25 ms·

Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

602 points by leotravis10 1y ago

mediumsmart 1y ago
Wikipedia broke some time ago in order to be allowed to survive. There are still things that can be looked up there and taken at face value.
- soupfordummies 1y ago
  I read this comment three times and I still don't understand what you're trying to say. Not trying to be rude, just saying.
  - mediumsmart 1y ago
    In my opinion some years back Wikipedia broke meaning that it was no longer impartial by default. It’s no biggie and was to be expected given its scale and perceived authority. Just saying. You could watch manufacturing consent maybe to understand the comment but you don’t have to.
arminiusreturns 1y ago
Wikipedia is hasbara central, yall are drinking too much of the simp-juice.
maskil 1y ago
Wikipedia is completely unreliable on any area of controversy, there are armies of editors who are skilled in fitting the articles to their agenda.
gcanyon 1y ago
> conservatives… claim[ing] Wikipedia has strayed from its neutrality principle by making judgments about the reliability of sources. Instead, … it should present all views equally, including things “many Republicans believe,” That is some 1984-level “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength" argument. If those “news” sources want people to stop calling them liars, they should stop lying.
homefree 1y ago
Wikipedia has major issues - there are a lot of topics with coordinated editing from bad actors. The verge article is paywalled so I can't read more than the first page + headline, but I can guess the case it makes. - https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik... - https://www.piratewires.com/p/wikipedia-editors-cant-decide-if https://www.piratewires.com/p/wikipedia-editors-cant-decide-... - https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-wikipedia-s-pro-hamas-editors-hijacked-the-israel-palestine-narrative https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-wikipedia-s-pro-hamas-edit... It's similar to the problem on Reddit, I wouldn't trust it on any topic that is even mildly controversial. Wikipedia will have a strong progressive left slant it launders carefully through seemingly neutral language and selective sourcing. Honestly it's gotten worse over the years too - makes me see more value in printed encyclopedia, they go out of date but at least they represent a slice of time. They're not endlessly revised to meet some false ideology that has edit power at present.
- techpineapple 1y ago
  But what is better? I mean yes, reading 20 sources on a topic and coming to your own conclusions about an issue is the right answer, but the fact that Wikipedia published its edit history and discussions page makes it seem better than then what everything? Almost every book you read about Israel Palestine will probably be biased in some way, certainly the news will be. It feels like perfect being the enemy of good. Like sure it’s a mess like all compendiums of human knowledge, but also seems massively better than the alternative. Your point about the encyclopedia seems strange, sure it’s likely to be less accurate less complete and more biased, but it’s narratively interesting is like? What are you trying to accomplish than that that’s better? Annoyance at Wikipedia feels nihilistic. Like “it’s not perfect so why try”. “I’d rather read things where I think I know what the bias is (but probably don’t”
  - cindyllm 1y ago
    [dead]
  - homefree 1y ago
KebabKanaken 1y ago
Wikipedia is, from an political bias and data quality POV, bad enough. Couple that with the endowment-enabled grifters of the WMF doing their usual donation blood drive twice a year, and you puke in disgust.
mrkramer 1y ago
I remember when teachers in school use to tell us that Wikipedia sucks because there in no scientific peer review. They couldn't wrap their heads around the concept of casual crowdsourcing.
- krapp 1y ago
  >They couldn't wrap their heads around the concept of casual crowdsourcing. I'm sure they could, most teachers aren't idiots. And they were correct that "casual crowdsourcing" is not a fitting replacement for peer review. And in fact, the current moderation policies for Wikipedia only work in so far as they use peer-review type processes, such as requiring "notability" and multiple sources, and preferring expertise in a field. Of course, if you're in a relevant field you shouldn't use Wikipedia as a primary source since you would presumably have access to whatever sources the wiki itself cites in the articles.
  - mrkramer 1y ago
    If I were to make Wikipedia once again from the ground up I would put more attention into building reputation system of contributors. If you have more reputation you are allowed to edit something and/or your edit has more weight.
doron 1y ago
You take the advertising driven paradigm out of the equation, and a website might be worth something more than rage clicks and doom scrolling machine, who knew?! Ad driven sites broke the internet; they might have broken society to some degree as well.
BrtByte 1y ago
The tragedy is that we all rely on Wikipedia, but very few of us contribute to it
krunck 1y ago
https://archive.is/rXgsz https://archive.is/rXgsz
Der_Einzige 1y ago
[flagged]
- yapyap 1y ago
  false equivalence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence
  - Der_Einzige 1y ago
    Maybe give some arguments or evidence instead of linking wikipedia. Everyone clicking on that archive link avoided having to pay someone to see information. I'm personally a copyright abolitionist, so I'm pretty okay with that - but I want people who pearl clutch about AI systems not paying to realize that it's the same damn thing going on when they click on the archive link.
    - sjsdaiuasgdia 1y ago
      I'd disagree that it's the same thing. With AI content scraping, the people whose content was ingested aren't getting paid. That part does align to paywalls. But there's more in the AI content situation. The scraped content is repackaged without any credit being given to the people who made the content. In most cases, the models trained on the content are intended to be monetized, and there is no intent to share revenue with the people who made the content. When I bypass a paywall, there is no particular expectation that I'm going to take the content, modify it, and display / sell it as my own. In the vast majority of cases, someone reads some free content and moves on. The damage to the site or publication is limited to the unpaid viewing. AI content scraping absolutely comes with an expectation that the content will be modified, presented, and sold. The damage goes beyond the unpaid viewing of the content.
    - mdp2021 1y ago
      The submission is not about LLMs being fed copyrighted material during training. The poster does not immediately seem to be an advocate condemning the practice. Your post was out of place.
djoldman 1y ago
> Wikipedia is the largest compendium of human knowledge ever assembled, with more than 7 million articles in its English version, the largest and most developed of 343 language projects. but: > The collections of the Library of Congress include more than 32 million catalogued books and other print materials in 470 languages; more than 61 million manuscripts; the largest rare book collection in North America ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress#Holdings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress#Holdings
- jalapenod 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
    It's handy to have a neutral place I can look up books or passages of the Christian Bible so that I have a reference point when talking to people about it
    - UncleSlacky 1y ago
      https://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/ https://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/ exists.
    - BlueTemplar 1y ago
      Isn't the issue with this is that you would first have to know which bible to use ?
      - spauldo 1y ago
        The differences between the translations are generally very minor. There are very few places where there is any significant difference in meaning.
  - UtopiaPunk 1y ago
    [citation needed]
glimshe 1y ago
The "largest compendium of human knowledge ever assembled" isn't Wikipedia. It's Anna's Archive. Especially relevant when reading this from a paywalled article.
- gosub100 1y ago
  True but we are in dire need of a killer search engine for it. We're hopefully just a couple years away from a great self-hosted search and life-like TTS for massive ebook collections.
bawolff 1y ago
There has been this trend recently of calling Wikipedia the last good thing on the internet. And i agree its great, i spend an inordinate amount of my time on Wikimedia related things. But i think there is a danger here with all these articles putting Wikipedia too much on a pedestal. It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws. The true best part of Wikipedia is that its a work in progress and people are working to make it a little better everyday. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact we aren't there yet. We'll never be "there". But hopefully we'll continue to be a little bit closer every day. And that is what makes Wikipedia great.
- fngjdflmdflg 1y ago
  This doesn't make sense because Wikipedia is a collection of sources, most of which are on the internet. If would be surprising if Wikipedia was a good thing but the online sources it uses are bad.
  - phantomathkg 1y ago
    Wikipedia can be bad because it is edited by human. And because it is edited by human, the side that has more people will win. For example, Wikipedia has a Chinese issue. [1] Because both Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese both live under the Chinese language in Wiki (And we have a dropdown within Chinese wiki to choose what regional variants we want to read). There's a constant wiki edit war. This is not only happened to the political topic, but also how something should be phased. Even though Chinese officially ban access to Wikipedia by the Great Firewall, enough people VPN and manage to edit wiki pages by pages, and more annoyingly, there are more wiki admin coming from PRC than Taiwan/Hong Kong/Macau etc. So you cannot assume Wikipedia is neutral. [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59081611 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59081611
- pohl 1y ago
  I've heard it expressed as "the last good thing on the internet" many times, but it never occurred to me to interpret that to mean it has attained perfection in some regard. I always took it to mean that it has thus far evaded the enshitification trends.
moiz41510 1y ago
[dead]
hungmung 1y ago
Honestly Wikipedia+Archive.org remaining online have national security implications (not just USA, but any democracy). Though I'd wager the current administration would take a different view.
- em-bee 1y ago
  what are the implications?
  - hungmung 1y ago
