User:Bovlb/AGF Challenge Exercise Answers

See User:Filll/AGF_Challenge_Exercises.

I already have an insight that while I can articulate that these are the right things to do, I do not do all these things when encountering a situation in the wild.

I found this a very interesting exercise, and would recommend it to all, especially those who are or contemplate being admins or OTRS responders. It certainly made me think, and develop my wiki-philosophy a little.

My wife is not a coauthor

• Respond via OTRS:

  Thank you for your note alerting us to an issue with the article. Accuracy is very important to us at Wikipedia, and it is a core policy for facts to be verifiable from reliable sources. We take this especially serious in the case of biographies of living people. I am sorry that you feel we have fallen short of our ideals in this instance.

  Unfortunately, it appears that all available online sources (e.g. ...) give the same information about co-authorship as is currently in the article, so our policies would make it difficult to change it in the way you suggest. To assist us in helping you, can you please provide a third party reference for this fact?

  Failing that, we could certainly include a statement that you have claimed these books were not co-authored. For your own protection, we would need for find some way to verify your identity. For example, you might like to publish this claim on your website (which currently makes a contradictory claim).

  As an aside, I should point out that we also have a policy against Wikipedia editors making threats of legal action. You don't say whether you have actually been editing Wikipedia yourself, but you should be aware that it is inappropriate for you to do so until either your legal action is complete or the threat is withdrawn. This applies only to editing on Wikipedia and not, of course, to this type of communication.

  I hope this response is helpful to you. Please don't hesitate to request clarification.

• Make a note on the article talk page:

  It has been suggested that all books have been written by the subject and not co-authored with his wife as stated. Does anyone have any sources that might shed light on this issue?

My town's library

• Cut the article back to encyclopedic content, say:

  blah is a library in Smithville, Iowa. It was established in 1939 by Lois Cooper, Beverley Sixsmith and Jill Chesser.

• Add some appropriate categories and some type of stub.
• Find the municipal site for Smithville and poke around for information on libraries.
• Tag the article as unreferenced and {{prod-nn}}.
• Inform the contributor:

  Hi. Thanks for you article on the blah library. Reading the article, I noticed that some of the material either wasn't related to the subject or did not seem to be encyclopedic in nature, so I'm afraid I had to trim it back. Presumably there is more information that could be added, like the type of building, the size of the collection, and the current managers. See some of the entries in this category for examples of how people have written about other libraries. You may also wish to use this infobox, and contact one of the following WikiProjects: Books, Education,

  More importantly, you have failed to cite any sources for this information and I have not been able to find any mention of this library online. In addition, the article does not indicate why this library is sufficiently important to merit an encyclopedia article (see Wikipedia:Notability (organizations and companies)). Regretfully, I had to propose the article for deletion because of this. All is not lost, however, because you have at least five days to remedy these flaws. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or if I can be of any further assistance.

• Notify the relevant WikiProjects:

  I have proposed this article for deletion because it does not assert notability, and I can find nothing about this library on the internet.

I am the best

So, if he is notable for a football cheating scandal, then he deserves an article on that basis. While the basis for notability should be the main focus of an article, once we have established that a topic is worth of inclusion, the bar on including details is much lower, but most of this is thin stuff, in the sense that it cannot be reliably sourced. We can use his own statements to source his own claims, but we should avoid expressing any unverifiable claim in a factual voice. Given the fine parsing involved in mediating between the claims here, a heavier than usual reliance on direct quotation seems indicated. This avoids us having to synthesize the exact nature of the contradiction. Hopefully that's not a clumsy cop-out, and we certainly don't want to turn the article into a sequence of "he said, she said".

Perhaps an education section something like:

• Johnstone attended Liberty Washington Community College, was expelled for theft, but was eventually readmitted and graduated with a bachelor's degree in history[1][2]. Although he claims to hold "a doctorate in botany from Liberty Washington University"[3], and styles himself "Dr. Johnstone"[4], this title may be just a respectful nickname[5]. He also describes himself as "a professor of botany at Winthrop College"[6], but has apparently "never been a faculty member" there[7].

