Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

25 Years of Wikipedia

wikipedia25.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 498 posts

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#351

Post by bawolff »

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…

> I do believe that Wikipedia is one of the least biased sources out there, but there is definitely bias

I think this is the wrong way to look at bias. Bias isnt a binary, instead its a journey to try and get succesively less and less biased. You can never achieve absolute unbiasedness, you can just try to journey closer.

And yes, wikipedia is far from perfect.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#352

Post by zahlman »

acdha wrote: post #307
zahlman wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> from the moment Eron Gjoni decided his ex should be punished for breaking up with him. There was no such moment in the first place.

It all started with his post, attacking her relationship with Grayson, who never reviewed her games. Even he later admitted that the original claims were fictitious but that did nothing to stop the attacks – if you look at the threats she received or the online statements the attackers made, they cared a LOT more about her alleged infidelity or what they perceived as unfair privileges for women in the gaming industry…

> Even he later admitted that the original claims were fictitious

No, he did not. And nobody was claiming that Grayson reviewed Quinn's games beyond like a day or two of confusion, and none of the arguments made relied on that being the case.

> what they perceived as unfair privileges for women in the gaming industry than anything about journalism.

This is a false dichotomy. The entire point was that the journalism had a role in creating those privileges.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#353

Post by woodpanel »

bawolff wrote: post #348
woodpanel wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Larry Sanger is not the most convincing on this topic due to how he keeps using conspiracy theories as examples of things Wikipedia is biased against. Like if the complaint is that Wikipedia is biased against pseudoscience like naturopathy, i consider that a good thing.

[flagged]

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#354

Post by bawolff »

daedrdev wrote: post #288
lgl wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure I'm very familiar with the donation banners etc but still, how unnecessary are they really? They have no actual "product" to sell and no ads. At the same time I imagine a huge amount of traffic, that has surely gotten much much worse with the AI "renaissance" we're going through. They have staff, etc.. So what's the deal with all the wikipedia hate lately?

The controversy is 95% of spending, including 90% of staff, is on things with no relation to wikipeida that few care about, with exponentially growing costs, which they imply is needed to keep the wiki alive despite how cheap it actually is to run.

There are things to criticize wmf spending on, but the above is absolute bullshit. It is simply not true that "95% of spending, including 90% of staff, is on things with no relation to wikipeida".

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#355

Post by zahlman »

thunderfork wrote: post #338
zahlman wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, to…

> 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?

I spent years trying to do this. It took inordinate amounts of time and mental energy, made exactly zero difference to the beliefs of my interlocutors no matter how well reasoned and evidenced, and additionally got me dismissed as some weirdo who cares too much (by people who clearly cared too much, but were annoyed that I disagreed with them).

I am not getting back into that now and am only willing to discuss this in the most top-level generalities. It was genuinely traumatic.

> 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.

You keep talking about /v/. I don't understand why. The main discussion was on Reddit. And they showed concrete evidence of new ethical issues regularly.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#356

Post by bawolff »

throawayonthe wrote: post #6
cm2012 wrote: post #2

This is cute, but kind of an example of Wikipedia's off-mission bloat. It irks me that they constantly fundraise when most of it is not needed for Wikipedia proper, but rather used for initiatives people know less about and may not fund if they knew.

i feel like that's a bit silly, the other projects are listed on the donation page ( https://donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/FAQ ) and tbh you are unlikely to be donating to the wikimedia foundation without being aware of (at least some of?) the rest

Honestly, most of the other projects get almost none of the resources (other then maybe wikidata and commons, but both of those are directly used by wikipedia)

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#357

Post by bawolff »

fragebogen wrote: post #18

Slightly off topic, but now that long context machine translation is roughly on-par with humans: are there any official efforts from Wikipedia, to translate the "best" or "most complete" language version of each article to all other languages? I'd imagine that the effort of getting all languages up to the same standards are just an impossible one and people from "lower-resource" languages would benefit a lot.

Well they made https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#358

Post by OvidNaso »

weslleyskah wrote: post #290
GuinansEyebrows wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wikipedia is a corporation nitpick: WMF (the org that develops and hosts Wikipedia and its related services like Wikimedia Commons) is a non-profit foundation, not the classic type of profit-driven corporation that your post implies.

Well, I prefer to be skeptical of any corporation, regardless if it is non-profit or not, until proven otherwise with substantial transparency on their methods of moderation and control. There is a lack of transparency on Wikipedia. The rules are nebulous and prone to abuse by veteran users and the oligarchs aggregating on political articles.

Hold on, their moderation methods are as transparent as could possibly be. Every article has a dedicated page where every decision has a reason and more often than not an overwhelming amount of discussion. Their overall policy is similarly debated publicly.

Is it overwhelming? Oh yes. Tough to change? Probably also yes without dedication and sound reasoning. But opaque? Certainly doesn't fail that criteria.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#359

Post by mmooss »

psunavy03 wrote: post #256
mmooss wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tired What relevance does that have to truth? I'm tired of online disinformation; should I say it's a tired issue and therefore irrelevant? Denial that bothsidesism exists, or being tired of dealing with the problem, is irrelevant.

"Bothsidesism" is a lie that is used to avoid criticizing one side when the other side is also bad. Just because one side is awful does not grant the other side a free pass to be immune from criticism or to get their way on everything. The idea of "bothsidesism" forces a false dichotomy and then forces you to pick a side, when there are almost always more than two choices. It's what partisans use to beat down people…

You define it that way but that's only you as far as I know - I haven't seen that definition or had that experience - and it ignores the actual bothsidesism problem, which is certainly not a lie IME.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#360

Post by weslleyskah »

OvidNaso wrote: post #358
weslleyskah wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I prefer to be skeptical of any corporation, regardless if it is non-profit or not, until proven otherwise with substantial transparency on their methods of moderation and control. There is a lack of transparency on Wikipedia. The rules are nebulous and prone to abuse by veteran users and the oligarchs aggregating on political articles.

Hold on, their moderation methods are as transparent as could possibly be. Every article has a dedicated page where every decision has a reason and more often than not an overwhelming amount of discussion. Their overall policy is similarly debated publicly. Is it overwhelming? Oh yes. Tough to change? Probably also yes without dedication and sound reasoning. But opaque? Certainly doesn't fail that criteria.

It certainly becomes opaque when it is a labyrinth of links and documents that you need to read and follow through. It does not help when these same rules can be abused to death by veteran users.

At a certain point, no one really knows the devil's dance happening at the top of the moderation ladder and you end up wasting a lot of lifetime on these dead talk pages.

It is a bureaucratic nightmare.

Post reply on HN