this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
1022 points (90.9% liked)
Showerthoughts
29786 readers
557 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- Avoid politics
- 3.1) NEW RULE as of 5 Nov 2024, trying it out
- 3.2) Political posts often end up being circle jerks (not offering unique perspective) or enflaming (too much work for mods).
- 3.3) Try c/politicaldiscussion, volunteer as a mod here, or start your own community.
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No. There are plenty of articles with the "needs citations" tag.
But even of the ones that are? A LOT of people never actually read the sources and you have plenty of wild claims that are not at all supported by their citation. Plenty of "celebrities" have even talked about how it was a huge hassle to get something changed because the lie was cited... with something unrelated.
"a huge hassle"
Step 1. Remove the unfounded claim
Step 2. Go to the talk page explaining why you removed it
Step 3. If someone puts it back, edit war them, tag needs citation, call them out in the talk page, get the article locked by an admin, etc etc etc. These things happen all the time, and 95% of the time it gets corrected as long as someone gives a damn
Can you show some examples of this?
Nice.
Lol this guy is getting ready to edit some articles.
A lot of the political entries are written with a bent towards being sympathetic with leftists.
The Kyle Rittenhouse article spends a lot of time on how Rittenhouse ‘appeared in conservative media’ or ‘appeared with conservative personalities’ which is a pretty weird thing to say, if you don’t already understand the political undertones of the Kenosha riot.
When you click the article for the Kenosha riot, it’s titled ‘civil unrest in Kenosha’ and focusses a lot on what a reader would perceive as positive aims of the riot. Protesting racism and police brutality, and doesn’t focus at all on the crime, danger, guns, vandalism, arson, etc
That article mentions BLM and when you read that article it makes sure to state that BLM protests were ‘largely peaceful’ and totally misses the amount of deaths and destruction that had happened at them.
The BLM article, if written like the Rittenhouse article, should focus a fair amount in the organizations ties to Marxism, the overthrowing of capitalism and colonialism, but doesn’t.
Wikipedia articles are written and edited and maintained to push a narrative.
If you agree with the narrative, you probably like that it does this. If you disagree, you probably don’t bother reading Wikipedia very much.
The issue with sources, is that a lot of ‘sources’ for stuff like this are already heavily curated to paint a picture the editors want to put on front street.
And anything that would combat that narrative is just outright banned from the site.
A lot of citations with politically charged topics are just opinions anyway. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer or sources on the war between Palestine and isreal, for example. But if Wikipedia editors want to push propaganda for either side over the other, all they have to do is only cite pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli sources.
This is easily exploitable by editors for whatever narrative they choose to push.
Wikipedia is not an exhaustive gathering of all relevant information, it is a carefully curated propaganda machine for the editors.
Good point. I forgot to mention that Wikipedia editors, for all their flaws, are really good at shutting down hateful right wing bullshit.
So you’d categorize it as hateful right wing bullshit if someone mentions that there as violence or criminal activity at BLM protests?
Why would that be hateful? Or right wing? Or anything other than just a description of what happened?
Exactly
You can have violence at a largely peaceful protest, as long as it is ... largely peaceful.
Which they were, the majority ended peacefully and only a handful were violent.
So what Wikipedia did was state the facts. You can disagree with those facts, but you would be wrong.
Well it’s the old fact that reality has a left-wing bias, as someone once put it.
That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.
Whoever said that should step out of their bubble and have a look around once in awhile