Wikipedia talk:Fringe theories

• Historically influential theories that are either believed by non-specialists or which are still applicable to some scope of problems, or which have influenced language or methodology, must be differentiated because they are part of intellectual history as well as science. Examples:
  • "F=MA" was considered literally to be true by 19th century scientists, but now is seen as an approximation that applies at low speeds and neither vast nor tiny masses. It was sufficient to get to the Moon.
  • Social Darwinism was another historically influential or tragic theory that had huge influence (racism, eugenics, forced sterilization) and did not generally die out until decades after World War II (partly caused by such views), bhy which time humans had developed enough nuclear weapons to destroy all advanced life on Earth thus making the endpoint of unlimited "darwinian" competition undesirable.
  • "the ether" has been suggested as just another name for dark matter but its characteristics were never clearly defined
  • Particle physics and electromagnetism have two quite different explanations for matter that have waxed and waned over centuries, so it would be incorrect to state one as consensus and the other as merely historical - even if 19th century texts employ more wave & 20 century employ more particle terminology.
• Such theories properly fit into intellectual history cannot be ignored nor all their followers necessarily treated as ignorant. In some cases it was not yet possible to experiment or see the logical consequences of a theory. In others terminology has been used to obscure similarity with more current theory.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.11.94.233 (talk) 05:04, 18 August 2017‎

There are arguments that are constructed to look like science, but aren't. To determine whether something is pseudoscientific or merely an alternative theoretical formulation, consider that:

• Alternative theoretical formulations generally tweak things on the frontiers of science, or deal with strong, puzzling evidence—which is difficult to explain away—in an effort to create a model that better explains reality. It incrementally changes models and generally does not reject good explanations of phenomena from prior theories.
• Pseudoscience generally proposes changes in the basic laws of nature to allow some phenomenon which the supporters want to believe occurs, but lack the strong scientific evidence or rigour that would justify such major changes. Corruption of science itself is often usually claimed.

Pseudoscience usually relies on attacking mainstream scientific theories and methodology while lacking a critical discourse itself. Watch specifically for:

• claims that solved problems are impossible to solve (e.g. Biblical creationists)
• reliance on weak evidence such as anecdotal evidence or weak statistical evidence (e.g. parapsychology)
• indulgence of a suspect theoretical premise (e.g. claims of water memory made by advocates of homeopathy).
• conflations of terminology that allow incoherent definitions.

An example of the latter is climate change. Obviously the Earth's climate has changed drastically over its history, but the phrase in its scientific meaning refers to recent rapid unprecedented changes (at least unprecedented within human time on Earth). A highly motivated lobby present the scientific consensus or dominant paradigm as having some problem, but it has proven impossible to disprove either global warming as an overall trend or the narrower anthropogenic global warming or the even narrower CAGW. While all the alternative theories of warming are "fringe" and studies citing them or claiming to support them have all proven irreproducible (as with parapsychology). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.11.94.233 (talk) 05:04, 18 August 2017‎

Motives of pseudoscience

Often pseudoscience theories are proliferated as part of a crapflood - a tactic in information warfare whereby a truth in plain sight can be rendered hard to believe by dilution. If the percentage of people believing the science motivates action can be reduced below some critical supermajority, it becomes easy to delay such action, and profits continue. It is not necessary for any new theory to emerge, only to prevent adoption of - and action on - the dominant one. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.11.94.233 (talk) 05:04, 18 August 2017‎

discredit consensus or establishment

Be careful to differentiate consensus from fringe status, to find answers to the fringe objections in the consensus, and to be especially watchful of WP:COI problems among sources. It can be useful to just enter the name of the theory with "debunked" in a search engine and see who has directly responded to it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.11.94.233 (talk) 05:04, 18 August 2017‎

discredit or delay policy

Consider medicine as the best analogy for differentiating between science & policy: No matter how many fringe theorists claim that arsenic is good for you, it is still illegal to dump it in your well, and you are entitled to defend yours based on the medical consensus that it is harmful. An argument about how scientific consensus may change is not an argument to ignore policy based on the current consensus.

