RationalWiki

RationalWiki

RationalWiki logo
Screenshot Screenshot of the RationalWiki Main Page as of March 11, 2019.
Web address	rationalwiki.org
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Wiki
Registration	Optional
Available in	English, Russian
Content license	CC-BY-SA 3.0
Written in	MediaWiki software
Owner	RationalMedia Foundation
Created by	Volunteer contributors
Launched	May 22, 2007 (2007-05-22)
Alexa rank	17,479; 5,727: United States (April 2015)
Current status	Active

RationalWiki is a wiki written from a skeptical, secular, and far-left perspective. It was created in 2007 after an incident in which contributors attempting to edit Conservapedia were banned, and is owned by Trent Morgan Toulouse, a psychology professor at Central New Mexico Community College. Since then, it has developed into a wiki that, like present-day Wikipedia, criticizes what it describes as "crank" ideas, pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and fundamentalism. Ideologically, RationalWiki typically argues in favor of atheism, feminism, racial egalitarianism, LGBT rights, and separation of church and state, and criticises conservatism and libertarianism. However, RationalWiki differs from Wikipedia in the sense that it frequently uses sarcasm and humor in its articles.

RationalWiki, much like Wikipedia, has been criticized for bias, factual inaccuracies, and has been the subject of libel lawsuits. Its owner, Trent Morgan Toulouse, is on record as saying he enjoys being sued over defamations made by editors on RationalWiki.

History

Origin

In April 2007, Peter Lipson, a doctor of internal medicine, attempted to edit Conservapedia's article on breast cancer to include his evidence against Conservapedia's claim that abortion was linked to the disease. Conservapedia is an encyclopedia started by Andy Schlafly to provide an alternative to Wikipedia, which Schlafly perceived as suffering from liberal and atheistic bias.

Conservapedia administrators, including Schlafly, questioned his credentials and eventually banned Lipson and several other contributors from the website. After this incident, Lipson and friends started their own website, RationalWiki.com [sic]."

RationalMedia Foundation

In 2010, Trent Morgan Toulouse, a psychology professor at Central New Mexico Community College incorporated a nonprofit called the "RationalWiki Foundation Inc." to manage the affairs and pay the operational expenses of the website. In July 2013, the RationalWiki Foundation changed its name to the RationalMedia Foundation, stating that its aims extended beyond the RationalWiki site alone.

Mission and content

RationalWiki's stated missions are:

1. Analyzing and refuting pseudoscience and the anti-science movement
2. Documenting the full range of crank ideas
3. Explorations of conspiracy theories, authoritarianism and fundamentalism
4. Analysis and criticism of how these subjects are handled in the media

RationalWiki differs in some ways from the philosophy of Wikipedia and some other informational wikis. It has a policy of "SPOV", which stands for "snarky point of view", as opposed to Wikipedia's (since abandoned) neutral point of view policy. Following this mission, many RationalWiki articles mock, sarcastically describe, and satirize beliefs that RationalWiki opposes, especially when covering topics like alternative medicine or fundamentalist Christian leaders.

A significant fraction of activity on RationalWiki has involved critiquing and "monitor[ing] Conservapedia". Many RationalWiki contributors have been highly critical of Conservapedia. 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'."

Many editors of RationalWiki are also editors on Wikipedia, what with its purge of conservative users and administrators, though some have previously been banned from the site for unconstructive editing.

Reception

Ballatore 2015 found RationalWiki to be the most visible "debunking" website in terms of Google and Bing search results, slightly more visible than rense.com and less visible than YouTube or Wikipedia.

In Intelligent Systems'2014, published by the IEEE, Alexander Shvets stated: "There are few online resources and periodical articles that provide some information about pseudoscientific theories. Such information helps non-experts to acquire the necessary knowledge to avoid being deceived. One of the online resources that can be distinguished is international resource "RationalWiki" that was created to organize and categorize knowledge about pseudoscientific theories, personalities, and organizations."

In Crowdsourced Knowledge: Peril and Promise for Complex Knowledge Systems, Mary Keeler et al. stated: "As W. Lippmann warned in 1955, 'When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute'. To help sort out the complexities there are sites like RationalWiki.org[.]"

In The Social Pollution Prevention Guide, Chester Davis described RationalWiki as "like Wikipedia, but with a focus on science and social issues. They promote logic, critical thinking, and expose scammers and nonsense."

Stephanie Simon of the Los Angeles Times stated that some RationalWiki contributors, "by their own admission ... engage in acts of cyber-vandalism [of Conservapedia]. The vandals have inserted errors, pornographic photos and satire[.]"

RationalWiki has occasionally been quoted in popular and academic sources. Tom Chivers of the Daily Telegraph cited and quoted RationalWiki for background on several Internet laws. Purported fact-checking website Snopes has repeatedly quoted RationalWiki for background on Sorcha Faal of the European Union Times. RationalWiki was quoted by Magnus Ramage in Perspectives on Information about the "Lenski affair". RationalWiki was quoted by Thomas Leitch in Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age on the history of Citizendium. RationalWiki was cited by Reiss Rubinstein and Lois Weithorn in Responding to the Childhood Vaccination Crisis about the website Whale.to, saying that "Whale.to ... is sufficiently familiar to science advocates to be identified as a particularly noncredible source for citation and reliance", using RationalWiki as an example.

Controversies

RationalWiki has been criticized in LessWrong for its selective usage of facts, "ideological bias," and having a mission that is "less useful and reliable than Wikipedia".

Race denialism

RationalWiki has been criticized for denying that measured IQ differences between the members of different human races are genetic in origin. They oppose the work of human biodiversity researchers, and the online subculture which has emerged to discuss this research. Instead, RationalWiki articles imply IQ differences are caused by racial discrimination and by economic or social hardships. Like Wikipedia, their articles tend to state that anyone who claims IQ does have a genetic basis is a racist and a believer in pseudoscience.

Criticism of Western cultures

Just like Wikipedia, RationalWiki also has many articles devoted to criticizing right-wing (especially far-right) or traditional Western and East Asian cultures, but is less likely to criticize Islam or Judaism. It also very rarely criticizes left-wing and far-left causes or subcultures, like homosexuality, transgenderism, climate change, social anarchism, and communism. However, it does allow mild mockery of them, and limited criticism of some communists and Islamist extremists.

See also

• Conservapedia
• Citizendium
• Debunking Denialism
• Infogalactic
• Metapedia
• LessWrong
• Wikipedia
• WikiSpooks

External links

• RationalWiki
• RationalMedia Foundation
• Lance Welton, VDARE; Lunatics Take Over Asylum: Oliver D. Smith, RationalWiki, And The Wikipedians