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"Kafka trap" listed at Redirects for discussion
An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Kafka trap and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 July 1#Kafka trap until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. — Guarapiranga ☎ 00:15, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
"Kakfatrapping"
Edit in question (diffs): Kafkatrapping – a sophistical rhetorical device in which any denial by an accused person serves as evidence of guilt.[1][2][3]
@Guarapiranga: you have restored this entry to this article despite not finding any appropriate sources for it. The three citations you give are to opinion pieces in non-scholarly media. I don't think any is a source suitable for Wikipedia. Reading any more of the text should have thrown up red flags. The second link is an opinion piece, dismissing whole fields of scholarly research, in something called the "Financial Post". If you think this is at all appropriate as a source for Wikipedia, you need to go back to basics and learn about Wikipedia's requirements for reliable sourcing. You need to learn that there are people who have a problem with legitimate scholarship and will try to deny it, and there are publication venues that will air those opinions; it doesn't mean we on Wikipedia have to treat their opinions as knowledge. If these three junk citations are all that you've come up with after a thorough search for the term "Kafkatrapping", and there's no mention in the literature on reasoning and fallacies, then the sensible conclusion is that "Kafkatrapping" is not an established logical fallacy. The entry needs to disappear from the list. MartinPoulter (talk) 12:18, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
you have restored this entry to this article despite not finding any appropriate sources for it.
I did it bc you said you removed the entry bc you deemed the ref therea junk site
. I thought the additional refs sorted the sourcing problem.The three citations you give are to opinion pieces in non-scholarly media.
Not only scholarly media are deemed RS at WP, and not all is either. In fact, most RS are not scholarly, and most scholarly media are not RS. Further, plenty of content on WP is backed up by opinion pieces, if published by RS, and that's backed up by the very policy you cited (did you learn it?):
The ref you deemedArticles should be based on reliable, independent, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. This means that we publish only the analysis, views, and opinions of reliable authors (WP:REPUTABLE)
a junk site
in the entry you removed was authored by Wendy McElroy, who is at least notable enough to have her own WP article.I don't think any is a source suitable for Wikipedia.
What we, as editors, think of the sources is pretty much irrelevant before the criteria you yourself linked.The second link is an opinion piece, dismissing whole fields of scholarly research, in something called the "Financial Post". If you think this is at all appropriate as a source for Wikipedia, you need to go back to basics and learn about Wikipedia's requirements for reliable sourcing.
The source of an opinion piece—which again, as aforementioned, is not excluded from WP:RS—is its author, which in this case is Bruce Pardy, professor of law at Queen’s University in Canada and Senior Fellow with the Fraser Institute.- The 3rd ref I cited, which you didn't address, is penned by Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass, professor of economics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, co-director of the Institute for Communities and Wildlife in Africa and founding director of the Centre for Social Science Research, and also notable enough to have its own WP article.
- @Guarapiranga: That you think we should treat opinions as reliable because their author has a Wikipedia article, or because they founded something that has a Wikipedia article, shows some sort of misunderstanding. That you seem to think Wikipedia's mission is to aggregate views and opinions is also a red flag. It's very strange to see these arguments being used in a Wikipedia discussion on reliable sources. There is a specific section of the RS guidance on op-eds that distinguishes editorials and op-eds from factual content, the former being "rarely reliable for statements of fact". That you have three op-eds, and that some authors have academic posts in other fields, doesn't improve the situation. The policy is quite clear that opinion pieces in newspapers can't be used for statements of fact which is how you have used them. In the quote you yourself provided, it states that reliable sources have "a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy". What kind of fact-checking do you think is applied to op-eds in these publications?
- Let's also talk about the disconnect between the topic of the sources and the use to which you put them. There is a huge literature of books, journals and even specialist databases that deal with fallacies: you haven't been able to find any mention in that literature, so you go to academics in law, economics, and... somebody who has written some books. If the author is an expert, but not in the relevant topic, then their opinion is irrelevant to establishing fact for Wikipedia. If you're using the person's expertise rather than the venue of publication to establish reliability, then note "Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established expert on the subject matter, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications".
- Note also that two of your three sources don't even describe Kafkatrapping as a fallacy. MartinPoulter (talk) 20:31, 6 July 2022 (UTC)
- I've posted on the Reliable Sources Noticeboard, hoping to get a third perspective. MartinPoulter (talk) 20:37, 6 July 2022 (UTC)
- You'll get more people willing to help if you post the sources and edit in question at the top of your informal-rfc. I took the liberty. First off, informal fallacies are generally stupid silly rhetorical nonsense that nobody seriously cares about. Fallacies like all the ones having to do with being a stupid jerk are a socio-linguistic phenomenon, not a logical/formal one, so having "expertise" on the subject enough to coin a new fallacy is really just a matter of being popular. And since we're not a WP:CRYSTALBALL, if a few isolated people insist on using this term and there's no evidence of it breaking into the mainstream, I don't see why it should go into an "informal" list like this. I did find a few more mentions of it, including its supposed origins in a 2010 blog post.[4] Then there's James Lindsay[5] and Robin DiAngelo[6] of the alt-Right who feature the term in their respective anti-CRT books. The politics itself doesn't really matter here – Burke writes the criticism of DiAngelo's book, and is also quoted in the Maverick article above for an earlier article in which Burke says DiAngelo herself makes the kafkatrap fallacy, among others. If there's evidence this particular argument of the debate were popular that would be one thing, but apart from this insular group of people yelling at each other about the issue of the month and using each other's terminology against each other, I'm not sure the term "kafkatrap" has gotten any traction elsewhere. I should note one of the New Discourses blog posts links the Wiktionary definition, which was made in 2018 (so predating all this crap). WP:CITOGENESIS should always be a potential concern, including when Wikipedia gives its seal of authority on some insignificant transient fad with its inclusion in a silly list like this.
- My point should be obvious by now. Cut the chaff. And if it's not in OED it shouldn't even by on Wiktionary IMO – we're not UrbanDictionary. SamuelRiv (talk) 04:46, 7 July 2022 (UTC)
- FYI, "something called the "Financial Post" was Canada's major financial newspaper, before it was transformed into the National Post. I would avoid the argument "Well I've never heard of it so it can't be a reliable source." TFD (talk) 01:56, 8 July 2022 (UTC)
References
- ^ McElroy, Wendy (14 August 2014). "Beware of Kafkatrapping". The Daily Bell. Archived from the original on 19 February 2018. Retrieved 18 February 2018.
- ^ Pardy, Bruce (26 June 2020). "Apocalyptic science: How the West is destroying itself". Financial Post. Archived from the original on 12 May 2022. Retrieved 1 July 2022.
- ^ Nattrass, Nicoli; Seekings, Jeremy (25 September 2020). "OPINIONISTA: UCT 'says no to non-racialism': A Freudian slip, or an embracing of the cult of 'anti-racism'?". Archived from the original on 2022-06-28. Retrieved 2022-07-01.
- ^ Raymond, Eric (2010-07-18). "Kafkatrapping". Armed and Dangerous. Cited in Currie-Knight, Kevin (2021-02-01). "The Kafkatrap". The Electric Agora.
- ^ Harper, Thomas (2022-03-18). "'Race Marxism' by James Lindsay – Summary and Review".
- ^ Burke, David (2020-06-14). "The Intellectual Fraud of Robin DiAngelo's 'White Fragility'". New Discourses.