3 ms·
I think that would be great, though I've been thinking of problems that would make it likely not to work that well. There was one fork called "Conservapedia" w
by schoen 6y ago
I think that would be great, though I've been thinking of problems that would make it likely not to work that well.
There was one fork called "Conservapedia" which aimed to be a conservative POV version of Wikipedia. But they did a bad job in terms of quality and engagement, and it's moved more and more in the direction of political advocacy until all that anyone edits or that appears there is political advocacy content. You could contrast this with the old Catholic Encyclopedia (https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/ https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/) which is more like an actual encyclopedia that someone, including a non-Catholic, would actually want to use to get the Catholic perspective on a topic.
Wikipedia's NPOV policy is impressive and the community's efforts to apply it are impressive, but it's ultimately very difficult to find an objective NPOV account of things, and one that's satisfactory to everyone. One difficulty here is the Undue Weight policy (which, to be clear, is probably necessary to make NPOV workable). This says, in effect, that it's considered NPOV to mention something at greater length than its relevance to the topic at hand warrants, or in a context where it's not particularly important. Unfortunately judgments of relevance, salience, or importance are themselves quite POV and Wikipedia's solution is mostly to rely on "reliable sources" -- typically published journalistic and academic writing. But journalistic and academic writing itself contains all sorts of biases (many of which Wikipedians are extremely aware of and have discussed at some length), including the likelihood that nobody will have actually written a journalistic analysis of the Mormon/vegan/Russian government/left-anarchist/Hindu nationalist/Reformed Christian/Maoist/gender-critical/Extinction Rebellion take on specific person or topic X. Which could very likely, if it existed, place much more weight on some aspect or issue than would be considered "due" in most other published analyses.
You can also read many Wikipedia articles and see that, to the extent they relied on sources, the sources all held the view that the subject of the article was good/legitimate/appropriate/normal, or was bad/illegitimate/sketchy/questionable, and it is in principle "NPOV" to not report on any other views (if they don't have reliable sources mentioning them). However there must be people who have substantive reasons to take another perspective but don't have the ability, resources, motivation, or desire to produce reliable sources reflecting that perspective. In the absence of that, those views can be described in their own article but can't be used to color any other article.
I think forks always have a huge network effects problem. There was a famous Wikipedia fork called Enciclopedia Libre y Universal en Español, which started as a result of ideological disagreements with or concerns about Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enciclopedia_Libre_Universal_en_Espa%C3%B1ol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enciclopedia_Libre_Universal_e...
The Enciclopedia Libre was bigger than Wikipedia for two years but ended up getting surpassed by Wikipedia, I think largely due to network effects.
Even now if you wanted to make a fork based on an ideological disagreement, or in order to be consciously and avowedly POV in some way, you would have to find people who wanted to actively edit and maintain a whole encyclopedia with high quality standards -- which is probably tough because Wikipedia has, by default, the mindshare, brand, infrastructure, and community to be the most comprehensive and up-to-date.
I don't see an obvious way out of this quandary, even though I would love for there to be more thorough, high-quality POV encyclopedias.
- Roritharr 6y agoThe idea is to not address this quandary at all, but to let individual people organize their own "Worldviewpedia" according to their belief. I would have roritharr.worldviewpedia.org and could start writing my drivel down there, and maybe copy something I agree with from schoen.worldviewpedia.org and some other stuff from infowars.worldviewpedia.org. This would allow me to fully rationally work through those topics and connect them to adjacent topics of the global consensus narrative I still believe in. This may push some people into an ever deeper rabbithole, but it might also cure a lot of the "5 min expert" syndrome we've seen.
- krapp 6y ago>This may push some people into an ever deeper rabbithole, but it might also cure a lot of the "5 min expert" syndrome we've seen. But people being pushed into an ever deeper rabbithole of lies and extremism is a much bigger problem than "5 min expert" syndrome, and the former inevitably feeds the latter. Sure, people have the right to their recursively self-reinforcing reality bubbles because freedom of speech and all, but societies decohere when their members violently disagree on even the fundamental aspects of reality.
- chordalkeyboard 6y agoThe decoherence is in some sense inevitable but the proliferation of viewpoints will make it to some extent self-correcting and prevent any particular viewpoint from gaining hegemony without being grounded in pragmatic utility (which is not to say that it will be ground in truth).
- intended 6y agoAny tech solution to this problem gurantees that it will make the human problem worse. I guarantee this. Any human behavior first approach, will have some marginally better but equally troubling progress. This is a hell problem.
- schoen 6y agoWouldn't maintaining a fork of Wikipedia all on your own be a huge about of work with relatively little benefit in terms of helping other people learn about your views and your knowledge? It would be a huge amount of effort just to keep up with other people's mainline Wikipedia edits on a handful of articles that you already knew were relevant to your interests, and prospective readers would have a super-hard time finding your versions, and also distinguishing "Wikipedia articles that you had the opportunity to edit and keep up with" from "copies of mainline Wikipedia articles that you actually disagree with, but that happen to be present in your fork because you haven't had the time to edit them, or you haven't even noticed that they're there". Or would you have a fork in which the only articles actually present were ones that you had edited, and all others produced a redirect to Wikipedia with an interstitial message indicating that you hadn't had any opportunity to review that content?