Anything vaguely sociopolitical is functionally censored on it and wikipedia does nothing about it even if they don't support it.
That said, I find Wikipedia's biases predictable, avoidable (topic specific) & also very interesting as a sociological study in itself.
Firstly, it reminds us of inherent bias in (mostly colonial-written) paper encyclopedia of the past. There has never been an unbiased encyclopedia written & seeing the biases fully sourced & rapidly evolving in realtime serves as an excellent crystallisation of slower processes in previous works: highlighting that many of the historical "facts" we all grew up with were ultimately fed to us by similarly biased groups.
I've also come to the slow realisation that this may be a fundamentally unsolvable problem & that simply categorising it as "biased beyond repair" & continuing to handle it in that manner may be the best thing we can do.
Is it a case of rot then? Or maybe I'm just biased, but I get the feel it wasn't always like this. It was never ideal, sure, but it used to be that I was wary of the site when checking, say, contemporary politics. Now it's a good chunk of recorded history instead.
I get this feeling but in the opposite direction. The more I see it the more I come to realise I was blinder to it in the past.
Many people comment on the internet ushering in an age of misinformation, but I actually see it as ushering in an age of misinformation awareness. Factchecks in legacy media were rare to nonexistent & generally not accessible to most media consumers. Information was more siloed leading to much greater acceptance of what was fed as fact without a lot of interrogation. Now, we're bombarded by such a slew of contradictions we "feel" less able to discern fact from fiction, which is disconcerting, but it's really just a broad awakening to something that's always been the case.
Can you make such an example?
Wikipedia doesn’t treat all sources as being equal, so even in cases where there’s no reasonable doubt towards a claim’s veracity, if the correct source hasn’t already claimed it, editors are liable to revert your edit.
Obviously this is a phenomenon that occurs much more often in ongoing or politically sensitive stories. That said, it’s important for people to understand the flaws in Wikipedias method of epistemology.
This is a good policy. It’s much easier for a couple small outlets to be wrong than for the small outlets and some major ones to be wrong, and the stakes are high - naming the wrong suspect could ruin an innocent person’s life. Wikipedia is for knowledge, not rumors. If you want rumors, there are lots of other sites out there.
This is the right approach. If more information sources held this standard, sloppy reporting and outright lies would be very costly. Would you tell everyone very important news based on a the word of a friend who is known to stretch or invent the truth? Be a reliable source and you can participate.
Apologies for the preamble, but I wanted to provide some context. In the 2000s, I began updating the Men's Rights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_rights_movement) Wikipedia page. Mostly statistics around things like suicide, homelessness, likelihood of being assaulted and murdered, disparities in the educational systems and courts, the high rates of workplace death and injury, etc. Always cited with peer reviewed or governmental data, and sometimes with "accepted" news articles. My goal was to inform people about the facts. Some time in the late 2000s and early 2010s, questionable edits began happening. For example, suicide statistics were removed periodically. The reasons were generally specious. Sometimes arguing about semantics. Sometimes the source. Sometimes procedural. One editor argued that the statistics should be contained as a subsection of the Feminism page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism), for example. They also tried to remove the page entirely. I began to notice that the people making the edits were frequent editors of related pages like Feminism.
It is at this point that I should point out that feminists and men's rights advocates don't always see eye to eye.
The questionable edits became malicious edits. Administrators began selectively enforcing rules. For example, applying a higher standard for sources on the Men's Rights page than they do on the Feminism page. They applied a banner at the very top of the page directing people to a feminist friendly page called the "men's liberation movement." They removed countless statistics and examples of inequalities in law and education. They changed the language in all sections to suggest or imply that the people involved in the movement are incorrect or mistaken. For example, the entire second paragraph (of only two) in the introduction is a refutation of the movement. Compare with the Feminism page. Criticisms are now located at the very bottom of the page in a sub-sub-section which doesn't even have its own anchor. It's a few small paragraphs now on a page with tens of thousands of words. In the "Suicide" section now they include, "studies have also found an over-representation of women in attempted or incomplete suicides and men in complete suicides." Just to make sure that no one could make the mistake of caring about men, *unless it's framed in relation to how women might be affected.*
I could go on but the stark differences between these pages should be extremely clear. They have not been edited for clarity or truth, but for ideological reasons. This is just one of millions of pages on which ideological wars are being waged. Unfortunately, the war is lost. WikiProjects, Arbitration Committees, and Administrators are all some version of far to extremely far left wing Americans. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger now calls the site "propaganda." (https://www.foxnews.com/media/wikipedia-co-founder-larry-san...) It's clear that many like this bias, but for those of us who used to be involved, we can confidently tell you that you should never, ever take what Wikipedia has to say at face value. It is much closer to propaganda than it is factual.
Although, handling it purely pragmatically, there is no other concise source of information as vast as Wikipedia's concerning so many facets of life as well as sciences that is far enough from feelings' reach that is pretty well-written as the only possible bias present is also factually incorrect (as opposed to ideological topics).
I understand that supporting and reading articles from a source which you know is blatantly lying or otherwise obstructive or manipulative on other topics is a difficult undertaking but we literally have no other option . There is no war but the war against illiteracy to be won. Education, information and intelligence is man's best friend and until a better alternative arises for the masses (e.g scientific articles do not count as an alternative, Britannica is only in English) the one we have should we stuck with, and its quite well managed too.
Bias in itself is eternal, and holding any entity to a standart so high is illogical at best in my view. If there was no Wiki, would you think the many blog pages filling its space would be absent of the very bias you're talking about, but worse, would they have had any factual backing?
Rather, there’s a real political legitimacy behind their frustration as the election has demonstrated. The GP's experience ought to be documented carefully and posted in a blog for others to learn from.
Its simply impossible to edit a public figures page at this point if you want an easy fail case to try.
Why should a complete random be allowed to edit a public figure's page without some overview? What could they possibly edit that is relevant to this figure's page?
If a public figure dies, their page will be updated in less than one hour of the announcement, so the edit is not the issue.
It seems healthy to have people gatekeeping those pages, since they are not a public forum, but a common source of knowledge.
Also I find a lot of people’s disagreements usually come down to “ok, I see that the information that I thought was censored is actually available but not in the format that I prefer”
And if you’re looking for objective information about the Israel Palestine conflict you’re hardly going to get it anywhere.
Individuals and groups, be they ad-hoc formations, corporate backed, or nation-state backed routinely astroturf all corners of the internet and Wikipedia is a very big, very common target.
No I will not waste my time researching proof for someone that is being intentionally obtuse. If you have interest you can easily find it by doing some research.
I know of at least of one case in which a person publicly admits he is using Wikipedia to promote their political stances and who is right now at the center of an arbitration case in which he intends to silence opposition.
This is not that.
You are looking at a case of a person LITERALLY admitting they are using it for propaganda and your reaction is "I'm sure it's actually not, it's actually neutral and it's just that it differs from your view". I'm sorry but I can only explain it to you, I can't understand it for you.