It is very good that the internal and political inner dynamics or wikipedia or pointed out. People should be aware of them. However, judging wikipedia´s place in the internet or the internet in general is an normative judgement that has nothing to do with Wikipedia´s internal dynamics.
How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
271–280 of 669 posts
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#272>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…
Here an example of a theory that current practitioners will just plainly call pseudo-science (and is very likely wrong):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics
If anything, my criticism of this article is that the first few paragraphs don't explain how fringe it is. (And I'm firmly on the opinion that working on it is important, because it's the only path out of the almost disproved box that we have.)
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#273> 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…
> everyone from every major newspaper more or less went to the same schools, has a similar world view, lives in the same metro and fraternizes with the same crowds
This may be true in the US, I wouldn't know, but I work in media, and that hasn't been my experience at all.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I think it's revisionism to suggest that the old internet was far more politically and culturally diverse Of course it was more diverse because no-one was kicking anyone off any platform when there was no social media and content policy in application in the first place. I don't even know how you can seriously think that this was not the case.
Wasn’t there but I find it hard to believe that webmasters were kicking off people with views they found toxic. That Forms don’t have ban wars. There’s nothing about the internet or social media in regards to “cancel culture” or anything like it. Humanity has been doing it since we formed communities.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia's goal isn't correctness, it is to aggregate the consensus of reliable sources. Wikipedia isn't reliable because it is agreed upon, it is reliable because determining truth values is outsourced to publishers who can mostly be depended on due to the value of reputation amongst experts in the information distribution sector. Publishers have their own biases which Wikipedia will aggregate. This is still, in my…
They mostly outsource to a large variety of very unreliable sources and then exclude others based purely on politics, to the extent that people can't even get false statements about themselves corrected, let alone false statements about other people or topics.
There is no "they". Wikipedia can be edited by anyone.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#276I love Wikipedia. It's my favourite website of all time.
However, to say that "fringe" editors were largely driven out is false. In many places, "fringe" editors co-operate to win edit wars and form secret voting blocks in community decisions in an attempt to push their misshapen ideas into the mainstream.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Individual action takes place in a context of social cues and incentives. Those who understand this try to work together to change those things, which in turn changes the “easy defaults” for everyone. This is a million times more effective than limiting your approach to nagging people to do better for ideological reasons.
> Individual action takes place in a context of social cues and incentives. Those who understand this try to work together to change those things, which in turn changes the “easy defaults” for everyone. I think this discounts the fact that people are not mindless automatons following the path of least resistance. Individuals are capable of difficult things that fly in the face of collective theory, and time and time…
Individual action directed toward the problem itself is what you do to feel like you're making a change, often at cost far in excess of the benefit of that change (which is part of why this mechanism often fails, even when a large majority want that change). There's nothing wrong with it, but at a society level, you can't count on it to get much done.
Individual action directed toward affecting policy in organizations that can overcome coordination problems (largely government) is where you focus if you want to have a big effect, but maybe not get as much immediate satisfaction.
It's still individual action.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#278Earlier 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…
I think professional trolls, bad faith argument, toxic influencers, lynch mobs, rage bait, and all the other moving parts that make up the Internet’s profoundly toxic political and social activism sphere also did their part. That stuff really exploded in the mid 20-teens. Of course you could consider some of that a special case of content mills and spam. It certainly can’t be separated from the ad based business mode…
To be honest, i do not think the internet invented that. There are parts of the world, were lynch mobs still are considered justice.
Were face is more important than facts.
To generate a healthy eco-system, for a unhealthy human species.. thats quite the challenge.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#279People 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’d add - pay for services when you can afford it. For example, encourage smaller search engines like Kagi. Maybe pay for email, instead of using gmail. Pay for smaller/local news orgs that do original and honest reporting. And so on. And donate to archive.org etc, even if it is only 5$ When we pay for services, we can fight spam/ad invested sites, at least to some extent
This is my approach. I've almost completely de-Googled my private life. For email I use Fastmail. I've migrated most my mail over there, but some remains on my old Google address. So many accounts to port.
For search I now mainly use Kagi. Sometimes I drop into Google if I can't find what I'm looking for on Kagi. The nice thing about Kagi is I can manually block or de-prioritize SEO spam domains so I get more relevant results. Takes a bit of time to build these lists, but it does work.
I use primarily Firefox and Safari as browsers. I also support Mozilla via my Pocket subscription.
Edit:
I also have my own website where I post content without any ads or tracking. The content is even licensed under a CC attribute and share-alike license so people can re-post and remix my content as long as they give proper attribution.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve been to fediverse. Many mastodongs are just the same entitled first world outrage vents as twitters, even more toxic at times because there are no moderators to shut them up.
Mastodon will never make it (e.g my parents, non tech siblings at least know what it is). My experience, too, wasn't positive, the only time there was meaningful activity there was when everyone said they hate Elon and Twitter, it's an echo chamber, no interesting voices, and that whole fediverse stuff is confusing even as a software developer, imagine how nontech people would feel (they _would_ if they ever heard ab…
Mastodon doesn't need to "make" it or "happen". Mastodon is not out there trying to become _the thing_. It works exactly as expected for a segment of people. It may not be your cup of tea and that's fine! Good thing we can have both.