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25 Years of Wikipedia

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Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#441

Post by nephihaha »

vee-kay wrote: post #408
thunderbong wrote: post #147

In the 2000s, in the tech world, the open source successes that were being talked about was always Apache and Linux. When Wikipedia started gaining a bit of traction, everyone made fun of it. It was the butt of jokes in all the prime time comedy shows. And I always felt like telling the critics - "Don't you see what is happening? People all over the world are adding their own bits of knowledge and creating this huge…

Wikipedia is extremely biased and has a lot of deliberate misinformation, so I wouldn't trust it for anything except as a basic starting point for information gathering alongside a web search. Wikipedia's founder itself has denounced it for its bias.

There are so many issues with Wikipedia which most people do not discuss here. I have witnessed dozens of articles deleted by people who had no understanding of the subject in question. In one case, someone went around deleting articles on rugby union, because the teams were not professional (most of them aren't to this day and weren't officially into the 1990s.)

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#442

Post by acdha »

FiveOhThree wrote: post #417
acdha wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GamerGate was still going strong in 2015, and did absolutely nothing to help stories like that. The people attacking journalists don’t get to take credit for their targets’ work.

I'm sure that the journalists involved would never admit that people putting a spotlight on their bad behaviour made them clean up their act.

Sexist attacks and lying about an imaginary sex-for-reviews scandal didn’t put a spotlight on anything. It wouldn’t excuse their actions even if they had been doing some real ethics work, but they weren’t even showing up to do productive work.

One reason why everyone who actually cared about those issues opposed GamerGate was because it distracted attention from non-imaginary problems and meant that anyone talking about journalistic ethics had to spend time proving they were acting in good faith rather than being part of the hateful mob.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#443

Post by nephihaha »

tb_technical wrote: post #211
weslleyskah wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is surely a formidable source of knowledge, but > Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion. You are romanticizing. Wikipedia is a corporation, just like Work or University, and I personally assume anything corporate is being manipulated by the owners or the ruling oligarchy because they are structurally unreliable. This is especially veritable for Wikipedia. Create an account ther…

The remote viewing article keeps being reverted as pseudoscientific when original research conducted by the CIA is cited. Such citations are removed swiftly. Any changes are denied or rolled back. The rationale is that, even though the documents themselves are a primary source from an organization that poured significant resources into researching the phenomenon of remote viewing, the individual posting the declassif…

They have a bee in their bonnet about pseudoscience and paranormal subject matter. It has never dawned on some of them that you can take an interest in a subject without believing it, or endorsing it. As I said elsewhere, hoaxers and fraudsters are interesting figures in their own right.

With something like remote viewing, it is undeniable that the USA, USSR and PRC all conducted research into it during the Cold War, which is documented. Someone might be more interested in that fact than getting a "Here be dragons" warning.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#444

Post by nephihaha »

hamdingers wrote: post #328
GaryBluto wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say his lack of acknowledgment of Larry Sanger is actually quite useful, as it is a perfect and irrefutable example that Wikipedia has no qualms with omitting information and twisting the truth to serve a narrative.

In order to find this useful you would have to believe that Jimmy Wales writes the articles on Wikipedia which is a ridiculous notion.

Rich people don't write articles on Wikipedia. They pay other people to do so. Some of the articles on billionaires read like hagiographies.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#445

Post by nephihaha »

bawolff wrote: post #349
amiga386 wrote: post #19

https://wikipedia25.org/en/the-first-day > Founder Jimbo Wales on a challenge overcome Aren't you forgetting someone, Jimmy? Your co-founder Larry Sanger, perhaps? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger Let's check one of the citations from the History of Wikipedia page: https://www.mid-day.com/lifestyle/health-and-fitness/article... > It was Larry Sanger who chanced upon the critical concept of combining the thr…

I think Wikipedia is the only place where an early employee who left relatively quickly would be considered a "co-founder". If this was a tech company i dont think Larry would be considered a co-founder. I think the thing is a soar subject because Wikipedia essentially rejected all of Sangar's ideas, but he's still kind of riding on its coattails.

A founder only has to be there for the beginning. "Early employee" and "left relatively quickly" would not disqualify him.

I know little about Sanger but he wouldn't be the first person to have been written out. Elon Musk's partner in early PayPal suffered that fate.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#446

Post by nephihaha »

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…

Re bias, it does depend which areas you are talking about. Some areas are better served than others.

When it comes to billionaires, some of the biographies are very biased indeed making them look like saints.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#447

Post by [deleted] »

dpark wrote: post #266
rvnx wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is literally a spin-off of a porn company. From that point on, where it came from or who founded it is not so important. The question is how it acts today. It is a highly-political organization supporting lot of “progressive” ideas, California-style. So if you like reading politically biased media it may be for you. If you are seeking for a global view you better ask different LLMs for arguments and counter…

> Wikipedia is literally a spin-off of a porn company. What? If Bomis was a porn company then Reddit is a porn company. Edit: I take it back. It looks like Bomis was more directly pushing soft core porn than I realized.

[deleted]

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#448

Post by mightyham »

bawolff wrote: post #377
mightyham wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because they have all been tried before and had the opposite affect. Did you even read the document? Claiming that Wikipedia has implemented all of these suggestions in the past is just plainly false. If you disagree with the documents contents, why don't you provide a substantive argument instead of just belittling efforts at changing the status quo?

> Claiming that Wikipedia has implemented all of these suggestions in the past is just plainly false I'm claiming people, not necessarily wikipedia, have tried them. However many have been tried by Wikipedia too. > just belittling efforts at changing the status quo? The status quo is pretty good. Change for change sake is an anti-pattern. Regardless, i think people who like these ideas should try them, on their own s…

Your comments are shallow because you just continue to assert the idea are bad with no reasoning. You also clearly don't know your protestant history: Martin Luther did basically just whine about the Pope. He was thoroughly a reformer that wanted to see the Catholic church changed; he did not condone "Lutheranism" as a separatist movement.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#449

Post by FiveOhThree »

acdha wrote: post #442
FiveOhThree wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure that the journalists involved would never admit that people putting a spotlight on their bad behaviour made them clean up their act.

Sexist attacks and lying about an imaginary sex-for-reviews scandal didn’t put a spotlight on anything. It wouldn’t excuse their actions even if they had been doing some real ethics work, but they weren’t even showing up to do productive work. One reason why everyone who actually cared about those issues opposed GamerGate was because it distracted attention from non-imaginary problems and meant that anyone talking ab…

I understand that you buy heavily into one side of this narrative, but statements like "everyone who actually cared about those issues opposed GamerGate" come across as naive rather than informed.

Sure, the label of GamerGate was clearly made toxic by a combination of bad actors within and the significant smear campaign in the press, but it remains extremely obvious that the gaming community were not happy with the state of the industry.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#450

Post by nailer »

jaydz wrote: post #259
thiht wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't wait for the specific examples

So many parroting the same "bias" line here, yet not a single example has been linked.

There’s about fourteen or so in other threads. I posted a couple:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46632023

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