Wikipedia has major process issues that make it unreliable especially in the long term. Editors are given a ton of power to wield, the process of giving them power is not something the laymen is involved in, once they have power it’s fairly entrenched and hard to remove, and bias absolutely occurs. For the most part the bias is tempered but it is seen more heavily in articles like Gaza, Crimea/Ukraine, Venezuela, war on terror, Autism, transgender issues, war crimes of Japan, articles related to colonalism, articles related to big tech controversies, etc.
It’s something they desperately need to address because the right wing nutjobs are gunning for them and are very well funded. They 100% are going to try to put people into the editorial process or convert people who are already there to swing bias (if this hasn’t happened already). The right wing has managed to do this with the us government, they can and will do it to Wikipedia
I completely agree, though they have an interesting policy where they themselves cannot be a primary source of information but can only quote secondary (news) sources.
The aim of this policy is to stay as impartial as possible, so that a Wikipedia page can link to another page, but not cite another Wikipedia page as a news source.
Great in theory, but the reality is that they remove hundreds of pages of content where the primary sources of that page (usually a news website) is no longer accessible (archive.org or otherwise).
Right-wing news media can therefore win in the longrun by simply keeping their news sources always online and available for Wikipedia to source, since left-wing news media is more likely to have expired links. Overtime this will compound to a right-wing bias.
The best thing for anyone to do therefore is to fund the archiving sites. Archive.org in particular is a crucial piece of news infrastructure keeping Wikipedia balanced.
Wikipedia has major process issues that make it unreliable especially in the long term. Editors are given a ton of power to wield, the process of giving them power is not something the laymen is involved in, once they have power it’s fairly entrenched and hard to remove, and bias absolutely occurs. For the most part the bias is tempered but it is seen more heavily in articles like Gaza, Crimea/Ukraine, Venezuela, war on terror, Autism, transgender issues, war crimes of Japan, articles related to colonalism, articles related to big tech controversies, etc.
It’s something they desperately need to address because the right wing nutjobs are gunning for them and are very well funded. They 100% are going to try to put people into the editorial process or convert people who are already there to swing bias (if this hasn’t happened already). The right wing has managed to do this with the us government, they can and will do it to Wikipedia
I completely agree, though they have an interesting policy where they themselves cannot be a primary source of information but can only quote secondary (news) sources.
The aim of this policy is to stay as impartial as possible, so that a Wikipedia page can link to another page, but not cite another Wikipedia page as a news source.
Great in theory, but the reality is that they remove hundreds of pages of content where the primary sources of that page (usually a news website) is no longer accessible (archive.org or otherwise).
Right-wing news media can therefore win in the longrun by simply keeping their news sources always online and available for Wikipedia to source, since left-wing news media is more likely to have expired links. Overtime this will compound to a right-wing bias.
The best thing for anyone to do therefore is to fund the archiving sites. Archive.org in particular is a crucial piece of news infrastructure keeping Wikipedia balanced.