Essay:RationalWiki's coverage of politics

RationalWiki's coverage of "mainstream" political topics is substantially more biased and substantially less useful than its coverage of pseudoscience or conspiracy theories. I would never feel confident about linking our article on Donald Trump as evidence against him, the way I might with homeopathy. I'd like to change that. To that end, here are two changes I feel are necessary:

Article style: Tag and tell

Let me clarify two article styles:

• Tag and tell: TATing is the process of "tagging" a statement and then providing that statement. ("[Person X] expresses [Y view] with statement [Z]") Note that this style [1] labels the statement, not the person and [2] actually provides the statement. For an example, see Joshua Conner Moon.
• Label and cite: LACing is the process of "labelling" a person and then referencing something. ("[Person X] is [Y].^[1]") For an example, see Steven Crowder.

Most of our political articles are LACers. This is bad. Because most people won't check the evidence, LACing encourages strong claims with weak evidence. For example our article on Shoe0nHead (pre-livestream) wrote:

She also made at least one video where she defended Mike Pence by attempting to equate comments against him to suspect internet persecution stories, which she calls "Faux Hate Crimes."^[42]

Watch the video and tell me if this is remotely correct:

Yet because of LACing, nobody realized that this claim was bullshit. Compare what our current article says:

Lapine's video, "faux hate crimes", is a reading of several obviously fake hate crimes allegedly committed by Trump supporters after his election. Although Lapine cautions that "I'm not a psycho who enjoys hate crimes", the implication is that "the sudden increase of [air quotes] hate crimes [air quotes]" is not real.[81] She repeated this on Twitter.[82] Although FBI data on 2017 hate crimes won't be released until 2018, there's reason to believe hate crimes have indeed increased.[83]

We should never have to rewrite claims this radically. More importantly: We should trust our readers to evaluate the evidence and come to the same conclusions that our "tags" do. And when we don't provide that evidence — or put it behind a citation — our articles are much less convincing to readers who disagree: They can simply handwave away our conclusions as "biased". In contrast, when we show the evidence — rub it in their faces — it's hard for them to ignore what someone's words themselves are saying.

Article content: Sieve out non-drama

“”The difference with New Age, creationism, etc. is that in those cases I can rather confidently say that "we (RW) are right" based on fairly simple and clear hard evidence. With GG, this is a lot less clear to me. Much of our evidence seems to be based on things someone once said, various interpretations of events, etc. None of this is really "hard evidence", and much of it is disputed by GGers—and not all of them are foaming-mouthing misogynists.

—Carpetsmoker

Here's an experiment. Go to Category:YouTube and find 3 "liberal" YouTubers, 3 "conservative" YouTubers. Read each of their articles and note the tonal differences and their content differences:

• For the liberal YouTubers, we summarize their main body of work (usually with glowing praise) and then stop.
• For the conservative YouTubers, we summarize their main body of work (usually with criticism & LACing) and then document every single thing they've said about Donald Trump, feminism, Black Lives Matter, and Islam — without actually debunking said statements.

My working definition of "drama" is "small matters lacking relevance to the whole". In more detail, drama fits these characteristics:

1. Detail doesn't help: Adding more detail (TATing) doesn't provide a reader substantially more information about a person's political views than briefly describing the situation (LACing).
2. Misclick vs monster: It is unclear whether the situation is a behavior worth documenting (e.g. Trump repeating "fake news" claims) or one-off action worth ignoring (e.g. Trump retweeting a fascist).
3. Objectivity is impossible: Factually "debunking" the situation is impossible (e.g. "liberals are whiny") or unimportant (e.g. every internet catfight ever).

In short: If it distracts from the main message of an article (e.g. that Shoe0nHead only attacks straw-feminists), it's not worth keeping. An article shouldn't be a list of grievances — it is to provide clear takeways about how a person's viewpoint is flawed. And if an article cannot do so — if the best it can do is a "list of grievances" — then the article itself is not worth keeping.