Wikipedia's political bias problem

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Re: Wikipedia's political bias problem

Post by CrowsNest » Thu Oct 18, 2018 8:33 am

Oh, and note now BullRangifer has outlined why it would be OK for JzG to block people on the basis of this essay (it is currently widely believed even by those who support it, that by committing it to paper, JzG has disqualified himself from ever being able to block anyone in the US politics topic area).

BullRangifer believes JzG can (and should) use his Admin powers in this fashion, because he would not be blocking them for their political opinions, but because they are being disruptive. Because, and he sees this as a FACT, having the wrong political opinion guarantees you will disrupt Wikipedia. He said it, plain as day ("it's a fact that it affects their editing").

The whole point of this horrible essay, as he says, is to enshrine the sheer arrogance it takes to declare everyone who doesn't accept the truthiness of it, as an ENEMY OF WIKIPEDIA. Naturally, he doesn't see the irony at all. Not even a little bit. Because he's a deranged little fuck, for whom "fact" has become indivisible from the (right) "opinion".

Let me give you a practical example. Say an editor puts in their user page that they believe the southern border wall is a good idea. They don't say why, they merely state it is their opinion. But they do make edits to related articles. Under this essay, that editor needs to be blocked, and can be blocked by JzG, without any examination of their edits at all. The mere fact that they are editing, is a problem, according to this essay, or at least BullRangifer's interpretation of it, which is most assuredly how JzG intends it to be interpreted in the fullness of time.

If this fucked up shit isn't a matter for ArbCom, if the community does not want them to step in and apply corrective action in the form of stern reminders of what policy says and why, then frankly ArbCom has no role at all. And if you know anything about JzG and the Untouchables like him who have always been at the core of Wikipedia, you know he has always been of the opinion that ArbCom should not exist, or at least it should not exist to curtail his powers. As he has repeatedly said, where is the questionable Administrative conduct in what he has done?

Wikipedia is biased as fuck. At the core, institutional level.

Anyone who disagrees with this essay who is still editing Wikipedia in the belief it is a neutral reference work, is a fool. Because they are coming for you. You will be given the special mark, you will be herded into the special transport, your influence on their world will be erased. Systematically, all above board according to the new policies this essay laid the groundwork for, policies that the Founders of Wikipedia could never have even imagined (seriously, do you see Jimmy Wales supporting this garbage? he knows how fucked up it is, how potentially inflammatory it is). Again, they do not see the irony. Much like hard-core Trump supporters do not see the irony in much of what they say or do.

Don't say I didn't warn you, you stupid fucks.

Oh, and hey, good folks of Wikipediocracy, how about you do your job and EXPOSE some of this shit? If you really want people to believe you're not just a Wikipedia clone, happy to host only Wikipedian views of what is logical and defensible. It won't matter how hard you suck his dick, JzG is never going to bestow legitimacy on your shitty website. The mere act of posting on there will be added to the list of what makes a person incompetent to edit, soon enough. And I so want to see the look on the face of Tim "I stood up to the evil Jimmy Wales, aren't I brave?" Davenport when it happens.

Useless fucking pseudo-critics. Into the sea with you.

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Re: Wikipedia's political bias problem

Post by CrowsNest » Sat Oct 20, 2018 9:39 am

ArbCom has now officially refused to see anything wrong in what happened over how the appropriateness of Guy Chapman's disgusting essay was discussed, or anything in their remit which compels them to step in and overrule the community.....

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case&oldid=864829040#Statement_by_Pudeo

This is such a monumental mistake, even Banedon spotted it. Banedon! You know you fucked up if even Banedon can explain how you fucked up. Not the brightest tool in the box, him. But every word of this is true.....
I think Arbcom should accept the case. A significant number of people were offended by the essay. The rationale behind declining the case is, the solution from the previous dispute resolution is sufficient - but that solution is "JzG did nothing wrong and Obsidi should not feel offended", which is hardly a solution. The people offended are still going to be offended. By having an Arbcom case, this dispute can be resolved even if the result is the same (sort of like how I'd be more satisfied if a lower court rules against me, but I appeal and the higher court still rules against me).

