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June 2021

Race and Intelligence - Fringe RfC

Hi, I've been getting myself up to speed with the RFC [1] (and the disputed close[2]) last year about a potential genetic component to the racial IQ gap. I saw your name in the discussion and have respected your contributions on other articles, so I was wondering if you have any input on the current situation, in which editors are citing the fringe consensus determination in defense of:

• Comparing the weak hereditarian hypothesis (that some genetic component may be involved) to pseudoscience like Bigfoot and creationism[3][4]
• Arguing there is no scientific rationale for a potential genetic component[5]
• Writing "The current scientific consensus is that there is no evidence for a genetic component", wording that is directly contradicted by the cited sources[6]

Editors are using the fringe determination to advance the argument that 100% of the racial IQ gap is due to environmental factors, and any dissent from this view is considered fringe, despite evidence to the contrary from a variety of reliable sources. Administrators at the ArbCom case back in 2010 proposed findings of fact affirming as much: "The (weak) hereditarian hypothesis is not fringe" and "The idea that genetics is one factor in racial IQ differences may not have achieved consensus in the scientific community, but neither is it fringe (and, in fact, no other factors have achieved consensus either—although some have been disproven)."[7]

I'm trying to to determine how best to proceed with this dispute, as the current situation strikes me as untenable and plainly wrong. I would rather avoid starting a new RfC and reigniting the whole debate again, if possible. Is there any better alternative? Stonkaments (talk) 21:14, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

I have been considering the idea of possibly starting a new RFC soon as well. If there is going to be a new RFC, I think it would be advantageous to wait until next month if possible, because there is some upcoming research that it would be useful to cite (nothing I’ve written, but I have given feedback to the authors). I’m also dreadfully short on time with work deadlines until April.

In the meantime, if a consensus can form on the article's talk page to bring that part of the article into line with what its sources say, that would be valuable. The article has a special restriction against misrepresenting sources, so I agree it's a problem that the outcome of last year's RFC is making that restriction impossible to follow. If this problem can't be addressed on the article's talk page, I can try raising it in a RFC next month. -Ferahgo the Assassin (talk) 21:40, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

@Stonkaments and Ferahgo the Assassin: This is apt to get ugly. Keep in mind that even if it turns out to be scientifically defensible that there's a slight average statistical variance in intelligence level along ethno-racial lines, this is essentially a dangerous thing to say, because wingnuts will latch onto and exaggerate it as a reason for discriminatory (or worse) behavior. WP needs to be super-mega-ultra-certain of the solidity of any scientific consensus in favor of the idea, and figure out a way to write about it that is engineered, in every clause of every sentence, to thwart attempts at misinterpretation and over-generalization.

However, I don't presently think the idea is scientifically defensible, because there is no agreed-upon definition of what "intelligence" really means (which becomes especially clear if you read up on animal-intelligence research), and our means of measuring it are neither cross-comparable nor, when it comes to things that involve more complex skills (language, mathematics, complicated problem solving of particular sorts, etc.), are our means of testing very well-vetted for socio-cultural biases. Many of them clearly have such biases (e.g., dependence on educational quality, acquisition of particular developmental and life skills by the testing age, ignoring of alternative skills, not taking account of the effects of social suppression and trauma, etc., etc.). When it comes to research purporting to show a particular group is more rather than less capable (the most common seems to be the claim that highly endogamous Askenazi Jews are better at numerical and some other tasks), there's been a lot of debunking of it (nor will it matter for the future since they are not very endogamous any longer except among the socially insular Orthodox Jewish community; one might as well make arguments about the Amish or the Trobriand Islanders). I don't know whether it's been entirely successful debunking, but the point is that there is very clearly not a scientific consensus that the "Ashkenazim are smarter" idea is true.

