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Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

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Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#43

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…

Get a quasi-referencable source like a Forbes blog written, and later refer to it.

Wikipedia is great for a low level consensus, but if you actually know anything about many of the subjects it’s hilariously bad.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#44
I'm, time to time, sending some money to the foundation. The work are great and help people a lot. But I know there are biased pages... But I'm not sure we are in the same page here: can you post some of the pages you found violates neutrality? Edit: Also the best way to fix wikipedia always will be reading more books, specially from the XX century. Maybe I'm a XX's century biased person.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#46

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…

Even more amazingly the invasion article on the Russian wikipedia was really good as well (as of a few days ago).

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#49
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.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#50

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…

If they don’t have a reliable source for the incorrect fact, it should be removed.

If they do have a “reliable” source for the incorrect fact, could you write to that source and get it corrected there?

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