[HN Gopher] 25 Years of Wikipedia
___________________________________________________________________
25 Years of Wikipedia
Author : easton
Score : 388 points
Date : 2026-01-15 13:17 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wikipedia25.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (wikipedia25.org)
| cm2012 wrote:
| This is cute, but kind of an example of Wikipedia's off-mission
| bloat. It irks me that they constantly fundraise when most of it
| is not needed for Wikipedia proper, but rather used for
| initiatives people know less about and may not fund if they knew.
| physicsguy wrote:
| And they have a huge endowment fund now too that more than
| covers the cost of Wikipedia...
| altilunium wrote:
| I wonder whether the emergence of a single, true Wikipedia
| competitor would actually put an end to this never-ending
| fundraising criticism (since people could simply donate to the
| competitor as a form of protest)
| p-e-w wrote:
| Projects like Wikipedia never have meaningful competition,
| because the social dynamics invariably converge to a single
| platform eating everything else.
| adventured wrote:
| Wikipedia is already dead, they just don't know it yet.
| They'll get Stackoverflowed.
|
| The LLMs have already guaranteed their zombie end. The HN
| crowd will be comically delusional about it right up to the
| point where Wikimedia struggles to keep the lights on and
| has to fire 90% of its staff. There is no scenario where
| that outcome is avoided (some prominent billionaire will
| step in with a check as they get really desperate, but it
| won't change anything fundamental, likely a Sergey Brin
| type figure).
|
| The LLMs will do to Wikipedia, what Wikipedia & Co. did to
| the physical encyclopedia business.
|
| You don't have to entirely wipe out Wikipedia's traffic
| base to collapse Wikimedia. They have no financial strength
| what-so-ever, they burn everything they intake. Their de
| facto collapse will be extremely rapid and is coming soon.
| Watch for the rumbles in 2026-2027.
| threetonesun wrote:
| If we kill all the platforms where content for training
| LLMs comes from, what do LLMs train on?
| rvnx wrote:
| Newspapers, scientific papers and soon, real-world
| interactions.
|
| News is the main feed of new data and that can be an
| infinite incremental source of new information
| threetonesun wrote:
| You talk about news here like it's some irrefutable ether
| LLMs can tap into. Also I'd think newspapers and
| scientific papers cover extremely little of what the
| average person uses an LLM to search for.
| jrmg wrote:
| This always feels to me like, an elephant in the room.
|
| I'd love to read a knowledgeable roundup of current
| thought on this. I have a hard time understanding how,
| with the web becoming a morass of SEO and AI slop - with
| really no effort being put into to keeping it accurate -
| we'll be able to train LLMs to the level we do today in
| the future.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| This. I'm really bothered by the almost cruel glee with
| which a lot of people respond to SO's downfall. Yeah, the
| moderation was needlessly aggressive. But it was
| successful at creating a huge repository of text-based
| knowledge which benefited LLMs greatly. If SO is gone,
| where will this come from for future programming
| languages, libraries, and tools?
| shuntress wrote:
| LLMs will use Wikipedia the same way humans use it
| empiko wrote:
| Wikipedia is not even in the game you are describing
| here. Wikipedia does not need billions of users clicking
| on ads to convince investors in yet another seed. They
| are an encyclopedia, and if fewer people will visit, they
| will still be an encyclopedia. Their costs are probably
| very strongly correlated with their number of visitors.
| zahlman wrote:
| SO was _supposed to_ be much the same, though. I guess
| you really do have to get directly funded by users for
| the model to work.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| Most people went to SO because they had to for their job.
| Most people go to Wikipedia because they want to, for
| curiosity and learning.
| throawayonthe wrote:
| i feel like that's a bit silly, the other projects are listed
| on the donation page (https://donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/FAQ)
| and tbh you are unlikely to be donating to the wikimedia
| foundation without being aware of (at least some of?) the rest
| arrowsmith wrote:
| I promise you that 99% of normal people have no idea what the
| Wikimedia foundation is and think that they're just donating
| to "fund Wikipedia".
| throawayonthe wrote:
| are normal people donating to wikipedia tho
| cm2012 wrote:
| Yes, the ads are essentially a guilt tax on normies who
| remember Wikipedia helped them in high school
| bawolff wrote:
| Honestly, most of the other projects get almost none of the
| resources (other then maybe wikidata and commons, but both of
| those are directly used by wikipedia)
| amiga386 wrote:
| I don't begrudge them the odd party, anniversary, meetup.
|
| And some of their subprojects are a great idea and could go
| much further -- it'd be fantastic to have a Wikipedia atlas,
| for example. The WikiMiniAtlas on geolocated articles is nice
| but it could be so much better.
|
| But as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER it's a huge
| concern that they're blowing money pretty much at the rate they
| get it, when they should be saving it for the future, and be
| pickier and choosier about what they're funding at any given
| time.
| altilunium wrote:
| I made "Wikidata Atlas" several weeks ago. [1] [2]
|
| [1] : https://wd-nearbyitem.toolforge.org/
|
| [2] : https://rtnf.substack.com/p/wd-nearbyitem
| amiga386 wrote:
| That is a nice start, a rendering of GIS wikidata. Perhaps
| ask Wikimedia Foundation for funding :)
|
| What I'd like to see is a more intimate marrying of OSM
| data and Wikipedia data. For example, if I go to zoom level
| 12 centred on London, UK on your page, there are about 80
| text labels on the OSM layer itself. At minimum this is
| going to need OSM vector tiles. I'd expect to be able to
| click any of _the OSM labels_ for the corresponding
| Wikipedia article, as well as adding in POIs for articles
| that don 't have corresponding OSM links. And then you need
| OSM rendering style rules about which POIs you show at each
| zoom level, based on whether labels will run into each
| other or not.
|
| The problem right now is that the WikiMiniAtlas treats all
| things, whether large areas or individual POIs, as POIs.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Thank you for this link, I was looking for something with
| that data in a clean format for some time!
| hulitu wrote:
| They, just like some newspapers, try to present themselves as
| neutral, not tied to any interest.
| rvnx wrote:
| Like Hackernews, supposedly neutral.
|
| The main issue with neutral people is that we do not know in
| which camp they are.
| TuringTest wrote:
| _> The main issue with neutral people is that we do not
| know in which camp they are._
|
| And that's a good thing, 'cause it means they're living to
| their standards.
| toinewx wrote:
| should have a fate similar to stackoverflow: less contributors,
| worse (or stale) content, less visits
| jader201 wrote:
| I'll be curious to see how true this turns out to be.
|
| I stopped visiting SO frequently years ago, even before LLMs.
|
| But I still visit Wikipedia. I often just want to read about X,
| vs. asking AI questions about X.
| thmsths wrote:
| This. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, while some of the content
| needs to be updated periodically, it also has A LOT of
| content that will stay relevant pretty much forever.
| fragebogen wrote:
| According to their own stats (visible in the graph some folds
| down), it seems to have a fairly steady rate of edits. As for
| visits, it looks quite constant as well
| https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wik...
| lysace wrote:
| So activity is plateauing.
| mezod wrote:
| Since we as a culture will be forgotten, a reminder that the
| catalan wikipedia was the 2nd one to have an article after the
| english version :)
| dreslan wrote:
| Wikipedia is and continues to be the best thing that happened to
| the internet. A shining example of an open platform that works.
| jader201 wrote:
| Except for their unnecessarily incessant fund raising.
|
| There's zero reason it should happen that often, and that
| intrusively.
| rkozik1989 wrote:
| There's a reason why nonprofits have fundraising events
| throughout the year instead once. Keep engagement going with
| donors is important.
| lgl wrote:
| Except for their unnecessarily incessant fund raising.
| [citation needed]
|
| Fixed.
| daedrdev wrote:
| Its a widely known controversy
|
| https://www.dailydot.com/news/wikipedia-endownemnt-
| fundraisi...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/
| 2...
| lgl wrote:
| Sure I'm very familiar with the donation banners etc but
| still, how unnecessary are they really?
|
| They have no actual "product" to sell and no ads.
|
| At the same time I imagine a huge amount of traffic, that
| has surely gotten much much worse with the AI
| "renaissance" we're going through.
|
| They have staff, etc.. So what's the deal with all the
| wikipedia hate lately?
| daedrdev wrote:
| The controversy is 95% of spending, including 90% of
| staff, is on things with no relation to wikipeida that
| few care about, with exponentially growing costs, which
| they imply is needed to keep the wiki alive despite how
| cheap it actually is to run.
| adventured wrote:
| By now they should be sitting on a billion dollars that
| safely yields a forever self-funding annual income
| ($30m-$50m) that would pay for all of their _necessary_
| expenses. They would no longer require any donations. It 's
| grotesque and wildly irresponsible how they're managing the
| organization. If LLMs become the center of knowledge
| resources going forward (which they will), Wikipedia's
| funding will decline as their traffic declines, and they'll
| collapse into a spiral of cut-backs, as they operate on a
| present structure that burns most of its financial capability
| annually (this opens them up to a shock to the system on
| inflection, which is happening now).
| zozbot234 wrote:
| LLM's can't just be "the center of knowledge" on their own,
| they need to learn and be trained if they are to be useful.
| A whole lot of LLM knowledge comes from Wikipedia to begin
| with.
| Levitz wrote:
| You go ahead an tell users that.
|
| Tailwind docs are also the source of, duh, docs. People
| browse them way less and as a result Tailwind gets way
| less funding.
|
| The problem is that Wikipedia should be set for life at
| this point, and they insist on rejecting that notion.
| There may be a future in which Wikipedia closes, and if
| that comes to pass it will due to wanton disregard for
| people's goodwill.
| breppp wrote:
| statements on wikipedia are summarized from sources, LLMs
| once trained on wikipedia to summarize, can then
| summarize on their own from the source material, and
| probably with less bias
| hliyan wrote:
| On Twitter/X "for you" feed, I'm frequently served posts by
| handles that are openly hostile toward Wikipedia. The most
| often cited reason is excessive fundraising / bloat
| (previously it was bias). But in my opinion, whatever bloat
| the Wikipedia organization suffers from, it is still a better
| alternative than all the other ad/engagement driven
| platforms.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| For a top-10 Internet website it's not "bloated" at all, if
| anything it's still running on a shoestring budget. And the
| fundraising ends up supporting a huge variety of technical
| improvements and less known "sister" projects that are
| instrumental in letting the community thrive and be
| relevant for the foreseeable future. Sure, you could keep
| the _existing_ content online for a lot less than what they
| 're asking for, but that's not what folks are looking for
| when they visit the site. Keeping a thriving community
| going takes a whole lot of effort especially in this day
| and age, where a vast majority of people just use the
| Internet for 100% casual entertainment, not productive
| activity.
| tdb7893 wrote:
| It's a weird thing to hate on Wikipedia for since in
| general it's one of the cleaner sites I visit. The absolute
| garbage of the Fandom wikis shows just how bad it could be.
| sirbutters wrote:
| For your own sake, get out of Xitter.
| jader201 wrote:
| To be clear, I'm not hating on Wikipedia, just their (IMO)
| overly-strong push for donations.
|
| The first word in my OP was "Except", and that was genuine
| -- I agree with the parent post, just outside of this one
| gripe. I definitely get value from it -- either directly
| through visits, or indirectly through it training LLMs I
| use.
|
| And I don't mind them asking for support. I just disagree
| with _how_ they ask, and _how often_ they ask.
|
| I feel like a simple persistent yet subtle "Support
| Wikipedia" link/button may be just as effective, and at the
| very most, a 30-pixel high banner once a year or so.
|
| Maybe they've done tests, and maybe this is effective for
| them, but it feels like there are much subtler ways that
| may be effective enough.
|
| I have supported sites and services much smaller than
| Wikipedia, with much less intrusive begging. But maybe
| that's not the case for others.
| frereubu wrote:
| To repurpose Winston Churchill's quote on democracy,
| "Wikipedia is the worst form of encyclopaedia, apart for
| all those other forms that have been tried from time to
| time."
| moffkalast wrote:
| Eh out of all the nonprofits that incessantly fundraise,
| Wikipedia gets a pass the most. Nobody else can compete with
| their vast utility to just about everyone.
| dpark wrote:
| Maybe I can prompt an LLM to translate this flying div
| monstrosity into a flat page I can read.
| fragebogen wrote:
| Slightly off topic, but now that long context machine translation
| is roughly on-par with humans: are there any official efforts
| from Wikipedia, to translate the "best" or "most complete"
| language version of each article to all other languages? I'd
| imagine that the effort of getting all languages up to the same
| standards are just an impossible one and people from "lower-
| resource" languages would benefit a lot.
| another-dave wrote:
| At least using Irish as an example, the state of machine
| translation is still far far behind proper translation
| unfortunately and wouldn't be up to scratch
| alansaber wrote:
| Yep exactly this, and some languages still haven't been fully
| digitised https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/a3369c56-aba
| a-4b67-a1...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Not quite, the official in-development project wrt. this area
| is Abstract Wikipedia
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia which plans
| to develop a human-editable structural interlanguage for
| encyclopedic content that can then be automatically "rendered"
| to existing natural languages, as opposed to just starting from
| an existing "best or most complete" natural-language text.
|
| This avoids the unreliability of existing "neural/ML"
| approaches, replacing them with something that might see
| contributions from bots as part of developing the support for
| specific content or languages (similar to what happens with
| Wikidata today) but can always be comprehensively understood by
| humans if need be.
| tux3 wrote:
| On enwiki there is a big problem with bad LLM edits at the
| moment, so it's probably not the right time for this idea.
|
| If anything, the community is discussing stronger guidelines
| against inappropriate LLM use.
| bjt wrote:
| You're not the first to have the idea. For languages that are
| only sparsely represented in the LLMs' training data, this has
| actually done a lot of damage. The LLMs spew out a bunch of
| hallucinations, and there aren't enough qualified human editors
| to review it, so the human record of that language itself
| becomes tainted.
