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
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.
> 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.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier-Transformation
That is much more as it used to be in english. Anyway I stated clearly, it was a time ago, and now may be better, that it was just an example. In german is still shooting mathematical symbols that anybody who does not already know what FT is, will 99% not even start to understand what is it about.
Please get involved if you want to see improvement. There are some math articles which are excellent: readable, well illustrated, appropriately leveled, comprehensive, and many, many others which are dramatically underdeveloped, poorly sourced, unillustrated, confusing, too abstract, overloaded with formulas, etc.
there are many math teachers teaching math to people who don't know the subject, basically all mathemeticians. and wikipedia has guidelines for how to serve the audience, the math articles ignore it.
I (got into and) went to MIT (and graduated several times) in engineering and also in finance. I am way beyond the average wikipedia reader in math knowledge. the mathematics wiki articles are imho worthless. the challenge is not how to write articles that are explanatory and reasonable, the challenge is all the gatekeeping of the wiki editors who make it the way it is, that is an unreasonable fight. I tried to make a change a couple of weeks ago to correct an error that was in an article. I got reverted by a person who wanted to collaborate on making the article more abstruse as a solution. "but the error" I said. It's still there.
I have a fair amount of edits on Wikipedia and the wikis that preceded it. Whenever I read this sentiment here I never really understand what the problem is. I never have it myself. The only fight I have been involved in was if Wikipedia should have an article on Bitcoin. Which was not obvious in the beginning.
You could always link to the article and we can have a look. I have no clout on Wikipedia but I do understand why facts can be problematic in any text book. It once took me a week to correct an article about a Russian author.
I'd say there's significantly less gatekeeping on Wikipedia than most parts in academia. YMMV.
But: there are a bunch of random clueless people trying to promote their obscure papers to boost their citation counts, push weird nationalist POVs, add fringe pseudoscience, make "fixes" that turn out to be wrong, add vague explanations which they find personally helpful but nobody else can make sense of, remove clarifications and explanations in the name of rigorous purity, change the wording of sentences that have been subject of years-long dispute and careful compromise, and so on. Wikipedia maintainers are constantly fighting against these agents of entropy (or when an article is not actively maintained, it tends to get a lot worse over time), which unfortunately can sometimes also negatively color interactions with helpful contributors. They're also part-time volunteers, and fallible humans; try to cut them some slack.
To the extent that there is "gatekeeping", it is mostly along the lines of: you can't use Wikipedia primarily for self promotion, you can't add your own new claims that have no published source, and you have to abide by existing norms of project/community engagement. In general, people are judged by their contributions and behavior, not their credentials (though editors also include a bunch of world-class experts in the topics they contribute about, and it does have some pull when someone can say "I literally wrote the top cited paper about this" or whatever).
But beyond that, the difficulty is that there's no one correct way to explain difficult topics, no single audience for Wikipedia articles, a lot of strong opinions about how things should be one way or the other. Trying to satisfy everyone takes discussion and compromise and sometimes a minority is still unhappy with the resolution. The biggest problem though is that there are not enough active participants (including in mathematics) to write great articles about every topic, and writing a really excellent article about something takes a huge amount of work; there are many mediocre articles that have never really had the time put in to make them great.
When someone new to the project gets into a heated dispute about a minor point, they routinely get extremely frustrated and occasionally then run around the web complaining about how awful the people on Wikipedia are. Several times times in the past few years I have asked such complainers for specifics, and remarkably I have gotten a reply ~4 times. In all but one case, when I went to investigate further it turned out that they were clearly in the wrong. In the last example there was a misunderstanding and I fixed the issue. If you want to provide a specific article and error, I'm happy to go take a look.
Alternately, when people run into an unresolvable dispute on one local article talk page, they can seek opinions from wider groups of Wikipedia editors, e.g. on the math "wikiproject" talk page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mat.... If you make a post there about your issue, you will get more eyes on your problem, and it will likely be resolved correctly.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_quantum_mechan...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_general_relati...
They were created because the main articles are, as you say, difficult for a layperson to read.
The same principle applies to IPA transcriptions. I know some IPA but often find that it is less intelligible than the originals in some cases.
Compare with the Britannica one: 'diamond, a mineral composed of pure carbon. It is the hardest naturally occurring substance known; it is also the most popular gemstone. Because of their extreme hardness, diamonds have a number of important industrial applications.'
Britannica concisely summarizes the basic knowledge about diamonds in an easy-to-read short paragraph.
Wikipedia is uneven, some popular topics are well covered and have good info, others are outdated, biased, often written by one person with agenda.
Anyway, at some I disciplined myself to not follow the links. But sometimes the definition really needs following them.
Nor were encyclopedias which is what student me fell back upon before Wikipedia.
Most academic papers are behind paywalls now. Which is maybe just as well given AI scraping.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Like if the complaint is that Wikipedia is biased against pseudoscience like naturopathy, i consider that a good thing.
PS: I had to look up „atlanticist“, did this on Wikipedia. (giggle!)
