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Ran across this category; it seems to imply that such things as Spirit photography and Apport have no explanation? - LuckyLouie ( talk) 16:36, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
We have an editor here who seems to have a hearing problem regarding due weight, and also what type of material belongs in a biography. IMO, lengthy quotes about defenses of books that have their own page do not. It's a tremendous amount added -- 11,000 byes in a now 58,000 byte article -- that throws off the balance of the article when it comes to FRINGE theory. Unfortunately, that is what User:Swood100 has done. Maybe I'm not getting through. Opinions? Auntie E. ( talk) 17:40, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
Please see the section "A Simple Request" on the Behe talk page.-- Swood100 ( talk) 19:53, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
Creation according to Genesis is under a creationist attack and needs a few more eyes. Apparently it is not OK to state the literary genre to which the creation story in Genesis belongs without any doubt, because its name creation myth has dangerous, anti-creationist pro-science overtones that might hurt innocent children. (No, I am not just being sarcastic. One reason given for the censorship was: "The agenda of the non-believers vs believers is to shape the minds of the innocent who read this article.") The article is currently protected in a stupid version that suggests most Christians and Jews are creationists and stresses the colloquial sense of "myth" in "creation myth" contrary to WP:WTA#Myth and legend. Hans Adler 13:52, 25 January 2010 (UTC)
this is a non-issue. This sort of ideological pov-pushing is pretty much rollback-able, and then there is WP:3RR. I don't see there is even anything to discuss. -- dab (𒁳) 20:28, 25 January 2010 (UTC)
That "observation" is a stereotype. Plain and simple. ScienceApologist ( talk) 04:46, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
The entire article is a pit of small minority and fringe viewpoints, as well as original research. The terminology matter is a pittance compared to the fundamental issues with the article, though it is indicative of the underlying problem. To take but one "obvious" example: The difference between the two creation accounts is one the main scholarly subtopics and widely accepted. Despite that, it is given extreme short shrift and the main viewpoint of the article gives the impression that they are alternative tellings/harmonized accounts. There are much bigger things to worry about here than what labels to use. Vassyana ( talk) 01:38, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
I agree with Vassyana and Hans Adler, the latest attempts to "sanitize" the article to conform with fundamentalist religionist viewpoints may be a good thing because it draws our attention to the fact that the same thing has been going on, more discreetly, for some time. The article needs to be put on a solid scholarly basis. This will also make deteriorating it more difficult. As for the title, "[the] Creation according to Genesis" is a perfectly common descriptor and there is no need to change it. I just note that Book of Genesis also needs more loving watchers. -- dab (𒁳) 08:44, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
I would not recommend entering a discussion with Til Eulenspiegel who (formerly known as User:Codex Sinaiticus) has managed to pull this Refusal to Get It for literally years on end. -- dab (𒁳) 14:48, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
Please also look into
Mosaic authorship and
Moses and
The Exodus please, while you're at it.
It is, to the best of my knowledge, beyond reasonable dispute that the Tanakh Torah is a 6th to 5th c.BC compilation, which includes fragments of earlier accounts, perhaps as old as the 10th c. BC. This "older fragments" point is perfectly normal in ancient texts dealing with mythology and/or religion, just as you have the
Rigveda which was compiled in the 10th c. BC but can include fragments as much as 5 centuries older, or the
Iliad which was composed in the 7th c. BC or so, but can include fragments as much as 5 centuries older. Five centuries appears to be a sort of natural lifetime for poetic fragments in oral tradition. --
dab
(𒁳) 09:15, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
strike Tanakh, I meant Torah (Pentateuch), sorry. -- dab (𒁳) 18:55, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
The biggest problem I'm seeing here is getting a reliable source for surveying the field. My impression for some time is that any random scholar in the field is likely to unreliable because the tendency is for each of them to say that their theory is state-of-the-art and the others are all being left behind. That also seems to be an issue in the Shakespeare question above. The question of what is a fringe view in a field where there is a lot of controversy (itself a difficult issue) is something we need a better approach in answering. Mangoe ( talk) 14:56, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
guys, this is a noticeboard. For the discussion of handling fringe theories on Wikipedia, go to Wikipedia talk:Fringe theories. For discussion of the notion of "fringe theory" in general, try Talk:Fringe theory. -- dab (𒁳) 18:51, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
There is an ongoing dispute on the article of the Egyptian god Horus. There several authors have subscribed to a theory that Horus and Jesus share many similarities, which has used as evidence of the Christ myth theory. This comparison was made in the Bill Maher film Religulous, as well as several articles and books published over the last 150 years (the full list of sources is here. There has not been much in the way of academic response, except for an article found on the History News Network: [1] My question is, does this theory qualify as a "fringe theory," which means that it should be ignored entirely? Or is it worthy of inclusion in the Horus article, including whatever response there is from the academic community? ColorOfSuffering ( talk) 22:37, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
the problem is not with comparing Jesus and Horus, which is perfectly straightforward if you use proper academic references from religious studies. The entire problem is that people will insist on using pop culture sources like Christ myth theory or Religulous instead of proper academic ones. Help Wikipedia by insisting on WP:RS! Jesus and Horus are not items of pop culture but of religion, hence the only permissible secondary sources should be academic publications from the field of theology and religious study. -- dab (𒁳) 09:07, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
There is a section on the Shakespeare biography which conjecturers on Shakespeare's sexuality based on dubious research that was sponsored by a small number of proactive gay rights intellectuals. They never conclude or prove or show any primary material or secondary research that Shakespeare was queer, What is known is that he was married and had three children. These facts have been continually pointed out on the main entries talk section and are never answered, and yet the editors of the page insist on including this baseless section, without answering any of the factual issues, It is a non-neutral segment which misleads reads about Shakespeare.
Mrbrklyn ( talk) 00:39, 27 January 2010 (UTC)mrbrklyn
I doubt this is "well-established" or should get more than passing mention under WP:DUE. The point is simply that when you have an entire literary establishment obsess over a single author for 400 years, there will be nothing that was not at some point said about him. -- dab (𒁳) 09:04, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
I know. A reasonable approach would be to simply point out the homoerotic aspects in a discussion of the Sonnets. But trust to it that Wikipedia will come up with a dedicated, painful Sexuality of William Shakespeare article, complete with a section entitled "Possible homoeroticism". I am not sure if I am the only one who thinks that any grown-up educated reader will consider this involuntary wiki-comedy. Perhaps the laws of Wikipedia should be expanded by "you cannot parody Wikipedia". And a corollary, "if you do parody Wikipedia, Wikipedia will grow a long and tedious article discussing your parody." -- dab (𒁳) 11:43, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
I've removed twice reference to the " Shakespeare authorship question" from this page as I believe it is a very poor example, and requires undue prominence to be explained properly in the (very) short article. It also seems to be a spreading of a disagreement from other pages. The Apollo moon hoax is a better example to my mind, but without good reason I don't think we should be littering the page with examples. We already have the list of pseudosciences for similar things. Review, opinions, compromises, etc welcome on the talk page (as usual). And it's nice to see you all again. Best, Verbal chat 09:56, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
( edit concflict)
The fringe theory article should indeed make the distinction between fringe-within-academia and completely-off-the-wall-batshit-crazy. Many items move from the former into the latter category over time, when a formerly arguable academic hypothesis becomes solidly refuted but lives on in crank publications. A useful criterion is that academic mainstream may be wrong at any given moment but forces itself to make progress over time, while fields of crackpottery simply grow weirder over time, possibly fracturing into subsects but never making any progress. -- dab (𒁳) 14:56, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
Wow - calm down. I didn't mean to offend, but of the two sides, you certainly have come down on the Stratfordian side. That was not an insult. But calling me a crank or implying stupidity is not needed. According to your definition, 1/3rd of the Supreme court, Freud, Walt Whitman, Henry James, hundreds of college professors and thousands of others are cranks or stupid? Can we avoid the name calling and just stick to the question? I think it is pretty clear where you and I stand - which is why I asked for some non-aligned editors to weigh in, which they have. Again - sorry for any perceived insult. Smatprt ( talk) 16:44, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
Thie implication is two equal camps? Where on earth did you get that. If that were the implication, then this wouldn't be fringe it would just be two regular articles of opposing viewpoints, which is obviously not the case. Nunh-huh was one of the most srtident editors who actually tried to censor all discussion of the subject completely, and failed for obvious reasons. When the leading Shakespeare scholars of the day, including Wells, Matus, Shoenbaum, all devote chapters in their latest books to the subject, even to dismiss it, the issue certainly deserves coverage. Call it minority viewpoint, alternative view, fringe theory, whatever - there is no doubt of its status. Smatprt ( talk) 23:13, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
I tried to discuss this at talk, but that very brief conversation was unfortunately cut off. At the policy page it states "We use the term fringe theory in a very broad sense to describe ideas that depart significantly from the prevailing or mainstream view in its particular field of study." Also "Some of the theories addressed here may in a stricter sense be hypotheses, conjectures, or speculations." Unfortunately, the article does not convey this broadness very well. And that was the point of my edit, and to show that some theories receive increasing support, as is the case with this one. I would think that different examples would help make those points. I had agreed to a rewrite of my original edit with a regular editor of this page so I thought things were good. After looking at the article again, I tried a slightly different edit - instead of lumping it with plate tectonics, I used it as an example of a "novel re-interpretations of history]]". Is this better? Smatprt ( talk) 17:09, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
There seems to be some confusion here. There are very few academics who feel that there is solid evidence that anybody other than Shakespeare wrote those plays. But there are lots of academics who feel that the information we have about Shakespeare's life is too sparse to permit certainty one way or another. So I am inclined to agree that this is not a good example for the Fringe Theory article. Looie496 ( talk) 17:53, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
Perhaps it is well to say at the outset that there is a good deal of evidence supporting the idea that William Shakespeare of Stratford and London wrote Shakespeare's plays. Several dozen other names have been put forward, the most notable of which are Bacon, Raleigh, Marlowe, and Queen Elizabeth; perhaps the most amusing candidates are a nun named Anne Whately and an alleged illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth. But there is no evidence to support any of these claims, all of which begin with the assumption that "the Stratford poacher" or "the Stratford butcher-boy" simply could not have written great plays and poems. A suitably learned or aristocratic candidate must then be found, and if the candidate has written under his own name, verbal echoes between the plays and the candidate's undisputed works must be collected. Sometimes ciphers are detected; for example, in the comically long word honorificabilitudinitatibus in Love's Labor's Lost (V.i.42), Bacon is said to have planted a Latin anagram, Hi ludi F. Bacon nati tuiti orbi ("These plays, offspring of F. Bacon, are preserved for the world"). It is true that a similar long word, honorificabilitudine, appears in a manuscript that contains some of Bacon's essays, but slight variations of this word appear elsewhere too; indeed, the word in the exact form in which it is found in Love's Labor's Lost had appeared in print a century before the birth of either Shakespeare or Bacon. Moreover, other anagrams can be extracted from it—for example, Ubi Italicus ibi Danti honor fit ("Where there is an Italian, there honor is paid to Dante").
Against all anti-Stratfordian theories stands the fact that scores of Elizabethans spoke of Shakespeare as a playwright, and no Elizabethan is on record as having believed that Shakespeare did not write the plays. If the actor William Shakespeare was a mere front for another author, how was the secret kept so well? Why, for example, was it never detected by Ben Jonson, who both in print and in conversation spoke of William Shakespeare's plays? (One answer which has been offered is that Jonson called Shakespeare the playwright because Jonson himself was the author of the plays but wished to hide his identity.) In short, if Shakespeare did not write the plays, a great many people were fooled during the thirty-five or so years between the date of the earliest plays and the publication in 1623 of the collected plays. Did the actors—some of whom worked with Shakespeare for about twenty years—never suspect that their dull colleague could not have written the plays he was passing off as his own? Or if, as another approach holds, so many people were not fooled but rather were in on the secret, how is it possible that in its own day this widely shared secret never leaked out? According to another desperate theory, which recognizes that the plays were regularly attributed to William Shakespeare but refuses to tolerate the idea of the Stratford poacher as an author, the plays were written not by William Shakespeare of Stratford but by another man of the same name. But to the charge that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was not William Shakespeare the actor and playwright there are many replies, at least two of which are simple and compelling: Jonson and others speak 0f the playwright as the "swan of Avon"; and in the Stratford man's will bequests are made to some actors in the London theatrical company who acted Shakespeare's plays, thus indisputably linking the Stratford man with the London theater. Not until 1769 was any doubt expressed about the authorship of the body of work ascribed to Shakespeare, and this doubt was founded on the a priori assumption that the plays must have been written by a learned man.
