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.
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?