DISCUSSIONWikipedia editors caught altering definition of “Recession” to assist Whitehouse get snarky at being called out over their blatant bias.

submitted by ClassroomPast6178 from (en.m.wikipedia.org)

sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]ClassroomPast6178[S] 10 insightful - 3 fun10 insightful - 2 fun11 insightful - 3 fun -  (2 children)

TLDR;

Wikipedia’s page on Recession was subject to lots of editing to make it agree with the Whitehouse’s redefinition of the word. They got caught so after trying and failing to argue that they were right, they reintroduced the neutral point of view and proper definition, but not before having a bit of a passive-aggressive tantrum on the talk page.

Be interesting to see what other Wikipedia pages have been given an ideological laundering to meet the standards of the current year and keep them in agreement with The Message.

Edit: when I worked in cancer research, over a decade ago now, we did a very small scale, informal study of where patients were getting their information from, and we found that Wikipedia was, even then, the number one source. We then looked at pages relevant to the cancers we treated and used some open source tools to look at the changes over time and where the changes were being made. We found that one of the treatment equipment manufacturers (I’d tell you, but it would dox me as the field I was in was tiny) was altering the relevant disease and treatment pages to make their products stand out and rival products suddenly gained side-effects (often completely false). It was a concerted effort to advertise direct to patients in markets where that is prohibited (iirc only the US and New Zealand allow it). Anyone that claims that Wikipedia and editor bias doesn’t matter is either an ostrich with their head in the sand or trying to cover some shit up.

[–]AkbarZip 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Wikipedia editor here, there are actually rules against that kind of stuff, you can get banned if you don't disclose upfront that you're being paid to edit on someone else's behalf and they find out.

[–]GammaKingPreferred pronouns: "My Liege" or "Your Majesty". 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Wikipedia's issue is that the application of the rules entirely depends on whether someone else investigates and reports it. Since most editors are expressly partisan objections are only ever raised when it runs against the desired narrative. A DNC employee can quite happily edit pages on Republicans to introduce bias and nobody will bat an eye.

In a similar vein, any newer editor who pushes against the mob is accused of being an "SPA", which in turn is used to justify harsher bans from enforcement of already convoluted policies. This actively pushes them away from editing and maintains the clique-like community.