Difference between revisions 43515 and 43556 on enwiki

Welcome to Wikipedia! May I call you "24" for short? [[Ed Poor]]
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Some stuff by 24.150.61.63 which still needs checking (I'm reluctant to just delete everything, although (s)he's adding stuff so fast there may be no alternative):
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*[[Blue-Green Alliance]]
*[[Bonobo]]
*[[Conservation movement]]
*[[Eco-villages]]
*[[Environmental movement]]
*[[Evolution of societies]]
*[[Four Pillars of the Green Party]]
*[[Gaians]]
*[[Great ape]]
*[[Greens]]
*[[Jane Goodall]]
*[[Libertarian survivalists]]
*[[Nearctic]]
*[[Neotropic]]
*[[New tribalists]]
*[[Smart growth]]
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  [list way out of date, deleted, click 'user's contributions']
... and more, but I think I'll give up trying to list them. Note that the "This user's contributions" link above actually works (with the usual caveats), despite the fact that the user has no user name.

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the user in question:  you don't seem too "reluctant", you are reversing careful rewrites without reading them apparently in defiance of protocol.

This one I edited first time without knowing the rules:
*[[Four Pillars of the Green Party]]
You are apparently also not distinguishing the generic "Four Pillars" (which may be adopted by any group) from the original FPOTGP as defined by European Green Parties - redirecting one to the other as if they were the same thing.

:I didn't redirect it - look at the [[http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Four_Pillars&action=history history]]. It was 213.253.39.xxx who did most of the work removing your junk. --[[user:Zundark|Zundark]], 2002 Mar 22

If you want to keep playing a game, we'll keep playing a game.  I have no problem with rewrites, they generally improve articles, but I have a big problem with people removing whole articles of relatively uncontroversial stuff that no one else has bothered to define or research at all.  Also with people who assume that just because a political party advocates it, it must be somehow biased or wrong.

Most of the research comes from National Geographic, on the ape material, although it's hard to quote sources since most of it was TV specials with state of the art information.

: I am SURE that there is a good deal of scholarly research that has been published on Jane Goodall, Bonobos, and the like.  My advice to 24.150.61.63 is this: if you would like to develop or contribute to an article in an encyclopedia (I mean, if it is really important to you and you are serious), why not do a little ''research'' rather than just rely on your memory of a TV show or popular magazine?  In general, I would not count on National Geographic specials to be 'state of the art."  Anyway, how would you know -- unless you have done additional research.  And if you have done additional research, please rely on it! SR

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''24.150.61.63 deleted most of the above, and replaced it with the following:''
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Zundark sez: Some stuff by 24.150.61.63 which still needs checking (I'm reluctant to just delete everything, although (s)he's adding stuff so fast there may be no alternative):

*[[Jane Goodall]]
*[[Bonobo]]
*[[Eco-villages]]
*[[Greens]]
*[[Four Pillars of the Green Party]]

Also sez: "24.150.61.63 inserting idiosyncratic non-NPOV ecology-related stuff all over the place" 

and SR sez: "if it is really important to you and you are serious), why not do a little ''research'' rather than just rely on your memory of a TV show or popular magazine?  SR" and 
"I wouldn't rely on National Geographic Specials to be state of the art"

The user in question sez:   *EVEN IF THEY WERE MADE IN 2002*??!?  Field researchers won't leave the field because they want to protect their subjects.  Unlike you I guess, but fine, let's leave motivations *out*...

I am not a "vandal" and don't like that term.  I'm getting used to the process here.  I am not sure I like serious essays being labelled 'junk' by some golfer or geek.

The material in question is generally pretty carefully researched - more importantly, I understand it.  It is you not me who are deleting far more than you have to - and applying a political bias.  If that's for lack of time, fine, I appreciate that and can slow down.

Generally one can tell state of the art information by who quotes it.  I doubt that some it is published at all - for instance anthropologists arguing about why some Great Apes are hominids by the classic definition, etc..

Why don't I wait for this to be published somewhere?  Because they may all be dead first - you'll note I'm not bothering to type in things about Britney Spears or Chandra Levy that I saw on TV... have a sense of priorities, man:  I may get some details wrong, but all told, if wiki readers help prevent an extinction of a misunderstood species... I'm not apologizing for the typos.

That said, there are much less important issues:

The Green Party material you are literally mangling by reversing corrections and explanatory extensions.  The definition of a Green Party is controversial and the Global Greens Charter is certainly not a sufficient definition of it.
If you bothered to go to globalgreens.org you'd see objections to it, and if you lived through the debate between Greenpeace and Green Parties that seems to always get them confused, you'd realize why that needs a section to discuss "non-violence" versus "harms reduction" and can't be simplified.

