Gaspa
Senior Member.
Do you mean, is me saying this nice? Is this about my tone? I think it's as nice as what I was responding to.
Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia
- Thread starter Mick West
- Start date
Ann K
Senior Member.
(From your quote)
The word "skeptical" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It is often misused, but it does NOT mean "nay-sayers", which sounds like what the unknown Wikipedia contributor describes.
What I've seen here in Metabunk is an attempt to explain the unknown by way of the known, which is (of course) the only way that things can really be explained. And the only way a UFO can be identified as known is if we ever have a real one to study. Is that what @beku-mant objects to so strongly, our attempts to relate things that are seen with things that we already know? We HAVE to do that if we are to study phenomena properly. We already know that natural earthly things exist. We have all seen balloons, insects, birds, and kites. We have all seen reflections in window glass. Many of us are familiar with searchlights on the clouds, arcing power lines and exploding transformers, aircraft at various altitudes, and passing satellites. (As a teenager I went out at night to see Sputnik, as its schedule was posted in the newspaper.)
Changing my mind about the intrusion of alien craft in our atmosphere will take a lot more than "A witness claimed that...". Any detective or judge will tell you that eyewitness testimony is less reliable than actual physical evidence. And when we have credible evidence of UFOs, we will study it.
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deirdre
Senior Member
yea you quoted me sayign the same thing.
i'm glad you verbalized that so Beku can see.
i hear you but perhaps its a matter of how people are defining the phrase. as a neutral i totally see how the phrase "coordinated editing" might not be literally correct, but i also see the casual usage ufo believers might use that also sound like ok usage. i think maybe instead of negative attacks, your above comment politely explaining (without excuses) is a better response.
that does suck. but it kinda goes with the territory.
i have no doubt the guerilla skeptics are doing what they think is right. (to be honest im still a bit traumatized by that horrible behavior over a friggin pumpkin spice latte! and all the praise that followed. it did taint skeptics to my eye, so i am biased in my viewpoints on issues like this)
deirdre
Senior Member
in this thread hes objecting to wikipedia issues.
Mendel
Senior Member.
"aggressively skeptical" refers to squabbles whether someone should be called a "psychic" or "alleged psychic", with the latter bring deemed aggressively skeptical since we already know that real psychics don't exist. (Yes, that's an actual example.)
JMartJr
Senior Member.
Somewhat tangentially, if one thinks that there is indeed some strange new phenomenon that can be discovered behind UFO reports, one should read such reports as skeptically as possible, and aggressively strive to identify and throw out the ones that are not really reports of whatever the phenomenon is. If you had a stack of reports, 5 of which were of experiences witnessing a "real UFO," 5 of which were foil balloons form Party City, 5 of which were Star Links flaring and 5 were hoaxes, it would be very difficult learning anything about the UFOs! But if you identify the ones that are NOT the phenomenon you are after, your data set is much better and you might learn something (maybe not much, as human witnesses are very error-prone, but at least you'd have a fighting chance!)
I know this is not the first time this has been mentioned, but the best course for a believer in UFO strangeness would be to encourage UFO skeptics to continue doing the work you need done, of cleaning out the data pool. And perhaps to get better at emulating them in doing that work. Yes, maybe skeptics come across to you as arrogant kill-joys, but that does not mean that when something is shown to be a party balloon, removing that from the data set is not useful to UFO believers trying to make their case just because you dan't like the people who figured it out! And yes, maybe it is frustrating to lose a favorite UFO video or story -- but isn't that better than keeping a report of of a UFO that was just a plane with landing lights on in your data, making it harder to learn anything about the real UFOs you think are in there somewhere?
And would that not extend to noting purveyors of UFO stories who habitually get things wrong, or push false stories, including making sure that this tendency is referenced in the Wikipedia article? Skepticism, even on Wikipedia, is not the enemy of The Truth Being Revealed. But bad data would be...
deirdre
Senior Member
to be fair the vast vast majority are not shown to be. we can give reasons why its likely to be a balloon, or state "i think i see a string".., show videos that prove balloons can indeed move that way etc.
(i know you know all this already, just mostly clarifying the point for believers who might not realize you are talking about the 4 or 5 examples where we can see the balloon clearly enough to be definitive.)
NoParty
Senior Member.
Okay, first, I 100% get your point, and 99% agree with it. Still, the above quote did give me a good belly laugh!
