UPDATE: The final version of Cla68’s request is here. As predicted his request was declined.
I periodically check what is happening over at Wikipedia w.r.t. Climate Change and the politics that appear there. There have been a number of people who were topic banned in the most recent Arbitration Case on Climate Change. Slowly people have been requesting lifting of those bans on a case by case basis. The results are both predictable and ideologically biased. No surprise there.
The current case involves User:Cla68 who got caught up in the climate arbitration after he had attempted to improve the Climate Change articles in much the same way he approaches his editing elsewhere on the project: by following the rules, seeking consensus, and most importantly seeking to keep the articles neutral.
Well as anyone who has followed the Wikipedia wars over climate change knows, seeking neutrality puts one directly in the sights of the ideologically driven climate cabal. This is how Cla68 found himself in his current predicament.
I believe that Cla68 is not even a denier of AGW, nor were most of the people who received topic bans, but I believe that he is the first who would have been called a skeptic to seek the lifting of his ban.
As I have noted in previous posts the ideologically driven alarmists have remained true to form as various people have sought the lifting of their bans. Using User:William M. Connolley as an exemplar for all such individuals we can see the insidious manner in which the prevailing bias is maintained. As I have noted earlier WMC has been uniformly supportive of the lifting of the topic bans for like minded individuals, whereas he continues to reject any efforts to allow even neutral editors such as Cla68 to return to editing the topic area. Even those who supported his own return.
So once again the bias is laid bare for all to see. You cannot trust the Climate Change articles on Wikipedia to provide an unbiased view of the topic because only the ideologically pure AGW supporting editors are able to contribute to the encyclopedia that “anyone can edit.”
Wikipedia Watch 
GR, this is a good post. I would suggest contacting Anthony Watts and seeing if you can do a guest post there for wider exposure. In my opinion, this is one of the worst cases of the cynical hypocrisy of the Wikipedia community that I’ve seen. I noted this issue on Jimmy Wales’ talk page too.
By: Alex Harvey on March 21, 2012
at 5:34 am
From the comments of Bishop Hill:
evidence of SKeptical Science (John Cook’s ‘climate consensus website) manipulating Wiki.
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2012/5/21/wicked-wikipedia.html#comments
Two months ago the entire content of John Cook’s Skeptical Science website’s secret forum fell in public domain. The details of SkS’s secret deliberations to manufacture a climate consensus was discussed extensively in two hilarious threads on Bishop Hill. See here and here.
What is of interest and relevance to this post is the ‘organic’ link between SkS climate warriors and Wikipedia.
David, a commenter at Bishop Hill, reported what he discovered towards the end of the second link above, on Mar 30, 2012 at 6:21 AM (Full comment in italics below. I’ve inserted SkS quotes in quote marks for clarity):
How to get your affiliated site into Wikipedia, a guide from SkS’s Dawei:
(original bold not transferred)
“Guys,
After two days of fumbling with Wikipedia code, I have finished a draft of what will be Skeptical Science’s entry into the world of Wiki. I’ve now gotten to a point where I’m ready to let people make suggestions for improvements. The site is not yet in Wikipedia’s mainspace, but rather held as a sub-page of my user page, meaning for now only those who have the link are likely going to find it.
I have included as many outside resources as I could find, but a veteran at Wikipedia has already urged me to find more and “better” ones before letting it go live. I haven’t been able to find too much else worthwhile on Google but suspect that some of the people who have been here longer will know of things that I couldn’t find. Consider finding additional outside sources to be priority #1 for this article.
Since it is a Wikipedia article, feel free to make small changes direclty in the article as you see fit (careful not to use your name if you contribute to SkS regularly), but it may be a good idea to discuss big changes here beforehand. And please remember the article needs read like an unbiased contribution to Wikipedia, and not a plug for the site. Neutrality is extra important when creating an article from scratch, as articles that read like mere advertisements are quickly deleted.
For this reason, it includes some information that is less than flattering. I believe this will help the article’s chances of being accepted as a new entry. After it has been firmly established as a valid article, negative passages can be toned down or removed completely without putting the entire article in as much danger of being removed. So for the moment, I encourage the loyal contributors to SkS to put on their denier hats and not be hesitant to include sources that are critical of SkS, even if you believe the criticism is factually inaccurate.
