Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 496 posts

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#71

Post by psychoslave »

visarga wrote: post #48
xorvoid wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say this is all we really should reasonably expect from our knowledge consensus systems. In fact it’s the same values that “science” stands on: do our best everyday and continue to try improving. It’s a bit hard for me to imagine something better (in practice). It’s easy to want more or feel like reality doesn’t live up to one’s idealism. But we live here and now in the messiness of the present. Viva la Wikip…

> In fact it’s the same values that “science” stands on: do our best everyday and continue to try improving. Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it. But philosophers still talk about Truth, they didn't get the message. As long as we are using leaky abstractions - which means all the time - we can't capture Truth. There is no view from nowhere.

Yeah sure, all scientists have the same opinion on that matter, while all philosophers have a different obsolete dogmatic view, both camp are perfectly disjoint, and only the first one is acquired this fundamental truth^W continuously improving model always closer to truth^W something relative to something else and disconnected of any permanent absolute.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#73

Post by 3036e4 »

An unexpected side-effect for me after I started subscribing to Kagi a few months ago, at a low tier with limited searches, is that I made sure to configure all my browsers with keywords for Wikipedia searches and I use those a lot, knowing that what I will end up with after searching is probably going to be the Wikipedia page anyway. No point wasting precious limited monthly searches.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#74

Post by logicprog »

postmodern99 wrote: post #58
visarga wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact it’s the same values that “science” stands on: do our best everyday and continue to try improving. Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it. But philosophers still talk about Truth, they didn't get the message. As long as we are using leaky abstractions - which means all the time - we can't capture Truth. There is no view from nowhere.

> Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it. > it What is "it", if not truth?

Yeah, that is where things get real fun!

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#75

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

howenterprisey wrote: post #51
Wikipedianon wrote: post #30

The article criticizes doxxing but well-known Wikipedia editors doxx each other all the time... There's a site called Wikipediocracy that's been around for 20 years and an Arbitrator (Wiki's Supreme Court) was suspended for leaking secret deliberations to the "private" section of the forum—just make an account and you can see it too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... According to that Ar…

Hi. I was an arbitrator who voted to suspend that arbitrator. There was no doxxing involved, which anyone can verify. Barely anything else in your comment is correct either. Doxxing is an issue but from where I sit it's much worse from people outside Wikipedia.

This comment is farcical. Supposing you are right and that there was "no doxxing involved", it's still impossible for an outsider like most of us here, to verify it. Especially if there is such a thing as non-public discourse of any kind.

It is not a transparent organization, and it does not even pay lip service to the effort of transparency. It is large enough of an organization that it is an absurd claim, on its face, that there are not cliques and factions who would do such things if it were at all possible.

You investigated yourselves and found no evidence of wrongdoing.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#76

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

mdp2021 wrote: post #20
bawolff wrote: 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…

It's a miracle that the model of voluntary contribution from random agents and imperfect overview partially worked. The science that could emerge by studying the phenomenon could constitute a milestone.

You may find this interesting!

https://web.archive.org/web/20080604020024/http://www.hereco...

> So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

> And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#77

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

jalapenod wrote: post #6
djoldman wrote: post #4

> Wikipedia is the largest compendium of human knowledge ever assembled, with more than 7 million articles in its English version, the largest and most developed of 343 language projects. but: > The collections of the Library of Congress include more than 32 million catalogued books and other print materials in 470 languages; more than 61 million manuscripts; the largest rare book collection in North America ... http…

[flagged]

It's handy to have a neutral place I can look up books or passages of the Christian Bible so that I have a reference point when talking to people about it

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#78

Post by mediumsmart »

soupfordummies wrote: post #68
mediumsmart wrote: post #59

Wikipedia broke some time ago in order to be allowed to survive. There are still things that can be looked up there and taken at face value.

I read this comment three times and I still don't understand what you're trying to say. Not trying to be rude, just saying.

In my opinion some years back Wikipedia broke meaning that it was no longer impartial by default. It’s no biggie and was to be expected given its scale and perceived authority. Just saying. You could watch manufacturing consent maybe to understand the comment but you don’t have to.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#79

Post by glitchc »

Wikipedia has plenty of propaganda. It's often at the fringes of knowledge, in niche subjects where there isn't yet an established group of proponents and detractors. It can be quite subtle too, will fool most laypeople, even those who are otherwise intellectually savvy.

It's only when a subject becomes popular that the propaganda gets recognized and rectified.

Post reply on HN