In any given decade, less than 1% of scientific consensus from the previous decade is typically challenged at all, so it would be entirely wrong and dangerous to claim that safety critical policy is ever dependent on scientific total certainty. It literally never is, policy decisions (as in medicine) are made based on best known science, and if that changes, then, it changes. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.11.94.233 (talk) 05:04, 18 August 2017‎

I propose we add "pseudohistory and other forms of pseudo-scholarship" into our description of fringe theories, in the Identifying fringe theories section. Pseudoscience is not the only form of pseudo-scholarship or fringe theory, and I believe explicitly terming other such fringe studies to counter would be very helpful. Shortening it all down to solely pseudoscience seems pretty reductive. — EarthDude (wanna talk?) 08:53, 11 October 2025 (UTC)

This page seems to have some difficulty deciding what it thinks fringe theories are, and in particular whether they're exclusively pseudoscience and crackpottery, or if minority but scientific opinions are covered.

The definition at the top of the page is:

In Wikipedia parlance, the term fringe theory is used in a broad sense to describe an idea that departs significantly from the prevailing views or mainstream views in its particular field.

and this is reinforced later with:

We use the term fringe theory in a very broad sense to describe an idea that departs significantly from the prevailing views or mainstream views in its particular field. For example, fringe theories in science depart significantly from mainstream science and have little or no scientific support.

This implies that a fringe theory can even have some scientific support and still be fringe. So for instance, Altaic or MOND are fringe theories by the letter of the guideline, and in fact there's a section of the guideline explicitly for minority but scientific theories.

However, that's not the full story, because once it progresses into what to actually do about fringe theories it seems very strongly like the guideline thinks that "fringe theory" = "pseudoscience". In fact in many places it uses the phrase "pseudoscience or fringe theories". And that's also anecdotally how most editors I've seen use the guideline.

So, I propose we either:

a) Rewrite the page to more consistently use the broad definition, and make it explicitly clear that WP:FRINGE/ALT is WP:FRINGE.

or

b) Narrow the definition at the top to only pseudoscience, and make it explicitly clear that WP:FRINGE/ALT is not WP:FRINGE. Loki (talk) 16:35, 23 October 2025 (UTC)

This is an interesting thought, but I would argue that no matter how fine-grained the guideline gets, you're never going to get rid of edge cases, which are where the conflicts actually arise (indeed, getting more fine-grained necessarily increases the number of edges where edge cases can arise). This article is relevant: "Rule Ambiguity, Institutional Clashes, and Population Loss: How Wikipedia Became the Last Good Place on the Internet". Generalrelative (talk) 17:44, 23 October 2025 (UTC)

So… a fringe theory is any idea that is only accepted by a fringe of experts in the relevant field. They are at the extreme end of “minority view”.

Also… fringe is not limited to fringe science (there are fringe theories in the humanities). Note that some fringe ideas can become popular among non-experts… and yet remain fringe (example: various conjectures about the Bermuda Triangle). Blueboar (talk) 18:07, 23 October 2025 (UTC)

Right, I wasn't intending to exclude fringe theories in the humanities. That was just poor wording on my part. Loki (talk) 19:23, 23 October 2025 (UTC)

Some related text in the guideline, dealing with "minority" views:

Lead:

all majority and significant-minority views published in reliable sources should be represented fairly and proportionately.

WP:PROFRINGE:

The neutral point of view policy requires that all majority and significant-minority positions be included in an article. However, it also requires that they not be given undue weight. ... Ideas supported only by a tiny minority may be explained in articles devoted to those ideas if they are notable.

I read this as distinguishing between "significant-minority" views and "tiny minority" views, where only the latter are considered fringe theories, and so agree with Blueboar. I'd go for option (b). I'd also like the text to be clear that the prefix "pseudo" is not limited to pseudoscience, but is also relevant in other fields, such as pseudohistory (e.g., Holocaust denial). FactOrOpinion (talk) 18:17, 23 October 2025 (UTC)

• I was wondering when someone would raise this issue again. I've been back to editing for a couple months now, and I'm used to seeing this pop up every few weeks. It's comforting to know that some things never change.

