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25 Years of Wikipedia

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Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#221

Post by DamnInteresting »

shevy-java wrote: post #197

In the last 2 years, Wikipdia's quality declined. For me this was evident when they suddenly changed the UI. The new UI is more annoying. Perhaps it is nicer for Average Joe people, but for powerusers it is just annoying to use now. But this is not the only problem: many articles have a low quality, or they are so complicated that Average Joe doesn't understand them, which is ironic considering the UI was most likely…

> For me this was evident when they suddenly changed the UI. The new UI is more annoying.

In case you are unaware, if you're logged in, you can go into the user preferences and change the Appearance to one of the older themes, such as Vector Legacy (2010).

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#223

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

weslleyskah wrote: post #187
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 ther…

> Wikipedia is a corporation

nitpick: WMF (the org that develops and hosts Wikipedia and its related services like Wikimedia Commons) is a non-profit foundation, not the classic type of profit-driven corporation that your post implies.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#224

Post by TuringTest »

zahlman wrote: post #130
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:/…

That was 2014, not 2012; and I was trying not to mention it.

You're right, I mistyped it.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#225

Post by anal_reactor »

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…

It is not possible to have unbiased communication. Whenever you communicate with someone, you do it because you think it's important that the other person hears what you're about to say. This means that you filter all communication through your own moral system, which obviously has biases. When people say "this is unbiased" they usually mean "this matches the biases of my culture". Wikipedia illustrates this very well because both cultures can claim "obviously the article in my language is unbiased, while the other one is weird".

So in a way, I'd argue that Wikipedia having different biases in different language versions actually proves that it's quite unbiased. If all languages had exactly the same content, the most likely explanation would've been that one culture dominates, and the rest are just translations.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#226

Post by xvilka »

The biggest complaint about Wikipedia I have is that they do not allow edits via VPNs, even for the registered users. These days VPN is a necessity in many places, thus it limits a big amount of potential contributors.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#227

Post by tgv »

steve1977 wrote: post #78
observationist wrote: post #46

[flagged]

This comment is the first time that I have heard about Grokipedia.

Sumary: it's a copy of Wikipedia, but without the bits Musk disagrees with. Perhaps it also has some other sources, but the articles I looked up when it was announced, were verbatim copies from Wikipedia, with some bits missing. My suspicion was that they instructed their LLM ("Grok". I wonder why it wasn't called X or Grox. Anyway...) to synthesize the article from the edits, leaving out those that were rated "liberal", with the error margin on the conservative side (pun intended).

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#228

Post by weslleyskah »

tb_technical wrote: post #211
weslleyskah wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ther…

The remote viewing article keeps being reverted as pseudoscientific when original research conducted by the CIA is cited. Such citations are removed swiftly. Any changes are denied or rolled back. The rationale is that, even though the documents themselves are a primary source from an organization that poured significant resources into researching the phenomenon of remote viewing, the individual posting the declassif…

I remember people saying that the article about Carl Jung was not worth contributing anymore because of his fascist sympathies with nazism. I don't know what to make of that.

I've experienced something similar about users downplaying on talk pages the atrocities done by the Soviet Government, like the Holodomor famine or the Katyn Massacre, in contrast to the atrocities done by the Nazis.

Controversial and relatively unknown subjects are easier to be attacked and ignored on wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#229

Post by zahlman »

acdha wrote: post #214
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was there as well. It was absolutely not as Wikipedia describes it. If the claim was that some people participating in GG did so because they were sexist, fair enough. That was true and unavoidable because you get crazies in every group. But that was not some kind of universal thing, such that Wikipedia should be describing the movement unambiguously as "misogynistic".

It absolutely matched the Wikipedia summary. There is a ton of evidence linked supporting each point: it was a hate mob from the moment Eron Gjoni decided his ex should be punished for breaking up with him.

> from the moment Eron Gjoni decided his ex should be punished for breaking up with him.

There was no such moment in the first place.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#230

Post by epx »

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…

In the last 2-3 years, every contribution I made has been reverted by a reviewer or editor, either giving some excuse like lack of references, or none at all. Ceased to contribute to articles, and financially as well.
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