[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
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Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
Hi, not sure whether this is a good topic to discuss here or not
but I keep seeing issues with Wikipedia which are getting worse
with time, with regards to neutrality and editorialisation. While
Wikipedia's model seems far better than an individual publishing
house's encyclopedia one where they can draw editors from millions
of people throughout the world and are not bound by ads or sales to
keep them afloat, in terms of editing it hasn't been working well.
Not every editor has equal power on Wikipedia. The more you have
stayed on the site and the more time you spend on the site, you
tend to have more say on what gets inside the articles. I have seen
talk pages where the same three editors who seem to be part of the
same echo chamber discussing issues preventing any alternative
opinion or tone to come in the article. A behaviour very similar to
Reddit where some subreddit moderators can sustain echo chambers by
moderating anything not falling in line. In Wikipedia's case this
often even leads to some sources getting picked over the other
specially when it comes to media or books. Is it possible to break
the grasp of "editors" or is every user curated platform doomed to
reach this state?
Author : actuator
Score : 149 points
Date : 2022-03-05 13:53 UTC (9 hours ago)
| crdrost wrote:
| So Wikipedia has a bunch of problems, it looks like you are
| focused on the political problem. By this, we must be careful to
| say that we don't mean the American political problem that is
| embedded on Wikipedia[1]. The problem you are having is that a
| particular Wikipedia political system exists separately from all
| that. Like, there is an artificial politics of contribution,
| there are committees and meetings and weird agreements about this
| is acceptable but that is not, elections and moderators and so
| forth. That is the problem you identify. Call it a LARP. You
| wanted to contribute or correct information and you find yourself
| LARPing as a senator to get it through.
|
| Open source software gives a way to address those political
| issues. So, they exist in OSS, some open source projects get
| these elaborate governance structures, they invent a governance
| LARP with elections and democracy etc. But some OSS projects have
| not had this.
|
| Cantrill offers an interesting insight about this in his talks...
| He points out that merge algorithms give a powerful way to fight
| this, because once you have a merge algorithm you can allow two
| realities to exist simultaneously. He says the LARP is a result
| of being "forkaphobic", afraid of allowing the project to
| splinter into two identical projects. Whereas, he says, if you
| look at the Linux kernel, Torvalds can tell you you're full of
| shit and you can do the thing anyway on your own branch and
| people can be like "that's actually really interesting" and
| Torvalds can admit he was wrong.
|
| So the fundamental thing you have to solve is allowing an article
| to exist in two independent states that get merged together at
| the end. And if you can solve this then you do not need a
| political structure to get everybody to agree because your
| technological process tolerates disagreement.
|
| 1. By the American political problem I mean this particular
| construction of right-vs-left where divisiveness reigns and
| nobody agrees on even basic facts... there is some of that, but
| it's not the problem you're having. 2. Some other problems
| include:
|
| - Wikipedia articles are typically extremely long. This is
| necessary because they do not have hierarchy but instead kind of
| cross-link to their peers which prevents any other way of
| attaining good depths in education. Information is routinely
| repeated in many pages.
|
| - Encyclopedias are biased to a sort of declarative information,
| whereas in most cases you really want to provide imperative
| information: think of what would happen to a university if we
| forbade labs, recitation sections, homework/exercises, practice
| tests, instead you must learn everything from lecture without
| ever assembling a circuit yourself. Who is gonna learn electrical
| engineering there? But Wikipedia is a fount of information about
| electrical engineering components, mathematical topics, there are
| physics articles. Sigh.
|
| - And then in terms of accessibility, Wikipedia has not solved
| the hard problem of allowing users to distribute computations in
| some vulgar programming language (Excel, HyperCard) similarly to
| how they enable typesetting in a vulgar markup language. As a
| result there is nothing interactive, there is barely any video or
| audio, everything must be textbook-serializable. Which makes it
| hard for us to have a volunteer effort of, here is a 150-word
| card on a topic, here are the deeper dives you can go into, here
| is how you can interactively play with this concept, here is some
| volunteer reading it to you so that you don't need a screen
| reader, here are examples to test whether you have understood the
| idea, etc. You want the same idea to have many different
| perspectives.
| can16358p wrote:
| At least you can be an author there. I am for whatever reason
| geoblocked from writing anything (I never spammed, probably a
| country-wide block) and when I use VPN (either shared or my own
| instance) then I'm blocked again for potential spam because of,
| again, IP block (this time cloud provider or VPN IP).
|
| I believe I can have a positive contribution to Wikipedia but
| they never allowed me to write, since like, 10 years.
| neurobot123 wrote:
| renewiltord wrote:
| Wikipedia is fine. Doesn't need fixing.
|
| What changes have you made to Wikipedia that you've encountered
| difficulty with.
| stretchpants wrote:
| Let 1,000,000 little Wikipedias sprout. Eventually the garbage
| model of the original will be forgotten.
| Afton wrote:
| Can you provide some substantial ideas about what you would
| like to see different and what makes the current model
| "garbage"? Otherwise it's not clear what you're advocating for.
| noxer wrote:
| There is nothing to fix, as you can see from the comments here
| most of NH thinks Wikipedia is neutral and objective and what
| not. This is the actual problem. People haven't figured out yet
| how bad it is because there is simply nothing that comes even
| close to an alternative to Wikipedia.
| evancoop wrote:
| I might reframe the discussion slightly. Wikipedia is growing
| with respect to time (that would seem factually-verifiable if the
| number of topics with a Wiki page is larger in each successive
| year).
|
| Increasing the number of pages should increase the number of
| pages that are controversial, problematic, or "echo-chambers" in
| absolute terms.
|
| Are they increasing as a proportion? Is this diminishing the
| utility of the site in aggregate?
| phreack wrote:
| When you go down to regional variants of Wikipedia it gets even
| worse. In Latin America the editors that fully control political
| articles are hilariously aligned with government entities. You'd
| get unsourced phrases like "the arrival of president X started a
| movement of improvement after the crisis caused by the economic
| policies of president Y", in practically every politically
| relevant article. The tonal shift with English Wikipedia is
| massive, but the editors are so many and versed in such obscure
| rulings that it's enormously difficult to get anything that goes
| against their propaganda to stick, even if it's demonstrably true
| stuff.
| chris_wot wrote:
| You think that's bad? All the actual contributors of content are
| chased off by those who tweak the site. What can I say, it's
| going to only get worse.
| Lascaille wrote:
| This seems to be the general case for user-contributed sites.
| People who are fans of a subject (be it football or model
| trains) may consistently use such sites but generally aren't
| invested enough to create content or do much beyond argue
| briefly when they feel something is totally incorrect,
| generally healthy people have healthy lives and don't get
| intensely invested in curating an internet forum.
|
| On the other hand, people who have unhealthy lives become
| totally invested in that forum or space because _it 's
| literally all they have_ and guard it like a mother hen guards
| their eggs. In Wikipedia they create a huge bureaucracy which
| excludes all but the most determined of users. That intensity
| drives away all casual users.
|
| On the other hand I once made an edit to a Wikipedia page from
| an IP address - I removed an unsourced claim from the Ron Paul
| page - and didn't find my edit reverted or blocked in any way.
|
| So while I have heard of the issue of frighteningly intense
| editors camping pages as though their life depended on it and
| demanding all changes be proven to the nth degree it doesn't
| seem to permeate the entire site.
| swilliamsio wrote:
| As the old saying goes: "Most of What You Read on the
| Internet is Written by Insane People."
| ausbah wrote:
| care to give some examples?
| puffoflogic wrote:
| > I have seen talk pages where the same three editors who seem to
| be part of the same echo chamber discussing issues preventing any
| alternative opinion or tone to come in the article.
|
| I believe I am part of such a cabal, despite my contributions on
| Wikipedia totaling about half a dozen in the past decade. Why
| would I be part of such a cabal? Well, first, I have no contact
| whatsoever with the other editor other than edits made with the
| same purpose -- and that purpose is to deflect an attempt by
| other editors to erase the details of a (well-sourced) historical
| event from Wikipedia and replace it with alternative facts more
| amenable to certain political ideologies. I (and my fellow
| cabalist) have explained in detail on the talk page that the
| other editors were pushing a fringe position which was not backed
| by any reliable sources, and with this justification I have
| removed every edit made by those editors attempting to change the
| facts in the article, even to the point of removing tags they add
| to the article indicating that there is a dispute as to its
| accuracy! And yet I believe I am in the right, due to
| overwhelming evidence of the correctness of the article's
| contents, and incorrectness of the position being pushed by (what
| I see as) rogue editors.
|
| The thing is, probably every single such cabal is maintained with
| essentially identical motivations, at least in the eyes of the
| cabalists. If even some fraction of us are correct, it shows that
| you have to choose between cabals and an encyclopedia of
| misinformation and propaganda. Except, of course, haha, there's
| no choice at all, because some portion of the cabals are
| _pushing_ misinformation and propaganda. In my view the Wikipedia
| experiment has failed, and not merely in some contingent way but
| in a way that shows that the concept cannot be executed as
| imagined, an "encyclopedia anyone can edit". Some [substantial?]
| portion of the information contained _will_ be misinformation,
| for the same reasons that misinformation exists at all.
|
| Unfortunately, insofar as Wikipedia seems to have displaced many
| other sources of information (which, to be fair, needn't have
| been any more reliable -- a traditional encyclopedia no doubt
| contained misinformation spread by the editors, with the only
| saving grace being a relative dearth of information limiting
| impact), I fear that it will prove to have been the greatest
| setback to the aggregation of accurate human knowledge so far in
| the history of humanity.
| thrower123 wrote:
| Ban the deletionists
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| I think Wikipedia is mostly good contentwise.
|
| Of course there are two extremes where there are problems:
| disputed topics (especially contemporary political topics) and
| niche topics receiving little to no attention.
|
| I think for both an improvment can be made by improving the view
| on the editing history. Showing what kind of editors (new
| accounts or ong term members? Editing only few articles or across
| the board? etc.) do what kind of editing. Maybe even broken down
| to article sections ("this section sees lots of change by new
| editors, while that section is stable")
|
| But not sure how that would really look like to be usable more or
| less intuitively.
| zamalek wrote:
| > I think Wikipedia is mostly good contentwise.
|
| Wikipedia politics is insane[1], and this power hunger can lead
| to objectively incorrect information being defended and
| sustained.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_cabals
| sss111 wrote:
| What exactly is this? What are cabals? I'm so confused!!!
| zamalek wrote:
| In this context, it's how a group of people manage to take
| control of some portion of a website (especially where
| crowdsourcing is concerned).
| ethbr0 wrote:
| (Reparented from another content thread) Agreed. Wikipedia's
| strength is its long tail of niche articles. However, once one
| gets off "popular" articles, the quality bounds rapidly spread.
|
| But that seems inherent to having an article for which there
| are only 1-2 editors, as opposed to 10+ frequently reviewing.
|
| So better UX is probably the best "solution." I.e. pulling
| editor count, frequency, and reputation into the reader-visible
| part of the page.
| actuator wrote:
| > However, once one gets off "popular" articles, the quality
| bounds rapidly spread
|
| The issues I have seen are mostly with these sorts of
| articles itself. Popular articles tend to be overall much
| more fair because of massive participation.
|
| But once you go into articles which are about less popular
| things or contentious topics or from highly polarised areas,
| there is either frequent vandalism or chokehold control by
| few editors which makes it impossible to have even a good
| discussion if you think the content can be presented better.
| kingcharles wrote:
| Yeah, the smaller articles are usually written by a single
| person who has spent an inordinate amount of time in the
| domain of the article and the article is good.
|
| I started this article recently and was very impressed by how
| everyone came together to reach a consensus on a very niche
| topic:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qeqertaq_Avannarleq
|
| But then the other day I noticed that a page about a certain
| very popular K-Pop band was missing one of their major
| releases, so I added it, but then got into a pissing war with
| an editor of that niche who argued that the band's own
| Instagram page was not a valid source for information on
| their releases?!
| Jiro wrote:
| The reason that someone said the band's Instagram page
| isn't a valid source for information about the band is
| because of the rules about self-published sources. The
| rules were patched at some point with a narrow exception,
| to allow sources for things like a band listing their own
| releases (see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wi
| kipedia:ABOUTSE... ) but it's easy for rules lawyers to
| insist that that patch doesn't apply. And people with OCD
| really don't like narrow exceptions.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| > Of course there are two extremes where there are problems:
| disputed topics (especially contemporary political topics) and
| niche topics receiving little to no attention.
|
| An unusual third extreme, where things are so wrong, so
| entrenched and so unchecked that they have the potential to not
| just misrepresent truth but also change it.
|
| I refer you to the story of the Scots Language Wikipedia:
|
| https://www.engadget.com/scots-wikipedia-230210674.html
| edent wrote:
| There are a few problems that need to be dealt with.
|
| First is that "Reality has a well-known liberal bias". Which
| means lots of people want a "neutral point of view" which
| reflects their own opinion.
|
| Secondly, there are lots of trolls and bad-faith actors. So a
| bureaucracy needs to be built up to deal with it in a structured
| and consistent (not necessarily fair) way.
|
| Thirdly, what can incentivise people? Most editors aren't paid.
| Introducing money just leads to corruption. So you end up with
| fake Internet points which can be gamed.
|
| Penultimately, can you appeal? I've had changes reverted,
| appealed, and reinstated. You can go all the way up the
| bureaucracy if you want to break out of the echo chamber.
|
| Finally, fork it. If you think you have a better way of doing
| things - and can't make internal changes - go run your own Wiki
| and see how long your system lasts without falling to bias.
| JavaBatman wrote:
| > First is that "Reality has a well-known liberal bias".
|
| Uh...what? Where is the proof of this?
| thetrip wrote:
| I know i will f(l)agged for this. But have some kind on me,
| it's just my opinion at the end. I know, through my work,
| some homo lads. The are not well, most of then needs some
| kind of help. But criminalizing this was the worst idea we
| ever have: some of my greatest idols were gay or least post
| as them: Wilde, Melville, Petronius, Capote... Some of them
| suffers the criminalization, some of them lived in a period
| when being gay was not a crimen or was not different at all.
| Edit: Freddie, I miss you as hell, man.
| legitster wrote:
| It's a common expression. I think Stephen Colbert may have
| been the first to use it.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| It's a famous Stephen Colbert quote. Google for the video.
| ironSkillet wrote:
| He is quoting political comedian Stephen Colbert, referring
| to the fact that different political groups all independently
| believe that their perspective is actually a reflection of
| reality.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| And it is! If everyone's reality == their politically-
| oriented news.
|
| Which is why objective, quality journalism is so critical
| to a democracy.
|
| Or, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan (and Schlesinger et al.)
| succinctly put it, "Everyone is entitled to his own
| opinion, but not his own facts."
| jancsika wrote:
| To the contrary-- his neocon character is admitting that
| his perspective does not align with reality. That's a much
| more scathing critique of the neocons than the generic
| upshot you wrote above.
| ChildOfEru wrote:
| I don't know; why don't you spend some time at
| https://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page and report back?