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1124005/ai-wikip...
| arjie wrote:
| I think it's optimal for this to be done at read-time rather
| than write-time. En Wikipedia is the most comprehensive but
| there are many articles in language Wikipedias that are far
| more complete. Rather than attempting to keep these branches of
| knowledge in sync, it is probably better to have some mechanism
| to pull them all together when someone wants to read a
| synthesis.
| zahlman wrote:
| If people want AI-translated versions of Wikipedia articles
| from other languages, they can trivially request that from the
| AI themselves.
| bawolff wrote:
| Well they made
| https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation
| amiga386 wrote:
| https://wikipedia25.org/en/the-first-day
|
| > Founder Jimbo Wales on a challenge overcome
|
| Aren't you forgetting someone, Jimmy? Your co-founder Larry
| Sanger, perhaps?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger
|
| Let's check one of the citations from the History of Wikipedia
| page: https://www.mid-day.com/lifestyle/health-and-
| fitness/article...
|
| > It was Larry Sanger who chanced upon the critical concept of
| combining the three fundamental elements of Wikipedia, namely an
| encyclopedia, a wiki, and essentially unrestricted editorial
| access to the public during a dinner meeting with an old friend
| Ben Kovitz in January 2, 2001. Kovitz a computer programmer and
| introduced Sanger to Ward Cunningham's wiki, a web application
| which allows collaborative modification, extension or deletion of
| its content and structure. The name wiki has been derived from
| the Hawaiian term which meant quick. Sanger feeling that the wiki
| software would facilitate a good platform for an online
| encyclopedia web portal, proposed the concept to Wales to be
| applied to Nupedia. Wales intially skeptic about the idea decided
| to give it a try later.
|
| > The credit for coining the term Wikipedia goes to Larry Sanger.
| He initially conceived the concept of a wiki-based encyclopedia
| project only as a means to accelerate Nupedia's slow growth.
| Larry Sanger served as the "chief organiser" of Wikipedia during
| its critical first year of growth and created and enforced many
| of the policies and strategy that made Wikipedia possible during
| its first formative year. Wikipedia turned out to contain 15,000
| articles and upwards to 350 Wikipedians contributing on several
| topics by the end of 2001.
|
| He may not be with the project now, but don't airbrush him out of
| history.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| It's a very touchy subject for Wales. It caused him to walk out
| of an interview after 48 seconds:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uswRbWyt_pg
| xemoka wrote:
| Oh. Wow. I had no idea Jimmy Wales was like that.
| Enlightening.
| rvnx wrote:
| Wikipedia is literally a spin-off of a porn company.
|
| From that point on, where it came from or who founded it is
| not so important. The question is how it acts today.
|
| It is a highly-political organization supporting lot of
| "progressive" ideas, California-style. So if you like
| reading politically biased media it may be for you.
|
| If you are seeking for a global view you better ask
| different LLMs for arguments and counter-arguments on a
| subject.
|
| EDIT: a couple downvotes denying the influence of specific
| "Wikipedia ideology" and politics.
|
| Take a chance to edit articles and you will see how tedious
| it is.
|
| There is also a lot of legal censorship. Celebrities
| putting pressure on removing info, or lobbies, or say
| things that are illegal or very frowned upon (for example
| questioning homosexuality, or the impact of certain wars).
|
| Sometime it is legality, ideology, politics, funding,
| pressure, etc.
|
| This is why you need to use different sources.
| jamespo wrote:
| Yes LLMs that don't disclose sources are much better.
| rvnx wrote:
| LLMs have their issues too.
|
| In everyday life, you cannot read 20 books about a topic
| about everything you are curious about, but you can ask 5
| subject-experts ("the LLMs") in 20 seconds
|
| some of them who are going to check on some news websites
| (most are also biased)
|
| Then you can ask for summaries of pros and cons, and make
| your own opinions.
|
| Are they hallucinating ? Could be. Are they lying ? Could
| be. Have they been trained on what their masters said to
| say ? Could be.
|
| But multiplying the amount of LLMs reduce the risk.
|
| For example, if you ask DeepSeek, Gemini, Grok, Claude,
| GLM-4.7 or some models that have no guardrails, what they
| think about XXX, then perhaps there are interesting
| insights.
| jamespo wrote:
| This may shock you, but wikipedia provides multiple
| sources, it even links to them. Where do you think the
| LLMs are getting their data from?
| dfxm12 wrote:
| To further this, articles also have an edit history and
| talk page. Even if one disagrees with consensus building
| or suspects foul play and they're really trying to get to
| the bottom of something, all the info is there on
| Wikipedia!
|
| If one just wants a friendly black box to tell them
| something they want to hear, AI is known to do that.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| LLMs disclose sources now.
| tux3 wrote:
| Right. Try clicking those sources, half the time there is
| zero relation to the sentence. LLMs just output what they
| want to say, and then sprinkle in what the web search
| found on random sentences.
|
| And not just bottom of the barrel LLMs. Ask Claude about
| Intel PIN tools, it will merrily tell you that it "Has
| thread-safe APIs but performance issues were noted with
| multi-threaded tools like ThreadSanitizer" and then cite
| the Disney Pins blog and the DropoutStore "2025 Pin of
| the Month Bundle" as an inline source.
|
| Enamel pins. That's the level of trust you should have
| when LLMs pretend to be citing a source.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Did I say not to check the sources?
|
| Or is that something _you_ made up?
| jamespo wrote:
| Ah so irrelevant / invalid sources are OK...
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Only the first couple of time derivatives matter. The
| models are better than they were. Are you?
| browningstreet wrote:
| The LLMs I use all supply references.
| onraglanroad wrote:
| Indeed! Sometimes even more than actually exist!
|
| I don't think LLMs can be faulted on their enthusiasm for
| supplying references.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Yup, there's a wonderful, presumably LLM generated,
| response to somebody explaining how trademark law
| actually works, the LLM response insists that explanation
| was all wrong and cites several US law cases. Most of the
| cases don't exist, the rest aren't about trademark law or
| anywhere close. But the LLM isn't _supposed_ to say
| truths, it 's a stochastic parrot, it makes what _looks_
| most plausible as a response. "Five" is a pretty
| plausible response to "What is two plus three?" but
| that's not because it added 2 + 3 = 5
| johnisgood wrote:
| "Five" is not merely "plausible". It is the uniquely
| correct answer, and it is what the model produces because
| the training corpus overwhelmingly associates "2 + 3"
| with "5" in truthful contexts.
|
| And the stochastic parrot framing has a real problem
| here: if the mechanism reliably produces correct outputs
| for a class of problems, dismissing it as "just
| plausibility" rather than computation becomes a
| philosophical stance rather than a technical critique.
| The model learned patterns that encode the mathematical
| relationship. Whether you call that "understanding" or
| "statistical correlation" is a definitional argument, not
| an empirical one.
|
| The legal citation example sounds about right. It is a
| genuine failure mode. But arithmetic is precisely where
| LLMs tend to succeed (at small scales) because there is
| no ambiguity in the training signal.
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| It is tedious because you must edit with facts, not
| ideology.
|
| But we now live in a world where people agree that
| ideology should be able to change facts.
|
| > or the impact of certain wars
|
| Exactly, like China wanting to completely censor anything
| regarding the Tiananmen Square protests.
|
| > for example questioning homosexuality
|
| I don't know what you have to question about this.
|
| >If you are seeking for a global view you better ask
| different LLMs for arguments and counter-arguments on a
| subject.
|
| All the LLM I've tested have a strong tendency to
| increase your echo chamber and not try to change your
| opinion on something.
|
| >This is why you need to use different sources.
|
| Only if deep down, you're ready to change your POV on
| something, otherwise you're just wasting time and
| ragebaiting yourself. Although I admit, it can still be
| entertaining to read some news to discover how they're
| able to twist reality.
| rvnx wrote:
| For the last part I agree with you, the LLMs tend to say
| what you like to hear. The echo chamber problem also
| exists, pushing them to say pros and cons is not perfect,
| but helps to make an opinion (and also "unaligned"
| models).
|
| Facts are very skewed by the environment: in the case you
| push too much in one direction that is too controversial
| or because the politicians disagree too much with you;
| there can be plenty of negative consequences:
|
| - your website gets blocked, or you get publicly under
| pressure, or you lose donations, you lose grants, your
| payment providers blocks you, you lose audience, you can
| get a fine, you can go to jail, etc.
|
| Many different options.
|
| There is asymmetry here: We disagree,
| you have one opinion, what happens if both of us fight
| for 10 months, 24/7 debating "what is the truth ?" on
| that topic. - You have that energy and time
| (because it's your own page, or your mission where you
| are paid by your company, or because this topic is
| personally important to you, etc) - I don't
| have time or that topic is not *that* important for me.
| - Consequence: Your truth is going to win.
|
| Sources are naturally going to be curated to support your
| view. At the end, the path of least resistance is to go
| with the flow.
|
| The tricky part: there are also truths that cannot be
| sourced properly, but are still facts (ex: famous SV men
| still offering founders today investment against sex).
| Add on top of that, legal concerns, and it becomes a very
| difficult environment to navigate. Even further, it's
| always doable to find or fabricate facts, and the truth
| wins based on the amount of energy, power and money that
| the person has.
| dc396 wrote:
| > It's always doable to find or fabricate facts, and the
| truth wins based on the amount of energy, power and money
| that the person has.
|
| You appear to be using unusual definitions of "fact" and
| "truth", more akin to "assertions" and "vibe". I'll stick
| with the traditional definitions.
| rvnx wrote:
| An example of (either fabricated, or just very
| convenient) facts:
|
| [1] https://patriotpolling.com/our-polls/f/greenland-
| supports-jo... According to an American
| poll that surveyed 416 people residing across Greenland
| on their support for joining the United States.
| 57.3% wants to join the US.
|
| [2] https://www.politico.eu/article/greenland-poll-mute-
| egede-do... According to a Danish poll
| (conducted through web interviews) among 497 selected
| citizens in Greenland. 85% do not want to join
| the US.
|
| What is the actual truth ? Who knows.
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| You know that both can be true right ?
|
| If I ask 10 people what they think of something and 60%
| says "no" and if I ask another 10 people and 90% says
| "yes" there's no relation between the 60% and the 90%,
| like at all.
|
| Or as Homer said it "Anybody can come up with statistics
| to prove anything, Kent. 40% of people know that."
| rvnx wrote:
| I like what you said about the quote :)
|
| My favorite is: "Numbers are fragile creatures, and if
| you can torture them enough, you can make them say
| whatever you want"
| dc396 wrote:
| You're confusing data with facts.
|
| A "fabricated fact" (or "alternative fact" if you prefer)
| is an oxymoron. Actual truth, as opposed to a vibe or
| what people are basing their decisions on these days, is
| orthogonal to "the amount of energy, power and money that
| the person has." Deriving or identifying actual facts and
| truth is hard (see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method) and
| always subject to change based on new data, so lots of
| people don't do it -- it's much easier to just make shit
| up and confirms biases.
| panath wrote:
| > It is tedious because you must edit with facts, not
| ideology.
|
| Not just because you must edit with facts. If your
| opposition outnumbers you and/or they have more energy to
| spend than you, they can grind you down with bad-faith
| arguments and questions for clarification.
|
| The way this goes is that they edit an article to insert
| their POV. You edit/revert it. They open a talk page
| discussion about the subject. Suppose their edit is
| "marine animals are generally considered cute throughout
| the world" with a reference to a paper by an organization
| in favor of seals. You revert it by saying this is NPOV.
| They open a talk page question asking where the
| organization has been declared to be partisan. Suppose
| you do research and find some such third-party statement
| that "the Foundation for Animal Aesthetics is organized
| by proponents of marine animals". Then they ask how this
| third party is accurate, or whether "organized by
| proponents" necessarily implies that they're biased.
|
| This can go on more or less forever until someone gives
| up. The attack even has a name on Wikipedia itself:
| "civil POV pushing". It works because few Wikipedia
| admins are subject matter experts, so they police
| behavior (conduct) more than they police subject
| accuracy.
|
| Civil POV pushers can thus keep their surface conduct
| unobjectionable while waiting for the one they are
| actioning against to either give up or to get angry
| enough to make a heated moment's conduct violation. It's
| essentially the wiki version of sealioning.
|
| In short, a thousand "but is really two plus two equal to
| four?" will overcome a single "You bastard, it is four
| and you're deliberately trolling me", because the latter
| is a personal insult.
| Propelloni wrote:
| > This is why you need to use different sources.
|
| This knife cuts both ways.
| dpark wrote:
| > Wikipedia is literally a spin-off of a porn company.
|
| What? If Bomis was a porn company then Reddit is a porn
| company.
|
| Edit: I take it back. It looks like Bomis was more
| directly pushing soft core porn than I realized.
| tchasnyk wrote:
| looks like interviewer asks question not in a good faith
| johnisgood wrote:
| It is a fair question, IMO. His reaction was childish.
| dpark wrote:
| After watching this I kind of disagree. Wales said he
| didn't care multiple times. Calling it the "dumbest
| question" is childish, yes. Walking out of an interview
| that was going nowhere is not childish.
|
| I personally think writing Sanger out of Wikipedia
| history (as in this 25 year celebration montage thing) is
| quite lame. But I also think pressing Wales on this when
| he says "you can say whatever you want" is also quite
| lame. No one is obligated to sit with an interviewer
| while the interviewer tries to pick a fight.
| hitekker wrote:
| You missed the part where Wales called a fact an
| "opinion". Wales could have said "I don't dispute the
| facts of that case. I see myself as the founder, but I
| won't argue against other interpretations. Lets move past
| it." Instead he immediately became defensive, even angry.
|
| The interviewer is right to press on the basic facts and
| Wales was wrong to ragequit, especially since the
| exchange lasted less than 45 seconds(!)
|
| I don't see this as a political victim issue: I can see
| Sanger as an asshole while also seeing Wales as weak.
| dpark wrote:
| > You missed the part where Wales called a fact an
| "opinion".
|
| Has Wales actually disputed the objective facts of the
| matter?
|
| I did not take his comment to mean "it's an opinion
| whether Sanger worked on Wikipedia from the beginning"
| but "it's an opinion whether that qualifies him as a
| cofounder".
|
| > Wales could have said "I don't dispute the facts of
| that case. I see myself as the founder, but I won't argue
| against other interpretations. Lets move past it."
|
| That is essentially what he said. He called himself the
| founder, then when the interviewer probed, said it's a
| dumb question, then said he doesn't care, then said the
| interviewer can frame it however he wants, then said
| again that he doesn't care.
|
| He said what you think he should've said. He just didn't
| use your exact words.
|
| > The interviewer is right to press on the basic facts
| and Wales was wrong to ragequit, especially since the
| exchange lasted less than 45 seconds(!)
|
| What "basic facts" did he press on? I heard no facts or
| questions about facts. He used the word "facts" while
| pressing Wales specifically about calling himself the
| founder.
| an_ko wrote:
| There's context. Hank Green talked about it in
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zi0ogvPfCA, but in short,
| paraphrasing, and adding my own thoughts:
|
| Jimmy Wales has been poked at with the question of whether
| he should call himself a founder or specifically co-founder
| for a long time, by right-wingers who think Wikipedia is
| too woke, and want to irritate and discredit him as much as
| possible, and instead raise up his co-founder Larry Sanger.
