Talk:Hungarian Spectrum

Recommend upgrading article importance

I would recommend raising the importance-level of this article because of the importance of the topic and the longstanding online english-language coverage by a qualified historian. It is reputed to have both a very wide readership and considerable political influence. User:Harnad (talk) 12:38, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

New reasons for upgrading the importance of Hungarian Spectrum:

March events in Hungary

Rule By Decree--User:Harnad (talk) 16:17, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

Contested deletion

Hungarian Spectrum should not be deleted.

Anonymous user 84.224.163.158 recommends speedy deletion of the WP page for Hungarian Spectrum (a page I created in April 2019) for the following 3 reasons:

(1) "Harnad is a friend of the author of HS".

My name is Stevan Harnad. The editor and principal author of HS (Hungarian Spectrum) is Professor Eva Balogh. I have never met Professor Balogh personally. I have been a faithful subscriber and reader of Hungarian Spectrum since 2011. Occasionally I (like many other subscribers) exchange public comments with Professor Balogh (and one another) on HS. I am indeed one of the many admirers of Professor Balogh's work. But alas I don't qualify to call myself a friend.

(2) "They are political activists"

I am indeed an activist, for two causes: (i) Open Access to peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly articles online and (ii) Animal Rights.

I am also Hungarian-born and (like many, many others) deeply concerned about the decline of democracy in Hungary under the current Hungarian government. I did resign the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2015 to protest Hungary's decline from democracy, but I would say that that was passivism rather than activism. Others who resigned with me were the Nobel Laureate Torsten Wiesel and Dan Dennett, likewise not political activists.

Professor Balogh is a historian and a blogger/journalist. She is certainly very active, publishing an article a day in Hungarian Spectrum, seven days a week, since 2007. And she is highly critical of the current Hungarian government. I am not sure whether that makes her a "political activist."

(3) "see Harnad's previous edits: selfpromotion and politics"

Editing WP non-anonymously, as I have done since 2005, sometimes leads to concerns about self-promotion, but when these have arisen in my case they have been resolved through discussion.

It may be worth taking into considration that anonymous user 84.224.163.158 recommended deleting the WP entry for Hungarian Spectrum two days after the Hungarian government suspended parliamentary rule and accorded the prime minister the power to govern by decree indefinitely, including imprisoning journalists for five years if they publish anything he judges to be scaremongering -- and one day after the international press expressed its reaction, reviewed by Professor Balogh in Hungarian Spectrum. Critics in Hungary can now be jailed; journalists outside Hungary can only be trolled, and their work nominated for deletion from WP.

I created the entry for Hungarian Spectrum almost exactly a year ago, when George Soros, Hungarian-born financier, philanthropist and creator of a worldwide network of Open Society Foundations in support of democracy and human rights, was awarded the Ridenhour Prize for Courage in April 2019. He contributed the full proceeds of the prize to Hungarian Spectrum. This week Soros also contributed one million dollars to Budapest, the capital of Hungary, to combat Covid-19.

File:Https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddawkins/2020/03/31/billionaire-george-soros-gifts-1-million-to-budapesti-remember-what-it-is-like-to-live-in-extreme-circumstances/

Billionaire George Soros ‘Gifts’ $1 Million To Budapest–‘I Remember What It Is Like To Live In Extreme Circumstances’

.

But most of my own WP contributions have been on the Symbol Grounding Problem, Categorical Perception and Self-archiving...

(I will personally be very interested to see how WP resolves this timely deletion request.) --User:Harnad (talk) 23:29, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

== Discussion transferred from User_talk:Boing!_said_Zebedee ==

User:84.224.163.158 wrote:

The deleted quote was just the appraisal of George Soros, the vilification of Orbán Viktor etc. And contrarily to your suggestion, I have nothing to do with the Hungarian government, what is more I tried to upgrade your article, by adding sourced material to it. So claiming that I am a vandal or something is really not nice, leaving me out of the discussion is even worse. And you won't get yourself out of this - that is what you are always doing: insert your long texts having clear political agenda, then when someone deletes it, you reinsert it, and try to avoid deletion by asking for consensus, alert your supporters (this time user DGG), try to aplaud those who took part in the debate in your favour, smear the others (vandal, gover nment agent etc.), and finally coming out as the representative of SCIENCE (I am a University professor who has no time to monitor the changes) - while keeping your text, your opinion in the WP, of course... Not the first time, not the last time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Canadian-Hungarian_Democratic_Charter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Stevan_Harnad#Is_this_a_self-promoting_article?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Constitution_of_Hungary#Professor_Scheppele's_analysis_and_the_government's_supermajority

https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stevan_Harnad&action=history

And so on... You created your own article in the WP!

If you insist on the Soros thing that much then rephrase it in 2 sentences or something. And you can call me 835 if you need a name...-- 84.224.163.158 (talk) 16:14, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

Reply to: User:84.224.163.158:

(1) You queried the Hungarian Spectrum entry for notability. The George Soros quote (along with all the other references) provides that.

(2) In addition, the quote provides the context for one of the principle contributions of Hungarian Spectrum, which is an English-language critique of the government of Viktor Orban and the course of democracy in Hungary under his government.

(3) That the quote "vilifies" (rather than states the truth) about Viktor Orban, is a POV: yours.

(4) George Soros is just being quoted, verbatim, and what he states is of course his POV.

(5) But a quote in WP that correctly states verbatim the (relevant) POV of a named, cited, notable and relevant person is not itself a POV.

(6) It is an objective fact that George Soros said what he said; and he said it in connection with Hungarian Spectrum and about one of the principle contributions of Hungarian Spectrum, which is an English-language critique of the government of Viktor Orban and the course of democracy in Hungary under his government.

(7) Hence the quote is relevant, and its length is not disproprtionate. If you wish to make that a question for WP mediation and adjudication, that's fine, but please stop deleting the quote (or asking administrators to do it).

(8) I will skip your ad hominem remarks. My identity is open; you are anonymous. The full WP history is there to see.

(9) I have no idea whether you have anything to do with the Hungarian government (nor whether you are the sock pocket of someone I have interacted with before).

(10) I do have a good idea of your POV; but that's ok! In the Critique section it can be assessed by WP readers on its own merits.

(11) The body of the entry for Hungarian Spectrum is verified and objective, as I was careful to make it when I wrote it. It does not express a POV. (I have one, but it is not expressed in the entry.)

(12) The body of the entry for Hungarian Spectrum describes a longstanding, much-cited, English-Language blog, one of whose principle contributions is an English-language critique of the government of Viktor Orban and the course of democracy in Hungary under his government.

(13) Yes, I too have made an appeal to a WP administrator. But not to delete something. To adjudicate the deletions from the entry for Hungarian Spectrum.

References

Undue prominence of quote

@Harnad: The third of the article about

George Soros, Hungarian-born financier, philanthropist and creator of a worldwide network of Open Society Foundations in support of democracy and human rights, was awarded the Ridenhour Prize for Courage in April 2019...

is not really about the Hungarian Spectrum. It’s undue prominence (a third of the article!) for George Soros winning a prize. Perhaps the relevant part of his quote could be (very briefly) summarized, but the entire bit is not in WP:PROPORTION. See my summarization.

Also keep in mind WP:ONUS. Just because someone verifiably said something does not mean that it should be included in a WP article. — MarkH₂₁^talk 21:54, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

@MarkH21: I very strongly disagree with you about the relevance and prominence of the George Soros quote, especially in view of [current historical events] in Hungary in the very same week that the anonymous user tagged Hungarian Spectrum for speedy deletion for political activism and self-promotion (and, failing that, for lack of notability). I accept your explanation that your own intervention was an independent coincidence, both regarding the anonymous user's request(s?) to you, which you ignored, and the very recent historical event. But despite the distance between measure theory and galois theory I hope you will not disagree with me that the synchronicities were improbable, so I might be forgiven for having suspected the worst!

Now about proportion: There are two ways to remedy a proportion problem. One is to trim the disproportionately big portion or to enlarge the rest. I tried to do the latter, but you still trimmed it. I think that was a mistake, but I don't think it's worth spending more time on. I think the entry is almost as informative with only your truncated version and the link to the full text, which contains the full quote. Just less explicit, for the unenterprising or uninterested WP reader.

As to the trimming of the details about Professor Balogh, you are right that there is no need to give her bio in an article about her blog. The right solution would be a WP bio article of her own. I don't know enough of the details to write it, but I hope others will -- or will at least provide me with the data so I can do it.--User:Harnad (talk) 04:09, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

I actually have had no awareness whatsoever of recent events in Hungary until reading your post just now! I imagine this is what spiked the activity from the IP. I only found this article from the administrators' noticeboard post.

