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Comment by johndcook | Hacker News Reader

Are you suggesting the editors of Frontiers in Virology are not serious virologists?

Not my domain but I had to search the publisher and journal. Frontiers Media has several editorial related controversies.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontiers_Media

The fact is that the state of research, peer review, and publication in academia is in complete shambles, in my professional opinion. The amount of system gaming in research has lead me to question most publications and claims I see anymore, unfortunately. I know the system, many of pressures / incentives, and I know a lot of the games played to optimize around these. It's impossible to be any bit lazy and give into any semblance of authoritative findings anymore unless you too just want to play the publication ranking game to stay afloat or get ahead in your career.

We need a massive overhaul of research culture in the US, IMHO.

Wikipedia has never been a source. It is demeaning to pretend it is one, and naive to believe it is a neutral aggregator.

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

While Wikipedia has never been a source, the particular linked wiki page clearly links to multiple controversies in the footnotes. Take a look starting at [37] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontiers_Media#cite_note-37

When it comes to heavily manipulated "sources" like Wikipedia, I "throw the baby out with the bathwater" (yet another lazy attempt at reasoning is to use phrases like that as justification for, well, anything) is because you cannot see what is not presented in the article, usually in the form of others who will contradict the claims of whatever criticism the page is presenting with equal or stronger sources. Wikipedia guards such open discussion with a lot of dirty tactics which include collusion between article guardians and admins who will have your account locked and IP address blocked from editing in less than one hour of a "violation", and they do not notify you through email of their activities so you have to go discovering what they are doing through their Kafkaesque procedures of adjudication which are decided without any defense from the accused and evidence that doesn't truly qualify as evidence based on any reasonable standard for evidence.

A relatively newer policy implemented through their MediaWiki project is a "feature" whereby an edit can be permanently hidden from view, so future editors cannot go back and see what edits were removed or reverted. This goes completely against the original concept of a wiki and bolsters my claims that Wikipedia should never be used as a source because in the most contentious articles they will hide removed edits containing information they don't like.

The result of this is editors who have contradicting opinions from the Wikipedia-approved opinion will stop editing simply because it isn't worth the effort as Wikipedia always wins (because it is Wikipedia's website).

Wikipedia is a dumpster fire full of bias, pettiness, and structured manipulation. Linking there or using those pages demonstrates laziness and a near complete lack of higher reasoning.

Well, it is not lazy to use the phrase, "throw the baby out with the bathwater." That is a well defined, well understood phrase of the English language that means, "Discard something valuable along with something not wanted." [1]

If you throw the baby out with the bath water, you lose the good parts of something as well as the bad parts, because you reject it as a whole instead of just removing what is bad. [2]

The meaning is that you were throwing out the clear links in the wiki article due to them being presented at wikipedia.org. Footnote 37 and onwards.

[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/throw-out-the-baby-with-th...

[2] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/to-thro...

The phrase, as with many others, is used to hand-wavy dismiss arguments. For example, you completely ignored basically >90% of my comment, which is what people with really poor positions do to attempt to maintain some position of superiority in their minds.

The points you made don't apply here, because they were already answered - in an answer you completely ignored and were tone-deaf about in order to type again about the dangers of wikipedia. What you have glossed over is that I was talking not about a wikipedia article but the links in the footnote section of that wikipedia article.

I specifically stated and made the case that Wikipedia will only allow what Wikipedia wants published to their site. To conclude some measure of criticism exists without competing claims against the criticism is a naive position. This applies to what you are linking to.

Your points do not acknowledgement this central thesis. Wikipedia is garbage, using it as a base of aggregated links is ignorant or naive.

To put it more bluntly: I don't care about the opinions you express regarding this topic, as you are demonstrating very arrogant behavior, particularly in linking to a dictionary dot com article on a common English phrase, as if I've demonstrated some lack of understanding in English require some assistance there. Then completely ignoring my points. You are terrible at discussion.

We are done.

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