This is a Lesson 101 on how to refute baseless arguments. Or maybe it is a 400-level class. It all comes down to recognizing mimicry of authenticity manipulated towards fringe ideas.
I like how the article adds weight to mainstream vs fringe. But it occurs to me that some ideas are given so little attention that there is no substantial basis of what is fringe and what is mainstream.
(Long time since I _attempted_ to create an article on Wikipedia, but the form of entries makes it clear) factual assertions must largely be supported by (some metric) of published sources. A fringe topic would by definition would have “so little attention”. So it stands to reason Wikipedia would need a _policy_ of supporting fringe in order to allow page creation.
In other words, fringe is what has few supporting references, but is otherwise noteworthy. With a number of notable exceptions.
That the ideas are given little attention is the substantial basis in determining that they are fringe.
If an idea is given a lot of attention, it might be mainstream or fringe, depending on how accepted it is. It might be getting a lot of negative attention, or it might just be getting a lot of attention right now. It might be transitioning from fringe to mainstream.
But if it is not getting any attention, or very little, then it is by definition fringe.
Compounding this is the aforementioned conundrum that when you fill out the gaps in "In 1987, $person met _____ in _____" with random but not implausible values you end up with a gazillion wrong assertions and (maybe) a very short list of accidentally correct ones. So even if a troll would like to tell the truth but enjoys peppering discussion threads with many low-effort comments just so someone will interact in whatever which way with them, none of their comments will likely be factually correct. It's like a multiple choice but it's not one out of four, it's one out of a billion answers, almost all of them wrong.
That is not true at all. The usefulness and value of many new things and discoveries is often immediately obvious. Even when the value is not immediately obvious, being a curiosity is more likely than being a fringe belief.
Fringe beliefs don't have evidence behind them, but progress does.
> Fringe beliefs don't have evidence behind them, but progress does.
That depends on your definition of fringe and evidence.
I suspect there may be some association between truth and some non-mainstream, cult idea, or conspiracy theory. e.g. it is widely accepted now that the earth is not flat although at one point more accepted that it was flat. That doesn’t eventually validate all fringe ideas, but acknowledges a possibility that when all fringe ideas are considered as a whole, some of them may be true or partially true or be a step towards truth.
A problem with this is that truth seeking and delusions go hand in hand. Delusions seem as real as anything else, and may be evidential but misconstrued evidence or even unknowingly invented evidence. This affects more mundane things like scientific studies, reporting, politics, and Wikipedia as well as “Are they after me” or “Are they lying” things.
Another problem more relevant today than ever is “Should this information be included in Wikipedia, national monuments, museums, libraries, books, or education in-general?” I’ve had articles in Wikipedia that were valid, that stood for years, and then were eventually removed, though they were valid and true, I assume because they didn’t believe it was important enough or relevant to their users that didn’t care as much as I did about preserving history. Is that the right thing to do? I don’t personally think so, but those in-control historically have and will change beliefs to suit their own. We must get involved to ensure that we are not misled. We should not stand idly by and think “Wow, Hitler really f’d up the education of our youth.” We must get involved to stop it. But that doesn’t mean culling or altering all information which doesn’t meet our worldview.
Dude, read the article please. It explains why it keeps the flat earth page AND why it’s exhausting to argue with fringe zealots. You are literally soapboxing instead of having a good faith argument, which is mentioned in the article.
It is not at all true that all progress starts as a fringe belief.
This is the negation of a categorical statement, not a categorically negative statement. Thus, all it means is that some progress does not start as a fringe belief.
If you're going to bitch at someone for getting their formal logic wrong, you'd best have your formal logic right.
The idea that the earth is flat is a fringe belief. No evidence (that hasn't been disproven) exists to suggest that the earth is flat. What progress is being made by giving flat earth ideology equal footing? If any idea—even those with no evidence to support them—are published in authoritative texts as possible truths, then how can anyone trust those texts? If I convince enough people that the center of the earth is filled with spaghetti (of course it is, that's why the moon is made of cheese! To go on the spaghetti!) does that deserve equal footing on Wikipedia? Of course not.
I’d like somewhere where I can read about flat-earth beliefs in a neutral, non-advocacy perspective.
My train of thought goes something like “wow, people actually think the earth is flat? That’s crazy.” > “Is this an internet meme thing or 4chan astroturf thing?” > “I wonder why and how many people actually believe that?”
At no point am I confused or persuadable about the shape of the planet. I’ve looked out an airplane window before. Maybe that’s what feels off about it. There’s an underlying feeling of protecting a gullible public from bad information, a process with a high risk of being corrupted by ideologues.
That's not what's being argued here. Wikipedia has exactly the information you've described (as it should!). There's no real argument over whether Wikipedia should or should not have information about flat earth ideology.
What's being discussed is whether Wikipedia should call it incorrect or not. Or rather, whether the idea that the earth is round is the truth. You can still provide information about provably false ideas while pointing to another idea grounded in facts as the truth.
Wikipedia has this. It's already covered in TFA, that Wikipedia can have a page about flat earth believers, but can't say, even on that page, that the earth is actually flat.
That's tautologically false. For something to be considered "progress" it has to provably improve upon something. But if your belief is provably an improvement, it's not a belief anymore, but more of a fact.
What you actually meant to say is that all progress stems from the research and implementation sparkled by a fringe intuition. But even then, you can have progress without going too far from the current mainstream, so it's not really true anyway
>For something to be considered "progress" it has to provably improve upon something. But if your belief is provably an improvement, it's not a belief anymore, but more of a fact.
This isn't true. For example, the Caloric theory of heat was a huge improvement over the existing heterodoxy (the phlogiston theory), made several testable predictions that were true (improving upon Newton's calculation of the speed of sound), and made it possible for Carnot to make serious advances in the field of thermodynamics with the postulation of the Carnot engine.
However, the theory was not a fact. The self-repellent fluid called "caloric" that the theory was predicated upon never existed. We need a bit more epistemic humility.
Agreed. Fringe beliefs die when they are challenged, not when censored. Driving them underground makes them stronger if anything.
Policing fringe beliefs is dangerous. A free society must tolerate & even welcome such beliefs into the public sphere, not because they are good, but because the freedom to be wrong is the foundation of our ability to be right.
There's no such thing as consensus when you're talking about the scope of the encyclopedia. People will say that birds don't exist, that the sun is not a star because it's a space ship circling the globe with a big flashlight, and that Area 51 is a place where the government is hiding the mole people that we've enslaved to dig tunnels for the rich to evacuate into when WW3 happens. There will never be 100% consensus on anything—even on the most verifiable and proven universal truths—and so by saying there's "false consensus" is meaningless. If the bar is 100% agreement by everyone who cares to speak up, the encyclopedia can't say that anything is true. And if that's the case, what's the point of an encyclopedia?
At the end of the day the encyclopedia was always written through the consensus of experts.
Early encyclopedias solved this problem by hiring experts. Wikipedia doesn't hire them, it just cites them.
It has only been recently that our cynical postmodern internet hordes have decided experts are somehow only equally worthy of trust as the high-school dropout uncles of facebook and the brain-worm infested politicians on the news.
These discussions are used to suck the oxygen out of the room. There is no purposed served to have the same discussion over and over and over. No progress is made repeating the same discussion. But the people willing to argue for reality are slowly warn down, with the goal being to get them to remove themselves from the discourse. The goal is not honest discussion (of a discussion already had thousands of times). The goal is a state of apathy with regards to the truth, not a seeking of truth.
Sometimes they’re right. Lab leak people dismissed by experts for example.
I guess there’s a spectrum of fringe ideas. Some are ridiculous, true. Trolls. But they have no power of policy - flat earthers for example are harmless.
The more dangerous threat are people with consensus based on political power who appeal to authority, like bad science by “experts”, to silence criticism or challenges.
