User talk:Vfrickey/Archive 21

I recently committed the error of giving people on both sides of a controversy over politicizing which sources are reliable enough to use in wikipedia a soapbox to use on this page. So, I archived everything.

A discussion of the issues and my thoughts on them can be found on my user page

Snopes talk

Hello, I don't know if I am talking to the right user or not. I am looking for loupgarous; when I clicked on the loupgarous link, it led me here. Anyways, I have recently engaged in Snopes talk 'Daily Mail expose' section. I saw your username there.

In addition to the Forbes article, I am trying to cite The Week article to talk about the transparency concern of Snopes.

Would you mind coming back and participating in the talk please? I would appreciate your input. SCIense (talk) 05:13, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

I'm the guy you're thinking of, but the reason I am taking a pause from that discussion is the unwillingness of secondary and tertiary sources to cover the story of how Mikkelson slants his "fact checking" in snopes.com. Without good sources, editors can go there, read things like the inclusion of the "Western White House" attack on George W. Bush in an article alleged to be evaluation of the "A Tale of Two Houses" viral Email comparing and contrasting GW Bush and Al Gore's use of energy and care for the environment for themselves, and any conclusions they might reach are WP:OR. Some editors looked squarely at that page and did WP:OR of their own defending it on the snopes talk page, but as long as they control the consensus, that makes no difference, either.

Until we have a good secondary source (and there's no chance of getting the Daily Mail article critical of the slant in snopes.com past the gauntlet of people who like it that way won't see past the Daily Mail's reputation and the guidance on WP:Potentially unreliable sources - also known as WP:PUS - not to treat it as usually reliable - and their decision is understandable, you have to wade through a ton of sleaze to get to the valid reporting in that Daily Mail article), we're stuck with the consensus.

And, unfortunately, consensus is as good as it gets - even though we have admins who are willing to wade in and "adjust" a consensus by discounting the votes of some editors for reasons which may or may not hold water, so apparently consensus is how we make decisions until an admin decides it's not. I'm going to wait, periodically look for secondary sources on snopes.com not mentioned in WP:PUS critical of how they check for facts with a partisan fact-checking staff, and when those sources appear, we can get going.

But until then, it's not worth getting into fights on that talk page we'll just lose - and lose credibility while we're doing it. See what I'm saying? Life's too short to spend time arguing with those won't see the obvious. loupgarous (talk) 20:20, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

OK, thank you for your advise. I agree that the Daily Mail article is not a good source, however, I had thought other people would be reasonable enough to recognize the transparency concern raised by the Forbes and The Week articles.

Tell you the truth, I am not familiar with the "A Tale of Two Houses" reference. I've always thought that Snopes was a neutral fact checking site: nothing more, nothing less. Recently, I've heard from someone on the internet saying how Snopes is untrustworthy. So, I've decided to fact check his claim, which led me to the Forbes article and this Wiki article. I've also heard many people saying how Wikipedia is liberally biased and thus untrustworthy, too. Unfortunately, the unwillingness of other editors to compromise, in their unreasonably effort to prevent any hint of text that may portray Snopes in a negative light, only corroborates those people's allegation. If the transparency concern cannot be even mentioned on this so-called public-editable Wikipedia due to the liberal censorship, I doubt that any other liberal media would pick up the story, especially if Facebook pressures them. That implies that the trustworthiness of Snopes is worse than it is, and although Daily Mail is not a good source, in this case, they may have gotten it right.

It looks like there are a lot of partisan people who don't like Snopes. They will no doubt continue with their accusations on the internet. And when people like me notice a lack of the coverage, just as North Korean media lacks any criticism of their leader, we will put two and two together. At least I've verified why people's don't trust Wikipedia. I'm sorry, but I will be recommending others not to trust Wikipedia and Snopes, too. Good luck and take care. SCIense (talk) 04:54, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

I strongly disagree with you that wikipedia as a whole has a liberal bias. I also disagree that people don't trust wikipedia. It's used as a resource more and more often by all sorts of people. And most of our editor base is why - we don't let crap remain up on the wikipedia project for long, if we can help it. The snopes.com article is a rare exception.

There are articles in which some editors may be taking a WP:OWN attitude, and those articles take the favored slant of the people curating them (usually enough of them that they never lose a consensus discussion). That is what I see happening on our article on snopes.com - not that people are necessarily pushing a political agenda or even consciously violating WP:OWN or any other guideline. These editors are actually pretty reliable - MjolnirPants has done really good work on many articles.

It's a just a shame that the only articles critical of Snopes are on WP:PUS. This makes normally thoughtful editors think (understandably) that there's no case for the idea that snopes.com slants its reporting on disputed stories in the Internet. In fact, it's a shame that Mr. Mikkelson decided to abuse the trust of his readers in the way he's done on too many articles in snopes.com. If not for that, snopes.com could be a valuable resource, but it really isn't if it can't be trusted, every time on every story.

