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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

#271

Post by Cthulhu_ »

djoldman wrote: post #4

> Wikipedia is the largest compendium of human knowledge ever assembled, with more than 7 million articles in its English version, the largest and most developed of 343 language projects. but: > The collections of the Library of Congress include more than 32 million catalogued books and other print materials in 470 languages; more than 61 million manuscripts; the largest rare book collection in North America ... http…

Different things though; "catalogued books and other print materials" is not the same as "compendium of human knowledge". The former is an archive, the latter is an encyclopedia.

You won't find a 1920's copy of a newspaper in Wikipedia, but you will find articles about events from then that link to said newspaper.

Both are super important though, Wikipedia can't exist as it does now without archives (digitized or at the very least referentiable).

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#272

Post by Cthulhu_ »

_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-...

I can't claim I was part of the original internet users, but this is part of why anonymity was so important to them. I'm pretty open about my real life on here and other channels, and some people IRL know my real name. But I would regret it if an organization, government or employer attaches consequences to my online behaviour.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#273

Post by crazybonkersai »

hkpack wrote: post #259
matusp wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ac…

Funny that you mention Russia, considering the bulk of Russian Wikipedia articles are written by Ukrainians. You can imagine how "objective" is that.

Source: https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/ru.wikipedia.org

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#274

Post by lucideer »

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…

I used to contribute semi-regularly to Wikipedia in the past, but tried contributing recently & found the experience to be off-putting (to put it mildly).

I also have long been frustrated with certain areas of Wikipedia that I feel struggle so significantly with NPV that they're rendered beyond useless, likely net harmful. (These are not the topics I've attempted contributing to recently, I wouldn't dare).

I'm continuously annoyed by the contrast of their overbearing donation pushes with the overspends in their published reports.

BUT all that said I do sometimes need reminding in today's world how much of a miracle Wikipedia still is. Not something to be taken for granted. And on the overspends: this is hard to qualify given there's really no comparable projects in existence. Maybe this is just the price we need to pay.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#275

Post by thefz »

scandox wrote: post #238
jl6 wrote: 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.

Had a colleague make the same point on open source, "don't trust code everyone can modify". He was a bottom tier programmer at best.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#276

Post by Cthulhu_ »

crote wrote: post #123
savef wrote: 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...

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…

It's a very thin line to walk, and I don't think "true neutral" or "true unbiased" exists for the same reasons you mention. A newspaper may be neutral and stick to the facts, but if it simply chooses not to publish something, or it chooses to publish something as a byline instead of headline, it's already biased.

There are organizations trying something else though; admittedly I got this through a promotion from a youtube channel, but Ground News [0] is a news aggregator that publishes news with many sources, including ownership, political affiliation, publishing type (facts or opinions, neutral or entertaining), and even notes on which channels do and don't report on it, identifying media blind spots like "low coverage from right sources" or "low original coverage" to help people escape their bubbles and provide multiple perspectives on an issue.

[0] https://ground.news/

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#277

Post by creatonez »

ljsprague wrote: post #262
creatonez wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're mad Wikipedia doesn't parrot thoroughly debunked eugenics arguments?

The fact that you jumped to "eugenics" proves my point.

The fact that you can't correctly identify debunked claims about a connection between race and IQ as inherently eugenicist talking points and instead quickly resorted to obfuscation proves my point.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#278

Post by psychoslave »

Belopolye wrote: post #184
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.

All you've accomplished here is to repackage the tired "there are no absolute truths" meme

Yes, that’s a nice self-contradicting statement to ignite thoughts. One possible resolution is to conclude "even granted that absolute truths do exist, and humans can experiment the intuition that they indeed exist, doesn’t imply that humans can reach absolute truth and fathom it down."

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#279

Post by input_sh »

emsign wrote: 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.

Oh it already started, the ADL convinced House Republicans to launch an investigation into Wikipedia because of its "anti-Israel bias": https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5473331-wikipedia-bias-pr...

One of the requests in the letter (https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/08272...) is to de-anonymise some of the Wikipedia editors.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#280

Post by visarga »

ironSkillet wrote: post #166
postmodern100 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I disagree, it is not universal. 1+1=2 is just a specific system of notation with consistency. There was a time when no human conceptualized this idea of 1+1=2, they did not have numerals or know about addition. Before you get to 1+1=2 you need a bunch of prior concepts that are themselves contingent on culture and history.
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