5 ms·

"There are many problems with Wikipedia. Here is an example from 12 years ago! Did we forget to mention that Wikipedia is now twice as old?" Ridiculous article

"There are many problems with Wikipedia. Here is an example from 12 years ago! Did we forget to mention that Wikipedia is now twice as old?" Ridiculous article. Organizing a wiki effort, just to spite the original won't work, because that's not enough, and not the right kind of fuel to last for such an undertaking. I feel like these people have no idea what kind of effort is to run an organization, instead seeing the issues as part of the technical, or ideological underpinnings. It doesn't work that way, and I invite every hopeful to look up the list of alternative Wikis that have sprung up over the years.

agumonkey 3y ago
I wonder if this has a name, it's a common reflex that pops up regularly, and yeah most of the time nothing comes out of it.
- npteljes 3y ago
  Dunning–Kruger effect might have something to do with it. People spotting issue in an established project, having an idea about how to improve it, but no actual experience in running such projects or even knowing the history and context of the established project. And the lack of this knowledge helping to overestimate their ability and perceived chance of success.
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    True, but I think there's a social/group aspect to it too. A lot of projects start like this, people all thinking it's time to start fresh only to devolve into nothingness in a few weeks.
  - observationist 3y ago
    If someone has staked a claim over an article, regardless of its factual accuracy, it's almost impossible to fix problems. Look at any politicians, celebrities, topics that are contentious in the public sphere, and you'll find control over the topic has been taken. There is no sane recourse - you can find endless examples of years long discussions as people who know what they're talking about battle it out with empty headed wiki editors who simply want the clout, or don't know the first thing about rational discourse and insist on their weird, distorted views of reality. Wikipedia could be made much less political, much more open, and given some mechanism by which consensus could be achieved without having to fight with tin pot tyrants in control of a wiki page. Wikipedia mostly works, but there are parts of the tech and processes that are unnecessary, counterproductive, and fundamentally political.
    - jjmarr 3y ago
      Speaking as someone who's been on there for years, the process is about as fair and transparent as it can be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discuss_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discus... You make a change, it gets reverted, and then you discuss it. The number one mistake I see new editors make is they don't understand how discussion works and when to seek additional input. After being reverted, you're expected to start a discussion on the talk page. So many people do not do that, and instead try to communicate through 200 character edit summaries. But talk pages are just the first step. The next step is to get more people involved. There are a bunch of informal rules which editors have tried to write down on how you can bring more people to a talk page in a fair way (otherwise you would only solicit input from people you would agree with). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution The typical way this is done is through an RfC, which is a structured discussion between multiple options. When you set up an RfC to resolve a dispute, a bot randomly messages people who are interested in the general area to comment at the talk page. That means you get a bunch of uninvolved editors that don't really have any stake in the dispute and are more level-headed. The discussion's consensus itself is then evaluated by someone (a closer) who must be uninvolved. In a contentious subject it is often an administrator who has never edited in the topic area before. The closer must give reasons for their decision and an explanation, and there is a working appeals process. Contrast to virtually any other website where decisions are frequently made by people involved in disputes, you typically don't get reasons for why something is moderated, and you can't effectively appeal to another decision maker as you don't understand the reasoning upon which the decision is based.
- boxed 3y ago
  I think it's universal among humans to see the flaw of existing systems and wanting to replace them and then are surprised at the following disaster. Communism, the French Revolution, Franco, the fall of the Roman Empire, every big software rewrite that failed spectacularly...
  - hnbad 3y ago
    > Communism Fun fact: prefiguration, a practice popular with anarchists, is essentially a form of refactoring rather than a rewrite. Arguably the problem with Soviet/Maoist communism and the French Revolution also was that it merely replaced who's in charge rather than dismantling the system of someone being in charge (i.e. it focused on individuals, not systems). It's worth noting though that the French Revolution did end up creating a representative democracy eventually even if it took a detour of replacing the monarch with a number of different autocrats - much like Cromwell in the UK for that matter. So I'd say the problem wasn't seeing flaws and wanting to replace the systems but thinking the flaws could be fixed without addressing the system in its entirety or looking at it from an actual systems theory point of view. Another fun fact: a lot of Nazis ended up back in positions of power in post-war Germany (both Germanies actually).
    - boxed 3y ago
      > Arguably the problem with Soviet/Maoist communism and the French Revolution also was that it merely replaced who's in charge rather than dismantling the system of someone being in charge I strongly disagree. They threw out way too much, not just who was in charge. "Throwing out the baby with the bathwater". In the case of Mao they made sweeping changes to agriculture several times. Each with the potential of causing massive famines, and together caused the largest man made disaster in history. That's not just replacing who is in charge (which would have been MUCH BETTER), it's dismantling a thousand years of knowledge and tradition in favor of something they thought was better. Absolute disaster. The French revolution, and USSR did quite similar things with disastrous consequences.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lenerdenator 3y ago
