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25 Years of Wikipedia

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Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#181

Post by rolfsen »

an_ko wrote: post #133
xemoka wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ok, but Tilo Jung is the absolute opposite of right wing

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#182

Post by throawayonthe »

arrowsmith wrote: post #20
throawayonthe wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i feel like that's a bit silly, the other projects are listed on the donation page ( https://donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/FAQ ) and tbh you are unlikely to be donating to the wikimedia foundation without being aware of (at least some of?) the rest

I promise you that 99% of normal people have no idea what the Wikimedia foundation is and think that they're just donating to "fund Wikipedia".

are normal people donating to wikipedia tho

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#183

Post by lysace »

fragebogen wrote: post #22
toinewx wrote: post #4

should have a fate similar to stackoverflow: less contributors, worse (or stale) content, less visits

According to their own stats (visible in the graph some folds down), it seems to have a fairly steady rate of edits. As for visits, it looks quite constant as well https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wik...

So activity is plateauing.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#184

Post by zahlman »

thunderfork wrote: post #166
FiveOhThree wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I was there, it was as Wikipedia describes it. Read the talk page. Edit: the replies to this comment demonstrate why this problem is intractable: people are very emotionally invested into their idea of how things unfolded, and outright reject other perspectives with little more than a "nuh-uh!".

I was also there, and I say it was very much not as Wikipedia describes it and the narrative is practically libelous. I would tell you to read as much of the archived back-room nonsense as I did (not just the talk page archives but internal Wikipedia government stuff), but even if could be unearthed this much later nobody deserves the trauma.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#185

Post by FiveOhThree »

thunderfork wrote: post #166
FiveOhThree wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I was there, it was as Wikipedia describes it. Read the talk page. Edit: the replies to this comment demonstrate why this problem is intractable: people are very emotionally invested into their idea of how things unfolded, and outright reject other perspectives with little more than a "nuh-uh!".

Well no, I was also around but not particularly interested at the time. This looks like a classic case of the media trying to close ranks and smear their critics.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#187

Post by weslleyskah »

thunderbong wrote: post #147

In the 2000s, in the tech world, the open source successes that were being talked about was always Apache and Linux. When Wikipedia started gaining a bit of traction, everyone made fun of it. It was the butt of jokes in all the prime time comedy shows. And I always felt like telling the critics - "Don't you see what is happening? People all over the world are adding their own bits of knowledge and creating this huge…

Wikipedia is surely a formidable source of knowledge, but

> Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion.

You are romanticizing.

Wikipedia is a corporation, just like Work or University, and I personally assume anything corporate is being manipulated by the owners or the ruling oligarchy because they are structurally unreliable. This is especially veritable for Wikipedia. Create an account there and try to go deeper into the articles about politics, literature and war.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#188

Post by zahlman »

thunderfork wrote: post #169
zahlman wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

GG wasn't constrained to Gjoni, it was the reaction to his posting. One guy saying "I'm on this team" does not define the characteristics of the resulting events.

You miss the point. It's about those people being misinformed, unwilling to look into matters independently, and selective in the application of their supposed ideological principles.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#189

Post by dieggsy »

konne88 wrote: post #142

I do believe that Wikipedia is one of the least biased sources out there, but there is definitely bias. Here is a concrete example. Compare the introduction paragraph of the English circumcision article ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision ) with the German one ( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zirkumzision ). The English intro talks a lot about medical advantages of the procedure: "reduced rates of sexually tr…

I love Wikipedia and think it's one of the greatest resources on the Internet, but there's absolutely a lot of bias in Wikipedia. Even within the same language, I think a lot of it has to do with how many people have or are contributing to a page, whether there's a recent event affecting it, how polarizing or political the subject, etc. But it's not hard to find examples of straight up opinions or very incomplete narratives.

I've also noticed huge differences between two different language versions of the same articles. (English/Spanish specifically). Sometimes they even feel independently written.

Of course, we should all do our part to improve these things when we spot them, if we're able.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#190

Post by lysace »

thiht wrote: post #71
jyscao wrote: post #29

Wikipedia is overall excellent, and it has certainly brought enormous value to me throughout the years. But it is noticeably biased on any topic that has political implications.

Can't wait for the specific examples

This kind of bias is a statistical measure; typically you can't prove or disprove it using a single sample.

It's about larger patterns, which things are talked about and (crucially) which are not. How much attention is given to things and not.

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