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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

This follows the standard format of these complaints. If you read through it believing the author is a true expert then it seems like Wikipedia is crazy. If you read through it believing the author is a crank, then Wikipedia is doing a fine job.

I'm not even sure the guy isn't a crank, but if he isn't he needs to understand that Wikipedia needs a system that takes cranks into account. If he's simply a false positive on the crank detector because it turns out that everyone else is actually wrong about this historical event then he'd have to demonstrate that the cost of false positives outweigh the good to effect a change, not just go in a huff because his pet subject isn't presented in the way he would like in Wikipedia.

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Quote: "as I had cited the documents that proved my point, including verbatim testimony from the trial published online by the Library of Congress"

His opinion in this matter isn't as relevant as the fact that he cited actual testimony. That alone should lend enough weight to the edit that it should not have been reverted simply b/c of the Wikipedia "undue weight" policy.

Evaluating primary sources isn't a perfectly simple and straightforward exercise, and cranks generally have facts that they can point to to "prove" that their view. I expect that with selective enough citation I could create a fairly convincing (to a layman) argument for quite a wide variety of points of view.

Comparing primary sources is indeed not straightforward, but this is primary vs. secondary. If a book makes a claim that is directly contradicted by the author's own source then not much expertise is required to see that preferring the "child" over the "parent" would be absurd.

His opinion in this matter isn't as relevant as the fact that he cited actual testimony.

Actually if you look at the page, he only cited his own blog post. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Haymarket_af... (His blog post cited those other sources, but that doesn't really add to WP.)

There is no expertise involved. The page made a statement that was factually false. This was a fact that is easy to check as the wrong "fact" of no evidence is obviously ( yes, obviously has a prosecutor ever gone to court with zero evidence to present?) wrong and a matter of public record.

To say a fact is subjective to popular, to say nothing of demonstrably wrong, opinion is the completely antithetical to the goal of being an encyclopedia.

I know nothing about the historical case itself, but I do know that show trials (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Show_trial) can and do happen. In that case people can be tried and convicted without evidence. So what you consider trivially true, is trivially false. So we're back to a complex debate in which one person is questioning what they readily admit as the accepted version of events. That's all very noble, but I don't expect Wikipedia or anyone else to just roll over at the first sign of a "debunking" of a controversial event.

I understand what you are trying to say however, you are incorrect. The specific case cited being that the original article made the statement "The prosecution, led by Julius Grinnell, did not offer evidence connecting any of the defendants with the bombing. ... ". This statement while presented as a fact is factually untrue. there is no uncertainty involved. One could argue the quality or value of said evidence but can not deny that said evidence was presented.

Regarding what I consider to be "trivially true" is true. The show trials article itself does not contain a single example of a U.S. court case where the prosecution has "gone to court with zero evidence to present".

Reading the article again, the issue seems to be not very subtle semantics. The student asks how the trial could have happened "without evidence" full stop, Wikipedia made the much weaker claim that there was no "evidence connecting any of the defendants with the bombing". They apparently got convicted for "not preventing" the bombing while being organizers of the rally, which you could easily do without being connected to it, and so no proof of that was required. (You could also read the sentence as meaning presenting no convincing evidence, but that amount of weaseling isn't even needed).

I also checked out the talk page, and if I didn't know the author was an expert, I would also have assumed he was a crank. He approached editing Wikipedia on a lark and failed to offer sources in an acceptable format. No wonder he got smacked down. He cited a blog post for a historical event!

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