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Moving a page subject of an RM

It is bad practice to move an article page while an RM is open, kindly do not do that again. Particularly since there was a pending request from another editor to myself. There is absolutely no need to rush such things. Selfstudier (talk) 22:13, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

I disagree, this is an example where you want to follow the spirit, not the letter, and focus on outcomes. Andre🚐 22:14, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Apology

By the way, taking Tryptofish's remark on board, I should apologize for writing 'incompetent'. I see why you could have been misled in all good faith by the Goldstein illustrative quote to make that edit. And I appreciate the rapid revert you made in response to my talk page notification. (My compliments on your gracing your page with Hopper's masterpiece, by the way. An extraordinary powerful statement.) Nishidani (talk) 08:26, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

That's ok. I accept the apology. and I apologize if I offended you. And thanks for the note. Andre🚐 18:09, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

Onus

Ugh! What a time sink. I tend to agree with you. My experiences at the dossier article have repeatedly shown examples of tendentious Trump supporting editors trying to delete stuff without any good reason, just their own OR, ignorance, opinions, and massive wikilawyering. One, who shall not be named because she no longer edits the article, even tried to delete the article. That's how far they really want to go. That shows an attitude completely at odds with WP:GNG and our mandate to document the sum of all human knowledge as it is found in RS. Some of these people are not acting in good faith, and it's such a waste of time dealing with them. Onus should be balance by PRESERVE, with a bit more weight on the side of keeping and adding good content. We are here to build, not tear down, an encyclopedia that is not limited by the size constraints of paper. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 01:00, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

I worry about the future of the world and the internet. A lot of the good stuff in the world, and the internet, and Wikipedia in particular, only exists due to the persistence and attention of well-meaning and clueful people. I worry about the world coming in inheriting the chaotic mess that our present generation has created. Are the smart and well-meaning people in control of enough of the levers to keep things stable? Right now, good admins and reasonable people outnumber the brigadiers and drive-by rock throwers. We need to ensure that we establish strong institutions while still embracing innovation. Andre🚐 01:05, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

Are you trying to imply that MelanieN is an ignorant tendentious Trump supporter? The lady that first put it up at AFD because it had a bunch of BLP violations and then withdrew it when most of those were addressed?[1] Are you sure you are remembering the situation correctly? PackMecEng (talk) 01:11, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

Let's not dig up the past, and he didn't name anyone or ping anyone. This is a user talk page. Let's keep it civil and relaxed. Nobody wants to barge into my office and start a bunch of drama now. Andre🚐 01:13, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

Definitely not her! Enough said. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 01:56, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

DYK

Your comment at the DYK appears to be intentionally unhelpful. Was it intended that way?

Alternative routes would either be to:

• carefully set out what you disagree with (perhaps explain your allusion to accuracy, in the light of the clear and wide sourcing), and/or
• propose your own, noting that, per WP:DYKHOOKSTYLE, The hook should be likely to be perceived as unusual or intriguing by readers with no special knowledge or interest.

Onceinawhile (talk) 14:17, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

My comments on the talk page should explain fully my view, and obviously it was not "intentionally unhelpful." AGF, please. Like I already wrote on that page, Josephus had a history of the Jews back in the Roman era, so why would you have DYK hook that says the first history was written by Protestants? Also, all major publications of Jewish history have been influenced by the political climates of their respective times isn't that true of all histories ever? And why would you write it like that? Do you think it's appropriate to make such sweeping claims about Jewish history on the main page for everyone to see? I don't agree with this, as I said. Andre🚐 14:25, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

I agree that the comment was evidently meant to be helpful (not saying I agree or disagree with it). Andrevan, you may want to paste it at the actual DYK page so it's considered by reviewers. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 14:27, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, I've added a comment there (a mix of my original comment and this one) Andre🚐 14:29, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for sorting. The emotive words "And why would you write it like that?" don't seem to be following AGF. I have read two dozen sources (all in the bibliography) to write the article, and all of them make the points in ALT0 and ALT1. Onceinawhile (talk) 14:45, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

Sun Oct 1: NYC Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month 2023

October 1: Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month 2023: Edit-a-thon!

