A photo on Wikipedia can ruin your life
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
“Why do you still use Wikipedia?” because the good parts are a great human achievement and even the OK parts can be adequate as a broad outline of a topic.
“Why don’t you just fix it?” I try, but it’s hard when I have a busy day and my edit will be reverted within minutes by a full-time Wikipedian / Expert Wikipedia Rules Lawyer and self-appointed lord of said article.
i can't say we can predict where all this is going or what will come out of this case. but wikipedia seems to have too much power over what constitute the "truth".
i recently read a book on cognitive science that has most of their sources from wikipedia.
Hell, for contentious articles given you have antagonistic co-authors it’s more likely to be fact checked than in the Wapo “2 Pinocchios” echo chamber.
Words are written by people…
I still use Wikipedia for pure STEM subjects, but beyond that, I wouldn't trust it.
(Apologies for any errors, as it's been the better part of a decade since then.) Wikipedia gave simplified formulas for the asymptomatic forms of the modified Bessel functions, and each formulas they gave were correct. However, each simplification used a different branch cut, so subtracting two of the asymptomatic forms wouldn't give the correct result. Tracing back that error, and why I was consistently off by a factor of 2*pi took a long time.
Im not declaring that Wikipedia is objective, but I don’t honestly believe it’s worse than other sources of info (beyond like… really digging into a primary source of a subject? And even then)
The amount of scrutiny individual Wikipedia articles receive differs vastly–the article on a top politician or a top science topic like a major planet will have hundreds of eagle-eyed watchers, while more obscure articles like the one discussed here may not be watched at all, and then anything goes. (This article for example had two different birth dates for six years, and then someone made them consistent—both wrong!)
Here are some more examples of the sorts of errors that are specific to a crowd-sourced work like Wikipedia:
https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday...
Few if any of these—like intentional hoaxes and undetected vandalism or a completely ignorant writer merely pretending to know a topic, by copying another text and then changing the name of one chemical substance in it to make it sound like the text was written about this substance—could or would have occurred in the traditional process of writing a reference work.
Traditional works have different problems, of course—instant obsolescence being one of them—and even the biggest ones have a far smaller scope than Wikipedia. But readers should bear in mind just how the Wikipedia sausage is made. Many seem to somehow believe that the Wikipedia process is, in terms of the results it produces, just like an orderly process with a professional writer and editors and fact checkers that try to verify everything before publication. That is not how crowdsourcing works.
It has mistakes, just like any other human-made source of knowledge too.
it's not like we have a god-given encyclopedia which is known to be completely right. I can use Google, DDG, or the library instead of wikipedia, and there's also chances that the sources there are mistaken or outdated too.
So absolutely true. These people are insufferable. Any time I've made a non-trivial edit to Wikipedia I usually end up clashing with these people. It really sucks because a lot of the time, they don't argue in good faith, and throw every rule in the book at you to get their way, while hiding behind a facade of impartial rule-abiding.
So frustrating, and has drastically lowered my confidence in Wikipedia.
Also, it's fun to note the "lords" of various general topics. Find an article about a person in the right-wing political sphere and you're very likely to find the same small set of "Wikipedian" toadies ruling over it with an iron fist. I'm sure the same goes for many other topics that aren't about politics.
Even with sources and pushback from other moderators, it’s hard to compete with people with an agenda and a lot of time.
Exactly! This, writ large, is why a small disciplined group can take over a bureaucracy that allows open participation in decision making processes.
You see this, for example, in everything from city council meetings to the state department.
Which explains why bureaucracies always end up with some ideological litmus test of us vs them applied to screen out who is allowed to participate, whether because the bureaucracy doesn't want to be taken over by an ideological group, or whether it has already been taken over by an ideological group, the ends result is the same -- every bureaucracy develops an ideology that it defends.
Taking this back to wikipedia, we see why no project like wikipedia can actually be "neutral". At best you can have a variety of ideological biases for different topics, with the most fanatical group's ideology dominating any given topic.