But when a fringe belief has already been categorically, 100%, without the slightest doubt, been proven to be false, but a bunch of people keep claiming it's true anyway, the best thing to do is just to stop giving them a platform.
They are not advancing science. They are not "challenging our orthodoxy". They are not doing anything positive for the world.
We may never be able to convince them that they're wrong, but that doesn't mean we need to make it sound like anyone else thinks they might, with even a tiny probability, be right.
I guess it depends on the topic. Flat Earthers - yeah I’d agree. Until someone comes up with compelling evidence. But those people have no real power - no ability to set policy based on their belief. Just cranks and harmless.
But it’s not fair to cherry pick such an obvious straw man. There’s a million current examples that are much better. Covid origins which were summarily and aggressively rejected as unorthodox for example. A ton of climate science, etc. No one is an authority on truth. Requires consensus over painfully long times.
wikipedia's function as a general (as in not specialized) tertiary source isn't to filter out ideas or beliefs but to catalog and present them in a standardized(ish) format.
The rules are not "insufficient" in this regard in the same way that a flute is not an "insufficient" guitar; they aren't designed to "protect against" any topic that would otherwise qualify for a wiki article.
Why should wikipedia protect itself from fringe, when it doesn't need to try to? If your fringe theory becomes the widely accepted one, it will naturally change the wording of the article, just based on sourcing alone.
There's nothing unique to Wikipedia there though, that kind of thing has always happened. Anyone with a printing press is tempted to control the narrative. History is written by the victors, as it were.
Wikipedia rules are provably sufficient to produce the greatest and most useful reference work in human history. That's good enough for me.
Maybe there's some truth to this article, but it doesn't address the history of people creating libelous content elsewhere, and then citing it on Wikipedia as truth. All you need to do to game Wikipedia is to create a few external stories, and then cross-cite them.
The first paragraph of the linked essay is as follows:
> It is unlikely that you will ever happen upon an editor who will argue that Wikipedia cannot claim that the Earth is not flat. But you may indeed encounter some...
From this, it is obvious that the essay is about people who claim Wikipedia can't claim the Earth is not flat, and how to respond to them.
These kinds of articles induce a feeling of deep hopelessness. Frankly, I can't understand how people managed to remain relatively sane for so long, given the circumstances. Being an abusive, smug, deceiving human being that tries to win arguments with rhetoric, maneuvering and logical fallacies is easy and looks good to others - look, they're crushing the other side! Taking it down requires dozens of paragraphs of instruction, and a single misstep is an almost instant loss, you have to have surgical precision. Worst of all, being right in those scenarios is extremely boring, and by the time you dismantle one of these claims, everyone's already looking the other way, towards the 17 new talking points that have spawned while you were methodically discussing the first one.
Why didn't their side win sooner? Perhaps 'being right' in the scientific sense has just been too beneficial for humans so far. But if that weakens, I fully expect humanity to go back to zealotry, superstition and undiscerning hatred, perhaps forever.
In the past these sycophants ran into hard limits of reality. Now that we are almost post scarcity on many things. It's easy for people to lose connection to science backed reality . In the past this would result in death or starvation or extreme suffering (simple things like saving food for winter pre industrial refrigeration). Now these people have EVERYTHING provided for them and an entire society that will bend over backward to make sure they have water roads etc..
It's quite literally spoiled children growing into spoiled adults. Raised to blthink whatever their current thoughts are the entire world and reality. See the rise of " affirmations" in new age woo stuff.
None of these rules allow distinguishing "flat earth" nonsense from stuff that is just controversial. The real reason that Wikipedia can claim the Earth is not flat is that it's bloody obvious and only idiots think otherwise. I suppose they don't want to say that.
Very interesting to see "Technical Analysis" in this list. I'm no expert in the field, and TA always seemed like quackery to me, but I suspect many more people believe in it than for example Cryptozoology. I personally know someone who even took a course in TA, couldn't imagine anyone taking a course in looking for Bigfoot.
Technical Analysis is a bit of a mixed bag. Some parts are fairly mainstream like saying there's a bull market in tech stocks is essentially part of it. On the other hand a lot of it is like tea leaf reading.
This is ridiculous. A "debate guide" on how to argue with people who hold views that diverge from mainstream opinion is just pointless. What do you think this will accomplish?
Every single scientific/engineering /humanities field contains people who disagree with the mainstream of that field. E.g. every advocate for purely functional programming diverges from the mainstream on the best practices for software engineering. Of course that doesn't mean equating this to "theories" about the earth being flat. My point is the exact opposite.
There always is a gradient between a debate in some field, to a totally bizarre nonsense theory. Deciding on a border between which of these views to platform and which of them to disregard is always arbitrary and has to be decided on a case by case basis. Especially arguing based on some idea of relative numerical superiority is just ridiculous and will make an encyclopedia look ridiculous.
That a binary distinction between "fringe" and "consensus" is nonsense and that trying to have a "debate manual" to argue with people holding "fringe views" is just ridiculous.
My recommendation is that this is treated on a case by case basis, rather than any determination whether a belief is "fringe", and that if any position is platformed, it is platformed together with how it is viewed by those who advocate for it and against it. In the case of flat earth it should be made clear that it is not a legitimate view, that nobody with any legitimacy or authority believes in it. I also gave the example of purely functional software development, which is also a fringe view. There it should be made clear that it is a legitimate view on software development, even if the majority of academia and industry disagrees with it.
I also recommend to not have debate manuals on how to debate people who try to push nonsense into Wikipedia.
I thought it was interesting how long Wikipedia took to rename "2023 Israel-Hamas war" to "Gaza war" and start calling it a genocide, but I suppose this is why. When major sources have a significant bias, Wikipedia copies that bias as a matter of policy.
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In response to the reply accusing this comment of bias: When people said this two years ago, they were accused of bias. But now, in the present, with the benefit of hindsight and more information, it's a mainstream fact, and Wikipedia does report on it. We also know that major news organizations were aware of this at the time and chose not to report it. After round earth theory becomes mainstream, it's not bias to talk about why it took so long for round earth theory to be recognized.
I believe what Wikipedia tries to do (simplifying here) is reporting the "opinion" of reputable sources which should have an informed view on the matter. If reputable sources believe it's a genocide, then they will report it, if not they will not.
Calling these sources biased because they do not corroborate your view of the situation is your subjective opinion and doesn't mean they actually do have a bias. The whole point of considering them reputable sources is that they should be as unbiased as possible (even though 100% neutrality is impossible), if they had "significant bias" as you claim they would not be considered as reliable sources to begin with.
Actually there's a Wikipedia guideline (WP:BIASED) along the lines of "bias doesn't necessarily make a source unreliable", which in practice is taken to mean that bias doesn't matter.
Of course in practice, editors have their own biases and decisions come down popularity contests. Wikipedia's own biases seem to get worse over time, as more neutral editors give up, so we end up with some weird things like
- Almost all conservative news sources having low reliability ratings.
- Daily Mail for example is deprecated, the lowest possible rating outside of literal spam.
- Al Jazeera, which seems largely controlled by the Qatari monarchy, has the highest reliability rating and is the most-used source in Israel-Palestine. Even their blog is the top source on many articles, despite news blogs being against policy.
- Al-Manar, the Hezbollah mouthpiece which is very unashamedly biased (e.g. refering to their terrorists as "men of god"), has a somewhat low reliability rating, but still higher than several conservative sources like Daily Mail.
There's also a tricky situation where some political factions consistently report closer to reality than others. This makes it hard to be both reality-focused* and politically neutral at the same time.
* It's not this page, but there's a separate Wikipedia policy which says that editors should only insert content which is true.
Circular reasoning that is completely ignorant of the last 2 years of analysis of media reporting on Gaza.
