Hacker News Reader

Comment by user3939382 | Hacker News Reader

> the only informational resource on the web that's still unscathed is Wikipedia

Wikipedia is great as long as the topic isn’t politically controversial. In those cases you get the US State Dept/corporate media-approved perspectives with all the censored perspectives available in the Talk page.

View on HN

Don’t forget Corporate PR

I was kinda shocked to see the stats on active editors, laid out fairly well in this report by a source that was banned from Wikipedia by a ridiculously small group

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wikipedia-formally-censor...

That was a particularly egregious ban. I googled a random username of those that voted to ban them, and it belonged to someone that worked for a political think tank in DC that was opposed to their editorial stance on US foreign policy.

It isn't necessarily in the talk page, those are scrubbed sometimes too.

Compare:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Hummus&oldid...

Yes there was an edit war over Hummus being called Levantine because some people insisted the Jews were colonizing the food.

Even political and historical events that you would not think are controversial have become biased.

As an example, there are some Wikipedia editors that continually remove mentions of genocide from the opening paragraphs of Stalin's page, whereas they leave them there for Hitler.

People really enjoy pushing their ideology in their spare time. I really don't understand it.

I think choosing the personal and political like of Stalin as your "political and historical events that you would not think are controversial" is a very, very poor example. It's very controversial and still impacts the lives of ~1 billion people.

Examples?

Start with Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

Can you boil it down to 1 or 2 unsavory facts about Biden (to pick one) that we "should" be seeing on his page, but aren't, due to the incessant State Dept / corporate media troll-editing that you maintain obviously exists?

I mean something along the lines of this kind of messaging being included on Donald Trump's page: "Many of his comments and actions have been characterized as racially charged or racist and many as misogynistic."

While nothing of the sort exists on Joe Biden's page.

Mind you I only gave this inspection some 10 seconds of my time, Ctrl+F for "rac" which I suspected would be one such topic.

While nothing of the sort exists on Joe Biden's page.

Probably because there's really nothing in Biden's history of statements that compares with the kind of stuff Trump routinely says. Not even the "racial jungle" remark (which while impolitic, doesn't carry the racist import sometimes attributed to it).

It does mention the sexual assault allegations (including the not-so-credible ones from Tara Reade), so there's no censorship there.

We don't have to come to agreement on your overall point (and precious few are still reading this thread by this stage). I just wanted to get a sense of where you were coming from.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com