Let me counter, as someone that's edited wikipedia articles: I have no interest in having power over other people. In fact I actively work against hierarchical power structures, which I find inherently unethical. Many others I've met in the weird niche community of hackers and wikipedia editors share these values.

I edit wikipedia articles for a variety of reasons. Off the top of my head: something written was factually incorrect (a date off, a mandarin word mistranslated, etc) and I feel an obsessive desire to make the documentation correct; there was no information on a subject I care about and so I wrote some because I really like documentation; the article on a band hadn't been updated to include their new album so I added it because I like the band and I want to make sure people know about the new album; the article wasn't written clearly enough and I worried about non native english speakers who find it and might misunderstand what was written.

I really don't understand either how editing a wikipedia article gives you power over someone. They can just edit it back, or ignore the article.

Edit: Thinking on it, I edit wikipedia articles maybe for the same reason I have a freesound.org account I upload my audio recordings to: I just really like having an internet full of useful and interesting stuff for people and contributing to that.

> I really don't understand either how editing a wikipedia article gives you power over someone

It is impossible for me to take this comment at face value. I don't believe that it is not immediately obvious to you how exerting editorial control over the 7th most visited site on the internet, a site that is aiming to represent "the sum of all human knowledge", represents a significant source of power to influence society.

It's great that you've enjoyed the process of contributing minor edits, and content to niche fields. But you can't ignore the fact that a majority of the content comes from a tiny minority of the userbase, and that their motives demonstrably resolve around a desire to control information in many cases.

[0]: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4228b090-8900-4a29-baa3-66...

> Based on empirical data drawn from a series of interviews and an exhaustive analysis of its cases between 2004 and 2020, this paper examines the ways in which the Arbitration Committee handles conduct-related disputes between editors, and the impact of social capital, summarily defined as the “capital captured through social relations” (Lin 2001, 19), on this process. My empirical material indicates that the Arbitration Committee not only examines the merits of the claims made by the disputants, but also and more crucially facilitates a social contest by considering the position of each disputant within the community of editors. Ultimately, the Arbitration Committee seeks to “cancel” these disputes in order to preserve Wikipedia’s social fabric.

As long as the different groups are on equal footing and there is a fair way to resolve disputes, the invisible hand should guide the article to something fair.

I think this has been borne out in practise for the most part.

That very much depends on the subject matter. Subjects that are at all politically or socially controversial are very likely to be under the control of one or the other side. If it's a "boring" subject that lots of people are interested in, then the page will probably be fairly balanced.

A better Wikipedia would have epistemological relativity as a central mechanic, while simultaneously relaxing the rules on acceptable sources. Implementing that in a way that doesn't compromise UX would be difficult, but it's a technical problem more than anything.

Not everything is an opinion. For example my physical height is a fact. How many versions of truths are there about it?

https://www.gq.com/story/nba-player-heights

But my point isn’t that all information on Wikipedia is factually incorrect. It contains a lot of useful information. My point is that the process for revolving controversies doesn’t simply focus on facts, or merit, or anything similar to scientific or academic rigour, as it is often influenced more by the politics of the Wikipedia editors social hierarchy.

Also prove your last statement that a significant amount of Wikipedia editors are influenced by political

> prove your last statement that a significant amount of Wikipedia editors are influenced by political

https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4228b090-8900-4a29-baa3-66...

> Based on empirical data drawn from a series of interviews and an exhaustive analysis of its cases between 2004 and 2020, this paper examines the ways in which the Arbitration Committee handles conduct-related disputes between editors, and the impact of social capital, summarily defined as the “capital captured through social relations” (Lin 2001, 19), on this process. My empirical material indicates that the Arbitration Committee not only examines the merits of the claims made by the disputants, but also and more crucially facilitates a social contest by considering the position of each disputant within the community of editors. Ultimately, the Arbitration Committee seeks to “cancel” these disputes in order to preserve Wikipedia’s social fabric.

Here you go, there’s some empirical evidence that proves it. This describes a _political process_ where controversies are resolved according to the _politics_ of Wikipedia editing. I am not talking strictly about something like democrats vs republicans, or whatever your own narrow view of politics entails, as I suspect you may have presumed.

