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 in progress and people are working to make it a little better everyday. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact we aren't there yet. We'll never be "there". But hopefully we'll continue to be a little bit closer every day. And that is what makes Wikipedia great.
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 Wikipedia!
Indeed, Wikipedia really is worth celebrating. While I sympathize with the GP, we should avoid devolving into purity spirals or we'll never have moments of joy.
FWIW, i don't think of my comment as a criticism, Wikipedia is beautiful because of what it is. We should celebrate it as it is.
In my view it is very much the journey towards an unatainable goal that makes Wikipedia so inspiring. The Wikipedian's themselves admit it is a work in progress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_a_work_...
I think that's part of what makes Wikipedia beautiful.
In some ways it makes me think of the religious monolouge from the tv show babylon5 https://youtu.be/JjnpTcvGvts?si=6jdzDxVXOt--LNHC
It’s possible to both criticise Wikipedia and celebrate it.
You know when you're proud of something and you tell it to someone and they always find something to nitpick while also saying good job. That's what this feels like. It's very unnecessary. Time and a place
That’s one example, but I mean less personal. Wikipedia isn’t a person.
For example:
I’m a big fan of Wikipedia. I spent countless hours writing articles in my early twenties. I stopped because the environment got more hostile as the site grew in popularity. I think that might have been necessary to address the influx of drive-by editing, but it still meant I stopped enjoying being a contributor. I don’t appreciate the constant asking for money — as far as I understand, they’re well off without donations.
There.
I think the misconception here is that criticism has to be mean and personal. As someone who celebrates the project’s ideals, giving criticism is an act of love.
You think that's bad? I got permanently banned and I started many important things on Wikipedia - like the admins noticeboard, a number of Australia communities, and the [citation needed]. I wrote dozens of articles about Australian women - none of them gave a shit and so I'm not able to write about them any more.
They are, by and large, a bunch of horrible bullies and losers - many Wikipedians don't actually care about articles creation or actual content, they fiddle about with URL fixes and categorisation. There was one horrible human being called BrownHairedGirl who did all these things and almost destroyed the place before they got indefinitely banned also.
I disagree. She did not almost destroy the place, she successfully turned Wikipedia into an intellectual black hole encompassing the entire human history. There are only unprintable words to describe her vileness.
I'm gonna need you to elaborate on that.
Why did you get permanently banned? And what stops you from creating a new account?
> Why did you get permanently banned.
Ta bu shi da yu created the citation needed template: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Citation... (I remember that account name from Kuro5hin. Much respect!)
He edited under several accounts, all of which are permabanned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Aussie_Article_Writer
Why? Because he'd earned an interaction ban (IBAN) from engaging with BrownHairedGirl, and he breached the ban: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=...
Whatever he said, it's been fully scrubbed, but it appears to have been commenting on BrownHairedGirl's not-yet-submitted Request for Adminship: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=1039021442#Piotrus...
How'd he get the interaction ban? Because another account of his and BrownHairedGirl were squabbling, and the admins have working eyes and brains, they could see he was doing the instigating: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=980273295#Proposa...
You're not meant to wind up or troll your fellow Wikipedians, even if they are combative dickheads who need taking down a peg.
What was the beef? That he was creating small subcategories for each suburb of Brisbane, and BrownHairedGirl goes off her nut at small categories.
BrownHairedGirl was eventually taken out by being needlessly combative about - of all things - Wikipedia's "small categories" policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...
> what stops you from creating a new account?
Wikipedians inevitably go back to their old stomping grounds, use their normal tone in discussions, repeat their same old habits and basically don't change. When they do that, they're very recognisable to the people they already spent 20 years interacting with. They out themselves as a sockpuppet of the original banned user, and they get banned again.
Perfect! Wikipedia is an overflowing of dickheads. Perfect. It is the instutionalisation of dickheads. And @#$# the czar of the New York Subway system and the people who endlessly add retracted citations.
Why'd you get banned?
Also I don't think it's necessary to call people names.
> and the [citation needed]
Citation needed.
You have been trolled by Wikipedia troll bot(tm). - there are hundreds of thousands of them - the hypnotized never lie.
Act of love? It's simply he who yells the loudest gets to write history. The controversy around the George Galloway, and Wireds coverage of the glorification of NAZI platoons and war heros? There are some articles so bad-you cannot even bear to read. But at least there are a few nonsensical articles and BAJADON, bad jokes and other deleted nonsense. My favorite article is about black light power. Absolute and complete garbage. I think that is the true enshitification is they do not take out the trash.
I did find some of the vandals, and became good friends with a few. Some of what they write is side splitting humor, but also the alt-right has an amazing amount of power they are using to rewrite history.
I would never give them a thin dime.
We don't always have to do both at once though. Sometimes we can just enjoy things.
> I would say this is all we really should reasonably expect from our knowledge consensus systems.
Compare this text from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_configuration :
>> The most common labeling method uses the descriptors R or S and is based on the Cahn–Ingold–Prelog priority rules. R and S refer to rectus and sinister, Latin for right and left, respectively.[2]
This claim is actually repeated further down in the article. The fact that it is false was noted on the talk page seven years ago, but this seems to bother no one. After all, there's a citation.
I think we can reasonably expect more. Wikipedia reliably fails at very, very easy problems of "knowledge consensus".
> The fact that it is false was noted on the talk page seven years ago, but this seems to bother no one.
From the talk page:
"This is inaccurate, as the linked Wikitionary page defines rectus as straight, not right"
From the Wiktionary page referenced: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rectus
- led straight along, drawn in a straight line, straight, upright.
- (in general) right, correct, proper, appropriate, befitting.
- (in particular) morally right, correct, lawful, just, virtuous, noble, good, proper, honest.
So, the wiktionary page literally defines it as right, and we see that it's not about direction but about being correct or incorrect. And then the follow up has literally no source to back it up.
So... "I think we can reasonably expect more."
The first claim is debunked. The second claim has nothing to back it up.
Is your proposal then to accept lies and claims without evidence?
The first claim is correct, as the topic was direction, not correctness.
> 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. But philosophers still talk about Truth, they didn't get the message.
When philosophers talk about 'Truth', they aren't searching for a perfect static artifact. They're investigating the concept itself, which is very necessary.
The entire project of model-building would be meaningless if there were no external reality to approximate. What is it that this "series of better and better models" is converging toward?
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.
Reading your comment, my mind is immediately awash with the endless sea of memories I cherish so dearly of discussions I've had with economists, psychologists, computer scientists, social scientists, political scientists, and of course let's not forget the physicists, chemists, biologists and mathematicians, and every scientist ever in fact, in which they, at all times, without fail, insisted on avoiding dogmatic truth!
Not like those hair-brained philosophers!
Sigh. One would have to possess an impressive level of ignorance in the history of philosophy and science in order to hold such a view. What would Raymond Smullyan, or Bertrand Russell, or Henri Poincaré, or who knows how many others, have to say about this remark, I wonder.
I had a shocking interaction with a scientist who insisted that theories are simply the best lies to explain the data. He has been nominated for two Nobel prizes. He will win neither.
> Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it.
I don't quite agree with this, unless what you mean is that there's no procedure we can follow which generates knowledge without the possibility of error. This doesn't mean that there's no such thing as truth, or that we can't generate knowledge. It just means that we can never guarantee that our knowledge doesn't contain errors. Another way to put this (for the philosophers among us) is that there is no way to justify a belief (such as a scientific theory) and as such there is no such thing as "justified true belief." But again, this doesn't mean that we cannot generate knowledge about the world.
There is very little about the universe that is axiomatically true and correct in and of itself. Math is about the only thing I can think of, and really that's in a different category. Everything we know as a species is really just consensus. "Truth" is what we agree it is because the universe does not offer actual truth. What we know is the best guess that our greatest minds can agree on. What we consider to be truth changes far more often than it stands to scrutiny.
There are only a very few people from the entire history of our species who have run particle collider experiments and verified first hand what's inside an atom. What they agree on is truth for everyone because almost nobody has the means to test it themselves. And then of course this truth is modified and updated as we find more data. Then old conclusions are rejected and the entire baseline of truth changes.
We can be sure of things to however many decimal places as you'd like, but reality itself is fundamentally built on probabilities and error bars. What we think we know is built on probabilities on probabilities.
I think you are confusing what we believe to be the truth at a point in time and how the physical world is.
Either atoms exist or they dont. Our idea of atom has evolved over time, but the thing that we call "atom" has always been there (at least on the time scale of human civilization).
The probabilistic nature of quantum objects isn't really a problem either. Electrons may be particles, waves, both or neither, but the "thing" is a real phenomenon of this world regardless of how we talk about it.
Similarly, the truth value of alien existence is well defined: either they exist at this time or they do not. We don't know it for sure, but this doesn't change whether they are actually there or not.
> Either atoms exist or they dont
Perfect example, since they only exist as a concept to describe an observation. With higher precision of observation, it became “the new truth“ that most of the time even on the observation level do not actually exist in terms of matter; they “flicker“ fast enough to appear existing at all times. When you look often enough or at the wrong times, there is nothing to observe.
> When you look often enough or at the wrong times, there is nothing to observe.
Is this because atoms don't exist, or because we are looking in the wrong way due to partial (mis)understanding?
The "new truth" that you talk about is just a different understanding of the concept of atom, but the actual thing that we call atom and that exists in the real world (whether as matter or in some other form) has not changed.
Exactly the right question. If atoms are forever retained as a locally true-in-its-domain and at-its-level-of-description phenomena in every future theory, I think they count as real in any important sense. Even classical mechanics is true in the sense of strongly accurate and predictive at its scales of description, as an approximation of something more precisely described by QM.
One thing that gets me excited is that there's a tantalizing possibility that the 21st century might have an Einstein-level breakthrough that treats holography and some principle of informational consistency as more fundamental than QM, which is amazing, and would change everything.
But even in that hypothetical future paradigm, an "atom" would still be something true and meaningful against that backdrop, and our measurements or knowledge claims about it would still be meaningful. And our progress toward knowledge of the atom was still real progress.
It's legitimate to treat our knowledge as limited, subject to revision, or approximating. But treating that grain of truth like it implies no knowledge or progress is in hand is an abuse of the concept.
> There is very little about the universe that is axiomatically true and correct in and of itself. Math is about the only thing I can think of, and really that's in a different category.
My thought is that math (broadly speaking) possesses correctness because of axiomatic decisions. The consequences of those decisions lead us to practice math that can't express everything that we can imagine (e.g., see axiom of choice/ZFC).
The math humanity practices today is a result of tuning the axioms to be: self-consistent, and, useful for explaining phenomena that we can observe. I don't believe this math is correct in a universal or absolute sense, just locally.
It seems like there is a universal sense in which statements like 1+1=2" or "7 is a prime number" are true, no?
I disagree, it is not universal. 1+1=2 is just a specific system of notation with consistency. There was a time when no human conceptualized this idea of 1+1=2, they did not have numerals or know about addition. Before you get to 1+1=2 you need a bunch of prior concepts that are themselves contingent on culture and history.
If by "universal" we mean median adult human which are apt and willing to engage in basic mathematical thoughts, yes. That’s certainly already a very greatly reduced set of entities compared to everything in existence, though.
Mathematics does its best, but it's still a language, and fallible. It's trying to explain things, and the concepts like "prime number" and "one" can be shaken by later improvements to understanding.
> This doesn't mean that there's no such thing as truth, or that we can't generate knowledge
Oh I agree we can generate knowledge, but it is never the Truth, it can't be. Any knowledge is composed from imperfect abstractions, the edge cases of which we don't know.
We are taking patterns from our experience, and coining them as abstractions, but ultimately we all have our own lived experience, a limited experience. We can only know approximatively. Some people know quantum physics, others know brain surgery, so the quality of our abstractions varies based on individual and topic. We are like the 5 blind men and the elephant.
> Any knowledge is composed from imperfect abstractions, the edge cases of which we don't know.
That is a pretty concrete epistemological statement. Is it true?
That's not just a game, or a "gotcha". Any discussion about "truth" eventually ends up with the question of what it means to know something, a subject about which you seem to be fairly confident.
A piece of knowledge is a claim about some property of reality, which is another way to say that it's a claim about what is true. Thus knowledge can contain truth and can also contain errors, and importantly it's impossible to guarantee that knowledge does not contain errors.
> Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it.
> it
What is "it", if not truth?
> What is "it", if not truth?
There's a misconception in this thread and commonly elsewhere.
Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts.
Truth depends on context. Facts are indisputable.
Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be true. But the fact might be that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently.
>Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts.
Is Bertrand Russel a scientist or a philosopher according to you?
https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/classicreadings/chapter/bertr...
What about Albert Einstein?
https://todayinsci.com/E/Einstein_Albert/EinsteinAlbert-Trut...
Or Richard Feynman?
https://www.cantorsparadise.com/the-fundamental-principles-o...
Finding resources for perspectives on truth by Ada Lovelace, Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin is left as an exercise.
Epistemology fight! Facts are ideas like there are 60,000 species of beetle. They're different from other ideas in that they don't explain very much, don't really contribute to understanding, and are quite boring. They are disputable, because my source for that particular fact is quite old, and by now we may think the fact is that there are 70,000 species of beetle. Objective facts are actually true, and nobody is ever completely, indisputably certain of those, although in some fields like mathematics we try very hard to say indisputable things, and in others like literary criticism we don't, because the subjective is of more interest in that context - that is, there is higher tolerance for vagueness. But really every claimed statement is a subjective attempt to approach the objective, which is forever beyond us, but we can travel in its direction.