The evidence of media bias is extensive and extremely blatant: it spans framing ("[horrible event, war crimes, etc.] happened, according to Hamas" vs no such qualification for Israeli claims, "20 people killed in Gaza" without mentioning who or what killed them), dehumanisation ("2 people killed" when reporting on children deaths in Gaza vs "2 teenagers in hospital" when talking about IDF soldiers), selective reporting (remember the pogroms in Amsterdam that got debunked on social media while every chief of state was sending their condolences?), constant repeat of Israeli "right to self-defence" while Palestinian context is not mentioned, etc., etc., etc.
If you need something more visual/real-time, Newscord has been been reporting on this consistently: https://newscord.org/editorials
The media might be largely a reputable source, when it doesn't contradict the preferred narrative, and the Gaza genocide was probably the strongest example we could have had of this.
I'm not sure why I even wrote this out, because 2 years in calling it "subjective opinion" is obviously not a position that is based on facts or reason.
This is not a "bias". There is precise legal definition for "genocide", and it was recognized as such. Israel goverment offials were very specific on record, what they will do to population in Gaza.
They also do not allow civilians to evacuate or to surrender!!! All exits from Gaza are blocked by Israel or their allies!
Which does not matter, because for Wikipedia, Journalists are a reputable source regardless of their bias. If the WaPo writes tomorrow that Hannah Arendt was a far-right extremist, that would be a valid source by Wikipedia standards.
The discussions that led to the renaming to Genocide were interesting, the opposition was very well coordinated hostile actors but in the end there was just nothing they could do, the facts just weren't on their side. They wrote books worth of text, used every procedural trick they could, violated every rule like editing comments of other users in talk pages or spamming so much text it would break the backend, they organized to coordinate editing of thousands of Wikipedia pages to push pro-zionist messages. In the end it was so much that wikipedia topic-banned 8 super-editors over that. Many more users were banned, many were perma banned from wikipedia entirely.
It was an incredible display of the resiliency of wikipedia when faced with a hostile attack by a state-actor putting hundreds of millions $ into spreading their propaganda. Most Governments, universities and news media are much less capable than that. It was such a failure that they now are pushing the us government itself to gain direct control over wikipedia and to cut the funding from the researchers and universities that produced the facts in the first place, going to the "root of the problem" basically.
> the opposition was very well coordinated hostile actors
Where are you getting this idea? While you can find examples of coordination on both sides, the most significant instance of coordinated editing and recruiting for agenda-based editing was by Tech for Palestine.
> In the end it was so much that wikipedia topic-banned 8 super-editors over that
If you're referring to PIA5, wasn't BilledMammal the only pro-Israel editor banned as a result? Quite a few were banned the pro-Palestinian side, like Iskandar323 (who seemed to lead Tech for Palestine's coordinated editing), Levivich, Nableezy, and several others.
> They wrote books worth of text
By far the worst WP:BLUDGEONING was actually from editors in favor of a "Gaza genocide" title. BilledMammal actually ran the numbers on it.
> the facts just weren't on their side
Actually the closing decision was largely based on !votes, and the admin seemed to just blatantly miscount them. By the actual !vote count it was almost exactly 50/50, a very clear no-consensus result, but sometimes closers make strange decisions.
It was only a matter of time though - Wikipedia is a numbers game and anti-Israeli editors are just far more numerous nowadays.
Well obvious response, you were defeated thankfully. I think it's ultimately a lost cause because most people will side with humanity once the scale and magnitude of the atrocities committed became impossible to ignore. Even if you manage to wrestle control of Wikipedia by force of the US government and defund every university department that publishes things you don't like, you still won't win because the truth is not on your side, you will use ever more repression and force naturally, but that will by itself turn even more people against you. There is a resiliency to Palestinians that is very inspiring to a lot of people. Free Palestine!
Humanity has little to do with it; Wikipedia is anti-Israel because there are approximately zero Israelis (especially with the requisite English skills, patience and political correctness) against heaps of editors with anti-Israeli agendas.
Wikipedia is not meant to appear neutral, it's meant to "mirror the current consensus of mainstream scholarship [... aka] 'accepted knowledge'". Basically, if the accepted knowledge of an event is that it is not a genocide, Wikipedia has to reflect _that_. Wikipedia is not a soapbox. It doesn't have an stance. It just copies and transmit as accurately as possible, the current understanding from qualified sources. You can literally see it in the "balance" section of this article.
So here's my problem. There is only one viewpoint present on the Gaza page. For comparison, the Kremlin's justification and explanation about the war is extensively detailed in the third paragraph on the Ukraine page.
And the fact that the Ukrainian war, specifically the agressive role of the Kremlin, is a controversy only on wikipedia pretty much shows what exactly wikipedia's slant is, doesn't it?
There are other ... what I would call "neutrality issues":
Did you know Iran never had any socialists or students in their ayatollah-dictatorship revolution? Perhaps should I say that the CIA's miniscule role is thoroughly mentioned, but international socialism massive role is entirely left out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution
(you will still find these facts if you dig into the detail pages on wikipedia, but the fact that they were critical, even were the origin of the Iranian revolution, is not mentioned on the Iranian revolution page)
More generally, the links between leftism and violent anti-immigration and anti-LGBT policies and anti-Youth policies in general are extremely hard to find (good luck finding, for example, that the current leader of the UN, in his youth as a violent communist, used violence against LGBT protestors, or that he beat a few of his own students into the hospital (he was a professor) when "discussing" communism ... hell, you will not even find that he betrayed communism, socialism and essentially everything he has ever believed in)
And the links known to exist between international socialism and world events are downplayed and not mentioned. Their discussions on Ukraine before the Holodomor genocide, or their attitude before, during and after the Cultural revolution genocide in China are not mentioned:
This illustrates a general problem: "communist dictatorship", well, those don't exist.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awikipedia.org+%22comm... ... (note: what is mentioned is the "The Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship" that Romania has, if you go to the page of Romania you will not find any mention of the actual communist dictatorship, again, the viewpoint of the Romanian government, which is that it replaced a communist dictatorship, cannot be found)
Same for "socialist dictatorship", where you will only find explanations of Marxist theory, not the many disasters, some of which mentioned above.
Or, how about, important leftist figures. Even when leftists claim they've betrayed leftism like Guterrez or Chavez, but let's go for more iconic figures. For example, Leon Trotsky was the commander of the Red Army when it executed the "red terror" in Russia. Therefore he is a genocidal war criminal, and for example, his soldiers broken the arms and legs of hundreds of Russian Imperial sailors ... and threw them into the freezing seas. He was the commander of a military force burned down schools with kids inside. Now go read:
This is not advocating neutrality. Quite the opposite, it is advocating for fighting fringe ideas.
In political discourse, this would be the equivalent of minutely minority alt far-right politics being talked about as if it was mainstream, and being inserted into Wikipedia as though it was another rational argument.
Maybe. We have not yet gone further right. But we are looking like we are about to. There is an extremism in politics that we have yet to reach. Regardless this is just an example of fringe (extremism) vs mainstream
Do you really want to defend that the search term "socialist dictatorship" means the person searching intends to be schooled on details of Marxist theory, and should be protected from finding Venezuela, North Korea or Cuba?
Is that "neutrality"? Seriously?
That's my point: some "fringe" ideas are covered extensively (because if Marxist theory is anything, it's fringe, to say nothing of details like the dictatorship of the proletariat), in situations where people obviously weren't asking for those ideas, with criticism suppressed or at least moved very deeply away. Don't you think it would be at least worth a mention on socialism's page that it has "once or twice" led to repression and dictatorship, not of the proletariat, but of billionnaires, religious lunatics, and worse? (oh right, leftists won't even participate in discussions of the fact that leftist "heroes" like Chavez and even Maduro are billionnaires[1]). And, what exactly is the problem with at least mentioning the viewpoint that what happened in Gaza isn't a genocide? That is not a fringe idea at all.
