Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#191

Post by sss111 » Sat, Mar 05, 2022, 6:53 PM UTC

zamalek wrote: post #171

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.)…

> I think Wikipedia is mostly good contentwise. Wikipedia politics is insane[1], and this power hunger can lead to objectively incorrect information being defended and sustained. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_cabals

What exactly is this? What are cabals? I'm so confused!!!

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#192

Post by lumpenprole » Sat, Mar 05, 2022, 6:57 PM UTC

No post body was provided.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#193

Post by cf141q5325 » Sat, Mar 05, 2022, 6:59 PM UTC

Instead of edit wars allow forking. So allow for multiple versions of articles with metalevel descriptions about the difference. This way we could have actual conversations about where the different perspectives come from and who has the better arguments.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#194

Post by dehrmann » Sat, Mar 05, 2022, 7:01 PM UTC

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…

> the documents cannot be published online without breaking copyright laws

Can you not excerpt them to the point that the quotes would qualify for fair use? Another option is contacting the source that was cited and see if they'd post a correction.

The other side of this is that family members aren't unbiased parties, so any facts they want corrected really need to be from verifiable sources--sources better than whichever source was already quoted.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#195

Post by pxeger1 » Sat, Mar 05, 2022, 7:02 PM UTC

sdoering wrote: post #148

lucb1e wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an editor [...] stated he could only allow changes to the "facts" if my SO could point to an online source (a credible one he said). That's plainly false, how many Wikipedia articles have (annoying, I'll admit) offline references to books, papers, and other things that are only available under specific terms and conditions, typically after some payment? You don't have to own anything's copyright to reference it. (I…

> That's plainly false, Thanks for denying experience. You could have said: "That should not be the case." But yet he kept denying changes. > offline references to books, papers, and other things that are only available under specific terms and conditions, typically after some payment I was talking about birth certificates, official but personal documents, things like birthday greetings personally signed by Erich Hon…

> > That's plainly false

I think this was referring to the claim by the other editor - that he "could only allow the changes if ...", was false. Not to your whole comment

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#196

Post by bjourne » Sat, Mar 05, 2022, 7:04 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #160

bjourne wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a specific example: Circumcision It has the features OP complains about. Content controlled by a small number of "guardians" who knows every Wikipedia rule and policy in existence and uses them to keep outsiders out. A shockingly biased tone that omits every dissenting source. The article's guardians call them "anti-circumcisionists" and in their view, the critics objects are as valid as 9/11 conspiracy theor…

I was asking the OP because I want to get an idea of what kind of articles they believe are evidence of the fact that Wikipedia is broken, not because I doubt that any such articles exist. Specifically to see what kind of angle they have. Once you report something like this to a forum like HN as being a serious enough problem that it warrants a discussion I think that party should bring their own evidence, because ch…

I see your point but I'm not sure one can produce the kind of evidence you are requiring. My areas of expertise allows me to evaluate at most 100 Wikipedia articles on mostly technical subjects. But Wikipedia contains millions of articles so I can only judge the quality or whether an agenda is being pushed on less than 0.1% of all articles. For the remaining 99.9% I can't tell since I don't know everything about everything.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#197

Post by mistrial9 » Sat, Mar 05, 2022, 7:13 PM UTC

I am a casual wikipedia page contributor, and have been since the earliest days. I tend to agree there is a problem with 'page guarding' and collusion between long-time editors. Its annoying to see the political litmus tests take a large part of these threads. With all that said..

I believe there is a strong and non-obvious aspect to Wikipedia evolution, that is exemplified by an anecdote: When I started doing "family history in New England" research in the 1990s, the Daughters of the American Revolution publications, in hardback volumes, was considered good sourcing, with some caveats .. In the space of five years, in the 1990s, the "facts" printed in impressive DAR fashion, were shredded, in not a few cases. There simply had never been the ability to check and cross-check, so quickly, over such vast numbers of resources. Truth in family history is evasive sometimes, but tends towards very verifiable. The Internet itself, and the eyes and minds of millions of participants, just created an information environment that had never existed; library of Alexandria on steroids, if you want to be colorful.

So now, decades into the process of Wikipedia, we find out that there are not one kind of fact, there is not one kind of editor, and the attention economy is more real than ever. Mix in human nature, and there is a sort of unsolvable situation.

so what to do? admit imperfection, don't waste pages on obviously irreconcilable situations like "the son of the current Presidential candidate of the USA and allegations", I mean sure, but not dominating the response here; and then do find the cases where the process can be evolved, like breaking up smug cliques of editors, when it needs to happen.. fairly, periodically perhaps.. whatever..

