It’s a bit hard for me to imagine something better (in practice). It’s easy to want more or feel like reality doesn’t live up to one’s idealism.
But we live here and now in the messiness of the present.
Viva la Wikipedia!
For example:
I’m a big fan of Wikipedia. I spent countless hours writing articles in my early twenties. I stopped because the environment got more hostile as the site grew in popularity. I think that might have been necessary to address the influx of drive-by editing, but it still meant I stopped enjoying being a contributor. I don’t appreciate the constant asking for money — as far as I understand, they’re well off without donations.
There.
I think the misconception here is that criticism has to be mean and personal. As someone who celebrates the project’s ideals, giving criticism is an act of love.
They are, by and large, a bunch of horrible bullies and losers - many Wikipedians don't actually care about articles creation or actual content, they fiddle about with URL fixes and categorisation. There was one horrible human being called BrownHairedGirl who did all these things and almost destroyed the place before they got indefinitely banned also.
Ta bu shi da yu created the citation needed template: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Citation... (I remember that account name from Kuro5hin. Much respect!)
He edited under several accounts, all of which are permabanned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Aussie_Article_Writer
Why? Because he'd earned an interaction ban (IBAN) from engaging with BrownHairedGirl, and he breached the ban: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=...
Whatever he said, it's been fully scrubbed, but it appears to have been commenting on BrownHairedGirl's not-yet-submitted Request for Adminship: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=1039021442#Piotrus...
How'd he get the interaction ban? Because another account of his and BrownHairedGirl were squabbling, and the admins have working eyes and brains, they could see he was doing the instigating: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=980273295#Proposa...
You're not meant to wind up or troll your fellow Wikipedians, even if they are combative dickheads who need taking down a peg.
What was the beef? That he was creating small subcategories for each suburb of Brisbane, and BrownHairedGirl goes off her nut at small categories.
BrownHairedGirl was eventually taken out by being needlessly combative about - of all things - Wikipedia's "small categories" policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...
> what stops you from creating a new account?
Wikipedians inevitably go back to their old stomping grounds, use their normal tone in discussions, repeat their same old habits and basically don't change. When they do that, they're very recognisable to the people they already spent 20 years interacting with. They out themselves as a sockpuppet of the original banned user, and they get banned again.
I can assure you, I was not doing the instigating. Though I did comment on her RFA, not realising it was not yet submitted. There was never an appropriate review of my one-way IBAN, and nobody has been able to explain why this was done given her vile and ongoing obnoxious comments about myself. unless you consider her accusing me of "whining" to have been acceptable, something not a single person commented on. Also, I had been asking them not to comment on my talk page and had taken it to WP:AN/I. Not sure why you consider this to have been something that I was not allowed to ask for review about?
I had no part in the scrubbing of that page. That was the ArbCom, for reasons only known to themselves. Probably instigated by then-arbitrator Beeblebrox, who was later suspended from ArbCom for disclosing ArbCom matters on an external anti-Wikipedia site.
Also: I was not doing any editing of Brisbane categories. I don't know where you got that from.
Furthermore, I have not edited Wikipedia since I was banned. If you are implying otherwise, then you are wrong.
Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=980273295#Proposa...
Your fellow Wikipedians had had enough of your and BHG's squabbling, and they decided it was primarily you needling her. And yes, even in the brief exchange in the thread there, BHG comes off like an absolute prick. In no way does BHG's awful behaviour allow you to excuse your own.
See also your own words "Upon reflection, that was indeed a needlessly inflammatory comment I made. I apologise for that."
Perhaps you can accept you've made more than one needlessly inflammatory comment towards BHG?
* Here you made a snide little comment exclusively about BHG where she'd see it: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Adminis...
* Here you accused her of gaslighting: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Wi...
* BHG then made a thuggish and threatening post on your user page: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Chris.s...
BHG later characterised this like "oh but he was trolling me and I merely asked him one time on his talk page to stop (which is allowed)", which is bollocks because the "one time" is a long, angry screed written in a menacing tone. But if you want to go no-contact with someone who's clearly bad for you to be around, go no-contact -- don't ever mention them again. Don't interact directly with them. Don't comment on things they're involved in. If you're in something and they join in, politely recuse yourself.
That you didn't, is the reason why your fellow Wikipedians decided to issue the one-way IBAN.
