It's also worth to mention that Wikipedia is absolutely not a good source for contemporary events. These use artificially constructed validity when it comes to primary news sources. While certain media outlets are known to be state propaganda, many accepted outlets are propaganda too and do not deserve to be sourced. However this issue is not unique to Wikipedia.
How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
241–250 of 669 posts
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#242Can'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 wikiped…
> a "metaverse wikipedia" with tabs at the top I could view a topic through different socio/economic/political lenses
I love this idea. Not likely to happen with Wikipedia as it currently exists, but could possibly be built with a Wikipedia article as one of many links listed for a particular subject.
Slight tangent, but this is why I go to All Sides News when I feel I need more varied perspective on an issue. I don't use it a lot, but when I do I'm super glad it exists.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#243People 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'm honestly shocked how often I still hear technical and educated people argue that the solution is federation.
You know what services we have that are federated? Phone (POTS), SMS and email. You know what services have a massive problem with spam, fraud, false positives on detection of the aforementioned, ID spoofing, etc? The exact same services.
People ignore the real reason Wikipedia is successful: ownership. It's also worth noting that Wikipedia isn't federated either.
We have the same issue with ISPs in the US. The best Internet is municipal broadband. The national ISPs are pretty much universally despised. Again, what's the difference? Ownership. With municipal broadband, the residents own the broadband. National ISPs exist to extract wealth from customers while doing the least possible and lobbying for legal protections against competition.
It's almost like the best results are achieved when the workers own the means of production. Someone should really look into that.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is no such thing as neutrality or unbiased views, we are humans, everything we do or say is filled with bias. Meh, there is a scale. > Claiming for Wikipedia to "stay neutral" is a bias itself. Yeah, everything is relative, truth doesn’t exist, yadda-yadda. > They do as good of a job as any of us in trying to stay neutral. They don’t.
I can also play this game of stating things without giving an argument: They do.
Here’s an article from Larry Sanger (original creator of Wikipedia) giving the case for why Wikipedia is biased https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ .
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#245All 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…
Fwiw I'm still using usenet in 2023. It's great alternative to torrents :)
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#246I have since distanced myself from Wikipedia as I feel I was increasingly pushed out of the "Cabal" (a term used to describe editors with aligned interest who usually worked together to set standards others must follow) who vigorously enforced the policy without considering the experience of, and willingness to engage with, new editors. I would rather have them create their own world while I move on to contribute to…
Agree, I had one very bad experience on Wikipedia. It was not a controversial or political subject area. I reverted ~30 bland look-at-me copy pasta contributions that might have belonged on the category page, but certainly not on every instance page. Obviously the right thing to do. Not controversial - or so I thought...
Some jumped-up self-appointed 'editor' appeared as-if-by-magic, made an obviously stupid decision to keep all the copy pasta, backed it up with a kangaroo court of 1 or 2 buddies weighing in on the Talk page, and that was that - 30 polluted pages.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
That site seems to have a captcha issue. Wikipedia editors shouldn't have more say in someone's gender than the person themselves. I guess that seems obvious to me. And yea being inclusive of trans people and accepting current theories of psychological and medical treatment is a Western bias. But I don't think any other angle would make sense, people are the gender they say they are seems to be a very simple policy.…
> But I don't think any other angle would make sense, people are the gender they say they are seems to be a very simple policy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Maria_Penttil%C3%A4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Finnish_female_serial... Does describing this man as a "Finnish female serial killer" make sense? He is male. This is just factually incorrect. Any attempts to change this categorisation were rev…
Why should I take your word, or anyone else's word, over the person themselves.
For example, go try to change Laverne Cox's Wikipedia to male you will have the same issue.
Why limit it to trans people, go change J.K Rowling to Male because I think she is male, if I get enough Wikipedia editors on board we should be able to do that right?
Also in all of these cases the gender of the person is one of the least interesting and important things about them to me as someone who doesn't know them, so why would I care to tell them what gender they are. Why would anyone else?
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#248People 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 can appreciate this kind of thinking as much as everyone else, but I think that the "fediverse" is too much of a distraction. Federation can be a great thing, but it's an adjunct to a solution, and not much of a large scale solution in and of itself.
What the web needs is new layers to make what your suggestions much more practical.
Creating a website was a nice idea back in 2003 when mostly geeks with skills were using the web. Today, most people don't want to put forth the effort of creating a website. Many geeks with skills that are still around today don't want to bother creating a website because few people will find it. If you make a website, at best only people who read websites will find it. A growing number of people today don't even know what a "website" is because they hardly live on the web proper. Free web hosting is generally bad news because the platform is far more likely to either shut down or provide zero support.
