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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

#521

Post by shadowgovt »

soundnote wrote: post #318
giraffe_lady wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with the culture of "just assume people are joking" is that some people aren't joking. The background of edgy jokes was used very effectively by actual hate movements, to massive impact. We all have to live with the consequences of that, and one of yours is that you're not getting the benefit of the doubt on nasty jokes anymore. You need to acknowledge that something went wrong, and then consider why it d…

[flagged]

Hits different when they're talking about you, huh?

It's the kind of thing that could make a person want to build a space where they could talk to like-minded folk and not have to put up with that culture-jamming noise every day of their lives. Fortunately, there are more tools than have ever existed in human history to do that now.

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

#522

Post by shadowgovt »

derelicta wrote: post #31
bad_alloc wrote: post #2

People complain a lot about the internet getting worse and worse. We can fix it, if we put in the effort to rebuild it. * Join fediverse services, e.g. [Lemmy](feddit.de) or Mastodon and post a bit. * Create your own website if you have sth like a cool hobby to share. Webhosting is available for free or cheap, depending on what you want. Link other pages you like to form a net. * If you can, host your own instances a…

What id like to see is a federated MySpace-like service. Users could host their blog on an instance of their choice, toy around its styling or its content directly as to learn about web techs (or keep it simple and remain with the default stylesheet!), and yet remain discoverable thanks to the federated nature of such service. If I had the time its honestly something id love working on.

Isn't that just "web pages crawled by a search engine?"

I think the technology you're looking for is the World Wide web.

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

#523

Post by malcolmgreaves »

lwhalen wrote: post #494
malcolmgreaves wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Is it true, or false, to observe one gender seeking out more or less conflict than the other?

Are you making a causal statement or one of correlation? Your original response doesn't make this crucial part clear. And, because of the way it's worded, it appears that you made a causal claim: `if gender then behavior`.

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

#524

Post by alkonaut »

I just want to be the lone comment that says I do not see any annoying bias or editorializing on Wikipedia. Not even on sensitive or political subjects. But that’s of course my subjective view of it. Judging the number of times I see that complaint here, I’m starting to think that commenters here have a different political midpoint than the one of the people editing the English Wikipedia? Are HN readers more American, for example? (the usual complaint for some reason tends to be that Wikipedia has a progressive bias, that could perhaps be explained by editors being more international).

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

#525

Post by denton-scratch »

mikhailfranco wrote: post #463
denton-scratch wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> obsession with editing random pages

I've been editing since about 2005, so I have a lot of edits (but nothing you could describe as a bazillion). They would seem fairly random, because I edit when I find a page that needs improving. Arguably, it's more likely to be "obsessive" if the edits are not random, but all in one subject-area.

Also, I revert crap edits when I find them, usually when I was not the original poster. You don't have to be the original poster to revert a crap edit; and if you were, there's a smell of edit-warring and proprietorship.

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

#528

Post by drankl »

kraftman wrote: post #287
bko wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is scientific American not reputabl? Here are a number of articles suggesting various arguments that there is no physical advantage of males in sports https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trans-girls-belon... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hormone-levels-ar... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/to-understand-sex... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the...

You seem to have missed these sections: "It turns out that when transgender girls play on girls’ sports teams, cisgender girls can win. In fact, the vast majority of female athletes are cisgender, as are the vast majority of winners. There is no epidemic of transgender girls dominating female sports. " "The Olympics have had trans-inclusive policies since 2004, but a single openly transgender athlete has yet to even…

> If trans people have such an obvious advantage why aren't they dominating every single category of every single strength-involving event?

Athletes who dope don't always dominate, but it still gives them an unfair advantage. Same as when males compete in women's events.

That said, in some women's sporting leagues these males are actually dominating - see https://shewon.org for a list of the many hundreds of women who have been denied their place on the podium by trans-identifying male athletes.

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

#529

Post by t-3 »

seti0Cha wrote: post #500
t-3 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think there's a terminology issue here. If the left and the right servers are never federated, then the experience will be homogeneous even if the fediverse is itself not. In other words, I probably shouldn't not have used the term homogeneous and stuck with "echo chamber". I was trying to avoid that term because of its pejorative connotations. It seems to me there is value in being exposed to what people you disag…

Experiencing homogeneity is a natural thing. Humans always self-segregate into groups when gathered in large numbers. I don't see anything wrong with people choosing an echo chamber if that makes them happy. It's being coerced into the echo chamber or the open forum that I disagree with.

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

#530

Post by [deleted] »

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!

[deleted]
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