Talk:Graham Hancock

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Q1: Why does the article say that Hancock's ideas are pseudoscientific?

A1: Hancock has written numerous books and has made television documentaries, but does not submit his work for peer review in mainstream academic journals. Wikipedia articles are based on reliable secondary sources and do not present theories as valid if they are not supported by experts in the relevant field. When Hancock's work was examined by mainstream archaeologists for the BBC's Horizon documentary series in 1999, academics were critical of aspects of his work, and after a complaint by Hancock and Robert Bauval, the Broadcasting Standards Commission found only one point of unfairness in the documentary.[1] Hancock has ample opportunities to promote his work through his own channels, but it is not the job of Wikipedia to right great wrongs. Unless his work undergoes peer review and is accepted in the academic community, it cannot be presented as having equal validity to work that has undergone peer review.

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Semi-protected edit request on 18 December 2024 (2)

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My request is simple.....this page is not objective.. Graham Hancock is a journalist..the description of him as a pseudoscientist begins the article with an overt bias....whatever he believes or advocates should be described before critiques are ordered below in a criticisms section...to begin by discrediting him renders the article 'pseudoencyclopedic' The page is more polemic than description or evaluation there is a dangerous misuse of narratives attempting to connect Mr Hancock with racism while there is absolutely no evidence to support such a conclusion. Whoever wrote this page did not do so in the spirit of the philosophy of science. I do not want to edit this page personally I want someone to ammend it accordingly. 81.132.255.64 (talk) 23:50, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. The "pseudoscientific" adjective on the opening sentence references two sources (the inline citations "^[2]^[3]") and reflects the Pseudoarchaeology section, which has even more sources. ObserveOwl 🎄 (talk) 00:42, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It is clear what is needed. A true description of Graham Hancock would first state that he is a journalist with an interest in history. This article is clearly not objective. 82.3.116.244 (talk) 09:50, 11 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A shame then that he ignores actual history. Slatersteven (talk) 10:43, 11 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia doesn't exist to debate the merits of certain ideas, and we're not here to write opinion pieces. We're here to summarise what reliable, independent sources have to say about a subject, and it's out of our hands that the overwhelming majority of reliable, independent sources discussing Hancock do so in the context of calling his ideas pseudoscience and explaining why. The concept of independent sources is straightforward, but here is our guideline on reliable sources if you want to know how we're supposed to determine reliability. On the most extreme end of things, we call Time Cube pseudoscience in the lead sentence too, simply because that's what reliable, independent sources have to say about it. Again, on the most extreme end, if multiple peer-reviewed academic journals started publishing papers seeking to create a theory of quantum gravity with the Time Cube as a basis, the lead would change substantially. I use this not to even remotely compare Hancock's lost civilisation with the Time Cube but to say that even an idea far more dismissed than Hancock's could see favorable representation on Wikipedia with the support of reliable, independent sources. This isn't meant to be facetious or dismissive: the way to get the Wikipedia article changed is to seek out evidence, decipher what this evidence is supposed to mean in relation to the current body of evidence, and publish it in a peer-reviewed journal. This isn't a "whoever that one editor is, grrr", the article was written collectively by nearly 200 editors. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 17:25, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Civilization vs Civilisation

The article appears to change between the spelling "civilization" and the spelling "civilisation", with about 45 instances of "ize" and about 10 of "ise" (please see MOS:IZE and MOS:ISE and Mos Eisley for context (last one is facetious)). I think these should be unified to to "civilization" for the following two reasons: 1) this article is about Graham Hancock. He grew up in the UK, he was educated in the UK, he spent his early career writing in UK newspapers, and to my understanding, he's continued to reside in the UK. British English appears to be split on "ise" and "ize", and so like "ise", this spelling would align with the article's subject. 2) it's already the vastly dominant version in the article. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 18:45, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I looked back to the original version and it used -ize in the examples I could see. It was then deleted as it was a copyright violations. I guess it might have been written using Oxford spelling, but there isn't any indication this was the case. I see no problem with changing this to British English spelling for the reasons pointed out by @TheTechnician27 above. Knitsey (talk) 18:57, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Personally, I'm a -ise person in British English; synthesiser looks ok, synthesizer looks more like American English. However, -ize spellings are allowed in British English. Whatever, there should be consistency in the article. By the way, Kenneth Clark's 1969 television documentary was called Civilisation, because -ize spellings were less common back then.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 19:04, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"The Last Ice Age"

Throughout the article, we call the Last Glacial Period (LGP) the "last ice age" or the "last Ice Age". Colloquially, the so-called "end of the ice age" is conflated with the end of the LGP, but in reality, Earth is still in the Late Cenozoic Ice Age. This isn't in dispute, and this is widely understood among archaeologists and geologists. Per WP:MTAU, we should make technical subjects understandable, but we should also avoid so-called "lies-to-children", which are oversimplifications for the sake of understanding. In reality, the real "last ice age" is the Karoo Ice Age – so it's not just that "last ice age" is incorrect but that it in fact refers to an entirely different period if used correctly. I personally think we should find a way to use more accurate terminology and find an effective way to convey this to the reader at the beginning, perhaps through an explanatory footnote. I really don't think this is pedantry. Saying that the ice age is over is outright and substantial misinformation, and not in a way that simplified but "accurate enough for most purposes" models like Rutherford–Bohr, Newton's laws, Arrhenius acids and bases, and the non-differential equation for a pendulum's motion are.

I'm going to try and see how it shakes out. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 21:09, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Academics somewhat regularly use "last ice age" with the meaning "Last Glacial Period" [2]. There's no need to be a pedant about it. Hemiauchenia (talk) 21:26, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, as long as the reliable sources use it that way, seems fine. Appreciate it. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 21:48, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]