Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-07-25/In the media

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• Stop giving this guy attention. He has not been a representation of what Wikipedia is for almost two decades now. – The Grid (talk) 23:22, 25 July 2021 (UTC)
  • I suspect it's inevitable that he'll always be sought out for comment, since he lends the impression of an authoritative voice to the existing suspicions of large numbers of people. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 00:03, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
  • "I am finished with Wikipedia criticism. Quote this back to me if I happen to lapse." (2013) Regards, HaeB (talk) 00:23, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
    • Oh wow, something that has nothing to do with what I stated. I acknowledge Wikipedia's criticisms but this person has not been a representative of Wikipedia for almost 20 years. – The Grid (talk) 00:32, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
      • In case you didn't get to click the link, it's a quote of Larry Sanger himself, from a moment more than eight years ago where he perhaps felt himself that he had passed his shelf life as Wikipedia critic with special status. Regards, HaeB (talk) 00:41, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
    • If not for his citizenship, Sanger could pursue a political career in India. Our Prime Minister went from "free vaccines" to "pay for your vaccines" and began giving free vaccines only after our Supreme Court showed some spine (but the government spent taxpayers' money on the vaccines and still insists on printing the PM's picture on every certificate). All in 3 months. Tube·of·Light 13:43, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
      • @Tube of Light: Please don't bring up random political disputes unrelated to the topic of discussion. It makes having productive discussion more difficult. --Yair rand (talk) 03:11, 27 July 2021 (UTC)
• This stuff with Sanger is just nuts considering that a) he hasn't been part of Wikipedia for, what, 19 years now and b) this "left-wing bias" charge acts like all English Wikipedia editors are from the U.S. which isn't true (anyone have the numbers?). Some of the most active editors on American politics articles are from other countries where I'm not sure this right-left distinction fits. I think this debate in U.S. right-wing media probably involves a handful of articles that present summaries of subjects they take issue with. It's ridiculous to state that there is a political bias in 6M+ articles unless suddenly science, civility and information verifiability are a political stance. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 23:24, 25 July 2021 (UTC)
  • @Liz Here's the numbers: [1] Note that "active editors" is defined as having made more than 5 edits in the last month. US-based editors make up a plurality, but not the majority. AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 00:36, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
    • I wish that was given in percentages but it's definitely less than 50% of active editors are from the U.S. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 03:02, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
      • • I think it was 42% not too long ago. Johnbod (talk) 18:48, 27 July 2021 (UTC)
      • The right-left distinction fits in most places. The right-wing media may take issue with it for good reason if it is left-wing but pretends to be neutral. What is more dangerous than news organisations which spout blatantly political dogma is organisations which spout it but claim it to be neutral which is done by much of left-wing publications such as this one. DukeLondon (talk) 11:57, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
        • I am one of the 190 portuguese listed on that list of active users. I stay away from US politics articles, quite frankly, one, I don't care much about US politics, and two, surely not enough for the trouble it takes. I bet some (many?) non-US editors do the same, more than US editors. Meaning that it is likely that editors involved in US politics' articles probably are a (clear?) majority from the US. I do feel WP has some US-left bias, we even actively campaigned for one side (Wikipedia:SOPA initiative). - Nabla (talk) 18:24, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
          • I don’t think SOPA was a left-right issue. X-Editor (talk) 20:37, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
            • Quoting our article on it: Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) expressed opposition to the bill, as well as Representatives Darrell Issa (R-CA) and presidential candidate Ron Paul (R-TX), who joined nine Democrats to sign a letter to other House members warning that the bill would cause "an explosion of innovation-killing lawsuits and litigation". If it brought together Nancy Pelosi and Ron Paul, it's not a left-right issue in any obvious way. XOR'easter (talk) 20:41, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
              • As I said, I don't care about US politics :-) so I might got it wrong (but I definetely do not want WP - with all its non US editors and users - dragged into US politics, left or right). But I note that just because someone "from the left (or right)" oppose some law, it does not prove the law is right (or left) wing. The same if they support. - Nabla (talk) 17:15, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
        • When has Wikipedia ever claimed that it is unbiased and neutral? We do have NPOV, but it only says Wikipedia tries to be neutral and unbiased and not that it is neutral and unbiased. X-Editor (talk) 20:28, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
        • I haven't heard of anyone referring to Wikipedia as a "publication", I usually think of that applying to media like newspapers, magazines and books, not user-generated content websites. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 04:04, 27 July 2021 (UTC)
          • While there exist downloadable snapshots and sometimes curated derived products that are released, usually by third parties, WP is indeed more always in flux versus a published product. —PaleoNeonate – 06:00, 27 July 2021 (UTC)
• I find the section about link rot to be particularly interesting.--🌀Locomotive207-talk🌀 23:54, 25 July 2021 (UTC)
  • Apropos, InternetArchiveBot has just been approved for global bot status, meaning that it will be able to combat link rot on 250 smaller wikis beyond the 65 projects where it had been enabled so far. Regards, HaeB (talk) 00:27, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
    • We tried unsuccessfully to persuade Wikimedia to acquire the Internet Archive. As it is, it falls well short of our needs. In Rio in 2016 I tried to get the IOC to keep the Rio2016 site, but the domain registration was paid for only until 2017. It was archived and sent to the IOC, but what happened to it then I don't know. We tried to grab everything we could for Wikipedia; our experience of London 2012 was that the Internet Archive would not correctly or completely archive the site. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 05:48, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
  • @Hawkeye7: Did you see the story about the NTV (Russia) archive at News and notes? If I'm not mistaken this is a hugely important archive of 1+ million news stories that was uploaded (with proper licensing) by a pretty small project Russian Wikinews. If they can do that, why can't Wikisource, Commons, or just about any other project? Unfortunately there are many news outlets that are in danger of closing with there archives in danger of being lost. We may have just lost Apple Daily's archive in Hong Kong - and there may be other papers in HK soon to be in a similar position. I've got my eye on another newspaper in Russia that may be in a similar position - but how would I even approach them to ask for permission to upload 150,000 articles?

