Posted by: EricBarbour
Because you might endure some indignity.
Because other bloggers might use Wikipedia as a mark of dishonesty....
I refer to http://skepticblog.org/2010/12/09/skeptoids-massive-ddt-fail/.
In which he admits he used WP as a source for info on DDT, and was promptly attacked for it by other science bloggers.
Note this in Tim Lambert's http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/11/skeptoid_fact_check_part_1.php:
QUOTE
The JunkScience guy has a blatant libertarian agenda. The SourceWatch guy has a blatant anticorporate agenda. Big whoop! They're both still researchers. I have no problem citing either if they've done the research I'm looking for.
If you must insist that this makes everything coming from either guy always right or always wrong, then you should demand to see the voting history of every scientist or researcher in order to determine the quality of their work.
As the Skepchick blogger (and actual working entomologist) said:
QUOTE
I can guarantee you that within 24 hours of this post, there will be at least one, probably more, commenters that will accuse me of racism (“you want to kill brown people in Africa!â€) or of lying about DDT. They have shown up all over my blog whenever I bring up the topic of DDT and Rachel Carson. Their primary methodology is copy/paste of the same old tired arguments over and over.
So. Although WP has a prevailing pseudo-screwball-left-wing pro-Israel bias, the DDT article
(and probably other articles dealing with pesticides) is being diddled by a very different crowd.
Result: still basically the same. Wikipedia is POVed all over the place.
(Bonus! Read the WP article on
Steven Milloy, operator of junkscience.com.
Left hand, meet right hand. Wash, repeat.)
Posted by: EricBarbour
Oh, btw......
If you examine the DDT article, you will find that it cites an http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3186 as an external link.
In which he discusses the "controversy" over DDT, and mentions the fact that some of the organizations promoting it (such as Africa Fighting Malaria) are actually right-wing fronts for corporate interests.
Who is Aaron Swartz? He's that nice young man who ran for the WMF board of directors in 2006.
And http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AaronSw/Election.
At the time, he wrote http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia to Jimbo.
I wonder if Aaron has read the DDT article lately. It currently appears to be saying some favorable things about the use of DDT in the third world for malaria control, despite the problems, which are mentioned but sometimes glossed over. Obviously this article is a major POV battleground.
Posted by: Peter Damian
I couldn't work out who the good guys and who the bad guys in that one. Or was that the point? In any case, the quote was priceless.
QUOTE
Whenever people ask me about Wikipedia’s reliability, I always answer that it’s great if you want to look up something about boron, but increasingly shaky if you look up 9/11 or something where there are lots of ideologically-charged cranks vandalizing articles with their own nonsense.