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Infoboxes − Wikipedia's red bus? |
- By Factotem
In the lead-up to the UK referendum on membership of the EU, the Vote Leave campaign wrote on the side of a bus, "We send the EU £350 million a week. Let's fund our NHS instead". That statement was actually a misleading over-simplifiction of the complexities of the UK's financial arrangements with the EU; a deriliction of the duty to properly inform the British public at a time when they were being asked to decide an issue of enormous consequence.
Obviously, Wikipedia is a record of the past, not a campaign to influence the future, more academically than politically significant. But the infobox which appears in many articles is its red bus, the place where complex issues are distilled down to easily digested soundbites. Sadly, they all too often provide the same opportunity for subtle mis-information, nowhere more so than in the result parameter of the military conflict infobox.