Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

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This is a good example of an amazingly bad article with the worst type of wiki lawyering on the talk page. It basically still has the same conclusion in the lead as when it was originally created, and most of the claims/leaks against Hunter were considered "false"/dinsinfo... But now that those laptop leaks were either confirmed by different reputable sources, it more or less indirectly calls most of the claims true yet still ends up labeling everything a conspiracy theory for absolutely no reason other than some editors going all "nuh uh"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira...

>"Almost no one is not no one, and simply the "fact" it was Hunter's laptop does not in itself establish anything improper, unless someone is upset about porn. We have no knowledge of its chain of custody. For all anyone knows, his laptop was snatched and flown to an SVR lab in Moscow for "enhancement" before being given to Rudy/Bannon. The Politico piece was not picked up by any other reliable source, it relies exclusively on an assertion by some unnamed guy whose credibility is unknown, hence it is REDFLAG and UNDUE"

After ignoring articles from the guardian, politico, the nyt just because it's supposedly not relevant. And even if it was actually hunter's laptop who care right? It has nothing to do with the article centered on the claims that it was his laptop. I think ultimately this is just unconsequential, and the hunter story does not really matter, but if you contrast it with the wiki page on the russian links with trump, the extreme selectivity in sources somehow just... disappear. Keep in mind that no one is actually contesting that the contents of the laptop are actually from hunter at this point except for Wikipedia. Even the emails have been pretty conclusively proven to be his.

The problem is that it leads to just more preaching to the choir; usually wikipedia is pretty good at neutrality in the tone of it's articles (even when those are biaised, which is normal). But with such a blatant attempt at mental gymnastics through the entire article, you end up convincing no one that the info is actually legit or credible. A lot of recent political articles end up being written in a manner much more similar to a smug RationalWiki article than to an actual encyclopedic text

>This is a good example of an amazingly bad article with the worst type of wiki lawyering on the talk page.

>absolutely no reason other than some editors going all "nuh uh"

They're almost certainly paid to keep that content on the talk page and off the article.

Once you're in the partisan politics bubble normal procedures and safeguards break down because there are absurd amounts of money being spent.

I looked at that talk page and it's just painful.

"It isn't his laptop"

"It isn't not proven to be not his laptop"

"Even if it is his laptop, it isn't his files"

"It isn't not proven to be not his files"

Just admit that it could be genuine or it could be a disinfo campaign. Ugh.

That makes me wonder what is the use in including anything political except blunt facts for a place like Wikipedia. If they want to do “political history” then I’d just have an open dump site of any kindling people want to add to the “discussion” and leave it at that. Basically just an archive of propaganda at worst.

it's always fun to find a page like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Night_(video_game) where a quarter or more of the content is some "Controversy" that everyone has long since forgotten, but at the time it was Crucially Important that the Facts of this Controversy be Documented, so it's given undue weight in terms of percentage of the overall article.

> the extreme selectivity in sources somehow just... disappear

Unimportant articles will draw a different crowd than more important articles. Those different groups will have different standards for sources and tone/bias.

What changes have you made to that article that were rejected / rolled back? How long have you been making edits to it?

The only thing this sort of obvious political bias does is discredit Wikipedia and push readers to less reputable sites for information.

Like many others on here, I prefer to go directly to multiple biased sources like npr, CNN, breitbart, nypost because I understand their bias and can sort through it to tease out information.

The thing that I find the most distasteful is any source that purports to be unbiased, but uses subtle language tricks to skew their readers towards a conclusion.

I find such things to be the most toxic, and avoid them.

I don't agree with the other commenters on here that argue "it's mostly good", so that makes it ok.

When there's a hidden bias, it makes it much more difficult to tease through the information to find something that resembles the truth.

It is mostly good, but the bad parts aren't evenly distributed. There are a couple specific categories of articles where Wikipedia can be bad. Anything political involving people on the Internet is guaranteed to produce a good or bad article depending mostly on which people on the Internet manage to edit the Wikipedia article. Anything political at all from the past couple of years beyond bare facts like "was this person convicted in court", for the same reasons. There's also subjects that not a lot of people care about, which can be good or bad depending on how competent the 1 or 2 people who edit the article are.

What bias do you think CNN has? Genuinely curious which part of the spectrum you think they belong to, because I could make arguments for either side.

Breitbart is an editorial/propaganda magazine, not a news source. Why would you go there for anything?

>What bias do you think CNN has?

CNN was openly anti-Trump for the entire administration, as in, instructions were literally passed down that reporting should be slanted in such a way as to taint him.

It isn't a case of having to think they have a bias, it's a case of literally being told that bias is part of their policy.

It wasn't hard to spot, either. Their reportage during the Trump administration was absurd. You'd have headlines and first-paragraphs that were contradicted by the entire rest of the article; the headline and intro para made Trump look bad, the rest of the article begrudgingly attempted to convey the facts. It was utter nonsense.

> CNN was openly anti-Trump for the entire administration, as in, instructions were literally passed down that reporting should be slanted in such a way as to taint him.

Interesting. Do you have a link to the evidence of these instructions? I'd like to read them.

There was an incident with a whistleblower - a CNN reporter - recorded in a restaurant relating how there'd be a narrative line passed down from the top every day. You'll have to dig it up as I can't remember the guy's name. Was relatively widely reported.

> Breitbart is an editorial/propaganda magazine, not a news source. Why would you go there for anything?

I think that label can be applied to most "news" sources these days.

To answer your question specifically though, it is because they report on events that other places don't, based on their particular bias.

> But now that those laptop leaks were either confirmed by different reputable sources

Citation needed

The citations are in the talk page of the article I linked. And a few of them are even at the end of the lead paragraph of the main page. The entire comment was about the citations that are in the article but still ignored in the main body ;)

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