How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet • Hacker News Board

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#111

Post by sasaf5 » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:12 PM UTC

WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #99

What's wrong with Stack Exchange? I'm a Math Stack Exchange user and I think it's absolutely amazing for the knowledge seeker. It's a repository of high quality questions and answers that you're not going to answer yourself. You can instantly access hundreds of the smartest people in the world. You can spend a week thinking about something difficult and frequently get it answered in under an hour, sometimes 10 minute…

> What's wrong with Stack Exchange?

Also with HN, many subreddits, millions of personal blogs and sites...

I tried to find why the paper says that Wikipedia is "the last good place on the internet", but it doesn't seem to provide any reference for that. Is it a meme somewhere?

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#112

Post by tvieron » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:12 PM UTC

aCoreyJ wrote: post #93

tvieron wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Would you like Wikipedia to claim something that is objectively false like your doctor or parents or "society" tell you what gender you are and your thoughts on it don't matter? Maybe if you give an example of what issue you have seen?

Describing this man as a woman is objectively false. The reality is that he is a man attempting to mimic women, or rather, his idea of what a woman is.

This is just one example of many. Perhaps worse than this, there is very obvious bias on any page or text related to critics of the transgender ideology. Even the Wikipedia page for Woman has been in endless battles over males trying to stake their ideological claim onto it.

As the now-banned female Wikipedia administrator Athaenara put it:

> I think the domination of Wikipedia's woman niche, for lack of a better term, by males masquerading as females as opposed to welcoming actual, genuine, real women who were born and have always been female, is highly toxic.

https://archive.ph/J3wbh#Statement_by_EvergreenFir

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#113

Post by robjan » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:12 PM UTC

xacky wrote: post #35

Wikipedia has become the worst place on the internet for me, it's so addictive that I've been on it for decades despite being banned from editing because I vandalized it years ago. If you look at the list of "long term abuse" on Wikipedia you see a lot of addicted people taking out their frustration on Wikipedia. There is not much true difference between an admin and a vandal, in fact a lot of admins became vandals t…

What part do you find addictive? Is it the endless depth of links or the ability to search for anything you think of or something else?

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#114

Post by aakjsdfajsdfh » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:13 PM UTC

Terretta wrote: post #73

aakjsdfajsdfh wrote: post #12

[flagged]

TL;DR: Parent is first asserting that “______ is just a construct” people are trying to make Wikipedia a “______ is just a construct”-opedia. Then the rest seems just a construct-ed rant. Where's this coming from? The paper examines "institutional" change of Wikipedia, showing how its content transformed over time from lending credence to fringe theories to actively debunking them. This transformation occurred due to…

The AI commenter is the only one who read the article in this entire comment section. kudos.

But yeah, see how the paper (and your summary) is full of holes? What creates the incentive so that one group become larger than the other? things do not happen in a vaccum, only in this paper I guess. or "endogenously" which might be their code word for "i don't want to investigate who paid for this".

basically, there's one law that can be interpreted two ways (wikipedia NPOV or US abortion law). They argue that if everyone agrees A is better than B and start to push for the A interpretation, the people who likes the B interpretation will just magically go home. Excellent. Who thought it was so easy?

Now, the question I wanted to pose is: why 4 papers in this month alone held this obviously flawed argument, using wikipedia NPOV case as their case study?

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#115

Post by VancouverMan » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:14 PM UTC

jwestbury wrote: post #36

bko wrote: post #15

> Over time, Wikipedians who supported fringe content departed or were ousted. Thus, population loss led to highly consequential institutional change. Is this a good thing? It seems like homogenous hive mind effects. Works in some instances but we should aim a little higher A big problem is homogeniety in media. For instance, everyone from every major newspaper more or less went to the same schools, has a similar wor…

Well, yes, when it comes to knowledge I'd say that it is a good thing to remove those supporting fringe content. Consensus amongst those who generally care about a topic is probably better for ensuring largely correct data than the alternative of a large number of voices, each with a questionable level of actual subject matter expertise.

While it was already obvious to some people before then, after everything that happened from early 2020 through most of 2022, it should be completely clear to everyone now that "expert consensus" has absolutely nothing to do with being factually correct.

Time and time again, from the lockdowns/restrictions to the forced masking to the forced shots to the censorship to pretty much everything in between, the "expert consensus" from the medical, political, and mass media communities was wrong.

Even worse than being wrong, so many of the ideas that were deemed "correct" by "expert consensus" often ended up being overtly harmful, and caused far worse outcomes and far more problems than were already being dealt with at the time.

In hindsight, we can see that correct and useful information tended to come from the "fringe voices" that were drawing upon much wider and diverse knowledge and experience, while correct and useful information tended to not come from the highly-centralized and highly-controlled "experts".

