On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 8:50 PM, Pete Forsyth <peteforsyth(a)gmail.com> wrote:
John, I want to say -- and I suspect many others here
agree -- this is absolutely an appropriate list to bring this up on, and I'm glad you
did. Interacting in an open community like Wikipedia takes some getting used to. I think
in a discussion like this, you'll almost always get somebody musing about whether or
not you've chosen the right forum. Sometimes that's useful feedback; other times
it's noise best ignored. I encourage you to go with your own judgment; an argument
about the proper forum probably doesn't benefit anybody, but even if a couple folks
don't feel this is the right place, the discussion can still go on (as you can see).
Have a good weekend,
-Pete
[[User:Peteforsyth]]
That's all well and good, except it ignores the very good reasons why
any discussion of Mr. Jackson's specific circumstances should remain
on-wiki. In a list such as wikipedia-l or wikien-l etc., his comments
are quite unlikely to encounter anyone with expertise in his field.
Without such expertise, we might not see past the quite
scientific-sounding language he uses to discover the fact that his
"book" is self-published on Amazon. We might not be aware that he is
the host and former host of a multitude of blogs that appear to serve
as the only public forum for his theories, which seemingly have found
minimal or no acceptance in academia.
Obviously Mr. Jackson is extremely intelligent and very familiar with
his subject matter, and I suspect that the members of this list are
ill-equipped to respond to his complaints with the appropriate context
and full knowledge of the circumstances. If he were to engage these
experts, as has been suggested, they might also be prompted to
investigate the many cases where Mr. Jackson has cited himself for the
insertion of material of dubious scientific merit into Wikipedia
articles.
Nathan