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| not sure if /s or not, but the first page is literally
| "Overcoming homosexuality". wtf?
| shagie wrote:
| It was founded by Andrew Schlafly (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Schlafly ), son of
| Phyllis Schlafly.
|
| You should check out the "Conservative Bible Project" (
| https://www.conservapedia.com/Conservative_Bible_Project
| ) and check its edit history.
| nojito wrote:
| conservapedia is 100% real and not satire.
| 3np wrote:
| Their pages on Putin/Ukraine/The Ukraine Crisis were
| enlightening reads. Not as much on the topics themselves
| as on the sites authorship.
|
| I took Schlafly for a 'merican bananas conservative but
| its looking like there's some connection to Kreml there..
| krapp wrote:
| There's no "proof." It's a joke made by comedian Steven
| Colbert (in character as a self-parody of a Conservative and
| right-wing pundit) during the 2006 White House
| correspondents' dinner, mocking the Bush Administration's low
| approval rating as "reality" having a "liberal bias." In the
| context of post-Trump politics, the joke would be to dismiss
| unfavorable poll numbers as "reality" being "fake news."
| Aelfsyg wrote:
| Yet, 'the facts of life are conservative'.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Introducing money just leads to corruption.
|
| Not sure what you mean by that. Corruption exists with or
| without paid labor, and I cannot for the life or me think how
| paying the people who do the lion's share of work at Wikipedia
| would increase the corruption there. Can you explain what you
| mean?
| [deleted]
| smitty1e wrote:
| > is every user curated platform doomed to reach this state?
|
| One hypothesis is that, yes: you're hitting on an intrinsic
| aspect of human nature.
|
| A possible remedy would be to set up curated sites across the
| spectrum, and query a 'millepedia' front end to ask: "Who is the
| all-time worst political figure, and why is it $GUY_I_DISDAIN?"
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I am a casual wikipedia page contributor, and have been since the
| earliest days. I tend to agree there is a problem with 'page
| guarding' and collusion between long-time editors. Its annoying
| to see the political litmus tests take a large part of these
| threads. With all that said..
|
| I believe there is a strong and non-obvious aspect to Wikipedia
| evolution, that is exemplified by an anecdote: When I started
| doing "family history in New England" research in the 1990s, the
| Daughters of the American Revolution publications, in hardback
| volumes, was considered good sourcing, with some caveats .. In
| the space of five years, in the 1990s, the "facts" printed in
| impressive DAR fashion, were shredded, in not a few cases. There
| simply had never been the ability to check and cross-check, so
| quickly, over such vast numbers of resources. Truth in family
| history is evasive sometimes, but tends towards very verifiable.
| The Internet itself, and the eyes and minds of millions of
| participants, just created an information environment that had
| never existed; library of Alexandria on steroids, if you want to
| be colorful.
|
| So now, decades into the process of Wikipedia, we find out that
| there are not one kind of fact, there is not one kind of editor,
| and the attention economy is more real than ever. Mix in human
| nature, and there is a sort of unsolvable situation.
|
| so what to do? admit imperfection, don't waste pages on obviously
| irreconcilable situations like "the son of the current
| Presidential candidate of the USA and allegations", I mean sure,
| but not dominating the response here; and then _do_ find the
| cases where the process can be evolved, like breaking up smug
| cliques of editors, when it needs to happen.. fairly,
| periodically perhaps.. whatever..
|
| Wikipedia -- amazing feature of the entire Internet
| sdoering wrote:
| I think overall the wikipedia model has shown itself to be
| decently working.
|
| But (anecdata) I have my gripes with the way it handles evidence.
|
| My SO has a person (died already) in her family with a
| (relatively) short wikipedia entry. There are factual errors in
| the article. We know that, because we have original documents
| showing that the "facts" reportet in the entry are wrong.
|
| Due to the fact that the documents cannot be published online
| without breaking copyright laws we can't point to a correction.
|
| She communicated with an editor (or whatever his role was, but he
| had the right to approve or deny changes to the entry) who stated
| he could only allow changes to the "facts" if my SO could point
| to an online source (a credible one he said). Else he would deny
| changing anything. Or she should upload the documents to
| wikipedia if she had copyright on them.
|
| He didn't accept the idea to send the documents to him as proof.
| He made it clear that it is either the wikipedia way of
| determining the truth or none.
|
| We stopped. Since then I am asking myself how much of wikipedia
| is actually wrong and actively or passively denied from
| correction by these gate keepers.
|
| Wikipedia could offer a way to upload documents for editors to
| review without automatically making them publicly available. This
| would enable fact checking and correction.
|
| I had heard of it before but since this personal experience with
| German Wikipedia's "Blockwart" mentality I will never consider
| them a valid organisation for donations.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Since this person is family, you can issue a publicly-available
| statement, e.g. on a website, and it will most likely qualify
| as a reliable source by Wikipedia's policies. The point is that
| Wikipedia must never be a _primary_ source for what it writes
| about; it just always be able to point at a source for what it
| says. Wikipedians ' job is to broadly evaluate and curate
| sources, not guess at the truth of any individual statement.
| sdoering wrote:
| Yeah I could do this. But I could also just accept the fact
| that Wikipedia isn't even willing to delete contested
| information when offered proof.
|
| I don't need the facts to be in the entry. I don't care. I
| only care about the fake facts in there and ask myself how
| much of the rest of Wikipedia is also riddled with falsehoods
| and nobody would want to remove that if shown actual state
| documents that show what is wrong.
|
| I did not want it to become a primary source. I just hoped
| they would remove information that has new evidence not known
| to the original source.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| There are problems with the approach of requiring third
| party reputable sources, for example the problems you are
| running into. There are associated costs, some published
| information will be wrong. There are also problems with the
| alternatives - e.g. primary sources providing motivated
| misinformation or volunteer editors being fooled by bad
| sources.
|
| It's easy to find problems with wikipedia's current model,
| but harder, I think, to argue that their model is the wrong
| choice.
| sdoering wrote:
| Evaluating the quality of a source was one of the most
| difficult and also most important skills we were taught
| in university.
|
| Do I still get it wrong. Oh dear, yes. Did I learn how
| important it was? Oh yes.
|
| I especially learned to qualify what I wrote and to mark
| when a source could not perfectly be trusted, but the
| argument/point of view was interesting to discuss
| nonetheless.
|
| Why can't Wikipedia at least either remove false
| information once provided credible sources. Or at least
| somehow mark the relevant section/parts with a disclaimer
| so that readers are at least aware that something might
| be suspicious.
|
| Could it be gamed? Weaponized? Probably. Would it be
| helpful to readers? Maybe.
|
| But how is the current situation better?
| philistine wrote:
| Wikipedia's whole system is not designed for interested first-
| party to intervene. They do ALL. THE. TIME. but it's not built
| for that.
|
| At this point you need to fight fire with fire. Everything you
| know that is factually wrong needs to be investigated; are
| there credible sources for those lies? Can those sources be
| discredited?
|
| It takes a mountain of work to fight casual lies,
| unfortunately.
| lucb1e wrote:
| > an editor [...] stated he could only allow changes to the
| "facts" if my SO could point to an online source (a credible
| one he said).
|
| That's plainly false, how many Wikipedia articles have
| (annoying, I'll admit) offline references to books, papers, and
| other things that are only available under specific terms and
| conditions, typically after some payment? You don't have to own
| anything's copyright to reference it. (In many jurisdictions
| you'd also be allowed to publish excerpts as fair use, that
| would make this easier but that's not a prerequisite here
| anyway.)
|
| And does Wikipedia even have an approval system? I thought
| either you have permission to edit a page or you don't (see
| e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=COVID-19&action
| =e...). This whole situation sounds quite odd.
|
| Not that I haven't dealt with overzealous page protectors
| myself that have some "I did a million-and-one edits and am
| holier than thou" status and will revert anything that changes
| their perception of the world. I don't disbelieve the situation
| in general, just those details seem odd to me.
| sdoering wrote:
| > That's plainly false,
|
| Thanks for denying experience. You could have said: "That
| should not be the case."
|
| But yet he kept denying changes.
|
| > offline references to books, papers, and other things that
| are only available under specific terms and conditions,
| typically after some payment
|
| I was talking about birth certificates, official but personal
| documents, things like birthday greetings personally signed
| by Erich Honecker, a Radio interview done in the 70ies at a
| GDR radio station were only one last tape of the recording
| exists in family archives.
|
| Nothing of that is anyhow publicly available.
|
| Whenever we proposed changes we were shut down by this
| person. They felt (or were - I have too little insights into
| the hierarchy of Wikipedia and don't want to actually) to be
| righteously empowered to change back any change were one
| could not provide citable proof. And that is actually a point
| I agree with.
|
| But he also was not willing to accept/provide a way to proof
| how "facts" in the entry were wrong.
|
| If they were missing I wouldn't have an issue. But they were
| already wrong in the cited source and we had the original
| documents to proof that. He just wasn't willing to look at
| them.
| mst wrote:
| > Nothing of that is anyhow publicly available.
|
| Therein the problem.
|
| Your situation sucks, and I'm genuinely sorry about it.
|
| But I'm not sure I can think of a way to change that policy
| that would be a net win overall.
|
| If anything I feel like you're more collateral damage of
| copyright law than wikipedia policy here, but I understand
| that even assuming I'm right about that, that doesn't make
| the specifics sucks any less.
|
| Bah.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| > > That's plainly false
|
| I think this was referring to the claim by the other editor
| - that he "could only allow the changes if ...", was false.
| Not to your whole comment
| mdoms wrote:
| You think the facts on the page should change because "trust me
| bro"? Come on. I don't know you from Adam.
| bombcar wrote:
| Get a quasi-referencable source like a Forbes blog written, and
| later refer to it.
|
| Wikipedia is great for a low level consensus, but if you
| actually know anything about many of the subjects it's
| hilariously bad.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| So Gell-Mann Amnesia applies there as in most other
| journalism.
| scatters wrote:
| Now more than ever, Wikipedia must be publicly verifiable. That
| means that any claim can be checked by anyone with an Internet
| connection and a library card. Imagine if contested articles
| contained controversial facts on the basis of secret evidence?
| The editor made the right call.
| not2b wrote:
| But if the editors receive proof that a statement article is
| wrong, but that information can't be published on the
| Internet for copyright or other reasons, that means it is
| proven that the source of the information is wrong, so that
| source should be removed as unreliable at least in this case.
| If the rules of Wikipedia don't allow unsourced information,
| they don't prevent removing incorrect information that has
| been shown to be incorrect. So they could nuke the bad
| information. If, after that, nothing is left, they can remove
| the entire article.
| sdoering wrote:
| Thanks. Exactly my thought on a valid approach. One not
| taken by this person in this case.
| Jiro wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Acces
| s... specifically allows the use of sources that are hard
| to access. The rule here wasn't that it couldn't be used
| because it was hard to access, but that it couldn't be used
| because it wasn't published at all.
|
| Furthermore, any sane editor would allow use of this
| information under Ignore All Rules
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules
| ), which is specifically there because sometimes the rules
| don't produce good results.
| jl6 wrote:
| If they don't have a reliable source for the incorrect fact, it
| should be removed.
|
| If they do have a "reliable" source for the incorrect fact,
| could you write to that source and get it corrected there?
