Forum:Expanding RW's mission

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(Forum: Contracting RW's mission.)
(Forum: Contracting RW's mission.)
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I feel like there's a misunderstanding about what I've proposed.  '''I am not advocating that we start taking positions on ''every'' political issue, nor that we become uniformly left-wing.'''  I am advocating that we counter lies, misinformation, bad analyses and bad policies, in politics as in science.  As I said above, sometimes someone in the political discourse makes an argument that is simply ''wrong'' and ought to be thoroughly debunked ''with reference to the facts''.  Wikipedia must remain politically neutral so it can't fulfill this function, and Politifact and other organizations like that seem to be more concerned with ''appearing'' unbiased (by criticizing right and left exactly 50% of the time each) than with actually ''being'' unbiased (by basing their rulings on facts).  That leaves RW as the only site I can think of that would take on this role.  [[User:Wehpudicabok|<span style="color: #F781F3">'''Wehpudicabok'''</span>]] <small>[[User talk:Wehpudicabok|<span style="color: #6A0888">[話]</span>]] [[Special:Contributions/Wehpudicabok|<span style="color: #6A0888">[変]</span>]] [[Special:Block/Wehpudicabok|<span style="color: #6A0888">[留]</span>]]</small> 22:39, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
 
I feel like there's a misunderstanding about what I've proposed.  '''I am not advocating that we start taking positions on ''every'' political issue, nor that we become uniformly left-wing.'''  I am advocating that we counter lies, misinformation, bad analyses and bad policies, in politics as in science.  As I said above, sometimes someone in the political discourse makes an argument that is simply ''wrong'' and ought to be thoroughly debunked ''with reference to the facts''.  Wikipedia must remain politically neutral so it can't fulfill this function, and Politifact and other organizations like that seem to be more concerned with ''appearing'' unbiased (by criticizing right and left exactly 50% of the time each) than with actually ''being'' unbiased (by basing their rulings on facts).  That leaves RW as the only site I can think of that would take on this role.  [[User:Wehpudicabok|<span style="color: #F781F3">'''Wehpudicabok'''</span>]] <small>[[User talk:Wehpudicabok|<span style="color: #6A0888">[話]</span>]] [[Special:Contributions/Wehpudicabok|<span style="color: #6A0888">[変]</span>]] [[Special:Block/Wehpudicabok|<span style="color: #6A0888">[留]</span>]]</small> 22:39, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
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Let me give another example of something that would be "on-mission" if my reworking of the mission were put into effect.  I recently came across an article wherein Bill O'Reilly criticized the parents of a transgender child (female-to-male) for putting him on hormone blockers, saying that it violated his "informed consent."  This is simply ignorant of the facts that transgender children have to receive information and be evaluated by psychologists before they can receive such treatment, so obviously he had already given informed consent.  '''When I see people making political arguments that are clearly based on known falsehoods, it really pisses me off.'''  This isn't scientific, and I agree that as it stands now, the mission doesn't cover this.  But it ''is'' a simple matter of what is true and what is not.  It ''is'' an indisputable fact that the child gave informed consent.  It ''is'' an indisputable fact that O'Reilly's position is based on falsehoods.  These are the sorts of topics that I feel we should be taking on.  [[User:Wehpudicabok|<span style="color: #F781F3">'''Wehpudicabok'''</span>]] <small>[[User talk:Wehpudicabok|<span style="color: #6A0888">[話]</span>]] [[Special:Contributions/Wehpudicabok|<span style="color: #6A0888">[変]</span>]] [[Special:Block/Wehpudicabok|<span style="color: #6A0888">[留]</span>]]</small> 22:48, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Revision as of 22:48, 9 January 2014

There seems to be a lot of discussion lately, often very heated, about what exactly falls under the scope of RationalWiki's mission. In particular, there are plenty of arguments between Smerdis and PSL, or Smerdis and Sophie, or Smerdis and... well, anyone else really, about whether some article or another is within the RW mission.

