5 ms·

> Every contributor-driven platform has eventually jumped the shark, and all in exactly the same way. Do you think Wikipedia has jumped the shark? Obviously no

> Every contributor-driven platform has eventually jumped the shark, and all in exactly the same way. Do you think Wikipedia has jumped the shark? Obviously not perfect, but it's certainly a lot better than Quora in terms of accuracy. It's been around for a very long time and it doesn't seem to me like quality has decreased. Edit: to be clear and re-iterate, I never said Wikipedia was perfect, just that it has a certain baseline, generally above where Quora is, and hasn't seemed to decline over the years.

b112 3y ago
It's only accurate if the view espoused in the page, matches what the gatekeeping moderator believes.
throw310822 3y ago
A lot of Wikipedia entries have become extremely partisan, and kept that way by moderators who are deeply invested in certain narratives. I find it very disappointing that no countermeasures have been taken- afaik Wikipedia still works exactly like 20 years ago, a barebone wiki governed by a lot of obscure, complex and unstructured politics. Granted, it might be the best possible way for an open-source encyclopedia to work. It is after all an incredible success. It's just pretty bad in some parts.
- apexalpha 3y ago
  Could you point to some examples of partisan entries?
  - throw310822 3y ago
    As one example, I wrote this comment a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974614 But to expand a bit, for example I'm annoyed at many of the entries calling their subject "conspiracy theory/ theorist". Not that conspiracy theories and their believers don't exist, but at this point it has become a highly pejorative and judgemental term to frame ideas and narratives that need to be stigmatized rather than explained. Passing judgements should not, in my view, be the primary focus of an encyclopedia entry.
    - emj 3y ago
      So climate change, is it surprising the thread went bonkers? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_J._Crockford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_J._Crockford What ever I answer in this case the easiest reaction will be; for you will be to judge me and lump me together with what you cal activists, and for those activists it will me easiest to put me in the same conspiracy theorist group as you. This is not a problem with Wikipedia, this is a human problem. While I also think that article is abysmal, it does give context what to expect from people posting stuff by her. The biggest problem with your complaint is that you are not linking to an alternative, just do a fast draft on Wikipedia remove everything that you feel is not relevant and link that. Sure it will be reverted but that is probably because you first draft will not be a good article, those are evidently very hard to write when people think so differently about something.
      - mistermann 3y ago
        > This is not a problem with Wikipedia, this is a human problem. Wikipedia could be an excellent attack vector for sorting out human's heads at scale.
    - logicprog 3y ago
      Are any of the details that you were upset they included in her bio (e.g. that she's a contract scientist running a small business) incorrect or irrelevant? They certainly don't seem irrelevant to me, obviously they should explain what kind of scientist she is and what she does for a living — are you just mad because they happen to make her look like a less prestigious scientist and/or reliable source then you would like her to be? Also they pretty clearly note that her doctorate in interdisciplinary studies focused on mammals as its subject, what would you have them do? Claim that her doctorate was in something it wasn't, instead of interdisciplinary studies, just to make her look better, because a doctorate in interdisciplinary studies with a focus on some particular thing is "essentially equivalent" in your mind to an actual doctorate in that thing? Or claim she focused on evolutionary biology, when not even her own blog bio claims it was about "evolutionary biology" (she implies it was about zoology or another similar field)? Why do you say evolutionary biology should be listed then? Is it just to make her sound better? Likewise, why wouldn't the criticism section be mostly filled with what she's been criticized about the most? If most of her other work was unremarkable or solid and nobody criticized it, but she's gotten a lot of criticism for her climate change views, why wouldn't that dominate the criticism section? And if she hasn't had much notable work outside of her business, books, dotgs, and polar bears, I'm not sure why you would expect her career or education sections to have a ton of other stuff? That's the stuff even herself