You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month 2023: Edit-a-thon!, with in-person at Prime Produce Guild Hall in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan. It is being held in the middle of National Hispanic Heritage Month (Sep 15–Oct 15). Some past local edit-a-thons touching on this area have included the two editions of Wikipedia:Meetup/WikiArte at MoMA in 2015-16, and the CUNY LaGuardia translat-a-thons held annually since 2018. Meeting info: Sunday, October 1 Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month 2023: Edit-a-thon! (optional RSVP on-wiki). 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm (Prime Produce Guild Hall, Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan) Alternatively, you can sign up for the edit-a-thon on Eventbrite. All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct. In addition, to participate in person, you should be vaccinated and also be sure to respect others' personal space, and we may limit overall attendance size if appropriate.

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--Wikimedia New York City Team via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:03, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks

I really appreciate your support at the MfDs. It's really stressful and depressing. I don't know what to do. I don't want to leave my wife alone, but life is just too painful at times. You're the only one showing any mercy. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 17:02, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. Sorry. I get the stress. But try to remember it's not real life, it's just Wikipedia. I agree with your wife that you should stay with her - it's not worth getting agitated over it. I recommend you download backed up copies of anything that is important to you, and which can't be moved into articles or other places, in the event that the essays are deleted. But they could also be no-consensus (though probably not at this rate unless a bunch of people notice those MFDs and opine to keep those essays relatively soon). I believe the reason for this is a related MFD that happened a couple weeks ago which I was a Delete on, to delete a "lab leak likely" essay that was in a userspace. In my mind, there is no hypocrisy or conflict here. Your essays are informative and are designed for countering fringe content and fringe editors. Which is why in my mind, they could eventually move to the main/project/talk space and become a canonical part of our FAQ or source guidance for these topics. WikiProjects are another place where this content could live. I've been wondering why the Wikipedia:WikiProject Politics/American politics or similar is so dormant, as they could be a good place for source guides and narrative guides that explain sources for editors. Andre🚐 17:17, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

• Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Valjean/Why Crossfire Hurricane?, Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/User:Valjean/Trump–Russia_crime_scene, for the purposes of explaining what this is about for future indexing. Andre🚐 17:23, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

Also, you might want to self-censor some of your stronger comments on MFD to avoid attracting any further sanctions or ire. I understand your frustration, I really do. Andre🚐 17:27, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

I have removed some emotional wording. I would never leave my wife, but life itself is the problem. When I get depressed, my mind goes to dark places. I'm alone most of the time as my wife still works and I'm retired. In some ways, it's nice (I can edit Wikipedia, my only hobby, in peace.), but when I'm depressed it's dangerous as I have no fear of death. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 17:56, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

Is there some way I could archive the subpage, with its history? That way I could at least access it. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 17:58, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

Technically, even when the page is deleted, the revisions will all be visible to admins. A friendly admin could dump the info. There is probably a good way to use the api to save a local copy of all the revisions. I know wikipedia dumps are available and are archived by a number of groups for various uses. You could ask at the village pump technical. I probably don't have time to look at it right now, but i'll see if I can later. Andre🚐 18:02, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

Wiki software for PC is freely available. All you need to do is open an edit window, then copy the wiki markup and copy to your home device for reference or editing. SPECIFICO talk 17:41, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Interesting. Do you have a link to such a service? -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 19:10, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

(Stumbled onto this discussion by accident, hope I'm not intruding) You can just bring up Notepad on your Windows system (or the equivalent on Mac or whatever) and copy into that and save to a file. At the source, all Wikipedia articles are is one big text file. Indeed, some people who are fluent in wiki markup prepare new content offline this way. Wasted Time R (talk) 00:29, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

Sure. That's how I use vim. But I think he wants to save all the history and old revisions since multiple users contributed. Andre🚐 01:01, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

I found something promising. Go to Special:Export and uncheck the checkbox to exclude history, check "save as file," "include templates," and put your pagename into it. When I did this, I downloaded a 50MB XML file which I suspect contains the full history of those pages. We could then load them into another instance of MediaWiki or just write some code to parse out the interesting bits. They also contain all the changes as follows:

</revision> <revision> <id>1139188764</id> <parentid>1139184482</parentid> <timestamp>2023-02-13T21:25:59Z</timestamp> <contributor> <username>Valjean</username> <id>700244</id> </contributor> <comment>/* The factors that influenced the decision */ .</comment> <model>wikitext</model> <format>text/x-wiki</format> <text bytes="11114" xml:space="preserve">This page has been removed from search engines' indexes. Why the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was opened

