Talk:Examples of Bias in Wikipedia

I think that we should call the page "Wikipedia."

Tim,

Thanks for your suggestion, but I'm inclined to disagree. "Wackypedia" conveys an important and valid point that merely calling it "Wikipedia" would not. --Aschlafly 22:54, 21 December 2006 (EST)

Man oh man! We are really beating Wikipedia up! Will N.

• Indeed. Dpbsmith 11:35, 6 January 2007 (EST)

Out of idle curiosity, is the important and valid point: "wikipedia is wacky"?

Ben

The point here is that if we want to be a credible website we should call things by their proper names. If you want to make the point that Wikipedia is waky or biased or whatever, do it in the body of the article. I think that if Wikipedia had an article on Conservapedia, but called it Conservastupidia, you would not like it, and would probably include it in your list of Wikipedia bias. --TimSvendsen 11:56, 6 January 2007 (EST)

I TOTALLY agree with Tim,

REPLYOK, Tim, you win. Go ahead and erase the "Wackypedia" references as you like.--Aschlafly 15:23, 6 January 2007 (EST)

Don't give in yet Mr. Schlafly :) I vote to definitely keep it Wackypedia. Who are we trying to appeal to here? The biased editors on Wikipedia? No, the Conservative editors elsewhere. We believe Wikipedia is wacky. Why try to sound nice? Also, why did we move all the examples of Wikipeda bias to another page? That is our view of Wikipedia. When people visit our Wikipedia page, we want them to see this. Don't put it someplace else that someone may not see it. Tim, who cares if Wikipedia puts an article up as Conservastupidia? Even if they wanted too they technically could not because of their no "personal attacks" policy. PhilipB 01:18, 8 January 2007 (EST)

Reply: If we call it "Wackypedia we hurt our own credibility. If we have a valid poit to make, we can make it without resorting to "personal attacks." (For lack of a better term) It is just acting immature to use namecalling instead of logic or truth to make our point. --TimSvendsen 10:56, 8 January 2007 (EST)

Counter: The "Wackeypedia" site is listed #2 in a Google search for "Conservapedia". But now that Wackeypedia has been omitted, many users who click on that link will be disappointed. This new piece of information may justify restoring the link. How about this: I'll redirect the link to "Wikipedia bias." Check this change out.--Aschlafly 16:58, 9 January 2007 (EST)

Gossip and vulgarity

The article states "Gossip and vulgarity are pervasive on Wikipedia."

I just tried an experiment. I clicked Wikipedia's "random article" link twenty times. I did not encounter any pages that I would describe as containing either gossip or vulgarity. I would be curious if others would try the same experiment and report their results. If you find one and are comfortable identifying which page contains the "gossip or vulgarity" do so, but of course do not if you think that the degree of vulgarity violates Conservapedia's standards.

Wikipedia's biographies, particularly of living people in the public eye, are more likely to contain unflattering material than some other sources. For example, the article on NPR news correspondent Nina Totenberg, mentions a plagiarism incident. Such biographies are usually subject to editing by many editors, and material of this sort doesn't usually stay very long unless a source is cited; in this case, a Wall Street Journal article. Dpbsmith 17:29, 7 January 2007 (EST)

Reply For starters, Wikipedia has no policy against gossip. That isn't just a matter of "editing by many editors." Gossip is not educational, and is often anti-intellectual. Look at 100 entries in the Encyclopedia Britannica and you're unlikely to see any gossip. Look at ten substantive entries in Wikipedia (other than the silly music/Hollywood/political stuff) and you're likely to see many instances of gossip. Also, I've noticed vulgar entries in Wikipedia that would never be found in a real encyclopedia, but it would violate the policy of Conservapedia to post examples here and they are not worth looking for.

Let's take your Nina Totenberg example. Here are the first five sentences:

Sentence one: Totenberg attended Boston University, and is the daughter of violinist Roman Totenberg, who is professor emeritus at Boston University and also teaches at the Longy School of Music.

Comment: why this detail about her father??? That's gossipy. The entry is about Totenberg, not her father.

Sentence two: Totenberg is the widow of the late former Sen. Floyd Haskell (D-Colo), whom she married in 1979.

Comment: That fact does not define Totenberg, and should not be the second sentence. Again, this is leading with gossip.

Sentences three and four: She married H. David Reines, a trauma physician, in 2000. On their honeymoon, he treated her for severe injuries after she was hit by a boat propeller while swimming.

Comment: This is really silly gossip at this point.

Sentence five: Totenberg began her career with the National Observer, from which she was fired for plagiarism in 1972.

Comment: That was over 30 years ago, and it exaggerates an incident concerning a couple of paragraphs. This is gossip.

One of the reasons people like Wikipedia is because it is so gossipy, without yet having the stigma of the National Enquirer. The same people would blush at the suggestion of reading the National Enquirer, which has higher standards than Wikipedia.

Disclosure: Totenberg interviewed me once on NPR. --Aschlafly 20:39, 7 January 2007 (EST)

Six degrees of separation: Nina Totenberg was a high school classmate of mine. (I knew her about well enough to say hi to her in the hallway).

The policy relating to gossip is the "verifiability policy." Gossip may be included in Wikipedia if (and only if) it has been previously published by a reliable source. Dpbsmith 21:03, 7 January 2007 (EST)

That's interesting concerning your connection to Nina Totenberg!

Gossip may well be verifiability. I don't think it is unreliability of information that makes it gossip. The National Enquirer is reviewed each week prior to publication by high-powered attorneys, but it is still rightly scorned. So why isn't Wikipedia treated in the same light? It should be.

