What I learned after ranking all 470 Wikipedia Pseudoscience Articles. Number 2 may surprise you!

Meme worthy headline brought to you by our search algorithm overlords.

While researching new topics for this site I was surprised to learn that there are 470 Wikipedia articles categorized as "pseudoscience". I thought it might be an interesting exercise to see what might be uncovered by looking at these articles across three different dimensions: popularity (based on views in the past 30 days), engagement (measured by edits made in the last year), and recency (determined by their creation date)."

I've included top 10s for each below along with links to the entire lists - without any interruptions or ad breaks. After analyzing the data, there were some surprising insights. Let's dive into the rankings, and then I'll share my thoughts on what was discovered.

Wikipedia Pseudoscience Articles Ranked by Page Views (30 Days)

Entire list of 470 articles here. Top 10 below.

Wikipedia Pseudoscience Articles Ranked by Page Edits (365 Days)

Entire list of 470 articles here. Top 10 below.

Wikipedia Pseudoscience Articles Ranked by Page Creation Date

Entire list of 470 articles here. Top 10 below.

Like the headline suggests, #2 (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) on the Most Viewed list is legitimately surprising. In fact, many of the articles on the list were head scratchers. It seems as there's a lot of room for interpretation as to what the pseudoscience category actually represents.

During my corporate days, I encountered the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) – a popular personality assessment tool that was all the rage in business circles not too long ago. Like many of my coworkers, I was asked to answer a series of questions, to help uncover the four-letter code that would supposedly unlock the secrets of my professional persona.

At the time, companies were intrigued by the MBTI's promise to predict job performance and improve team dynamics. However, as the years passed, a cloud of skepticism began to loom over the framework. Critics started labeling it as pseudoscience, citing a lack of empirical evidence to support its claims.

One of the main objections? The MBTI's attempt to shoehorn complex human personalities into neat, predefined categories. Trying to slot the wide spectrum of human nature into a handful of cookie-cutter shapes...

Yet, despite the mounting criticism, the MBTI hasn't completely lost its footing. Some studies suggest there might be a kernel of truth when it comes to identifying certain personality traits. It's a reminder that in the world of personality assessments, the line between science and pseudoscience can sometimes be blurrier than we'd like to admit.

Myers-Briggs led me to contemplate how categories get assigned to wikipedia articles in the first place. This particular page was created in 2002, but wasn't relegated to pseudoscience until 2017 - 15 years later.

Between 2002 and 2017 there many edits made that added weight to the pseudoscience argument. Here's how one editor summarized the four paragraphs of changes that were made in 2019: "The MBTI is a pseudoscience, as much as 'which chakra' is out of balance or which type of crystal you are". The editor did include several legitimate references that refuted MBTI, but I would certainly give more weight to my "INTJ" personality type label than my favorite crystal or zodiac sign.

Wikipedia, with it's crowdsourced edits is a powerful tool for democratizing knowledge, but at the same time it can be vulnerable to bias, lack of expert review and skewed representation.

Case in point, there are several on this list that are a hotbed of controversy - especially the articles that cover religious movements and political topics. Falun Gong was first categorized as pseudoscience in 2022 because a single editor cited the movement's creationist views and that "creationism is tagged with pseudoscience".

I'm certainly not going there, but regardless of anyone's political or religious beliefs, the Wikipedia main Creationism article itself is not specifically tagged as pseudoscience.

Another odd one is "Titanic Conspiracy Theories" (#47). This one took a bit to unravel as to why it is on the list.

In 2019 an editor categorized the page as "pseudophysics" and then a bot subsequently switched the category over to pseudoscience with the retirement of the pseudophysics category.

As per the page itself: "The Titanic collided with an iceberg, damaging the hull's plates below the waterline on the starboard side, causing the front compartments to flood." There is absolutely nothing pseudo about the physics there. The article includes some theories as to the physics involved with the actual sinking, but they were largely refuted. I'm not sure that the debunked theories adhere to the pseudoscience definition of "continued adherence long after the pseudoscientific hypotheses have been experimentally discredited".

Another one ripe for dispute is the Ganzfield Experiment (#134). This is a well known extrasensory perception experiment related to telepathy.

The page states that "ongoing parapsychology research using ganzfeld experiments has been criticized by independent reviewers as having the hallmarks of pseudoscience". The problem here is that the reality is the exact opposite. There have been multiple studies that have validated the claimed effect including a meta analysis in 2024 that reviewed 78 studies with over 40 years of data which demonstrated a small effect size but statistically significant.