Andre🚐 03:14, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

Cool! Too bad I already speedy deleted them. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 15:42, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

It's ok, I did that before. I'll upload them somewhere and send you the link. Andre🚐 17:12, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

One last note about depression. Life has been tough for a lot of people in the last few years. I've struggled with my own issues. I had a death in my family recently. Just remember that you can definitely keep editing Wikipedia and you shouldn't let a bit of scrutiny feel like harassment; the scrutiny is inevitable. You're doing a good job. You can't please everyone. What did FDR say? But you also have to listen to feedback. And you do. Intently. But it can be good to remember that nothing that happens here really means anything. This isn't the record, and this isn't reality. It's just a project and an experiment with an unusual scope and reach. Life goes on. It goes on in our libraries and museums, schools, theaters, comedy clubs, and the beach, and the woods, and in our books and music. So don't overcorrect, don't panic, and stick to your guns, politely, and with a sense of humor and a grain of salt. I, for one, value and would miss your contributions, and I feel they are important. Andre🚐 04:57, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. My depression started as work-related stress as a business owner who worked far too many hours each day. Then we moved and quickly became financially precarious. We lived at a bare minimum and still had only $100 in the bank at the end of the month. This lasted for many years, with my depression worsening and worsening, with daily dark thoughts. Suicidal thoughts became obsessive. Then our financial situation improved and that helped a lot. Then we lost everything in the 2018 Camp Fire, one of those types of experiences that has serious physical and mental health consequences. Everything in life was upended with huge losses in many areas. 99% of our friends and workmates were suddenly gone, without even the possibility of saying goodbye. All our pictures are gone, and I have difficulty even remembering what some family members look like. Without pictures, memories fade away quickly. We have gotten back on our feet, thanks to our good home/fire insurance, but it forced me into a very solitary and isolated early retirement, so Wikipedia is not some "unreal" thing. It is very real and means a lot. This would destroy normal people, but my autistic side loves being alone, so the internet is a real blessing. I can be alone while still socializing on Facebook. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 15:42, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – September 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2023).

Administrator changes

Hey man im josh

• Alex Bakharev
• CorbieVreccan
• Cyphoidbomb
• Davodd
• Hog Farm
• JamesR
• KnightLago
• Mark Ironie
• Nosebagbear (deceased)
• Rschen7754
• Tamzin
• TonyBallioni

CheckUser changes

DatGuy

• Ferret
• RickinBaltimore

• TonyBallioni
• Worm That Turned

Oversighter changes

RickinBaltimore

• TonyBallioni
• Worm That Turned

Guideline and policy news

• An RfC is open regarding amending the paid-contribution disclosure policy to add the following text: Any administrator soliciting clients for paid Wikipedia-related consulting or advising services not covered by other paid-contribution rules must disclose all clients on their userpage.

Technical news

• Administrators can now choose to add the user's user page to their watchlist when changing the usergroups for a user. This works both via Special:UserRights and via the API. (T272294)

Arbitration

• Remedy 9 ("MarioProtIV topic ban") of the WikiProject Tropical Cyclones case has been rescinded.

Miscellaneous

• The 2023 CheckUser and Oversight appointments process has concluded with the appointment of one new CheckUser.
• Self-nominations for the electoral commission for the 2023 Arbitration Committee elections opens on 2 October and closes on 8 October.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:41, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

Doorpost amulet etc.

I utterly lack energy at the moment, so do as you please. You're free to insert foreign mambo jambo (It's not an English word) rather than linking as above, and claiming that the 1st century Palestinian Jews used the Syriac alphabet. AddMore-III (talk) 18:18, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

Mezuzah is the English loanword and it's entered the dictionary[2][3][4] "doorpost amulet" is not descriptive, not a common name, and shouldn't replace it. There's also a principle that you should not use piped links in a surprising way. And as far as the languages spoken by 1st century Palestinian Jews, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin, were the languages around, but Hebrew was already not a spoken but merely a liturgical language, so changing it to Hebrew wouldn't be an improvement. St. Peter's actual name is from the Aramaic for rock as I understand it. Andre🚐 19:00, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

See Aramaic alphabet. Andre🚐 20:12, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

I was mistaken

Groan !!. Now pushing the same paranoid conspiracy theories as in that article they wrote. They keep attacking our RS policy. That should only be done at WP:RSN to change policy, whereafter that failed attempt should result in a ban for providing evidence of their extreme CIR problems. They should go to Conservapedia or Fringeopedia. We don't need this fringe advocacy here. For every one CIA person paid to edit here there are 500,000 ordinary people who edit and revert their shit edits. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 05:50, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

