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Re:WMF Board considering the removal of Jimmy Wales' trustee... by mellosouls on Monday December 07, 2020 @11:00AM (#25333395)
The problem is this has been tried in at least two significant efforts and the results pretty disastrous, at least on the political bias front.

Conservapedia - right wing

RationalWiki - left wing

Neither are remotely trustworthy for anything that might require a genuinely neutral take.

I'd like to see Wikipedia fixed rather than replaced, though I guess the complexity of doing that is partly what has spurred the article here.

Re:WMF Board considering the removal of Jimmy Wales' trustee... by whatshisface on Monday December 07, 2020 @11:07AM (#25333458)
Both of those wikis were started specifically to promote an ideology (conservatism, and internet atheist subculture, respectively.) Nowhere in the charter of Conservapedia is any admonition to be unbiased! "Be conservative" is in their name! (And their slogan, and their site rules...)

The same is true of Rationalwiki, but less directly. It was created by the promoters of a specific ideology, and as the chessboard of subculture politics evolved, the fact that the people who posted there were generally inclined toward promoting ideologies proved to be a more stable trend than any particular ideology. Right now it's one kind of leftist, but in the future it could evolve into a breed of leftism, or something else entirely. In any case, it will probably go on being ideological in nature, as it always has been, right from conception.

Wikipedia has done relatively well as far as political bias goes. Emphasis on the word "relatively," but it's not the worst thing ever. Jimmy Wales is the best person to lead an attempt to repeat that state of not-abject-failure, because we already know that he is a reliable supporter of democratic principles and sticking to the facts. (Democratic principles including the democratic principle of averaging the opinion of everyone who shows up.)

Re:WMF Board considering the removal of Jimmy Wales' trustee... by mellosouls on Monday December 07, 2020 @11:13AM (#25333503)
the democratic principle of averaging the opinion of everyone who shows up

This only works wrt neutrality if the people who show up are representative of the population as a whole, and as already discussed in other comments Wikipedia seems to draw a particular type in the same way some professions do.

Re:WMF Board considering the removal of Jimmy Wales' trustee... by antientropic on Monday December 07, 2020 @12:06PM (#25334079)
AFAIK, RationalWiki was never intended as a general-purpose encyclopedia, but primarily as a wiki to document the shenanigans at Conservapedia (which was intended as a general-purpose encyclopedia) which then broadened into "analyzing and refuting pseudoscience and the anti-science movement".
Re:WMF Board considering the removal of Jimmy Wales' trustee... by ceilingcorner on Monday December 07, 2020 @11:14AM (#25333509)
Wikipedia is already pretty biased, especially when it comes to obscure writers or political figures. It’s clearly become an activist website, or at least one that looks the other way while pages are rewritten to fit the zeitgeist.

I’d like to see a Wikipedia in the old encyclopedia style, when being neutral was the goal. As stated in their own rules, Wikipedia just uses the collective opinion of its sources, many of which are extremely biased.