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>Whereas Wikipedia used to normalize and lend credence to pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and fringe rhetoric, it has over time become firmly anti-pseudosci

by z7 3y ago

>Whereas Wikipedia used to normalize and lend credence to pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and fringe rhetoric, it has over time become firmly anti-pseudoscience and anti-conspiracy theories. Okay, so before the mid-20th century Wikipedia would have categorized the concept of plate tectonics as pseudoscience. Consensus doesn't mean truth. Today's conspiracy theory could be tomorrow's government press release. Being firmly anti-pseudoscience and anti-conspiracy theory and anti-fringe might not be the best heuristic for discovering the truth.

vasco 3y ago
Wikipedia's articles can be updated along with scientific progress. Wikipedia would only be in trouble if they held articles back compared to contemporaneous scientific knowledge. Not sure what your point is other than that scientific progress is a thing and consensus on how things work evolves over time as we figure things out.
altcognito 3y ago
> Okay, so before the mid-20th century Wikipedia would have categorized the concept of plate tectonics as pseudoscience. So just throw all theory/hypothesis in the same bucket because one might be true? You can't cherry pick one thing that happened to be true and say "it is wrong to label that pseudoscience" There are a lot of bad theories and hypothesis out there. Clathrate gun hypothesis is just that, and should be labeled as such.
bigger_inside 3y ago
and this, exactly, is why I scoffed when I read the headline touting wikipedia as the "last good place" on the internet. It's become a defender of hegemonic status quo narratives. I read wikipedia articles about phenomena my academic discipline is involved with and I keep thinking, "why do they still push that as true? This is ridiculous" about every time I log in. But it serves hegemonic knowledge production,so it's in there, and we now know the effort the US government is making to make sure its viewpoint gets shown as "true". It's disgusting at times.
- drawkward 3y ago
  How do you feel about science? How is science different than Wikipedia? The scientific method is just a method for taking down hegemonic statuses quo, and honestly, doesn't seem that different from how Wikipedia works.
Sharlin 3y ago
They laughed at Semmelweis, they laughed at Wegener, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. One of these is not like the others! The plate tectonics hypothesis was criticized because there was no known mechanism for how continental plates could drift. Until that mechanism was understood, it was perfectly good science to be critical of Wegener's hypothesis, and a Wikipedia of that time would have been entirely correct to document the hypothesis as controversial. Hindsight is 20:20. It's also very much not an encyclopedia's job to try to discover the "truth", whatever that means! Its job is explicitly to document current consensus understanding, however flawed that might be. Trying to figure out the "truth" is very much above Wikipedia editors' pay grade. Pseudoscience and conspiracy theories are something entirely different from simply proposing hypotheses that might not be backed by currently available evidence, and it's incredibly fallacious and dangerous to try to equate homeopathy or flat-Earthism or climate change denial with something like hand hygiene or plate tectonics.
thinkingtoilet 3y ago
To your last point, I think this is something people get confused about. I think no reasonable person says science is always right and there is never any corruption in the process. Science is done by humans and humans are fallible. The argument is that science is the best we have, not that it's perfect. One thing I see with 100% of conspiracy theorists is that they have no self-awareness of when they're wrong. They will believe 1000 things and when 1 of them turns out to be true, they both think it validates the other 999 and will never consider they were perhaps right for the wrong reasons. My point is that, as you say, "Being firmly anti-pseudoscience and anti-conspiracy theory and anti-fringe might not be the best heuristic for discovering the truth", but it's the best we have. I'll also paraphrase one more quote that I heard from the great Tim Minchin, but he didn't know who to credit it to, "if you open your mind too much, your brain will fall out".
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  But who gets to decide what stays on and what gets deleted? Does the tectonic plate theory stay on wikipedia, or do we delete it, since it's just a conspiracy theory (let's say we flew back in time a bit)? What about epsteins "suicide"? Would an articl about "heart problems as covid vaccine side-effect" stay on wikipedia a year and a half ago, or would it get deleted? In hindsight, it's easy... but who gets to decide about the 'now'?
  - jl6 3y ago
    Wikipedia editors are supposed to evaluate what the consensus of reliable sources is, and report that. So there's a second-order game being played around what counts as a reliable source.
  - thinkingtoilet 3y ago
    There is no answer that will satisfy everyone. In fact, there is no Right(TM) answer. The answer is the people who put in the effort to make wikipedia and the processes they've developed. Wikipedia isn't a right we're owed. It's done be people and those people make the choices and I can guarantee you they will make wrong choices at times. What I don't like is the attitude some have, not necessarily you, where it's either "this isn't perfect so it's all bad!" or "they were wrong about this one thing, therefore they are wrong about everything that I disagree with them on". We're humans. We're trying. And I believe most people there are doing it in good faith. That's literally the best we can do.
allturtles 3y ago
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, whose goal is to capture the consensus state of knowledge at a particular point in time. An encyclopedia that only captures "the truth" is an impossibility. No one has direct access to the truth. So I'm not sure what you're proposing as an alternative.
marcosdumay 3y ago
Here an example of a theory that current practitioners will just plainly call pseudo-science (and is very likely wrong): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics If anything, my criticism of this article is that the first few paragraphs don't explain how fringe it is. (And I'm firmly on the opinion that working on it is important, because it's the only path out of the almost disproved box that we have.)
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  All theories are wrong. Some are wronger than others.
pvg 3y ago
Wikipedia is supposed to represent current consensus so that's not a particularly strong critique of an encyclopedia. When the current consensus is wrong, Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, will be wrong.
brlewis 3y ago
Wikipedia is a repository for established truth, not for discovering truth. For discovering truth you have https://www.kialo.com/ https://www.kialo.com/ and the one I'm working on, https://en.howtruthful.com/ https://en.howtruthful.com/ but I've only in the past 2 weeks been able to work on it full-time.
babypuncher 3y ago
"Current consensus" is the closest thing we can even pretend to be "the truth" on complex scientific topics. If Wikipedia existed in its current form in the mid-20th century, it would have dismissed plate tectonics. But, importantly, as the scientific consensus evolved, so would Wikipedia's stance on the theory. This is the key difference between science/academia and politics/religion. The former changes with new evidence while the latter doubles down in the face of it.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
shadowgovt 3y ago
> Consensus doesn't mean truth. That's true, but it's fine if Wikipedia, not being able to discern truth and falsehood as "a collection of people arguing online about stuff," uses consensus as a low-resolution proxy. It's the best tool they have given their circumstances. > Today's conspiracy theory could be tomorrow's government press release But it usually isn't, which is why consensus works as a pretty good low-resolution proxy for truth.
- imadierich 3y ago
  [dead]
Mr_Minderbinder 3y ago
>Okay, so before the mid-20th century Wikipedia would have categorized the concept of plate tectonics as pseudoscience. I am almost certain they would of. The "fringe" and "pseudoscience" labels are used much more broadly on Wikipedia then one might expect. I have seen a Palestinian scholar, whose research went against the prevailing Euro-centric Western view, labelled as "fringe" on Wikipedia even though it was being published by UNESCO and Cambridge University Press and he was by every metric a mainstream academic. The main editor's critique of his work was mainly ad-hominem and that it hadn't been acknowledged or "approved" by Western scholars. He didn't seem interested in verifying the texts that he cited and quoted; texts that the previous scholars were ignorant of. This was simply a case of a likely correct but minority view that was also difficult for an English speaking Westerner to verify, as the cited works were obscure and written in the 9th/10th century in Arabic. One of the few known manuscripts was located in a religious building in Turkey and not known to be available online in either scanned or transcribed form.

