How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet • Hacker News Board

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#351

Post by user3939382 » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 3:58 PM UTC

I've soured on Wikipedia. You can't make edits without turning Wikipedia internal politics into your full-time hobby because you run into people who have. That doesn't mean their opinions are more or less correct, yet they count for more.

Any political or politically controversial topic you basically get the US State Dept.-approved official/propaganda narrative on the topic with 0 room for other views. To actually get the full view of these topics that should be in the article, you instead have to refer to the dozens-of-pages-long Talk pages to see all the non-corporate-media viewpoints being squashed and silenced. These in turn aren't readily available in mobile format.

I recently was researching a news outlet blacklisted as a source from Wikipedia, which is known for being very pro-Palestinian. When I googled the very first username for the vote on Wikipedia to ban them, it belonged to a pro-Israeli think tank writer in DC. How interesting it would be to unmask the rest of the votes.

So my trust in Wikipedia on the issues where you need trust is basically 0.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#352

Post by KittenInABox » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 3:58 PM UTC

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #163

afavour wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree about your assessment of the early internet. It was extremely white and nerdy when looked at on average. Certainly diversity was out there but it wasn’t easily found, much like the fediverse today. Even Wikipedia (not that it counts as early internet): > I knew that early Wikipedia editors were (and kinda still are) academically-inclined hacker dudes, but it's crazy when you realize the article about mole…

By 1995 I was regularly interacting on the internet with Japanese, people in the former USSR (who wouldn't necessarily be considered "white"), Romanians, etc. What was special is that when those people had political and social views that may have differed from one's own, but were representative of their countries, they could air those views. And the result was that a user of the nascent internet could learn about the…

How can you possibly claim that social diversity was universal in the old school internet when "tits or gtfo" was an extremely common meme for anyone who claimed to be female?

No, in my experience people mostly kept to individual federated spaces dependent on interests or demographics. LGBTQ people kept to their IRC channels, black people kept to their channels, and banned anyone who was also a member of the local nazi IRC channel. This was totally normal and I don't see a difference between 1990s era IRC and Fediverse in this respect.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#353

Post by pessimizer » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 3:59 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #260

bad_alloc wrote: post #2

People complain a lot about the internet getting worse and worse. We can fix it, if we put in the effort to rebuild it. * Join fediverse services, e.g. [Lemmy](feddit.de) or Mastodon and post a bit. * Create your own website if you have sth like a cool hobby to share. Webhosting is available for free or cheap, depending on what you want. Link other pages you like to form a net. * If you can, host your own instances a…

The main thing that should happen is that there is a threshold of effort before people can post things. Like before Eternal September, people had to learn stuff to do things on the internet.

That's just leaving the internet to the most insane. A tiny bit of effort to post cuts out 95% of participants, leaving mostly the obsessed, often with a specific axe to grind. Cutting by 95% again is distilling nuttiness.

The thing that should happen is carefully cultivating closed memberships, and real tools for formal group decision-making. Mods are just benevolent dictators, and the debate that happens around mods with absolute power is essentially theater. Wikipedia barely hides this with its votes that anybody can show up to, and its code of rules being a arbitrary wise-sounding series of koan-shaped aphorisms. Wikipedia has been vulnerable to anybody with a few bucks and an issue that they're willing to camp on.

The only reason one can't manipulate Wikipedia at will is because you may have some real life opposition who is also attacking the same articles you are. Instead of formalizing that competition between people of different opinions, Wikipedia has ultimately fallen into dictating who is correct based on the opinion of the highest ranked interested person, within an organization that survives on donations and on volunteer editors who get income from any number of sources. This can't stand up to the manipulation of someone invested in distorting the history of hard-shelled tacos, it certainly can't (and isn't) standing up to state-state level actors.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#354

Post by soundnote » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 4:00 PM UTC

jwestbury wrote: post #36

bko wrote: post #15

> Over time, Wikipedians who supported fringe content departed or were ousted. Thus, population loss led to highly consequential institutional change. Is this a good thing? It seems like homogenous hive mind effects. Works in some instances but we should aim a little higher A big problem is homogeniety in media. For instance, everyone from every major newspaper more or less went to the same schools, has a similar wor…

Well, yes, when it comes to knowledge I'd say that it is a good thing to remove those supporting fringe content. Consensus amongst those who generally care about a topic is probably better for ensuring largely correct data than the alternative of a large number of voices, each with a questionable level of actual subject matter expertise.

So when a topic like the Hunter Biden laptop comes up right before an election, could clearly impact it and... the mainstream media just refuses to report, or uncritically calls it a hoax. Wikipedia claims NYPost is an unreliable source, and social media sites blackout the topic.

