https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama
Which is the point I'm making - it's possible to write unbiased articles about bad people. Wikipedia just isn't doing that for modern-day politicians. Which is fine! But not unbiased.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashe...
(I know the answers to this comment will be “oh but it’s not the same…”. Spare me. You missed the point of my comment.)
You can absolutely say that, if it's true. As it stands, I don't know of country "filled with immigrants", so it's possible your edits are getting revoked for being incendiary hyperbole.
I'm also not aware of any politician described as racist in the first paragraph of their article. Can you indicate who you have in mind?
More realistically, controversies about racism and immigration are likely to be mentioned in a section of the given article, not in the first paragraph. That strikes me as a very fair way to handle it, which conveniently disarms accusations of bias against Wikipedia.
Canadian residents, for example, as of 2021 [1], were 23% foreign-born, and further 2.5% non-permanent residents. In the five year period from 2016 to 2021, the number of foreign-born Canadians increased by 18% alone, which to me is significant growth. The number of non-permanent residents doubled from 2016 to 2021, and tripled again by July 2024 [2]. The share of third-generation+ Canadians, defined as those born in Canada to parents born in Canada, was 56% in 2021 [1]. When the 2026 census data is released next year, it’s estimated that number could be as low as 52%.
[1] https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/as-sa/fo... [2] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/91-215-x/91-215-x2024001...
An encyclopedia is no place for subjectivity. [1]
> Canadian residents,
I don't care. I'm not here to discuss immigration. We're talking about Wikipedia and its standards. You can like immigration or be against it, but it's not Wikipedia's job to allow you to express your opinion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie...
It's all accurate info citing legal cases where he was literally convicted of things. A president being convicted of the things he's been convicted of is the story. Not mentioning it in the intro and elsewhere would be biased.
Your issue seems to be not with "bias" but with how topicality of Donald Trump's actions require them to be prominent within an encyclopedia entry. Which has nothing to do with bias of the editors.
People become more conservative as they age, so maybe the reality quote is about the young and the young edit Wikipedia more
e.g "teens are going to experiment with sex, so comprehensive sex education is the best way to keep them safe"
vs
"Teens should not have sex, so abstinence-only education is the best way to keep them safe"
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Reality_has_a_well_known_lib...
> Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in reality. And reality has a well-known liberal bias...
His whole thing was phenomenal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ-a2KeyCAY
Please supply actual instances of the supposed bias.
And disagreeing with the supposed "negative portrayal" or disapproving/approving of the actions of one does not make an article biased.
For those not in the loop, AE is the main mechanism to enforce civility and neutrality in contentious areas (obvious stuff like Israel-Palestine, American Politics, but also India-Pakistan, casteism, etc etc). It removes editors that are obviously only on the site to astroturf a specific belief relating to a globally controversial topic.
This requires painstaking review of one's conduct and is the main reason Wikipedia is not astroturfed in the same way Reddit or other discussion forums are.
If the strike goes forward, Wikipedia will have a massive realignment towards whatever political groups can amass the most accounts agreeing with them.
Grokipedia would unironically become more neutral in a year.
That was ten years ago. Now, political stuff (countries articles for example) is biased. It really looks like CIA fact book.
Basically I think it's good if people stop trusting Wikipedia on contentious topics.
> Basically I think it's good if people stop trusting Wikipedia on contentious topics.
What is the alternative ? Being born smart (i.e "not a sheep") ? Review the much less accessible corpus of academic literature on any subject ? Read a 300 to 1000 pages book ?
If half the people who boast being critically minded (but really just contrarian) did the actual work to engage with Wikipedia articles, the commentariat would be in much better shape.
There doesn't have to be an alternative to Wikipedia as a short-cut to being well informed on contentious topics, because there isn't a short cut, and the sooner people realize, the better.
You can still use Wikipedia for non-contentious topics, if you wish. I do, sometimes. I'm still not going to invest into it though - I'm way too disgusted at the Wikipedia sausage making process for that. That process is made for the contentious topics, it poisons the non-contentious topics, and it doesn't even work well for the contentious topics.
s/firebomb a Walmart/do your own research
You know which tweet
Why? Is there a better source of information for those not able to spend years following all news from all sides?
