Wikipedia talk:Activist

the mechanics of spotting "activism"

 * how to spot an activist on wikipedia? asked and answered. opinions among wikipedians are like bubbles in champaign. look for debasing comments on the subject in the text of any article. those comments might need to be scrubbed pretty hard. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 140.247.25.6 (talk) 18:15, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

"Wikistorming"
According to this article (I hate reading Fox News as much as the next guy) some colleges offer college credits to those that add certain ideological content into Wikipedia, I have previously discussed this on another article and some veteran users found it something acceptable, ¿but could it be seen as WP:ACTIVISM or not? As I've noticed that some forms of activism get a pass through as opposed to following Wiki policy. Sincerely, --86.81.201.94 (talk) 21:32, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

Undue weight
Speaking of fringe activists, they are rather (openly) against WP:UNDUE than hypocritically endorsing it. So, is that caption a good advice? Tgeorgescu (talk) 01:06, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Each Wikipedian is an activist
Amusingly, this essay fails to recognize that from the outsider perspective (and that includes social movement scholars) each person who contributes to Wikipedia is an activist in the Wikimedia movement, part of the free culture movement/free software movement... (ref). Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 04:00, 22 June 2021 (UTC)
 * I suspect this essay is more concerned about tendentious editing than about the fact that WP is an education advocacy project... — Paleo  Neonate  – 23:56, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

Source misrepresentation
May be worth mentioning: it's common when after failing to push unsourced material or unreliable sources, to then quote mine specific parts of more acceptable sources and suggest a conclusion that is not necessarily that of the citations. It's close to synthesis, but still distinct and a textbook feature of deceptive propaganda... — Paleo Neonate  – 23:14, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

Adding a classic example: creationists quoting Darwin's introductory question in relation to the evolution of the eye, to present "absurd in the highest possible degree" as a conclusion and omitting the rest of the text that explains how it is actually plausible. Climate change denialists commonly cherry pick convenient material to make their arguments and also use false balance to give the impression of a controversy that doesn't actually exist among experts. Another example was misrepresentation of a source to conclude that the COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis was likely, that I discussed here. Another recent example is the use and misrepresentation of the public CDC vaccine database by amateurs and conspiracy theorists (in WP's case, this would also consist of original research since it must instead use secondary reliable sources that already interpret such primary information). — Paleo Neonate  – 23:26, 25 June 2021 (UTC)


 * I added a subsection, input/improvements welcome. If someone knows it, I also failed to see the date for the New Scientist article so only the access-date parameter was supplied for now.  — Paleo  Neonate  – 15:18, 30 June 2021 (UTC)