But I have to add, that once the obvious balloons, flares & planes, etc., are moved off the plate...
there not much to do but re-re-re-hash grainy photos from 1933 & 1990...
I'm curious what the assumptions are?
On Wikipedia, one of the patterns I am seeing is where the eye witness testimony is selectively suppressed, or paraphrased inaccurately. For example, Fravor and Dietrich reported in very explicit terms how the object appeared to suddenly accelerate. The Wikipedia article just says they reported it disappeared.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_UFO_videos
In Westall, the witnesses also reported extreme acceleration, but the article doesn't mention it at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westall_UFO
In the article on black triangle UFOs, no mention at all of reports of sudden acceleration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_triangle_(UFO)
The most notable reported observations of the eyewitness are being systematically rephrased, diminished, or deleted.
Should we know what they claim they saw even if it is something fringe? Well, the articles already include partial, and inaccurately revised, descriptions of what they claim they saw. And then "skeptical" explanations are offered that happen to conflict with the very details of the reports that were suppressed. So what is the point? We look at only the data that supports the skeptical conclusion and none of it that doesn't?
How about support for disclosure? Is the assumption you're making the assumption that there is something to disclose in the first place?
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FatPhil
Senior Member.
Road Runner appeared to suddenly accelerate. Everyone who knows anything about animation and perception knows that he actually disappeared.
The fact is "witnesses reported the object suddenly accelerated to high speed", not "the object suddenly accelerated to high speed" (which is the unknown).
Mendel
Senior Member.
The thing is, it's irrelevant. The page already reports that there is considerable variations among accounts. The article is about the sighting, not about the ufo, because ufos are not real until proven otherwise.
says it disappeared
but you still haven't understood "no original resesrch"
yes, because it's relevant, and well sourced
deirdre
Senior Member
read your link
1. its kinda messed up theres more space dedicated to the "explanation" than data about the sighting. but that makes my brain go "hhmmmm".. so a plus for your side.
2. i dont mind Dunnings quote..again a plus for your side, because its really the only thing on the page that makes me want to dig into the details more.
overall i think its typical of what anyone would expect on wiki. and in this case the entry is SO short readers are encouraged to google other sites on the sighting.
Ann K
Senior Member.
Fravor said (many years after the fact):
https://time.com/5070962/navy-pilot-ufo-california-not-from-this-world/External Quote:
Dietrich said:
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/navy-pilot-nimitz-ufo-sighting/External Quote:
They both said it disappeared, so Wikipedia's statement is not incorrect. But each expressed their own conclusions, that's all. There are reams of information, a lot of it repetitive, that are not reported in Wikipedia. The actual words they said may be irrelevant, and may even be misremembered or mis-stated by you, but Wikipedia is intended to be a digest of information, not the National Archives.
Mendel
Senior Member.
To put this very succinctly:
• you want Wikipedia to include "the witnesses said that the UFOs did something that is physically impossible: instantaneous acceleration"
• you don't want Wikipedia to include "Brian Dunning said that the witnesses did something that is psychologically inevitable: fabricating memories"
• the thing you want included proves the thing you want excluded
• the thing you want excluded helps to understand what happened
• the thing you want included does not help to understand what happened
If we consider the purpose of the encyclopedia, and WP:FRINGE, it is clear that they want their readers to understand the mainstream version of the event, and not advocate for the fringe version of the event.
Wikipedia is not the battleground where you fight for your theory, science is. Convince Brian Dunning or other notable scientists that Westall was a real UFO, get it reported in a scholarly publication, and Wikipedia will include it.
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FatPhil
Senior Member.
You can't pretend to get all petty about wording when I used *exactly your own wording* in my response. You can take it as read that whatever wording you were to use, my response would make the identical point, just using your new wording. So there's no point in trying. You're clearly trying to sidestep any counters to your points, but not stealthy enough to get away with such deception.
Mendel
Senior Member.
Even more so because @beku-mant just got banned, apparently.
FatPhil
Senior Member.
Belt and braces never hurts. However, my "please don't" lasts forever, whilst the admins' "you can't" is likely temporary.
deirdre
Senior Member
i dont read what dunning said to mean that.
but not sure why this is being discussed since Mick deleted the example beku gave in response to requests, and then asked us all not to talk about it.<the topic of westall.
Article: Dunning added that, as years have passed, "descriptions of what was actually seen have now become diluted with made-up descriptions by an unknown number of students who didn't see anything, and there's no way to know which is which".[3]
Gaspa
Senior Member.
