I think for anything controversial we need a completely different model.

Officially wikipedia is NPOV but an especially contentious and murky political mudfight decides what counts as a "citeable" source and what doesnt and what counts as notable and what doesnt.

It also has an incredibly strong western bias.

Every government, corporation and billionaire pays somebody to participate in that fight as well, using every dirty trick they can.

Until we have a model that can sidestep these politics (which Wikipedia seemingly has no real desire to do) and aggregate sources objectively I think it will continue to suck.

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falcor84 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I agree with the issues, but it definitely doesn't suck if compared to every single other massive endeavor out there. As I see it, it's like that quote about democracy - it's the worst way to attempt to catalogue human knowledge, except for all those other forms that have been tried.

> It also has an incredibly strong western bias.

What's the issue with that? Why shouldn't English Wikipedia have a strong Western bias? I've explored and participated in several other Wikipedias and other collaborative projects, and each is biased towards the worldviews common to the culture that its main editors come from. I don't think there's a way to have an encyclopedic project without any cultural bias at all (if such a platonic ideal could even be properly defined), and seeing how Western values include a significant focus on pluralism, freedom of expression and scientific inquiry, I think this situation is much better than the alternatives.

	▲	pydry 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>I agree with the issues, but it definitely doesn't suck if compared to every single other massive endeavor out there. Compared to what? I dont really see much aggregation being done at all on Wikipedia's scale. >What's the issue with that? It's supposed to be impartial and objective and it sells itself as such but if you see how the sausage is made it is patently the exact opposite. >I don't think there's a way to have an encyclopedic project without any cultural bias at all I think it's perfectly possible to have an encyclopedia which is more liberal about allowing more sources to be used and which provides tools and metadata about those sources and gives tools to the user allowing them to filter accordingly. Whereas "Blessing" one group of sources and condemning another will inevitably turn it into a propaganda outlet for whomever controls it. You might think that this is the only way but that represents more of a failure of imagination than a lack of options.

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nephihaha an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The way some billionaires are described on Wikipedia you'd think they were saints. Even though most of their philanthropy is a tax write-off and goal-orientated (producing good publicity for them or pushing society in a direction they want).