Talk:Younger Dryas impact hypothesis

Issues with Summary First Paragraph

@Slatersteven reverted my good faith edit shown in the following diff [1]

The existing paragraph:

The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis (YDIH) or Clovis comet hypothesis is a speculative attempt to explain the onset of the Younger Dryas (YD) cooling at the end of the Last Glacial Period, around 12,900 years ago. The hypothesis is controversial and not widely accepted by relevant experts.

has several issues:

• The first sentence needed at least a citation.
• The summary should first define YDIH (without stating that it is "speculative") in order to address the overall comment on the website that "This article may lend undue weight to certain ideas, incidents, or controversies.  (August 2022)" I proposed that [Powell 2022] is a good source for this and moved the text up from reference [9] to here. (The text was already in the article, I just moved it and replaced the first sentence.)
• There are many instances of refutation, and I believe that [Holliday 2023] is the best and I added a quote from the abstract. The Boslough Skeptic Magazine citation was to a list of 50 articles opposing YDIH, which I believe is not appropriate for a summary paragraph. I recommended moving this later.

References

Dmcdysan (talk) 19:36, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

I added two more sentences from the Powell abstract as well. Dmcdysan (talk) 19:39, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

@Slatersteven, I made the following changes today to the second paragraph: the first removed the citation needed template by citing Toon 1997 [2], the next [3] addition of a "better source needed" template since in general PubPeer is not a reliable source (suggested citing [Holliday 2023] instead) and the third [4] to align with the [Powell 2022] quote. In my note to this change I requested Previously I had proposed moving the quote to the first sentence but it was reverted. Please discuss on Talk page before reverting again.

Still awaiting a response to my comments above to the first paragraph where I made no changes, but I believe with the changes proposed above the summary would better achieve Wikipedia:NPOV.

Comments? Dmcdysan (talk) 19:04, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

@Slatersteven, reading over the Wikipedia:BRD policy, I propose that we move to the WP:BRD#Alternatives approach on a sentence by sentence basis for the two sentences in the first paragraph of the summary:

• "Bold, revert, bold again: Don't stop editing, and don't discuss. Make a guess about why the reverter disagreed with you, and try a different edit to see whether that will be accepted. It's often helpful if your next effort is smaller, because that may help you figure out why the other editor objected to your change."

The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis (YDIH) or Clovis comet hypothesis is a speculative attempt to explain the onset of the Younger Dryas (YD) cooling at the end of the Last Glacial Period, around 12,900 years ago.

In this diff, I provided a citation for "speculative" and propose that deleting "speculative " here and making changes that I suggested above. If you do not object, then we could proceed with:

• "Bold, discuss, bold: You make a bold edit, then open a discussion. After the discussion, you or others boldly improve the edit based on the discussion suggestions. This cycle is useful if your edit is helpful, but needs to be improved, and if feedback would be valuable to improving the edit."

Do you agree to proceeding cooperatively in this way to improve the article? Dmcdysan (talk) 17:29, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

No, I am waiting to see what others say, I am not the only person here, I objected to the edit. 17:44, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

Previous unsigned remark from @Slatersteven[5]

@Slatersteven OK, thanks for responding. Looking back through the history, I found that the phrase "is a speculative attempt" was created on 22 Aug 2022 by an anonymous IP address as shown in this diff: [6]

That anonymous user also deleted text and a reference by a renowned climate scientist WS Broecker[7] on 12 Aug 2022 as shown in this diff: [8] IMHO this is important information from an expert in the field (It is reference 109 in [Powell 2022] dated to 2013). I am undoing that change since it is separate from this topic.

Some, some questions and hopefully@User:Doug Weller and/or others can provide some advice or give some pointers:

• Do Wikipedia editors have to accept (older) input from an anonymous IP address, or can it be undone without discussion?
• If true, can such a reversion be done manually, with explanation in Notes, for example referring to this topic?

Briefly in early January 2023 "speculative attempt" was changed to "theory" and reverted back to an earlier version where another anonymous IP replaced user "speculative attempt" with "theory attempting" as shown in this diff [9] I agree with what Doug stated there in his revert, paraphrasing, look at the title - this is a hypothesis, not a theory.