If you decide to go with the Wikipedia "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" opinion on climate, you won't be well-informed. For that you'll have to do a lot more of that reading you don't have time for. But as it happens, you'll be on the whole right, because (last time I checked) the people trying to deny the climate crisis on Wikipedia weren't very successful. It's such an old "dispute", I think Wikipedia may have developed antibodies so to speak, before manipulation could get really competent.
The scary topics are the ones we don't know are contentious. I couldn't give you examples of those, obviously.
It seems that climate change denialists have failed to do that
But lots of uninformed and ignorant people don't go to Wikipedia for their takes on contentious topics, do they? It seems to me that the climate change denialists are capitalizing on that.
One of my mantras is: Bad people sometimes have good points. And it sucks when they do, because then they use that as leverage for all their bad points. Climate denialists have all bad points on climate, but "Wikipedia can't be trusted on contentious issues" is unfortunately not a bad point, because it's entirely true.
Concerning doing your own research, are you reading all research paper on all topics in the world? Or do you sometimes rely on an authority or scientific consensus, exactly as Wikipedia does?
If you had wanted suggestions for gradual improvement, I'd say wikipedia would be better with a "high stakes" template to a lot of pages, with blunt language about idiots fighting over defining the objective Wikipedia position on issues.
If you make the bias so subtle that people actively looking for it can't find it, you're just doing a decent job describing the topic. Sure, the cumulative slant across hundreds of pages might be enough to tweak populations at the margins, but I don't think that's a bigger negative than access to the information is a positive.
And any other source of information is hardly going to be unbiased anyway. Everyone has an opinion!
This is incorrect.
Shills do well when they contribute outside of the topic area, memorize wiki-law, and only coordinate to !vote in contentious high-impact discussions. e.g. requested moves, reliable sources noticeboard discussions, and RfCs. They are seen as "normal" Wikipedia editors.
Professionally organized shills are unable to do this since they must ensure most of their time is "on-task" meeting a comment/karma/etc qutoa and find it difficult to justify doing non-shilling work. This works well on sites like Reddit or HackerNews. It does not work on Wikipedia.
For starters, discussion outcomes are moderated and closers do not count votes. Closers look at your history and assign lower weight to editors that appear only to be interested in a particular area.
Other mechanisms include a 500 edit minimum for certain areas + a "balanced editing restriction" (maintained by Tamzin, the same person starting the strike) which tracks %age of edits by subject area and can impose a maximum of 30% in the contentious subject.
Trying to skate under these bare minimums is similar to avoiding money-laundering by making many cash deposits of $9999. You'll be taken to Arbitration Enforcement and look even more suspicious.
You need someone who'll can non-professionally shoot-the-shit at random hours to maintain the cover story despite it not being a clear requirement.
Currently, the best shill-farm is run by the /r/Palestine subreddit. If you join their Discord, you can participate yourself! https://discord.com/invite/hhsG4QTf9n
Essentially, you're given free rein to edit as you see fit with an encouragement to make many uncontroversial edits & befriend normal editors. You do not know who else is part of the project and do not interact with them on Discord. It is very antisocial in that sense.
You are only "activated" by the Discord mod through direct messages to !vote in high-impact RfCs/discussions, e.g. officially recognizing the Gaza Genocide.
This avoids creating a clear paper trail of collusion and means it's difficult for someone to infiltrate/burn the network. It's also incompatible with the micromanagement typical of traditional influence operations.
It's been going on for a few years now as a continuation of other farms. It's one of the main reasons there's been such a slant towards Palestine onwiki lately.
Yes, it's been reported many times by many people. It is an open secret at this point and Arbitration has failed at actioning this.
So far, the only people who have been banned were the ones dumb enough to re-use the same username on Discord as Wikipedia, so now you get a warning not to do that during onboarding. Otherwise, it's too difficult to prove participation.
Haha, it'd be funny if they sabotaged themselves with red tape around hours billing. I could see it happening - sometimes. But not generally. I assume professional manipulators understand that gaining trust in the Wikipedia bureaucracy is part of the job.
I have a low opinion of spy agencies - but not THAT low. I have an even lower opinion of open Reddit communities ability to get anything done.
On Wikipedia, the possibly Israeli intelligence operative known as "Icewhiz" spent years cultivating an account known as "Eostrix" that operated entirely out of Israel-Palestine. They were one day from passing their admin election* before getting banned. A member of the committee that oversees allegations of misconduct against admins analyzed patterns in Eostrix's writing/behaviour to discover the ruse.
