English Wikipedia drove out fringe editors over two decades
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
"The lab leak theory is informed by racist undercurrents, and has resulted in anti-Chinese sentiment. [...] While the proposed scenarios are theoretically subject to evidence-based investigation, it is not clear than any can can be sufficiently falsified to placate lab leak supporters, and they are fed by pseudoscientific and conspiratorial thinking."
Edit: It is weird that on a pretty technical forum there are a bunch of people here who don't know anything about virology disagreeing with the overwhelming scientific consensus in the field, based on overtly conspiratorial thinking (e.g. "Look at the connections, this can't be a coincidence, this man leaked the truth and they silenced him" etc etc). You don't get to scientific consensus on something through a conspiracy. I wonder what the people replying with conspiracy theories think about climate change.
Oh you were serious?
Yea I guess I don’t get where anyone would get all that nonsense from.
It’s nothing more than a coincidence that the first people that got sick worked in and around China’s only level4 bio lab, that the NIH was confirmed to 1-degree indirectly funding gain of function research on sars coronaviruses… then after the virus was out the Chinese government came in to prevent access to that facility and it’s data. I mean… how racist do you have to be to give any credit to the conspiracy theory that it didn’t come from a wet market near that lab?
Covid was an extreme case of "this is the only truth, everyone else has rocks for brains", and then the truth changing overnight. Masks don't help, you don't need them, just wash your hands, to you must wear a mask, vaccinated people don't get sick, don't spread the virus, to whoops, heart issues are just a conspiracy thory, to countries stopping use of specific vaccines due to heart issues.
Don't be like that, accept that other theories are possible, and that we don't know the whole truth yet.
If someone (from the government, national 'cdc', whoever) stood up infront of the cameras, said "we fucked up, masks are really needed, we thought so otherwise and gave bad advice, we're sorry, please wear masks", then sure... some will get mad, because their relatives died by following the advice, but for most, it would be a decent thing done by their governments... but banning people who suggested that we need masks, and then banning people who suggested that we didn't need masks without unbanning the first group, is, well... stupid.
> The initial recommendation not to go out and panic buy masks was for a good reason, healthcare providers needed them first.
Oh yeah, just a thing I'd like to see with people in power, scientists in doctors... "we lied to you, because we couldn't fill out order forms in time, you could have died by following our advice, but here's new advice, we're totally not lying now, whoopsie, sorry!" (but without the 'sorry'). How am I supposed to trust them now, when they recommend something else?
There's two different things to discuss here. One is "the science" and one is "public health guidelines", and they're different things. It is one thing to discuss the behavior of the virus in a scientific context. It is another thing to spread memes, FUD, or armchair conjecture in a forum of non-experts that make claims counter to the latest scientific consensus.
> censoring them from social networks, calling them covid deniers, conspiracy theorists, having their wikipedia edits removed,
This isn't a fault of scientists or regulators. This is a failure of social media and their user base. They are incapable of being nuanced enough to determine the difference between scientific discussion, pseudoscience, conjecture, and malice. And so, those platforms became filled with speech that confused all four, and those who managed those platforms threw up their hands and resorted to heavy handed tactics because they lack the capability to do anything more precise.
> If someone (from the government, national 'cdc', whoever) stood up infront of the cameras, said "we fucked up, masks are really needed
When the guidance changed, they did announce the change, along with the reason. The reason wasn't a "fuck up" it was new data that changed the calculus.
> Oh yeah, just a thing I'd like to see with people in power, scientists in doctors... "we lied to you, because we couldn't fill out order forms in time, you could have died by following our advice, but here's new advice, we're totally not lying now, whoopsie, sorry!" (but without the 'sorry'). How am I supposed to trust them now, when they recommend something else?
That isn't at all what happened, or what the problem was. The national stockpile of masks wasn't mismanaged by scientists, it was mismanaged by politicians. And JIT inventory wasn't implemented by distributors and hospital management by scientists, it was done by MBAs. And divesting manufacturing overseas wasn't done by scientists, it was done by wall street. And again, as I said in a sibling comment, the CDC was upfront about the rationale from the beginning.
But what if the memes and FUD are right? Should we really censor the paranoid conspiracy theorist, that said that you need a mask, when fauci was saying that washing hands is enough? What about when vaccines became available, someone said "even if vaccinated, you'll still get it, you can still spread it to your grandma, and she can still die from it, and the 'vaccinated people don't get ill' is a lie!"? I mean... it turned out to be true, but it got deleted from facebook and it got you banned from a lot of reddit.
> This isn't a fault of scientists or regulators. This is a failure of social media and their user base. They are incapable of being nuanced enough to determine the difference between scientific discussion, pseudoscience, conjecture, and malice. And so, those platforms became filled with speech that confused all four, and those who managed those platforms threw up their hands and resorted to heavy handed tactics because they lack the capability to do anything more precise.
...and wikipedia, the topic of this post.
> That isn't at all what happened, or what the problem was. The national stockpile of masks wasn't mismanaged by scientists, it was mismanaged by politicians. And JIT inventory wasn't implemented by distributors and hospital management by scientists, it was done by MBAs. And divesting manufacturing overseas wasn't done by scientists, it was done by wall street. And again, as I said in a sibling comment, the CDC was upfront about the rationale from the beginning.
The general consensus was, that masks don't help a lot, that's why you don't need them. It wasn't "you really need a mask, and we'll mandate it soon, but we don't have enough for now".
I'll answer this two different ways:
1. For ad supported platforms: Regardless of anyone's moral objections, ad supported platforms have neither the expertise nor desire to do anything otherwise. They are not scientific experts, they aren't any good at moderating nuanced speech, and they barely have the capability to moderate even the most obvious of situations on their platform.
2. In regards to Wikipedia, while they at least attempt to operate in a way that prioritizes information over profit incentives, it has always been a battleground of agendas by people of varying qualification hiding behind keyboards. Truth is just an inherently hard thing to determine, especially when it is a contemporary topic with a lot of change that requires expertise to understand. If it is hard for the world's best experts to come to an answer, it will be even harder others to do the same. Then the question is more about balance of quality -- do you want your platform to contain more information, even if some is wrong? Or do you want to maintain a higher standard, even if you kick out some people who might have been right? What if the wrong information could be dangerous to people's health? Do you bear some responsibility to ensure it is correct? I don't think there's a correct answer for every situation here, but there are absolutely good arguments for why you might not want to let people cry fire in a crowded theatre if the other attendees disagree.
> The general consensus was, that masks don't help a lot, that's why you don't need them. It wasn't "you really need a mask, and we'll mandate it soon, but we don't have enough for now".
What "general consensus" are you referring to? What the CDC said in March 2020 was that masks were recommended to be prioritized for healthcare workers who needed them the most. This was reasonable at the time, and still reasonable in hindsight.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210402002315/https://www.msnbc...
> And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.
So, if you listened to CDC, you'd get vaccinated, grandma would get vaccinated, you'd go to grandma, and think you were safe, while infecting her with covid and in a few days/weeks killing her.