> Also: I was not doing any editing of Brisbane categories
OK, that was not quite right. What happened was: BHG relisted a bunch of small categories for Australian city suburbs (starting with Brisbane), then you commented with unhelpful snark on several of them, and then deleted all your commentary minutes later: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Categor...
That's a classic tactic for needling someone watching the page, then playing innocent afterwards, as I'm sure you know. Bonus points for referring to her as "the nominator" rather than by name, for a further level of deniability.
> I can assure you, I was not doing the instigating
Per Beeblebrox: https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=11595&p...
"AAW was actually doing good, quiet work for some time. Then he decided to let the committee know that it was him and he was doing a "clean start" and of course our only option was to inform him that he was not qualified for a clean start because of the interaction ban with BHG."
"And then he did the only thing he was not allowed to do, and did it like six times in a row on several different pages (and there was a seventh time that nobody had noticed on his user page like a week earlier). I don't think there's any coming back from that, and ArbCom has taken over the block"
If you had simply not interacted with BHG after coming back, until the point that she was finally banned, you'd still be editing today. Instead, you got perma'd for violating your IBAN with impunity. And honestly, would you really want to have your IBAN reviewed, maybe even removed... for what? So that you could go back to needling her, and having her bully you right back? WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO DO THAT? IT'S VERY CLEAR NO GOOD COULD EVER COME OF THAT.
> I have not edited Wikipedia since I was banned.
I never said you did. I was explaining to the other HN user how Wikipedians know that banned users have come back under a sockpuppet. Essentially, it is very obvious when the banned users come back and start doing the same things they were banned for, which decloaks them.
Also I don't think it's necessary to call people names.
Citation needed.
What did she do on Wikipedia?
She "fixed" barelinks and did categorization work. On the former, she wrote a script that utterly buggered up links to the extent they were being cleaned up long after she was banned. On the latter, she was so toxic that she was eventually blocked for her actions on categories.
She was a toxic editor who did virtually no editing of content on the site.
I did find some of the vandals, and became good friends with a few. Some of what they write is side splitting humor, but also the alt-right has an amazing amount of power they are using to rewrite history.
I would never give them a thin dime.
In my view it is very much the journey towards an unatainable goal that makes Wikipedia so inspiring. The Wikipedian's themselves admit it is a work in progress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_a_work_...
I think that's part of what makes Wikipedia beautiful.
In some ways it makes me think of the religious monolouge from the tv show babylon5 https://youtu.be/JjnpTcvGvts?si=6jdzDxVXOt--LNHC
Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it. But philosophers still talk about Truth, they didn't get the message. As long as we are using leaky abstractions - which means all the time - we can't capture Truth. There is no view from nowhere.
I don't quite agree with this, unless what you mean is that there's no procedure we can follow which generates knowledge without the possibility of error. This doesn't mean that there's no such thing as truth, or that we can't generate knowledge. It just means that we can never guarantee that our knowledge doesn't contain errors. Another way to put this (for the philosophers among us) is that there is no way to justify a belief (such as a scientific theory) and as such there is no such thing as "justified true belief." But again, this doesn't mean that we cannot generate knowledge about the world.
Oh I agree we can generate knowledge, but it is never the Truth, it can't be. Any knowledge is composed from imperfect abstractions, the edge cases of which we don't know.
We are taking patterns from our experience, and coining them as abstractions, but ultimately we all have our own lived experience, a limited experience. We can only know approximatively. Some people know quantum physics, others know brain surgery, so the quality of our abstractions varies based on individual and topic. We are like the 5 blind men and the elephant.
That is a pretty concrete epistemological statement. Is it true?
That's not just a game, or a "gotcha". Any discussion about "truth" eventually ends up with the question of what it means to know something, a subject about which you seem to be fairly confident.
There are only a very few people from the entire history of our species who have run particle collider experiments and verified first hand what's inside an atom. What they agree on is truth for everyone because almost nobody has the means to test it themselves. And then of course this truth is modified and updated as we find more data. Then old conclusions are rejected and the entire baseline of truth changes.
We can be sure of things to however many decimal places as you'd like, but reality itself is fundamentally built on probabilities and error bars. What we think we know is built on probabilities on probabilities.
My thought is that math (broadly speaking) possesses correctness because of axiomatic decisions. The consequences of those decisions lead us to practice math that can't express everything that we can imagine (e.g., see axiom of choice/ZFC).
The math humanity practices today is a result of tuning the axioms to be: self-consistent, and, useful for explaining phenomena that we can observe. I don't believe this math is correct in a universal or absolute sense, just locally.
