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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

#181

Post by Sharlin »

z7 wrote: post #47

>Whereas Wikipedia used to normalize and lend credence to pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and fringe rhetoric, it has over time become firmly anti-pseudoscience and anti-conspiracy theories. Okay, so before the mid-20th century Wikipedia would have categorized the concept of plate tectonics as pseudoscience. Consensus doesn't mean truth. Today's conspiracy theory could be tomorrow's government press release. Bein…

They laughed at Semmelweis, they laughed at Wegener, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. One of these is not like the others!

The plate tectonics hypothesis was criticized because there was no known mechanism for how continental plates could drift. Until that mechanism was understood, it was perfectly good science to be critical of Wegener's hypothesis, and a Wikipedia of that time would have been entirely correct to document the hypothesis as controversial. Hindsight is 20:20.

It's also very much not an encyclopedia's job to try to discover the "truth", whatever that means! Its job is explicitly to document current consensus understanding, however flawed that might be. Trying to figure out the "truth" is very much above Wikipedia editors' pay grade.

Pseudoscience and conspiracy theories are something entirely different from simply proposing hypotheses that might not be backed by currently available evidence, and it's incredibly fallacious and dangerous to try to equate homeopathy or flat-Earthism or climate change denial with something like hand hygiene or plate tectonics.

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

#182

Post by dragontamer »

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.

> How would you solve that?

Does it need to be solved? If we're talking about the magic and wonder of the early internet, then I raise you my 800-count Geocities counter and my Neopets storefront with probably got less views than that.

The early web was much, much, much smaller. There weren't slashdot effects that made you go viral. You just did things because you felt cool, and getting like 800 views lifetime or 1200 views was exciting.

Oh right. No one here is actually talking about early internet are they... because they want modern internet attention with a million tweets and half-a-million views by going viral.

> How would I discover a blog in practice and how would this work from a technical standpoint?

Things weren't discoverable back then. You surfed on hours on web-rings looking for like-minded folk. When you found them, they weren't active any more (not by modern day active anyway), but seeing their pages encouraged you to dig deeper.

-------------------

That's IMO, the wonder of the early internet that has been lost today. People didn't seek attention back then, because the internet was still niche.

But now that the internet has proven itself to be one of the best ways to project and capture attention, its become a better reflection of society. I don't think we're going back.

Wikipedia doesn't really have attention-seekers. Just moderators diligently doing their job. Community driven sites off of the advertising networks are likely closer to replicating the feel of early internet, by self-selecting away from attention seekers.

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

#183

Post by gspencley »

sanex wrote: post #56
hliyan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, a pay-per-use Internet (where appropriate), where people will vote for content with their wallets, instead of having to purchase subscriptions whether they read an article or not. Just a few minutes ago, I wanted to read an NYT article but it asked me to buy a $1/mo subscription. Very cheap, but a) I don't read NYT that regularly and b) doing that with every news outlet I occasionally read, adds up. On the othe…

I've been saying this for a while. It doesn't even need to be that expensive either. Pay a penny to watch a YouTube video type of deal. It can be done through lightning network to avoid per transaction credit card fees which would probably otherwise make it too expensive. My biggest hangup is paying for something that quickly turns out to be crap. I guess people would learn pretty quickly and hopefully the recommenda…

> and hopefully the recommendation algorithm would start to favor just good content over clickbait sellout garbage.

My problem with recommendation algorithms, at least YouTube's, is that by design they recommend things based on keywords and categories for videos you have watched previously. So what happens is that I get hooked on some new topic, say cave diving for example. And then I watch a whole bunch of cave diving videos ... until I get sick of cave diving and want something different. But because of my viewing patterns, my recommendations are FLOODED with cave diving videos that I don't care about anymore.

I don't know how to solve that problem. And it might even just be a "me" problem related to the way that my brain works.

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

#184

Post by jabroni_salad »

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…

One of the earliest to go was media fandom. The kind of stuff you find today on fandom.com used to happen on wikipedia, but then Jimmy Wales founded wikicities for that kind of thing because he did not like it being there.

