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Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

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Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#161

Post by zozbot234 »

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #147
endominus wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a motte and bailey argument. The motte here is that people living in unjust situations will likely be unable or less able to contribute to the Wikipedia project, which is true. The bailey is that donation funds are being funneled into these initiatives rather than improving Wikipedia itself (see other comments about bug counts and features lacking in Wikipedia, which are not being addressed). The Knowledge Eq…

My favourite irony with the WMF's love of funding racial justice [1] is that one thing that does not work well at all in MediaWiki is the mobile editing interface [2]. It's basically just plain text and you're expected to type in the syntax manually on a phone, and also all the links to the talk, history and other pages are hidden when editing. Guess which countries disproportionately use mobile devices and don't hav…

> the mobile editing interface

They used to have a formalized project aimed at improving this, but it seems that work on it stopped mid-2019. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Advanced_mobile_c... Their stated (as of 2019) workflow requires going to site settings and turning on a special "Advanced" interface in order to get something that's not broken. Awful.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#162

Post by can16358p »

At least you can be an author there. I am for whatever reason geoblocked from writing anything (I never spammed, probably a country-wide block) and when I use VPN (either shared or my own instance) then I'm blocked again for potential spam because of, again, IP block (this time cloud provider or VPN IP).

I believe I can have a positive contribution to Wikipedia but they never allowed me to write, since like, 10 years.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#163

Post by Lascaille »

mardifoufs wrote: post #67
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.

This is a good example of an amazingly bad article with the worst type of wiki lawyering on the talk page. It basically still has the same conclusion in the lead as when it was originally created, and most of the claims/leaks against Hunter were considered "false"/dinsinfo... But now that those laptop leaks were either confirmed by different reputable sources, it more or less indirectly calls most of the claims true…

>This is a good example of an amazingly bad article with the worst type of wiki lawyering on the talk page.

>absolutely no reason other than some editors going all "nuh uh"

They're almost certainly paid to keep that content on the talk page and off the article.

Once you're in the partisan politics bubble normal procedures and safeguards break down because there are absurd amounts of money being spent.

I looked at that talk page and it's just painful.

"It isn't his laptop"

"It isn't not proven to be not his laptop"

"Even if it is his laptop, it isn't his files"

"It isn't not proven to be not his files"

Just admit that it could be genuine or it could be a disinfo campaign. Ugh.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#164

Post by remram »

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…

Is that true? I have been told that money given to Wikipedia went towards wikipedia only, and those other activities were separate. I can't find a definite answer in their public reports and plans though.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#165

Post by smitty1e »

> is every user curated platform doomed to reach this state?

One hypothesis is that, yes: you're hitting on an intrinsic aspect of human nature.

A possible remedy would be to set up curated sites across the spectrum, and query a 'millepedia' front end to ask: "Who is the all-time worst political figure, and why is it $GUY_I_DISDAIN?"

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#166

Post by mplanchard »

devwastaken wrote: post #132
regularjack wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while men with entire books on the subject get rejected. Ok, I'll bite. Giving incentives to increase the number of pages about women, does not impact in any way the number of existing pages about men.

Lets say you have a company that requires a level of technical skill to work at, and instead of hiring for that technical skill, you hire them based on being blue. Everyone else, including those who are blue, know you are doing this because the individual is clearly not ready for that work. This creates resentment, which creates discrimination. You have to promote natural systems, not artificial ones, or you create f…

Or you maintain the same hiring standards, but do more work to ensure your candidate pool, which historically is 99% not blue, actually contains some blue people, which naturally leads to more blue people on the team. These blue people are just as qualified as anyone else, and their presence keeps people from building idiotic ideas like “the only reason blue people can be hired is if we lower our standards,” since everyone who works with them can see that they are talented and deserve to be there.

The idea that the only way to promote equity is through lowering standards is a pernicious and unrealistic strawman.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#167

Post by ALittleLight »

sdoering wrote: post #151
zozbot234 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since this person is family, you can issue a publicly-available statement, e.g. on a website, and it will most likely qualify as a reliable source by Wikipedia's policies. The point is that Wikipedia must never be a primary source for what it writes about; it just always be able to point at a source for what it says. Wikipedians' job is to broadly evaluate and curate sources, not guess at the truth of any individual…

Yeah I could do this. But I could also just accept the fact that Wikipedia isn't even willing to delete contested information when offered proof. I don't need the facts to be in the entry. I don't care. I only care about the fake facts in there and ask myself how much of the rest of Wikipedia is also riddled with falsehoods and nobody would want to remove that if shown actual state documents that show what is wrong.…

There are problems with the approach of requiring third party reputable sources, for example the problems you are running into. There are associated costs, some published information will be wrong. There are also problems with the alternatives - e.g. primary sources providing motivated misinformation or volunteer editors being fooled by bad sources.

It's easy to find problems with wikipedia's current model, but harder, I think, to argue that their model is the wrong choice.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#169

Post by Lascaille »

hooby wrote: post #29

The 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 relia…

>many people will possibly agree that this problem exists

>a reliable way to measure whether it actually improves things

After the process has been carried out, it is measured as successful if less people agree the problem exists. Very simple, very quantifiable.

>Then do some thorough data analysis, trying to learn as much about the problem as you can.

No, that's not necessary. That seems more like gatekeeping and wikilawyering, which is basically the actual problem - entrenched power networks refusing to let anybody consider changing things without first having produced ten man-years worth of proof.

You don't solve the problem by doing what the problem tells you that you must do in order to be allowed to solve it.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#170

Post by thrashh »

thepasswordis wrote: post #116
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…

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 f…

I think waaay too many people are unknowingly hanging around other people they like too much and it causes their circle to double down on crazy.
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