(Sorry I already forgot the password to my recently created account!)
> There's a misconception in this thread and commonly elsewhere. Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts. Truth depends on context. Facts are indisputable. Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be true. But the fact might be that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently.
This to me reads as semantic games; let me rephrase your example:
"Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be factual. But the truth is that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently."
> can simultaneously be factual. But the truth is that the displayed color
Your rephrase is incorrect.
"Red" and "green" depends on what your brain interprets. That doesn't change the underlying EM frequencies of the color you see.
Therefore, red and green are truth while EM frequencies are factual.
My brain (the one in my head) can only interpret red or green, given its makeup and the rest of the state of the universe including the display that I'm looking at.
Therefore, it's a fact that my brain interprets red instead of green, or vise versa. It's a fact for someone else's brain that they interpret it as green instead of red.
> my brain interprets
> someone else's brain
Yes, like I said: it depends on context.
Red and green is interpretation, which depends on context. That's truth.
Sure, it's indisputable that one brain and a different brain can have different associations for names of colors. That's a fact. But the name of the color that each brain associates with corresponding input depends on context. That's truth.
The irony lol.
Yeah, that is where things get real fun!
It's not a coincidence that somebody might insult philosophy as a discipline and then drop some freshman dorm room level epistemology as evidence. If you don't know anything about a topic, it is very easy to dismiss it.
Very common in STEM circles.
I understand the spirit of what you're saying, but I think this phrasing can be abused by burn-it-all-down skeptics, and I would prefer to say the notion of forward iteration depends on there being some such real thing as truth. The "relativity of wrong" essay by Isaac Asimov, recently upvoted on HN, captures the idea pretty well imo.
Scientists are trying to make predictions about the future based on past experiences (inductive reasoning).
Philosophers aren't necessarily trying to do that.
You can't get to capital T truth via inductive reasoning like science uses. Just because the apple fell from the tree every single previous time, does not necessarily imply that it is going to fall down next time.
But if you are after other forms of reasoning its possible. 1+1 will always equal 2. Why? Because you (implicitly) specified the axioms before hand and they imply the result. Talking about capital T truth is possible in such a situation.
So its perfectly reasonable for philosophers to still be after capital T truth. They are doing different things and using different methods than scientists do.
All you've accomplished here is to repackage the tired "there are no absolute truths" meme
Yes, that’s a nice self-contradicting statement to ignite thoughts. One possible resolution is to conclude "even granted that absolute truths do exist, and humans can experiment the intuition that they indeed exist, doesn’t imply that humans can reach absolute truth and fathom it down."
I don't think there can be a resolution on a fundamental level, unless you count some therapeutic attempt at "we're going to pretend like we can grasp truth for the sake of convenience, or because the alternative is too uncomfortable" as a resolution.
The consequence of what it means is that we can't have any justified claims or knowledge at all. If you can't even count on the law of identity you've lost all intelligibility.
Alternatively, objective truth does exist and humans can comprehend it, and the issue of truth versus the development of how we come to understand it is a semantic one (I rather like the distinction between historie and geschichte in German).
To my mind, where we've gone wrong is that we began by assuming transcendentals, holding certain axiomatic, a priori metaphysical assumptions that make the scientific method possible, and then turned around and denied that transcendentals exist in the first place- undercutting the foundation rather than really questioning our tooling or our capacity to understand the data.
>The consequence of what it means is that we can't have any justified claims or knowledge at all.
Just that we can’t claim all of our knowledge are equally close to the absolute truth we suppose to exist. The belief that the current attention exist is among the closest thing we can have to an absolute truth. That something like "I" exists is a step further away. That an external world exists is yet an other step further. That 1+1=2, it depends if we take the road of Principia Mathematica à la Whitehead&Russel or if we take more faith in intuition on sensory/memory inputs + reward/penalty from what teachers asked us to integrate at primary school.
>If you can't even count on the law of identity you've lost all intelligibility.
Change as sole stable permanent foundation is harder to play with, at least by the most spread education systems in western civilization (outside it I don’t have first hand experience), and the concept of identity can be derived from it as a transitional side effect. Not that identity must be dropped entirely, but then considered under different perspectives. Somehow like we can build our math under ZFC or category theory (or without anything so firmly and meticulously founded really), and at high level notions it doesn’t prevent us to reemploy familiar patterns.
Identity as a foundational block is not only an issue for humanity at epistemological level, but also at psychological and societal level. Used as inscrutable fundamental black box, it can actually prevent intelligibility and sound reasoning in all the contexts it’s broadly employed.
>To my mind, where we've gone wrong is that we began by assuming transcendentals, holding certain axiomatic, a priori metaphysical assumptions that make the scientific method possible, and then turned around and denied that transcendentals exist in the first place- undercutting the foundation rather than really questioning our tooling or our capacity to understand the data.
That’s probably smoothing "we" very broadly here. "We" also have a very firm tendency to easily build disagreement on every matters and the rest. Nonetheless I would be interested to know more about what leads to this perspective.
I would say that OpenStreetMap is also a pretty good thing on the internet. Maybe not quite as impactful, and I'd say less well run, and rougher around the edges, but it's largely resisted being taken over by evil corporations or heavily influenced in bad directions.
The difference is that there are corporate alternatives to OSM, and they're popular. The closest alternative to Wikipedia is asking an LLM to read Wikipedia for you.
Torrents are also a good thing on the internet.
Me getting free movies and music, piracy good
Meta getting free books to train an LLM, piracy bad
For the courts, it seems it's the opposite.. Meta, Anthropic and others seem to be getting away with terabytes of piracy, on a much larger scale than the typical consumer
Powerful entities getting a pass, bad.
Individuals getting a pass, good.
See, it just depends on how you slice the Venn diagram. With a bit of imagination you'll be able to start connecting the dots by yourself in no time.
I've already connected the dots of the HN zeitgeist. Besides this was done by a few individuals at Meta, or are you thinking they had a board meeting and shareholder vote on it?
even if we completely ignore organizational structure, do you truly believe not holding companies accountable for a few rogue employees is a good call? Is it too difficult for higher-ups to blame the rank-and-file and arrange scapegoats in the opaque black box that is a corporation? and even still, we can ignore this potential precedent and focus on motivation only: if an employee uses illegal means as a tool to reach their work goals, isn't an investigation into said work goals and culture warranted?
This is all already happening, that's why we know about it. But there's also nuance. Was piracy Meta corporate strategy, as implied ad nauseam on here, or was it some guy taking a shortcut?
Is it actually bad that Meta trained their AI on books? No, court already decided that it's substantially transformative and doesn't harm the publishers. Should Meta employees have stolen the books? No, obviously not. The middle men need their cut.
"Move fast and break things" A guy taking a shortcut is the ethos of Meta, it's the DNA.
Linux is also good thing on the internet.
Definitely!
So I guess we need a go-to "good things on the internet" list :)
I submit libgen / annas-archive
Add musicbrainz to the list. It was weirdly comforting to rediscover it 15 years later with nothing really having changed (for better and worse)
Basically. Things that don’t rely either ads or data collection.
I'm not so sure I go there less and less. Wikipedia is very biased and turf guarded against negative factually true information even when it meets all requirements it will often be taken down automatically with no recourse. Many pages are functionally not editable because of turf guarding.
Anything vaguely sociopolitical is functionally censored on it and wikipedia does nothing about it even if they don't support it.
Firstly let me agree with both current sibling commenters: zero bias is impossible & the brand & extent of Wikipedia's biases is distinctly bad.
That said, I find Wikipedia's biases predictable, avoidable (topic specific) & also very interesting as a sociological study in itself.
Firstly, it reminds us of inherent bias in (mostly colonial-written) paper encyclopedia of the past. There has never been an unbiased encyclopedia written & seeing the biases fully sourced & rapidly evolving in realtime serves as an excellent crystallisation of slower processes in previous works: highlighting that many of the historical "facts" we all grew up with were ultimately fed to us by similarly biased groups.
I've also come to the slow realisation that this may be a fundamentally unsolvable problem & that simply categorising it as "biased beyond repair" & continuing to handle it in that manner may be the best thing we can do.
>I've also come to the slow realisation that this may be a fundamentally unsolvable problem & that simply categorising it as "biased beyond repair" & continuing to handle it in that manner may be the best thing we can do.
Is it a case of rot then? Or maybe I'm just biased, but I get the feel it wasn't always like this. It was never ideal, sure, but it used to be that I was wary of the site when checking, say, contemporary politics. Now it's a good chunk of recorded history instead.
> I get the feel it wasn't always like this
I get this feeling but in the opposite direction. The more I see it the more I come to realise I was blinder to it in the past.
Many people comment on the internet ushering in an age of misinformation, but I actually see it as ushering in an age of misinformation awareness. Factchecks in legacy media were rare to nonexistent & generally not accessible to most media consumers. Information was more siloed leading to much greater acceptance of what was fed as fact without a lot of interrogation. Now, we're bombarded by such a slew of contradictions we "feel" less able to discern fact from fiction, which is disconcerting, but it's really just a broad awakening to something that's always been the case.
>factually true information [...] meets all requirements [...] it will be taken down
Can you make such an example?
A very simple example are ongoing cases where the identity of a perpetrator has been released by smaller or local agencies but not by larger ones. There are countless, countless other examples too, I can walk you through some others if it’ll be helpful.
Wikipedia doesn’t treat all sources as being equal, so even in cases where there’s no reasonable doubt towards a claim’s veracity, if the correct source hasn’t already claimed it, editors are liable to revert your edit.
Obviously this is a phenomenon that occurs much more often in ongoing or politically sensitive stories. That said, it’s important for people to understand the flaws in Wikipedias method of epistemology.
> A very simple example are ongoing cases where the identity of a perpetrator has been released by smaller or local agencies but not by larger ones.
This is a good policy. It’s much easier for a couple small outlets to be wrong than for the small outlets and some major ones to be wrong, and the stakes are high - naming the wrong suspect could ruin an innocent person’s life. Wikipedia is for knowledge, not rumors. If you want rumors, there are lots of other sites out there.
> Wikipedia doesn’t treat all sources as being equal, so even in cases where there’s no reasonable doubt towards a claim’s veracity, if the correct source hasn’t already claimed it, editors are liable to revert your edit.
This is the right approach. If more information sources held this standard, sloppy reporting and outright lies would be very costly. Would you tell everyone very important news based on a the word of a friend who is known to stretch or invent the truth? Be a reliable source and you can participate.
I can, but perhaps not with the specificity that you'd like. I should also preface this by saying I was involved in a community which is often stereotyped and denigrated by those on the "online left." When I was younger my parents divorced and my dad was treated very badly by the courts, by friends, and by society. He is a good man and I saw the ways in which he was systematically marginalised and outright discriminated against. It helped me understand why male suicide is so high. This led me to learning more about the men's rights movement. Nothing like the "manosphere," men's rights is interested in the many issues men face as a group; the various ways in which society and the law discriminate, and how men might adapt and help each other through some very difficult periods. For many men, it is mostly a support group. A place where they can talk about how they were raped and then the police laughed at them at the station. Or about how the judge awarded their wife full custody of their three children because she lied about being abused. Or about how they lost limbs in unsafe workplaces and no one cared. Or about how they feel suicidal. Etc. I organised support groups online and in real life. It was very positive and I believe we helped many men through some very dark times.
Apologies for the preamble, but I wanted to provide some context. In the 2000s, I began updating the Men's Rights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_rights_movement) Wikipedia page. Mostly statistics around things like suicide, homelessness, likelihood of being assaulted and murdered, disparities in the educational systems and courts, the high rates of workplace death and injury, etc. Always cited with peer reviewed or governmental data, and sometimes with "accepted" news articles. My goal was to inform people about the facts. Some time in the late 2000s and early 2010s, questionable edits began happening. For example, suicide statistics were removed periodically. The reasons were generally specious. Sometimes arguing about semantics. Sometimes the source. Sometimes procedural. One editor argued that the statistics should be contained as a subsection of the Feminism page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism), for example. They also tried to remove the page entirely. I began to notice that the people making the edits were frequent editors of related pages like Feminism.
It is at this point that I should point out that feminists and men's rights advocates don't always see eye to eye.
The questionable edits became malicious edits. Administrators began selectively enforcing rules. For example, applying a higher standard for sources on the Men's Rights page than they do on the Feminism page. They applied a banner at the very top of the page directing people to a feminist friendly page called the "men's liberation movement." They removed countless statistics and examples of inequalities in law and education. They changed the language in all sections to suggest or imply that the people involved in the movement are incorrect or mistaken. For example, the entire second paragraph (of only two) in the introduction is a refutation of the movement. Compare with the Feminism page. Criticisms are now located at the very bottom of the page in a sub-sub-section which doesn't even have its own anchor. It's a few small paragraphs now on a page with tens of thousands of words. In the "Suicide" section now they include, "studies have also found an over-representation of women in attempted or incomplete suicides and men in complete suicides." Just to make sure that no one could make the mistake of caring about men, *unless it's framed in relation to how women might be affected.*
I could go on but the stark differences between these pages should be extremely clear. They have not been edited for clarity or truth, but for ideological reasons. This is just one of millions of pages on which ideological wars are being waged. Unfortunately, the war is lost. WikiProjects, Arbitration Committees, and Administrators are all some version of far to extremely far left wing Americans. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger now calls the site "propaganda." (https://www.foxnews.com/media/wikipedia-co-founder-larry-san...) It's clear that many like this bias, but for those of us who used to be involved, we can confidently tell you that you should never, ever take what Wikipedia has to say at face value. It is much closer to propaganda than it is factual.
