[AnthonyMouse]

> Wikipedia's general level of trustworthiness exceeds that of most other internet resources by far.

This can be true of technical articles, especially covering popular subjects which are likely to be reviewed by enough people that errors get removed.

Anything even tangentially related to politics is hopeless.

[jl6]

Not completely true. There are two different types of political articles: 1) Those where two opposing edit-warring factions have battled each other into a compromise/stalemate, resulting in a passably neutral article, and 2) Those where a single aligned group of edit-warriors have gained supremacy and have come to gatekeep the article against any opposing perspectives.

[AnthonyMouse]

It's worse than that. It affects the entire site. Here's an example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_(automobile_manufact...

> "GM, for instance, at one time picked up the entire cost of funding health insurance premiums of its employees, their survivors and GM retirees, as the US did not have a universal health care system."

This is an article about automakers. The reason they picked up future healthcare costs is because they're future healthcare costs, which lets the bosses pay themselves bonuses from current profits and then the company can go bankrupt from unfunded future obligations after they've moved on to another company. The reason isn't that the US doesn't have a universal healthcare system, and even if it did, they could have provided supplemental insurance etc., and would still have wanted to because that too is a future cost instead of a present day one.

The reason that qualifier is there is as a dig against the US healthcare system, in a way that aligns with particular partisans. The opposing partisan might have inserted something like "as the US has high healthcare costs as a result of regulatory dysfunction" though of course neutrality would have been to say neither of them because it's an article about automakers rather than healthcare systems.

And yet it's there, and that kind of thing is all over the place.

[avar]

You're only reading that as a political jab because you're too entranced in American partisan politics.

Americans are a minority among the portion of the world's population that can read English easily enough to consult the English language Wikipedia.

When doing so, the rest us can use a brief reminder of what's ultimately a rather quaint aspect of the US: The fact that healthcare costs are a significant concern of employers.

The source cited for the paragraph you're picking apart is an article that's contrasting US automakers and their international competition.

[seabass-labrax]

I think you're on the right track here. For instance, I have no idea whether or not Brazil has a universal healthcare system, so if the article was about a company in Brazil, such a note would be relevant to me. The USA population includes approximately between a quarter and a half of the world's English speakers, depending on whether you count English as a second language or not. Therefore it's reasonable to assume that the majority of English speakers won't have a personal connection to the USA or necessarily have knowledge of their politics.

As for this specific article about the Big Three, the statement in question was added by user GoldDragon[1], who was banned for 'sock-puppetry' in 2011 and, by their edit history, appears to have hailed from Ontario, Canada.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Big_Three_(automo...

[AnthonyMouse]

> For instance, I have no idea whether or not Brazil has a universal healthcare system, so if the article was about a company in Brazil, such a note would be relevant to me.

The problem with this theory isn't just that it's much more widely known internationally that the US has a private insurance system, it's that that is already implied by the rest of the sentence. US employees getting their healthcare coverage from their employer means that they're not getting it from the government. Specifically calling it out is to make a political point.

> As for this specific article about the Big Three, the statement in question was added by user GoldDragon[1], who was banned for 'sock-puppetry' in 2011 and, by their edit history, appears to have hailed from Ontario, Canada.

This is proving my case. You don't need sock puppets if your modus operandi is to make neutral edits.

And being from Canada doesn't imply non-partisanship -- "the US should have a universal healthcare system" is a common political opinion in Canada.

[seabass-labrax]

> it's that that is already implied by the rest of the sentence

But is it? Here in the UK, we have the National Health Service with completely free treatment except for some combinations of basic services and higher personal income levels. Yet, most employers for higher-up jobs provide part or even full private healthcare. A quick search on a jobs board shows some examples:

Train driver at Great Western Railways:

  ...all GWR colleagues enjoy a range of benefits including... [a] company-sponsored health care plan...

Software developer at Motorola*:

  ...Also, to reward your hard work you’ll get... Private medical care...

Senior accountant at a firm in Teddington, salary £50k-£65k:

  ...Benefits... Private medical insurance...

Are these employers offering this because the NHS isn't good enough at keeping their employees healthy? Because they want to make a political point against state-funded welfare? Because it's a status symbol? I don't know, but again, they are offering (a supposedly better version of) a vital service that people already have provided by the country. So to continue the earlier analogy of Brazil, if my ignorant self read that a Brazilian company provided private health insurance, I wouldn't be able to tell whether this was a 'nice extra to have' on top of state support like it is here, or an absolutely vital service like in the USA.

> This is proving my case. You don't need sock puppets if your modus operandi is to make neutral edits.

I agree with you here. If it wasn't clear, I wasn't trying to defend user 'GoldDragon' or those like them. It's a biased statement by its wording, but the facts are all there and accurate. I think I like that aspect of Wikipedia - yes, there is editorial bias, but it can only exist around the fringes of the facts; conjecture is strictly banned. In my experience, plenty of newspapers indulge in conjecture as well as editorial bias; being primary sources doesn't fully redeem them for this.

* this one is unintentionally hilarious, as they also promise company-funded 'life assurance'. If only :)

[canarypilot]

Removing context to make a selective argument is intellectually dishonest.

The article contrasts the operating environment of “Big Three” auto-manufacturers across countries. It compares manufacture costs in Germany and Japan with those in the US, and the paragraph you cite links through to a (2004) article in which it is estimated that pensions and health insurance combined add $1,784 to the cost of a car in the US.

You need to subtract some contradictory numbers in the article to come to a number you can ascribe to health insurance, but somewhere between $400 and $800 fits a quoted “$900 will flow to [pension] funds”.

Given this context it is reasonable to argue that General Motors is (or at least was in 2004) at a competitive disadvantage to manufacturers in Japan or Germany as a result of the US having no universal healthcare system.

Lamentably for your position, just because there are political decisions involved that bring about consequences, factual discussion of those consequences is not itself necessarily political.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Given this context it is reasonable to argue that General Motors is (or at least was in 2004) at a competitive disadvantage to manufacturers in Japan or Germany as a result of the US having no universal healthcare system.

Japanese and German carmakers also make cars in the US. The primary distinction isn't that the company has to provide healthcare, which they all do, and even if they were manufacturing in different countries they still would because someone would have to pay the taxes that pay for healthcare instead of the insurance premiums. The primary distinction is that foreign automakers have non-union shops in the South whereas domestic automakers have union shops in and around Detroit, and management discovered that promising generous future benefits is a way to placate the UAW without cutting into present-day profits, with rather deleterious consequences for the company's future.

This still has nothing to do with the healthcare system except insofar as it was a category of future benefit that could be promised. The same thing would have happened (and did) by promising future pension payments or other benefits. The proportionality of healthcare vs. pension payments and other benefits wouldn't have materially affected the result, they'd have just been promised more of something else.