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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

#391

Post by kelseyfrog »

seti0Cha wrote: post #373
kelseyfrog wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, and the result of which is an echo chamber, which was OPs point. I didn't see anyone complaining that their own speech was being suppressed. Does anyone question that it's ideologically homogeneous? It seems to me the question is, is that a good thing or a bad thing.

"I don't see anyone questioning, so we must conclude it's true," is epistemological laziness. Any hypothesis must be testable and actually tested before believed otherwise it's religion. JTB applies here too.

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

#392

Post by marcusverus »

soundnote wrote: post #267
afavour wrote: post #202

Earlier 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.

Lefties always rationalize their embrace of illiberal tactics like censorship by citing extreme cases (“we just want to filter out people who want us dead”), only to turn around and apply the tactic very broadly (wrongthink = permanban). This Motte-and-Bailey fallacy is the rhetorical lever which has allowed the left to crybully millions of erstwhile liberals into becoming so many cheerleaders for censorship.

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

#393

Post by sockaddr »

aroundtown wrote: post #219
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…

> What's wrong with Stack Exchange? Every time I have posted a question on SE it is either flagged as already answered (when it's not) or people screaming "XY Problem!" My approach to SE now is "Look, Don't Touch".

Exactly.

It's such a pain in the ass to contribute knowledge there that I just don't even bother trying anymore.

It's a collection of petty tyrants at this point. I can't wait for LLMs to just digest them whole.

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

#394

Post by chris_wot »

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…

I got banned for life from Wikipedia, because I commented on a request for adminship from a user the literally banned forever 9 weeks ago.

I wrote countless articles for them, but they didn’t give a crap. I now contribute photos to commons.

Don’t bother contributing to Wikipedia. Only people who fiddle around with changing URLs, categories and templates are appreciated. It’s not worthwhile putting in the effort.

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

#395

Post by chris_wot »

hindsightbias wrote: post #322
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…

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…

Many of us did actually go to libraries, but we got kicked off the site.

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

#396

Post by gunapologist99 »

veltas wrote: post #52
Angostura wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common complaint against many publications or resources that attempt unbiased coverage - they are are attacked by people on all sides as being biased against their side.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...

MSNBC = reliable

Mother Jones = reliable

Fox News = unreliable

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

#397

Post by drawkward »

xacky wrote: post #315
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.

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.

>Wikipedia is not a good environment for when things go wrong.

I want that, when it is being said by someone who

>built up a grudge which turned into making more unhelpful edits

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

#398

Post by some_random »

WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #136
sasaf5 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's wrong with Stack Exchange? Also with HN, many subreddits, millions of personal blogs and sites... I tried to find why the paper says that Wikipedia is "the last good place on the internet", but it doesn't seem to provide any reference for that. Is it a meme somewhere?

I like the AskHistorians subreddit, but I haven't found much else. I think AskHistorians and Stack Exchange have a somewhat high "barrier to entry" for actually answering questions, which might be part of it. (I mean this in the sense that you're going to get down-voted to hell if you don't really know what you're doing on Stack Exchange, and I think you actually have to be a historian to answer on AskHistorians.) HN…

The difference is that the answers to history related questions don't change with nearly the same frequency that tech related answers change, and even still r/askhistorians doesn't just lock "duplicate" questions so answers that are new or subtly different can still be submitted.

Also it's worth noting that you do NOT need to be a professional historian to answer, you basically just have to provide sources that pass the sniff test.

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

#399

Post by terminous »

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…

It sounds like you're not addicted to Wikipedia, you're addicted to imposing your particular point of view on everyone else, and all the messy Internet drama that results from that. Things don't go your way in a collaboration and so you "vandalize" other people's contributions, and then blame the platform that "addicted" you?

It sounds like if you joined any open source, open collaboration project, or volunteer organization, you'd be a huge pain to work with unless everyone agreed with you all the time.

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

#400

Post by MR4D »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #22
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…

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…

This.

SEO has become a real current day Paperclip Apocalypse, just through ads instead of paperclips. And to think we’ve barely introduced AI to it yet!

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