Long quotes in Wikipedia articles are rarely appropriate (cf. MOS:QUOTE), and even less so in small articles. The current summary gives effectively the same information without too much of a diversion away from Hungarian Spectrum to George Soros. — MarkH₂₁^talk 04:19, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

I believe the MOS:QUOTE about quote-length is concerned largely with copyright, which is not an issue with the Soros quote. Quote-frequency is not relevant because there was only one quote. -- No, from every angle the quote ought to have been left intact. But I will not belabor this further. --User:Harnad (talk) 13:03, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

Requested move 5 August 2020

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: No consensus. This has already had two listing periods, and there's little agreement about whether the page shpjld be about the blog or the author. Hence for now we retain the status quo.  — Amakuru (talk) 17:04, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

---

Hungarian Spectrum → Eva Balogh – As discussed in the AfD, this article is largely focused on Eva Balogh rather than the blog itself and all of the potential notability-indicating sources actually talk about Balogh in more detail than the blog itself. The blog-specific details can be placed in a "Hungarian Spectrum" section in the Eva Balogh article. — MarkH₂₁^talk 19:45, 5 August 2020 (UTC)—Relisting. —usernamekiran (talk) 14:14, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

Against move. Rather, an additional biographical article should be created for Eva Balogh. Hungarian Spectrum is important and gaining in importance with time. User:MarkH21, who requested this move, has just removed the list of citations of Hungarian Spectrum, which had been added during the deletion discussion in response to a request for evidence of notability. I agree that the list was long and unnecessary, but it looks like it needs to be re-instated and extended again, this time as evidence that the entry should not be re-named for the founder and principal contributor to Hungarian Spectrum. More than half the content is from regular commentators, some of them also well-known and well-informed. The Hungarian Spectrum article should be left where it is, but it is certainly true that Eva Balogh should also have an article of her own. I would write it, but I unfortunately don't have the time to do the research. I hope others will. --User:Harnad (talk) 23:33, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

A source mentioning the name "Hungarian Spectrum" while quoting it isn’t significant coverage. We still haven't found a reliable source that discusses the Hungarian Spectrum in detail.

It’s also irrelevant whether those mentions are cited in the article or not. Notability is about the existence of sources, not whether they are cited in the article. — MarkH₂₁^talk 23:52, 5 August 2020 (UTC); copyedit 09:28, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

(1) I didn't say notability was proved by citations of sources in the article. I said that the list of citations of sources in the article was inserted in response to the request for evidence of notability from a contributor to the deletion discussion. I agree that the list is not needed in the article itself, and that it was fine to remove it, once the deletion discussion had closed.

(2) When the WP article is about a blog like Hungarian Spectrum, most of whose articles are written by one author -- hence most of the external citations (and there are many) are about the contents of the articles in the blog and not about either the blog or their author -- I think both the blog and the author merit a WP article. The analogy is that if a scholarly journal has articles by multiple authors, the journal's notability depends on how widely the articles in the journal are cited and discussed, not on how widely the journal itself is discussed. Whether an individual author merits a WP article depends in turn on the notability of that author's articles.

In other words, surely the notability criteria for a WP article about an author or about a topic should not be identical to the notability criteria for a journal or newspaper -- or even a monograph. How much can one say about a journal, qua journal, apart from stating its content area, its subscribership, its authorship, its years of publication, its article count, and its citation count (and diversity)?

WP's Wikipedia:Notability criterion as well as google's PageRank metric are unmistakably modelled on the journal impact factor, all three of which were in turn partly inspired by Eugene Garfield's citation impact metrics. Citations -- and not publications that discuss the journal -- were and are also the main criterion for including a journal in coverage by Garfield's Institute for Scientific Information and its successors. (Citation counts have their weaknesses too, but those details are probably not relevant here.) --User:Harnad (talk) 14:23, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Notability does say that notability is based on citations at all. There is the general notability guideline (based entirely on significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject) and subject-specific notability guidelines, the only applicable one being WP:WEBCRIT (also based entirely on being the subject of multiple non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the site itself or having won a well-known and independent award). These are completely different from impact factor and citation impact. — MarkH₂₁^talk 23:15, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

• Support per nominators arguments.(KIENGIR (talk) 09:00, 6 August 2020 (UTC))
• Definetly no! Eva S Balogh is NOT notable. Can anyone name at least 3 books of her? No, you can't... "Henry viii" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.234.67.41 (talk) 08:06, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

