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25 Years of Wikipedia

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Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#331

Post by mightyham »

shuntress wrote: post #206
amiga386 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly there's no love lost between the two co-founders, but if either of them had been missing, Wikipedia wouldn't be what it is today. Larry may have left the project, but sticks his oar in frequently, see for example the Nine Theses he posted to Wikipedia last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Nine_Theses Neither Larry nor Jimbo "are" Wikipedia. Wikipedia's editors are Wikipedia, and if they c…

His nine theses are basically a how-to guide for replacing democratic consensus with culture war bullshit. He clearly wants to bend the process to match his perception of the world rather than update his understanding of the world to match the facts. The process Wikipedia uses to produce articles that present facts with without editorializing has clearly worked fairly well. Obviously we have a more difficult time rea…

I don't understand how you could read the nine theses essays and think they are anything but reasonable. Even if you disagree with his politics, the results of his suggestions would almost certainly make Wikipedia more pluralistic, welcoming and neutral.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#332

Post by could-of »

bakugo wrote: post #199
amrocha wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s more likely that you became more radicalized so what used to read as neutral seems partisan now.

I mean... this is a very real phenomenon, but probably not in the way you're thinking of. There are many simple statements of fact that, 15 or 20 years ago, were as universally uncontroversial as "the sky is blue", but today are considered radically controversial political opinions, and will get you banned for most online platforms if you dare utter them.

Can you list some specific examples? Do Wikipedia articles on these topics adhere to the facts, or do they take a political stance?

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#333

Post by FiveOhThree »

acdha wrote: post #313
FiveOhThree wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, you know, people had long been unhappy with the poor state of game reviews and the incident in question prompted broad complaints. Rather than accept criticism the journalists in focus instead decided to use their platforms to smear their critics as a sexist hate mob.

If that was really their motive, they sure picked an odd way to express it by focusing their efforts on attacking one woman with very little power in the industry while ignoring the actual game media outlets and huge companies. It’s like claiming you’re an environmental activist but instead of even talking about Exxon you’re busy making death threats to the local pet store claiming their organic kibble isn’t really o…

That's it though, at the time there were plenty of complaints about the media outlets and publishers. Your problem is that the only people reporting on this to the wider public were the very journalists that the group were criticising.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#334

Post by woodpanel »

duozerk wrote: post #172
thunderbong wrote: post #147

In the 2000s, in the tech world, the open source successes that were being talked about was always Apache and Linux. When Wikipedia started gaining a bit of traction, everyone made fun of it. It was the butt of jokes in all the prime time comedy shows. And I always felt like telling the critics - "Don't you see what is happening? People all over the world are adding their own bits of knowledge and creating this huge…

> Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion Religion maybe, and Wikipedia is indeed pretty awesome for many topics, but politics is THE bad example here. Much of the political - especially geopolitical - content on Wikipedia has a tremendous atlanticist bias.

Wikipedia has been the proto-Reddit for a long time, that is, it was relatively easy for ideological bubbles to manufacture the Chomskyian Consent, just by being early adopters.

As such it rapidly developed into heavily biased page, as Wikipedia‘s co-founder Larry Sanger keeps pointing out.

It helps if you are proficient in multiple languages so you can at least „hop“ between the (some) bubbles. But the gatekeeping is always there.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#335

Post by pndy »

konne88 wrote: post #142

I do believe that Wikipedia is one of the least biased sources out there, but there is definitely bias. Here is a concrete example. Compare the introduction paragraph of the English circumcision article ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision ) with the German one ( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zirkumzision ). The English intro talks a lot about medical advantages of the procedure: "reduced rates of sexually tr…

It become heavily biased in last years indeed.

If something looks controversial for my tastes, I track when the change was made and look for last version before dubious content was added. And so, I've seen edits done to media-related articles which introduced sections that weren't present in some cases for even 20 years. Sections being replaced or included because there was a need for including particular bias prevalent in the namely United States sociopolitical scene in last 15 years. My country's wiki did suffer as well and there are ongoing edits replacing grammar to fit unjustified trends that damage our language. In the past hot topics which were controversial IRL were including "the Catholic Church's position" - now that's largely gone. Then, it's even impossible to edit articles without being logged in because the most popular ISP has blocked all IP ranges - all because a "trend" of vandalism that happen around 24 to 25 years ago, and which supposedly happens again according to the message presented.

