Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

They didn’t get my donations saying they’re gonna bring about racial justice. They said this is what is needed to keep Wikipedia without ads and that they’re suffering. Misleading is an understatement.

So Wikipedia has a bunch of problems, it looks like you are focused on the political problem. By this, we must be careful to say that we don't mean the American political problem that is embedded on Wikipedia[1]. The problem you are having is that a particular Wikipedia political system exists separately from all that. Like, there is an artificial politics of contribution, there are committees and meetings and weird agreements about this is acceptable but that is not, elections and moderators and so forth. That is the problem you identify. Call it a LARP. You wanted to contribute or correct information and you find yourself LARPing as a senator to get it through.

Open source software gives a way to address those political issues. So, they exist in OSS, some open source projects get these elaborate governance structures, they invent a governance LARP with elections and democracy etc. But some OSS projects have not had this.

Cantrill offers an interesting insight about this in his talks... He points out that merge algorithms give a powerful way to fight this, because once you have a merge algorithm you can allow two realities to exist simultaneously. He says the LARP is a result of being “forkaphobic”, afraid of allowing the project to splinter into two identical projects. Whereas, he says, if you look at the Linux kernel, Torvalds can tell you you're full of shit and you can do the thing anyway on your own branch and people can be like “that's actually really interesting” and Torvalds can admit he was wrong.

So the fundamental thing you have to solve is allowing an article to exist in two independent states that get merged together at the end. And if you can solve this then you do not need a political structure to get everybody to agree because your technological process tolerates disagreement.

1. By the American political problem I mean this particular construction of right-vs-left where divisiveness reigns and nobody agrees on even basic facts... there is some of that, but it's not the problem you're having. 2. Some other problems include:

- Wikipedia articles are typically extremely long. This is necessary because they do not have hierarchy but instead kind of cross-link to their peers which prevents any other way of attaining good depths in education. Information is routinely repeated in many pages.

- Encyclopedias are biased to a sort of declarative information, whereas in most cases you really want to provide imperative information: think of what would happen to a university if we forbade labs, recitation sections, homework/exercises, practice tests, instead you must learn everything from lecture without ever assembling a circuit yourself. Who is gonna learn electrical engineering there? But Wikipedia is a fount of information about electrical engineering components, mathematical topics, there are physics articles. Sigh.

- And then in terms of accessibility, Wikipedia has not solved the hard problem of allowing users to distribute computations in some vulgar programming language (Excel, HyperCard) similarly to how they enable typesetting in a vulgar markup language. As a result there is nothing interactive, there is barely any video or audio, everything must be textbook-serializable. Which makes it hard for us to have a volunteer effort of, here is a 150-word card on a topic, here are the deeper dives you can go into, here is how you can interactively play with this concept, here is some volunteer reading it to you so that you don't need a screen reader, here are examples to test whether you have understood the idea, etc. You want the same idea to have many different perspectives.

From the first link:

>The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and privilege to create an environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of communities of color worldwide.

What an interesting signaling statement. If you did not know what "racial equity" was, imagine trying to parse out what it is from that statement.

Imagine reading this phrase out loud to anybody not already involved in this debate. Would this help them understand what "racial equity" was? If you read this statement to any of my family or friends, who live in the middle of the country, they would probably conclude that this was some sort of racist propaganda thing, and wouldn't want to talk to whoever brought it up anymore.

I mean the fact that the foundation which is supposed to also be providing information to the world is also proudly publishing things like that should be pretty revelatory.

But if the editors receive proof that a statement article is wrong, but that information can't be published on the Internet for copyright or other reasons, that means it is proven that the source of the information is wrong, so that source should be removed as unreliable at least in this case. If the rules of Wikipedia don't allow unsourced information, they don't prevent removing incorrect information that has been shown to be incorrect. So they could nuke the bad information. If, after that, nothing is left, they can remove the entire article.

To the contrary-- his neocon character is admitting that his perspective does not align with reality. That's a much more scathing critique of the neocons than the generic upshot you wrote above.