Talk:Race and intelligence

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Removal of tags

I have reinstated the tags removed by Dmcq, on the basis that they are still appropriate in my opinion. The fact that editors don't currently seem to have te time to finish addressing these concerns should not be taken for an implicit admission that the issue has been resolved. In my opinion, the issues are still very much there; however I, for one, cannot presently devote the energy necessary to work on them at the moment. If Dmcq disagrees, I would suggest he should set up a straw poll among editors. If after a reasonable amount of time the consensus of editors is in favor of removing the tags, I wll gladly bend to the will of the consensus. But I believe it necessary to gather the opinions of other editors first. Thanks.--Ramdrake (talk) 20:32, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

I questioned those tags a few weeks ago[1], and the two editors who replied essentially said that the tags are there to encourage people to make the article better. I don't think that alone can be a rationale for including the tags. Furthermore, it is clear that in practise the tags have not encouraged more editors to pay attention to the article.

If people want to keep the tags, they need to articulate the ways in which the article is biased or factually inaccurate. If the reasons for keeping the tags are not explained, no one knows how to work towards removing them, and they can be retained infinitely.

WP:AD suggests that the disputed tag should only be used when the factual accurary of the article is being actively disputed. As this is clearly not the case, the tag should be removed.--Victor Chmara (talk) 21:57, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Straw Polls

Well lets just have a straw poll to see how much the article has come towards being neutral and accurate. I'd like to be able to copy over much of the leader to another article and put a link from there here but there's not much point if there are major problems here. There are two tags which haven't been discussed for a while but another editor wants kept until this is thrashed out - viz neutrality and factual accuracy.--Dmcq

Do you believe that the NPOV tags are still relevant now? Also how would the article have become any more neutral than when the tags were placed without anyone having done any editing of it? Whenever someone has tried to make any edits they have promptly been reverted by the other editors who disagreed and after a fruitless discussion everyone has resigned to status quo. This is simply the kind of article that is highly unlikely to ever make it to a sufficiently neutral state to no longer require the tags.·Maunus·ƛ· 01:44, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Neutral point of view?

Do you think the article is reasonably neutral overall? Are there particular sections which you feel are not neutral?

Nope. 1. the history section doesn't actually provide a history of the issue - it only lists the most prominent pro-hereditarian publications and authors. It doesn't show that there has been a debate about the issue since the first reports of the gap.

2. the current debate section again summarises mostly the hereditarian arguments. It gives a laundry list of studies critiquing the bell curve but does not summarise the arguments other than mention the rather trivial peer review argument. It then spends the rest of the section summarising Rushton and Jensen and Lynn and Vanhanen. It mentions "ethical guidelines" but doesn't mention why many people think the research is unethical. The section in short is focused on presenting hereditarian viewpoints and arguments and only mentions that there are opposing viewpoints with out actually presenting them.

3. the grouop difference section presents an unproblematized list of what is largely accepted about IQ. It doesn't mention any of the problems that are often pointed out for some of these statements - e.g. "IQ is heritable" it doesn't say how much so and what that means, IQ predicts performance without regards to SES or racial background (perhaps because western education is based on IQ type tasks). In the test scores section it baldy states that self report has been shown to match up with racial/genetic clustering. This is based on very few studies and it is commonly contradicted as nonsense - since there is as much genetic variability inside of any racial group as there is without. It states that G-loaded tests show the highest gap - Nisbett criticizes this assumption stating that it is only partly true and that the gap diminishes for some highly g-loaded tests. It gives Rushton and Lynns estimated IQ numbers without mentioning that they have been severly criticized for being based on selective sampling and bad math. The views on research section mixes different statements together almost randomly. Completely incoherent, but with ample quitation space especially to hereditarians like Linda Gotfredson. It always gives the last word to the hereditarian pov. The section debate overview has been extensively criticized above from both sides of the argument.