While I agree that refuting pseudoscience is a laudable goal and one that we should continue pursuing, I disagree with those who say that it should be our sole focus. As we're a rationalist community, I feel we should be shining a critical eye on many areas not currently covered, or only tangentially covered, by our mission statement. In particular, politics as a whole ought to be part of what we analyze and critique.

This site started out with a focus on criticizing one particular, politically driven website, and politics has always been part of the RationalWiki dialogue. (Many contributors here now are too new to remember it, but when Bush was president, the main page had a clock counting down the days until he left office, with a delightfully snarky randomized template accompanying it.) Yet lately it seems that some users, particularly PowderSmokeAndLeather, want to focus only on those parts of the political dialogue in which pseudoscience plays a heavy part. As an example, I recently started an article on right-to-work laws, to which many other contributors have since added useful content. The idea wasn't mine; I took it from the suggestion box, where it had received many upvotes. Yet not long after that, PSL issued a challenge on the talk page regarding its missionality. And frankly, I don't think PSL was wrong, in that as the rules stand now, we have no particular business commenting on right-to-work laws. They aren't under our purview. The fact that the idea received so many upvotes in the to-do list suggests to me that there is a disconnect between what the mission statement says we talk about (pseudoscience, cranks, authoritarianism, and the media) and what we actually want to talk about (the above, plus politics, society, culture, religion, etc.).

I think Smerdis's addition of plenty of articles that have been challenged for missionality (Indo-European languages, Romanticism, etc.) has brought to the surface this issue, but I think it predates his arrival here, and I think now is the time that we should talk about it. The question I want to ask is:

Should we expand the RationalWiki mission statement to include broader coverage of topics in politics and society?

I personally believe the answer is "yes." I look forward to hearing others' opinions. Wehpudicabok [話] [変] [留] 05:30, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

