They have their NPOV[1] policy, and seem impressively unbiased to me, given the various divisive situations they have to try to cover.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_v...
There are organizations trying something else though; admittedly I got this through a promotion from a youtube channel, but Ground News [0] is a news aggregator that publishes news with many sources, including ownership, political affiliation, publishing type (facts or opinions, neutral or entertaining), and even notes on which channels do and don't report on it, identifying media blind spots like "low coverage from right sources" or "low original coverage" to help people escape their bubbles and provide multiple perspectives on an issue.
As a non American this is very obvious to me.
Even Reuters that was supposedly meant to be a non-biased media outlet is clearly left-leaning at this point
I had a look at the most potentially controversial topics I could find right now, and I say they seem fair. For example: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/dozens-detained-us-immigrat... (on ICE arrests in NY) and https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/what-would-wider-r... (on recognition of a Palestinian state).
Indeed, Wikipedia lists it as a good source[1]. It's worth comparing that to outlets like CNN (reliable, but "... talk show content should be treated as opinion pieces. Some editors consider CNN biased, though not to the extent that it affects reliability.") or The Wall Street Journal ("Most editors consider The Wall Street Journal generally reliable for news. Use WP:NEWSBLOG to evaluate the newspaper's blogs, including Washington Wire. Use WP:RSOPINION for opinion pieces.")
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per... ("Reuters is a news agency. There is consensus that Reuters is generally reliable.")
When evaluating a news source for whether it’s unbiased, left or right, we necessarily look at the stories it presents and check whether they align with and present in a positive light a particular political option.
We call it „unbiased” if it doesn’t particularly favor any of these.
We’re already in the realm of US electoral politics - for a second we can assume that nothing else exists.
In 2016 the political landscape shifted drammatically and presenting the „right wing” option in a favorable light required certain concessions when it comes to previous journalistic standards.
So, just by sticking to its previous guidelines, the AP would automatically shift to the „left” - because the landscape changes.
It would be more accurate to say that the world shifted underneath AP’s lense and so it immediately started being perceived as left wing.
https://app.adfontesmedia.com/chart/interactive?utm_source=a...
(I expect a lot fewer people to reference that chart in the future unless they fix the new user interface)
These measurements do feel a bit arbitrary, since our definitions of left and right bias are subject to change. For example, one interesting thing about the AP is that their stylebook used to urge their reporters to avoid even using the word "Palestine," one of many ways they put their thumb on the scale in favor of Israel in that conflict. (not sure what it says today) They somewhat famously fired a reporter for having participated in some college activism related to the Arab-Israeli conflict that would seem very quaint and anodyne today, a firing that stirred up journalists and was pretty widely regarded outside the right wing media sphere as unfair. (ironically, a week or two later the IDF destroyed the AP's Gaza office in an airstrike)
I'm increasingly concerned about the fact that any media outlet, conservative or otherwise, that doesn't engage in far right pandering to the propaganda of politicians is magically labeled "left wing." Anecdotal but someone was arguing to me at a pub last night that Piers Morgan is a liberal now because of his criticism of Israel.
I've been guilty of pointing out that the US doesn't really have a left wing, according to the textbook definitions of things, but that's not how people usually talk. People really are talking about the median when they say "politically neutral," even if they shouldn't.
And here's the point: the median can certainly shift as the number of media sources shifts, or if you prefer, as the culture shifts.
Accordingly, the average media experienced a shift to the right, but not to the left. To be neutral, one thus has to look left of the average of what the media report.
Wikipedia says (or said, I guess - I haven't checked) that it unambiguously *was* a slur then too. As evidence, it cites a study of 17th century literature that notes redskins were more likely to be villains than heros in a small sample of 80 books and a diary entry about a sign outside a small town that said "Indian / Redskin scalps - $1" or some such. I don't recall the details.
The point is there wasn't one cited source that showed redskin specifically was a slur, only general evidence that white settlers were racist against Native Americans. Clear WP:SYNTH violation.
Tried to make my own changes, got immediately reverted. Tried to start on the talk page, got totally filibustered by two editors who has the page and a hundred other racism adjacent pages on their watchlist and whose edit history was basically just those handful of pages. Started reading about internal wikipedia boards I could appeal to. Stopped and logged off.
