[duozerk]

> Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion

Religion maybe, and Wikipedia is indeed pretty awesome for many topics, but politics is THE bad example here.

Much of the political - especially geopolitical - content on Wikipedia has a tremendous atlanticist bias.

[wwweston]

“atlanticist” - the culture of the enlightenment and the good that’s come from it.

Wikipedia does hold ideals, that access to knowledge is a net good, that people can cooperate both in contribution and review without a dominating magisterial authority. That rational dialogue and qualification and refinement is possible, and that it’s possible to correct for bias, and see the difference between bias and agenda.

Like those whose anti-enlightenment agenda is revealed when they use “atlanticist” as a slur.

[sophacles]

No. One can beleive in the enlightenment ideals without placing north america, europe, and the relations between them as the most important thing.

For example - one could argue (quite successfully) that the US and Europe propping up dictators in south america and middle east to secure easy access to oil against the wishes and election results of those nations is opposed to many enlightenment ideals, but it is still atlanticism by prioritizing north american and european relations and preservation of values within their little bubble.

Also, just because there was much good resulting from enlightenment thinking, we also got things like the slave trade, the belgian congo, various genocides and so on from it... all of which are pretty bad.

The very notion that the enlightenment had all the answers and that there is nothing more to improve or learn is itself anti-enlightenment.

(I know there were abolitionists in the enlightnement,and examples of people opposed to all the other bad ideas i mentioned, but there are plenty of people who "rationally" argued for them too)

[philipkglass]

Is there another public source for encyclopedia-type articles that is better for geopolitical content? For example, if I have a philosophy question I'll often consult the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy instead of Wikipedia.

If there isn't a more neutral public source -- if there are only sources with different biases, or if the better sources are behind paywalls -- then I think that Wikipedia is still doing pretty well even for contentious geopolitical topics.

Usually disputes are visible on the Talk page, regardless of whatever viewpoint may prevail in the main article. It can also be useful to jump back to years-old revisions of articles, if there are recent world events that put the subject of the article in the news.

Apart from Wikipedia, speaking more generally, I think that articles with a strong editorial bias still provide useful information to an alert reader. I can read articles from Mother Jones, Newsmax, Russia Today, the BBC, Times of India, etc. and find different political and/or geopolitical slants to what is written about and how it is reported. I can also learn a lot even when I strongly disagree with the narrative thrust of what is reported. The key thing is to take any particular article or publication as only circumstantial evidence for an underlying reality, and to avoid falling into complacency even when (or especially when) the information you're reading aligns with what you already believe to be true.

[woodpanel]

Wikipedia has been the proto-Reddit for a long time, that is, it was relatively easy for ideological bubbles to manufacture the Chomskyian Consent, just by being early adopters.

As such it rapidly developed into heavily biased page, as Wikipedia‘s co-founder Larry Sanger keeps pointing out.

It helps if you are proficient in multiple languages so you can at least „hop“ between the (some) bubbles. But the gatekeeping is always there.

[bawolff]

Larry Sanger is not the most convincing on this topic due to how he keeps using conspiracy theories as examples of things Wikipedia is biased against.

Like if the complaint is that Wikipedia is biased against pseudoscience like naturopathy, i consider that a good thing.

[_moof]

Are you talking about English Wikipedia, or all of the Wikipedia sites?

[MarsIronPI]

In general my impression is that the longer the article title is, the more slanted the article itself is.

[defjm]

Could you provide an example article from Wikipedia for such bias?

PS: I had to look up „atlanticist“, did this on Wikipedia. (giggle!)

[hbn]

I know sometime around Trump's first presidency, in Bill Clinton's Wikipedia entry, under the Impeachment section they added in a picture of Trump and Clinton shaking hands, apropos of nothing in the surrounding text.

I just checked and it's still there.