Wikipedia:Requests for mediation/Roger Pearson (Anthropologist)

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Roger Pearson (Anthropologist)[edit]

Editors involved in this dispute
  1. Gyu93 (talk · contribs) – filing party
  2. Maunus (talk · contribs)
  3. WeijiBaikeBianji (talk · contribs)
  4. Bbb23 (talk · contribs)
  5. Nomoskedasticity (talk · contribs)
Articles affected by this dispute
  1. Roger Pearson (anthropologist) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)
Other attempts at resolving this dispute that you have attempted

Issues to be mediated[edit]

Primary issues (added by the filing party)
  1. I would like to appeal to Wikipedia to request a neutral party somehow to introduce a greater fairness toward Roger Pearson into the Wikipedia article <Roger Pearson (Anthropologist)>. I can not do more as my efforts have either been blocked by edit warring or reworded and buried so to imply something either inadequate or self defeating (see below).

If the volunteer(s) who is looking after this would kindly look back over <Roger Pearson (Anthropologist)>’s Talk Page you will see a reasonably long history — over a number of years — of various users seeking to discuss their rejected efforts to make the Wikipedia page more neutral and more accurate and these efforts very largely being roundly rebuffed by those insistent on using <Roger Pearson (Anthropologist)> to supply Pearson with as bad a reputation as possible. I accept that these users believe this terrible reputation to be ethically deserved by Pearson however the fact is that ONE: a huge amount of totally fictious and severely defamatory material has grown up about Pearson over the years and into a still actively morphing mythology, and TWO: regardless of this fact (supported by, for example, Roger Pearson’s own website) there simply are a great many ways in which the content of the Wikipedia article in repeatedly contravenes Wikipedia rules and policy. Upon looking over the Talk Page you will also see that that I myself have tried hard to engage with those who wish to see the Wikipedia article <Roger Pearson (Anthropologist)> uncorrected. I can not keep trying to make changes when others have made clear that they will make each effort of mine to look like an attempt on my part to fight an editing war.


MOST importantly, if I may please say, I need Wikipedia’s volunteer representative(s) very generously to give the time to look most carefully over one particular page on Roger Pearson’s own website: http://www.professor-roger-pearson.com/derogations.html. On THAT page you will find a long list of derogatory inaccuracies that have been published about Pearson which he clearly disputes together with reasoned discussion.

The Wikipedia article <Roger Pearson (Anthropologist)> has been used less to list allegations that have been made than to state the content of such allegations as being known facts, despite their in fact being in most cases disputed on his website. It is true that peppered through the Wikipedia article <Roger Pearson (Anthropologist)> a few citations of Pearson’s own denials are made. However given, ONE, the mealy-mouthed phrasing of these citations, TWO their location buried after or between more engaging and sophisticated statements, THREE given the wealth of denials by Pearson NOT listed in the article, such citations of disputations made by Pearson do little more than appear falsely to argue that as Pearson seems MERELY to have denied x or y, that a, b, c & d etc are as good as confirmed by the erroneously implied paucity of response and counter-argument.

Above all, the opening paragraph and, most particularly, the opening sentence, casts negative allegations about Pearson as indisputable certitudes, and without citing the fact of Pearson’s extensive denials of many published accusations against himself. For example, and of particular importance, the first sentence should not state that he is an organizer of the ‘extreme right’: Pearson clearly denies participation in extreme politics on his website, supported by reasoned discussion. Either the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia article, or perhaps a caveat, positioned above the opening paragraph, should make clear the extensive and reasoned nature of Pearson’s denials. Furthermore the opening paragraph (last line) features an example an accusation of guilt made against Pearson merely on the grounds of association with another person (Willis Carto). This is expressly against Wikipedia policy. Furthermore this association lasted no more than a few months and amounted to little more than Pearson writing two articles both on attitudes to heredity in the ANCIENT world. And yet the opening paragraph’s closing statement states as fact the preposterous and outrageous claim that Pearson assisted Carto with “publishing white supremacist and anti-Semitic literature”. This would be wrongful in any paragraph but in the OPENING paragraph this is dramatically wrongful. Another improper attempt to establish guilt by association is the way in which accusations arguing Nazi attributes to the Northern League under Pearson (firmly denied by Pearson with reasoned argument). There is no other logical reason, for example, for claims made in the article that the Northern League included former Nazi’s (Pearson makes clear on his website that anyone could ‘join’ and nobody was ‘recruited’. ‘Joining’ meant no more than subscribing to a magazine and getting invited to a consiliatory cultural celebration!) to appear in the article about Pearson rather than the article about Northern League where a (fair) discussion of this argument and counterargument is appropriate.

This is also an example of one of the many arguments made by contributors in the article. Not just recording and citing a fair minded variety of arguments that exist, but actually making an argument – this is against Wikipedia policy. Indeed it is clear that the entire article amounts to an environment in which one unitary argument and thrive and compell: ‘Pearson is a Nazi and the few protests that he makes are so minor as to confirm the bigger picture”. Wikipedia should not be subverted into making arguments, let alone unfair argument, especially not ones which are clearly defamatory and most especially when there have be many firmly rejected efforts over the years to introduce fairness into the article. An example of an argument that is made is the totally false, offensive and unevidenced claim that Pearson “faced difficulties in publishing his work. For this reason he founded several journals dedicated to publicising research that was otherwise excluded from mainstream journals”. These are false claims (that he experienced difficulties getting published or that he started journals because he was in any way not accepted) used to deploy the false argument that Pearson could not find academic peers willing to approve his scholarly material for publication, so that the reader would conclude that Pearson must be nefarious indeed and so choose join in the condemnation.

In terms of Wikipedia rules this leads to the related infraction that this one theme – the falacious argument that there is little worth mentioning about Pearson except in the context of his (untrue) nefarious characteristics – takes up an undue proportion of what is said about him. It is against Wikipedia policy that one component of an article should dominate: in this case the ‘demonstration’ of Pearson’s allegedly politically wicked legacy. There really is almost no part of the article that is not suffused with implication and claims of something nefarious about Pearson. For example take the following: Even Pearson’s detractors could not ignore that, contrary to what a person would expect of a man so laden with alleged guilt, Pearson in fact has had more than one well recognized, distinguished and mainstream career or achievement that occupied walks of life clearly requiring probity and an altruistic outlook. These things in fact make up the overhwhelming bulk of his life. However instead of simply describing the nature of these uncontentious achievements as facts about Pearson’s life in their own right and in their own context, his detractors found ways of subverting even scant reference to this side of his life into an excuse to imply that once more nefarious truth has been exposed from behind the facade, for example: “It has been noted that Pearson has been surprisingly successful in combining a career in academics with political activities on the far right.”!

Furthermore this ever present bias does mean that the article is, among other things no doubt, an ‘attack article’ and as such yet again contravenes Wikipedia policy.

One serious practical obstacle facing those wishing to restore fariness to how Pearson is treated in the public record is the ever changing nature of accusations made against Pearson. Allow me to give you one specific example of an apparently very recently morphed, invented or at east published allegation. A little while ago Pearson mentioned to me that he had noticed a new false claim on Wikipedia article <Roger Pearson (Anthropologist)>. The new statement set out that "The first meeting of the [...Northern...] League […] Hans F. K. Günther […was among the…] keynote speakers, although Günther's participation, him being a prominent former Nazi, had to be kept low profile.” Pearson has now added to his own website the contradiction firstly that Günther did attend that meeting but secondly that Günther was in fact no Nazi anyway (I have been shown with my own eyes PRIMARY source material citing that Guenther had in fact courageously opposed Nazi policies from time to time — this tallies with his official ‘denazification' after the war which is itself a matter of public record). The point is that this claim seems to be quite recently invented. Crucially, I have personally gone through the book listed in the citation (Jackson, John P. (2005). Science for Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case against Brown v. Board of Education. NYU Press. ISBN 978-0-8147-4271-6. pp.43–144) and I can confirm that NOWHERE in that book is there ANY mention of this claim.

On the same theme of false citations I have in the past tried to use the edit page to delete unfair denigratory accusations that were without citation on the grounds, mostly among other things, that they were without citation. They were all reinstated overnight (!), paired, with astonishing speed, with citations. I am of course NOT saying that the person who listed that particular citation was being dishonest — I presume that he/she was mislead by the actual new source and that this new itself supplied the false citation, however the point is how can one combat falsehoods of this type that, invented over a half a century following the events, replete with demonstrably false citations to recent publications? I was in a position subsequently to check most of those new citations I mention above and I did not find ONE that was not demonstrably false! There are many other citations also that I have carefully checked against the cited book or journal and I have found that the problem of false citations is rife in this article. And yet I can be as careful as I like in proving to myself that a citation is false, it will not enable me to ‘prove’ to anyone else! All I can achieve is sparkign an editing war as I try to remove citations that I know to be false. This is why I have not tried to remove any more such false citations: were I to do so I would become looked upon as being guilty of startiung editing wars. Short of a Wikipedia volunteer her or himself giving their time to visit a major library in order to check all citations I am at a complete loss what to do about the legion of false citations used in the Article.

