Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Walmart and Homeopathy

Wow this was really a big one in my book. Same SI magazine an article on page 7 about CSI and CFI teaming up to condemn Walmart on its support of homeopathy products. Walmart is a big company and has a massive Wikipedia page. They even have a separate criticism page that I didn't want to use.

Here is the blurb I left

The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry [[CSICOP]] and the [[Center for Inquiry]] along with several medical doctors and one [[Noble Laureate]], [[Venki Ramakrishnan]] teamed up to condemn Walmarts promotion of [[homeopathic]] medicines in its stores and websites. Walmart states that Boiron Oscillococcinum is effective against flu-like symptoms, when in fact there is no science that shows Boiron Oscillococcinum or any homepathic solution contains a single active ingredient and performs no better than a [[placebo]].

I had to keep it factual and neutral so I think it is as good as I can get it. Would welcome anyone else who wants to clean up grammar or whatever. The page is semi-protected so not just anyone can go on the page and edit it.

The reason why I didn't want to use the criticism page is because in the discussion area of that page people were saying that there was no evidence of the criticism. Well in the case of CFI and CSICOP there is a lot of evidence. Anyone just needs to follow the hyperlink to homeopathy I left for evidence. This will be my argument if pushed to it. If I have no choice I will move the blurb to the criticism page, but not until pushed to it. Besides on the normal page there looks like there is some criticism already of Walmart's gender relations when hiring/firing/promoting.

So for the moment it is there 5:23pm on Tuesday June 15, 2011. Maybe it will squeak by?

Also a cool note I learned how to make the size of the category text change. I had to leave a category in order to put my blurb so I called it "support for homeopathy" when I looked at what I wrote it didn't match other categories on the page already. So I kept looking and looking when finally I realized that my category looked like this ==Support for Homeopathy== and the other categories were like this ===Support for Homeopathy===. The extra equal sign on each side of the phrase increases/decreases the font. Wow! I'm still a long way from being good at this.

3 comments:

  1. Just checked the Walmart Wikipedia site and someone has edited it. They added the word "evidence" to this sentence ..."when in fact there is no scientific evidence that shows..."

    Very welcome edit. When it is edited this way it makes it harder for other editors to take it out because I know have the support of someone else who thinks the blurb is fine in the article.

    So good news.

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  2. I've linked the text "Oscillococcinum" to the existing article on the placebo.

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  3. Brilliant! I had no idea that oscillococcinum had its own Wikipedia page. Wonder if there should be a link on the oscillococcinum page back to the Walmart page? And also to the SI article?

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