Once you start noticing things like that and start double checking, you find such minor distortions in a lot of political adjacent Wikipedia pages.
Another good example is to grab five super murderous left wing dictators and five super murderous right wing dictators and read the summary section. Use a pen or a highlighter and classify each sentence as positive, negative, or neutral.
It doesn't seem to say this - there's quite a nuanced discussion about whether or not it was a slur during that time period[1]:
> The term redskin underwent pejoration through the 19th to early 20th centuries and in contemporary dictionaries of American English it is labeled as offensive, disparaging, or insulting..
> Documents from the colonial period indicate that the use of "red" as an identifier by Native Americans for themselves emerged in the context of Indian-European diplomacy in the southeastern region of North America, before later being adopted by Europeans and becoming a generic label for all Native Americans....
> In the debate over the meaning of the word "redskin", team supporters frequently cite a paper by Ives Goddard, a Smithsonian Institution senior linguist and curator emeritus, who asserts that the term was a direct translation of words used by Native Americans to refer to themselves and was benign in its original meaning ...
> Sociologist James V. Fenelon makes a more explicit statement that Goddard's article is poor scholarship, given that the conclusion of the origin and usage by Natives as "entirely benign" is divorced from the socio-historical realities of hostility and racism from which it emerged.
I think your summary saying the "status in the 17th and 18th century is a bit less clear" is fair, but I think the Wikipeida article outlines that lack of clarity too.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Redskins_name_contr...
> A controversial etymological claim is that the term emerged from the practice of paying a bounty for Indians, and that "redskin" refers to the bloody scalp of Native Americans.[55] Although official documents do not use the word in this way, a historical association between the use of "redskin" and the paying of bounties can be made. In 1863, a Winona, Minnesota, newspaper, the Daily Republican, printed an announcement: "The state reward for dead Indians has been increased to $200 for every red-skin sent to Purgatory. This sum is more than the dead bodies of all the Indians east of the Red River are worth."[56]
This is all WP:UNDUE. The claim is not just contoversial, it's downright nonsensical, unless you also believe "Indian" is a racial slur.
And of course famous people's PR people.
Why don’t you just say what you mean? Not everything is about proving points or “winning”, it’s okay to just have honest discussion.
And being fair, if there's one weakness in a site which relies on several sources agreeing on something it surely is when those sources are colluding on something, but the end result is a page rife with misinformation.
This is prevalent in culture wars stuff, Keffals article "graciously" fails to mention how she frequently lied and instigated vast amounts of harassment towards herself or how she basically spent the GoFundMe money she campaigned for on heroin. If the media spins a narrative, Wikipedia doesn't really have a counter to that in any way.
I'm not sure if there's anything else out there that's better at giving a fairly neutral summary of political controversies?
It reminds me of the Churchill quote "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"
https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/is-wikipedia-politically-...
It could be that politicians right of center have a tendency to do things which merit negative sentiment slightly more often than politicians left of center. It begs the question to call this bias.
NSFW images on Wikimedia tends to be a very hot button issue when it comes to Wikimedia politics. There obviously some cases where such images are needed, and there is a lot of debate on where the line should be drawn (or if it should be drawn at all). Wikipedia is traditionally very anti-censorship in any form. Fun fact - Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales lost a bunch of his user rights when he went on a deletion spree of classical art work containing nudity.
There is an automated filter for child sexual abuse images. Its not public what the procedures related to it is, but i assume if it goes off the fbi gets called.
No means or methods are necessary. I am familiar with the work of the NW3C and other groups who do important work in that area. My sympathies to the janitors. Truly difficult and important work.
In full fairness to jimmy, i think only a handful were risque art from the 1800s. Many of the other images would probably be classed as sex educational if you're being sympathetic, and exhibitionist if you are not. However the ultimate issue was not what the files contained but that he acted alone without agreement to delete outside of proper procedure.
> However the ultimate issue was not what the files contained but that he acted alone without agreement to delete outside of proper procedure.
Were any changes to Wikipedia policies implemented as a result of this, and if so, do you know which ones?
