The Wonderful World of Wikipedia | Watts Up With That?
the climategate2.0 emails have a lot of background on this story. funny how all the people who cried "taken out of context" when the first batch of emails came out are not being very vocal anymore. the emails show the context very well, thank you.
I wonder who mastcell is? W Connelly was banned from Wiki a while back for being obnoxious in rewriting climate articles that had any criticism of 'consensus' so its probably no him. I bet it is one of the other peripheral members of the hockey team though.
As many readers are aware, the culture surrounding the climate change topic area of Wikipedia has been a microcosm of climate science for nearly a full decade.
This is not a compliment.
Early last month I was browsing the Wikipedia article on the Soon-Baliunas controversy. The mainstream view on the topic is that the paper was so horrible that several editors resigned from Climate Research in protest. Those following the Climategate emails know that there was a strong and shady behind-the-scenes effort to both discredit the paper and show journals what happens to their reputations and hairlines when you dare to publish research contradictory to the settled science.
Part of this public relations process, of which Wikipedia is an integral component, involves rewriting facts, refocusing views and never ever giving in to rationality or reality.
How was this done in the Soon-Baliunas article? I dont have the time or inclination to point out all the bias and opinion-herding in the article, but Ill show you the sentence that initially caught my eye back in early December:
The Soon and Baliunas paper had been sent to four reviewers during publication, all of whom recommended rejecting it. (1)
Now isnt that interesting? Why would they publish the paper if all of the reviewers recommended rejecting it? It certainly would be quite the scandal if that villainous Chris de Freitas pushed to publish it under such conditions.
A little digging shows that Wikipedia use to have the correct sentence that none of the reviewers recommended rejecting it. In fact, an anonymous user tried to revert the article back to this correct version. The response was typical change it back and then have one of the administrator gatekeepers, MastCell, protect the article from anonymous users.
the climategate2.0 emails have a lot of background on this story. funny how all the people who cried "taken out of context" when the first batch of emails came out are not being very vocal anymore. the emails show the context very well, thank you.
I wonder who mastcell is? W Connelly was banned from Wiki a while back for being obnoxious in rewriting climate articles that had any criticism of 'consensus' so its probably no him. I bet it is one of the other peripheral members of the hockey team though.