Overall I agree that Wikipedia is largely neutral, and I'm sure great effort is put into it, but we are all human and everyone has biases. It's just whether we're aware of them or not, and even if you're aware of a bias, it can be a trap because we think "oh I'm aware of it, I wouldn't do that" and then trick ourselves into doing it anyway, we just got more skilled at deceitfully rationalising it to ourselves. All this to say, we're all flawed, and as a consequence so is Wikipedia.
A really good example of where this happened is the Toxic Masculinity article, which evolved over time to be a bit more... "Contemporarily woke"[1] instead of purely psychological (last time I checked).
Similar thing happened to a lot of trans articles that tend to advertise benefits of transitioning (and don't get me wrong, there are many life changing benefits for people with gender dysmorphia, I'm not disputing them), but diminish criticism of lack of process and due diligence in clinics prior to green lighting transition, and citations being removed (under pretense of transphobia and the source being biased), etc. Trans representation in related history articles is also being embellished through subtle linguistic edits; they're not wrong per se, but are still deceitful word games (which I think just makes everyone more distrusting and sceptical as is evident from that thread).
I do think the woke neurosis will settle down eventually, and we'll have increased our "decency" baseline in society thanks to it, since all historic movement were riddled with bad actors, but it's still difficult to watch an otherwise good movement soil itself like this, and as an extension influence Wikipedia.
So in certain "niche" categories where things are largely a matter of opinion, it's a bit of a wild west unfortunately. I waged a small edit war in the past, only to be burnt out. I do care about the topics outlined here, but I'm not pathologically online (alas, but apparently I am enough to post this comment) to dedicate so much of my free time on playing edit pong with an on-line asshole (I'm sure their intentions are for the net good since they're technically arguing for things I want in society myself, but I don't like that it comes at the cost of candor and increased overall social outrage and distrust)
[1]: I think being woke in the traditional, pre social-media era was a good thing. Now it's just performative due to communal narcissists infiltrating, abusing and feeding of socially vulnerable demographics. Ie, being woke is good, but performative wokeness is a shield people now use online to be bullies, unfortunately.
0dayz|2 years ago
stainablesteel|2 years ago
spoiler|2 years ago
A really good example of where this happened is the Toxic Masculinity article, which evolved over time to be a bit more... "Contemporarily woke"[1] instead of purely psychological (last time I checked).
Similar thing happened to a lot of trans articles that tend to advertise benefits of transitioning (and don't get me wrong, there are many life changing benefits for people with gender dysmorphia, I'm not disputing them), but diminish criticism of lack of process and due diligence in clinics prior to green lighting transition, and citations being removed (under pretense of transphobia and the source being biased), etc. Trans representation in related history articles is also being embellished through subtle linguistic edits; they're not wrong per se, but are still deceitful word games (which I think just makes everyone more distrusting and sceptical as is evident from that thread).
I do think the woke neurosis will settle down eventually, and we'll have increased our "decency" baseline in society thanks to it, since all historic movement were riddled with bad actors, but it's still difficult to watch an otherwise good movement soil itself like this, and as an extension influence Wikipedia.
So in certain "niche" categories where things are largely a matter of opinion, it's a bit of a wild west unfortunately. I waged a small edit war in the past, only to be burnt out. I do care about the topics outlined here, but I'm not pathologically online (alas, but apparently I am enough to post this comment) to dedicate so much of my free time on playing edit pong with an on-line asshole (I'm sure their intentions are for the net good since they're technically arguing for things I want in society myself, but I don't like that it comes at the cost of candor and increased overall social outrage and distrust)
[1]: I think being woke in the traditional, pre social-media era was a good thing. Now it's just performative due to communal narcissists infiltrating, abusing and feeding of socially vulnerable demographics. Ie, being woke is good, but performative wokeness is a shield people now use online to be bullies, unfortunately.
varsketiz|2 years ago