It seems reasonable, then, to believe what so many Elizabethans believed, that William Shakespeare of Stratford and London wrote the works of William Shakespeare.
.
So there is the one side with evidence, and the other side with uncertainty...that's more or less the definition of fringe. - Nunh-huh 18:36, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
I would recommend taking this back to Talk:Fringe theory at this point. This is quite apparently a dispute between two users both with preconceived opinions on the Shakespeare question and not about he definition of "fringe theory" at all. To resolve the dispute, more outside input will be needed. Fwiiw, I sympathize with Paul's point that the Shakespeare authorship debate deserves a place of honour in the article as the "mother of all fringe theories". -- dab (𒁳) 20:14, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
leave it until someone offers better and finally edit out Shakespeare for prominence. Nerdseeksblonde ( talk) 22:45, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
This debate is not a legitimate one within academia. It may be referenced off-handedly and with humor by serious academics, but the real key is that the mainstream treatment does not take the fringe position seriously when discussing it. ScienceApologist ( talk) 21:58, 25 January 2010 (UTC)
The anti-Stratfordian theories quite clearly comprise a school of thought that has extremely tiny minority of support among the relevant academics with a noteworthy, but still tiny minority, lay following. That's practically a textbook example of what is framed as a fringe theory. Vassyana ( talk) 01:52, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
“ | Yet [despite the broad historical liveliness of the authorship question] the histories of this subject are marked by a dreary sameness. They are all written from the same point of view: there is no Shakespeare authorship question, really, only a gabble of cranks who thinks there is. | ” |
“ | This history of the subject is quite different. It is written from the point of view that there is an authorship question, that it is important, and that the right answer has already been found and broadcast among us. | ” |
“ | In short, this is a history written in opposition to the current prevailing view — a view that will pass. | ” |
If that is so, then why has Verbal (or any other editor) not even put that language in considering all the editors who have said the subject should be included in the article, and references have been supplied both here and on the article talk page? Does one editor really control the article? Smatprt ( talk) 02:43, 28 January 2010 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bob Shannon (computer programmer). Pcap ping 01:33, 29 January 2010 (UTC)
An odd cross between a literature survey, term paper, and personal essay, seems to be a POV fork of The Golden Bough. - LuckyLouie ( talk) 19:00, 29 January 2010 (UTC)
LuckyLouie has got it right, this is like a term paper. There is an interesting topic somewhere in this. Our puberty article is altogether too biologistic and desperately needs a cultural section, it is amazing how Wikipedia often misses the most essential topics (by this I mean items so central to the conditio humana as to be almost invisible to us) completely. Seclusion of girls at puberty isn't a finished product, but it contains important points that would nudge the puberty article into the right direction.
Obviously we cannot base coverage of an anthropological item on Frazer (1890), but it's a start. We definitely need better coverage of puberty rites across cultures. Also, gender roles is the usual postmodernist/LBGT trash instead of a proper encyclopedic laying out of the known anthropological facts. Wikipedia has a lot to catch up on in this sector. Of course submissions like The Seclusion of Girls at Puberty aren't going to solve this for us, but they do serve to point out the deficit. -- dab (𒁳) 08:10, 30 January 2010 (UTC)
Could some folks here have a look at Ley line, particularly the tone of the section on skepticism. Sample quote: "Some skeptics have suggested that ley lines do not exist, and are a product of human fancy." (Oh, really? How odd of them.) -- Steven J. Anderson ( talk) 22:13, 31 January 2010 (UTC)
The discredited "Prescott Bush was a Nazi because he was on the board of directors of a bank that the Nazis confiscated" conspiracy theory is the subject of a POV-pusher on this page. Additional eyes needed. THF ( talk) 02:04, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
I've really had it with the Jesus mess. "Christ myth" is just the top of the iceberg. See Jesus and history and my comment here. The Jesus people are quite obviously unable to sort it out on their own. Vigorous fringe-busting intervention is needed here, almost as badly as in the Kamboja-Jat-Kshatriya nightmare articles. The crucifixion eclipse article is just another example of a ludicrous fringe theory given the place of a serious theory in a long detailed article. Date the crucifixion based on the mention of "a darkness", I ask you. The Christian cranks will insist that this is valid scholarship, while the anti-Christian cranks will point out the obvious flaws and then jump to equally flawed "Christ myth" conclusions. And so on in circles ad infinitum. Except, that is, if we really clamp down on this thing and insist on the restriction to real, academic references, not pop culture items about how the Vatican is hushing up the truth. -- dab (𒁳) 10:21, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
as often, I am having a hard time making sense of anything Nerdseeksblonde is saying. As for the crucifixion eclipse, yes, it's just bogus. We have an extremely long and detailed article on something that will be just shrugged off by anyone who knows anyone about the issues involved. WP:DUE says, that sure, we can have articles on items that are totally bogus just as long as they are notable, but then the introduction needs to make clear immediately that the topic is, in fact, bogus and only discussed for its cultural notability. -- dab (𒁳) 11:08, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
The Lancet just retracted an old paper often cited as linking autism to vaccination, and was cited on the mainpage. As well as the preceding, Andrew Wakefield, Vaccine controversy, MMR vaccine, Generation Rescue, Thiomersal, Thiomersal controversy, and suchlike articles could use a few extra eyes over the next few days. - 2/0 ( cont.) 20:13, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
Editor trying to introduce fringe ideas as fact, should I be bringing this up here or at NOR? See [4]. Thanks. Dougweller ( talk) 21:53, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
There seems to be a lot of new accounts editwarring here, promoting or otherwise this technique. Probable socking/block evasion. I'm just going, so could people take a look? Cheers, Verbal chat 22:09, 5 February 2010 (UTC)
New article (remarkably well-formatted) about blue-green algae, by a new editor, full of spurious health claims. I suspect a connection with Christian Drapeau, see Wikipedia:Fringe theories/Noticeboard/Archive 17#Christian Drapeau. I suspect that the author who created this, Simplexitywiki ( talk · contribs), is the same as the editor who created the earlier article, JaySutton ( talk · contribs). The one thing I am sure of is that this ought not to exist. Looie496 ( talk) 22:30, 5 February 2010 (UTC)
I'm separating this to an appropriate section for some actual discussion that this board can handle. ScienceApologist ( talk) 17:36, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
The biggest problem with the lead that I see is the weasel-word "some" in the last clause. Who are the people who disagree and why? We need to get some sources and tighten the language there. ScienceApologist ( talk) 17:36, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
This article is mostly plagiarism from a Telegraph story (its reference). I think it should be deleted, but probably some would claim notability. Do with it as you wish :)
Other questionable articles to be found under the category "supernatural healing" include Hagiotherapy and Vibrational medicine. ▻ Tim Shuba ( talk) 04:04, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
Is the official position of the United States government on a controversial legal-political issue "fringe"? THF ( talk) 03:48, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
Two editors have changed the subject above, so let me repeat the question so it doesn't get hijacked: On controversial legal-political questions of international law, capital punishment, Zionism, whether an organization is "terrorist", etc., is the position of the United States government fringe, or, by definition, is it a serious position that, even if in some defined minority, deserves to be accounted for? In other words, is it ever appropriate for Wikipedia to take an NPOV position in an article that states that the US government is wrong? (Please note that this is not asking about scientific questions such as stem cells or evolution; solely about legal-political issues.) THF ( talk) 04:24, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
THC, I think there needs to be more discussion before even attempting a vote. Can you please self-revert the vote below or close it? A Quest For Knowledge ( talk) 04:59, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
This vote IMHO is idiotic and not the function of this noticeboard. I move to close this discussion or demand a much narrower enquiry by THF.-- LexCorp ( talk) 04:56, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
Hold on... I can now see where you're coming from: Are you looking for an intro to the first part of the sentence along the lines of "According to XYZ, capital punishment is a violation of human rights."... ? In that case, you'd have a point. Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 > haneʼ 06:39, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
The Four Deuces writes: The fact that the US government holds a position has no bearing on whether or not it is WP:Fringe. That does severe damage to the NPOV policy. Then a concerted band of editors can take a page on a legal or political topic and edit it to say that the US is wrong on issue X -- and then hide behind WP:FRINGE. Since WP:FRINGE applies only to "non-significant opinions", I'm hard-pressed to see how the view of the US on a controversial political or legal question could ever be "non-significant." THF ( talk) 06:20, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
For purposes of WP:NPOV, the position of the United States government on a legal-political issue can never be considered "fringe" per WP:FRINGE.
All of these comments fail to AGF. I'm asking for a general rule about NPOV because I don't want to have the same debate dozens of times on dozens of pages, and I think correct application of NPOV is consistent with that general rule. If you disagree with that general rule, just state that you disagree with the general rule rather than personally attacking me. I'm not asking for "democracy", I'm asking for consensus. If the consensus is that the general rule is not consistent with NPOV, that's very useful for me to know, so I can stop making the argument here, and start making the argument outside of Wikipedia that its NPOV policy is a sham. THF ( talk) 16:11, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
I move to archive the discussions related to these matters of "US Government positions" as inappropriate for the noticeboard. I am trying to assume good faith but think that specific questions on specific articles are better than these generalized debates. ScienceApologist ( talk) 15:40, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
There was a time when US held many views that were considered fringe... Fringe views like the idea that all men are created equal, the superiority of democratic government, or that people should have a right to free speach and the freedom of religion. It also held veiws that were fairly mainstream such as the idea that you needed slavery to make a plantation ecconomy work. Fringe does not mean right or wrong... it simply is a function of how wide spread acceptance of the view is. Any government can hold fringe views, as long as the view held is rejected by the world as a whole. That much is self-evident. Blueboar ( talk) 05:07, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
The stance of the US government may be a factor in deciding whether a view is fringe or mainstream - may even be a significant factor on some issues - but it cannot be an ultimate and infallible authority. If, for example, the US government and US legislature took a position which ever other government and legal authority in the world opposed, then this would still be a fringe position. Gandalf61 ( talk) 14:43, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
My vote is WP:UCS. Sure, the US are a superpower, and most of the time they take a position, that position will be relevant simply because they have a big enough stick to make sure it is relevant. But that isn't an a priori truth or something, that's just what considering the question at hand will turn up most of the time.
Why are we being asked to consider this in such abstract terms? Just cut to the chase and outline the actual dispute behind this. -- dab (𒁳) 15:47, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
This does not appear to be a fruitful discussion, probably because it's not clear where the position of the united states government is considered fringe. Sometimes that's because people misunderstand the purpose of this noticeboard, and other times it's because the goal is to use this board as a "gotchya, see what they said!" noticeboard. Given that we have to assume the first, we'll need to see this in context. Where is the position of the US government being treated as fringy? Hipocrite ( talk) 16:20, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
Personally this whole exchange strikes me as quite bizarre. I just don't see how governmental rhetoric constitutes a "theory", as opposed to a rank act of self-justification. Mangoe ( talk) 17:55, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
this has gone far beyond what is appropriate for this noticeboard. My opinion is that THF is wrong in his approach to this. It is misguided to discuss items of policy or politics as "fringe, yes or no" in the first place. "fringe" is properly applied to academic or pseudo-academic hypotheses, not to government positions. And no, this cannot be treated on a once-and-for-all basis, there is no way around the case-by-case approach. -- dab (𒁳) 09:59, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
I think it is fair to assume THF is asking this question out of good faith, rather than trying to push a given POV; from my experience with him, although I disagree with many of his opinions, his primary failing is approaching conflicts thinking as a lawyer, rather than as an average, rational, yet prudent person. (Not to bad-mouth lawyers: my brother & brother-in-law are lawyers.) The problem which is being overlooked is that the US government is hardly a monolithic institution which holds one, consistent opinion on any given topic. Not only does the US government change its stance on issues between administrations, different officials of a given administration will often have different opinions on a given issue. (And then there is the matter whether members of the legislative or judicial branch speak for the US government: does Dennis Kucinich represent the US government's opinion with as much authority as James G. Watt?) The best approach to this matter is to identify with as much detail as possible who in the US government holds the opinion. Otherwise, we will find the US government being used to endorse such fringe positions as Eugenics (which was supported in the 1930s) or the extermination of Native Americans. Does this offer a solution for all involved? -- llywrch ( talk) 23:57, 7 February 2010 (UTC)
Just discovered that this article is getting attention again, I just had to change an edit which used Bovon's original claim about a name, ignoring the fact that he later changed his mind and retracted it. If anyone else is interested in the subject I'd appreciate more eyes. Dougweller ( talk) 10:42, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
It appears that Spiritism has been taken over by excessively credulous authors. Mangoe ( talk) 16:52, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
The word 'spiritism' was defined for the first time by Allan Kardec in the introduction to The Spirits' Book published 18 April 1857. Spiritism is a doctrine founded on the existence, manifestations, and teachings of spirits, most often of incorporeal human spirits. The the word applies more broadly to animist or other practices which intend to communicate with these spirits by various means, including trance states or objects such as seance tables. In our day, spiritism designates both the modern English Spiritualism initiated by the Fox sisters in 1848, and the spiritistic doctrines of Allan Kardec defined in 1857 as 'a moral philosophy and a science'.