So, that that is system of notation which has consistency is itself a truth, isn’t it?
Either atoms exist or they dont. Our idea of atom has evolved over time, but the thing that we call "atom" has always been there (at least on the time scale of human civilization).
The probabilistic nature of quantum objects isn't really a problem either. Electrons may be particles, waves, both or neither, but the "thing" is a real phenomenon of this world regardless of how we talk about it.
Similarly, the truth value of alien existence is well defined: either they exist at this time or they do not. We don't know it for sure, but this doesn't change whether they are actually there or not.
Perfect example, since they only exist as a concept to describe an observation. With higher precision of observation, it became “the new truth“ that most of the time even on the observation level do not actually exist in terms of matter; they “flicker“ fast enough to appear existing at all times. When you look often enough or at the wrong times, there is nothing to observe.
Is this because atoms don't exist, or because we are looking in the wrong way due to partial (mis)understanding?
The "new truth" that you talk about is just a different understanding of the concept of atom, but the actual thing that we call atom and that exists in the real world (whether as matter or in some other form) has not changed.
One thing that gets me excited is that there's a tantalizing possibility that the 21st century might have an Einstein-level breakthrough that treats holography and some principle of informational consistency as more fundamental than QM, which is amazing, and would change everything.
But even in that hypothetical future paradigm, an "atom" would still be something true and meaningful against that backdrop, and our measurements or knowledge claims about it would still be meaningful. And our progress toward knowledge of the atom was still real progress.
It's legitimate to treat our knowledge as limited, subject to revision, or approximating. But treating that grain of truth like it implies no knowledge or progress is in hand is an abuse of the concept.
> it
What is "it", if not truth?
There's a misconception in this thread and commonly elsewhere.
Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts.
Truth depends on context. Facts are indisputable.
Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be true. But the fact might be that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently.
> There's a misconception in this thread and commonly elsewhere. Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts. Truth depends on context. Facts are indisputable. Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be true. But the fact might be that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently.
This to me reads as semantic games; let me rephrase your example:
"Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be factual. But the truth is that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently."
Your rephrase is incorrect.
"Red" and "green" depends on what your brain interprets. That doesn't change the underlying EM frequencies of the color you see.
Therefore, red and green are truth while EM frequencies are factual.
Therefore, it's a fact that my brain interprets red instead of green, or vise versa. It's a fact for someone else's brain that they interpret it as green instead of red.
> someone else's brain
Yes, like I said: it depends on context.
Red and green is interpretation, which depends on context. That's truth.
Sure, it's indisputable that one brain and a different brain can have different associations for names of colors. That's a fact. But the name of the color that each brain associates with corresponding input depends on context. That's truth.
Is Bertrand Russel a scientist or a philosopher according to you?
https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/classicreadings/chapter/bertr...
What about Albert Einstein?
https://todayinsci.com/E/Einstein_Albert/EinsteinAlbert-Trut...
Or Richard Feynman?
https://www.cantorsparadise.com/the-fundamental-principles-o...
Finding resources for perspectives on truth by Ada Lovelace, Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin is left as an exercise.
Philosophers aren't necessarily trying to do that.
You can't get to capital T truth via inductive reasoning like science uses. Just because the apple fell from the tree every single previous time, does not necessarily imply that it is going to fall down next time.
But if you are after other forms of reasoning its possible. 1+1 will always equal 2. Why? Because you (implicitly) specified the axioms before hand and they imply the result. Talking about capital T truth is possible in such a situation.
So its perfectly reasonable for philosophers to still be after capital T truth. They are doing different things and using different methods than scientists do.
The consequence of what it means is that we can't have any justified claims or knowledge at all. If you can't even count on the law of identity you've lost all intelligibility.
Alternatively, objective truth does exist and humans can comprehend it, and the issue of truth versus the development of how we come to understand it is a semantic one (I rather like the distinction between historie and geschichte in German).
To my mind, where we've gone wrong is that we began by assuming transcendentals, holding certain axiomatic, a priori metaphysical assumptions that make the scientific method possible, and then turned around and denied that transcendentals exist in the first place- undercutting the foundation rather than really questioning our tooling or our capacity to understand the data.
