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25 Years of Wikipedia

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Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#291

Post by f1shy »

andrepd wrote: post #284
jbki wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

I'm reading the Diamond article you liked and I cannot understand for the lift of me what you wanted? The Brittanica article seems substantially poorer. Note also that a key feature of Wikipedia is the hyperlinks! If you don't know what a "crystalline structure" is, or you want to know more about "hardness", you're welcome to click the links and dive further!

Let me point out, that for me personally, for many years, hyperlinks in Wikipedia were the worst feature. I hated that! Anytime I started looking for something, I would start following links ad infinitum. Was extremely distracting. Instead of a little inline definition, for everything is a link. There is a good balance between linking to the definition of each word, and just inlining the definition.

Anyway, at some I disciplined myself to not follow the links. But sometimes the definition really needs following them.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#292

Post by themafia »

gwbas1c wrote: post #123
mr_mitm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very touchy subject for Wales. It caused him to walk out of an interview after 48 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uswRbWyt_pg

Without context, it looks like the interviewer was a jerk and ambushed him. I've seen plenty of stalling like that on major news programs, and the interviewer always knows to move on (and possibly edit something in to provide context.) --- That being said, "who started what" and "who had what idea" are silly topics to obsesses about. It always come down to who put the long-term work in. I think Wales was "in the righ…

Journalism can't be deferential to it's subjects. Jimmy is a CEO of a company with lots of money and tons of access to the media. If he can't successfully prepare himself for the obvious then I can't feel bad for him.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#293

Post by tb_technical »

gcanyon wrote: post #219
tb_technical wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The remote viewing article keeps being reverted as pseudoscientific when original research conducted by the CIA is cited. Such citations are removed swiftly. Any changes are denied or rolled back. The rationale is that, even though the documents themselves are a primary source from an organization that poured significant resources into researching the phenomenon of remote viewing, the individual posting the declassif…

I haven’t looked at the article in question, but is there enough material to make an article specifically about the CIA research programs?

There already is a separate wikipedia article about the specific program. It is an extensive article. If you look up "Stargate CIA" in any search engine you'll find it easily.

There is a large amount of data on this topic. Literally hundreds of pages of reports and summaries of experiments written over decades of effort (if memory serves). The CIA was trying to use the phenomenon to view distant targets with mediums. It was deemed ineffective, and discontinued in the 90s. Even today there are people attempting to replicate remote viewing and prove it as a phenomenon.

For the record, I do not believe this phenomenon is as effective as is claimed. Regardless there is a chance that remote viewing (also known as astral projection) is just something the human brain commonly imagines in some populations. It might be an emergent property of human brains reacting to certain input stimulus, like ASMR.

Regardless, the article written about remote viewing as a concept should be allowed to cite documents about how the Stargate program defined and tested remote viewing (their methodologies, etc). But editors, like all humans, have bias.

There was a similar kerfuffle that happened about a decade and a half ago about homeopathy. It lead to an edit thread where one of the founders of Wikipedia was cursing about how fake something was.

The only objection I have to this, is that primary sources relevant to an article should be allowed to be cited. If a study, whitepaper, or report is widely discredited - include that too. The sum of human knowledge needs to include what we know to be false as well.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#294

Post by streaming »

thunderfork wrote: post #243
observationist wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's consistently better in content quality, for everything that I've used it for. I've seen conversations complaining about it that effectively reek of either anti-Musk or anti-AI bias, and when I dig in, I haven't found any legitimate bad information or arbitrary bias in the articles themselves. It's not yet as comprehensive, with ~6 million articles compared to Wikipedia's ~7 million, and the UI isn't as good, wit…

Got any examples of articles to demonstrate that difference?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden vs. https://grokipedia.com/page/Hunter_Biden

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#295

Post by Romario77 »

layer8 wrote: post #268
johnisgood wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond ?

The introductory paragraph in Simple English is: 'A diamond (from the ancient Greek αδάμας – adámas "unbreakable") is a re-arrangement of carbon atoms (those are called allotropes).' Seriously? Compare with the Britannica one: 'diamond, a mineral composed of pure carbon. It is the hardest naturally occurring substance known; it is also the most popular gemstone. Because of their extreme hardness, diamonds have a numb…

The thing is - Britannica is a lot smaller. Also - wikipedia is updated almost immediately for significant events where Brittanica would only be updated sometimes.

Wikipedia is uneven, some popular topics are well covered and have good info, others are outdated, biased, often written by one person with agenda.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#296

Post by advisedwang »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #271
advisedwang wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impossible to write completely neutrally. Editorial decisions like what information to include or exclude, what sources to cite, what order to present information in, what illustrations to use cannot be avoided and inherently present some kind of narrative.