(My emphasis) I don't know the literature that well but I think the confusion between these three senses doesn't obtain in English; therefore "spiritism" should be reserved for the Kardecian system. Rooting out all the stuff that isn't directly related should help relieve this mess of the POV fork. I'm half inclined simply to translate the French wiki article on the Kardec system and throw everything else away. Is there someone else with adequate/superior-to-my French who could look this over? Mangoe ( talk) 18:30, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
Sometimes minority viewpoints are widespread, beyond total FRINGE, but disregarded and laughed at by (all) Reliable Sources.
To give a hypothetical example, 500 years ago Catholisism was the dominant viewpoint in Western Europe. Then Luther came, protesting against it. Suppose for the sake of argument, that all Reliable Sources at that time were representing the dominant viewpoint, and if they ever did represent some of Luther's viewpoints, they did so in a distorted fashion. Would wikipedia, had it existed in the year 1517, be allowed to quote Luther directly from his own Ninety-Five Theses, or should wikipedia only quote the theses as quoted by the Catholic Church in their Reliable Sources literature?
My own gut feeling is: that is makes most sense to quote directly from the source, from the moment that Reliable Sources have treated the criticism as Notable. If trustworthy primary sources exist (for Luther's theses), this should provide a more honest and neutral and factual representation of the conflict than when solely quoting from Reliable Secondary/Tertiary Sources. (In the past however I have had strong disagreement with wiki-editors who shared a certain bias with the Reliable Sources, and then claimed that the viewpoint of the Reliable Sources was the Neutral Viewpoint that wikipedia should take.)
Xiutwel-0002 (
talk) 11:47, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
See: WP:OR#Primary, secondary, and tertiary sources. Zaereth ( talk) 19:29, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
- Airplane technology rapidly increased after World War I. By 1936, dogfighting was thought to be a thing of the past, since aircraft were reaching top speeds of over 250 miles per hour. This was proved wrong during the Spanish civil war, as quoted by the U.S. Attaché in 1937, “The peacetime theory of the complete invulnerability of the modern type of bombardment airplane no longer holds. The increased speeds of both the bombardment and pursuit plane have worked in favor of the pursuit … The flying fortress died in Spain.”
I am sorry, but this noticeboard seems to deteriorate into a general brainstorming on general principles. This discussion belongs on a project talkpage, such as Wikipedia_talk:Fringe_theories, and I hereby propose to move it there to reduce clutter on this noticeboard. Incidentially, I also resent the naive assumption that Roman Catholicism is "a position" and that there was no theological dispute prior to Luther. -- dab (𒁳) 18:04, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
An article with few editors interested in it, but see [6]. I'm not sure if I should have brought this here or the NOR board. Dougweller ( talk) 08:51, 7 February 2010 (UTC)
mensurology, eh? 524.1483 mm for the Royal Cubit? Seven digits accuracy, not bad at all for the Middle Bronze Age. -- dab (𒁳) 17:59, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
I left a note at WP:BLPN about Ntsukunyane Mphanya's BLP violations on Motsoko Pheko and an IP has suggested that NM is actually BL (who has an account here I believe). Which would be impersonation. Dougweller ( talk) 11:48, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
Looie: Ntsukunyane Mphanya was up on this board recently for spamming Leeman's cranky theories concerning Ethiopian Judaism and the Bible all over the place. From memory the two men do have an IRL connection. I would be surprised if this actually is impersonation: I think we have a comrade-in-arms who is on the warpath without Leeman's active connivance, though possibly Leeman read our COI policy and thought he'd better create an alias. It doesn't really matter either way, disruption is blockable as disruption no matter who is behind it. Moreschi ( talk) 19:33, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
The subject of Aubrey de Grey has recently begun to his biography and related discussions from various IP addresses (including 212.183.140.4, 212.183.140.52, 81.155.164.81 and possibly also as new single-purpose account User:Marainein). de Grey appears to want to portray his idea that human beings will soon live forever (if they follow his genetic re-engineering strategy, including inserting mitochondrial DNA into the nucleus and lengthening telomeres in an unspecified fashion) as a concept generally accepted by the scientific community, when as far as I can tell, the only scientists agreeing seem to be on the board of his immortality organisation. I placed a notice at AN/I about the COI (after a COIN report went nowhere), but it wouldn't hurt for other editors to take a look at this and related articles.
de Grey's Methusaleh Foundation has established a notable prize, and de Grey edits his own journal, but does this make his speculations mainstream science? Are we truly to the point where declaring that humans will live forever is not WP:FRINGE?
Aubrey de Grey is just one of many fork-like articles on immortality speculation related to de Grey, including SENS Foundation, Rejuvenation (aging), Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, Methuselah Foundation and De Grey Technology Review debate, most of which are built around SENS website pages (and in some cases copied text) and not much else. A thorough clean-up is required. Any volunteers? Keepcalmandcarryon ( talk) 20:31, 9 February 2010 (UTC)
This ID proponent's article seems to be having trouble with WP:RS and possible WP:BLP issues. Help required! Thanks, Verbal chat
This bizarre article has just received a massive and highly nonencyclopedic expansion by an SPA, Frank777w ( talk · contribs). The changes have been reverted, but it's not clear how the story will develop, and more eyes might be useful. Looie496 ( talk) 22:18, 9 February 2010 (UTC)
My experience as an ArbCom clerk leads me to agree with Seddon, this will almost certainly not be accepted. Dougweller ( talk) 17:21, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
A very determined cabal of editors with obvious and in one case admitted personal interests are promoting some slightly fringe ideas at a variety of related articles including chronic fatigue syndrome, xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus and Whittemore Peterson Institute. The chronic fatigue syndrome "walled garden" (as an experienced editor described these articles to me) has been a notorious haven of activists for a particular view of disease causation (namely, that a virus is responsible for what they prefer to call "myalgic encephalopathy" or "X-associated neuroimmune disease"), and has witnessed some rather deprecable behaviour in the past.
To the best of my knowledge, no scientific study claiming viral aetiology of CFS has been confirmed. The latest virus claim ( XMRV), published in Science last October, was contradicted by a PLoS ONE report in January. Several special-interest editors are now using Wikipedia as a soapbox to promote the Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI), responsible for the Science report. They delete any information about the institute that they deem somehow negative, even if it's from the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. They remove accurate descriptions of the Institute's findings in favour of scientifically inaccurate summaries. They won't allow mention of the status of Ampligen, a drug rejected by the FDA and with which the founders have a long and intimate history. Additional, current issues:
Any aid in bringing the Whittemore Peterson Institute article (and others) to a more NPOV, whilst fairly and accurately emphasising the slightly out-of-the-mainstream stances of the institution's workers/founders would be greatly appreciated. Keepcalmandcarryon ( talk) 21:46, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
The main problem is at the Durupinar site article, a link farm of pro and con sites, I've started a talk page discussion on both articles mentioning WP:UNDUE. There's an IP Wyatt fan involved. Some comments on the talk page at least would be useful. Thanks. Dougweller ( talk) 08:54, 12 February 2010 (UTC)
I've just yanked a section from Stephen Decatur concerning how he shot the Jersey devil through the wing. It was inserted by an IP a year and a half ago, so there may not be that much pressure to keep it, but someone else might like to take a look at it. The sources were all Fortean/Ripley stuff except for a fluff newspaper thing. Mangoe ( talk) 12:18, 16 February 2010 (UTC)
Is it just my imagination, or is Jersey Devil a bit on the credulous side? Mangoe ( talk) 12:24, 16 February 2010 (UTC)
I have sympathy for the concept, but as I establish on the article talkpage, this idea has a pedigree of having been made up online, and it has not seeped into any academic literature short of one or two mentions-in-passing in Mother Tongue (a journal which is itself of rather fringy status).
Definitely a "fringe theory" (in the best academic sense), but one of very minimal notability. -- dab (𒁳) 18:59, 17 February 2010 (UTC)
Article about a possibly non-notable Italian physicist includes claims that run the gamut from originating "revolutionary theories in physics and electronics" to being "unable to obtain a degree because of bullying at work". Internet searches turn up nothing aside from his own claims of being the co inventor of "the first non-invasive interface for decoding of brain waves", sourced to an online patent. - LuckyLouie ( talk) 20:35, 17 February 2010 (UTC)
There have been some recent problematic edits attempting to add unrelated commentary about the Committee for skeptical inquiry to this article. Please see Talk:Ghost#confused by a revert, review, and discuss. Thanks, Verbal chat 19:10, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
Fundamentally, and different from other skeptical groups, CSI is a committee that is dedicated to actually researching the evidence for paranormal claims. They've been around for so long in their various forms (formerly CSICOP) that there is almost no claim that they haven't subject to scientific investigation. What they've discovered over the years is that the vast majority of their research has yet to be challenged by anyone else. So, to deprecate them as being primarily and "advocacy group" rather than a "research group" is pretty strange. I have yet to see a research group that has done better research on the subject of ghosts than CSI. If you can point me to one, please let me know. They are certainly more reliable when it comes to evaluating paranormal claims than any so-called "Parapsychology organization". I am a bit curious that particular attribution is being used incorrectly. The section as it is currently worded actually violates particular attribution because it attributes rather mundane points to specific individuals rather than summarizing facts (e.g. it is a fact that many of the claimed abilities and properties of ghosts violate the laws of physics). In short, when statements are only contradicted by the Parapsychological Association and Institute of Noetic Sciences, NPOV does not require us to provide particular attribution of the facts. ScienceApologist ( talk) 22:12, 15 February 2010 (UTC)
The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) is a nonprofit scientific and educational organization started in 1976 by scientists (including several Nobel laureates), members of the academic community, and science writers. Members of CSICOP, frequently referred to as skeptics, advocate the scientific investigation of paranormal claims and the dissemination of factual information to counter those claims. CSICOP's mission includes taking advantage of opportunities to promote critical thinking, science education, and the use of reason to determine the merits of important issues.
