I can't be the only one who feels that Wikipedia's quality has really started to go downhill over the past 5 or so years. I've noticed more and more articles which read as ridiculously partisan, usually around subjects with any link to politics or current events.
That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the US, but I get the impression that the sites neutrality policies have gradually been chipped away by introducing concepts like "false balance" as an excuse to pick a side on an issue. I could easily see that causing the site to slowly decline like StackOverflow did, most people don't want to deal with agenda pushing.
Fortunately articles related to topics like science and history haven't been significantly damaged by this yet. Something to watch carefully.
I didn't notice this, in fact, I still find Wikipedia to be remarkably neutral on controversial topics. It is very explicit about not being a news website, and yet, that's where I find the best coverage for hot topics like the war in Ukraine and Gaza, Black Lives Matter, protests in Hong-Kong, etc... For instance, most western media completely disregard the Russian side of the Ukraine war, not Wikipedia, where you have both points of views shown side by side, as well as international reactions, and most importantly, sources.
It is not perfect of course, small topics and non-English Wikipedias usually show more bias, and not just about controversial topics. Even on scientific articles, you may find some guy who considers himself the king of the Estonian Striped Beetle and will not tolerate any other ideas than his, driving away other contributors because they have better things to do than go to war to defend beetle truths.
You are getting bad information. The Wikipedia pages on those specific topics (Ukraine, Gaza, BLM) is known to be have been manipulated by groups of editors acting in coordination to advance political narratives.
Is there a single source that is not manipulated on these topics? For example in Ukraine, it is very obvious that both western mainstream media and Russian mainstream media are little more than propaganda for their respective camps.
The good thing with Wikipedia (the English version in particular) is that both sides try to manipulate it, in addition to those who really want to say the truth, so in the end, it is relatively neutral. And if you want to go further, there are citations, which is maybe the most important aspect of Wikipedia compared to traditional media, including encyclopedias.
Wikipedia is not perfect, but it does its best to resist manipulation: citations, all activity is recorded and publicly available, etc...
Non-English Wikipedias have more bias, because they are smaller and also because unlike the English version that is used worldwide, even by non-English speakers, the non-English ones are often tied to specific countries. For example, I think I remember seeing the Arabic Wikipedia as being explicitly pro-Palestine, I guess the opposite is true for the Hebrew version.
Both sides try to manipulate it, but in certain topic areas, the numbers are highly skewed such that one side wins almost all disputes.
For example, Wikipedia's definition of Zionism was updated to include "as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible". There are absolutely no other dictionaries or encyclopedias with definitions resembling that; Wikipedia is uniquely biased there.
When you can't eliminate bias completely, as I think it is the case here, the next best thing is transparency, and you can hardly get better than that! Maybe no other dictionaries or encyclopedias describe it like that, but no other dictionaries or encyclopedias give so much detail on why it is described the way they do.
In the end "Zionism" is just a word, the meaning of it is what people make it to be, not what dictionaries or encyclopedias say it is, and considering the current situation, it means different things if you ask different people, so bias is unavoidable. Of course, if it is etymology you are after, the Wikipedia article covers that too, with plenty of citations.
I think you would have a point if such biased statements had tags such as [1], directing readers to the relevant discussions. Attempts to add such tags are normally reverted by the usual anti-Israeli editors.
So we have theoretical transparency, but no hint to the reader that they may want to look into a dispute rather than accepting the content at face value. Readers could peruse the talk page, but it contains several hundred (mostly archived) discussions.
The main page history also contains thousands of smaller disputes, where communication was done via edit summaries. Realistically, readers aren't going to dig through talk page archives, let alone years of edit history.
Yes, of course there are sources that aren’t actively manipulated by groups of activist editors whose goals are to obscure the truth. Have you tried ChatGPT?
Wikipedia was always insufficiently neutral about political or social topics. At a bare minimum, you need to check whether there are any highlighted controversies in the article talk page.
Wikipedia itself knows how much shit it's in. Every ongoing conflict and culture-war issue is a "contentious topic", which is Wikipedia code for "editors are at each others' throats"
> Q1: Why does this article state that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, even though this is heavily contested and neither the ICJ nor the ICC have issued a final judgment?
> A1: A September 2025 request for comment (RfC) decided to state, in Wikipedia's own voice, that it is a genocide. The current lead is the result of later discussion on the specific wording.
This whole affair should get much more attention. If one topic on Wikipedia can be so manipulated, any topic on Wikipedia can, and it's no longer a reliable source of knowledge.
I hope The Wikimedia Foundation can get its act together, and I admire the courage of Jimmy Wales for speaking up about this, but I've also stopped donating. I want no part of this.
I also have stopped donating. I replied to a WM Foundation email explaining why and they said they don't have editorial control over wikipedia, i.e. their hands are tied. Well OK, but I'm not giving money to fund the promulgation of Jew hatred and blood libel. Sad state of affairs! I've given for years.
