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It still can't be trusted for articles related to politics, specially if you're reading it in a language different from English.

ChrisKnott 5y ago
Can you post some examples?
- gpcr1949 5y ago
  https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Site-wide_administrator_abuse_and_WP:PILLARS_violations_on_the_Croatian_Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Site-wi...
  - kaliali 5y ago
    You also have the same problems of history revisionism for the far left as well. You can't trust wiki when it pertains to politics.
    - pfarrell 5y ago
      citation needed
- Const-me 5y ago
  There’s an ongoing war in Europe since 2014, between Russia and Ukraine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War The fact is well-established, the article has more than 600 sources. Russian Wikipedia doesn’t have such article. They only have “military conflict in eastern Ukraine” https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%BE%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%83%D0%B6%D1%91%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%84%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%BA%D1%82_%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%B2%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%B5_%D0%A3%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%8B https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%BE%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%83... That article does not list Russia on the right panel under “belligerents” section. Many sections simply tell official Russian version. When it does tell some bits of truth it uses wordings like “allegedly” and “according to Ukrainian side”. The “casualties and losses” section only contains losses on Ukrainian side.
  - nzmsv 5y ago
    You don't think that 600 Ukrainian and western sources only tell one side of the story though? I went down the list. All the Russian sources are actually Ukrainian (in Russian language). Just because you disagree with a perspective doesn't mean it should be censored. Look at the "reactions in Russia" section. There is not a single positive sentiment expressed there about the situation in Crimea. I guarantee you that this is not representative of the the public opinion in Russia (whether or not you agree with it). All citations are from opposition people nobody has ever heard of. Not a single one from the official media? That's neutral? Really? If all the people in Crimea are victims and are controlled by evil bad Russia, how come Ukraine turned off their water supply? The one they didn't build. Don't they want those poor oppressed souls to come back into the fold? Where's that reference in the article? And in the interest of keeping an open mind: here come the downvotes! The people clicking that arrow probably think of themselves as very open minded too.
    - Const-me 5y ago
      > You don't think that 600 Ukrainian and western sources only tell one side of the story though? These sources aren’t exclusively western, e.g. Al Jazeera is based in Qatar. Another thing, I have some sources outside of the Internets. I personally know a few people who fought the war, and many civilians who fled the war. Their stories match these 600 sources of the English version of Wikipedia.
      - nzmsv 5y ago
        I know some people who fled the war as well, to Russia. Not liking war doesn't necessarily mean supporting handing Ukraine over to the USA. This part is completely lost in the "Russia bad" narrative though.
        nemothekid 5y ago
        I'm not sure what your anecdotes have to do with the matter being discussed. Regardless of the fact if you support the war, the truth remains that the war is happening between Ukraine and Russia. For Russian wikipedia to conceal that fact is censorship.
- inamiyar 5y ago
  The wikipedia article on NIAC - the National Iranian American Council, which seems to be an Iran state-sponsored organization, is guarded by their members. Luckily Wikipedia is fairly good at pointing it out in this instance: > A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject. It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia's content policies, particularly neutral point of view. Please discuss further on the talk page. (June 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) But going to the talk page shows they still control the page and content on it. > Dear User Wikidave2009, since June 2017 the well-sourced March 2017 revelations and implications section has been created five times in this page by three different editors like Wiki726, Ours18 and myself, you have deleted it every single time without providing any credible reference to discredit that the sources cited in that section. Your claim that these sources are "fringe" and "dubious" is not wellfounded. Michael Rubin is a leading expert on Iran at the AEI, Darren Tromblay is a veteran intelligence analyst and both the Small Wars Journal and Commentary Magazine are solid and reliable sources. I do realize that you are very dedicated to guarding the NIAC page, however, you're forcing your opinion on this page without any regard for other editors who disagree with you. Please STOP removing content that you don't like, and perhaps find a way to deal with this conflict of interest that is obvious. Alwaysf (talk) 05:29, 17 January 2018 (UTC) That section is not on the main page. You can see it in the history: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=National_Iranian_American_Council&oldid=819617418#March_2017_revelations_and_implications https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=National_Iranian_...
