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Wikipedia is an MMORPG

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Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#91

Post by k__ »

captainmuon wrote: post #57
jl6 wrote: post #52

I’d be grateful if, in this thread, anybody with an anecdote about how their perfectly fine edit was reverted by the evil career Wikipedians, could provide a link so we can judge for ourselves.

Not an edit I made, but the final straw for me was a debate about the article name of the turkey (the animal) on the German wikipedia. The only commonly used name is "Truthahn" which refers to both the female and male animal if you are not being specific. But one especially vocal Wikipedian insists that in his ornithology book, the generic term is always the female term, so "Truthuhn" (with u). That sounds like "turk…

I read, German Wikipedia is a garbage fire compared to the English one.

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#93

Post by LostTrackHowM »

I am shocked this first version of an online encyclopedia has lasted so long.

Typically first versions of software reproduce real world limitations, which don't apply to the software. Second and third iterations tend to drop them.

Wikipedia has lots of those real world limitations. Notoriety and style of writing were determined by the limitations of shelf space and paper.

The selected editor team is something wikipedia specifically wanted to get rid of but has bumbled back into over time.

I keep expecting someone else to crate wikipedia 2.0, but so far nothing. Here's my suggestion for a better virtual encyclopedia.

- Articles are cryptographically signed by authors.

- Articles are not editable after publication. Edits result in new articles.

- Articles have a unique and unchanging url.

- Registered users can vote on articles.

- Registered users can create collections of existing articles. And those collections can be tread as an article.

- Articles can be filtered on popularity, and on popularity among select groups of authors, and on popularity among select groups of up-voters.

I think based on the above you end up with human repository of knowledge. Where articles and links to articles are reliably unchanged, and you never have to worry about them changing "under your feet" so to speak.

The same group of people running wikipedia now, can reproduce their own view of the world in the above setup, and their fans can use it.

Any other group can also create their view of things. There is going to be one most popular view of things. But there could also be a one armed economists' view of modern dance filter of the knowledge pool.

How to deal with spammer or trolls? In addition to voting and filtering, top notch text compression and time based moving of the least often visited articles to slower and cheaper storage.

The slowest and cheapest storage we have, combined with how well we can compress text, in my opinion, results in almost unlimited capacity to store text. And thus notoriety should not be a concern. Leave that to paper encyclopedias.

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#94

Post by nsajko »

jl6 wrote: post #52

I’d be grateful if, in this thread, anybody with an anecdote about how their perfectly fine edit was reverted by the evil career Wikipedians, could provide a link so we can judge for ourselves.

Since Wikipedia is getting a lot of unfounded criticism here, it may be good to raise some real issues: Wikipedia (even just the English Wikipedia) should not be considered as a unit. The fact is, a lot of articles are very good, better than in any other encyclopedia, but that can sadly lull people into dropping their guard/critical thinking when it comes to other articles/topics.

The thing is, Wikipedia is very vulnerable not just to unconscious biases, but also to malicious involvement. Just a single malicious editor with a lot of time on their hands can be unexpectedly harmful, especially if they are targeting a topic where the malice will not be obvious to the majority of editors, or if there are not many editors there to contest the malicious edits for some other reason.

Once that single editor gets support of like minded people, the situation is grim. The other ones don't even have to be naturally competent, a single "puppet master" can coordinate many "meat puppets" (people that follow orders or a common goal) or even plain-old "sock puppets" (abusing alternative accounts). Most good-faithed editors just avoid conflict with the malicious group, because

* it is unpleasant * it requires much time * it may require knowledge (even though malice requires less knowledge, especially with off-wiki coordination) * it (and other conflict) may look bad for them on Wikipedia in the future * the admins and the arbitration committee tend to punish all sides of a conflict

The "political" topics (including the parts of history that are "relevant" to nationalism) tend to be the worst. I suppose one reason for that is that politics is a viable common goal that can unify some meat puppets and competent malicious actors together. Another is that politics tends to scare a lot of editors that operate in good faith.

Another issue is that the people in power on Wikipedia in case of conflict between other editors, admins and ARBCOM, very rarely (or never) want to invest enough time to really get to the bottom of the issue at hand (which can, admittedly, be very difficult, especially since the people in power often lack the specific knowledge regarding the possibly obscure topics at hand). In the end often both the pro-Wikipedia and the malicious side gets punished, because the admins or ARBCOM just want to "resolve" the conflict or content dispute and get it over and done with.

Yet another issue is that in recent years the Wikimedia Foundation (owner of Wikipedia and other projects) has started to act against the volunteers (the case with Fram[0] is most notorious).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:FRAM

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#95

Post by nsajko »

gilrain wrote: post #90
nsajko wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is supposed to be a reliably sourced and verifiable encyclopedia, not a blog or advertisement, not full of random non-notable or unverifiable information. In other words, it is supposed to be useful.

