Stephen Bain wrote: So who is claiming that it is caused by aliens? It's easy to invent an argument that is supported by no-one and use that as an argument that the position is not verifiable. This is still treating truth as a numbers game. Sometimes great scientific discoveries have come from people who stubbornly maintained their opinions on a discovery. Verifiability is a more important criterion than being the position of a small minority. Some people who held the ridiculous minority notion that the earth went around the sun were severely persecuted at one time. Ec

Jack Lynch wrote: Absolutely! And I hope we can add much more. If it's verified as having been proposed by somebody (which does not mean verifying that the guy's theories make any sense), and properly sourced what more can we ask for. I just acquired a volume of "Popular Science" from1872. Wow!! Ec

Andrew Venier wrote: I said nothing about being indiscriminate with the various available nutcases. Ec

"Andrew Venier" <avenier(a)venier.net> wrote in message news:42AF8877.4070305@venier.net... If it's the kind of nut-job-ness that the average person is likely to be taken in by, then we have a responsibility to at least mention it, together with (presumably ample) evidence that the guy **is** a nut-job and why people should **not** be taken in. -- Phil [[en:User:Phil Boswell]]

James D. Forrester wrote: If Sollog is the only source of evidence for his being God he has a verifiability problem. Under those circumstances being a part of a minority is moot. Ec

James D. Forrester wrote: Sounds like a good enough reason to eliminate all articles about God. :-) Ec

Nobody is talking about "truth" here. "Truth" is fought on the vanguards, in little communities which do nothing but spend their time producing "facts" and "knowledge" and "understanding", all fitting into their own sets of standards of what counts as valid and reliable ("regimes of truth"), some of which brutally disagree with each other. We don't want to play *that* game. That's not the role of an encyclopedia. We digest those battles and report on them. We sit above it all. We don't take part in that battle. You don't turn to Encyclopedia Brittanica to get cutting-edge information on the latest scientific research. You turn to it for the basics of what is reasonably established, or the range of opinions which the reasonably established people in the world consider possible. You also turn there for references to sources for further reading, if you want a more comprehensive view of things, or if you want to take part in those battles for truth. Our advantages over EB? We can update things considerably easier and faster -- if tomorrow's patent clerk becomes today's Einstein, all the better! We'll update it when it happens, but not a moment sooner. And though I *loathe* the phrase "Wikipedia is not paper" (which never called out to defend anything I find truly interesting in the world), it is worth noting that another advantage we have is that we can say a whole lot about a whole lot more. The "cut" of notability to get into WP is significantly lower than with EB -- and I think that's a good thing. But that doesn't mean there shouldn't be a cut at all. Paul Feyerabend's famous critique of the scientific method was that it -- and all "methods" -- restrained investigations into the truth, restrained the ways to which one could approach the world. On that observation, I think he was dead right. But I think he errs in thinking this a scandal: it's that way on purpose! Limiting inquiry to what are thought to be "solvable" problems at the time using "reliable" methods (however much they will be laughed at in the future) allows one to focus manpower, energy, and resources towards things which are likely to pan out. Is it a "numbers game" of truth? No more than the world already is one -- it is about who says what, how much you trust them, and one hopes that if someone starts saying something "true", it will catch on with others (though it is generally only "others in their same regime of truth"). Does it work that way in real life? Only roughly. But Wikipedia's pretension should only be to accurately summarize and report on "real life" -- never to create "real life". We need to ditch the pretension that Wikipedia is the place to negotiate "truth" -- it isn't, it never has been, it never will be. Time has shown it difficult enough to simply report on it! FF On 6/10/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: