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Wikipedia Is Badly Biased
- codeddesign 6y agoThis needs to be upvoted more. It’s a great view into how internet media is so polarized to one side. Politically, ideologically, and now with the Google Covid scandals.
- gus_massa 6y agoMore discussion in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23254000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23254000
- m463 6y agoI find it amusing that the article was flagged.
- nkurz 6y agoTo note, my submission with the original title was a little earlier than that one, which was done as a followup with the title edited to be less contentious. Both were quickly flag killed, but mine was kindly resurrected by "the mods", likely chosen because it was earlier and used the original title. Possibly further flags were probably "turned off" so it could stay alive? [1] I appreciate this, although I can also see that Sanger is a polarizing figure and this may be a difficult article to discuss here. Keeping the comment quality high probably helps to allow future similar resurrections. [1] Or maybe not. Comments seem to have stopped flowing, and I don't find it on any of the first few pages of links, so maybe it was flagged off again.
- olliej 6y agoI mean most of this is complaining that no one is giving credence to the fairly heavily discounted Obama conspiracies, and “unfairly” detailing the behaviour of president trump.
- codeddesign 6y agoOr is it the behavior of Obama and the discounted Trump conspiracies? ;)
- praestigiare 6y agoIt is not. Because not everything is some kind of mirror reflection across the left/right boundary.
- ZeroGravitas 6y agoGiven the last line, it just seems like he's begging for money from crazy people.
- jonnypotty 6y agoPersonally I think its important for people to read this as it really does highlight an issue we have in the west. Its also important to realize that presenting facts about things which people disagree about will always be contentious.
- miffy900 6y ago> Indeed, Wikipedia defines the very term as follows: “Alternative medicine describes any practice that aims to achieve the healing effects of medicine, but which lacks biological plausibility and is untested, untestable or proven ineffective.” OK, what? The author completely lost me at this point. This seems like a very reasonable definition of the term 'alternative medicine'. If it was tested and/or proven effective then it wouldn't be alternative - it would be just medicine.
- OneGuy123 6y agoWestern medicine is good if your guts are hanging out after an accident. But it completely fails to fully cure many chronic conditions. They just give you a pill. Eastern medicine is more hollistic (meaning it fully address chronic conditions by finding the true source so that not more pills are needed). So for this statement above: what he was trying to say is that western medicine labels any healing methods that try to use natural remedies or hollistic healing as "alternative". Or in other words: he is trying to show you that big pharma is controlling everything to such extend that even just trying any hollistic (permanently curing by finding the real cause) medicine is being ignored in favor of permanent pill dispesing. Why cure it permanently if you can profit from symptom management :)
- swiley 6y agoIMO if your doctor is just pushing pills instead of thinking you need a new doctor. My doctors have always recommended other things before drugs. There’s plenty of scientific support for treatments other than drugs and this idea is compatible with the definition from Wikipedia.
- oehtXRwMkIs 6y agoEastern medicine is not empirical. Very few treatments outperform placebo.
- waltpad 6y agoWhat do you mean by "empirical"? Are you saying that eastern medicine is not based on empirical evidence, ie. observation and experimentation, but on some other approach?
- Werewolf255 6y ago"Why isn't Wikipedia accepting my conspiracy theories as facts? IT MUST BE LIBERAL BIAS" Now take that quote and expand it into a long-form article where you get asked for money at the end, and I've saved you ten minutes of your life.
- foobar_ 6y agoProblem is many conspiracy theories were later on validated as facts. Take big pharma for example. They have paid scientists to lie repeatedly. Every nation is also biased against others. The big problem we now have is ... all journalism has a bias. How can you cite or link any article which doesn't have bias. What is foolish is assuming that conservatives don't conspire to create biased news and only liberals do that.
- sippeangelo 6y agoHow is the literal difference between conspiracy theory and fact the problem here?
- Olreich 6y agoNormalization and legitimization of opinions as facts when facts don’t suit those opinions. Lots of little cogs in the machine that made that change. But it’s easier to hold an opinion that is factually wrong nowadays. Now that it’s normal for 30% of the world believing whatever they want and finding their tribe to support them, it’s hard to convince everyone that facts are even valuable, let alone more valuable than those incorrect opinions.
- m000 6y agoThis is just sly right-wing mindfucking. I.e. someone with a fundamendalist set of beliefs using sophisms to instill doubts about Wikipedia on people he knows that have fact-based beliefs. Wikipiedia has its problems, but this is not a serious or unbiased discussion of them.
