G'day Guy,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Viewing_Timeline - user Huntley Troth wants a more neutral moderator - i.e. one who does not see remote viewing as pseudoscience. Obviously it is necessary to accept bizarre claims in order to be neutral...

Because of a supposed secret contract between the CIA and highly trained Scientologists at the inception of the CIA-initiated remote viewing program, events related to Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard that led up to the unlikely marriage of CIA and Scientology are included.

[etc., etc.]

I think it's very clear: we can either have this reviewed by someone with enough connection to reality to know the article is nonsense well in advance, or we can try to contact the nearest asylum and request one of the fellows locked up for their safety and ours to take a look.

Some things are utterly, incontrovertibly, 100% iron-clad bollocks. I bring up the old LaRouche cases from ArbCom a lot (strange, 'cos I wasn't around at the time and am not an arbitres), because I think they were quite important in establishing that LaRouche is a dangerous lunatic and Wikipedians are not required to respect any LaRouchite publications as a source (quite the opposite, in fact).

I think this was a Good Thing, and we should have more liberty to deal in a similar manner with people even crazier than LaRouche. Discussion, consensus, sources, etc., is a wonderful goal, but we shouldn't allow kooks to scare off good contributors through sheer doggedness and wiki-lawyering. If someone is peddling something that is clearly, unarguably bollocks, they can bloody-well fuck off. Kooks try the patience of long-term editors and administrators, they render far too many pages utterly unusable and untrustworthy, they waste the time of ArbCom, and they drive actual experts away with their incessant bullshit. We're "the free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit", provided they have the patience to deal with fools who spend all their time trying to pervert a resource for knowledge into a tool of propagandists.

Saying something along the lines of "you're a twat and you have forfeited your right to continue to damage our hard work, because we think you're batshit insane" ought to fit the bill.

(I've spent a decent amount of time this morning deleting embarrassingly inaccurate articles written by kooks attempting to abuse Wikipedia to get the word out about their idiotic scientific or spiritual revelations. You can tell, can't you?)