This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Wikipedia is deciding whether to discourage use of Fox News as a source in articles specifically for politics and science. As usual, please do not comment there unless you know your way around a Wikipedia discussion and can participate while following community standards.
In context: Wikipedia periodically holds discussions about the reliability of sources. It has a five-level ranking system for sources:
generally reliable
no consensus (= "we couldn't decide")
generally unreliable (= "usually don't use")
deprecated (= "never use")
blacklisted (= "never use", enforced in the wiki software)
The current discussion is about Fox News when it talks about the two topics of politics and science - for those topics, it is currently listed as "no consensus". For other topics, it is "generally reliable", and that status is not up for discussion here. Fox's talk shows are also listed separately as "deprecated" (= "never use"), and that status is also not up for discussion. There are 23 prior discussions listed about the reliability of Fox News for politics and science, starting in 2009 (although there may be more). This is the latest one.
Why this is relevant here: Wikipedia is a widely-used reference on the Internet (top ten websites globally, by number of visits) and Fox News is a well-known news source. The debate on whether Fox News is a reliable source for science and politics is thus likely to be of interest on this website.
Moving to the discussion itself: many points were raised of varying quality. There's quite a bit of back-and-forth and it's certainly not one-sided.
My take: while Fox is certainly useful for presenting facts that other sources don't, it's made factually incorrect claims that remain uncorrected. Those would make it difficult to use as the only source for a claim, and if you can't do that, what's the point. It can still be used for research while writing articles, like every other website on the Internet. As for the incorrect claims, various editors compiled lists of these; here's an 18-item list. I checked a few. Some were weak; some were worrying. For example, item 10 quotes from this Fox article: "PolitiFact appears to be shielding President Biden and Vice President Harris from criticism over their past rhetoric expressing distrust in the coronavirus vaccine during the Trump administration". Here's the PolitiFact page. It shows that "expressing distrust in the coronavirus vaccine during the Trump administration" is a misleading construction: Biden and Harris repeatedly emphasize that they would take a vaccine approved by public health professionals, but would not trust the sole word of Trump. Fox phrases it as during the administration, they expressed distrust in the vaccine, in general, but this is simply not what they did. Why that's bad: one could write a sentence in an article with that claim, and cite it to the Fox article, and that would be incorrect. The Fox article was published July 2021 and has not been corrected.
My take, part 2: The optics might not be great, but at least Fox still counts as reliable for everything but politics and science. I don't think they're managing the optics enough. Of course, it's a decentralized and anti-hierarchical community, so the odds they'd organically do something like that are low.
Where we go from here: Editors are requesting that the discussion be "closed" by a neutral third-party editor (or panel of such editors), and that may happen sometime soon. Editors are still adding comments to the main discussion in the meantime. The "close" can be appealed to the community, but if the closer does a decent job this is unlikely.
My credentials: I've edited Wikipedia for a while. I usually don't touch the politics side much.
Wikipedia is a nakedly political organisation and has been for some time. "Made factually incorrect claims that remain uncorrected" is not the criteria being used by Wikipedia - if it was, then you'd be unable to rely on any mainstream/"reliable" source of information. I have a long enough memory that I can recall discussions during the gamergate period where wikipedia editors made it clear that even if there was direct proof that a reliable source was lying, the reliable source was to be the viewpoint presented in the article no matter how much evidence there was to the contrary. Wikipedia has already been politicised, and has been for a long time - I would prefer it if they were just honest and flat out said that Fox was being banned for political reasons.
While I can appreciate where you're coming from, by no means can the linked discussion be described as having a monolithic point of view. It would look very different if Wikipedia's community were as polarized as you suggest.
And the easiest way to fix any other issues you see is to do it yourself or convince someone to. I would like to make a standing offer to anyone reading this, that I will coach you through fixing any "political lean" problem of the sort you're alluding to. (Of course, a writeup should get posted here during/afterwards.)
I don't think that "do it yourself or convince someone to" is actually going to be possible - if I tried to make an earnest, good faith effort to fix the inaccuracies and politically slanted representation of the articles that concern me, I would just be banned within short order. And while I appreciate the offer, I do not believe you can actually meaningfully do anything to correct the "political lean" of the sort that I'm alluding to. Are you going to single-handedly remove a bunch of admins and institute sweeping reforms to the culture of Wikipedia? I don't see any other way to make articles like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Tower_meeting present a balanced and accurate picture of events as opposed to what they show now.
