User:Omegatron/Memory holes

I dislike it when people delete pseudoscientific articles, burn books, censor opinion, or otherwise destroy information. If an idea has a hold in people's minds, the only way to fight it is to address it and show why it is wrong, not delete it as nonsense. My first response when I see something crackpottish: check Wikipedia for an unbiased, scientific account. "Censoring" information is exactly what makes crackpot stuff take off. "Go to our website to find out what They don't want you to know!!!" Providing a good source of unbiased non-crackpot info is the only way to keep it under control. Improve it; don't remove it. (or Don't delete; debunk?)

From a memetic standpoint, you could say that this is the difference between quarantine and vaccination. Rather than trying to prevent the spread of bad memes by cutting the carriers off from society (which doesn't work anyway), we should seek to destroy the memes themselves with antibodies and set up vaccines in other people to prevent them from being contractible. If you need to commit "memocide" to get people to believe what you believe, your beliefs are probably wrong.

I guess this makes me a crackpottery Inclusionist. See also:
 * Replies to common objections
 * Jimbo's opinion
 * List of pseudosciences and pseudoscientific concepts
 * User:Wjbeaty's external pages on excessive skepticism

I'm seeing an increasing number of the vehemently pseudoskeptical around the project lately, and it's quite frustrating. These are the people who scoff and discount things before they know anything about them, who try to get articles on notable subjects deleted just because they're about hoaxes or pseudoscience, who add "allegedly" and other weasel words to every sentence of an article to "neutralize" it, without providing any substantial criticism. This doesn't make the article more neutral; it just makes it stupid. Wikipedia's job is to cover anything notable; "worthy of notice". If more than a handful of people are talking about it, it's probably notable. The truth of the concept is irrelevant in deciding whether we should cover it.


 * In deciding whether to write articles about things, we look to whether they are notable, meaning that they are significantly talked about. Doesn't matter if the things are legit or not.  See Notability.
 * In deciding how to write articles about things that we have decided are notable enough, we try to maintain a neutral viewpoint, which means that we address the concept in a stale, detached, objective manner and don't make value judgments about it. See Neutral point of view.