Your local library probably has a magazine rack with some stupid shit in it but is it not stupid shit that patrons are interested in? Wikipedia ousted it for better or for worse.

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

#185

Post by tentacleuno »

raisedbyninjas wrote: post #138
tentacleuno wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SEO, content farms and click mills are the things ruining the internet. Right, so how do we fix it? I'm wondering if uBlacklist has a place here (a tool to block domains from search results) -- it would be interesting to see if we could all come together and contribute to a database of SEO farm / junk websites to improve search results.

Doesn't this just assume that ad domains are some scarce resource? Ada can be served from a GUID domain just as effectively.

It does not -- it follows the same concept as an adblock list, just being used for a different purpose.

As an example, EasyList includes a lot of GUID domains[0].

[0]: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/blob/master/easylist/ea...

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

#186

Post by thinkingtoilet »

z7 wrote: post #47

>Whereas Wikipedia used to normalize and lend credence to pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and fringe rhetoric, it has over time become firmly anti-pseudoscience and anti-conspiracy theories. Okay, so before the mid-20th century Wikipedia would have categorized the concept of plate tectonics as pseudoscience. Consensus doesn't mean truth. Today's conspiracy theory could be tomorrow's government press release. Bein…

To your last point, I think this is something people get confused about. I think no reasonable person says science is always right and there is never any corruption in the process. Science is done by humans and humans are fallible. The argument is that science is the best we have, not that it's perfect.

One thing I see with 100% of conspiracy theorists is that they have no self-awareness of when they're wrong. They will believe 1000 things and when 1 of them turns out to be true, they both think it validates the other 999 and will never consider they were perhaps right for the wrong reasons. My point is that, as you say, "Being firmly anti-pseudoscience and anti-conspiracy theory and anti-fringe might not be the best heuristic for discovering the truth", but it's the best we have. I'll also paraphrase one more quote that I heard from the great Tim Minchin, but he didn't know who to credit it to, "if you open your mind too much, your brain will fall out".

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

#187

Post by bad_alloc »

marak830 wrote: post #165
bad_alloc wrote: post #2

People 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…

I do not discount anything you posted. At all. * I don't use any social media except here. * I have nothing to say so don't host * Duck duck go? * I tell everyone to move to firefox, help them set it up and most are convinced. Just wish I knew a way to actually help.

> I tell everyone to move to firefox, help them set it up and most are convinced.

That already helps significantly. :)

> I have nothing to say so don't host

A fair point, probably only a small % of people on the internet need to actualyl host something. There is some middle ground with federated hosting like write.as , so hosting is not always needed.

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

#188

Post by jonasdegendt »

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…

Reddit has this problem and it ultimately drove me (and I'm sure many others) away, it seems like you can't have a nuanced opinion, and god forbid if you have an opinion that goes against the grain of a sub.

FWIW, Wikipedia also has this problem. Just spend half an hour going through some page histories and browsing some user pages, you'll find feuds and infighting all over the place. People with a profile saying "I stopped contributing because user XYZ essentially bullied me", yadda yadda.

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

#189

Post by hliyan »

red_admiral wrote: post #164
toyg wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if it had asked for $0.25 The economics of credit-card transactions, unfortunately, make this fundamentally impossible.

I can't reply to the child directly due to nesting, so I'll do it here: As far as I know, for in-person transactions ("contactless" in Europe) the economics work differently - for example SumUp quotes a flat fee of 1.69% plus a small one-time cost to buy and register the reader devices. That gets you parking meters, public toilets and the like. However, for online credit card transactions (which are a very different…

Can't a Medium-like model work -- where a third party aggregates all the credits and bills monthly?

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

#190

Post by gorbachev »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #174
OfSanguineFire wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"My experience of the internet in the 90s is that it was very homogenous and Western-focused"

So was mine, but that was because I was living in a western country.

I bet the experience of people not living in western countries was quite different.

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