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25 Years of Wikipedia

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Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#131

Post by PurpleRamen »

FiveOhThree wrote: post #55
amrocha wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s more likely that you became more radicalized so what used to read as neutral seems partisan now.

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 "

> Is it radicalised to want even a basic premise of neutrality in an encyclopedia?

Facts are not neutral or "balanced".

And your whole phrasing smells of someone who doesn't want to be challenged with facts which are against you worldview, which is pretty much against the whole purpose of Wikipedia.

> Despite not being particularly political, even I raise an eyebrow when an article opens with "____ is a , , known for "

Without giving the actual example, there seems nothing wrong with this in general. Could be important, could be overrated. But at least I assume it's true, because wrong claims would be a valid problem.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#132

Post by amiga386 »

oytis wrote: post #117
amiga386 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not how fame and credit for some novel thing is shared. The minds of two people were vital to its success, and we don't fold that into one because of business structure.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#133

Post by an_ko »

xemoka wrote: post #44
mr_mitm wrote: 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.

There's context. Hank Green talked about it in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zi0ogvPfCA, but in short, paraphrasing, and adding my own thoughts:

Jimmy Wales has been poked at with the question of whether he should call himself a founder or specifically co-founder for a long time, by right-wingers who think Wikipedia is too woke, and want to irritate and discredit him as much as possible, and instead raise up his co-founder Larry Sanger. Sanger has right-wing views and a habit of accusing any article as biased that doesn't praise Trump and fundamentalist Christian values, and takes these as proof that Wikipedia has a left lean.

The interview Wales walked out of was for his book tour. I imagine it's the umpteenth interview that week with the same question asked for the same transparently bad-faith reasons, trying to bend the interview away from his book and into right-wing conspiracy theory land.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#134

Post by Levitz »

zozbot234 wrote: post #77
adventured wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By now they should be sitting on a billion dollars that safely yields a forever self-funding annual income ($30m-$50m) that would pay for all of their necessary expenses. They would no longer require any donations. It's grotesque and wildly irresponsible how they're managing the organization. If LLMs become the center of knowledge resources going forward (which they will), Wikipedia's funding will decline as their tr…

LLM's can't just be "the center of knowledge" on their own, they need to learn and be trained if they are to be useful. A whole lot of LLM knowledge comes from Wikipedia to begin with.

You go ahead an tell users that.

Tailwind docs are also the source of, duh, docs. People browse them way less and as a result Tailwind gets way less funding.

The problem is that Wikipedia should be set for life at this point, and they insist on rejecting that notion. There may be a future in which Wikipedia closes, and if that comes to pass it will due to wanton disregard for people's goodwill.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#135

Post by burnt-resistor »

FiveOhThree wrote: post #55
amrocha wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s more likely that you became more radicalized so what used to read as neutral seems partisan now.

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 want an improvement upon "Encyclopedia Brittanica". If we have to have governments around the world fund a nonprofit educational equivalent of that, then I'm all for it but we can't keep depending upon a least-common denominator "central public knowledge repository" that's an improperly-managed, easily-manipulated, often incomplete and inaccurate mobacracy fed by largely unknown randos, enough of whom aren't doing so for honest purposes and too many are foolish/crazy/unreliable enough to curate and preserve worthwhile information consistently.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#136

Post by EcommerceFlow »

The Wikipedia "reliability" list shows wild, almost laughable biases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...

Surely people don't think sources such as Mother Jones are more 'reliable' than The New York Post, Fox News, or The Heritage Foundation? Not a coincidence there.

Having such obvious biases does nothing but damage the Wikipedia brand, and at this point has me anticipating Ai replacements.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#137

Post by onraglanroad »

browningstreet wrote: post #74
jamespo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The LLMs I use all supply references.

Indeed! Sometimes even more than actually exist!

I don't think LLMs can be faulted on their enthusiasm for supplying references.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#138

Post by chairhairair »

jyscao wrote: post #126
chairhairair wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The point is not that Wikipedia is completely unbiased. That's an obvious impossibility - for any encyclopedia.

The point is that accusations of "noticeable bias on any topic that has political implications" is the kind of accusation made by someone simply trying to sow distrust in information, writ large. It's increasingly common.

Being asked for an example or two isn't weird.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#139

Post by arjie »

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.

I think it's optimal for this to be done at read-time rather than write-time. En Wikipedia is the most comprehensive but there are many articles in language Wikipedias that are far more complete. Rather than attempting to keep these branches of knowledge in sync, it is probably better to have some mechanism to pull them all together when someone wants to read a synthesis.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#140

Post by zahlman »

FiveOhThree wrote: post #121
TuringTest wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sigh. Well, now that it's come up....

Fun thing about that. Whenever someone starts going off about how Zoe Quinn was supposedly mistreated and how that supposedly launched a "right-wing backlash against feminism" and a "misogynistic online harassment campaign", quiz them about the "jilted boyfriend" (as they typically put it) who wrote the post that supposedly set everything off. With remarkable consistency, they don't know his name (Eron Gjoni) or anything about his far-left political views, and will refuse to say the name if you ask. They have never read the post and have no idea what it says, and will at most handwave at incredibly-biased third-hand summaries.

I'm pretty sure I've even had this happen on HN.

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