22 ms·

Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?

• cf141q5325 5y ago
  Instead of edit wars allow forking. So allow for multiple versions of articles with metalevel descriptions about the difference. This way we could have actual conversations about where the different perspectives come from and who has the better arguments.
  • topranks 5y ago
    I think this would be very confusing. You basically legitimise lies on one page by giving them equal status as the truth.
    • cf141q5325 5y ago
      Which you can point out one level higher. All it would do is to allow actual conversation and getting an overview of existing perspectives. This would allow to actually point out holes in peoples worldview which are normally glossed over. The problem with the "legitimizing lies" perspective is that i havent seen a perfect truth machine lie around. Plus there being incentives to have you belief you already found a convenient truth. You iteratively improve through finding (or getting pushed into) errors in your perspective. Thats something we can help each other with, and i havent seen a better alternative. As far as i can tell, they are all quite a bit worse. I think all it is is a complexity problem. Which you can tackle with better tooling. Just not one that thinks for us but that makes discourse more efficient. edit: Differently put, i think the problem is that nobody bothered to explain to me well enough how stupid i am. And i dont see why i should be attached to remaining stupid. Unfortunately however there dont seem to be any spare smart people for the task so we dummies might have to figure something out together.
• slater 5y ago
  What are the examples of "Wikipedia [...] getting worse with time, with regards to neutrality and editorialisation"?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• stretchpants 5y ago
  Let 1,000,000 little Wikipedias sprout. Eventually the garbage model of the original will be forgotten.
  • Afton 5y ago
    Can you provide some substantial ideas about what you would like to see different and what makes the current model "garbage"? Otherwise it's not clear what you're advocating for.
    • stretchpants 5y ago
      nah i'm good
• evancoop 5y ago
  I might reframe the discussion slightly. Wikipedia is growing with respect to time (that would seem factually-verifiable if the number of topics with a Wiki page is larger in each successive year). Increasing the number of pages should increase the number of pages that are controversial, problematic, or "echo-chambers" in absolute terms. Are they increasing as a proportion? Is this diminishing the utility of the site in aggregate?
• chris_wot 5y ago
  You think that's bad? All the actual contributors of content are chased off by those who tweak the site. What can I say, it's going to only get worse.
  • Lascaille 5y ago
    This seems to be the general case for user-contributed sites. People who are fans of a subject (be it football or model trains) may consistently use such sites but generally aren't invested enough to create content or do much beyond argue briefly when they feel something is totally incorrect, generally healthy people have healthy lives and don't get intensely invested in curating an internet forum. On the other hand, people who have unhealthy lives become totally invested in that forum or space because it's literally all they have and guard it like a mother hen guards their eggs. In Wikipedia they create a huge bureaucracy which excludes all but the most determined of users. That intensity drives away all casual users. On the other hand I once made an edit to a Wikipedia page from an IP address - I removed an unsourced claim from the Ron Paul page - and didn't find my edit reverted or blocked in any way. So while I have heard of the issue of frighteningly intense editors camping pages as though their life depended on it and demanding all changes be proven to the nth degree it doesn't seem to permeate the entire site.
    • swilliamsio 5y ago
      As the old saying goes: "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People."
• thrower123 5y ago
  Ban the deletionists
• edent 5y ago
  There are a few problems that need to be dealt with. First is that "Reality has a well-known liberal bias". Which means lots of people want a "neutral point of view" which reflects their own opinion. Secondly, there are lots of trolls and bad-faith actors. So a bureaucracy needs to be built up to deal with it in a structured and consistent (not necessarily fair) way. Thirdly, what can incentivise people? Most editors aren't paid. Introducing money just leads to corruption. So you end up with fake Internet points which can be gamed. Penultimately, can you appeal? I've had changes reverted, appealed, and reinstated. You can go all the way up the bureaucracy if you want to break out of the echo chamber. Finally, fork it. If you think you have a better way of doing things - and can't make internal changes - go run your own Wiki and see how long your system lasts without falling to bias.
  • JavaBatman 5y ago
    > First is that "Reality has a well-known liberal bias". Uh...what? Where is the proof of this?
    • legitster 5y ago
      It's a common expression. I think Stephen Colbert may have been the first to use it.
    • SeanLuke 5y ago
      It's a famous Stephen Colbert quote. Google for the video.
    • ironSkillet 5y ago
      He is quoting political comedian Stephen Colbert, referring to the fact that different political groups all independently believe that their perspective is actually a reflection of reality.
      • ethbr0 5y ago
        And it is! If everyone's reality == their politically-oriented news. Which is why objective, quality journalism is so critical to a democracy. Or, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan (and Schlesinger et al.) succinctly put it, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."
• legitster 5y ago
  I'm not sure if I share the same assessment. I am amazed at how robust your typical Wikipedia page is despite the chaos that goes into writing it. Given that it's not possible to make a version of reality that everyone is happy with, I think Wikipedia comes pretty dang close.
  • legitster 5y ago
    As an example, I want to point people to the page I have been spending a lot of time on as of late: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukrai... Is the information on this page perfect? Obviously not. But this single page probably represents the best up-to-date summary of information you will find on the internet. And I can only imagine the thankless work volunteer editors put into making it coherent and readable - free from random garbage and conspiracy theories.
    • formerly_proven 5y ago
      Even more amazingly the invasion article on the Russian wikipedia was really good as well (as of a few days ago).
      • contravariant 5y ago
        Did this change or was it a few days ago that you last checked?
        • formerly_proven 5y ago
          The latter
    • rozab 5y ago
      Articles on conflicts are usually shockingly well written. I spend a lot of time reading them, at least in part for entertainment. The one on the Congo Crisis is fantastic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Crisis I guess I'm not the only one doing this, because there's this meme trend of making video edits of these articles. Pretty much captures how it feels to read them if you're into it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48hGOxw2heg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48hGOxw2heg
• bwb 5y ago
  Sorry, I am not quite sure what the problem is? I think Wikipedia is great from my day to usage. Can you point me to specific examples where the output is bad due to this? I would like to see the problem.
