The Battle for Hearts and Minds: Skepticism, Woo, Wikipedia and Beyond

Let me state from the outset that I very much appreciate the utility of, and need for, healthy skepticism – at Wikipedia, in the world at large, and in my personal life – especially in areas where practises and ideologies may be medically, personally, socially or culturally harmful. The emphasis here, however, is very much on the word "healthy", in both camps. A self-confessed libtard, I write, having played minor working roles in the fields of physics, electronics and computing, and having an amateur interest in the study of Eastern action-philosophy as applied in the modern West, and both traditional and modern psychology.

In December 2013, things came to a head at Wikipedia – though not for the first time and certainly not for the last – between adherents of certain fields that are considered by mainstream scientific consensus to be pseudoscience, and skeptics: "After what appears to have been several years of trying to skew Wikipedia coverage of their field to something more favourable, the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology (ACEP) took it upon themselves to petition Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales to change Wikipedia policy." The petition at change.org called for "fair-minded referees".

In response to this, on 23 March 2014, Jimmy Wales replied:

"No, you have to be kidding me. Every single person who signed this petition needs to go back to check their premises and think harder about what it means to be honest, factual, truthful.

"Wikipedia's policies around this kind of thing are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals - that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately.

"What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of 'true scientific discourse'. It isn't."

This gave rise to an essay on Wikipedia entitled "Lunatic charlatans", which continues, and takes up the challenge: