Forum Talk:Content

Help system	All recent posts	Back to top	Contact Administrators	Archives
Content issues Discussion on all aspects of content and content policy, including inclusionism, audience, original research, neutrality and copyediting

Pages: Content • Governance and Policy • Style • Management • Technical Issues • Requests for Help • Competitors and Press • Archived Boards

Archives

1, 2

Note

The first two threads below started on a user Talk page and have been moved here on request. John Stephenson (talk) 11:49, 4 December 2022 (CST)

Could you please explain...

I got email advisories today that you deleted several article I started:

recently deleted

page	when	log entry	question
Steinberg Award	2022-11-28 08:48	promotion of sympathy towards criminal	This Steinberg series of awards has annual winners. I started articles on multiple awardees, including Eboni Booth, Jeff Augustin, Ike Holter, Clare Barron, Haruna Lee, Paola Lázaro. Are they also at risk of deletion?
Harold and Mimi Steinberg National Student Playwriting Award	2022-11-28 08:46	promotion of sympathy towards criminal
Steinberg Emerging Playwrights Award	2022-11-28 08:42	promotion of sympathy towards criminal
9 Circles	2022-11-28 08:39	no explanation for this deletion was offered...	The deletion log entry contains the first couple of hundred bytes of the article - not an explanation as to why it was deleted
Nikolas Cruz	2022-11-01 08:13	by policy, not encouraging articles describing people who commit atrocities or mass murders
Steven Dale Green	2022-11-01 08:11	Copied from Wikipedia: by policy, not encouraging articles describing people who commit atrocities or mass murders

Can topics, themselves, be biased? What does it mean to "promote sympathy towards criminals"?

Way back in September 2005 I had only made about 2000 wikipedia edits. I had never encountered a wikipedia administrator, and I was unaware of the wikipedia's deletion policies and procedures. Over the previous six months I had started stubs on a small handful of the individuals who were being held in Guantanamo. At that time it was US policy to keep their identities a secret - not even telling their families.

Then, all of sudden, four articles I started were nominated for deletion. One nominator's sole justification was the two letters "NN", and he declined to answer my request for an explanation as to what that meant.

Another person asserted that the topic of Guantanamo was "inherently biased", and could only serve for "America-bashing".

I thought about that one all afternoon. I concluded that topics are not, in and of themselves, biased. I concluded the only thing that can be biased was how we covered them.

I concluded that there was no topic so controversial that good faith contributors couldn't agree on the wording of an article about it that everyone agreed measured up to the standards of neutrality, verification, authoritative sources, provided everyone tried hard enough. I committed myself to the extra effort to measure up to those standards, whenever I tackled a controversial topic.

I am really surprised you characterized the articles I wrote on the Steinberg Awards as "promoting sympathy towards criminals". The Steinbergs, like Pullitzer, like Nobel, like the Motion Picture Academy, created a competition that grants awards to promote works of art.

Consider Schindler's List - a highly admired work of art. Yet Oskar Schindler, the protagonist, employed slave labor. He corruptly bribed government officials. The movie doesn't try to be neutral. It portrays him as a hero, because he made sacrifices, in the end, and he saved lives.

But someone else could have made a film that portrayed Schindler as a pure villain, and his saving of lives as motivated purely by cynicism.

You deleted the articles on the Steinberg awards. I am guessing that this is because they awarded Bill Cain an award, and, among his works was his play inspired by the Steven Dale Green case. Well, would you delete an article on the Academy Awards because Oscars were awarded for Schindler's List?

Your deletion log entries refer to a policy. I scanned your revision history, to see if you had drafted policy on when and how articles should or should not cover criminals. I didn't find anything.

Consider Alfred Dreyfus, convicted on innuendo, racism, and forged evidence, he spent decades imprisoned on Devil's Island, prior to his eventual exoneration. If someone tried to write a neutral article about him, during the period between his conviction and his exoneration, would this policy require its deletion? He was officially a criminal, then.

In many wikipedia discussions I argued that an article was neither a punishment or a reward. Sometimes the person arguing for deletion was some variation of "but Joe is basically a good person, they don't deserve to have stuff that makes them look bad talked about like this..." Alternately the deletion proponent would say some variation of "but Joe is basically a bad person, they shouldn't be rewarded with an article..." Articles are neither punishments or rewards. Individuals or topics become candidates for articles when reliable sources write about them. Period. If we are writing neutrally then the article is neither a hagiography or demonization.

What about Richard Jewell, the heroic security guard at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta? FBI director Freer ruined his life, by naming him as the prime suspect in that bombing. Director Freer implied the security guard wanted to be a hero so badly that he planted a bomb that he would later discover. Most press coverage was unfair to him. As I am sure you remember, more than half a decade later he was definitively cleared, when an anti-abortion kook, who mainly bombed abortion clinics, turned out to be the actual bombing. Jewell had been a bona fide hero, who saved dozens of lives.

The extremely unfair demonization of Jewell took place before there was a wikipedia or citizendium. I used to think that, if they had been around, a truly neutral article about Jewell would have helped to cool the hysterical leaping to the conclusion he was guilty. And, if Freer's innuendoes had contained a kernel of truth, a neutrally written article would still have served the public good, in helping to prevent an over-reaction.

Yes, there are ugly things in the world, like mass-murderers. I too am not that interested in supporting detailed coverage of murderers, where there is nothing more to their story than that they were murderers. But while Steven Dale Green seems to have been a simpleton, who couldn't finish high school, and who racked up some misdemeanor crimes, prior to enlisting, he is worth covering because he became central to other issues. I tried to explain this when we discussed him before. Scholars have cited his case in other contexts. I read an academic paper who cited his case when discussing the policy of not allowing the openly gay to serve in the military. The author argued that if the military had not been barring openly gay individuals from serving they would not have had to lower their standards to admit guys like him. Other scholars cited his case when discussing that lowering of standards - admitting dropout and criminals. I suggested then that the other wider issues his case was entagled with made it worthwhile to cover him, when it wouldn't be interesting or worthwhile to cover a murderer who was simply a murderer, and had never been covered as anything more than a murderer.

