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RationalWiki is a wikimedia platform based website which claimed purpose is (see its mainpage):

  1. Analyzing and refuting pseudoscience and the anti-science movement;
  2. Documenting the full range of crank ideas;
  3. Explorations of authoritarianism and fundamentalism;
  4. Analysis and criticism of how these subjects are handled in the media.

All of this sounds great. However, while reading some of RationalWiki articles, I noted a quite strong political bias, which is often somehow masked as irony. (I prefer to not give explicit examples, because I am afraid that the discuss would quickly turn political and goes off-topic.)

I looked for some criticisms of RationalWiki, but I have found very few of them, and their all seemed very bias by their own.

My questions are:

(A). Under which metrics can RationalWiki be considered a reliable, unbiased, and scientific/rational driven source of material? And under which metrics, it can not?

(B). Are there some good analysis/criticism of RationalWiki?

EDIT: The question has been put on hold as "primarily opinion-based" but I suggest to give it a second thought. As in my reply to OddThinking's comment, there are many objective indicators of reliability. Let say for example that my question was about Conservapedia instead of RationalWiki: I can image several possible answers showing by facts, not opinions, that the former is not a reliable source.

Tzason
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    [Welcome to Skeptics!](http://meta.skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1505/welcome-to-new-users) There isn't a specific measure we could use to determine whether a Wiki has a bias, and if there was, there is no claim that it is unbiased in that way. – Oddthinking Sep 10 '17 at 12:18
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    Most of Rationalwiki's "political bias" accusations tend to stem from Conservapaedia's adherents, who tend to take personal offense when RW calls them out on unscientific claims and statements. – Shadur Sep 10 '17 at 13:03
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    @Oddthinking I think that there are many "measures" to understand if something is a "reliable, unbiased, and scientific/rational driven source", e.g.: Does it contain scientific-correct information? What are its sources? Is it peer-review? Do the majority of the experts agree? ... Of course, none of these "measures" give absolute guarantees, but I wouldn't call them opinion-based. To make it clear: Would you say that a book on medicine which have been written by non-experts, which didn't pass a peer-review process, and contains many incorrect basic claims is a "reliable,unbiased ecc. source"? – Tzason Sep 10 '17 at 14:42
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    @Shadur Indeed, this is the reason I asked question (B). As far as I understood, RationalWiki was created in opposition of the unscientific and politically biased claims of Conservapedia, and this is good. But I think that RW, although it is undoubtedly much less biased than Conservapedia, suffers itself of many biases. I also think that someway this is much more dangerous, because Conservapedia introduce itself has a clearly politically biased source, while RW introduce itself has "rational". – Tzason Sep 10 '17 at 14:55
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    Asking about specific metrics won't help this question. Skeptics.SE is about providing citations for notable claims. Questions here should be of the form, such-and-such notably (with a broad audience) said something. Is that true? Both before and now, this has no notable claim. So even if it's no longer opinion-based, it's still off-topic. – Brythan Sep 10 '17 at 17:40
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    I would not accept a question asking if Conservapedia was a reliable source either, unless there was a specific claim. Show me that someone claims that RationalWiki is reliable against some objective measure, and we can edit this question into shape. [Hint: It is a wiki with multiple anonymous authors; we know it isn't formally peer-reviewed by experts. We know it isn't completely referenced. We know the quality of articles (or even sentences) varies. We don't need a question here to answer that, because no-one doubts it.] – Oddthinking Sep 11 '17 at 01:44
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    @Oddthinking The question about Conservapedia would be answerable---by showing that it's not. – Loren Pechtel Sep 11 '17 at 04:08
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    @Oddthinking "Show me that someone claims that RationalWiki is reliable against some objective measure, and we can edit this question into shape." I don't get it: If someone publish an article with some claims, I cannot ask on SE about the article reliability unless someone else claims that the article is reliable? – Tzason Sep 11 '17 at 09:16
  • @Tzason : You can ask whether specific claims that the article makes are reliable but that's something very different than asking whether a population is generally reliable. – Christian Sep 11 '17 at 13:58
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    @Tzason: We have notability requirements for many reasons, including: (a) to ensure we aren't tackling strawman, (b) to allow us to get the context of the claim (including definitions), (c) to verify that many people believe the claim to justify that it is worth the effort and to avoid propagating speculations. The claims you want us to tackle, including "RationalWiki is (politically) unbiased." and "RationalWiki is reliable (by some undefined metric, even though the definition/metric choice is opinion-based)" fail all of these. – Oddthinking Sep 11 '17 at 15:31
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    The accuracy of wiki sites is a point of contention among many, especially academics. Wikipedia is usually the target of such things, where your professor tells you it's not a good source, yet the topic you need to write about has the most complete article anywhere on wikipedia. However, at the same time, topics less discussed, or more obscure, or more politically/religiously charged, tend to have bias issues, which is a reflection of the contributors' biases. –  Sep 11 '17 at 18:11
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    Rational wiki is no exception. Their contributor base is primarily well meaning scientists and atheists who fancy themselves great thinkers. As such, some of their articles come off as snide rather than rational, though likely factually correct on scientific matters. –  Sep 11 '17 at 18:12
  • As to your question (metrics to test Rational wiki's bias and accuracy), there's some I've seen for wikipedia, but they are typically lacking, usually ending up being a list of bad articles at the neglect of the many great articles. If anything for Rational wiki exists, it's probably about the same. –  Sep 11 '17 at 18:14
  • @fredsbend Exactly! They are well meaning people. They try to make up for the evils that befell the Jews so [they are accused of bias](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Talk:Judaism#Judaism_vs._Christianity) but who cares. If it helps avoid another holocaust so be it! I my very humbl opinion, this is a case were the goal justifies the means. What they could (and should do) is make it more subtle, no need to make it obvious that they favor a religion over another religion. But they are probably very excited for protecting fellow humans from Nazi-like idiology. – Maria check profile Sep 13 '17 at 13:43
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    @Maria I'm not sure an appeal to emotion is in keeping with what "rational wiki" would imply. –  Sep 13 '17 at 14:07
  • @Maria BTW, religion is probably the least reliable topic to read about on rational wiki. –  Sep 13 '17 at 14:22
  • @fredsbend `I'm not sure an appeal to emotion is in keeping with what "rational wiki" would imply` - What do you mean? – Maria check profile Sep 13 '17 at 15:55
  • @fredsbend `religion is probably the least reliable topic` - So you are saying we should ignore bias on those topics. I don't mind, but... why? (english is not my mother language if i say something wrong please let me know :P ) – Maria check profile Sep 13 '17 at 16:06

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