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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: 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.