Why Wikipedia cannot claim the Earth is not flat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_Wikipedia_cannot_claim_the_Earth_is_not_flat

by duncanjbrown • 9 months ago

140 91 9 months ago

en.wikipedia.org

blueflow2• 9 months ago

Wikipedia rules are just insufficient to protect against "fringe" beliefs. Wikipedia itself creates several of them per year due to citogenesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...

jstanley• 9 months ago

Why are fringe beliefs something that need protecting against?

All progress starts out as a fringe belief.

blackbear_• 9 months ago

But not all fringe beliefs lead to progress, in fact most of them don't.

mkl• 9 months ago

All progress starts out as a fringe belief.

That is not true at all. The usefulness and value of many new things and discoveries is often immediately obvious. Even when the value is not immediately obvious, being a curiosity is more likely than being a fringe belief.

Fringe beliefs don't have evidence behind them, but progress does.

Almondsetat2• 9 months ago

That's tautologically false. For something to be considered "progress" it has to provably improve upon something. But if your belief is provably an improvement, it's not a belief anymore, but more of a fact.

What you actually meant to say is that all progress stems from the research and implementation sparkled by a fringe intuition. But even then, you can have progress without going too far from the current mainstream, so it's not really true anyway

nemo44x4• 9 months ago

Agreed. Fringe beliefs die when they are challenged, not when censored. Driving them underground makes them stronger if anything.

Policing fringe beliefs is dangerous. A free society must tolerate & even welcome such beliefs into the public sphere, not because they are good, but because the freedom to be wrong is the foundation of our ability to be right.

mapontosevenths5• 9 months ago

Because the world isn't flat, and that theory does not deserve equal weight with the truth in a reference work.

There are an infinite number of falsehoods, and only one truth. If we let the lies in the truth becomes impossible to find in the pile of lies.

JKCalhoun2• 9 months ago

It’s covered in the article. In short, Wikipedia is not that place.

bastawhiz3• 9 months ago

The idea that the earth is flat is a fringe belief. No evidence (that hasn't been disproven) exists to suggest that the earth is flat. What progress is being made by giving flat earth ideology equal footing? If any idea—even those with no evidence to support them—are published in authoritative texts as possible truths, then how can anyone trust those texts? If I convince enough people that the center of the earth is filled with spaghetti (of course it is, that's why the moon is made of cheese! To go on the spaghetti!) does that deserve equal footing on Wikipedia? Of course not.

JohnTHaller• 9 months ago

The vast majority of fringe beliefs are regressive.

braiamp2• 9 months ago

Why should wikipedia protect itself from fringe, when it doesn't need to try to? If your fringe theory becomes the widely accepted one, it will naturally change the wording of the article, just based on sourcing alone.

JKCalhoun2• 9 months ago

Probably because ignorance has shown itself to be tenacious, dedicated, persistent. (I think I repeat myself though.)

ajross• 9 months ago

There's nothing unique to Wikipedia there though, that kind of thing has always happened. Anyone with a printing press is tempted to control the narrative. History is written by the victors, as it were.

Wikipedia rules are provably sufficient to produce the greatest and most useful reference work in human history. That's good enough for me.

bawolff• 9 months ago

Wikipedia's rules do not have it as a goal to protect the world at large from fringe beliefs

b00ty4breakfast• 9 months ago

wikipedia's function as a general (as in not specialized) tertiary source isn't to filter out ideas or beliefs but to catalog and present them in a standardized(ish) format.

The rules are not "insufficient" in this regard in the same way that a flute is not an "insufficient" guitar; they aren't designed to "protect against" any topic that would otherwise qualify for a wiki article.

y-curious3• 9 months ago

This was such a fascinating read, wow! The term I use frequently, “Dunning-Kruger Effect”, came from Wikipedia!? Out of thin air?

IAmBroom6• 9 months ago

No, it came from a paper published in 1999 by David Dunning and Justin Kruger.

immibis5• 9 months ago

I thought it was interesting how long Wikipedia took to rename "2023 Israel-Hamas war" to "Gaza war" and start calling it a genocide, but I suppose this is why. When major sources have a significant bias, Wikipedia copies that bias as a matter of policy.

---

In response to the reply accusing this comment of bias: When people said this two years ago, they were accused of bias. But now, in the present, with the benefit of hindsight and more information, it's a mainstream fact, and Wikipedia does report on it. We also know that major news organizations were aware of this at the time and chose not to report it. After round earth theory becomes mainstream, it's not bias to talk about why it took so long for round earth theory to be recognized.

throw83949448• 9 months ago

This is not a "bias". There is precise legal definition for "genocide", and it was recognized as such. Israel goverment offials were very specific on record, what they will do to population in Gaza.

