Sunday, December 20, 2009

Brian Dell vs William Connolley on Wikipedia

Lawrence Solomon has written an interesting piece in the National Post about William Connelley's Wikipedia edits and deletions.

As one can see from here, almost 2 years ago I was the first to take issue with Connelley with respect to the Wikipedia article for the "hockey stick controversy." I finally gave up but not without writing a "Note to Article Readers" where I stated:
I have attempted to provide more balance to this article but my edits have been reverted wholesale and I fail to see the point of extended revert war. So I would just caution you that a critical criticism of Mann's graph is that it implies no Medieval Warming Period or Little Ice Age and these phenomena are well documented in other sources. ...

Wikipedia is leftist. Even TIME's Obamaphile pundit Joe Klein grants that much. In Wikipedia one can find laughable assertions like "the question of [Alger] Hiss's guilt [as a Soviet spy] or innocence remains controversial." But it is interesting to see some recognition of this in the MSM.

Despite my taking up the guantlet for the skeptical side, however, I think that it is still important to tread carefully with respect to climate change. In Copenhagen Obama said, "This is not fiction, this is science," and I would be very reluctant to challenge that claim head on. Just as no government, either elected or unelected, anywhere in the world denies the climate change thesis, no scientific body of national or international standing is currently denying the reality of climate change either. In a community like Wikipedia editors, the need for a neutral point of view requires editors to give more representation to the views of the skeptics, but in a community of self-identified "conservative Albertans," there is the danger of going too far to the other side in one's rhetoric and advocacy.

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