Just that we can’t claim all of our knowledge are equally close to the absolute truth we suppose to exist. The belief that the current attention exist is among the closest thing we can have to an absolute truth. That something like "I" exists is a step further away. That an external world exists is yet an other step further. That 1+1=2, it depends if we take the road of Principia Mathematica à la Whitehead&Russel or if we take more faith in intuition on sensory/memory inputs + reward/penalty from what teachers asked us to integrate at primary school.
>If you can't even count on the law of identity you've lost all intelligibility.
Change as sole stable permanent foundation is harder to play with, at least by the most spread education systems in western civilization (outside it I don’t have first hand experience), and the concept of identity can be derived from it as a transitional side effect. Not that identity must be dropped entirely, but then considered under different perspectives. Somehow like we can build our math under ZFC or category theory (or without anything so firmly and meticulously founded really), and at high level notions it doesn’t prevent us to reemploy familiar patterns.
Identity as a foundational block is not only an issue for humanity at epistemological level, but also at psychological and societal level. Used as inscrutable fundamental black box, it can actually prevent intelligibility and sound reasoning in all the contexts it’s broadly employed.
>To my mind, where we've gone wrong is that we began by assuming transcendentals, holding certain axiomatic, a priori metaphysical assumptions that make the scientific method possible, and then turned around and denied that transcendentals exist in the first place- undercutting the foundation rather than really questioning our tooling or our capacity to understand the data.
That’s probably smoothing "we" very broadly here. "We" also have a very firm tendency to easily build disagreement on every matters and the rest. Nonetheless I would be interested to know more about what leads to this perspective.
When philosophers talk about 'Truth', they aren't searching for a perfect static artifact. They're investigating the concept itself, which is very necessary.
The entire project of model-building would be meaningless if there were no external reality to approximate. What is it that this "series of better and better models" is converging toward?
Not like those hair-brained philosophers!
Sigh. One would have to possess an impressive level of ignorance in the history of philosophy and science in order to hold such a view. What would Raymond Smullyan, or Bertrand Russell, or Henri Poincaré, or who knows how many others, have to say about this remark, I wonder.
That’s not accurate. Science is orthogonal to belief in ultimate truth, and scientists have very diverse opinions on that point. Science is about finding more useful models to predict future observations, but whether and how that relates to truth is a question outside of the domain of science.
Social “sciences”, humanities, and psychology maybe different
Compare this text from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_configuration :
>> The most common labeling method uses the descriptors R or S and is based on the Cahn–Ingold–Prelog priority rules. R and S refer to rectus and sinister, Latin for right and left, respectively.[2]
This claim is actually repeated further down in the article. The fact that it is false was noted on the talk page seven years ago, but this seems to bother no one. After all, there's a citation.
I think we can reasonably expect more. Wikipedia reliably fails at very, very easy problems of "knowledge consensus".
From the talk page:
"This is inaccurate, as the linked Wikitionary page defines rectus as straight, not right"
From the Wiktionary page referenced: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rectus
- led straight along, drawn in a straight line, straight, upright.
- (in general) right, correct, proper, appropriate, befitting.
- (in particular) morally right, correct, lawful, just, virtuous, noble, good, proper, honest.
So, the wiktionary page literally defines it as right, and we see that it's not about direction but about being correct or incorrect. And then the follow up has literally no source to back it up.
So... "I think we can reasonably expect more."
The first claim is debunked. The second claim has nothing to back it up.
Is your proposal then to accept lies and claims without evidence?
Question: in the phrase "right and left", what does right mean?
However its current political enemies are not interested in a constructive debate with a shared goal of finding the truth. These are extremists that can think of nothing else but the destruction of their ideological opponents. They will destroy everything including the concept of truth as long as they see an opportunity for a temporary victory or more publicity.
One of the greatest risks is to have a precieved threat make everyone think they have to close ranks and stifle all debate. That is how projects (or even societies) die.
Much has been written on this topic, you should avail yourself.
https://conversational-leadership.net/tolerance-is-a-social-...
In my experience, the majority of accusations of various groups or individuals wanting to do these things, are simply not supported by the available evidence. Meanwhile, accusations of the desire to discriminate, impose religion etc. are often cited as justifications for censorship.
I try to be open to the possibility that I'm wrong about things like this, but even as someone who tends to be very hesitant to make judgments about other people's motives, it's hard for me to imagine how much more convincing the evidence would need to be in order to conclude that one of the major political parties in the United States has long abandoned any semblance of good faith. Having a civil discourse requires both sides to sit at the table, and that can't happen when one side is busy flipping the table instead.
