Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Skepticism/Pseudoscience/Archive 2

message: I've opened a RfC on the Astral projection article.  Any chance the members of this project would be willing to weigh in on the issue? (unsigned per RfC rules) 20:01, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  RfC on [[Astral projection]] 

message: I've made changes to the "claims" section of the Green Cheese Model sample article, as it's what I plan to base a blank-article template off of.
If lurkers here could read the article and comment at the end of the talk page, that would be greatly appreciated. I want a reasonable generic pseudoscience article structure finalized before it gets cast into a substitution template.
— Preceding unsigned comment added by Christopher Thomas (talk • contribs) Pjacobi 09:14, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: FYI, there is already an example article which has - I suppose unknowingly - a structure and treatment of the subject similiar to our "Green cheese" template: Nazi moon base. --Pjacobi 09:14, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Green cheese model feedback and template

message: this project seems to focus more on pseudoscience in the hard sciences, but I figure at least someone might be concerned about what's going on over at Hypnosis:  Sam Spade and some self-proclaimed "Dr" whose degrees appear to be from those "prestigious non-accredited universities" we keep getting spammed by have succeeded in converting the page to a presentation solely of their POV on hypnosis.  The introduction used to cover the fact that hypnosis is believed by some to grant access to the subconscious, allowing applications such as memory enhancement and sensory alteration, but that there are also those who believe that hypnosis does not exist.  Now the introduction starts off by claiming that hypnosis comes from the ancient Egyptians and until recently, it claimed that hypnosis could be used to increase breast size, and one has to scroll halfway down the page to discover that the existence of hypnosis is not universally agreed upon.  Sam announced his intention to force his POV on the article by fair means or foul here, and even though it was my illness flaring up rather than my "losing interest", he still took advantage of my absence to convert the article into one that he knew for fact did not represent all views fairly. -- Antaeus Feldspar 19:43, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Whereas sometimes a cry for help here may get heard, this page is not a substitute for Wikipedia:Requests for comment/All. The project was instead created to find better ways of encyclopedic treatment of pseudoscientific topics. (BTW: Sam Spade is indeed a Wikipedia legend, and you can't really claim to be a real Wikipedian if you didn't enjoyed a article content dispute with him). --Pjacobi 20:19, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Maybe you can ask at Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine or perhaps someone should start a Wikipedia:WikiProject Psychology linas 02:43, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Or start a thread on Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Psychology. --Christopher Thomas 03:42, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wish I'd found this earlier... 

message: The first half of speed of gravity looks like a reasonable historical review of what newton thought, and a discussion of gravity waves. But then we get to the section on experimental tests, and leave the known universe. Deleting this content is easy, fighting the anon editors will be harder. Volunteers, please! linas 05:14, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  pseudoscience alert: [[Speed of gravity]] 

message: FYI, there is potentially some legal liability for misrepresenting such machines. This is an area that is regularly plied by fraudsters and con-men bent on bilking gullible investors out of millions.  I present two examples. In one case, I acted as a consultant to a California millionaire, in the family of the owners of a national chain of stores. He'd been given a demo of a teleportation device, which was promptly dismantled after the demo. Claims were that teleportation could also be done to satellites in orbit, and that tens of millions of dollars of investment were needed to design the satellites. This was a pure, classic con.  In the second case, there was a slahdot story a few years ago about "seven machines that could predict the future", with these machines being ticking away in the basements of Harvard, Oxford, etc. The link was to a science website that carried this story. This site was highly professional: it carried several dozen science stories of the day, all legit except this one. It had top-notch production sensibilities, clean layout, a bit of advertising, but not much: this site looked as good as or better than Scientific American, Science News, the New Scientist, etc. While pretending to be a periodical, I note that after half a year, the site was never ever updated again.  It was a one-shot deal. I became convinced that it was built entirely to carry this one story about the future-predicting machines, and was meant to make them look very credible in the eyes of some victim, who was the target of a scam.  Its not unreasonable to think that WP could be a venue for something similar: some mark being told that something is so well-known, there's even a WP article on it. You don't want the victim coming back and suing. linas 16:48, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: A bit of a straw man and, moreover, a slippery slope. Have you not read the General disclaimers? Wikipedia is not a source of professional advice. As stated in the Risk disclaimer, no consequential damages can be sought against Wikipedia ... there is not an agreement or understanding between the reader and Wikipedia. J. D. Redding 02:41, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Legal liability, fraud

message: You may like to view Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Reddi_2/Workshop#Troika. I don't know if this is going to fly - it may depend on peoples views - but its interesting. Who wants to be #3 :-)? William M. Connolley 22:52, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: This is an interesting idea, but it would have to be spelled out that the watchdog users would only have the power to ban people who are making blatantly disruptive or unscientific additions, as opposed to merely controvertial additions. I decline to be considered for this committee, as it sounds like it would involve far more drama and stress than I'm prepared to deal with. Potentially useful if implemented carefully, though. --Christopher Thomas 21:44, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

text: SCZenz may be interested. Perhaps it would be better if we had a peer review system for all science articles. The reviewers would be contributers to wikipedia who have a background in science or who have a track record of high quality wiki articles on scientific topics. The referee report has to be discussed openly and any decision would be made in the usual way. So, in principle this does not change any of the usual wiki rules because people could choose to ignore the referee report.
Count Iblis 15:04, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Potentially interesting proposal at [[Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Reddi_2/Workshop#Troika]] 

message: Over at an article that more than one editor has found dubious, the following exchange occurred:
:EDITOR 1:  "This article needs to be written around a peer-reviewed source. There's no reason to believe that any of this is accurate."
:EDITOR 2:  "No it doesn't.  This is Wikipedia, not a Scientifically approved journal or anything like that."
I'm wondering how well these two statements square up respectively with Wikipedia's actual standards.  Does the fact that Wikipedia isn't "a Scientifically approved journal or anything like that" really mean that its scientific articles do not need to be based on peer-reviewed science?  This is the article, in case context is needed. -- Antaeus Feldspar 17:39, 16 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: See Wikipedia:Reliable source and Wikipedia:Verifiability. Consensus from past AfD debates was that if it doesn't have peer-reviewed literature about it, it's not notable enough to be included, but 1) Wikipedia:Notability is not a policy, so you'll get debate over this, and 2) it's quite possible for a pseudoscience to be well-known but not published about in scientific literature. Mostly I'd suggest using peer-reviewed, reputable scientific publications as a yardstick for whether or not something is considered valid science by the scientific community. This will affect how an article is written (whether or not something is claimed to be scientific fact), but won't necessarily cause the article to be dumped. Good luck sorting it out (debates like this were part of why I went on sabbatical). --Christopher Thomas 18:14, 16 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Should sources be peer-reviewed? 

message: Hi, I recently added myself to the participants in the project.  As I understand it, members agree upon the goal of ensuring that articles on pseudoscience topics are fully WP:NPOV, and in particular do not portray a fringe science speculation as mainstream, a crank "theory" as comparable to general relativity, etc.  I am currently watching a number of pseudoscience related articles, but my watchlist is too long to be useful on a daily basis.  Is it technically possible to create a watchlist for this project?  So that members can add articles to the list and from time to time drop by and conveniently check the recent history of articles listed on the watchlist?  I have in mind a page which would consist of links with buttons you could press to see the history.  Comments?  ---CH 21:53, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It's certainly possible (and easy) to create a list of page history quick-links (using , producing something like ). If you want to put something like this at Wikipedia:WikiProject Pseudoscience/Articles attracting pseudoscientific edits or the like, by all means go ahead, as it's a useful tool that doesn't already exist elsewhere on Wikipedia. Be ready for political drama in response, of course. Making a watchlist-equivalent page would have to involve off-site scripting, I think. Ask me again when this term is over and I'll put together a script for this (after getting proper bot approval). I won't be in a position to do this before April, due to schedule craziness. --Christopher Thomas 22:23, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: There's also a  template -- the watchlist page itself has to be created and edited by hand, but I created a couple of subst'able templates ( for list items and  for redirects) that make it easier.  You might want to look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Scientology/publicwatchlist for an example of such a watchlist in use. -- Antaeus Feldspar 23:21, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

text: The idea is to list recent changes to a set of articles on one page, in the same manner as a user's watchlist, which these watchlist templates don't appear to do. Thanks for pointing them out, though, as they're potentially useful for other purposes. --Christopher Thomas 05:57, 28 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: They do do that, though.  The set of articles is described on one page, and then the  template itself gives convenient URLs for seeing the recent changes to articles in that list, viewing the list history, editing that list, and just going to the list page itself.  Actually, adding "Special:Recentchangeslinked/" to the beginning of any normal double-bracket link should have the same effect as navigating there manually and then clicking "Related changes" in the sidebar.  Check Special:Recentchangeslinked/Wikipedia:WikiProject Scientology/publicwatchlist to see what I mean. -- Antaeus Feldspar 15:40, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

text: Ok, I'd misread the templates the first few times around. Thanks for clearing that up. I'll add a watchlist to the WikiProject some time within the next week or so. --Christopher Thomas 06:00, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

text: I've made a start; can you read it over and see how well it explains things? -- Antaeus Feldspar 04:29, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

text: Hmmm, interesting!  I'll have to play around with something like that, but I believe it could be done.  It'd probably be better to start a new template for that, however, because it differs significantly from the  template and therefore doesn't serve quite the same purpose.  What you describe has an advantage over the existing template in that it can automatically start watching pages as they're added to the category; however, it has the disadvantage that you can't add pages without putting them in the category, and it won't detect the change if someone removes the page from the category (and frankly, that's probably one of the changes one wants to watch for most on a project like this. -- Antaeus Feldspar 23:24, 4 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It also won't see any changes in sub-categories of the category, only in the pages directly in the category. -- Antaeus Feldspar 23:40, 7 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: A pseudoscience watchlist?

message: Hi, I am concerned by edits I've noticed in various articles which favorably describe some alleged  development and link to a cranky website promoting an alleged propriety "technology".  Such sites often include appeals to potential investors.  This is not a particularly good example, but the most recent such instance I've seen is that 130.184.88.44 from the University of Arkansas edited Gravitational radiation.   The added text included several links to a website, [www.gravwave.com Gravwave LLC] which claims Gravwave® LLC is the first company to pioneer efforts to create important practical, commercial and military high-technology applications for HFGWs.  I would regard such claims as cranky; indeed, this site is mentioned at [www.americanantigravity.com American Antigravity], a clearly cranky website.
I just want to make sure users other than myself are looking out for this kind of thing. ---CH 19:56, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: When I'm active, I flag it (along with any other changes) on articles on my watchlist. Promotion like this can generally be reverted on-sight, and these reversions don't tend to be disputed. --Christopher Thomas 06:48, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Linkspam, cranky POV pushing, proprietary "technology" promotion

message: I just found out about this project.  There is this fairly new project: Wikipedia:WikiProject Rational Skepticism that I think could go un your list of related projects.  I didn't want to make the change myself because I'm new over here.  
A question: this project mainly seems to be about topics that are in the domain of physics.  Is it involved with other forms of pseudoscience too?  Bubba73 (talk), 18:23, 7 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Has anyone made the change?  As for possible topics of interest to this WikiProject, see the shared watchlist. ---CH 18:14, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  A related project 

message: Hi, I'm a member of the Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team, which is looking to identify quality articles in Wikipedia for future publication on CD or paper. We recently began assessing using these criteria, and we are looking for A-class, B-class, and Good articles, with no POV or copyright problems. Can you recommend any suitable articles? Please post your suggestions here. Cheers, Shanel 20:39, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Articles for the Wikipedia 1.0 project

message: Because some advocates of cryptozoology claim the mantle of science, this subject IMO does count as pseudoscience.  In this category, apart from Nessie there is no more famous subject than Bigfoot, and for this there is no more famous "evidence" than the Patterson film.  This article has a huge bibliography, but to my astonishment, this list omitted the book by journalist Greg Long until I added it just now.  
Patterson, the ringleader of the hoax (which involved two other principals), died in 1972, but Long tracked down his confederates and obtained a complete confession from the man who actually wore the suit.  The monkey suit turns out to have been a commercial gorilla suit owned by Patterson, which was slightly modified to make the film. Long also obtained much information on the motivations of Patterson (basically, a con man in constant need of money who hit upon yet another scheme to rake in some cash).  
Anyway, someone needs to edit the section dealing with the Patterson film to summarize Long's findings. It is amazing to me that this film is still discussed as it could possibly be "genuine", when by any journalistic standards known to me, it can only be described as a confessed hoax.---CH 19:53, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Bigfoot]]

message: Recently, User:Epastore made some well-intentioned changes to Template:Infobox Pseudoscience that accidentally caused rendering problems in some cases. I've kept what could be kept, and to make it easier to avoid similar difficulties in the future, I've added documentation at Template talk:Infobox Pseudoscience on what bits are there for a reason, as well as test instances of the infobox so that the effects of a template change can be quickly evaluated under various pathological conditions. --Christopher Thomas 20:45, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Template tweaks, and test renderings

message: User:Epastore has pointed out that the bulletted list style the template is currently optimized for may or may not be the best alternative to use. I've started an informal poll, as I recognize that my preferences might not be representative of all of yours:
Should lists in the "disputed science" infobox be single-line comma-delimited lists, or newline-delimited bulletted lists?
While this is a pretty trivial issue, it does have surprisingly large impact on how the guts of the template work (one or the other will look nice, but not both, with the way tables currently seem to work). Votes go below.
* Bulletted. I think it's more readable than comma-delimited, though I agree that list length is a concern. --Christopher Thomas 05:37, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Pseudoscience template formatting poll

message: Been a while since I've been here, and hope it is OK to draw attention here to a specific pseudoscience problem which I think is particularly blatant.  I have presented some startling evidence at Talk:Bios theory of some very troubling POV-pushing and also a serious conflict of interest, not to mention deceptive behavior.  What to do? ---CH 05:37, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Added to AfD as non-notable. This isn't really the place to have OR about the theory's use in neonatal ICUs, so it is probably best to delete it. If you want to investigate it and write a report about it, we might be able to recreate the article and use it as a source, though. I would think that something being used would have a bigger internet presence.--Philosophus T 09:41, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Bios theory]] and [[User: Lakinekaki]]

message: Help requested on Bi-Digital O-Ring Test. It was just re-written by a proponent. -Will Beback 20:33, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've submitted it to AfD. If it is notable enough, we could merge it into the Omura article. Philosophus T 21:01, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

text: Ok, I am now having some difficulties with this. It is obviously pseudoscience and quackery, but as with many other cases, it is somewhat difficult to find sources that will satisfy everyone, and I am predictably having problems justifying the categorization to at least one editor. It would be nice if someone could help strengthen the evidence for keeping these categories. --Philosophus T 01:08, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Bi-Digital O-Ring Test]]