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Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

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Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#121

Post by inetknght »

postmodern100 wrote: post #116
inetknght wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is "it", if not truth? There's a misconception in this thread and commonly elsewhere. Scientists aren't after truth . They're after facts . Truth depends on context. Facts are indisputable. Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously…

(Sorry I already forgot the password to my recently created account!) > There's a misconception in this thread and commonly elsewhere. Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts. Truth depends on context. Facts are indisputable. Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The colo…

> can simultaneously be factual. But the truth is that the displayed color

Your rephrase is incorrect.

"Red" and "green" depends on what your brain interprets. That doesn't change the underlying EM frequencies of the color you see.

Therefore, red and green are truth while EM frequencies are factual.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#122

Post by Kim_Bruning »

e3bc54b2 wrote: post #39
mdp2021 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a miracle that the model of voluntary contribution from random agents and imperfect overview partially worked. The science that could emerge by studying the phenomenon could constitute a milestone.

The zeroeth law of Wikipedia – The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.

Uh.. I might be one of the few people who actually knows a bunch of the theory on why wikipedia works (properly). I had to do a bunch of research while working on wikipedia mediation and policies stuff, a long time ago.

I never got around to writing it all out though. Bits of it can be found in old policy discussions on bold-reverse-discuss, consensus, and etc.

I guess the first thing to realize is that wikipedia is split into a lot of pages, and n_editors for most pages in the long tail is very very low, so most definitely below n_dunbar[]; and really can be edited almost the same way wikipeida used to be back in 2002. At the same time a small number of pages above n_dunbar get the most attention and are the most messy to deal with.

Aaron Swartz actually did a bunch of research into some of the base statistics too, and he DID publish stuff online... let me look that up...

http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/whowriteswikipedia/

and especially * http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number (note I'm using lossely in empirical sense, where an online page might have a much lower actual limit than 150)

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#123

Post by crote »

savef wrote: post #110
Whoppertime wrote: post #109

Wikipedia is a good source for certain kinds of information. If you ask it about anything political it's going to be from a certain slant and the most informative part of the page will be the Talk page which explains what people would like on the page that isn't there, or shouldn't be on the page but is

What examples of this are there? I've usually found Wikipedia to be quite equal opportunity, well rounded, and factual. They have their NPOV[1] policy, and seem impressively unbiased to me, given the various divisive situations they have to try to cover. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_v...

Just because the policies are supposed to be neutral doesn't mean the resulting work is guaranteed to be truly neutral. Whether something is definitely a fact or an opinion can be very fluid, and you can play a lot with the amount of attention each viewpoint gets. Even a "neutral" article can end up reading completely differently when one viewpoint is very detailed and described in a fact-like way, while another only gets a short summary which reads as if it is a fringe opinion. And even when you are trying to be neutral, it is incredibly hard to avoid your output from getting shaped by the culture you are surrounded with.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#124

Post by SlowTao »

IAmBroom wrote: post #47
e3bc54b2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The zeroeth law of Wikipedia – The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.

Clever. I had to read that repeatedly to get it. Cf: The difference between theory and practice is: "Practice works, in theory."

I have heard the same thing from Grid based electrical engineers. The grids fails in theory but works in practice.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#125

Post by Kim_Bruning »

crote wrote: post #114
masfuerte wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I routinely edit articles on Wikipedia without even logging in. The controversial articles, where you are likely to run into problems, are a small minority of what's there.

Wikipedia also tends to suffer from fiefdoms, where even seemingly low-controversy articles become impossible to edit, as someone has decided that article is now their personal pet and they'll spend an absurd amount of time undoing and preventing other people's edits. The same applies on a larger scale with moderation. There are plenty of poorly-sourced database-like stub entries for STEM subjects, but try to make a…

If you encounter that, you can possibly get help to get those articles unstuck. People are not supposed to keep fiefdoms, much of policy prevents it. (and someone with a bit of practice can call in help and clear it up)

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#126

Post by SlowTao »

fishmicrowaver wrote: post #112
Whoppertime wrote: post #109

Wikipedia is a good source for certain kinds of information. If you ask it about anything political it's going to be from a certain slant and the most informative part of the page will be the Talk page which explains what people would like on the page that isn't there, or shouldn't be on the page but is

Yeah check out the Talk archives for the Human Anus page. It's like 20 years of hole fetishists and people trying to upload their own.

