Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Electric universe (concept)

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. - Mailer Diablo 00:45, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Electric universe (concept)

Electric universe (concept) (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

Two years ago, this article was nominated for deletion, and no consensus was reached. The community has given enough time for supporters of keeping the article to make their additions and referencing to keep the article, but it is now more clear than ever that this article should be deleted on grounds of original research, non-notability, and it being impossible to reach standards required of verifiability and reliability. As another editor stated: "EU seems to be notable primarily in the minds of the advocates, and scientifically it is less notable than the sum of its parts."[1] Any information contained in the article that is relevant to uncontroversial science (e.g. descriptions of plasma, z-pinches, or electric discharge) is already present at the relevant articles. Here are the reasons for deletion of the rest of the content:

  1. The article is written mostly by supporters and advocates of the concept which is a definite conflict of interest
  2. There are only two people who currently publish ideas of the "electric universe" and both of those people (Scott and Thornhill) publish exclusively on the internet or vanity presses. Despite being ostensibly "scientific" the concept has received no peer review. This makes their ideas original research.
  3. The article includes very misleading original research amalgamations of various citations gleaned from mainstream sources in attempt to pass a veneer of respectability for the subject. This original research amalgamation includes using as "sources" papers written by Nobel laureate Hannes Alfven and descriptive links to NASA press releases. However, neither of these sources was/is aware let alone actually supported/supports the ideas of Thornhill and Scott.
  4. Contributors who support and advocate EU have falsely claimed that this subject has been subject to peer review research. In fact, every IEEE transaction paper the contributor listed to show evidence of "notability" is not about "electric universe" but rather about plasma cosmology (a different idea). Just recently, this charge was reinvorgated with the false claim that will be subject to a future peer-reviewed publication. This assertion also is in reference to plasma cosmology. As such the "electric universe" has no single paper subject to peer review about its ideas.
  5. For a fringe idea like this to be included in Wikipedia it has to have some recognition from the mainstream whether it be internet memes, the media, the scientific community, etc. In fact, there has been absolutely no verifiable nor reliable independent review of this idea since it is not notable. There is only one single piece of press that this idea ever received, and this piece of press is neither a notable nor a directly relevant example. The press was a single, non-notable article in Wired Magazine about an exchange on internet message boards between proponents of this idea and amateur space enthusiasts, obviously reporting of this sort violates Wikipedia's internet verifiability rules and reliability concerns. As such the subject fully and completely defies notability in the "media recognition" category as well.
  6. As stated by another editor: "As it is, the article has an alarming tendency to grow into a mat of poorly-connected references into holoscience.com and thunderbolts.info, and normal editing is impossible."

--ScienceApologist 13:40, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

Comment: Comments on the nomination redacted to the talkpage

Commentary moved to the Talk page. Please keep discussion there, this page is for the voting.

