Wikipedia, Knowledge and NLP

My teacher Joseph once asked me if I know what an apple is....

I was looking the other day at the Wikipedia entry for NLP – Neurolinguistic Programming. Wikipedia is an interesting phenomenon. It’s said to be more accurate than Encyclopaedia Britannica. It’s an unpaid social enterprise – “big society”? It’s an astonishing and valuable achievement. I use it a lot. To me, sometimes, it can be a bit like the media, a wonderful source of information, until you read an article on something you actually know a fair bit about, and then you realise the limitations.

Particularly interesting can be to read the discussion page behind an article, where the editors discuss what they should put on the page. This, like the articles, is open to the public. “Editors” just means anyone who decides to participate; you don’t have to be anyone to be an editor.

Wikipedia operates under some rules, which include “NPOV” – articles should take a neutral point of view, and “OR”, no original research. That is "all material must be attributable to a reliable published source, even if not actually attributed." You can’t include any information, or analysis or synthesis of information, of your own; it has to be from published sources.

So Wikipedia does not exactly contain knowledge. It doesn’t tell you what’s true, it tells you what’s been said elsewhere. It’s science-based, so where appropriate, that means in scientific publications. If you know something, you can’t put that in Wikipedia. This is the pons asinorum of Wikipedia, a point that those who “don’t get it” can never grasp. They’ll post something like “such and such a food is bad for you” and wail “but it’s true” as other editors remove the offending sentence.

Of course, that varies depending on the context. If you write that Winchester is in Hampshire, you don’t need to provide a journal reference. If you give a number for its population, you probably should state your source. It depends whether the topic is something science is applicable to.

And so to NLP. It is (in my opinion) a school of psychology and psychotherapy. I’ve been trained in it. I can be neutral, because I don’t earn my living that way, and I am sceptical about quite a lot of NLP. However, I wouldn’t recognise it at all from the Wikipedia article. And, interestingly, looking at the discussion page, this isn’t really the editors’ fault. They are working hard and fairly to present the facts. But they can’t really include an explanation of NLP – that’s against the rules, and quite rightly so. All they can do is extract things from NLP publications – which tend to be self-help books, with very non-Wikipedia-style dumbed-down introductory explanations.

NLP is controversial – it is probably the most widely used (again this my opinion), widely known to the general public (think e.g. Derren Brown, Paul McKenna), school of psychology, but for various valid reasons, is totally unaccepted in the academic psychology world. The Wikipedia editors have been forced down the road of “what academia has to say about it”. The answer to that is, very few studies have been done, and there is no scientific evidence to support it; and therefore the Wiki article is pretty uniformly negative in tone. It imparts the (true and correct) information that NLP is widely popular but scientifically unvalidated.

The thing is ... more or less no form of therapy rests on facts that are scientifically validated. Freud for example tells us we have an id, an ego, and a superego. No scientific studies exist to demonstrate this. Evaluations of Freudian therapy rest not on the evaluation of the stated theories, but rather on testing the effectiveness of the therapists. (Where it does pretty badly). Transactional Analysis, another popular form of psychotherapy, says we each have three ego states called parent adult and child. Again, it’s a way of thinking about it, but absolutely not scientifically validated. However, NLP was incautious enough to make some claims about representational systems and eye movements, which are fairly incidental to the therapy, but possibly testable in a lab, and the scientific evaluation has tended to be about testing these theories rather than measuring the effectiveness of NLP.

Gestalt therapy rests on no particular theoretical basis, but gets a fairly positive write-up in Wikipedia. In this regard, Wiki does what it’s supposed to: it reflects current perception. NLP is indeed regarded with suspicion in academia, whereas Gestalt and Transactional Analysis are well received there, even though they are no more scientifically based than NLP. If you read the editors discussion page on Wikipedia for NLP, you find that the editors are not discussing how to explain what NLP is, nor whether the evidence suggests that it’s valid. They’re discussing which journal papers referenced which, where they were published, what order they came in – it’s all about what can be cited.

In practice, the effectiveness of any form of psychotherapy is only 10% about the school, and 90% about the therapist. (I made those numbers up). I’ve seen some amazing NLP therapists and plenty of useless ones. I expect the same is true of TA and Gestalt.

So what is NLP? That’s for another day. This piece is about Wikipedia, science, and knowledge. It doesn't count if someone says it; it only counts if it's in a publication. Do you know what an apple is?