My (admittedly personal & anecdotal) impression of Wikipedia is that the objectivity of the content highly depends on the subject - particularly anything that touches on more recent historical events and public/political figures continues to be of the debatable objectivity (at least on the subjects that I'm familiar with enough to notice the problem).
How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
221–230 of 669 posts
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
I'd actually agree to a significant extent that people should own their employment (this is the original American Founding ideal of "free labor" that Jefferson and Lincoln both believed in) but I think you're better off not using the word "socialism" to describe that economic system. People associate that word with "communism" which is defined as a dictatorship where the government operates as a single monopoly under…
No, the word socialism is correct, it describes pretty much what you call "distributed ownership", although a condition should be it's also democratic. I don't see why to avoid a well-defined term because of a connotation, that's a receiver's and not a sender's problem.
Regarding democracy, this kind of voting (although it's unequal) already exists with publicly traded companies. Interestingly, nobody is worried where billionaires will find the time or interest to vote in many companies they own; it's always the common people being the problem.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
SEO, content farms and click mills are the things ruining the internet. All of this is the result of advertising as a business model. For any content, the perverse incentive is to copy it repeatedly with slight variations then monetize the copies with ads and SEO your monetized version to the top of the search results. What we need is a social-first internet where every piece of content is associated with an actual h…
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…
You just spent much more than $1 of your time arguing against spending a dollar. You would never spend 25 cents to read an article, don't fool yourself. If that was an option, you'd invent another reason not to pay. Oh, I need to fold my laundry, no time to read this article.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
These are some strong statements without any reference. Haven't you personally dealt with any situation in which you have to take a decision based on incomplete information? That was covid for most part of it. You could compare it with a bet, and some bets look retrospectively "bad" (although we have no way to check, don't we?) There were also plenty of "fringe voices" with ideas that were proven wrong over time, so…
Claiming things to be true that had no evidence is not the same thing as making decisions with partial information.
The mRNA shots were not tested at all for transmissibility yet we were told they prevented transmission.
Thank goodness some people have a memory longer than 2 weeks.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
> hahaha seriously. this is the internet they want to go back to. Well there were obviously good and bad things about it. Some people think there's a way to be inclusive unlike the way it was once very exclusive while still embracing the general ethos of the original Internet - which was people connected directly via the infrastructure rather than through third party corporations. We can have an inclusive internet -…
Can we though? That comment demonstrates very clearly that it wasn't as democratic as people are remembering.
You had a chance to make an inclusive internet, and you made an encyclopedia that was blind to the largest most significant art & cultural movement in generations. What are you going to do differently this time?
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 divi…
Not just a "you" problem. I have to routinely reset my youtube history (I don't have time to prune it) to avoid stale recommendation. I have few interests, but every once in a while, I'm on a research spree or just want some new vibes, then my home view is ruined.
If they are not getting rid of the algorithm, it would make sense to let me manage the keywords that are driving it.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#227People 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…
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…
A quote I read today that reminds me of this:
‘Don't be distracted by the myth that “every little [bit] helps.” If everyone does a little, we'll achieve only a little. We must do a lot. What's required are big changes in demand and in supply’ --David MacKay
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#228Earlier 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…
By 1995 I was regularly interacting on the internet with Japanese, people in the former USSR (who wouldn't necessarily be considered "white"), Romanians, etc. What was special is that when those people had political and social views that may have differed from one's own, but were representative of their countries, they could air those views. And the result was that a user of the nascent internet could learn about the…
It was much more diverse back then only if you were looking for or desiring that diversity. I was drawn to it for that reason, the foreign languages, the strangeness. I feel like the same people now who prefer homogenization of their internet are people who never experienced that diversity. Because they are people who don’t really like diversity, not in the literal sense. They like a certain type of diversity, which is how the internet got ruined.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia policy mandating that this man be described as a woman is bringing gender identity politics into it.
It's not relevant to the premise of the article, though. I don't understand how someone committing a crime means we should change what gender we address them as. Does this mean that, for people you like, you respect their gender, while you do the opposite for people you dislike ?
Imagine if the Pope started spouting some completely insane nonsense, but did it ex cathedra. Are we to treat his ravings as fact since Catholicism holds that the Pope speaking ex cathedra is infallible? The editors wouldn't, and most of us wouldn't.
Gender ideology/wokeness/whatever you want to call it is in many senses religious, and certainly their claims of TWAW/TMAM are not factual: Our science and medicine come far short of being able to actually change anyone's sex. We can, through constant intervention, force the body to change a bit into one direction, but not much more.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#230Wikipedia has become the worst place on the internet for me, it's so addictive that I've been on it for decades despite being banned from editing because I vandalized it years ago. If you look at the list of "long term abuse" on Wikipedia you see a lot of addicted people taking out their frustration on Wikipedia. There is not much true difference between an admin and a vandal, in fact a lot of admins became vandals t…
If I may ask, how did you 'vandalize' it? It sounds like the definition of this word has some additional connotation within Wikipedia.
"Vandalizing" in the Wikipedia context means editing pages to add stupid, offensive, trollish, or deliberately incorrect content. It happens all the time, which is why some pages (mainly those about controversial topics) have additional protections to make it harder for untrusted people to edit them.