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April 2020

Misrepresenting sources

 Done

Given your thoughts on Wikipedia:Frequently misinterpreted sourcing policy, you might be interested in my comment about misrepresentation of sources. --Macrakis (talk) 20:12, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

"World Café" listed at Redirects for discussion

 Done

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect World Café. Since you had some involvement with the World Café redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. wbm1058 (talk) 15:04, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Accu-Stats

 Done

Template:Accu-Stats has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 08:39, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Happy Easter

or: the resurrection of loving-kindness --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:45, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

You too. Mine was mostly spent indoors, but that's okay. I'm a indoorsy person anyway.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:15, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

... today Credo, or this is the day from Psalm 118. Master of article titles, what do you think about Fanny Hensel vs. Fanny Mendelssohn? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:21, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

Editing news 2020 #1 – Discussion tools

 In progress

 – I've done a couple of rounds of this, but may give it another go.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:49, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Read this in another language • Subscription list

This early version of the Reply tool automatically signs and indents comments.

The Editing team has been working on the talk pages project. The goal of the talk pages project is to help contributors communicate on wiki more easily. This project is the result of the Talk pages consultation 2019.

In a future update, the team plans to test a tool for easily linking to another user's name, a rich-text editing option, and other tools.

The team is building a new tool for replying to comments now. This early version can sign and indent comments automatically. Please test the new Reply tool.

• On 31 March 2020, the new reply tool was offered as a Beta Feature editors at four Wikipedias: Arabic, Dutch, French, and Hungarian. If your community also wants early access to the new tool, contact User:Whatamidoing (WMF).
• The team is planning some upcoming changes. Please review the proposed design and share your thoughts on the talk page. The team will test features such as:
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  • other features identified through user testing or recommended by editors.

To hear more about Editing Team updates, please add your name to the "Get involved" section of the project page. You can also watch these pages: the main project page, Updates, Replying, and User testing.

– PPelberg (WMF) (talk) & Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:45, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

FAC you may be interested in Suggestion

Hi Stanton, I hope you are well and you had a good Easter! There's a FAC currently open that you might be interested in, and I'd appreciate any comments you have. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 11:23, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

Will try to set aside from time for it. Things are a bit hectic right now (as my mostly-absence might indicate :-).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:44, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

I get it (My workload has trebled due to the situation). Thanks for thinking of me. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 11:51, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

You may tremble from the trebling, but tumble not from the trouble!  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:30, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

The RFC

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

While I appreciate your participation in the ongoing RFC, you haven't yet answered the question that user:Literaturegeek was, I think, intending to ask you there: whether NightHeron (or anyone else) ought to be reported at Arbitration Enforcement. (Or if you did answer it, I missed where you did.) Do you have an opinion about that?

In the discussion here you commented that improving some articles is only possible after certain editors have gone away, and that after another month I should ask you again about trying to rewrite/restore the section about international comparisons. It's been a little over a month since we discussed that, but the situation has not calmed down since then, and if anything it has escalated. While the current disputes are happening at a noticeboard instead of on the article talk page, I think it's clear that they will shift back to the talk page when the current RFC is concluded, and at this stage it's highly unlikely that any of the major parties are going to go away without some sort of administrative action.

If you think there are multiple editors behaving badly and that it's necessary to request an ArbCom case with multiple parties, I would be fine with that also. (And the parties can include me, if you think that my own behavior has been disruptive.) In this AE report several admins argued that a full case was needed, and one admin suggested a list of parties that such a case should include.

Aside from the outcome of the current RFC, I would appreciate any help you can give with resolving the longer-term issue. As an unregistered user, I'm not able make ArbCom or AE requests myself, so I have to rely on other editors taking the initiative to address issues like these. 2600:1004:B127:D823:71A5:A349:3F5C:2EA7 (talk) 19:00, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

My name was mentioned so will chip in here as my views have changed a little. I am opposed to sanctions on NightHeron right now. I have actually found, in the past 24 hours or less, that NightHeron is being more collaborative and reasonable, for example we reached agreement re. Lynn where my main point was accepted by NightHeron and I accepted one of their main points. It left me thinking that there is a chance this RfC could help lessen the drama and increased collaborative behaviour could result. I think if 2 or 3 months after the RfC closes the drama is still at a high level then there would be a good case for ArbCom. ArbCom might want to wait and see the impact that the RfC close has on the drama before deciding on a case or course of action. I intend to back away from this RfC now and don’t intend to edit this topic area as it is too toxic and don’t want to get drawn in any more than I have already. Although, I am open to being persuaded differently and I’m interested in SMcCandlish’s perspective.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 19:16, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