  • smt88 5y ago
    I personally haven't seen a biased Wikipedia article in a very long time. It is absolutely astounding to me and seems like one of the great successes of internet culture. I assume OP has a particular set of issues that they are not in agreement with the majority of experts on.
    • itsoktocry 5y ago
      >I personally haven't seen a biased Wikipedia article in a very long time. What leads you to believe you can so easily spot a biased article? Everyone believes they're a neutral arbiter.
      • smt88 5y ago
        "Biased" to me doesn't mean "I disagree". It means: - presented as a fact, rather than as the opinion of a scholar/researcher/etc. (meaning Wikipedia says it is true without citing anyone else) - ignoring a significant controversy or dissent - describing uncertain information as certain - perpetuating the myth that science is settled and can't be updated with new information
        • mst 5y ago
          Pages with culture war elements will inevitably be impacted by the culture war positions of the active editors in the area in question affecting how strictly a given source is judged for quality. I'm deliberately avoiding giving examples because it seems logical to assume that I'd merely reflect my own culture war positions with respect to any such example and thereby generate more heat than light. Overall though I still think wikipedia turns out pretty reasonably as a whole even given having seen a number of situations where I disagreed with the outcome.
• magpi3 5y ago
  Well I suppose another "Who watches the watchmen" type site can be built to report on bias issues/irresponsible editors. But ideally Wikipedia itself would build some internal mechanism for dealing with disputes. Has it done so? I have heard that Wikipedia is "broken" before, but without specific examples the complaint comes across as hollow. And if you do have specific examples, then I think it gives people the chance to investigate your claims.
  • actuator 5y ago
    > But ideally Wikipedia itself would build some internal mechanism It has WP:ANI, but it is hard to go against established editors, if they are not writing outright lies or doing harassment. Say, if I want to edit a line from a summary of the Wikipedia page on a person which unfairly represents a person and the established editor thinks it makes sense, then I can't do anything. They are not writing misinformation as they will often have a source for it, but the tone and representation of that on the Wikipedia article can still be unfair. I would give specific examples here but then I would be accused of trying to influence talk pages with publicity on social media/forums. Moreover, as some of the talk pages have my comments, I don't want my online personas to be linked.
    • zozbot234 5y ago
      > Say, if I want to edit a line from a summary of the Wikipedia page on a person which unfairly represents a person and the established editor thinks it makes sense, then I can't do anything. Of course you can. You can argue for your prferred wording on the talk page for the individual article, and a compromise can be reached. This is how this stuff works. Talk pages are critical to dealing with even the slightest amount of controversy, "reverts" are supposed to be emergency actions only.
      • actuator 5y ago
        > You can argue for your prferred wording on the talk page for the individual article, and a compromise can be reached. This is how this stuff works. Talk pages are critical to dealing with even the slightest amount of controversy, "reverts" are supposed to be emergency actions only. I did try to argue for that but I was shut down as there was no way to agree what a fair representation is.
• agumonkey 5y ago
  maybe a contradictory bot farm ... something that can dig wide data graphs on wikipedia to point at inconsistencies and provide more fixes
  • HKH2 5y ago
    You can be consistently wrong though.
  • ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    This is partly the mission of Wikidata, for example if the two language wikipedias involved in a historical war can agree on the date it started and ended, and so do all the non-combatents, thats a good sign that there isn't mistakes or intentional bias.
• simion314 5y ago
  We all know Wikipedia is not perfect, wrong information can be in there, so is it relevant that some bullshit political things is not perfectly represented? One solution would be to teach people to check multiple sources, and each political camp can put their own version of "truth" and people could read all the versions and decide . I am curious what type of pages bothers people that they need to endlessly fight on attempting to edit them, my bias as a non american is that is about the americans and their political/cultural war and maybe a few nationalists trying to change historical facts on some pages.
• 29vito 5y ago
  Could you please point to an example where you feel the article isn't neutral?
  • calumetregion 5y ago
    Many people asking for examples. For an easy one (among millions) just compare The New York Times Wikipedia article to the article for The Epoch Times. "Oh, but The Epoch Times is right wing, so..." How can I compare the Ochs-Sulzberger family to the Falun Gong? Well I just did. They're both made up of humans with opinions.
    • cy_hauser 5y ago
      I'm interpreting your comment as, "Wikipedia isn't far right enough for my tastes." Is that accurate? Do you know of any examples where Wikipedia leans farther right than left?
      • calumetregion 5y ago
        Or you could see it as "poisoning the well" - an approach so common and accepted that neither of you see it, apparently. Although clearly a lefty news organization, I don't see the NY Times as a "wing" on that easy left-right spectrum we all seem to love. NYT has had many writers and done some excellent work along the way. In the aggregate their ideology is more in support of population density (cities), industrialism and technology - with some hostility towards more pastoral living, herding animals for food, etc.
    • notafraudster 5y ago
      I just read through both articles but I don't understand the point you're making. Is it that the NYT article is more fleshed out and talks about their various print products? You can add such a section to the Epoch Times.
      • calumetregion 5y ago
        Because of a different thread I thought of another subtle, yet similar example. Look at the Wikipedia entry for The Verge. It's a media product, a tech news site, all good. But it's a "left wing" site on the merits. Not a single mention of that in the Wikipedia article. There's a little bit of discussion about tabloid-style content on the Talk page, but it doesn't go anywhere. Even the Vox Media Wikipedia article makes no mention of this being a lefty business. Wild, isn't it?
• akvadrako 5y ago
  It should be possible to fork pages. If an active editor doesn't like edits they can publish their own version. The main Wikipedia owners then choose, like they do now, which editor they support as default.
  • smt88 5y ago
    You can already do this by just forking all of Wikipedia, as many people have done.
