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Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

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Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#791

Post by cyberax »

ty6853 wrote: post #116
r053bud wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We voted for this! This is “democracy” at work

I mean yes? Democracy is a pretty poor model for governance. IMO peak enlightenment happened circa the 17th or 18th century when classical liberalism decided government should be based on individual liberties and anything outside of that is decided democratically not because it is a good system but because votes are roughly a tally of who would win if we all pull knives on each other because we didn't like the vote.

> IMO peak enlightenment happened circa the 17th or 18th century

Hmmm... The time when most people were not able to read?

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#792

Post by xvilka »

jtrip wrote: post #10

The scale of deep body trauma that has been done to the US will not seem clear today, but it will have dire consequences for the future trajectory of US. I am sad for this, for the current status quo I was born under, but I suppose History must happen.

There's always a choice to move somewhere else.

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#793

Post by II2II »

YZF wrote: post #380
bawolff wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It just feels like it's too big and there are too many interests that want to distort things. I was surprised to see some article recently removed effectively rewriting history and directing to some alternative version. I just checked again and it's been restored but it just seems like the wild west. In fairness, this does mean the system is working.

Yeah- Maybe it's "eventually working". It's hard to trust when it seems so fluid. Maybe there needs to be some mechanics to make it harder to change. Something like being able to suggest changes/corrections but having those come out on some schedule after a review? (thinking software release process here). Quarterly Wikipedia releases? Creating some "core" of Wikipedia that is subject to tougher editorial standards?…

> It's hard to trust when it seems so fluid.

Perhaps we should trust it more because it is fluid and that fluidity is documented (see the history and talk tabs for any given article). Historically, reputable sources depended upon, to a very large degree, the authority of the author. The reader typically had little to no insight into what was generally agreed upon and where there was some debate. How the Wikipedia exposes that may be imperfect, but it is better than nothing.

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#794

Post by jfengel »

gigatexal wrote: post #498

This admin has no shame. They’re burning everything good/stable about the US because of an unstable, megalomaniac idiot happened to win the presidency.

He didn't just happen to win the presidency. He brought with him both houses of Congress on his coattails, and he had previously filled the Supreme Court (already heavily laden with his partisans).

He's not the one with no shame. It's tens of millions of Americans who are even now cheering this action on. Many of them on this web site.

If we have a megalomaniac idiot, it's because it reflects who we are.

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#795

Post by nailer »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #772
nailer wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So his complaint is what, the article about Benghazi isn't summarized on Obama's Wikipedia page? No. His complaint is: > The Barack Obama article completely fails to mention many well-known scandals: Benghazi Visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama Read: > Libya > Main articles: 2011 military intervention in Libya and 2012 Benghazi attack > In February 2011, protests in Libya began against long-time dicta…

Search Benghazi on the page.

One of one references are in the post you’re responding to.

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#796

Post by selfselfgo »

rayiner wrote: post #272
mulmen wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s also no evidence that increased turnout would have had the same result. What seems to be overlooked in these conversations is the skill with which American voters have been disenfranchised by partisan forces. It’s easy to blame people for not voting if you ignore the real difficulties in actually casting a vote for many Americans.

In fact there was an extensive analysis of the election by Democrat pollster David Shor, who found that 100% turnout would have resulted in an even larger Trump win, by 4.8 points: https://www.vox.com/politics/403364/tik-tok-young-voters-202... This has been the pattern for awhile now. The pool of politically unengaged people are especially Trumpy compared to regular voters: https://abcnews.go.com/538/vote-back-trump…

[dead]

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#797

Post by anigbrowl »

eastbound wrote: post #564
dxroshan wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is happening is very scary. Many people don't seem to care about any evidence or sources. They blindly follow whatever lies that their leaders say. I think this has been the case at anytime in history. However, now, with the internet, it is easy to spread such lies to mass and easy for such leaders to make blind followers.

