On 3/7/07, Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com wrote:
Of course, where do the figures come from? In addition, how does he come to the conclusion that Wikipedia editors are 7x more liberal than the average American? And does he mean American editors, or all editors? And how much more "liberal" is the rest of the world than the average American?
"Polls show that about twice as many Americans identify themselves as "conservative" compared with "liberal", and that ratio has been increasing for two decades.[1] But on Wikipedia, about three times as many editors identify themselves as "liberal" compared with "conservative".[2] That suggests Wikipedia is six times more liberal than the American public. "
Yeah, that's how statistics work :)
I don't doubt that our editors are more "liberal" than the average American
- we're also probably better educated than the average American, more
computer literate than the average American, better informed than the average American, and more likely to be non-American than the average American. But how does claiming that "dinosaur" is a Latin-root word, discussing the amount of space on the ark http://www.conservapedia.com/Dinosaur
and including pix of Jesus riding a dinosaur (gone now, but oh so amusing) http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Dinosaur&oldid=17255
somehow balance the "liberal bias"? Since when do conservatives believe that the opposite of liberal is nut?
Can I just make this point again: what did you expect? This is a website with its POV right there in the name! Of course it has a conservative bias, of course their arguements aren't going to make sense, of course it's going to claim that dinosaurs was created on the 6th day! There isn't any logic to it, it's a bunch of people that are 100% certain of their beliefs, and they aren't going to let silly stuff like "neutrality", "fairness" or "reason" stand in their way.
Have we learned nothing from the Time Cube guy?
--Oskar