John J. Miller makes a suggestion in The Corner which resonates with me:
Wikipedia is about to change the way it does business, making it harder to update information on living people. In the future, editors who belong to a special rank will have to approve changes to these entries. The site is responding to a genuine concern about accuracy. At the same time, this new rule will limit the effect of crowdsourcing, which has been Wikipedia’s greatest strength.
So how will this affect conservatives? Given O’Sullivan’s Law — organizations that are not actually right-wing will become left-wing over time — the answer is: probably not well.
Wikipedians have beat up on conservatives for a while. A year ago, I wrote an article on Wikipedia’s liberal bias:
A Wikipedia entry is only as good as the person who wrote it or the last person who edited it — and if that person is a liberal who isn’t committed to the Wikipedian principle of objectivity, conservatives can suffer. “I used to monitor my boss’s page,” says a former staffer to a Republican congressman. “The people who set it up were obviously on the other side.” A section on “notable stances,” for instance, included data from pro-labor and pro-abortion groups — and no alternative views. “I tried to offer some balance,” says the staffer. “I didn’t take down any of the liberal material, but I did add content from a more conservative orientation.” He became a Wikipedian, editing the entry from home or a public library.
The answer to the problem is obvious: More conservatives need to follow this person’s example and become Wikipedia editors.This would be a good project for the Media Research Center or a similar media watchdog group. Tracking the liberal statements of Chris Matthews remains useful, though less useful than it once was, given the diminished standing of the mainstream media. Making sure that Wikipedia has fair and balanced entries on everything from Jim DeMint to global warming may be more important.
The other day, I checked Wikipedia’s entry for “Winter Soldiers.” All allegations that many of the men who gave eyewitness testimony were either not servicemen or had not served in Vietnam was brushed away.
This sort of thing happens all the time at Wikipedia, but as I have no idea how to edit an entry, I shake my head and move on. (IMDB is a much more user-friendly site.)
If anybody can provide a good Wikipedia tutorial, here’s the place to do it.
Mike, You make a good point, a very good point. Conservatives need to learn to engage in the culture, not flee from it. If we abandon something like wikipedia, it will veer sharply to the left.
And unfortunately, far too many people (particularly the young) rely on it and trust it. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had some troll try to cite the wikidepia to me as a source for some silly argument they were making. I always like to point out the number of people the Wikipedia has wrongly declared dead, with the most famous being Fox Sports announcer Terry Bradshaw.
Terry Bradshaw’s dead?!
So said the Wikipedia, much to Terry’s surprise.
I agree this is a real problem. We can’t let this go they might just as well rename it “Sorospedia”.
Wikipedia:Tutorial
Thank you, David.
While we’re at it, Snopes is taking a liberal dive, as well.
Somehow I ended up at Wikipedia’s entry for “media bias.” Just out of curiosity I read the entry and virtually every source of information was from Media Matters or similar groups – no mention of the MRC, Newsbusters and the conservative entry was about a paragraph long. Most of it was written in typical academic speak. Wikipedia’s inherent strength is its inherent flaw, which is how something as ubiquitous as the discussion of media bias against the right wing can be completely snowed over on a major entry.
I read Wikipedia for entertainment purposes. If I want information, I check out the direct source that is referenced, but even those are somewhat shady depending on who did the reporting and just what the person doing the entry took out of it.
My last employer used a “wiki” for internal documentation and “an institutional memory”. No one really used it, or kept it up to date. As the new guy, I got the task of doing some cleanup. I hated it. As someone who knows HTML and CSS and all that, the limitations were annoying and cumbersome, and I could see how/why on public sites like Wikipedia, it’s the true believers who are willing to put up with the lousy design and interfaces end up dominating. (And no surprise, since the same people are already comfortable with “theoretics” and “deconstruction” and other such gobbledegook.)
I’ve had some troll try to cite the wikidepia to me as a source for some silly argument they were making.
Recently I came across a squish who was defending his labeling of Palin as a “right wing wacko” by citing Brooks and Frum and Parker and the like. I responded that “if you are going to use an ‘appeal to authority’, you should at least use an authority that the other side respects and uses.” I feel the same way about those who cite wikipedia.com.
TVTropes is a wiki that is relatively free of political bias — and tends to collectively scold itself when such things get caught. They tend to talk about and analyze fiction in a way that makes it difficult to introduce political bias, unless you’re trying really hard to do so.
All the same, I may be one of the few openly right-wing editors there.