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> Over time, Wikipedians who supported fringe content departed or were ousted. Thus, population loss led to highly consequential institutional change. Is this

by bko 3y ago

> Over time, Wikipedians who supported fringe content departed or were ousted. Thus, population loss led to highly consequential institutional change. Is this a good thing? It seems like homogenous hive mind effects. Works in some instances but we should aim a little higher A big problem is homogeniety in media. For instance, everyone from every major newspaper more or less went to the same schools, has a similar world view, lives in the same metro and fraternizes with the same crowds. So you have every newspaper say something like X is a [y]ist, and Wikipedia states it as fact with a lot of sources [1][2][3]. But it's all the same people

jwestbury 3y ago
Well, yes, when it comes to knowledge I'd say that it is a good thing to remove those supporting fringe content. Consensus amongst those who generally care about a topic is probably better for ensuring largely correct data than the alternative of a large number of voices, each with a questionable level of actual subject matter expertise.
- synecdoche 3y ago
  Plenty of assumptions there. There is nothing to say that correctness is a function of size or homogeneity. The claim is cause for concern in itself.
  - stuartjohnson12 3y ago
    Wikipedia's goal isn't correctness, it is to aggregate the consensus of reliable sources. Wikipedia isn't reliable because it is agreed upon, it is reliable because determining truth values is outsourced to publishers who can mostly be depended on due to the value of reputation amongst experts in the information distribution sector. Publishers have their own biases which Wikipedia will aggregate. This is still, in my experience, a better bar than any others I've come across.
    - nvm0n2 3y ago
      They mostly outsource to a large variety of very unreliable sources and then exclude others based purely on politics, to the extent that people can't even get false statements about themselves corrected, let alone false statements about other people or topics.
      - stuartjohnson12 3y ago
        There is no "they". Wikipedia can be edited by anyone.
        laverya 3y ago
        And reverted by anyone, if the edit doesn't meet standards - like relying on an unapproved source to correct a claim. And that's if the article isn't locked or otherwise restricted!
        Uhhrrr 3y ago
        In practice, there is a hivemind of extremely active editors which will rules lawyer you to death if you introduce a fact they don't like.
- VancouverMan 3y ago
  While it was already obvious to some people before then, after everything that happened from early 2020 through most of 2022, it should be completely clear to everyone now that "expert consensus" has absolutely nothing to do with being factually correct. Time and time again, from the lockdowns/restrictions to the forced masking to the forced shots to the censorship to pretty much everything in between, the "expert consensus" from the medical, political, and mass media communities was wrong. Even worse than being wrong, so many of the ideas that were deemed "correct" by "expert consensus" often ended up being overtly harmful, and caused far worse outcomes and far more problems than were already being dealt with at the time. In hindsight, we can see that correct and useful information tended to come from the "fringe voices" that were drawing upon much wider and diverse knowledge and experience, while correct and useful information tended to not come from the highly-centralized and highly-controlled "experts".
  - VMG 3y ago
    Of course the contrarian will only defend the "fringe voices" up to the point that he agrees with. Once it goes into 5G-activated magnetic microchip implants, the contrarian will defer to experts without the quotes.
    - gunapologist99 3y ago
      That doesn't mean that the contrarian tries to silence those he disagrees with.
  - vladms 3y ago
    These are some strong statements without any reference. Haven't you personally dealt with any situation in which you have to take a decision based on incomplete information? That was covid for most part of it. You could compare it with a bet, and some bets look retrospectively "bad" (although we have no way to check, don't we?) There were also plenty of "fringe voices" with ideas that were proven wrong over time, so not sure how you imagine "someone" would have selected "the right ones".
    - 3y ago
- bko 3y ago
  I disagree. Science faces a similar problem with homogeniety, specifically in regards to funding usually coming from the state and in general state influence in research. To take an obvious example, the debate on the impact of sex and physical ability. It's obvious that males have an advantage over women on most physical tasks. I can't find a single event with an objective comparable scoring (e.g. how fast you finished, how high you jumped etc) where males don't outperform at every level by a significant degree. For instance, high school boy records beat pretty much all female world records in track [0]. And this is fine. We adapt societally by having women's leagues. And every scientist would admit this up until maybe 5 years ago. But now there is a growing "scientific consensus" that really it's some other societal effect. Humans knew this to be true for thousands of years, but in the last 5 years we're beginning to upturn that for some reason. So maybe some deference to the past is warranted. If thousands of years from now the "consensus" still says sex doesn't really matter, then I'll grant you that. But for now the "scientific consensus" doesn't make something true [0] https://boysvswomen.com/ https://boysvswomen.com/ [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/to-understand-sex-we-need-to-ask-the-right-questions/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/to-understand-sex...
