Mar 252014
 

Heh. So, some practitioners of “alternative medicine” petitioned Wikipedia to change their rules so that they could over-rule skeptical editors. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales responded thusly:

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.

Well said.

 Posted by at 7:55 pm