UPDATE: The error has now been completely eliminated from the article. Details below.
Guest post by James Padgett
As many readers are aware, the culture surrounding the climate change topic area of Wikipedia has been a microcosm of climate science for nearly a full decade.
This is not a compliment.
When you read the Climategate emails and see discussions of finding people to investigate and discredit your ideological opponents – that is Wikipedia. When you read about the IPCC’s usage of the WWF and students in composing their Climate Bible (KJV) – that is Wikipedia. When you read about “climate scientists” conspiring to get other scientists fired for challenging the orthodoxy – that is Wikipedia.
In short, Wikipedia does not care about truth, and certainly not doubts, it cares about message.
And that’s what this article is about, how the truth, when made plainly clear, is suppressed in favor of misinformation that is on message.
Early last month I was browsing the Wikipedia article on the Soon-Baliunas controversy. The “mainstream” view on the topic is that the paper was so horrible that several editors resigned from Climate Research in protest. Those following the Climategate emails know that there was a strong and shady behind-the-scenes effort to both discredit the paper and show journals what happens to their reputations and hairlines when you dare to publish research contradictory to the “settled science.”
Part of this public relations process, of which Wikipedia is an integral component, involves rewriting facts, refocusing views and never ever giving in to rationality or reality.
How was this done in the Soon-Baliunas article? I don’t have the time or inclination to point out all the bias and opinion-herding in the article, but I’ll show you the sentence that initially caught my eye back in early December:
“The Soon and Baliunas paper had been sent to four reviewers during publication, all of whom recommended rejecting it.” (1)
Now isn’t that interesting? Why would they publish the paper if all of the reviewers recommended rejecting it? It certainly would be quite the scandal if that villainous Chris de Freitas pushed to publish it under such conditions.
A little digging shows that Wikipedia used to have the correct sentence – that none of the reviewers recommended rejecting it. In fact, an anonymous user tried to revert the article back to this correct version. The response was typical – change it back and then have one of the administrator gatekeepers, “MastCell,” protect the article from anonymous users. After all, the only people who could ever be correct are the Champions of the Earth.
But that wasn’t the end of it. That wouldn’t be a good demonstration of the obstinacy of the keeper of climate truth.
The few non-anonymous users who cared about the article being accurate pointed this out. Pages and pages of argument resulted, with the typical gatekeepers like Dave Souza and Stephan Schulz relying on a single source to make their claim, while ignoring numerous other sources, not to mention common sense, which contradicted their assertion regarding the reviewers.
What was their source?
An article in the Guardian by Fred Pearce.
What sources contradicted this?
Chris de Freitas himself publically showed this email (also here from Climategate), which would support my view – and he privately made it crystal clear to me that everyone recommended publication.
Of course, de Freitas would be biased….
But Clare Goodess, of the ever-reputable University of East Anglia, an editor who resigned over the incident, ambiguously intoned in a manner subject to much interpretation:
“The publisher eventually asked to see the documentation associated with the review of the paper – which had apparently gone to four reviewers none of whom had recommended rejection. Otto Kinne concluded that the review process had been properly conducted.” (2)
So instead of relying on common sense, original documents, and the statement, at the time, of an involved scientist certainly not supportive of the Soon-Baliunas paper, weight was given to Fred Pearce’s article which was written seven years after the fact.
Naturally, I was curious as to where Mr. Pearce received his information. He was friendly and helpful, despite his busy schedule with the holidays and Durban, and attempted to find the original source for the claim in his article. Unfortunately, he could not find the original source in his records. He does agree that the statement was, in his words, “almost certainly wrong” and theorizes that he may have misread Clare Goodess’ statement on the matter.
So that should settle it right? This article itself could be a “reliable source” to remove the error from Wikipedia. After all, Real Climate is quoted extensively throughout the climate change articles. Perhaps, but not when you have obsessive-compulsive activists who care more about their cause than their integrity.
However, this incident does bring some other questions to mind.
Andrew Montford, author of the Hockey Stick Illusion, was inquiring with Pearce about his source as well and was curious if Michael Mann had been the one to mislead Pearce. This is an interesting theory, and I had been wondering if this was the case myself both due to Mann’s behavior regarding this incident, his well-known inclination towards manipulating journalists, as well as the original wording in Pearce’s article, which was:
“But many on the 10-man editorial board agreed with Mann. They concluded that their colleague de Freitas had ignored the anonymous advice of four reviewers to reject the paper.”
There is no way to know for certain; it certainly isn’t clear. All I know is that Mann and his friends, and this is the short list, when confronted with a paper that challenged their own work, threatened to boycott the journal, tried to get the editor fired, tried to get the authors fired, and was even so juvenile as to file a complaint against the New Zealand Herald for not letting him publish his attacks against de Freitas.
Obviously, he is the quintessential climate scientist of our day – and I hope one day that Wikipedia gives him due credit as such.
Cheers,
James Padgett
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UPDATE: Following a conversation on Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales’ talk page the error has been removed despite initial resistance from those who perpetrated the misinformation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#Activism_at_Wikipedia.3F
Also, I’d like to thank Nona, who tried to correct the error earlier as an anonymous user.
When Wikipedia was first proposed, the first thing I thought of was “Zero” from Rollerball. I’ve seen nothing over the years to dispel that initial impression.
I had long ago accepted Christopher Monckton‘s usage in calling it “Wiki-bloody-pedia.”
It should be noted that similar problems are encountered when one attempts to cope with the duplicitous fanatical proponents of victim disarmament (deceitfully termed “gun control”) infesting that Web site.
Words fail me
Ot But cannot find place to post this please move it to an appropriate place or ignore at your own peril (joke) This was posted “by Memory vault”on Jo Anne Nova’s site re R Muller BEST project as I always suspected. Needs to be verified if you think its worth a story etc here.
memoryvault
January 10, 2012 at 9:09 pm · Reply
To Otter at 1.1.3 (and others)
Dr Richard Muller is not a skeptic. He has never claimed to be a skeptic. He has always been a firm believer in CAGW. He has many peer-reviewed, published papers on the subject. He has been on the CAGW gravy train for years.
Trouble was, his “research” was largely based on the “cooked” temperature records which constitute Mann’s “hockey schtick graph”. Basically, when the “climategate” emails were leaked, he saw the value of his past work reduced to trash, and he was more than mildly pissed off about it.
(Personally, I think he was even more pissed off at finding out he wasn’t part of the “inner circle” – the “team”, but that’s just my theory.)
In a webinar lecture soon after Climategate he ripped into Mann and the team, basically for making him look like an idiot. The actual lecture is nearly an hour long, and is totally supportive of the whole doom and gloom, the sky is falling, global warming scenario. No “skeptic” here.
But buried in the lecture is a small piece of less than five minutes, where he vents his spleen against Mann and the “team” for making him – and other researchers – look like idiots with their “hide the decline” subterfuge.
It is on this five minute piece of video, and this alone, that people like JB justify their branding of Muller as a “skeptic”.
Here is a link to the five minute segment:
And here is a link to the whole webinar lecture:
My personal opinion is that, as a result of his outburst, Muller soon realised he faced total ostracisation from the funding gravy train he had enjoyed for years, and the opportunity to head up the BEST analysis was thrown to him as a life-line – “do this, and will be forgiven, and you will be welcomed back into the fold” sort of scenario.
But that’s just my reading of events surrounding BEST.
So not only should incorrect statements in Wikipedia be corrected (I think everyone can agree on that), but we have to ladle every correction with a half-baked, unsupported insinuation against Mann? Way to go with the intellectual integrity!
Wikipedia claims to have an effective process for resolving the truth on issues like these. But here we have a simple, convincing truth (“NONE_REJECTED_PUBLICATION”) that the Wikipedia process can’t resolve, suggesting that its formal system of review is somehow ‘incomplete’ (Gödel).
With a reputation of this sort of behavior going for years now, I never use wiki for anything beyond a dictionary, and a skeptical eye on that.
Great research.
One of the many reasons not to cite Wiki as “evidence”
I’ve given up on Wikipedia. I used to believe they could be trusted on non-controversial subjects. But their behavior has become so egregious, that I won’t give them the traffic. On any subject.
Wikipedia, building a better Tower of Babble..
Wikipedia has a couple of core policies that make sense overall, but which create a structural bias in favor of climate orthodoxy. Wikipedia views itself as a tertiary source — it collects and summarizes secondary sources like books and newspaper articles. Original research from primary documents is strongly discouraged, and deprecated in favor of secondary sources. The philosophy is essentially this: There may be multiple primary sources which may be contradictory. If you allow anonymous Wikipedia contributors (“MastCell”, or logged out IP addresses, or whomever) the job of deciding which ones are important or credible, then other readers have no way to judge the credibility of the article. If, on the other hand, you only rely on secondary sources, then the job of deciding which primary sources are credible is “outsourced” to the book author or newspaper reporter. That person is then cited in the Wikipedia article, so that other readers who want to verify an article can look to the credibility of the reporter or other secondary source.
