Which is why mild whitewashing is the standard corporate PR policy to take
with Wikipedia. It's just a dialing down of the quality, a subtle way of
violating NPOV by discouraging the inclusion of unhappy facts.
On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 6:17 PM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
The thing is, it takes a conspiracy within the
Wikipedia's rank and
file to bias an article significantly over a long period; otherwise
normal editing and then RFCs and so forth will tend sort it out.
If it remains sufficiently inaccurate then the target will kick up a
big fuss; initially within the Wikipedia, and then other places like
Wikipedia Review and eventually in the press. The more people that
look at the bias, the less sustainable the position of the conspiracy
becomes.
On 15/03/2011, Ken Arromdee <arromdee(a)rahul.net> wrote:
On Mon, 14 Mar 2011, The Cunctator wrote:
Oh,
certainly, left wing blogs are attacking the Kochs. And awareness
among
hard-core political activists and junkies is probably pretty high.
There you go.
> But we're talking a very small percentage of the US population.
>
> There are only a few thousand regular editors on en.wp. There really
> aren't
> that many people who edit Wikipedia. And [[David H. Koch]] for example
is
semi-protected. So we're talking about a handful of editors.
There are big differences between the hypothetical potential pool of
people
capable of editing Wikipedia, the pool of people interested in doing so,
the
people with the experience and ability to do so effectively, etc.
It's true that only a certain number of people would bias a Koch article
against the Koch's. It's also true that this can be said for virtually
any
article where there is danger of political bias.
By your reasoning
nobody
should ever have to worry about political bias
anywhere on Wikipedia.
Some people do like to believe that no outsider should ever worry about
political bias on Wikipedia. If so, there's not much I can say to
convince
you except to point out that you have an inflated
idea of how well
Wikipedia
works. But if there's ever any article which
is a valid concern, surely
the Koch article has to be one of them. It's a BLP on a subject that is
routinely the target of the left; about the only way it could be worse is
to be about Obama or Bush (and those are so high profile that the danger
is
probably less, anyway.)
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-Ian Woollard
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