To respond directly to it: Though I understand that it's not obvious, it is nonetheless true that we treat minority scientific theories such as MOND or Loop quantum gravity the same way we treat pseudoscientific nonsense like flat earth or Acupuncture. The marked differences one can observe between those two classes of topics isn't a result of us treating them differently, but of the sources treating them differently. A scientific paper that is critical of LQG will take its tenets seriously, respond in detail and treat its advocates respectfully, precisely because it's a different beast than the flat earth. Naturally, our articles will read differently, give this difference in the way the sources treat these theories.

Indeed, we really treat all topics the same exact way. For example, we don't use walled-garden flat-earth sources to describe the flat-earth theory not because they're about the taboo subject of flat earth, but because those sources aren't reliable. It's the same reason we don't cite those sources at earth. We don't really have different standards for different topics (with the arguable exception of BLP topics). If you were to carefully go through all the guidance in this page and apply it to a minority-view scientific theory, you'd find that the article is generally pretty much already in compliance with it. It's just that those articles tend to weather that level of scrutiny much better, owing to their much stronger sourcing. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 19:02, 23 October 2025 (UTC)

Really well put, MPants. Generalrelative (talk) 19:06, 23 October 2025 (UTC)

See, that's historically the way I've interpreted WP:FRINGE too. However, the recent disputes over in the trans healthcare policy area, and especially this comment from CaptainEek explicitly differentiating between minority and fringe views in the recent case about trans healthcare, have made me realize this interpretation is very much not universal.

So I think that rather than assuming we all have the same shared understanding of the guideline, we should clarify it, and possibly even rename the policy so people don't assume that "fringe theory" can be taken as the non-jargon term that it sounds like. As someone who often edits in a topic area where whether WP:FRINGE is broad or narrow is a frequent area of contention, I think it's very important for the community to decide one way or the other so in the future we can point to an RfC or something to cut off these arguments. Loki (talk) 19:23, 23 October 2025 (UTC)

I'm quite aware that we all have different understandings of this policy. In fact, I'd be shocked if any two editors shared the exact same views of any policy we have. This is why we operate by consensus. But I do see where you're coming from here. You want something to point to, which you can use to say "this is fringe, but this is fringe." I can see the utility in that.

If you'd like my advice, I would get some collaborators (I'd help), and then write an essay on the different ways WP:FRINGE is used and why it's important to understand that all articles are held to the same standards, regardless of topic. After some work, move it into WP-space, and then add a see-also to this article where most appropriate. Once that's stable, it would be relatively uncontroversial to write a very short summary of what that essay says in this article. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 19:38, 23 October 2025 (UTC)

I don't think that's quite what I'm going for, actually.

While it's common for editors to not agree on exactly what a policy means, the fact that there are two coherent and basically plausible interpretations of the policy that on major topics relevant to the policy are directly contradictory seems like a pretty major deal to me. I don't think this is something a clarifying essay can solve: I would like to make the community sit down and reach consensus on one of these interpretations.

Anecdotally, it's very common for editor A to call a minority scientific perspective "fringe", and then editor B reacts to that as if it's some kind of crazy insult. As long as we're in a situation where one editor means "the Cass Review represents a minority view" and another editor hears that as "the Cass Review is crackpottery" we're not going to be able to talk about the Cass Review without a massive argument. Loki (talk) 21:53, 23 October 2025 (UTC)

I understand that. In your anecdotal example, I would say the problem stems from editor B's reaction.

WRT the Cass review, the best understanding I've gotten from reading the review and reading the academic reaction to it is that it contains a significant mass of both minority views and crackpottery, in addition to a healthy sprinkle of accepted medicine. So the problem with that is the Cass review itself. It's a thing which just so happens to be the exact thing that catches in the cracks of WP policy. Of course, we have a solution for that, too, as evidence by the fact that, as bad as that discussion got, ArbCom is currently working on turning down the heat (or rather, giving admins the tools to do so). ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 18:47, 27 October 2025 (UTC)