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I find it unfortunate that the academic discussions I witness tend towards "Wikipedia bad" rather than a more nuanced understanding. Some aspects of Wikipedia a

I find it unfortunate that the academic discussions I witness tend towards "Wikipedia bad" rather than a more nuanced understanding. Some aspects of Wikipedia are great, and academia still has a lot to learn from web technologies.

throw_m239339 5y ago
> I find it unfortunate that the academic discussions I witness tend towards "Wikipedia bad" rather than a more nuanced understanding. Some aspects of Wikipedia are great, and academia still has a lot to learn from web technologies. No Wikipedia is bad, it has become a subtle but effective political propaganda tool that reflects only a certain point of view, it is not a encyclopedia by the definition of the word. It takes stances on wedge issues by the sole fact that it eliminates any sources its editors do not agree with. When you only source assertions from a tiny number of sources you know only reflect your point of view then you are badly biased. https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ The author is Wikipedia's co-founder, so he knows what he is talking about.
- gremlinsinc 5y ago
  that article is SEVERELY biased to the right. > Or to take an up-to-the-minute issue, the LGBT adoption article includes several talking points in favor of LGBT adoption rights, but omits any arguments against. What if we replace LGBT "rights" with Jewish Rights during the Holocaust. It'd go something like: just because "liberals" think Jews deserve to live, and we should all have equal rights, that maybe we should also have a fair "view" or balanced "insight" into Hitler's side of the argument, so people can choose for themselves whether they want to be racist or genocidal or not. Tolerance isn't for everyone, we should be tolerant of those not tolerant of anybody who isn't white, no? SMH. It's an encyclopedia, facts should matter, if you're peeved that liberal facts are often more true or accurate than those based on crapola like the bible or oil-industry-endorsed climate change studies, or Presidential decrees that Bleach cures Covid-19, then honestly you should probably just stick to your facebook echo chambers, and please stay away from public platforms and politics in general. I saw a meme once about the right trolling itself where they basically said -- GUYS stop showing statistics and studies they're all against us. Yes, they are, not because they're fabricated but because the conservative worldview is extremely warped and often just insane. I mean 86% of flat-earthers are conservative. The majority of people who believe in bigfoot, also conservative. Only 32% of conservatives believe in evolution and there's probably a HUGE percent that believe the world was created 8k years ago by God (factually impossible). Sure, Wikipedia should strive for FACTUAL neutrality, but not when facts are from a dogmatic source like the bible, it could still show those "facts" as it were as an "opinion" by Christian Seminologists, for example, however the majority of historians and archaelogists find flaws see: <insert page> etc... Most articles I've ever read have been pretty darn good, I haven't seen much in way of not-neutral, but then I think neutrality doesn't mean allowing bigots free reign either.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    I agree with you about LGBT adoption, because most of the things people feared didn't actually happen when gay people started adopting in more liberal countries. That said, I don't think it's fair to compare that particular debate (which was genuinely an unknown phenomenon at the time, and erring on the side of LGBT parents could have caused thousands of children to suffer if liberal-minded peoples' assumptions turned out to be wrong) to a literal genocide (which, even if the Jews turned out to be part of a secret cabal who controlled the banks, undermined the German war effort during WW1 and denied promising young upstarts opportunities at art college, would still be clearly immoral).
