Not OP and don't have an example to hand, but something I noticed is that with subjects where I understand them well I do tend to notice a bit of a bias, but equally edits are usually accepted too.
The problem in my mind is that on subjects where I'm not as well educated I may well not notice the bias because I don't know what may or may not be disputed for a given subject matter.
Obviously everything on Wikipedia should be sourced but it's entirely possible to be selective of which sources you use.
Welcome to the entire gamut of human endeavour. We don’t live long enough or have brains enough to know everything at once so we delegate information gathering to others.
I don't know anything about the guy but the first few sentences normally summarize the article and that article has an entire section "Views on Jews" and "Third Reich" so putting the antisemite in the first paragraph at least is not that far fetched. From a neutral, never before heard of this guy, point of view.
Yeah, that dude is deeeefinitely deserving of having antisemitism mentioned in the first sentence.
My problem with Wikipedia is that some articles are fiercely gatekept by individuals who have clear bias and the community does little about it. A great example of this would be the Alcoholics Anonymous page.
Any time someone tries to add information about the ineffectiveness of AA's all-or-nothing treatment of substance abuse, the abuse/harassment that goes on in groups, the documentary that revealed said abuse and harassment - one of a small handful of accounts, who rarely participate on any other page, immediately revert the edit with a gish-gallop of claimed wikipedia violations.
Now, aside from the fact that reverting edits is supposed to be something of last resort - the reasons they cite for removing stuff strain credulity all the time. For example, they dismiss the documentary because it apparently wasn't screened in enough festivals and theatres. Which...might be a thing (it really isn't), if one were trying to cite it as a source...but you can't even mention the existence of the documentary, a demonstrable fact, without that being shot down as well due to the documentary not meeting their standards for a documentary.
I believe they also cited a wikipedia rule that says that "both sides" type coverage of a subject needs to be proportionate to how mainstream/fringe each "side" is. So by their reasoning: because there aren't many people talking about the problems with AA, the AA article shouldn't have any mention of the problems with AA.
They justify all this by claiming the AA is under "attack" and they are "defending" AA from the evil people (did I mention that AA is closely tied to Christianity?)
Wikipedia is controlled by a very small number of people who use an exhaustive policy manual to justify whatever actions they want to take, defend viewpoints they like and attack those they don't. It's sort of like how US federal and state laws are extensive that just walking to your mailbox, you probably break some sort of law and could be detained by police for it.
That's the core problem. Wikipedia isn't governed by the truth or fact, but by who knows the policy manual best.
"BRD" is not at all a recommended approach to editing, it really is more of a last resort. You're very much expected to propose non-trivial improvements to the article on the talk page before you make them, and then respond to any actionable feedback; at which point anyone who reverts you after the fact is acting against established consensus. Being "BOLD" is okay for simple copyedits but not for much else nowadays.
> Consider reverting only when necessary. BRD does not encourage reverting
It's bizarre that you think it "puts reverting at the center of the recommended approach to editing" when the policy specifically says it doesn't even encourage reverting.
If we're being fair, the deletion log mentions the exact reason: it wasn't an article that was deleted; it was a (cross-namespace) redirect. The actual article could've been some user's sandbox page or something. If a page is a sandbox (not complete), there shouldn't be redirects to it. When the page is complete enough, then it can be moved to the main namespace.
Yes and no. It’s just that no one has bothered to make the page for one; you’re free to do so. Your accusation of deletion implies that there was a page that was deleted. That would be a bias, but it wasn’t the case. The page was a redirect that violated the rules.
In other words, there’s a bias in the editors to not make it, but there’s no malicious bias that deleting an actual article would imply.
Seriously? How can you have a 'neutral take' on Julius Evola? Do you want Wikipedia to make a neutral take on the literary merit of the Turner Diaries?
Some things cannot be expressed or explained without political language or terminology because they are inherently political. For what it's worth I think Wikipedia did a great job with that article.
After having read the article, I concur that it does not warrant such a prominent place. There's a paragraph dedicated to his views on Jews, and they're not particularly antisemitic, and it certainly doesn't seem to be a feature of the core of his thinking, merely a (convenient?) derivative of it. Mentioning his rejection of values he associated with Jews in the second paragraph would have been more consistent. There's more in that introduction that shouldn't be there, e.g. the phrase about admiring Himmler.
