[Foundation-l] Organization on Wikipedia that deals with content issues.

[Bod Notbod]

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 5:30 AM, James Heilman <jmh649 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Currently I am involved in a dispute regarding the interpretation of
> the literature regarding Transcendental Meditation (TM) which has been going
> on for years.  There are about 5 editors who admit to being practitioner of
> TM and only or mainly edit the subject area of TM.  They have been using
> Wikipedia to promote this organization / religion...

I've read all the responses to this and it is clear that solutions
will be hard to find.

This is not a *solution* but merely an expression of what I might do
when faced with your situation:

1. Given that what you face is partly a question of uneven numbers (ie
more pro TM than against) you might wish to draw in other editors that
may not see a RfC. I was going to suggest Wikiproject Pseudoscience,
but this might foul [[WP:CANVAS]], so perhaps you could scout
Wikiprojects that relate to general healthcare.

2. Given that part of the problem is that your edits are being
removed/reverted or otherwise stymied I would content myself, in the
interim, by making my case powerfully on the relevant talk pages. They
may be able to remove your edits from an article but removing your
points from a talk page would be extremely frowned upon and - though
you might have to confirm this - actionable; ie if they removed your
case from Talk they might receive censure.

Actually, I would do '2' before '1' and then link directly to the
discussion section at the aforementioned venues once a few views have
been expressed. Ideally you will question article claims with great
specificity rather than an article as a whole.

For example, this conversation...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Transcendental_Meditation#Edit_warring_against_consensus

...isn't going to achieve much.

My approach would be:

a) Copy the sentence I disapprove of into talk.
b) Refute it with as many reliable sources as I can find.
c) State my intentions as to what I will do in the light of the sources.
d) Leave it entirely alone in talk for a week and see what has happened.

3. Transcendental Meditation, as far as I'm aware, is not a great
threat to the global or a national community. Don't let the issue
aggravate you and don't lose sight of the super-abundance of stuff in
this world aside from TM. Sometimes people can get incredibly
*furious* that an article is biased. What may anger you is that people
are spending money on what you have reason to believe are false
claims. Personally I dislike TM because there are plenty of beneficial
meditation resources that are free and I see little attraction in
cultish leaders and financial outlay when it comes to sitting quietly
with my eyes shut trying and failing to STOP THE NEVER ENDING STREAM
OF HORRIBLE THOUGHTS... and breathe...

4. You may take quiet satisfaction that one of the few categories the
TM article resides in is 'self-religions' which doesn't have many
members but one of which is scientology. I imagine that any of our
readers that see that will pause for thought before wiring $$$ to TM
bodies.

And, actually, reading through the first few paragraphs, the article
does already make some pretty stern criticisms of TM. Don't lose sight
of that.

There will always be people in this world that have a whiff of
snake-oil about them. It's unsurprising that some of that comes to
Wikipedia. By all means keep fighting the good fight. But don't ever
let it spoil even one hour of your day.