DNS over Wikipedia

The same concern was raised by the user "segfaultbuserr" in that Show HN thread[1].

In 2019 I wrote up this very idea as part of a brain dump of long-stalled thoughts that I had been kicking around but not published anywhere. There are mitigations to the attack you describe, which I included in my original terse writeup about such a "Wikipedia Name System"[2]. I pasted the explanation in a comment in the original Show HN thread. The idea lies in the fact that although wikis can be edited to point to your own fake honeytrap, there are things that can't be faked; it's a public ledger sort of thought exercise in the vein of Bitcoin—but no need for proof of work or what is currently associated with cryptocurrency, etc. As I (re-)explained three years ago:

> Not as trivially compromised as it sounds like it would be; could be faked with (inevitably short-lived) edits, but temporality can't be faked. If a system were rolled out tomorrow, nothing that happens after rollout [...] would alter the fact that for the last N years, Wikipedia has understood that the website for Facebook is facebook.com. Newly created, low-traffic articles and short-lived edits would fail the trust threshold. After rollout, there would be increased attention to make sure that longstanding edits getting in that misrepresent the link between domain and identity [can never reach maturity]. Would-be attackers would be discouraged to the point of not even trying.

(This also provides mitigation for what is (currently) the top comment in this thread—the issue of Wikipedians censoring certain domains, provided that they have a long enough history to meet the trust threshold before they were decided to be too contentious to share information about them.)

1. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22791534>

2. Originally published, along with other thoughts from that month, at https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/05/15/may-integration.html...>

Is this a function of reality or me getting better at spotting it?

I felt as though in the 90s CNN legitimately was a good news source. Early 21centuey VICE was legitimately good.

Today there is next to nothing given anything other than a heavily biased view.

I think the internet has made things worse, there's a new kind of bias. What do you set the headline to for the breaking alert? Because that's what people will see. Follow that up with a more subtle article and boom you've got a basically iron glad propaganda machine.

If all the news sources are rather centrist (i.e., they all "cooperate"), then no one gains or loses audiences because of bias. This is a good strategy when publishing is expensive. However, as the costs of publishing drop, it becomes profitable to shave off niche (smaller) audiences, with biased publication. This begins the defection phase of the PD game series. As defections accelerate, anyone who doesn't defect eventually suffers by continuing to not defect, leading to a new optimal state of all defections--i.e., publishers have to defect to maintain audience.

I dunno, I just came up with that as I was writing it.

There are also things to be said about the ability now to track engagement, which allowed humans to quantify (i.e., put a cost/value/ROI on) the extent to which bias/outrage drive engagement. But, this function would still play into the greater theoretical framework I proposed.