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I was in library school around this time (a couple years later, actually), and I remember that Wikipedia was a hot topic: can it be trusted, and why is the answ
by karaterobot 6y ago
I was in library school around this time (a couple years later, actually), and I remember that Wikipedia was a hot topic: can it be trusted, and why is the answer "no"?
Bucking that trend somewhat, I was in the cautiously optimistic camp. By that time it was already more useful to me than the Encyclopedia Britannica, and getting better all the time. The trajectory was clear.
It seems like, of all the exciting things from the early web, Wikipedia has been one of the only things that actually panned out the way it was intended. It didn't get commercialized, but it didn't go broke either. It didn't become a cesspool, or try to consume all of my attention. It just does the thing it's supposed to do. If there was a fire on the internet, and I could only save one website, it would be you Wikipedia.
- ghaff 6y agoYeah. While there are plenty of things to criticize, in general, it works. And a number of different approaches to a crowdsourced encyclopedia, e.g. Google Knol, have clearly not worked. There are big incentives to game anything like this--see also Quora.
- _joel 6y agoIndeed, it's no Yahoo Answers (RIP)
- kiba 6y agoQuora degrades because you're trying to fit a business model into a square hole where it won't fit. Maybe not every project should be a commercial enterprise.
- ghaff 6y agoQuora also degrades because as soon as you have a popular site that individuals can push unfiltered content to, the scammers, spammers, or just people with positions/products to push show up. It's pretty clear that moderation (both community and admins) are a pretty important part of a popular crowdsourced site. (Not that I disagree with your point as well.)
- guerrilla 6y agoIs quora so bad? I usually use it for little questions before I ask something on stackexchange and it seems to work fine enough...
- ghaff 6y agoThere's a lot of dross on there. Every now and then a search will lead me to a useful answer but it was a much more interesting site when it started out. More active interesting people and fewer worthless or scammy questions and answers.
- frosted-flakes 6y agoAnd for some reason they seem to actively merge only tangentially-related questions and answers. I often see answers that have nothing to do with the question.
- TNorthover 6y agoIt’s a pretty notorious hideout for cranks, both benign and weird nationalist ones.
- tzs 6y agoThey email me a daily digest of maybe a dozen questions and answers they think I might find interesting. Typically, at least half of them each day are interesting enough that I'll click to read the full question and the full answer that they picked to highlight. Most of the rest are usually decent questions, but I'm just not interested enough to click. Of those I do click, maybe half of those turn out to be sufficiently interesting that after reading the featured answer I'll click to see the other answers too. Like many sites based on user provided content, Quora tries to show you what they think you will be interested in, but "interested in" really means what you'll click on. I see enough stupid stuff (especially stupid political stuff) elsewhere, so don't click on it on Quora. I seem to be consistent enough with this that their algorithms have figured out there is better stuff to show me to get my click. I also do not use "sign in with Facebook" or "sign in with Google" there, and am not really active on any social media that exposes user email addresses or that exposes contact lists (or even has contact lists). I don't know if I have any friends who also read Quora, but if I do there is a decent chance that Quora does not know that I do, and so won't be using their interests to try to guess mine. I don't know why do many others have bad Quora experiences, but for whatever reason it works great for me.
- colechristensen 6y agoYou essentially can't get that big, survive that long, or be so relevant without deserving criticism. Until people are angels, large complex efforts that survive necessarily need to be kind of shitty in one way or another. Linux (and Linus) are in the same boat. The ways that they are shitty have maintained (and are necessary for) the ways that they are great. People argue the opposite, that things could be better, that the criticisms could be addressed and everything else would continue on, but I'm not so sure. Where is the large, successful organization -- based on money or not -- which has survived into greatness without these kinds of criticisms? It reminds me of Marxism/Communisms/various utopian ideas. People have big ideas about how things can be "perfect" and all problems can be abolished. Except for a very few, very small exception, when those ideas have been tried, the outcome has been far worse than the problems that were trying to be avoided.
- Kim_Bruning 6y agoIt's one of the huge challenges to mankind, and an underappreciated field of research. If we better understand how to organize ourselves, we can slowly make less shitty systems over time. That, and before you can make a system work, however shitty it is, you really need to make sure everyone knows how to use it. (hence it's important to educate or on-board people. One of the things en.wikipedia is bad at. )
- colechristensen 6y ago"There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles." Ok maybe a bit off topic, but what I'm getting at is... well I think that a bit of unpleasantness is simply necessary and unavoidable. How, where, and the correct amount are important, but people seem to be overly outraged over every bit of negativity these days. Human misery has a tendency to adjust itself to whatever circumstances a person finds themselves in which is why you find people in profound poverty imagining if they just had this they would be happy forever and then you go and look at people who actually have it and find that they are just as likely to be completely miserable. I think shittiness is necessary in places because without it you'll have some people making really bad choices just to make folks happy and others who no matter what will find something to be miserable about. So it's not about eliminating all the rough spots, but instead intentionally shaping them to be in the right places at the right intensities.
- convery 6y agoWorth noting that the whole "can it be trusted" mainly revolves around political or otherwise controversial topics. Where entire pages can switch from "freedom fighter helping the world" to "literally Hitler" overnight with news articles/interviews being blacklisted for not being reliable while sourcing random blog-posts. For a good example, check the edit history of the Gamergate page, well known editors even got banned for wanting accuracy rather than pushing narratives.
- harles 6y agoI have to imagine it’s an order of magnitude better than the old encyclopedias, even for controversial articles.
- veddox 6y agoI‘m guessing you haven‘t used too many „real“ encyclopedias? The quality of writing on those was very high. In terms of readability, understandability, and reliability, I find the average print article to be significantly better than your average Wikipedia article. Their big downsides being, of course, that they were not as exhaustive on any given topic as Wikipedia is (though this actually helped with the understandability), and they were quickly out of date (especially as they were too expensive to replace every few years).
- ghaff 6y agoOne of the things that traditional encyclopedias (as well as a given book/magazine/etc.) have is a very clear view of the persona that they're writing for. With Wikipedia, this differs considerably from article to article depending upon the topic. With respect to many technical topics, especially in areas like math and physics, Wikipedia articles often dive right into equations and many articles are largely incomprehensible to anyone not already familiar with the subject matter.
- notahacker 6y agoAnd on the flip side, there are other technical topics where large parts of the article are written by people unschooled in the subject citing magazine and news articles which are online rather than the field's core texts which aren't...
- stefan_ 6y agoHas it? Wikipedia is primarily edited by an insulated, slowly dying clique of mostly ignorant people who would rather nothing be written at all than a domain expert outsider article. Meanwhile, the foundation is some sort of self-perpetuating money vacuum expanding at a great rate while expenditures for actually running Wikipedia is stagnant, if anything getting cheaper. It turns out a wishy-washy NGO save the world mission is a lot more exciting than the daily struggle of community building, and with the foundation all these do-gooders don't even have to forgo the competitive salary. Obviously a bit exaggerated, but there is a lot of truth here.
- caturopath 6y agoCan you tell me a couple large, human-made things you do like?
- coliveira 6y agoI could be much worse, corporations could have taken over.
- pilingual 6y agoWikipedia is absolutely in need of disrupting. If that happens, it should be done very thoughtfully. https://www.wired.com/2007/08/wiki-tracker/ https://www.wired.com/2007/08/wiki-tracker/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190410141316/old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190410141316/old.ycombinator.c... (Item #23)
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agoi would save scihub too.
- bionade24 6y agoAnd wikibooks. I think they're are actually multiple websites, so if I had to decide, it would be web.archive.org. Yes, this would mean nearly all internet sites, but without CGI backends.
- fumblebee 6y agoAFAIK a large part of why it hasn't yet been corrupted has been the total lack of greed on behalf of founder Jimmy Wales. Kudos to you, Jimmy (and team). Keep up the great work.
- billiam 6y agoThat's basically it. Naked Greed and convincing yourself that monetizing a thing you think you invented but which invariably turns out to be people's attention is always good in and of itself. I've been in or inside lots of wonderful things created as the Internet has evolved, and almost all end up this way.
- respondo2134 6y agoHe's extracted a pretty good life from wikipedia, but nothing compared to your typical SV start-up founder would demand, so I'm totally OK with this.
