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.
(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.
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.
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.
> That is not true at all.
> Fringe beliefs don't have evidence behind them, but progress does.
That depends on your definition of fringe and evidence.
I suspect there may be some association between truth and some non-mainstream, cult idea, or conspiracy theory. e.g. it is widely accepted now that the earth is not flat although at one point more accepted that it was flat. That doesn’t eventually validate all fringe ideas, but acknowledges a possibility that when all fringe ideas are considered as a whole, some of them may be true or partially true or be a step towards truth.
A problem with this is that truth seeking and delusions go hand in hand. Delusions seem as real as anything else, and may be evidential but misconstrued evidence or even unknowingly invented evidence. This affects more mundane things like scientific studies, reporting, politics, and Wikipedia as well as “Are they after me” or “Are they lying” things.
Another problem more relevant today than ever is “Should this information be included in Wikipedia, national monuments, museums, libraries, books, or education in-general?” I’ve had articles in Wikipedia that were valid, that stood for years, and then were eventually removed, though they were valid and true, I assume because they didn’t believe it was important enough or relevant to their users that didn’t care as much as I did about preserving history. Is that the right thing to do? I don’t personally think so, but those in-control historically have and will change beliefs to suit their own. We must get involved to ensure that we are not misled. We should not stand idly by and think “Wow, Hitler really f’d up the education of our youth.” We must get involved to stop it. But that doesn’t mean culling or altering all information which doesn’t meet our worldview.
> often
which is it?
This is the negation of a categorical statement, not a categorically negative statement. Thus, all it means is that some progress does not start as a fringe belief.
If you're going to bitch at someone for getting their formal logic wrong, you'd best have your formal logic right.
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.
There are many truths. Cleveland is two hours away from me. Cleveland is 40 hours away from me. Both of these are true, but there is not enough detail in them to ascertain exactly what they mean. The same can be said of any statement outside of formal, logic-based language constraints.
The point your statement keenly misses, however, is that the truth is nowhere near as obvious as you make it seem. Darwin's theories were preposterous to people who were just as certain of "one truth" as you are.
My train of thought goes something like “wow, people actually think the earth is flat? That’s crazy.” > “Is this an internet meme thing or 4chan astroturf thing?” > “I wonder why and how many people actually believe that?”
At no point am I confused or persuadable about the shape of the planet. I’ve looked out an airplane window before. Maybe that’s what feels off about it. There’s an underlying feeling of protecting a gullible public from bad information, a process with a high risk of being corrupted by ideologues.
What's being discussed is whether Wikipedia should call it incorrect or not. Or rather, whether the idea that the earth is round is the truth. You can still provide information about provably false ideas while pointing to another idea grounded in facts as the truth.
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
This isn't true. For example, the Caloric theory of heat was a huge improvement over the existing heterodoxy (the phlogiston theory), made several testable predictions that were true (improving upon Newton's calculation of the speed of sound), and made it possible for Carnot to make serious advances in the field of thermodynamics with the postulation of the Carnot engine.
However, the theory was not a fact. The self-repellent fluid called "caloric" that the theory was predicated upon never existed. We need a bit more epistemic humility.
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.
Why even have Wikipedia then? Why not just ask Reddit at that point?
Early encyclopedias solved this problem by hiring experts. Wikipedia doesn't hire them, it just cites them.
It has only been recently that our cynical postmodern internet hordes have decided experts are somehow only equally worthy of trust as the high-school dropout uncles of facebook and the brain-worm infested politicians on the news.
Citing experts is good practice, but invoking them to silence dissent is anti-scientific.
That's not really what we're discussing here. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. The encyclopedia should report things that are widely regarded to be factual as facts. They should not give equal time to every looney tune with a pet theory.
Noteworthy dissent about complex subjects doesn't come from the unqualified, it comes from other qualified people with differing ideas.
I guess there’s a spectrum of fringe ideas. Some are ridiculous, true. Trolls. But they have no power of policy - flat earthers for example are harmless.
The more dangerous threat are people with consensus based on political power who appeal to authority, like bad science by “experts”, to silence criticism or challenges.
They are not advancing science. They are not "challenging our orthodoxy". They are not doing anything positive for the world.
We may never be able to convince them that they're wrong, but that doesn't mean we need to make it sound like anyone else thinks they might, with even a tiny probability, be right.
But it’s not fair to cherry pick such an obvious straw man. There’s a million current examples that are much better. Covid origins which were summarily and aggressively rejected as unorthodox for example. A ton of climate science, etc. No one is an authority on truth. Requires consensus over painfully long times.
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.
Wikipedia rules are provably sufficient to produce the greatest and most useful reference work in human history. That's good enough for me.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth
This text explicitly and implicitly states that the Earth is not flat.
> 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.
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.
https://slate.com/technology/2019/03/wikipedia-citogenesis-c...
https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/1c1uazj/why_did_...
---
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.
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...)
* It's not this page, but there's a separate Wikipedia policy which says that editors should only insert content which is true.
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.
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...
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.
There is the separate issue of war crimes. Some commanders in the IDF may not have shown due caution towards civilians. That will eventually be adjudicated in the courts. But that is a separate charge and has nothing to do with genocide.
I remain baffled why some people want to take the various charges that could be made against Israel and conflate all of the charges with the charge of genocide. The charge of genocide has become deeply attractive to a large number of people, even when other charges would be easier to prove and have more evidence to support them. But for some reason "war crime" is not as attractive as "genocide" and so supporters of the people of Gaza have developed an emotional commitment to fighting for the charge which they cannot possibly prove, because events have undermined their narrative.
It can be both, an ordinary war that is also used as cover for genocide while it is ongoing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War
Note: before you point out that that page does mention genocide, read what you found. It details Putin's fake claim that Ukraine is committing genocide, several times, and does not mention that the Kremlin has committed at least 5 separate campaigns of genocide (so far) in Ukraine.
Wikipedia has a pretty damn serious case of extreme leftist bias (meaning there are many instance of leftist bias on wikipedia where most people I consider lifelong leftists would not accept that as a reasonable leftist position.
You see, Venezuela had a "socalist revolution" followed by a slight misinterpretation of Marxism, and ... let's just call it "dictatorship of billionnaires", and ignore that for more than a decade this was enormously supported and pushed by leftists worldwide:
https://marxist.com/a-tribute-to-hugo-chavez.htm
Now Venezuela is a state run through criminal gangs with a billionaire dictator on top. You know, doesn't quite satisfy the definition of socialism or communism. Yet socialism is what got them there.
Therefore ... can you call Chavez a socialist? Why? He certainly had the chance to implement socialism, even communism ... and did the exact opposite. Kim Jong Il or his father? Xi Jingping? Khomeini or Khamenei of Iran? All gathered power as communists, none can be said to be even remotely communist once they got to power.
So same can be said of Iran, North Korea, China, Vietnam, Soviet Union and many others. It'd be very inaccurate to call any of these places communist (except the Soviet Union), or even socialist. Most of them never even tried (in fact it surprised me quite a bit that the mullahs actually really tried to be communist)
Even many leaders in the west started their careers as communists, only to betray every communist and socialist principle once they got any amount of power, for example, the best paid politician in the world, Antonio Guterrez. Can you call them communists? They're about as communist as I am canine.
And in a roundabout way, the same goes for Putin. He came into power as an extreme version of Guterrez: they both climbed the ladder to power using violence to push communism. They both totally betrayed communism once they had even a small amount of power, and frankly Putin's the more honorable of the two: the choice to betray communism was made for him, whereas Guterrez betrayed communism out of free will in trade for power. And there's so many of these guys. Jose Manuel Barrosso, violent communist, non-executive chairman and senior adviser of Goldman Sachs International, after ... let's say "helping" that firm in 2007. Yes, really.
So is Putin a communist? You can be cynical and simply state the truth: Putin is an incredibly successful communist. The most successful communist in the world today, except perhaps for Xi Jinping. And, like all successful communists, he isn't the least bit communist.
Putin returned the church to a prominent position, is extremely conservative.
Look at his political friends: Orban, Wilders, Farage, Trump, Le Pen. All very right wing.
He's among the leaders of the current extreme right wing wave in the world, not in any way leftist.
You're also right, of course, that he's extreme right. So are other successful communists. Chavez was never anything but the leader of criminal gangs, as is Maduro. Khamenei in Iran is also extreme right of course, not even that different (his power also mostly comes from control over criminal gangs, and obviously the members of his gangs are about as muslim as bikini-clad pigs having a barbecue on a beach). There's other kinds, like UN's Guterrez or Jose Manuel Barosso, much less successful than Putin, but another violent enforcer of communism, now non-executive chairman of Goldman Sachs International. But again, is there even a single socialist in your entire country that can make a better claim to being a communist than him?
Makes you wonder how loyal current well known leftists are to leftism. Greta Thunberg, to stay on the Gaza issue, has made millions of dollars on her "green-left" activism. About 10 times the absolute maximum she could have earned as a politician (ie. 10 times what the prime minister of Sweden makes). And of course Nicolas Maduro is a billionaire. Putin, if you wanted to quantify it, can probably claim to be the world's first trillionnaire. So I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that they also have somewhat less complete faith in communism.
I don't think he was ever a communist. Soviet Russia was a single party state, so people with ambitions had to join it.
I don't know much about Maduro or Thunberg and don't see why they're relevant.
Except the one that matters.
That could be an indication that it's just not reasonable. Wait, sorry, what am I saying, CHANGE THE RULES AGAIN! We just KNOW the Jew did it!
Can you also explain what the League of Nations is ... and why the UN was created ? (or should I say, why the League of Nations was renamed)
They also do not allow civilians to evacuate or to surrender!!! All exits from Gaza are blocked by Israel or their allies!
https://larrysanger.org/2025/08/on-the-cybersecurity-subcomm...
Well, clearly they're failing at that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45557885
I mean, of all the soapboxes to stand on, hills to die on, people to attack, and lack of virtues to signal, you choose to post THAT?
What the fuck is wrong with you, dude? Who are you so angry at? Can't you think of a better way to waste your time and reputation than punching down for no justifiable reason, without even contributing anything to the conversation?
If you want everyone to know you're an insufferable asshole, then just put it in your user profile.
Feel free to moralize elsewhere, preferably straight into /dev/null
This has nothing to do with how encyclopedias present fringe scientific ideas.
> The threshold for including material in Wikipedia is that it is verifiable, not merely that we think it is true
> Wikipedia acknowledges diverse viewpoints on contemporary controversies, but represents them in proportion to their prevalence
Sounds great! Now compare:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War
So here's my problem. There is only one viewpoint present on the Gaza page. For comparison, the Kremlin's justification and explanation about the war is extensively detailed in the third paragraph on the Ukraine page.
And the fact that the Ukrainian war, specifically the agressive role of the Kremlin, is a controversy only on wikipedia pretty much shows what exactly wikipedia's slant is, doesn't it?