    We've always been at war with Eurasia. Not all threats are external.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  I can see the national security implications for countries like Russia and China, that are widely known for pushing false histories backed up with state punishment, but in high-functioning democracies the state does not control public speech.
- jacobgkau 1y ago
  > national security implications (not just USA, but any democracy) That's not really "national," is it?
  - hungmung 1y ago
    National security doesn't just refer to USA...? France has national security considerations, just like the UK, Uruguay and Uganda. They'd all benefit from having open access to verifiable information.
    - jacobgkau 1y ago
      That's fine, it just seems more like a "societal security consideration," "democratic consideration," or just a general "consideration" than specifically "national security," which has the scope of a nation.
Aurornis 1y ago
In the past few years I've noticed more and more issues on Wikipedia. It has never been perfect, but in the past it seemed like anything without sufficient sources would quickly get flagged as "citation needed" or questionable statements would get a warning label slapped on them. Now, I can visit pages for certain medical conditions that contain completely unsourced claims with no "citation needed" nor any warnings. When I try to search for it, I often trace it back to alternative medicine or pseudoscience influencers. The sad part is that when I've tried to remove obviously flimsy information, someone will immediately come along and add it back. Unless you're ready to spend months in a Wikipedia edit war with someone who obsesses over a page, there's no point in even trying. These people know the rules and processes and will use every one of them against you. When that fails, they'll try to pull rank. If that fails, they'll just quietly continue editing and rewriting (possibly from alt accounts) until you get too tired to fight the battle any more.
- ars 1y ago
  I've noticed this exact same thing. And I too just gave up. People have their pet causes and they force the article to match, and normal, non-obsessed people give up. Any controversial topic should never be read on Wikipedia, it will not be accurate.
  - mothballed 1y ago
    I noticed this during the election. As soon as Kamala become the contender, it was edited out that her father was described as a "marxist scholar" by a college newspaper. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&diff=1309230172&oldid=1217573879 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&...
    - bakugo 1y ago
      Another great example is when the "Cultural Marxism" article was converted into "Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory", an entirely different article claiming that the concept of cultural marxism was actually always a "far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory", complete with a section relating it to Gamergate. It's so ridiculous, it's almost funny to read. https://web.archive.org/web/20140519194937/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism https://web.archive.org/web/20140519194937/http://en.wikiped... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...
Wikipedianon 1y ago
The article criticizes doxxing but well-known Wikipedia editors doxx each other all the time... There's a site called Wikipediocracy that's been around for 20 years and an Arbitrator (Wiki's Supreme Court) was suspended for leaking secret deliberations to the "private" section of the forum—just make an account and you can see it too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2023-12-04/News_and_notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... According to that Arbitrator, Wikimedia gave a legal opinion that he violated the law in doing so: "Well, I got a result today: the ombuds commisssion found that I did indeed violate the access to nonpublic data policy, and has issued a final warning to me. Apparently mailing list comments are, "under a contemporary understanding of privacy law and the policies in question," nonpublic data on the same level as CU data or supressed libel." https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=350266#p350207 https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=350266#p350... Wasn't the first time he did it either... Officially, community guidelines only apply on the site itself. Once you get into the Discords or forums, doxxing is common and tolerated. Admins and arbitrators are happy to participate on those forums under their Wikipedia usernames because they feel like they need doxx to take action against those trying to harm Wikipedia. And because it (usually) isn't them doing the doxxing, it's ok. There's even an "alt-right identification thread" where established editors can request doxxing from people who don't link their accounts onwiki. Generally this targets newer editors who aren't in a clique yet. e.g. The person who made "Wikipedia and Antisemitism" got doxxed. Once you get to a certain level, you are expected to participate in these "offwiki" forums to get anything done. Some people try to complain about it but it doesn't end well. Generally you don't want to fuck with them because by the time you find out about Wikipediocracy, you've already revealed too much and are doxxable. & unlike nation-state actors they have inside information and understand the site. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Archive360#Are_people_allowed_to_just_open_Wikipediocracy_threads_for_backup_when_they_get_blocked_for_canvassing_on_Wikipediocracy_%3Credacted%3E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no... If you do choose to edit Wikipedia, use a burner email and only edit during the same one or two hours of the day so they can't track timezones. & don't post any photos or information on where you live nor attend meetups. There are some good people but once you get deeply involved it is a toxic community. Sorry for the rant but it pisses me off whenever people talk about how great the Wikipedia community is as someone who's into the internal shit. it's the worst place to get involved in "free culture".
carabiner 1y ago
[flagged]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
lenerdenator 1y ago
This is because of the lack of a profit motive and sane expectations on salary from the people running the Wikimedia project. I think that starting in the 1980s, people started to expect anything involving information technology created immediately-accountable monetary value on a massive scale after seeing the fortunes of people like Gates, Wozniak, Jobs, et al. This was further boosted by the Dotcom bubble. The fact is, a significant fraction of IT is indeed profitable, but applying the model of perpetual growth is not appropriate for all of that significant fraction, and there's the other fraction of the IT world that isn't directly profitable. More people need to realize that their work falls in the latter two fractions instead of the first.
pessimizer 1y ago
I've started to think that the fact that Wikipedia will change its descriptions of reality based on whoever is willing to spend the time and money to subvert it is a feature when it comes to survival. When the final sci-fi authoritarian dictatorship comes down, Wikipedia will happily explain that it was always here, and that Eastasia was always the enemy.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  Its (relatively short) history suggests otherwise, so far.
  - pessimizer 1y ago
    It certainly does not. It is not dependable for any subject that anybody or any government that commands any significant resources has any interest in. I'm sure there's somebody right this second guarding distortions on some obscure page about some scientific phenomenon that 99.999% of people have never heard of because their investment depends on it. The political model doesn't work at all. If you just count the votes of the people who show up to vote, the Party will hire buses and empty the retirement homes and homeless shelters. Maybe you can fight this irl if everyone knows there's an election, but nobody knows when there's a war on a talk page.
    - zahlman 1y ago
      > If you just count the votes of the people who show up to vote, the Party will hire buses and empty the retirement homes and homeless shelters. They don't even have to go that far; consider the "consensus is not a vote" policy.
    - HankStallone 1y ago
      Yeah, I've heard people say, "I don't use it for anything controversial, but it's accurate for other stuff." That's usually true, but you can't assume it, because you never know what will be someone's personal hobbyhorse. If I just want to know some dry facts about Podunk, BFE, it'll probably have them right. But maybe not, if the mayor of Podunk wrote the page and is trying to promote the town, or if it was last edited by someone who used to live there and hates the place. And very few people are going to check the talk or history pages to see whether there's been an edit war or other hints that the page might be sketchy.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
_dke7 1y ago
Important recent context - just a few days ago House Republicans asked Wikipedia to reveal the name of some editors: https://truthout.org/articles/house-republicans-investigate-wikipedia-for-alleged-anti-israel-bias/ https://truthout.org/articles/house-republicans-investigate-...
- sirbutters 1y ago
  [flagged]
- Jean-Papoulos 1y ago
  Putting bibles everywhere, removing books from libraries, now getting the names of wikipedians... They're going slowly, but they're going surely.
  - SlowTao 1y ago
    They have been playing the long game for decades, the speed up in recent times feels like they realised the windows was closing and they need to lock things down before many wise up.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  I can't claim I was part of the original internet users, but this is part of why anonymity was so important to them. I'm pretty open about my real life on here and other channels, and some people IRL know my real name. But I would regret it if an organization, government or employer attaches consequences to my online behaviour.
3036e4 1y ago
An unexpected side-effect for me after I started subscribing to Kagi a few months ago, at a low tier with limited searches, is that I made sure to configure all my browsers with keywords for Wikipedia searches and I use those a lot, knowing that what I will end up with after searching is probably going to be the Wikipedia page anyway. No point wasting precious limited monthly searches.
- manquer 1y ago
  Kagi does not count bangs as part of monthly usage - for wiki that would be !w search term https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/plan-types.html#how-searches-are-counted-starter-plan https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/plan-types.html#how-searche...
  - BlueTemplar 1y ago
