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A comment on 72% of Americans say social media companies have too much political influence. Parent comment

Re:72% of Americans say social media companies have too much... by dexen on Friday July 24, 2020 @07:36AM (#23938253)
Excellent post, one nitpick:

>Wikipedia is another example [of the public square]

Quite the opposite; Wikipedia is explicitly based on published reliable sources. They have a specific rule[1] excluding information that was not published in such way.

There are certain advantages to this rule, and its utility has been validated through Wikipedia's long, and ongoing, run. Nonetheless this cathedral mindset cannot be compared to a public square in any way other than being a very opposite.

In particular the published reliable sources rule excludes general blogs and public forums and the likes, thus excluding the majority of discourse & voices on the internet. Even expert sources, if self-published, can only be used in limited way and with caution.

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[1] "If no reliable sources can be found on a topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources

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Re:72% of Americans say social media companies have too much... by lr4444lr on Friday July 24, 2020 @07:54AM (#23938402)
You're not wrong, but I think you're missing his key point, which is that a forum for free thought simply isn't if it's policed by content moderators around a set of culture rules, no matter how high-minded the intentions. Now for sure, WP has moderators, and they are human, but they're pretty tightly bound to enforce only the rules of admission. They're not vested with the power and mission to censor opinions deemed odious or disharmonious. I'm sure abuses happen and the slope is slippery, but moderators tend to respond to conflict there. Not predefine and block it's alleged precursors.
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Re:72% of Americans say social media companies have too much... by dexen on Friday July 24, 2020 @08:06AM (#23938495)
The key point was wrong wrt Wikipedia :-)

>a forum for free thought >if it [isn't] policed by content moderators around a set of culture rules

The rules are mostly invisible to us because we are surrounded with, and submersed in, this very culture 24/7.

To get written up in Wikipedia one must first get published in a reliable source. This mostly means a journal or "books published by respected publishing houses" (full list: [1]). The publishing is the gatekeeper here; the wikipedia moderators are a secondary consideration.

This does indeed silence out a priori (i.e., censors) ideas that are culturally unpopular or frowned upon or just held by small number of individuals. To avoid muddling the argument with hot button issues, here's a very mild and barely objectionable example: picoLisp, a modern interpreted programming language with dynamic scoping. Having it written up, and then kept, in Wikipedia is an uphill struggle spanning years, and with sad reversals & losses. And that's with ideas that are only mildly unpopular.

Again, Wikipedia's utility is clear and recognized. Let's just not mix it up with a public square.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#What_c...

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Re:72% of Americans say social media companies have too much... by throw_m239339 on Friday July 24, 2020 @08:02AM (#23938472)
https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

This is wikipedia co-founder writing this.

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Re:72% of Americans say social media companies have too much... by dexen on Friday July 24, 2020 @08:20AM (#23938591)
It's true. Sadly it takes strong familiarity with wide range of subjects to be able to point out the biases of omission, and a big name to point it out without attracting too much of dismissive shrugs.

In my opinion, the bias is primarily derived from the bias of the sources Wikipedia uses, with influence by the WP editors being only a secondary influence.

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Re:72% of Americans say social media companies have too much... by xxpor on Friday July 24, 2020 @10:32AM (#23939986)
Larry Sanger is an idiot. There's a reason he was kicked out early in Wikipedia's history.

Wikipedia is certainly biased, but in what topics are covered, not the content itself. I think they had an example that the article for the Falklands war was longer than the Congo civil war, the deadliest conflict since WW2.

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Re:72% of Americans say social media companies have too much... by netcan on Friday July 24, 2020 @09:54AM (#23939498)
I'm not saying that wikipedia is equivalent in every way to twitter, vis-a-vis the public square concept. It is a very important media though, and faces a lot of the same issues.

Whatever issues social media has encountered around politics, covid, etc. are arguably more acute for wikipedia... because of its authority and role as a source of objective information. Meanwhile, it has handled everything much better by default. That's why we don't think of it as part of the social media problem.

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Re:72% of Americans say social media companies have too much... by jfk13 on Friday July 24, 2020 @07:47AM (#23938341)
Naturally, there's a relevant XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/978/

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Re:72% of Americans say social media companies have too much... by apexalpha on Friday July 24, 2020 @08:36AM (#23938713)
Does Wikipedia not have rules against using sources that were published later than the 'fact' on Wikipedia was asserted?
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Re:72% of Americans say social media companies have too much... by MarxOk on Friday July 24, 2020 @08:57AM (#23938875)
If only the stakes were as low as the scroll lock key...
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Re:72% of Americans say social media companies have too much... by dexen on Friday July 24, 2020 @07:51AM (#23938378)
The citogenesis xkcd is right, but could & should take one more step and say openly:

Wikipedia has became part of the media ecosystem, not much different from any other part of the media ecosystem.

Journalists at typical outlets are also engaged in re-publishing -edited or verbatim- content from other outlets. Among those practices, churnalism [1].

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churnalism

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Re:72% of Americans say social media companies have too much... by jan_Inkepa on Friday July 24, 2020 @08:03AM (#23938480)
Why do you say that? Wikipedia is vastly different from anything I’d normally recognise as news media(I guess that’s what you mean?). It puts content up front (except when asking for donations). It shows how the sausage is made (you can look at talk pages if you really want to). It sources claims. I guess at some point it’ll take a turn for the worse, but it’s nowhere close to there yet from what I can see. Am I missing something? I guess you could say that it’s part of the ecosystem in that it trusts it and news sources are an integral part of its fact-checking process, but I don’t see that that makes it resemble too closely the sources it uses for fact-checking. And companies use it for PR\allow-washing, which isn’t great. And subject-experts express frustration in getting their edits reverted by idiots. But, it’s still recognisably wikipedia from the old days. I don’t see how you get to “not much different from any other part of the media ecosystem”.
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Re:72% of Americans say social media companies have too much... by dexen on Friday July 24, 2020 @08:09AM (#23938512)
>Wikipedia is vastly different from anything I’d normally recognise as news media

Agreed - Wikipedia is not news media.

Instead it's media fact & opinion aggregator and editor. It does function as media platform, with content provided by the media and only by the media. The editors' opinions are a secondary consideration; they are obliged by the rules to only ever derive content from the published reliable sources.

My "not much different from any other part of the media ecosystem" statement is connected with how the ideas & opinions flowing back and forth between Wikipedia and other medias (as shown in the citogenesis xkcd) - a process that's typical, even characteristic, of media.

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