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Wikipedia is a good source for certain kinds of information. If you ask it about anything political it's going to be from a certain slant and the most informati
by Whoppertime 1y ago
Wikipedia is a good source for certain kinds of information. If you ask it about anything political it's going to be from a certain slant and the most informative part of the page will be the Talk page which explains what people would like on the page that isn't there, or shouldn't be on the page but is
- gcanyon 1y agoCites please. Seriously, if there is a chronically-biased Wikipedia page I would very much like to know about it.
- BrtByte 1y agoCompared to opaque algorithms and AI-generated summaries, Wikipedia still feels like a relatively honest mess
- savef 1y agoWhat examples of this are there? I've usually found Wikipedia to be quite equal opportunity, well rounded, and factual. They have their NPOV[1] policy, and seem impressively unbiased to me, given the various divisive situations they have to try to cover. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_v...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- crote 1y agoJust because the policies are supposed to be neutral doesn't mean the resulting work is guaranteed to be truly neutral. Whether something is definitely a fact or an opinion can be very fluid, and you can play a lot with the amount of attention each viewpoint gets. Even a "neutral" article can end up reading completely differently when one viewpoint is very detailed and described in a fact-like way, while another only gets a short summary which reads as if it is a fringe opinion. And even when you are trying to be neutral, it is incredibly hard to avoid your output from getting shaped by the culture you are surrounded with.
- straydusk 1y agoThen give an example
- slater 1y agoYou're unlikely to get one; these discussions are usually just a speedrun to that "which opinions, mfer?" goose meme
- synecdoche 1y agoAn example of this in biased media is that people or entities of one end of the political spectrum is almost always qualified as extreme in some way while those from the opposite end of the spectrum is almost never qualified as extreme, as if it were self evident that it is true. Hard to unsee once you know what to look for.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoIt's a very thin line to walk, and I don't think "true neutral" or "true unbiased" exists for the same reasons you mention. A newspaper may be neutral and stick to the facts, but if it simply chooses not to publish something, or it chooses to publish something as a byline instead of headline, it's already biased. There are organizations trying something else though; admittedly I got this through a promotion from a youtube channel, but Ground News [0] is a news aggregator that publishes news with many sources, including ownership, political affiliation, publishing type (facts or opinions, neutral or entertaining), and even notes on which channels do and don't report on it, identifying media blind spots like "low coverage from right sources" or "low original coverage" to help people escape their bubbles and provide multiple perspectives on an issue. [0] https://ground.news/ https://ground.news/
- krmboya 1y agoThe editors mostly reference left-leaning media outlets when it comes to political topics, without providing a counterbalance from right-leaning sources, assuming it were a truth-seeking endeavor. As a non American this is very obvious to me. Even Reuters that was supposedly meant to be a non-biased media outlet is clearly left-leaning at this point
- mafuy 1y agoThe Right-leaning has a relevant influence on media because some of its supporters are affluent and it is in their financial interest. Ex: Bezos bought a newspaper. The same is far less often the case for the Left-leaning. There are few "land and factory owners" that are part of a pro-worker movement, simply because it would hurt them (or at least that's what they truly believe). Accordingly, the average media experienced a shift to the right, but not to the left. To be neutral, one thus has to look left of the average of what the media report.
- straydusk 1y agoJesus Christ Reuters is left-leaning lmao in what universe
- guelo 1y agoLabeling all media that isn't rabid right wing partisan as "left wing" is unconvincing.
- EE84M3i 1y agoReminds me of "reality has a well known liberal bias"
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoOr "anything left of right is left-leaning", I suppose. It's the Overton window and the steady decline of moderation; centrists are wrong no matter who you ask ("pick a side you coward", "silence is complicity"), moderate Republicans are RINOs, Republican In Name Only [0], and their disloyalty to the Party is shamed. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_in_name_only https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_in_name_only
- will4274 1y agoI don't know how much you know about the Washington Redskins naming controversy. There's little doubt that "redskin" is a slur today - Native Americans say so, and it's kind of up to them. The status in the 17th and 18th century is a bit less clear IMHO. Wikipedia says (or said, I guess - I haven't checked) that it unambiguously *was* a slur then too. As evidence, it cites a study of 17th century literature that notes redskins were more likely to be villains than heros in a small sample of 80 books and a diary entry about a sign outside a small town that said "Indian / Redskin scalps - $1" or some such. I don't recall the details. The point is there wasn't one cited source that showed redskin specifically was a slur, only general evidence that white settlers were racist against Native Americans. Clear WP:SYNTH violation. Tried to make my own changes, got immediately reverted. Tried to start on the talk page, got totally filibustered by two editors who has the page and a hundred other racism adjacent pages on their watchlist and whose edit history was basically just those handful of pages. Started reading about internal wikipedia boards I could appeal to. Stopped and logged off. Once you start noticing things like that and start double checking, you find such minor distortions in a lot of political adjacent Wikipedia pages. Another good example is to grab five super murderous left wing dictators and five super murderous right wing dictators and read the summary section. Use a pen or a highlighter and classify each sentence as positive, negative, or neutral.