/rant
But my general attitude toward Wikipedia is not to take it too seriously. These moderators are also generally randos with no credibility anyway, and they know it, hence their style of moderation.
Also, I would much rather have an encyclopedia with individual or a limited number of authors per article (like SEP does). If there is significant divergence on a subject, those divergences can be represented as alternate articles. What you don't want to do is pretend to have a "neutral" body of knowledge just because you have some article edited by an anonymous, unbounded committee and moderated by an asshole.
These people are effectively activists who use wikipedia's reputation for objectivity to disguise what amounts to propaganda. The network of bullies lean almost exclusively in one political direction and any remotely political article will be immediately swarmed if edited with wrongthink - regardless of how well it is sourced. It's not just dishonest, it's dangerous that people are coming to wikipedia, reading articles with subtle but overwhelming bias, and leaving with the impression that they read something objective. Just check the talk page for anything adjacent to politics - you will inevitably see rabidly left leaning full time editors piling onto any remotely right of center edits.
I still browse wikipedia on occasion, due to ease of finding things, but I read everything with a very critical eye and keep in mind that I'm only getting one carefully curated version of reality. And it may be false even so.
Doesn't matter how true it is... If you're an employee of the company and get found out, your edits get reverted.
The kinds of things I offered corrections on were simple and sourced off public filings. Like the relationship of the company with another -- our company bought another, but wikipedia claimed the other company bought ours. Another obvious mistake was the picture of our building. They put a picture of the building next door. There were a number of really egregious mistakes that I tried to correct, but I got a no-comment reversion of almost all of them.
And in case you were wondering, at no time did I identify myself as an employee (and I was just a software guy anyway, not part of the marketing group), nor did they suggest that they knew I was.
And, as you’ve found out, trying to improve the cesspool is a waste of time.
Reddit has fallen to this same problem with subreddit moderators. A subreddit moderator can remove posts and comments they don't want anyone to see.
A lot of the popular subreddits and many of the more obscure subreddits are moderator-crafted echo chambers. Some moderators have unbelievable amounts of free time to observe the subreddit and surgically remove discussions they disagree with.
Worse, it's all invisible. These subreddits become an extension of what the moderators want without the moderators having to show their actions at all. When you visit a subreddit, you could be reading a carefully constructed echo chamber of a single moderator and have no idea.
I think the Reddit situation would be very different if it had a "showdead" style option that let readers see removed comments.
If it had this option, why even allow the moderation at all?
I.e. we (mods and flagging users) remove stuff, but for those who wonder (and have a small amount of "karma"?) they can always use showdead to see what they are missing out on and even vouch for things that have been killed for no good reason.
This works beautifully here, except for stories where it seems a few can kill it with next to no trace except in the server logs. (You sometimes find them in /active even after they are flagged off the front page.)
Coz it's cheaper to pay moderators with a power trip than with money.
I've yet to see a viable solution to this economic dilemma.
* Decentralized moderation tends to end up meaning no moderation coz normal users are not really motivated to clean up spam, etc.
* Free centralized moderation like reddit does inevitably means the space becomes a fiefdom from people who have their own reasons for doing grunt work for free (e.g. pushing their agenda, marketing, etc).
* Paid moderation isn't usually something people are willing to pay for.
Is there any reason to think that paid moderation wouldn't lead to its own (possibly worse) biases?
Could you designate a bunch of people as mini moderators and have the majority vote of mini mods decide moderation?
Then have one moderator curate the list of mini mods. By spreading the work out, more actual time can be spent on the decision and feedback given.
r/science has something like 1500 moderators, most of which only have the power to remove comments. The rules are applied seemingly at random, and the problematic posts/titles are rarely actually fixed, they just have a sea of [removed] under them. This makes the biased posts even worse as the comments correcting them and the discussion about it disappears.
It sounds like if any of the 1500 mods dislike a comment, then that comment disappears. That's extremely biased towards removing comments.
