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→ Wikipedia has a political bias — report
From suspicious donation pleas to censorship drives, Wikipedia has long carried out much of its business in the shadows. Now, a new study has provided further evidence for a widely-held hunch: that the site carries a clear political bias.
Researcher David Rozado has written a piece, complete with numerous illustrative charts, arguing that Wikipedia has a Left-of-centre slant when discussing politicians and politicised organisations. Examples include the average sentiment with which US Presidents are described in articles on the site, as well as the application of terms such as “far-Left” and “far-Right”.
“These results,” Rozado writes, “suggest that Wikipedia’s neutral point of view policy (NPOV) is not achieving its stated goal of viewpoint impartiality in […] articles.” Given that Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained using Wikipedia pages, among other sources, this could have broader implications for AI too. Maybe school teachers are right to warn that it isn’t a reliable source…
→ Trump guarantees no boots on the ground in Ukraine
A major worry voiced about a potential Trump second term, apart from another “insurrection” and the end of the world as we know it, is his isolationist tendencies when it comes to foreign policy. In February, some Atlanticists went into meltdown when Trump said that the US contributes too much to Nato proportionately, and that Russia can “do whatever the hell they want” to any Nato country that doesn’t pay its fair share.
In his interview with @theallinpod, President Trump made a number of important comments on Ukraine.
First, Trump guaranteed that if he becomes the next commander-in-chief, he will not put American boots on the ground in Ukraine. If France were to do so, as French President… pic.twitter.com/gk66ad1ymB
— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) June 20, 2024
He’ll no doubt ruffle some feathers with his latest promise that no American troops will ever set foot on Ukrainian territory. Speaking to the All-In podcast, he was asked by host David Sacks: “Can you guarantee that no matter what you’re not going to put American boots on the ground in Ukraine.” The former president was clear: “I would guarantee it. I wouldn’t do it, no.” Trump also said of Ukraine joining Nato: “It’s always been understood that that was a no-no.” On a side note, he said he’ll release the JFK files early on in any second term. Popcorn at the ready…
→ PinkNews blames colonialism for LGBT discrimination
A problem is easier to solve once you know the cause. Thanks to PinkNews, we can now stop discrimination against gay, queer and trans people all over the world. That’s because the site has revealed, in a report listing the 68 countries in which homosexuality is still illegal, that the evil responsible is — drum roll — British colonialism.
Alistair Stewart (no, not that one), head of advocacy at the Human Dignity Trust, told PinkNews many anti-gay laws were exported by Europeans during the colonial era, “imposing them at times [on] diverse indigenous traditions where same-sex activity and gender diversity was not necessarily taboo”. He added: “The clearest example of this is in the Commonwealth where the majority of the 33 Commonwealth countries that criminalise same-sex activity do so on the basis of laws that stem from the colonial era.”
Around half the countries on the list are Commonwealth members, so we can naturally blame the Britain for those. Just don’t ask PinkNews about the other countries…
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SubscribeHardly surprising that Wikipedia has a left wing bias when senior editors regularly block anyone attempting to write or amend an article from anything other than a left wing perspective. And unfortunately it’s the first port of call for most people doing a web search on any topic.
The left has a tightening monopoly on culture and a stranglehold on discourse for like decades now – the fact that the first web search for a topic is a left-wing partisan site is unsurprising.
Wikipedia has a political bias — report
I can’t post my WE ALREADY KNEW THAT gif here, so you’re just going to have to imagine it.
For better or worse, I’m a regular Wikipedia user, and the level of influence that power-users (Coincidentally, always left-wing) have is very huge. Political narratives are carefully constructed and maintained – some articles are off-limits. I’ve seen some truly shocking things on Wikipedia, like a suspicious power-user systematically erasing well-sourced and well-written paragaphs on Porn addiction across many, many different pages. I have an untrustworthy source that claims this particular power-user is on MindGeek payroll.
Another major reason for Wikipedia’s partisan bias is the sources policy. What Wikipedia considers to be “reliable sources” is generally American, British, or European left-liberal partisan media, non left-wing media is explicitly marginalised. You can check it out for yourself in their “Reliable sources” page.
I have no issues with left-wing partisan media being used because I don’t believe that there’s such a thing as non-partisan, the issue is the discrepancy.
Good comment, I’ve seen myself how impeccable scholarship is blocked from Wikipedia if it contradicts untrue, but mythically powerful, left wing narratives. But I disagree with your last paragraph. It is possible to strive for NPV. And for that, one wouldn’t be citing overtly leftist narratives as in any way “objective”, just as you wouldn’t be citing Infowars either. So when Wikipedia’s policy green-lights left-partisan media as objective, you instantly see it’s become a worthless left-propaganda website. And it has become just that: worthless. I don’t use it except for dry topics like mathematical or computer programming information.
Cry-bully groups like Pink News will always attack soft targets like Britain rather than truly anti-LGBTQ countries like Iran or Turkmenistan. I’m just surprised that such distasteful groups have amassed such a huge popular following over the last two decades.
Another WIN for the British Empire.
“Wikipedia has a political bias”
No shit.
Pink News — their tiresome rendering of white people as the centre of the universe reminds me of a great essay that appeared in Tablet a few days ago, about ethnopolitical mythmaking and woke’s inability to intellectually think beyond simply reversing, as “photo negative ideology”, a caricature of what they think they’re criticizing. It’s a nice essay which advances the argument in new terms:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/photo-negative-ideology-wokeness
But you can see why there’s such a bonkers idea as “Queers for Palestine”, with its activists completely oblivious that there are others outside of “British colonialism” that want gays dead: in their ethnopolitical myth, because Islam is not “white” (a woke category, not mine!), it is definitionally sinless — as a categorical precept of their woke ethnopolitical myth.
I use Wikipedia for checking the height of volcanoes, the chemical structure of serotonin, the sentence structure of the Basque language, the phylogenesis of palm trees, the history of Liverpool FC, but for nothing that has to do with politics or biographies.
Wikipedia has a political bias. In other news: Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead and water is wet.
Did Pink News get their info from Wikipedia, I wonder?
Their page on LGBT laws in Palestine clearly blames British Colonialism, and says nothing at all about Islam and homosexuality. It also mentions only one incident of a man being murdered for being gay. Yet there is a trope that Palestinians push gay men off tall buildings. It was this trope that led me to search for evidence, either for or against this, and hence to the Wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_State_of_Palestine