Wikipedia talk:Requests for arbitration/Regarding The Bogdanov Affair

message: Oops. I didn't realize that the Bogdanov Affair affair had made it to RFAR; I just blocked XAL for the third time for unrepentant personal attacks. 72 hours. Should I unblock her so she can respond to this RFAR? I'd appreciate it if she could get an injunction against editing anywhere else, though (especially not on Talk:Bogdanov Affair), for what would have been the duration of the block. I'm not happy about all this vitriol she spreads, and, from past experience, I'd expect it to be worse now that I've gotten her worked up with a new block. Bishonen | talk 20:42, 26 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: For what it is worth, I support this motion. XAL has contributed nothing to the discussion, in stark contraindistinction to most of the other users like Igor or rbj or ybm, and often stirs things up. --Maru (talk) 21:03, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

text: Also from an outsider: XAL appears to only rant and to only rant on one topic (user:YBM, whose letters are sequentially one after hers, like IBM and HAL), and to contribute nothing but a negative -- an anti- point of view.  Thus, she seems to have come to us from some outside web fight and longterm flamewar.  Since coming here, she has demonstrated the grace, understanding, curiosity, and equanimity of a wounded hyena with rabies.  Geogre 11:08, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Question from Bishonen: an injunction for XAL? 

message: I am not a physicist.  I am an electrical engineer with some experience in publishing and in academia, although I'm not in the academia at the moment.  Being on the Review Board of a technical journal (Journal of the Audio Engineering Society), I have a little experience about how stuff like this gets published.  No journal is immune to it which is why some physicists thought that the Bogdanoff brothers were deliberately stinging the physics discipline in the same way that Sokal did to the sociology discipline.
There are two initial possible classes for the Bogdanoff's work: either it has some merit (perhaps with flaws or perhaps not flawed at all) or it has no merit.
If it's the latter, then it is bad science or junk science or pseudoscience (which would be called "quackery" if the science were medicine).  In that case, it doesn't matter what the consensus of physicists think.  reality is not dictated by majority rule.
If it is the former, that is that it is not devoid of merit, then it is either mainstream science or it is fringe science or protoscience.  But here, which category that it falls into does depend on the consensus of the mainstream of the existing discipline.  If a majority or even a large minority of physicists recognize the Bogdanoff's work to be valid (or, at least, to have some merit) a case could be made for it to be called "mainstream". But, given the supposition that the work has some merit, if the Bogdanoff's work is not respected as having any merit by any more than a token set of recognized physicists, then the best that can be claimed for it is that it is fringe science or protoscience.  That label is not necessarily disparaging.  A century ago special relativity was fringe science or protoscience and now it is standard in any introductory modern physics text.
But if the theory is not accepted by the "mainstream" physics community, there is no basis to claim that the theory is mainstream.  And if it is not mainstream, the remaining categories are: fringe science or protoscience, and junk science or pseudoscience.  In some manner, even string theory, which has a lot of adherents and respect, must accept such a label.  If it turns out that string theory can never be falsifiable, it will eventually fall by the wayside and become an obsolete theory.
So there are two main questions to deal with:
:1.  Does the Bogdanoff's published work have technical merit or not?  That issue is too technical and arcane to be debated here, however, a bona-fide cosmologist who has identified himself and his credentials has offered an opinion here on the talk page.  Igor would be correct to imply that only the "specialists" can debate this effectively, but he is not correct that this is the salient question for debate about the Wikipedian article.  Wikipedia is not the Annals of Physics nor Classical and Quantum Gravity nor the USENET newsgroup sci.physics.research.  It would be nice if we could get more real physicists other than User:YBM and User:Alain_r involved, but then again, Wikipedia is not the place for real physicists to slug out what is or what is not real physics (but, unfortunately, it looks like it may become that).
:2.  The other question that is salient is: what does the wider community of physicists say about the quality and veracity of the Bogdanoff's work?  Well, there is quite a record and, despite the publication of their earlier papers in reputable journals, the record is not flattering for the Bogdanoffs.  The VAST majority of the credentialed physics community has utterly rejected and dismissed their published work as "wrong", "hoax", "embarrassing", "incoherent", "gibberish", conceptully invalid (my paraphrase of many positions), and even "BS" (and i don't think they mean "Bachelor of Science").  VERY, VERY, FEW physicists have come to their defense on the record.  We virtually only hear the journal referee's comments (and only relayed to us via the Bogdanoff's, that has to be a dubious source) but that fails to recognize the problem.  No one disputes that the Bogdanoff's got published in a couple of legitimate journals of theoretical physics.  The problem is that their papers are believed by the mainstream to be without merit.  The journal referees competence regarding this arcane field are also suspect (indeed physicist John Baez has said that the referees have something to answer for).  And the merit that Bogdanoff's try to extract from such publication has been destroyed by the fact that the editorial board of CQG has made it clear that the papers, in retrospect, have failed to meet the standards expected of any article published in the journal.  The editors of CQG have repudiated the very papers that the Bogdanoffs have published in their journal.  This is undeniably damning (except that Igor does actually deny that it is).
The Wikipedia policy is that there is no original research and neutral POV (we don't get to write our own autobiographies here).  The fact that the Bogdanoffs continue to defend their work as genuine should be reported as such.  But the fact that their work is overwelmingly rejected by the mainstream physics community should also be reported as such.  Including links to fringe science, protoscience, junk science, and pseudoscience is not inappropriate at all, because there is no way that anyone can claim it to be in the mainstream.
I have been editing on Wikipedia for about a year or two (I think).  The Bogdanov Affair is not my only agenda, but that cannot be said for the Bogdanovs, their sock-puppets, and the few flesh-and-blood supporters: XAL, Laurence67, CatherineV; -- they are here for one and only one reason: to paint the B brothers in the most flattering light possible.  To turn this stinkhorn into a rose.  But it simply stinks, and that stink is of the Bogdanov's own making.  Their behavior regarding this, both here on WP, and at other sites/blogs and USENET, has been nakedly dishonest.  They act like imposters much of the time, and I am confident that the reason is that they are imposters.  They are pretending to be physicists, but the real physicists know that the B. brothers are not. 
The admins and ArbCom of Wikipedia are going to have to make a judgement about what the real physicists say about the Bogdanov "research".  On the latest version that I or YBM (now a few others have stepped in to defend the article from the B. vandals) have left, you will get links to the extensive web pages and blogs where this has been discussed since 2002 (a quick check of some words as at Talk:Bogdanov_Affair/comments including an older NYT article).  This is the very information that the Bogdanov brothers want to suppress.  Sunshine is the best disinfectant. r b-j 22:28, 26 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Statement from [[User:Rbj]] 