I understand PowderSmokeAndLeather's reasoning behind streamlining the political content, but we are always going to have debates over what is going to be on mission regardless of updating the text. I'd disagree with deleting right-to-work despite it not relating to "doctrinaire" pseudoscience; the policy remains purely in the US experience, but various politicians outside the country have suggested to mimic it (because if it's American, it's therefore good) while the vast majority of mainstream academics, based in labour law or economics, say it will do more harm than benefit. If that doesn't fit 2. Documenting the full range of crank ideas, I don't know what does.
Same goes for, say, World War II. On its own it's just a history recap, but the features of the war — the levelling of entire countries, extermination of civilians, the treatment of POWs and unethical experimentation, all because of the spread of blatanly wrong theories about government and racial supremacy (and the aftermath, with historical revisionism/denialism and the creation of even more dangerous weapons, purely due to ideological motivation) — make it a necessary portal for me. Osaka Sun (talk) 06:20, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
Long time reader here. Stick with what the site's good at: exposing and mocking stupidity, including politics. WW2 is a good example of a subject where both the reader and the writer would be better served by Wikipedia. Holocaust denial or a revival of such pseudoscience would be more RW's realm. Stringbeans (talk) 06:56, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
I do think that "check Wikipedia for just the facts" is an approach we could be taking more often, but defining our mission as "exposing and mocking stupidity, including politics" would seem to be even more vague than the current one, and would likely invite more debate about whether individual topics qualify. I would rather we cover both the good and the bad elements of any topic we consider to be part of our domain; that way an article's relevance isn't determined by the positions espoused by its subject.
Let me propose a thought experiment. Suppose a YouTube vlogger starts accumulating tons of pageviews and inspires commentary from others because he says things that are ignorant of political facts and that appeal to ill-informed voters. That would seem to fall within the definition of "stupid," and we would be right to criticize it. Then suppose that same vlogger has a change of heart, and starts doing research before posting, and his arguments and positions change accordingly, becoming mostly fact-based. Does he no longer fall within our domain of interest? Defining our mission as "combating stupid ideas" or something similar would seem to suggest that when someone stops making stupid arguments, they aren't relevant to us anymore. I think it's better for us to first define a range of topics we want to cover (esp. politics), and then state that our position is the superiority of evidence-based reasoning, etc. Wehpudicabok [話] [変] [留] 07:11, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
Combating pseudo-science is a nice clear objective. We can more-or-less define it and there is a standard against which we can measure it - real science. You know when it's right an you know when it's not.
But "politics as a whole"? That's a lot more messy. I'm not even sure what that would entail, but it would certainly mean that we would need to decide on what was politically acceptable and what was not. We would need to select some political standard to support and presumably criticise other political opinions which differed from the one we had decided upon.
I accept that we sort of do this already but having written these notes I'm starting to wonder if we should even do that.--Bob"I think you'll find it's more complicated than that." 09:05, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
I don't think we would need to "decide on what was politically acceptable and what was not," beyond a simple principle of evidence-based reasoning, which we all (presumably) agree on already. We don't necessarily all have to have the same position on every issue; in fact, having many positions represented is probably healthier for the community. What I'm envisioning is a RationalWiki that has a base of factual knowledge and then uses that base to criticize politicians and pundits whose arguments and positions are not based on observed reality. A sort of reality-based community wiki, if you will. It's a natural extension of the science-versus-religious-fundamentalism coverage, and it does not require users to take specific positions beyond a basic principle of empiricism. Wehpudicabok [話] [変] [留] 09:38, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
Well, your initial proposal was "politics as a whole" which seems pretty inclusive. But how does what you are proposing in the paragraph above differ from what we do already? Take Global Warming - a science subject with major political and social overtones - we've got no problem with that.
So can you give an example of a specific subject or topic which would be covered by your politics proposal which we would not cover now?--Bob"I think you'll find it's more complicated than that." 09:47, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
It is hard to say, because the boundaries are not clearly defined as they are now, which is why there's so much debating about what is on-mission and what is not. Take the above comments on right-to-work laws, for instance. Osaka believes it's on-mission; PSL doesn't (or at least didn't; we'll see whether his position has changed if he chimes in soon). So my proposal would cement the missionality of topics like that – from PSL and other skeptics' perspectives, they are being added to our domain, but from Osaka's perspective, it's just a clarification that such topics are already covered.
Other topics that would shift from "maybe relevant" to "definitely relevant" would include: corporate influence in politics/funding of campaigns; legality of marijuana; health care reform; LGBT rights; and honestly, pretty much every contemporary political issue other than evolution and global warming, which are already in the "definitely relevant" category. Wehpudicabok [話] [変] [留] 09:59, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
Very simply, I say this: Does the political article further serve #1-4 on the front page? No? Then I have no interest in it. However, it can be reasonably stated that the whole of politics has some relation to cranks and pseudoscience. Even something as seemingly mundane as right-to-work can have such a link; look at the whackaloons who claim RTW laws give them the right to be God-bosses and demand blowjobs from their employees. I see no reason to further expand the mission, as I see the mission as broad enough already. --Castaigne (talk) 04:15, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

Contents

No more feminist and gender politics and transexualism

We should stick to debunking pseudoscience like creationism, race-denialism, gender politics feminist bullshit etc.— Unsigned, by: 174.88.154.64 / talk / contribs

What an amusing little fart of an idea that was. Tell me, do you have any evidence that so-called "race-denialism" is a pseudoscience? Or even any reason to oppose our coverage of ideas you cannot even be bothered to spell correctly?
And Psy and Osaka, please cut down on pointless reverts. Ignorance is best treated with exposure to knowledge, not hidden in the shadows of the subconscious minds of fools. Wehpudicabok [話] [変] [留] 08:10, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
Unless you want this page to look like this one, I'd suggest you be wary. Osaka Sun (talk) 09:21, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
Admittedly, that was a ridiculously long-winded argument. Nevertheless, when we revert the first comment someone makes on a particular forum it looks less like "stop this before it turns into a shitstorm" and more like pure censorship, which I firmly oppose. Even when used on Dunning-Kruger poster-boys like our anonymous friend here. Wehpudicabok [話] [変] [留] 09:36, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Listicles and sharticles

