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The notices give a sense of urgency and uncertainty. They also use that insinuation, as well as the fact that proportionately few users donate, to guilt readers
by garbagetime 6y ago
The notices give a sense of urgency and uncertainty. They also use that insinuation, as well as the fact that proportionately few users donate, to guilt readers into donating. That's unkind, unpleasant behavior that makes me like Wikipedia less (along with increasing issues with the content of the website - at least the English articles).
- kaba0 6y agoWhat issues do you have with content?
- garbagetime 6y agoGwern says it best: https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism
- JamesBarney 6y agoDamn, he always does. Good read. I feel like the same thing happened to stack overflow.
- geoduck14 6y agoWhat is happening with Stack Overflow?
- brokenmachine 6y agoIt's toxic. Just try asking a question.
- Blikkentrekker 6y agoCommonly cited problems are the lack of neutrality, which is well reflected by how different the political tone of different language versions is. — the Russian article on Vladimir Putin is quite a bit less critical than the English article, and in reverse, the English article on Barack Obama is quite a bit more lauding than how other languages treat him. But that is unavoidable for articles written by men, rather than some truly neutral artificial intelligence. My gripe is that I find that Wikipedia does not acknowledge the issues enough, and seems to mostly assert that it is fairly neutral.
- blueblisters 6y agoI believe the bias generally comes from the sources - "reputable" (and generally liberal) English language sources tend to take a deferential tone towards Obama, even while criticizing him, because of the political significance of his presidency. This is likely exacerbated by the fact that there are very few "reputable" right-wing English language sources that can be cited on Wikipedia. Similarly, sources from the Middle-East or Russia, which are less likely to be cited, would probably take a less charitable view as well.
- Blikkentrekker 6y agoWell that would be the problem with the U.S.A. culture war: — there are two sides, and both consider themselves “fair and balanced” and the other unreliable, and from where I'm standing as a European, both are unreliable, because politics is not about reliability, and truth is not a weapon in politics and never has been. English language Wikipedia of course has a disproportional number of editors from the U.S.A. and most of them have a particular side in this culture war. But it touches upon another issue of All voices must be repræsented, proportional to their weight.. — does this mean all voices currently on the planet? all voices that have ever been on the planet? or only English voices on the English-language Wikipedia? In particular, I find it somewhat odd that, for instance, English-language Wikipedia will speak of the “critical consensus” surrounding a Japanese work of fiction, using only English-language reviews thereof, while there are probably more Japanese-language reviews and fans of the work, and the critical perception is often very different in different cultures, but English-language Wikipedia very often speaks of “critical consensus” for what should be called “Anglo-Saxon critical consensus”, and dare I say that it is often not even that, but chiefly a U.S.A. consensus.
- tryonenow 6y ago>I believe the bias generally comes from the sources - "reputable" (and generally liberal) English language sources tend to take a deferential tone towards Obama It's much worse than that. The vast majority of sources that would potentially provide alternative [and valid, but right leaning] perspectives on basically any subject are effectively blacklisted as unreliable by somewhat of a cabal of heavily left leaning regular editors. Go to any talk page on any politically controversial subject and you'll see how the seasoned editors are almost all extremely left leaning and easily overwhelm anyone asking for a more neutral representation of facts. And let's not pretend that this has anything to do with "quality" or "factual reporting" when you'll find sources like Vox and Salon on some of these pages. It's self reinforcing, in that such heavy editorial bias discourages neutral and right leaning people from making edits that they then have to defend publicly against virtual extremists. It's pure cultural warfare. And in typical subversive fashion, they all play dumb and dance around the fact that the only approved sources are extremely biased towards their side.
- sqqqqrly 6y agoRead the communism page. Does it mention the hundred million plus dead because of communism? Only "Excess deaths"...
- Const-me 6y agoI'm from Ukraine. In the 20-th century communists killed several of my relatives. I will never forget about that, and there're many million people like me all over the world. I do observe tendency in modern world to white-wash communism, and cancel facts about crimes committed by communist regimes. I know it sounds crazy and I don't have any evidence, but one possible explanation of the trend - Russia's or China's state-sponsored propaganda.
- garbagetime 6y agoIf it sounds crazy AND you haven't any evidence - why bring it up?
- Const-me 6y agoBecause I don’t know other possible explanations of the observed phenomenon. Do you?
- klibertp 6y agoAuthoritarian regimes tend to commit atrocities. Unchecked power tends to lead to abuse of power. This is true regardless of what ideology helped the regime take root. Recognizing this fact is not whitewashing anything. To give you a less personal (to you) example, the Islamic State of Irak and Levant filmed and uploaded executions of hundreds of people, and killed many, many more people off-screen. They have "Islam" in their name. Should the page about "Islam (religion)" put ISIL front and center, despite them existing for less than a 1‰ of time Islam existed, and having similarly little adherents in comparison to global population of muslims?
- 6y ago
- h_anna_h 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspiracy_theory/Archive_3#DKIM_email_verification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_con...
- hedberg10 6y agoThe banner is moving (thus moving the whole text below it) and loads after ~a sec. I don't give money to people who intentionally try really hard to annoy me.
- isoskeles 6y agoYour comment just made me realize Wikipedia is using dark patterns to try to get me to donate.
- Itsdijital 6y agoThey probably have a fundraising team on staff that does all the standard fundraising "tricks" that the rest of the fundraising industry does.
- fomine3 6y agoThey do A/B testing. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Banner_testing https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Banner_test... https://diff.wikimedia.org/2013/04/08/intro-to-the-statistics-of-ab-testing-with-wikimedia-fundraising-banners/ https://diff.wikimedia.org/2013/04/08/intro-to-the-statistic...