4. the policy relevance section uncritically states the hereditarian counter claim without even providing any of the criticisms that they are responding to - it basically amounts to saying "Rushton and Jensen say that affirmative action is worse than what they are doing". All in all the article is clearly biased towards the hereditarian viewpoint and completely fails to give an adequate account of the many important arguments against it, it also fails to adequately put the topic into a social and historical context - which of course has to include an account of the social circumstances that lead the topic to become controversial - namely the context of institutionalized racial discrimintation in the US through out the 20th century. ·Maunus·ƛ· 22:24, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Well, that was a mouthful. You should probably start separate discussions about some of those issues. And please use paragraph breaks! At this point, I will just point out that the correspondence between self-reported race/ethnicity and genetic clusters in America has been replicated a number of times, and is uncontroversial, whereas the idea that "there is as much genetic variability inside of any racial group as there is without" is known as Lewontin's Fallacy.--Victor Chmara (talk) 22:40, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Its not like I haven't mentioned this before. Also please don't tout that Lewontin's fallacy thing at me. This is no more of a fallacy than it is still mentioned in genetics handbooks as a fact (e.g. Vogel and Motulsky) - Lewontin's fallacy is merely that this doesn't make it impossible make between group comparisons. This doesn't change the point that belief in genetically defined races is a minority viewpoint. Pace A.W.F. Edwards geneticists do not believe in genetically defined races, but in population with seamlessly blending genetic profiles, and in haplogroups which are also not racial groups. Genetic clustering is a statistical artefact it does not change the fact that a person selfidentifying as black can be more genetically similar to a person selfidentifying as white than as another black person. There is no genetic test that positively identify a person with a racial group - particularly not if there has been any influx of genes from a different geographical population in the persons immediate ancestry (including grandparents). (Collins states this in the piece I have brought around here many times now). The idea that selfidentified race tells us much about a persons genetic make up is wildly problematic and has received tonnes of criticism - e.g. in relation to race in biomedicine. ·Maunus·ƛ· 22:53, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

I have not found support in the current secondary sources for the claim that most scholars agree with Edwards as against Lewontin. Lewontin is cited as a "brilliant" (one source's term) scholar whose results have been repeatedly replicated in numerous current sources. Maybe the "fallacy" is having a whole Wikipedia article on what is very much a minority point of view. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 23:11, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

The fact that Edwards is right has been empirically verified (in fact, it happened already back in the 1960s), and is completely uncontroversial. From the abstract of the Vogel and Motulsky book (4th ed., 2010) mentioned by Maunus:

Early studies showed that most human genetic variation occurs within populations rather than between them, and that genetically related populations often cluster geographically. Recent studies based on much larger data sets have recapitulated these observations, but have also demonstrated that high-density genotyping allows individuals to be reliably assigned to their population of origin. In fact, for admixed individuals, even the ancestry of particular genomic regions can often be reliably inferred.

On pp. 595-596, they explain how Edwards's argument refutes Lewontin (Maunus quoted this passage in an earlier discussion):

An important point to realize is that Lewontin’s calculation (and later work that confirms his finding) are based on the F-statistics introduced in Sect. 20.2.1 (see for a discussion) averaged across single genetic loci. While it is an undeniable mathematical fact that the amount of genetic variation observed within groups is much larger than the differences among groups, this does not mean that genetic data do not contain discernable information regarding genetic ancestry. In fact, we will see that minute differences in allele frequencies across loci when compounded across the whole of the genome actually contain a great deal of information regarding ancestry. Given current technology, for example, it is feasible to accurately identify individuals from populations that differ by as little as 1% in FST if enough markers are genotyped. (See discussion below for a detailed treatment of the subject.) It is also important to note that when one looks at correlations in allelic variation across loci, self-identified populations and populations inferred for human subjects using genetic data correspond closely.

In The g Factor, Jensen similarly describes genetic racial differences as differences in allele frequencies. The hereditarian approach is therefore 100 percent compatible with the latest genetic knowledge. No one thinks that races are non-overlapping essences, so it's a strawman to argue that. There's much research on the ancestry of black and white Americans, some of it described in the Vogel and Motulsky book: blacks are, on average, 80 percent West African and 20 percent European, while most whites have little to no recent non-European ancestry. In America, genetic tests can apparently predict self-identified race more reliably than self-identified gender! The fact that African Americans have varying amounts of white ancestry is a natural experiment that could be used to test the hereditarian hypothesis -- this is because genetic tests can determine the magnitudes of different ancestry components in admixed individuals (see Rowe & Rodgers [2005] in the article). Also, whether someone who identifies as black can be more genetically similar to someone who identifies as white depends on the amounts of admixture in them.

As to what most scientists in different fields currently think about the reality of race (however defined), I don't think we can say anything too certain about it. Neil Risch, who is probably the most influential population geneticist in the world at the moment, has argued that race is a useful concept in biomedical research. In psychology, even Richard Nisbett, in his recent book that Maunus so loves, says that hereditary intelligence differences between races are entirely possible (even though he argues that such differences don't exist).

