Fred Bauder writes: This analogy is breathtakingly unpersuasive. Apart from the fact that consensus about scientific theory is not analogous to consensus about the historical records of particular events, climate-change-denial theory is actually discussed quite thoroughly on Wikipedia. Plus, the author of the op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education doesn't seem at all like climate-change deniers. If there is something specific you want to suggest about the author -- that he's agenda-driven, that his work is unreliable, or that the journal in which he published the article is not a reliable source -- then I think equity requires that you declare why you doubt or dismiss his article. I read the article in the Chronicle pretty carefully. The author's experience struck me as an example of a pattern that may account for the flattening of the growth curve in new editors as well as for some other phenomena. As you may rememember, Andrew Lih conducted a presentation on "the policy thicket" at Wikimania almost five years ago. The wielding of policy by long-term editors, plus the rewriting of the policy so that it is used to undercut NPOV rather than preserve it, strikes me as worth talking about. Dismissing it out of hand, or analogizing it to climate-change denial, undercuts my trust in the Wikipedian process rather than reinforces it. --Mike