The criticism needs to be conservative, and not overwhelming. WP:BLP also says that it needs to be related to the subject's notability, and if we restrict that to scandalously cheating at football this is unrelated, but basic information about education is the norm in biographies. This should not in in the lead, nor should it be at the end in a "controversies" section; rather it should fit naturally into his history.

The lead should mention that he is an author of illustrated books about orchids. A publications section should list them. We can probably leave both the negative reviews and his grandiose claims out, as they would each be borderline in isolation.

This ought to go without saying, but we should be conservative in categorisation, so no Category:Thieves, Category:Impostors or Category:Academics, but we can probably allow Category:Orchidologists and Category:Botanical writers.

If he challenges this article and threaten to sue, then the answer is much the same as for the co-author wife above: respectfully ask him to cite sources (and refrain from editing). If he can cite third-party sources that substantiate his claims, then we must assess which sources are more reliable. The dean seems unimpeachable as do the college and university records. Sports Illustrated is very weak, however, and the local newspaper is only a little better.

If he can cite sources (including self-published) that quote him retracting, clarifying or contradicting his disputed claims, then it would be reasonable to weaken or even remove them, together with the counter-claims.

Arrow of Time

The phrase "total of 47 edits" is designed to make me think "vandalism-only account" and block indefinitely, and I think we're close, but we have a couple of steps left. (Warning: Bleeding heart liberal ahead.) I've seen a lot of cases where newcomers get caught in a vicious circle. They come to Wikipedia with all sorts of misconceptions (many quite understandable) and do things wrongly. They get bitten hard by established editors: their contributions are reverted and deleted, and their talk pages start to fill with a sequence of scary looking warnings. (An editor once told me that her initial experiences with Wikipedia were giving her sleepless nights.) Yet because the warnings are all generic templates, and come with a scattershot of links to jargon-heavy policies and guidelines and essays, no-one ever manages to explain to the newcomer what's going wrong and how to fix it. There are many places on the Internet where the correct response to such intimidation is to shout back as loudly as you can, and re-insert your changes all the more vigorously. Suddenly, the would-be editor is bewildered to find himself blocked forever just for responding in kind to perceived attacks. Editors matter. If Wikipedia is going to survive, we need to continue to grow our editor base, but I have the depressing sense that we're becoming less and less welcoming to tomorrow's productive contributors. Yes, we need to protect the project from vandals, POV-pushers and the plain clueless, but imagine how much better Wikipedia (and the world) would be if we could catch these newcomers before they get hardened into this role and try our utmost to communicate what this place is about, and infect them our passion for the collaborative production of a free encyclopedia.

Sorry, what was the question again? I'll just go get a glass of single malt. I'll be right back.

Ah. That's better. It's not a real drink if it doesn't have partially decayed vegetation matter in it. Where was I? Oh, yes.

I need to check over the various warnings, this user has received, and his responses, to see where his budding relationship with our project went wrong. He's obviously not an out-and-out vandal, but at the same time he hasn't taken our core policies to heart. Maybe he's redeemable. Having determined what approaches have been tried already, I leave him a note something like:

Hi. Welcome to Wikipedia. I see that you've had rather a rocky start to your career here, and I thought I'd drop you a line to see if I can help you get things straight. I've been looking through your contributions on the Young Earth Creationism article and its talk page and I see that you are very determined to include a specific paragraph about the arrow of time. We really do appreciate your enthusiasm to contribute, but your efforts have run into a number of problems:

• Several other editors seem to feel that your paragraph is inappropriate for this article, and have removed it. It probably feels like you're struggling against a conspiracy, but I urge you to consider that perhaps these editors are all coming to the same conclusion independently. To err is human, after all. We all make mistakes, and we all fall short of the ideals we set for ourselves. We must all have to have the humility to realise that. If everyone is telling us we're wrong, we have to be prepared to consider the possibility that we might not be entirely correct.
• Regarding the content of your paragraph, I'm not very familiar with the subject matter, but at first blush there seem to be three different issues with it:
  1. The meaning is somewhat unclear. Please think of newcomers to the subject like myself, and how hard we would find it to extract the sense of it. Why don't you try explaining on the talk page what it is that you're trying to get across, and maybe other editors will be able to assist you in communicating your point?
  2. Perhaps related to my previous point, it's not clear why this paragraph is so key for this specific article. So far as I'm aware, creationism does not usually concern itself with big bang theory, and the arrow of time is at best an implicit element. Maybe it would be worth establishing why this is relevant as well.
  3. Most important, is that verifiability is a key policy here. Obviously we don't insist on a reference for every word, but the moment that there is any substantial question about a specific point, then it is the responsibility of any editor who wishes to keep it in an article to ensure that it can be justified from a reliable source. I notice that you have been asked to provide sources for this paragraph, and I'm disappointed to see that you declined to do so.
• Turning to non-content issues, I should explain that this project is, at heart, collaborative. We do not allow editors to ride roughshod over others by continually doing the same thing again and again despite all protests. Looking at your contributions for the last two weeks, I'm a little surprised that you haven't been blocked already for what we call edit warring. I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but things just aren't going to work out for you here if you can't be more moderate.
• I see that you have justified your behaviour by quoting from the Bible. I mean no disrespect to your religious beliefs, but this is inappropriate for two reasons: we have editors here from many religions, and is disrespectful to assume that the holy text of one religion should be the basis for discussion; and even worse, the specific passage you used is tantamount to a personal attack on the other editors. Please take a moment to imagine that someone had addressed you in such terms and think about whether you would appreciate them. As part of our collaborative atmosphere here, we value civility very highly. I know that you probably feel that you have not been treated very well by other editors, but you should consider civility to be a restriction you apply to yourself, rather than seeking to judge others. The more set upon you feel, the more important it is for you to take the high road. I think you will find that if you can keep your head while all around you are losing theirs, then any third parties coming in will be far more likely to be sympathetic to your position.
• One policy that is very strictly enforced here, is against making legal threats. If you try to gain advantage in a content dispute by talking about lawsuits and defamation, then you are likely to find your editing privileges suspended indefinitely, or at least until you retract your threats or complete any legal action. It is because of this that I am asking you to go through your recent contributions (like this one) and delete or strike out (using <s>...</s>) anywhere that you have done this. I'm afraid that I'm going to firm here, and ask that you do this first.

I hope this has been helpful to you. I really hope that we can put these difficulties behind us and welcome you as a productive contributor. Please don't hesitate to contact me if I can be of any further assistance.

If this doesn't work, block him. Make some attempt to channel any unblock requests into productive discussion.

Ghost in the machine

WP:FRINGE definitely applies here. If this topic can't be substantiated by reliable independent coverage (positive or negative), then it doesn't deserve an article, though it will probably take an AfD to get rid of it. (I would not be comfortable speedy deleting it, and I assume that a proposed deletion would be declined.) AfD is the correct forum to thrash out a rough consensus. The nomination would read something like:

I'm sure there are some people that hold this belief but, without any reliable independent coverage, it fails WP:FRINGE. No such sources are listed in any version of the article, or on the talk page. My web searches have not revealed any.

Given that nominating reason, the attempt to delete should fail if sources are found in the "voting" period.

If it passes that test (and while we're waiting), then the article needs to conform to WP:FRINGE by correctly characterising it as a "belief" in the lead, but this does not have to be hammered throughout the article. Negative coverage can be included, and does not have to meet any bar (e.g. peer review) that positive coverage cannot pass, but it should not dominate the article. Any reference to actual technological concepts (e.g. cell phone, static) should be appropriately linked, and key areas should also be included in the "See also" section. All these measures, together with the inherent implausibility, are quite sufficient for readers not to be misled (unwillingly).

This topic does not deserve a mention under cell phone, but might merit one under List of reported paranormal phenomena.

