Hacker News Reader

Comment by efitz | Hacker News Reader

I know nothing about bitchute, but I am skeptical of the Wikipedia article you cite.

This Wikipedia article excerpt seems like editorial, not information. It might be 100% accurate but the spin is so blatant that I don’t trust Wikipedia on this.

Similarly, I wouldn’t trust a Wikipedia article about Adolf Hitler if it began “Hitler was one of the most evil men of the 20th century”. Although I believe that statement to be true, there’s too much editorial bias.

I want an encyclopedia to tell me unbiased facts and let ME make the moral conclusions.

“Conspiracy theories” and “right wing” are labels of opinion, not fact, these days. They don’t inform, they label.

View on HN

The claims you mention are backed by eight (8) sources. Additionally, there has been extended discussion on the Wikipedia talk page for this article about this exact "neutrality" issue. You should have a read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:BitChute

I would invite you to improve the wikipedia article and contribute.

I would love to but on politically charged topics, zealous Wikipedia editors revert any change in tone, even from an emotional to neutral tone.

When that happens, how often do you wonder whether you could be mistaken?

I've attempted this several times when I noticed blatant NPOV violations or political propaganda in articles on the most diverse subjects. The result tends to be swift, the edits are reverted without any clear explanation. When I make edits I tend to add a section to the "Talk" page inviting other editors to discuss the proposed change and - after making the edit - add a note to the change calling for a discussion instead of a reversion. The discussion tends to be limited to "this is not a NPOV violation" or "there are sources" where the former is clearly untrue and the latter tend to be circular references to articles in activist publications. As it stands Wikipedia is not a reliable source for anything which involves politics - which is getting close to being just about everything now that even mathematics is getting challenged by critical theorists. This is a classical example of the tragedy of the commons with political activists abusing the platform for their own purposes without taking into account whether this abuse weakens the platform - which it clearly does.

Would you be willing to point us to some of the edits you made?

Yes, I would also love to see these edits!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com