User:Leifern/Accusations by Midgley

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This is an extension of my user page and should only be edited by me. Feel free to use this document's Talk page if you wish to comment. Any edits made by others than me will be reverted at the first opportunity.

[edit] Examples of attacks

Midgley has launched a campaign against me lately, and here are a few examples:

  • [1] "recent unbroken series of egregious violations of WP:CIVIL by him in my direction"
  • [2] "He had also been staggeringly unpleasant in a wide range of other articles and edits...anyone who disagrees is a bad person...I think his recent editing conduct has been egregious in personal attacks on me...
  • [3] "He is being steadily more unpleasant and I have in mind an RFC on his behaviour"
  • [4] "...his son is autistic, as he throws at people from time to time, and I understand that he is having chelation therapy to remove Mercury, on the basis that only those who hold these to be effective treatment and single cause for Autism know anything about medicine."
  • [5] "whether Leifern is succesful in distinguishing his personal grief, rage and sense of injury about his child'
  • [6] "Leifern has been making threats for months now, legal and otherwise, and bothering admins and others with his poorly-founded accusations."
  • [7] "Leifern is lying."
  • [8] "Leifern is unbalanced on matters relating to me."


There are undoubtedly many more, and I have asked Midgley several times to extend the courtesy of notifying me when he lodges such complaints so that I can defend himself. [9] [10] [11] [12], which are all deleted on his talk page.

He also nominated this very page for deletion, as he felt it was all an "attack." Some choice quotes from his nomination:

  • "I think he needs to be given a long rest"
  • "There is an underying theme, and it first surfaced in Leifern's edit history in his very first days of identifiable editing, on autism"

Midgley has also included a number of ad hominem attacks on me in the past, such as:

  • [13] "But Leifern will not have it that any such people exist [anti-vaccinationists], regardless of anyone lese's [sic] use of this simple compound word. Why? is the question that comes to my mind."
  • "I suppose I may be wildy wrong, and by all means correct me if so, but I suspect that English, of the relevant period or the modern one, is not Leifern's first language"
  • "I've remarked before that Leifern's actions suggest a non-objective component, on this topic and those related to it."
  • "The assertion that there is agreement, never mind that none exist is either pathological, or a deliberate attempt to represent collaborative anti-vaccinationist activity as non-existent by a stealth anti-vaccinationist."
  • "Leifern is an anti-vaccinationist, John is an anti-vaccinationist, Ombudsman is, and so is the anonymous detractor from 86.10.231.219 It is no more a personal attack to remark on this than it is to say that I am a doctor."
  • "Leifern is prone to making threats" (because I warned him that blanking is vandalism, accusing people of something is libelous, and calling him on various mischief, including sockpuppetry,
  • "Hasn't changed. Leifern seems to have a very clear image of me"
  • "Has Leifern actually written any articles?"

I can certainly defend myself against these charges, but I think those interested in this dispute should understand what our disagreement is about.

[edit] The core disagreement

Now, I'm not going to claim I'm completely blameless. But let's go through the contentious issue here:

Midgley has done a few things I disagree with. It started out on February 1st, 2006 at 19:08 hours when he blanked out an entire section of Thimerosal [14] and buried it in a recently created article [15] called Anti-vaccinationists. The burial is evident here: [16], where he labeled objections to one particular aspect of vaccinations as "attacks against a broad front." He claimed that the move followed a thoroughly discussed consensus on the talk page for Thimerosal, when in fact he proposed the move at 18:57[17], a full 11 minutes before he went ahead and blanked and moved, and then to a different article than what he originally proposed.

I nominated the anti-vaccinationist article for deletion. The nomination attracted furious debate, and was prematurely closed after only four days. I still stand by the grounds for the nomination, and I believe subsequent events have vindicated me, but I respected the decision.

Midgley has made much of the fact that my google search came up with no hits for anti-vaccinationists. I'll confess that I probably misspelled the term in my search, but it's still not a widely spread term. I get 470 hits for "anti-vaccinationist" [18] and 945 for anti-vaccinationists [19], a number that gets reduced if you take out a) referrals to the article by Wolfe and Sharp; and b) mention of the historical movements that labelled themselves as anti-vaccinationists.

