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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

#351

Post by zahlman »

yummypaint wrote: post #160
thegrim33 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not realize that ridiculously straw-manning people with different beliefs than you as horrible, evil, hateful, truth-hating extremists .. is the very "extremism" and "attempting to destroy ideological opponents" that you're supposedly fighting against? How do you not see the irony?

It's essential to understand that tolerance is not a moral precept, it's more like a peace treaty. It's a practical social contract that allows everyone to live in peace while exercising their rights. Treaties only protect parties who abide by their terms, and it MUST be this way, or a free society will be torn down by people who want to ban books, racially discriminate, and impose their religion on others. Much has…

> Treaties only protect parties who abide by their terms, and it MUST be this way, or a free society will be torn down by people who want to ban books, racially discriminate, and impose their religion on others.

In my experience, the majority of accusations of various groups or individuals wanting to do these things, are simply not supported by the available evidence. Meanwhile, accusations of the desire to discriminate, impose religion etc. are often cited as justifications for censorship.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#352

Post by cormorant »

hungmung wrote: post #16

Honestly Wikipedia+Archive.org remaining online have national security implications (not just USA, but any democracy). Though I'd wager the current administration would take a different view.

There are mirrors and backups of Wikipedia. Archive.org has no substitute.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#353

Post by rafram »

joenot443 wrote: post #328
ragazzina wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>factually true information [...] meets all requirements [...] it will be taken down Can you make such an example?

A very simple example are ongoing cases where the identity of a perpetrator has been released by smaller or local agencies but not by larger ones. There are countless, countless other examples too, I can walk you through some others if it’ll be helpful. Wikipedia doesn’t treat all sources as being equal, so even in cases where there’s no reasonable doubt towards a claim’s veracity, if the correct source hasn’t alread…

> A very simple example are ongoing cases where the identity of a perpetrator has been released by smaller or local agencies but not by larger ones.

This is a good policy. It’s much easier for a couple small outlets to be wrong than for the small outlets and some major ones to be wrong, and the stakes are high - naming the wrong suspect could ruin an innocent person’s life. Wikipedia is for knowledge, not rumors. If you want rumors, there are lots of other sites out there.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#354

Post by zahlman »

saghm wrote: post #221
thegrim33 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not realize that ridiculously straw-manning people with different beliefs than you as horrible, evil, hateful, truth-hating extremists .. is the very "extremism" and "attempting to destroy ideological opponents" that you're supposedly fighting against? How do you not see the irony?

Honest question: do you genuinely not think that there are ever groups of people with an ideology based on ignoring inconvenient facts in favor of their preferred agenda ? I don't think that it's that implausible to argue that this is at least in principle possible. If you're willing to accept that premise, the obvious follow-up question is how exactly you can effectively debate someone who quite literally is opposed…

> Honest question: do you genuinely not think that there are ever groups of people with an ideology based on ignoring inconvenient facts in favor of their preferred agenda ?

Plenty of people disagree with you (and each other) about which groups of people have these characteristics.

> the obvious follow-up question is how exactly you can effectively debate someone who quite literally is opposed to the idea of rational debate

I'm unclear on how "ignoring inconvenient facts" is supposed to imply "opposition to the idea of rational debate". But my experience has been that both are common among the most active and respected Wikipedia editors and curators. Just try to get one to give any concrete standard for what it would take to start or stop considering a source valid for WP:RS purposes, and then try to hold them to that. The combination of RS inertia with WP:NOR is the primary thing enabling citogenesis (https://xkcd.com/978/).

> it's hard for me to imagine how much more convincing the evidence would need to be in order to conclude that one of the major political parties in the United States has long abandoned any semblance of good faith.

If you think this is only true of one of those parties, you're part of the problem.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#355

Post by xwkd »

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.

Critical thinking requires that the sources themselves are evaluated for bias. Anecdotally, I've come across several articles for which the bulk of citations all come from one source, and that source is a heavily political "newspaper" article. This is true for topics that are hot on all sides of whatever spectrum or division they tend to land. If Wikipedia is going to be taught to be used as a tool for research, then its governance structure should be taught and critically evaluated. The bias of the board of the Wikimedia Foundation should be taken into account.

I suspect that the bulk of readers don't give a second thought to Wikipedia's Magisterium.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#356

Post by zahlman »

djoldman wrote: post #4

> Wikipedia is the largest compendium of human knowledge ever assembled, with more than 7 million articles in its English version, the largest and most developed of 343 language projects. but: > The collections of the Library of Congress include more than 32 million catalogued books and other print materials in 470 languages; more than 61 million manuscripts; the largest rare book collection in North America ... http…

Those who object to this comparison might also consider that Stack Overflow hosts about 24 million publicly visible questions. And that's just (in theory) about programming!

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#358

Post by zahlman »

jfengel wrote: post #169

I was surprised that Wikipedia wasn't immediately overrun by trolls, griefers, and spammers. I'm still not entirely sure how it avoids that, though I've got some speculations. Unlike most user contributed sites it's happy to throw stuff away. It does grow but it doesn't care about growing fast. That's great but it's a hard formula to replicate.

> I'm still not entirely sure how it avoids that

It really doesn't. Granted, it could be a lot worse.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#359

Post by PathOfEclipse »

rsynnott wrote: post #247
Clamchop wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fox News argued in court that their political commentary programming isn't news. They didn't argue that none of their programming is news.

I mean, given how inclined they are to blur the lines, a certain amount of caution seems reasonable. They're a tabloid, essentially.

It takes an incredible lack of awareness or intellectual honesty to hold Fox news to this standard, but not CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, and ABC, or, if we include print media, the NYT, the Washington Post, the Guardian, Reuters, AP, Axios, LA Times, and the Atlantic.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#360

Post by fkyoureadthedoc »

torium wrote: post #341
stevage wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that OpenStreetMap is also a pretty good thing on the internet. Maybe not quite as impactful, and I'd say less well run, and rougher around the edges, but it's largely resisted being taken over by evil corporations or heavily influenced in bad directions.

Torrents are also a good thing on the internet.

Me getting free movies and music, piracy good

Meta getting free books to train an LLM, piracy bad

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