My suggestion would have those 1500 mini mods vote "keep" or "remove" - majority wins. The main mod can look at contentious votes and override the mini mods decisions. Further the main mod can remove mini mods that are voting poorly.
Hrmmm... Reddit pays mods? It would be very interesting to know how much they get paid by reddit. We didn't know how much Twitch streamers made until that info was leaked this year, and it encouraged many others to stop wasting their time on the platform in hopes of fairness.
It seems to me that reddit mods, and even the platform, often do(does) side deals with certain accounts to allow and help posts to reach the front page as well, while reddit also fosters this with paid promotions on the site. Lots of things that make it to the front page are not likeable, but somehow embedded with political and marketing messages, that's what corrupted the overall experience of browsing reddit for me... Not proven fact, but my opinion as a web developer mind you.
People play with anonymity that social media can provide to make money, now companies also do it. If transparency isn't practiced on the corporate side, everything online becomes a carefully controlled reality show while the shady deals go on behind the curtains.
Reddit removing public metrics, like displaying both upvotes and downvotes next to each other allows brigading to go on unchecked, and it enables an ideal that certain things are popular or likeable without dispute... The ideal that things make it to the front page because they are favorable, controversial, or popular is a big lie in itself especially if the numbers aren't truly accurate and/or transparent.
I think more subreddits should use a tool like this.
In general, the voices with the most power aren't the most correct; they're the boxes with the most time (leisure or paid) to dedicate to being online.
Upshot was reverting to my old Microsoft Encarta disks, until I discovered Britannica. €100 a year and I have it all, and it's all from an organization that stakes its reputation on accuracy.
Even more useful now that my boy benefits.
Post a link. I'm doing some research on this. Ideally we'd get rid of the ability to revert people most of the time, and only let people improve the edit by adding sources and such.
Now that all of this has happened, it feels like he is now a minor pubic figure worthy of his own wiki page. Something like "Nathaniel White (not serial killer)" with an article describing the mistake. Ask a newspaper to do a small article about it, interviewing him, and taking a really nice photo of him- which can go on the wiki page.
Yes, it would probably be the exact kind of page that Wikipedia would take down saying this person isn't important enough. But they can choose when and how those rules apply. Give him five years with it up, protected from take down.
It doesn't make up for the problem, but it is something they can do, at no cost to anyone, and it would make a difference. A small amount of compassion can matter.
https://tallahassee.com/story/news/2020/08/28/man-confused-r...
Nobody else has written about it.
I suspect though Mr. White might possibly prefer to go back to his private life and never hear about Wikipedia again.
If Wikipedia ever covers this, it had perhaps best be in an article about Wikipedia controversies (which could be linked from the Nathaniel White article).
> I suspect though Mr. White might possibly prefer to go back to his private life and never hear about Wikipedia again.
Except that the image was used in a Discovery channel doc on the killer - which isn't an easily fixable Wiki. No idea if Discovery Channel nixed this episode, or clawed back any distributions of this content from consumers. The focus of the article was on Wikipedia errors, which is undoubtedly to blame for the onset of the issue (albeit now "corrected" with a.link to the Tallahassee article - further subtly perpetuating), but the primary issue of perpetuation appears to be the fault of Discovery Channel's journalistic negligence.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201128204840/https://www.monst...
It's dated July 1, 2017, which would mean it precedes the presence of the image on Wikipedia by almost a year.
I haven't seen the complete Reelz episode referred to on that page (see trailer at the bottom of the page), but it looks like it may feature (or may have featured) the wrong image as well.
https://www.reelznow.com/video/9c2e55a5-0478-4e91-a338-983e7...
I don't have access to it so can't check. In Google, this Reelznow page is dated 16 June 2017.
The broadcast date for the Discovery episode on the IMDb page you linked ("Episode aired May 3, 2018") seems to be wrong. According to the legal papers, the episode was broadcast August 13, 2018. See page no. 4:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/2e/White...