Frankly, you don't seem too "reluctant", I'd guess you are reversing careful rewrites and whole articles without reading them apparently in defiance of protocol.  [Perhaps they will reappear but if so wiki should say 'this is in rewrite'].  I appreciate you guys are working without an editor, but really... there must be a better way to deal than calling people 'vandals'.

It's not like I don't have a theory of what I'm doing.  Check the entries in the meta defining ethics and NPOV itself.  You might see where I'm coming from and why I think certain things are important and others might not be.  I want my facts straight, but I don't want to see typo-corrections reversed by a clique of self-appointed gurus.  What you need here is a consensus process.

You also don't seem to realize that ecology is a science and defines facts and consensus theory.  

That was a very intelligent comment about "Homonidae" which makes note of the difference between taxonomists and anthropologists (and also primatologists).

Other almost-meaningless details:

I have a big problem with people removing whole articles of relatively uncontroversial stuff that no one else has bothered to define or research at all.  Also with people who assume that just because a political party advocates it, it must be somehow biased or wrong.

You have a body, you live in an ecology, and without both you'd be dead.  So I kind of resent being told that it's "BIASED" to bring up body and ecology issues in an encyclopedia entry, or quote things (like the origin of female breasts) that are not controversial.  Just how long have you dudes been here hacking?
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Zundark sez: [Neartic, Neotropic (really we should just delete this stuff before it gets totally out of hand)] 

I repeat "ecology is a science and defines facts" including Nearctic and Neotropic as the ecoregional names of the North-Central and South American continents.  You are trying to delete the entire science of ecology, Zundark.

That will not work.

:Actually, I didn't mean we shouldn't have articles on [[Nearctic]] and [[Neotropic]]. (They do, however, need to be properly written.) I just meant that we should delete all your stuff as the easiest way of dealing with it for now. It would be great if someone would come along and convert all your stuff into something encyclopedic, but I don't see this happening at the moment. --[[user:Zundark|Zundark]], 2002 Mar 22
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:: I haven't seen Zundark around, so evidently he found an "easier way"...


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OK, the term "undo" should not be confused with the term "delete" but I hear whta you are saying.  I figured this out myself and went mostly to one-liner stub-type articles.  Some, like 'ecology movement', were cut down to that but left senseless.  Now the only thing it says is that they became Greens - but the fact that ecology movements still exist or what they believe is gone...

It's not just a question of having articles on Nearctic and Neotropic, these are new scientific names for ecozones that correspond to continents just like Homo Sapiens is the scientific name for humans.  So scientists going forward are more likely to refer to Nearctic or Neotropic peoples or species than to North and South American, which are colonial names now going out of style... likewise Europe is now considered ecologically aligned with Russia and North Africa while China/Malay is split off from the rest of Asia.

This is a major shift in how people see the world, and I'm not surprised it is surprising to some.  But it's not an attempt to push some personal agenda.

I'm just reporting.

If you want, I can report like a Libertarian or a hardcore Communist, but I'm still going to have to differentiate ecologically-real things like Nearctic from ideologically-made-up things like 'class struggle' or 'property rights'.

That's going to make me sound like a Green.  But that's also what makes a scientist sound like a scientist.

I'd just ask you to look at your own motivations, and why something like Four_Pillars you consider so objectionable in its edited form, while Electoral_Reform is not. 

:My listing an article here doesn't mean that I object to it. It just means that the article needs to be checked. [[Electoral Reform]] is not listed because I hadn't even noticed it. (However, I'm not going to add it now, because it looks like 64.26.98.xxx and 213.253.39.xxx have dealt with it. You could try doing something useful by moving it to [[Electoral reform]], which is where it should be.) --[[user:Zundark|Zundark]], 2002 Mar 22

I'm sure you don't want me digging through every entry to find ideological points of view that don't reflect modern scientific ideas of body and ecology, so we have to find some middle ground here somewhere.

Biosafety has three definitions:  one in agriculture, one in medicine, and one in trade.  I can't explain the three meanings without some attempt at unifying them, and I can't unify them without some reference to ecology and the body.  That's going to make me sound like a Green, because only Greens can do this... unfortunately.  Biosafety and biosecurity don't make sense if your brain is addled by ideology.  They make perfect sense if you view your self as body wandering around in an ecology.

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:''only Greens can do this... unfortunately''
:''Biosafety and biosecurity don't make sense if your brain is addled by ideology.''

Oh dear, we are now getting into the world of 'only we can see the real truth; you are 'addled by ideology'. Unfortunately, that way lies the [[tinfoil hat]]. 

You may be the One True Messiah, and we may all be disastrously wrong -- but we don't believe that yet.

Our minds are open, truly: ''if you can convince us that what you are saying represents the real world, please''.

Please, attempt to reason with us with [[argument]], backed up with real-world [[evidence]]:generally quoting credible sources helps.