bio on her blog focuses on. Like you look at the headings of her non-criticism sections and decry them as if they are obviously lacking or derogatory or something but if that's all her notable work is about, why wouldn't they be like that? Like, your entire criticism seems at least to lack citations of why the material you are upset about shouldn't be there, and without them it really appears like you're just upset that a factual article about someone you are to some degree sympathetic with makes them look worse than you'd like. Honestly this is my problem with a lot of people's complaints of bias. A lot of it boils down to "the facts make my side of the issue look bad, can you emphasize/deemphasize some facts for me so both sides seem equal?" People seem to think that truly unbiased reporting makes all sides of a controversy seem equally correct and equally to have a point, but that is simply not true. Unbiased reporting is reporting the facts of the case, and if that happens to show that one side of a controversy is more correct than the others, then so be it. The job is to report the facts as best you can, and misrepresenting the facts and skewing their connotation or interpretation to make it look like a side of a controversy that doesn't have much going for it is equal to a side that has more of the facts on their side just in order to make everyone look equal would actually be biased, not the other way around. I'm not claiming the mainstream news media reports the facts of the case well, they don't, but they also fall afoul of this problem: on whatever issue the mainstream news media has decided they are going to be "impartial" on, every time they publish an article that is even slightly supportive of one side of the controversy, they feel it necessary to post an article from the other side of the controversy, even if that second article is a completely factually false, incoherent screed that has no facts or logic on its side, and treat it on supposedly equal footing in the name of impartiality. Or anytime they report on the issue they feel the need to use unnecessarily strained language to circumlocate around calling things what they actually are in order to prevent people from coming to the obvious conclusion the facts would lead them to, because that would make one side of the narrative be obviously more correct than the other, and you can't have that.
  - wonderfulcloud 3y ago
    Essentially any issue that relates to politics or geopolitics tends to have a strong left wing bias, as if it is written from the perspective of the left wing against the right wing.
    - Angostura 3y ago
      Or, your Overton window has shifted.
    - Karellen 3y ago
      Then again, reality has a well-known liberal bias. ;-)
      - kikokikokiko 3y ago
        [flagged]
        Apocryphon 3y ago
        Actually, numbers run on a libertarian-communitarian spectrum
      - ffgjgf1 3y ago
        So it would be centrist/moderate then, certainly not leftwing?
        function_seven 3y ago
        Not if the Overton Window is out of whack. Reality could conceivably be to the left or to the right of what we consider the extremes. What we label as “centrist” isn’t guaranteed to be the “actual” center of reality’s spectrum of ideology.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        At least, the internet does. Providing labor el gratis apparently goes against their purview, after all. But they sure will complain about free labor
  - google234123 3y ago
    This is a funny one - the editors have blocked the Mavels movie from being called a “bomb” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marvels https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marvels
  - DarkUranium 3y ago
    I've noticed anything copyleft-related will have edits in favour of not copyleft (e.g. MIT-style licensing) reverted, even if the pro-copyleft arguments are patently false in that case, or otherwise biased (e.g. mentioning specifically copyleft, but not alternatives). This is typically done in under the guise of notability ("GPL/copyleft is notable, other alternatives aren't").
eastbound 3y ago
Wikipedia is in the business of paying secret writers for content to sway opinions, politically. Of course they have jumped the shark, they’re basically working for agencies.
- sp332 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2024-01-31/Disinformation_report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    Surely we can trust Wikipedia about this topic /s
    - sp332 3y ago
      Fair, I am just posting the other side.
oxfordmale 3y ago
