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Undid revision 1165877827 by TrangaBellam (talk) That's removing all positive references to RationalWiki and keeping all the negative ones. That's not on.
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No reason to remove other positive references to RationalWiki either.
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=== Analysis ===
=== Analysis ===
Andrea Ballatore, a lecturer in [[Geographic information system|GIS]] at [[Birkbeck, University of London]], categorizes RationalWiki as similar in tone to [[Snopes]] in a 2015 study, finding it to be the third most visible website when researching [[conspiracy theory|conspiracy theories]] in terms of [[Google Search|Google]] and [[Bing (search engine)|Bing]] search results, and the most visible among those sites that made openly negative value judgments about conspiracy theories.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Ballatore |first=Andrea |url=http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5597/4652 |title=Google chemtrails: A methodology to analyze topic representation in search engine results. |issue=7 |journal=First Monday |volume=20 |series=20.7 (2015) |access-date=March 15, 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160308111444/http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5597/4652 |archive-date=March 8, 2016 |url-status=live |date=June 19, 2015}}</ref> In ''Intelligent Systems 2014'', Alexander Shvets found RationalWiki to be one of the few online resources that "provide some information about pseudoscientific theories".<ref name="IntelSys2014" /> Likewise, Keeler et al. believe that sites like RationalWiki can help to "sort out the complexities" that arise when "distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people".<ref name="Crowdsourced">{{cite web |url=http://necsi.edu/events/iccs2011/papers/45.pdf#page=4 |title=Crowdsourced Knowledge: Peril and Promise for Complex Knowledge Systems |first1=Mary |last1=Keeler |first2=Josh |last2=Johnson |first3=Arun |last3=Majumdar |page=756 |publisher=New England Complex Systems Institute |date=2011 |access-date=January 17, 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150413184123/http://necsi.edu/events/iccs2011/papers/45.pdf#page=4 |archive-date=April 13, 2015 |url-status=dead }}</ref>
Andrea Ballatore, a lecturer in [[Geographic information system|GIS]] at [[Birkbeck, University of London]], categorizes RationalWiki as similar in tone to [[Snopes]] in a 2015 study, finding it to be the third most visible website when researching [[conspiracy theory|conspiracy theories]] in terms of [[Google Search|Google]] and [[Bing (search engine)|Bing]] search results, and the most visible among those sites that made openly negative value judgments about conspiracy theories.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Ballatore |first=Andrea |url=http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5597/4652 |title=Google chemtrails: A methodology to analyze topic representation in search engine results. |issue=7 |journal=First Monday |volume=20 |series=20.7 (2015) |access-date=March 15, 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160308111444/http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5597/4652 |archive-date=March 8, 2016 |url-status=live |date=June 19, 2015}}</ref>


In ''Intelligent Systems 2014'', Alexander Shvets stated that RationalWiki is one of the few online resources that "provide some information about pseudoscientific theories".<ref name="IntelSys2014"/> Similarly, Keeler et al. stated that sites like RationalWiki can help to "sort out the complexities" that arise when "distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people".<ref name=Crowdsourced>{{cite web |url=http://necsi.edu/events/iccs2011/papers/45.pdf#page=4 |title=Crowdsourced Knowledge: Peril and Promise for Complex Knowledge Systems |first1=Mary |last1=Keeler |first2=Josh |last2=Johnson |first3=Arun |last3=Majumdar |page=756 |publisher=New England Complex Systems Institute |date=2011 |access-date=January 17, 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150413184123/http://necsi.edu/events/iccs2011/papers/45.pdf#page=4 |archive-date=April 13, 2015 |url-status=dead }}</ref>
A 2019 study of bias analysis based on [[word embedding]] in RationalWiki, Conservapedia, and Wikipedia by researchers from [[RWTH Aachen University]] found all had significant gender biases, reflecting classical gender stereotypes, but these biases were less pronounced in RationalWiki.<ref name=":0" />

A 2019 study of bias analysis based on [[word embedding]] in RationalWiki, Conservapedia, and Wikipedia by researchers from [[RWTH Aachen University]] found all had significant gender biases, reflecting classical gender stereotypes, but these biases were less pronounced in RationalWiki.<ref name=":0" /> RationalWiki's characterization of indigenous science as pseudoscience was described as "Eurocentric gatekeeping" by Lindy Orthia of [[Australian National University]].<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Orthia|first=Lindy A.|date=2020|title=Strategies for including communication of non-Western and indigenous knowledges in science communication histories|url=https://jcom.sissa.it/archive/19/02/JCOM_1902_2020_A02|journal=Journal of Science Communication|volume=19|issue=2|pages=A02|doi=10.22323/2.19020202|s2cid=216463422|issn=1824-2049|doi-access=free}}</ref>


