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Yeah, I figured that you saying that was a possibility.
This is kind of awkward to point out right now, but... I already quit Wikipedia. I thought the problems could be fixed bottom-up. Maybe they could have. I'm now convinced that they can't, not since No Nazis* and the lab-leak purge - attempting to fix them is now considered evidence of being an enemy infiltrator. So I'm on strike as a WP editor, for years now, because "no longer lend our strength to that which we wish to be free from" i.e. the admin/crat class and to an extent WMF.
*If you want to be bitterly disappointed, look at the history of the talk page on that essay. I thought I had it bad when my objections got hatted as NOTFORUM; afterward, they just straight-up deleted all the dissent against it.
Well, then I guess we'll never know.
I found your post on Wikipedia talk:No Nazis, and I don't see why it was hatted when the surrounding threads were allowed. In case you were suggesting your post was deleted, it wasn't; it was archived, as is standard practice on talk pages with lots of activity.
Regarding the lab leak hypothesis, the consensus in the mainstream media early on during the pandemic was that it was baseless, so that's what Wikipedia reported. Wikipedia isn't really set up to deal with instances of the mainstream media lying. The entire thing is based on the assumption that they are reliable. See: Wikipedia:Verifiability, not truth. (Not that they I'm saying they were lying – I don't have a strong opinion on the lab leak hypothesis.) Your only hope is that eventually the media will correct the record. Sometimes the principle fails and the media do lie, but what's the alternative? Trusting random Substacks? If you're going to suggest evaluating the evidence yourself, it's worth noting that the publicly available evidence for the lab leak hypothesis is largely circumstantial or speculative, like the alleged implausibility of this happening right to the next virology institute.
I changed my mind. Here.
(The former discussion was here; the edit removing it was here.)
I didn't technically do what you asked me to do, for reasons I explained in that post, but would you still consider this an adequate test?
Honestly, despite the impressive age of your account, you don't seem very adept at handling disputes. With all due respect, what were you expecting to achieve by posting on the talk page? No one is going to see your comment and get inspired to edit the article. The proper way to do this is to go in guns blazing: boldly make your edit and then explain it on talk. (I know you're aware of WP:BOLD, but I'm linking it for the benefit of any other potential readers.) Then the onus is on them to dispute it. (There was no clear preexisting consensus which you would be going against – the discussion from 2025 is ambiguous.) Instead, you got three replies, in order: one non sequitur, one agreeing with you and one disagreeing with you. Now there is no consensus either way, and you may have spoiled your chance to make the edit. You can still try, but it's going to be harder to justify now.
I speak from years of experience fighting excessive wokeness on Wikipedia. (While I acknowledge that the policy of not including the former names of people who weren't notable before transitioning may be regarded as "woke", I don't consider it excessive.) Yes, you're supposed to assume good faith, but in reality, when it comes to controversial topics like this, few people are actually editing because of a disinterested desire to spread knowledge. It's agendaposting all the way down.
You also didn't cite the guideline I quoted above, with the bolded bit, but apparently found another gender identity guideline? Not sure why there are two and they seem to disagree with each other. (There's a third one, too??? They need to get this sorted.)
The language of the guideline I quoted plainly supports keeping "Jack". I suppose you could dispute what it means to be "known under" a name, but if it's their legal name and is widely used in reliable sources, I would say they are "known under" that name. The guidelines talk about former names, but by all accounts, "Jack" was the current name at the time of reporting.
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I wasn't suggesting that. I'm aware it was archived. But a bunch of later complaints by others were not; they were removed outright.
(NB: I believe I've seen that essay cited in a ban comment; I know it says it's not policy, but it's highly-questionable whether this is true.)
So, what I mean by "lab-leak purge" is not that WP didn't support the lab leak hypothesis. It's that WP categorised it as "misinformation" - which is an extremely-strong term, implying not just unlikelihood but certitude against. A bunch of people tried to push back on this overconfidence, and a very large number of them (though not me) got banned for it due to the perceived urgency. That bad blood (including from the ban evasion and canvassing attempts that followed) made it much harder to fix WP's bias problem, because it made the admins start considering ideological heresy to be evidence of bad faith (as this issue largely split along partisan lines).
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