    I'm still puzzled after all these years : why would anyone use search engine bangs instead of directly configuring custom searches from their browser's URL bar ?
    - freediver 1y ago
      Bangs through Kagi work cross-device, on every browser you use whether it supports custom searches or not.
    - macintux 1y ago
      Because I know how to use search engine bangs, and I have no idea what a “custom search” would look like. After probably 15 years of using DDG the bangs are just part of my muscle memory. Why bother changing things?
      - BlueTemplar 1y ago
        Well, my question then is why didn't you use custom search before DDG added bangs ? Today in Firefox : right click on a search field, add search engine. Pretty sure that this evolved from that separate search field that browsers used to have in addition to the URL field ?
glitchc 1y ago
Wikipedia has plenty of propaganda. It's often at the fringes of knowledge, in niche subjects where there isn't yet an established group of proponents and detractors. It can be quite subtle too, will fool most laypeople, even those who are otherwise intellectually savvy. It's only when a subject becomes popular that the propaganda gets recognized and rectified.
- voxl 1y ago
  And? Share an example. This reads like conspiratorial thinking without any evidence.
  - Andrex 1y ago
    Not the OP but I'll back him up, and I'll edit this comment when I come across them. They're pretty common. If the domain of knowledge is niche and the page is absolutely huge, that's a good sign to start looking for editoralizations and slants. A lot of wiki pages about smaller companies only list the good things (fundraising, tech, etc.) and omit any controversies. The deliberate omissions due to bias are even more insidious than weasel words or other forms of poor journalism. Fwiw I truly believe in Wikipedia and donate every year, but calling it "perfect" would be extremely dangerous (and false!)
    - straydusk 1y ago
      Share an example then
    - glitchc 1y ago
      Thanks! I've noticed this for descriptions of political individuals, entities and current events in offbeat parts of the world, where coverage of such in mainstream media is slim to non-existent.
    - jajko 1y ago
      Perfect it ain't, I never even heard anybody actually relevant state that, by the core principle of it it can't be. But, its by far the best human-averaged source of info on most topics. I'd say even politically charged topics, definitely much better than most news out there who always show some clear bias. Its not exhaustive (another common complain form folks who seek visibility by complaining and denigrating stuff for the heck of it or some immature popularity), its not meant to be. You also don't do postgrad level physics studies from Encyclopædia Britannica, do you, but it may give you some shallow introduction to orientate in the field a bit.
jandrusk 1y ago
They’ve always have had a leftist bias like most of big tech. https://x.com/therabbithole84/status/1957598712693452920?s=46 https://x.com/therabbithole84/status/1957598712693452920?s=4...
- slater 1y ago
  aka, biased towards reality
  - pityJuke 1y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/?redirect=no&title=Reality_has_a_well_known_liberal_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/?redirect=no&title=Reality_has_a_...
- pavlov 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - PathOfEclipse 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - fnikacevic 1y ago
      The only specific example from that nypost article is about Fox News not being allowed as a source. Fox news has been found in court to be guilty of defamation and has argued in court that it cannot be considered news, only entertainment. So do you want reality or reality TV on Wikipedia? Should we consider Ancient Aliens as a source?
      - Clamchop 1y ago
        Fox News argued in court that their political commentary programming isn't news. They didn't argue that none of their programming is news.
testplzignore 1y ago
> Because Wikipedia was under a Creative Commons license, anyone who didn’t like the way the project was run could copy it and start their own, as a group of Spanish users did when the possibility of running ads was raised in 2002. Correction on this: Wikipedia was GFDL until 2009. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Licensing_update https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Licensing_update .
- globular-toast 1y ago
  If I remember correctly, the licence change was achieved by the FSF releasing a special version of the GFDL allowing the change, taking advantage of the "any later version" part of the original licence. OpenStreetMap's licence change was much more difficult. Agreement had to be sought from all editors and for the few that didn't respond their work was removed. We actually replaced the work of most non-responders before the licence change though.
jacquesm 1y ago
Wikipedia and the Khan academy are my two best examples for the potential of the internet. Each is an incredible feat that took a simple vision and took it far beyond what I ever thought possible.
p3rls 1y ago
[flagged]
- bee_rider 1y ago
  What’s “indoslop” mean? Is it supposed to be a combination of indolent and sloppy? I guess that does describe a lot of the Internet.
  - p3rls 1y ago
    [flagged]
guidedlight 1y ago
Says an article with a paywall.
- intermerda 1y ago
  We live in a society.
ajsnigrutin 1y ago
Wikipedia has one great feature... you can see all the editing history. Something happened, a war started, someone did X, someone else did Y... you open wikipedia, see all the "current situation" bias, open the history tab and look at the article from before <the thing> happened.
Whoppertime 1y ago
Wikipedia is a good source for certain kinds of information. If you ask it about anything political it's going to be from a certain slant and the most informative part of the page will be the Talk page which explains what people would like on the page that isn't there, or shouldn't be on the page but is
- gcanyon 1y ago
  Cites please. Seriously, if there is a chronically-biased Wikipedia page I would very much like to know about it.
- BrtByte 1y ago
  Compared to opaque algorithms and AI-generated summaries, Wikipedia still feels like a relatively honest mess
- savef 1y ago
  What examples of this are there? I've usually found Wikipedia to be quite equal opportunity, well rounded, and factual. They have their NPOV[1] policy, and seem impressively unbiased to me, given the various divisive situations they have to try to cover. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_v...
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - crote 1y ago
    Just because the policies are supposed to be neutral doesn't mean the resulting work is guaranteed to be truly neutral. Whether something is definitely a fact or an opinion can be very fluid, and you can play a lot with the amount of attention each viewpoint gets. Even a "neutral" article can end up reading completely differently when one viewpoint is very detailed and described in a fact-like way, while another only gets a short summary which reads as if it is a fringe opinion. And even when you are trying to be neutral, it is incredibly hard to avoid your output from getting shaped by the culture you are surrounded with.
bloomingeek 1y ago
<In 1967, Hannah Arendt published an essay in The New Yorker about what she saw as an inherent conflict between politics and facts. Wow, she was ahead of her time, no? I admit to have never contributed to Wikipedia, that is about to change.
throw4847285 1y ago
The corners where Wikipedia breaks down are niche but fascinating. Check out the list of superhero movies (not Marvel or DC). Or any page that contains information on Video Game Console Generations. In cases like those, what has gone wrong is a mix of apophenia and people protecting their own turf. Elaborate classification systems are created that are internally consistent but have no relationship to reality.
rufus_foreman 1y ago
[flagged]
- intermerda 1y ago
  True. Reality does have a liberal bias.
alex1138 1y ago
I can't defend Wiki any further after their politicization How about not calling Peter McCullough or Ryan Cole or Pierre Kory misinformation spreaders about covid when they were right the whole time Larry Sanger was correct Edit: (I know we're not supposed to comment on downvotes but I seriously don't care) Those of you who insta-downvote stuff like this should not enjoy the privileges of the karma system on HN that allows you to downvote (Further - how many of you actually work for big tech? Do you think it's ok to censor doctors like has been going on the last few years? Do you have any qualities of personal reflection, whatsoever?)
- intermerda 1y ago
  > How about not calling Peter McCullough or Ryan Cole or Pierre Kory misinformation spreaders about covid when they were right the whole time What were they right about? I'm looking at Peter McCullough's Wikipedia article and some of the things he's claimed include young people don't need the vaccine, there is no evidence of asymptomatic spread of COVID-19, and COVID-19 pandemic was planned, etc. Is this what you're saying they were right about the whole time? The pandemic was planned?
- Antibabelic 1y ago
  The goal of Wikipedia has always been to summarize what mainstream secondary sources say, not what is "true" or "right" according to your or some other editor's personal opinion. See WP:DUE, WP:VNT and WP:RGW
  - lp0_on_fire 1y ago
    It literally styles itself as an encyclopedia, not a collection of summaries by "mainstream secondary sources". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars > Wikipedia combines many features of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers. Wikipedia is not a soapbox, an advertising platform, a social network, a vanity press, an experiment in anarchy or democracy, an indiscriminate collection of information, nor a web directory. It is not a dictionary, a newspaper, an instruction manual, nor a collection of source documents or media files, although some of its fellow Wikimedia projects are.
hoshi73 1y ago
Many call Wikipedia "the last good place on the internet", but that's really only true of the English edition. Non-English versions are generally filled with political misinformation and propaganda from people trying to politicize a nation's history, which, frankly, makes them not worth bothering with: https://slate.com/technology/2021/03/japanese-wikipedia-misinformation-non-english-editions.html https://slate.com/technology/2021/03/japanese-wikipedia-misi...
- Aachen 1y ago
