[Interview with social media expert and Wikipedia critic, Rome Viharo exposes cyber bullying tactics employed by dogmatic Skeptics on Wikipedia.]

Rome Viharo: Personally I have no interest in promoting Rupert Sheldrake’s ideas or his hypotheses and I really can’t say scientifically if they’re valid or invalid. That was never my argument. My arguments were always on what’s called the “lead section,” which is just describing the basic information about the man. Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist, author, and lecturer.

I was offended because these editors were basically abusing the metadata, the first sentence of the paragraph, to immediately frame Rupert Sheldrake in a light that is just biographically not true but in a way where he has no credibility after the first sentence.

So when I joined the page, what I found offensive was “Rupert Sheldrake is a former biologist,” right? So I just found that offensive and I was like, “Where is the source that he’s a former biologist? Where is the evidence of this?” So all I was trying to do was really just change the lead section. There are so many scientific publications that refer to him as a biologist.

Alex Tsakiris: Well, it’s absurd. He has dozens and dozens of scholarly, peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals. I think he’s published in Nature, if I remember correctly.

Take line two from the Wikipedia entry. It’s just unbelievable. “From 1967 to 1973 he was a biochemist and cell biologist at Cambridge University.” Well, what happened after that? He stopped being a biochemist? He’s not being a biologist? It’s just absurd.

Rome Viharo: It’s like something from a Monty Python movie.

