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lucideer 5 days ago

Firstly let me agree with both current sibling commenters: zero bias is impossible & the brand & extent of Wikipedia's biases is distinctly bad.

That said, I find Wikipedia's biases predictable, avoidable (topic specific) & also very interesting as a sociological study in itself.

Firstly, it reminds us of inherent bias in (mostly colonial-written) paper encyclopedia of the past. There has never been an unbiased encyclopedia written & seeing the biases fully sourced & rapidly evolving in realtime serves as an excellent crystallisation of slower processes in previous works: highlighting that many of the historical "facts" we all grew up with were ultimately fed to us by similarly biased groups.

I've also come to the slow realisation that this may be a fundamentally unsolvable problem & that simply categorising it as "biased beyond repair" & continuing to handle it in that manner may be the best thing we can do.

Levitz 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

>I've also come to the slow realisation that this may be a fundamentally unsolvable problem & that simply categorising it as "biased beyond repair" & continuing to handle it in that manner may be the best thing we can do.

Is it a case of rot then? Or maybe I'm just biased, but I get the feel it wasn't always like this. It was never ideal, sure, but it used to be that I was wary of the site when checking, say, contemporary politics. Now it's a good chunk of recorded history instead.

lucideer 5 days ago | parent [-]

> I get the feel it wasn't always like this

I get this feeling but in the opposite direction. The more I see it the more I come to realise I was blinder to it in the past.

Many people comment on the internet ushering in an age of misinformation, but I actually see it as ushering in an age of misinformation awareness. Factchecks in legacy media were rare to nonexistent & generally not accessible to most media consumers. Information was more siloed leading to much greater acceptance of what was fed as fact without a lot of interrogation. Now, we're bombarded by such a slew of contradictions we "feel" less able to discern fact from fiction, which is disconcerting, but it's really just a broad awakening to something that's always been the case.

5 days ago | parent | prev [-]
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