I think you're bending a little bit over backwards in order to maintain "advocacy" as a primary aim of CSI. The reason this looks problematic is because it makes it seem like the organization is self-promotional and not dispassionate nor neutral when, in fact, they're the closest thing we've got to dispassionate and neutral evaluation of claims of the paranormal. I'm just concerned that they are being contrasted against nebulous and ill-defined "other" groups which are somehow "better" sources for NPOV facts. ScienceApologist ( talk) 13:58, 16 February 2010 (UTC)
Well, Ludwigs2, it's even more difficult to find common ground with that post. We're going to have to agree to disagree. We'll see what happens whether or when our wikiphilosophies collide in actual editing environments. ScienceApologist ( talk) 03:44, 19 February 2010 (UTC)
Our article on Secret society needs a lot of attention. Due to the nature of its topic, the article is always going to be a Fringe theory magnet. At the moment it strikes me as attempting to deal with the subject neutrally... but inconsistent citation style (ie a serious lack of inline citations) makes it all but impossible to know if it is actually doing so. The same problem exists in knowing what is Original research and what is backed by reliable sources. Blueboar ( talk) 15:28, 18 February 2010 (UTC)
At Moses as symbol in American history there appears to be a mixture of legitimate accounts of the important symbolic role Moses has played in struggles for freedom (Civil Rights movement, etc.), but also pseudo-historical claims that Moses and the 10 C's are the basis of democracy and human rights. I noticed this when the author of that article added a summary of it to the into of Ten Commandments, and, after I removed that, created a new section for it further down in the article. I haven't read the sources, but this has the appearance of recent domestic movements to rewrite US history to argue that America was founded as a Christian state. I don't have the background in history to argue this myself. kwami ( talk) 08:02, 13 February 2010 (UTC)
Wolf effect ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
Here's one of the casualties from the great cosmology wars of 2005. I'm not sure how to approach this. Here's the story:
In the late 1970s and 1980s, a major question was, "What is the nature of Quasars?" A flurry of researchers went to work on the subject and came up with a number of options. One was that quasars were at cosmological distances and the tremendous redshifts seen in them were really examples of objects that were really far away (now known to be the unequivocal right answer). A number of observationalist sticks-in-the-mud continue to argue that quasars (or at least a subpopulation of them) are actually nearby objects which are ejected from nearby active galactic nuclei (famously, Halton Arp argues this). Finally, a small group from University of Rochester led by Emil Wolf proposed an effect which hadn't been observed, and is the eponymous name of the article.
We now know for a number of reasons that the Wolf Effect explanation for quasar redshifts is completely untenable. Majorly, quasars are known to exist in systems that are decoherent, the massive redshifts associated with them are seen in absorption lines, and in order to get systematic redshifts of any size a rather dense medium is needed to allow for the dissipation of energy through scattering. Lacking these conditions, a consistent redshift is not possible and the Wolf Effect is therefore not considered a redshift mechanism. A protracted battle that resulted in Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Pseudoscience happened back then over this issue that resulted in, primarily, a vindication of the idea that Wikipedia is supposed to marginalize fringe ideas in mainstream topics to the extent that they are marginalized in reliable sources.
The detailed physics of the Wolf effect was worked out in a number of mainstream journal articles that are now all but forgotten. Though they were published in mainstream journals, no one bothered to comment on the papers after the consensus models for quasars was developed. It seems that Wolf himself may have even abandoned the idea that there is any cosmological implication to his prediction and discovery at all, having not published about the hypothesis for more than a decade.
So we've got this article on the Wolf Effect. It's a real effect that was theorized to explain a particular set of observations and it turns out not to be the explanation for those observations. However, the sources we can locate on this matter all essentially just tell the first half of the story (theorizing, predicting a spectrum, observing it in the lab, explaining the conditions) and the second half is missing (critique of the idea is done through overwhelming silence of the community and the consensus model ignoring it). But how do we write an article that captures this state of being? What is most prominent and notable about the Wolf Effect? How do we avoid original research?
I personally think what's most interesting is the effect itself (a sort of combination of coherence, physical optics, and scattering) which is an effect that has been observed in laboratory conditions, but has never been seen in the natural world. It's historical backwater tributary that, while interesting, is an almost unverifiable story because no one bothered to publish anything refuting it as a possible cosmological redshift mechanism. So I'm left not knowing exactly what to do. Real physics, real phenomenon, unreal antiquated explanation for unrelated things. I tried working on it, but am thinking of self-reverting because I'm so confused.
Please help.
ScienceApologist ( talk) 03:53, 16 February 2010 (UTC)
That's actually a pretty promising source, but is still rather combatively fringe and could serve to source a different perspective than the one I provide above. I quote it here now for completeness and ask the opinion of the community whether a different source should be found. (Note, for example, the divisive use of the word 'careerist' and the vague reference to 'Pandora's Box'.
“ | On the Wolf Effect
Dear Jack (Sulentic), among plasma physicists, the Wolf effect has been considered a possible cause of noncosmological redshifts. Can you please explain why this effect should be relevant under the physical conditions expected for line emission from quasar? Can this effect account for the internal shifts observed between lines emitted by ions of widely different ionization potential? Emil Wolf is an impressive scientist who easily satisfies the definition of a truth seeker (Baconian). He was therefore rather naive when he suggested that a mechanism that came to be called the Wolf effect might have an application in astrophysics. This was a mechanism capable of producing non-Doppler shifts in spectral lines. Any application offering this possibility will be dismissed by careerists because any demonstration of a non-Doppler component, however small, could be said to open Pandora’s Box. I accept some of the blame for encouraging him to explore such possibilities. I think he was genuinely surprised by the rancor and hostility that greeted his suggestion. The Wolf effect can be included in a general category of scattering mechanisms that can in principal (i.e., given the proper set of physical conditions) shift line emitting photons to longer (or shorter) wavelength. Others include Compton and Raman scattering mechanisms. Compton downshifting of photons is well known especially among X-ray astronomers. All of these mechanisms might play a roll in complex sources like quasars. Compton scattering was invoked [516] to explain a significant (but not cosmological) redshift observed in the 6.4 keV X-ray line discovered in many low redshift quasars in the 1980s. It was not warmly welcomed but now higher S/N spectra reveal that most of the redshifted lines were not real. Scattering mechanisms do not seem promising as a way to produce all or most of the cosmological redshift. I am not qualified to discuss such models in detail, but the empiricism can provide first-order constraints for such models. Producing small shifts or asymmetries in emission lines is one thing, but shifting the bulk of the photons outside the envelope of the intrinsic (rest frame) line is quite another. A scattering process generally broadens a line and alters its shape. The broad and complex emission lines in quasars offer a tempting target for scattering applications. Electron scattering, for example, almost certainly has some small effect on emission line structure in quasars. Unfortunately, a large fraction of quasars also show one or more narrow emission lines with the same or very similar redshift as the broad ones. Scattering mechanisms also often produce wavelength-dependant shifts. In recent years, we have been able to compare the emission lines at UV, Optical, and IR wavelengths, and we find that all lines in a quasar show the same redshift within a scatter of at most 800 km/s (UV emission lines do show a systematic blueshift relative to optical lines in perhaps 60% of quasars). In summary, we do not know enough about the physical conditions within the central regions of quasars to rule out scattering mechanisms, but to produce a pseudo-cosmological redshift, they would have to scatter all of the lines from Ly-alpha, to Paschen-alpha˛ in a way to produce the same redshift and preserve their intrinsic widths. If I were looking for an astrophysical application of the Wolf effect in quasar astronomy, it would be to explain small scale shifts and asymmetric differences within a source. In summary, the Wolf effect appears most promising for explaining smaller line shift and shape anomalies. It does not appear promising as a mechanism that might produce non-Doppler redshifts that could mimic observed cosmological redshifts. |
” |
ScienceApologist ( talk) 19:10, 16 February 2010 (UTC)
I came across this section while reading Criticism of the United Nations, and something about it didn't seem right. I know we're not supposed to use weasel words like "some," but when there are multiple sources that make up a significant minority, I think there is a reason to use it. None of the sources are online. The author of one of the sources, Michel Schooyans has a stub level article with 5 of the same sources, I suspect placed by the same person who made that section. I don't really know much about the UN or the " New Age" conspiracy, but I was wondering if someone knowledgeable about this could take a look and see if they think anything is wrong. AzureFury ( talk | contribs) 07:08, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
Longevity traditions ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
This article needs some balance toward neutrality, and it's a bit more than I can handle. There's some unqualified creation science attributing the long ages of Adam et al. to the antediluvian "firmament". The other sections aren't much better.
NB: I did change the title from "Longevity myths" because of our section on the word "myth" as a word to avoid in the casual sense. If anyone disagrees, feel free to change it back. Auntie E. ( talk) 19:18, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
Orb (optics) ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
Not sure what to do with this article. I removed a section on the paranormal, but notice that the vast majority of references and external links are to paranormal resources. Nevertheless, backscatter and near-camera reflections are very real phenomena which deserve an article. I'm just not sure that this umbrella (orb (optics)) does the trick. There is also extensive discussion of orbs in the paranormal literature, but this article is not orb (paranormal), it's orb (optics). WP:ONEWAY would have us segregate the mundane idea of backscatter (which has nothing to do with guessing about ghosts and is a real problem in almost all optical arrangements) with the more outrageous (and possibly interesting to our readers) ideas that these aren't photographs of ghosts. Then again, I'm feeling that another name would be more appropriate since "orb" is not the preferred nomenclature amongst those not debunking/ghosthunting.
Anyway, I thoroughly confused myself, but I really do think that there are two articles in here and not one. Advice and help in creating/splitting articles would be greatly appreciated.
ScienceApologist ( talk) 21:58, 15 February 2010 (UTC)
Hey guys, look at the heading of this discussion and ask yourselves one question... why we are having it here?
This is a great discussion, and I appreciate everyone's input. However, it is not kosher to have a discussion about the Orb (optics) article on this page, and then once the discussion is over, announce a so-called 'consensus' (as in here), on the Orb (optics) article page. It's the second time the article has been broadsided recently, as when here, the article was merged, again with no discussion on it's own discussion page. This is in very poor form; it does not reflect a good faith effort to include the editors on that page in the discussion. Please conduct discussion about the fate of the Orb (optics) page on it's discussion page. That's what the page is for. Or at the very least, announce on that page that article's fate is in discussion elsewhere, before the... er... consensus is reached.
And for the record, I will reiterate, the Backscatter page is ultimately about a broad concept of physics, and includes references to other specific instances where the term is used. Now the editors on the Backscatter page seem committed to conflating the disparte subjects (physics, flash photography and computers) because they share the same word. There is no need to conflate these subjects. What is really called for is a disambiguation page for the word backscatter, that could include each of the subjects that include the term backscatter.
And for what it's worth, the Orb(optics) page is poorly named. It's an article about digital flash photography. It has gone under several different names including Orb(photography) and Orb(paranormal). Please note that Orb (photographic) does redirect to Orb (optics) and Orb (paranormal) is the one that goes off into make-believe land. This has confused the issue, of course.
I appreciate your understanding in hearing my points. I know we can and will do better. Thanks. 842U ( talk) 03:57, 21 February 2010 (UTC)
I think some readers of this board are interested and might want to chime in at Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#Brief_Chronicles Dougweller ( talk) 10:32, 22 February 2010 (UTC)
Edit war erupting. Apparently it is "propaganda" to assert that Iranians have any claim on the Glorious Word. Paul B ( talk) 13:18, 22 February 2010 (UTC)
Could interested editors review recent changes to the article Ica stones? Regards, ClovisPt ( talk) 16:59, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
The Christ myth theory article recently obtained GA status. In my glee I quickly (perhaps overly quickly) submitted the article for FA candidacy. While reviewers indicated that there were a number of issues in need of resolution, the article's candidacy was derailed primarily by one reviewer's accusation that the article was POV.
Specifically, a very experienced reviewer read the article, claimed to have read the 39 footnotes (I know, excessive, I'm working on it) that indicate the theory is WP:FRINGE, and then faulted the article for presenting the theory as "fringe when it may simply be a minority position". The reviewer's go-to fact checking source here was that unassailable pillar of historical Jesus research, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Needless to say I was both shocked and deeply frustrated. But this sort of thing keeps happening: anonymous IP users, moderately involved editors, and now even an admin have read the article, claimed to have read the footnotes, and still--inexplicably--questioned the WP:FRINGE nature of the topic.
I understand that the article needs to shed some of its footnotes; 39 citations in support of a single point is far too much. But considering this baffling trend I'm hesitant to do anything. Afterall, if some people will question the fringiness of the theory in the face of literally dozens of citations, what will happen if that list is pared down to just two or three? So before I do much in terms of trimming the list, I'd very much like to put this issue to bed once and for all.
