Trumpms

patent references

Thanks for the addition to the patent article and intellectual property. Just so you know for future edits, a "minor" edit means things like fixing typos.--Nowa (talk) 13:02, 16 August 2016 (UTC)

By the way, I see the reference hasn't published yet. We have to wait for that. Nowa (talk) 19:04, 16 August 2016 (UTC)

Discussion about Jytdog editing and COI

You didn't ask me any questions here - to what you would like me to respond? Jytdog (talk) 02:18, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

Jytdog: I was just about to start into some major editing and I looked back at the article log to see if you had moved the benefit text out and fixed your mis-representation of Boldrin - but realized you not only didnt do that but had just cut another peer reviewed source from the criticism section and weakened the section even more. The Barnett article you cut reviewed over 70 articles that looked at the trivial nature of IP and has been cited 43 times according to Google Scholar. This appears to be a reliable source - exactly the kind I was about to add a lot more of -- would you please explain your reasoning for weakening the patent criticism section in detail. -- Trumpms (talk) 11:12, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

Jytdog: So I just went through the edit log of this page and the Societal views on patents page - and found that your editing is almost always reducing (e.g. removing content particularly that is critical of patents). I have no doubt that you are an editor of good will - but I noticed in your COI disclosure [1] that you "work for a startup company developing drugs for acute neurological disorders..." You appear to be technically sophisticated - so I would suspect that you personally or at the very least your employer is heavily invested in the patenting process, which appears to be a COI of your continued editing of these types of articles. I recommend that you do another "Self-initiated COI Investigation" - but from my skimming of your edits I think the bias is clear. That said - I respectfully disagree with your interpretation of what to do about COI. I think you should continue to actively edit this page - and put the best possible cited arguments for the continued use of the patent system - but put it in Patent#Rationale (or even change that section title to "Patent Benefits". In addition, however, I request that you stop deleting criticisms supported by peer-reviewed articles. I think with both those actions we can make a really strong wikipedia article. -- Trumpms (talk) 11:54, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

Please read WP:TPG - article talk pages are for discussing article content. If you want to discuss my behavior I would be happy to do that, but the place for that is your Talk page or mine. Jytdog (talk) 18:24, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

I dont mind moving the discussion to either talk page - but I thought it would be more clear to do it here - the section/pages in question. Please respond in detail on my talk page so I can understand your POV. Trumpms (talk) 20:18, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

As I said above. You didn't ask me any questions. To what do you want me to respond? (btw I am watching this page and I will see what ever you write here) Jytdog (talk) 02:27, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

1. please explain your reasoning for weakening the patent criticism section in detail
2. Is my solution detailed above acceptable to you? (e.g you should continue to actively edit this page - and put the best possible cited arguments for the continued use of the patent system - but put it in Patent#Rationale (or even change that section title to "Patent Benefits". In addition, however, I request that you stop deleting criticisms supported by peer-reviewed articles.)

I don't agree that I have weakened the section. You are asking a loaded question by including the claim that I made it "weaker". That is like asking me if my mom knows I beat my wife. I also don't agree that I have a COI with regard to IP law - you are also bringing a loaded statement there as well.

My problem with edits that have been made to this article (and to many others) is that people keep bringing sources that are not reviews of the field (that are making an effort to actually review the literature and describe what views are important in the field) but instead are bringing primary sources that make arguments. As I noted on the article Talk page, there are probably thousands of articles that have been published in the legal literature and elsewhere that make various arguments about patent law. On what basis are you picking the Osborne paper out of that huge sea and representing their argument in WP?

Wikipedia is not like any other publishing site in the world - we have a strange sort of epistemology here. Please have a look at this section of my Userpage before you reply. Thanks. Jytdog (talk) 05:22, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

Your argument on your talk page is your opinion and it is wrong. Wikipedia is clearly better if more peer reviewed literature is included. Yes our best information comes from review articles, however, the second best sources are peer reviewed articles themselves. So making a statement in Wikipedia such as "Some scholars have shown x" and then citing the paper where they did it - is a good thing. The more of that - the more information in the encyclopedia. It is my opinion that every time you have deleted something in the patent criticism section you have decreased the overall information content and made the article worse. This I think will be clear to other editors, who will have to deal with your behavior. I dont believe you have made any rational arguments for proving you dont have a COI. If you dont have a COI - why dont you let other editors delete things from this section that are inappropriate. I should note that the benefits section is also rather weak now - with many claims without references -- why dont you simply work on making that better? -- Trumpms (talk) 11:17, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

Content issues

Would you please answer my question? On what basis have you picked Osborne out of the sea of thousands of articles giving opinions on the patent system (all primary sources), and what is your proposal to represent the rest of them? Thanks. Jytdog (talk) 17:35, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

Osborne article showed up on my desk and I thought it was the strongest argument to date to weaken patents. e.g. If some area of tech uses simulation to speed innovation and if cloud computing reduces simulation costs then the costs to innovate decline - Osborne has pages of such examples. If costs decline to innovate then the same level of protection is not necessary. I think it is pretty clear from his article and from what I know about technology that this is a true statement. He goes into detail on other methods to weaken patents - but I think that part is speculative so not really appropriate for a wikipedia article.

