The Wikipedia Page that Wasn't: Wikipedia Won't Take a Chance on the Bosnian Pyramids

Wikipedia Continues to Reject a Page about Five International Scientific Conferences on the Bosnian Pyramids

Draft article rejected by Wikipedia

The First in a Series of Articles about Wikipedia's Continuing Rejection of Information on the Bosnian Pyramid Complex

by Jock Doubleday

[ Please Note: The page submitted to Wikipedia in early 2015, and resubmitted twice thereafter, is not about the existence of pyramids in Bosnia. It does not argue for or against the idea of pyramids in Bosnia. The page is simply a chronology of events -- including speakers, paper titles, dates, and times -- at five separate international scientific conferences on the Bosnian Pyramids that took place in Sarajevo and Visoko, Bosnia between 2008 and 2014. These five international scientific conferences did take place. Hundreds of people from around the world attended them, and scores of scientists who had investigated the structures in the Visoko, Bosnia area were invited to read papers at them. These conferences should therefore be included in any objective world encyclopedia, whether or not the Bosnian Pyramids hypothesis is accepted. ]

Fifth International Scientific Conference on the Bosnian Pyramids (ICBP 2014)
September 6, 2014 -- Press Conference

Three Rejections by Wikipedia Editors (in reverse chronology):

[ Please Note: The responses by Eclipsed and Primefac are cookie-cutter (form, prefabricated) responses. They were not written by the editors in question and do not address the text of the page in question. Nor were any of the reasonable objections (see below) to the three rejections engaged by any Wikipedia editor at any time. ]

Submission declined on 11 July 2015 by Eclipsed (form letter response):

"This submission appears to read more like an advertisement than an entry in an encyclopedia. Encyclopedia articles need to be written from a neutral point of view, and should refer to a range of independent, reliable, published sources, not just to materials produced by the creator of the subject being discussed. This is important so that the article can meet Wikipedia's verifiability policy and the notability of the subject can be established. If you still feel that this subject is worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia, please rewrite your submission to comply with these policies. You are encouraged to make improvements by clicking on the "Edit" tab at the top of this page. If you require extra help, please ask a question on the Articles for creation help desk, ask the reviewer that declined your submission, or get help at our live help chat from experienced editors."

Submission declined on 14 February 2015 by StarryGrandma:

"A short description of the conferences should be added to the article Bosnian pyramid claims. Wikipedia is not the place to list conference proceedings. The Bosnian pyramids are hills that have an entry in the Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology."

Submission declined on 29 January 2015 by Primefac (form letter response):

"This submission reads more like an essay than an encyclopedia article. Submissions should summarise information in secondary, reliable sources and not contain opinions or original research. Please write about the topic from a neutral point of view in an encyclopedic manner." 

Screen-grab of the three Wikipedia editors' rejections:

Article Submission (full text)

To read the full text of the article submission that three Wikipedia editors rejected, please visit:

"Draft:International Scientific Conferences on the Bosnian Pyramids"

If you desire to read the whole article, please give yourself at least an hour to get through the body of the text -- something that Wikipedia editors have been for some reason unwilling to do -- and several weeks to check the links.

Reasonable Objections to the First Rejection (January 29, 2015) Not Engaged by Any Wikipedia Editor 

None of the copious, detailed, and reasonable objections to the first rejection of the article were engaged by any Wikipedia editor at any time.

Below is the full text of the reasonable objections to Primefac's (the first) rejection of the page:

"User talk:Jockdoubleday (link here)

"Hi Primefac,
 
"Thanks for your help editing the article by inserting "cite web" instead of "source" in the article's numerous html "References" templates.
 
"You commented the following on the Draft of the article after it was declined ("Submission declined on 29 January 2015 by Primefac"):

"Comment: The sections on the individual conferences should not contain a blow-by-blow account of what happened. It is entirely irrelevant that at 10am participants were taken into a tunnel (an example). This draft should present a short, concise summary of what the ICBP does and the major themes of the conferences. Primefac (talk) 15:31, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

"I believe that a whole-cloth declining of this article, which chronicles the events of five scientific conferences over seven years, and which therefore, even as a strict chronology, necessitates a lengthy treatment, is unfair.

"The textual problems you have cited are minimal and could be edited out by anyone -- you, myself, any editor -- in a few minutes, and probably would have been edited out virtually immediately by Wiki editors, had the article been left up. Why has the entire article been declined because of a less-than-1%-text problem (tour times and destinations)? The vast majority, 99+%, of the article is dates, times, names, and locations of speaker presentations, and of course reliable sources for those bare facts. (By the way, the reason for the inclusion of tour times is not so that people reading the article can learn about the tours but so that they will understand why, for instance, there was only one speaker a day for three days in a row before the weekend speaker marathon -- and that reason is simply that the participants and attendees were on tours during the day, and therefore they had time for only one speaker presentation each evening. However, if tour times and locations must go, they must go.)