Foremost, I personally appreciate the effort you've given for this comment and your fight for your beliefs in general.
Although, handling it purely pragmatically, there is no other concise source of information as vast as Wikipedia's concerning so many facets of life as well as sciences that is far enough from feelings' reach that is pretty well-written as the only possible bias present is also factually incorrect (as opposed to ideological topics).
I understand that supporting and reading articles from a source which you know is blatantly lying or otherwise obstructive or manipulative on other topics is a difficult undertaking but we literally have no other option . There is no war but the war against illiteracy to be won. Education, information and intelligence is man's best friend and until a better alternative arises for the masses (e.g scientific articles do not count as an alternative, Britannica is only in English) the one we have should we stuck with, and its quite well managed too.
Bias in itself is eternal, and holding any entity to a standart so high is illogical at best in my view. If there was no Wiki, would you think the many blog pages filling its space would be absent of the very bias you're talking about, but worse, would they have had any factual backing?
What are people regularly using Wikipedia for that the bias is that terrible? Are you exclusively looking up controversial conflicts, right wing leaders and climate change? I just have never had my everyday curiosity cross paths with only those things which are controversial by Wikipedia standards.
Also I find a lot of people’s disagreements usually come down to “ok, I see that the information that I thought was censored is actually available but not in the format that I prefer”
And if you’re looking for objective information about the Israel Palestine conflict you’re hardly going to get it anywhere.
There is no such thing as unbiased. Maybe it simply doesn’t match your bias.
It's impossible to produce such material with a complete lack of bias, sure.
I know of at least of one case in which a person publicly admits he is using Wikipedia to promote their political stances and who is right now at the center of an arbitration case in which he intends to silence opposition.
This is not that.
People who edit Wikipedia run the gamut from those that are zealous about neutral point of view up to and including people that do it for their own selfish purposes. But lets take the zealous NPOV type. If I were to try and do that, to try my hardest to produce an article which truly takes an NPOV stance, it would still come off biased to you because you and I can't possibly share the same idea about what is neutral. Based on some peoples venom here - including charges of propaganda - I suspect you all are just reading articles written by people with a different worldview than your own. I really don't understand this sense of unfairness or even conspiracy people have about it.
I'm really at a loss on how to make this any more clear.
You are looking at a case of a person LITERALLY admitting they are using it for propaganda and your reaction is "I'm sure it's actually not, it's actually neutral and it's just that it differs from your view". I'm sorry but I can only explain it to you, I can't understand it for you.
Do you think anyone here on HN uses this site for propaganda?
HN doesn't style itself as an encyclopedia for all human knowledge that's worth writing down.
I disagree. Reality is objective and publications all over the world like the BBC do a great job of maintaining journalistic standards. Wikipedia could ensure information is unbiased. You clearly enjoy the bias, and it conforms well to your own. If it didn't, I highly doubt I'd be hearing you defend bias with such a strange postmodernist argument.
You are actually agreeing with me. I'm saying it is biased, because everything is, and it is not offensive (or even avoidable) to have a bias. Ask someone in Afghanistan if the BBC is biased. BBC matches your bias I guess. It pretty well matches mine too, but that doesn't mean I don't recognize it carries one.
There is a difference between unintentionally introducing a bias and propaganda . The latter is a guided by professionals. It is not an accident.
You are accusing Wikipedia of spreading propaganda? On behalf of who?
Wikipedia isn’t a person. Wikipedia isn’t doing anything.
Individuals and groups, be they ad-hoc formations, corporate backed, or nation-state backed routinely astroturf all corners of the internet and Wikipedia is a very big, very common target.
Sure but this thread is in response to a statement starting with "Wikipedia is biased".
I used to contribute semi-regularly to Wikipedia in the past, but tried contributing recently & found the experience to be off-putting (to put it mildly).
I also have long been frustrated with certain areas of Wikipedia that I feel struggle so significantly with NPV that they're rendered beyond useless, likely net harmful. (These are not the topics I've attempted contributing to recently, I wouldn't dare).
I'm continuously annoyed by the contrast of their overbearing donation pushes with the overspends in their published reports.
BUT all that said I do sometimes need reminding in today's world how much of a miracle Wikipedia still is. Not something to be taken for granted. And on the overspends: this is hard to qualify given there's really no comparable projects in existence. Maybe this is just the price we need to pay.
To add a thought on tackling the listed faults:
1. I suspect the NPV problem may be a fundamentally unsolvable problem (or at least one that would literally take a global paradigm shift in how all societies are structured to do so). This seems outside of Wikipedia's control. Attempting any draconian measures to tackle it might have negative knock-on effects on many of the other assets that give Wikipedia it's value.
2. The spending problem, as I said, is subjective & might simply be a case of efficiency being incompatible with an organisational culture that produces such a miraculous thing. I honestly suspect the opposite is true: I personally think the overspends are indicative of organisational disfunction that could seriously hurt the project in the longer term, but that's pure gut feeling on my part, based on nothing of substance. Who knows.
3. The increasing difficulty in contributing (80% of edits coming from 1% of editors) on the other hand is - imo - a potentially terminal problem & one that needs to be addressed urgently if we want to keep this resource alive.
In the past, Wikipedia vandalism was a rite-of-passage of school & college kids. This obviously needs counter-measures but it really feels like today's Wikipedia has gone so far in the opposite direction as to entirely dissuade new contributors. Old Wikipedia used to be filled with User: namespaced subpages with long form essays on the ever running debate between deletionism & inclusionism. In today's Wikipedia, the inclusionists have emigrated, tired of battle, & the remaining deletionists bravely prevent any budding new contributor from having a positive welcoming community experience by quickly auto-deleting their WIP stubs or moving them into esoteric red-taped namespaced processes nobody knows how to navigate. It's a deeply unwelcoming environment for new users, especially young people. I'd love to see an age profile of the population of frequent editors.
It's staggering how many articles get deleted despite having a dozen citations and at least some level of notability.
Even more concerning is that the deletion "consensus" is often formed by just half a dozen people who almost always cast a deletion vote.
I pop into AFD discussions occasionally and try to put my thumb on the scale but always end up disappointed with the results.
Someone should make a "Deleted From Wikipedia" website composed of nothing but Wikipedia articles that were deleted due to supposedly insufficient coverage/notability.
"It isn't perfect."
Articles about some chemical process are fine, indeed often excellent.
Everything where facts get filtered and presented, is bad. Read about real world events - especially where different groups or countries were involved - in three different languages on Wikipedia, and you'd think three different universes exist.
> Read about real world events - especially where different groups or countries were involved - in three different languages on Wikipedia, and you'd think three different universes exist.
It isn't so much as bad, as inevitable. And as you say, Wikipedia has the built-in antidote with the other language versions and the Talk pages.
> And as you say, Wikipedia has the built-in antidote with the other language versions and the Talk pages.
The Talk pages are just a first introduction to the sheer madness behind the scenes; one quickly starts to realize that relative few people are calling the shots in a lot of places and that their personal biases are causing serious problems. The "Reliable Sources" policy would be atrocious enough already (there are no objective processes for challenging a source's inclusion or exclusion from the informal list on a given topic, only political ones) without the "power user" editors who are clearly abusing it.
Wikipedia has gone too far from being what it was meant to be. I can agree it is the "last good thing on the internet" with the caveat - "for some people". Is is neither objective, thus not scientific, nor complete in terms of depth of the information. All of this happens because of invading obsession with "modern" ideologies that pollute and distort the pure knowledge gathering, which is a very complex matter itself that becomes a mission impossible in the case of Wikipedia.
I was thinking the other day about which websites might still exist in 100 years on whatever the web becomes, and Wikipedia to me seemed the most likely. It manages to be both stable and flexible. Functionally it's almost identical in all important ways to how it was ~25 years ago, but organisationally it has adapted to handle the incredible increase in scale. It is certainly flawed, because it's made by humans, but I think it may be the web's greatest achievement.
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.
The zeroeth law of Wikipedia – The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.
Uh.. <raises hand> I might be one of the few people who actually knows a bunch of the theory on why wikipedia works (properly). I had to do a bunch of research while working on wikipedia mediation and policies stuff, a long time ago.
I never got around to writing it all out though. Bits of it can be found in old policy discussions on bold-reverse-discuss, consensus, and etc.
I guess the first thing to realize is that wikipedia is split into a lot of pages, and n_editors for most pages in the long tail is very very low, so most definitely below n_dunbar[]; and really can be edited almost the same way wikipeida used to be back in 2002. At the same time a small number of pages above n_dunbar get the most attention and are the most messy to deal with.
Aaron Swartz actually did a bunch of research into some of the base statistics too, and he DID publish stuff online... let me look that up...
http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/whowriteswikipedia/
and especially * http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number (note I'm using lossely in empirical sense, where an online page might have a much lower actual limit than 150)
Clever. I had to read that repeatedly to get it.
Cf: The difference between theory and practice is: "Practice works, in theory."
I heard it as "in theory, theory and practice are the same"
I've heard that style too, with the addendum "in practice, not".
I have heard the same thing from Grid based electrical engineers. The grids fails in theory but works in practice.
"In theory, theory is ninety percent of practice; in practice, theory is ten percent of practice"
Same with Communism. It works in practice, in theory, it can never work. /s
To me the key highlight of the article is the finding that editors generally start fairly radical and neutralize over time. Only really passionate people are willing to put the effort into Wikipedia articles which correlates well with radical opinions. But over time working as Wikipedia editors tends to de-radicalize people's work.
Contrast that with the rest of the internet, which mostly rewards radicalization and nudges people towards it.
That's some of it, but certainly Wikipedia's editorial discussions differ from most forums in that its objective remains neutral, with worldwide access.
If the number of editors were limited, it could easily develop bias (see your own Facebook page for examples).
If the subject matters were limited, it could develop bias (WikiSolarEnergy wouldn't tend to attract anti-solar-energy types).
I think “random agents” was only at start. I don’t think you as a random person can edit much there anymore.
Which is good in ways. Though random phase is song of the past.
I routinely edit articles on Wikipedia without even logging in. The controversial articles, where you are likely to run into problems, are a small minority of what's there.
Wikipedia also tends to suffer from fiefdoms, where even seemingly low-controversy articles become impossible to edit, as someone has decided that article is now their personal pet and they'll spend an absurd amount of time undoing and preventing other people's edits.
The same applies on a larger scale with moderation. There are plenty of poorly-sourced database-like stub entries for STEM subjects, but try to make a page on a "softer" subject and there's a pretty good chance someone will try to nuke it with WP:PROOF, WP:NOTE, and/or WP:OBSCURE if it isn't perfectly fleshed out in the very first draft.
If you encounter that, you can possibly get help to get those articles unstuck. People are not supposed to keep fiefdoms, much of policy prevents it. (and someone with a bit of practice can call in help and clear it up)
But to do that you have to stop being random and start playing Wikipedia game.
Random people don’t have time for that.
Ergo “it is not a project for random editors anymore”.
I want do an edit or addition and be fairly evaluated without having to call higher instances or fight through bureaucracy.
Fair-ish. It really depends. The last few areas I did anything in (I'm not a regular anymore) basically nothing happened except what I wrote, so I guess the quiet parts are really really quiet and you don't get into much trouble at all.
All my random edits go through and stick around. Probably because they're relatively simple. A table with data up until 2020, and I update it with sources up until 2024? Never had it removed.
I seldomly add much beyond such things though.
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
I'm not sure one can compare an hour of watching TV to an hour of researching and writing, the former is essentially mindless idling that does not take any mental effort. I wonder if there's a measurable difference in brain energy consumption, but probably not.
It suffers similar to stackoverflow in terms of making it excessively hard to contribute to something you really do know a lot about. I don't really see a solution for hot topics like isreal-palestine. However, I should be able to improve a page on some physics subject I'm an expert in that has been turned into an obvious ad for some professor's niche work.
Agreed. It's funny how only a couple of years ago we all told schoolchildren "stop citing Wikipedia, anyone can edit it, read an actual book!" yet now in this benighted era of AI we urge them to consult Wikipedia for "the truth" because it's not the hallucination of a machine.
Yes, it has its flaws, but I plan to keep on editing and donating.
If you choose to donate, know that a small fraction of your donation goes to Wikipedia. Most of your donation goes to unrelated projects.
Wikipedia could function forever without another donation if they wanted to.
Source? (Particularly for that last part.)
Discussion about Wikipedia not actually being in financial jeopardy has been around for some time, and I remember reading about it at least once a year, during the donation banner season. Here are a few sources that discuss them.
[1] https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-fou...
[2] https://www.dailydot.com/news/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraisi...
[3] https://archive.ph/CClQ6 (this is a Washington Post article. I'm using the Archived link as it's paywall-free)
I agree with both your points. Wikipedia is extremely useful because it's generally very good - and it's also not perfect.
I'll add I don't think it can be any closer to "perfect" than it is because the same fundamental traits which lead to its imperfections also enable its unique value - like speed, breadth, depth and broad perspectives. The only areas where it might very occasionally not be ideal tend to be contentious political and culture war topics or newer niche articles with low traffic. Basically topics where some people care too much and those where not enough people care at all.
But this isn't as big a downside as it might be because anyone can look at an article's talk page and edit history and immediately see if it's a contentiously divisive topic or, on the other end of the spectrum, see when there's been little to no discussion.
This doesn't make sense because Wikipedia is a collection of sources, most of which are on the internet. If would be surprising if Wikipedia was a good thing but the online sources it uses are bad.