I included it along with all the others I just put in because it was a well-researched, high degree of synthesis article (it reviewed many others), passed peer-review in a decent archival journal. So my opinion is it - and the dozen or so other articles I included to provide support for a particular point were the best I could find. If you can find better ones - please include them. I think wikipedia is stronger with more references not with less. And this article in particular either was missing huge well-known claims about patents benefits or drawbacks, or had claims that were not referenced/or not referenced well. Trumpms (talk) 18:54, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

Right. It showed up randomly. And you judged that this primary source was important. That is not how we operate. We use published books or reviews by experts in the field who show they are trying to cover the ground and who teach us what arguments are important and which aren't. You are doing WP:OR by selecting source X and giving WP:WEIGHT to it. Jytdog (talk) 19:18, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

All wikipedia editors make judgement calls on what peer reviewed journal articles are the best - in this case it is a huge document - please have a look at it and the 300+ footnotes - it showed up on my desk as a soft cover book! If you can find a better source making the same value to wikipedia then add that. You dont need to agree with it. Similarly, all the other articles I included were the best ones I know of -- I am reasonably well associated with the field now- particularly after doing this editing -- and I feel very comfortable with them all with the exception of the India pharmaceutical one I just posted in the benefit section- it provided the data that another wikipedia author said was there (maybe you) but the site popped up as blacklisted -- it looked fine to me and I dont know why anyone would make up years of India drug imports data so I included it. If you can find a better source please add it. Trumpms (talk) 19:24, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

You are not listening. All the content policies urge us to use secondary sources exactly to overcome this problem. You are ignoring that. Many new editors do. Jytdog (talk) 19:26, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

And again, my primary objection is not to what the source says. My objection is to what the source is - one primary source among thousands that has been randomly picked to be described in WP. Think about the principle here. If everyone edited like you WP articles would be garbage dumps listing and summarizing thousands of primary sources. it makes no sense and fails the mission. Jytdog (talk) 19:28, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

It is very clear in the guidelines for sources that primary sources are ok if used carefully. Read it again. If you have a better source use it - or use it when it comes up. I cant disagree with you strongly enough here. I think any editor or reader of wikipedia would clearly see that I have substantially improved both the criticism and benefits section of patents BECAUSE I added the best available sources for all of the claims. Trumpms (talk) 19:32, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

You have not answered the question I have asked you several times. Why not? Jytdog (talk) 19:41, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

What are you talking about - I have answered all questions - you still have not explained how you do not have a COI if your employer depends on them for survival??? Trumpms (talk) 19:43, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

The question I keep asking, is that you have picked one primary source of thousands. How is that a reasonable way to build an encyclopedia article? Why not source 800 or 655 or 432? What is the principle that can apply to anyone who edits WP? Jytdog (talk) 21:12, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

The principle is this - when asking a question on a wikipedia article such as "what are the criticisms of patents that have been published?" - you can jot down a bullet list. Then you go through the list and make sure you have firm peer-reviewed support for each claim using the best source(s) available. When I started editing - some of the key factors were missing - such as innovation reduces innovation costs. I had just read that article among dozens of other articles I have been reading on patents...that argument was not in the page - so I added it. Since then I have added all the arguments I know of - and included the references I have read that support the claims. I did this for both the pro and the con sections. The pro section was more developed than the con -- again I contend because you have been deleting things from the con section for awhile (at least the first page or two of history that I looked at). I hardly think wikipedia is about to be ruined because people are citing things too much- I think the contrary. Trumpms (talk) 22:05, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, you really don't understand how this place works and you are insisting that you do, so there is really no point pursuing this further. Again if everybody edited like you this place would be even more full of crappy content than it is. We seem to be done here. Jytdog (talk) 22:18, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

Look - if everyone edited like you there would hardly be any content and it would all be biased. So, whomever was being paid or who had a major horse in the race - e.g. someone whose livelihood depends on a particular viewpoint - will erase all edits they do not agree with....this would be a sad wikipedia. Looking at some of the other arguments you have had in Wikipedia - it is clear many others do not agree with your interpretation. Trumpms (talk) 01:58, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

COI claim

About your claim that I have a COI. One mistake that new editors make in this strange context that is wikipedia where editors are anonymous, is to invent some backstory about the other editor to try to explain why they have a different perspective from you. Something Must Be Very Wrong With That Person! This is a very old problem here and if you think about it for a minute, something very obvious that people would do in this context. It is not how we operate here. Again, see WP:TPG and see also WP:AGF. My reason for removing content is exactly as I have said. Bad sourcing that misrepresents the field of thought. Our mission here is to provide accepted knowledge, not bits and pieces of things grabbed from here or there. Jytdog (talk) 17:40, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

