logoalt Hacker News

arjieyesterday at 5:35 PM1 replyview on HN

When you say you disagree, I assume you mean that you disagree that Wikipedia's approach is good. I don't think I was making that claim, however. I have no value position on Wikipedia's approach except that I appear to endorse it by participating. There are certainly true things that Wikipedia will not contain because they are insufficiently described in sources that Wikipedians find acceptable. But nonetheless that is Wikipedia's purpose: to find a list of sources that generally report fact, and to aggregate them.

Like any consensus-based thing it's pretty loose. It's unlikely that EN wikipedia had much of a position on the reliability of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, for instance.

As an example, when I resurrected the Makoto Matsumoto article, I mirrored it to my personal wiki[0] in case it is deleted from the original. Another loss I lament is that of Chinese Numbered Policies[1] which I think is a genuinely interesting list and a meaningful categorization that I will eventually re-create on my personal wiki.

I'm a Wikipedia inclusionist which means I want as many true things there as possible in a way that represents the truth as accurately as possible, but it's a collaborative effort and that means that sometimes I don't get what I want.

Any way, as you can see from my earlier experience, I seem to have a skill of getting facts into Wikipedia when others do not, and I have a personal desire to see them there as well. So if you want to list a couple of the examples you had trouble with I can see if I can help. I know you said "politics and current events", but hopefully there are non-emergent situations that you can describe because evolving situations require more attention than I'm able to apply at the moment. I will still try, though. As an example, the Salvadoran Gang Crackdown had some ridiculous language on it that I removed[3] that was clearly an attempt to insert a left-wing (as it is in the US) political slant.

To be clear, I have no affiliation with Wikipedia (beyond the fact that as an auto-confirmed user I have the user privilege to create articles without going through AfC). I just have a personal interest in fact recording[2].

0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Makoto_Matsumoto

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AArticles_for_delet...

2: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Observation_Dharma

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_c...


Replies

FiveOhThreeyesterday at 5:45 PM

I meant that I disagree that Wikipedia is really trying to give a general view of events. That might have been the original intention, but it's not what it's doing in practice.

It does all hinge on that important list of acceptable vs unacceptable sources. In the last few decades there's been an increasing trend for news outlets to take a political position and decline to report on stories which would damage that position, which becomes most obvious whenever the US holds an election.

show 1 reply