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The first two threads below started on a user Talk page and have been moved here on request. John Stephenson (talk) 11:49, 4 December 2022 (CST)

Could you please explain...

I got email advisories today that you deleted several article I started:

recently deleted

page	when	log entry	question
Steinberg Award	2022-11-28 08:48	promotion of sympathy towards criminal	This Steinberg series of awards has annual winners. I started articles on multiple awardees, including Eboni Booth, Jeff Augustin, Ike Holter, Clare Barron, Haruna Lee, Paola Lázaro. Are they also at risk of deletion?
Harold and Mimi Steinberg National Student Playwriting Award	2022-11-28 08:46	promotion of sympathy towards criminal
Steinberg Emerging Playwrights Award	2022-11-28 08:42	promotion of sympathy towards criminal
9 Circles	2022-11-28 08:39	no explanation for this deletion was offered...	The deletion log entry contains the first couple of hundred bytes of the article - not an explanation as to why it was deleted
Nikolas Cruz	2022-11-01 08:13	by policy, not encouraging articles describing people who commit atrocities or mass murders
Steven Dale Green	2022-11-01 08:11	Copied from Wikipedia: by policy, not encouraging articles describing people who commit atrocities or mass murders

Can topics, themselves, be biased? What does it mean to "promote sympathy towards criminals"?

Way back in September 2005 I had only made about 2000 wikipedia edits. I had never encountered a wikipedia administrator, and I was unaware of the wikipedia's deletion policies and procedures. Over the previous six months I had started stubs on a small handful of the individuals who were being held in Guantanamo. At that time it was US policy to keep their identities a secret - not even telling their families.

Then, all of sudden, four articles I started were nominated for deletion. One nominator's sole justification was the two letters "NN", and he declined to answer my request for an explanation as to what that meant.

Another person asserted that the topic of Guantanamo was "inherently biased", and could only serve for "America-bashing".

I thought about that one all afternoon. I concluded that topics are not, in and of themselves, biased. I concluded the only thing that can be biased was how we covered them.

I concluded that there was no topic so controversial that good faith contributors couldn't agree on the wording of an article about it that everyone agreed measured up to the standards of neutrality, verification, authoritative sources, provided everyone tried hard enough. I committed myself to the extra effort to measure up to those standards, whenever I tackled a controversial topic.

I am really surprised you characterized the articles I wrote on the Steinberg Awards as "promoting sympathy towards criminals". The Steinbergs, like Pullitzer, like Nobel, like the Motion Picture Academy, created a competition that grants awards to promote works of art.

Consider Schindler's List - a highly admired work of art. Yet Oskar Schindler, the protagonist, employed slave labor. He corruptly bribed government officials. The movie doesn't try to be neutral. It portrays him as a hero, because he made sacrifices, in the end, and he saved lives.

But someone else could have made a film that portrayed Schindler as a pure villain, and his saving of lives as motivated purely by cynicism.

You deleted the articles on the Steinberg awards. I am guessing that this is because they awarded Bill Cain an award, and, among his works was his play inspired by the Steven Dale Green case. Well, would you delete an article on the Academy Awards because Oscars were awarded for Schindler's List?

Your deletion log entries refer to a policy. I scanned your revision history, to see if you had drafted policy on when and how articles should or should not cover criminals. I didn't find anything.

Consider Alfred Dreyfus, convicted on innuendo, racism, and forged evidence, he spent decades imprisoned on Devil's Island, prior to his eventual exoneration. If someone tried to write a neutral article about him, during the period between his conviction and his exoneration, would this policy require its deletion? He was officially a criminal, then.

In many wikipedia discussions I argued that an article was neither a punishment or a reward. Sometimes the person arguing for deletion was some variation of "but Joe is basically a good person, they don't deserve to have stuff that makes them look bad talked about like this..." Alternately the deletion proponent would say some variation of "but Joe is basically a bad person, they shouldn't be rewarded with an article..." Articles are neither punishments or rewards. Individuals or topics become candidates for articles when reliable sources write about them. Period. If we are writing neutrally then the article is neither a hagiography or demonization.

