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lhsi writes:
A petition on Change.org was created: "Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia: Create and enforce new policies that allow for true scientific discourse about holistic approaches to healing."
Jimmy Wales
responded.
No, you have to be kidding me. Every single person who signed this petition needs to go back to check their premises and think harder about what it means to be honest, factual, truthful.
Wikipedia's policies around this kind of thing are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately. What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of "true scientific discourse". It isn't.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Dale on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:15PM
I like how certain groups want everyone to include their point of view in everything going on with evolution, climate, abortion, etc. However, when it comes to others wanting them to include their point of view they rattle on about free speech and such so they can continue to ignore the competing points of view.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by wjwlsn on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:22PM
Next thing you know, they'll be asking for equal time on Cosmos.
I am a traveler of both time and space. Duh.
(Score: 1) by nicdoye on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:32PM
Exactly. I'm religious and I notice all(?) religious articles on Wikipedia are presented as fact. I don't believe in homoeopathy, but others do.
How do we deal with unprovable and disputed areas of belief on a public site that contains the sum of human knowledge. Move belief to separate sections from fact? If so, where do we place theoretical physics or the Axiom of Choice/Principle of Well-Ordering, etc., etc. What if random-seemingly-insane-conspiracy-theory is true?
Many areas of history, social science and even national borders, are hotly contested. It's a can of worms.
I code because I can
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:59PM
"I notice all(?) religious articles on Wikipedia are presented as fact."
You'd need to expand on that, or provide some quotes / cites. I glanced at the Japanese Zen and Hinduism articles and saw a lot of stuff like this:
"Reginald Horace Blyth (1898–1964) was an Englishman who went to Japan in 1940 to further his study of Zen"
I don't think there's much disagreement about Blyth dying in '64, or going to Japan in '40. I also see some documentation of what various people reportedly believe.
Didn't see much along the lines of proselytizing or portraying mythology as fact.
The worst stuff I could find that might fit your definition, would be honest disagreements in opinion along the line of :
"Some of the more prominent Rinzai Zen centers in North America include ..."
I don't disagree with this particular detail, or think it a bad idea to try to categorize into more prominent and inherently not more prominent, but I can see how resentment could happen from not meeting the cutoff for being listed, or similar. And that's the worst I could find in a short search.
Even worse, I'm not religious, so I'd likely be inherently biased to search for falsehood, and I didn't find much worth noting in a short search.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by RobotMonster on Tuesday March 25 2014, @03:10PM
Can you point to a wikipedia page where religious beliefs are presented as fact?
I looked up a few (Heaven, Hell, Garden of Eden), and found them to be quite scholarly and plainly discussing religious beliefs & traditions, not ascribing beliefs as facts. For example, the page on Hell starts out "In many mythological, folklore and religious traditions, hell is a place of eternal torment in an afterlife, often after resurrection. " - it does not say "Hell is where bad people go when they die."
The page on homeopathy is similarly scholarly, and covers the topic quite well from one end to the other, from a factual point of view. (Btw, how do homeopaths wash dishes? the more they wash them, the more powerful the dirt should become!)
You'll find Wikipedia pages for lots of random-seemingly-insane-conspiracy-theories -- information about them is freely available, Wikipedia just doesn't like to present unverifiable ideas as facts.
The pages on EFT and the other topics mentioned in the petition do seem light on details about the random-seemingly-insane-theories, but I'm sure if people added more information that didn't try to pass itself off as fact, the editors would let it stay. e.g. "TAT proponents believe that pressing in this special spot and going through this verbal exercise will help you feel better" instead of "pressing in this special spot and going through this verbal exercise will help you feel better." See the homeopathy page for a good example.
To me the petition seems quite close to step 9 of How to Sell a Pseudoscience [positiveatheism.org], "Attack Opponents Through Innuendo and Character Assassination." (I found this article in the wikipedia footnotes for the Tapas Acupressure Technique ;-)
I remember the general disbelief with the idea that Wikipedia could work at all, when it was first announced way back when. Today it is a truly amazing resource, and I'm pleased that Mr Wales responded in such a blunt manner to people who want to corrupt the tenets of unbiassed accuracy that has gotten Wikipedia this far.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by nicdoye on Tuesday March 25 2014, @04:56PM
You know what? You're right. It's clearly my brain filtering out the "according to" etc. at the beginning of each article. I agree wholeheartedly with the rest of your comment.
Thank you for your time correcting me. Other people: mod RobotMonster's post up.
I code because I can
(Score: 3) by Kell on Tuesday March 25 2014, @11:25PM
It's posts like this, the "Thank you for your insights" posts, that make me glad Soylent is a thing! It seems we have selectively attracted people who want good discussion and useful debate, whilst leaving behind a lot of the trolls and partisans. Even thought Soylent is smaller than /., I feel like the quality is much higher. But perhaps this should not be too surprising when you think that the people who came to Soylent are the people who actually care about the quality of their news.
Polite debate on the internet - who'd have known?
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 4, Funny) by TheGratefulNet on Tuesday March 25 2014, @03:25PM
a simple fix would do it: anything that is not factual based should have their pages rendered with a purple background (which happens to be the exact color of unicorns). then, you'd know for sure you were reading fictional material.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2, Informative) by rcamera on Tuesday March 25 2014, @03:44PM
/* no comment */
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Boxzy on Tuesday March 25 2014, @03:37PM
This is the demand for 'tolerance' of anyone not in their religion that they be allowed to cram their belief system into science like the search for life outside the solar system, just so they can claim God did that too. Though if you demand that they include science in their unscientific beliefs, suddenly somebody is being intolerant.