    Yes I did. Russian Wikinews is a surprisingly active project - far more so than its moribund English-language counterpart. I once wrote an article on a dam opening in Australia, and it was quickly translated into Russian. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 02:26, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

  • Locomotive207, yes, it was a fascinating piece. The other comments about newspaper archiving make me think - I've heard that some archivists are now encouraging the creation and storage of certain types of long lasting microfilm. The big advantage to microfilm, evidently, is that it's not very technologically difficult to rig up a projector to read it, so we can be confident that future generations won't be scuppered by a lack of VCRs or DVD players or whatever technological gizmos they've long since left behind. Ganesha811 (talk) 18:19, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

• Even in the US there are lots of newspapers closing down. What would happen if the Podunk (Iowa) Press came to us and said "please save our archive". I can give you one example of this type of thing (details are sketchy - from memory) An important big city newspaper, The Chicago Daily News closed about 1980 and donated their huge archive (starting about 1890 - with photos) to the Chicago Historical Society stipulating that they be open to the public. They digitized much of it in a joint project with the Library of Congress and the archive was tempotarily on the LOC website. But the CHS withdrew them after a few years. Why? Copyright problems? Too many people copied the photos? Don't kmow. So is there anything Wikipedia. WMF, Wayback Machine can do to help out in this type of situation? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 15:43, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
• Wikipedia is at war with the Jews? That is the most hyperbolic nonsense I’ve ever heard about this site aside from Sanger’s recent comments. X-Editor (talk) 00:59, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

  I'm sympathetic to both sides but unfortunately smelled the obvious BS reading the Jewish Press blog post. I'm sure WP abuse by antisemites exists but this overgeneralization and those accusations are over the top... And calling theocratic Islamists hard-left? Or I guess it generalizes academia as "Islamists", since it also accuses academia. —PaleoNeonate – 05:42, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

  The author makes it pretty clear that you need to assume "Muslim" and "left-wing" are two subtypes of antisemitism. There's also a distinct lack of understanding of Verifiability and other editorial policies and guidelines (we don't just make up descriptors like "right-wing website" from nowhere—we're repeating what those small blue brackets say). — Bilorv (talk) 14:11, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