=== Usage ===
=== Usage ===

Revision as of 12:05, 18 July 2023

RationalWiki
Screenshot
RationalWiki Main Page as of March 11, 2019
Type of site
Wiki
Available inEnglish and 13 other languages[1]
OwnerRationalMedia Foundation[2]
Created byVolunteer contributors[3]
Key peopleTrent Toulouse (operations manager)[4]
URLrationalwiki.org Edit this at Wikidata
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional
LaunchedMay 22, 2007; 17 years ago (2007-05-22)[5]
Current statusActive
Content license
CC BY-SA 3.0[6]
Written inMediaWiki software

RationalWiki is an online wiki which is written from a scientific skeptic, secular, and progressive perspective. Its stated goals are to "analyze and refute pseudoscience and the anti-science movement, document crank ideas, explore conspiracy theories, authoritarianism, and fundamentalism, and analyze how these subjects are handled in the media."[7] It was created in 2007 as a counterpoint to the Christian fundamentalist Conservapedia after an incident in which some editors of Conservapedia were banned.[5][8] RationalWiki has been described as liberal.[9][10]

History

Origin

In April 2007, Peter Lipson, a doctor of internal medicine, attempted to edit Conservapedia's article on breast cancer to include evidence against Conservapedia's claim that abortion was linked to the disease. Conservapedia is an encyclopedia established by Andy Schlafly as an alternative to Wikipedia, which Schlafly perceived as suffering from a liberal and atheist bias. He and Conservapedia administrators "questioned [Lipson's] credentials and shut down debate". After being reverted and blocked, "Lipson and several other contributors quit trying to moderate the articles [on Conservapedia] and instead started their own website, RationalWiki".[8][11]

RationalMedia Foundation

Prior to 2010, RationalWiki's domains were registered to Trent Toulouse, and the wiki was hosted from a server located in his home.[5] In 2010, Trent Toulouse incorporated a nonprofit organization, the RationalWiki Foundation Inc., to manage the affairs and pay the operational expenses of the website.[2] In July 2013, the RationalWiki Foundation changed its name to the RationalMedia Foundation, stating that its aims extended beyond the RationalWiki site alone.[12]

Content

Screenshot of RationalWiki's article on goats. The humor in the article is a running gag in the wiki and is not the result of vandalism.

RationalWiki provides information about pseudoscientific theories[13] and to educate "individuals with unorthodox views".[14]

RationalWiki differs in several ways from the philosophy of Wikipedia and some other informational wikis. It is written from a self-described "snarky point of view" and "scientific point of view" (both abbreviated as SPOV) rather than a "neutral point of view" (NPOV), and publishes opinion, speculation, and original research.[15] Many RationalWiki articles mockingly describe beliefs that RationalWiki opposes, especially when covering topics such as alternative medicine or fundamentalist Christians.[11]

Some activity on RationalWiki is used for critiquing and "monitor[ing] Conservapedia".[8] RationalWiki contributors, some of which are former Conservapedia contributors, are often highly critical of Conservapedia, and according to an article published in the Los Angeles Times in 2007, RationalWiki members "by their own admission" vandalize Conservapedia.[8] Lester Haines of The Register stated: "Its entry entitled 'Conservapedia:Delusions' promptly mocks the claims that 'Homosexuality is a mental disorder', 'Atheists are sociopaths', and 'During the 6 days of creation G-d placed the Earth inside a black hole to slow down time so the light from distant stars had time to reach us'."[11]

Both Yan et al. 2019[9] and Knoche et al.,[10] two articles about classifying a writer's biases via text analysis, asserted that Conservapedia was "conservative" and RationalWiki was "liberal". Mic described RationalWiki as "progressive".[16]

When Krebs et al. 2023 compared text on controversial topics across multiple community-managed wikis, they found that content and contributors on RationalWiki leaned liberal while Conservapedia leaned conservative. In contrast, Wikipedia's content leaned slightly liberal and editors leaned centrist. Both RationalWiki and Conservapedia were "more loaded with moral content".[17]

Reception

Analysis

Andrea Ballatore, a lecturer in GIS at Birkbeck, University of London, categorizes RationalWiki as similar in tone to Snopes in a 2015 study, finding it to be the third most visible website when researching conspiracy theories in terms of Google and Bing search results, and the most visible among those sites that made openly negative value judgments about conspiracy theories.[18]

In Intelligent Systems 2014, Alexander Shvets stated that RationalWiki is one of the few online resources that "provide some information about pseudoscientific theories".[13] Similarly, Keeler et al. stated that sites like RationalWiki can help to "sort out the complexities" that arise when "distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people".[7]