Also in January 2023, @Ghmyrtleproposed alternative text:Talk:Younger Dryas impact hypothesis/Archive 4 § Opening sentence

Please look at their proposed text and comment as to whether the current text or that proposal is best for the article. Thanks

(Wasn't easy for me to find the above! Possibly there is a better way to search, I am still learning.) Dmcdysan (talk) 20:52, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia Internal Links (Wikilinks) versus Section Links

Response and questions to reversions in these diffs by @Beland [10], and @Doug Weller [11]

Searching on "inappropriate usage of internal link" I found: Help:Link § Wikilinks (internal links), which states "A wikilink (or internal link) is a link from one page to another page within the English Wikipedia ...."

Within Wikipedia, I have seen the internal link syntax used to link to a section within the same article many times, and obviously the Wiki language syntax allows this (since it generates HTML). Links within an article (implemented as a web page by Wikipedia) to other sections (HTML anchors) in the same article are valuable in at least some cases, and that is what I wanted to do here After more searching, I found the following:

Template:Slink, which states: "This template is appropriate ... to reference sections within the same article. (Wikilinks to sections in other articles appear to be used appropriately here).

In the future, I suggest not only mentioning inappropriate usage of a wikilink, but recommend use of Template:Slink.

Questions: Are the internal links in the first paragraphs of Wikipedia:BRD inappropriate internal links (i.e., links to the same page, not another)? Should a section link be used instead? Does the indirection via the redirect WP:BRB change this?

Unless I hear an objection I plan to begin using section links. I have already begun using them on Talk pages. On some other pages I am aware of, internal link syntax should be changed to section link syntax.

Comments?

Looking though all these administrative guidelines and sampling the contributions of senior editors, I have gained an appreciation for the work that goes on behind the scenes to keep Wikipedia at the level of quality it has in many articles. Than you for all that you do! Dmcdysan (talk) 17:13, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

@Dmcdysan: Normally article introductions don't say "as explained below" because readers are simply expected to continue reading if they want more information, or click on the table of contents. Typically every piece of the intro is simply summarizing more detailed information in the body, so cross-referencing in this way would lead to a lot of bloat and make article intros harder to read. If you think readers will doubt what they are reading in the intro and need immediate access to reliable supporting sources (as MOS:LEADCITE implies is more likely for controversial subjects), the most common way to do that cleanly is to add inline citations that point to the same footnotes as the body. If you put a "name" field in the ref tag like, <ref name="Bik">...</ref> in the body for the Bik paper, and then <ref name="Bik" /> in the intro, they will both point to the same footnote without duplicating the citation in the wikitext. -- Beland (talk) 23:50, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

@Beland, thank you for the response and general guidance but that was not my question. The pointer needed is not to a footnote but a section in the same article. I want to insert a link to sections on the same page (and other pages), similar to what is done twice in the first paragraph of Wikipedia:BRD as described above. This uses an internal link (wikilink), which is what had I done her: you deleted it, I added some text back trying to address what I apparently misunderstood your concern and then @Doug Weller reverted my edit because it was an inappropriate internal link (the same as used in WP:BRD).. I was trying to confirm that I should use the Section link template should be used so that you, Doug or some other editor doesn't delete the link and instead would advise the editor to use the section link. If you or Doug can provide me a pointer I can try to get the Internal link (wikilink) document revised to help make such editing consistent. Thank you. Dmcdysan (talk) 05:47, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

@Dmcdysan: I think the point is that while a link to an anchor on the same page is syntactically possible, as a matter of style they are not used in these circumstances. Internal links to other article pages are extremely common and not at issue here. Policy pages like WP:BRD don't follow encyclopedic style, and not useful to emulate when editing articles. -- Beland (talk) 06:27, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

@Beland, can you identify Wikipedia documentation for the matter of style where section links are not to be used in particular circumstances? My intent was to us this in more than the instance being discussed.

I guess I could put it in the text as follows: "these items are described in the evidence section" I don't believe it would be obvious to a reader just looking at the table of contents in this case.

According to Template:Section link it is used on approximately 68,000 pages and explicitly states: which states: "This template is appropriate ... to reference sections within the same article." Dmcdysan (talk) 10:57, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

@Beland, this page https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Links shows in the table in the Internal links section that states "If you're trying to create a wikilink to the current page, you probably want to link to a specific section or to an anchor within the page; see the examples below."

See in the table the row header "Link to an anchor on the same page" that gives an example to the section "See Also" on that page. I believe this is similar to the syntax that both you and @Doug Weller indicated as inappropriate use of an internal link when deleting and reverting my edits. Dmcdysan (talk) 11:13, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

@Beland, Here is an example of an article that is not a policy page and uses multiple such links as described above, Great Pyramid of Giza § Interior

I recall seeing it in a number of other instances as well.

