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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

#281

Post by amiga386 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #229
chris_wot wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Why did you get permanently banned.

Ta bu shi da yu created the citation needed template: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Citation... (I remember that account name from Kuro5hin. Much respect!)

He edited under several accounts, all of which are permabanned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Aussie_Article_Writer

Why? Because he'd earned an interaction ban (IBAN) from engaging with BrownHairedGirl, and he breached the ban: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=...

Whatever he said, it's been fully scrubbed, but it appears to have been commenting on BrownHairedGirl's not-yet-submitted Request for Adminship: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=1039021442#Piotrus...

How'd he get the interaction ban? Because another account of his and BrownHairedGirl were squabbling, and the admins have working eyes and brains, they could see he was doing the instigating: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=980273295#Proposa...

You're not meant to wind up or troll your fellow Wikipedians, even if they are combative dickheads who need taking down a peg.

What was the beef? That he was creating small subcategories for each suburb of Brisbane, and BrownHairedGirl goes off her nut at small categories.

BrownHairedGirl was eventually taken out by being needlessly combative about - of all things - Wikipedia's "small categories" policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...

> what stops you from creating a new account?

Wikipedians inevitably go back to their old stomping grounds, use their normal tone in discussions, repeat their same old habits and basically don't change. When they do that, they're very recognisable to the people they already spent 20 years interacting with. They out themselves as a sockpuppet of the original banned user, and they get banned again.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#282

Post by lucideer »

citizenpaul wrote: post #187
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'm not so sure I go there less and less. Wikipedia is very biased and turf guarded against negative factually true information even when it meets all requirements it will often be taken down automatically with no recourse. Many pages are functionally not editable because of turf guarding. Anything vaguely sociopolitical is functionally censored on it and wikipedia does nothing about it even if they don't support it.

Firstly let me agree with both current sibling commenters: zero bias is impossible & the brand & extent of Wikipedia's biases is distinctly bad.

That said, I find Wikipedia's biases predictable, avoidable (topic specific) & also very interesting as a sociological study in itself.

Firstly, it reminds us of inherent bias in (mostly colonial-written) paper encyclopedia of the past. There has never been an unbiased encyclopedia written & seeing the biases fully sourced & rapidly evolving in realtime serves as an excellent crystallisation of slower processes in previous works: highlighting that many of the historical "facts" we all grew up with were ultimately fed to us by similarly biased groups.

I've also come to the slow realisation that this may be a fundamentally unsolvable problem & that simply categorising it as "biased beyond repair" & continuing to handle it in that manner may be the best thing we can do.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#283

Post by spauldo »

dyauspitr wrote: post #218
voxl wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And? Share an example. This reads like conspiratorial thinking without any evidence.

It says on there that the mRNA vaccine doesn’t kill you.

What an outrage! Everyone knows (but big pharma tries to hide it) that if a barrel of the vaccine rolls off a high roof and falls onto your head it'll kill you instantly!

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#284

Post by Cthulhu_ »

EE84M3i wrote: post #256
guelo wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Or "anything left of right is left-leaning", I suppose. It's the Overton window and the steady decline of moderation; centrists are wrong no matter who you ask ("pick a side you coward", "silence is complicity"), moderate Republicans are RINOs, Republican In Name Only [0], and their disloyalty to the Party is shamed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_in_name_only

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#285

Post by Cthulhu_ »

hnpolicestate wrote: post #205
ljsprague wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Race and IQ stuff.

Current geopolitical stuff too. Intelligence agencies use Wikipedia articles as propaganda tools. The Ukraine War articles are factually incorrect. To be expected with so much at stake.

Yeah I try to avoid pages on Ukraine and Israel, although admittely they don't shun away from the factual things that Israel did. I bet there's a lot of well-paid organizations keeping a sharp eye on a lot of more sensitive pages.