| sdoering wrote:
| As I have just written in another comment:
|
| But they were already wrong in the cited source and we had
| the original documents to proof that. He just wasn't willing
| to look at them.
|
| To add to that - the source is a digitized out of print book
| that will probably never have another edition or printing.
|
| I could start a website or create a blog post with parts of
| the proof documents and maybe even sound snippets from an old
| interview (and part of old Stasi documents as well to make
| the point and that to be referenced by Wikipedia as a new
| source.
|
| But why would I need to go to these lengths if I could
| provide proof to Wikipedia more easily if they wanted and
| have them at least remove the wrong parts. Even if they would
| not include the corrected things.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| This seems like something the Commons Volunteer Response Team
| (VRT, previously OTRS) can help with. You can send them the
| documents and they can vouch that they say what was claimed,
| but without having to publish the material against the licence.
|
| I have used this for license confirmations, not for fact
| checking, but they do Biographies of Living Persons work so
| they might be able to help.
| halestock wrote:
| This is an unfortunate situation for sure, but I think I still
| agree with how they responded. What if they had accepted your
| evidence? The page still has no publicly visible references, so
| I (the user) have to just take the editor's word that the
| article is correct - I have no way to verify that information
| myself.
| sdoering wrote:
| I agree. They could however remove the wrong parts.
|
| This way they would not have the user need to trust
| unverifiable claims but also protect the user from learning
| falsehoods.
| halestock wrote:
| Yeah, I think that's a fair criticism.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > the documents cannot be published online without breaking
| copyright laws
|
| Can you not excerpt them to the point that the quotes would
| qualify for fair use? Another option is contacting the source
| that was cited and see if they'd post a correction.
|
| The other side of this is that family members aren't unbiased
| parties, so any facts they want corrected really need to be
| from verifiable sources--sources better than whichever source
| was already quoted.
| ajross wrote:
| What do you want Wikipedia to do in that circumstance, though?
| Just accept uncited facts based on the promise of someone on
| the internet? The problem with your SO's relative isn't that
| Wikipedia is doing something incorrect, it's that _the
| historical record is wrong_. And that sucks, but it 's not
| something an encyclopedia is going to be able to solve. That's
| why we have historians.
| sdoering wrote:
| They could see the evidence and remove the contested source.
| In this case they would remove a part from the entry. People
| wouldn't learn falsehoods. I think this would at least be
| better than knowingly spreading fake knowledge.
|
| I would have welcomed that approach. And applauded them. But
| once he decided to let wrong facts stay as part of the entry
| this was a lost cause to me.
|
| As said. I would have been more than fine if they had just
| deleted these parts.
| majani wrote:
| At Wikipedia's scale, the red tape is more of a safety harness
| than anything
| NoSorryCannot wrote:
| I feel your frustration but I don't think I want a Wikipedia
| with secret citations and an editor voucher system. Such a
| scheme would not be in the spirit of Wikipedia, which is
| nominally supposed to be verifiable and editable by any reader,
| and could only reinforce the gatekeeping mentality of its
| editors.
| legitster wrote:
| I'm not sure if I share the same assessment. I am amazed at how
| robust your typical Wikipedia page is despite the chaos that goes
| into writing it. Given that it's not possible to make a version
| of reality that everyone is happy with, I think Wikipedia comes
| pretty dang close.
| civilized wrote:
| I agree. While some articles may seem to have a slant in
| emphasis, I can't recall a time when credible information
| contrary to the slant was omitted or distorted. That's much
| better than I can say for just about any other source I read
| online.
|
| I remain an avid wikipedia reader.
| actuator wrote:
| > some articles may seem to have a slant in emphasis
|
| The editorial slant which sets the tone of the article also
| colours the thoughts of the reader, it is not just
| dissemination or omission of facts. Moreover, editors do tend
| to give more weightage to some sources than the other if they
| are reporting on the same issue.
| civilized wrote:
| > The editorial slant which sets the tone of the article
| also colours the thoughts of the reader, it is not just
| dissemination or omission of facts.
|
| Yes, but as I said, Wikipedia is much less bad in this
| respect than any other source. If I have the sources, at
| least I can do my own digging. With most other sources I
| have to assume there is information contrary to the slant
| that is being swept under the rug, and I won't immediately
| know where to find that information.
|
| > editors do tend to give more weightage to some sources
| than the other if they are reporting on the same issue.
|
| Sometimes there is good reason to do this. Some sources
| _are_ more credible than others.
|
| If editors didn't exercise judgment in selection of
| sources, Wikipedia would just be a disinformation
| playground dominated by the most energetic propagandists.
| actuator wrote:
| > Some sources are more credible than others.
|
| I am not saying we should trust DailyMail more than BBC.
| My issue is with sources where the lines are more blurry.
|
| Say, they will not publish outright misinformation but
| they will definitely have a editorial stance which
| colours their coverage.
|
| > If editors didn't exercise judgment in selection of
| sources, Wikipedia would just be a disinformation
| playground dominated by the most energetic propagandists
|
| Agreed. But how do we rank which sources are better than
| the other. Sure, remove ones which publish outright
| misinformation but after that how do you rank them.
|
| The source will be discussed in WP:NEWSORG boards, the
| people weighing in on the discussion will be established
| editors of the site. They will more likely tend to rate
| sources which fit their echo chambers better higher than
| others. The same sources will get more weightage in
| Wikipedia articles. When argued against, Wikipedia
| editors will cite it is trusted more. It is a self
| fulfilling loop.
|
| This is why my original question was, is any user curated
| platform doomed to reach this state.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| If you have genuine issues with any part of the existing
| rating in WP:RSP, it's entirely appropriate to raise that
| on the talk page. "I think this source should be ranked
| higher/lower than it currently is, and here's evidence"
| is a valid concern. Wikipedians are well aware that
| verifiability standards may reinforce biases in article
| coverage, and some have even proposed (though not very
| seriously) that doing away with verifiability altogether
| may be better than the alternative of being left with a
| systemically biased encyclopedia.
| actuator wrote:
| I have tried making an effort for this in the past but it
| didn't work as there was no opposition but there wasn't
| much support as well.
|
| Also, I am not sure how we can verifiably prove that the
| editorial stance of one source is either day pro or
| against something, so it should be rated higher or lower,
| and if equal whose tone do we go with. As wiki
| editorialisation of news events is not preferred, you
| will have to go with existing editorialisation in media
| zozbot234 wrote:
| "Some support but no opposition" qualifies as consensus,
| at least provisionally. So you should be WP:BOLD and just
| edit the policy page directly. People might be upset and
| revert you, but you won't be in the _wrong_ because you
| did after all seek consensus on talk, and they didn 't
| object.
| [deleted]
| ajross wrote:
| I tend to agree. Wikipedia does a fantastic job of trying to
| stay objective. I think the real root here is that the last
| decade has led to a bifurcation of "facts" across partisan
| lines. There are realms of discourse where people just don't
| think it's appropriate to present unrefuted fact A without also
| presenting perspective B, even if the support for B is mostly
| just spin. So someone reads an article on A and thinks it's
| "biased" because it doesn't lead to the readers' own opinions.
|
| But that's not something Wikipedia can solve, and I think they
| do what they can about as well as is possible. Here's a good
| example page of the effect, check out some of the edit wars on
| this page:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_masks_during_the_COVID-19...
|
| The result is a little jumbled, with some contradictory spin
| still lurking in sentences here and there. But for the most
| part the article has limited itself to an objective treatment,
| and done well.
| actuator wrote:
| The face mask article example you gave is actually one of the
| ones which would be less affected by established editor bias
| as there would be more editors from different regions
| participating in editing it.
|
| Moreover claims by health organisations like WHO can be used
| to prove or disprove the efficacy of masks. But this is a
| luxury articles that are dealing with established authorities
| publishing information have.
|
| Articles on persons and social issues tend to mostly not have
| any such authority and the debate is mostly generated through
| opinion.
| ajross wrote:
| Do you have an example? I mean, I'm sure there's a
| terrible-but-forgotten-and-ignored page in there, but in my
| experience Wikipedia's rules about citation and notability
| work very well to limit expressions of opinion in the
| pages.
|
| Are you absolutely sure you aren't just expressing the
| effect I noted? You got mad because a page listed facts,
| but not the "right" facts?
| actuator wrote:
| No, I am fine with the facts being listed and with the
| page in contention, I wasn't even discussing the presence
| or omission of the fact.
|
| My concern was with the weightage the said fact had in
| the overall article. The weightage of the said issue in
| the summary and article, seems to far outweigh what it
| deserved.
| legitster wrote:
| As an example, I want to point people to the page I have been
| spending a lot of time on as of late:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukrai...
|
| Is the information on this page perfect? Obviously not. But
| this single page probably represents the best up-to-date
| summary of information you will find on the internet. And I can
| only imagine the thankless work volunteer editors put into
| making it coherent and readable - free from random garbage and
| conspiracy theories.
| noxer wrote:
| I didn't read it all but wasn't hard to find "mistakes" in
| that wiki article
|
| For example: "Several countries which are historically
| neutral, such as Switzerland and Singapore have agreed to
| sanctions."
|
| Clearly a misrepresentation of Swiss neutrality. The news
| outlets all over the world posted this and various similar
| claims over the last week and wiki picks it up. Some news
| articles even straight out tell you that Switzerland ditched
| its neutrality and "picked a side" in this war. It could not
| be more wrong. But Wikipedia doesn't care about right or
| wrong it just repeats what a subset of sources say even if
| its like in this case obviously propaganda.
| alephaleph wrote:
| I don't really think it's Wikipedia's job to litigate the
| truthfulness of such claims -- it's about consensus, not
| about "truth." Assigning Wikipedia the job of deciding what
| is true and what is not beyond just summarizing mainstream
| consensus and Wikipedia ends up having to take many more
| political stances and the project could quickly break down.
| Jiro wrote:
| If Wikipedia wasn't about truth, nobody would use it.
|
| And if the consensus is particularly bad on a subject
| _and_ the people editing the Wikipedia page are
| cooperative, they 'll usually be able to find a rule
| intepretation that allows the consensus statements not to
| count (for insatnce, claiming that a generally reliable
| source isn't reliable for this particular statement).
| noxer wrote:
| I didn't say its Wikipedia fault or that they did
| anything other than what they claim to do "pick up the
| stuff form other places".
|
| But wrong is still wrong and wrong is not useful. And
| even thou I know its wrong I have no way to fix it
| despite the idea of Wikipedia that anyone could correct
| everything. But I can't because I would need to find an
| article (from an accepted source) which opposes this
| exact claim. And even then if there are 5 sources for
| something that is wrong and 1 source pointing out that it
| is wrong, Wikipedia will at best report this as neutral
| as it gets which boils down to "The majority says [insert
| wrong statement here]". This IS neutral and in it self
| correct but the wrong statement is still there anyway.
| This is just the fundamental way how Wikipedia works.
| jl6 wrote:
| Are you disputing that Switzerland is historically neutral?
| noxer wrote:
| No absolutely not. But the Swiss neutrality is a broad
| concept/principle not a strictly defined set of actions
| that the gov can or can not do.
|
| The sanction against Russia for example are not in
| conflict with the neutrality principle despite the media
| reporting pretending that this is somehow "unexpected" or
| "a first" or "clearly picking a side" or even "ditching
| neutrality because Russia so bad". This is either the
| media sacrificing truth for click bait headlines or
| straight out propaganda but its in "Wikipedia trusted"
| media so Wikipedia picks that up because that what it
| should do.
|
| So now you have people thinking Switzerland somehow after
| 200 year of being neutral sides with EU/NATO whatever
| against Russia. And if people point out that this is not
| true, people point to Wikipedia. That is the dilemma.
| Wikipedia doesn't say its a source for truth but people
| use it as such anyway.
| windmark wrote:
| Can you elaborate with sources for someone who have only
| read the main stream media about this?
| noxer wrote:
| "Several countries which are historically neutral, such
| as Switzerland [...] have agreed to sanctions."
|
| This implies that Switzerland neutrality is somehow
| relevant while in reality it is not. It implies sanctions
| DESPITE neutrality.
|
| https://www.eda.admin.ch/eda/en/fdfa/fdfa/aktuell/newsueb
| ers...
