Comment by cassepipe
9 days ago
If all the people who are uninformed and ignorant are on your side, I am sorry but it's your job to distantiate themselves from them and show what you actually care about is being integrated back into the scientific consensus (which is never perfect, terrible I know)
It seems that climate change denialists have failed to do that
I'm not sure you understood me. The people who are uninformed and ignorant and go to Wikipedia for their takes, get the right take on climate in my opinion.
But lots of uninformed and ignorant people don't go to Wikipedia for their takes on contentious topics, do they? It seems to me that the climate change denialists are capitalizing on that.
One of my mantras is: Bad people sometimes have good points. And it sucks when they do, because then they use that as leverage for all their bad points. Climate denialists have all bad points on climate, but "Wikipedia can't be trusted on contentious issues" is unfortunately not a bad point, because it's entirely true.
So your argument is basically "since it's not perfect, it shouldn't exist" aka Nirvana fallacy.
Concerning doing your own research, are you reading all research paper on all topics in the world? Or do you sometimes rely on an authority or scientific consensus, exactly as Wikipedia does?
I have never said Wikipedia shouldn't exist. I said you shouldn't trust Wikipedia on contentious issues.
If you had wanted suggestions for gradual improvement, I'd say wikipedia would be better with a "high stakes" template to a lot of pages, with blunt language about idiots fighting over defining the objective Wikipedia position on issues.