Wikipedia:Lunatic charlatans

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This page in a nutshell: What Wikipedia won't do is pretend that the work of "lunatic charlatans", as they were described by Jimmy Wales, is the equivalent of "true scientific discourse". It isn't.

If science rejects your favoured alternative therapy, Wikipedia is not the place to fix it. This principle is illustrated by the saga of the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology's petition to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

Petition

In December 2013, 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 Jimmy Wales to change Wikipedia policy. Posted on Change.org with a view to getting 10,000 signatures, the text of the petition includes this:

Some might say "mission accomplished". The entire point of Wikipedia is to give dispassionate information, and in the case of alternative medicine, Minchin's Law states that there is no alternative medicine that provably works, because any medicine that fulfills this condition is by definition no longer alternative.

Analysis

The petition title was:

Of course, the problem is precisely that Wikipedia does have such a policy. Fringe subjects are covered according to the reality-based consensus. We do not document Nessie as an elusive plesiosaur, crop circles as the work of alien visitors or homeopathy as a clinically effective form of medicine, because in every case the more parsimonious explanation is that they are complete bollocks.

The petitioners invoke the quack mantra du jour in respect of skeptics:

Ironically, as noted on the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast, the skeptic community is pretty much the only group that does engage in scientific discourse with cranks. There is little prospect of real scientists wasting time investigating the conjectured effects of hypothetical forms of energy which have never been observed or measured with any instrument. Science does not investigate "subtle energy" and will not do so until it is quantified in joules. This argument is just an extension of the Galileo gambit, ignoring the fact that in order to don the mantle of Galileo it is not enough to be persecuted and ridiculed: you must also be right. Or as Carl Sagan said:

Wales' response

Wales' response:

Conclusion

The story has been widely covered in the press, one of the few occasions where Wales has spoken out publicly about a contentious matter of Wikipedia content policy. One prominent previous example is the policy on biographies of living people.

This unapologetic endorsement of the NPOV policy on pseudoscience and the policy on fringe science is the clearest indication yet that Wikipedia's robust response to cranks, quacks, and charlatans is solidly in line with Wikipedia's foundational goals. We should document these things, we should politely explain why we will not follow the line of Natural News, Mercola, and Dr. Oz, but will instead follow reputable scientific sources. If science rejects your favoured alternative therapy, Wikipedia is not the place to fix it. Instead, come up with robust, replicable scientific evidence, published in reputable journals, and then we will tell the world all about it.