  The difference between English, Dutch, and German Wikipedias is also very interesting. I used to never open the Dutch one unless there was a near-zero chance of the English one having any article on the topic at all (like how to make vlaai or idk). It has way fewer articles, has virtually no references for anything, is written more casually by fewer people, and everyone who needs information in the Netherlands speaks English (under 55yo) or German (over 55yo) or both (those in border-nearing retail) so nobody bothers (Even tinier is the Limburgian dialect that have their own Wikipedia. It seems to mostly be an exercise in how to write this spoken language than to make actually useful articles with unique content. Literally nobody can read that who can't also read Dutch, since it has no spelling or even a dictionary that'd work for more than a few square kilometres. But I digress) The Germans on the other hand, I've been amazed that there exists, not infrequently, articles in German with more information than in English. It seems like such a shame to me to put all this effort into a niche language, yet it's there. There are well-maintained silos of information out there if you know where to find them!
jfengel 1y ago
I was surprised that Wikipedia wasn't immediately overrun by trolls, griefers, and spammers. I'm still not entirely sure how it avoids that, though I've got some speculations. Unlike most user contributed sites it's happy to throw stuff away. It does grow but it doesn't care about growing fast. That's great but it's a hard formula to replicate.
- idle_zealot 1y ago
  > That's great but it's a hard formula to replicate One important piece of even trying to replicate that is its nature as a nonprofit. Any profit-seeking organization trying to grow a user-contribution based site will prefer content and moderation pipelines that drive engagement over quality.
- rafram 1y ago
  Because contributions from new users are immediately reviewed by legions of volunteer cops who are eager to revert vandalism, and most wannabe vandals don’t have the sense to make a couple legitimate edits before vandalizing.
  - jfengel 1y ago
    Can you imagine any other crowdsourced site who was willing to subject new users to so much scrutiny, and err on the side of deleting contributions? Certainly that's not a great way to make money. Not if you're depending on people to spend a lot of time seeking new content (and be shown ads).
- zahlman 1y ago
  > I'm still not entirely sure how it avoids that It really doesn't. Granted, it could be a lot worse.
ProllyInfamous 1y ago
My blue-collar journey with LLMs began Summer 2022, after watching Yannic's GPT 4-chan video [0] — visiting simple GPT-2 iterations (e.g. http://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com http://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com — which still exists and is a fantastic linguist's homepage — &al CRAIYON &c). My most-shocking LLM interaction so-far ties with when http://www.perplexity.ai http://www.perplexity.ai cited my recent wikipedia edit (from my two decade+ account) in answering a question about transistor density... less than one day after I had made the update it cited [1]. Like I am nobody why tf are you listening to me?!? This ties with having sat with a published author of a non-fiction war chronicle as we discussed his books, himself, and his world (with a computer, me typing / brainstorming). Among many other reconfigurations of muh'brain. [0] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/efPrtcLdcdM https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/efPrtcLdcdM [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count I am just the electrician.
BrenBarn 1y ago
Don't jinx it.
jl6 1y ago
Wikipedia is fabulous. I wish educators would stop telling people that it’s not reliable, and start using it to teach media literacy - which, for wiki purposes, is essentially to read the talk page to see what viewpoints have been included and excluded and why.
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  Aren't they exactly teaching students media literacy by warning them Wikipedia is not reliable ?
  - jl6 1y ago
    No, because media literacy is not about sorting the world into “reliable” and “unreliable”, it’s about understanding a text in its full context.
    - tremon 1y ago
      ...and that includes assessing its accuracy and its reliability.
- scandox 1y ago
  My daughter's teacher told her class that Wikipedia is unreliable because it's just made up by volunteers. So I asked her where they should find information and she said other sites on the internet that can't just be edited by anyone. Blew my mind.
  - jowea 1y ago
    Did the teacher teach how to recognize a reliable other site?
  - jl6 1y ago
    I can’t count how many times I’ve heard “Wikipedia is unreliable because it can be edited by anyone”. I tend to think that Wikipedia converges on reliable because it can be edited by anyone.
lz400 1y ago
This reminds me of donating again, thanks
emsign 1y ago
Oh, just wait til MAGA sycophants feel threatened by Wikipedia. It'll be a war against the online encyclopedia like none before. I'm actually anxious that might happen at any time. For instance when Trump runs out of enemies to scapegoat.
- monksy 1y ago
  Once they do, I'm sure we'll see blackouts that are similar to most dictatorships. (i.e. metal themed pages in Turkey, FB/Google in China, etc)
- input_sh 1y ago
  Oh it already started, the ADL convinced House Republicans to launch an investigation into Wikipedia because of its "anti-Israel bias": https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5473331-wikipedia-bias-probe-republicans/ https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5473331-wikipedia-bias-pr... One of the requests in the letter (https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/082725-letter-to-Wikimedia.pdf https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/08272...) is to de-anonymise some of the Wikipedia editors.
seyz 1y ago
Opening the page... eyes burned... closing the page. Ouch.
maeln 1y ago
In an age of accelerating hypercapitalism causing rabid enshittification, non-profit and volunteer website and servicice might struggle, but they remain the only becon of quality.
blackhaz 1y ago
Would the Age of Encyclopaediae be next, with human information safeguarded by the selected, several giant egregors taking shape and competing for world views?
submeta 1y ago
Does it survive though? I haven’t opened Wikipedia in years. And young folks rather ask Chatgpt for their homework instead of Wikipedia. And that’s the crux. Llms are vacuuming the content of Wikipedia, just like Google is doing the same with Web content.
- Aachen 1y ago
  It's dirt cheap to host text contributed by volunteers compared to audiovisual media or newspapers written by paid people Which is not to say free and without challenges, definitely not at Wikipedia's scale, but compared to how much donation money they get it's peanuts, not even the same ballpark (the vast majority of the money they get via Wikipedian beg banners goes to projects other than Wikipedia) Also, personal opinion but > I haven’t opened Wikipedia in years. sounded like someone proudly telling a group of supposedly cool friends how they don't read stuffy books anymore now that they've discovered one-page summaries online. This might fall on deaf ears but there's value in reading the actual thing including following references where relevant
Labo333 1y ago
archive.is breaks the styling and doesn't execute the js But archive.org has the subscription popup... https://web.archive.org/web/20250905062805/https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/717322/wikipedia-attacks-neutrality-history-jimmy-wales https://web.archive.org/web/20250905062805/https://www.theve...
marsven_422 1y ago
[dead]
david-james-2 1y ago
Reading the article made me think about other examples of Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP). The Wikipedia page on CBBP lists examples like Linux and OpenStreetMap. Although CBPP shares a lot with general User-generated content (UGC) and the open source model, maybe mechanisms that make it work is a little different. The article points out system-side elements like "Talk page" and human-side elements like policies and guidelines. I wonder if there are any studies on this subject.
1970-01-01 1y ago
We need a new metric to complement system uptime: "link lifetime" I have an email, old enough to vote, that I received from an engineer. They wrote "Wikipedia is a good site for learning how our new RAID array works. People need to change their mind about Wikipedia. Just because anyone can make a page doesn't mean the information is wrong." If they had sent me any other link, all this info would be behind a paywall, login, or would simply 404 today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels
sharpshadow 1y ago
To be very specific I was told that the hand does not go over the head when doing a nazi salute.
- Quarrelsome 1y ago
  I just imagine a hypothetical future where a party funded by the richest man in the world goes full fascist and we trot out the "who could have known?". We get out the protractors or simply admit that it was a Nazi salute. Its the lack of clarity or apology, he never said that it wasn't, he never apologised or said "oh yeah, i didnt mean that" or he even could have brushed it off as a joke or trolling to evoke a reaction. But he never did, he just said people were overreacting. Combined with his public support for groups like AfD and Patriotic Alternative UK, it seems pretty obvious that he's a Nazi. If anything this subject shows a clear divide between US and European reaction, given how he's now overwhelmingly persona non grata in Europe since that. The US has this bizarre tribalism in its politics, where half its electorate deny the reality that an government official (as he started his doge role at the time) is glorifying the symbols of America's greatest adversary in the world's most destructive war.
Prime_Axiom 1y ago
Appreciate the archive link, don’t know how to directly reply to a comment.
- zahlman 1y ago
  Don't you see the "reply" link underneath each comment?
  - Prime_Axiom 1y ago
    There wasn’t one, I took a screenshot to make sure I wasn’t missing it. It was the newest comment by krunck that had the button missing.
    - zahlman 1y ago
      It does seem to be missing from individual comments on rare occasions. I've assumed this to be a bug in the past. Maybe refreshing helps?
  - Aachen 1y ago
    I assume moderators disable comments (automatically or manually) on such dummy posts because they usually don't contribute to the conversation, such as by posting just "thank you" or some comment about the article that'd be better suited as a top-level comment (Not that I necessarily agree with this practice. Don't decapitate the messenger)
damnesian 1y ago
It was inevitable that the ideologues who fancy themselves responsible leaders would attack the relative openness of Wikipedia. This makes it all the more important that you DONATE to help maintain it. I put my $2 in every month, every bit helps to fortify the bastions against invaders. In a world run by criminals, telling the truth becomes a crime.
- rc_mob 1y ago
  oookay. I hear ya. Will do.