I would say it absolutely violates the NPOV policy, and it's worth noting that both Wikipedia founders share this view [1] [2]. It's the only thing they've agreed on in many years.
Ultimately it's just a numbers game - Wikipedia almost always follows consensus, even when the consensus is to (effectively, without admission) throw neutrality or other rules out the window.
Do you have suggestion of better repository of knowledge gathering, which achieve better level of neutrality than Wikipedia on every matter it covers, or throw right into your face that the article doesn’t meet consensual neutral POV?
There is pretty much no way this was ever not going to happen, given Wikipedia's position and structure. It is a massive repository of knowledge, that is consulted by millions if not billions of people around the world on a regular basis, that is (in theory) editable by anyone and that has articles on just about every conceivable topic, including many politically charged ones. There must be immense pressure to use it to propagate all kinds of narratives. Given all of that, I think it does as good a job as can be expected of remaining objective, but absolutely you need to be careful when reading articles on politically charged topics (which is true of all media).
Some of this has to do with concerted and long-running campaigns of coordinated editing (against wikipedia rules) to push a one-sided political narrative. Most notably this happened and continues to be done by Israel-eliminationists[0]. Wikipedia eventually acknowledged the problem and banned a couple of the worst offenders[1] but that's a drop in the bucket as far as I'm concerned. I read it less and less these days and don't consult it at all for anything controversial ("controversial" meaning "topics that leftists have strong opinions about").
Sadly, a system like Wikipedia is hard to defend against persistent coordinated attacks by people who have lots of time.
> I can't be the only one who feels that Wikipedia's quality has really started to go downhill over the past 5 or so years. I've noticed more and more articles which read as ridiculously partisan, usually around subjects with any link to politics or current events.
I would say this started over a decade ago. Otherwise I completely agree.
Oh dear, you need to learn about the GamerGate incident which started August 2012. All the extreme division and online manipulation through the collaborative creation of false narratives started right there, with that issue, before contaminating the entire political landscape.
It's the Eternal September of our generation, and it's not recognised enough as such. Before that, the internet was a different place.
> Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture
Okay, what the actual fuck? IIRC it was people whining about the absolute state of games journalism in the 2010's.
GamerGate was about ethics in games journalism roughly as much as the Arab Spring was about a street vendor having his cart confiscated.
That was their initial spark, but it kicked off a ding-dong battle for years. You could argue it's still going today, given places like /v/ and ResetEra are still fighting it, games like Dustborn and Concord are pilloried, and the "Sweet Baby Inc. detected" Steam curator exists to list games that have taken that company's advice.
I was there, it was as Wikipedia describes it. Read the talk page.
Edit: the replies to this comment demonstrate why this problem is intractable: people are very emotionally invested into their idea of how things unfolded, and outright reject other perspectives with little more than a "nuh-uh!".
I was there as well. It was absolutely not as Wikipedia describes it. If the claim was that some people participating in GG did so because they were sexist, fair enough. That was true and unavoidable because you get crazies in every group. But that was not some kind of universal thing, such that Wikipedia should be describing the movement unambiguously as "misogynistic".
It absolutely matched the Wikipedia summary. There is a ton of evidence linked supporting each point: it was a hate mob from the moment Eron Gjoni decided his ex should be punished for breaking up with him.
It all started with his post, attacking her relationship with Grayson, who never reviewed her games. Even he later admitted that the original claims were fictitious but that did nothing to stop the attacks – if you look at the threats she received or the online statements the attackers made, they cared a LOT more about her alleged infidelity or what they perceived as unfair privileges for women in the gaming industry than anything about journalism.
This was later added to his post:
> To be clear, if there was any conflict of interest between Zoe and Nathan regarding coverage of Depression Quest prior to April, I have no evidence to imply that it was sexual in nature.
He even told Boston Magazine that this was the hook he used to get attention, with what he knew was a high likelihood of attacks:
> As Gjoni began to craft “The Zoe Post,” his early drafts read like a “really boring, really depressing legal document,” he says. He didn’t want to merely prove his case; it had to read like a potboiler. So he deliberately punched up the narrative in the voice of a bitter ex-boyfriend, organizing it into seven acts with dramatic titles like “Damage Control” and “The Cum Collage May Not Be Accurate.” He ended sections on cliffhangers, and wove in video-game analogies to grab the attention of Quinn’s industry colleagues. He was keenly aware of attracting an impressionable readership. “If I can target people who are in the mood to read stories about exes and horrible breakups,” he says now, “I will have an audience.”