message: Crossposted from WP:AN/I. Update: Bogdanov Affair is eerily quiet just now, after a huge edit war. I removed one POV rant from each side, and everybody (that I've heard from) seems quite happy with the result. Igor Bogdanov has registered a name account, and declared that he doesn't feel any need to change the article any more. And hey, it's a good article, much better than before the wars! Admittedly, this may be the calm before another storm, as the talk page remains a horror story and I just had to threaten to ban two editors--acrimoniously discussing everything but Bogdanov Affair--from it. Bishonen | talk 01:43, 3 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Not convinced: Article is swamped by recently added cites . Talk page conflicts the same as ever. --Pjacobi 21:40, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Update October 3: sweetness and light!

message: * Accept Fred Bauder 14:08, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Arbitrators' opinions on hearing this matter (4/0/0/0) 

message: What a silly ruling! I realize Wikipedia is not a democracy/lots of other stuff, but with the pretense towards objective ruling that this arbitration makes process (with "defendants," etc.), one would think that the "findings of fact" would include facts that are significant to the ruling, and that the ruling would be based on those findings of fact. Instead, the ruling is just to ban lots of people from editing, apparently mostly people on one side of the issue, ignoring the extensive arguments on both sides. It seems rather arbitrary, but then it is called "arbitration." There's no principle behind the ruling. It might solve this particular issue - like slapping on a band-aid stops bleeding - but states no principle that could help to solve future issues in advance. Luckily this bleeding doesn't appear to come from hemophilia, but it could, couldn't it?
(Granted, this is coming from someone who just recently came across the article/issue in question, has no real opinion or basis or background to talk about the issue, and doesn't really care either way. But a ruling should have a reason behind it, I would think. And no reason is stated, much less supported.)
zafiroblue05 | Talk 05:26, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Further Comments