Directory:The Wikipedia Point of View

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Welcome to The Wikipedia Point of View.

Pretty much any subject you search Google for – let's say 'Neurolinguistic programming', the article about it in Wikipedia comes first in the ranking. That makes Wikipedia an attractive target for determined groups of individuals who want to present their idea or product in a global market, free of charge. Join the encylopedia that anyone can edit, write an article about, let's say, Neurolinguistic programming, and you have as much free advertising as you want.

Wikipedia has a Neutral Point of View policy. This requires you to write not what you believe to be true – not even if you know it to be true, in the philosopher's justified true belief sense - but only what is verifiable. The theory is that any overtly biased article on NLP, crystal healing, or whatever, will be overwritten by someone else who will come along and edit the article to a more 'neutral point of view'. He, or she who can cite reputable, authoritative peer-reviewed research against the many strange and idiosyncratic views we encounter in real life, in quack medicine, from proponents of 'alternative sexuality' viewpoints, and so on.

But it has become apparent that the NPOV policy has failed Wikipedia in many areas. This has happened for many reasons, to be documented in The Wikipedia Point of View.

  • "If there’s one thing I hope people take from this sort of issue, it’s that there really is a “Wikipedia perspective” on almost any controversial subject. As you’ve recognized, that perspective is extremely insular and values “civility” – which translates to “avoidance of all negative reactions to, or personal criticism of, established Wikipedians” – above almost anything else, including morality, accuracy, and fairness. Meanwhile, Jimbo & Co. realized a long time ago that drama and controversy are just another recruitment strategy. Jimbo in particular won’t step in to try and quell it unless his personal interests are threatened". ("Somey" of Wikipedia Review).
  • Encyclopedias are compendiums of settled, broadly-agreed, and largely non-controversial scholarship. They are not newspapers, they are not research journals, they are not book reviews, they are not giant rubbish heaps of every possible theory on any given topic. This is why Wikipedia is either: a) not an encyclopedia at all; or b) the world's worst encyclopedia. (Gomi of Wikipedia Review).
  • "... the currently seriously malfunctioning Wikipedia experiment, which has gone from being a well-intentioned experiment run by a few nerds to being a source of defamation and misinformation so powerful that it's having a genuine and noticeable corrosive effect on the world's media. One of the key issues in that is the discussion of the pros and cons of the Wikimedia Foundation's almost unique decision to allow children unrestricted access to positions of authority in which they're obliged to make serious ethical and legal decisions (often on extremely sensitive issues, such as the ethics of publishing material likely negatively to impact real-life medical diagnoses, the ethics of a charitably-funded educational institution maintaining a large-scale collection of hardcore pornography, or the appropriate way to handle defamation on a massive scale, which is beyond the ability of a rapidly shrinking volunteer group to control completely). Many people feel that people below the age of legal responsibility should not be taking decisions of this nature, and that allowing them to do so has serious moral and legal implications for the adults involved". - Eva of Wikipedia Review - [1]
  • "Essentially the Pol Pot view that the scientists should be down in the mud weeding plants along with everybody else, if they haven't already been executed. I've compared the structure of WP to the Khmer Rouge more than once. Nobody gets killed, imprisoned, tortured, fired, censored, or had their books or papers burned on WP, but that's not because nobody would be willing to, I think." Milton of Wikipedia Review - [2].
  • "As I have said previously, I consider many Wikipedia users, and particularly administrators, socially dysfunctional computer geeks with no normal interpersonal social skills. To compensate for that lack, they live in the virtual world of Wikipedia, where they pretend that enforcing perceived violations against Wikipedia rules (which rules exist no place but Wikipedia) is actually doing something worthwhile. That personality defect, so common among Wikipedia users, does not make them charming company, and getting thrown out of WP and into the real world is always a refreshing change. " - Parting shot from Banned user:Kwork [3].

Contents

Cults

Cults are groups with strange beliefs who have an interest in publicising their existence, recruiting new members, and usually suppressing the more unpalatable facts about their financial statements and other irregularities. Too many of these to mention, but some of the more amusing include the Brahma Kumaris, who seem to enjoy some support among Wikipedians, at least judging from the way that those who opposed them are so regularly blocked, simply for saying stuff like this ("You and your other adherents have wasted too much time of too many people's lives ... never mind mentioning the broken families and suicides that litter your religion's history"). The Scientologists did not fare so well, as is well known (their IP is currently blocked), but that is only because a group of prominent Wikipedians dislike scientology - it has nothing to do with any self-governing mechanism that prevents cults from promoting their views on the global electronic reference work. See for example Prem Rawat, defended for years by a prominent Wikipedia administrator, although he eventually came to grief.

Plagiarism

Pseudoscientific topics

Administrative corruption

Sceptics or scientists who have been blocked from Wikipedia

Other Wikipedian sceptics

See also Expert_withdrawal

Editors who are not sceptical

Guide to Wikipedia

Sceptics

Criticism of Wikipedia

Wikipedia Review

Strange or crappy articles

Wikipedia and Academia

Amusement

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