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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

#291

Post by Levitz »

LastTrain wrote: post #190
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.

There is no such thing as unbiased. Maybe it simply doesn’t match your bias.

It's impossible to produce such material with a complete lack of bias, sure.

I know of at least of one case in which a person publicly admits he is using Wikipedia to promote their political stances and who is right now at the center of an arbitration case in which he intends to silence opposition.

This is not that.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#292

Post by ascorbic »

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 was thinking the other day about which websites might still exist in 100 years on whatever the web becomes, and Wikipedia to me seemed the most likely. It manages to be both stable and flexible. Functionally it's almost identical in all important ways to how it was ~25 years ago, but organisationally it has adapted to handle the incredible increase in scale. It is certainly flawed, because it's made by humans, but I think it may be the web's greatest achievement.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#293

Post by ForOldHack »

rkomorn wrote: post #212
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…

> and the [citation needed] Citation needed.

You have been trolled by Wikipedia troll bot(tm). - there are hundreds of thousands of them - the hypnotized never lie.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#294

Post by [deleted] »

visarga wrote: post #48
xorvoid wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say this is all we really should reasonably expect from our knowledge consensus systems. In fact it’s the same values that “science” stands on: do our best everyday and continue to try improving. It’s a bit hard for me to imagine something better (in practice). It’s easy to want more or feel like reality doesn’t live up to one’s idealism. But we live here and now in the messiness of the present. Viva la Wikip…

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#295

Post by ForOldHack »

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…

I disagree. She did not almost destroy the place, she successfully turned Wikipedia into an intellectual black hole encompassing the entire human history. There are only unprintable words to describe her vileness.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#296

Post by Levitz »

SirHackalot wrote: post #225
thegrim33 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

The first problem is thinking it's uniquely about "The nazis" when it's equally about comments like this.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#297

Post by tremon »

jl6 wrote: post #237
makeitdouble wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't they exactly teaching students media literacy by warning them Wikipedia is not reliable ?

No, because media literacy is not about sorting the world into “reliable” and “unreliable”, it’s about understanding a text in its full context.

...and that includes assessing its accuracy and its reliability.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#298

Post by ForOldHack »

amiga386 wrote: post #281
throwaway2037 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 BrownHairedGi…

Perfect! Wikipedia is an overflowing of dickheads. Perfect. It is the instutionalisation of dickheads. And @#$# the czar of the New York Subway system and the people who endlessly add retracted citations.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#299

Post by protocolture »

rstuart4133 wrote: post #137
voxl wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I came across a similar thing when I first read the Wikipedia page on 5G was it was in development. I read it after learning an early phones 5G power consumption was through the roof, and I was trying to figure out what benefits 5G had. I was accepting everything I read at face value, until I came across the section waxing lyrical about 30GHz. I knew 30GHz was stopped by glass, or a human hand, and so was more or les…

I remember having to dig up vendor documentation to correct those 5g fallacies.

Thankfully one of the primary vendors (Qualcomm?) had really good doco publicly available.

It even included a lovely diagram showing which frequencies were useful in different scenarios. And a list of likely allocations per country. Letting me create a nice side by side of possible 5g strengths in Australia vs the USA.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#300

Post by ForOldHack »

lordhumphrey wrote: post #264
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.

Reading your comment, my mind is immediately awash with the endless sea of memories I cherish so dearly of discussions I've had with economists, psychologists, computer scientists, social scientists, political scientists, and of course let's not forget the physicists, chemists, biologists and mathematicians, and every scientist ever in fact, in which they, at all times, without fail, insisted on avoiding dogmatic tru…

I had a shocking interaction with a scientist who insisted that theories are simply the best lies to explain the data. He has been nominated for two Nobel prizes. He will win neither.
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