Talk:Deej

Facilitated communication

This documentary promotes the idea that this pseudoscientific technique works.

Per the FC article: "There is widespread agreement within the scientific community and multiple disability advocacy organizations that FC is not a valid technique for communicating with those with autism spectrum disorder.[3] Research indicates that the facilitator is the source of the messages obtained through FC (involving ideomotor effect guidance of the arm of the patient by the facilitator)… Facilitated communication has been called "the single most scientifically discredited intervention in all of developmental disabilities".[8]...there is a scientific consensus that facilitated communication is invalid and a pseudoscience, and its use is strongly discouraged by most speech and language disability professional organizations.[3]

Therefore, I hope to see criticism of this documentary by the science and medical community added to this article! RobP (talk) 18:01, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

Let's not shit all over an article because you've determined it's pseudoscience. Martin Wisse (talk) 15:02, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

Interesting that you describe the suggestion to add valid scientific criticism of what is presented as fact in this documentary in the crudest terms. RobP (talk) 01:40, 26 August 2019 (UTC)

The criticism section appears to be written by someone with a heavy anti FC bias, there are articles both about and by autistic's who use FC to communicate which points towards it not being a pseudoscientific technique. Imanautie (talk) 15:30, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia does not give pseudoscience extra weight. You obviously aren't paying attention, read the FC Wikipedia page. People who use FC/RPM say it works because they are not the ones "speaking" the words are coming from the facilitators. You have some better articles to use, present them here. Sgerbic (talk) 17:48, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Indeed, with WP:PSCI being policy. —PaleoNeonate – 23:33, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Endorsement section

I've not seen a endorsement section for a Wikipedia page before. Who are these endorsers? Are they Wikipedia notable? Sgerbic (talk) 04:29, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, I've removed the section as undue promotion, it also only cited its own material (WP:ABOUTSELF, WP:SPS, etc). It reminded me of the testimonial shows for multilevel-marketting companies. —PaleoNeonate – 23:33, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Oh dear! I guess I should have just removed it myself, but thought maybe this is a normal "thing" that I haven't seen here before. Thanks Paleo. Sgerbic (talk) 23:54, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

I want to preface this with a clear note that I do not think this section should be brought back. ("Endorsements" in this kind of situation are probably best addressed in well-sourced prose within the context of a more broadly encompassing reception-type section, which this was not. I simply know of its contents because I was interested in improving this article but wanted to explore its history to make sure I didn't accidentally rehash anything, unless it happened to be worth rehashing, which this isn't.) But I did want to say just for the record: I think the majority of the list was not easily verifiable as notable, but a handful of people (for instance, Ari Ne'eman and Julia Bascom, former and current directors, respectively, of Autistic Self Advocacy Network, alongside one or two others whose names stick less firmly in my head after a night of sleep) were in fact notable. - Purplewowies (talk) 15:40, 31 July 2022 (UTC)

Axes to grind regarding facilitated communication

Criticism of the film's depiction of facilitated communication (FC) is welcome, and is covered in the "Criticism" section. But what I saw and corrected (and then got reverted on) went way beyond discussion, suggesting that the film is *about* FC, that it's an advocacy film for it, and including a long introduction that misrepresented the film itself. This film is about FC is the same sense that The Wizard of Oz is about shoes. I'd argue that the "Alternative Medicine" topic is also unwarranted, as -- again -- that's not even close to the topic of the film. I find it hard to believe the critics have seen the film itself. Tone down your obsessions. --tgeller (talk) 15:31, 12 June 2021 (UTC)

I went through it again and found a deceptive junk reference. It claimed that an article by subject's father (about DJ's early education) is a "scientific stud[y that] raised questions about facilitated communication". Regardless of anything else, that's just scummy. --tgeller (talk) 15:46, 12 June 2021 (UTC)

I only did a cursory search last time I watched the documentary (wanting to know more about it and what people thought) and at the very least I think the focus on FC here feels WP:UNDUE given that it's half the article, because that level of focus on the criticism doesn't feel due with the amount I came across when doing a casual search. I'm also not sure the alternative medicine series template is warranted. (Also, though this is a personal note more than a discussion of the content: I worry that people who are so focused on how apparently all facilitated communication is "always" the "facilitator's words" or whatever may be letting that bias leech into how much focus they think should be put on it in articles that tangentially are related to facilitated communication, though I may be biased myself from anecdotes I've heard from people who now type mostly or completely independently (i.e. without someone touching them, even if someone may be present) who have expressed disappointment at their communication being maligned because it started as FC.) - Purplewowies (talk) 22:08, 28 July 2022 (UTC)

You have "heard from from people who now type mostly or completely independently... " really? And "tangentially are related to FC?" The entire reason Deej is "writing" is due to the use of FC. Sgerbic (talk) 03:28, 30 July 2022 (UTC)

