8 ms·

It is easy to mess up public places. You can spit on the floor in a bus, throw trash on a street, vandalize Wikipedia. Or you can clean the trash and help Wikip

by smsm42 8y ago

It is easy to mess up public places. You can spit on the floor in a bus, throw trash on a street, vandalize Wikipedia. Or you can clean the trash and help Wikipedia. The choice is yours. There's no mystical powers coming in and cleaning up after you - just you and people exactly like you. So before complaining "nobody cared" ask yourself - how did I help? What did I do to expect others to clean up after me and feel entitled offense if they did not? Maybe if you and your friends helped instead of messing it up, there would be less need for somebody else to do it.

abugher 8y ago
You have a choice. You can engage in conversation with peers as if you might want to understand the reasons for their actions. Or you can preach at them and blame them as individuals for system problems.
- gnud 8y ago
  Those individuals, and a few thousand more like them, _are_ the system problem.
  - komali2 8y ago
    And the way I see it the only way around it is cultural indoctrination. It doesn't have to be a negative concept. It can be as simple as picking up a can as you walk by it on the street, and otherwise having a completely normal life. People with you can then see "huh, I can contribute just a little bit, feel good about it, without going full hippie high-viz jacket and tongs with a trash bag every weekend."
    - smsm42 8y ago
      Yes. Small things help. Or at least not making it worse. One doesn't have to be a Greenpeace activist to not throw trash on the street, normal everyday behavior would be enough in this case. If only all other societal problems were so easy to solve!
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dwaltrip 8y ago
  The answer is to do both. Continually fix systemic issues as best as we can, but also help individuals become more empathetic, wise, and responsible, as best we can.
- smsm42 8y ago
  How far the entitlement can go? Not only people expect that their vandalism is promptly cleaned up and feel offended when this does not happen, they also feel offended when being reminded of it being vandalism! Yes, I blame individual for individual's action to make the world around them worse. It's not some vague system, it's somebody deciding to do it and doing it. Just don't, and no system would have anything to do with it.
ThoAppelsin 8y ago
The important difference here is that this platform claims to be an encyclopedia, and any random vandal may not simply make an edit on an article of the conventional encyclopedia. It would only be natural for us to take this resource as not-so-reliable, for that it is as easy a man to spit on the floor to infiltrate Wikipedia with false information. Yet, we usually don't. We usually just go ahead and trust what we see on Wikipedia, and maybe that's because it looks so convincing and reliable. If Wikipedia cannot handle vandalism, maybe it should then warn it's users to realize that there is some higher chance than they might expect that the article they are about to read might have been compromised in terms of correctness, or has never been correct to begin with. Instead of displaying full-page banners, perhaps they should spare a couple of lines to such disclaimer statistics.
- JdeBP 8y ago
  The General Disclaimer saying that very thing is hyperlinked at the bottom of every single page on the WWW site. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer
  - ThoAppelsin 8y ago
    ... which pretty much catches nobody's attention unfortunately. If Wikipedia does have the goodwill, then something has to be made to bring the average user's perception of trustworthiness down to the level of how much trustworthy they really are, and maybe even less. In the context of trust, false positives are worse than false negatives, since an individual may simply build up trust by referring to other resources and relieve their scepticism. I'd say Wikipedia is really to blame for creating this false sense of trust on their platform. Not that they are completely unreliable, but they are less so than they seem to an average user.
    - c22 8y ago
      You are manufacturing an absurd allegation. Wikipedia put the wikiness of their model right in the name. If an "average user" doesn't bother to research their resources [0] or understand modern language then the problem lies somewhere in our educational system, not in the number of disclaimers on internet websites. It takes a special kind of curious person to want to find information on a subject but not wonder where it came from. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
dingaling 8y ago
> Or you can clean the trash and help Wikipedia That sounds very noble but imagine every time you lifted a bit of litter you had to argue with someone about why it should be put in the bin. Sometimes even when you win the argument they take it out of the bin and throw it down again. That's how many qualified-to-contribute people feel about Wikipedia now. I run all my web searches with '-wikipedia' as I lack any confidence in its pages. But that's only half the battle, it doesn't address people who arrive on topic-specific fora with statements like 'Wikipedia says that..'
- smsm42 8y ago
  It is to some measure an existing problem (though there are a lot of ways to contribute which are nearly 1005 uncontroversial, especially in more minor spaces - Wikidata, Wikitravel, Wikisource, Wikiversity, etc.) but it's definitely not the problem that the comment author describes. He didn't try to clean up anything. He didn't meet any adversity in doing so. He didn't try to pick up the trash. He threw the trash there and complained why other people - which are volunteers - are so lazy as not to promptly clean it up.