In reply to the entire thread: I did suggest in one of my posts there that this should go to ArbCom if there's sufficient evidence of malfeasance like meatpuppetry. I don't think that yet another RfC or community noticeboard action, right on the heels of another one, which came right after another one, and another before that, is going to resolve anything. (Though, yes, let's see if this RfC's eventual closure decision makes a difference.) We are clearly at an impasse here, where there are two camps: 1) do the encyclopedic thing, and present the topic neutrally, and with studiously, cautiously WP:DUE weight, with a lot of watchlisting, or 2) censor away the entire topic, out of misplaced political-correction impulses and argument to emotion rather than actual reason. There's only one way that can actually end. And ArbCom will know this. They will not make a content decision, but the content decision is essentially pre-made by policy, and all that is left for them to do is to remove from the subject area both a) racist far-right PoV pushers, and b) censorious ultra-leftist PoV pushers, as both of these entrenched "armies" are disruptive to the topic area and to the ability of neutrality-minded editors to manage it.

So, I don't think it's really a matter of "report [insert username here] to AE". That approach could be taken for some particular parties, I suppose, but it will not resolve the underlying problem, that we have some loosey-goosey DS to apply in the topic area, but insufficient guidance on the ArbCom and DS side about what is and is not going to be tolerated there and why. Ergo, any AE enforcement is at this point likely to come down to just whatever the personal socio-political opinion and feelings are of whatever admin happens to be reading and who decides to "do something". That's a rather iffy proposition. "Discretionary" admin actions only make sense on a system like this when the topic is one in which the range of that discretion has been sharply pre-defined, to circumvent PoV-laden supervoting. I think it would be better to have a new RfArb case, or at least an ARCA, to more clearly define the discretionary scope and what is sanctionable and why (with an eye to restraining the excesses of both political-wing extremes). The very fact that this controversy has raged for months, at the talk pages and in multiple noticeboards and RfCs and deletion procedures and yadda yadda, with no end in sight, and with nastiness markedly increasing (along with apparent meat puppetry, accusations of anon-IP socking by banned users, etc.), all while DS are already active in the topic, conclusively proves that the present DS regime for the topic area is failing to work at all. Only ArbCom can fix that. And this is just the latest few rounds in a dispute that's been going on since before I even got here in 2005.

I would consider myself a party in such a case, both for involvement in the recent debates, and much longer-term "encyclopedia defense" activity at this and related articles like Race (human categorization), plus my authorship of WP:Race and ethnicity, long-term shepherding of MOS:IDENTITY and MOS:WTW, and my spearheading the removal of |ethnicity= and |religion= from most biographical infoboxes, and combating racist and racialist commentary at places like Talk:Albinism in humans; among other interrelated matters. I'm not involved in this stuff daily, but I'm deeply involved in it, going back over a decade now.

I am personally just worn out when it comes to WP:DRAMA, so I will not be opening an RfArb or ARCA case myself, nor starting an AE complaint, unless something serious happens that leaves me little choice. I'll defer to Literaturegeek's boots-on-the-ground judgement about the current state of affairs with NightHeron. (That editor may make a lot of fallacious arguments and engage in too much OR nonsense, but is actually spot-on correct about a particular fraudulent researcher's lack of credibility despite his fame, and despite my belief that said researcher's viewpoint is actually correct and need not have relied on falsification at all. But he did it, and nothing in the world can ever undo that, so we should not be quoting him as an RS, and quoting him at all only with attribution and with due rebuttal from also-attributed critics.)

Finally, User:2600..., I don't think anyone is ever going to take you very seriously in this debate until you create a named account. Just make up anything, like XYZ09876ABC or MyOcelotLikesPisachios. Most editors are going to take you for either a sock of an active editor, a sock of a banned editor, or a troll if you persist in being an IP-only participant; lack of an account hampers your technical ability to edit in many ways; and in a topic like this, going by your IP address is more hazardous to privacy that not doing so (unless you are studious about VPN usage, and your VPN's outbound access point[s] is/are nowhere near where you actually live).
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:23, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply, your second from the bottom paragraph confused me.... which researcher are you referring to: Gould or Lynn?--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 11:36, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Gould. Does the same criticism also apply to Lynn? I haven't looked into that one in detail yet.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:08, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Well, I haven’t seen any evidence Lynn has ever engaged in pseudoscience or fraud but he clearly comes from the “mostly genetic” hereditarian persuasion which seems to influence him to have controversial right of centre viewpoints on this topic area e.g., with regard to immigration of unskilled/low I.Q. immigrants. His views, when cited, would need to be balanced by appropriate weight from his peers who disagree with him, assuming the RfC is over turned because at the moment essentially only one POV is allowed. I am still confused. When you wrote in the 2nd from the bottom paragraph “That editor” did you mean myself or NightHeron? It was myself, not NightHeron, who felt Gould had falsified his research. Maybe you got confused following the discussion? It is okay, I can take the criticism haha, the heated RfC is over. :-) I ask because whilst fallacious is a matter of opinion and an editor could apply that term to me I did not think my arguments were OR, quite the opposite.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 12:35, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, that sounds pretty fringey, if that's a good encapsulation of Lynn. In fairness, most of these ideas would not have seemed fringe even a couple of generations ago. We [everyone, including scientists] knew a lot less about genetics, about the difficulty of quantifying or even defining "intelligence", and about the fact that the brain is tremendously more complex than previously supposed. The obvious land-mine here is in permitting reportage of what old science attempted to show under old understandings as if it's still valid science under new understanding, and trying to OR one's way into a position based on that old data and poor interpretation of it. It doesn't mean that all mention of that work must be suppressed, it simply has to be put into context. That is, the less obvious land mine is that if, as encyclopedists, we fail to do that, then we just cede control of the whole topic to fringe-"science" and racism boards all over the world. "Wikipedia is suppressing the truth and hiding all this old research!" We just cannot do that. We have to tackle it head on with later and more interdisciplinary material.

