Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-01-31/Special report



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  • The very set up at Wikipedia has made our efforts more evenly balanced on stories like this. National news casts in the United States are very POV based, in any direction, to the point of being tabloid journalism. Some say Rupert Murdoch had a lot of influence in that trend. Any national media outlet is not-very-subtlety hammering away giving the audience their POV presented as newscasts. Switch channels, and you get the opposite POV. Try and pull that on Wikipedia, and your fellow editors are going to take out what is not NPOV. Nice system here. And, yes, editors like those mentioned by GorillaWarfare work very hard to be neutral and factually thorough on these subjects. We have a lot to be proud of here.— Maile (talk) 00:38, 1 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • As a very distant observer of this event (I am a foreigner who lives in a foreign city located almost at the polar opposite of Washington DC), I can't help thinking that the event has recentism all over it. Sure, some people died, including a trespasser who was shot by police. But the impression I get is that security didn't do very much to prevent trespassing, and that the trespassers didn't really know what to do when they got inside. Hardly a Battle of Midway or Stalingrad, or even of the US Civil War for that matter. As for the impeachment, I just wonder what the Congresspersons have been smoking: why would you bother "impeaching" a President who has already left office, when there is far more important legislative work to do? Bahnfrend (talk) 04:42, 1 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • Why does any politician take any action in a (so-called) representative democracy like America? Public image and to pursue and maintain power. But I think the concrete outcome of an impeachment conviction in the Senate (which won't happen) would be the prevention of Trump from running for office again. — Bilorv (talk) 12:22, 1 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      • If you're right about that, then the impeachment sounds to me a lot like something that the Russian Parliament might do to one of Vladimir Putin's political enemies, or that the Myanmar military might do to Aung San Suu Kyi. Trump is no longer the President. If he really has committed a criminal offence, why can't he just be tried for that offence in a court of law before an impartial judge and a jury, like every other American accused of a criminal offence? Bahnfrend (talk) 07:07, 2 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

    • Hardly a Battle of Midway or Stalingrad, or even of the US Civil War for that matter.

      What a peculiar minimization of the events that took place. A better apples to oranges comparison would be recommended. Ckoerner (talk) 15:51, 1 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    If Wikipedia (and modern technological society as we know it) is still around in another 20 years, maybe the article will have acquired an extra tab at the top: [ Brief article | Article | Talk ], where "Brief article" could be a long-view rewrite. I’m old enough to know what Encyclopædia Britannica looked like before they added the Micropædia to their paper version. Pelagic ( messages ) – (03:18 Sat 06, AEDT) 16:18, 5 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    The Simple English Wikipedia are doing something quite similar to this, but it's also (ostensibly) written in language easy for a non-native speaker to understand. I worry, though, that the process of summarizing leads to the abandonment and misrepresentation of reliable sources. I also don't think that being briefer than the English Wikipedia is actually part of their mission (e.g. simple:2021 storming of the United States Capitol has a stub tag). — Bilorv (talk) 16:28, 5 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • It's not my intention to rain on anyone's parade, but isn't this a bit of a leap?

    That thousands of editors can work together, communicating only through edit summaries and talk page messages, to accurately and comprehensively document breaking news as it unfolds