Is there some authoritative Wikipedia body that could rule in some way on the fringiness of the Christ myth theory? I'd like to get such a ruling into the article milestones on the talk page or something. Eugene ( talk) 20:54, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
This page is an archive. Do not edit the contents of this page. Please direct any additional comments to the current main page. |
Ran across this category; it seems to imply that such things as Spirit photography and Apport have no explanation? - LuckyLouie ( talk) 16:36, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
We have an editor here who seems to have a hearing problem regarding due weight, and also what type of material belongs in a biography. IMO, lengthy quotes about defenses of books that have their own page do not. It's a tremendous amount added -- 11,000 byes in a now 58,000 byte article -- that throws off the balance of the article when it comes to FRINGE theory. Unfortunately, that is what User:Swood100 has done. Maybe I'm not getting through. Opinions? Auntie E. ( talk) 17:40, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
Please see the section "A Simple Request" on the Behe talk page.-- Swood100 ( talk) 19:53, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
Creation according to Genesis is under a creationist attack and needs a few more eyes. Apparently it is not OK to state the literary genre to which the creation story in Genesis belongs without any doubt, because its name creation myth has dangerous, anti-creationist pro-science overtones that might hurt innocent children. (No, I am not just being sarcastic. One reason given for the censorship was: "The agenda of the non-believers vs believers is to shape the minds of the innocent who read this article.") The article is currently protected in a stupid version that suggests most Christians and Jews are creationists and stresses the colloquial sense of "myth" in "creation myth" contrary to WP:WTA#Myth and legend. Hans Adler 13:52, 25 January 2010 (UTC)
this is a non-issue. This sort of ideological pov-pushing is pretty much rollback-able, and then there is WP:3RR. I don't see there is even anything to discuss. -- dab (𒁳) 20:28, 25 January 2010 (UTC)
That "observation" is a stereotype. Plain and simple. ScienceApologist ( talk) 04:46, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
The entire article is a pit of small minority and fringe viewpoints, as well as original research. The terminology matter is a pittance compared to the fundamental issues with the article, though it is indicative of the underlying problem. To take but one "obvious" example: The difference between the two creation accounts is one the main scholarly subtopics and widely accepted. Despite that, it is given extreme short shrift and the main viewpoint of the article gives the impression that they are alternative tellings/harmonized accounts. There are much bigger things to worry about here than what labels to use. Vassyana ( talk) 01:38, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
I agree with Vassyana and Hans Adler, the latest attempts to "sanitize" the article to conform with fundamentalist religionist viewpoints may be a good thing because it draws our attention to the fact that the same thing has been going on, more discreetly, for some time. The article needs to be put on a solid scholarly basis. This will also make deteriorating it more difficult. As for the title, "[the] Creation according to Genesis" is a perfectly common descriptor and there is no need to change it. I just note that Book of Genesis also needs more loving watchers. -- dab (𒁳) 08:44, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
I would not recommend entering a discussion with Til Eulenspiegel who (formerly known as User:Codex Sinaiticus) has managed to pull this Refusal to Get It for literally years on end. -- dab (𒁳) 14:48, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
Please also look into
Mosaic authorship and
Moses and
The Exodus please, while you're at it.
It is, to the best of my knowledge, beyond reasonable dispute that the Tanakh Torah is a 6th to 5th c.BC compilation, which includes fragments of earlier accounts, perhaps as old as the 10th c. BC. This "older fragments" point is perfectly normal in ancient texts dealing with mythology and/or religion, just as you have the
Rigveda which was compiled in the 10th c. BC but can include fragments as much as 5 centuries older, or the
Iliad which was composed in the 7th c. BC or so, but can include fragments as much as 5 centuries older. Five centuries appears to be a sort of natural lifetime for poetic fragments in oral tradition. --
dab
(𒁳) 09:15, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
strike Tanakh, I meant Torah (Pentateuch), sorry. -- dab (𒁳) 18:55, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
The biggest problem I'm seeing here is getting a reliable source for surveying the field. My impression for some time is that any random scholar in the field is likely to unreliable because the tendency is for each of them to say that their theory is state-of-the-art and the others are all being left behind. That also seems to be an issue in the Shakespeare question above. The question of what is a fringe view in a field where there is a lot of controversy (itself a difficult issue) is something we need a better approach in answering. Mangoe ( talk) 14:56, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
guys, this is a noticeboard. For the discussion of handling fringe theories on Wikipedia, go to Wikipedia talk:Fringe theories. For discussion of the notion of "fringe theory" in general, try Talk:Fringe theory. -- dab (𒁳) 18:51, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
There is an ongoing dispute on the article of the Egyptian god Horus. There several authors have subscribed to a theory that Horus and Jesus share many similarities, which has used as evidence of the Christ myth theory. This comparison was made in the Bill Maher film Religulous, as well as several articles and books published over the last 150 years (the full list of sources is here. There has not been much in the way of academic response, except for an article found on the History News Network: [1] My question is, does this theory qualify as a "fringe theory," which means that it should be ignored entirely? Or is it worthy of inclusion in the Horus article, including whatever response there is from the academic community? ColorOfSuffering ( talk) 22:37, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
the problem is not with comparing Jesus and Horus, which is perfectly straightforward if you use proper academic references from religious studies. The entire problem is that people will insist on using pop culture sources like Christ myth theory or Religulous instead of proper academic ones. Help Wikipedia by insisting on WP:RS! Jesus and Horus are not items of pop culture but of religion, hence the only permissible secondary sources should be academic publications from the field of theology and religious study. -- dab (𒁳) 09:07, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
There is a section on the Shakespeare biography which conjecturers on Shakespeare's sexuality based on dubious research that was sponsored by a small number of proactive gay rights intellectuals. They never conclude or prove or show any primary material or secondary research that Shakespeare was queer, What is known is that he was married and had three children. These facts have been continually pointed out on the main entries talk section and are never answered, and yet the editors of the page insist on including this baseless section, without answering any of the factual issues, It is a non-neutral segment which misleads reads about Shakespeare.
Mrbrklyn ( talk) 00:39, 27 January 2010 (UTC)mrbrklyn
I doubt this is "well-established" or should get more than passing mention under WP:DUE. The point is simply that when you have an entire literary establishment obsess over a single author for 400 years, there will be nothing that was not at some point said about him. -- dab (𒁳) 09:04, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
I know. A reasonable approach would be to simply point out the homoerotic aspects in a discussion of the Sonnets. But trust to it that Wikipedia will come up with a dedicated, painful Sexuality of William Shakespeare article, complete with a section entitled "Possible homoeroticism". I am not sure if I am the only one who thinks that any grown-up educated reader will consider this involuntary wiki-comedy. Perhaps the laws of Wikipedia should be expanded by "you cannot parody Wikipedia". And a corollary, "if you do parody Wikipedia, Wikipedia will grow a long and tedious article discussing your parody." -- dab (𒁳) 11:43, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
I've removed twice reference to the " Shakespeare authorship question" from this page as I believe it is a very poor example, and requires undue prominence to be explained properly in the (very) short article. It also seems to be a spreading of a disagreement from other pages. The Apollo moon hoax is a better example to my mind, but without good reason I don't think we should be littering the page with examples. We already have the list of pseudosciences for similar things. Review, opinions, compromises, etc welcome on the talk page (as usual). And it's nice to see you all again. Best, Verbal chat 09:56, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
( edit concflict)
The fringe theory article should indeed make the distinction between fringe-within-academia and completely-off-the-wall-batshit-crazy. Many items move from the former into the latter category over time, when a formerly arguable academic hypothesis becomes solidly refuted but lives on in crank publications. A useful criterion is that academic mainstream may be wrong at any given moment but forces itself to make progress over time, while fields of crackpottery simply grow weirder over time, possibly fracturing into subsects but never making any progress. -- dab (𒁳) 14:56, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
Wow - calm down. I didn't mean to offend, but of the two sides, you certainly have come down on the Stratfordian side. That was not an insult. But calling me a crank or implying stupidity is not needed. According to your definition, 1/3rd of the Supreme court, Freud, Walt Whitman, Henry James, hundreds of college professors and thousands of others are cranks or stupid? Can we avoid the name calling and just stick to the question? I think it is pretty clear where you and I stand - which is why I asked for some non-aligned editors to weigh in, which they have. Again - sorry for any perceived insult. Smatprt ( talk) 16:44, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
Thie implication is two equal camps? Where on earth did you get that. If that were the implication, then this wouldn't be fringe it would just be two regular articles of opposing viewpoints, which is obviously not the case. Nunh-huh was one of the most srtident editors who actually tried to censor all discussion of the subject completely, and failed for obvious reasons. When the leading Shakespeare scholars of the day, including Wells, Matus, Shoenbaum, all devote chapters in their latest books to the subject, even to dismiss it, the issue certainly deserves coverage. Call it minority viewpoint, alternative view, fringe theory, whatever - there is no doubt of its status. Smatprt ( talk) 23:13, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
I tried to discuss this at talk, but that very brief conversation was unfortunately cut off. At the policy page it states "We use the term fringe theory in a very broad sense to describe ideas that depart significantly from the prevailing or mainstream view in its particular field of study." Also "Some of the theories addressed here may in a stricter sense be hypotheses, conjectures, or speculations." Unfortunately, the article does not convey this broadness very well. And that was the point of my edit, and to show that some theories receive increasing support, as is the case with this one. I would think that different examples would help make those points. I had agreed to a rewrite of my original edit with a regular editor of this page so I thought things were good. After looking at the article again, I tried a slightly different edit - instead of lumping it with plate tectonics, I used it as an example of a "novel re-interpretations of history]]". Is this better? Smatprt ( talk) 17:09, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
There seems to be some confusion here. There are very few academics who feel that there is solid evidence that anybody other than Shakespeare wrote those plays. But there are lots of academics who feel that the information we have about Shakespeare's life is too sparse to permit certainty one way or another. So I am inclined to agree that this is not a good example for the Fringe Theory article. Looie496 ( talk) 17:53, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
Perhaps it is well to say at the outset that there is a good deal of evidence supporting the idea that William Shakespeare of Stratford and London wrote Shakespeare's plays. Several dozen other names have been put forward, the most notable of which are Bacon, Raleigh, Marlowe, and Queen Elizabeth; perhaps the most amusing candidates are a nun named Anne Whately and an alleged illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth. But there is no evidence to support any of these claims, all of which begin with the assumption that "the Stratford poacher" or "the Stratford butcher-boy" simply could not have written great plays and poems. A suitably learned or aristocratic candidate must then be found, and if the candidate has written under his own name, verbal echoes between the plays and the candidate's undisputed works must be collected. Sometimes ciphers are detected; for example, in the comically long word honorificabilitudinitatibus in Love's Labor's Lost (V.i.42), Bacon is said to have planted a Latin anagram, Hi ludi F. Bacon nati tuiti orbi ("These plays, offspring of F. Bacon, are preserved for the world"). It is true that a similar long word, honorificabilitudine, appears in a manuscript that contains some of Bacon's essays, but slight variations of this word appear elsewhere too; indeed, the word in the exact form in which it is found in Love's Labor's Lost had appeared in print a century before the birth of either Shakespeare or Bacon. Moreover, other anagrams can be extracted from it—for example, Ubi Italicus ibi Danti honor fit ("Where there is an Italian, there honor is paid to Dante").
Against all anti-Stratfordian theories stands the fact that scores of Elizabethans spoke of Shakespeare as a playwright, and no Elizabethan is on record as having believed that Shakespeare did not write the plays. If the actor William Shakespeare was a mere front for another author, how was the secret kept so well? Why, for example, was it never detected by Ben Jonson, who both in print and in conversation spoke of William Shakespeare's plays? (One answer which has been offered is that Jonson called Shakespeare the playwright because Jonson himself was the author of the plays but wished to hide his identity.) In short, if Shakespeare did not write the plays, a great many people were fooled during the thirty-five or so years between the date of the earliest plays and the publication in 1623 of the collected plays. Did the actors—some of whom worked with Shakespeare for about twenty years—never suspect that their dull colleague could not have written the plays he was passing off as his own? Or if, as another approach holds, so many people were not fooled but rather were in on the secret, how is it possible that in its own day this widely shared secret never leaked out? According to another desperate theory, which recognizes that the plays were regularly attributed to William Shakespeare but refuses to tolerate the idea of the Stratford poacher as an author, the plays were written not by William Shakespeare of Stratford but by another man of the same name. But to the charge that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was not William Shakespeare the actor and playwright there are many replies, at least two of which are simple and compelling: Jonson and others speak 0f the playwright as the "swan of Avon"; and in the Stratford man's will bequests are made to some actors in the London theatrical company who acted Shakespeare's plays, thus indisputably linking the Stratford man with the London theater. Not until 1769 was any doubt expressed about the authorship of the body of work ascribed to Shakespeare, and this doubt was founded on the a priori assumption that the plays must have been written by a learned man.