A 2019 study of bias analysis based on word embedding in RationalWiki, Conservapedia, and Wikipedia by researchers from RWTH Aachen University found all had significant gender biases, reflecting classical gender stereotypes, but these biases were less pronounced in RationalWiki.[10] RationalWiki's characterization of indigenous science as pseudoscience was described as "Eurocentric gatekeeping" by Lindy Orthia of Australian National University.[19]

Usage

In Critical Thinking: Pseudoscience and the Paranormal, Jonathan C. Smith lists RationalWiki in an exercise on finding and identifying fallacies.[20] Snopes has quoted RationalWiki for background on Sorcha Faal of the European Union Times.[21][22][23][24] RationalWiki's description of the "Lenski affair" was quoted by Magnus Ramage in Perspectives on Information[25] and cited by Tom Kaden in Creationism and Anti-Creationism in the United States.[26] It was quoted by Thomas Leitch in Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age on the history of Citizendium.[27] RationalWiki was cited by Dorit Rubinstein Reiss and Lois Weithorn in Responding to the Childhood Vaccination Crisis about the website Whale.to, saying that it is an "infamous conspiracy site", using RationalWiki as a source.[28] RationalWiki's explanation of Gish gallops was referenced by The Guardian in an article on climate change denial[29] and Erik Krabbe and Jan van Laar in an article on "quibbles".[30] RationalWiki's description of the history and membership of LessWrong was quoted by Beth Singler in Existential Hope and Existential Despair in AI Apocalypticism and Transhumanism[31] and cited by Saswat Sarangi and Pankaj Sharma in Artificial Intelligence.[32] The Daily Beast writer Charles Davis alleges that Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies has "several passages" that "are similar to entries in Wikipedia and another online encyclopedia, RationalWiki" and that similar allegations were "first published on Libcom".[33]

Writing in The Verge, Adi Robertson stated that RationalWiki provided a good explanation of Time Cube, though conveying the "full impression" of the original Time Cube website was all but impossible.[34]

