User:William M. Connolley/For me/Misc arbcomm-y stuff/Stuff I may want to say in the new case

"I must admit to being surprised myself at how much blogs and opinion pieces have featured in the arguments"

There is a fundamental problem, which is exposed by this comment of C's. It applies really to the more political side of things rather than the science, but also to the degree to which wiki responds to "current events" and to the degree to which we trust "RS"'s.

So: like it or not, nowadays, it is commonplace whenever a "controversial" new scientific paper is published for that paper to be extensively (and often, very competently) discussed on blogs. It is also very common for other blogs to deliberately lie about the paper (you'll know which "sides" I'm thinking of, but feel free to invert them if it makes you happier). At the same time, the same paper may get mentioned by what wiki would normally consider "reliable sources" - the BBC; the Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately these so-called RS's very frequently are not, for issues of science; they adopt a he-said-but-he-said type attitude which, over the long term, gets proved wrong and removed.

The ideal would be not to add new science until the paper has had a chance to "sink in" - i.e., people have had a chance to digest and respond. A good example of this is the Schwartz 2007 estimate of cliamte sensitivity, which has subsequently proved to be just wrong. See-also Talk:Climate_sensitivity/archive#Schwartz, where there were comments like I protest against POV deletion of peer reviewed literature. The paper was rapidly and correctly dissed in the blogosphere [1]