Wikipedia's COATRACK essay and wikipedia's notion of DUE WEIGHT

The wikipedia has a widely read essay known as COATRACK. It is often treated as if it were a policy, when it is only an essay. And those citing it routinely ignore its actual advice when citing it in deletion discussions.

The essay warns about articles whose first sentence, or first paragraph, says the article is about one thing, generally an actually notable topic, but then quickly shifts to covering something else. One of the colorful examples cited was "wongo juice".

The advice of that essay that is routinely ignored by those who cite it in deletion discussions, is that it never recommended deletion as a solution the problem of a contributor hi-jacking an article to talk about something else. Its advice was that, if the underlying topic of the article was notable the solution would be to trim back, or maybe even entirely trim out, the paragraph(s) that were really talking about something else

I don't have those Steinberg Award articles in front of me. But I am sure I didn't start talking about them, only to shift over to promoting Steven Dale Green. I drafted those in August. I don't remember whether I mentioned Steven Dale Green, by name, in the portion of those articles that mentioned Bill Cain. But, if I had, surely it was only a sentence or two. How could that justify the deletion of two whole articles?

Those who ignored what the COATRACK essay actually advised also ignored WP:DUE, a link to a subsection of the Wikipedia policy on neutrality. What I generally concluded was that the passages I had included in articles that triggered those COATRACK complaints, because they touched on something else, were short enough to comply with the DUE portion of NPOV. Topics are inter-related, and that means articles should mention related topics, and link to them, and, sometimes that requires a brief passage of coverage of that other topic, to provide context.

If you thought I went beyond that, in 9 circles, or the articles on the Steinberg awards, I suggest your choices included: (1) voicing your concern first, possibly on Talk:9 circles, on Talk:Steinberg Award, on User talk:George Swan, or via email; (2) shortening, or maybe even eliminating the specific passage(s) that triggered your concern, and then leaving an explanation on the talk page.

Given that there was no warning how would I know what policy I violated, so I could know how to avoid violating it somewhere else? George Swan (talk) 15:23, 28 November 2022 (CST)

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF RESPONSE: We shouldn't have articles on the lives of people who are *only* known for taking life

Mass murderers do not deserve fame or to have an encyclopedia article. This is known for encouraging more people to commit outrageous crimes in hopes of becoming famous. There exists on your Talk page this thread in which I discussed with you that I'd like to remove the first mass murderer article you had imported and expressing my distaste for it. Neither article placed any emphasis on victims and did not even name them. You asked for three months to rework the article and change its emphasis. But then as a result, you also created another murderer article stub, which you also failed to improve per my request, and you added articles about the play about the murderer and more articles emphasizing one particular award this play had one. I was frustrated yesterday to find TWO versions of the article about the play (each differing by a single letter in the title), so I couldn't tell which version to delete--and both pointed at the murderer article. And then, I found there were at least three different articles about the minor award, which was little more than a modest monetary grant as near as I can tell, with no one publicizing it except the group which granted it. Duplicating information across multiple articles on a wiki is not a good idea; the versions diverge and then no one can tell which one to edit. So yesterday, assuming you would not object because you seemed to have left the wiki, I removed the entire cluster of articles relating to the murderers. Those peripheral articles should I feel have been included in the stub murderer article anyway, and they pointed back to the now-missing article, inviting someone to create those again in the future. I understand very well how it hurts to have one's work deleted, but I am not willing to restore any of those articles right now. IF you return to the wiki and are active here, I will consider restoring the "9 Circles" article (whichever one you want), but with restrictions: I will not have it name the murderer except once in one footnote, nor will I have that name be an active link inviting for an article to be created about said murderer. Any information about the award can be included in the article about the play. You had included around a dozen excerpts of the play's reviews in the footnotes, and I read those, after which I still wanted that article gone as well, because most reviewers pointed back to the murderer as having been the main model for the play's protagonist. And, should it matter whether an author worked as a priest or a waiter to put food on the table? It seems like an attempt to add moral justification to him writing a play sympathetic to a brutal killer. But he could have set his play in any number of other times and places and still provided a setting for his version of Dante's nine hells as represented by a Kafka-esque bureaucracy. By choosing this sensational case to model, even if his intention was to lambast the lameness of the law, the government, the military, or psychiatry (and I don't KNOW what his intentions were, but even if they were "good" intentions), his results are muddied and weakened by the fact that his play engendered a certain degree of sympathy in reviewers for the murderer. And that's why I deleted that article. I couldn't have gone through the normal process of warnings without proliferating and attracting yet more attention to these murderer's names, so I have made an editorial decision, which is my right to do because I am, right now, personally and almost single-handedly keeping this behemoth of a wiki afloat because I believe deeply that it is still a better place to write than Wikipedia. If you have more objections after this explanation, I urge you to private message me. I will listen sincerely to everything, but I will not have these murderers names in the wiki any more than they already are, because as you know, nothing ever written in a wiki really disappears. George, I sincerely hope you will put up with our disagreement about this and return to The Citizendium, where you have informed and delighted me many times over the years. Pat Palmer (talk) 09:38, 29 November 2022 (CST)

You are of course in charge here & can make policy as you wish, but you might like to think about this. It's certainly true that reports of crimes can cause copycat ones. But should the news be censored? It's not just that. Every time there's a news report of an Islamist terror attack it's followed by a spike in violence against Muslims. Every time there's a news report of Israelis hurtin Palestiisns it's followed by a spike in violence against Jews. In recent years there's been an uptick in violence against Chinese, and in recent months against Russians. We accept all this as part of the price we pay for free press & democracy. Proportionate coverage seems to me reasonable. What application that might have here I'm not expressing any opinion. See also [1]. Peter Jackson (talk) 05:07, 30 November 2022 (CST)