They also do not allow civilians to evacuate or to surrender!!! All exits from Gaza are blocked by Israel or their allies!

blueflow2• 9 months ago

Which does not matter, because for Wikipedia, Journalists are a reputable source regardless of their bias. If the WaPo writes tomorrow that Hannah Arendt was a far-right extremist, that would be a valid source by Wikipedia standards.

lnrd• 9 months ago

I believe what Wikipedia tries to do (simplifying here) is reporting the "opinion" of reputable sources which should have an informed view on the matter. If reputable sources believe it's a genocide, then they will report it, if not they will not. Calling these sources biased because they do not corroborate your view of the situation is your subjective opinion and doesn't mean they actually do have a bias. The whole point of considering them reputable sources is that they should be as unbiased as possible (even though 100% neutrality is impossible), if they had "significant bias" as you claim they would not be considered as reliable sources to begin with.

constantius• 9 months ago

Circular reasoning that is completely ignorant of the last 2 years of analysis of media reporting on Gaza.

The evidence of media bias is extensive and extremely blatant: it spans framing ("[horrible event, war crimes, etc.] happened, according to Hamas" vs no such qualification for Israeli claims, "20 people killed in Gaza" without mentioning who or what killed them), dehumanisation ("2 people killed" when reporting on children deaths in Gaza vs "2 teenagers in hospital" when talking about IDF soldiers), selective reporting (remember the pogroms in Amsterdam that got debunked on social media while every chief of state was sending their condolences?), constant repeat of Israeli "right to self-defence" while Palestinian context is not mentioned, etc., etc., etc.

One of many, many, many reports/investigations on this: https://cfmm.org.uk/cfmm-report-media-bias-gaza-2023-24/

If you need something more visual/real-time, Newscord has been been reporting on this consistently: https://newscord.org/editorials

The media might be largely a reputable source, when it doesn't contradict the preferred narrative, and the Gaza genocide was probably the strongest example we could have had of this.

I'm not sure why I even wrote this out, because 2 years in calling it "subjective opinion" is obviously not a position that is based on facts or reason.

dlubarov3• 9 months ago

Actually there's a Wikipedia guideline (WP:BIASED) along the lines of "bias doesn't necessarily make a source unreliable", which in practice is taken to mean that bias doesn't matter.

Of course in practice, editors have their own biases and decisions come down popularity contests. Wikipedia's own biases seem to get worse over time, as more neutral editors give up, so we end up with some weird things like

- Almost all conservative news sources having low reliability ratings.

- Daily Mail for example is deprecated, the lowest possible rating outside of literal spam.

- Al Jazeera, which seems largely controlled by the Qatari monarchy, has the highest reliability rating and is the most-used source in Israel-Palestine. Even their blog is the top source on many articles, despite news blogs being against policy.

- Al-Manar, the Hezbollah mouthpiece which is very unashamedly biased (e.g. refering to their terrorists as "men of god"), has a somewhat low reliability rating, but still higher than several conservative sources like Daily Mail.

(See the list here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...)

braiamp2• 9 months ago

Wikipedia is not meant to appear neutral, it's meant to "mirror the current consensus of mainstream scholarship [... aka] 'accepted knowledge'". Basically, if the accepted knowledge of an event is that it is not a genocide, Wikipedia has to reflect _that_. Wikipedia is not a soapbox. It doesn't have an stance. It just copies and transmit as accurately as possible, the current understanding from qualified sources. You can literally see it in the "balance" section of this article.

DaSHacka• 9 months ago

Wikipedia is not a soapbox.

Well, clearly they're failing at that.

0x445442• 9 months ago

The creator of Wikipedia disagrees with you.

https://larrysanger.org/2025/08/on-the-cybersecurity-subcomm...

lyu072824• 9 months ago

The discussions that led to the renaming to Genocide were interesting, the opposition was very well coordinated hostile actors but in the end there was just nothing they could do, the facts just weren't on their side. They wrote books worth of text, used every procedural trick they could, violated every rule like editing comments of other users in talk pages or spamming so much text it would break the backend, they organized to coordinate editing of thousands of Wikipedia pages to push pro-zionist messages. In the end it was so much that wikipedia topic-banned 8 super-editors over that. Many more users were banned, many were perma banned from wikipedia entirely.

