[WikiEN-l] Worrying trends

[Erik Moeller]

David Gerard:
> We're having fun with this on [[WP:SCN]] (a Scientology wikiproject). You
> have the views of the CoS members and the views of the critics, and they're
> basically almost utterly incompatible. But NPOV is achievable! With great
> effort! (Also, we have a recently ex-member who's doing a great job on the
> articles about the "tech", i.e. the substance of the religion itself.)
> [[Xenu]] is achieving widespread fame in the blogosphere, and is being
> quoted (uncredited) in just about every recent press article on Tom
> Cruise's proselytisation for the Church. So we're getting just a little
> attention. I'm sure we'll weather it, and Wikipedia's immune systems appear
> to be kicking in just fine in at least one case ...

While I would love to agree with you entirely, the situation e.g. with 
the LDS articles is exactly the opposite. Criticism is spread on 
sub-articles of sub-articles, and you have pages like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Mormonism which is largely an LDS 
description of anti-Mormon activities. Some of the LDS pages could come 
straight out of glossy brochures from Utah.

Then you have stuff like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephi - a 
character out of the Book of Mormon - which is simply prefaced with 
"According to the Book of Mormon", and everything else is presented as 
fact. There's a Mormonism WikiProject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Latter_Day_Saint_movement
- most of whose members appear to be Mormons.

There are many passionate Mormons and relatively few critics. The 
critics focus on a small number of key articles, which are continually 
unstable. Many articles off the main center of activity will simply 
reflect official LDS or at least believer POV because nobody else cares 
to work on them, and even if they do, they can easily be pushed away by 
the Mormon majority.

Opus Dei members are also presently trying to turn the OD-related 
articles into pure apologetics, largely relying on writings by Catholic 
scholars and trying to discredit everyone in the anti-cult movement 
outside the Church. In addition to changing the text, some of them tried 
to insert series of photos of smiling women and children into the main 
article to reflect the "theology of joy" of Opus Dei. This effort is 
currently stalled due to copyright issues with the images.

Then there's articles like [[creationism]] which never reach any level 
of long-term stability, and where, beyond the conflict between science 
and faith, there's a conflict between many different beliefs about 
creation, Christian or otherwise, and whether or not they should 
challenge science, or coexist with it.

Every religious movement with resources and some intelligence will 
eventually discover Wikipedia and try to systematically undermine its 
articles, aided by the passion of its members. If we want to stay open 
even to irrationalism, there is no solution beyond occasionally taking 
snapshots when the articles have reached some level of stability. That 
is, when we have peer review, we can systematically try to guide 
NPOV-aware Wikipedians into the dark corners of Wikipedia and push them 
to be ready for publication, then leave them to the ignor^Wpeople of 
faith again.

Erik