602 points by leotravis10 1y ago

Wikipedia broke some time ago in order to be allowed to survive. There are still things that can be looked up there and taken at face value.

soupfordummies 1y ago
I read this comment three times and I still don't understand what you're trying to say. Not trying to be rude, just saying.
- mediumsmart 1y ago
  In my opinion some years back Wikipedia broke meaning that it was no longer impartial by default. It’s no biggie and was to be expected given its scale and perceived authority. Just saying. You could watch manufacturing consent maybe to understand the comment but you don’t have to.

arminiusreturns 1y ago

Wikipedia is hasbara central, yall are drinking too much of the simp-juice.

maskil 1y ago

Wikipedia is completely unreliable on any area of controversy, there are armies of editors who are skilled in fitting the articles to their agenda.

gcanyon 1y ago

> conservatives… claim[ing] Wikipedia has strayed from its neutrality principle by making judgments about the reliability of sources. Instead, … it should present all views equally, including things “many Republicans believe,” That is some 1984-level “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength" argument. If those “news” sources want people to stop calling them liars, they should stop lying.

homefree 1y ago

Wikipedia has major issues - there are a lot of topics with coordinated editing from bad actors. The verge article is paywalled so I can't read more than the first page + headline, but I can guess the case it makes. - https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik... - https://www.piratewires.com/p/wikipedia-editors-cant-decide-if https://www.piratewires.com/p/wikipedia-editors-cant-decide-... - https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-wikipedia-s-pro-hamas-editors-hijacked-the-israel-palestine-narrative https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-wikipedia-s-pro-hamas-edit... It's similar to the problem on Reddit, I wouldn't trust it on any topic that is even mildly controversial. Wikipedia will have a strong progressive left slant it launders carefully through seemingly neutral language and selective sourcing. Honestly it's gotten worse over the years too - makes me see more value in printed encyclopedia, they go out of date but at least they represent a slice of time. They're not endlessly revised to meet some false ideology that has edit power at present.

techpineapple 1y ago
But what is better? I mean yes, reading 20 sources on a topic and coming to your own conclusions about an issue is the right answer, but the fact that Wikipedia published its edit history and discussions page makes it seem better than then what everything? Almost every book you read about Israel Palestine will probably be biased in some way, certainly the news will be. It feels like perfect being the enemy of good. Like sure it’s a mess like all compendiums of human knowledge, but also seems massively better than the alternative. Your point about the encyclopedia seems strange, sure it’s likely to be less accurate less complete and more biased, but it’s narratively interesting is like? What are you trying to accomplish than that that’s better? Annoyance at Wikipedia feels nihilistic. Like “it’s not perfect so why try”. “I’d rather read things where I think I know what the bias is (but probably don’t”
- cindyllm 1y ago
  [dead]
- homefree 1y ago

KebabKanaken 1y ago

Wikipedia is, from an political bias and data quality POV, bad enough. Couple that with the endowment-enabled grifters of the WMF doing their usual donation blood drive twice a year, and you puke in disgust.

mrkramer 1y ago

I remember when teachers in school use to tell us that Wikipedia sucks because there in no scientific peer review. They couldn't wrap their heads around the concept of casual crowdsourcing.

krapp 1y ago
>They couldn't wrap their heads around the concept of casual crowdsourcing. I'm sure they could, most teachers aren't idiots. And they were correct that "casual crowdsourcing" is not a fitting replacement for peer review. And in fact, the current moderation policies for Wikipedia only work in so far as they use peer-review type processes, such as requiring "notability" and multiple sources, and preferring expertise in a field. Of course, if you're in a relevant field you shouldn't use Wikipedia as a primary source since you would presumably have access to whatever sources the wiki itself cites in the articles.
- mrkramer 1y ago
  If I were to make Wikipedia once again from the ground up I would put more attention into building reputation system of contributors. If you have more reputation you are allowed to edit something and/or your edit has more weight.

doron 1y ago

You take the advertising driven paradigm out of the equation, and a website might be worth something more than rage clicks and doom scrolling machine, who knew?! Ad driven sites broke the internet; they might have broken society to some degree as well.

BrtByte 1y ago

The tragedy is that we all rely on Wikipedia, but very few of us contribute to it

krunck 1y ago

https://archive.is/rXgsz https://archive.is/rXgsz

Der_Einzige 1y ago

[flagged]

yapyap 1y ago
false equivalence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence
- Der_Einzige 1y ago
  Maybe give some arguments or evidence instead of linking wikipedia. Everyone clicking on that archive link avoided having to pay someone to see information. I'm personally a copyright abolitionist, so I'm pretty okay with that - but I want people who pearl clutch about AI systems not paying to realize that it's the same damn thing going on when they click on the archive link.
  - sjsdaiuasgdia 1y ago
    I'd disagree that it's the same thing. With AI content scraping, the people whose content was ingested aren't getting paid. That part does align to paywalls. But there's more in the AI content situation. The scraped content is repackaged without any credit being given to the people who made the content. In most cases, the models trained on the content are intended to be monetized, and there is no intent to share revenue with the people who made the content. When I bypass a paywall, there is no particular expectation that I'm going to take the content, modify it, and display / sell it as my own. In the vast majority of cases, someone reads some free content and moves on. The damage to the site or publication is limited to the unpaid viewing. AI content scraping absolutely comes with an expectation that the content will be modified, presented, and sold. The damage goes beyond the unpaid viewing of the content.
  - mdp2021 1y ago
    The submission is not about LLMs being fed copyrighted material during training. The poster does not immediately seem to be an advocate condemning the practice. Your post was out of place.

djoldman 1y ago

> Wikipedia is the largest compendium of human knowledge ever assembled, with more than 7 million articles in its English version, the largest and most developed of 343 language projects. but: > The collections of the Library of Congress include more than 32 million catalogued books and other print materials in 470 languages; more than 61 million manuscripts; the largest rare book collection in North America ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress#Holdings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress#Holdings

jalapenod 1y ago
[flagged]
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
  It's handy to have a neutral place I can look up books or passages of the Christian Bible so that I have a reference point when talking to people about it
  - UncleSlacky 1y ago
    https://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/ https://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/ exists.
  - BlueTemplar 1y ago
    Isn't the issue with this is that you would first have to know which bible to use ?
    - spauldo 1y ago
      The differences between the translations are generally very minor. There are very few places where there is any significant difference in meaning.
- UtopiaPunk 1y ago
  [citation needed]

glimshe 1y ago

The "largest compendium of human knowledge ever assembled" isn't Wikipedia. It's Anna's Archive. Especially relevant when reading this from a paywalled article.

