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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

#311

Post by didibus »

whatwhaaaaat wrote: post #224
vladms wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The mRNA shots were not tested at all for transmissibility yet we were told they prevented transmission

Data that has come out since does seem to indicate it lowers transmission.

But I'm unclear if you're trying to say that this turned out to be false (the reduction in transmission), or that you're pointing out how some policies were driven by claims that didn't yet have strong enough evidence backing them up?

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

#312

Post by bko »

kraftman wrote: post #287
bko wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is scientific American not reputabl? Here are a number of articles suggesting various arguments that there is no physical advantage of males in sports https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trans-girls-belon... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hormone-levels-ar... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/to-understand-sex... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the...

You seem to have missed these sections: "It turns out that when transgender girls play on girls’ sports teams, cisgender girls can win. In fact, the vast majority of female athletes are cisgender, as are the vast majority of winners. There is no epidemic of transgender girls dominating female sports. " "The Olympics have had trans-inclusive policies since 2004, but a single openly transgender athlete has yet to even…

> If trans people have such an obvious advantage why aren't they dominating every single category of every single strength-involving event?

Because there are fewer of them competing. Not every man is more athletic than every woman, but the most athletic men are more athletic than the most athletic women.

If me, as a man, tries competing in a women's weightlifting competition, I wouldnt do well, but I wouldn't do well in the male category either. But if you take competitive male athletes and have them compete against females, they will be incredibly competitive.

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

#313

Post by carapace »

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…

Nothing prevents Nigerians from setting up Mastodon servers.

The point of federation is not to force people to talk to people they don't like (for whatever reasons).

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

#314

Post by isodev »

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #107
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…

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…

> Just look at mastodon.social/explore

.social is but one of hundreds of instances. That's also what the parent comment was trying to say - we don't have to be drones, all unified under the same social server.

You're welcome to find an instance that aligns with your mindset or create one and shape it the way you like.

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

#315

Post by xacky »

101011 wrote: post #124
xacky wrote: post #35

Wikipedia 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.

It's a long story, I was a legitimate editor for a about a year and just built up a grudge which turned into making more unhelpful edits until I got banned. Wikipedia is not a good environment for when things go wrong.

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

#316

Post by CuriouslyC »

rvbissell wrote: post #63
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…

> What we need is a social-first internet * blood pressure intensifies * > where every piece of content is associated with an actual human and people query for content through their social graph I do think that latter part is an interesting idea, modulo performance questions and echo-chamber concerns. Also, what about providing anonymity to oppressed peoples? Perhaps for my last point above, we could have bifurcated…

The idea of a social first internet is that each person would maintain their own trust graph, rather than relying exclusively on centralized authorities to do so. It's a lot easier to game google than to try and astroturf the entire internet, and it's harder for google to quickly tweak ranking algorithms to fix some bad results than it is to revoke trust in the social graph from a bad actor.

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

#317

Post by laverya »

stuartjohnson12 wrote: post #275
nvm0n2 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And reverted by anyone, if the edit doesn't meet standards - like relying on an unapproved source to correct a claim.

And that's if the article isn't locked or otherwise restricted!

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

#318

Post by soundnote »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #300
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…

The problem with the culture of "just assume people are joking" is that some people aren't joking. The background of edgy jokes was used very effectively by actual hate movements, to massive impact. We all have to live with the consequences of that, and one of yours is that you're not getting the benefit of the doubt on nasty jokes anymore. You need to acknowledge that something went wrong, and then consider why it d…

[flagged]

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

#319

Post by slibhb »

kraftman wrote: post #287
bko wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is scientific American not reputabl? Here are a number of articles suggesting various arguments that there is no physical advantage of males in sports https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trans-girls-belon... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hormone-levels-ar... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/to-understand-sex... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the...

You seem to have missed these sections: "It turns out that when transgender girls play on girls’ sports teams, cisgender girls can win. In fact, the vast majority of female athletes are cisgender, as are the vast majority of winners. There is no epidemic of transgender girls dominating female sports. " "The Olympics have had trans-inclusive policies since 2004, but a single openly transgender athlete has yet to even…

> If trans people have such an obvious advantage why aren't they dominating every single category of every single strength-involving event?

Because there aren't that many trans women who compete in women's sports.

Neither of your quotes is close to a good argument. If you want to answer this question empirically, look at statistics (race times, lbs lifted, etc) and women's competitions where trans women competed.

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

#320

Post by ants_everywhere »

tentacleuno wrote: post #168
ants_everywhere wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I think that's exactly right. In the ideal case you would want to moderate with a personal touch at the start and the use automation to scale that personality as needed. I was thinking of AI in moderation mainly as signals. Like looking for synchronized activity or standard canned tactics and just surface them as signals or alerts to be looked at by humans. Basically make it easier to combat coordination and scal…

> I was thinking of AI in moderation mainly as signals. Like looking for synchronized activity or standard canned tactics and just surface them as signals or alerts to be looked at by humans. Basically make it easier to combat coordination and scale that is hard for any one moderater to see. 100%. It would be great if that could become public, too -- perhaps moderators could contribute to the model, maybe even automa…

> It would be great if that could become public, too

Absolutely, that would be awesome

> Though I'm unsure as to how you would prevent bias from entering the model.

My only thought here is that something like the Hacker News model works pretty well (at least in theory). You would focus on norms of communication rather than on the content being expressed.

You'd still get bias for things like one community may prefer things very deferential. Another might value frank communication. But presumably nobody likes screaming or brigading. I think you're less likely to get left/right style biases if you focus on the quality of the communication rather than its content.

An approach like this would still miss important things. For example, you can say very toxic things in a civil voice. So you'd likely have to combine different orthogonal signals to have any sort of guarantee that your site isn't slowly drifting into a place where people know how to consistently violate the rules while evading detection.

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