It was an incredible display of the resiliency of wikipedia when faced with a hostile attack by a state-actor putting hundreds of millions $ into spreading their propaganda. Most Governments, universities and news media are much less capable than that. It was such a failure that they now are pushing the us government itself to gain direct control over wikipedia and to cut the funding from the researchers and universities that produced the facts in the first place, going to the "root of the problem" basically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ClueBot_III/Master_Detail...

https://www.piratewires.com/p/wikipedia-supreme-court-enforc...

https://www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/live-blog-update/isr...

dlubarov3• 9 months ago

the opposition was very well coordinated hostile actors

Where are you getting this idea? While you can find examples of coordination on both sides, the most significant instance of coordinated editing and recruiting for agenda-based editing was by Tech for Palestine.

In the end it was so much that wikipedia topic-banned 8 super-editors over that

If you're referring to PIA5, wasn't BilledMammal the only pro-Israel editor banned as a result? Quite a few were banned the pro-Palestinian side, like Iskandar323 (who seemed to lead Tech for Palestine's coordinated editing), Levivich, Nableezy, and several others.

They wrote books worth of text

By far the worst WP:BLUDGEONING was actually from editors in favor of a "Gaza genocide" title. BilledMammal actually ran the numbers on it.

the facts just weren't on their side

Actually the closing decision was largely based on !votes, and the admin seemed to just blatantly miscount them. By the actual !vote count it was almost exactly 50/50, a very clear no-consensus result, but sometimes closers make strange decisions.

It was only a matter of time though - Wikipedia is a numbers game and anti-Israeli editors are just far more numerous nowadays.

nashashmi• 9 months ago

This is a Lesson 101 on how to refute baseless arguments. Or maybe it is a 400-level class. It all comes down to recognizing mimicry of authenticity manipulated towards fringe ideas.

I like how the article adds weight to mainstream vs fringe. But it occurs to me that some ideas are given so little attention that there is no substantial basis of what is fringe and what is mainstream.

bckr2• 9 months ago

That the ideas are given little attention is the substantial basis in determining that they are fringe.

If an idea is given a lot of attention, it might be mainstream or fringe, depending on how accepted it is. It might be getting a lot of negative attention, or it might just be getting a lot of attention right now. It might be transitioning from fringe to mainstream.

But if it is not getting any attention, or very little, then it is by definition fringe.

piyuv• 9 months ago

I hate that producing and promoting baseless arguments is near zero effort, but refuting them requires an essay.

oceansky• 9 months ago

Brandolini's law (or the bullshit asymmetry principle)

DemocracyFTW2• 9 months ago

Compounding this is the aforementioned conundrum that when you fill out the gaps in "In 1987, $person met _____ in _____" with random but not implausible values you end up with a gazillion wrong assertions and (maybe) a very short list of accidentally correct ones. So even if a troll would like to tell the truth but enjoys peppering discussion threads with many low-effort comments just so someone will interact in whatever which way with them, none of their comments will likely be factually correct. It's like a multiple choice but it's not one out of four, it's one out of a billion answers, almost all of them wrong.

xtiansimon• 9 months ago

“…some ideas are given so little attention…”

(Long time since I _attempted_ to create an article on Wikipedia, but the form of entries makes it clear) factual assertions must largely be supported by (some metric) of published sources. A fringe topic would by definition would have “so little attention”. So it stands to reason Wikipedia would need a _policy_ of supporting fringe in order to allow page creation.

In other words, fringe is what has few supporting references, but is otherwise noteworthy. With a number of notable exceptions.

binary1322• 9 months ago

There are so many Wikipedia articles which have extremely poor cited works, like literally just somebody’s crappy blog.

charlieyu1• 9 months ago

lol but they are quick to take Chinese propaganda

david_draco• 9 months ago

Now apply to each topic at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_topics_characterized_a...

almogo• 9 months ago

Very interesting to see "Technical Analysis" in this list. I'm no expert in the field, and TA always seemed like quackery to me, but I suspect many more people believe in it than for example Cryptozoology. I personally know someone who even took a course in TA, couldn't imagine anyone taking a course in looking for Bigfoot.

karmakurtisaani• 9 months ago

Could it be that the course instructor was just grifting suckers?

tim333• 9 months ago

Technical Analysis is a bit of a mixed bag. Some parts are fairly mainstream like saying there's a bull market in tech stocks is essentially part of it. On the other hand a lot of it is like tea leaf reading.

raffael_de• 9 months ago

I don't get it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth

This text explicitly and implicitly states that the Earth is not flat.

strken• 9 months ago

The first paragraph of the linked essay is as follows:

It is unlikely that you will ever happen upon an editor who will argue that Wikipedia cannot claim that the Earth is not flat. But you may indeed encounter some...

