Welcome!
Hello, Encyclopaedia21, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:
I hope you enjoy editing here and being a
Wikipedian! Please
sign your messages on
discussion pages using four
tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out
Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}}
before the question. Again, welcome! --
Ssilvers (
talk) 19:09, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
If you are viewing this page regarding a request I have posted on your talk page and want to know more about the study, you can either get the survey questionnaire via my webpage. Or you could email me at encyclopaedia@educ.gla.ac.uk.
Also, a few users have expressed concern about preserving their anonymity. I understand that email communications would impinge this to some extent. Unfortunately, I have not planned to use online survey websites or other alternatives, and it is too late to change methodology at this stage of my research. However, as in all research projects, the anonymity of participants will be preserved in the results published. Encyclopaedia21 ( talk) 09:41, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
Are there scientific certainties? I had not been aware. A central problem in this topic is the difficulty of dealing with what we might call scientific consensus, or scientific near-certainties, and the disproportionate space given on Wikipedia to unsubstantiated assertions in politically fraught areas. I suggest that you begin by talking about evidence-based work, preponderances of evidence, and disproportionate space devoted to small or paltry bodies of evidence. When you have worked out a protocol to stop the fanatics from editing in vast amounts of copy sans real evidence, do let the rest of us know. . Historicist ( talk) 21:23, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
I've noticed your messages to people's pages regarding scientific controversy. Just wondering, but have you heard of WikiProject Science? I'm sure you can ask the pople there about it with a higher likelihood of a response than going up to random people. PXK T /C 16:27, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
Sending talk page messages asking people to email you might not be the best way to get responses, especially given the fact that you are a new user with no history here. I'm not about to give out my email address to some random person who requests it. I suggest you set up your survey process such that the anonymity of the participants can be preserved.-- Srleffler ( talk) 21:25, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
Happy to participate. Have you tried looking at online survey websites?-- naught101 ( talk) 08:16, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
I don't follow. Where's the survey? DirkvdM ( talk) 09:00, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
"Wikipedia is not a space for personal promotion or the promotion of products, services, Web sites, fandoms, ideologies, or other memes. If you're here to tell readers how great something is, or to get exposure for an idea or product that nobody's heard of yet, you're in the wrong place." -- from WP:SPAMMER. -- John Nagle ( talk) 17:32, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
I posted on his talk page that he should participate, otherwise the survey will fail (because you would miss the editor who has academic experience in this subject and who made the largest contributions to the wiki article on global warming). In fact, you could do with interviewing only him. Count Iblis ( talk) 02:19, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
Dear Encyclopaedia, thanks a lot for your offer but I am afraid that it is one that I will have to refuse because it seems as a waste of time. While I admire Wikipedia as an amazing resource that beats most classical encyclopedias on most topics, global warming is a topic where it is being made irrational by activists.
In the context of Wikipedia, the most obvious activist who makes it impossible to keep balanced and accurate articles about the climate change, its accuracy, and the certainty or uncertainty of various statements, is William M. Connolley, an official of the British Green Party. The reason why one single activist became so powerful with the topic is that he was spending hours with edit wars on Wikipedia and cared about the topic so much that despite his obvious bias and lousy scientific credentials, he became a kind of administrator on Wikipedia.
