Fastfission wrote:
[[Category:Pseudoscience]] is one which gets objections at fairly regular intervals. The reasons for the objections are pretty straightforward -- the users making such objections are almost always either Creationists or Eugenicists or other people who believe in bodies of thought labeled as "pseudoscience" -- and the response is generally pretty straightforward as well: Wikipedia is not claiming these so-labeled articles are actually "pseudoscience", but rather that they are labeled *by the mainstream scientific community* as "pseudoscience".
It is the year 2047.
After a plentiful dinner, Bob and Stan have somehow got into this discussion that doesn't seem to want to come to an end. Bob is a Creationist, firmly believing in the truth of the Bible. Stan is a scientist and defends Darwin's theory of evolution.
To settle the dispute, Stan gets up and grabs a book from the shelf. The front cover reads, "Wikipedia 1.0 - Category Index". Knowing that if there's one thing he and Bob can agree on, it's the reliability of the world-renowned Wikipedia, he browses through it and eventually presents to Bob a page led by the heading "Category:Pseudoscience". His finger points to the place where Creationism is listed.
"See, Creationism is pseudoscience," he explains.
Bob snaps the book out of Stan's hands and browses forward a fair chunk of pages. Under "Category:Satanic lies", he shows to Stan, we find a reference to the entry on "Evolution".
"See, Evolution is a Satanic lie."
No matter how many people you can convince that listing Article X under [[Category:Pseudoscience]] does /not/ mean that Wikipedia takes the stance that Topic X is a pseudoscience, the vast majority will assume that it does.
And that is why people are complaining about those categorisations.
I am happy to have [[Creationism]] listed under [[Category:Pseudoscience]], but only because it happens to agree with my POV.
Maybe the only way out of this is to call the categories something unwieldy-but-NPOV like [[Category:Theories or beliefs widely considered pseudoscience]]...
Timwi