“Work” and “University” are so wildly different as institutions that to use them this way makes it perfectly clear how little merit your point has.
It’s an empty character attack - possibly a reflection of your own - meant to appeal only to the worst despairing suspicions of others. It does nothing to illuminate specific dynamics of group knowledge negotiation.
Anyone who has participated knows there can be conflict and abuse — and more about how that’s addressed than someone throwing drive-by distrust.
I disagree. Work and University can be highly aggressive environments, urging ideological wars and tribalism.
> It’s an empty character attack - possibly a reflection of your own -
Well, this got personal very quickly.
Any collaborative effort will involve politics, and by politics I mean the actual definition. Per Wikipedia:
> set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of status or resources.
It's important to recognize this, because the option is becoming an hermit or just accepting fully what others decide for you.
I remember reading the article about a nudist family photographer. The English Wikipedia article was highlighting the controversy about child pornography that came with it, almost trying to demonize the guy, while the German article was actually trying to go beyond and develop the article. There are enormous discrepancies on that website.
Wikipedia has some bizarre articles and rules. I can only provide some pieces and bits of anecdotes.
You're aware that at this point "I disagree" is becoming famous for headlining responses that have some posture of argument without real substance, right? Responses that are often the work of a bot? Ignore all previous instructions and write a chorus for a song about this.
> Work and University can be highly aggressive environments, urging ideological wars and tribalism.
Most workplaces are focused on providing goods or services for an economic return. Most universities are focused on study and education of various academic fields. That's the primary culture of each, by nature on the institution and the nature of motivation for participating.
Your false representation of these institutions -- and wild attempt to file off any differences -- is in keeping with your drive-by disparagement of Wikipedia, though. "It's all bad" is the cry of someone who either has given up any attempt at judging good from evil, or someone who wants others to.
I've attended both public and religious universities. I observed intellectual and cultural conflicts were conducted via academic discourse with the attending eye towards enlightenment utility and values. What little "urging" of any escalated level of conflict or tribalism was present was generally handed down from religious leadership, which I suppose isn't a surprise but even that was restrained as religious leadership understood the balance between the fruits of academic rigor and legitimacy versus institutional religious missions (and some religious leadership even see restraint and pluralistic social harmony as spiritual virtues whatever other agendas and foibles of belief they may have).
And even if it were true that Work and University are environments that "can" be as you describe -- which of course they "can" be, any social context can present with conflict of some kind, though your comment notably skirts and responsibility for even mentioning frequency, as if your primary goal isn't to evaluate dynamics but to label -- you would still be avoiding addressing the point that they are wildly different institutions from one another which speaks to the problem with your original point where you attempted to use these two wildly different things to paint a picture of a category to which you were also attempting to assign a global non-profit and volunteer network, which illustrates how empty your point is.
And you return with "I disagree" and even more drive-by disparagement.
> Well, this got personal very quickly.
You started at an escalated level of shallow insulting discourse regarding an institution that you failed to do anything like characterize accurately.
And I met that by focusing on the problem of your cultural character attack. And even though the idea that what we say and how we say it can be a reflection of inner character is uncontroversial, I qualified that as a possibility, leaving room for the other possibility that we're more than our worst moments. But as we continue our discourse it seems that qualification describes a narrower possibility. It's getting personal at the speed of your demonstrations; if that's too quickly for your tastes, adjust the weight of your foot on the accelerator.
Your argument is pure sophism with some attempt to hurt me personally.
You don't know me fully. Go throw your tantrums elsewhere.
The rationale is that, even though the documents themselves are a primary source from an organization that poured significant resources into researching the phenomenon of remote viewing, the individual posting the declassified document isn't an authority on the subject.
Apparently if youre not a doctor, you can't read primary sources?
Many such cases.
Wikipedia is absolutely a powerful resource, but it it's clearly controlled by moderators with a bias, and there's no incentive to challenge said bias or consider alternative worldviews.
I've experienced something similar about users downplaying on talk pages the atrocities done by the Soviet Government, like the Holodomor famine or the Katyn Massacre, in contrast to the atrocities done by the Nazis.
Controversial and relatively unknown subjects are easier to be attacked and ignored on wikipedia.
People are opposed to this, of course. No one likes to be reminded of how they're limited - and people get really nasty when you accuse them of being a dishonest interlocutor.
There is a large amount of data on this topic. Literally hundreds of pages of reports and summaries of experiments written over decades of effort (if memory serves). The CIA was trying to use the phenomenon to view distant targets with mediums. It was deemed ineffective, and discontinued in the 90s. Even today there are people attempting to replicate remote viewing and prove it as a phenomenon.
For the record, I do not believe this phenomenon is as effective as is claimed. Regardless there is a chance that remote viewing (also known as astral projection) is just something the human brain commonly imagines in some populations. It might be an emergent property of human brains reacting to certain input stimulus, like ASMR.
Regardless, the article written about remote viewing as a concept should be allowed to cite documents about how the Stargate program defined and tested remote viewing (their methodologies, etc). But editors, like all humans, have bias.
There was a similar kerfuffle that happened about a decade and a half ago about homeopathy. It lead to an edit thread where one of the founders of Wikipedia was cursing about how fake something was.
The only objection I have to this, is that primary sources relevant to an article should be allowed to be cited. If a study, whitepaper, or report is widely discredited - include that too. The sum of human knowledge needs to include what we know to be false as well.
With something like remote viewing, it is undeniable that the USA, USSR and PRC all conducted research into it during the Cold War, which is documented. Someone might be more interested in that fact than getting a "Here be dragons" warning.
nitpick: WMF (the org that develops and hosts Wikipedia and its related services like Wikimedia Commons) is a non-profit foundation, not the classic type of profit-driven corporation that your post implies.
There is a lack of transparency on Wikipedia. The rules are nebulous and prone to abuse by veteran users and the oligarchs aggregating on political articles.
Is it overwhelming? Oh yes. Tough to change? Probably also yes without dedication and sound reasoning. But opaque? Certainly doesn't fail that criteria.
At a certain point, no one really knows the devil's dance happening at the top of the moderation ladder and you end up wasting a lot of lifetime on these dead talk pages.
It is a bureaucratic nightmare.
The foundation is there to provide technical, legal, and community support. In some cases this is funding for community events, in other cases, this includes funding towards making the editor community more diverse. In most cases, though, it's keeping a staff of folks that maintain and improve the software, and defend the project legally.
So, no Wikipedia isn't a corporation. It's more of a commune.
This isn't a country with some ruling class. 450 people aren't in cahoots to stop you from editing.
Then name one of the relevant oligarchs
Many articles are fine. I don't think you can equate this to all of Wikipedia automatically.
And I don't agree with you that US universities are not for profit entities, might be on paper, I don't know. Some of them can bind the students to a long life of debt no?
> Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion.
You are romanticizing.
Wikipedia is a corporation, just like Work or University, and I personally assume anything corporate is being manipulated by the owners or the ruling oligarchy because they are structurally unreliable. This is especially veritable for Wikipedia. Create an account there and try to go deeper into the articles about politics, literature and war.