This was presented to the committee and resulted in a ban of Eostrix.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration_Com...
If this were a Reddit, Discord, or even a government employee, banning Eostrix would've been a discretionary act of the top moderator/manager, who would've also been the person to have vetted Eostrix.
This is embarrassing and creates an incentive to cover up the scandal. In real life, Aldrich Ames was able to spend years avoiding scrutiny from the CIA because the CIA's management didn't follow-up on reports he was suspicious.
But because the committee is a group ultimately elected by the community, the individual incentive is to take action against, because any member of the committee could betray a cover-up and fuck over everyone else. If ArbCom did not take action, the information that they ignored a serious report would become public and lead to an even bigger scandal.
This is the same reason why even weak democracies are harder to emplace spies into than strong authoritarian regimes.
*technically not an election but they were almost guaranteed a win by that point
you mean the best one that you know of
The pro-Israel ones have been around for decades. Icewhiz, NoCal100, etc. They are easy to spot because they are tightly regimented and run a volume game of many accounts. They are obviously billing by the hour to a nation-state level actor that is not demanding a clear ROI on their investment and is instead using shitty KPIs.
There are also commercial sock farms. They are easy to spot because their income is "clients that want Wikipedia articles and don't qualify for one". Any account who spends all their time writing articles on small market cap companies without news coverage is a paid shill.
They are meaningless to target because Wikipedia has a bureaucratic process called "Articles for Creation" where these shills can submit the same crap endlessly for years and bill the client for time spent without impacting the encyclopedia.
Genuine question - where does the line between “group of people who are interested in a topic” and “shilling” lie? I don’t envy the arbitration group for having to try answer that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Canvassing
Generally, it is unacceptable to notify people of a structured discussion in a non-neutral manner to get them to advocate a specific point of view in that discussion.
This can be applicable to notifying specific groups of people if only groups likely to have a specific viewpoint were notified.
It's also generally considered worse to give these notifications secretly or off of Wikipedia.
In this case, it would be acceptable to notify a project related to Israel and a project related to Palestine of discussions related to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
But its not acceptable to only notify the project related to Palestine.
It's also not acceptable to instruct people in your notification to vote in a certain way. r/Palestine giving these instructions is a big problem.
The fact it's "secret" and offsite also plays a role. Collaboration on Wikipedia itself shows you didn't have malicious intent, so unintentional violations usually result in warnings the first few times it happens. The fact you need to join a Discord server hidden from others is a clear signal to any reasonable person that the group is against the rules.
The line is clear and the arbitration group has banned some participants, the challenge is detecting who participated.
Not sure I agree with the whole "human editors" stuff anymore.
Also, I basically stopped visiting my building’s first floor because all the amenities I need are on my level now. I’m not sure I agree with the whole “buildings need foundations” stuff anymore.
You realize wikipedia is built on sources right?
Admittedly this is mainly an issue for the long tail of more obscure topics. And of course AI is still reliant on some human to produce those articles it is using as input. But Wikipedia isn’t in the picture.
The phenomenon you are referring to usually happens in areas where there is ideological or political friction. Sure, some articles can be biased, because staying perfectly factual in the middle of an active political debate or social change is difficult for most people. But in that case, there is still the option to edit the page or start a discussion.
If something is created by a community and editable by anyone, then yes, you can safely assume that certain topics will not be perfectly unbiased. But the fact that you can see the sources, edit history, and discussions that led to a given decision is already a major advantage.
Personally, I do not know a better alternative. I have a friend who told me Wikipedia is biased, so he refuses to use it. When I asked him what he uses instead, he said, completely seriously, “X is my main source of information.”
Honestly, I think on any politicised topic, that’s a waste of time - there’s a large contingent of Wikipedia editors with a shared deeply ingrained perspective that will reliably back each other up. There are better uses of one’s time than fighting such a losing battle.
> Personally, I do not know a better alternative. I have a friend who told me Wikipedia is biased, so he refuses to use it. When I asked him what he uses instead, he said, completely seriously, “X is my main source of information.”
I tend to use AI to surface sources and concepts, and then go read the sources for myself to verify the AI’s claims. AI has a strong tendency to e.g. misrepresent what journal articles say, but (if they are open access or otherwise available-and they generally are if an AI is citing them) you can then read them yourself and make up your own mind.
