As an aside, > This had meaningful consequences, turning an organization that used to lend credence and false balance to pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, an

As an aside, > This had meaningful consequences, turning an organization that used to lend credence and false balance to pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and extremism into a proactive debunker, fact-checker and identifier of fringe discourse. This isn't a good thing. Wikipedia is supposed to be a source of knowledge, not a arbiter of reality. From Information Theory we have the result that the unpredictability of a message is a measure of its information content. Ergo, deleting unpredictable ("fringe") information makes you stupid. Also, consider that we need to learn to deal with ambiguous and false information to be able to learn to discern true information in the first place. (E.g. just like a profanity filter needs to have a list of profanities to work, eh?) Then there is the simple truth that things that are crazy "conspiracy" nonsense sometimes turn out to be true! Cosby is a rapist. Epstein ran a resort for pedos. Crypto AG was a CIA front. Something called MK Ultra really happened. I could go on all day. E.g. over half of the regime changes in the Twentieth Century were the result of coups, aka conspiracies. In re: pseudoscience, there are several healing modalities that I have personal experience with, that are outside the mainstream, and all of them are decried as pseudoscience. Just because something hasn't yet been systematized by mainstream science doesn't make it not exist. I know of a prominent author who had his article in WP deleted by deletionist activists calling themselves the "Guerrilla Skeptics"! It's a kind of culture war: norm core skeptics vs. the weird. Anyway, my point is that as an encyclopedia WP is weakened, not strengthened, by making it into a cultural conformity center that omits whole dimensions of human experience.