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We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45128461 and marked it off topic.
Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
151–160 of 496 posts
Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
#152There has been this trend recently of calling Wikipedia the last good thing on the internet. And i agree its great, i spend an inordinate amount of my time on Wikimedia related things. But i think there is a danger here with all these articles putting Wikipedia too much on a pedestal. It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws. The true best part of Wikipedia is that its a work i…
Excellence is never finished:
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/64d6548c19f38a...
Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
#153Wikipedia has plenty of propaganda. It's often at the fringes of knowledge, in niche subjects where there isn't yet an established group of proponents and detractors. It can be quite subtle too, will fool most laypeople, even those who are otherwise intellectually savvy. It's only when a subject becomes popular that the propaganda gets recognized and rectified.
And? Share an example. This reads like conspiratorial thinking without any evidence.
It’s not a niche topic, but anything to do with Iran tends to censor the bad things going on there.
Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say this is all we really should reasonably expect from our knowledge consensus systems. In fact it’s the same values that “science” stands on: do our best everyday and continue to try improving. It’s a bit hard for me to imagine something better (in practice). It’s easy to want more or feel like reality doesn’t live up to one’s idealism. But we live here and now in the messiness of the present. Viva la Wikip…
> In fact it’s the same values that “science” stands on: do our best everyday and continue to try improving. Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it. But philosophers still talk about Truth, they didn't get the message. As long as we are using leaky abstractions - which means all the time - we can't capture Truth. There is no view from nowhere.
It's not a coincidence that somebody might insult philosophy as a discipline and then drop some freshman dorm room level epistemology as evidence. If you don't know anything about a topic, it is very easy to dismiss it.
Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
#155The corners where Wikipedia breaks down are niche but fascinating. Check out the list of superhero movies (not Marvel or DC). Or any page that contains information on Video Game Console Generations.
In cases like those, what has gone wrong is a mix of apophenia and people protecting their own turf. Elaborate classification systems are created that are internally consistent but have no relationship to reality.
Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
#156There has been this trend recently of calling Wikipedia the last good thing on the internet. And i agree its great, i spend an inordinate amount of my time on Wikimedia related things. But i think there is a danger here with all these articles putting Wikipedia too much on a pedestal. It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws. The true best part of Wikipedia is that its a work i…
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Do you not realize that ridiculously straw-manning people with different beliefs than you as horrible, evil, hateful, truth-hating extremists .. is the very "extremism" and "attempting to destroy ideological opponents" that you're supposedly fighting against? How do you not see the irony?
Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
#157[flagged]
Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
#158There has been this trend recently of calling Wikipedia the last good thing on the internet. And i agree its great, i spend an inordinate amount of my time on Wikimedia related things. But i think there is a danger here with all these articles putting Wikipedia too much on a pedestal. It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws. The true best part of Wikipedia is that its a work i…
the fact that anyone can be an editor on Wikipedia scares me. I mostly use it for STEM, current affairs and timelines, stuff that can't be easily fiddled—unlike topics around history & politics. These are highly baised on wikipedia.
For instance, look at wikipediocracy.com
Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it. > it What is "it", if not truth?
> 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…
Epistemology fight! Facts are ideas like there are 60,000 species of beetle. They're different from other ideas in that they don't explain very much, don't really contribute to understanding, and are quite boring. They are disputable, because my source for that particular fact is quite old, and by now we may think the fact is that there are 70,000 species of beetle. Objective facts are actually true, and nobody is ever completely, indisputably certain of those, although in some fields like mathematics we try very hard to say indisputable things, and in others like literary criticism we don't, because the subjective is of more interest in that context - that is, there is higher tolerance for vagueness. But really every claimed statement is a subjective attempt to approach the objective, which is forever beyond us, but we can travel in its direction.
Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Do you not realize that ridiculously straw-manning people with different beliefs than you as horrible, evil, hateful, truth-hating extremists .. is the very "extremism" and "attempting to destroy ideological opponents" that you're supposedly fighting against? How do you not see the irony?
It's essential to understand that tolerance is not a moral precept, it's more like a peace treaty. It's a practical social contract that allows everyone to live in peace while exercising their rights. Treaties only protect parties who abide by their terms, and it MUST be this way, or a free society will be torn down by people who want to ban books, racially discriminate, and impose their religion on others.
Much has been written on this topic, you should avail yourself.
https://conversational-leadership.net/tolerance-is-a-social-...