- thethirdone 5y ago
  > It takes stances on wedge issues by the sole fact that it eliminates any sources its editors do not agree with.|| > > The global warming and MMR vaccine articles are examples; I hardly need to dive into these pages, since it is quite enough to say that they endorse definite positions that scientific minorities reject. I do not think either of these are examples of bias in Wikipedia. Especially for the MMR article, I am aware of no scientific minority that would take issue with the article. Both articles mention the existence of controversy about the topics. I think it would be hard to provide any unbiased information about actual wedge topics if this counts as biased. I am not going to make any claim that Wikipedia is not biased, but I do not think it is possible for any encyclopedia to be unbiased to Larry Sanger's ideals without being decidedly leaning to the right.
- Kim_Bruning 5y ago
  I'm not sure what happened to Larry Sanger; he went off the rails someplace. :-/ I seem to recall it was fairly hard to get hold of him even back in 2005-ish. At any rate, en.wikipedia is a bit funny. Many language versions of Wikipedia are particular to just one country, or at best/worst a couple of countries. They also tend to have biases associated with those countries and cultures. The English Wikipedia, on the other hand, is edited by people around the world. So the intrinsic bias (or lack thereof) is at world-scale. Since on world-scale looking in the USA is quite conservative these days; looking out you'd expect Americans to feel that the world (and thus the English Wikipedia) has a progressive bias.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> I find it unfortunate that the academic discussions I witness tend towards “Wikipedia bad” rather than a more nuanced understanding. Academia has always viewed tertiary sources as bad for academia (they might be fine for popular use outside of academia, but even as a gateway to useful primary/secondary sources in academia they are poor by comparison to proper research catalogs.) > Some aspects of Wikipedia are great, and academia still has a lot to learn from web technologies. Some aspects of Wikipedia are great, but Wikipedia doesn’t (by fairly explicit choice of mission) do anything to alter any of the reasons why tertiary sources aren’t any good for academia. Academia may have something to learn about technology, and maybe even Wiki technology, but that still far from having any use of Wikipedia as a product.
- Kim_Bruning 5y ago
  According to the paper we're discussing, Wikipedia clearly has a measurable effect on science, so either these researchers did their statistics wrong, or you know something they don't. ;-) I had really hoped that wikis would have been used more often for science. The wiki process seems to align pretty well with the process of scientific publication and peer review. Wikipedia didn't go this road, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lost_functionalities#Ability_to_establish_priority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lost_functionalities... But it seems others apparently did! https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_User_Group https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_User_Group
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > According to the paper we're discussing, Wikipedia clearly has a measurable effect on science, so either these researchers did their statistics wrong, or you know something they don't. ;-) “Has a measurable impact on science” and “is part of a category of things to which academia aa a whole has a negative response” are not, even approximately, mutually exclusive so, no, the dichotomy you try to draw is quite false.
    - Kim_Bruning 5y ago
      I do agree that tertiary sources are what they are (upsides and downsides) I was mostly responding to "but that still far from having any use of Wikipedia as a product" ; which I think might be overstating your case just a little.