Peter, I welcome your and George's comments, because it's a gray area. Wikipedia (WP) has long articles on all the mass killings. The WP articles have unrelenting detail, though they are not all under the names of the killers. I was unable to sleep for two nights after reading WP about SDG, the killer who got a sympathetic play written about him by a Jesuit priest. Any twelve-year-old might stumble across that article while reading about Iraq, and it would tempt reasonable parents to confiscate their kids' cell phones immediately. Clearly, George tried to do better here, and I appreciate that. *If* these articles get restored, I would like that the murderer's name not the title of the article if at all possible (though in some cases, it may have to be). If there are legal/social aspects making the case of interest, that should be made clear in the introduction. In other words, I am tentatively open to restoring any or all of these articles *if* my editorial requirements are honored.Pat Palmer (talk) 10:22, 30 November 2022 (CST)

It occurred to me afterwards that we already have articles on Osama bin Laden & a number of his associates (nothing to do with George; probably written by Howard). Could it be said they're known for anything other than killing people? Peter Jackson (talk) 05:50, 1 December 2022 (CST)

Bin Laden touched off a war, founded an international terrorist organization that occupied much of the world for decades, and thus is a figure who will for better or worse appear in history books. SDG (and his associates) are soldier criminals who murdered four people on their day off. Crimes of similar horror happen around the world at regular intervals though thankfully not "often" statistically, and we don't cover them usually. This particular crime got lots of press in part because of the play and its publicity, but also because at first there was a question of whether the crime was part of systematic behavior by troops in Iraq while doing their jobs. It turned out not to be, and there was no deliberate attempt by higher-ups in the military to cover anything up. SDG is only one example of a psychotic personality who should never have been allowed into the military--THAT topic might deserve an article. As for mass gun murderers such as NC, at most I think we might list their names in a catalog somewhere, but certainly not giving them a biography and an article of their own, because to do so is inconsistent--are you aware of how MANY of these take place every year? If we covered all of them, we would soon double the size of the wiki--and greatly increase the chance of children stumbling upon the descriptions of their brutal acts. That is what is happening over in Wikipedia right now--they ARE largely covering all of them, and it's a feedback loop creating an ever-expanding set of horrible descriptions of crimes. The more I think about this problem in such terms, the clearer it becomes to me that we ought not to grace every one of these cases with a distinct article. But as I told George last June, if there IS a compelling reason why a certain case is of special interest (and not just to lawyers), detail why that is true in the introduction to the article. That had not been done in the articles I have deleted.Pat Palmer (talk) 08:15, 1 December 2022 (CST)

I'll just add one more about Wikipedia covering almost all the mass shooting cases. I can see why they might choose to do so, but since they ARE doing so, and in such detail, I don't see why we should do it also. It doesn't add anything for us to do it, even if somehow our articles are more nicely done. And frankly as an editor, I am horrified at the specter of being asked to overlook the creation of such articles every time such an incident happens, which in the United States right now is about every two to four days. On the other hand, I am reluctantly open to someone using this wiki to create an alternative version of an existing Wikipedia article, and then going over to Wikipedia and saying, "Let's do it this way instead". But no one has proposed to do that, and it usually doesn't work. Almost all of us have tried replacing some really awful material in Wikipedia with a better version of the topic that we first created here, and what usually happens is that the person(s) in WP who created the thing protect it there because of all the work they already put into it. I'm not going to make a rule that we can never have any articles in Citizendium about mass murderers, psychotic people in the military, or matters pertaining to violence. I'm saying let's have an intelligent, clear-cut reason for having those that we do, and maybe put a blurb on the Talk page explaining the motivation for a particular article to save us from recreating the debate we are having right now.Pat Palmer (talk) 08:32, 1 December 2022 (CST)

Are killers monsters, so there is no point covering them...

Pat, I made several sets of notes in preparation to responding to your note of 2022-11-29, the first comment in this subsection. It is one long paragraph, containing a dozen or so points, rather than a dozen paragraphs, each focussed around a single point. Comments written this way make it impossible for a response to start with something like, "WRT the point in your fifth paragraph".

Rather than try to respond to them all, at once, may I start with your early point, where you wrote that any article on a mass-murderer "... is known for encouraging more people to commit outrageous crimes in hopes of becoming famous."

Pat, did you mean to assert that this is a fact, some kind of unchallengeable, universally accepted fact? But is it a fact? Could it even be described as a hypothesis. I am not a scientist, but I spent years working for scientists, and I challenge whether this could be described as a hypothesis, because I suggest it is untestable. It seems to me that, while anecdotal reports might be used to back this up, these are not evidence.

I think your assertion could be called a premise. The alternate premise, that my edits are based on, is that difficult problems are best dealt with by dispassionately and neutrally trying to understand them.

You didn't actually say this, but other people, who held similar opinions to yours, have implied or explicitly stated, that serial killers, spree killers, are monsters. At least some of those people meant this literally. Killers were so unlike us regular people that they were not really even human beings. No regular human being could ever understand them, and it was a mistake to even try.

Here is a complication of that position... if monstrous killers are born, not made, then steps to purge the historical record of other killers should have no effect on their potential death toll.

Pat, you are about my age, or maybe just a bit older. When I was a teenager I heard about two deeply important psychology experiments. They weren't only deeply important, they were deeply disturbing. What both experiments showed, in different ways, was that it only took the wrong circumstances, and the wrong pressure, to get ordinary people, people who thought of themselves as ordinary decent people, to commit monstrous acts.

I am going to remind you of those experiments. In one of those experiments ordinary decent volunteers were paired up. A flip of a coin would assign one to a booth where they could hear the other experimental subject being asked to answer questions. The experimental subject in the booth would be directed by an experimenter, in a lab coat, to press a button that administered an electric shock, when the other guy gave the wrong answer. During the course of the experiment the experimenter would direct the subject to increase the voltage. During the course of the experiment the subject in the booth could hear the other guy complain, then scream, then shout that a higher voltage would kill them, then go silent, as if they had died.

It was a cruel experiment, as there was never more than one subject. The other experimental subject was an actor, a confederate of the experimenter, and no actual electric shocks were ever administered. The experimental subjects were told it was an experiment into whether pain and the absence of pain, could be used to make people better learners. But it was really an experiment into how much pain an ordinary decent person could be made to administer.

