I'm glad others are keeping an eye on this issue. It is incredibly ironic to me that anyone in a leadership role at Wikipedia would criticize Zuckerberg or Dorsey. It's not even just political content, it's getting to the point where history is being actively re-written and re-interpreted to match a radical narrative.
In some sort of temporal example of humour, I've gone back to recommending people use Britannica as a starting point and for surface level reading.
According to (ironically) Wikipedia[1], Sanger left the project in 2006^W the early 2000s:
> Frustrated by sustained content battles and feeling he had a lack of support from Wales, Sanger eventually left the project.
There is an article about economics, obviously. And in its "criticism" section there is a long paragraph about criticism of economics from a feminist point of view.
However wikipedia also has an article about feminist economics. Which is almost equal in length to the article about economics in general. And if you go to the feminist economics page - there is no criticism section. But you can open the talk page, and there is a discussion, where editors argue that criticism hurts the neutrality of the article and should not be added there.
It just doesn't seem impartial to me.
A lot of articles in Wikipedia are inside the battle ground for politics. I like to talk about it and point it out. But would rather stay a safe distance away.
I agree with you that wiki-style projects depend on neutral volunteers to succeed. But you and me are not wiki-style projects. Our knowledge can be gathered from several differently biased sources and then combined, in hopes to get closer to "neutral".
Also it might just be the case that it was too early to praise Wikipedia as success. When it started people had precisely these doubts in mind - how could a "democratic" platform aim at truth. Maybe critics were right, just the down-spiral effect was delayed. And at first it was delayed because there was a technical barrier at being an editor. Then various groups began to train people in editing Wikipedia, and here we are.
Also see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20371610
What I do personally for subject that feel a bit controversial is: 1) read the Wiki article 2) read the Talk page 3) look for edits that were made earlier (special before the 2016 USA election) 4) look for primary sources when feasible.
As another commenter mentioned here - editing articles in Wikipedia is a waste of time now, because there are interest groups that control a lot of "touchy" subjects. As an example (and I am adding it because I know the subject matter, having read 5 books by the author) compare the leading abstract of "Julius Evola" before 2016, and after:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Julius_Evola&oldi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Julius_Evola
What changed? Evola was one of the authors that Steve Bannon mentioned in one of his interviews. So editors tried to turn Evola into a misogynist + racist + fascist, just to smear the Bannon guy.
I acknowledge that making ones edits pass by other interested editors (especially those with more time or numbers than you have) is exhausting. But it is worth it, considering Wikipedia gets first place in Google's search results.
A human tradition dating back to the origin of storytelling. But at least now it comes packaged with a version history.
Nitpick: Sanger is not part of Wikipedia or the WMF as far as I know.
> t's not even just political content, it's getting to the point where history is being actively re-written and re-interpreted to match a radical narrative.
Mind giving some examples?
> In some sort of temporal example of humour, I've gone back to recommending people use Britannica as a starting point and for surface level reading.
In what way could Britannica possibly be better than Wikipedia. It is usually based on a single viewpoint, instead of Wikipedia's thousands.
> Mind giving some examples?
Google can help you with these questions, to your own satisfaction.
This is not a winnable debate, but differing views exist.
This is an incomplete list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-interest_editing_o...
https://www.quora.com/Am-I-the-only-frustrated-former-Wikipe...
etc.
The dubious nature of wikipedia's editing is recorded within books and articles from over the last decade that are casually discoverable from google. AFAIK, anyone who implies they aren't aware of the biases of editors, are either willfully ignorant (since this is covered under multiple topics within wikipedia itself) or trolling.
All the criticism of Wikipedia that you raise is valid, but there are some things implied in your posts that are dubious:
* That there exists an encyclopedia better than Wikipedia (or some other Wikimedia project).
* That Wikipedia can just be ignored.
Considering the placement Wikipedias currently have, it is hard to imagine a better or more influential project being created, so we might as well try improving what already exists.
I think that the solution is similar to what he's proposing for the social networks: decentralization. One example would be to take hint from github, and allow articles to be forked when they reach some threshold of editing warfare. Embrace and aggregate partisan takes rather pursuing the noble but chimeric goal of neutrality.
RationalWiki is not, and I'm not sure why you mentioned it. It's not a Wikipedia fork or alternative. It's not even trying to be one, it has completely different goals. The only thing they have in common is the fact that they are both wikis, but there's thousands of those around.
The "noble but chimeric goal of neutrality" is core to Wikipedia's content policies [1]. Abandoning it would be an abdication of their mission.
I remember watching a BBC documentary about the history of the American Revolution -- it was very different than what I was taught in the USA.
Read Ishmael as well. Similar take on, according to some, all of history.
"India: Fake News and Agitprop": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0LgwL6rMPk
Recently google sponsored data journalism award was given to one of the most partisan website. And new think tanks which are sponsored by unknown forces come up all the time. One of the recent ones which I am investigating is called equality labs which recently did a dubious study claiming that there is absolutely no abuse of a majority group on Internet by a minority group. A simple search can disapprove that in seconds.
Fake news is not the same as partisan news.
> One of the recent ones which I am investigating is called equality labs which recently did a dubious study claiming that there is absolutely no abuse of a majority group on Internet by a minority group.
Link to the study?
Also to elaborate - if you are claiming to be doing data driven journalism, but are ignoring with malice all the data which does not fit your narrative, that seems more like fake news than just partisanship to me.
As I've tried to point out elsewhere: Mr. Sanger departed from the Wikipedia project in 2002, and, in the time since, has been openly critical of the project. He really isn't in much of a position to make changes to the project he departed from 17 years ago.
I also strongly encourage him to look at state of wikipedia moderations. Specially in a country like India. Lot of pages related to political content is moderated by people who are deeply partisan and have no respect for facts.