So back to the thing I said about new layers to the web...
If we're going to bring back websites, then we need to bring back the idea that sites will be hosted on many individual machines that aren't necessarily server infrastructure. With the bandwidth most ISPs and devices are capable of today, data isn't a limiting factor in terms of serving a standard website to even thousands of users. The web was meant to be closer to a peer-to-peer model, and it can be used peer-to-peer, but the layer just isn't there to make that model seamless. Most P2P protocols avoid fiddling with the actual network stack and do entirely their own thing; BitTorrent for the most part lives in their own client applications, as historically have many other P2P protocols. That was fine when geeks were using them, but this is insufficient for making the web itself P2P.
The closest implementation to what I am describing here is Yggdrasil:
https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/
Yggdrasil implements P2P mesh networks by behaving like a VPN, assigning an IPv6 address to peers based on public keys. There's no one network, so people are free to create their own networks, and the same address can be used between networks. Although it has some similarities with anonymity networks like Tor, it is not designed for anonymity, which I think is a good thing because Yggdrasil should focus specifically on the networking aspect. Although it's technically in alpha status, I've already been using it to network devices together in my home office. I even have it installed in my car's Android head unit so I can SSH into it and do Linuxy things with it.
The current issue I see with Yggdrasil is that it's not plug-n-play enough to become the de facto next generation layer of the web/internet. It still requires manually configuring a JSON file in order to join a network and so forth. Yggdrasil isn't difficult to install, but if the world wants to go with something like it as this next layer, we need to get it to a state where the user needs next to no knowledge to set it up.
With this hypothetical layer, groups of people can form their own networks and exchange addresses. This is perfect if you want to have an application similar to WhatsApp or Signal that is mostly private and scoped to groups of people, but allows users to cross into multiple groups.
In terms of websites, it's perfect because you get an IPv6 address that is publicly available to anyone on your network and with none of the hassle that's involved with getting a public IP address on the clearnet. It's all a matter of who is connected to the network.
If you want anonymity, this layer can still work through another layer like Tor, or even live entirely within something like I2P. A benefit to using I2P here is that its design makes DDoS attacks more difficult, at least in theory.
With such a layer, hosting sites can become much more trivial. For everyday people who are a little more technically savvy but don't want to be fussing with the command line, I picture simply downloading something like a Reddit clone that runs like any other app on Linux or MacOS and it runs with a neat little admin interface. Share the address (or the domain if a secondary DNS is used) and you're off to the races.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Describing this man as a woman is objectively false. The reality is that he is a man attempting to mimic women, or rather, his idea of what a woman is. This is just one example of many. Perhaps worse than this, there is very obvious bias on any page or text related to critics of the transgender ideology. Even the Wikipedia page for Woman has been in endless battles over males trying to stake their ideological claim o…
That site seems to have a captcha issue. Wikipedia editors shouldn't have more say in someone's gender than the person themselves. I guess that seems obvious to me. And yea being inclusive of trans people and accepting current theories of psychological and medical treatment is a Western bias. But I don't think any other angle would make sense, people are the gender they say they are seems to be a very simple policy.…
> people are the gender they say they are seems to be a very simple policy.
Simple, yes, but is the policy particularily sane? Consider, for example, if I were to claim I was a duck. Should my wikipedia page pretend I have been a duck all my life? That would be preposterous, because as anyone can see, I am human.
Our science and medicine cannot change a person's sex, we can force the body to act a bit more like the opposite sex through constant medical intervention, but nothing more than that.
People's inner feelings fail the "soundnote is a duck" test: There are quite a few MtF writers, for example, whose style of communication is clearly male despite their self-identification: They physically are men, and have grown up as men, and their thinking clearly fits the male mold such that seeing a female name under their text just feels off. Just as I am not a duck, they are not the sex they wish to, even if they say so.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#250People 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…
The fediverse is an echo chamber for many groups, including notably hard left gen Z. It's integrity is similar to that of early days 4chans /b/, in that it wholly rejects reality around it, and it serves not as a discussion forum, but a self-fed enshittification engine racing to the most extreme take.
It couldn't look any more different from the intellectually curious people that largely constituted the beautiful artificial frontier of the early net, sprinkled with little webpages, and optimistic exchanges of early explorers.