Jtkiefer wrote:
Your right calling creationism a science would be POV pushing, but if you take the stance that creationism is anything, science, pseudo-science, legend, myth, total bullshit... you're still gonna piss someone off which is an inherent problem with having an open medium like wikipedia.
The issue is generally easy enough to solve with freeform text in the body of an article by "going meta" and shifting the emphasis carefully until everyone is more or less satisfied. I am not the only person who has been pleasantly astounded at how well Wikipedia actually works at producing good high-quality consensus explanations in this manner.
Categories, on the other hand, are not as easy because they are so strictly limited. If we had a category of "things which are widely regarded, by scientists and others of a similar bent, as being less than fully established science, but which are often, by those who are not scientists, put forward as if they were science" then we'd have less trouble, I think. (And edit my description as you please until it's satisfactorily neutral. :-))
<POV> Now, a big part of the irritant in this discussion is that creationism is, as a matter of simple ordinary fact, pseudo-science or worse. Readers deserve to know, and quickly and simply, that treating creationist theories as if they were somehow scientific is completely and utterly unacceptable in scientific circles. The category does that concisely and correctly. </POV>
I have been thinking for many days (but with no progress) about a better name for the category.
--Jimbo