PSaL may be engaging in overkill a bit, but I see his point. Regardless of the larger issue, I think we can all agree that we need to cut down on uninformative listicles and other articles that seem to have no purpose other than to say "Look, it's a wingnut!" (I admit to being guilty of perpetrating this as well.) in addition to avoiding the "crappy version of Wikipedia problem." Although this is not confined to political articles, I feel like this is a particular problem with them. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 15:32, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

I may not be the most qualified to contribute, since I haven't contributed all that much to the wiki (mostly just lurking and keeping an eye on pseudoscientists trying to push their stuff into the quantum articles), but it seems to me that this is exactly the problem. While the wiki's pseudoscience articles are (for the most part) fairly sound, well-backed, and supported by the evidence, many of the articles on politics and social issues tend to be poorly written. I've seen many political articles on this wiki that seem like they are no more than an outlet for the author's venting. - GrantC (talk) 15:44, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
I agree. I'd say that it would better to reduce the political content than increase it.--Bob"I think you'll find it's more complicated than that." 16:30, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
If our political articles are of low quality, it would seem to me that the proper solution would be to work on them, not cut them out entirely. Though I would agree that we shouldn't have "look it's a wingnut" articles; I would prefer we focus on issues and misinformation surrounding them. Wehpudicabok [話] [変] [留] 17:58, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
My interest is less in politics and more in science, so I don't purport to know what the best solution is for the community as a whole (I will not likely be venturing into editing any of the articles on social or political issues). I think the question is: what is the effort required to bring the relevant political and social issues articles up to par? Also, as sort of a corollary to the discussion in the section above, it's important to draw the line between misinformation about social/political issues (as you keep mentioning) and the unstable morass that is the current coverage, which often seems to be comprised mostly of attacks on whatever political position the article author disagrees with most vehemently that day. - GrantC (talk) 18:08, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
I guess I'd rather see us improve what we have rather than take new directions. Some of the articles listed on the Main page are very mission-centric but could use vast improvement. Sterilesig.svgtalk 20:24, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
It's much easier to say what is right and wrong in science, and politics are heavily culturally nuanced. I don't think we need to expand into the political arena any more than we have, and if anything we should cut back and focus on what can be proven or disproven. Redchuck.gif ГенгисOur ignorance is God; what we know is science. Moderator 20:36, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
I'm slowly coming round to this view. I think articles on political -isms and unfair/negative methods are still RWish though. Articles just going "look at this jerk of a Governor"... not so much. SophieWilderModerator 20:43, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
Politics and culture are indeed nuanced, and sometimes there is no right or wrong answer for a particular issue. But sometimes there is. Sometimes there's an argument floating through the discourse that is based on known falsehoods. I feel like the way the mission is right now, we'll only target those arguments if their topic is scientific, and that's a waste of our talents. Wehpudicabok [話] [変] [留] 06:05, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

I think stuff on feminism/anti-feminism & LGBT rights is definitely relevant to us. Stuff on governmental politics is mostly relevant, but we should maybe shy away from explicitly taking sides in the liberal vs conservative divide & focus instead on exposing bullshit (from either side). I don't like the articles on the history of languages that are 90% unnecessary trivia justified by a token paragraph acknowledging that some people have unorthodox opinions which are incorrect. I don't think we need articles on ancient history in general: there should be some direct relevance to the modern world. Stuff like WW2, the Holocaust, US slavery, the American Civil War is relevant to us (but doesn't need detailed blow-by-blow coverage here) because of continuing repercussions & controversies relating to these things. The pogrom in Cordoba in 1391, not so much. We periodically get suggestions to write about the Titanic, the Hindenburg disaster, Richard III & the princes in the Tower, etc. I don't see the point. Yeah, there are revisionist theories & conspiracy theories about these things, but they don't impact understanding of modern politics & society to the same extent as, say, Holocaust denialism or the 9/11 truth movement. I don't think we need an article on Shakespeare authorship, for example, but we have one. I wouldn't mind it, but increasingly it seems like the existence of articles like that & British English/American English is being used to justify more off-topic articles about history, languages & literature which don't really relate to anything else we write about. WẽãšẽĩõĩďWeaselly.jpgMethinks it is a Weasel 21:53, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