I found the link to the discussion I referred to upthread since the discussion was from a bit ago:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:IdeaLab/A_Tor_On...
Did this ever go anywhere? I found a grant proposal, but I need to sign up for an account or reactivate my existing one, or whatever.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/A_Tor_Onion_S...
Not that i'm aware but it was a long time ago so i might just not be aware. Note that the majority of the files he deleted were undeleted and are still present to this day. The list is at https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&... and most of the links are blue.
> I found the link to the discussion I referred to upthread since the discussion was from a bit ago:
Not as far as i am aware. People are really nervous that without accurate IP addresses it will be difficult to do anti-abuse stuff.
The new thing that is happening right now is we are killing public display of IP addresses of anonoymous users. Perhaps once that rolls out people will be less attached to ip address tracking and more open to something like tor.
That said, if the tor hidden service is read but not write as the grant proposals, that solves that concern. I don't think anyone would object to a read-only service. There just isn't that much interest from the people who could make it happen, and regular concerns about added complexity for limited gains.
As an aside, the grants process is really disconected from wikimedia tech stuff. Grants might give some money to someone to make an unofficial mirror, but it wont be helpful for making an actual official tor hidden service. There is a 0% chance that a grant will lead to an official hidden service. If this ever happens the discussion threads will be on phabricator and not grant pages.
The way in theory to make this happen is one of:
- convince wikimedia community this is super important. (Unlikely to happen as this is too niche). Wikipedians have some influence over WMF priorities but really only when they start a riot.
- convince wmf senior leadership it is super important (also pretty unlikely)
- lobby the idea with individual developers who work on SRE stuff. Maybe if you convince them, they convince their boss, and it eventually happens when the team is having a sliw sprint. (This is the part where its open source so external contributions are in theory possible to a certain extent, but to effectively do this you basically already need to be an insider and know all the right people to talk to)
I did hear about the hiding of anonymous users’ IPs in passing as I was looking into the .onion URL for Wikipedia concept. I was looking at stuff like TorBlock and thinking that they’re so close and yet so far from having a Tor accessible view or subsite. It could be a special view like the .m mobile views, or something. It could be made to work, but it would take some doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Torblock-blocked
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TorBlock
If one can implement that, a read-only mode for Tor users would seem fairly straightforward.
Once while randomly walking around in the Sunset district of SF, near the Internet Archive iirc, I bumped into someone who claimed to be a legal counsel of Wikipedia/Wikimedia with a business card to match. I don’t have many Wikipedia contacts besides, alas, but I am already a user, though I don’t post much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AspenMayer
Found my old account, as it were. Then I tried to edit my user page and discovered I have an IP block due to using iCloud private relay and/or a vpn. And that block prevents me from editing my own user page. That’s where this policy is going too far, imo. It’s my user page! I can see how even that feature could be abused, but come on. I know it’s not your personal policy, it’s just frustrating.
The issue seems one of institutional support and momentum more than a technically difficult problem to solve, especially if the Tor version were read only. I think it is just a shame that the issue has low awareness. Then again, I bet more folks associate Tor with bad actors than good or merely desperate ones, which is an earned reputation when it comes to bad actors on Tor. I don’t know how fair that is, but that’s the way it is currently. If only we could have a profile option to enable Tor access and then folks could get a unique .onion URL that proxies to a backend Tor read only connection to Wikipedia/Wikimedia? I think that could be done, but impetus is lacking, I suppose.
In a lot of ways, Tor can seem like a solution looking for a problem, at least for legitimate use cases that don’t involve law violating and/or antisocial behavior. It’s a shame that a bad reputation can hold Tor back from doing more good. I think Wikipedia is the single most important and impactful site that could benefit the world and all Wikipedia users simply by adding a .onion version, even if it has the same policy on blocking open proxy access and Tor access from edits. Read only is better than the status quo where Tor use is risky but necessary to access the site, as the alternative to that is no access at all.
I’m a working journalist, so I’ll have to make an effort to edit this Wiki user page while maintaining opsec, because I’m not turning off my vpn or private relay, or any other security features on my end of the connection. I respect Wikipedia/Wikimedia, but I have standards, and sources, to protect.