Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Tim Smith

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[edit] "Three admins agreed" is a little misleading.

Only four people have actually commented there, and only one not involved in this RfC. -Amarkov blahedits 00:09, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

I agree. I was confused by it at first, thinking three outside admins had come in and reprimanded Tim Smith. That is not the case. The three admins are all party to the dispute itself. —Tox 12:32, 13 January 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Dicussion related to response to the suggestion for a resolution

Note: the instructions say this discussion should be here on the talk page. —Tox

Discussions, yes; properly formatted responses up for endorsement, no. I've restored the response to Tim Smith's proposed solution and offered for endorsement, which many already have. The several attempts to stifle this part of the RFC are transparent and becoming disruptive. FeloniousMonk 17:43, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
Please Assume good faith. Seeing this move had already been reverted, and wanting to respond to what was said, before moving the discussion back here, I searched far and wide, reading through all of the procedures at Wikipedia:Requests for comment, and the instructions at the head of each section at this RfC. I then perused half a dozen other RfCs looking for similar discussions. On all the ones I saw, most discussion took place on the talk page, and in only one instance did anyone else edit the response section, and they appologized for it and told the accused to move it to the talk page at their first convenience.
So, all explicit statements of policy tell me it should be here, and all practice I was able to encounter also tells me it should be here. You yourself have now put your response to Tim Smith's suggestion for a resolution in both the response section and the outside views section. Where is the proper place for it then? Could you please point me in the direction of Wikipedia policies or guidelines on the matter, rather than accuse me of stifling the RfC? —Tox 19:36, 13 January 2007 (UTC)


