RationalWiki


RationalWiki is a wiki whose 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 contributors attempting to edit Conservapedia were banned. In recent years, the website has explicitly moved its focus away from criticizing Conservapedia.

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 credentials and shut down debate". After they were blocked, "Lipson and several other contributors quit trying to moderate the articles 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 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" rather than a "", 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.
A significant fraction of activity on RationalWiki is critiquing and "monitor Conservapedia". RationalWiki contributors, many of whom 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". Examining RationalWiki, Conservapedia, and Wikipedia, Knoche et al. measured word set correlations, and found biases in gender and religion for all three wikis, though in different ways between them. Racial bias was found only in Conservapedia, in the "pleasant" vs. "unpleasant" attributes, but not the three other attribute pairs. Knoche et al. notes that RationalWiki's "contents often include sarcasm and satire, posing special challenges to statistical analysis".

Reception

Andrea Ballatore, a lecturer in GIS at the University of California, Santa Barbara categorizes RationalWiki as a debunking website 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, slightly more visible than rense.com and less visible than YouTube or Wikipedia. In Critical Thinking: Pseudoscience and the Paranormal, Johnathan Smith lists RationalWiki in an exercise on finding and identifying fallacies.
In Intelligent Systems 2014, Alexander Shvets stated that RationalWiki is one of the few online resources that "provide some information about pseudoscientific theories" and notes that it attempts to "organize and categorize knowledge about pseudoscientific theories, personalities, and organizations". 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". Benjamin Brojakowski of Bowling Green State University described RationalWiki as "a Wikipedia-style website aimed at educating individuals with unorthodox views".
RationalWiki has been cited on Internet history. Snopes has repeatedly 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 Reiss Rubinstein 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, according to LibCom.org, Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies has "several passages" that "are similar to entries in Wikipedia and another online encyclopedia, RationalWiki".
Several conservative magazines and op-eds have criticized specific RationalWiki articles. Paul Austin Murphy, of American Thinker magazine, criticized RationalWiki for being irrational and unencyclopedic when it called American Thinker a "wingnut publication". George Selgin of the Cato Institute disagreed with RationalWiki's criticism of the stability of the gold standard. Franklin Einspruch of The Federalist criticized RationalWiki for debunking the "Cultural Marxism" conspiracy theory.