Plenty of people disagree with you (and each other) about which groups of people have these characteristics.
> the obvious follow-up question is how exactly you can effectively debate someone who quite literally is opposed to the idea of rational debate
I'm unclear on how "ignoring inconvenient facts" is supposed to imply "opposition to the idea of rational debate". But my experience has been that both are common among the most active and respected Wikipedia editors and curators. Just try to get one to give any concrete standard for what it would take to start or stop considering a source valid for WP:RS purposes, and then try to hold them to that. The combination of RS inertia with WP:NOR is the primary thing enabling citogenesis (https://xkcd.com/978/).
> it's hard for me to imagine how much more convincing the evidence would need to be in order to conclude that one of the major political parties in the United States has long abandoned any semblance of good faith.
If you think this is only true of one of those parties, you're part of the problem.
The science that could emerge by studying the phenomenon could constitute a milestone.
Cf: The difference between theory and practice is: "Practice works, in theory."
I never got around to writing it all out though. Bits of it can be found in old policy discussions on bold-reverse-discuss, consensus, and etc.
I guess the first thing to realize is that wikipedia is split into a lot of pages, and n_editors for most pages in the long tail is very very low, so most definitely below n_dunbar[]; and really can be edited almost the same way wikipeida used to be back in 2002. At the same time a small number of pages above n_dunbar get the most attention and are the most messy to deal with.
Aaron Swartz actually did a bunch of research into some of the base statistics too, and he DID publish stuff online... let me look that up...
http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/whowriteswikipedia/
and especially * http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number (note I'm using lossely in empirical sense, where an online page might have a much lower actual limit than 150)
Which is good in ways. Though random phase is song of the past.
The same applies on a larger scale with moderation. There are plenty of poorly-sourced database-like stub entries for STEM subjects, but try to make a page on a "softer" subject and there's a pretty good chance someone will try to nuke it with WP:PROOF, WP:NOTE, and/or WP:OBSCURE if it isn't perfectly fleshed out in the very first draft.
Random people don’t have time for that.
Ergo “it is not a project for random editors anymore”.
I want do an edit or addition and be fairly evaluated without having to call higher instances or fight through bureaucracy.
I seldomly add much beyond such things though.
Contrast that with the rest of the internet, which mostly rewards radicalization and nudges people towards it.
If the number of editors were limited, it could easily develop bias (see your own Facebook page for examples).
If the subject matters were limited, it could develop bias (WikiSolarEnergy wouldn't tend to attract anti-solar-energy types).
https://web.archive.org/web/20080604020024/http://www.hereco...
> So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.
> And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus
I'll add I don't think it can be any closer to "perfect" than it is because the same fundamental traits which lead to its imperfections also enable its unique value - like speed, breadth, depth and broad perspectives. The only areas where it might very occasionally not be ideal tend to be contentious political and culture war topics or newer niche articles with low traffic. Basically topics where some people care too much and those where not enough people care at all.
But this isn't as big a downside as it might be because anyone can look at an article's talk page and edit history and immediately see if it's a contentiously divisive topic or, on the other end of the spectrum, see when there's been little to no discussion.
Of all the demographics who should understand this, you'd think that people complaining about the failure of all the other institutions would be high on the list.
https://paste.sr.ht/~awal/2310cfca431e9f723df281d02558eaebd7...
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/64d6548c19f38a...
Yes, it has its flaws, but I plan to keep on editing and donating.
Wikipedia could function forever without another donation if they wanted to.
[1] https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-fou...
[2] https://www.dailydot.com/news/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraisi...
[3] https://archive.ph/CClQ6 (this is a Washington Post article. I'm using the Archived link as it's paywall-free)
Anything vaguely sociopolitical is functionally censored on it and wikipedia does nothing about it even if they don't support it.
Individuals and groups, be they ad-hoc formations, corporate backed, or nation-state backed routinely astroturf all corners of the internet and Wikipedia is a very big, very common target.
No I will not waste my time researching proof for someone that is being intentionally obtuse. If you have interest you can easily find it by doing some research.
I know of at least of one case in which a person publicly admits he is using Wikipedia to promote their political stances and who is right now at the center of an arbitration case in which he intends to silence opposition.
This is not that.
You are looking at a case of a person LITERALLY admitting they are using it for propaganda and your reaction is "I'm sure it's actually not, it's actually neutral and it's just that it differs from your view". I'm sorry but I can only explain it to you, I can't understand it for you.
