User talk:DeanRadin

 Hello and Welcome to Wikiversity DeanRadin! You can contact us with questions at the colloquium or me personally when you need help. Please remember to sign and date your finished comments when participating in discussions. The signature icon above the edit window makes it simple. All users are expected to abide by our Privacy, Civility, and the Terms of Use policies while at Wikiversity.

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You do not need to be an educator to edit. You only need to be bold to contribute and to experiment with the sandbox or your userpage. See you around Wikiversity! --Abd (discuss • contribs) 23:41, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

Moved Parapsychology FAQ
I moved this page which you created to Parapsychology/FAQ and that may not be adequate for neutrality. (I.e., the FAQ is prepared from a particular point of view.) We can address that later.

This should not be, in any case, a top-level resource. I will fix the link and request the page be deleted where it was placed.

In general, I suspect you did not notice the subpage links on Parapsychology. I had a page set up for your list of peer-reviewed papers at Parapsychology/Sources/Peer reviewed, linked from a more general sources page at Parapsychology/Sources. Most of the material now on the top level page should be moved to subpages.

This is very different from Wikipedia structure! To create a subpage link, prefix the page name, within double brackets, with a slash (/). To suppress display of the slash, follow it with a slash as well. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 01:21, 25 May 2014


 * Ok, thanks --2601:C:9980:50:3839:D455:3986:5DFF (discuss) 02:59, 25 May 2014 (UTC).

Parapsychology/Sources/Peer reviewed
Ben has been adding a lot of material to this page. I'm concerned that some of this may not be on topic or peer-reviewed. Please check it over. You could revert his edits, in full or in part, and we could then move them to Talk or elsewhere in the structure. I'm thinking of that page as special-purpose. We can link and refer to all kinds of material, but it can dilute the impact. What do you think? I liked your web page which was apparently just links to whatever was published under peer-review and relevant, including critical material.

When we link to critical material, we should be careful not to insult it in unattributed text. I.e, "in this paper, X gives misleading arguments." Rather, we can, with a source, list a brief signed or attributed comment. Or we can go as far as creating a subpage on every source, with thorough discussion of the source. Whatever people have time for, really. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 18:04, 25 May 2014 (UTC)

I agree. --DeanRadin (discuss • contribs) 18:27, 25 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks. We can create, on Wikiversity, far deeper resources than is possible (or appropriate) for an encyclopedia article. With controversial topics, where editors may have strong a priori opinions, and shifting those positions can require a great deal of research and study, it is practically guaranteed that Wikipedia articles will become battlegrounds, and the reader suffers. Each editor is battling for reader attention and focus, to the "right" sources and claims. Here, we assume serious interest. Someone coming here to the top level will get basic information with links to places to get more. We can create Introduction seminars where users are guided through the vast array of sources. Those, of course, can "suffer" from POV bias. Here, we hope, if there is bias, it is, at least, expert bias. Where there is other bias, this is a wiki, it can all be fixed. The top-level resource should be such that a skeptic reads it, and will, "well, it doesn't say everything I'd want it to say, "pseudoscience" should be in huge text with blinking lights, but what it does say is fine." If it isn't fine, we expect the editor to tell us the exact problem, and we will work to find consensus. We really do want consensus here, not just "rough consensus," a euphemism for "majority of the active editors" on Wikipedia. There is little harm in shoving anything controversial down in the structure, to avoid undue weight. And then the controversial position can have, in the extreme, *total control* of a subpage (through attribution), though the community here would not allow, for example, lying about sources or libel about individuals. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 20:07, 25 May 2014 (UTC)

Agreed. On the expert POV issue, it might be worthwhile saying somewhere in these resources that there is an analogy here with debates over say, climate change. Some people strongly argue that human-enhanced climate change is all a big hoax, while others argue that based on the opinions of 97% of climate scientists it's virtually certain. In the present case, here we have the majority of experts on parapsychology, vetted by being members of an affiliated society of the AAAS (the largest scientific organization of its kind in the world), arguing that there's a there there. At the same time (on WP at least) we have a community of so-called skeptics, who are not affiliated with the AAAS or any other broadly recognized scientific organizations, arguing through their POV that there is no there there. While every group will invariably prefer its own POV, when dealing with scientific topics like parapsychology, one presumably is justified in leaning toward the POV affiliated with a bona fide scientific organization, and not with ad hoc groups interested in other-than-scientific ideologies. --DeanRadin (discuss • contribs) 21:44, 25 May 2014 (UTC)