User talk:The Four Deuces/Archives/2023/January

H. Biden, the saga continues

It's looking like the RFC you began concerning Hunter Biden, is being 'bleeped up' by one or two individuals. GoodDay (talk) 18:38, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Hey TFD, I'm looking over your RfC and I have some suggestions. First, I highly recommend making an RfC that honestly addresses the underlying issue rather than one where you ask people to choose between different wordings. For example, you might ask, "Should the first paragraph of the Lead state or imply that the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden without qualification?" Or, "Should the first paragraph of the Lead qualify Hunter Biden's ownership of the laptop?" Answer that question, and then you can start to hammer out individual wordings that fit the result of the RfC. Second, if you do need make an RfC with choices of wordings, it should be done in collaboration with someone in your opposition. Ask them to help frame the two sentences and resolve any wording issues before it goes to full RfC. It's not a real choice when you present an RfC with your preferred wording versus something that nobody likes, so things will get messy. I don't know what you want to do with the current RfC, but I came pretty close today to closing it as malformed and unlikely to be productive. Maybe it can be salvaged as an exercise in brainstorming, but I think there are better ways of doing that without it being a formal RfC. ~Awilley (talk) 07:55, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

Awilley, the choice in the RfC is between the original wording and a contested edit. One editor wrote, "Seems most people like "The Hunter Biden laptop controversy involves a laptop computer, its contents, and the question of its ownership by Hunter Biden, son of then-US presidential candidate candidate Joe Biden." Well enough, at least."[03:35, 6 December 2022][1] That was a change that was subject to the edit war.[2]

So I do not think it is correct to say that the choice is between my preferred wording versus something that nobody likes. It's a choice between wording editors agree to keep at the previous RfC (Talk:Hunter Biden laptop controversy/Archive 2#RfC about ownership of the laptop) and wording that a group of editors support.

My guess is that however the RfC is phrased, some editors will not accept any outcome that does not qualify the ownership since they believe the laptop was created and planted by Hunter Biden's enemies. However, I am willing to change the wording of the RfC. Do you have any recommendation on what wording should be used?

TFD (talk) 12:51, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

Ah, that makes more sense. Fair enough. Editing an RfC this far into it, I think, will only make things messier. I think it may be better to cut your losses and start a better RfC that asks a yes no question instead of comparing specific wordings. I don't know how heartily I recommend that because I personally prefer to try to resolve things without an RfC, but I suppose that has been tried already and the dispute is so intractable that nothing short of a vote will resolve it. ~Awilley (talk) 15:37, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

There were a couple of mistakes over the past many weeks. I bungled the close review request, because I thought that posting at AN would immediately get an uninvolved Admin close. I didn't realize it would just be a replay of the same issue in a more diffuse forum. But also, as I think Awilley has pointed out, the RfC seemed to fail WP:RFCBEFORE and TFD was not receptive to postponing or canceling it when it was initally posted.

WRT the concern that "some editors will not accept any outcome..." That's really not the issue with this text. The ownership of the device itself is not even the central issue in the "controversy". What matters is which of the files can be authenticated and which might have been fabricated. There are other issues relating to the chain of custody of the device, even if it were an intact Biden laptop. The concerns that I have raised and many of the better-informed and policy-aware editors have raised, is whether the ownership is so well established that we should lead off the entire article with an upfront categorical statement that the device was in fact Biden's. The status quo had been to say "alleged to be Biden's", with lots of detail later in the page. This avoided the BLP and NPOV issues that have been widely, though not uniformly, acknowledged at the article and BLPN pages.

Finally, while TFD is well-informed and well-read on these subjects and has a considered opinion, the unfortunate fact is that many editors get their news and form opinions from what WP considers deprecated sources. They don't try to cite those in article pages, but they google for other sources that confirm their prior opinions. TFD does not do this, but many others on the Politics pages do it and even acknowledge that the do it.

I think more discussion is needed before an RfC, and I would greatly respect TFD if he would withdraw the current one and propose a structured but less formal discussion on the issue.

Anyway, I welcome Awilley's volunteer involvement in this. It is not going to make the dispute go away, but I think the page will be less chaotic. SPECIFICO talk 16:31, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

FYI, I don't get my information from deprecated sources and have never read the New York Post article that broke the story. As I have consistently argued, articles must be based on reliable secondary sources. Not only is the NYP a deprecated source, but since it is the original report of the case, we need to refer to secondary sources to determine which parts of the story have weight for inclusion.