It absolutely is possible to write completely neutrally. All it takes is for the writer to be aware/honest of their biases and to have a goal of achieving a neutral perspective. Of course the goal of most writing is explicitly to not be neutral.

Take the example of circumcision. You could probably write a mere definition of circumcision neutrally, sure.

But do you include cultural practices of circumcision? Do you include criticism? If so, how many column inches do you dedicate to either? Which comes first? That surely is going to determine whether the article appears to support or oppose, which is basically the issue in the comment above.

But beyond that, do you group female circumcision in the same article as male circumcision? If not, you are tacitly approving of male circumcision by separating it from disapproved of practice. If so, surely you need to explain the difference in social and legal acceptability. If you do that without noting controversy, then you are implying the social acceptance of male circumcision is universal. If you note controversy, then you are necessarily elevating that to noteworthyness.

There's no way out of it.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#297

Post by themafia »

an_ko wrote: post #133
xemoka wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh. Wow. I had no idea Jimmy Wales was like that. Enlightening.

There's context. Hank Green talked about it in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zi0ogvPfCA , but in short, paraphrasing, and adding my own thoughts: Jimmy Wales has been poked at with the question of whether he should call himself a founder or specifically co-founder for a long time, by right-wingers who think Wikipedia is too woke, and want to irritate and discredit him as much as possible, and instead raise up his…

The inability of wealthy people to take responsibility for themselves and instead blame their own bad behavior on the mere existence of Trump is getting exceptionally thin.

Credit your co-founders. Even if you don't agree with them anymore. There's no excuse not to.

If you've been asked the question a lot then you should be _very good_ at answering it by now.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#298

Post by tb_technical »

weslleyskah wrote: post #228
tb_technical wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The remote viewing article keeps being reverted as pseudoscientific when original research conducted by the CIA is cited. Such citations are removed swiftly. Any changes are denied or rolled back. The rationale is that, even though the documents themselves are a primary source from an organization that poured significant resources into researching the phenomenon of remote viewing, the individual posting the declassif…

I remember people saying that the article about Carl Jung was not worth contributing anymore because of his fascist sympathies with nazism. I don't know what to make of that. I've experienced something similar about users downplaying on talk pages the atrocities done by the Soviet Government, like the Holodomor famine or the Katyn Massacre, in contrast to the atrocities done by the Nazis. Controversial and relatively…

Editors have biases. The best we can do is shine a spotlight on them.

People are opposed to this, of course. No one likes to be reminded of how they're limited - and people get really nasty when you accuse them of being a dishonest interlocutor.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#299

Post by jbki »

andrepd wrote: post #284
jbki wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

I'm reading the Diamond article you liked and I cannot understand for the lift of me what you wanted? The Brittanica article seems substantially poorer. Note also that a key feature of Wikipedia is the hyperlinks! If you don't know what a "crystalline structure" is, or you want to know more about "hardness", you're welcome to click the links and dive further!

The wikipedia is more information dense, but that's not always what I want in a general purpose reference. Also hyperlinks are good if you want to read the article. But I don't want to have to click through hyperlinks, and thereby lose focus. Sometimes I just want to know just enough to complete the context in which some thing was mentioned. In the opening sentence there's a whole phrase "solid form of the element carbon" hyperlinked - to what is not immediately clear - but curiosity peaks the mind and I see that it's to an article on carbon allotropes. Later on it says it's "metastable" so I need to know what that means, but it just links to an article that's equally obstruse and so I have to go on an endless rabbit hole of hyperlinks. Britannica usually explains briefly in parentheses what some piece of jargon means.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#300

Post by f1shy »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #238
lostlogin wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this relate to a particular domain or field? I find it so good, and on the rare occasion I’ve found something wrong, I’ve fixed it.

I find math topics to be insufferable. They are written to be as theoretical as possible and borderline useless if you do not already know the topic at hand.

Absolutely. I do not know the current status, so don’t kill me if now is much better, because is just an example from many. But take fourier series. I remember going into the article, and instead of starting with something lime “helps to decompose functions in sums of sin and cos”, started with “the forier transform is defined as (PUM the integral for with Euler formula) continues: is easy to show the integral converges according to xxx criterion, as long as the function is…” you get the idea. Had I not know what FT is, I would’ve not undestand anything

Articles in biology, from which I understand nothing, are a wall for me. I could never understand anything biology related. Also for example, in Spanish, don’t ask me why, any plant or animal is always under the latin scientific name, and you have to search the whole article to find the “common” name of the thing.

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