The truth can be very elusive. So it makes sense to move that burden to the sources.
The next best thought out knowledge-based site is StackExchange.
- Antifa did the coup.
- Face masks are harmful.
- There have been "almost zero" deaths from COVID-19.
- Soros may have paid people to riot for George Floyd.
- The Ten Commandments were God's words: not "inspired", but precisely dictated. [2]
Since Wikipedia is hostile to conspiracy theories and religious woo, Larry has in the ensuing years tried (without success) to make a Wikipedia-equivalent site that will be friendly to his nuttery.
I was clued into this when the BLM protests happened. When I poked into all the names of the protesters I could find who were present on-site, very few of them had day jobs.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger#Views_on_Rational...
> Besides being the cofounder of one of the biggest websites on the Internet, he is mostly known for two things; criticising Wikipedia, and having created many failed WikiProjects to fix said criticisms.
This writing is fine penmanship for a 2nd grader about why I hate Kevin and his Pokemon cards.
Searching that sentence verbatim on Google produces, as a first result, a paper on the National Library of Medicine [1] that states in its abstract:
> Extended mask-wearing by the general population could lead to relevant effects and consequences in many medical fields.
How is that a conspiracy theory? At most, you can argue that it's not absolutely conclusive or that other studies reach different conclusions. But that's far from declaring something a conspiracy theory.
Heaven forbid! It's almost comical how certain people furrow for the tiniest of cherries to support their antivaxx, antimask knee jerking while their bodies get submitted to a gauntlet of health risks from contracting COVID.
Flu shots are indeed a vaccine.
I think you're confused by the word "immunity". In the medical sense, it doesn't mean "invincibility". It's a reference to the immune system!
Your original argument was that this is a conspiracy theory, and it isn't.
> As a library, NLM provides access to scientific literature. Inclusion in an NLM database does not imply endorsement of, or agreement with, the contents by NLM or the National Institutes of Health.
That's a banner at the top of the page.
Science is not done by consensus or endorsement. Studies must be refuted on scientific grounds.
Studies that disagree with your opinion are not conspiracy theories.
I think some people consider information contrary to that communicated by government officials to be conspiracy theory: If the government didn't tell us the truth about something, they conspired to tell us something untrue.
By this definition of conspiracy theory, anybody who is not a conspiracy theorist is credulous. I proudly call myself a conspiracy theorist AKA skeptic.
There's also the whole way the software works. So that's twice that Wikipedia owes Ward Cunningham.
Well, that and the most important exchange of all of course:
"My question, to this esteemed Wiki community, is this: Do you think that a Wiki could successfully generate a useful encyclopedia? -- JimboWales [a]
Yes, but in the end it wouldn't be an encyclopedia. It would be a wiki. -- WardCunningham [b]" [2]
[2] https://wiki.c2.com/?WikiPedia
I think it's a good rule of thumb to not have people edit articles too close to them, but for some objective facts you may as well let it in (and remember: "facts" means "can be proven OR disproven". I can make a fake birth certifricate but you can objecively prove through later talks that I lied. Or the hospital realizes they messed up and my own birthday is a lie to begin with. Much easier to reason with than "am I a good person?")
It's a bizarre rule that doesn't consider a birth certificate to be a primary source.
1. Someone adds obvious nonsense to wikipedia
2. A mainstream publication republishes this because wikipedia is generally trustworthy
3. Someone else at wikipedia notices nonsense and removes article
4. Article gets reinstated using a referense to publication at (2)
It may sound weird but it has happened a few times. Wikipedia could probably do more to avoid circular references, but there's really no simple answer.
but the answer in my head is simple.
1. make sure the primary source is publicly viewable and archiveable (be it a blog, acedemic profile, about us on a news site, or even a social media post).
2. ensure that there's some way to verify this as a primary source. This one pains me the most, but if we trust news sites to vet anonymous sources, may as well trust social media communities to vouch for a source really being that person. IME social media loves to call out lies, so them trusting a personality isn't as scary as it sounds.
3. be able to mark a source as "primary" to give a bit of distinction so we know there is some lack of vetting compared to a mainstream resource (which hopefully has such vetting built in). similar to [citation needed], it can be footnoted like [2, primary].
There is and always will be nonsense that penetrates through, but I don't think we should discount primary resources as much we do currently. That's not how real life reflects on such resources. Wikipedia has loosened up and started to use more social media as ciations, so this isn't a radical direction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Amelia_Bedelia
https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/amelia-bedelia-wikipedia-ho...
(EDIT: please use noscript if you visit the daily dot link, it's a terrible 3rd party spam site)
Not quite sure what the birthday problem was about.
There's an insidious aspect to Wikipedia's reliance on verifiability: any wild claim can be posted, repeated by third parties, and afterwards have Wikipedia refer to those third parties as sources. I know this to be a fact because I read a Wikipedia article on the subject.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesi...
Advertising provides a perverse incentive that has the effect of injecting rot into the core of products that depend on it.
[Accessing Wikipedia from command line I never see the nags for donations.]
How odd.