> One of the keys to how Gjoni justified the cruelty of “The Zoe Post” to its intended audience was his claim that Quinn slept with five men during and after their brief romance. In retrospect, he thinks one of his most amusing ideas was to paste the Five Guys restaurant logo into his screed: “Now I can’t stop mentally referring to her as Burgers and Fries,” he wrote. By the time he released the post into the wild, he figured the odds of Quinn’s being harassed were 80 percent.
> Even he later admitted that the original claims were fictitious
No, he did not. And nobody was claiming that Grayson reviewed Quinn's games beyond like a day or two of confusion, and none of the arguments made relied on that being the case.
> what they perceived as unfair privileges for women in the gaming industry than anything about journalism.
This is a false dichotomy. The entire point was that the journalism had a role in creating those privileges.
No, they aren't. They're your interpretation of Boston Magazine's spin (and it's really, really obvious purely from the style of the prose that it's a complete hit piece that chose its conclusion ahead of time). The article provides no evidence of any such words. Because there is no such evidence, because he said nothing of the sort.
> They spent a year lying about her “unethical” actions justifying all of the abuse
That is, again, objectively not what happened. Any claims WRT Quinn were evidenced, and were also irrelevant to the large majority of what was going on. (What was actually going on, not what sources like the ones you prefer chose to focus on.)
> They’re literally the words he updated his blogpost to add.
I'm looking at it right now and it objectively says nothing of the sort. I genuinely don't understand where you're getting that from. Please quote the part that you think is an admission of the "original claims" being "fictitious". Ctrl-F `fict` gives no results; the two hits for `false` are part of the original account; the one hit for `fake` is part of a nuanced take in the original account; hits for `make up` are either describing Quinn's actions or false positives; similarly for any other wording I can think of.
And the bit at the start is not at all denying the factual accuracy of the account in any way:
> Additionally, as a heads up, it’s worth noting that in providing a concrete story and examples, this blog has apparently had the unintended side effect of helping a number of abuse survivors come to terms with their own relationships (and from what I understand, causing distress to some others who have not yet come to terms). I didn’t really know what emotional abuse was when I wrote this blog, and the comments from therapists and survivors who have since taken the time to inform me have been tremendously helpful to myself and a number of other commenters. I’m grateful to those of you who have reached out, and apologize to those who came expecting a light read and left feeling any significant measure of distress. If you’ve never dealt with emotional abuse before (as I hadn’t up until this point), it can be especially difficult to spot, as one of the most persistent patterns is being made to feel at fault for your partner’s behavior. Each situation is different, so I’m hesitant to offer general advice, but if things get bad enough that you fear for your wellbeing, and you feel safe enough to do so, please consider calling the National Domestic Violence Hotline.
In fact, it is not even denying the claim that Gjoni suffered emotional abuse. (Which I think is a reasonable conclusion based on the facts provided.)
Actually, the first sentence before that is:
> There are likely things you have read in various forms of media about what this blog is. You will find those descriptions to be generally incorrect.
which is to say he is explicitly challenging how sources like Boston Magazine presented the post.
> You keep saying every period source is wrong, based on what?
Based on personally seeing it all play out. Based on seeing people I know personally be directly accused of things they objectively had not done. Based on the extensive memory of critically analyzing what period sources were saying, in period.
Well no, I was also around but not particularly interested at the time. This looks like a classic case of the media trying to close ranks and smear their critics.
Funny enough, it would the movement stopped being about harassing women the moment the media stopped writing about it, advocates kept on going, criticizing ideological push into videogames to this day. At the same time by now both Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian have been shown to be grifters who really knew jackshit but how to play a crowd.
I was also there, and I say it was very much not as Wikipedia describes it and the narrative is practically libelous. I would tell you to read as much of the archived back-room nonsense as I did (not just the talk page archives but internal Wikipedia government stuff), but even if could be unearthed this much later nobody deserves the trauma.
GamerGate was about journalism in the same way that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was to protect the rights of ethnic Russian minorities in that country. The GamerGate people used ethics as an excuse because that sounds a lot more reasonable than “hate mob riled up by a bitter ex”, but it fell apart as soon as you looked at the evidence (e.g. they were most focused on attacking a developer over a relationship with someone who never reviewed her games), where they went for support (right-wing agitators with low journalistic ethics), and all of the real issues they ignored between huge gaming companies and the major media outlets.
The excuse was as believable as someone saying they were super concerned about ethics in tech journalism, but then never said a word about a huge tech company and spent all of their time badgering the Temple OS guy for sharing a meal with an OS News writer.
Or, you know, people had long been unhappy with the poor state of game reviews and the incident in question prompted broad complaints. Rather than accept criticism the journalists in focus instead decided to use their platforms to smear their critics as a sexist hate mob.
If that was really their motive, they sure picked an odd way to express it by focusing their efforts on attacking one woman with very little power in the industry while ignoring the actual game media outlets and huge companies. It’s like claiming you’re an environmental activist but instead of even talking about Exxon you’re busy making death threats to the local pet store claiming their organic kibble isn’t really organic.