The assumptions are that there are "known facts that would prove the UFO believers' faith to be correct" being hidden and skeptics want those to be hidden. The idea that skeptics are against "disclosure" assumes that we believe that "the truth is out there" but we don't want to know about it, which is absolutely bonkers.
You describe these "sudden acceleration" reports as "the most notable reported observations". Other people have deemed those "unnecessary details from unrealiable eyewitness testimony" and chose not to include them. That's not suppressing or hiding information. WP editors have no power (or intent) on stopping people from reading about or hearing those out. Anyone who wants to hear their full testimony, there are several places to find them, but WP is not going to be one of them in these cases.
Encyclopedic articles are not meant to include every single detail on every subject. When we edit an article, we have to choose what goes in and what doesn't, and some things get thrown out. And, yes, there is a pro-reality bias in WP, which means the fringe point of view tends to get thrown out more often.
Some people, who have no idea what they're looking at, how large or how far away it is, and might be misremembering, claim they saw the thing accelerating suddenly. Sometimes it gets included in the WP article about the event, and sometimes is doesn't. UFO folks think it's a fundamental thing that might help explain what really happen, but that's their biased POV because they believe something extraordinary is a likely explanation. But they are wrong. And a factual encyclopedia, that is based on reliable sources, doesn't share that belief.
There are skeptical explanations that conflict with these unrealiable claims, sure. And they are more likely to be correct than the claims, which sometimes violates the laws of physics, so we have high confidence that they can't be true.
No, that's the assumption you're making. No one is against disclosure, I just don't go out of my way to demand it because I don't believe there is anything to disclose.
We can talk about how Wikipedia handles Westall. The thead was starting to diverge into JUST discussing Westall, with no reference to Wikipedia.
JMartJr
Senior Member.
Might that not be an inevitable result of people setting up a Wiki-encyclopedia who were trying to make it as accurate and fact-based as possible? That particular complaint reads a bit like "We're upset that what we believe does not have the facts to back it up, and that people are aware of that in making Wikipedia articles."External Quote:
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Gaspa
Senior Member.
It sounds pretty accurate to me, apart from the ending which I don't fully understand what is being said. "Categories established without reference to reliable sources"? Not sure what they mean, or how it relates to the broader point being made.
The part about being biased against challengers to scientific orthodoxy is by design. Wikipedia is supposed to rely on what the most reputable sources say, and to the point that fringe ideas are mentioned, that is done in a way that explains how it relates to the mainstream view and how actual experts view it. This can include explaining why the fringe ideas are wrong and describing them as pseudoscientific, and practitioners/proponents of those ideas consider this label derogatory.
Sometimes the labeling gets more aggressive, like (emphasis added by me):
Homeopathy - WikipediaExternal Quote:
deirdre
Senior Member
i read it to mean that for ex: why are [whoever] labeling something a conspiracy theory, when reputable scientists don't call it a conspiracy theory. if you had to cite a reputable source, then you wouldnt be able to call it a conspiracy theory.
(of course this depends on what people consider a reputable source, i'm guessing skeptics would just cite some writer at the Washington Post or a skeptic magazine saying POV-HIV theory is a conspiracy theory. done and done. ??)
External Quote:
what are you reading as the broader point being made? i read it as: the broader point is biased people with an agenda make the types of mistakes that you would expect biased people with an agenda to make.
Kyle Ferriter
Senior Member.
The OPV-AIDS wikipedia article in question is currently titled 'Oral polio vaccine AIDS hypothesis', and this change was made more than 5 years ago, while the title which included "conspiracy theory" before that was only active for about 3 months, which is maybe a helpful reminder that Wikipedia is not immutably handed down and declared final, it is constantly being modified and built upon. So a valid criticism of one specific edit may be largely irrelevant as other editors later remedied the situation and no such changes have ever been made since.
In terms of UFOs/paranormal, if Wikipedia was expected to allow in any story of someone seeing a thing happen that they thought was weird, it would be overrun. The posting guidelines are a necessity to make the site usable at all.
In terms of UFOs/paranormal, if Wikipedia was expected to allow in any story of someone seeing a thing happen that they thought was weird, it would be overrun. The posting guidelines are a necessity to make the site usable at all.
The author of this cites 4 others as critics raising the issue of 'bias against challenges to scientific orthodoxy', and the author chooses some interesting examples. While these examples are examples of people accusing wikipedia of bias, I don't think they are good examples of unwarranted content decisions on wikipedia.
