User:Vipul/RationalWiki

RationalWiki is a wiki and a community (involved with editing the wiki) whose self-described purpose is to "explore and provide information about a range of topics centered around science, skepticism, and critical thinking."

Goals
On its About page, RationalWiki describes its goals as follows:


 * 1) Analyzing and refuting pseudoscience and the anti-science movement.
 * 2) Documenting the full range of crank ideas.
 * 3) Explorations of authoritarianism and fundamentalism.
 * 4) Analysis and criticism of how these subjects are handled in the media.

Coverage of pseudoscience
RationalWiki has extensive coverage of things its contributors consider pseudoscience from what they consider a rationalist, skeptical perspective. This includes:


 * Opposing young earth creationism and making arguments in support of evolution
 * Opposing many forms of alternative medicine, including homeopathy
 * Opposing the anti-vaccine movement that they call "vaccine hysteria"
 * Opposing the claims of some religions that conflict with what they understand the scientific evidence to be
 * Critiquing conspiracy theories including conspiracy theories surrounding global warming, 9/11, and unidentified flying objects.

Coverage of Conservapedia
A significant fraction of activity at RationalWiki involves documenting and archiving activity on Conservapedia. Conservapedia is an encyclopedia started by Andy Schlafly to provide an alternative to Wikipedia, that Schlafly perceived to be suffering from problems of liberal and atheist bias. RationalWiki contributors, many of whom are former Conservapedia contributors who had a fallout with Conservapedia, are often highly critical of Conservapedia.

Coverage of other wikis, blogs, and websites
RationalWiki has extensive coverage of some other wikis. For instance, they have a detailed article on Citizendium as well as a page with the latest goings-on at Citizendium. Citizendium is a wiki started in 2006 by former Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger as a proposed alternative to Wikipedia. RationalWiki also has coverage of Metapedia, New World Encyclopedia, and other wikis.

RationalWiki has regularly updated pages with the latest happenings in the blogosphere.

Operations
The RationalWiki website is a community-managed, collaboratively edited wiki. According to their statistics page, 600+ people have made an edit in the past 91 days as of June 10, 2012.

Operating costs, including servers and bandwidth, are paid through the RationalWiki Foundation, which collects the money by soliciting for donations on the RationalWiki website.

RationalWiki 1.0: response to Conservapedia
According to its history page, the first iteration of RationalWiki (now called "RationalWiki 1.0") was started in March 2007 by Colin R., a disgruntled contributor at Conservapedia. Conservapedia is an encyclopedia created to correct what was perceived as liberal and atheist bias in Wikipedia. The initial body of contributors was largely drawn from dissatisfied Conservapedia editors. Due to vandalism, the site had to be shut down soon.

RationalWiki 2.0
On May 22, 2007, after a number of contributors to RationalWiki 1.0 were bannd from editing Conservapedia, Colin R. and Trent Toulouse restarted RationalWiki. The new incarnation is now called "RationalWiki 2.0."

RationalWiki 3.0
In 2010, RationalWiki's founders incorporated a nonprofit called "RationalWiki Foundation Inc." that would manage the affairs and pay the operational expenses of the website.

Views and popular pages
According to its statistics page, RationalWiki has had over 75 million pageviews over its lifetime as of June 2012. This puts it above Citizendium, Scholarpedia, and the English and German versions of Metapedia, but below Conservapedia, Uncyclopedia, and most language versions of Wikipedia. RationalWiki pages are often read, shared and discussed on Reddit.

One of the most popular pages on RationalWiki is their page on scientific evidence of evolution being a hoax. The page is blank, indicating the view held by RationalWiki contributors that there is no scientific evidence of evolution being a hoax. In April 2011, this was featured on the front page of Reddit, causing a huge traffic spike to the website. The page has received over 500,000 pageviews as of June 2012.

Criticism
RationalWiki has been criticized by a number of people.

The Metapedia page about RationalWiki states that: "The website [RationalWiki] fraudulently portrays itself as being “rational”, and opposed to “pseudoscience”, yet promotes exactly the thing that they claim to oppose: the irrational spiritual pseudosciences of genetic egalitarianism and race denialism. On top of such deceptiveness, Trent Toulouse solicits donations (on the website’s main page) under these false pretenses. That fits within the definition of criminal fraud."

From a somewhat different angle, a website called RationalWikiWiki has been set up with the aim of documenting and critiquing RationalWiki. They list some common critiques of RationalWiki.