Wikipedia can be bad because it is edited by human. And because it is edited by human, the side that has more people will win.
For example, Wikipedia has a Chinese issue. [1]
Because both Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese both live under the Chinese language in Wiki (And we have a dropdown within Chinese wiki to choose what regional variants we want to read). There's a constant wiki edit war. This is not only happened to the political topic, but also how something should be phased. Even though Chinese officially ban access to Wikipedia by the Great Firewall, enough people VPN and manage to edit wiki pages by pages, and more annoyingly, there are more wiki admin coming from PRC than Taiwan/Hong Kong/Macau etc.
So you cannot assume Wikipedia is neutral.
When you put something on a pedestal it almost always eventually gets co-opted by people who's goals are not noble enough to build a pedestal themselves and who are seeking a ready made pedestal from which to spew their garbage.
Of all the demographics who should understand this, you'd think that people complaining about the failure of all the other institutions would be high on the list.
To say "It isn't perfect" is simply to admit it's a human endeavor.
Excellence is never finished:
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/64d6548c19f38a...
people are also working to o make it worse everyday. We’re lucky the people working to make it better are winning. It it’s a hard battle
The last good place is https://neal.fun
I've heard it expressed as "the last good thing on the internet" many times, but it never occurred to me to interpret that to mean it has attained perfection in some regard. I always took it to mean that it has thus far evaded the enshitification trends.
It's also full of bullies and those who are drinking from the cool-aid.
> It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws.
I don't know that the attackers against Wikipedia are advocating for a modest point like that, which I would think even proponets accept as a truism. I think Wikipedia is just another variation on institutional knowledge, and, as the world descends into misinformation and authoritarianism, it was inevitable it too would be attacked for perceived "bias."
Everything from global warming to vaccines, to newer and newer frontiers we never would have guessed, like hurricane trajectories or drones or air traffic, have fallen one after another to a kind of reactionary skepticism, resentful of the fact that these domains are controlled by real facts, and not merely participatory collective storytelling. There are some things left, that we problaby think could never get politicized, that will be. Pickleball rules? Quantum mechanics? Baseball history? Soon longstanding uncontroversial claims belonging to those are going to fall into the category of essentially contested concepts.
So Wikipedia, with ordinary and lonstanding requirements for reliable sourcing, and decades of policy on what that means in reaction to countlessly many debates, is resilient against the kind of recreational, hedonic skepticism that the masses use to dismantle other knowledge claims.
So "well wikipedia's not perfect" kind of rubs me the wrong way because it seems like it implies we should be more welcoming of this attitude of hedonic skepticism, which has been so destructive. I think it should be celebrated. Authoritative factual validity, and the norms that make it possible, used to be uncontroversial. And thus far, social media misinformation has outcompeted fact checkers, but not (yet) Wikipedia. I feel like that's never been more important.
Wikipedia is my default search engine.
Mine, too. 1. Wikipedia for general knowledge questions ("What languages are spoken in Nigeria?") 2. Wolfram Alpha for time/date/number questions ("How many days until 2026-07-01?") 3. Mapquest for driving directions 4. DuckDuckGo for everything else
> Wikipedia is my default search engine
https://paste.sr.ht/~awal/2310cfca431e9f723df281d02558eaebd7...
I used to edit for wikipedia. I saw a "problem" where a specific troll factory was pushing a particular narrative which is factually contrary to international law.
I held out for as long as I could but it was emotionally draining
> factually contrary to international law
now you can look it up yourself, i wont give links or anything. "kashmir" as is name, is an international dispute for control over a region between india and pakistan with the natives of that land wanting independence.
What UN recognized definition of the place is "india administered kashmir" and "pakistan administered kashmir" that is split between the two till the time the issue is resolved before the UN. This is a internationally accepted definition that encompasses the situation being active.
what indian based troll factory does is, unilaterally call it "indian UT of jammu and kashmir" and "pakistan occupied kashmir".
I resisted for as much i could, i would revert the edits and they would be back, i would give evidence of the same in order to maintain status quo but sadly i could not keep up. i was overrun and it felt like being eaten by a mob of hungry zombies.
What does that mean? Laws don’t define truth.
will of the people does? what is truth?
the fact that anyone can be an editor on Wikipedia scares me. I mostly use it for STEM, current affairs and timelines, stuff that can't be easily fiddled—unlike topics around history & politics. These are highly baised on wikipedia. For instance, look at wikipediocracy.com
i've built my own wiki platform cms for my niche-- the reason cool shit like wikipedia doesn't get built these days is because google will kill you. in my niche it's 90% indoslop content promoted by google these days. good luck against that and AI
What’s “indoslop” mean? Is it supposed to be a combination of indolent and sloppy? I guess that does describe a lot of the Internet.
You take the advertising driven paradigm out of the equation, and a website might be worth something more than rage clicks and doom scrolling machine, who knew?!
Ad driven sites broke the internet; they might have broken society to some degree as well.
It was inevitable that the ideologues who fancy themselves responsible leaders would attack the relative openness of Wikipedia. This makes it all the more important that you DONATE to help maintain it. I put my $2 in every month, every bit helps to fortify the bastions against invaders.
In a world run by criminals, telling the truth becomes a crime.
oookay. I hear ya. Will do.
Important recent context - just a few days ago House Republicans asked Wikipedia to reveal the name of some editors: https://truthout.org/articles/house-republicans-investigate-...
I can't claim I was part of the original internet users, but this is part of why anonymity was so important to them. I'm pretty open about my real life on here and other channels, and some people IRL know my real name. But I would regret it if an organization, government or employer attaches consequences to my online behaviour.
Putting bibles everywhere, removing books from libraries, now getting the names of wikipedians... They're going slowly, but they're going surely.
They have been playing the long game for decades, the speed up in recent times feels like they realised the windows was closing and they need to lock things down before many wise up.
Wikipedia is a good source for certain kinds of information. If you ask it about anything political it's going to be from a certain slant and the most informative part of the page will be the Talk page which explains what people would like on the page that isn't there, or shouldn't be on the page but is
>If you ask it about anything political it's going to be from a certain slant
I'm not sure if there's anything else out there that's better at giving a fairly neutral summary of political controversies?
It reminds me of the Churchill quote "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"
Ground.news is quite good. It provides a bias meter next to publications, and offers a blind spot tool so one doesn't only see one side of a report or discussion. Wikipedia doesn't have such a counter-measure. Most of the political pages have been entirely captured and there are no mechanisms promote neutrality. On the contrary. WikiProjects, Arbitration Committees, and Administrators are all very entrenched positions and once the scales tipped towards a left wing American political bias, there is no way to tip them back.
stupid reality and its left wing bias
This cute phrase was much more believable before Democrats were so insistently wrong about so many important things during COVID (lab leak theory, efficacy of cloth mask mandates, arresting surfers on the beach, natural versus vaccine immunity).
What examples of this are there? I've usually found Wikipedia to be quite equal opportunity, well rounded, and factual.
They have their NPOV[1] policy, and seem impressively unbiased to me, given the various divisive situations they have to try to cover.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_v...
Just because the policies are supposed to be neutral doesn't mean the resulting work is guaranteed to be truly neutral. Whether something is definitely a fact or an opinion can be very fluid, and you can play a lot with the amount of attention each viewpoint gets. Even a "neutral" article can end up reading completely differently when one viewpoint is very detailed and described in a fact-like way, while another only gets a short summary which reads as if it is a fringe opinion. And even when you are trying to be neutral, it is incredibly hard to avoid your output from getting shaped by the culture you are surrounded with.
It's a very thin line to walk, and I don't think "true neutral" or "true unbiased" exists for the same reasons you mention. A newspaper may be neutral and stick to the facts, but if it simply chooses not to publish something, or it chooses to publish something as a byline instead of headline, it's already biased.
There are organizations trying something else though; admittedly I got this through a promotion from a youtube channel, but Ground News [0] is a news aggregator that publishes news with many sources, including ownership, political affiliation, publishing type (facts or opinions, neutral or entertaining), and even notes on which channels do and don't report on it, identifying media blind spots like "low coverage from right sources" or "low original coverage" to help people escape their bubbles and provide multiple perspectives on an issue.
An example of this in biased media is that people or entities of one end of the political spectrum is almost always qualified as extreme in some way while those from the opposite end of the spectrum is almost never qualified as extreme, as if it were self evident that it is true. Hard to unsee once you know what to look for.
The editors mostly reference left-leaning media outlets when it comes to political topics, without providing a counterbalance from right-leaning sources, assuming it were a truth-seeking endeavor.
As a non American this is very obvious to me.
Even Reuters that was supposedly meant to be a non-biased media outlet is clearly left-leaning at this point
Reuters is left-leaning? How so? It's a new agency and as far as I've seen just sticks to publishing summaries of events.
I had a look at the most potentially controversial topics I could find right now, and I say they seem fair. For example: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/dozens-detained-us-immigrat... (on ICE arrests in NY) and https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/what-would-wider-r... (on recognition of a Palestinian state).
Indeed, Wikipedia lists it as a good source[1]. It's worth comparing that to outlets like CNN (reliable, but "... talk show content should be treated as opinion pieces. Some editors consider CNN biased, though not to the extent that it affects reliability.") or The Wall Street Journal ("Most editors consider The Wall Street Journal generally reliable for news. Use WP:NEWSBLOG to evaluate the newspaper's blogs, including Washington Wire. Use WP:RSOPINION for opinion pieces.")
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per... ("Reuters is a news agency. There is consensus that Reuters is generally reliable.")
I’m guessing the other person meant AP not Reuters. Both used to be considered to be straightforward neutral primary sources, and to many readers they both occupied the same role in the news industry. But since around 2016, the AP has shifted more and more left. This is evident in their editorial guidelines, which include guidance on controversial current issues that makes them biased. This bias is recognized in respected bias ratings (https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart). Reuters is typically considered center though.
This is an astute observation, and if I may I’d like to add to it.
When evaluating a news source for whether it’s unbiased, left or right, we necessarily look at the stories it presents and check whether they align with and present in a positive light a particular political option.
We call it „unbiased” if it doesn’t particularly favor any of these.
We’re already in the realm of US electoral politics - for a second we can assume that nothing else exists.
In 2016 the political landscape shifted drammatically and presenting the „right wing” option in a favorable light required certain concessions when it comes to previous journalistic standards.
So, just by sticking to its previous guidelines, the AP would automatically shift to the „left” - because the landscape changes.
It would be more accurate to say that the world shifted underneath AP’s lense and so it immediately started being perceived as left wing.
If New York Post just "leans right", then AP should post obvious lies en masse every day for the left with non existing fact checking. If the scale is this, then it is a completely useless metric. It puts using "ostensibly" regarding Trump's random word clouds to the same level as this: https://nypost.com/2022/09/06/teacher-enoch-burke-jailed-ove.... The first paragraph starts with a lie, then the last two paragraphs are worse than anything on AP... but sure, the metric is definitely useful.
The AP is still mostly in the political center and sometimes "skews left" a bit according to the media bias chart everyone I know references:
https://app.adfontesmedia.com/chart/interactive?utm_source=a...
(I expect a lot fewer people to reference that chart in the future unless they fix the new user interface)
These measurements do feel a bit arbitrary, since our definitions of left and right bias are subject to change. For example, one interesting thing about the AP is that their stylebook used to urge their reporters to avoid even using the word "Palestine," one of many ways they put their thumb on the scale in favor of Israel in that conflict. (not sure what it says today) They somewhat famously fired a reporter for having participated in some college activism related to the Arab-Israeli conflict that would seem very quaint and anodyne today, a firing that stirred up journalists and was pretty widely regarded outside the right wing media sphere as unfair. (ironically, a week or two later the IDF destroyed the AP's Gaza office in an airstrike)
The Right-leaning has a relevant influence on media because some of its supporters are affluent and it is in their financial interest. Ex: Bezos bought a newspaper. The same is far less often the case for the Left-leaning. There are few "land and factory owners" that are part of a pro-worker movement, simply because it would hurt them (or at least that's what they truly believe).
Accordingly, the average media experienced a shift to the right, but not to the left. To be neutral, one thus has to look left of the average of what the media report.
> without providing a counterbalance from right-leaning sources
If you succeed in moving the overton window to the right, formerly "neutral" media outlets now appear to be left-leaning.
This comment was downvoted and I honestly can't understand why. Given the way people use political terminology with reference to media bias, it's certainly true.
I've been guilty of pointing out that the US doesn't really have a left wing, according to the textbook definitions of things, but that's not how people usually talk. People really are talking about the median when they say "politically neutral," even if they shouldn't.
And here's the point: the median can certainly shift as the number of media sources shifts, or if you prefer, as the culture shifts.
I'm very surprised to hear Reuters described as left wing. I suppose though that even my Republican twice Trump voting uncle is left of someone, is that what you mean?
I'm increasingly concerned about the fact that any media outlet, conservative or otherwise, that doesn't engage in far right pandering to the propaganda of politicians is magically labeled "left wing." Anecdotal but someone was arguing to me at a pub last night that Piers Morgan is a liberal now because of his criticism of Israel.
Well Morgan was the editor of a broadly left wing tabloid in the UK for 11 years. His politics are quite fluid, except that I think he's consistently quite socially conservative ... "Common Sense" sort of thing.
Labeling all media that isn't rabid right wing partisan as "left wing" is unconvincing.