No editors have claimed that everything on the laptop is genuine and certainly the article should report the opinions about authenticity and the challenges in determining it in the article. The only disagreement is that while editors responding to the earlier RfC said the article should say the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden, you think we should quality it with "alleged," "purportedly" or whether there is a "question of ownership."

Your appeal to AN to overturn the RfC result was rejected because editors felt that whatever errors the closing editor may have made, they came to the correct conclusion.

Facts in Wikipedia articles are whatever reliable sources treat as facts. In some cases, things reported as facts turn out to be wrong, and we correct them. The New York Times for example publishes corrections every day. That doesn't mean that we qualify every fact in every article since occasionally they turn out to be incorrect. Instead we make sure that facts are verifiable, i.e., that they are supported by sources.

I have in fact explained all this to you several times. I suggest you read WP:V and if you don't like the policy then get it changed.

TFD (talk) 21:02, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

I think you've significantly misunderstood most of what I tried to say above. Just so you don't get even more upset, I thought it was clear from what I wrote that I do not think you are influenced by deprecated sources.Happy editing. SPECIFICO talk 21:19, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

@Awilley: I share TFD's concerns. I do get the impression that a few editors will never accept any RFC consensus that ends with H. Biden having owned the laptop. Indeed one directly and another seemingly indirectly, hinted that BLPN could stop such a consensus from being implemented. GoodDay (talk) 18:03, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

I get that, and I understand how you feel. But you don't need to convince everybody. If you were to win over just one or two of those editors you mentioned the battle would be over. If you and SPECIFICO and TFD hammered out some kind of compromise that satisfied all of you, that compromise would stick. When Mr Ernie and Valjean revert each other that's unremarkable. When SPECIFICO reverts Valjean to restore GoodDay's preferred revision that's significant, and Valjean will fall into line even if he disagrees with the consensus. (Not trying to put words into these users mouths...I don't know exactly where the battle lines lie, I was just picking names that popped into my head.) Anyway the point is, I'd encourage you three to try working together, either in framing an RfC, or in finding a compromise wording. And please think outside the box. The first sentence of the article doesn't necessarily need to start with the words "The Hunter Biden laptop controversy" or contain the exact words "Hunter Biden's laptop" or "laptop belonging to Hunter Biden". The RfC did not mandate a specific wording. From my reading, it mostly just outlawed words/phrasings that introduce doubt about the ownership. ~Awilley (talk) 18:03, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

Valjean has come around to agreeing that H. Biden owned the laptop. As for SPECIFICO? I'm not getting any impression that they'll 'ever' change their position. GoodDay (talk) 22:16, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

Awilley, what aroused some animosity was when, after the RfC close, I changed "owned by" to "was believed to be owned by". This conformed to the one-sentence question, the only question, asked in the RfC: "Should the article use the term "alleged" in reference to the ownership of the laptop computer?" and I thought this would be an acceptable and Verifiable compromise text. I only edited the article again, to my knowledge, when an editor wrote a new lead along the lines you suggest - without starting off with the article name - and it was awkward and I copyedited it and added his version to the then-started second RfC. While we're all here having fun, GoodDay please don't speculate about the behavior of other editors. It's counterproductive. SPECIFICO talk 22:32, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

Well then prove me wrong. Stop going against Hunter Biden being described as having owned the laptop. GoodDay (talk) 22:49, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

Feoffer seems to be continuing to undermind your RFC, pinging editors to support a version he prefers. GoodDay (talk) 02:32, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

Of course they're not trying to do anything like that. It must be Russian hackers. TFD (talk) 17:29, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

It appears that an editor is trying to control (first deleting, then hatting) what can & can't be posted at that article's talkpage. Particularly if they consider it a negative post about Biden. Anyways, my response there, is that we're basically all in agreement that Hunter Biden isn't a saint. GoodDay (talk) 05:00, 8 January 2023 (UTC)

Far-left politics

Hi. I saw your discussions on the talk page of Far-left politics, and I thought you might be interested in Talk:The Grayzone#RfC about the use of "far-left" in Wikivoice in the opening sentence Philomathes2357 (talk) 10:24, 15 January 2023 (UTC)