This is borne out by the Wikipedia page views:
https://pageviews.toolforge.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&pl...
Big spike in August 2018, nothing in May 2018.
Well, judging from TFA and a The Register link posted in this discussion, I think I know of someone who knows how to write such articles... ;-)
Per general notability guidelines, a brief article isn't likely to help a case for a separate wiki page [0]. Per low-key, may be there's a case to be made [1], though there's also concerns around advocacy [2].
> and taking a really nice photo of him- which can go on the wiki page.
To get a photo on wikimedia you own, upload it any where (preferably flickr / straight up on commons.wikimedia) and release it under a wikimedia-compatible license [Ex A]
> It doesn't make up for the problem, but it is something they can do, at no cost to anyone, and it would make a difference.
Wikipedia has its warts, and the community is pretty open about what it means to have an article on there and why it may not be the best thing for anyone that's famous [3]. Wikipedia favours verifiability over truth [4], and is not bothered with incorrect information [5], because someone somewhere ought to eventually correct it [6].
(And of course, I am wiki-lawyering at this point [7])
--
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:GNG
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:LOWKEY
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SOAPBOX
[Ex A] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bradfitz-sunglasses....
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:FAMOUS
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:VNT
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS
After what they did to this man, they should be that someone. Never had a lower opinion on Wikipedia than today.
Personally, this is the excerpt that really hit home. The same kind of criticism has been levied on popular-activism in the past. I would have liked to see a more benevolent response from an organization which purports to be so.
https://pageviews.toolforge.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&pl...
In this case it would have been something like: 1) google name 2) oh. The applicant has the same name as a serial killer 3) click on wikipedia article 4) OMG 5) the applicant being significantly less likely to receive an offer
I'd follow the same process if it was a high-value hire. But in this process, if I'd discover that it seems to be a serial killer, I think I would at least reach out and ask if this is the same person, even if the pictures seems to match. Seems unlikely that a known serial killer would apply to any jobs I usually offer, so making sure it's the same person is surely something you'd do first.
There's a man with the exact same name as mine (not a common one) and the exact same age who is a disbarred attorney in Arizona. More than once I've been asked by a prospective client if I ever was an attorney even though it's not on my C.V. (I would love to find a way to put these wanna-be Sherlock Holmeses who don't know how to google in their places!)
Imagine if I had a Wikipedia page and the names got conflated. I'd never be able to unwind that.
Playing it a lot would make it more likely that the people that saw the misinformation would see the correction.
That seems to amount to adding the following paragraph to their policies:
« Any police photograph used to imply that the person depicted was charged with or convicted of a specific crime must be sourced to a top-quality reliable source with a widely acknowledged reputation for fact-checking and accuracy that links the relevant image to the specific incident or crime in question. »
That seems like an improvement to me, though it would be nice to also see an announcement that the Wikimedia Foundation are going to use some of their large piles of cash to pay someone to check that all their existing articles follow the new rule.
I don't know if section 230 would protect google there.
Google search isn’t really a publishing platform, but they do have lots of money and lawyers, which counts for something, I guess.
It may be different when Google has been notified that there is a problem with its Knowledge Graph panel. As described in this article, they do fix those:
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-knowledge-panel-s...
Beats me why they haven't done so in this case.
> In its order granting the Wikimedia Foundation's motion to dismiss, the court affirmed that "interactive computer service providers" such as the Foundation generally cannot be held liable for third-party content like Wikipedia articles and photographs. ... the plaintiff argued that the Foundation should be treated like a traditional offline publisher and held responsible as though it were vetting all posts made to the sites it hosts, despite the fact that it does not write or curate any of the content found on the projects. The court rejected this argument because it directly conflicts with Section 230 ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230
Wikipedia (nor Twitter, Facebook or YouTube) reviews content _before_ it's made available online, they only review content afterwards. That being one of the major differences between providing 3rd party content and "publishing".
