User talk:Neil Brick

Welcome!

Welcome to the Citizendium! We hope you will contribute boldly and well. Here are pointers for a quick start. You'll probably want to know how to get started as an author. Just look at CZ:Getting Started for other helpful "startup" links, and CZ:Home for the top menu of community pages. Be sure to stay abreast of events via the Citizendium-L (broadcast) mailing list (do join!) and the blog. Please also join the workgroup mailing list(s) that concern your particular interests. You can test out editing in the sandbox if you'd like. If you need help to get going, the forums is one option. That's also where we discuss policy and proposals. You can ask any constable for help, too. Me, for instance! Just put a note on their "talk" page. Again, welcome and have fun! Larry Sanger 20:18, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

EAS definition

Hi Neil, and welcome. I made a slight change to your definition as they are designed to be used in the context of the {{R}} template on the Related Articles subpages. FYI, so you can see the context, if I write {{R|Extreme Abuse Survey}} it will display as follows:

• Extreme abuse survey [r]: Add brief definition or description

Consequently, have the full name in the definition becomes redundant. Chris Day 04:48, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

As for getting the article approved you will need to get a Psychology editor to fill out the metadata and start the approval process. I'm not sure if there are any active ones around but you could try using the mailing list. Possibly you could post a request at CZ the forum too. Sorry I can't be of any more help. Chris Day 04:57, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

my talk

Hi Neil, thanks for the note. I'm getting ready to call it quits tonight. I'll take a look tomorrow morning. The last I saw, i was still really concerned with how the article was more concerned with the details of abuse rather than the details of the book. Do you understand the difference? It is subtle. Keep inmind, we also have a family friendly policy here as well, so some of the goary details will have to go, I think. D. Matt Innis 05:21, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. I have cut out all of the gory details and cut way back on the details of the abuse. Hope this is closer to what works.Neil Brick 05:40, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

I have made further edits to address your comments above. Please let me know if you think it is ready for main space now. Thanks. Neil Brick 05:26, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Okay, Neil, I made some changes, too. Mostly re-arranging now as you cleaned up most of my concerns. I think if you are happy with it, you can put it back and we'll let the rest of the authors go at it. We still need a literature editor to take a look at it, but as long as we don't get too much into the details in this book, I think we can avoid the psychology and health science aspects. However, I would like to see articles about all of these issues that handle them neutrally and without passion on either side. It is important. D. Matt Innis 02:21, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Your papers

Hi Neil, your profile currently states that you have "written many research papers on child abuse issues". However, I did not find any of them via a Google Scholar search for "Neil Brick" child abuse (nor in ISI Web of Knowledge). Can you thus please provide the metadata (or, better yet, links to online versions) of, say, the top five or top ten of your papers? Thanks! --Daniel Mietchen 09:48, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

quotation

It has been in one of the other article pages, where it was removed several times. If I'm wrong about this, I will apologize and remove my quote, but I don't think that I am. Hayford Peirce 19:09, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Hayford, I do not recall it ever being in any other article. Please show me where it was. Neil Brick 19:14, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Please give me a day or so to research it. Thanks. Hayford Peirce 20:04, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Sure, please let me know if you find it anywhere. I cannot recall ever using it anywhere else. Neil Brick 20:07, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Your appeal to CZ-Psychology

Hello Neil,

following up on your mail to the list of the Psychology Workgroup in which I am an editor, I had another look at your contributions to Satanic ritual abuse and think the content-based ban for this aticle is appropriate (though I noticed that Psychology is not listed amongst the three primary workgroups, and I personally think it would be more appropriate than Anthropology), since you do not seem to be willing to help the article to describe the topic in a balanced way. I hope you take this decision as an incentive to reconsider your involvement in this project. If you have an agenda, use your blog to promote it.

I also think the ban (i.e. that you are not allowed to contribute to the article but can continue to make suggestions at its talk page) should be extended -- on the same grounds of you failing to make a visible effort towards neutral contributions to this encyclopedic project -- to the following articles of yours that indeed fall under the realm of the Psychology Workgroup:

1. Hell Minus One,
2. Cult and Ritual Abuse (book),
3. Recovered memory,
4. Dissociative identity disorder and
5. Forensic aspects of dissociative identity disorder (book).

I add, for transparency, that I just changed the workgroup affiliation for the second of these, as I think this better reflects the scope of the article. You may appeal this change with an editor from the Literature Workgroup.

An encyclopedia -- and certainly this one -- is about balanced structuring of knowledge, and I would welcome your contributions to that. Specifically, this would mean that knowledge on a topic would have to be integrated with already existing content - in this case Child abuse and Child sexual abuse, which were both drafted in a balanced way.

