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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: 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 */