3 ms·

> You're not being genuine if you are trying to argue that the coverage of liberals on Wikipedia is the same as conservatives. And you are injecting a lot of y

> You're not being genuine if you are trying to argue that the coverage of liberals on Wikipedia is the same as conservatives. And you are injecting a lot of your very uniquely American biases and perceptions into something where they don't really apply. Wikipedia has over 140.000 active contributors across over 200 languages. Your notion that all of them have conspired to suppress American conservatives in favor of "liberals", across dozens of different languages, is frankly quite a bit out there and reminiscent of that whole "cultural Marxism" narrative. That's not to say that Wikipedia doesn't have its issues, it has them, but jumping from there to something that could very well be described as a conspiracy theory, is reaching a bit far. > There's a reason why there's a Conservapedia. There's also a RationalWiki, a PsychonautWiki, a GayPedia, there's a Wookieepedia, there's a Wiki for pretty much everything. The existence of these is not evidence for a lack of such topics on actual Wikipedia, it's merely evidence of more specialized communities creating their own specialized Wikipedias where they can take things to details and dept that would usually be considered inappropriate for a general encyclopedia.

throwaway4china 6y ago
> That's not to say that Wikipedia doesn't have it's issues, it has them, but jumping from there to something that could very well be described as a conspiracy theory, is reaching a bit much. You jumped to conspiracy theory. You said all. I did not. The editors simply have a bias that affects how they accept and offer contributions. These biases show especially in politically charged topics and you have to identify and check them, often they are factually wrong or misleading. I did not say all articles have this bias, but it is prevalent and makes Wikipedia unusable for any political research, unless you scrutinize all sources and do additional source finding that Wikipedia omitted on purpose because it didn't align with it's viewpoints. There are niche wikis, but Conservapedia exists to counter Wikipedia's bias on certain topics. They have a page I linked to which lists a lot of these biases, but it's barely an exhaustive list. You can find instances like these on nearly every political page. This is not some unfounded conspiracy theory as you suggest, Harvard has done a study on this as well as other institutions. Studies: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Coverage-bias-on-Wikipedia-Evidence-from-of-German-Kerkhof/b9788b4deee9df60e16660a805352fb33f9ea1a0 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Coverage-bias-on-Wikip... https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/17-028_e7788722-408f-48b4-8c82-f1f4de3539f3.pdf https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/17-028_e7788722-... http://wikipediocracy.com/2018/08/26/wikipedia-sources-methods/ http://wikipediocracy.com/2018/08/26/wikipedia-sources-metho... http://archive.is/dDr7X http://archive.is/dDr7X https://thecritic.co.uk/the-left-wing-bias-of-wikipedia/ https://thecritic.co.uk/the-left-wing-bias-of-wikipedia/ Another example: https://medium.com/@MainstreamWatc2/blatant-liberal-bias-on-wikipedia-is-real-8c57c257931b https://medium.com/@MainstreamWatc2/blatant-liberal-bias-on-...
- gottagetwnsite 6y ago
  Dude you're barking up the wrong tree, Hacker News is completely lost. Real hackers with the old spirit of questioning authority instead of just believing whatever the government (or anonymous people on Wikipedia) tells them are not welcome on this site. Conservative engineers need to start banding together and building companies, and we should explicitly exclude Woke people and others that insist on bringing politics into our profession.
jasonfarnon 6y ago
? Actually I find it ridiculous to suggest there wouldn't be a bias. Are you suggesting wikipedia editors are typical of the population at large? What are you basing that on? And if you concede there are demographic differences (eg education level) why do you think those differences would be orthogonal to political bias? Note I'm not saying that there is a bias, but I would say that's the null hypothesis, and a lot easier to defend than the position that there is no bias.
- freeflight 6y ago
  I didn't say bias is not a thing, bias is very real. All I'm saying that the collective bias that was stipulated, spanning across tens of thousands of users and dozens of languages, would need to be very organized. Which has nothing to do with wikipedia editors being typical of the population, but a lot with trying to stereotype wikipedia editors as supposedly all sharing the same political bias. When in many cases they don't even share the same language, nor the same conceptual framework about political dimensions/currents due to often very big cultural differences.

throwaway4china 6y ago

> That's not to say that Wikipedia doesn't have it's issues, it has them, but jumping from there to something that could very well be described as a conspiracy theory, is reaching a bit much. You jumped to conspiracy theory. You said all. I did not. The editors simply have a bias that affects how they accept and offer contributions. These biases show especially in politically charged topics and you have to identify and check them, often they are factually wrong or misleading. I did not say all articles have this bias, but it is prevalent and makes Wikipedia unusable for any political research, unless you scrutinize all sources and do additional source finding that Wikipedia omitted on purpose because it didn't align with it's viewpoints. There are niche wikis, but Conservapedia exists to counter Wikipedia's bias on certain topics. They have a page I linked to which lists a lot of these biases, but it's barely an exhaustive list. You can find instances like these on nearly every political page. This is not some unfounded conspiracy theory as you suggest, Harvard has done a study on this as well as other institutions. Studies: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Coverage-bias-on-Wikipedia-Evidence-from-of-German-Kerkhof/b9788b4deee9df60e16660a805352fb33f9ea1a0 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Coverage-bias-on-Wikip... https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/17-028_e7788722-408f-48b4-8c82-f1f4de3539f3.pdf https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/17-028_e7788722-... http://wikipediocracy.com/2018/08/26/wikipedia-sources-methods/ http://wikipediocracy.com/2018/08/26/wikipedia-sources-metho... http://archive.is/dDr7X http://archive.is/dDr7X https://thecritic.co.uk/the-left-wing-bias-of-wikipedia/ https://thecritic.co.uk/the-left-wing-bias-of-wikipedia/ Another example: https://medium.com/@MainstreamWatc2/blatant-liberal-bias-on-wikipedia-is-real-8c57c257931b https://medium.com/@MainstreamWatc2/blatant-liberal-bias-on-...

gottagetwnsite 6y ago
Dude you're barking up the wrong tree, Hacker News is completely lost. Real hackers with the old spirit of questioning authority instead of just believing whatever the government (or anonymous people on Wikipedia) tells them are not welcome on this site. Conservative engineers need to start banding together and building companies, and we should explicitly exclude Woke people and others that insist on bringing politics into our profession.

jasonfarnon 6y ago

? Actually I find it ridiculous to suggest there wouldn't be a bias. Are you suggesting wikipedia editors are typical of the population at large? What are you basing that on? And if you concede there are demographic differences (eg education level) why do you think those differences would be orthogonal to political bias? Note I'm not saying that there is a bias, but I would say that's the null hypothesis, and a lot easier to defend than the position that there is no bias.

freeflight 6y ago
I didn't say bias is not a thing, bias is very real. All I'm saying that the collective bias that was stipulated, spanning across tens of thousands of users and dozens of languages, would need to be very organized. Which has nothing to do with wikipedia editors being typical of the population, but a lot with trying to stereotype wikipedia editors as supposedly all sharing the same political bias. When in many cases they don't even share the same language, nor the same conceptual framework about political dimensions/currents due to often very big cultural differences.