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I loved Wikipedia.
If you ask me the greatest achievement of humankind, something to give to aliens as an example of the best we could be, Wikipedia would be my pick. It's a reasonable approximation of the sum total of human knowledge, available to all for free. It's a Wonder of the Modern World.
...which means that when I call what's happened to it "sacrilege", I'm not exaggerating. It always had a bit of a bias issue, but early on that seemed fixable, the mere result of not enough conservatives being there and/or some of their ideas being objectively false. No longer. Rightists are actively purged*, adding conservative-media sources gets you auto-reverted**, and right-coded ideas get lumped into "misinformation" articles. This shining beacon is smothered and perverted by its use as a club in the culture wars.
I don't know what to do about this. @The_Nybbler talks a lot about how the long march through the institutions won't work a second time; I might disagree with him in the general case, but in this specific instance I agree that Wikipedia's bureaucratic setup and independence from government make it extremely hard to change things from either below or above, and as noted it has gone to the extreme of having an outright ideological banning policy* which makes any form of organic change even harder. All I've done myself is quit making edits - something something, not perpetuating a corrupt system - and taken it off my homepage. But it's something I've been very upset about for a long time now, and I thought I'd share.
*Yes, I know it's not an official policy. I also know it's been cited by admins as cause for permabans, which makes that ring rather hollow.
**NB: I've seen someone refuse to include something on the grounds of (paraphrasing) "only conservatives thought this was newsworthy, and therefore there are no Reliable Sources to support the content".
(in case you don't read the rant, first:)
I'm curious if Wikipedia had less of the 'I got reverted by an editor with more clout' issues back in the early 2010s, and for detailed writeups of how wikipedia is bad in current_year, if you have any. Long is fine, the awful wiki-reddit-thread format is fine too.
Okay.
Okay, let's see what we're working with.
WP: No Nazis is a page about how nazis should be blocked just by viewpoint. It was created in 2018. It then goes on to describe a series of beliefs that are, more or less, what modern nazis believe. This is "purging rightists", in the sense that banning Stalinists from your forum would be "purging progressives".
Maybe the page is frequently used as a justification for banning conservatives. I wouldn't know. But I'd like to, before I start nodding along with the post.
And, yeah, they shouldn't ban nazis, the nazis are right about a lot more than one would expect. Still, 'um, what the fuck, ban nazis?', when applied to actual nazis rather than republicans, is a universal, cross-party value in America (... sure, slightly less so among the populist right in 2023), so it's not too damning that wikipedia adopted it.
No it doesn't! Well, again, it does in the sense that adding progressive (i.e. iranian state media) sources also gets you auto-reverted. But I sometimes read the National Review, the Daily Wire, the New York Post, the American Conservative, the Washington Examiner, the Spectator, the Dispatch, the Bulwark ... none are on that list. Is Fox?
And the sites on that list deserve to be. The Daily Caller, Breitbart, the Epoch Times, InfoWars, Project Veritas, really do constantly make things up. Unz and VDARE do too, unfortunately. They belong with Occupy Democrats, MintPress News, Grayzone, etc, all on that list. They lean left.
Again, maybe the National Review isn't treated as a RS. I don't see any evidence in the OP.
... Okay, I could leave it there, but I can also just ... look. So here we have perennial sources, which summarizes prior consensus on the reliability of various sources. Of the sources I listed, the WSJ is reliable, Fox is reliable for non-politics, the NR, AmCon, Examiner and Spectator are yellow/mixed, Daily Wire and Post are unreliable. There's a bit of bias here. But it also does reflect differences in accuracy, quality of fact-checking. I don't need to mention where the NYT lies, but it does so less, on average, than the Daily Wire. When Nate Silver or Scott note that the 'reliable media' is also the 'progressive media', they don't deny that they're still more reliable on average. So ... most quality conservative media isn't auto-reverted.
I mean, they do give the lab leak its own article, and reference it in the origins article. But, yeah, they dismiss it and call it a conspiracy theory for essentially no good reason. The times takes a different perspective, saying we might never get a clear answer. This ... clashes ... with wikipedia's "Some scientists and politicians have speculated that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory. This theory is not supported by evidence". They even cite the NYT article with the title "The Ongoing Mystery of Covid's Origin - We still don't know how the pandemic started. Here's what we do know — and why it matters"."! Almost all of the wiki articles' statements are true, technically, but they're clearly misleading in tone.
Sacrilege, though? That's one thing. It's an entire encyclopedia. And it's maintained by people, who are falliable. What would the Vietnam War or War on Drugs articles look like in the 20th century?
Like, maybe you're right. It'd be more illuminating to go through a few specific incidents of bias, rather than just link some pages that readers may or may not have clicked on.
The big incident I'd point to there was actually the COVID thing in 2020; the "lab leak is a conspiracy theory and misinformation" line attracted a huge amount of right-leaners who promptly got either banned for "misinformation" or yelled at sufficiently to leave. Up until that point I'd have considered it organically fixable, but that incident both crushed the right-leaners and gave the bureaucracy an excuse to be suspicious of any new or remaining ones.
I didn't mention the proximate cause of me taking it off my homepage, and perhaps I should have, but it was the fact that the Main Page's "did you know" section had a factoid about female advancement and another about non-white advancement every day for like 6 months and it just wore me down.
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