> There's a paragraph dedicated to his views on Jews, and they're not particularly antisemitic
Are we reading the same article? It says 'Evola viewed Jews as corrosive' and that he believed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were broadly accurate even if they were fake.
I doubt that scanning a Wikipedia article is sufficient qualification to announce that someone has been confirmed an antisemite or not, but I'm sure victims of antisemitism are grateful for your judgement.
Maybe a more apt comparison is between Louis Farrakhan and David Duke? Both are featured as "Prominent Figures" section of the Antisemitism sidebar but only one has "antisemitic" in the lead.
Yes. The old lets the reader to decide for him/herself whether he was antisemitic or not. Does not obstruct information about his views yet does not devolve into name calling in the first sentence.
I'm not trying to underplay what he is saying, but dismissing him in the first sentence on a supposedly neutral article really rubs me the wrong way.
There is no question that he was an antisemite if you read the
sources provided on the very same page. He was objectively an antisemite there is no room for interpretation or your definition of the word differs from the one of the general public.
Would you have an issue if we put "suspected paedophile and open paedophile apologist" in the opening lines for philosophers like Foucault, Sarte and gore vidal? Those are also objective facts.
I would rather have dinner with a antisemite than a paedophile.
> Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola (19 May 1898 – 11 June 1974), better known as Julius Evola, was an Italian philosopher, poet, and painter whose esoteric worldview featured antisemitic conspiracy theories and the occult. He has been described as a "fascist intellectual", a "radical traditionalist", "antiegalitarian, antiliberal, antidemocratic, and antipopular", and as "the leading philosopher of Europe's neofascist movement".
It does not appear to portray antisemitic beliefs as "the single most important or relevant fact about him". It presents them as an important fact, just as Washington's intro includes slaveholding before moving on to the table of contents.
Realistically, only a small proportion read entire Wikipedia articles of such length. Most users would scan the introduction of the old version and come away with the belief he was some sort of noble hero, rather than a crackpot.
If many reputable people say he's an antisemite, which is the case here, it belongs in the intro. The first sentence may be a bit too much in this case.
Those two versions seem like two extremes. I would say his antisemitism belongs in the intro (the bit before the first paragraph header), but not in the first sentence. The style of the older version of the intro is definitely better and more neutral. Then again, I only read the intro and scanned the rest of the article.
Playbook slippery slope, first minor remarks here and there, then clearly labelling someone as "the enemy", or perhaps complete erasure from the website if it suits the purpose.
>The Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory is a series of unevidenced claims centered on the false allegation that while Joe Biden was vice president of the United States, he engaged in corrupt activities relating to the employment of his son Hunter Biden by the Ukrainian gas company Burisma.[1] They were spread primarily in an attempt to damage Joe Biden's reputation during the 2020 presidential campaign.[2] United States intelligence community analysis released in March 2021 found that proxies of Russian intelligence promoted and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about the Bidens "to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration."
The article begins by immediately labeling the accusations “unevidenced” and “false” and then suggests that it is a foreign intelligence plot, an allegation which is itself a conspiracy theory. The article then continues to debunk the accusations point by point all in the introduction of the article, placing the refutation prominently at the top so that the only impression the reader is left with is that there is nothing to it. Only in the final sentence does it reluctantly concede that:
>The article's veracity was strongly questioned by most mainstream media outlets, analysts and intelligence officials, due to the questionable provenance of the laptop and its contents, and the suspicion it may have been part of a disinformation campaign.[8][9][10] It was later confirmed that at least some of the laptop materials were genuine and Hunter Biden himself said that the laptop could be his.[11]
Wikipedia is a teriary source; its "bias" reflects that of the secondary sources on which it based. The article you refer to has 93 references to major news organizations and other sources. Are there reputable sources that argue the Biden-Ukraine theory is true and well-founded?
That’s the rub, isn’t it? According to WP:RELIABLE, HuffPost is a reputable media source whereas the New York Post is not. Therefore, if the latter claims to be in possession of Hunter’s emails while the former claims that it’s an FSB forgery, the former must be correct. If only it were so easy to determine reputation.
Neither are stellar examples of high class journalism, but just search the names of both publications plus "lawsuit" or "libel" or similar to observe the categorial difference. The NYPost is undeniably factually wrong more often.
Their smearing of independent anti-war media is consistent. MPN, The Greyzone, and others have been disallowed as sources for very flimsy reasons: [0].
