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Bias in Wikipedia

why not address the specific biases, and solutions to them, in the discussion pages?

You don't think that the industrial production of falsehoods into wikipedia will have any propaganda value?

Do you think that he discussion pages are as viewed?
 
I think the point actually is that Phillip Cross is apparently not an individual. At 30 edits every day, "he" is either a group of people or he is unemployed and does nothing but edit Wikipedia articles.

Question is, which articles? Are they in certain categories. Because I can tell you that most people specialize. They don't just randomly run around editing, though there will always be some. There are some serious article creators/editors on Wiki, and take it very seriously. They also look at partisanship and many other aspects of an article.
 
Thirty edits a day would be easy as long as they are mostly fairly brief. Even assuming it's 4 hours of free time it's 8 minutes an edit.

It doesn't really matter. The beef is that a right winger can do this. The outrage!

Correcting a misspelled word is an edit.
 
Correcting a misspelled word is an edit.

True, but we don't know what the edits were. Nobody is going to quibble over changing a misspelled word, but that would be unbiased.
 
True, but we don't know what the edits were. Nobody is going to quibble over changing a misspelled word, but that would be unbiased.

I guess you missed my point. The number of edits can be deceiving.
 
I guess you missed my point. The number of edits can be deceiving.

I guess the point was slightly toward LowDown who said this was because of the guy's right wing politics. You can't tell a person's politics based on correcting a misspelled word.
 
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/



There seems, according to the blog, to be a campaign of disinformation opperating on Wikipedia.


I guess you missed my point. The number of edits can be deceiving.


True, but we don't know what the edits were. Nobody is going to quibble over changing a misspelled word, but that would be unbiased.




There was a really good article written about this whole situation recently.

https://wikipedia.fivefilters.org/

Edit: Also some of the edits can be seen here, they seem to be quite serious.
 
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You don't discuss the changes you want to make, first?

1, I think we should all be vey aware that the often primary source of "common knowledeg information" is being twisted by interest groups.

2, Given the status of Wikipedia, that of the go-to instant referance source, it may well be necessary to have some sort of governance which has a level of open democratic over sight of it.
 
So, a left wing historian is complaining that a right winger can edit Wikipedia articles. Nothing new about that. Left wingers don't think right wingers should have any voice at all in any media platform.

Nothing at all about specifics of the edits and how much truth there is to them. All you have to know is that Philip Cross is a right winger.

I believe the current GOP refers to their reality as "alternative truths".
 
1, I think we should all be vey aware that the often primary source of "common knowledeg information" is being twisted by interest groups.

2, Given the status of Wikipedia, that of the go-to instant referance source, it may well be necessary to have some sort of governance which has a level of open democratic over sight of it.

Tim the plumber:

To your second point. Is not imposing some type of governance upon an international Internet forum just as likely to impose a new set of biases upon Wikipedia rather than removing all the biases which may already exist in the Wikipedia model? The imposition of outside governance is likely to impose a new group of biases, based on officially sanctioned received-truth by the governing body being imposed on what is supposed to be a popular, peer-to-peer and non-governmental model of archiving and disseminating information and analysis.

A second question is who or what body would be mandated to exert governance on Wikipedia? Such a mandate would come with great power to influence global perceptions about almost everything we know, think we know and think about as a species. Thus the choice of governance is a potentially highly-charged political question. Is such a desire to impose governance responsible prudence? Or is this a conscious or unconscious echoing of a vested interest to attempt a forced-enclosure of a public common space which is challenging the received informational orthodoxy of the powerful? Is this call one for better practices or is it a veiled bid to silence other popular points of view from being championed, by the bodies and networks with political power, in an attempt to muzzle utterances popular which question the validity of received and sanctioned outlooks? Is this a demand for good management or is it the seductive call from witting and unwitting agents of orthodoxy to stifle a powerful popular informational vehicle from being allowed to question the sacred cows of power?

Cheers.
Evilroddy.
 
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1, I think we should all be vey aware that the often primary source of "common knowledeg information" is being twisted by interest groups.

2, Given the status of Wikipedia, that of the go-to instant referance source, it may well be necessary to have some sort of governance which has a level of open democratic over sight of it.

more regulation instead of social morals for free?
 
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/



There seems, according to the blog, to be a campaign of disinformation opperating on Wikipedia.