Seems like technically a search could be done across Wikipedia for usages of this type of link, but I am not sure if such a thing has been implemented.

In the absence of a written policy it is unclear how consistency of this could be achieved in Wikipedia. I am going to hold off doing any more edits of this type and just type things in text until I can read some documentation regarding matter of style.

I am trying to be difficult, just get some clarity on the applicable guidelines. Thank you. Dmcdysan (talk) 11:31, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

@Dmcdysan: Text like "these items are described in the evidence section" should be unnecessary, as readers are expected to simply continue reading past the intro if they want more details. If you're worried about people curious about the proposed boundary layer not being able to jump to the right section from the table of contents, we could change the section title from "Hypothetical impact markers" to "Hypothetical impact markers and boundary layer". Or whatever other section title changes you think would be helpful to navigation.

The Help:Links page is just showing what is technically possible and how to do it; it is not part of the English Wikipedia's style manual. (As you can see, it's on a different, though affiliated, website.)

Counting the number of articles using {{section link}} doesn't tell us much; I use that template all the time to make links to anchors on other pages, which generally seems to speed navigation. I could search a database dump to see how many articles link to same-page anchors from their introductions, but that wouldn't necessarily tell us whether they should be doing that. To answer this type of question in the absence of style guidelines, I like to see what a random assortment of Wikipedia:Featured articles are doing in similar situations; these articles have been highly vetted and generally represent best practices at the time of approval (though they may decay over time).

Great Pyramid of Giza is not linking to sections from its introduction; it's linking to subsections from an image caption. I think that's actually a good use of same-page anchor links. Linking from infoboxes is also often useful to avoid duplication or to direct readers to a longer explanation of a complicated situation. Even there, it's better to link the existing words and try to avoid adding words just for the sake of making a link. Sometimes linking from the prose of one section to another section is done, but I find that's usually a sign that the organization of the article could be improved.

Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section contains the most direct advice specifically concerning article introductions that I could find in a quick search: "gives the basics in a nutshell and cultivates interest in reading on—though not by teasing the reader or hinting at what follows". "The lead should stand on its own", that page says, partly because Wikipedia articles are recycled in other distribution channels, and often truncated. If the intro to this article were to show up without the body as a Google search result, for example, or in a print version of Wikipedia, or as a transclusion in another Wikipedia article, it would be undesirable for the text to refer to later sections (whether with plain text or with a hyperlink) that weren't included. -- Beland (talk) 15:18, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

@Beland, thank you for the thoughtful response. If it's in the TOC, no need to mention it in text - got it. Changing section titles breaks other links to that anchor so in general I think that is not a good idea - I already fixed one on this site that I believe was several years old. Looking at a few instances I recall, the same-page anchor links are in the body, and in a complex article that may be warranted. There is another such link in the Giza article. The MOS lead section reference is very helpful - I had not seen that before - I will read it carefully. I believe the lead section in the YDIH article could be improved to better meet these guidelines. Adding some of your suggestions to existing Wikipedia guidelines could be helpful to other editors and I leave it to your judgment as to how best do that. I believe that I understand your comments and will take them into consideration in any future editing that I may do.

Regarding, a truncated result the print version would have the same issue for every type of link. Regarding recycling distribution channels, I believe in rendering the HTML Wikipedia resolves all links to external links (read that somewhere) and know that same-page links get expanded to a full internal link. A truncated portion of an article with a link would then take a user back to the Wikipedia site and not the recycling site, unless that site alters this (I have seen this in a few cases). To address this, an editor could make every link in a lead section external if that is a concern.

Due to personal matters, I will only be intermittently active for a few months, but I will remember this if/when I start editing again. Dmcdysan (talk) 17:09, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Section titles do need to change from time to time, and we shouldn't be afraid that they are so fragile that we leave bad titles in place. Broken section links can be automatically detected, and will eventually be fixed. If you want to fix them right away, you can check through the "what links here" page [12] or even quicker, search for such links directly: [13]. From those search results, I see that no other articles link to this section.

For print distribution, hyperlinks would presumably be stripped out entirely because paper does not do anything when you poke at it, and there's no guarantee that the article referred to is important enough to be included in the print distribution. Which is why the text of the intro prose is supposed to stand on its own.

Internal links always need to use the internal link wiki syntax because if the entire project is copied, those links need to resolve to website of the copy of Wikipedia, not the official English Wikipedia. Links that use external link wiki syntax stay the same on web sites that just copy Wikipedia in full. (Sometimes there is a link back to the source Wikipedia article for copyright legal reasons, but that's added by the copying site outside the article text.)