It seems reasonable, then, to believe what so many Elizabethans believed, that William Shakespeare of Stratford and London wrote the works of William Shakespeare.
.
So there is the one side with evidence, and the other side with uncertainty...that's more or less the definition of fringe. - Nunh-huh 18:36, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
I would recommend taking this back to Talk:Fringe theory at this point. This is quite apparently a dispute between two users both with preconceived opinions on the Shakespeare question and not about he definition of "fringe theory" at all. To resolve the dispute, more outside input will be needed. Fwiiw, I sympathize with Paul's point that the Shakespeare authorship debate deserves a place of honour in the article as the "mother of all fringe theories". -- dab (𒁳) 20:14, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
leave it until someone offers better and finally edit out Shakespeare for prominence. Nerdseeksblonde ( talk) 22:45, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
This debate is not a legitimate one within academia. It may be referenced off-handedly and with humor by serious academics, but the real key is that the mainstream treatment does not take the fringe position seriously when discussing it. ScienceApologist ( talk) 21:58, 25 January 2010 (UTC)
The anti-Stratfordian theories quite clearly comprise a school of thought that has extremely tiny minority of support among the relevant academics with a noteworthy, but still tiny minority, lay following. That's practically a textbook example of what is framed as a fringe theory. Vassyana ( talk) 01:52, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
“ | Yet [despite the broad historical liveliness of the authorship question] the histories of this subject are marked by a dreary sameness. They are all written from the same point of view: there is no Shakespeare authorship question, really, only a gabble of cranks who thinks there is. | ” |
“ | This history of the subject is quite different. It is written from the point of view that there is an authorship question, that it is important, and that the right answer has already been found and broadcast among us. | ” |
“ | In short, this is a history written in opposition to the current prevailing view — a view that will pass. | ” |
If that is so, then why has Verbal (or any other editor) not even put that language in considering all the editors who have said the subject should be included in the article, and references have been supplied both here and on the article talk page? Does one editor really control the article? Smatprt ( talk) 02:43, 28 January 2010 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bob Shannon (computer programmer). Pcap ping 01:33, 29 January 2010 (UTC)
An odd cross between a literature survey, term paper, and personal essay, seems to be a POV fork of The Golden Bough. - LuckyLouie ( talk) 19:00, 29 January 2010 (UTC)
LuckyLouie has got it right, this is like a term paper. There is an interesting topic somewhere in this. Our puberty article is altogether too biologistic and desperately needs a cultural section, it is amazing how Wikipedia often misses the most essential topics (by this I mean items so central to the conditio humana as to be almost invisible to us) completely. Seclusion of girls at puberty isn't a finished product, but it contains important points that would nudge the puberty article into the right direction.
Obviously we cannot base coverage of an anthropological item on Frazer (1890), but it's a start. We definitely need better coverage of puberty rites across cultures. Also, gender roles is the usual postmodernist/LBGT trash instead of a proper encyclopedic laying out of the known anthropological facts. Wikipedia has a lot to catch up on in this sector. Of course submissions like The Seclusion of Girls at Puberty aren't going to solve this for us, but they do serve to point out the deficit. -- dab (𒁳) 08:10, 30 January 2010 (UTC)
Could some folks here have a look at Ley line, particularly the tone of the section on skepticism. Sample quote: "Some skeptics have suggested that ley lines do not exist, and are a product of human fancy." (Oh, really? How odd of them.) -- Steven J. Anderson ( talk) 22:13, 31 January 2010 (UTC)
The discredited "Prescott Bush was a Nazi because he was on the board of directors of a bank that the Nazis confiscated" conspiracy theory is the subject of a POV-pusher on this page. Additional eyes needed. THF ( talk) 02:04, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
I've really had it with the Jesus mess. "Christ myth" is just the top of the iceberg. See Jesus and history and my comment here. The Jesus people are quite obviously unable to sort it out on their own. Vigorous fringe-busting intervention is needed here, almost as badly as in the Kamboja-Jat-Kshatriya nightmare articles. The crucifixion eclipse article is just another example of a ludicrous fringe theory given the place of a serious theory in a long detailed article. Date the crucifixion based on the mention of "a darkness", I ask you. The Christian cranks will insist that this is valid scholarship, while the anti-Christian cranks will point out the obvious flaws and then jump to equally flawed "Christ myth" conclusions. And so on in circles ad infinitum. Except, that is, if we really clamp down on this thing and insist on the restriction to real, academic references, not pop culture items about how the Vatican is hushing up the truth. -- dab (𒁳) 10:21, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
as often, I am having a hard time making sense of anything Nerdseeksblonde is saying. As for the crucifixion eclipse, yes, it's just bogus. We have an extremely long and detailed article on something that will be just shrugged off by anyone who knows anyone about the issues involved. WP:DUE says, that sure, we can have articles on items that are totally bogus just as long as they are notable, but then the introduction needs to make clear immediately that the topic is, in fact, bogus and only discussed for its cultural notability. -- dab (𒁳) 11:08, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
The Lancet just retracted an old paper often cited as linking autism to vaccination, and was cited on the mainpage. As well as the preceding, Andrew Wakefield, Vaccine controversy, MMR vaccine, Generation Rescue, Thiomersal, Thiomersal controversy, and suchlike articles could use a few extra eyes over the next few days. - 2/0 ( cont.) 20:13, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
Editor trying to introduce fringe ideas as fact, should I be bringing this up here or at NOR? See [4]. Thanks. Dougweller ( talk) 21:53, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
There seems to be a lot of new accounts editwarring here, promoting or otherwise this technique. Probable socking/block evasion. I'm just going, so could people take a look? Cheers, Verbal chat 22:09, 5 February 2010 (UTC)
New article (remarkably well-formatted) about blue-green algae, by a new editor, full of spurious health claims. I suspect a connection with Christian Drapeau, see Wikipedia:Fringe theories/Noticeboard/Archive 17#Christian Drapeau. I suspect that the author who created this, Simplexitywiki ( talk · contribs), is the same as the editor who created the earlier article, JaySutton ( talk · contribs). The one thing I am sure of is that this ought not to exist. Looie496 ( talk) 22:30, 5 February 2010 (UTC)
I'm separating this to an appropriate section for some actual discussion that this board can handle. ScienceApologist ( talk) 17:36, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
The biggest problem with the lead that I see is the weasel-word "some" in the last clause. Who are the people who disagree and why? We need to get some sources and tighten the language there. ScienceApologist ( talk) 17:36, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
This article is mostly plagiarism from a Telegraph story (its reference). I think it should be deleted, but probably some would claim notability. Do with it as you wish :)
Other questionable articles to be found under the category "supernatural healing" include Hagiotherapy and Vibrational medicine. ▻ Tim Shuba ( talk) 04:04, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
Is the official position of the United States government on a controversial legal-political issue "fringe"? THF ( talk) 03:48, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
Two editors have changed the subject above, so let me repeat the question so it doesn't get hijacked: On controversial legal-political questions of international law, capital punishment, Zionism, whether an organization is "terrorist", etc., is the position of the United States government fringe, or, by definition, is it a serious position that, even if in some defined minority, deserves to be accounted for? In other words, is it ever appropriate for Wikipedia to take an NPOV position in an article that states that the US government is wrong? (Please note that this is not asking about scientific questions such as stem cells or evolution; solely about legal-political issues.) THF ( talk) 04:24, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
THC, I think there needs to be more discussion before even attempting a vote. Can you please self-revert the vote below or close it? A Quest For Knowledge ( talk) 04:59, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
This vote IMHO is idiotic and not the function of this noticeboard. I move to close this discussion or demand a much narrower enquiry by THF.-- LexCorp ( talk) 04:56, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
Hold on... I can now see where you're coming from: Are you looking for an intro to the first part of the sentence along the lines of "According to XYZ, capital punishment is a violation of human rights."... ? In that case, you'd have a point. Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 > haneʼ 06:39, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
The Four Deuces writes: The fact that the US government holds a position has no bearing on whether or not it is WP:Fringe. That does severe damage to the NPOV policy. Then a concerted band of editors can take a page on a legal or political topic and edit it to say that the US is wrong on issue X -- and then hide behind WP:FRINGE. Since WP:FRINGE applies only to "non-significant opinions", I'm hard-pressed to see how the view of the US on a controversial political or legal question could ever be "non-significant." THF ( talk) 06:20, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
For purposes of WP:NPOV, the position of the United States government on a legal-political issue can never be considered "fringe" per WP:FRINGE.
All of these comments fail to AGF. I'm asking for a general rule about NPOV because I don't want to have the same debate dozens of times on dozens of pages, and I think correct application of NPOV is consistent with that general rule. If you disagree with that general rule, just state that you disagree with the general rule rather than personally attacking me. I'm not asking for "democracy", I'm asking for consensus. If the consensus is that the general rule is not consistent with NPOV, that's very useful for me to know, so I can stop making the argument here, and start making the argument outside of Wikipedia that its NPOV policy is a sham. THF ( talk) 16:11, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
I move to archive the discussions related to these matters of "US Government positions" as inappropriate for the noticeboard. I am trying to assume good faith but think that specific questions on specific articles are better than these generalized debates. ScienceApologist ( talk) 15:40, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
There was a time when US held many views that were considered fringe... Fringe views like the idea that all men are created equal, the superiority of democratic government, or that people should have a right to free speach and the freedom of religion. It also held veiws that were fairly mainstream such as the idea that you needed slavery to make a plantation ecconomy work. Fringe does not mean right or wrong... it simply is a function of how wide spread acceptance of the view is. Any government can hold fringe views, as long as the view held is rejected by the world as a whole. That much is self-evident. Blueboar ( talk) 05:07, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
The stance of the US government may be a factor in deciding whether a view is fringe or mainstream - may even be a significant factor on some issues - but it cannot be an ultimate and infallible authority. If, for example, the US government and US legislature took a position which ever other government and legal authority in the world opposed, then this would still be a fringe position. Gandalf61 ( talk) 14:43, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
My vote is WP:UCS. Sure, the US are a superpower, and most of the time they take a position, that position will be relevant simply because they have a big enough stick to make sure it is relevant. But that isn't an a priori truth or something, that's just what considering the question at hand will turn up most of the time.
Why are we being asked to consider this in such abstract terms? Just cut to the chase and outline the actual dispute behind this. -- dab (𒁳) 15:47, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
This does not appear to be a fruitful discussion, probably because it's not clear where the position of the united states government is considered fringe. Sometimes that's because people misunderstand the purpose of this noticeboard, and other times it's because the goal is to use this board as a "gotchya, see what they said!" noticeboard. Given that we have to assume the first, we'll need to see this in context. Where is the position of the US government being treated as fringy? Hipocrite ( talk) 16:20, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
Personally this whole exchange strikes me as quite bizarre. I just don't see how governmental rhetoric constitutes a "theory", as opposed to a rank act of self-justification. Mangoe ( talk) 17:55, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
this has gone far beyond what is appropriate for this noticeboard. My opinion is that THF is wrong in his approach to this. It is misguided to discuss items of policy or politics as "fringe, yes or no" in the first place. "fringe" is properly applied to academic or pseudo-academic hypotheses, not to government positions. And no, this cannot be treated on a once-and-for-all basis, there is no way around the case-by-case approach. -- dab (𒁳) 09:59, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
I think it is fair to assume THF is asking this question out of good faith, rather than trying to push a given POV; from my experience with him, although I disagree with many of his opinions, his primary failing is approaching conflicts thinking as a lawyer, rather than as an average, rational, yet prudent person. (Not to bad-mouth lawyers: my brother & brother-in-law are lawyers.) The problem which is being overlooked is that the US government is hardly a monolithic institution which holds one, consistent opinion on any given topic. Not only does the US government change its stance on issues between administrations, different officials of a given administration will often have different opinions on a given issue. (And then there is the matter whether members of the legislative or judicial branch speak for the US government: does Dennis Kucinich represent the US government's opinion with as much authority as James G. Watt?) The best approach to this matter is to identify with as much detail as possible who in the US government holds the opinion. Otherwise, we will find the US government being used to endorse such fringe positions as Eugenics (which was supported in the 1930s) or the extermination of Native Americans. Does this offer a solution for all involved? -- llywrch ( talk) 23:57, 7 February 2010 (UTC)
Just discovered that this article is getting attention again, I just had to change an edit which used Bovon's original claim about a name, ignoring the fact that he later changed his mind and retracted it. If anyone else is interested in the subject I'd appreciate more eyes. Dougweller ( talk) 10:42, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
It appears that Spiritism has been taken over by excessively credulous authors. Mangoe ( talk) 16:52, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
The word 'spiritism' was defined for the first time by Allan Kardec in the introduction to The Spirits' Book published 18 April 1857. Spiritism is a doctrine founded on the existence, manifestations, and teachings of spirits, most often of incorporeal human spirits. The the word applies more broadly to animist or other practices which intend to communicate with these spirits by various means, including trance states or objects such as seance tables. In our day, spiritism designates both the modern English Spiritualism initiated by the Fox sisters in 1848, and the spiritistic doctrines of Allan Kardec defined in 1857 as 'a moral philosophy and a science'.
