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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, 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.