Originally published on the Progressive Radio Network, May 10, 2018
© Richard Gale and Dr Gary Null

In Part One, we discussed the threats social media technology poses to a healthy and educated populace, the scientist cult of Skepticism and its extremist medical wing, and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as a leading promulgator for Skepticism’s agenda. In Part Two, we go deeper into the Science-Based Medical faction and its advancing an unfounded and authoritarian interpretation about science.

Science-Based Medicine (SBM) is a recent splinter faction, a break-away group, from Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM). EBM is often recognized as one of the great advances in modern medicine to emerge during the 20th century. Although SBM endorses EBM’s premises and principles, it also regards it as incomplete. Consequently SBM blatantly hails itself as the future paradigm for evaluating medical science and recommending best practices and treatments.

Continue reading Wikipedia: Our New Technological McCarthyism, Part Two →

For several years now Rome Viharo has been documenting his disturbing Wikipedia experiences on his website Wikipedia, We Have a Problem. His latest post is an excellent case study on the harassment, libel and slander routinely practiced by some editors of the king of encyclopedias.

There is a disturbing pattern of behaviors evolving across Wikipedia – a number of skeptic activists on Wikipedia believe that only they are qualified to edit a large swath of topics and biographies on Wikipedia, and they seek to purge other editors from those articles or Wikipedia itself. Skeptic activists take this very seriously and treat Wikipedia like a battleground for their activism, where online harassment, slander, bullying, character assassination, and public shaming are all used as tactics to control editing permissions on the world’s largest repository of knowledge.

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It’s not just individuals who are subject to harassment; entire fields of scientific and medical research are being targeted [e.g. Dysfunction at Wikipedia on Homeopathic Medicine, Huffington Post]. In 2014 the ACEP went so far as to create a formal petition demanding changes to Wikipedia policies which 11,519 people signed. How did Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, respond to all these people?

No, you have to be kidding me. Every single person who signed this petition needs to go back to check their premises and think harder about what it means to be honest, factual, truthful. Wikipedia’s policies around this kind of thing are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals – that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately.

What we won’t do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of “true scientific discourse”. It isn’t.

One might argue that Jimmy Wales is simply ignorant of the facts or in denial of the sickness that’s taken hold of his creation, but the tone and content of his response falls right in line with the disruptive, head-in-the-sand, bully editors which inspired this petition in the first place. Ironically, the ACEP (Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology) had been trying to correct factual errors on articles about energy psychology and add references to work published in respectable scientific journals but were blocked at every turn with the same irrational arguments and harassment Rome Viharo and so many others have suffered through.

Continue reading Rampant Harassment on Wikipedia →

 
Although Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, supports the scientifically-uninformed party line, Wikipedia as an entity is promoted to the public as scientifically sound. Unfortunately, it is not.

“Guy”, a self-described “skeptical” blogger with a moderate following, has “Administrator” status on Wikipedia, a step above the usual “Editor” designation common to all who edit Wikipedia.

A powerful figure, Guy has used his position openly to denigrate those who have disagreed with Wikipedia-published skeptically-biased editing of articles. Guy argues that the “skeptical point of view” is synonymous with Wikipedia’s stated “Neutral Point of View”, and therefore that any editor who does not align with it is violating one of the “five pillars” of Wikipedia by default.

Guy has acknowledged that he disapproves of Rupert Sheldrake’s work and supporters. He has edited Sheldrake’s consensus-built biography-article in favor of a strongly pejorative version that he has protected with reverts (reversions to previously-published editing versions), warnings against neutrally-inclined editors, and the blocking of unbiased editors.

In the “discussion” section of the Sheldrake page, Guy has insisted that he has edited the page simply as an editor and not as an Admin, yet as an Admin he has banned several editors who have disagreed with him. He warned an editor who was attempting to include academic-source citations supporting Sheldrake’s credentials to stop. Guy has threatened editors who have not obeyed his bullying with the information that he was an Admin and that the editors should back down if they knew what was good for them.

