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Wikipedia is 20

economist.com

381–390 of 391 posts

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting question, how did the article end up? In general Wikipedia does have mechanisms to deal with this sort of thing, but admins don't always catch on early enough.

> In general Wikipedia does have mechanisms to deal with this sort of thing, but admins don't always catch on early enough. I'm not convinced that it works, but regardless, 'not early enough' is effectively not at all. It's like the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust suit against Microsoft - Netscape and others were long out of business. 'Justice delayed is justice denied.' The comment below by arp242 demonstrates i…

> There's no evidence that the accusations were false

This is quite the comment; do you need evidence to prove someone's innocence? Last I checked, this isn't really how the legal system works. This does let some crimes go unpunished, which is terrible, but the alternative is much worse.

If you want to claim that the disbarment of Nifong was done for political reasons then you're going to have to do a hell of a lot better than some vague story about "the university is powerful" and "Beltway influence". Among other things, he withheld DNA evidence and lied about the facts of the case. Even Nifong himself agreed that disbarment was an appropriate judgement.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#382
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even that subtle. For instance, declaring that Taiwan is a country despite the fact that it isn’t recognized as such by most of the world. That was such a big deal that it was met with triumph by Taiwanese media: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3948149 Don’t get me wrong, I support the cause of Taiwanese independence, but facts are facts. I also think that the Basque Country should be independent, and yet i…

Surely if anyone's pushing an agenda of the Taiwan issue it's the geopolitical entities that have extremely strong financial incentives to do so. If you define "country" as being an entity recognised as a country by some percentage of other countries, then sure, you'd exclude Taiwan. But Wikipedia worked out pretty quickly that this is a terrible definition when a thousand microstates all recognised each other but di…

Either the entities themselves, or good faith individuals that are so exposed to the storytelling of one of the two parties as to consider it factual truth instead of just one of the possible ways to look at the world.

That being said, I imagine that if for the US the issue is so important as to repeatedly send their warships all the way to the South China Sea for it, trying to exercise some influence over the content of a wiki page would be quite a low-hanging fruit in comparison.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#383
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he's not a dick, he's just a christian

You're right. I forgot that christians and dicks are mutually exclusive.

We've banned this account for trolling, or whatever it is that you've been doing with your recent flamey comments. This site is not for that.

I'm disappointed, because you posted good comments before that.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#384
post #383
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. I forgot that christians and dicks are mutually exclusive.

We've banned this account for trolling, or whatever it is that you've been doing with your recent flamey comments. This site is not for that. I'm disappointed, because you posted good comments before that.

Can you delete all this garbage that I posted? When I'm in a better state of mind, I usually just write this kind of garbage in a text box, and delete instead of hitting reply just so it's out of my head. Had a bad night. Sorry.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#385
post #384
post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've banned this account for trolling, or whatever it is that you've been doing with your recent flamey comments. This site is not for that. I'm disappointed, because you posted good comments before that.

Can you delete all this garbage that I posted? When I'm in a better state of mind, I usually just write this kind of garbage in a text box, and delete instead of hitting reply just so it's out of my head. Had a bad night. Sorry.

You might try emailing hn@ycombinator.com.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#386
post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you delete all this garbage that I posted? When I'm in a better state of mind, I usually just write this kind of garbage in a text box, and delete instead of hitting reply just so it's out of my head. Had a bad night. Sorry.

You might try emailing hn@ycombinator.com.

Thanks

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#387
post #384
post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've banned this account for trolling, or whatever it is that you've been doing with your recent flamey comments. This site is not for that. I'm disappointed, because you posted good comments before that.

Can you delete all this garbage that I posted? When I'm in a better state of mind, I usually just write this kind of garbage in a text box, and delete instead of hitting reply just so it's out of my head. Had a bad night. Sorry.

Ok, I've disassociated those comments from your account and given them a random username, so it's as if you'd used a throwaway account to post them.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#388
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might not be quite the examples you're looking for, but here's a study of Wikipedia's leftward bias from Harvard: https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/41946110/greenst...

Are you sure? That article talks about how unbiased Wikipedia is: >Our study finds that crowd-based knowledge production does not result in articles with more biased than articles produced by experts when the crowd-based articles are substantially revised.

Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, also gives a number of examples of Wikipedia's bias in this article:

https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#389
post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In general Wikipedia does have mechanisms to deal with this sort of thing, but admins don't always catch on early enough. I'm not convinced that it works, but regardless, 'not early enough' is effectively not at all. It's like the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust suit against Microsoft - Netscape and others were long out of business. 'Justice delayed is justice denied.' The comment below by arp242 demonstrates i…

> There's no evidence that the accusations were false This is quite the comment; do you need evidence to prove someone's innocence? Last I checked, this isn't really how the legal system works. This does let some crimes go unpunished, which is terrible, but the alternative is much worse. If you want to claim that the disbarment of Nifong was done for political reasons then you're going to have to do a hell of a lot b…

>> There's no evidence that the accusations were false

> This is quite the comment; do you need evidence to prove someone's innocence?

I didn't say whether they were innocent or guilty; you can see above what I said. As the charges and evidence were never heard in a public forum, we don't know much about them.

I think the rest of the parent comment reinforces my view about the power of the communications machine aligned against one woman with few resources and a local DA.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#390
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But all the citations are going to mention that or it's just another chemical. No they aren’t. All you need to do is cite all of the material that was used for its initial approval before they knew about the problems. Another example to help illustrate. The Boeing 737 MAX had a well-cited full article before the MCAS issues were known. Unbalanced moderation could just revert any future edits that tried to add in th…

> All you’re stating is that you have confirmation bias and don’t like seeing ideas you disagree with. Well ideas that I think are factually wrong, yes. HN is the only place on the internet where I find myself regularly having to prove that Julian Assange isn't necessarily a saint and that Donald Trump is corrupt. Also, if (let's say you're right) it is merely confirmation bias - surely that means that we can infer t…

> Basic Income is not left-wing policy in any way at all unless your litmus test for that is caring about poor people at all - it's effectively submitting to the free market which isn't exactly sporting for most socialists.

This is pathetic goal post shifting at best. UBI is literally the government giving you enough money to never have to work again. It’s supposed to cover housing, food, and medical expenses. This is far more ambitious than any of the other “socialist” proposals from the likes of Bernie Sanders and co.

> Capitol Attack thread was flagged almost immediately and then dang resurrected it.

Because there is essentially nothing productive to discuss there. Emerging events are almost always flagged. BLM protests, CHAZ, shootings, etc. all end up flagged almost right away because there is little insight in the comments and mostly knee jerk stupidity.

> For example, the Parler thread is not flagged

You mean the one where the top comment is about how it was such a great move? Isn’t that pretty solid evidence of bias in the opposite direction you imply?

> HN is the only place on the internet where I find myself regularly having to prove that Julian Assange isn't necessarily a saint and that Donald Trump is corrupt.

I’m gonna go ahead an call bullshit on this one. You’re either replying to already down-modded comments or bringing up irrelevant info. Could it be that you’re just overreacting to comments still being visible even though they aren’t popular?

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