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Wikipedia is fine for looking up information about chemical compounds, see what the flag of a given country looks like, read about some physics, maths, hardware

Wikipedia is fine for looking up information about chemical compounds, see what the flag of a given country looks like, read about some physics, maths, hardware-related information and other things which have not yet been politicised. Anything which has been politicised - and that category is getting bigger and bigger - should be read with a critical [1] lens, filtering out the politics which often makes its way into the articles. Whether it is an "Analysis" section based on critical theory which suddenly appears in articles about cartoon characters or myopic reporting on historical events, Wikipedia shows its lack of resistance against concerted attempts to inject ideology into its pages. It is a modern example the tragedy of the commons where people with an ideological axe to grind don't care that they are destroying the reputation of the medium by abusing it for their own political purposes. Just like the medium of email was almost brought to its knees by spammers who cared only for their own profits, the medium of "news" - NNTP - was brought to its knees by a combination of the "eternal September" [2] and the explosion of feed sizes caused by "pirates" (ab)using NNTP to distribute large binaries in the bin groups, so now Wikipedia has fallen victim to zealous editors "colonising" "their" subjects, not allowing any edits which go against their own ideology. [1] really critical, not "critical theory" critical [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September (using Wikipedia to point out Wikipedia is biased)

_lettucehead 5y ago
Re [1] - critical is a word.
- the_third_wave 5y ago
  It is. It has a specific meaning which can be found in printed dictionaries from a few years ago. While language evolves and words can gain new meanings in time this process has been radically sped up in the last few years with the emergence of a multitude of "critical" theories into the public discourse - critical race theory being the one most often mentioned but there are many more. What these all have in common is that they are off-shoots of Critical Theory [1] which Encyclopaedia Britannica describes as [a] Marxist-inspired movement in social and political philosophy originally associated with the work of the Frankfurt School. Drawing particularly on the thought of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, critical theorists maintain that a primary goal of philosophy is to understand and to help overcome the social structures through which people are dominated and oppressed. One of the hallmarks of these "critical" theories is that they tend to use common words like "critical" to indicate different concepts [2] from those which these words actually mean, hence the distinction. The critical eye to be used should be the one following the concept outlined in §2.2 of the Oxford English Dictionary's description of the adjective critical: 2.2 Involving the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgement. ‘professors often find it difficult to encourage critical thinking amongst their students’ When words change their meaning in a natural way this is called language evolution. When this change is being pushed to serve an agenda it is called language revolution, or revolutionary language. That is why I made the distinction between a critical eye and an eye guided by critical theory. [1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/critical-theory https://www.britannica.com/topic/critical-theory [2] https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-critical/ https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-critical/

_lettucehead 5y ago

Re [1] - critical is a word.

the_third_wave 5y ago
It is. It has a specific meaning which can be found in printed dictionaries from a few years ago. While language evolves and words can gain new meanings in time this process has been radically sped up in the last few years with the emergence of a multitude of "critical" theories into the public discourse - critical race theory being the one most often mentioned but there are many more. What these all have in common is that they are off-shoots of Critical Theory [1] which Encyclopaedia Britannica describes as [a] Marxist-inspired movement in social and political philosophy originally associated with the work of the Frankfurt School. Drawing particularly on the thought of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, critical theorists maintain that a primary goal of philosophy is to understand and to help overcome the social structures through which people are dominated and oppressed. One of the hallmarks of these "critical" theories is that they tend to use common words like "critical" to indicate different concepts [2] from those which these words actually mean, hence the distinction. The critical eye to be used should be the one following the concept outlined in §2.2 of the Oxford English Dictionary's description of the adjective critical: 2.2 Involving the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgement. ‘professors often find it difficult to encourage critical thinking amongst their students’ When words change their meaning in a natural way this is called language evolution. When this change is being pushed to serve an agenda it is called language revolution, or revolutionary language. That is why I made the distinction between a critical eye and an eye guided by critical theory. [1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/critical-theory https://www.britannica.com/topic/critical-theory [2] https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-critical/ https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-critical/