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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

#341

Post by billywhizz »

toyg wrote: post #125
hliyan wrote: post #43

Earlier 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…

> if it had asked for $0.25 The economics of credit-card transactions, unfortunately, make this fundamentally impossible.

there is an ongoing initiative in EU (I think US has something similar brewing) called SEPA-Inst which in theory allows free transfers between bank accounts in the EuroZone. sadly, it still comes with a lot of caveats and not possible to guarantee it being free, depending on counterparty banks and potential FX charges.

https://www.quanloop.com/en/investing/are-sepa-payments-real...

it will be interesting to see if lightning/crypto etc. will continue to increase pressure to improve this capability in the traditional banking system - it would enable all sorts of new payment/pricing models for online services like discussed here.

i would love to be able to just make micro-payments for things i have found useful, regardless of what site they are on.

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

#342

Post by fumeux_fume »

WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #99

What's wrong with Stack Exchange? I'm a Math Stack Exchange user and I think it's absolutely amazing for the knowledge seeker. It's a repository of high quality questions and answers that you're not going to answer yourself. You can instantly access hundreds of the smartest people in the world. You can spend a week thinking about something difficult and frequently get it answered in under an hour, sometimes 10 minute…

Not all, but many of the SE elite are awful to deal with unless you want to spend more time following their arbitrary demands than providing helpful answers to people's questions.

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

#343

Post by PopePompus »

arrowsmith wrote: post #230
101011 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I may ask, how did you 'vandalize' it? It sounds like the definition of this word has some additional connotation within Wikipedia.

"Vandalizing" in the Wikipedia context means editing pages to add stupid, offensive, trollish, or deliberately incorrect content. It happens all the time, which is why some pages (mainly those about controversial topics) have additional protections to make it harder for untrusted people to edit them.

It is amazing how frequently Wikipedia is vandalized. It happens several times per second. Much of it is removed automatically by bots that will roll back edits which contain strings like "qeqeqeqewqeerrttt". On weekends, you can expect something like "List of Sluts" to appear on the articles for many highschools - they will disappear within a minute or so.

You can configure Wikipedia to send you an email whenever a certain article is edited. I monitor several thousand articles that way, and remove malicious edits. Lots of editors do that, and vandalism is usually cleaned up very quickly.

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

#344

Post by RationalDino »

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?

The bad kind of diversity is projecting your ideology onto others, and deciding to like them. The good kind of diversity is attempting to understand what it would be like to think in ways that are alien to you.

To consider current events, let's take Hamas. Hamas is a deeply conservative and radicalized group. They believe in banning abortion, killing gays, killing Jews, and that atheists are evil. This is not slander, they would agree with all of this. And there are good historical reasons why they believe these things.

Suppose that you're LBGTQ+ and aren't a member of a church, and are carrying a sign saying, "Palestine will be free from sea to sea." What are you actually supporting? You're supporting people who are brown and oppressed, who in turn would like to see you dead. Now it may be that in your ideology it is worth this on ethical principles. But most people like that who I've dealt with simply ignore the fact that they are supporting people who believe in banning abortion, killing gays, killing Jews, and that atheists are evil. And then are caught by surprise if they encounter the fact that Hamas believes in banning abortion, killing gays, killing Jews, and that atheists are evil. (And try to forget that they heard it.)

I, personally, like knowing a diverse group of people. And understanding them for who they are. I may disagree with them violently, but I still like trying to understand them. But this requires a very different kind of tolerance than most progressives preach. For a start, you can't start by banning intolerant speech. Because there is no way to express the intolerant views that many people actually have without being willing to listen to (though not agree with) intolerant speech.

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

#345

Post by cameronh90 »

afavour wrote: post #116
OfSanguineFire wrote: post #107

Earlier 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…

I suspect GP was referring to the diversity of thought as well as the diversity of race. However, I would also expect the average isn't a useful metric in this context.

