In science one can, often does, arguable should, exclude other major viewpoints one disagrees with. Since even mentioning (citing) work to criticize it can serve to bump its citation count without seriously diminishing its influence, it can be very difficult to recover the conversations that are going on under the surface of scientific literature.

But because there are many venues, for publication and the community is highly fragmented, censorship is not a major concern. The good science, it is assumed, gets sorted out in the long run, even if the vast majority of what gets published is utter crap. (When I worked in a biochem lab, the professor insisted that most publications were indeed wrong and/or useless.)

Wikipedia, in contrast, is a somewhat monolithic venue (I say ‘somewhat’ because there is are spheres of discourse outside of but still connected to Wikipedia) where there is an expectation of fairly representing, not simply ignoring, views one disagrees with. But the downside is that when the community norms are broken, it can be harder work around unfair exclusion.

I think your sense of timescale is a bit mis-matched for Wikipedia drama vs. science drama, though. Wikipedia editors, even influential ones, are likely to retire from Wikipedia much sooner than the average crotchety scientist. Naturally, when the norms of either science or Wikipedia break down, one has to move to the realm of politics to redress them (whether academic politics or wikipolitics). But the channels for doing so on Wikipedia are more arcane, if no more or less transparent, than the ones in academia (where, indeed, the personal career consequences of political drama can be much more serious).

Ultimately, I think Joseph Reagle’s sociology approach might be the best way to compare the epistemic cultures of science and Wikipedia. [I’m shooting from the hip here, as my knowledge of sociology and psychology is minimal.) The norms are mostly very similar in science and Wikipedia (and where they differ, either set would be capable of creating reliable knowledge). The main difference comes from how thoroughly they are disseminated. Scientists have a long, formal process of enculturation, and they identify as “scientists” much more strongly than typical editors identify as “Wikipedians”. Its the psychological consequences — commitment to the norms of science and the psychological costs of violating them — more than anything else that are effective in science in ensuring reliability. The same basic factors apply on Wikipedia, just less strongly.

However, in Wikipedia if you hold a position unpopular with one of the major power-brokering elites that runs rampant within the community, you are quite likely to be excluded from expressing your opinion, forcibly if necessary, and without any real regard to the merits of your argument or even the “niceness” with which you present it.

Of course, there’s a history of such exclusionism in science as well; continental drift was excluded from establishment science for many years, simply because one of its opponents held a great deal of political power within the establishment and suppressed publication of papers on the minority position.

At least in establishment science, the people who are standing in opposition to you have names and reputations, and you can lobby them and their sponsors, and eventually they retire, die off, or lose their funding. In Wikipedia, these people are anonymous, unapproachable, inpenetrable, and immovable, except through backstabbing political games played entirely within Wikipedia’s hothouse political forum. There is no way to reliably discover if they are resisting dissent out of a honest desire for truth, or instead because of undue outside influences, such as, say, sponsorship from a corporation with a concern on the issue. Ever notice how scientists are increasingly expected to reveal the sources of their research funding, because of concerns that such funding may be slanting their conclusions? How does one do this for a Wikipedia editor?

http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/culture/wikipedia/wray-episteme.html