> Any somewhat political article is extremely left leaning.
I've seen that same argument before to argue how the Nazis, and modern neo-Nazi groups are supposedly all "left wing", their categorization on Wikipedia as right wing and far right is allegedly only the result of that very same "left leaning" bias you are claiming.
Which, as a German, is just a tad bit weird, because it wasn't Wikipedia that defined these groups as such, those results come out of the political sciences. Nazis being right-wing, and neo-Nazis having moved further into the far-right is a very established fact in Germany.
On one hand he complains Obama's article doesn't mention the Benghazi Attack, when that's actually listed as one of the events during his first term.
On the other hand Trump's article doesn't mention the 2019 attack against the US embassy in Baghdad.
The choice of topics after that doesn't help dispel the notion of the author having a bit of an bias issue himself: Abortion, Jesus (a whole lot of that), global warming and vaccines. It's like a best-of of the deeper ends of American conservative talking points, the only thing missing is 2A and some good old "teach the controversy".
Particularly that Jesus part is very difficult for me to take serious: Recognizing that the biblical Jesus is mostly a myth is not "bias", as much as it might offend some religious sensibilities.
Indeed, wanted to check out a few other articles, sadly the "Random page" link only keeps sending me to the very short, and rather unspectacular, article about "Wushu".
> You're not being genuine if you are trying to argue that the coverage of liberals on Wikipedia is the same as conservatives.
And you are injecting a lot of your very uniquely American biases and perceptions into something where they don't really apply.
Wikipedia has over 140.000 active contributors across over 200 languages.
Your notion that all of them have conspired to suppress American conservatives in favor of "liberals", across dozens of different languages, is frankly quite a bit out there and reminiscent of that whole "cultural Marxism" narrative.
That's not to say that Wikipedia doesn't have its issues, it has them, but jumping from there to something that could very well be described as a conspiracy theory, is reaching a bit far.
> There's a reason why there's a Conservapedia.
There's also a RationalWiki, a PsychonautWiki, a GayPedia, there's a Wookieepedia, there's a Wiki for pretty much everything.
The existence of these is not evidence for a lack of such topics on actual Wikipedia, it's merely evidence of more specialized communities creating their own specialized Wikipedias where they can take things to details and dept that would usually be considered inappropriate for a general encyclopedia.
? Actually I find it ridiculous to suggest there wouldn't be a bias.
Are you suggesting wikipedia editors are typical of the population at large? What are you basing that on?
And if you concede there are demographic differences (eg education level) why do you think those differences would be orthogonal to political bias?
Note I'm not saying that there is a bias, but I would say that's the null hypothesis, and a lot easier to defend than the position that there is no bias.
I didn't say bias is not a thing, bias is very real.
All I'm saying that the collective bias that was stipulated, spanning across tens of thousands of users and dozens of languages, would need to be very organized.
Which has nothing to do with wikipedia editors being typical of the population, but a lot with trying to stereotype wikipedia editors as supposedly all sharing the same political bias.
When in many cases they don't even share the same language, nor the same conceptual framework about political dimensions/currents due to often very big cultural differences.
> That's not to say that Wikipedia doesn't have it's issues, it has them, but jumping from there to something that could very well be described as a conspiracy theory, is reaching a bit much.
You jumped to conspiracy theory. You said all. I did not. The editors simply have a bias that affects how they accept and offer contributions. These biases show especially in politically charged topics and you have to identify and check them, often they are factually wrong or misleading. I did not say all articles have this bias, but it is prevalent and makes Wikipedia unusable for any political research, unless you scrutinize all sources and do additional source finding that Wikipedia omitted on purpose because it didn't align with it's viewpoints.
There are niche wikis, but Conservapedia exists to counter Wikipedia's bias on certain topics. They have a page I linked to which lists a lot of these biases, but it's barely an exhaustive list. You can find instances like these on nearly every political page.
This is not some unfounded conspiracy theory as you suggest, Harvard has done a study on this as well as other institutions.
Larry Sanger hasn't been involved in Wikipedia for almost 20 years. He's just a random person on the internet, one with some feelings of animosity towards Wikipedia to boot – he's hardly neutral.
Wikipedia has its problems, but an article that complains "Oh no, Wikipedia calls Trump a liar!" from someone with a chip on his shoulder about Wikipedia in general is silly.
Their name has "socialist" right in the middle of it. You might argue over definitions of socialism and whether it's left or right. But I don't think you can say "a group that calls itself socialist has at least this one left-leaning trait" isn't a position reasonable people can disagree on.
What I find worse than people going both ways on wether nazis are left or right leaning, is someone in a position of authority like wikipedia saying, one side is objectively right [about a question that isn't even rigorously posed] and will be treated as such.
Oh, I don't think socialism is only in the name of nazis, I think their nationalization of many practices and aspects of culture is key. Do you think "nazis had socialist tendencies" is a position that no reasonable people can take?
I didn't mean to suggest taking the name itself as the only evidence of socialism.
> Do you think "nazis had socialist tendencies" is a position that no reasonable people can take?
Yes, because a socialism that benefits only members of the "Aryan race" while excluding, oppressing and murdering others in the same country is not socialism at all.
That can very well be socialism for a subgroup of your existing population.