If you listened to a "local conspiracy nut", who was telling you that vaccines don't work, that there will be no herd immunity and that vaccines were causing heart issues, you'd be closer to reality than if you listened to the CDC director.
So, do you want a platform that lets all opinions, "correct" and "wrong", to stay there, or a platform that lets wrong 'facts' (because some authority told them they're facts) stay, while deleting true 'conspiracy theories'.
How many times can "authorities" (cdc, whoever) be wrong, and conspiracy theorists right, before we stop censoring the truth to protect the authorities?
> What if the wrong information could be dangerous to people's health? Do you bear some responsibility to ensure it is correct?
Like "if you get vaccinated, you won't get sick and spread it"? Fever and caughing? You're vaccinated right? It's just a cold, go to work, visit grandma, vaccinated people don't get covid, don't carry the virus. I mean.. you're advocating censorship for Bob Average from oregon while supporting the wrong and dangerous information from authorities.
A broken clock is wrong twice per day, but that doesn't mean you should consider one as a valid NTP server. (and in fact, the conspiracy nut was still wrong, vaccines do work, to prevent hospitalization and death) Basing a guideline off of data, and updating when wrong, is a more rigorous methodology than fabrication and conjecture.
The quantity and quality of evidence available to support an opinion is a relatively way to measure that opinion's validity. That doesn't make them infallible, but it makes them less fallible than opinions that lack quality rationale.
> So, do you want a platform that lets all opinions, "correct" and "wrong", to stay there, or a platform that lets wrong 'facts' (because some authority told them they're facts) stay, while deleting true 'conspiracy theories'.
Usually something in the middle, depending on the specifics. I think too many people are quick to apply broad free speech ideals to everything, when in reality, context, audience, venue, and impact matters a LOT.
And if your NTP server has failed you once before.. and again.. and again... would it be unreasonable to say "maybe the NTP is wrong" the next time something weird happens with your system clock?
The degree to which someone might do reasonably do this, and what action they might reasonably take as a result, depends on the audience, the moderator of the medium, their ability to moderate, and their ability judge the evidence independently.
Except that wasn’t the messaging at the time. The messaging at the time was that masks didn’t work. Then, when the supply chain caught up and the authorities wanted to impose mask mandates, the messaging changed and they said masks did work. The “facts” were manipulated in order to align with the desired policy outcomes.
That isn't true, at least in regards to the CDC's guidance. The CDC was up front about the reasoning from the beginning. There were others who repeated different variations of this, which has clouded this topic for a long time.
> March 24, 2020
> “Facemasks may be in short supply and they should be saved for caregivers,” the government agency says.
> https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-07-27/timeline-cd...
(7) In March 2020, Dr. Fauci told Americans not to wear
masks, noting: ``There's no reason to be walking around with a
mask. When you are in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask
might make people feel a little bit better and it might even
block a droplet, but it is not providing the perfect protection
that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended
consequences--people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep
touching their face.''.
(10) Dr. Fauci also now claims that herd immunity will
require 80 to 85 percent of Americans to get the vaccine.
At that time, many people thought that transmission was (or might be) also prevalent thorough surface contact. If that was the case, it would be less of a reason to wear masks, as the general public isn't trained in aseptic technique and, as I'm sure you're observed, touches the heck out of their masks.
In that context, there's not a damn thing wrong with that quote.
> Somehow herd immunity dissapeared from the media too.
Yeah, because we all learned new things! We learned that while the vaccines did do a good job at preventing death and serious disease, they not provide a great deal of immunity. And we also learned that immunity, if any, waned quickly, and people could be infected multiple times. So yeah, there's not much reason to talk about herd immunity, because it ain't gonna happen.
> Yeah, because we all learned new things! We learned that while the vaccines did do a good job at preventing death and serious disease, they not provide a great deal of immunity.
Back then? No.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210402002315/https://www.msnbc... (interview with the director of the CDC)
> And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.
If you went on facebook/reddit back then, the day after that interview, and wrote: "vaccines don't give you a lot of immunity, you'll still get ill, you'll still infect grandma, she can still die from covid, and even with 100% vaccination rate, there will never be herd immunity!", what would happen to your post? Would it stay there? Or would it be removed for misinformation? If you were a public figure and said that out loud, would "the science/experts" agree with your (then and now) perfectly valid theory, or would you be called an antivaxxer, denyer, conspiracy theorist?
The problem is that Facebook is an expert on the React codebase, not immunology, and their moderators are underpaid, overworked, and unskilled. The best they can do is "if post doesn't match official guidelines, delete".
When people are dying, regulators are breathing down your neck, and you just want to keep selling ads in a freefall market, what would you do? It's understandable that they did what they did. They're a digital billboard company that makes money off of boomer memes, vacation photo sharing, and high school reunion organizing. They're not arbiters of truth.
Statements that are actually factual are some of the strongest supporting evidence for false conspiracy theories, when given to audiences that don't fully understand the context of the situation. As a basic example, many people misinterpreted things like "you can still get COVID if you wear a mask or vaccinate" as being equivalent to "masks and vaccines don't work", because they're not intimately familiar with how viruses spread and/or how disease impact may vary in outcome. Most people unfamiliar with a topic will have a more general, black-and-white approximate understanding of something, and this is no different for public health topics.
Whether or not a statement should be frowned upon or not really depends not just on the factuality, but also a lot on the context and what it might suggest to the audience.
If someone sees someone else smoking a cigarette in a crowded theater, yells "fire!", and then people die in a stampede to the exits, the statement should be frowned upon, regardless of the fact that it was factual. "Being right" is not always enough.
> vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.
This does not require you to be scientifically literate to be able to understand what she's saying. It's not a scientific show, they're not using greek symbols and formulas, but "vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick". This means that a vast majority if not all vaccinated people don't carry the virus and don't get sick (as they don't with eg. polio vaccine, mumps vaccine, whooping cough etc. vaccines).
If we put a scale from "totally work" to "don't work at all", the vaccines would be closer to "don't work".
The cigaretta analogy is bad. This is like seeing dark smoke coming from a long hallway at work, your boss closing of the hallway, saying "we have everythng under control, go back to your office" and your coworker getting arrested for saying "the burning will burn down, run outside".... and then the building burns down.
The vaccines are highly effective at preventing people from dying or becoming seriously ill. Which is the entire reason to be afraid of the virus to begin with.
"Preventing infection" is only relevant in the context of the consequences of the infection, and muddying the water with discussions about infection probability when the the vaccine is effective at preventing death and hospitalization is a reckless red herring that confuses people.
An equivocation of "you can still get sick with the vaccine" with "the vaccines don't work" is exactly the kind of misinformation crap that should be removed from platforms with any kind of responsible moderation.
I’m not making fun of you. I think you are probably an intelligent person who now is forced to persuade themselves that they weren’t lied to, it was just all messy and complicated. That your authority figures weren’t acting in ignorance or bad faith, most people just didn’t get it.
We really are wired for religious tribalism.