    • akvadrako 5y ago
      Technically yes, but the UX leaves a lot to be desired. Forking the whole wiki just to present your own version of a few pages isn't useful. Even the basics aren't there, like being discoverable or an easy way to track upstream changes.
• slightwinder 5y ago
  These are normal problems in every society. A certain level of control and moderation is necessary to reach functionality and quality. But this means people gain power, might misuse it, but also gain haters who just don't like the result independent of its quality. This is also nothing new. Complaints over Wikipedia's system and quality are existing since the beginning. This is normal because any system has their grind, their winners and losers. It doesn't mean the system is bad, or is producing bad results. Can you point out any real issues in their articles? Any widespreaded misinformation or actual issue? Most complaints I always see are usually about disputable details, not about actual problems.
• jacquesm 5y ago
  Without specific examples this is pretty meaningless. Every now and then there are groups that try to gain control of an article or group of articles on Wikipedia (especially around big current events) and then they start looking for ways to game the system all the while bitching about how Wikipedia is 'broken'. The way I see it: Wikipedia is imperfect, but not broken, and it has developed a pretty impressive array of defenses against being overtly gamed.
  • lucb1e 5y ago
    > Without specific examples this is pretty meaningless. I'd go one step further: specific examples are still meaningless. On a site with editors from every country and region on the world and millions of articles (not each one equally popular and viewed/vetted by other editors), of course you'll find examples for any point of view. I'm also afraid it might then become a conversation about those specific examples. Proving systemic bias is unfortunately not trivial here. Without looking into examples at all, though, it's indeed a meaningless conversation that OP is creating.
    • noxer 5y ago
      I think you overestimate who actually write and edits articles on Wikipedia. Its a very very very small group of people who does 80% and then an other small group who does 19% and then you have the millions of random people with internet who have contributed something.
  • bjourne 5y ago
    Here is a specific example: Circumcision It has the features OP complains about. Content controlled by a small number of "guardians" who knows every Wikipedia rule and policy in existence and uses them to keep outsiders out. A shockingly biased tone that omits every dissenting source. The article's guardians call them "anti-circumcisionists" and in their view, the critics objects are as valid as 9/11 conspiracy theorists'. "Male circumcision significantly reduces the risk of HIV infection among heterosexual men in sub-Saharan Africa." "The highest quality evidence indicates that circumcision has no impact on sexual function, sensation, or pleasure." Mentioned in the first two paragraphs. The fact that many believe that male circumcision is a grave violation of boys' rights to body autonomy is not.
• lovelearning 5y ago
  I think most of the conflicts are because the left-wing and the right-wing are incompatible moral philosophies. Because Wikipedia content is completely public, I'd like a forking model where the left-wing and right-wing maintain independent versions. Viewer apps can provide ways to read both for people interested in all sides (like allsides.com).
  • zaik 5y ago
    It has been attempted: https://www.conservapedia.com/Climate-change https://www.conservapedia.com/Climate-change
• hooby 5y ago
  The first step to fixing a problem, is to understand the problem. I know, many people will possibly agree that this problem exists - but that sort of empirical observation isn't all that useful. If you want to try a method to fix it - any method at all - you need to first have a reliable way to measure whether it actually improves things. And for that you first need to find a way to actually measure this - in a reliable, repeatable, unbiased way. You need to find a way to measure all of Wikipedia for this sort of problem. Not just the current state - but through the change history for any arbitrary point in the past as well. Then do some thorough data analysis, trying to learn as much about the problem as you can. That's your best bet for actually solving the problem.
  • Lascaille 5y ago
    >many people will possibly agree that this problem exists >a reliable way to measure whether it actually improves things After the process has been carried out, it is measured as successful if less people agree the problem exists. Very simple, very quantifiable. >Then do some thorough data analysis, trying to learn as much about the problem as you can. No, that's not necessary. That seems more like gatekeeping and wikilawyering, which is basically the actual problem - entrenched power networks refusing to let anybody consider changing things without first having produced ten man-years worth of proof. You don't solve the problem by doing what the problem tells you that you must do in order to be allowed to solve it.
• adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  Get the Wikimedia Foundation to spend money on the technical foundation of the sites, rather than spraying millions up the wall of "racial justice". That's not me making a strawman by going straight to "omg, the SJWs", it's a exact phrase from the 3rd paragraph of the 4.5 million Knowledge Equity Fund page [1]. That, and executive pay, is where donations go, not to keeping the lights on. The running cost to keeping the servers running is about the same as that fund. It certainly isn't the case that engineering is "done" either, as the open bug count is growing constantly and huge swathes of the software aren't maintained and don't even have maintainers[2]. Just minor things of no importance to modern didactics like, you know, functional video support and rarely used, obscure, functions like uploading. They have more important things to do like weird elections and appointing cryptobro "disrupters" to the board. [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund [2] https://mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers https://mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers
  • threatofrain 5y ago
    > It certainly isn't the case that engineering is "done" either, as the open bug count is growing constantly and huge swathes of the software aren't maintained and don't even have maintainers[2]. Wikipedia is moving to Vue.
    • snarkerson 5y ago
      That's almost just like doing something to fix things.
    • adhesive_wombat 5y ago
      They haven't even finished moving to OOUI. Actually, if they'd just bothered to document OOUI properly in the first place, would they need to move? As it is, they'll now have three concurrent systems (jQuery, OOUI and Vue). It's like GTK 2,3,4 all over again.
    • zozbot234 5y ago
      They're not "moving" to Vue. They plan to build some optional JS-based components on Vue, since the alternative of purely handcrafted code is unappealing. And even then, that code can probably be refactored to use the vastly superior Svelte once the dev team's weird hostility to workflows based on ahead-of-time code generation is addressed.
• ausbah 5y ago
  care to give some examples?
