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598 points leotravis10 | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.002s | source
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bawolff ◴[] No.45129304[source]
There has been this trend recently of calling Wikipedia the last good thing on the internet.

And i agree its great, i spend an inordinate amount of my time on Wikimedia related things.

But i think there is a danger here with all these articles putting Wikipedia too much on a pedestal. It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws.

The true best part of Wikipedia is that its a work in progress and people are working to make it a little better everyday. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact we aren't there yet. We'll never be "there". But hopefully we'll continue to be a little bit closer every day. And that is what makes Wikipedia great.

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citizenpaul ◴[] No.45134802[source]
I'm not so sure I go there less and less. Wikipedia is very biased and turf guarded against negative factually true information even when it meets all requirements it will often be taken down automatically with no recourse. Many pages are functionally not editable because of turf guarding.

Anything vaguely sociopolitical is functionally censored on it and wikipedia does nothing about it even if they don't support it.

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LastTrain ◴[] No.45134830[source]
There is no such thing as unbiased. Maybe it simply doesn’t match your bias.
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Levitz ◴[] No.45136648[source]
It's impossible to produce such material with a complete lack of bias, sure.

I know of at least of one case in which a person publicly admits he is using Wikipedia to promote their political stances and who is right now at the center of an arbitration case in which he intends to silence opposition.

This is not that.

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LastTrain ◴[] No.45137856[source]
People who edit Wikipedia run the gamut from those that are zealous about neutral point of view up to and including people that do it for their own selfish purposes. But lets take the zealous NPOV type. If I were to try and do that, to try my hardest to produce an article which truly takes an NPOV stance, it would still come off biased to you because you and I can't possibly share the same idea about what is neutral. Based on some peoples venom here - including charges of propaganda - I suspect you all are just reading articles written by people with a different worldview than your own. I really don't understand this sense of unfairness or even conspiracy people have about it.
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Levitz ◴[] No.45139660{3}[source]
I'm really at a loss on how to make this any more clear.

You are looking at a case of a person LITERALLY admitting they are using it for propaganda and your reaction is "I'm sure it's actually not, it's actually neutral and it's just that it differs from your view". I'm sorry but I can only explain it to you, I can't understand it for you.

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1. LastTrain ◴[] No.45140581{4}[source]
Do you think anyone here on HN uses this site for propaganda?
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2. lp0_on_fire ◴[] No.45141728[source]
HN doesn't style itself as an encyclopedia for all human knowledge that's worth writing down.