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Comment on Elon Musk Offers to Also Ruin Wikipedia

It is an encyclopedia. It is not a place for subjective content. Just because you keep getting your opinion edits rolled back does not mean that that's a bad thing. A Wikipedia page SHOULD be filled only with objective facts. Again, it is an encyclopedia.

Also, you can trust that a given page is not poisoned by checking the sources yourself. They're all right there at the bottom. Anything without a citation can be ignored but most things of substance are going to have a citation, because an encyclopedia is a place in which to collect objective facts with sources to back them up.

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Maven@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I didn’t say subjective content, I said content about something subjective. Wikipedia contains a wealth of “one proposed explanation for”, or “a common theory is” on any event or phenomenon, (of which many are covered). Objective descriptions of subjective matters. And the choice of which to use, which perspectives to include, is a form of bias. The reporting of which proposed theories for causes of historical events or meanings for literature are included, and which are left out, is a form of bias. One that cannot be seen through simply by “checking the sources”. An article written with a slant is going to include sources that agree with its viewpoint and not include sources that do not, and checking the sources is going to show you those viewpoints, and not the ones that were left out.

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- Hobo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  Also, again, there are absolutely editors who will just wordlessly revert objective, factual edits, with clear, proper citations from accepted primary sources…
  
  That might be the misunderstanding. Primary sources are not directly allowed on wikipedia without very careful consideration that no analysis was done. Wikipedia article are, and should be, mostly derived from secondary sources to avoid bias. The Wikipedia page does a pretty good job of describing the guideline:
  
  …wikipedia.org/…/Wikipedia:No_original_research
  
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- skulblaka@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Alright, you do actually make fair points here that I hadn't taken into consideration. I still stand by my statement but now I see that you aren't really necessarily disagreeing with me. Guess I'm going to have to start checking the edit history as well as the sources now...
  
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