A search for “socialist dictatorship” in Wikipedia brings up an article aliased to the same name, which yes, explains what that means – this is an encyclopedia after all – and then says:
> Presently, there are five communist states in the world: China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam.
> if Marxist theory is anything, it's fringe
It has shaped the history of the world, for good or bad, and is still one of the most mainstream theories on how modern societies organize. “Fringe” refers to the recognition something has in the world, not the number of “supporters” (not to mention just suggesting that is a misunderstanding of what Marxism is).
You seem to have bought into several fringe theories. There is little evidence of Maduro being a billionaire other than pieces from US magazines. You can certainly hold that view, but not demand that it be featured equally alongside what is publicly verifiable knowledge.
You entirely avoided the question, and then try to deceive ... which I guess is an answer in itself.
When searching for socialist dictatorships, the relevant bit of information is that the application of Marxist theory in practice—especially in the 20th and 21st centuries—has always resulted in authoritarian rule, human rights abuses, and repression and economic hardship for hundreds of millions. And yes, Venezuela and Iran are examples of that. Every. Single. Time. Communism, Marxism, ... never resulted in the magical la-la-land that keeps getting promised. Not once. With irrelevant exceptions, like ironically Israel, whose parliament peacefully chose to abandon communism rather than repress the population into total misery.
The question was why Wikipedia needs to hide the examples of total socialist failures and instead pushes TINY details of Marxist theory. "Socialist dictatorship" obviously also refers to the many countries where socialism has resulted in repression, hardship and failure rather than justice, and hiding that is obviously not neutral.
Similar to the Gaza genocide page. One viewpoint, anything but neutral, is pushed to the total exclusion of the obvious alternate viewpoints. Even the extreme viewpoint on the other side has merit: that what Hamas is doing is at the very least attempted genocide (that is nothing new for Hamas: they have in the past successfully committed genocide against other Palestinian factions, the very definition of genocide, more than once. Plus, of course, that a terrorist organization that has mass-murder as an explicit goal in their charter is obviously not very concerned with human rights), and what Israel is successfully doing is not genocide. But that shall not be discussed (read the talk page).
Is that neutrality?
It's also extremely obvious that Wikipedia's bias is first and foremost about extreme leftist propaganda (extreme meaning viewpoints that even regular leftists would take offense to), not about Gaza. Take the icons of communism, you see the same. Leon Trotsky is obviously first and foremost a mass-murderer. That's what we call a military commander who had hundreds of people's bones broken and then thrown into the sea, who locks a school with children inside and burns it to the ground, no matter how "bourgeois" those children were (not that the children were very bourgeois at all). And yes, the other side also did bad things. But it is entirely left out. Why? This is not some tiny detail. All that is discussed are very fine details of different branches of communism. Or take the actions of prominent leftist states against immigration, violent anti-religionism or anti-LGBT socialist violence is silenced (illustrating that there have been huge swings in socialist thought). Or the fact that socialism was, and is, very much opposed to science (and I don't just mean Lysenkoism or North Korea's pine needle tea against famine). Yet all these were, and are, part of all big communist states. Soviets did that. China did (and does) that. North Korea does that. Even Cuba gives it a try now and then.
Not sure what you are protesting - wikipedia is not “hiding” anything which is what I pointed out. The killings during the “Red Terror” are also well documented in wikipedia and not left out. Documenting genocide (mass murder or whatever you want to call it) in Gaza is not leftist, just history. Israel’s justification for the war are also documented elsewhere.
You seem to look at everything slightly related to socialism/communism under the same lens and expect to see your worldview reflected in Wikipedia, that is the opposite of neutrality. In fact you’re enacting a perfect example of item #3 in the original post, the “balance” argument.
Just want to say thanks for taking the energy to argue against these people.... I was so drained reading the exchange I couldn't be bothers to rebutt anything. But you did it perfectly .
> Did you know Iran never had any socialists or students in their ayatollah-dictatorship revolution?
"However, as ideological tensions persisted between Pahlavi and Khomeini, anti-government demonstrations began in October 1977, developing into a campaign of civil resistance that included communism, socialism, and Islamism."
> you will still find these facts if you dig into the detail pages on wikipedia
Yes, that's called "research"...
> the current leader of the UN, in his youth as a violent communist, used violence against LGBT protestors, or that he beat a few of his own students into the hospital
This sounds like a conspiracy theory, and I couldn't find any reference to those events anywhere online. Even the incredibly biased socialist/communist prolewiki doesn't name him as a communist: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B3nio_Guterres
> Did you know that North Korea is not communist? It is a "a highly centralized, one-party totalitarian dictatorship"
That's correct, the state ideology of north korea is "juche", which has it's roots in marxism/communism but splintered decades ago, with a focus on nationalism, historical revisionism and reverence for the leader(s). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche)
> Same for "socialist dictatorship", where you will only find explanations of Marxist theory, not the many disasters, some of which mentioned above.
An intellectually incestuous gaggle of fools who tell and get the same jokes, hang out in the same group chats, and have all fallen, in lockstep, for the same intellectual fads and conspiracy theories, penned this insipid screed.
Musk has his own problems, of course. But I'm really looking forward to grokipedia breaking the monopoly on what's "serious" by the very unserious leadership of wikipedia.
This is a Lesson 101 on how to refute baseless arguments. Or maybe it is a 400-level class. It all comes down to recognizing mimicry of authenticity manipulated towards fringe ideas.
I like how the article adds weight to mainstream vs fringe. But it occurs to me that some ideas are given so little attention that there is no substantial basis of what is fringe and what is mainstream.
> “…some ideas are given so little attention…”
(Long time since I _attempted_ to create an article on Wikipedia, but the form of entries makes it clear) factual assertions must largely be supported by (some metric) of published sources. A fringe topic would by definition would have “so little attention”. So it stands to reason Wikipedia would need a _policy_ of supporting fringe in order to allow page creation.
In other words, fringe is what has few supporting references, but is otherwise noteworthy. With a number of notable exceptions.
There are so many Wikipedia articles which have extremely poor cited works, like literally just somebody’s crappy blog.
That the ideas are given little attention is the substantial basis in determining that they are fringe.
If an idea is given a lot of attention, it might be mainstream or fringe, depending on how accepted it is. It might be getting a lot of negative attention, or it might just be getting a lot of attention right now. It might be transitioning from fringe to mainstream.
But if it is not getting any attention, or very little, then it is by definition fringe.
I hate that producing and promoting baseless arguments is near zero effort, but refuting them requires an essay.
Compounding this is the aforementioned conundrum that when you fill out the gaps in "In 1987, $person met _____ in _____" with random but not implausible values you end up with a gazillion wrong assertions and (maybe) a very short list of accidentally correct ones. So even if a troll would like to tell the truth but enjoys peppering discussion threads with many low-effort comments just so someone will interact in whatever which way with them, none of their comments will likely be factually correct. It's like a multiple choice but it's not one out of four, it's one out of a billion answers, almost all of them wrong.
Brandolini's law (or the bullshit asymmetry principle)
Wikipedia rules are just insufficient to protect against "fringe" beliefs. Wikipedia itself creates several of them per year due to citogenesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...
Why are fringe beliefs something that need protecting against?
All progress starts out as a fringe belief.
But not all fringe beliefs lead to progress, in fact most of them don't.
> All progress starts out as a fringe belief.
That is not true at all. The usefulness and value of many new things and discoveries is often immediately obvious. Even when the value is not immediately obvious, being a curiosity is more likely than being a fringe belief.
Fringe beliefs don't have evidence behind them, but progress does.
>> All progress starts out as a fringe belief.
> That is not true at all.
> Fringe beliefs don't have evidence behind them, but progress does.
That depends on your definition of fringe and evidence.
I suspect there may be some association between truth and some non-mainstream, cult idea, or conspiracy theory. e.g. it is widely accepted now that the earth is not flat although at one point more accepted that it was flat. That doesn’t eventually validate all fringe ideas, but acknowledges a possibility that when all fringe ideas are considered as a whole, some of them may be true or partially true or be a step towards truth.
A problem with this is that truth seeking and delusions go hand in hand. Delusions seem as real as anything else, and may be evidential but misconstrued evidence or even unknowingly invented evidence. This affects more mundane things like scientific studies, reporting, politics, and Wikipedia as well as “Are they after me” or “Are they lying” things.
Another problem more relevant today than ever is “Should this information be included in Wikipedia, national monuments, museums, libraries, books, or education in-general?” I’ve had articles in Wikipedia that were valid, that stood for years, and then were eventually removed, though they were valid and true, I assume because they didn’t believe it was important enough or relevant to their users that didn’t care as much as I did about preserving history. Is that the right thing to do? I don’t personally think so, but those in-control historically have and will change beliefs to suit their own. We must get involved to ensure that we are not misled. We should not stand idly by and think “Wow, Hitler really f’d up the education of our youth.” We must get involved to stop it. But that doesn’t mean culling or altering all information which doesn’t meet our worldview.
Dude, read the article please. It explains why it keeps the flat earth page AND why it’s exhausting to argue with fringe zealots. You are literally soapboxing instead of having a good faith argument, which is mentioned in the article.
> at all
> often
which is it?
It is not at all true that all progress starts as a fringe belief.
This is the negation of a categorical statement, not a categorically negative statement. Thus, all it means is that some progress does not start as a fringe belief.
If you're going to bitch at someone for getting their formal logic wrong, you'd best have your formal logic right.
It’s covered in the article. In short, Wikipedia is not that place.
Because the world isn't flat, and that theory does not deserve equal weight with the truth in a reference work.
There are an infinite number of falsehoods, and only one truth. If we let the lies in the truth becomes impossible to find in the pile of lies.
The idea that the earth is flat is a fringe belief. No evidence (that hasn't been disproven) exists to suggest that the earth is flat. What progress is being made by giving flat earth ideology equal footing? If any idea—even those with no evidence to support them—are published in authoritative texts as possible truths, then how can anyone trust those texts? If I convince enough people that the center of the earth is filled with spaghetti (of course it is, that's why the moon is made of cheese! To go on the spaghetti!) does that deserve equal footing on Wikipedia? Of course not.
I’d like somewhere where I can read about flat-earth beliefs in a neutral, non-advocacy perspective.
My train of thought goes something like “wow, people actually think the earth is flat? That’s crazy.” > “Is this an internet meme thing or 4chan astroturf thing?” > “I wonder why and how many people actually believe that?”
At no point am I confused or persuadable about the shape of the planet. I’ve looked out an airplane window before. Maybe that’s what feels off about it. There’s an underlying feeling of protecting a gullible public from bad information, a process with a high risk of being corrupted by ideologues.
That's not what's being argued here. Wikipedia has exactly the information you've described (as it should!). There's no real argument over whether Wikipedia should or should not have information about flat earth ideology.
What's being discussed is whether Wikipedia should call it incorrect or not. Or rather, whether the idea that the earth is round is the truth. You can still provide information about provably false ideas while pointing to another idea grounded in facts as the truth.
Wikipedia has this. It's already covered in TFA, that Wikipedia can have a page about flat earth believers, but can't say, even on that page, that the earth is actually flat.
The vast majority of fringe beliefs are regressive.
That's tautologically false. For something to be considered "progress" it has to provably improve upon something. But if your belief is provably an improvement, it's not a belief anymore, but more of a fact.
What you actually meant to say is that all progress stems from the research and implementation sparkled by a fringe intuition. But even then, you can have progress without going too far from the current mainstream, so it's not really true anyway
>For something to be considered "progress" it has to provably improve upon something. But if your belief is provably an improvement, it's not a belief anymore, but more of a fact.
This isn't true. For example, the Caloric theory of heat was a huge improvement over the existing heterodoxy (the phlogiston theory), made several testable predictions that were true (improving upon Newton's calculation of the speed of sound), and made it possible for Carnot to make serious advances in the field of thermodynamics with the postulation of the Carnot engine.
However, the theory was not a fact. The self-repellent fluid called "caloric" that the theory was predicated upon never existed. We need a bit more epistemic humility.
Nothing ever exists, it's all models to interpret reality. Your point?
Agreed. Fringe beliefs die when they are challenged, not when censored. Driving them underground makes them stronger if anything.
Policing fringe beliefs is dangerous. A free society must tolerate & even welcome such beliefs into the public sphere, not because they are good, but because the freedom to be wrong is the foundation of our ability to be right.
The encyclopedia is not the place for debate.
Because a false appearance of consensus is better?
Why even have Wikipedia then? Why not just ask Reddit at that point?
There's no such thing as consensus when you're talking about the scope of the encyclopedia. People will say that birds don't exist, that the sun is not a star because it's a space ship circling the globe with a big flashlight, and that Area 51 is a place where the government is hiding the mole people that we've enslaved to dig tunnels for the rich to evacuate into when WW3 happens. There will never be 100% consensus on anything—even on the most verifiable and proven universal truths—and so by saying there's "false consensus" is meaningless. If the bar is 100% agreement by everyone who cares to speak up, the encyclopedia can't say that anything is true. And if that's the case, what's the point of an encyclopedia?
At the end of the day the encyclopedia was always written through the consensus of experts.
Early encyclopedias solved this problem by hiring experts. Wikipedia doesn't hire them, it just cites them.
It has only been recently that our cynical postmodern internet hordes have decided experts are somehow only equally worthy of trust as the high-school dropout uncles of facebook and the brain-worm infested politicians on the news.
Being an expert, while nice and valuable, isn’t a claim to be a final arbiter. Authority is earned provisionally by surviving criticism.
Citing experts is good practice, but invoking them to silence dissent is anti-scientific.
These discussions are used to suck the oxygen out of the room. There is no purposed served to have the same discussion over and over and over. No progress is made repeating the same discussion. But the people willing to argue for reality are slowly warn down, with the goal being to get them to remove themselves from the discourse. The goal is not honest discussion (of a discussion already had thousands of times). The goal is a state of apathy with regards to the truth, not a seeking of truth.
Sometimes they’re right. Lab leak people dismissed by experts for example.
I guess there’s a spectrum of fringe ideas. Some are ridiculous, true. Trolls. But they have no power of policy - flat earthers for example are harmless.
The more dangerous threat are people with consensus based on political power who appeal to authority, like bad science by “experts”, to silence criticism or challenges.
But when a fringe belief has already been categorically, 100%, without the slightest doubt, been proven to be false, but a bunch of people keep claiming it's true anyway, the best thing to do is just to stop giving them a platform.
They are not advancing science. They are not "challenging our orthodoxy". They are not doing anything positive for the world.
We may never be able to convince them that they're wrong, but that doesn't mean we need to make it sound like anyone else thinks they might, with even a tiny probability, be right.
I guess it depends on the topic. Flat Earthers - yeah I’d agree. Until someone comes up with compelling evidence. But those people have no real power - no ability to set policy based on their belief. Just cranks and harmless.
But it’s not fair to cherry pick such an obvious straw man. There’s a million current examples that are much better. Covid origins which were summarily and aggressively rejected as unorthodox for example. A ton of climate science, etc. No one is an authority on truth. Requires consensus over painfully long times.
Wikipedia's rules do not have it as a goal to protect the world at large from fringe beliefs
wikipedia's function as a general (as in not specialized) tertiary source isn't to filter out ideas or beliefs but to catalog and present them in a standardized(ish) format.
The rules are not "insufficient" in this regard in the same way that a flute is not an "insufficient" guitar; they aren't designed to "protect against" any topic that would otherwise qualify for a wiki article.