Wikipedia describes editing behavior such as Guy’s as a conflict of interest and an abuse of “Admin” status.

 
Wikipedia articles of interest to Guy:

Acupuncture

Chinese Medicine

Deepak Chopra

EMIS Health

Energy (esotericism)

Faith Healing

Homeopathy

Dean Ornish

Parapsychology

Rupert Sheldrake

“What the Bleep Do We Know?”

Zicam

 
“Barney the Barney Barney” is a member of a Wikipedia “skeptic” community self-named the Fringe Noticeboard.

Barney wrote the defamatory Wikipedia essay “Why it isn’t cool to describe Rupert Sheldrake as a biologist”; a false assertion as Sheldrake’s Cambridge Ph.D. is in biochemistry; Sheldrake has published peer-reviewed scientific research and review articles on the subject in respected international journals.

Statements that knowingly twist facts and distort history are common to the conservative-reactionary mindset as sported by pseudoskeptics. They engage in lying, in other words, to justify their opinions, which they promote to “protect” their causes, activities, and other ends. Truth does not need falsehood to protect it.

Barney was highly involved in Rupert Sheldrake’s Wikipedia article (along with Wikipedia editor Vzaak/Manul), restoring the article to his own biased, pseudoskeptically-slanted writing whenever factually correct changes were made to the article by scientifically-modern, philosophically-neutral, professionally-inclined editors.

Barney currently has been banned indefinitely from Wikipedia for making personal attacks against other Wikipedia editors.

Wikipedia articles and biographies Barney has edited against neutrality toward a pseudoskeptical bias:

Parapsychology
Scepticism is Mainstream on Wikipedia (essay)
Parapsychological Association Outstanding Career Award
Homeopathy
Astrology in the Bible
Richard C. Hoagland
Deepak Chopra
Brian Josephson
Michael Behe
Marilyn Schlitz
Richard Dawkins
Rupert Sheldrake

According to the website Wikipedia, We Have a Problem, behavioral data suggests that “Vzaak”, who in 2015 changed his Wikipedia account name to “Manul”, may be skeptic-activist Tim Farley or working within a network directed by Tim Farley and Jerry Coyne.

Evidence indicates that Manul’s Wikipedia account began as a single purpose account (SPA) for the sole purpose of editing Rupert Sheldrake’s biography on Wikipedia, slanting it toward dogmatic-skeptic party-line toward Sheldrake’s research.

Single purpose accounts are considered evidence of agenda-based editing and are generally frowned upon. They do not have credibility on Wikipedia and can be banned or blocked more easily than the accounts of other editors. Manul himself has attempted aggressively to block or ban other single purpose accounts. Manul’s single purpose account has never been challenged by Wikipedia’s administrators, however.

One of Manul’s first edits to Rupert Sheldrake’s biography was to remove the word “biologist” and replace it with the word “pseudoscientist”. He made this change without seeking a consensus among editors for a lead sentence edit, usually a Wikipedia requirement.

Manul’s first 200 edits on Wikipedia were made solely to Sheldrake’s biography; with him sheriffing the article his editing continued, in similar disproportionate amount, for almost a full year. Over time Manul has participated less in editing the page and contributing to its associated Talk Page but he continues to pay close attention to it, collating data to use against dissenting editors.

To date Manul since has made well over 2500 edits on Wikipedia. A clear majority of the edits changed articles toward the interests of dogmatic skeptic activism, changing articles such as Sheldrake’s that are the typical targets of scientific reactionaries or making positive edits to other skeptics’ pages, such as Susan Blackmore’s page and James Randi’s Million Dollar Challenge page.

Manul’s Wikipedia editing initiated the systematic effort among skeptical editors to purge scientific viewpoints with which they disagree from Wikipedia. Manul, along with “Barney the Barney Barney”, casts aspersions on other editors if they express a viewpoint that does not agree with the dogmatic skeptic party line. They have also forced less biased, more even-handed editors into administrative arbitration in an attempt to have them blocked or banned from Wikipedia altogether.

