>It’s and honest question. I haven’t noticed a strong bias on Wikipedia but that may just be because the kinds of the things I look up on Wikipedia are usually not political in nature.

Lets do it on some random article that isnt political.I have aichophobia, so I'm an outside observer on this one. I will never ever ever ever have it done on me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acupuncture

>Acupuncture[b] is a form of alternative medicine[2] and a component of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in which thin needles are inserted into the body.[3] Acupuncture is a pseudoscience;[4][5] the theories and practices of TCM are not based on scientific knowledge,[6] and it has been characterized as quackery.[c]

So no neutrality here at all. Just straight up ideological attack. You scroll down:

>It is difficult but not impossible to design rigorous research trials for acupuncture.[69][70]

So that's some pretty strong and biased statements against a widely used procedure that they cant really make conclusions about?

https://grokipedia.com/page/Acupuncture

>Scientific evaluation reveals that while acupuncture demonstrates short-term benefits for some pain-related issues compared to no treatment, its superiority over sham procedures—such as needle insertion at non-acupoints—is often minimal or absent, suggesting effects may stem from placebo responses, expectation, or non-specific factors like counter-irritation rather than meridian-based mechanism

This is shockingly better writing.

>A 2020 Cochrane systematic review of 33 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving 7,297 participants found that acupuncture, compared to no treatment or sham acupuncture, provided short-term pain relief and functional improvement for chronic nonspecific low back pain, with standardized mean differences (SMD) of -0.82 for pain versus no treatment (moderate-quality evidence) and -0.18 versus sham (low-quality evidence due to imprecision and inconsistency).[91] The

This is what I'm aware of. That acupuncture has some minimum affect on pain better than placebo. Efficacy comparable to tylenol for pain relief. Which I dont know if you know, but tylenol is extremely ineffective for pain relief.

The science says there's something to it, it's difficult to measure, and further investigation is needed. But Wiki's ideological bias is showing big time.

I agree with you that the Grokipedia article is better here, though I guess I disagree that the wikipedia lead has "no neutrality" and is a "straight up ideological attack."

Having read both articles (and knowing very little about this topic before), I came away with the firm conclusion that acupuncture is psuedoscience; both articles clearly explain that is not based on scientific principles and its practice is not governed by scientific methods. There was no disagreement between the articles on this point. That many in medicine describe it as quackery is a relevant observation.

It is interesting that needling as a therapy does seem to have some efficacy over placebo in trials, but both articles agree that the current body of evidence is weak with a lack of methodological rigor and very small effect sizes. But I should note that both articles describe acupuncture as being more than just a specific type of needle based therapy. They describe it as an entire system of medicine based on "qi" and the "meridians" of the body, concepts for which there is no scientific evidence. So I think describing acupuncture as "pseudoscience" is accurate.

Anyway, I thought the Grokipedia article was quite good, but also didn't find the Wikipedia article to be particularly biased.

>I came away with the firm conclusion that acupuncture is psuedoscience;

I dont think most disagrees on this. As I said, I'm not interested in it at all, even if it did work. The science however is not saying it's pseduoscience. It's saying that the Qi and meridians and that sort of stuff is wrong. Whereas the actual needles are scientifically based as providing pain relief in a small and short term effect.

It's a complex topic that doesn't have good conclusions and I chose it because I knew it would show their ideological bias. There's absolutely no reason to call it qwackery when it's not a settled subject. Perhaps even finish defining what it is before going on the attack.

>Anyway, I thought the Grokipedia article was quite good, but also didn't find the Wikipedia article to be particularly biased.

That's completely fair to come to the conclusion. My guess would be that you tend to also align with the ideology that wiki is written for.

> The science however is not saying it's pseduoscience. It's saying that the Qi and meridians and that sort of stuff is wrong. Whereas the actual needles are scientifically based as providing pain relief in a small and short term effect.

You seem to be conflating the concepts acupuncture and needling as well as the concepts of science and efficacy. Qi and Meridians are a part of acupuncture and it is entirely fair to point at that these systems are unscientific. The Grokipedia entry certainly considers qi and meridians to be parts of acupuncture.

Also, for something to be scientific, it has to be based on scientific methods. If acupuncture wants to be a science, it needs to discard all the baseless qi, meridians, and yin-yang explanations and there needs to be more widespread and rigorous investigation of the therapies.

I am an avid yoga practitioner (I do yoga 4 or 5 days a week) and I think it has all kinds of health benefits. That doesn't mean that yoga is "scientific." Indeed, if someone described yoga as pseudoscience I would probably agree (though it varies a lot between studios), because it is common for teachers to go off on unscientific explanatory tangents involving "chakra," "energy," "detoxification" and so on. Is yoga beneficial by various benchmarks? Yes. Is it based on and further developed by scientific inquiry? Not so much.

So it seems to me like you've misinterpreted a sentence in the wikipedia article. It is actually stating something like: "the acupuncture system is unscientific." You've interpreted it to mean something like: "needling therapy is ineffective." And from that misinterpretation, you've drawn lots of invalid conclusions.

> Whereas the actual needles are scientifically based as providing pain relief in a small and short term effect.

This is the basically the same evidence that says if I set you on fire you'll stop complaining about a cough, right?

> qwackery

Quackery has a 'u'. Maybe you need Grammarly.

> Which I dont know if you know, but tylenol is extremely ineffective for pain relief.

Try not to source all your opinions from the guy who suggested people drink bleach.