[WikiEN-l] Consumerium

Fri May 7 22:29:52 UTC 2004

Caroline Ford wrote:

> Do you all really believe that WP is dominated by the left? All I ever 
> seem to see is US rightists and nationalists. If Wikipedia was 
> dominated by the left it would be a much more pleasant place to edit.

Well, it's the old relativism problem.  To a die-hard communist, Green 
Parties look like right-wingers, and to a die-hard libertarian, most 
countries' conservative parties look like left-wing socialists.  I think 
this happens on Wikipedia a lot, to a lesser extent of course.

I think Wikipedia tends to tilt slightly tilted towards the left of 
center, and slightly towards an EU-centric viewpoint, vaguely along the 
lines of BBC News's tilt (though theirs is somewhat more pronounced).  I 
find myself often being slightly on the conservative side of 
disagreements on Wikipedia, while in wider US society I'm generally 
pretty solidly left-of-center (I even like many of Noam Chomsky's books, 
which to many people makes me automatically so far to the left that I've 
fallen off the edge of the political spectrum).  All things considered, 
I think the editorial tilt on Wikipedia is quite good, and on articles 
with a lot of hashing out opinions ends up at a reasonable compromise.  
For example, [[Israel]] neither reads like a pro-Israel nor an 
anti-Israel article, and does an (I think) fairly admirable job of 
presenting the issue.

Individual subsections differ quite a bit though, and some are 
thoroughly tilted in either direction.  Sometimes it's not even a matter 
of facts so much as the viewpoints of the person writing it being 
transparent, which they shouldn't be.  When one reads an article, one 
should not immediately be able to discern the ideology of the person who 
put it there, and with a lot of Wikipedia's articles, you can.  Articles 
should sound like the person writing it does not care what your 
viewpoint on the issue is, while a lot of our articles sound like 
they're trying to pursuade you a particular viewpoint is the correct 
one.  Of course, each side thinks they're presenting the facts 
"neutrally", and some people here are even pretty pretentious about how 
"neutral" their pretty obvious biases are (on all sides), which doesn't 
really help.  I think in particular on issues where people have 
clear-cut opinions they ought to be cautious about claiming their 
viewpoints are the neutral ones---one can use perfectly accurate facts 
and still present them in a non-neutral way, so simply being factual 
does not make one neutral.

-Mark