throw_m239339 5y ago

> I find it unfortunate that the academic discussions I witness tend towards "Wikipedia bad" rather than a more nuanced understanding. Some aspects of Wikipedia are great, and academia still has a lot to learn from web technologies. No Wikipedia is bad, it has become a subtle but effective political propaganda tool that reflects only a certain point of view, it is not a encyclopedia by the definition of the word. It takes stances on wedge issues by the sole fact that it eliminates any sources its editors do not agree with. When you only source assertions from a tiny number of sources you know only reflect your point of view then you are badly biased. https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ The author is Wikipedia's co-founder, so he knows what he is talking about.

gremlinsinc 5y ago
that article is SEVERELY biased to the right. > Or to take an up-to-the-minute issue, the LGBT adoption article includes several talking points in favor of LGBT adoption rights, but omits any arguments against. What if we replace LGBT "rights" with Jewish Rights during the Holocaust. It'd go something like: just because "liberals" think Jews deserve to live, and we should all have equal rights, that maybe we should also have a fair "view" or balanced "insight" into Hitler's side of the argument, so people can choose for themselves whether they want to be racist or genocidal or not. Tolerance isn't for everyone, we should be tolerant of those not tolerant of anybody who isn't white, no? SMH. It's an encyclopedia, facts should matter, if you're peeved that liberal facts are often more true or accurate than those based on crapola like the bible or oil-industry-endorsed climate change studies, or Presidential decrees that Bleach cures Covid-19, then honestly you should probably just stick to your facebook echo chambers, and please stay away from public platforms and politics in general. I saw a meme once about the right trolling itself where they basically said -- GUYS stop showing statistics and studies they're all against us. Yes, they are, not because they're fabricated but because the conservative worldview is extremely warped and often just insane. I mean 86% of flat-earthers are conservative. The majority of people who believe in bigfoot, also conservative. Only 32% of conservatives believe in evolution and there's probably a HUGE percent that believe the world was created 8k years ago by God (factually impossible). Sure, Wikipedia should strive for FACTUAL neutrality, but not when facts are from a dogmatic source like the bible, it could still show those "facts" as it were as an "opinion" by Christian Seminologists, for example, however the majority of historians and archaelogists find flaws see: <insert page> etc... Most articles I've ever read have been pretty darn good, I haven't seen much in way of not-neutral, but then I think neutrality doesn't mean allowing bigots free reign either.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  I agree with you about LGBT adoption, because most of the things people feared didn't actually happen when gay people started adopting in more liberal countries. That said, I don't think it's fair to compare that particular debate (which was genuinely an unknown phenomenon at the time, and erring on the side of LGBT parents could have caused thousands of children to suffer if liberal-minded peoples' assumptions turned out to be wrong) to a literal genocide (which, even if the Jews turned out to be part of a secret cabal who controlled the banks, undermined the German war effort during WW1 and denied promising young upstarts opportunities at art college, would still be clearly immoral).
thethirdone 5y ago
> It takes stances on wedge issues by the sole fact that it eliminates any sources its editors do not agree with.|| > > The global warming and MMR vaccine articles are examples; I hardly need to dive into these pages, since it is quite enough to say that they endorse definite positions that scientific minorities reject. I do not think either of these are examples of bias in Wikipedia. Especially for the MMR article, I am aware of no scientific minority that would take issue with the article. Both articles mention the existence of controversy about the topics. I think it would be hard to provide any unbiased information about actual wedge topics if this counts as biased. I am not going to make any claim that Wikipedia is not biased, but I do not think it is possible for any encyclopedia to be unbiased to Larry Sanger's ideals without being decidedly leaning to the right.
Kim_Bruning 5y ago
I'm not sure what happened to Larry Sanger; he went off the rails someplace. :-/ I seem to recall it was fairly hard to get hold of him even back in 2005-ish. At any rate, en.wikipedia is a bit funny. Many language versions of Wikipedia are particular to just one country, or at best/worst a couple of countries. They also tend to have biases associated with those countries and cultures. The English Wikipedia, on the other hand, is edited by people around the world. So the intrinsic bias (or lack thereof) is at world-scale. Since on world-scale looking in the USA is quite conservative these days; looking out you'd expect Americans to feel that the world (and thus the English Wikipedia) has a progressive bias.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> I find it unfortunate that the academic discussions I witness tend towards “Wikipedia bad” rather than a more nuanced understanding. Academia has always viewed tertiary sources as bad for academia (they might be fine for popular use outside of academia, but even as a gateway to useful primary/secondary sources in academia they are poor by comparison to proper research catalogs.) > Some aspects of Wikipedia are great, and academia still has a lot to learn from web technologies. Some aspects of Wikipedia are great, but Wikipedia doesn’t (by fairly explicit choice of mission) do anything to alter any of the reasons why tertiary sources aren’t any good for academia. Academia may have something to learn about technology, and maybe even Wiki technology, but that still far from having any use of Wikipedia as a product.

Kim_Bruning 5y ago
According to the paper we're discussing, Wikipedia clearly has a measurable effect on science, so either these researchers did their statistics wrong, or you know something they don't. ;-) I had really hoped that wikis would have been used more often for science. The wiki process seems to align pretty well with the process of scientific publication and peer review. Wikipedia didn't go this road, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lost_functionalities#Ability_to_establish_priority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lost_functionalities... But it seems others apparently did! https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_User_Group https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_User_Group
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > According to the paper we're discussing, Wikipedia clearly has a measurable effect on science, so either these researchers did their statistics wrong, or you know something they don't. ;-) “Has a measurable impact on science” and “is part of a category of things to which academia aa a whole has a negative response” are not, even approximately, mutually exclusive so, no, the dichotomy you try to draw is quite false.
  - Kim_Bruning 5y ago
    I do agree that tertiary sources are what they are (upsides and downsides) I was mostly responding to "but that still far from having any use of Wikipedia as a product" ; which I think might be overstating your case just a little.