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Wikipedia is a wonderful resource. If you want to know about something, or someone, it is the obvious place to go: it’s easy to find, easy to read and looks authoritative.
If you are a newcomer to EFT, Emotional Freedom Techniques or tapping, then Wikipedia is the obvious place to go to find out about it.
Unfortunately, what you find isn’t encouraging.
According to Wikipedia:
“EFT has no benefit as a therapy beyond the placebo effect or any known effective psychological techniques that may be provided in addition to the purported ”energy“ technique. It is generally characterized as pseudoscience, and it has not garnered significant support in clinical psychology.”
On the face of it, this doesn’t look good, you might even be put off from trying it.
Nowhere on the Wikipedia page will you find references to the more than 100 research studies, 5 meta analyses and articles, published in 12 peer reviewed journals, that demonstrate the benefits and effectiveness of EFT.
Nor do they mention more than 50 Randomised Controlled Trials (the gold standard research methodology) performed by hundreds of investigators in more than a dozen countries.
What’s going on?
In a conventional encyclopaedia (remember those), a board of editors review the content, written by experts in their field to guarantee it is balanced and objective.
However, Wikipedia is a crowd-sourced encyclopaedia: anyone can contribute or edit an article. You don’t need to be an expert in the field to write an article. Many articles a day are created, updated and edited without editorial oversight.
In principle a page can be edited by anyone. If you spot something that isn’t true or needs to be improved, you can become a contributor to the page and make those changes.
In an ideal world, with contributors acting in good faith, Wikipedia will continue to develop into an ever more detailed repository of information.
Unfortunately, if you don’t like what you see you can change it to something that suits you. It’s easy for a determined group of ’editors’ to undo changes and maintain their own particular point of view. There are several individuals and groups active on Wikipedia who use the informal structure of contribution to maintain a ’sceptical’ version of the EFT entry (and others). These ’contributors’ can, and do, remove more accurate information.
If you look at any Wikipedia entry you will find three tabs: ’Read’, ’Edit’, ’View history’ on the top right side of the webpage. If you click on the ’View history’ tab of the EFT Wikipedia page you will find a list of several hundred edits going all the way back to 2013.
Remember the quote at the beginning?
“EFT has no benefit as a therapy beyond the placebo effect or any known effective psychological techniques that may be provided in addition to the purported ”energy“ technique. It is generally characterized as pseudoscience, and it has not garnered significant support in clinical psychology.”
On the 2nd of May 2021 at 1:25pm a would-be contributor edited the quote to read:
“To the inexperienced or uneducated on the topic, it may seem that EFT has no benefit as a therapy beyond the placebo effect or any known effective psychological techniques that may be provided in addition to the purported “energy” technique. It is sometimes characterized as pseudoscience, but it has garnered significant support in clinical psychology.“
At 1:33pm on the same day, just seven minutes later, that edit was removed and the quote returned to its original unflattering state.
It’s clear that the group that controls the page don’t want to include a more balanced view of EFT. They work hard to remove anything that contradicts their ’sceptical’ viewpoint.
Wikipedia Isn’t An Encyclopaedia (and sometimes doesn’t even follow its own guidelines)
So even if Wikipedia is the first link to show up in a Google search for EFT, it is not the best place to go for accurate and up to date information about EFT.
In 2014 Change.org submitted a petition to Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, asking Wikipedia to allow a more balanced approach to ’holistic’ therapeutic techniques.
In his reply, rejecting the petition, Jimmy Wales said:
“Wikipedia’s policies around this kind of thing are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals - that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately.”
Well, we have the evidence in reputable science journals, how about the appropriate coverage?
There are many facts on Wikipedia, but all of them are placed there by people with opinions.
For more information read Jessica Dorzinsky’s excellent article about the evidence for EFT and its effectiveness and more about why you won’t see it on Wikipedia : https://eftinternational.org/does-eft-tapping-really-work-is-it-evidence-based/
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