Talk:Shoehorning

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It's it worth talking about shoehorning facts into articles more specifically/explicitly? Like people trying to get facts put into Wikipedia by sheer bloody-mindedness alone, thus avoiding any rules on the quality of references. I reckon it's still an important part that is only implicitly covered in the introduction. Scarlet A.pngnarchist 13:28, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Pinnacle of Shoehorning and Prophetic Nonsense[edit]

[1] This person does it all, NWO garbage, Project Blue Beam... the whole shebang!! I think this needs to be added to the links as examples of shoehorning. At least they made it look nice. AmazingS37 (talk) 22:40, 3 July 2010 (UTC)AmazingS37

Rationality vs Shoehorning[edit]

The simplest way to distinguish between rational exclusion of data and shoehorning is the application of Occam's razor. Every bit of data excluded from a description becomes an additional "entitiy" which, if "multiplied beyond necessity" violates the Razor. Scientists cannot agree if entities or assumptions should not be multiplied unecessarily so alternatively a separate assumption is made that each excluded item does not count and assumptions are multiplied beyond necessity. In rational terms, one description "shoehorns" more than another description if the complete description of one -- including excluded data -- is of greater length than the other[Related topics include Minimum Description Length/Minimum Message Length and Kolmogorov Complexity]. Note that there is a difference between imputation of missing data and shoehorning, although one may also apply similar rational criteria based on Ockham's Razor.[The aforementioned exemplar of "shoehorning" by "Sovereign Press" might be better characterized as biased imputation of missing data since they are concerned chiefly with attributes of pre-literate societies -- although to be rational one must examine how tendentious are those imputations compared to the biases imposed by the antipathy toward pre-literate societies by literate societies hence the "available data" in written form.]


Can anyone explain this in English? Scarlet A.pngmoral 10:57, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

It is pretty weird. I see that the same editor was also the last contributor to this article: Sovereign Press. Perhaps a review is in order?--BobSpring is sprung! 09:16, 5 November 2011 (UTC)
Which I have now zapped.--BobSpring is sprung! 10:23, 5 November 2011 (UTC)
I reverted back to his edits, since they're accurate and go into more detail about what the publisher's books propose. Although I tweaked the language to take out the anti-Semitic reference to "the philo-Semitic". Maybe could use more tweaking, but I'd at least let his description of what they propose stay. Secret Squirrel (talk) 11:46, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

Papacy[edit]

Would this an example of shoehorning:

In 1903 Emperor Francis Joseph got the Cardinal of Krakow to block the leading candidate to succeed Pope Leo III, which resulted in the Patriarch of Venice being elected.

From 1978 the four Popes have been successively the Patriarch of Venice, the Cardinal of Krakow, Joseph Ratzinger and Pope Francis.

I know this is 'one of those very weird coincidences.' Anna Livia (talk) 23:26, 13 June 2020 (UTC)