It makes almost no sense for more qualified people than himself to try to improve the articles, starting with global warming, so that they're more than mentally limited ideological booklets of the Green Party. I have given up the desire to fix this segment of Wikipedia a long time ago, and I am afraid that your request won't change anything about it. Unfortunately, similar control by incompetent and often downright dishonest people extends from Wikipedia to much more important institutions in the society, so Wikipedia's outrageous alarmist bias and misinformation about the climate is probably just the most innocent tip of this iceberg. -- Lumidek ( talk) 20:21, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
I'd be glad to help on Global Warming issues, particularly with engaging on the science, and community aspects. Regards John D. Croft ( talk) 10:11, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
I am the starter and one of the primary authors of the article
Retreat of glaciers since 1850...I have also started numerous stub articles on individual glaciers as well as made numerous edits to related issues. I believe global warming is a fact, but I disagree with the premise that humans are the primary only reason we are seeing increasing temperatures and I also do not believe that a great deal can be done by humans to mitigate increasing temperatures unless the world's population is reduced 50%, via birth control. I have my opinion, but I have generally stayed away from the climate change debate overall. I would suggest if you haven't contacted them that you email
Wsiegmund and especially
Peltoms, both of whom made the Retreat of glaciers since 1850 a viable article and in the case of Peltoms, you'll be addressing one of the best glaciologists in the United States...here's his website:
[2]--
MONGO 00:26, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
I wanted to further clarify before anyone thinks I am not suggesting global warming is a farce. Again, I believe it is true, the evidence supports this finding and I adhere to such evidence. But, in qualifying my previous comments, I wish emphasize that I believe that global warming is occurring due to a myriad of causes beyond human CO2 contributions via fossil fuel consumption. Deforestation (by humans of course) is overlooked.-- MONGO 00:42, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
Just to give you some hard data for your research on the amount people view an article versus edit it, here are the traffic statistics for the Emissions trading article. There are 72,938 views in May 2009 for the article compared to the 29 edits (by 16 users) during that period of time as can be seen here.-- Jorfer ( talk) 21:27, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
Hi, I read your survey, and have responded on my discussion page. As it happens, I worked in the same general area as some professionals working on aspects of climate change. My perception may not be very helpful to your survey, but it is an answer of sorts. Regards, Piano non troppo ( talk) 23:16, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
I emailed my response to the survey (since you have your own page on the University of Glasgow's site, I trust you are with the university). Make sure it didn't end up in your spam folder (I know that happens to mail I want to receive sometimes).-- Jorfer ( talk) 00:01, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
Filled out your form. Couldn't send it to the e_mail address you provided. Dikstr ( talk) 21:18, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
Errrm, have you looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Obedium ?
If you don't know what that means, we can explain William M. Connolley ( talk) 22:14, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
And User:SpinyNorman? It would behoove you to look at user pages and filter a bit. A bit of selective care at this level would make some of us more receptive mayhaps. Vsmith ( talk) 22:20, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
And [3] William M. Connolley ( talk) 22:37, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
Hello Encyclopaedia21, I'm still deciding whether to participate in your survey. I don't object to the idea, nor even to the execution very much, but I haven't actually contributed much to climate change articles per se. I have more edits in the articles relating to topics like peak oil and renewable energy (especially wind power). Since renewable energy would seem to be among the few credible options for mitigating climate change, I suppose that could count, but I'm not much of an expert on the debate about whether humans are warming the globe. My perspective is to have concluded that global warming is but one of several highly compelling reasons to stop burning fossil fuels - humans have no choice but to stop burning fossil fuels sooner or later, so let's get on with it. Either we stop burning them, or we dump that problem onto future generations. I view resource depletion and energy security issues as equally compelling motivators. But my area of greatest activity on Wikipedia is answering questions on the Help desk, which is where we watch users struggling with the monumental complexity of this novel experiment in mass communication. You may find something useful on my subpages:
Also check out WP:TMM for a free online book about Wikipedia, and see the Editor's index for an overview of Wikipedia's complexity. This complexity is enormous and colors everything that happens here, not the least (in my opinion) by intimidating and excluding people who aren't comfortable with reading and quickly understanding detailed instructions. I suspect (without any rigorous evidence) that so-called cranks of every stripe are less likely to feel they need to consider anybody else's rules, and Wikipedia tends to drive them away in due course. Elsewhere on the Web, you will find all sorts of bloggers and pundits maligning Wikipedia, and while many of their criticisms have merit, some percentage of the critiques are more or less simply raging against the kind of intellectual orthodoxy and consensus that naturally arise on Wikipedia. For example, of all the various ways that people can choose to think, critical thinking seems to be the most productive method for bridging gaps in personal backgrounds and tastes. People who reject critical thinking or apply it only selectively are only able to get along with people who share their particular biases and unexamined assumptions, putting them at odds with most of the incredibly diverse Wikipedia community. On Wikipedia, a sizable fraction of contributors can recognize logical fallacies and factual errors, so the kind of discourse that works in much of the real world fails here.
For people who are comfortable with abandoning preconceptions and learning how Wikipedia works, Wikipedia satisfies at least one of the conditions for psychological "flow", namely the existence of clear rules. Wikipedia is an unusually well-ordered online environment, created by and for people who like to make their rules explicit. This differs from most real-world venues, where many social rules are implicit, sometimes maddeningly so. Wikipedia also has the odd property that users of all skill levels participate, both in terms of their domain knowledge of the articles they edit, and their knowledge of Wikipedia's policies, guidelines, and procedures. Part of learning to function here involves being able to deal with a constant stream of strangers who may or may not know how the site works. Fortunately, since the rules are all in writing, one only has to link to the relevant policy or guideline page to shift any argument about procedure away from one's own person to some page which is effectively above any individual. Arguments about content can be trickier, because Wikipedia's policies and guidelines do not pass explicit judgment on the full scope of what is true and what is not. Instead we shift responsibility for "truth" onto the reliable sources we cite.
