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Jimmy Wales Responds to Holistic Healing Petition

posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:08PM   
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.

• Re:Just a wee bit closed minded? Re:Just a wee bit closed minded? (Score: 5, Insightful) by Kilo110 on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:55PM

  by Kilo110 (2853) on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:55PM (#20975)

  They likely want it on wikipedia pages so they can sell more healing crystals, eye of neut, or whatever has a 1000% profit margin.

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• Re:Just a wee bit closed minded? (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 26 2014, @12:33AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 26 2014, @12:33AM (#21254)

  Eye of newt, ball of neut.

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• Re:Just a wee bit closed minded? (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:56AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:56AM (#21389)

  Hey, Ig Nobel prize winning research shows that expensive placebos work better:
  http://psychologyofpain.blogspot.com/2008/10/ig-no bel-prize-for-study-on-placebo.html [blogspot.com]

  Ethically it might be dubious but since we're talking about scientific discourse and healing, you can see there's plenty of science to prove it that in enough cases it works better than no treatment. It may not be science or results you like, but it's still science :).

  As it is, it would be good to figure out the limits of what placebos can and cannot do.
  And what can be defined as "placebo" - does sham surgery count - it definitely makes some changes to the body: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/12/26/health/knee-surg ery-study/ [cnn.com]

  And there's also the Hawthorne effect - where people behave differently when they believe they are being observed.

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