It doesn't matter how hard it is to determine his height, if it's wrong on Wikipedia, or if it's controversial. If the height is incorrect on Wikipedia it's not true or a fact. If two sources have his height and they are different only one is true, which one? No idea but there aren't multiple truths.

This line of thought is a way to muddy the difference between opinions and facts. A good opinion is one that is based on factual information, if you can claim there are multiple true but contradictory facts (like his height) it allows you have an opinion that might otherwise be based on nothing or false information.

The difference between an opinion and a fact is an opinion can't be falsified[1]. It's possible to find out his height[2], therefore there is only one truth, and other "truths" would turn out to be false.

-------

The paper you supplied shows social capital helps with the arbitration committee and talks about some inner circle of people who coordinate. You're right, this does prove your point and I did assume that you were talking about the more common current use of politics. I was too focused on the "facts" part of our discussion and read too quickly. That's my fault.

There are sophisticated institutions in our society that are devoted to evaluating facts, and none of them have a definition of a fact that is as rigid as yours. The criminal justice system is one, they only require proof "beyond reasonable doubt" (as subjectively decided by a jury or judge) to establish a fact. The academic system is another, and their standard for establishing a fact is arguably lower, as they rely on a (perhaps similar) peer evaluation process.

It's not possible to have a fact with the characteristics you're describing. All facts can be subject to legitimate controversy.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_trilemma

I was implying "true fact" because I didn't know that it has a definition "a statement that can be proven true or false". An opinion can't be falsified right? So there's still a clear difference even though I wasn't using "fact" incorrectly.*

Let me rewind to the statement I replied to ""promote their own views as the truth (for whatever reason they have for doing that), and suppress all opposing views."

What I don't understand and you can help me with (I'm not being sarcastic at all) is that how can you push views (opinions) using truths (proven facts?) over another view without at least one of the following

1. False facts, fake sources, and other out of bounds actions 2. Omission of information

Because I think I'm beginning to understand what you might be saying. Is it that someone would want to push a view by only adding facts that could cause someone to come to a conclusion but leaving out other information that might sway them to another conclusion?

If that's true wouldn't that occur less often than other sources of information because those other sources of information are created once by a small set of authors? Books, blogs, news articles, etc. If so then isn't Wikipedia the best option?

* I think I've gotten so used to saying "fact" to mean "proven fact" obviously if that was the case there would be no way to describe incorrect facts. I'm sorry, I do appreciate your patience. I have a habit of assuming other people know what I mean.

The role of the fact validator is to evaluate the proof, and decide whether it meets a subjective criteria that elevates it to the level of fact. Controlling this process allows the fact validator to decide which information is fact, and which is not. Even when you have a rigid criteria for evaluating facts, the criteria itself is going to be subjective and opinionated, and no matter how much you try to control it, the fact validator will have some leeway in interpreting the criteria and how it applies differently for different facts.

This is one of the roles of a jury. When a jury is presented with conflicting accounts of facts (as they often are), one of their jobs is to review the evidence and come to a consensus on which facts (in their opinion) are true.

There's also the issue that statements of fact, and statements of opinion are not quite that clear cut. Consider the statement "He attempted to undermine the process", which is the sort of thing I could hypothetically imagine a fact checker attempting to validate. It's a statement of opinion that potentially alludes to statements of fact. If you break it down into how you might reach that conclusion, you'd have: "He did a thing" this is a statement of fact (whether it's "proven" or not). "The thing he did undermined the process" this is more of a statement of opinion, as it presupposes what the process is intended to do, and how the thing he did influenced that. "It was his intention for this thing that he did to undermine the process" and this is unambiguously an opinion as all cases of attributing a motive are naturally opinionated.

But keep in mind that this whole argument I'm making is based upon the idea that there are no universal truths (which relates to philosophical ideas like relativism and absurdism). These ideas have their critics (such as Plato who criticised Socrates' interpretation of them), but I've never heard any satisfactory (according to me) explanation of how you might go about proving a universal truth (with universalist ideas typically only being embraced by religion, and perhaps ironically the anti-religion moral universalist camp, people like Richard Dawkins)