gosub100 1y ago
True but we are in dire need of a killer search engine for it. We're hopefully just a couple years away from a great self-hosted search and life-like TTS for massive ebook collections.

bawolff 1y ago

There has been this trend recently of calling Wikipedia the last good thing on the internet. And i agree its great, i spend an inordinate amount of my time on Wikimedia related things. But i think there is a danger here with all these articles putting Wikipedia too much on a pedestal. It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws. The true best part of Wikipedia is that its a work in progress and people are working to make it a little better everyday. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact we aren't there yet. We'll never be "there". But hopefully we'll continue to be a little bit closer every day. And that is what makes Wikipedia great.

fngjdflmdflg 1y ago
This doesn't make sense because Wikipedia is a collection of sources, most of which are on the internet. If would be surprising if Wikipedia was a good thing but the online sources it uses are bad.
- phantomathkg 1y ago
  Wikipedia can be bad because it is edited by human. And because it is edited by human, the side that has more people will win. For example, Wikipedia has a Chinese issue. [1] Because both Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese both live under the Chinese language in Wiki (And we have a dropdown within Chinese wiki to choose what regional variants we want to read). There's a constant wiki edit war. This is not only happened to the political topic, but also how something should be phased. Even though Chinese officially ban access to Wikipedia by the Great Firewall, enough people VPN and manage to edit wiki pages by pages, and more annoyingly, there are more wiki admin coming from PRC than Taiwan/Hong Kong/Macau etc. So you cannot assume Wikipedia is neutral. [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59081611 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59081611
pohl 1y ago
I've heard it expressed as "the last good thing on the internet" many times, but it never occurred to me to interpret that to mean it has attained perfection in some regard. I always took it to mean that it has thus far evaded the enshitification trends.

moiz41510 1y ago

[dead]

hungmung 1y ago

Honestly Wikipedia+Archive.org remaining online have national security implications (not just USA, but any democracy). Though I'd wager the current administration would take a different view.

em-bee 1y ago
what are the implications?
- hungmung 1y ago
  We've always been at war with Eurasia. Not all threats are external.
IAmBroom 1y ago
I can see the national security implications for countries like Russia and China, that are widely known for pushing false histories backed up with state punishment, but in high-functioning democracies the state does not control public speech.
jacobgkau 1y ago
> national security implications (not just USA, but any democracy) That's not really "national," is it?
- hungmung 1y ago
  National security doesn't just refer to USA...? France has national security considerations, just like the UK, Uruguay and Uganda. They'd all benefit from having open access to verifiable information.
  - jacobgkau 1y ago
    That's fine, it just seems more like a "societal security consideration," "democratic consideration," or just a general "consideration" than specifically "national security," which has the scope of a nation.

Aurornis 1y ago

In the past few years I've noticed more and more issues on Wikipedia. It has never been perfect, but in the past it seemed like anything without sufficient sources would quickly get flagged as "citation needed" or questionable statements would get a warning label slapped on them. Now, I can visit pages for certain medical conditions that contain completely unsourced claims with no "citation needed" nor any warnings. When I try to search for it, I often trace it back to alternative medicine or pseudoscience influencers. The sad part is that when I've tried to remove obviously flimsy information, someone will immediately come along and add it back. Unless you're ready to spend months in a Wikipedia edit war with someone who obsesses over a page, there's no point in even trying. These people know the rules and processes and will use every one of them against you. When that fails, they'll try to pull rank. If that fails, they'll just quietly continue editing and rewriting (possibly from alt accounts) until you get too tired to fight the battle any more.

ars 1y ago
I've noticed this exact same thing. And I too just gave up. People have their pet causes and they force the article to match, and normal, non-obsessed people give up. Any controversial topic should never be read on Wikipedia, it will not be accurate.
- mothballed 1y ago
  I noticed this during the election. As soon as Kamala become the contender, it was edited out that her father was described as a "marxist scholar" by a college newspaper. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&diff=1309230172&oldid=1217573879 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&...
  - bakugo 1y ago
    Another great example is when the "Cultural Marxism" article was converted into "Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory", an entirely different article claiming that the concept of cultural marxism was actually always a "far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory", complete with a section relating it to Gamergate. It's so ridiculous, it's almost funny to read. https://web.archive.org/web/20140519194937/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism https://web.archive.org/web/20140519194937/http://en.wikiped... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...

Wikipedianon 1y ago

The article criticizes doxxing but well-known Wikipedia editors doxx each other all the time... There's a site called Wikipediocracy that's been around for 20 years and an Arbitrator (Wiki's Supreme Court) was suspended for leaking secret deliberations to the "private" section of the forum—just make an account and you can see it too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2023-12-04/News_and_notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... According to that Arbitrator, Wikimedia gave a legal opinion that he violated the law in doing so: "Well, I got a result today: the ombuds commisssion found that I did indeed violate the access to nonpublic data policy, and has issued a final warning to me. Apparently mailing list comments are, "under a contemporary understanding of privacy law and the policies in question," nonpublic data on the same level as CU data or supressed libel." https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=350266#p350207 https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=350266#p350... Wasn't the first time he did it either... Officially, community guidelines only apply on the site itself. Once you get into the Discords or forums, doxxing is common and tolerated. Admins and arbitrators are happy to participate on those forums under their Wikipedia usernames because they feel like they need doxx to take action against those trying to harm Wikipedia. And because it (usually) isn't them doing the doxxing, it's ok. There's even an "alt-right identification thread" where established editors can request doxxing from people who don't link their accounts onwiki. Generally this targets newer editors who aren't in a clique yet. e.g. The person who made "Wikipedia and Antisemitism" got doxxed. Once you get to a certain level, you are expected to participate in these "offwiki" forums to get anything done. Some people try to complain about it but it doesn't end well. Generally you don't want to fuck with them because by the time you find out about Wikipediocracy, you've already revealed too much and are doxxable. & unlike nation-state actors they have inside information and understand the site. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Archive360#Are_people_allowed_to_just_open_Wikipediocracy_threads_for_backup_when_they_get_blocked_for_canvassing_on_Wikipediocracy_%3Credacted%3E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no... If you do choose to edit Wikipedia, use a burner email and only edit during the same one or two hours of the day so they can't track timezones. & don't post any photos or information on where you live nor attend meetups. There are some good people but once you get deeply involved it is a toxic community. Sorry for the rant but it pisses me off whenever people talk about how great the Wikipedia community is as someone who's into the internal shit. it's the worst place to get involved in "free culture".

carabiner 1y ago

[flagged]

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

lenerdenator 1y ago

This is because of the lack of a profit motive and sane expectations on salary from the people running the Wikimedia project. I think that starting in the 1980s, people started to expect anything involving information technology created immediately-accountable monetary value on a massive scale after seeing the fortunes of people like Gates, Wozniak, Jobs, et al. This was further boosted by the Dotcom bubble. The fact is, a significant fraction of IT is indeed profitable, but applying the model of perpetual growth is not appropriate for all of that significant fraction, and there's the other fraction of the IT world that isn't directly profitable. More people need to realize that their work falls in the latter two fractions instead of the first.

pessimizer 1y ago

I've started to think that the fact that Wikipedia will change its descriptions of reality based on whoever is willing to spend the time and money to subvert it is a feature when it comes to survival. When the final sci-fi authoritarian dictatorship comes down, Wikipedia will happily explain that it was always here, and that Eastasia was always the enemy.

