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While I can appreciate where you're coming from, by no means can the linked discussion be described as having a monolithic point of view. It would look very different if Wikipedia's community were as polarized as you suggest.
And the easiest way to fix any other issues you see is to do it yourself or convince someone to. I would like to make a standing offer to anyone reading this, that I will coach you through fixing any "political lean" problem of the sort you're alluding to. (Of course, a writeup should get posted here during/afterwards.)
How long do you think it is going to take? How many rounds of edits? If they keep on holding me off for a month and I get tired, do you win?
What if the source got cito-genesised?
One thing I would like fixed is their article about Kiwi Farms. The article has this:
Follow those three citations.
[10]: Gizmodo article. The full sum of their Terryberry coverage is this:
"ended her life" is a hyperlink to some rando's Wordpress site, which doxxes Josh's mother, and has this:
That is it. That is the entire chain of [10].
[11] is in Fucking French.
[13] is to Business Insider, and just links to [10] and [11]. BECAUSE THEY JUST SOURCED IT FROM WIKIPEDIA.
Those are their own sources. But even if I tried fixing them now and we got Business Insider kicked out as trash, this "fact" from the Wikipedia article has been cite-washed through the Washington Post https://archive.ph/ExKi4 "At least three suicides have been tied to harassment stemming from the Kiwi Farms community." Will you help stop that article from being cited?
Time and effort estimate: not gonna sugarcoat it, probably high. Kiwi Farms is probably the single worst possible article to do this sort of experiment on, because it's on perhaps the single most poisoned and low-trust topic area on the website. Every Kiwi Farms user (dunno the demonym, don't care) from here to Sunday has probably had a go at the article at some point. I'm gonna say the best time to work on this article is not now. Maybe in a year. Happy to stick to the relatively calm (ha, ha) waters of American politics.
"You can fix things yourself as long as the other side does not notice and put up a fight" is kind of what my starting position was.
While generally true, external temporary factors are in play from time to time, and in this case Kiwi Farms is both a current-ish news event as well as the target of some of the most dedicated trolls on the Internet.
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I don't think that "do it yourself or convince someone to" is actually going to be possible - if I tried to make an earnest, good faith effort to fix the inaccuracies and politically slanted representation of the articles that concern me, I would just be banned within short order. And while I appreciate the offer, I do not believe you can actually meaningfully do anything to correct the "political lean" of the sort that I'm alluding to. Are you going to single-handedly remove a bunch of admins and institute sweeping reforms to the culture of Wikipedia? I don't see any other way to make articles like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Tower_meeting present a balanced and accurate picture of events as opposed to what they show now.
Have you actually tried editing Wikipedia before? Because this does not match with my experience. If you're actually operating in good faith and within Wikipedia's policies, you're not going to get banned. Bans are for people who are clearly "not there to build an encyclopedia" (e.g. spammers), or editors who chronically or egregiously disregard Wikipedia's policies. You might get reverted a lot, which can be very annoying, but I think you'd be surprised how much progress you can make in getting changes through if you politely argue your case on the talk page with reference to relevant policies.
the_last_pigeon is right - if you're patient and competent, you could absolutely single-handedly ameliorate some of the bias in an article on a culture-war topic if you sat down and tried. I say this as someone who has actually done this. (Granted, it wasn't fun having to patiently deal with what clearly seemed to me to be ideologically motivated bad faith arguments and isolated demands for rigor, which is why, for my own sanity, I mostly edit non-CW articles.)
This is the rub. Most people don't have the time or the patience to learn the intricacies of Wikipedia's byzantine network of policies, pseudo-policies, and unofficial-but-not-really best practices, all of which are referred to exclusively in jargon and wielded as weapons to revert or block even good-faith edits. Editors especially on influential articles are basically lawyers in all but name, and the result of trying to work against their interests is the same as someone with no legal training trying to out-lawyer a lawyer. With enough self-education and persistence, you might have a chance. Otherwise, it's hopeless. But of course, to those on the inside, with the arcane knowledge and the community recognition, it seems so easy! Practically effortless!
Most people inclined to contribute would have no idea what to do if their change was reverted, and either give up at that point or just change it back.
There's some truth to this, but I don't think the community is as uniformly nasty as you're making it out to be. There are plenty of editors who will patiently try to point you toward relevant policy or help you through a point of misunderstanding. (See, for example, the saintly editors who answer newbie questions at "The Teahouse".)
Also, while I would never admit to holding this opinion in an on-wiki discussion, I secretly think that the relatively high barrier for entry to making non-trivial contributions to Wikipedia is actually a crucial ingredient to its success, in that it filters out would-be editors who are insufficiently smart or diligent. This is why I cringe a little every time Wikimedia developers try to roll out more glossy, simplified, WYSIWYG interfaces. I'm not sure I want more people coming in to the project who aren't smart enough to use wikitext (the markup language that constitutes the "source code" of all articles and discussion pages).