There's also a countervailing and very different kind of fringe belief system involved here, namely that it simply isn't possible that research will ever show an average, aggregate difference of any kind between populations (by any measure/criterion) at various narrow cognitive tests. The odds of that socio-political dogma and wish actually being true are just zero. Anyone with any understanding of genetics and biology at all knows that it cannot possibly be true. The odds against is are astronomical. So, the third land mine is how to not suppress facts about such research, while we also short-circuit the ability to weave a false "superiority" narrative out of unrelated and unimportant statistical blips. As I suggested in the RfC, the causes of these disparity results are almost always social inequalities and testing biases; that's the key point. But to the extent any of them will every prove to be actual genetic traits, they will be both statistically insignificant (more so over time as genepools mix more and more every day), and counterbalanced by essentially opposite results on different cognitive-task tests. Being, say, 0.1% better at math on average doesn't mean the same population will also be a hair better at rote memorization, at logic puzzles, at correctly rotating a complex 3D shape in their mind, at reading or speaking very quickly, at correct recall of names and faces, etc., etc., etc.). But we can never get at this stuff and write the WP article that correctly reflects that scientific mainstream view (that differences can be "measured", mostly due to non-biological biases, but are essentially meaningless), if the censorship brigade will not stop miring all attempts by anyone to work on the article at all in their constant accusatory noise.

“That editor”, in the critical part, meant NightHeron; I appear to have commingled my memories of who was making which argument. So, good on you for calling out Gould (I think anon 2600... also did so). What I was criticizing here was various fallacies that I laid out and linked to in NH's material. (Did I also do that with one your posts? I do not always pay any attention to what name is in the sig of what I'm responding to, just the arguments I'm reading.) I spent most of my time at that RfC pointing out people on both sides of the debate engaging in the same fallacies back and forth with each other, in a silly junk-waving contest. I'm not meaning to single out NightHeron, or you, or anyone else in particular, but just decry the general pointless time waste and editorial goodwill-erosion getting in the way of the proper work being done. Wading into that, pretty much the most argumentatively WP:BLUDGEONed RfC in WP history, feels rather like walking down an alley with people in multiple storeys of windows on both sides of it pissing on you from above. If I were an uninvolved admin I would have already shut that RfC down.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:16, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Yeah SMcCandlish, I raised that concern during the RfC that if the RfC results in a biased article which impresses no one but far left equalitarianists insisting the article focus excessively on white privilege (which is a real thing but does not seem explain everything in this topic area) and only briefly mention genetic contributions but only in the context of labelling it pseudoscience it could likely push many of our readers onto other sources of information which could include, sadly, alt-right websites and message boards where they will get exposed to truly biased racist pseudoscience and hateful content and antisemetic conspiracy theories. I would have been okay if the RfC closed saying there should be less weight given to genetic contributions and may even have supported such an RfC depending on how it was worded but the fringe designation I fear will result in a POV nightmare that only a minority of readers will take seriously. No I don’t think you did that with any of my posts, I just got confused with that second from the bottom paragraph and you have explained what you mean so the confusion is sorted out now. :-)--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 16:18, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

It's something that will have to shake out over time. I've learned the hard way to be very, very patient when it comes to cleaning up some topics (like 5–10 years patient).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:31, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for your detailed comments, SMcCandlish. Several other editors have also told me that I should start using a named account, but with my current setup I'm unable to use cookies, so Wikipedia immediately logs me out any time I try to log in. I haven't yet found a way around this. I accept that until and unless I do, I'll be unable to edit certain pages.