That's it though, at the time there were plenty of complaints about the media outlets and publishers. Your problem is that the only people reporting on this to the wider public were the very journalists that the group were criticising.
GamerGate wasn’t doing that work and they distracted mightily from it. For example, the much-hated Kotaku was actually doing reporting which got them black listed so not only was GamerGate not contributing there, they were actually harming the people who were:
That Kotaku piece was a full year after GamerGate, if anything people might question whether it'd have happened if GamerGate hasn't drawn attention to these problems.
GamerGate was still going strong in 2015, and did absolutely nothing to help stories like that. The people attacking journalists don’t get to take credit for their targets’ work.
Sexist attacks and lying about an imaginary sex-for-reviews scandal didn’t put a spotlight on anything. It wouldn’t excuse their actions even if they had been doing some real ethics work, but they weren’t even showing up to do productive work.
One reason why everyone who actually cared about those issues opposed GamerGate was because it distracted attention from non-imaginary problems and meant that anyone talking about journalistic ethics had to spend time proving they were acting in good faith rather than being part of the hateful mob.
I understand that you buy heavily into one side of this narrative, but statements like "everyone who actually cared about those issues opposed GamerGate" come across as naive rather than informed.
Sure, the label of GamerGate was clearly made toxic by a combination of bad actors within and the significant smear campaign in the press, but it remains extremely obvious that the gaming community were not happy with the state of the industry.
There was no "sex-for-reviews scandal" and nobody "lying about" it.
> and meant that anyone talking about journalistic ethics had to spend time proving they were acting in good faith rather than being part of the hateful mob.
This is a consequence of the fact that very many people were very obviously not acting in good faith.
The GamerGate article is probably the best example of Wikipedia's blatant political bias.
There are many biased articles out there, of course, but not many manage to misrepresent past events to such an extreme that it borders on comical. It reads like it was written by Zoe Quinn herself. Maybe it was.
Fun thing about that. Whenever someone starts going off about how Zoe Quinn was supposedly mistreated and how that supposedly launched a "right-wing backlash against feminism" and a "misogynistic online harassment campaign", quiz them about the "jilted boyfriend" (as they typically put it) who wrote the post that supposedly set everything off. With remarkable consistency, they don't know his name (Eron Gjoni) or anything about his far-left political views, and will refuse to say the name if you ask. They have never read the post and have no idea what it says, and will at most handwave at incredibly-biased third-hand summaries.
GG wasn't constrained to Gjoni, it was the reaction to his posting. One guy saying "I'm on this team" does not define the characteristics of the resulting events.
You miss the point. It's about those people being misinformed, unwilling to look into matters independently, and selective in the application of their supposed ideological principles.
Does "someone doesn't know trivia about the inflection point" really demonstrate any of those things?
Like, if I asked you whether the anger at Depression Quest was downstream of a long-standing meme-feud on /v/ about whether visual novels are videogames and you didn't know that, that doesn't really mean anything about your understanding of anything other than /v/ culture wars of the 2010s.
I mean, c'mon, "five guys burgers and fries"?
The whole thing springs out of "someone who made a thing we don't like" and "an excuse to attack" - the lack of any actual ethical breaches in the coverage of Depression Quest should be immediately disqualifying.
Among other things, I think it suggests that my opinion about what happened, as someone who does know those things from distinctly remembering them and having had them be personally relevant at the time, should be taken more seriously than that of people telling me over a decade later what happened based on some combination of { the Wikipedia article, their own worldview, what their friends have said about it, more recent news articles from aggrieved people who cite it as part of a grand conspiracy theory about contemporary right-wing politics }.
If your grievance is "people don't take me seriously in arguments", then you could try deploying sources. There's probably still plenty of /v/ archives from back in the day, right?
But I think "people trust contemporary and retrospective reporting more than me, a guy who self-identifies as having a skin-in-the-game perspective" shouldn't be very surprising.
And, if it means anything, I was reading /v/ at the time, too, was initially sympathetic, and eventually realized it was all just an extension of existing /v/ grievance politics (from my perspective) - "people who disagree with us or make things we don't like are getting attention, which is evil".
I was there for threads where people were seething about positive coverage around Depression Quest before the "Zoe Post" blow-up, which was purely "we don't like that people enjoy experiences that don't suit our tastes".
At some point I realized that there just wasn't any actual ethical issues to speak of around the Depression Quest coverage, and it was just more /v/ seething about outlets liking things they didn't.
> If your grievance is "people don't take me seriously in arguments", then you could try deploying sources. There's probably still plenty of /v/ archives from back in the day, right?
