Are people really reading Youtube, pornhub, facebook, Instagram pages this frequently or are these misclicks from search result page?
So that if you write "youtube" without the .com the browser will direct you to wikipedia instead.
Relatively compared to other sources, sure, but not absolutely. Wikipedia supereditors have their own biases that are obvious when reading articles on topics one has expert knowledge on.
(I include "accessible" deliberate, because while I like reading scientific papers, they are hard to read and often difficult to get or impossible to find)
Of course, you should never blindly trust any source, but in spite of the simple fact that every author has their own "biases", Wikipedia's general level of trustworthiness exceeds that of most other internet resources by far.
This can be true of technical articles, especially covering popular subjects which are likely to be reviewed by enough people that errors get removed.
Anything even tangentially related to politics is hopeless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_(automobile_manufact...
> "GM, for instance, at one time picked up the entire cost of funding health insurance premiums of its employees, their survivors and GM retirees, as the US did not have a universal health care system."
This is an article about automakers. The reason they picked up future healthcare costs is because they're future healthcare costs, which lets the bosses pay themselves bonuses from current profits and then the company can go bankrupt from unfunded future obligations after they've moved on to another company. The reason isn't that the US doesn't have a universal healthcare system, and even if it did, they could have provided supplemental insurance etc., and would still have wanted to because that too is a future cost instead of a present day one.
The reason that qualifier is there is as a dig against the US healthcare system, in a way that aligns with particular partisans. The opposing partisan might have inserted something like "as the US has high healthcare costs as a result of regulatory dysfunction" though of course neutrality would have been to say neither of them because it's an article about automakers rather than healthcare systems.
And yet it's there, and that kind of thing is all over the place.
Americans are a minority among the portion of the world's population that can read English easily enough to consult the English language Wikipedia.
When doing so, the rest us can use a brief reminder of what's ultimately a rather quaint aspect of the US: The fact that healthcare costs are a significant concern of employers.
The source cited for the paragraph you're picking apart is an article that's contrasting US automakers and their international competition.
As for this specific article about the Big Three, the statement in question was added by user GoldDragon[1], who was banned for 'sock-puppetry' in 2011 and, by their edit history, appears to have hailed from Ontario, Canada.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Big_Three_(automo...
The problem with this theory isn't just that it's much more widely known internationally that the US has a private insurance system, it's that that is already implied by the rest of the sentence. US employees getting their healthcare coverage from their employer means that they're not getting it from the government. Specifically calling it out is to make a political point.
> As for this specific article about the Big Three, the statement in question was added by user GoldDragon[1], who was banned for 'sock-puppetry' in 2011 and, by their edit history, appears to have hailed from Ontario, Canada.
This is proving my case. You don't need sock puppets if your modus operandi is to make neutral edits.
And being from Canada doesn't imply non-partisanship -- "the US should have a universal healthcare system" is a common political opinion in Canada.
But is it? Here in the UK, we have the National Health Service with completely free treatment except for some combinations of basic services and higher personal income levels. Yet, most employers for higher-up jobs provide part or even full private healthcare. A quick search on a jobs board shows some examples:
Train driver at Great Western Railways:
...all GWR colleagues enjoy a range of benefits including... [a] company-sponsored health care plan...
...Also, to reward your hard work you’ll get... Private medical care...
...Benefits... Private medical insurance...
> This is proving my case. You don't need sock puppets if your modus operandi is to make neutral edits.
I agree with you here. If it wasn't clear, I wasn't trying to defend user 'GoldDragon' or those like them. It's a biased statement by its wording, but the facts are all there and accurate. I think I like that aspect of Wikipedia - yes, there is editorial bias, but it can only exist around the fringes of the facts; conjecture is strictly banned. In my experience, plenty of newspapers indulge in conjecture as well as editorial bias; being primary sources doesn't fully redeem them for this.
* this one is unintentionally hilarious, as they also promise company-funded 'life assurance'. If only :)
Only you can:
> "GM, for instance, at one time picked up the entire cost of funding health insurance premiums of its employees, their survivors and GM retirees"
Implies the employees et al are paying part or all of the premiums themselves in the alternative.