The dispute should be within Arbcom's remit - it's about JzG's conduct in writing the essay. Remember a case doesn't have to result in sanctions. Even if Arbcom finds against JzG, it can amend the essay instead of sanctioning JzG.

There's also one thing to be said about the MfD: Alex Shih effectively had only two choices, to delete or not to delete. He couldn't have said something like, "you can keep most of it but delete this sentence". Arbcom can.

In short: accept the case since it will resolve the dispute. If Arbcom does not accept the case, the only way this dispute will be resolved is if the people who were offended stop being offended, which is not realistic. Banedon (talk) 01:52, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
"Stop being offended"! is of course exactly how many Wikipedians, including many supposedly highly trusted Administrators, are claiming this dispute should be resolved. It's moronic. Hence why certified morons like MjolnirPants are Cullen happy with the outcome. When they are happy, right minded people should be very unhappy, because those two represent the exact sort of brain disease you need to be afflicted with to be able to see the things that happen on Wikipedia as normal.

People are not only going to keep being offended, they going to be furious when they start getting blocked on the basis of this essay. That is the not so cryptic message of BullRangifer, or mini-Guy as we should probably start referring to him as (sorry Jytdog, there can be only one apprentice). He has a list of names now. A list of people with the wrong views.

What's really fucked up, other than that blatant example of psychological warfare, is people, including an Arbitrator, are claiming Banedon made a mistake by assuming Alex only had two options. The key word there is "effectively". In theory, an MfD closer can keep an essay while compelling the removal of offending parts. What he clearly meant was that in this case, there is such disagreement over which bits, if any, actually violate policy, this was not an option. Not to mention the bits which manifestly do violate WP:POLEMIC, Guy would absolutely go to war to keep. Up to and including using his status as an Administrator. These are things only Arbcom can fix when, as is clearly the case here, there is only a dispute because countless editors are willing to ignore policy in ways that are manifestly not good faith or well reasoned. Indeed they are lies. Blatant lies.

Wikipedia is institutionally biased because so few editors spot these things. Many of them see the issues, they see the lies, they see how things are being manipulated to the point policy means nothing. They just choose not to act, because to do so would weaken Wikipedia's ability to be a combatant. The people really in control of Wikipedia are those who think like Guy Chapman and BullRangifer. Who are biased to their very core.

The Arbitrators even denied seeing any problem specifically with how Guy used his tools, now we apparently have this declaration of his biases. People literally put examples of where he has used his tools against people who he decries in this essay, for the reasons he decries them in this essay. And they chose not to see it.

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Re: Wikipedia's political bias problem

Post by hyatt » Fri Oct 26, 2018 4:13 pm

Obsidi, who proposed the Arbcom case against JzG, has now been indefinitely banned as "NOTHERE" for reporting Mjolnirpants abusing his rollback tool and misrepresenting a source to include an unsourced BLP violation calling Milo Yiannopoulos "inspired by neo-nazis and white nationalists" because he wrote an investigative piece on the alt-right [s]for British intelligence[/s] that was published in Breitbart. Milo, you may recall, was one of the few remotely reliable sources reporting on Gamergate. He is also an asshole but that is no excuse for breaking site rules and abusing tools.

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Re: Wikipedia's political bias problem

Post by CrowsNest » Fri Oct 26, 2018 7:04 pm

They're gonna find any way they can to ban people who try to hold obvious partisans like MjolnirPants to account. He's gone from insisting "There are seven sources used in the article to establish Milo's nazi cred." on 14 October, to conceding there's not an overwhelming consensus for his edit on 24 October, in particular there is no consensus for it at BLP/N (which means it cannot be included), and there was a hell of a lot of whining and incivility from point A to point B. By banning people like Obsidi, people like MjolnirPants are spared this kind of humiliation, and Wikipedia remains steadfastly a tool of the Democrats, presenting their reality as everyone's reality. Obsidi is better off being banned, he is wasting his time trying to combat this problem from inside Wikipedia. The place is rigged, to the max.

