Bishop Hill Wikifun
Jan 11, 2012 Climate: MWP Climate: Sceptics Further to yesterday's post on Wikipedia's Soon and Baliunas article, do go and take a look at the talk page for the article, where the usual suspects are going through agonising contortions over why the allegation - that Chris de Freitas accepted an article that had been rejected by four peer reviewers - should stand, despite the retraction of that claim that Fred Pearce sent me.
Much of this seems to centre around whether I am a reliable source under Wiki rules. This is not a question that bothers me hugely, but I must say, I thought that as a published author in the area, I might carry some weight.
Perhaps more importantly though, given the damaging nature of the allegations for de Freitas's reputation, I would have wanted quite a lot of documentary evidence to support them. If there was even a hint that they were wrong, I would be erring on the side of caution. Each to their own, I suppose.
(As always with Wikipedia, please don't get involved - there are rules against canvassing for support).
Bishop Hill
TerryS in the comments notes that the text of the article has now been changed, and also an ongoing discussion on Jimmy Wales' Wiki page.
Reader Comments (78)
TerryS amazing isn't it! Nothing about his "innovative" use of statistical techniques? Nothing about his interpretations of proxies that did not conform with the views of the experts on those proxies.....etc etc
"on non contentious issues Wiki is very good"
I agree entirely. It's a wonderful resource for definitions of words and principles, and fun to browse for most other things. It's usually pretty obvious when the results are skewed, IMO.
Wikipedia is a great complement to IMDB too. But that's not what it was supposed to be.
Palantir Slightly off topic, but does anybody know why the UEA crowd didn't like the S & B paper?
It was the first real shot across the bows of the original IPCC-blessed Mann Hockey Stick. Dangerously, it showed that LOTS of other peer-reviewed papers supported the MWP pretty widely. Mann shrieked pretty nonstop IIRC.
I believe it may have used treering data which were more likely showing moisture than temperature. But hey, who else did that?
From near bottom of "Compromise" section in Talk:Soon and Baliunas
[30] is the scottishreviewofbooks review
[31] is the Guardian review
I think both have been dealt with here.
Now this should be easy proof for an important point:
The WP "ok" sources can be factually inaccurate, in making allegations of "factual inaccuracy" that are disproven here, yet this place is considered, on the above allegations, to be unuseable.
Richard Drake
Thank you for your statements here. I've put a ref to them over at WUWT - IMHO they restore balance. Thank you for giving firsthand evidence of Jimmy Wales and that he did see the self-evident illogic of four reviewers rejecting a paper that got accepted.
When we can concede where Wales is right, it will surely be much easier to show him where he is, perhaps innocently and ignorantly, mistaken in believing that peer-review is trustworthy and that Climate Science is in a healthy state of open debate.
Jan 11, 2012 at 4:17 PM | John in France:
Absolutely correct, John. As a glutton for punishment I read through the 'Talk' page twice today and after taking in all the circuitous logic and sophisticated reasoning from the likes of Schultz and Souza I kinda missed the naive pedantry of our own omegaman and hengist. S&S are truly quite scary, not to mention incredibly juvenile in their crude attacks on the Bish and Watts. Their comments definitely need a health warning.
Interested spectators may wish to have a look-in at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Soon_and_Baliunas_controversy#Recent_article_revisions.2C_continued_BLP_problems
re an ongoing discussion of what to do with the CG1 & CG2 emails. Arcane wiki-(sort-of) policies apply to use of primary sources -- and are actually (mostly) sensible, but susceptible to manipulation by activists.
His Grace notes:
"As always with Wikipedia, please don't get involved - there are rules against canvassing for support."
Actually, if anyone here wants to get involved at Wikipedia, and has expertise to offer, thy would be most welcome. But I wouldn't start out in the CC area, which is fraught with activists and minefields.
Best for 2012,
Peter D. Tillman
Consulting Geologist, Arizona and New Mexico (USA)
Snotrocket wrote:
"S&S are truly quite scary, not to mention incredibly juvenile in their crude attacks on the Bish and Watts.
Such comments are explicitly forbidden in WP's rules of conduct, and I've asked them to desist.
Peter
Very amused by the "fringe" remarks. Is it possible to be one of the New Statesman's 50 people most important people in the world and still be fringe? Only at Wikipedia!
Bish's admirer -
Stephan Schulz, Dr. rer.nat., Dipl. Inform TU Munchen
who's an Enlish Wiki Rouge Admin and thinks..... "Montford is, at best, a clown"
seems to be this Stephan Schulz, Dr. rer.nat., Dipl. Inform TU Munchen
http://www4.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/~schulz/index.html
I've always wondered why some of the most virulent of the warmist praetorian guard are computer science types (Gavin, Tim Lambert etc) - perhaps they get transported from reality into their models like one of those sci-fi movies.
Herr Dr Schulz is also one of the generation who feel the need to publish every aspect of their personal lives on the interweb (links above) and hence we know that his favourite recreational activity is "fantasy games".
Hmmm................
There's little "hard science" in Schultz's CV and he is apparently supporting free speech and against "fear of repression".