Manufacturing Consent is a classic actually; I read quite a bit of Chomsky myself in college. Anyway, I honestly do not know much about the Greyzone, but I am sure that Taibbi and Greenwald cannot be trusted to comment on it in a factual way; but luckily, I don't see much evidence that anyone is convinced by these arguments. Andre🚐 01:29, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

Wiki.NYC Pavilion for Open House New York (Oct 21–22) and Wikidata Day (Oct 29)

October 21–22: Wiki.NYC Pavilion for Open House New York @ Prime Produce
Prime Produce You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our Wiki.NYC Pavilion for Open House New York at Prime Produce in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan. The event will feature several interactive exhibits highlighting the "wiki way" for New York City Saturday, October 21 & Sunday, October 22 (optional RSVP on-wiki). 10:00 am – 6:30 pm (come by any time, either or both days!) Prime Produce Guild Hall, Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan
October 29: Wikidata Day in New York City
2023 Wikidata Day NYC flyer Additionally, you are invited to Wikidata Day in New York City at Butler Library, Columbia University, in celebration of Wikidata's 11th birthday. This coincides with the online/global WikidataCon 2023 and is a sequel to Wikidata Day 2022. The event will feature a Harlem Arts & Culture edit-a-thon, spotlight sessions, lightning talks, and cake! Sunday, October 29, 2023 Wikidata Day in New York City (RSVP required on Eventbrite and optional on-wiki). 11:00 am – 5:15 pm Butler Library (Room 203), 535 West 114th Street, Morningside Heights RSVP off-wiki is required! See the event page for a tentative schedule. At both events, all attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct. In addition, to participate in person, you should be vaccinated and also be sure to respect others' personal space, and we may limit overall attendance size if appropriate.

(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)

--Wikimedia New York City Team via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:59, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

Gérard Nissim Amzallag

Hello my friend, I hope you are fine. I do not believe this article meets wikipedia notability criteria for either writers or academics, and I may formally make a nomination for the article's deletion. But I wanted forst to extend to you a fair opportunity to strengthen it. Very best wishes, BoyTheKingCanDance (talk) 04:16, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

You are mistaken, and please go ahead if you wish to AFD the article, but it is easily notable. Andre🚐 04:17, 19 October 2023 (UTC) [5]

Engagement

Following your most recent responses, and as I am anxious not to further disrupt the RM, I have decided not to engage further with you at the Zionism, race and genetics article. Bfn. Selfstudier (talk) 18:11, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

That is your prerogative. If you wish to engage, here, there, via email, or otherwise, my door is always open to the rational and logical. If you would like to hat any discussion, you may hat my replies as well. Andre🚐 18:12, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Hi

Andre, let me preface everything that follows with this: I think you have very obvious POVs on some topics, the ones that come to mind are the CT topics of AP2 and PIA. But I also think you generally have whxat you think to be Wikipedia's best interests at heart, that you are not a bad faith actor, that you have a sincere goal of improving our articles. And I also understand that emotions have gotten to a boiling temperature in the PIA area in the last couple of weeks and I understand why. But I would like you to reconsider several things that you do, chief among them attempting to disqualify sources. I dont understand how you reconcile "all significant views" with the attempts to carve out significant views from our articles wholesale. Second, the idea that you can excise an academic writing in an area where she has been academically published because you think her political views make her biases has absolutely zero basis in any policy on this website. And further, repeatedly harping on her ethnicity, and yes it was just her ethnicity because she is an American citizen, is something that would never fly for basically any other person besides a Palestinian. If somebody said this Black anthropologist is a BLM supporter, he cannot write about white supremacy, or this Jewish anthropologist is a Zionist, she cannot write about Palestinian identity. The person who said that would be blocked or topic banned within five minutes. This method of ruling out sources based on ideology is insidious to what is supposed to be the foundation of this entire place. And it just makes the people who disagree with you feel like you're attempting to run-around the sources by artificially restricting what may be used as a source. nableezy - 00:39, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

Hey, Nableezy. Thanks for the note. I also feel that you are an editor with the best interests at heart and a good faith actor. I also agree that times are pretty messed up right now. For the record, as I think you know, I am not a supporter of Netanyahu or of blockading or of retaliating toward Gaza, and I know that you wouldn't support a group like Hamas taking hostages either. These things are unconscionable and nobody wants them that I know. Of course, I'm not Israeli, I am American. All of my ancestors are either American, or from Eastern Europe. I know some Israelis who don't agree with me, and this time is a little different than usual, because there are still innocent hostages. It's a sad situation. But I do not judge the entire Palestinian people on these Hamas activities. And I know that many Jews are grieving for Palestinian children in Gaza and demanding a ceasefire, too.