And all this is aside from the fact that the typical Western view of "race" is largely nonsense. The short version is that humans have been massively miscegenating since prehistory, even in places where doing so is particular difficult (e.g. the Arctic circle, Oceania, etc.) We have the illusion of races because the average human has, when given much of a choice, a strong innate desire to breed with someone who looks like him/herself (more accurately, as has been proven experimentally, like those whom that person spent early childhood with). The consequence of this is strong regional selection for outward appearance, reinforced by environmental evolutionary pressures, e.g. to have darker skin and thicker, darker hair near the equator). But there's no tie between genes for particular coloration (and other really obvious phenotype like nose width, breast size, etc.), and genes for more subtle things. Even some apparent ties are illusory, e.g. "Africans are more prone to sickle-cell anemia". It's random accident and, on a long scale, a temporary coincidence. In reality, people with a particular malarial adaptation are more prone to SCA, and they're statistically likely to be African[-diaspora] simply because of where that particular anti-malaria gene arose. But it has nothing to do with their skin color or nose width or whatever. If they breed with someone from Europe or Asia, with a different anti-malaria gene, their offspring are likely to get the other A-M gene, but end with an obviously African-ish appearance due to the dominance of those phenotype genes. And this is hardly theoretical; African-Americans (other than recent-generation African immigrants) have much lower incidence of SCA than do the sub-Saharan African populations ancestral to them (on that side of their genealogy). So, think about the consequences of how genes and chromosomes actually work, not how people wrongly imagine they do, when it comes to subtle traits like numerical or linguistic or spatial navigation or memory skills that don't have even any obvious regional adaptation correlation. The likelihood of there being a causal link is very low. A direct analogy is that we're pretty sure that Western men have larger penises today, on average, than they did in antiquity (judging from ancient art, mummies, etc.), entirely because of female preferential selection, yet there is no evidence of any other change: European[-diaspora] men are not less or more smart, better or worse fathers, less or more warlike, etc., etc., than their forbears, and there's no reason to suspect they would be since there's no reason a gene for the size of particular body part would have any connection to entirely unrelated heritable traits.

Keep in mind also that "science" is variable and often does not live up to its ideals. E.g., most physical anthropologists in China, despite being able do proper research – except on one particular thing – and to get published in good journals, are still indoctrinated to believe that the main Chinese cluster of ethnicities (or East Asians in general) are descended from an entirely different early hominid than other humans, despite the rest of the scientific world having disproved this, beyond any shadow of doubt. They simply ignore data that doesn't suit their preferences (just as medical proto-science in the West for over a millennium ignored the bare facts about certain internal human body parts, because they disagreed with ancient Greek dogma; something similar happened in Japan before extensive contact with the West and Western medical literature; cf. also traditional Chinese medicine's resistance to scientific facts). There's a similar cultural blind spot when it comes to psychologists, psychiatrists, behavioral scientists, neurologists, ethologists, some sociologists, etc., in the West and their firm belief in the legitimacy of IQ tests, despite the fact that any cultural anthropologist (and some sociologists) can point out really obvious socio-cultural biases in those tests. (Same goes for MBTI/Keirsey personality testing, NLP/EST, Freudian/Jungian psychoanalysis, and various other downright pseudoscientific but plausible-seeming-to-some-people approaches to human cognitive assessment that have become "big deals" but which unravel under scrutiny.)

So, yes, do more RfCs, but keep in mind that WP has a responsibility to not harm the world. Something like this really rises to WP:MEDRS levels of sourcing rigor, combined with a "WP is here to make the world better" focus in the writing of material on this topic. If stuff gets really nasty, it'll be time for another ArbCom or AE filing. And it probably will get really nasty. Just be aware that if you go the route of arguing that there's good science behind hereditary intelligence differences, even in a minor way, you will be subjected to character assassination, and the admin corps generally will not defend you, since doing so would subject them to the same [mis]treatment. WP is hardly immune to socio-politics and to cancel culture, and is dominated by American and British liberals (perhaps largely for the better, but not without occasional consequences). So, be sure you want to run that gantlet, and be extra sure you have both the sourcing to back it up and a way to write about it that doesn't play into racists' hands. That said, if something has been getting a lot of press, WP should cover it along with critical scientific response to it, so it cannot be "run away with" by bad reporting and worse misinterpretation of what the reporting said, based in turn on unfaithful overgeneralization from extremely limited scientific data and conclusions.

PS: One of the reasons I've been staying away from all this for some time is that even if it did eventually turn out to be incontrovertible that there are heritable cognitive differences tied to ethnicity (which I doubt), WP isn't doing any harm by "failing" to say so at this early, iffy stage. (WP is incomplete and not 100% up-to-date on at least hundreds of thousands of topics, and "we are all equal" is not a terrible fiction to maintain if it did turn out to be a fiction). Jumping on that racial-intelligence-differences bandwagon and ultimately being wrong about it would do a great deal of harm, both in the real world and to WP's reputation. Meanwhile, avoidance of siding with racialists on this question has no negative consequences. Another way of looking at it: Just letting the leftists own this topic for the foreseeable future, censorious biases and all, has fewer predictable bad outcomes than effectively ceding it to the far right. The centrist/moderate thing to do is to continue to maintain that the jury is still out, and until that's incontrovertibly no longer the case, we treat it at least as WP:UNDUE if not literally WP:FRINGE. A related argument is that if we have WP:BLP policy because we care about negative effects of bad encylcopedism even on a single individual, we necessarily also must care even more about negative effects on entire groups of them.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:20, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for the very thorough and thoughtful response. It sounds like you're essentially advocating for First, do no harm, which is certainly a very reasonable argument, but also gives me some cause for concern. I agree with your concerns about the definitions of the concepts of race and intelligence, but I think all we can do is follow how the scientific community resolves those issues. Besides that, I think my counterargument is twofold, with both points stemming from my disagreement with the claim that in the status quo WP isn't doing any harm:

1) The belief that all differences are 100% environmental and 0% genetic can be harmful in its own right. That belief can be used to advance the argument that any and all inequalities are due to overt or systemic racism. If that turns out to be wrong, very real societal harm is caused by seeing everything solely through the lens of rooting out systemic racism and failing to pursue other necessary reforms; in that respect, WP is causing harm by suppressing information that gives a full and accurate picture of the debate. To be clear, I think racism in all its forms is abhorrent and a very real problem. But I think it is also harmful to suppress information that gives a more accurate understanding of the current scientific consensus, when that may have a very real impact on the argument that all inequalities are a priori due to discrimination. See the examples given of harm done by belief in the blank slate theory here[8].

2) Should the suppression of facts in the face of foreseeable misuse by bad actors trump WP:Verifiability? In my view, making an editorial decision based not on the evidence at hand but in consideration of the negative societal implications of including that information, is a dangerous road to go down for an encyclopedia. For example, couldn't that argument also be extended to removing any mention of the fact that there is a ~1 standard deviation gap in black-white IQ scores, since that fact can be used to support any number of racist/hateful/white supremacist arguments? Doesn't China make a similar argument for the good of society in favor of suppressing information about the Tiananmen Square protests? I understand the fact that the science is unresolved complicates matters somewhat, and certainly sympathize with the desire to simply "let the dust settle" first so to speak, but suppressing information just strikes me as very dangerous and antithetical to what Wikipedia stands for. As long as the jury is still out, I think it's important for WP to convey that fact. That's all I'm pushing for, and I think the article currently fails to accurately convey that in several key ways. Stonkaments (talk) 16:52, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

@Stonkaments: Yes, the medical-practice principle is a good analogy, since what is being made is essentially a medical claim, though a thinly disguised one. As for "all we can do is follow how the scientific community resolves those issues", MEDRS is again very good guidance: We do not rely on primary research (journal papers), which is a form of WP:PRIMARY sourcing (though we might cite it secondarily so more technical readers have easy access to the original material, and we sometimes also use it more directly for attributed statements when they are themselves key elements of the story, e.g. a notable controversy over a purportedly scientific claim). Primary research is extremely often disproved by later confirmation attempts by other scientists. Nor do we rely on the mainstream press's understanding of the science, which is generally going to be incomplete at best and is often flat-out wrong. (That even holds in non-medical science articles, though we don't have a "WP:SCIENCERS" saying so; it's just a de facto consensus that, for example, no amount of non-expert material written about how Pluto really is a planet actually means much encyclopedically.) Similarly, we have no medical-sphere permissiveness for blogs, op-eds, and other WP:SPS by alleged experts, which we might accept in a different topic, like pool playing or the recording industry. As with un- or poorly-sourced WP:BLP claims, uncertain medical ones should simply be deleted on-sight. What we rely on is high-quality scientific secondary sourcing, mostly literature reviews, especially systematic reviews. This is a good model to follow with anything that makes claims about human psychology/cognition, which is definitely covered by MEDRS as much as claims about the human pancreas or immune system. (MEDRS is even generally held to apply to veterinary material.)

On your numbered points, in order: The issue isn't really about whether "all differences are 100% environmental and 0% genetic"; it's about whether any of the heritable ones are tied, with certainty, to ethnicity/race. So, I would agree with you that the most activistic persons who are making bogus "100% environmental" arguments need to be removed from the topic area if they become (or get more) disruptive. There is no question that, say, two people with the same congenital mental disability have highly elevated risk of producing children who also have the same disability. It's much less certain that two MENSA members with advanced degrees are going to produce smarter-than-average children (and that they would still turn out that way if, say, raised in the foster-care system after their parents' untimely deaths – i.e., subjected to an entirely different environment), much less whether either a positive or negative potential for short-term heritability of a trait we cluster under the ever-changing "intelligence" umbrella has any connection whatever to broad groups of people who share some degree of regional genetic origin.