IAmBroom 1y ago
Its (relatively short) history suggests otherwise, so far.
- pessimizer 1y ago
  It certainly does not. It is not dependable for any subject that anybody or any government that commands any significant resources has any interest in. I'm sure there's somebody right this second guarding distortions on some obscure page about some scientific phenomenon that 99.999% of people have never heard of because their investment depends on it. The political model doesn't work at all. If you just count the votes of the people who show up to vote, the Party will hire buses and empty the retirement homes and homeless shelters. Maybe you can fight this irl if everyone knows there's an election, but nobody knows when there's a war on a talk page.
  - zahlman 1y ago
    > If you just count the votes of the people who show up to vote, the Party will hire buses and empty the retirement homes and homeless shelters. They don't even have to go that far; consider the "consensus is not a vote" policy.
  - HankStallone 1y ago
    Yeah, I've heard people say, "I don't use it for anything controversial, but it's accurate for other stuff." That's usually true, but you can't assume it, because you never know what will be someone's personal hobbyhorse. If I just want to know some dry facts about Podunk, BFE, it'll probably have them right. But maybe not, if the mayor of Podunk wrote the page and is trying to promote the town, or if it was last edited by someone who used to live there and hates the place. And very few people are going to check the talk or history pages to see whether there's been an edit war or other hints that the page might be sketchy.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

_dke7 1y ago

Important recent context - just a few days ago House Republicans asked Wikipedia to reveal the name of some editors: https://truthout.org/articles/house-republicans-investigate-wikipedia-for-alleged-anti-israel-bias/ https://truthout.org/articles/house-republicans-investigate-...

sirbutters 1y ago
[flagged]
Jean-Papoulos 1y ago
Putting bibles everywhere, removing books from libraries, now getting the names of wikipedians... They're going slowly, but they're going surely.
- SlowTao 1y ago
  They have been playing the long game for decades, the speed up in recent times feels like they realised the windows was closing and they need to lock things down before many wise up.
Cthulhu_ 1y ago
I can't claim I was part of the original internet users, but this is part of why anonymity was so important to them. I'm pretty open about my real life on here and other channels, and some people IRL know my real name. But I would regret it if an organization, government or employer attaches consequences to my online behaviour.

3036e4 1y ago

An unexpected side-effect for me after I started subscribing to Kagi a few months ago, at a low tier with limited searches, is that I made sure to configure all my browsers with keywords for Wikipedia searches and I use those a lot, knowing that what I will end up with after searching is probably going to be the Wikipedia page anyway. No point wasting precious limited monthly searches.

manquer 1y ago
Kagi does not count bangs as part of monthly usage - for wiki that would be !w search term https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/plan-types.html#how-searches-are-counted-starter-plan https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/plan-types.html#how-searche...
- BlueTemplar 1y ago
  I'm still puzzled after all these years : why would anyone use search engine bangs instead of directly configuring custom searches from their browser's URL bar ?
  - freediver 1y ago
    Bangs through Kagi work cross-device, on every browser you use whether it supports custom searches or not.
  - macintux 1y ago
    Because I know how to use search engine bangs, and I have no idea what a “custom search” would look like. After probably 15 years of using DDG the bangs are just part of my muscle memory. Why bother changing things?
    - BlueTemplar 1y ago
      Well, my question then is why didn't you use custom search before DDG added bangs ? Today in Firefox : right click on a search field, add search engine. Pretty sure that this evolved from that separate search field that browsers used to have in addition to the URL field ?

glitchc 1y ago

Wikipedia has plenty of propaganda. It's often at the fringes of knowledge, in niche subjects where there isn't yet an established group of proponents and detractors. It can be quite subtle too, will fool most laypeople, even those who are otherwise intellectually savvy. It's only when a subject becomes popular that the propaganda gets recognized and rectified.

voxl 1y ago
And? Share an example. This reads like conspiratorial thinking without any evidence.
- Andrex 1y ago
  Not the OP but I'll back him up, and I'll edit this comment when I come across them. They're pretty common. If the domain of knowledge is niche and the page is absolutely huge, that's a good sign to start looking for editoralizations and slants. A lot of wiki pages about smaller companies only list the good things (fundraising, tech, etc.) and omit any controversies. The deliberate omissions due to bias are even more insidious than weasel words or other forms of poor journalism. Fwiw I truly believe in Wikipedia and donate every year, but calling it "perfect" would be extremely dangerous (and false!)
  - straydusk 1y ago
    Share an example then
  - glitchc 1y ago
    Thanks! I've noticed this for descriptions of political individuals, entities and current events in offbeat parts of the world, where coverage of such in mainstream media is slim to non-existent.
  - jajko 1y ago
    Perfect it ain't, I never even heard anybody actually relevant state that, by the core principle of it it can't be. But, its by far the best human-averaged source of info on most topics. I'd say even politically charged topics, definitely much better than most news out there who always show some clear bias. Its not exhaustive (another common complain form folks who seek visibility by complaining and denigrating stuff for the heck of it or some immature popularity), its not meant to be. You also don't do postgrad level physics studies from Encyclopædia Britannica, do you, but it may give you some shallow introduction to orientate in the field a bit.

jandrusk 1y ago

They’ve always have had a leftist bias like most of big tech. https://x.com/therabbithole84/status/1957598712693452920?s=46 https://x.com/therabbithole84/status/1957598712693452920?s=4...

slater 1y ago
aka, biased towards reality
- pityJuke 1y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/?redirect=no&title=Reality_has_a_well_known_liberal_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/?redirect=no&title=Reality_has_a_...
pavlov 1y ago
[flagged]
- PathOfEclipse 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - fnikacevic 1y ago
    The only specific example from that nypost article is about Fox News not being allowed as a source. Fox news has been found in court to be guilty of defamation and has argued in court that it cannot be considered news, only entertainment. So do you want reality or reality TV on Wikipedia? Should we consider Ancient Aliens as a source?
    - Clamchop 1y ago
      Fox News argued in court that their political commentary programming isn't news. They didn't argue that none of their programming is news.

testplzignore 1y ago

> Because Wikipedia was under a Creative Commons license, anyone who didn’t like the way the project was run could copy it and start their own, as a group of Spanish users did when the possibility of running ads was raised in 2002. Correction on this: Wikipedia was GFDL until 2009. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Licensing_update https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Licensing_update .

globular-toast 1y ago
If I remember correctly, the licence change was achieved by the FSF releasing a special version of the GFDL allowing the change, taking advantage of the "any later version" part of the original licence. OpenStreetMap's licence change was much more difficult. Agreement had to be sought from all editors and for the few that didn't respond their work was removed. We actually replaced the work of most non-responders before the licence change though.

jacquesm 1y ago

Wikipedia and the Khan academy are my two best examples for the potential of the internet. Each is an incredible feat that took a simple vision and took it far beyond what I ever thought possible.

p3rls 1y ago

[flagged]

bee_rider 1y ago
What’s “indoslop” mean? Is it supposed to be a combination of indolent and sloppy? I guess that does describe a lot of the Internet.
- p3rls 1y ago
  [flagged]

guidedlight 1y ago

Says an article with a paywall.

intermerda 1y ago
We live in a society.

ajsnigrutin 1y ago

Wikipedia has one great feature... you can see all the editing history. Something happened, a war started, someone did X, someone else did Y... you open wikipedia, see all the "current situation" bias, open the history tab and look at the article from before <the thing> happened.