Yes, but that's not what the film is about and the back and forth on this talk page shows that it's controversial enough that it's worth leaving out of the short description specifically, even if facilitated communication as a concept is a fringe viewpoint in Wikipedia parlance (what also suggests it's controversial is the template on the facilitated communication talk page specifically labeling the topic as controversial). The film 100% indisputably features an autistic high school student preparing for college, so I thought it would be more in line with avoiding controversy per WP:SDJARGON's advice to "use universally accepted facts that will not be subject to rapid change, avoiding anything that could be understood as controversial or judgemental" when I changed the short description to cover the most uncontroversial facts of this. I didn't change any of the article text, just took mention of controversial aspects out of the shortdesc. Also, this may be a rash reaction on my end and I'm willing to accept that possibility, but the commanding "your bias is showing, take it to talk" on what I felt was a fairly face value edit felt less than civil--I acknowledged my own biases in this very talk section before I made a single edit to the article (so it wasn't like I was unfamiliar with taking it to the talk page), and even though I described desire to do more than I actually did within the talk message in which I also acknowledged my bias, I only made bold edits to the article for changes I thought would be fairly uncontroversial.

Regarding the "heard from people" bit I used as an example of where I may be biased, since you responded to it, I was going to link a piece of writing I was thinking of but am having trouble finding it (I don't know if the person who wrote it took it down or if I am thinking of the wrong person), so unless/until I do find it, all I can point to that is tangible regarding times I've seen it is that DJ himself is seen typing independently in a few chronologically later scenes in the documentary, which logically cannot be construed as a facilitator putting words in his mouth. But given for the most part that was just a statement of where my own perspective stands, it has little to do with the actual article discussion I was bringing up and is probably not worth zeroing in on (even if the fact I just now mentioned it happened in the film establishes something related to the article if only in an OR-y sort of way). - Purplewowies (talk) 06:02, 30 July 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply. I do not wish to disagree with you, we have seen much vandalism and bias on the FC pages over the years and I am quick on the button to changes that seem to be leaning towards an editor's opinion of FC as a valid communication. Especially if the editor is in communication with someone that practices FC or RPM. In my experience, a person who can type independently is just someone who types. There is no need to qualify an individual as not needing FC any more than you are I need FC to type here on talk. If you are in communication with people who complain that they are not taken seriously because they use FC, then that is an odd statement. You either use FC and are dependent on your facilitator, or you are an independent communicator and never use FC or RPM to communicate. How can someone use FC and be independent?

Your opinion that DJ has been seen typing independently on the video as evidence shows that you have not read the actual articles cited here in the article. You know as well as I do that we editors do not get to interrupt the film for ourselves, but must rely on the secondary sources. The secondary sources that are used here are critical of the methods of FC and there is no ambiguity that what you see on the video is independent communication. Therefore this Wikipedia article must reflect that.

About the short description. This is not the story of just some random autistic teen getting ready for college. The entire story from beginning to end relies on the supposed communication method which the notable sources show as controversial. The description should remain as is unless there is discussion here to change it. You may not be aware of the rules of FRINGE on Wikipedia which this article clearly falls into. FRINGE topics do not shy away from making it clear that it is controversial. If this were the flat earth page we wouldn't say that because some people actually think the earth is flat we should be cautious and take out the criticism.

Again I apologize if I seem blunt. As I said FRINGE pages including all the FC and RPM pages have had possibly well-meaning editors try to remove criticism for reasons of their own without understanding that these pages have had years of work and contain strong citations explaining that FC is a discredited pseudoscience and not a credible communication method. I keep few pages on my watchlists these days, but this is one of the few that remains. Sgerbic (talk) 07:04, 30 July 2022 (UTC)

My mentioning DJ typing in film independently was not meant to be a comment on what content should be in the article (which is part of why I called my own comment out as OR-y when I brought it up--like, sure, I watched it happen, but at best that'd be synthesizing info from a primary source); it was meant as a... for lack of a better term... "consolation prize" for my not being able to find that piece of writing by someone who has used what they called facilitated communication who primarily types independently now (and I use "independently" here mostly as juxtaposition with the specific types of facilitation/supports that are characteristic of facilitated communication; I don't usually use that descriptor in almost any context). It's about as usable in-article as if I casually mentioned I attended a webinar that happened to include the doc subject on its panel (something that I did do once, without realizing)--it has little to do with the article content, and in the places where it does overlap, it's OR.