See also

References

  1. ^ "RationalWiki:Languages". RationalWiki. Archived from the original on October 9, 2018. Retrieved October 9, 2018.
  2. ^ a b "About". RationalMedia Foundation. Archived from the original on November 10, 2019. Retrieved November 10, 2019.
  3. ^ "RationalWiki:General disclaimer". RationalWiki. Archived from the original on January 6, 2015. Retrieved January 16, 2015.
  4. ^ "RationalWiki talk:RationalMedia Foundation - RationalWiki".
  5. ^ a b c "RationalWiki:Timeline". RationalWiki. Archived from the original on August 10, 2017. Retrieved August 10, 2017.
  6. ^ "RationalWiki:Copyrights". RationalWiki. Archived from the original on November 5, 2018. Retrieved November 5, 2018.
  7. ^ a b Keeler, Mary; Johnson, Josh; Majumdar, Arun (2011). "Crowdsourced Knowledge: Peril and Promise for Complex Knowledge Systems" (PDF). New England Complex Systems Institute. p. 756. Archived from the original (PDF) on April 13, 2015. Retrieved January 17, 2015.
  8. ^ a b c d Simon, Stephanie (June 19, 2007). "A conservative's answer to Wikipedia". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on May 5, 2019. Retrieved June 13, 2019.
  9. ^ a b Yan, Hao; Das, Sanmay; Lavoie, Allen; Li, Sirui; Sinclair, Betsy (2018). "The Congressional Classification Challenge: Domain Specificity and Partisan Intensity". EC '19 Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation. EC '19: 71–89. doi:10.1145/3328526.3329582. ISBN 9781450367929. S2CID 146802854.
  10. ^ a b c Knoche, Markus; Popović, Radomir; Lemmerich, Florian; Strohmaier, Markus (2019). "Identifying Biases in Politically Biased Wikis through Word Embedding". Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media. HT '19: 253–257. doi:10.1145/3342220.3343658. ISBN 9781450368858. S2CID 202640737.
  11. ^ a b c Haines, Lester (June 20, 2007). "Need hard facts? Try Conservapedia". The Register. Archived from the original on February 11, 2015. Retrieved January 19, 2015.
  12. ^ "A message from our Chair". RationalMedia Foundation blog. July 30, 2013. Archived from the original on April 5, 2016. Retrieved August 22, 2017.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  13. ^ a b Shvets, Alexander (October 2, 2014). Filev, D.; Jabłkowski, J.; Kacprzyk, J.; et al. (eds.). Intelligent Systems'2014: Proceedings of the 7th IEEE International Conference Intelligent Systems IS'2014, September 24–26, 2014, Warsaw, Poland, Volume 2: Tools, Architectures, Systems, Applications. Series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, Vol. 323. Springer Publishing. A Method of Automatic Detection of Pseudoscientific Publications, page 533 et seq. ISBN 978-3-319-11310-4.
  14. ^ Brojakowski, Benjamin (August 2017). "Digital Whiteness Imperialism: Redefining Caucasian Identity Post-Boston Bombing". Bowling Green State University (dissertation). Archived from the original on October 3, 2017. Retrieved October 3, 2017.
  15. ^ "RationalWiki:What is a RationalWiki article?". RationalWiki. Archived from the original on February 9, 2015. Retrieved January 16, 2015.
  16. ^ McKay, Tom (September 30, 2015). "7 Tips on Gender Relations, According to Men's Rights Activists and the "Manosphere"". Mic. Retrieved June 17, 2022.
  17. ^ Krebs, Marie-Christin; Oeberst, Aileen; von der Beck, Ina (April 22, 2023). "The Wisdom of the Crowd is not a Forgone Conclusion. Effects of Self-Selection on (Collaborative) Knowledge Construction". Topics in Cognitive Science: tops.12647. doi:10.1111/tops.12647. PMID 37086058. S2CID 258276697.
  18. ^ Ballatore, Andrea (June 19, 2015). "Google chemtrails: A methodology to analyze topic representation in search engine results". First Monday. 20.7 (2015). 20 (7). Archived from the original on March 8, 2016. Retrieved March 15, 2016.
  19. ^ Orthia, Lindy A. (2020). "Strategies for including communication of non-Western and indigenous knowledges in science communication histories". Journal of Science Communication. 19 (2): A02. doi:10.22323/2.19020202. ISSN 1824-2049. S2CID 216463422.
  20. ^ Smith, Jonathan C. (2017). Critical Thinking: Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. John Wiley & Sons. p. 77. ISBN 978-1-119-02948-9.
  21. ^ Mikkelson, David (May 29, 2013). "Russia Warns Obama: Monsanto". Snopes. Retrieved January 19, 2015.
  22. ^ Mikkelson, David (October 10, 2013). "Pentagon Warns to Expect 'Radical' Change in U.S. Government Soon". Snopes. Retrieved January 19, 2015.
  23. ^ Mikkelson, David (March 19, 2015). "Obama Ousts Top Officers After Nuke Explodes in Ocean Instead of Charleston". Snopes. Retrieved August 19, 2019.
  24. ^ Mikkelson, David (January 27, 2014). "Obama Plan to Depopulate Montana Raises Crisis Fears in Moscow". Snopes. Retrieved January 19, 2015.
  25. ^ Ramage, Magnus; Chapman, David (2012). Perspectives on Information. Routledge. p. 90. ISBN 978-1-136-70763-6.
  26. ^ Kaden, Tom (2019). Creationism and Anti-Creationism in the United States: A Sociology of Conflict. Springer. pp. 22, 111. ISBN 978-3-319-99379-9.
  27. ^ Leitch, Thomas (2014). Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age. JHU Press. p. 145. ISBN 978-1-4214-1550-5.
  28. ^ Reiss, Dorit Rubinstein; Weithorn, Lois A. (2015). "Responding to the Childhood Vaccination Crisis: Legal Frameworks and Tools in the Context of Parental Vaccine Refusal". Buffalo Law Review. 63: 943. Retrieved August 19, 2019.
  29. ^ Nuccitelli, Dana (July 25, 2016). "These are the best arguments from the 3% of climate scientist 'skeptics.' Really". The Guardian. Archived from the original on October 6, 2017. Retrieved October 6, 2017.
  30. ^ Krabbe, Erik; van Laar, Jan (2019). "In the quagmire of quibbles: a dialectical exploration". Synthese. 198 (4): 3459–3476. doi:10.1007/s11229-019-02289-4. ISSN 0039-7857.
  31. ^ Singler, Beth (March 2019). "Existential Hope and Existential Despair in AI Apocalypticism and Transhumanism". Zygon. 54 (1): 156–176. doi:10.1111/zygo.12494.
  32. ^ Sarangi, Saswat; Sharma, Pankaj (2018). "Introduction". Artificial Intelligence: Evolution, Ethics and Public Policy. Routledge India. p. 24. ISBN 978-0-429-46100-2.
  33. ^ Davis, Charles (May 19, 2018). "Sloppy Sourcing Plagues 'Kill All Normies' Alt-Right Book". The Daily Beast. Archived from the original on June 26, 2019. Retrieved November 28, 2018.
  34. ^ Robertson, Adi (September 2, 2015). "Time Cube is gone". The Verge. Retrieved June 17, 2022.
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