| Sanger has right-wing views and a habit of accusing any
| article as biased that doesn't praise Trump and
| fundamentalist Christian values, and takes these as proof
| that Wikipedia has a left lean.
|
| The interview Wales walked out of was for his book tour. I
| imagine it's the umpteenth interview that week with the
| same question asked for the same transparently bad-faith
| reasons, trying to bend the interview away from his book
| and into right-wing conspiracy theory land.
| rolfsen wrote:
| Ok, but Tilo Jung is the absolute opposite of right wing
| deknos wrote:
| yes, but question can be done in different ways. and tilo
| jung always at least, not cared, if his questions are
| offensive... or trying to up the interviewed person
|
| a group of people seems to think, that journalists should
| trip up people, like in interrogations, instead of being
| hard in the topic but nice in the tone.
| hallole wrote:
| > Jimmy Wales has been poked at with the question of
| whether he should call himself a founder or specifically
| co-founder
|
| Not surprising! Are we setting aside how deceitful his
| answer his? Claiming all credit for a collaborative
| accomplishment -- which he does by adopting the "founder"
| title -- would rightfully provoke "poking" by
| interviewers. I can't imagine an interview not addressing
| a question that is so pertinent to Wales' notoriety. They
| literally cannot properly introduce him without
| confronting it! To say those interviewers are acting in
| "transparently bad-faith" comes across to me as plainly
| biased.
|
| Sanger's politics don't change this, either. It might be
| the case that you have to concede on this to people you
| politically disagree with.
| cptskippy wrote:
| > Not surprising! Are we setting aside how deceitful his
| answer his? Claiming all credit for a collaborative
| accomplishment -- which he does by adopting the "founder"
| title -- would rightfully provoke "poking" by
| interviewers.
|
| I went down the rabbit hole on this a while back and came
| away with the impression that it's complicated. And
| whether or not Wales is being deceitful hinges on
| pedantic arguments and mincing of words. Should Wales be
| referred to as "a founder", "co-founder", or "one of the
| founders"? It's not as if he's titling himself "sole
| founder". And Sanger is still list on his Wiki page and
| the Wikipedia pages as a Founder.
|
| It should also be noted that Sanger was hired by Wales to
| manage Nupedia, and that Wikipedia was created as a side-
| project of Nupedia for the purpose to generating content
| for Nupedia. Does the fact that Sanger was an employee of
| Wales, and that Wikipedia only exists because Sanger was
| tasked with generating content for Nupedia impact his
| status as a founder? Would Sanger or Wales have gone on
| to create a wiki without the other?
|
| Can Steve Jobs claim to be the creator of the iPhone
| since he was CEO at the time it was created at Apple?
|
| At the end of the day Sanger was present at the ground
| breaking of Wikipedia but was laid off and stopped
| participating in the project entirely after a year. He
| didn't spend 25 years fostering and growing the
| foundation. He did however try to sabotage or subvert the
| project 5 years later when it was clear that it was a
| success. Interestingly he tried to fork it to a project
| that had strong editorial oversight from experts like
| Nupedia which flies in the face of the ethos of
| Wikipedia.
| DavidPiper wrote:
| Wales actually covers this at length in his book:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Rules_of_Trust
|
| He himself admits it's a complicated situation, and
| argues both his own and Sanger's position.
|
| Combined with the context provided by all the parent
| comments here, it's quite difficult to argue good faith
| given the interview was also specifically on the book
| tour. There are many different and actually productive
| ways the interview could have talked about the conflict
| between Wales and Sanger.
| themafia wrote:
| The inability of wealthy people to take responsibility
| for themselves and instead blame their own bad behavior
| on the mere existence of Trump is getting exceptionally
| thin.
|
| Credit your co-founders. Even if you don't agree with
| them anymore. There's no excuse not to.
|
| If you've been asked the question a lot then you should
| be _very good_ at answering it by now.
| joering2 wrote:
| Wow, thanks for the video actually. For a long time I felt he
| was complete jerk but I felt it was maybe biased propaganda.
| The mere fact he couldn't answer a basic question and explain
| for all those who don't know, but rather stormed out like a 4
| year old child, only proves what I felt about him prior.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Without context, it looks like the interviewer was a jerk and
| ambushed him.
|
| I've seen plenty of stalling like that on major news
| programs, and the interviewer always knows to move on (and
| possibly edit something in to provide context.)
|
| ---
|
| That being said, "who started what" and "who had what idea"
| are silly topics to obsesses about. It always come down to
| who put the long-term work in. I think Wales was "in the
| right" to walk off; or at least say something like "I can't
| tell the story accurately, so please move on to a different
| question."
| UebVar wrote:
| The interview started with the most mundane question "Who
| are you?", and the very first sentence of Wales is either a
| lie or misleading. The journalists asks for clarification
| (thats a journalists job, btw), and in his second sentence
| of the interview Wales insults the journalist. I'm pretty
| sure who is the jerk here.
|
| It also was Wales who bought up the topic, not the
| journalist. If he considers it a stupid topic he does not
| want to talk about, why is it the very first thing he talks
| about?
| hallole wrote:
| "So, who are you?" "Stupid question."
|
| What an interview! I had never seen this clip before,
| it's really something. Facts and context are important
| for sure, but as someone who isn't clued in on the Sanger
| drama, Wales could not possibly have made himself look
| worse. And in under a minute!
|
| As you said, the interviewer is in the right, carrying
| out the job of interviewing, by pushing Wales as he did.
| To call him a "jerk" is silly, I think.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Sanger was originally hired to edit Nupedia, a web
| encyclopedia project with a strict peer review process,
| and only worked for Wales for about a year. Wikipedia was
| started as a side project (with Sanger contributing to
| the concept and some early organizing), but Wikipedia
| quickly became much more successful while Nupedia
| basically never got off the ground. My impression is that
| Sanger wanted to impose his own vision on Wikipedia, but
| couldn't because the community of volunteer editors
| disagreed, and when Wales stopped paying him as a full
| time Nupedia editor (Wales's company was tight on cash at
| that time), he stopped any involvement. This was long
| before most of the actual work of Wikipedia happened, and
| that should have been the end of the story.
|
| But ever since, Sanger has been trash talking Wikipedia
| as a project and community ("broken beyond repair") and
| trying to undermine it. A few years later he started a
| competing project (which was predictably a total
| failure). For two decades he has been promoting himself
| as "cofounder of Wikipedia". Interviewer after
| interviewer asks the same lazy questions about the
| subject, without ever adding any new insight. (You can
| see that Sanger's ghost is chasing Wikipedia even into
| this discussion.)
|
| It's beating a dead horse, and entirely off the topic of
| what the interview was supposed to be about. Answering
| the question clearly and accurately takes a lot of time
| and finesse, which is wasted on the interviewer and most
| of the audience. Wales clearly screwed up in that
| interview, but it's not hard to see where he's coming
| from, psychologically.
| psychoslave wrote:
| >It always come down to who put the long-term work in.
|
| Exactly. Kudo to the wikimedia community!
| dpark wrote:
| > That being said, "who started what" and "who had what
| idea" are silly topics to obsesses about. It always come
| down to who put the long-term work in.
|
| So Wales can write Sanger out of the history of Wikipedia,
| despite evidence strongly showing that Sanger originated
| the idea, the name, the policies, and indeed that Sanger
| was the primary driving force for years. And everyone's is
| supposed to accept this historical revision because who
| created it is a "silly topic".
|
| Is it also a silly topic when Wales claims credit? Or only
| when someone questions his assertion?
| ljsprague wrote:
| I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask "who had what
| idea".
| themafia wrote:
| Journalism can't be deferential to it's subjects. Jimmy is
| a CEO of a company with lots of money and tons of access to
| the media. If he can't successfully prepare himself for the
| obvious then I can't feel bad for him.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| In fact, journalists should be less deferential to every
| CEO. Those should be treated with the highest degree of
| scrutiny.
| wesselbindt wrote:
| I really hate gotcha questions like "who are you".
| shevy-java wrote:
| IMO Wales has been sitting on that chair for too long. He
| should retire.
|
| It would also be better for Wikipedia to not have any "public
| face". I don't want fake-heroes; I want accurate, objective
| content.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Pffft hahaha. Looks like interviewer was inexperienced AND
| hit a touchy subject. It's like trying to have a casual
| conversation about dating with someone who's secretly gay.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| I'd say his lack of acknowledgment of Larry Sanger is actually
| quite useful, as it is a perfect and irrefutable example that
| Wikipedia has no qualms with omitting information and twisting
| the truth to serve a narrative.
| amiga386 wrote:
| Wikimedia, maybe, but Wikipedia itself acknowledges it in the
| lead paragraph:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
|
| > Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales
|
| > Most notably, he co-founded Wikipedia
|
| Wikipedia shows integrity even when its co-founder does not:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales#Co-
| founder_status_...
|
| > In late 2005, Wales edited his biographical entry on the
| English Wikipedia. Writer Rogers Cadenhead drew attention to
| logs showing that in his edits to the page, Wales had removed
| references to Sanger as the co-founder of Wikipedia.[53][54]
| Sanger commented that "having seen edits like this, it does
| seem that Jimmy is attempting to rewrite history. But this is
| a futile process because, in our brave new world of
| transparent activity and maximum communication, the truth
| will out."[20][55] Wales was also observed to have modified
| references to Bomis in a way that was characterized as
| downplaying the sexual nature of some of his former company's
| products.[16][20] Though Wales argued that his modifications
| were solely intended to improve the accuracy of the
| content,[20] he apologized for editing his biography, a
| practice generally discouraged on Wikipedia.[20][55]
| hamdingers wrote:
| In order to find this useful you would have to believe that
| Jimmy Wales writes the articles on Wikipedia which is a
| ridiculous notion.
| reddalo wrote:
| >He may not be with the project now, but don't airbrush him out
| of history.
|
| I don't want to defend Jimbo Wales (he's very touchy about the
| subject), but to be honest, even if he's a founder, Larry
| Sanger didn't contribute much to what Wikipedia today is.
| dlubarov wrote:
| Larry Singer was essentially running Wikipedia in the early
| days though, until he was laid off, so in some sense we could
| think of him as a co-founder who was ousted. It's true that
| he didn't contribute much (as an unpaid volunteer) after that
| though.
| shuntress wrote:
| Larry Sanger is weird. He "founded Wikipedia" but hasn't
| actually been involved with it for decades.
|
| "Right-Wing Perspectives" are not artificially suppressed to
| conform to a shadow-government's agenda, they are naturally
| suppressed because they tend not to align with logical
| interpretation of facts.
| amiga386 wrote:
| Clearly there's no love lost between the two co-founders, but
| if either of them had been missing, Wikipedia wouldn't be
| what it is today.
|
| Larry may have left the project, but sticks his oar in
| frequently, see for example the Nine Theses he posted to
| Wikipedia last year:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Nine_Theses
|
| Neither Larry nor Jimbo "are" Wikipedia. Wikipedia's
| _editors_ are Wikipedia, and if they collectively agree with
| any of Larry 's policy ideas, they'll adopt them in time.
|
| I used to glibly agree with what you said, because back in
| the early 2000s it was primarily the right-wing nutters being
| fed a diet of Fox News bullshit that were deranged from
| reality... "reality has a liberal bias", right? Remember the
| crackpot Conservapedia? But these days I find plenty of equal
| opportunity derangement from terrible news sources chasing
| clicks, promoting FOMO, anxiety and keeping their
| readers/viewers addicted. No political flavour of bullshit
| belongs on Wikipedia.
| shuntress wrote:
| His nine theses are basically a how-to guide for replacing
| democratic consensus with culture war bullshit. He clearly
| wants to bend the process to match his perception of the
| world rather than update his understanding of the world to
| match the facts.
|
| The process Wikipedia uses to produce articles that present
| facts with without editorializing has clearly worked fairly
| well. Obviously we have a more difficult time reaching
| consensus on contentious topics but in general the system
| works quite well.
| mightyham wrote:
| I don't understand how you could read the nine theses
| essays and think they are anything but reasonable. Even
| if you disagree with his politics, the results of his
| suggestions would almost certainly make Wikipedia more
| pluralistic, welcoming and neutral.
| bawolff wrote:
| Because they have all been tried before and had the
| opposite affect.
|
| Anyone who likes them should make their own site to try
| and see. Oh wait, sangar already did that multiple times
| and it crashed and burned every time.
| oytis wrote:
| Wikipedia itself says Larry Sanger "co-founded" Wikipedia, but
| I don't quite understand why. If you get into the details, he
| was Wales' employee at the time, and made initial version of
| Wikipedia while being paid as such. So I'm tentatively with
| Wales on that ATM.
| amiga386 wrote:
| Employing someone doesn't let you pass off their achievements
| as your own.
|
| If Wales had anyone else, or had gone it alone, it's unlikely
| Wikipedia would be what it is today.
| oytis wrote:
| > Employing someone doesn't let you pass off their
| achievements as your own.
|
| Doesn't it? That's basically how tech companies work. You
| can tell he's written an initial version of Wikipedia, but
| founder is emphatically not an employee.
| amiga386 wrote:
| That's not how fame and credit for some novel thing is
| shared. The minds of two people were vital to its
| success, and we don't fold that into one because of
| business structure.
| glaslong wrote:
| Please tell the founders of various companies I've
| developed novel things for that my name should be at the
| top with theirs :p
| gowld wrote:
| "founder" is a weasel word that doesn't belong on Wikipedia.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
| gowld wrote:
| Does the OP site give _anyone_ credit for _anything_ , except
| crediting Jimmy Wales and "volunteers"?
|
| A monument to vanity.
| bawolff wrote:
| I think Wikipedia is the only place where an early employee who
| left relatively quickly would be considered a "co-founder". If
| this was a tech company i dont think Larry would be considered
| a co-founder.
|
| I think the thing is a soar subject because Wikipedia
| essentially rejected all of Sangar's ideas, but he's still kind
| of riding on its coattails.
| FiveOhThree wrote:
| I can't be the only one who feels that Wikipedia's quality has
| really started to go downhill over the past 5 or so years. I've
| noticed more and more articles which read as ridiculously
| partisan, usually around subjects with any link to politics or
| current events.
|
| That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the US,
| but I get the impression that the sites neutrality policies have
| gradually been chipped away by introducing concepts like "false
| balance" as an excuse to pick a side on an issue. I could easily
| see that causing the site to slowly decline like StackOverflow
| did, most people don't want to deal with agenda pushing.
