Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney • Hacker News Board

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

#981

Post by moritzwarhier » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 5:48 PM UTC

moritonal wrote: post #978

moritzwarhier wrote: post #925

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the issue with naming the person if you think there should be an encyclopedic article about said person? If it's about anonymity / not wanting to publicly link your HN and Wikipedia profiles, well fine, but the fact that there are two films about a person does not say much. People can make films about themselves, too.

Oh, it was just because it didn't matter to the conversation. It was about Bernie Jordan who left his nursing home to attend a D-Day event. I created the article because both films imply the nursing home prevented him, but in actuality they went to great lengths to help him.

I see, thanks!

Reading the article about the movie, I can kind of see both sides here.

Probably a veteran Wikipedia contributor could draw the lines best, but it seems reasonable to say that the incident itself would not be relevant enough unless it had been made into a movie.

The article about the movie clearly states that it's a true story.

i mean, there are often "curiosity" stories reported by multiple newspapers that are still not really historical events warranting their own article.

I'd draw the line depending on the volume of coverage and publicity in such cases.

And this case doesn't appear to me as if it was a major cultural thing that everyone knew about when it happened (unless they were interested in the movie).

I'm not in the US though, so I can only tell what I see in search results and that the story hasn't really crossed the atlantic into any notable publicity here.

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

#982

Post by 93po » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 6:18 PM UTC

llm_nerd wrote: post #746

93po wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we stop bringing up annoying people in every single comment section when they have nothing to do with the topic at hand?

Elon Musk has been waging a war with Wikipedia[1] for a couple of years now, and has the ear of the president. Of those in the administration, he is the single name that really stands out as a guy with a Wikipedia beef. Seems like he has lots to do with the topic, and it is absolutely likely that he is the one who elicited this. Recall that Musk also basically appointed his own head of the IRS (though Bessent then ou…

this is a really high level of hyperbole that isn't reflective of reality

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

#983

Post by 93po » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 6:20 PM UTC

sterlind wrote: post #907

93po wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the root of the problem though: wikipedia isn't an objective source by its very nature. Wikipedia requires mainstream established news sources for a lot of articles that aren't academic in nature, and especially for articles about people. You cannot include information that isn't supported by corporate news articles, which means corporate news is now the arbiter of truth, and corporate news lies all the time a…

corporate news rarely lies outright. libel is illegal. articles will spin and speculate, emphasize and elide, omit and opine, but that's not lying, it's spin, and a careful reading can extract the facts of the matter. yes, you have to cite reliable sources on Wikipedia. yes, this means AP is considered more reliable than someone's Substack. you can, however, cite NPR or PBS, the BBC or the Guardian. if two reliable s…

if you characterize something with such incredible bias, and do so knowing that the resulting impression and information someone will leave with does not match objective facts in reality, then that is dishonest and to me, equivalent to outright lying. this mischaracterization is in basically every single political article, including literally the top story on cnn dot com right now

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

#984

Post by llm_nerd » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 7:17 PM UTC

93po wrote: post #982

llm_nerd wrote: post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon Musk has been waging a war with Wikipedia[1] for a couple of years now, and has the ear of the president. Of those in the administration, he is the single name that really stands out as a guy with a Wikipedia beef. Seems like he has lots to do with the topic, and it is absolutely likely that he is the one who elicited this. Recall that Musk also basically appointed his own head of the IRS (though Bessent then ou…

this is a really high level of hyperbole that isn't reflective of reality

Hyperbole? What? What did I say is remotely hyperbole? You can't simply drop that as if it immunizes you from reality.

Your claim that Elon has "nothing to do" with this is simple ignorance. Either you simply didn't know, in which case say "oops, sorry, I don't know what I'm talking about", or you're being grossly insincere.

Elon brings up Wikipedia constantly. Elon, you know the guy constantly at the president's side and who literally named a head of the IRS, absolutely has something to do with the government suddenly turning its evil eye of ignorance towards the group.