Have you actually tried editing Wikipedia before? Because this does not match with my experience. If you're actually operating in good faith and within Wikipedia's policies, you're not going to get banned. Bans are for people who are clearly "not there to build an encyclopedia" (e.g. spammers), or editors who chronically or egregiously disregard Wikipedia's policies. You might get reverted a lot, which can be very annoying, but I think you'd be surprised how much progress you can make in getting changes through if you politely argue your case on the talk page with reference to relevant policies.
the_last_pigeon is right - if you're patient and competent, you could absolutely single-handedly ameliorate some of the bias in an article on a culture-war topic if you sat down and tried. I say this as someone who has actually done this. (Granted, it wasn't fun having to patiently deal with what clearly seemed to me to be ideologically motivated bad faith arguments and isolated demands for rigor, which is why, for my own sanity, I mostly edit non-CW articles.)
This is the rub. Most people don't have the time or the patience to learn the intricacies of Wikipedia's byzantine network of policies, pseudo-policies, and unofficial-but-not-really best practices, all of which are referred to exclusively in jargon and wielded as weapons to revert or block even good-faith edits. Editors especially on influential articles are basically lawyers in all but name, and the result of trying to work against their interests is the same as someone with no legal training trying to out-lawyer a lawyer. With enough self-education and persistence, you might have a chance. Otherwise, it's hopeless. But of course, to those on the inside, with the arcane knowledge and the community recognition, it seems so easy! Practically effortless!
Most people inclined to contribute would have no idea what to do if their change was reverted, and either give up at that point or just change it back.
There's some truth to this, but I don't think the community is as uniformly nasty as you're making it out to be. There are plenty of editors who will patiently try to point you toward relevant policy or help you through a point of misunderstanding. (See, for example, the saintly editors who answer newbie questions at "The Teahouse".)
Also, while I would never admit to holding this opinion in an on-wiki discussion, I secretly think that the relatively high barrier for entry to making non-trivial contributions to Wikipedia is actually a crucial ingredient to its success, in that it filters out would-be editors who are insufficiently smart or diligent. This is why I cringe a little every time Wikimedia developers try to roll out more glossy, simplified, WYSIWYG interfaces. I'm not sure I want more people coming in to the project who aren't smart enough to use wikitext (the markup language that constitutes the "source code" of all articles and discussion pages).
As it is, Wikipedia kind of does feel like a community of scholars. But the more accessible it becomes, the more it's going to come to resemble the YouTube comments section of yore. Case in point, a while back the WMF did an experiment where they actively solicited feedback from readers of Wikipedia articles. Their theory was that Wikipedia needs more voices (and this continues to be an overarching theme of their work), and that a) this user feedback would help existing editors identify areas for improvement for articles, and b) users who are induced to leave feedback can also be induced to go fix the problems they identified, and thus graduate from reader to editor. The experiment was a failure, because the signal to noise ratio of the reader comments was pretty abysmal. You can actually still download a dataset of some of this feedback and it's pretty funny to read. Here's a random sample of comments on the article "Apple Inc.":
(Reminder that there are a lot of sub-100 IQ people out in the world, but you probably don't have much interaction with them because you exist in a bubble of above-average intelligence friends, family members, and coworkers.)
More options
Context Copy link
There's also the sneaking suspicion that the layers of policies, pseudo-policies, and unofficial-but-not-really best practices are just window-dressing disguising outright bias. If for any given issue a wiki-lawyer can use the policies (etc) in different ways to come to opposite conclusions, that's exactly what's going on.
I used to see a lot of this 'rules lawyering' back when I played Dungeons & Dragons as a teen, and from reading the discussion page it seems that the exact same personality types are still at it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This reminds me of debates I've had in the past with religious (Jewish) people, after they found out I was a non-believer. I used to try to show them some contradiction within the bible, or how something in it is just factually incorrect, and the reply would be some reference to the Talmud or whatever that supposedly resolves the issue. I've learned not to try to beat people at their own games - it's their lives, I will never beat them at it. They're still wrong, but surrendering frame is not the right way to go about it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link