The people who built Wikipedia, technically
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25 Years of Wikipedia
201–210 of 498 posts
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#202https://wikipedia25.org/en/the-first-day > Founder Jimbo Wales on a challenge overcome Aren't you forgetting someone, Jimmy? Your co-founder Larry Sanger, perhaps? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger Let's check one of the citations from the History of Wikipedia page: https://www.mid-day.com/lifestyle/health-and-fitness/article... > It was Larry Sanger who chanced upon the critical concept of combining the thr…
It's a very touchy subject for Wales. It caused him to walk out of an interview after 48 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uswRbWyt_pg
IMO Wales has been sitting on that chair for too long. He should retire.
It would also be better for Wikipedia to not have any "public face". I don't want fake-heroes; I want accurate, objective content.
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#203In the 2000s, in the tech world, the open source successes that were being talked about was always Apache and Linux. When Wikipedia started gaining a bit of traction, everyone made fun of it. It was the butt of jokes in all the prime time comedy shows. And I always felt like telling the critics - "Don't you see what is happening? People all over the world are adding their own bits of knowledge and creating this huge…
If I want to look something up, I always check out wikipedia first. Its not always accurate, but its invariably a lot more accurate on most topics than random information across the web. Its also pretty easy to spot bad quality wiki articles once you get the gist of the site Its amazing that wikipedia exists - there've been multiple hardcore attempts to kill it over the years for profit, but its still managing to go
Wikipedia is often the last on my goto resources to consult. The information is huge, but writing quality or style often irks me more than I can stand. I I always check Britannica first. If it's not there, then I move on.
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#204I do believe that Wikipedia is one of the least biased sources out there, but there is definitely bias. Here is a concrete example. Compare the introduction paragraph of the English circumcision article ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision ) with the German one ( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zirkumzision ). The English intro talks a lot about medical advantages of the procedure: "reduced rates of sexually tr…
It's impossible to write completely neutrally. Editorial decisions like what information to include or exclude, what sources to cite, what order to present information in, what illustrations to use cannot be avoided and inherently present some kind of narrative.
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia is literally a spin-off of a porn company. From that point on, where it came from or who founded it is not so important. The question is how it acts today. It is a highly-political organization supporting lot of “progressive” ideas, California-style. So if you like reading politically biased media it may be for you. If you are seeking for a global view you better ask different LLMs for arguments and counter…
It is tedious because you must edit with facts, not ideology. But we now live in a world where people agree that ideology should be able to change facts. > or the impact of certain wars Exactly, like China wanting to completely censor anything regarding the Tiananmen Square protests. > for example questioning homosexuality I don't know what you have to question about this. >If you are seeking for a global view you be…
> It is tedious because you must edit with facts, not ideology.
Not just because you must edit with facts. If your opposition outnumbers you and/or they have more energy to spend than you, they can grind you down with bad-faith arguments and questions for clarification.
The way this goes is that they edit an article to insert their POV. You edit/revert it. They open a talk page discussion about the subject. Suppose their edit is "marine animals are generally considered cute throughout the world" with a reference to a paper by an organization in favor of seals. You revert it by saying this is NPOV. They open a talk page question asking where the organization has been declared to be partisan. Suppose you do research and find some such third-party statement that "the Foundation for Animal Aesthetics is organized by proponents of marine animals". Then they ask how this third party is accurate, or whether "organized by proponents" necessarily implies that they're biased.
This can go on more or less forever until someone gives up. The attack even has a name on Wikipedia itself: "civil POV pushing". It works because few Wikipedia admins are subject matter experts, so they police behavior (conduct) more than they police subject accuracy.
Civil POV pushers can thus keep their surface conduct unobjectionable while waiting for the one they are actioning against to either give up or to get angry enough to make a heated moment's conduct violation. It's essentially the wiki version of sealioning.
In short, a thousand "but is really two plus two equal to four?" will overcome a single "You bastard, it is four and you're deliberately trolling me", because the latter is a personal insult.