I agree that we should not "suppress information", but in a topic like this it doesn't qualify as information rather than as conjecture and theory and tentative data interpretation until a higher hurdle than usual has been leapt (in the real world, not just in WP editors' selective attempts at proving their points). And not everything that is factual must be covered by Wikipedia; WP not writing about something isn't "suppression", or we could not have WP:N, WP:NOT#INDISCRIMINATE, etc. (That said, I have argued before, when people have tried to delete race-and-intelligence articles outright, that WP needs to cover the topic and do it really well, otherwise it effectively cedes writing about the topic to far-right webboards.) To the extent the standard deviation gap you mention is being covered here (largely because it's a huge-ass public controversy – cf. The Bell Curve and our coverage of it – not because it's rigorous or meaningful science), and we're covering it with clarification about what it means, and what little can be drawn from it, and how much criticism IQ tests themselves have against them, etc., plus all the debate we've had about going even that far on the subject in Wikipedia content ... that all is probably a good indicator of how to proceed on related topics, though perhaps with even more caution. Public belief in the accuracy of IQ tests (viewed a lot like lie-detector tests and personality tests) is much lower than public belief in the accuracy of anything that claims to be "genetic testing", as a result of things like police-procedural TV shows. It's even been observed in the legal profession that juries are increasingly difficult to convince to convict in rape and murder cases on the basis of traditional "circumstantial" evidence, because they've become conditioned to expect the genetic kind, and to trust it absolutely. This fallacious belief that "genetics" is just one thing, and something like infallibly powerful magic, has multiple effects. One of them is at play in this subject area.

Anyway, I'm not replying at length again just to argue; rather, I think the topic is important and covering it "just so" is important, too. I don't think I will, nor do I mean to, dissuade you from working on it in that direction, but I do hope to have a little effect on the approach. And I did want make sure (in the first reply) that you understand that pursuing it will have stressful costs. I've learned this the hard way by getting involved in gender identity and human sexuality topics, another sphere of over-politicized WP:DRAMA (and off-site conflict) that is also subject to a big mixture of science, pseudo-science, polarized posturing, witch-hunting, and potential for actual harm.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:41, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for your thoughts, they're greatly appreciated. I will take everything you've said to heart, especially the utmost importance of covering the topic "just so", as well as the stressful personal costs you've mentioned. I was involved in an arbitration incident last year when I dove too zealously into another hot button topic, so I'm already somewhat aware of how stressful that sort of character assassination and general nastiness can be. Already it's being alleged this time around that my "only purpose here is to try to overturn the consensus and promote racialist hereditarianism"[9], so I'll definitely need to weigh the pros and cons of pursuing this debate further.

ETA: I just discovered the guide to Wikistress[10] from your profile, which looks quite handy! Stonkaments (talk) 00:39, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

@Stonkaments: Aieee! I see the pitchforks are already being brandished in your direction. That bears a striking resemblance to what I was subjected to: the imputing of motives, the reductio ad absurdum, the fallacious confusion of seeking DUE coverage of X with a "promotion" of X. Those who are activists about Y often have (or pretend they have) a great deal of difficulty understanding that writing neutrally about the matter is not supporting X and being an opponent of Y; they just see anyone who is not parroting the Y dogma as necessarily an outright enemy of Y. It's part of our society's unfortunate shift toward polarization and echo chambers.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:24, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

@Stonkaments: I know you are considering starting another RFC, but I would really appreciate it if you could wait another month so I can do it. I have a lot of experience with that article, and starting another RFC will cause more harm than good if it isn't handled in the right way. I encourage you to pursue other forms of dispute resolution or to make an Arbitration Enforcement report, and then if those things fail to resolve the issue, I'll start another RFC next month. -Ferahgo the Assassin (talk) 03:31, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Youse might consider collaboratively drafting an RfC, and use AE as needed in the interim.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:49, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Sure, I'm very amenable to suggestions as I'm still somewhat new here and learning the ropes of how to best approach these heated issues. I wasn't planning to start another RfC, but rather bring the issue to WP:DRN (those are two separate things, right?) to resolve the narrow content dispute ongoing of whether "no evidence for a genetic component" accurately represents the cited sources and meets the requirements of WP:VERIFIABILITY. But if you think that will cause more harm than good for the community then I'll gladly hold off, so please let me know. Stonkaments (talk) 15:07, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

