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.
xorvoid · 5h ago
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!
abnercoimbre · 5h ago
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.
sshine · 1h ago
It’s possible to both criticise Wikipedia and celebrate it.
squigz · 1h ago
We don't always have to do both at once though. Sometimes we can just enjoy things.
visarga · 4h ago
> 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.
psychoslave · 3h ago
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.
tshaddox · 3h ago
> 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.
estimator7292 · 1h ago
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.
postmodern100 · 1h ago
> 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.
visarga · 2h ago
> 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.
bawolff · 1h ago
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.
postmodern99 · 4h ago
> Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it.
> it
What is "it", if not truth?
inetknght · 2h ago
> 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.
postmodern100 · 1h ago
(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."
inetknght · 1h ago
> 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.
postmodern100 · 1h ago
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.
b_e_n_t_o_n · 4h ago
The irony lol.
logicprog · 3h ago
Yeah, that is where things get real fun!
uragur27754 · 4h ago
Wikipedia isn't perfect and worthy of constructive criticism and debate.
However its current political enemies are not interested in a constructive debate with a shared goal of finding the truth. These are extremists that can think of nothing else but the destruction of their ideological opponents. They will destroy everything including the concept of truth as long as they see an opportunity for a temporary victory or more publicity.
bawolff · 1h ago
All the more reason to debate among ourselves.
One of the greatest risks is to have a precieved threat make everyone think they have to close ranks and stifle all debate. That is how projects (or even societies) die.
mdp2021 · 6h ago
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.
e3bc54b2 · 4h ago
The zeroeth law of Wikipedia – The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.
Kim_Bruning · 1h ago
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...
Cf: The difference between theory and practice is: "Practice works, in theory."
SlowTao · 1h ago
I have heard the same thing from Grid based electrical engineers. The grids fails in theory but works in practice.
alpaca128 · 2h ago
I heard it as "in theory, theory and practice are the same"
ozim · 5h ago
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.
masfuerte · 4h ago
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.
crote · 1h ago
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.
Kim_Bruning · 1h ago
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)
ozim · 52m ago
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.
Kim_Bruning · 47m ago
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.
bryanlarsen · 5h ago
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.
IAmBroom · 4h ago
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).
> 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
mrandish · 4h ago
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.
potato3732842 · 6h ago
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.
mmphosis · 4h ago
Wikipedia is my default search engine.
p3rls · 2h ago
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
bee_rider · 2h ago
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.
djoldman · 6h ago
> 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.
dmbche · 2h ago
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.
Whoppertime · 2h ago
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
savef · 2h ago
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.
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.
stopthebullshit · 2h ago
Wikipedia is useless for anything even slightly political.
All bought up by psyops from China, Russia, and Qatar.
noman-land · 26m ago
Got any notable examples? All the history is publc so it should be easy to link to, presumably.
fishmicrowaver · 2h ago
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.
SlowTao · 1h ago
It is 7:29am here and already this is enough internet for the day.
> 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.
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.
voxl · 2h ago
And? Share an example. This reads like conspiratorial thinking without any evidence.
Andrex · 2h ago
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!)
glitchc · 1h ago
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.
blululu · 2h ago
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.
voxl · 15m ago
It's not an unreasonable request to ask for one example of a trend. It's unreasonable to make a claim with no evidence.
NathanKP · 1h ago
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.
rstuart4133 · 1h ago
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.
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.
zozbot234 · 4h ago
> 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.
Kim_Bruning · 1h ago
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?
ars · 5h ago
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.
pessimizer · 4h ago
> 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.
theteapot · 4h ago
I'd love some examples of specific pages.
UncleSlacky · 2h ago
The "Philip Cross" controversy is relevant here, I think:
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.
Did you look into why? They always list the reasons. How long had it been on the page?
mothballed · 4h ago
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.
Or, it wasn't important enough to merit editorial discussion prior to that.
mothballed · 4h ago
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.
martey · 4h ago
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&...
mothballed · 4h ago
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.
3036e4 · 3h ago
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.
jacquesm · 2h ago
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.
bloomingeek · 1h ago
<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.
ajsnigrutin · 2h ago
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.
hungmung · 6h ago
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.
IAmBroom · 4h ago
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.
jacobgkau · 2h ago
> national security implications (not just USA, but any democracy)
That's not really "national," is it?
hungmung · 20m ago
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.
em-bee · 5h ago
what are the implications?
hungmung · 20m ago
We've always been at war with Eurasia. Not all threats are external.
guidedlight · 2h ago
Says an article with a paywall.
pessimizer · 4h ago
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.
IAmBroom · 4h ago
Its (relatively short) history suggests otherwise, so far.
pessimizer · 4h ago
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.
lenerdenator · 4h ago
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.
glimshe · 6h ago
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.
gosub100 · 5h ago
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.
jandrusk · 3h ago
They’ve always have had a leftist bias like most of big tech.
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.
More accurately, they’ve always had a reality bias, which looks like a leftist bias if you’re extreme right (or a right-wing bias if you’re Stalinist-style extreme left).
No comments yet
mediumsmart · 4h ago
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.
soupfordummies · 4h ago
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.
mediumsmart · 3h ago
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> it
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
However its current political enemies are not interested in a constructive debate with a shared goal of finding the truth. These are extremists that can think of nothing else but the destruction of their ideological opponents. They will destroy everything including the concept of truth as long as they see an opportunity for a temporary victory or more publicity.
One of the greatest risks is to have a precieved threat make everyone think they have to close ranks and stifle all debate. That is how projects (or even societies) die.
The science that could emerge by studying the phenomenon could constitute a milestone.
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)
Cf: The difference between theory and practice is: "Practice works, in theory."
Which is good in ways. Though random phase is song of the past.
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.
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.
Contrast that with the rest of the internet, which mostly rewards radicalization and nudges people towards it.
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).
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'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.
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.
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
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.
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...
All bought up by psyops from China, Russia, and Qatar.
Correction on this: Wikipedia was GFDL until 2009. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Licensing_update .
It's only when a subject becomes popular that the propaganda gets recognized and rectified.
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!)
* 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.
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.
No comments yet
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 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.
Any controversial topic should never be read on Wikipedia, it will not be accurate.
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.
https://wikipedia.fivefilters.org/banning/
See also Canceling Disputes: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/law-and-social-inqui...
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&...
[] 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&...
>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.
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&...
Not much of an indictment that additional information was added sometime shortly after the article was created.
Wow, she was ahead of her time, no? I admit to have never contributed to Wikipedia, that is about to change.
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.
That's not really "national," is it?
France has national security considerations, just like the UK, Uruguay and Uganda. They'd all benefit from having open access to verifiable information.
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.
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.
Especially relevant when reading this from a paywalled article.
https://x.com/therabbithole84/status/1957598712693452920?s=4...
No comments yet