Mastering Wikipedia is probably the equivalent of a year or two of college-level study, with many specialized skill areas that might correspond to graduate-level study (for example, becoming a MediaWiki hacker). One common new-user error is to underestimate the complexity of Wikipedia, and I suspect this is in part due to the deliberately welcoming nature of the user interface. It really is easy to start editing, but far from easy to determine exactly what sort of edits will "stick". Wikipedia tries to look easy to encourage new users to try, and then more experienced users mercilessly remove the new user transgressions when they fail to follow all the rules that would take them months just to read through and understand. The result is a Pareto distribution of edit count. Of the 47,561,537 registered user accounts, the vast majority have few edits - they experimented a little and gave up. Perhaps only about 100,000 people have edited enough on Wikipedia to have a fair understanding of how it works, and as you go up the scale of edit count you find progressively smaller numbers of progressively more prodigious contributors. The result is a kind of hierarchy in which users earn influence by investing time to become ever more skilled at parsing the rules. I like to say that in any dispute on Wikipedia, the side with the best understanding of the rules "wins". As a corollary, it is possible that the rules are so complete and so definitive that if everyone had a perfect understanding of them, we might not have any disputes at all (except when well-informed users want to change the rules, but leaving and starting one's own wiki is always an option too). I merely speculate, of course, because we are very far from the situation of everyone perfectly understanding the rules, and we will probably never get close to that state due to constant turnover in the user community. Maybe decades in the future, advances in artificial intelligence will enable the software to directly embed all the site rules, and apply them to edits as users make them, but that is not currently imaginable, so we still rely on human intelligence to enforce the rules after the fact (that is, after other users have spent the time to make edits for others to critique).
While I'm rambling, I might also mention that I happen to think Wikipedia itself exemplifies a climate change mitigation strategy that seems to get little attention, namely the fact that on Wikipedia we have remote collaboration on a massive scale without any real need for face-to-face contact or even getting to know anybody much. What Wikipedia does is probably as complicated as anything humans do, and we do it all without needing to drag bodies around. Since dragging bodies around by current technology burns a lot of petroleum, anything that enables less dragging of bodies has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Almost the entire educated class works with information at least part time, and much more of this work could probably happen over wires if the Wikipedia approach extended further (for example, in the form of enterprise wikis). In other words, I think Wikipedia's contribution to humanity (pardon the lofty phrasing) is not just in the content of the articles, but a possibly even greater contribution is the method the community has developed for creating the encyclopedia (and for training new users). Granted, we have a long way to go with the training of new users, but Wikipedia is already learnable by people who are sufficiently smart and motivated. We probably still rely too much on the do it yourself philosophy of reading the friendly manuals for Wikipedia's method to really go mainstream. The great mass of average people require formal education to learn anything complicated, with active human teachers to direct and motivate them. -- Teratornis ( talk) 05:29, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
Hi, I'm not sure what relevant articles I have contributed to, or whether they involve any controversy... I have looked at the questions on your survey and I don't think they are relevant to how I contribute here. I suggest you do a little editing and gain understanding of how things work. I don't see how you will get decent results or be able to formulate appropriate questions without having a basic understanding first. I have previously ignored a survey request from a university researcher because they, like you, haven't used Wikipedia yourself. Regards. -- Barrylb ( talk) 10:32, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
Hi, You were interested in having me participate in a short survey on how to cover scientific uncertainties/controversies in articles pertaining to global warming and climate change.
I find there are several ways of creating a point of view neutral article. The key is to cover the key facts as they are known from the most reliable sources and let the reader make the conclusion. One weakness of this is that people make up their minds based on pragmatism and not the rigors of science which also must prove the contrapositive.
For example (in the Peak oil article) there are people that believe in abiotic oil. Essentially, they believe that oil is made by the earth itself. And, these people reason due to abiotic oil, we cannot ever run out of oil. The scientific community on the other hand now *knows* oil comes from a biological process. The scientific community feels certain because all oil samples from all oil wells in the world contain biomarkers for life and there is no counter example - naturally occurring oil that does not have a biomarker. In a sense, believers in abiotic oil are right in there with the Flat Earth Society. Nevertheless, the peak oil article has had to deal with this "scientific controversy" because it's part of the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) that the opposition throws up against peak oil.