DRN's a very different process (and a weird and usually unsuccessful one; I don't think it'll be around much longer, for the same reason WP:MEDCAB came to an end). What you'd probably want is WP:RSN or WP:NPOVN, or maybe even WP:NORN, depending on whether the problem is more one of (respectively): 1) problems identifying and accepting reliable sources and assessing their reliability; 2) pushing a personal or organizational/dogmatic viewpoint despite what sources say; or 3) misusing sources to weave, out of unrelated material, a novel-synthesis (WP:SYNTH) conclusion that cannot be found in any of them. It's been my experience that even when the issue is really no. 2 at root, RSN can be more effective (by focusing on sources instead of on editors and their viewpoints), though even NORN is that way to an extent, just a bit more subjective. They're all more effective than DRN, because they're open to general community assessment and can reach binding conclusions (like ANI), while DRN is dependent on a single volunteer to "get it" well enough to produce a solution that both sides agree to (tends not to happen). I think I would avoid NPOVN for this, because editors who agree with a PoV tend not to recognize that is is one.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:10, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

@Ferahgo the Assassin: @SMcCandlish: I've written up a draft for a WP:RSN discussion: User:Stonkaments/sandbox. Please let me know if you have any thoughts, objections, words of wisdom, etc.—greatly appreciated. And again, Ferahgo the Assassin if you think pursuing this discussion now will cause more harm than good, please let me know and I'll gladly hold off. Stonkaments (talk) 20:53, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Actually I'm thinking the discussion may be better suited for WP:NORN, as it is not so much a question of the reliability of the sources but a claim that is not supported by any of the sources. Stonkaments (talk) 21:15, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

@Stonkaments: If you want to try raising this issue at the NOR noticeboard, that's fine. My request was just that you not start a new RFC yet. I have two suggestions about your draft:

First, the disputed part of Hunt's textbook is available at Google books. If you raise the issue at a noticeboard, I suggest including this link so others can see what the book says directly.

Second, I suggest mentioning that this issue exists on more than just the Race and intelligence article. The same wording cited to the same sources (Hunt, Mackintosh, Nisbett and Kaplan) has been copied to at least three other articles: Intelligence quotient [11], Heritability of IQ [12] and then again about 2/3 of the way through the first large paragraph added here [13], and Racial achievement gap in the United States (originally added in this edit [14] and then moved to the other article [15]). It may also have been copied to other articles that I'm not remembering. -Ferahgo the Assassin (talk) 21:45, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

I would add that the only way to avoid a total freakout is going to be front-loading the discussion with a note that this is not about positing that intelligence is mostly heritable and that the environmental factors are not the primary ones; it's about not suppressing the science saying there is at least a minor genetic factor – and that our encyclopedic writing goals will include ensuring that this is not misinterpreted or exaggerated in any way that supports racist notions. However, there are some other potential pitfalls here, and it'll require some source combing.

First, be sure that "heritable" means true-breeding genetic heritability in all this material. While it's not common usage, a child receiving damaged or otherwise altered genes/chromosomes from a parent, caused by environmental factor (radioactive, chemical, etc.) and not inherited in turn by that parent from a grandparent, is sometimes imprecisely referred to as inherited or genetic.

Even when the normal sense of long-term, evolutionary heritability is what is meant, that doesn't necessarily tie into ethnicity/race. E.g., if Test Student A did poorly and Parent A1 and Parent A2 both do poorly on the same test, and genetic analysis shows they share a trait that is demonstrated to effect these scores, on average, then that is some evidence for performance heritability, but it is not evidence for it being tied to a particular population-of-general-geographic-origin or a particular looks-like-a-race-to-me phenotypic appearance trait associated with a general geographic ancestral origin. It would have to be shown that again and again and again people who are genetically mostly or entirely from that population carry this trait (not found much in other populations) and reliably pass it on and it reliably has a suppressive effect on the test results. (And the tests don't have cultural and related biases.)

Third, "race" is generally bullshit except as a socio-cultural force, but not all scientists outside of physical anthropology and the more sensible side of sociology understand this. There's more genetic diversity between neighboring groups in Africa, and there are more genetically identifiable ethnic groups there (aside from cultural identifiers of them) than in all of the rest of the world combined. That is, Aboriginal Australians, Danes, the Ainu of Japan, and the Yanomami of the Amazon are all more closely related to each other and more genetically similar to each other than two fairly endogamous groups in the same country in sub-Saharan Africa (who look superficially similar because of a much longer period of consistent environmental pressure, with the best adaptations to it spreading comparatively rapidly because haplogroups that come into contact). So, to the extent any claims are being made about "Europeans" versus "Africans", or "African Americans" versus "Asian Americans", and other broad pseudo-racial categories that our censuses like to use (because they encapsulate cultural views about "races"), that data is probably unreliable, even if a journal published it. And remember that WP doesn't rely in primary-research papers to begin with. What are systematic reviews saying? Are there not any? Then it's too soon for WP to be advancing something as scientifically factual, and we should be approaching this from a "public controversy" angle, with elevated amounts of attribution, quotation, balancing, and hedging.

