[lbo-talk] SDS and wikis

Lance Murdoch lancemurdoch at gmail.com
Wed Dec 1 15:42:50 PST 2004


On Wed, 1 Dec 2004 11:47:01 -0500, Jon Johanning <zenner41 at mac.com> wrote:
> For politics and other controversial subjects,
> the discussion ("talk") of an article is often more revealing than the
> article itself.
>
> On these subjects, I think it should be regarded as an ongoing
> conversation or dispute among people who care about the subject in
> question, more than as a traditional type of encyclopedia. If you
> really need to depend on what it says on a particular matter, use that
> as a jumping-off point for your own research. Self-education is always
> the best education.
>
> Of course, the same could be said of the traditional encyclopedia, but
> it was always disguised by its hard copy (usually very expensive)
> format, presenting its smorgasbord of "points of view" as the holy writ
> of Experts carved in stone.

I agree. I think Wikipedia is good for non-controversial subjects but I feel that due to the control of the "libertarian" millionaire Jimbo Wales, and his tilted right administrators, as long as the mostly white, white collar American constiuency of English Wikipedia, much of it is hopelessly biased. I've found it's gotten better over the past few months and it's easier to remove spurious allegations and insert apologetics with references, although this is not always the case. I have a lot of data about the Communist Party of Kampuchea, including Noam Chomsky's "After the Cataclysm", a Nuon Chea statement in 1978 to the Communist Workers' Party of Denmark, but for almost a year the Khmer Rouge page has been just a baseless screed against the CPK, and has actually gotten worse. For example two pictures are up - one of 24 people the CPK executed and then a picture of the bones of someone they executed. I mentioned if a picture of 24 people George W. Bush executed and then one of their bones was on his page or the Republican Party page it would be considered unfair. Wikipedia's bias, especially its more hidden and more heavy one from months ago drew me in, sort of like in Robert Benchley's "Making of a Red", and for some reason I've become a full-fledged apologist on the Khmer Rouge, Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin pages. I find it is good as the counter-arguments, especially from the Eastern Europeans who are not super-nationalists are good and help me (and Wikipedia) sort Cold War propaganda to actual misdeeds of the CPSU. Some of it perspective, I'm more forgiving of Khrushchev's Virgin Lands campaign then others (including the Central Committee) were. Even Molotov in his exile thought it was a good idea to some degree.

Anyhow, that's why I like Chuck0's wiki ( http://www.infoshop.org/wiki ), Anarchopedia ( http://eng.anarchopedia.org ) and so forth. I think a wiki of left-wing users focused on history, philosophy, political economy and politics could be a good resource. I could look up Rwanda, Sudan and so forth and see what's really going on, not relying on what NBC News tells me. And of course, these could be niche wiki's, as we could rely on Wikipedia for mostly uncontroversial topics such as quantum mechanics.

LM



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