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Changes of 2 July 2018

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Jason Colavita's blog is not a Wiki RS except for biographical info about himself. I had in fact mentioned Colavita's Mesha Stele in my 1988 TA article, where I had stated, "But in Paleo-Hebrew words are divided by small marks (Naveh 1973, 1982:36). Usually these are simple dots, as in the Mesha and Kilamu steles (Birnbaum 1954: plates O13, O14). In the Qumran Leviticus fragments, not found until shortly after World War II, however, precisely this comma-shaped mark is used to separate words." Wiki administrator Doug Weller indicates that I should not be contributing substantive material here, so I'll leave it to someone else to correct this.

Colavita's 5/16/12 blogpost does provide an interesting new reference to a c. 1870 illustration of the Mesha Stele in Morris's _Freemasonry in the Holy Land_, but Weller seems to confuse this with the c. 1870 Masonic encyclopedia that had been cited by Mainfort and Kwas, and which is discussed only later in the article. I'm not sure how Morris can be introduced here, however, since Wiki editors are not supposed to provide their own OR interpretations of raw material, and Colavita's blog interpretation of it isn't supposed to be authoritative.

My 1988 statement is in any event superseded by my reply to Mainfort and Kwas (2005), published 2015 in _Pre-Columbiana_ (and expunged from this article recently by Weller), in which I state, "The unusual Bat Creek word divider does appear in the Siloam inscription, which was discovered in 1880 in Hezekiah’s tunnel in Jerusalem and dates historically to 701 B.C. Although Guthe’s transcription (1882) of the inscription into Square Hebrew letters uses bold dots to represent the word dividers, a close examination of his accompanying photograph of an impression of the inscription reveals that they are in fact short diagonal lines set at approximately the same angle as is the Bat Creek word divider." But again I'm apparently not supposed to be adding substantive material here.