And the experiment showed that almost all ordinary decent people could be pretty easily convinced to administer a lot of pain.

The other experiment took a bunch of college student volunteers. They were split up into two groups, prisoners and guards. Surprisingly early in the experiment the guards started dishing out cruel treatment in order to control the prisoners.

I read that the guy running this experiment was so excited by what he was finding he invited some of his peers to come and observe, even though the experiment hadn't run to completion. One of his colleagues stood up to him, even though he had been her thesis advisor. I'm paraphrasing from memory here... she told him he had to end the experiment, right that moment. She told him that he was so blinded by the results he was getting that he was totally overlooking the traumatizing effect the experiment was sure to be having on his subjects.

He realized she was right, and he did end the experiment.

I suggest this experiment also shows that people who had previously been regarded as ordinary decent people, people who had previously regarded themselves as ordinary decent people, could be induced to commit monstrous cruel acts.

And, therefore, I suggest it is very strongly in the public interest to try to neutrally and rationally understand killers, torturers, and the people who commit other atrocities.

As for whether it is pointless to try to understand any truly monstrous inhuman people. There are scientists who study non-human animal behaviour, and they are capable of drawing meaningful conclusions about that behaviour, even though their subjects are non-human, by defition. George Swan (talk) 13:21, 8 December 2022 (CST)

See [2]. Peter Jackson (talk) 05:42, 10 December 2022 (CST)

• @Peter Jackson I followed the link you provided me and spent much of Sunday reading about this whole #no-notoriety premise.

I am shocked. I had thought the #no-notoriety premise was a fringe premise. I had no idea that some academics had got behind it. I think I wrote, above, that I am not a scientist, merely someone who used to work for scientists. Having said that, the papers those academics wrote, to support the #no-notoriety premise seemed like bad science. Their papers were based on comments from killers who said they had been influenced by earlier killers.

The very important point they were overlooking is that killers from within the incel community, the gun-enthusiast community, the anti-arbotion community, the MAGA community, they all have their own websites, message boards, mailing lists. They don't need to look to mainstream press, scholarly papers, or online encyclopedias, to read about those previous killers. I think this means the news embargo proposed in the #no-notoriety premise will have the opposite effect of what those proposing it desire. I am afraid the leaders within those movements are more dangerous under a #no-notoriety information embargo, as it allows the leaders within that movement to offer their followers hagiographies of those killers, using their internal websites, that then go without challenge.

I am afraid those potential copycats are going to be MORE LIKELY to follow the examples of earlier killers when the only accounts they get to read of them are hagiographies from within the killer's community. I suggest those potential copycats are going to be LESS LIKELY to follow those examples when they have access to neutrally written accounts of those earlier killers lives. George Swan (talk) 10:41, 13 December 2022 (CST)

I think you may well be right there. I'm thinking mainly in anecdotal evidence. For example, back in 1981 there was a race riot in Brixton. What followed looked like people round the country seeing it on TV, thinking that looked like fun, & organizing their own riots, which were nothing to do with race. But that's not much in the way of scientific. More broadly, the way society works is by people following an instinct to follow the tribal customs, doing what others do, especially successful people. I don't know how scientific that is either. Peter Jackson (talk) 05:10, 14 December 2022 (CST)

I'm considering deleting the article about Onion (dog)

Will anyone argue, now, against deleting the article Onion (dog)? I've put my reasons on its Talk page. Pat Palmer (talk) 10:36, 3 December 2022 (CST)

Another candidate for deletion: Curtis_Dagenais

Although the manner in which the killer turned himself in is slightly bizarrely interesting, overall this is just another crime report. Anyone have a real reason why it should not be deleted? Also, articles of this sort may NOT be titled merely with a person's name; other people bearing an identical name almost certainly exist, and I don't think they should have to tolerate finding their name in an encyclopedia delineated as a murderer of police.Pat Palmer (talk) 09:57, 7 December 2022 (CST)

• For the record, third parties, I wrote this article.

I don't agree that "this is just another crime report". Canada is not the US. Police on citizen violence is relatively rare. Citizen on Police violence, also relatively rare. So, in Canada, there are no routine crime reports on Citizen on Police violence. Rational commentators tried to make meaningful suggestions as to the steps that could have prevented this tragic event.

As for what is "routine", back in 2007 I copied a discussion from a talk page to my userspace here. In particular, I direct your attention to the 4th and 5th paragraphs in this section.

With regard to the embarrassment, or actual danger, an individual faces when he or she has a notorious namesake...

Did you know that when the Department of Homeland Security was created, and it compiled and published its first "no-fly list", Ted Kennedy's name was on it? Senator Ted Kennedy, wearing a face that would be known and recognized by every security guard, was prevented from boarding his flights because his name was on this list. Kennedy was able to buttonhole the Director of Homeland Security, and have him personally order his name to be removed from the list - after he had been prevented from boarding five times.

We have all got namesakes. Every notorious person has namesakes. Is there a good reason to protect any non-notable namesakes from the embarrassment of a wiki covering the notorious namesake? Being temporarily mistaken for a notorious namesake is a risk every single human being faces. I suggest there is no effective step a wiki can take that would guarantee non-notable namesakes would be free of the risk of being embarrassed by a notorious namesake. I don't think it makes sense to protect non-notable people from being embarrassed by being a namesake. George Swan (talk) 14:06, 8 December 2022 (CST)

Nothing in the article as written makes the point that "police on citizen" violence is rare in Canada and that this somehow makes this case special. Did you mean citizen on police (the opposite)? The homicide rate in Saskatchewan province is higher than in the neighboring state of Montana. Are you concerned about the shooter's claim that police "started the whole thing"? I'm baffled.Pat Palmer (talk) 11:33, 9 December 2022 (CST)

Nothing about this case has anything to do with Guantanamo captives, so I really don't understand the passages you direct me to here in relation to this article.

With the exception of extraordinarily famous historical figures, articles in The Citizendium should not be titled with a simple name. This is my editorial opinion. I have a list of several such articles in The Citizendium that I intend to rename when I get time. It's common sense that there might be another notable person with the same name someday in the future, and many people with the same name who have *not* become notable, so let's please try to be unambiguous from the beginning if we can.Pat Palmer (talk) 11:33, 9 December 2022 (CST)

When two or more topics intersect...

