Comment by jrflowers
20 hours ago
>Ray Peat
>Seems bizarre to just not have a page on a subject discussed every day on Twitter.
The idea that if a guy writes “avocados cause cancer and honey cures it” he should be put in the encyclopedia if it gets enough retweets is the organizing principle behind grokipedia. It would be much more bizarre to expect a serious encyclopedia to work the same way for no good reason.
TBH, Wikipedia should have pages on these cranks and point out they are cranks and that if they say the sky is blue that's because it changed color.
Other, much dumber nutrition cranks like Anthony William and Gary Null have Wikipedia pages. Fundamentally, the purpose of an encyclopedia is to be the place that you go to when you hear a concept and want to look up what it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#General_n...
You are welcome to join the conversation and try and convince everyone maintaining Wikipedia that random peoples' tweets should be considered a reliable source. Both those other people you mention have been mentioned multiple times in various reliable articles (see the bibliography), while the only thing I can find online about Ray Peat is something that looks a whole lot like blogspam on usnews.com.
The existence of some nutrition pseudoscientists that meet Wikipedia’s threshold of notability does not mean that being a nutrition pseudoscientist by itself qualifies a person as being sufficiently notable. Wikipedia doesn’t need an exhaustive list of every kook with weird opinions about food, there are other websites for that, like grokipedia.
If you hear a name in an internet argument, and want to know who that person is, and one site is more likely than the other to contain it, that site is definitionally the better encyclopedia in the moment. If you arbitrarily define notability so as not to include the guy who came up with the seed oil craze presently informing the federal health policy of the United States, you're just giving away part of the game for no reason. Like Stallman deliberately throwing away GPL compiler share dominance by refusing to make GCC a library, and now we've got a million proprietary LLVM compilers. Wikipedia isn't the gatekeeper of notability, such that refusing to have an article on some niche topic will prevent it getting oxygen. All it does is ensure that your first search result will be sympathetic to his fringe views, instead of critical.
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