Forbes.com shouldn't even be on WP:PUS, because even if bloggers. not staff write some of those articles, these are bloggers who are well-known in their professions - Kalev Leetaru, the guy who called Mikkelson up and asked him what was up with the Democratic party activists on his fact-checking staff, isn't some Breitbart fanboy in his mom's basement - he's notable enough for his own article here, as the Yahoo! Fellow in Residence of International Values, Communications Technology & the Global Internet at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. But, again, the other editors curating our article won't look past the guidance (not a hard and fast prohibition, and there are very few of those) on WP:PUS to be careful which articles on Forbes.com to use. It makes me wonder how Forbes.com got on WP:PUS to begin with, and I just haven't looked that far back on the WP:PUS page history.

The founder of liberalism (what we'd consider libertarianism now), Edmund Burke, once said "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." If you give up on wikipedia because a relative few editors succeed temporarily in using the consensus process to push their political agenda (liberal, conservative or another agenda still) in an article, you're not helping. You're letting the people who abuse consensus win. That's not an option for me. loupgarous (talk) 14:52, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

You guys keep talking as if it's a given that snopes is full of BS, and discussing the implications of that. That is a really poor assumption. The evidence does not support the claim that snopes is unreliable. There are accusations of bias (which, notably, all stem from unreliable sources, a fact which is less "unfortunate" and more "telling"), but there is no evidence of snopes getting it wrong on a regular basis, or any evidence of snopes getting it wrong and refusing to correct it even once. One would think there would be at least one case in which snopes disagrees with the rest of the fact checkers, but nope.

The worst I've seen is a notable reporter doing the same thing you guys are doing: trying to twist the facts to suit the preconceived notion that snopes is unreliable. Hence we end up with that forbes article: a long-winded diatribe that doesn't actually level any specific criticisms at snopes beyond "They don't operated the way I expected them to", and "they might have political opinions". Never once does the author entertain the notion that maybe the way he thinks fact checkers should operate isn't the best (or even the only viable) way for fact checkers to operate. Never once does the author entertain the notion that someone can have political opinions and still be objective. Which is, I'm sorry to say, an assumption I see coming from the political right quite often. I'm not sure what's more worrying: The fact that there seems to be a concerted effort to undermine the credibility of one of the few sites on the web where one can rely on the fact that everything they say is true, or the fact that two Wikipedians are sitting here discussing how to get around our RS policy in order to make this article reflect WP:THETRUTH. I'm sorry to say this, but if your views don't line up with reality, your views are wrong. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 16:13, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

@MjolnirPants:Please stop conflating what I have to say with what other people have to say. Here, I said "In fact, it's a shame that Mr. Mikkelson decided to abuse the trust of his readers in the way he's done on too many articles in snopes.com. If not for that, snopes.com could be a valuable resource, but it really isn't if it can't be trusted, every time on every story." And I stand by that statement.

I also told SCIense what other editors on the article's talk page told him - to cease further discussion until persuasive sources not on WP:PUS can be cited to show the pattern of partisan comment in snopes.com's fact-checking. I'm not finding such sources yet, and it's only reasonable to stop arguing the matter until such sources can be found. How's that "discussing how to get around our RS policy"?

It's also reasonable to comment when, as in the "Accuracy" section of the article, the Web site's own proprietor is cited for most assertions made in that section. Come on, Mjolnir, when do we let anyone else tell readers in one of our articles how objective he is without proper weighting?

Finally, you stopped talking about the article or what I actually said on this page a while back and made a number of ad hominem comments about me, accusing me of "discussing how to get around our RS policy in order to make this article reflect WP:THETRUTH." If you can prove that, take me to WP:AN/I and make your case. I did the exact opposite - I counselled SCIense to stop arguing his point until WP:RS sources could be found to persuade other editors curating the page.

You seem to have a bad case of the attitude counselled against in WP:OWN (See bullet point five under "Actions", WP:OWNBEHAVIOR). It's driving you to ignore real issues with that article. Right now, the "Accuracy" section is an embarrassment to wikipedia - you are defending citing someone on how objective he and the other workers on his Web site are, without proper weighting. Primary sourcing is allowed, but only with proper weighting. loupgarous (talk) 16:59, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

Nomination of Wikipedia:Churnalism for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the essay Wikipedia:Churnalism, a page you have made significant contributions to, is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Churnalism until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the page during the discussion, including to improve the page to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the page. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 23:10, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

• N.b. WP:CHURN was moved to my user space. I added a link in the essay's see also section to User:Vfrickey § Politics and reliable sources, as I find the content on your user page to be interesting. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 23:27, 13 August 2017 (UTC)
  • Thanks. I would have fought deletion of WP:CHURNALISM harder, but WP:Canvassing against things like that and the AFD request I initiated for our article "Ruggero Santilli" is so efficient that I can't afford to spend time trying to counter it any longer. It's in the class of things like my proposed article "Kenneth Mahood" which was arbitrarily refused by the same reviewer over 15 times - I must now regretfully consider those activities wastes of time.
  • The wikipediocracy's fine with abuse of consensus-building by cliques of editors to enforce preferred political narratives, so... <action: shrugs>. Wikipedia can believe it has a healthy consensus process, but when even Jimbo publicly admits the project slants left, that's like believing in Bigfoot. loupgarous (talk) 09:01, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

Please update your signature

Your account name is "Vfrickey" but your signature is "loupgarous", very confusing (seen at Talk:Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections/GA1). Perhaps you changed names and forgot to update? — JFG ^talk 06:05, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Why should I "update my signature"? It's been "loupgarous" on wikipedia since 2003. Please review wikipedia policy WP:UI and WP:SIG#CustomSig. WP:SIG#CustomSig says "A customised signature should make it easy to identify the username, to visit the user's talk-page, and preferably user page".

