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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

#451

Post by t-3 »

seti0Cha wrote: post #431
kelseyfrog wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

What the heck are you even talking about? I'm not running experiments, I'm trying to have a conversation. Do you or do you not believe the fediverse is ideologically homogeneous? I see people here arguing that it is, but that it is justifiably so. I don't see anyone clearly claiming it's not, but someone might. I think it is homogeneous for the very reasons you gave (i.e. people are not obliged to propagate speech th…

The fediverse is not ideologically or politically homogenous, there exist right-wing and apolitical instances, there exist instances targeted at exclusive and obscure subgroups, etc. If you never bother to look beyond the most popular instances, you obviously won't see many unpopular views.

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

#452

Post by ants_everywhere »

js8 wrote: post #41
ants_everywhere wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all great ideas, and I echo them. But I do feel like these sorts of collective problems are hard to solve by each person trying to do their own part working alone. One reason that corporate internet won is that money transfers to a single entity, and that pot of money can be used to coordinate action in some particular direction (for better or worse depending on your view). Without some coordination mechani…

I think socialism is the mechanism - one person one vote with the stake of ownership. I am pretty liberal but it I believe it needs socialism (democracy in economic sphere) to avoid capture by corporations. (And vice versa, socialism needs liberalism to prevent capture by government. They can't survive without each other, being constantly threatened by authoritarianism.)

> one person one vote with the stake of ownership.

I'm not great with the terminology of this stuff. Just to be clear on what you're suggesting, do you mean that each person has a stake of ownership as well as a single vote? So functionally something like a corporation with one kind of stock where no owner owns more than one share?

And do you mean to have restrictions on stock ownership? Like everyone in the country gets a share? Or only employees can own a share? Or anyone can buy a single share? Or something else?

I think there are interesting points to explore along the design space of how we distribute stock shares. I just don't know enough about it to have much intuition, and I'm trying to get a sense of how I could model it.

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

#453

Post by _jal »

denton-scratch wrote: post #402
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]

I used to, but mostly changed my mind. I still do it with certain people/discussions, but that's usually for long, high-context, complicated discussions.

In the general case, I try very hard to make no more than one point or ask no more than one question per email. It feels reductive and limiting, but it really does make comms with the median person work much better.

I'm not sure what work that weird, irrelevant gendered speculation is supposed to be doing, so I have no comment.

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

#454

Post by nvy »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #396
veltas wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

MSNBC = reliable Mother Jones = reliable Fox News = unreliable

I'm not familiar with MSNBC and have never even heard of Mother Jones, but surely it's not controversial that Fox News is unreliable? They're an absolute punch line everywhere outside the US.

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

#455

Post by babypuncher »

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…

"Current consensus" is the closest thing we can even pretend to be "the truth" on complex scientific topics.

If Wikipedia existed in its current form in the mid-20th century, it would have dismissed plate tectonics. But, importantly, as the scientific consensus evolved, so would Wikipedia's stance on the theory.

This is the key difference between science/academia and politics/religion. The former changes with new evidence while the latter doubles down in the face of it.

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

#456

Post by sodality2 »

silent_cal wrote: post #435
snuxoll wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contrarian views on many topics are not backed by facts but by emotion. A collection of knowledge is not obligated to let contrarian viewpoints with no scientific basis share the same space as factual coverage of a topic. This is the problem I see far too often with people who criticize Wikipedia for their NPOV policy.

In some cases sure, but on these issues it doesn't matter if you have facts or not. The contrarian view simply isn't allowed on Wikipedia.

What points of views are scrubbed from WP, with credible scientific evidence supporting them?

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

#457

Post by kccqzy »

matthewfelgate wrote: post #18
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…

This sounds interesting please could you share a link if you find it?

The "population change" effect mentioned above is called Eternal September. Wikipedia is a good source here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

I didn't quite find the quote mentioned by GP but for stack overflow itself, an explicit design goal is to minimize discussions and make the site focus on Q&A, since the kind of argumentative jerks mentioned by GP tend to be involved in long discussions. I quote from Jeff Atwood:

> At Stack Exchange, one of the tricky things we learned about Q&A is that if your goal is to have an excellent signal to noise ratio, you must suppress discussion. Stack Exchange only supports the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary to produce great questions and great answers. That's why answers get constantly re-ordered by votes, that's why comments have limited formatting and length and only a few display, and so forth. Almost every design decision we made was informed by our desire to push discussion down, to inhibit it in every way we could. Spare us the long-winded diatribe, just answer the damn question already.

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

#458

Post by hnbad »

denton-scratch wrote: post #402
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]

> It does make discussions more "robust", though.

Citation needed.

> especially women

Citation needed.

But (semi-)jokes aside, "reply in-line" can be good for debate in the sense that you can dissect arguments point-by-point and argue them individually. It does however also mean you can derail the conversation more easily by attacking multiple irrelevant fragments of the post without addressing the actual point.

Replying in-line to multiple points is useful to you, the reply guy, when writing the first reply. It's completely useless to anyone else two replies in as you're basically forced to either maintain multiple different conversations in the same post or need to decide which ones to abandon.

It's trivial to overload any conversation using "reply in-line" with the shotgun approach of throwing a bunch of low-effort nitpick replies into one post and seeing which one sticks. This is the opposite of robustness. Instead of being forced to steelman the other person's argument because you need to reply to the post as a whole or risk being called out for nitpicking, "reply in-line" allows you to unravel the argument, pick out the weakest parts, ignore the rest and then derail the conversation by replying to an army of strawmen all at once. This is the conversational equivalent of bikeshedding.

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

#459

Post by failingslooowly »

anon25783 wrote: post #439
denton-scratch wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> especially women (I suspect). Not to be a woke feminist culture warrior on main but, that seems misogynistic.

Interesting read here about this very subject: https://archive.li/MDq6o

In short, it's not misogynistic, it's backed by a large amount of research.

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

#460

Post by bawolff »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #140

I'd totally settle for the Internet circa 2000-2005 in a box, with a 1990's Google search interface. Gimme a VM, with maybe 20 or 50 TB compressed image of Wikipedia, all of the early Stack Exchange and a few mailing lists or forum archives for Tex, Lisp and whatnot... and I'd be happy on my porch, in my rocking chair with a bottle of whiskey and a pipe to smoke. Why do you kids have to keep meddlin' with things!

Have you seen https://kiwix.org/en/
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