User:Eleland/Symptoms of disguised quackery
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Quackery is a derogatory term used to describe questionable medical practices, and, by extension, dubious or fraudulent theories generally. Because Wikipedia is a high-profile website which can be edited by anyone, inappropriate pushing of fringe theories is a constant problem.
Blatant quackery is easy to detect, and is generally reverted or deleted on sight. However, subtly disguised quackery can be more difficult to recognize. Nevertheless, articles infected with the quack virus tend to display recognizable symptoms, which this essay aims to classify.
Pathology[edit]
Language and tone[edit]
- Excessive jargon used to express trivial ideas or logical truisms
There are, of course, legitimate uses of obtuse technical language. Many topics in mathematics and science absolutely require it. However, when truisms or trivialities are restated in impressive Latinate terminology, quackery is often afoot. John Baez once observed that the Bogdanov brothers' statement, "whatever the orientation, the plane of oscillation of Foucault's pendulum is necessarily aligned with the initial singularity marking the origin of physical space," was precisely equivalent to the statement, "Any plane contains a point," a geometrical truism.
- Duplicating established legitimate concepts under a different name
For instance, Embodied energy is an accounting method which aims to tally all of the energy going into providing a product or service — "from the acquisition of natural resources to product delivery, including mining, manufacturing of materials and equipment, transport and administrative functions."[1] Exergy is a core concept of thermodynamics, introduced in the 19th century and now well-understood. Emergy, on the other hand, piggybacks sweepingly non-falsifiable claims on to these concepts, proposing the addition of a new dimension to physics and declaring that "The concept of GOD is merely a 'personification' of emergy." Quack, quack, quack...
- Argumentative and persuasive implications in lieu of direct statements
Statements which clearly express a point of view or subjective opinion are easy to identify, flag, and correct. But it's possible to frame the issues in a profoundly biased manner without any overtly POV language. Facts which support a certain view are highlighted, while facts which militate against it are downplayed or ignored. For example, a news report stating that "the prosecutor did not seek to indict Mr. Jones, stating that the evidence was compelling but the crimes occurred outside his jurisdiction", might in the language of conspiratorial quackery become "despite the compelling evidence, the prosecutor refused to indict Mr. Jones." By omitting salient details, a tendentioius narrative is constructed from neutral facts.
Conversely, if an implication is made in reliable published sources, it's perfectly acceptable to include it attributed as an implication by that source.* Thus, "the prosecutor did not seek to indict Mr. Jones, stating that the evidence was compelling but the crimes occurred outside his jurisdiction. International Journal of Quackery said that the lack of indictment reflected "clear evidence of collusion between the prosecutor and the criminal enterprise".
*Subject, of course, to the implication's overall relevance to the subject, per WP:UNDUE weight and potentially WP:BLP.
Citations and sources[edit]
- Credible and reliable, but only tangentially relevant sources
Quackish editors often realise that scanning over the reference list is one of the quickest ways to spot quackery. Thus, they may make a point of citing top-tier reliable sources such as journal articles by renowned experts. Few casual reviewers are willing to question an assertion sourced to "On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light" by one A. Einstein! However, a close examination of quackish references often reveals that they are being used to source background details which are not essential to an article, or worse yet, being used for assertions they simply do not support. Credible articles on meaningful subjects do not require this type of puffery, but quackery often does.
- Sources that were reliable 100 years ago
Sources like the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica or scientific papers from the 19th century are of mainly historical interest. While they contain a lot of good information, they also contain discredited theories, archaic language, and deplorable biases. An article about a contemporary subject which relies heavily on such references is deserving of scrutiny. An article which constructs a surprising or exceptional narrative based solely on such sources is probably deserving of deletion.
Of course, this does not apply to articles which directly copy text from sources with expired copyrights as a temporary expedient. Text from archaic sources can often be cleaned up and verified to produce a high-quality article.
- Carpet-bombing citations
It's easy to tell when an article has few or no sources. Thus, quackish articles often include a veritable blizzard of citations, such that virtually[a] every[b][c] word[d] is foot[e][f][a]-noted.[g][h][i][b][e] This may give the appearance of impeccable research. However, on closer examination, the references often turn out to be:
- All from the same author or narrow group of authors with little mainstream acceptance
- Examples meant to support the point, rather than sources which actually state the point
- The nicest tree in the forest
Scientific research tends to produce large volumes of data, which require very skilled and methodical interpretation to be meaningful. There are always "outlier" results and statistical noise down below the margin of error. Beware the citation which delves deep into a technical or scientific paper, pulls out one particular result, and highlights it — while contradicting the overall conclusions of the paper. This kind of cherry picking misses the forest for the trees, willfully.
Editing and linking patterns[edit]
It is difficult, though not impossible, for quackery to take hold over a heavily edited, watched, and linked article. That's why September 11, 2001 attacks, at about 10,000 words, has only two sentences about 9/11 conspiracy theories, one of which points out their lack of acceptance. Cf. Global warming, evolution, The Holocaust, et al.
However, Wikipedia's blank-slate ideology makes it relatively easy to create new articles lavishing untoward respect on ideas with little or no support from the relevant academic communities. A trawl through the archives of the Fringe Theories Noticeboard will show that articles like mercury vortex engine, Hemohydrosis, Franco-Mongol alliance and Radionics occupy the lion's share of attention. Almost without exception, these articles are broken by design — they were initially created to advance dubious claims, and have only seesawed towards some vaguely acceptable form via endless drama.
One common gambit is to create series on books, films, or other content which summarize their thesis in laborious detail — to the point where the articles become coatracks about the subject of the books, rather than the books themselves. Once the walled garden is filled out, quacks tend to introduce links in from mainstream articles.
User conduct[edit]
Quackery advocates often insist that WP:NPOV, which requires that "all significant views that have been published by reliable sources" be represented proportionally, implies that opinion polls of the general public play a role in determining the relative weight to be placed on certain arguments. Strangely enough, the same people often argue that Wikipedia is dominated by wikiality and Groupthink.
If we assume that any given discussion on Wikipedia has a nonzero probability of closing in favour of quackery, then as the number of times an issue is re-opened, the probability of the quacks getting their way approaches one.
They seem to realize this.
- Bachmann's Second Law (proposed)
It is unlikely that an author has landed a major breakthrough in theoretical physics if he is beaten by the complexities of Wikipedia procedures as he is trying to write an article on his discoveries. [2]
References[edit]
- ^ CSIRO: Embodied Energy
- ^ Proposed by Dbachmann, 22 October 2007