    (emphasis mine) I mean, don't get me wrong, it's impressive enough that thousands of people can work together to produce anything at all, and that alone is worth celebrating. But to imagine that the in-progress article was either accurate or comprehensive — or even that it was as accurate and comprehensive as it may have ended up by now, a few weeks out from the events, or as it will be in the future, as the result of edits yet to be made — feels like believing our own hype, a bit.
The very nature of a "breaking news" cycle makes it nearly impossible for anyone to provide "accurate and comprehensive" information, after all. (I'm reminded of CNN and their "#FIRST!" claims, which always seem sort of ironic when the reporting done under that banner turns out to have inconsistencies and flat-out errors. Which it not-infrequently does, to greater or lesser degrees. Oh, sure, they go back and correct the errors later, they're not not journalists. But I often wonder whether they might take a few extra minutes to not be #FIRST!, and instead have a better claim to being "CNN: #CORRECT!".) I'm sure there were plenty of times the insurrection article had The Wrong Version live, and there are likely plenty of minor errors still to be corrected or details to be fleshed out in the current version. As I said, it's the nature of the beast, and doesn't make it or the process by which it was created any less impressive. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 12:34, 1 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I appreciate that "breaking news" is never "accurate and comprehensive" except in a relative sense, but would say that's built in to the last part "breaking news as it unfolds". Relative to other reports we're accurate and comprehensive, due to the combination and vetting of multiple reports. Another caveat should be mentioned, even though we all know it: we're *never* the first to report something. Some journalist has to report it first. So it looks to me like much of the time Wikipedia was 15 minutes behind the first reports. That by itself is simply amazing. Smallbones(smalltalk) 17:35, 1 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Any national media outlet is not-very-subtlety hammering away giving the audience their POV presented as newscasts. Switch channels, and you get the opposite POV." - this strikes me as a bit dishonest. Yes, the mainstream media in the US does have a serious agenda-driven POV-pushing problem, but this comes entirely from conservative media outlets such as Fox, OAN, the Daily Caller and their sort. Simply disregard those and you will get accurate, unbiased, non-partisan coverage of events. Mistakes happen, but always due to lack of information rather than malicious distortion of facts, and you can expect a correction before the story even cycles out. With right wing media, that is not the case. 46.97.170.253 (talk) 16:58, 7 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • There's no such thing as "unbiased, non-partisan coverage" because someone has to decide what topics to cover and in how much detail—and that decision is political. For instance, the conservative channel CNN (regarded within the country as somehow "left-wing") broadcasted many Trump speeches prior to his election uncritically and without commentary, in full, because that's what sold. Now they cover every sentence that Trump says critically and with commentary, because that's what sells now. But covering Trump in so much detail is still a political decision. It still plays to this underlying notion of populism—that a political party is defined by its leader's personality rather than its legislation passed and day-to-day activities. This is not to say, of course, that there is no difference between telling lies and truth, or that there is no correlation between political point of view and rate of inaccuracy in coverage.
    This is why I think the terms "NPOV" and "neutrality" as used on Wikipedia are somewhat misnomers. Wikipedia's political perspective is grounded in choices we make like adopting verifiability as policy, never engaging in original research and deciding what level of fact-checking is sufficient for reliability (of a source in a context). These are political choices I (usually) agree with, but they give us systemic biases in coverage of cultures which rely on oral tradition, coverage of (fact-based) ideas which are excluded or marginalized within academia or journalism etc. (That's not even to say that these biases are bad—they could simply be pragmatic given our limited resources and editor numbers—just that they exist.) On the flip side, I love the focus we have on due weight because it implicitly acknowledges that the choices of what or whether to write about a topic is related to provenance, rather than anything being fair game if it's true and "neutrally" written. — Bilorv (talk) 18:43, 7 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • It's hard to cover anything related to the GOP in any other way. The party has completely foregone all notion of policy in favor of right wing populism (which is just a euphemism for fascism, really). The Democratic party is being torn between mainline, right wing neocon/neolib corporatism and actual liberalism, policy wise. Meanwhile, the GOP has got nothing besides trumpism. Therefore that is what CNN covered, because there was nothing else about the trump administration to cover. And it's something that needed to be criticised. I'd say I'm relieved that America finally woke up and voted him out, but then I look at how many people voted FOR him in November and I'm terrified. 46.97.170.253 (talk) 01:38, 8 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think you're misunderstanding my point. In a country where most citizens wrongly think that crime is increasing, wrongly think that refugee admittance is not at an all-time low, don't understand the current admission process for immigrants, don't understand the current laws about sex work, can't name the countries in which the U.S. military is taking action etc., why is it that CNN is choosing to "educate" people about Trump saying "our military is great, our country is great" on a podium for the 600th day in a row rather than educating people about the actual functioning and current practices of your government (which is just as much "news" if not moreso)? Well, because they're making the political decision to do that, and there's a few factors I would argue are behind that decision, but I'm sure you can think of plenty yourself as well. — Bilorv (talk) 14:14, 8 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • That a successful violent overthrow almost happened became a bit more evident after the video from the (show) trial came out. Given the facts we know, it's plausible (word chosen carefully) that different actions of as little as one police officer would have led to a situation where Pence and Pelosi had been hung, half the Senate had been murdered, Trump was still in office today, and so on ... (Someone should write a book, screenplay ...) Surely someone's already published a short story? Excellent final point, Bilorv.
    The window of discourse for wikipedia articles is not very wide. Despite adequate sources [op.cit. galore], we don't report the fact that the scientific consensus among all published reviews in the medical literature based on clinical trials is that the dozens of CTs show ivermectin stops Covid-19. We don't report ANYTHING regarding ivermectin's ability to prevent and cure COVID-19 infection. We don't report on its ability to keep the COVID-19 pandemic from having more than a relatively insignificant impact in all the countries where nationwide, population-wide dispensing of ivermectin is routine either. Not yet anyway. Likewise, we're still reporting on a storming, not a putsch, insurrection or attempted coup.
    It IS for the most part, a good thing when content is excluded from wikipedia. On en, a)Perhaps 99% of the topics that are excluded should be. But among that remaining sliver are important topics like these. b)Perhaps 99% of the topics that are included should be. I wonder if anyone's tried to ascertain the ratio between a and b. (I'm interested here in topics for which we have only deleted content, not topics for which we have no content.)--50.201.195.170 (talk) 05:06, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]