Wiki is not a valid source of information and it's obvious why that is. Anything potentially controversial, political, or of a subject matter that can be used as a vehicle for disinformation should be avoided. For information on things insignificant to such matters, it's probably fine. For example, you could probably trust that a wiki about Wilt Chamberlain will be fairly accurate, but a wiki about Alex Jones of infowars will not be. A wiki about fire ants could be trusted, but a wiki about firearms not so much.

And, lo and behold, I just pulled this quote from the Alex Jones wiki: "His website, Infowars.com, is a conspiracy theories and fake news website."

If you watch or listen to his show on a regular basis, you know that it's very much NOT fake news. In fact, it's so real and disruptive to the fake narratives of the MSM that that is why they want to shut infowars down so bad - because it's exposing truth in the face of lies. If it was really fake news they wouldn't care so much about it now would they?
 
Tim the plumber:

To your second point. Is not imposing some type of governance upon an international Internet forum just as likely to impose a new set of biases upon Wikipedia rather than removing all the biases which may already exist in the Wikipedia model? The imposition of outside governance is likely to impose a new group of biases, based on officially sanctioned received-truth by the governing body being imposed on what is supposed to be a popular, peer-to-peer and non-governmental model of archiving and disseminating information and analysis.

A second question is who or what body would be mandated to exert governance on Wikipedia? Such a mandate would come with great power to influence global perceptions about almost everything we know, think we know and think about as a species. Thus the choice of governance is a potentially highly-charged political question. Is such a desire to impose governance responsible prudence? Or is this a conscious or unconscious echoing of a vested interest to attempt a forced-enclosure of a public common space which is challenging the received informational orthodoxy of the powerful? Is this call one for better practices or is it a veiled bid to silence other popular points of view from being championed, by the bodies and networks with political power, in an attempt to muzzle utterances popular which question the validity of received and sanctioned outlooks? Is this a demand for good management or is it the seductive call from witting and unwitting agents of orthodoxy to stifle a powerful popular informational vehicle from being allowed to question the sacred cows of power?

Cheers.
Evilroddy.

I understand that it would have to be done in a very very careful way but there does appear to be a need to have some sort of limit to the ability for interest groups/lobbyists/big business to slant it. The ability to remake somebody else's history for example is right out surely?
 
Wiki has been hijacked for a long time... mostly by big business interests. It's a good source for getting a primer on topics but then you really must dig deeper elsewhere.
 
Wiki is not a valid source of information and it's obvious why that is. Anything potentially controversial, political, or of a subject matter that can be used as a vehicle for disinformation should be avoided. For information on things insignificant to such matters, it's probably fine. For example, you could probably trust that a wiki about Wilt Chamberlain will be fairly accurate, but a wiki about Alex Jones of infowars will not be. A wiki about fire ants could be trusted, but a wiki about firearms not so much.

And, lo and behold, I just pulled this quote from the Alex Jones wiki: "His website, Infowars.com, is a conspiracy theories and fake news website."

If you watch or listen to his show on a regular basis, you know that it's very much NOT fake news. In fact, it's so real and disruptive to the fake narratives of the MSM that that is why they want to shut infowars down so bad - because it's exposing truth in the face of lies. If it was really fake news they wouldn't care so much about it now would they?

There you have the problem;

You think you can trust it on fine art. Why?

How would you go about hyping up the value of a particular painter? You might have some of their work brought cheap.....
 

I understand that it would have to be done in a very very careful way but there does appear to be a need to have some sort of limit to the ability for interest groups/lobbyists/big business to slant it. The ability to remake somebody else's history for example is right out surely?

Tim the plumber:

"Somebody else's history?" People own history and have proprietorial control over it? No one owns history, not even their own life stories which intersect with so many other life stories. People are constantly examining and revising history all the time. The same is true for almost any subject in the arts, sciences and the whole corpus of human knowledge. The idea that one or several powerful groups can expropriate history and can be allowed to enclose it in order to claim it as their own is anathema to me and I hope to many others here.

Wikipedia is just one source for knowledge and interpretation of that knowledge; one source from a wide spectrum of many, many sources. If it is systematically biased in certain areas, then that slanting will become apparent if one conducts even a modest amount of comparative analysis using other sources. The problem is that people in the modern right-now world want instant understanding without doing the work to earn that wisdom. They want one-stop-shopping at fast-food-for-thought brain-burger joints as a pathway to better understanding and they want the knowledge pre-digested and pre-analysed for their convenience and their lack of time. They want wisdom-lite and they want it now! That is the root of this problem, not the back-room editing decisions made by one group of editors over the content of one source among many.

