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duozerkyesterday at 5:33 PM6 repliesview on HN

> Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion

Religion maybe, and Wikipedia is indeed pretty awesome for many topics, but politics is THE bad example here.

Much of the political - especially geopolitical - content on Wikipedia has a tremendous atlanticist bias.


Replies

wwwestonyesterday at 8:22 PM

“atlanticist” - the culture of the enlightenment and the good that’s come from it.

Wikipedia does hold ideals, that access to knowledge is a net good, that people can cooperate both in contribution and review without a dominating magisterial authority. That rational dialogue and qualification and refinement is possible, and that it’s possible to correct for bias, and see the difference between bias and agenda.

Like those whose anti-enlightenment agenda is revealed when they use “atlanticist” as a slur.

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philipkglassyesterday at 5:58 PM

Is there another public source for encyclopedia-type articles that is better for geopolitical content? For example, if I have a philosophy question I'll often consult the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy instead of Wikipedia.

If there isn't a more neutral public source -- if there are only sources with different biases, or if the better sources are behind paywalls -- then I think that Wikipedia is still doing pretty well even for contentious geopolitical topics.

Usually disputes are visible on the Talk page, regardless of whatever viewpoint may prevail in the main article. It can also be useful to jump back to years-old revisions of articles, if there are recent world events that put the subject of the article in the news.

Apart from Wikipedia, speaking more generally, I think that articles with a strong editorial bias still provide useful information to an alert reader. I can read articles from Mother Jones, Newsmax, Russia Today, the BBC, Times of India, etc. and find different political and/or geopolitical slants to what is written about and how it is reported. I can also learn a lot even when I strongly disagree with the narrative thrust of what is reported. The key thing is to take any particular article or publication as only circumstantial evidence for an underlying reality, and to avoid falling into complacency even when (or especially when) the information you're reading aligns with what you already believe to be true.

defjmyesterday at 7:18 PM

Could you provide an example article from Wikipedia for such bias?

PS: I had to look up „atlanticist“, did this on Wikipedia. (giggle!)

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_moofyesterday at 9:56 PM

Are you talking about English Wikipedia, or all of the Wikipedia sites?

MarsIronPIyesterday at 6:34 PM

In general my impression is that the longer the article title is, the more slanted the article itself is.

woodpanelyesterday at 9:07 PM

Wikipedia has been the proto-Reddit for a long time, that is, it was relatively easy for ideological bubbles to manufacture the Chomskyian Consent, just by being early adopters.

As such it rapidly developed into heavily biased page, as Wikipedia‘s co-founder Larry Sanger keeps pointing out.

It helps if you are proficient in multiple languages so you can at least „hop“ between the (some) bubbles. But the gatekeeping is always there.

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