Otherwise, we have no reason not to believe that you are a lone nutter. [[user:The Anome|The Anome]]
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24.150.61.63 (may I call you 24?)  I'm a card-carrying [[Green Party]] member, and I have to tell you, I really think you're going about making your points in a way that's more likely to get them deleted than listened to. May I suggest [[wikipedia: Wikipedia policy]] and [[wikipedia: Wikipetiquette]] for starters?  This is an evolving society all its own, and it has developed certain standards of interaction based on the Founding Fathers Larry and Jimbo. ;)  

We don't ask you to change your opinions, or even to not include information. However, there's a definite consensus againt including viewpoint ''as fact'', rather than "facts about opinions" as the [[NPOV]] has it.  Certainly you have your own paradigm through which you view all these events; I might even agree with you on some of it.  However, you cannot demand that this encyclopeda adopt your paradigm. It has its own: the attempt to portray a "balanced" summary of the current state of human knowledge.  

It also has a fair number of academic and scientific sorts working on it, which means that academic standards on references and scientific rules of evidence are quite often invoked when a point is disputed. Luck to you in future contributions! [[user:-- April|-- April]]
:I agree, April, that 24 can be damaging to his own cause, while Zundark is there like a bull in a china shop at the other end of the teeter-totter.  The true NPOV is likely somewhere in between.  [[user:Eclecticology|Eclecticology]]
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::somewhere between Natural point of view, and the current French or German mass media view maybe.  


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24 here:  I don't object to a single blessed word of this.  In fact I'm very pleased that you're on the case.  It shows there is a consensus process here, that it's not unanimous (i.e. always blocked until a dictator shows up), etc.

I'm also pleased that "academic standards on references and scientific rules of evidence are quite often invoked when a point is disputed."  That's as it should be.

However, most of the issues with my writing have been with regard to ecology, which is where I made reference to these standards from day one and even went out on a limb to ensure that political material supposedly based on ecological theory was using the right words to describe the right thing in advance of some Green group agreeing on it.  In my experience if no one does that we never see it done... if you're a Green Party member, you know how many irrational objections block things.

Now, I don't want to make work for people who don't have a feel for the material, I'm pleasantly surprised at how many people are on the case here, and I'm willing to make a profound and detailed case for why these things are defined as they are - each of them.  I'll use the "talk" feature for that as things come up.

I'm in a rush for other reasons - I've been working on this material for a long time, I'm going to lose online access for a while, and I would like to make sure that there's a starting point for genuine experts in each topic to correct, edit, update, etc..

If you know anything about ecology or Green politics, you know that it's a movement of specialists, and that people who can write such articles in plain language are rare.  People who can actually write neutrally are even rarer.

Maybe I'm not one of them.

So, here's what I can do:  First, I can explain exactly how I define neutral - I already did that in the NPOV article itself, and differentiated a thing called "natural point of view" which pretends not to rely on human adult type socialization.  I didn't say I could do it - I said it exists.

I realize there's a bit of a gap when "body and environment concerns" doesn't parse...

Also, I can explain exactly how I see ethical balances between the "neutral" and "natural" view - and what moral foundation they rest on.  The "Simple View of Ethics and Morals" was good when I found it - but now it's really the best short guide to the subject anywhere.  I encourage you to read it and see if you agree.  If not, we should have that discussion before we have this one.

I'd like to help you get to 100,000 articles, hell I could write 10,000 myself, but first you have to trust that I'm at least more right than wrong, and that the way I write these things will bring in more expert helpers than just leaving them blank or incompletely defined.
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Maybe it's just me, but i think i don't like 24, his attitude to wikipedia and way of writing (for example in his revision of [[NPOV]]).  [[user:szopen|szopen]]

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I did that fairly early on, in response to some outright censorship - some of which is documented above.  Last I saw it was reversed.  It's not at all clear what is the central arbiter of policy here, since there's no single editor.  I'd appreciate a discussion of that.

I don't give a damn who likes me, my writing, or my attitude.  However, I am here to cooperate, and there's no point denying that one of the things that I'm here to change is the idea that NPOV always means compromise with socially prevalent errors.

:We are here to report on society, not to judge what its errors are and certainly not to attempt to change those errors. If you have a political agenda, which is pretty clear to the most casual observer, you may want to consider pushing this agenda in other forums. [[user:AxelBoldt|AxelBoldt]]

::all I want to push is you - back into the math which you understand, and out of the politics and philosophy that you don't.  Everyone has a political agenda, and mine is reflected in my choice of subjects, and sources, not in advocacy.  Among sane people, the body and its surrounding ecology are real, and mathematics and physics are fantasies that create nuclear weaponry somehow.  In a safe happy world we'd likely abandon the math and physics and spend more time on dance or gardening.  The errors of US or EU society are not the errors of real human society, which they have lost.  Accordingly it is normal that you would see "a political agenda" in something that reduced your own relative power.
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I can prove to the satisfaction of any expert that "natural point of view" and "neutral point of view" are not the same thing. 