In other places, there are several competing theories in order to explain a certain phenomenon. For example, with climate change, the largest majority of glaciers in the world are retreating, but not all. So it's not as clear cut as abiotic oil. It is pretty clear it is happening, but the exact cause has not been 100% clearly demonstrated. In this case, we've layed out the various potential causes - humans, the sun's emissions, etc, etc. And, it's left for the reader to make up their own mind. It would help if you read-up about how to deal with the neutral point of view NPOV.
I would be happy to take your survey. kgrr talk 14:56, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
In reply to the discussion in #Response to global warming issues above about the relative merits of Index of climate change articles and the {{ Global warming}} template:
In addition to relying on the navigation tools that other editors have built, you can search Wikipedia. Due to the size and value of Wikipedia's content, search technology is another active area of development here. For example, see what turns up when we search for "list of global warming topics" with the {{ Google wikipedia}} template:
That finds several partially overlapping pages, including these on just the first search results page:
To get a comprehensive overview of climate change topics on Wikipedia, you would have to look at all those pages, and more. -- Teratornis ( talk) 23:06, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
Vanessa
What is the survey some people speak of. I'd be glad to complete it for you. John D. Croft ( talk) 10:13, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
I think that you might find the following information from a published article useful to your study. As an editor who tried to introduce balance to the Global Warming articles and was completely shut out by the group in firm control of this area of Wikipedia, I can verify that what Lawrence Solomon reported in his article is true and accurate:
In July 2008, the CBS News website carried a story titled "Wikipropaganda On Global Warming" [4] in which Lawrence Solomon exposed the control exercised by William Connolley & others over Wikipedia articles related to Global Warming.
Solomon wrote: "Naturally I was surprised to read on Wikipedia that Oreskes’s work had been vindicated and that, for instance, one of her most thorough critics, British scientist and publisher Bennie Peiser, not only had been discredited but had grudgingly conceded Oreskes was right. I checked with Peiser, who said he had done no such thing. I then corrected the Wikipedia entry, and advised Peiser that I had done so. Peiser wrote back saying he couldn’t see my corrections on the Wikipedia page. I made the changes again, and this time confirmed that the changes had been saved. But then, in a twinkle, they were gone again. I made other changes. And others. They all disappeared shortly after they were made.
Turns out that on Wikipedia some folks are more equal than others. Kim Dabelstein Petersen is a Wikipedia “editor” who seems to devote a large part of his life to editing reams and reams of Wikipedia pages to pump the assertions of global-warming alarmists and deprecate or make disappear the arguments of skeptics.
I soon found others who had the same experience: They would try to squeeze in any dissent, or even correct an obvious slander against a dissenter, and Petersen or some other censor would immediately snuff them out."
Solomon said of one administrator: "by virtue of his power at Wikipedia, Connolley, a ruthless enforcer of the doomsday consensus, may be the world’s most influential person in the global warming debate after Al Gore." Solomon further alleged: "Connolley routinely uses his editorial clout to tear down scientists of great accomplishment such as Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite Service and a scientist with dazzling achievements."
Solomon charged Connolley with flouting wikipedia rules: "Wikipedia is full of rules that editors are supposed to follow, and it has a code of civility. Those rules and codes don’t apply to Connolley, or to those he favors."
"Peisers crap shouldn’t be in here,” Connolley wrote several weeks ago, in berating a Wikipedian colleague during an “edit war,” as they’re called. Trumping Wikipedia’s stated rules, Connelly used his authority to ensure Wikipedia readers saw only what he wanted them to see."
Finally Solomon condemned Wikipedia's credibility on Global Warming stating categorically: "Any reference, anywhere among Wikipedia’s 2.5 million English-language pages, that casts doubt on the consequences of climate change will be bent to Connolley’s bidding." ~ Rameses ( talk) 01:35, 25 June 2009 (UTC)
Let me know what you would like to know.
Ill participate.
Best, Ron -- Ronjamin ( talk) 14:52, 9 July 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia will have a personal virus soon. Developed by me. 24 hours. Spread the news... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.68.234.177 ( talk) 23:19, 22 December 2009 (UTC)
Since I am publishing on this topic I think it is better left to others at this point. It is hard to be both a ref and a player. Thank you for the message though, and best on the editing. Stirling Newberry 22:49, 23 March 2010 (UTC)
Welcome!
