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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

#141

Post by gdulli »

PathOfEclipse wrote: post #138
gdulli wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Larry Sanger literally does not understand what the concept of bias is. He has said: "you aligned yourself with one side, against another side, in a debate. That makes you biased, not neutral." He's so unable to engage with ideas he doesn't agree with that he's conflated having a stance with "bias".

It sounds to me like you're just nitpicking his words. I can't find this quote anywhere, but he's probably saying Wikipedia is taking "stances", to use your word, on subjects where it should instead be trying harder to be neutral and provide multiple perspectives in a balanced manner. Sincerely trying to understand and convey the perspectives of two opposing sides looks vastly different from taking one side, amplifyi…

https://bsky.app/profile/curious-maga.bsky.social/post/3loel...

He first invents a link between a topic being "complex" with not being able to take a side. Then he conflates taking a side with "bias".

This is detached from reality. That is not nitpicking words. This is a word salad that starts with a need to dismiss a viewpoint and works backwards.

This "co-founder" was let go from Wikipedia in its first year over 20 years ago. He's had a crusade against them ever since.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#142

Post by ozim »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #125
crote wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

But to do that you have to stop being random and start playing Wikipedia game.

Random people don’t have time for that.

Ergo “it is not a project for random editors anymore”.

I want do an edit or addition and be fairly evaluated without having to call higher instances or fight through bureaucracy.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#143

Post by Kim_Bruning »

ozim wrote: post #142
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

But to do that you have to stop being random and start playing Wikipedia game. Random people don’t have time for that. Ergo “it is not a project for random editors anymore”. I want do an edit or addition and be fairly evaluated without having to call higher instances or fight through bureaucracy.

Fair-ish. It really depends. The last few areas I did anything in (I'm not a regular anymore) basically nothing happened except what I wrote, so I guess the quiet parts are really really quiet and you don't get into much trouble at all.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#144

Post by Wikipedianon »

justiciar9 wrote: post #140
Wikipedianon wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beeblebrox leaked internal mailing list messages to a forum known for doxxing in violation of the NDA they signed. i know that Beeblebrox did not doxx anyone and I said that in my comment. my point is leaking information to a doxxing forum sends the wrong message and is dangerous. Maybe you should create an account and look at the "Wikimedian Folks Too Embarrassing for Public Viewing" forum and get back to me. Or do…

That’s hardly doxxing. Asking if two publicly visible usernames might be related is hardly alarming.

What about the part where they revealed the full name of the person allegedly behind the two usernames?

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#145

Post by noman-land »

stopthebullshit wrote: post #113
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

[flagged]

Got any notable examples? All the history is publc so it should be easy to link to, presumably.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#146

Post by hungmung »

jacobgkau wrote: post #104
hungmung wrote: post #16

Honestly Wikipedia+Archive.org remaining online have national security implications (not just USA, but any democracy). Though I'd wager the current administration would take a different view.

> national security implications (not just USA, but any democracy) That's not really "national," is it?

National security doesn't just refer to USA...?

France has national security considerations, just like the UK, Uruguay and Uganda. They'd all benefit from having open access to verifiable information.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#147

Post by hungmung »

em-bee wrote: post #34
hungmung wrote: post #16

Honestly Wikipedia+Archive.org remaining online have national security implications (not just USA, but any democracy). Though I'd wager the current administration would take a different view.

what are the implications?

We've always been at war with Eurasia. Not all threats are external.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#148

Post by voxl »

blululu wrote: post #107
voxl wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And? Share an example. This reads like conspiratorial thinking without any evidence.

This is kind of an unreasonable request. The OP is making claim of a general trend not obscure and subtle bias on any single article. Informally the claim feels true from my experience with Wikipedia and it makes sense that a small number of editors would have a wider bias. Just think central limit theorem here.

It's not an unreasonable request to ask for one example of a trend. It's unreasonable to make a claim with no evidence.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#149

Post by inetknght »

postmodern100 wrote: post #130
inetknght wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> my brain interprets

> someone else's brain

Yes, like I said: it depends on context.

Red and green is interpretation, which depends on context. That's truth.

Sure, it's indisputable that one brain and a different brain can have different associations for names of colors. That's a fact. But the name of the color that each brain associates with corresponding input depends on context. That's truth.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#150

Post by tshaddox »

visarga wrote: post #111
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…

> This doesn't mean that there's no such thing as truth, or that we can't generate knowledge Oh I agree we can generate knowledge, but it is never the Truth, it can't be. Any knowledge is composed from imperfect abstractions, the edge cases of which we don't know. We are taking patterns from our experience, and coining them as abstractions, but ultimately we all have our own lived experience, a limited experience. We…

A piece of knowledge is a claim about some property of reality, which is another way to say that it's a claim about what is true. Thus knowledge can contain truth and can also contain errors, and importantly it's impossible to guarantee that knowledge does not contain errors.
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