If I were looking for information about this school, a war hero alum with a local monument would definitely be of interest.

You missed at least the verifiability part.

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#96

Post by qPM9l3XJrF »

nsajko wrote: post #86
qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once came across some Python code on Wikipedia which looked like: for i in range(n): a = [f(i) for i in range(q)] I was reading over it and got temporarily confused by the re-use of the variable "i" in the list comprehension so I edited it to something else in order to help the next person. Reverted without explanation. Another complaint I have about Wikipedia: There are certain people who are sometimes described i…

Your example with the python list comprehension could just be an example of a conflict over content because of an inevitable difference of opinion. There is nothing wrong with that, and no way around it: you either invest enough of your time to work it through, or pay someone else to do that (although I don't know how you could find someone both competent enough and willing to do it). The example with the antisemite…

"I very much doubt it would be appropriate to take Twitter as source in that case"

Editors also didn't like it when I added info from his website. Basically, they didn't want anything he said in his own defense to make it to his Wikipedia page.

"Also, it seems like you are not aware that it is very much possible to be a pro-Israel antisemite, e.g., the Nazis at one point supported Jewish Zionist emmigration to Palestine."

I'm aware of that. This person also said he encouraged Jews to join a political organization he ran.

But anyway, I tried to be very clear: I was not saying the citations which claimed this guy was an antisemite should be removed. I'm saying it was worth including this person's own statement of their political views as well.

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#97

Post by Ntrails »

qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #96
nsajko wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your example with the python list comprehension could just be an example of a conflict over content because of an inevitable difference of opinion. There is nothing wrong with that, and no way around it: you either invest enough of your time to work it through, or pay someone else to do that (although I don't know how you could find someone both competent enough and willing to do it). The example with the antisemite…

"I very much doubt it would be appropriate to take Twitter as source in that case" Editors also didn't like it when I added info from his website. Basically, they didn't want anything he said in his own defense to make it to his Wikipedia page. "Also, it seems like you are not aware that it is very much possible to be a pro-Israel antisemite, e.g., the Nazis at one point supported Jewish Zionist emmigration to Palest…

> I'm saying it was worth including this person's own statement of their political views as well.

It is an interesting situation, because I dislike the idea that my defence of my own position is insubmissible, vs the interpretation of some third party of what they claim I think. Certainly there are positions I have on sensitive topics that could be trivially misrepresented.

On the other hand, just taking my 'PR' response is dangerous as it allows me to potentially Rewrite history / spin truth etc.

I lean towards the right to state: "author claims to be misunderstood and accusations are unfounded". I can see both sides a bit though

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#98

Post by pmachinery »

qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #96
nsajko wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your example with the python list comprehension could just be an example of a conflict over content because of an inevitable difference of opinion. There is nothing wrong with that, and no way around it: you either invest enough of your time to work it through, or pay someone else to do that (although I don't know how you could find someone both competent enough and willing to do it). The example with the antisemite…

"I very much doubt it would be appropriate to take Twitter as source in that case" Editors also didn't like it when I added info from his website. Basically, they didn't want anything he said in his own defense to make it to his Wikipedia page. "Also, it seems like you are not aware that it is very much possible to be a pro-Israel antisemite, e.g., the Nazis at one point supported Jewish Zionist emmigration to Palest…

It would be a lot easier to see if Wikipedia had a point or not if you named the public figure you're talking about.

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#99

Post by LostTrackHowM »

qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #83
jl6 wrote: post #52

I’d be grateful if, in this thread, anybody with an anecdote about how their perfectly fine edit was reverted by the evil career Wikipedians, could provide a link so we can judge for ourselves.

I once came across some Python code on Wikipedia which looked like: for i in range(n): a = [f(i) for i in range(q)] I was reading over it and got temporarily confused by the re-use of the variable "i" in the list comprehension so I edited it to something else in order to help the next person. Reverted without explanation. Another complaint I have about Wikipedia: There are certain people who are sometimes described i…

You not being a reliable source about yourself is an old Wikipedia rule.

I think they are fans of the Brazil movie.

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#100

Post by LostTrackHowM »

busterarm wrote: post #15
haunter wrote: post #3

Good comparison tbh. MMOs are one of the most toxic game genre (only topped by MOBAs) and that perfectly fits to the holier than thou attitude of the majority of editors

Scary when you consider that "winning" this game means you get to control the interpretation of facts.

Wikipedia trust peaked years ago, it's been steadily down-trending since.
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