[WikiEN-l] Koch brothers articles doctored says Think Progress

[George Herbert]

On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 7:15 PM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Mar 2011, George Herbert wrote:
>> Someone organizing an off-wiki organized group intended to push
>> on-wiki bias one way or the other is an unfair advantage for their
>> viewpoint and biases.
>
> *If* someone was organizing a group to push bias, they'd have an unfair
> advantage against others without such a group.  But is that what they're
> doing?
>
> Or are you just assuming "they say they're trying to stop bias, but they
> *must* really be trying to push bias, because they're too organized, and
> their opinions show they're evil, and besides, Wikipedia has no bias
> anyway"?  The Kochs are one of the biggest left-wing targets around.  (So
> is Israel.)  They have plenty of reason to be legitimately concerned with
> bias against them.  If someone claims to be stopping bias, saying "they're
> here to create it instead" is blatantly non-AGF unless you have some reason
> for that belief other than "they can't really mean it".

Generically, no.

I assume there is no intrinsic higher truth in the universe.  Neutral
point of view is what the collection of humans editing WP (and its
readers using it) believe to be balanced.  I believe that the system
we're supposed to be using here works - It shouldn't, but it does.

There are ways to work within the system, including handling "the
system"s inherent biases as "the system" isn't truly totally
middle-of-humanity-viewpoints balanced.

Organizing offsite - paid, or collaborative in secret, or whatnot - is
throwing the system aside in the interests of winning.  That's not OK.


Wikipedia's community ideological bias accepted, it is entirely
possible for right-wing and republican editors to be constructively
engaged here.  THF has come and gone a couple of times as his
available time and life situation changed but last I checked he was
constructively representing that side of things as effectively as
anyone else.  There are plenty of Israeli and Jewish editors, and I
don't have any evidence that Palestinians / Arabs outnumber them
on-wiki (though a fair number of far left wing editors align there,
yes).


It's not perfect, but it's balanceable.  It's sometimes broken, but
SOFIXIT - within the system, not by introducing a new external entity
trying to subvert it.  That does work.  People demonstrate that every
day, even on the worst of hostile topics.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com