WikiEN-l June 2005

wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org

137 participants
234 discussions

Re: Pseudoscience category - GSPOV
by Haukur Þorgeirsson 29 Jun '05

29 Jun '05

>> If you want to make a distinction between alternative medicine >> and quackery would you object if I moved [[homeopathy]] to the >> quackery category? > I would. > Me too. That's a really hard-to-defend > category except for proven frauds. I may well be mistaken. I'm not a native English speaker and often miss fine distinctions in meaning. Perhaps "quackery" has more negative connotations than I was aware of. What I mean by "quack medicine" is simply "treatments falsely presented as having curative powers". If the term has more negative connotations than that it may well be inappropriate for a Wikipedia category. I still think that "Alternative medicine" is misleading, has undeserved positive connotations and does not represent a NPOV. I still think the Quackery category and the Alternative medicine category should be merged. If Quackery is an unacceptable term then I suggest "Ineffective medicine". We can debate the inclusion of each item there on its merits. I would also be happy with Category:Pseudomedicine. Regards, Haukur

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The elections are on, but I cast a blank ballot!
by Gregory Maxwell 28 Jun '05

28 Jun '05

If you haven't heard, the board member elections are official on. I'd like to encourage everyone who is eligible to participate, but I'd also like to encourage you do like I did and cast a blank ballot. Because we use approval voting, a blank ballot is the same as voting for everyone and the same as not voting for all. But it is also different because it shows your interest in the process, without either approving of or disapproving of any particular candidate. Since there already votes there is no risk of us going without a board, which is good. :) I have posted why I choose to vote blank and why I think you should do the same on my userpage, and I welcome comments. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gmaxwell/vote_blank

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Re: Pseudoscience category - GSPOV
by Haukur Þorgeirsson 28 Jun '05

28 Jun '05

> Your definition, I'd say, is unusual. As far as I can see, quackery > really have two meanings. One is stated in the beginning of > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quackery > It is a disputed article needing improvement, but it starts > > "Quackery is the practice of producing fraudulent medicine" > > and thus, if someone believes in what they are doing they are not > quacks. > > ... > > If you can show good reasons to believe that homeopathy is a > deliberate fraud, that it is illegal in at least a few countries, _or_ > a definition of the word "quackery" from a good source where the main > meaning of the word supports you then please go ahead. I got my definition of quack medicine from Webster's. By your definition medicine that doesn't work is only quackery if the practitioner is intentionally deceiving the subject. I'm sure most homeopaths act more or less in good faith. But I don't see any particular reason to doubt that this is also the case for practitioners of the stuff currently in the quackery category. Our medical disclaimer notwithstanding I believe Wikipedia should do its darndest to provide people with accurate information on medical subjects. This includes making a clear distinction between quackery/alternative medicine and useful medical care. I think the alternative medicine and quackery categories should be merged because I don't believe that the difference between them can be defined in a workable way. If there is strong resistance to merging the alt. med. category into the quackery category then I suggest merging the quackery category into the alt. med. category. Regards, Haukur

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My case for classifying homeopathy as pseudoscience and quackery
by Haukur Þorgeirsson 28 Jun '05

28 Jun '05

> "Alternative medicine" is excellent as an NPOV category without > introducing a needlessly pejorative term like "quack". "Not proven to > work" within the rules of mainstream science is already implicit in the > term "alternative". The concepts "not proven to work" and "proven not > to work" are very different, and quackery would have more kinship with > the latter. It's very hard to prove something doesn't ever work under any conditions. On the other hand most popular "alternative medicine" stuff *has* been put to scientific tests and *failed*. When tested in properly controlled double blind scientific studies (such as any new medicine is subjected to) homeopathy has failed. More than once. Homeopaths alternatively point to poorly conducted studies that seemed to show some efficacy and, more usually, anecdotal evidence. Sometimes they like to imply that their craft has never been tested scientifically and that scientific validation is just around the corner. Needless to say, that is not the case. This is, I think, what many people think of when they hear about "alternative medicine" - something new that hasn't been properly tested but just might work. That's the impression the quacks like to give (often in good faith, no doubt) but it's wrong. Most of this has been tested and failed long ago. That's why it's accurate to call it quackery and somewhat misleading to call it alternative medicine. > "Falsely presented" is a point that would need to be proven. Do you > have evidence that homeopathic medicines are not curative, or that they > are just water? Certainly. The homeopaths don't even really deny the fact. Their idea is that the pure water they sell has some magical properties. They don't usually deny that chemically it's pure water. James Randi (http://www.randi.org) offers his million dollar price to anyone who has a method for distinguishing between homeopathic water and normal water. > That may very well be the case, but I would not be > prepared to jump to that conclusion. Making definitive statements about > these practices requires more than parroting the opinions of their > opponents. I may be a parrot but I'm a fairly well informed one :) > I can just as easily see that "quack medicine" has > undeserved negative connotations, while "alternative" adequately warns > the user to proceed at his own risk. The credibility of the various > practices that come under this heading is wildly variable, and some may > indeed qualify as quackery, but certainly not all. The overwhelming majority of what quacks (and other well-meaning people) like to call alternative medicine is quackery. Sometimes the term is defined so broadly as to include massage. This is a further attempt to confuse the issue since massage has very little in common with, for example, homeopathy. To sum up the case against homeopathy: 1. Theory developed in the infancy of modern medicine. 2. No plausible mechanism by which it could work. 3. Proper scientific studies fail to show any efficacy. 4. No-one has come up with a method to distinguish between normal water and homeopathic water. 5. It's sold for profit to many people around the world, some of them sick and desperate. What more could you possibly want in order to classify something as quackery? > The degree of doubt that there might be about homeopathy does indeed > belong in the article on the topic. Our article on [[Holocaust denial]] is in the [[Category:Pseudohistory]]. That term sounds pretty derisive to me. Does the "degree of doubt that there might be" on the occurrence of the Holocaust deserve a prominent place and a sympathetic representation in any articles related to it? (I'm sorry for breaking Godwin's law. I honestly tried to come up with another well known example of pseudohistory. I tried the Apollo hoax theory but for some reason the relevant article isn't in the pseudohistory category. Nothing in that category is as well known as [[Holocaust denial]]. To be absolutely clear I'm not suggesting that any member of this list is a Holocaust denier or that the Holocaust is somehow comparable to homeopathy or other types of quackery.) My opinion is that [[Homeopathy]] belongs both in [[Category:Pseudoscience]] and in [[Category:Quackery]]. If there is a consensus that it doesn't I will of course defer to it. I'm willing to discuss other members of the alternative medicine category on their individual merits for classification as quackery. Regards, Haukur