|
| Fortunately articles related to topics like science and history
| haven't been significantly damaged by this yet. Something to
| watch carefully.
| amrocha wrote:
| It's more likely that you became more radicalized so what used
| to read as neutral seems partisan now.
| FiveOhThree wrote:
| Is it radicalised to want even a basic premise of neutrality
| in an encyclopedia?
|
| Despite not being particularly political, even I raise an
| eyebrow when an article opens with "____ is a <negative
| label>, <negative label>, <negative label> known for
| <controversial statement>"
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| I've never seen an article like that, other than for people
| like Epstein, who are primarily famous for their crimes. I
| just went and checked the pages of some famous people where
| you might expect this kind of treatment if Wikipedia were
| indeed biased in the way people seem to think (like Donald
| Trump or Ted Cruz), and they're not like that.
|
| There are a lot of comments in this thread talking about a
| strong bias in Wikipedia, but I don't see any examples. I
| have no doubt that there are some articles that are biased,
| particularly in less popular areas that get less attention,
| but overall, Wikipedia does a great job maintaining a
| neutral point of view in its articles.
|
| I do get the impression that what people perceive as bias
| is often simply neutrality. If you think yourself the
| victim of an evil cabal of your political opponents, then a
| neutral description of the facts might seem like an attack.
| FiveOhThree wrote:
| To be honest I don't keep a list of examples, I usually
| raise an eyebrow and move on. It's typically on pages for
| smaller public figures where you get some extremely
| questionable descriptions.
|
| It's also definitely a thing for contentious topics, a
| while back I tried to look up some info on the Gaza war
| and some of the pages were a complete battleground. I
| feel that there was a time when Wikipedia leaned away
| from using labels like "terrorist", but their modern
| policy seems to be that if you can find a bunch of news
| articles that say so then that's what the article should
| declare in Wikipedia's voice.
| pavlov wrote:
| Please provide an example so we can evaluate what makes
| even someone as non-political and neutral as you raise an
| eyebrow.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| Can you please provide an example?
| amrocha wrote:
| That's not my perception at all, but if you find an article
| like that please change it!
|
| That's the beauty of wikipedia after all. I recently made
| my first contribution and it was a really smooth process.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| > Is it radicalised to want even a basic premise of
| neutrality in an encyclopedia?
|
| Facts are not neutral or "balanced".
|
| And your whole phrasing smells of someone who doesn't want
| to be challenged with facts which are against you
| worldview, which is pretty much against the whole purpose
| of Wikipedia.
|
| > Despite not being particularly political, even I raise an
| eyebrow when an article opens with "____ is a <negative
| label>, <negative label>, <negative label> known for
| <controversial statement>"
|
| Without giving the actual example, there seems nothing
| wrong with this in general. Could be important, could be
| overrated. But at least I assume it's true, because wrong
| claims would be a valid problem.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| I want an improvement upon "Encyclopedia Brittanica". If we
| have to have governments around the world fund a nonprofit
| educational equivalent of that, then I'm all for it but we
| can't keep depending upon a least-common denominator
| "central public knowledge repository" that's an improperly-
| managed, easily-manipulated, often incomplete and
| inaccurate mobacracy fed by largely unknown randos, enough
| of whom aren't doing so for honest purposes and too many
| are foolish/crazy/unreliable enough to curate and preserve
| worthwhile information consistently.
| could-of wrote:
| Indeed, neutral point of view is one of the most important
| principles of Wikipedia [1]. I only recall phrasing like
| that being used used in very clear-cut cases, like the word
| "pseudoscience" in the article on homeopathy. If you don't
| think something is neutral, the guideline "be bold" [2]
| encourages you to edit it. You don't have to wait for
| somebody else to.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_o
| f_vie... [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold
| bakugo wrote:
| I mean... this is a very real phenomenon, but probably not in
| the way you're thinking of.
|
| There are many simple statements of fact that, 15 or 20 years
| ago, were as universally uncontroversial as "the sky is
| blue", but today are considered radically controversial
| political opinions, and will get you banned for most online
| platforms if you dare utter them.
| amrocha wrote:
| No, I don't think that's true, and I don't think you could
| produce a single example.
|
| Keep in mind that stating a fact and dogwhistling are not
| the same thing.
| bakugo wrote:
| Exactly, you don't think it's true because you don't
| believe they're facts, you've been radicalized into
| believing they're "dogwhistles" (a term only used by
| radicalized people, by the way - if you keep hearing
| dogwhistles, you might just be a dog.)
| could-of wrote:
| Can you list some specific examples? Do Wikipedia articles
| on these topics adhere to the facts, or do they take a
| political stance?
| jdauriemma wrote:
| Example?
| gibspaulding wrote:
| Friendly reminder that we all have the power to improve this!
| Become an editor and If you come across a problematic article,
| you can make improvements, or even just flag it as needing
| work. I know this is not a small ask, and can feel discouraging
| if you see more issues than you have time to address or your
| edits are not accepted, but when you consider the relatively
| small number of editors and the huge number of readers (not to
| mention AI's being built on it) it is likely one of the more
| significant differences you can make towards improving the
| greater problem polarization.
| FiveOhThree wrote:
| The impression I've had from trying to contribute in the past
| has been that some editors will fight tooth and nail to
| prevent changes to an article they effectively own. The maze
| of rules and regulations makes it far too easy to simply
| block changes by dragging everything through protracted
| resolution processes.
|
| Even something as clear-cut as "the provided source doesn't
| support this claim at all" becomes an uphill struggle to
| correct. When it comes to anything related to politics this
| problem is also exaggerated by editors selectively opposing
| changes based on whether they apply a desired slant to the
| text.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The trick these days is to calmly make your case on the
| talk page _first_ for anything that might be even slightly
| controversial, before you attempt any editing. So if
| someone wants to "own" the article they have to engage on
| the same terms, or you can just point out the lack of
| opposition and make the edit yourself.
| FiveOhThree wrote:
| That's the thing though, expecting users to have a
| discussion over even minor changes is extremely off-
| putting for most potential editors.
|
| I've also noticed that a few of these editors seem to be
| deliberately abrasive towards new users, perhaps with the
| hope that they'll break a rule by posting insults in
| frustration. The moment that happens those editors
| quickly run to the site administration and try to get
| said user banned. Wikipedia's policies are increasingly
| treated as a weapon to beat down dissent rather than a
| guide on how to contribute positively.
| zahlman wrote:
| > When it comes to anything related to politics this
| problem is also exaggerated by editors selectively opposing
| changes based on whether they apply a desired slant to the
| text.
|
| This is amplified by the fact that active editors socialize
| with each other heavily behind the scenes, and over a
| period of many years you end up with a core group that all
| desire to apply the same slant.
| arjie wrote:
| I have a personal interest in getting fixes into Wikipedia.
| If you'll share here a couple of examples I can attempt a
| fix. Here are some stories of what I've done in the past
| where people mentioned that they've struggled with
| corrections (one says he was banned, another said his
| article was deleted, and the third said he couldn't get it
| corrected - I solved all of these):
|
| https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2024-10-17/Path_Depend
| e...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40655989
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Weierstrass_function#Acc
| u...
|
| One thing I should clarify is that Wikipedia's purpose is
| to aggregate the current general view on things. So even if
| you know something is true personally, you cannot put it in
| unless you can find a reliable place where someone has
| documented it. In the cases I have there I had to first
| find the appropriate backing references before I could make
| something happen so it's not a trivial fix. Getting Makoto
| Matsumoto in there took me many hours because I know only a
| tourist's amount of Japanese.
|
| I've also edited controversial articles (the Mannheim
| stabbing, one of the George Floyd incident related
| convicts) successfully.
|
| Anyway that's my resume. Bring me the work you need done
| and once I've got a moment I'll see what I can do (no
| guarantees, I have a little baby to care for).
| FiveOhThree wrote:
| > One thing I should clarify is that Wikipedia's purpose
| is to aggregate the current general view on things. So
| even if you know something is true personally, you cannot
| put it in unless you can find a reliable place where
| someone has documented it. In the cases I have there I
| had to first find the appropriate backing references
| before I could make something happen so it's not a
| trivial fix.
|
| This is where I would disagree, the model really doesn't
| work for politics and current events. In those topics
| Wikipedia may be better described as "The world according
| to a handful of (mostly US-based) news outlets". There's
| been a prolonged effort to deprecate sources,
| particularly those which lean to the right, so it's
| increasingly difficult to portray a neutral perspective
| reflecting multiple interpretations of the same topic.
| Instead excessive weight is given to what a majority of a
| select group of online sources say, and that's not
| necessarily trustworthy.
|
| Most obviously it's a model which will fall flat when
| trying to document criticism of the press.
| arjie wrote:
| When you say you disagree, I assume you mean that you
| disagree that Wikipedia's approach is good. I don't think
| I was making that claim, however. I have no value
| position on Wikipedia's approach except that I appear to
| endorse it by participating. There are certainly true
| things that Wikipedia will not contain because they are
| insufficiently described in sources that Wikipedians find
| acceptable. But nonetheless that is Wikipedia's purpose:
| to find a list of sources that generally report fact, and
| to aggregate them.
|
| Like any consensus-based thing it's pretty loose. It's
| unlikely that EN wikipedia had much of a position on the
| reliability of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, for instance.
|
| As an example, when I resurrected the Makoto Matsumoto
| article, I mirrored it to my personal wiki[0] in case it
| is deleted from the original. Another loss I lament is
| that of Chinese Numbered Policies[1] which I think is a
| genuinely interesting list and a meaningful
| categorization that I will eventually re-create on my
| personal wiki.
|
| I'm a Wikipedia inclusionist which means I want as many
| true things there as possible in a way that represents
| the truth as accurately as possible, but it's a
| collaborative effort and that means that sometimes I
| don't get what I want.
|
| Any way, as you can see from my earlier experience, I
| seem to have a skill of getting facts into Wikipedia when
| others do not, and I have a personal desire to see them
| there as well. So if you want to list a couple of the
| examples you had trouble with I can see if I can help. I
| know you said "politics and current events", but
| hopefully there are non-emergent situations that you can
| describe because evolving situations require more
| attention than I'm able to apply at the moment. I will
| still try, though. As an example, the Salvadoran Gang
| Crackdown had some ridiculous language on it that I
| removed[3] that was clearly an attempt to insert a left-
| wing (as it is in the US) political slant.
|
| To be clear, I have no affiliation with Wikipedia (beyond
| the fact that as an auto-confirmed user I have the user
| privilege to create articles without going through AfC).
| I just have a personal interest in fact recording[2].
|
| 0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Makoto_Matsumoto
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AArticles_for
| _delet...
|
| 2: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Observation_Dharma
|
| 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_
| gang_c...
| FiveOhThree wrote:
| I meant that I disagree that Wikipedia is really trying
| to give a general view of events. That might have been
| the original intention, but it's not what it's doing in
| practice.
|
| It does all hinge on that important list of acceptable vs
| unacceptable sources. In the last few decades there's
| been an increasing trend for news outlets to take a
| political position and decline to report on stories which
| would damage that position, which becomes most obvious
| whenever the US holds an election.
| arjie wrote:
| I think the reality is that any group will develop
| certain norms for this. I have a personal interest in
| making sure that Wikipedia's norms don't diverge too far
| from fact, but even that is limited because I have other
| things in my life to do. I think it's probably the most
| accurate mainstream aggregator there is, which is
| valuable in its own sense, so if I can make it a little
| better with a little effort I will usually try. But I
| wouldn't say that this means it's anywhere near flawless.
|
| Speaking of norms, the Hacker News community will flag
| and downvote any comments of mine that mention that our
| 10 month old did not receive the COVID-19 vaccine. I
| think that's clear evidence of some kind of political
| bias. But that's this community's norms. I don't care as
| much to convince them as I do to fix Wikipedia.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46564106
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45717802 (this one
| _was_ flagged but someone must have vouched for it)
|
| Anyway, I understand if your experience trying to correct
| Wikipedia might have been at a different time, so you may
| not recall right now, but if you ever recall, my email is
| in my profile. I collect a list of these things and when
| I have a spare moment I try to make some progress.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Yep. Wikipedia editors too often resemble US police
| officers: stupid and drunk with power.
|
| I gave them a fair shot a couple of times, but they're
| unreasonable and unmoved to listen to reason or experience
| they don't actually possess.
| encom wrote:
| I'm not going into an edit war with some deranged redditor
| activist.
| zxcvasd wrote:
| this attitude is exactly why and how those "deranged
| redditor activists" (we're from the superior hacker news,
| of course, where there is no controversy or activists or
| differences in opinion) took and maintain control.
| zahlman wrote:
| > Friendly reminder that we all have the power to improve
| this! Become an editor and If you come across a problematic
| article, you can make improvements, or even just flag it as
| needing work.
|
| This works very well when there's a clear non-partisan issue
| with the text, like a logical inconsistency or the citation
| doesn't line up with the claim or the prose is just sloppy or
| unnatural.
|
| If someone is trying to push biased sources, good luck.
|
| The I-swear-it-isn't-a-cabal of highly-active editors knows
| policy better than you do, and they will continue to
| conveniently know policy better than you do no matter how
| much time you spend studying it. (And if you study it and
| then try to do your business anonymously, they will consider
| it suspicious that you know anything about policy and demand
| that you log in to your nonexistent long-standing account.)
| And that policy allows them to use highly biased sources
| because they are on they "reliable sources" list, except it
| isn't really a single list but rather some sources are
| restricted in applicability, unless it's one of them using it
| inappropriately. And the bias of those sources doesn't
| disqualify them as long as it's properly taken into
| consideration by whatever arcane rules, except this doesn't
| happen in practice and nobody will care if you point out them
| doing it, as long as it serves their purposes.
|
| Meanwhile, the way sources get approved as reliable is
| generally that they agree with other reliable sources. Good
| luck trying to convince people that a source has become
| unreliable. You aren't going to be able to do it by pointing
| out things they've repeatedly objectively gotten wrong, for
| example. But they'll happily spend all day listing every
| article they can find that an ideologically opposed source
| has ever gotten wrong (according to them, no evidence
| necessary).
|
| And it all leans in the same direction because the policy-
| makers all lean in the same direction. Because nobody who
| opposes them will survive in that social environment. There
| are entire web sites out there dedicated to cataloging absurd
| stuff they allowed their friends to get away with over years
| and years, just because of ideological agreement, where
| people who dispute a Wikipedia-established narrative on a
| politically charged topic will be summarily dismissed as
| trolls.