I spent years trying to do this. It took inordinate amounts of time and mental energy, made exactly zero difference to the beliefs of my interlocutors no matter how well reasoned and evidenced, and additionally got me dismissed as some weirdo who cares too much (by people who clearly cared too much, but were annoyed that I disagreed with them).
I am not getting back into that now and am only willing to discuss this in the most top-level generalities. It was genuinely traumatic.
> At some point I realized that there just wasn't any actual ethical issues to speak of around the Depression Quest coverage, and it was just more /v/ seething about outlets liking things they didn't.
You keep talking about /v/. I don't understand why. The main discussion was on Reddit. And they showed concrete evidence of new ethical issues regularly.
>You keep talking about /v/. I don't understand why.
Given that you find not knowing the blog post guy's name disqualifying, this is extremely funny. The ground level of the whole shitshow wasn't /r/KiA.
(I'd love to see a scrap of evidence that /r/KiA did anything beyond "we did it reddit"-style conspiracy posting and going "hmm this dev is queer, is this an ethics issue?", but given that this was apparently traumatic for you, I won't force the issue)
In the last 2-3 years, every contribution I made has been reverted by a reviewer or editor, either giving some excuse like lack of references, or none at all. Ceased to contribute to articles, and financially as well.
Wikipedia has a number of notorious and strange editors who have taken it over as if it was their personal kingdom, where they censor and revert at their pleasure. It's their Wikipedia versus for the public. MrOllie is among the most infamous (somehow has over 258,000 edits - WTH) of this type of editor (or sadistic censor), with a number of articles and posts elsewhere on the Internet about him[1][2].
Complaints about him seem to do nothing, as he appears to have support and students of his brand of sadism and censorship. For instance, Remsense (over 97,000 edits). The group that they are part of, backs each other up and gangs up on others, to make sure they'll get their way.
> That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the US,
Not really. The phenomenon exists in other languages Wikipedias. I think it is related to the fact that NGOs that "shape" political discourse and politicians have become "sensible" to the text in Wikipedia pages.
It is always good, when you read Wikipedia, to "follow the money", i.e. look at the sources, see if they make sense.
In the last 5 years, a lot of online platforms, HN also, are used by state actors to spread propaganda and Wikipedia is perfect for that because it presents itself as a "neutral" source.
Fully agreed. The Talk pages are a very interesting read these days. I things continue down this path I think Wikipedia will be a lot less relevant in the coming years, at least for current events and things related to the on-going culture war.
There's a reason why historians tend to view anything more recent than 10-20 years ago as politics. If you don't want to get embroiled in political debates, stick to stuff old enough to be history. There's still politics there, but it's less raw.
Wikipedia doesn't restrict itself to topics that are older than ten years ago, so some of their material is necessarily going to be viewed as political.
e.g. Wikipedia has a stand-alone page on Elon Musk's Nazi salute[1].
{Edit: It's worth noting here that Wikipedia also maintains separate pages for things like Bill Clinton's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein[3].}
This particular page is very interesting because of the sheer amount of political blow-back it's caused for Wikipedia. If you're a Republican, this one page may be the biggest reason you might view Wikipedia as having become "ridiculously partisan". As a direct result of this page, and the refusal to remove or censor it, Musk is now taking aim at Wikipedia and calling for a boycott[2]. He also had his employees produce Grokipedia which, notably, does not include a page on his Nazi salute.
Musk may have had a public falling out with Trump, but he is still very much plugged into the Republican party. He's about to throw a lot of money at the mid-term elections. So, naturally, one hand washes the other and Wikipedia is on every good Republican's hit list. The kicker is that a lot of Republicans, who don't like Musk and think he's a Nazi/idiot, are going to feel a lot of Musk-instigated pressure from their own party to target Wikipedia.
This is the price Wikipedia pays for including recent events and refusing to bow to demands for censorship.
I'm also not American so I'm not well-versed in this topic, but perhaps to raise the obvious:
Does Wikipedia really need a page running for thousands of words on Musk allegedly making a Nazi salute?
It's longer than some of the content on major historical figures, yet this is a subject that I'd be surprised to see mentioned again after a few years have passed.
Considering that the subject matter is highly sensitive and concerns a living person I'm surprised that such an article was allowed at all.
It shows a recency bias, which is probably unavoidable. I'd hope that, as time passes, there are mechanisms to archive (not delete!) pages that seem unimportant. However, while this level of coverage may present a noise problem for average users, it will be a gift to future historians. How much material about the historical figures you mention was simply lost?
That being said, there should be absolutely no regard for "sensitivity" or the fact that Musk is a living person. He is a public figure wielding a ridiculous amount of resources to reshape the world as he sees fit. Regardless of his virtues or shortcomings, his power makes him somebody that should be watched closely. He helped shape the last U.S. election, played a key role in this presidency, and promises to continue his influence in the mid-terms. It matters if he's a Nazi.
