> If I tell you that HIV is sexually transmitted and causes AIDS, you should know this to be untrue if you are in the medical profession.
Some of this article raises known issues (Phillip Cross for example), but a lot of it just seems to amount to, “my biases are not adequately represented!”
http://prn.fm/category/archives/gary-null-show/
That's irresponsible failure to disclose possible conflict-of-interest, at best.
Its entire shop inventory is gary null media http://prn.fm/prn-store/page/1/
It's a little more than irresponsible.
I did help write some of the Philip Cross pieces which were discussed on HN, and are also referenced in this piece in the Philip Cross section. But the article submitted here also covers a lot more, for example how PR companies and even Wikimedia employees appear to have sold their Wikipedia-editing services. I found a lot of it interesting.
Wikipedia is an awesome tool. It will provide generally useful, broadly accurate, basic information on most topics. But accuracy and freedom from bias isn't guaranteed. Anything highly technical can suffer from inaccuracy. Anything political will generally not be bias free (not least because it's essentially impossible to construct a concept of "objective truth" or "neutrality" in any remotely political topic).
It's still a useful starting point for basically any research. If you subsequently need to rely on those facts – you'll need to do more research. And I think that's okay.
I'll give you an example (some names may have been changed and all that...): imagine a businessman being presented in a favorable light even after he's convicted of embezzlement, bribery, the whole 9 yards, basically his whole career turned out to be a sham wrapped in a web of illegality. Any attempts to include this official info in his profile gets promptly shot down. Years later the guy is still squeaky clean and with the "right to be forgotten" he'll eventually stay that way.
It's natural to find mistakes in a highly technical article. It's bias to find situations when the truth will be bent a little to give more importance to one player of a team. When you realize the mistakes you just have correct them. When you refuse to correct them then you crossed into a whole different problem.
Keeping in place mechanisms that impair efforts to correct the errors, or not putting mechanisms in place to mitigate the issues is way beyond bias. It's negligence at best and when money is involved it's likely more than that.
Don't bother to continue reading if you think that a "diverse" range of failings are going to be discussed; it's really just about alternative medicine hucksters and left-wing journalists and politicians.
1) I'm happy that Wikipedia doesn't cover health scams as if they were reality based, and
2) As a person on the left-wing, I understand that we are attacking the most powerful elements in modern society, and I don't have the unattainable standard for a publicly-edited encyclopedia to somehow manage to be neutral on those people who are attacking those powerful elements. All of the types of sources that encyclopedias should use will be filled with attacks against the left-wing on a constant basis.
Superficially, both classes of people seem the same (health scammers and left-wing reformers), because they face a similar challenge - attacks by the corporate mainstream media. I hold the same standard for both types of cases: that factual misstatements be promptly removed (which I think will do good things for the left, and bad things for alternative health practitioners.) I do not expect Wikipedia to remove the editorial biases of its sources. Somebody trying to find out more information about Jill Stein in an encyclopedia might actually be trying to discover the nature of the slanders directed at her, or the content of a particular slander; I'd like it to be there and well sourced.
The Philip Cross article I worked on was discussed here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17109290 - and it contributed to the Philip Cross account being banned from the area of British politics on Wikipedia.
I posted the link to this article here on HN, having seen it on Twitter. I don't know anything about the author or Gary Null, but the piece covers a lot more which I found quite interesting.
> It was Dr. Gary Null’s investigation into this phenomenon that first alerted me that Wikipedia was playing fast and loose with the facts beyond of the political realm ... Null is a board-certified clinical nutritionist who has conducted over 40 clinical studies on lifestyle and diet, more than anyone else in his field. ... He has published over 700 articles, many in peer-reviewed journals, and has been invited to present his findings at scientific conferences.
To me, this reads as if Gary Null has a medical degree. He does not. His qualification is a PhD from an online university (Union Institute & University). The graduate school has since been dissolved following investigation from the Ohio Board of Regents.
Moving on, the author seems to have a bone to pick with Stephen Barrett (who runs quackwatch.org, which regularly criticises Null). This is how he's described:
> Stephen Barrett, a discredited former psychiatrist
Again, to me, that seems like he lost his license or something. After a quick google, Stephen Barrett holds a medical degree, and is retired. I couldn't find any evidence of disciplinary action of any sort.
Anyway, the author's main issue with the wikipedia page on Null seems to be that it portrays him as unscientific.
> I reviewed the scientific literature on five topics where Null and Barrett disagree – sugar, alcohol, mercury, fluoridation, and the safety of vitamins and minerals – and after scanning thousands of abstracts, found Barrett to be wrong on every issue.
This is pretty ridiculous. [Barrett's write-up on Null](http://www.quackwatch.org/04ConsumerEducation/null.html) specifically mentions homeopathy, AIDS denialism, anti-vaccination, chelation therapy, among other things. Strangely the author makes no mention of those.
Hilariously, I think "the safety of vitamins and minerals" is referring to an incident where Null sued the manufacturer of his line of diet supplements (because yes, of course, he sells a line of diet supplements), after it allegedly hospitalised Null along with six other individuals. That story in itself is incredibly surreal (his website said he was "completely and totally healthy", for instance), so I recommend anyone interested to go read up on it.
I was a little disappointed at first that there wasn't a decent discussion of wikipedia's policies, but Gary Null is such a weird and wonderful character it more than made up for it!