Colavita's post is at http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/the-mesha-stele-a-source-for-the-bat-creek-stones-word-divider See also my comment immediately after the post in reference to Siloam. HuMcCulloch (talk) 22:15, 31 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia Administrator Doug Weller often deletes sources here as "unreliable" or "self-published". See for example his 2/18/13 comments above in the section 2 Paragraphs Deleted.
But now Weller himself, on July 2, had added a long edit that relies entirely on a blogpost by Jason Colavito (which I incorrectly spelled Colavita above). When I tagged it as RS:SPS, Weller quickly removed the tag and left the reference. Are the rules here different for Administrators than for ordinary Users?
As I point out above, the blogpost in question makes an interesting point that could be of interest to readers of this page. As such, I would have no objection if Weller wanted to add it as an External Link instead of using it in the text. However, since he has now effectively barred me from adding anything of substance to the page (I'm the subject of red flag he has now posted at the top of the page), he might bar me from Wikipedia or some such if I add it myself.
Incidentally, Colavito also has another, 5/15/18 page on Bat Creek, entitled "What was the Bat Creek Stone Inscription Intended to Depict?", that would likewise be appropriate as an EL, in case anyone wants to add it. It's at http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/what-was-the-bat-creek-stone-inscription-intended-to-depict HuMcCulloch (talk) 14:46, 4 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Are the rules here different for Administrators than for ordinary Users? Administrators are normal editors. They have extra tools but only use them when they consider themselves uninvolved (WP:INVOLVED). As such you will not see him block you for content disputes, only for behavioral reasons if needed. I've seen him report people at WP:ANI or open discussions at WP:FTN like any other editor would. However, policy allows to sometimes use non-optimal sources if they agree with the academic consensus, when good sources are difficult to find (WP:PARITY). This includes self-published sources if the author's reputation is good. —PaleoNeonate – 23:57, 4 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Adding: if resorting to WP:PARITY is necessary, it often indicates that reliable sources on the topic are rare or absent. If so, it may either be for recentism reasons or because most sources on a topic are fringe with few mainstream scholars evaluating their claims. This also means that some claims may not merit mention. If they do because they are notable, but that the claims contradict the mainstream view, this is where the parity of sources comes in. —PaleoNeonate – 00:03, 5 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Doug Weller's 1278 character addition to this page on 7/2/18 certainly now makes him a WP:INVOLVED administrator, but of course administrators are as welcome as anyone to represent their POVs on Wiki pages. It is to be hoped that multiple POVs will be represented, ultimately arriving at a Wiki voice that takes a neutral POV. The immediate issue at hand, however, is his introduction of Jason Colavito's 5/16/12 blogpost in his edit, which would seem to be a clear violation of WP:RS/SPS. WP:PARITY is not an issue, since this is not a case of dueling blogpost references. Nor is "recentism" an issue when a 6-year old blogpost is used to elaborate on a 30-year old published paper, which itself has been already replied to at least 3 times in the published literature.
Colavito says (in his 5/15/18 blogpost) that he is finishing up a book that deals with Bat Creek and related issues. I don't know whether it will be self-published or not, but presumably it will represent his considered opinion on these matters after years of research (including bouncing trial balloons off the internet community with his blog), so I suggest that as a compromise we accept his book as an RS after it comes out.
PS, Doug, I notice that the links to the Mainfort and Kwas 1991 and 1993 papers that used to be available at your ramtops.co.uk website are no longer active. If you are no longer maintaining that webpage, perhaps you could suggest to them that they now upload their papers to Researchgate.com or some such so that readers can easily find them? Also, you neglected to include the date of the Colavito blogpost that you introduced here. If you are not going to withdraw it, you should at least provide its date.
Furthermore, the reference to Mainfort and Kwas (2004) [not 2005 as I misstated above] has somehow been snipped from the references section. I'm pretty sure it was here earlier, since I would have added it. In case anyone wants to add it now, it's Mainfort, Robert C., and Mary L. Kwas, "The Bat Creek Stone Revisited: A Fraud Exposed," American Antiquity 64 (Oct. 2004): 761-769. HuMcCulloch (talk) 13:11, 6 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I see now that Doug Weller has, for some inexplicable reason, withdrawn himself from discussion of the matter at hand, over at WP:Fringe_theories/Noticeboard#Talk:Bat_Creek_inscription.HuMcCulloch (talk) 13:45, 6 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It's been over a week, and still no word here from Doug Weller justifying his 7/2 inclusion of a [WP:RS/SPS] self-published blogpost in the article, despite his regularly removing materials he doesn't like on the same grounds. Since he is a Wikipedia administrator, he could block me from Wikipedia if I reverse his edit myself, so I'll leave it to someone else to do this. As I mention above, it seems appropriate to me to add the blogpost in question to the External Links section, with just a couple of words explaining that it's relevant to the word divider issue. HuMcCulloch (talk) 20:26, 13 August 2018 (UTC) HuMcCulloch (talk) 20:53, 13 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@HuMcCulloch: I see that you're one of the authors. This also means that you are strongly discouraged from editing the article yourself and should instead make requests to this page while disclosing your affiliation. Thanks, —PaleoNeonate – 00:21, 5 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I have initiated a discussion of whether Colavito's blogpost constitutes a WP:RS over at WP:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#Is_a_blogpost_a_reliable_source? HuMcCulloch (talk) (For some reason, my signature didn't generate a time stamp on the preceding notice. It was posted immediately after 2:45 UTC on 17 Aug 2018.) HuMcCulloch (talk) 17:08, 18 August 2018 (UTC) The discussion is in Archive 246, no. 46, at Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_246#Is_a_blogpost_a_reliable_source? HuMcCulloch (talk) 17:51, 7 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It should be noted that User:Doug Weller has asked for help with this discussion over on Wikipedia:Fringe_theories/Noticeboard#Talk:Bat_Creek_inscription, not once but twice, on 4 August and again on 14 August. While such solicitation of editors who may share one's POV is not per se contrary to the Wikipedia WP:Canvassing policy, it is generally regarded as good practice to leave a note at the relevant discussion that such a call for reinforcements has been made. Weller has posted no such notice here. I suspect that User:PaleoNeonate, who first posted here six hours after Weller's first solicitation, came in answer to Weller's call. Is this the case? HuMcCulloch (talk) 18:47, 18 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I came here from your post at RSN. With regard to your signature in your post above, if you type exactly four tildas, you get the links to user and talk page + date stamp; if you type only three, you get only the links to user & talk page; if you type 5 tildas you get only the date. Jytdog (talk) 19:06, 18 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Is this the case? Yes. FTN is not a place for people who share one's POV but an official noticeboard to help bring articles about fringe theories to encyclopedic standards (and policies like WP:FRINGE, WP:PSCI, etc). On Wikipedia, posting notices on public boards is not canvassing. Anyone can read FTN and watchlist it. Canvassing would be reaching multiple specific editors. —PaleoNeonate – 21:12, 18 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Incorrectly founded