Though Manul has been careful to avoid openly abusing non-dogmatic-skeptic editors on articles’ Talk Pages, he has been known to reveal the personal names of those editors who frustrate him, or to abuse them in Arbitration Enforcement or on the editors’ Talk Pages.

Manul has played a prominent role in the harassment of several Wikipedia editors, presenting, for instance, massive amounts of invented data in arbitration to the arbitration administrator to make it appear that the amount of evidence against the editors he has challenged is overwhelming.

Manul has received public praise from skeptic activists for working on the Sheldrake article: from Jerry Coyne in a New Republic article; from Tim Farley, developer of the so-called Skeptical Software Tools used to promote the dogmatic-skeptic point of view; and from Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW) (also see “Gerbic, Susan”).

Manul crafted a response to being the main editor of GSoW’s Talk Page supporting the story that GSoW had not edited the article and that Manul is just a dedicated Wikipedian following Wikipedia’s guidelines with no other intention, a response which has been passed around by skeptical activists through social media.

Wikipedia currently is the area in which dogmatic skeptics are most successful and influential. One of these activist groups is called Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia, founded by Susan Gerbic. Another leader of the online skeptical movement is Tim Farley, who runs the website Skeptical Software Tools.

The situation is particularly bad in any areas to do with parapsychology, alternative and complementary medicine, and on the biography pages of scientists involved in investigating these areas.

The Wikipedia skeptics work in teams (contrary to Wikipedia rules) and most are well trained. They generally operate under pseudonyms. It is not necessary to have any particular skill or expertise to become an editor. Anyone can edit. But it is necessary to understand the complex rules of Wikipedia. The skeptical activists are well versed in the rules, and are able to bully and outwit editors who are trying to ensure that articles are balanced and fair. When fair-minded editors oppose the skeptic teams, they are accused of defying the skeptical consensus, and warned that they will be banned from editing. If they persist they are indeed banned. Many such editors have been driven away, to the detriment of Wikipedia and its users. For a detailed case study, see Wikipedia, We Have a Problem.

Although Wikipedia’s official policy is that articles should represent a neutral point of view, skeptics have infiltrated the administration of Wikipedia and have managed to get parapsychology defined as a pseudoscience, along with many aspects of alternative and complementary medicine. The skeptic teams then claim that any editor opposing them is contravening the neutral point of view policy, because these subjects are defined as pseudoscience. These teams are committed to a kind of scientific fundamentalism, and take an extremely narrow view of science, even narrower than that of more mainstream skeptical organizations. Even the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry does not dismiss all parapsychology as pseudoscience: indeed some leading skeptics, like Professor Chris French, have explicitly stated that they regard it as a real science (French, C. C., & Stone, A. Anomalistic Psychology: Exploring Paranormal Belief and Experience, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

Unfortunately, the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, is a supporter of the skeptical extremists. In response to the systematic distortion to Wikipedia entries on holistic medicine, the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology (ACEP) organized on online petition to Jimmy Wales through change.org asking for a balanced and scientific approach to these subjects. There were 7,000 signatures.

In response, Wales called practitioners of alternative medicine “lunatic charlatans.” He resisted calls for change by saying that Wikipedia’s policies are “exactly spot-on and correct.”

So beware! Until Wikipedia can be reformed or replaced, it is essential to treat its skeptic-infested pages with skepticism.

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Wikipedia, We Have a Problem

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"... this entire narrative is my personal diary, a journey through misinformation, disinformation, fake encyclopedias, sock puppets, catfishes, gaslighting, digital wildfires, trolls, stalkers, impersonators, social propaganda, edge lords, flag waving, blackmail, astroturfing, and “joe jobbing” occurring on Wikipedia and the broader web."

Wikipedia and Deepak Chopra: Open-Source Character Assassination

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