ProfHenley

December 2012

Hello, I'm Binksternet. Wikipedia is written by people who have a wide diversity of opinions, but we try hard to make sure articles have a neutral point of view. Your recent edit to United States presidential election, 2012 seemed less than neutral to me, so I removed it for now. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you. Please use WP:Reliable sources instead of whyrepublicanshate etc. dot com for your sourcing. Please refrain from the grave-dancing word choice; a neutral tone is essential. Binksternet (talk) 19:17, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Binksternet, you asked me to message you on your page if I had a question, but I see no way to message you. Can you clariy?

As far as the neutrality of the edits to the 2012 presidential election page, the edits were facts only, verifiable from dozens of sources, and are 100% neutral. The page referenced is not neutral, but you could make that argument about many kinds of sources. The page I referenced is the only place on the internet that has the data compiled and organized in a decipherable format.

Beyond that, I think it is a confusion to say that an edit is not neutral because you feel a source of data is not neutral. If the data paints a picture, that is something you have to accept. It has not been altered in any way. What you're saying is a little like arguing that if you ask me someone's height, and I say 4 feet, that characterization is unacceptable because it makes that person seem short and is not neutral. The answer, in that case, is data only, even if your interpretation ends up biased because of your own preconceptions about height. If you would like the last sentence removed to make it seem more neutral, I'm fine with that, but I think your argument about neutrality here is based on how you think users might respond, not any objective definition of neutrality. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ProfHenley (talk • contribs)

In this edit you used http://www.whyrepublicanshateeducation.com as the source for your information. This webpage has no author listed, no sense of authority or whether the references are being interpreted correctly. It is a WP:Self-published source akin to a blog post. You can ask at WP:RSN whether anybody over there thinks the webpage is a reliable source but I think it very clearly is not.

Also, your wording was non-neutral. One man is "President Obama" and the other is "Mr. Romney". The word "convincingly" pushes the point too far. "Managed only" is demeaning. The bit about the former Confederate states is inflammatory stuff and should have only the best sourcing such as the New York Times or similar.

The data points are interesting as is the analysis. Various newspapers have made these comparisons. If you source the data to WP:Reliable sources such as these then you'll be in better shape. Binksternet (talk) 20:15, 21 December 2012 (UTC

The page you're talking about is referenced extensively (copied directly from the page):

http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/p20-566.pdf

http://www.politico.com/2012-election/map/#/President/2012/

Bartels, Larry M. 2008. Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. Princeton, NJ. Princeton University Press.

Bureau of Economic Analysis: United States Department of Commerce. "National Income and Products Account Table (NIPA)." [1]. November 2010.

Bureau of Labor Statistics: United States Department of Labor. "Employment status of the civilian noninstitutional population, 1940 to date." [2]. Downloaded on 11/23/2010.

Hibbs, Douglas A. 1987. The American Political Economy: Macroeconomics and Electoral Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kopczuk, Wojciech. 2005. "Tax bases, tax rates and the elasticity of reported income1." Journal of Public Economics, Vol. 89: 2093-2119.

Tax Foundation. U.S. Federal Individual Income Tax Rates History; 1913-2010. [3]. November 2010.

United States Census Bureau. "Table H-1. Income Limits for Each Fifth and Top 5 Percent of All Households: 1967 to 2009." [4] November

So if the Princeton University Press, The Harvard University Press, The Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Census Bureau, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics "have no sense of authority whatsoever", what does exactly? Did you scroll down the entire page to see the references and raw data? Not only does it have a sense of authority, by any reasonable standard it is unimpeachable.

You're right that the one sentence is inflammatory, but factual nonetheless. The others are exactly the kind of language that you could find in any media outlet, liberal, conservative, or neutral, but I'm fine with removing the language. In this case, simply asking me to edit it would probably be more appropriate. As I said before, biased or not, http://www.whyrepublicanshateeducation.com is the only source on the internet that compiles and cross-tabulates this data, and the references on that page are straight out of academic publications, peer-reviewed and held to the most rigorous standards of verifiability.

As far as interpretation, the data was plugged into excel and charted, not "interpreted." Saying that, in the District of Columbia, 48.5% of the population has a bachelor's degree, 28% has a graduate degree, and 91.4% voted for president Obama is reporting, not interpreting. And saying that no one at Wikipedia could say the source is reliable can just as easily be turned on its head, as no one can say it is unreliable either, and given the extensive citations, I challenge anyone to find one word in the entire edit I submitted that isn't verifiable through any reputable source anywhere.

I can change the language you're talking about, and include these references as well, but there is no strong argument that the submission isn't verifiably true and in-line with an analysis of the voting results. If you'd like an author, it is me, and I have a graduate degree in political science and the paper referenced at that page won an award -- voted on by people with PhDs. Maybe only 20% of all of Wikipedia can be verified by sources as reliable as these. I say again, your knee-jerk reaction to this is based on how you know how people might react to it, not on a fair evaluation of whether the data is verifiable. If it isn't, show me a source that discredits any piece of it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ProfHenley (talk • contribs)

Let me emphasize that, convenient as it might be, Wikipedia must not accept the website www.whyrepublicanshateeducation.com as a reference. Not at all. If the contained data is to be presented to the reader, the relevant news and government articles must be referenced with inline footnotes. The Bartels book was printed in 2008 so I don't see how it could apply. Same with other published documents from 2010, 2005, etc. Wikipedia has an unyielding policy against original research which is what scholars are familiar with, what they do all the time. Wikipedia doesn't allow original research to take place within Wikipedia articles—it must be externally sourced. In this case, Wikipedia must refuse to be the publisher of new analysis that takes disparate sources published at various times and compares them to create a novel conclusion related to the present year. If analysis like that is to be described on Wikipedia then it must have been published in a scholarly paper, a book, a magazine, a newspaper, or similar. Wikipedia will then summarize the published source. Binksternet (talk) 22:07, 21 December 2012 (UTC)