New information doesn't make old information a lie. The act of distilling nuanced judgment about a complex topic into a recommendation is not a lie.
Outsiders on many topics believe things are a lot more black-and-white than they really are. The reality is the scope of discussion in the public sphere is always much more narrow than the scope of discussion among experts. You could point to any public statement ever, in any field, and the internal discussions would be more nuanced than the public statement. This isn't prima facie evidence of lying or scheming. Public statements are inherently not a brain dump of internal discussion.
You know how people on this forum and watch the news about a tech topic, and shake their head at how they oversimplify the topics to the point of misunderstanding? That is exactly how public health experts react to people trying to make a fuss about the CDCs response.
It's super confusing due to all the lying, but actually that's the revisionist history. The real timeline goes like this:
1. Scientists are asked if masks will work to stop COVID. They say no because there's little to no evidence in the literature that surgical/cloth masks can stop the spread of a respiratory virus. This initial position is correct.
2. There is a very short lived campaign by professional activist types called #MasksForAll which pressures public health officials to recommend masks for everyone.
3. Scientific advisors discuss in private and say things like "it probably won't help but can't really hurt so why not" and agree to support it.
4. Message changes.
5. People demand explanations for why the message changed. Mostly officials stay silent and refuse to answer. Fauci specifically (not so much elsewhere) claims that this was a vast conspiracy (!) to manage supply chain capacity. But this isn't correct and private correspondence uncovered afterwards reveals this, for example, Fauci is asked in private emails what he thinks about masks and answers the same way as in step (1).
What happened here took a lot of work to uncover, but there's no longer any doubt about the correct sequence of events here. The idea of "masks don't work" being a noble lie, is itself a lie, which is why it's so confusing - Fauci and allies lied about lying.
As an example of just one piece of evidence pointing in this direction, a BBC journalist tweeted:
https://archive.is/20201205224307/https://twitter.com/deb_co...
> We had been told by various sources WHO committee reviewing the evidence had not backed masks but they recommended them due to political lobbying. This point was put to WHO who did not deny
(she later deleted the tweet as orthodoxy inverted and the true reasons for masking were covered up)
But there's also the fact that mask mandates didn't have any effect when introduced, which shows that the initial stance was the correct one. And the posited conspiracy is a stupid one too. Almost all masks were imported and governments can easily seize shipments at the ports to control distribution if they need to. Lying to the public (and by extension, health workers) is by far the most idiotic way to manage supply chains imaginable.
Why did they do this? Public health seems to have big cultural problems with the idea that tradeoffs exist. In both private and public they tend to describe their proposed policies as being cost-free. If you and everyone around you genuinely believes that any health policy is pure upside then why not mandate masks? It can't hurt and might help, therefore, you must do it. But people outside public health culture expect recommendations to be stable and tradeoffs to be justified. So they conclude that they must lie to the public, because they know deep down that expressing their true beliefs and true level of uncertainty would discredit them.
Some call it "revisionist history" some call it gaslighting. It was the same with vaccines... get vaccinated, and you won't get it, herd immunity at X% vaccination rate, safe and effective, etc. ...and now? Slightly lower chance to die, but you can still infect and kill grandma, even if both of you are vaccinated.
Imagine seeing ads for a car, buying it, and getting something that doesn't drive, the radio doesn't work, and the car salesman saying "if it rains, you can still sit inside and it'll keep you dry". ...and then finding out, that everyon warning you about that got censored from everywhere.
They’ll go to their graves defending that car.
Someone put together a super clip of all the vaccine propaganda, including all of Colbert’s (literally and proudly, sponsored by Pfizer) song and dance routines… looking at it now, to call it blatant propaganda would be under selling it.
> Writing a message with an audience in mind is good communication.
Yes, and lying isn't.
The problem is that his admission to lying is itself a lie. That's quite the 5D chess move and it has confused a huge number of people. Masks never worked, the claim that they did is a lie. The original claim was correct, and the claim that it was a lie, is a lie. That's just masks, before you even get to other topics.
It was later drummed up by pretty much all masking enthusiasts that not wearing a mask is equal to murdering a grandma or two, and some "immunnocompromised" people on top. Surely, grand-scale messaging from position of high authority that "you don't need to wear a mask" will have a quantifiable number of associated deaths, and a very substantial one, under such assumption? Why the perpetrators of the message aren't put on trial for manslaughter? After all, the court may find that they had a "good reason" and acquit them of charges! I will have some basis to believe "public health" messaging, but not before such case is heard. What is the chance it will be?
I know it will never happen.
The bigger issue was, if some in the scientific or medical community disagreed, it didn't seem like they could safely voice that disagreement.
"""
The mainstream media downplayed—and even denied—the scientific theory that COVID-19 emerged from the WIV.
Nicholas Wade testified about the campaign to discredit the lab leak theory. He pointed out that scientists kept in line with the natural origin camp led by Drs. Fauci and Collins because of their dependence on government grants and that the media failed to challenge the forced narrative.
All witnesses agreed that the possibility of COVID-19 originating from a lab is not a conspiracy theory.> In 2014, the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, the part of the NIH headed by Fauci, awarded a $3.4 million grant to the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, which aims to protect people from viruses that jump from species to species.
> The group hired the virology lab in Wuhan to conduct genetic analyses of bat coronaviruses collected in Yunnan province, about 800 miles southwest of Wuhan. EcoHealth Alliance paid the lab $598,500 over five years. The lab had secured approval from both the U.S. State Department and the NIH.
> That the NIAID funded the project is not in question.
https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/202...
There’s still no known natural precursor and the only thing we see with a similar Furin cleavage site (which greatly enhanced the virality) doesn’t look like the backbone of the virus. The only US intelligence agency which assessed the situation with moderate confidence was the one who concluded that it was a lab leak. The natural origin conclusion only received low confidence.
Never mind that multiple virologists stated in emails that it looked engineered — until a private call with Fauci, when they recanted, and wouldn’t you know, got millions in grants shortly after.
You seem to be ignoring the actual scientific data, the work of intelligence agencies, and the documented human aspects which impacted this.
But yeah, keep throwing that abuse out there to shame others because they don’t recite the headlines as good as you.
Edit:
People who ignore you led with scientific facts and expert analysis to focus on the documented conspiracy — then try to call your whole post “conspiratorial nonsense” are funny.
Are they self-aware enough to realize they were fishing for a pretense to ignore you?
Are you self-aware enough to know that this paragraph gives the game away that your whole comment is conspiratorial nonsense, or does it feel normal to you to theorise that some US public health official who got caught up in partisan US politics is personally intimidating scientists into agreeing with scientific consensus, and rewarding them with grants for doing so?
https://www.natesilver.net/p/journalists-should-be-skeptical...
We also now know of natural viruses which are very close to SARS-CoV-2 and only missing the FCS, but at the same time there has been zero evidence that WIV was ever working with SARS-CoV-2-like viruses when their focus was on SARS-CoV-1 like viruses.
