3 ms·

> It has never been easier to share knowledge, and thus there has never been a greater time to be curious. It's also never been easier to share disinformation,

by imiric 4y ago

> It has never been easier to share knowledge, and thus there has never been a greater time to be curious. It's also never been easier to share disinformation, and pollute the vast sea of actual knowledge that exists on the internet. Sources of information are silo'd into proprietary closed off gardens run by large corporations who only serve their shareholders. Searching for information has been corrupted by advertisers and the sheer amount of misleading content, that finding reliable sources often feels like searching for a needle in a haystack. The one exception is Wikipedia, though it also struggles with keeping factual information, and has its own set of issues.

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
Add in the rising tide of ML generated content that is able to get itself well placed in search results, diluting information with real value. It's really irritating to start reading something that starts out seeming legit and then you get in a few sentences or paragraphs before it becomes incoherent nonsense.
morpheos137 4y ago
Wikipedia can be show to be biased or unbalanced about political issues. Since wikipedia views newspapers as reliable sources their articles are often skewed by whatever is the conventions of the day.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  I second the call that WP is web done right. Yes, of course there's bias; it's not possible to produce bias-free content, and WP's particularly bad in the fields of politics and history, and really any field where facts aren't settled and feelings are strong. Enter critical thinking. If you dig just a little (e.g. read the talk pages and the edit histories), you can soon learn that some topic has been taken over by POV-pushers and is unreliable. Anything to do with Israel/Palestine/West Bank is unreliable; the boss is a zionist, and so are a lot of the senior staff, so it's not surprising. But WP is a million times better than the web that search engines expose. Incidentally, I usually search using DDG. But DDG seems to hate Wikipedia; WP results usually don't show up on DDG until page 2. Google surfaces WP results on page 1, if not at the top of the resultset.
  - this2shallPass 4y ago
    > Anything to do with Israel/Palestine/West Bank is unreliable; the boss is a zionist, and so are a lot of the senior staff, so it's not surprising. But WP is a million times better than the web that search engines expose. Is there good evidence for this claim? Evidence is useful, especially for these claims of general bias. On the contrary, in general Wikipedia's content is likely biased against Israel when considering its general overall political preferences / bias. > 5 Studies Find Wikipedia Bias > Five studies, including two from Harvard researchers, have found a left-wing bias at Wikipedia: > * A Harvard study found Wikipedia articles are more left-wing than Encyclopedia Britannica. > * Another paper from the same Harvard researchers found left-wing editors are more active and partisan on the site. > * A 2018 analysis found top-cited news outlets on Wikipedia are mainly left-wing. > * Another analysis using AllSides Media Bias Ratings™ found that pages on American politicians cite mostly left-wing news outlets. > * American academics found conservative editors are 6 times more likely to be sanctioned in Wikipedia policy enforcement. From: https://www.allsides.com/blog/wikipedia-biased https://www.allsides.com/blog/wikipedia-biased
    - inkywatcher 4y ago
      I find it interesting that your way of proving anti-Zionist sentiment is to demonstrate that there are quantifiably more leftist editors on Wikipedia. That does not demonstrate your thesis of anti-Israeli bias. Plenty of people who at least claim to be leftists are profuse in their support of Israel. Neither should it surprise that a scholarly endeavor for bored young people on the internet tends to tilt leftward: there is a big education differential between political poles, and a strong demographic tilt based on age. To put it in a nutshell: if boomers spent their time writing citations instead of pounding out all-caps screeds about ivermectin in the comments sections of local newspapers, there would be a more robust wikipedia contingent.
      - this2shallPass 4y ago
        > I find it interesting that your way of proving anti-Zionist sentiment is to demonstrate that there are quantifiably more leftist editors on Wikipedia. That does not demonstrate your thesis of anti-Israeli bias. Plenty of people who at least claim to be leftists are profuse in their support of Israel. It’s not definitive proof of anti-Israel bias - it is, however, evidence. As opposed to the unsubstantiated assertion I responded to. Evidence of what? A leftward slant in Wikipedia, if you believe the conclusion of these studies (or the summaries of them - I haven’t read them all). And it's easy to see that such a slant would broadly coincide with somewhat less support - though far from zero support - for Israel in 2022 and the past couple decades. I’m not sure how leftward the slant is. It could be slight. It could also not be relevant in specific areas (such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). I didn’t exhaustively research the topic (nor did I believe Wikipedia had any specific leftward slant before today.) If you find anything useful, please share your findings - happy to read! “Quantifiably more leftist editors on Wikipedia” isn’t a good summary of the headlines of those 5 studies. To your other point, number of editors matter - and the Israel-antagonists presumably outnumber the Israel-supporters - but it’s far from the only thing that matters. To name a few more things that make an editor more or less influential: the number of edits made, the prominence of their edits (for example if it is in the introduction vs elsewhere in an article), the degree to which the edits are neutral vs slanted, and the relative power they have as editors.
naasking 4y ago
> Sources of information are silo'd into proprietary closed off gardens run by large corporations who only serve their shareholders. Searching for information has been corrupted by advertisers and the sheer amount of misleading content, that finding reliable sources often feels like searching for a needle in a haystack. I'm not particularly worried about disinformation or misinformation as long as good information is out there to improve the signal to noise ratio. But you've definitely hit a nail on the head here, good information has value so there are a lot of incentives to wall it off and charge for it. This is the real danger.
- smolder 4y ago
  > good information has value so there are a lot of incentives to wall it off and charge for it. There's even an incentive there to pollute free sources of good information in order to devalue them relative to proprietary knowledgebases.