More on topic: I am quite aware of WP:FRINGE, yes (I can't say this now since I don't always have the best memory, but at one point long ago I knew it "cover to cover"). But I also think that in the interest of the fact that WP:SDJARGON mentions avoiding things understood as controversial within short descriptions specifically, I thought it made more sense to focus on the cold hard facts rather than the interpretation that the film's intent was to promote facilitated communication. That felt like something it made more sense to address in the article content for that reason, even if I've raised concerns here about whether the current weight on that information is due in the context of the film. Similar to how Modern flat Earth beliefs does not remotely shy away from describing them in the frame of generally-accepted science (that is, that it's pseudoscience/fringe/conspiracy thinking), but its current (longstanding) short description describes the topic using language that does not get into these aspects but describes it using the core description of what it technically is: "Modern-day beliefs concerning the shape of the Earth". An article can directly address controversy or fringe beliefs while having a short description that doesn't attempt to address that controversy in that limited space. - Purplewowies (talk) 19:06, 30 July 2022 (UTC)

So with this logic if the controversy is removed the short description for Simone Gold would be "Short description|American doctor" and not what it currently is "Short description|American doctor, anti-vaccine activist, and founder of America's Frontline Doctors" and Flat Earth would be "short description|Earth's shape as a plane or disk" not what it currently is "short description|Archaic conception of Earth's shape as a plane or disk" or Homeopathy as "Short description|medicine created by Samuel Hahnemann" and not what it is currently "Short description|Pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine". NOTE that I just copied and pasted the flat earth short description and it is not what you stated "Modern-day beliefs concerning the shape of the Earth". Sgerbic (talk) 04:19, 31 July 2022 (UTC)

It's a bit late so I'm not sure this reply to you will cover or respond to enough of your message to actually further discussion (even though your reply not very long and even though this reply is inexplicably very long XP) and so I may look at/address more of the "meat" of it later if I think I need to, but I noticed it on my watchlist before I was about to close the tab and wanted to clarify something.

I pulled that "modern-day beliefs" description from the page I linked in my prior reply, Modern flat Earth beliefs, because I figured when you were talking about flat Earth you were talking about the more recent surges of conspiracy theory type beliefs, so I actually went over there to see how they phrased it because I wanted to know if and how they addressed it being a pseudoscience in the short description and found the fact it didn't try using the short description to address that at all (despite very clearly addressing it in the article text) interesting/a-tad-surprising enough to bring up here.

I did also look at Flat Earth before I went to the modern beliefs article (because it's what first comes up when searching "flat earth" on here) and noted that it used the "archaic conception" language (which doesn't come across as controversial or judgemental to me, as it just means "old" and the article is about ancient cultures), but I wikiladdered on over to the modern article because I figured that you were talking about modern day pseudoscience/conspiracy beliefs and not that article which largely discusses since-debunked historical conceptions that would have been considered some level of mainstream when they were conceived. - Purplewowies (talk) 06:38, 31 July 2022 (UTC)

So you have addressed the flat earth short description but not the others. We are getting off the subject of Deej. Sgerbic (talk) 08:51, 31 July 2022 (UTC)

Honestly, I felt that your bringing the "if this were the flat earth" page into this (and honestly the other short descriptions) felt a tad WP:OTHERCONTENT but I decided to follow the rabbithole originally because you made a claim about what should or shouldn't be happening in the flat earth description but had not referenced what said description's content might actually be, so I was interested in looking into it (even if that could be a bit OTHERCONTENT itself). Then my comment last night was mostly intended to clarify something it seemed you misunderstood, though I took a lot of words to get there. I would go back and address the full comment, but as your most recent reply seems to be criticizing both my incomplete addressing of your previous reply as well as the fact that I addressed it at all, there's not really a "winner" path I can take here regarding further discussing any of the rest of your comment about other short descriptions, so I'll be going the path of "let it go" and dropping that tangent of this discussion.

My focus within the context of this chunk of thread has been and continues to be that I believe it's possible to not shy away from accurately representing some of the criticisms that seem to have been levied against this documentary/its controversial aspects in the article prose without hashing them out in the limited space of the short description, which to my understanding of WP:SDJARGON is discouraged. But perhaps with the centripetal force produced by the way this discussion seems to be going in circles, the focus is having a hard time staying in "orbit" as it were. I hesitate to say this but it's beginning to feel in this one-on-one between us as if The Rock and The Hard Place are trying to find a consensus they may never reach. - Purplewowies (talk) 16:05, 31 July 2022 (UTC)

I have placed a tag on the first source in the criticism section as it does not support the sentence it is attached to. It's an article by the documentary's subject and discusses facilitated communication but it contains no information about the documentary or its contents, which makes sense as it was published several years before the documentary was even filmed. I'm curious as to what logic was used to have it support that sentence. Unrelatedly, I've looked into the alternative medicine series template and its documentation says it should be used "articles that are included in [it]", which this film is not. I'm sure the rationale for its inclusion is "facilitated communication exists within this film", but to me that rationale is about like, say, putting the Elon Musk sidebar on the Twitter article, or putting the human growth and development sidebar on every BLP. Part of me wants to boldly remove it but I figured I'd more thoroughly detail my concerns here first because at least that way there might be some chance at discussion. - Purplewowies (talk) 02:10, 30 July 2022 (UTC)

