Larry Sanger, one of the co-founders of Wikipedia, has been going on a tirade for like a decade about how Wikipedia has a Liberal bias and that it needs to be a little more Conservative to keep a semblance of neutrality and he recently got permanently banned for trying to inject said Conservative viewpoints.
Hey now, you need to be careful there. Having your beliefs conform to the best available evidence and being careful not to distort data to match your pre-existing beliefs is some real Satanic shit.
Because they (pretend to) think EVERYTHING can be an opinion. Then all you have to do to paint yourself a victim is say "it's just my opinion and they hate me for it"
This also is just phase one. Once they've got equal weight for truth and lies, they then insist that the truth shouldn't be told because it makes them feel bad.
Yeah it hasn't been even progress. News and social media has been in phase 2 for a long time but there are still holdouts like Wikipedia which has refused phase 1.
The earth is either billions of years old, like chemistry tells us, or 6000 years old because some guy said so. Both opinions are equal according to them
Ironically enough the history behind all that would smack them so silly they'd have whiplash. Western science has been historically driven by Christians attempting to understand the world via the gospel, and running into all the evidence forced the church into discussion of alternative interpretations more in line with reality. I wont be excusing anything the Church has done vis a vis Heliocentrism/anti-intellectualism in general of course, but it's so striking to me that some of the people who confirmed the former back in the day literally were the people who thought it was 6000 years old, and now we have the entire flat earth/young earth ""debate"" still somehow going on today.
Realistically people of all ideological stripes have a tendency to do this to some degree, although conservatives tend to be much more egregious about it.
I think the biggest issue with people on the left these days is idealism, and infighting over slight differences. But i guess thats just the nature of politics.
”Why do have paragraph after paragraph in the vaccine article about studies of safety, and dr. Armpitfart’s statements from his tiktok reel are in conspiracy section? These should be presented as equally valid points!”
They want false balance/bothsidesism fallacy to be forced on everyone and not just on Fox News, just to affirm their viewpoints. Almost everything they say is a projection.
Where's that image where someone claims fact checking in a debate is unfair because left wing arguments are based more on fact, and are hard to fight against without lying?
Conservative neutrality is all states having equal voting power, the one doctor of the "nine out of ten doctors" being invited to endless podcasts and news segments, and talking heads with takes so hot hell wouldn't want them garnering audiences in the millions to watch as they use bad faith arguments filled with misinformation versus people who simply know right from wrong. And all the while the ultra wealthy push their endless wars and suck the life from society like so many leeches
Yeah, basically, many are either like fox news, and are closer cousins to entertainment than news, or just have a rocky at best history with what and how things get reported
Scientific discovery does not have a political leaning. Something is, or it isn't, given available data.
It just so happens that reducing stress for many people is proven to be good, but doing that often means upending the current status quo which favors some but not others.
Supporting said status quo would then be, conservative. Upending it happens to be liberal. The facts of today becomes the status quo of tomorrow, so it has been for centuries.
Scientific discovery does not have a political leaning. Something is, or it isn't, given available data.
In practice this is just not true. People and institutions have biases, pet theories, and political affiliations. They also find it hard to let go of prior beliefs (see also Kuhn's paradigm shift), which means the same data gets interpreted differently based on the scientist's prior beliefs (see e.g. a fascinating recent study on the choices of statistical methods- there's usually multiple ways of doing the stats), institutions do have leanings as well, and many actively publishing scientists are part of lobbying groups or political activist groups.
Science is a human endeavour, and humans are messy! That doesn't mean we should discount our scientific findings and the scientific process- it's the best tool for discovering reality we've got. But we can't just trust it to be objective either.
My point was not to say that conservative ideology is factually incorrect (though I do think it's a horrible ideology that at its core is nothing more than selfishness and hate)
My point is that conservative "sources" tend to straight up lie constantly
verifiable facts? Wikipedia as it stands right now values secondary sources over primary ones, which easily leads to chains of news articles sourcing each other. One broken link and the whole chain is left without a primary source. Is that what you call verification? In effect that is no better than watching the news and believing everything they say.
