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Comment by cassepipe

9 days ago

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.

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cassepipe

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vintermann  9 days ago

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.