Why should wikipedia protect itself from fringe, when it doesn't need to try to? If your fringe theory becomes the widely accepted one, it will naturally change the wording of the article, just based on sourcing alone.
Probably because ignorance has shown itself to be tenacious, dedicated, persistent. (I think I repeat myself though.)
This was such a fascinating read, wow! The term I use frequently, “Dunning-Kruger Effect”, came from Wikipedia!? Out of thin air?
There's nothing unique to Wikipedia there though, that kind of thing has always happened. Anyone with a printing press is tempted to control the narrative. History is written by the victors, as it were.
Wikipedia rules are provably sufficient to produce the greatest and most useful reference work in human history. That's good enough for me.
Maybe there's some truth to this article, but it doesn't address the history of people creating libelous content elsewhere, and then citing it on Wikipedia as truth. All you need to do to game Wikipedia is to create a few external stories, and then cross-cite them.
https://slate.com/technology/2019/03/wikipedia-citogenesis-c...
https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/1c1uazj/why_did_...
I don't get it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth
This text explicitly and implicitly states that the Earth is not flat.
The first paragraph of the linked essay is as follows:
> It is unlikely that you will ever happen upon an editor who will argue that Wikipedia cannot claim that the Earth is not flat. But you may indeed encounter some...
From this, it is obvious that the essay is about people who claim Wikipedia can't claim the Earth is not flat, and how to respond to them.
It’s an essay with a title that is tongue-in-cheek. It’s throwing shade at flat earthers.
Rather ask if Wikipedia can claim that human activity is causing climate change:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_climate_change
These kinds of articles induce a feeling of deep hopelessness. Frankly, I can't understand how people managed to remain relatively sane for so long, given the circumstances. Being an abusive, smug, deceiving human being that tries to win arguments with rhetoric, maneuvering and logical fallacies is easy and looks good to others - look, they're crushing the other side! Taking it down requires dozens of paragraphs of instruction, and a single misstep is an almost instant loss, you have to have surgical precision. Worst of all, being right in those scenarios is extremely boring, and by the time you dismantle one of these claims, everyone's already looking the other way, towards the 17 new talking points that have spawned while you were methodically discussing the first one.
Why didn't their side win sooner? Perhaps 'being right' in the scientific sense has just been too beneficial for humans so far. But if that weakens, I fully expect humanity to go back to zealotry, superstition and undiscerning hatred, perhaps forever.
In the past these sycophants ran into hard limits of reality. Now that we are almost post scarcity on many things. It's easy for people to lose connection to science backed reality . In the past this would result in death or starvation or extreme suffering (simple things like saving food for winter pre industrial refrigeration). Now these people have EVERYTHING provided for them and an entire society that will bend over backward to make sure they have water roads etc..
It's quite literally spoiled children growing into spoiled adults. Raised to blthink whatever their current thoughts are the entire world and reality. See the rise of " affirmations" in new age woo stuff.
Maybe it's a matter of time and process?, bear with me:
An encyclopedia is slow. It has to be slow. It's good (beneficial) that it's slow.
And yes, it means that it is self-correcting, slowly
Thing is, if it was fast to self-correct -> it would generate more errors and it would leave the door opened to more errors.
None of these rules allow distinguishing "flat earth" nonsense from stuff that is just controversial. The real reason that Wikipedia can claim the Earth is not flat is that it's bloody obvious and only idiots think otherwise. I suppose they don't want to say that.
Now apply to each topic at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_topics_characterized_a...
Very interesting to see "Technical Analysis" in this list. I'm no expert in the field, and TA always seemed like quackery to me, but I suspect many more people believe in it than for example Cryptozoology. I personally know someone who even took a course in TA, couldn't imagine anyone taking a course in looking for Bigfoot.
Technical Analysis is a bit of a mixed bag. Some parts are fairly mainstream like saying there's a bull market in tech stocks is essentially part of it. On the other hand a lot of it is like tea leaf reading.
Could it be that the course instructor was just grifting suckers?
Instead of reading this stupid page that does not proof anything, you better listen to what it really isn't and how it can be salvaged [0]
[0] Wikipedia Co-Creator Reveals All: CIA Infiltration, Banning Conservatives, & How to Fix the Internet https://youtu.be/vyfKyrSAVFg?t=3730
This is ridiculous. A "debate guide" on how to argue with people who hold views that diverge from mainstream opinion is just pointless. What do you think this will accomplish?
Every single scientific/engineering /humanities field contains people who disagree with the mainstream of that field. E.g. every advocate for purely functional programming diverges from the mainstream on the best practices for software engineering. Of course that doesn't mean equating this to "theories" about the earth being flat. My point is the exact opposite.
There always is a gradient between a debate in some field, to a totally bizarre nonsense theory. Deciding on a border between which of these views to platform and which of them to disregard is always arbitrary and has to be decided on a case by case basis. Especially arguing based on some idea of relative numerical superiority is just ridiculous and will make an encyclopedia look ridiculous.
1. Aptly named HN user
2. “I didn’t read the article award” recipient
I did read the article, what makes you say I didn't?
…Huh? What are you proposing?
That a binary distinction between "fringe" and "consensus" is nonsense and that trying to have a "debate manual" to argue with people holding "fringe views" is just ridiculous.
What policy would you recommend for something like Wikipedia? Obviously, you can’t let people post whatever they want.
My recommendation is that this is treated on a case by case basis, rather than any determination whether a belief is "fringe", and that if any position is platformed, it is platformed together with how it is viewed by those who advocate for it and against it. In the case of flat earth it should be made clear that it is not a legitimate view, that nobody with any legitimacy or authority believes in it. I also gave the example of purely functional software development, which is also a fringe view. There it should be made clear that it is a legitimate view on software development, even if the majority of academia and industry disagrees with it.
I also recommend to not have debate manuals on how to debate people who try to push nonsense into Wikipedia.
I thought it was interesting how long Wikipedia took to rename "2023 Israel-Hamas war" to "Gaza war" and start calling it a genocide, but I suppose this is why. When major sources have a significant bias, Wikipedia copies that bias as a matter of policy.
---
In response to the reply accusing this comment of bias: When people said this two years ago, they were accused of bias. But now, in the present, with the benefit of hindsight and more information, it's a mainstream fact, and Wikipedia does report on it. We also know that major news organizations were aware of this at the time and chose not to report it. After round earth theory becomes mainstream, it's not bias to talk about why it took so long for round earth theory to be recognized.
I believe what Wikipedia tries to do (simplifying here) is reporting the "opinion" of reputable sources which should have an informed view on the matter. If reputable sources believe it's a genocide, then they will report it, if not they will not. Calling these sources biased because they do not corroborate your view of the situation is your subjective opinion and doesn't mean they actually do have a bias. The whole point of considering them reputable sources is that they should be as unbiased as possible (even though 100% neutrality is impossible), if they had "significant bias" as you claim they would not be considered as reliable sources to begin with.
Actually there's a Wikipedia guideline (WP:BIASED) along the lines of "bias doesn't necessarily make a source unreliable", which in practice is taken to mean that bias doesn't matter.
Of course in practice, editors have their own biases and decisions come down popularity contests. Wikipedia's own biases seem to get worse over time, as more neutral editors give up, so we end up with some weird things like
- Almost all conservative news sources having low reliability ratings.
- Daily Mail for example is deprecated, the lowest possible rating outside of literal spam.
- Al Jazeera, which seems largely controlled by the Qatari monarchy, has the highest reliability rating and is the most-used source in Israel-Palestine. Even their blog is the top source on many articles, despite news blogs being against policy.
- Al-Manar, the Hezbollah mouthpiece which is very unashamedly biased (e.g. refering to their terrorists as "men of god"), has a somewhat low reliability rating, but still higher than several conservative sources like Daily Mail.
(See the list here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...)
There's also a tricky situation where some political factions consistently report closer to reality than others. This makes it hard to be both reality-focused* and politically neutral at the same time.