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Re: Wikipedia's political bias problem

Post by sashi » Tue Nov 13, 2018 8:18 pm

re Mast Cell, Round 2 is as good a point of entry as any to Calton's most recent appearance on a drama board.

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Re: Wikipedia's political bias problem

Post by CrowsNest » Wed Dec 19, 2018 11:34 am

A reliable source has claimed Linda Sarsour co-opted the Women's March for reasons of anti-Semitism.

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-a ... lting-down

Here are the given reasons why Wikipedia supposedly can't include this allegation....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Lind ... blet_piece

-it is negative information about a living person, which is poorly sourced because....
--the source is biased (pro-Israel)
--the source is a magazine
--the allegations are not backed by quotes or named sources
--the authors are not credible because they are a podcast host and Penthouse columnist
-it would be undue weight because nobody else is discussing it

This is all well and good, and maybe it even has grounding in policy (seems debatable at least for some of the points), I'm just posting it here to illustrate what the Wikipedians do to protect people with the right causes, because it will take you five seconds to find the same Wikipedians doing the exact opposite for people with the wrong opinions.

For certain figures on the right, certainly anyone who has ever remotely said a good thing about Trump, Wikipedians will jump on any vaguely credible source, no matter what it is, where they got their information, or who else thinks it is important, and stuff it immediately into Wikipedia.

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Re: Wikipedia's political bias problem

Post by CrowsNest » Wed Jan 09, 2019 10:25 am

Jimmy_Wales wrote:I think it is pretty clear that what Trump will announce will be that he intends to exercise the powers of 10 U.S. Code § 2808 to begin construction of the wall that Congress is denying him funding for. This is probably not particularly alarming in the short run although, as Smallbones predicts, there will be a lot of noise about it. My concern personally is that this is a trial balloon for the exercise of much more alarming powers that the President may (or may not) theoretically have.

My view is that Congress has been lazy for a very long time in terms of giving increasing arbitrary authority to the Executive branch for all kinds of things. This has largely been kind of ok, mostly because whatever your views of various Presidents, none of them were actual lunatics. Depending on your view of our current President, you may find it alarming that he has these powers.

I'd like to add that I don't mind a little bit of personal chit-chat here about politics, I'd like to always seek to tie it back to Wikipedia. We have chosen a very tough job: NPOV. Dislike for the President, fear about things that are happening in the world, may make it emotionally harder to remain neutral, but remain neutral we must. I happen to personally think that given the decline in quality of the media across the board (there are still fantastic journalists out there, but overall the landscape isn't great) the best way for us to help the world heal is neutrality.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:12, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
Hmm. I somehow don't think someone who can't refrain from calling the President a lunatic, in the very same post he seeks to lecture others about the importance of neutrality, is the right person to be inspiring people to be better sober recorders of history (or in this case, as has become the norm for Wikipedia, scribes of every second of the Trump Administration, which is of course itself an example of inherent bias).

The last time Jimmy said the word "lunatic", in relation to pseudoscience advocates, it turned an already massively biased arena, into a free fire zone. The ramifications were far and wide, and completely ignored by the mainstream media. Jimmy of course has not one clue what he triggered, he has other interests. Even now, there are many Wikipedians who do not seem to accept that calling someone up uninvited, to rant at them about how they are ruining Wikipedia with their "woo" pushing, was not an insane thing to do.

These lunatics are fast becoming The Warrior Priests of Wikipedia, in words and deeds. The worrying thing is, even though these people are self-proclaimed liberals, they tend to all own guns. They tell themselves it is for protection, should a red-hat ever come for them. In reality, they have them because they know, deep down, the final solution is to simply execute the people who go against the doctrine. Purify the gene pool. It's the only logical thing to do.

Pretty tragic that the only hope for anyone in the real world noticing what Wikipedia is all about, is for the Lord High Jimmy to have blood on his hands.