  - nickelpro 3y ago
    The problems of homogeneity among hard sciences is in no way bettered or solved by introducing quackery and conspiracy theories to the mix. The rest of your post is insane, "War on Christmas"-style. No one reputable is claiming men and women are biologically equivalent in all things.
    - bko 3y ago
      Is scientific American not reputabl? Here are a number of articles suggesting various arguments that there is no physical advantage of males in sports https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trans-girls-belong-on-girls-sports-teams/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trans-girls-belon... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hormone-levels-are-being-used-to-discriminate-against-female-athletes/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hormone-levels-ar... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/to-understand-sex-we-need-to-ask-the-right-questions/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/to-understand-sex... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the...
- soundnote 3y ago
  So when a topic like the Hunter Biden laptop comes up right before an election, could clearly impact it and... the mainstream media just refuses to report, or uncritically calls it a hoax. Wikipedia claims NYPost is an unreliable source, and social media sites blackout the topic. Turns out, "fringe" thing that was definitely not true was true. Was the consensus better? Doesn't seem so, and it's not an isolated instance.
- ruszki 3y ago
  Some of the commenters under your comment shows that Hacker News is not a “good place”. Pseudoscience is strong here. At least we got answer to that, but not to your question.
- gunapologist99 3y ago
  Do you also support removing the question you replied to?
altcognito 3y ago
> A big problem is homogeniety in media. Lack of viewpoints is the least of the problems with "traditional media". Fox news and MSNBC have the same, debilitating problems as NBC, CBS and ABC. 1. They cover things poorly, little depth 2. They are beholden to their sponsorship (a great non-political example is their unwavering support of particular CFB conferences) 3. They offer opinions first instead of facts 4. They are highly selective of only certain topics (Wikipedia is really broad despite having moderation) 5. Wikipedia has 120k active editors. Networks are lucky to break 1000 employees. I think that US traditional media could do a better job, they've just catered to the LCD. There are examples of non-US media that do a solid job of maintaining NPOV and cover topics in reasonable detail without injecting overt opinions.
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  The current Fox vs Disney/ESPN war going on in college football is pretty amazing if you don't have a dog in the fight. Seems inevitable it would eventually happen given the money involved but they are quite shameless about what and how they're reporting right now.
  - yuppiepuppie 3y ago
    Any links to articles covering the media on that topic? I have not heard about this one.
jabroni_salad 3y ago
One of the earliest to go was media fandom. The kind of stuff you find today on fandom.com used to happen on wikipedia, but then Jimmy Wales founded wikicities for that kind of thing because he did not like it being there. Your local library probably has a magazine rack with some stupid shit in it but is it not stupid shit that patrons are interested in? Wikipedia ousted it for better or for worse.
nonameiguess 3y ago
In spite of the "wikimedia" name, it's wrong to think of Wikipedia in the same vein as the 24-hour news cycle. It's very good for an encyclopedia to have quality control and remove fringe content. It's meant to be an enduring repository of factual information that some form of widespread authoritative consensus exists on, not a place to hash out hot-topic culture war debates that nobody will remember or care about in 50 years, nor a place for alternative pseudoscience like all the guys who spam physics newsgroups claiming to have disproven special relativity or invented a perpetual motion machine. Even if those things end up being correct, it's also not a place for original research because nobody who edits Wikipedia is qualified to make the kind of judgment on whether original research meets any meaningful quality standard. Submit to a journal if you think you have a worthwhile revolutionary idea. It'll make it to Wikipedia after it becomes generally accepted and that's fine. I don't think a single knowledge repository can realistically hope to be both a repository of trusted, accepted knowledge of the day and a place to hash out the ongoing debate about what should be accepted knowledge and where we might be wrong.
NicuCalcea 3y ago
> everyone from every major newspaper more or less went to the same schools, has a similar world view, lives in the same metro and fraternizes with the same crowds This may be true in the US, I wouldn't know, but I work in media, and that hasn't been my experience at all.
deleted 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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by bko 3y ago

jwestbury 3y ago

Well, yes, when it comes to knowledge I'd say that it is a good thing to remove those supporting fringe content. Consensus amongst those who generally care about a topic is probably better for ensuring largely correct data than the alternative of a large number of voices, each with a questionable level of actual subject matter expertise.