Reminds me of "reality has a well known liberal bias"
Or "anything left of right is left-leaning", I suppose. It's the Overton window and the steady decline of moderation; centrists are wrong no matter who you ask ("pick a side you coward", "silence is complicity"), moderate Republicans are RINOs, Republican In Name Only [0], and their disloyalty to the Party is shamed.
I don't know how much you know about the Washington Redskins naming controversy. There's little doubt that "redskin" is a slur today - Native Americans say so, and it's kind of up to them. The status in the 17th and 18th century is a bit less clear IMHO.
Wikipedia says (or said, I guess - I haven't checked) that it unambiguously *was* a slur then too. As evidence, it cites a study of 17th century literature that notes redskins were more likely to be villains than heros in a small sample of 80 books and a diary entry about a sign outside a small town that said "Indian / Redskin scalps - $1" or some such. I don't recall the details.
The point is there wasn't one cited source that showed redskin specifically was a slur, only general evidence that white settlers were racist against Native Americans. Clear WP:SYNTH violation.
Tried to make my own changes, got immediately reverted. Tried to start on the talk page, got totally filibustered by two editors who has the page and a hundred other racism adjacent pages on their watchlist and whose edit history was basically just those handful of pages. Started reading about internal wikipedia boards I could appeal to. Stopped and logged off.
Once you start noticing things like that and start double checking, you find such minor distortions in a lot of political adjacent Wikipedia pages.
Another good example is to grab five super murderous left wing dictators and five super murderous right wing dictators and read the summary section. Use a pen or a highlighter and classify each sentence as positive, negative, or neutral.
> Wikipedia says (or said, I guess - I haven't checked) that it unambiguously was a slur then too.
It doesn't seem to say this - there's quite a nuanced discussion about whether or not it was a slur during that time period[1]:
> The term redskin underwent pejoration through the 19th to early 20th centuries and in contemporary dictionaries of American English it is labeled as offensive, disparaging, or insulting..
> Documents from the colonial period indicate that the use of "red" as an identifier by Native Americans for themselves emerged in the context of Indian-European diplomacy in the southeastern region of North America, before later being adopted by Europeans and becoming a generic label for all Native Americans....
> In the debate over the meaning of the word "redskin", team supporters frequently cite a paper by Ives Goddard, a Smithsonian Institution senior linguist and curator emeritus, who asserts that the term was a direct translation of words used by Native Americans to refer to themselves and was benign in its original meaning ...
> Sociologist James V. Fenelon makes a more explicit statement that Goddard's article is poor scholarship, given that the conclusion of the origin and usage by Natives as "entirely benign" is divorced from the socio-historical realities of hostility and racism from which it emerged.
I think your summary saying the "status in the 17th and 18th century is a bit less clear" is fair, but I think the Wikipeida article outlines that lack of clarity too.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Redskins_name_contr...
Like I said, this was a few years ago. Since the controversy is basically over, the article has normalized somewhat. Fwiw, the current article still says:
> A controversial etymological claim is that the term emerged from the practice of paying a bounty for Indians, and that "redskin" refers to the bloody scalp of Native Americans.[55] Although official documents do not use the word in this way, a historical association between the use of "redskin" and the paying of bounties can be made. In 1863, a Winona, Minnesota, newspaper, the Daily Republican, printed an announcement: "The state reward for dead Indians has been increased to $200 for every red-skin sent to Purgatory. This sum is more than the dead bodies of all the Indians east of the Red River are worth."[56]
This is all WP:UNDUE. The claim is not just contoversial, it's downright nonsensical, unless you also believe "Indian" is a racial slur.
Race and IQ stuff.
You're mad Wikipedia doesn't parrot thoroughly debunked eugenics arguments?
The fact that you jumped to "eugenics" proves my point.
The fact that you can't correctly identify debunked claims about a connection between race and IQ as inherently eugenicist talking points and instead quickly resorted to obfuscation proves my point.
This is a pretty severe leap of logic; respectfully it seems to me like both of you are sort of talking past each other here.
Why don’t you just say what you mean? Not everything is about proving points or “winning”, it’s okay to just have honest discussion.
What I'm saying: Because Wikipedia is a premier world-class source in debunking scientific racism, and presents a constellation of facts that are rather damaging to frauds like Charles Murray, nearly every single critic of Wikipedia on this particular topic is a scientific racist. Which is a set of positions indistinguishable from eugenics. Pretty much without exception.
Current geopolitical stuff too. Intelligence agencies use Wikipedia articles as propaganda tools. The Ukraine War articles are factually incorrect. To be expected with so much at stake.
Yeah I try to avoid pages on Ukraine and Israel, although admittely they don't shun away from the factual things that Israel did. I bet there's a lot of well-paid organizations keeping a sharp eye on a lot of more sensitive pages.
And of course famous people's PR people.
The article for Gamergate is basically an entire page ultimately sourcing from games journalism outlets when it was explicitly about calling out games journalism and collusion in the industry.
And being fair, if there's one weakness in a site which relies on several sources agreeing on something it surely is when those sources are colluding on something, but the end result is a page rife with misinformation.
This is prevalent in culture wars stuff, Keffals article "graciously" fails to mention how she frequently lied and instigated vast amounts of harassment towards herself or how she basically spent the GoFundMe money she campaigned for on heroin. If the media spins a narrative, Wikipedia doesn't really have a counter to that in any way.
Not only politics, also articles on philosophy and history are very hard to trust, due to the slant.
Yeah check out the Talk archives for the Human Anus page. It's like 20 years of hole fetishists and people trying to upload their own.
It is 7:29am here and already this is enough internet for the day.
I always found the warning text for people who upload dick pics pretty amusing https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Nopenis
Is there some kind of automated NSFW/nudity detector that runs against Wikipedia/Wikimedia uploads? One would think there would be at their scale, I just don’t actually know. I saw your user page the other day while looking at a proposal to have a .onion URL for Wikipedia, and I thought that I’d seen you around here, and figure you’re as good a person as any to ask.
Not as far as i know, i think things are just manual review.
NSFW images on Wikimedia tends to be a very hot button issue when it comes to Wikimedia politics. There obviously some cases where such images are needed, and there is a lot of debate on where the line should be drawn (or if it should be drawn at all). Wikipedia is traditionally very anti-censorship in any form. Fun fact - Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales lost a bunch of his user rights when he went on a deletion spree of classical art work containing nudity.
There is an automated filter for child sexual abuse images. Its not public what the procedures related to it is, but i assume if it goes off the fbi gets called.
I think I heard about Jimmy getting his privs revoked, but had no idea what precipitated that to occur. Some kind of misguided heading-off-at-the-pass of future naysayers and potential lawfare, I guess. Heavy hangs the head that wears the crown, and I guess he’s a figurehead as much as he’s a lead of operations. It makes sense to tie his hands so he can say he tried I guess. Interesting interplay of authority, both individual and collective.
No means or methods are necessary. I am familiar with the work of the NW3C and other groups who do important work in that area. My sympathies to the janitors. Truly difficult and important work.
[NSFW] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... has a summary of the issue. From what i understand Fox news was running a bunch of stories at the time on how Wikipedia was full of porn.
In full fairness to jimmy, i think only a handful were risque art from the 1800s. Many of the other images would probably be classed as sex educational if you're being sympathetic, and exhibitionist if you are not. However the ultimate issue was not what the files contained but that he acted alone without agreement to delete outside of proper procedure.
Thanks for the inside baseball play-by-play, coach! Much appreciated.
> However the ultimate issue was not what the files contained but that he acted alone without agreement to delete outside of proper procedure.
Were any changes to Wikipedia policies implemented as a result of this, and if so, do you know which ones?
I found the link to the discussion I referred to upthread since the discussion was from a bit ago:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:IdeaLab/A_Tor_On...
Did this ever go anywhere? I found a grant proposal, but I need to sign up for an account or reactivate my existing one, or whatever.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/A_Tor_Onion_S...
> Were any changes to Wikipedia policies implemented as a result of this, and if so, do you know which ones?
Not that i'm aware but it was a long time ago so i might just not be aware. Note that the majority of the files he deleted were undeleted and are still present to this day. The list is at https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&... and most of the links are blue.
> I found the link to the discussion I referred to upthread since the discussion was from a bit ago:
Not as far as i am aware. People are really nervous that without accurate IP addresses it will be difficult to do anti-abuse stuff.
The new thing that is happening right now is we are killing public display of IP addresses of anonoymous users. Perhaps once that rolls out people will be less attached to ip address tracking and more open to something like tor.
That said, if the tor hidden service is read but not write as the grant proposals, that solves that concern. I don't think anyone would object to a read-only service. There just isn't that much interest from the people who could make it happen, and regular concerns about added complexity for limited gains.
As an aside, the grants process is really disconected from wikimedia tech stuff. Grants might give some money to someone to make an unofficial mirror, but it wont be helpful for making an actual official tor hidden service. There is a 0% chance that a grant will lead to an official hidden service. If this ever happens the discussion threads will be on phabricator and not grant pages.
The way in theory to make this happen is one of:
- convince wikimedia community this is super important. (Unlikely to happen as this is too niche). Wikipedians have some influence over WMF priorities but really only when they start a riot.
- convince wmf senior leadership it is super important (also pretty unlikely)
- lobby the idea with individual developers who work on SRE stuff. Maybe if you convince them, they convince their boss, and it eventually happens when the team is having a sliw sprint. (This is the part where its open source so external contributions are in theory possible to a certain extent, but to effectively do this you basically already need to be an insider and know all the right people to talk to)
Appreciate the thorough concise reply.
I did hear about the hiding of anonymous users’ IPs in passing as I was looking into the .onion URL for Wikipedia concept. I was looking at stuff like TorBlock and thinking that they’re so close and yet so far from having a Tor accessible view or subsite. It could be a special view like the .m mobile views, or something. It could be made to work, but it would take some doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Torblock-blocked
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TorBlock
If one can implement that, a read-only mode for Tor users would seem fairly straightforward.
Once while randomly walking around in the Sunset district of SF, near the Internet Archive iirc, I bumped into someone who claimed to be a legal counsel of Wikipedia/Wikimedia with a business card to match. I don’t have many Wikipedia contacts besides, alas, but I am already a user, though I don’t post much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AspenMayer
Found my old account, as it were. Then I tried to edit my user page and discovered I have an IP block due to using iCloud private relay and/or a vpn. And that block prevents me from editing my own user page. That’s where this policy is going too far, imo. It’s my user page! I can see how even that feature could be abused, but come on. I know it’s not your personal policy, it’s just frustrating.
The issue seems one of institutional support and momentum more than a technically difficult problem to solve, especially if the Tor version were read only. I think it is just a shame that the issue has low awareness. Then again, I bet more folks associate Tor with bad actors than good or merely desperate ones, which is an earned reputation when it comes to bad actors on Tor. I don’t know how fair that is, but that’s the way it is currently. If only we could have a profile option to enable Tor access and then folks could get a unique .onion URL that proxies to a backend Tor read only connection to Wikipedia/Wikimedia? I think that could be done, but impetus is lacking, I suppose.
In a lot of ways, Tor can seem like a solution looking for a problem, at least for legitimate use cases that don’t involve law violating and/or antisocial behavior. It’s a shame that a bad reputation can hold Tor back from doing more good. I think Wikipedia is the single most important and impactful site that could benefit the world and all Wikipedia users simply by adding a .onion version, even if it has the same policy on blocking open proxy access and Tor access from edits. Read only is better than the status quo where Tor use is risky but necessary to access the site, as the alternative to that is no access at all.
I’m a working journalist, so I’ll have to make an effort to edit this Wiki user page while maintaining opsec, because I’m not turning off my vpn or private relay, or any other security features on my end of the connection. I respect Wikipedia/Wikimedia, but I have standards, and sources, to protect.
Cites please. Seriously, if there is a chronically-biased Wikipedia page I would very much like to know about it.
Wikipedia is fabulous. I wish educators would stop telling people that it’s not reliable, and start using it to teach media literacy - which, for wiki purposes, is essentially to read the talk page to see what viewpoints have been included and excluded and why.
When educators say that Wikipedia is not reliable, what they usually mean is that serious work should be based on primary sources, not secondary sources like Wikipedia or any other encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is good for casual research, and in practice, I found the English Wikipedia very reliable, at least for scientific topics, but it is also pretty good on big controversial subjects. Reliability only starts to drop on minor subjects.
But educators want you to go beyond that. Here, Wikipedia is just a starting point, with its best feature being citations.
Wikipedia and other encyclopedias are tertiary sources.
No, they genuinely mean it's unreliable.
Obviously popular articles are great -- they have so many eyeballs and editors that they're not just quite accurate, but often more comprehensive than other sources (in terms of describing competing schools of thought, for example).
But when you really drill down into more niche articles, there's a tremendous amount of information that is uncited or not found in the citation, has glaring omissions, and/or is just plain wrong. These are the kinds of articles that get 1 edit every six months.
It's those latter articles that are the reason Wikipedia is too unreliable to cite.
(Also, Wikipedia is a tertiary source, as it is meant to only cite secondary sources, not primary sources.)
> (Also, Wikipedia is a tertiary source, as it is meant to only cite secondary sources, not primary sources.)
Wikipedia absolutely cites primary sources (as well as secondary and tertiary sources), and this is in accordance with their policy. Breaking news stories and scientific papers are some commonly used primary sources. You may be thinking of their "no original research" policy or their warnings against editors adding their own interpretation to primary sources.
Perhaps I was a bit strict, but Wikipedia is mainly meant to cite secondary sources.
When they explain where primary sources are allowed, they emphasize they "should be used carefully":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_usin...
