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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

#541

Post by drankl »

kraftman wrote: post #355
bko wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If trans people have such an obvious advantage why aren't they dominating every single category of every single strength-involving event? Because there are fewer of them competing. Not every man is more athletic than every woman, but the most athletic men are more athletic than the most athletic women. If me, as a man, tries competing in a women's weightlifting competition, I wouldnt do well, but I wouldn't do well…

So trans women arent doing well vs other women because there are fewer of them competing, but also women arent doing well vs other men because there are fewer of them competing. If your only issue is the potential that a person has based on their testosterone, then maybe we should have no gender division, but testosterone categories instead. It seems it would make more sense than preventing both cis women and trans w…

Male performance advantage remains even for those males who choose to lower their testosterone levels; they retain muscle mass and strength above women, and their overall skeletal structure remains intact too: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7846503

In fact, the difference between male and female athletic performance is so stark that even the most elite female athletes are at a disadvantage compared to teenage boys: https://boysvswomen.com

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

#542

Post by cbozeman »

KittenInABox wrote: post #422
cbozeman wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, although I understand why such a simplistic and easily-digestible idea would be appealing to a group of people who increasingly want simple answers. We want to go back to the Internet of thick-skinned people who rarely even blocked others, much less actively tried to get them banned. We want to go back to the Internet where you can say wild shit and people are smart / savvy enough to know you're just being edgy a…

> We want to go back to the Internet of thick-skinned people who rarely even blocked others, much less actively tried to get them banned. IRC had channel-wide, server-wide blocks available since the olden days, as well as user-to-user blocking. The term "flamewar" is old school from these days where people got hella banned. Forums had trolls that were banned and re-banned, see: the age of the term "sockpuppet". If an…

> IRC had channel-wide, server-wide blocks available since the olden days, as well as user-to-user blocking. The term "flamewar" is old school from these days where people got hella banned. Forums had trolls that were banned and re-banned, see: the age of the term "sockpuppet".

And you had to really work to get a ban in most forums and IRC channels. You had to really step out of line - and continue stepping out of line.

Cast even a momentary glance at the things people get banned for on Reddit, or used to be banned for on Twitter.

A woman declaring, "Men are not women." is enough to have her Twitter account permanently deactivated. Try telling me that's even remotely close to how things were in the 1990s Internet.

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

#543

Post by johnnyanmac »

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.

I guess that's one reason I can't fully trust Wikipedia. Because of its beauracracy, primary sources can't make much headway. If I had an entry and they got my birthday wrong, I can show them my birth certificate and they wouldn't accept it. But if I talked to Fox News and said I was born in X, suddenly it's "a good source for wikipedia".

I think it's a good rule of thumb to not have people edit articles too close to them, but for some objective facts you may as well let it in (and remember: "facts" means "can be proven OR disproven". I can make a fake birth certifricate but you can objecively prove through later talks that I lied. Or the hospital realizes they messed up and my own birthday is a lie to begin with. Much easier to reason with than "am I a good person?")

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

#544

Post by justinbaker84 »

alkonaut wrote: post #524

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…

I am an american with libertarian/conservative political views and I rarely see outward political bias toward the left on the articles I visit. I think it happens on contentious issues but it is really mild compared to every other media outlet.

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

#545

Post by exo-pla-net »

bawolff wrote: post #514
esafak wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd expand that: Wikipedia's greatness is due to its policies and guidelines in general. It is not surprising that they were drafted by a second-time encyclopedist and PhD in epistemology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger The next best thought out knowledge-based site is StackExchange.

The flip side of that is larry sanger's post-wikipedia success record is very bad and quite frankly a bit nutty.

Larry Sanger is now a conspiracy theorist [1], believing gems including:

- Antifa did the coup.

- Face masks are harmful.

- There have been "almost zero" deaths from COVID-19.

- Soros may have paid people to riot for George Floyd.

- The Ten Commandments were God's words: not "inspired", but precisely dictated. [2]

Since Wikipedia is hostile to conspiracy theories and religious woo, Larry has in the ensuing years tried (without success) to make a Wikipedia-equivalent site that will be friendly to his nuttery.

[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger

[2] https://twitter.com/lsanger/status/1719344152356217057

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

#546

Post by esafak »

datadeft wrote: post #135
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…

Think about with you mother in mind. The issue with thinking we can fix it is that you think about another HN reader in mind. Humanity's biggest issues are coming from concentration or centralisation. You can apply this pretty much to anything: wealth, population, corporations, etc. We create bubbles based on these. The solution is decentralisation. The question is how to get there?