@User:Pat Palmer, I got an email this morning, informing me you deleted Efforts_to_impeach_Ronald_Reagan, and folded it into the article on Ronald Reagan.

I have two concerns: (1) overall article-topic organization; (2) provenance.

I have a topic informant page on the months I spent working under Ted Nelson, in 1979. TI:George Swan/Project Xanadu's computer resources in 1979 I may have been one of the least significant volunteers to work under him, but it is enough I think I get to claim him as a mentor. Does working under the guy who first described a hypertext give me any extra credibility when talking about article organization?

The world of human knowledge is full of topics. Those topics intersect. Sometimes they richly intersect. Wikipedia and Citizendium articles on topics that are richly interconnected with other topics are full of outgoing links, and have lots of incoming links.

Pat, you recently wrote about a concern over duplication of material within multiple articles. That is, in general, a very valid concern, for various reasons, including that, even if the duplicated material started off identical in every article where it occurred, it is likely to diverge, as those articles are edited and updated. The wiki equivalent of genetic drift. That can result in one instance getting an important update, while others don't. It can even result in the two different articles contradicting one another.

There is a solution to this.

When the article on Topic A and the article on Topic B both address another topic, topic C, it may be time to have them both link to an article on Topic C. In this particular instance there is an article Ronald Reagan, so that would be Topic A. The Citizendium also has an article on the U.S. Constitution. It contains a redlink to Article III of the United States Constitution, the article that talks about Impeachment. When the Citizendium has more articles the article on Impeachment should link to an article on Efforts to impeach US Presidents.

19th Century President Johnson was actually impeached; Nixon was almost impeached; Clinton was actually impeached; and Trump was actually impeached. There were efforts to impeach multiple other Presidents, including, most recently, Joe Biden. Marjorie Taylor Greene seems to have been the first Congressional Representative who tried to initiate an impeachment of Biden. Over on the wikipedia someone argued it shouldn't have an article Efforts to impeach Joe Biden because no one had worked on an article on Efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan.

That didn't sound right to me. I guessed that, if I looked, I could find enough good valid references to support an article on Efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan.

I know there are people who would tell me, "Geo, even if there are enough good valid references to support an article on the topic Efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan surely you realize that it would be better to shoehorn all that stuff into the article on Ronald Reagan?" And, no, I strongly disagree with that approach, in general, and in this particular instance.

Why? Because the material you shoehorned into the article on Ronald Reagan could equally well be shoehorned into the article on Impeachment of US Presidents.

We are on a wiki. We should take full advantage of the freedom it offers both authors and readers. The freedom wikis offer authors is they allow the author to go in two different directions. When the topic they are writing about intersects with another topic, they can both continue writing about the original topic, and provide a wikilink to the intersecting topic. People with an urge to merge claim that it is better to have one big article that covers both topics.

I very strongly disagree. I disagree because I think it is a disservice to readers, and because that is not really how the universe of human knowledge should be structured.

Disservice to readers? Writing shorter articles, that are only about a single topic, and are richly wikilinked to related topics provides readers a lot more freedom. When a reader encounters a wikilink, they have a choice. Keep reading the current stream, or jump through the wikilink, because it might be the actual place they can find the information they are looking for. If they follow that wikilink, and after ten seconds, or ten minutes, they decide it didn't have the information they were looking for, returning back to the text where they choice to try something else is trivial... Just hit the back button.

Contrast that with the cognitive burden imposed on the reader when we yield to the urge to merge. They go to some OTHER section of the current article. How? Repeated presses of the arrow keys, or through the use of their browser's find button. And, how do they get back to where they were? More scrolling, or more uses of the find button. Woah. I am generally already using my find button, and every browser I have ever used only remembers the current find search.

It is much more convenient for a reader to follow wikilinks to short articles that are only about a single topic, than to scroll around in big omnibus articles, because returning where you came from is trivial, with the wikilinks, and painful in the omnibus articles. You restore the history, and the talk page, and I will add the provenance subsection, if I initially failed to put it in. George Swan (talk) 14:21, 15 December 2022 (CST)

provenance

Pat, when a smaller article is merged into a larger article, on the wikipedia, the person who squeezed it in is supposed to explicitly say "merging intellectual property from Efforts to Impeach Ronald Reagan", in their edit summary; and, if they think there is no more need for an article on Efforts to Impeach Ronald Reagan, they don't delete it, or call for its deletion. They turn it into a redirect. Not only do they turn it into a redirect, but there is a special template that is left on the redirect that explicitly says something like "do not delete this redirect, because, when this was an article, material was cut from here and pasted into another article, and this page's revision history is required to preserve the chain of provenance."

I was out, when I read the email that told me you deleted the article. I didn't recall whether I had ported the article from the wikipedia, to wikialpha, before I ported it here. Wikialpha contributors put all their contributions into the public domain, so it could be argued that, legally, you did not have to acknowledge re-using public domain material from wikialpha.

However: (1) I ported that article from the wikipedia, without going through wikialpha first; (2) over on the wikipedia someone merged and redirected my original draft there into the wikipedia article List of efforts to impeach presidents of the United States.

I put lots of stuff into the public domain, on wikialpha. So I am prepared to let people re-use material I wrote, without explicitly acknowledging my contribution, but I really do think there are strong reasons to acknowledge the source of material, even if it comes from the public domain, because not doing so can look like plagiarism.

Pat, while I don't generally care if material I wrote is copied without attribution, someone looking at the revision control record of the Ronald Reagan article is very likely to think you wrote those three paragraphs. And, if they compared them to the similar three paragraphs in List of efforts to impeach presidents of the United States it would look like you copied them directly from the wikipedia, without attribution.

