RationalWiki
RationalWiki[1] is a politically-motivated pseudo-science debunking wiki that has fairly high popularity for a Wikipedia knockoff. It has very few pages, perhaps explaining its low Alexa ranking relative to Wikipedia. But its pages rank very, very high on relevant search terms, meaning if you create a page for it, it will most likely get high SEO and a lot of readership. It features a blatantly inceldom-denialist article on incels and inceldom.
Politics[edit | edit source]
Users are almost exclusively feminist, atheist, socialist and/or liberal. The wiki also came more SJW over time, and might as well just be a new SJWiki.org
"Incel" page[edit | edit source]
Similar to the namesake Wikipedia page, RationalWiki's article on incels makes no attempt to truly analyze the blackpill theory, and merely dismisses it as "sociopathic" after giving a very brief definition in the "See also" section at the bottom of the article.[2]
Despite the wiki allegedly being pro-science and featuring articles that support evolution, the admins and writers seem uninterested in properly presenting and attempting to debunk the numerous sciencific findings that support the blackpill, which itself comes from interpreting human behaviors from a modern evolutionary perspective (i.e. evolutionary psychology). This blatant contradiction is quite telling of the wiki's leftist political, rather than claimed pro-scientific, motivations, as other articles on the website that deal with the nature/nuture debate and group & individual differences in socially desirable traits also reveal.
It also lists multiple incidents of "incel-driven" homocides, while only listing one suicide, possibly a subtle attempt to imply that incels are more hateful and violent towards others than they are depressed and suicidal, while in reality the opposite is true.
It also falsely generalizes and accuses incels of having too high standards, completely ignoring juggernaut theory, and accuses this wiki of being "apologetic" for professing the fact that inceldom is a life circumstance, proving that the article, and hence the wiki itself, is incelphobic and inceldom denialist.
Banning process[edit | edit source]
RationalWiki is mainly fun to write for because their owner values free speech. Extremely controversial writers are allowed to stay on the wiki more than other wikis would normally permit. It's egalitarian writing commitment also manifests in them automatically giving SysOp status to most of their userbase (or they used to do this, not sure if they still do this).
Activity[edit | edit source]
The wiki is mostly inactive, even less active than this wiki at times. Users generally don't care about topics outside political drama, meaning one can write about any non-dramatic topic pretty much without interruption.
But do they actually debunk pseudoscience?[edit | edit source]
Many of their pages are poor attempts at debunking pseudoscience. They partly chose to focus on combatting alternative medicine, but as a result went a bit too far in the opposite direction. Many of their pages seem like they could have been represented by a pharmaceutical representative. This is just one example.
Origin[edit | edit source]
The wiki was created as a reaction to the pseudoscience contained on Conservapedia, which was indeed rife with pseudoscience, with many vague references to Christian religious dogma as proof of various things. Not long afterward, people stopped taking Conservapedia seriously.