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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

#471

Post by baja_blast »

jonasdegendt wrote: post #188
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…

Reddit has this problem and it ultimately drove me (and I'm sure many others) away, it seems like you can't have a nuanced opinion, and god forbid if you have an opinion that goes against the grain of a sub. FWIW, Wikipedia also has this problem. Just spend half an hour going through some page histories and browsing some user pages, you'll find feuds and infighting all over the place. People with a profile saying "I…

I feel like on has been so inundated with bots and shill accounts from PR firms, non profits, and state actors that nuanced opinions get shutdown via mass downvoting by bots they also artificially boost fake shill posts as well.

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

#472

Post by fossislife »

user3939382 wrote: post #351

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…

> To actually get the full view of these topics that should be in the article, you instead have to refer to the dozens-of-pages-long Talk pages to see all the non-corporate-media viewpoints being squashed and silenced.

This is exactly what I do. When I visit articles about politically discussed topics I often read the Talk pages. I usually find important and (regularly) well-sourced information on there that, for some reason, do not make it into the article.

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

#473

Post by bcrosby95 »

_uhtu wrote: post #37
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.

I'd be willing to say this is causation. Wikipedia is one of the few places on the Internet where there isn't an a absolutely desperate end goal to keep people staring at it all day and all night to make 0.006 cents on ad revenue. So the content can actually be useful instead of drowned out in SEO and ads.

So much this. One thing I regularly think about is that there are many popular websites that could be sustainable with a smaller headcount, but they took VC and need to eat the world.

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

#474

Post by jugad »

mikhailfranco wrote: post #246
kayxspre wrote: post #128

I have since distanced myself from Wikipedia as I feel I was increasingly pushed out of the "Cabal" (a term used to describe editors with aligned interest who usually worked together to set standards others must follow) who vigorously enforced the policy without considering the experience of, and willingness to engage with, new editors. I would rather have them create their own world while I move on to contribute to…

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…

> backed it up with a kangaroo court of 1 or 2 buddies weighing in on the Talk page

If they had a couple of other editors backing them up, then it doesn't sound all that "jumped up" to me. Sounds more like you are playing with a different set of rules in mind.

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

#475

Post by TaylorAlexander »

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..

Hmm I guess I would like to add some nuance. I’m a trans woman, and I have thought a whole lot about gendered roles in our society. Indeed, women and afab people are taught in our society to behave a certain way - to be deferential to men, to please others, and to avoid confrontation. Men and amab people are taught to speak their minds, not shy away from confrontation, and to be direct. This cultural pattern is indeed sexist - it seems to be driven by a patriarchal society.

But as observers if we are cautious about what we are saying, it can be okay to point out that women are socialized a certain way and this can lead to certain conversational patterns. We need to be careful to realize this is not some biological thing (hormones make impressive changes but this isn’t one of them), but I think it’s okay to point out common socialization differences if we are careful to attribute them to socialization. At least it can be okay. Certainly it is a delicate subject.

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

#476

Post by Clamchop »

Namari wrote: post #8

It would be good if Wikipedia could stay neutral and not biased. It's not as good as it was.

Calling stuff biased is becoming a hell of a thought-stopper. That you say elsewhere,

> Yeah, everything is relative, truth doesn't exist, yadda-yadda.

strikes me as downright ironic. The routine and wholesale dismissal of sources because they don't tell the story with someone's preferred angle is amounting to a whole lot of yadda-yadda, I agree!

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

#477

Post by depressedpanda »

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.

Why?

The claim was that women to a higher degree find "direct, robust speech" alienating. Disregarding whether it's true or not, and my own reservations against using "robust" as a descriptor, it looks like a fairly neutral statement to me.

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

#478

Post by thinkingtoilet »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #349
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To your last point, I think this is something people get confused about. I think no reasonable person says science is always right and there is never any corruption in the process. Science is done by humans and humans are fallible. The argument is that science is the best we have , not that it's perfect. One thing I see with 100% of conspiracy theorists is that they have no self-awareness of when they're wrong. They…

But who gets to decide what stays on and what gets deleted? Does the tectonic plate theory stay on wikipedia, or do we delete it, since it's just a conspiracy theory (let's say we flew back in time a bit)? What about epsteins "suicide"? Would an articl about "heart problems as covid vaccine side-effect" stay on wikipedia a year and a half ago, or would it get deleted? In hindsight, it's easy... but who gets to decide…

There is no answer that will satisfy everyone. In fact, there is no Right(TM) answer. The answer is the people who put in the effort to make wikipedia and the processes they've developed. Wikipedia isn't a right we're owed. It's done be people and those people make the choices and I can guarantee you they will make wrong choices at times. What I don't like is the attitude some have, not necessarily you, where it's either "this isn't perfect so it's all bad!" or "they were wrong about this one thing, therefore they are wrong about everything that I disagree with them on". We're humans. We're trying. And I believe most people there are doing it in good faith. That's literally the best we can do.

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

#479

Post by tensor »

logicchains wrote: post #76
LastTrain wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every bit of content has a POV, there is no getting around that. Neutral POV is the Wikipedia ideal - one they work towards but will never reach. They do as good a job as anybody at it.

>Every bit of content has a POV Every bit of content has multiple POVs, and when you continuously present only the POVs associated with one part of the political spectrum, that's an avoidable bias. >They do as good a job as anybody at it. Actual encyclopedias do a much better job of it.

Honestly I think it should be biased when it comes to politics. It should be unbiased in terms of evidence. If some narrative has no evidence, but a strong political following, that political following should contribute zero weight to the validity of the narrative. No evidence is no evidence.

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

#480

Post by hnbad »

FireBeyond wrote: post #408
_gabe_ wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "neg…

> He complains that the article on abortion describes it as a very safe medical procedure, "a claim that is questionable on its face"

So far the only good argument I've seen for abortions being very unsafe from people ideologically opposed to them is that they're unsafe by definition because they lead to a person dying (in which case, yeah, but that's not what people normally mean by "safe").

Also, as with other culture war medical topics, the danger of the cure needs to be assessed relatively to the danger of the "disease". Pregnancies are not safe. Giving birth is extremely not safe, regardless of method. Heck, even menstrual cycles aren't safe. Even conception can lead to death in the case of ectopic pregnancies, not to mention the health risks of sexual intercourse itself (which is why it's called "safer sex", not "safe sex"). So we need to take those into account as a baseline when talking about the safety of medical procedures or drugs interfering with these. Those on the side that insists on making it a culture war topic usually deny or downplay that baseline risk while widely exaggerating the risk of the procedure.

This goes for abortions, hormone suppressors, vaccines, premarital sex and many more. But of course it isn't about the medical risk. They'd still be opposed even if it were perfectly 100% safe (which can't even be said about ordinary daily activities like using the toilet, walking or sitting). The main "risk" they are concerned about is moral, and that can't really be argued with.

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