:That's obvious. Your chosing the same initials NPOV for your unpopular policy is a deliberate attempt to muddy the water. [[user:AxelBoldt|AxelBoldt]]

::It's plenty popular with the six billion people on Earth who see themselves as victims of the US mass media and its true believers.  Sorry to disappoint, Ax baby, but "natural law" and "natural sciences" preceded "neutral" by a lot.
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The baby brother of these arguments is the ones about Eurocentrism, the middle brother is the arguments about dominator culture and mathematics, adn the big brother argument is that someone always knows what's "Natural" better than you do.

So, every new entry to wikipedia is going to change its political and ethical tone.  That's life.

So, you don't like me, and maybe I don't like you.  Fine.  For this to work, you'd have to say *why*, or how you think my work biases wikipedia.

Go ahead.  The floor is yours.
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You don't like me, i don't like you, at least one thing settled. I am just one of many contributors to wikipedia - i would say one of probabably less important, but officially none here is more or less important. You can safely ignore me (and others). I know one person who is constantly ignoring anything what i (and at least five or six different other persons) am trying to told her.

Why i don't like you? Quite simple.
:"The "Simple View of Ethics and Morals" was good when I found it - but now it's really the best short guide to the subject anywhere."

I've read it. I must say this entry _is good_. But i would hesitate to call it the best. And definetely i would hesitate to call it the best if i would write it. Moreover, simple conclusion one take from reading that article is that ethics in fact do not exist.
I don't like label "most societies consider some acts as bad for society". Most people consider some acts as bad, period.

While much good can be told about simple view of ethics (Although now it is not simple view), i was really confused when i read your contribution to NPOV. Maybe it is because i am not native English speaker - therefore youcould treat me as equivalent of four year child to whom you are trying to explain something - but i considered one point as being direct attack on one person, and, instead of contributing to general policy of wikipedia, being direct answer to some problem which should be discussed elsewhere on talk pages - and last points i understand as you are trying to convince that in fact there is no neutral point of view and one should not care about everything all others write and agreed to.

And others articles are too overloaded with eco-newspeach. I was born in communist country and similar speeches i've read before only before 1989. Eco-this, eco-those, just like pre-1989 everything was class struggle and efect of natural history processes.
[[user:szopen|szopen]]
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actually, I am starting to like you a bit.  ;-)

OK, here's what I've done.  The stuff you didn't like in NPOV is now in [[natural point of view]] where it doesn't pretend to be policy.  I should have done that from the start.

Second, I don't deny that you have the right to claim certain things as being morally absolute - including moral relativism if you want - and I don't pretend to understand the actual life of someone ni Poland,, and I sure don't intend to tell you what your body means or what ecology is.  Still less its political consequences.

But I hope we dont disagree that we are both breathing, drinking water, etc., and have a certain shared bodily interest in keeping those things going.  That there *is* some kind of natural point of view that we share by both being human.

Third, where I draw the line:  I'm not responsible for other people's abuses of "eco-speak".  I am more careful than most other writers about atton political sciciences, but I cam not going to pretend that I believe that primate extninction isiinction doesn't deeply disgust me etc. - I am going to find references that make a point of that , which are increasingly easy to find.

Fourth, ethics is what we are doing right here right now:  hashing out our differences to de-escalate them so they don't lead to bigger conflicts, side-taking, and the like.

So, it exists, but it isn't a matter of me imposing a moral point of view on you.  In fact my idea of ethics *is* the Four Pillars and the consensus process that they represent.

It wsa necessary for me to update some of that other material just so that I'd be able to go back and make clear that this is not just a list of four idealistic goals, but the specification of a process tthat I see as scientific and rigorous as mathematics or physics.

Perhaps even strong enough to replace peer review, trust in particle physics, representative democracy, etc., although I'm not claiming anyone is anywhere near that today.

Is that like Marx or Hegel and the end of history?  Yes.  Do I share the willingness to take shortcuts by violence?  Not at the moment.  But talk to me after a Great Ape is extincted in the wild, and see what I say then.  Everybody can change their mind about life and their place in it.

In general, I write articles that strongly understate and even conflict directly with my view on something - you can tell my politics from *what I write aboout* rather than *how I write about it*.

I think that's the socially acceptable way to proceed... don't you?

BTWI like the "Orange Alternative" and I wish it was here at the moment...;-)


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This is to thank TheAnome, AxelBoldt, szopen and Ed Poor for recent exchanges, all of which have been enlightening.  And of course for the articles which get better as a result of your critiques.