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.
They have been playing the long game for decades, the speed up in recent times feels like they realised the windows was closing and they need to lock things down before many wise up.
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'd you get banned?
Also I don't think it's necessary to call people names.
> There is very little about the universe that is axiomatically true and correct in and of itself. Math is about the only thing I can think of, and really that's in a different category. My thought is that math (broadly speaking) possesses correctness because of axiomatic decisions. The consequences of those decisions lead us to practice math that can't express everything that we can imagine (e.g., see axiom of choic…
It seems like there is a universal sense in which statements like 1+1=2" or "7 is a prime number" are true, no?
If by "universal" we mean median adult human which are apt and willing to engage in basic mathematical thoughts, yes. That’s certainly already a very greatly reduced set of entities compared to everything in existence, though.
Would the Age of Encyclopaediae be next, with human information safeguarded by the selected, several giant egregors taking shape and competing for world views?
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.
Simple phrases heard elsewhere which make the person feel for 5s like a really smart experienced one in given topic, while being the opposite. A very common trait in large part of population, any population, which usually comes in pair with lack of critical thinking inward & outward.
At the end though, most of us are guilty of such behavior from time to time.
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
Labeling all media that isn't rabid right wing partisan as "left wing" is unconvincing.
Reminds me of "reality has a well known liberal bias"
In an age of accelerating hypercapitalism causing rabid enshittification, non-profit and volunteer website and servicice might struggle, but they remain the only becon of quality.
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…
Wikipedia has gone too far from being what it was meant to be. I can agree it is the "last good thing on the internet" with the caveat - "for some people".
Is is neither objective, thus not scientific, nor complete in terms of depth of the information. All of this happens because of invading obsession with "modern" ideologies that pollute and distort the pure knowledge gathering, which is a very complex matter itself that becomes a mission impossible in the case of Wikipedia.
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 regio…
> The nationalists from each country will try to establish their own ethnicity for persons of interest.
Russia is the major player in pushing disinformation in historical articles about eastern europe (and not only). It works on it systematically by using both hired editors and volunteers on scale as well as producing “backing” materials.
Framing editors who are trying to keep up with cleaning all this mess as bad actors is understandable if you support the goal why russia is doing that.
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 resp…
If New York Post just "leans right", then AP should post obvious lies en masse every day for the left with non existing fact checking. If the scale is this, then it is a completely useless metric. It puts using "ostensibly" regarding Trump's random word clouds to the same level as this: https://nypost.com/2022/09/06/teacher-enoch-burke-jailed-ove.... The first paragraph starts with a lie, then the last two paragraphs are worse than anything on AP... but sure, the metric is definitely useful.