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 straw man arguments, ad hominem attacks, argumentum ad populum, argumentum ad verecundiam, argumentum ad lapidem, appeals to emotion (including loaded language), 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."

The site's unwillingness to adopt unpopular positions that are supported by facts and logic, or even in some cases 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 (typically without providing any explanation), including eliminating proven and relevant facts, rather than reverting selectively. Restoring the facts is then considered disruptive edit-warring.

The burden of proof in argumentation is generally placed on the person who wishes to challenge the community consensus opinions currently expressed in RationalWiki's articles, rather than on the person who argues for constraining individual liberty in society. If a person wishes to challenge an opinion strongly felt by RationalWiki editors, then he is expected to provide "extraordinary evidence" from a source that the community deems acceptable; however, even credentialed sources (such as university professors) are deemed disqualified to express a credible opinion if their opinion differs from the RationalWiki community's. Those professionals are viewed as "crackpots," and the lay scholars who adhere to those same dissident views are "quacks," regardless of what evidence they might put forth.

Users sometimes point out that for a site called "RationalWiki," its commitment to reasonable argumentation appears shaky at best. RationalWikians respond by refuting a straw man argument that anyone who disagrees with crank opinions must not be "rational." Actually, in many cases what users take issue with concerning RationalWiki is not necessarily the conclusions reached through argumentation but the employment of flawed logic to reach those conclusions. Reasonable people can and do disagree about which arguments concerning a given topic are supported by a preponderance of evidence. But disputes concerning logic are more clear-cut; the rules of logic and the methods of logical argumentation are well-established, and there is little excuse to persist in fallacious reasoning when it has been exposed as such.

The fact that the RationalWiki community often condones such faulty argumentation by allowing articles to continue reflecting those flawed lines of reasoning is why many users find the site's name ironic. In some cases, users even admit that they are abandoning reason in favor of emotion, and do not see a problem with this. As Mises pointed out, this sort of approach is problematic; he warns, "If man reconsiders freeing himself from the supremacy of reason, he must know what he will have to forsake."

A great deal of joking and pranking occurs on RationalWiki, 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. However, that site tends to be no more tolerant of divergent thought than RationalWiki itself, and editors can be blocked for contesting conventional wisdom on certain issues.

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.