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How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
331–340 of 669 posts
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think “political and social views” covers a very wide range of thought. For instance, an avowed Nazi would not have been welcome in a holocaust survivors newsgroup in the early internet. Someone who is “anti-LGBT” to the extent that they wish those people dead have a similarly extreme view and I’m not surprised that they are policed. > they would be unwelcome on the Fediverse I think part of the problem here is cen…
You don't need to be very anti rainbow ideology (which should be distinguished from simply being gay, for example: "Listen to gay people" never means Douglas Murray or the Gays Against Groomers organization, for example, because they may be gay but they have the wrong politics) to be tossed from most spaces rainbow activist types moderate.
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Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
> It was extremely white and nerdy
and male.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
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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 word "plonk" was coined in 1989. https://infogalactic.com/info/Plonk_(Usenet)
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need to be very anti rainbow ideology (which should be distinguished from simply being gay, for example: "Listen to gay people" never means Douglas Murray or the Gays Against Groomers organization, for example, because they may be gay but they have the wrong politics) to be tossed from most spaces rainbow activist types moderate.
There's a reason there's other letters besides 'G', and "a minority can be hostile to another minority" isn't a new idea. Of course a person gets booted for attacking other members of the community regardless of who they are.
The point is: "anti-LGBT" is much more about politics and ideology than it is about the actual minorities - the minorities are used as a shield against criticism by activist types, who claim critiquing their ideology is hating those minorities. The typical rhetoric is also highly exaggerating, where if I disagree with the sensibility of trans identification, for example, people will readily accuse me of "denying their existence", as if disagreeing with one idea they hold invalidates their entire person (well, I guess it could if they really have no other content in their heads), when it's just one idea.
Same with being pro-LGBT: The activists aren't pro gay people, or pro black, or pro transpeople. They don't want me listening to Douglas Murray, or Gays Against Groomers, or Thomas Sowell. They definitely aren't pro Scott Newgent of "What is a woman?" fame. They're pro rainbow ideologue people. The politics is the point, the minority status simply a convenient shield from criticism and hate claims a cudgel to beat people over the head with.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Ted Nelson's vision (in "Dream Machines") was strongly focused on micro-transactions for this reason.
To “nickel and dime”¹ is usually seen as a bad thing; to intentionally build it into our information infrastructure would probably be a horrible idea.
1. https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=nickel_and_dime&...>
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#337Earlier 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…
It's also notable what a small number of people we're talking about. States have passed laws aimed at addressing this that affect literally a handful individuals living in that state. The amount of smoke this issue is generating is way out of proportion to its actual impact. Meanwhile, PED use among athletes and the general public is increasing[1][2] with little public pushback.
[1] https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/issues/2021/0215/p203.html
[2] https://www.usada.org/spirit-of-sport/education/use-performa...
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#338Can'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…
Add generational lens. I barely recognize much of the 70's and 80's history on wiki. A lot of it clearly wasn't written by someone who lived through it, and if it isn't linkable it basically doesn't exist. History is written by the victors, and they only do the internet. All those books, newspaper and magazine articles of that era just don't exist outside of libraries and microfiche and it's clear none of those wiki…
It will only get worse.
Even with the internet, there are things (eg. from the beginning of covid), where I clearly remember someone (in my country) saying/promising something, eg. regarding vaccines, anti-covid measures, etc., and those things don't exist anymore. I've found a few articles or transcripts in google cache, but the orignals are gone, archive.org doesn't have them and poof, they're gone. "we've always been saying X" will become the truth, since any record of them saying otherwise has somehow disapeared... and it's only been two years!
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#339Earlier 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.
Depends on the community. Some were very quick to ban you. But there'd ~always be other ones.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#340Earlier 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.
In practice, there is a hivemind of extremely active editors which will rules lawyer you to death if you introduce a fact they don't like.