by smsm42 8y ago

abugher 8y ago

You have a choice. You can engage in conversation with peers as if you might want to understand the reasons for their actions. Or you can preach at them and blame them as individuals for system problems.

gnud 8y ago
Those individuals, and a few thousand more like them, _are_ the system problem.
- komali2 8y ago
  And the way I see it the only way around it is cultural indoctrination. It doesn't have to be a negative concept. It can be as simple as picking up a can as you walk by it on the street, and otherwise having a completely normal life. People with you can then see "huh, I can contribute just a little bit, feel good about it, without going full hippie high-viz jacket and tongs with a trash bag every weekend."
  - smsm42 8y ago
    Yes. Small things help. Or at least not making it worse. One doesn't have to be a Greenpeace activist to not throw trash on the street, normal everyday behavior would be enough in this case. If only all other societal problems were so easy to solve!
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dwaltrip 8y ago
The answer is to do both. Continually fix systemic issues as best as we can, but also help individuals become more empathetic, wise, and responsible, as best we can.
smsm42 8y ago
How far the entitlement can go? Not only people expect that their vandalism is promptly cleaned up and feel offended when this does not happen, they also feel offended when being reminded of it being vandalism! Yes, I blame individual for individual's action to make the world around them worse. It's not some vague system, it's somebody deciding to do it and doing it. Just don't, and no system would have anything to do with it.

ThoAppelsin 8y ago

The important difference here is that this platform claims to be an encyclopedia, and any random vandal may not simply make an edit on an article of the conventional encyclopedia. It would only be natural for us to take this resource as not-so-reliable, for that it is as easy a man to spit on the floor to infiltrate Wikipedia with false information. Yet, we usually don't. We usually just go ahead and trust what we see on Wikipedia, and maybe that's because it looks so convincing and reliable. If Wikipedia cannot handle vandalism, maybe it should then warn it's users to realize that there is some higher chance than they might expect that the article they are about to read might have been compromised in terms of correctness, or has never been correct to begin with. Instead of displaying full-page banners, perhaps they should spare a couple of lines to such disclaimer statistics.

JdeBP 8y ago
The General Disclaimer saying that very thing is hyperlinked at the bottom of every single page on the WWW site. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer
- ThoAppelsin 8y ago
  ... which pretty much catches nobody's attention unfortunately. If Wikipedia does have the goodwill, then something has to be made to bring the average user's perception of trustworthiness down to the level of how much trustworthy they really are, and maybe even less. In the context of trust, false positives are worse than false negatives, since an individual may simply build up trust by referring to other resources and relieve their scepticism. I'd say Wikipedia is really to blame for creating this false sense of trust on their platform. Not that they are completely unreliable, but they are less so than they seem to an average user.
  - c22 8y ago
    You are manufacturing an absurd allegation. Wikipedia put the wikiness of their model right in the name. If an "average user" doesn't bother to research their resources [0] or understand modern language then the problem lies somewhere in our educational system, not in the number of disclaimers on internet websites. It takes a special kind of curious person to want to find information on a subject but not wonder where it came from. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki

dingaling 8y ago

> Or you can clean the trash and help Wikipedia That sounds very noble but imagine every time you lifted a bit of litter you had to argue with someone about why it should be put in the bin. Sometimes even when you win the argument they take it out of the bin and throw it down again. That's how many qualified-to-contribute people feel about Wikipedia now. I run all my web searches with '-wikipedia' as I lack any confidence in its pages. But that's only half the battle, it doesn't address people who arrive on topic-specific fora with statements like 'Wikipedia says that..'

smsm42 8y ago
It is to some measure an existing problem (though there are a lot of ways to contribute which are nearly 1005 uncontroversial, especially in more minor spaces - Wikidata, Wikitravel, Wikisource, Wikiversity, etc.) but it's definitely not the problem that the comment author describes. He didn't try to clean up anything. He didn't meet any adversity in doing so. He didn't try to pick up the trash. He threw the trash there and complained why other people - which are volunteers - are so lazy as not to promptly clean it up.