Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

cambridge.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 669 posts

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

#401

Post by lamontcg »

cabalamat wrote: post #376
bnralt wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the fundamental problems with most things on the internet is that there’s unlimited output. A socially dysfunctional shut-in living on the internet is simply going to have a much larger output than someone with a healthy social life that only uses the internet in moderation. Someone who is judicious about their upvotes is going to have a much smaller impact than some who just reflexively upvotes or downvotes e…

> Someone who is judicious about their upvotes is going to have a much smaller impact than some who just reflexively upvotes or downvotes everything based on kneejerk reactions. It would be very easy for websites to weight upvotes so that one from someone who seldom uses them weighs more.

That probably incentivizes selling accounts to bot farms, usually in social media you give more weight to people who have stuck around longer rather than the accounts that have less activity and might be fake.

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

#402

Post by denton-scratch »

gwd wrote: post #4

I seem to remember a talk I heard a very long time ago, maybe by Joel Splosky? He was saying that he'd observed the "population change" effect in USENET; where argumentative jerks tended to stay and helpful people tended to be driven away; and in his mind the "reply in-line" mechanic specifically contributed to this. So the first-order goal he had when he built Stack Overflow was to build a system with mechanics whic…

[flagged]

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

#403

Post by drawkward »

bigger_inside wrote: post #64
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…

and this, exactly, is why I scoffed when I read the headline touting wikipedia as the "last good place" on the internet. It's become a defender of hegemonic status quo narratives. I read wikipedia articles about phenomena my academic discipline is involved with and I keep thinking, "why do they still push that as true? This is ridiculous" about every time I log in. But it serves hegemonic knowledge production,so it's…

How do you feel about science? How is science different than Wikipedia? The scientific method is just a method for taking down hegemonic statuses quo, and honestly, doesn't seem that different from how Wikipedia works.

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

#404

Post by seattle_spring »

PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #282
afavour wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

diversity doesn't imply race and anyone who thinks so is a racist. Just as minorities are not defined by their skin color, neither are whites.

I always find it deeply hilarious when people online expand on their definition of "diversity of thought." Mostly because it always means more of exactly one single type of "thought".

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

#405

Post by vcg3rd »

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".

SE has become (for a while now) the Platonic Form for RTFM.

It doesn't matter how much effort one puts into researching and troubleshooting (including reading many F (man)uals and forums) before asking, nor does it matter how much detail you provide to show how X (which is supposed to do Y, and does on many machines), does Z on yours for some reason, and, BTW, here's my logs and output for foo[1-5], all you get is "asked and answered RTFM, n00b."

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

#406

Post by pvg »

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…

Wikipedia is supposed to represent current consensus so that's not a particularly strong critique of an encyclopedia. When the current consensus is wrong, Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, will be wrong.

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

#408

Post by FireBeyond »

_gabe_ wrote: post #244
fesoliveira wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can also play this game of stating things without giving an argument: They do.

Here’s an article from Larry Sanger (original creator of Wikipedia) giving the case for why Wikipedia is biased https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ .

That's ... not a good article.

Larry just comes across as pissed off. He complains that Obama's article doesn't discuss, or discuss enough for his liking, "Hilary's email servers".

He complains that it doesn't discuss Obamagate in any detail. Possibly because it was essentially a baseless accusation/conspiracy from Trump that when investigated, showed no evidence?

He complains that Trump's page contains too many "negative words", in sections like his "Public Profile" (and then complains that Obama doesn't have a section titled exactly the same, though he does have "Cultural and Political Image").

He complains that the article on abortion describes it as a very safe medical procedure, "a claim that is questionable on its face" - which is why the article links to citations, unlike Larry, who just rebuts with "conservatives don't think so".

He then goes on to claim that "Wikipedia holds positions that some scientific minorities reject" around concepts such as the MMR vaccine, global warning, chiropractic and homeopathy. That latter one is the easiest, as there is zero assertion based in physics that a substance can be imbued with the "essence" of something when diluted to the point where it would take multiple universes worth of molecules to get one original molecule in the final substance. Sanger wholly fails to give a valid reason why anyone should give homeopathic dilutions an equal weight to the rest of our body of work on medicine and physics other than "bias!"

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

#409

Post by simbolit »

chris_wot wrote: post #394
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.

Depends what your goal is. If you want to feel appreciated, I agree, wikipedia is a horrible place.

If you want to contribute to making human knowledge available to everyone, it's the best place we have.

My personal rule: don't interact with the community, unless absolutely necessary. has served me well in the last 18 years.

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

#410

Post by brlewis »

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…

Wikipedia is a repository for established truth, not for discovering truth. For discovering truth you have https://www.kialo.com/ and the one I'm working on, https://en.howtruthful.com/ but I've only in the past 2 weeks been able to work on it full-time.
Post reply on HN