• johannes1234321 5y ago
  I think Wikipedia is mostly good contentwise. Of course there are two extremes where there are problems: disputed topics (especially contemporary political topics) and niche topics receiving little to no attention. I think for both an improvment can be made by improving the view on the editing history. Showing what kind of editors (new accounts or ong term members? Editing only few articles or across the board? etc.) do what kind of editing. Maybe even broken down to article sections ("this section sees lots of change by new editors, while that section is stable") But not sure how that would really look like to be usable more or less intuitively.
  • ethbr0 5y ago
    (Reparented from another content thread) Agreed. Wikipedia's strength is its long tail of niche articles. However, once one gets off "popular" articles, the quality bounds rapidly spread. But that seems inherent to having an article for which there are only 1-2 editors, as opposed to 10+ frequently reviewing. So better UX is probably the best "solution." I.e. pulling editor count, frequency, and reputation into the reader-visible part of the page.
    • actuator 5y ago
      > However, once one gets off "popular" articles, the quality bounds rapidly spread The issues I have seen are mostly with these sorts of articles itself. Popular articles tend to be overall much more fair because of massive participation. But once you go into articles which are about less popular things or contentious topics or from highly polarised areas, there is either frequent vandalism or chokehold control by few editors which makes it impossible to have even a good discussion if you think the content can be presented better.
    • kingcharles 5y ago
      Yeah, the smaller articles are usually written by a single person who has spent an inordinate amount of time in the domain of the article and the article is good. I started this article recently and was very impressed by how everyone came together to reach a consensus on a very niche topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qeqertaq_Avannarleq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qeqertaq_Avannarleq But then the other day I noticed that a page about a certain very popular K-Pop band was missing one of their major releases, so I added it, but then got into a pissing war with an editor of that niche who argued that the band's own Instagram page was not a valid source for information on their releases?!
• sdoering 5y ago
  I think overall the wikipedia model has shown itself to be decently working. But (anecdata) I have my gripes with the way it handles evidence. My SO has a person (died already) in her family with a (relatively) short wikipedia entry. There are factual errors in the article. We know that, because we have original documents showing that the "facts" reportet in the entry are wrong. Due to the fact that the documents cannot be published online without breaking copyright laws we can't point to a correction. She communicated with an editor (or whatever his role was, but he had the right to approve or deny changes to the entry) who stated he could only allow changes to the "facts" if my SO could point to an online source (a credible one he said). Else he would deny changing anything. Or she should upload the documents to wikipedia if she had copyright on them. He didn't accept the idea to send the documents to him as proof. He made it clear that it is either the wikipedia way of determining the truth or none. We stopped. Since then I am asking myself how much of wikipedia is actually wrong and actively or passively denied from correction by these gate keepers. Wikipedia could offer a way to upload documents for editors to review without automatically making them publicly available. This would enable fact checking and correction. I had heard of it before but since this personal experience with German Wikipedia's "Blockwart" mentality I will never consider them a valid organisation for donations.
  • bombcar 5y ago
    Get a quasi-referencable source like a Forbes blog written, and later refer to it. Wikipedia is great for a low level consensus, but if you actually know anything about many of the subjects it’s hilariously bad.
    • throwawayboise 5y ago
      So Gell-Mann Amnesia applies there as in most other journalism.
  • jl6 5y ago
    If they don’t have a reliable source for the incorrect fact, it should be removed. If they do have a “reliable” source for the incorrect fact, could you write to that source and get it corrected there?
• ravenstine 5y ago
  > I have seen talk pages where the same three editors who seem to be part of the same echo chamber discussing issues preventing any alternative opinion or tone to come in the article. This pretty much describes the problem with Wikipedia, but it's highly cryptic because possibly 95% of people are never going to realize this because I don't think they even know a Talk page exists for every article. I read lots of scientific articles and I always visit the Talk pages even when I haven't spotted any errors in the article content. There's tons of crazy petty shit that goes on between the people who edit Wikipedia articles. Whether something is considered a valid source for citation depends on which part of Wikipedia's inner circle you're talking to; in some articles, contributors are shouted down because "blogs aren't authoritative" even when they're the subject falls outside mainstream media and blogs are most proximal to the subject, but in other cases I've seen blogs be considered to be perfectly adequate when it's totally inappropriate. When it comes to anything even remotely tied to news and current events, you might as well skip Wikipedia and just read MSM news articles because those are really what Wikipedia largely considers "authoritative" no matter how biased the mainstream articles actually are. I've even seen totally legit edits and sources being ultimately rejected after a person answers every question of the [obstinate] editor because "nuh uh". Sadly, I cannot edit Wikipedia myself even though I've never even tried doing so. Even if I'm not using a VPN, it just flat out rejects my IP from even attempting to sign up. This is how Wikipedia can either fix itself or how someone can replace Wikipedia: - Be run by an accountable benevolent dictator who can ultimately veto any form of democracy present in the system; ultimately everything hinges on management no matter how the system is configured - Charge people money to edit Wikipedia (imo this would fix many of the content moderation problems on the internet as a whole at the cost of fewer active users) - Be transparent about who is in charge (Wikipedia obfuscates this with a facade that suggests that users are no different from one another, which is anything but the truth in 2022) - Refine official policies around authoritative sources, because right now any existing policies aren't working very well
• s0teri0s 5y ago
  I still send them money (even though they have plenty of money) because I feel that despite its human flaws, it's still a better objective representation of 'the facts' than any other source on the planet. If, in fact, the editors are biased, but still represent a more objective viewpoint than those given to greater speculative possibilities, the public is still better served than if they are subjected to a cacophony of unsupported opinions.
• nojito 5y ago
  Can you provide links to any talk pages that showcase issues with neutrality and editorialization?
• thetrip 5y ago
  I'm, time to time, sending some money to the foundation. The work are great and help people a lot. But I know there are biased pages... But I'm not sure we are in the same page here: can you post some of the pages you found violates neutrality? Edit: Also the best way to fix wikipedia always will be reading more books, specially from the XX century. Maybe I'm a XX's century biased person.
