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25 Years of Wikipedia

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Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#241

Post by notepad0x90 »

If you use wikipedia as a starting point, and actually check reference material critically, it's invaluable in my opinion.

We used to have to pay lots of money for encyclopedias for less quality.

My hope is that while I think the website/webapp itself doesn't need much change, if they moved the back-end to a distributed system, like ipfs perhaps? that would be amazing. Even if wikipedia is blocked, or tampered with, arbitrary people around the world would have mirrors of pages here and there. They could store it just as it is now, and simply expose the data via ipfs and change the webapp to use their own ipfs http gateway.

The unthinkable can happen. I wondered if the burning of the library of alexandria was something people thought was in the realm of practical possibility back then?

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#242

Post by kccqzy »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #238
lostlogin wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this relate to a particular domain or field? I find it so good, and on the rare occasion I’ve found something wrong, I’ve fixed it.

I find math topics to be insufferable. They are written to be as theoretical as possible and borderline useless if you do not already know the topic at hand.

I find it the other way around. I remember vividly that the textbook I was using for proving Gödel's first incompleteness theorem was insufferable and dense. Wikipedia gave a nice and more easily understood proof sketch. Pedagogically it’s better to provide a proof sketch for students to turn it into a full proof anyways.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#243

Post by thunderfork »

observationist wrote: post #158
dgrin91 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has it? I think to challenge you have to show some comparable usage numbers. Its certainly an impressive technical feat to have this AI-based wiki project, but does anyone actually use it? I mean that genuinely. I don't know any usage numbers for Grok. Is it even 1% of Wiki? Is it 50%? Is it more?

It's consistently better in content quality, for everything that I've used it for. I've seen conversations complaining about it that effectively reek of either anti-Musk or anti-AI bias, and when I dig in, I haven't found any legitimate bad information or arbitrary bias in the articles themselves. It's not yet as comprehensive, with ~6 million articles compared to Wikipedia's ~7 million, and the UI isn't as good, wit…

Got any examples of articles to demonstrate that difference?

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#244

Post by MarsIronPI »

duozerk wrote: post #172
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…

> Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion Religion maybe, and Wikipedia is indeed pretty awesome for many topics, but politics is THE bad example here. Much of the political - especially geopolitical - content on Wikipedia has a tremendous atlanticist bias.

In general my impression is that the longer the article title is, the more slanted the article itself is.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#245

Post by daedrdev »

lgl wrote: post #23
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.

Except for their unnecessarily incessant fund raising. [citation needed] Fixed.

Its a widely known controversy

https://www.dailydot.com/news/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraisi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#246

Post by jader201 »

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.

To be clear, I'm not hating on Wikipedia, just their (IMO) overly-strong push for donations.

The first word in my OP was "Except", and that was genuine -- I agree with the parent post, just outside of this one gripe. I definitely get value from it -- either directly through visits, or indirectly through it training LLMs I use.

And I don't mind them asking for support. I just disagree with how they ask, and how often they ask.

I feel like a simple persistent yet subtle "Support Wikipedia" link/button may be just as effective, and at the very most, a 30-pixel high banner once a year or so.

Maybe they've done tests, and maybe this is effective for them, but it feels like there are much subtler ways that may be effective enough.

I have supported sites and services much smaller than Wikipedia, with much less intrusive begging. But maybe that's not the case for others.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#247

Post by rvnx »

dc396 wrote: post #216
rvnx wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the last part I agree with you, the LLMs tend to say what you like to hear. The echo chamber problem also exists, pushing them to say pros and cons is not perfect, but helps to make an opinion (and also "unaligned" models). Facts are very skewed by the environment: in the case you push too much in one direction that is too controversial or because the politicians disagree too much with you; there can be plenty of…

> It's always doable to find or fabricate facts, and the truth wins based on the amount of energy, power and money that the person has. You appear to be using unusual definitions of "fact" and "truth", more akin to "assertions" and "vibe". I'll stick with the traditional definitions.

An example of (either fabricated, or just very convenient) facts:

[1] https://patriotpolling.com/our-polls/f/greenland-supports-jo...

    According to an American poll that surveyed 416 people residing across Greenland on their support for joining the United States.
    57.3% wants to join the US.
[2] https://www.politico.eu/article/greenland-poll-mute-egede-do...

    According to a Danish poll (conducted through web interviews) among 497 selected citizens in Greenland.
    85% do not want to join the US.
What is the actual truth ? Who knows.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#248

Post by thunderfork »

zahlman wrote: post #188
thunderfork wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does "someone doesn't know trivia about the inflection point" really demonstrate any of those things?

Like, if I asked you whether the anger at Depression Quest was downstream of a long-standing meme-feud on /v/ about whether visual novels are videogames and you didn't know that, that doesn't really mean anything about your understanding of anything other than /v/ culture wars of the 2010s.

I mean, c'mon, "five guys burgers and fries"?

The whole thing springs out of "someone who made a thing we don't like" and "an excuse to attack" - the lack of any actual ethical breaches in the coverage of Depression Quest should be immediately disqualifying.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#249

Post by cm2012 »

throawayonthe wrote: post #182
arrowsmith wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, the ads are essentially a guilt tax on normies who remember Wikipedia helped them in high school

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#250

Post by xmprt »

GuinansEyebrows wrote: post #223
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…

> 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.

I don't think corporation implies for-profit. In my eyes, corporation refers to a large organization with some self-serving motivation which is not necessarily just money. Being a non-profit just so happens to be the best vehicle for this motivation but it doesn't mean that the motivation doesn't exist.
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