[Foundation-l] Organization on Wikipedia that deals withcontent issues.

Peter Damian peter.damian at btinternet.com
Tue Aug 31 20:06:38 UTC 2010


From: "John Vandenberg" <jayvdb at gmail.com>

>Pseudo-science, pseudo-humanities, etc are no stranger to Wikipedia,
>and our processes have not always been victorious over it.  Simply
>put, the rubbish on Wikipedia outweights the rubbish on CZ, and I
>suspect that an academically sound study would indicate that,
>proportionally speaking, Wikipedia pollutes the interweb more than CZ.

I looked at the two following two pages

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Alice_Bailey
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Bailey

The first of which (the CZ version) is mentioned in the RationalWiki page as 
an abomination.  The CZ version is better.  It is still too long for such a 
silly subject, but minute in comparison to the Wikipedia page, which is 
endless.  So yes, a serious study comparing the "crank quotient" between the 
two encyclopedias would be interesting. I suspect WP would win (for 
crankiness, I mean) hands down.  I attempted to document some of it here

http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:The_Wikipedia_Point_of_View/Cranks

but gave up, there is just too much.  There are whole categories of it 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Theosophical_philosophical_concepts . 
And don't get me onto the subject of the gurus who are using the project to 
self-advertise http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Wilber . That gets me very 
close to what got me banned in the first place.  (End of rant, sorry).

Peter




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