At 01:44 PM 4/4/2010, Carcharoth wrote:
>What about Wikipedia editors who change career to become PR people? :-)
>
>Carcharoth
>
>(Who nevers wants to be a PR person, ever)
Not even to support a cause which, you might know, is not
representing itself well, and you could help?
Pure, ethics-free PR, sure. I never want to be that kind of PR person
either. I would not ever lie or deceive to promote a cause, paid or not.
But the skills I gained as a Wikipedia editor may prove to have been
invaluable in the work I'm starting to do with cold fusion, which is
to overcome widespread confusion based on how the early evidence was
framed, with that framing then being applied reflexively to later
evidence as it appeared, assuming that it was all the same. It wasn't.
I know what the critical results are, because they are the ones that
convinced me to give up my own skepticism. They are not mentioned
accurately in the Wikipedia article, and the most important,
heat/helium correlation, still, is only cited with a blatant error in
an anonymous 2004 DOE review (if that text were true, it would not be
correlation at all, it would be anti-correlation), when the real
results are covered extensively in reliable source (and even with
accurate mention, I recently found, in Huizenga, the fiercest
critic). ScienceApologist has started improving the article, it's
possible he'll get to this, some of his work is quite good.
It was not intended that way, but my work on-wiki also introduced me
to the cold fusion community, and through that to the senior
scientists, and I've been asked to help edit a paper for submission
to a mainstream journal. I know that Pcarbonn, also topic-banned
(this time by a grossly unfair process on AN, spearheaded by JzG,
who, those who followed RfAr/Abd and Jzg would know, was highly
involved, but which wasn't disclosed there, nor was it disclosed that
many of those voting were already involved....), got a job working as
a researcher. Again, I see no sign that this was his goal, it simply
fell out of being topic-banned and then turning more attention to
direct involvement.
So thanks, Wikipedia.