AI has genuinely taught me things I didn’t know before about topics of interest to me-e.g. Islamic history-but I’m careful to verify its claims with reliable sources rather than just trusting them-which of course one should do with Wikipedia too
I guess that was a few years ago? Because now he also has Grokipedia ("from the guy that brought you X")...
I haven't paid that much attention to it, to be honest.
> Musk is positioning Grokipedia as an alternative to Wikipedia, which he called "Wokepedia" in an X post last December.
> Grokipedia also says Wikipedia is the subject of "persistent criticisms regarding factual reliability, susceptibility to vandalism and hoaxes, and systemic ideological biases — particularly a left-leaning slant in coverage of political figures and topics.
...which is consistent with what the right side of the US political spectrum keeps saying about media outlets that dare to disagree with them.
This is true of good articles, but the overwhelming majority of Wikipedia tends to lack citations or, worse, cites sources that don't actually support the stated facts.
If an account in good standing adds a cited sentence the likelihood that anyone will actually go and check the source to confirm it supports the sentence is low. It's more likely that the edit will be reverted for other reasons.
Citogenesis is also a real problem, and wildly under-documented.
And most people who read Wikipedia do not take the time to examine all of the sources (if they're even able to - just cite a book if you want to make something up), read through the edit history, and get up to speed on the article-specific politics playing out on the talk page.
Still, it's better than everything else out there.
For a long time, traditional encyclopedias had a much better track record on topics related to politics and society, simply because their editor selection process largely eliminated single-issue crusading. You wouldn't be picked to lead a particular domain unless your academic track record made it clear that you're level-headed.
But I think that AI, just like your X friend anecdote, actually illustrates an interesting point: most of the time, when we consult some sort of an online reference, we're not doing anything important, so the accuracy is not critical. Quite often, we're just trying to validate our beliefs or win online arguments. An LLM that's 90% accurate but sounds 120% authoritative (and almost always willing to support your priors) is perfect for that.
That's a bit debatable. Traditional encyclopedias also had articles that were far from perfect, some of which had biases (not to mention there wasn't just one traditional encyclopedia. Different ones were of different quality). I think more research would be needed to figure out which is better.
Like WW2-era articles backed by books wtitten in 2003 from an obscure author. And only this author.
It’s their official policy.
Wikipedia is absolutely not unbiased, astroturf-free, or low entry, but it was close to that, and it could be.
I see this as a win for Wikipedia.
Though arguably it being biased during the time of its relevance achieved the goals of the original biased editors.
As long as it's reasonably decent, the AI can't go full biased without consequences, but once it's gone there's nowhere normal people can easily to go and get a good enough sanity check.
I personally don't know if the world is on some sort of precipice. It seems like that's possibly the case. The strongest piece of evidence is that many of the rich and powerful, including those big tech leaders, are behaving like it is and that they think they're close to some sort of victory.
Other end is concentrated power (via money, violence, manipulation,...) so something like a dollar per universal vote.
Other end is one vote for each, including the future generations.
Wikipedia is an obstacle for the first one that must be taken down. Perhaps one of the last barriers before the endgame.
And there's no fuzzy middle option, we've (me included) have thought in our comfort for too long that us vs. them scenario that both the left and the right (at least mainstream ones) is possible. But it's now clear that there's no lukewarm at-right or green social democrat version. Only full fascism or full democracy.
We might still have the time but one by one the platforms that would enable this (wiki included) keep being ingested thus making it less and less likely.
But like you said five years ago this level of consciousness would have been out of the question for us both so perhaps there are more of us?
What’s novel isn’t that powerful people are trying to shape the perception of reality, it’s that who is powerful and what makes them powerful may be rapidly changing. I think it’s something that our “big tech leaders” are primarily concerned with, over everything else. Fundamentally evil, imo.
That said it's still the best we have for most things.
That is not the case, sorry. Pre-2015 Wikipedia was as honest and unbiased as we can get. Now the political, historical, philosophical segments of English Wikipedia is very biased and I cannot recommend or support it.
That brings to mind an interesting parallel: I spent over ~2 years actively editing Waze for multiple hours every day. I don't fly much, but I remember taking notes about changes and taking my laptop out when I had a chance (wherever I was) to correct the map to better-match reality. While I originally started because the area I edited had way too much basemap[1], I quickly realized how vigorous the editing process could be when the end goal was to provide a map of driveable roads.