Autism rights movement template removal

Per WP:BRD I'm bringing my concern about this undo here. Sgerbic, is there a specific reason you removed this template, since you didn't provide a summary on your undo? I was bold with the edit since I figured the template was relevant; this article mentions the documentary being related to the neurodiversity movement (so a connection with the topic of the sidebar) and the template even contains links in its issues section to other topics that this article discusses, like facilitated communication and augmentative and alternative communication. It seems as if the article is clearly related to the template's topic. I'm mostly just confused with the removal in conjunction with its unexplained nature and thought it was better to follow BRD than to, say, potentially edit war by reverting an unexplained removal. Thanks. - Purplewowies (talk) 19:39, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

You have been making lots of edits to the Deej's article, as if the communication is real. There are many R/S that show that Deej is not communicating though FC and did not graduate from school, the facilitator did. The autism rights movement you added is added as if FC is pro autism. I'm sorry I didn't add a summary, I realized I forgot as I was doing something else at the time. I think we need to look at the changes you have already made to the article before making more. Sgerbic (talk) 04:55, 29 July 2024 (UTC)

I've made four edits (not a number I would categorize as "a lot", even though all have been made in the past week or so) to this article in the past two years, not counting the one to add that template; I had actually been avoiding editing the article until seeing someone else make edits because it felt two years ago (and now, frankly) like you had been approaching edits I make with some sort of assumption of bad faith on my part. Heck, part of me was even a little scared to make edits for the past two years until I saw someone else do it; it feels as if my edits are being squashed into a slide that you have to accession before I can be "allowed" to edit the article. (Last time this happened, it translated into me backing off for fear of starting an edit war or protracted dispute, trying to figure out if I could draft some edits and then bring them to the talk page for discussion/your approval before actually making them, and then ultimately not doing that, because I got sick and then got too busy.)

Not counting the template addition, the edits I've made to the article recently were to: a) remove a sentence that was tagged as using a dubious source two years ago, which never received focus or discussion on this talk page after the initial time it was brought up and had thus become stale (plus move a nearby sentence so that its content still made sense in the context of the paragraph once the dubiously sourced one was removed), b) add what I tried to make sure was neutrally-phrased context about who one of the reviewers was, c) change the short description slightly (the entire short description has been rewritten by someone in the shortdesc Wikiproject since then), and d) removing what I believed to be very clear synthesis of something no reliable sources appeared to say. A number of other edits have been made recently by Blobs2; are you conflating their edits with mine?

The sources on the article merely state that he graduated college; is there a reliable source you can provide that says that his facilitator graduated and not him? From the sources provided, the assertion that was removed (item d in my list of edits) seemed to be drawing its own conclusion based on sources that state he was conferred a degree and sources that state he uses/used FC (i.e. "source A says he used FC, and because FC is not legitimate, source B must mean that a facilitator got/did the degree and not him" when neither set of sources actually says that). This kind of thing would be synthesis/original research on its own, but I did note in my edit summary for that removal that another reliable source cited in the article (added by Blobs2) states DJ can communicate independently.

You are drawing conclusions about my reasons for adding the template that do not actually reflect why I added it. I don't think an article's topic even has to be pro-autism to be relevant enough for the autism rights movement template to be added (and its transclusions would seem to support this; it's on articles for a few people I know are not pro-autism or at least not pro-neurodiversity). To be worth transcluding, I just think the article has to be sufficiently relevant to the topic. I added the template because the article relates the film to the neurodiversity movement; in particular, it states "The film depicts Savarese as an activist with the goal of promoting communication access for nonspeaking autistic people as part of the neurodiversity movement." I added the template because the article seemed related enough to the template's topic that it was worth including. In the absence of an edit summary (though thank you for explaining why one was not included), the removal was confusing given my own rationale for adding the template, though looking back, maybe I could have included the "I think it's related" reasoning in my own edit summary instead of just saying I was adding the template. I was making a quick edit before needing to do something else at the time myself and probably could have stood to spend more time writing that summary. - Purplewowies (talk) 07:40, 29 July 2024 (UTC)

I'll join the discussion here, since I added the source saying that Deej communicated using AAC, not FC. For convenience, the source I cited is here: https://thinkingautismguide.com/2019/09/distorting-deej-deconstructing.html. Sgerbic, since you seemed confused about the past several edits to the article, you might consider reading this source, then deciding what your stance is after that. Blobs2 (talk) 15:11, 29 July 2024 (UTC)