Oh Massimo, what a funny story. Well I happen to know Rupert Sheldrake personally (lovely fellow in real life) and the funny thing is I got to know him because I was researching consensus building and harassment on Wikipedia. I have no stake in his theories. His biography was a very prominent “wiki war”. I was expecting my research to last about a month, and instead I unintentionally uncovered quite a large “troll farm” operating within the skeptic community (by skeptic community I mean primarily juveniles). I didn’t find any evidence linking GSoW, but did discover evidence of harassment that in any circumstance completely uncalled for. As it was wrongly assumed that I was “promoting” Sheldrake in the case study, I then became a focus of this harassment itself.

All in all, it was a harrowing 5 years of my life, it changed my outlook on many things, and one of those things was how petty and ideological any group can be, and how any group can justify the most horrible and irrational reactive response.

While I can’t say I support (or certainly promote) Rupert’s “theories”, I can say that for a fact he is a target, Wikipedia was a “battleground”, and it actually exposes a remarkable lack of ethics and principle within certain communities.

To prove to you what I am talking about, I ask you to judge your own reaction to me, simply by my association with Rupert during his Wikipedia trials. And next look at the certain responses to my comment from your own community, which I predict will bare none of the hallmarks of enlightened science and all the hallmarks of just one more ideological enraged group on the internet.