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Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-01-15/Op-ed

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  • [Commenting on the original blog is paywalled, so I leave my 2 cents here] Well done, User:GorillaWarfare, it is always soothing to read Wikimedia defenses that lay bare some of the common misconceptions. I think you omitted a rather obvious argument: Wikipedia leans to the left (imo a matter of fact) because left-leaning people are more likely to contribute than right-leaning people. And that says more about about the Left and the Right than it says about Wikipedia. --Pgallert (talk) 08:44, 15 January 2025 (UTC) [reply ]
  • That's not just an American sentiment. The German Wikipedia faces the same accusations, persistently and for a long time. And while some German politicians are American-centric themselves, the population certainly is not. --Pgallert (talk) 08:11, 16 January 2025 (UTC) [reply ]
  • In the USA and some other places pretending that Evolution didn't happen, being snowflakes re needle pricks and even denial of Climate change all exist on the political spectrum, despite the science. We aren't going to be neutral about such intrusions of politics on science any more than we can be neutral re people who prefer alternative facts. That doesn't mean we have a bias on issues such as how egalitarian a society should be or how authoritarian - provided it isn't so authoritarian that it censors or blocks us. Ϣere Spiel Chequers 14:12, 16 January 2025 (UTC) [reply ]
You might call it left wing bias but to me it seems staunchly centrist. Sure, some articles, like those related to social justice would be written very differently by anyone not center-left and other articles would be written very differently by anyone not center-right. To me that just seems like 'legacy media (that wants to be hip with the times to a degree their investors find acceptable)' bias with some 'the vast majority of editors are from the global north' bias, though I do agree that people contributing to free and open projects, like Wikipedia, are often left wing. I mean, the very way editing on Wikipedia itself is organised is very much Anarchist and a great example of a very flat organizational structure actually working. ObsidianCompass (talk) 17:08, 10 February 2025 (UTC) [reply ]
  • These bad-faith attacks on Wikipedia are frustrating to no end, and present a real threat to our reputation in the world at large. We need editors of all political stripes who are committed to reliable sourcing, neutrality, and verifiability, or else we do run the risk of becoming an echo chamber. My faint and fondest hope is that some committed conservatives who are led here to "fight the bias" on Wikipedia end up learning the ropes by accident, staying put, and becoming productive contributors. People have wound up here for stranger reasons than that. —Ganesha811 (talk) 19:22, 15 January 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

I think that "Unbiased" is impossible to define much less achieve. But when bias reaches the point where it impacts the informativeness of coverage, perhaps some introspection is in order (including for systemic issues) rather than villainizing everyone who says so, including cherry picking the things that they said that have the worst optics. We want to keep Wikipedia strong, including reputation as an information source on politics-related articles. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 20:51, 15 January 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

We aren't "unbiased", by our very nature we reflect the bias of reliable sources. For better or worse, academia and other similar careers (investigative journalism, etc.) tend to have more left leaning people in them. So it would be surprising if there was no "leftist bias" compared to public opinion on Wikipedia as that would require going against our current policies. (t · c) buidhe 18:18, 16 January 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

Yes, that is one of the causes of the problem. BTW, to be more specific, I would use the term "wp:Reliable sources" instead of "reliable sources". North8000 (talk) 18:32, 16 January 2025 (UTC) [reply ]
  • Simple vandalism, like simple violence, is not the best way to harm the community's health. Someone with the know-how of wikipedia internals and editor psychology could literally use the community against itself, stir up division, making every edit and reply feel like an act of war, and destroying the unmistakenable and unexhaustable source of balancing force: the simple joy of editing. Only when that day comes can we say that Wikipedia is dead. Hym3242 (talk) 15:27, 20 January 2025 (UTC) [reply ]
  • Thanks for the excellent article, GW. I don't envy you wading through Musk's tweets, and appreciate your summary of the far-right voices and networks that are being amplified. Also shocked to hear cisgender is blacklisted on Twitter – what further proof do you need of the hypocrisy of Musk's claim to be interested in free speech? Any news about Musk, or America more generally, is grim reading at the moment. Jr8825 • Talk 12:43, 27 January 2025 (UTC) [reply ]
  • Seeing billionaires (especially those from the alt-right) have temper tantrums over not being able to buy this website and manipulate it to their fit is very entertaining to watch. Their supporters run on here and call us "biased" because we don't show the already shunned and/or debunked ideas they regurgitate (e.g gender dysphoria being a contagious "trend", Haitian immigrants eating cats, or that "Jews control the world") in a positive light. We are not for sale, and we are not an outlet for your hateful neo-Nazi beliefs, Elon Musk. 💽 🌙Eclipse 💽 🌹 ⚧ (she/they) talk/edits 15:25, 28 January 2025 (UTC) [reply ]
  • All the more concerning after Musk's recent tirade against the project amid his salute antics. The Japanese Wikipedia is particularly prone to such extremist rhetoric (and now mainstreams it) the result being that it is heavily distorted beyond entertainment topics (even that is debatable e.g. Talk:Yasuke); let us hope enwiki and Wikipedia in general does not fall flat in face of these attacks. Gotitbro (talk) 10:41, 30 January 2025 (UTC) [reply ]
    @Gotitbro: If I may, I would warn against declaring Wikipedia projects like jawiki to be irredeemable, or relying on mere hope that enwiki remains resilient. The wonderful thing about Wikipedia projects is that they can always be edited, and if any of them stray from the mission of curating the sum of the world's knowledge in a neutral and verifiable way, the Wikimedia communities can work to return them to that mission. If outside parties try to exert pressures on Wikimedia projects to deviate from our mission, our community is a bulwark. But it takes more than passive hope — as Grace Paley once said, "the only recognizable feature of hope is action." GorillaWarfare (she/her • talk) 15:54, 30 January 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

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