Support multiple competing Wikipedia-type online encyclopedias.
Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
61–70 of 301 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
#62I think overall the wikipedia model has shown itself to be decently working. But (anecdata) I have my gripes with the way it handles evidence. My SO has a person (died already) in her family with a (relatively) short wikipedia entry. There are factual errors in the article. We know that, because we have original documents showing that the "facts" reportet in the entry are wrong. Due to the fact that the documents can…
What do you want Wikipedia to do in that circumstance, though? Just accept uncited facts based on the promise of someone on the internet? The problem with your SO's relative isn't that Wikipedia is doing something incorrect, it's that the historical record is wrong. And that sucks, but it's not something an encyclopedia is going to be able to solve. That's why we have historians.
Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
#63I'm not sure if I share the same assessment. I am amazed at how robust your typical Wikipedia page is despite the chaos that goes into writing it. Given that it's not possible to make a version of reality that everyone is happy with, I think Wikipedia comes pretty dang close.
I tend to agree. Wikipedia does a fantastic job of trying to stay objective. I think the real root here is that the last decade has led to a bifurcation of "facts" across partisan lines. There are realms of discourse where people just don't think it's appropriate to present unrefuted fact A without also presenting perspective B, even if the support for B is mostly just spin. So someone reads an article on A and think…
The face mask article example you gave is actually one of the ones which would be less affected by established editor bias as there would be more editors from different regions participating in editing it.
Moreover claims by health organisations like WHO can be used to prove or disprove the efficacy of masks. But this is a luxury articles that are dealing with established authorities publishing information have.
Articles on persons and social issues tend to mostly not have any such authority and the debate is mostly generated through opinion.
Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
#64I think Wikipedia is mostly good contentwise. Of course there are two extremes where there are problems: disputed topics (especially contemporary political topics) and niche topics receiving little to no attention. I think for both an improvment can be made by improving the view on the editing history. Showing what kind of editors (new accounts or ong term members? Editing only few articles or across the board? etc.)…
> Of course there are two extremes where there are problems: disputed topics (especially contemporary political topics) and niche topics receiving little to no attention.
An unusual third extreme, where things are so wrong, so entrenched and so unchecked that they have the potential to not just misrepresent truth but also change it.
I refer you to the story of the Scots Language Wikipedia:
Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
#65Get the Wikimedia Foundation to spend money on the technical foundation of the sites, rather than spraying millions up the wall of "racial justice". That's not me making a strawman by going straight to "omg, the SJWs", it's a exact phrase from the 3rd paragraph of the 4.5 million Knowledge Equity Fund page [1]. That, and executive pay, is where donations go, not to keeping the lights on. The running cost to keeping t…
I was ashamed when I learnt Wikipedia artificially funds the writing of pages of women, so they try to reach equal numbers to men. I wouldn’t be ashamed if the criteria for admissibility were equal, but barely being a researcher with published papers is enough, while men with entire books on the subject get rejected.
Talk about rewriting history…
Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
#66Get the Wikimedia Foundation to spend money on the technical foundation of the sites, rather than spraying millions up the wall of "racial justice". That's not me making a strawman by going straight to "omg, the SJWs", it's a exact phrase from the 3rd paragraph of the 4.5 million Knowledge Equity Fund page [1]. That, and executive pay, is where donations go, not to keeping the lights on. The running cost to keeping t…
This could almost be taken word for word from an article about Mozilla.
People who think 'social justice' is a bad thing seem to set really high standards for the open, independant organisations they say they support, and they're not afraid to give them some extreme tough love and undermine them at every step if they don't follow their priorities.
Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
#67I'm not sure if I share the same assessment. I am amazed at how robust your typical Wikipedia page is despite the chaos that goes into writing it. Given that it's not possible to make a version of reality that everyone is happy with, I think Wikipedia comes pretty dang close.
This is a good example of an amazingly bad article with the worst type of wiki lawyering on the talk page. It basically still has the same conclusion in the lead as when it was originally created, and most of the claims/leaks against Hunter were considered "false"/dinsinfo... But now that those laptop leaks were either confirmed by different reputable sources, it more or less indirectly calls most of the claims true yet still ends up labeling everything a conspiracy theory for absolutely no reason other than some editors going all "nuh uh"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira...
>"Almost no one is not no one, and simply the "fact" it was Hunter's laptop does not in itself establish anything improper, unless someone is upset about porn. We have no knowledge of its chain of custody. For all anyone knows, his laptop was snatched and flown to an SVR lab in Moscow for "enhancement" before being given to Rudy/Bannon. The Politico piece was not picked up by any other reliable source, it relies exclusively on an assertion by some unnamed guy whose credibility is unknown, hence it is REDFLAG and UNDUE"
After ignoring articles from the guardian, politico, the nyt just because it's supposedly not relevant. And even if it was actually hunter's laptop who care right? It has nothing to do with the article centered on the claims that it was his laptop. I think ultimately this is just unconsequential, and the hunter story does not really matter, but if you contrast it with the wiki page on the russian links with trump, the extreme selectivity in sources somehow just... disappear. Keep in mind that no one is actually contesting that the contents of the laptop are actually from hunter at this point except for Wikipedia. Even the emails have been pretty conclusively proven to be his.
The problem is that it leads to just more preaching to the choir; usually wikipedia is pretty good at neutrality in the tone of it's articles (even when those are biaised, which is normal). But with such a blatant attempt at mental gymnastics through the entire article, you end up convincing no one that the info is actually legit or credible. A lot of recent political articles end up being written in a manner much more similar to a smug RationalWiki article than to an actual encyclopedic text
Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
#68I think overall the wikipedia model has shown itself to be decently working. But (anecdata) I have my gripes with the way it handles evidence. My SO has a person (died already) in her family with a (relatively) short wikipedia entry. There are factual errors in the article. We know that, because we have original documents showing that the "facts" reportet in the entry are wrong. Due to the fact that the documents can…
Get a quasi-referencable source like a Forbes blog written, and later refer to it. Wikipedia is great for a low level consensus, but if you actually know anything about many of the subjects it’s hilariously bad.
So Gell-Mann Amnesia applies there as in most other journalism.
Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tend to agree. Wikipedia does a fantastic job of trying to stay objective. I think the real root here is that the last decade has led to a bifurcation of "facts" across partisan lines. There are realms of discourse where people just don't think it's appropriate to present unrefuted fact A without also presenting perspective B, even if the support for B is mostly just spin. So someone reads an article on A and think…
The face mask article example you gave is actually one of the ones which would be less affected by established editor bias as there would be more editors from different regions participating in editing it. Moreover claims by health organisations like WHO can be used to prove or disprove the efficacy of masks. But this is a luxury articles that are dealing with established authorities publishing information have. Arti…
Do you have an example? I mean, I'm sure there's a terrible-but-forgotten-and-ignored page in there, but in my experience Wikipedia's rules about citation and notability work very well to limit expressions of opinion in the pages.
Are you absolutely sure you aren't just expressing the effect I noted? You got mad because a page listed facts, but not the "right" facts?
Re: Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
#70I'm assuming this is only coincidentally coming shortly after Russia's threat of a ban on them?