I go into the race illusion quite a bit in WP:R&E. It's easy to invent a fake "race" by just selecting some appearance traits and an environmental factor; e.g. one could divide the world into a "Sunbelt race" and a "Coldzone race" by latitude and relative darkness of hair and skin, but this would bear little resemblance to genetic history. This is pretty much the situation with the present "races", since sub-Saharan Africans aren't closely inter-related, and the entire "White race" is just a variant of the "East Asian race" that lost epicanthic folds and got a bit paler (mostly - there are Koreans, Japanese, Mongols, Asian Siberians, etc., who are paler than many Mediterranean "White people"). "Whites" on average are closer related in most genetic respects to northern East Asians and northern South Asians than any of those are to southern East Asians, southern South Asians, and Oceanian peoples. However, particular traits like epicanthic folds, certain skull shapes, melanin level, etc., quickly migrate from one group to another if they interbreed with any regularity; genes do not travel as total "racial packages". The essay gets into that as well, in discussing anti-malarial genes.

What proper science is likely to be showing or eventually show is some minor level of heritable performance difference between haplogroups, which do not correspond closely to "races". Having said all this (in more than one place), I don't think I want to get very deeply involved in further RfCs, noticeboardings, etc., on this subject. It's a hot potato, and my hands are already burning enough from gender/sexuality hot potatoes.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:06, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Yes indeed, it is quite the complex subject, and I'll admit I'm far from an expert in the field. Until recently I had no idea just how fraught and ill-defined the concept of race is. I wonder if research that continues to look at "race" as the defining variable rather than haplogroups, etc. is partly a case of "meet them where they are", where it remains valuable to use such an ill-defined idea precisely because it is such a socio-cultural force as you say? Or is it more often simply a sign of sloppy/naive thinking?

And I totally agree that the best way for Wikipedia to approach this is from a "public controversy" angle, with the heightened levels of attribution, balance, and hedging that entails. Unfortunately, as Gardenofaleph pointed out, I think the RfC makes it difficult (impossible?) to provide the appropriate level of balance.[16] Nevertheless, despite the usual personal attacks and motivated reasoning, I'm still encouraged by all of the recent talk page discussion. I was starting to lose hope that policy and careful consideration could ever overcome ideology on a topic like this, but there's still hope yet. I appreciate your patience in taking the time to share your thoughts. It's a shame that WP is missing out on a thoughtful, moderate voice of reason on this topic, but of course I totally understand given the circumstances. Stonkaments (talk) 03:37, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

It's a topic area I'll come back to eventually. I'm not concerned in the interim with this camp or that camp having more control over the article. This stuff is a tide; it ebbs and flows. You get ArbCom saying "not fringe", then that gets ignored, then it doesn't get ignored, then it does, etc. For me, it's one of those WP:THEREISNODEADLINE things.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:31, 20 March 2021 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish and Ferahgo the Assassin: Sorry to bump this again, but I'm feeling rather disillusioned at the moment given the admin who closed the WP:NOR/N discussion seems to be rather biased on this topic.[17][18][19] Is there a way to have an impartial admin review the close, or should I just chalk it up to the tide going the wrong way right now? :/ Stonkaments (talk) 21:01, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

@Stonkaments: I don't think it's worth challenging the closure at this point, but please don't give up on this topic area yet. I'm still planning on opening the new RFC that I mentioned within the week, and I think a new RFC probably is the only thing that could make a difference on these articles. My apologies for the delay on this; preparing the RFC has taken longer than I'd anticipated. -Ferahgo the Assassin (talk) 20:32, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

Editors at that article are now denying even the rather mundane and uncontroversial fact that considerations of political correctness have played any role in the research of race/intelligence[20]. I give up. Stonkaments (talk) 14:52, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

Sister Project Boxes and MOS Conflict

Resolved

 – The solution arrived at in the WT:MOS thread was the correct one (and, yes, it was my fault).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:56, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

• Copied from Wikipedia:Help desk#Sister Project Boxes and MOS Conflict

Hi! The MOS Seems to contradict in an area and I could use some clarification.