@Literaturegeek: Combined with the various admins who expressed this view at AE, SMcCandlish is at least the fourth person who's argued that an ArbCom case is needed here. But someone would need to take the initiative in requesting such a case, and nobody seems to want to take on that task. I also can't do it myself, because even if I were to suddenly become able edit from a named account, I think it would be a bad idea for me to make such a request as a newly registered editor. Does the discussion here affect your view about whether it would be appropriate for you to request the proposed case yourself? 2600:1004:B10F:2086:59A4:D34C:4402:41E8 (talk) 14:20, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

What's the nature of the cookie problem? I may know a workaround. If you're constrained to some kiosk-like machine at an institution, and it does no local hard drive writes at all without admin access (isn't even cacheing what it's loading in the browser), if you have access to a USB port and enough OS access to get to a drive mounted via that port, you could possibly get around that with a "portable" copy of Chrome or the like, on a thumb drive, and configured to use a user profile (which includes cookie and cache storage) on the thumb drive. If there's even less access than that, but it is a Windows machine, including an auto-executing script on the thumb might work, if the machine has not already been configured to not allow removable disks to fire up things like autorun scripts. I would need more specifics to be able to advise further or look into the matter.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:32, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

The device that I use to edit is technically capable of accepting cookies, but for personal reasons I can't enable them. I can't go into more detail than that in public, sorry. In order to start using a named account, I would have to find a way to stay logged in while cookies are disabled. 2600:1004:B10F:2086:59A4:D34C:4402:41E8 (talk) 14:46, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

I'm not sure what that means, but will take your word for it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:31, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

2600, I do not see what value an ArbCom case will have, they will not overrule community decisions about content RFCs, they will not overrule a community review of an RfC close that says Tony was not involved and a 3 admin panel was not necessary, etc. Correct me if I am wrong in what I just wrote please SMcCandlish. Finally 2600, the RfC will be used as stronger tool against editors in that topic area. Even if ArbCom were to topic ban NightHeron which is what you desire for example, (and you risk a topic ban IP editors like yourself) it still will not change the fact that content decisions will be made with that close by Tony by other editors who share NightHeron’s viewpoint. I assume your motives are like mine and you have a strong distaste for biased presentation of academic information and pseudoscience and you are not motivated by alt-right activism but unfortunately this RfC basically shuts down contributions from editors who just want the literature presented fairly in a pro-science anti-pseudoscience fashion per WP:WEIGHT and WP:NPOV. Your only hope is if in a couple of years more sources become available regarding the RfC question and there is ongoing drama with the article then the RfC question could be proposed again. Or else wait for DNA and genetic evidence to advance to such an extent that this whole environmental vs genetic debate is resolved beyond any debate, but you could be waiting for 20 to 50 years or more for that to happen. So yeah, I just don’t see how ArbCom can help your position now this RfC is what it is, it makes it more likely you and editors with a similar POV will be sanctioned, not the other way around and it makes it much less likely the edits you want will stick. A greater number of wikipedians have stronger views on racially offensive academic research than they do for pseudoscience, so trying to persuade the community about the science and WEIGHT and NPOV may well be a waste of time, that is my optics on the matter. I would, after the community review, start backing away from the topic area, maybe not entirely, and find more productive things to do.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 16:18, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

I didn't realize the RfC had been closed. I'll have to go read that, though it doesn't sound promising, more like a supervote. Either way, an ArbCom case might not be ripe until another horrendous dispute breaks out (which may next time be over censorious suppression rather than racist OR).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:31, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

I've looked at it, and I don't think I agree with your summary of it. For the most part, it passes the buck and just shuts down the train wreck (in particular, it totally avoids the central matter of the entire discussion, which was direct suppression of particular researchers and their work from any considering in Wikipedia). So, in that I'm actually quite satisfied. Now that I know which Tony you mean, I would have expected something like this; he knows full well that no amount of noisy rabble can invalidate the central policies and pillars of Wikipedia for emotive and "popular" reasons. And we already knew that the position that intelligence is generally a genetic matter is fringey (i.e., does not enjoy mainstream scientific support). So, the first part of the close was inevitable and just a reaffirmation of the status quo. I have no doubt that certain censorious pseudo-liberals will attempt to use this to totally suppress encyclopedic coverage of everything contrary to that viewpoint, but that is a much easier to dispute to deal with that the broader one which has been raging on and on for months (and itself just re-inflammation of previous similar battlegrounds, as led to the original ArbCom case about this). While I expected a detailed three-admin close, this "everyone just STFU" close is actually fine.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:44, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

SMcCandlish, why am I not seeing the genetic contribution to I.Q. gap as fringe in the literature? Why is your take on it quite different than mine, I am genuinely interested? Like what literature are you using to determine genetic contributions to be fringe? What are your thoughts on the 2020 survey of experts published in Intelligence (journal) that found that only 16 percent of experts regarded I.Q. gaps between races to be fully explained by environmental factors, with 43 percent saying mostly genetics and 40 percent saying mostly environmental factors explain the gap. To me that clearly shows that academia is roughly split down the middle only slightly favouring environmental explainations. To be a fringe theory, and not a minority viewpoint, it has to be a theory that few if any academics would embrace it.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 16:59, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

