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by dextorious 5287 days ago
"""One of the best things about wikipedia, some might argue the best thing, is that it is free from all the conflicts of interest invited in by money changing hands in exchange for services."""

As an organization, maybe, as an encyclopedia, not so true.

For one, we have a lot of examples of people working within companies to add content that they like. A lot where exposed, but others surely are not.

Especially in non technical issues (politics, history, etc), I find Wikipedia to be an assortment of western media biases. It's only natural, of course, given the majority of content editors origin, training, the selection bias inherent in wanting to contribute to such an effort, etc. I wouldn't give it any more worth on such subjects than I give to the CIA World Factbook.

1 comments

>I find Wikipedia to be an assortment of western media biases.

That you find that I won't contest. I'd point out that one might also see local biases in non-western language wikipedia articles. So to me, that point is kind of tangential. I'd rather say that everything has some inherent bias, rather than couching it as wikipedia having an especially (western) bias, as if other sources could be bias-free.

I agree, that everything has some inherent bias, the problem I see is that Wikipedia is often taken as the "gospel", from both western and a lot of non-western residents, and because of it's status as a "world-wide, collaborative, encyclopedia" it's assumed that it is unbiased --while people treat other sources with more caution.
Funny, I seem to run into people everywhere saying you can't trust Wikipedia. Where are all these people who take it as Gospel?
For everyone telling you "not to trust Wikipedia", there are 100 out there citing it for their blog post/article/school paper/personal research...