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This page has way, way too many primary sources. See WP:PRIMARY. It should be based on secondary scholarly sources and probably about half as long as it is now. This is a great example of what WP:Beware of tigers warns against. Jytdog (talk) 03:52, 17 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

In fact, WP:Primary states,
Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources and, to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources and primary sources. Secondary or tertiary sources are needed to establish the topic's notability and to avoid novel interpretations of primary sources. All analyses and interpretive or synthetic claims about primary sources must be referenced to a secondary or tertiary source, and must not be an original analysis of the primary-source material by Wikipedia editors.
Wikipedia's goal is to become a good tertiary source itself, by relying almost entirely on published secondary sources. If Wikipedia were to rely entirely on tertiary sources, it would be come a pathetic and uninteresting fourth-hand source. The only really primary sources here are Thomas (1890, 1894) and Macoy (1868/70), and the article appropriately relies entirely on secondary sources for their interpretation. The article has a lot of problems, but this is not one of them. HuMcCulloch (talk) 19:01, 18 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

More non-primary sources

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  • Fritze, Ronald H. (2009). Invented Knowledge - false history, fake science and pseudo-religions. Reaktion. pp. 117–118. ISBN 9781861896742.
  • Birx, H. James, ed. (2006). Encyclopedia of anthrolology. Vol. 4. Ohio Hopewell: SAGE. p. 1762. ISBN 9780761930297 https://books.google.com/books?id=R2Y5DQAAQBAJ&pg=PA1762. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

—PaleoNeonate – 04:58, 17 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the Brix reference, Paleo. Other tertiary sources, such as Feder, praise the Smithsonian's Mound Survey as definitive in one chapter, and then dismiss Bat Creek as a hoax in another, without facing up to the inconsistency. But Brix actually does both in the same paragraph on p. 1762. Priceless!
Fritze is harder to find. NYPL has never heard of it, and NYU can only get it for me through ILL. But in any event, the article already quotes Feder in the first paragraph of the lead. Does it really need to pile on more tertiary sources? HuMcCulloch (talk) 15:06, 17 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The article in Birx's Encyclopedia of Anthropology containing the extraordinary paragraph simultaneously praising the Smithsonian's Mound Survey as authoritative and dismissing its Bat Creek Inscription as a hoax is entitled Ohio Hopewell (pp. 1758-64), and is by Paul J. Pacheco, not Birx himself (Birx, not Brix, is correct). HuMcCulloch (talk) 12:50, 18 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, he is only an editor. —PaleoNeonate – 13:07, 18 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
What we need to do is remove primary sources, and have this article be driven by secondary and tertiary sources and simply summarize them. If they contradict each other (or self-contradict) then we simply say that, giving weight per WP:WEIGHT. Please do see WP:Controversial articles and especially the "raise source quality" section. Jytdog (talk) 15:09, 17 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Jytdog, if you want to "raise source quality" here, you could replace Colavito's SPS blogpost "discovery" of the use of the word divider in the Mesha stele with my 1988 RS statement to that effect, as quoted above in the first paragraph of the previous section above. But since I'm connected to the topic at hand I'll leave that for you to do. HuMcCulloch (talk)
The entire article needs to be revised; dramatically. There is no point fussing over that one source. Almost everything here will be gone. I am reading the secondary sources and will start working in a day or two. Jytdog (talk) 17:21, 18 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Please read the above quote from WP:Primary before you do. BTW, what's your take on the Colavito blogpost issue? HuMcCulloch (talk) 19:11, 18 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Pretty much everyone here agreed back in 2013 that the lead was awful and much too long -- see Talk:Bat_Creek_inscription#Lead_again above, and especially the subsection Talk:Bat_Creek_inscription#discussion_on_above_proposal. There wasn't much objection (except maybe from RedPen) to my short proposed lead at the end of that subsection, but being a connected author I was effectively barred from making substantive changes at about that time, and no one else took over. Even Doug Weller agreed that there should be no personal names in the lead. Anyone who was really interested could then pour over the body of the article. Go for it! HuMcCulloch (talk) 19:25, 18 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The entire article. Jytdog (talk) 19:37, 18 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that a rewrite is badly needed. My main concern is that there is no clear delineation between the current mainstream view and older, disproven theories. Terms like "debate" and "commentary" add to the confusion. Secondary sources are essential in deciding how to present the prevailing scientific consensus. –dlthewave ☎ 20:41, 18 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The self-contradictory Birx/Pacheco statement found by PaleoNeonate above is an excellent summary of the ″prevailing scientific consensus″ on this artifact. This is a tertiary, not secondary source vis a vis the stone itself, but is a good primary source about that consensus, which is also pertinent to the article.— Preceding unsigned comment added by HuMcCulloch (talk • contribs) 15:41, 19 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I have now obtained Fritze's 2009 book Invented Knowledge through NYU/ILL. He states, on p. 93, that Gordon's 1970 claim that the inscription is Hebrew has been refuted, but the only reference he gives for that is McKusick's 1979 note in Biblical Archaeologist, reaffirming Thomas's 1890/94 identification of the inscription as Cherokee. He makes no mention of my 1988 article showing that Hebrew in fact fits much better than Cherokee or the subsequent lively discussion in Tennessee Anthropologist, and therefore was already 21 years out of date in 2009. He is not even aware of Mainfort and Kwas (2004), who now confirm that it is indeed Hebrew, albeit, in their view, copied verbatim from the 1868/70 Masonic text they discovered. Fritze may have useful things to say about other topics, but this is not one of them. HuMcCulloch (talk) 14:19, 7 September 2018 (UTC) HuMcCulloch (talk) 16:26, 7 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