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Confirmation in bug in ugrade.
by actionforum＠comcast.net 28 Jun '05

28 Jun '05

-------------- Original message -------------- > Roll back to the previous version! That's some pretty powerful > medicine there - it took twenty-odd hours to roll forward... > > There's a lot of bugs currently listed at > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:MW_1.5_bugs (which I've just > discovered); there seems to be a good bit of patching going on. I > suspect it'll be fixed relatively soon, and a buggy live wiki is > better than a frozen one. That would be good news. Given the expense of a rollback, we can probably live with this if there a prospects of a fix within a week. However, is there a way to make the message on the edit page FLASH, even though it was highlighted, it took me many edits to finally notice it. You get out of the habit of looking at the boilerplate. I bet others are not noticing it either. -- thanx, silverback

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Confirmation in bug in ugrade.
by actionforum＠comcast.net 28 Jun '05

28 Jun '05

There is a message on the edit screens which acknowledges the bug. Here is the quote: Expect edit conflicts. Due to a bug on the new software, edit conflicts will overwrite other people's changes, even if you do not save on the edit conflicts screen, and even if you were editing a different section. As a courtesy, take a look at the edit history after saving and fix any accidental text deletion or duplication. This is pretty serious. They should roll back to the previous version. -- Silverback

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Re: Pseudoscience category - GSPOV
by Haukur Þorgeirsson 28 Jun '05

28 Jun '05

Habj wrote: "Quackery and alternative medicine is not the same. In Great Britain, healers etc. are often welcomed to work in the hospitals. That is alternative medicine/complementary medicin, choose what term you like best. The German ex-med-doctor (forgot his name) who claim that cancer is pure psychological and cancer patients should leave the normal health care and go to him for some kind of therapy, is a definity quack." By my definition quack medicine is a remedy falsely presented as having curative powers. In this sense the overwhelming majority of "alternative medicine" is quackery. Homeopaths, for example, sell people water and tell them that it will cure their illness. If you want to make a distinction between alternative medicine and quackery would you object if I moved [[homeopathy]] to the quackery category? Regards, Haukur Þorgeirsson

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bug in the new software upgrade? edit collisions
by actionforum＠comcast.net 28 Jun '05

28 Jun '05

There seems to be a huge increase in people "deleting" each others edit to talk pages. Since it has happened in different page communities, and I have even deleted the comments of others unwittingly without being notified of edit conflicts. I suspect a bug in the new software. Is anyone else seeing this? -- thanx, Silverback

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Pywikipedia bot : iso --> utf-8
by Gdr 28 Jun '05

28 Jun '05

MacGyverMagic wrote: > Since the upgrade yesterday, my python bot code is no longer working > and halts with the following error: You need to edit families/wikipedia_family.py and on lines 106–110 move all wikipedias from latin1 to latin1old. Hopefully the pywikipedia developers will fix this and make a new release soon.

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RE: [WikiEN-l] bug in the new software upgrade? edit collisions
by actionforum＠comcast.net 28 Jun '05

28 Jun '05

-------------- Original message -------------- > >From: actionforum(a)comcast.net > > > >There seems to be a huge increase in people "deleting" each others edit to > >talk pages. Since it has > >happened in different page communities, and I have even deleted the > >comments of others > >unwittingly without being notified of edit conflicts. I suspect a bug in > >the new software. Is anyone > >else seeing this? > > -- thanx, Silverback > > This was moderately common even before the upgrade. I never had it happen before the upgrade, and never deleted other edits myself. I had edit conflicts occur more often before the upgrade, this seems to be happening when edit conflicts should be occurring. I can recall only one edit conflict occuring since the upgrade, and given what was going on, on these talk pages, more should have been happening. Perhaps, I just had a coincidental multiple occurrance of rare behavior that was present before the upgrade. -- Silverback

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WikiEN-l June 2005