A constructive, genuine debate informed by data and observation is impossible if one side tends to deal in emotions and belief.
If they prioritized factual data over their own feelings, global warming would never have been a question.
It's a sad truth of the matter: the only way Republicans know how to stay in power is to rile up emotions to overwhelm the facts, usually by fear and anger. "Immigrants will take your jobs! Teachers are brainwashing your children! Vaccines will give you autism! Gay marriage is wrong and will somehow lessen the value of your own marriage! Trans people?!??! Woke-ism!!!??!!"
They are all messages tailored to maximize fear and drown out logic—bombastic claims that are easy to parrot because they pamper to our primal instincts.
I spent way too long rewriting and thinking about this comment and now I'm depressed. Butt stuff.
Fear and anger, eh? Democrats have done their fair share of that too. Al Gore made a number of hyperbolic claims in his documentary An Inconvenient Truth that have not come to pass when he said they would. Gave the republicans a lot of ammo, that one has. There was also the fearmongering over the republicans destroying democracy if they got in power. The accusation of trump colluding with russia that went nowhere. The shouting that trans people are facing a genocide in America. Acting like people are in danger if a republican speaks at a collage campus. That last one is also something I dont get. Its like they have no faith in their abilities to argue or the beliefs they hold. Like they think the republican's words are an anomalous infohazard that can corrupt or harm you with just a few seconds of listening.
There was also the fearmongering over the republicans destroying democracy if they got in power.
That's exactly what they are still doing right now, and the insane damage they've already caused, the even for US standards incredibly bad international reputation, let alone the not even remotely fully realized long-term effects, will literally take several decades to repair even under the best possible circumstances.
What in the world do you think people think of when they hear 'destroy our democracy?' Damage to our international reputation?
HELL.
NO.
People are going to assume it means turning the country into a dictatorship. Don't play these word games with me. You know exactly what it sounds like.
And honestly, I dont think for a second we truly had a good reputation.
I mean, Trump attempting a coup and then centralizing power in the executive while blatantly ignoring the Constitution, law, and court system all points a lot more to dictatorship than democracy.
You probably wont believe me but the protesters being let inside on that day was not part of trump's plan. I dont know why trump thought a protest there would get him the win, but the man believes his own hype way too much.
ignoring the courts... there are no consequences for it... jackson first exploited that loophole and we never fixed it.
it disgusts me that he is exploiting it but i find it even more absurd we let that loophole persist for over a hundred years
I'm not talking about the activity of protestors/rioters (although he is of course responsible for that), I'm talking about the attempt on the part of Trump and his team to illegally stay in power by getting the Vice President to throw out electors of states he didn't like the results from. The blatant attempt at a self-coup that he got away with solely because Congress, the organ with the power to indict, was made up of his conspirators that supported the attempt
It was anti-democratic when Jackson did it and it's anti-democratic now that Trump's doing it. Although there are many ways that make it worse under Trump than Jackson, most notably the insane frequency of such actions as well as the open disregard. As much as I'm not a fan of Jackson, he was more democratic than Trump currently is
Yup looks concervatives are too kind to liberals.
Liberals keep projecting so hard it is actually funny 😁.
Liberals keep implementing failed policies and then say they need even more resources and power then fail again.
Then they complain when concervatives start pushing back against their bs and they keep pointing the finger and acting o so high and mighty when they are completely wrong.
The fuck you mean incorrect??? We haven't SEEN evolution, and our theory on it expands every decade: we now know that POPULATIONS are changing, not species.
Because the actual statistic is that black people are 50% more likely to be incarcerated for a crime they didn’t commit. But media literacy was never a strong point for conservatives. Blindly regurgitating fake statistics without any sort of fact checking for the sake of justifying your own racism however is.