I think the divergence in views is in the definition of socialism we have; I see it as an economical doctrine of state centralisation, you probably have other egalitarian ideals attached to it.
Economically, on a scale from free-market to socialism, where do you think nazis rank? I think they were closer to socialism that nowadays mainstream left wing parties
> That can very well be socialism for a subgroup of your existing population.
Using that same line of reasoning one could frame the American slave trade as "socialist" in nature because the slave owners were "socialized" by the exploited slaves.
> Economically, on a scale from free-market to socialism, where do you think nazis rank?
Which is kinda meaningless, if you want to see were Nazis stood on what you gotta look at their actions past abstract economic theories and their own PR, you have to look at the people they oppressed, persecuted, killed and for what reasons they did it.
Or you could also look at what kind of people [0] and ideas [1] in large parts inspired them.
Those weren't socialist/communist ideals out of the East, that inspiration came nearly exclusively from the West, a lot of it from over the pond, straight down to originally coining the term "Untermensch" and the associated race theories [2]
> That can very well be socialism for a subgroup of your existing population.
This is like calling ancient Sparta - where the Spartans lived in an egalitarian structure while simultaneously oppressing their Helot slaves - socialism.
Or for a more a recent example, apartheid South Africa, where whites received a great deal of support via government policy that practically ensured their prosperity. That wasn't socialism, either.
Socialism is not about centralized state control. It's about whether the state plays a strong role in ensuring a standard of living for all it's citizens. In successful examples (like Social Security and Medicare in the US) it has accomplished this while the majority of the economy is not under state control.
That's exactly my point, there is a difference between the ideals of socialism and the economic doctrine which plays out when socialism gets implemented.
In terms of economic policy, all the examples you cited are on the left side or going left in my book. There is definitely nothing capitalistic about state intervention.
It also makes sense historically: it took us a long time to understand that capitalism is the most efficient way to create value and advance technology. Even the communist dictatorship that is China understood that and it's using this to rule the world, while the western world (especially the USA) marched back on their capitalism and hampered their economy with more and more regulations.
I think we still don't have enough capitalism and we need a completely unregulated market and no government at all.
> I think we still don't have enough capitalism and we need a completely unregulated market and no government at all.
Who was arguing the merits of capitalism? Not me.
But true colors shine through. It seems like your actual motivation for arguing that Nazis were socialist was just a device to argue for unfettered capitalism by falsely associating socialism with them. That's a weak rhetorical trick that far right commentators have been using for quite a while now.
I'd say that's a staple of socialism/communism/marxism.
From Mao to Venezuela, the core idea depends upon excluding, oppressing, and murder of others in the same country based on class.
The only thing different about the Nazis is they targeted by race not class, though Communist China is targeting Uighur and other minorities in their country.
> But I don't think you can say "a group that calls itself socialist has at least this one left-leaning trait" isn't a position reasonable people can disagree on.
It is to anybody actually familiar with the history of the NSDAP. The "socialism" in their name was mostly PR, what little socialist currents existed in the early NSDAP, represented by the Strasser brothers, was bloodily purged during the Night of the Long Knives.
It's for that reason the very first victims in the concentration camp Dachau were not just Jews, they where German leftist political opposition Jews: Communists, socialists, antifascists, killed as early as 1933. The very same reason why Nazis considered the communist USSR as their arch-nemesis.
> What I find worse than people going both ways on wether nazis are left or right leaning, is someone in a position of authority like wikipedia saying, one side is objectively right [about a question that isn't even rigorously posed] and will be treated as such.
All this information can be found on Wikipedia, not just there, but also local Wikipedias from the places it actually happened. Like the Fuerth Wikipedia being even more in-depth and detailed [0], which is the city next to Nuremberg, both very relevant places for the early rise of Nazism.
That's why it's really not this "open debate" you make it out to be. The only people who insist on that are usually US Americans, due to the caricature "atheist socialist leftist" boogeyman that's been peddled to them for decades and some Eastern Europeans with post-communism shock, to justify their ideological hard shift to the right into often straight up fascism.
I've read extensively on the subject and I'm aware of the claims of using socialism as PR and I'm aware of the great purge.
At the same time, Hitler viewed Marxism not only as a philosophy close to its own, but also as a rival. I don't think the first victims of Dachau prove anything.
The only data I use to argue nazis were closer to socialism than free market capitalism is that their economy (despite having a semblance of a free economy) revolved around the state: prices, wages were fixed, members of the nazi party were put in control of private companies who disobeyed.
Hitler was definitely to the right of Stalin, but he was left of most modern left wing parties.
I also disagree with you that something is not open to debate, and I think it's worrying to hear people hold this view - especially on something so subjective as political categorisations.
That's a well established fact everywhere. That's what every kid studies in school.
I don't think it's correct.
The main problem is that left wing and right wing are meaningless terms.
Left and right generally apply to the economical sphere which goes from communism (entirely state operated economy) to libertarianism (entirely de-regulated market).
Usually when people talk about left wing vs right wing they attach some authoritarian / anarchic connotations. The politicalcompass.org (which is kind of left leaning) has a nice explanation of this problem.
Any somewhat political article is extremely left leaning.
God forbid you have to use it for research of any political topic, always check the references and compare to right leaning sources.
It's funny because their critique of DM can be applied to Wikipedia as a whole.