- mrpopo 6y agoWhen a significant portion of the American population stops believing in the truth, the world's most valuable encyclopedia becomes a biased beacon of leftist facts. The author criticizes Wikipedia for not mentioning "Obamagate", but that name has no reputable source, remember Trump never defined it, even though the author seems to have understood what it meant. An encyclopedia needs to be based on reliable sources, and Trump's blabbering is just not reliable. Just listen to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTLu8vCH4Os https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTLu8vCH4Os
- thawaway1837 6y agoAnd he mentions Solyndra. By that logic every Venture capitalist’s Wikipedia page should have a massive section called scandals that lists all their investments that did not pay out.
- thejynxed 6y agoHe probably mentions Solyndra because they absconded with $250 million in taxpayer money shortly after it was granted to them. They got the funds and the doors were shut the same week, money gone into who knows what offshore bank accounts.
- aaron695 6y agoThere are some issues with Wikipedia. And it is a left wing bias. But this is a fail at showing it's true and any proof on it's magnitude and any argument Wikipedia just needs to be thrown out and any argument if any alternative is even possible.
- rguiliani 6y agoFuck you you conservative piece of shit
- dang 6y agoWe've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- colejohnson66 6y agoHi dang, I see you post this (it seems) every time you ban an account. What’s the purpose? I’ll admit, I’ve never been banned, so idk what it looks like when you try to log in or do something.
- dang 6y agoDo you mean what's the purpose of banning, or the purpose of posting that we did it?
- colejohnson66 6y agoPurpose of posting that you did
- dang 6y agoIt's basically treating people the way we'd want to be treated ourselves. Also, it's good to convey to the community some of the things we ban people for and where the lines are. HN used to shadowban (i.e. ban people without telling them), but it led to a lot of resentment, not just from the banned users but from many community members who don't think that's fair. At the time, there wasn't much of an alternative because HN had one moderator (pg) and he was also working on YC and raising small children. It takes a ton of time and energy to write such comments and to engage with user responses about them. We still shadowban accounts when they're new and show signs of spamming or trolling: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20shadowban&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... p.s. Banning mostly just means that your posts are autokilled. They're still visible to anyone with 'showdead' set to 'yes' in their profile.
- rguiliani 6y agoFuck conservatives. Fuck trump. Fuck the reds.
- rguiliani 6y agoFuck repubs
- rguiliani 6y agoEat shit GOP
- rguiliani 6y agoGo to hell trump supporter
- waltpad 6y agoI find it strange that the writer presents Wikipedia as a well defined entity: it is possible for anyone (including the writer) to amend a Wikipedia article. This may even be done anonymously. The writer goes on to describe various issues about various articles, which could be brought up directly in the discussion sections of these articles, as well as possible solutions for these issues. However, the first few lines point out something really interesting: Wikipedia doesn't seem to look for facts, but rather to describe point of views. If you are familiar with stackoverflow, the main policy there is to only provide factual information. Any opinion-based question or answer are at the least frowned upon, and usually rejected (though it may also depends on a sub-topic local behaviour). However, I believe that this policy wasn't devised from the beginning, but rather refined over time, considering that the entries at the dawn of the site were much less restricted on that ground. Wikipedia seems to be much more open to opinions, in a "neutral" way, which they explain by giving each opinion as much coverage has it is popular (and thus accepted). So, does it mean that if the "flat Earth" theory (which is given as an example in the Wikipedia page) was much more popular, it would be prevalent in the article about Earth? So mainstream ideas will be described in much more details than so-called alternate views. For me, this seems somewhat counter-intuitive. I would want to have an encyclopedia which compiles facts, rather than opinions. Am I missing something?
- CryptoBanker 6y agoHave you actually tried editing a Wikipedia article? I guarantee it will be changed back within about 5 minutes
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- grawprog 6y agoThat is if the article isn't locked for editing by approved editors only and you can actually edit it.
- waltpad 6y agoActually, I did that, numerous times, although it was mostly to do spelling correction or in one case linking to external pages trying to leverage Wikipedia's SEO(?) value (ie. the external pages were discussing the topic in the wiki page in order to promote their own business, which wasn't related at all), which shows that it's clearly easy to get Wikipedia to fulfill its purpose. So all in all what I did was minor editing, perhaps it doesn't count as what you would mean as an edit immediately reverted by other editors. I have no doubt that there are factions monitoring pages of strategic value, it makes sense for a website of that importance culturally. But it also means that the Wikipedia core community must always remain vigilant about these unfortunate slides.