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Even more amazingly the invasion article on the Russian
| wikipedia was really good as well (as of a few days ago).
| rozab wrote:
| Articles on conflicts are usually shockingly well written. I
| spend a lot of time reading them, at least in part for
| entertainment. The one on the Congo Crisis is fantastic:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Crisis
|
| I guess I'm not the only one doing this, because there's this
| meme trend of making video edits of these articles. Pretty
| much captures how it feels to read them if you're into it:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48hGOxw2heg
| mardifoufs wrote:
| This is a good example of an amazingly bad article with the
| worst type of wiki lawyering on the talk page. It basically
| still has the same conclusion in the lead as when it was
| originally created, and most of the claims/leaks against Hunter
| were considered "false"/dinsinfo... But now that those laptop
| leaks were either confirmed by different reputable sources, it
| more or less indirectly calls most of the claims true yet still
| ends up labeling everything a conspiracy theory for absolutely
| no reason other than some editors going all "nuh uh"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira...
|
| >"Almost no one is not no one, and simply the "fact" it was
| Hunter's laptop does not in itself establish anything improper,
| unless someone is upset about porn. We have no knowledge of its
| chain of custody. For all anyone knows, his laptop was snatched
| and flown to an SVR lab in Moscow for "enhancement" before
| being given to Rudy/Bannon. The Politico piece was not picked
| up by any other reliable source, it relies exclusively on an
| assertion by some unnamed guy whose credibility is unknown,
| hence it is REDFLAG and UNDUE"
|
| After ignoring articles from the guardian, politico, the nyt
| just because it's supposedly not relevant. And even if it was
| actually hunter's laptop who care right? It has nothing to do
| with the article _centered on the claims that it was his
| laptop_. I think ultimately this is just unconsequential, and
| the hunter story does not really matter, but if you contrast it
| with the wiki page on the russian links with trump, the extreme
| selectivity in sources somehow just... disappear. Keep in mind
| that no one is actually contesting that the contents of the
| laptop are actually from hunter at this point except for
| Wikipedia. Even the emails have been pretty conclusively proven
| to be his.
|
| The problem is that it leads to just more preaching to the
| choir; usually wikipedia is pretty good at neutrality in the
| tone of it's articles (even when those are biaised, which is
| normal). But with such a blatant attempt at mental gymnastics
| through the entire article, you end up convincing no one that
| the info is actually legit or credible. A lot of recent
| political articles end up being written in a manner much more
| similar to a smug RationalWiki article than to an actual
| encyclopedic text
| minerva23 wrote:
| > the extreme selectivity in sources somehow just...
| disappear
|
| Unimportant articles will draw a different crowd than more
| important articles. Those different groups will have
| different standards for sources and tone/bias.
|
| What changes have you made to that article that were rejected
| / rolled back? How long have you been making edits to it?
| ianai wrote:
| That makes me wonder what is the use in including anything
| political except blunt facts for a place like Wikipedia. If
| they want to do "political history" then I'd just have an
| open dump site of any kindling people want to add to the
| "discussion" and leave it at that. Basically just an archive
| of propaganda at worst.
| adamrezich wrote:
| it's always fun to find a page like
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Night_(video_game)
| where a quarter or more of the content is some
| "Controversy" that everyone has long since forgotten, but
| at the time it was Crucially Important that the Facts of
| this Controversy be Documented, so it's given undue weight
| in terms of percentage of the overall article.
| Lascaille wrote:
| >This is a good example of an amazingly bad article with the
| worst type of wiki lawyering on the talk page.
|
| >absolutely no reason other than some editors going all "nuh
| uh"
|
| They're almost certainly paid to keep that content on the
| talk page and off the article.
|
| Once you're in the partisan politics bubble normal procedures
| and safeguards break down because there are absurd amounts of
| money being spent.
|
| I looked at that talk page and it's just painful.
|
| "It isn't his laptop"
|
| "It isn't not proven to be not his laptop"
|
| "Even if it is his laptop, it isn't his files"
|
| "It isn't not proven to be not his files"
|
| Just admit that it could be genuine or it could be a disinfo
| campaign. Ugh.
| claytongulick wrote:
| The only thing this sort of obvious political bias does is
| discredit Wikipedia and push readers to less reputable sites
| for information.
|
| Like many others on here, I prefer to go directly to multiple
| biased sources like npr, CNN, breitbart, nypost because I
| understand their bias and can sort through it to tease out
| information.
|
| The thing that I find the most distasteful is any source that
| purports to be unbiased, but uses subtle language tricks to
| skew their readers towards a conclusion.
|
| I find such things to be the most toxic, and avoid them.
|
| I don't agree with the other commenters on here that argue
| "it's mostly good", so that makes it ok.
|
| When there's a hidden bias, it makes it much more difficult
| to tease through the information to find something that
| resembles the truth.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| What bias do you think CNN has? Genuinely curious which
| part of the spectrum you think they belong to, because I
| could make arguments for either side.
|
| Breitbart is an editorial/propaganda magazine, not a news
| source. Why would you go there for anything?
| Jiro wrote:
| It is mostly good, but the bad parts aren't evenly
| distributed. There are a couple specific categories of
| articles where Wikipedia can be bad. Anything political
| involving people on the Internet is guaranteed to produce a
| good or bad article depending mostly on which people on the
| Internet manage to edit the Wikipedia article. Anything
| political at all from the past couple of years beyond bare
| facts like "was this person convicted in court", for the
| same reasons. There's also subjects that not a lot of
| people care about, which can be good or bad depending on
| how competent the 1 or 2 people who edit the article are.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| > But now that those laptop leaks were either confirmed by
| different reputable sources
|
| Citation needed
| bwb wrote:
| Sorry, I am not quite sure what the problem is? I think Wikipedia
| is great from my day to usage. Can you point me to specific
| examples where the output is bad due to this?
|
| I would like to see the problem.
| smt88 wrote:
| I personally haven't seen a biased Wikipedia article in a very
| long time. It is absolutely astounding to me and seems like one
| of the great successes of internet culture.
|
| I assume OP has a particular set of issues that they are not in
| agreement with the majority of experts on.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _I personally haven 't seen a biased Wikipedia article in a
| very long time._
|
| What leads you to believe you can so easily spot a biased
| article? Everyone believes they're a neutral arbiter.
| smt88 wrote:
| "Biased" to me doesn't mean "I disagree".
|
| It means:
|
| - presented as a fact, rather than as the opinion of a
| scholar/researcher/etc. (meaning Wikipedia says it is true
| without citing anyone else)
|
| - ignoring a significant controversy or dissent
|
| - describing uncertain information as certain
|
| - perpetuating the myth that science is settled and can't
| be updated with new information
| mst wrote:
| Pages with culture war elements will inevitably be
| impacted by the culture war positions of the active
| editors in the area in question affecting how strictly a
| given source is judged for quality.
|
| I'm deliberately avoiding giving examples because it
| seems logical to assume that I'd merely reflect my own
| culture war positions with respect to any such example
| and thereby generate more heat than light.
|
| Overall though I still think wikipedia turns out pretty
| reasonably as a whole even given having seen a number of
| situations where I disagreed with the outcome.
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| "Experts" just depends on who you draw on as an expert:
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/02/24/wikipedia.
| ..
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/02/02/169470/computati.
| ..
|
| https://thecritic.co.uk/the-left-wing-bias-of-wikipedia/
| smt88 wrote:
| I don't have a set of experts in my mind.
|
| To me, experts are people who have spent a lot of time
| studying something firsthand, have turned over their
| research in a transparent way, who submit their work to
| criticism by their peers and the public, and who have no
| hidden financial backing from a biased party.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Yeah, I don't get it either. It's not perfect, but it might be
| the only web institution that hasn't broken down over time, and
| has done an impressive job of holding itself to quality
| standards given the absurdly large scale.
|
| Encyclopedias are, by definition, fairly superficial. You could
| also sit down and nitpick Britannica. The quality of writing is
| better because they actually have a professional staff, but
| they have to make all the same hard choices about what to
| include and objectivity.
| tasha0663 wrote:
| > the only web institution that hasn't broken down over time,
| and has done an impressive job of holding itself to quality
| standards given the absurdly large scale.
|
| Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg come to mind.
| Wikipedia might be an encyclopedia, but those are the
| libraries.
| ravenstine wrote:
| > I have seen talk pages where the same three editors who seem to
| be part of the same echo chamber discussing issues preventing any
| alternative opinion or tone to come in the article.
|
| This pretty much describes the problem with Wikipedia, but it's
| highly cryptic because possibly 95% of people are never going to
| realize this because I don't think they even know a Talk page
| exists for every article. I read lots of scientific articles and
| I always visit the Talk pages even when I haven't spotted any
| errors in the article content. There's tons of crazy petty shit
| that goes on between the people who edit Wikipedia articles.
| Whether something is considered a valid source for citation
| depends on which part of Wikipedia's inner circle you're talking
| to; in some articles, contributors are shouted down because
| "blogs aren't authoritative" even when they're the subject falls
| outside mainstream media and blogs are most proximal to the
| subject, but in other cases I've seen blogs be considered to be
| perfectly adequate when it's totally inappropriate. When it comes
| to anything even remotely tied to news and current events, you
| might as well skip Wikipedia and just read MSM news articles
| because those are really what Wikipedia largely considers
| "authoritative" no matter how biased the mainstream articles
| actually are. I've even seen totally legit edits and sources
| being ultimately rejected after a person answers every question
| of the [obstinate] editor because "nuh uh".
|
| Sadly, I cannot edit Wikipedia myself even though I've never even
| tried doing so. Even if I'm not using a VPN, it just flat out
| rejects my IP from even attempting to sign up.
|
| This is how Wikipedia can either fix itself or how someone can
| replace Wikipedia:
|
| - Be run by an accountable benevolent dictator who can ultimately
| veto any form of democracy present in the system; ultimately
| everything hinges on management no matter how the system is
| configured
|
| - Charge people money to edit Wikipedia (imo this would fix many
| of the content moderation problems on the internet as a whole at
| the cost of fewer active users)
|
| - Be transparent about who is in charge (Wikipedia obfuscates
| this with a facade that suggests that users are no different from
| one another, which is anything but the truth in 2022)
|
| - Refine official policies around authoritative sources, because
| right now any existing policies aren't working very well
| s0teri0s wrote:
| I still send them money (even though they have plenty of money)
| because I feel that despite its human flaws, it's still a better
| objective representation of 'the facts' than any other source on
| the planet. If, in fact, the editors are biased, but still
| represent a more objective viewpoint than those given to greater
| speculative possibilities, the public is still better served than
| if they are subjected to a cacophony of unsupported opinions.
| nojito wrote:
| Can you provide links to any talk pages that showcase issues with
| neutrality and editorialization?
| magpi3 wrote:
| Well I suppose another "Who watches the watchmen" type site can
| be built to report on bias issues/irresponsible editors. But
| ideally Wikipedia itself would build some internal mechanism for
| dealing with disputes. Has it done so?
|
| I have heard that Wikipedia is "broken" before, but without
| specific examples the complaint comes across as hollow. And if
| you do have specific examples, then I think it gives people the
| chance to investigate your claims.
| aliswe wrote:
| There was a site like this about 10 years ago, it contained
| some bizarre examples but i dont know if it was accurate.
| Perhaps it needed fact checking!
| actuator wrote:
| > But ideally Wikipedia itself would build some internal
| mechanism
|
| It has WP:ANI, but it is hard to go against established
| editors, if they are not writing outright lies or doing
| harassment. Say, if I want to edit a line from a summary of the
| Wikipedia page on a person which unfairly represents a person
| and the established editor thinks it makes sense, then I can't
| do anything. They are not writing misinformation as they will
| often have a source for it, but the tone and representation of
| that on the Wikipedia article can still be unfair.
|
| I would give specific examples here but then I would be accused
| of trying to influence talk pages with publicity on social
| media/forums. Moreover, as some of the talk pages have my
| comments, I don't want my online personas to be linked.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Say, if I want to edit a line from a summary of the
| Wikipedia page on a person which unfairly represents a person
| and the established editor thinks it makes sense, then I
| can't do anything.
|
| Of course you can. You can argue for your prferred wording on
| the talk page for the individual article, and a compromise
| can be reached. This is how this stuff works. Talk pages are
| _critical_ to dealing with even the slightest amount of
| controversy, "reverts" are supposed to be emergency actions
| only.
| actuator wrote:
| > You can argue for your prferred wording on the talk page
| for the individual article, and a compromise can be
| reached. This is how this stuff works. Talk pages are
| critical to dealing with even the slightest amount of
| controversy, "reverts" are supposed to be emergency actions
| only.
|
| I did try to argue for that but I was shut down as there
| was no way to agree what a fair representation is.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| There are established policies for that, actually.
| Ideally, the 'lead' section should accurately summarize
| what's already stated in the article and supported by
| appropriate sources.
| thetrip wrote:
| I'm, time to time, sending some money to the foundation. The work
| are great and help people a lot. But I know there are biased
| pages... But I'm not sure we are in the same page here: can you
| post some of the pages you found violates neutrality? Edit: Also
| the best way to fix wikipedia always will be reading more books,
| specially from the XX century. Maybe I'm a XX's century biased
| person.
| agumonkey wrote:
| maybe a contradictory bot farm ... something that can dig wide
| data graphs on wikipedia to point at inconsistencies and provide
| more fixes
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| This is partly the mission of Wikidata, for example if the two
| language wikipedias involved in a historical war can agree on
| the date it started and ended, and so do all the non-
| combatents, thats a good sign that there isn't mistakes or
| intentional bias.
| HKH2 wrote:
| You can be consistently wrong though.
| aasasd wrote:
| The first thing to do is to stop writing loud clickbait titles.
| And I don't mean on Wikipedia.