Laziness of the readers is the problem here, not the biases of editors of sources whose opposing biases in the market-place of free exchange of ideas should cancel each other out with a little research and critical thinking. People are disengaging from their own educations and their responsibility to pursue life-long-learning as a prerequisite for gaining wisdom and they want to outsource the reading and thinking they're supposed to be doing themselves to others in order to save time and effort. That dependence on outsourced thought and interpretation is the real culprit here for it makes people and societies vulnerable to manipulation, not the editorial decisions of one source among many.

Fix the lazy people who can be easily suckered and leave the diversity of sources unchecked by the heavy hand of "governance" or we will likely see lots of digital book burnings, demands for coercive enforcement of certain types of recieved wisdom or thought and the imposition of a straight-jacket of intellectual orthodoxy by the powerful few upon the vulnerable many. That is not cool.

Cheers.
Evilroddy.
 
I just checked Wikipedia for the MH17, and no surprise, it contained only the official version. Not a word about the early photos, videos and testimony that was taken down quickly.

Wiki is a propaganda organ in that case. It did not mention the Russian radar record, it did not question how and why the flight was redirected and given a lower altitude, and not a picture of the early photos.

When everything the American people believe is false, the success of propaganda efforts will become apparent.

Go Goebbels.
 
Tim the plumber:

"Somebody else's history?" People own history and have proprietorial control over it? No one owns history, not even their own life stories which intersect with so many other life stories. People are constantly examining and revising history all the time. The same is true for almost any subject in the arts, sciences and the whole corpus of human knowledge. The idea that one or several powerful groups can expropriate history and can be allowed to enclose it in order to claim it as their own is anathema to me and I hope to many others here.

Wikipedia is just one source for knowledge and interpretation of that knowledge; one source from a wide spectrum of many, many sources. If it is systematically biased in certain areas, then that slanting will become apparent if one conducts even a modest amount of comparative analysis using other sources. The problem is that people in the modern right-now world want instant understanding without doing the work to earn that wisdom. They want one-stop-shopping at fast-food-for-thought brain-burger joints as a pathway to better understanding and they want the knowledge pre-digested and pre-analysed for their convenience and their lack of time. They want wisdom-lite and they want it now! That is the root of this problem, not the back-room editing decisions made by one group of editors over the content of one source among many.

Laziness of the readers is the problem here, not the biases of editors of sources whose opposing biases in the market-place of free exchange of ideas should cancel each other out with a little research and critical thinking. People are disengaging from their own educations and their responsibility to pursue life-long-learning as a prerequisite for gaining wisdom and they want to outsource the reading and thinking they're supposed to be doing themselves to others in order to save time and effort. That dependence on outsourced thought and interpretation is the real culprit here for it makes people and societies vulnerable to manipulation, not the editorial decisions of one source among many.

Fix the lazy people who can be easily suckered and leave the diversity of sources unchecked by the heavy hand of "governance" or we will likely see lots of digital book burnings, demands for coercive enforcement of certain types of recieved wisdom or thought and the imposition of a straight-jacket of intellectual orthodoxy by the powerful few upon the vulnerable many. That is not cool.

Cheers.
Evilroddy.

If us humans had all the time in the world to assign to all questions in the world then your point would be 100% right.

But we don't.

So we have to put a level of faith into our instutions. All of us do.

So we need to make that faith justified by decent management of those instutions. Unlucky.

It will never be perfect in opperation but that's how life is.
 

There you have the problem;

You think you can trust it on fine art. Why?

How would you go about hyping up the value of a particular painter? You might have some of their work brought cheap.....

Right, it's really up to you to decide on a case to case basis if it's a subject matter worthy to someone of tainting, but you get the picture - an artist wiki is questionable if you are seeking monetary values for that artist's work...
Bottom line Wiki cannot be trusted for any content that could have any bearing on things happening in the present.
 
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Right, it's really up to you to decide on a case to case basis if it's a subject matter worthy to someone of tainting, but you get the picture - an artist wiki is questionable if you are seeking monetary values for that artist's work...
Bottom line Wiki cannot be trusted for any content that could have any bearing on things happening in the present.

Do yourself a favor and don't ever quote anything you read on Wiki anything- wikipedia or wikileaks!

Let me quote Trump here just for laughs!

"It could be a fat guy sitting on a couch"! LOL!
 
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