There are other ... what I would call "neutrality issues":
For some reason the word "dictator" is not mentioned here, nor is the fact that both the Chavez and Maduro families are multi-billionnaire families: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolivarian_Revolution
Did you know Iran never had any socialists or students in their ayatollah-dictatorship revolution? Perhaps should I say that the CIA's miniscule role is thoroughly mentioned, but international socialism massive role is entirely left out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution
(you will still find these facts if you dig into the detail pages on wikipedia, but the fact that they were critical, even were the origin of the Iranian revolution, is not mentioned on the Iranian revolution page)
More generally, the links between leftism and violent anti-immigration and anti-LGBT policies and anti-Youth policies in general are extremely hard to find (good luck finding, for example, that the current leader of the UN, in his youth as a violent communist, used violence against LGBT protestors, or that he beat a few of his own students into the hospital (he was a professor) when "discussing" communism ... hell, you will not even find that he betrayed communism, socialism and essentially everything he has ever believed in)
And the links known to exist between international socialism and world events are downplayed and not mentioned. Their discussions on Ukraine before the Holodomor genocide, or their attitude before, during and after the Cultural revolution genocide in China are not mentioned:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_International
This illustrates a general problem: "communist dictatorship", well, those don't exist.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awikipedia.org+%22comm... ... (note: what is mentioned is the "The Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship" that Romania has, if you go to the page of Romania you will not find any mention of the actual communist dictatorship, again, the viewpoint of the Romanian government, which is that it replaced a communist dictatorship, cannot be found)
Did you know that North Korea is not communist? It is a "a highly centralized, one-party totalitarian dictatorship" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea#Government_and_pol...
Same for "socialist dictatorship", where you will only find explanations of Marxist theory, not the many disasters, some of which mentioned above.
Or, how about, important leftist figures. Even when leftists claim they've betrayed leftism like Guterrez or Chavez, but let's go for more iconic figures. For example, Leon Trotsky was the commander of the Red Army when it executed the "red terror" in Russia. Therefore he is a genocidal war criminal, and for example, his soldiers broken the arms and legs of hundreds of Russian Imperial sailors ... and threw them into the freezing seas. He was the commander of a military force burned down schools with kids inside. Now go read:
In political discourse, this would be the equivalent of minutely minority alt far-right politics being talked about as if it was mainstream, and being inserted into Wikipedia as though it was another rational argument.
Is that "neutrality"? Seriously?
That's my point: some "fringe" ideas are covered extensively (because if Marxist theory is anything, it's fringe, to say nothing of details like the dictatorship of the proletariat), in situations where people obviously weren't asking for those ideas, with criticism suppressed or at least moved very deeply away. Don't you think it would be at least worth a mention on socialism's page that it has "once or twice" led to repression and dictatorship, not of the proletariat, but of billionnaires, religious lunatics, and worse? (oh right, leftists won't even participate in discussions of the fact that leftist "heroes" like Chavez and even Maduro are billionnaires[1]). And, what exactly is the problem with at least mentioning the viewpoint that what happened in Gaza isn't a genocide? That is not a fringe idea at all.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/moderatepolitics/comments/anenmt/th...
> Presently, there are five communist states in the world: China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam.
> if Marxist theory is anything, it's fringe
It has shaped the history of the world, for good or bad, and is still one of the most mainstream theories on how modern societies organize. “Fringe” refers to the recognition something has in the world, not the number of “supporters” (not to mention just suggesting that is a misunderstanding of what Marxism is).
You seem to have bought into several fringe theories. There is little evidence of Maduro being a billionaire other than pieces from US magazines. You can certainly hold that view, but not demand that it be featured equally alongside what is publicly verifiable knowledge.
When searching for socialist dictatorships, the relevant bit of information is that the application of Marxist theory in practice—especially in the 20th and 21st centuries—has always resulted in authoritarian rule, human rights abuses, and repression and economic hardship for hundreds of millions. And yes, Venezuela and Iran are examples of that. Every. Single. Time. Communism, Marxism, ... never resulted in the magical la-la-land that keeps getting promised. Not once. With irrelevant exceptions, like ironically Israel, whose parliament peacefully chose to abandon communism rather than repress the population into total misery.
The question was why Wikipedia needs to hide the examples of total socialist failures and instead pushes TINY details of Marxist theory. "Socialist dictatorship" obviously also refers to the many countries where socialism has resulted in repression, hardship and failure rather than justice, and hiding that is obviously not neutral.