- rvba 5y ago
  1. This isn't a political example, but big parts of Scottish Wikipedia were basically written by one teenager, who took English texts and wrote them with Scottish accent. He did not use real Scottish language, but rather some strange version of English. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-... Either nobody reads the relatively small Scottish Wikipedia, or (more likely) everyone who complained about it got banned by said admin. And since nobody really reviews bans (why cant the Wikimedia Foundation have someone for it?), then you are generally out of luck. 2A. There was a Wikipedia administrator who created 80 000 pages and redirects related to breasts. Also seemed to have some obsession over some low key political woman. https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/dk17c9/wikipedia_the_admin_who_created_80000_pages_about/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/dk17c9/wikipedi... What is more sad in this case, is that every other admin knew very well that thousands of such pages were created, but nobody did anything. This is the usual situation when the clique will never go against one of their own. It took them an incredible amount of time to do anything with that rogue admin and at the end I think he wasn't even removed from his role and banned, he simply stepped down on his own. 2B. Compare the rogue admin described in point 2A (who created 80 thousand articles and redirects related to breasts) with the typical experience of a new wikipedia user, whose article will be probably speedy deleted immediately after creation. There is a big group of admins who try to speed delete everything - because by default they treat every new user as human trash and every new article as not encyclopedic. I dont have any statistics,but I assume that after the new article is deleted, most new users will simply give up, because the alternative is to fight versus the admin clique through various "committees" (full of said admins). This time is wasted, because instead of improving the article you go through a trial of tears. 2C. Also very possible is that every edit by a new user is reverted by default. The new user cannot revert it back - since this is an "edit war". I dont feel like searching for examples, but there are admins who have literal counters that show how many things they reverted - and they pride themselves of it. This basically means thousands of users pushed away of trying to improve wikipedia, just because some sad asshole sits and reverts everything to paddle his stats. Other admins dont do anything about it, because it is incredibly hard to remove an admin / if they removed that guy, then someone else could go after them. The Wikimedia foundation simply does not care at all. They just need those millions for various expensive "projects", lunches and so on. A very similar thing happened with Firefox, where the Mozilla foundation is interested in everything, but not their core product. If you are a new Wikipedia user a very typical situation is that if you create a new article, some admin will "improve" it (generally making it worse) and you cannot revert those changes, or you get banned by the said admin. On some smaller Wikipedia the admins knew each other very well, so they ask their friend to ban you. I am aware that I dont provide any examples for those + I sound like a "frustrated person". If you dont believe me, you can make a second account and see how it looks for someone new (using two accounts is against Wikipedia terms of service btw). Perhaps a good way would be to randomize admin names, so those assholes get banned by their own friends, or reverted by own friends, who like to revert everything. 3. Regarding examples of "fresh" political cases having a lot of problems. You can check the page of Aimee Channelor and constant edit wars related to that person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Aimee_Challenor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Aimee_Challenor That's the person involved in the reddit scandal in 2021. If you feel like a detective, you can also try to figure out who are the people who constantly guard and edit the said article. Btw. I guess I also have to add a disclaimer that I never had anything to do with article from point 3.
belorn 5y ago
The reason it can't be trusted is methodology used to create articles: weight based statements using reliable sources. The concept does not work with politics. You can't take the top 10 news sites, sum up how often a certain statement is made, and then derive the truth. When you have two polarizing sides, the extremist that are the most popular view might not even be close to reality or even the majority opinion. With two narratives that define their own "good" side and a "bad" side, the messy truth might not be found in news articles but rather in hindsight a few decades later (or fringe analysts that is struggling to survive). Political topics do however get fairly good coverage by citing reliable sources of what kind of narratives have been made, and except for correct weighting, might give some clues about the truth.
- jll29 5y ago