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#116

Post by afavour » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:14 PM UTC

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #107

bad_alloc wrote: post #2

People complain a lot about the internet getting worse and worse. We can fix it, if we put in the effort to rebuild it. * Join fediverse services, e.g. [Lemmy](feddit.de) or Mastodon and post a bit. * Create your own website if you have sth like a cool hobby to share. Webhosting is available for free or cheap, depending on what you want. Link other pages you like to form a net. * If you can, host your own instances a…

Fediverse (in the sense of the major servers that federate) is an extreme echo chamber representative of mainly a certain sociopolitical wing and mainly from North America and Western Europe. Just look at mastodon.social/explore and consider that many founding activists of Mastodon have spoken about how they yearn to keep the community just like that even as it grows. Part of the early internet was about being able t…

I disagree about your assessment of the early internet. It was extremely white and nerdy when looked at on average. Certainly diversity was out there but it wasn’t easily found, much like the fediverse today.

Even Wikipedia (not that it counts as early internet):

> I knew that early Wikipedia editors were (and kinda still are) academically-inclined hacker dudes, but it's crazy when you realize the article about mole day, created January 2002, is an entire year older than the article "hip hop music" and five years older than "fashion show"

https://twitter.com/depthsofwiki/status/1716655903695425695

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#117

Post by suoduandao3 » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:14 PM UTC

tentacleuno wrote: post #89

CuriouslyC wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SEO, content farms and click mills are the things ruining the internet. All of this is the result of advertising as a business model. For any content, the perverse incentive is to copy it repeatedly with slight variations then monetize the copies with ads and SEO your monetized version to the top of the search results. What we need is a social-first internet where every piece of content is associated with an actual h…

> SEO, content farms and click mills are the things ruining the internet. Right, so how do we fix it? I'm wondering if uBlacklist has a place here (a tool to block domains from search results) -- it would be interesting to see if we could all come together and contribute to a database of SEO farm / junk websites to improve search results.

My idea: Align ads to the viewer's self-actualization. I had chatgpt write me a full business plan for it a while back, shameless plug: https://eucyclos.wixsite.com/eucyclos/post/making-advertisin...

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#118

Post by serial_dev » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:15 PM UTC

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #6

bad_alloc wrote: post #2

People complain a lot about the internet getting worse and worse. We can fix it, if we put in the effort to rebuild it. * Join fediverse services, e.g. [Lemmy](feddit.de) or Mastodon and post a bit. * Create your own website if you have sth like a cool hobby to share. Webhosting is available for free or cheap, depending on what you want. Link other pages you like to form a net. * If you can, host your own instances a…

I’ve been to fediverse. Many mastodongs are just the same entitled first world outrage vents as twitters, even more toxic at times because there are no moderators to shut them up.

Mastodon will never make it (e.g my parents, non tech siblings at least know what it is).

My experience, too, wasn't positive, the only time there was meaningful activity there was when everyone said they hate Elon and Twitter, it's an echo chamber, no interesting voices, and that whole fediverse stuff is confusing even as a software developer, imagine how nontech people would feel (they _would_ if they ever heard about Mastodon).

It might just be me, but I also hate the name. "Follow me on Mastodon" sounds like something that will get the cops called on me.

It had its chance when Elon took over, but then people realized that federation will not make a good user experience and will not make a community. I see anyone who offers Mastodon as a solution to anything in 2023 as "too deep in their bubble".

Stop trying to make Mastodon happen, it's not going to happen.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#119

Post by hospitalJail » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:15 PM UTC

sasaf5 wrote: post #111

WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #99

What's wrong with Stack Exchange? I'm a Math Stack Exchange user and I think it's absolutely amazing for the knowledge seeker. It's a repository of high quality questions and answers that you're not going to answer yourself. You can instantly access hundreds of the smartest people in the world. You can spend a week thinking about something difficult and frequently get it answered in under an hour, sometimes 10 minute…

> What's wrong with Stack Exchange? Also with HN, many subreddits, millions of personal blogs and sites... I tried to find why the paper says that Wikipedia is "the last good place on the internet", but it doesn't seem to provide any reference for that. Is it a meme somewhere?

Yeah as much as 'blogs' used to have a bad reputation, they are basically the only place worth visiting that isnt a social media site.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#120

Post by nvm0n2 » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:16 PM UTC

stuartjohnson12 wrote: post #105

synecdoche wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of assumptions there. There is nothing to say that correctness is a function of size or homogeneity. The claim is cause for concern in itself.

Wikipedia's goal isn't correctness, it is to aggregate the consensus of reliable sources. Wikipedia isn't reliable because it is agreed upon, it is reliable because determining truth values is outsourced to publishers who can mostly be depended on due to the value of reputation amongst experts in the information distribution sector. Publishers have their own biases which Wikipedia will aggregate. This is still, in my…

They mostly outsource to a large variety of very unreliable sources and then exclude others based purely on politics, to the extent that people can't even get false statements about themselves corrected, let alone false statements about other people or topics.