I disagree with you on several points. First of al, El Haj's ethnicity is not my concern. I said she was a Palestinian anthropologist, which is also what RS called her. That's not a statement that no Palestinian anthropologist should be allowed to comment. But we should make clear where her commentary comes from and her politics and views, so that it can be properly contextualized, in this particular case because she is controversial and a Palestinian nationalist, not simply Palestinian. She's clearly controversial and a leader of BDS. She needs to be appropriately qualified and attributed; more importantly, she's not a geneticist. She shouldn't be used for facts about genetic haplotype frequencies and statistics. You get your own opinions, but they are only for qualified experts in a field. El Haj was the subject of considerable controversy for her work. I won't repeat it here, because a lot of it was pretty nasty. I don't endorse it. I just think it's fundamentally a problem to base huge portions of the article on such a strong POV. That's what Wikipedia guidelines suggest not to do. We also have unfairly maligned Ostrer, Behar, and others. Nishidani, and others, have excluded many pro-Israeli sources for being political. Do you agree? Because I can definitely provide diffs of Nishidani doing this.

Regarding MEDRS, BESTSOURCES, etc., I think it's a good argument, and I stand by it. I didn't just start making it to move the goalposts. It's something that crystallized as a result of the discussion and it's perfectly valid. Genetics should be considered a quasi-medical topic. The article discusses Tay-Sachs, etc. The policy and guideline makes the argument that I made. El Haj is not qualified to talk about the genetic facts, just the social, cultural, and political ones. I don't want to remove her altogether. Just contextualize.

Feel free to respond if you want, but no hard feelings, I hope. Andre🚐 00:57, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

MEDRS is about medical information, this is what it covers. We do not discuss any of the following in that article: Attributes of a disease or condition, Attributes of a treatment or drug, Medical decisions, Health effects, Population data and epidemiology, or Biomedical research. So on what grounds do you claim that sources must be MEDRS? You wrote on the talk page it is relevant that El-Haj is Palestinian (as an ethnicity) because she is a Palestinian nationalist with an anti-Israel POV. Now set aside that this is basically a BLP violation, even if it were true why would it impact her being cited in other reliable sources like Journal of the History of Biology. Why is it that you think youre qualified to overrule the judgment of Elise Burton writing in a peer-reviewed journal? And yes, Id love to see Nishidani exclude a person on the basis of ethnicity or even their outside political views. Because Ive seen a lot of his writing over the last damn near twenty years but Ive never seen that. nableezy - 01:09, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

• Some 20 single gene mutations alone have been detected that affect the Ashkenazi, among them illnesses such as Tay–Sachs disease, Canavan disease, Gaucher's disease, Riley-Day syndrome, Niemann–Pick disease and Huntington's chorea and many other often fatal conditions, some associated particularly with, but not exclusively to, Jews. Institutions such as Dor Yeshorim have created a DNA database so that one can check for genetically incompatible matches among prospective couples. from the article, which is clearly medical info. I also quoted, but I won't repeat, text of policy and an essay that Levivich had linked which says basically anything potentially medical is also part of MEDRS.
• Elise Burton is also not a geneticist.
• The professor, Nadia Abu El-Haj, who is of Palestinian descent... Critics of Dr. Abu El-Haj’s book, however, said her aim was to undermine Israel’s right to exist, and challenged her methodology and findings... “I am horrified,” Ms. Stern said in an interview, “that Barnard would even consider tenure for a professor who is so clearly unqualified.”[6]
• In El-Haj's narrative, Israeli archaeologists turn into nationalist robots, wielding bulldozers in a desperate effort to 'create' evidence of a historic Jewish presence in the Land of Israel.[7]
• Abu El Haj is not merely saying that there is a colonial dimension to Israel; she is arguing that the colonial is all there is, for any claim that there is a genuine Jewish nationhood that is expressed through Zionism and through the state of Israel is false...Those critics who saw in Facts on the Ground a work intrinsically hostile to Israel were, in my judgement, correct. That does not justify all the accusations that were made against its author, nor all the tactics that were used by those seeking to damage her, even to silence her; but it can be argued that the high-profile controversy over Nadia Abu El Haj has brought the partisan and politicized state of academic middle east studies in the United States to the attention of the wider community. Nadia Abu El Haj has been granted tenure, which – regardless of her individual merits – is a good outcome for anyone who believes that professorship by plebiscite is a bad idea and that academic independence is a vital principle whether you agree with all the results or not. But such decisions tend to confirm the impression that Middle East Studies in the U.S. can simply be equated to anti-Israel studies, and this can only lead to a loss of credibility for the field and for academia as a whole.[8]