• aasasd 5y ago
  The first thing to do is to stop writing loud clickbait titles. And I don't mean on Wikipedia.
• fortran77 5y ago
  Re-write MediaWiki in Rust.
  • smolder 5y ago
    This meme is considered harmful.
• bombcar 5y ago
  You can’t. You can only wait for it to collapse under its own problems, if such a time comes.
• deknos 5y ago
  In Germany this was talked already over quite a few years ago. Wikipedia would have to make it easy to clone parts of its websites to your own service so you can change the parts which are important to you. and then basically the most surfed-on-site wins. but atm you either fetch the database and set it up with everything.. or .. no idea. but nobody liked that model either. we'd need wikipedia with more-git-like backend i think, some guy wrote "levitation" for that, but there would be still a need of setting it up as service and declare which parts are important for you and for which you redirect yourself from your service to the real wikipedia.
• frabbit 5y ago
  A formal ban on editors being members/volunteers/associated-with state-related propaganda outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) would be good. It wouldn't stop anything underhanded, but at least they would not be able to lie to themselves that they were doing nothing wrong.
• CalChris 5y ago
  Get rid of anonymous edits.
  • teddyh 5y ago
    https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22R...
  • projektfu 5y ago
    A big part of the value in Wikipedia is that an anonymous person can fix grammar and things like that without having to register.
• aimor 5y ago
  Support multiple competing Wikipedia-type online encyclopedias.
• ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  I'm assuming this is only coincidentally coming shortly after Russia's threat of a ban on them?
• neurobot123 5y ago
• teddyh 5y ago
  You speak in vague generalizations about bad things you have seen. Since Wikipedia preserves all history, it should be no problem for you, then, to provide links to these things, would it?
• qiskit 5y ago
  You can't. Anything that is editorialized will skew to an extreme over time. In the past, wikipedia was bad because its quality of information was generally terrible. "Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a general algorithm to solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs cannot exist." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem Alan Turing did no such thing, but that's wikipedia for you. On topics you know nothing about, it feels like wikipedia is great. But on topics you have some knowledge/expertise, wikipedia reveals itself to be amateurish nonsense. Now throw in politics and it isn't good for anything but superficial knowledge in a narrow band of non-political topics. And that's not touching on the problems of limiting the sources to select news/media sources which exacerbates the problem. If you have time to waste, use waybackmachine to compare the wikipedia pages of "controversial" figures and see how noticeably those pages have been changed in a consistent manner. The only thing you can do is set up competing wikipedias. My hope is major countries around the world set up their own wikipedias ( hopefully with english translations ) because I don't see anyone competing with wikipedia in the US.
  • olah_1 5y ago
    > Anything that is editorialized will skew to an extreme over time It is exactly why Actuator’s point in the OP was actually incorrect. > While Wikipedia's model seems far better than an individual publishing house's encyclopedia The illusion of an unbiased “encyclopedia for the world” has harmed the decentralization of information. It has actually created a unipolarity much like we see elsewhere around the world. It would be far better to have multiple different encyclopedia companies that could compete and perhaps even specialize in certain areas. But how do we keep the convenience of having them all connected? That is what Larry Sanger has been working on[1]. A federated network of encyclopedias that use the same data formats. [1]: https://encyclosphere.org/ https://encyclosphere.org/
  • munch117 5y ago
    Care to tell us who did prove it then? While the 1936 paper, "On Computable Numbers", doesn't explicitly mention the halting problem, it does cover the Entscheidungsproblem, and that the halting problem is undecidable follows trivially from that.
• thepasswordis 5y ago
  You need a culture that supports truth. You will not be able to do this with policy changes. For instance, this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspiracy_theory\ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira... >The Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory is a series of unevidenced claims centered on the false allegation that while Joe Biden was vice president of the United States, he engaged in corrupt activities relating to the employment of his son Hunter Biden by the Ukrainian gas company Burisma. This is not a statement of fact, but an opinion of the person writing it. The fact of corruption is the question at hand. The Vice President's son was being paid $1,000,000/yr to sit on the board of a foreign gas company. That isn't a disputed. Joe and Hunter Biden don't dispute this. This article should be listing the basis of accusations against Hunter, and listing refutations to those accusations. Instead, this reads like an opinion piece/defense/misdirection. Wikipedia should have a culture that reflexively recoils at stuff like this. I should have no idea what the political leanings of the editors at wikipedia have, but I do, and they make it obvious.
  • Mathnerd314 5y ago
    >>The Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory is ... > This is not a statement of fact, but an opinion Actually the way Wikipedia articles work, this is a definition. They are taking various articles about similar topics (in the citation link at the end), and coming up with a single topic name and its definition. Sometimes it's hard to accomplish this and you have to settle for a vague definition, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_number is defined to allow starting at 0 or at 1. As far as the $1,000,00/yr salary, that's mentioned on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden#Burisma_Holdings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden#Burisma_Holdings. But it's not relevant to the conspiracy theory so it's not mentioned there. I think you could add it, just copy the source.
• tasha0663 5y ago
  At the end of the day, Wikipedia is just another source of "but I read it on the Internet!" Take it with a grain of salt.
• captainmuon 5y ago
  I think this has to be solved culturally. Wikipedia would have to have a radical cultural dedication against "cliques" and sectarianism and towards openness. I also don't like the maxime of Wikipedia to prefer "sourced" information, rather than "true" information. Something can be wrong, but if reputable sources claim it, then it goes in WP. I know in the English speaking world the term "truth" has gotten some problematic connotations recently, but frankly I find that disturbung. I really would prefer a site that goes for the truth, and when there is no agreement then I want them to detail the disagreement (with correct proportions to prevent "false balance") and then I want to discuss the fuck out. I feel in Wikipedia, too often the "admins" (i.e. the established editors) decide on a whim. Finally I think deletionism is the plaque, and we need an inclusionist wikipedia. This is not just because I want to read articles about Pokemon, or because I believe disk space is cheap. I personally think there is a fundamental philosophical or political argument pro inclusionism.
