Following involvement by The International Rights Network (IRN) and Dr. Jeanette Rowley, The Vegan Society’s legal expert on human rights, veganism has now been removed from the NHS Prevent counter-terrorism training materials. Prevent, part of the UK government’s counter-terrorism strategy, is designed to identify individuals at risk of radicalisation. However, it came to The Vegan... Read more »
As someone who edits Wikipedia fairly prolifically and does have quite a lot of insight into how it works, I’m going to go up to bat for it here: Wikipedia operates on the premise that all information (some exceptions apply for information considered obvious like “2+2 = 4” or “Paris is in France” outside of an article on Paris) must be cited to a reliable source. This means that we can only say what the reliable sources have to say about a subject. As much as possible, we aren’t allowed to synthesize from existing material to form a conclusion not explicitly stated in a reliable source. Wikipedia aims to be a tertiary source that captures as best as possible what reliable secondary sources say, interspersing primary sources only as needed and especially as much as possible not personally weighing in. Lastly, we are to provide due weight to viewpoints based on how substantially they’re covered in reliable sources.*
It’s an unfortunate fact that presently, reliable news sources often tend to be biased against veganism. That’s pretty obvious from articles like this that overwhelmingly portray the animal agriculture industry as victimized by an extremist movement, giving only the bare minimum attention to the activists and intercutting their points with “buts”. When this is what Wikipedia has to work with, it really isn’t their fault. It’s a large part of why, for instance, Wikipedia’s article on Elon Musk used to fellate him to Mars and back; it was because reliable news sources absolutely constantly treated this man like a supergenius and consistently downplayed the awful things he would do.
If you’re able to cite specific articles, I can look into them and see if they fall short of Wikipedia’s standards, but ultimately, people need to change before secondary sources will, and secondary sources need to change before Wikipedia can. If you have any specific questions related to the project, I’d be happy to answer; I have pretty extensive experience with policies and guidelines at this point.
(* For instance, if we have an article about a video game that consistently got 7s and 8s from reviewers except for a sole outlier who gave it a 3, we can definitely highlight that 3 as a counterpoint, but we have to consider what proportion of the coverage we give to that review.)
@TheTechnician27 I know Wikipedia perfectly well because I edit it in Spanish. My criticism was not against Wikipedia, but against the bias of many people who edit in veganism that has provoked numerous edit wars and heated discussions in the discussion pages. The veganism article itself has been under discussion for years, where some clearly anti-vegan editors have manipulated. https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veganismo
Oh hey, it’s cool to meet a fellow editor out in the wild, especially someone from another language. I will say for what it’s worth that I so far haven’t run into what I perceive as an anti-vegan bias on the English Wikipedia. Simultaneously, though, I often avoid editing articles specifically about veganism because I recognize I could get heated over what for me is a deeply held ethical belief, so I may just not be where it is if it does exist.
As someone who edits Wikipedia fairly prolifically and does have quite a lot of insight into how it works, I’m going to go up to bat for it here: Wikipedia operates on the premise that all information (some exceptions apply for information considered obvious like “2+2 = 4” or “Paris is in France” outside of an article on Paris) must be cited to a reliable source. This means that we can only say what the reliable sources have to say about a subject. As much as possible, we aren’t allowed to synthesize from existing material to form a conclusion not explicitly stated in a reliable source. Wikipedia aims to be a tertiary source that captures as best as possible what reliable secondary sources say, interspersing primary sources only as needed and especially as much as possible not personally weighing in. Lastly, we are to provide due weight to viewpoints based on how substantially they’re covered in reliable sources.*
It’s an unfortunate fact that presently, reliable news sources often tend to be biased against veganism. That’s pretty obvious from articles like this that overwhelmingly portray the animal agriculture industry as victimized by an extremist movement, giving only the bare minimum attention to the activists and intercutting their points with “buts”. When this is what Wikipedia has to work with, it really isn’t their fault. It’s a large part of why, for instance, Wikipedia’s article on Elon Musk used to fellate him to Mars and back; it was because reliable news sources absolutely constantly treated this man like a supergenius and consistently downplayed the awful things he would do.
If you’re able to cite specific articles, I can look into them and see if they fall short of Wikipedia’s standards, but ultimately, people need to change before secondary sources will, and secondary sources need to change before Wikipedia can. If you have any specific questions related to the project, I’d be happy to answer; I have pretty extensive experience with policies and guidelines at this point.
(* For instance, if we have an article about a video game that consistently got 7s and 8s from reviewers except for a sole outlier who gave it a 3, we can definitely highlight that 3 as a counterpoint, but we have to consider what proportion of the coverage we give to that review.)
@TheTechnician27 I know Wikipedia perfectly well because I edit it in Spanish. My criticism was not against Wikipedia, but against the bias of many people who edit in veganism that has provoked numerous edit wars and heated discussions in the discussion pages. The veganism article itself has been under discussion for years, where some clearly anti-vegan editors have manipulated.
https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veganismo
Oh hey, it’s cool to meet a fellow editor out in the wild, especially someone from another language. I will say for what it’s worth that I so far haven’t run into what I perceive as an anti-vegan bias on the English Wikipedia. Simultaneously, though, I often avoid editing articles specifically about veganism because I recognize I could get heated over what for me is a deeply held ethical belief, so I may just not be where it is if it does exist.
@TheTechnician27@lemmy.world @edumilla@veganism.social ☞ https://lemmy.world/c/wikipedia or !wikipedia@lemmy.world