User talk:148.64.106.190

Point of view editing on Satyananda Saraswati

Hi, welcome to Wikipedia. This is a global, shared encyclopedia. It does not take any point of view but reports neutrally on every topic. I see you have edited on exactly one topic, each time to limit what you feel may be said. If you have any connection with Satyananda, then be aware that editors including you are required to be neutral, especially if you have a conflict of interest. It is not acceptable to try to censor Wikipedia because it says something you personally find uncomfortable. You commented that the section was "specifically about the alleged abuses of Swami Satyananda": well, no - the section covers alleged abuse connected with him, and since it's his ashrams, the abuse is very definitely of interest in relation to him - like the captain of a ship, he was responsible for what happened whether he was asleep in his cabin or active on the bridge. For a guru to run ashrams which perpetrated serious abuses is certainly significant, whether he took part in them or not. Therefore, I do hope you won't attempt any such deletion again. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:04, 9 April 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up Chiswick! I was not trying to censor Wikipedia at all. I noted that you had changed the title of the section to be Alleged Abuse, from the previous title. As such, I don't know why we are talking about Akhandananda on a page about Swami Satyananda and his alleged abuses. I would have thought a separate page on the Royal Commission and/or Akhandananda would be more appropriate? 148.64.106.190 (talk) 19:10, 9 April 2022 (UTC)

Ahh I see. That does make more sense, thanks for the clarification. However, Swami Satyananda was not running Mangrove Mountain ashram - since Akhanandananda was the director, so I'm not sure how he was responsible for what happened? I believe he was running the Indian ashram, but he was only the inspiration for all other ashrams. 148.64.106.190 (talk) 19:14, 9 April 2022 (UTC)

It would not be impossible for someone to create another article on the commission as it is surely notable; and perhaps on Akhandananda also (he currently redirects here). However, we'd still want to have a brief summary of those article here, so the only effect on this article would be that we would add "main" links to the subsidiary articles. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:18, 9 April 2022 (UTC)

Seems like there already is a page on the Royal Commission, and specifically the case study on Mangrove Mountain : Royal Commission Page section on Mangrove Mountain, though it is fairly sparse at the moment. 148.64.106.190 (talk) 19:35, 9 April 2022 (UTC)

Once again, you are giving cause for serious concern. Yet another of your edits fits into the clear pattern of trying to minimise the rock-solid evidence of abuse. This is evidently point-of-view or partisan editing, with the apparent intention of hiding the facts. That is a conflict of interest with Wikipedia's mission of reporting the facts neutrally and objectively. You can be permanently blocked from editing for that. So far I have attempted to reason with you in good faith. I could equally have issued a series of formal warnings, culminating in a block. I do hope you will now desist from further attempts. You might like to study our policy on strict neutrality, WP:N. It is core to everything we do here All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 18:36, 17 April 2022 (UTC)

Chiswick, thank you for your clarification regarding the time-frame edit. After reading your reasoning, I better understand what you meant and agree with your reasoning.

However I find it extremely disconcerting that you are attacking me for making edits to Wikipedia in good faith.

• "Yet another one of your edits fits the clear pattern of trying to minimise the rock-solid evidence of abuse"? Please clarify. I have moved the information that was *irrelevant* to this section, to a more relevant section on Wikipedia. Furthermore, I have added a link to this section to that other section so that readers can expand on their understanding of the Royal Commission. This did not exist previously, and is the opposite of minimising evidence. I am grateful that you provided guidance on the relevance after my initial edit.

• time-frame edit - I initially added a clause for further clarification. After some time, when nobody clarified this timeframe, I decided to make the edit because my interpretation of the paragraph was that the time period was already given in the first sentence. You have clarified this, and after reading this, I agree with you.

• I have looked at the WP:NPOV article (I assume you meant this, rather than WP:N), and I would love further guidance from you on which specific aspect of WP:NPOV that I was not following.

From my understanding, Wikipedia is an open platform because discussion and differing points of view are encouraged. I am by no means an expert at Wikipedia, but I understand to some degree its ethos and aims. I feel your language is quite strong and threatening, after I have only made a few edits - most of which actually added information rather than minimised. I do understand this is potentially a contentious article, and perhaps others in the past have reverted content that you have created in the spirit of minimisation. However, I implore you to keep an open mind so that not everybody is treated in the same light, and that we may work together to represent the topic at hand in the most neutral, factual and relevant possible manner. 148.64.106.190 (talk) 21:58, 17 April 2022 (UTC)

Hmm. I have repeatedly abstained from giving g you formal warnings, and you have repeatedly triggered my IP-editor-getting-up-to-tricks sensor. I can see you are intelligent and informed, but you have continually taken the side of the article's subject as if defending it. That is the definition of POV. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:18, 18 April 2022 (UTC)

I see your latest edit is constructive, thank you. Even it, however, could be taken as diffusing responsibility and thus fitting the pattern above; ditto with the exclusive focus on this topic. That too is a marker of POV editing, since you ask. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:30, 18 April 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification regarding POV.

According to Wikipedia, from WP:NPOV: Editors, while naturally having their own points of view, should strive in good faith to provide complete information and not to promote one particular point of view over another. As such, the neutral point of view does not mean the exclusion of certain points of view. It means including all verifiable points of view which have sufficient due weight. Just because I was making edits seemingly from one point of view does not make my edits non-neutral - in order to make a non-neutral article more neutral, it is natural that the edits would seem opposed to the existing non-neutral POV.