YHWH and The Lord

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This sentence from the last para of the lead: " The General History correctly translates the inscription "Holiness to the Lord," though "Holy to Yahweh" would be more precise." To be precise, YHWH is Yahweh, and LYHWH is "to Yahweh". God knows what "the Lord" would be in ancient Hebrew, but not this.

More seriously, the lead is far too long. One para would be quite enough. The problem seems to be that the article is being edited by enthusiasts.PiCo (talk) 23:11, 3 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The Tetragrammaton is and was commonly pronounced as "Adonai" by Jews, going at least as far back as early Hellenistic times, and this was traditionally rendered as "The Lord" in Bible translations starting with the Septuagint (see Kyrios) down through the 19th century (the American Standard Version was the first significant departure from this tradition, and not an improvement in the eyes of many). AnonMoos (talk) 11:10, 28 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

New Lead

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Here is a condensed lead with citations I am thinking of adding:

The Bat Creek inscription is an inscribed stone tablet. The tablet was excavated by John W. Emmert on February 14, 1889 from Tipton Mound 3[1]. The inscription was found during a series of exactions of Hopewell mounds in Loundon County, Tennessee. The aim of the excavations was to shed light on who had built the mounds covering the Eastern United States[1].

When the Bat Creek tablet was discovered by Emmert, Cyrus Thomas was the director of the Division of Mound Exploration. Initially, Thomas concluded the inscription presented letters from the Cherokee alphabet.[2] However, this claim was refuted in the 1970’s when scholar of Near Eastern Cultures and ancient languages, Cyrus H. Gordon proposed the inscribed letters represented Paleo-Hebrew of the 1st or 2nd century[2]. According to Gordon, five of the eight letters could be read as "for Judea." Following Gordon’s claims, further arguments arose promoting both sides of the debate. Notably, in a 1991 reply, archaeologists Robert Mainfort and Mary Kwas, concluded the inscription is not genuine paleo-Hebrew but rather a 19th-century forgery[2]. And in a 1993 article in Biblical Archaeology Review, Semitist P. Kyle McCarter, Jr. stated that although the inscription "is not an authentic paleo-Hebrew inscription," it "clearly imitates one in certain features.” McCarter concluded, "It seems probable that we are dealing here not with a coincidental similarity but with a fraud.[3]" In 2004, further contributing to the growing body of evidence that the inscription is a hoax, Mainfort and Kwas published an article that included an illustration from an 1870 Masonic reference book with striking similarities to the Bat Creek inscription[2]. In the article, they provide evidence for their argument that the inscription is an attempted copy of the phrase “holy yahweh” from a freemason book readily accessible in the 1880’s. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ecp7201 (talk • contribs) 00:17, 31 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 21 August 2022

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The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: moved. (closed by non-admin page mover) – robertsky (talk) 12:00, 4 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Bat Creek inscription → Bat Creek Stone – A search suggests that this is the most common name in reliable sources. Doug Weller talk 14:23, 21 August 2022 (UTC) — Relisting. – robertsky (talk) 09:52, 28 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Note: WikiProject Archaeology has been notified of this discussion. – robertsky (talk) 09:53, 28 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Note: WikiProject Tennessee has been notified of this discussion. – robertsky (talk) 09:53, 28 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
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