Maunus, above you disputed the correspondence between race/ethnicity and genetic clusters, whereas the Vogel and Motulsky book explicitly affirms it. What are you talking about?--Victor Chmara (talk) 01:01, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

I don't know how you derive that conclusion form those quotes. I see this: "While it is an undeniable mathematical fact that the amount of genetic variation observed within groups is much larger than the differences among groups, this does not mean that genetic data do not contain discernable information regarding genetic ancestry." Which is exactly what I said above - ingroup variation is larger than outgroup variation - just like lewontin said - it is his conclusion that this means that genetic groupings based on ancestry cannot be made that is false, as I acknowledged.

I'll quote the relevant sentence again: It is also important to note that when one looks at correlations in allelic variation across loci, self-identified populations and populations inferred for human subjects using genetic data correspond closely. That is, when one considers an individual's genes as an aggregate rather than as isolated entities as Lewontin stupidly does, self-identified categories such as races correspond to genetic clusters. Moreover, as Witherspoon et al. 2007[2] have shown, when one compares a large number of markers at the same time in populations geographically separated in their evolution (e.g. Europeans, East Asians, and sub-Saharan Africans), everyone is genetically closer to every single person in their own population than anyone in the other ones. So on what do you base your assertion that there's no correspondence between self-identified race/ethnicity and genetic clusters?--Victor Chmara (talk) 02:07, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Now - you know full well that geneticists don't generally work with "races" - Vogel and Motulsky also do not deal with races or racial clusterings - they talk about populations (although some of them believe that what they refer to populations is the same thing - but social scientists know that that is nonsense). Race as a category has a lot of different variables and genetics and geographic origin is only one of them - others are social and cultural in nature. Denying the existience and validity of the humonguous body of research on race is simply stupid. I don't know what data suggests that selfidentified gender is less genetically accurate than self identified race - but untill you provide a number of very reliable quotes for that I will regard it as nonsensical hyperbole. It is very difficult to argue with you when you simply choose to dismiss and disregard the opposition viewpoint. If you were truly interested in a neutral and balanced article you would read the opposing accounts and try to integrate them into the article - currently you are denying that they even exist. As long as that is the case I don't see how the POV tag could ever be removed.·Maunus·ƛ· 01:32, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

More about the Vogel and motulsky quote: What the V& M quote says is basically that genetics is now so advanced that they can pinpoint a persons geographic ancestry very precisely - we could for example tell if a person is likely to have ancestry in belgium. This does not of course mean that belgians are a race. ·Maunus·ƛ· 01:41, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

The claims that the hereditarian IQ & race hypothesis is false because the race concept is meaningless or because genetic variation is clinal or whatever -- these are all pseudo arguments. All you need for the hereditarian hypothesis to work is that there be systematic allele frequency differences between socially identified races. That is indeed the case, and it has long been known. Playing the semantic game about the reality of race is therefore meaningless from the hereditarian perspective, as was pointed out by Jensen a long time ago.

The idea that gender is less genetic than race in America was one result of this large (N=3,636) study[3] (one of whose authors, Hua Tang, was incidentally a coauthor of the "race" article in the Vogel and Motulsky book). Neil Risch mentioned it in this interview[4]: "In a recent study, when we looked at the correlation between genetic structure [based on microsatellite markers] versus self-description [of race/ethnicity--VC], we found 99.9% concordance between the two. We actually had a higher discordance rate between self-reported sex and markers on the X chromosome!" Whether this generalizes to the entire population is unknown (and irrelevant for our purposes), but transsexualism and conditions like AIS suggest that it is possible.--Victor Chmara (talk) 02:47, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

This discussion is too much about the TRUTH, and not enough about WP:V. I agree with Maunus that the article does not express a neutral point of view in the way that it presents the debate. Too much is unchallenged or phrased starkly as to appear as truth. Lewontin's point is not generally considered to have been refuted. What we personally think here should be neither here nor there, except insofar as understanding what each piece of research actually says helps us to edit better.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 05:46, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Lewontin's argument about variability is true, but it is a non sequitur to say, as Lewontin did, that race is therefore "of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance". This is how Richard Dawkins put it in The Ancestor's Tale:

We can all happily agree that human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations. That is one reason why I object to ticking boxes in forms and why I object to positive discrimination in job selection. But that doesn't mean that race is of ‘virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance’. This is Edwards's point, and he reasons as follows. However small the racial partition of the total variation may be, if such racial characteristics as there are are highly correlated with other racial characteristics, they are by definition informative, and therefore of taxonomic significance.