From this, it is obvious that the essay is about people who claim Wikipedia can't claim the Earth is not flat, and how to respond to them.

bckr2• 9 months ago

It’s an essay with a title that is tongue-in-cheek. It’s throwing shade at flat earthers.

nroets• 9 months ago

Rather ask if Wikipedia can claim that human activity is causing climate change:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_climate_change

constantcrying4• 9 months ago

This is ridiculous. A "debate guide" on how to argue with people who hold views that diverge from mainstream opinion is just pointless. What do you think this will accomplish?

Every single scientific/engineering /humanities field contains people who disagree with the mainstream of that field. E.g. every advocate for purely functional programming diverges from the mainstream on the best practices for software engineering. Of course that doesn't mean equating this to "theories" about the earth being flat. My point is the exact opposite.

There always is a gradient between a debate in some field, to a totally bizarre nonsense theory. Deciding on a border between which of these views to platform and which of them to disregard is always arbitrary and has to be decided on a case by case basis. Especially arguing based on some idea of relative numerical superiority is just ridiculous and will make an encyclopedia look ridiculous.

dwaltrip2• 9 months ago

…Huh? What are you proposing?

constantcrying4• 9 months ago

That a binary distinction between "fringe" and "consensus" is nonsense and that trying to have a "debate manual" to argue with people holding "fringe views" is just ridiculous.

y-curious3• 9 months ago

1. Aptly named HN user

2. “I didn’t read the article award” recipient

constantcrying4• 9 months ago

I did read the article, what makes you say I didn't?

gethly• 9 months ago

This is why wikipedia is no longer a useful tool, among other reasons.

tavavex• 9 months ago

These kinds of articles induce a feeling of deep hopelessness. Frankly, I can't understand how people managed to remain relatively sane for so long, given the circumstances. Being an abusive, smug, deceiving human being that tries to win arguments with rhetoric, maneuvering and logical fallacies is easy and looks good to others - look, they're crushing the other side! Taking it down requires dozens of paragraphs of instruction, and a single misstep is an almost instant loss, you have to have surgical precision. Worst of all, being right in those scenarios is extremely boring, and by the time you dismantle one of these claims, everyone's already looking the other way, towards the 17 new talking points that have spawned while you were methodically discussing the first one.

Why didn't their side win sooner? Perhaps 'being right' in the scientific sense has just been too beneficial for humans so far. But if that weakens, I fully expect humanity to go back to zealotry, superstition and undiscerning hatred, perhaps forever.

asacrowflies• 9 months ago

In the past these sycophants ran into hard limits of reality. Now that we are almost post scarcity on many things. It's easy for people to lose connection to science backed reality . In the past this would result in death or starvation or extreme suffering (simple things like saving food for winter pre industrial refrigeration). Now these people have EVERYTHING provided for them and an entire society that will bend over backward to make sure they have water roads etc..

It's quite literally spoiled children growing into spoiled adults. Raised to blthink whatever their current thoughts are the entire world and reality. See the rise of " affirmations" in new age woo stuff.

mrjay42• 9 months ago

Maybe it's a matter of time and process?, bear with me:

An encyclopedia is slow. It has to be slow. It's good (beneficial) that it's slow.

And yes, it means that it is self-correcting, slowly

Thing is, if it was fast to self-correct -> it would generate more errors and it would leave the door opened to more errors.

diimdeep• 9 months ago

Instead of reading this stupid page that does not proof anything, you better listen to what it really isn't and how it can be salvaged [0]

[0] Wikipedia Co-Creator Reveals All: CIA Infiltration, Banning Conservatives, & How to Fix the Internet https://youtu.be/vyfKyrSAVFg?t=3730

IshKebab• 9 months ago

None of these rules allow distinguishing "flat earth" nonsense from stuff that is just controversial. The real reason that Wikipedia can claim the Earth is not flat is that it's bloody obvious and only idiots think otherwise. I suppose they don't want to say that.

anonymousiam• 9 months ago

Maybe there's some truth to this article, but it doesn't address the history of people creating libelous content elsewhere, and then citing it on Wikipedia as truth. All you need to do to game Wikipedia is to create a few external stories, and then cross-cite them.

https://slate.com/technology/2019/03/wikipedia-citogenesis-c...

https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/1c1uazj/why_did_...

IAmBroom6• 9 months ago

It's not surprising that the article doesn't address something off-topic to the article itself.

Why Wikipedia cannot claim the Earth is not flat

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