- nl 1y ago> Wikipedia says (or said, I guess - I haven't checked) that it unambiguously was a slur then too. It doesn't seem to say this - there's quite a nuanced discussion about whether or not it was a slur during that time period[1]: > The term redskin underwent pejoration through the 19th to early 20th centuries and in contemporary dictionaries of American English it is labeled as offensive, disparaging, or insulting.. > Documents from the colonial period indicate that the use of "red" as an identifier by Native Americans for themselves emerged in the context of Indian-European diplomacy in the southeastern region of North America, before later being adopted by Europeans and becoming a generic label for all Native Americans.... > In the debate over the meaning of the word "redskin", team supporters frequently cite a paper by Ives Goddard, a Smithsonian Institution senior linguist and curator emeritus, who asserts that the term was a direct translation of words used by Native Americans to refer to themselves and was benign in its original meaning ... > Sociologist James V. Fenelon makes a more explicit statement that Goddard's article is poor scholarship, given that the conclusion of the origin and usage by Natives as "entirely benign" is divorced from the socio-historical realities of hostility and racism from which it emerged. I think your summary saying the "status in the 17th and 18th century is a bit less clear" is fair, but I think the Wikipeida article outlines that lack of clarity too. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Redskins_name_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Redskins_name_contr...
- ljsprague 1y agoRace and IQ stuff.
- hnpolicestate 1y agoCurrent geopolitical stuff too. Intelligence agencies use Wikipedia articles as propaganda tools. The Ukraine War articles are factually incorrect. To be expected with so much at stake.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoYeah I try to avoid pages on Ukraine and Israel, although admittely they don't shun away from the factual things that Israel did. I bet there's a lot of well-paid organizations keeping a sharp eye on a lot of more sensitive pages. And of course famous people's PR people.
- creatonez 1y agoYou're mad Wikipedia doesn't parrot thoroughly debunked eugenics arguments?
- ljsprague 1y agoThe fact that you jumped to "eugenics" proves my point.
- creatonez 1y agoThe fact that you can't correctly identify debunked claims about a connection between race and IQ as inherently eugenicist talking points and instead quickly resorted to obfuscation proves my point.
- joenot443 1y agoThis is a pretty severe leap of logic; respectfully it seems to me like both of you are sort of talking past each other here. Why don’t you just say what you mean? Not everything is about proving points or “winning”, it’s okay to just have honest discussion.
- Levitz 1y agoThe article for Gamergate is basically an entire page ultimately sourcing from games journalism outlets when it was explicitly about calling out games journalism and collusion in the industry. And being fair, if there's one weakness in a site which relies on several sources agreeing on something it surely is when those sources are colluding on something, but the end result is a page rife with misinformation. This is prevalent in culture wars stuff, Keffals article "graciously" fails to mention how she frequently lied and instigated vast amounts of harassment towards herself or how she basically spent the GoFundMe money she campaigned for on heroin. If the media spins a narrative, Wikipedia doesn't really have a counter to that in any way.
- fishmicrowaver 1y agoYeah check out the Talk archives for the Human Anus page. It's like 20 years of hole fetishists and people trying to upload their own.
- SlowTao 1y agoIt is 7:29am here and already this is enough internet for the day.
- bawolff 1y agoI always found the warning text for people who upload dick pics pretty amusing https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Nopenis https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Nopenis
- aspenmayer 1y agoIs there some kind of automated NSFW/nudity detector that runs against Wikipedia/Wikimedia uploads? One would think there would be at their scale, I just don’t actually know. I saw your user page the other day while looking at a proposal to have a .onion URL for Wikipedia, and I thought that I’d seen you around here, and figure you’re as good a person as any to ask.
- bawolff 1y agoNot as far as i know, i think things are just manual review. NSFW images on Wikimedia tends to be a very hot button issue when it comes to Wikimedia politics. There obviously some cases where such images are needed, and there is a lot of debate on where the line should be drawn (or if it should be drawn at all). Wikipedia is traditionally very anti-censorship in any form. Fun fact - Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales lost a bunch of his user rights when he went on a deletion spree of classical art work containing nudity. There is an automated filter for child sexual abuse images. Its not public what the procedures related to it is, but i assume if it goes off the fbi gets called.
- aspenmayer 1y ago
- stopthebullshit 1y ago[flagged]
- noman-land 1y agoGot any notable examples? All the history is publc so it should be easy to link to, presumably.
- adzm 1y agoPeople say this about political topics on Wikipedia often but rarely if ever provide examples.
- idle_zealot 1y agoAnother case of the well-documented left-wing bias of reality.
- bad_username 1y agoNot only politics, also articles on philosophy and history are very hard to trust, due to the slant.
- tim333 1y ago>If you ask it about anything political it's going to be from a certain slant I'm not sure if there's anything else out there that's better at giving a fairly neutral summary of political controversies? It reminds me of the Churchill quote "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"
- Gareth321 1y agoGround.news is quite good. It provides a bias meter next to publications, and offers a blind spot tool so one doesn't only see one side of a report or discussion. Wikipedia doesn't have such a counter-measure. Most of the political pages have been entirely captured and there are no mechanisms promote neutrality. On the contrary. WikiProjects, Arbitration Committees, and Administrators are all very entrenched positions and once the scales tipped towards a left wing American political bias, there is no way to tip them back.
- rc_mob 1y agostupid reality and its left wing bias
- apparent 1y agoThis cute phrase was much more believable before Democrats were so insistently wrong about so many important things during COVID (lab leak theory, efficacy of cloth mask mandates, arresting surfers on the beach, natural versus vaccine immunity).
- apparent 1y agoI see that others disagree. Perhaps you can share which of the items I mentioned you disagree with?
- voldacar 1y agoA quantitative look which might interest you: https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/is-wikipedia-politically-biased https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/is-wikipedia-politically-...