synecdoche 3y ago
Plenty of assumptions there. There is nothing to say that correctness is a function of size or homogeneity. The claim is cause for concern in itself.
- stuartjohnson12 3y ago
  Wikipedia's goal isn't correctness, it is to aggregate the consensus of reliable sources. Wikipedia isn't reliable because it is agreed upon, it is reliable because determining truth values is outsourced to publishers who can mostly be depended on due to the value of reputation amongst experts in the information distribution sector. Publishers have their own biases which Wikipedia will aggregate. This is still, in my experience, a better bar than any others I've come across.
  - nvm0n2 3y ago
    They mostly outsource to a large variety of very unreliable sources and then exclude others based purely on politics, to the extent that people can't even get false statements about themselves corrected, let alone false statements about other people or topics.
    - stuartjohnson12 3y ago
      There is no "they". Wikipedia can be edited by anyone.
      - laverya 3y ago
        And reverted by anyone, if the edit doesn't meet standards - like relying on an unapproved source to correct a claim. And that's if the article isn't locked or otherwise restricted!
      - Uhhrrr 3y ago
        In practice, there is a hivemind of extremely active editors which will rules lawyer you to death if you introduce a fact they don't like.
VancouverMan 3y ago
While it was already obvious to some people before then, after everything that happened from early 2020 through most of 2022, it should be completely clear to everyone now that "expert consensus" has absolutely nothing to do with being factually correct. Time and time again, from the lockdowns/restrictions to the forced masking to the forced shots to the censorship to pretty much everything in between, the "expert consensus" from the medical, political, and mass media communities was wrong. Even worse than being wrong, so many of the ideas that were deemed "correct" by "expert consensus" often ended up being overtly harmful, and caused far worse outcomes and far more problems than were already being dealt with at the time. In hindsight, we can see that correct and useful information tended to come from the "fringe voices" that were drawing upon much wider and diverse knowledge and experience, while correct and useful information tended to not come from the highly-centralized and highly-controlled "experts".
- VMG 3y ago
  Of course the contrarian will only defend the "fringe voices" up to the point that he agrees with. Once it goes into 5G-activated magnetic microchip implants, the contrarian will defer to experts without the quotes.
  - gunapologist99 3y ago
    That doesn't mean that the contrarian tries to silence those he disagrees with.
- vladms 3y ago
  These are some strong statements without any reference. Haven't you personally dealt with any situation in which you have to take a decision based on incomplete information? That was covid for most part of it. You could compare it with a bet, and some bets look retrospectively "bad" (although we have no way to check, don't we?) There were also plenty of "fringe voices" with ideas that were proven wrong over time, so not sure how you imagine "someone" would have selected "the right ones".
  - 3y ago
bko 3y ago
I disagree. Science faces a similar problem with homogeniety, specifically in regards to funding usually coming from the state and in general state influence in research. To take an obvious example, the debate on the impact of sex and physical ability. It's obvious that males have an advantage over women on most physical tasks. I can't find a single event with an objective comparable scoring (e.g. how fast you finished, how high you jumped etc) where males don't outperform at every level by a significant degree. For instance, high school boy records beat pretty much all female world records in track [0]. And this is fine. We adapt societally by having women's leagues. And every scientist would admit this up until maybe 5 years ago. But now there is a growing "scientific consensus" that really it's some other societal effect. Humans knew this to be true for thousands of years, but in the last 5 years we're beginning to upturn that for some reason. So maybe some deference to the past is warranted. If thousands of years from now the "consensus" still says sex doesn't really matter, then I'll grant you that. But for now the "scientific consensus" doesn't make something true [0] https://boysvswomen.com/ https://boysvswomen.com/ [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/to-understand-sex-we-need-to-ask-the-right-questions/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/to-understand-sex...
- nickelpro 3y ago
  The problems of homogeneity among hard sciences is in no way bettered or solved by introducing quackery and conspiracy theories to the mix. The rest of your post is insane, "War on Christmas"-style. No one reputable is claiming men and women are biologically equivalent in all things.
  - bko 3y ago
    Is scientific American not reputabl? Here are a number of articles suggesting various arguments that there is no physical advantage of males in sports https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trans-girls-belong-on-girls-sports-teams/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trans-girls-belon... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hormone-levels-are-being-used-to-discriminate-against-female-athletes/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hormone-levels-ar... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/to-understand-sex-we-need-to-ask-the-right-questions/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/to-understand-sex... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the...
soundnote 3y ago
So when a topic like the Hunter Biden laptop comes up right before an election, could clearly impact it and... the mainstream media just refuses to report, or uncritically calls it a hoax. Wikipedia claims NYPost is an unreliable source, and social media sites blackout the topic. Turns out, "fringe" thing that was definitely not true was true. Was the consensus better? Doesn't seem so, and it's not an isolated instance.
ruszki 3y ago
Some of the commenters under your comment shows that Hacker News is not a “good place”. Pseudoscience is strong here. At least we got answer to that, but not to your question.
gunapologist99 3y ago
Do you also support removing the question you replied to?

