 | |
|
Screenshot
 RationalWiki Main Page as of March 11, 2019
| |
Type of site |
Wiki |
|---|---|
| Available in | English and 13 other languages |
| Owner | RationalMedia Foundation |
| Created by | Volunteer contributors |
| Key people | Trent Toulouse (operations manager) |
| URL |
rationalwiki.org 
|
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional |
| Launched | May 22, 2007 |
| Current status | Active |
Content license |
CC BY-SA 3.0 |
| Written in | MediaWiki software |
RationalWiki is an online wiki which is written from a skeptical, secular, and progressivist perspective. Its stated goals are to "analyze and refute pseudoscience and the anti-science movement, document 'crank' ideas, explore conspiracy theories, authoritarianism, and fundamentalism, and analyze how these subjects are handled in the media." It was created in 2007 as a counterpoint to Conservapedia after an incident in which some editors of Conservapedia were banned. RationalWiki has been described as liberal.
History
Origin
In April 2007, Peter Lipson, a doctor of internal medicine, attempted to edit Conservapedia's article on breast cancer to include evidence against Conservapedia's claim that abortion was linked to the disease. Conservapedia is an encyclopedia established by Andy Schlafly as an alternative to Wikipedia, which Schlafly perceived as suffering from a liberal and atheist bias. He and Conservapedia administrators "questioned [Lipson's] credentials and shut down debate". After being reverted and blocked, "Lipson and several other contributors quit trying to moderate the articles [on Conservapedia] and instead started their own website, RationalWiki".
RationalMedia Foundation
Prior to 2010, RationalWiki's domains were registered to Trent Toulouse, and the wiki was hosted from a server located in his home. In 2010, Trent Toulouse incorporated a nonprofit organization, the RationalWiki Foundation Inc., to manage the affairs and pay the operational expenses of the website. In July 2013, the RationalWiki Foundation changed its name to the RationalMedia Foundation, stating that its aims extended beyond the RationalWiki site alone.
Content
RationalWiki provides information about pseudoscientific theories and to educate "individuals with unorthodox views".
RationalWiki differs in several ways from the philosophy of Wikipedia and some other informational wikis. It is written from a self-described "snarky point of view" and "scientific point of view" (both abbreviated as SPOV) rather than a "neutral point of view" (NPOV), and publishes opinion, speculation, and original research. Many RationalWiki articles mockingly describe beliefs that RationalWiki opposes, especially when covering topics such as alternative medicine or fundamentalist Christians.
Some activity on RationalWiki is used for critiquing and "monitor[ing] Conservapedia". RationalWiki contributors, some of which are former Conservapedia contributors, are often highly critical of Conservapedia, and according to an article published in the Los Angeles Times in 2007, RationalWiki members "by their own admission" vandalize Conservapedia. Lester Haines of The Register stated: "Its entry entitled 'Conservapedia:Delusions' promptly mocks the claims that 'Homosexuality is a mental disorder', 'Atheists are sociopaths', and 'During the 6 days of creation G-d placed the Earth inside a black hole to slow down time so the light from distant stars had time to reach us'."
Both Yan et al. 2019 and Knoche et al., two articles about classifying a writer's biases via text analysis, asserted that Conservapedia was "conservative" and RationalWiki was "liberal". Mic described RationalWiki as "progressive".
When Krebs et al. 2023 compared text on controversial topics across multiple community-managed wikis, they found that content and contributors on RationalWiki leaned liberal while Conservapedia leaned conservative. In contrast, Wikipedia's content leaned slightly liberal and editors leaned centrist. Both RationalWiki and Conservapedia were "more loaded with moral content".
Reception
Analysis
Andrea Ballatore, a lecturer in GIS at Birkbeck, University of London, categorizes RationalWiki as similar in tone to Snopes in a 2015 study, finding it to be the third most visible website when researching conspiracy theories in terms of Google and Bing search results, and the most visible among those sites that made openly negative value judgments about conspiracy theories.
In Intelligent Systems 2014, Alexander Shvets stated that RationalWiki is one of the few online resources that "provide some information about pseudoscientific theories". Similarly, Keeler et al. stated that sites like RationalWiki can help to "sort out the complexities" that arise when "distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people". Biologist and pseudoscience critic Jerry Coyne has written that its articles appear slanted toward the "authoritarian Left".
A 2019 study of bias analysis based on word embedding in RationalWiki, Conservapedia, and Wikipedia by researchers from RWTH Aachen University found all had significant gender biases, reflecting classical gender stereotypes, but these biases were less pronounced in RationalWiki. RationalWiki's characterization of indigenous science as pseudoscience was described as "Eurocentric gatekeeping" by Lindy Orthia of Australian National University.
Usage
In Critical Thinking: Pseudoscience and the Paranormal, Jonathan C. Smith lists RationalWiki in an exercise on finding and identifying fallacies.Snopes has quoted RationalWiki for background on Sorcha Faal of the European Union Times. RationalWiki's description of the "Lenski affair" was quoted by Magnus Ramage in Perspectives on Information and cited by Tom Kaden in Creationism and Anti-Creationism in the United States. It was quoted by Thomas Leitch in Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age on the history of Citizendium. RationalWiki was cited by Dorit Rubinstein Reiss and Lois Weithorn in Responding to the Childhood Vaccination Crisis about the website Whale.to, saying that it is an "infamous conspiracy site", using RationalWiki as a source. RationalWiki's explanation of Gish gallops was referenced by The Guardian in an article on climate change denial and Erik Krabbe and Jan van Laar in an article on "quibbles". RationalWiki's description of the history and membership of LessWrong was quoted by Beth Singler in Existential Hope and Existential Despair in AI Apocalypticism and Transhumanism and cited by Saswat Sarangi and Pankaj Sharma in Artificial Intelligence. The Daily Beast writer Charles Davis alleges that Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies has "several passages" that "are similar to entries in Wikipedia and another online encyclopedia, RationalWiki" and that similar allegations were "first published on Libcom".
Writing in The Verge, Adi Robertson stated that RationalWiki provided a good explanation of Time Cube, though conveying the "full impression" of the original Time Cube website was all but impossible.
See also
External links
-
Media related to RationalWiki at Wikimedia Commons -
Official website