Most of the time this is probably a good thing. You probably don’t want articles on autism to be dominated by vaccine conspiracy people, selectively picking and choosing the primary sources that fit their biases. In the case of AGW, the result is that the statements of the editor (a primary source) can be rejected in favor of a newspaper article (a secondary source), even if the newspaper article is wrong.
Because of these policies, and even without the influence of committed advocates, Wikipedia will always — and by design — reflect the prevailing orthodoxy about any topic, whether it be cold fusion, homeopathy, or AGW. I have said before that if Wikipedia had existed in the 17th century, it would have ignored Galileo and reported the Aristotelian model of the universe.
If your “truth” about any topic is different from the current orthodoxy, Wikipedia — by design — is not the place to express it. 10 years of written and unwritten policy are against you.
It’s a sad day when so much of what we hear and read must be considered as part of an information battle where the info doesn’t always have a uniform. I suppose it’s been going on since the dawn of man, but still….
I think you meant “compliment”. Wikipedia is evil, Google is evil.
How’s this for a coincidence? You show the Wikipedia graphic saying “A network error has occurred”. Well, the advertisement at the bottom of your blog post just said: Document.write(); that’s it — LOL.
Wikipedia’s bias is evident also in the treatment of two controversial phrases. “Climate change denier” has a page dedicated under that name and heading, whereas “Climategate” was changed to “Climatic Research Unit email controversy” and all attempts to change it back to “Climategate” have been suppressed, despite the common usage of “Climategate”.
Moderator:
I think it should be “compliment” rather than “complemen”, unless some wordplay is being tried.
Redo:
Moderator:
I think it should be “compliment” rather than “complement”, unless some wordplay is being tried.
Reading the Climategate e-mails, including ones about the Soon-Baliunas paper, it’s amazing how frightened Mann’s fellow-travelers are of him, and clear how he both exploits and does everything in his power to increase this.
Do you have a link to the original Wikipedia page, the one that had the correct sentence?
I must add however, that I do have alot of time for WUWT, primarily because I am able to express any opinion regardless of whether or not it chimes with the opinions of others. There are a great number of other sites where this is simply not possible, where if your opinion doesn’t meet with approval, it simply fails to pass moderation.
It is abundantly clear though that WUWT is a skeptic site re AGW, which is needed. But I do think we should try to maintain balance in our opinions rather than reject out of hand any research which supports AGW. It is the orthodox view and will remain so until there is real evidence either that the world has ceased to warm or that it is cooling – at least on a decadal basis.
I must confess that I find it hard to believe that any scientist can seriously make the claim that AGW is fact on the basis of a 30 year warming trend. But as it stands, the trend over that 30 years is upward despite 1998 being the warmist on record. Indeed we have had two consecutive decades with 8 of the 10 warmist years on record being posted in each decade. Even the satellite record confirms something similar,while Arctic Sea Ice & land based glaciers continue to recede. Antarctica does paint different picture but we must at the very least treat AGW research with a little respect until both the warming trend and the loss of global ice is clearly reversed.
The truth is, as we all know, an elusive concept at best. Time will be the ultimate judge but in the meantime skeptical science should avoid indulging in misinformation and censorship, which has become the trademark of orthodox science on AGW.
Now this is a good story. More, please.
Give it up Anthony; it’s ancient history. Your time will be spent more valuably as a reviewer for IPCC AR5. We are all looking forward to you uncovering scientific errors in that document, and reporting back here.
In their zeal to appeal, Wiki is making itself irrelevant.
William Connolley has been allowed back on board and has immediately reverted to type doing that for which he was previously banned
Tells you all you need to know really
AS stated previously. Wiki is a useful tool except for ‘political’ subjects where its almost wholly left biased
James,
Thanks for the background on this sorry affair. It is a textbook case of contentious academic politicking working in concert with mainstream media to create a crisis out of thin air (man-made catastrophic global warming); a crisis that is clearly not happening if temperature data, sea-level rise etc are any indication. Wikipedia’s participation in tarring Soon and Baliunas is despicable. And now watch MSM as they quietly ignore CAGW and let it die publicly as a topic of concern; hoping all will be forgotten…