Could you please point to an example where you feel the article isn't neutral?
Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
21–30 of 301 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
#22It should be possible to fork pages. If an active editor doesn't like edits they can publish their own version.
The main Wikipedia owners then choose, like they do now, which editor they support as default.
Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
#23maybe a contradictory bot farm ... something that can dig wide data graphs on wikipedia to point at inconsistencies and provide more fixes
You can be consistently wrong though.
Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
#24These are normal problems in every society. A certain level of control and moderation is necessary to reach functionality and quality. But this means people gain power, might misuse it, but also gain haters who just don't like the result independent of its quality. This is also nothing new. Complaints over Wikipedia's system and quality are existing since the beginning. This is normal because any system has their grind, their winners and losers. It doesn't mean the system is bad, or is producing bad results.
Can you point out any real issues in their articles? Any widespreaded misinformation or actual issue? Most complaints I always see are usually about disputable details, not about actual problems.
Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
#25I'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 coherent and readable - free from random garbage and conspiracy theories.
Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
#26What are the examples of "Wikipedia [...] getting worse with time, with regards to neutrality and editorialisation"?
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Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
#27Without specific examples this is pretty meaningless.
Every now and then there are groups that try to gain control of an article or group of articles on Wikipedia (especially around big current events) and then they start looking for ways to game the system all the while bitching about how Wikipedia is 'broken'.
The way I see it: Wikipedia is imperfect, but not broken, and it has developed a pretty impressive array of defenses against being overtly gamed.
Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
#28I think most of the conflicts are because the left-wing and the right-wing are incompatible moral philosophies. Because Wikipedia content is completely public, I'd like a forking model where the left-wing and right-wing maintain independent versions. Viewer apps can provide ways to read both for people interested in all sides (like allsides.com).
Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
#29The first step to fixing a problem, is to understand the problem.
I know, many people will possibly agree that this problem exists - but that sort of empirical observation isn't all that useful. If you want to try a method to fix it - any method at all - you need to first have a reliable way to measure whether it actually improves things.
And for that you first need to find a way to actually measure this - in a reliable, repeatable, unbiased way. You need to find a way to measure all of Wikipedia for this sort of problem. Not just the current state - but through the change history for any arbitrary point in the past as well.
Then do some thorough data analysis, trying to learn as much about the problem as you can. That's your best bet for actually solving the problem.
Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
#30Get 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 the servers running is about the same as that fund. 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]. Just minor things of no importance to modern didactics like, you know, functional video support and rarely used, obscure, functions like uploading.
They have more important things to do like weird elections and appointing cryptobro "disrupters" to the board.