641–650 of 669 posts
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Depends what your goal is. If you want to feel appreciated, I agree, wikipedia is a horrible place. If you want to contribute to making human knowledge available to everyone, it's the best place we have. My personal rule: don't interact with the community, unless absolutely necessary. has served me well in the last 18 years.
Is it really the best place we have, though?
My (admittedly personal & anecdotal) impression of Wikipedia is that the objectivity of the content highly depends on the subject - particularly anything that touches on more recent historical events and public/political figures continues to be of the debatable objectivity (at least on the subjects that I'm familiar with enough to notice the problem).
Someone recently pointed out the incongruity between the English wikipedia article about the "Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion" and the Arabic Wikipedia article about the "مجزرة مستشفى المعمداني" (Baptist hospital massacre). Without sidelining the thread discussion with unproductive arguments about the conflict, I found it really fascinating how the two articles can paint such different pictures, just by picking diffe…
>Whereas Wikipedia used to normalize and lend credence to pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and fringe rhetoric, it has over time become firmly anti-pseudoscience and anti-conspiracy theories. Okay, so before the mid-20th century Wikipedia would have categorized the concept of plate tectonics as pseudoscience. Consensus doesn't mean truth. Today's conspiracy theory could be tomorrow's government press release. Bein…
I am almost certain they would of. The "fringe" and "pseudoscience" labels are used much more broadly on Wikipedia then one might expect.
I have seen a Palestinian scholar, whose research went against the prevailing Euro-centric Western view, labelled as "fringe" on Wikipedia even though it was being published by UNESCO and Cambridge University Press and he was by every metric a mainstream academic. The main editor's critique of his work was mainly ad-hominem and that it hadn't been acknowledged or "approved" by Western scholars. He didn't seem interested in verifying the texts that he cited and quoted; texts that the previous scholars were ignorant of. This was simply a case of a likely correct but minority view that was also difficult for an English speaking Westerner to verify, as the cited works were obscure and written in the 9th/10th century in Arabic. One of the few known manuscripts was located in a religious building in Turkey and not known to be available online in either scanned or transcribed form.
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Every single public health official got up and told us that the mRNA shot prevented transmission. They had no science backing those claims. I have a hard time believing you somehow missed fauci or Walenski or ALL of the mainstream media going on for months about the vaccine preventing transmission. There was even the famous Rachel Maddie “it stops, with every vaccinated person”. So if public health officials didn’t b…
I was even more curious, and it's pretty hard to search for what information was available on the web in early 2021. So don't judge me, but using ChatGPT is the fastest way I could think to get an idea. This is what chatGpt thinks was the CDC statement in early 2021: > In early 2021, the CDC indicated that while COVID-19 vaccines were highly effective at preventing severe illness, the ability of vaccinated individual…
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> one person one vote with the stake of ownership. I'm not great with the terminology of this stuff. Just to be clear on what you're suggesting, do you mean that each person has a stake of ownership as well as a single vote? So functionally something like a corporation with one kind of stock where no owner owns more than one share? And do you mean to have restrictions on stock ownership? Like everyone in the country…
What I am suggesting in practice would be similar to either consumer or worker cooperative. These are similar to publicly-traded companies, except the stakeholders are not some Wall Street randos, but people who actually use company products or employees of the company. Of course, for this to be truly socialist, the system has to be democratic, i.e. each person involved has equal and non-transferrable vote. What type…
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If hackers pray five times per day to the European Union, they will one day step down from the sky regulate and ban all our dreams into being. Jokes aside, you're completely right, but I think individuals should remember to limit their effort when it's without reimbursement. In order to not burn out and become bitter, etc.
> I think individuals should remember to limit their effort when it's without reimbursement. In order to not burn out and become bitter, etc. You're projecting your will onto the world and making it more like how you think it should be. It's nice when other people share your vision and chip in to support the effort, but I don't think that can be a prerequisite. If it is, then you will never be true to your vision, an…
Even people seeking hyper-individualistic goals are paid, for example in sports. I don't mean that getting paid is a prerequisite, but if you're struggling alone you have to check after some time if it's really worth doing.
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I think this misunderstands what "ownership of means of production" really means in Marxism. The point is NOT that the capitalist owns the factory, which they then rent to workers, who can choose to do whatever they want with it. The ownership of means of production instead refers to full control over the production process, including the social structure of work that makes production possible. Marx's point is that i…
So if someone improves the logistic infrastructure involved in getting the products from the workers to the consumers none of the value they generated belongs to them? That actually explains a lot. Even today, places with food insecurity don't have supply but distribution problems, so it's a pretty hard problem to solve. I wonder how many Marxists study logistics.
If you want to improve things by doing things on your own, you will own the fruits of your labor. If you need additional employees to improve things, then you will probably have to share with them.
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So if someone improves the logistic infrastructure involved in getting the products from the workers to the consumers none of the value they generated belongs to them? That actually explains a lot. Even today, places with food insecurity don't have supply but distribution problems, so it's a pretty hard problem to solve. I wonder how many Marxists study logistics.
If you improve the operation of the worker-owned company, you will get rewarded just like any other employee who improves things. If you want to improve things by doing things on your own, you will own the fruits of your labor. If you need additional employees to improve things, then you will probably have to share with them.
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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 trie…
Searching that sentence verbatim on Google produces, as a first result, a paper on the National Library of Medicine [1] that states in its abstract:
> Extended mask-wearing by the general population could lead to relevant effects and consequences in many medical fields.
How is that a conspiracy theory? At most, you can argue that it's not absolutely conclusive or that other studies reach different conclusions. But that's far from declaring something a conspiracy theory.