Hello, Encyclopaedia21, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:
I hope you enjoy editing here and being a
Wikipedian! Please
sign your messages on
discussion pages using four
tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out
Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}}
before the question. Again, welcome! --
Ssilvers (
talk) 19:09, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
If you are viewing this page regarding a request I have posted on your talk page and want to know more about the study, you can either get the survey questionnaire via my webpage. Or you could email me at encyclopaedia@educ.gla.ac.uk.
Also, a few users have expressed concern about preserving their anonymity. I understand that email communications would impinge this to some extent. Unfortunately, I have not planned to use online survey websites or other alternatives, and it is too late to change methodology at this stage of my research. However, as in all research projects, the anonymity of participants will be preserved in the results published. Encyclopaedia21 ( talk) 09:41, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
Are there scientific certainties? I had not been aware. A central problem in this topic is the difficulty of dealing with what we might call scientific consensus, or scientific near-certainties, and the disproportionate space given on Wikipedia to unsubstantiated assertions in politically fraught areas. I suggest that you begin by talking about evidence-based work, preponderances of evidence, and disproportionate space devoted to small or paltry bodies of evidence. When you have worked out a protocol to stop the fanatics from editing in vast amounts of copy sans real evidence, do let the rest of us know. . Historicist ( talk) 21:23, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
I've noticed your messages to people's pages regarding scientific controversy. Just wondering, but have you heard of WikiProject Science? I'm sure you can ask the pople there about it with a higher likelihood of a response than going up to random people. PXK T /C 16:27, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
Sending talk page messages asking people to email you might not be the best way to get responses, especially given the fact that you are a new user with no history here. I'm not about to give out my email address to some random person who requests it. I suggest you set up your survey process such that the anonymity of the participants can be preserved.-- Srleffler ( talk) 21:25, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
Happy to participate. Have you tried looking at online survey websites?-- naught101 ( talk) 08:16, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
I don't follow. Where's the survey? DirkvdM ( talk) 09:00, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
"Wikipedia is not a space for personal promotion or the promotion of products, services, Web sites, fandoms, ideologies, or other memes. If you're here to tell readers how great something is, or to get exposure for an idea or product that nobody's heard of yet, you're in the wrong place." -- from WP:SPAMMER. -- John Nagle ( talk) 17:32, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
I posted on his talk page that he should participate, otherwise the survey will fail (because you would miss the editor who has academic experience in this subject and who made the largest contributions to the wiki article on global warming). In fact, you could do with interviewing only him. Count Iblis ( talk) 02:19, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
Dear Encyclopaedia, thanks a lot for your offer but I am afraid that it is one that I will have to refuse because it seems as a waste of time. While I admire Wikipedia as an amazing resource that beats most classical encyclopedias on most topics, global warming is a topic where it is being made irrational by activists.
In the context of Wikipedia, the most obvious activist who makes it impossible to keep balanced and accurate articles about the climate change, its accuracy, and the certainty or uncertainty of various statements, is William M. Connolley, an official of the British Green Party. The reason why one single activist became so powerful with the topic is that he was spending hours with edit wars on Wikipedia and cared about the topic so much that despite his obvious bias and lousy scientific credentials, he became a kind of administrator on Wikipedia.