|
| On top of that they will inject additional bias down to the
| level of individual word-choice level. They have layers and
| layers of policy surrounding, for example, when to use words
| like "killing", "murder", "assassination" and "genocide" (or
| "rioting" vs "unrest" vs "protest"); but if you compare
| article titles back and forth there is no consistency to it
| without the assumption of endemic political bias.
|
| WP:NOTNEWS is, as far as I can tell, not a real policy at
| all, at least not if there's any possible way to use the news
| story to promote a narrative they like.
|
| And if the article is _about you_ , of course you aren't a
| reliable source. If the Wikipedians don't like you, and their
| preferred set of reliable sources don't like you, Wikipedia
| will just provide a positive feedback loop for everything
| mainstream media does to make you look bad. This will happen
| while they swear up and down that they are upholding WP:BLP.
|
| I've been watching this stuff happen, and getting burned by
| it off and on, for years and years.
| weslleyskah wrote:
| Man, I know what you are talking about through and through.
| Happens all the time on the political Right/Left pages,
| controversial authors of classical literature, WWII
| atrocities, and the list goes on. Scientific and Movie or
| Art articles are way better to discover interesting stuff.
|
| The stalking, censorship, and unwillingness to contribute
| to topics deemed as "controversial" is unreal. People might
| not believe, but wikipedia truly is one hell of a cesspool.
|
| There is just too much bureaucracy for beginner editors
| nowadays. The whole baptism of fire that you need to
| undergo to be part of the oligarchy is just not worth the
| hassle.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Utopian lionization that doesn't reflect reality or the
| bullshit. Unqualified people have the power to tell experts
| who were there that their contributions are insignificant,
| wrong, or that details don't matter. That's just stupid and
| pointless, and so less people contribute to hostile and
| idiotic half-assery.
|
| I'll take curated information that is better and rigorous
| every time.
| hulitu wrote:
| > That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the
| US,
|
| Not really. The phenomenon exists in other languages
| Wikipedias. I think it is related to the fact that NGOs that
| "shape" political discourse and politicians have become
| "sensible" to the text in Wikipedia pages.
|
| It is always good, when you read Wikipedia, to "follow the
| money", i.e. look at the sources, see if they make sense.
|
| In the last 5 years, a lot of online platforms, HN also, are
| used by state actors to spread propaganda and Wikipedia is
| perfect for that because it presents itself as a "neutral"
| source.
| zahlman wrote:
| > I can't be the only one who feels that Wikipedia's quality
| has really started to go downhill over the past 5 or so years.
| I've noticed more and more articles which read as ridiculously
| partisan, usually around subjects with any link to politics or
| current events.
|
| I would say this started over a decade ago. Otherwise I
| completely agree.
| TuringTest wrote:
| Oh dear, you need to learn about the GamerGate incident which
| started August 2012. All the extreme division and online
| manipulation through the collaborative creation of false
| narratives started right there, with that issue, before
| contaminating the entire political landscape.
|
| It's the Eternal September of our generation, and it's not
| recognised enough as such. Before that, the internet was a
| different place.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate
| FiveOhThree wrote:
| > Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized
| misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a
| right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and
| progressivism in video game culture
|
| Okay, what the actual fuck? IIRC it was people whining
| about the absolute state of games journalism in the 2010's.
| zahlman wrote:
| Sigh. Well, now that it's come up....
|
| Fun thing about that. Whenever someone starts going off
| about how Zoe Quinn was supposedly mistreated and how
| that supposedly launched a "right-wing backlash against
| feminism" and a "misogynistic online harassment
| campaign", quiz them about the "jilted boyfriend" (as
| they typically put it) who wrote the post that supposedly
| set everything off. With _remarkable_ consistency, they
| don 't know his name (Eron Gjoni) or anything about his
| far-left political views, and will refuse to say the name
| if you ask. They have never read the post and have no
| idea what it says, and will at most handwave at
| incredibly-biased third-hand summaries.
|
| I'm pretty sure I've even had this happen on HN.
| thunderfork wrote:
| GG wasn't constrained to Gjoni, it was the reaction to
| his posting. One guy saying "I'm on this team" does not
| define the characteristics of the resulting events.
| zahlman wrote:
| You miss the point. It's about those people being
| misinformed, unwilling to look into matters
| independently, and selective in the application of their
| supposed ideological principles.
| thunderfork wrote:
| Does "someone doesn't know trivia about the inflection
| point" really demonstrate any of those things?
|
| Like, if I asked you whether the anger at Depression
| Quest was downstream of a long-standing meme-feud on /v/
| about whether visual novels are videogames and you didn't
| know that, that doesn't really mean anything about your
| understanding of anything other than /v/ culture wars of
| the 2010s.
|
| I mean, c'mon, "five guys burgers and fries"?
|
| The whole thing springs out of "someone who made a thing
| we don't like" and "an excuse to attack" - the lack of
| any actual ethical breaches in the coverage of Depression
| Quest should be immediately disqualifying.
| zahlman wrote:
| Among other things, I think it suggests that my opinion
| about what happened, as someone who does know those
| things from distinctly remembering them and having had
| them be personally relevant at the time, should be taken
| more seriously than that of people telling me over a
| decade later what happened based on some combination of {
| the Wikipedia article, their own worldview, what their
| friends have said about it, more recent news articles
| from aggrieved people who cite it as part of a grand
| conspiracy theory about contemporary right-wing politics
| }.
| thunderfork wrote:
| If your grievance is "people don't take me seriously in
| arguments", then you could try deploying sources. There's
| probably still plenty of /v/ archives from back in the
| day, right?
|
| But I think "people trust contemporary and retrospective
| reporting more than me, a guy who self-identifies as
| having a skin-in-the-game perspective" shouldn't be very
| surprising.
|
| And, if it means anything, I was reading /v/ at the time,
| too, was initially sympathetic, and eventually realized
| it was all just an extension of existing /v/ grievance
| politics (from my perspective) - "people who disagree
| with us or make things we don't like are getting
| attention, which is evil".
|
| I was there for threads where people were seething about
| positive coverage around Depression Quest _before_ the
| "Zoe Post" blow-up, which was purely "we don't like that
| people enjoy experiences that don't suit our tastes".
|
| At some point I realized that there just wasn't any
| actual ethical issues to speak of around the Depression
| Quest coverage, and it was just more /v/ seething about
| outlets liking things they didn't.
| zahlman wrote:
| > If your grievance is "people don't take me seriously in
| arguments", then you could try deploying sources. There's
| probably still plenty of /v/ archives from back in the
| day, right?
|
| I spent years trying to do this. It took inordinate
| amounts of time and mental energy, made exactly zero
| difference to the beliefs of my interlocutors no matter
| how well reasoned and evidenced, and additionally got me
| dismissed as some weirdo who cares too much (by people
| who clearly cared too much, but were annoyed that I
| disagreed with them).
|
| I am _not_ getting back into that now and am only willing
| to discuss this in the most top-level generalities. It
| was genuinely traumatic.
|
| > At some point I realized that there just wasn't any
| actual ethical issues to speak of around the Depression
| Quest coverage, and it was just more /v/ seething about
| outlets liking things they didn't.
|
| You keep talking about /v/. I don't understand why. The
| main discussion was on Reddit. And they showed concrete
| evidence of new ethical issues regularly.
| thunderfork wrote:
| >You keep talking about /v/. I don't understand why.
|
| Given that you find not knowing the blog post guy's name
| disqualifying, this is extremely funny. The ground level
| of the whole shitshow wasn't /r/KiA.
|
| (I'd love to see a scrap of evidence that /r/KiA did
| anything beyond "we did it reddit"-style conspiracy
| posting and going "hmm this dev is queer, is this an
| ethics issue?", but given that this was apparently
| traumatic for you, I won't force the issue)
| Levitz wrote:
| Basically Wikipedia has a failure point in which if media
| creates a narrative that's what passes as valid.
| thunderfork wrote:
| I was there, it was as Wikipedia describes it. Read the
| talk page.
|
| Edit: the replies to this comment demonstrate why this
| problem is intractable: people are very emotionally
| invested into their idea of how things unfolded, and
| outright reject other perspectives with little more than
| a "nuh-uh!".
| zahlman wrote:
| I was also there, and I say it was very much not as
| Wikipedia describes it and the narrative is practically
| libelous. I would tell you to read as much of the
| archived back-room nonsense as I did (not just the talk
| page archives but internal Wikipedia government stuff),
| but even if could be unearthed this much later nobody
| deserves the trauma.
| FiveOhThree wrote:
| Well no, I was also around but not particularly
| interested at the time. This looks like a classic case of
| the media trying to close ranks and smear their critics.
| Levitz wrote:
| Funny enough, it would the movement stopped being about
| harassing women the moment the media stopped writing
| about it, advocates kept on going, criticizing
| ideological push into videogames to this day. At the same
| time by now both Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian have
| been shown to be grifters who really knew jackshit but
| how to play a crowd.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I was there as well. It was absolutely _not_ as Wikipedia
| describes it. If the claim was that some people
| participating in GG did so because they were sexist, fair
| enough. That was true and unavoidable because you get
| crazies in every group. But that was not some kind of
| universal thing, such that Wikipedia should be describing
| the movement unambiguously as "misogynistic".
| acdha wrote:
| It absolutely matched the Wikipedia summary. There is a
| ton of evidence linked supporting each point: it was a
| hate mob from the moment Eron Gjoni decided his ex should
| be punished for breaking up with him.
| zahlman wrote:
| > from the moment Eron Gjoni decided his ex should be
| punished for breaking up with him.
|
| There was no such moment in the first place.
| thunderfork wrote:
| How would you characterize the initial blog post?
| acdha wrote:
| It all started with his post, attacking her relationship
| with Grayson, who never reviewed her games. Even he later
| admitted that the original claims were fictitious but
| that did nothing to stop the attacks - if you look at the
| threats she received or the online statements the
| attackers made, they cared a LOT more about her alleged
| infidelity or what they perceived as unfair privileges
| for women in the gaming industry than anything about
| journalism.
|
| This was later added to his post:
|
| > To be clear, if there was any conflict of interest
| between Zoe and Nathan regarding coverage of Depression
| Quest prior to April, I have no evidence to imply that it
| was sexual in nature.
|
| He even told Boston Magazine that this was the hook he
| used to get attention, with what he knew was a high
| likelihood of attacks:
|
| > As Gjoni began to craft "The Zoe Post," his early
| drafts read like a "really boring, really depressing
| legal document," he says. He didn't want to merely prove
| his case; it had to read like a potboiler. So he
| deliberately punched up the narrative in the voice of a
| bitter ex-boyfriend, organizing it into seven acts with
| dramatic titles like "Damage Control" and "The Cum
| Collage May Not Be Accurate." He ended sections on
| cliffhangers, and wove in video-game analogies to grab
| the attention of Quinn's industry colleagues. He was
| keenly aware of attracting an impressionable readership.
| "If I can target people who are in the mood to read
| stories about exes and horrible breakups," he says now,
| "I will have an audience."
|
| > One of the keys to how Gjoni justified the cruelty of
| "The Zoe Post" to its intended audience was his claim
| that Quinn slept with five men during and after their
| brief romance. In retrospect, he thinks one of his most
| amusing ideas was to paste the Five Guys restaurant logo
| into his screed: "Now I can't stop mentally referring to
| her as Burgers and Fries," he wrote. By the time he
| released the post into the wild, he figured the odds of
| Quinn's being harassed were 80 percent.
|
| https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2015/04/28/gamergate/
| 2/
| zahlman wrote:
| > Even he later admitted that the original claims were
| fictitious
|
| No, he did not. And nobody was claiming that Grayson
| reviewed Quinn's games beyond like a day or two of
| confusion, and none of the arguments made relied on that
| being the case.
|
| > what they perceived as unfair privileges for women in
| the gaming industry than anything about journalism.
|
| This is a false dichotomy. The _entire point_ was that
| _the journalism_ had a role in creating those privileges.
| bakugo wrote:
| The GamerGate article is probably the best example of
| Wikipedia's blatant political bias.
|
| There are many biased articles out there, of course, but
| not many manage to misrepresent past events to such an
| extreme that it borders on comical. It reads like it was
| written by Zoe Quinn herself. Maybe it was.
| amiga386 wrote:
| GamerGate was about ethics in games journalism roughly as
| much as the Arab Spring was about a street vendor having
| his cart confiscated.
|
| That was their _initial spark_ , but it kicked off a
| ding-dong battle for _years_. You could argue it 's still
| going today, given places like /v/ and ResetEra are still
| fighting it, games like Dustborn and Concord are
| pilloried, and the "Sweet Baby Inc. detected" Steam
| curator exists to list games that have taken that
| company's advice.
| acdha wrote:
| GamerGate was about journalism in the same way that the
| Russian invasion of Ukraine was to protect the rights of
| ethnic Russian minorities in that country. The GamerGate
| people used ethics as an excuse because that sounds a lot
| more reasonable than "hate mob riled up by a bitter ex",
| but it fell apart as soon as you looked at the evidence
| (e.g. they were most focused on attacking a developer
| over a relationship with someone who never reviewed her
| games), where they went for support (right-wing agitators
| with low journalistic ethics), and all of the real issues
| they ignored between huge gaming companies and the major
| media outlets.
|
| The excuse was as believable as someone saying they were
| super concerned about ethics in tech journalism, but then
| never said a word about a huge tech company and spent all
| of their time badgering the Temple OS guy for sharing a
| meal with an OS News writer.
| FiveOhThree wrote:
| Or, you know, people had long been unhappy with the poor
| state of game reviews and the incident in question
| prompted broad complaints. Rather than accept criticism
| the journalists in focus instead decided to use their
| platforms to smear their critics as a sexist hate mob.
| acdha wrote:
| If that was really their motive, they sure picked an odd
| way to express it by focusing their efforts on attacking
| one woman with very little power in the industry while
| ignoring the actual game media outlets and huge
| companies. It's like claiming you're an environmental
| activist but instead of even talking about Exxon you're
| busy making death threats to the local pet store claiming
| their organic kibble isn't really organic.
| FiveOhThree wrote:
| That's it though, at the time there were plenty of
| complaints about the media outlets and publishers. Your
| problem is that the only people reporting on this to the
| wider public were the very journalists that the group
| were criticising.
| zahlman wrote:
| That was 2014, not 2012; and I was trying not to mention
| it.
| TuringTest wrote:
| You're right, I mistyped it.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Wikipedia was _always_ insufficiently neutral about political
| or social topics. At a bare minimum, you need to check whether
| there are any highlighted controversies in the article talk
| page.
| amiga386 wrote:
| Wikipedia itself knows how much shit it's in. Every ongoing
| conflict and culture-war issue is a "contentious topic",
| which is Wikipedia code for "editors are at each others'
| throats"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contentious_topics#L.
| ..
|
| They have a giant pile of editors banned from topics until
| they can play nice.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editing_restrictions.
| ..
|
| But you do give a great tip: at minimum, check the talk page.
| If it's longer than the article itself, run away.
|
| Some articles are so far gone, even the _talk page_ is locked
| down like Fort Knox. For example:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide
|
| That page even has an FAQ!
|
| > Q1: Why does this article state that Israel has committed
| genocide in Gaza, even though this is heavily contested and
| neither the ICJ nor the ICC have issued a final judgment?
|
| > A1: A September 2025 request for comment (RfC) decided to
| state, in Wikipedia's own voice, that it is a genocide. The
| current lead is the result of later discussion on the
| specific wording.
| sequoia wrote:
| this is so crazy. How does this accord with wikipedia's NOR
| & NPV stances?
|
| This is a case of "if you abandon your convictions when
| it's inconvenient, you never really had convictions in the
| first place."
| psychoslave wrote:
| Do you have suggestion of better repository of knowledge
| gathering, which achieve better level of neutrality than
| Wikipedia on every matter it covers, or throw right into your
| face that the article doesn't meet consensual neutral POV?
