Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

25 Years of Wikipedia

wikipedia25.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 498 posts

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#121

Post by FiveOhThree »

TuringTest wrote: post #110
zahlman wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I would say this started over a decade ago. Otherwise I completely agree.

Oh dear, you need to learn about the GamerGate incident which started August 2012. All the extreme division and online manipulation through the collaborative creation of false narratives started right there, with that issue, before contaminating the entire political landscape. It's the Eternal September of our generation, and it's not recognised enough as such. Before that, the internet was a different place. https:/…

> Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture

Okay, what the actual fuck? IIRC it was people whining about the absolute state of games journalism in the 2010's.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#122

Post by b00ty4breakfast »

rvnx wrote: post #50
xemoka wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wikipedia is literally a spin-off of a porn company. From that point on, where it came from or who founded it is not so important. The question is how it acts today. It is a highly-political organization supporting lot of “progressive” ideas, California-style. So if you like reading politically biased media it may be for you. If you are seeking for a global view you better ask different LLMs for arguments and counter…

[flagged]

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#123

Post by gwbas1c »

mr_mitm wrote: post #38
amiga386 wrote: post #19

https://wikipedia25.org/en/the-first-day > Founder Jimbo Wales on a challenge overcome Aren't you forgetting someone, Jimmy? Your co-founder Larry Sanger, perhaps? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger Let's check one of the citations from the History of Wikipedia page: https://www.mid-day.com/lifestyle/health-and-fitness/article... > It was Larry Sanger who chanced upon the critical concept of combining the thr…

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

Without context, it looks like the interviewer was a jerk and ambushed him.

I've seen plenty of stalling like that on major news programs, and the interviewer always knows to move on (and possibly edit something in to provide context.)

---

That being said, "who started what" and "who had what idea" are silly topics to obsesses about. It always come down to who put the long-term work in. I think Wales was "in the right" to walk off; or at least say something like "I can't tell the story accurately, so please move on to a different question."

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#124

Post by burnt-resistor »

gibspaulding wrote: post #39
FiveOhThree wrote: post #24

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…

Utopian lionization that doesn't reflect reality or the bullshit. Unqualified people have the power to tell experts who were there that their contributions are insignificant, wrong, or that details don't matter. That's just stupid and pointless, and so less people contribute to hostile and idiotic half-assery.

I'll take curated information that is better and rigorous every time.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#125

Post by bjt »

fragebogen wrote: post #18

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.

You're not the first to have the idea. For languages that are only sparsely represented in the LLMs' training data, this has actually done a lot of damage. The LLMs spew out a bunch of hallucinations, and there aren't enough qualified human editors to review it, so the human record of that language itself becomes tainted.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1124005/ai-wikip...

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#126

Post by jyscao »

chairhairair wrote: post #100
jyscao wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What for? To start a flame war? No one is going to get convinced one way or the other. Which was why I just wanted to point out that while I think Wikipedia is a net good overall, it is not without blemishes.

> Makes claim. > Is asked for evidence. > Refuses. Brilliant work. These kinds of posts should be bannable.

If you do not know of a single Wikipedia article that you judge to be politically biased, then that says more about you and your gullibility than it does about me.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#127

Post by tdb7893 »

hliyan wrote: post #56
jader201 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for their unnecessarily incessant fund raising. There’s zero reason it should happen that often, and that intrusively.

On Twitter/X "for you" feed, I'm frequently served posts by handles that are openly hostile toward Wikipedia. The most often cited reason is excessive fundraising / bloat (previously it was bias). But in my opinion, whatever bloat the Wikipedia organization suffers from, it is still a better alternative than all the other ad/engagement driven platforms.

It's a weird thing to hate on Wikipedia for since in general it's one of the cleaner sites I visit. The absolute garbage of the Fandom wikis shows just how bad it could be.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#128

Post by burnt-resistor »

FiveOhThree wrote: post #51
gibspaulding wrote: post #39

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…

Yep. Wikipedia editors too often resemble US police officers: stupid and drunk with power.

I gave them a fair shot a couple of times, but they're unreasonable and unmoved to listen to reason or experience they don't actually possess.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#129

Post by FiveOhThree »

arjie wrote: post #120
FiveOhThree wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

> 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.

This is where I would disagree, the model really doesn't work for politics and current events. In those topics Wikipedia may be better described as "The world according to a handful of (mostly US-based) news outlets". There's been a prolonged effort to deprecate sources, particularly those which lean to the right, so it's increasingly difficult to portray a neutral perspective reflecting multiple interpretations of the same topic. Instead excessive weight is given to what a majority of a select group of online sources say, and that's not necessarily trustworthy.

Most obviously it's a model which will fall flat when trying to document criticism of the press.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#130

Post by zahlman »

TuringTest wrote: post #110
zahlman wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I would say this started over a decade ago. Otherwise I completely agree.

Oh dear, you need to learn about the GamerGate incident which started August 2012. All the extreme division and online manipulation through the collaborative creation of false narratives started right there, with that issue, before contaminating the entire political landscape. It's the Eternal September of our generation, and it's not recognised enough as such. Before that, the internet was a different place. https:/…

That was 2014, not 2012; and I was trying not to mention it.
Post reply on HN