• I also find it very sad that Larry Sanger has gone down this path of far-right nonsense. X-Editor (talk) 01:08, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
  • I'm disappointed (and rather surprised) that a newspaper I view so highly (The Independent) decided to publish an entire article regurgitating that nutter's views – there's not even meaningful journalism accompanying it, it's just quotes or paraphrasing. Jr8825 • Talk 01:21, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
    • I was also surprised by The Independent’s article. Very lazy journalism for a publication that’s usually very good. X-Editor (talk) 02:09, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
  • And it's not about things where reasonable people can disagree, e.g. whether the Biden article should give more room to Ukraine etc. (although I think Sanger is wrong there too), or criticism of English Wikipedia's handling of the lab leak theory (which some editors clearly went too far in dismissing outright). Rather, Larry Sanger has
    • been quite preoccupied with the Pizzagate conspiracy in recent years
    • appeared to espouse the Great reset conspiracy theory (e.g. "You are an enthusiastic citizen of a new clown world in which “liberals” systematically ignore and excuse the fact that the apparatus of a global totalitarian regime is being set up. This is not an exaggeration. It's 100% true. Think about it. What happened in 2020? [...]"I DON’T TRUST THESE PEOPLE—the Covid vax mafia the ppl installing a global vax regime. Sure, even Trump, when he pushes this experimental vaccine.")
    • proclaimed that "there is an *amazing* amount of excelent (sic) evidence of fraud" in the 2020 presidential election (a mere four days after the event)
  • and so on.
  • And while these are recent quotes, it had become evident years ago that Sanger's strong belief in his own epistemological supremacy would set him up for such failure modes. See for example Rationalwiki's detailed description of how Citizendium (the Wikipedia competitor Sanger launched in 2006) devolved into promoting pseudoscience and becoming a "crank magnet", thanks in large part to Sanger's leadership.
  • Regards, HaeB (talk) 01:59, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
  • He is not far-right. DukeLondon (talk) 11:57, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
    • He may has not explicitly state that he's alt-right but he sure keep using dogwhistles related to it because it gives attention to him -Gouleg🛋️ ^harass/_hound 13:36, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
• I'm very disappointed that David Collier has failed to take notice of some of the great work being done on Holocaust-related articles at the moment. Also Sanger is full of garbage and speaks from an incredibly narrow point of view (which I guess is the NPOV he's looking for) by painting all of Eng Wikipedia with the brush of the standards of what right-wing American political media thinks is fair. And what evil indoctrination machine hosts its own page dedicated to highlighting all of its flaws? -Indy beetle (talk) 05:08, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

that article also seems to equate anti-semitism with opposition to the present government of the State of Israel. All of the instances he give are those dealing with recent politics, not with coverage of any other aspect of Jew or Judaism. DGG ( talk ) 03:33, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

Not... quite. He claims the Balad al-Shaykh massacre ~70 years ago (not really recent politics) is "fake history", but this is a position so bizarre I don't even see anyone speaking up for it on the talk page. (And as usual, even if his homebrew history was actually correct, then the WP article still properly covers the "wrong but mainstream" view, verifiability not truth etc.) SnowFire (talk) 23:02, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Non-random break

• Don't we have any better pictures of Larry Sanger? Ones that make him look like he's not a serial killer? Hawkeye7 (discuss) 05:48, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
  • @Hawkeye7: - I wouldn't have picked that photo if I thought anybody would think that he looks like a serial-killer. This photo (or various cropped versions) is about the only Sanger photo used on-Wiki. Please check commons:Category:Larry Sanger to see if you can find a better one. If you post it here I might put it in thr article. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 15:01, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
  • Now I'm curious as to what about him makes him look like a serial killer. He looks nothing like Dr Seuss when Shakespeare disses him (on Epic Rap Battles of History on YouTube) 39 seconds into the video. Tube·of·Light 15:45, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
  • He looks more like your stereotypical middle-aged uncle who is into or works with computers -Gouleg🛋️ ^harass/_hound 18:21, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
  • The source of this photo was Sanger's own website, so the above concerns seem a bit exaggerated. (It is quite dated though; I would suggest to include a caption like "Larry Sanger in 2006" next time.) Regards, HaeB (talk) 07:16, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