I remember needing to watch a news clip in my HS government class that was making complaints about Wikipedia having a “heavy liberal bias” and the example several people went off on was imprisoning camps used US by immigration enforcement being listed “on par with the Holocaust” because they were both in a list on a page on internment camps.
Uh, immigrant imprisonment camps are internment camps? No one was saying they’re “as bad as the holocaust” they simply also meet the definition of ‘prison camp where large groups of people from demographics are taken against their will and held for undisclosed and undetermined amounts of time.’ It was such an annoying complaint on the simple facts of things being applied as they are. I could totally see arguments in some places for Wikipedia being left leaning, but they chose the worst possible one to try and argue on.
Considering what Conservatism is these days, trying to find a middle ground between liberalism and it would be like trying to find the middle ground between black licorice, which people have mixed opinions about, or the Elephant's Foot in Chernobyl.
Neutral =/= Middle Ground. Not when one of the schools of thought has become so damn vile that said middle ground is still somewhat egregious.
Also important context is that Larry Sanger was fired from Wikipedia in 2002 during the dot-com crash, after which he's spent the last 25 years complaining about it.
Love people like that who cannot think outside the American politics bubble. He thinks neutrality means something between liberals and conservatives? Brother these are both right wing for any country with a somewhat normal political landscape.
I'm not informed about anything Larry Sanger has said, but there genuinely is coordinated wiki vandalism from left wing groups that's been documented. I'm saying this is as someone on the left.
His actual ban was for trying to coordinate a group of conservatives to edit the platform, not for making the site more conservative. Essentially brigading which they have rules against
Then why are you only criticizing left wing vandalism as if it is a unique issue and ignoring the much more prominent corporate vandalism and white washing, or right wing vandalism? "As someone on the left," you are oddly going out of your way to make this seem like a unique issue of the left when it very much is not. It is almost like you are actually a fascist.
I talked about left wing vandalism because most people here seem to be scoffing at the idea that there's any bad actors on the left editing Wikipedia. Regardless...buddy, you genuinely need to take a break from the internet from the year. How does your brain go from "left wing vandalism of Wikipedia exists" to "you must be a fascist"? This is not a normal thought process.
It does have a liberal bias due to the fact of having a closed clique of extremely liberal writers and editors, but these problems are small compared to the biggest issue wikipedia has in that it deviated from it's original intent and has devolved into surface level reading created by people unknowledgeable about the subject.
1,300 people are creating over three-quarters of the 600 new articles posted to Wikipedia every day.
You are basically mindjacked by a closed clique writing reality by mostly making shit up. Anyone who has actually tried to use wikipedia's references (me) gets fucked because everything is either missing our the intent from the research is not actually apparent.
I've read conservative news articles where the conservative authors may have used the term liberal in the broader sense of the word, like "liberal democracy", and had to see all of the people commenting, completely forget about the article because they were too busy screeching about that. If you read something like the Conservapedia, or the Conservative Bible Project, or any effort from conservatives to try to make something "fair", they read so on the nose, they come off as bad parodies. Conservatives don't know what unbiased and neutral means, they literally don't have the mental capacity for it.
its a great sign at how conservative viewpoints are often founded in falsehoods. the aim of wikipedia is to contain as much verifiably true and accurate information as possible. So calling that "anti-conservative" really gives the game away
I don't even see Wikipedia as Liberal. I see it as neutral and just more factorial and edits are typically made by fans of whatever the said subject is. But that's just me.
Has he considered that conservatives are literally just wrong about everything, and you don't need to add any conservative viewpoints to be objective or accurate?
I love when this type of thing happens. "Liberal bias" oh, you mean based on reality?
"Wikipedia is too factual! It needs to be more full of shit because I have the emotional intelligence of an orange and I need a safe space for my fascism!"
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u/abermea Jun 28 '26
Larry Sanger, one of the co-founders of Wikipedia, has been going on a tirade for like a decade about how Wikipedia has a Liberal bias and that it needs to be a little more Conservative to keep a semblance of neutrality and he recently got permanently banned for trying to inject said Conservative viewpoints.