I was surprised that Wikipedia wasn't immediately overrun by trolls, griefers, and spammers. I'm still not entirely sure how it avoids that, though I've got some speculations. Unlike most user contributed sites it's happy to throw stuff away. It does grow but it doesn't care about growing fast. That's great but it's a hard formula to replicate.
Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
191–200 of 496 posts
Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
#192Earlier 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…
Indeed, Wikipedia really is worth celebrating. While I sympathize with the GP, we should avoid devolving into purity spirals or we'll never have moments of joy.
In my view it is very much the journey towards an unatainable goal that makes Wikipedia so inspiring. The Wikipedian's themselves admit it is a work in progress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_a_work_...
I think that's part of what makes Wikipedia beautiful.
In some ways it makes me think of the religious monolouge from the tv show babylon5 https://youtu.be/JjnpTcvGvts?si=6jdzDxVXOt--LNHC
Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
#193Earlier 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…
That is a pretty concrete epistemological statement. Is it true?
That's not just a game, or a "gotcha". Any discussion about "truth" eventually ends up with the question of what it means to know something, a subject about which you seem to be fairly confident.
Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
#194Wikipedia 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...
Wikipedia says (or said, I guess - I haven't checked) that it unambiguously *was* a slur then too. As evidence, it cites a study of 17th century literature that notes redskins were more likely to be villains than heros in a small sample of 80 books and a diary entry about a sign outside a small town that said "Indian / Redskin scalps - $1" or some such. I don't recall the details.
The point is there wasn't one cited source that showed redskin specifically was a slur, only general evidence that white settlers were racist against Native Americans. Clear WP:SYNTH violation.
Tried to make my own changes, got immediately reverted. Tried to start on the talk page, got totally filibustered by two editors who has the page and a hundred other racism adjacent pages on their watchlist and whose edit history was basically just those handful of pages. Started reading about internal wikipedia boards I could appeal to. Stopped and logged off.
Once you start noticing things like that and start double checking, you find such minor distortions in a lot of political adjacent Wikipedia pages.
Another good example is to grab five super murderous left wing dictators and five super murderous right wing dictators and read the summary section. Use a pen or a highlighter and classify each sentence as positive, negative, or neutral.
Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
#196My most-shocking LLM interaction so-far ties with when http://www.perplexity.ai cited my recent wikipedia edit (from my two decade+ account) in answering a question about transistor density... less than one day after I had made the update it cited [1]. Like I am nobody why tf are you listening to me?!?
This ties with having sat with a published author of a non-fiction war chronicle as we discussed his books, himself, and his world (with a computer, me typing / brainstorming).
Among many other reconfigurations of muh'brain.
[0] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/efPrtcLdcdM
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
I am just the electrician.
Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
#197In 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.…
- https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2024-10-17/Path_Depende...
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40655989
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Weierstrass_function#Accu...
And my personal favourite is recently when the most ridiculous thing was added to Bukele's Gang Crackdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_c...
If you still have the desire to have some of these fixed, post here and I'll put it in my queue and get to it at some point. If you don't want the resulting interaction from other commenters here, send it to my email (in profile).
Wikipedia is ultimately a consensus summarizer frequently mistaken for a truth-seeker. So you have to make the case for something being true somewhere where the experts live, and then Wikipedia can express the experts' opinion. But crucially, it is not truth-seeking on its own.
Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
#198There 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…
Agreed. It's funny how only a couple of years ago we all told schoolchildren "stop citing Wikipedia, anyone can edit it, read an actual book!" yet now in this benighted era of AI we urge them to consult Wikipedia for "the truth" because it's not the hallucination of a machine. Yes, it has its flaws, but I plan to keep on editing and donating.
Wikipedia could function forever without another donation if they wanted to.
Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I heard about Jimmy getting his privs revoked, but had no idea what precipitated that to occur. Some kind of misguided heading-off-at-the-pass of future naysayers and potential lawfare, I guess. Heavy hangs the head that wears the crown, and I guess he’s a figurehead as much as he’s a lead of operations. It makes sense to tie his hands so he can say he tried I guess. Interesting interplay of authority, both i…
[NSFW] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... has a summary of the issue. From what i understand Fox news was running a bunch of stories at the time on how Wikipedia was full of porn. In full fairness to jimmy, i think only a handful were risque art from the 1800s. Many of the other images would probably be classed as sex educational if you're being sympathetic, and exhibitionist if you are n…
> However the ultimate issue was not what the files contained but that he acted alone without agreement to delete outside of proper procedure.
Were any changes to Wikipedia policies implemented as a result of this, and if so, do you know which ones?
I found the link to the discussion I referred to upthread since the discussion was from a bit ago:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:IdeaLab/A_Tor_On...
Did this ever go anywhere? I found a grant proposal, but I need to sign up for an account or reactivate my existing one, or whatever.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/A_Tor_Onion_S...
Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
#200There 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…
I held out for as long as I could but it was emotionally draining