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Do you think Wikipedia has a bias against alternative practitioners and treatments ?

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I think that the answer is "Yes" and that for the most part it is because of the reasons Oldtimekid2 cited. The system is set up with a bias towards mainstream to begin with.

I can also tell you from personal experience that while anybody can write, add to or edit an entry in Wiki, it is heavily patrolled by mainstreamers who make sure to delete or edit most information about alternativs to mainstream medicine. You see some of the same types here, but thankfully they just naysay and rant for the most part and appear to have limited control.

In August of 2007, Caltech graduate Virgil Griffith launched "Wikipedia Scanner" which offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

Not surprisingly, it was found that many of the edits on articles about mainstream and alternative medicine came from IP addresses of entities who had vested interests in the articles being edited, and that included drug companies, federal agencies and mainstream medicine advocates.

In one example, AstraZeneca deleted references to claims that taking Seroquel carries a risk for teenagers: they will be more likely thinking about harming or killing themselves when taking this drug. The deleter was a user of a computer shown to be registered to the drug company.

Such was also the case with a great many other entries. For example, on November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. As it turned out, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself.

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Other Answers (3)

• Ooh, that's a tough one. I would love to say "yes" or "no"... but it's a more in depth answer of "kind of". It's not so much Wikipedia as it is the guidelines and restrictions that they've set up based on clinical studies and whatnot.
  
  What I mean is that Wikipedia is edited by the general population, so they had to make guidelines that you need proof (books or websites) that were acceptable and unbiased and would have cited proof for what they say as well. Most of what would fall under that for treatments would be clinical studies and most of those guidelines are set up by the pharmaceutical companies.
  The down side of that is that the pharmaceutical companies charge hugely exorbitant prices for their drugs, so they can afford to do huge studies with thousands of people for years on end... but supplement companies only charge a few dollars a bottle and have comparatively minimal mark-up. Even if the biggest supplement company were to take their entire year's profit and run a controlled study that would live up to those expectations set by the pharmaceutical companies, they wouldn't see much of that profit back. After all, they sell the same Vitamin C as every other company (each one dressed up a little different, but Vitamin C is Vitamin C regardless), so every other company could cite that study to sell their product without paying a thing to hold the study. It just doesn't make good business sense to even try that, not to mention having thousands of herbs, vitamins, and minerals to have to do that on.
  
  Yeah, that's a long explanation, but it's almost like they are set up to fail by the way clinical studies were first set up... not just that they had to be scientifically proven, but they had to be large enough and justifiable enough to be too expensive to justify for non-pharmaceutical companies. Some may call that biased in and of itself and some may put more into it and make it a conspiracy... but part of it is our culture, I suppose. I hope I helped!

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• well wikipedia is written by anbody. it depends on whos writing the article. I didnt think the pot section was very bias
• No.