Wikipedia Founder to Holistic Medicine Devotees: Drop Dead

Fans of holistic medicine want
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to change the policies of the online
encyclopedia he founded, so they
launched a Change.org petition: 

People who are interested in the benefits of Energy Medicine,
Energy Psychology, and specific approaches such as the Emotional
Freedom Techniques, Thought Field Therapy and the Tapas Acupressure
Technique, turn to your pages, trust what they read, and do not
pursue getting help from these approaches which research has, in
fact, proven to be of great benefit to many. This has serious
implications, as people continue to suffer with physical and
emotional problems that might well be alleviated by these
approaches.

The petition, which asks Wales to alter the standards of proof
required to make assertions on the site, has garnered about 8,000
signatures. Right now, attempts by boosters to insert claims not up
to the standards applied elsewhere on the site are repeatedly
removed by other editors, who point to official Wikipedia policy about
reliable
sources to justify their actions. Remember, anyone can edit any
entry on Wikipedia, but there is no guarantee their contributions
will be safe from other editors.  

Then things got interesting when Wales himself

hopped into the comments section at Change.org: 

No, you have to be kidding me. Every single person who signed
this petition needs to go back to check their premises and think
harder about what it means to be honest, factual, truthful.

Wikipedia’s policies around this kind of thing are exactly
spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in
respectable scientific journals—that is to say, if you can produce
evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia
will cover it appropriately.

What we won’t do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans
is the equivalent of “true scientific discourse”. It isn’t.

For more on Wales’ various strongly held (and often strongly
phrased) views, check out this now-ancient
Reason profile of the man behind the Wikipedia
curtain.