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Re: Wikipedia's political bias problem

Post by CrowsNest » Fri Feb 08, 2019 9:59 am

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =882318874

Wikipedia Administrator Drmies at 01:53, 8 February......

This is a nothing burger, just a bunch of media reports about...well, about media reports. That has news value, of course, but no encyclopedic value. Including it violates our most sacred policy, WP:BLP

Wikipedia Administrator Drmies at 02:13, 8 February......

There is clear consensus among Wikipedia editors that this information has encyclopedia value, and including it does not violate WP:BLP

What an amazing turnaround. In other, completely unrelated news, Drmies can be seen regularly making partisan comments that would explain why he could have possibly been so out of whack even with the liberal leaning Wikipedia community, in his efforts to protect a Democract.

If he was just an editor, that would still be stupid, but couldn't damage Wikipedia, since ignoring obviously biased and obviously stupid editors is part of the editorial process. But he is not. He is an Administrator, and as seen here, that means he can be directly involved in making sure his bias becomes Wikipedia's content reality, through threats, blocks and lockdowns of the article.

What is remarkable, what underpins the bedrock of how Wikipedia locks in political bias, is how he is so blatant about not caring what new users thought, but was most careful not to hold to an unustainable position in the eyes of the in-crowd, even though both were saying the exactly the same things about the merits of the content and the policy argument.

It is worth noting that for all his arrogant claims he alone was enforcing BLP and his opponents should "listen more carefully when an admin invokes the BLP", it should be rather obvious to anyone not trying to abuse Wikipedia, that the policy does not exist to shield politicians from already unfolding media scandals that they have directly addressed in the media, it exists to stop Wikipedia unduly amplifying potentially damaging information about low profile individuals. Similarly, the policy that Wikipedia is not a newspaper does not exist to shield politicians from negative media coverage that directly impacts their careers and public image, it exists to ensure Wikipedia does be become a repository of transient information of no lasting impact.

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Re: Wikipedia's political bias problem

Post by CrowsNest » Thu Feb 14, 2019 6:48 pm

Mark Dice has recruited people to correct his Wikipedia entry. He's has been blocked. Anyone who makes their first edit to Talk:Mark Dice, is being blocked, and CheckUsered. This reaction has been universally endorsed, with not one Wikipedia Administrator noticing, much less caring, that it goes squarely against their policies and general tenet of being open and assuming good faith to those who have no idea what Wikipedia is, and is in all likelihood also a violation of the privacy policy (a recent case of course emphasising the point that you cannot use this privacy invading tool "for political control; to apply pressure on editors; or as a threat against another editor in a content dispute."). The idea every new editor arriving there is a potential sock-puppet and therefore the check is valid, is of course entirely unsustainable, but you would need someone in a position of authority, to be able to give that common sense view of the situation some effect.

This is all fallout from the fight that ensued when none other than Jimmy Wales tried to start a civil conversation over whether or not Dice's Wikipedia biography fairly represents the subject (another basic Wikipedia tenet). He has basically been told to fuck off by a whole host of experienced editors, with the Wikipedia Administrator who is squatting on the page (Tony Ballioni) basically saying Jimmy is........
trying to help a conspiracy theorist white wash his article by making it seem more positive than what the overwhelming majority of reliable secondary sources report..... TonyBallioni (talk) 16:40, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
No block was forthcoming for that gross personal attack, much less a request this editor's status as an Administrator be reviewed in light of such a gross breach of standards. Nor has there been any Administrative response to any of the other similar attacks directed Jimmy's way.

This is all just the latest in a very long line of incidents that have demonstrated that in these current times, Wikipedia is not a neutral observer, but a partisan actor. You will accept what the ruling elite of the site tells you is the truth, and you will not be allowed to use their own processes to review of whether what they are telling you is anything from a subtle misrepresentation to a flat out lie. You will accept that any and all disputes you have with what they say, is down to the fact you are an absolute fuckwit.