The fringe is in a) assuming that a population result is a genetic result when social factors are almost always a better explanation, and b) leaping from a population-based difference at some narrowly-defined task to claiming a population difference in "intelligence"; and that's just for starters. All the criticism is already in the literature, and I'm not going to pore over it for the sake of a talk page thread (nor am I up to speed on all of it anyway). This is the kind of stuff that's going to come up and be hashed out in the long slow process of working on the article and getting it into proper shape. PS: your 2020 survey is not cross-disciplinary, but only involves "experts" (specialists) mostly in a particular field which has a vested interest in preferring interpretation that assume both genetic causal factors being strong and socio-cultural factors being weak, and the concept of "intelligence" being accepted as defined the way they'd like to define it. If you run this by a group dominated by anthropologists, you'll get a very different result (and the anthropologists will be able to tell the "intelligence" researchers – mostly psychologists, cognitive scientists, and ethologists – exactly how their methods and conclusions are biased, but they just won't want to hear it. And that's before social science and sociology get involved and point out additional biases. Now, the fact that psych and cog-sci people (more the former than the latter) tend almost 50/50 to go for genetic explanations that no one else buys (and after the problems with this interpretation have been spelled out in detail for decades), well, that is worth covering.

I've experienced the psych side's denialism that cultural and social factors are meaningful – first hand and in a big way. As an undergrad, I did a detailed analysis of every single question in the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator / Keirsey Temperament Sorter personality testing systems, which (in these two slightly different variants) purport to divide humans into 4-, 8-, and 16-bucket distinctions at various levels, and on which real-world companies make real-world hiring, promotion, and other decisions. Even aside from the fact that the entire mess is based on the Freudian/Jungian psychoanalysis fraud (mired in a bunch of disguised-religion "archetype" and "racial memory" mumbo-jumbo that has utterly zero scientific basis of any kind and which is quite literally biologically impossible), anyone with a cultural anthropology or sociology background can pick these tests apart down to the atomic level and show how biased they are (in different ways; those fields are not the same and do not bring an identical analysis). The questions are intentionally engineered for, or just sloppily written with the effect of, skewing the kinds of answers people will choose depending on their economic, educational, and experiential background, as well as how Westernized they are. And aside from all that, it's about like astrology in the level of self-assessment "steering" is involved (trick the subjects into re-imagining themselves better conforming to the expected traits of the bucket they're initially sorted into; upon re-taking the "test", subjects will generally more and more firmly plop into a bucket each time they take it, and worse yet may actually start adjusting their real-life behavior and viewpoint to actually conform better! I call this the "redhead syndrome"; there is zero credible evidence that red hair has anything whatsoever to do with innate personality, but many redheads by the time they reach late childhood to early adulthood exhibit exaggerated tendencies to hot-tempered behavior, simply in an effort to conform to the stereotype that is pushed onto them). It's patently, utterly bogus. The MBTI people responded to my analysis with blanket dismissiveness that amounted to "we disagree, on the basis that, uh, we just disagree." They could not refute a single line item, and produced no evidence of any kind that their dismissal had any basis, nor that any point I raised was incorrect or even inaccurate. Their idea of a defense was simply that lots of big companies and other organizations use their tests, so they must not be broken. I shit you not. Meanwhile, the KTS people simply refused to address my analysis at all. You can show these people the flaws in their method, in stark black and white, right in front of their face, and they just will not get it, and do not want to get it (because it challenges their dogmatic assumptions and threatens their credibility and livelihoods). There's a word for this: pseudoscience. It's just one example, but these are the same kinds of "researchers" who are behind a lot of primary-paper claims that get spun into race-and-intelligence claims.

All that said, I'm honestly not interested in getting into a big user-talk debate about this stuff, per WP:NOT#SOAPBOX / WP:NOT#FACEBOOK, and because the entire subject is apt to give me an ulcer or heart palpitations. With the RfC over, and various parties basically on-notice that others are poised to noticeboard them, we can hopefully expect that the article will be able to evolve more organically into something that is actually encyclopedic, albeit with probably some inevitable attempts to suppress all research results that don't agree with far-left politics. I will occasionally argue for their WP:DUE inclusion, but not without cross-disciplinary criticism and alternative interpretations than leaping to "it's genetic" and "this is intelligence". And if it's primary research, it should not be included; we need systematic review material. Even aside from DS and such, this is actually under WP:MEDRS, too, and given the sensitivity of the topic, there may be no more important article to write in a way that cannot be bent toward repugnant propaganda.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:16, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

