4 ms·

I use Wikipedia a lot and will never, ever donate a single dollar unless there's radical changes (that we know we'll never happen). If there was a better altern

by gcau 4y ago

I use Wikipedia a lot and will never, ever donate a single dollar unless there's radical changes (that we know we'll never happen). If there was a better alternative to Wikipedia without all it's beaurocratic and managerial BS I would donate to it. Wikipedia is a lost cause now in that regard I think.

Akronymus 4y ago
I long stopped using wikipedia for anything that involves the media, is contemporary, is political or otherwise controversial, due to the sheer amount of bias because of the "reliable" sources rules, which simply don't reliably work for any of those. For the "hard" sciences they generally are pretty reliable.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  > or otherwise controversial I find that articles about political theories and movements are usually fairly good. Articles about history, especially the history of regions where nationalist movements are active, are another matter entirely. Those are political battlegrounds. They tend to have 10 or more archives of the talk page, indicating that the article is widely disputed or even "owned". Any article about the Middle East, for example, is heavily gatekept; I won't even try to fix punctuation on such articles, I treat them only as a source of links to more-reliable material.
  - Akronymus 4y ago
    Political theories, yeah I can see them having some rigor. For movements? Very much depends on what media sources think of them, because they are the "reliable sources". This gets even more pronounced when they have a conflict of interest, for example "This subset of media sources is engaging in behaviour that indicates a conflict of interest" easily gets you labelled as everything bad in the world by those very same outlets. Which then get cited as reliable sources, and through those citations other outlets start mirroring that and so on. Until the reliable sources are mostly in agreement and you can't do shit about it.

by gcau 4y ago

Akronymus 4y ago

I long stopped using wikipedia for anything that involves the media, is contemporary, is political or otherwise controversial, due to the sheer amount of bias because of the "reliable" sources rules, which simply don't reliably work for any of those. For the "hard" sciences they generally are pretty reliable.

denton-scratch 4y ago
> or otherwise controversial I find that articles about political theories and movements are usually fairly good. Articles about history, especially the history of regions where nationalist movements are active, are another matter entirely. Those are political battlegrounds. They tend to have 10 or more archives of the talk page, indicating that the article is widely disputed or even "owned". Any article about the Middle East, for example, is heavily gatekept; I won't even try to fix punctuation on such articles, I treat them only as a source of links to more-reliable material.
- Akronymus 4y ago
  Political theories, yeah I can see them having some rigor. For movements? Very much depends on what media sources think of them, because they are the "reliable sources". This gets even more pronounced when they have a conflict of interest, for example "This subset of media sources is engaging in behaviour that indicates a conflict of interest" easily gets you labelled as everything bad in the world by those very same outlets. Which then get cited as reliable sources, and through those citations other outlets start mirroring that and so on. Until the reliable sources are mostly in agreement and you can't do shit about it.