The fact we're having this discussion shows you located my user talk page with no difficulty, so that guideline has been met. The code in my signature contains my username and always has.

I don't understand what you're confused about. I'm not changing my signature, however.

Feel free to complain to an admin if that's a problem. loupgarous (talk) 07:48, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Well, the review page started with: Reviewer: Vfrickey, and the first review comment was signed "loupgarous", so your use of a nickname confused me, and I thought it may be a mistake. No worries. Glad to meet you. — JFG ^talk 08:27, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Same here, sorry for the testy response. Best wishes. loupgarous (talk) 22:55, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Please be cautious

"That would be the lady you all burn incense to."

Perhaps you were attempting to be humorous but that comes very close to a personal attack against the other editors in that conversation. That is not a good idea. Focus on content, not contributors, and remember that Wikipedia is not a forum or a social media site. That applies even to the reference desks. Thank you. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 01:51, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for taking this admonition to my talk page. That comment was, indeed, jocular in nature. I see that instead of making that comment, I ought to have realized I was expected to confine myself to matrers of content. Perhaps the posts preceding mine misled me to think that particular reference desk was allowing extended political discourse and demolition of political views opposed to one side of controversies surrounding Hillary Clinton. At first I responded responsively to the OP's question laying out both sides of the controversy.

One of the other posters responed to my comments with a tu quoque comment of no relevance to the OP's question regarding Donald Trump, about whose criminal activity the OP did not ask. Another editor addressed my comments as "boring" in two consecutive posts of hers. So, yes, I made a joking comment along the same lines.

Were the other editors responding to that question admonished about comments that could be construed as personal attacks or being OT and argumentative? Examples of that would be

The IT person(s) who configured the device(s) she used to email from (and bought and installed the server) made a dumb decision. Boring! If you wanna criticize a Clinton I'd recommend starting with Bill. Poveglia (talk) 02:35, 29 August 2019 (UTC) She hired someone to break the page-long exposition of her legal responsibilities to safeguard information that came into her possession when she processed in as Secretary of State. She signed a form promising not to do what she did - and it was her responsibility to keep that information safe and behind Federal firewalls. Especially the Top Secret/Special Access Program stuff that could have been human source intel. NOT boring when a host nation arrests one of your sources because they know where the TS/SAP information came from that someone picked off your unsecured home-brew server. Nice whataboutism, though. Let me guess. Bill made her neglect her custodial responsibility over Special Access Program data? Guy's a regular Devil in a Blue Dress. --loupgarous (talk) 02:51, 29 August 2019 (UTC) Yawn. Poveglia (talk) 03:21, 29 August 2019 (UTC) It was rather ironic that Trump was attacking Hillary for placing emails where they theoretically were more likely to be hacked by foreign entitires, while at the same time encouraging foreign entity Wikileaks to hack those very emails. SinisterLefty (talk) 03:34, 29 August 2019 (UTC)I am not a fan and I would never vote for her (or her husband) if she would be a politician in my country. That hasn't stopped me pointing out the facts tho. You have not provided evidence of "serious diplomatic incompetence" and "a big body count". If you have some, then Fox News will love to hear all about it. If they publish the evidence you think you have we can include it in the article. If not, then having a political debate is pointless. You are not going to convince anyone and you are not going to be convinced by anyone. So why argue? Poveglia (talk) 22:36, 29 August 2019 (UTC) p.s. Sinister is Latin for the direction "left", so SinisterLefty is LeftLeft. Seems unlikely that you and him are going to convince eachother. -

I can see where I and the other editors allowed ourselves to be sidetracked into not responding strictly to the OP's question.

In any event I now will stick to answering OTs questions and confining my engagement with other editors strictly to matters of content. Thanks for your feedback. -loupgarous (talk) 03:33, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

I am an editor who has advocated for the abolition of Wikipedia's reference desks because of this type of conversation, which does nothing to improve the encylopedia. Consensus did not go my way, although a significant minority of active editors are very concerned about the refdesks. When things get heated, the best course of action is to de-escalate and disengage. The comment I quoted at the beginning of this thread is the subject of this discussion, and my purpose here is to ask you to be cautious, which seems reasonable to me under the circumstances. No more, no less. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 04:02, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, Cullen. I can see your point. I'm editing Reference Desk:Science right now. I'm noticing the ratio of information to conversation is lower than it ideally ought to be, and I was an offender in that regard. I'm going to be more disciplined in the future, hopefully as an example to others. What others do is between them and the project. --loupgarous (talk) 04:36, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

Thank you very much. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 04:57, 31 August 2019 (UTC)