  • Delete as per nom. Chrisch 13:48, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete per nom with reservations too minor to debate here. Metamagician3000 13:50, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete per nom. MER-C 13:56, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete as per nomination. Mike Peel 13:58, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete - I cannot say more than what the nominator has said. Dr. Submillimeter 14:58, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete. Impressively researched nomination. Plasma cosmology is wrong, but possibly notable, but this is wrong and not notable. — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 15:16, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete I agree with the nominator on all points TSO1D 15:31, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete, User:ScienceApologist's point 5 above is decisive. We can have articles about pseudoscientific theories (and even hoaxes), but they must be properly externally verifiable. A single brief article in Wired News is not enough to build a proper WP:NPOV encyclopaedia article. Demiurge 15:47, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete. Even if there is an IEEE Transactions article on this "concept" it seems hardly sufficient to establish notability. Meanwhile, as hoax or kook practice it doesn't rise anywhere Time Cube status. Sdedeo (tips) 15:56, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Keep and stubifyDelete without prejudice Here's the problem. It appears that the subject has been noted by the press, as evidenced by links such as http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,68258,00.html ... I think the article probably needs to be marked as potential pseudoscience, and described as unsupported by the general scientific community--but if a theory, even a hopelessly flawed and controversial one has received some press attention, then I think it needs to stay. Wired is a fairly notable source to have written about it. Therefore other people might come to Wikipedia trying to learn more about it, and they should probably learn that it is considered pseudoscience by most reliable sources. Tarinth 16:22, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
We've been talking about the criteria for notability for scientific theories over at a project page, and the question of how much press coverage is sufficient to make a theory notable. To me, a single mention -- in the context of "internet kook" news -- in Wired is insufficient really to make something notable, and the current criteria of "ongoing coverage" seems much more reasonable. In any case, do join the discussion over at that linked page on proposed criteria. Sdedeo (tips) 18:16, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
It is extremely difficult to create such an article for a theory that isn't completely incoherent like Time Cube. In my experience, such an article can only be created when the supporters of the concept are either banned for some reason, or banned by the ArbCom from editing articles on the topic. Even then, a fundamental problem with writing that sort of article is that while the pseudoscientists write copious amounts, there generally are not enough people who care about the topic to write proper debunkings, and most reliable sources don't consider the subject pseudoscience in a verifiable manner, since they either don't care or have never heard of the topic. This seems to be the case here: there simply is not a large enough corpus of critical material to create an article that treats the subject from a popular culture point of view. I think this criteria might be a good measurement of whether an pseudotheory is notable from a popular culture perspective: if a pseudotheory is notable enough in the media, it must have reached enough people who care enough to write debunkings. --Philosophus T 19:34, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • External sites appear to contain thorough debunkings, such as http://www.geocities.com/kingvegeta80/pseudoscience.html and New Scientist seemed to think the issue was controversial enough to accept for publication some sort of "Open letter" on the subject. If you search on "Electric Universe" via google right now, the first link you get is the holoscience.com pseudoscience site; Wikipedia is third in line. I'm troubled by the idea that someone might hear about the "theory" and then search for it, and only find these other sites, with Wikipedia silent on the issue. If we allow articles on Wikipedia about malware (destructive software programs) with warnings about them, isn't it helpful to have articles about pseudoscience (with appropriate warnings) so that people can quickly learn that that these are merely the ideas of a few vocal people on the fringe? I'd be willing to switch over to Delete if I can be persuaded that there truly is no interest in the media for debunking and/or commenting on this subject, but I am concerned about removing it purely on the basis that it is an incorrect/implausible/pseudoscientific theory when it could simply be described as such. Tarinth 20:11, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • My suggestion here would be for you to start rewriting the article now from a popular culture perspective. The new article could be significantly shorter, so it shouldn't be so hard to do. There have been AfDs in the past which have gone from 95% of users being for deletion to being kept after such a rewrite. If you can rewrite the article to assert notability in the media, include proper criticism, exclude long passages purporting to be science, and cover the history and popularity of the pseudotheory, I believe you will find that most users here will change their votes. --Philosophus T 20:15, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • For now I'm going to go with "delete without prejudice"; the subject isn't sufficiently interesting to me to work on a rewrite at this time, but I would not be against someone else creating an article that gave a critical treatment of it as an example of fringe-science in the future. It would also appear that an argument for notability based on media-attention to the subject is fairly tenuous. Tarinth 20:21, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete, per nom. At best, this should be a sub-section in the Plasma cosmology article, until peer reviewed research is published which supports this as an actual theory of its own, or at least until it achieves outside notability. I would support a redirect to Plasma cosmology for the term, and a section could be devoted there to the concept. -- Kesh 16:35, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete per excellent nom. Fails WP:OR. Tevildo 17:06, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Keep This is just another attempt of ScienceApologist to eradicate views that he personally disagrees with. I would agree with Kesh's suggestion of a merge with Plasma Cosmology, however ScienceApologist is also attempting to remove the Plasma_cosmology article by proposing to Merge it with one of its stubs, Ambiplasma. -Ionized 17:23, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete per Arthur Rubin above, and as original research by synthesis. Tom Harrison Talk 17:26, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete as per nomination. HEL 17:58, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete Original research apparently...not verifiable.--MONGO 18:00, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete. There are no appropriate sources for a scientific article per the interpretation of the Pseudoscience ArbCom decision, and there hasn't been enough media coverage to be considered a popular culture article like Time Cube. Even the article admits that the concept is absent for peer-reviewed scientific literature, which precludes a scientific portrayal of the topic, again per the ArbCom decision. --Philosophus T 19:34, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete per nom. Failures of WP:OR and WP:V. Resolute 20:06, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Redirect to Plasma cosmology and make a sub-paragraph there. Same with Ambiplasma. However, ambiplasma passes the notablility test, whereas EU really doesn't at this time. ABlake 21:07, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete per nom. Re Tarinth's point: this was my position in the debate two years ago, and I and some other editors did thoroughly shrink and rewrite the article to reflect the cultural interest aspect. However, as pointed out by Philosophus above, it is very difficult to maintain such an article in the face of a small but prolific community of advocates, and the article has once again veered away from the "cultural impact" orientation to become an advocacy page. zowie 22:59, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete. There is no way to locate reliable information that would satisfy WP:V. In the absence of genuine science, it would difficult to maintain a Wikipedia article on this topic against the constant onslaught of WP:FRINGE enthusiasm. EdJohnston 22:59, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Keep, I fully agree with editor Ionized; some of the science editors around (with an academic career to protect and a dogmatic view to hold in spite of all the evidences, like the fanatic bishop in the middle ages) seem to forget what an encyclopedia is and the Wikipedia:Five pillars, suppressing data (articles with valuable sourced data) from different views existent in society, when it should be "unacceptable for Wikipedia to to be dogmatic or one-sided, in stark contrast to for example textbooks". As a joke, I usually say that if Reincarnation is to be seen as a real concept, most of these people must have been in dark side of the church - the middle ages Inquisition - in their prior lives... yet there is now at hand a Galileo, whose suppression attempt went already for several long decades, in order to open these deeply crystallized minds. --Utad3 23:07, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia is not a crystal ball. The oppressed Galileos in whom you believe may yet change the world, but that is not for Wikipedia to accomodate. --ScienceApologist 23:53, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete With such a detailed and clearly well thought out and accurate nomination, there is little more one can say. WP:BOLLOCKS does spring to mind.--Anthony.bradbury 00:26, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete per nom Vsmith 00:33, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete without prejudice. Possibly, some day, someone musters the energy to report on this marginally notable piece of fringe science, but this time based on verifiable and reliable sources. We should not leave this unverifiable piece of junk hanging around until then.  --LambiamTalk 00:59, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
