Wikipedia rules are just insufficient to protect against "fringe" beliefs. Wikipedia itself creates several of them per year due to citogenesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...
All progress starts out as a fringe belief.
That is not true at all. The usefulness and value of many new things and discoveries is often immediately obvious. Even when the value is not immediately obvious, being a curiosity is more likely than being a fringe belief.
Fringe beliefs don't have evidence behind them, but progress does.
> That is not true at all.
> Fringe beliefs don't have evidence behind them, but progress does.
That depends on your definition of fringe and evidence.
I suspect there may be some association between truth and some non-mainstream, cult idea, or conspiracy theory. e.g. it is widely accepted now that the earth is not flat although at one point more accepted that it was flat. That doesn’t eventually validate all fringe ideas, but acknowledges a possibility that when all fringe ideas are considered as a whole, some of them may be true or partially true or be a step towards truth.
A problem with this is that truth seeking and delusions go hand in hand. Delusions seem as real as anything else, and may be evidential but misconstrued evidence or even unknowingly invented evidence. This affects more mundane things like scientific studies, reporting, politics, and Wikipedia as well as “Are they after me” or “Are they lying” things.
Another problem more relevant today than ever is “Should this information be included in Wikipedia, national monuments, museums, libraries, books, or education in-general?” I’ve had articles in Wikipedia that were valid, that stood for years, and then were eventually removed, though they were valid and true, I assume because they didn’t believe it was important enough or relevant to their users that didn’t care as much as I did about preserving history. Is that the right thing to do? I don’t personally think so, but those in-control historically have and will change beliefs to suit their own. We must get involved to ensure that we are not misled. We should not stand idly by and think “Wow, Hitler really f’d up the education of our youth.” We must get involved to stop it. But that doesn’t mean culling or altering all information which doesn’t meet our worldview.
> often
which is it?
This is the negation of a categorical statement, not a categorically negative statement. Thus, all it means is that some progress does not start as a fringe belief.
If you're going to bitch at someone for getting their formal logic wrong, you'd best have your formal logic right.
> which
I can play that game, too.
What you actually meant to say is that all progress stems from the research and implementation sparkled by a fringe intuition. But even then, you can have progress without going too far from the current mainstream, so it's not really true anyway
This isn't true. For example, the Caloric theory of heat was a huge improvement over the existing heterodoxy (the phlogiston theory), made several testable predictions that were true (improving upon Newton's calculation of the speed of sound), and made it possible for Carnot to make serious advances in the field of thermodynamics with the postulation of the Carnot engine.
However, the theory was not a fact. The self-repellent fluid called "caloric" that the theory was predicated upon never existed. We need a bit more epistemic humility.
Policing fringe beliefs is dangerous. A free society must tolerate & even welcome such beliefs into the public sphere, not because they are good, but because the freedom to be wrong is the foundation of our ability to be right.
Why even have Wikipedia then? Why not just ask Reddit at that point?
Early encyclopedias solved this problem by hiring experts. Wikipedia doesn't hire them, it just cites them.
It has only been recently that our cynical postmodern internet hordes have decided experts are somehow only equally worthy of trust as the high-school dropout uncles of facebook and the brain-worm infested politicians on the news.
Citing experts is good practice, but invoking them to silence dissent is anti-scientific.
That's not really what we're discussing here. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. The encyclopedia should report things that are widely regarded to be factual as facts. They should not give equal time to every looney tune with a pet theory.
Noteworthy dissent about complex subjects doesn't come from the unqualified, it comes from other qualified people with differing ideas.
They are not advancing science. They are not "challenging our orthodoxy". They are not doing anything positive for the world.
We may never be able to convince them that they're wrong, but that doesn't mean we need to make it sound like anyone else thinks they might, with even a tiny probability, be right.
But it’s not fair to cherry pick such an obvious straw man. There’s a million current examples that are much better. Covid origins which were summarily and aggressively rejected as unorthodox for example. A ton of climate science, etc. No one is an authority on truth. Requires consensus over painfully long times.
I guess there’s a spectrum of fringe ideas. Some are ridiculous, true. Trolls. But they have no power of policy - flat earthers for example are harmless.
The more dangerous threat are people with consensus based on political power who appeal to authority, like bad science by “experts”, to silence criticism or challenges.
There are an infinite number of falsehoods, and only one truth. If we let the lies in the truth becomes impossible to find in the pile of lies.
There are many truths. Cleveland is two hours away from me. Cleveland is 40 hours away from me. Both of these are true, but there is not enough detail in them to ascertain exactly what they mean. The same can be said of any statement outside of formal, logic-based language constraints.
The point your statement keenly misses, however, is that the truth is nowhere near as obvious as you make it seem. Darwin's theories were preposterous to people who were just as certain of "one truth" as you are.
Some things are objectively true, and those objective things are exactly what encyclopedias are for. Starting from the presupposition that all statements are equally true is wrong headed in the extreme.
Some people will disagree with even obvious facts like the world not being flat. We don't have to listen to them, and we should not.
My train of thought goes something like “wow, people actually think the earth is flat? That’s crazy.” > “Is this an internet meme thing or 4chan astroturf thing?” > “I wonder why and how many people actually believe that?”
At no point am I confused or persuadable about the shape of the planet. I’ve looked out an airplane window before. Maybe that’s what feels off about it. There’s an underlying feeling of protecting a gullible public from bad information, a process with a high risk of being corrupted by ideologues.
What's being discussed is whether Wikipedia should call it incorrect or not. Or rather, whether the idea that the earth is round is the truth. You can still provide information about provably false ideas while pointing to another idea grounded in facts as the truth.
The rules are not "insufficient" in this regard in the same way that a flute is not an "insufficient" guitar; they aren't designed to "protect against" any topic that would otherwise qualify for a wiki article.
Wikipedia rules are provably sufficient to produce the greatest and most useful reference work in human history. That's good enough for me.