Examples of Nishidani disqualifying/challening Israel-leaning sources or 2nd-guessing them, particularly on Talk:Khazar_hypothesis_of_Ashkenazi_ancestry#Request_new_section_to_discuss_Brook_2022_and_later_studies_that_confirm_or_disconfirm_it and Talk:Khazar_hypothesis_of_Ashkenazi_ancestry#The_genetics_stuff, in which he expounds his belief that Middle Eastern origin of Jews is a myth (contra RS). But in the present article, Talk:Zionism,_race_and_genetics/Archive_3, Talk:Zionism,_race_and_genetics/Archive_5, Talk:Genetic_studies_on_Jews/Archive_8

• I might add I don't like the word 'Jewish' in any title.I don't believe, despite what some sources say, that it is healthy to essentialize anything 'Jews' or 'Jewishness' or 'Jewish thinking'
• Almost all major Zionist histories have been produced by scholars working from within a Zionist framework
• Just for the record, Behar et als., own data on the localization of Ashkenazim 's ancient admixture proportions compared to neighboring populations places them not quite in the classic 'Middle East' but on both sides of the Bosphorus and environs. They refuse to share the data base on which their conclusions were based
• (often dating back to Hammer et al 2000, way outdated). Paleogenetics leads to historical implications, historical knowledge (of things like conversion, a very important factor) sits uneasily with what molecular biologists claim about history (Ostrer and Behar are particular poor in this regard: Ostrer even cites the Tanakh for the population of Israel in the 9th and 8th centuries BCE).
• No doubt a polemicist from these quarters would say what counts is some direct inkling now of recent partial Jewish descent, so that 11 of my 16 nephews don't qualify and only 5, unbeknown to them and their parents and grandparents, had an ancestral address in Isaiah St.,Shechem etc., 3,000 years ago. You'd need one of the Keystone cops to track it down, but (responding to a view of Ostrer)
• This is a strawman argument, consisting of a list of papers that, probably unread, have been clipped from the relevant wiki pages, regardless of the numerous differences and figures that can be elicited regarding hypothetical admixture percentages in research over 2 decades (Nebel 2001) to Kopelman (2020). No one is contesting that there is a ME component among the Ashkenazi, as your assumption above suggests. If you are familiar with the literature, that component has been estimated to range from 3% upwards. What was noted is that (a) wiki genetic articles are slapdash piles of reports whose details conflict, often as with Yemeni Jews, where our article asserts two contradictory theories, each appealing to DNA studies i.e., (I) that there were almost no conversions (pure descent) and (ii)there were large-scale conversions (something historically known to be the case) (b) that Middle East is an empty term abusively used to hint at a Levantine or Israeli founding origin whereas (c) as with Behar 2013, it appears to point to northern Turkish origins. One could add dozens of other incoherences, such as (d) the ignorance of history illustrated by many of these papers (e) and its replacement by a religious narrative so that (e) miraculously, per Behar et al., the suggested foundation dates are made to coincide with the mythical dates of a putative expulsion or imposed exile; (f) that the whole literature is marked by a philosophical ineptitude full of unargued assumptions or ignored difficulties, (not least the incongruency between the modern Jewish religious definition of Jewishness as grounded in descent from a Jewish mother, and the Old Testamental belief that legitimacy as a Jew comes through the paternal line). Namely, in any lineage both maternal and paternal origins have equal weight. If I have mixed parentage ethnically, it is wholly arbitrary to privilege just one line to the exclusion of the other. Harping on 4 founding fathersmothers of apparent ME origin (while studiously avoiding any precision about where in the vast ME they may have hailed from) as defining one's ethnicity as an Middle-Eastern descended Ashkenazi, sits unhappily beside a feasible estimate that 80% of the female line descends from a European genomic heritage going back to the Neolithic. The massive obfuscation is POV-driven, and, if the critique of PCA is correct, the results of these various papers throughout those decades has, wittingly or unwittingly, reflect the historical preconceptions (the myth of return/the idea that identity is biological) of their authors, rather than the extremely complex realities of the past. It is quite pointless my stating this. The ideological commitments are too deeply enseamed into our public and scientific discourse, so that commonsense has no traction, and passages like the following are, if read, quickly forgotten, because their exposure of the absurd assumptions underwriting the literature on genetic identity would put a lot of people out of work. How far back must we go to find the most recent shared ancestor for – say – all Welsh people or all Japanese? And how much further is it to the last person from whom everyone alive today- Welsh, Japanese, Nigerian, or Papuan-can trace descent. . . Speculative as they are, the results are a surprise. In a population of around a thousand people everyone is likely to share the same ancestor about ten generations. Some three hundred years- ago. The figure goes up at a regular rate for larger groups, which means that almost all native Britons can trace descent from a single anonymous individual on these islands who lived in about the thirteenth century. On the global scale, universal common ancestry emerges no more than a hundred generations ago-well into the Old Testament era, perhaps, around the destruction of the First Temple in about 600 B.C.Steve Jones, Serpent's Promise: The Bible Retold as Science Hachette 2013 p.27. That means, analytically, that attempts to define Jewishness by selective manipulation of haplotypes is nonsensical, since all one is doing is repressing everything else in the genome that points to cross-ethnic affinities.Nishidani (talk) 8:16 am, 5 December 2022, Monday (10 months, 18 days ago) (UTC−5)