Wikipedia is great for non political, non-controversial topics, such as sciences. I wouldn't trust it on active politicians or other figures of public interest. One major problem is that you need to submit references to back up any claim. PR companies can easily buy an article in a fringe news site and them modify Wikipedia with a reference to that article. It is almost impossible to roll back. I once tried to update a company page to state they were going through redundancies. I was personally affected by this, and had internal emails to back this up. However, lacking a public reference it was rolled back.
- multjoy 3y ago
  Which is how it works. It is an encyclopaedia, not a breaking news site.
  - oxfordmale 3y ago
    The problem is that PR companies can push out whatever they want, where as an ordinary individual with personal knowledge of a topic, can't. It means many Wiki articles on person or companies, are often glorified advertisements, rather than encyclopedic entries.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      I've thought a two/three-lens Wikipedia split was needed to handle this, because each brings its benefits. I remember when nascent Wikipedia had user-contributed content, and the niche articles were way more interesting and detailed. Though at the cost of inaccuracy. Now, the submarine PR being backfed into it makes cited content pretty beige. Something like (1) a non-reader-visible, upstream Wikifacts + (2) a community-driven, laxer Wikiprototype + (3) an authoritative, cited Wikipedia.
    - multjoy 3y ago
      A blog post can be sufficient reference. The point is that Wikipedia isn't original research. You updating the page on the basis of personal knowledge isn't the way it is supposed to work.
thriftwy 3y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39019573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39019573 An amusing discussion where the OP says Wikipedia is here to stay, and every answer is downvoted, most of them flagged. All of them voicing concerns of some validity. This is super representative of that happens on Wikipedia.
- asveikau 3y ago
  I have show dead enabled here. There is a shocking amount of irrational negativity in that thread, even for HN.
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    It is well-known that people radicalize when they are excluded from political process. Wikipedia is notorious for excluding ordinary contributors from the process. Anybody can revert your change and that takes precedence over what you did, and there is no obvious appeal process for you, but de facto there is for the well-connected long-time editors. They can always gather some cavalry and run you over. So they should probably do what Stack Overflow tried to do, and explicitly say that new users / infrequent contributors have to receive more care, that needs to be provided by veterans / frequent contributors, as well as provide mechanisms to do so. Otherwise it is not a wikipedia that everyone can edit, rather a wikipedia written by a cabal who is also contains a large number of biased people, often getting direct or indirect funding from maintaining that bias.
    - stevage 3y ago
      StackOverflow also raises the bar for becoming a contributor. You can't start commenting until you have some upvotes on answers or questions for instance. I think these things turn out to be a bit important.
      - musicale 3y ago
        StackOverflow simply discourages contribution. Which saves me time that I might otherwise spend submitting thoughtful answers on StackOverflow.
araes 3y ago
I like Wikipedia and think it is still one of the better user contribution sites on the web. However, having been a long time contributor to [Current Events](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events) (fought over because of news relevancy), there have been waves of sock puppeting and attempts to constantly revoke all edits from certain users, that often make you not want to contribute. There is also this editorial talking about spending that makes some arguments about current issues with Wikipedia. Namely, that there's a lot of money going in, and not a lot of requested feature development. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
TulliusCicero 3y ago
Yeah, it's probably more accurate to say > Every for-profit contributor-driven platform has eventually jumped the shark
kranke155 3y ago
Wikipedia is extremely hard to edit these days, and some of the other language Wikipedias are dominated by ill intended accounts. The Portuguese language Wikipedia is censored by mods that work for local politicians in Portugal. It’s virtually impossible to add corruption cases to their page. So now you have this bizarro world where English language pages on Portuguese politicians have corruption scandals but Portuguese language do not.
- stevage 3y ago
  English Wikipedia is just as easy to edit these days as ever.
esafak 3y ago
Wikipedia is doing fine because it is not advertising supported.

