| This is a Wikipedia user page. This is not an encyclopedia article or the talk page for an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user whom this page is about may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia. The original page is located at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jordansparks. |
|
About me edit
My name is Jordan Sparks, living in Salem, Oregon.
I'm the owner of Open Dental Software, opendental.com,
a licensed dentist, although I no longer practice,
Executive Director of Oregon Cryonics oregoncryo.com,
Director of Apex Neuroscience http://www.apexneuro.org [1],
and Director of Oregon Body Gift.
I rarely edit anymore, choosing instead to support Wikipedia with donations. My favorite page to edit used to be Cryonics until it was deemed pseudoscience by a group of admins. Cryonics is not pseudoscience, but it does meet the fairly low Wikipedia standards for pseudoscience: It has been characterized in reputable sources as being pseudoscience, and there has been no solid refutation or consensus showing that all of the elements are based on science. (I cannot, unfortunately find my source for these standards) In other words, Wikipedia errs on the conservative side. That's great! Many borderline pseudoscience pages are flatly deemed to be pseudoscience. I think this is fantastic! I wish we would clamp down on the 50,000 chiropractors in the US and put them all out of work. Same goes for naturopathy, supplements, acupuncture, anti-vaxxing, etc. I really don't mind that cryonics wrongly got caught up in this refreshing move away from pseudoscience.
But the WP documentation and the admins do not do a good job of explaining how WP:GOODBIAS works. It is apparently encouraged to be derogatory and hostile on a pseudoscience page. This goes directly against the WP documentation. WP:NPOV states, "A neutral point of view neither sympathizes with nor disparages its subject." The Cryonics page uses inappropriate words that the scientific critics do not use: resurrection, corpse, etc. When I have tried to point out that WP:GOODBIAS seems to encourage disparagement, the admins bristle and tell me to shut up, wrongly claiming that they are being neutral rather than disparaging. They can't point to documentation that says their tone is acceptable, but they do seem to agree that it is. The closest I have ever come to finding documentation supporting their claim is WP:PSCI which states, "The pseudoscientific view should be clearly described as such. An explanation of how scientists have reacted to pseudoscientific theories should be prominently included." But there remains significant dissonance between how the documentation says to treat pseudoscience vs how the admins are treating it. This is confusing for many readers, but the admins have clearly rejected my attempts at clarification, so I sort of gave up.
For entertainment, I like to read the Talk:Chiropractic page, where this is an even hotter issue.