  The "Blackjack and Hookers" reflex, from Futurama when Bender gets thrown out of the amusement park on the Moon and says "I'll start my own theme park... with blackjack!... and hookers!... in fact, forget the park!" EDIT: Basically that's how these projects turn out. Having a theme park was never the point; blackjack and hookers were the point. Having a federated Wikipedia alternative isn't the point; having an encyclopedia where you can push an insane description of a topic and present it as reality is the point. And really, that makes for a shitty encyclopedia. Shitty enough for it to disappear before doing damage to the shared sense of reality society needs? No, but still shitty.
  - nick238 3y ago
    Wikipedia + Blackjack + Hookers - Wikipedia = https://www.conservapedia.com/ https://www.conservapedia.com/
    - lolc 3y ago
      Wow I haven't seen a link to Conservapedia in a looong time. Out of curiosity, I clicked. They claim physical reality of the biblical flood: https://www.conservapedia.com/Great_Flood https://www.conservapedia.com/Great_Flood And wow somebody has put a lot of work in this page https://www.conservapedia.com/Conservapedia_proven_right https://www.conservapedia.com/Conservapedia_proven_right Great resource if you want to know what US bible people care about. They have institutionalised their confirmation bias.
      - hagbard_c 3y ago
        > They claim physical reality of the biblical flood There is evidence of the Mediterranean Basin flooding after breach of a land bridge across what is now the Strait of Gibraltar [1,2] some 5 million years ago. In the same way there is some evidence of the Black Sea rapidly expanding some 8000 years ago [3]. Similar 'catastrophic flood' scenarios have played out elsewhere on the planet which has led to the rise of flood myths like the Biblical flood. While Conservapedia goes heavy on scripture in laying out their proof for a historical basis for the flood (i.e. they are just as biased as Wikipedia tends to be on politically contentious subjects) it is a rational position to state that the myriad of flood myths around the world and along the ages are based on historical flood events. In short, Conservapedia does what Wikipedia does but replaces the 'progressive' bias with a 'conservative' one. [1] https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/science-and-technology/2020/03/the-mediterranean-nearly-dried-up-a-cataclysmic-flood-revived-it https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/science-and-technology/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis
- hnbad 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect Beyond the Wikipedia definition, I've heard the term used to describe the phenomenon of people looking at an ugly codebase with tons of special cases and expectations, thinking they can create a leaner version only to end up going nowhere because all those special cases and expectations that made for ugly UML diagrams had reasons to exist and the overconfidence led to feature creep to justify the time investment to stakeholders. I.e. a good explanation for why it's often better to refactor than rewrite.
  - LordDragonfang 3y ago
    Having read the book that term came from, I recall that being more about the developers of the first system feeling overconfidence in their abilities on a version two, rather than an outsider looking in (as is the case here).
- solidsnack9000 3y ago
  Maybe we should name it. The "alt-Wiki reflex" or something like that.
- LordDragonfang 3y ago
  I've seen something similar referred to as the "Voat" effect. Voat was a reddit alternative that popped up when reddit started banning subs that had poor optics (the explicit hate subreddits, the pro-racism subreddits, the basically-child-porn subs). Voat was founded on a principle of free speech, allowing whatever content users wanted. Regardless of whether reddit made the correct decision banning those suspect subreddits, it turns out having a community composed almost entirely of those cast-offs is not a pleasant place to be.
  - hughesjj 3y ago
    I tried it for a solid 5m before noping TF out. There was also a bunch of mudslinging against Ellen Pao when it turned out she was basically just a scapegoat for the founders and other reddit higher ups to make some unpopular (at the time, given public context) decisions
jrm4 3y ago
Right? I think there is a cool idea here, but the article is so weirdly negative and generally garbage I have trouble telling.
SpecialistK 3y ago
> Organizing a wiki effort, just to spite the original won't work, because that's not enough, and not the right kind of fuel to last for such an undertaking. Can confirm firsthand. The wiki project I founded was pretty niche (no overlap with Wikipedia) but took hundreds of hours of page creation just to get off the ground. It has to be a labour of love.
- npteljes 3y ago
  I agree. I feel like it's a combination of labor of love, and the effort of organizing a community. I also think that with Wikis specifically, it needs to allow something that the original doesn't. For example this is why fandom wikis are popular, because they allow "in-universe" explanations and notability is only required in terms of the universe discussed. Or RationalWiki, which has a specifically different style guide, and an opinionated slant. Or Encyclopedia Dramatica, which allows... well not the healthiest things, but still, I consider it a successful project, compared to the ghost towns of other Wiki initiatives. And neither of these wikis aim to be alternatives to the original Wiki, which is also very important.
archagon 3y ago
I feel the second biggest innovation of Wikipedia, after the wiki format itself, is establishing the proper tooling, policies, and incentives to allow a stable hierarchy of editors and maintainers to develop. This is the aspect that gives Wikipedia its longevity.
- SllX 3y ago
  Well, the wiki format isn’t really theirs: https://wiki.c2.com/?WikiWikiWeb https://wiki.c2.com/?WikiWikiWeb

agumonkey 3y ago

I wonder if this has a name, it's a common reflex that pops up regularly, and yeah most of the time nothing comes out of it.