(My emphasis) I don't know the literature that well but I think the confusion between these three senses doesn't obtain in English; therefore "spiritism" should be reserved for the Kardecian system. Rooting out all the stuff that isn't directly related should help relieve this mess of the POV fork. I'm half inclined simply to translate the French wiki article on the Kardec system and throw everything else away. Is there someone else with adequate/superior-to-my French who could look this over? Mangoe ( talk) 18:30, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
Sometimes minority viewpoints are widespread, beyond total FRINGE, but disregarded and laughed at by (all) Reliable Sources.
To give a hypothetical example, 500 years ago Catholisism was the dominant viewpoint in Western Europe. Then Luther came, protesting against it. Suppose for the sake of argument, that all Reliable Sources at that time were representing the dominant viewpoint, and if they ever did represent some of Luther's viewpoints, they did so in a distorted fashion. Would wikipedia, had it existed in the year 1517, be allowed to quote Luther directly from his own Ninety-Five Theses, or should wikipedia only quote the theses as quoted by the Catholic Church in their Reliable Sources literature?
My own gut feeling is: that is makes most sense to quote directly from the source, from the moment that Reliable Sources have treated the criticism as Notable. If trustworthy primary sources exist (for Luther's theses), this should provide a more honest and neutral and factual representation of the conflict than when solely quoting from Reliable Secondary/Tertiary Sources. (In the past however I have had strong disagreement with wiki-editors who shared a certain bias with the Reliable Sources, and then claimed that the viewpoint of the Reliable Sources was the Neutral Viewpoint that wikipedia should take.)
Xiutwel-0002 (
talk) 11:47, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
See: WP:OR#Primary, secondary, and tertiary sources. Zaereth ( talk) 19:29, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
- Airplane technology rapidly increased after World War I. By 1936, dogfighting was thought to be a thing of the past, since aircraft were reaching top speeds of over 250 miles per hour. This was proved wrong during the Spanish civil war, as quoted by the U.S. Attaché in 1937, “The peacetime theory of the complete invulnerability of the modern type of bombardment airplane no longer holds. The increased speeds of both the bombardment and pursuit plane have worked in favor of the pursuit … The flying fortress died in Spain.”
I am sorry, but this noticeboard seems to deteriorate into a general brainstorming on general principles. This discussion belongs on a project talkpage, such as Wikipedia_talk:Fringe_theories, and I hereby propose to move it there to reduce clutter on this noticeboard. Incidentially, I also resent the naive assumption that Roman Catholicism is "a position" and that there was no theological dispute prior to Luther. -- dab (𒁳) 18:04, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
An article with few editors interested in it, but see [6]. I'm not sure if I should have brought this here or the NOR board. Dougweller ( talk) 08:51, 7 February 2010 (UTC)
mensurology, eh? 524.1483 mm for the Royal Cubit? Seven digits accuracy, not bad at all for the Middle Bronze Age. -- dab (𒁳) 17:59, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
I left a note at WP:BLPN about Ntsukunyane Mphanya's BLP violations on Motsoko Pheko and an IP has suggested that NM is actually BL (who has an account here I believe). Which would be impersonation. Dougweller ( talk) 11:48, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
Looie: Ntsukunyane Mphanya was up on this board recently for spamming Leeman's cranky theories concerning Ethiopian Judaism and the Bible all over the place. From memory the two men do have an IRL connection. I would be surprised if this actually is impersonation: I think we have a comrade-in-arms who is on the warpath without Leeman's active connivance, though possibly Leeman read our COI policy and thought he'd better create an alias. It doesn't really matter either way, disruption is blockable as disruption no matter who is behind it. Moreschi ( talk) 19:33, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
The subject of Aubrey de Grey has recently begun to his biography and related discussions from various IP addresses (including 212.183.140.4, 212.183.140.52, 81.155.164.81 and possibly also as new single-purpose account User:Marainein). de Grey appears to want to portray his idea that human beings will soon live forever (if they follow his genetic re-engineering strategy, including inserting mitochondrial DNA into the nucleus and lengthening telomeres in an unspecified fashion) as a concept generally accepted by the scientific community, when as far as I can tell, the only scientists agreeing seem to be on the board of his immortality organisation. I placed a notice at AN/I about the COI (after a COIN report went nowhere), but it wouldn't hurt for other editors to take a look at this and related articles.
de Grey's Methusaleh Foundation has established a notable prize, and de Grey edits his own journal, but does this make his speculations mainstream science? Are we truly to the point where declaring that humans will live forever is not WP:FRINGE?
Aubrey de Grey is just one of many fork-like articles on immortality speculation related to de Grey, including SENS Foundation, Rejuvenation (aging), Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, Methuselah Foundation and De Grey Technology Review debate, most of which are built around SENS website pages (and in some cases copied text) and not much else. A thorough clean-up is required. Any volunteers? Keepcalmandcarryon ( talk) 20:31, 9 February 2010 (UTC)
This ID proponent's article seems to be having trouble with WP:RS and possible WP:BLP issues. Help required! Thanks, Verbal chat
This bizarre article has just received a massive and highly nonencyclopedic expansion by an SPA, Frank777w ( talk · contribs). The changes have been reverted, but it's not clear how the story will develop, and more eyes might be useful. Looie496 ( talk) 22:18, 9 February 2010 (UTC)
My experience as an ArbCom clerk leads me to agree with Seddon, this will almost certainly not be accepted. Dougweller ( talk) 17:21, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
A very determined cabal of editors with obvious and in one case admitted personal interests are promoting some slightly fringe ideas at a variety of related articles including chronic fatigue syndrome, xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus and Whittemore Peterson Institute. The chronic fatigue syndrome "walled garden" (as an experienced editor described these articles to me) has been a notorious haven of activists for a particular view of disease causation (namely, that a virus is responsible for what they prefer to call "myalgic encephalopathy" or "X-associated neuroimmune disease"), and has witnessed some rather deprecable behaviour in the past.
To the best of my knowledge, no scientific study claiming viral aetiology of CFS has been confirmed. The latest virus claim ( XMRV), published in Science last October, was contradicted by a PLoS ONE report in January. Several special-interest editors are now using Wikipedia as a soapbox to promote the Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI), responsible for the Science report. They delete any information about the institute that they deem somehow negative, even if it's from the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. They remove accurate descriptions of the Institute's findings in favour of scientifically inaccurate summaries. They won't allow mention of the status of Ampligen, a drug rejected by the FDA and with which the founders have a long and intimate history. Additional, current issues:
Any aid in bringing the Whittemore Peterson Institute article (and others) to a more NPOV, whilst fairly and accurately emphasising the slightly out-of-the-mainstream stances of the institution's workers/founders would be greatly appreciated. Keepcalmandcarryon ( talk) 21:46, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
The main problem is at the Durupinar site article, a link farm of pro and con sites, I've started a talk page discussion on both articles mentioning WP:UNDUE. There's an IP Wyatt fan involved. Some comments on the talk page at least would be useful. Thanks. Dougweller ( talk) 08:54, 12 February 2010 (UTC)
I've just yanked a section from Stephen Decatur concerning how he shot the Jersey devil through the wing. It was inserted by an IP a year and a half ago, so there may not be that much pressure to keep it, but someone else might like to take a look at it. The sources were all Fortean/Ripley stuff except for a fluff newspaper thing. Mangoe ( talk) 12:18, 16 February 2010 (UTC)
Is it just my imagination, or is Jersey Devil a bit on the credulous side? Mangoe ( talk) 12:24, 16 February 2010 (UTC)
I have sympathy for the concept, but as I establish on the article talkpage, this idea has a pedigree of having been made up online, and it has not seeped into any academic literature short of one or two mentions-in-passing in Mother Tongue (a journal which is itself of rather fringy status).
Definitely a "fringe theory" (in the best academic sense), but one of very minimal notability. -- dab (𒁳) 18:59, 17 February 2010 (UTC)
Article about a possibly non-notable Italian physicist includes claims that run the gamut from originating "revolutionary theories in physics and electronics" to being "unable to obtain a degree because of bullying at work". Internet searches turn up nothing aside from his own claims of being the co inventor of "the first non-invasive interface for decoding of brain waves", sourced to an online patent. - LuckyLouie ( talk) 20:35, 17 February 2010 (UTC)
There have been some recent problematic edits attempting to add unrelated commentary about the Committee for skeptical inquiry to this article. Please see Talk:Ghost#confused by a revert, review, and discuss. Thanks, Verbal chat 19:10, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
Fundamentally, and different from other skeptical groups, CSI is a committee that is dedicated to actually researching the evidence for paranormal claims. They've been around for so long in their various forms (formerly CSICOP) that there is almost no claim that they haven't subject to scientific investigation. What they've discovered over the years is that the vast majority of their research has yet to be challenged by anyone else. So, to deprecate them as being primarily and "advocacy group" rather than a "research group" is pretty strange. I have yet to see a research group that has done better research on the subject of ghosts than CSI. If you can point me to one, please let me know. They are certainly more reliable when it comes to evaluating paranormal claims than any so-called "Parapsychology organization". I am a bit curious that particular attribution is being used incorrectly. The section as it is currently worded actually violates particular attribution because it attributes rather mundane points to specific individuals rather than summarizing facts (e.g. it is a fact that many of the claimed abilities and properties of ghosts violate the laws of physics). In short, when statements are only contradicted by the Parapsychological Association and Institute of Noetic Sciences, NPOV does not require us to provide particular attribution of the facts. ScienceApologist ( talk) 22:12, 15 February 2010 (UTC)
The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) is a nonprofit scientific and educational organization started in 1976 by scientists (including several Nobel laureates), members of the academic community, and science writers. Members of CSICOP, frequently referred to as skeptics, advocate the scientific investigation of paranormal claims and the dissemination of factual information to counter those claims. CSICOP's mission includes taking advantage of opportunities to promote critical thinking, science education, and the use of reason to determine the merits of important issues.
