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This dispute concerns the appropriateness of Whaleto linking to his personal website, and his conduct relating to such discussions.
John, Whaleto, who is the owner and operator of the site [[deprecated source?] whale.to], has persisted in adding and re-adding links to material on it to many articles, mostly those relating to healthcare and particularly connected with vaccination. Whaleto does not meet the standards of WP:RS and fits essentially all of the characteristics of sites to which linking is not advised in WP External Links. John refuses to accept that this is true.
Recent links have been to a companion site [[deprecated source?] vaccination.org.uk], a subset of whale.to focusing on vaccination[1], but the same problems apply: WP:EL avoid "A website that you own or maintain (unless it is the official site of the subject of the article)" also applies.
He almost invariably accuses those who remove such links of bias and of being part of a cabal of vaccinators and allopaths (the latter despite repeated explanations that many users take it as a pejorative term). He was recently blocked for breach of WP:Civility in discussion of this issue at Talk:Measles#Love to edit but impossible due to allopath suppression. He also maintains a user page section - User:Whaleto#Allopath Editors deleting my links and edits attacking editors who have removed links to the site.
This is not a short-lived or recent phenomenom: [2] User:Tearlach commented during an rfc on User:Ombudsman that an rfc on Whaleto was due for POV pushing and self-promotion. The issue of the whale.to website is part of a wider pattern: the great majority of this user's edits involve some kind of accusation of bad faith, presumption of bias, or exposition of his views.
(Vaccination.org.uk was set up when whale.to was criticised [3]. John described it as being not a clone of whale.to, just the (anti-)vaccination material. The context was that someone, possibly me, had described it as "a clone of whale.to" in applying the same arguments to it. I don't think there is any dispute over any of that so I've not dug out a reference, but someone denies it I'll do so. vaccination.org.uk being controlled by the same person and holding much of the same material and being linked back to whale.to should be regared as part of this RFC, as should any other current or subsequent sites set up for the purpose of having a different URL for the same usage. Midgley 09:43, 14 April 2006 (UTC))
Intro refactored for terseness Tearlach 01:37, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
Update 00:40, 22 April 2006 (UTC) I don't know how long these pages have been up, but a further egregious aspect of the situation is John's hosting of Whale.to pages making personal attacks on Wikipedia editors. See evidence list below. Tearlach 00:40, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
(Provide diffs. Links to entire articles aren't helpful unless the editor created the entire article. Edit histories also aren't helpful as they change as new edits are performed.)
Addition of links to whale.to/vaccination.org.uk:
Response to removal of Whale.to / vaccination.org.uk links:
[28]following RFC and response.
Assumption of bad faith
Soapboxing
Personal attacks
Hosting copyright violations (not a breach of Wikipedia rules per se, but under Wikipedia:Copyrights#Linking to copyrighted works, this is further reason not to link to this site)
{list the policies and guidelines that apply to the disputed conduct}
(provide diffs and links)
{Users who tried and failed to resolve the dispute}
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John's web site www.vaccinations.org.uk/wale.to could be the "poster child" for the wisdom of Wiki's policy against editors including their own self-published web sites as external links. Giving this disreputable web site even the slightest credibility by linking it in Wikipedia is almost as bad as falsely yelling fire in a crowded movie theater. Linking people to false and misleading "health" information on this self-published web site has the potential of causing people enormous harm.
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:: Zero, none, zilch, a great big Easter goose egg! www.vaccination.org.uk site [40]
John states many times above that the material he linked to was valid, and notes that in some cases it can also be found in academic sources. This is irrelevant. The fact that some items on his site may be peer-reviewed evidence appropriate to Wikipedia is a red herring, because much of it is not, because the dissenting view is never represented (as it would be in an academ ic journal), because John has a tendency to editorialise around the content, and becaise overall the site is polemical not analytical. Add to this the dubious copyright status of some of the material, the fact that John is the owner of the website, and the fact that it over-represents a view which goes direcrtly against the balance of informed opinion (so amounts to a POV fork, albeit external to WP) and you have a self-evident problem.
The solution is for John to cite the source papers properly using <ref> syntax, and link to the abstracts of the published material in medical journals or one of the online Medline databases. Any material which is not taken from peer-reviewed publications should, of course, not be included. All this is covered by policies which have been brought to John's attention more than once.
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Verifiability and reputable sources have to be at the centre of Wikipedia's ambitions to be a serious source. The whale.to site is not particularly unusual in being partial, highly opinionated, and indifferent to the quality of sources. However it goes beyond these in presenting fictitious nonsense as though it were fact; see [[deprecated source?] for an example. It would perhaps be funny if this sort of thing wasn't taken seriously by some. References to whale.to except as examples of indiscriminate nonsense seem to have no place in WP. Verifiable sources need a trustworthy origin. Whale.to may indeed lodge genuine documents, but how can anything on this site be trusted?
Having now seen the personal attacks on Wikipedia editors on whale.to, I think that this must have escalated into something very serious. Personal attacks within WP are bad enough, but at least there are processes of reply, sanction and resolution. This goes to the heart of WP ethics, and I do not think that any link to whale.to should be permitted, or any editing of any sort by john, while these attacks are posted.
