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Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Calorimetry in cold fusion experiments

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was Delete. There is clear consensus below, both before and after the relisting, that this is an inappropriate POV-fork. Eluchil404 (talk) 01:59, 3 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Calorimetry in cold fusion experiments

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information Administrator note Reopened debate per request by User:Abd at my talk page. — Aitias // discussion 13:28, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Calorimetry in cold fusion experiments (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (delete) – (View log)

Yet another POV fork from Pcarbonn's attempts to boost cold fusion. Most of the rest were cleaned up some time ago, obviously this one got missed. See Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Cold fusion for the gory details. This gives undue weight to one aspect of a subject that is covered more neutrally by the day at cold fusion. Guy (Help!) 21:19, 10 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delete Clearly a content fork. No material worth merging into cold fusion article. -Atmoz (talk) 22:07, 10 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete POV fork. Verbal chat 22:10, 10 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete Fails WP:NPOV, redundant and biased version of cold fusion--Patar knight - chat/contributions 22:30, 10 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete POV fork. Vsmith (talk) 00:07, 11 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete POV fork. kilbad (talk) 13:51, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep or Merge This is not a POV fork and Pcarbonn, while he created the page, was not the principal contributor. There has been a continual problem with Cold fusion that reliably sourced detail has been excluded from the article because of alleged undue weight. Creating more specific articles brought back in summary style is the classic and suggested solution. The editors of Cold fusion were not notified of the AfD. I'll fix that. --Abd (talk) 14:01, 28 January 2009 (UTC) Changed to add Merge option which allows editorial consensus at Cold fusion to decide as appropriate for the needs of that article. Status quo would be Merge if claims here that the topic is fully covered in the article are true, but this leaves the material available in History for possible future use. --Abd (talk) 13:38, 29 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete Entirely a POV fork, and the material can easily be incorporated into cold fusion. This was created by an Arbcom-banned editor while the main article was locked due to edit warring, and further edited by a COI editor describing his own work. There are few reliable sources that cover the topic; and no secondary ones that I'm aware of except for a brief mention in a biased book by a CF advocate. If the article is going to be more than a couple of paragraphs long, it's always going to consist of a lot of primary papers on both sides of the debate combined with a healthy degree of OR and synthesis. There's absolutely no reason why the points can't be covered in cold fusion. You could make the same (probably stronger) arguments in favor of nuclear detections in cold fusion experiments or experimental error in cold fusion experiments. As for Abd's comment, There has been a continual problem with Cold fusion that reliably sourced detail has been excluded from the article because of alleged undue weight., this is best handled in the CF article, at the RS noticeboard, or via dispute resolution, not by creating a separate article where we hold the sources to far lower standards than we do on the main article. Besides, the verifiable material and related references in this fork are largely covered in Cold_fusion#Non-nuclear_explanations_for_excess_heat...despite Abd's claims of "exclusion" of this material, no one has attempted to add more information to this section since it was created a month ago, so exclusion is totally unproven. In addition, the topic itself is not notable as something covered in reliable, independent secondary sources. It's barely notable by its coverage by primary sources. The two redlinks above are more notable. Phil153 (talk) 14:28, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Pcarbonn was topic banned, much later, and he wasn't the main contributor to the article. Yes, the COI editor (a critic of cold fusion calorimetry) was a major contributor; nevertheless, this doesn't appear to have been controversial. However, PHil153 is correct: the decision should be made by editorial consensus at Cold fusion. Not by AfD. As an editorial decision, it can be implemented with ordinary, non-administrative process, by merger through redirection, as was done with Condensed matter nuclear science, or, in the other direction, by removal of the redirection, depending on current consensus. --Abd (talk) 16:46, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete POVFORK trying to remove criticism from the article by moving it somewhere else. As Phil153 points out, there are no independient secondary sources covering this, only primary ones. The "reliably sourced" material mentioned by Abd is actually weakly sourced material that was being piled up in order to POV push the fringe view from supporters of cold fusion. --Enric Naval (talk) 14:38, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
If the Calorimetry article is imbalanced or improper, it should be fixed, and what is significant about the topic should be in the Cold fusion article, in summary style. The topic of asserted errors with calorimetry, and the responses of experimenters and reviewers, should be covered in more detail in the encyclopedia than is appropriate in the cold fusion article. If the calorimetry article is used to "remove criticism" that would, of course, be improper, and should be fixed, not by deleting the detailed article, but by bringing back a summary that presents what's needed for the cold fusion article without excess detail. --Abd (talk) 16:39, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
