I saw this coming a mile away.
On Wednesday August 20th, Dr. Roy Spencer noted how John Cook’s well debunked 97% ‘consensus’ claim, based of statistical sleight of hand and pal review, was used as an example of propaganda techniques
Wikipedia Page on Propaganda Techniques Uses 97% Meme
Roy opined:
I wonder how long the example will stay there, without William Connolly to play gatekeeper. I also see “Hope and Change” is given as an example. Hmmm…sounds vaguely familiar.
Like a moth to a flame, William M. Connolley showed up in comments, and accused Dr. Spencer of adding the 97% example himself:
You’re fast. That example was added only a few days ago. Its almost like you did it, or someone did it and then told you. No? Seems like a pretty bizarre coincidence otherwise.
Having boobed the date, he later had to retract that statement:
> only a few days ago
A month and a few days. So, not so fast.
Connolley is equally fast it seems, because he immediately went into Orwellian 1984 Winston Smith mode and re-wrote the entry, simply because he himself believes in the 97% consensus meme. Roy writes today:
Censorship Alive and Well at Wikipedia
That didn’t take long. Less than 24 hours after I noted the use of the “97% of scientists agree” meme as an example of “propaganda techniques” on Wikipedia, the example has disappeared.
And who did the change? Well you know who:
07:29, 21 August 2014 William M. Connolley (talk | contribs) . . (16,792 bytes) (-53) . . (Undid revision 617361920 by 130.22.49.227 (talk) better to use a non-controversial example)
In science, citations are done on published works knowing that good or bad, they’ll be there in 10-20 years for the most part, except in cases where the work is so bad, it has to be retracted, such as the Lewandowsky-Cook Recursive Fury paper.
Wikipedia, being at the mercy of thousands of Winston Smiths in the form of the banned and maligned William Connolley, is like a shape-shifting information portal at the will of the controlling Wikipedians. It might be good enough for a passing blog reference, but there’s no guarantee it will have the same meaning as a citation tomorrow or even an hour from now. With such shape shifting references at the mercy of often politically motivated editors, it certainly isn’t good enough for scientific publication citation.
Maybe that’s why there has been a movement at colleges to ban Wikipedia as a source, even going so far recently as to remove it from college dorm WiFi connections.
Zealots and activists like Connolley should never be trusted as editors, (his track record speaks for itself) and Wikipedia edit wars were even the subject of a study. Unfortunately, Wikipedia is not very good at self-policing such editing zealotry, and this is why Wikipedia will eventually fall by the wayside as a serious reference source.
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I wouldn’t know how to edit Wikipedia anyway. Looks like the IP address of the original 97% example there belongs to Joint Interagency Task Force South, Key West, that works drug interdiction.
Movement at colleges? I work for a college system. Any student using Wiki as a reference gets a failing grade. You can use it to find the original source, but not as a final reference. But that is anecdotal, so there are probably some colleges that do accept it. More’s the pity.
” and this is why Wikipedia will eventually fall by the wayside as a serious reference source”
You mean it hasn’t already?
Whenever I see someone’s argument is based on Wikipedia as a source I know they are clueless. It is the same with the alarmists and their models, as soon as I see their claims are based on models my BS meter starts going off.
Not saying I don’t go to Wikipedia, but only as a quick and dirty start to my research. I scroll down to the reference section of the entry and start following those links to what hopefully are actual sources. But even then I search other places for sources as a bias in a Wikipedia article will also lead to a bias in the sources referenced.
@ddpalmer – Yep! I tell them to Google WC, and that shuts off that avenue.
Just image how bad Wikipedia would be if Billy C wasn’t banned ;(
“and this is why Wikipedia will eventually fall by the wayside as a serious reference source.”
Will? Does anyone take Wikipedia seriously as a reference source anymore? May daughter’s university rejected any papers using Wikipedia as a source over 5 years ago. They accept sources taken from the lists of sources at bottom of Wikipedia pages. Wikipedia is useful for finding the source of the source of their information and then people should check that. And if they are studying one of the sciences, then strictly apply the scientific method.
Using wikipedia in lecture material even to make a small point is very much deprecated. No way would it be accepted as a source in an essay or dissertation. That said, it’s very useful on most topics just not the contentious ones.