> Many people don't seem to care about any evidence or sources. They blindly follow whatever lies that their leaders say. I’m one of those people you complain about. When I did deep research about DEI, I presented evidence and sources to people like you, including judges that I knew in my private life. It seems you didn’t care, to a point that I had in my hand a document printed from a department of justice’s own web…

Yeah I think you might be doing a little over-generalization there.

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#798

Post by mlindner »

sedev wrote: post #213

I am going to say a thing I say a lot: please edit Wikipedia. It is easier to do than you probably think! Wikipedia's biggest constraint is no longer money or server space, it's editor time (especially since LLM-based garbage is a force multiplier on disruptive editing that does not have a corresponding improvement to good-faith editing). Any topic area you know about and/or care about can benefit from your attention…

I used to edit wikipedia until I got permanently "community banned" because of some poor choices of words and even my apologies were ignored. The site is full of people who are chronically online and like to witch hunt and destroy people's lives. That wasn't the case almost two decades ago when I started using the site, but now it's full of the type of people that passionately use reddit and bluesky and that were formerly on twitter. (It's worth noting that a "community ban" is a special type of ban that's basically a lynch mob where a bunch of people dog pile and if there's enough "consensus" you get banned, which can happen by the person proposing it simply calling forth all their friends. And this type of ban is considered "stronger" than an actual administrator ban so cannot be overturned by an administrator. It's mob violence at its finest.)

I was a very active editor who'd been using the site for a very long time, but they don't care. One major mistake and you're gone forever.

The site also has a huge bias toward "media" sources rather than actual scientific content or primary sources in general. They treat the media as vetters of the truth and ignore all of the group-think/mass delusion that is common among mainstream media where they all re-report each others stories. That causes a huge blind spot. It didn't used to be that way too, it used to be that most notable sources were books, but nowaydays with everything online and the quality of media reporting going down and down it's caused Wikipedia itself to decline in quality.

I used to encourage people to edit Wikipedia like you, no longer. The site needs a hard fork, at least for the english speaking site.

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#799

Post by sgc »

cyberax wrote: post #790
sgc wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not say 'is', I said 'was'. I have not seen studies or even many anecdotal stories indicating people think it was too hard for they themselves to vote. I have seen a lot of people saying that about other people, but as of 2024, attempts to disenfranchise voters had not been very well done. I also don't think having ID is a high bar, which is what a large amount of the noise has been about. Many, many democratic…

The problem is that all the additional requirements _always_ result in targeting Democratic voters. Always. For example, voting by mail is bad. Unless you are a senior (and thus more likely to vote Republican). And it doesn't take much to change the outcome of many elections. Just a 0.1% shift is often enough to flip the result.

So the fight needs to be to make things universal and fair, not to do away with everything. I agree there are many attempts to throw elections in the US, but I also think unreasonable resistance to measures that make a lot of sense on many levels would have far better results if it was spent making sure things were implemented correctly.

I think a lot of people see all-out resistance as extremist and somewhat irrational, and so you are losing people's good will. I do see it that way, I am sympathetic as to what leads to it and don't let it count against those pushing for 'no new rules' even if I find it immature / poorly thought out - but at the same time I don't think most people think it through and are as understanding as I try to be.

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#800

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #780
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, but lets for the sake of argument assume that I buy into your premise. In terms of degrees, do people who own land and have the laws of the nation apply to you ( which is a fascinating distinction by the way, which you may have not fully thought through, but I will leave it as a tangent unless you want to explore it further here ) have more skin in the game than those who only have laws of the nation appl…

No, they have the same amount of skin in the game. Given that the state can decide to kill you, or to force you to work, land is irrelevant in the grand scheme of the law's impact.

The response seems a little too emotional to be considered rational. Still, lets consider another perspective.

Would you agree that people with more money are treated differently from people with less money? Money is not exactly property or power, but would you agree that they stand more to lose than a person without either? If they stand to lose more, they automatically have more skin in the game. In fact, if we count money, we can give fairly definitive amount of skin in said game.

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