  Whether or not we can fully trust Wikipedia is one thing, and it is true that truth should not just be a result of frequency counting. I'd say Wikipedia, like the scientific process, works in the limit; any snapshot may contain errors, but there's a process for weeding out errors that leads to conversion towards the right direction, if not always in a strictly monotonic fashion. There are countries in which things said on Wikipedia are not permissible to be viewed, or where it is banned in whole. I prefer to live in a place where you can view everything (e.g, [1,2]) and make up your mind for yourself, weighing the evidence. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110512173914/http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2009280577_apchinabornonthefourth.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110512173914/http://seattletim... [2] https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%85%AD%E5%9B%9B%E4%BA%8B%E4%BB%B6 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%85%AD%E5%9B%9B%E4%BA%8B%E4... [3] https://www.history.com/news/who-was-the-tank-man-of-tiananmen-square https://www.history.com/news/who-was-the-tank-man-of-tiananm...
wpietri 5y ago
Is that about Wikipedia, or more about politics in general? Another way to put it: is there another source you'd trust more? I'm only familiar with English-language Wikipedia, but from what I've seen, NPOV and other standards mean that the battling factions of editors tend to produce something that does a better job of portraying multiple points of view than most other sources.
- ghaff 5y ago
  I'm sure there are folks here who would disagree but I'd generally trust mainstream global news sources like The Economist, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. (Which is not to say they don't get stories or even whole narratives wrong.)
  - yashap 5y ago
    Agreed. They certainly have their biases, but they are at least correct about the facts they state almost all the time, and when they have factual inaccuracies, they seem to be rare, honest mistakes. Better than a lot of sources of information related to politics, that are full of intentionally incorrect facts.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      I was interviewed for a fairly trivial story in the WSJ based on something I wrote on Twitter a while back. Total nothingburger comment and, from a 30 minute conversation, total nothingburger quote. But the amount of back and forth, confirming quote and associated details, etc. was incredible. Most pubs would have just quoted the tweet. (That said, I've also been interviewed for a breaking news story and that's simply run.)
- s17n 5y ago
  I think the issue is if an article doesn't get enough attention, it's easy for people to slip in blatantly false or misleading information for self interested reasons. I imagine this is worse on non-english wikipedia but it does also happen on English. So on Wikipedia, you need to always be thinking about whether anyone has a motivation to manipulate the article and checking to see whether they in fact have. You could argue that this is true of everything though, and at least on Wikipedia people are usually pretty clumsy about revealing their biases.
osrec 5y ago
Unfortunately, politics is riddled with opinion. No piece on politics is really that trustworthy, regardless of whether it's in an encyclopedia or a tabloid newspaper.
- suifbwish 5y ago
  That is because politics is 100% based on ideology. Ideologies are almost never rationally constructed.
  - psychoslave 5y ago
    What is a statement that might be out of any ideology? Also note that rationalism is an ideology.
NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
You can't trust it any more or less than any other source. The circumcision (a euphemism for male genital mutilation) page for example is run and moderated by pro-circumcision people. And you can tell because there's any support for it whatsoever.
- arp242 5y ago
  It's not Wikipedia's job to be pro or against anything. The topic of circumcision is a topic of debate in the US, which Wikipedia records, and arguments from both proponents and opponents have a place in it. Does this mean that Wikipedia is, in a way, kind of a "bad" resource? Absolutely. My personal opinion is that circumcision is indefensible, and we can quickly agree on this. But this kind of resource has value too; what if I want to educate myself on the argument that pro-circumcision people use? There's Wikipedia for that! I was raised very secular; up to my early 20s I didn't really have an opinion on religion in general because I was simply never really exposed to it; I knew it existed of course, but outside of that: idunnoknow. After I had some Jehovah's Witnesses at my door I decided to educate myself a bit more about this and looked up, among other things, arguments in favour of God's existence on Wikipedia. I thought they were ridiculous and didn't even hold up to the most basic of critical thinking; I couldn't believe this nonsense was really the best they could come up with. I've been atheist ever since. However, this doesn't mean that these arguments – ridiculous as I might think they are – don't have a place on Wikipedia, and shouldn't be described there.
e12e 5y ago
It's a lot better than traditional encyclopedias on these matters though, as there's revision history and talk pages readily available. Go look up native American history/history of the US in a pre 80s encyclopedia for example.

