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I was looking into the following sentence in the lead: "Scientific skepticism involves the application of skeptical philosophy, critical-thinking skills, and knowledge of science and its methods to empirical claims, while remaining agnostic or neutral to non-empirical claims[definition needed] (except those that directly impact the practice of science)." It appears this was copied verbatim (starting with "the application of...") from https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/scientific-skepticism-rationalism-and-secularism/.
I'm not sure how to best handle this, as the sentence provides a relatively clear and concise summary of the subject, but unfortunately I don't believe copying verbatim like this is allowed. For now I've removed the sentence in question. Maybe someone can come up with a good introductory sentence to replace it? Stonkaments (talk) 02:36, 25 October 2021 (UTC)
@Rp2006: As per WP:BRD let's get to it. My position is that exactly one article has been provided as a source that covers the GSoW. Said source has not described GSoW as an especially notable skeptic project; it is simply a skeptic project that exists and it's unclear to me as to why it should occupy a privileged position above all other skeptic projects in existence. Additionally, the section title "Notable skeptical projects" logically implies that subsections should be notable, yet GSoW has not been shown to be notable as evidenced by its lack of a Wikipedia article. It would seem like WP:SPAM to include an entire subsection on this obscure organization that doesn't have a Wikipedia article based on a single independent reliable source. The subsection itself seems to be promotionally written as well, given its heavy reliance on affiliated sources and the long laudatory quote from the JREF.
I believe that the solution to this is to remove the subsection entirely and maybe place a single sentence mention of GSoW in the history section. This would be an appropriate level of coverage for an organization of GSoW's importance. Chess (talk) (please use ((reply to|Chess))
on reply) 17:41, 29 November 2021 (UTC)
((reply to|Chess))
on reply) 18:41, 29 November 2021 (UTC)
Agreed. To dedicate a large section to GSoW but only single sentences for Plato, Bertrand Russell, James Randi, and Richard Dawkins is an incredibly arrogant violation of WP:Due weight. Chop that shit down to one sentence. MarshallKe (talk) 19:25, 29 November 2021 (UTC)
I don’t have a problem significantly reducing the GSoW text to something like it currently is. I do however think it’s warranted to include the fact (removed in the recent edit) that one of the founders of modern Skepticism, James Randi, thought the project was important enough to recognize it’s importance and give a grant to Susan Gerbic for her work. Rp2006 (talk) 18:14, 30 November 2021 (UTC)
@Hob Gadling: Starting a new section because this seems worthy of it. Regarding Plato and Russell, and possibly many other pieces of this article. What standard(s) shall we use for this article to determine whether a particular source is relevant to the topic? WP:Relevance is a mere essay that touches on this. It seems to me that Russell is pretty obviously related to scientific skepticism even if no direct source says he is. Could this be an instance of WP:SKYBLUE? How many "times removed" can a topic be before we start calling it synthesis? I'm not attached to any position here, just trying to figure out how this stuff is handled. MarshallKe (talk) 16:35, 11 December 2021 (UTC)
Bertrand Russell argued that some individual actions based on beliefs for which there is no evidence of efficacy, can result in destructive actionsis what Russell said about the dangers of wrong thinking. While that is something scientific skeptics also care about, it has nothing to do directly with them. This is as if a Wikipedian wrote in the UFO article that in Renaissance paintings there are things that look like flying saucers. The connection to the subject of the article is made by the Wikipedia user, not by WP:RS. Plato, Russell and saucers are WP:SYNTH. --Hob Gadling (talk) 17:57, 11 December 2021 (UTC)