And of course famous people's PR people.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#287

Post by lucideer »

lucideer wrote: post #274
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 contin…

To add a thought on tackling the listed faults:

1. I suspect the NPV problem may be a fundamentally unsolvable problem (or at least one that would literally take a global paradigm shift in how all societies are structured to do so). This seems outside of Wikipedia's control. Attempting any draconian measures to tackle it might have negative knock-on effects on many of the other assets that give Wikipedia it's value.

2. The spending problem, as I said, is subjective & might simply be a case of efficiency being incompatible with an organisational culture that produces such a miraculous thing. I honestly suspect the opposite is true: I personally think the overspends are indicative of organisational disfunction that could seriously hurt the project in the longer term, but that's pure gut feeling on my part, based on nothing of substance. Who knows.

3. The increasing difficulty in contributing (80% of edits coming from 1% of editors) on the other hand is - imo - a potentially terminal problem & one that needs to be addressed urgently if we want to keep this resource alive.

In the past, Wikipedia vandalism was a rite-of-passage of school & college kids. This obviously needs counter-measures but it really feels like today's Wikipedia has gone so far in the opposite direction as to entirely dissuade new contributors. Old Wikipedia used to be filled with User: namespaced subpages with long form essays on the ever running debate between deletionism & inclusionism. In today's Wikipedia, the inclusionists have emigrated, tired of battle, & the remaining deletionists bravely prevent any budding new contributor from having a positive welcoming community experience by quickly auto-deleting their WIP stubs or moving them into esoteric red-taped namespaced processes nobody knows how to navigate. It's a deeply unwelcoming environment for new users, especially young people. I'd love to see an age profile of the population of frequent editors.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#288

Post by Levitz »

lucideer wrote: post #282
citizenpaul wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure I go there less and less. Wikipedia is very biased and turf guarded against negative factually true information even when it meets all requirements it will often be taken down automatically with no recourse. Many pages are functionally not editable because of turf guarding. Anything vaguely sociopolitical is functionally censored on it and wikipedia does nothing about it even if they don't support it.

Firstly let me agree with both current sibling commenters: zero bias is impossible & the brand & extent of Wikipedia's biases is distinctly bad. That said, I find Wikipedia's biases predictable, avoidable (topic specific) & also very interesting as a sociological study in itself. Firstly, it reminds us of inherent bias in (mostly colonial-written) paper encyclopedia of the past. There has never been an unbiased encyc…

>I've also come to the slow realisation that this may be a fundamentally unsolvable problem & that simply categorising it as "biased beyond repair" & continuing to handle it in that manner may be the best thing we can do.

Is it a case of rot then? Or maybe I'm just biased, but I get the feel it wasn't always like this. It was never ideal, sure, but it used to be that I was wary of the site when checking, say, contemporary politics. Now it's a good chunk of recorded history instead.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#289

Post by GuB-42 »

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.

When educators say that Wikipedia is not reliable, what they usually mean is that serious work should be based on primary sources, not secondary sources like Wikipedia or any other encyclopedia.

Wikipedia is good for casual research, and in practice, I found the English Wikipedia very reliable, at least for scientific topics, but it is also pretty good on big controversial subjects. Reliability only starts to drop on minor subjects.

But educators want you to go beyond that. Here, Wikipedia is just a starting point, with its best feature being citations.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#290

Post by ForOldHack »

sshine wrote: post #189
xeromal wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know when you're proud of something and you tell it to someone and they always find something to nitpick while also saying good job. That's what this feels like. It's very unnecessary. Time and a place

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…

Act of love? It's simply he who yells the loudest gets to write history. The controversy around the George Galloway, and Wireds coverage of the glorification of NAZI platoons and war heros? There are some articles so bad-you cannot even bear to read. But at least there are a few nonsensical articles and BAJADON, bad jokes and other deleted nonsense. My favorite article is about black light power. Absolute and complete garbage. I think that is the true enshitification is they do not take out the trash.

I did find some of the vandals, and became good friends with a few. Some of what they write is side splitting humor, but also the alt-right has an amazing amount of power they are using to rewrite history.

I would never give them a thin dime.

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