Similar to the Gaza genocide page. One viewpoint, anything but neutral, is pushed to the total exclusion of the obvious alternate viewpoints. Even the extreme viewpoint on the other side has merit: that what Hamas is doing is at the very least attempted genocide (that is nothing new for Hamas: they have in the past successfully committed genocide against other Palestinian factions, the very definition of genocide, more than once. Plus, of course, that a terrorist organization that has mass-murder as an explicit goal in their charter is obviously not very concerned with human rights), and what Israel is successfully doing is not genocide. But that shall not be discussed (read the talk page).
Is that neutrality?
It's also extremely obvious that Wikipedia's bias is first and foremost about extreme leftist propaganda (extreme meaning viewpoints that even regular leftists would take offense to), not about Gaza. Take the icons of communism, you see the same. Leon Trotsky is obviously first and foremost a mass-murderer. That's what we call a military commander who had hundreds of people's bones broken and then thrown into the sea, who locks a school with children inside and burns it to the ground, no matter how "bourgeois" those children were (not that the children were very bourgeois at all). And yes, the other side also did bad things. But it is entirely left out. Why? This is not some tiny detail. All that is discussed are very fine details of different branches of communism. Or take the actions of prominent leftist states against immigration, violent anti-religionism or anti-LGBT socialist violence is silenced (illustrating that there have been huge swings in socialist thought). Or the fact that socialism was, and is, very much opposed to science (and I don't just mean Lysenkoism or North Korea's pine needle tea against famine). Yet all these were, and are, part of all big communist states. Soviets did that. China did (and does) that. North Korea does that. Even Cuba gives it a try now and then.
You seem to look at everything slightly related to socialism/communism under the same lens and expect to see your worldview reflected in Wikipedia, that is the opposite of neutrality. In fact you’re enacting a perfect example of item #3 in the original post, the “balance” argument.
I do find the way you casually cast shade by association on students and socialists at the same time to be interesting. Are they all the same to you?
That's because there's an entirely different page that outlines the war in Gaza and Israel's justification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_war#Initial_Israeli_count...
> For some reason the word "dictator" is not mentioned here
You're looking in the wrong place again. Maduro's article names him a dictator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicol%C3%A1s_Maduro, third paragraph). Chavez's doesn't go that far, but it does state the dictatorial claims of his political opponents in a few locations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Ch%C3%A1vez#%22Socialism_...).
> Did you know Iran never had any socialists or students in their ayatollah-dictatorship revolution?
"However, as ideological tensions persisted between Pahlavi and Khomeini, anti-government demonstrations began in October 1977, developing into a campaign of civil resistance that included communism, socialism, and Islamism."
A search for "iranian revolution" on this page will return many results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_Iran
> you will still find these facts if you dig into the detail pages on wikipedia
Yes, that's called "research"...
> the current leader of the UN, in his youth as a violent communist, used violence against LGBT protestors, or that he beat a few of his own students into the hospital
This sounds like a conspiracy theory, and I couldn't find any reference to those events anywhere online. Even the incredibly biased socialist/communist prolewiki doesn't name him as a communist: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B3nio_Guterres
> Did you know that North Korea is not communist? It is a "a highly centralized, one-party totalitarian dictatorship"
That's correct, the state ideology of north korea is "juche", which has it's roots in marxism/communism but splintered decades ago, with a focus on nationalism, historical revisionism and reverence for the leader(s). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche)
> Same for "socialist dictatorship", where you will only find explanations of Marxist theory, not the many disasters, some of which mentioned above.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_socialism#Develo...
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.
I also recommend to not have debate manuals on how to debate people who try to push nonsense into Wikipedia.
[0] Wikipedia Co-Creator Reveals All: CIA Infiltration, Banning Conservatives, & How to Fix the Internet https://youtu.be/vyfKyrSAVFg?t=3730