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The Wikipedia version virtually doesn't mention the stoning of Hypatia or the burning of the library, except for a different smaller fire caused by a war during Julius Caesar.
This page certainly reads like Christian apology, where the almost total destruction of the library by Christian fanatics didn't happen.
For me, this heavy bias in basically every article is the reason Wikipedia traffic is falling.
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> Which businesses did Wikipedia put out of business? Just as a start, other sources of reference, including encylopedias, dictionaries, websites, etc. For example, I'm sure it impacts McGraw-Hill's AccessScience, which likely you've never heard of. > This is documented on Wikipedia itself Maybe there's a little bias there? Would Wikipedia accept Wikipedia's analysis of its own reliability as a valid source? I've hea…
> Just as a start, other sources of reference, including encylopedias, dictionaries This just seems like healthy competition. I thought we were talking about a situation where Wikipedia’s use of other encyclopedias is an instrument of their demise. > Maybe there's a little bias there Paradoxically, I suspect you’d be pleasantly surprised about how tough this article is on itself. A lot of attention is given to bias i…
> This just seems like healthy competition. I thought we were talking about a situation where Wikipedia’s use of other encyclopedias is an instrument of their demise.
Somewhere above, someone complained that LLMs were harming Wikipedia, a source of its information. My point is that Wikipedia did the same to others.
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I prefer the reference books myself - life is too short for anything but the highest quality information. But that's not how the world has worked out recently ...
Life is too short to waste it leafing through printed documentation.
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scraping Wikipedia feels like the stupidest possible move. You can in fact download the entire encyclopedia at any time and take all the time in the world parsing offline. For such purposes, I'd naively just setup some weekly job to download Wikipedia and then run a "scrape" on that. Even weekly may be overkill; a monthly snapshot may do more than enough.
You can download twice-monthly database dumps, but they consist of the raw wikitext, so you need to do a bunch of extra work to render templates and stuff. Meanwhile, if you write a generic scraper, it can connect to Wikipedia like it connects to any other website and get the correctly-rendered HTML. People who aren't interested in Wikipedia specifically but want to download pretty much the entire internet unsurprisi…
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Post-truth means a couple of things to me: It indicates that it's a follow-on to postmodernism. To a significant degree the post-truth era is built on a reactionary attack on postmodernism - you can see it on HN, where many people reflexively attack like a mob anything they perceive is postmodern. You can see it in so many people who will accept lies and disaster over postmodernism. And post-truth is a postmodern ter…
>It indicates that it's a follow-on to postmodernism. How? it's just postmodernism itself. There is no truth because everything is relative. There is no singular, objective truth, facts are intrinsically bound to their context, hence post-truth.
That's not postmodernism but a caricature of it by its critics.
Postmodernism cares deeply about truth. It is highly skeptical of power, bias, perception, etc. and provides tools to mitigate these risks to truth.
Post-truth is cares very little about truth and is especially non-skeptical, imho.
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You can download twice-monthly database dumps, but they consist of the raw wikitext, so you need to do a bunch of extra work to render templates and stuff. Meanwhile, if you write a generic scraper, it can connect to Wikipedia like it connects to any other website and get the correctly-rendered HTML. People who aren't interested in Wikipedia specifically but want to download pretty much the entire internet unsurprisi…
as somebody that has wrassled with the wikipedia dumps a number of times, i don't understand why wiki doesn't release some sort of sdk that gives you the 'official' parse
At the time I though, well it's a bunch of hippies with a small budget, who can blame them? Now I learn that there is 600 of them with a budget in the hundreds of millions??
This is becoming another Mozilla foundation...
The other day I was reading the page about the Library of Alexandria. The Wikipedia version virtually doesn't mention the stoning of Hypatia or the burning of the library, except for a different smaller fire caused by a war during Julius Caesar. This page certainly reads like Christian apology, where the almost total destruction of the library by Christian fanatics didn't happen. For me, this heavy bias in basically…
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The Wikimedia Endowment [0] has been created for this. From it's Financials [1] it mentions that > ... [its mission is...] to act as a permanent fund that can support in perpetuity the operations and activities of current and future Wikimedia projects, which are projects that are approved by and advance the purposes of the Foundation or its successor if the Foundation ceases to exist [0] https://wikimediaendowment.or…
But Wikipedia only really exists as long as there are editors of a certain quality and dedication. Without those, what good is the foundation?
By having a separate fund that the Wikimedia Foundation can access to help Wikipedia to have the technical expertise and knowledge workers required to continue the work of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Should the Wikimedia Foundation cease to exist, the funds in the endowment can be redirected to a successor.
EDIT: this is similar in style to the UK's Guardian Foundation, who provides funding to The Guardian newspaper. https://theguardianfoundation.org/
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> Conservapedia This is the first time I've heard about it. Is that meant to be a satire website? I can't tell anymore.
No, it was a fork from like a decade ago. https://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page It started out crazy but it only got crazier as time went on. The biggest problem with wikipedia competitors, is the only people who tend to put in effort to make one are usually crazy.