Makes me appreciate that tech-utopianism takes a lot of work. Technology alone seems to have no values.
Which brings to mind Kranzberg's first law of technology: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”
The curious case of Croatian wikipedia
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Re: The curious case of Croatian wikipedia
#12Tbh that just sounds like the regular Wikipedia editing drama. "Everyone can edit Wikipedia!" except almost every page has an editor or group of editors who feels it belongs to them and they will push their own agenda. This is not a unique situation at all. It's a deep rooted problem with Wikipedia almost from the very beginning.
Yes. So much narcissism, Dunning-Kruger and so little authoritative expertise/oral history. I had a guitarist Wikipedia editor tell me that a niche science industry page update adding historical details of people and places "wasn't relevant" when it was an account of an important era for that industry. Smh. History lost forever.
I sympathize with your situation. People are fallible arbiters of truth and relevancy. But why was the fact that this editor was a guitarist have relevance? Was that his/her stated profession (and so by implication you're saying they overestimate their ability as an editor in this particular field of science industry ala Dunning-Kruger effect)?
Re: The curious case of Croatian wikipedia
#13For those outside Croatia, the drama perfectly reflects the politics of the country. You have the left and right still bickering over WWII events and shaping the "conversation", while the moderate majority is apathetic about the whole thing ("don't use hr wikipedia" in this case, "emigrate" in real life).
Politics is getting extremely polarized in a lot of the western world. In Croatia, we never had non-polarized politics.
Re: The curious case of Croatian wikipedia
#14Makes me appreciate that tech-utopianism takes a lot of work. Technology alone seems to have no values.
To me, it often seems like technology does have a moral imperative it follows: It chooses transparency in all kinds of situations. That's not to say that technology consciously chooses to impart transparency. In reality it's just too damn expensive to erease traces in data. Which leads to transparency by default.
I'm not sure if I'm convinced that technology leads to transparency by default. I don't think it would be too expensive to drop a particular record or table from a database if the incentive was there. Of course, when you consider distributed systems in which data for an entity or transaction is spread across many different systems and infrastructures, it would be too expensive to track down and eliminate all traces of the data.
But could you elaborate on what you mean by 'transparency by default'?
Re: The curious case of Croatian wikipedia
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. So much narcissism, Dunning-Kruger and so little authoritative expertise/oral history. I had a guitarist Wikipedia editor tell me that a niche science industry page update adding historical details of people and places "wasn't relevant" when it was an account of an important era for that industry. Smh. History lost forever.
I sympathize with your situation. People are fallible arbiters of truth and relevancy. But why was the fact that this editor was a guitarist have relevance? Was that his/her stated profession (and so by implication you're saying they overestimate their ability as an editor in this particular field of science industry ala Dunning-Kruger effect)?
I think they’re saying the editor had expertise in, and had only edited, guitar related Wikipedia pages previously.
Re: The curious case of Croatian wikipedia
#16Interesting, I mentioned this a few days ago in an HN comment. I'm a big fan of Wikipedia and donate regularly, but it's nearly unusable in my mother tongue.
Re: The curious case of Croatian wikipedia
#17There are always skirmishes between ideologies on Wikipedia.
Re: The curious case of Croatian wikipedia
#18For some background on the history in English Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_Serbs_in_the_Ind...
Re: The curious case of Croatian wikipedia
#19It’s difficult to tell how pervasive this problem is in the Croatian edition as opposed to others (even this narrative may be “partisan”, but I don’t know how the cited sources lean or who owns those media outlets). In any case, there are some rather blatant examples in the English language version that demonstrate the phenomenon, or at least half-assed solutions to neo-Nazi distortions via special pleading (the article on Copernicus is a nice piece of revisionism; in every historical reference I have ever come across, Copernicus is referred to as a Polish astronomer, but because the editors where either too foolish, cowardly in the face of German nationalism, or count neo-Nazis among their ranks, they decided to remove the national adjective altogether. Most articles do not conform to this practice which is why it’s a piece of special pleading and a pernicious concession. Shame on them.)
Re: The curious case of Croatian wikipedia
#20I think I’d be suspicious of articles about a country edited by nationals of that country if Pew Research shows that country as having relatively high national pride. Usually, that manifests in an attempt to avoid shame by altering representations of reality rather than being secure enough to handle reality.
An example of something I encountered was that many articles on India in Wikipedia were written in a manner that is sort of child like, aiming at grandiose claims and conspiracy theories. It was obvious, reading from the outside, that it was nonsense.
Anyway, in general I find a English language Wikipedia pretty good where there is a lot of traffic but it looks like the rarer articles are where random people assert their propaganda.