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

501–510 of 669 posts

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

#501

Post by IlllIIl »

dingnuts wrote: post #470
adr1an wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Go look on female-oriented forums like Mumsnet, you'll find similar levels of conflict as are found in male-dominated places, especially around contentious topics.

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

#502

Post by esafak »

LastTrain wrote: post #45
Namari wrote: post #8

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

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.

Especially given that anyone can be an author.

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

#503

Post by didibus »

whatwhaaaaat wrote: post #362
didibus wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The mRNA shots were not tested at all for transmissibility yet we were told they prevented transmission Data that has come out since does seem to indicate it lowers transmission. But I'm unclear if you're trying to say that this turned out to be false (the reduction in transmission), or that you're pointing out how some policies were driven by claims that didn't yet have strong enough evidence backing them up?

Take a look at some of the details about what I’m saying. If you still feel like you were told the truth then that is fine. No trials on transmission were done yet we were lead to believe they were. I was skeptical myself at first.

I was never under the impression that there were any trials specifically about transmission.

I can believe some people said or published articles saying that it would reduce transmission, I'm not sure they'd all claim it was from evidence that it did, as opposed to just inference that it would.

I'm interested where you feel you were led to believe it would?

I also find the word "truth" in your sentence a bit confusing, do you mean that you actually read from "official" publications that trials about transmissions had been conducted even when they hadn't? Or do you just feel like there were claims of reducing transmission made, and you later realized their rationale didn't even include trials specific to transmission?

I feel this is important. Because someone could have claimed it will reduce transmission, and based their reasoning on how pior vaccines typically have that effect, or how logically if it prevents infection or major infection, it should lower re-transmission. Or other rationales.

This wouldn't really be a lie, even though it could turned out to be wrong.

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

#504

Post by dazzlefruit »

waveBidder wrote: post #489
bcrosby95 wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

~0% interest was a mistake.

Should we expect more useful websites in the next 10 years? Should we expect them to rot and need replacement in the decade after that? Should the Fed add "make the Internet a nice place" as a fourth mission?

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

#505

Post by itsyaboi »

dehrmann wrote: post #466
nvm0n2 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The parent comment only claimed that the ads were deceptive (which they are), not that they are deceptive __like Google's__. That is entirely a straw man which you added to conveniently knock down.

Wikipedia ads are frequently phrased in a way to suggest that the funds are vital for keeping the site up when in reality, the majority of the funding goes to various social "justice" orgs.

https://nitter.net/echetus/status/1579776106034757633

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

#506

Post by denton-scratch »

depressedpanda wrote: post #477
anon25783 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> my own reservations against using "robust" as a descriptor

I thought for a few minutes about what word to use there. Perhaps "direct" on its own would have been better; but I wanted connotations of "assertive" and "strong".

I used to participate in certain political mailing lists that had a much higher proportion of women participants than, say, Usenet (and I knew many of the participants in these lists IRL). My experience was that it was predominantly women that objected to the style of discussion that inline replies often led to. Inline replies being the Usenet norm, perhaps that explains why Usenet was such a male-dominated environment.

FWIW, I don't think it's misogynistic to say that on the whole, women have different attitudes from men, or behave differently. To what extent that's the effect of hormones or socialization, I don't care to speculate.

I gradually came round to the view that the objectors had a point, and I toned down my use of inline replies a lot.

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

#507

Post by riffruff24 »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #157
nvm0n2 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly once you learn the truth about their finances their banner campaign are actually the absolute pits of advertising and the most deceptive and emotionally manipulative type of advertising going. Laughable to claim wikipedia is "ad free" just because the one ad is for wikipedia.

I like that they're up front about it. They also didn't pollute their own content with indistinguishable ads.

Also I've been using adblocks for so long, the only ads I see are ones that pollute the content. So yay wikipedia.

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

#508

Post by esafak »

pseudostem wrote: post #298
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…

Math stack exchange IIRC is independent of stack exchange

https://mathoverflow.net/

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

#509

Post by silent_cal »

sodality2 wrote: post #456
silent_cal wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Take this passage from the vaccination page for example:

> Some studies have claimed to show that current vaccine schedules increase infant mortality and hospitalization rates;[103][104] those studies, however, are correlational in nature and therefore cannot demonstrate causal effects, and the studies have also been criticized for cherry picking the comparisons they report, for ignoring historical trends that support an opposing conclusion, and for counting vaccines in a manner that is "completely arbitrary and riddled with mistakes".[105][106]

If you go to the vaccination page and look at the cited studies, you'll see they are peer-reviewed studies in real scientific journals. But a Wikipedia editor went in and modified the language to cast doubt on it (see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vaccination&diff=...).

All statistical analyses are "correlational in nature", so there's no reason why that should weaken the findings of this study, and the source used to accuse the study of "cherry-picking" is a blog post from 2011. In my estimation this kind of spin happens all the time on Wikipedia.

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

#510

Post by denton-scratch »

malcolmgreaves wrote: post #487
depressedpanda wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The claim was that women to a higher degree find "direct, robust speech" alienating. I'll assume that (1) you're not sexist and (2) you're asking why is this claim rooted in sexism. The nature of this claim is rooted in an idea that any observable behaviors between genders is due to the nature of genders themselves. It is not worded to indicate that its root is, for instance, a commentary about how _external factor…

(Not the poster to whom you are replying) I didn't suggest there was a causal relationship, nor that the observed behaviour was due to some intrinsic properties of the respective genders, nor that gender controls behaviour. I just said that I suspected that women disliked inline replies more than men.
Post reply on HN