To my view it looks more like an attempt to inflate a minor controversy by excessively documenting it. If this much effort were being put into writing about government policy I'd totally agree with you, but this level of detail is uncharacteristic even for Wikipedia.
> That being said, there should be absolutely no regard for "sensitivity" or the fact that Musk is a living person
Wikipedia always had particularly strong rules about how living persons are supposed to be covered. I wouldn't agree with making exceptions just because I dislike a powerful individual.
In terms of leaving the page up: I don't expect Wikipedia to be censored, but looking at this page the content unavoidably comes across as something that'd only merit a couple of lines on the main article. Instead you have a literal essay just to record "those aligned with the left believe that Musk made a Nazi salute, those aligned with the right say that he didn't".
> If this much effort were being put into writing about government policy I'd totally agree with you, but this level of detail is uncharacteristic even for Wikipedia.
Honestly, I think you're very much underestimating how much Wikipedia writes about government policy - but perhaps more to the point, it's trivial to find articles about controversies regarding the "other side" that are also quite well furnished, e.g.:
So I don't think there's much of an argument to say that they're being particularly biased in doing this (you might believe that none, or almost none of these articles at all should exist, but that's a different issue).
Friendly reminder that we all have the power to improve this! Become an editor and If you come across a problematic article, you can make improvements, or even just flag it as needing work. I know this is not a small ask, and can feel discouraging if you see more issues than you have time to address or your edits are not accepted, but when you consider the relatively small number of editors and the huge number of readers (not to mention AI’s being built on it) it is likely one of the more significant differences you can make towards improving the greater problem polarization.
The impression I've had from trying to contribute in the past has been that some editors will fight tooth and nail to prevent changes to an article they effectively own. The maze of rules and regulations makes it far too easy to simply block changes by dragging everything through protracted resolution processes.
Even something as clear-cut as "the provided source doesn't support this claim at all" becomes an uphill struggle to correct. When it comes to anything related to politics this problem is also exaggerated by editors selectively opposing changes based on whether they apply a desired slant to the text.
I have a personal interest in getting fixes into Wikipedia. If you'll share here a couple of examples I can attempt a fix. Here are some stories of what I've done in the past where people mentioned that they've struggled with corrections (one says he was banned, another said his article was deleted, and the third said he couldn't get it corrected - I solved all of these):
One thing I should clarify is that Wikipedia's purpose is to aggregate the current general view on things. So even if you know something is true personally, you cannot put it in unless you can find a reliable place where someone has documented it. In the cases I have there I had to first find the appropriate backing references before I could make something happen so it's not a trivial fix. Getting Makoto Matsumoto in there took me many hours because I know only a tourist's amount of Japanese.
I've also edited controversial articles (the Mannheim stabbing, one of the George Floyd incident related convicts) successfully.
Anyway that's my resume. Bring me the work you need done and once I've got a moment I'll see what I can do (no guarantees, I have a little baby to care for).
> One thing I should clarify is that Wikipedia's purpose is to aggregate the current general view on things. So even if you know something is true personally, you cannot put it in unless you can find a reliable place where someone has documented it. In the cases I have there I had to first find the appropriate backing references before I could make something happen so it's not a trivial fix.
This is where I would disagree, the model really doesn't work for politics and current events. In those topics Wikipedia may be better described as "The world according to a handful of (mostly US-based) news outlets". There's been a prolonged effort to deprecate sources, particularly those which lean to the right, so it's increasingly difficult to portray a neutral perspective reflecting multiple interpretations of the same topic. Instead excessive weight is given to what a majority of a select group of online sources say, and that's not necessarily trustworthy.
Most obviously it's a model which will fall flat when trying to document criticism of the press.
When you say you disagree, I assume you mean that you disagree that Wikipedia's approach is good. I don't think I was making that claim, however. I have no value position on Wikipedia's approach except that I appear to endorse it by participating. There are certainly true things that Wikipedia will not contain because they are insufficiently described in sources that Wikipedians find acceptable. But nonetheless that is Wikipedia's purpose: to find a list of sources that generally report fact, and to aggregate them.
Like any consensus-based thing it's pretty loose. It's unlikely that EN wikipedia had much of a position on the reliability of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, for instance.
As an example, when I resurrected the Makoto Matsumoto article, I mirrored it to my personal wiki[0] in case it is deleted from the original. Another loss I lament is that of Chinese Numbered Policies[1] which I think is a genuinely interesting list and a meaningful categorization that I will eventually re-create on my personal wiki.
I'm a Wikipedia inclusionist which means I want as many true things there as possible in a way that represents the truth as accurately as possible, but it's a collaborative effort and that means that sometimes I don't get what I want.
