I'm not worried about someone lying to me in an article about Conway's Game of Life, but I am very concerned about misinformation in an article that has value to special interest groups with media leverage.
For example, the headline picture is from a normal prison in Xinjiang that houses convicted criminals of various Chinese ethnicities, not a "Uyghur Concentration Camp". Yet it is misused as representation of "Uyghur Genocide"?
Nayirah level nonsense.
Not only that but anyone can review and contribute to the discussion, and submit edit requests. So if you're able to prove the inaccuracy of that picture, you can post about it and submit an edit request about it.
Compared with headline news it's a pretty amazing resource even for the most fiercely political issues.
I don't think that it's a fair assessment to say that it's a stage where propaganda can easily pass off as undeniable truth.
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."
- Joseph Goebbels (allegedly)
It is farcical propaganda, period. While there may be heavy-handed counterterrorism and anti-poverty policies circa 2017 in Xinjiang, there is no evidence of "genocide".
It is not Qanon-tier disinformation, which Wikipedia is resilient against.
It is Nayirah-tier disinformation: peddled by special interest groups in Washington, including the State Department, it gets signal-boosted by establishment media who are on good terms with those SIGs.
Wikipedia is extraordinarily vulnerable to this class of disinformation campaign.
And good luck challenging it in the talk page. Your edits will get instantly reverted by an army of pro-Washington trolls. How else could that extremely inaccurate header image stay up?
Why do people say “there is no evidence of X” to mean “the evidence that has been presented of X is not sufficient to make me believe that X is more likely than not to be true.”
I mean, I get that it sounds stronger to an audience that has no exposure whatsoever to the debate, but to otherwise it seems mostly to be credibility-killing.
But that's not the point. USG doesn't give a single F--- about distant Muslims, much less Chinese Muslims.
The propaganda effect is the point. And Wikipedia is an important tool for that.
Evidence has been provided specifically to the internationally accepted legal definition of genocide. [0] If that doesn't convince you, that's fine, but there is not “no evidence”.
[0] for which, see https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml
Please link this "evidence". The actual primary evidence.
Have you tried?
https://eagle.bchigh.edu/features/2021/04/26/the-uyghur-geno...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/04/china/xinjiang-detective-tort...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55794071
https://scholarship.law.uc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
Consent = manufactured
And mods there will listen to well crafted arguments, and commonly do.
"Both sides probably have some good points" or "the truth is likely somewhere in the middle" are guidelines that are wrong often enough that they're not very useful.
An aim at 'balance' is part of the problem because it's not an aim at facts or truth.
Aiming at balance is the media twisting debate to produce maximum outrage, and therefore increase 'consumer engagement'.
Aiming at balance is politicians providing themselves supposed reasons to maintain the status quo or move in counter-factual directions.
Middle grounds are a slippery slope.
Politics does not only consist of "two sides", framing it like that is a very US-centric way of going about it.
Btw; Anybody who thinks Wikipedia is biased on politics should really take a stroll trough the self-declared conservative opposite to Wikipedia; Conservapedia, which features some of the most delusional content I've seen on the web.
Would you expand on who, exactly these "both sides" might be?
In the US, the "sides" are a center-right party (the Democratic Party) and a far-right party (the Republican Party). Focusing on two right-wing parties isn't "equal representation."
In a broader context, "equal representation" would include the far left (Anarchists, hard-core Communists, left Libertarians like myself, etc.) the center (Social Democrats, US Democratic Party, UK Tories, etc.) and the far right (US Republican Party, the Polish Prawo i Sprawiedliwość , French National Front, Hungary's Fidesz, actual Nazis, etc.)
There are examples of parties from the broader political spectrum in most countries, including the US (Green Party, American Socialist Party, American Nazi Party, etc.). Ignoring them is one of the issues with the US's two party system.
Pretending that the major US political parties represent the breadth of the political spectrum is self-delusion at best, and willful deception at worst.
Randians essentially believe there is only one correct opinion (i.e. that which is true according to universal Reason) and every bona fide Objectivist will (eventually) arrive at that same opinion. Otherwise, they must be misguided by ideology or something. Therefore let's make sure only Reasonable content lands on Wikipedia.
The real world doesn't work like that.
Wikipedia would be better served if it presented data in the format "According to X, Y is true" and make no a priori claims about veracity. Right now, Wikipedia is all "Y is true" with the implicit assumption that it is backed by a so-called "reliable source", which results in horribly biased and misinformational coverage of many sensitive topics.
If you want to discard everything said by CGTN or RT or NYT, fine, but let's put that decision into the user's hands (literally, with cookie-based content filtering) rather than authoritarianly deciding what is best for them.
The key Objectivist principles are that are relevant to Wikipedia — realism and rationalism — are hardly the controversial parts of Objectivist philosophy. Moreover, they seem like appropriate a priori beliefs for an encyclopedia, given that the entire point of an encyclopedia is to be an accurate reference of objects and events in the real world.
I do however agree that the problem of trust and sourcing is a huge issue for Wikipedia, and speaks to a larger problem in epistemology that as our collective knowledge grows, we have to rely more and more on trust and appeals to authority, since most of that knowledge consists of things that you or I can’t easily go verify.
I was going to propose that perhaps Wikipedia should just tighten up their definitions of “trusted sources” rather than throwing out a priori notions of truth, but that would just be appealing to a different authority. Maybe that’s the best we can hope for, though?
On the contrary, I think the belief in a universal Reason is the root what makes it a ridiculous ideology. Way to go putting a postmodern veneer on Plato.
This is one of the big unspoken rules of HN also don't you think? I'm curious to see if anyone else engages with this one, because I think the reason-as-Truth framework is nearly pervasive and actively policed here.