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Re:The Shining light of Wikipedia and other disappointments by FrozenVoid on Monday June 05, 2017 @07:10AM (#14486691)
Wikipedia is fine if you look up something less controversial like proton decay, but as soon as article has multiple points of view, there is a fight to establish the 'dominant narrative'. Articles that have any arbitration measures applied or in semi-protection shouldn't be trusted: if there are huge talk page archives its also a sign the topic has multiple points of view which Wikipedia can't express. Neutral point of view(Wiki policy) with controversial topics often leads to one-sided articles where the side which 'won the article' controls completely the content, which is massaged to fit the NPOV policy without adding anything from opponents.
Re:The Shining light of Wikipedia and other disappointments by kerkeslager on Monday June 05, 2017 @10:51AM (#14487986)
This is a problem for sure, but consider the alternative. We could include all viewpoints. This means we put "the universe originated with a big bang and humans evolved from apes" next to "an invisible being created the world and humans 8000 years ago", "AIDS is caused by HIV" next to "AIDS is caused by vaccines and can be cured by ear candling", "the Holocaust killed 10 million plus people" next to "the Holocaust is a Jewish conspiracy to gain sympathy so they can take over the banking system". It's true that for some topics, including only the dominant view glosses over substantial evidence, but we can't ignore the fact that dominant viewpoints are often dominant because the non-dominant viewpoints have no basis in reality.
Re:The Shining light of Wikipedia and other disappointments by FrozenVoid on Monday June 05, 2017 @11:42AM (#14488389)
These contrasting views are documented in Wikipedia as conspiracy theories(holocaust denial, HIV denial) and creationism, wikipedia is fine with it. What i talk about are single articles where there is no other view elsewhere: the only expression of that topic belongs in a single article. It doesn't require to seek political articles to find obvious bias. Lets take for example 0.999... ; its contained in single article, there is only a brief mention of opposing view in skepticism section, but if you look at the talk pages you'll see its more controversial than it sounds and the opposing view is silenced.
Re:The Shining light of Wikipedia and other disappointments by kerkeslager on Monday June 05, 2017 @11:50AM (#14488456)
Okay, but there's similar argument on vaccines and Obama's birth certificate; how do you propose to resolve that? Do you feel qualified to say that the minority opinion on 0.999 is more notable or sane than moon landing denials? On what basis?
Re:The Shining light of Wikipedia and other disappointments by FrozenVoid on Monday June 05, 2017 @11:58AM (#14488548)
Wikipedia is fine with all of these topics and has articles documenting them: Obama birth certificate has its own article,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_consp... Moon landing conspiracy theories article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing_conspiracy_theori... Vaccines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_controversies
Re:The Shining light of Wikipedia and other disappointments by kerkeslager on Monday June 05, 2017 @03:29PM (#14490645)
I think you're conflating "documenting disproved conspiracy theories" with "presenting disproved conspiracy theories as alternative theories".

The vaccine controversies page, for example, notes that some people think vaccines cause autism, but also prominently quotes someone calling the vaccine-autism connection "perhaps, the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years". At no point does either the vaccine or vaccine controversies article deviate from the dominant viewpoint that vaccines do not cause autism.

This is very different from the numerous attempts to edit the page vaccines to say that vaccines cause autism. That is what we'd be allowing if we say that articles must present opposing viewpoints when there is controversy. Do you really want the vaccines page to present that as a valid viewpoint?

Re:The Shining light of Wikipedia and other disappointments by FrozenVoid on Monday June 05, 2017 @03:48PM (#14490934)
Wikipedia pretends to be neutral retelling of secondary sources("Verifiability, not Truth"). If Wikipedia was truly neutral it wouldn't need to adhere to "valid/dominant viewpoints" and pretend everything else doesn't exist. Basically, they claim to be neutral and unbiased while "dominant viewpoints" determine the content.
Re:The Shining light of Wikipedia and other disappointments by kerkeslager on Monday June 05, 2017 @04:29PM (#14491577)
I agree. As I said upthread, that's a problem.

However, I'm saying, the alternative, where treating every viewpoint that exists as worthy of inclusion, is worse.

Re:The Shining light of Wikipedia and other disappointments by hoofish on Monday June 05, 2017 @05:44PM (#14492432)
but those are not two mutually exclusive options. There is a difference between suppressing a minority voice (perspective) away from editing an article as opposed to INCLUDING a minority reference or fact in the article itself.
Re:The Shining light of Wikipedia and other disappointments by kerkeslager on Monday June 05, 2017 @08:24PM (#14493669)
My argument is that many minority views (for example "vaccines cause autism") should be actively removed ("suppressed" in your words) from Wikipedia in favor of reality-based opinions. The only mechanism wikipedia has for choosing which minority opinions to remove is majority opinion (hopefully expert majority opinion). Wikipedia doesn't have a mechanism to include minority opinions without also including crazies.

Majority opinion isn't always right, but Wikipedia isn't well suited for solving that problem. This isn't speculation: it wasn't always this way, but the rules were made because people were flooding Wikipedia with all the insane things people believe. I've never been an active wikipedia contributor, but I've used the site long enough to remember this.