And the natural spillover event is the leading theory in the intelligence community, from the ODNI report:
> The National Intelligence Council and four other IC agencies assess that the initial human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was caused by natural exposure to an infected animal that carried SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, a virus that probably would be more than 99 percent similar to SARS-CoV-2.
> The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assess that a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2, although for different reasons.
> The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.
> Almost all IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered. Most agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not laboratory-adapted; some are unable to make a determination. All IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon.
The natural spillover theory is the leading theory 5-to-3 compared to other theories and only DoE and the FBI think that the lab leak was more likely. Genetic engineering is not a well-supported theory. And I don't know what evidence DoE or FBI could have that CIA/NSA doesn't that leads them to the conclusion that it was a lab leak.
> People who ignore you led with scientific facts and expert analysis to focus on the documented conspiracy — then try to call your whole post “conspiratorial nonsense” are funny.
You haven't presented any scientific facts. And then you pivoted into conspiracy theories about scientists. Yeah, there was a scientist early on who looked at the FCS and got startled by it and thought it was a smoking gun, and then after considering the scientific evidence he changed his mind. Assuming and stating as a fact that he changed his mind due to financial pressure, without any evidence, is exactly conspiratorial thinking.
WIV collected the viruses from 800mi away which are the known closest relative — but missing the Furin cleavage site.
> only DoE and the FBI think that the lab leak was more likely […] I don't know what evidence DoE or FBI could have that CIA/NSA doesn't that leads them to the conclusion that it was a lab leak
DoE specializes in things like bioterrorism, via one of their analysis labs. FBI similarly. Neither CIA nor NSA do, who specialize in HUMINT and SIGINT respectively.
> natural spillover theory is the leading theory 5-to-3
And as I mentioned before, the only one to asses with moderate rather than low confidence is in that group of 3. When assessing such matters, we need to consider not just the number of analyses, but their relative confidence in their conclusions.
> Assuming and stating as a fact that he changed his mind due to financial pressure, without any evidence, is exactly conspiratorial thinking.
There was more than one — and they changed their opinion after a phone call, not based on later evidence. Feel free to present the evidence you believe changed his mind.
> Assuming and stating as a fact that he changed his mind due to financial pressure, without any evidence, is exactly conspiratorial thinking.
Except that we do have evidence in the timing of him being contacted by an implicated official and later receiving grants from a related organization. Dismissing evidence of collusion as “conspiratorial” because you don’t like the conclusions is bad faith.
RaTG13 is not the known closest relative any more and the spike is considerably different and probably doesn't bind to human ACE2. There's also no known evidence that they ever had 'live' RaTG13 or any other SARS-CoV-2-like virus in the lab.
> And as I mentioned before, the only one to asses with moderate rather than low confidence is in that group of 3. When assessing such matters, we need to consider not just the number of analyses, but their relative confidence in their conclusions.
And it seems whatever evidence they have isn't sufficient to convince any of the other intelligence agencies, and they haven't disclosed what that evidence is. So because one intelligence agency says "trust me bro" while the others are unconvinced that makes the one with the strongest opinion clearly the correct one. That isn't a good way to judge truth.
> There was more than one — and they changed their opinion after a phone call, not based on later evidence. Feel free to present the evidence you believe changed his mind.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/science/covid-lab-leak-fa...
"I cautioned in that same email that we would need to look at the question much more closely and that our opinions could change within a few days based on new data and analyses — which they did."
"The features in SARS-CoV-2 that initially suggested possible engineering were identified in related coronaviruses, meaning that features that initially looked unusual to us weren’t."
"Many of these analyses were completed in a matter of days, while we worked around the clock, which allowed us to reject our preliminary hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 might have been engineered, while other “lab”-based scenarios were still on the table."
"Yet more extensive analyses, significant additional data and thorough investigations to compare genomic diversity more broadly across coronaviruses led to the peer-reviewed study published in Nature Medicine. For example, we looked at data from coronaviruses found in other species, such as bats and pangolins, which demonstrated that the features that first appeared unique to SARS-CoV-2 were in fact found in other, related viruses."
"Overall, this is a textbook example of the scientific method where a preliminary hypothesis is rejected in favor of a competing hypothesis after more data become available and analyses are completed."
> later receiving grants from a related organization
"Virologist accepts grants to continue research" is not exactly a ground-breaking headline.
And on such an important topic! It's horrifying that grown adults take this bullshit at face value.
Like - we know for a fact, thanks to many leaks, that scientists believed lableak was possible and even likely, that they were pressured from "on high" to say otherwise.
We know for a fact that scientists and others who talked about the lableak theory - at all - had their posts delete, suppressed, "fact-checked", restricted, and were even banned or shadow-banned.
So for that to be said with a straight face - it's vomitous. It's about as daft as calling Corbyn an anti-semite, or calling protestors who want a Gaza ceasefire 'violent extremists' and 'Hamas supporters'. Media's gonna media, I guess.
You're doing an egregious sanitization of what a lot of participants of the Palestine protests defend, establishing a Caliphate for one.[0]
There are valid reasons to call Corbyn an anti-Semite. I will list them below, they are far too many.[1]
None of these examples are comparable to the pressure to label the lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy.
[0]https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/anti-israel-protest-in-essen-si...
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/21/do-not-forg...
Some of the evidence that supports calling Corbyn an anti semite are:
- Corbyn wrote the foreword for a book that claims Jews control banks and the press[2].
- Corbyn expressed support for a self-described Holocaust denier and others accused of anti-Semitism[2].
- Corbyn laid a wreath at the graves of Palestinian terrorists who murdered 11 Israeli Olympic athletes in 1972[2].
- Corbyn failed to suspend or expel members of his party who engaged in anti-Semitic conduct, such as calling Jewish people "child killers", "Tory Jews" and "Zio scum"[3].
- Corbyn rejected the internationally accepted definition of anti-Semitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance[4].
- Corbyn was formally investigated by the UK's anti-racism watchdog, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which found that Labour had unlawfully discriminated against, harassed and victimized Jewish people[5].
- Corbyn refused to apologize for anti-Semitism in the Labour Party in a BBC interview, and claimed that the issue had been "dramatically overstated for political reasons" by his opponents[6].
- Corbyn was suspended from the Labour Party over his reaction to the anti-Semitism report, but later reinstated after he said he regretted his comments[7].
- Corbyn lost the support and trust of many Jewish voters and organizations, who feared that he would pose a threat to their safety and security if he became prime minister[8].
[2] Jeremy Corbyn | Politics | The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/jeremy-corbyn/2023/feb/....
[3] Mike Katz on Twitter: "It's beyond time @guardian stopped giving Corbyn .... https://twitter.com/mikekatz/status/1628175186947080196.
[4] Politics | The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/politics.
[5] Jeremy Corbyn and Labour's anti-Semitism row explained - BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-43893791.
[6] Document lists 9 instances of anti-Semitism by Corbyn among thousands .... https://www.timesofisrael.com/document-lists-9-instances-of-....
[7] Labour suspends Jeremy Corbyn over reaction to anti-Semitism report - BBC. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-54730425.
