Originally posted by Severian+November 01, 2006 12:32 am--> (Severian @ November 01, 2006 12:32 am)
Originally posted by
[email protected] 31, 2006 02:48 pm
Big
[email protected] 31, 2006 03:27 pm
and that it's bias
explain how something that is peer edited by thousands of people cna be biased
Are you serious? Those thousands of people all have biases, obviously, including the people who are administrators and tend to have final say on the articles. And there's a sort of average to their biases.
Everything is biased. Critical reading is all about figuring out what the bias is.
Sources don't make anything unbiased; they may make it more truthful or at least factually accurate, but that's not the same thing. At all. [/b]
Thanks Severian, you always seem to say what I was thinking of and about to write. ;) It is completely ludicrous and very naive to think that anything that deals with history or politics can be "unbiased" Everything is biased in some way or another; one quick example is that you cannot possibly fill the entire history of the world in a few pages, so you pick and choose which information to put in , which information to leave out, which to emphasize, which not to emphasize etc. That process in inherently biased and will always favor one point of view and one persepective (bourgeois, working class, etc) over another.
And with wikipedia in particular, the editors and administrators have final say over what stays and what goes in their website. And who generally has time to spend hours and hours pouring over different listings on their website? Not working class people.
A "few thousand people" means absolutely nothing. I can find a few thousand Nazis to edit some news-clippings and write some "history"; maybe they'll even allow some members of the general public to contribute as well, as long as they have final say over what stays in and what doesn't. Does this mean that they won't be biased? Because they have been edited by a "few thousand people?
Quite frankly, it doesn't bother me at all that wikipedia might take off a site like this from its website; this will only make it all the more obvious that wikipedia is profoundly bourgeois and anti-revolutionary. It makes it all the more necessary to create a revolutionary-wiki site which comes from a working-class and socialist perspective as opposed to a bourgeois and philistine one.