Thats fine -- I guess I am still having trouble believing that you have read Boldrin and you think the main thing they were getting at is info tech....hopefully you can see the grounds for my suspicion by your aggressive deleting and that statement. Trumpms (talk) 18:56, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

I am very familiar with all the arguments for and against patents. Boldrin opens his book making it clear that he thinks IP sucks - that is the assumption he comes in with and his book is a long argument to justify his assumption. Look how he poses the question on page 3 here: "More broadly, are the two essential components of our current system of intellectual property – patents and copyrights – with all of their many faults, a necessary evil we must put up with to enjoy the fruits of invention and creativity? Or are they just unnecessary evils, the relics of an earlier time when governments routinely granted monopolies to favored courtiers? That is the question we seek to answer." for Boldrin, all IP is evil -- at best IP is a "necessary evil" and it is no big surprise that his book concludes that IP is an unneccessary evil. He is making no effort to neutrally survey the world of thought about patents; instead he represents one pole of the debate. That is not a bad thing at all - people do this all the time. But any scholar needs to understand the sources he or she is using and not act as though a reference is something that it isn't. Jytdog (talk) 19:22, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

Right - but when you edited that sentence about the book you made it say it was about IT. This is simply wrong - that was not what the book was about - it is about making the strongest arguments against IP. I think it does a pretty good job, you do not - neither of our opinions matter here. What does matter is that it is the pre-eminent source against patents and IP published - and cited now nearly 1000 times by the academic community. There is no question at all that it should be included in a section of patent criticisms in wikipedia - and that it should be appropriately put in context. Trumpms (talk) 19:29, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

The book makes a case against intellectual property. I don't care if it does a good job or not; that is not my place to judge. You again miss the point, that this is not a good source for a Wikipedia article since it is a primary source and the source itself cannot tell us how much WEIGHT to give it. A book or review article that laid out various perspectives on patent law - that aimed to do that - would tell us that. Jytdog (talk) 21:25, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

• Above you ask me to explain "how you do not have a COI if your employer depends on them for survival???". Again you are new to WP and you don't understand how we think about COI in WP. A doctor doesn't have a COI on articles about medicine; he or she would have a COI if he or she wrote about him/herself or his or her own medical practice. You don't have a COI for articles about English although you use it and rely on it, some could say for survival; you don't have a COI with regard to an article about money although you buy things every day, and one could say that you depend on money for survival.

Another confusion you seem to have, is that Wikipedia is not a vehicle for promoting any idea (see WP:NOTADVOCACY - that is policy). Another way we say this, is that WP is not a vehicle for righting great wrongs. Wikipedia describes the world that exists. The patent system exists. So our articles describe it. Our articles describe various arguments in favor of it, arguments opposed to it, arguments about reforming it or replacing it, etc. It's pretty simple. The way that we make sure that our articles follow NPOV - that they don't give UNDUE weight to one thing or another, is that we rely on secondary (and sometimes tertiary) sources created by experts in the field that lay out the various perspectives and they tell us what perspectives are important and which ones are minor. Please read WP:WEIGHT. I try to keep all the articles that I work on neutral per NPOV, and I do that by ensuring that sources are high quality, recent, secondary/tertiary sources. Jytdog (talk) 21:20, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

That is all well and good - but I think you have erred on the more aggressive for the con rather than the pro in this instance - if you just look at your negative vs positive contributions (recently) - I think that will be clear. As you are an experienced editor you know the rules well and I dont think you are applying them consistently (and I contend that is because your firm depends on patents). My firm also depends on patents to a - what I suspect is a lesser extent -- so I believe I am more neutral by default. I dont really have a horse in this race other than the fact I like wikipedia and rely on it as a first blush lit review on a topic. I want all the sources included. Absolutely more weight should go to the better ones - but there are also a lot of crappy review articles out there....Trumpms (talk) 22:12, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

If you look at who edits WP, it is generally younger white men who are IT savvy. Exactly the kind of people for whom patents are mostly a pain in the ass, who have no use for them, and unsurprisingly often don't understand them. We get shitloads of drive by editors who just add thoughtless negative things based on whatever sources their hand happens to fall on or is hyped on some blog today. So yes most of the deletions have been of "criticism". This kind of activity is one of the downsides of WP that you will see when you have been around longer. Jytdog (talk) 22:16, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

Again this is you making something up - the same young IT savy people tend to be employed by companies that live on patents -- and I also think it is obvious that it is much easier to do scholarship that supports patents than that which does not -- so I would expect the pro section to be stronger-- which it was....the only problem is the con section is unhealthily weak because of you COI and continued biased deletions. Trumpms (talk) 02:00, 21 August 2016 (UTC)