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That was ten years ago. Now, political stuff (countries articles for example) is biased. It really looks like CIA fact book.
Basically I think it's good if people stop trusting Wikipedia on contentious topics.
> Basically I think it's good if people stop trusting Wikipedia on contentious topics.
What is the alternative ? Being born smart (i.e "not a sheep") ? Review the much less accessible corpus of academic literature on any subject ? Read a 300 to 1000 pages book ?
If half the people who boast being critically minded (but really just contrarian) did the actual work to engage with Wikipedia articles, the commentariat would be in much better shape.
There doesn't have to be an alternative to Wikipedia as a short-cut to being well informed on contentious topics, because there isn't a short cut, and the sooner people realize, the better.
You can still use Wikipedia for non-contentious topics, if you wish. I do, sometimes. I'm still not going to invest into it though - I'm way too disgusted at the Wikipedia sausage making process for that. That process is made for the contentious topics, it poisons the non-contentious topics, and it doesn't even work well for the contentious topics.
s/firebomb a Walmart/do your own research
You know which tweet
If you make the bias so subtle that people actively looking for it can't find it, you're just doing a decent job describing the topic. Sure, the cumulative slant across hundreds of pages might be enough to tweak populations at the margins, but I don't think that's a bigger negative than access to the information is a positive.
And any other source of information is hardly going to be unbiased anyway. Everyone has an opinion!
Why? Is there a better source of information for those not able to spend years following all news from all sides?
If you decide to go with the Wikipedia "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" opinion on climate, you won't be well-informed. For that you'll have to do a lot more of that reading you don't have time for. But as it happens, you'll be on the whole right, because (last time I checked) the people trying to deny the climate crisis on Wikipedia weren't very successful. It's such an old "dispute", I think Wikipedia may have developed antibodies so to speak, before manipulation could get really competent.
The scary topics are the ones we don't know are contentious. I couldn't give you examples of those, obviously.
It seems that climate change denialists have failed to do that
But lots of uninformed and ignorant people don't go to Wikipedia for their takes on contentious topics, do they? It seems to me that the climate change denialists are capitalizing on that.
One of my mantras is: Bad people sometimes have good points. And it sucks when they do, because then they use that as leverage for all their bad points. Climate denialists have all bad points on climate, but "Wikipedia can't be trusted on contentious issues" is unfortunately not a bad point, because it's entirely true.
Concerning doing your own research, are you reading all research paper on all topics in the world? Or do you sometimes rely on an authority or scientific consensus, exactly as Wikipedia does?
If you had wanted suggestions for gradual improvement, I'd say wikipedia would be better with a "high stakes" template to a lot of pages, with blunt language about idiots fighting over defining the objective Wikipedia position on issues.