidentally, given the mention of lead in the article, the WP page on Lead has gone through peer review as 10.15347/wjs/2018.007 (full list here). T.Shafee(Evo &#38; Evo)talk 11:09, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Good piece. Thanks! --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 09:27, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
 * My personal experience in contributing to scientific debate on Wikipedia, which is documented on talk pages but I can not easily find it now, is from several years ago, when I have seen a hot debate between two users discussing what is the energy flux and some issues related to it. I am a full professor in physics at a top-100 university in the world. I have taken an undergraduate text which was on my table and added a citation from the text, which answered precisely the question being debated. Both sides dismissed the citation, saying that it does not correspond to the current scientific consensus or whatever formulation they have chosen, I do not remember, and continued fighting. Then I thought "fuck you" and unwatched the page. I have to fight enough for my own research results and funding in the real world, and I do not have time and energy to debate with ignorant users without academic credentials about the issues which are part of a standard undergrad curriculum. I believe one of the users was later dragged to ANI and either blocked or topic-banned, the other one is probably still there.--Ymblanter (talk) 10:27, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
 * That's exactly the Randy in Boise scenario, isn't it? ☆ Bri (talk) 01:07, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, kind of.--Ymblanter (talk) 06:35, 2 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Yes, I agree this is a good article, and points out some of the tension that exists in science, science as servant, science as master. Are we suppressing "fringe theories" or are we ignoring disinterested science? I must admit that the "fringe" stuff is often so bleeding obvious that there is no problem refuting and dismissing it. The history of hand-washing in medicine and continental drift in geology and biogeography are both depressing however. My 2 bob: archaeologist, academic in Geography, Environmental Science, Biomedical Science and Medicine. Scientists are experts, but usually in the field that they are expert in. In other fields they are not. Take medical science, what they do they do well, but they are driven by funding and by medical culture (a powerful force in medicine). Sociology, history &c., they are quite often rubbish at. Look at the Kombucha article, the history there would fail a first year arts essay, relying on other medical journals quoting puff pieces written by kombucha sellers. But it must be true, it is written in a first-class refereed journal. No, medical scientist often do history as well as historians do medical science. Science is not the only discipline with the problems outlined in the article above. But all too often we seem to equate "scientist" with "rational thinker who can solve anything". No, scientists in the real world do what they do in their field of expertise usually quite well, but asking them to solve problems in the political or social or cultural or other complex spheres is not a "golden bullet". So, Wikipedia, disinterested, scientifically literate outsiders have been a powerful force in communicating science. Stephen Jay Gould, Tim Flannery and others are good scientists, but they also stepped out of their narrow field of expertise to summarize a broad range of disciplines. Many had/have quibbles with their work, hey, that's science. But you do not necessarily need to be a practising scientist to evaluate and communicate science, there are many science journalists who convey reasonable information strongly. Sometimes it helps to have some distance. An encyclopaedia is not a science journal. Does WP scare scientist away? Yes, if they are people who do not accept criticism and/or simplification, or notification of breaching WP protocols. I'm sorry, the previous response above, professor of physics, quotes something about energy flux from a undergraduate textbook, secondary source, a few years old, obviously not his field of expertise otherwise quote the definitive references. He gets upset when he is told that it does not represent present consensus (it may not have), the textbooks view may be under pressure from recent research, &c. He was not sufficiently disinterested in the topic to discuss calmly the options. I'm not saying that there aren't people who are sure that dragons are involved somehow, but it's amazing what a quick back and forth can reveal. Are there less scientists involved in editing WP than there are out there in the real world? Is the science in WP poorly done generally? Sorry, as a consequence of science and academia I ask, what does the data tell us? Thank you to Mary Mark Ockerbloom for the article, it is good, thank you to Ymblanter and all others who are endeavouring to make WP a better information communication source. Brunswicknic (talk) 12:22, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