My contributions weren't large and I stopped doing these quickly because fighting people who unload their complexes on the Internet on total strangers weren't worth trying to improve articles about e.g. Milky Way galaxy or some generic local non-political stuff.

Wikipedia looks good on a paper and surely it works for trivial stuff people all around the world can agree upon. But it fails whenever there's a possibility of endorsing a point of view, which is always disguised as "neutral", which applies to probably 80% of articles on English Wikipedia alone. It suffers same degradation as nearly every place on the Internet - just not from the usual ads and tracking .

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#336

Post by hamdingers »

konne88 wrote: post #142

I do believe that Wikipedia is one of the least biased sources out there, but there is definitely bias. Here is a concrete example. Compare the introduction paragraph of the English circumcision article ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision ) with the German one ( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zirkumzision ). The English intro talks a lot about medical advantages of the procedure: "reduced rates of sexually tr…

This suggests one article or the other is incomplete.

To have evidence of bias, you would have to show that a paragraph like the one in the English article would be rejected for the German one.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#337

Post by CamperBob2 »

jamespo wrote: post #317
CamperBob2 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did I say not to check the sources? Or is that something you made up?

Ah so irrelevant / invalid sources are OK...

Only the first couple of time derivatives matter. The models are better than they were. Are you?

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#338

Post by thunderfork »

zahlman wrote: post #252
thunderfork wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does "someone doesn't know trivia about the inflection point" really demonstrate any of those things? Like, if I asked you whether the anger at Depression Quest was downstream of a long-standing meme-feud on /v/ about whether visual novels are videogames and you didn't know that, that doesn't really mean anything about your understanding of anything other than /v/ culture wars of the 2010s. I mean, c'mon, "five guys…

Among other things, I think it suggests that my opinion about what happened, as someone who does know those things from distinctly remembering them and having had them be personally relevant at the time, should be taken more seriously than that of people telling me over a decade later what happened based on some combination of { the Wikipedia article, their own worldview, what their friends have said about it, more r…

If your grievance is "people don't take me seriously in arguments", then you could try deploying sources. There's probably still plenty of /v/ archives from back in the day, right?

But I think "people trust contemporary and retrospective reporting more than me, a guy who self-identifies as having a skin-in-the-game perspective" shouldn't be very surprising.

And, if it means anything, I was reading /v/ at the time, too, was initially sympathetic, and eventually realized it was all just an extension of existing /v/ grievance politics (from my perspective) - "people who disagree with us or make things we don't like are getting attention, which is evil".

I was there for threads where people were seething about positive coverage around Depression Quest before the "Zoe Post" blow-up, which was purely "we don't like that people enjoy experiences that don't suit our tastes".

At some point I realized that there just wasn't any actual ethical issues to speak of around the Depression Quest coverage, and it was just more /v/ seething about outlets liking things they didn't.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#339

Post by GuB-42 »

FiveOhThree wrote: post #24

I can't be the only one who feels that Wikipedia's quality has really started to go downhill over the past 5 or so years. I've noticed more and more articles which read as ridiculously partisan, usually around subjects with any link to politics or current events. That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the US, but I get the impression that the sites neutrality policies have gradually been chipped awa…

I didn't notice this, in fact, I still find Wikipedia to be remarkably neutral on controversial topics. It is very explicit about not being a news website, and yet, that's where I find the best coverage for hot topics like the war in Ukraine and Gaza, Black Lives Matter, protests in Hong-Kong, etc... For instance, most western media completely disregard the Russian side of the Ukraine war, not Wikipedia, where you have both points of views shown side by side, as well as international reactions, and most importantly, sources.

It is not perfect of course, small topics and non-English Wikipedias usually show more bias, and not just about controversial topics. Even on scientific articles, you may find some guy who considers himself the king of the Estonian Striped Beetle and will not tolerate any other ideas than his, driving away other contributors because they have better things to do than go to war to defend beetle truths.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#340

Post by behringer »

thunderbong wrote: post #147

In the 2000s, in the tech world, the open source successes that were being talked about was always Apache and Linux. When Wikipedia started gaining a bit of traction, everyone made fun of it. It was the butt of jokes in all the prime time comedy shows. And I always felt like telling the critics - "Don't you see what is happening? People all over the world are adding their own bits of knowledge and creating this huge…

Wikipedia is one of the greatest projects people have indeavored on. It has certainly surpassed the pyramids as one of the great wonders of the world, in usefulness, size and scope and human hours.
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