We talked about this a bit here,
http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&sh...ndpost&p=268173

but it deserves its own thread. So the article is real nonsense (and please respect the suggestion I made here http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&sh...ndpost&p=268175 and leave it as it is). But what explains it being nonsense for so long?

Someone called Rodney Shakespeare seems to be the main 'owner', and we are going back to 2007. Someone called Gene Callahan, who is a minor academic, complained about it then, but nothing seems to have happened. Roll forward to Jan 2011 where the owner has a long rant beginning here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Binary_e...ssed_one_by_one

It's not worth reading, the main point being the sheer length. This is the crank's main weapon - unlimited amounts of time and patience to ensure that their point of view is represented on the world's biggest encyclopedia. The rant seems to be prompted by Marek/Radek's placing an NPOV tag here http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=406986934. "Still a hopelessly POV proselytizing pamphlet after all these years - at some point might have to go to AfD with this whole mess". Don't do it Marek! You may get the boulder to the top of the hill. But then don't complain, otherwise some Wikipedian will point to those neatly piled boulders at the top, and claim how wonderful Wikipedia is. As soon as you turn your back, all those boulders will slowly roll back down again, and so it will go on to infinity. Just leave them. Write about it somewhere else.

Aha - Radek say "Honestly I have better things to do with my time - even the portion of it that is uselessly allocated to Wikipedia editing - than engage in pointless discussion with crazy people." Heard that before. What are you doing on the talk page. Now look what has happened. The useless Lar comes along, and agrees the tags are legit (boulder getting towards the top). And scolds you for calling crazy people crazy. LEAVE WELL ALONE.

And Shakespeare has helpers, of course. Someone called Captain Nemo, who only has six edits. And someone else called User:Janosabel, who is a proponent of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-reserve_banking full reserve banking. I've heard of that.

If you look through the talk page archives you'll see that Seraphimblade - an administrator and a somewhat "powerful" one at that - tried to make something of the article previously but our Rodney successfully stalled and deflected him until Sb gave up.

As far as I can tell there is a whole bunch of nonsense that goes under the label of economics. It is one big bag of junk science and none of the practitioners anywhere know a damn thing about it. Every 10 years or so its a "whoops didn't see that coming" or "Oops sorry made a mistake there" and its not just one or two of them its the whole damn lot. None of their theories can predict anything all they can do is build a plausible fictions as to how everybody screwed up the last time .

Wikipedia and the media are clearly working, then. There is a solid academic discipline there, to be sure, but it is mixed up with so much junk and crap that it is impossible for most people to tell the difference. Particularly so with the interlinking you get on Wikipedia. You can be reading something quite orthodox and then you hit on a link that takes you somewhere pretty wild, and you have no way of telling.

Much more so in psychiatry. Freud wrote some excellent things, but essentially it has all the characteristics of junk science.

Again for philsophy. Professional philosophers regard their work as precise and analytical, and it mostly is. In the popular imagination it covers everthing from wearing sandals and chanting 'om', to magic crystals, astral planes and occultism and all sorts of other bunk.

Here is some 'hippy philosophy' which is a half-digested salad of complete nonsense with a kernel of truth that the hippy probably got second or third hand from some badly written popular book on the subject.