Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

To me, experts are people who have spent a lot of time studying something firsthand, have turned over their research in a transparent way, who submit their work to criticism by their peers and the public, and who have no hidden financial backing from a biased party.

Social justice INSTEAD of one's primary mission is a terrible idea. This happens when social justice initiatives are put in place to help the careers of people running them instead of the organization. That's when you get issues like the displeasure when I tried asking how many poor white people went to our graduate school in a racism discussion. My interest was in knowing whether it was first-order/direct racism resulting in an underrepresentation of POC or second-order/indirect racism (via classism and POC being more likely to be in poverty). Different causes would mean different solutions, but examining the issue wasn't the actual point. The POINT was so we could all stand up and declare ourselves good people + put it on our CVs.

Social justice in addition to a primary mission is very useful, because getting different people in the room means you think of way more things and identify new ways to carry out your mission.

I believe I am part of such a cabal, despite my contributions on Wikipedia totaling about half a dozen in the past decade. Why would I be part of such a cabal? Well, first, I have no contact whatsoever with the other editor other than edits made with the same purpose — and that purpose is to deflect an attempt by other editors to erase the details of a (well-sourced) historical event from Wikipedia and replace it with alternative facts more amenable to certain political ideologies. I (and my fellow cabalist) have explained in detail on the talk page that the other editors were pushing a fringe position which was not backed by any reliable sources, and with this justification I have removed every edit made by those editors attempting to change the facts in the article, even to the point of removing tags they add to the article indicating that there is a dispute as to its accuracy! And yet I believe I am in the right, due to overwhelming evidence of the correctness of the article's contents, and incorrectness of the position being pushed by (what I see as) rogue editors.

The thing is, probably every single such cabal is maintained with essentially identical motivations, at least in the eyes of the cabalists. If even some fraction of us are correct, it shows that you have to choose between cabals and an encyclopedia of misinformation and propaganda. Except, of course, haha, there's no choice at all, because some portion of the cabals are pushing misinformation and propaganda. In my view the Wikipedia experiment has failed, and not merely in some contingent way but in a way that shows that the concept cannot be executed as imagined, an "encyclopedia anyone can edit". Some [substantial?] portion of the information contained will be misinformation, for the same reasons that misinformation exists at all.

Unfortunately, insofar as Wikipedia seems to have displaced many other sources of information (which, to be fair, needn't have been any more reliable — a traditional encyclopedia no doubt contained misinformation spread by the editors, with the only saving grace being a relative dearth of information limiting impact), I fear that it will prove to have been the greatest setback to the aggregation of accurate human knowledge so far in the history of humanity.

Since you are handing out free advice, is it normally considered polite or helpful here to accuse people of using fake accounts? Is assuming that a person speaking with confidence about a topic may have some direct knowledge of that topic somehow rude or against the rules?

If you're speaking confidently on behalf of the person that I was responding to, are you sure that you reflect their opinion faithfully? If the GP wanted to say "I refuse to give more details about the fund due to the phrasing of your request for details," surely they could have typed that themselves.

Namaste!