It makes almost no sense for more qualified people than himself to try to improve the articles, starting with global warming, so that they're more than mentally limited ideological booklets of the Green Party. I have given up the desire to fix this segment of Wikipedia a long time ago, and I am afraid that your request won't change anything about it. Unfortunately, similar control by incompetent and often downright dishonest people extends from Wikipedia to much more important institutions in the society, so Wikipedia's outrageous alarmist bias and misinformation about the climate is probably just the most innocent tip of this iceberg. -- Lumidek ( talk) 20:21, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
I'd be glad to help on Global Warming issues, particularly with engaging on the science, and community aspects. Regards John D. Croft ( talk) 10:11, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
I am the starter and one of the primary authors of the article
Retreat of glaciers since 1850...I have also started numerous stub articles on individual glaciers as well as made numerous edits to related issues. I believe global warming is a fact, but I disagree with the premise that humans are the primary only reason we are seeing increasing temperatures and I also do not believe that a great deal can be done by humans to mitigate increasing temperatures unless the world's population is reduced 50%, via birth control. I have my opinion, but I have generally stayed away from the climate change debate overall. I would suggest if you haven't contacted them that you email
Wsiegmund and especially
Peltoms, both of whom made the Retreat of glaciers since 1850 a viable article and in the case of Peltoms, you'll be addressing one of the best glaciologists in the United States...here's his website:
[2]--
MONGO 00:26, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
I wanted to further clarify before anyone thinks I am not suggesting global warming is a farce. Again, I believe it is true, the evidence supports this finding and I adhere to such evidence. But, in qualifying my previous comments, I wish emphasize that I believe that global warming is occurring due to a myriad of causes beyond human CO2 contributions via fossil fuel consumption. Deforestation (by humans of course) is overlooked.-- MONGO 00:42, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
Just to give you some hard data for your research on the amount people view an article versus edit it, here are the traffic statistics for the Emissions trading article. There are 72,938 views in May 2009 for the article compared to the 29 edits (by 16 users) during that period of time as can be seen here.-- Jorfer ( talk) 21:27, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
Hi, I read your survey, and have responded on my discussion page. As it happens, I worked in the same general area as some professionals working on aspects of climate change. My perception may not be very helpful to your survey, but it is an answer of sorts. Regards, Piano non troppo ( talk) 23:16, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
I emailed my response to the survey (since you have your own page on the University of Glasgow's site, I trust you are with the university). Make sure it didn't end up in your spam folder (I know that happens to mail I want to receive sometimes).-- Jorfer ( talk) 00:01, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
Filled out your form. Couldn't send it to the e_mail address you provided. Dikstr ( talk) 21:18, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
Errrm, have you looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Obedium ?
If you don't know what that means, we can explain William M. Connolley ( talk) 22:14, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
And User:SpinyNorman? It would behoove you to look at user pages and filter a bit. A bit of selective care at this level would make some of us more receptive mayhaps. Vsmith ( talk) 22:20, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
And [3] William M. Connolley ( talk) 22:37, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
Hello Encyclopaedia21, I'm still deciding whether to participate in your survey. I don't object to the idea, nor even to the execution very much, but I haven't actually contributed much to climate change articles per se. I have more edits in the articles relating to topics like peak oil and renewable energy (especially wind power). Since renewable energy would seem to be among the few credible options for mitigating climate change, I suppose that could count, but I'm not much of an expert on the debate about whether humans are warming the globe. My perspective is to have concluded that global warming is but one of several highly compelling reasons to stop burning fossil fuels - humans have no choice but to stop burning fossil fuels sooner or later, so let's get on with it. Either we stop burning them, or we dump that problem onto future generations. I view resource depletion and energy security issues as equally compelling motivators. But my area of greatest activity on Wikipedia is answering questions on the Help desk, which is where we watch users struggling with the monumental complexity of this novel experiment in mass communication. You may find something useful on my subpages:
Also check out WP:TMM for a free online book about Wikipedia, and see the Editor's index for an overview of Wikipedia's complexity. This complexity is enormous and colors everything that happens here, not the least (in my opinion) by intimidating and excluding people who aren't comfortable with reading and quickly understanding detailed instructions. I suspect (without any rigorous evidence) that so-called cranks of every stripe are less likely to feel they need to consider anybody else's rules, and Wikipedia tends to drive them away in due course. Elsewhere on the Web, you will find all sorts of bloggers and pundits maligning Wikipedia, and while many of their criticisms have merit, some percentage of the critiques are more or less simply raging against the kind of intellectual orthodoxy and consensus that naturally arise on Wikipedia. For example, of all the various ways that people can choose to think, critical thinking seems to be the most productive method for bridging gaps in personal backgrounds and tastes. People who reject critical thinking or apply it only selectively are only able to get along with people who share their particular biases and unexamined assumptions, putting them at odds with most of the incredibly diverse Wikipedia community. On Wikipedia, a sizable fraction of contributors can recognize logical fallacies and factual errors, so the kind of discourse that works in much of the real world fails here.
For people who are comfortable with abandoning preconceptions and learning how Wikipedia works, Wikipedia satisfies at least one of the conditions for psychological "flow", namely the existence of clear rules. Wikipedia is an unusually well-ordered online environment, created by and for people who like to make their rules explicit. This differs from most real-world venues, where many social rules are implicit, sometimes maddeningly so. Wikipedia also has the odd property that users of all skill levels participate, both in terms of their domain knowledge of the articles they edit, and their knowledge of Wikipedia's policies, guidelines, and procedures. Part of learning to function here involves being able to deal with a constant stream of strangers who may or may not know how the site works. Fortunately, since the rules are all in writing, one only has to link to the relevant policy or guideline page to shift any argument about procedure away from one's own person to some page which is effectively above any individual. Arguments about content can be trickier, because Wikipedia's policies and guidelines do not pass explicit judgment on the full scope of what is true and what is not. Instead we shift responsibility for "truth" onto the reliable sources we cite.
