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Comment by joenot443 | Hacker News Reader

This site isn’t really any above EncyclopediaDramatica in its proximity to reality. It’s a meme pit for teenagers, not really somewhere to be taken seriously.

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Really? I've checked a range of topics and the Rational Wiki seemed spot on. Do you know of any topics it's completely wrong or unfair on?

It of course takes side on some issues like Atheism, Religion but nothing unexpected for a site to be unapologetically rational/empirical.

> Tesla Motors is a car company figure-headed by Elon Musk. It is famous for being the only company with a commercially available car floating in space. It makes electric cars, which made the news for catching fire.[133][134] As it turns out, though, while Teslas caught fire, they did so at a much lower rate than the cars relying on controlled explosions of flammable material.

>Despite being a rock star of scientific progress and innovation, a busy professional with a million things to do and a good understanding of the essential importance of good communication, Elon still finds time to tweet stupid shit every now and then. He apparently loves Tweeting so much, he bought 9.2% of Twitter, making him the single largest shareholder of the company.

Is that worth defending? I donno, it's not even up to date. I'm no Musk fan at all, but I think it's a pretty good example of what kind of intellectual position the authors are acting from. Maybe we have different standards for where we get our information, but I just can't read stuff like that and pretend the authors are people operating with even on iota of good faith.

Perhaps the comparison to ED is a bit harsh. In my opinion, ED is 4chan-based satire for immature and ideologically minded teenagers. RW is a series of stale reddit dunks for immature and ideologically driven teenagers.

> RW is a series of stale reddit dunks for immature and ideologically driven teenagers.

Yea it's certainly a bit immature and yea it doesn't have the ruthless update frequency Wikipedia has but it's almost never plain wrong. I think most reasonable people would agree Elon tweets too much and it often gets him in trouble.

I don't know how to substantiate this, so I won't try. My impression of the site is that it has a particular left-wing/pro-socialist political bias that creeps into articles, particularly about individuals. It doesn't usually have false information, but the language is often quite unfair. It's not wrong to have an opinion of course, but I assume it's opinions are an emergent property of its users and not the result of unapologetic rationality.

This websites opinion aligns pretty closely with my impression: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/rationalwiki/

RationalWiki was created in opposition to Conservapedia, so it's not unsurprising that it would attract users of the opposite political persuasion to the latter site. The comparison to Encyclopedia Dramatica, a dead wiki that in its heyday was populated by edgy teenage trolls, is silly though.

I was just answering why I don't take it too seriously as an impartial source, I agree it's not as bad as Encyclopedia Dramatica.

With that said, if you look at a page like this: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Emil_O._W._Kirkegaard , it's very similar to an ED page minus all the outlandish racism.

> Overall, we rate RationalWiki Left-Center biased based on the use of loaded language against conservatives and High for factual reporting due to pro-science reporting coupled with proper sourcing and a clean fact check record.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/encyclopedia-dramatica/

> SATIRE

> These sources exclusively use humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues. Primarily these sources are clear that they are satire and do not attempt to deceive. See all Satire sources.

> Update: This source is no longer online.

Yes, I wasn't trying to say they're the same, just commenting on RationalWiki by itself. I suppose that wasn't clear.

The article's claims about Kirkegaard are all well cited, linking to his own comments.

See https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/inaccuracies-in-rationalwikis-o...

does not rebut the RationalWiki page but is a poorly written smear piece. convienently, emil kirkegaard does not mention he lost the lawsuit he filed and changed his name and moved country to avoid debt collection. https://www.pdf-archive.com/2022/11/27/emil-kirkegaard-name-...

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