Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-08-15/In the media

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• Hi Jayen466, Adam Cuerden and Bri. I am confused by the title of the first article. What does this piece have to do with Brazil? Of course, Glenn Greenwald lives in Brazil (which the article doesn't mention!) but he doesn't really talk about Brazil or from a Brazilian perspective in this short piece about Sanger. I find this title quite misleading... --Joalpe (talk) 14:30, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

  You pung everyone except the guy who wrote the headline! I said it that way mostly because it was true, provided grammatical parallelism with the rest of the headline, and suggested an interesting click. (For what it's worth, the globe on my desk suggests that the Brazilian perspective is about 45 degrees tilted from the United States one, so maybe this is why the article appears slanted.) jp×g 14:44, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

  Agreed with Joalpe; while it's technically correct, it seems a bit insensitive to Brazilians and not the way the better newspapers (what few there are left) would handle this. I'd suggest removing "from Brazil" from the headline. Parallelism be damned. - Dank (push to talk) 14:54, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

  Sorry for forgetting to add you to the thread, JPxG. Another issue with this title is that it lists two countries and a US state (and not the United States as a country). This parallelism trick is not helping to convey information adequately. --Joalpe (talk) 15:28, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

  I agree. The headline is clearly showing the site's WP:BIAS. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 10:12, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

• Tangentially related, published today by Lee Fang, one of Greenwald's former Intercept colleagues: Emails Show Hunter Biden Hired Specialists to Quietly Airbrush Wikipedia. --Andreas JN466 17:28, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

  Worth noting that Fang links your March disinformation report, Smallbones. Andreas JN466 17:33, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

• As a brazilian I didn't understand why Brazil is in title since its not mentioned in body. I too didn't understand why to give attention to Sanger's rightwing conspiracies. The Biden laptop "affair" is an obvious dogwhistle. Ixocactus (talk) 18:11, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

  Mention of Brazil now added. Andreas JN466 19:36, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

Sanger misrepresented

Sorry to be blunt, but it seems like the editors either did not read the ID Talk and/or Medium essay they linked, or else grossly misrepresented it. ... Larry Sanger supports Intelligent Design, and fought to make Wikipedia handle it more favourably. This is true: Sanger has been very vocal with his views.: First off, the discussion and essay are nearly 6 years old now, and Sanger deleted the essay 5 years ago, so you don't link any evidence that this is true in the present tense. Second, as Sanger opens his ID Talk thread with As ... an agnostic who believes intelligent design to be completely wrong...., and as the thread and the essay are entirely about neutrality (and to a lesser extent, suggesting moderate policies with respect to significantly large populations in democratic societies) and explicitly neither "support" ID nor its "more favourabl[e]" coverage. Exact words from Sanger's ID thread opener, which are basically just reiterated throughout with no further reference to ID: I just have to say that this article is appallingly biased. It simply cannot be defended as neutral. ... I'm not here to argue the point.

Perhaps the editors can direct this reader to where Sanger actually definitively "supports ID", moreover in a manner that is "very vocal". SamuelRiv (talk) 15:48, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

I agree you have a point and have edited the entry (I didn't write it). Andreas JN466 17:57, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

Be that as it may in this specific case (ID). But Larry Sanger had a long history of espousing fringe views. Adapted from a comment I wrote in 2021 about a Signpost story about Sanger similarly failing on his 2013 resolution ("I am finished with Wikipedia criticism. Quote this back to me if I happen to lapse."): Larry Sanger has

• been quite preoccupied with the Pizzagate conspiracy [1] [2] [3]
• appeared to espouse the Great reset conspiracy theory (e.g. "You are an enthusiastic citizen of a new clown world in which “liberals” systematically ignore and excuse the fact that the apparatus of a global totalitarian regime is being set up. This is not an exaggeration. It's 100% true. Think about it. What happened in 2020? [...] "I DON’T TRUST THESE PEOPLE—the Covid vax mafia the ppl installing a global vax regime. Sure, even Trump, when he pushes this experimental vaccine.")
• proclaimed that "there is an *amazing* amount of excelent (sic) evidence of fraud" in the 2020 presidential election (a mere four days after it happened)

Those quotes are from around 2019-2021, but it had become evident years earlier that Sanger's strong belief in his own epistemological supremacy would set him up for such failure modes. See for example RationalWiki's detailed description of how Citizendium (the Wikipedia competitor Sanger launched in 2006) devolved into promoting pseudoscience and "crank magnetism", thanks in large part to Sanger's leadership. I myself had highlighted that aspect of Citizendium in a presentation at Wikimania 2009 ("Several observers have voiced concern that the mainstream scientific view is under-represented on Citizendium in topics such as homeopathy, water memory, global warming and chiropractic." etc).

Regards, HaeB (talk) 11:57, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

That's all fine. So why can't the writing in the Signpost accurately reflect the sources being linked? The new revisions by @Adam Cuerden -- he feels they should be presented as equally valid, then let the reader decide, as per previous link -- again misrepresents what he wrote in the link cited. This kind of writing is simply sloppy and insulting to the reader, especially following the effort made in providing citations and quotations that both you and I made. (This editor did not respond to my request to comment.)

And shouldn't this popular WP newsletter be setting an example to editors to take special care that their text is faithful to their citations? This obviously does not preclude their own use of style, the writer's ability to give their opinion, or the newsletter from taking an editorial stance. SamuelRiv (talk) 21:43, 17 August 2023 (UTC)