Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales vigorously rejected a Change.org petition to allow more positive discussion of holistic medicine on his crowd-sourced Internet encyclopedia.
The petition, which has nearly 8,000 supporters, calls for people to stop donating to Wikipedia in response to what it called "biased, misleading, out-of-date, or just plain wrong" information about holistic approaches to healing.
"As gatekeepers for the status quo, they refuse discourse with leading edge research scientists and clinicians or, for that matter, anyone with a different point of view," it reads.
Wales disagreed, commenting in response:
"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."
Guess he won't be signing that petition.
(via Time)
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