On 12/17/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
And using "pseudoscience" alone would be at the expense of NPOV
You still appear to be trying to "prove" this by assertion.
Actually if you'd look over the discussion you'd see there is somewhat more than just assertion, and that you have been the one doing the most blunt asserting. If you can't see why labeling a form of inquiry as "pretend science" might be a POV problem, I'm not sure how much you are going to bring to the discussion.
I agree that most things labeled pseudoscience are "crap" or worst. But I'm willing to recognize where that POV I happen to hold comes from, and that there are valid and actually quite common alternatives to it.
As an aside, did anybody notice in last month's _Wired_ they made fun of Wikipedia for having decided that Scientology was a pseudoscience? I don't know enough about Scientology to know whether it was a good idea or not (I suspect it is bonkers, but that's different from being pseudoscience), but the fact that _Wired_ would find that amusing enough to comment on is a bit suspicious and really gets at the heart of some of what I have been saying.
Labeling something as "pretend science" is a POV statement, as I have tried to demonstrate at length (and have not yet seen any compelling arguments against it), and if we are to be applying such a label, we should come up with standards so that it is not "Wikipedia" who is responsible for the POV.
The biggest difficulty, in my mind, is figuring out a better category name which expresses something along the lines of "Considered 'pseudoscience' by the scientific community". Which would be both a useful tag (labels the nonsense for those who are fans of real science) and a neutral one (properly attributes POV, is not WP who is making the decision), as well as a set of verifiable critieria (it is not hard to determine whether or not something is considered pseudoscience in an indisputed way amongst most mainstream scientists; keyword searches of _Nature_ and _Science_ make that pretty easy).
FF