Also "Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources, and to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources and primary sources."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...
The general idea is that primary sources have not been judged as notable by anyone. The fact that a secondary source considers it notable to include a primary source is a strong signal that the information has passed a first, minimal bar for inclusion in an encyclopedia.
And when primary sources are cited, Wikipedia is exceptionally clear that they must be cited only for verifiable statements of fact, not interpretations or synthesis. That's what secondary sources are for.
My daughter's teacher told her class that Wikipedia is unreliable because it's just made up by volunteers. So I asked her where they should find information and she said other sites on the internet that can't just be edited by anyone.
Blew my mind.
I can’t count how many times I’ve heard “Wikipedia is unreliable because it can be edited by anyone”. I tend to think that Wikipedia converges on reliable because it can be edited by anyone.
This is the argument used for almost 25 years (...yes), did the teacher never get updated?
I'd love to see your daughter submit something extremely wrong with citations from nonsense on the internet.
Had a colleague make the same point on open source, "don't trust code everyone can modify". He was a bottom tier programmer at best.
Is there any modern programming environment / IDE / toolchain / etc that doesn't heavily rely on open source work? Even initially-proprietary solutions like .NET are mostly OSS nowadays.
SQL server comes to mind
Did the teacher teach how to recognize a reliable other site?
I have sometimes thought about firing up my old Encarta 98 CD. A bit outdated now though.
I think you might be surprised, a lot of information on there is pretty timeless. Before Encarta and the internet, people would buy series of encyclopedias - but they wouldn't buy new ones every year.
I'm seeing an ISO for Encarta on the Internet Archive, but I was hoping for a runnable version.
Dont use iso. Pick up an original CD for cheap on ebay. It's not the same without disc spinning
The company Abadonware sells Encarta95 baseball caps. I love mine. https://abandonware.online/products/encarta95-hat?srsltid=Af...
An iso can easily be burned to a CD, too.
The thing about Wikipedia is that every claim is sourced. And those that aren't are usually noted with a "Citation Needed" disclaimer.
So even if Wikipeda isn't permitted as a direct source for students, it's a great place to find other sources for claims and facts about almost any topic. That's how I taught my kids to use it in school. It's a ready-made bibliography on almost anything.
Simple phrases heard elsewhere which make the person feel for 5s like a really smart experienced one in given topic, while being the opposite. A very common trait in large part of population, any population, which usually comes in pair with lack of critical thinking inward & outward.
At the end though, most of us are guilty of such behavior from time to time.
As a general site awareness program, Wikipedia, needs to highlight people to go and read the talk page. Many users are not able to appreciate this vibrant section of the website and assume facts of the article at face value.
Critical thinking requires that the sources themselves are evaluated for bias. Anecdotally, I've come across several articles for which the bulk of citations all come from one source, and that source is a heavily political "newspaper" article. This is true for topics that are hot on all sides of whatever spectrum or division they tend to land. If Wikipedia is going to be taught to be used as a tool for research, then its governance structure should be taught and critically evaluated. The bias of the board of the Wikimedia Foundation should be taken into account.
I suspect that the bulk of readers don't give a second thought to Wikipedia's Magisterium.
Aren't they exactly teaching students media literacy by warning them Wikipedia is not reliable ?
No, because media literacy is not about sorting the world into “reliable” and “unreliable”, it’s about understanding a text in its full context.
...and that includes assessing its accuracy and its reliability.
Compared to an encyclopedia, Wikipedia is unreliable. That doesn’t mean that Wikipedia isn’t useful. But there is a hidden danger with Wikipedia being mostly reliable - people lower their guard and end up consuming misinformation without realizing.
>I wish educators would stop telling people that it’s not reliable
Why? It's really not reliable. It doesn't have any decent standards for sources. Any controversial topic is a constant edit war. Wikipedia is only good when you're okay if info turn out to be false.
totally agree. But in best case you check the reference Wikipedia is referencing which is usually the first source of a fact.
> 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 ...
To me, "compendium" means a single organized reference, not a collection of many different individual works. More encyclopedia than library.
From Merriam Webster:
COMPENDIUM Brief summary of a larger work or of a field of knowledge : abstract
The library is more extensive, but they don't have the same goals. I'd even argue that part of Wikipedia's quality is it's ability to remain small relative to the knowledge it summarises.
Different things though; "catalogued books and other print materials" is not the same as "compendium of human knowledge". The former is an archive, the latter is an encyclopedia.
You won't find a 1920's copy of a newspaper in Wikipedia, but you will find articles about events from then that link to said newspaper.
Both are super important though, Wikipedia can't exist as it does now without archives (digitized or at the very least referentiable).
Those who object to this comparison might also consider that Stack Overflow hosts about 24 million publicly visible questions. And that's just (in theory) about programming!
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.
And? Share an example. This reads like conspiratorial thinking without any evidence.
I've seen this regularly on fringe articles that are clearly being manipulated. I don't have direct links right now, but things I have seen in the past:
* A sketchy online university that was clearly manipulating their Wikipedia page with lots of positive information about themselves to suppress info about their active lawsuits and controversies
* On medical topics: non scientific, baseless claims about the efficacy of various herbal treatments, vitamin supplements, or other snake oil treatments.
* On various fringe politicians. Someone clearly rewrites the article or adds additional things to the article with claims about what the politician has done or not done or wants to do, but these claims are arguably not fact based.
Now these things usually don't last for a long time. They do get rolled back or removed. But it doesn't have to be on there long for it to be utilized. For example, someone just needs to modify the Wikipedia page long enough to get through their active lawsuits, or the snake oil salesman just needs their info up on Wikipedia for long enough to use it to increase their perceived authenticity to trick some seniors. There is such a constant stream of bad actors trying to put this stuff out there that you'll see it eventually, and it doesn't even have to be up there for long for it to be harmful.
I agree, to add on: a significant number of wikipedia pages about companies. Look up any large company that's not google-sized or super big, and you'll surprisingly often find a banner saying the article may be biased and relies heavily from one source... yeah, no surprise companies don't like having their bad things publicized.
Not the OP but I'll back him up, and I'll edit this comment when I come across them. They're pretty common. If the domain of knowledge is niche and the page is absolutely huge, that's a good sign to start looking for editoralizations and slants.
A lot of wiki pages about smaller companies only list the good things (fundraising, tech, etc.) and omit any controversies. The deliberate omissions due to bias are even more insidious than weasel words or other forms of poor journalism.
Fwiw I truly believe in Wikipedia and donate every year, but calling it "perfect" would be extremely dangerous (and false!)
Thanks! I've noticed this for descriptions of political individuals, entities and current events in offbeat parts of the world, where coverage of such in mainstream media is slim to non-existent.
Perfect it ain't, I never even heard anybody actually relevant state that, by the core principle of it it can't be.
But, its by far the best human-averaged source of info on most topics. I'd say even politically charged topics, definitely much better than most news out there who always show some clear bias.
Its not exhaustive (another common complain form folks who seek visibility by complaining and denigrating stuff for the heck of it or some immature popularity), its not meant to be. You also don't do postgrad level physics studies from Encyclopædia Britannica, do you, but it may give you some shallow introduction to orientate in the field a bit.
Why do we keep going out of our way to call it "not perfect?" Nothing in the world is perfect. It's a meaningless phrase.
Just because we don't enumerate Wikipedia's faults doesn't mean we think it's perfect.
Many countries in Eastern Europe have radically different interpretations of history. The nationalists from each country will try to establish their own ethnicity for persons of interest. They will try to add editorial comments or hyperpartisan sources to all kinds of historical articles. There are edit wars about what language to use for what city in what era. I would guess that this is the case for many other regions of the world.
> The nationalists from each country will try to establish their own ethnicity for persons of interest.
Russia is the major player in pushing disinformation in historical articles about eastern europe (and not only). It works on it systematically by using both hired editors and volunteers on scale as well as producing “backing” materials.
Framing editors who are trying to keep up with cleaning all this mess as bad actors is understandable if you support the goal why russia is doing that.
Funny that you mention Russia, considering the bulk of Russian Wikipedia articles are written by Ukrainians. You can imagine how "objective" is that.
I came across a similar thing when I first read the Wikipedia page on 5G was it was in development. I read it after learning an early phones 5G power consumption was through the roof, and I was trying to figure out what benefits 5G had. I was accepting everything I read at face value, until I came across the section waxing lyrical about 30GHz. I knew 30GHz was stopped by glass, or a human hand, and so was more or less useless in a mobile phone.
So I re-read the entire page, this time looking for signs it was written by marketing rather as a factual document. Of course it was exactly that. Only the engineers deep in the bowels of the organisations developing 5G knew how it would perform at that stage, and evidently they weren't contributing to Wikipedia. Until the man on the street had experience with 5G, the marketing people were going to use the Wikipedia page on it as an advertising platform.
So I'm in agreement with the OP. From what what I can see a Wikipedia page that only has a few contributors it is no better than any other page about the same subject on the internet. The breath and depth of a Wikipedia page on a subject arises because of the wisdom of the crowds contributing to it. If there is no crowd, it's possible there is no wisdom.
Fortunately Wikipedia does have one other advantage over a random Internet page - you can tell when the have been lots of contributions. There is an audit trail of changes, and you can get a feel for the contentious points by reading the Talk page. That contrasts to getting the same information from an LLM, where you have no idea if you are being bullshitted.
As you might predict from all that, the Wikipedia page on 5G is very good now.
I remember having to dig up vendor documentation to correct those 5g fallacies.
Thankfully one of the primary vendors (Qualcomm?) had really good doco publicly available.
It even included a lovely diagram showing which frequencies were useful in different scenarios. And a list of likely allocations per country. Letting me create a nice side by side of possible 5g strengths in Australia vs the USA.
This is not exactly propaganda in the typical sense, but it clearly is the case that people successfully edit Wikipedia to further objectives. As an example, the Wikipedia page for Meta-analysis (which isn't even that obscure of a topic) currently contains content that seems to plausibly be trying to promote Suhail Doi's methods, and it seems that it has been like this for a number of years. It cites 5 papers from him, more than anyone else, of which the largest has 297 citations. It has a subsection devoted to his method of meta-analysis, despite it being a rather obscure and rarely used method. There have been additional subsections added over time, which also focus on somewhat obscure areas, but frankly these additions are sketchy in similar ways.
In general, it is not uncommon to come across slantedness issues. Is it completely 100% clear that Doi has come on and maliciously added his papers? Not quite, but good propaganda wouldn't be either, and would actually be far less suspicious-looking.
It’s not a niche topic, but anything to do with Iran tends to censor the bad things going on there.
Look up the page on ICE, it's straight up propaganda.
Many historical atrocities with death counts is a common one I'll run into.
You'll see "xy atrocity had caused the deaths of this many people*", where the additional note will say something like "The numbers reported in this study have been challenged by many scholars on the subject and has been accused of invalid methods".
It's super common with history around Communist countries, because for a lot of folks in the west, the black book of communism is taken as fact when it's far from it, and you have groups like the Victims of Communism memorial foundation that have huge coffers for pushing the black book line.
It says on there that the mRNA vaccine doesn’t kill you.
What an outrage! Everyone knows (but big pharma tries to hide it) that if a barrel of the vaccine rolls off a high roof and falls onto your head it'll kill you instantly!
This is kind of an unreasonable request. The OP is making claim of a general trend not obscure and subtle bias on any single article. Informally the claim feels true from my experience with Wikipedia and it makes sense that a small number of editors would have a wider bias. Just think central limit theorem here.
It's not an unreasonable request to ask for one example of a trend. It's unreasonable to make a claim with no evidence.
> Because Wikipedia was under a Creative Commons license, anyone who didn’t like the way the project was run could copy it and start their own, as a group of Spanish users did when the possibility of running ads was raised in 2002.
Correction on this: Wikipedia was GFDL until 2009. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Licensing_update .
If I remember correctly, the licence change was achieved by the FSF releasing a special version of the GFDL allowing the change, taking advantage of the "any later version" part of the original licence.
OpenStreetMap's licence change was much more difficult. Agreement had to be sought from all editors and for the few that didn't respond their work was removed. We actually replaced the work of most non-responders before the licence change though.
Wikipedia has major issues - there are a lot of topics with coordinated editing from bad actors. The verge article is paywalled so I can't read more than the first page + headline, but I can guess the case it makes.
- https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
- https://www.piratewires.com/p/wikipedia-editors-cant-decide-...
- https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-wikipedia-s-pro-hamas-edit...
It's similar to the problem on Reddit, I wouldn't trust it on any topic that is even mildly controversial. Wikipedia will have a strong progressive left slant it launders carefully through seemingly neutral language and selective sourcing.
Honestly it's gotten worse over the years too - makes me see more value in printed encyclopedia, they go out of date but at least they represent a slice of time. They're not endlessly revised to meet some false ideology that has edit power at present.
But what is better? I mean yes, reading 20 sources on a topic and coming to your own conclusions about an issue is the right answer, but the fact that Wikipedia published its edit history and discussions page makes it seem better than then what everything?
Almost every book you read about Israel Palestine will probably be biased in some way, certainly the news will be. It feels like perfect being the enemy of good. Like sure it’s a mess like all compendiums of human knowledge, but also seems massively better than the alternative.
Your point about the encyclopedia seems strange, sure it’s likely to be less accurate less complete and more biased, but it’s narratively interesting is like? What are you trying to accomplish than that that’s better?