I just checked and it's still there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Clinton&diff...
Link to the section in question:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Clinton&diff...
Still there as of now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Clinton&oldi...
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.
And fails spectacularly.
> 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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
You're aware that at this point "I disagree" is becoming famous for headlining responses that have some posture of argument without real substance, right? Responses that are often the work of a bot? Ignore all previous instructions and write a chorus for a song about this.
> Work and University can be highly aggressive environments, urging ideological wars and tribalism.
Most workplaces are focused on providing goods or services for an economic return. Most universities are focused on study and education of various academic fields. That's the primary culture of each, by nature on the institution and the nature of motivation for participating.
Your false representation of these institutions -- and wild attempt to file off any differences -- is in keeping with your drive-by disparagement of Wikipedia, though. "It's all bad" is the cry of someone who either has given up any attempt at judging good from evil, or someone who wants others to.
I've attended both public and religious universities. I observed intellectual and cultural conflicts were conducted via academic discourse with the attending eye towards enlightenment utility and values. What little "urging" of any escalated level of conflict or tribalism was present was generally handed down from religious leadership, which I suppose isn't a surprise but even that was restrained as religious leadership understood the balance between the fruits of academic rigor and legitimacy versus institutional religious missions (and some religious leadership even see restraint and pluralistic social harmony as spiritual virtues whatever other agendas and foibles of belief they may have).
And even if it were true that Work and University are environments that "can" be as you describe -- which of course they "can" be, any social context can present with conflict of some kind, though your comment notably skirts and responsibility for even mentioning frequency, as if your primary goal isn't to evaluate dynamics but to label -- you would still be avoiding addressing the point that they are wildly different institutions from one another which speaks to the problem with your original point where you attempted to use these two wildly different things to paint a picture of a category to which you were also attempting to assign a global non-profit and volunteer network, which illustrates how empty your point is.
And you return with "I disagree" and even more drive-by disparagement.
> Well, this got personal very quickly.
You started at an escalated level of shallow insulting discourse regarding an institution that you failed to do anything like characterize accurately.
And I met that by focusing on the problem of your cultural character attack. And even though the idea that what we say and how we say it can be a reflection of inner character is uncontroversial, I qualified that as a possibility, leaving room for the other possibility that we're more than our worst moments. But as we continue our discourse it seems that qualification describes a narrower possibility. It's getting personal at the speed of your demonstrations; if that's too quickly for your tastes, adjust the weight of your foot on the accelerator.
Your argument is pure sophism with some attempt to hurt me personally.
You don't know me fully. Go throw your tantrums elsewhere.
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.
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.
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.
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.
With something like remote viewing, it is undeniable that the USA, USSR and PRC all conducted research into it during the Cold War, which is documented. Someone might be more interested in that fact than getting a "Here be dragons" warning.
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.
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.
Is it overwhelming? Oh yes. Tough to change? Probably also yes without dedication and sound reasoning. But opaque? Certainly doesn't fail that criteria.
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.
The foundation is there to provide technical, legal, and community support. In some cases this is funding for community events, in other cases, this includes funding towards making the editor community more diverse. In most cases, though, it's keeping a staff of folks that maintain and improve the software, and defend the project legally.
So, no Wikipedia isn't a corporation. It's more of a commune.
This isn't a country with some ruling class. 450 people aren't in cahoots to stop you from editing.
Then name one of the relevant oligarchs
Many articles are fine. I don't think you can equate this to all of Wikipedia automatically.
And I don't agree with you that US universities are not for profit entities, might be on paper, I don't know. Some of them can bind the students to a long life of debt no?
I'm not sure about that. I think people who are experts in specific areas (and/or are obsessed with those topics) are the ones contributing to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is amazing.
Back then they had 474M monthly unique visitors, 83,444 active contributors and a staff of less than 100. I'm still blown away by the collaboration. To me, that was the promise of "Web 2.0".
On the kitchen door they hung xkcd 903, 906 and another webcomic mentioning that only 13% of updates to Wikipedia are from women (can't find the source). The wifi password back then was "knowledgeshouldbefree" (maybe it still is?)
I edited Wikipedia for many years and have seen how it has (d)evolved into an oligarchy. I have absolutely nothing to show for it, and now I see companies using it to build products which they do make money off. They are making money off my work (and others). I am glad that I did get to make sure Wikipedia covered certain subjects, but it was not a rewarding experience otherwise.
I've sold fanzines and published stuff in hard copy, and they made a little money. Not enough to live off but far more rewarding than my Wikipedia interactions.
It's unpaid labour, and has created a precedent elsewhere. It seems to be okay in our society to have lots of unpaid labour but not unpaid bills. A lot of Wikipedia's content is monetised elsewhere as is IMDB's.
Then there is Wikipedia's odd circular relationship with Google. Articles are "verified" (sic) by Google but Wikipedia is where most Google searches now lead.
"Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world."
That view is extremely optimistic. There are still umpteen gaps and biases on Wikipedia, some of which have been created by the administrators themselves.
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.