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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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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.

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

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.)

If you're actually operating in good faith and within Wikipedia's policies, you're not going to get banned

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.":

This page needs a long, detailed explanation on the type of stone used for the floors of all Apple Stores.

say that apple is not or is better than Microsoft corporation created by Bill Gates

make it a little more easier for children to read as many teens use this site for education..

Crapple is a scam

It was great

More pictures

Seriously, this did not help me at all!!! I need MORE information people!

Steve Jobs said that consumers will finally get the chance to own an iphone, a mobile phone that plays iTunes and surfs the Web. He also disclosed that Apple's iTunes will sell Paramount films. (From CNNMoney, January 9, 2007)

Add colors!

incident is missing

(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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.