Wikipedia -- amazing feature of the entire Internet

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#198

Post by cf141q5325 » Sat, Mar 05, 2022, 7:21 PM UTC

PCGamer_Empath wrote: post #189

hitekker wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a few too many passive aggressive questions to be asking with a sockpuppet account. If you could rewrite it to be less leading and resentful, I think the GP would be more willing to engage.

I'm not really sure how I am supposed to retroactively go back in time and register earlier. 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 perso…

Since you arent a sockpuppet and just new, do you really feel confident to have hit the right tone here, even after somebody gave you a heads up how a conversation is more likely to be fruitful?

You dont need to speak on behalf of OP to give you a heads up about a common problem with your approach, its pretty universal. Picture it this way, there is list of common problems which make a sensible discussion less likely. Which might be overlooked if you havent heard about it before. For example your sentences being too convoluted or having a bad structure. Another one of those is needlessly escalating a conversation.

That kind of boils down to what the aim of your post is. If its not aimed at having a fruitful engaging conversation that might proof your wrong, then you are either doing it for yourself or to set an atmosphere. Which is where the assumption of a sockpuppet comes from.

Differently put, what good does your post if its not aimed at getting somebody to engage in a meaningful way? And if that is your aim, you might want to take his advice, you generally get better results.

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#199

Post by adhesive_wombat » Sat, Mar 05, 2022, 7:29 PM UTC

PCGamer_Empath wrote: post #172

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…

Since you're familiar enough with the activities of the knowledge equity fund to be confident that it's a waste, can you fill in more detail about which grants that it has issued that ended up being wasteful? I understand that you're not "going straight to OMG, the SJWs", so surely you have some knowledge of how these millions of dollars were allocated and at least some vague understanding of their particular failure…

Just from the grants on that page, none of them are designed to actually result in concrete wiki-relevant activity. This is, apparently, deliberate[1].

The metrics of success are not defined in a measurable way with respect to the wiki projects; whatever they do result in won't be published until the end of the year. Maybe we will see 4.5 million worth of value. Maybe we will not.

I'm not saying that it's a waste in absolute terms: the initiatives are likely a net good to humanity. But I don't think they are going to improve Wikipedia very much when the money is withheld from the platform itself. Yes, that's a false dichotomy, because if you have enough cash, you can have both racial justice funds and engineering excellence. But somewhere a decision was made that one is more important than the other, and I suggest that if you can have only one, going the other way will help Wikipedia more.

And no, I don't have an example of an racial justice grant that resulted in a value, but I don't claim that they are axiomatically without it.

The WMF does do quite a few other grants that I think have been and are valuable in wiki-adjacent areas. A lot of Wikipedian in Residences are very interesting, and these can have vast potential for increasing access to non-Western cultural resources. Something that I'd say is more in the WMF wheelhouse.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knowledge_Equity_Fund#W...

Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

#200

Post by _Nat_ » Sat, Mar 05, 2022, 7:43 PM UTC

bjourne wrote: post #157

jacquesm wrote: post #27

Without specific examples this is pretty meaningless. Every now and then there are groups that try to gain control of an article or group of articles on Wikipedia (especially around big current events) and then they start looking for ways to game the system all the while bitching about how Wikipedia is 'broken'. The way I see it: Wikipedia is imperfect, but not broken, and it has developed a pretty impressive array o…

Here is a specific example: Circumcision It has the features OP complains about. Content controlled by a small number of "guardians" who knows every Wikipedia rule and policy in existence and uses them to keep outsiders out. A shockingly biased tone that omits every dissenting source. The article's guardians call them "anti-circumcisionists" and in their view, the critics objects are as valid as 9/11 conspiracy theor…

> The fact that many believe that male circumcision is a grave violation of boys' rights to body autonomy is not.

For reference, how many people believe that? Like, is it a view held by 50% of the population, 10% of the population, or is it more of a niche view, or..?

Because when we get down to stuff that ---

Tried looking it up; appears to be a niche perspective. A significant minority of the population doesn't favor circumcision, but there doesn't seem to be much about folks having a huge problem with it. Also, it appears that, among men who were/weren't circumcised, it's more common for men who were circumcised to be happy about their parents' decision (from Questions 5 and 6 of [this survey [PDF]](http://cdn.yougov.com/cumulus_uploads/document/ugf8jh0ufk/to... )).