Gleng 13:12, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
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There are issues where sheer numbers of conventional medical editors, aggressive presumptions of knowledge and intellect, gamesmanship with his articles, industry definitions and editorial control are fostering a hostile environment for John that is also a significant and changeable factor here in some of his defensive ripostes. "Nice" needs to be a 2-way street that works most of the time, not just holidays. A number of editors have improved their NPOV skills here, but it is still a developmental item. Frankly there are items where both sides are deeply frustrated on issues of counterfactuality where I don't think speedy delete, multiple fork, merge and/or delete, and stacked democracy are helping. Longer edit efforts might have dividends. Finally I think the conventional medical crowd is so far removed from alt med issues, the underlying history, terminology, threads of logic and chains of conventional science concepts are still unknown to them when the shooting starts - good reason for John's presence in the Wiki encyclopedia community if his position and materials are properly extracted and respected. I suggest that we try to re-establish a better communication basis, I see process failure rather than gross personal faults with John. --66.58.130.26 13:42, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
updated: see also User talk:Whaleto RfC_on_Whaleto For several months now I have studiously avoided this particular debate over Whale, minding my own edits even when the deletion campaign happened to intrude, just browsing and keeping an eye on it. I am broadly concerned by some of the medical editors' statements, their proposals and the trends that I see here and elsewhere in Wikipedia, where the conventional medical editors are most active. A rapidly looming issue is the "seize the means" medical censorship - elements that are being proposed, and implemented, in the name of science when in fact its processes more closely resemble scholasticism. Even more amazing, are some of the implicit proposals to automatically reign in free speech commentary on the web itself, where actual personal names/information are not involved (a common corporate standard of speech and correspondence is "ask yourself how you would feel if it were printed in the NY Times"...). I see apparent asymmetry in the application of the Wiki rules & sanctions here.
I am very concerned about a near pogrom of those editors who have contributions about various forms of alternative medicine. I generally perceive a marginalization of editors that have a less-than-sterling conventional view of 20th century medicine. I also perceive a growing sense of "outcomes and experience-based" disenchantment in society at large with the current medical industry but only token reforms (e.g. nutrition, pharmaceutical influence$, EBM and CAM "reforms" to date in the US medical schools appear to be more for student-customer-patient placation, sometimes mere sops or even “scientific” counterbattery operations - Lenin's "useful idiot", rather than a timely, serious, directed investigation for *successful* biological results with non-patentable and out-of-patent materials).
John's strengths are his historical compilations, a POV familiarity with some non conventional medical issues and propositions to *slightly* balance the unconstrained claims of the conventional medical – pharmaceutical industry proponents. His logic appears based on points in history, perhaps experience, and sometimes medically unaccepted yet scientifically unchallenged data (based on documented data, not just uninformed opinion) that is legitimate scientific data today of a lower priority. He has a persistent ability (ahem) to fill the vacuum of absent alternative medical editors, now departed or those never even bothering. On a number of his articles, I would rather rely upon a reasonable degree of evolution than de facto deletionist tactics. Ultimately John's greatest service to Wiki may not be his surviving edits (obviously a hard sell) but the challenge that he gives conventional editors to answer questions frequently on minds of common people, to cause people to think at all, and to keep the conventional medicines crowd a little less biased in their final product.
What is remarkable is how much literally "patent medicine" we are asked to swallow today, even when other medical literature clearly shows a much superior generic alternative. And as for practical EBM, I see commercially inspired articles in JAMA (pharma friendly political recommendations based on deliberate, wildly reckless, time-release overdoses) and Archives Int'l Medicine (Merck Mevacore vs underdosed niacin, short 1.5g/day niacin for comparable statin doses; & misadministered enterically coated aspirin, with, rather than before, quickly soluble niacin - too late) that are such clear hatchet jobs that I am astounded at the effronty that they were even submitted there - it indicates that the authors, pharma connections acknowledged or not, are relying upon a substantial technical ignorance or political sympathy in the readership and the editors ! If some "right thinking" innocent lambs wander from a historical article, briefly entranced by reading something more, I mostly expect bemused cautionary thoughts: "Maybe I should not drag Suzie in today for 5 or 6 vaccines when she's been a little iffy/sick all week", "maybe I should defer some or use the (slower) Japanese vax schedules", "maybe I should consider more vegetables, vitamins, sleep and less sugar this week for Johnnie" rather than the Big Revelation that John promotes. And of course, the dear doctors may cite the patients that blow with every new wind, that spouted John's site after reading it over last weekend, as public menaces.
