I’ve been exploring a concept for a wiki recently. The idea would be that people contribute fringe theories and present the best evidence for that theory, perhaps by contrasting it with mainstream interpretations of the data. Some examples of pages on the wiki could include,
Robin Hanson’s theory that a panspermia sibling to Earth hosts an ancient advanced alien civilization, whose world government experienced complex system rot in the process of developing an Earth-monitoring system, resulting in bizarre UFO encounters with them that we sometimes hear about on Earth.
The theory from various cryonicists, following Eric Drexler, that future nanotechnology will be sufficient to repair damage from vitrification and subsequent cryopreservation.
Robin Gardiner’s theory that the ship called “The Titanic” was in fact the ship Olympic, and was purposely sunk as part of an elaborate insurance scam.
Scott Alexander’s pseudo-religious theory that “There is an all-powerful, all-knowing logically necessary entity spawning all possible worlds and identical to the moral law.”
The purpose would not be to make a determination to whether each theory was true or false, but rather just present the evidence.
Naturally, I’m more interested in theories that (1) have some sort of technical argument favoring it (regardless of credibility), (2) aren’t merely moral or political theses in disguise, and (3) aren’t already covered in sufficient detail in other places (unlike the JFK conspiracy theory). Wikipedia is a terrible place to do this, given their rules disallowing original research. Of course, without such constraints, there is a large risk that a Fringe Theories Wiki would attract bad editors, so some strict editing rules would still probably be required on the site.
[Question] How much interest would there be in a fringe theories wiki?
I’ve been exploring a concept for a wiki recently. The idea would be that people contribute fringe theories and present the best evidence for that theory, perhaps by contrasting it with mainstream interpretations of the data. Some examples of pages on the wiki could include,
CellBioGuy’s theory that the paleocene-eocene thermal maximum was caused by an industrial civilization of birds living in Antarctica.
Robin Hanson’s theory that a panspermia sibling to Earth hosts an ancient advanced alien civilization, whose world government experienced complex system rot in the process of developing an Earth-monitoring system, resulting in bizarre UFO encounters with them that we sometimes hear about on Earth.
The theory from various cryonicists, following Eric Drexler, that future nanotechnology will be sufficient to repair damage from vitrification and subsequent cryopreservation.
Robin Gardiner’s theory that the ship called “The Titanic” was in fact the ship Olympic, and was purposely sunk as part of an elaborate insurance scam.
Scott Alexander’s pseudo-religious theory that “There is an all-powerful, all-knowing logically necessary entity spawning all possible worlds and identical to the moral law.”
The purpose would not be to make a determination to whether each theory was true or false, but rather just present the evidence.
Naturally, I’m more interested in theories that (1) have some sort of technical argument favoring it (regardless of credibility), (2) aren’t merely moral or political theses in disguise, and (3) aren’t already covered in sufficient detail in other places (unlike the JFK conspiracy theory). Wikipedia is a terrible place to do this, given their rules disallowing original research. Of course, without such constraints, there is a large risk that a Fringe Theories Wiki would attract bad editors, so some strict editing rules would still probably be required on the site.