by z7 3y ago

vasco 3y ago

Wikipedia's articles can be updated along with scientific progress. Wikipedia would only be in trouble if they held articles back compared to contemporaneous scientific knowledge. Not sure what your point is other than that scientific progress is a thing and consensus on how things work evolves over time as we figure things out.

altcognito 3y ago

> Okay, so before the mid-20th century Wikipedia would have categorized the concept of plate tectonics as pseudoscience. So just throw all theory/hypothesis in the same bucket because one might be true? You can't cherry pick one thing that happened to be true and say "it is wrong to label that pseudoscience" There are a lot of bad theories and hypothesis out there. Clathrate gun hypothesis is just that, and should be labeled as such.

bigger_inside 3y ago

and this, exactly, is why I scoffed when I read the headline touting wikipedia as the "last good place" on the internet. It's become a defender of hegemonic status quo narratives. I read wikipedia articles about phenomena my academic discipline is involved with and I keep thinking, "why do they still push that as true? This is ridiculous" about every time I log in. But it serves hegemonic knowledge production,so it's in there, and we now know the effort the US government is making to make sure its viewpoint gets shown as "true". It's disgusting at times.

drawkward 3y ago
How do you feel about science? How is science different than Wikipedia? The scientific method is just a method for taking down hegemonic statuses quo, and honestly, doesn't seem that different from how Wikipedia works.

Sharlin 3y ago

They laughed at Semmelweis, they laughed at Wegener, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. One of these is not like the others! The plate tectonics hypothesis was criticized because there was no known mechanism for how continental plates could drift. Until that mechanism was understood, it was perfectly good science to be critical of Wegener's hypothesis, and a Wikipedia of that time would have been entirely correct to document the hypothesis as controversial. Hindsight is 20:20. It's also very much not an encyclopedia's job to try to discover the "truth", whatever that means! Its job is explicitly to document current consensus understanding, however flawed that might be. Trying to figure out the "truth" is very much above Wikipedia editors' pay grade. Pseudoscience and conspiracy theories are something entirely different from simply proposing hypotheses that might not be backed by currently available evidence, and it's incredibly fallacious and dangerous to try to equate homeopathy or flat-Earthism or climate change denial with something like hand hygiene or plate tectonics.

