User talk:Ermadog

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[edit] Welcome!

Hello, Ermadog! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions to this free encyclopedia. If you decide that you need help, check out Getting Help below, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking Image:Signature icon.png or using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your username and the date. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field. Below are some useful links to facilitate your involvement. Happy editing! -- Levine2112 discuss 02:15, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
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[edit] How do I make a bookmarking link?

{{helpme}}

Thanks for the welcome.

I would like to know how to make a link that directs a person to a particular section of a web page. I know how to copy and insert an url from my browser bar. How can I direct the reader to the relevant paragrapgh in the page? I am using Opera 9.27 on Vista 32 bit Home Premium, if that is relevant.

Oh, yah, and how do I stick a template on my page? ermadogErmadog (talk) 05:33, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

OK, if you talk about link in Wikipedia, it use [[LINK]], if you want to place a template, just do {{TEMPLATE NAME}}. Any question, you can still ask me. --Aleenf1 14:42, 26 April 2008 (UTC)


Thanks. I posed the question because the template name did not show up when I first pasted it. Now I see that it is there. did you edit it for me or does it just not show up in the preview mode? ermadogErmadog (talk) 23:33, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Civility and personal attacks

Per the Wikipedia policy on biographies of living persons, please do not make comments such as this unless you have solid reliable sources. Comments such as that, this, this and this are uncivil and cross the line into personal attacks and will lead to your being blocked. Dreadstar † 19:06, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Please quote the exact wording of mine which you consider to be uncivil or a personal attack. If you consult dictionary.com, you will discover that terms such as civil, rude, courtesy, etc. are matters of opinion devolving around an undefinable concept of "good manners". My experience of 55 years of living an a Western democracy shows that different social layers have different consensus as to what that constitutes good manners. For, instance, some people consider formality in matters of etiquette to be cold, and therefore rude; while others consider informality to constitute an unwarranted personal importunity. The wiki policy which you have cited further defines "unvility" as "personally-targeted, belligerent behavior and rudeness that results in an atmosphere of conflict and stress". This definition pretty much precludes any possiblity of any discussion of any disagreement whatsoever, because such discussion is, by definition, a conflict. And "stress" is another matter of subjective opinion.
For instance, Olive's response to ScienceApologist in this exchange appears to me to be a calculated dismissive response intended to stultify an unwelcome discussion:
"This edit restores NPOV to the article over the objections of those who believe that this subject can magically affect the world in mechanistic ways science does not recognize. We must be clear that the people doing the "research" are obviously deluded and biased. ScienceApologist (talk) 14:35, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
SA, thanks for your opinion.(olive (talk) 15:47, 9 March 2008 (UTC))"
I would consider this response to be uncivil and counterproductive. The bias to which he refers had been demonstrated in previous discussion by others.
If you think that I have made "titillating claims about people's lives", as per the biography of living persons section, please cite the exact wording. ermadogErmadog (talk) 23:29, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
Although this is Dreadstar's territory, I wanted to a reply to comments made on a statement I made weeks ago, and which may be outside of this warning period.
My response was exactly what it says it is. I consider SA's comment to be an opinion couched in less than neutral language... "deluded and biased" for which I thanked him, but did not engage him. Had he wanted to engage in further conversation there was absolutely nothing to stop him. Assuming SA is not capable of dealing with such a statement is less than complimentary. I have engaged SA in discussion in the past, and there is nothing in his history to indicate that he lacks the courage or intelligence to deal with any kind of statement if he wants to, and especially one that is so completely innocuous.(olive (talk) 23:59, 27 April 2008 (UTC))

Accusing a living person of being a "liar," “fraudulent” and “disingenuous” as you did here does indeed violate WP:BLP, and forgive me if I don’t repeat the violation by quoting your exact wording.

Here are some examples of where you targed another editor with uncivil personal attacks:

As for the statement number one above, you’re wrong, there is no excuse for being uncivil…even if another editor actually is being dishonest as you so claim. This type of behavior will not be tolerated. Dreadstar † 02:59, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Ermadog. I'm hoping you'll consider moving your comment directed to Olive that you posted on the TM Talk page to Olive's Talk page. I'd hate to have our discussion interrupted by a discussion of civility. And the Talk page may be a more appropriate venue. TimidGuy (talk) 11:37, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] TM and science

Hi Ermadog, I saw your note at SA's talk page asking SA or others for advice on this, so thought I'd drop by and say hello. I've only been in Wikipedia for 3 months and I've been watching these pages, especially TM-Sidhi, for most of that time (it's kind of a funny story how I first got interested in the Maharishi Effect, but not worth telling now) and trying to decide whether there's a way to address the problems. For a long time, I was stymied by a misinterpretation of WP:V (verifiability) and of WP:RS (reliable sources) that is widely held among fringe advocates, that says that as long as something is verifiable, and as long as it's published in a peer-reviewed source, it's unassailable. I spent some time last night studying the reliable sources policy and finally realized that I've let these people just flat pull the wool over my eyes. I had always assumed good faith and supposed that if they're so sure that's what policy says, then that must be a reasonable interpretation of policy, or at least a reasonable misreading of the policy, made possible because the policy isn't clearly enough written to avoid confusion. Now I see there's no way a reasonable person could read policy the way they read it. Unfortunately some of them are extremely busy just now rewriting policy to fit their misreading, to make it easier to make Wikipedia a compendium of fringe ideas rather than a serious encyclopedia, but I hope there's someone more knowledgeable and respected than I am, who's paying attention and will ultimately keep them from being successful at that effort.

I was also stymied by WP:NOR (no original research) because much of my understanding about how bad these studies are is based on my expertise as a statistician and my having looked at some of the data and at the studies themselves, but none of the result of that evaluation is allowable because it all qualifies as original research. So as I say, I'd been biding my time and trying to think of a way to approach this that might have even a tiny chance of being successful against the vested interests that guard these articles. I'm thinking now that reliable sources is the obvious way to address the deficiencies of the article, because it is in so obvious violation of that policy, but you'd need enough people who believe in NPOV (real NPOV, not the weird kind of NPOV these people engage in, where if you add some muffled criticism to balance the positive spin, they think that qualifies as NPOV) to be able to make any progress. I hate fighting, more than about anything (you seem to have more of a taste for it) so I've been hoping to find a way to make these articles encyclopedic without fighting. I'm also very encouraged by the proposal to set up a Sourcing Adjudication Board; I figure that if we editors can't convince the vested interests that the fact that basically it's all primary sources, and no independent verification make this material unencyclopedic, then the Sources Board can.

As I've watched the article, what I've seen is one person at a time comes along, raises criticisms about the research, gets gently corrected by the (oh so polite and always impeccably civil) guardians of the Maharishi interests who patrol the pages, ends up apologizing to them for daring to raise the questions, and goes away. (And yes, many people have raised the question of conflict of interest, but it never goes anywhere, because they are very careful to give the impression of attempting to keep the article neutral, so there's really no case, even though of course anyone looking closely can see that there's nothing neutral about it).

You asked for advice, so I'll give you some: your approach in the beginning wasn't terribly helpful; your somewhat insulting comments just gave them an excuse to dismiss your valid criticisms and focus on what they characterized as incivility. It's best not to give them ammunition but to stick to the issues. I don't think John Hagelin, for example, is dishonest; I think he's just very deluded. But whether he's one or the other doesn't really matter to writing the encyclopedia, so there's no point in sharing my opinion about it with people whose reflex reaction would be to defend him. That's a very long post, but I've been thinking about this for quite a while, so forgive me for unloading. Welcome to the weird world of Wikipedia. Woonpton (talk) 21:16, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

P.S. To round out the above discussion, you might be interested in looking at a post on my talk page from olive, who was shocked (shocked!) to read what I wrote to you and felt the need to respond. However, instead of rebutting anything of substance in the thoughts I shared with you, she rather corroborates most of it by and in her response. That she takes everything in it very personally and assumes it's all about her, seems just bizarre, since in fact, I wasn't thinking of her particularly when I wrote any of it but the mention of guardians of the Maharishi interests who patrol the TM pages. Anyway, read, and see if it doesn't just confirm much of what I said. As I said, welcome to the weird world of Wikipedia. A well-developed sense of humor may not be a prerequisite, but it does make the whole experience more entertaining. Woonpton (talk) 01:17, 1 May 2008 (UTC)