What about Richard Jewell, the heroic security guard at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta? FBI director Freer ruined his life, by naming him as the prime suspect in that bombing. Director Freer implied the security guard wanted to be a hero so badly that he planted a bomb that he would later discover. Most press coverage was unfair to him. As I am sure you remember, more than half a decade later he was definitively cleared, when an anti-abortion kook, who mainly bombed abortion clinics, turned out to be the actual bombing. Jewell had been a bona fide hero, who saved dozens of lives.

The extremely unfair demonization of Jewell took place before there was a wikipedia or citizendium. I used to think that, if they had been around, a truly neutral article about Jewell would have helped to cool the hysterical leaping to the conclusion he was guilty. And, if Freer's innuendoes had contained a kernel of truth, a neutrally written article would still have served the public good, in helping to prevent an over-reaction.

Yes, there are ugly things in the world, like mass-murderers. I too am not that interested in supporting detailed coverage of murderers, where there is nothing more to their story than that they were murderers. But while Steven Dale Green seems to have been a simpleton, who couldn't finish high school, and who racked up some misdemeanor crimes, prior to enlisting, he is worth covering because he became central to other issues. I tried to explain this when we discussed him before. Scholars have cited his case in other contexts. I read an academic paper who cited his case when discussing the policy of not allowing the openly gay to serve in the military. The author argued that if the military had not been barring openly gay individuals from serving they would not have had to lower their standards to admit guys like him. Other scholars cited his case when discussing that lowering of standards - admitting dropout and criminals. I suggested then that the other wider issues his case was entagled with made it worthwhile to cover him, when it wouldn't be interesting or worthwhile to cover a murderer who was simply a murderer, and had never been covered as anything more than a murderer.

Wikipedia's COATRACK essay and wikipedia's notion of DUE WEIGHT

The wikipedia has a widely read essay known as COATRACK. It is often treated as if it were a policy, when it is only an essay. And those citing it routinely ignore its actual advice when citing it in deletion discussions.

The essay warns about articles whose first sentence, or first paragraph, says the article is about one thing, generally an actually notable topic, but then quickly shifts to covering something else. One of the colorful examples cited was "wongo juice".

The advice of that essay that is routinely ignored by those who cite it in deletion discussions, is that it never recommended deletion as a solution the problem of a contributor hi-jacking an article to talk about something else. Its advice was that, if the underlying topic of the article was notable the solution would be to trim back, or maybe even entirely trim out, the paragraph(s) that were really talking about something else

I don't have those Steinberg Award articles in front of me. But I am sure I didn't start talking about them, only to shift over to promoting Steven Dale Green. I drafted those in August. I don't remember whether I mentioned Steven Dale Green, by name, in the portion of those articles that mentioned Bill Cain. But, if I had, surely it was only a sentence or two. How could that justify the deletion of two whole articles?

Those who ignored what the COATRACK essay actually advised also ignored WP:DUE, a link to a subsection of the Wikipedia policy on neutrality. What I generally concluded was that the passages I had included in articles that triggered those COATRACK complaints, because they touched on something else, were short enough to comply with the DUE portion of NPOV. Topics are inter-related, and that means articles should mention related topics, and link to them, and, sometimes that requires a brief passage of coverage of that other topic, to provide context.

If you thought I went beyond that, in 9 circles, or the articles on the Steinberg awards, I suggest your choices included: (1) voicing your concern first, possibly on Talk:9 circles, on Talk:Steinberg Award, on User talk:George Swan, or via email; (2) shortening, or maybe even eliminating the specific passage(s) that triggered your concern, and then leaving an explanation on the talk page.

