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Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

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Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#471

Post by lazide »

chii wrote: post #396
gonzobonzo wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. The fact that someone so terrible got 99% approval and only one anonymous investigator was able to stop them makes me think that it's likely a lot of other terrible admins who didn't have an anonymous investigator go after them probably go through the process. And the times I've brought up the fact that Wikipedia can be unreliable before, I've had numerous editors come in and claim that wasn't true and that pe…

I wonder if there's room in using AI to gather past edits of someone, as part of vetting, and use the sentiment analysis to check how neutral their biases are.

Neutrality != necessarily accurate or useful. And the most neutral thing to say is nothing.

And most LLMs probably have Wikipedia as a significant part of their training corpus, so there is a big ouroboros issue too.

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#472

Post by LightHugger »

acdha wrote: post #101
LightHugger wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are counterexamples where this has failed/continues to fail, the gamergate article is famously non-neutral, only accepting primary sources from journalists directly involved in the controversy. This is rather than true secondary sources with less extreme and biased views, like is supposed to be the rules there. You can switch from the english one to other languages and get completely different content with very…

Do you have any specific examples? You mentioned the Gamergate article but your assertion that it doesn’t reference non-primary sources needs some citations that all of the academic and media sources were directly involved. Since it was a harassment campaign involving journalists, there’s a big question about what a policy would need to look like to prevent someone from attacking a journalist and then saying Wikipedi…

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Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#473

Post by JimDabell »

terribleperson wrote: post #418
YZF wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah- Maybe it's "eventually working". It's hard to trust when it seems so fluid. Maybe there needs to be some mechanics to make it harder to change. Something like being able to suggest changes/corrections but having those come out on some schedule after a review? (thinking software release process here). Quarterly Wikipedia releases? Creating some "core" of Wikipedia that is subject to tougher editorial standards?…

Harder to change doesn't make it more or less correct, just means wrong information sticks around longer. Because revision history is kept and changes are instant, it's easy to fix bad changes. For topics that see extensive astroturfing, they can be restricted.

It’s worth remembering that the entire point of a wiki is that it’s quick and easy to make a change (the name means “quick” in Hawaiian). Being quick and easy to change was the defining quality of Wikipedia and its advantage over more rigid traditional encyclopaedias. These days editing Wikipedia seems like you have to fight bureaucracy and rules lawyering, and doesn’t seem very wiki-like at all.

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#474

Post by LightHugger »

jjmarr wrote: post #120
LightHugger wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are counterexamples where this has failed/continues to fail, the gamergate article is famously non-neutral, only accepting primary sources from journalists directly involved in the controversy. This is rather than true secondary sources with less extreme and biased views, like is supposed to be the rules there. You can switch from the english one to other languages and get completely different content with very…

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Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#475

Post by Arch-TK »

webstrand wrote: post #300
flask_manager wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have in the past, but three things put me off doing so now; Pages where I can spot inconsistencies are often controversial, with long dense discussion pages, edits here are almost impossible beyond trivial details. I dont mind fixing trivia, but not if the actual improvement I think I can make is rejected. There is a bit of a deletionist crusade to keep some topics small, for example, Ive had interesting trivia abo…

I made an edit last year, it immediately got reverted and I got a banner on my user page for vandalism. I complained about that, other people agreed with me but the person who reverted my edits never responded. So there it sits.

If there's a dispute and the person you're having a dispute with never materialises to argue their side of the argument, you're fine to just revert the banner.

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#476

Post by LightHugger »

freen wrote: post #122
LightHugger wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are counterexamples where this has failed/continues to fail, the gamergate article is famously non-neutral, only accepting primary sources from journalists directly involved in the controversy. This is rather than true secondary sources with less extreme and biased views, like is supposed to be the rules there. You can switch from the english one to other languages and get completely different content with very…

Anecdote != evidence. Also, your anecdote is specifically about a social media article about an attempt to use social media spaces to harass people. Seems extra “special case” to me.

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Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#477

Post by k4rli »

tintor wrote: post #144

Wikipedia needs decentralized hosting infra, away from any single country. It is way too important.

One of the few truly good sites remaining. I'm afraid decentralization will take away the credibility even further but also would be very sad to see it fall.

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#478

Post by efilife »

bjourne wrote: post #131
jjmarr wrote: post #87

The English Wikipedia is a massive target for influence campaigns. I don't think there are any other communities as resilient as it. Just an example: There's certain individual or group that edited under the name "Icewhiz", was banned, and now operates endless sockpuppet accounts in the topic area to influence Wikipedia's coverage on the Middle East. One of them was an account named "Eostrix", that spent years making…

I knew IceWhiz. You are correct that he (or rather "they") eventually was kicked from the site. But he/they operated on the site for years and was the biggest PITA you can imagine. He must have single-handedly scared away two dozen honest contributors with his BS. It is very, very easy to game the rules on Wikipedia. Wars of attrition goes on for years. Normal people don't waste their time. IceWhiz and his meat puppe…

how do you know he scared off 24 contributors?

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#479

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Terr_ wrote: post #333
sedev wrote: post #213

I am going to say a thing I say a lot: please edit Wikipedia. It is easier to do than you probably think! Wikipedia's biggest constraint is no longer money or server space, it's editor time (especially since LLM-based garbage is a force multiplier on disruptive editing that does not have a corresponding improvement to good-faith editing). Any topic area you know about and/or care about can benefit from your attention…

I tried on a completely uncontroversial page that documented a certain idiom and examples of where it was used. My edit was reverted, twice, because apparently there is no such thing as a notable source for lines from a 1980s British TV episode, not even a fan website that has a transcript for all of them. Gave up after that.

Sounds like that might have been a copyright issue? In the UK a transcript of a show would need permission of the writers/owners to be reproduced. I can see Wikipedia would be sensible to disallow infringing works as being bad sources.

Ironically an excerpt of the script/transcript would be allowed by UK copyright - but a site with only excerpts would probably but be a good source for Wikipedia's purposes.

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#480

Post by Fraterkes »

IceHegel wrote: post #391

Curtis Yarvin has a riff that goes something like this: Liberal Wikipedia, Communist Wikipedia, and Fascist Wikipedia will all actually agree on the vast majority of topics: Physics, botany, the solar system, chemistry, math, statistics etc. However they'll be worlds apart on history, economics, anthropology, sexuality, politics, previous leaders and so on. Our Wikipedia is the world seen through the eyes of the New…

Yarvin putting his intellectual mediocrity on display: the nazis, for example, dismissed relativity as "jewish science".
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