ChrisKnott 5y ago

Can you post some examples?

gpcr1949 5y ago
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Site-wide_administrator_abuse_and_WP:PILLARS_violations_on_the_Croatian_Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Site-wi...
- kaliali 5y ago
  You also have the same problems of history revisionism for the far left as well. You can't trust wiki when it pertains to politics.
  - pfarrell 5y ago
    citation needed
Const-me 5y ago
There’s an ongoing war in Europe since 2014, between Russia and Ukraine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War The fact is well-established, the article has more than 600 sources. Russian Wikipedia doesn’t have such article. They only have “military conflict in eastern Ukraine” https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%BE%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%83%D0%B6%D1%91%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%84%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%BA%D1%82_%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%B2%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%B5_%D0%A3%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%8B https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%BE%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%83... That article does not list Russia on the right panel under “belligerents” section. Many sections simply tell official Russian version. When it does tell some bits of truth it uses wordings like “allegedly” and “according to Ukrainian side”. The “casualties and losses” section only contains losses on Ukrainian side.
- nzmsv 5y ago
  You don't think that 600 Ukrainian and western sources only tell one side of the story though? I went down the list. All the Russian sources are actually Ukrainian (in Russian language). Just because you disagree with a perspective doesn't mean it should be censored. Look at the "reactions in Russia" section. There is not a single positive sentiment expressed there about the situation in Crimea. I guarantee you that this is not representative of the the public opinion in Russia (whether or not you agree with it). All citations are from opposition people nobody has ever heard of. Not a single one from the official media? That's neutral? Really? If all the people in Crimea are victims and are controlled by evil bad Russia, how come Ukraine turned off their water supply? The one they didn't build. Don't they want those poor oppressed souls to come back into the fold? Where's that reference in the article? And in the interest of keeping an open mind: here come the downvotes! The people clicking that arrow probably think of themselves as very open minded too.
  - Const-me 5y ago
    > You don't think that 600 Ukrainian and western sources only tell one side of the story though? These sources aren’t exclusively western, e.g. Al Jazeera is based in Qatar. Another thing, I have some sources outside of the Internets. I personally know a few people who fought the war, and many civilians who fled the war. Their stories match these 600 sources of the English version of Wikipedia.
    - nzmsv 5y ago
      I know some people who fled the war as well, to Russia. Not liking war doesn't necessarily mean supporting handing Ukraine over to the USA. This part is completely lost in the "Russia bad" narrative though.
      - nemothekid 5y ago
        I'm not sure what your anecdotes have to do with the matter being discussed. Regardless of the fact if you support the war, the truth remains that the war is happening between Ukraine and Russia. For Russian wikipedia to conceal that fact is censorship.
inamiyar 5y ago
The wikipedia article on NIAC - the National Iranian American Council, which seems to be an Iran state-sponsored organization, is guarded by their members. Luckily Wikipedia is fairly good at pointing it out in this instance: > A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject. It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia's content policies, particularly neutral point of view. Please discuss further on the talk page. (June 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) But going to the talk page shows they still control the page and content on it. > Dear User Wikidave2009, since June 2017 the well-sourced March 2017 revelations and implications section has been created five times in this page by three different editors like Wiki726, Ours18 and myself, you have deleted it every single time without providing any credible reference to discredit that the sources cited in that section. Your claim that these sources are "fringe" and "dubious" is not wellfounded. Michael Rubin is a leading expert on Iran at the AEI, Darren Tromblay is a veteran intelligence analyst and both the Small Wars Journal and Commentary Magazine are solid and reliable sources. I do realize that you are very dedicated to guarding the NIAC page, however, you're forcing your opinion on this page without any regard for other editors who disagree with you. Please STOP removing content that you don't like, and perhaps find a way to deal with this conflict of interest that is obvious. Alwaysf (talk) 05:29, 17 January 2018 (UTC) That section is not on the main page. You can see it in the history: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=National_Iranian_American_Council&oldid=819617418#March_2017_revelations_and_implications https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=National_Iranian_...
