Wal-mart's Wikipedia War

An anonymous reader writes "Whitedust is running an article which claims that lobbyists for Wal-mart have successfully waged a war against a fair viewpoint on Wikipedia's Wal-mart page. From the article: "Although Wikipedia maintains a 'Neutral Point of View' (NPOV) policy, the Wal-mart page is highly biased. Additionally, all criticism has, contrary to policy, practice, and the general opinion of those concerned, been moved to a Debates Over Wal-mart section. Even that page has noticeable resistance to negative points of view about Wal-mart."

Comments

Re:This was bound to happen.

[vought]

I have a true issue with the concept of a "neutral" point of view. No POV is neutral. The belief that such a POV exists is born of the idea that all issues have 2 sides to them, black and white, right and wrong, and that a neutral POV can exist somewhere in the middle. This simply isn't the case.?

This is not Wikipedia's definition of NPOV [wikipedia.org]. What you are talking about is more similar to "balance."

Balance in and of itself can be wrong. Imagine a five minute news story about a shooting witnessed by 1000 people. You spend half the allotted TV time giving the criminal's story about the reasons he shot someone in front of 1000 witnesses. Is that balanced, or just a waste of viewer's time?

Part of the problem with news gathering (not wikis) is that cable networks have been trying to sell themselves on balance (usually code for "reporters are no longer allowed to be critical of obvious bullshit") when news organizations don't exist to report both sides of news, and they don't even pretend to do so. You think Crazy Nancy Grace on Cnn cares about balance? What about Hallucinating Hume from Fox? He's just plain nuts - but both are sold as "balanced" sources, even when neither has anything to do with the news or facts at hand. They're just analysts pretending to give both ides of the story when they probably only agree with and understand one side.

Real balance allows presenters from both sides of a debate to state their case in an open forum for an equal length of time. Pretending that a reporter could do so - as unfamiliar as they usually are with the subjects they report on - is laughable. Balance in a wiki setting would have to provide for the same thing - a point/counterpoint setting on neutral ground with limits as to the length and subject of opposing views.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[_Sprocket_]

You think Crazy Nancy Grace on Cnn cares about balance?

Hey - glad to see someone else thinks less-than-highly of Nancy Grace. She strikes me as an educated idiot.

Is there a TV news agency that's NOT pandering to this brand of foolishness?

Re:This was bound to happen.

[Anonymous Coed]

And yet you said nothing to counter what he said, you only called him names. Speaking of spewing knee jerk crap... go back to your post-modern deconstructionist class and leave the discussion to grownups.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[saltydogdesign]

Why should I respond to someone who comes to me with a condescending, preconceived stereotype of who I am, who my teachers were, and of the topic at hand? I posted something I thought about a great deal and I get a snotty third-grade rejoinder that misses the point by a mile and a half. More or less the same as you are doing with "go back to your post-modern deconstructionist class," which has about as much to do with what I was talking about as fission does with evolution.

I'd be happy to have a discussion, but I'm not going to have one with people as asinine as you and the previous poster. It's that simple.