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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

#241
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…

[flagged]

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#242
post #239

Oh, just wait til MAGA sycophants feel threatened by Wikipedia. It'll be a war against the online encyclopedia like none before. I'm actually anxious that might happen at any time. For instance when Trump runs out of enemies to scapegoat.

Once they do, I'm sure we'll see blackouts that are similar to most dictatorships. (i.e. metal themed pages in Turkey, FB/Google in China, etc)

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#243
post #233

Wikipedia is fabulous. I wish educators would stop telling people that it’s not reliable, and start using it to teach media literacy - which, for wiki purposes, is essentially to read the talk page to see what viewpoints have been included and excluded and why.

My daughter's teacher told her class that Wikipedia is unreliable because it's just made up by volunteers. So I asked her where they should find information and she said other sites on the internet that can't just be edited by anyone. Blew my mind.

I can’t count how many times I’ve heard “Wikipedia is unreliable because it can be edited by anyone”. I tend to think that Wikipedia converges on reliable because it can be edited by anyone.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#244

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

I'm very surprised to hear Reuters described as left wing. I suppose though that even my Republican twice Trump voting uncle is left of someone, is that what you mean? I'm increasingly concerned about the fact that any media outlet, conservative or otherwise, that doesn't engage in far right pandering to the propaganda of politicians is magically labeled "left wing." Anecdotal but someone was arguing to me at a pub l…

Well Morgan was the editor of a broadly left wing tabloid in the UK for 11 years. His politics are quite fluid, except that I think he's consistently quite socially conservative ... "Common Sense" sort of thing.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#245
post #233

Wikipedia is fabulous. I wish educators would stop telling people that it’s not reliable, and start using it to teach media literacy - which, for wiki purposes, is essentially to read the talk page to see what viewpoints have been included and excluded and why.

totally agree. But in best case you check the reference Wikipedia is referencing which is usually the first source of a fact.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#246
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…

people are also working to o make it worse everyday. We’re lucky the people working to make it better are winning. It it’s a hard battle

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only specific example from that nypost article is about Fox News not being allowed as a source. Fox news has been found in court to be guilty of defamation and has argued in court that it cannot be considered news, only entertainment. So do you want reality or reality TV on Wikipedia? Should we consider Ancient Aliens as a source?

Fox News argued in court that their political commentary programming isn't news. They didn't argue that none of their programming is news.

I mean, given how inclined they are to blur the lines, a certain amount of caution seems reasonable. They're a tabloid, essentially.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#248
post #73

An unexpected side-effect for me after I started subscribing to Kagi a few months ago, at a low tier with limited searches, is that I made sure to configure all my browsers with keywords for Wikipedia searches and I use those a lot, knowing that what I will end up with after searching is probably going to be the Wikipedia page anyway. No point wasting precious limited monthly searches.

Kagi does not count bangs as part of monthly usage - for wiki that would be !w search term https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/plan-types.html#how-searche...

I'm still puzzled after all these years : why would anyone use search engine bangs instead of directly configuring custom searches from their browser's URL bar ?

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#249
post #110

Earlier 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...

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

If you succeed in moving the overton window to the right, formerly "neutral" media outlets now appear to be left-leaning.
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