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I do not understand how federation is going to solve the problems mentioned in the homepage. Surely it is going to make them 10x worse, right? The same incidents can happen, but it becomes impossible to moderate the content.
I do not understand how federation is going to solve the problems mentioned in the homepage. Surely it is going to make them 10x worse, right? The same incidents can happen, but it becomes impossible to moderate the content.
Moderation is not a feature; it is a limitation imposed by powers that be for you if you want to conduct business. Moderation is not a feature.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their significance in public life was been almost completely replaced by Wikipedia, though
Wikipedia articles are not consumed like traditional encyclopedias anyway. I would say that encyclopedias became much less relevant in general, but being one of the first influencial online encyclopedias, Wikipedia came to be used as a volatile source of information even though it didn't strive to be one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A federated version of Wikipedia wouldn't displace the centralized Wikipedia (for the same reason that Wikipedia didn't exactly replace traditional encyclopedias), but it has a potential to supplement everything else, and I believe it's worthwhile enough.
> for the same reason that Wikipedia didn't exactly replace traditional encyclopedias It didn't? Compare https://www.worldbook.com/world-book-encyclopedia-2024.aspx : > As the only general reference encyclopedia still published today, The World Book Encyclopedia 2024 provides authoritative content on almost every topic to learners of all ages
I do not understand how federation is going to solve the problems mentioned in the homepage. Surely it is going to make them 10x worse, right? The same incidents can happen, but it becomes impossible to moderate the content.
- jimbo making CoI edits. He got caught, and edits were reviewed for appropriateness. System worked as it was supposed to
- college drop out on arbcom (for those not in the know, arbcom is kind of like an internal court to solve user disputes. They are not allowed to solve content disputes or say what an article should say, only user behaviour problems). How is that a problem? You don't need a degree to mediate user disputes.
(In fairness, the Gibraltar thing they mention was pretty bad)
Wikipedia certainly isn't perfect, but for some reason they chose some of the silliest controversies.
It sounds more like they want to implement the github fork & pull-request model of version control where currently Wikipedia uses a more SVN type of version control.
There are pros and cons to both models. However federation it is not. The mentioned controversies also seem entirely unrelated to which model you like.
…they couldn’t think of a good Wikipedia scandal from within the last decade? (The "why wikipedia is bad" bit at the start talks about things from 2005, 2007, and 2012.) Anyway, this might be pretty "it's hard to make a man understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it" since I work for the WMF, but I'm not really seeing much appeal from federation in this area. It certainly seems less relevant…
As a small example (not a scandal), a local celebrity mentioned in the (local) media last week that she'd put some incorrect facts on her own wiki page in the past, but can't get them corrected any more.
I tried to suggest a useful addition onto a page recently (against knowing better), and was blocked immediately. Then I noticed others tried the same change several times already, to no avail. So i gave up, and wont bother any more. Also in the future, i wont bother. Life's too short.
Things like this happen all the time without having any visibility.
Its good to be protective, and necessary to avoid spam. But in a few encounters it felt like there are many tiny kingdoms on wikipedia being guarded by their monarchs.
I do not understand how federation is going to solve the problems mentioned in the homepage. Surely it is going to make them 10x worse, right? The same incidents can happen, but it becomes impossible to moderate the content.
Moderation is not a feature; it is a limitation imposed by powers that be for you if you want to conduct business. Moderation is not a feature.