FeloniousMonk et al, appear to be confusing two seperate issues:
  1. The meaning and use of the term Darwinism at large
  2. The meaning and use of the term Darwinism in Uncommon Dissent
While #1 is useful to set the larger context the book was published in, #2 is the basis of what the book itself is about.
FM, et al:
[I]n cases of describing carefully organized disinformation campaigns, such as intelligent design, "stick closely to the sources" often results in promoting one side's distorted representation of the actual state of affairs. That is the case here.
This article is not on ID, rather it is on Uncommon Dissent. The actual state of affairs in question here is the content of the book. If the book defines a certain term (in this case Darwinism) a certain way, then that is by far the most valid source on the actual state of affairs on its use within that book.
Furthermore, I take issue with the idea that sticking closely to the sources would result in a distorted representation. An encyclopedia is only about the sources. If, for the moment, you think of an encyclopedia article as a debate, then in that debate we argue only as proxies of experts through sources. Meaning, you can delete an argument if its source is an editor. If its source is not (and is reasonable), you can only counter through arguments which you are not the source of. (Now, let's not take this metaphor too far, debate is not the actual point of an encyclopedia article and there may be other reasons for deleting statements, etc.) My point here being that if one side's views are so strong, then it is not hard to find sources.
FM, et al:
It is well documented with no shortage of sources that ID proponents intentionally use the catch-all, hot button phrase "Darwinism" to refer to evolution in general.
Fine, if that's relevant to the larger context, then mention it. But in this case the "actual state of affairs" is the use by 15 specific people. That is only verifiable by citing either a quote from the introduction (which we can presume each of the 15 authors were aware of), or by citing quotes from those authors about what they meant in that book.
FM, et al:
To follow that policy [WP:NPOVFAQ#Pseudoscience] the article needs to be very specific in describing the terms Darwinism and evolution.
Tim Smith is the only one who has given a specific definition of Darwinism. Not only did he provide a quote showing what the 15 authors mean within the book, but, at one point, he also described the term's use in a larger context. Furthermore, I see no specific description of evolution anywhere in the article, which in the context of an ID book can be almost as ambiguous.
Current passage:
. . ."Darwinism", which they use to refer to the theory of evolution. The book's introduction characterizes Darwinism by the central claim that "an unguided physical process can account for the emergence of all biological complexity and diversity.
Again, as I said in my outside view, the first part is not only sourced poorly, but is useless. In the context of a book by pro-IDers or creationits I do not know what is meant by evolution any more than I do by Darwinism. How many times have we seen evolution and ambiogenesis conglomerated under the umbrella evolution? Furthermore, the quotes attributed to Barham in the section "Darwinism" of the article on Uncommon Dissent indicate to me that Barham, at least, might not be opposed to evolution, but merely to a specific metaphysical interpretation of it. Biology and metaphysics are obviously seperate fields. In fact, I'm left with more questions over what the scope of this book really is (which could be addressed in the article). So again, in the introduction, the quote from the book indicates what the 15 authors are refering to, while the other sentence at best does nothing to elucidate me, someone who has not read the book, on what its authors are saying. However, even it does not elucidate me enough as a fully fleshed out article could, if this impasse can be overcome.
FM, et al:
Tim Smith's preferred version creates a hierarchy of fact - the views of the ID proponents are "true" and "undisputed", whereas the view of the scientific community is "controversial", held by "critics" and therefore more likely to be false, an implication that is both inaccurate and inappropriate, getting WP:NPOVFAQ#Pseudoscience exactly backward.
Yes, Tim Smith's preferred version does create a hierarchy of fact — the views of the 15 authors are characterized by quote A, whereas critics say they mean notion B. This is issue #2 I refer to above, and is in fact the central issue of the article. FM et al are confusing Tim Smith's version of a description about the contents of a book with a description of Darwinism in general. Smith never states anything directly about Darwinism (or ID) (either as true or false) at all. He only directly states that a particular passage quoted from the book characterizes the use of Darwinism in that book.
Both sides seem to be trying to follow NPOV, but FM et al are confusing this article with an article directly on Darwinism or ID. Here the intent is to neutrally convey what a specific set of 15 people meant within a specific set of articles. The veracity of particular theories, scientific or otherwise, is not the scope of this article. We have other articles that users can and should be referred to for that. Please try to understand the real issues here. Then I think it becomes apparent that Tim Smith's resolution is a "proper application of policy". —Tox 12:30, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
The 15 authors in Uncommon Dissent represent a tiny minority on a subject that claims to be science. They are an extreme minority within the scientific community, which views their notions as pseudoscience. WP:NPOVFAQ#Pseudoscience says "The task before us is not to describe disputes as though, for example, pseudoscience were on a par with science; rather, the task is to represent the majority (scientific) view as the majority view and the minority (sometimes pseudoscientific) view as the minority view; and, moreover, to explain how scientists have received pseudoscientific theories. This is all in the purview of the task of describing a dispute fairly." The only issue here is which side's views and terms are are presented as more accepted, and WP:NPOV tells us that it should the scientific community's as it is the majority view. FeloniousMonk 17:40, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
Yes, we all know how WP:NPOV applies on a page about ID. Please re-read my post and respond to the issue at hand: how to neutrally describe the specific views espoused by 15 specific authors in a specific book. —Tox 19:52, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
Of course Uncommon Dissent is not the ID article. But Uncommon Dissent is a ID article, which you'd know had you read the book. Had I'd admitted to not having read it, I'd defer to those editors who have when presenting opinion on the thrust and substance of the book.
The discussion here is moot now; since in the greater debate there's clearly differing views specifically attributable to each camp on what the term means and what ID actually object to, I've broken out the Darwinism/evolution term debate into a proper Controversy section in the article. That should settle matters, unless TS thinks there still needs to be a dispute tag on the article due to some new issue... FeloniousMonk 16:49, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

You can't blaame the guy for using the process when you delete all his edits without even talking about it. I personally would like to read the article on the cognitive whatever theory of the universe, but I guess my mind might be poisoned from it. Who made you the guardian over peoples beliefs. There is no reason to go around deleting stuff just because it is a minotrity view. Puddytang 06:13, 23 March 2007 (UTC)