From my perspective, which at this point is still an outsider's one, I'm a bit uncertain as to whether we want to be a semi-comedic compendium of anti-religious snark, a response to Conservapedia, or some kind of educational resource on pseudoscience and crank theories. If "response to Conservapedia" is the big thing, I'm in the wrong place; I don't give a fuck about Conservapedia. I'm more hoping it was "educational resource on pseudoscience and crank theories".

If this is the mission, we most definitely do need an article on Shakespeare authorship, and I'm just getting started on articles on the history of language; it isn't a sexy science, but it is extremely attractive to old fashioned crackpots. We absolutely need Indo-European languages in that case, and much else beside: Proto-World, Nostratic, Nicholas Marr, Amerind, Etruscan, Joseph Greenberg, Prince Madoc. This isn't the sexiest field of pseudo-science and uninformed published speculation, but it's one I know well. I still do not understand what's off mission about my fairly careful explanation of why the perennial proposals to make English spelling more logical are doomed to failure. It's a crank magnet IMO, not far different from a perpetual motion machine from my outlook. If we're doing this, I've always taken Martin Gardner as my model. You need to leave the article knowing enough of the sound science to be able to explain why the cranks are wrong.

Or maybe our skepticism and educational aims are more limited; we don't cover cranks and pseudoscience generally, only those that make explicitly supernatural claims. This is first and foremost an atheist and agnostic site. I get that it is one, but refuting all religions isn't really why I'm here either. This is what occurs to me as the actual explanation of why an article on English spelling reform is off-topic; it's an article about inherently unworkable crackpot projects, but has nothing to do with God. If this is the case, I may not belong here, either. (But Babylon still does.)

Politics becomes a problem when we deal with political subjects in the peremptory and didactic manner properly addressed to pseudoscience and crackpottery. It's always going to be a problem. I understand that I'm dealing with a consensus perfectly willing to call me nasty names for saying so, but I at bare minimum do not find the confidence of our articles on subjects like privilege, sexual objectification, or patriarchy appropriate. I consider "patriarchy" pure woo, deriving ultimately from nineteenth century armchair anthropology about how there might be some people so primitive they don't know about the birds and the bees. (Tabula rasa and noble savage. Unfortunately, this nonsense got popularized by Friedrich Engels.) Our article on "sexual objectification" told the simple truth when it called the idea a feminist snarl word based on a hostile caricature of male sexuality. "Privilege" is as overbearing and condescending as the reverse-snobbery of the underlying idea. This rubbish is always going to be contested; and I submit that it can be contested by people you could at least count as reasonable, regardless of the fact that they disagree with the site's current consensus about this stuff. Quite simply, I suspect that people who look up these concepts on the skeptical wiki are looking for skeptical opinions, and what they're finding instead is cognitive dissonance and a fair bit of avoidable friction. - Smerdis of Tlön (talk) 04:36, 2 January 2014 (UTC)
I agree with most of that, and the parts I don't agree with I'll save for another time because they're not relevant to my current thesis. Wehpudicabok [話] [変] [留] 06:05, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

WWII

As Osaka Sun pointed out, it's worth persuing. There's enough revisonism existing by pro Soviet and pro Nazi revisionists, with many of the pro Nazi revsionists coming out on the apperent moral high ground claiming that they just want "justice" for "innocent" victims and that they're debunking revisionism with their own load of horseshit. Fergelteskaya (talk) 19:02, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Forum: Contracting RW's mission.

Someone told me that I comment I'd made was what drove him to start this conversation. It seems like people have a good sense of where I stand on this, but, just to be clear.We are not Wikipedia, and never will be. By trying to write articles on Guyana and nuclear war that do NOTHING that WP doesn't already do, we're weakening our brand, and distracting attention from taking down pseudo-scientists and woo hucksters. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a crime against humanity and a military decision of questionable virtue. They weren't about the intersection of politics and religious fundamentalism, pseudoscience, or woo. There are trillions of words written about them. Ours say nothing new or valuable.