thinkingtoilet 3y ago

To your last point, I think this is something people get confused about. I think no reasonable person says science is always right and there is never any corruption in the process. Science is done by humans and humans are fallible. The argument is that science is the best we have, not that it's perfect. One thing I see with 100% of conspiracy theorists is that they have no self-awareness of when they're wrong. They will believe 1000 things and when 1 of them turns out to be true, they both think it validates the other 999 and will never consider they were perhaps right for the wrong reasons. My point is that, as you say, "Being firmly anti-pseudoscience and anti-conspiracy theory and anti-fringe might not be the best heuristic for discovering the truth", but it's the best we have. I'll also paraphrase one more quote that I heard from the great Tim Minchin, but he didn't know who to credit it to, "if you open your mind too much, your brain will fall out".

ajsnigrutin 3y ago
But who gets to decide what stays on and what gets deleted? Does the tectonic plate theory stay on wikipedia, or do we delete it, since it's just a conspiracy theory (let's say we flew back in time a bit)? What about epsteins "suicide"? Would an articl about "heart problems as covid vaccine side-effect" stay on wikipedia a year and a half ago, or would it get deleted? In hindsight, it's easy... but who gets to decide about the 'now'?
- jl6 3y ago
  Wikipedia editors are supposed to evaluate what the consensus of reliable sources is, and report that. So there's a second-order game being played around what counts as a reliable source.
- thinkingtoilet 3y ago
  There is no answer that will satisfy everyone. In fact, there is no Right(TM) answer. The answer is the people who put in the effort to make wikipedia and the processes they've developed. Wikipedia isn't a right we're owed. It's done be people and those people make the choices and I can guarantee you they will make wrong choices at times. What I don't like is the attitude some have, not necessarily you, where it's either "this isn't perfect so it's all bad!" or "they were wrong about this one thing, therefore they are wrong about everything that I disagree with them on". We're humans. We're trying. And I believe most people there are doing it in good faith. That's literally the best we can do.

allturtles 3y ago

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, whose goal is to capture the consensus state of knowledge at a particular point in time. An encyclopedia that only captures "the truth" is an impossibility. No one has direct access to the truth. So I'm not sure what you're proposing as an alternative.

marcosdumay 3y ago

Here an example of a theory that current practitioners will just plainly call pseudo-science (and is very likely wrong): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics If anything, my criticism of this article is that the first few paragraphs don't explain how fringe it is. (And I'm firmly on the opinion that working on it is important, because it's the only path out of the almost disproved box that we have.)

denton-scratch 3y ago
All theories are wrong. Some are wronger than others.

pvg 3y ago

Wikipedia is supposed to represent current consensus so that's not a particularly strong critique of an encyclopedia. When the current consensus is wrong, Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, will be wrong.

brlewis 3y ago

Wikipedia is a repository for established truth, not for discovering truth. For discovering truth you have https://www.kialo.com/ https://www.kialo.com/ and the one I'm working on, https://en.howtruthful.com/ https://en.howtruthful.com/ but I've only in the past 2 weeks been able to work on it full-time.

babypuncher 3y ago

"Current consensus" is the closest thing we can even pretend to be "the truth" on complex scientific topics. If Wikipedia existed in its current form in the mid-20th century, it would have dismissed plate tectonics. But, importantly, as the scientific consensus evolved, so would Wikipedia's stance on the theory. This is the key difference between science/academia and politics/religion. The former changes with new evidence while the latter doubles down in the face of it.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

shadowgovt 3y ago

> Consensus doesn't mean truth. That's true, but it's fine if Wikipedia, not being able to discern truth and falsehood as "a collection of people arguing online about stuff," uses consensus as a low-resolution proxy. It's the best tool they have given their circumstances. > Today's conspiracy theory could be tomorrow's government press release But it usually isn't, which is why consensus works as a pretty good low-resolution proxy for truth.

imadierich 3y ago
[dead]

Mr_Minderbinder 3y ago

>Okay, so before the mid-20th century Wikipedia would have categorized the concept of plate tectonics as pseudoscience. I am almost certain they would of. The "fringe" and "pseudoscience" labels are used much more broadly on Wikipedia then one might expect. I have seen a Palestinian scholar, whose research went against the prevailing Euro-centric Western view, labelled as "fringe" on Wikipedia even though it was being published by UNESCO and Cambridge University Press and he was by every metric a mainstream academic. The main editor's critique of his work was mainly ad-hominem and that it hadn't been acknowledged or "approved" by Western scholars. He didn't seem interested in verifying the texts that he cited and quoted; texts that the previous scholars were ignorant of. This was simply a case of a likely correct but minority view that was also difficult for an English speaking Westerner to verify, as the cited works were obscure and written in the 9th/10th century in Arabic. One of the few known manuscripts was located in a religious building in Turkey and not known to be available online in either scanned or transcribed form.