  • enterpriseyWiki 5y ago
• crdrost 5y ago
  So Wikipedia has a bunch of problems, it looks like you are focused on the political problem. By this, we must be careful to say that we don't mean the American political problem that is embedded on Wikipedia[1]. The problem you are having is that a particular Wikipedia political system exists separately from all that. Like, there is an artificial politics of contribution, there are committees and meetings and weird agreements about this is acceptable but that is not, elections and moderators and so forth. That is the problem you identify. Call it a LARP. You wanted to contribute or correct information and you find yourself LARPing as a senator to get it through. Open source software gives a way to address those political issues. So, they exist in OSS, some open source projects get these elaborate governance structures, they invent a governance LARP with elections and democracy etc. But some OSS projects have not had this. Cantrill offers an interesting insight about this in his talks... He points out that merge algorithms give a powerful way to fight this, because once you have a merge algorithm you can allow two realities to exist simultaneously. He says the LARP is a result of being “forkaphobic”, afraid of allowing the project to splinter into two identical projects. Whereas, he says, if you look at the Linux kernel, Torvalds can tell you you're full of shit and you can do the thing anyway on your own branch and people can be like “that's actually really interesting” and Torvalds can admit he was wrong. So the fundamental thing you have to solve is allowing an article to exist in two independent states that get merged together at the end. And if you can solve this then you do not need a political structure to get everybody to agree because your technological process tolerates disagreement. 1. By the American political problem I mean this particular construction of right-vs-left where divisiveness reigns and nobody agrees on even basic facts... there is some of that, but it's not the problem you're having. 2. Some other problems include: - Wikipedia articles are typically extremely long. This is necessary because they do not have hierarchy but instead kind of cross-link to their peers which prevents any other way of attaining good depths in education. Information is routinely repeated in many pages. - Encyclopedias are biased to a sort of declarative information, whereas in most cases you really want to provide imperative information: think of what would happen to a university if we forbade labs, recitation sections, homework/exercises, practice tests, instead you must learn everything from lecture without ever assembling a circuit yourself. Who is gonna learn electrical engineering there? But Wikipedia is a fount of information about electrical engineering components, mathematical topics, there are physics articles. Sigh. - And then in terms of accessibility, Wikipedia has not solved the hard problem of allowing users to distribute computations in some vulgar programming language (Excel, HyperCard) similarly to how they enable typesetting in a vulgar markup language. As a result there is nothing interactive, there is barely any video or audio, everything must be textbook-serializable. Which makes it hard for us to have a volunteer effort of, here is a 150-word card on a topic, here are the deeper dives you can go into, here is how you can interactively play with this concept, here is some volunteer reading it to you so that you don't need a screen reader, here are examples to test whether you have understood the idea, etc. You want the same idea to have many different perspectives.
• IYasha 5y ago
  1. stop cooperating with three-letter agencies (probably, impossible?) 2. limit powers / volume of moderation
• _23sd 5y ago
  I'm not really a power user but I have been editing on and off for well over a decade, so perhaps I'm part of the insider group you think is too powerful. That said, I don't share the perception that these problems are as bad or widespread as you say. There are certain topics, such as Middle East politics, where there's such a critical mass of people who are just there to push an agenda that to maintain order there need to be actual admin-imposed restrictions. And there are some topics where individuals or small groups keep the article's tone and content under tight control, but that's usually because the topic is obscure enough that few people are interested enough to force changes through. Popular or politically charged topics have so many people contributing that it's virtually impossible to create a Reddit-style echo chamber, more often the problem is articles that consist of a jumble of contradictory propaganda. I think overall Wikipedia works well: even on today's highly politicized topics like COVID-19 vaccines and Ukraine/Russia, on Wikipedia you can read about the dissenting views, not free from refutation but considerably more free from the blanket statements, false equivalences, and even self-censorship that the news media treats these topics with. Of course, Wikipedia isn't apolitical: since the beginning it's been full of people who consider themselves critical thinkers and skeptics interested in spreading the truth as science tells it, which is itself an ideology that is necessarily opposed to political or religious ideologies which assert some truth that can't be refuted or proven by evidence, and of course to conspiracy theorists who openly detest science and expertise. So yes, people and organizations who make enemies of Wikipedia's ideology won't get nice or even 100% fair treatment in Wikipedia articles. Anyone who sees this as some new development due to recent political currents wasn't paying attention during the 2000s. If you see it as a problem, you're free to follow in the footsteps of widely mocked sites like RationalWiki or Conservapedia and create a wiki that favors your ideology instead. I think it's telling that even people who lean more left or right wing still rely on Wikipedia rather than those places.