However, incorporated content producers are often fronts for political parties, wealthy private donators and foreign actors to amplify their opinion. They are quite resourceful and influental already and don't need further amplification by allowing social networks and news aggregators to share their content for them.
Edit: The term "academic institutions" should be understood to also include government archives open to the public and content from museums and the like.
In this case, the Wikimedia Foundation (which owns Wikipedia) is the "provider ... of an interactive computer service".
The "information content provider" is the individual user of Wikipedia who writes or edits an article—usually doing so under a pseudonym. (They're all unpaid volunteers—anyone can click "Edit" at any time and add something to a Wikipedia article.)
For better and worse, this is the legal situation in the US.
Surely if @Jack sent a defamatory tweet both he and Twitter could be held responsible. He’s both a user and an agent of Twitter. I think Wikipedia contributors are both users and agents in the same way.
Notably, this lawsuit was filed months after Wikipedia editors proactively corrected the error at issue in September 2020.
WTF, really? His photo was on there for more than 2 years (28 months). The damage is done. To somehow claim the lawsuit is super extra invalid because it came a couple months later does nothing but make me really hate lawyers.
For most things of any import (aside from areas like geography or fundamental parts of science, which are usually trustworthy), I rely on the sources cited by Wikipedia to try to suss out actual information, rather than Wikipedia itself, but that often takes a lot of time and doesn't change the fact that Wikipedia, for better or worse, is the central general knowledge repository of our time.
The adage that teachers still teach, "don't cite Wikipedia" -- has some merit, sure, but also has increasingly become a joke because actual edited encyclopedias (which yes, had their own issues, but also had standards and oversight that needed to be answered to) have basically become extinct -- so what are people supposed to use?
I genuinely long for the days of stuff like the Encarta CD-ROMs, or even expensive encyclopedia sets -- not because I think those resources could keep up with the breadth of knowledge that Wikipedia obviously has, but because whatever biases they may have aside (and every source or text has a bias -- which makes Wikipedia's NPOV mandate all the more ironic), they were edited and staffed by professionals.
I'm constantly bombarded by pleas for money from Wikipedia/Wikimedia Foundation, despite that fact that the Wikimedia Foundation has revenues of something like $150 million a year, and where most of the budget goes to pay for staff (hosting is only $2.5 million), not anyone who actually contributes to the content. The whole appeal of Wikipedia is supposed to be that anyone can edit it, but that isn't actually true (the gatekeepers make even correcting typos a chore) and the lack of commitment to verifiability, especially when it comes to living people, makes the whole thing utterly depressing.
Wikipedia cites sources. Go to those sources, find the ones that best line up with the data you need, and cite them directly.
Treat Wikipedia like an aggregator -- you wouldn't cite an HN post, you'd cite the link it pointed at.
The article itself says he confessed under torture to having torched it so his name would remembered forever. But that doesn't even make sense on its own terms: If he wanted to be remembered for having torched it, why did they need torture to find out? In any case, confession under torture comes nowhere close to establishing a fact, not that that has often stopped somebody who wanted a body to string up, and didn't much care whose.
I would have many other great achievements, but they get reverted by self-important gatekeepers.
Do we have a baseline for how trustworthy print/TV media was before?
More insidiously, the news is also molded by a set of institutional incentives that often results in a highly distorted picture of the world.
>> Do we have a baseline for how trustworthy print/TV media was before?
> Most people that have knowledge of a news story are often incredulous reading one due to incorrect framing or outright mistakes.
Which makes it even worse for Wikipedia that this kind of sources is explicitly the only kind it allows.
So, then they say, "Wikimedia should do something." Wikimedia has very limited control over the content that exists on Wikipedia and this ruling relies on and validates that position.
I'm not arguing that this is ideal or preferable. I'm saying that the lines between these two words are important and yet sometimes difficult to define. The crux is that Wikipedia is wholly separate from Wikimedia in all the ways that matter in a case like this.
I'm glad I've never donated to this organization, and now I certainly never will.