But the problem is that it can't be fixed because, even taking WP:PARITY into account, you are still only left with a few primary sources and absolutely no secondary source at all. How are calibrations of calorimeters so tremendously important to CF if you can't find not one secondary source treating them? --Enric Naval (talk) 18:16, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep No idea (and I don't much care) how it got here, but the calorimetry is a crucial aspect to the whole CF story. This article deserves to exist separately for the undue weight reason already cited. Andy Dingley (talk) 15:12, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 16:28, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. The calorimetry is indeed central to cold fusion, which is why this material belongs, if at all,in the article cold fusion. In its current form this reads poorly, giving grossly excessive weight to the speculative thinking of experimenters on the fringe of the field of calorimetry. I suspect that this article was spun off because the editor who created it knew that such imbalance would not be tolerated within the main article. The issues are discussed in the section "Non-nuclear explanations for excess heat" of the Cold fusion article. Until and unless there is significant mainstream support for the field of cold fusion, this material is excessively detailed and likely to be prone to gross imbalances of treatment for the rest of its life on Wikipedia. --TS 17:01, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
If it's important then it deserves to be here, and if the quality is poor then it needs to be improved. Poor quality is rarely a justification for deletion when it could be fixed. Andy Dingley (talk) 17:20, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
It can't be fixed, that's the whole point. There aren't enough reliable sources and it's a magnet for OR and synth. Have a read of the article - what exists is speculation by a few groups, claims of refutations, claims of re-refutations and further claims of re-re-refutations. It's a complete mess and can easily be covered by a section in the CF article, where it deserves and has a section. Calorimetry is just one aspect of cold fusion - we can write much longer and more reliably sourced articles about the other redlinks I included above. Do you support forks for those as well? If not, why this one? The bottom line is that the topic just isn't notable enough or covered in enough reliable secondary sources to write a separate article about. Since noone has written about the topic or the disagreement independently, the article is basically synthing he said, she said from primary papers between heavily involved researchers. Not really encyclopedic. Phil153 (talk) 17:39, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I see you covered my objections below in your comment below at the same time I posted this. Please ignore. Phil153 (talk) 17:48, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep - This is clearly an important aspect of the whole Cold Fusion validation/refutation debate and it deserves some amount of focused discussion. The calls of this being a POV fork are ridiculous. Calorimetry is not a POV. If the current version is biased then it should be fixed, but as a topic this is important. --GoRight (talk) 17:11, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Can Wikipedia cover Cold Fusion at all?
Wikipedia has standards that are different to, albeit rarely actually incompatible with, mainstream science. Wikipedia demands verifiability and secondary sourcing, Science values truth and often accepts an idea of "self-evident truth" that is anathema to Wikipedia. With CF, mainstream science has simply abandoned it and no longer cares about studying the problem. There's truth available (accurate calorimetry discredits CF), but little sourcing for this because no one wants to work on publishing more of it. The pro-CF camp are still working away at it though, so the only WP-compatible secondary sources out there are self-selecting to be pro-CF.
So any article like this is naturally facing an uphill struggle because that's the emergent conclusion of the environment in which it's built. We can't change that much. It doesn't rule this article out, nor does it invalidate the need for this article. It does however make it particularly difficult to achieve a balanced summary from a skewed distribution of sources. I still favour keeping it, and don't let's be discouraged by the difficulty of bringing it to a state that's not a harmful bias. Andy Dingley (talk) 17:40, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete again. We have spent literally months trying to get the fringe POV-pushing scaled back, and now someone appears to be trying to undo all that good work. The topic of calorimetry in these experiments is not notable above and beyond the topic of calorimetry generallly, and the whole purpose of this article was always to act as an apologia for the failure of most scientists to duplicate the so-called "cold fusion" effect. Guy (Help!) 21:49, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Guy is the nominator, so this is redundant. --Abd (talk) 13:40, 29 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. Maybe I missed it, but I think that those claiming POV problems have not mentioned one single example of something in the article that they think needs to be fixed to achieve NPOV. As GoRight says, "Calorimetry is not a POV." The nomination statement says that this article gives undue weight to one aspect of a subject; but covering specific aspects of subjects is just what we're supposed to do per WP:SUMMARY
    This article looks to me to be reasonably NPOV or probably fixable by editing a few specific sentences if anyone does point out any POV problems.
    I would be very surprised if there weren't a significant amount of literature on the topic of calorimetry in cold fusion, since it's an important aspect of what has been a widely-publicized, controversial and intriguing topic. Here are secondary sources I'm finding from simple web searches; quotes are Google snippets:
    • [1] An assessment of claims of 'excess heat' in 'cold fusion' calorimetry Undead Science by Bart Simon, Rutgers University Press.
