It’s worth checking out the contribs and talk regarding articles that can be divisive. People acting with ulterior motives and inserting their own bias are fairly common. They also make regular corrections for this reason. I still place more faith and trust in Wikipedia as an info source more than most news articles
Comment on Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors
SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world 3 weeks agoIt’s funny that MAGA and ml tankies both think that Wikipedia is the devil.
NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 3 weeks ago
Wikipedia has an imperfect process, but it is open to review and you can see how the sausage is made. It isn’t perfect, but the best we have.
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Luv u Wiki
devolution@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
MAGA and tankies are pretty much the same except MAGA votes while tankies whine.
kameecoding@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Red hat vs red coat fascists
mistermodal@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
The site engages in holocaust denial, apologia for wehrmacht, and directly collaborates with western governments. Jimmy Wales is a far-right libertarian. It might be a reliable source of information for reinforcing your own worldview, but it’s not a project to create the world’s encyclopedia. Something like that would at least be less stingy about what a “notable sandwich” is.
SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world 3 weeks ago
Citation needed.
mistermodal@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Your mother.
SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world 3 weeks ago
Long dead and completely unreliable while alive.
shalafi@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Show me. That’s a simple request.
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
As a Wikipedia editor I can comfirm - we regularly say that napalm sticking to objects in water is POV. I do it at least twice a week. I’ll try making a bot to do it automatically so I’ll have more time for holocaust denial.
buttnugget@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I have been editing Wikipedia since 2004, and my very first edit was to deny a clearly POV edit to a sticky napalm article. It’s kind of a point of pride for me.
mistermodal@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
As a fellow Wikipedia editor I have confirmed that you are in fact the intern who kept making edits directly from the Capitol without even using a VPN.
I_Clean_Here@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Ah yes, you were personally insulted and now discredit the biggest collection of knowledge the world has ever had. Fuck you, you fool.
mistermodal@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
WRONG. You are thinking of the Quran 🙏🏻
ripcord@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
No it doesn’t
mistermodal@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
This is a very low-quality reply. Try making more high-quality replies to contribute to discussions here on Lemmy. Thanks!
ripcord@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Try not making shit up
DMCMNFIBFFF@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
FWIW,
wp:Talk:Napalm#Burns_under_water?
wp:Talk:Burn/Archive 1#Burn pain
This page was last edited on 20 February 2024, at 12:50 (UTC).
Wales defended his comments in response to backlash from supporters of Gamergate, saying that “it isn’t about what I believe. Gg is famous for harassment. Stop and think about why.”[125]
…
Wales labeled himself a libertarian, qualifying his remark by referring to the Libertarian Party as “lunatics”, and citing “freedom, liberty, basically individual rights, that idea of dealing with other people in a manner that is not initiating force against them” as his guiding principles.[10] In a 2014 tweet, he expressed support for open borders.[104]
…
Wales has lived in London since 2012,[146] and became a British citizen in 2019.[147]
mistermodal@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Yeah endless waves of attempted edits to tone down war crimes is the tip of the iceberg, a subject I will circle back to in the coming days. This is a bizarre comment on several levels. So is he less right-wing because he is British? It doesn’t matter if you enjoy particular sects of Ayn Rand worshippers, it makes no difference to me. The Gamergate business is the typical damage control response you see out of any site owner amenable to Nazis. Exactly like reddit admins. “We don’t take sides against the right-wing ☝️🤓 they broke site rules fair and square.” Typical bs. Nerds think everyone else is as singlemindedly gullible as them, invariably. Unfortunately the legal system demands people adhere to it
Ulvain@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
So very much on-script though
Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com 3 weeks ago
Tankies don’t think Wikipedia is the devil. You could call me a tankie from my political views, and I very much appreciate Wikipedia and use it on a daily basis. That is not to say it should be used uncritically and unaware of its biases.
Because of the way Wikipedia works, it requires sourcing claims with references, which is a good thing. The problem comes when you have an overwhelming majority of available references in one topic being heavily biased in one particular direction for whatever reason.
For example, when doing research on geopolitically charged topics, you may expect an intrinsic bias in the source availability. Say you go to China and create an open encyclopedia, Wikipedia style, and make an article about the Tiananmen Square events. You may expect that, if the encyclopedia is primarily edited by Chinese users using Chinese language sources, given the bias in the availability of said sources, the article will end up portraying the bias that the sources suffer from.
This is the criticism of tankies towards Wikipedia: in geopolitically charged topics, western sources are quick to unite. We saw it with the genocide in Palestine, where most media regardless of supposed ideological allegiance was reporting on the “both sides are bad” style at best, and outright Israeli propaganda at worst.