npteljes 3y ago
Dunning–Kruger effect might have something to do with it. People spotting issue in an established project, having an idea about how to improve it, but no actual experience in running such projects or even knowing the history and context of the established project. And the lack of this knowledge helping to overestimate their ability and perceived chance of success.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  True, but I think there's a social/group aspect to it too. A lot of projects start like this, people all thinking it's time to start fresh only to devolve into nothingness in a few weeks.
- observationist 3y ago
  If someone has staked a claim over an article, regardless of its factual accuracy, it's almost impossible to fix problems. Look at any politicians, celebrities, topics that are contentious in the public sphere, and you'll find control over the topic has been taken. There is no sane recourse - you can find endless examples of years long discussions as people who know what they're talking about battle it out with empty headed wiki editors who simply want the clout, or don't know the first thing about rational discourse and insist on their weird, distorted views of reality. Wikipedia could be made much less political, much more open, and given some mechanism by which consensus could be achieved without having to fight with tin pot tyrants in control of a wiki page. Wikipedia mostly works, but there are parts of the tech and processes that are unnecessary, counterproductive, and fundamentally political.
  - jjmarr 3y ago
    Speaking as someone who's been on there for years, the process is about as fair and transparent as it can be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discuss_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discus... You make a change, it gets reverted, and then you discuss it. The number one mistake I see new editors make is they don't understand how discussion works and when to seek additional input. After being reverted, you're expected to start a discussion on the talk page. So many people do not do that, and instead try to communicate through 200 character edit summaries. But talk pages are just the first step. The next step is to get more people involved. There are a bunch of informal rules which editors have tried to write down on how you can bring more people to a talk page in a fair way (otherwise you would only solicit input from people you would agree with). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution The typical way this is done is through an RfC, which is a structured discussion between multiple options. When you set up an RfC to resolve a dispute, a bot randomly messages people who are interested in the general area to comment at the talk page. That means you get a bunch of uninvolved editors that don't really have any stake in the dispute and are more level-headed. The discussion's consensus itself is then evaluated by someone (a closer) who must be uninvolved. In a contentious subject it is often an administrator who has never edited in the topic area before. The closer must give reasons for their decision and an explanation, and there is a working appeals process. Contrast to virtually any other website where decisions are frequently made by people involved in disputes, you typically don't get reasons for why something is moderated, and you can't effectively appeal to another decision maker as you don't understand the reasoning upon which the decision is based.
boxed 3y ago
I think it's universal among humans to see the flaw of existing systems and wanting to replace them and then are surprised at the following disaster. Communism, the French Revolution, Franco, the fall of the Roman Empire, every big software rewrite that failed spectacularly...
- hnbad 3y ago
  > Communism Fun fact: prefiguration, a practice popular with anarchists, is essentially a form of refactoring rather than a rewrite. Arguably the problem with Soviet/Maoist communism and the French Revolution also was that it merely replaced who's in charge rather than dismantling the system of someone being in charge (i.e. it focused on individuals, not systems). It's worth noting though that the French Revolution did end up creating a representative democracy eventually even if it took a detour of replacing the monarch with a number of different autocrats - much like Cromwell in the UK for that matter. So I'd say the problem wasn't seeing flaws and wanting to replace the systems but thinking the flaws could be fixed without addressing the system in its entirety or looking at it from an actual systems theory point of view. Another fun fact: a lot of Nazis ended up back in positions of power in post-war Germany (both Germanies actually).
  - boxed 3y ago
    > Arguably the problem with Soviet/Maoist communism and the French Revolution also was that it merely replaced who's in charge rather than dismantling the system of someone being in charge I strongly disagree. They threw out way too much, not just who was in charge. "Throwing out the baby with the bathwater". In the case of Mao they made sweeping changes to agriculture several times. Each with the potential of causing massive famines, and together caused the largest man made disaster in history. That's not just replacing who is in charge (which would have been MUCH BETTER), it's dismantling a thousand years of knowledge and tradition in favor of something they thought was better. Absolute disaster. The French revolution, and USSR did quite similar things with disastrous consequences.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lenerdenator 3y ago
The "Blackjack and Hookers" reflex, from Futurama when Bender gets thrown out of the amusement park on the Moon and says "I'll start my own theme park... with blackjack!... and hookers!... in fact, forget the park!" EDIT: Basically that's how these projects turn out. Having a theme park was never the point; blackjack and hookers were the point. Having a federated Wikipedia alternative isn't the point; having an encyclopedia where you can push an insane description of a topic and present it as reality is the point. And really, that makes for a shitty encyclopedia. Shitty enough for it to disappear before doing damage to the shared sense of reality society needs? No, but still shitty.
- nick238 3y ago
  Wikipedia + Blackjack + Hookers - Wikipedia = https://www.conservapedia.com/ https://www.conservapedia.com/
  - lolc 3y ago
    Wow I haven't seen a link to Conservapedia in a looong time. Out of curiosity, I clicked. They claim physical reality of the biblical flood: https://www.conservapedia.com/Great_Flood https://www.conservapedia.com/Great_Flood And wow somebody has put a lot of work in this page https://www.conservapedia.com/Conservapedia_proven_right https://www.conservapedia.com/Conservapedia_proven_right Great resource if you want to know what US bible people care about. They have institutionalised their confirmation bias.
    - hagbard_c 3y ago
      > They claim physical reality of the biblical flood There is evidence of the Mediterranean Basin flooding after breach of a land bridge across what is now the Strait of Gibraltar [1,2] some 5 million years ago. In the same way there is some evidence of the Black Sea rapidly expanding some 8000 years ago [3]. Similar 'catastrophic flood' scenarios have played out elsewhere on the planet which has led to the rise of flood myths like the Biblical flood. While Conservapedia goes heavy on scripture in laying out their proof for a historical basis for the flood (i.e. they are just as biased as Wikipedia tends to be on politically contentious subjects) it is a rational position to state that the myriad of flood myths around the world and along the ages are based on historical flood events. In short, Conservapedia does what Wikipedia does but replaces the 'progressive' bias with a 'conservative' one. [1] https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/science-and-technology/2020/03/the-mediterranean-nearly-dried-up-a-cataclysmic-flood-revived-it https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/science-and-technology/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis
hnbad 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect Beyond the Wikipedia definition, I've heard the term used to describe the phenomenon of people looking at an ugly codebase with tons of special cases and expectations, thinking they can create a leaner version only to end up going nowhere because all those special cases and expectations that made for ugly UML diagrams had reasons to exist and the overconfidence led to feature creep to justify the time investment to stakeholders. I.e. a good explanation for why it's often better to refactor than rewrite.
- LordDragonfang 3y ago
  Having read the book that term came from, I recall that being more about the developers of the first system feeling overconfidence in their abilities on a version two, rather than an outsider looking in (as is the case here).
solidsnack9000 3y ago
Maybe we should name it. The "alt-Wiki reflex" or something like that.
LordDragonfang 3y ago
I've seen something similar referred to as the "Voat" effect. Voat was a reddit alternative that popped up when reddit started banning subs that had poor optics (the explicit hate subreddits, the pro-racism subreddits, the basically-child-porn subs). Voat was founded on a principle of free speech, allowing whatever content users wanted. Regardless of whether reddit made the correct decision banning those suspect subreddits, it turns out having a community composed almost entirely of those cast-offs is not a pleasant place to be.
- hughesjj 3y ago
  I tried it for a solid 5m before noping TF out. There was also a bunch of mudslinging against Ellen Pao when it turned out she was basically just a scapegoat for the founders and other reddit higher ups to make some unpopular (at the time, given public context) decisions

