Hello dear community! I find you today with great troubles. The wikipedia page about nasal snuff have been edited with ignorant missinformation in the health section.

have a look yourself: Snuff (tobacco) - Wikipedia

There are many people here far more knowledgeable than me that can give a more accurate statement but what I see there has little to do with NASAL SNUFF.

Should those changes be reverted? What to do think?

Wikipedia is a propaganda site, don’t bother.

I think that’s a bit strong, there’s a lot of useful information to be had and there are references that you can check. Its not perfect but it is a good go to source for many things.

@Tc2642 Effective propaganda often has truthful claims added to enhance its validity. Being an open-editing website, anyone can make changes to a page and its up to moderators to correct it, which they often don’t.

Wikipedia can be useful to learn about the formation of islands (which don’t float, sorry Hank Johnson), or to learn the scientific name of a honeybee, but I wouldn’t trust anything from Wikipedia having to do with history, politics, or anything remotely controversial.

I do have knowledge on this topic, as said you can check what references are being used. Being open source means as a potential propaganda tool it has quite a few limitations. For some political issues it is quite useful as it will put positions and criticisms of positions, there are news sites out there that are more biased.

I had the misfortune of fighting with Wikipedians over a Polish article on snuff. In my case, the only right solution to the conflict was to write the entire article from scratch, add a large number of footnotes and construct the text in such a way that it would be practically unchangeable. So far, the only thing anyone has added after that is some religious crap unrelated to the topic. Not that I am without blame. My entire interference in the article was to introduce a non-existent holiday into circulation and thanks to that Polish snuff day entered the Polish calendar. So yes, I used Wikipedia for my own purposes.

I quickly looked through these changes and well, it contains a rather big problem - they are largely based on research from Indian regions, which of course are not false. This was also pointed out by my colleague, who a few years ago wrote a scientific article on the harmfulness of snuff on health, analyzing all contemporary research on the subject, who clearly stated that European research cannot be lumped together with those from India or South Africa due to demographic and production differences. He also noted that the percentage of subjects in each of these studies is relatively low to draw any valid conclusions. I will check later if there was any summary in English in my colleague’s article, to possibly defend this topic.

@Tc2642 Sure, but the problem with that argument is that you don’t have to use citations on Wikipedia. It will flag the subject as ‘citation needed’ but it isn’t a requirement.

And additionally, the citations themselves don’t make the statement reliable, because citations can be biased themselves.

Just to use as an example, I tried looking up a wikipedia article on a controversial figure… It was Donald Trump lol.

Browsing through the 700+ citations on his page, many of them are from sources like New York Times, Vox, CNN, MSNBC… All sources completely opposed to the American right and who have been rightly criticized of bias, especially during the years of the Trump presidency.

Also it is open source, but there are still moderators that control the content, it’s not as “open” as it’s made to seem. If moderators use bias in their control procedures, that bias will show in the articles.

Open source or not, there are organizations that pay people to control narratives on Wikipedia. They also know the rules better than the average person, and will egg people on in edit-reversal wars. Because they know that after 3 times you’ll get banned and they’ve won. This has been admitted by the Guerrilla Skeptiks group who police anything and everything they deem “fringe”. As an example, compare their article on Telepathy with the ones in Brittanica or other mainstream encyclopedias. They even police anthropology and religion pages for stuff they don’t like, so that you have they guys who know about bitcoin and video games overriding the expertise of scholars. I don’t specifically about tobacco products, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

Some of the articles they cite in the health section are about chewing tobacco (paan and gutkha). So they’re conflating two different forms, lumped together as “smokeless toboacc” and making statements about one with reference to the other. Which is totally anti-scientific.

Also just so I don’t appear too biased, I did a little digging just to find a couple articles that expressed concerns about Wikipedia bias.

Here’s an article about Wikipedia’s cofounder expressing concerns about Wikipedia having a left-wing bias. This is from the New York Post so a little more of a right-leaning article:

And here’s an article from Washington Post worried about political science coverage bias, and approaches it from a left-leaning angle:

I see where you’re coming from but I do think you have to differentiate between propaganda and bias, especially in history and politics.

All historical books, sources, authors etc. are going to have bias, there is no way of being unbiased in that field of study, or politics for that matter.

As with all things, people should do their own research and, hopefully, visit their local library now and then.

@Tc2642 Agreed. It’s just my personal opinion, but if a company dedicated to providing neutral, factual information is found to have bias and does not correct it, or is intentionally being biased, then that would constitute propaganda in my opinion.

Hi folks. In the past I was an editor in Wikipedia and I know very well the difficulties in writing contents coming from reliable sources.
The Health section of the article is pure nonsense because is referred mostly to chewing tobacco, so it should be rewritten, but before that, it’s necessary to go in the discussion page and to explain to the moderators why and where the article is biased.
I could do by myself the dirty job…

@BarlimanButtersnuff is right. All closed loop information systems (Google/alphabet Microsoft/MSNBC) are used by the proprietor to influence the end-users opinion and outlook. Wikipedia can fuck off with that flowing shiny mane. The information stream is 100% bought and paid for, globally. Dealing in information is only profitable when sponsored.

This information was brought to you by, Mr Snuff. You’re here because you spend money there. All good, they want to get me talking about snuff, then I take another sniff and we’re closer to the next tin. I was going to sniff some tobacco anyway.

Politics aren’t issues unless you consider the bloviated speak of enforcing policy and taxation to be a factual part of the human experience. Politics create complacency, it allows the average citizen to go about their benign life never taking action or making a stand because their appointed leader will settle the issue. China holds more human history than any of the Anglo/Panafrican world, the people are happiest and most prosperous under a sovereign. The US and EU just play the role, behind the scenes they do as they please. EPA and environmental laws are a joke and they’re made without consensus. They’re being used right now to majorly affect some facet of our lives. Smoke and mirrors.