• For info, on page 12 of the latest issue of Private Eye (#1552) has a piece on Sanger/Daily Mail/WP. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 11:26, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
  • The description of the magazine includes "satire". Is that what they have treated Sanger's claims as? Tube·of·Light 13:43, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
    • The Private Eye is a very interesting publication, part satire, part exceptionally high quality investigative journalism. I presume it's in one of the latter columns. Jr8825 • Talk 19:24, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
• It's times like this that make me wish we could obtain gag orders against Sanger and some anti-Wikipedia news sites (or at least make a press release publicly disowning Sanger just for the sake of it). I am aware that it could mean stifling one's freedom of speech, but there should be a limit to even that right. Criticising real issues like incomplete articles? Sure, that's sensible. Exaggerating things clearly for entertainment? Hey, Hamilton exaggerates some things (and makes other things up) and I love it. Yapping about a non-existent global conspiracy to make Wikipedia leftist? That's not sensible. Tube·of·Light 13:34, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
• Sanger has also boosted QAnon, calling the Q drops an "information source" [2] rather than, you know, garbage. Yesterday he was retweeting PragerU and yammering about a massive left-wing and mainstream media movement to cancel the Bible [3]. The day before that, he called Tucker Carlson, noted employer of white supremacists, election-fraud conspiracist and anti-vaccination activist, one of the most effective bulwarks against the insanities and evil of the left [4]. A few days before that, he was dismissing the delta variant by sharing a story from the New York Post. I could keep scrolling, but I think I'll content myself by quoting the advice I formulated for a hypothetical journalist last summer: It is against our policy to indulge in speculation that Larry Sanger has been desperately grasping for relevance since the year of Super Troopers, Star Trek: Nemesis, and Blade II. However, if you make that comparison, we are allowed to report that he has, according to reliable sources, been trying to ice-skate uphill. XOR'easter (talk) 20:26, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
• A story in The Wall Street Journal did not reference Sanger specifically but said in "How Science Lost the Public’s Trust" that science writer Matt Ridley held "Wikipedia long banned any mention" of heterodox topics like the Wuhan lab leak theory. It's a bit awkward, then, that the article COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis exists. To be scrupulously honest, I should note that I argued for deleting that page, but only because it looked like a disruption magnet that would be redundant with pages like Investigations into the origin of COVID-19, COVID-19 misinformation, Wuhan Institute of Virology ... XOR'easter (talk) 20:37, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

• It's really only existed as anything other than a redirect for less than 10 days. Prior to that, editwarring that was allowed to result in the redirect to another topic. Even a draft of a new article was deleted in February. I'd say Sanger Ridley has a point on this one. ☆ Bri (talk) 22:10, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

The other articles have discussed the topic for over a year. (For example, when COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis was a redirect, the section it redirected to was 500+ words long, not including references. And Wuhan Institute of Virology already had content on the subject in February 2020.) The draft was deleted because it was a POV fork of content that already existed in mainspace. Not having an article dedicated to something is a far cry from banning "any mention" of it. XOR'easter (talk) 23:31, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

I was about to discuss this WSJ opinion source: it appears to be a press release for a book that is more about advocacy than science... —PaleoNeonate – 04:13, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

The earlier presentations about the lab leak hypothesis presented it as a fringe conspiracy theory, which might not be NPOV coverage for something discussed extensively in the most reliable general sources and is a political as well as medical issue. Personally I think we're in danger of looking as silly as we did with Donna Strickland. DGG ( talk ) 03:48, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for adding that. I was trying to think of a way to put my thoughts into words on this. It seems like we've swatted some things aside as redirects to "things only obvious idiots believe in". Allowing the heterodox to be presented only as something worthy of derision is constructively banning any mention of it, and is likely to drive away tons of GF editors. As described in the now-defunct WP:WikiProject Alternative Views, alternative views [are] at risk of neglect, misrepresentation, and a level of coverage not in keeping with their relative notability. Preventing development of a neutral article in draft space seems like the icing on the cake to me. ☆ Bri (talk) 18:37, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

• I will repeat what I wrote on the "Wikipedia Weekly" Facebook page: He (Sanger) was very influential in the first year of Wikipedia and that's his little claim to fame. Then he slunk away nursing his wounds (an anarchist was mean to him!), and has spent the last 19 years being consistently and spectacularly wrong about every single issue related to online free encyclopedias. Now, this "philosopher" has gone over to the MAGA cult and Qanon. So sad. He and The Devil's Advocate will spend years interviewing each other. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 04:14, 30 July 2021 (UTC)