• renewiltord 5y ago
  Wikipedia is fine. Doesn’t need fixing. What changes have you made to Wikipedia that you’ve encountered difficulty with.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• Zondor3000 5y ago
  No, Wikipedia cannot be fixed. And the reason it cannot be fixed rests on the very nature of humanity and communication, which is that many times, people tend to be prideful, stupid and inarticulate. Thus, one does not "fix" a bad Wikipedia article so much as one outlasts the bad editors who keep writing crap and/or deliberately suppress opposing views. An example of that would be the Wiki article for "Fact", which can be viewed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact Look at the talk page for this same article - and then look at the revision history for the article itself. Some literally absurd explanations for the meaning of the word "Fact" were kept in the article for far too long. Oddly enough, there's another English Wiki out there, a "simple" one and they too have an article about "Fact", but with a much less cluttered talk page https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact Why is this talk page (and article) it less cluttered? It's because there are fewer people there, and thus less persons pridefully defending their obvious errors. So then how does one write the "lede" sentence/paragraph for such an article? Anyone who thinks can tell you that the word "fact" has a very broad application and a number of application-specific variations in meaning. However, a skilled writer, if allowed by the resident Wiki editors, could post a simple but apropos opening blurb. Where I do so so, I would say this "A fact is an item of information offered up as a genuine portrayal of an actuality. When offered by a bona fide reliable source, it's generally accepted as true, unless otherwise disproved". Now, given that I'm the author of this blurb, and given that I too tend to be prideful and defensive of that which I write (and feel is true), am I the best arbiter of of the truth, precision and applicability of my blurb? The answer of course, is no, I am not. But neither is the mosh pit known as "Wikipedia". Instead, what Wikipedia is a brute force battle royal; an extended donnybrook which plays out over weeks and months. And what do people do when caught up in a massive, extended brawl? They join forces and pile on the opposition to defeat them. And at any given moment, that's also what Wikipedia is: It's a small network of entrenched editors who stay aligned with themselves, fighting off all interlopers via the means of "Admin" status and collective self congratulatory behavior. In fact, some of them go so far as to apply to themselves a user name which exalts them and seeks to place them beyond question. Here's a user account which is a great example of that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Neutrality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Neutrality As reflected by this user's Contributions history, User:Neutrality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Neutrality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Neutrali... is one of the long-time guardians of the status-quo at Wikipedia. And as clearly evidenced by his Contributions history, by being a long-time editor who is part of the Wikipedia "Admin" club, User:Neutrality, has virtually unfettered leeway to edit, revert and opine; while at the same time, disallowing any effective rebuttal. So no, the biases and other problems at Wikipedia cannot be fixed, not unless more people across a broader political mindset join and work their way up to Admin, so as to offset the entrenched left-leaning cabal which runs things there. As George Carlin used to say "It's a big club, and you ain't in it"
• can16358p 5y ago
  At least you can be an author there. I am for whatever reason geoblocked from writing anything (I never spammed, probably a country-wide block) and when I use VPN (either shared or my own instance) then I'm blocked again for potential spam because of, again, IP block (this time cloud provider or VPN IP). I believe I can have a positive contribution to Wikipedia but they never allowed me to write, since like, 10 years.
  • topranks 5y ago
    You’re probably just unluckily stuck on an IP range that’s been responsible for vandalism or similar in past. Did you request an unblock? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:I_have_been_blocked https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:I_have_been_blocked
    • can16358p 5y ago
      I don't (and can't) have a static IP because I constantly move between several places, usually on mobile hotspot or stuck to LTE modem where in one of the places aı live there isn't fiber or VDSL, and my ISP doesn't offer static IP over LTE.
• smitty1e 5y ago
  > is every user curated platform doomed to reach this state? One hypothesis is that, yes: you're hitting on an intrinsic aspect of human nature. A possible remedy would be to set up curated sites across the spectrum, and query a 'millepedia' front end to ask: "Who is the all-time worst political figure, and why is it $GUY_I_DISDAIN?"
• ipunchghosts 5y ago
  Reddit useless for good discussion and has been since covid started.
• jl2718 5y ago
  Humor (sort of): https://medium.com/@johnlakness/case-study-decentralizing-the-flat-earth-society-44cf45be850e https://medium.com/@johnlakness/case-study-decentralizing-th... My idea for this specifically is to make a pijul repository for Wikipedia, and then a staking/delegation/voting mechanism for acceptance of each vertex in the hash tree. At each level of the tree, a user would be presented with versioning options based on maximum aggregation of unique voters, like in hierarchical clustering, which will roughly define the ‘tribes’ of viewpoints. It would also be possible to render from a specific hash. I would hope to build a user interface with maximum flexibility to explore across ‘versions’ and encourage voting and merges across clusters. I’ve also considered using randomization, as in, selecting a hash to render with probability equal to the vote within the user’s cluster. This would be to prevent too much separation among the clusters.
• puffoflogic 5y ago
  > I have seen talk pages where the same three editors who seem to be part of the same echo chamber discussing issues preventing any alternative opinion or tone to come in the article. I believe I am part of such a cabal, despite my contributions on Wikipedia totaling about half a dozen in the past decade. Why would I be part of such a cabal? Well, first, I have no contact whatsoever with the other editor other than edits made with the same purpose — and that purpose is to deflect an attempt by other editors to erase the details of a (well-sourced) historical event from Wikipedia and replace it with alternative facts more amenable to certain political ideologies. I (and my fellow cabalist) have explained in detail on the talk page that the other editors were pushing a fringe position which was not backed by any reliable sources, and with this justification I have removed every edit made by those editors attempting to change the facts in the article, even to the point of removing tags they add to the article indicating that there is a dispute as to its accuracy! And yet I believe I am in the right, due to overwhelming evidence of the correctness of the article's contents, and incorrectness of the position being pushed by (what I see as) rogue editors. The thing is, probably every single such cabal is maintained with essentially identical motivations, at least in the eyes of the cabalists. If even some fraction of us are correct, it shows that you have to choose between cabals and an encyclopedia of misinformation and propaganda. Except, of course, haha, there's no choice at all, because some portion of the cabals are pushing misinformation and propaganda. In my view the Wikipedia experiment has failed, and not merely in some contingent way but in a way that shows that the concept cannot be executed as imagined, an "encyclopedia anyone can edit". Some [substantial?] portion of the information contained will be misinformation, for the same reasons that misinformation exists at all. Unfortunately, insofar as Wikipedia seems to have displaced many other sources of information (which, to be fair, needn't have been any more reliable — a traditional encyclopedia no doubt contained misinformation spread by the editors, with the only saving grace being a relative dearth of information limiting impact), I fear that it will prove to have been the greatest setback to the aggregation of accurate human knowledge so far in the history of humanity.
• phreack 5y ago
  When you go down to regional variants of Wikipedia it gets even worse. In Latin America the editors that fully control political articles are hilariously aligned with government entities. You'd get unsourced phrases like "the arrival of president X started a movement of improvement after the crisis caused by the economic policies of president Y", in practically every politically relevant article. The tonal shift with English Wikipedia is massive, but the editors are so many and versed in such obscure rulings that it's enormously difficult to get anything that goes against their propaganda to stick, even if it's demonstrably true stuff.
