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Jimmy Wales Responds to Holistic Healing Petition

posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the If-it-quacks-like-a-duck dept.

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.

 
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:36PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:36PM (#20964)

    He himself has a false premise. There are so many junk journals out there and even the ones that are respected often have an agenda. Every postgrad knows that if you do research in an unpopular area then you wont get published.

    Essentially, just because something is published does not mean that it is scientific, or even respectable, and just because journals wont publish specific works does not mean that they are not scientific and repeatable.

    I am sure you can see by the time he resorts to ad hominem that he does not care about what useful facts are, merely what his organization chooses to believe in. I suppose that is a pretty good reason to add to the pile of why wikipedia is not a valid citable source itself.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Kilo110 on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:50PM

    by Kilo110 (2853) on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:50PM (#20970)

    I like how you whitewash holistic "medicine" as simply unpopular. No, it's insane. Holistic "medicine" has already been looked into many times. It's crap. Placebo at best, outright fraud otherwise.

  • (Score: 2, Informative) by ClownFactory on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:50PM

    by ClownFactory (1874) on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:50PM (#20972)

    Wikipedia is inherently not a citable source because it is an encyclopedia.