  • KEEPEven if it is considered fring science, someone interested in investigating it more thoroughly may come here as a means of verifying its legitimacy. Calls to delete are merely the bitter efforts of jealous sectarians who are lame apologists for conventional thinking at the expense of any thoughtful examination of alternatives. This is not a question of how "out there" you think EU is, its a matter of suppression! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Aclog7373 (talk • contribs) 01:07, 2 January 2007 (UTC).
    • That's rather the point. It is not currently legitimate, and therefore we should not have an article on it. If it does ever achieve legitimacy, then that's the time for a Wikipedia article. Tevildo 01:20, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
      • Note: Aclog7373 (talk • contribs) has made only two edits at this time. --EMS | Talk 03:32, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete per item 5 in the nomination. — BillC talk 01:28, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete per above. Doczilla 01:48, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete per nom. This is a compelling and well presented request. --EMS | Talk 03:32, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Keep or merge, but warn and truncate I think the Electric Universe concept and websites are real stinkers, but that doesn't mean it is best to have no WP article about them. Capital punishment is final has not ongoing educational value. Better to hold the troublemaker in stocks in a corner of the village square so everyone can get a good look at him/her and his/her type.
I suggest starting the article with the mainstream position: This theory is not regarded as having any scientific validity etc. etc. Then let the proponents have their say, briefly describing how their theory differs from others, and linking to their site. Its not reasonable to expect WP to give more space than that to a concept which is extremely non-conventional and lacking scientific notability. But that doesn't mean all mention of it should be expunged.
Keeping a brief article with a non-conventional warning at the top is helpful for anyone consulting WP to find out something reasonably reliable about the concept.
I think the concept of "Electric Universe" probably meets the proposed criteria 6 or 7 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SCIENCE: "It is or was well known due to extensive press coverage, or due to being found within a notable work of fiction." and/or "It is or was believed to be true by a significant part of the general population, even if rejected by scientific authorities." since there are far too many (20,000) Google hits for http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Electric+Universe%22+Plasma for the concept to be regarded as not accepted or discussed by a significant number of people. (Unless it could be shown that most of this was generated by the concept's proponents.) Maybe it is a work of fiction, presented as scientific fact, with the intention of selling books, or gaining speaking engagements in the New Age scene. (Though if the books Amazon sales rank of >1,000,000 and http://www.fonerbooks.com/surfing.htm are to be believed, they are only selling a handful a year at Amazon.)
Overall, I think people who want to keep Wikipedia's science pages pure and completely uncluttered by even brief mention of challenging perspectives, including annoying lunacy, are swimming against the tide. The Internet is full of *stuff*. Human beliefs are messy. The best way to cope with contrary voices is to let them say a few words and give a link to their website - or link to a website where they are saying all they like. Pretending the voices don't exist, or that they WP is lofty enough to refuse to mention them at all, seems silly to me.
Good science isn't going to be harmed by clearly labelled links to sites which are radically at odds with mainstream thinking. I think narrow thinking and being caught in blinding paradigms are far greater problems for science. The delete, ban and ignore approach can entrench faulty paradigms, while maybe some of these apparently loony ideas carry the seeds of a much better paradigm.Robin Whittle 03:50, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete. I know this topic is contentious, and that it has been the focal point of two ArbCom cases. I know that is going to make for an unpleasant task for the closing admin. But I simply cannot see any way that this article, and through it, this topic, meets inclusion standards. As a scientific theory, it does not approach the standards bar. The two sources overwhelmingly cited in its defense are thunderbolts.info and the journal Kronos. The website is not a reliable source as WP:RS understands it; indeed, a case could be argued that the guidelines for extremist sources (that they "should be used only as primary sources; that is, they should only be used as sources about themselves and their activities, and even then should be used with caution") should apply to the dedicated websites of fringe science proponents. Likewise, Kronos is not an established, peer-reviwed, scientific journal as either Wikipedia or the physics community understands such ideas. Per the ArbCom ruling on Pseudoscience, neither such source is appropriate documentation for a science article. This topic could be written as a popular culture article, but currently the single reference to Wired is insufficient to meet the standard of multiple, independent, non-trivial references. On the other hand, the arguments to keep this article seem to fall back on a professional version of WP:ILIKEIT (sometimes drifting towards WP:IWROTEIT) or an appeal to Wikipedia's status as non-censored content. The first is no more a reason for inclusion for science (or topics which would like to be thought of as science) than it is for any other subject; the latter is a false dilemma because standards for inclusion are not censorship. At the end of it all, I can reach no other conclusion but to regard the single paragraph in Immanuel Velikovsky (here, final paragraph) as the due weight to be afforded this topic. Serpent's Choice 04:02, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
  • edit and keep.I do not agree with some of the comments above , though they are made by people with whom I usually do agree. I do not find the article in its existing form the least sympathetic to the theory; the lead paragraph in particular is written with a POV which I can best characterise as amused contempt. The article is overbalanced by the discussion about deep impact, which may have been an interesting potential test case, but arguably an inconclusive one, as the concept/theory is so inspecific as to be able to explain away almost anything. The discussions of other elements of physics amounts to an assertion that the conventional theories are right--it is necessary to at least cite a demonstration of this, but--as noted above--few qualified people have taken this seriously enough to explain the errors. Though not a physicist, I have enough knowledge of science to interpret the material presented as demonstrating the theory (or concept) to be utter nonsense, and I think anyone with a college physics course would judge the same. Personally, I am not in the least amused by pseudoscience, and have an definite prejudice against it, as I consider the public knowledge of genuine science tenuous enough without introducing additional confusion. But I think assertions that it is non-notable a little absurd after the "Wired" article. I think assertions of verifiability equally absurd: the question is nt to demonstrate that the theory is right, but to demonstrate what the theory is, and the sources do that in a very full manner. it can't be OR either, as the theory is based upon whim entirely, with no research of any sort being evident. We do not refute nonsense by hiding it--we refute nonsense by exposing it. Exposing it means first displaying, and then discussing. DGG 05:51, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
I really think we need a higher bar than a single Wired article for notability. The question here is not whether the article is NPOV -- it may indeed be -- and shows the subject in the right light. The question is whether it is notable. Sdedeo (tips) 06:11, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete as complete bollucks and hoax by persons with zero understanding of electricity. Edison 06:28, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete without prejudice. Per nom, and because the article as it stands is something of a travesty. Cardamon 12:33, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete. It is possible to imagine a decent or even a quite good article on this topic. However, the leap of imagination required is much like that needed to visualize a magnetic monopole, or even a complex zero of the Riemann zeta function whose real part is not one-half. Such an article might not violate fundamental laws of nature and logic, but I do not expect to encounter it. Anville 19:55, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete - per nom. I agree with most of the thoughts in the nomination and while pseudoscience can be reported as such for encyclopedic purposes, this article does nothing of the sort and instead fails WP:V in the process. ju66l3r 23:53, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete - Clearly in conflict with well established physical concepts and experimental data. Only a candidate for inclusion as a well-known, but not accepted "theory." But as documented well in nom, it is not notable enough. Awolf002 01:40, 3 January 2007 (UTC)


