RationalWiki
From RationalWiki
| “ | This is a goofy wiki, not the Meet the Press or the Times of London. | ” |
RationalWiki is a community working together to explore and provide information about a range of topics centered around science, skepticism, and critical thinking. While RationalWiki uses software originally developed for Wikipedia it is important to realize that it is not trying to be an encyclopedia. Wikipedia has dominated the public understanding of the wiki concept for years, but wikis were originally developed as a much broader tool for any kind of collaborative content creation. In fact, RationalWiki is closer in design to original wikis than Wikipedia.
Contents |
[edit] The mission
RationalWiki's specific mission statement is to:
- Analyze and refute pseudoscience and the anti-science movement, ideas and people.
- Analyze and refute the full range of crank ideas - why do people believe stupid things?
- Develop essays, articles and discussions on authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, and other social and political constructs
Many aspects of the popular web 2.0 paradigm have been incorporated into the site.
- The community has embraced the concept of wikis by creating an information source out of the collaborative editing of thousands of people.
- By encouraging original research and essays the site has also incorporated many aspects of the blogging community.
- Discussion between members is facilitated on many levels such as large scale debate articles, specific discussions on talk pages, and just coming together to talk about whatever is on our mind at the saloon bar. This focus on discussion captures the essences of Internet forums.
In short, we are not an encyclopedia: we are a collaborative blog/forum/wiki with a specific focus.
[edit] History
- See the main article RationalWiki:History
Most of the original editors at this site came together because of their collective experience with Conservapedia.[2]
In fact, RationalWiki started out as a private wiki to bitch and whine about Conservapedia. Most of the content was incredibly random, "article" pages were treated as talk pages, and wandalism ran rampant. It was a fun place to hang out, but really meant nothing in the big scheme of things.
The original wiki was wiped and RationalWiki 2.0 was created as an open editing wiki, on May 22, 2007.
Because of the importance of Conservapedia in the history of RationalWiki a lot of our shared interest is in dealing with the issues we all experienced at that site. Conservapedia also represents a microcosm of much of what is wrong with right-wing authoritarian religious fundamentalism. So it provides good fodder for making our point.
As the site has grown however, the user base has brought in people who never went through the odious experience of being an editor at Conservapedia. RationalWiki has continued to expand in its effort to more fully explore all dark recesses of pseudoscience and fundamentalism across a broad range of topics.
[edit] Notability and repute
RationalWiki is a small site and rarely makes it into the top 100,000 sites at Alexa. We come up usually on the second page on a google search for a topic we have a page on, with a few exceptions where we are ranked very high. We so far are not notable enough to have a Wikipedia article, since we haven't "made the news" yet; however, we were mentioned in passing in an L.A. Times article about Conservapedia, and later an article in the London Telegraph drew heavily, with attribution, from our series of articles on Internet laws.[3]
Our objective here is not to collect "hits" but to disseminate true and accurate information whilst debunking pseudoscience and other anti-intellectual "information". Remember, the truth is not a popularity contest.
[edit] See also
- RationalWiki:What is a RationalWiki article?
- RationalWiki:Newcomers
- Snarky point of view
- Main Help page
- RationalWiki.info
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ RationalWiki - Difflink
- ↑ Wikipedia - RationalWiki (In Swedish!).
- ↑ 23 Oct 2009 [1]
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