Cannabis Ruderalis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Clarification_and_Amendment

User:SPECIFICO claims to be an American economist, businessman, and on the faculty of a university, a Ph.D., and been published in academic journals, but his writing style and attention to detail seem incompatible with that.

==lack of editorial balance

As a wiki, our article space grows over time (ie, there is no net loss of word count). Wikipedia is fundamentally built on contribution. Of course, a good deal of work can be done by simple modification, which doesn't change the word count of an article very much. But SPECIFICO's driving focus seems to be reliable sourcing on WP. It would be expected then, that in addition to removing unsourced information (a net character loss) but also find adequate sources (a net gain in character count). An editor with a balanced approach would spend time doing both, but one who says he is concerned with sourcing should especially be one that adds sources. SPECIFICO also claims to be a peer-reviewed journal author, so finding fresh sources should come second-nature.

The reality is that SPECIFICO does not locate and add new sourcing. Looking just at the month of May 2014 (which comes after his ArbCom decision), he made 77 article edits from May 1-30. Looking at that the red in that list of edits should make it apparent that he is major deleter of information, and that indicates an unbalanced approach to editing. His edits to articles come to a net loss of 5365 characters. In none of his edits did he locate an original cited source and add it to wikipedia.

Hounding

  • May 24 "ce. Conform to cited reference" - He makes an edit on a page I just edited about 20 minutes earlier. He's never edited it before.
  • May 26 "Stefan Molyneux edit warring: new section" - He goes shopping around for an admin to block me for "edit warring". His complaint was logged "2014-05-26T03:45:20", yet the last substantive edit by anyone else in the article was 2014-05-24T22:44:03‎, about 30 hours earlier.
  • May 30 - After I made an observation on my sandbox page that SPECIFICO doesn't add new sources, his very next edit (20 minutes later) is to add a citation to an article. This proves that he is monitoring my every edit.
  • May 30 - A completely bogus warning accusing me of "4RR" which is completely off-base. Clear WP:HUSH violation.