jrm4 3y ago

Right? I think there is a cool idea here, but the article is so weirdly negative and generally garbage I have trouble telling.

SpecialistK 3y ago

> Organizing a wiki effort, just to spite the original won't work, because that's not enough, and not the right kind of fuel to last for such an undertaking. Can confirm firsthand. The wiki project I founded was pretty niche (no overlap with Wikipedia) but took hundreds of hours of page creation just to get off the ground. It has to be a labour of love.

npteljes 3y ago
I agree. I feel like it's a combination of labor of love, and the effort of organizing a community. I also think that with Wikis specifically, it needs to allow something that the original doesn't. For example this is why fandom wikis are popular, because they allow "in-universe" explanations and notability is only required in terms of the universe discussed. Or RationalWiki, which has a specifically different style guide, and an opinionated slant. Or Encyclopedia Dramatica, which allows... well not the healthiest things, but still, I consider it a successful project, compared to the ghost towns of other Wiki initiatives. And neither of these wikis aim to be alternatives to the original Wiki, which is also very important.

archagon 3y ago

I feel the second biggest innovation of Wikipedia, after the wiki format itself, is establishing the proper tooling, policies, and incentives to allow a stable hierarchy of editors and maintainers to develop. This is the aspect that gives Wikipedia its longevity.

SllX 3y ago
Well, the wiki format isn’t really theirs: https://wiki.c2.com/?WikiWikiWeb https://wiki.c2.com/?WikiWikiWeb