To me the measuring of and understanding of intelligence is the domain of Educational Psychologists, neuropsychologists, etc and so that survey asked the appropriate professionals. It is not normally within the expertise of an anthropologist to comment. Had the author included social workers, sociologists, anthropologists, etc., it would have made the survey unprofessional, compromised its integrity and meaningfulness and as a result it probably would not have then gotten through peer review. I am not saying other disciplines can’t have an opinion but it is of less value. Like a nurse can have opinions on surgical procedures but you would not include them in a survey of surgeons about surgical procedures. I guess you could do a separate survey on a specific point that a nurse could answer and similar with anthropologists and other experts could be surveyed on a perceived problem or bias of psychologists and publish it. To me that RfC should have closed saying that genetic contributions is a major minority view. We may just have to agree to disagree on this. Anyway, that RfC really educated me on this topic area, a topic area I had only a very limited knowledge of, so all is not lost. Thank you for the chat, it was fun. :-)--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 18:54, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Well, that set of statements indicates we are never going to agree on the substantive disputes behind all of this. There is no set of people on the planet better qualified to analyze subjective cultural bias in this kind of research than cultural anthropologists. As long as people with views you espouse (and who like to capitalize their Favored Field as if It is Magically Special) continue to pretend one is being "professional" by having one's material dodge and weave away from cross-disciplinary analysis, it will continue to produce fringey results that everyone but one's echo chamber can see is fringey. Neuropsychologists (except in some narrow avenues of very recent cross-field research) and especially educational psychologists have no business commenting on genetic matters, since they lack the training. Modern physical anthropologists are generally steeped in it, especially in cross-discipline subfields like human evolutionary ecology. Your idea of what "appropriate" professionals are and what expertise is are too skewed for me to devote any more time to this conversation.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:23, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

I am not closed minded, please remember that I am very new to this topic area so prone to making mistakes and do not have hardened views; your last two replies, particularly this reply I am responding to has got me thinking, and you make a good point regarding psychologists not being qualified to interpret genetic information, it is indeed outside their field of expertise. Perhaps what is needed for this topic area is a survey of the views of specialist anthropologists, as I did not know, until now, that they had knowledge of genetics and intelligence. Thanks for giving me additional angles to think from for this topic area. Thank you for your time.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 19:35, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Cf. previous comment about systematic reviews. These are the kinds of in-depth, field-wide and cross-field, truly secondary, but hardcore-scientific sources that need to be brought to bear on things like this (and more than one of them – all of them that can be found. They need to be given weight by the depth and breadth of their inquiry into the published research and other researchers' assessment of it to date (replicability, methodological flaws, etc.), the reputation of the publishing journal of the review, and the recentness of the review (e.g. if two 2010s lit. revs. conclude there is a scientific consensus against the idea, it doesn't matter if one from the 1970s suggested there was a consensus in favor of it – that means that the consensus changed, not that there is an ongoing lack of consensus).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:59, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

Both of you, we need to decide what we're going to do going forward. There's unlikely to be a consensus at AN to overturn TonyBallioni's closure, and nobody seems to want to request an ArbCom case, so what should happen next?

@Literaturegeek: we all seem to be in agreement that going forward, there are going to be further attempts to suppress all research results that don't agree with far-left politics (to use SMcCandlish's phrasing). While I understand that you don't enjoy being involved in these articles, please also consider the fact the fewer editors there are trying to prevent that outcome, the greater the burden there is on each one of us. It's been utterly overwhelming when I tried to prevent these attempts by myself. So if you can, I ask that you please reconsider your decision to forget about this topic area now that the RFC is over. (And this request goes for user:Insertcleverphrasehere as well.)

SMcCandlish: In our discussion on March 16, you said that after a month I could ask you again if you'd be willing to make a new proposal to restore the section about international comparisons. It's now been a month, and there's no reason to think waiting longer will produce any further resolution to the long-term conflict over these articles, so would you be willing to work on proposing a revision/restoration of the section at this point? I have found a few sources that might be useful for an updated version of that section. 2600:1004:B109:A549:E918:2939:512:DF4A (talk) 19:42, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Look, I helped out in the RfC, but I have no desire to get involved in another contentious topic area. Sorry. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 20:05, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

I see. Well, thanks for your help in the RFC, at any rate. 2600:1004:B109:A549:E918:2939:512:DF4A (talk) 20:18, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

I'll think on it, but I really need a break from this. It's been months of noticeboard strife of one kind or another, and the RfC just closed. I agree that TonyB's closure is not likely to be overturned; while it did not address everything that it could have, it does not appear to be faulty as WP would define that. So, it'll be a WP:CCC matter. The dust needs to settle a bit before people wade immediately into more mass restoration or mass deletion of material (or the people going that route are like to be the next noticeboard subjects). That's not a crosshair I need trained on my chest right now. That said, yes, I would be interested in the additional sources, but they really belong on the article's talk page. It won't do any good for two or three editors to cobble together some kind of WP:RIGHTVERSION on their own and then try to impose it. After all this drama, it's going to take a slow and open consensus-building process. And I would have a lot of reading to catch up on, anyway. I don't presently have much in the way of full-text journals access, so I'm not necessarily in the best position to be evaluating the material and the professional responses to it. Seriously, I would advise just forgetting about this for an entire month or so. Work on something else. WP:THEREISNODEADLINE. Some topics like this can take 5–10 years to clean up. So it goes. Don't double your blood pressure over it. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:59, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

In our previous discussion about the section on international IQ comparisons, you suggested that I look for sources that criticize the validity of these comparisons, and I did eventually find a source about that: [1] This is a primary source that according to Google scholar has not been cited by anyone, but it's the best I could find. There really does not seem to be much literature disputing the conclusion that these comparisons are valid. (Obviously, whether or not they are valid is a completely separate question from whether the cause of the differences is genetic or environmental.)

