Talk:Cognitive warfare

I am getting a message that "Cognitive Warfare" may not meet notability?

I'm not sure how to inquire about this. CW is a separate form of warfare distinguishing itself in military circles as an evolved iteration of psychological and information warfare. Academic and military circles have made this distinction and I presented a clear case for this; yet I still see this at the top of the article. CognitiveOP (talk) 05:31, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

@CognitiveOP, some remaining issues:

1. Article's a bit too buzzwordy at times.
2. When you cite a long video, you need to include a timestamp so we can double-check the citation.
3. Same goes for books (you need to cite the chapter or page number; we can't read the whole thing).
4. There is technically no requirement for doing this, but it makes our lives a lot easier when you use the built-in citation tool, so we can easily keep the citation formatting consistent.

– Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 22:28, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Weasel words??

Hey all!

I looked up the definition of weasel words but the definition seems to be just as ambiguous!

SOS wikipedians!

Thanks again!! CognitiveOP (talk) 07:09, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

CognitiveOP: Apologies for the tone; I realise these standardised warnings can come across as impersonal, especially for new contributors.

I do hope others stop by and can give a second or third opinion. The fact is, I've made a few attempts at trying to understand this article, and I don't know whether it's my lack of expertise in cognitive science and military matters, or the dense language it's written in, but this article remains inscrutable to me. Therefore I also can't assess whether this is an accurate summary of reliable secondary sources, or contains original research or fringe theories.

To be clear, this is not a judgment of you or your work, but keep in mind that the goal of Wikipedia is to build an encyclopaedia, that is, a tertiary reference, accessible to general readers, that summarises topics that have already seen significant coverage in reliable secondary sources. To that end, we strive to make technical or specialised subjects comprehensible to general readers, while holding fast to our fundamental principles. You may also find the essay Relationships with academic editors illuminates how scholars and Wikipedians may end up at loggerheads despite everyone's best intentions. — ClaudineChionh (she/her · talk · contribs · email) 08:24, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

It is completely ok! no offense taken at all! I am currently in the midst of making it more digestible! If you have any more opinions at all don't hesitate to drop them here! The sources are another thing I'm improving upon to make it as reliable and credible as possible! Will doing so begin to remove the caveats at the top of the page? CognitiveOP (talk) 19:49, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

After revising the article, there's only two top-of-page maintenance tag issues remaining: one for the article itself maybe not meeting the general notability guideline, and one for the sources having questionable reliability. I think we can probably remove the source-reliability one at this point; everything that's left appears to at least facially pass the reliability test. The general notability guideline is topic based, and says that "A topic is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list when it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject." The main sticking point on this issue would be whether the coverage cognitive warfare has received meets the "significant" bar. I think it arguably does, though it's maybe a bit questionable whether it does so from sufficiently independent sources (e.g. the major sources that appear to discuss cognitive warfare appear to be mostly military entities and defense academia) but I don't think that's enough to suggest it fails the GNG bar. As such, I'm going to remove those two maintenance tags, but if someone disagrees with my assessment there they're more than welcome to revert away. ⇒SWATJester ^{Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat!} 20:26, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Major article cleanup

This article needed cleanup: lots of sources to unreliable sources, full of synthesis, non-neutral language, and fringe theories. I've done a significant cleanup effort which can be summarized as follows:

• Removed all claims and references sourced solely to Gary Bonick JR. This person appears to lack any recognized expertise in the field, and these were overwhelmingly sourced to a self-published e-book; thus failing to meet the reliability standard.
• Attributed almost all claims sourced solely to Masakowski, and rewritten to not be in wiki-voice. Whether Masakowski qualifies as an expert in the field is debatable -- for the sake of this article I operated under the assumption that she is, and thus that her Youtube video constitutes an expert SPS -- however, her claims cannot be used in wikivoice as there is no indication they are broadly representative of anything but her own opinion.
• Maintenance tagged most claims by Masakowski as needing verification (they link to a Youtube video without timestamps) and as requiring better sourcing (in general, a youtube video is a poor source even for an SPS as it lacks the traditional indicia of reliability.
• Removed a number of claims that were not directly supported by their source. Per WP:V, WP:SYNTH, and WP:RS, sources need to be *directly* applicable to the claims made
• Removed a significant amount of synthesis. See above explanation.
• Removed entire history section tangent about SCL, Cambridge Analytica and the U.S. presidential elections. Not one of those sources make any reference to cognitive warfare; this is a textbook WP:SYNTH violation and a massive neutrality issue.
• Rewrote section on "Cognitive warfare weaponry" -- inappropriate tone, as there are no "weapons" used; this is masking language that makes the article more difficult to understand. It's referring to data.
• Copyediting, mostly combining sentences, decapitalizations
• Page moved from Cognitive Warfare to Cognitive warfare in accordance with our capitalization practices.

There's probably more but that's the high points. Issues that still remain:

• Concerning over-reliance on Masakowski, and questions about her qualification as an expert
• Better sourcing than Paolo Ruggiero's statements -- same concerns about Masakowski and
• Better sourcing than the RigaDialogue video, which frequently veered into WP:SYNTH territory in the article.

In any event, it looks like there's just barely enough meat here after cleaning up, that it would survive an XfD so I'm not nominating it, but there's still a lot of work left to be done. ⇒SWATJester ^{Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat!} 16:39, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you so much, @Swatjester – this article is now easier for a non-expert to read and evaluate against our notability and verifiability criteria. ClaudineChionh (she/her · talk · contribs · email) 23:42, 27 October 2024 (UTC)