Given that there was no warning how would I know what policy I violated, so I could know how to avoid violating it somewhere else? George Swan (talk) 15:23, 28 November 2022 (CST)

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF RESPONSE: We shouldn't have articles on the lives of people who are *only* known for taking life

Mass murderers do not deserve fame or to have an encyclopedia article. This is known for encouraging more people to commit outrageous crimes in hopes of becoming famous. There exists on your Talk page this thread in which I discussed with you that I'd like to remove the first mass murderer article you had imported and expressing my distaste for it. Neither article placed any emphasis on victims and did not even name them. You asked for three months to rework the article and change its emphasis. But then as a result, you also created another murderer article stub, which you also failed to improve per my request, and you added articles about the play about the murderer and more articles emphasizing one particular award this play had one. I was frustrated yesterday to find TWO versions of the article about the play (each differing by a single letter in the title), so I couldn't tell which version to delete--and both pointed at the murderer article. And then, I found there were at least three different articles about the minor award, which was little more than a modest monetary grant as near as I can tell, with no one publicizing it except the group which granted it. Duplicating information across multiple articles on a wiki is not a good idea; the versions diverge and then no one can tell which one to edit. So yesterday, assuming you would not object because you seemed to have left the wiki, I removed the entire cluster of articles relating to the murderers. Those peripheral articles should I feel have been included in the stub murderer article anyway, and they pointed back to the now-missing article, inviting someone to create those again in the future. I understand very well how it hurts to have one's work deleted, but I am not willing to restore any of those articles right now. IF you return to the wiki and are active here, I will consider restoring the "9 Circles" article (whichever one you want), but with restrictions: I will not have it name the murderer except once in one footnote, nor will I have that name be an active link inviting for an article to be created about said murderer. Any information about the award can be included in the article about the play. You had included around a dozen excerpts of the play's reviews in the footnotes, and I read those, after which I still wanted that article gone as well, because most reviewers pointed back to the murderer as having been the main model for the play's protagonist. And, should it matter whether an author worked as a priest or a waiter to put food on the table? It seems like an attempt to add moral justification to him writing a play sympathetic to a brutal killer. But he could have set his play in any number of other times and places and still provided a setting for his version of Dante's nine hells as represented by a Kafka-esque bureaucracy. By choosing this sensational case to model, even if his intention was to lambast the lameness of the law, the government, the military, or psychiatry (and I don't KNOW what his intentions were, but even if they were "good" intentions), his results are muddied and weakened by the fact that his play engendered a certain degree of sympathy in reviewers for the murderer. And that's why I deleted that article. I couldn't have gone through the normal process of warnings without proliferating and attracting yet more attention to these murderer's names, so I have made an editorial decision, which is my right to do because I am, right now, personally and almost single-handedly keeping this behemoth of a wiki afloat because I believe deeply that it is still a better place to write than Wikipedia. If you have more objections after this explanation, I urge you to private message me. I will listen sincerely to everything, but I will not have these murderers names in the wiki any more than they already are, because as you know, nothing ever written in a wiki really disappears. George, I sincerely hope you will put up with our disagreement about this and return to The Citizendium, where you have informed and delighted me many times over the years. Pat Palmer (talk) 09:38, 29 November 2022 (CST)

You are of course in charge here & can make policy as you wish, but you might like to think about this. It's certainly true that reports of crimes can cause copycat ones. But should the news be censored? It's not just that. Every time there's a news report of an Islamist terror attack it's followed by a spike in violence against Muslims. Every time there's a news report of Israelis hurtin Palestiisns it's followed by a spike in violence against Jews. In recent years there's been an uptick in violence against Chinese, and in recent months against Russians. We accept all this as part of the price we pay for free press & democracy. Proportionate coverage seems to me reasonable. What application that might have here I'm not expressing any opinion. See also [1]. Peter Jackson (talk) 05:07, 30 November 2022 (CST)

Peter, I welcome your and George's comments, because it's a gray area. Wikipedia (WP) has long articles on all the mass killings. The WP articles have unrelenting detail, though they are not all under the names of the killers. I was unable to sleep for two nights after reading WP about SDG, the killer who got a sympathetic play written about him by a Jesuit priest. Any twelve-year-old might stumble across that article while reading about Iraq, and it would tempt reasonable parents to confiscate their kids' cell phones immediately. Clearly, George tried to do better here, and I appreciate that. *If* these articles get restored, I would like that the murderer's name not the title of the article if at all possible (though in some cases, it may have to be). If there are legal/social aspects making the case of interest, that should be made clear in the introduction. In other words, I am tentatively open to restoring any or all of these articles *if* my editorial requirements are honored.Pat Palmer (talk) 10:22, 30 November 2022 (CST)