One other source I think you'd find useful is Are We Getting Smarter? by James Flynn, especially the book's third chapter, which discusses IQ gains from the Flynn Effect in various developing countries.

After thinking about this section over the past month, I've concluded that the main problem with my earlier attempt at restoring it is that I placed too much emphasis on the nature vs. nurture question of international comparisons. I was stuck in the mindset of trying to restore something similar to the section that had been recently removed from the article, which also heavily emphasized that aspect. But most secondary sources that discuss international IQ comparisons either are silent on the nature vs. nurture question (such as Hive Mind), or devote relatively little space to it. Whenever you're ready to make a new proposal to restore that section, I suggest only including a few sentences about this aspect of the comparisons.

Lastly, I'll understand if you don't want to do this, but I would really appreciate you requesting arbitration. Not about TonyBallioni's closure of the RFC, but about the longer-term issue of BLP violations in this topic, particularly NightHeron's repeatedly stating that various living people are white supremacists without citing any sources that describe them with this label. I explained in my comment here why I consider this issue so important. It is about more than just the integrity of the encyclopedia - one person has already lost his job as a consequence of this problem, and other people's livelihoods may also be at risk.

Meisenberg's attorney has already contacted the Wikimedia Foundation legal team about what happened to him, but was told in response that it is up to the Wikipedia community to address this issue. When the same issue was raised before the community at Arbitration Enforcement, the report was procedurally declined because the editor being reported had not been notified of the discretionary sanctions with the correct template. So it seems clear that if the BLP issue is going to be addressed, ArbCom is the only way that will happen. 2600:1004:B151:B695:112B:2B5C:B58A:EB6D (talk) 22:54, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the background stuff. I don't disagree this needs to be an ArbCom case, but I'm just not in a position to do it. I have important matters to deal with IRL; to the extent that I have any time for WP at all right now, it's as stress relief, not a source of additional stress. I just don't have the mental/emotional bandwidth to take on something like this, and I'm missing too much of the background of the dispute and its spillover effects to properly construct the case anyway.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:15, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

It's evident from the discussion on the article's talk page that NightHeron is preparing to purge a lot of material from this article based on the RFC outcome, so I hope you can at least be part of the discussion about him doing that. 2600:1004:B11A:E74E:DD3F:340B:3C9B:851E (talk) 01:27, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

Someone is finally requesting arbitration, but ArbCom might not be willing to accept the case. I hope you'll be online again soon. Someone needs to explain to ArbCom why a case is necessary, and I think you understand the reason it's necessary better than anyone else does. 2600:1004:B156:2805:69A8:D59E:7D3B:254A (talk) 22:22, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

I have done so, in some detail (about the topic and WP's relation to it, not about specific editors who need a spanking). However, I already see a lot of hand-waving there about how a new case or clarification supposedly isn't needed, so I'm skeptical this will go anywhere. It may really come down to someone pulling a slow-editwar tactic over the next few months, and AE failing to do anything about it, before ArbCom will take a "part 2" case on this subject.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:45, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. Based on the discussion here, it seems probable that I will be topic banned from this entire topic, so I hope you'll continue to make an attempt at upholding BLP policy on these articles when I'm no longer able to do so. 2600:1004:B16B:2EF7:F845:8636:E163:1E01 (talk) 00:48, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

Hadn't seen that until now. I agree with your assessment of where that is heading (though I don't necessarily disagree with what you posted that led there; it is suspicious that a supposed leftist is making arguments that fall perfectly into not actual leftism but right-wing parodies of leftism, and the editor is also citing insider right-wing "sources" that no one in their right mind would ever try to use as source on Wikipedia.) But it's not just that one accusatory-of-another-editor post that's led you into T-ban land, but the general WP:SPA-style approach, the canvassing for specific admins, etc. All that said, I have to be clear that I'm not "on your side" or on that of particular opponents of yours. I think it would be a good idea for quite a number of parties to take an involuntary vacation from this topic for a long time. And frankly, I'm pretty concerned about your apparent self-declared connections to persons associated with the Pioneer Fund, etc. It's not a mindset I buy into. I'm on the side of patient neutrality and rigorously applying policy to report what mainstream and current science is telling us, but not report on fringe science except inasmuch as we must to report what mainstream science has to say about it, and inasmuch as we need to cover it to address common reader questions. There is no deadline, and the article can be adjusted over time as needed in response to later research, which needs (for WP purposes) to be firmly grounded in things like systematic reviews. History of the race and intelligence controversy is a vastly better article, and the content should really be merged, mostly using the content from that article but at the older and shorter article title. I'm honestly not going to devote a lot of time and attention to this, because I've run out of patience and temper with it, but others will do so.