[8] Labour suspends Jeremy Corbyn over reaction to anti-Semitism report - BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-54730425.
[9] Jeremy Corbyn's Anti-Semitism Crisis | The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-uk/jeremy-cor....
> As The Canary extensively reported during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, figures from the Conservative Party, the Labour right, and the establishment media orchestrated a transparently politically-motivated smear campaign against him. Their weapon of choice was employing a litany of bogus accusations of antisemitism to paint the lifelong anti-racism campaigner as some kind of bigot.
> The purpose of the campaign was straightforward – they sought to derail his chances of becoming prime minister and distract attention from his (widely popular) policy proposals. Their motive was equally straightforward – they rightly feared the threat that a Corbyn-led government would pose to the status quo and their own political and economic interests. Now, one of the major players in this campaign has admitted that its whole underlying premise was false all along.
It was an utterly ridiculous smear campaign.
Corbyn was popular, would have disrupted the status quo, said true things, and helped poor people; so he was smeared as an anti-semite and IRA supporter, lol. It's terribly ignorant, and dangerous, to be taken in by such incredibly obvious hit-jobs.
I judge Corbyn's antisemitism based on his own actions, of which I listed many, not what journalists say positively or negatively of it.
> [4] Politics | The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/politics.
Sorry, is your citation for this point the Guardian's entire politics section? Four years ago that would have been pretty accurate, admittedly, but today, this is an absolutely non-serious thing to post.
In any case, it wasn't just Corbyn who opposed incorporating the IHRA definition into disciplinary rules, it was, amongst others, the guy who wrote it:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/13/antise...
Well yeah. I would hope that a foreign nation that we (the US) so consistently arm, fund, and diplomatically support would be held to higher standards than one we don't.
Sorry but I'm not inclined to keep reading after this.
Are there Sinophobes that support the lab leak theory? Yes.
Are there Hamas supporters that attend Gaza ceasefire demonstrations? Yes.
Doesn't mean that you can just write off the entire arguments of each group.
Do we know that for a fact?
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/secret-messages-behind-lab-l...
Those terms were frequently used to shut down discussion when the Quebec government made the decision to prohibit certain public employees from displaying religious symbols a few years ago.
Which, until the Chinese decide to be more forthcoming with the world, is likely true. We can't know, and we won't know, because they won't talk.
> We can't know, and we won't know, because they won't talk.
So no crime can ever be solved unless the criminal admits guilt? We do accept that things can be proven about events without the perp admitting directly they did it, and COVID's origins as a genetic engineering experiment gone wrong have long ago passed the threshold of all reasonable doubt.
The article merges the theories together, and then uses scientist's support of natural origin to dismiss both. Having it come from a wild bat doesn't suddenly rule out the lab that was doing research on wild bats.
The experiments shouldn't have happened in the first place... but that's another issue.
The leaks were inevitable and predictable, which is why it should have been at least a BSL4 lab, that's another issue.
No vast conspiracy, no fringe theories about bioweapons... just trying to get experiments done on the cheap.
If we funded science research properly, the work would have been far better organized and managed.
The language used here is indicative. Few native English speakers would ever deploy a racist undercurrent when a perfectly decent overtone exists to do the job properly. An undercurrent is covert and an overtone is overt. The allegations are largely overt.
It turns out that most large Chinese cities are home to labs that study coronaviruses and virus outbreaks occur rurally ... anyway the article is now obviously bollocks, through over editing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory - click on View History, hit the 500 entry link and you will only go back to February this year!
You do get to view the complete history of this article. You can watch it churn, revision by revision. There must be a paper in there or two - just on the revision history of a WP article.
Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=COVID-19_lab_leak...
Modern medical practice was a fringe view two hundred years ago.
My point is if you hide the fringe then you either get left behind or prevent others from moving forward.
I think this is really only an “issue” when it comes to politics and culture wars
Ultimately they’re OK with both because the politics justify it.
It’s so obvious that as formal religion has weakened that informal religion has taken over. It’s not a bible, it’s a screen, you have faith, you think what it tells you, there are priests, you can wear the wrong thing, you do what makes you accepted in your tribe. If you didn’t see it during covid, then you extra double have a religion.
All these people that mock religion - and have no idea they have their own is almost entertaining if it wasn’t so destructive. It’s wired into humans, we know it is, and then pretend it isn’t to our detriment.
Most useful stuff comes from the leading edge. Occasionally from the fringe, but the SNR there is terrible. Either way though, by the time you want it written up in an encyclopedia it's been sorted out if it's useful for something.
If you just write up everything, you'll be drowning in half-baked ideas and crackpot theories, the net damage to the value of the place far outweighs any positives.
Do you feel like there are a shortage of places to discuss ideas that don’t have much traction?
I think this is far less true in other arenas, which is why I'm not talking about politics or culture here. Although there is probably some merit in anarchy there too. It'd be naive of us to assume our current understanding of government is complete. Imagine being a Monarchist in the 1700s and thinking there was no more perfect form of government!
I think it’s incredibly valuable to be able to apply it to politics enough to understand what is normal and feels natural to us (liberalism, capitalism, technology) was not always so.
People here may be familiar with the exploration–exploitation tradeoff (which, by the way, has a Wikipedia article that could use some significant expansion by some people who are familiar). It is rightly pointed out here that there are areas where it is appropriate for there to be less discovery and greater focus on exploiting or validating existing knowledge, and of course, vice versa. One may propose also the possibility that there be multiple points on the spectrum that one could take even in the same field, for example, preliminary results may be shared as preprints before peer-review, yet even after review, post-publication review and replication are essential for robustness.
Still, it may seem odd that exploration, original research, is expressly prohibited on Wikipedia. But should we be without any such restriction, Wikipedia is written by Randy in Boise.
to
"statements of fact, sourcing hierarchy, and acceptance of pejorative labels."
This transition was propelled by early victories in the "anti-fringe" camp, driving away members of the "pro-fringe" camp.
What's the rationale for the 'anti-fringe' camp to intentionally lower Wikipedia's credibility?
And why would Jimmy Wales et al. accept that?
In this case, you may not talk someone out of believing in homeopathy, particularly if they've invested a lot of time or money in it. You may have better luck with people who are first hearing about homeopathy, visiting the article, and seeing that it's junk.
I've seen this play out in other subjects, like global warming (there's not a real "both sides"; climate scientists nearly universally believe in it), evolution (almost no biologists believe in Creationism), chiropractic (there's no plausible mechanism of action; studies fail to show that it works for anything beyond some back pain), the "electric universe" (cosmologists universally think it's dumb), and many others. Diehards are gonna diehard. People on the fence can benefit from a solid dose of reality.
Are you sure? Why? Because they told you it is? Because you donated? Because you see the people that make edits and articles?
What if it a community labor site? How would you as an outsider be able to tell the difference?
It's also possible I misunderstood and was only seeing the removed edits because of HTTP caching, but I did know about that at the time...