MOS:SO states that Internal links to related English Wikipedia articles, with section heading "See also"; link templates for sister-project content also usually go at the top of this section when it is present (otherwise in the last section on the page).

This is in apparent contradiction to MOS:ELLAYOUT, which states that Links to Wikimedia sister projects and Spoken Wikipedia should generally appear in "External links", not under "See also". If the article has no "External links" section, then place sister links at the top of the last section in the article. Two exceptions: Wiktionary and Wikisource links may be linked inline (e.g. to an unusual word or the text of a document being discussed).

So, which is it? Should I put sister project boxes in External links or See also? Thanks, Tyrone Madera (talk) 18:54, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

Tyrone Madera, I have checked the history of the passages you quote, now highlighted in green, and the more recent is MOS:SO, which was updated in the Revision to Wikipedia:Manual of Style as of 10:06, 23 November 2020 by SMcCandlish. SMcCandlish please could you resolve the inconsistency between MOS:SO and MOS:ELLAYOUT? TSventon (talk) 23:53, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

SMcCandlish, Tyrone Madera, this has now been discussed at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Sister Project Boxes and MOS Conflict, so it probably makes sense to respond there if you wish. TSventon (talk) 10:55, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

Feedback request: Politics, government, and law request for comment

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technical question about RFCs

Maybe you are a good person to ask, how do you stop bots "expiring" on-going RFCs after 30 days?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:48, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

@Andrew Lancaster: Not sure you can. I think you just have to put another RfC tag on it, if it needs to continue longer. (And figure out what the original numeric ID was and keep that one around as an anchor for incoming links).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:10, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: hopefully what Carlstak did is good enough, or should we do more? OTOH, I can't really understand your posts on that RFC, and I beg you to spend a few more minutes on this, so we can try to get some clarity. (1) You are responding to an RFC which is a draft proposal, and saying there should be a draft proposal. (2) You are saying that you judge that the proposal has been criticized, but actually I am struggling to get other editors such as yourself to give any feedback at all, presumably because they are (understandably) sick of it. So put simply, if this situation is ever going to change, the article really needs there to be feedback on this RFC - including indeed negative feedback. If there would be clear negative feedback on the draft, THEN indeed we should look forward to an improved draft based on that feedback. But that is not the situation.

(FWIW The only negative feedback so far was effectively a statement of minority disagreement with the findings of the previous RFCs which led to this one. Berig and Krakkos would prefer no reduction of the 3 controversial sections about pre 3rd century Goths. Note the wording of Krakkos in the RFC he previously started: "it is obvious that there is a clear consensus among editors that the Prehistory, Early history and Movement towards the Black Sea sections are too long and complicated, too reliant and focused on Jordanes and his Getica, and that they should be give more emphasis on the analysis of archaeological, historical and linguistic evidence by modern scholars." And the closing said "there is a clear consensus to substantially trim these sections. The specific text proposed, however, has drawn significant objections and a consensus to implement it as-is is not apparent in this discussion.") --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:07, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

A request @ WP:ANI

Resolved

 – That was closed almost before I could respond.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:15, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Greetings,

One of previous non Admin discussion closure from your side has been discussed @ Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#A request

Thanks and warm regards

Bookku (talk) 13:49, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

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Nomination of The Decapitones for deletion

Disregard

 – Not interested; I only did basic cleanup work there, and don't have the time to do source searching on this.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:15, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article The Decapitones, to which you have significantly contributed, is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or if it should be deleted.

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Editing news 2021 #2

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this newsletter

When newcomers had the Reply tool and tried to post on a talk page, they were more successful at posting a comment. (Source)

Earlier this year, the Editing team ran a large study of the Reply Tool. The main goal was to find out whether the Reply Tool helped newer editors communicate on wiki. The second goal was to see whether the comments that newer editors made using the tool needed to be reverted more frequently than comments newer editors made with the existing wikitext page editor.

The key results were:

• Newer editors who had automatic ("default on") access to the Reply tool were more likely to post a comment on a talk page.
• The comments that newer editors made with the Reply Tool were also less likely to be reverted than the comments that newer editors made with page editing.

These results give the Editing team confidence that the tool is helpful.

Looking ahead

The team is planning to make the Reply tool available to everyone as an opt-out preference in the coming months. This has already happened at the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedias.

The next step is to resolve a technical challenge. Then, they will deploy the Reply tool first to the Wikipedias that participated in the study. After that, they will deploy it, in stages, to the other Wikipedias and all WMF-hosted wikis.

