Wikipedia has good and bad aspects to it:-
I have recently rewritten the raw foodism page and it is now much, much better:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_foodismThe trick is this:-
1) Make sure to only edit pages which are none too popular. The raw foodism page goes through long periods of inactivity as regards editing, here and there, so it is sometimes possible to edit/add/delete without someone always attacking your efforts.
2) In order to keep a wikipedia page free of opposing bias, one has to monitor that page regularly. This is why I recently asked people on rawpaleoforum to check the raw foodism wikipedia page once a month. All we would need is c. 10 people who would be willing to step in at any time and participate in any arbitrations or to revert any trollish edits, and things would be fine. If 10 people randomly checked the raw foodism wikipedia page once a month each ( or 120 people randomly checked that page once a year, each?), we could easily maintain the site without heavy bias against raw foodists. There are some nasty, subtle tricks one has to watch out for :- for example, I only noticed , maybe a year later, that some anti-raw fanatic had deliberately inserted dud links in place of my previous solid anti-Wrangham references, while keeping the actual text the same.
3) One does need to compromise. I, for example, was happy to allow multiple references to food-poisoning to appear in the raw foodism page, and in return they were unable to convincingly argue against the deletion of the "potential harmful effects of cooked foods" section, despite desperate efforts by 1 or 2 very biased individuals.
4) One has to know the wikipedia guidelines thoroughly. For example, I had 1 anally-retentive and biased penny-pincher who insisted that no online notes/references could be added unless raw food diets were specifically mentioned in the relevant sites/articles - he also hypocritically insisted that only well-known newspaper articles could be cited, yet, due to simple ignorance/stupidity, decided that an independent on sunday article wasn't important enough(!). Fortunately, an unbiased individual who was neither pro- or anti-raw, pointed out that wikipedia allowed 3 different ranks of references so that a minor description of a particular raw diet could link to a rawpalaeo website, for example.
The problem lies with people who are totally unaware of their bias but pretend to be impartial. I had 1 female contributor who automatically assumed that Wrangham was right, openly derided raw food diets as being "fringe", but liked to claim that she wanted me to have my say. I had to point out that Wrangham was hardly mentioned in serious scientific articles, and that, even in those, most of them stated that "most anthropologists" or "many anthropologists" viewed Wrangham as being completely wrong - 1 article even derided Wrangham as a mere "chimp researcher" and not a serious anthropologist. I even included an article in which Wrangham had admitted that he had no real evidence to support his claims as yet. I lost that argument as the other poster was so biased/determined and I was outnumbered, but at least I managed to get any mention of Wrangham deleted from the introduction to the article, as I had relevantly pointed out that Wrangham mentions should legally only be allowed in the criticism section.
Well, I think my current effort is going to last quite a bit. I will have to check it every now and then, of course. In recent times, I have had 1 raw vegan troll deleting the entire raw animal foods section but he has now been warned by various monitors and bots and will be kicked out if he continues(plus his deletions were reverted within 1 minute of his entering them by various bots). I also had 1 anti-raw fanatic trying to delete the whole "beliefs" section because they made claims he did not agree with. As I pointed out to him, his argument was unjustified as these statements were phrased as beliefs. In the end, I simply inserted into some of the statements an extra "raw foodists believe that" in addition to the one which preceded the whole paragraph("common beliefs of raw foodists").
Another point:- there are 2 large, opposing camps within Wikipedia. 1 camp is totally biased and only wants to include information on mainstream viewpoints/ideas, while the other camp is far more intelligent, wanting to include information on every possible viewpoint or subject, as long as all sides/views are covered for each subject.
Also, if others laboriously cite a particular rule in trying to delete pro-raw information, make sure to use the same rule against them in another part of the article which is anti-raw - they then often back down.
I also made it a special rule to include as many solid scientific references as possible to any info I added in on raw diets. I already knew that most of the anti-raw information had extremely poor references, so that it would make it much easier to mention this as a means of preventing others from attempting to delete pro-raw info. The "potential harmful effects of cooked foods" section was my original idea, and includes so many solid scientific studies/references on the harm done by cooking, that it makes the anti-raw side look ridiculous by comparison.
As SD said, though, it is definitely not acceptable to mention testimonials or to state things like "raw foods are the healthiest foods on the planet" or some similiar arbitrary statement. One has to include dozens of scientific references here and there - the more one has, the weaker the anti-raw side seems.