Andre🚐 01:45, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

and I want to be really clear that when I said El Haj was a Palestinian anthropologist, I would not have said that if she was not a pro-Palestinian activist. It is not her ethnicity I am responding to. Her ethnicity is incidental. It is her politics and the controversy and her clear POV. Andre🚐 01:49, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

First, no DNA is not "medical", it is science sure but it is not BMI per our policy. You can say it should be treated as quasi-medical, but thats really an admission that it is not treated as medical information. Making the rest of that moot.

Next, no, he does not do that in any of those quotes. He criticizes some of their methods and arguments, he does not use being Jewish as any type of disqualifier in any way. That seems almost purposely tendentious in your reading of each of these quotes. The first is about the title of the Wikipedia article, the next is a fact, and doesnt have anything to do with Judaism or Jews or Jewishness, the next doesnt say anything of the sort, the next is attacking your argument. Im not really sure what you think youre proving here, but to me its just you cant see straight when it comes to Nishidani and imagine all sorts of things about what he writes. We went through similar before, if you recall. nableezy - 01:55, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

We can agree to disagree, but I included the genetic disease content that's in the article, and I reserve the right to pursue this later if it seems like a good idea and I am able to. And it's clear to me that Nishidani has his own strong POV on whether Jewishness or Zionism disqualifies a statement in the sources. I will note the current article doesn't seem to mention Behar much and is extremely critical of Ostrer. There are other sources as well that are omitted. You are entitled to your opinion, but you can't see that I am "tendentiously" making an argument, as I am doing so in good faith. I would argue that Nishidani is incivil, continuously insults whether editors are qualified or have read the material, posts extremely dense WP:TEXTWALLs and it is not just me, but many other people complaining about his behavior. If you're going to just come to my page to tell me I can't see straight, that's not really what I need right now. Thanks. Andre🚐 02:20, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

WP:SCHOLARSHIP does not have a carve out for those whose politics you dislike.