    • "UK Experiments using three different calorimeter designs ..." Nature: [2] Published by Nature Publishing Group Item notes: v.342 1989 Nov-Dec p. 375
    • " types of calorimeter, should all be making the same mistakes all the time. ..." The Economist [3] Published by The Economist Newspaper Ltd., 1989 Item notes: v.312 1989
    • "excess heat Harwell put in a calorimeter which was controlled expressly to be ..." The Search for Free Energy: a scientific tale of jealousy, genius and electricity By Keith Tutt Edition: illustrated Published by Simon & Schuster, 2001 ISBN 0684866609, 9780684866604 p. 134)
    • " the configuration and placement of the calorimeter heating element and failure ... Other efforts to establish the existence of cold fusion have centered ..." Greenhouse Mitigation [4]Greenhouse Mitigation: Presented at the 1989 Joint Power Generation Conference, Dallas, Texas, October 22-26, 1989 By Alex Edward Samuel Green, Joint Power Generation Conference, American Society of Mechanical Engineers Fuels and Combustion Technologies Division. Fuels Processing and Alternative Fuels Subcommittee Contributor Alex Edward Samuel Green Published by American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1989 Digitized Nov 26, 2007 ISBN 0791803791, 9780791803790
    • This snippet suggests some notability of calorimetry within the science, as I would expect: "The Calorimeter Working Group of this workshop was formed in April..." [5]Physics Briefs: Physikalische Berichte By Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft (1963- ), American Institute of Physics, Fachinformationszentrum Energie, Physik, Mathematik Published by Physik Verlag., 1991 Item notes: v.13 no.50827-59123
    • "while others have used a Seebeck or related calorimeter..." [6] Heat Transfer in Advanced Energy Systems: Presented at the Winter Annual Meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Dallas, Texas, November 25-30, 1990 By American Society of Mechanical Engineers Winter Meeting, R. F. Boehm, Gary C. Vliet, American Society of Mechanical Engineers Heat Transfer Division Contributor Gary C. Vliet Edition: illustrated Published by American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1990
    • " Williams and his team used three different types of calorimeter,..." New Scientist [7] p. 18 Published by New Science Publications., 1989 Item notes: v.124 1989 Oct-Dec
    • A skeptic website
    That's without even trying Google Scholar. This topic seems to have a lot more sources available than Mucoid plaque, which was recently kept at AfD.
    In its current state, the article seems to be largely duplicating the topic of a section of the cold fusion article, and if that were all it were ever going to contain, it could perhaps be merged into that article if there's room to expand the section there (since I think it does have some interesting detail not present in the other article); but better would be to expand this article. I would like to see more information: what are the particular characteristics of the different calorimeters? What is a typical estimate of experimental error in the heat measurements, for each type of calorimeter, and how does it compare to the amount of excess heat reported? What are the sources of experimental error (for example, is some heat lost through the thermometer itself)? What are the calorimeters made of and what do they look like? What steps are taken to reduce experimental error? Let's keep and expand this article, and write some more articles on other specific aspects of the "cold fusion" phenomenon (or alleged phenomenon or "condensed matter nuclear science" or whatever such experiments are called these days). ☺Coppertwig (talk) 20:26, 31 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    The POV problems can be summarised as WP:WEIGHT. Various interpretations are attached to the calorimetry of a series of experiments, many of which have not proven replicable. There is already coverage in cold fusion where the measurements are covered in context, and this can be extended if needed. This article will almost inevitably misrepresent the significance of these isolated experiments to the field of calorimetry. --TS 20:45, 31 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The links you cite aren't about the topic of the article, any more than they are about excess heat in cold fusion experiments. Much of what you've mentioned belongs in a general article on calorimetry or calorimeter accuracy, should Wikipedia choose to delve that deeply into a technical topic. The stuff that relates to cold fusion is perfectly well kept in the cold fusion article. Do you also support the following articles? nuclear detections in cold fusion experiments, experimental error in cold fusion experiments, reproducibility in cold fusion experiments, transmutation in cold fusion experiments, theoretical issues in cold fusion experiments, excess heat in cold fusion experiments? I ask because I'm not understanding your rationale for this particular article, when the other forks can be longer, better sourced, just as "interesting" and certainly as notable (with the exception of maybe transmutation). This is what JzG is talking about when he calls this a POV fork designed to give undue weight to one particular aspect of cold fusion where primary research and opinion rules and little verifiable has been written. Phil153 (talk) 20:54, 31 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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