It used to be that you would do a search on a relevant subject and get blog posts, forums posts, and maybe a couple of relevant companies offering the product or service. (And if you wanted more information on said company you could give them a call and actually talk to a real person about said service) You could even trust amazon and yelp reviews. Now searches have been completely taken over by Forbes top 10 lists, random affiliate link click through aggregators that copy and paste each others work, review factories that will kill your competitors and boost your product stars, ect… It seems like the internet has gotten soooo much harder to use, just because you have to wade through all the bullshit. It’s no wonder people switch to reddit and lemmy style sites, in a way it mirrors a little what kind of information you used to be able to garner from the internet in it’s early days. What do people do these days to find genuine information about products or services?
Back in the day, Wikipedia was so neutral that they had people arguing how to write articles from a non-human POV. Yes, certain articles get political, but that is when the talk page arguments, counter-arguments, and linked ARBICOM evidence pages give you a good lesson on what people think are fact and opinion. I haven’t been a editor for a while, is wikipedia not a hotbed of nerds who have to be in alignment with the facts regardless of what current political discourse says is right nowadays?
Academics have since acknowledged the impossibility of achieving this fantasy “unbiased” perspective.
This has been such an incredible change to Wikipedia’s work, allowing dedicated spaces to talking about rhetoric and talking points for readers to learn.
Yeah, more or less. We are always free to check the sources, which is also a part of what Wikipedia nerds debate - what is the best resource to link to for those who need more info?
Again with this. Wikipedia can’t be neutral. Nothing can be. Neutral doesn’t exist.
There is absolutely no way to be “politically unbiased” when talking about things. Being “neutral” just means being in favor of the status quo, which is not neutral at all. There is no third position, you either oppose or support the way things work right now. Bias is completely inescapable.
If you want to get an “unbiased” view of something, the only real thing you can do is to read many sources biased against both outlooks and compare and contrast. What you end up with will still be biased though, just by virtue of what you select to care about and not.
People who claim to be neutral and unbiased only say it because they think it makes them look more credible, or they have deluded themselves to be able to think they’re somehow more rational than everyone else. There is no way to not be biased as a human being.
A good chunk of Wikipedia content is minor sports teams, players, towns with sub-1000 population, and minor highways that connect them. I’m not sure how you can be “politically biased” when describing “Alberta Highway 564 which runs mostly west-east from the east Calgary boundary”.
I mean Wikipedia is not without a shitload of bias. Try searching democracy in China or homelessness in the USSR.
Take the contrast between the pages democracy in China vs democracy in the US. The Chinese page uses shit like oxford and Cambridge to call China an authoritarian one party state. Which: okay, but the framing of this is incredibly negative given the same argument could be for the US. Notably, the US page (redirected from democracy in the US) simply outlines US government structure and function.
The Chinese page condemns the current government of China as being antidemocratic while unironically citing the government that lost the civil war to the Chinese communist party instituted martial law for 38 years in Taiwan. Yes, the current Chinese government does not allow other parties to run candidates (as far as I understand it) but given what the people experienced before this government, its not that shocking that the vast majority of the population believes they live in a democracy.
Long windedly, Wikipedia is also super biased and corrupt.
Wow are you saying Wikipedia is biased and corrup because they didn’t inaccurately call the U.S. a one-party Authoritarian state?
The “Democracy in China” page explicitly states at the top that i’s going to be an overview of political concepts and that there is on-going debate.
Homelessness in Russia does have a section on Soviet Union, talking about “Densification” following the October Revolution ie. Forced re-housing into small state owned flats.
Criticism of the US is indeed found directly in the same paragraph about how our government works:
Open your eyes, Wikipedia is showing how it can be an incredibly dense and informative resource.
The debate is from western scholars and from a western perspective.
If you are going to call communist party control of elections authoritarian and undemocratic, then two capitalist parties controlling all elections in the US isn’t really functionally different. I’m not a China Stan. My point is that even trying to research how Chinese government and politics function using Wikipedia is exposing one to western propaganda.
Also, I think it should be fairly obvious that the western state and intelligence wings clearly are influential on Wikipedia.
Calling the CCP Authoritarian and Undemocratic / Illiberal is accurate. They disappear those who protest or object.
Having a two party, first past the post, electoral college system in the US is less democratic than other Liberal Democracies. And wikipedia has links acknowledging that.
Researching China is always going to be exposing oneself to Western Propoganda. Why? Because Chinese Propoganda is the direct source we have to go by. We are unsure 100% how it works, and must try to read China state actions, and makr educated guesses - because of China’s obfuscation of the truth.
The thing is most of the people who say they’re making educated guesses are actually just being deliberately dishonest to plant dislike for a geopolitical rival in the population. And obviously Chinese state media is being dishonest too. You don’t have to pick one over the other.
One of the longest running ARBICOM cases is about Tawain. The first one ended, and then another one pops up literally on naming conventions of geography in Tawain. It is like a unmovable obstacle vs. an unmovable obstacle with endless chineese editors vs. endless wikipedia burocracy.
I would hate to see what the mandarin version of Wikipedia has to put up with.