altcognito 3y ago

> A big problem is homogeniety in media. Lack of viewpoints is the least of the problems with "traditional media". Fox news and MSNBC have the same, debilitating problems as NBC, CBS and ABC. 1. They cover things poorly, little depth 2. They are beholden to their sponsorship (a great non-political example is their unwavering support of particular CFB conferences) 3. They offer opinions first instead of facts 4. They are highly selective of only certain topics (Wikipedia is really broad despite having moderation) 5. Wikipedia has 120k active editors. Networks are lucky to break 1000 employees. I think that US traditional media could do a better job, they've just catered to the LCD. There are examples of non-US media that do a solid job of maintaining NPOV and cover topics in reasonable detail without injecting overt opinions.

Mountain_Skies 3y ago
The current Fox vs Disney/ESPN war going on in college football is pretty amazing if you don't have a dog in the fight. Seems inevitable it would eventually happen given the money involved but they are quite shameless about what and how they're reporting right now.
- yuppiepuppie 3y ago
  Any links to articles covering the media on that topic? I have not heard about this one.

jabroni_salad 3y ago

One of the earliest to go was media fandom. The kind of stuff you find today on fandom.com used to happen on wikipedia, but then Jimmy Wales founded wikicities for that kind of thing because he did not like it being there. Your local library probably has a magazine rack with some stupid shit in it but is it not stupid shit that patrons are interested in? Wikipedia ousted it for better or for worse.

nonameiguess 3y ago

In spite of the "wikimedia" name, it's wrong to think of Wikipedia in the same vein as the 24-hour news cycle. It's very good for an encyclopedia to have quality control and remove fringe content. It's meant to be an enduring repository of factual information that some form of widespread authoritative consensus exists on, not a place to hash out hot-topic culture war debates that nobody will remember or care about in 50 years, nor a place for alternative pseudoscience like all the guys who spam physics newsgroups claiming to have disproven special relativity or invented a perpetual motion machine. Even if those things end up being correct, it's also not a place for original research because nobody who edits Wikipedia is qualified to make the kind of judgment on whether original research meets any meaningful quality standard. Submit to a journal if you think you have a worthwhile revolutionary idea. It'll make it to Wikipedia after it becomes generally accepted and that's fine. I don't think a single knowledge repository can realistically hope to be both a repository of trusted, accepted knowledge of the day and a place to hash out the ongoing debate about what should be accepted knowledge and where we might be wrong.

NicuCalcea 3y ago

> everyone from every major newspaper more or less went to the same schools, has a similar world view, lives in the same metro and fraternizes with the same crowds This may be true in the US, I wouldn't know, but I work in media, and that hasn't been my experience at all.

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deleted 3y ago
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