This problem is, as always, it easy for people who know Wikipedia polices, to point out in a venue like this, when they are being followed, and when they are being distorted. Such is the unquestioned grip of control of those who do not want policies to be enforced over the site, they would not waste their time trying to make these points on Wikipedia. Hence why the only rational answer, is to simply destroy it.

As has already been pointed out on the talk page, there are reliable sources who say Dice is a "media analyst", currently not present in the article, and therefore it has to be demonstrated these are in the region of fringe incidence, for the obvious dissonance with Wikipedia approved label 'conspiracy theorist', the cause of Dice's anger and Jimmy's queries.

What you don't do, and what Tony obviously did do, because he's very much the fuckwit on this scene, is make it clear and obvious what analytical process you used to get to the outcome you so obviously want.....
He’s a conspiracy theorist who styled himself as a media analyst to gain credibility. No main stream source takes his media analysis credibly, so we don’t call him that.
In the encyclopedia writing business, we call that confirmation bias. It is of course entirely possible there are reliable sources who put Tony's thoughts into words, and indeed in such volume and breadth of commentary that makes it indisputable, far beyond the level needed to completely expunge alternate viewpoints. But naturally, when you look at the article, they are not there. Neither is there any sign of such an analysis having taken place in the talk page, despite Tony claiming this has been debated many times, all ending in agreement with his views of Dice, of course.

If Tony expended as much effort adding text to the article that supports his view of what he thinks reliable sources say about Dice, as he does in arguing against those who think he is full of shit, he might be doing the world an encyclopedic service, and at the very least, would be proving he is not full of shit.

But hey, what do you think he is, a Wikipedia editor? Let some other fool do that shit.

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Re: Wikipedia's political bias problem

Post by CrowsNest » Sat Feb 16, 2019 2:30 am

Unsurprisingly, at the very first sign of someone attempting to analyse in a systematic way, what reliable sources call Dice, so we can know whether the Wikipedians are lying their asses off or not, wouldn't you know, they've now decided there aren't enough sources out there to justify an article on him at all.

Gee, you would think Tony would have spotted that, right? What with him being so knowledgeable of policy and having spent so much time on this article, ensuring it is correct and follows policy. He's a Wikipedia Administrator, no way would be be trying to keep this page around just so he could use Wikipedia's high profile to smear someone he so clearly has a huge dislike of.......no way, that's never happened. :roll:

Oh, and of course, rather than admit they have been caught with their pants down, they are now blaming Jimmy Wales for causing this whole mess. The editor who calls himself Pants included, which is ironic.

Wikipedians really are scumbags. Jimmy says this.......
NPOV is fundamental. Viewing things through the lens of "accommodation" is mistaken. My argument remains completely 100% valid: not liking someone or their political positions is not a valid reason to ignore their concerns about their biography in Wikipedia. I will continue to advise Mr Dice that confrontational behavior is not helpful to his cause, but at the same time, it shouldn't really matter - Wikipedia is about the facts of reality, and that is the only thing that should guide us.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 02:21, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

The point is: I don't care about him or his motives, I care whenever any article needs improving. I advise people regularly that being spectacularly aggressive with Wikipedians is super duper counter productive, and of course it is. But I think we are at our best when we make as sure as we can that our dislike of someone or their behavior is kept strictly separate from our mission of NPOV.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:14, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
....and they all pretend like they DON'T EVEN HEAR HIM.

The governance on the whole site is a fucking joke. You get better standards in a high school debate society. Even my goldfish understands what Jimmy's argument is, but to the Wikipedians being spectacularly aggressive toward Dice, people whose personal views of him are beyond obvious from the posts they are making on Wikipedia servers, they would rather people genuinely believed Jimmy is shilling for him.

Wikipedia would make genuine progress toward its neutrality goals if there was just one Administrator on the site who was prepared to start blocking to enforce basic standards, starting with this massive problem of people just being allowed to get away with ignoring each other, and clearly deliberately, in pursuit of a goal of using Wikipedia to smear political opponents. Jimmy tried it once himself, and they lost their fucking minds.

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