To constables: I think the ban is handled best if you move the current contents of these articles to talk space and let other CZ contributors decide whether they wish to use any of these materials to work on the articles themselves. I also suggest that the state of these articles be revisited after 14 days, and if no contributions to them have been made during this time. They should be moved out of mainspace (either into Neil's user space or into Cold storage).

--Daniel Mietchen 13:52, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

I created the Satanic ritual abuse article and assigned Anthropology, with the thought it would cover non-religious ritual abuse. In retrospect, since memory and perceptual issues are key matters in this article, I'd certainly have no objection to changing Anthropology to psychology. Robert, I believe, is covering the religious/ritual aspects quite well. Howard C. Berkowitz 18:15, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Obviously I would disagree with extending the ban, in particular to

1. Dissociative identity disorder and
2. Forensic aspects of dissociative identity disorder (book)

I don't see how my edits to either of these articles on DID were not neutral. The book article simply has a blurb describing the book. The DID article simply describes the disorder from the majority perspective citing the DSM and Merck.com . I can try to find additional information on DID if others believe there are other perspectives that need to be included.

The Recovered memory article and the Hell Minus One article have been worked on extensively by several Citizens and were deemed acceptable by contributors.

It appears to be very extreme to extend the ban further and to move all of these articles, some with long edit histories, to talk pages.

When I started at CZ, I thought (now I know incorrectly) that I would write an article and others would add to it to balance it further. I have begun to modify my editing to be more balanced. I am hoping that if a Constable does become involved in this situation, it is one that has no opinion on the above topics either pro or con.Neil Brick 18:51, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

First, may I suggest you review the role of Constables? Editors make content rulings; Constables enforce those rulings as well as enforcing behavioral rules. You have now had specific rulings from a Religion and a Psychology Editor. While others that have criticized or rewritten have not been Editors in the specific workgroups, I would not take it lightly that several are Editors in other workgroups, have substantial experience in CZ writing, and, even though they may not be making formal rulings, their concerns are significant.

"Deemed acceptable" is a long, long distance from "approved", or even "highly regarded". I will emphasize Daniel's observation that some of this content would have been much more credible if it had been added to child abuse or child sexual abuse, rather than creating new articles emphasizing what most feel is a very specialized aspect. Further, as far as Hell Minus One and other books, you certainly should be aware that several Citizens have expressed the opinion that these do not pass maintainability criteria and, at most, should be notes in a bibliography, not full articles.

These may seem extreme actions to you, but do be aware that some of the content you have introduced, and argued at length, seem extreme to other Citizens. Extreme Abuse Survey did not help the credibility of your case. Citizendium is not and will not be a place to give "a voice" to groups; it reports information.

Neil, a suggestion: frequently, when your material is criticized, you will respond with words to the effect that you don't think it's extreme, or unbalanced, or whatever. Don't you think the critic is aware that you thought it was appropriate, rightly or wrongly, because you posted it? Repeating that you don't think it's extreme really doesn't add to discussing substance, because the critics clearly don't agree with you. Howard C. Berkowitz 19:32, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

And I have followed all of the rulings I have been given, to the letter. When told to refrain from editing an article, I have. Hell Minus One was edited by several editors until it was deemed acceptable. I did not say it was approved as it has not been. Yet it is a neutral article at this point and has significant media coverage in both television and in newspapers. The Extreme Abuse Survey was written and re-written until it was a neutral article. It was decided not to be maintainable because a peer reviewed journal article had not been written about it yet, though it had a chapter in a respectable publisher's book.

And I do believe it is extreme to lump together five articles I have started and simply state they should all be moved to talk pages and then possibly cold storage, without looking at the substantial editing history of several of them by different editors from different perspectives as well as the fact that several of them do in fact fulfill the neutrality principle at CZ. If a CZ contributor believes that an article is unbalanced, then it would be helpful to know why, then I and other contributors can work on fixing the issue.

I don't understand how my edits were not neutral to Dissociative identity disorder and Forensic aspects of dissociative identity disorder (book). The other articles I tried to add balance to, to be fair to the topic, especially Recovered memory and if any of my edits were not found to be acceptable, they were deleted and I did not restore the edits.

I am assuming that the above means that I am no longer able to edit any of the above five articles. Is there any way I can find a neutral party to appeal to, that will allow me to discuss what is going on, instead of just handing me a decision without an explanation as to specifically what I have done wrong. If not, then there is no point in my appealing any further.

And Mr. Berkowitz, in my opinion, your edits on the topics I have edited with you have not been neutral. In a way, our edits have balanced each others out. But my voice as a contributor to these articles has been effectively silenced. It is unfortunate there is no forum at CZ for me to bring this to. Neil Brick 01:54, 12 April 2009 (UTC)