biology

RationalWiki

RationalWiki is a biology topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand RationalWiki rather than just read about it. In short: RationalWiki is an online wiki which is written from a scientific skeptic, secular, and progressive perspective. Its stated goals are to "analyze and refute pseudoscience and the anti-science movement, document crank ideas, explore conspiracy theories, authoritarianism, and fundamentalism, and analyze how these subjects are handled in the media." It was created in 2007 as a counterpoint to Conservapedia, an American…

Key takeaways

RationalWiki belongs to biology; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect RationalWiki to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of RationalWiki from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

RationalWiki is an online wiki which is written from a scientific skeptic, secular, and progressive perspective. Its stated goals are to "analyze and refute pseudoscience and the anti-science movement, document crank ideas, explore conspiracy theories, authoritarianism, and fundamentalism, and analyze how these subjects are handled in the media." It was created in 2007 as a counterpoint to Conservapedia, an American conservative and Christian fundamentalist website, after an incident in which some editors of Conservapedia were banned. RationalWiki has been described as liberal in contrast to Conservapedia. As of March 2026, RationalWiki has 8,000+ articles and 314 active users.

History

Origin In April 2007, Peter Lipson, a doctor of internal medicine, attempted to edit Conservapedia's article on breast cancer to include evidence against Conservapedia's claim that abortion was linked to the disease. Conservapedia is an encyclopedia established by Andrew Schlafly as an alternative to Wikipedia, which Schlafly perceived as suffering from a liberal, atheist, and "anti-American" bias. He and Conservapedia administrators "questioned [Lipson's] credentials and shut down debate". After being reverted and blocked, "Lipson and several other contributors quit trying to moderate the articles [on Conservapedia] and instead started their own website, RationalWiki".

RationalMedia Foundation Prior to 2010, RationalWiki's domains were registered to Trent Toulouse, and the wiki was hosted from a server located in his home. In 2010, Trent Toulouse incorporated a nonprofit organization, the RationalWiki Foundation Inc., to manage the affairs and pay the operational expenses of the website. In July 2013, the RationalWiki Foundation changed its name to the RationalMedia Foundation, stating that its aims extended beyond the RationalWiki site alone. In April 2025, the RationalMedia Foundation was sued for defamation by various plaintiffs who were covered on RationalWiki. In the same month, despite concerns about the foundation dissolving, it reached an out of court settlement with the plaintiffs where it agreed to delete their articles.

Content

RationalWiki aims to provide information about pseudoscientific theories and to educate "individuals with unorthodox views". Many RationalWiki articles satirically describe beliefs that RationalWiki opposes, especially when covering topics such as alternative medicine or fundamentalist Christians. Some activity on RationalWiki was used for critiquing and "monitor[ing] Conservapedia". RationalWiki contributors, some of whom are former Conservapedia contributors, are often highly critical of Conservapedia. According to a 2007 Los Angeles Times article, RationalWiki members "by their own admission" vandalize Conservapedia. Lester Haines of The Register stated: "Its entry entitled 'Conservapedia:Delusions' promptly mocks the claims that 'Homosexuality is a mental disorder', 'Atheists are sociopaths', and 'During the 6 days of creation G-d placed the Earth inside a black hole to slow down time so the light from distant stars had time to reach us'." Both Yan et al. 2019 and Knoche et al., two articles about classifying a writer's biases via text analysis, asserted that Conservapedia was "conservative" and RationalWiki was "liberal". Mic described RationalWiki as "progressive". When Krebs et al. 2023 compared text on controversial topics across multiple community-managed wikis, they found that content and contributors on RationalWiki leaned liberal while Conservapedia leaned conservative. In contrast, Wikipedia's content was comparable to the Encyclopedia Britannica, leaned slightly liberal and its editors leaned centrist. Both RationalWiki and Conservapedia were "more loaded with moral content".

Reception

Analysis Andrea Ballatore, a lecturer in GIS at Birkbeck, University of London, categorizes RationalWiki as similar in tone to Snopes in a 2015 study, finding it to be the third-most-visible website when researching conspiracy theories in terms of Google and Bing search results, and the most visible among those sites that made openly negative value judgments about conspiracy theories. In Intelligent Systems 2014, Alexander Shvets found RationalWiki to be one of the few online resources that "provide some information about pseudoscientific theories". Likewise, Keeler et al. believe that sites like RationalWiki can help to "sort out the complexities" that arise when "distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people". A 2019 study of bias analysis based on word embedding in RationalWiki, Conservapedia, and Wikipedia by researchers from RWTH Aachen University found all had significant gender biases, reflecting classical gender stereotypes, but these biases were less pronounced in RationalWiki.

Usage In Critical Thinking: Pseudoscience and the Paranormal, Jonathan C. Smith lists RationalWiki in an exercise on finding and identifying fallacies. Writing in The Verge, Adi Robertson stated that RationalWiki provided a good explanation of Time Cube, though conveying the "full impression" of the original Time Cube website was all but impossible.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with RationalWiki

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what RationalWiki claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In biology, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to RationalWiki before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about RationalWiki ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of RationalWiki

In research: RationalWiki appears in biology research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses RationalWiki in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: RationalWiki is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics American encyclopedias, American websites, Criticism of religion, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for RationalWiki outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study RationalWiki in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what RationalWiki means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain RationalWiki out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is RationalWiki in simple terms?

Why does RationalWiki matter?

Because it connects several biology ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study RationalWiki?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on RationalWiki.