An editor moved the article from "Pyschology Experiments" to "Pseudoscience" in 2013. Perhaps it's time to move it back.

As a self proclaimed aficionado on pseudoscience topics I was surprised that there were a few on the list that I never heard of.

One example is the "Space Animal Hypothesis" (#369) which also wins the prize for the most recently created page (May 8th, 2024). From the page: "The space animal hypothesis proposes that reports of flying saucers or UFOs might be caused not by technological alien spacecraft or mass hysteria, but rather by animal lifeforms ("space critters") that are indigenous to Earth's atmosphere or interplanetary space."

I would imagine this was inspired at least in part by researcher Jeremy Corbell's recently released jellyfish UAP video that made the rounds a few months ago. I'm upvoting pseudoscience for this one.

Surprisingly, the second most recently created page is "Traditional Siberian Medicine" (#434), born on May 3rd, 2024. The topic is exactly what you might expect. Alternative medical treatment methods from Siberia handed down generation to generation. This is one of three pages on the list that are similar. There's also Traditional Chinese Medicine and Traditional African medicine. To a certain extent this is a never ending race to the bottom - we could create a page for almost every nationality and claim there's a traditional medicinal approach.

I'm on the fence as whether it's accurate to categorize these "traditional medicine" pages as pseudoscience. The broader Alternative Medicine page is tagged as pseudoscience and each one of these pages are categorized with this as well.

There are many examples of traditional medicinal practices that have demonstrated at least some degree of efficacy. Here's an example: Willow bark has been used for thousands of years in various cultures, including ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Native American traditions, to treat pain and reduce fever. The active compound in willow bark is salicin, which the body metabolizes into salicylic acid.

In the late 19th century, scientists at Bayer developed a synthetic version of salicylic acid called acetylsalicylic acid, which we now know as aspirin. Aspirin has become one of the most widely used medications globally for pain relief, fever reduction, and its anti-inflammatory properties.

The Siberian page details some specific indigenous plants that were used for healing purposes such as "Toad Rush". This plant was used as a diuretic and a laxative for the people of the region. If there is at least some medicinal effect, I'm not sure that a sweeping pseudoscience label is accurate in this case.

Now lets discuss the pages with the highest number of edits. Where's there's volatility there's controversy.

Not surprisingly, number one on the list is Eugenics, a complete minefield of a terrible topic, and with 383 edits in the last year alone. Nearly 7,000 changes have been made with 2,800 different editors contributing since the page came into existence in 2001.

Second on the pseudoscience list with most edits is "Mewing". Newly created this year with 258 edits and 152 editors. From the topic page: "Mewing is a form of oral posture training purported to improve jaw and facial structure".

Knowyourmeme.com details how the TikTok Looksmaxxing craze of 2023 propelled mewing from fringe pseudoscience into a semi-ironic lifestyle trend, with teens sharing memes and edits of them and even their cats mewing. Here's a a Youtube video from the inventor Dr Mew explaining how it was invented.

The third page with the most edits is Neuro-linguistic Programming (aka NLP) with 226 changes last year.

This one I put in the same category as Myers-Briggs as corporations have been using peripheral NLP techniques in training and development programs for years. NLP proposes that our internal representations of the world show a bias for a particular sensory modality (e.g. visual, auditory, or kinesthetic). Sales professionals are routinely taught to match modality biases when communicating with their prospects.

For example a visual person says "I see what you mean", that is a cue for the sales person that visual collateral should be used when presenting a product or service. As cited here, a central tenent of NLP is that communication will be more effective if tailored to match the target audience.

Meta-analyses evaluating the effects of Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) on health-related outcomes have found no significant impact. However, researchers note a lack of high-quality studies in sufficient quantity, suggesting it may be premature to definitively label NLP as pseudoscience. Perhaps more research is needed to draw conclusive judgments about its effectiveness.

While looking at the creation of pseudoscience articles over time I noticed that the trend was fairly uniform in that you can expect 1-2 new pages per month.

At first curious as to why there was such an uptick in the early 2000s, but in reality this is when Wikipedia was having a moment.

In 2005, Wikipedia became the most popular reference website on the internet. This is when Wikipedia's first multilingual and subject portals were established, so there was a huge increase in articles at this time.

After exploring these Wikipedia pseudoscience articles, it's clear that the line between fringe theories and accepted science is ever-shifting. What pseudoscience of today might become tomorrow's innovation? I'd love to hear your thoughts on topics like these.

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