They backed up one editor at the highest levels, after people wised up that he edited Wikipedia an average of 30 times per day, every day, over 14 years; almost entirely making edits against left wing and anti-war causes: [1]
They've also literally destroyed someone's life, lied about it, and then patted themselves on the back for fixing the problem nearly a year too late: [2]
With regard to Irish national politics, I can attest that they leave out serious scandal information regarding the top two parties politicians, while leaving out important good stuff and including all sorts of bs about independent and left wing politicians; from what I've seen they do the same everywhere.
But yes, it's the endemic failure to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" that is so worrying. The Wikimedia Foundation wants to become the "essential infrastructure of the [global] ecosystem of free knowledge".
Even if one were to agree that such a global infrastructure monopoly is a desirable thing to have, one would have to need one's head examined to want an organisation in charge of this infrastructure that regularly resorts to lying by omission to suit its own self-interest.
> essential infrastructure of the [global] ecosystem of free knowledge
I've been a WP editor since a couple of years after it was founded. I don't bother trying to edit anything on the Middle East - those articles are patrolled by zionists, with support from the very top. Articles about those states that are the remnants of Yugoslavia seem to be edited by various kinds of authoritarian bigots.
To get the best out of WP, you have to be clear that many editors have an axe to grind; if something smells fishy, have a look at the talk page, and see if people have been challenging it. And have a look at the edit history.
What's remarkable is that WP is as good as it is. But I'm not happy with the idea of one website becoming the touchstone of human knowledge.
> What's remarkable is that WP is as good as it is. But I'm not happy with the idea of one website becoming the touchstone of human knowledge.
Exactly. It's a remarkable constellation of interests. People are invited to exercise anonymous influence on the most widely propagated information source on the planet, on condition that they work for free. Big Tech profits from the free content thus produced.
I love Wikipedia, but it's a very human project. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, all mixed together.
I started to agreed with the beginning of the article, but then this part:
"""
This article weirdly claims, or implies, a thing that no serious Biblical scholar of any sort would claim, viz., that Jesus was not given the title “Christ” by the original Apostles in the New Testament. The Wikipedia article itself later contradicts that claim, so perhaps the editors of the above paragraph simply meant the two conjoined words “Jesus Christ,” and that Jesus was rarely referred to with those two conjoined words in the New Testament. But this is false, too: the two words are found together in that form throughout the New Testament.
"""
This is wrong. Or rather, wikipedia is completely right in this case. In fact, the line quoted in the article is fully taken from Encyclopedia Britannica. The line is very clear of what it mean, and while it is true that Jesus (son of Joseph) was probably titled "messiah" (or Christ if you want) after meeting with John the Baptist (from the gospels), "Jesus Christ" as a name probably came later. Some bad translations of the gospel or Paul's letter might say otherwise, but don't found your knowledge on translation. And the historiography tends to agree with Wikipedia/me/anybody who had catechism.
Another article ruined. I can't read further after that, if the author is wrong about that, he might also be wrong on things i'm not an expert on, so i won't be able to take anything i read on this seriously. People should just stop talking about history in political articles, they ruin it every time. Or maybe they should everytime, and allow history geeks to classified them easily in the "untrustworthy" category.
>Another article ruined. I can't read further after that, if the author is wrong about that, he might also be wrong on things i'm not an expert on, so i won't be able to take anything i read on this seriously. People should just stop talking about history in political articles, they ruin it every time. Or maybe they should everytime, and allow history geeks to classified them easily in the "untrustworthy" category.
I'm not the guy, i just linked the blog which had examples. My reading of the blog isn't that he's taking a position but rather pointing out how the wiki page is clearly written by someone who does not believe Jesus ever existed. That Christians wouldn't write the article that way.
> The global warming and MMR vaccine articles are examples; I hardly need to dive into these pages, since it is quite enough to say that they endorse definite positions that scientific minorities reject. Another example is how Wikipedia treats various topics in alternative medicine—often dismissively, and frequently labeled as “pseudoscience” in Wikipedia’s own voice. [...]
Yeah I'm OK with Wikipedia being biased against misinformation.
>Yeah I'm OK with Wikipedia being biased against misinformation.