You can turn on "Discussion Tools" in Beta Features now. After you get the Reply tool, you can change your preferences at any time in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion.

–Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

00:27, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

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MOS image issue

MOS:LEADIMAGE says a lead/infobox image often has "a representative image—such as of a person or place, a book or album cover—to give readers visual confirmation that they've arrived at the right page." I have always interpreted that to mean a bio should include a image of the person and not something they created. If I find an article with a building/painting in the infobox for an architect/artist, I will move it out of the infobox. It is even rarer to find image of person in an infobox for a work of art (book/film/TV show/sculpture, etc). These are normally illustrated with an image of a book cover (not author), movie poster (not lead actor or director), logo or title card, artwork itself (not artist), etc. I recently found a series of operas with an image of the composer in the infobox and removed them all. This was reverted, and the ensuing discussion indicates members of WP:OPERA say this is normal to use a photo of the composer. Discussion started on my TP, then continued at the Opera project TP. I tried to get MOS input from editors who might not think operas should be any different than other works of art, but no comments there. Suggestions on where to go next? MB 03:36, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

@MB: People are going to fight about this, either way. If we have no image of the person it will be argued that an image of the work is better than nothing. In many cases that will be objectively correct because the article is where the work title redirects to (i.e., it's the article on both the author and the work). In a case like Thomas Malory and Le Morte d'Arthur, it's a weaker sell to use an image from the book at the author page (aside from the fact that the image at the latter, in this specific case, is worse than useless, as I've addressed on the book's talk page). Overall I lean toward your view, but am not sure I would want to fight about it. And people in the opera and classics areas are certainly willing to fight to the wiki-death about "their" topics; total F'ing drama factory. Where to go next? I would say to centralize discussion at WT:MOSIMAGES (consider working up an RfC on it), and make it generalized without focusing on opera in particular, or all that does is encourage an already-entrenched WP:CAMP to dig deeper trenches, since they'll feel singled-out and besieged.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:45, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

There was no response to my first attempt to raise this at WP:MOSIMAGES. A proposed change to the MOS will probably elicit comments. Before I go there, can you take a look at my first pass. I added the two new sections in green. MB 02:02, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

@MB: Seems reasonable. The first three sentences of the third bullet have some grammar and logic problems (and the second is missing a key point about books that people will fight about if we're not specific). Try: "Lead images for works of art should be of the sort the most commonly used as illustrations for that type of work. As some examples, articles on books are most commonly illustrated with images of first-edition book covers; plays, movies, and TV shows are commonly illustrated with posters or title cards."  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:16, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

I've incorporated your changes and posted it at WT:MOSIMAGES. I'm not sure why you think a book image should be of the first-edition. What if a book is a surprise hit, and is re-issued as a second edition with a new cover, and this edition outsells the first by 10 or 20 times. Wouldn't the second edition be more representative. Anyway, it is in the proposal and I will leave it to you to defend that part if anyone objects. On the opera front, another editor independently ran across the articles with the composer's photo and removed them again, just as I did; they were reverted too (per opera project consensus).

I don't think it should be the first edition; the community does, or at least the loudest segement of the community to comment on the matter consistently does. People have fought like hell about this for years (and with real reasons for wanting to use another, e.g. for The Children of the Sea, given its unsavoury original title. The opera wikiproject needs to be reminded the ArbCom cases that have gone against them and of WP:CONLEVEL policy, which was written primarily to stop the opera and classical music wikiprojects from acting like they WP:OWN those topics. Seriously, no other topical segment has been more of an OWN problem that those (and their something-like-a-ringleader was recently community banned, for years of OWNish and hostile behavior). They're also the epicenter of "the infobox wars" and way, way too much other WP:DRAMA. They are basically on notice that the community is tired of their bullshit, and I have little doubt that ArbCom would accept another case about that behavior, especially if there's any element of WP:GANG to it. There is no such thing as a "wikiproject consensus" that can force particular topics of articles, or particular individual articles, to be laid out a certain way or to contain or not contain certain elements, and they damned well know this. Yet here they are making this tired fucking argument again.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:48, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

OK on the book cover, I was unaware there was history about this. I had picked up on opera project. I'll certainly remove those images again if/when we get this into the MOS. Are you going to comment at the discussion? There is one AGAINST the change so far. I was hoping to get some preliminary support there before starting a formal RFC. MB 06:03, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

@MB: Which thread[s] in particular?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:52, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

WT:MOSIMAGES#Proposed MOS update MB 06:11, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

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Disregard

 – Already involved in that before I got this notice.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:16, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

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