Whatever though, I thought I might be able to reason with you, but I can admit failure. nableezy - 01:56, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

You asked me for some evidence, I provided it in depth, and you handwaved it away. Andre🚐 02:21, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

No, I did not, you provided things that do not support your accusation. Quote, exactly, where Nishidani argues against using a source because the author is Jewish. nableezy - 02:26, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

That isn't what I said. I said Nishidani, and others, have excluded many pro-Israeli sources for being political. Do you agree? Because I can definitely provide diffs of Nishidani doing this. And he's clearly stating he doubts the conclusions by Behar and Ostrer in the above, and he believes certain sources are iredeemably Zionist. much of the 'science' over the past 15 years has been questioned as questionable. It is a part of Zionist doctrine to speak of a 'return' to one's putative territorial roots - but Zionism is an ideology, not a science...Y-DNA , further, defines patrilineal descent, which is excluded as a criterion for Jewishness by rabbinical consensus. If the rabbis are right, Behar et al., are wrong. If Behar and co are right, then the relevant halakha must be rewritten. See? The conceptual paradigm is messyCategory_talk:People_of_Jewish_descent/Archive_1 The 23 sources or 80 books and articles you keep citing cover nuanced, often reciprocally challenging material in a debate that is new, and far too early to establish a consensus, particularly since many of the historical inferences made by those papers are by geneticists who appear to have a frail grasp of the ongoing historical and linguistic debatesTalk:Genetic_studies_on_Jews/Archive_6 this page is largely crap, because it is held under lock and key by POV pushers, who are illiterate in the topic, and steadfastly wedded to 'proving' modern Israelis descend from ancient Israelites living in Palestine. Second point, is that, unlike the impression given on this page, Elhaik's northern Turkey hypothesis, successively modified, for the Middle Eastern component, rather than the Levantine thesis, is not a minority view. Behar and others basically same the same thingTalk:Genetic_studies_on_Jews/Archive_6 The genetic section (which Stampfer's study should not be mentioned, but it is) has undergone a major expansion, with separate sections on papers that are now almost 2 decades old, as if nothing had o occurred since Behar and Atzmon's studies. Elhaik et al., have substantially finetuned their hypothesis to meet criticisms, and there is no mention of this. Instead we have a large section on criticisms of what he first proposed. Highly unbalanced.Nishidani with a skeptical eye on the incongruencies in the ideas proposed by all parties, Behar's team included 2017 pp.103-104 That is how I view the matter: the methodologies yield different results, and there is no consensus from which one can then brand any one theory 'fringe'.Nishidani (talk) Talk:Khazar_hypothesis_of_Ashkenazi_ancestry/Archive_2 Andre🚐 02:43, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

Wait, you think you are not allowed to cast doubts on a source? We went through this already, Nishidani is allowed to challenge a source based on other sources. Hes allowed to challenge a conclusion made. NOR doesnt extend to talk pages, and I myself have participated in talk pages where we found a source to be wrong and removed it. That has nothing to do with challenging a source because of their politics or even worse ethnicity. That is what you have done, you have repeatedly denigrated a source because the person is Palestinian you dislike at least one of her political views. You are not attacking the actual content of the source, you are attacking the author. Hey, we have an article about that type of argument. So no, this is nowhere close to what you were doing, and yes I restate my failure in being able to reason with you. Take care Andre, nableezy - 02:50, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

Nableezy, when did I ever say it was not allowed? I'm saying it's OK to exclude sources from either side because they are too political. Andre🚐 02:51, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

That is both not OK and not what he was doing, but I cant be bothered with this anymore. Ill be taking this off my watchlist, feel free to the last word. nableezy - 02:56, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

OK then. I wish you the best. I am sorry we are far apart on this, but I hope the record will show that I engaged in good faith, and provided extensive support for my assertions. But I don't claim to be perfect or right about everything, and there are always things I can do better. As I said, I attacked El Haj's credibility as a non-geneticist who is being used to attack a Jewish, more pro-Israel geneticist, Ostrer. She happens to be a Palestinian nationalist and supporter of BDS, so her views on Zionism and Israel are not exactly impartial, and she's also been extensively attacked by others in the field due to her methodology and results in her work on archeology. She's controversial, and normally when sources are controversial, we attribute them instead of resting the entire article about them. This is covered extensively in policy on RS, weight, etc. BESTSOURCES. Academic subjects of expertise is the name of the game here. So I think, again, there's too much weight on her views given that she is pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel by position. Meanwhile, Ostrer, has been accused of being a Zionist, so is being counterweighed. That is the issue I have with El Haj. I've said it before, and I'm saying it again, but this is my own talk page. Best wishes and take care. Andre🚐 03:00, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

and "exclude" was the wrong word there - I meant reduced weight, attributed and contextualized. I don't want to exclude altogether, though some minority views should be, but this one isn't a total exclude by my judgment, just a recontextualize and a removal of the genetic science attributed to anthropologists. Andre🚐 03:02, 23 October 2023 (UTC)