It doesn't mention Nathaniel White of Florida suing or implying damage was done by Wikipedia, or the damages/harm to the other Nathaniel White who is suing Wikipedia.
But will he sell me a saucepan, or a cook's knife...?
15 years ago.
This is not a new criticism.
Maybe we differ on the definition of "political alignment", but there is no way that an entity has no angle.
> There is no objective truth.
And yet you say that like you think it's the (objective) truth. Or is that just your opinion, or just true for you, etc? I don't think it makes any sense to deny objective truth—it's self-contradictory. When you hear "There is no objective truth", ask "Is that true?". (At least you immediately backpedalled with "Especially for..")
I take your point I think—e.g. more than once on HN I've criticized the idea some people have of starting a facts-only objective 'unbiased' news service as totally implausible and naïve. But to deny that anything is or can be true seems rather to throw the baby out with bathwater.
Where exactly did I deny that? I was merely noting that the an impartial encyclopedia (which is there to document everything in existence) is impossible, as there are indeed issues of controversy in existence. Even in trying to represent the controversy, as opposed to one of the myriad points of views, is a stance in itself and subject to false balance, selection bias, and I guess a few other fallacies.
We're not talking about a collection of mathematical formulas here.
Context and interpretation matters, and a lot of those disagreements over "objective facts" often come down to different interpretations of the context.
There's no such thing as "pure data" without a huge system of definitions underlying the whole thing, which are often unspoken. Do you consider "my website got 10,000 views today" to be unambiguous factual data? If so, what counts as a "view"? Do bot views count? The browser auto-refreshing because it reloaded the tab? What about the exact definitions of "today"? What hours do you start and stop counting?
Even the most basic facts succumb to this. There's lots of talk about birthdays and ages in this thread. Well, in South Korea, the cultural standard is that everyone's age goes up by one on New Year's Day (so a baby born on Dec. 31st turns two years old the next day), so someone's age is going to be reported differently when reading Korean media. And I know of someone who was born on April 4th, but because of some mix-ups at the busy hospital, her official records state April 5th instead. She chooses to celebrate it on April 4th, but she couldn't legally buy any liquor herself until the next day.
Culture and context matter. Different people have different takes on what is reasonable, and that's why there's no "objective truth" unless you interrogate all of your definitions and standards all the way to the bottom.
You forget that Wikipedia is already biased and has been for years despite many complaints (some of which have been featured on HN over the time):
- the utter majority of its authors in the English and German are young white males, which has led to numerous cases of "toxic culture"/"hostility to newcomers" issues as well as complaints of bias in deletion requests such as for female authors vs male authors.
- the entire Balkan region is, and I say this as a half-Croat, a shitshow everywhere. Nationalists of all kinds, from the individual ethnicities to "Grand Yugoslavia" Titoists, continue past wars in the online world, with both sides resorting to whitewashing of atrocities (Ustasa on the Croatian Nationalist side, Srebrenica on the Serbian side), fake news and other propaganda.
An organization such as Wikipedia can only thrive wenn all people of this world are represented by it, and yes, that includes taking a stance on societal structural discrimination.
Changing that would completely compromise both projects: Wikipedia, as it would immediately lead to "whoever bids the most controls the narrative" orchestrated by shady PR companies eager to white-wash the history of nations and individuals (again, it is already difficult enough to prevent that with the current model), and Reddit would face similar issues.
That said, both are in dire need of more paid and fully transparent support staff that mediates issues as well as takes over the load of policing outright abuse either by mods/admins or by mere contributors. Way too much volunteer time is wasted on dealing with low-effort bullshit (which is partially why I left Wikipedia over a decade ago).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Paid-contribution_di...
Edit:
The Wikimedia Foundation ToU allows this in all its projects (wikis) and allows project-specific policies:
https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use/en#:~:tex...
List of projects with their own policies:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Alternative_paid_contributio...
FAQ:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_use/FAQ_on_paid_con...