rvba 5y ago
1. This isn't a political example, but big parts of Scottish Wikipedia were basically written by one teenager, who took English texts and wrote them with Scottish accent. He did not use real Scottish language, but rather some strange version of English. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-... Either nobody reads the relatively small Scottish Wikipedia, or (more likely) everyone who complained about it got banned by said admin. And since nobody really reviews bans (why cant the Wikimedia Foundation have someone for it?), then you are generally out of luck. 2A. There was a Wikipedia administrator who created 80 000 pages and redirects related to breasts. Also seemed to have some obsession over some low key political woman. https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/dk17c9/wikipedia_the_admin_who_created_80000_pages_about/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/dk17c9/wikipedi... What is more sad in this case, is that every other admin knew very well that thousands of such pages were created, but nobody did anything. This is the usual situation when the clique will never go against one of their own. It took them an incredible amount of time to do anything with that rogue admin and at the end I think he wasn't even removed from his role and banned, he simply stepped down on his own. 2B. Compare the rogue admin described in point 2A (who created 80 thousand articles and redirects related to breasts) with the typical experience of a new wikipedia user, whose article will be probably speedy deleted immediately after creation. There is a big group of admins who try to speed delete everything - because by default they treat every new user as human trash and every new article as not encyclopedic. I dont have any statistics,but I assume that after the new article is deleted, most new users will simply give up, because the alternative is to fight versus the admin clique through various "committees" (full of said admins). This time is wasted, because instead of improving the article you go through a trial of tears. 2C. Also very possible is that every edit by a new user is reverted by default. The new user cannot revert it back - since this is an "edit war". I dont feel like searching for examples, but there are admins who have literal counters that show how many things they reverted - and they pride themselves of it. This basically means thousands of users pushed away of trying to improve wikipedia, just because some sad asshole sits and reverts everything to paddle his stats. Other admins dont do anything about it, because it is incredibly hard to remove an admin / if they removed that guy, then someone else could go after them. The Wikimedia foundation simply does not care at all. They just need those millions for various expensive "projects", lunches and so on. A very similar thing happened with Firefox, where the Mozilla foundation is interested in everything, but not their core product. If you are a new Wikipedia user a very typical situation is that if you create a new article, some admin will "improve" it (generally making it worse) and you cannot revert those changes, or you get banned by the said admin. On some smaller Wikipedia the admins knew each other very well, so they ask their friend to ban you. I am aware that I dont provide any examples for those + I sound like a "frustrated person". If you dont believe me, you can make a second account and see how it looks for someone new (using two accounts is against Wikipedia terms of service btw). Perhaps a good way would be to randomize admin names, so those assholes get banned by their own friends, or reverted by own friends, who like to revert everything. 3. Regarding examples of "fresh" political cases having a lot of problems. You can check the page of Aimee Channelor and constant edit wars related to that person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Aimee_Challenor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Aimee_Challenor That's the person involved in the reddit scandal in 2021. If you feel like a detective, you can also try to figure out who are the people who constantly guard and edit the said article. Btw. I guess I also have to add a disclaimer that I never had anything to do with article from point 3.

