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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 Serial_Priest on Tuesday March 25 2014, @03:44PM
The proponents of "holistic" healing are making the exact logical mistake found with creationists and religious literalists: assuming an answer, dismissing counterexamples, seizing upon relatively weak justifications, and ignoring or maligning alternative (and generally better-fitting) explanatory theories. It reflects a general weakness in human thinking: a desire for elegance, patterns, completeness. But honest scientific theories are necessarily incomplete, partial, and tentative (which is why they are so unsatisfactory to primate brains.) The key here is that there are better (more reliable, more suited to the medical and physical evidence of the universe accumulated thus far) theories for all the phenomena described by the "holistic" crowd, and that these theories (e.g. placebo effect) are already well represented on Wikipedia's extensive alternative medicine section.
Encyclopedias are the quintessential Enlightenment project - compiling the results of human experiments, exploration, speculation, etc. But they themselves are not places for "discourse" or "debate" - that occurs elsewhere, as noted above, in scholarly journals, in popular media, in the broader intellectual culture. It would be one thing if Wales was saying that all reference to alternative medicine should be banned. But all he is asking is that they be discussed honestly. The fundamentalists should not ask the encyclopedists to be their advocates.
(Score: 0, Troll) by freetown on Wednesday March 26 2014, @01:30AM
When will people stop the rubbish about theories, theories, theories. If you jump off a building, you will go DOWN. That is a fact. Why? Due to the LAW of gravity. It is NOT a theory. Just because we may not know the absolute exact definition of a law and so we then reduce it to something supposedly unproven such as a theory? This is the reason why we have bad science in certain quarters. Then there are principles which are true anytime and anywhere such as the principle of the conversation of matter. Please stop equating theories about the definition of a law to the law itself.
Since when does one pour billions of dollars into a project on the basis of a theory? No, men were sent to the moon on the basis of reliable laws, not unproven theories. Keep calling these laws theories and you get people who will be willing to risk everything on theories and those who would like to exploit them.