Live data from Hacker News

Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

theverge.com

361–370 of 496 posts

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#361
post #12

There has been this trend recently of calling Wikipedia the last good thing on the internet. And i agree its great, i spend an inordinate amount of my time on Wikimedia related things. But i think there is a danger here with all these articles putting Wikipedia too much on a pedestal. It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws. The true best part of Wikipedia is that its a work i…

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.

The difference is that there are corporate alternatives to OSM, and they're popular. The closest alternative to Wikipedia is asking an LLM to read Wikipedia for you.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#362
post #289
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.

When educators say that Wikipedia is not reliable, what they usually mean is that serious work should be based on primary sources, not secondary sources like Wikipedia or any other encyclopedia. Wikipedia is good for casual research, and in practice, I found the English Wikipedia very reliable, at least for scientific topics, but it is also pretty good on big controversial subjects. Reliability only starts to drop on…

No, they genuinely mean it's unreliable.

Obviously popular articles are great -- they have so many eyeballs and editors that they're not just quite accurate, but often more comprehensive than other sources (in terms of describing competing schools of thought, for example).

But when you really drill down into more niche articles, there's a tremendous amount of information that is uncited or not found in the citation, has glaring omissions, and/or is just plain wrong. These are the kinds of articles that get 1 edit every six months.

It's those latter articles that are the reason Wikipedia is too unreliable to cite.

(Also, Wikipedia is a tertiary source, as it is meant to only cite secondary sources, not primary sources.)

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#363
It was inevitable that the ideologues who fancy themselves responsible leaders would attack the relative openness of Wikipedia. This makes it all the more important that you DONATE to help maintain it. I put my $2 in every month, every bit helps to fortify the bastions against invaders.

In a world run by criminals, telling the truth becomes a crime.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure I go there less and less. Wikipedia is very biased and turf guarded against negative factually true information even when it meets all requirements it will often be taken down automatically with no recourse. Many pages are functionally not editable because of turf guarding. Anything vaguely sociopolitical is functionally censored on it and wikipedia does nothing about it even if they don't support it.

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

I can, but perhaps not with the specificity that you'd like. I should also preface this by saying I was involved in a community which is often stereotyped and denigrated by those on the "online left." When I was younger my parents divorced and my dad was treated very badly by the courts, by friends, and by society. He is a good man and I saw the ways in which he was systematically marginalised and outright discriminated against. It helped me understand why male suicide is so high. This led me to learning more about the men's rights movement. Nothing like the "manosphere," men's rights is interested in the many issues men face as a group; the various ways in which society and the law discriminate, and how men might adapt and help each other through some very difficult periods. For many men, it is mostly a support group. A place where they can talk about how they were raped and then the police laughed at them at the station. Or about how the judge awarded their wife full custody of their three children because she lied about being abused. Or about how they lost limbs in unsafe workplaces and no one cared. Or about how they feel suicidal. Etc. I organised support groups online and in real life. It was very positive and I believe we helped many men through some very dark times.

Apologies for the preamble, but I wanted to provide some context. In the 2000s, I began updating the Men's Rights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_rights_movement) Wikipedia page. Mostly statistics around things like suicide, homelessness, likelihood of being assaulted and murdered, disparities in the educational systems and courts, the high rates of workplace death and injury, etc. Always cited with peer reviewed or governmental data, and sometimes with "accepted" news articles. My goal was to inform people about the facts. Some time in the late 2000s and early 2010s, questionable edits began happening. For example, suicide statistics were removed periodically. The reasons were generally specious. Sometimes arguing about semantics. Sometimes the source. Sometimes procedural. One editor argued that the statistics should be contained as a subsection of the Feminism page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism), for example. They also tried to remove the page entirely. I began to notice that the people making the edits were frequent editors of related pages like Feminism.

It is at this point that I should point out that feminists and men's rights advocates don't always see eye to eye.

The questionable edits became malicious edits. Administrators began selectively enforcing rules. For example, applying a higher standard for sources on the Men's Rights page than they do on the Feminism page. They applied a banner at the very top of the page directing people to a feminist friendly page called the "men's liberation movement." They removed countless statistics and examples of inequalities in law and education. They changed the language in all sections to suggest or imply that the people involved in the movement are incorrect or mistaken. For example, the entire second paragraph (of only two) in the introduction is a refutation of the movement. Compare with the Feminism page. Criticisms are now located at the very bottom of the page in a sub-sub-section which doesn't even have its own anchor. It's a few small paragraphs now on a page with tens of thousands of words. In the "Suicide" section now they include, "studies have also found an over-representation of women in attempted or incomplete suicides and men in complete suicides." Just to make sure that no one could make the mistake of caring about men, *unless it's framed in relation to how women might be affected.*

I could go on but the stark differences between these pages should be extremely clear. They have not been edited for clarity or truth, but for ideological reasons. This is just one of millions of pages on which ideological wars are being waged. Unfortunately, the war is lost. WikiProjects, Arbitration Committees, and Administrators are all some version of far to extremely far left wing Americans. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger now calls the site "propaganda." (https://www.foxnews.com/media/wikipedia-co-founder-larry-san...) It's clear that many like this bias, but for those of us who used to be involved, we can confidently tell you that you should never, ever take what Wikipedia has to say at face value. It is much closer to propaganda than it is factual.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#365
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.

