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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

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

You can't retroactively justify a lie. If I think Bob is in jail and I tell you he's not in jail, it doesn't matter later if he turned out never to have been in jail.

The claims that were being made, and being used to push policy, were at the time something that hadn't even been tested.

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

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Take a look at some of the details about what I’m saying. If you still feel like you were told the truth then that is fine. No trials on transmission were done yet we were lead to believe they were. I was skeptical myself at first.

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

#363

My (admittedly personal & anecdotal) impression of Wikipedia is that the objectivity of the content highly depends on the subject - particularly anything that touches on more recent historical events and public/political figures continues to be of the debatable objectivity (at least on the subjects that I'm familiar with enough to notice the problem).

Yes. There are some remarkably high-quality articles on somewhat esoteric topics that don't directly touch on politics that I'd definitely recommend, but if it touches on politics, it's highly likely to be tainted and editorialized.

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

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

#365

I've soured on Wikipedia. You can't make edits without turning Wikipedia internal politics into your full-time hobby because you run into people who have. That doesn't mean their opinions are more or less correct, yet they count for more. Any political or politically controversial topic you basically get the US State Dept.-approved official/propaganda narrative on the topic with 0 room for other views. To actually ge…

Wikipedia doesn't cover politically charged topics very well. I mostly edit topics which don't have such a problem.

Even so, I've managed to edit the Derek Chauvin article without any trouble. There's a certain shape of controversy that's painful to get involved with.

Usually it's matters of nationalism. For instance, anything with respect to India is a complicated thing to act on.

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

#366

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…

I love your attitude, and I agree that we should be trying to fix this, but the problem is not a lack of signal, it's an increase in noise. Fixing the web means changing it in fundamental ways.

Suppose your webbable hobby is curating trustworthy product reviews. You're the hero that's going to fix the web AND capitalism. You can still do that, but you're going to help fewer people because you have to split your attention between you know, doing the thing, and doing the kind of marketing which helps people tell the difference between your thing and the ones that are secretly ads. Meanwhile, the bad guys can focus entirely on the latter. Sorry about the time you wanted to spend comparing blenders, your hobby is now competing with marketers... Or you have to make peace with either obscurity, or contributing to the thing you're trying to kill, because you know that the second you start making an impact somebody is going to rehost your site interleaved with misinformation.

Yes, let's fix this thing but the answer is protocols with different inherent priorities. We can't shout over the noise, we need to build something less noisy.

My personal view is that we should stop building trust around server names and implicitly trusting whatever those servers send us. In this model the non-content-generating work converges on systems to identify and remove malicious content (either from the server or from the browser screen).

Instead we should be addressing content, and sourcing it from whatever device has a copy and is most near. Our browser should know which people we trust and should make it easy for us to lean on that trust such that we can propagate only the trusted bits in the first place.

That is: stop identifying ads so that we can block them, start identifying trustworthy content so we can all participate in propagating it more efficiently and supporting it's creators.

Or to put it differently: there needs to be no way to spend money to promote content. No third parties injecting bits anywhere. If you notice that kind of shit, you apply annotations which distinguish the signal from the noise and then you propagate only the signal. If people abuse this power, you revoke trust in them and move on.

It'll require an awareness of information hygiene, which will be work to maintain, but all of the alternatives I can see involve tolerating life in a Skinner box

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

#367

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…

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

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

This isn't something you should do, because it is not sensible. If you ask 10,000 people what two plus two equals, then write out a list of all of the unique answers you get, 99% of them will be wrong.

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

#369

I've soured on Wikipedia. You can't make edits without turning Wikipedia internal politics into your full-time hobby because you run into people who have. That doesn't mean their opinions are more or less correct, yet they count for more. Any political or politically controversial topic you basically get the US State Dept.-approved official/propaganda narrative on the topic with 0 room for other views. To actually ge…

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

#370
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…

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