Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 301 posts

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#91

Post by notafraudster »

calumetregion wrote: post #49
29vito wrote: post #21

Could you please point to an example where you feel the article isn't neutral?

Many people asking for examples. For an easy one (among millions) just compare The New York Times Wikipedia article to the article for The Epoch Times. "Oh, but The Epoch Times is right wing, so..." How can I compare the Ochs-Sulzberger family to the Falun Gong? Well I just did. They're both made up of humans with opinions.

I just read through both articles but I don't understand the point you're making. Is it that the NYT article is more fleshed out and talks about their various print products? You can add such a section to the Epoch Times.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#92

Post by thatguy0900 »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #66
adhesive_wombat wrote: post #30

Get the Wikimedia Foundation to spend money on the technical foundation of the sites, rather than spraying millions up the wall of "racial justice". That's not me making a strawman by going straight to "omg, the SJWs", it's a exact phrase from the 3rd paragraph of the 4.5 million Knowledge Equity Fund page [1]. That, and executive pay, is where donations go, not to keeping the lights on. The running cost to keeping t…

This could almost be taken word for word from an article about Mozilla. People who think 'social justice' is a bad thing seem to set really high standards for the open, independant organisations they say they support, and they're not afraid to give them some extreme tough love and undermine them at every step if they don't follow their priorities.

I don't think this is a social justice thing. I personally would be just as annoyed about any other cause. Wikipedia donations shouldn't be championing any cause that isn't open access to information, no matter what side of the political spectrum it's on. Especially if it's to the point that Wikipedia itself is being left to rot in favor of unrelated causes.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#93

Post by zozbot234 »

threatofrain wrote: post #60
adhesive_wombat wrote: post #30

Get the Wikimedia Foundation to spend money on the technical foundation of the sites, rather than spraying millions up the wall of "racial justice". That's not me making a strawman by going straight to "omg, the SJWs", it's a exact phrase from the 3rd paragraph of the 4.5 million Knowledge Equity Fund page [1]. That, and executive pay, is where donations go, not to keeping the lights on. The running cost to keeping t…

> It certainly isn't the case that engineering is "done" either, as the open bug count is growing constantly and huge swathes of the software aren't maintained and don't even have maintainers[2]. Wikipedia is moving to Vue.

They're not "moving" to Vue. They plan to build some optional JS-based components on Vue, since the alternative of purely handcrafted code is unappealing. And even then, that code can probably be refactored to use the vastly superior Svelte once the dev team's weird hostility to workflows based on ahead-of-time code generation is addressed.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#94

Post by actuator »

civilized wrote: post #84
actuator wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some articles may seem to have a slant in emphasis The editorial slant which sets the tone of the article also colours the thoughts of the reader, it is not just dissemination or omission of facts. Moreover, editors do tend to give more weightage to some sources than the other if they are reporting on the same issue.

> The editorial slant which sets the tone of the article also colours the thoughts of the reader, it is not just dissemination or omission of facts. Yes, but as I said, Wikipedia is much less bad in this respect than any other source. If I have the sources, at least I can do my own digging. With most other sources I have to assume there is information contrary to the slant that is being swept under the rug, and I won…

> Some sources are more credible than others.

I am not saying we should trust DailyMail more than BBC. My issue is with sources where the lines are more blurry.

Say, they will not publish outright misinformation but they will definitely have a editorial stance which colours their coverage.

> If editors didn't exercise judgment in selection of sources, Wikipedia would just be a disinformation playground dominated by the most energetic propagandists

Agreed. But how do we rank which sources are better than the other. Sure, remove ones which publish outright misinformation but after that how do you rank them.

The source will be discussed in WP:NEWSORG boards, the people weighing in on the discussion will be established editors of the site. They will more likely tend to rate sources which fit their echo chambers better higher than others. The same sources will get more weightage in Wikipedia articles. When argued against, Wikipedia editors will cite it is trusted more. It is a self fulfilling loop.

This is why my original question was, is any user curated platform doomed to reach this state.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#95

Post by scatters »

sdoering wrote: post #38

I think overall the wikipedia model has shown itself to be decently working. But (anecdata) I have my gripes with the way it handles evidence. My SO has a person (died already) in her family with a (relatively) short wikipedia entry. There are factual errors in the article. We know that, because we have original documents showing that the "facts" reportet in the entry are wrong. Due to the fact that the documents can…

Now more than ever, Wikipedia must be publicly verifiable. That means that any claim can be checked by anyone with an Internet connection and a library card. Imagine if contested articles contained controversial facts on the basis of secret evidence? The editor made the right call.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#96

Post by actuator »

zozbot234 wrote: post #83
actuator wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But ideally Wikipedia itself would build some internal mechanism It has WP:ANI, but it is hard to go against established editors, if they are not writing outright lies or doing harassment. Say, if I want to edit a line from a summary of the Wikipedia page on a person which unfairly represents a person and the established editor thinks it makes sense, then I can't do anything. They are not writing misinformation as…

> Say, if I want to edit a line from a summary of the Wikipedia page on a person which unfairly represents a person and the established editor thinks it makes sense, then I can't do anything. Of course you can. You can argue for your prferred wording on the talk page for the individual article, and a compromise can be reached. This is how this stuff works. Talk pages are critical to dealing with even the slightest am…

> You can argue for your prferred wording on the talk page for the individual article, and a compromise can be reached. This is how this stuff works. Talk pages are critical to dealing with even the slightest amount of controversy, "reverts" are supposed to be emergency actions only.

I did try to argue for that but I was shut down as there was no way to agree what a fair representation is.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#98

Post by [deleted] »

laurent92 wrote: post #65
adhesive_wombat wrote: post #30

Get the Wikimedia Foundation to spend money on the technical foundation of the sites, rather than spraying millions up the wall of "racial justice". That's not me making a strawman by going straight to "omg, the SJWs", it's a exact phrase from the 3rd paragraph of the 4.5 million Knowledge Equity Fund page [1]. That, and executive pay, is where donations go, not to keeping the lights on. The running cost to keeping t…

I was ashamed when I learnt Wikipedia artificially funds the writing of pages of women, so they try to reach equal numbers to men. I wouldn’t be ashamed if the criteria for admissibility were equal, but barely being a researcher with published papers is enough, while men with entire books on the subject get rejected. Talk about rewriting history…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#100

Post by rozab »

legitster wrote: post #25
legitster wrote: post #10

I'm not sure if I share the same assessment. I am amazed at how robust your typical Wikipedia page is despite the chaos that goes into writing it. Given that it's not possible to make a version of reality that everyone is happy with, I think Wikipedia comes pretty dang close.

As an example, I want to point people to the page I have been spending a lot of time on as of late: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukrai... Is the information on this page perfect? Obviously not. But this single page probably represents the best up-to-date summary of information you will find on the internet. And I can only imagine the thankless work volunteer editors put into making it cohere…

Articles on conflicts are usually shockingly well written. I spend a lot of time reading them, at least in part for entertainment. The one on the Congo Crisis is fantastic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Crisis

I guess I'm not the only one doing this, because there's this meme trend of making video edits of these articles. Pretty much captures how it feels to read them if you're into it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48hGOxw2heg

Post reply on HN