Much madness is divinest Sense –
To a discerning Eye –
Much Sense – the starkest Madness –
'Tis the Majority –
In this, as All, prevail –
Assent – and you are sane –
Demur – you're straightway dangerous –
And handled with a Chain –

 

 

Dissident, can you spare a minute?

 

Rethinking Activism can be made easy through editorial crowdsourcing.

First, register on Wikipedia using your real name, profession, and locale. (The leading orthodox opposition uses pseudonyms and hides. That contrast is our weapon and our goal.)

Second, check the AIDS Denialism article once a day. If this template message over the article is not present, place it by adding {{POV title}} at the top of the article in edit mode, or undo its deletion with a click.

Third, check the Discussion page. Make your opinion known, if only with a word.

That's it. You're done!

If enough of us participate more or less serially, no one of us need engage in edit warring or violate Wikipedia's 3-revert-rule.

Template messages carry real force. They are the first thing readers see, and they mark the article as disputed and so destroy the illusion of its encyclopedic neutrality. (There are other template messages to consider as well.) 

  

Extra-credit assignments

Support the above AIDS Denialism template-message with a challenge-grant: pledge an amount of your choosing for every edit or undo made per real-name signatory.

Take a look at the following articles and consider placing the {{POV}} template-message in them:

AIDS, AZT, HIV, Reader Test, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Duesberg Hypothesis, Peter Duesberg, Koch’s Postulates, Poppers

 

Background

 In Wikipedia, the HIV/AIDS hypothesis is only rarely maintained and defended by editors using their real names. The problem is that the logic and assumptions underlying the hypothesis are so fundamentally dishonest that, like the press secretary of a tottering tyrant or failing president, anyone who becomes publicly and continually associated with them eventually suffers a damaged personal and professional reputation. Considering the amount of work and risk involved, no one would bother for long without a direct or indirect special interest. What better solution than to hide behind a pseudonym, given that most editors use them by custom? That’s our opportunity. We dissidents went public with our views when we became signatories here or on our Facebook page, so there is nothing to stop us from doing the same on Wikipedia.

It's a curious situation: dissidents have names but orthodoxists don't. Isn't it supposed to be the other way around?

We suggest a crowdsourcing approach specifically to keep dissidents focused only on edits that will garner the most support from other dissidents. Template messages are the obvious place to start. Later, as informal associations among us congeal, more detailed text-edits among a range of HIV/AIDS articles (see above) should become feasible. Use the Discussion pages for that, but don’t waste your time trying to reason with or convert pseudonyms. (If a rare real-name orthodoxist editor should challenge you, have fun.) And finally, be careful of burnout. Towards that end, try to limit your edits to one per article per day. Speed and convenience is the idea.