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Clearly there's no love lost between the two co-founders, but if either of them had been missing, Wikipedia wouldn't be what it is today. Larry may have left the project, but sticks his oar in frequently, see for example the Nine Theses he posted to Wikipedia last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Nine_Theses Neither Larry nor Jimbo "are" Wikipedia. Wikipedia's editors are Wikipedia, and if they c…
His nine theses are basically a how-to guide for replacing democratic consensus with culture war bullshit. He clearly wants to bend the process to match his perception of the world rather than update his understanding of the world to match the facts.
The process Wikipedia uses to produce articles that present facts with without editorializing has clearly worked fairly well. Obviously we have a more difficult time reaching consensus on contentious topics but in general the system works quite well.
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#207https://wikipedia25.org/en/the-first-day > Founder Jimbo Wales on a challenge overcome Aren't you forgetting someone, Jimmy? Your co-founder Larry Sanger, perhaps? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger Let's check one of the citations from the History of Wikipedia page: https://www.mid-day.com/lifestyle/health-and-fitness/article... > It was Larry Sanger who chanced upon the critical concept of combining the thr…
It's a very touchy subject for Wales. It caused him to walk out of an interview after 48 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uswRbWyt_pg
Pffft hahaha. Looks like interviewer was inexperienced AND hit a touchy subject. It's like trying to have a casual conversation about dating with someone who's secretly gay.
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#208In the 2000s, in the tech world, the open source successes that were being talked about was always Apache and Linux. When Wikipedia started gaining a bit of traction, everyone made fun of it. It was the butt of jokes in all the prime time comedy shows. And I always felt like telling the critics - "Don't you see what is happening? People all over the world are adding their own bits of knowledge and creating this huge…
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Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh dear, you need to learn about the GamerGate incident which started August 2012. All the extreme division and online manipulation through the collaborative creation of false narratives started right there, with that issue, before contaminating the entire political landscape. It's the Eternal September of our generation, and it's not recognised enough as such. Before that, the internet was a different place. https:/…
> Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture Okay, what the actual fuck? IIRC it was people whining about the absolute state of games journalism in the 2010's.
GamerGate was about journalism in the same way that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was to protect the rights of ethnic Russian minorities in that country. The GamerGate people used ethics as an excuse because that sounds a lot more reasonable than “hate mob riled up by a bitter ex”, but it fell apart as soon as you looked at the evidence (e.g. they were most focused on attacking a developer over a relationship with someone who never reviewed her games), where they went for support (right-wing agitators with low journalistic ethics), and all of the real issues they ignored between huge gaming companies and the major media outlets.
The excuse was as believable as someone saying they were super concerned about ethics in tech journalism, but then never said a word about a huge tech company and spent all of their time badgering the Temple OS guy for sharing a meal with an OS News writer.
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#210In the 2000s, in the tech world, the open source successes that were being talked about was always Apache and Linux. When Wikipedia started gaining a bit of traction, everyone made fun of it. It was the butt of jokes in all the prime time comedy shows. And I always felt like telling the critics - "Don't you see what is happening? People all over the world are adding their own bits of knowledge and creating this huge…
> Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion Religion maybe, and Wikipedia is indeed pretty awesome for many topics, but politics is THE bad example here. Much of the political - especially geopolitical - content on Wikipedia has a tremendous atlanticist bias.
Is there another public source for encyclopedia-type articles that is better for geopolitical content? For example, if I have a philosophy question I'll often consult the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy instead of Wikipedia.
If there isn't a more neutral public source -- if there are only sources with different biases, or if the better sources are behind paywalls -- then I think that Wikipedia is still doing pretty well even for contentious geopolitical topics.
Usually disputes are visible on the Talk page, regardless of whatever viewpoint may prevail in the main article. It can also be useful to jump back to years-old revisions of articles, if there are recent world events that put the subject of the article in the news.
Apart from Wikipedia, speaking more generally, I think that articles with a strong editorial bias still provide useful information to an alert reader. I can read articles from Mother Jones, Newsmax, Russia Today, the BBC, Times of India, etc. and find different political and/or geopolitical slants to what is written about and how it is reported. I can also learn a lot even when I strongly disagree with the narrative thrust of what is reported. The key thing is to take any particular article or publication as only circumstantial evidence for an underlying reality, and to avoid falling into complacency even when (or especially when) the information you're reading aligns with what you already believe to be true.