That said, I find Wikipedia's biases predictable, avoidable (topic specific) & also very interesting as a sociological study in itself.
Firstly, it reminds us of inherent bias in (mostly colonial-written) paper encyclopedia of the past. There has never been an unbiased encyclopedia written & seeing the biases fully sourced & rapidly evolving in realtime serves as an excellent crystallisation of slower processes in previous works: highlighting that many of the historical "facts" we all grew up with were ultimately fed to us by similarly biased groups.
I've also come to the slow realisation that this may be a fundamentally unsolvable problem & that simply categorising it as "biased beyond repair" & continuing to handle it in that manner may be the best thing we can do.
Is it a case of rot then? Or maybe I'm just biased, but I get the feel it wasn't always like this. It was never ideal, sure, but it used to be that I was wary of the site when checking, say, contemporary politics. Now it's a good chunk of recorded history instead.
I get this feeling but in the opposite direction. The more I see it the more I come to realise I was blinder to it in the past.
Many people comment on the internet ushering in an age of misinformation, but I actually see it as ushering in an age of misinformation awareness. Factchecks in legacy media were rare to nonexistent & generally not accessible to most media consumers. Information was more siloed leading to much greater acceptance of what was fed as fact without a lot of interrogation. Now, we're bombarded by such a slew of contradictions we "feel" less able to discern fact from fiction, which is disconcerting, but it's really just a broad awakening to something that's always been the case.
Can you make such an example?
Wikipedia doesn’t treat all sources as being equal, so even in cases where there’s no reasonable doubt towards a claim’s veracity, if the correct source hasn’t already claimed it, editors are liable to revert your edit.
Obviously this is a phenomenon that occurs much more often in ongoing or politically sensitive stories. That said, it’s important for people to understand the flaws in Wikipedias method of epistemology.
This is a good policy. It’s much easier for a couple small outlets to be wrong than for the small outlets and some major ones to be wrong, and the stakes are high - naming the wrong suspect could ruin an innocent person’s life. Wikipedia is for knowledge, not rumors. If you want rumors, there are lots of other sites out there.
This is the right approach. If more information sources held this standard, sloppy reporting and outright lies would be very costly. Would you tell everyone very important news based on a the word of a friend who is known to stretch or invent the truth? Be a reliable source and you can participate.
Apologies for the preamble, but I wanted to provide some context. In the 2000s, I began updating the Men's Rights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_rights_movement) Wikipedia page. Mostly statistics around things like suicide, homelessness, likelihood of being assaulted and murdered, disparities in the educational systems and courts, the high rates of workplace death and injury, etc. Always cited with peer reviewed or governmental data, and sometimes with "accepted" news articles. My goal was to inform people about the facts. Some time in the late 2000s and early 2010s, questionable edits began happening. For example, suicide statistics were removed periodically. The reasons were generally specious. Sometimes arguing about semantics. Sometimes the source. Sometimes procedural. One editor argued that the statistics should be contained as a subsection of the Feminism page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism), for example. They also tried to remove the page entirely. I began to notice that the people making the edits were frequent editors of related pages like Feminism.
It is at this point that I should point out that feminists and men's rights advocates don't always see eye to eye.
The questionable edits became malicious edits. Administrators began selectively enforcing rules. For example, applying a higher standard for sources on the Men's Rights page than they do on the Feminism page. They applied a banner at the very top of the page directing people to a feminist friendly page called the "men's liberation movement." They removed countless statistics and examples of inequalities in law and education. They changed the language in all sections to suggest or imply that the people involved in the movement are incorrect or mistaken. For example, the entire second paragraph (of only two) in the introduction is a refutation of the movement. Compare with the Feminism page. Criticisms are now located at the very bottom of the page in a sub-sub-section which doesn't even have its own anchor. It's a few small paragraphs now on a page with tens of thousands of words. In the "Suicide" section now they include, "studies have also found an over-representation of women in attempted or incomplete suicides and men in complete suicides." Just to make sure that no one could make the mistake of caring about men, *unless it's framed in relation to how women might be affected.*
I could go on but the stark differences between these pages should be extremely clear. They have not been edited for clarity or truth, but for ideological reasons. This is just one of millions of pages on which ideological wars are being waged. Unfortunately, the war is lost. WikiProjects, Arbitration Committees, and Administrators are all some version of far to extremely far left wing Americans. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger now calls the site "propaganda." (https://www.foxnews.com/media/wikipedia-co-founder-larry-san...) It's clear that many like this bias, but for those of us who used to be involved, we can confidently tell you that you should never, ever take what Wikipedia has to say at face value. It is much closer to propaganda than it is factual.