Any way, as you can see from my earlier experience, I seem to have a skill of getting facts into Wikipedia when others do not, and I have a personal desire to see them there as well. So if you want to list a couple of the examples you had trouble with I can see if I can help. I know you said "politics and current events", but hopefully there are non-emergent situations that you can describe because evolving situations require more attention than I'm able to apply at the moment. I will still try, though. As an example, the Salvadoran Gang Crackdown had some ridiculous language on it that I removed[3] that was clearly an attempt to insert a left-wing (as it is in the US) political slant.
To be clear, I have no affiliation with Wikipedia (beyond the fact that as an auto-confirmed user I have the user privilege to create articles without going through AfC). I just have a personal interest in fact recording[2].
I meant that I disagree that Wikipedia is really trying to give a general view of events. That might have been the original intention, but it's not what it's doing in practice.
It does all hinge on that important list of acceptable vs unacceptable sources. In the last few decades there's been an increasing trend for news outlets to take a political position and decline to report on stories which would damage that position, which becomes most obvious whenever the US holds an election.
I think the reality is that any group will develop certain norms for this. I have a personal interest in making sure that Wikipedia's norms don't diverge too far from fact, but even that is limited because I have other things in my life to do. I think it's probably the most accurate mainstream aggregator there is, which is valuable in its own sense, so if I can make it a little better with a little effort I will usually try. But I wouldn't say that this means it's anywhere near flawless.
Speaking of norms, the Hacker News community will flag and downvote any comments of mine that mention that our 10 month old did not receive the COVID-19 vaccine. I think that's clear evidence of some kind of political bias. But that's this community's norms. I don't care as much to convince them as I do to fix Wikipedia.
Anyway, I understand if your experience trying to correct Wikipedia might have been at a different time, so you may not recall right now, but if you ever recall, my email is in my profile. I collect a list of these things and when I have a spare moment I try to make some progress.
> When it comes to anything related to politics this problem is also exaggerated by editors selectively opposing changes based on whether they apply a desired slant to the text.
This is amplified by the fact that active editors socialize with each other heavily behind the scenes, and over a period of many years you end up with a core group that all desire to apply the same slant.
The trick these days is to calmly make your case on the talk page first for anything that might be even slightly controversial, before you attempt any editing. So if someone wants to "own" the article they have to engage on the same terms, or you can just point out the lack of opposition and make the edit yourself.
That's the thing though, expecting users to have a discussion over even minor changes is extremely off-putting for most potential editors.
I've also noticed that a few of these editors seem to be deliberately abrasive towards new users, perhaps with the hope that they'll break a rule by posting insults in frustration. The moment that happens those editors quickly run to the site administration and try to get said user banned. Wikipedia's policies are increasingly treated as a weapon to beat down dissent rather than a guide on how to contribute positively.
this attitude is exactly why and how those "deranged redditor activists" (we're from the superior hacker news, of course, where there is no controversy or activists or differences in opinion) took and maintain control.
Utopian lionization that doesn't reflect reality or the bullshit. Unqualified people have the power to tell experts who were there that their contributions are insignificant, wrong, or that details don't matter. That's just stupid and pointless, and so less people contribute to hostile and idiotic half-assery.
I'll take curated information that is better and rigorous every time.
> Friendly reminder that we all have the power to improve this! Become an editor and If you come across a problematic article, you can make improvements, or even just flag it as needing work.
This works very well when there's a clear non-partisan issue with the text, like a logical inconsistency or the citation doesn't line up with the claim or the prose is just sloppy or unnatural.
If someone is trying to push biased sources, good luck.
The I-swear-it-isn't-a-cabal of highly-active editors knows policy better than you do, and they will continue to conveniently know policy better than you do no matter how much time you spend studying it. (And if you study it and then try to do your business anonymously, they will consider it suspicious that you know anything about policy and demand that you log in to your nonexistent long-standing account.) And that policy allows them to use highly biased sources because they are on they "reliable sources" list, except it isn't really a single list but rather some sources are restricted in applicability, unless it's one of them using it inappropriately. And the bias of those sources doesn't disqualify them as long as it's properly taken into consideration by whatever arcane rules, except this doesn't happen in practice and nobody will care if you point out them doing it, as long as it serves their purposes.
Meanwhile, the way sources get approved as reliable is generally that they agree with other reliable sources. Good luck trying to convince people that a source has become unreliable. You aren't going to be able to do it by pointing out things they've repeatedly objectively gotten wrong, for example. But they'll happily spend all day listing every article they can find that an ideologically opposed source has ever gotten wrong (according to them, no evidence necessary).
And it all leans in the same direction because the policy-makers all lean in the same direction. Because nobody who opposes them will survive in that social environment. There are entire web sites out there dedicated to cataloging absurd stuff they allowed their friends to get away with over years and years, just because of ideological agreement, where people who dispute a Wikipedia-established narrative on a politically charged topic will be summarily dismissed as trolls.
