
Wikipedia Is Badly Biased - nkurz
https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/
======
miffy900
> Indeed, Wikipedia defines the very term as follows: “Alternative medicine
> describes any practice that aims to achieve the healing effects of medicine,
> but which lacks biological plausibility and is untested, untestable or
> proven ineffective.”

OK, what? The author completely lost me at this point. This seems like a very
reasonable definition of the term 'alternative medicine'. If it was tested
and/or proven effective then it wouldn't be alternative - it would be just
_medicine_.

~~~
OneGuy123
Western medicine is good if your guts are hanging out after an accident.

But it completely fails to fully cure many chronic conditions. They just give
you a pill.

Eastern medicine is more hollistic (meaning it fully address chronic
conditions by finding the true source so that not more pills are needed).

So for this statement above: what he was trying to say is that western
medicine labels any healing methods that try to use natural remedies or
hollistic healing as "alternative".

Or in other words: he is trying to show you that big pharma is controlling
everything to such extend that even just trying any hollistic (permanently
curing by finding the real cause) medicine is being ignored in favor of
permanent pill dispesing.

Why cure it permanently if you can profit from symptom management :)

~~~
dfgdghdf
If your Western doctor is not suggesting regular exercise and a balanced diet
to prevent chronic conditions __before __giving you a pill then they are not
using an evidence-based approach.

~~~
m463
No doctor I have gone to in recent memory has said anything like that to me,
ever.

I remember once when a test result got close to a threshold, I was told, "this
test result is a little high, we should work at getting that down, and if it
stays high we can pursue medicine to bring it down."

Could this merely be part of some non-confrontational advice? Maybe waiting
for me to ask about exercise before answering?

On the other hand, I have had two friends whose relationships soured with
their doctor by giving unwarranted advice.

One friend smoked. The other was overweight.

The doctors pursued the smoking/weight issue to the exclusion of what they
were coming in for, and neither friend went back to that doctor.

~~~
Quekid5
I think it bears saying that doctors are people too, that includes all the
flaws/biases/etc. that we all succumb to.

There is a huge issue that there is no feedback loop when doctors are
incompetent or cannot be bothered to actually engage -- as your friends'
experience suggests, the doctor has no way (or incentive, really, if they're
just trying to satisfy a metric) to find out if they actually helped or not.
The only filtering mechanism seems to be either a) passed medical school, or
b) gross incompetence which gets reported to an authority, but patients
themselves (by definition) usually cannot judge if a doctor is giving them
actively bad/dangerous advice.

Metrics are becoming a plague in and of itself... I live somewhere in
Scandiwegia, and when I reserve a time slot with my doctor, the _biggest_ time
slot I could get was 10 minutes. That's 10 minutes to discuss a complex
lifelong pain-related issue which may have genetics playing into it, etc. etc.
It's absolutely insane for complex issues, but I'm betting a lot of these
issues are essentially invisible to the system because people just give up and
take (too many) painkillers. Trying to get a referral to experts in the type
of pain I experience is of course heavily gatekept, and means I have to face a
whole battery of other non-specialists (neuoroligists, etc.) who can only give
wholly inconclusive answers as to whether I'm "worthy" of getting to talk to
the specialists who could probably give me a proper diagnosis pretty quickly.

Of course, most things (general practitioner) doctors see are probably pretty
simple and _can_ handily be handled in 10 minutes, but it just gets very
frustrating when it _isn 't_ that simple.

EDIT: Just wanted to add that none of this means that TCM (or alternative
medicine in general) necessarily has any worth. The _science_ of 'Western'
medicine is overall really solid, but the systems around engaging with
patients is really screwed up right now.

------
xxpor
Folks, this is Larry Sanger. He was a cofounder of wikipedia, but left around
2002. He's been on the same war path ever since then. No one takes him
seriously. He's already tried founding multiple alternative wikis, and has
accused commons of harboring child pornography.

------
waltpad
I find it strange that the writer presents Wikipedia as a well defined entity:
it is possible for anyone (including the writer) to amend a Wikipedia article.
This may even be done _anonymously_.

The writer goes on to describe various issues about various articles, which
could be brought up directly in the discussion sections of these articles, as
well as possible solutions for these issues.

However, the first few lines point out something really interesting: Wikipedia
doesn't seem to look for facts, but rather to describe point of views. If you
are familiar with stackoverflow, the main policy there is to only provide
factual information. Any opinion-based question or answer are at the least
frowned upon, and usually rejected (though it may also depends on a sub-topic
local behaviour). However, I believe that this policy wasn't devised from the
beginning, but rather refined over time, considering that the entries at the
dawn of the site were much less restricted on that ground. Wikipedia seems to
be much more open to opinions, in a "neutral" way, which they explain by
giving each opinion as much coverage has it is popular (and thus accepted).
So, does it mean that if the "flat Earth" theory (which is given as an example
in the Wikipedia page) was much more popular, it would be prevalent in the
article about Earth?

So mainstream ideas will be described in much more details than so-called
alternate views. For me, this seems somewhat counter-intuitive. I would want
to have an encyclopedia which compiles facts, rather than opinions. Am I
missing something?

~~~
CryptoBanker
Have you actually tried editing a Wikipedia article? I guarantee it will be
changed back within about 5 minutes

~~~
waltpad
Actually, I did that, numerous times, although it was mostly to do spelling
correction or in one case linking to external pages trying to leverage
Wikipedia's SEO(?) value (ie. the external pages were discussing the topic in
the wiki page in order to promote their own business, which wasn't related at
all), which shows that it's clearly easy to get Wikipedia to fulfill its
purpose.

So all in all what I did was minor editing, perhaps it doesn't count as what
you would mean as an edit immediately reverted by other editors. I have no
doubt that there are factions monitoring pages of strategic value, it makes
sense for a website of that importance culturally. But it also means that the
Wikipedia core community must always remain vigilant about these unfortunate
slides.

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olliej
I mean most of this is complaining that no one is giving credence to the
fairly heavily discounted Obama conspiracies, and “unfairly” detailing the
behaviour of president trump.

~~~
codeddesign
Or is it the behavior of Obama and the discounted Trump conspiracies? ;)

~~~
praestigiare
It is not. Because not everything is some kind of mirror reflection across the
left/right boundary.

------
ZeroGravitas
Given the last line, it just seems like he's begging for money from crazy
people.

------
mrpopo
When a significant portion of the American population stops believing in the
truth, the world's most valuable encyclopedia becomes a biased beacon of
leftist facts.

The author criticizes Wikipedia for not mentioning "Obamagate", but that name
has no reputable source, remember Trump never defined it, even though the
author seems to have understood what it meant. An encyclopedia needs to be
based on reliable sources, and Trump's blabbering is just not reliable.

Just listen to this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTLu8vCH4Os](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTLu8vCH4Os)

~~~
thawaway1837
And he mentions Solyndra.

By that logic every Venture capitalist’s Wikipedia page should have a massive
section called scandals that lists all their investments that did not pay out.

~~~
thejynxed
He probably mentions Solyndra because they absconded with $250 million in
taxpayer money shortly after it was granted to them. They got the funds and
the doors were shut the same week, money gone into who knows what offshore
bank accounts.

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skookum-skuad
Says a dude who wants WikiLeaks closed and condones killing Assange.

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jumelles
> The Barack Obama article completely fails to mention many well-known
> scandals: Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the AP phone records scandal, and Fast
> and Furious, to say nothing of Solyndra or the Hillary Clinton email server
> scandal—or, of course, the developing “Obamagate” story in which Obama was
> personally involved in surveilling Donald Trump.

Leaving aside the issue of whether these articles warrant inclusion on the
Obama Wiki page:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Benghazi_attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Benghazi_attack)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_articles_about_the_Depart...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_articles_about_the_Department_of_Justice_investigations_of_reporters)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controve...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controversy)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Dona...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Donald_Trump#Obamagate)

------
jonnypotty
Personally I think its important for people to read this as it really does
highlight an issue we have in the west. Its also important to realize that
presenting facts about things which people disagree about will always be
contentious.

------
switch11
Wikipedia is a very useful resource

and at the same time it does have its biases

I'll give an example that should illustrate this

ONe of my close friends belongs to a royal family

The Wikipedia editors who control the article will not update the information
ABOUT HIS FAMILY because of some reason they will not explain

They also disregard records from the Government about his family

 __*

Basically

whoever the Czar of that area of Wikipedia is, or the group that controls
those decisions

want to put their research (or beliefs)

over

What the government of the country says

What the actual members of the royal family say

 __ __ __ __*

they have family member names wrong the hierarchy wrong and key details wrong

------
djaque
"badly biased" is the author's way of saying that the articles he finds don't
agree with his far-right view point. The current politicization of what is
fact and what is fiction by the current administration in the US doesn't give
me sympathy for his argument.

As an example, he complains that the so-called "obamagate scandal" is not
covered on wikipedia. As a reminder, the "scandal" is that:

1) Russia sabotages the US election (both sides of the political aisle agree
on this)

2) the Obama admin puts sanctions on Russia

3) Russia doesn't retaliate (this is VERY weird)

4) The Obama administration asks the intelligence agencies to investigate why
they didn't retaliate.

5) They find that an American was talking to the Russian ambassador and they
told them not to worry about the sanctions since they will make them "go away"
when Trump is in office

6) To find out who was undermining US foreign policy, they go through a legal
process that everyone agrees (including Trump) was followed to the tee.

7) They find that it was Michael Flynn (Trump's national security advisor) who
was talking to the ambassador and it was on a call that as national security
advisor he knew was monitored.

8) Flynn lies to FBI officials about the call (he has plead guilty to this
under oath twice)

8) Obama warns Trump that Flynn is being sketchy and that he might want to
reconsider hiring him

9) It comes out that Flynn was interfering with US foreign policy and Trump
fires him saying that he lied to VP Pence. Pence when asked about it says that
he made the right decision in firing him.

11) Now we're being asked to believe that investigation was an "Obama
deepstate coupe" to bring down Donald Trump

It is a shameless political ploy to spin up a scandal that doesn't exist. I'm
proud that wikipedia isn't curtailing to what is, simply put, a republican
talking point designed to stir up support in an election year.

edit: I'm bad at formatting

------
Noctem
> Wikipedia frequently asserts, in its own voice, that many of Trump’s
> statements are “false.” Well, perhaps they are. But even if they are, it is
> not exactly neutral for an encyclopedia article to say so, especially
> without attribution. You might approve of Wikipedia describing Trump’s
> incorrect statements as “false,” very well; but then you must admit that you
> no longer support a policy of neutrality on Wikipedia.

What? No. Objective truth exists and stating it is absolutely not an
indication of bias. If Wikipedia is incorrectly referring to his statements as
false then those cases should be fixed, but his argument is that it doesn't
even matter if these assertions are correct or not.

His "Encyclosphere" is going to be an absolute disaster if it adopts his
conception of neutrality as described here. It sounds like he rejects any
evaluation of the factuality of the subjects at hand and his preferred
standard for inclusion is "some people believe." That sounds like a great way
to create a catalog of falsehoods and misinformation.

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Werewolf255
"Why isn't Wikipedia accepting my conspiracy theories as facts? IT MUST BE
LIBERAL BIAS"

Now take that quote and expand it into a long-form article where you get asked
for money at the end, and I've saved you ten minutes of your life.

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aaron695
There are some issues with Wikipedia.

And it is a left wing bias.

But this is a fail at showing it's true and any proof on it's magnitude and
any argument Wikipedia just needs to be thrown out and any argument if any
alternative is even possible.

