Ray Saintonge wrote:
The difficulty with this comes when we run into the maxim that the wiki is not paper. If scientific theories depended on being published in the mainstream media that part of Wikipedia would be very skimpy indeed. NOR in science was intended to counteract the influence of crackpot theories.
I guess that depends on what you mean by "mainstream media." Scientists have their own media, namely scientific journals, which do a better job overall of peer review and fact-checking than the popular media. I suppose scientific journals are not "mainstream" in the sense of being read by Joe and Jane Sixpack, but they're very mainstream in the sense of reflecting the range of scientific views considered reasonable outside the crackpot community.
I don't believe Wikipedia has a rule about "mainstream media as acceptable sources" that allows Newsweek and CBS News to be used as sources but forbids the New England Journal of Medicine or the Annalen der Physik (where Einstein published his relativity theory). The problem that Ray imagines is therefore not really a problem.
There *would* be a problem, however, if Wikipedia were to treat every patent application filed and accepted at the U.S. Patent Office as sufficient documentation to warrant mention in Wikipedia. All kinds of crackpot scientific theories get patented. (They probably have a whole wing just for storing blueprints of perpetual motion machines.)
Reasoning back to the lawsuits that we're discussing here, I would say that the existence of a lawsuit and court decision is akin to issuance of a patent by the U.S. Patent Office. It's an undeniable fact that the patent was issued, but until said patent is deemed noteworthy enough to be mentioned in a scientific journal, it's not significant or noteworthy or credible enough for mention in Wikipedia. Likewise, until a court's legal verdict is considered noteworthy enough to be reported in SOME publication (be it a newspaper or a law review), it's probably not appropriate for Wikipedia.
-------------------------------- | Sheldon Rampton | Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org) | Author of books including: | Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities | Toxic Sludge Is Good For You | Mad Cow USA | Trust Us, We're Experts | Weapons of Mass Deception | Banana Republicans | The Best War Ever -------------------------------- | Subscribe to our free weekly list serve by visiting: | http://www.prwatch.org/cmd/subscribe_sotd.html | | Donate now to support independent, public interest reporting: | https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=1118 --------------------------------