Centralization is what made Wikipedia, Facebook, and other sites great before they deteriorated. You can go farther when united. Up or down.

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

#547

Post by trealira »

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…

> idea that any observable behaviors between genders is due to the nature of genders themselves.

> This is the nature of misogyny. The invalid logical implication that gender controls behavior.

Why do you consider the very suggestion misogynistic (leaving aside whether it's true)? "Misogyny" means "hatred of women," in the literal sense. What you're stating is that biological essentialism implies misogyny, which isn't true. As a counterexample, there are radical feminists and self-described misandrists who argue that men and women act differently for inherent biological reasons, and they aren't misogynist.

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

#548

Post by denton-scratch »

malcolmgreaves wrote: post #519
denton-scratch wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

Right, I was operating under the assumption that this all was driven by a misunderstanding. It's a sensitive topic. I see how the ways in which language is written can make readers jump to particular conclusions about the writer's motivation (and, ultimately, the intent of their writing). > I suspected that women disliked inline replies more than men. Not trying to pick on what you wrote here, but I wanted to take a…

Yeah.

Well, I can qualify what I say; and then I can go back over my qualifications, and qualify them too. Your proposed rewrite is OK; it conveys my meaning. But it reads a bit like a sociology essay, when it was really just a tangential comment on an article about Wikipedia.

One of the Wikipedia rules is "Assume good faith". It's tedious to harden all your comments against people who assume malevolence, and it makes the comments over-long and hard to read; so I don't do it.

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

#549

Post by flkenosad »

denton-scratch wrote: post #506
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.

> 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 ex…

I'm now fascinated by this insight.

Forget human beings for a minute here and just think in terms of masculine/feminine energy. Where the masculine energy is defined as the "breaking apart" and the feminine is defined as the "coming together". You can see how this describes so many aspects of reality. Also understand that all humans, both male and female, have aspects within them of both natures. Okay.

Now, is it just the case that the "threaded" reply style you see on Reddit and HN is just, simply, masculine in it's purest form. It branches endlessly. Dividing and sub-dividing forever. Destructive. Masculine. Not necessarily bad but, you know, masculine.

Whereas the inline nature of traditional forums is not that. The chronologicalness ensures that arguments are either resolved relatively quickly or become lost in the noise. There is no real opportunity to break down an idea. As a result, you don't see that extreme division take place.

So it may be the case that the structure of the site determines what sort of moderation you need to do. If the site is threaded, you're going to need to worry a lot more about divisive topics. Whereas, tradition-style forums will probably need to set out separate dedicated spaces for, say, "serious discussion" so that conversations with more depth are allowed to take place.

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

#550

Post by shadowgovt »

cbozeman wrote: post #531
shadowgovt wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but if I may try to interpret: it sounds like you want to go back to an Internet with not nearly so many people on it, where the culture of "being online" was more homogeneous. One can imagine why that's a problem in a world of 8 billion people, all of whom (some say) have a right to be online.

Anytime someone says, "Blah blah sentiment blah blah... BUUUUUUT", what they're really saying is, "I'm doing exactly what you think I'm doing, but I don't want anyone to call me out on it!" And just have the goddamned courage to say what you want to say to begin with. You're exactly the problem. You can't even be honest enough to say, "You just want the Internet to be white again!" We didn't have voice communication…

> "You just want the Internet to be white again!"

I sought not to put words in your mouth because I didn't know your meaning. But if they come out of your mouth as an intepretation of my interpretation, I have to assume that's what you meant to say.

> You were judged solely by the quality of your content

I remember; I was there too. A not-insignificant portion of "quality of one's content" was whether it fit the right 'hacker' mold. How well did you present your argument? Did you use the right words? Were you savvy to the right concepts?

Those concepts were couched in the culture that originated the Internet, which leaned in a certain race, class, and gender direction. You didn't know what nationality someone was, but they got ignored if they didn't use the right words. And the choice of what words were right wasn't a democracy; it was a biased selection from the first people to trailblaze the culture, who brought their cultural baggage with them.

You and I are both old enough to remember "There are no girls on the Internet."

Now that we're building a net for 8 billion people, a lot of those norms are obsolete and over-constraining.

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