These arguments are always won by the group that gets offended first and shouts loudest.
Go green, Go Soylent.
(Score: 1) by gishzida on Tuesday March 25 2014, @06:26PM
Wikipedia IS intolerant. I find that many of the pages at Wikipedia have crud edited into them which I find intolerant of my beliefs but there is no point complaining because "belief" on Wikipedia is subject to a "majority religious bias".
I myself find the "Christianizing" of Jewish belief or Jewish ideas a willing distortion on the part of the Editors. For example in the entry
Angels in Judaism [wikipedia.org] the sub-section entitled, "
Second Temple Period Texts (Not Part of Mainstream Judaism) [wikipedia.org] takes up two thirds of the whole entry and none of which has an basis in the Jewish bible. When you look at the references you'll find that at least three quarters of the references are to books which are not Jewish.
Or one could go look at the entry on Satan [wikipedia.org] where on the same page a majority rules kind of definition: "Satan (Hebrew: meaning "adversary,") is a term, later a character appearing in the texts of the Abrahamic religions who personifies evil and temptation, and is known as the deceiver that leads humanity astray. The term is often applied to an angel who fell out of favor with God, seducing humanity into the ways of sin, and who now rules over the fallen world."
Um... but then it says... "The original Hebrew term, satan, is a noun from a verb meaning primarily to, "obstruct, oppose," as it is found in Numbers 22:22, 1 Samuel 29:4, Psalms 109:6.[6] Ha-Satan is traditionally translated as "the accuser," or "the adversary." The definite article "ha-," English "the," is used to show that this is a title bestowed on a being, versus the name of a being. Thus this being would be referred to as "the satan."
The Satan of Christianity is not the Satan of Judaism yet the primary definition of "Satan" is the "Christian one". Or one might look at the Jewish definition of Messiah and then at the general definition. You will note that the Jewish definition excludes the Christian one.
These are not the only entries at Wikipedia where the "Christian bias" of the editors shows. The point is that the bias shown is that the "Christian Editors" of Wikipedia distort things in favor of their belief.
Science it its purest sense does not distort facts... except when acceptance of "new observations" counters "established science". Things which counter "established Science" tend to have an extremely high barrier to climb over. Cold Fusion, Psi, and "Unidentified Phenomena" are things which have not been able to scale those walls even when the "phenomena" continues.
One might add that Science even has its own low brow Brown Shirt Shock troops-- The Skeptics. Skeptics deny everything... and yet they too Fail at "doing science" because they use unreliable sources like Wikipedia or LiveScience [don't believe that Live Science has a problem? Go there and read their various articles about Jesus. For example this one [livescience.com]... Yup not scientific.]
The bottom line line observation from a not particularly unbiased observer is that Jimmy Wales is talking out both sides of his mouth. He finds no need to add what he considers as unscientific to Wikipedia but does not much care that the European-English-American biased "Great-White-Christian-Brotherhood" model of history and belief is the primary Wikipedia editorial line.
One can use Wikipedia but check the references carefully.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 01 2014, @04:33PM
If the article is titled in part "(Not part of mainstream Judaism)", then what is your problem with it's lack of texts from the Jewish bible? The Jewish bible, when compiled, excluded troublesome writings just as the Christian bible did. There is evidence that several versions of Torah were in circulation before the Jewish bible was settled on and alternative scriptures are historically interesting whether rabbis approve or not.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by edIII on Wednesday March 26 2014, @05:07AM
While I agree with you, on this specific issue I think it's grossly misrepresented or a typo.
I happen to believe in a holistic approach to medicine, as it's described.
What does Jimmy think? All holistic medicine is 1 part per million miracle organic compound with the rest water?
Some holistic practitioners strongly believe in a spiritual aspect that must be considered. That's not unreasonable in many cases, and can lead towards understanding in the psychological and social aspects of a person's well being.
I guess it is more often referred to as something else with a suitable term, but that doesn't change the fact that plenty of "alternative" medicine is now recognized.
Acupuncture. Shit works. If it has absolutely no benefit of any kind, it at least has the benefit of a placebo. Nobody should underestimate the apparent power of the human mind and soul to heal itself.
There are other alternative medicines that are rapidly meeting the rigorous demands of science. Chinese herbal medicine is not even close to "magic water". I've had medicine delivered to me in wax balls while in China from a herbalist that was packaged no different than medical grade pharma back in the US. It also worked well. Whatever issue I had with my stomach was gone in about 5 minutes. Took it for a few days and my stomach ailment was gone.
The US loves Chinese herbs. God knows we use enough of it stupidly via energy drinks.
It seems that Jimmy is being a bit of an ass. Not everything is magic in a holistic approach in medicine, and does pass scientific scrutiny.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by wjwlsn on Wednesday March 26 2014, @06:15PM
At the time I read it, the parent post was rated (Score 1: Flamebait). The post is clearly written in a non-inflammatory style, conveys its argument in a clear and unambiguous fashion, and is generally polite and on-topic... so why did somebody mod it down?
This is an example of shitty moderating. Maybe it expresses a minority opinion here on SN, but that doesn't mean it has no value. In fact, that's why it has value in the first place. If you don't like what edIII has to say on the subject, then post an intelligent reply that addresses the points of disagreement.
I personally am extremely skeptical of "alternative medicine" - see, I put it in quotes because I have difficulty referring to it as medicine at all! Even so, I probably would have modded this up because of its positive aspects... maybe "+1 Interesting" or "+1 Underrated". I most certainly would not have modded it down!
I am a traveler of both time and space. Duh.