1. As above, I think the article should have remained a stand-alone article, that parallel articles on the efforts to impeach other presidents should also be standalone articles. Why? The duplication issue you addressed a week or two ago.
2. If material was going to be cut and pasted an edit summary should have said where it came from.
3. The revision history of the article where the merged material came from should be preserved. I generally tried to leave a "provenance" subsection on the talk pages of any articles I ported from elsewhere. If I thought I was the sole author on the other site, I always wanted to say so. I should have left a Talk:Efforts_to_impeach_Ronald_Reagan#provenance. I don't know if I did, because you deleted the talk page, as well. George Swan (talk) 14:21, 15 December 2022 (CST)

• This happened to me here once. I'd written a detailed account of the history of the House of Lords in that article. The late Nick Gardner thought it was out of proportion to the size of the article as a whole. I suggested it might be a separate article, History of the House of Lords. Nick, without thinking about the issues you're talking about here, did that, resulting in an article that looked like he'd written it (I don't know whether he'd have wanted the credit). It took some time to work through the then bureaucracy, who evetually left it to me to add a suitable note. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:52, 16 December 2022 (CST)

• George, I did not know the provenance of the deleted stub. Please feel free to put a note on the Talk page saying that you wrote that section and copied it over from wherever, before it got merged into the main article. Nothing was linking to that stub, and there are at present no other articles about attempts to impeach other presidents, or sections in president articles about impeachment (though there is occasional brief mention), nor any article about presidential impeachment generally. If someone wants to write that, they can link directly to the section about impeachment using a bookmark: Ronald_Reagan#Efforts_to_impeach [[Ronald_Reagan#Efforts_to_impeach]]. For now, I propose to leave the information as part of the Ronald Reagan article because it's relevant there and more likely to be found. The wiki search now can find any article even containing the word "impeach" or "impeachment", making it possible for someone in future to pull all this kind of info together. If someone *does* undertake such an article, we can split the information off again and point over to it. Can you live with that?Pat Palmer (talk) 09:16, 16 December 2022 (CST)
  1. WRT the provenance of any material anyone would want to copy? In every simple case isn't the provenance in the revision history? I suggest it should be considered best practice, when copying content from one article to another, to always state, in the edit summary, which article the copied material came from.

     Contributors to Citizendium and Wikipedia agree to release most of their intellectual property rights, when they click the Save changes button. But one key right they retain is the right to have their contributions acknowledged. This is, I think, not a mere courtesy, but an actual legal obligation.

  2. WRT me putting a note, on Talk:Ronald Reagan, stating I was the author of those paragraphs... I don't know how to say this more tactfully. The obligation in the licenses we use, to ackowledge earlier contributors, when material is copied, is on the copier.
  3. WRT to incoming links to Efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan... well, I should made sure that, at least, the Ronald Reagan article linked to it. Sorry for that. But the fact clicking the what links here button doesn't find incoming Citizendium wikilinks doesn't mean that no one linked to the article. Citizendium's goal was to offer citable articles. Citable articles guarantees incoming links from outside the Citizendium, that won't show up through the what links here button. Consequently, in a case like this, where I do not believe you are asserting that the topic of efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan is not worth covering, if the editorial decision is that it should be merged into a larger article, than it should have been turned into a redirect, not deleted.
  4. You write someone "... can link directly to the section about impeachment ... [[Ronald_Reagan#Efforts_to_impeach]] ..." I wrote that I was a protege of Ted Nelson, the guy who coined the term hypertext. In the theoretical ideal hypertext he described, an author would be able to link to anything, even just an iconic phrase. But, using WMF software, as on Citizendium or Wikipedia, the wikilink to the article is really the only kind of link that works properly. Wikilinks to subsections within articles work, but only halfway.

     The Wikipedia makes EXTENSIVE use of wikilinks to subsections within the pages in the Wikipedia namespace. They are rarely used in article space. In my opinion, because wikilinks to subsections within articles is only partially supported, these links should never be used, in article space.

     1. One of the huge advantages wikilinks have over the plain old everyday URLs of the regular internet is that those links are fragile. In the 18 years I have been contributing to wikis I have seen about half of the newspapers we cite re-arrange their directory hierarchies. Universities do it too. All kinds of institutions do it. And, when they do it all the other places that linked to a specific page in the old hierarchy? Broken. Those links don't work anymore. Most of the time the old page IS still accessable, but in a different spot. Sometimes it is merely hard to find. More often the new location of old page is essentially impossible to find. With wikilinks that isn't true. You move a page, and a redirect is left behind. On the wikipedia there a robot that quietly watches for pages that have recently been moved, checks the incoming links to the old name, and the incoming links that were redirects are quietly changed to point to the new location.

        So, wikilinks don't break. Regular wikilinks, that is, the unusual wikilink to a subsection within an article does break.

        What happens if someone innocently edits the Ronald Reagan article, and they think it would be an innocent improvement to change the name of that subsection heading from "Efforts to impeach" to "Impeachment efforts"?

        Early in my wikipedia career I wrote an article on the iconic phrase "There is a sucker born every minute". When I started that article I knew the phrase was widely associated with circus impressario P.T. Barnum. I was delighted to learn he denied ever saying the phrase, and that scholars backed him up. A few months later someone nominated the article for deletion, arguing that the material in the article really belonged in the article on P.T. Barnum. It was suggested that the article I wrote should be pasted into a subsection of the P.T. Barnum article, and the article on the phrase should be turned into a redirect, [[P.T. Barnum#There is a sucker born every minute]].

        So, what happens when the subsection's name is changed? Clicking on the wikilink does take the person away from where they were. But, since that exact phrase is no longer the name of a subsection, the reader is left at the top of the Ronald Reagan article, or the P.T. Barnum article, wondering why the heck they were left there. In the case of that phrase, one author could link to the phrase, not realizing it was a redirect, and another author could trim the subsection heading, and the entire subsection, as off-topic. So, a reader clicks on a link to a phrase, looking for an explanation of the phrase, and finds themselves at a completely unrelated article about some boring old impressario.

     2. The very great value of watchlists is eroded when a small but adequately referenced article is shoehorned into a larger article on a distinct but related topic. Ronald Reagan and Efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan are distinct by related topics. They are related to other distinct but related topics, like U.S. Presidents, U.S. Constitution, Article III of the United States Constitution, Impeaching US Presidents.

