Wikipedia as a political resource?

Doink · Post by **Doink** » Mon Apr 10, 2006 7:50 am

I am an ignorant teenager. At no time is this more apparent than when I read the debate logs on these forums. Fortunately, I can probably fix this by learning more about how politics works, and the deeper meanings behind the important issues of the day.

For this purpose, I am considering using Wikipedia as a guide to politics. This site has information on practically everything of relevance (and probably some things that are completely irrelevant). Thanks to it, I have learned that no one has settled on a definite interpretation of the lyrics of 'American Pie'. It's also a very professional site. You may not expect a site that allows anyone to edit the encyclopedia entries, but it's true. Dedicated users keep watchlists of articles that interest them, and should some idiot vandalize one of those articles, they can change it right back. If an article is vandalized too much, it's locked and no one can edit it anymore. If a certain person screws around too much, his ICP (sic?) is blocked from editing the site. It also has editions in... more languages than I care to count, frankly (although I doubt any of them have as much content as the English edition). And most importantly (I amy be wrong about this), it's objective. A lot of the articles that I've read don't form any definite opinions. Overall, Wikipedia sounds quite appealing to me right now.

But what do I know? It's not really that hard to impress me. The rest of you, on the other hand, might not be so keen on Wikipedia. So feel free to dissuade or encourage me, whichever sounds better.

Jrynd1 · Post by **Jrynd1** » Mon Apr 10, 2006 10:31 am

WP is generally articles created by people who have time to post. Someone wanting to steer WP towards a specific point of view can easily do this adopting several different personas, claiming bias about the existing article, and having another persona write an "improved" article that is more biased towrds his side.

Unless one of the regulars figures out what's happening and calls the cavalry, the article won't remain objective (although it may look objective).

Greatbeast · Post by **Greatbeast** » Mon Apr 10, 2006 10:53 am

I wouldnt put too much faith on ANY Wiki at all being 100% correct on anything. Its all user entered as far as I know. All it would take is one convincing sounding person telling a few stories and all of a sudden you are way off track...

and thats assuming something (NOT politics) that can actually be nailed down as "facts".

I would consider anything anyone says about religion/politics/etc to be all opinion....some things are just very subjective and there truely is no one answer.

(unlike 2+2=4 or similar)

Sariah · Post by **Sariah** » Mon Apr 10, 2006 11:23 am

I've found that Wiki is pretty reliable. I've never found information on it to be totally wrong, but if you are looking for a good site go here:

http://www.vote-smart.org/index.htm

Project Vote Smart is dedicated to informing voters, free of charge. All of its money comes from private donations, and refuses to take donations from comanies/groups lobbying for different parties. Not only does it give info on politians, it has a section called "Government 101" that will tell you such things like how a bill becomes law to how many Senators we have.

Lee M · Post by **Lee M** » Mon Apr 10, 2006 2:14 pm

I always treat Wikipedia articles with a pinch of salt, but anyone who tries to slant an article politically will generally find themselves blocked. In extreme cases the article may be locked from editing until the administrators have (here's that phrase again) got rid of the troublemaker.

JakeWasHere · Post by **JakeWasHere** » Mon Apr 10, 2006 2:58 pm

Lee M wrote:I always treat Wikipedia articles with a pinch of salt, but anyone who tries to slant an article politically will generally find themselves blocked. In extreme cases the article may be locked from editing until the administrators have (here's that phrase again) got rid of the troublemaker.

When you have 100,000 people working on 1 million articles, the political biases of all those people are going to even out pretty quickly. Anyone trying to make hay by throwing in controversy is going to fall foul of the more responsible editors rather quickly; WP has a policy called Neutral Point of View (NPOV) which is prosecuted tirelessly and equivocally across the site. Radical opinions of either kind are never presented without disclaimers, and false information is generally caught.

The most famous anti-WP story is that of John Seigenthaler; he found a near-slanderous discrepancy in his WP biography, and instead of complaining or changing it himself - which the site not only permits but encourages - he waited three months to see someone else catch it, then wrote a news article slamming Wikipedia. WP, in the spirit of fairness and comprehensiveness, added this controversy to their article on him after correcting his bio.

All WP's problems could be fixed by those who, instead of contributing, choose to stand back and complain about its "editorial slant." The point is that the public can join up in order to CORRECT that slant.

Namrepus221 · Post by **Namrepus221** » Mon Apr 10, 2006 3:05 pm

If your gonna use Wikipedia for politics then I have some land I'd like to sell you.

Honestly Wikipedia is good for statistics, some historicial information, and genreal encyclopedic stuff.

Anything that can have a decided slant to it, most likely does.

Bengaley · Post by **Bengaley** » Tue Apr 11, 2006 4:46 am

Wikipedia is a good place to start. Don't finish there, and NEVER use it as a primary source in anything for school.

~College essayist >.>;

Doink · Post by **Doink** » Tue Apr 11, 2006 7:22 am

Thanks.

Does this Vote Smart site have infomation on current events? If not, what would be a good site to find out about that.

Sariah · Post by **Sariah** » Tue Apr 11, 2006 8:38 am

I'm not sure about current events. I'm not sure about where to find a website for that. I sometimes listen to NPR in the morning. That has a lot of information, and tries to present it as impartially as possible.

Acolyte · Post by **Acolyte** » Tue Apr 11, 2006 12:09 pm

In a recent article in Nature, Wikipedia was shown to be roughly as reliable as the Britannica when it comes to scientific subjects. I'd be a little more cautious about its coverage of any controversial issue, though. While it's often true that such articles are, on average, well-balanced, at any given time some editor might have made a strong effort to impose his paricular point-of-view on it, and until it's corrected it must be taken with a grain of salt. It's often worth a visit to the associated discussion page to see what the current controversies about article content are.

About the Seigenthaler article: One reason this happened was because there wasn't much interest in this person, so the slanderous edit simply wasn't noticed by anyone who cared. This is less a problem in better-attended articles, but by the same token they're more likely to be vandalized at any given time.

Atarlost · Post by **Atarlost** » Sat Apr 15, 2006 7:04 am

I would trust wikipedia as far as I'd trust any encyclopedia for most things.

I wouldn't trust any encyclopedia as far as I could throw it on anything political. Well, that's not true. I'd trust an encyclopedia to tell me raw historical facts (such as the margin of victory in the 1912 presidential election), but never interpretation.

As far as what to do I'd reccomend reading the classics of government: John Stewart Mill's on liberty, John Locke's second treatise on government, Jean Jacues Rosseau's the social contract, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, etc. These are some of the basic foundational political theorists of the west.