The USPTO does not reccomend Wikipedia as a source.
I use Wikipedia routinely to learn about stuff, but only if it’s a not very controversial subject.
It’s good for ancient history.
Until the advent of the internet people like Connolley used to stand on street corners with sandwich boards. Oh for the good old days…
I sometimes use it as a source list on a topic. However, I have discovered that I can find more pdf’s on my own faster than I can slogging through a citation list that seems not to include very many nonpaywalled papers.
I feel like my degree is Wikipedia studies has been for naught.
“The discordant [f******g] mob.”
http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2005/12/16
Connolley is clearly OCD.
I’m trying to be nice.
I agree with Dr Spencer – Wikipedia can be useful if areas of controversy are avoided, along with any biographies of the living or recently deceased.
Wikipedia? A very handy starting point for further research. I thought WC had been banned from editing there? Clearly not. Sadly, it’s folks like him who give Wikipedia a bad name.
In Orwell’s Oceania, Connolley would have been put in charge of the Ministry of Records, and O’Brien would have been proud of him.
“Zealots and activists like Connolley should never be trusted as editors,…”
Remove the words “as editors” and you also have an accurate statement.
@ur momisugly rogerknights:
How about “Wiki’d down” as in “dumbed down”?
I once read on the Wikipedia page how plug-in hybrids were going to save the earth by moving us all around without those evil CO2 emissions. I proceeded to go to another Wikipedia page to look up what percentage of electricity in the US comes from coal, and use that to make the caveat in the PHEV article that all you’re really doing is moving the emissions from the road to the power plant. When I attempted to edit the PHEV page, it wouldn’t let me use another Wikipedia page as my citation. I pointed out this idiocy in the discussion page.
The next day both my edit to the PHEV page and my entry in its discussion page had been memory-holed.
That was maybe five years ago, and I haven’t tried editing a Wikipedia page, again, since.
There was a report recently about a congress-critter editing his own wiki page to clean it up. How handy. And of course the Eurpoean “right to be forgotten” is used mainly by people to clean up references to usually true events such as convictions or political scandals.
Many years ago I selected a non-political (I thought) subject I knew a lot about and joined Wikipedia to post a few good paragraphs correcting false statements on the subject (a subject I have been heavily involved with since the mid-1960’s).
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All of my non-controversial, non-political contributions were soon “revised” by other posters until the article was pretty much back to where it started.
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Wikipedia is a majority-rule view of the world where the majority are young and leftist.
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As leftists they typically express their beliefs and feelings as if they were proven conclusions, and have no interest in debating or changing their beliefs.
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Whatever they write becomes “correct” because they say so, and so does everyone they know, so it couldn’t be wrong.
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They don’t think like scientists.
If you assume “thinking” requires a conclusion to be based on facts, data, logic, and especially honesty, with the conclusion changing if the supporting data require a change, then you really don’t understand how leftists “think”, or Wikipedia, at all.
I’d rather not mention the subject I contributed to, so no one will be tempted to read the wrong information still there.
Once I realized Wikipedia was a majority-rule “encyclopedia, I have only used it to look up unimportant subjects, such as looking up Leave it to Beaver to see how many episodes there were.
“Wiki” means “fast” or “quick”. And that’s exactly what wikipedia is… a quick reference guide.
It’s a starting point for research, not the ending point.
Now I cite Wikii articles quite often …. simply because they are written in verbiage that is more easily understood by those who are not well learned in the sciences. But I only cite specific verbiage within said article that I know is actual, factual, true and/or supported by factual evidence and observations.
And my citing of an article does not mean, infer or imply that I approve and/or agree with 100% of the contents/context of said article or that I disagree with 100% of the contents/context of said article.
And I do likewise for published papers on scientific studies, abstracts and/or other scientific literature simply because many of the more recent ones contain a lot of misinformation as well as silly, illogical and/or asinine conclusions.
As the ole fellow said: “There is oftentimes a little bit of “good” even in the “worsest” of things.”
In political issue areas Wikipedia is next to useless due to the liberal lean of its editors. On non-political, technical matters, it can be quite useful and instructive – go read some of the entries describing math like Laplace transforms. But for lectures or scientific articles, cites should only go to the source material and only after actually reading and understanding the source material.