Strictly personally speaking I find it unlikely that even with Wikipedia volunteer’s most generous efforts, that it would be an achievable goal to maintain over any extended period the Wikipedia article <Roger Pearson (Anthropologist)> as a perfectly fair and just discussion of cases made either for or against Pearson. Clearly however, at the very least the Wikipedia article <Roger Pearson (Anthropologist)> should state most prominently (in other words, both extremely early in the entry as a whole, and buried neither stylistically nor in terms of being tucked away after or amongst more stimulating claims) that Pearson has indeed compiled a genuinely extensive list of denials with discussion. I am trying to be realistic not just as to what improvements can be achieved in the short term but also as to what improvements can in reality be maintained into the future as I fear there will always be politicized enthusiasts who will feel a need to promote Roger Pearson as bogeyman to their cause. Simply put Pearson has been built up into too big a bogeyman for certain activists to be willing to let him go. I am NOT labeling all his detractors as conforming to that stereotype — MOST I am quite sure are themselves victims having been mislead by the large quantity of entirely erroneous materials about Pearson — but to be sure there are a committed few who believe their ideological end to justify a lack of concern with the truthfulness of what they regard to be ‘mere’ details. These few such people will, I fear, never give up and so I am trying to be realistic about that in relation to this appeal to Wikipedia’s volunteers.

I have for example certainly NOT tried to ask that the Wikipedia entry should skip mention of published and citable accusations against Pearson, just that, in relation to that issue, it should be clear that such claims are only allegations and that mention of the fact of Pearson’s many denials must be given equally prominent and, stylistically, equally impactful reference. This could be achieved very easily I would think by one ultra-clear and prominent caveat at the very beginning of the article - perhaps contained within a box that can not be tampered with. Obviously it would be better achieved by integrated discussion throughout the article — I fear however detractors would make such a structure very difficult to maintain over any reasonable length of time. Another method could be to restrict criticism (allegations of things considered disreputable by the average english language person) to a section labelled ‘criticism and response’ - this section would soon become very large no doubt and much fought over! Equally no doubt however, you and your colleagues are better equipped than I to know the available techniques that may be employable.

I realise that Wikipedia is not written by its volunteers however it has been made quite clear over the years that there are a certain number of Pearson’s detractors who are not going willingly to allow fairness to be introduced to the article. This will only be achieved Wikipedia authorities imposing what remedies are found to be practicable or, failing that, by the deletion of the article all together.

Thank you most sincerely for your time and effort. Please accept my apologies for the lengthy nature of this submission. Yours sincerely,

Wikipedia Username: Gyu93 Wikipedia Signature: gh38999

  • Additional issue 2

I hope it is not inappropriate that I should here 'reply' to comments that other authors have kindly taken the time pen. Very simply I would like to reassure WeijiBaikeBianji and Maunus that, contrary to their stated concern, I have not anywhere in my submission requested that allegations against Pearson should be removed from his article. I have however asked that, either systematically throughout the article, or, by way of a prominently displayed caveat at the start of the article, the disputed nature of these allegations is properly noted. The vast majority of the negative stuff is merely allegation. I have of course also pointed out that certain allegations made in the opening paragraph are not appropriate for that location, nor indeed are properly worded for Wikipedia policy in that they make arguments (rather than clearly citing that the argument has elsewhere been made), and even do so by arguing guilt by (very brief!) association. I have made very clear that I do not expect or demand miracles. I am seeking compromise.

  • Additional issue 3

I think it important to point out that Maunus is mistaken in his recollection that all of my "actionable requests have been implemented, even the verbatim insertion of a disclaimer requested by him." I agreed with him that I'd leave it if that verbatim request was placed in a position of extreme prominence and it sounded to me that his response was likely agreeing to that. When I could not find that statement in such a position I replied to him on the Talk Page to tell him that I could not see it but he decline further discussion. I later discovered that he had placed it in a position (buried at the end of a long paragraph, many paragraphs down) arguably less prominent than the poor location to which someone had early exiled it. As it clear from my submission I NOW FEEL I WAS MOST MISTAKEN to have said that giving such a statement true prominence would be enough. As I indicate in my submission I do now feel that, short of some better solution that the mediation committee might come up with, the injustice of the damning initial paragraph is also far too egregious to be left as it is.

