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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

#251

Post by nonameiguess »

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…

In spite of the "wikimedia" name, it's wrong to think of Wikipedia in the same vein as the 24-hour news cycle. It's very good for an encyclopedia to have quality control and remove fringe content. It's meant to be an enduring repository of factual information that some form of widespread authoritative consensus exists on, not a place to hash out hot-topic culture war debates that nobody will remember or care about in 50 years, nor a place for alternative pseudoscience like all the guys who spam physics newsgroups claiming to have disproven special relativity or invented a perpetual motion machine.

Even if those things end up being correct, it's also not a place for original research because nobody who edits Wikipedia is qualified to make the kind of judgment on whether original research meets any meaningful quality standard. Submit to a journal if you think you have a worthwhile revolutionary idea. It'll make it to Wikipedia after it becomes generally accepted and that's fine. I don't think a single knowledge repository can realistically hope to be both a repository of trusted, accepted knowledge of the day and a place to hash out the ongoing debate about what should be accepted knowledge and where we might be wrong.

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

#252

Post by local_crmdgeon »

matkoniecz wrote: post #180
hliyan wrote: post #21

To 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)

Yes, but I have no idea how to participate in OSM and I'm a huge map nerd. Not true of Wiki

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

#253

Post by giraffe_lady »

nkozyra wrote: post #239
giraffe_lady wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I find "we didn't, therefore we can't" a kind of defeatist and unrealistic reaction. The internet has been shaped and reshaped a few times, in a lot of ways for the better, I don't see why it couldn't continue to be refined.

I'm not taking that position, quite. But I'm not seeing much contrition for it being that way the first time around, or sophisticated evaluation of why it was, or a plan for how to improve it in the future. Without those I think the hope that it'll improve in these ways is simply naive.

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

#254

Post by t-3 »

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #163
afavour wrote: post #116

Earlier 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…

You seem to be viewing the fediverse as a blob, but it's actually a federated network. There's no need to join an instance if you don't like the moderation!

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

#255

Post by marcosdumay »

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?

It worked for a long while, and things only got bad after a lot of changes from the original rules.

Changes were clearly necessary because SO became too large. So, I'm not sure there was an alternative besides staying small. (Maybe that's the answer.)

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

#256

Post by Semaphor »

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 was on the (Lemmy) fediverse for a few months, selfhosted instance, a lot of comments and post, kept one niche community from Reddit alive over there. It’s pretty much worse than Reddit in most ways. Most small communities don’t exist, small-ish communities get all the assholes big subs have on reddit, because so many people browse all instead of subscribed and post on anything (literally. I had a meta community on my single user instance where I’d just log some descisions and had people vote & comment on those).

You have the power mods issue, only far worse, because they are vastly more powerful now that they control whole instances.

Then you have all the fascists who claim they are leftists but are actually just "anything Anti-USA is amazing". They also run major instances.

I ended up deleting my instance, returning to Reddit (and simply using it from desktop only, and regularly delete my content), and the quality of discourse is already so much better again. I did create an account on beehaw and treat it as unfederated (only subscribing to local communities), the people there can be a bit strange, and there’s not a huge amount of content, but at least they aren’t as bad as the rest of the Lemmy fediverse.

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

#257

Post by Terretta »

aakjsdfajsdfh wrote: post #114
Terretta wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 AI commenter is the only one who read the article in this entire comment section. kudos. But yeah, see how the paper (and your summary) is full of holes? What creates the incentive so that one group become larger than the other? things do not happen in a vaccum, only in this paper I guess. or "endogenously" which might be their code word for "i don't want to investigate who paid for this". basically, there's one…

Having read the whole article I wanted to reply but know most of HN would not, so needed a recap to reply to you. Yes, recap was by Claude 2 100k because it's a long article and it types faster than I do. :-)

Now:

> What creates the incentive so that one group become larger than the other? things do not happen in a vaccum, only in this paper I guess. or "endogenously" which might be their code word for "i don't want to investigate who paid for this".

You don't need conspiracy to explain the "endogenous" results of democratic processes. They go like this.

> Now, the question I wanted to pose is: why 4 papers in this month alone held this obviously flawed argument, using wikipedia NPOV case as their case study?

Because (a) like 12 people work in academia and they're all at the same conference, and (b) how tenure works.

It's not a conspiracy so much as a "that guy talking about that idea by the punchbowl is going to get credit, I should do that and also get credit" lack of creativity. I think I also used the word "groupthink" above.

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

#258

Post by renonce »

hliyan wrote: post #43
CuriouslyC wrote: post #22

Earlier 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…

A social-first Internet makes sense but this is not going to be the way people do it. Let’s consider some models for rewarding content authors:

1. You are asked to pay before viewing the content. This incentivizes content owners to display clickbait titles but does not incentivize content quality. People will click through lots of interesting titles and have a hard time finding out the valuable ones.

2. You are asked to pay after viewing the content. This is similar to a donation - just look at the state of open-source software. Only a few geeks who understand the value of donation will pay.

3. You are asked to pay a subscription fee upfront, and the fee is split between all content owners that you did read. If you view YouTube, have you signed up for YouTube Premium? Why not? Do you trust YouTube not to hold your videos hostage and pay only a tiny bit of revenue to uploaders?

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

#259

Post by EricE »

pastage wrote: post #231
OfSanguineFire wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> [nigerians] would be unwelcome in the fediverse except for those few, often westernized+hipsterized people Considering people are sentenced to death by stoning for being LGBTQ in Nigeria. It is easy to understand why this might be an issue worth policing if you can.. Is it sane to fedderate with people who might be killed for what they interact with on your fediverse. Ordinary people does include gay people you kno…

Ah yes, the noble bigotry argument. Historically that's never, ever lead to disaster.

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

#260

Post by amelius »

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…

The main thing that should happen is that there is a threshold of effort before people can post things.

Like before Eternal September, people had to learn stuff to do things on the internet.

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