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Comment by psychphysic | Hacker News Reader

I do enjoy reading the Wikipedia article on particular hot button topics.

And medical articles are also very frequently biased/agenda driven.

Often it's a complete fantasy omitting any real world painful facts.

I'm easily entertained but a recent one from a week ago was the article on Monkeypox outbreak within the UK[0]. The current UK strategy from the likes of PHE is to vaccinate gay & bisexual men.

It's been a sore topic in the UK, but literally no mention in the article.

The NHS article mentions it [1].

So the world's most popular encyclopaedia, sanitizer its 'truth'.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_monkeypox_outbreak_in_t...

[1] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/monkeypox/

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There is no conspiracy. The main article (linked to in the first sentence of this one) says pretty clearly:

"While anyone can get monkeypox, to date the majority of confirmed cases outside of the endemic regions in Africa occurred in young or middle-aged men who have sex with men (MSM) who had recent sexual contact with new or multiple partners."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_monkeypox_outbreak

You seem to be part of the cover up!

The fact you likely aren't even aware of the incredible controversy around this topic makes clear the santization is working.

>I do enjoy reading the Wikipedia article on particular hot button topics.

Read the "Talk" page too on those

I don't know what you do here. It's being omitted because the alternative is pouring fire on the campaigns by anti-lgbt groups who are trying to use the outbreak as an opportunity to spread the "gay men are pedophile groomers" narrative whenever a child catches monkeypox which when people believe this garbage manifests in real life harm.

Could you explain this whole controversy in the Wikipedia article? Yes, but doing that is also divisive so you just ignore it since it's not that important in the grand scheme of things.

How about just having the encyclopedia stick to the facts?

It's not all anti-LGBT stuff although, that is perennial.

But there were doubts around the vaccine safety and effectiveness.

And the campaign was secretive (invites asked you not to disclose to others it was happening).

This is the problem though, people who are "informed" of the culture war (on either side) have been given a list of dog whistles which are "facts" - true data but which can supposedly be bent to service of enemy objectives.

I've seen so many of these in the last few years who people on the talk pages are literally saying "Yes, but we can't let the Rep/Dem party benefit from this!"

An example of this that I saw was the "86-45" kerfuffle. To eighty-six something means dispose of, in some contexts to kill, and when someone was referenced saying this about trump (president 45) the fans of whoever said it went to Wiki and removed years-old references to the term meaning kill. It was obviously a reasonable statement meaning vote-out in context but they weren't happy letting people read the article and form the correct opinion - they wanted to censor all "potentially misleading" facts.

It’s a very important fact and an objective source should include it. This is a great example of the article’s thesis.

I'm confused about what you're implying has been "sanitized" from this article. there's no indication in the edit history that someone has added or removed any information about the vaccine strategy.

Not that such a history of edits and reverts are required for there to be santization.

But there are edits and reverts and removed versions of the article... So what are you getting at?

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