        I am going to restate an important point I made earlier, that you did not respond to. The topics in the Universe of Human Knowledge are deeply interconnected. Projects like Citizendium and Wikipedia work best when the structure of articles reflects the deep interconnectedness of the real world. That is best achieved with small focussed articles, that confine themselves to a single topic, but are richly connected to the other related topics.

        Consider Physics, Optics, Electronics, Mechanics, Celestial mechanics, Astronomy, Astrometry, Astrophysics, Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams, Stellar classification (astrophysics), population III stars, population II stars, population I stars, Dark matter, Dark energy... Someone might argue that all these topics could be covered in the article on Physics, and that they should all be merged. Not only would that master article on all topics related to Physics be unmanageably large, it would be difficult for authors and readers to navigate. One could argue that the same functionality could be provided by extensive use of redirects to Physics#Optics, Physics#Electronics, Physics#Mechanics, Physics#Celestial mechanics, Physics#Astronomy, Physics#Astrometry, Physics#Astrophysics, Physics#Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams, Physics#Stellar classification (astrophysics), Physics#population III stars, Physics#population II stars, Physics#population I stars, Physics#Dark matter, Physics#Dark energy

        I think we both know this would be a bad idea. And one of the reasons why it would be a bad idea was the person who was interested in some branches, Astrophysics, and Stellar classification (astrophysics), can currently put just those two topics on their watchlist, and skip the rest of Physics. If there is just one article on Physics the watchlist holder gets a watchlist hit when there are updates to the coverage of Physics topics they aren't interested in.

        To return Efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan... what about the reader who is interested in the process of impeachment, but is uninterested in Ronald Reagan. When Efforts to impeach FDR, Efforts to impeach Harry Truman, Efforts to impeach Dwight Eisenhower, Efforts to impeach JFK, Efforts to impeach Lyndon Johnson, Efforts to impeach Richard Nixon, Efforts to impeach Gerald Ford, Efforts to impeach Jimmy Carter, Efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan, Efforts to impeach George H.W. Bush, Efforts to impeach Bill Clinton, Efforts to impeach George W. Bush, Efforts to impeach Barack Obama, Efforts to impeach Donald Trump and Efforts to impeach Joe Biden to their watchlist.

     3. Similar to above a very great advantage is the What links here button. The non wiki internet has nothing like it. Consider dark energy. Citizendium has an article on dark matter, but no article on dark energy. Nevertheless, https://citizendium.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Dark_energy is useful, even with redlinks. The zero-point energy article mentions dark energy, and should have linked to dark energy. I added that missing link. So, now, someone looking here, can check what links to dark energy, and it could turn out that, even though Citizendium doesn't have an article on dark energy the article on zero-point energy will answer their questions.

        The value of this very valuable feature is eroded when all the articles on Physics are shoehorned into one huge article.

        To return Efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan... As of this writing it is a redlink. https://citizendium.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Efforts_to_impeach_Ronald_Reagan shows links to (newly created) articles on Edwin Meese, Oliver North and Robert Bork. Readers who want more information on a topic that is a redlink can look at the articles with wikilinks to that redlink.

  5. I don't know what you meant when you wrote that the information impeaching Reagan would be "more likely to be found" if it were shoehorned into the article on a related topic, than if it remained in its own standalone article.
  6. You wrote: "The wiki search now can find any article even containing the word 'impeach' or 'impeachment'..." Hold on a second. Is searching for an article the only way someone reading a wiki finds the information they are looking for? Absolutely not. I suggest it is not even the most common way people reading a wiki find the information they are looking for. Sure, they START with a google search for a search term, or they start with typing a search term into the wiki's own search box. But, once they have done that, to find their starting place, and started reading, they should be reading text that is chock full of lovely blue-links. They think to themselves, "that blue link looks promising... maybe that is where I will find the information I really want..."

     This is why readers are best served reading a richly connected wiki full of smaller articles that confine themselves to one single topic, and not poorly connected wikis where topics are, arbitrarily, shoehorned into articles on related topics.

     I don't know how many wikipedia AFD you participated in. AFD is short for "Articles For Deletion". Keep, merge or delete, are the three outcomes people generally argue for there. And one of the most frustrating things I found was to see multiple people state something like: "I (1)think this article is too short; and (2) its topic is not as significant as this other topic, which already has a longer article; (3) therefore I think it is obvious it should be merged into that larger article! That is where that information REALLY belongs." But then the next commenter down would agree on their first two points, only to insist the only possible merge target was a completely different article! So far as I am concerned, any time the people who think a small article should be merged into a larger article on a related topic, but can't agree on the merge target, that is a crystal clear sign there is a need for the information in that smaller article to stay just where it is, in that smaller article -- so all the related articles can link to it there.

  7. You wrote: "If someone *does* undertake such an article, we can split the information off again and point over to it. Can you live with that?" Okay, first, wikilinking to the best target is useful, even when that target article doesn't exist. I think I showed that by showing how the redlink Efforts_to_impeach_Ronald_Reagan's https://citizendium.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Efforts_to_impeach_Ronald_Reagan still provides useful links to related articles Edwin Meese, Oliver North and Robert Bork. When I started Efforts_to_impeach_Ronald_Reagan I really should have gone over to the article on Ronald Reagan, and added a sentence or two there, linking to Efforts_to_impeach_Ronald_Reagan, or, at least, added it to the related articles subpage.

     If I return to active participation here I do so as a volunteer. You have said you are the editor-in-chief, and what you say goes. If I was an employee I would have to accept that, or lose my job. If I was an employee, and you pulled rank, I would have to say "I agree to do what you say, boss." I am not an employee. I am a volunteer. No, I don't agree that the article on Ronald Reagan is where that information should remain. I think the information was already where it belonged.