It occurred to me afterwards that we already have articles on Osama bin Laden & a number of his associates (nothing to do with George; probably written by Howard). Could it be said they're known for anything other than killing people? Peter Jackson (talk) 05:50, 1 December 2022 (CST)

Bin Laden touched off a war, founded an international terrorist organization that occupied much of the world for decades, and thus is a figure who will for better or worse appear in history books. SDG (and his associates) are soldier criminals who murdered four people on their day off. Crimes of similar horror happen around the world at regular intervals though thankfully not "often" statistically, and we don't cover them usually. This particular crime got lots of press in part because of the play and its publicity, but also because at first there was a question of whether the crime was part of systematic behavior by troops in Iraq while doing their jobs. It turned out not to be, and there was no deliberate attempt by higher-ups in the military to cover anything up. SDG is only one example of a psychotic personality who should never have been allowed into the military--THAT topic might deserve an article. As for mass gun murderers such as NC, at most I think we might list their names in a catalog somewhere, but certainly not giving them a biography and an article of their own, because to do so is inconsistent--are you aware of how MANY of these take place every year? If we covered all of them, we would soon double the size of the wiki--and greatly increase the chance of children stumbling upon the descriptions of their brutal acts. That is what is happening over in Wikipedia right now--they ARE largely covering all of them, and it's a feedback loop creating an ever-expanding set of horrible descriptions of crimes. The more I think about this problem in such terms, the clearer it becomes to me that we ought not to grace every one of these cases with a distinct article. But as I told George last June, if there IS a compelling reason why a certain case is of special interest (and not just to lawyers), detail why that is true in the introduction to the article. That had not been done in the articles I have deleted.Pat Palmer (talk) 08:15, 1 December 2022 (CST)

I'll just add one more about Wikipedia covering almost all the mass shooting cases. I can see why they might choose to do so, but since they ARE doing so, and in such detail, I don't see why we should do it also. It doesn't add anything for us to do it, even if somehow our articles are more nicely done. And frankly as an editor, I am horrified at the specter of being asked to overlook the creation of such articles every time such an incident happens, which in the United States right now is about every two to four days. On the other hand, I am reluctantly open to someone using this wiki to create an alternative version of an existing Wikipedia article, and then going over to Wikipedia and saying, "Let's do it this way instead". But no one has proposed to do that, and it usually doesn't work. Almost all of us have tried replacing some really awful material in Wikipedia with a better version of the topic that we first created here, and what usually happens is that the person(s) in WP who created the thing protect it there because of all the work they already put into it. I'm not going to make a rule that we can never have any articles in Citizendium about mass murderers, psychotic people in the military, or matters pertaining to violence. I'm saying let's have an intelligent, clear-cut reason for having those that we do, and maybe put a blurb on the Talk page explaining the motivation for a particular article to save us from recreating the debate we are having right now.Pat Palmer (talk) 08:32, 1 December 2022 (CST)

Are killers monsters, so there is no point covering them...

Pat, I made several sets of notes in preparation to responding to your note of 2022-11-29, the first comment in this subsection. It is one long paragraph, containing a dozen or so points, rather than a dozen paragraphs, each focussed around a single point. Comments written this way make it impossible for a response to start with something like, "WRT the point in your fifth paragraph".

Rather than try to respond to them all, at once, may I start with your early point, where you wrote that any article on a mass-murderer "... is known for encouraging more people to commit outrageous crimes in hopes of becoming famous."

Pat, did you mean to assert that this is a fact, some kind of unchallengeable, universally accepted fact? But is it a fact? Could it even be described as a hypothesis. I am not a scientist, but I spent years working for scientists, and I challenge whether this could be described as a hypothesis, because I suggest it is untestable. It seems to me that, while anecdotal reports might be used to back this up, these are not evidence.