by imiric 4y ago

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago

Add in the rising tide of ML generated content that is able to get itself well placed in search results, diluting information with real value. It's really irritating to start reading something that starts out seeming legit and then you get in a few sentences or paragraphs before it becomes incoherent nonsense.

morpheos137 4y ago

Wikipedia can be show to be biased or unbalanced about political issues. Since wikipedia views newspapers as reliable sources their articles are often skewed by whatever is the conventions of the day.

denton-scratch 4y ago
I second the call that WP is web done right. Yes, of course there's bias; it's not possible to produce bias-free content, and WP's particularly bad in the fields of politics and history, and really any field where facts aren't settled and feelings are strong. Enter critical thinking. If you dig just a little (e.g. read the talk pages and the edit histories), you can soon learn that some topic has been taken over by POV-pushers and is unreliable. Anything to do with Israel/Palestine/West Bank is unreliable; the boss is a zionist, and so are a lot of the senior staff, so it's not surprising. But WP is a million times better than the web that search engines expose. Incidentally, I usually search using DDG. But DDG seems to hate Wikipedia; WP results usually don't show up on DDG until page 2. Google surfaces WP results on page 1, if not at the top of the resultset.
- this2shallPass 4y ago
  > Anything to do with Israel/Palestine/West Bank is unreliable; the boss is a zionist, and so are a lot of the senior staff, so it's not surprising. But WP is a million times better than the web that search engines expose. Is there good evidence for this claim? Evidence is useful, especially for these claims of general bias. On the contrary, in general Wikipedia's content is likely biased against Israel when considering its general overall political preferences / bias. > 5 Studies Find Wikipedia Bias > Five studies, including two from Harvard researchers, have found a left-wing bias at Wikipedia: > * A Harvard study found Wikipedia articles are more left-wing than Encyclopedia Britannica. > * Another paper from the same Harvard researchers found left-wing editors are more active and partisan on the site. > * A 2018 analysis found top-cited news outlets on Wikipedia are mainly left-wing. > * Another analysis using AllSides Media Bias Ratings™ found that pages on American politicians cite mostly left-wing news outlets. > * American academics found conservative editors are 6 times more likely to be sanctioned in Wikipedia policy enforcement. From: https://www.allsides.com/blog/wikipedia-biased https://www.allsides.com/blog/wikipedia-biased
  - inkywatcher 4y ago
    I find it interesting that your way of proving anti-Zionist sentiment is to demonstrate that there are quantifiably more leftist editors on Wikipedia. That does not demonstrate your thesis of anti-Israeli bias. Plenty of people who at least claim to be leftists are profuse in their support of Israel. Neither should it surprise that a scholarly endeavor for bored young people on the internet tends to tilt leftward: there is a big education differential between political poles, and a strong demographic tilt based on age. To put it in a nutshell: if boomers spent their time writing citations instead of pounding out all-caps screeds about ivermectin in the comments sections of local newspapers, there would be a more robust wikipedia contingent.
    - this2shallPass 4y ago
      > I find it interesting that your way of proving anti-Zionist sentiment is to demonstrate that there are quantifiably more leftist editors on Wikipedia. That does not demonstrate your thesis of anti-Israeli bias. Plenty of people who at least claim to be leftists are profuse in their support of Israel. It’s not definitive proof of anti-Israel bias - it is, however, evidence. As opposed to the unsubstantiated assertion I responded to. Evidence of what? A leftward slant in Wikipedia, if you believe the conclusion of these studies (or the summaries of them - I haven’t read them all). And it's easy to see that such a slant would broadly coincide with somewhat less support - though far from zero support - for Israel in 2022 and the past couple decades. I’m not sure how leftward the slant is. It could be slight. It could also not be relevant in specific areas (such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). I didn’t exhaustively research the topic (nor did I believe Wikipedia had any specific leftward slant before today.) If you find anything useful, please share your findings - happy to read! “Quantifiably more leftist editors on Wikipedia” isn’t a good summary of the headlines of those 5 studies. To your other point, number of editors matter - and the Israel-antagonists presumably outnumber the Israel-supporters - but it’s far from the only thing that matters. To name a few more things that make an editor more or less influential: the number of edits made, the prominence of their edits (for example if it is in the introduction vs elsewhere in an article), the degree to which the edits are neutral vs slanted, and the relative power they have as editors.

naasking 4y ago

> Sources of information are silo'd into proprietary closed off gardens run by large corporations who only serve their shareholders. Searching for information has been corrupted by advertisers and the sheer amount of misleading content, that finding reliable sources often feels like searching for a needle in a haystack. I'm not particularly worried about disinformation or misinformation as long as good information is out there to improve the signal to noise ratio. But you've definitely hit a nail on the head here, good information has value so there are a lot of incentives to wall it off and charge for it. This is the real danger.

smolder 4y ago
> good information has value so there are a lot of incentives to wall it off and charge for it. There's even an incentive there to pollute free sources of good information in order to devalue them relative to proprietary knowledgebases.