On the other hand, if our work can keep people from taking Errol_Denton and Ralph_W._Moss seriously, and can get readers to understand why their kids are spouting weird nonsense from their school textbooks, we're doing good work that needs to be done.

If I had my way, there would be a severe culling of mainspace with a narrow reading of the mission held in mind.

Also, not all people who oppose woo, pseudoscience and religious fundamentalism (especially in as far as it influences education and politics) identify with our basic "liberal-left" political orientation. sure, our article on Obama takes the worst of the idolatry around him down a notch or two, but on the whole our political orientation skews massively in a way that alienates some potential readers and contributors. No more articles on partisan political issues unless they distinctly overlap with an issue having to do with science or anti-science. Right to work laws are evil, and of questionable economic value, but they are not woo. Legit economists argue for them. I disagree with them, but they're not the public-policy equivalent of snake-oil salesmen.

None of this will matter, because we will keep allowing editors to write articles on stuff they think is cool or happen to be knowledgeable about, and we will continue to debase the nuggets of real gold on the wiki by filling it with off-mission, third-rate general encyclopedia articles and high-handed fourth-rate partisan analyses.

So it goes. PowderSmokeAndLeather: Say something once, why say it again?.Moderator 14:10, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

I endorse this. Redchuck.gif ГенгисOur ignorance is God; what we know is science. Moderator 14:16, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
Thnaks. Afterthought: part of the problem would go away if people would stop redlinking off-mission terms, thereby creating the "But there are 17 redlinks to Tobago on the wiki, so I wrote a stub. It'll get missional if we keep it" defence. PowderSmokeAndLeather: Say something once, why say it again?.Moderator 14:22, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
I endorse this. You are a reasonable character. Nutty Roux100x100 anarchy symbol.svg 20:08, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
I'm also a great dancer. PowderSmokeAndLeather: Say something once, why say it again?.Moderator 20:21, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
I say that we should find and raze our plethora of non-mission articles, and focus on expandind/correcting the ones we have, and then we can talk about expanding our mission.
But saying that right now that wouldn't contribute to the conversation, would it? So, I say that we should diminish our cover of the softer sciences (the humanities and the social sciences) and focus on the harder sciences. It's hard to nail down a "pro-science" view in those, given the oh-so-pronounced rivalry between the harder and softer sciences (now bigger since postmodernism took hold of them in the 90s). But again, that's my socially-constructed, paradigm-enforcing, linguistics-blind engineer side (even if it's software engineering, I still have to take all the math and science regular engineers take. My university's crazy.) --Ray´s Super Fun Hellhole! g͘͡r̸̀a̸̶̡n̶̶͜ţ̡ ̀҉̴̨͡m̀͘͜͢e͡ ̸͟҉̷̢ỳ̸̡̀͞ơ̡̢̡ų̧r̴̀͡͝ ̡҉҉̧̛s̵̕͏̡ǫ̀́͢ų́l̵̕҉ 14:34, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
The problem is that there is so much of the stuff. Most of Category:Fundamental particles, Category:Countries, Category:United States states, and probably not much of Category:Language have much do do with the core mission. And that's just off the top of my head.--Bob"I think you'll find it's more complicated than that." 15:12, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
I'm inclined to agree. I'm going to steer clear of comments about politics, but many of our articles on physics concepts are entirely unnecessary. Even worse, many of them are horribly outdated, and thus aren't even necessarily correct anymore. A while back on a discussion about our quantum computing article, I suggested an idea for handling hard science concepts that I think we could reasonably adopt. For articles on hard science woo, we could open with a short paragraph briefly outlining the actual science, with a reference to another source (Wikipedia is usually a decent for that, seeing as many other scientific sources are behind paywalls). This is what I did with our quantum consciousness article when it briefly mentioned Penrose and Hameroff's crazy mind quantum computing hypothesis. I think this also adds an additional benefit, in that the categories could be cleaned up a bit more to make it easier to find related content. Right now a lot of our science articles are hard to find, and there are even a few that are linked to from only a single isolated page. Thoughts? - GrantC (talk) 15:38, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
@Bob: Too much of the stuff? I don't care if it's too much, raze it, burn it to the ground; the fire will be one that our descendants will be proud of our efforts towards RationalWiki's mission. If they are worthy, we are to merge them with on-mission articles; otherwise, they shall be expunged from our humble dwelling. (And I'm also inclined to say that much of our stuff on gender isn't on-mission, but not many others agree with me on that one).
@GrantC: Yeah. We should outsource science definitions or give a brief outline in the relevant articles. --Ray´s Super Fun Hellhole! g͘͡r̸̀a̸̶̡n̶̶͜ţ̡ ̀҉̴̨͡m̀͘͜͢e͡ ̸͟҉̷̢ỳ̸̡̀͞ơ̡̢̡ų̧r̴̀͡͝ ̡҉҉̧̛s̵̕͏̡ǫ̀́͢ų́l̵̕҉ 19:57, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
I've kept on about having reference:space over the years, for general science or history articles, only to be met with "what's the harm?" or "everything can be on-mission if you try hard enough." So what can we do? SophieWilderModerator 20:13, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
Well my gutting of the quantum computing article went unopposed, so perhaps the folks who were dead set on this change aren't around anymore? I could see the idea of a reference space being useful if a group of articles all drew on the same concept. For example, a page briefly outlining quantum mechanics and then linking elsewhere for details (outsourcing, if you will) could be useful if we had a whole spectrum of quantum woo articles. Then again, that only becomes relevant if it's really a concern to have the same brief reference appear on multiple pages. - GrantC (talk) 20:17, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
I'm pretty damn sure that a whole lot of the articles Bob mentioned would be deleted with virtually zero opposition. --Raysenn Get the paddles, he's having a cancer! 20:29, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
Start with the stubs. Let's not casually destroy anything someone worked hard on. That should preferably be relegated to user space, to avoid any drama.--"Shut up, Brx." 21:44, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
That is, by a country mile, the worst idea on this page. SophieWilderModerator 22:24, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