• lumpenprole 5y ago
• mistrial9 5y ago
  I am a casual wikipedia page contributor, and have been since the earliest days. I tend to agree there is a problem with 'page guarding' and collusion between long-time editors. Its annoying to see the political litmus tests take a large part of these threads. With all that said.. I believe there is a strong and non-obvious aspect to Wikipedia evolution, that is exemplified by an anecdote: When I started doing "family history in New England" research in the 1990s, the Daughters of the American Revolution publications, in hardback volumes, was considered good sourcing, with some caveats .. In the space of five years, in the 1990s, the "facts" printed in impressive DAR fashion, were shredded, in not a few cases. There simply had never been the ability to check and cross-check, so quickly, over such vast numbers of resources. Truth in family history is evasive sometimes, but tends towards very verifiable. The Internet itself, and the eyes and minds of millions of participants, just created an information environment that had never existed; library of Alexandria on steroids, if you want to be colorful. So now, decades into the process of Wikipedia, we find out that there are not one kind of fact, there is not one kind of editor, and the attention economy is more real than ever. Mix in human nature, and there is a sort of unsolvable situation. so what to do? admit imperfection, don't waste pages on obviously irreconcilable situations like "the son of the current Presidential candidate of the USA and allegations", I mean sure, but not dominating the response here; and then do find the cases where the process can be evolved, like breaking up smug cliques of editors, when it needs to happen.. fairly, periodically perhaps.. whatever.. Wikipedia -- amazing feature of the entire Internet
• noxer 5y ago
  There is nothing to fix, as you can see from the comments here most of NH thinks Wikipedia is neutral and objective and what not. This is the actual problem. People haven't figured out yet how bad it is because there is simply nothing that comes even close to an alternative to Wikipedia.
• 1270018080 5y ago
  Wikipedia is very good.
• blindmute 5y ago
  Bias I've seen in politically charged articles: - Only allowing "reliable sources", and defining that based on criteria which essentially excludes any right wing publication, even when the unreliable source has irrefutable evidence of the claim (video, etc). Similarly, citing claims from 'reliable' sources that are misleading, or slightly incorrect (you don't need to look at many news articles to find an example of this) - Using social academic sources, like gender studies, to cite things that are literally just opinions. Social sciences have a lot of these publications putting forth claims, that are basically citing each other in a circle, with the root claim being someone's opinion (usually grievance studies). - Citing lack of 'relevance' to stifle any claim that doesn't fall under the above two. Who decides what's relevant? Well that's the trick; there's no objective criteria, so the power mods decide it.
• 8bitsrule 5y ago
  It's easy to find thousands of 'stub' to 'start'-class articles that obviously need lots more content and/or citations. They may be less 'important' or trendy, and hopefullly less 'opinionated', and unlikely to be on 'watch list's. There you'll run into less-to-no helicopter parents, and stand a much-better chance of creating most of a great article before they show up. Load up on good citation prospects for solid content. Over to the left on any page you can see how many visits/day it's been getting - that can help you stay away from them.
• noodles_nomore 5y ago
  Skimming the revision history of any non-recent nontechnical page shows you that the editing process, rather than revealing a steady dialectical progress, is just a constant back-and-forth churn of competing systems of thought. The winner is the one who can sacrifice the most time for vigilance and simulating an appearance of reasonableness. Of course moderation mitigates this state of affairs somewhat, but by the nature of Wikipedia, the ideal of impartiality, moderation cannot mediate truth; it can only raise the cost of contribution. As a result Wikipedia's model resembles proof-of-work, ceding governance to the fiercest advocates and wasting lots of energy. I believe we'd be better off with real intellectual diversity. Replace the melting-pot model with a federation, a la mastodon, where any topic can be represented by multiple articles from different wikis that have different specialties. The indexing needs to be federated as well, as different groups will want to in-/exclude different alternatives. But just relieving the single pressure point that Wikipedia represents should offer huge benefits to the ecosystem.
• jzer0cool 5y ago
  > Wikipedia Would be interested to know any future planned scope of work. What are the current big issues needing resolving?
• paulnpace 5y ago
  We can summarize most comments here as either: -I agree with how articles are written, so Wikipedia isn't that bad - maybe still a little rough around the edges, but all things considered I trust it. -I disagree with how articles are written, and the problems are unsolvable within Wikipedia. Allowing different editors to one article has not resolved this difference. Given that we are approaching 20 years of Wikipedia being widely popular on the 'Net and this problem has persisted, a solution likely requires something on the technical level of the site, itself, (or, more likely, a new site outside of the Wikimedia Foundation) that changes fundamentally how it operates. To the extent that competition exists for encyclopedic wikis, the ones I have discovered use some version of a preferred view on what articles should be published and what sources are acceptable, so they are essentially using a nearly identical process as Wikipedia, thus suffer from the same problems. Imagine if GitHub maintained editable standards through a "volunteer" bureaucracy for what software could be published to the site; what a software can do; what language is used for a given software; deciding which libraries are permitted for use in a project; not permitting "duplicate" software, even when they share the same name (users and projects still maintain unique names). To summarize, this version of GitHub would suck and nobody would use it, but this is analogous to how Wikipedia is managed. Since the problem revolves around how a single article is to be created, edited, and sourced, and given the difficulty just in this concept, the rather obvious solution is to have multiple articles for a given topic where each is created, edited, and sourced however the maintainers of such articles desire. The next problem of course is this generating an incredible number of articles, each predictably with its maintainer-guard dog. The way to make this usable could be through implementing "universes" of articles. Some universes could operate on some revision of the current Wikipedia and its bureaucracy, others may be purely top-down, hand-curated lists, or could include multiple universes. This is one sort of way to deal with what is effectively fundamental problems with observing the Universe combined with aspects of the human experience.