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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28234 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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The more interesting question is why isn’t there a conservative Wikipedia?

There is! More precisely, there are two.

Normie boomer conservative Conservapedia that began as creationist intelligent design project during the noughties and Infogalactic, alt right flagship project by Vox Day.

Why you never heard about them, you are asking? Because they are not Wikipedia. Everyone uses Wikipedia because everyone uses Wikipedia, because Wikipedia link comes first in every search. Even if Elon started heavily shilling one of these sites, I cannot see how he could singlehandedly change it.

I looked up the page for "evolution" on both of these sites, then looked up "Gamergate", "Gaza," and "Trump" on Infogalactic vs. Wikipedia.

Conservapedia goes ad hominem in the second paragraph of "Evolution", stating that the majority of the vocal proponents are atheists and agnostics, and proceeds to go into 12 paragraphs of skepticism, including in there the whopper that "The fossil record does not support the theory of evolution and is one of the flaws in the theory of evolution." (Sources: "creation.com" and "annointed-one.net"). Combined with the failure to properly explain what evolution is, this bias makes it useless as an information source.

Infogalactic, in contrast, takes the text for the "Evolution" and "Gaza" articles straight from Wikipedia. Gamergate, as one may imagine given the Vox Day connection, is a completely different article from that of Wikipedia: the Wikipedia article emphasizes the "harrassment campaign". The Infogalactic article emphasizes the revealed corruption in journalism, but does touch on harrassment allegations.

Finally, the "Donald Trump" article: Infogalactic auto-redirects from "Trump" to "Donald Trump". Wikipedia redirects to "Trump (disambiguation)". The intro to the Wikipedia article injects POV in where it doesn't seem appropriate (differences with Infogalactic emphasized):

Trump won the 2016 presidential election as the Republican nominee against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton while losing the popular vote.[a] During the campaign, his political positions were described as populist, protectionist, isolationist, and nationalist. His election and policies sparked numerous protests. He was the first U.S. president with no prior military or government experience. The 2017–2019 special counsel investigation established that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to favor Trump's campaign. Trump promoted conspiracy theories and made many false and misleading statements during his campaigns and presidency, to a degree unprecedented in American politics. Many of his comments and actions have been characterized as racially charged or racist and many as misogynistic.

The corresponding infogalactic paragraphs:

Trump won the general election on November 8, 2016, in a surprise victory against Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, and commenced his presidency on January 20, 2017. He became the oldest person to assume the presidency (surpassing Ronald Reagan), until Joe Biden in 2021, the wealthiest person ever to assume the presidency, and the fifth to have won election while losing the popular vote, though his supporters claimed there were irregularities.[1] His political positions have been described by scholars and commentators as populist, protectionist, and nationalist. In the first year of Trump's presidency, the economy improved significantly[2], but progressive opponents strongly criticized his direct and plain-spoken personal style. With no significant scandals or international events to report, the democrat media focused on unsubstantiated allegations that Trump's election campaign team had colluded with Russian intelligence agencies to influence public opinion[3][4]. The official investigation was eventually closed, with no evidence of the conspiracy theory[5].

Infogalactic definitely has a bias, but it isn't leaving as many details out selectively. I might start preferring Infogalactic now. However, from the change log it looks like there is only one active contributor?!

Yeah infogalactic started as a straight fork of Wikipedia with the planned killer app of replacing edit wars with something showing multiple views. I think it died from lack of use.

Most people using wikipedia are not looking for high-profile political topics. As Encyclopedia Dramatica famously put it when launching a vandalism campaign, you can't have a free-to-edit encyclopedia without editors who are willing to periodically check in on the article on fourth-order Runge-Kutta numerical integration to make sure it hasn't succumbed to vandalism, linkrot, or onward progress in computer languages used to implement the algorithm. What ED learned was that Wikipedia does, in fact, have editors willing to do that.

Vox Day thought that gamergaters and puppies would give him the basis of editors he needed to do this on Infogalactic. It didn't. It didn't help that he was dividing his time between too many projects at the time.

It makes you realize what an incredible coup flipping Twitter from far-left to neutral was.

Once networks become entrenched they become almost impossible to dislodge. Despite the truly epic level of whining after losing their playground, progressives journalists and celebrities can't break their Twitter addiction and still use it. Even a new product with the backing of a trillion dollar corporation couldn't dislodge Twitter.

If progressives can't create a left-wing Twitter alternative, then creating a conservative Wikipedia is a doomed project from the start. The only hope is that Wikipedia is disrupted by new technology or there is a slow march through the institution.

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