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.