So, the point is not to hate on Wikipedia, Wikipedia is as good as an open encyclopedia edited by random people can get. The problem is that if you don’t specifically incorporate filters to compensate for the ideological bias present in the demographic cohort of editors (white, young males of English-speaking countries) and their sources, you will end up with a similar bias in your open encyclopedia. This is why us tankies say that Wikipedia isn’t really that reliable when it comes to, e.g., the eastern block or socialist history.
DMCMNFIBFFF@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
One would think that leftists, socialists, communists, tankies, and/or others would come up with supplementary wikis such as Conservapedia or RationalWiki that are good.
and, FWIW:
Category:Wikidebates
en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Category:Wikidebates
e.g.
Is capitalism sustainable?
en.wikiversity.org/…/Is_capitalism_sustainable%3F
It’s sad how little news there is relatively little news in Wikinews ( en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page ).
Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com 3 weeks ago
supplementary wikis
We have them, e.g. ProleWiki, but good luck trying to explain to the average western Wikipedia user that for certain geopolitical topics they might be worth checking out and contrasted with Wikipedia. My problem isn’t the lack of alternatives, my problem is the anticommunist and pro-western bias in Wikipedia in geopolitically charged topics.
DMCMNFIBFFF@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Hmmm,
Let’s see:
Wikipedia is an imperialist propaganda outlet and disinformation website presenting itself as an encyclopedia launched in 2001 by bourgeois libertarians Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Wikipedia is maintained by a predominantly white male population, of which about 1% are responsible for 80% of edits. It has also been linked to corporate and governmental manipulation and imperialist agendas, including the U.S. State Department, World Bank,[1] FBI, CIA, and New York Police Department.[2][3]
Wow. 😁🙂
and while I’m at it:
Wikipedia, is an online wiki-based encyclopedia hosted and owned by the non-profit organization Wikimedia Foundation and financially supported by grants from left-leaning foundations plus an aggressive annual online fundraising drive.[1] Big Pharma pushes its agenda and profits by paying anonymous editors to smear its opponents there, while others are moronic internet trolls who include teenagers and the unemployed.[2] As such, it projects a liberal—and, in some cases, even socialist, Communist, and Nazi-sympathizing—worldview, which is totally at odds with conservative reality and rationality.[3]
pw:Communist Party of Peru – Shining Path
The party organized its own militia, the People’s Guerrilla Army and claimed to have begun a protracted people’s war against the bourgeois government of Peru since 1980, with the intention of establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat.[1] Throughout its period of highest activity, the party frequently engaged in terrorist tactics, and has committed brutal and violent attacks on peasants, including children.[2] The class composition of the party consisted in mostly petty-bourgeois intellectuals, and the growth of the party was closely linked with student movements in universities.[3]
My problem isn’t the lack of alternatives, my problem is the anticommunist and pro-western bias in Wikipedia, the most used encyclopedia, in geopolitically charged topics.
and I suppose the supplements are a way, however the effectiveness/ineffectiveness.
username123@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
That instance is fucking bananas
scala@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
They are scared of facts.
OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
There’s a lot of problems with Wikipedia, but in my years editing there (I’m extended protected rank), I’ve come to terms that it’s about as good as it can be.
In all but one edit war, the better sourced team came out on top. Source quality discussion is also quite good. There’s a problem with from positive/negative tone in articles, and sometimes articles get away with bad sourcing before someone can correct it, but this is about as good as any information hub can get.
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Thank you for your service 🫡
SaraTonin@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I remeber an article form a decade or more ago which did some research and said that basically, yes there are inaccuracies on Wikipedia, and yes there are over-simplifications, but** no more than in any other encyclopaedia**. They argued that this meant that it should be considered equally valid as an academic resource.
markko@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Any chance you remember what that one edit war was about?
OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
It was about whether Bitcoin Cash was referred to as “Bcash” or not
markko@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Thank you very much!
I’m glad it was at least about something fairly trivial.
demonsword@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
There was a hilarious one in the human anus article, about the picture being used in said article
vin@lemmynsfw.com 3 weeks ago
And don’t forget the British-American bias. Hopefully the automated translation and adaptation that is being pursued by wikipedia helps to improve it.
Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
I remember in the past few years that I’ve had to switch to non-American or non-British versions of Wikipedia just in order to find the answer I was looking for.
We need to remind Americans and Britains that knowledge on Wikipedia doesn’t stop with their languages. We need to do a better job of gathering knowledge from non-English sources and translating those into English. Same goes vice versa for English sources and pages into languages that other people can understand.
There’s still a lot of work to be done with Wikipedia to make it truly a universal knowledge repository. But it is one of the best we have