| noodles_nomore wrote:
| I don't agree that "Wikipedia's model seems far better than an
| individual publishing house's encyclopedia". Skimming the
| revision history of any non-recent nontechnical page shows you
| that the editing process, rather than revealing a steady
| dialectical progress, is just a constant back-and-forth churn of
| competing systems of thought. The winner is the one who can
| sacrifice the most time for vigilance and simulating an
| appearance of reasonableness. Of course moderation mitigates this
| state of affairs somewhat, but by the nature of Wikipedia, its
| ideal of impartiality, moderation cannot mediate truth; it can
| only raise the cost of contribution. As a result Wikipedia's
| model resembles proof-of-work, ceding governance to the fiercest
| advocates and wasting lots of energy.
|
| I believe we'd be better off with real intellectual diversity.
| Replace the melting-pot model with a federation, a la mastodon,
| where any topic can be represented by multiple articles from
| different wikis that have different specialties. The indexing
| needs to be federated as well, as different groups will want to
| in-/exclude different alternatives. But just relieving the single
| pressure point that Wikipedia represents should offer huge
| benefits to the ecosystem.
| IYasha wrote:
| 1. stop cooperating with three-letter agencies (probably,
| impossible?) 2. limit powers / volume of moderation
| resfirestar wrote:
| I'm not really a power user but I have been editing on and off
| for well over a decade, so perhaps I'm part of the insider group
| you think is too powerful. That said, I don't share the
| perception that these problems are as bad or widespread as you
| say. There are certain topics, such as Middle East politics,
| where there's such a critical mass of people who are just there
| to push an agenda that to maintain order there need to be actual
| admin-imposed restrictions. And there are some topics where
| individuals or small groups keep the article's tone and content
| under tight control, but that's usually because the topic is
| obscure enough that few people are interested enough to force
| changes through. Popular or politically charged topics have so
| many people contributing that it's virtually impossible to create
| a Reddit-style echo chamber, more often the problem is articles
| that consist of a jumble of contradictory propaganda. I think
| overall Wikipedia works well: even on today's highly politicized
| topics like COVID-19 vaccines and Ukraine/Russia, on Wikipedia
| you can read about the dissenting views, not free from refutation
| but considerably more free from the blanket statements, false
| equivalences, and even self-censorship that the news media treats
| these topics with.
|
| Of course, Wikipedia isn't apolitical: since the beginning it's
| been full of people who consider themselves critical thinkers and
| skeptics interested in spreading the truth as science tells it,
| which is itself an ideology that is necessarily opposed to
| political or religious ideologies which assert some truth that
| can't be refuted or proven by evidence, and of course to
| conspiracy theorists who openly detest science and expertise. So
| yes, people and organizations who make enemies of Wikipedia's
| ideology won't get nice or even 100% fair treatment in Wikipedia
| articles. Anyone who sees this as some new development due to
| recent political currents wasn't paying attention during the
| 2000s. If you see it as a problem, you're free to follow in the
| footsteps of widely mocked sites like RationalWiki or
| Conservapedia and create a wiki that favors your ideology
| instead. I think it's telling that even people who lean more left
| or right wing still rely on Wikipedia rather than those places.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| Wikipedia is very good.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Re-write MediaWiki in Rust.
| smolder wrote:
| This meme is considered harmful.
| bombcar wrote:
| You can't. You can only wait for it to collapse under its own
| problems, if such a time comes.
| slater wrote:
| What are the examples of "Wikipedia [...] getting worse with
| time, with regards to neutrality and editorialisation"?
| [deleted]
| blindmute wrote:
| Bias I've seen in politically charged articles:
|
| - Only allowing "reliable sources", and defining that based on
| criteria which essentially excludes any right wing publication,
| even when the unreliable source has irrefutable evidence of the
| claim (video, etc). Similarly, citing claims from 'reliable'
| sources that are misleading, or slightly incorrect (you don't
| need to look at many news articles to find an example of this)
|
| - Using social academic sources, like gender studies, to cite
| things that are literally just opinions. Social sciences have a
| lot of these publications putting forth claims, that are
| basically citing each other in a circle, with the root claim
| being someone's opinion (usually grievance studies).
|
| - Citing lack of 'relevance' to stifle any claim that doesn't
| fall under the above two. Who decides what's relevant? Well
| that's the trick; there's no objective criteria, so the power
| mods decide it.
| Zondor3000 wrote:
| No, Wikipedia cannot be fixed.
|
| And the reason it cannot be fixed rests on the very nature of
| humanity and communication, which is that many times, people tend
| to be prideful, stupid and inarticulate. Thus, one does not "fix"
| a bad Wikipedia article so much as one outlasts the bad editors
| who keep writing crap and/or deliberately suppress opposing
| views.
|
| An example of that would be the Wiki article for "Fact", which
| can be viewed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact Look at
| the talk page for this same article - and then look at the
| revision history for the article itself. Some literally absurd
| explanations for the meaning of the word "Fact" were kept in the
| article for far too long.
|
| Oddly enough, there's another English Wiki out there, a "simple"
| one and they too have an article about "Fact", but with a much
| less cluttered talk page https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact
| Why is this talk page (and article) it less cluttered? It's
| because there are fewer people there, and thus less persons
| pridefully defending their obvious errors.
|
| So then how does one write the "lede" sentence/paragraph for such
| an article? Anyone who thinks can tell you that the word "fact"
| has a very broad application and a number of application-specific
| variations in meaning. However, a skilled writer, if allowed by
| the resident Wiki editors, could post a simple but apropos
| opening blurb. Where I do so so, I would say this "A fact is an
| item of information offered up as a genuine portrayal of an
| actuality. When offered by a bona fide reliable source, it's
| generally accepted as true, unless otherwise disproved".
|
| Now, given that I'm the author of this blurb, and given that I
| too tend to be prideful and defensive of that which I write (and
| feel is true), am I the best arbiter of of the truth, precision
| and applicability of my blurb? The answer of course, is no, I am
| not. But neither is the mosh pit known as "Wikipedia".
|
| Instead, what Wikipedia is a brute force battle royal; an
| extended donnybrook which plays out over weeks and months. And
| what do people do when caught up in a massive, extended brawl?
| They join forces and pile on the opposition to defeat them. And
| at any given moment, that's also what Wikipedia is: It's a small
| network of entrenched editors who stay aligned with themselves,
| fighting off all interlopers via the means of "Admin" status and
| collective self congratulatory behavior.
|
| In fact, some of them go so far as to apply to themselves a user
| name which exalts them and seeks to place them beyond question.
| Here's a user account which is a great example of that:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Neutrality
|
| As reflected by this user's Contributions history,
| User:Neutrality
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Neutrali...
| is one of the long-time guardians of the status-quo at Wikipedia.
|
| And as clearly evidenced by his Contributions history, by being a
| long-time editor who is part of the Wikipedia "Admin" club,
| User:Neutrality, has virtually unfettered leeway to edit, revert
| and opine; while at the same time, disallowing any effective
| rebuttal.
|
| So no, the biases and other problems at Wikipedia cannot be
| fixed, not unless more people across a broader political mindset
| join and work their way up to Admin, so as to offset the
| entrenched left-leaning cabal which runs things there.
|
| As George Carlin used to say "It's a big club, and you ain't in
| it"
| simion314 wrote:
| We all know Wikipedia is not perfect, wrong information can be in
| there, so is it relevant that some bullshit political things is
| not perfectly represented?
|
| One solution would be to teach people to check multiple sources,
| and each political camp can put their own version of "truth" and
| people could read all the versions and decide .
|
| I am curious what type of pages bothers people that they need to
| endlessly fight on attempting to edit them, my bias as a non
| american is that is about the americans and their
| political/cultural war and maybe a few nationalists trying to
| change historical facts on some pages.
| teddyh wrote:
| You speak in vague generalizations about bad things you have
| seen. Since Wikipedia preserves all history, it should be no
| problem for you, then, to provide links to these things, would
| it?
| lumpenprole wrote:
| deknos wrote:
| In Germany this was talked already over quite a few years ago.
|
| Wikipedia would have to make it easy to clone parts of its
| websites to your own service so you can change the parts which
| are important to you. and then basically the most surfed-on-site
| wins.
|
| but atm you either fetch the database and set it up with
| everything.. or .. no idea.
|
| but nobody liked that model either.
|
| we'd need wikipedia with more-git-like backend i think, some guy
| wrote "levitation" for that, but there would be still a need of
| setting it up as service and declare which parts are important
| for you and for which you redirect yourself from your service to
| the real wikipedia.
| qiskit wrote:
| You can't. Anything that is editorialized will skew to an extreme
| over time. In the past, wikipedia was bad because its quality of
| information was generally terrible.
|
| "Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a general algorithm to solve the
| halting problem for all possible program-input pairs cannot
| exist."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
|
| Alan Turing did no such thing, but that's wikipedia for you. On
| topics you know nothing about, it feels like wikipedia is great.
| But on topics you have some knowledge/expertise, wikipedia
| reveals itself to be amateurish nonsense.
|
| Now throw in politics and it isn't good for anything but
| superficial knowledge in a narrow band of non-political topics.
| And that's not touching on the problems of limiting the sources
| to select news/media sources which exacerbates the problem. If
| you have time to waste, use waybackmachine to compare the
| wikipedia pages of "controversial" figures and see how noticeably
| those pages have been changed in a consistent manner.
|
| The only thing you can do is set up competing wikipedias. My hope
| is major countries around the world set up their own wikipedias (
| hopefully with english translations ) because I don't see anyone
| competing with wikipedia in the US.
| olah_1 wrote:
| > Anything that is editorialized will skew to an extreme over
| time
|
| It is exactly why Actuator's point in the OP was actually
| incorrect.
|
| > While Wikipedia's model seems far better than an individual
| publishing house's encyclopedia
|
| The illusion of an unbiased "encyclopedia for the world" has
| harmed the decentralization of information. It has actually
| created a unipolarity much like we see elsewhere around the
| world.
|
| It would be far better to have multiple different encyclopedia
| companies that could compete and perhaps even specialize in
| certain areas.
|
| But how do we keep the convenience of having them all
| connected? That is what Larry Sanger has been working on[1]. A
| federated network of encyclopedias that use the same data
| formats.
|
| [1]: https://encyclosphere.org/
| Mathnerd314 wrote:
| I worked on the Halting problem article a bit. The article has
| a "more footnotes needed" warning at the top - nobody is
| claiming the article is good. But at least the history section
| is well-sourced, so it's clear that the 1936 proof refers to
| Turing's paper "On Computable Numbers With an Application to
| the Entscheidungsproblem". There is a summary at
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing%27s_proof.
| slavik81 wrote:
| The pages on Verlet integration are also quite poor. If you
| follow the sources, they sometimes directly contradict the
| article text.
| munch117 wrote:
| Care to tell us who did prove it then?
|
| While the 1936 paper, "On Computable Numbers", doesn't
| explicitly mention the halting problem, it does cover the
| Entscheidungsproblem, and that the halting problem is
| undecidable follows trivially from that.
| qiskit wrote:
| "Jack Copeland (2004) attributes the introduction of the term
| halting problem to the work of Martin Davis in the 1950s.[1]"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
|
| Martin Davis did in the early 1950s after Turing's death.
|
| > and that the halting problem is undecidable follows
| trivially from that.
|
| Trivially? Took nearly 2 decades after Turing published his
| paper for Martin Davis to come up with the halting problem.
| And it required a reformulation of the Turing machine itself.
| Today, we view 'good' Turing machines as those that
| stop/halt. Turing viewed 'good' Turing machines as those that
| continued forever ( aka never stops ).
| munch117 wrote:
| If you can solve the halting problem, then you can apply it
| to a solution checker that works by enumerating potential
| solutions and halting when it finds one. Therefore, if
| you've solved the halting problem then you've also solved
| the Entscheidungsproblem, and since the latter is
| impossible, it follows that the premise of having a
| solution to the halting problem is false.
|
| Yes, that does seems trivial to me. Although maybe that
| just shows the brilliance of the people who came up with it
| and made it sound simple.
|
| Did Turing's original machine not have a halting state?
| That does change things. You can hardly express the halting
| problem if you don't have the concept of halting.
| qiskit wrote:
| Using your logic, Alonzo Church should be credited with
| the Turing machine and the halting problem since he
| solved Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem before Turing did.
| If everything follows trivially from an answer to the
| same question, then Turing's solution follows trivially
| from Church.
|
| Not sure why you are fixated on the Entscheidungsproblem.
| Turing's claim to fame isn't the entscheidungsproblem. If
| it were, nobody would know who Turing is because Church
| already solved the entscheidungsproblem. His contribution
| are the theoretical concept of Turing machines (
| universal turing machines especially ) and computable
| numbers.
|
| > Did Turing's original machine not have a halting state?
|
| Are you asking me?
|
| > You can hardly express the halting problem if you don't
| have the concept of halting.
|
| He did have a concept of halting. He called them
| circular/unsatisfactory.
|
| Did you even read his paper?
| 29vito wrote:
| Could you please point to an example where you feel the article
| isn't neutral?
| calumetregion wrote:
| Many people asking for examples.
|
| For an easy one (among millions) just compare The New York
| Times Wikipedia article to the article for The Epoch Times.
| "Oh, but The Epoch Times is right wing, so..."
|
| How can I compare the Ochs-Sulzberger family to the Falun Gong?
| Well I just did. They're both made up of humans with opinions.