Annoyance at Wikipedia feels nihilistic. Like “it’s not perfect so why try”. “I’d rather read things where I think I know what the bias is (but probably don’t”
I seek out individuals I think are smart from a variety of places and read a lot - I'm not sure if there's another way. The more I do this, the more I have a general dislike for wikipedia.
The problem with wikipedia is it pretends to be above the fray and as a result it's deceptive. People think they're getting a neutral topic overview when they're actually getting something that's been designed to persuade based on the editors that control it and the editors are generally bad power hungry reddit mod types with extreme bias. It's particularly insidious because the people reading wikipedia are the least able to detect this deception. It launders their pet ideology through pseudo neutrality.
I think most alternative options are better.
The encyclopedia point is at least it is a static record from a point in time vs. a sort of "we were always at war with Eurasia" kind of fluid that bends to the times.
“I seek out individuals I think are smart from a variety of places and read a lot - I'm not sure if there's another way. The more I do this, the more I have a general dislike for wikipedia.”
Right but then this isn’t the purpose of an encyclopedia. Like great! But it feels like you’re saying “the more I cook fresh meals, the less I like microwave dinners”. I should Hope so!
I was surprised that Wikipedia wasn't immediately overrun by trolls, griefers, and spammers. I'm still not entirely sure how it avoids that, though I've got some speculations.
Unlike most user contributed sites it's happy to throw stuff away. It does grow but it doesn't care about growing fast. That's great but it's a hard formula to replicate.
> That's great but it's a hard formula to replicate
One important piece of even trying to replicate that is its nature as a nonprofit. Any profit-seeking organization trying to grow a user-contribution based site will prefer content and moderation pipelines that drive engagement over quality.
Because contributions from new users are immediately reviewed by legions of volunteer cops who are eager to revert vandalism, and most wannabe vandals don’t have the sense to make a couple legitimate edits before vandalizing.
Can you imagine any other crowdsourced site who was willing to subject new users to so much scrutiny, and err on the side of deleting contributions?
Certainly that's not a great way to make money. Not if you're depending on people to spend a lot of time seeking new content (and be shown ads).
> I'm still not entirely sure how it avoids that
It really doesn't. Granted, it could be a lot worse.
The corners where Wikipedia breaks down are niche but fascinating. Check out the list of superhero movies (not Marvel or DC). Or any page that contains information on Video Game Console Generations.
In cases like those, what has gone wrong is a mix of apophenia and people protecting their own turf. Elaborate classification systems are created that are internally consistent but have no relationship to reality.
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.
Kagi does not count bangs as part of monthly usage - for wiki that would be !w search term
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/plan-types.html#how-searche...
I'm still puzzled after all these years : why would anyone use search engine bangs instead of directly configuring custom searches from their browser's URL bar ?
Bangs through Kagi work cross-device, on every browser you use whether it supports custom searches or not.
It takes a bit of effort to add all you would want and, for me personally, bangs can be anywhere instead of having to be at the start of a search query as is needed for custom search keywords.
Because I know how to use search engine bangs, and I have no idea what a “custom search” would look like.
After probably 15 years of using DDG the bangs are just part of my muscle memory. Why bother changing things?
In the past few years I've noticed more and more issues on Wikipedia. It has never been perfect, but in the past it seemed like anything without sufficient sources would quickly get flagged as "citation needed" or questionable statements would get a warning label slapped on them.
Now, I can visit pages for certain medical conditions that contain completely unsourced claims with no "citation needed" nor any warnings. When I try to search for it, I often trace it back to alternative medicine or pseudoscience influencers.
The sad part is that when I've tried to remove obviously flimsy information, someone will immediately come along and add it back. Unless you're ready to spend months in a Wikipedia edit war with someone who obsesses over a page, there's no point in even trying. These people know the rules and processes and will use every one of them against you. When that fails, they'll try to pull rank. If that fails, they'll just quietly continue editing and rewriting (possibly from alt accounts) until you get too tired to fight the battle any more.
> The sad part is that when I've tried to remove obviously flimsy information, someone will immediately come along and add it back.
The trick is to write about your proposed edit on the talk page and wait a few days. If nobody has complained, you make the edit and write "see talk" in the edit summary. The notion that you should push an edit first and wait for someone to revert you just doesn't work in practice except for trivial typo fixes. Discuss your edit in depth, then push it once you have a presumed near-consensus for it.
I think it's important to edit early and often, but it certainly can't hurt to also explain your edits on the talk page. Bonus points if the other side makes no explanations, you get to "rv unexplained edit, see talk page". Just look in on the article every couple of days for a while to see what sticks and what doesn't. Originally when I started editing, more often than not people would have improved and built on my edits, rather than fought them. But you may need to be a bit (un)lucky these days?
Do you recall a couple? It's one of my minor hobbies when I'm bored to try to find sources and fix Wikipedia articles that others have trouble with. As examples that this is a good faith attempt and not the usual online comment technique of "oh yeah? show me!", here are some stories of edits I got in that others said they had trouble with:
- https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2024-10-17/Path_Depende...
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40655989
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Weierstrass_function#Accu...
And my personal favourite is recently when the most ridiculous thing was added to Bukele's Gang Crackdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_c...
If you still have the desire to have some of these fixed, post here and I'll put it in my queue and get to it at some point. If you don't want the resulting interaction from other commenters here, send it to my email (in profile).
Wikipedia is ultimately a consensus summarizer frequently mistaken for a truth-seeker. So you have to make the case for something being true somewhere where the experts live, and then Wikipedia can express the experts' opinion. But crucially, it is not truth-seeking on its own.
I've noticed this exact same thing. And I too just gave up. People have their pet causes and they force the article to match, and normal, non-obsessed people give up.
Any controversial topic should never be read on Wikipedia, it will not be accurate.
I noticed this during the election. As soon as Kamala become the contender, it was edited out that her father was described as a "marxist scholar" by a college newspaper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&...
They also removed a big part of her page when she was a primary candidate in 2019/2020 about a man she intentionally kept in prison despite knowing he was innocent. Wikipedia is absolutely a political battleground. Take a look at this old version of her 2019 page about Daniel Larsen [1] and compare it with her current Wikipedia page.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kamala_Harris&old...
> Wikipedia is absolutely a political battleground.
Even the titles are a place of political warfare. For example, note carefully which incidents are labelled as "riots" and which as "unrest", and try to find any objective, politically neutral principle that could explain those results.
I think that when a wealth of other reliable sources don't describe an economist as Marxist, Wikipedia shouldn't give precedence to a single op-ed in the Stanford Daily from 1976.
You're focusing on when the word "Marxist" was removed in 2024, but you might want to consider when it was added to the article (in August 2020, about two weeks after Harris was selected to be the vice presidential nominee): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&...
You say it was added in August 2020, but the article was created in August 2020.
Not much of an indictment that additional information was added sometime shortly after the article was created.
Did you look into why? They always list the reasons. How long had it been on the page?
It had been at least 2 years. [] Never became much of a contentious issue until Kamala was looking at the presidential nomination, from what I can tell, then suddenly there was a vicious fight to remove it based on reasoning that mysteriously didn't exist for years and years before that.
[] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&...
Edit: at least ~4 years
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&...
Or, it wasn't important enough to merit editorial discussion prior to that.
Flipping
>Any controversial topic should never be read on Wikipedia, it will not be accurate.
to
>A controversial topic will become important enough to merit editorial discussion
Is an interesting point. I think I will vouch you just for the genius of flipping it.
Another great example is when the "Cultural Marxism" article was converted into "Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory", an entirely different article claiming that the concept of cultural marxism was actually always a "far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory", complete with a section relating it to Gamergate. It's so ridiculous, it's almost funny to read.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140519194937/http://en.wikiped...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...
> People have their pet causes
People are paid whole-ass salaries to edit Wikipedia (and to become mods on Reddit.) They masquerade as (a dozen different) obsessed weirdos, but they are just normal middle-class people who are being paid to lie.
I'd love some examples of specific pages.
The "Philip Cross" controversy is relevant here, I think:
The ArbCom is the worst of the lot: they proclaim themselves to be a supreme court, but they are closer to riot cops or a drumhead trial.
See also Canceling Disputes: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/law-and-social-inqui...
Wikipedia and the Khan academy are my two best examples for the potential of the internet. Each is an incredible feat that took a simple vision and took it far beyond what I ever thought possible.
I remember when teachers in school use to tell us that Wikipedia sucks because there in no scientific peer review. They couldn't wrap their heads around the concept of casual crowdsourcing.
>They couldn't wrap their heads around the concept of casual crowdsourcing.
I'm sure they could, most teachers aren't idiots. And they were correct that "casual crowdsourcing" is not a fitting replacement for peer review.
And in fact, the current moderation policies for Wikipedia only work in so far as they use peer-review type processes, such as requiring "notability" and multiple sources, and preferring expertise in a field. Of course, if you're in a relevant field you shouldn't use Wikipedia as a primary source since you would presumably have access to whatever sources the wiki itself cites in the articles.
If I were to make Wikipedia once again from the ground up I would put more attention into building reputation system of contributors. If you have more reputation you are allowed to edit something and/or your edit has more weight.
Reading the article made me think about other examples of Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP). The Wikipedia page on CBBP lists examples like Linux and OpenStreetMap.
Although CBPP shares a lot with general User-generated content (UGC) and the open source model, maybe mechanisms that make it work is a little different.
The article points out system-side elements like "Talk page" and human-side elements like policies and guidelines.
I wonder if there are any studies on this subject.
We need a new metric to complement system uptime: "link lifetime"
I have an email, old enough to vote, that I received from an engineer. They wrote "Wikipedia is a good site for learning how our new RAID array works. People need to change their mind about Wikipedia. Just because anyone can make a page doesn't mean the information is wrong."
If they had sent me any other link, all this info would be behind a paywall, login, or would simply 404 today.
Wikipedia is completely unreliable on any area of controversy, there are armies of editors who are skilled in fitting the articles to their agenda.
Appreciate the archive link, don’t know how to directly reply to a comment.
Don't you see the "reply" link underneath each comment?
There wasn’t one, I took a screenshot to make sure I wasn’t missing it. It was the newest comment by krunck that had the button missing.
It does seem to be missing from individual comments on rare occasions. I've assumed this to be a bug in the past. Maybe refreshing helps?
Would the Age of Encyclopaediae be next, with human information safeguarded by the selected, several giant egregors taking shape and competing for world views?
archive.is breaks the styling and doesn't execute the js
But archive.org has the subscription popup...
https://web.archive.org/web/20250905062805/https://www.theve...
Opening the page... eyes burned... closing the page. Ouch.
This reminds me of donating again, thanks
<In 1967, Hannah Arendt published an essay in The New Yorker about what she saw as an inherent conflict between politics and facts.
Wow, she was ahead of her time, no? I admit to have never contributed to Wikipedia, that is about to change.
Wikipedia is, from an political bias and data quality POV, bad enough. Couple that with the endowment-enabled grifters of the WMF doing their usual donation blood drive twice a year, and you puke in disgust.
Wikipedia has one great feature... you can see all the editing history.
Something happened, a war started, someone did X, someone else did Y... you open wikipedia, see all the "current situation" bias, open the history tab and look at the article from before <the thing> happened.
> conservatives… claim[ing] Wikipedia has strayed from its neutrality principle by making judgments about the reliability of sources. Instead, … it should present all views equally, including things “many Republicans believe,”
That is some 1984-level “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength" argument. If those “news” sources want people to stop calling them liars, they should stop lying.
Many call Wikipedia "the last good place on the internet", but that's really only true of the English edition. Non-English versions are generally filled with political misinformation and propaganda from people trying to politicize a nation's history, which, frankly, makes them not worth bothering with:
https://slate.com/technology/2021/03/japanese-wikipedia-misi...
Does it survive though? I haven’t opened Wikipedia in years. And young folks rather ask Chatgpt for their homework instead of Wikipedia. And that’s the crux. Llms are vacuuming the content of Wikipedia, just like Google is doing the same with Web content.
I've started to think that the fact that Wikipedia will change its descriptions of reality based on whoever is willing to spend the time and money to subvert it is a feature when it comes to survival. When the final sci-fi authoritarian dictatorship comes down, Wikipedia will happily explain that it was always here, and that Eastasia was always the enemy.
Its (relatively short) history suggests otherwise, so far.
It certainly does not. It is not dependable for any subject that anybody or any government that commands any significant resources has any interest in. I'm sure there's somebody right this second guarding distortions on some obscure page about some scientific phenomenon that 99.999% of people have never heard of because their investment depends on it.
The political model doesn't work at all. If you just count the votes of the people who show up to vote, the Party will hire buses and empty the retirement homes and homeless shelters. Maybe you can fight this irl if everyone knows there's an election, but nobody knows when there's a war on a talk page.
Yeah, I've heard people say, "I don't use it for anything controversial, but it's accurate for other stuff." That's usually true, but you can't assume it, because you never know what will be someone's personal hobbyhorse.
If I just want to know some dry facts about Podunk, BFE, it'll probably have them right. But maybe not, if the mayor of Podunk wrote the page and is trying to promote the town, or if it was last edited by someone who used to live there and hates the place. And very few people are going to check the talk or history pages to see whether there's been an edit war or other hints that the page might be sketchy.
> If you just count the votes of the people who show up to vote, the Party will hire buses and empty the retirement homes and homeless shelters.
They don't even have to go that far; consider the "consensus is not a vote" policy.
Honestly Wikipedia+Archive.org remaining online have national security implications (not just USA, but any democracy). Though I'd wager the current administration would take a different view.
Getting ready for doomsday? You need a solar powered, wifi-enabled, offline wikipedia server.