     Even if Peter and other people were to weigh in here, and they all agreed to leave the information shoehorned into the article on Ronald Reagan I would still disagree that deletion of Efforts_to_impeach_Ronald_Reagan and Talk:Efforts_to_impeach_Ronald_Reagan was appropriate. Even if others agreed the information belonged in the article on Ronald Reagan, then why wouldn't we turn Efforts_to_impeach_Ronald_Reagan into a redirect, leaving its revision history and leave Talk:Efforts_to_impeach_Ronald_Reagan as is, preserving Talk:Efforts_to_impeach_Ronald_Reagan#provenance, as it is, after all, an obligation of the intellectual property licenses on which both Citizendium and Wikipedia rely?

• My penultimate point, returning to Astronomy. I said Ted Nelson, the guy who first described hypertext, was my mentor. A point I thought he made very convincingly, in his 1974 book Computer Lib, was that hierarchies were arbitrary. Suppose you and I thought we were the too most senior Astronomers on Planet Earth, and we were collaborating on the definitive Astronomy textbook. We could agree that no one should learn about the links between Red dwarf stars, and the Goldilocks Zone, until they had a firm understanding of Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams, stellar classification. A professor can insist on his or her students learning the subject of their course in the precise order and manner they are sure is the right order. But our readers aren't our students. WRT stellar classification they might already know red dwarfs are the really small dim stars. They don't actually have to understand Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams to understand the habitable zone.

  Biologists, who study such things, used to have a pretty rigid hierarchy of Species and Genera, of Kingdoms and Phyla. They thought they knew which species shared common ancestors. And now that we can analyze DNA, it turns out their hierarchy was often surprisingly wrong.

• My final point...

  Pat, back in March and April, I thanked you, and your colleagues, who worked on the migration to the new server. I was grateful the Citizendium had a new server, and maybe a new start. My thanks for that stands.

  You are not the only one who made a big time commitment. I know you know that between April and September I either ported, or wrote brand new, from scratch, a bunch of articles. I don't think you were really aware of how many. I don't actually know, myself, over 200, possibly as many as 300. So, about 2-3 percent of the Citizendium's article base.

  I am not bringing that up to brag.

  Pat, when I discuss an issue with someone, anyone, I try to remember no matter how smart I used to be, I am fallible, and I could be wrong, and the other guy could be right. It doesn't matter to me whether my correspondent has dyslexia, or their English is imperfect because they learned it as a second language, and still haven't masted it. I always do my best to try to understand their points, because, no matter how smart I used to be I am fallible, and they could be right and I could be wrong.

  Pat, I know being editor-in-chief is a heavy responsibility. I know most or all of the burden of site maintenance is on your shoulders. Nevertheless, I committed hundreds of hours of my time to the project, since March, and I am afraid you aren't really making an effort to understand the points I am trying to make. George Swan (talk) 15:39, 19 December 2022 (CST)

In the last five days, you have inundated this forum (which is readable by the entire world) with 4,353 words of verbiage complaining about my having merged a short, unlinked stub into the Ronald Reagan article. I have managed to respond, so far, with 396 words. I understand your dislike of bookmarks. I understand that you want things put back the way they were before I deleted the stub. While I am still considering whether to restore the stub, I have questions. Why the hurry for me to render a judgement about a stub that sat untouched for six months, unlinked, unfinished, without provenance, and with no author note attached? Can I not take a few days to think it over before being accused of not making an effort? Why is this request to restore it being made HERE in a public forum where even non-contributors can see it, instead of on the Ronald Reagan article's Talk page? And finally, why are you ignoring my request that you make complaints "off the record" before trying to resolve them "on the record"? In future, please first post on my Talk page, or on the article's Talk page, or better yet, make use of a private message. None of this needed to be in the public forum. Please don't use the forum in this way.Pat Palmer (talk) 07:15, 20 December 2022 (CST)

Regardless of George's attitude in this instance, you still need to develop a practice of compliance with the legal requirements of the licence (or else change to another, but even then you'd have lots of legacy material). Readers should be able to ascertain authorship by taking obvious steps. This usually means analysing the history. If the information isn't there, there needs to be a notice on the article itself saying where the information can be found (whether the talk page or anywhere else). Peter Jackson (talk) 04:32, 19 December 2022 (CST)

I have placed a notice in Ronald_Reagan#Efforts_to_impeach to clarify this a little, because indeed I was careless in failing to give George credit in the comment when merging the stub. However, George failed to label the stub as being from Wikipedia, so that's on him. Also, I would genuinely appreciate it if you would both consider private messaging me first before issuing a public correction when I make a mistake about something. There is no policy debate going on here that I can see, and I don't want us to become adversarial. Having worked in corporations for decades, I will say that going "on the record" to demand a course correction without having first exhausted private communications can make a lot of enemies. That happened with various people in this wiki in the past, and it's one of the reasons that Larry's inspiring "expert model" approach failed. People got into fights, got their feelings hurt, and lost face. Don't let's do that. It's a management style thing. I've been thinking about wiki communications since I first joined Wikipedia in 2007, and I feel that this is one way in which the wiki way really would benefit from change.Pat Palmer (talk) 08:55, 19 December 2022 (CST)

Funny related story

Decades ago there was a guy who posted about losing a job because a plagiarism detection robot falsely accused him of plagiarism.

Here is what happened:

1. Early in his career he had published one of the first key papers in a practically brand new field. He had published it so early and so long ago that it appeared on a small circulation mimeographed journal, that was never digitized, and put online.
2. However, his early paper was so important to the field that people who came after him, found those mimeographed editions, and quoted him.
3. Fast forward years or a decade or more... he hadn't been active in that field, or maybe any field... I can't remember the details, but he is applying for an academic job, after a gap from being an academic
4. He is asked to submit a sample of his work.
5. He decides to get out his old floppy of that early paper that was so seminal in a field that is now well developed.
6. As a standard practice his potential employers tell a plagiarism detection robot to check the machine readable paper he submitted against a big database of online papers.
7. The robot finds all kinds of papers that quoted his original paper. The robot concluded that he had plagiarized the later authors who thought his seminal paper was worth quoting.

Actually, it was so long ago, I am not sure whether he was able to get his potential employers to recognize the plagiarism detection robots report was unreliable. George Swan (talk) 14:25, 15 December 2022 (CST)