Angela Kennedy wrote:
You have to define 'established' and 'orthodoxy' though. On Wikipedia, these things seem to be constructed according to who the shoutiest rhetorician and most active cabals are.
I think we have pretty good dictionary definitions of 'established' and 'orthodoxy'. When the loudest are getting their way simply because they are the loudest then there is indeed a problem. When 'established' and 'orthodoxy' are used as a weapon to pile on and denigrate BLPs then that is a problem. When 'established' and 'orthodoxy' is used to marginalize a theory then that is what an encyclopaedia is for.
Angela Kennedy wrote:Unfortunately, many members of the public are NOT questioning and critical thinkers (it seems to need to be taught), but simply defer to appeals to authority. And these people follow wikipedia as if it were an authoritative source. And yes, I've seen 'practitioners' and even academics use wikipedia as such, which is VERY dangerous.
Isn't that the purpose of an encyclopaedia? An authoritative statement on the dominate view of a subject, along with some hat tips to credible alternatives theories.
Angela Kennedy wrote:The other problem is that there is no 'proper place' to debate science. What you propose is exclusionary, so people end up on public places on wikipedia to try and debate issues of enormous importance. This is course is why there are SO MANY power struggles over subjects on wikipedia! Control of public 'knowledge'. It also explains the use of astroturfers, and organisations like Sense about Science.
Why should an encyclopaedia be a place to debate science? Of course what I propose is exclusionary, it has to be otherwise you get debates about 15ft hominids running upright, at speed through forests. Or you get atrocities like these.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit ... ontroversy
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit ... =104634552
Thiomersal in MMR is blamed for increased Autism rates, despite the fact that in the US it has never been used in MMR:
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/Concer ... _faqs.html
and that in Japan they do not use MMR and yet the Autism rates are the same as elsewhere.
Despite the fact that back in 2002 it was known that there was no link, vast sums of money and researcher time, has been spent in the last decade or more reproving no link between MMR, Thiomersal, and Autism. Money and time totally wasted, money that could have been spent on developing treatments, or a better understanding of teh condition.
Yet still the anti-vaccination woo artists promulgate their fuckwit bullshit crap any which way they can.
http://www.naturalnews.com/MMR_vaccine.html
Behind all of this are arsehole, anti-health care Libertarians. Their concerns aren't with the safety of the vaccines, but with large scale government health care programs, which in the US are primarily vaccinations.