RationalWiki (en)
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- RationalWiki is currently experiencing a service outage. See the section titled Tempory service outage for more details.
RationalWiki is an open wiki taking a critical look at the pseudoscience movement and extremist politics, through the use of side-by-side examinations and humour.
Their stated goals are:
- Analyzing and refuting the anti-science movement, ideas and people.
- Analyzing and refuting the full range of crank ideas.
- Explorations of authoritarianism and fundamentalism.
RationalWiki is currently suffering a temporary loss of service and will return to normal service as early as the 6th of September, no later than the 8th.[1]
Info
| Wiki size: | 3,534 article pages see stats |
| wikiFactor: | 16 info / verify |
RationalWiki has about 3,197 registered users, of which 359 (or 11.23%) have Sysops rights, which are awarded very liberally by the bureaucrats.
RationalWiki runs a large collection of specially customized extensions allowing a wide range of features such as; up-down voting, slider voting, a site wide intercom system, and easy bible quotations.
RationalWiki also has a namespace dedicated to Conservapedia.
History
RationalWiki started in May 2007 after a group of editors at Conservapedia were banned over ideological differences with the authorities there. Their edits had consisted mostly of debating on talk pages, attempting to counteract what they perceived to be overwhelming anti-scientific and far-right political bias. Although the site was called RationalWiki to highlight the pro-scientific worldview of the founders, the content was largely weighted to the perceived lunacy of events at Conservapedia.
Rationalwiki today
While Conservapedia continues to be a major focus of RationalWiki, they have branched out into many areas of skepticism. Many articles focus on unfounded medical claims, pseudoscience and Biblical literalism. Despite a seemingly anti-religious stance, some editors are practicing Christians or Jews, tending towards the more liberal aspects of their religion rather than fundamentalism.
The site works to refute a range of faith based ideas and superstitions. They have critical material on Scientology, Creationism, Astrology, "New Age" philosophy, and many others. It also comments critically on other Christian creationist wikis notably A Storehouse of Knowledge, see RationalWiki on A Storehouse of Knowledge.
Despite this branching into other areas, most of their traffic is to the page What is going on at Conservapedia?.
The website has a rather idiosyncratic sense of humour, which includes widespread intentional misspellings and other peculiar phrases. There are many "inside jokes", particularly in the material relating to Conservapedia, and the writing often has the tone of a close-knit social group.
Example of RationalWiki’s perspective:-
As a site we have a point of view, and that point of view is that the scientific method and the information gained from its application is better than almost anything else humanity has come up with. We believe that the support of, profiting from and creation of pseudosciences is dangerous and wrong. [2]
Tempory service outage
On Aug 19th, RationalWiki (and related sites such as RationalWikiWiki and the RationalWiki forums) became inaccessible.[3] The stated reason is that a problem has occurred with the server, most likely due to a MySQL connection error. RationalWiki is hosted on its own private server at Tmtoulouse's domicile, who is on a trip out of town and is unable to attend to the problem. Although RationalWiki has nightly backups stored on a separate server, it is hoped they will not be needed.
During the "crisis", RationalWikians have found a temporary home to discuss their drinking habits and love of the goat at Teflpedia, where roughly 30-40 RationalWikians have signed up to endure the inaccessibility of their home wiki. A more complete list of places to find RationalWikians can be found here.
Criticism
Although it claims to welcome contributors of all religions, many of its users are hostile towards religion. An ex-conservapedia sysop who has never edited at RationalWiki accused it of containing "...filthy and blasphemous language, replete with name-calling, smearing, innuendo, hypocrisy, and other undesirable attributes" [4]
See also
- RationalWikiWiki meta site for RationalWiki.
- Debatepedia wiki also discusses controversial topics -- but puts both viewpoints side-by-side on the same page.
- FreeThoughtPedia
- Iron Chariots
- Liberapedia started as a parody of Conservapedia. It is a less formal wiki that is inclusive of both humor and serious content.
- Atheism Wiki
External links
- RationalWiki
- RationalWiki's most popular article RationalWiki's take on events at Conservapedia
further tags: