Directory:The Wikipedia Point of View/Dealing with pseudoscience

Why Wikipedia cannot claim the earth is round

1. X's paper on 'scientific fallacies' contains only passing reference to the 'flat earth fallacy'. WP:NPOV says "Even with well-sourced material ... if you use it out of context or to advance a position that is not directly and explicitly supported by the source used, you as an editor are engaging in original research."
2. The flat-earth theory is not amenable to scientific approaches and methods.
3. Flat-earth theorists are pragmatic. They are not interested in what is 'true', they are interested in 'what works'.
4. Scientist X, who claimed the flat-earth theory was nonsense, clearly had not read the literature on the flat-earth theory.
5. Scientist X was not trained in flat-earth theory, and therefore could not make an expert judgment.
6. The criticisms made by scientist X were valid only against Rosencrantz' version of the flat-earth theory, long since outmoded. They fail to address Guildernstein's improved version of the theory.
7. You must not say 'the earth is not flat' but 'according to critics of the flat-earth theory, the earth is not flat'.
8. X Y and Z are hard-line skeptics about flat-earthism. They often publish in skeptics magazines and take a hard line with any approach to any theory which is not empirically verified.
9. There is no reliable source for the statement that 'flat-earthism has entirely been ignored by reliable sources'
10. The statement 'there is no scientific consensus for the flat-earth view' has no scientific consensus.
11. X's statement "Informal soundings amongst scientists revealed an almost total absence of awareness of the flat earth theory" is mere opinion. X is using personal experience as evidence. This is not a scientific evidence and is therefore mere opinion.
12. The statement 'The earth is round' has reliable sources in scientific literature. The statement 'If the X is round, X is not flat' is a valid inference that can be sourced from any reliable logic textbook. But 'The earth is not flat', while a conclusion validly yielded by these two reliably-sourced premisses, is a violation of WP:SYNTH: "Even if published by reliable sources, material must not be connected together in such a way that it constitutes original research".
13. There has been no serious study of whether the earth is flat since 1493. Therefore we cannot claim in Wikipedia that earth is not flat, only that a study in 1493 came to this conclusion.

Civil POV pushing

Wikipedia, and specifically the dispute resolution process, has a difficult time dealing with civil POV pushers. These are editors who are superficially polite while exhibiting some or all of the following behaviors:

• They often edit primarily or entirely on one topic or theme.
• They attempt to water down language, unreasonably exclude, marginalize or push views beyond the requirements of WP:NPOV, or give undue weight to fringe theories - pseudoscience, crankery, conspiracy theories, marginal nationalist or historic viewpoints, and the like (PCCTL for short).
• They revert war over such edits.
• They frivolously request citations for obvious or well known information.
• They argue endlessly about the neutral-point-of-view policy and particularly try to undermine the undue weight clause. They try to add information that is (at best) peripherally relevant on the grounds that "it is verifiable, so it should be in."
• They argue for the inclusion of material of dubious reliability; for example, using commentary from partisan think tanks rather than from the scientific literature.
• They may use sockpuppets, or recruit meat puppets.
• They repeatedly use the talk page for soapboxing, and/or to re-raise the same issues that have already been discussed numerous times.
• They hang around forever wearing down more serious editors and become expert in an odd kind of way on their niche POV.
• They often make a series of silly and time wasting requests for comment, mediation or arbitration again to try to wear down the serious editors.

Other arguments

• They try to claim that a fringe viewpoint is 'controversial', as though there were a minority but substantial view held by serious scientists or academics, in controversy with the mainstream.