--Victor Chmara (talk) 11:37, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Victor, you neglected to note what Dawkins says before that, and which is absolutely germane to this discussion: Lewontin's view of race has become near universal-orthodoxy in scientific circles. (p. 417) That is what is important for Wikipedia, not what you or I happen to think is the WP:TRUTH. If Dawkins is saying it, and he disagrees with it, it carries a hell of a lot of weight as far as I can see.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 12:00, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

• No I think the main reason stems from what I'd term the article's "dissociative identity disorder". What is race? What is intelligence? Why would the two be linked as an article topic? Is it currently a real life topic? Is there a current controversy? What positions are there in this controversy? The article's voice, the NPOV "stage" for a topic rife with divisive p.o.v.'s, the mooring in other words, or contextual anchor necessary to help the reader first fix and then relate to the various perspectives, isn't commanding the ship. This is a significant problem, and I don't mean to trivialize it with metaphors. But this topic is of a sort traditional encyclopedias don't touch and wikipedia is venturing into with a "crowd sourced voice". And this voice fails so far focusing simply on giving the reader the basics, a context, outlines and a map. Instead, the undertone is "the hereditarian---right or wrong?" While the reader is treated like an unwitting jury, without the necessary "introduction".

I realize these remarks aren't specific enough to resolve simply and neatly. But the article is being drawn to this hereditarian "view" like a ship a'storm to the craggy rocks. The article needs the dispassionate voice from above the "storm". That's not the same thing as the "anti-heretarian view" but the perch of the "dispassionate observer".

Though I don't think the article is anywhere close to NPOV yet, I don't see much value here in haggling over the article's tags. Tags are (limitedly) useful for soliciting editors to make repairs. On WP they're frequently used like WP-brand "disapprovals" or "disclaimers". I think solicitations should be placed on talk pages--and if the WP community deems article disapproval or disclaimer tags legitimate then WP should call them that. I'm much more amenable if WP encourages readers to "read this but what do we know? here are the sources we see. please do verify!" And at this point, I see the "tag" as having no value whatsoever except like a light switch. Editors acclimate and can fall asleep with it on or off. Flicking it once in awhile might wake them back up temporarily but mainspace should be devoted to keeping readers alert, not editors...imho. And this article, tags or no tags, is not providing service to readers. Professor marginalia (talk) 08:51, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

• The preceding back-and-forth was unproductive because it was premised on the belief that if one could show that "race" was a folk category rather than a natural category that it would be impossible for racial differences to be genetic in origin. That's a view some scientists hold, and other disagree with them. I'll leave it as an exercise to figure out if either group is in the majority. But the problem is that there are yet other scientists who don't care about that argument because either way it doesn't change the answer to the question of whether particular socially identifiable groups of individuals differ in a particular trait on average or the cause of that average difference. Google admixture mapping to find out more. NPOV requires all of those POVs to co-exist in one article. --Cant1lev3r (talk) 06:53, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

Factually accurate?

Are there parts of this article which are factually inaccurate? Can you point to them? Are they verifiable with citations and yet still reasonably certainly untrue? This is irrespective of any feelings about neutrality.

The main overall problem is undue weight, with the article not reflecting the balance of issues and sources that any textbook or professional's handbook on this issue would show. Many current sources are available to show how the issue is treated in the professional literature. I'll check for article statements that don't square with sources in the next few days as my work schedule allows. One rather blatant mispresentation of a living scholar's point of view stood in article text for a long time, with a misleading source (former source by the scholar, who long ago changed his view), but that was cured a little while ago by another editor's edit. I think there are still some more of those. There are a lot of unreplicated primary research findings reported here inconsistently with WP:MEDRS. Thanks for asking. I look forward to seeing what other editors think. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 00:29, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

WBB, be more specific. Highly general statements like the above are not useful. (Also, a hint: Everybody learned about your not-terribly-representative-of-expert-opinion list of sources the last one hundred times you told us about it, so you can stop spamming it.)--Victor Chmara (talk) 01:35, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