Or maybe you were so annoying you'd got yourself added to the automated filter list? I guess that's unlikely for a random twerp but who knows.
Are you trying to make the point that it is impossible to deceive you that Wikipedia could be ideologically and politically manipulated?
You’ve made an excellent point for me. Is entirely likely, that at Wikipedia is some level deceiving its users and we can’t know.
I'm not quite sure what the advantage is over labelling it 'disputed'.
Nope, it was still pseudoscientific at the time, even if it gained scientific evidence later.
Wikipedia is a purveyor of facts, not of judgments, but sometimes the two are inseparable. As long as it's a fact, it's ok if it's implicitly a judgment too.
Right, but how does that relate to pejorative labelling policies?
i.e. If even just 20% of readers will misinterpret the label, then why go with the label instead of something like 'disputed' which has a mis-interpretation rate close to 0%?
What does 50/50 mean in this context?
If you mean a 50% probability of the article ultimately proving to be mostly true, then that would genuinely be the case for some small fraction of homeopathy articles?
Like climate change, or creationists trying to claim evolution is disputed at a scientific level. It isn't, but they'll tout lists of "experts who doubt evolution" to try and make people think there's more doubt than there really is.
(Leading to things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Steve as response.)
Yes I understand, what I'm saying is that is genuinely true for some small fraction of articles. Obviously not anywhere close to 100%, but the amount of people who would actually read 'disputed' as anywhere close to 100% of articles have 'significant camps' is almost 0.
That "if" is doing a lot of work there. Never has any effect of homeopathy been shown in double blind studies, and the proposed mechanism of classical honeopathy is absurd in all its parts.
There's not a universe where modern physics and chemistry can coexist with homeopathy. Either you can treat the flu by drinking water with zero likelihood[2] of containing a single anti-flu molecule, or you can have working CPUs. No world can have both. I don't want the world I live in to have policymakers who believe in something so inherently impossible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathic_dilutions: "10*(−400) -- Dilution of popular homeopathic flu preparation Oscillococcinum"
Still, the advantage of an editable wikipedia is that when homeopathy has a repeatable significant trial result, when mind to mind messaging has the same, and when a mouse is levitated on demand the wiki articles can be updated to reflect the facts.
Even if this is true (no study has shown it is, many have shown there is no effect) why doesn't the mechanisms employed by homeopathic medicine match this theory?
Many homeopathic medicines are available in pill form. Not water pills but sugar pills. What is the scientific basis for water memory that lines up with using sugar pills?
Additionally dilution is expensive and not actually done by homeopathic medicine manufacturers. Instead unpurified water is ran through a container which is shoken and emptied completely. The assumption being that upon refilling the container a 1:100 dilution will be created.
Once more I point out, what does this have to do with the proposed scientific basis?
Even if there were a "method to the madness" with regards to Homeopathies "less than one molecule in all of Earth's water" dilutions: the reality of homeopathic medicine creation is they don't even use fresh water for each dosage often reusing the same water to save on fresh water costs.
So the best you can say is while the psuedoscience might be pseudoscience and not just made up (note it is certainly made up) however the manufacturing industry is unable to even reach that low bar of psuedoscience.
Instead the manufacturing here is simply abusing a whole in FDA regulation made by a questionable ruling by the Supreme Court. "As long as the magic words 'Not for the treatment of any disease' exists you can put any unregulated substance next to regulated medicine".
An article that "objectively" lays out the claims and though processes of homeopathy and then simply states that there is zero supporting evidence and no experimental setup has ever been able to establish any effect above placebo, gives much more credibility to Wikipedia because it suggests to the reader that the wording has been challenged by proponents of homeopathy, but the factual statements about the lack of evidence could not be removed on objective grounds.
Oh man, if only..!
I guess I will have to admit I did not examine the figures…
Pro-war media, corporate media, whether "liberal" or "conservative" both look rabid and bloodthirsty to the rest of the world. The NYT and WaPo, Fox ABC CNN CBS, even NPR have cheer-lead us into expensive atrocity after expensive atrocity.
Wikipedia have enabled them and censored dissenting views, openly, even clapping themselves on the back for it. They've red- and black-listed every anti-war outlet. "The last good place on the internet" my arse.
It's absolutely unhinged to put them in the same category as Fox News.
They're absolutely in the same category as Fox - corporate pro-war pro-fossil fuel anti-union entertainment propaganda, masked as news. Outside the narrow window of 'acceptable' debate they're essentially indistinguishable.
CNN and the NYT are covering the atrocities and war crimes in Palestine a little better than Fox. Sure. But do you know how many journalists have been fired from those companies, and from the Guardian and the BBC as well, for simply voicing mild support for Palestine? And how many more journalists have resigned, citing fucked up editorial policy?
It's simply gaslighting to say that these mouthpieces are "very good" on Palestine's suffering. It's offensively ignorant.
- When a UN official in NYC stepped down citing failure to do anything about the ongoing 'genocide' in Gaza¹, other outlets, including some international ones, had articles about it the same day. NYT never released a piece about this NY news.²
- basically all coverage of the recent pro-Palestinian protests in Washington DC understates the size of the protests by an order of magnitude, sometimes by two, with headlines generally not updated after counts of attendees were verified (e.g., WaPo³)
1: https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/1/craig_mokhiber_un_res...
2: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Anytimes.com+craig+mokhiber
3: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/11/04/dc-palest...
But my recipe of adding anything to Wikipedia still stands, I adopted it from an article added by Hungarian nationalists: while you must source things, the quality of the source is not checked. So take an obscure book, obviously not in English and claim your fact comes from it. No one will try to dig up a small run German book decades or even hundreds of years old to verify. Or will be able to.
The thing is, the people Wikipedia successfully did drive out are actual experts -- or rather they never came. The no credentials are accepted policy makes sure the experts stay away in droves. Imagine someone putting in decades of work to gain expertise in a field being told they need to argue with a neckbeard with too much time on their hands. No thanks.
Agreed, this is a problem esp. on smaller Wikipedias.
> The no credentials are accepted policy makes sure the experts stay away in droves.
Perhaps partially true, but without this policy there would be basically no Wikipedia. There are projects requiring credentials like Citizendium where experts don't have to fear being bothered by neckbeards, but they're basically dead.
I am not asking for experts to be given free reign -- what they add should be sourced etc but they need to be able to apply checks.
Wikipedia isn't completely anonymous in the sense that people contributing to a similar area know each other (not personally) and will often defer to a person with clearly higher qualifications.
That doesn't mean the system is perfect and there are cases where it doesn't work out well. But it's not really true that on Wikipedia, an opinion of a rando is taken as equal of an established authority in the field.
It's the unalterable division of labor. Scientists are experts, science journalists are clueless. You'll never get the first group to take up the job of the second group because they have way better, more interesting, more important things to do. Same with Wikipedia, even if experts were sought out, they wouldn't want to edit it.
The real answer is real things aren’t controversial. Nonsense to enrage is also to engage.