My sense is that these sorts of complaints at their core are just someone upset that other people don't believe them, and upset to hear any criticism of their ideas, while they feel they should be free to make very very harsh criticism of other people's ideas. For example, Sheldrake may pontificate for hours and write a series of popular books about how "science" is completely broken and science and scientists as a whole are colluding to suppress his ideas, and about how he believes the speed of light is not fixed and how people have proven that telepathy works, but he gets very upset when a wikipedia editor cites someone pointing out a lack of evidence for these ideas. The accusations and criticism are allowed to flow freely in one direction but it's offensive and intolerable acts of suppression when it flows the other way at all.External Quote:
Brian Martin is an emeritus professor at University of Wollongong, Australia and I spent probably too much time skimming his publication history, which includes a number of single-author papers like this one on the subject of scientific orthodoxy.
In his June 14, 2023 blog post "Trans Dilemmas," he talks about his interests:
In most if not all topics he seems to say there should be more dissent involved and less pushback against people with differing opinions.
The problem, though, is that he doesn't seem to like it when people or organizations reach conclusions -- and take action based on those conclusions. (Actions such as requiring vaccinations as a good public health policy, permitting nuclear power pants, or putting fluoride in water.) Like he really, really wants there to be ongoing discussion of the (widely dismissed) theories that the polio vaccination campaign in Africa created AIDS or that vaccines in general cause(d) autism, or the lab-leak theory that Covid-19 was created by Chinese scientists.
In one of his examples about even-handedness in how he introduced "the vaccine debate" in scholarly articles was for the paragraph to have two citations for the claim that medical professions worldwide support vaccination (with no explanation why) and two citations for how "In the face of this medical orthodoxy, a small number of citizens' groups and professionals present a contrary position, arguing that the benefits of vaccination have been overestimated and that there are significant risks to individuals and society, with recorded cases of seriously affected children." That is, the orthodoxy just exists; the dissenters have reasons.
He's not monolithic -- he does write glowingly of both RFK Jr. and Greta Thunberg -- but he does seem to have a strong libertarian-like bias against public action.
Gary C
Senior Member.
Well when I want to find a reliable source, I usually search for peer reviewed articles that have been around long enough to be critiqued, cited, or withdrawn by the relevant community of experts. For example, if beku-mant were really interested in understanding the UFO case in the article he was criticizing, he might have done a search on Google-Scholar to learn about errors in human perception. I did that just now and my top result was this:
"Observers cannot accurately estimate the speed of an approaching object in flight"
Which is exactly what it sounds like. A simple, well laid out scientific paper, written by the principle investigator who did the work, attempting to put some error bars around the degree of inaccuracy we should expect when a UFO eyewitness describes incredible speeds or accelerations.
Source - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042698908006081
I typically don't quote popular articles about a scientific paper unless I can access the original paper in question. That includes articles from the Washington Post.
Which isn't really a controversial position except that our friend B' is convinced it's primarily the skeptics who are biased.
Gaspa
Senior Member.
That doesn't/isn't supposed to happen.
deirdre
Senior Member
and we should be wary of bias?
Gaspa
Senior Member.
In 2020, someone went on the talk page for the article asking if it should be called a hypothesis, given it had been thoroughly debunked decades prior. He claimed it was on the realm of conspiracy theorists, which sounds reasonable.
Another user responded in agreement, and changed the title of the article.
Other users chimed in, saying that isn't a good label because conspiracy sounds intentional, and POV-HIV doesn't propose anything intentional. Some more discussion ensued, and it got changed back after a few months.
My opinion is that the article should be named in whichever manner it is referred to by reliable sources, but sometimes users have other ideas. And, sure, sometimes people make mistakes. This one surely doesn't show any sort of pattern of persistent widespread mistakes within wikipedia, as it was one user and it was short-lived. Very weak example.
deirdre
Senior Member
he said it is happening in regards to labeling categories.
NoParty
Senior Member.
I getcha...and agree.
But I think we both know that for some people, their position (fun UFO stories, being an insider in-the-know, fighting
conspiracies to thwart the faithful) is a helluva lot more fun, & ego stroking, then dull ol' reality. I totally concede that.
Thus, putting effort into an explanation, that one probably doesn't want to know...isn't very appealing.