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| There is pretty much no way this was ever _not_ going to
| happen, given Wikipedia 's position and structure. It is a
| massive repository of knowledge, that is consulted by millions
| if not billions of people around the world on a regular basis,
| that is (in theory) editable by anyone and that has articles on
| just about every conceivable topic, including many politically
| charged ones. There must be immense pressure to use it to
| propagate all kinds of narratives. Given all of that, I think
| it does as good a job as can be expected of remaining
| objective, but absolutely you need to be careful when reading
| articles on politically charged topics (which is true of all
| media).
| beloch wrote:
| There's a reason why historians tend to view anything more
| recent than 10-20 years ago as politics. If you don't want to
| get embroiled in political debates, stick to stuff old enough
| to be history. There's still politics there, but it's less raw.
|
| Wikipedia doesn't restrict itself to topics that are older than
| ten years ago, so some of their material is necessarily going
| to be viewed as political.
|
| e.g. Wikipedia has a stand-alone page on Elon Musk's Nazi
| salute[1].
|
| { _Edit:_ It 's worth noting here that Wikipedia also maintains
| separate pages for things like Bill Clinton's relationship with
| Jeffrey Epstein[3].}
|
| This particular page is very interesting because of the sheer
| amount of political blow-back it's caused for Wikipedia. If
| you're a Republican, this _one_ page may be the biggest reason
| you might view Wikipedia as having become "ridiculously
| partisan". As a direct result of this page, and the refusal to
| remove or censor it, Musk is now taking aim at Wikipedia and
| calling for a boycott[2]. He also had his employees produce
| Grokipedia which, _notably_ , does not include a page on his
| Nazi salute.
|
| Musk may have had a public falling out with Trump, but he is
| still very much plugged into the Republican party. He's about
| to throw a _lot_ of money at the mid-term elections. So,
| naturally, one hand washes the other and Wikipedia is on every
| good Republican 's hit list. The kicker is that a lot of
| Republicans, who don't like Musk and think he's a Nazi/idiot,
| are going to feel a lot of Musk-instigated pressure from their
| own party to target Wikipedia.
|
| This is the price Wikipedia pays for including recent events
| and refusing to bow to demands for censorship.
|
| __________________
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy
|
| [2]https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2025/01/29/why-
| elon...
|
| [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_Bill_Clinton_a
| ...
|
| _Disclosure:_ I 'm Canadian and am neither a Republican or a
| Democrat.
| FiveOhThree wrote:
| I'm also not American so I'm not well-versed in this topic,
| but perhaps to raise the obvious:
|
| Does Wikipedia really need a page running for thousands of
| words on Musk allegedly making a Nazi salute?
|
| It's longer than some of the content on major historical
| figures, yet this is a subject that I'd be surprised to see
| mentioned again after a few years have passed.
|
| Considering that the subject matter is highly sensitive and
| concerns a living person I'm surprised that such an article
| was allowed at all.
| beloch wrote:
| It shows a recency bias, which is probably unavoidable. I'd
| hope that, as time passes, there are mechanisms to archive
| (not delete!) pages that seem unimportant. However, while
| this level of coverage may present a noise problem for
| average users, it will be a _gift_ to future historians.
| How much material about the historical figures you mention
| was simply lost?
|
| That being said, there should be absolutely no regard for
| "sensitivity" or the fact that Musk is a living person. He
| is a public figure wielding a ridiculous amount of
| resources to reshape the world as he sees fit. Regardless
| of his virtues or shortcomings, his power makes him
| somebody that should be watched closely. He helped shape
| the last U.S. election, played a key role in this
| presidency, and promises to continue his influence in the
| mid-terms. It _matters_ if he 's a Nazi.
|
| Kudos to Wikipedia for leaving that page up.
| FiveOhThree wrote:
| To my view it looks more like an attempt to inflate a
| minor controversy by excessively documenting it. If this
| much effort were being put into writing about government
| policy I'd totally agree with you, but this level of
| detail is uncharacteristic even for Wikipedia.
|
| > That being said, there should be absolutely no regard
| for "sensitivity" or the fact that Musk is a living
| person
|
| Wikipedia always had particularly strong rules about how
| living persons are supposed to be covered. I wouldn't
| agree with making exceptions just because I dislike a
| powerful individual.
|
| In terms of leaving the page up: I don't expect Wikipedia
| to be censored, but looking at this page the content
| unavoidably comes across as something that'd only merit a
| couple of lines on the main article. Instead you have a
| literal essay just to record "those aligned with the left
| believe that Musk made a Nazi salute, those aligned with
| the right say that he didn't".
| epx wrote:
| In the last 2-3 years, every contribution I made has been
| reverted by a reviewer or editor, either giving some excuse
| like lack of references, or none at all. Ceased to contribute
| to articles, and financially as well.
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| I haven't noticed this.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I didn't notice this, in fact, I still find Wikipedia to be
| remarkably neutral on controversial topics. It is very explicit
| about not being a news website, and yet, that's where I find
| the best coverage for hot topics like the war in Ukraine and
| Gaza, Black Lives Matter, protests in Hong-Kong, etc... For
| instance, most western media completely disregard the Russian
| side of the Ukraine war, not Wikipedia, where you have both
| points of views shown side by side, as well as international
| reactions, and most importantly, sources.
|
| It is not perfect of course, small topics and non-English
| Wikipedias usually show more bias, and not just about
| controversial topics. Even on scientific articles, you may find
| some guy who considers himself the king of the Estonian Striped
| Beetle and will not tolerate any other ideas than his, driving
| away other contributors because they have better things to do
| than go to war to defend beetle truths.
| sequoia wrote:
| Some of this has to do with concerted and long-running
| campaigns of coordinated editing (against wikipedia rules) to
| push a one-sided political narrative. Most notably this
| happened and continues to be done by Israel-eliminationists[0].
| Wikipedia eventually acknowledged the problem and banned a
| couple of the worst offenders[1] but that's a drop in the
| bucket as far as I'm concerned. I read it less and less these
| days and don't consult it at all for anything controversial
| ("controversial" meaning "topics that leftists have strong
| opinions about").
|
| Sadly, a system like Wikipedia is hard to defend against
| persistent coordinated attacks by people who have lots of time.
|
| 0: https://aish.com/weaponizing-wikipedia-against-israel/ 1:
| https://www.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/article-833180
| jyscao wrote:
| Wikipedia is overall excellent, and it has certainly brought
| enormous value to me throughout the years.
|
| But it is noticeably biased on any topic that has political
| implications.
| tonymet wrote:
| History and many fields of science also have political
| implications, and you'll find just as much editorial slant
| there, too
| lambdaone wrote:
| This would be the reality-based editorial slant, then? What
| are you proposing as an alternative?
| tonymet wrote:
| "Reality-based" is rather smug, isn't it?
| thiht wrote:
| Can't wait for the specific examples
| jyscao wrote:
| What for? To start a flame war? No one is going to get
| convinced one way or the other.
|
| Which was why I just wanted to point out that while I think
| Wikipedia is a net good overall, it is not without blemishes.
| chairhairair wrote:
| > Makes claim.
|
| > Is asked for evidence.
|
| > Refuses.
|
| Brilliant work. These kinds of posts should be bannable.
| jyscao wrote:
| If you do not know of a single Wikipedia article that you
| judge to be politically biased, then that says more about
| you and your gullibility than it does about me.
| chairhairair wrote:
| The point is not that Wikipedia is completely unbiased.
| That's an obvious impossibility - for any encyclopedia.
|
| The point is that accusations of "noticeable bias on any
| topic that has political implications" is the kind of
| accusation made by someone simply trying to sow distrust
| in information, writ large. It's increasingly common.
|
| Being asked for an example or two isn't weird.
| lysace wrote:
| This kind of bias is a statistical measure; typically you
| can't prove or disprove it using a single sample.
|
| It's about larger patterns, which things are talked about and
| (crucially) which are not. How much attention is given to
| things and not.
| thiht wrote:
| Ok, can't wait for specific examples illustrating the
| larger patterns
| lysace wrote:
| Eh... this is a joke comment, right?
| jaydz wrote:
| So many parroting the same "bias" line here, yet not a single
| example has been linked.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Aside from AI, Wikipedia's greatest upcoming challenge will be
| censorship as Western governments start to adopt various traits
| of Eastern dictatorships.
| lambdaone wrote:
| For all of its ubiquity, Wikipedia is a single fragile
| organization in an increasingly unstable political landscape.
|
| I hope that efforts are being made to make sure that its
| content is not only being archived in many places, but also
| that the know-how to reboot Wikipedia's hosting from its dumps
| (software, infrastructure deployment and all) is being actively
| preserved by people independent of the organization.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Buried in this mix of 25-year commemoration pages, the release
| they put out today:
|
| https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2026/01/15/wikipedia-ce...
|
| Which includes a section about Wikipedia in the age of AI: _New
| partnerships with tech companies support Wikipedia's
| sustainability_
|
| > _several companies -- including Ecosia, Microsoft, Mistral AI,
| Perplexity, Pleias, and ProRata -- became new Wikimedia
| Enterprise partners, joining existing partners such as Amazon,
| Google, and Meta._
| squigz wrote:
| It's really remarkable how, every single time Wikipedia comes up
| on HN, there's a bunch of comments about bias and such... and yet
| never a single example is ever linked.
| mmooss wrote:
| There are examples listed on this page and in many discussions.
| windowpains wrote:
| Despite everything we now know about Wikipedia, I still think
| it's one of the better websites of the early 00s.
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| The Wikipedia "reliability" list shows wild, almost laughable
| biases.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
|
| Surely people don't think sources such as Mother Jones are more
| 'reliable' than The New York Post, Fox News, or The Heritage
| Foundation? Not a coincidence there.
|
| Having such obvious biases does nothing but damage the Wikipedia
| brand, and at this point has me anticipating Ai replacements.
| LasEspuelas wrote:
| This is the comment on the Mother Jones entry: "There is
| consensus that Mother Jones is generally reliable. Almost all
| editors consider Mother Jones a biased source, so its
| statements (particularly on political topics) may need to be
| attributed. Consider whether content from this publication
| constitutes due weight before citing it in an article."
|
| They acknowledge it is a biased source and they make a
| distinction between reliability and bias. Not familiar with the
| publication.
| kemayo wrote:
| To elaborate slightly, note that "reliable" is sort of
| Wikipedia jargon. When it applies to a news organization, it
| means that statements of fact are likely to be correct... or
| at least, not _intentionally_ incorrect, because errors do
| happen. So a source can be reliable and biased at the same
| time, which means that if it says a thing happened you can
| largely trust that it really did happen... but any
| interpretation of that might be slanted, and so shouldn 't be
| trusted.
|
| The New York Post isn't "reliable" because it's a tabloid
| that doesn't care overmuch about fact-checking what it
| publishes (and, worse, has a history of just making stuff up
| sometimes). So the Wikipedia position is that you can't trust
| a citation to the NY Post without finding something else to
| corroborate it -- at which point you might as well just cite
| the corroborating reliable source instead.
|
| Whereas Mother Jones will absolutely mostly publish articles
| which say good things about progressives and bad things about
| conservatives, but those things will all be _true_. Their
| bias comes in the form of selectively presenting these things
| -- they 're unlikely to bother posting a "Ted Cruz just did a
| good thing" article -- and in their color commentary /
| opinion pieces, not in the form of just making things up.
|
| See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
| mmooss wrote:
| > Surely people don't think sources such as Mother Jones are
| more 'reliable' than The New York Post, Fox News, or The
| Heritage Foundation?
|
| That seems based on a premise that I don't grasp. Why is Mother
| Jones more or less reliable than those sources? Are those
| sources reliable in your opinion?
|
| My impression is that you have a strong opinion and are
| assuming everyone shares it.
| konne88 wrote:
| I do believe that Wikipedia is one of the least biased sources
| out there, but there is definitely bias. Here is a concrete
| example. Compare the introduction paragraph of the English
| circumcision article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision)
| with the German one (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zirkumzision).
|
| The English intro talks a lot about medical advantages of the
| procedure: "reduced rates of sexually transmitted infections and
| urinary tract infections. This includes reducing the incidence of
| cancer-causing forms of human papillomavirus (HPV) and reducing
| HIV transmission among heterosexual men in high-risk populations
| by up to 60%; ... Neonatal circumcision decreases the risk of
| penile cancer.[14] ... Some medical organizations take the
| position that it carries prophylactic health benefits that
| outweigh the risks," and has one sentence of it being
| controversial worldwide "others hold that its medical benefits
| are not sufficient to justify it."
|
| The German one has not a single sentence in the intro about
| advantages, but a whole paragraph on how it's controversial. "Die
| Zirkumzision als Routineeingriff ist besonders bei Minderjahrigen
| umstritten, ... Von vielen Kinderschutzverbanden und einem Teil
| der Arzteorganisationen wird die nicht medizinisch begrundete
| Beschneidung abgelehnt, da sie den Korper irreversibel verandere
| und bei nicht einwilligungsfahigen Jungen nicht im Einklang mit
| Gesundheitsschutz und Kindeswohl stehe.[6] Im angelsachsischen
| Bereich gibt es schon langer eine gesellschaftliche Debatte
| zwischen Gruppen von Gegnern der Beschneidung
| (,,Intaktivisten"-Bewegung) und Befurwortern. Umstritten sind
| insbesondere medizinischer Nutzen und Risiken, bei Kindern auch
| ethische und rechtliche Aspekte sowie die Beurteilung im Hinblick
| auf die Menschenrechte, vor allem das Recht auf korperliche
| Unversehrtheit."