I think your assertion could be called a premise. The alternate premise, that my edits are based on, is that difficult problems are best dealt with by dispassionately and neutrally trying to understand them.

You didn't actually say this, but other people, who held similar opinions to yours, have implied or explicitly stated, that serial killers, spree killers, are monsters. At least some of those people meant this literally. Killers were so unlike us regular people that they were not really even human beings. No regular human being could ever understand them, and it was a mistake to even try.

Here is a complication of that position... if monstrous killers are born, not made, then steps to purge the historical record of other killers should have no effect on their potential death toll.

Pat, you are about my age, or maybe just a bit older. When I was a teenager I heard about two deeply important psychology experiments. They weren't only deeply important, they were deeply disturbing. What both experiments showed, in different ways, was that it only took the wrong circumstances, and the wrong pressure, to get ordinary people, people who thought of themselves as ordinary decent people, to commit monstrous acts.

I am going to remind you of those experiments. In one of those experiments ordinary decent volunteers were paired up. A flip of a coin would assign one to a booth where they could hear the other experimental subject being asked to answer questions. The experimental subject in the booth would be directed by an experimenter, in a lab coat, to press a button that administered an electric shock, when the other guy gave the wrong answer. During the course of the experiment the experimenter would direct the subject to increase the voltage. During the course of the experiment the subject in the booth could hear the other guy complain, then scream, then shout that a higher voltage would kill them, then go silent, as if they had died.

It was a cruel experiment, as there was never more than one subject. The other experimental subject was an actor, a confederate of the experimenter, and no actual electric shocks were ever administered. The experimental subjects were told it was an experiment into whether pain and the absence of pain, could be used to make people better learners. But it was really an experiment into how much pain an ordinary decent person could be made to administer.

And the experiment showed that almost all ordinary decent people could be pretty easily convinced to administer a lot of pain.

The other experiment took a bunch of college student volunteers. They were split up into two groups, prisoners and guards. Surprisingly early in the experiment the guards started dishing out cruel treatment in order to control the prisoners.

I read that the guy running this experiment was so excited by what he was finding he invited some of his peers to come and observe, even though the experiment hadn't run to completion. One of his colleagues stood up to him, even though he had been her thesis advisor. I'm paraphrasing from memory here... she told him he had to end the experiment, right that moment. She told him that he was so blinded by the results he was getting that he was totally overlooking the traumatizing effect the experiment was sure to be having on his subjects.

He realized she was right, and he did end the experiment.

I suggest this experiment also shows that people who had previously been regarded as ordinary decent people, people who had previously regarded themselves as ordinary decent people, could be induced to commit monstrous cruel acts.

And, therefore, I suggest it is very strongly in the public interest to try to neutrally and rationally understand killers, torturers, and the people who commit other atrocities.

As for whether it is pointless to try to understand any truly monstrous inhuman people. There are scientists who study non-human animal behaviour, and they are capable of drawing meaningful conclusions about that behaviour, even though their subjects are non-human, by defition. George Swan (talk) 13:21, 8 December 2022 (CST)

See [2]. Peter Jackson (talk) 05:42, 10 December 2022 (CST)

• @Peter Jackson I followed the link you provided me and spent much of Sunday reading about this whole #no-notoriety premise.

I am shocked. I had thought the #no-notoriety premise was a fringe premise. I had no idea that some academics had got behind it. I think I wrote, above, that I am not a scientist, merely someone who used to work for scientists. Having said that, the papers those academics wrote, to support the #no-notoriety premise seemed like bad science. Their papers were based on comments from killers who said they had been influenced by earlier killers.

The very important point they were overlooking is that killers from within the incel community, the gun-enthusiast community, the anti-arbotion community, the MAGA community, they all have their own websites, message boards, mailing lists. They don't need to look to mainstream press, scholarly papers, or online encyclopedias, to read about those previous killers. I think this means the news embargo proposed in the #no-notoriety premise will have the opposite effect of what those proposing it desire. I am afraid the leaders within those movements are more dangerous under a #no-notoriety information embargo, as it allows the leaders within that movement to offer their followers hagiographies of those killers, using their internal websites, that then go without challenge.