It makes me think of the great quote by Upton Sinclair (of The Jungle fame):
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
It may not be a salary, in this case...but maybe a significant chunk of one's identity...or just wishful thinking...
deirdre
Senior Member
yea he says his article doesnt show that either and that sociologists could study wiki further.
Mendel
Senior Member.
Everyone is biased.
There's research on this in education, because you can simply give different teachers the same exams to grade, but tell them different things about the background of the students. Turns out that even teachers who are aware of the problem are biased.
The best you can hope for is processes that catch and reduce unwarranted bias.
There's research on this in education, because you can simply give different teachers the same exams to grade, but tell them different things about the background of the students. Turns out that even teachers who are aware of the problem are biased.
The best you can hope for is processes that catch and reduce unwarranted bias.
Not ours, obviously.
Ann K
Senior Member.
"Scientific orthodoxy" generally means that a subject has been very thoroughly studied, and only accepted by scientists as "orthodox" after a rigorous examination of the matter. Unless and until the disproof of a point reaches approximately the same level of experimentation and scrutiny, there is no justification for jumping on that shiny new bandwagon. It's a thing to be studied by many well-qualified people, perhaps for decades, before the original results are supplanted.
It is not "bias" to leave the fringe concepts out in the cold, nor is it "bias" to choose not to give the public a misleading impression. That sort of thing is more suitable for YouTube, not Wikipedia.
John J.
Senior Member.
I think the activities of Wikipedia user Chetsford (see @Giddierone's post #13), who appears to have proposed deleting pages relating to people known for their interest in (and perhaps beliefs about) UFOs are examples of someone with (presumably) a skeptical outlook acting to "chill" discussion and airbrush-out material about (not by) people who might believe that UFOs are exotic craft.
But that is one person, who is not part of GSoW (@Gaspa's post #33), and that person was not successful (at least re. the Wikipedia article on Jenny Randles). @Giddierone played a part in this. People might be more likely to pay attention to changes proposed by Chetsford (or changes made to Chetsford's "targets") in the future. @Gaspa's post #80 relates how issues re. editing by two GSoW-affiliated people have been addressed.
Some years ago I noticed the Wikipedia article on the Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter had been vandalised in a way which ridiculed the claims; this was corrected. Whatever our views on those events, I don't think most people who might call themselves skeptics - if we take that term to mean people who spend some time thinking about unusual claims, but who are critical of extraordinary explanations- would condone such behaviour.
Skeptics and believers* in the context being discussed are members of the public. They have an interest in common- claims of unusual phenomena.
It's a fair bet that the vast majority of adults have some awareness of these claims, and might volunteer an opinion on whether e.g. ghosts or alien visitation are real if asked, so I agree in a very loose sense that
...though the Statistica poll posted by @Gary C (post #76) might indicate that these aren't issues of great concern to most people.
Of the (large?) majority of the public who are not "skeptics" or "believers", many must be aware that (1) some people strongly believe unusual claims that are almost certainly incorrect, and (2) some people are inflexibly resistant to new ideas or findings. After all, there are examples of (1) and (2) in popular entertainment (The X-Files, Doctor Who, various SF films), they will be familiar tropes to many people not otherwise interested in believer-skeptic arguments.
But I would be surprised if there were some significant groundswell of public opinion regarding the credibility of either skeptics or believers- most people just aren't that interested. (Maybe they should be, but that's a different issue).
I'd guess the same is broadly true for regular Wikipedia users (although that population might have different characteristics to the public as a whole); most are perhaps not very interested in unusual claims, but are maybe aware that Wikipedia articles about those claims might contain incomplete, unproven or contentious material, just as articles about "happening" news stories sometimes do.
I don't think there is a controlled or controllable "UFO narrative on Wikipedia", the posting/ content guidelines are transparent, and pretty much anyone who accesses the site can make edits/ add content.
There's nothing to stop anyone who includes a checkable reference to a contemporaneous source from adding that information.
Objectively, it wouldn't change much; it would still be dependent on a claimed eyewitness report. It doesn't make that claim more likely to be an accurate account.
Wikipedia isn't perfect, and I have some suspicions about possible biases/ deliberate abuses (which aren't relevant here), but it is essentially open access, and where people with skeptical views (and, hopefully unconnected, vandals) have made proposals/ edits/ additions that are uncalled for, we have evidence that this is addressed.
*I don't particularly like either term, but we all have a rough idea what they mean in this context and I haven't got any equally concise alternatives.
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