In some cases, the signal-to-noise ratio was so bad that I selectively nuked large parts of whole cities just to redraw them more-correctly.
I was producing good results that unambiguously had better validity than what I started with. The flurry of activity had me rise up quickly through both the editor ranks, and also the role-rankings.
It felt good.
But eventually, I got to see my careful well-researched edits be reverted by either stupid people or stupid bots. I didn't like this; I started editing Waze to make better maps of my area so I could have better maps with which to navigate with. That was awesome, but I finished those maps. So I branched out to improve adjacent areas and finished those maps, too. That also felt awesome.
I was motivated by improvement, not by competition.
When the competition showed up to re-arrange my work in ways that didn't make sense, I dropped out of editing maps on Waze as a serious pastime. I don't want to actively compete; I just want to passively fix.
I still fix things here or there, but months (instead of hours) will go by between edits.
And that's OK, I think: It still works better than it did before I put the effort in.
[1]: Oh, right. Basemap. We don't really have a single, official, freely-usable/government-supplied road map source in the US. We instead have counties doing their things with their formats, and 50 differnt states doing whatever they do, and sometimes cities with their own ways, with only the US Census Bureau's old TIGER database covering the whole gamut.
That conglomerate dataset is a damned mess, and that damnednness of that mess varies from place to place, but that damned mess is what Waze had to work with for the initial map import.
That initial import is known as "basemap."
And TIGER is cool and all (I remember an Internet where online census-provided TIGER maps were the only online maps), but it's really geared towards census-takers. It can include every private driveway, and every cowpath -- and it can include them as regular roads. I've cleaned up thousands of square miles of basemap in my area.
But AFAIK OSM still has no mechanism that helps me get from A to B with dynamic and otherwise-unforeseeable roadway conditions. Waze still provides that, and improving the utility of a system that provides this kind of navigation aid has always been a primary motivation for working on Waze.
So my personal reward/payoff was/is high with Waze, because I could put those edits to use. It's not very good at all with OSM.
Besides. OSM seems to get bogged down in weird shit, like: Who cares how wide a public street is, in fractional meters? Maybe someone cares, but that someone isn't me: I drive a fairly large vehicle with fairly low ground clearance, but I've never had any difficulty driving it on urban roads in my neck of the woods. Those details don't matter to me.
So I'm not motivated to go out and measure these things like road width, and I'm also not motivated to provide assumed data as a presumed source of truth.
Falsification is bad. That's lies.
Superfluously-precise extrapolation is also bad. That's also lies.
I recently read an article about a notable person. The article attacked her personal appearance as having "Mar-a-Lago Face". I'm certain it was backed up with quality "sources".
The outrageous part is that description linked to a deranged multi-page article explaining what that is, written by who I assume must be the most terminally-online basement-dwelling losers on planet Earth.
So I'm going to disagree with you.
> Noem has since become one of the most prominent examples of so-called "Mar-a-Lago face", a cosmetic surgery trend among conservative women,[370][371] also known as "Republican makeup".[372]
Is [370] pushing it for a biography of a living person? Yeah, probably, especially with the "one of the most prominent" and "so-called" in there. But since "Mar-a-Lago face" has its own, cited Wikipedia entry... maybe not? It's not like Wikipedians made up the term, they're citing that _others_ use that term for her.
I'm not sure how I'd phrase it to say that she is a prominent example of the plastic surgery common to the Republican inner circle, and reference the "Mar-a-Lago Face" article, without attributing the phrase to her plastic surgery.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristi_Noem#Religion_and_publi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar-a-Lago_face
[370] https://theweek.com/health/mar-a-lago-face-the-hottest-maga-...
[371] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/20/style/kristi-noem-teeth-t...
[372] https://www.thelist.com/1796655/politicians-reporters-republ...
For what simple HTML you see on the surface, you would be absolutely shocked to see how many hundreds of thousands of hours are spent to create an encyclopedia that, to be honest, is about as unbiased, astroturf-free, and low barrier of entry as you can get. It's not built with crappy automation but instead hand crafted with love and respect. I would bet my salary on Wikipedia turning to shit within a year if the editors who signed the Editor Strike[0] leave en masse.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Workers_United_...