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Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

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Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#51

Post by [deleted] »

civilized wrote: post #37
legitster wrote: post #10

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.

I agree. While some articles may seem to have a slant in emphasis, I can't recall a time when credible information contrary to the slant was omitted or distorted. That's much better than I can say for just about any other source I read online. I remain an avid wikipedia reader.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#52

Post by swilliamsio »

Lascaille wrote: post #35
chris_wot wrote: post #5

You think that's bad? All the actual contributors of content are chased off by those who tweak the site. What can I say, it's going to only get worse.

This seems to be the general case for user-contributed sites. People who are fans of a subject (be it football or model trains) may consistently use such sites but generally aren't invested enough to create content or do much beyond argue briefly when they feel something is totally incorrect, generally healthy people have healthy lives and don't get intensely invested in curating an internet forum. On the other hand,…

As the old saying goes: "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People."

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#53

Post by ajross »

legitster wrote: post #10

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.

I tend to agree. Wikipedia does a fantastic job of trying to stay objective. I think the real root here is that the last decade has led to a bifurcation of "facts" across partisan lines. There are realms of discourse where people just don't think it's appropriate to present unrefuted fact A without also presenting perspective B, even if the support for B is mostly just spin. So someone reads an article on A and thinks it's "biased" because it doesn't lead to the readers' own opinions.

But that's not something Wikipedia can solve, and I think they do what they can about as well as is possible. Here's a good example page of the effect, check out some of the edit wars on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_masks_during_the_COVID-19...

The result is a little jumbled, with some contradictory spin still lurking in sentences here and there. But for the most part the article has limited itself to an objective treatment, and done well.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#54

Post by deknos »

In Germany this was talked already over quite a few years ago.

Wikipedia would have to make it easy to clone parts of its websites to your own service so you can change the parts which are important to you. and then basically the most surfed-on-site wins.

but atm you either fetch the database and set it up with everything.. or .. no idea.

but nobody liked that model either.

we'd need wikipedia with more-git-like backend i think, some guy wrote "levitation" for that, but there would be still a need of setting it up as service and declare which parts are important for you and for which you redirect yourself from your service to the real wikipedia.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#55

Post by ethbr0 »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #34

I think Wikipedia is mostly good contentwise. Of course there are two extremes where there are problems: disputed topics (especially contemporary political topics) and niche topics receiving little to no attention. I think for both an improvment can be made by improving the view on the editing history. Showing what kind of editors (new accounts or ong term members? Editing only few articles or across the board? etc.)…

(Reparented from another content thread) Agreed. Wikipedia's strength is its long tail of niche articles. However, once one gets off "popular" articles, the quality bounds rapidly spread.

But that seems inherent to having an article for which there are only 1-2 editors, as opposed to 10+ frequently reviewing.

So better UX is probably the best "solution." I.e. pulling editor count, frequency, and reputation into the reader-visible part of the page.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#56

Post by actuator »

magpi3 wrote: post #12

Well I suppose another "Who watches the watchmen" type site can be built to report on bias issues/irresponsible editors. But ideally Wikipedia itself would build some internal mechanism for dealing with disputes. Has it done so? I have heard that Wikipedia is "broken" before, but without specific examples the complaint comes across as hollow. And if you do have specific examples, then I think it gives people the chan…

> But ideally Wikipedia itself would build some internal mechanism

It has WP:ANI, but it is hard to go against established editors, if they are not writing outright lies or doing harassment. Say, if I want to edit a line from a summary of the Wikipedia page on a person which unfairly represents a person and the established editor thinks it makes sense, then I can't do anything. They are not writing misinformation as they will often have a source for it, but the tone and representation of that on the Wikipedia article can still be unfair.

I would give specific examples here but then I would be accused of trying to influence talk pages with publicity on social media/forums. Moreover, as some of the talk pages have my comments, I don't want my online personas to be linked.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#57

Post by frabbit »

A formal ban on editors being members/volunteers/associated-with state-related propaganda outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) would be good. It wouldn't stop anything underhanded, but at least they would not be able to lie to themselves that they were doing nothing wrong.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#58

Post by halestock »

sdoering wrote: post #38

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…

This is an unfortunate situation for sure, but I think I still agree with how they responded. What if they had accepted your evidence? The page still has no publicly visible references, so I (the user) have to just take the editor's word that the article is correct - I have no way to verify that information myself.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#60

Post by threatofrain »

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #30

Get 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 t…

> 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].

Wikipedia is moving to Vue.

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