> The Wikimedia Foundation has in the recent past cited the fate of George Floyd and the resulting Black Lives Matter protests as its inspiration for the Knowledge Equity Fund, a $4.5 million fund set up last year to support racial equity initiatives outside the Wikimedia movement. It has declared "We stand for racial justice"…
Taking a step back, I wonder what things count as a "political alignment". Like, in general. Is, say, being "against murder" a poltical alignment? Or being for "being kind to people"? Probably not.
So, back to this passage, what aspects strike you as a "political alignment", and why? Is being against racism a "political alignment", or perhaps it becomes so when expressed with the term "racial justice"?
Are all "moral values" also "political alignments", are these things the same or different? I think they are not quite the same, although probably have overlap. And people can and do certainly disagree on moral values too. But I don't think we would suggest people, including people working on an encyclopedia, either can or should be without "moral values". Where is the boundary at which it becomes a "political alignment"?
One obvious one to me, and what I first think of when I hear "political alignment", is supporting a particular political party or candidate or other electoral cause. I don't think wikipedia does that, and generally I don't think it should.
(Although even here... supporting or opposing the literal 1930s German Nazi Party, in the 1930s, would I suppose, actually indeed be a "political alignment", but... now that makes me think I wouldn't always want to put "political alignment" off the table either. It may be impossible to act morally in the world without some political alignment... but I still don't want wikipedia supporting particular US parties or candidates -- mainly because it would put into question the fairness or truth-goals of it's articles. I'm honestly not sure where the line is.)
Similarly, whether or not you think specific instances of deaths at the hands of police are murder is political. For example, the nature of acceptable violence in self-defense is controversial (in the US particularly), and the acceptable nature of force used by police is controversial too.
And the brand of "Black Lives Matter" does not exist in a vacuum, it been used over a number of years, by many different people, and has become associated (whether these are 'core tenets' or potentially misattributed) with a number of controversial stances, for example anarchist principles, support of disorder, vandalism, violence, revolution, etc. This might be surprising to some, but it is familiar to others. If someone criticizes or dislikes the movement with that context, then are they necessarily dismissive of police brutality against blacks, do they feel blacks don't deserve the same safety as others?
But ok, are you saying that being opposed to racism in itself isn't an inappropriate "political alignment", but using the words "Black Lives Matter" is?
No, I don't think that if someone critisizes or dislikes the movement "within that context" they are necessarily dismissive of police brutality against Black people or feel Black people don't deserve the same safety as others. (I do think they are mistaken about some things).
But do you think... refraining from critisizing the movement under that name is a "political alignment" that is inappropriate for wikipedia? I'm trying to understand what part of what wikipedia has done you think is an inappropriate "political alignment" for them.
If the question is very literally whether murder in a broad sense is bad, it wouldn't be political, no, but it would still be interpreted politically probably. There is always context. Even broad movements like 60's "peace" movements have had political undertones. It's not in favor or against them to say they're political; but I think it does mean companies and organisations should expect simultaneously annoying and encourage different groups whenever they support movements that seem in their name or basic statement to be fair or innocuous like this.
Well, of course you did, didn't you? I thought you said in your original comment that saying certain things indicated wikipedia was politically aligned, and you wouldn't like them to be politically aligned. That's what I was trying to get more info about, what sorts of utterances you thought indicated or led to an inappropriate political alignment for wikipedia.
I think? Am I misunderstanding? These conversations often somehow do seem like we're speaking different languages, that's why I was trying to get clarification.
I'm not following the grammar of "companies and organiations should expect simultaneously annoying and encourage different groups whenever they support movements that seem in their name or basic statement to be fair or innocuous like this", I lost the meaning of that sentence, sorry. Missing a word maybe?
I agree there are interesting questions here.
I iterate what I post a lot and didn't re-read, had company. I apologise, I know that is frustrating.
In this day and age, any false accusation can ruin your life, especially if posted on popular sites. In the old days, you could move to started over if need be, not today. So Discovery and Wikipedia needs to make things right for him.