Although, handling it purely pragmatically, there is no other concise source of information as vast as Wikipedia's concerning so many facets of life as well as sciences that is far enough from feelings' reach that is pretty well-written as the only possible bias present is also factually incorrect (as opposed to ideological topics).
I understand that supporting and reading articles from a source which you know is blatantly lying or otherwise obstructive or manipulative on other topics is a difficult undertaking but we literally have no other option . There is no war but the war against illiteracy to be won. Education, information and intelligence is man's best friend and until a better alternative arises for the masses (e.g scientific articles do not count as an alternative, Britannica is only in English) the one we have should we stuck with, and its quite well managed too.
Bias in itself is eternal, and holding any entity to a standart so high is illogical at best in my view. If there was no Wiki, would you think the many blog pages filling its space would be absent of the very bias you're talking about, but worse, would they have had any factual backing?
Rather, there’s a real political legitimacy behind their frustration as the election has demonstrated. The GP's experience ought to be documented carefully and posted in a blog for others to learn from.
Its simply impossible to edit a public figures page at this point if you want an easy fail case to try.
Why should a complete random be allowed to edit a public figure's page without some overview? What could they possibly edit that is relevant to this figure's page?
If a public figure dies, their page will be updated in less than one hour of the announcement, so the edit is not the issue.
It seems healthy to have people gatekeeping those pages, since they are not a public forum, but a common source of knowledge.
Also I find a lot of people’s disagreements usually come down to “ok, I see that the information that I thought was censored is actually available but not in the format that I prefer”
And if you’re looking for objective information about the Israel Palestine conflict you’re hardly going to get it anywhere.
I held out for as long as I could but it was emotionally draining
> factually contrary to international law
What UN recognized definition of the place is "india administered kashmir" and "pakistan administered kashmir" that is split between the two till the time the issue is resolved before the UN. This is a internationally accepted definition that encompasses the situation being active.
what indian based troll factory does is, unilaterally call it "indian UT of jammu and kashmir" and "pakistan occupied kashmir".
I resisted for as much i could, i would revert the edits and they would be back, i would give evidence of the same in order to maintain status quo but sadly i could not keep up. i was overrun and it felt like being eaten by a mob of hungry zombies.
Articles about some chemical process are fine, indeed often excellent.
Everything where facts get filtered and presented, is bad. Read about real world events - especially where different groups or countries were involved - in three different languages on Wikipedia, and you'd think three different universes exist.
> Read about real world events - especially where different groups or countries were involved - in three different languages on Wikipedia, and you'd think three different universes exist.
The Talk pages are just a first introduction to the sheer madness behind the scenes; one quickly starts to realize that relative few people are calling the shots in a lot of places and that their personal biases are causing serious problems. The "Reliable Sources" policy would be atrocious enough already (there are no objective processes for challenging a source's inclusion or exclusion from the informal list on a given topic, only political ones) without the "power user" editors who are clearly abusing it.
I also have long been frustrated with certain areas of Wikipedia that I feel struggle so significantly with NPV that they're rendered beyond useless, likely net harmful. (These are not the topics I've attempted contributing to recently, I wouldn't dare).
I'm continuously annoyed by the contrast of their overbearing donation pushes with the overspends in their published reports.
BUT all that said I do sometimes need reminding in today's world how much of a miracle Wikipedia still is. Not something to be taken for granted. And on the overspends: this is hard to qualify given there's really no comparable projects in existence. Maybe this is just the price we need to pay.
1. I suspect the NPV problem may be a fundamentally unsolvable problem (or at least one that would literally take a global paradigm shift in how all societies are structured to do so). This seems outside of Wikipedia's control. Attempting any draconian measures to tackle it might have negative knock-on effects on many of the other assets that give Wikipedia it's value.
2. The spending problem, as I said, is subjective & might simply be a case of efficiency being incompatible with an organisational culture that produces such a miraculous thing. I honestly suspect the opposite is true: I personally think the overspends are indicative of organisational disfunction that could seriously hurt the project in the longer term, but that's pure gut feeling on my part, based on nothing of substance. Who knows.