* It's not this page, but there's a separate Wikipedia policy which says that editors should only insert content which is true.
Circular reasoning that is completely ignorant of the last 2 years of analysis of media reporting on Gaza.
The evidence of media bias is extensive and extremely blatant: it spans framing ("[horrible event, war crimes, etc.] happened, according to Hamas" vs no such qualification for Israeli claims, "20 people killed in Gaza" without mentioning who or what killed them), dehumanisation ("2 people killed" when reporting on children deaths in Gaza vs "2 teenagers in hospital" when talking about IDF soldiers), selective reporting (remember the pogroms in Amsterdam that got debunked on social media while every chief of state was sending their condolences?), constant repeat of Israeli "right to self-defence" while Palestinian context is not mentioned, etc., etc., etc.
One of many, many, many reports/investigations on this: https://cfmm.org.uk/cfmm-report-media-bias-gaza-2023-24/
If you need something more visual/real-time, Newscord has been been reporting on this consistently: https://newscord.org/editorials
The media might be largely a reputable source, when it doesn't contradict the preferred narrative, and the Gaza genocide was probably the strongest example we could have had of this.
I'm not sure why I even wrote this out, because 2 years in calling it "subjective opinion" is obviously not a position that is based on facts or reason.
This is not a "bias". There is precise legal definition for "genocide", and it was recognized as such. Israel goverment offials were very specific on record, what they will do to population in Gaza.
They also do not allow civilians to evacuate or to surrender!!! All exits from Gaza are blocked by Israel or their allies!
Which does not matter, because for Wikipedia, Journalists are a reputable source regardless of their bias. If the WaPo writes tomorrow that Hannah Arendt was a far-right extremist, that would be a valid source by Wikipedia standards.
The discussions that led to the renaming to Genocide were interesting, the opposition was very well coordinated hostile actors but in the end there was just nothing they could do, the facts just weren't on their side. They wrote books worth of text, used every procedural trick they could, violated every rule like editing comments of other users in talk pages or spamming so much text it would break the backend, they organized to coordinate editing of thousands of Wikipedia pages to push pro-zionist messages. In the end it was so much that wikipedia topic-banned 8 super-editors over that. Many more users were banned, many were perma banned from wikipedia entirely.
It was an incredible display of the resiliency of wikipedia when faced with a hostile attack by a state-actor putting hundreds of millions $ into spreading their propaganda. Most Governments, universities and news media are much less capable than that. It was such a failure that they now are pushing the us government itself to gain direct control over wikipedia and to cut the funding from the researchers and universities that produced the facts in the first place, going to the "root of the problem" basically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ClueBot_III/Master_Detail...
https://www.piratewires.com/p/wikipedia-supreme-court-enforc...
https://www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/live-blog-update/isr...
> the opposition was very well coordinated hostile actors
Where are you getting this idea? While you can find examples of coordination on both sides, the most significant instance of coordinated editing and recruiting for agenda-based editing was by Tech for Palestine.
> In the end it was so much that wikipedia topic-banned 8 super-editors over that
If you're referring to PIA5, wasn't BilledMammal the only pro-Israel editor banned as a result? Quite a few were banned the pro-Palestinian side, like Iskandar323 (who seemed to lead Tech for Palestine's coordinated editing), Levivich, Nableezy, and several others.
> They wrote books worth of text
By far the worst WP:BLUDGEONING was actually from editors in favor of a "Gaza genocide" title. BilledMammal actually ran the numbers on it.
> the facts just weren't on their side
Actually the closing decision was largely based on !votes, and the admin seemed to just blatantly miscount them. By the actual !vote count it was almost exactly 50/50, a very clear no-consensus result, but sometimes closers make strange decisions.
It was only a matter of time though - Wikipedia is a numbers game and anti-Israeli editors are just far more numerous nowadays.
Well obvious response, you were defeated thankfully. I think it's ultimately a lost cause because most people will side with humanity once the scale and magnitude of the atrocities committed became impossible to ignore. Even if you manage to wrestle control of Wikipedia by force of the US government and defund every university department that publishes things you don't like, you still won't win because the truth is not on your side, you will use ever more repression and force naturally, but that will by itself turn even more people against you. There is a resiliency to Palestinians that is very inspiring to a lot of people. Free Palestine!
Humanity has little to do with it; Wikipedia is anti-Israel because there are approximately zero Israelis (especially with the requisite English skills, patience and political correctness) against heaps of editors with anti-Israeli agendas.
Historically, truth is not what wins wars, power is.
That's the point, it's not a war, it's a genocide, and it will be remembered as such.
Wikipedia is not meant to appear neutral, it's meant to "mirror the current consensus of mainstream scholarship [... aka] 'accepted knowledge'". Basically, if the accepted knowledge of an event is that it is not a genocide, Wikipedia has to reflect _that_. Wikipedia is not a soapbox. It doesn't have an stance. It just copies and transmit as accurately as possible, the current understanding from qualified sources. You can literally see it in the "balance" section of this article.
The creator of Wikipedia disagrees with you.
https://larrysanger.org/2025/08/on-the-cybersecurity-subcomm...
> Wikipedia is not a soapbox.
Well, clearly they're failing at that.
Wikipedia defending it's neutrality. Except ... it's not even remotely neutral on political topics.
> The threshold for including material in Wikipedia is that it is verifiable, not merely that we think it is true
> Wikipedia acknowledges diverse viewpoints on contemporary controversies, but represents them in proportion to their prevalence
Sounds great! Now compare:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War
So here's my problem. There is only one viewpoint present on the Gaza page. For comparison, the Kremlin's justification and explanation about the war is extensively detailed in the third paragraph on the Ukraine page.
And the fact that the Ukrainian war, specifically the agressive role of the Kremlin, is a controversy only on wikipedia pretty much shows what exactly wikipedia's slant is, doesn't it?
There are other ... what I would call "neutrality issues":
For some reason the word "dictator" is not mentioned here, nor is the fact that both the Chavez and Maduro families are multi-billionnaire families: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolivarian_Revolution
Did you know Iran never had any socialists or students in their ayatollah-dictatorship revolution? Perhaps should I say that the CIA's miniscule role is thoroughly mentioned, but international socialism massive role is entirely left out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution
(you will still find these facts if you dig into the detail pages on wikipedia, but the fact that they were critical, even were the origin of the Iranian revolution, is not mentioned on the Iranian revolution page)
More generally, the links between leftism and violent anti-immigration and anti-LGBT policies and anti-Youth policies in general are extremely hard to find (good luck finding, for example, that the current leader of the UN, in his youth as a violent communist, used violence against LGBT protestors, or that he beat a few of his own students into the hospital (he was a professor) when "discussing" communism ... hell, you will not even find that he betrayed communism, socialism and essentially everything he has ever believed in)
And the links known to exist between international socialism and world events are downplayed and not mentioned. Their discussions on Ukraine before the Holodomor genocide, or their attitude before, during and after the Cultural revolution genocide in China are not mentioned:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_International
This illustrates a general problem: "communist dictatorship", well, those don't exist.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awikipedia.org+%22comm... ... (note: what is mentioned is the "The Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship" that Romania has, if you go to the page of Romania you will not find any mention of the actual communist dictatorship, again, the viewpoint of the Romanian government, which is that it replaced a communist dictatorship, cannot be found)
Did you know that North Korea is not communist? It is a "a highly centralized, one-party totalitarian dictatorship" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea#Government_and_pol...
Same for "socialist dictatorship", where you will only find explanations of Marxist theory, not the many disasters, some of which mentioned above.
