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25 Years of Wikipedia

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Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Corporate editors, boiler room political operations, and random conspiracy cranks are given a bothsideism platform to edit and narrate facts in their favor. https://en.ejo.ch/public-relations/manipulation-wikipedia https://imemc.org/article/59294/ https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2026-01-14/lon... https://avim.org.tr/en/Analiz/THE-DARKNESS-BEYOND-WIKIPEDIA-... https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/cong…

"Bothsidesism" is a tired argument. Somehow if you don't think that one side of a debate is utter evil and the other side is as pure as the driven snow, you're engaging in "bothsidesism" if you acknowledge there are any shades of gray in the world. Which is a childish argument for anyone older than a high school sophomore.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#112
post #61
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes LLMs that don't disclose sources are much better.

LLMs have their issues too. In everyday life, you cannot read 20 books about a topic about everything you are curious about, but you can ask 5 subject-experts (“the LLMs”) in 20 seconds some of them who are going to check on some news websites (most are also biased) Then you can ask for summaries of pros and cons, and make your own opinions. Are they hallucinating ? Could be. Are they lying ? Could be. Have they been…

This may shock you, but wikipedia provides multiple sources, it even links to them. Where do you think the LLMs are getting their data from?

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#114

Slightly off topic, but now that long context machine translation is roughly on-par with humans: are there any official efforts from Wikipedia, to translate the "best" or "most complete" language version of each article to all other languages? I'd imagine that the effort of getting all languages up to the same standards are just an impossible one and people from "lower-resource" languages would benefit a lot.

On enwiki there is a big problem with bad LLM edits at the moment, so it's probably not the right time for this idea.

If anything, the community is discussing stronger guidelines against inappropriate LLM use.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#115
post #44
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very touchy subject for Wales. It caused him to walk out of an interview after 48 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uswRbWyt_pg

Oh. Wow. I had no idea Jimmy Wales was like that. Enlightening.

looks like interviewer asks question not in a good faith

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#116

I can't be the only one who feels that Wikipedia's quality has really started to go downhill over the past 5 or so years. I've noticed more and more articles which read as ridiculously partisan, usually around subjects with any link to politics or current events. That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the US, but I get the impression that the sites neutrality policies have gradually been chipped awa…

Friendly reminder that we all have the power to improve this! Become an editor and If you come across a problematic article, you can make improvements, or even just flag it as needing work. I know this is not a small ask, and can feel discouraging if you see more issues than you have time to address or your edits are not accepted, but when you consider the relatively small number of editors and the huge number of rea…

> Friendly reminder that we all have the power to improve this! Become an editor and If you come across a problematic article, you can make improvements, or even just flag it as needing work.

This works very well when there's a clear non-partisan issue with the text, like a logical inconsistency or the citation doesn't line up with the claim or the prose is just sloppy or unnatural.

If someone is trying to push biased sources, good luck.

The I-swear-it-isn't-a-cabal of highly-active editors knows policy better than you do, and they will continue to conveniently know policy better than you do no matter how much time you spend studying it. (And if you study it and then try to do your business anonymously, they will consider it suspicious that you know anything about policy and demand that you log in to your nonexistent long-standing account.) And that policy allows them to use highly biased sources because they are on they "reliable sources" list, except it isn't really a single list but rather some sources are restricted in applicability, unless it's one of them using it inappropriately. And the bias of those sources doesn't disqualify them as long as it's properly taken into consideration by whatever arcane rules, except this doesn't happen in practice and nobody will care if you point out them doing it, as long as it serves their purposes.

Meanwhile, the way sources get approved as reliable is generally that they agree with other reliable sources. Good luck trying to convince people that a source has become unreliable. You aren't going to be able to do it by pointing out things they've repeatedly objectively gotten wrong, for example. But they'll happily spend all day listing every article they can find that an ideologically opposed source has ever gotten wrong (according to them, no evidence necessary).

And it all leans in the same direction because the policy-makers all lean in the same direction. Because nobody who opposes them will survive in that social environment. There are entire web sites out there dedicated to cataloging absurd stuff they allowed their friends to get away with over years and years, just because of ideological agreement, where people who dispute a Wikipedia-established narrative on a politically charged topic will be summarily dismissed as trolls.

On top of that they will inject additional bias down to the level of individual word-choice level. They have layers and layers of policy surrounding, for example, when to use words like "killing", "murder", "assassination" and "genocide" (or "rioting" vs "unrest" vs "protest"); but if you compare article titles back and forth there is no consistency to it without the assumption of endemic political bias.

