Comment by kelseydh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kelseydh | Hacker News Reader

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Wikipedia is actually falling victim to this. Some articles now show noticeable bias (e.g. compare the "Men's Rights 'movement'" article to "Women's Rights"). On many pages, particularly gender related articles, there is a band of aggressive editors who will fight reasonable efforts to balance the tone of articles. Outside contributors who try to improve these pages will get dogpiled on. Unless you are an expert at wiki-lawyering, you won't survive even a couple edits before you are banned or restricted from editing. They enforce/investigate multiple accounts, VPN & proxy usage vigorously, so once you are out, you are effectively purged.

If you are ambitious and make edits similar to what others have tried (often because all of them are trying to fix the same biased statement), expect to be accused of being a "sockpuppet" or of being a "meatpuppet." If that fails, you will be accused of "tendentious editing". Of course responding to these accusations takes extraordinary amounts of time -- which is the point. These tactics are used (very successfully) to reduce people's resolve to contribute or fix biased articles.

Wikipedia's ideological hijacking is a serious problem and arguably represents the biggest threat to Wikipedia's longterm legitimacy. Those engaging in ideological hijackings have (very rightly) realized that if they can define what is written about a movement on Wikipedia, they can control what society thinks about it.

There is a real, documented, historically significant movement for women's rights --- most notably, suffrage. The same isn't true of "men's rights", and the fact that you'd make that comparison is, I think, extremely telling.

This comes across as an effort to shut down discussion via ad hominem. I'm sure that you didn't mean it as such, but "the fact that you x is telling" is a pretty commonly used rhetorical tool to impugn a counterpart without actually saying anything substantive.

What it was is a short comment implying the poster of creating a false equivalence between the women's rights movement and the men's rights movement. What it seems like to you has no relation to it's content.

There are also real, documented, movement for men's rights, for example fathers rights organisations.

    the fact that you'd make that comparison is, I think, extremely telling.

Could one not argue that it is telling us that there is a need for such organisations, and that the privileged mainstream prefers not to address such issues, because it would have to give up on some privileges?

As an aside, what is the reason that you mention the suffrage without mentioning that the suffrage movement did not campaign for women being included in the draft, when the only non-sexist resolution of the conundrum would have been (and still is) to legislate that suffrage should be given exactly to those who are subject to the draft? In other words, why did you omit mentioning this outrageous and still ongoing basic sexism of the suffrage movement?

That's only because "men's rights" are conflated with human rights. You don't have to actively define a subset of rights to a gender in order to specifically address them. It just so happens to be the case with women's rights and suffrage.

Clearly men did and do not have the ability to vote in a large amount of political climates both historically and currently.

This isn't a gender study class. The fact that someone's opinion is "extremely telling" means they are getting their point across, and as much as you would enjoy that to be a GOTCHA, it's not, and you won't be burning anyone at the stake here.

Opinions about the "men's rights movement" and its veracity very, I understand that. I only referenced it because it was an example I encountered where there is a clear effort to make the article's central theme criticisms of the movement.

But more generally, what happens on Wikipedia is that a few passionate and experienced editors with an ideological motive (who have unbelieveable amounts of time on their hands) begin "taking ownership" over a collection of pages. (Some of them even organize "edit-a-thons" with other activists in a team effort to quickly skew a page.) Once the page has become biased, progress to fix it stalls to a standstill because they will fight every change tooth and nail, and because they can dogpile to create the appearance of a consensus in the talk page, they succeed. The other side has equally as many people disagreeing with their stances, but they are not hitting the article all at once in an organized stance so they get picked off one by one.

Without a degree in wiki-lawyering, a team of dedicated editors by your side, moderators who will do your bidding and the equivalent of a semesters worth of free time available to contradict attempts to overemphasize one POV, you don't stand a chance.

If we are going to measure movements in historically significance, the social equality movement far surpasses the women's rights in historical age, number of people involved, number of people being effected, and number of wars been fought and continue being fought over it.

It is pointless to try to compare movements this way as there is always an other movement that is bigger and older.

What is it telling?

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