belorn 5y ago

The reason it can't be trusted is methodology used to create articles: weight based statements using reliable sources. The concept does not work with politics. You can't take the top 10 news sites, sum up how often a certain statement is made, and then derive the truth. When you have two polarizing sides, the extremist that are the most popular view might not even be close to reality or even the majority opinion. With two narratives that define their own "good" side and a "bad" side, the messy truth might not be found in news articles but rather in hindsight a few decades later (or fringe analysts that is struggling to survive). Political topics do however get fairly good coverage by citing reliable sources of what kind of narratives have been made, and except for correct weighting, might give some clues about the truth.

jll29 5y ago
Whether or not we can fully trust Wikipedia is one thing, and it is true that truth should not just be a result of frequency counting. I'd say Wikipedia, like the scientific process, works in the limit; any snapshot may contain errors, but there's a process for weeding out errors that leads to conversion towards the right direction, if not always in a strictly monotonic fashion. There are countries in which things said on Wikipedia are not permissible to be viewed, or where it is banned in whole. I prefer to live in a place where you can view everything (e.g, [1,2]) and make up your mind for yourself, weighing the evidence. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110512173914/http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2009280577_apchinabornonthefourth.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110512173914/http://seattletim... [2] https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%85%AD%E5%9B%9B%E4%BA%8B%E4%BB%B6 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%85%AD%E5%9B%9B%E4%BA%8B%E4... [3] https://www.history.com/news/who-was-the-tank-man-of-tiananmen-square https://www.history.com/news/who-was-the-tank-man-of-tiananm...

wpietri 5y ago

Is that about Wikipedia, or more about politics in general? Another way to put it: is there another source you'd trust more? I'm only familiar with English-language Wikipedia, but from what I've seen, NPOV and other standards mean that the battling factions of editors tend to produce something that does a better job of portraying multiple points of view than most other sources.

ghaff 5y ago
I'm sure there are folks here who would disagree but I'd generally trust mainstream global news sources like The Economist, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. (Which is not to say they don't get stories or even whole narratives wrong.)
- yashap 5y ago
  Agreed. They certainly have their biases, but they are at least correct about the facts they state almost all the time, and when they have factual inaccuracies, they seem to be rare, honest mistakes. Better than a lot of sources of information related to politics, that are full of intentionally incorrect facts.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    I was interviewed for a fairly trivial story in the WSJ based on something I wrote on Twitter a while back. Total nothingburger comment and, from a 30 minute conversation, total nothingburger quote. But the amount of back and forth, confirming quote and associated details, etc. was incredible. Most pubs would have just quoted the tweet. (That said, I've also been interviewed for a breaking news story and that's simply run.)
s17n 5y ago
I think the issue is if an article doesn't get enough attention, it's easy for people to slip in blatantly false or misleading information for self interested reasons. I imagine this is worse on non-english wikipedia but it does also happen on English. So on Wikipedia, you need to always be thinking about whether anyone has a motivation to manipulate the article and checking to see whether they in fact have. You could argue that this is true of everything though, and at least on Wikipedia people are usually pretty clumsy about revealing their biases.

osrec 5y ago

Unfortunately, politics is riddled with opinion. No piece on politics is really that trustworthy, regardless of whether it's in an encyclopedia or a tabloid newspaper.

suifbwish 5y ago
That is because politics is 100% based on ideology. Ideologies are almost never rationally constructed.
- psychoslave 5y ago
  What is a statement that might be out of any ideology? Also note that rationalism is an ideology.

NaturalPhallacy 5y ago

You can't trust it any more or less than any other source. The circumcision (a euphemism for male genital mutilation) page for example is run and moderated by pro-circumcision people. And you can tell because there's any support for it whatsoever.

arp242 5y ago
It's not Wikipedia's job to be pro or against anything. The topic of circumcision is a topic of debate in the US, which Wikipedia records, and arguments from both proponents and opponents have a place in it. Does this mean that Wikipedia is, in a way, kind of a "bad" resource? Absolutely. My personal opinion is that circumcision is indefensible, and we can quickly agree on this. But this kind of resource has value too; what if I want to educate myself on the argument that pro-circumcision people use? There's Wikipedia for that! I was raised very secular; up to my early 20s I didn't really have an opinion on religion in general because I was simply never really exposed to it; I knew it existed of course, but outside of that: idunnoknow. After I had some Jehovah's Witnesses at my door I decided to educate myself a bit more about this and looked up, among other things, arguments in favour of God's existence on Wikipedia. I thought they were ridiculous and didn't even hold up to the most basic of critical thinking; I couldn't believe this nonsense was really the best they could come up with. I've been atheist ever since. However, this doesn't mean that these arguments – ridiculous as I might think they are – don't have a place on Wikipedia, and shouldn't be described there.

e12e 5y ago

It's a lot better than traditional encyclopedias on these matters though, as there's revision history and talk pages readily available. Go look up native American history/history of the US in a pre 80s encyclopedia for example.