With respect to John vs the other medical editors, I offer the Wiki administrators this piece of advice: pls go VERY slowly on any sanctions and REDOUBLE your perceived efforts at deriving a methodology for peaceful collaboration with John. (In corporation world, the pain within is often far less than the devil outside.) For John I have to suggest that he try his hardest to carefully consider and address the graded distinctions between engaging, pithy, pointed, and harsh comments, to try to surface elemental technical points missed in the counter parties' assertions and address that directly, to try to avoid the appearance of spamlinking, to resolve any copyright issues with the sanitized site, and to carefully consider his own operating policies over this next month when he feels slighted or injured, whether associated with conventional editors zeal or an ongoing misunderstanding. For the conventional medical editors I suggest that they try much harder to even identify their own anti-alternative prejudices, misunderstood scientific concepts, conceptual structures and terminology inside orthomolecular medicine and the biologically based parts of naturopathic medicine. The conventional medical editors need to better realize how much they have been externally influenced, sometimes subtly, along with some crucial exclusions to their information sources and their operational usages of EBM vis a vis the traditional paradigms of "science" for emergent technologies. And I count from the first day of med school with the texts they use (I have seen some amazingly pharma friendly changes between editions), not just free meals and trips/seminars. I can only see meaningful response and the barest reforms to the crassest commercial influences in medicine so far.
There are a number of issues we need to work out. Perhaps I might be a little more successful in addressing John, although I am not into the vaccine question itself. I view this RfC outcome as a critical brick in the wall to having a healthy enough atmosphere that eventually alt med parties with more academic background will have enough confidence to attempt input at Wiki without being trampled (I notice one conv'l med editor here has difficulty finding a suitable "tame enough" alt med rep to recruit ). --66.58.130.26 14:44, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
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Discussion at Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Whaleto
--66.58.130.26 03:10, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
Although I think he has summarized many points pretty well, I respectful disagree with Merecat's "There are no other feasible solutions" conclusion, below, and that the minority report is not well addressed.
Personally, I have no interest in the subject matter of Whale.to. That web site could have the secret to perpetual youth posted on it and it would make no difference to me. It could have the formula to turn dross into gold and it would not interest me. Likewise, virtually nothing about the arguments regarding "this treatment works, that treatment doesn't" is personally interesting to me. However... what does interest me is that we avoid absurd scenarios. And frankly, we have one here. What we have is a wiki editor who runs a website and then links to that web site via the wiki. Quite apart from the distasteful fact that this allows him to drive traffic to his website via his wiki links, we are left with a "framing of the debate" problem. For example, if you and I are debating whether Black, White or Hispanic baseball players did better in 2005, and we can only choose from the baseball card scans which I post on my web site, I could manipulate the outcome by hosting only a limited selection for the side you have to defend. In other words, it does not matter if the individual records (the cards) are accurate because, as the web host, I can determine which records get posted and also how to categorize them. And precisely how would one categorize say, Derek Jeter or Nomar Garciaparra? Suffice it to say, we are thankfully not reducing ourselves to racist categorizing of ball players, but this debate regarding the validity of sources at Whale.to, is frankly, not that much better. It's clear that there are deep seated bias driven agendas at work here all around and for that reason, arm's length transactions are all the more important. There is absolutely no way that it can be acceptable for a wiki editor who does indeed have a dog in the fight can be allowed to manipulate an underling repository of sources which are being drawn on. John Whaleto is 100% wrong for thinking that his actions are acceptable here. He is violating his fiduciary duty to the wiki by trying to wear two hats. If he wants to own and run Whale.to, then he needs to stop editing any wiki article which covers the subject matter of that site, whether we link to it or not. He's welcome to write about Barbie dolls, etc., but he has a conflict of interest on vaccine articles, etc. There's really no way around this; web sites are too dynamic and they give the publishers too much control over content. And if that's not true, I should start a web site that tells 100 reasons why sending $$ to Merecat will stop world poverty, create world peace, eliminate pollution and give us all fair, honest government. Then, I could link it to every article on those topics. John, be realistic here: you can't have your butt in two boats at the same time. Either you are a wiki editor on vaccines etc., and you help contribute to the free joint effort at this site to make free information available to others on the basis which this wiki offers it or you run Whale.to. You can run Whale.to however you see fit, but you can't do both and you have to choose. Either Whale.to links leave the wiki, John leaves the wiki (in whole - or in part, as per above) or John leaves Whale.to. There are no other feasible solutions. PS: Sorry if this sounded harsh. I don't know the players in this dispute and I am not taking sides on the merits of the link contents. Personally, I'm guessing that John is a nice fellow. It's just that using Whale.to like this is wrong. Merecat 17:05, 30 April 2006 (UTC)
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All signed comments and talk not related to an endorsement should be directed to this page's discussion page. Discussion should not be added below. Discussion should be posted on the talk page. Threaded replies to another user's vote, endorsement, evidence, response, or comment should be posted to the talk page.
John has not re-inserted links to his sites since it was made plain that they were against policy and consensus. There are reports of attacks on Wikipedia editors on whale.to which need to be removed. Editing of articles by well-informed critics of majority views is not necessarily a problem, provided that all articles confirm, in the round, to WP:NPOV, and all edits conform to WP:V and by extension WP:RS. Provided John adheres to policy there should be no need for further action; should further action be desired it is a matter for ArbCom.
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