It is 7:29am here and already this is enough internet for the day.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#127

Post by PathOfEclipse »

fnikacevic wrote: post #88
PathOfEclipse wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The only specific example from that nypost article is about Fox News not being allowed as a source. Fox news has been found in court to be guilty of defamation and has argued in court that it cannot be considered news, only entertainment. So do you want reality or reality TV on Wikipedia? Should we consider Ancient Aliens as a source?

You're not trying very hard to see a side that's different from yours, are you? You are responding to a comment saying "leftist != realistic", yet you seem to be pretending my intent was to say "here's proof Wikipedia is left-leaning." Neither of my links were given to "prove" bias, either, only to show that accusations of leftwing bias are accusations that Wikipedia is valuing propaganda over truth and objectivity.

Anyways, to get off-topic from my original comment, here's some evidence for you to ignore:

https://larrysanger.org/2021/06/wikipedia-is-more-one-sided-...

https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/is...

https://www.allsides.com/blog/wikipedia-biased

https://stophindudvesha.org/the-myth-of-wikipedias-neutralit...

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#128

Post by postmodern100 »

estimator7292 wrote: post #117
tshaddox wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it. I don't quite agree with this, unless what you mean is that there's no procedure we can follow which generates knowledge without the possibility of error. This doesn't mean that there's no such thing as truth, or that we can't generate knowledge. It just means that we can never guarantee that our knowledge doesn't c…

There is very little about the universe that is axiomatically true and correct in and of itself. Math is about the only thing I can think of, and really that's in a different category. Everything we know as a species is really just consensus . "Truth" is what we agree it is because the universe does not offer actual truth. What we know is the best guess that our greatest minds can agree on. What we consider to be tru…

> There is very little about the universe that is axiomatically true and correct in and of itself. Math is about the only thing I can think of, and really that's in a different category.

My thought is that math (broadly speaking) possesses correctness because of axiomatic decisions. The consequences of those decisions lead us to practice math that can't express everything that we can imagine (e.g., see axiom of choice/ZFC).

The math humanity practices today is a result of tuning the axioms to be: self-consistent, and, useful for explaining phenomena that we can observe. I don't believe this math is correct in a universal or absolute sense, just locally.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#129

Post by Kim_Bruning »

zozbot234 wrote: post #40
Aurornis wrote: post #24

In the past few years I've noticed more and more issues on Wikipedia. It has never been perfect, but in the past it seemed like anything without sufficient sources would quickly get flagged as "citation needed" or questionable statements would get a warning label slapped on them. Now, I can visit pages for certain medical conditions that contain completely unsourced claims with no "citation needed" nor any warnings.…

> The sad part is that when I've tried to remove obviously flimsy information, someone will immediately come along and add it back. The trick is to write about your proposed edit on the talk page and wait a few days. If nobody has complained, you make the edit and write "see talk" in the edit summary. The notion that you should push an edit first and wait for someone to revert you just doesn't work in practice except…

I think it's important to edit early and often, but it certainly can't hurt to also explain your edits on the talk page. Bonus points if the other side makes no explanations, you get to "rv unexplained edit, see talk page". Just look in on the article every couple of days for a while to see what sticks and what doesn't. Originally when I started editing, more often than not people would have improved and built on my edits, rather than fought them. But you may need to be a bit (un)lucky these days?

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#130

Post by postmodern100 »

inetknght wrote: post #121
postmodern100 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Sorry I already forgot the password to my recently created account!) > There's a misconception in this thread and commonly elsewhere. Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts. Truth depends on context. Facts are indisputable. Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The colo…

> can simultaneously be factual. But the truth is that the displayed color Your rephrase is incorrect. "Red" and "green" depends on what your brain interprets. That doesn't change the underlying EM frequencies of the color you see. Therefore, red and green are truth while EM frequencies are factual.

My brain (the one in my head) can only interpret red or green, given its makeup and the rest of the state of the universe including the display that I'm looking at.

Therefore, it's a fact that my brain interprets red instead of green, or vise versa. It's a fact for someone else's brain that they interpret it as green instead of red.

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