|
| I'm not sure who's right, but it's hard to not see some bias
| here.
| dieggsy wrote:
| I love Wikipedia and think it's one of the greatest resources
| on the Internet, but there's absolutely a lot of bias in
| Wikipedia. Even within the same language, I think a lot of it
| has to do with how many people have or are contributing to a
| page, whether there's a recent event affecting it, how
| polarizing or political the subject, etc. But it's not hard to
| find examples of straight up opinions or very incomplete
| narratives.
|
| I've also noticed huge differences between two different
| language versions of the same articles. (English/Spanish
| specifically). Sometimes they even feel independently written.
|
| Of course, we should all do our part to improve these things
| when we spot them, if we're able.
| benatkin wrote:
| It also shows that it isn't perfectly organized, that it isn't
| an ideal model for knowledge aggregation. If it's ideal for it
| to be globally consistent, then it doesn't have that. If it's
| ideal for it to be adapted to different cultures, then it
| doesn't have that either, because the divisions are based only
| on language. However, Wikipedia it is really an amazing place,
| and it should continue to be preserved and improved.
| advisedwang wrote:
| It's impossible to write completely neutrally. Editorial
| decisions like what information to include or exclude, what
| sources to cite, what order to present information in, what
| illustrations to use cannot be avoided and inherently present
| some kind of narrative.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| It absolutely is possible to write completely neutrally. All
| it takes is for the writer to be aware/honest of their biases
| and to have a goal of achieving a neutral perspective. Of
| course the goal of most writing is explicitly to not be
| neutral.
| advisedwang wrote:
| Take the example of circumcision. You could probably write
| a mere definition of circumcision neutrally, sure.
|
| But do you include cultural practices of circumcision? Do
| you include criticism? If so, how many column inches do you
| dedicate to either? Which comes first? That surely is going
| to determine whether the article appears to support or
| oppose, which is basically the issue in the comment above.
|
| But beyond that, do you group female circumcision in the
| same article as male circumcision? If not, you are tacitly
| approving of male circumcision by separating it from
| disapproved of practice. If so, surely you need to explain
| the difference in social and legal acceptability. If you do
| that without noting controversy, then you are implying the
| social acceptance of male circumcision is universal. If you
| note controversy, then you are necessarily elevating that
| to noteworthyness.
|
| There's no way out of it.
| 12ian34 wrote:
| well said, reminds me of the Kuleshov Effect[0]
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_effect
| phailhaus wrote:
| Literally the first thing you will learn in journalism
| school is that there is no such thing as "objective
| neutrality". Even deciding what story to cover includes
| bias.
| padjo wrote:
| Have you ever taken a media class? It really isn't.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| It is not possible to have unbiased communication. Whenever you
| communicate with someone, you do it because you think it's
| important that the other person hears what you're about to say.
| This means that you filter all communication through your own
| moral system, which obviously has biases. When people say "this
| is unbiased" they usually mean "this matches the biases of my
| culture". Wikipedia illustrates this very well because both
| cultures can claim "obviously the article in my language is
| unbiased, while the other one is weird".
|
| So in a way, I'd argue that Wikipedia having different biases
| in different language versions actually proves that it's quite
| unbiased. If all languages had exactly the same content, the
| most likely explanation would've been that one culture
| dominates, and the rest are just translations.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I'd love to see someone make a less biased encyclopedia. It's
| easy to throw stones. I think people hate that there is an
| open and valuable source of information on the internet that
| isn't monetized.
|
| Wikipedia is a treasure
| pndy wrote:
| It become heavily biased in last years indeed.
|
| If something looks controversial for my tastes, I track when
| the change was made and look for last version before dubious
| content was added. And so, I've seen edits done to media-
| related articles which introduced sections that weren't present
| in some cases for even 20 years. Sections being replaced or
| included because there was a need for including particular bias
| prevalent in the namely United States sociopolitical scene in
| last 15 years. My country's wiki did suffer as well and there
| are ongoing edits replacing grammar to fit unjustified trends
| that damage our language. In the past hot topics which were
| controversial IRL were including "the Catholic Church's
| position" - now that's largely gone. Then, it's even impossible
| to edit articles without being logged in because the most
| popular ISP has blocked all IP ranges - all because a "trend"
| of vandalism that happen around 24 to 25 years ago, and which
| supposedly happens again according to the message presented.
|
| My contributions weren't large and I stopped doing these
| quickly because fighting people who unload their complexes on
| the Internet on total strangers weren't worth trying to improve
| articles about e.g. Milky Way galaxy or some generic local non-
| political stuff.
|
| Wikipedia looks good on a paper and surely it works for trivial
| stuff people all around the world can agree upon. But it fails
| whenever there's a possibility of endorsing a point of view,
| which is always disguised as "neutral", which applies to
| probably 80% of articles on English Wikipedia alone. It suffers
| same degradation as nearly every place on the Internet - just
| not from the usual ads and tracking .
| hamdingers wrote:
| This suggests one article or the other is incomplete.
|
| To have evidence of bias, you would have to show that a
| paragraph like the one in the English article would be rejected
| for the German one.
| bawolff wrote:
| > I do believe that Wikipedia is one of the least biased
| sources out there, but there is definitely bias
|
| I think this is the wrong way to look at bias. Bias isnt a
| binary, instead its a journey to try and get succesively less
| and less biased. You can never achieve absolute unbiasedness,
| you can just try to journey closer.
|
| And yes, wikipedia is far from perfect.
| thunderbong wrote:
| In the 2000s, in the tech world, the open source successes that
| were being talked about was always Apache and Linux.
|
| When Wikipedia started gaining a bit of traction, everyone made
| fun of it. It was the butt of jokes in all the prime time comedy
| shows. And I always felt like telling the critics - "Don't you
| see what is happening? People all over the world are adding their
| own bits of knowledge and creating this huge thing way beyond
| what we've seen till now. It's cooperation on an international
| scale! By regular people! This is what the internet is all about.
| People, by the thousands, are contributing without asking for
| anything else in return. This is incredible! "
|
| A few years later, Encyclopedia Britannica, stopped their print
| edition. A few years after that I read that Wikipedia had
| surpassed even that.
|
| The amount of value Wikipedia brings to the world is
| incalculable.
|
| And I'm very fortunate to be alive at a time where I can witness
| something at this scale. Something that transcends borders and
| boundaries. Something that goes beyond our daily vices of
| politics and religion. Something that tries to bring a lot of
| balance and objectivity in today's polarized world.
|
| Thank you, Wikipedia.
| duozerk wrote:
| > Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and
| religion
|
| Religion maybe, and Wikipedia is indeed pretty awesome for many
| topics, but politics is THE bad example here.
|
| Much of the political - especially geopolitical - content on
| Wikipedia has a tremendous atlanticist bias.
| philipkglass wrote:
| Is there another public source for encyclopedia-type articles
| that is better for geopolitical content? For example, if I
| have a philosophy question I'll often consult the Stanford
| Encyclopedia of Philosophy instead of Wikipedia.
|
| If there isn't a more neutral public source -- if there are
| only sources with _different_ biases, or if the better
| sources are behind paywalls -- then I think that Wikipedia is
| still doing pretty well even for contentious geopolitical
| topics.
|
| Usually disputes are visible on the Talk page, regardless of
| whatever viewpoint may prevail in the main article. It can
| also be useful to jump back to years-old revisions of
| articles, if there are recent world events that put the
| subject of the article in the news.
|
| Apart from Wikipedia, speaking more generally, I think that
| articles with a strong editorial bias still provide useful
| information to an alert reader. I can read articles from
| Mother Jones, Newsmax, Russia Today, the BBC, Times of India,
| etc. and find different political and/or geopolitical slants
| to what is written about and how it is reported. I can also
| learn a lot even when I strongly disagree with the narrative
| thrust of what is reported. The key thing is to take any
| particular article or publication as only circumstantial
| evidence for an underlying reality, and to avoid falling into
| complacency even when (or especially when) the information
| you're reading aligns with what you already believe to be
| true.
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| In general my impression is that the longer the article title
| is, the more slanted the article itself is.
| defjm wrote:
| Could you provide an example article from Wikipedia for such
| bias?
|
| PS: I had to look up ,,atlanticist", did this on Wikipedia.
| (giggle!)
| hbn wrote:
| I know sometime around Trump's first presidency, in Bill
| Clinton's Wikipedia entry, under the Impeachment section
| they added in a picture of Trump and Clinton shaking hands,
| apropos of nothing in the surrounding text.
|
| I just checked and it's still there.
| wwweston wrote:
| "atlanticist" - the culture of the enlightenment and the good
| that's come from it.
|
| Wikipedia does hold ideals, that access to knowledge is a net
| good, that people can cooperate both in contribution and
| review without a dominating magisterial authority. That
| rational dialogue and qualification and refinement is
| possible, and that it's possible to correct for bias, and see
| the difference between bias and agenda.
|
| Like those whose anti-enlightenment agenda is revealed when
| they use "atlanticist" as a slur.
| sophacles wrote:
| No. One can beleive in the enlightenment ideals without
| placing north america, europe, and the relations between
| them as the most important thing.
|
| For example - one could argue (quite successfully) that the
| US and Europe propping up dictators in south america and
| middle east to secure easy access to oil against the wishes
| and election results of those nations is opposed to many
| enlightenment ideals, but it is still atlanticism by
| prioritizing north american and european relations and
| preservation of values within their little bubble.
|
| Also, just because there was much good resulting from
| enlightenment thinking, we also got things like the slave
| trade, the belgian congo, various genocides and so on from
| it... all of which are pretty bad.
|
| The very notion that the enlightenment had all the answers
| and that there is nothing more to improve or learn is
| itself anti-enlightenment.
|
| (I know there were abolitionists in the enlightnement,and
| examples of people opposed to all the other bad ideas i
| mentioned, but there are plenty of people who "rationally"
| argued for them too)
| woodpanel wrote:
| Wikipedia has been the proto-Reddit for a long time, that is,
| it was relatively easy for ideological bubbles to manufacture
| the Chomskyian Consent, just by being early adopters.
|
| As such it rapidly developed into heavily biased page, as
| Wikipedia's co-founder Larry Sanger keeps pointing out.
|
| It helps if you are proficient in multiple languages so you
| can at least ,,hop" between the (some) bubbles. But the
| gatekeeping is always there.
| bawolff wrote:
| Larry Sanger is not the most convincing on this topic due
| to how he keeps using conspiracy theories as examples of
| things Wikipedia is biased against.
|
| Like if the complaint is that Wikipedia is biased against
| pseudoscience like naturopathy, i consider that a good
| thing.
| woodpanel wrote:
| Classical Wikipedia author move right there
| _moof wrote:
| Are you talking about English Wikipedia, or all of the
| Wikipedia sites?
| 20k wrote:
| If I want to look something up, I always check out wikipedia
| first. Its not always accurate, but its invariably a lot _more_
| accurate on most topics than random information across the web.
| Its also pretty easy to spot bad quality wiki articles once you
| get the gist of the site
|
| Its amazing that wikipedia exists - there've been multiple
| hardcore attempts to kill it over the years for profit, but its
| still managing to go
| jbki wrote:
| Wikipedia is often the last on my goto resources to consult.
| The information is huge, but writing quality or style often
| irks me more than I can stand. I I always check Britannica
| first. If it's not there, then I move on.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Does this relate to a particular domain or field? I find it
| so good, and on the rare occasion I've found something
| wrong, I've fixed it.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I find math topics to be insufferable. They are written
| to be as theoretical as possible and borderline useless
| if you do not already know the topic at hand.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I find it the other way around. I remember vividly that
| the textbook I was using for proving Godel's first
| incompleteness theorem was insufferable and dense.
| Wikipedia gave a nice and more easily understood proof
| sketch. Pedagogically it's better to provide a proof
| sketch for students to turn it into a full proof anyways.
| f1shy wrote:
| Absolutely. I do not know the current status, so don't
| kill me if now is much better, because is just an example
| from many. But take fourier series. I remember going into
| the article, and instead of starting with something lime
| "helps to decompose functions in sums of sin and cos",
| started with "the forier transform is defined as (PUM the
| integral for with Euler formula) continues: is easy to
| show the integral converges according to xxx criterion,
| as long as the function is..." you get the idea. Had I
| not know what FT is, I would've not undestand _anything_
|
| Articles in biology, from which I understand nothing, are
| a wall for me. I could never understand anything biology
| related. Also for example, in Spanish, don't ask me why,
| any plant or animal is always under the latin scientific
| name, and you have to search the whole article to find
| the "common" name of the thing.
| jacobolus wrote:
| The articles about Fourier series and Fourier transform
| currently begin with:
|
| > _A Fourier series is a series expansion of a periodic
| function into a sum of trigonometric functions. The
| Fourier series is an example of a trigonometric series.
| By expressing a function as a sum of sines and cosines,
| many problems involving the function become easier to
| analyze because trigonometric functions are well
| understood._
|
| and
|
| > _In mathematics, the Fourier transform (FT) is an
| integral transform that takes a function as input, and
| outputs another function that describes the extent to
| which various frequencies are present in the original
| function. The output of the transform is a complex valued
| function of frequency. The term Fourier transform refers
| to both the mathematical operation and to this complex-
| valued function. When a distinction needs to be made, the
| output of the operation is sometimes called the frequency
| domain representation of the original function. The
| Fourier transform is analogous to decomposing the sound
| of a musical chord into the intensities of its
| constituent pitches._
| jacobolus wrote:
| It's extremely difficult to write math articles for a
| general audience which are both accessible and accurate,
| and the number of excellent writers working on Wikipedia
| math articles is tiny.
|
| Please get involved if you want to see improvement. There
| are some math articles which are excellent: readable,
| well illustrated, appropriately leveled, comprehensive;
| but there are many, many others which are dramatically
| underdeveloped, poorly sourced, unillustrated, confusing,
| too abstract, overloaded with formulas, etc.
| frereubu wrote:
| While studying a neuroscience-adjacent MSc at UCL in
| London during the mid-2010s, senior academics would
| regularly recommend Wikipedia as an excellent primer for
| neuroanatomy. They wouldn't do it for people on actual
| neuroscience courses, who needed to know things in more
| detail, but they were very complimentary about the
| accuracy of the information on there.