Abuse of policy tags

Removal of substantive content by misrepresenting the source material

  • May 22 "Remove content sourced to non-RS blog per BLP and remove primary sourced statement concerning book. Please find secondary RS for discussion of Molyneux work."
  • Misrepresents source by calling it a "blog" when in fact it is a very popular libertarian site that publishes independent articles. The article in question that he removed cite's Molyneux original article, and so is very relevant as a secondary source.
  • Removes a cited source that points to one of the subjects books, which contains a reprint of the original article. This falls under WP:ABOUTSELF and WP:PSTS as "straightforward, descriptive statements of fact" written by the subject about himself in that he cites his own work and expands upon it in book form.
  • May 22 "Remove non-RS and primary sourced content concerning speaking engagements. Tag cn"
He removes a large number of sourced speaking appearances, and in the same edit tags the section for "citation needed".
  • May 22 "ce. Remove unsourced statement. Remove easter egg link.Remove SYNTH"
Removes a relevant statement and wikilink to health care in Canada#Criticisms. Cited source is an interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Zdqp22G_K4. At 00:40 the subject expresses criticisms of the Canadian health care systems as the reason he went to this private surgery center in the US for treatment.
  • May 22 "Remove undue content. Unencyclopedic tone and the statements are redundant -- repeated elsewhere in the section." - Removal of background info about acting and playwriting that adds context to other information further down. No reason for it to be removed.
  • May 22 "ref" - Duplicates a reference from another section that has no relevance to the place he moved it. Perhaps just careless, but it was never corrected by him later.
  • May 22 "ce per sources" - Pure POV edit. Implies that Molyneux work is only on the website, whereas his focus extends across many media - the show, essays, books, speeches, videos, podcasts. He also ruins the intent of "publicly spoken" to indicate someone making a speech on a stage, by weakening the sentence to make it seem like he was a mere participant in a discussion.
  • May 22 "ce conform to cited source" - removes a key word "philosophies" using edit summary
He misrepresents the source at http://freedomainradio.com/about which reads "...my Master's Thesis analyzing the political implications of the philosophies of Immanuel Kant...".
  • May 22 - "ce. Remove non-RS statistical profile of Freedomain. Remove other non-RS statement and replace with Molyneux' "about self" quote, which is RS for his view that Freedomain is most popular in the world."
  • removes highly relevant viewership statistics about the show published by reliable a secondary source.
  • misrepresents the cited sources by re-phrasing it as "Molyneux calls it 'the most popular philosophy site in the world'" when in fact none of the cited sources attribute that phrase to a Molyneux himself. The sources use that phrase (or very similar) independently. Again, this is inappropriate and unsupported, and insertion of the editor's belief and POV.
  • May 22 - rephrases sentence with edit summary "conform to Molyneux' statement in cited source"
Full source is here. SPECIFICO changes the POV by removing the key word "quality" as the reason he takes donations. What the source said: ""I get instant feedback. I know right away if it was good or not based on how many donations come in for that material."
  • May 22 - removes "Divorce Corp director Joseph Sorge" with edit summary "ce. Move guest list to paragraph which describes Freedomain. Remove non-Notable guest. Remove undue credentials of guests, whose details can be seen in links."
Yes, the guest was not notable, but the movie is (because we have a page for it and not him). Perfectly adequate for inclusion.
  • May 22 - adds "citation needed" tags when the paragraph has ample and obvious citations for TV and radio appearances.
  • May 23 - removes the phrase "focusing on the history of philosophy" with edit summary "ce. Remove statement.not contained in cited source"
The cited source is at http://freedomainradio.com/about which reads in part "earned a graduate degree from the University of Toronto, focusing on the history of philosophy."
  • May 23 - Repeats the same removal of health care in Canada#Criticisms from May 22
  • May 23 "ce" - mistakenly restates this, probably because the source link doesn't show the entire article. It reads "Molyneux is an Irish-born author who grew up in England and Africa before coming to Canada 25 years ago". He shouldn't be making edits to content without accessing the full source because because it can lead to these kinds of tiny mistakes.
  • May 23 "ce. Conform to statements in cited sources" - Yet here SPECIFICO breaks the cited source material up in a careless way and ends up incorrectly stating a timeline that isn't true (how can Molyneux pursue acting after he got out of the Glendon where he was in theatre?).
  • May 24 "ce. Conform to cited reference" - He misrepresents the source of the data as being the APA, in reality it reads "According to the National Research Council data for 1993, reporting on responses from 7,900 holders of the Ph.D. in philosophy..."


https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stefan_Molyneux&diff=610583929&oldid=610550236

  • May 29 "ce" - removes specific details about the types of conferences. removes "guest", making the sentence imply he may have been host.
  • May 29 - poor grammar: "He has presented his views on television, radio, and podcasts and at various public conferences."
  • May 29 "ce remove synth of unrelated facts" - there is no SYNTH, this timeline of events is given in this form in the sources.
  • May 29 "ce remove undue detail" - This level of detail is appropriate, and found in many articles with GA or FA status - no reason to remove it. He broke a helpful wikilink.


  • June 1 - Adds a "Reception" clearly contentious section consisting of one sentence of opinion about Molyneux from a non-notable philosopher. Cites 4 sources, but 1 is Molyneux's own podcast, the libertarianism.org article does not mention Molyneux by name, and the other 2 are from "Bleeding Heart Libertarians" group blog and unreliable source per WP:BLPSPS. There is presently no context about feminism in the Molyneux article, so citing an offhand comment on a blog saying "And it’s a shame because we still live in a world in which people like Stefan Molyneux dismiss feminism as “socialism with panties,”" is unencyclopedic. "Molyneuxveau Arguments for the NAP" might OK for a minimal mention at some future point (since its a response to Molyneux's response), but only in context and with due weight - not as a standalone statement without context.
  • June 1 "rv text which again falsely attributes a statement to Molyneux. Fails verification. This is a BLP violation and should not be reinserted in any form." - Here he reverts a phrase that has been rephrased based on talk page discussion to the version which he and another user objected to. Since he reverted this within moments, I think it is likely he didn't even read the change or evaluate the difference, but rather snap-reverted hastily.
  • June 1 "Primary source removal was undone without discussion. I am restoring the tag removed by @David Gerard: when he cleaned up the primary sourced text." - Here he again puts back misleading issue tags. The article is not "based on primary sources", but rather uses them as supplemental information and could stand alone without them. The article does not need "additional citations for verification", because there are no {{citation needed}} tags used at all. All passages are sourced (which SPECIFICO knows).

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