Er, Wikipedia has a page on misinformation about Covid, and the first example is Wuhan lab origin. Kinda shocked that Wikipedia is calling this misinformation. Seems like their authoritative sources are abusing their positions. I am scared that I’m going to stop trusting Wikipedia soon enough, which is leaving me feeling pretty shook.
Wikipedia has beaten all odds for longevity of trust—I remember pretty heated arguments circa 2005 whether it was referenceable on any topic, though it was known to be very good on technical topics or niches without controversy where nerds could agree on what was true (but not always what was important). By 2010, it was pretty widely respected, though the recommendation from Very Serious People was to cite the underlying sources, not the articles themselves. I think it was considered pretty authoritative in discussions I was having by 2013 or so, and nowadays it’s surprising and newsworthy when something is wrong for very long (though edit wars and locking down sections happens fairly often).
I still take it with a little skepticism for very recently-edited or created topics—it’s an awesome resource to know the shape of knowledge in the area, but until things have been there for weeks or months, it’s hard to be sure it’s a consensus.
Wikipedia is considered trustworthy → people with strong agenda get to positions where they can abuse Wikipedia → Wikipedia is considered untrustworthy → people with strong agenda find better use of their time and stop abusing Wikipedia, people who care about correct information fix it → Wikipedia is considered trustworthy...
The agenda is mainly to follow the institutions like the New York Times. In a time where the New York Times isn’t worth much more then saw dust, that’s not a strategy to get to truth.
I suggest not having a notion of “quality” that’s supposed to generalize across all wiki pages. They’re written by different people, they’re scrutinized to wildly different degrees. Even different sections of the same article can be obviously different in trustworthiness … Or even different sentences in the same section … Or different words in the same sentence :)
Wikipedia unfortunately threw out their neutral point of view policy on COVID-19. Besides that page, the one of ivermectin ignores the meta analysises in favor of using it for COVID-19. There’s also no page for “patient zero” (who was likely employed in the Wuhan Institute for Virology)
I am relatively hesitant to start doing opinionated fixes on Wikipedia, I think that’s not the culture of page setup that they want. My understanding is that the best Wikipedia editors write masses of pages that they’re relatively disinterested in, and that being overly interested in a specific page mostly leads you to violating all of their rules and getting banned. This sort of actively political editing is precisely the sort of thing that they’re trying to avoid.
By saying “Wuhan lab origin”, you can roughly mean three things:
biological weapon, intentionally released,
natural virus collected, artificially improved, then escaped,
natural virus collected, then escaped in the original form.
The first we can safely dismiss: who would drop a biological weapon of this type on their own population?
We can also dismiss the third one, if you think in near mode what that would actually mean. It means the virus was already out there. Then someone collected it—obviously, not all existing particles of the virus—which means that most of the virus particles that were already out there, have remained out there. But that makes the leak from Wuhan lab an unnecessary detail; “virus already in the wild, starts pandemic” is way more likely than “virus already in the wild, does not start pandemic, but when a few particles are brought into a lab and then accidentally released without being modified, they start pandemic”… what?
This is why arguing for natural evolution of the virus is arguing against the lab leak. (It’s just not clearly explained.) If you do not assume that the virus was modified, then the hypothesis that the pandemic started by Wuhan lab leak, despite the virus already being out there before it was brought to the Wuhan lab, is privileging the hypothesis. If the virus is already out there, you don’t need to bring it to a lab and let it escape again in order to… be out there, again.
Now here I agree that the artificial improvement of the virus cannot be disproved. I mean, whatever can happen in the nature, probably can also happen in the lab, so how would you prove it didn’t?
I guess I am trying to say that in the Wikipedia article, the section “gain of function research” does not deserve to be classified as misinformation, but the remaining sections do.
Er, Wikipedia has a page on misinformation about Covid, and the first example is Wuhan lab origin. Kinda shocked that Wikipedia is calling this misinformation. Seems like their authoritative sources are abusing their positions. I am scared that I’m going to stop trusting Wikipedia soon enough, which is leaving me feeling pretty shook.
Wikipedia has beaten all odds for longevity of trust—I remember pretty heated arguments circa 2005 whether it was referenceable on any topic, though it was known to be very good on technical topics or niches without controversy where nerds could agree on what was true (but not always what was important). By 2010, it was pretty widely respected, though the recommendation from Very Serious People was to cite the underlying sources, not the articles themselves. I think it was considered pretty authoritative in discussions I was having by 2013 or so, and nowadays it’s surprising and newsworthy when something is wrong for very long (though edit wars and locking down sections happens fairly often).
I still take it with a little skepticism for very recently-edited or created topics—it’s an awesome resource to know the shape of knowledge in the area, but until things have been there for weeks or months, it’s hard to be sure it’s a consensus.
Could it be a natural cycle?
Wikipedia is considered trustworthy → people with strong agenda get to positions where they can abuse Wikipedia → Wikipedia is considered untrustworthy → people with strong agenda find better use of their time and stop abusing Wikipedia, people who care about correct information fix it → Wikipedia is considered trustworthy...
The agenda is mainly to follow the institutions like the New York Times. In a time where the New York Times isn’t worth much more then saw dust, that’s not a strategy to get to truth.
“No safe defense, not even Wikipedia” :-P
I suggest not having a notion of “quality” that’s supposed to generalize across all wiki pages. They’re written by different people, they’re scrutinized to wildly different degrees. Even different sections of the same article can be obviously different in trustworthiness … Or even different sentences in the same section … Or different words in the same sentence :)
Wikipedia unfortunately threw out their neutral point of view policy on COVID-19. Besides that page, the one of ivermectin ignores the meta analysises in favor of using it for COVID-19. There’s also no page for “patient zero” (who was likely employed in the Wuhan Institute for Virology)
Fix it. (And let us know how long that sticks for.)
You fix it! If you think it’s such a good idea :)
I am relatively hesitant to start doing opinionated fixes on Wikipedia, I think that’s not the culture of page setup that they want. My understanding is that the best Wikipedia editors write masses of pages that they’re relatively disinterested in, and that being overly interested in a specific page mostly leads you to violating all of their rules and getting banned. This sort of actively political editing is precisely the sort of thing that they’re trying to avoid.
By saying “Wuhan lab origin”, you can roughly mean three things:
biological weapon, intentionally released,
natural virus collected, artificially improved, then escaped,
natural virus collected, then escaped in the original form.
The first we can safely dismiss: who would drop a biological weapon of this type on their own population?
We can also dismiss the third one, if you think in near mode what that would actually mean. It means the virus was already out there. Then someone collected it—obviously, not all existing particles of the virus—which means that most of the virus particles that were already out there, have remained out there. But that makes the leak from Wuhan lab an unnecessary detail; “virus already in the wild, starts pandemic” is way more likely than “virus already in the wild, does not start pandemic, but when a few particles are brought into a lab and then accidentally released without being modified, they start pandemic”… what?
This is why arguing for natural evolution of the virus is arguing against the lab leak. (It’s just not clearly explained.) If you do not assume that the virus was modified, then the hypothesis that the pandemic started by Wuhan lab leak, despite the virus already being out there before it was brought to the Wuhan lab, is privileging the hypothesis. If the virus is already out there, you don’t need to bring it to a lab and let it escape again in order to… be out there, again.
Now here I agree that the artificial improvement of the virus cannot be disproved. I mean, whatever can happen in the nature, probably can also happen in the lab, so how would you prove it didn’t?
I guess I am trying to say that in the Wikipedia article, the section “gain of function research” does not deserve to be classified as misinformation, but the remaining sections do.