| cy_hauser wrote:
| I'm interpreting your comment as, "Wikipedia isn't far right
| enough for my tastes." Is that accurate? Do you know of any
| examples where Wikipedia leans farther right than left?
| calumetregion wrote:
| Or you could see it as "poisoning the well" - an approach
| so common and accepted that neither of you see it,
| apparently.
|
| Although clearly a _lefty_ news organization, I don 't see
| the NY Times as a "wing" on that easy left-right spectrum
| we all seem to love. NYT has had many writers and done some
| excellent work along the way. In the aggregate their
| ideology is more in support of population density (cities),
| industrialism and technology - with some hostility towards
| more pastoral living, herding animals for food, etc.
| notafraudster wrote:
| I just read through both articles but I don't understand the
| point you're making. Is it that the NYT article is more
| fleshed out and talks about their various print products? You
| can add such a section to the Epoch Times.
| akvadrako wrote:
| It should be possible to fork pages. If an active editor doesn't
| like edits they can publish their own version.
|
| The main Wikipedia owners then choose, like they do now, which
| editor they support as default.
| smt88 wrote:
| You can already do this by just forking all of Wikipedia, as
| many people have done.
| akvadrako wrote:
| Technically yes, but the UX leaves a lot to be desired.
|
| Forking the whole wiki just to present your own version of a
| few pages isn't useful. Even the basics aren't there, like
| being discoverable or an easy way to track upstream changes.
| cf141q5325 wrote:
| Instead of edit wars allow forking. So allow for multiple
| versions of articles with metalevel descriptions about the
| difference. This way we could have actual conversations about
| where the different perspectives come from and who has the better
| arguments.
| ipunchghosts wrote:
| Reddit useless for good discussion and has been since covid
| started.
| frabbit wrote:
| A formal ban on editors being members/volunteers/associated-with
| state-related propaganda outfits like the National Endowment for
| Democracy (NED) would be good. It wouldn't stop anything
| underhanded, but at least they would not be able to lie to
| themselves that they were doing nothing wrong.
| slightwinder wrote:
| These are normal problems in every society. A certain level of
| control and moderation is necessary to reach functionality and
| quality. But this means people gain power, might misuse it, but
| also gain haters who just don't like the result independent of
| its quality. This is also nothing new. Complaints over
| Wikipedia's system and quality are existing since the beginning.
| This is normal because any system has their grind, their winners
| and losers. It doesn't mean the system is bad, or is producing
| bad results.
|
| Can you point out any real issues in their articles? Any
| widespreaded misinformation or actual issue? Most complaints I
| always see are usually about disputable details, not about actual
| problems.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| You need a culture that supports truth. You will not be able to
| do this with policy changes.
|
| For instance, this article:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira...
|
| >The Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theory is a series of unevidenced
| claims centered on the false allegation that while Joe Biden was
| vice president of the United States, he engaged in corrupt
| activities relating to the employment of his son Hunter Biden by
| the Ukrainian gas company Burisma.
|
| This is not a statement of fact, but an _opinion_ of the person
| writing it. The fact of corruption is _the question at hand_.
|
| The Vice President's son was being paid $1,000,000/yr to sit on
| the board of a foreign gas company.
|
| That isn't a disputed. Joe and Hunter Biden don't dispute this.
|
| This article should be listing the basis of accusations against
| Hunter, and listing refutations to those accusations.
|
| Instead, this reads like an opinion piece/defense/misdirection.
|
| Wikipedia should have a culture that reflexively recoils at stuff
| like this. I should have no idea what the political leanings of
| the editors at wikipedia have, but I do, and they make it
| obvious.
| Mathnerd314 wrote:
| >>The Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theory is ...
|
| > This is not a statement of fact, but an opinion
|
| Actually the way Wikipedia articles work, this is a definition.
| They are taking various articles about similar topics (in the
| citation link at the end), and coming up with a single topic
| name and its definition. Sometimes it's hard to accomplish this
| and you have to settle for a vague definition, e.g.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_number is defined to
| allow starting at 0 or at 1.
|
| As far as the $1,000,00/yr salary, that's mentioned on
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden#Burisma_Holdings.
| But it's not relevant to the conspiracy theory so it's not
| mentioned there. I think you could add it, just copy the
| source.
| jl2718 wrote:
| Humor (sort of): https://medium.com/@johnlakness/case-study-
| decentralizing-th...
|
| My idea for this specifically is to make a pijul repository for
| Wikipedia, and then a staking/delegation/voting mechanism for
| acceptance of each vertex in the hash tree. At each level of the
| tree, a user would be presented with versioning options based on
| maximum aggregation of unique voters, like in hierarchical
| clustering, which will roughly define the 'tribes' of viewpoints.
| It would also be possible to render from a specific hash. I would
| hope to build a user interface with maximum flexibility to
| explore across 'versions' and encourage voting and merges across
| clusters.
|
| I've also considered using randomization, as in, selecting a hash
| to render with probability equal to the vote within the user's
| cluster. This would be to prevent too much separation among the
| clusters.
| CalChris wrote:
| Get rid of anonymous edits.
| projektfu wrote:
| A big part of the value in Wikipedia is that an anonymous
| person can fix grammar and things like that without having to
| register.
| teddyh wrote:
| https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22R...
| aimor wrote:
| Support multiple competing Wikipedia-type online encyclopedias.
| tasha0663 wrote:
| At the end of the day, Wikipedia is just another source of "but I
| read it on the Internet!" Take it with a grain of salt.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Without specific examples this is pretty meaningless.
|
| Every now and then there are groups that try to gain control of
| an article or group of articles on Wikipedia (especially around
| big current events) and then they start looking for ways to game
| the system all the while bitching about how Wikipedia is
| 'broken'.
|
| The way I see it: Wikipedia is imperfect, but not broken, and it
| has developed a pretty impressive array of defenses against being
| overtly gamed.
| lucb1e wrote:
| > Without specific examples this is pretty meaningless.
|
| I'd go one step further: specific examples are still
| meaningless. On a site with editors from every country and
| region on the world and millions of articles (not each one
| equally popular and viewed/vetted by other editors), of course
| you'll find examples for any point of view.
|
| I'm also afraid it might then become a conversation about those
| specific examples. Proving systemic bias is unfortunately not
| trivial here. Without looking into examples at all, though,
| it's indeed a meaningless conversation that OP is creating.
| noxer wrote:
| I think you overestimate who actually write and edits
| articles on Wikipedia. Its a very very very small group of
| people who does 80% and then an other small group who does
| 19% and then you have the millions of random people with
| internet who have contributed something.
| bjourne wrote:
| Here is a specific example: Circumcision It has the features OP
| complains about. Content controlled by a small number of
| "guardians" who knows every Wikipedia rule and policy in
| existence and uses them to keep outsiders out. A shockingly
| biased tone that omits every dissenting source. The article's
| guardians call them "anti-circumcisionists" and in their view,
| the critics objects are as valid as 9/11 conspiracy theorists'.
|
| "Male circumcision significantly reduces the risk of HIV
| infection among heterosexual men in sub-Saharan Africa." "The
| highest quality evidence indicates that circumcision has no
| impact on sexual function, sensation, or pleasure." Mentioned
| in the first two paragraphs. The fact that many believe that
| male circumcision is a grave violation of boys' rights to body
| autonomy is not.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I was asking the OP because I want to get an idea of what
| kind of articles they believe are evidence of the fact that
| Wikipedia is broken, not because I doubt that any such
| articles exist. Specifically to see what kind of angle they
| have. Once you report something like this to a forum like HN
| as being a serious enough problem that it warrants a
| discussion I think that party should bring their own
| evidence, because chances are they are just unable to push
| their own agenda on some pet subject. If I were to come to
| the conclusion that Wikipedia is broken and I'd post it to HN
| I would make sure to bring ample evidence.
|
| That said, that article could certainly be improved on.
|
| I have my own pet peeves about Wikipedia and even about some
| articles, but I don't think it is 'structurally broken', that
| requires a different level of evidence.
| bjourne wrote:
| I see your point but I'm not sure one can produce the kind
| of evidence you are requiring. My areas of expertise allows
| me to evaluate at most 100 Wikipedia articles on mostly
| technical subjects. But Wikipedia contains millions of
| articles so I can only judge the quality or whether an
| agenda is being pushed on less than 0.1% of all articles.
| For the remaining 99.9% I can't tell since I don't know
| everything about everything.
| _Nat_ wrote:
| > The fact that many believe that male circumcision is a
| grave violation of boys' rights to body autonomy is not.
|
| For reference, how many people believe that? Like, is it a
| view held by 50% of the population, 10% of the population, or
| is it more of a niche view, or..?
|
| Because when we get down to stuff that <10% of the population
| believes, things get super-weird.
|
| ---
|
| Tried looking it up; appears to be a niche perspective. A
| significant minority of the population doesn't favor
| circumcision, but there doesn't seem to be much about folks
| having a huge problem with it. Also, it appears that, among
| men who were/weren't circumcised, it's more common for men
| who were circumcised to be happy about their parents'
| decision (from Questions 5 and 6 of [this survey [PDF]](http:
| //cdn.yougov.com/cumulus_uploads/document/ugf8jh0ufk/to...
| )).
| bjourne wrote:
| > Dutch doctors want politicians and human rights groups to
| speak out and discourage the practice of male circumcision
| in the Netherlands because they say it is a "painful and
| harmful ritual," and a violation of children's rights.
|
| > Between 10,000 and 15,000 boys are circumcised in the
| Netherlands each year, mostly for religious reasons and not
| always with an anesthetic, according to the Royal Dutch
| Medical Association (KNMG) which represents surgeons,
| pediatricians, general practitioners and urologists.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dutch-circumcision-
| health...
|
| You can find similar views expressed by many medical
| associations around the world
| (https://www.thelocal.dk/20161205/danish-doctors-come-out-
| aga... https://www.thelocal.se/20090725/20900/
| https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-5142149) I believe the American
| Pediatrics Association is the only major one that has come
| out in favor of circumcision. Their statement is along the
| lines of "the benefits slightly outweigh the risks".
| Americans may be cool with genital cutting but in the rest
| of the world the procedure is very controversial.
| _Nat_ wrote:
| I appreciate that you're able to show that some people
| hold such beliefs, but the numbers I'm finding suggest
| that it's still less common than beliefs in, say,
| 9/11-conspiracy theories.
|
| Don't get me wrong -- I appreciate that you can show that
| there're advocacy groups in that arena. But there're
| groups who advocate 9/11 conspiracy-theories, aliens,
| anti-vaccination, flat-Earth, mysticism, etc., so the
| mere existence of advocacy groups doesn't seem like a
| distinction from such things.
|
| Instead, is there some sort of poll/survey -- non-
| American, if you prefer -- that demonstrates that a
| significant portion of some population holds such strong
| views against circumcision?
|
| To note it: If you want to get Wikipedia to change its
| presentation, presenting such evidence might help out.
| Because, it really does seem like you're advocating a
| niche belief; but, if you can demonstrate that it's held
| by a significant portion of people on Earth, then that
| might change stuff.
| bjourne wrote:
| I don't understand how you can compare national medical
| associations with 9/11-conspiracy theorists? 86%
| (https://nyheder.tv2.dk/samfund/2020-09-01-partier-
| kraever-fo...) of all Danes and 62% of all Britons
| (https://eachother.org.uk/uk-ban-male-infant-
| circumcision/), and 64% of all Swiss
| (https://www.thelocal.ch/20120731/majority-of-swiss-want-
| reli...) want to outlaw circumcision. The idea that a
| child's right to body autonomy takes precedence over its
| parents desire to have elective surgery performed on
| their genitals is certainly not a fringe view in many
| Western countries.
|
| However, this is not about circumcision per se. My point
| is that Wikipedia's presentation of circumcision is a
| product of the article's guardians who. You can look at
| the article's talk page and see for yourself that plenty
| of people have complained about the article's slanted
| coverage but no one has been able to do anything about it
| due to the opposition of the guardians. This is how it
| works on almost any article about any remotely
| controversial topic. Just being right is not enough when
| you're up against an experienced editor that knows all
| the rules and have a vested interest in pushing a certain
| view.
| lovelearning wrote:
| I think most of the conflicts are because the left-wing and the
| right-wing are incompatible moral philosophies. Because Wikipedia
| content is completely public, I'd like a forking model where the
| left-wing and right-wing maintain independent versions. Viewer
| apps can provide ways to read both for people interested in all
| sides (like allsides.com).
| zaik wrote:
| It has been attempted: https://www.conservapedia.com/Climate-
| change
| captainmuon wrote:
| I think this has to be solved culturally. Wikipedia would have to
| have a radical cultural dedication against "cliques" and
| sectarianism and towards openness.
|
| I also don't like the maxime of Wikipedia to prefer "sourced"
| information, rather than "true" information. Something can be
| wrong, but if reputable sources claim it, then it goes in WP. I
| know in the English speaking world the term "truth" has gotten
| some problematic connotations recently, but frankly I find that
| disturbung. I really would prefer a site that goes for the truth,
| and when there is no agreement then I want them to detail the
| disagreement (with correct proportions to prevent "false
| balance") and then I want to discuss the fuck out. I feel in
| Wikipedia, too often the "admins" (i.e. the established editors)
| decide on a whim.
|
| Finally I think deletionism is the plaque, and we need an
| inclusionist wikipedia. This is not just because I want to read
| articles about Pokemon, or because I believe disk space is cheap.
| I personally think there is a fundamental philosophical or
| political argument pro inclusionism.
| hooby wrote:
| The first step to fixing a problem, is to understand the problem.
|
| I know, many people will possibly agree that this problem exists
| - but that sort of empirical observation isn't all that useful.
| If you want to try a method to fix it - any method at all - you
| need to first have a reliable way to measure whether it actually
| improves things.
|
| And for that you first need to find a way to actually measure
| this - in a reliable, repeatable, unbiased way. You need to find
| a way to measure all of Wikipedia for this sort of problem. Not
| just the current state - but through the change history for any
| arbitrary point in the past as well.
|
| Then do some thorough data analysis, trying to learn as much
| about the problem as you can. That's your best bet for actually
| solving the problem.
| Lascaille wrote:
| >many people will possibly agree that this problem exists
|
| >a reliable way to measure whether it actually improves things
|
| After the process has been carried out, it is measured as
| successful if less people agree the problem exists. Very
| simple, very quantifiable.
|
| >Then do some thorough data analysis, trying to learn as much
| about the problem as you can.
|
| No, that's not necessary. That seems more like gatekeeping and
| wikilawyering, which is basically the actual problem -
| entrenched power networks refusing to let anybody consider
| changing things without first having produced ten man-years
| worth of proof.
|
| You don't solve the problem by doing what the problem tells you
| that you must do in order to be allowed to solve it.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I'm assuming this is only coincidentally coming shortly after
| Russia's threat of a ban on them?