- xxpor 6y agoFolks, this is Larry Sanger. He was a cofounder of wikipedia, but left around 2002. He's been on the same war path ever since then. No one takes him seriously. He's already tried founding multiple alternative wikis, and has accused commons of harboring child pornography.
- skookum-skuad 6y agoSays a dude who wants WikiLeaks closed and condones killing Assange.
- oburoni45fuck 6y agoWikipedia is just an encyclopedia. If you want to be a doctor go to a medical school. If you think that earth is flat or that homeopathy is a medicine - then you are the problem, not wikipedia. > vaccine articles are examples :D Again - it is not the Wikipedia is just your ignorance
- jumelles 6y ago> The Barack Obama article completely fails to mention many well-known scandals: Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the AP phone records scandal, and Fast and Furious, to say nothing of Solyndra or the Hillary Clinton email server scandal—or, of course, the developing “Obamagate” story in which Obama was personally involved in surveilling Donald Trump. Leaving aside the issue of whether these articles warrant inclusion on the Obama Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Benghazi_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Benghazi_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_articles_about_the_Department_of_Justice_investigations_of_reporters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_articles_about_the_Depart... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controve... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Donald_Trump#Obamagate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Dona...
- switch11 6y agoWikipedia is a very useful resource and at the same time it does have its biases I'll give an example that should illustrate this ONe of my close friends belongs to a royal family The Wikipedia editors who control the article will not update the information ABOUT HIS FAMILY because of some reason they will not explain They also disregard records from the Government about his family * Basically whoever the Czar of that area of Wikipedia is, or the group that controls those decisions want to put their research (or beliefs) over What the government of the country says What the actual members of the royal family say * they have family member names wrong the hierarchy wrong and key details wrong
- djaque 6y ago"badly biased" is the author's way of saying that the articles he finds don't agree with his far-right view point. The current politicization of what is fact and what is fiction by the current administration in the US doesn't give me sympathy for his argument. As an example, he complains that the so-called "obamagate scandal" is not covered on wikipedia. As a reminder, the "scandal" is that: 1) Russia sabotages the US election (both sides of the political aisle agree on this) 2) the Obama admin puts sanctions on Russia 3) Russia doesn't retaliate (this is VERY weird) 4) The Obama administration asks the intelligence agencies to investigate why they didn't retaliate. 5) They find that an American was talking to the Russian ambassador and they told them not to worry about the sanctions since they will make them "go away" when Trump is in office 6) To find out who was undermining US foreign policy, they go through a legal process that everyone agrees (including Trump) was followed to the tee. 7) They find that it was Michael Flynn (Trump's national security advisor) who was talking to the ambassador and it was on a call that as national security advisor he knew was monitored. 8) Flynn lies to FBI officials about the call (he has plead guilty to this under oath twice) 8) Obama warns Trump that Flynn is being sketchy and that he might want to reconsider hiring him 9) It comes out that Flynn was interfering with US foreign policy and Trump fires him saying that he lied to VP Pence. Pence when asked about it says that he made the right decision in firing him. 11) Now we're being asked to believe that investigation was an "Obama deepstate coupe" to bring down Donald Trump It is a shameless political ploy to spin up a scandal that doesn't exist. I'm proud that wikipedia isn't curtailing to what is, simply put, a republican talking point designed to stir up support in an election year. edit: I'm bad at formatting
- Noctem 6y ago> Wikipedia frequently asserts, in its own voice, that many of Trump’s statements are “false.” Well, perhaps they are. But even if they are, it is not exactly neutral for an encyclopedia article to say so, especially without attribution. You might approve of Wikipedia describing Trump’s incorrect statements as “false,” very well; but then you must admit that you no longer support a policy of neutrality on Wikipedia. What? No. Objective truth exists and stating it is absolutely not an indication of bias. If Wikipedia is incorrectly referring to his statements as false then those cases should be fixed, but his argument is that it doesn't even matter if these assertions are correct or not. His "Encyclosphere" is going to be an absolute disaster if it adopts his conception of neutrality as described here. It sounds like he rejects any evaluation of the factuality of the subjects at hand and his preferred standard for inclusion is "some people believe." That sounds like a great way to create a catalog of falsehoods and misinformation.