Early in the pandemic, a conspiracy theory emerged that the virus had been bio-engineered by China at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. One early source of this theory was former Israeli secret service officer Dany Shoham, who gave an interview to The Washington Times regarding the lab.[28][29] Later, US politicians began propagating the idea, including Senator Tom Cotton, President Donald Trump, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.[29] One scientist from Hong Kong, Li-Meng Yan, fled China and supported the idea. Many authorities debunked the conspiracy theory, including American biologist Richard Ebright, NIAID director Anthony Fauci, prominent scientists, and the US intelligence community.[29][failed verification] The conspiracy theory spread widely on social media, but subsequent scientific investigation showed that the virus originated in bats.[25]
So you agree with Wikipedia being biased against the misinformation of the lab leak? You're even fine with them asserting it's a conspiracy theory and shutting down conversation about the possibility?
I was kind of unclear here intentionally. The source being wild has been disproven. This leaves lab leak as the only viable theory. So while it hasnt been proven, it sure as hell is the current theory.
The point I was making is that the political position set by wikipedia proves the bias. If they reported in a neutral fashion they would have NEVER called it a conspiracy theory. They might have said that we lack the evidence of it being a lab leak and wild source is quite likely over lab leak.
The bias is proven though and then the person I replied to was alright with them ignoring 'misinformation' but this is tantamount to agreeing with the bias.
If you step back, early in the covid lab leak story is that the lead scientists from said wuhan lab published in nature mag the source appears to be bat. Afterall, it is indeed quite related. I believe what this says is that it wasn't an intention leak, they just didn't think they did it.
The follow up theory is that it was intention but not by them. Intentional by someone who was actively in a cold war with china... who might that be... oh right...
> The Mueller investigation culminated with the Mueller Report, which concluded that though the Trump campaign welcomed Russian interference and expected to benefit from it, there was insufficient evidence to bring any conspiracy charges against Trump or his associates.
This makes it sound like there was something underhanded there, and their source for it was some opinion piece news article rather than the report itself. The fact is that the report conceded that they found no evidence which linked Trump or his campaign of colluding, conspiring with Russia.
The alleged hacking or leaking of Clinton and DNC information under the Obama administration by Russians or other hackers was nothing to do with Trump. He "welcomed" it like any politician welcomes bad news for their opponent, but it's a total mischaracterization of the report, which is really a incredibly problematic indictment of the wild conspiracy theories, lies, and misinformation pushed by many politicians and corporations and people around this.
And major related articles from this one, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates.... When you look at other kinds of misinformation or even unproven allegations made by less favorable sides of politics, the articles often lead with "unsubstantiated claims", "without evidence", etc. This Trump Russia conspiracy theory clearly should be treated the same way, but it is not, wikipedia is still attempting to keep it alive and is trying to salvage the reputations of those who perpetuated it and those who fell for it.
I love how one can see the examples and the (political stances) effect which is being described especially when this question is asked by reading the responses to the answers.
I first noticed it with the article on the Orlando gay club shooting.
The initial article contained unverified reports that the suspect was himself gay, and that that was his motive for the attack. ...and mods on Wikipedia were deleting any edits that referenced the fact that the suspect's father was a former Taliban official that was admitted under the Obama administration, and was politically active in Florida, attending a number of Hillary Clinton talks despite video evidence.
References to the suspect verbally professing his allegiance to ISIS was constantly struck from the article with constant rewrites that the motive was that he himself was gay.
It was wild to see the disinformation being pushed by mods.
I think the clearest example would be the Gamergate page. Whole page being rewritten twice a day, conservative outlets being blacklisted as sources for not supporting the narrative while random blogs were fine, long time editors being banned from editing because they wanted it to be 'neutral', and a lot of users being banned for pointing out that a lot of the claims were not supported by the questionable sources.
For a more recent example that was posted on HN a few days ago: the proposed deletion of a page on mass-killings under Communism. Most of the arguments on the discussion page were from power-editors complaining that the page was "making Communism look bad" and that it was used for "anti-revolutionary talking-points". While the deletion is still being voted on, gives you an insight into the culture.
> An administrator or other editor is in the process of closing this discussion. Please do not contribute further to it; the result should be posted shortly.
Note that nomination for deletion is not some vote count, especially if people were encouraged elsewhere to come there and blindly vote without any prior contributions.
The problem in my mind is that on subjects where I'm not as well educated I may well not notice the bias because I don't know what may or may not be disputed for a given subject matter.
Obviously everything on Wikipedia should be sourced but it's entirely possible to be selective of which sources you use.