Can you trust wikipedia on climate change? | Hacker News Reader

Can you trust wikipedia on climate change?

nationalpost.com

16 pointsalexkearns15 comments

I trust Wikipedia more than the National Post. The author's thesis is that William Connolley "erase[d] the Little Ice Age [and] the Medieval Warm Period" from Wikipedia. Well, all you have to do is go to the "Medieval Warming Period" article click "view history" and you can see the last version William Connolley submitted to the site, which begins:

"The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) or Medieval Climate Optimum was a time of warm climate in the North Atlantic region, lasting from about AD 800–1300. It was followed by a cooler period in the North Atlantic termed the Little Ice Age. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Medieval_Warm_Peri...

So these claims seem pretty ridiculous.

First of all I dont believe that he banned 2000 users for disagreeing with him. Thats a preposterous assumption I assume it will be very obvious to anyone in a administrative role that he did not for such a pity reason.

However, even if he did ban even one user for disagreeing with him without breaking a rule, then that is a very serious violation in the spirit of wikipedia.

Now I'm sure this goes on and on in such as place as wikipedia. I wonder how many administrators they have that are looking into climate change / weather on a day-day basis.

Far too many people are going to make their decisions on these matters based of what wikipedia says for it to be allowed to be tainted by information not backed up by facts.

> First of all I dont believe that he banned 2000 users for disagreeing with him. Thats a preposterous assumption I assume it will be very obvious to anyone in a administrative role that he did not for such a pity reason.

Right. This is an extremely mendacious way of presenting the basic statistics, that he has made >2000 blocks/bans in general. See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?user=William%20M.%20Conn... and for a more readable summary of that, see http://toolserver.org/~interiot/cgi-bin/count_edits?user=Wil...

As of right now, he has 2029 block/ban actions to his credit. Looking at just the most recent ones, we see quite a few 3RR enforcements (on non-climate articles), similar edit-warring blocks, basic anti-vandalism work ('vandalism at Plus-size model'), sock puppet blocking, some unblocks, and so on. Looking through the last 70 actions, I see none that obviously pertain to climate change. (2029-70 is obviously <2000.)

So "When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions." is obviously a lie; things like that are why I assume the opposite of anything the National Post says.

The author's bias is obvious from the first paragraph.

Can you trust anyone on climate change?

> Can you trust anyone on climate change?

Okay, let's say we can't. Should we:

(A) Spend trillions of dollars and place complex legal restrictions on activities that quickly develop the world

(B) Give it a while and keep researching

The call for immediate action is based on the idea that Armageddon is coming around soon if we don't do anything. That's looking more false by the day as people investigate. The largest piece they had for Armageddon level climate change was the hockey stick graph, which has been thoroughly debunked now.

> But a funny thing happened on the way to Copenhagen: a couple of Canadian researchers, McIntyre and McKitrick, found that when they ran simulations of "red noise" random principle components data into Mann's reconstruction model, 99% of the time it produced the same hockey stick pattern. They attributed this to Mann's method / time frame for selecting of principle components.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=992073

So - yes, let's say everyone is questionable right now. Isn't that a pretty good reason not to spend trillions of dollars on programs of questionable effectiveness? At least until we learn more? You'd have to be convinced of an imminent Armageddon to argue otherwise, and that's looking more and more unlikely by the day.

It took a month to get anything written about climategate on climatologist Michael Mann's wikipedia page - many of the contraversial emails were his. It finally got unlocked and was able to add something yesterday.

All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions.

If true, I find so much power over what people believe to be mind-boggling. While we've all heard various people complain about Wikipedia, I never would have thought the situation was like this in a million years. I guess I just assumed there always were multiple viewpoints for things that were in any way controversial.

I'm incredulous at this. It has to be exaggerated.

> It has to be exaggerated.

I hope you will not be surprised that it is. See my other comment about the blocking (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1005437). The 'created or rewrote' is mendacious as well. Connolley has created ~230 actual articles (http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/pages/index.php?name=William...), and many of those are stubs or have been massively expanded by others.

Here are some examples:

- here's an example stub: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Robin_Hood%27... - look at the history for https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/w/index.php?title=... or - https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/w/index.php?title=...

Further, I'm not sure where that number comes from. 'unique Wikipedia articles' sounds like borrowed phrasing to me, specifically, borrowed from an edit counter like http://toolserver.org/~interiot/cgi-bin/count_edits?user=Wil...

But Connelly has edited >6200 unique articles (this includes article creation), not 5,500. 700 is a lot, so unless this guy is working off rather old data, I don't know how to explain it.

And needless to say, if you go through his edits, you'll find that 'rewrote' is massively misleading: adding links or references, fixing formatting, or copyediting - the daily fare of a Wikipedian - are in no wise 'rewriting'. That has connotations of changing everything, not tweaking small bits incrementally. It may technically fall under the dictionary definition, but here it's very clearly being used out of either ignorance or for rhetorical effect.

I really doubt the author of this piece knows what a Wikipedia "Admin" actually is. They do not have godlike powers over WP.

Kind of makes the meat of the article not worth arguing about.

One would think so ... but the author makes a lot of very specific and falsifiable claims. Any Wikipedia data miner would I assume be able to disprove them rather quickly, if they are indeed exaggerated.

Aaron Swartz just falsified the fundamental claim of the article. It's the highest rated comment on this article. The right thing to do now is to flag the article.

Flagged. I get really depressed by all the approval such utter crap receives here on HN.

> Flagged. I get really depressed by all the approval such utter crap receives here on HN.

Odd. Two of your four submissions are about how climate change is real.

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ugh

It seems like you comment favorably when a pro-climate change article is submitted, and the flag is because you disagree with the piece more than the topic.

Presumably s/he considers the claim "climate change is real" less crappy than the claim "climate change is a giant hoax". I don't see anything very awful about that, although of course not everyone will agree with it.

You misunderstood me. I have nothing against discussing the topic. I have something against posting utter crap and the massive amount of approval it receives here.

I am allowed to flag utter crap, right?

(And, just for the record, I most certainly did not flag every climate change critical post. Some made points that are worth discussing.)

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