[sien]

Not always. Any particular two or more wikipedians who decide they don't want something in can sometimes stop it.

For example, in Australia there is a body that does sport participation statistics, Ausplay. They do this every year. It's a great source for sport statistics on Australia.

Two wikipedians decided that these statistics were not permissible in the sport in Australia article. They won :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Sport_in_Australia#RFC_on...

This is sport in Australia, which is not that controversial. Now things that are controversial like IQ or the role of heritability in ability are surely going to be problematic.

[setr]

If I’m reading this right, I’m seeing a vote taking place in the “Survey” section, with 5 votes invoked — 2 no, 3 yes.

And an end result of No Consensus.

Framing this as if 2 Wikipedians exercising outsized power to produce this ruling seems disingenuous at best. And their basic objection (I only bothered skimming) of bias and ambiguity in the source/data/methodology seems fairly reasonable on its face; whether it’s correct I have no idea but it’d be a reasonable objection

As a policy, this whole thing seems like good behavior; the only gap is in the lack of voting participants. I suppose it is a real problem if the vote can’t be recast when more people are willing, but otherwise

[jacobolus]

sien: If you think this decision was wrong you can try to bring it up again, and point out the discussion in Wikiprojects or other community pages where a larger number of Wikipedia editors will see it. If you could only get 3–4 people interested enough to discuss and nobody could come up with an acceptable compromise, that’s not really the fault of the process. If you think these particular editors did something improper, you can escalate to further community processes designed for dealing with various abuses.

The nature of any large project is that people will disagree and not everyone will get precisely what they want.

[sien]

Yes. This is true. But honestly, while it still midly annoys me it just doesn't seem worth the effort.

What was interesting is just how unobjectionable this addition is and how hard it was to go through all the processes.

I've added stats in a few wikipedia articles which have all gone in just fine. With this one part of it was OMG, really, you can just object and object and keep something out if you're determined enough.

[jacobolus]

From the other side, editor X is doing their best to present a neutral and accurate view of a topic, and editor Y (who is a random stranger to them) keeps trying to add survey data which editor X believes to be methodologically unsound to the point of irrelevance.

(Disclaimer: I didn’t investigate this carefully enough to have a well formed opinion about the outcome.)

[sien]

Some of the stats in the current article come from the predecessor of the AusPlay Survey.

Also, there are stats in the article that are completely biased that are self-reported stats from sports organisations.

The people objecting to new stats had no problem with these ones.

[Gareth321]

>Now things that are controversial like IQ or the role of heritability in ability are surely going to be problematic.

FYI this kind of "wrong think" is already being removed in many articles. The way it's removed is applying the existing deep and numerous rules more strictly to information which cuts against the current dominant cultural narratives. For one of the best examples I can provide, have a look at how the "Feminism" and "Men's Rights" pages are written. Completely different standards for evidence, commentary, style, and even sections. Criticism of men's rights is evident in the heading, while of course, there is no criticism of feminism in Feminism's heading.

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has described Wikipedia as "badly biased." He's 100% correct.

[bawolff]

> Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has described Wikipedia as "badly biased." He's 100% correct.

Larry Sanger is involved with several competitors, including some for-profit examples, so he has a financial incentive to bash wikipedia

Not to say that he is neccesarily wrong. I wouldn't say "badly biased", but nobody is going to claim wikipedia is perfect.

[rascul]

> Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has described Wikipedia as "badly biased." He's 100% correct.

I was curious and I looked it up:

https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/