3. The increasing difficulty in contributing (80% of edits coming from 1% of editors) on the other hand is - imo - a potentially terminal problem & one that needs to be addressed urgently if we want to keep this resource alive.
In the past, Wikipedia vandalism was a rite-of-passage of school & college kids. This obviously needs counter-measures but it really feels like today's Wikipedia has gone so far in the opposite direction as to entirely dissuade new contributors. Old Wikipedia used to be filled with User: namespaced subpages with long form essays on the ever running debate between deletionism & inclusionism. In today's Wikipedia, the inclusionists have emigrated, tired of battle, & the remaining deletionists bravely prevent any budding new contributor from having a positive welcoming community experience by quickly auto-deleting their WIP stubs or moving them into esoteric red-taped namespaced processes nobody knows how to navigate. It's a deeply unwelcoming environment for new users, especially young people. I'd love to see an age profile of the population of frequent editors.
Even more concerning is that the deletion "consensus" is often formed by just half a dozen people who almost always cast a deletion vote.
I pop into AFD discussions occasionally and try to put my thumb on the scale but always end up disappointed with the results.
Someone should make a "Deleted From Wikipedia" website composed of nothing but Wikipedia articles that were deleted due to supposedly insufficient coverage/notability.
I actually think that's probably a good thing for OSM. If OSM was the only game in town, there would be a lot more contention, fighting over how businesses are represented etc etc.
Meta getting free books to train an LLM, piracy bad
Individuals getting a pass, good.
See, it just depends on how you slice the Venn diagram. With a bit of imagination you'll be able to start connecting the dots by yourself in no time.
Is it actually bad that Meta trained their AI on books? No, court already decided that it's substantially transformative and doesn't harm the publishers. Should Meta employees have stolen the books? No, obviously not. The middle men need their cut.
So I guess we need a go-to "good things on the internet" list :)
I submit libgen / annas-archive
The latest example of this behavior for me is recipe websites that do SEO to get the top spot on Google and then serve you a 30-page long webpage full of ads with the recipe at the bottom.
I think a huge part of the world’s current problems come from “news” sites that are funded by ads.
For example, Wikipedia has a Chinese issue. [1]
Because both Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese both live under the Chinese language in Wiki (And we have a dropdown within Chinese wiki to choose what regional variants we want to read). There's a constant wiki edit war. This is not only happened to the political topic, but also how something should be phased. Even though Chinese officially ban access to Wikipedia by the Great Firewall, enough people VPN and manage to edit wiki pages by pages, and more annoyingly, there are more wiki admin coming from PRC than Taiwan/Hong Kong/Macau etc.
So you cannot assume Wikipedia is neutral.
I don't know that the attackers against Wikipedia are advocating for a modest point like that, which I would think even proponets accept as a truism. I think Wikipedia is just another variation on institutional knowledge, and, as the world descends into misinformation and authoritarianism, it was inevitable it too would be attacked for perceived "bias."
Everything from global warming to vaccines, to newer and newer frontiers we never would have guessed, like hurricane trajectories or drones or air traffic, have fallen one after another to a kind of reactionary skepticism, resentful of the fact that these domains are controlled by real facts, and not merely participatory collective storytelling. There are some things left, that we problaby think could never get politicized, that will be. Pickleball rules? Quantum mechanics? Baseball history? Soon longstanding uncontroversial claims belonging to those are going to fall into the category of essentially contested concepts.
So Wikipedia, with ordinary and lonstanding requirements for reliable sourcing, and decades of policy on what that means in reaction to countlessly many debates, is resilient against the kind of recreational, hedonic skepticism that the masses use to dismantle other knowledge claims.
So "well wikipedia's not perfect" kind of rubs me the wrong way because it seems like it implies we should be more welcoming of this attitude of hedonic skepticism, which has been so destructive. I think it should be celebrated. Authoritative factual validity, and the norms that make it possible, used to be uncontroversial. And thus far, social media misinformation has outcompeted fact checkers, but not (yet) Wikipedia. I feel like that's never been more important.
And i agree its great, i spend an inordinate amount of my time on Wikimedia related things.
But i think there is a danger here with all these articles putting Wikipedia too much on a pedestal. It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws.
The true best part of Wikipedia is that its a work in progress and people are working to make it a little better everyday. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact we aren't there yet. We'll never be "there". But hopefully we'll continue to be a little bit closer every day. And that is what makes Wikipedia great.