Mastering Wikipedia is probably the equivalent of a year or two of college-level study, with many specialized skill areas that might correspond to graduate-level study (for example, becoming a MediaWiki hacker). One common new-user error is to underestimate the complexity of Wikipedia, and I suspect this is in part due to the deliberately welcoming nature of the user interface. It really is easy to start editing, but far from easy to determine exactly what sort of edits will "stick". Wikipedia tries to look easy to encourage new users to try, and then more experienced users mercilessly remove the new user transgressions when they fail to follow all the rules that would take them months just to read through and understand. The result is a Pareto distribution of edit count. Of the 47,561,537 registered user accounts, the vast majority have few edits - they experimented a little and gave up. Perhaps only about 100,000 people have edited enough on Wikipedia to have a fair understanding of how it works, and as you go up the scale of edit count you find progressively smaller numbers of progressively more prodigious contributors. The result is a kind of hierarchy in which users earn influence by investing time to become ever more skilled at parsing the rules. I like to say that in any dispute on Wikipedia, the side with the best understanding of the rules "wins". As a corollary, it is possible that the rules are so complete and so definitive that if everyone had a perfect understanding of them, we might not have any disputes at all (except when well-informed users want to change the rules, but leaving and starting one's own wiki is always an option too). I merely speculate, of course, because we are very far from the situation of everyone perfectly understanding the rules, and we will probably never get close to that state due to constant turnover in the user community. Maybe decades in the future, advances in artificial intelligence will enable the software to directly embed all the site rules, and apply them to edits as users make them, but that is not currently imaginable, so we still rely on human intelligence to enforce the rules after the fact (that is, after other users have spent the time to make edits for others to critique).
While I'm rambling, I might also mention that I happen to think Wikipedia itself exemplifies a climate change mitigation strategy that seems to get little attention, namely the fact that on Wikipedia we have remote collaboration on a massive scale without any real need for face-to-face contact or even getting to know anybody much. What Wikipedia does is probably as complicated as anything humans do, and we do it all without needing to drag bodies around. Since dragging bodies around by current technology burns a lot of petroleum, anything that enables less dragging of bodies has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Almost the entire educated class works with information at least part time, and much more of this work could probably happen over wires if the Wikipedia approach extended further (for example, in the form of enterprise wikis). In other words, I think Wikipedia's contribution to humanity (pardon the lofty phrasing) is not just in the content of the articles, but a possibly even greater contribution is the method the community has developed for creating the encyclopedia (and for training new users). Granted, we have a long way to go with the training of new users, but Wikipedia is already learnable by people who are sufficiently smart and motivated. We probably still rely too much on the do it yourself philosophy of reading the friendly manuals for Wikipedia's method to really go mainstream. The great mass of average people require formal education to learn anything complicated, with active human teachers to direct and motivate them. -- Teratornis ( talk) 05:29, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
Hi, I'm not sure what relevant articles I have contributed to, or whether they involve any controversy... I have looked at the questions on your survey and I don't think they are relevant to how I contribute here. I suggest you do a little editing and gain understanding of how things work. I don't see how you will get decent results or be able to formulate appropriate questions without having a basic understanding first. I have previously ignored a survey request from a university researcher because they, like you, haven't used Wikipedia yourself. Regards. -- Barrylb ( talk) 10:32, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
Hi, You were interested in having me participate in a short survey on how to cover scientific uncertainties/controversies in articles pertaining to global warming and climate change.
I find there are several ways of creating a point of view neutral article. The key is to cover the key facts as they are known from the most reliable sources and let the reader make the conclusion. One weakness of this is that people make up their minds based on pragmatism and not the rigors of science which also must prove the contrapositive.
For example (in the Peak oil article) there are people that believe in abiotic oil. Essentially, they believe that oil is made by the earth itself. And, these people reason due to abiotic oil, we cannot ever run out of oil. The scientific community on the other hand now *knows* oil comes from a biological process. The scientific community feels certain because all oil samples from all oil wells in the world contain biomarkers for life and there is no counter example - naturally occurring oil that does not have a biomarker. In a sense, believers in abiotic oil are right in there with the Flat Earth Society. Nevertheless, the peak oil article has had to deal with this "scientific controversy" because it's part of the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) that the opposition throws up against peak oil.
