Wikipedia is NOT Faux News

In blogging earlier today about NASA’s breathless hyping of its arsenic-using bacterium, I cited this Wikipedia page as a source for the fact that other arsenic presences in “organic” compounds was already known. And, when I dropped this link on a couple of different ScienceBlog sites, like Greg Laden’s, people went ape-shit.

Folks, as the header says, Wikipedia is NOT Faux News.

As I said rhetorically to those people, I now say in general, re the specific NASA post:

For readers who criticize Wikipedia, before the NASA story broke, the three footnotes on the arsenic section prior came from the University of Minnesota, NIH, and New Scientist. Got problems with all of them, too? The first two footnotes for the page as a whole were to National Academy of Sciences publications. Beyond that, Pharyngula, in his post about the NASA story, also has information on how arsenic in organic compounds is nothing new.

So, let’s get over the false skepticism about Wikipedia.

Now, in cases of history, biography or political science involving living persons or ongoing events, Wikipedia has a well-earned reputation for needing a skeptical look, though it’s getting better with new controls installed earlier this year.

Natural sciences? Different story. I challenge readers to show me a Wikipedia post in the natural sciences that’s contains monkey-wrenched information. Is it college-level textbook quality? Maybe not, but maybe so. It depends on the individual page. It’s usually at least as good as a high-school science textbook.

And, Wikipedia normally does NOT succumb to wingnuts. Its article on vaccine conspiracy, for example, has no room for antivaxxers' claims getting scientific or medical acceptance. Ditto its article on thimerosal controversy.

In brief, random reading, Wikiepedia's cold fusion article was the only one I saw that even halfway approached giving credence to non-mainstream science.

And, on the plus side, Wiki even has an article (more a list of links to individual articles) about topics generally considered as pseudoscience.

For people who think they're being skeptical by dismissing all of Wikipedia, or at least all science articles, they're not.

Here's an analogy. Just because Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt gives every appearance of being a warmonger on anything associated with Iraq or Afghanistan, and otherwise willing to accept uncritically anything voiced by a presidential administration as long as it doesn't go left of center, do I dismiss every Post editorial, let alone every Post op-ed columnist? Of course not.

Anyway, back to the NASA story vs. Wikipedia. I still say NASA's motives behind fluffery of this story is what needs scrutiny more than a Wikipedia science page.

Beyond fluffery, there appears to have been a lot of rushing this story to print, which, ironically, has a direct connection to cold fusion. There, the University of Utah pushed Pons and Fleischmann forward on a fast track so that it could establish priority on some patents.