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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

#301

Post by giraffe_lady »

mavhc wrote: post #288
cbozeman wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, although I understand why such a simplistic and easily-digestible idea would be appealing to a group of people who increasingly want simple answers. We want to go back to the Internet of thick-skinned people who rarely even blocked others, much less actively tried to get them banned. We want to go back to the Internet where you can say wild shit and people are smart / savvy enough to know you're just being edgy a…

[flagged]

ha thank you this got to the heart of it much more concisely than I could.

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

#302

Post by 1970-01-01 »

dongping wrote: post #23

Not that I don't agree. I would however rank Sci-Hub, Library Genesis and Anna's Archive higher than Wikipedia. And don't forget about Internet Archive and Arxiv. This vast amount of high quality human knowledge was not available in the good old internet 20 years ago.

The irony is wonderful. 'Last' is a relative term, and was poorly chosen as an attention grabbing headline. Also worth mentioning is the Internet is not the WWW, and content is so often conflated with the network that it overflows into 'academic' papers.

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

#303

Post by kelseyfrog »

soundnote wrote: post #264
t-3 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

The point is that the federation mechanism explicitly means that any server that is federated will have to follow those policies, because the admins of all the large servers hew to a certain ideology that will not tolerate dissent from key talking points. So the server can technically speaking exist on the protocol but in practice won't be federated with the broader network unless it's palatable to Californicated act…

This reads like, "I don't like it because my messages won't end up on other servers," which I guess that's fine. We have to be cognizant that no one running a server is obligated technically, socially, or morally to platform anyone's speech because doing so would violate the NAP of admins.

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

#304

Post by soundnote »

shadowgovt wrote: post #283
2devnull wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd be interested to learn more. What is the bad kind of diversity, and what is the good kind of diversity?

Presumably: The bad sort is a diversity where people look different but all think more or less the same, so the proponents can pat themselves on the back for being good and openminded people but don't actually have to deal with genuinely different people. You can see it in how those sorts tend to despise people who look the same as themselves but have different views and how their love of diversity disappears the second the different-looking person doesn't hew to their ideology.

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

#305

Post by didibus »

VancouverMan wrote: post #115
jwestbury wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yes, when it comes to knowledge I'd say that it is a good thing to remove those supporting fringe content. Consensus amongst those who generally care about a topic is probably better for ensuring largely correct data than the alternative of a large number of voices, each with a questionable level of actual subject matter expertise.

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…

> 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 consensus" from the medical, political, and mass media communities was wrong

If you take all fringe hypothesis and claims posted online, you'll find time and time again that so many of them are wrong, and not just by a margin, but often times ridiculously far off.

And you'll find that a lot of more "official" claims were right.

It leaves us with some of the outliers, where fringe claims were right and "official" claims were wrong.

Now someone would need to tally them up and all to actually see how often. But that impression you have seems to be misjudging this.

The other issue in your judgement in my opinion is that you're focusing entirely on this particular event. But the expert process was being interfered with, due to the extensively political nature of it, and the strong pressures from everyone else to get answers before it's possible to do so with high confidence.

And finally, the only basis we're even using to assess which ones were "right" or "wrong" after the fact is a form of consensus, and primarily an "expert consensus" that has simply had more time to settle.

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

#306

Post by js8 »

anononaut wrote: post #284
js8 wrote: post #123

Yanis Varoufakis had some interesting talks about techno-feudalism. He argues that if the big cloud and platform companies control the platform, it's not really a free market capitalism anymore. I used to be skeptical, because I believe for such transformation to take hold completely, a supporting ideology has to be developed, but maybe it's just too early for that yet and some ideology will appear. Varoufakis is als…

I want to discuss online my burnin disdain for governments. I'm certain likeminded people would not be allowed to on a platform operated as a public service. For true freedom of expression, it's a nonstarter.

I think you're wrong, there were plenty of anti-government people appearing in public TV back in the 60s, 70s, 80s.. The government doesn't really care as much as you think it does.

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

#307

Post by oliveiracwb »

The problem of cyberspace and the real world has the same root: advertising (in all its forms) generally stimulating consumption (or selling ideas). The real world would also be a nicer place with less advertising. Somehow they discovered that controlling the form, manner and timing of advertisements is a great power. And they are fighting to take this power from the big networks.

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

#308

Post by jmbwell »

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…

> Mastodon's federation policies

Perhaps you're referring to the policies of individual instance administrators, as "Mastodon" has no centralized "policies" as far as I know.

I run more than one instance, and as far as I can tell, I can manage them however I want.

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

#309

Post by amiga386 »

local_crmdgeon wrote: post #252
matkoniecz wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This probably isn't the spirit, but the simplest thing is to right-click on the map and pick "Add note", that's definitely participating, although there's an "outsiderness" to it, you have to hope an "insider" (someone who has created an account) actually works on the map to address your note... someone unlike Wikipedia where both anonymous and logged-in users get direct editing access to the underlying data.

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

#310

Post by carimura »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #177

Can'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…

> 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

Came here to say this. 98% of the content is perfectly fine. Searching for "lemurs" in any search engine returns a perfectly trustworthy (calling all lemur experts!) wikipedia page. But, look for anything divisive, political, cultural, etc., and I've increasingly noticed the articles take clear positions.

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