I think that the Race and intelligence article is likely to sway to a far-left-dominated, "try to hide anything that anyone anywhere could use in a racist argument" approach, until enough people are fed up with this censoriousness (and the way that it backfires, to cede control of the issue to far-right webboards), and we then swing it back to a more neutral position. That's just where the WP socio-political landscape is right now, and there's little anyone can do about it for probably the next several years, unless they have an amazingly high tolerance for being smeared by other editors. My own willingness to deal with that kind of stuff is at an all-time low.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:28, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Category:Carrom people has been nominated for deletion

Category:Carrom people, which you created, has been nominated for deletion. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Rathfelder (talk) 09:17, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

Am I allowed to give you a compliment?

I don't really know how this website works even though I've been giving it small edits for years. Anyway, am I allowed to give you a compliment on this page? Is this the proper way to do it? I wanted to compliment you for your work on the article about linguistic prescription, whatever it is you wrote on there, it's a pretty good article, I only know for sure I read your response in 2017 to a seemingly "butthurt" prescription apologist on the talk page and I very much enjoyed reading it, and I'm glad people like you are safeguarding the article from people like that, I myself did some small edits to it as well. Dapperedavid (talk) 12:28, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

@Dapperedavid: Sure. This is one of the things user talk pages are for (and it's much nicer to get a compliment than a complaint, so thank you. :-) That's not an article I regularly spend a lot of time at. My "interface" to the topic is primarily internal.

A lot of Wikipedia editors have a hard time compartmentalizing the ideas that WP's article content is not to be prescriptive (per WP:NPOV policy, etc.), while our internal WP:Manual of Style is, like all style guides, prescriptive in nature ("do it this way, not that way") because it is a rule set, even if it is also largely descriptive in rule-origins. That is, the MoS prescribes as "how to write Wikipedia" what we observe (describe) as norms of mainstream, professional, academic-leaning English, mostly via what other style guides say, which are predominantly primary sources. Simultaneously, our public-facing content about English spelling, grammar, and other "rules" (at articles like Quotation marks in English, etc.) is strictly descriptive linguistics, and based primarily on secondary sources (such as non-learner grammars of English, like Oxford's comprehensive one) and tertiary sources (e.g., mainstream dictionaries), though we may also report what various primary-source style guides say and how they conflict with each other. We don't favor one or another of them as sources for what we write about English (we don't say Chicago Manual of Style is right and AP Stylebook is wrong). Internally, we clearly do favor particular ones for how we write here (MoS is based almost exclusively on the two most recent editions each of Chicago Manual, New Hart's Rules, Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English, Garner's Modern English, and Scientific Style and Format).

Some brains just seem to melt on contact with this kind of general semantics distinction between external "rules", writing about external "rules", and internal actual rules for writing about anything, and how the derivation of the "rules" and the rules are unrelated. We thus have recurrent problems with people bringing subjective and often nationalistic prescriptivist notions (e.g. "the only correct way to use quotation marks in American English is to put terminal punctation before the closing quotation mark, no matter what"), convinced not only that they are Right, but that MoS being a prescriptive project in insisting that there be some rules we use means that their prescriptivist motivation for a particular rule must be obeyed. [sigh]
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:07, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

English

Hey I'm new here Abelwe (talk) 23:42, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

@Abelwe: Did you need help with something?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:58, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Merger discussion for Robotic automation software

 Done

 – I commented in support of the proposal.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:43, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

An article that you have been involved in editing—Robotic automation software—has been proposed for merging with another article. If you are interested, please participate in the merger discussion. Thank you. Stonkaments (talk) 17:16, 25 April 2020 (UTC)

Issue 38, January – April 2020

Hiding the projectspam.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:59, 29 April 2020 (UTC)
The Wikipedia Library Books & Bytes Issue 38, January – April 2020 New partnership Global roundup Read the full newsletter On behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --15:58, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Applause

On the R&I arb thing. Quality job there. Also in removing "religion=", which was always a bunch of religionist special pleading. Guy (help!) 21:53, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

It's always chapped my hide how much WP (being American-dominated) buys into the racialist thinking of American-dominated politics, statistics, sociology, even social psychology (also a major factor in the UK, Australia, France, Latin America, and several other blobs of human geography). That's the real pseudo-science, but it's likely to take a few more generations (if some damned virus doesn't kill us all first) for everyone to understand this. I tried to cover this a bit in the WP:RACIALISM essay, but it's just a surface-scratch. Entire books can (and have been) written about this stuff. Still, it's probably our most glaring WP:Systemic bias problem, even after accounting for male skew.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:13, 29 April 2020 (UTC)