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How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
171–180 of 669 posts
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#172I like to think that OpenStreetMap is also a nice project.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
While it was already obvious to some people before then, after everything that happened from early 2020 through most of 2022, it should be completely clear to everyone now that "expert consensus" has absolutely nothing to do with being factually correct. Time and time again, from the lockdowns/restrictions to the forced masking to the forced shots to the censorship to pretty much everything in between, the "expert co…
Of course the contrarian will only defend the "fringe voices" up to the point that he agrees with. Once it goes into 5G-activated magnetic microchip implants, the contrarian will defer to experts without the quotes.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#174People complain a lot about the internet getting worse and worse. We can fix it, if we put in the effort to rebuild it. * Join fediverse services, e.g. [Lemmy](feddit.de) or Mastodon and post a bit. * Create your own website if you have sth like a cool hobby to share. Webhosting is available for free or cheap, depending on what you want. Link other pages you like to form a net. * If you can, host your own instances a…
Fediverse (in the sense of the major servers that federate) is an extreme echo chamber representative of mainly a certain sociopolitical wing and mainly from North America and Western Europe. Just look at mastodon.social/explore and consider that many founding activists of Mastodon have spoken about how they yearn to keep the community just like that even as it grows. Part of the early internet was about being able t…
My experience of the internet in the 90s is that it was very homogenous and Western-focused, and I doubt it was much more diverse pre-Eternal September. Also most discussion took place in smaller forums which either focused on a specific topic (and so all members shared at least one common interest) or had a very specific culture.
I think it's revisionism to suggest that the old internet was far more politically and culturally diverse. It is in fact modern social media that has sucked in people of all walks of life and dumped them onto the same platform. An internet of small, open communities sounds more like the internet I grew up with.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#175It would be good if Wikipedia could stay neutral and not biased. It's not as good as it was.
There's certain "radioactive" topics on Wikipedia where it's almost impossible for contrarian views to get a fair hearing: evolution, vaccination, nationalism, etc.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#176What's wrong with Stack Exchange? I'm a Math Stack Exchange user and I think it's absolutely amazing for the knowledge seeker. It's a repository of high quality questions and answers that you're not going to answer yourself. You can instantly access hundreds of the smartest people in the world. You can spend a week thinking about something difficult and frequently get it answered in under an hour, sometimes 10 minute…
There is nothing in the article mentioning anything other than Wikipedia. The title is completely unsupported and I think intentional click-bait. Trump is also mentioned several times in the article as well.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#177Can't really trust an academic on this matter, Wikipedia is like academia it's a closed system where a small group get to decide what opinions are correct, what facts get a mention and what are worth looking at with a feedback loop to itself that is used to control facts by deciding what sources are valid. Really the open decentralized internet is the antithesis of academia.
Not to say its all bad but reading wikipedia you have to be aware of that it's an opinionated lens of viewing the world, and by not realizing you're viewing through a lens is why over the past decade people keep getting blindsided when reality doesn't play out how their bubble told them it would.
Honestly I feel a "metaverse wikipedia" with tabs at the top I could view a topic through different socio/economic/political lenses would be much more useful for actually making sense of the world we have today.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree about your assessment of the early internet. It was extremely white and nerdy when looked at on average. Certainly diversity was out there but it wasn’t easily found, much like the fediverse today. Even Wikipedia (not that it counts as early internet): > I knew that early Wikipedia editors were (and kinda still are) academically-inclined hacker dudes, but it's crazy when you realize the article about mole…
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Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Actual encyclopedias do a much better job of it.
I can't validate that statement and neither can you. You didn't even say which one. Setting aside the fact that traditional encyclopedias aren't part of the internet that we are discussing in this thread, I will at least give you that the motivations of a traditional encyclopedia are more clear than the amorphous network of people who maintain Wikipedia.
I have a 1936 set of Encyclopedia Britannica on the shelf, you should read some of the articles in that.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#180To me, the main difference between almost every other place on the Internet (save for personal websites) and Wikipedia is the lack of advertising, or attempting to generate revenue through engagement. That is the reason why Wikipedia still remains tolerable.
I would like to pitch OpenStreetMap as another example (to be clear there are also banners about donating, but it is smaller and not misleading one)