  • Keep in entirety - I found this article to be interesting and informative, and it does explain these peoples theories accurately. The purpose of this article is to explain the theory, and their ideas to provide a record of them. We really must not allow our personal views about the theory and whether or not we think it is correct to lead us to censor this information. I see many people here who clearly have a disagreement with the theory and want to kill this article because it does not comply with their own personal opinions. It seems, we have little room here for differing viewpoints, and if something doesnt comply exactly with what some people want, they want to delete it, censor it. I say, keep the article here, and let the reader decide. Millueradfa 03:53, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • I fail to see how this argument addresses the concerns of this topic violating WP:OR and WP:N. --EMS | Talk 05:30, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • I agree. WP is not for something you make up in school one day would apply to your argument (i.e., I can't theorize about a Quazaloo bird that has the legs of a man and plays soccer and then quote my own research on the bird to generate an article here to record my theory). While this article is a bit more substantial than my given example, it still does not reach much further to satisfy WP:OR or WP:N or WP:V. There are many scientifically unverified hypotheses and proposals in Wikipedia, but in each case, they are able to satisfy the tenets of WP...and if they can't, they'll end up here eventually. ju66l3r 16:47, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Keep per media recognition in the Wired News article "They Sing the Comet Electric". The material at thunderbolts.info, though obviously not a reliable source for verifying the concept's claims, does verify that its proponents make those claims, and that's what our article can present. Tim Smith 03:58, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.