I'm sure they're effective at maintaining the appearance of objectivity, so I agree that things will look terribly biased if they take a collective leave. That it will actually be worse on contentious topics, I'm not so sure if. My assumption for Wikipedia on any contentious topic, is that professionals have been gaming the system for so long that you're going to see very competent propaganda.
Basically I think it's good if people stop trusting Wikipedia on contentious topics.
I find that the type of person who think themselves very smart for noting how objectivity is never absolute, microbiases experts if you will, will give a pass to most obvious propaganda when it goes in the direction of their contrarian beliefs. The argument seems to always be "Since it's not perfect we may as well do away with it".
> Basically I think it's good if people stop trusting Wikipedia on contentious topics.
What is the alternative ? Being born smart (i.e "not a sheep") ? Review the much less accessible corpus of academic literature on any subject ? Read a 300 to 1000 pages book ?
If half the people who boast being critically minded (but really just contrarian) did the actual work to engage with Wikipedia articles, the commentariat would be in much better shape.
The alternative, is to "do your own research" yes. No matter how much they sneer at it, no matter how many people who say they do it suck at it. You have to put in work if you want to be well-informed about anything.
There doesn't have to be an alternative to Wikipedia as a short-cut to being well informed on contentious topics, because there isn't a short cut, and the sooner people realize, the better.
You can still use Wikipedia for non-contentious topics, if you wish. I do, sometimes. I'm still not going to invest into it though - I'm way too disgusted at the Wikipedia sausage making process for that. That process is made for the contentious topics, it poisons the non-contentious topics, and it doesn't even work well for the contentious topics.
After a point, sufficiently competent propaganda is indistinguishable from information.
If you make the bias so subtle that people actively looking for it can't find it, you're just doing a decent job describing the topic. Sure, the cumulative slant across hundreds of pages might be enough to tweak populations at the margins, but I don't think that's a bigger negative than access to the information is a positive.
And any other source of information is hardly going to be unbiased anyway. Everyone has an opinion!
No. So if you're OK with having the most respectable wrong beliefs about a contentious topic, go for it. It's basically the political equivalent of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
Yes. It's a contentious topic. It shouldn't be a contentious topic, but it is.
If you decide to go with the Wikipedia "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" opinion on climate, you won't be well-informed. For that you'll have to do a lot more of that reading you don't have time for. But as it happens, you'll be on the whole right, because (last time I checked) the people trying to deny the climate crisis on Wikipedia weren't very successful. It's such an old "dispute", I think Wikipedia may have developed antibodies so to speak, before manipulation could get really competent.
The scary topics are the ones we don't know are contentious. I couldn't give you examples of those, obviously.
If all the people who are uninformed and ignorant are on your side, I am sorry but it's your job to distantiate themselves from them and show what you actually care about is being integrated back into the scientific consensus (which is never perfect, terrible I know)
It seems that climate change denialists have failed to do that
I'm not sure you understood me. The people who are uninformed and ignorant and go to Wikipedia for their takes, get the right take on climate in my opinion.
But lots of uninformed and ignorant people don't go to Wikipedia for their takes on contentious topics, do they? It seems to me that the climate change denialists are capitalizing on that.
One of my mantras is: Bad people sometimes have good points. And it sucks when they do, because then they use that as leverage for all their bad points. Climate denialists have all bad points on climate, but "Wikipedia can't be trusted on contentious issues" is unfortunately not a bad point, because it's entirely true.
So your argument is basically "since it's not perfect, it shouldn't exist" aka Nirvana fallacy.
Concerning doing your own research, are you reading all research paper on all topics in the world? Or do you sometimes rely on an authority or scientific consensus, exactly as Wikipedia does?
I have never said Wikipedia shouldn't exist. I said you shouldn't trust Wikipedia on contentious issues.
If you had wanted suggestions for gradual improvement, I'd say wikipedia would be better with a "high stakes" template to a lot of pages, with blunt language about idiots fighting over defining the objective Wikipedia position on issues.
I can. They're oftentimes rather random, but the talk pages on contentious topics are rather illuminating. One of the more interesting ones I have encountered was about the descendants of Genghis Khan.
Basically I think it's good if people stop trusting Wikipedia on contentious topics.