b112 3y ago

It's only accurate if the view espoused in the page, matches what the gatekeeping moderator believes.

throw310822 3y ago

A lot of Wikipedia entries have become extremely partisan, and kept that way by moderators who are deeply invested in certain narratives. I find it very disappointing that no countermeasures have been taken- afaik Wikipedia still works exactly like 20 years ago, a barebone wiki governed by a lot of obscure, complex and unstructured politics. Granted, it might be the best possible way for an open-source encyclopedia to work. It is after all an incredible success. It's just pretty bad in some parts.

apexalpha 3y ago
Could you point to some examples of partisan entries?
- throw310822 3y ago
  As one example, I wrote this comment a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974614 But to expand a bit, for example I'm annoyed at many of the entries calling their subject "conspiracy theory/ theorist". Not that conspiracy theories and their believers don't exist, but at this point it has become a highly pejorative and judgemental term to frame ideas and narratives that need to be stigmatized rather than explained. Passing judgements should not, in my view, be the primary focus of an encyclopedia entry.
  - emj 3y ago
    So climate change, is it surprising the thread went bonkers? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_J._Crockford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_J._Crockford What ever I answer in this case the easiest reaction will be; for you will be to judge me and lump me together with what you cal activists, and for those activists it will me easiest to put me in the same conspiracy theorist group as you. This is not a problem with Wikipedia, this is a human problem. While I also think that article is abysmal, it does give context what to expect from people posting stuff by her. The biggest problem with your complaint is that you are not linking to an alternative, just do a fast draft on Wikipedia remove everything that you feel is not relevant and link that. Sure it will be reverted but that is probably because you first draft will not be a good article, those are evidently very hard to write when people think so differently about something.
    - mistermann 3y ago
      > This is not a problem with Wikipedia, this is a human problem. Wikipedia could be an excellent attack vector for sorting out human's heads at scale.
  - logicprog 3y ago
    Are any of the details that you were upset they included in her bio (e.g. that she's a contract scientist running a small business) incorrect or irrelevant? They certainly don't seem irrelevant to me, obviously they should explain what kind of scientist she is and what she does for a living — are you just mad because they happen to make her look like a less prestigious scientist and/or reliable source then you would like her to be? Also they pretty clearly note that her doctorate in interdisciplinary studies focused on mammals as its subject, what would you have them do? Claim that her doctorate was in something it wasn't, instead of interdisciplinary studies, just to make her look better, because a doctorate in interdisciplinary studies with a focus on some particular thing is "essentially equivalent" in your mind to an actual doctorate in that thing? Or claim she focused on evolutionary biology, when not even her own blog bio claims it was about "evolutionary biology" (she implies it was about zoology or another similar field)? Why do you say evolutionary biology should be listed then? Is it just to make her sound better? Likewise, why wouldn't the criticism section be mostly filled with what she's been criticized about the most? If most of her other work was unremarkable or solid and nobody criticized it, but she's gotten a lot of criticism for her climate change views, why wouldn't that dominate the criticism section? And if she hasn't had much notable work outside of her business, books, dotgs, and polar bears, I'm not sure why you would expect her career or education sections to have a ton of other stuff? That's the stuff even herself bio on her blog focuses on. Like you look at the headings of her non-criticism sections and decry them as if they are obviously lacking or derogatory or something but if that's all her notable work is about, why wouldn't they be like that? Like, your entire criticism seems at least to lack citations of why the material you are upset about shouldn't be there, and without them it really appears like you're just upset that a factual article about someone you are to some degree sympathetic with makes them look worse than you'd like. Honestly this is my problem with a lot of people's complaints of bias. A lot of it boils down to "the facts make my side of the issue look bad, can you emphasize/deemphasize some facts for me so both sides seem equal?" People seem to think that truly unbiased reporting makes all sides of a controversy seem equally correct and equally to have a point, but that is simply not true. Unbiased reporting is reporting the facts of the case, and if that happens to show that one side of a controversy is more correct than the others, then so be it. The job is to report the facts as best you can, and misrepresenting the facts and skewing their connotation or interpretation to make it look like a side of a controversy that doesn't have much going for it is equal to a side that has more of the facts on their side just in order to make everyone look equal would actually be biased, not the other way around. I'm not claiming the mainstream news media reports the facts of the case well, they don't, but they also fall afoul of this problem: on whatever issue the mainstream news media has decided they are going to be "impartial" on, every time they publish an article that is even slightly supportive of one side of the controversy, they feel it necessary to post an article from the other side of the controversy, even if that second article is a completely factually false, incoherent screed that has no facts or logic on its side, and treat it on supposedly equal footing in the name of impartiality. Or anytime they report on the issue they feel the need to use unnecessarily strained language to circumlocate around calling things what they actually are in order to prevent people from coming to the obvious conclusion the facts would lead them to, because that would make one side of the narrative be obviously more correct than the other, and you can't have that.
- wonderfulcloud 3y ago
  Essentially any issue that relates to politics or geopolitics tends to have a strong left wing bias, as if it is written from the perspective of the left wing against the right wing.
  - Angostura 3y ago
    Or, your Overton window has shifted.
  - Karellen 3y ago
    Then again, reality has a well-known liberal bias. ;-)
    - kikokikokiko 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - Apocryphon 3y ago
        Actually, numbers run on a libertarian-communitarian spectrum
    - ffgjgf1 3y ago
      So it would be centrist/moderate then, certainly not leftwing?
      - function_seven 3y ago
        Not if the Overton Window is out of whack. Reality could conceivably be to the left or to the right of what we consider the extremes. What we label as “centrist” isn’t guaranteed to be the “actual” center of reality’s spectrum of ideology.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      At least, the internet does. Providing labor el gratis apparently goes against their purview, after all. But they sure will complain about free labor
- google234123 3y ago
  This is a funny one - the editors have blocked the Mavels movie from being called a “bomb” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marvels https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marvels
- DarkUranium 3y ago
  I've noticed anything copyleft-related will have edits in favour of not copyleft (e.g. MIT-style licensing) reverted, even if the pro-copyleft arguments are patently false in that case, or otherwise biased (e.g. mentioning specifically copyleft, but not alternatives). This is typically done in under the guise of notability ("GPL/copyleft is notable, other alternatives aren't").

