[WikiEN-l] SPOV threatens NPOV

Sat Dec 17 18:26:32 UTC 2005

On 12/17/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> > And using "pseudoscience" alone would be at the expense of NPOV
> You still appear to be trying to "prove" this by assertion.

Actually if you'd look over the discussion you'd see there is somewhat
more than just assertion, and that you have been the one doing the
most blunt asserting. If you can't see why labeling a form of inquiry
as "pretend science" might be a POV problem, I'm not sure how much you
are going to bring to the discussion.

I agree that most things labeled pseudoscience are "crap" or worst.
But I'm willing to recognize where that POV I happen to hold comes
from, and that there are valid and actually quite common alternatives
to it.

As an aside, did anybody notice in last month's _Wired_ they made fun
of Wikipedia for having decided that Scientology was a pseudoscience?
I don't know enough about Scientology to know whether it was a good
idea or not (I suspect it is bonkers, but that's different from being
pseudoscience), but the fact that _Wired_ would find that amusing
enough to comment on is a bit suspicious and really gets at the heart
of some of what I have been saying.

Labeling something as "pretend science" is a POV statement, as I have
tried to demonstrate at length (and have not yet seen any compelling
arguments against it), and if we are to be applying such a label, we
should come up with standards so that it is not "Wikipedia" who is
responsible for the POV.

The biggest difficulty, in my mind, is figuring out a better category
name which expresses something along the lines of "Considered
'pseudoscience' by the scientific community". Which would be both a
useful tag (labels the nonsense for those who are fans of real
science) and a neutral one (properly attributes POV, is not WP who is
making the decision), as well as a set of verifiable critieria (it is
not hard to determine whether or not something is considered
pseudoscience in an indisputed way amongst most mainstream scientists;
keyword searches of _Nature_ and _Science_ make that pretty easy).

FF