Wikipedia -- Successful Yet Stagnating

By the Blog Author

MIT Technology Review has a long and thoughtful article about Wikipedia and its growth into a worldwide encyclopedia with significant problems accompanying that success. See http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/.

The article seems to indicate that Wikipedia peaked around 2007 and has been discouraging new postings from new reviewers because of a bureaucratic system involved in rating and checking quality of the entries. Another issue seems to be the preponderance of entries by male researchers, especially in the science and technology area.

Since 92 percent of engineers graduating from college in the United States are male, and a similar high percentage of computer programmers in the USA are male, it is unlikely that these statistics are going to change in the foreseeable future. Perhaps the bias to worry about is the result of a preponderance of nerds.

Take a look at this diagram:
　

                                                                      Nerdogram
Nerds and other related introverts are fine in crafting quality encyclopedia entries as long as they stay strictly within an area of expertise and resist any faint impulse to write science fiction instead of simply explaining the technology of a development or invention.

Of course, Wikipedia is used very frequently here on this blog. So as an intelligent and wily user, I have noticed an extensive bias that the MIT Technology Review skipped or deleted out of political correctness. This is the notorious bias and sometimes slander that accompanies political leaders’ postings, popular causes, bad science (like global warming, an entry that includes skeptics but not the best skeptics), and topics within the social "sciences" in general.

These social and political issues are written or edited and rewritten by the left as a general statement. This is because of an insurmountable and extensive left wing bias in academia regarding the social "sciences."
　

     　　                                  Social science political preferences by discipline
This means that biographical information about politicians such as "W" Bush or Barrack Obama tends to get edited and re-edited and bickered over. Some topics can only be discussed in politically correct ways. At the worst, facts can be and are edited out of important discussions.

As an example of editing out facts, the blog author has contributed to the discussion on Wikipedia about "Invulnerability" within the topic of "Psychological resistance." I made the following post to the subtopic of invulnerability within psychological resistance:

"A separate view is that certain children survive extremely high risk environments, such as a schizophrenic parent, through personal invulnerability—a stubborn resistance to being drawn into a maelstrom of mental illness due to a profound attachment to reality."

I then referred to the book The Invulnerable Child by E. James Anthony and Bertram J. Cohler, who conducted case studies of children who survived tremendous individual stress and survived with a "stubborn resistance" to being sucked into a crazy paradigm. But this was deleted from the Wikipedia entry and replaced by this: "Contemporary resilience researchers and thinkers appreciate this view as something in the history of thought on resilience in development, but recognize that it is oversimplified at best. The science of resilience in development has largely moved past the idea of 'invulnerable children.'"

Case studies and actual examples be damned! Invulnerable children don’t exist. Why is that? Because the social science acadamia cannot escape their mental models in which individual thought is always the product of the social environment. This is a bone-hard bias that works its way into Wikipedia and brooks neither opposition nor rational discussion.

So when you read a Wikipedia entry on a social "science" topic, beware of the thought police who have made sure that the concepts are all politically correct and in line with current fads –even when counter-factual.

For purposes of this blog, I avoid the social "sciences" because of socio-political academic corruption and do not trust Wikipedia in this area. However, I am unable to determine whether the rot of correctness will expand into other areas of the free dictionary.