The Totenberg entry says, "She married H. David Reines, a trauma physician, in 2000. On their honeymoon, he treated her for severe injuries after she was hit by a boat propeller while swimming." Since medical records are considered highly confidential, I'm skeptical that claim is verifiable. I clicked the "reference" for it on Wikipedia and it is a "Site Error." There are many such "references" on Wikipedia. --Aschlafly 21:24, 7 January 2007 (EST)

Comment: Is the Totenberg entry the best example of wikipedia's gossip and vulgarity? The example above is only borderline gossip-ish. The other examples of "gossip" you gave are relevant biography information. I can see why you find "gossip" prevelant throughout wikipedia.

--Ben 22:49, 7 January 2007 (EST)

Reply: It is enough to observe that Wikipedia has no policy against gossip, other than a general (and relatively new but unenforced) policy against unverified claims. Gossip is welcomed by Wikipedia and, as with the National Enquirer, helps boost popularity with the general public.

In http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Seigenthaler_Sr._Wikipedia_biography_controversy

it was a hoax that created a backlash against Wikipedia. But perhaps the real problem was how Wikipedia welcomes gossip.--Aschlafly 23:14, 7 January 2007 (EST)

Another Comment: I suppose it is worth pointing out that gossip can be true and verifiable. Such a policy does harbor some worthless (though not necessarily bad) information.

--BenjaminS 09:58, 8 January 2007 (EST)

Another Point of View You can debate whether or not Wikipedia has a gossip problem all you like. However, that is not an example of Bias, just proof of alot of useless but not biased information. --TimSvendsen 10:14, 8 January 2007 (EST)

I agree. I think the "gossip" critique has more merit to it than the "bias" critique. I'd put it something like this:

Wikipedia's openness and lack of central authority is particularly problematical in the case of biographies of living people. Many people enjoy attacking public figures whose ideology they disagree with by inserting unflattering, scandalous, or spiteful statements into an article about them. As the Seigenthaler incident shows, such statements may go uncorrected for a long time. But even when Wikipedia works in the way its advocates say it is supposed to work, the result is only that the unflattering information is presented neutrally and is an accurate representation of material that has been published by a reliable source. There is no overarching, enforced policy like the New York Times' "all the news that's fit to print."

Thus, in the case of the Nina Totenberg article, it is possible to achieve a fairly stable consensus that an early incident of copied material should carefully attribute it to the columnist that reported it, accurately summarize what the columnist said, say where the columnist said it, not editorialize by calling it "plagiarism," and should include Nina Totenberg's own statement about the incident. What is not possible in Wikipedia is to declare that the incident is irrelevant, remove it from the article, and get the removal to stick. Dpbsmith 16:56, 8 January 2007 (EST)

Examples Of Bias???

Many of the entries in this article are examples of bias but some of them are just reasons why Wikipedia is not a very good website. Nos 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16 and 18 are not examples of bias.

Beating Out Wackypedia

Hey me and Andrew were discussing, if we want to beat out the amount of entries that Wackypedia has, we have to really pick it up and start putting alot of post up. We need approx. 274 for 10 years and we just get to 1,000,100. Thats if they dont put up anymore post. We need to get out to others cause we cant do this by ourselves. If we are going to do this all by ourselves, each of us has to do at least 5 entries a day, that is everyone in the class. Just wanted to alert the community. We need to grow. Thats all folks! Will N.

Will, thanks for the encouragement. More postings are helpful, most of all to the person who is posting the information. He learns and won't forget that material for a long time. That said, the vast majority of postings on Wikipedia is silly trivial or worse, lacking in any real value. I bet 90% of Wikipedia could be removed without hardly anyone even noticing or caring. --Aschlafly 16:50, 19 January 2007 (EST)

Well, you already have more articles than the Scots Wikipedia, anyway. Dpbsmith 19:58, 19 January 2007 (EST)

Another thought:

Do you expect the growth of a project like Wikipedia or Conservapedia to occur at a constant rate? ("274 articles per day for 10 years?") Or do you expect it to be an example of a geometric progression?

If Conservapedia has 3,000 articles and grows at 70 articles per day, that means that it grows by 2.3% every day. I don't think it will really keep doing this, but let's suppose it did. My calculations show that 1.023³¹, that is 1.023 multiplied by itself thirty-one times, is 2.02. That means that the number of articles would double every month.

If the number of articles in Conservapedia were to double every month, how long would it take to reach a million? Dpbsmith 06:55, 20 January 2007 (EST)

• I think that our focus should be not on the number of pages, but on the quality of the pages. The number of possible useful, high quality pages is finite. We do not need to have a million pages if half of them are going to be controversial or useless. It is much better to have less pages and maintain our high quality standards. SharonS 07:53, 20 January 2007 (EST)

I agree with you Sharon, but disagree at the same time. We can make higher quality pages (which I have already seen us do), but lets make alot of them. Cant hurt us. It will only make us better. More pages, and higher quality. Thats what we should do. We have alot of pages (considering how long we have been around), but they are of a high quality. We need to keep doing this. On google if u punch in Online Encyclipideia, ours is not in the first 5 pages. We need to get more publicity. This is done by: 1. More terms and higher quality; 2. Sharing it with others. Thats all we can do for now. If there is anything else, add on to the list. Will N.

As a way of placing more information on Conservapedia and encouraging more posting by others, I've just added links to Conservapedia by other websites and posted my American History Lecture One.--Aschlafly 20:29, 20 January 2007 (EST)