> "private health insurance"
Implies they get public health insurance in the alternative.
> It's a biased statement by its wording, but the facts are all there and accurate. I think I like that aspect of Wikipedia - yes, there is editorial bias, but it can only exist around the fringes of the facts; conjecture is strictly banned.
Selection bias is all you need to control the world though.
> In my experience, plenty of newspapers indulge in conjecture as well as editorial bias; being primary sources doesn't fully redeem them for this.
Newspapers are notoriously biased. See Yellow Journalism etc. It's the same practice and the same problem -- a lie of omission is a type of lie, not a type of honesty. They'd like to lie, but don't want to get caught in a lie or sued for libel, so they lead you down the garden path.
"Technically Correct: The Best Kind of Correct." Because that's how you get away with something. But getting away with something isn't neutrality, it's the system having a bias in your favor.
The article contrasts the operating environment of “Big Three” auto-manufacturers across countries. It compares manufacture costs in Germany and Japan with those in the US, and the paragraph you cite links through to a (2004) article in which it is estimated that pensions and health insurance combined add $1,784 to the cost of a car in the US.
You need to subtract some contradictory numbers in the article to come to a number you can ascribe to health insurance, but somewhere between $400 and $800 fits a quoted “$900 will flow to [pension] funds”.
Given this context it is reasonable to argue that General Motors is (or at least was in 2004) at a competitive disadvantage to manufacturers in Japan or Germany as a result of the US having no universal healthcare system.
Lamentably for your position, just because there are political decisions involved that bring about consequences, factual discussion of those consequences is not itself necessarily political.
Japanese and German carmakers also make cars in the US. The primary distinction isn't that the company has to provide healthcare, which they all do, and even if they were manufacturing in different countries they still would because someone would have to pay the taxes that pay for healthcare instead of the insurance premiums. The primary distinction is that foreign automakers have non-union shops in the South whereas domestic automakers have union shops in and around Detroit, and management discovered that promising generous future benefits is a way to placate the UAW without cutting into present-day profits, with rather deleterious consequences for the company's future.
This still has nothing to do with the healthcare system except insofar as it was a category of future benefit that could be promised. The same thing would have happened (and did) by promising future pension payments or other benefits. The proportionality of healthcare vs. pension payments and other benefits wouldn't have materially affected the result, they'd have just been promised more of something else.
Excuse me, what?
Wikipedia is great. But assuming it's neutral and factually correct is delusional.
Like with every single organization made up of human beings, power dynamics and censorship are part of Wikipedia.
It's still the less bad one, but no one should trust it that blindly.
The inevitable occasional mistake does not bring it down to the level of arbitrary internet resources.
The ideal of checks and balances keeping the system relatively neutral would only work if there was a relative balance of ideological views among overactive editors. And on that, I'm reminded of that line from the Blues Brothers, 'We have all types of music here - country and western!'
What sources do you think Britannica can use which are not available to Wikipedia?
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica#P...
There was a pretty interesting paper written looking at the biases in Wiki vs Britannica. [1] You might find it interesting.
[1] - https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/do-experts-or-collective-intellig...
I just pointed out that Britannica (like Wikipedia) is not a primary source. “Primary source” have a specific meaning and encyclopedias are not primary sources - regardless of the editorial process and the credentials of the authors.
Try citing Britannica in an academic paper and se how well it goes.
[1] - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?lookup=0&q=%22Britannica,...
For different people to get to that feeling means different things. A lot of people place trust in certain figures of authority, in politics or on social media. The reasons for which they do so differ wildly and very often have very little to do with ground truth (although I suspect most people would find that hard to admit).
When somebody says they can trust Wikipedia to be factually correct that mostly is a reflection of choices and what they believe helps them to navigate the world, in a way that is manageable and reasonable to them. Given that time is always a constraint to a varying degree, I think you could do a lot worse if being less wrong is your goal.
https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/topviews/?project=en.wikipedia...
Also, not for these specifically, but if someone tells me about a website I haven't heard of, and not sure if safe / SFW etc I'll usually checkout it's Wikipedia page first.