I agree with some of what is being said here. There is a lot of our content that isn't on-mission and wouldn't be on-mission even if the mission changed to reflect what I advocated above. I'd favor cutting our articles on countries and science concepts and the like.

I feel like there's a misunderstanding about what I've proposed. I am not advocating that we start taking positions on every political issue, nor that we become uniformly left-wing. I am advocating that we counter lies, misinformation, bad analyses and bad policies, in politics as in science. As I said above, sometimes someone in the political discourse makes an argument that is simply wrong and ought to be thoroughly debunked with reference to the facts. Wikipedia must remain politically neutral so it can't fulfill this function, and Politifact and other organizations like that seem to be more concerned with appearing unbiased (by criticizing right and left exactly 50% of the time each) than with actually being unbiased (by basing their rulings on facts). That leaves RW as the only site I can think of that would take on this role. Wehpudicabok [話] [変] [留] 22:39, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Let me give another example of something that would be "on-mission" if my reworking of the mission were put into effect. I recently came across an article wherein Bill O'Reilly criticized the parents of a transgender child (female-to-male) for putting him on hormone blockers, saying that it violated his "informed consent." This is simply ignorant of the facts that transgender children have to receive information and be evaluated by psychologists before they can receive such treatment, so obviously he had already given informed consent. When I see people making political arguments that are clearly based on known falsehoods, it really pisses me off. This isn't scientific, and I agree that as it stands now, the mission doesn't cover this. But it is a simple matter of what is true and what is not. It is an indisputable fact that the child gave informed consent. It is an indisputable fact that O'Reilly's position is based on falsehoods. These are the sorts of topics that I feel we should be taking on. Wehpudicabok [話] [変] [留] 22:48, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

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