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House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias

thehill.com

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Re: House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias

#61

Post by riffic »

bbor wrote: post #57
riffic wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for the dismissive tone, but this is a silly reactionary take. It's noise and the hot air is meant to serve as a distraction. Your doomerism isn't helpful.

Blatant, open, unabashed authoritarianism is just “noise”…? What red line are you waiting for before acknowledging that we’re in a dangerous situation (aka headed towards doom)?

I'm just as concerned about all this as you are. I guess I just have a bit of faith left in that reason will prevail. I'm cranky but also a perennial optimist.

Re: House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias

#62

Post by Paratoner »

righthand wrote: post #42
epgui wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is not a source of original research or thinking. If prominent and reputable sources spoke about and coined these other terms there would be articles about them, or the article would be more generic. Wikipedia exists in the context of the real world. All it does is reflect it. Deal with it.

I am dealing with it. I am informing people about the crap quality of content on Wikipedia. All I’m doing is reflecting the hypocrisy. You don’t like the fact that I can post my dissent online? Deal with it.

This is has to be ragebait by a pathetic troll. You haven't even read the first 4 lines of the page you've linked, where it refutes your argument that "this is specific to Trump". At least work a little on your clown material.

Re: House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias

#63

Post by dachris »

bhouston wrote: post #28
Fricken wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's time to move Wikipedia from the US to a safer haven

Moving Wikipedia elsewhere will likely have to happen. Thought, the US may respond by blocking Wikipedia content as many regimes in the past have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia

Not to give any ideas, but a likely outcome is a US-based fork that has the offending bias removed, with a "ministry of truth"-y name.

Re: House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias

#64

Post by mbeavitt »

aeternum wrote: post #44
bix6 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preach. How much time and money will Wikipedia have to waste defending this? Don’t these people have anything better to do? Like lowering prices for everyday Americans instead of running up baseless legal bills?

[flagged]

what evidence do you have to back up this baseless claim? They openly publish their financial reports: https://wikimediafoundation.org/who-we-are/financial-reports

$178 million might sound like an extremely large amount of money if you're a member of the general public, but for a global resource kept up to date that serves hundreds of billions of visitors per year this is actually not a huge quantity of money.

Re: House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias

#65

Post by perihelions »

bbor wrote: post #55
Fricken wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's time to move Wikipedia from the US to a safer haven

Real… luckily they can just hop the border into Vancouver - not as safe as Europe or east Asia, but certainly an easier ask. I wonder if they have any dedicated compute stateside, tho…

> "not as safe as Europe"

French spooks once detained a randomly-chosen Wikipedia admin and coerced them into using their credentials to delete an article (about French spooks),

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5503354 ("French homeland intelligence threatens a sysop into deleting a Wikipedia Article (wikimedia.fr)" (2013)—191 comments)

Re: House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias

#66

Post by schoen »

wrs wrote: post #51
hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what is a greater threat to free speech. A group of students throwing a tantrum because someone they don’t like was invited to speak? The most powerful government in the world using every tool it has to make the university whose speech they don’t like suffer? Tools including threatening to remove accreditation, refusing to disburse hundreds of millions of dollars in grants, threatening to end the student visas of…

Also, note that only the second of those actors is prohibited by the Constitution from infringing free speech.

UC Berkeley is a public university, so its administration is bound by the first amendment according to the incorporation doctrine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...

(Though maybe the actors you're referring to are students rather than the administration. It's true that students can't violate someone's first amendment rights, although they can interfere with their exercise in a way that the administration might have a legal duty to prevent.)

Re: House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias

#67

Post by bawolff »

Aurornis wrote: post #3

I don’t trust this administration to perform an unbiased investigation, but it’s not a secret that Wikipedia is a high profile target for anyone who wants to push an agenda. Even trivial topics can attract die-hards who refuse to let an article say something they don’t like. Wikipedia also seeks to have a similar problem to StackOverflow where some users have become very good at working their way into the site’s stru…

I think that is what happens to every large system that tries to have fair rules. Eventually it gets lawyered.

Either there are objective rules where people can get a benefit out of knowing the ins and outs of them better, or there are no objective rules and decision makers decide things on vibes.

I'd definitely prefer the objective rules case. [Of course in real life its a spectrum and Wikipedia is somewhere in the middle]

> I’ve visited “talk” pages for topics that seemed a bit off lately I found a whirlwind of activity from a handful of accounts who seemed to find a Wikipedia rule or procedure to shut down talk they disagreed with.

If you think legalese is bad on talk pages, try reading an arbcom case sometime ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Index/Ca... ) its a fascinating pseudo-legal system.

Re: House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias

#69

Post by beezle »

zoddie wrote: post #17

They should also investigate Google, which often puts Wikipedia article extracts right at the top of the search results. There has been a great deal of misinformation spread this way. Wikipedia is just the tip of the iceberg. How their biased viewpoints get amplified globally is a huge problem on top of that.

One man's biased is another man's correct.

Re: House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias

#70

Post by tyre »

gnerd00 wrote: post #27
bhouston wrote: post #6

There is a ton of bias on Wikipedia. But this is the nature of anything trying to create a collective understanding of the world that involves multiple authors with diverse viewpoints. But given the way this administration works (looking at their treatment of Universities/Colleges), they will only identify specific types of bias: - criticism of Republicans - criticism of Christian conservatism - pro-LGBTQ+ - criticis…

UC Berkeley students embarrassed themselves on the world stage by attacking the free speech rights of conservative speakers... petualant, threatening and very in the media. People in Berkeley familiar with the history bent their heads in grief to see it. Free speech means that yes, conservatives may also speak in public IMHO

> the free speech rights of conservative speakers

Free speech is the right to speak without retribution of the law. It is not the right to be heard or platformed.

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