My response to a Wikipedia fund raising letter:
Dear Katherine,
I will not renew my giving, your practice of inserting yourselves in legitimate scientific debates by selecting one set of disputants to shut out alternative views is unacceptable. Typically, this is done in favor well-known institutions defending theories for which there is little evidence (other than their reputation). Your staff and volunteer editors apparently are unaware just how much dysfunctional science pervades some disciplines.
This degree of dysfunction isn't exactly a secret, Stanford medical professor and evidence analyst John Ioaniddis is pretty outspoken about the pseudo-scientific practices in nutritional epidemiology (though in fact they are apparent to any stats undergraduate). And yet you allow articles where the mainstream opinion of bodies practicing this bad science to be treated as authoritative when really all they are doing is making appeals to their own authority. That might be appropriate when summarizing political disagreements, but this supposedly is scientific debate.
A good example of this is an article on Nina Teicholz's book The Big Fat Surprise in which the article's editor thought it appropriate to quote Marion Nestle's critique of TBFS as though authoritative. Nestle merely quoted the official statements of organizations like the AHA,and ADA while completely avoiding any of the real and concerning evidence issues that Teicholz competently raised, and that indeed were at the core of her book.
In essence, Wikipedia has taken to the practice that journalists have been roundly criticized for, choreographing a sham sort of objectivity by having paid corporate shills respond to legitimate critics, often with fabricated evidence. That in this case, the respondent is not a shill but someone whose professional position depends on the adherence to the "party line", or that the data used is inherently speculative rather than fabricated hardly invalidates the comparison. When a respondent in an exchange expressing opinions that merely parrot
powerful institutions and said institutions rely only on weak observational data, it bears
commenting upon, just as surely as pointing out the ties of a commentator to tobacco company.
Your censuring of Malcolm Kendricks work is another example of this. I personally don't know if Kendrick's theory of atherosclerosis is right or not, but I am pretty sure no one really does given the quality of his arguments. Kendrick apparently fell afoul of a wikipedia editor who thought they knew what was and was not settled science. Such a person apparently has little idea that important aspects of arterial physiology and anatomy, with substantial connection to disease processes, such as the glycocalyx and endothelial progenitor cells, were not even discovered until the 90's, decades after the conventional wisdom became enshrined (wisdom which, by the way, has stubbornly failed to produced confirming experimental data). In short, treating Kendrick as a crank or science denialist is another indictment of your faux scientific stance.
In short, within your pool of "experts" evaluating "nutrition war" topics, there apparently is an unwillingness or an inability to appreciate the widely known and understood data issues that drive the contentious of these debates.
Before I can recommend support of Wikipedia, you will need to redress this, perhaps by appointing diverse panels of experts who can negotiate a fair representation of alternative views in contentious sciences (which typically are ones where there actually is not enough hard experimental data to settle disputes). The prime candidates for this sort of review would include nutrition and public health.
Sorry I've had to come to adopt this position.
Sincerely, ....
