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How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

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Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#71

Post by wildrhythms »

js8 wrote: post #41
ants_everywhere wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all great ideas, and I echo them. But I do feel like these sorts of collective problems are hard to solve by each person trying to do their own part working alone. One reason that corporate internet won is that money transfers to a single entity, and that pot of money can be used to coordinate action in some particular direction (for better or worse depending on your view). Without some coordination mechani…

I think socialism is the mechanism - one person one vote with the stake of ownership. I am pretty liberal but it I believe it needs socialism (democracy in economic sphere) to avoid capture by corporations. (And vice versa, socialism needs liberalism to prevent capture by government. They can't survive without each other, being constantly threatened by authoritarianism.)

Socialism has nothing to do with 'government capture'; it only concerns itself with worker ownership over the means of production.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#73

Post by Terretta »

aakjsdfajsdfh wrote: post #12

[flagged]

TL;DR: Parent is first asserting that “______ is just a construct” people are trying to make Wikipedia a “______ is just a construct”-opedia.

Then the rest seems just a construct-ed rant.

Where's this coming from?

The paper examines "institutional" change of Wikipedia, showing how its content transformed over time from lending credence to fringe theories to actively debunking them.

This transformation occurred due to the ambiguity of Wikipedia's "Neutral Point of View" (NPOV) guideline, which was open to different interpretations.

There were two camps of editors - the "Anti-Fringe" camp pushed for firmly anti-pseudoscience interpretations of NPOV, while the "Pro-Fringe" camp pushed for more neutrality towards fringe theories.

Early disputes over NPOV were frequently resolved in favor of the Anti-Fringe camp, empowering them while demoralizing the Pro-Fringe camp.

The Pro-Fringe editors gradually exited Wikipedia over time, leaving the Anti-Fringe camp with more power to reinterpret NPOV in an anti-fringe manner.

The paper suggests similar dynamics may drive change in other groups like political parties, social movements, bureaucracies, etc. Losers choose to leave rather than keep fighting uphill battles.

Neither the paper, nor the rant, mention one hypothesis for why academia's paradoxically groupthink radicalism may have an outsized or disproportionate influence on Wikipedia: the evergreen activity from teachers everywhere assigning "edit a Wikipedia article" to each new class of haven't yet experienced the real world students and the self-selecting cohort of those who see an outlet for an introverted form of activism that then persists for perhaps a decade among a subset.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#74

Post by tentacleuno »

tvieron wrote: post #40
aakjsdfajsdfh wrote: post #12

[flagged]

[flagged]

> So as a result of this we get, for example, articles like this one on Dana Rivers, who murdered in cold blood a lesbian couple and their son: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Rivers. He is described as "she" and "her" throughout the article, despite this actually being the crime of a man.

In this case, isn't the crime more important than what she chooses to identify as? I'm all for prosecuting a murder, but bringing gender politics into it feels strange and unwarranted.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#75

Post by synecdoche »

jwestbury wrote: post #36
bko wrote: post #15

> Over time, Wikipedians who supported fringe content departed or were ousted. Thus, population loss led to highly consequential institutional change. Is this a good thing? It seems like homogenous hive mind effects. Works in some instances but we should aim a little higher A big problem is homogeniety in media. For instance, everyone from every major newspaper more or less went to the same schools, has a similar wor…

Well, yes, when it comes to knowledge I'd say that it is a good thing to remove those supporting fringe content. Consensus amongst those who generally care about a topic is probably better for ensuring largely correct data than the alternative of a large number of voices, each with a questionable level of actual subject matter expertise.

Plenty of assumptions there. There is nothing to say that correctness is a function of size or homogeneity. The claim is cause for concern in itself.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#76

Post by logicchains »

LastTrain wrote: post #45
Namari wrote: post #8

It would be good if Wikipedia could stay neutral and not biased. It's not as good as it was.

Every bit of content has a POV, there is no getting around that. Neutral POV is the Wikipedia ideal - one they work towards but will never reach. They do as good a job as anybody at it.

>Every bit of content has a POV

Every bit of content has multiple POVs, and when you continuously present only the POVs associated with one part of the political spectrum, that's an avoidable bias.

>They do as good a job as anybody at it.

Actual encyclopedias do a much better job of it.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#77

Post by boxed »

Ygg2 wrote: post #9
gwd wrote: post #4

I seem to remember a talk I heard a very long time ago, maybe by Joel Splosky? He was saying that he'd observed the "population change" effect in USENET; where argumentative jerks tended to stay and helpful people tended to be driven away; and in his mind the "reply in-line" mechanic specifically contributed to this. So the first-order goal he had when he built Stack Overflow was to build a system with mechanics whic…

Didn't that backfire anyway? Jerks found other ways to be jerks?

No. Stackoverflow is, after Wikipedia, the most sane place on the internet. We have our gripes of course, but there really is no contest here.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#78

Post by kreeben »

Grumbledour wrote: post #51
derelicta wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What id like to see is a federated MySpace-like service. Users could host their blog on an instance of their choice, toy around its styling or its content directly as to learn about web techs (or keep it simple and remain with the default stylesheet!), and yet remain discoverable thanks to the federated nature of such service. If I had the time its honestly something id love working on.

But discoverability seems the Achilles heel of federated services. How would you solve that? How would I discover a blog in practice and how would this work from a technical standpoint? I am asking not to poke holes, but because this is an interesting topic. Finding content seems the biggest problem to me in a more decentralized web and we need more good solutions and ideas here.

Someone, say Google, will index them thus make them discoverable?

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#79

Post by tvieron »

hardware2win wrote: post #58
tvieron wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Aint it about the fact that Gender =! Sex?

In this case it's more about a particular point of view being forcibly pushed onto everyone else by decree, with no dissent allowed.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#80

Post by supriyo-biswas »

HPsquared wrote: post #68
yason wrote: post #24

All places ever deemed 'good' have had sufficient technological or financial, and above all intellectual barriers of entry that filter out regular joes. BBS's in the 80's. Usenet till the early 90's. WWW till the late 90's. IRC till early 00's. Forums replaced usenet groups but have been in decline for years. Once those barriers are broken and the masses flood in then the supply side will emerge and takes over with s…

Maybe a blockchain-based chat protocol, where there is a cost to posting? That's a pretty steep barrier to entry.

That's effectively what ads are, but without the blockchain part of it.
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