2 The Quackbuster manipulation of Wikipedia the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is an odd thing It is made up of a so called volunteer system Several years ago a team of quackbusters infiltrated various levels of the Wikipedia operation and are now entrenched in the middle and lower level volunteer management system If you try and put any positive information about advanced medicine or the problems of US health care on Wikipedia or change false or misleading information the quackbusters have installed you will fail You will be blocked from further editing and the pages of Wikipedia will now carry information about what a terrible person you are The only way to have ANY influence over what Wikipedia says about subject is to approach them with a legal threat letter at the highest levels Nothing else works Even that has problems for Wikipedia management operates on a financial shoestring and apparently has no ability to police its own encyclopedia Unfortunately people use the encyclopedia and they get very bad information about health care Below is a paragraph from the editor s section of Wikipedia The editor here is discussing the problem of the quackbuster slime acting to control the information flow on Wikipedia and what to do about it so you understand the abbreviation POV stand for Point of View and NPOV stands for No Point of View which Wikipedia wants The part in red is for emphasis Read this I guess it depends on what purpose the External Links section serves Do the links have to serve the NPOV interests of the article or can the links section be a place where specific points of view can have a chance to be expressed As it is now the chiropractic link section is broken down into Advocacy and Critiques I think that this warns the researcher that they are leaving the NPOV environment that Wikipedia tries to provide and will be entering a POV external site If these links are truly just linking to the page for marketing reasons and don t serve a primary function of adding to the knowledge base I would then say to axe them I haven t checked every critical link but they do seem to link to essays or research on pages that don t directly try to sell you anything other than their POV If they are all offering the same POV with no really distinguishing differences then they should be reduced in number The soapbox point is interesting These are external links so it would seem that Wikipedia is not being directly exploited as a soapbox However the abundance of critical links could be seen as an attempt to present bias using the amount of negative criticisms to invoke a negative POV about chiropractic My solution up until now has been to add to the advocacy links to balance out the criticism You can certainly try to delete the critical links and claim NPOV but I can almost guarantee you that you be quickly and improperly accused of vandalism by one of three specific chiroskeptics who police the chiropractic page all day long as far as I can tell They love to throw vandalism accusations around and usually are vastly overstating the matter That being said I have suggested a disarming strategy where both sides would remove links in a balanced way but my suggestion was met with silence Now as far as the link farming goes Yes virtually all of the critical sites are linked together through the SkepticRing Anti Quackery Ring Chiropractic Subluxated Ring and other ways fashioned specifically for the purpose of boosting Search Engine ranking A lot of those sites are operated by Stephen Barrett and his buddy Sammy Homola Chirobase org Quackwatch org and NCAHF They re three organizations all saying the same thing What s really slimy is that they state opinions then reference their sister sites support to that opinion A lot of the links are operated or moderated by Fyslee one of the three chiroskepics users who regularly accuse people of vandalism for removing links to his sites Check out his userpage to see which sites he operates and moderates for These chiroskepitics are working together to actively employ search engine tricks such as artifically boosting Google ranking by adding external links to their sites all over Wikipedia I have documented this Their goal is for a researcher curious about chiropractic to encounter their anti chiropractic sites first on a Google search Given these organizations objective I can certainly understand why they would want to do this Unfortunately the tactics that they employ are objectionable to both Google and Wikipedia Hopefully these organizations will get wise to the chiroskeptic ring and ban their sites I m not sure what to do in the meantime One thing that I would like to suggest is that a website is linked to only once in the external links section As