English (language not kingdom) Wikipedia has become a party organ* for whatever they call themselves, those people who took over and ruined philosophy, history, sociology, linguistics, anthropology, et al departments of universities (get rid of dead white males and anything they ever wrote!) to allow only deconstructive, post modernist, existentialist, nihilist, anti-western, socialist, personal truth and lived experience; the same people who are now battering down the gates of science and technology (remember Shut Down Tech day?) because believing there is "the right answer" to a problem is itself problematic, an expression of white privilege. Math should allow many answers depending on the student's truth and lived experience. And they shouldn't have to turn in their work "on time", that oppressive white western male notion. The same people that are marching in the streets to say that mass murder and terrorism are morally justifiable expressions of yearning for a brighter future, alongside a brighter future for women in Islam, just don't be too specific about what you mean, said the Walrus.
This is not my personal original research, the "other" cofounder of wikipedia (along with The Outlaw Jimmy Wales) says the same https://nypost.com/2021/07/16/wikipedia-co-founder-says-site...
Wikipedia btw raises tons of money, they are rolling in cash. Why do they keep begging you for more with interstitials? Because they have a number of woke "diversity", "equity", and "inclusion" projects they are dumping your money into. It has nothing to do with making wikipedia better.
*party organ as in: The Nation, volume 180, number 9, page 173: “Modern armed forces cannot be built without heavy industry,” the People’s Daily, the central organ of the Chinese Communist Party, has remarked pointedly.
When an organization's primary form of fundraising is pointing at their one useful product and saying "give us money so that we can keep doing this! If we don't have enough money this might go away!" that's fine and moral so long as it's what's required for primarily funding the useful thing in question.
When the above method accounts for 90% of funds raised, but the useful thing people thought they were supporting only accounts for 10% of expenditures, then that means 1) the organization has more money than they need for "useful thing", and 2) it means that people will feel misled and get upset when they find out about this, because they thought they were donating money to "useful thing" but their money actually went to "side project".
Wikipedia's fundraising messaging is blatantly manipulative and misleading compared to the reality of financial risk to the continued existence of the content on wikipedia.org.
I never understand this obsession that people have with non profit funding. A weird way of counting efficiency by counting how every dollar spend and not really the value produced.
Clearly Wikipedia is one of the most useful things in the world. They would be more "efficient" wrt money most people give to them even if they were to set fire to a large portion of it.
Their having made something useful does not entitle them to be able to set money on fire without objection, nor does it excuse ads implying the useful thing might go away when the reality is that they are asking for money because they would prefer to have more firewood to burn, without affecting the useful thing whatsoever.
I expressed clear and open distain but was specific. You are using, I think a sneakier version, a snideness... but if "how long have I" is a serious question, I was editing wikipedia when it barely had any articles. I watched it go from feeble to great to a steady degradation over the last decade; is how long.
It suffers other degradations which are not poitical. Categories of narrow interest get taken over by advocates, such that people of casual interest don't get to see the whole truth or even see what they're looking for; or specialist articles no longer have general salience (for example with regard to specific isotopes or something). Articles about celebrities get scrubbed free of stain. People with weird little fetishes take it upon themselves to insert something like the word "metonymy" everywhere they possibly can. And more, but I've been around, son, I've been around, as a contributor.
and it's a standard technique to give people like me a worklist to go do, but I won't do it. If you think I'm wrong about their funding, and some numbers are in order, you research, publish, and I'll evaluate.
Show me, rewrite some piece of what I wrote in your exalted tone that would be better. I want to learn from you. I'm not being sarcastic. I legitimately don't think you are right, and I legitimately don't think you can do it, but you say it can be done. I think you are falsely using "tone" to stand in for "you disagree with me".
But, if you can express what I expressed politely and palatably, please, I REALLY want to know how to do it. Let's teach each other, this site is built on curiosity.
If your tone is better, I will exalt it.
also, maybe read this, it's an interesting take: https://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html
English (language not kingdom) Wikipedia has become a party organ* for whatever they call themselves, [note: incoherent to assign partyship here given the footnote lack-of-definition; implies a level of organization you've failed to demonstrate] those people who took over and ruined philosophy, history, sociology, linguistics, anthropology, et al departments of universities [note: strong claim, not backed up or even defined] (get rid of dead white males and anything they ever wrote! [note: hyperbolic, readers who don't agree are now more inclined to assume the rest of the text is also exaggerated]) to allow only deconstructive, post modernist, existentialist, nihilist, anti-western, socialist, personal truth and lived experience [note: buzzword soup, no substance except to readers who already share sentiments]; the same people who are now battering down the gates of science and technology (remember Shut Down Tech day? [note: no, and googling it returns results that are non-obviously connected to your concepts here; clarity would help your message]) because believing there is "the right answer" to a problem is itself problematic, an expression of white privilege [note: I live in academia and have never seen this formulation. if hyperbole, not conducive to persuasion (see above)]. Math should allow many answers depending on the student's truth and lived experience [note: never seen this in any math class, citations would help]. And they shouldn't have to turn in their work "on time", that oppressive white western male notion [note: same as previous]. The same people are are marching in the streets to say that mass murder and terrorism are morally justifiable expressions of yearning for a brighter future [note: references here would help, unless this is israel/palestine partisanship in either direction, in which case it's a distraction].
This is not my personal original research, the "other" cofounder of wikipedia (along with The Outlaw Jimmy Wales [note: much of your audience was not even born when this movie came out, more distractions]) says the same https://nypost.com/2021/07/16/wikipedia-co-founder-says-site...
Wikipedia btw raises tons of money, they are rolling in cash. Why do they keep begging you for more with interstitials? Because they have a number of woke "diversity", "equity", and "inclusion" projects they are dumping your money into[note: unable to find reference to these expenditures in public reporting, either in form 990 or annual report. not clear what things like "project rewrite" cost. if you know, better to cite hard facts]. It has nothing to do with making wikipedia better.
*party organ as in: The Nation, volume 180, number 9, page 173: “Modern armed forces cannot be built without heavy industry,” the People’s Daily, the central organ of the Chinese Communist Party, has remarked pointedly.
rewrite:
English Wikipedia specifically is largely under the control of left-wing participants who are applying their political preferences to editorial and policy decisions. This is a situation which has held in academia for some time[0], and I don't think their decision-making is based on neutrally representing matters or rigorous factual correctness. One of Wikipedia's cofounders left the organization, and has been sounding alarms about the political biases that have overwhelmed the operation of the site[1]. I have reason to believe they're spending Foundation money in furtherance of their political goals[2] instead of pursuing the actual mission of Wikipedia, which is on-record as explicitly targeting neutrality[3]. Many of the politically-driven decisions being made in that organization are detrimental to the operation of the project and they're descended from a worldview with whose priorities I strongly disagree and are detrimental to society at large.
0 - [note: I don't have a reference for this claim but presumably you do; this is where it would go]
1 - https://nypost.com/2021/07/16/wikipedia-co-founder-says-site...