We can actually see content recycling of this article in action on Duck Duck Go: [14]. All the links get stripped out and only plain text remains. So when the older version of this article was live, the phrase "as detailed in the sections on Evidence and Hypothetical impact markers;" appeared on that Duck Duck Go page (if you click the down arrow to expand the Wikipedia excerpt). Which is confusing for Duck Duck Go users, because there are no such sections on that page. -- Beland (talk) 23:26, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Aloha, and Thanks for All the Fish!

Attributing topic title to this great work [15],

in order to attend to personal matters I will be only intermittently active on Wikipedia, if at all, for several months. ....pause .... waiting for cheering and applause to subside .....

Seriously though, I intended to help, but realize sometimes such statements are not well received. [16] (Click past the donation request to see content).

I tried to make an number of suggestions that I viewed as constructive to improve this article and asked if anyone one was interested - I did not interpret lack of response as WP:SILENCE and tried to ask questions in the sense "that if you disagree, the onus is on you to say so." However, before expending more effort, if you are interested in me expanding on my proposals to improve this article please let me know by a positive response over the next several months. The good news is that I have already posted many of my ideas as topics on this talk page; the bad news is that I have more ideas only in a draft state.

I have been desperately seeking reliable third-party sources (e.g., college textbooks) on this subject and will purchase them for my own education. I think citing such sources would help address the too many primary sources issue that this article has. So far, I purchased the 2021 text Vanished Giants which supports the YDIH opponent view for Late Pleistocene extinctions. I plan to cite this reference there and that may help with the large number of primary sources used there. I am still searching for other such college level textbooks and if anyone has recommendations, I would greatly appreciate that.

The following may be disturbing to some, and although not directly relevant here, before reacting I suggest recalling and/or (re) reading WP:CIVIL - I have found this to be a helpful coping method for past stressful situations on Wikipedia. Others are reading this Wikipedia article and criticizing it, for example the 22 Oct 2022 Wikipedia's bias - a case study: The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis and the related discussion starting 25 Oct 2022 at Wikipedia FTN Talk thread M Sweatman publishing a blog attacking Wikipedia and two editors. Looking over that critique and the current state of the article, not much has changed for the better. Personally, I consider some of Sweatman's statements rude according to WP:CIVIL (e.g., the comments on the Evidence and History sections) but in IMHO (IETF parlance), the critique does make some valid points that editors of this article should consider. I found this only recently after going over hundreds of pages of archives. I had already independently made some recommendations along these lines previously.

The above FTN thread clarified to me in how some ways the article has come to its current state that may actually worse than that critiqued above by deleting a number of sentences and text that stated the YDIH proponent (which at my current level of understanding is equivalent to CRG member (however that is defined)). In a number of cases, the deleted statements had little content and may have been written by an editor sympathetic to YDIH opponents and the deletion was justified. However, the result is now that many sections/ paragraphs (e.g., the summary) begin with the YDIH opponent view while the YDIH proponent view is never described. IMHO, this is a major reason why I believe the article has an even less WP:NPOV than it did on 22 Oct 2022. Through cooperative editing, I believe this could be resolved. I have little experience with WP:BRD, and see that it has been used extensively in Talk:YDIH. I found that WP:BRD does describe many optional strategies and I suggest that interested editors consider those as well. I made such a proposal in Talk:Younger Dryas impact hypothesis § Issues with Summary First Paragraph.

IMHO, there was some good discussion about reorganizing the article to list the proponent view (without undue weight) and follow it with the opponent view but no consensus that I saw. There was also some discussion about starting over on the article and rewriting it from scratch and I did see some interest for other editors in this approach. Some secondary sources have also become available and rewriting using only those could help condense and improve the article. For my own usage, I have started to do this in my sandbox, but it is not ready for review. If and when I have something worthy of your review, I will post a draft on this talk page. I can't find an official Wikipedia guideline for this, but please don't mess around in my sandbox. If you do, you will find a bunch of stuff there unrelated to this topic, but I believe that I have avoided Wikipedia:BADSAND (cool acronym) and have followed guidelines in Wikipedia:User pages so I have nothing to hide. By stating this I realize that I have opened myself up to an investigation, and if I have done something inappropriate please message me with @ so that I can attempt to resolve it and learn. Doing Wikipedia work on an iPad is limited, so I will not be able to provide a detailed response but would appreciate the opportunity to attempt a response and learn.

Mahalo Dmcdysan (talk) 19:29, 12 March 2024 (UTC)