Summoning involved editors here: @Doug Weller: @Grayfell: @Hob Gadling: @Schazjmd:
Alright, so I'd like to start off by saying that I apologize for the massive wall of text above, and again, I apologize if I come across as overly defensive. I pasted the FTN discussion into a collapsible for the sake of readability — if anyone disagrees with doing that on WP:RTP grounds, let me know, but I think(?) it should be fine. Discussion is still ongoing, so it's going to have to be updated here whenever someone responds there.
Re: Grayfell's response. I slept on it, and you are right about not linking to stochastic terrorism. It's a heavy allegation to drop on someone, and this article isn't the place for that. Keeping conspiracy theorist in the lede is fine too, although I think we should at least have an in-line citation following it.
I guess we can start off with a few questions that I think will be uncontroversial before we move onto stuff that other editors might have qualms with.
- Should a Wikipedia:Contentious topics/Pseudoscience and fringe science notice be applied to this page, in addition to the existing notices for post-1992 politics of the United States and gender-related disputes or controversies?
- Is this article within the scope of Wikipedia:WikiProject Skepticism?
- Should a section about his YouTube channel be added to the infobox?
— Kodiak Blackjack (talk) • (contribs) 15:34, 20 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
- Thanks for bringing this up here. I apologize for being so rude. The article's history of memes and COI editing and such may help explain that somewhat, but it was not an excuse.
- For the first, WP:CT/CF applies to pseudoscience regardless of whether or not the notice is applied. I defer to those with more experience with the arbitration process on whether or not this notice would be appropriate for this article.
- For the second, sure, why wouldn't it? The article already mentions his anti-vaccine pseudoscience, and Hidden Colors contains chemtrail and AIDs denialism nonsense, so it's basically WikiSkeptic's bread-and-butter.
- Since it's come up a lot here and elsewhere in the past: it is almost universal for conspiracy theorists to include some valid points and criticism in with their conspiracies. Calling him a conspiracy theorist should not be seen as a criticism of every single word he says. The problem (as already indicated in the article) is that he severely undermines his own credibility by conflating real issues with bigoted fringe nonsense, which only makes it harder for anyone to take him seriously. This is not a problem that Wikipedia can help him fix.
- For the third, I cannot remember, do reliable, independent sources mention this channel or describe him as a youtuber or similar with any regularity?
- For the swatting incident, as far as I can see, Nasheed is the only source for this being from Ice Poseidon's followers. Reliable sources present this as Nasheed's accusation, not as a simple fact. That is not a defense of Ice Poseidon. Reliably-sourced and properly attributed information about Ice Poseidon belongs at Ice Poseidon, not here. Grayfell (talk) 22:49, 20 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
- @Grayfell: Hey, no harm, no foul. I totally understand. It's a high-risk article, I made six consecutive edits in the span of eight hours, and I didn't have any edit summaries for five of them. I'm sure it must've looked like a signal flare going off in the watchlists of anyone keeping an eye on it. You had every right to be suspicious.
For the first, [...] I defer to those with more experience with the arbitration process on whether or not this notice would be appropriate for this article.
- Then I will too. I will say that it'd probably be more applicable to this article than gender-related disputes is, but I also don't know the specifics on how that sort of thing is decided.
For the second, sure, why wouldn't it? [...]
- Alright. I'll add it to the talk page banner then, since I don't think that anyone would have any objections to that.
For the third, I cannot remember, do reliable, independent sources mention this channel or describe him as a youtuber or similar with any regularity?
- Some. [16] does in the prose, and [28] links to his channel, as previously mentioned. I think most media outlets are hesitant to give him the publicity. His channel is verified, though, and it has ~234K subs at the time of writing — not a huge audience, granted, but it's large enough where I think it'd be weird not to document its existence in some capacity.
- Now, there's two sources in the article that jump out to me as potentially unreliable. The first [9] is IMDb, which is generally unreliable per WP:IMDB. The second is [30], which I'm pretty sure is a self-published paper, and (pot meet kettle) is hosted on a wiki that anyone could edit. The former, I think we can replace with Metacritic's page on the episode, the second is only used once in the Filmography section, and could be substituted with [23].
- Thoughts?
- — Kodiak Blackjack (talk) • (contribs) 14:25, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
- Agree about IMDb. But Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-07-31/Recent research does say "the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) is a school of Internet researchers at University of Amsterdam led by Rogers to 'create a platform to display the tools and methods to perform research that ... take advantage of "web epistemology"'. Currently the DMI has built some basic Wikipedia research tools that help social scientists to analyze cross-lingual images, anonymous edits, tables of contents, etc. " so it seems ok.
- I've removed one bad source. Doug Weller talk 14:40, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Have to be linked to cites, it is not a list of external sites. Slatersteven (talk) 14:51, 18 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
