Even if Conservapedia are raving lunatics (and I agree with David on that),
paying careful attention to our critics is a useful exercise. If you're
really interested Fred, make a list of smart people and try to pry specific,
constructive pieces of criticism out of them.
We all know we're not yet meeting our own standards though. There's plenty
of work to on the neutrality front without wondering about how fringe groups
like Conservapedia view our neutrality. The silent majority of readers
already appreciate what we're shooting for with NPOV.
</twocents>
Steven Walling
On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 8:29 AM, Charles Matthews <
charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
On 13/10/2010 16:02, Fred Bauder wrote:
So we got
Conservapedia and some other conservative website accusing
Wikipedia of having a liberal bias. What else is new, or what else are
we to expect?
-MuZemike
Well, is there anything at all to it, or is it just bull?
Of course they can point out deficiencies in Wikipedia articles. Those
exist. The question is whether they can prove the case for either of (a)
conscious slanting or (b) systemic bias, away from neutral treatment. We
should not care if anyone dislikes a WP article because it is neutral:
we should care if a serious deviation from neutrality can be shown.
Naturally Conservapedia is selective in its interests, and probably the
list is as revealing about its selectivity as about anything else. By
putting the focus on a subset of articles it might be possible to
demonstrate selective bias in an area in Wikipedia: I don't suppose
anyone seriously thinks we have no systemic bias of any kind. Which is
why my response was in terms of sorting. It is more perhaps of looking
for signal in a load of "noise". We know that criticisms of
disproportion in coverage, for example, are always with us.
I didn't feel much illuminated.
Charles
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