I haven't followed the above discussion but alarm bells are ringing for me about the above post. Presenting a list of sources for discussion must surely be an excellent way forward for the article. People should be discussing the quality of the sources per objective criteria independent of the sources' conclusions, e.g. academic publisher, peer review, author's qualifications. Itsmejudith (talk) 09:17, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

It shows a real serious lack of good faith to accuse WBB of "spamming" the article; since participating s/he has brought to our attention a great number of important recent works of scholarship. This cannot be a bad thing, unless one wishes to ignore recent scholarship. Slrubenstein | Talk 17:24, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

WBB has posted essentially the same message probably hundreds of times on the talk pages of dozens of articles. That is quite simply spamming.--Victor Chmara (talk) 21:59, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

Literacy and IQ

The Flynn effect and racial IQ differences could both be an artifact of differences in literacy

David Marks hypothesizes that IQ differences across time, race and nationality are all caused by differences in literacy. Intelligence text performance requires literacy skills not present in all people to the same extent. In eight different analyses mean full scale IQ and literacy scores yielded correlations ranging from .79 to .99. Racial differences in IQ and the Flynn effect can both be explained in a similar way: literacy differences across race and across time could be the cause of both. Racial IQ differences are converging as the literacy skills within two populations become more equal. Thus racial differences have an environmental cause, just like the Flynn effect. Social justice requires more effective implementation of policies and programs designed to eliminate inequities in IQ and literacy.~~David F Marks 12 .5.10~~

Your research seems to have found little support or even interest in the scholarly community so far. WP:SECONDARY requires that claims cited in articles be reported in reliable secondary sources so as to establish notability and avoid misrepresentations. The use of primary sources is discouraged. For this reason, I don't think your findings can be discussed in the article for now.

On the face of it, your thesis sounds implausible for several reasons. For example, racial differences in IQ and the Flynn effect are present in pre-literate children, and on tests that do not require literacy (e.g. Raven's tests, ECTs). Structural equation modeling studies suggest that racial differences between contemporary groups (in the US) and cohort differences have dissimilar causes.--Victor Chmara (talk) 21:55, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

Added Lede Sentences

these are on my talk page in the thread notifying me of the Arbcom involvement in this article. As noted above, I don't want to wade into the mess here, did so inadvertently yesterday, and think I may have been involved a few years ago before it had reached the current level of controversy. I don't believe the excised text is inaccurate or in violation of any wiki policies known to me and do believe that it answers the action requested by the tags in restoring balance to the Lede. That the primary variation in genetics is within and not between groups, that the genetic contribution to intelligence is multi-focal, that there is more human genetic diversity in Africa than anywhere else, etc., are all "obviously" relevant to the phenomenon in question. Lycurgus (talk) 10:40, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Noting that yes, I am well aware of the difference between genotype and phenotype, and for that matter between genetic and epigenetic characters. Nonetheless for a phenotypic trait to become associated with a physical as distinct from a cultural group it must be based on a difference in the genome. This isn't meant to encourage an immature or banned user but for completeness of my contribution to the important discussion here and so that a random reader will not assume the removed comment had value other than as venom. Lycurgus (talk) 12:32, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

Wait a second buddy. You wanted to edit war to insert this: "That there are differences in intellectual attainment between "racially" distinct populations is not disputed. However the modern scientific conception of "race", which shows that there is more genetic variation within than between race groups, casts doubt on the basis of these results.", which was unsourced, is not relevant to the phenomenon in question, and doesn't even make sense. Please stop trying to cover your ass, your pants are down, and we all saw. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.137.222.37 (talk) 14:20, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

Let me give you an example: "That there are differences in skin color between "racially" distinct populations is not disputed. However the modern scientific conception of "race", which shows that there is more genetic variation within than between race groups, casts doubt on the basis of these results." or "That there are differences in height between "racially" distinct populations is not disputed. However the modern scientific conception of "race", which shows that there is more genetic variation within than between race groups, casts doubt on the basis of these results." See how stupid that sounds? Same logic. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.40.189.197 (talk) 18:28, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

I have tagged the article with Globalize Tag...

I have tagged the article with Globalize Tag due to the primarily American View point. There is no such mention on Chinese Efforts to prove a race and intelligence nor the nazi view points in the historical. The Resident Anthropologist (talk) 00:21, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Can you provide us with sources? I did not know that the Nazis used Stanford Binet, nor the Chinese. It is hard to make international comparisons when the data is not comparable. But if you know of comparabl data or studies, please, let us know about them. Slrubenstein | Talk 00:26, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

If we can get reliable sources describing any Chinese or Nazi research agendas around this topic, we could add something. The research doesn't have to be comparable with the North American/European research, we just have to have enough to say something meaningful. It doesn't have to be good research and we don't have to endorse its conclusions. Itsmejudith (talk) 21:50, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

I think the problem is that there is too much on studies in the U.S. where historical negative social and family circumstances (IMHO) are a major factor in poor academic performance, often aligned to groups scoring less well on standardized intelligence tests, much less on studies outside the U.S.. And, as mentioned, international studies are not necessarily comparable to U.S. ones. The article should be more than Debate over race and intelligence in the United States. Or maybe we actually do need to split off such an article--that might actually improve it; meanwhile a more "global" view could focus on comparative analysis of U.S. and international studies. Thinking out loud, again. PЄTЄRS J VЄСRUМВА ►TALK 23:49, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

The only problem with splitting off Debate over race and intelligence in the United States is that protagonists come from the UK as well as the USA. Probably also Canada too. Itsmejudith (talk) 00:26, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Stop the Han Chinese edit warring

It is inappropriate and in violation of Wikipedia policies to keep edit warring like this and to keep trying to advocate a position or promote fringe theories using the encyclopedia. This text dump is also a violation of our talk page policy.

IP editor - this is not OK, and you need to stop doing this. Period.

I have blocked the latest IP address doing this for 48 hrs.

If you keep this up we will block further IP addresses if necessary, for longer periods of time if necessary, and in extremis can protect the page from editing by anonymous users.

You must abide by Wikipedia policy and attempt to get along with other editors here. This is not optional.

Georgewilliamherbert (talk) 02:23, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

I think I will add that I have this page (and others like it) on my watchlist and will instantly revert any re-additions of the material that I see. So, basic message, don't waste your time. HiLo48 (talk) 02:30, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

Additional note:

I am imposing a warning under the Standard Discretionary Sanctions finding of the Race and intelligence arbcom case against the IP editor who keeps adding this "Han Chinese" material.

For more details on the discretionary sanctions, see: Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Discretionary sanctions

To quote from that:

Authorization

Any uninvolved administrator may, on his or her own discretion, impose sanctions on any editor working on an article within the area of conflict (or for whom discretionary sanctions have otherwise been authorized) if, despite being warned, that editor repeatedly or seriously fails to adhere to the purpose of Wikipedia, any expected standards of behavior, or any normal editorial process. The sanctions imposed may include blocks of up to one year in length; bans from editing any page or set of pages within the area of conflict; bans on any editing related to a topic within the area of conflict or its closely related topics; restrictions on reverts or other specified behaviors; or any other measures which the imposing administrator believes are reasonably necessary to ensure the smooth functioning of the project.

I will be notifying the IP addresses on their respective talk pages as well.

Georgewilliamherbert (talk) 02:59, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

I think someone should look at this sequence of edits. (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Race_(classification_of_humans)&action=historysubmit&diff=404715590&oldid=404707139) (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Race_(classification_of_humans)&action=historysubmit&diff=404816678&oldid=404813601) (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Race_(classification_of_humans)&action=historysubmit&diff=404841582&oldid=404817269) (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Race_(classification_of_humans)&action=historysubmit&diff=404988075&oldid=404978372) (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Race_(classification_of_humans)&action=historysubmit&diff=405012986&oldid=405006613) Slrubenstein, Professor Marginalia and Snowded worked together to remove this editor’s comments from the talk page, even though he wasn’t making personal attacks, and the SPI about him determined that he isn’t a sockpuppet. They weren’t archiving his posts, like was done with the Han Chinese material, they were just removing them. Then Professor Marginalia reported BT35 at the edit warring noticeboard, causing BT35 to be blocked for two days.

BT35 shouldn’t have editwarred to add his comments back when other editors were removing them, but I’m also concerned about the removing. Is it acceptable to cooperatively revert a new editor’s comments on an article talk page if it’s been determined that the new editor isn’t a sockpuppet, and the comments being removed don’t violate any policies? This looks like it goes against the principle WP:DONTBITE.Boothello (talk) 23:31, 31 December 2010 (UTC)