I can see the national security implications for countries like Russia and China, that are widely known for pushing false histories backed up with state punishment, but in high-functioning democracies the state does not control public speech.
There are mirrors and backups of Wikipedia. Archive.org has no substitute.
archive.today at least allows people to preserve snapshots of selected websites, which is often important for being able to demonstrate that mainstream sources have edited or deleted content without proper acknowledgment.
Interestingly enough, Wikipedia once (I haven't checked if it's still in effect) blacklisted links to there, with compelling evidence (if you read any of the discussion behind the scenes) that it was actually about certain admins and power users trying to maintain control over the bias in main-space article content.
> national security implications (not just USA, but any democracy)
That's not really "national," is it?
National security doesn't just refer to USA...?
France has national security considerations, just like the UK, Uruguay and Uganda. They'd all benefit from having open access to verifiable information.
That's fine, it just seems more like a "societal security consideration," "democratic consideration," or just a general "consideration" than specifically "national security," which has the scope of a nation.
what are the implications?
We've always been at war with Eurasia. Not all threats are external.
The "largest compendium of human knowledge ever assembled" isn't Wikipedia. It's Anna's Archive.
Especially relevant when reading this from a paywalled article.
True but we are in dire need of a killer search engine for it. We're hopefully just a couple years away from a great self-hosted search and life-like TTS for massive ebook collections.
Don't jinx it.
In an age of accelerating hypercapitalism causing rabid enshittification, non-profit and volunteer website and servicice might struggle, but they remain the only becon of quality.
This is because of the lack of a profit motive and sane expectations on salary from the people running the Wikimedia project.
I think that starting in the 1980s, people started to expect anything involving information technology created immediately-accountable monetary value on a massive scale after seeing the fortunes of people like Gates, Wozniak, Jobs, et al. This was further boosted by the Dotcom bubble.
The fact is, a significant fraction of IT is indeed profitable, but applying the model of perpetual growth is not appropriate for all of that significant fraction, and there's the other fraction of the IT world that isn't directly profitable. More people need to realize that their work falls in the latter two fractions instead of the first.
Wikipedia is hasbara central, yall are drinking too much of the simp-juice.
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 Arbitrator, Wikimedia gave a legal opinion that he violated the law in doing so:
"Well, I got a result today: the ombuds commisssion found that I did indeed violate the access to nonpublic data policy, and has issued a final warning to me. Apparently mailing list comments are, "under a contemporary understanding of privacy law and the policies in question," nonpublic data on the same level as CU data or supressed libel."
https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=350266#p350...
Wasn't the first time he did it either... Officially, community guidelines only apply on the site itself. Once you get into the Discords or forums, doxxing is common and tolerated. Admins and arbitrators are happy to participate on those forums under their Wikipedia usernames because they feel like they need doxx to take action against those trying to harm Wikipedia. And because it (usually) isn't them doing the doxxing, it's ok. There's even an "alt-right identification thread" where established editors can request doxxing from people who don't link their accounts onwiki.
Generally this targets newer editors who aren't in a clique yet. e.g. The person who made "Wikipedia and Antisemitism" got doxxed. Once you get to a certain level, you are expected to participate in these "offwiki" forums to get anything done.
Some people try to complain about it but it doesn't end well. Generally you don't want to fuck with them because by the time you find out about Wikipediocracy, you've already revealed too much and are doxxable. & unlike nation-state actors they have inside information and understand the site.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...
If you do choose to edit Wikipedia, use a burner email and only edit during the same one or two hours of the day so they can't track timezones. & don't post any photos or information on where you live nor attend meetups.
There are some good people but once you get deeply involved it is a toxic community. Sorry for the rant but it pisses me off whenever people talk about how great the Wikipedia community is as someone who's into the internal shit. it's the worst place to get involved in "free culture".
I think I've agree with you on this one. Even on Wikipedia there's a ton of pages like SPI pages which can be indistinguishable from actual malicious doxxings.
Not to mention that there a whole load of #MeToo scandals which would doom Wikipedia if exposed to the media.
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.
Also, the poster "Wikipedianon" makes Tu Quoque fallacies. The fact that some Wikipedia editors have engaged in doxxing of others doesn't make it less of a problem for the government to do so.
Unsurprisingly, "Wikipedianon" is a hit-and-run profile created just for this post, AFAICT.
it's a hit-and-run because I don't want to get doxxed.
I dont want a world in which Trump regulates Wikipedia but pretending it's sunshine and rainbows is a joke at this point.
And the person you're replying to is strawmanning. I never said Beeblebrox doxxed anyone, just that they leaked secret information on a doxxing forum in violation of Wikipolicy and possibly privacy law.
Wikipediocracy is hardly a doxxing forum…
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.
When I said anyone can verify it, I meant it; go make an account on wikipediocracy, go to the "Wikimedian Folks Too Embarrassing for Public Viewing" forums, and go through the posts by that user.
Quite to the contrary, it's a very transparent organization because edit histories are public. It would be trivial to link to any instances of doxxing on the project, unless they don't exist, which they don't. Wikipediocracy doesn't count when talking about Wikipedia doxxing.
> It would be trivial to link to any instances of doxxing on the project, unless they don't exist
Please don't pretend as if people having a discussion at this level are unaware of the facilities available for permanent deletion on Wikipedia (the so-called "oversight").
> Wikipediocracy doesn't count when talking about Wikipedia doxxing.
"Wikipedia doxxing" clearly means doxxing performed by and/or against Wikipedians, not necessarily on Wikipedia's actual domains. Especially if you're using the term to refer to GP, which states:
> The article criticizes doxxing but well-known Wikipedia editors doxx each other all the time...
So unless you can demonstrate that these Wikipedia editors don't post on Wikipediocracy, then yes it obviously does count. "Wikipedia editors doxxing each other" doesn't stop being "Wikipedia editors doxxing each other" just because of where it's posted.
> When I said anyone can verify it, I meant it; go make an account on wikipediocracy, go to the "Wikimedian Folks Too Embarrassing for Public Viewing" forums, and go through the posts by that user.
It looks to me like the top-level commenter already did exactly this, and found the exact opposite of what you imply we'd find.
Beeblebrox leaked internal mailing list messages to a forum known for doxxing in violation of the NDA they signed.
i know that Beeblebrox did not doxx anyone and I said that in my comment. my point is leaking information to a doxxing forum sends the wrong message and is dangerous.
Maybe you should create an account and look at the "Wikimedian Folks Too Embarrassing for Public Viewing" forum and get back to me. Or do something about it before the Trump administration uses this as an excuse to censor enwiki. Either way here are some excerpts if you don't want to.
From the first page, here's an active editor (iii, known as jps or ජපස) doxxing someone about UFOs. I took out the names to be polite but it's all there:
https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=14172
"Is [username 1] (T-C-L) an alt account of [username 2] (T-C-L)?
For those who are not aware, [username2] is the name of an account used by one [redacted] on various platforms up until about 2024 when he more or less abandoned them. That account also was involved in the ongoing game of accusing [redacted] (T-H-L) of being [redacted] (T-C-L) which is about as fairly ludicrous an attempt at matching a Wikipedia username as I've ever seen.
Anyway, I feel like maybe he thought "If [__] can do it, so can I." And maybe that's the origin of the VPP.
Oh, this is about UFOs. Yeah, I'm in the shit. Maybe someone can link to some other stuff for you to read, but I just want to drop this here because I have nowhere else I get to speculate on these matters and everyone loves a good conspiracy theory data dump from time to time "
Here's the thread "Who is Wikipedia editor i.am.qwerty"
https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=13821
"I.am.a.qwerty (T-C-L) gathered up a bunch of those articles and some earlier material to create Wikipedia and antisemitism..."
It goes on:
"But who is I.am.a.qwerty? Let's suppose, just for the sake of argument, that I.a.am.a.qwerty is a PhD student named [real name]. Specifically, this [real name]:"
"[real name] is a PhD candidate [major] at [university name]. He received his BA (Hons) in [major] from [university]. Previously [real name] received his rabbinical ordination from the [other school] in [location] in [year]. [real name] is also the [job title] at [organization]."
That’s hardly doxxing. Asking if two publicly visible usernames might be related is hardly alarming.
To be absolutely, 100% clear: your position is that someone who writes on the Internet, a statement of the form:
> Let's suppose, just for the sake of argument, that [username] is a PhD student named [real name]. Specifically, this [real name]:"
> "[real name] is a PhD candidate [major] at [university name]. He received his BA (Hons) in [major] from [university]. Previously [real name] received his rabbinical ordination from the [other school] in [location] in [year]. [real name] is also the [job title] at [organization]."
is not "doxxing"?
Let's suppose, just for the sake of argument, that I find that patently absurd.
What about the part where they revealed the full name of the person allegedly behind the two usernames?
They’ve always have had a leftist bias like most of big tech.
https://x.com/therabbithole84/status/1957598712693452920?s=4...
That's a fake Wikipedia screenshot! That line doesn't exist in the actual article and didn't at the time when that tweet was written, and does not even fit in the context. To me, this is at best an example for how much higher the quality is on Wikipedia than in average social media like X.
Amazing. And it's listed as having 23.7K views. I suppose far less than 1% of those people would have taken the time to see if that was real or fake.
EDIT That line did exist in the past. It was there one year ago. Can someone more skilled in Wikipedia find and link the revision where it was removed? Bonus points for finding when it was added. Thanks in advance.
The edit did exist. So the phrase "Multiple studies have found a left-wing bias at Wikipedia" can be found last in the edit (4 February 2025) [1] and was removed by the editor Aquillion with the explanation [2]
Not seeing anything in this source that supports this language; they summarize no other sources that I could see, and their own conclusions are more complex than this (as covered further down the article.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ideological_bias_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ideological_bias_...
aka, biased towards reality
Says an article with a paywall.
We live in a society.
Oh, just wait til MAGA sycophants feel threatened by Wikipedia. It'll be a war against the online encyclopedia like none before. I'm actually anxious that might happen at any time. For instance when Trump runs out of enemies to scapegoat.
Oh it already started, the ADL convinced House Republicans to launch an investigation into Wikipedia because of its "anti-Israel bias": https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5473331-wikipedia-bias-pr...
One of the requests in the letter (https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/08272...) is to de-anonymise some of the Wikipedia editors.
Once they do, I'm sure we'll see blackouts that are similar to most dictatorships. (i.e. metal themed pages in Turkey, FB/Google in China, etc)
My blue-collar journey with LLMs began Summer 2022, after watching Yannic's GPT 4-chan video [0] — visiting simple GPT-2 iterations (e.g. http://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com — which still exists and is a fantastic linguist's homepage — &al CRAIYON &c).
My most-shocking LLM interaction so-far ties with when http://www.perplexity.ai cited my recent wikipedia edit (from my two decade+ account) in answering a question about transistor density... less than one day after I had made the update it cited [1]. Like I am nobody why tf are you listening to me?!?
This ties with having sat with a published author of a non-fiction war chronicle as we discussed his books, himself, and his world (with a computer, me typing / brainstorming).
Among many other reconfigurations of muh'brain.
[0] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/efPrtcLdcdM
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
I am just the electrician.
I can't defend Wiki any further after their politicization
How about not calling Peter McCullough or Ryan Cole or Pierre Kory misinformation spreaders about covid when they were right the whole time
Larry Sanger was correct
Edit: (I know we're not supposed to comment on downvotes but I seriously don't care) Those of you who insta-downvote stuff like this should not enjoy the privileges of the karma system on HN that allows you to downvote
(Further - how many of you actually work for big tech? Do you think it's ok to censor doctors like has been going on the last few years? Do you have any qualities of personal reflection, whatsoever?)
The goal of Wikipedia has always been to summarize what mainstream secondary sources say, not what is "true" or "right" according to your or some other editor's personal opinion. See WP:DUE, WP:VNT and WP:RGW
It literally styles itself as an encyclopedia, not a collection of summaries by "mainstream secondary sources".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars
> Wikipedia combines many features of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers. Wikipedia is not a soapbox, an advertising platform, a social network, a vanity press, an experiment in anarchy or democracy, an indiscriminate collection of information, nor a web directory. It is not a dictionary, a newspaper, an instruction manual, nor a collection of source documents or media files, although some of its fellow Wikimedia projects are.
> How about not calling Peter McCullough or Ryan Cole or Pierre Kory misinformation spreaders about covid when they were right the whole time
What were they right about? I'm looking at Peter McCullough's Wikipedia article and some of the things he's claimed include young people don't need the vaccine, there is no evidence of asymptomatic spread of COVID-19, and COVID-19 pandemic was planned, etc.
Is this what you're saying they were right about the whole time? The pandemic was planned?
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.
To be very specific I was told that the hand does not go over the head when doing a nazi salute.
I just imagine a hypothetical future where a party funded by the richest man in the world goes full fascist and we trot out the "who could have known?". We get out the protractors or simply admit that it was a Nazi salute.
Its the lack of clarity or apology, he never said that it wasn't, he never apologised or said "oh yeah, i didnt mean that" or he even could have brushed it off as a joke or trolling to evoke a reaction. But he never did, he just said people were overreacting.
Combined with his public support for groups like AfD and Patriotic Alternative UK, it seems pretty obvious that he's a Nazi. If anything this subject shows a clear divide between US and European reaction, given how he's now overwhelmingly persona non grata in Europe since that. The US has this bizarre tribalism in its politics, where half its electorate deny the reality that an government official (as he started his doge role at the time) is glorifying the symbols of America's greatest adversary in the world's most destructive war.