WP:NOTNEWS is, as far as I can tell, not a real policy at all, at least not if there's any possible way to use the news story to promote a narrative they like.

And if the article is about you, of course you aren't a reliable source. If the Wikipedians don't like you, and their preferred set of reliable sources don't like you, Wikipedia will just provide a positive feedback loop for everything mainstream media does to make you look bad. This will happen while they swear up and down that they are upholding WP:BLP.

I've been watching this stuff happen, and getting burned by it off and on, for years and years.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#117
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia itself says Larry Sanger "co-founded" Wikipedia, but I don't quite understand why. If you get into the details, he was Wales' employee at the time, and made initial version of Wikipedia while being paid as such. So I'm tentatively with Wales on that ATM.

Employing someone doesn't let you pass off their achievements as your own. If Wales had anyone else, or had gone it alone, it's unlikely Wikipedia would be what it is today.

> Employing someone doesn't let you pass off their achievements as your own.

Doesn't it? That's basically how tech companies work. You can tell he's written an initial version of Wikipedia, but founder is emphatically not an employee.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friendly reminder that we all have the power to improve this! Become an editor and If you come across a problematic article, you can make improvements, or even just flag it as needing work. I know this is not a small ask, and can feel discouraging if you see more issues than you have time to address or your edits are not accepted, but when you consider the relatively small number of editors and the huge number of rea…

The impression I've had from trying to contribute in the past has been that some editors will fight tooth and nail to prevent changes to an article they effectively own. The maze of rules and regulations makes it far too easy to simply block changes by dragging everything through protracted resolution processes. Even something as clear-cut as "the provided source doesn't support this claim at all" becomes an uphill s…

> When it comes to anything related to politics this problem is also exaggerated by editors selectively opposing changes based on whether they apply a desired slant to the text.

This is amplified by the fact that active editors socialize with each other heavily behind the scenes, and over a period of many years you end up with a core group that all desire to apply the same slant.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it radicalised to want even a basic premise of neutrality in an encyclopedia? Despite not being particularly political, even I raise an eyebrow when an article opens with "____ is a , , known for "

I've never seen an article like that, other than for people like Epstein, who are primarily famous for their crimes. I just went and checked the pages of some famous people where you might expect this kind of treatment if Wikipedia were indeed biased in the way people seem to think (like Donald Trump or Ted Cruz), and they're not like that. There are a lot of comments in this thread talking about a strong bias in Wik…

To be honest I don't keep a list of examples, I usually raise an eyebrow and move on. It's typically on pages for smaller public figures where you get some extremely questionable descriptions.

It's also definitely a thing for contentious topics, a while back I tried to look up some info on the Gaza war and some of the pages were a complete battleground. I feel that there was a time when Wikipedia leaned away from using labels like "terrorist", but their modern policy seems to be that if you can find a bunch of news articles that say so then that's what the article should declare in Wikipedia's voice.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friendly reminder that we all have the power to improve this! Become an editor and If you come across a problematic article, you can make improvements, or even just flag it as needing work. I know this is not a small ask, and can feel discouraging if you see more issues than you have time to address or your edits are not accepted, but when you consider the relatively small number of editors and the huge number of rea…

The impression I've had from trying to contribute in the past has been that some editors will fight tooth and nail to prevent changes to an article they effectively own. The maze of rules and regulations makes it far too easy to simply block changes by dragging everything through protracted resolution processes. Even something as clear-cut as "the provided source doesn't support this claim at all" becomes an uphill s…

I have a personal interest in getting fixes into Wikipedia. If you'll share here a couple of examples I can attempt a fix. Here are some stories of what I've done in the past where people mentioned that they've struggled with corrections (one says he was banned, another said his article was deleted, and the third said he couldn't get it corrected - I solved all of these):

https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2024-10-17/Path_Depende...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40655989

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Weierstrass_function#Accu...

One thing I should clarify is that Wikipedia's purpose is to aggregate the current general view on things. So even if you know something is true personally, you cannot put it in unless you can find a reliable place where someone has documented it. In the cases I have there I had to first find the appropriate backing references before I could make something happen so it's not a trivial fix. Getting Makoto Matsumoto in there took me many hours because I know only a tourist's amount of Japanese.

I've also edited controversial articles (the Mannheim stabbing, one of the George Floyd incident related convicts) successfully.

Anyway that's my resume. Bring me the work you need done and once I've got a moment I'll see what I can do (no guarantees, I have a little baby to care for).

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