House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias

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 structures and saying the right things to leverage the site’s governance model to their advantage. The couple times 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.

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.