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Get the Wikimedia Foundation to spend money on the technical
| foundation of the sites, rather than spraying millions up the
| wall of "racial justice". That's not me making a strawman by
| going straight to "omg, the SJWs", it's a exact phrase from the
| 3rd paragraph of the 4.5 million Knowledge Equity Fund page [1].
|
| That, and executive pay, is where donations go, not to keeping
| the lights on. The running cost to keeping the servers running is
| about the same as that fund. It certainly isn't the case that
| engineering is "done" either, as the open bug count is growing
| constantly and huge swathes of the software aren't maintained and
| don't even have maintainers[2]. Just minor things of no
| importance to modern didactics like, you know, functional video
| support and rarely used, obscure, functions like uploading.
|
| They have more important things to do like weird elections and
| appointing cryptobro "disrupters" to the board.
|
| [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund
|
| [2] https://mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers
| [deleted]
| thepasswordis wrote:
| From the first link:
|
| >The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting
| away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal
| supremacy, superiority, power and privilege to create an
| environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of
| communities of color worldwide.
|
| What an interesting signaling statement. If you did not know
| what "racial equity" was, imagine trying to parse out what it
| is from that statement.
|
| Imagine reading this phrase out loud to anybody not already
| involved in this debate. Would this help them understand what
| "racial equity" was? If you read this statement to any of my
| family or friends, who live in the middle of the country, they
| would probably conclude that this was some sort of racist
| propaganda thing, and wouldn't want to talk to whoever brought
| it up anymore.
|
| I mean the fact that the foundation which is supposed to also
| be providing information to the world is _also_ proudly
| publishing things like that should be pretty revelatory.
| phphphphp wrote:
| Your friends and family probably wouldn't participate in a
| debate about how to build an encyclopaedia that is
| representative of the world, not just the world according to
| a bunch of mostly middle class white nerds. If they did have
| an interest in such a debate, I am sure they would be capable
| of processing that statement.
|
| There's nothing intellectually controversial about
| Wikipedia's statement, to argue against it on the basis that
| it's impossible to parse seems anti-intellectual rather
| than... actually challenging the content of the statement.
|
| You may wish to argue that Wikipedia can simultaneously be an
| encyclopaedia that represents the world AND be an
| encyclopaedia mostly written by middle class white people,
| but that's a point that requires much more discussion than a
| hand-wavey statement about how this discussion isn't relevant
| to your friends and family.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| If the content of the encyclopedia is meant to be a
| representation of objective facts, then why on earth
| _could_ it matter what the race of the people writing it
| is?
|
| This sounds like straight up Nazi propaganda. The idea that
| races are so different that we literally inhabit separate
| realities is _insane_ levels of bigotry.
| phphphphp wrote:
| The hyperbole isn't helpful. As has been highlighted time
| and time again, Wikipedia is the work of a relatively
| small amount of people and there is a great deal of bias
| because humans suffer from bias -- regardless of their
| intentions.
|
| "History is written by the victors" is a famous phrase a
| reason -- facts are a representation of the information
| we are most confident in, not truth.
| _Nat_ wrote:
| " _History 's written by the victors_" seems like a
| stretch that's only kinda truth-adjacent in some
| situations, e.g. where one side gets wiped out and
| there're no third-party observers, etc.. But, it doesn't
| hold in most cases, e.g. in World War 1 or 2, nor
| basically any modern war, where most of the losing side
| survives and tells its stories too. Heck, in the US, some
| folks _complain_ about how much the loser of the American
| Civil War got to push its narratives. [From StackExchange
| 's History site](https://history.stackexchange.com/questi
| ons/5597/is-history-... ).
|
| Anyway, critique of that quote aside, how's it relevant
| to Wikipedia?
| phphphphp wrote:
| The quote is relevant because it demonstrates that it is
| widely understood that history ("facts") is not an
| absolute truth, but a collection of ostensibly-true
| pieces of information disseminated by one party.
|
| To say that Wikipedia is not representative of its
| editors, is to say that history is not representative of
| the victors.
|
| To pick an example of a group that is somewhat insular:
| if the majority of Wikipedia editors were Chinese, would
| Wikipedia look as it does today? Would Wikipedia be an
| equally-as-accurate reflection on the west as Wikipedia
| is today?
| _Nat_ wrote:
| > To pick an example of a group that is somewhat insular:
| if the majority of Wikipedia editors were Chinese, would
| Wikipedia look as it does today? Would Wikipedia be an
| equally-as-accurate reflection on the west as Wikipedia
| is today?
|
| There's a Chinese Wikipedia site:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Wikipedia
|
| However, even the English-Wikipedia's articles on China
| are likely to be disproportionately influenced by Chinese
| posters, even if they're a minority of the overall
| contribution-base.
|
| That said, what's the potential relevance here? Is this
| purely about articles on politics, or..?
| oauea wrote:
| Sure does sound like racism to me, just like Reddit's stance
| that you can't be racist against white people.
| bavell wrote:
| Absolutely 100%. I can't tell you how many companies I've
| lost respect for because they've hopped on the virtue-
| signalling PR bandwagon. It couldn't be more obvious they
| don't even believe what they're saying but it's in vouge
| these days so they plow forward anyways. The added bonus of
| some casual anti-white/anti-european hatred is the cherry on
| top.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Interestingly, from the Universal Code of Conduct [1]
|
| > Note: The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and
| "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people.
|
| [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct
| Mezzie wrote:
| I just always find it funny that 'Eurocentricity' is one of
| the problems, given the whole movement is AMERICA-CENTRIC as
| hell. We've even co-opted what being 'Eurocentric' means!
| Talk about arrogance!
| thrashh wrote:
| I think waaay too many people are unknowingly hanging around
| other people they like too much and it causes their circle to
| double down on crazy.
| PCGamer_Empath wrote:
| Since you're familiar enough with the activities of the
| knowledge equity fund to be confident that it's a waste, can
| you fill in more detail about which grants that it has issued
| that ended up being wasteful? I understand that you're not
| "going straight to OMG, the SJWs", so surely you have some
| knowledge of how these millions of dollars were allocated and
| at least some vague understanding of their particular failures.
|
| Unless of course you read "racial equity" and assumed that
| there could not possibly be a valuable distribution of funds
| based on that idea. Assuming that's not the case, could you
| give an example of a grant writing fund that ostensibly
| supports the idea _and_ has created value?
| hitekker wrote:
| That's a few too many passive aggressive questions to be
| asking with a sockpuppet account. If you could rewrite it to
| be less leading and resentful, I think the GP would be more
| willing to engage.
| PCGamer_Empath wrote:
| I'm not really sure how I am supposed to retroactively go
| back in time and register earlier.
|
| Since you are handing out free advice, is it normally
| considered polite or helpful here to accuse people of using
| fake accounts? Is assuming that a person speaking with
| confidence about a topic may have some direct knowledge of
| that topic somehow rude or against the rules?
|
| If you're speaking confidently on behalf of the person that
| I was responding to, are you sure that you reflect their
| opinion faithfully? If the GP wanted to say "I refuse to
| give more details about the fund due to the phrasing of
| your request for details," surely they could have typed
| that themselves.
|
| Namaste!
| mst wrote:
| Different registers of english are an interesting
| conversational issue.
|
| Your phrasing read to me as being close to passive
| aggressive, but had I been the author of the top level
| post you were replying to I would have assumed good faith
| too.
|
| My most common failure mode in HN comments is coming
| across as more combative than I intended because I tend
| towards blunt in my communication style. If you look at
| my comments, you'll note quite a few have a disclaimer in
| a parenthetical at the end to try and avoid that
| happening.
|
| Whether or not adopting a similar approach would be
| remotely useful to you, I genuinely have no idea.
| cf141q5325 wrote:
| Since you arent a sockpuppet and just new, do you really
| feel confident to have hit the right tone here, even
| after somebody gave you a heads up how a conversation is
| more likely to be fruitful?
|
| You dont need to speak on behalf of OP to give you a
| heads up about a common problem with your approach, its
| pretty universal. Picture it this way, there is list of
| common problems which make a sensible discussion less
| likely. Which might be overlooked if you havent heard
| about it before. For example your sentences being too
| convoluted or having a bad structure. Another one of
| those is needlessly escalating a conversation.
|
| That kind of boils down to what the aim of your post is.
| If its not aimed at having a fruitful engaging
| conversation that might proof your wrong, then you are
| either doing it for yourself or to set an atmosphere.
| Which is where the assumption of a sockpuppet comes from.
|
| Differently put, what good does your post if its not
| aimed at getting somebody to engage in a meaningful way?
| And if that is your aim, you might want to take his
| advice, you generally get better results.
| PCGamer_Empath wrote:
| >do you really feel confident to have hit the right tone
| here, even after somebody gave you a heads up how a
| conversation is more likely to be fruitful?
|
| Considering that the person whom I was addressing
| responded to my post in a productive manner and we were
| able to have a civil and thoughtful exchange... Yes?
|
| Do you think it's productive to police the conversations
| of others in a way that is entirely off topic to the
| threads? I understand that neither you nor hitekker
| enjoyed my wording. In the future, when I am speaking to
| you about a topic in a thread, I'll try to imagine what
| one's reaction might be if they interpret it as meaning
| offense before I post. I can't guarantee that I'll always
| be able to align with your preferred style of decorum,
| especially since I'm not sure what the rules are here; my
| post was bad and hitekker's post (an unprovoked off-topic
| personal attack on me under the auspices of speaking for
| another person who didn't appear to share their sentiment
| in the first place) was good.
|
| I won't be engaging any further on the minutae of posting
| best practices in the discussion thread for the future of
| the wikimedia project. Have a nice day!
