QUOTE(Peter Damian @ Mon 19th January 2009, 2:38pm)
QUOTE(Doc glasgow @ Mon 19th January 2009, 2:13pm)
The soap opera stuff, which is mainly about the power-politics of the Role-Playing wikipedia are just one massive distraction. I mean, who outside the bubble should care about FT2's attitude to animals, whether his edits were oversighted, or whether Lar did or didn't tell his wife about Slim's friend? It's all horseshit that concerns egos, personalties and pride of people who ultimately have the option of turning off their PCs.
No, you really don't have the faintest idea about the real issues, do you. The issue is about the ownership of the Zoo page by a group of individuals led by FT2 who had an agenda to normalise the practice of bestiality. This group persistently bullied and tag-teamed against numerous editors who wanted an impartial view of the subject. Precisely the same issue applies to the Pederasty articles, and to [[Ayn Rand]] and Sociology, junk science and all the rest. I have been campaigning about this for a long time in case you hadn't noticed. See my articles here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FLAThttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:TABOOSo while it also has plenty to do with power-politics, namely the fact that a person like FT2 with his advocacy for not one but two partisan fringe groups (the other being NLP), there is an issue of principle here. How does Wikipedia protect itself from fringe groups infiltrating its power structure and taking control? Any thoughts in your head, Doc. No, I thought not.
Ha!
There's a simple answer to your question: it doesn't, and it structurally can't. Get over it.
Wikipedia is biased in 100 ways, and has various pages of minority interest (and not so minority interest) controlled by cliques of fringe and not-so-fringe POV pushers.
Without going into cultist pages, just try some neutral editing on Intelligent Design, or Messianic Judaism and see how far you get! Powerful users have been getting away with this for years (jayig anyone?) and always will.
Of course, you can fight a righteous fight against it, but you'll soon give up, as we all do.
However, there's a difference. If wikipedia contains biased, slanted, and controlled content, there's plenty of other things out there to ballance it, and so it's harm is minimal. (Probably no more "harmful to truth" than Fox News, and there's lots of fine content on uncontroversial issues to balance it). However, biographical articles on people otherwise unnotable on the internet can do real harm.