| mettamage wrote:
| Hmm, I think this is an area where LLMs can be quite useful
| to make a wikipedia article more approachable.
| f1shy wrote:
| But dangerous, as the LLMs are trained on wikipedia.
| weslleyskah wrote:
| Wikipedia is surely a formidable source of knowledge, but
|
| > Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and
| religion.
|
| You are romanticizing.
|
| Wikipedia is a corporation, just like Work or University, and I
| personally assume anything corporate is being manipulated by
| the owners or the ruling oligarchy because they are
| structurally unreliable. This is especially veritable for
| Wikipedia. Create an account there and try to go deeper into
| the articles about politics, literature and war.
| shevy-java wrote:
| > Wikipedia is a corporation, and I personally assume
| anything corporate is being manipulated by the owners or the
| ruling oligarchy because they are structurally unreliable.
|
| Many articles are fine. I don't think you can equate this to
| all of Wikipedia automatically.
| tb_technical wrote:
| The remote viewing article keeps being reverted as
| pseudoscientific when original research conducted by the CIA
| is cited. Such citations are removed swiftly. Any changes are
| denied or rolled back.
|
| The rationale is that, even though the documents themselves
| are a primary source from an organization that poured
| significant resources into researching the phenomenon of
| remote viewing, the individual posting the declassified
| document isn't an authority on the subject.
|
| Apparently if youre not a doctor, you can't read primary
| sources?
|
| Many such cases.
|
| Wikipedia is absolutely a powerful resource, but it it's
| clearly controlled by moderators with a bias, and there's no
| incentive to challenge said bias or consider alternative
| worldviews.
| gcanyon wrote:
| I haven't looked at the article in question, but is there
| enough material to make an article specifically about the
| CIA research programs?
| tb_technical wrote:
| There already is a separate wikipedia article about the
| specific program. It is an extensive article. If you look
| up "Stargate CIA" in any search engine you'll find it
| easily.
|
| There is a large amount of data on this topic. Literally
| hundreds of pages of reports and summaries of experiments
| written over decades of effort (if memory serves). The
| CIA was trying to use the phenomenon to view distant
| targets with mediums. It was deemed ineffective, and
| discontinued in the 90s. Even today there are people
| attempting to replicate remote viewing and prove it as a
| phenomenon.
|
| For the record, I do not believe this phenomenon is as
| effective as is claimed. Regardless there is a chance
| that remote viewing (also known as astral projection) is
| just something the human brain commonly imagines in some
| populations. It might be an emergent property of human
| brains reacting to certain input stimulus, like ASMR.
|
| Regardless, the article written about remote viewing as a
| concept should be allowed to cite documents about how the
| Stargate program defined and tested remote viewing (their
| methodologies, etc). But editors, like all humans, have
| bias.
|
| There was a similar kerfuffle that happened about a
| decade and a half ago about homeopathy. It lead to an
| edit thread where one of the founders of Wikipedia was
| cursing about how fake something was.
|
| The only objection I have to this, is that primary
| sources relevant to an article should be allowed to be
| cited. If a study, whitepaper, or report is widely
| discredited - include that too. The sum of human
| knowledge needs to include what we know to be false as
| well.
| weslleyskah wrote:
| I remember people saying that the article about Carl Jung
| was not worth contributing anymore because of his fascist
| sympathies with nazism. I don't know what to make of that.
|
| I've experienced something similar about users downplaying
| on talk pages the atrocities done by the Soviet Government,
| like the Holodomor famine or the Katyn Massacre, in
| contrast to the atrocities done by the Nazis.
|
| Controversial and relatively unknown subjects are easier to
| be attacked and ignored on wikipedia.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
| tb_technical wrote:
| Editors have biases. The best we can do is shine a
| spotlight on them.
|
| People are opposed to this, of course. No one likes to be
| reminded of how they're limited - and people get really
| nasty when you accuse them of being a dishonest
| interlocutor.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| > Wikipedia is a corporation
|
| nitpick: WMF (the org that develops and hosts Wikipedia and
| its related services like Wikimedia Commons) is a non-profit
| foundation, not the classic type of profit-driven corporation
| that your post implies.
| xmprt wrote:
| I don't think corporation implies for-profit. In my eyes,
| corporation refers to a large organization with some self-
| serving motivation which is not necessarily just money.
| Being a non-profit just so happens to be the best vehicle
| for this motivation but it doesn't mean that the motivation
| doesn't exist.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| at least in america, in common discussion outside of
| legal/highly wonky circles, referring to an organization
| as a corporation almost always implies a for-profit
| corporation, with (literally) vanishingly few examples of
| the contrary in popular knowledge (RIP CPB, may you
| return someday).
| weslleyskah wrote:
| Well, I prefer to be skeptical of any corporation,
| regardless if it is non-profit or not, until proven
| otherwise with substantial transparency on their methods of
| moderation and control.
|
| There is a lack of transparency on Wikipedia. The rules are
| nebulous and prone to abuse by veteran users and the
| oligarchs aggregating on political articles.
| OvidNaso wrote:
| Hold on, their moderation methods are as transparent as
| could possibly be. Every article has a dedicated page
| where every decision has a reason and more often than not
| an overwhelming amount of discussion. Their overall
| policy is similarly debated publicly.
|
| Is it overwhelming? Oh yes. Tough to change? Probably
| also yes without dedication and sound reasoning. But
| opaque? Certainly doesn't fail that criteria.
| weslleyskah wrote:
| It certainly becomes opaque when it is a labyrinth of
| links and documents that you need to read and follow
| through. It does not help when these same rules can be
| abused to death by veteran users.
|
| At a certain point, no one really knows the devil's dance
| happening at the top of the moderation ladder and you end
| up wasting a lot of lifetime on these dead talk pages.
|
| It is a bureaucratic nightmare.
| wwweston wrote:
| > Wikipedia is a corporation, just like Work or University
|
| "Work" and "University" are so wildly different as
| institutions that to use them this way makes it perfectly
| clear how little merit your point has.
|
| It's an empty character attack - possibly a reflection of
| your own - meant to appeal only to the worst despairing
| suspicions of others. It does nothing to illuminate specific
| dynamics of group knowledge negotiation.
|
| Anyone who has participated knows there can be conflict and
| abuse -- and more about how that's addressed than someone
| throwing drive-by distrust.
| weslleyskah wrote:
| > "Work" and "University" are so wildly different as
| institutions that to use them this way makes it perfectly
| clear how little merit your point has.
|
| I disagree. Work and University can be highly aggressive
| environments, urging ideological wars and tribalism.
|
| > It's an empty character attack - possibly a reflection of
| your own -
|
| Well, this got personal very quickly.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Ideological wars are everywhere, especially if you are
| willing to make them up.
|
| Any collaborative effort will involve politics, and by
| politics I mean the actual definition. Per Wikipedia:
|
| > set of activities that are associated with making
| decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations
| among individuals, such as the distribution of status or
| resources.
|
| It's important to recognize this, because the option is
| becoming an hermit or just accepting fully what others
| decide for you.
| weslleyskah wrote:
| I know this, I've experienced this. There is not a
| concrete source for what I'm saying here.
|
| I remember reading the article about a nudist family
| photographer. The English Wikipedia article was
| highlighting the controversy about child pornography that
| came with it, almost trying to demonize the guy, while
| the German article was actually trying to go beyond and
| develop the article. There are enormous discrepancies on
| that website.
|
| Wikipedia has some bizarre articles and rules. I can only
| provide some pieces and bits of anecdotes.
| drysine wrote:
| >Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity
| in today's polarized world.
|
| And fails spectacularly.
| behringer wrote:
| Wikipedia is one of the greatest projects people have
| indeavored on. It has certainly surpassed the pyramids as one
| of the great wonders of the world, in usefulness, size and
| scope and human hours.
| l7l wrote:
| Every time I try to contribute, I get censored by some
| gatekeeper. It feels as open and inviting nowadays as
| StackOverflow.
| trashburger wrote:
| I'm noticing a distinct lack of Guy Standing sitting in the
| "Weird and wonderful Wikipedia" section.
| shevy-java wrote:
| In the last 2 years, Wikipdia's quality declined. For me this was
| evident when they suddenly changed the UI. The new UI is more
| annoying. Perhaps it is nicer for Average Joe people, but for
| powerusers it is just annoying to use now. But this is not the
| only problem: many articles have a low quality, or they are so
| complicated that Average Joe doesn't understand them, which is
| ironic considering the UI was most likely changed to appease
| Average Joe.
|
| I am also displeased with the constant pop-up or slide-in
| widgets. This is a general curse for browsers that ublock origin
| prevented. I hate this. My browser should not allow for any such
| slide-in banner. I am never interested in anything written there
| - usually it is a "gimme more money", but even if it is not, I
| simply don't CARE what is written on it. Even python used this,
| on their homepage, where they are even so cheeky that you can not
| fully disable this thing, unless you block it with ublock origin.
|
| I feel that too many websites fail the user now. Wikipedia does
| too. The intrinsic quality is still better than the AI slop spam
| that Google amplified world wide, while also ruining Google
| search, but the quality used to be better in the past, on
| Wikipedia.
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| > _For me this was evident when they suddenly changed the UI.
| The new UI is more annoying._
|
| In case you are unaware, if you're logged in, you can go into
| the user preferences and change the Appearance to one of the
| older themes, such as Vector Legacy (2010).
| kuharich wrote:
| The people who built Wikipedia, technically
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| I have been a fan of Wikipedia since I first learned about it,
| about six months after it launched. What a concept! Anyone can
| edit, citations are required, revisions are kept indefinitely.
| That's a recipe for building a clearinghouse of human knowledge
| with the power of iteration.
|
| But I am also a non-fiction researcher/writer, and I experience
| some problems caused by Wikipedia:
|
| 1) I like to dig deep into historical stories--newspapers,
| archives, court records, FOIA requests--and I try to produce high
| quality, well-sourced articles about historic events. Inevitably,
| someone updates the Wikipedia article(s) to include new
| information I have surfaced, which exiles my article to the
| digital dustbin in favor of Wikipedia. Occasionally the Wikipedia
| editors cite my article in their updates, but much more often
| they just cite the sources that I cited, and skip over my
| contribution. It can be painful for my hard work to become
| irrelevant so rapidly.
|
| 2) Multiple of my writings have been plagiarized on Wikipedia by
| careless editors over the years, and I have been subsequently
| accused of plagiarizing from Wikipedia. That is unpleasant.
|
| For a recent example, in 2006 I wrote an article about Doble
| Steam Cars[1]. A few months ago I had reason to visit the Doble
| steam car Wikipedia entry[2], and as I was reading, I realized
| that a large portion of the text was an uncanny, nearly verbatim
| copy of my article. I looked at the revision history, and found
| that a wiki editor had copied my text to revamp the article just
| a few months after I wrote mine in 2006. I visited /r/wikipedia
| and asked how to best handle this, and the Wikipedia editors
| there determined that it was indeed a violation, and they decided
| to revdelete almost 20 years of edits to purge the violation. It
| was quite something to behold.
|
| To be clear, I am not happy that the huge revdelete resulted in
| so many lost subsequent good faith edits. But it's impressive
| that it was possible to roll it back so quickly and cleanly.
|
| [1] https://www.damninteresting.com/the-last-great-steam-car/
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doble_steam_car
| MattGrommes wrote:
| I always like to point people to Simple Wikipedia -
| https://simple.wikipedia.org/. You can also change the
| (lang).wikipedia.org URL to simple.wikipedia.org and a lot of the
| time you get a great, simple language explanation that's better
| for a quick overview of a topic than the regular page.
| 7e wrote:
| 25 years of ranking in the cash and yet constantly begging for
| money. It's a cushy gig for the employees.
| xvilka wrote:
| The biggest complaint about Wikipedia I have is that they do not
| allow edits via VPNs, even for the registered users. These days
| VPN is a necessity in many places, thus it limits a big amount of
| potential contributors.
| miduil wrote:
| My first "contributions" were 2004, I was 10 years old and
| supposed to write a text about Mozart. Somehow I noticed the edit
| button and started vandalizing the page, as I didn't understood
| what Wikipedia was meant to be. Some patient wikipedian kept
| reverting and reporting my IP addresses during that day. It's
| both incredible to see how old and young Wikipedia is, if we'd
| say there was a "World Wide Web Heritage" project, Wikipedia and
| the contributors are truly the first thing that comes to mind.
|
| Wonderful website!
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| If you use wikipedia as a starting point, and actually check
| reference material critically, it's invaluable in my opinion.
|
| We used to have to pay lots of money for encyclopedias for less
| quality.
|
| My hope is that while I think the website/webapp itself doesn't
| need much change, if they moved the back-end to a distributed
| system, like ipfs perhaps? that would be amazing. Even if
| wikipedia is blocked, or tampered with, arbitrary people around
| the world would have mirrors of pages here and there. They could
| store it just as it is now, and simply expose the data via ipfs
| and change the webapp to use their own ipfs http gateway.
|
| The unthinkable can happen. I wondered if the burning of the
| library of alexandria was something people thought was in the
| realm of practical possibility back then?
| mahirsaid wrote:
| i remember using wiki for the first time. I can't imagine the
| internet without it.
| pflenker wrote:
| I was close to finishing school when Wikipedia came up. A lot of
| complaints and concerns about LLMs today echo remarks about
| Wikipedia back then. Kids won't learn anything, they will just
| copy and paste! The information is unreliable, our kids will stop
| thinking critically or learning how to research!
|
| While I don't mean to equate both, I find the resemblance in this
| case striking.
| oxag3n wrote:
| It's a miracle that in a world where everything becomes a
| service, proprietary and cloud based, you can download a
| collective human knowledge (while some argue it's biased, not
| truth-based and consensus ran - yes, but I think it's one of the
| best outcome for a socially constructed knowledge).
| hit8run wrote:
| https://grokipedia.com
| nailer wrote:
| Still in beta. It's apparently going to be called 'Encyclopedia
| Galactica' when released.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Wouldn't touch that piece of shit if you paid me.
|
| It's not that it doesn't have potential. But I hope the other
| players take up the mantle and auto-generate alternatives.
|
| The stench of Mr Elon Musk is just too strong with Grokipedia
| (scrape that, bitch)
| erickhill wrote:
| I've often found it's bare bone utilitarian and efficient design
| a breath of fresh air compared to most of what's online today.
| That, and their philosophy of being donation based to keep the
| lights on.
| nailer wrote:
| Wikipedia could do a lot by reminding people of their own rule:
| that Wikipedia is not a source to be cited - more often.
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