Short description: Free-access wiki written to criticize religion, government, and pseudoscience
RationalWiki
RationalWiki Logo.png
Screenshot
RationalWiki Main Page.png
RationalWiki Main Page (As of March 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]
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional
LaunchedMay 22, 2007; 15 years ago (2007-05-22)[5]
Current statusActive
Content license
CC-BY-SA 3.0[6]
Written inMediaWiki software

RationalWiki is an online wiki whose 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 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 longstanding 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]

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.[17]

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] Biologist and pseudoscience critic Jerry Coyne has written that its articles appear slanted toward the "authoritarian Left".[18]

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, according to Libcom.org, Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies has "several passages" that "are similar to entries in Wikipedia and another online encyclopedia, RationalWiki".[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

  • List of wikis
  • List of online encyclopedias

References

  1. ↑ "RationalWiki:Languages". RationalWiki. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/RationalWiki:Languages. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "About". RationalMedia Foundation. https://rationalweb.org/about/. 
  3. ↑ "RationalWiki:General disclaimer". RationalWiki. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/RationalWiki:General_disclaimer. 
  4. ↑ "RationalWiki talk:RationalMedia Foundation - RationalWiki". https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/RationalWiki_talk:RationalMedia_Foundation. 
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 "RationalWiki:Timeline". RationalWiki. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/RationalWiki:Timeline. 
  6. ↑ "RationalWiki:Copyrights". RationalWiki. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/RationalWiki:Copyrights. 
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Keeler, Mary; Johnson, Josh; Majumdar, Arun (2011). "Crowdsourced Knowledge: Peril and Promise for Complex Knowledge Systems". New England Complex Systems Institute. p. 756. http://necsi.edu/events/iccs2011/papers/45.pdf#page=4. 
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 Simon, Stephanie (June 19, 2007). "A conservative's answer to Wikipedia". Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-jun-19-na-schlafly19-story.html. 
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 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. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3329582. 
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 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. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3343658. 
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Haines, Lester (June 20, 2007). "Need hard facts? Try Conservapedia". The Register. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/20/conservapedia?page=3. 
  12. ↑ "A message from our Chair". RationalMedia Foundation blog. July 30, 2013. http://rationalblogs.org/rationalmedia/2013/07/30/a-message-from-our-chair/. 
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Shvets, Alexander (October 2, 2014). 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). https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=bgsu1499383965589843&disposition=inline. 
  15. ↑ "RationalWiki:What is a RationalWiki article?". RationalWiki. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/RationalWiki:What_is_a_RationalWiki_article?. 
  16. ↑ McKay, Tom (2015-09-30). "7 Tips on Gender Relations, According to Men's Rights Activists and the "Manosphere"". https://www.mic.com/articles/125977/7-tips-on-gender-relations-according-to-men-s-rights-activists-and-the-manosphere. 
  17. ↑ Ballatore, Andrea (June 19, 2015). "Google chemtrails: A methodology to analyze topic representation in search engine results.". First Monday. 20.7 (2015) 20 (7). http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5597/4652. Retrieved March 15, 2016. 
  18. ↑ Coyne, Jerry (February 13, 2016). "RationalWiki guts a reader's attempt to correct its article on female genital mutilation". https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2016/02/13/rationalwiki-guts-a-readers-attempt-to-correct-its-article-on-female-genital-mutilation/. 
  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. https://jcom.sissa.it/archive/19/02/JCOM_1902_2020_A02. 
  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". http://www.snopes.com/politics/conspiracy/monsanto.asp. 
  22. ↑ Mikkelson, David (October 10, 2013). "Pentagon Warns to Expect 'Radical' Change in U.S. Government Soon". http://www.snopes.com/politics/conspiracy/radicalchange.asp. 
  23. ↑ Mikkelson, David (March 19, 2015). "Obama Ousts Top Officers After Nuke Explodes in Ocean Instead of Charleston". http://www.snopes.com/politics/conspiracy/charleston.asp. 
  24. ↑ Mikkelson, David (January 27, 2014). "Obama Plan to Depopulate Montana Raises Crisis Fears in Moscow". http://www.snopes.com/politics/conspiracy/montana.asp. 
  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. http://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=836003098074001079005096124086066081113072089033089044065118030103091069064017082096019037058000058022054081013009094064109066056045086013087023087025109079006005031001031075124095115064127101110106097120103087105065031086004024116066004099080086103&EXT=pd. 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. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/jul/25/these-are-the-best-arguments-from-the-3-of-climate-scientist-skeptics-really. 
  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. https://books.google.com/books?id=5U9tDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT24. 
  33. ↑ Davis, Charles (2018-05-19). "Sloppy Sourcing Plagues 'Kill All Normies' Alt-Right Book". The Daily Beast. https://www.thedailybeast.com/kill-all-citations-sloppy-sourcing-plagues-kill-all-normies-book-on-sjws-and-the-alt-right. 
  34. ↑ Robertson, Adi (2015-09-02). "Time Cube is gone". https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/2/9247913/time-cube-is-gone. 

External links



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