User talk:The Four Deuces/Archives/2019/February

Venezuela

Venezuela's a perfect example of why our dependence on newsmedia at Wikipedia has become a toxic problem. Here's an example: A group in London came out to protest against the coup. This group was large enough to attract media attention, and one of their spokespeople was interviewed by CTV (Canada) and gave an impassioned plea for non-intervention, where they described the Maduro government as being the democratic will of the people, etc. etc. etc. CTV edited out any mention of which president the protesters supported, and used edited footage from the interview in a spot about pro-Guaido protests. The group whose message was inverted by CTV had to take to social media to set the record straight that they'd actually been saying the exact opposite of what the news reported.

Wikipedia would treat the CTV segment as reliable, the Facebook correction of the segment as unreliable. I have the Venezuela articles, like all of them, on my watchlist. And will occasionally dip in to get rid of the straight up "Maduro is a badman" vandalism. The reason I don't collaborate further is because the entrenched POV warriors there are far more aggressive than even what we saw during the Urumqi riots a few years back. The AN/I t-ban request is the single-most inappropriate WP:BITE example I've seen in ages. Bah. I suspect this particular wiki-ogre (me) is getting ready to return to his cave because between Wikipedia's unwillingness to rein in racists and nativists on one hand and it's unwillingness to separate American foreign policy objectives from encyclopedic content, I'm getting to the point where editing doesn't bring me any happiness. Simonm223 (talk) 18:38, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

It is an inherent feature of Wikipedia articles that they will reflect the opinions of mainstream media for current events. Fortunately, as academic sources weigh in, inaccurate information can be weeded out and the bias of articles will be less pronounced. The problem is though that some standard must be used for what goes into articles, otherwise editors could never come to agreement.

What I find however is that many editors want to go beyond the bias in mainstream sources. For example, one editor decided to state in the info-box that Guaidó was president of Venezuela,[1] while reliable sources do not do that.

While shoddy reporting such as that from CTV may occur, weight, if properly applied, would keep out a story that was only reported in one news source.

TFD (talk) 20:33, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

Ugh, I had to explain to all my commie friends who think that Wikipedia is nothing but bootlickers that, no, the blank incumbent box and the edit protection link were actually to prevent the article from becoming more explicitly biased. Not a fun day that one. Simonm223 (talk) 20:41, 28 February 2019 (UTC)