---

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Section on the author's death and reaction to it

I would like to know 176.77.136.98's reasoning for repeatedly blanking this section. Azure94 (talk) 15:32, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

I would like to know since when an eulogy is enyclopedic content? "may her legacy be carried on" - seriously? In a lexicon?--176.77.136.98 (talk) 16:10, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

So you have an issue with only a part of the text? Then why remove the rest? I'll restore the link and reactions from important public figures, such as Kim Lane Scheppele and Charles Gati. That is absolutely not breaking any rules. --Azure94 (talk) 18:30, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Information about the death of the author is included, but eulogizing the author, listing tributes, etc., are not appropriate on this page. Paisarepa 18:58, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Which wikipedia rule is this breaking? Plenty of articles have even entire sections on the stuff you're claiming is not "appropriate" for this case. --Azure94 (talk) 17:18, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

it is not a valid argument that other WP articles are bad too. the person, Harnad, who inserted this epitaph first, is closely related to its subject, Eva S Balogh, he even seeks help on the Hungarian spectrum.org to track me down. https://hungarianspectrum.org/2021/11/30/eva-s-balogh-1936-2021/#comments . it is soapboxing which seeks to increase the importance of her anti-orbán stance.--176.77.136.98 (talk) 12:25, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

And who are you? You seem to be just as closely related, since you only started to edit this wikipedia to remove this one thing from it. It's becoming clear that you're one of the trolls who previously resided on the comments of her blog, and after her death are now on a misguided quest to move your trolling to wikipedia. Wheter the late Eva had or hadn't have an "anti-orbán stance" is utterly irrelevant to the current issue of you removing factual information --Azure94 (talk) 20:02, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

please presume good faith and dont call me troll. plus i have never wrote onto her blog. but as u just admitted, you are closely related to her. so basically saying that her followers mourn, means that u mourn. it is simply self promotion.--176.77.136.98 (talk) 20:10, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Where did I "admit" that I am closely related to her???? I'm not "self promoting" anything at all. I've been on wikipedia long before you. You're the only one who seem to have arrived from the comment section of her blog, judging by your irrelevant comments about how she was "anti-orban". --Azure94 (talk) 20:13, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Have you read this article at all? it is not too long, her snti orbán stance is written in the third or fourth paragraph--176.77.136.98 (talk) 20:41, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Her stance on Orban is utterly irrelevant to the current debate. On the other hand, the fact that you think this matters is highly relevant to explain your malicious edits. --Azure94 (talk) 20:45, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

176.77.136.98 just inserted some text about people being "relieved" that she died. The Hungarian source he used doesn't say that at all. I think it's beyond pale how much trolling from this vandal is being allowed on this website. Azure94 (talk) 20:43, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Dude, u were the one, who kept deleting sourced data from Kim Lane Scheppele's bio calling it pro-Orbán propaganda... --176.77.136.98 (talk) 20:50, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Said "sourced data" being a highly slanderous article from a pro-fidesz propaganda website. And good job on completely ignoring the main point, which is that you right now unmasked yourself as a troll when you pretended that the Hungarian source you linked says that people are "relieved" that she died. --Azure94 (talk) 20:56, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Dude, can u read Hungarian? read the comment section of the mandiner article, like this: magyargyűlölő sárkány, pszichopata, szellemi Kun Béla, The witch is dead, etc--176.77.136.98 (talk) 21:14, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

If anybody but a very new user had come up with the last comment we would be at ANI right now. For future reference, online comment sections do not constitute a Reliable Source or provide notability for a viewpoint. Boynamedsue (talk) 06:39, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Original research

The source regarding the Soros donation includes a quote of him describing the organization, but he never states that is the reason why he made the donation. Making that assumption from him describing the organization is original research. It is also original research to modify the original quote to include languages and imply that the language difference is key to Soros' description, which is not supported by the source. Paisarepa 19:02, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Are you saying that he gave absolutely no reasoning for why he gave the award to this organization? Do you realize how bizarre that sounds when the article is clear that the quoted part you're erasing is precisely the reason why he gave the award? --Azure94 (talk) 17:19, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

I've removed the modified parts of the quote. Hopefully this will be acceptable to you. Azure94 (talk) 17:31, 4 December 2021 (UTC)