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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-...

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

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.

> 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 ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress#Holdings

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.

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.

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.

> 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 .

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wikipedia is completely unreliable on any area of controversy, there are armies of editors who are skilled in fitting the articles to their agenda.

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels

<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.

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.

Would the Age of Encyclopaediae be next, with human information safeguarded by the selected, several giant egregors taking shape and competing for world views?

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.

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...

This reminds me of donating again, thanks

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...

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.

The tragedy is that we all rely on Wikipedia, but very few of us contribute to it

Opening the page... eyes burned... closing the page. Ouch.

Appreciate the archive link, don’t know how to directly reply to a comment.

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.

Don't jinx it.

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.

> 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.

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".

Wikipedia is hasbara central, yall are drinking too much of the simp-juice.

Says an article with a paywall.

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.

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.

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.

They’ve always have had a leftist bias like most of big tech.

https://x.com/therabbithole84/status/1957598712693452920?s=4...

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?)

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.

To be very specific I was told that the hand does not go over the head when doing a nazi salute.