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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

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beeblebrox leaked internal mailing list messages to a forum known for doxxing in violation of the NDA they signed. i know that Beeblebrox did not doxx anyone and I said that in my comment. my point is leaking information to a doxxing forum sends the wrong message and is dangerous. Maybe you should create an account and look at the "Wikimedian Folks Too Embarrassing for Public Viewing" forum and get back to me. Or do…

That’s hardly doxxing. Asking if two publicly visible usernames might be related is hardly alarming.

To be absolutely, 100% clear: your position is that someone who writes on the Internet, a statement of the form:

> Let's suppose, just for the sake of argument, that [username] is a PhD student named [real name]. Specifically, this [real name]:"

> "[real name] is a PhD candidate [major] at [university name]. He received his BA (Hons) in [major] from [university]. Previously [real name] received his rabbinical ordination from the [other school] in [location] in [year]. [real name] is also the [job title] at [organization]."

is not "doxxing"?

Let's suppose, just for the sake of argument, that I find that patently absurd.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#382
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For the courts, it seems it's the opposite.. Meta, Anthropic and others seem to be getting away with terabytes of piracy, on a much larger scale than the typical consumer

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#383

Appreciate the archive link, don’t know how to directly reply to a comment.

Don't you see the "reply" link underneath each comment?

There wasn’t one, I took a screenshot to make sure I wasn’t missing it. It was the newest comment by krunck that had the button missing.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#384
post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might be surprised, a lot of information on there is pretty timeless. Before Encarta and the internet, people would buy series of encyclopedias - but they wouldn't buy new ones every year. I'm seeing an ISO for Encarta on the Internet Archive, but I was hoping for a runnable version.

Dont use iso. Pick up an original CD for cheap on ebay. It's not the same without disc spinning

The company Abadonware sells Encarta95 baseball caps. I love mine. https://abandonware.online/products/encarta95-hat?srsltid=Af...

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#385

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.

Firstly let me agree with both current sibling commenters: zero bias is impossible & the brand & extent of Wikipedia's biases is distinctly bad. That said, I find Wikipedia's biases predictable, avoidable (topic specific) & also very interesting as a sociological study in itself. Firstly, it reminds us of inherent bias in (mostly colonial-written) paper encyclopedia of the past. There has never been an unbiased encyc…

[deleted]

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#386

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…

> 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 already claimed it, editors are liable to revert your edit.

This is the right approach. If more information sources held this standard, sloppy reporting and outright lies would be very costly. Would you tell everyone very important news based on a the word of a friend who is known to stretch or invent the truth? Be a reliable source and you can participate.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#387
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed this exact same thing. And I too just gave up. People have their pet causes and they force the article to match, and normal, non-obsessed people give up. Any controversial topic should never be read on Wikipedia, it will not be accurate.

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&...

Another great example is when the "Cultural Marxism" article was converted into "Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory", an entirely different article claiming that the concept of cultural marxism was actually always a "far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory", complete with a section relating it to Gamergate. It's so ridiculous, it's almost funny to read.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140519194937/http://en.wikiped...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#388
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…

This doesn't make sense because Wikipedia is a collection of sources, most of which are on the internet. If would be surprising if Wikipedia was a good thing but the online sources it uses are bad.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi does not count bangs as part of monthly usage - for wiki that would be !w search term https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/plan-types.html#how-searche...

I'm still puzzled after all these years : why would anyone use search engine bangs instead of directly configuring custom searches from their browser's URL bar ?

Bangs through Kagi work cross-device, on every browser you use whether it supports custom searches or not.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#390
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…

This doesn't make sense because Wikipedia is a collection of sources, most of which are on the internet. If would be surprising if Wikipedia was a good thing but the online sources it uses are bad.

Wikipedia can be bad because it is edited by human. And because it is edited by human, the side that has more people will win.

For example, Wikipedia has a Chinese issue. [1]

Because both Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese both live under the Chinese language in Wiki (And we have a dropdown within Chinese wiki to choose what regional variants we want to read). There's a constant wiki edit war. This is not only happened to the political topic, but also how something should be phased. Even though Chinese officially ban access to Wikipedia by the Great Firewall, enough people VPN and manage to edit wiki pages by pages, and more annoyingly, there are more wiki admin coming from PRC than Taiwan/Hong Kong/Macau etc.

So you cannot assume Wikipedia is neutral.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59081611

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