But, since I am an inclusionist by disposition, I have two additional and arguably more important objections to this article:

  • First, there is a general tendency in Wikipedia to avoid articles that characterize people rather than opinions. Labels such as Anti-Semite, Anti-Zionist, Communist, Fascist, etc., etc., redirect to articles that describe the underlying set of opinions.
  • Second, the position Midgley is trying to propose in the article rests on a rhetorical fallacy. His main point is that any opposition to any aspect of vaccination is equivalent to categorical opposition to all vaccination. He bases this premise entirely on an article in BMJ by Wolfe and Sharp that finds similarities between arguments made by the anti-vaccinationist leagues of the past and various critics of vaccination policy of the present. There are two problems with this:
    • An NPOV article can not rest on a single, disputed premise. There is, for example, a long, much-disputed article on New anti-semitism, precisely because the Wikipedia (rightly) wouldn't stand for an article that simply assumed that strident anti-Zionists also hate Jews.
    • Even if we assumed that Wolfe and Sharp were absolutely correct in everything they write, they do not make the conclusion Midgley is aiming for, namely that a similarity between arguments amounts to the same movement.

To be sure, critics of vaccination cover a wide range. Some, like whale.to, incorporate opposition to vaccination into a broader set of beliefs that I personally find a little zany. Others are questioning the claimed efficacy and safety of vaccinations by trying to document problems with such claims. And some are critical to specific aspects of vaccination but accept their general use. My view, which I've made repeatedly, is that parents should make an informed decision about vaccination, and that means understanding the state of the controversy. I have never sought to delete or discredit any opinions or fact that support vaccination. My original draft of Vaccine controversy summarizes the case for vaccination in its introduction [20], and I have consistently sought to maintain NPOV in it.

Now, it seems evident to me that Midgley believes that "anti-vaccinationist" activity (however he defines it) is of harm. Here we also disagree. I think that it is appropriate for people to continually question conventional wisdom of any matter, and certainly in the field of rapidly evolving medical science. If history is any guide, many of the medical treatments we take for granted today will be completely rejected within the next 100 years.

All I have asked for is that the article be labelled in a way that doesn't beg the question, and that the content conform to NPOV standards. I have made several proposals for accomplishing this [21] [22], but none have met with Midgley's favor [23].

[edit] Response to personal attacks

I should note that Midgley hasn't made any specifics in these accusations to substantiate his case, so it's a little hard to know how he derives his opinions. Still, here are some of them, with comments:

  • Violations of WP:Civil. I am certainly capable of being spirited and even strident from time to time, but I scrupulously try to characterize actions rather than people. When Midgley has accused me, as a parent, of being non-objective because I have a sick son, I have rejected his unwelcome armchair diagnosis. I have certainly criticized his actions of:
    • Registering under a different user name and editing content that he is involved with under his usual name, what we usually call sockpuppetry;
    • Using a user name that another anonymous user previously used, thereby impersonating him/her
    • Confusing the discussion through this sockpuppetry and impersonation
    • I have also questioned whether a mere admonishment for these actions is appropriate admin action, as I suspect most other editors would have at least received a temporary block and some a ban.
  • Accusing those who disagree with me as bad people - I can't recall I've ever done that, either in those words or others. Yes, I can be confrontational in my discussions, but this is rather the norm than the exception on Wikipedia.
  • Claiming the truth on autism, etc. This is a blatant lie and finds no substantiation in anything I've written. In fact, my edits demonstrate that the truth is very elusive - a good example can be found here [24]
  • Denying there are anti-vaccinationists. Midgley has referred this comment I made on October 16th, 2004 [25], related to edits I made in the article here[26]:
I removed sentences and two entire paragraphs that were argumentative against the alleged link between vaccination and autism. Perhaps there should be a separate entry on vaccination controversies.
But since this entry is about the controversy surrounding the theory (which shouldn't need to be put in quotes if that's what it is), it doesn't need to go into detail about the public health benefits of vaccinations.
Perhaps those who wish to eliminate vaccines entirely are "radical." I doubt that vaccinations have saved "countless" lives from death by rubella and mumps, or diphteria in developed countries. And I'd have to say that withholding information about dangers of vaccination is grounds for lawsuit if not criminal conviction.
The term "anti-vaccinationist" doesn't appear anywhere in this section, for starters. Secondly, I explicitly acknowledge that there are people who "wish to eliminate vaccines entirely" and even allow for the possibility that they are "radical." (I also take exceptions to terms like "countless," and I think every doctor would agree that withholding information about the risks of any medical treatment is a bad thing.) In short, there is no evidence that I have denied the existence of anti-vaccinationists.
  • Having my judgment clouded because of my son's illness. I suppose that if that were the case, compassion or even pity would go farther than scorn. It seems a little odd - to put it kindly - to make a parent's love a case for condemnation; that somehow the people who care the most about their children's health are least capable of having an opinion what is best for them.
  • Being drunk. Ehmm, no.
  • Not writing English all that well. My writing, like everyone else's, could certainly stand to improve. But it has certainly passed muster at some of the world's most demanding universities and corporations.