As it is, Wikipedia kind of does feel like a community of scholars. But the more accessible it becomes, the more it's going to come to resemble the YouTube comments section of yore. Case in point, a while back the WMF did an experiment where they actively solicited feedback from readers of Wikipedia articles. Their theory was that Wikipedia needs more voices (and this continues to be an overarching theme of their work), and that a) this user feedback would help existing editors identify areas for improvement for articles, and b) users who are induced to leave feedback can also be induced to go fix the problems they identified, and thus graduate from reader to editor. The experiment was a failure, because the signal to noise ratio of the reader comments was pretty abysmal. You can actually still download a dataset of some of this feedback and it's pretty funny to read. Here's a random sample of comments on the article "Apple Inc.":
(Reminder that there are a lot of sub-100 IQ people out in the world, but you probably don't have much interaction with them because you exist in a bubble of above-average intelligence friends, family members, and coworkers.)
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There's also the sneaking suspicion that the layers of policies, pseudo-policies, and unofficial-but-not-really best practices are just window-dressing disguising outright bias. If for any given issue a wiki-lawyer can use the policies (etc) in different ways to come to opposite conclusions, that's exactly what's going on.
I used to see a lot of this 'rules lawyering' back when I played Dungeons & Dragons as a teen, and from reading the discussion page it seems that the exact same personality types are still at it.
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This reminds me of debates I've had in the past with religious (Jewish) people, after they found out I was a non-believer. I used to try to show them some contradiction within the bible, or how something in it is just factually incorrect, and the reply would be some reference to the Talmud or whatever that supposedly resolves the issue. I've learned not to try to beat people at their own games - it's their lives, I will never beat them at it. They're still wrong, but surrendering frame is not the right way to go about it.
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Would you like to work together to improve that article? I would enjoy seeing a "bunch of admins" get in the way. Let's start a new post for it, though. I hope our overlords would be OK with that, as it is sort of culture-war.
I wonder if it would be possible to engineer some sort of bot solution. I certainly don't want to dedicate my life to an online wiki, but if there's a hack that makes things easier then I'm all for it. Wikipedia is basically the universal source of truth online.
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I am absolutely not interested in registering an account on wikipedia or providing my IP address to that site - but I can tell you about the missing context and inaccurate, deceptive framing of the events presented in that article. However you're going to have your work cut out for you, as this article and the events in question are also linked and referenced in multiple other pages on the site.
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I haven't read the linked discussion, but I don't see how this is an argument against what he said?
Is his characterization of the conclusion, that reliable sources are reliable even when lying, accurate?
I wasn't around for GamerGate, so while I find that assertion highly plausible, I'd prefer to see an example linked here.
Here's a non-GG example that I remember from previous discussions on TheMotte:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gab_(social_network)/Archive_10#Gab_never_refers_to_Breitbart_and_Infowars_as_competitors
To summarize: WaPo reports something, and vaguely cites a primary source - an SEC filing. What they're reporting is not in the source. There is no way to disprove their report with a secondary source, because no other secondary source will state the non-existence of something unprompted. Citing the primary source on Wikipedia isn't allowed. So WaPo must be taken as reliable in their lie.
That discussion ended in your desired outcome with the contested sentence being removed. The current text of the article (can't bother to check how long it's been there, but this is the tool you would use for that):
That's nice. Looks like it came from this revision in Nov 2018, so it sat there a bit over a year. BTW, that should count against WaPo's reliability, no?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability,_not_truth
I'm sure I can go dig up an example for you if you want, but here's the actual official policy on this topic.
EDIT: This isn't the official policy - this is an essay on the official policy. See below for correction.
Knowingly using sources that are lying is straightforwardly stupid and I'd hope that both (1) no actual Wikipedia policy can be construed that way, and (2) no discussion has concluded that way. What you linked is an unofficial and unsanctioned interpretation of policy. From the box at the top:
I suppose that's on us, for bad signage. I'll certainly never argue that we're good at user interfaces :)
That said, a common criticism of Wikipedia is how it relies on existing sources rather than "the truth". This is an entirely valid criticism. It is a correct interpretation of policy that, as your essay says, Wikipedia would have advocated for a geocentric universe if it had existed back in the days when that was the mainstream viewpoint. In a sense, that's how it has to be. People fighting over truth itself doesn't make for a good encyclopedia, because verification of the results is many times harder.
Ah, my mistake. In that case just take it as an essay on the official policy rather than the official policy itself - I was confused due to seeing this particular course of events play out in real time, and then seeing this essay essentially explaining what had just happened.
EDIT:
This was in fact the situation in which I was made aware of this policy. If you want to see more, please go read the archived talk pages for the Gamergate article (hope you have some time on your hands).
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