Or, how about, important leftist figures. Even when leftists claim they've betrayed leftism like Guterrez or Chavez, but let's go for more iconic figures. For example, Leon Trotsky was the commander of the Red Army when it executed the "red terror" in Russia. Therefore he is a genocidal war criminal, and for example, his soldiers broken the arms and legs of hundreds of Russian Imperial sailors ... and threw them into the freezing seas. He was the commander of a military force burned down schools with kids inside. Now go read:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky
Everything you said is the political equivalent of flat-earth. That's why it's not the front-center of Wikipedia.
This is not advocating neutrality. Quite the opposite, it is advocating for fighting fringe ideas.
In political discourse, this would be the equivalent of minutely minority alt far-right politics being talked about as if it was mainstream, and being inserted into Wikipedia as though it was another rational argument.
Er, far-right politics *is* currently mainstream. The POTUS, for instance. The majority of the majority of both houses of Congress.
Maybe. We have not yet gone further right. But we are looking like we are about to. There is an extremism in politics that we have yet to reach. Regardless this is just an example of fringe (extremism) vs mainstream
Do you really want to defend that the search term "socialist dictatorship" means the person searching intends to be schooled on details of Marxist theory, and should be protected from finding Venezuela, North Korea or Cuba?
Is that "neutrality"? Seriously?
That's my point: some "fringe" ideas are covered extensively (because if Marxist theory is anything, it's fringe, to say nothing of details like the dictatorship of the proletariat), in situations where people obviously weren't asking for those ideas, with criticism suppressed or at least moved very deeply away. Don't you think it would be at least worth a mention on socialism's page that it has "once or twice" led to repression and dictatorship, not of the proletariat, but of billionnaires, religious lunatics, and worse? (oh right, leftists won't even participate in discussions of the fact that leftist "heroes" like Chavez and even Maduro are billionnaires[1]). And, what exactly is the problem with at least mentioning the viewpoint that what happened in Gaza isn't a genocide? That is not a fringe idea at all.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/moderatepolitics/comments/anenmt/th...
A search for “socialist dictatorship” in Wikipedia brings up an article aliased to the same name, which yes, explains what that means – this is an encyclopedia after all – and then says:
> Presently, there are five communist states in the world: China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam.
> if Marxist theory is anything, it's fringe
It has shaped the history of the world, for good or bad, and is still one of the most mainstream theories on how modern societies organize. “Fringe” refers to the recognition something has in the world, not the number of “supporters” (not to mention just suggesting that is a misunderstanding of what Marxism is).
You seem to have bought into several fringe theories. There is little evidence of Maduro being a billionaire other than pieces from US magazines. You can certainly hold that view, but not demand that it be featured equally alongside what is publicly verifiable knowledge.
You entirely avoided the question, and then try to deceive ... which I guess is an answer in itself.
When searching for socialist dictatorships, the relevant bit of information is that the application of Marxist theory in practice—especially in the 20th and 21st centuries—has always resulted in authoritarian rule, human rights abuses, and repression and economic hardship for hundreds of millions. And yes, Venezuela and Iran are examples of that. Every. Single. Time. Communism, Marxism, ... never resulted in the magical la-la-land that keeps getting promised. Not once. With irrelevant exceptions, like ironically Israel, whose parliament peacefully chose to abandon communism rather than repress the population into total misery.
The question was why Wikipedia needs to hide the examples of total socialist failures and instead pushes TINY details of Marxist theory. "Socialist dictatorship" obviously also refers to the many countries where socialism has resulted in repression, hardship and failure rather than justice, and hiding that is obviously not neutral.
Similar to the Gaza genocide page. One viewpoint, anything but neutral, is pushed to the total exclusion of the obvious alternate viewpoints. Even the extreme viewpoint on the other side has merit: that what Hamas is doing is at the very least attempted genocide (that is nothing new for Hamas: they have in the past successfully committed genocide against other Palestinian factions, the very definition of genocide, more than once. Plus, of course, that a terrorist organization that has mass-murder as an explicit goal in their charter is obviously not very concerned with human rights), and what Israel is successfully doing is not genocide. But that shall not be discussed (read the talk page).
Is that neutrality?
It's also extremely obvious that Wikipedia's bias is first and foremost about extreme leftist propaganda (extreme meaning viewpoints that even regular leftists would take offense to), not about Gaza. Take the icons of communism, you see the same. Leon Trotsky is obviously first and foremost a mass-murderer. That's what we call a military commander who had hundreds of people's bones broken and then thrown into the sea, who locks a school with children inside and burns it to the ground, no matter how "bourgeois" those children were (not that the children were very bourgeois at all). And yes, the other side also did bad things. But it is entirely left out. Why? This is not some tiny detail. All that is discussed are very fine details of different branches of communism. Or take the actions of prominent leftist states against immigration, violent anti-religionism or anti-LGBT socialist violence is silenced (illustrating that there have been huge swings in socialist thought). Or the fact that socialism was, and is, very much opposed to science (and I don't just mean Lysenkoism or North Korea's pine needle tea against famine). Yet all these were, and are, part of all big communist states. Soviets did that. China did (and does) that. North Korea does that. Even Cuba gives it a try now and then.
Not sure what you are protesting - wikipedia is not “hiding” anything which is what I pointed out. The killings during the “Red Terror” are also well documented in wikipedia and not left out. Documenting genocide (mass murder or whatever you want to call it) in Gaza is not leftist, just history. Israel’s justification for the war are also documented elsewhere.
You seem to look at everything slightly related to socialism/communism under the same lens and expect to see your worldview reflected in Wikipedia, that is the opposite of neutrality. In fact you’re enacting a perfect example of item #3 in the original post, the “balance” argument.
Just want to say thanks for taking the energy to argue against these people.... I was so drained reading the exchange I couldn't be bothers to rebutt anything. But you did it perfectly .
> Did you know Iran never had any socialists or students in their ayatollah-dictatorship revolution?
I do find the way you casually cast shade by association on students and socialists at the same time to be interesting. Are they all the same to you?
> There is only one viewpoint present on the Gaza page
That's because there's an entirely different page that outlines the war in Gaza and Israel's justification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_war#Initial_Israeli_count...
> For some reason the word "dictator" is not mentioned here
You're looking in the wrong place again. Maduro's article names him a dictator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicol%C3%A1s_Maduro, third paragraph). Chavez's doesn't go that far, but it does state the dictatorial claims of his political opponents in a few locations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Ch%C3%A1vez#%22Socialism_...).
> Did you know Iran never had any socialists or students in their ayatollah-dictatorship revolution?
"However, as ideological tensions persisted between Pahlavi and Khomeini, anti-government demonstrations began in October 1977, developing into a campaign of civil resistance that included communism, socialism, and Islamism."
A search for "iranian revolution" on this page will return many results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_Iran
> you will still find these facts if you dig into the detail pages on wikipedia
Yes, that's called "research"...
> the current leader of the UN, in his youth as a violent communist, used violence against LGBT protestors, or that he beat a few of his own students into the hospital
This sounds like a conspiracy theory, and I couldn't find any reference to those events anywhere online. Even the incredibly biased socialist/communist prolewiki doesn't name him as a communist: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B3nio_Guterres
> Did you know that North Korea is not communist? It is a "a highly centralized, one-party totalitarian dictatorship"
That's correct, the state ideology of north korea is "juche", which has it's roots in marxism/communism but splintered decades ago, with a focus on nationalism, historical revisionism and reverence for the leader(s). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche)
> Same for "socialist dictatorship", where you will only find explanations of Marxist theory, not the many disasters, some of which mentioned above.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_socialism#Develo...
lol but they are quick to take Chinese propaganda
This is why wikipedia is no longer a useful tool, among other reasons.
An intellectually incestuous gaggle of fools who tell and get the same jokes, hang out in the same group chats, and have all fallen, in lockstep, for the same intellectual fads and conspiracy theories, penned this insipid screed.
Musk has his own problems, of course. But I'm really looking forward to grokipedia breaking the monopoly on what's "serious" by the very unserious leadership of wikipedia.