In other places, there are several competing theories in order to explain a certain phenomenon. For example, with climate change, the largest majority of glaciers in the world are retreating, but not all. So it's not as clear cut as abiotic oil. It is pretty clear it is happening, but the exact cause has not been 100% clearly demonstrated. In this case, we've layed out the various potential causes - humans, the sun's emissions, etc, etc. And, it's left for the reader to make up their own mind. It would help if you read-up about how to deal with the neutral point of view NPOV.
I would be happy to take your survey. kgrr talk 14:56, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
In reply to the discussion in #Response to global warming issues above about the relative merits of Index of climate change articles and the {{ Global warming}} template:
In addition to relying on the navigation tools that other editors have built, you can search Wikipedia. Due to the size and value of Wikipedia's content, search technology is another active area of development here. For example, see what turns up when we search for "list of global warming topics" with the {{ Google wikipedia}} template:
That finds several partially overlapping pages, including these on just the first search results page:
To get a comprehensive overview of climate change topics on Wikipedia, you would have to look at all those pages, and more. -- Teratornis ( talk) 23:06, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
Vanessa
What is the survey some people speak of. I'd be glad to complete it for you. John D. Croft ( talk) 10:13, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
I think that you might find the following information from a published article useful to your study. As an editor who tried to introduce balance to the Global Warming articles and was completely shut out by the group in firm control of this area of Wikipedia, I can verify that what Lawrence Solomon reported in his article is true and accurate:
In July 2008, the CBS News website carried a story titled "Wikipropaganda On Global Warming" [4] in which Lawrence Solomon exposed the control exercised by William Connolley & others over Wikipedia articles related to Global Warming.
Solomon wrote: "Naturally I was surprised to read on Wikipedia that Oreskes’s work had been vindicated and that, for instance, one of her most thorough critics, British scientist and publisher Bennie Peiser, not only had been discredited but had grudgingly conceded Oreskes was right. I checked with Peiser, who said he had done no such thing. I then corrected the Wikipedia entry, and advised Peiser that I had done so. Peiser wrote back saying he couldn’t see my corrections on the Wikipedia page. I made the changes again, and this time confirmed that the changes had been saved. But then, in a twinkle, they were gone again. I made other changes. And others. They all disappeared shortly after they were made.
Turns out that on Wikipedia some folks are more equal than others. Kim Dabelstein Petersen is a Wikipedia “editor” who seems to devote a large part of his life to editing reams and reams of Wikipedia pages to pump the assertions of global-warming alarmists and deprecate or make disappear the arguments of skeptics.
I soon found others who had the same experience: They would try to squeeze in any dissent, or even correct an obvious slander against a dissenter, and Petersen or some other censor would immediately snuff them out."
Solomon said of one administrator: "by virtue of his power at Wikipedia, Connolley, a ruthless enforcer of the doomsday consensus, may be the world’s most influential person in the global warming debate after Al Gore." Solomon further alleged: "Connolley routinely uses his editorial clout to tear down scientists of great accomplishment such as Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite Service and a scientist with dazzling achievements."
Solomon charged Connolley with flouting wikipedia rules: "Wikipedia is full of rules that editors are supposed to follow, and it has a code of civility. Those rules and codes don’t apply to Connolley, or to those he favors."
"Peisers crap shouldn’t be in here,” Connolley wrote several weeks ago, in berating a Wikipedian colleague during an “edit war,” as they’re called. Trumping Wikipedia’s stated rules, Connelly used his authority to ensure Wikipedia readers saw only what he wanted them to see."
Finally Solomon condemned Wikipedia's credibility on Global Warming stating categorically: "Any reference, anywhere among Wikipedia’s 2.5 million English-language pages, that casts doubt on the consequences of climate change will be bent to Connolley’s bidding." ~ Rameses ( talk) 01:35, 25 June 2009 (UTC)
Let me know what you would like to know.
Ill participate.
Best, Ron -- Ronjamin ( talk) 14:52, 9 July 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia will have a personal virus soon. Developed by me. 24 hours. Spread the news... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.68.234.177 ( talk) 23:19, 22 December 2009 (UTC)
Since I am publishing on this topic I think it is better left to others at this point. It is hard to be both a ref and a player. Thank you for the message though, and best on the editing. Stirling Newberry 22:49, 23 March 2010 (UTC)