"You asserted in your comment above that the article should be a "summary." Since the five conferences consisted of speaker events (89 speakers in five conferences), and since the article is a chronology of speaker events, the article cannot be a summary. And there would be no reason to create a summary, since Wikipedia readers couldn't learn from that article who the speakers were, what their papers were about, nor would readers be able to follow links to the specific topics spoken about to see, through text and photos and video, if they found the evidence and arguments on those topics to be reasonable. A summary of the conference would not do what Wikipedia does best and what Wikipedia has set out to do: give the exacting details of a subject.

Out-of-place Artifacts curator Klaus Dona gives a presentation at the
Fifth International Scientific Conference on the Bosnian Pyramids in
Sarajevo, Bosnia

"Further, as you may know, the subject of the Bosnian pyramids is highly controversial. So I think it behooves Wikipedia not to rush toward the declining of an article on the Bosnian pyramids but to maintain at least the appearance of a rigorous stance of neutrality, otherwise known as "the principle of endeavoring not to appear biased." I'm not saying that Wikipedia is biased in this case, but I believe (I may be wrong) that Wikipedia would want to maintain the appearance of not being biased by allowing an article on a controversial subject to stay up longer than 10 minutes before declining it. Allowing the article to stay up for several days in Draft or Review form, for instance, would give many Wiki editors a chance to chime in on textual matters, so that the article could be change based on editorial consensus. And if eventual rejection were the consensus, then many editors would be involved in the decision and presumably right to reject it on whatever grounds were offered.

"To reiterate:

"1) You said in your comment notes (embedded five paragraphs above) that I should make the article a "summary," but a summary doesn't give the details of the conferences, and the details are the point of the article;

"2) You said in your comment notes above that the article should state the "themes" of the conferences. I would not say that the five international scientific conferences on the Bosnian pyramids had unique themes but that they have been wedded to one theme: the verifiable fact that, for ten years, the scientific method has discovered, probed, and made conclusions about various aspects of an ancient pyramid complex in Bosnia. But this theme is a bare one sentence long and does not need a Wikipedia article for it. What readers of an article on the Bosnian pyramids conferences need is not simply the conference theme stated in one sentence but the details of the playing out of that theme, the details of the scientific conferences themselves, to which hundreds of researchers and interested parties have traveled from many different countries for seven years. Without a complete list of the speakers' names, their credentials, their paper titles, their dates and times of speaking, what use would the article be to anyone? How could Wikipedia readers even begin to form their own opinions about a pyramid complex in Bosnia without these details to work from? And since these factual, voluminous, and verifiable details are what the article presently consists of, why has it been officially declined by Wikipedia?

"Thank for your considered reply, and I look forward to hearing from you.

"Jockdoubleday (talk) 17:11, 29 January 2015 (UTC)"

[ Please Note: To date, no response has been made to any of the reasonable objections above. ]  

Wikipedia Editors Are Anonymous! Why?

Why are Wikipedia editors anonymous?  

Anonymous persons have no accountability! They can say or do anything they like, while they hide behind a handle like "Primefac" or "StarryGrandma" or "Eclipsed." 

Who are these people? Who gave them the power to decline entire articles because *someone* said the subject matter is "dubious"? 

Shouldn't Wikipedia editors be proud of their editing and therefore put their names on all the articles they have worked on? Should Wikipedia editors have up-to-date photos prominently displayed on their pages? 

Who are the anonymous persons who are controlling the world's information? Only Wikipedia insiders know.

"Dubious Archaeology"?

On March 28, 2015, I submitted an article to Wikinews detailing Dr. Paul LaViolette's public statements on the Bosnian Pyramid Complex.

The article was rejected immediately, on several grounds, one of which was that the Bosnian Pyramids are considered by Wikipedia to be "dubious archaeology."

"The Wikinews Article that Wasn't: Wikinews Rejects Article about the Bosnian Pyramids: 'Newsworthiness Not Established'" (http://anamericaninbosnia.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-wikinews-article-that-wasnt.html)

The reason Wikinews classifies the Bosnian Pyramids under "dubious archaeology" is that one man, Kenneth L. Feder, a professor at Central Connecticut State University, authored an encyclopedia titled, The Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology and included the Bosnian Pyramids in that work.

Professor Kenneth L. Feder, author of
The Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology,
at Sego Canyon

Below is a letter I wrote to Professor Feder on July 28, 2015 (screen-grab of a Microsoft Word document):

Shockingly, it seems that uninformed (indeed willfully ignorant) persons, such as Kenneth L. Feder at Central Connecticut State University, are the "experts" whom anonymous Wikipedia editors are quoting to justify preventing real data and real science from being included in Wikipedia's database.

And so, we have one more Wikipedia Page that Wasn't. How many millions of unfairly rejected pages are there?