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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

#301

Post by Levitz »

savef wrote: post #110
Whoppertime wrote: post #109

Wikipedia is a good source for certain kinds of information. If you ask it about anything political it's going to be from a certain slant and the most informative part of the page will be the Talk page which explains what people would like on the page that isn't there, or shouldn't be on the page but is

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...

The article for Gamergate is basically an entire page ultimately sourcing from games journalism outlets when it was explicitly about calling out games journalism and collusion in the industry.

And being fair, if there's one weakness in a site which relies on several sources agreeing on something it surely is when those sources are colluding on something, but the end result is a page rife with misinformation.

This is prevalent in culture wars stuff, Keffals article "graciously" fails to mention how she frequently lied and instigated vast amounts of harassment towards herself or how she basically spent the GoFundMe money she campaigned for on heroin. If the media spins a narrative, Wikipedia doesn't really have a counter to that in any way.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#302

Post by Gander5739 »

GuB-42 wrote: post #289
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…

Wikipedia and other encyclopedias are tertiary sources.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#304

Post by kubb »

SilverElfin wrote: post #228
nl wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is an astute observation, and if I may I’d like to add to it.

When evaluating a news source for whether it’s unbiased, left or right, we necessarily look at the stories it presents and check whether they align with and present in a positive light a particular political option.

We call it „unbiased” if it doesn’t particularly favor any of these.

We’re already in the realm of US electoral politics - for a second we can assume that nothing else exists.

In 2016 the political landscape shifted drammatically and presenting the „right wing” option in a favorable light required certain concessions when it comes to previous journalistic standards.

So, just by sticking to its previous guidelines, the AP would automatically shift to the „left” - because the landscape changes.

It would be more accurate to say that the world shifted underneath AP’s lense and so it immediately started being perceived as left wing.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#305

Post by rollcat »

thefz wrote: post #275
scandox wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there any modern programming environment / IDE / toolchain / etc that doesn't heavily rely on open source work? Even initially-proprietary solutions like .NET are mostly OSS nowadays.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#306

Post by Belopolye »

psychoslave wrote: post #278
Belopolye wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

I don't think there can be a resolution on a fundamental level, unless you count some therapeutic attempt at "we're going to pretend like we can grasp truth for the sake of convenience, or because the alternative is too uncomfortable" as a resolution.

The consequence of what it means is that we can't have any justified claims or knowledge at all. If you can't even count on the law of identity you've lost all intelligibility.

Alternatively, objective truth does exist and humans can comprehend it, and the issue of truth versus the development of how we come to understand it is a semantic one (I rather like the distinction between historie and geschichte in German).

To my mind, where we've gone wrong is that we began by assuming transcendentals, holding certain axiomatic, a priori metaphysical assumptions that make the scientific method possible, and then turned around and denied that transcendentals exist in the first place- undercutting the foundation rather than really questioning our tooling or our capacity to understand the data.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#307

Post by bawolff »

aspenmayer wrote: post #199
bawolff wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[NSFW] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... has a summary of the issue. From what i understand Fox news was running a bunch of stories at the time on how Wikipedia was full of porn. In full fairness to jimmy, i think only a handful were risque art from the 1800s. Many of the other images would probably be classed as sex educational if you're being sympathetic, and exhibitionist if you are n…

Thanks for the inside baseball play-by-play, coach! Much appreciated. > However the ultimate issue was not what the files contained but that he acted alone without agreement to delete outside of proper procedure. Were any changes to Wikipedia policies implemented as a result of this, and if so, do you know which ones? I found the link to the discussion I referred to upthread since the discussion was from a bit ago: h…

> Were any changes to Wikipedia policies implemented as a result of this, and if so, do you know which ones?

Not that i'm aware but it was a long time ago so i might just not be aware. Note that the majority of the files he deleted were undeleted and are still present to this day. The list is at https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&... and most of the links are blue.

> I found the link to the discussion I referred to upthread since the discussion was from a bit ago:

Not as far as i am aware. People are really nervous that without accurate IP addresses it will be difficult to do anti-abuse stuff.

The new thing that is happening right now is we are killing public display of IP addresses of anonoymous users. Perhaps once that rolls out people will be less attached to ip address tracking and more open to something like tor.

That said, if the tor hidden service is read but not write as the grant proposals, that solves that concern. I don't think anyone would object to a read-only service. There just isn't that much interest from the people who could make it happen, and regular concerns about added complexity for limited gains.

As an aside, the grants process is really disconected from wikimedia tech stuff. Grants might give some money to someone to make an unofficial mirror, but it wont be helpful for making an actual official tor hidden service. There is a 0% chance that a grant will lead to an official hidden service. If this ever happens the discussion threads will be on phabricator and not grant pages.

The way in theory to make this happen is one of:

- convince wikimedia community this is super important. (Unlikely to happen as this is too niche). Wikipedians have some influence over WMF priorities but really only when they start a riot.

- convince wmf senior leadership it is super important (also pretty unlikely)

- lobby the idea with individual developers who work on SRE stuff. Maybe if you convince them, they convince their boss, and it eventually happens when the team is having a sliw sprint. (This is the part where its open source so external contributions are in theory possible to a certain extent, but to effectively do this you basically already need to be an insider and know all the right people to talk to)

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#308

Post by ragazzina »

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.

>factually true information [...] meets all requirements [...] it will be taken down

Can you make such an example?

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#309

Post by arcade79 »

ozim wrote: post #28
mdp2021 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a miracle that the model of voluntary contribution from random agents and imperfect overview partially worked. The science that could emerge by studying the phenomenon could constitute a milestone.

I think “random agents” was only at start. I don’t think you as a random person can edit much there anymore. Which is good in ways. Though random phase is song of the past.

All my random edits go through and stick around. Probably because they're relatively simple. A table with data up until 2020, and I update it with sources up until 2024? Never had it removed.

I seldomly add much beyond such things though.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#310

Post by thaumasiotes »

xorvoid wrote: post #31
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 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…

> I would say this is all we really should reasonably expect from our knowledge consensus systems.

Compare this text from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_configuration :

>> The most common labeling method uses the descriptors R or S and is based on the Cahn–Ingold–Prelog priority rules. R and S refer to rectus and sinister, Latin for right and left, respectively.[2]

This claim is actually repeated further down in the article. The fact that it is false was noted on the talk page seven years ago, but this seems to bother no one. After all, there's a citation.

I think we can reasonably expect more. Wikipedia reliably fails at very, very easy problems of "knowledge consensus".

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