Anti-religion bias
From RationalWikiWiki
Comments are sometimes made about an apparent anti-religion bias on RationalWiki.
This article attempts to describe and analyze the situation and ask if such a bias is likely – it makes no effort to say what the situation “should” be.
We need to consider two elements: The Editing Policies, and the User Base.
Contents |
[edit] Editing policies
The editing policy is most clearly laid out in the RW article, “What is a RationalWiki article”. An initial point to note is the instruction that:
- "RationalWiki is not neutral point of view." "As a site we have a point of view, and that point of view is that the scientific method and the information gained from its application is better than almost anything else humanity has come up with."
Subsequently editors are told:
- to feel free to slant the content towards the goals of the site.
- that it is not necessary to supply references for all entries.
- that RationalWiki is original research.
- to draw (additional) conclusions not clearly stated in a source.
Given that the Scientific Method is wholly naturalistic and explicitly excludes supernatural or religious explanations, this POV will presumably eliminate any religious explanations for phenomenon. There is no obligation to present alternative points of view opposed to, or apart from, the scientific method – indeed they would seem to be explicitly excluded.
The subsequent points allow – even encourage - people to write more-or-less what they want as long as it is consistent with point one.
[edit] Implications
All of this means that RW authors, as a group, are likely to create 1. articles with a naturalistic slant and 2. articles which will which reflect the dominant beliefs and opinions of the group; and that opinions contrary to the general group consensus may get short shrift. It might conceivably be possible for the wiki to somehow present theistic or agnostic ideas within the above guidelines – but this would depend on the user base. Nevertheless, with such guidelines the articles on the site will be dominated by the opinions of the majority of the authors (or by the opinions of the most prolific authors) as long as their articles are consistent with (or at least not inconsistent with) the Scientific method.
[edit] User Base
The top four posters on the site as of August 2008 were Human, SusanG, Bob M and Tmtoulouse. Between them, these four authors have generated almost 40% of the total posts to the site to date, in addition they have all been quite active in creating actual article content in addition to talk page content. They are all confirmed atheists. Two of the four top posters are members of the reportedly hyper-atheistic Gang of Four, and Human has sort of expressed the belief that he would be a member of the gang if he could find the motivation.
An analysis of all the posters with more than a thousand posts revealed that users who had explicit atheistic userboxes, or who had engaged in debates where they expressed notable atheistic ideas, generated about 52% of the posts.
Users who have explicitly theistic userboxes, or who have defended religious ideas in posts, generated a little less than 20% of posts.
The other 28% of the user posts were made by users who described themselves as agnostic or whose stance cannot be easily identified. Given the nature of the site, one might assume that over 50% of these remaining users also had atheistic leanings but this cannot be confirmed by this quick analysis.
[edit] Conclusions
The site has a stated POV which explicitly favors a scientific POV which excludes supernatural or religious explanations.
The site’s policies encourage posters to include their opinions in articles.
There are more explicitly atheistic authors than theistic authors.
The atheistic authors, in addition to being more numerous, are more active than the theistic authors.
Therefore one would expect to see a predominance of atheistic ideas on the site.
Should the most prominent atheistic authors also be anti-religious then articles will be both atheistic and explicitly anti-religious.