My daughter's teacher told her class that Wikipedia is unreliable because it's just made up by volunteers. So I asked her where they should find information and she said other sites on the internet that can't just be edited by anyone. Blew my mind.

The thing about Wikipedia is that every claim is sourced. And those that aren't are usually noted with a "Citation Needed" disclaimer.

So even if Wikipeda isn't permitted as a direct source for students, it's a great place to find other sources for claims and facts about almost any topic. That's how I taught my kids to use it in school. It's a ready-made bibliography on almost anything.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#366
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impossible to produce such material with a complete lack of bias, sure. I know of at least of one case in which a person publicly admits he is using Wikipedia to promote their political stances and who is right now at the center of an arbitration case in which he intends to silence opposition. This is not that.

People who edit Wikipedia run the gamut from those that are zealous about neutral point of view up to and including people that do it for their own selfish purposes. But lets take the zealous NPOV type. If I were to try and do that, to try my hardest to produce an article which truly takes an NPOV stance, it would still come off biased to you because you and I can't possibly share the same idea about what is neutral.…

I disagree. Reality is objective and publications all over the world like the BBC do a great job of maintaining journalistic standards. Wikipedia could ensure information is unbiased. You clearly enjoy the bias, and it conforms well to your own. If it didn't, I highly doubt I'd be hearing you defend bias with such a strange postmodernist argument.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#367
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.

My daughter's teacher told her class that Wikipedia is unreliable because it's just made up by volunteers. So I asked her where they should find information and she said other sites on the internet that can't just be edited by anyone. Blew my mind.

Did the teacher teach how to recognize a reliable other site?

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#368
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed this during the election. As soon as Kamala become the contender, it was edited out that her father was described as a "marxist scholar" by a college newspaper. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&...

They also removed a big part of her page when she was a primary candidate in 2019/2020 about a man she intentionally kept in prison despite knowing he was innocent. Wikipedia is absolutely a political battleground. Take a look at this old version of her 2019 page about Daniel Larsen [1] and compare it with her current Wikipedia page. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kamala_Harris&old...

> Wikipedia is absolutely a political battleground.

Even the titles are a place of political warfare. For example, note carefully which incidents are labelled as "riots" and which as "unrest", and try to find any objective, politically neutral principle that could explain those results.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#369
post #105

They’ve always have had a leftist bias like most of big tech. https://x.com/therabbithole84/status/1957598712693452920?s=4...

That's a fake Wikipedia screenshot! That line doesn't exist in the actual article and didn't at the time when that tweet was written, and does not even fit in the context. To me, this is at best an example for how much higher the quality is on Wikipedia than in average social media like X.

The edit did exist. So the phrase "Multiple studies have found a left-wing bias at Wikipedia" can be found last in the edit (4 February 2025) [1] and was removed by the editor Aquillion with the explanation [2]

     Not seeing anything in this source that supports this language; they summarize no other sources that I could see, and their own conclusions are more complex than this (as covered further down the article.)
I think that the one who previously introduced the phrase should have either not stated 'Multiple studies' or provided information about other studies. I suspect that a single research is usually not enough to be mentioned in an article

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ideological_bias_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ideological_bias_...

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#370
post #324

Wikipedia is a good source for certain kinds of information. If you ask it about anything political it's going to be from a certain slant and the most informative part of the page will be the Talk page which explains what people would like on the page that isn't there, or shouldn't be on the page but is

>If you ask it about anything political it's going to be from a certain slant I'm not sure if there's anything else out there that's better at giving a fairly neutral summary of political controversies? It reminds me of the Churchill quote "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"

Ground.news is quite good. It provides a bias meter next to publications, and offers a blind spot tool so one doesn't only see one side of a report or discussion. Wikipedia doesn't have such a counter-measure. Most of the political pages have been entirely captured and there are no mechanisms promote neutrality. On the contrary. WikiProjects, Arbitration Committees, and Administrators are all very entrenched positions and once the scales tipped towards a left wing American political bias, there is no way to tip them back.
Post reply on HN