[WikiEN-l] Protoscience category

[David Gerard]

Haukur Þorgeirsson (haukurth at hi.is) [050629 23:27]:

> >The current article on [[Alternative medicine]] has suffered a bad case of
> >Gohde and could do with a lot of cleaning up, but the Category links to
> >Pseudoscience and Protoscience get the point across IMO (having as it does
> >both).
 
> Currently the Protoscience category includes such
> topics as String theory and Quantum gravity as well
> as Phrenology (old debunked non-sense) and Biorythm
> (recent debunked non-sense). To me it does not seem
> that these things have enough in common to be usefully
> included in the same category.


Phrenology has almost certainly fallen well into pseudoscience (if it still
has followers). Biorhythms, I don't know enough about. String theory
probably isn't. Stuff like [[Ufology]] probably belongs there - some
cranks, some people trying to gather information in a respectable manner.

I started the category for the sake of [[Alternative medicine]] and added
stuff from [[List of protosciences]] to it as I thought were sensible.
There was a lot of editorial decision-making involved.  We need a handy
NPOV definition of "protoscience" that divides these things up elegantly.
This sort of thing is endlessly fascinating :-)


- d.