 * For the record, what I was referring to is my field of expertise - well, this particular question has been resolved a hundred years ago, and there is no current research going on, but the ideas are still being used in my field of research. In addition, the undergraduate book was on my table because I was at the time giving an undergraduate course on the subject.--Ymblanter (talk) 12:53, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
 * ps. Lead is increasingly being used as a dating tool for the recent past, not only do lead radioisotopes lend themselves to recent timescales, but the sudden increase of lead in urban deposits can mark the introduction of lead into petrol into the atmosphere into sediments. Brunswicknic (talk) 12:22, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes,, there's some really interesting work there! Mary Mark Ockerbloom (talk) 15:28, 5 February 2021 (UTC)


 * I'd say that Wikipedia needs more editors with expertise in countless fields. My college degree is in English literature, & I dread reading any article on one of the standard texts of the Western Canon. They are often inadequate because students are taught to respond to literature, not what are the important commentaries on a given work. (Both approaches are defensible.) I learned about what tools exists to find academic papers on literature -- such as the MLA International Bibliography -- as an afterthought by a few of my professors. I could make similar remarks about other areas I've contributed to, such as Ancient & Classical history.To be fair, this is a symptom of our success: back in the Stone Age of Wikipedia, articles were not very good, often written on the fly; over the years, we've gradually raised the level of quality, insisting on citations & that articles better reflect the state of knowledge. With over 6 million articles (half of which are stubs), it is expected that many will not match our expectations. But we are still raising the level of quality. -- llywrch (talk) 07:53, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , I agree with your first statement -- more expertise is needed cross the board -- but I also want to emphasize that scientific disinformation has potentially harmful consequences that are serious for everyone. Unlike Jasper Fforde's alternate Nextian England, where ProCath terrorists wreck havoc in support of the young Catherine, no one is likely to die if we mess up a literary detail. This comment is not meant to disparage your field, btw. Mary Mark Ockerbloom (talk) 15:28, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately, your comment is harmful. There is a movement in higher education to cut back offerings in the Liberal Arts in order to expand those in STEM; while this is mostly happening in the US, I've seen signs of this in the UK. The largest target for these cutbacks is in the Classics, but I have seen reports that offerings in such arguably practical fields as French are being slashed back or eliminated. All because of thinking like yours -- "scientific disinformation has potentially harmful consequences ... [while] no one is likely to die if we mess up a literary detail" -- ignoring the fact that many wars have been fought over faulty explications of texts. In short, education is focusing more on how to do things, rather than on what things, or why. -- llywrch (talk) 22:53, 5 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Thank you for writing this article. The permanent damage caused by TEL is a powerful example of how disinformation harms us in material ways, and illustrates why it is important to ensure that Wikipedia articles afford academic and scientific consensus its due weight. Wikipedia's best defense against disinformation is high-quality academic sources. When available, academic and peer-reviewed publications, scholarly monographs, and textbooks are usually the most reliable sources. Especially for popular non-medical topics, it may take more effort to locate and review academic sources (as opposed to news sources), but the higher quality and depth of the information in academic sources make the search more rewarding. Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, and Google Books are available to everyone. Additionally, The Wikipedia Library Card Platform grants access to a wide selection of paywalled journals free of charge, and I encourage all eligible editors to sign up and make full use of this valuable resource. —  Newslinger  talk   08:17, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Indeed to the above- creating accessible, high quality sources are where experts should focus their energies. I can't imagine spending all the time, money and effort for a PhD just to deal with internet trolls and emotionally-charged COI editors. Estheim (talk) 12:51, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * It's not just a matter of keeping disinformation off Wikipedia. We all need to be calling out disinformation around us, whether it's on twitter, talking to a coworker, or chatting with Uncle Bill at the dinner table.  I just read this Canadian news article: Why we all need to call out misinformation (Scroll to part #3) Mary Mark Ockerbloom (talk) 17:57, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Wonderful article, thank you for writing this and for the work you've done. Yes, disinformation and media manipulation is not new. Thanks for presenting this excellent case study. Shameran81 (talk)