It's perfectly clear who the clown is.
fox
yes interesting
maybe it is because they channel their frustration about all these non-academic non-pal reviewed software programmers who churn out better products (linux, firefox, openoffice..) while they sit helplessly about pondering in how many statements you canprove an equation(!) in an algorithm is correct
he is also an expert in cooking and vegetarian recipes
he must hv so much idle time the poor sucker
TBH I don't understand wiki talk pages/discussion pages/history pages. I did however stumble across this yesterday after reading this post which kind of illustrates why I feel the need to take wiki with a pinch of salt.
Wiki entry for RC. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealClimate)
"The site's contributors are a group of climate scientists whose goal is to provide a quick response to developing stories and providing the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary."
Then on Gavin's GISS page (http://www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/gschmidt/)
"I am a contributing editor to the website RealClimate.org which tries to provide context and background on climate science issues that are often missing in popular media coverage."
Those 2 sentences are so wierdly similar that it suggests to me that the author is common to both. As a result I find it difficult to trust wiki entries which have either a political or biographical dimension for fear that they've all been Connellied (tm).
When someone says something like this:
Surely that should automatically call into question their ability to determine what is NPOV or not? It's hardly neutral language.
Ah Tim - you just reminded me Connelley's another computer maths type isn't he?
They all seem to fit a template - youngish, highly agressive, narrowly educated in a subject completely detached from real world observation - yet maniacally convinced that they alone can understand the physical processes governing the planet.
I think they all came down in pods one very stormy night in the 70's - and they're taking us over.
There's probably a physical sign if you know where to look. I thought it was the funny little beard for a while but Connolley had his back-to-front.
I might ask you guys to consider reading a hard, avant-garde novel...Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. he wrote it in the late 60s and it shows all the things we see from climate science.
Lucy, thanks.
Diogenes - please elaborate
it's too elaborate to try to summarise MM...sorry
one man writes a poem and a colleague claims the poem is all about him..and it spirals into chaos
Perhaps Wikipedia can help
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Fire
Is it true that S&S were 'moderating' on a 'Religion' section of Wiki, and specifically on a tendentious topic involving angels, heads of pins and dancing. Apparently S&S refused to take any references from a fringe document authorised by someone called James Rex because the references were not primary sources.
/sarc
Yes, Connolley is another computer whizz.
I've had visions of him at a console of red flashing lights, programmed by himself, to alert him to unwanted changes in his pet articles. Seriously. He's been such a fast shot in reversions, probably the biggest factor in burning-out dissenters IMO. Oh, and when he got demoted,I reckoned simple, probably passed his techie expertise to sidekick Schultz et al.
I was worried Connolley had exited WP in favour of Google and/or Amazon.
Hey! I have a wikitale as well. In fact, it is a wiksperiment now.
Several months back, inspired by a quote from a wikipage that I'd read in a thread hereabouts, I decided to exercise my right(?) to edit Wikipedia so as to better tell the truth to hoi polloi. My edit radically expanded the definition of the key term that had just been quoted.
I did that initially as a joke, as something that climate doomsday cultist William Connolley and his ilk would have done: rush to the said wikipage to re-define the wikitruth with our latest understanding so as to better educate the masses and cover their own butts at the same time.
Now, I love Wiki. I use it as often as google and find it as helpful. It truly is an indispensable resource. Kudos to all those who created it and those who genuinely try to improve it. Although I fully agree with one of the more incisive criticisms of Wikipedia -that its basic philosophy is more conducive to producing consensus rather than accuracy-, I still care about Wikipedia, and my little edit at the time made me feel guilty as though I'd committed an act of vandalism. I agonised over it. Honestly!
With the passage of time and with more reflection however I've come to think that my cynical joke may well have become the mainstream view in the last few decades, especially with climate science, and that Wikipedia had had the definition wrong all along. Certainly none of my 'peers' who have had the chance to read the said page has considered my editing act as vandalism. Only one peer has raised some objection, a valid one IMHO, that could be satisfied with further elaboration but nothing that advocated the removal of my spanky new re-definition.
Three months and 150 thousand views later (average 50k view per month), my little joke on a wikipage has evolved into a curious experiment. How long is it going to remain under the radar? Will my 'correction' eventually be corrected or be adopted as the consensus view (if it wasn't already the consensus view)? In any case, is it accurate? I don't know the answers to any of these questions.
The wiksperiment is ongoing. I won't disclose yet the entry that's the subject matter of my tale and now your curiosity but I'll try to update the readers if and when we go wikitopical again.
Jimmy and the Wikipedia board really need to put in place rigorous controls on the editing of contentious subjects. This might start with permanent bands on anyone who behaves as an obvious advocate by distorting factual information. A glance at any of the climate related Wikipidia pages shows an overwhelming bias in the presentation of factual information; they just aren't doing what they claim they want to do when it comes to politically contentious subjects. I informed Jimmy that I will withdraw my financial support for Wikipedia unless reasonable editorial controls are put in place. I suggest others do the same.
steveta_uk: "And it has been compared in a serious way against Encyclopedia Britannica and found to have a similar error density."
Indeed, there is no evidence—nor rational—for the idea that allowing a few people in Britain to be the gatekeepers for the Truth would ever produce a less biased product.
Here at least the product can be publicly debated, blatant errors identified, and blatant biases on the part of some editors appropriately pilloried.
That stuff about Wikipedia being as accurate as Brittanica came from a source skeptics might recognise:
turns out it's not true.