2 - [note: I don't have a reference for this claim but presumably you do; this is where it would go]
3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Purpose Specifically: The goal of a Wikipedia article is to present a neutrally written summary of existing mainstream knowledge in a fair and accurate manner with a straightforward, "just-the-facts style".
end of rewrite
I don't really know anything about Wikipedia politics; the only thing I do know is they are indeed flush with cash, which is the main reason I don't donate. I do know a bit about academia, since that's where I work. My opinions there might be affected by the fact that I work in a discipline which is heavily mathematics-based, rather than in the social fields.
I hope this helps you understand which parts of your message could be compromising your intentions and what people mean when they're talking about tone.
English Wikipedia has become a party organ for the ideology of universities' liberal arts departments. It filters for a particular viewpoint: deconstructive, post modernist, existentialist, nihilist, anti-western, socialist. English Wikipedia no longer cares about objective truth, and is more interested in assigning inflammatory labels to opinions outside of its ideology, and purging views that come from the wrong sources, namely dead white males.
Some notes: The clarification about language vs. kingdom is unnecessary. Specifying that philosophy et al are now "ruined" is deliberately argumentative. "personal truth and lived experience" is duplicative of "post modernist". "battering down the gates" is also deliberately argumentative. I do not remember Shut Down Tech day, and so it adds nothing. The footnote on "party organ" doesn't help explain what a party organ is, but instead seems focused on aligning you with the views of The Nation against the CCP.
Your entire first post reads like you're trying to pick a fight, and not trying to explain or convince anyone.
People complain about the ugliness of politic, but free politics arises mostly out of democracy, before democracy average people could only express politics during bloody revolutions. So I don't see anything wrong with fighting (with words) about things we care about. The people who keep talking about undefined behavior have an agenda. So did the people who ruined the liberal arts. They were open about wishing to expel the people and ideas that they expelled. I'm not against expulsion, I wish to expel them. But at the same time I bring up the explicit ideological reasons. If you urge conciliation and compromise, great, join me, and put the Western canon back into the curriculum, we don't need to remove post-modern writing, just look at it askance, as any good skeptic should. If you don't want to do that, I don't want to cooperate with you. If writing things in a nice way hides what you want, I want no part of it.
"language not kingdom" was a nit, but as another nit, when I read the orig, my brain had me thinking I was going to be reading about England, so that's what was on my mind. en.wikipedia would have been more understandable to me, and till this moment right now, I never considered that different *.wikis would have different enough sensibilities that Wikimedia's PR machine would make that language distinction in a PR puff piece they planted. I guess they might be saying, "we've kicked retrograde ideas out of en.wikipedia, now we're turning our attention to the others."
Because, having experience with PR, I believe that the original article under consideration here is a PR piece, attempting to push back against the articles and ideas I'm expressing and that i linked to, that en.wikipedia is already ideologically captured by people who in private and sometimes in public talk exactly the way I'm talking, just in the other direction.
I do salute you for writing a nice response, it's possible missed somethings you said, but this is what came to my mind as I replied.
add on: postmodernism vs personal truth and lived experience. Postmoderism started as an art movement, where art has an academic tradition of exploring ideas and moving on, not persuading the middle classes to live that way; being associated with anything middle class is anathema to art. Personal truth and lived experience are much easier, and much more worthy, to ridicule.
For what it's worth, I think Bayart is right. I agree with most of what you wrote above, but didn't like the tone, so I chose not to vote. Like Bayart, I would assume the earlier downvotes were primarily because of the tone, not the content. This doesn't mean that your tone was "wrong", just that it was the likely cause of the downvotes.
It's interesting to see Wikipedia publication so readily admit that, rightly or wrongly, its "Neutral Point of View" considers [American] conservatism a "fringe" (implicitly, counterfactual) belief.
The "politics" section further down touches on this, but doesn't actually deny it. Like I said, interesting, since it's something that I've seen conservatives whine about, but I assumed Wikipedia's official position was the "NPOV" meant politically neutral.
2) A classification system that combines multiple attributes to define a group is not a claim that all the attributes that define one group are equivalent to each other. It's a measure of correlation.
"Endorsing" might be too strong a word, but they're certainly highlighting it.
None of the issues the article author (User:HaeB) has with the study's classification really manage to rebut it. They bring up a 2012 study (pointing out its methods were dubious) - but that was over a decade ago, and before the reforms to NPOV enforcement as the article and paper define them.
The author says it may not "generalize to other countries", but that just means we're talking specifically about American "conservatism" (and "liberalism"). Likewise, there's the anecdote about applying the general principles to the Republican Houses of Congress, where anti-Trump is the fringe, but the comparison there only really holds with the implicit admission that in Wikipedian politics, non-liberals are the fringe among the people making the decisions.
This article briefly addresses this inclusion of the political-leaning in the definition of fringe later on.
> As readers might have noticed above, the author includes political coordinates in his conception of "fringe" ("more supportive of conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and conservatism") and "anti-fringe" ("anti-conspiracy theories, anti-pseudoscience, and liberal"). This is introduced rather casually in the paper without much justification...
I don't want to quote the whole thing, but its worth a read.
https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Orb%C3%A1n#Criticism_an...
It's only unfortunate in that it legitimizes groupthink. Varying degress of conservatism with a small C should ideally be allowed and encouraged, the same as varying degrees of novelty-seeking vs risk-aversion (value freedom vs value safety), tolerance for confrontation or debate, logic vs emotion, etc, etc.
> Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. (born January 17, 1954), also known by his initials as RFK Jr. and the nickname Bobby, is an American environmental lawyer and writer who promotes anti-vaccine misinformation and public health conspiracy theories.
That's the #1 most important thing to be known about him, Wikipedia? Compare to the opening paragraph on Stalin:
> Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was a Soviet revolutionary and politician who was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922–1952) and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (1941–1953). Initially governing the country as part of a collective leadership, he consolidated power to become a dictator by the 1930s. Ideologically adhering to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, he formalised these ideas as Marxism–Leninism, while his own policies are called Stalinism.
Or Mao:
> Mao Zedong was a Chinese politician, Marxist theorist, military strategist, poet, and revolutionary who was the founder of the People's Republic of China (PRC). He led the country from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976, while also serving as the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party during that time. His theories, military strategies and policies are known as Maoism.
Is there any term more accurate than 'misinformation' for what he says? When a claim is not even slightly supported with hard evidence, and is in fact heavily contradicted, it's fair to label it for what it is.
1. http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html
2. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/rfk-jr-accused-making-antise...
3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32664879/
4. https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/16802273225096355...
Well, yeah. What else makes him important?
Contrast that with Stalin, a long-standing leader of a superpower, with immense influence on the course of the 20th century.
Not sure what you mean by "terrorist" - his activity during Czarism might qualify, but it's again very far from being his most important activity.
Equally, I'm not sure what is meant by the other claims. Maybe they are true in some sense, but again, they are just minor aspects of one of the most important persons of the 20th century.
Truly, a most vexing situation.
* i'm obviously not agreeing with their politics
Note that I don’t support him either at this point, for other reasons. But the editorial bias is absurd.