The Great Wikipedia Scandal!
Uncle Fetzer explains how the coverup goes even deeper than we thought. This just goes to show that anyone can be gotten to!
posted by James B. @ 11:40 PM
9 comments
As Seen in Vanity Fair's August 2006 Issue!
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Wednesday, October 25, 2006
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Wait? So wikipedia isn't a reliable and accurate source for information? Why do I always find this stuff out after everyone else!
Dude needs a handkerchief. This is Fetzer's attempt at NPOV by the way:
http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org/ArticlesWikipedia.html
Clearly someone got to the Wikipedians. His rewriting of the criticism section to remove the bit about their having no experts in their list of experts is particuilarly unbiased.
Ironic since the ST 9 11 page on wiki is basically a commercial advertisement which glosses over significant criticism of the members and theories involved.
Wikipedia is reliable enough for any innocuous boring matters. If I wanna find out the population of alaska in under 60 seconds or the ethnic breakdown, it work great....
But for anything where there is room for debate, the scales get tilted and the info just doesn't hold up to a true encyclopedia.
The only thing less worse the the cult of wiki (the admins and loyalists who swear by the format and it's accuracy) are the people who dismiss it entirely out of hand as being completely useless.
Like everything on the internet...it has to be taken with a grain of salt.
One of the most dishonest things the "scholars" do is try to twist the meaning of "peer review."
Peer review works a lot of different ways, but one of the key points is that you don't get to pick who's doing the reviewing. Yet that is precisely what the "scholars" do: the conspiracy theories are reviewed solely by other conspiracy theorists, and then declared "peer reviewed."
If their scientific claims about 9/11 could stand up to scrutiny, Fetzer et al would have no difficulty getting their claims published in an existing journal, like the guy from Northwestern did.
A real peer-reviewed article in a real scientific journal would be a tremendous boon to the 9/11 conspiracy movement. But they do not even pursue it, preferring instead to invent their own journals and avoid objective review at all costs. And that is the fatal blow to their credibility.
Wikipedia is quite kind to all the nutjobs, I've tried to edit them to be more accurate and have been shut down in my attempts.
Priceless:
Peer reviewed by ANONYMOUS experts. Oh, oh, can I be one. I'd like to be a...a...an expert on Quantum Mechanics. Now all you people who want your quantum mechanics papers "officially peer reviewed" send them to me at..
youstupidclowns@scholaridiots911.org
smirk
TAM
And why must they be anonymous, Mr. Fetzer?
This is actually pretty standard for academic journals. The problem being that if you're trying to show that your field has any basis in reason it's rather best to start sending your work to established reputable journals first so as to establish the merit of your work. Also best if the chaps in charge of your spiffing new journal are somewhat trustworthy and not obviously biased.
Plus if there is such a pool of legitimate experts (and their ranks are so resplendent with experts after all) willing to perform peer review for the ST 911 journal it's extremely unusual that they're not weighing in on any of the issues, particularly when the peer review is called into account. I'd also suggest that anonymous peer review would be hampered by the very limited number of people writing for the journal.
And heck that's before we even get to the appalling quality of the articles, which suggest the peer review isn't rigorous and isn't done by experts, if at all.
I guess my point here is that Wikipedia itself is a better source
Hopefully wikipedia will become irrelevant soon anyway, once The Citizendium Project starts moving at full steam.
It is standard for reviewers to be anonymous, the problem is the journal itself has no reputation for reliability. It is a joke when the editor of a journal (Kevin Ryan) is in charge of setting up a peer review by "anonymous experts" for the other editor of the journal, Steven Jones, who appointed him to the position in the first place, on a paper they both worked on.
We have no way of knowing the reputation of who did the review. It could have been his 8 year old nephew, and judging by the quality of work, it probably was.
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