I am afraid those potential copycats are going to be MORE LIKELY to follow the examples of earlier killers when the only accounts they get to read of them are hagiographies from within the killer's community. I suggest those potential copycats are going to be LESS LIKELY to follow those examples when they have access to neutrally written accounts of those earlier killers lives. George Swan (talk) 10:41, 13 December 2022 (CST)

I think you may well be right there. I'm thinking mainly in anecdotal evidence. For example, back in 1981 there was a race riot in Brixton. What followed looked like people round the country seeing it on TV, thinking that looked like fun, & organizing their own riots, which were nothing to do with race. But that's not much in the way of scientific. More broadly, the way society works is by people following an instinct to follow the tribal customs, doing what others do, especially successful people. I don't know how scientific that is either. Peter Jackson (talk) 05:10, 14 December 2022 (CST)

I'm considering deleting the article about Onion (dog)

Will anyone argue, now, against deleting the article Onion (dog)? I've put my reasons on its Talk page. Pat Palmer (talk) 10:36, 3 December 2022 (CST)

Another candidate for deletion: Curtis_Dagenais

Although the manner in which the killer turned himself in is slightly bizarrely interesting, overall this is just another crime report. Anyone have a real reason why it should not be deleted? Also, articles of this sort may NOT be titled merely with a person's name; other people bearing an identical name almost certainly exist, and I don't think they should have to tolerate finding their name in an encyclopedia delineated as a murderer of police.Pat Palmer (talk) 09:57, 7 December 2022 (CST)

• For the record, third parties, I wrote this article.

I don't agree that "this is just another crime report". Canada is not the US. Police on citizen violence is relatively rare. Citizen on Police violence, also relatively rare. So, in Canada, there are no routine crime reports on Citizen on Police violence. Rational commentators tried to make meaningful suggestions as to the steps that could have prevented this tragic event.

As for what is "routine", back in 2007 I copied a discussion from a talk page to my userspace here. In particular, I direct your attention to the 4th and 5th paragraphs in this section.

With regard to the embarrassment, or actual danger, an individual faces when he or she has a notorious namesake...

Did you know that when the Department of Homeland Security was created, and it compiled and published its first "no-fly list", Ted Kennedy's name was on it? Senator Ted Kennedy, wearing a face that would be known and recognized by every security guard, was prevented from boarding his flights because his name was on this list. Kennedy was able to buttonhole the Director of Homeland Security, and have him personally order his name to be removed from the list - after he had been prevented from boarding five times.

We have all got namesakes. Every notorious person has namesakes. Is there a good reason to protect any non-notable namesakes from the embarrassment of a wiki covering the notorious namesake? Being temporarily mistaken for a notorious namesake is a risk every single human being faces. I suggest there is no effective step a wiki can take that would guarantee non-notable namesakes would be free of the risk of being embarrassed by a notorious namesake. I don't think it makes sense to protect non-notable people from being embarrassed by being a namesake. George Swan (talk) 14:06, 8 December 2022 (CST)

Nothing in the article as written makes the point that "police on citizen" violence is rare in Canada and that this somehow makes this case special. Did you mean citizen on police (the opposite)? The homicide rate in Saskatchewan province is higher than in the neighboring state of Montana. Are you concerned about the shooter's claim that police "started the whole thing"? I'm baffled.Pat Palmer (talk) 11:33, 9 December 2022 (CST)

Nothing about this case has anything to do with Guantanamo captives, so I really don't understand the passages you direct me to here in relation to this article.

With the exception of extraordinarily famous historical figures, articles in The Citizendium should not be titled with a simple name. This is my editorial opinion. I have a list of several such articles in The Citizendium that I intend to rename when I get time. It's common sense that there might be another notable person with the same name someday in the future, and many people with the same name who have *not* become notable, so let's please try to be unambiguous from the beginning if we can.Pat Palmer (talk) 11:33, 9 December 2022 (CST)