  • Additional issue 4

I wish to object in the strongest terms that Maunus has, without evidence, accused me of dishonestly representing myself as being nobody's agent in this matter. To state "I consider it to be obvious that the filer is working directly on behalf of Pearson" is completely improper and unfair. Just because Maunus believes something with fervor does not give him the right to use Wikipedia to argue his acts of faith as knowledge of facts. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gyu93 (talk • contribs) 16:01, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Additional issues (added by other parties)
  • Additional issue 1
  • Additional issue 2

Parties' agreement to mediation[edit]

  1. Agree. gh38999 18:03, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
  2. [Decline:] This is a mess. I have not read the wall of text by the filer. BTW, gh38999 just above is the filer. I decline.--Bbb23 (talk) 23:36, 19 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Decline. At first there was defective notice here. Moreover, the request is ill-considered. It looks like the requesting editor made some mistakes in mark-up, later cleaned up by someone who watches this page, when he first filed the mediation request. On my part, looking at both the extreme wordiness of this request and the premises it includes (basically violating core Wikipedia policy in the interest of POV-pushing), I am not interested in participating in the proposed mediation. I also note for the record that I have not edited the article in question for this entire calendar year, and what the article most needs is a bunch of editors who are willing to read the sources carefully and then to discuss what the sources say calmly on the article talk page. The article talk page is where problems with the article should be solved (after editors make a fair effort to look up sources), not the Mediation Committee. I am working on other articles at the moment with orders of magnitude more page views than the Roger Pearson (anthropologist) article, for example the articles English language and Psychology, and I have utterly no intention of editing the Pearson article any time in the next month or more. Other editors can fix the problems meanwhile--it's easy to look up Roger Pearson (even though there is another writer with the same name) on Google Books. (Response updated at time shown in signature.) -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 16:30, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  4. [Decline :] There is no basis for mediation here. The filer has participated on the talkpage and all his actionable requests have been implemented, even the verbatim insertion of a disclaimer requested by him. Copious citation of the biographic subjects own website where he contradicts most of what the many reliably published academic sources say about him was also made to accommodate the filers requests, in spite of the fact that this source is clearly a highly problematic source under WP policy, but it was used in the interest of fairness. Pearson's work is amply covered in secondary sources, and it is not described in flattering terms. Consequently, there are many statements in the article that may be considered unflattering, but they are all meticulously sourced either to academically published books or articles or to Pearsons own works. We cannot simply remove those statements because the subject don't like them. Some of the specific claims made by the filer are counterfactual in the extreme, such as the statements about Gunther not being a Nazi or "courageously" working against the Nazi regime. Sources are unanimous in describing Gunther as one of the main architects of Hitlers racial philosophy, and one of the earliest and most devoted party members. The fact that he was apparently a close personal friend of Pearson and Pearson now wants to redeem him is not a basis for rewriting history. In essence Pearson and his agents (I consider it to be obvious that the filer is working directly on behalf of Pearson), have a problem not with wikipedia but with the many books and articles published by academics about him. We cannot accommodate his request to essentially ignore those sources and substitute his own account of his life from his website. Also I was not notified of this, someone pinged me from the talkpage. [Edit in response to filers comments: 2. you have not made any suggestsions of altering the placements of the subjects own statements on the talkpage. Nonetheless they can hardly be given more prominence than directly following the claims they contradict which they do in each case. 3. I consider the placement as the very last sentence in the lead to be a very prominent position indeed, it amounts to giving the biographical subject the last word on the topic, something that we would not normally do in wikipedia. 4. I disagree, it is clear that you have corresponded directly with Pearson, you even impersonated him for a while, and you have made many statements that relate information that can only come from personal communication with Pearson. This is of course not a problem, and you have the right to do so, but I do maintain that your argument is essentially a question of how Pearson wants to represent himself. His website for example wa clearly created as a response to previous arguments with User:Teddyguyton on the talkpage. I actually also assume that you are the same user who posted as Teddyguyton, but that is somewhat irrelevant.] ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 14:46, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Decision of the Mediation Committee[edit]

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