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

#985

Post by MartinGAugustin » Tue, Apr 29, 2025, 6:57 AM UTC

myself248 wrote: post #694

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've done a fair bit of editing over almost 20 years. Some of my photos are featured in small articles, and I've only had a few of my edits reverted, always for sensible reasons. It's easy to get started, and the pitfalls (chiefly, adding commentary without a source) are well documented. So on that basis, I agree. Please edit. It's easy. Start small. That said, I've watched entire articles vanish under the banner of…

[dead]

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

#986

Post by psychoslave » Tue, Apr 29, 2025, 10:02 AM UTC

zahlman wrote: post #846

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting how so many people are answering that they've had trouble! How about I look at some of those cases? Especially if it's relatively recent, I can take a look. Leave me a message here, or at my email address (see my HN info) , or on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Kim_Bruning I'm not very active anymore, but I'll check in the next couple of days and see what I can do. Really to be able to help I gene…

There are multiple entire websites out there criticizing Wikipedia and what they have to say tends to revolve around the editing process, specifically the social/cultural aspects. Have you attempted to research this yourself? Are you familiar with what Larry Sanger himself had to say about the bias that has emerged in Wikipedia ( https://unherd.com/newsroom/wikipedia-co-founder-i-no-longer... )? e: another comment el…

How do we rate biases, and what’s the rank of Wikipedia along the diverse methodologies to do so?

Also note that the issue is biases in there whole generality. Most data produced by the universe will just not attract interest of most human beings. Or at least, as finite beings, we have to pounder where we put our attention and can’t afford to study every single topic with the same level of scrutiny.

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

#987

Post by empthought » Tue, Apr 29, 2025, 10:51 AM UTC

sneak wrote: post #941

empthought wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the world as a whole is not a better place because Facebook and Lockheed and the US CIA exist. You've cherry-picked a few bogeymen. What about Norman Borlaug, Bell Laboratories, the Gates Foundation, Margaret Sanger and the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology?

I’d have picked the Manhattan Project, ARPANET/Wikipedia, and aerospace development in the wake of the Wright brothers. Many of the ones you’ve listed would likely have happened whether or not the USA-qua-USA existed. The Manhattan project and the current internet and the rush to build airplanes (first as weapons of war, of course) would probably not have happened the way they did without the USA.

You’re probably wrong about this but will never admit it.

This is because you have an ideological commitment and are backing into the answer that is orthodox to this commitment, rather than any real rationale or spirit of inquiry.

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

#988

Post by BrtByte » Tue, Apr 29, 2025, 11:51 AM UTC

user3939382 wrote: post #584

BrtByte wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia isn't immune to influence campaigns - honestly, no open platform is - but the key difference is how seriously the community takes it. The amount of volunteer effort that goes into investigating sockpuppets, enforcing sourcing standards, and maintaining some kind of neutrality is incredible when you step back and think about it.

Neutrality? I’ve never seen an English language wikipedia article on a politically controversial topic that wasn’t the DC establishment/State Dept official take. They listed Greyzone as an unreputable new source because it’s pro-Palestinian. When you Google the usernames of those who voted to ban them pro Israeli think tanks from DC come up. Wikipedia is a joke when it comes to politics. If you’re lucky you can find…

It's not about trusting Wikipedia blindly - it's about knowing how to read between the lines

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

#989

Post by BrtByte » Tue, Apr 29, 2025, 11:53 AM UTC

20after4 wrote: post #534

BrtByte wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia's value isn't that it's perfect, it's that it shows its work

On articles that are either controversial or cover some kind of current events, I often find more value from reading the edit history and the discussions than from the article itself.

It's messy, but honestly, that mess teaches you way more about how information is shaped than a polished "final" version ever could

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

#990

Post by psychoslave » Tue, Apr 29, 2025, 12:32 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #942

matwood wrote: post #839

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure talking about guns in the US is proving what you want. The US has a much higher gun murder rate per capita than most other high income countries. It’s in fact near the top with active war zones. When everyone has weapons, more people get shot. That’s a fact. When countries arm up there is a much higher chance of a conflict happening that can’t be rolled back.

> The US has a much higher gun murder rate per capita than most other high income countries. It’s in fact near the top with active war zones. This is markedly untrue in most parts of the USA, including the most heavily armed ones. Almost all of the gun murders in the USA are in 3 or 4 extremely high crime (and high poverty) counties. Dozens of other counties that have gun ownership rates 2-10x higher per capita have…

Not every phenomenon is only cause on one side and only consequence on the other side, multiplexed feedback loops are often more appropriate models.

More poverty, more fears, more will to be perceived as an unbeatable threat no one dare to attack, more actual aggression fueled by us vs them mentality, more tragedies. Rinse and repeat.

Also having bad outcomes of a social structure being geographically condensed doesn’t mean they are decoupled from causal inter-dependencies with the places where all the happy shiny outcomes is jealously isolated.