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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

#461

Post by kelseyfrog »

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…

I'm saying that while believing in unfalsifiable beliefs or refusing to falsify them is certainly anyone's prerogative, I have to ask, why would anyone want to do that?

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

#462

Post by derefr »

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".

I would love a place that works almost exactly like Stack Exchange, but which is geared toward polling experts' opinions on something (which is a thing that SE explicitly says it doesn't allow.)

Like, I can solve most concrete single answer problems (the kind SE is "for") on my own by digging into the offending component's source code. Reverse engineering if necessary.

The type of question that I really want to ask others, is when I have multiple options that all seem good to me as solutions, and I want guidance on which way to go — or, more deeply, which factors I should consider in my selection. (Example: "what should I use as a database for this project?")

This is exactly the sort of decision that a manager on a product, would hire a lead engineer for that project for their expertise in, and so would expect said lead engineer to be able to lay out for them when asked.

I feel like all the right people are there on SE to be able to answer this type of question. But SE itself just doesn't let them do it — or at least, isn't structured to incentivize them to do it.

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

#463

Post by mikhailfranco »

denton-scratch wrote: post #423
mikhailfranco wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, I had one very bad experience on Wikipedia. It was not a controversial or political subject area. I reverted ~30 bland look-at-me copy pasta contributions that might have belonged on the category page, but certainly not on every instance page. Obviously the right thing to do. Not controversial - or so I thought... Some jumped-up self-appointed 'editor' appeared as-if-by-magic , made an obviously stupid decisio…

> and that was that - 30 polluted pages. This happens. Unless you're heavily-invested in the subject of an article, you can just shrug and move on, no? There's over a million articles you can choose to edit. And by the way, when you made your edits, were you appointed to the position of editor, or were you a " jumped-up self-appointed 'editor'" as well?

I moved on, it was many years ago. But now that you mention it ... :)

No, I was doing everyday wikigardening of pages that were well-known to me. The 'editor' was jumped-up and self-appointed in the sense that: they were not the original poster of the copy pasta; they had no previous record of creating or editing those pages; they had a bezillion WP edits (indicating an almost full-time obsession with editing random pages); and they had no rational argument against my common-sense application of normal WP rules & style guidelines.

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

#464

Post by aidenn0 »

bebop404 wrote: post #434

One thing (perhaps the thing) that makes Wikipedia great is that it doesn't seek the truth. Instead, it seeks verifiability. This means that editors don't have to be experts to write articles, which is the main reason the site is useful at all. The truth can be very elusive. So it makes sense to move that burden to the sources.

Also, there are enough people meticulous enough to follow up on the sources. When a source is not freely available online that often involves going to the library and looking things up; there are people who spend many hours a week doing this, unpaid as a hobby.

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

#465

Post by hnbad »

nvm0n2 wrote: post #127
hliyan wrote: post #21

To me, the main difference between almost every other place on the Internet (save for personal websites) and Wikipedia is the lack of advertising, or attempting to generate revenue through engagement. That is the reason why Wikipedia still remains tolerable.

They routinely run absolutely massive banner ads for themselves at the top of every page begging for donations they don't need. And these ads are the worst: extremely deceptive, unnecessary, and huge.

There's a huge functional difference between fundraising ads (no matter how manipulative) and the kind of commercial (and behavioral) ads you see everywhere else: the incentive structure it creates. Behavioral ads also require extremely intrusive tracking.

Commercial ads incentivise optimising for impressions, i.e. getting users to see as many ads as possible. This leads to clickbait, bloating one-line news bits into entire articles and extending the number of clicks necessary for a user to get what they want. Social media makes this even worse by making the ads "content" (i.e. "sponsored posts") and thus trying to drive up "engagement" which in practice leads to outrage bait (because people are more likely to comment or share what they disagree with or dislike).

Wikipedia on the other hand just has a slightly annoying banner made more annoying by lazy-loading (and thus shifting the layout) that shows up for a few weeks each year.

Unless your complaint is with "supposedly non-profit organizations trying to make more money" (in which case I'd say your problem might be more systemic than just a website with an ad) I'd take this over the former any day.

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

#466

Post by dehrmann »

nvm0n2 wrote: post #127
hliyan wrote: post #21

To me, the main difference between almost every other place on the Internet (save for personal websites) and Wikipedia is the lack of advertising, or attempting to generate revenue through engagement. That is the reason why Wikipedia still remains tolerable.

They routinely run absolutely massive banner ads for themselves at the top of every page begging for donations they don't need. And these ads are the worst: extremely deceptive, unnecessary, and huge.

They run house ads, and it's the same ad on every page. It's not engagement driven, and it's not deceptive like Google's ads that look like search results. Whether or not they need the money is a different question.

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

#467

Post by baja_blast »

bebop404 wrote: post #434

One thing (perhaps the thing) that makes Wikipedia great is that it doesn't seek the truth. Instead, it seeks verifiability. This means that editors don't have to be experts to write articles, which is the main reason the site is useful at all. The truth can be very elusive. So it makes sense to move that burden to the sources.

So when the sources contain inaccurate information then Wikipedia does so as well. I don't see how that is a good thing people view Wikipedia as the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica which was curated by experts. Wikipedia should strive for the truth since finding truthful and factual information is becoming increasingly more difficult online.

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

#468

Post by Gareth321 »

soundnote wrote: post #199
kingofthehill98 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such thing as neutrality or unbiased views, we are humans, everything we do or say is filled with bias. Claiming for Wikipedia to "stay neutral" is a bias itself. They do as good of a job as any of us in trying to stay neutral.

> They do as good of a job as any of us in trying to stay neutral. Not even close. Anything even close to political has a clear slant to it, from actual article wordings to allowed sources to build the articles off of.

Yeah it’s really egregious, but hard to notice for people who aren’t involved in the topic more deeply.

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

#470

Post by dingnuts »

adr1an wrote: post #447
denton-scratch wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The gender remark was totally uncalled for, off topic, and not backed by any evidence (other than your personal experience in the form of "I suspect"). Maybe you can rethink what you had in mind. But please don't take my comment as a platform to expand on it.. I'm already regretting pointing this out... But it seemed almost sexist..

I thought it was an interesting hypothesis for why I see women actively avoid the sort of debate spaces online that I seek out. They are all absolutely dominated by men and it doesn't matter what part of the political spectrum the particular echo chamber embodies, this happens in both leftist and right-wing spaces.

Is it sexist to say that women seek out conflict less than men? Mens' brains are literally doused in a hormone that makes them aggressive for many years of their development. Isn't it sexist, or just weird, to suggest that testosterone has no effect on mens' behavior?

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