So, at this point I’ll stop my pompous lecturing and see what you guys think. I’ll be interested to hear all suggestions for changes/additions/deletions.”
John Cook:
“To be precise, I *read* Inhofe’s speech, not heard it but that’s just nitpicking to the nth degree! :-)”
Dawei:
“Hah, alright, I’ll make that correction later. I’d do it now but doing so might be seen as evidence that I am collaborating with you, which could be bad.”
Noooo, you wouldn’t collaborate with the site creator! That could be bad.
If you go to SkS’s Wiki entry and look at the edit history you’ll see Dawei’s name all over it.
Stay tuned, the next one is a doosy!
(The next doosy one on the Bishop Hill thread that David mentions is a collaboration between climate warriors of SkS and a ‘Clima-pscyhologist’ Prof from University of Western Australia for “a psychological experiment with UWA cognitive scientists testing for the effects of blog comments on readers’ comprehension.” So that particular mendacity is not relevant to the Wikipedia issue currently at hand.)
I happen to have the full content of the SkS secret deliberations downloaded through a link in Bishop Hill (not sure if the link is still active). When I searched for “Wikipedia” I also came across this in a thread entitled “Wikipedia Wars”. John Cook reports a mail he received from a climate scientist:
“Got this from a climate scientist on a group I’m on:
folks–just a heads up. for those of you looking for ways to help out in the online climate disinformation war, one thing to consider is getting involved in wikipedia. right now deniers seem to outnumber reasonable people in the wikipedia editing wars of climate change-themed wikipedia pages. many disputes are handled by a vote of active wikipedia participants, and the deniers have been winning many of these.
this is most evident in anything related to ‘climategate’, the “hockey stick’, and the personal webpages of prominent players (both legitimate scientists and deniers/disinformers).
you might want to take a look yourself and see what I’m talking about. the discussions are *way* out of balance. Wikipedia is perhaps the most widely used resource on the web for getting basic, background information on a topic, and the deniers understand that. that is why they have put quite a bit of effort into distorting climate-change related content on the site, and to maintaining that distorted content in the face of efforts by reasonable people to restore some accuracy and balance.
the good news here is that it doesn’t take a whole lot of people to make a difference. if you look at the “talk” pages, you’ll see some familiar names, e.g. John Mashey (thanks to John for all of his efforts here!). But John alone can’t do very much here. There needs to be a small army of do-gooders helping out.
so to any of you who think you might be willing to help out, I (and I think I speak for many of my climate scientist colleagues) would be very much obliged”
There is more than enough evidence here to prove that an organised campaign is afoot by catastrophist climate scientists and their acolytes to control and distort the information on Wikipedia pages towards an alarmist direction.
May 22, 2012 at 3:45 AM | sHx
By: Barry Woods on May 22, 2012
at 8:55 am
Wikipedia is controlled and censored by radical leftists, who ban anyone who repeatedly adds true, reliably sourced info that disagrees with the ideas of the radical left. I have written several posts about wikipedia’s bias and censorship.
By: danfromsquirrelhill on June 29, 2012
at 11:41 am
You want to see a laugh, go to the talk page for r/K Selection Theory. Way back, some guy postulated r/K could be used to describe racial differences. Nobody even knows about his work, and those who do think it is either fringe work or wrong.
But the Lib editing the r/K article hates it so much he wrote the entire r/K article saying r/K had been soundly debunked. I guess if r/K has been debunked, then the racial guy’s theory is really wrong. The only problem is r/K hasn’t been debunked, and is still being taught in every major university’s biology course, since it is a useful means to view reproductive behaviors.
Which will all make for interesting debates in classrooms, where I am sure professors are going to be told they are teaching a debunked subject.
Of course, after saying r/K is debunked, the guy makes a point of saying all humans are so highly K there is no way to say they are r on the talk page. Which is funny because even the guy saying r/K doesn’t exist still classifies species as r or K, indicating he still believes in it.
Gotta love the politically correct scientist.
By: Anonymous on June 29, 2012
at 2:18 pm