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Just from the grants on that page, none of them are designed
| to actually result in concrete wiki-relevant activity. This
| is, apparently, deliberate[1].
|
| The metrics of success are not defined in a measurable way
| with respect to the wiki projects; whatever they do result in
| won't be published until the end of the year. Maybe we will
| see 4.5 million worth of value. Maybe we will not.
|
| I'm not saying that it's a waste in absolute terms: the
| initiatives are likely a net good to humanity. But I don't
| think they are going to improve _Wikipedia_ very much when
| the money is withheld from the platform itself. Yes, that 's
| a false dichotomy, because if you have enough cash, you can
| have both racial justice funds and engineering excellence.
| But somewhere a decision was made that one is more important
| than the other, and I suggest that if you can have only one,
| going the other way will help Wikipedia more.
|
| And no, I don't have an example of an racial justice grant
| that resulted in a value, but I don't claim that they are
| axiomatically without it.
|
| The WMF does do quite a few other grants that I think have
| been and are valuable _in wiki-adjacent_ areas. A lot of
| Wikipedian in Residences are very interesting, and these can
| have vast potential for increasing access to non-Western
| cultural resources. Something that I 'd say is more in the
| WMF wheelhouse.
|
| [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knowledge_Equity_Fun
| d#W...
| PCGamer_Empath wrote:
| Thanks for the link! I can see being sceptical about the
| fund given the somewhat nebulous nature of the descriptions
| of their grants, and I look forward to seeing how they
| shake out by the end of the year. The reason why I asked is
| because it seemed like a strong position to take to say
| that the money was being "sprayed up the wall" given the
| little information we have about the outcomes of the fund.
| ?
|
| That being said, "what is best for Wikipedia" is in itself
| a nebulous proposition in the first place because different
| people have different requirements and visions for the
| project. Personally to me, the investments in investigative
| journalism (1) seem like they could have a direct value
| contribution since it could expand original reporting of
| facts for the site. That is of course debatable, but we'll
| see.
|
| Thanks for clarifying!
|
| 1 https://medium.com/freely-sharing-the-sum-of-all-
| knowledge/p...
| aliswe wrote:
| there should be a pie chart specifying where the Wikipedia
| budget is going
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Close enough[1]? That breakdown doesn't seem too
| unreasonable, the 'community' bucket is large, but not
| larger than 'direct support to websites' (which I take to
| mean Keeping The Lights On). The overhead for admin and
| fundraising looks fairly typical for a nonprofit.
|
| 1: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-
| annu...
| remram wrote:
| Is that true? I have been told that money given to Wikipedia
| went towards wikipedia only, and those other activities were
| separate. I can't find a definite answer in their public
| reports and plans though.
| devwastaken wrote:
| Yes, remember that Wikipedia, just like other big "nonprofits"
| abuse that meaning to make money. This isn't some org comprised
| of engineers and servers. It's a few engineers, some servers,
| and mostly warm bodies that are incentivizes to come up to
| contrived problems to justify their existence. It's very
| similar to modern U.S. academia.
| jl6 wrote:
| If you look at where the money is going, it seems a mix of orgs
| working to create new citable sources about under-covered
| topics (good, and surely in line with an encyclopaedia's
| mission), and orgs who are going to "study" "issues" (highly
| questionable value).
| [deleted]
| threatofrain wrote:
| > It certainly isn't the case that engineering is "done"
| either, as the open bug count is growing constantly and huge
| swathes of the software aren't maintained and don't even have
| maintainers[2].
|
| Wikipedia is moving to Vue.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| They haven't even finished moving to OOUI.
|
| Actually, if they'd just bothered to document OOUI properly
| in the first place, would they need to move?
|
| As it is, they'll now have three concurrent systems (jQuery,
| OOUI and Vue). It's like GTK 2,3,4 all over again.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| They're not "moving" to Vue. They plan to build some
| _optional_ JS-based components on Vue, since the alternative
| of purely handcrafted code is unappealing. And even then,
| that code can probably be refactored to use the vastly
| superior Svelte once the dev team 's weird hostility to
| workflows based on ahead-of-time code generation is
| addressed.
| snarkerson wrote:
| That's almost just like doing something to fix things.
| laurent92 wrote:
| I was ashamed when I learnt Wikipedia artificially funds the
| writing of pages of women, so they try to reach equal numbers
| to men. I wouldn't be ashamed if the criteria for admissibility
| were equal, but barely being a researcher with published papers
| is enough, while men with entire books on the subject get
| rejected.
|
| Talk about rewriting history...
| regularjack wrote:
| > while men with entire books on the subject get rejected.
|
| Ok, I'll bite. Giving incentives to increase the number of
| pages about women, does not impact in any way the number of
| existing pages about men.
| aliswe wrote:
| I believe what the parent post is hinting at is that this
| is likely to impact the notability treshold - which would
| require some proof in order to start the discussion.
| devwastaken wrote:
| Lets say you have a company that requires a level of
| technical skill to work at, and instead of hiring for that
| technical skill, you hire them based on being blue.
| Everyone else, including those who are blue, know you are
| doing this because the individual is clearly not ready for
| that work. This creates resentment, which creates
| discrimination.
|
| You have to promote natural systems, not artificial ones,
| or you create further inequality. A natural solution in
| this case would be to create a policy where anyone whom is
| an authority on a subject can write about it on Wikipedia,
| and they can write even conflicting opinions. That can all
| be put together. If woman are paid, men are paid, etc.
| mplanchard wrote:
| Or you maintain the same hiring standards, but do more
| work to ensure your candidate pool, which historically is
| 99% not blue, actually contains some blue people, which
| naturally leads to more blue people on the team. These
| blue people are just as qualified as anyone else, and
| their presence keeps people from building idiotic ideas
| like "the only reason blue people can be hired is if we
| lower our standards," since everyone who works with them
| can see that they are talented and deserve to be there.
|
| The idea that the only way to promote equity is through
| lowering standards is a pernicious and unrealistic
| strawman.
| [deleted]
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| This could almost be taken word for word from an article about
| Mozilla.
|
| People who think 'social justice' is a bad thing seem to set
| really high standards for the open, independant organisations
| they say they support, and they're not afraid to give them some
| extreme tough love and undermine them at every step if they
| don't follow their priorities.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| They didn't get my donations saying they're gonna bring about
| racial justice. They said this is what is needed to keep
| Wikipedia without ads and that they're suffering. Misleading
| is an understatement.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Social justice isn't a bad thing. Social justice _instead_ of
| actually fulfilling your primary goal is. If all the bugs are
| closed, the product is beautiful and there 's still money
| sloshing about, then fill your boots.
|
| Also, make sure that your donors know their donation is going
| to go to racial education of Arab journalists (grantee #1),
| and not to paying developers and server bills. The begging
| banners on Wikimedia sites fail to mention that there's
| already 9 figure surplus, and yet the engineering teams will
| not see any of it no matter what you give, and their money
| isn't going to actually end up helping a wiki at all.
|
| If I wanted to donate to racial justice in media, I can send
| the money to the Media Foundation for West Africa (grantee
| #5), the Borealis Racial Equity in Journalism Fund (#2) or
| any of the others myself.
| paulcole wrote:
| Instead of treating it as a nice-to-have when everything
| else is perfect, maybe consider that pursuing social
| justice will _help_ you fulfill your primary goal?
| Mezzie wrote:
| I think you're both right.
|
| Social justice INSTEAD of one's primary mission is a
| terrible idea. This happens when social justice
| initiatives are put in place to help the careers of
| people running them instead of the organization. That's
| when you get issues like the displeasure when I tried
| asking how many poor white people went to our graduate
| school in a racism discussion. My interest was in knowing
| whether it was first-order/direct racism resulting in an
| underrepresentation of POC or second-order/indirect
| racism (via classism and POC being more likely to be in
| poverty). Different causes would mean different
| solutions, but examining the issue wasn't the actual
| point. The POINT was so we could all stand up and declare
| ourselves good people + put it on our CVs.
|
| Social justice in addition to a primary mission is very
| useful, because getting different people in the room
| means you think of way more things and identify new ways
| to carry out your mission.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I think it's a bad thing by itself. With the wikipedia
| example - anyone can edit, editors can by anonymous or
| psuedonomous, and there is no preference, implicit or
| explicit, for race and gender. Over the years wikipedia has
| been built up, by volunteers, into an amazing and valuable
| resource.
|
| Now, the organization controlling their work and this
| global good, decides that aggregate race and gender
| statistics are a problem. Wikipedia is a little too white,
| and a little too male, and that's a bad thing!
|
| Imagine applying this reason to any other organization and
| any other race and gender combination. Here's a crazy idea
| - if you want to reduce race and gender based prejudice,
| start by not having clear race and gender prejudices
| yourself.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| I don't think this is a social justice thing. I personally
| would be just as annoyed about any other cause. Wikipedia
| donations shouldn't be championing any cause that isn't open
| access to information, no matter what side of the political
| spectrum it's on. Especially if it's to the point that
| Wikipedia itself is being left to rot in favor of unrelated
| causes.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| The thing being complained about is literally them
| executing their stated mission:
|
| > This pilot initiative is rooted in our strategic
| direction, where Knowledge Equity emerged in 2017 as one of
| two key pillars of focus in order for us to achieve our
| vision for 2030. Knowledge equity acknowledges that we
| can't achieve free knowledge if there are societal or
| economic barriers that prevent some people's ability to
| share and contribute to knowledge. With this focused fund,
| we will invest in organizations working to address systems
| of racial bias and inequality around the world, with the
| goal of creating a more inclusive, representative future
| for free knowledge.
| endominus wrote:
| This is a motte and bailey argument. The motte here is
| that people living in unjust situations will likely be
| unable or less able to contribute to the Wikipedia
| project, which is true. The bailey is that donation funds
| are being funneled into these initiatives rather than
| improving Wikipedia itself (see other comments about bug
| counts and features lacking in Wikipedia, which are not
| being addressed). The Knowledge Equity fund may or may
| not improve "racial justice," however they define that -
| but the strategic goal of improving free access to the
| world's knowledge is almost certainly better reached by
| direct improvements to the Wikipedia software and
| development, and support of open access and free speech
| causes rather than racially-focused ones (such as, for
| example, support for Alexandra Elbakyan's endeavors to
| keep Sci-Hub operational, or speech protection in more
| repressive governments).
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| My favourite irony with the WMF's love of funding racial
| justice [1] is that one thing that does not work well at
| all in MediaWiki is the mobile editing interface [2].
| It's basically just plain text and you're expected to
| type in the syntax manually on a phone, and also all the
| links to the talk, history and other pages are hidden
| when editing. Guess which countries disproportionately
| use mobile devices and don't have as much access to
| actual computers.
|
| [1] Not my emphasis: the KEF seems very much racial
| rather then social. Social justice that cuts across
| "class" lines rather than race lines seems much
| inherently fairer to me, since the point is to offset
| disadvantages, and race is a proxy of disadvantage, while
| "class" is almost a direct statement of how disadvantaged
| you are.
|
| [2] The reading interface is quite good, though certainly
| could be better (hidden ToCs in articles?).
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > the mobile editing interface
|
| They used to have a formalized project aimed at improving
| this, but it seems that work on it stopped mid-2019. http
| s://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Advanced_mobile_c.
| .. Their stated (as of 2019) workflow requires going to
| site settings and turning on a special "Advanced"
| interface in order to get something that's not broken.
| Awful.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| It's worth noting that the bias in Wikipedia editorship
| is very real, and persists even after controlling for
| obvious causal factors such as Internet access. This is
| why "knowledge equity" was identified as a key part of
| Wikimedia projects' future strategy. Of course, trying to
| single-handedly solve "systems of racial bias and
| inequality around the world" is a pointless, Sisyphean
| task: what they ought to do in the first place is
| identify what factors make it harder for minorities and
| the socially marginalized to contribute to Wiki projects,
| specifically, and address these things. But Wikimedia is
| not a very evidence-driven organization, so they'd rather
| content themselves with these pointless and self-
| defeating platitudes.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| > At the same time, we recognize this is work that we as
| a movement cannot do alone. Our projects can only do so
| much when, for example, academic and mass media
| representation of marginalized communities remains
| insufficient, which in turn limits citations and primary
| sources for us to build from.
|
| The document linked above has some very pragmatic and
| boring goals like:
|
| * Supporting media and journalism efforts focused on
| people of color around the world, in order to expand
| reliable media sources covering these communities
|
| * Addressing unequal internet access
|
| * Improving digital literacy skills that impede access to
| knowledge
|
| * Investing in non-traditional records of knowledge (i.e.
| oral histories)
|
| What do you think they're doing that's so wooly and vague
| and useless?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| These "goals" are far from narrowly targeted towards
| fixing the critical issue of biased minority editorship.
| We don't even _know_ what exactly might deter
| marginalized people from contributing. Perhaps they 're
| turned away by all the pointless wikilawyering, in which
| case the most effective solution would look _very_
| different from what the WMF is proposing here.
|
| Supporting minority media is a job for _minorities_ , who
| will be far more keenly aware of what media are worth
| supporting and what are not. Writing down oral history is
| great, but is properly a job for academia, not for WMF
| projects (with the singular and notable exception of
| Wikijournal, which _is_ a primary source of publishable
| research). Other listed things are similarly beside the
| point, e.g. as argued above wrt. Internet access.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| This is a grant giving programme in which they support
| vital projects that need to be done outside Wikimedia to
| further their mission and work with outside groups with
| proven experience in those areas to enable that. So,
| stuff inside wikipedia, is by definition not going to be
| in this list, and they are explicitly not doing any of
| these things themselves, because it's not their focus or
| skillset. Why are you assuming these tasks won't be done
| by minorities and/or academics as appropriate? Those both
| seem highly likely to be involved unless I'm missing
| something.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Spoken like a true Culture citizen.
| jollybean wrote:
| Np, this is gaslighting.
|
| "If you don't agree with our objectives, you are the enemy!"
|
| Disagreeing with specific elements of social justice,
| particularly statements like:
|
| "The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting
| away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal
| supremacy, superiority, power and privilege to create an
| environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of
| communities of color worldwide."
|
| Etc. is not 'being against social justice'.
|
| The distinction is quite important, in fact, it's kind of
| 'the point'.
|
| Most people agree with basic elements of social justice.
|
| How many people are opposed to women voting? To women having
| 'equal opportunity'? Etc.
|
| We're now into a war of opportunity and outcomes, which is a
| different kind of playing field.
|
| I think Wikepedia generally does a good job overall, and it's
| probably fairly hard to do, that said, there is bias.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| It's easy to find thousands of 'stub' to 'start'-class articles
| that obviously need lots more content and/or citations. They may
| be less 'important' or trendy, and hopefullly less 'opinionated',
| and unlikely to be on 'watch list's.
|
| There you'll run into less-to-no helicopter parents, and stand a
| much-better chance of creating most of a great article before
| they show up. Load up on good citation prospects for solid
| content.
|
| Over to the left on any page you can see how many visits/day it's
| been getting - that can help you stay away from them.
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