[Gendergap] Drama issue ... not my experience

[Daniel and Elizabeth Case]

> But there seems to be a significant misunderstanding about what I mean
> by areas where vested interests work tirelessly to advance agendas.
> I'm not talking about areas of real life strife and controversy,
> goodness; I wouldn't think of editing in such areas.   Areas like
> Israel-Palestine, climate change, intelligent design, abortion --- I
> wouldn't go near those political minefields.  But I think it's worth
> noting that those areas differ materially from the areas I'm talking
> about, in that in those political areas there are reliable sources on
> both sides and the question is how to negotiate neutrality between
> contradictory sources.
>
> What I'm talking about is areas where the consensus of research
> literature is unequivocal and clear  but where vested interests
> continually remove scientific literature reviews and replace them with
> blogs or  promotional literature or other less reliable sources, in
> the interest of promoting  unscientific or pseudoscientific claims,
> most often to serve a financial interest.  It's like trying to bail
> out the ocean with a teacup to keep those articles neutral, and
> there's little help from anyone  on the project; when one of these
> topic areas goes to ArbCom it's most often  someone on the side of the
> encyclopedia rather than on the side of the vested interests that is
> banned for becoming frustrated and losing their temper.   Occasionally
> an editor that is seen as too close in a COI way to the interest
> that's being served by the POV edits is banned, but as I've said
> before, there are always more where those came from.

OK, now I know what you're talking about - not in the sense that you're 
talking about any specific article or controversy, which I respect your 
decision not to name, but in the general sense you're talking about. At the 
anniversary celebrations in New York, after I gave my presentation 
(completely unrelated to this subject), someone mentioned this to me. He 
talked specifically about articles about certain drugs, where he felt that 
there were organized, possibly paid groups of editors, working hard to keep 
the articles consistent with the company line, and endlessly reverting 
anyone who even tried to add anything from a somewhat reputable journal that 
might suggest otherwise.

And the pseudoscience issue ... I know exactly what you mean; I've seen 
several editors who made it their business to keep those articles neutral 
and in accord with mainstream scientific consensus (often with little in the 
way of support from any other member of the community) succumb to the 
constant pressure and vitriol directed their way from off- and on-wiki, to 
the point of, as you noted, getting sanctioned by ArbCom. That phenomenon 
certainly existed online before Wikipedia, although it did acquire its own 
special volatility when "anyone could edit".

Daniel Case