The early internet didn't attempt to silo you as it had no real technical capacity for it. Maybe only (for argument's sake) ~2% of the internet back then was non-US/Europe, but that meant ~2% of the messages I read came from non-US/Europe. Nowadays, Xitter, Reddit, TikTok, etc. all have algorithms that try to fit me into a bucket with similar people, so even if now 50% of the internet is non-US/Europe, what I'm actually experiencing is far closer to 0% than it used to be.

The internet I experience now is far less diverse even than just walking down my local high street. Looking at that mastodon link, for example, is so unbelievably unrepresentative of the kind of diversity (by all axes) I experience just by going outside.

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

#346

Post by throwaway14356 »

wwweston wrote: post #329
soundnote wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you literally can’t find a space where your views are palatable, then it’s possible there’s something wrong with them. And if what you’re seeking is the privilege to compel other people who take responsibility for setting up and administering such spaces to carry / broadcast your unmoderated views regardless of their own, what we’re talking about isn’t really any principled kind of liberty.

possibly, but we could also be wrong. Tell me the solution is to not talk about it but do it without the talking?

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

#347

Post by superkuh »

yard2010 wrote: post #245
yason wrote: post #24

All places ever deemed 'good' have had sufficient technological or financial, and above all intellectual barriers of entry that filter out regular joes. BBS's in the 80's. Usenet till the early 90's. WWW till the late 90's. IRC till early 00's. Forums replaced usenet groups but have been in decline for years. Once those barriers are broken and the masses flood in then the supply side will emerge and takes over with s…

Fwiw I'm still using usenet in 2023. It's great alternative to torrents :)

I'm still using text only usenet groups to talk to other people about star trek, cyberpunk, linux, and IRC. Activity is low, maybe a post or two a month per group, but it's real people and decent community. Come back and join us. Usenet/IRC/email/self-hosted blogging still works. There aren't fewer of us, there are just more people in the walled gardens.

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

#348

Post by 4ggr0 »

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]

And what a shame that we can't really call people the f-word anymore, can't even use LGBT slurs, angrily shakes fist at the sky.

Seriously, I don't get the people who miss these things. I admit that it was funny to the 14 year old version of me to call my friends the n-word while playing Call of Duty, but rather sooner than later we understood that some things aren't edgy, just offensive, unnecessary and hurtful.

And it's not as if edgyness went away completely. Reddit has it's corners, there's plenty of *chan sites, if you search around on YouTube you'll encounter "eDgY" content (edgy in that context == "racist, anti-lgbt, mysoginistic etc.")

Netflix and YT have stand-up specials from edgy comedians. I saw more than one "edgy" Discord server, with "edgy" memes and jokes.

Also typical that a bit furter up in this comment thread, the one thing which is deemed to be wrong with Mastodon is that Anti-LGBT speech is not allowed, which somehow means that you loose diversity. Because what I want when talking to diverse people is hearing them hate gay people for absolutely no reason at all.

Anti-LGBT takes are not opinions to me. I label myself as a tolerating, open-minded person, which doesn't mean that I accept or want intolerant and closed-minded people near me, and I refuse to accept that this somehow makes me intolerant or anti-diversity.

/rant

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

#349

Post by ajsnigrutin »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #186
z7 wrote: post #47

>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…

To your last point, I think this is something people get confused about. I think no reasonable person says science is always right and there is never any corruption in the process. Science is done by humans and humans are fallible. The argument is that science is the best we have , not that it's perfect. One thing I see with 100% of conspiracy theorists is that they have no self-awareness of when they're wrong. They…

But who gets to decide what stays on and what gets deleted? Does the tectonic plate theory stay on wikipedia, or do we delete it, since it's just a conspiracy theory (let's say we flew back in time a bit)? What about epsteins "suicide"? Would an articl about "heart problems as covid vaccine side-effect" stay on wikipedia a year and a half ago, or would it get deleted? In hindsight, it's easy... but who gets to decide about the 'now'?

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

#350

Post by slibhb »

With "fringe editors" forced out from wikipedia, the people who forced them out have become more and more political. Instead of arguing about homeopathy and astrology, hot topics now include trans issues and covid. The former situation was preferable.

The basic problem is that, once you win your battle, you ought to pack up and go home. In practice this rarely happens; success leads to triumphalism and excess.

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