Turns out, "fringe" thing that was definitely not true was true. Was the consensus better? Doesn't seem so, and it's not an isolated instance.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#355

Post by kraftman » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 4:01 PM UTC

bko wrote: post #312

kraftman wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to have missed these sections: "It turns out that when transgender girls play on girls’ sports teams, cisgender girls can win. In fact, the vast majority of female athletes are cisgender, as are the vast majority of winners. There is no epidemic of transgender girls dominating female sports. " "The Olympics have had trans-inclusive policies since 2004, but a single openly transgender athlete has yet to even…

> If trans people have such an obvious advantage why aren't they dominating every single category of every single strength-involving event? Because there are fewer of them competing. Not every man is more athletic than every woman, but the most athletic men are more athletic than the most athletic women. If me, as a man, tries competing in a women's weightlifting competition, I wouldnt do well, but I wouldn't do well…

So trans women arent doing well vs other women because there are fewer of them competing, but also women arent doing well vs other men because there are fewer of them competing. If your only issue is the potential that a person has based on their testosterone, then maybe we should have no gender division, but testosterone categories instead. It seems it would make more sense than preventing both cis women and trans women from competing in a sport just because their hormone levels are too high (a trait we're apparently already directly pre selecting for)

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#356

Post by nkozyra » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 4:01 PM UTC

giraffe_lady wrote: post #253

nkozyra wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find "we didn't, therefore we can't" a kind of defeatist and unrealistic reaction. The internet has been shaped and reshaped a few times, in a lot of ways for the better, I don't see why it couldn't continue to be refined.

I'm not taking that position, quite. But I'm not seeing much contrition for it being that way the first time around, or sophisticated evaluation of why it was, or a plan for how to improve it in the future. Without those I think the hope that it'll improve in these ways is simply naive.

What I'm arguing is that we're taking 2 steps forward and 1 step back rather than a linear path of improvement. In this case one of the steps backward being the walled gardens, steps forward including the democratization of the internet as a whole.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#357

Post by WesolyKubeczek » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 4:01 PM UTC

thih9 wrote: post #32

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been to fediverse. Many mastodongs are just the same entitled first world outrage vents as twitters, even more toxic at times because there are no moderators to shut them up.

Anecdotally, I'm happy with my mastodon instance and its level of moderation. > Many mastodongs are just the same entitled first world outrage vents Calling others "mastodongs" is not exactly the opposite of an entitled first world outrage vent. Have you tried to solve the problem yourself, e.g. finding an instance that suits you better?

There’s this directory of mastodon instances one is invited to browse to pick one, and after sifting through an insane amount of instances that are no longer up, instances that highly favor furry anime erotica, instances that are inclusive of LGBT+ people to the point of exlusion of everyone else at all, instances that are full of left wing activists so peaceful and welcoming that they have users with nicknames like “Let’s dismember Scott Adams” and user avatars with the sickle and the hammer, I’ve come to a conclusion that it’s not an environment I’m going to enjoy much.

Since “the federation” is actively nurturing the environment to be like that, my hopes are not high.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#358

Post by AlexandrB » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 4:02 PM UTC

bko wrote: post #330

nickelpro wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those articles argue that men and women are biologically equivalent in all things. If I might summarize, they mostly argue that hormonal arguments towards unfair advantages in certain sports understate the already existing disparities in hormonal distribution in a given sex. That a given trans athlete might be less hormonally advantaged than a cis woman who competes uncontroversially. The latter articles are…

> the uncontroversial point that binary biological sex is an incomplete model of humanity as a whole. Why does sex have to be a complete model of humanity? It's real and useful. For instance as a male I don't bother getting mamograms. Sex tells you more about predisposition of health conditions than any other factor apart from maybe age and weight. Let's not pretend it doesn't exist

> Let's not pretend it doesn't exist

This is a common straw man. No trans advocate I've heard pretends that sex doesn't exist. Indeed, what would be the point of medically transitioning if one thought sex wasn't real? Instead it seems like trans opponents like to pretend that sex is the only thing that exists or that gender identity and expression do not exist.

Additionally, sex is more complicated than a binary m/f - the obvious examples of intersex individuals or androgen insensitivity[1] come to mind. So yes, sex exists, it's not a binary state, and it's connected to but not fully descriptive of gender identity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgen_insensitivity_syndrom...

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#359

Post by ruszki » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 4:02 PM UTC

jwestbury wrote: post #36

bko wrote: post #15

> Over time, Wikipedians who supported fringe content departed or were ousted. Thus, population loss led to highly consequential institutional change. Is this a good thing? It seems like homogenous hive mind effects. Works in some instances but we should aim a little higher A big problem is homogeniety in media. For instance, everyone from every major newspaper more or less went to the same schools, has a similar wor…

Well, yes, when it comes to knowledge I'd say that it is a good thing to remove those supporting fringe content. Consensus amongst those who generally care about a topic is probably better for ensuring largely correct data than the alternative of a large number of voices, each with a questionable level of actual subject matter expertise.

Some of the commenters under your comment shows that Hacker News is not a “good place”. Pseudoscience is strong here. At least we got answer to that, but not to your question.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#360

Post by 4ggr0 » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 4:02 PM UTC

1over137 wrote: post #281

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fediverse (in the sense of the major servers that federate) is an extreme echo chamber representative of mainly a certain sociopolitical wing and mainly from North America and Western Europe. Just look at mastodon.social/explore and consider that many founding activists of Mastodon have spoken about how they yearn to keep the community just like that even as it grows. Part of the early internet was about being able t…

>representative of mainly a certain sociopolitical wing... Just look at mastodon.social/explore Wow, I've never used Twitter or Mastodon, but I just visited that link, and it's all American politics, abortion, trans, and computer nerd stuff. Wow. Boring.

> and computer nerd stuff. Wow. Boring.