My edits made the article more neutral, not less. Specifically:

• Moving details regarding Akhandananda to Royal Commission page: These details had 'Low' and 'Very Low' WP:RELEVANCE to the article, according to the examples given by Wikipedia on relevance, and as such, added undue WP:WEIGHT to the section. Moving these to the Royal Commission page and adding a link maintained the information whilst making the existing section better weighted towards Swami Satyananda, whom the page is about.

• time-edit regarding "prolonged". The use of "prolonged" was a case of a relative time reference that can indicate a non-neutral point of view MOS:RELTIME. After first asking clarification with , I removed this. After you disagreed, I changed this refer to the actual dates, making the article more neutral.

• Clarifying multiple perpetrators exist : Please clarify how this could be interpreted as diffusing responsibility. By stating that multiple perpetrators exist, my edit makes it clear to readers that Swami Satyananda was not the only perpetrator. This is making the section more neutral, because the Royal Commission investigated child sexual abuse that was carried out by and large by Akhandananda. This is giving correct WP:WEIGHT to the section, making it more neutral.

Rather than the issue being WP:NPOV, I believe the real issue at hand is deleting text without talking about it WP:POVDELETION. This makes sense, and in the future for contentious phrases I will add them to the talk page before simply deleting, so that a discussion can be had about the relevant sentence, paragraph or phrase. 148.64.106.190 (talk) 19:12, 18 April 2022 (UTC)

I'm away from my desk, also tired from travel, and can't reply in detail now. On multiple perpetrators, this could tend to diffuse blame in multiple directions so as to reduce blame in one direction; if that's not your intention, I'm pleased to hear it - the multiple people bit is certainly true.

On your further edit last night, I have removed "primarily". This is because it implies the Royal Commission, the public, Wikipedia editors all know where the abuse primarily was. But we all don't. The RC gathered evidence thoroughly in Australia, and was incidentally offered a small amount of evidence, out of its formally-appointed scope, about abuse in India. It explicitly stated it had not tested or explored that evidence, so it gives precisely no information about the extent of abuse in India or other countries. I will take this as an error in good faith, i.e. you sincerely thought you were saying something appropriate. However it is a category error: you have confused a sample with a population. The sample is the very small number of untested allegations about abuse in India; the population is the unknown, possibly large, number of abuses in that country. A small unplanned sample is an extremely poor statistical guide to the nature of a population. The RC did not draw any conclusions about that population, of abuses in India, and nor should we. It might very well be much larger than that in Australia, or the same size, we simply do not know, and it is at best WP:OR to draw any deductions like "primarily" or mainly or mostly, all are original research. At worst, obviously, if there was an intention to absolve India then we would once again be looking at POV editing. But the reason we can't say "primarily" is that the evidence is not there to justify it. I do hope this is clear, and I really hope I won't have to come back to this page with yet another lengthy explanation. Please notice that even single-word changes to this sort of topic can have major implications, so you don need to think things through and, as you say, obtain consensus first before taking what may be far more drastic edits than one might suspect. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:11, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

Hi Chiswick, a few things in response:

• You have questioned/mentioned my intention several times now, and I'm curious why you believe it is relevant to our discussion. Wikipedia's three core principles are WP:NPOV, WP:VERIFY and WP:ORIGINAL. No-where in any of these articles is 'intention' of the editor mentioned. Intentions are simply not verifiable in any objective way, and so I cannot see how they come into a discussion regarding edits on Wikipedia. Please point me to the relevant Wikipedia policy page on this if I am mistaken in my understanding.

• Regarding your point on removal of 'primarily', I made the edit with the understanding that the sentence being edited was not a statement on the truth of the matter - this would violate the WP:VERIFY and WP:ORIGINAL principles as you mentioned - but was referencing specifically the allegations before the Royal Commission. That is to say, the allegations put forth to the Royal Commission were primarily regarding the ashrams in Australia, not the ashrams in India. I assumed this interpretation, because the section starts off with a sentence on the Royal Commission, and so it is in this context that I understood the sentence. Without this context, the sentence by itself, even in its current form, would violate the WP:VERIFY principle. Does this make sense? 148.64.106.190 (talk) 17:45, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

Actually, regarding my first point around intention, I actually have found something around intention - WP:GOODFAITH. Please let me know if there is any other policy page that I should look at. 148.64.106.190 (talk) 21:28, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

April 2022

Hello, I'm Glane23. I wanted to let you know that I reverted one of your recent contributions—specifically this edit to Bihar School of Yoga—because it did not appear constructive. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. If you have any questions, you can ask for assistance at the Help desk. Thanks. Geoff | ^{Who, me?} 21:24, 18 April 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Glane23! Thanks for the heads up. That additional reference was a link to the Wikipedia page that is specifically about the Royal Commission which that section talks about. It would allow readers to gain a further understanding of the Royal Commission. In what way did you find it not constructive?

Thanks 148.64.106.190 (talk) 21:26, 18 April 2022 (UTC)

You'll find that the addition did not display in the article. If you want to cite the Royal Commission, it would be better to reference its report as a citation within the text, at the appropriate place. Geoff | ^{Who, me?} 21:29, 18 April 2022 (UTC)

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