eastbound 3y ago

Wikipedia is in the business of paying secret writers for content to sway opinions, politically. Of course they have jumped the shark, they’re basically working for agencies.

sp332 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2024-01-31/Disinformation_report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
- edgyquant 3y ago
  Surely we can trust Wikipedia about this topic /s
  - sp332 3y ago
    Fair, I am just posting the other side.

oxfordmale 3y ago

Wikipedia is great for non political, non-controversial topics, such as sciences. I wouldn't trust it on active politicians or other figures of public interest. One major problem is that you need to submit references to back up any claim. PR companies can easily buy an article in a fringe news site and them modify Wikipedia with a reference to that article. It is almost impossible to roll back. I once tried to update a company page to state they were going through redundancies. I was personally affected by this, and had internal emails to back this up. However, lacking a public reference it was rolled back.

multjoy 3y ago
Which is how it works. It is an encyclopaedia, not a breaking news site.
- oxfordmale 3y ago
  The problem is that PR companies can push out whatever they want, where as an ordinary individual with personal knowledge of a topic, can't. It means many Wiki articles on person or companies, are often glorified advertisements, rather than encyclopedic entries.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    I've thought a two/three-lens Wikipedia split was needed to handle this, because each brings its benefits. I remember when nascent Wikipedia had user-contributed content, and the niche articles were way more interesting and detailed. Though at the cost of inaccuracy. Now, the submarine PR being backfed into it makes cited content pretty beige. Something like (1) a non-reader-visible, upstream Wikifacts + (2) a community-driven, laxer Wikiprototype + (3) an authoritative, cited Wikipedia.
  - multjoy 3y ago
    A blog post can be sufficient reference. The point is that Wikipedia isn't original research. You updating the page on the basis of personal knowledge isn't the way it is supposed to work.

thriftwy 3y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39019573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39019573 An amusing discussion where the OP says Wikipedia is here to stay, and every answer is downvoted, most of them flagged. All of them voicing concerns of some validity. This is super representative of that happens on Wikipedia.

asveikau 3y ago
I have show dead enabled here. There is a shocking amount of irrational negativity in that thread, even for HN.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  It is well-known that people radicalize when they are excluded from political process. Wikipedia is notorious for excluding ordinary contributors from the process. Anybody can revert your change and that takes precedence over what you did, and there is no obvious appeal process for you, but de facto there is for the well-connected long-time editors. They can always gather some cavalry and run you over. So they should probably do what Stack Overflow tried to do, and explicitly say that new users / infrequent contributors have to receive more care, that needs to be provided by veterans / frequent contributors, as well as provide mechanisms to do so. Otherwise it is not a wikipedia that everyone can edit, rather a wikipedia written by a cabal who is also contains a large number of biased people, often getting direct or indirect funding from maintaining that bias.
  - stevage 3y ago
    StackOverflow also raises the bar for becoming a contributor. You can't start commenting until you have some upvotes on answers or questions for instance. I think these things turn out to be a bit important.
    - musicale 3y ago
      StackOverflow simply discourages contribution. Which saves me time that I might otherwise spend submitting thoughtful answers on StackOverflow.

araes 3y ago

I like Wikipedia and think it is still one of the better user contribution sites on the web. However, having been a long time contributor to [Current Events](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events) (fought over because of news relevancy), there have been waves of sock puppeting and attempts to constantly revoke all edits from certain users, that often make you not want to contribute. There is also this editorial talking about spending that makes some arguments about current issues with Wikipedia. Namely, that there's a lot of money going in, and not a lot of requested feature development. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

TulliusCicero 3y ago

Yeah, it's probably more accurate to say > Every for-profit contributor-driven platform has eventually jumped the shark

kranke155 3y ago

Wikipedia is extremely hard to edit these days, and some of the other language Wikipedias are dominated by ill intended accounts. The Portuguese language Wikipedia is censored by mods that work for local politicians in Portugal. It’s virtually impossible to add corruption cases to their page. So now you have this bizarro world where English language pages on Portuguese politicians have corruption scandals but Portuguese language do not.

stevage 3y ago
English Wikipedia is just as easy to edit these days as ever.

esafak 3y ago

Wikipedia is doing fine because it is not advertising supported.