So, that's what the article should look like, but how do we deal with the editors? Well, hopefully the policy-grounded approach described above will keep everyone reasonably happy. (I'm such an optimist.) It's difficult to draft a generic response, but I might try to explain matters to editors like this:

• Thank you for your contributions to CPP. Although I commend your enthusiasm, I'm afraid I had to revert one of your changes, and I'd like to explain why. CPP is a notable phenomenon, and as such it deserves an article in Wikipedia. Unfortunately, with topics like this that fall outside the mainstream, we have a fine line to tread in terms of establishing reliable sources and balancing positive and negative coverage. This topic falls into the broad spectrum covered by Wikipedia:Fringe theories. As such, we cannot restrict sources to proponents of the belief, but must include third-party sources that may be more critical or negative. Likewise, while we prefer all sources to be peer-reviewed, it is perfectly acceptable to use sources that are published under the ægis of fact-checking, or by a reputable figure in a related field.
• Thanks for your contributions to CPP. I appreciate your desire to make the status of this theory as clear as possible, but I feel that some of your recent changes may have gone a little too far. Under WP:FRINGE guidelines, it is sufficient to indicate that this theory is just a "belief" in the lead, and give significant but not overwhelming coverage of negative sources in the body. We don't need to use words like "false" throughout, or interject mainstream explanations for phenomena. If you review the version I reverted to carefully, I hope you'll come the the same conclusion I did, that no reader is going to be misled into thinking this is any more authoritative than any of the various belief systems we cover (unless they are already determined to be so misled). We have to maintain a careful balance in articles like this to treat the topic neutrally, with due weight to all relevant views. The article has many links (both inline at at the end) to other articles that give more science-based coverage of cellphone-related phenomena.

Take me to your Leader Extraterrestrial Shape-shifting Reptile

This belief is likely sufficiently notable to merit an article, in which case it may be reasonable to list some examples of the notable people about whom well-documented allegations have been made. This list should be kept very short, as it cannot by its nature be either comprehensive or accurate. These allegations should absolutely not be mentioned in the biographies of the targets, unless it can be shown that the allegation has had a significant effect on the person, or how he is generally regarded. One heckler at one public event is not a significant effect. It makes little or no difference whether the target is alive or dead; death is not an excuse to open the floodgates. This belief is definitely significant enough to mention in the biographies of adherents.

Related to a saint

Wikipedia should go with the published material from reliable sources. The user should be asked to provide reliable sources for his information, and cautioned against removing well-sourced material.

I make my own rules

Hmm. I'd leave him a note something like:

• Hi! I see that you have been welcoming new users with a message that links to pages in your userspace that masquerade as official Wikipedia policies and give a rather misleading impression. I'm afraid that this is disruptive, so I have to ask you to stop immediately. I also plan to seek deletion of these pages. You could expedite the process by indicating here that you wish them to be deleted.

If he's using any templates on these pages that indicate consensus, I would remove them. I don't think they could be speedily deleted (G3 blatant and obvious misinformation?), so an MfD is the next step. I'll also start a thread at AN/I describing the situation and my actions, inviting assistance and review.

I should also contact everyone he's welcomed with a custom message like:

• Welcome to Wikipedia. I am sorry to have to tell you that the welcome message above from <user> is misleading, in that it links to pages within his user space that resemble official policy pages, but diverge from them in some significant ways. You can tell the difference because the official pages are all in the project namespace (their links include "/Wikipedia:" or "/WP:"). Below is a more normal welcome message, which is copied from Template:Welcome (the template namespace). I have taken the liberty of striking out the notice above to minimise disruption. I apologise on behalf of the Wikipedia community for the fact that you were exposed to this on your first day. Feel free to put it from your mind and edit some articles, but if you are intrigued, you can find more details in this thread.

Most likely he will have been doing it at a furious rate, so I will need to call for assistance on AN/I.

If he continues to do it without clarifying the message, or any other helpful response, block him for persistent disruption. Be open to unblock requests that indicate an appreciation for why this is disruptive and a promise to stop. Keep the AN/I thread informed.

Note, the only violation of policy here is in striking out his welcome message. If he starts reverting me, I would ask someone else to block him.