On top of that they will inject additional bias down to the level of individual word-choice level. They have layers and layers of policy surrounding, for example, when to use words like "killing", "murder", "assassination" and "genocide" (or "rioting" vs "unrest" vs "protest"); but if you compare article titles back and forth there is no consistency to it without the assumption of endemic political bias.
WP:NOTNEWS is, as far as I can tell, not a real policy at all, at least not if there's any possible way to use the news story to promote a narrative they like.
And if the article is about you, of course you aren't a reliable source. If the Wikipedians don't like you, and their preferred set of reliable sources don't like you, Wikipedia will just provide a positive feedback loop for everything mainstream media does to make you look bad. This will happen while they swear up and down that they are upholding WP:BLP.
I've been watching this stuff happen, and getting burned by it off and on, for years and years.
Man, I know what you are talking about through and through. Happens all the time on the political Right/Left pages, controversial authors of classical literature, WWII atrocities, and the list goes on. Scientific and Movie or Art articles are way better to discover interesting stuff.
The stalking, censorship, and unwillingness to contribute to topics deemed as "controversial" is unreal. People might not believe, but wikipedia truly is one hell of a cesspool.
There is just too much bureaucracy for beginner editors nowadays. The whole baptism of fire that you need to undergo to be part of the oligarchy is just not worth the hassle.
Is it radicalised to want even a basic premise of neutrality in an encyclopedia?
Despite not being particularly political, even I raise an eyebrow when an article opens with "____ is a <negative label>, <negative label>, <negative label> known for <controversial statement>"
I want an improvement upon "Encyclopedia Brittanica". If we have to have governments around the world fund a nonprofit educational equivalent of that, then I'm all for it but we can't keep depending upon a least-common denominator "central public knowledge repository" that's an improperly-managed, easily-manipulated, often incomplete and inaccurate mobacracy fed by largely unknown randos, enough of whom aren't doing so for honest purposes and too many are foolish/crazy/unreliable enough to curate and preserve worthwhile information consistently.
I've never seen an article like that, other than for people like Epstein, who are primarily famous for their crimes. I just went and checked the pages of some famous people where you might expect this kind of treatment if Wikipedia were indeed biased in the way people seem to think (like Donald Trump or Ted Cruz), and they're not like that.
There are a lot of comments in this thread talking about a strong bias in Wikipedia, but I don't see any examples. I have no doubt that there are some articles that are biased, particularly in less popular areas that get less attention, but overall, Wikipedia does a great job maintaining a neutral point of view in its articles.
I do get the impression that what people perceive as bias is often simply neutrality. If you think yourself the victim of an evil cabal of your political opponents, then a neutral description of the facts might seem like an attack.
To be honest I don't keep a list of examples, I usually raise an eyebrow and move on. It's typically on pages for smaller public figures where you get some extremely questionable descriptions.
It's also definitely a thing for contentious topics, a while back I tried to look up some info on the Gaza war and some of the pages were a complete battleground. I feel that there was a time when Wikipedia leaned away from using labels like "terrorist", but their modern policy seems to be that if you can find a bunch of news articles that say so then that's what the article should declare in Wikipedia's voice.
Indeed, neutral point of view is one of the most important principles of Wikipedia [1]. I only recall phrasing like that being used used in very clear-cut cases, like the word "pseudoscience" in the article on homeopathy. If you don't think something is neutral, the guideline "be bold" [2] encourages you to edit it. You don't have to wait for somebody else to.
> Is it radicalised to want even a basic premise of neutrality in an encyclopedia?
Facts are not neutral or "balanced".
And your whole phrasing smells of someone who doesn't want to be challenged with facts which are against you worldview, which is pretty much against the whole purpose of Wikipedia.
> Despite not being particularly political, even I raise an eyebrow when an article opens with "____ is a <negative label>, <negative label>, <negative label> known for <controversial statement>"
Without giving the actual example, there seems nothing wrong with this in general. Could be important, could be overrated. But at least I assume it's true, because wrong claims would be a valid problem.
I mean... this is a very real phenomenon, but probably not in the way you're thinking of.
There are many simple statements of fact that, 15 or 20 years ago, were as universally uncontroversial as "the sky is blue", but today are considered radically controversial political opinions, and will get you banned for most online platforms if you dare utter them.
Exactly, you don't think it's true because you don't believe they're facts, you've been radicalized into believing they're "dogwhistles" (a term only used by radicalized people, by the way - if you keep hearing dogwhistles, you might just be a dog.)
That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the US, but I get the impression that the sites neutrality policies have gradually been chipped away by introducing concepts like "false balance" as an excuse to pick a side on an issue. I could easily see that causing the site to slowly decline like StackOverflow did, most people don't want to deal with agenda pushing.
Fortunately articles related to topics like science and history haven't been significantly damaged by this yet. Something to watch carefully.