Mighty American of you to have put it there, UK.
The Prevent stuff is all a bit… Murican
what…
Why was veganism anywhere near terrorism? Veganism and terrorism do not belong in the same sentence unless “is not” is between them.
For the same reasons that abolitionists are always considered insurgents against the states that practice slavery.
Why was veganism anywhere near terrorism?
probably because of ALF 🤷
As someone who edits Wikipedia fairly prolifically and does have quite a lot of insight into how it works, I’m going to go up to bat for it here: Wikipedia operates on the premise that all information (some exceptions apply for information considered obvious like “2+2 = 4” or “Paris is in France” outside of an article on Paris) must be cited to a reliable source. This means that we can only say what the reliable sources have to say about a subject. As much as possible, we aren’t allowed to synthesize from existing material to form a conclusion not explicitly stated in a reliable source. Wikipedia aims to be a tertiary source that captures as best as possible what reliable secondary sources say, interspersing primary sources only as needed and especially as much as possible not personally weighing in. Lastly, we are to provide due weight to viewpoints based on how substantially they’re covered in reliable sources.*
It’s an unfortunate fact that presently, reliable news sources often tend to be biased against veganism. That’s pretty obvious from articles like this that overwhelmingly portray the animal agriculture industry as victimized by an extremist movement, giving only the bare minimum attention to the activists and intercutting their points with “buts”. When this is what Wikipedia has to work with, it really isn’t their fault. It’s a large part of why, for instance, Wikipedia’s article on Elon Musk used to fellate him to Mars and back; it was because reliable news sources absolutely constantly treated this man like a supergenius and consistently downplayed the awful things he would do.
If you’re able to cite specific articles, I can look into them and see if they fall short of Wikipedia’s standards, but ultimately, people need to change before secondary sources will, and secondary sources need to change before Wikipedia can. If you have any specific questions related to the project, I’d be happy to answer; I have pretty extensive experience with policies and guidelines at this point.
(* For instance, if we have an article about a video game that consistently got 7s and 8s from reviewers except for a sole outlier who gave it a 3, we can definitely highlight that 3 as a counterpoint, but we have to consider what proportion of the coverage we give to that review.)
The pamphlet referred to veganism in general, and one out of every 25 people in the UK is vegan. This would be like saying “Hey, better watch out if your coworker starts wearing a hijab”, or better yet “Coworker talking about being more environmentally friendly? Probably an eco-terrorist.”
It was completely ridiculous. If you’re offering what you think is their reason for doing this, then the actual information they put in the pamphlet doesn’t reflect that. If you’re attempting to justify this, you’re off the mark.
Well you see, if you don’t turn veganism into a bogeyman at every turn, you might encourage people to think critically about the merits of veganism and actually try it themselves, and that might challenge the status quo and result in lost profits for the animal agriculture industry.
It’s so interesting to me now that veganism is starting to gain an honest-to-goodness foothold in the public consciousness seeing the ridiculous lengths lobbies will go to to try to stop the beginning of the end of their industry.