- NaturalPhallacy 6y agoOh it's definitely been corrupted: https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ Note the article is written by the same guy who wrote the email in the original post.
- caturopath 6y agoYeah, it's difficult to remember just how audacious an idea Wikipedia was. Even as an earlyish contributor, I thought it was an impossible dream. It has turned out to be a really great tool.
- pfarrell 6y agoI always liked the quip: Wikipedia works well in practice, just not in theory.
- young_unixer 6y agoIt still can't be trusted for articles related to politics, specially if you're reading it in a language different from English.
- ChrisKnott 6y agoCan you post some examples?
- gpcr1949 6y agohttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Site-wide_administrator_abuse_and_WP:PILLARS_violations_on_the_Croatian_Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Site-wi...
- Const-me 6y agoThere’s an ongoing war in Europe since 2014, between Russia and Ukraine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War The fact is well-established, the article has more than 600 sources. Russian Wikipedia doesn’t have such article. They only have “military conflict in eastern Ukraine” https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%BE%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%83%D0%B6%D1%91%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%84%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%BA%D1%82_%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%B2%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%B5_%D0%A3%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%8B https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%BE%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%83... That article does not list Russia on the right panel under “belligerents” section. Many sections simply tell official Russian version. When it does tell some bits of truth it uses wordings like “allegedly” and “according to Ukrainian side”. The “casualties and losses” section only contains losses on Ukrainian side.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- paulz_ 6y agoA few months ago Tyler Cowen had Jimmy Wales on the Conversations with Tyler podcast[0]. He spends some time talking about why he thinks Wikipedia turned out the way it did and avoid some of the potential traps you pointed out. Really enjoyed listening to it and made me think a lot of about structure of organizations. [0] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jimmy-wales/ https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jimmy-wales/
- ClosedPistachio 6y agoIn a similar way, an interview with departing CEO Katherine Maher on the Why Is This Happening? podcast. https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9wb2RjYXN0ZmVlZHMubmJjbmV3cy5jb20vd2l0aA/episode/Yjg2MGY0NDAtOWNjNS00OWVmLTg3MDUtMWNhOTkxMzk1NTdm?ep=14 https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9wb2RjYXN0ZmVlZHM...
- la_fayette 6y agoOpenstreetmap fits IMHO also into this category. Personally, if I could save one website, I might choose OSM ;)
- tkgally 6y agoI love both Wikipedia and OSM, but my own desert island website would be the Internet Archive.
- chris_wot 6y agoIf you think it isn’t a cesspool, do t go to the admin’s Noticeboard, and certainly do not change categories.
- lucasnortj 6y agoit is absolutely riddled with falsehoods and most articles are written by people who know nothing about the topics. It is a garbage site
- jll29 6y ago> If there was a fire on the internet, and I could only save one website, it would be you Wikipedia. Well said, I concur, and I'm borrowing your quote for my fortunes file.
- valyagolev 6y agoThe moment the question is “which resource can I unreservedly trust”, you’re already duped. Encyclopedias are written and edited by real people, with real agendas, and no collaboration or editorial model will get rid of those. There’s a difference in “how exactly should I not trust this or that resource” though.
- jvanderbot 6y agoOp said useful, as intended, worthy of saving. Not trusted without reservations. No need to strawman.
- valyagolev 6y agoHe quoted people discussing that very question
- stjohnswarts 6y agoYeah I knew it wasn't a legit "cite" but it was a good entrance to rabbit hole from.
- mclide 6y agoWikipedia articles related to politics should have warning labels about bias and potential disinformation when linked from google/twitter/facebook. Entrenched activist admins and editors sabotage its ability to self-correct entries towards a neutral point of view.
- phyzome 6y agoMmm, it's still best taken with a small pile of salt. If you spend much time editing in any topic area, you will quickly find a few editors with a lot of time on their hands and a particular bone to pick. These people can be exhausting and tend to get their way, so particular biases don't get corrected. It's still "the world according to people with the most free time (and sometimes strong opinions)". Which mostly works out, but... yeah. Keep that salt handy.
- zinckiwi 6y agoIf there was a fire on the internet, and I could only save one website, it would be Hamster Dance. But if I could save two the other one would be Wikipedia.