Experiences with RationalWiki and MetaPedia?

[oranges33]

Another thing for people who claim RationalWiki is "leftist"

Their Joe Biden article is dozens of pages of his supposed "accomplishments", only criticizing him for not enough lockdowns

Pick at random someone even nominally to the left of Joe, say Stein https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Jill_Stein, and it's a no-holds-barred attack article

RationalWiki is Democratic Party liberals and associated teenage Redditors. Their 'Saloon Bar' also hints as much.

[ericbarbour]

They are not "leftist", they are "trollist". RW exists to shit on everyone in the political world, and not just alternative-medicine and conspiracy nuts. No one is good enough for David Gerard, who (I'm assuming) thinks he's so brilliant and astute that he's angry the world won't automatically make him Planetary President For Life and God-King Incapable Of Error.

They even take repeated potshots at Bernie Sanders. As I said, really no different from Encyclopedia Dramatica.

[Strelnikov]

Here is Gerard on the anti-Nazi podcast I Don't Speak German in 2021 talking about Slate Star Codex, the crypto-fascist blog run by Scott Alexander; Liz Sandifer is also there: https://idontspeakgerman.libsyn.com/82- ... h-sandifer

Here he is again on "IDSGpod" talking about neo-Nazis use cryptocurrencies the same year: https://idontspeakgerman.libsyn.com/85- ... vid-gerard

I leave these here so that site readers can listen to Gerard himself. He is not as fascinating as he thinks he is.

[ericbarbour]

I leave these here so that site readers can listen to Gerard himself. He is not as fascinating as he thinks he is.

I've seen several live interviews with Gerard. Every one of them was awkward and mumbled.

This shows a true weakness of the "Wikimedia Movement". A proper nonprofit would hire smart, polished PR types and push Gerard into a backroom without windows. Yet they let him speak for them. Just another nerd who spends most of his life online, berating and abusing people. (If he can do it and continue to be a "spokesman" of some variety, then I can do it too. So can anyone. Don't be afraid to berate Wikipedians--it's Amateur Hour over there 24/7, AND THEY DESERVE ABUSE.)

[Strelnikov]

I know this is beating a dead horse but....

.....In 1980 Dennis Rawlins wrote a scathing takedown of the "Mars effect" experiments he was roped into in Fate magazine. The Effect in question was discovered by Michel and Francoise Gauquelin (French neoastrologers) -- statistically, athletes born when Mars is astrologically ascending do better than those when it isn't. Paul Kurtz though it was nonsense before CSICOP was formed and he made it CSICOP's first test to disprove it, and CSICOP blew it and tried to hide the damage. Rawlins (an astronomer) still thinks the Effect is tosh to this day, but is furious as to how he was used by Kurtz, Gardner, Zelen, Abell, etc.This article is where we get the Randi quotes "Drink the Kool-Aid, Dennis!" (right after Jonestown happened) and "I always have an out." (talking about his then-10,000 dollar psychic ability prize.) Note that Randi, like most people, screws it up -- they used Flavor-Aid as the medium for the liquid poison at Jonestown, not the more famous Kool-Aid.

.....that's one of the other things about Randi and the skeptics who model their public personas after him that I can't stand, the "cocky asshole" style he and they use. It was in everything that he wrote, as Michael Prescott pointed out in a review of Flim-Flam!, a book Randi originally published in 1980 and updated a couple of times that decade. Robert Anton Wilson got a lot of mileage out of Randi's on-stage invective in the late '70s-early '80s, it was that over the top. The ultimate cocky asshole bit of cynicism from James Randi was his "Prize" -- the amount somebody could win grew from $1000 in 1964 to $10,000 in 1978 and then to $1,000,000 by the 1990s, but by that point it was mostly promissory notes of some kind from "donors"; the victorious claimant would have to wrangle the money out of these people, and knowing Randi, he probably would have just given his thousand dollars worth from 1964 as a paper check. The other element of the Prize was how the testing would be done -- Randi and his people would have total control of the testing, they could stop at any time and claim a fake, even Ray Hyman said the test would have no scientific credibility. I see it as a perpetual self-promotion tool, until Randi "retired" in 2015. Nobody has done a similar challenge since, though Randi ripped off the idea from Scientific American and electronics magazine publisher Hugo Gernsback, who had separately offered prizes for proof of psychic ability (Gernsback also would give prizes for correct astrological predictions and proof of perpetual motion).

[Dysklyver]

They are not "leftist", they are "trollist". RW exists to shit on everyone in the political world ...

I would say yes, at points certain politically capable users have attempted to go beyond the TrollWiki brand, quickly to be worn down and discarded. At the heart of the project has always been this sense of irreverence for just about everyone, including each other and the Wiki itself.

[oranges33]

They are not "leftist", they are "trollist". RW exists to shit on everyone in the political world ...

I would say yes, at points certain politically capable users have attempted to go beyond the TrollWiki brand, quickly to be worn down and discarded. At the heart of the project has always been this sense of irreverence for just about everyone, including each other and the Wiki itself.

Almost all the current activity here is Bongo and 3 other users writing about current events articles from a Democratic Party perspective

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges

they aren't writing troll articles anymore

sure, it's partly a troll wiki, as far as backdoor editor attitude, given it's wikipedia's backyard

but I swear since 2020 it's turned into a generic Democratic Party liberal / Reddit liberal talking point wiki. And where their political knowledge is missing they fill in with pettiness against x or y person who was ever rude to them

[WikiWikiWow]

This is how RationalWiki talks about Michael Shermer:

A modern Paul

During adolescence, Shermer became a born again, fundamentalist Christian and later even got a theology degree at a Christian university. Later still, Shermer studied psychology and became more skeptical about Christian belief, finally becoming an atheist/agnostic/skeptic.[1] Shermer stated the final end of his Christian faith was when a girl was paralyzed in a motor accident. Shermer prayed to God to heal her. She remained paralyzed.[2]

So he was an idiot? I'm pretty sure nobody but the dumbest Bible-thumping rednecks think that a god is like a personal genie, you make a wish and it gets fulfilled. I don't know why they think that is flattering to Shermer or an own for Christians.

That's like saying you became an anti-boat advocate when you tried to drive one on land but didn't succeed.