Wikisphere

The wikisphere is made up of all wikis and their interconnections.

Wikis and wiki farms

The following is a small selection of the wikis in the wikisphere:

Wiki	Owner	Point of view	Date founded	URL
Conservapedia	Andy Schlafly	Conservative	21 November 2006	http://www.conservapedia.com/
Liberapedia	WillH	Leftist	16 May 2008	http://liberapedia.wikia.com/
Libertapedia	Nathan Larson	Libertarian	28 February 2004	http://libertapedia.org/
Metapedia	Anders Lagerström	European racialist	28 April 2007	(Blocked by spam filter)
Mises Wiki	Ludwig von Mises Institute	Austrian school	3 July 2008	http://wiki.mises.org/
RationalWiki	RationalWiki Foundation	Snarky	22 May 2007	http://rationalwiki.org/
Wikipedia	Wikimedia Foundation	Neutral	15 January 2001	http://en.wikipedia.org/

Points of view

Several wikis and wiki farms ostensibly promote a "neutral point of view" in their encyclopedias. The Wikimedia Foundation operates Wikipedia, the largest wiki in the world, and many smaller wikis (e.g. Wiktionary, Wikiquote, etc.) Citizendium was launched by Larry Sanger in an attempt to compete with Wikipedia. Wikinfo, operated by Fred Bauder, supplements Wikipedia. It adheres to a "sympathetic point of view" except with regard to "manifestly evil concepts, people, or events". Many wikis openly adhere to a particular philosophical or religious point of view. Examples include Conservapedia, Liberapedia, Libertapedia, Metapedia, and Mises Wiki.

RationalWiki

RationalWiki is a site whose stated purpose consists of analyzing and refuting pseudoscience and the anti-science movement; documenting the full range of crank ideas; explorations of authoritarianism and fundamentalism; and analysis and criticism of how these subjects are handled in the media. RationalWiki invites users to engage in "constructive dialog." In practice, "users, by bickering, shouting, unilateral actions, complaints about unilateral actions, and ad hoc voting eventually reach a mass consensus" in a mobocratic process. RationalWiki was supposedly intended to counter the flawed thinking and argumentation of some believers in theism, creationism, and other mainstream philosophies. However, the editors are typically happy to engage in the same sort of flawed reasoning, or lazy unwillingness to consider opposing arguments, as their opponents, when it comes to their own beliefs.

Editors frequently resort to fallacies such as ad hominem attacks, argumentum ad populum, argumentum ad verecundiam, appeals to emotion, and thought-terminating clichés. Articles and talk page discussions typically (and often summarily) dismiss adherents to minority viewpoints as cranks and pseudoscientists. A prime example would be the RationalWiki article on the Austrian school, which refers to Austrians as "a small group of cranks funded by even richer cranks through the von Mises Institute looking for self-serving rationalizations couched in the form of economic theory." One of the users responsible for that article content has successfully pushed his own pet theory that the labor market is a "monopsonistic oligopoly" (he had never heard of an "oligopsony") and that "a minimum wage might actually decrease unemployment."

The site's unwillingness to adopt unpopular positions that are supported by facts and logic, or even to engage in argumentation about the factual and logical issues at hand, could be accurately described as pseudoskeptical. It is also noteworthy that, when the editors encounter a portion of an edit that they disagree with, they will often perform a wholesale revert, including eliminating proven and relevant facts, rather than reverting selectively. Restoring the facts is then considered disruptive edit-warring.

A great deal of joking and pranking occurs, and the site adheres to a "snarky point of view" policy. It is difficult to say whether RationalWiki is primarily a joke wiki with some serious content or vice versa. RationalWikiWiki was created on 27 December 2007 to critique, and often mock, the many missteps made by the RationalWiki community.

Despite all of its flaws, RationalWiki is notable for its unusual practice of promoting almost all editors to sysop status. This produces greater transparency by enabling most editors to view deleted articles. It also produces a more egalitarian atmosphere than is seen on typical wikis, since most RationalWiki editors are able to exercise sysop functions such as blocking users, and to revert sysop actions taken by others.

Other purposes

Joke wikis include Uncyclopedia and Encyclopedia Dramatica. Wikis can serve a number of different purposes other than hosting encyclopedias; for example, wiki software can be used as a content management system for a blog. Such blogs are called "blikis."

External links

• WikiIndex — A wiki about wikis.