How Would You Handle It?

All businesses have complaints pop up every now and again. How they deal with complaints can, on occassion, have a meaningful impact on their operations. Recently, a group started a Change.org petition to goad Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales into changing some aspects of their editing policies. They feel that their areas of interest are not being fairly represented on Wikipedia. To date, they've only received around 8,000 signitures which, as some of the younger people in my office have informed me, is not very many. This is probably - at least in my opinion - because their crusade is stupid.

Wikipedia is widely used and trusted. Unfortunately, much of the information related to holistic approaches to healing is biased, misleading, out-of-date, or just plain wrong. For five years, repeated efforts to correct this misinformation have been blocked and the Wikipedia organization has not addressed these issues. As a result, 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.

Here's the question, how would you handle this kind of complaint? Jimmy Wales actually responded rather perfectly in my opinion:

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.

How would you monkeys have responded?