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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

#221

Post by saghm »

thegrim33 wrote: post #156
uragur27754 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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?

Honest question: do you genuinely not think that there are ever groups of people with an ideology based on ignoring inconvenient facts in favor of their preferred agenda ? I don't think that it's that implausible to argue that this is at least in principle possible. If you're willing to accept that premise, the obvious follow-up question is how exactly you can effectively debate someone who quite literally is opposed to the idea of rational debate because it would require a willingness to prioritize facts over their ideology. At the end of the day, if someone isn't acting in good faith, there's not much you can do to interact with them fruitfully, so the best thing you can do is try to mitigate the damage they cause.

I try to be open to the possibility that I'm wrong about things like this, but even as someone who tends to be very hesitant to make judgments about other people's motives, it's hard for me to imagine how much more convincing the evidence would need to be in order to conclude that one of the major political parties in the United States has long abandoned any semblance of good faith. Having a civil discourse requires both sides to sit at the table, and that can't happen when one side is busy flipping the table instead.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#222

Post by wolvesechoes »

throw4847285 wrote: post #154
visarga wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Very common in STEM circles.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#223

Post by bad_username »

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

Not only politics, also articles on philosophy and history are very hard to trust, due to the slant.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#224

Post by Jean-Papoulos »

_dke7 wrote: post #72

Important recent context - just a few days ago House Republicans asked Wikipedia to reveal the name of some editors: https://truthout.org/articles/house-republicans-investigate-...

Putting bibles everywhere, removing books from libraries, now getting the names of wikipedians... They're going slowly, but they're going surely.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#225

Post by SirHackalot »

thegrim33 wrote: post #156
uragur27754 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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?

[flagged]

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#226

Post by matusp »

voxl wrote: post #90
glitchc wrote: post #79

Wikipedia 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.

Many countries in Eastern Europe have radically different interpretations of history. The nationalists from each country will try to establish their own ethnicity for persons of interest. They will try to add editorial comments or hyperpartisan sources to all kinds of historical articles. There are edit wars about what language to use for what city in what era. I would guess that this is the case for many other regions of the world.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#227

Post by moffkalast »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #76
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.

You may find this interesting! https://web.archive.org/web/20080604020024/http://www.hereco... > So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. > And television watchin…

I'm not sure one can compare an hour of watching TV to an hour of researching and writing, the former is essentially mindless idling that does not take any mental effort. I wonder if there's a measurable difference in brain energy consumption, but probably not.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#228

Post by SilverElfin »

nl wrote: post #214
krmboya wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The editors mostly reference left-leaning media outlets when it comes to political topics, without providing a counterbalance from right-leaning sources, assuming it were a truth-seeking endeavor. As a non American this is very obvious to me. Even Reuters that was supposedly meant to be a non-biased media outlet is clearly left-leaning at this point

Reuters is left-leaning? How so? It's a new agency and as far as I've seen just sticks to publishing summaries of events. I had a look at the most potentially controversial topics I could find right now, and I say they seem fair. For example: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/dozens-detained-us-immigrat... (on ICE arrests in NY) and https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/what-would-wider-r... (on recognition of a P…

I’m guessing the other person meant AP not Reuters. Both used to be considered to be straightforward neutral primary sources, and to many readers they both occupied the same role in the news industry. But since around 2016, the AP has shifted more and more left. This is evident in their editorial guidelines, which include guidance on controversial current issues that makes them biased. This bias is recognized in respected bias ratings (https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart). Reuters is typically considered center though.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#229

Post by throwaway2037 »

chris_wot wrote: post #211
sshine wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s one example, but I mean less personal. Wikipedia isn’t a person. For example: I’m a big fan of Wikipedia. I spent countless hours writing articles in my early twenties. I stopped because the environment got more hostile as the site grew in popularity. I think that might have been necessary to address the influx of drive-by editing, but it still meant I stopped enjoying being a contributor. I don’t appreciate t…

You think that's bad? I got permanently banned and I started many important things on Wikipedia - like the admins noticeboard, a number of Australia communities, and the [citation needed]. I wrote dozens of articles about Australian women - none of them gave a shit and so I'm not able to write about them any more. They are, by and large, a bunch of horrible bullies and losers - many Wikipedians don't actually care ab…

Why did you get permanently banned? And what stops you from creating a new account?

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#230

Post by throwaway2037 »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #216
bawolff wrote: post #12

There 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…

"It isn't perfect." Articles about some chemical process are fine, indeed often excellent. Everything where facts get filtered and presented, is bad. Read about real world events - especially where different groups or countries were involved - in three different languages on Wikipedia, and you'd think three different universes exist.

    > Read about real world events - especially where different groups or countries were involved - in three different languages on Wikipedia, and you'd think three different universes exist.
Can you give a clear example? I would like to read it for myself.
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