I think you're bending a little bit over backwards in order to maintain "advocacy" as a primary aim of CSI. The reason this looks problematic is because it makes it seem like the organization is self-promotional and not dispassionate nor neutral when, in fact, they're the closest thing we've got to dispassionate and neutral evaluation of claims of the paranormal. I'm just concerned that they are being contrasted against nebulous and ill-defined "other" groups which are somehow "better" sources for NPOV facts. ScienceApologist ( talk) 13:58, 16 February 2010 (UTC)
Well, Ludwigs2, it's even more difficult to find common ground with that post. We're going to have to agree to disagree. We'll see what happens whether or when our wikiphilosophies collide in actual editing environments. ScienceApologist ( talk) 03:44, 19 February 2010 (UTC)
Our article on Secret society needs a lot of attention. Due to the nature of its topic, the article is always going to be a Fringe theory magnet. At the moment it strikes me as attempting to deal with the subject neutrally... but inconsistent citation style (ie a serious lack of inline citations) makes it all but impossible to know if it is actually doing so. The same problem exists in knowing what is Original research and what is backed by reliable sources. Blueboar ( talk) 15:28, 18 February 2010 (UTC)
At Moses as symbol in American history there appears to be a mixture of legitimate accounts of the important symbolic role Moses has played in struggles for freedom (Civil Rights movement, etc.), but also pseudo-historical claims that Moses and the 10 C's are the basis of democracy and human rights. I noticed this when the author of that article added a summary of it to the into of Ten Commandments, and, after I removed that, created a new section for it further down in the article. I haven't read the sources, but this has the appearance of recent domestic movements to rewrite US history to argue that America was founded as a Christian state. I don't have the background in history to argue this myself. kwami ( talk) 08:02, 13 February 2010 (UTC)
Wolf effect ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
Here's one of the casualties from the great cosmology wars of 2005. I'm not sure how to approach this. Here's the story:
In the late 1970s and 1980s, a major question was, "What is the nature of Quasars?" A flurry of researchers went to work on the subject and came up with a number of options. One was that quasars were at cosmological distances and the tremendous redshifts seen in them were really examples of objects that were really far away (now known to be the unequivocal right answer). A number of observationalist sticks-in-the-mud continue to argue that quasars (or at least a subpopulation of them) are actually nearby objects which are ejected from nearby active galactic nuclei (famously, Halton Arp argues this). Finally, a small group from University of Rochester led by Emil Wolf proposed an effect which hadn't been observed, and is the eponymous name of the article.
We now know for a number of reasons that the Wolf Effect explanation for quasar redshifts is completely untenable. Majorly, quasars are known to exist in systems that are decoherent, the massive redshifts associated with them are seen in absorption lines, and in order to get systematic redshifts of any size a rather dense medium is needed to allow for the dissipation of energy through scattering. Lacking these conditions, a consistent redshift is not possible and the Wolf Effect is therefore not considered a redshift mechanism. A protracted battle that resulted in Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Pseudoscience happened back then over this issue that resulted in, primarily, a vindication of the idea that Wikipedia is supposed to marginalize fringe ideas in mainstream topics to the extent that they are marginalized in reliable sources.
The detailed physics of the Wolf effect was worked out in a number of mainstream journal articles that are now all but forgotten. Though they were published in mainstream journals, no one bothered to comment on the papers after the consensus models for quasars was developed. It seems that Wolf himself may have even abandoned the idea that there is any cosmological implication to his prediction and discovery at all, having not published about the hypothesis for more than a decade.
So we've got this article on the Wolf Effect. It's a real effect that was theorized to explain a particular set of observations and it turns out not to be the explanation for those observations. However, the sources we can locate on this matter all essentially just tell the first half of the story (theorizing, predicting a spectrum, observing it in the lab, explaining the conditions) and the second half is missing (critique of the idea is done through overwhelming silence of the community and the consensus model ignoring it). But how do we write an article that captures this state of being? What is most prominent and notable about the Wolf Effect? How do we avoid original research?
I personally think what's most interesting is the effect itself (a sort of combination of coherence, physical optics, and scattering) which is an effect that has been observed in laboratory conditions, but has never been seen in the natural world. It's historical backwater tributary that, while interesting, is an almost unverifiable story because no one bothered to publish anything refuting it as a possible cosmological redshift mechanism. So I'm left not knowing exactly what to do. Real physics, real phenomenon, unreal antiquated explanation for unrelated things. I tried working on it, but am thinking of self-reverting because I'm so confused.
Please help.
ScienceApologist ( talk) 03:53, 16 February 2010 (UTC)
That's actually a pretty promising source, but is still rather combatively fringe and could serve to source a different perspective than the one I provide above. I quote it here now for completeness and ask the opinion of the community whether a different source should be found. (Note, for example, the divisive use of the word 'careerist' and the vague reference to 'Pandora's Box'.
“ | On the Wolf Effect
Dear Jack (Sulentic), among plasma physicists, the Wolf effect has been considered a possible cause of noncosmological redshifts. Can you please explain why this effect should be relevant under the physical conditions expected for line emission from quasar? Can this effect account for the internal shifts observed between lines emitted by ions of widely different ionization potential? Emil Wolf is an impressive scientist who easily satisfies the definition of a truth seeker (Baconian). He was therefore rather naive when he suggested that a mechanism that came to be called the Wolf effect might have an application in astrophysics. This was a mechanism capable of producing non-Doppler shifts in spectral lines. Any application offering this possibility will be dismissed by careerists because any demonstration of a non-Doppler component, however small, could be said to open Pandora’s Box. I accept some of the blame for encouraging him to explore such possibilities. I think he was genuinely surprised by the rancor and hostility that greeted his suggestion. The Wolf effect can be included in a general category of scattering mechanisms that can in principal (i.e., given the proper set of physical conditions) shift line emitting photons to longer (or shorter) wavelength. Others include Compton and Raman scattering mechanisms. Compton downshifting of photons is well known especially among X-ray astronomers. All of these mechanisms might play a roll in complex sources like quasars. Compton scattering was invoked [516] to explain a significant (but not cosmological) redshift observed in the 6.4 keV X-ray line discovered in many low redshift quasars in the 1980s. It was not warmly welcomed but now higher S/N spectra reveal that most of the redshifted lines were not real. Scattering mechanisms do not seem promising as a way to produce all or most of the cosmological redshift. I am not qualified to discuss such models in detail, but the empiricism can provide first-order constraints for such models. Producing small shifts or asymmetries in emission lines is one thing, but shifting the bulk of the photons outside the envelope of the intrinsic (rest frame) line is quite another. A scattering process generally broadens a line and alters its shape. The broad and complex emission lines in quasars offer a tempting target for scattering applications. Electron scattering, for example, almost certainly has some small effect on emission line structure in quasars. Unfortunately, a large fraction of quasars also show one or more narrow emission lines with the same or very similar redshift as the broad ones. Scattering mechanisms also often produce wavelength-dependant shifts. In recent years, we have been able to compare the emission lines at UV, Optical, and IR wavelengths, and we find that all lines in a quasar show the same redshift within a scatter of at most 800 km/s (UV emission lines do show a systematic blueshift relative to optical lines in perhaps 60% of quasars). In summary, we do not know enough about the physical conditions within the central regions of quasars to rule out scattering mechanisms, but to produce a pseudo-cosmological redshift, they would have to scatter all of the lines from Ly-alpha, to Paschen-alpha˛ in a way to produce the same redshift and preserve their intrinsic widths. If I were looking for an astrophysical application of the Wolf effect in quasar astronomy, it would be to explain small scale shifts and asymmetric differences within a source. In summary, the Wolf effect appears most promising for explaining smaller line shift and shape anomalies. It does not appear promising as a mechanism that might produce non-Doppler redshifts that could mimic observed cosmological redshifts. |
” |
ScienceApologist ( talk) 19:10, 16 February 2010 (UTC)
I came across this section while reading Criticism of the United Nations, and something about it didn't seem right. I know we're not supposed to use weasel words like "some," but when there are multiple sources that make up a significant minority, I think there is a reason to use it. None of the sources are online. The author of one of the sources, Michel Schooyans has a stub level article with 5 of the same sources, I suspect placed by the same person who made that section. I don't really know much about the UN or the " New Age" conspiracy, but I was wondering if someone knowledgeable about this could take a look and see if they think anything is wrong. AzureFury ( talk | contribs) 07:08, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
Longevity traditions ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
This article needs some balance toward neutrality, and it's a bit more than I can handle. There's some unqualified creation science attributing the long ages of Adam et al. to the antediluvian "firmament". The other sections aren't much better.
NB: I did change the title from "Longevity myths" because of our section on the word "myth" as a word to avoid in the casual sense. If anyone disagrees, feel free to change it back. Auntie E. ( talk) 19:18, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
Orb (optics) ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
Not sure what to do with this article. I removed a section on the paranormal, but notice that the vast majority of references and external links are to paranormal resources. Nevertheless, backscatter and near-camera reflections are very real phenomena which deserve an article. I'm just not sure that this umbrella (orb (optics)) does the trick. There is also extensive discussion of orbs in the paranormal literature, but this article is not orb (paranormal), it's orb (optics). WP:ONEWAY would have us segregate the mundane idea of backscatter (which has nothing to do with guessing about ghosts and is a real problem in almost all optical arrangements) with the more outrageous (and possibly interesting to our readers) ideas that these aren't photographs of ghosts. Then again, I'm feeling that another name would be more appropriate since "orb" is not the preferred nomenclature amongst those not debunking/ghosthunting.
Anyway, I thoroughly confused myself, but I really do think that there are two articles in here and not one. Advice and help in creating/splitting articles would be greatly appreciated.
ScienceApologist ( talk) 21:58, 15 February 2010 (UTC)
Hey guys, look at the heading of this discussion and ask yourselves one question... why we are having it here?
This is a great discussion, and I appreciate everyone's input. However, it is not kosher to have a discussion about the Orb (optics) article on this page, and then once the discussion is over, announce a so-called 'consensus' (as in here), on the Orb (optics) article page. It's the second time the article has been broadsided recently, as when here, the article was merged, again with no discussion on it's own discussion page. This is in very poor form; it does not reflect a good faith effort to include the editors on that page in the discussion. Please conduct discussion about the fate of the Orb (optics) page on it's discussion page. That's what the page is for. Or at the very least, announce on that page that article's fate is in discussion elsewhere, before the... er... consensus is reached.
And for the record, I will reiterate, the Backscatter page is ultimately about a broad concept of physics, and includes references to other specific instances where the term is used. Now the editors on the Backscatter page seem committed to conflating the disparte subjects (physics, flash photography and computers) because they share the same word. There is no need to conflate these subjects. What is really called for is a disambiguation page for the word backscatter, that could include each of the subjects that include the term backscatter.
And for what it's worth, the Orb(optics) page is poorly named. It's an article about digital flash photography. It has gone under several different names including Orb(photography) and Orb(paranormal). Please note that Orb (photographic) does redirect to Orb (optics) and Orb (paranormal) is the one that goes off into make-believe land. This has confused the issue, of course.
I appreciate your understanding in hearing my points. I know we can and will do better. Thanks. 842U ( talk) 03:57, 21 February 2010 (UTC)
I think some readers of this board are interested and might want to chime in at Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#Brief_Chronicles Dougweller ( talk) 10:32, 22 February 2010 (UTC)
Edit war erupting. Apparently it is "propaganda" to assert that Iranians have any claim on the Glorious Word. Paul B ( talk) 13:18, 22 February 2010 (UTC)
Could interested editors review recent changes to the article Ica stones? Regards, ClovisPt ( talk) 16:59, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
The Christ myth theory article recently obtained GA status. In my glee I quickly (perhaps overly quickly) submitted the article for FA candidacy. While reviewers indicated that there were a number of issues in need of resolution, the article's candidacy was derailed primarily by one reviewer's accusation that the article was POV.
Specifically, a very experienced reviewer read the article, claimed to have read the 39 footnotes (I know, excessive, I'm working on it) that indicate the theory is WP:FRINGE, and then faulted the article for presenting the theory as "fringe when it may simply be a minority position". The reviewer's go-to fact checking source here was that unassailable pillar of historical Jesus research, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Needless to say I was both shocked and deeply frustrated. But this sort of thing keeps happening: anonymous IP users, moderately involved editors, and now even an admin have read the article, claimed to have read the footnotes, and still--inexplicably--questioned the WP:FRINGE nature of the topic.
I understand that the article needs to shed some of its footnotes; 39 citations in support of a single point is far too much. But considering this baffling trend I'm hesitant to do anything. Afterall, if some people will question the fringiness of the theory in the face of literally dozens of citations, what will happen if that list is pared down to just two or three? So before I do much in terms of trimming the list, I'd very much like to put this issue to bed once and for all.
Is there some authoritative Wikipedia body that could rule in some way on the fringiness of the Christ myth theory? I'd like to get such a ruling into the article milestones on the talk page or something. Eugene ( talk) 20:54, 23 February 2010 (UTC)