Whoppertime 1y ago

Wikipedia is a good source for certain kinds of information. If you ask it about anything political it's going to be from a certain slant and the most informative part of the page will be the Talk page which explains what people would like on the page that isn't there, or shouldn't be on the page but is

gcanyon 1y ago
Cites please. Seriously, if there is a chronically-biased Wikipedia page I would very much like to know about it.
BrtByte 1y ago
Compared to opaque algorithms and AI-generated summaries, Wikipedia still feels like a relatively honest mess
savef 1y ago
What examples of this are there? I've usually found Wikipedia to be quite equal opportunity, well rounded, and factual. They have their NPOV[1] policy, and seem impressively unbiased to me, given the various divisive situations they have to try to cover. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_v...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- crote 1y ago
  Just because the policies are supposed to be neutral doesn't mean the resulting work is guaranteed to be truly neutral. Whether something is definitely a fact or an opinion can be very fluid, and you can play a lot with the amount of attention each viewpoint gets. Even a "neutral" article can end up reading completely differently when one viewpoint is very detailed and described in a fact-like way, while another only gets a short summary which reads as if it is a fringe opinion. And even when you are trying to be neutral, it is incredibly hard to avoid your output from getting shaped by the culture you are surrounded with.

bloomingeek 1y ago

<In 1967, Hannah Arendt published an essay in The New Yorker about what she saw as an inherent conflict between politics and facts. Wow, she was ahead of her time, no? I admit to have never contributed to Wikipedia, that is about to change.

throw4847285 1y ago

The corners where Wikipedia breaks down are niche but fascinating. Check out the list of superhero movies (not Marvel or DC). Or any page that contains information on Video Game Console Generations. In cases like those, what has gone wrong is a mix of apophenia and people protecting their own turf. Elaborate classification systems are created that are internally consistent but have no relationship to reality.

rufus_foreman 1y ago

[flagged]

intermerda 1y ago
True. Reality does have a liberal bias.

alex1138 1y ago

I can't defend Wiki any further after their politicization How about not calling Peter McCullough or Ryan Cole or Pierre Kory misinformation spreaders about covid when they were right the whole time Larry Sanger was correct Edit: (I know we're not supposed to comment on downvotes but I seriously don't care) Those of you who insta-downvote stuff like this should not enjoy the privileges of the karma system on HN that allows you to downvote (Further - how many of you actually work for big tech? Do you think it's ok to censor doctors like has been going on the last few years? Do you have any qualities of personal reflection, whatsoever?)

intermerda 1y ago
> How about not calling Peter McCullough or Ryan Cole or Pierre Kory misinformation spreaders about covid when they were right the whole time What were they right about? I'm looking at Peter McCullough's Wikipedia article and some of the things he's claimed include young people don't need the vaccine, there is no evidence of asymptomatic spread of COVID-19, and COVID-19 pandemic was planned, etc. Is this what you're saying they were right about the whole time? The pandemic was planned?
Antibabelic 1y ago
The goal of Wikipedia has always been to summarize what mainstream secondary sources say, not what is "true" or "right" according to your or some other editor's personal opinion. See WP:DUE, WP:VNT and WP:RGW
- lp0_on_fire 1y ago
  It literally styles itself as an encyclopedia, not a collection of summaries by "mainstream secondary sources". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars > Wikipedia combines many features of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers. Wikipedia is not a soapbox, an advertising platform, a social network, a vanity press, an experiment in anarchy or democracy, an indiscriminate collection of information, nor a web directory. It is not a dictionary, a newspaper, an instruction manual, nor a collection of source documents or media files, although some of its fellow Wikimedia projects are.

hoshi73 1y ago

Many call Wikipedia "the last good place on the internet", but that's really only true of the English edition. Non-English versions are generally filled with political misinformation and propaganda from people trying to politicize a nation's history, which, frankly, makes them not worth bothering with: https://slate.com/technology/2021/03/japanese-wikipedia-misinformation-non-english-editions.html https://slate.com/technology/2021/03/japanese-wikipedia-misi...

Aachen 1y ago
The difference between English, Dutch, and German Wikipedias is also very interesting. I used to never open the Dutch one unless there was a near-zero chance of the English one having any article on the topic at all (like how to make vlaai or idk). It has way fewer articles, has virtually no references for anything, is written more casually by fewer people, and everyone who needs information in the Netherlands speaks English (under 55yo) or German (over 55yo) or both (those in border-nearing retail) so nobody bothers (Even tinier is the Limburgian dialect that have their own Wikipedia. It seems to mostly be an exercise in how to write this spoken language than to make actually useful articles with unique content. Literally nobody can read that who can't also read Dutch, since it has no spelling or even a dictionary that'd work for more than a few square kilometres. But I digress) The Germans on the other hand, I've been amazed that there exists, not infrequently, articles in German with more information than in English. It seems like such a shame to me to put all this effort into a niche language, yet it's there. There are well-maintained silos of information out there if you know where to find them!

jfengel 1y ago

I was surprised that Wikipedia wasn't immediately overrun by trolls, griefers, and spammers. I'm still not entirely sure how it avoids that, though I've got some speculations. Unlike most user contributed sites it's happy to throw stuff away. It does grow but it doesn't care about growing fast. That's great but it's a hard formula to replicate.

idle_zealot 1y ago
> That's great but it's a hard formula to replicate One important piece of even trying to replicate that is its nature as a nonprofit. Any profit-seeking organization trying to grow a user-contribution based site will prefer content and moderation pipelines that drive engagement over quality.
rafram 1y ago
Because contributions from new users are immediately reviewed by legions of volunteer cops who are eager to revert vandalism, and most wannabe vandals don’t have the sense to make a couple legitimate edits before vandalizing.
- jfengel 1y ago
  Can you imagine any other crowdsourced site who was willing to subject new users to so much scrutiny, and err on the side of deleting contributions? Certainly that's not a great way to make money. Not if you're depending on people to spend a lot of time seeking new content (and be shown ads).
zahlman 1y ago
> I'm still not entirely sure how it avoids that It really doesn't. Granted, it could be a lot worse.

ProllyInfamous 1y ago

My blue-collar journey with LLMs began Summer 2022, after watching Yannic's GPT 4-chan video [0] — visiting simple GPT-2 iterations (e.g. http://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com http://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com — which still exists and is a fantastic linguist's homepage — &al CRAIYON &c). My most-shocking LLM interaction so-far ties with when http://www.perplexity.ai http://www.perplexity.ai cited my recent wikipedia edit (from my two decade+ account) in answering a question about transistor density... less than one day after I had made the update it cited [1]. Like I am nobody why tf are you listening to me?!? This ties with having sat with a published author of a non-fiction war chronicle as we discussed his books, himself, and his world (with a computer, me typing / brainstorming). Among many other reconfigurations of muh'brain. [0] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/efPrtcLdcdM https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/efPrtcLdcdM [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count I am just the electrician.

BrenBarn 1y ago

Don't jinx it.

jl6 1y ago

Wikipedia is fabulous. I wish educators would stop telling people that it’s not reliable, and start using it to teach media literacy - which, for wiki purposes, is essentially to read the talk page to see what viewpoints have been included and excluded and why.

makeitdouble 1y ago
Aren't they exactly teaching students media literacy by warning them Wikipedia is not reliable ?
- jl6 1y ago
  No, because media literacy is not about sorting the world into “reliable” and “unreliable”, it’s about understanding a text in its full context.
  - tremon 1y ago
    ...and that includes assessing its accuracy and its reliability.
scandox 1y ago
My daughter's teacher told her class that Wikipedia is unreliable because it's just made up by volunteers. So I asked her where they should find information and she said other sites on the internet that can't just be edited by anyone. Blew my mind.
- jowea 1y ago
  Did the teacher teach how to recognize a reliable other site?
- jl6 1y ago
  I can’t count how many times I’ve heard “Wikipedia is unreliable because it can be edited by anyone”. I tend to think that Wikipedia converges on reliable because it can be edited by anyone.

lz400 1y ago

This reminds me of donating again, thanks

emsign 1y ago

Oh, just wait til MAGA sycophants feel threatened by Wikipedia. It'll be a war against the online encyclopedia like none before. I'm actually anxious that might happen at any time. For instance when Trump runs out of enemies to scapegoat.

monksy 1y ago
Once they do, I'm sure we'll see blackouts that are similar to most dictatorships. (i.e. metal themed pages in Turkey, FB/Google in China, etc)
input_sh 1y ago
Oh it already started, the ADL convinced House Republicans to launch an investigation into Wikipedia because of its "anti-Israel bias": https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5473331-wikipedia-bias-probe-republicans/ https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5473331-wikipedia-bias-pr... One of the requests in the letter (https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/082725-letter-to-Wikimedia.pdf https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/08272...) is to de-anonymise some of the Wikipedia editors.

seyz 1y ago

Opening the page... eyes burned... closing the page. Ouch.

maeln 1y ago

In an age of accelerating hypercapitalism causing rabid enshittification, non-profit and volunteer website and servicice might struggle, but they remain the only becon of quality.

blackhaz 1y ago

Would the Age of Encyclopaediae be next, with human information safeguarded by the selected, several giant egregors taking shape and competing for world views?

submeta 1y ago

Does it survive though? I haven’t opened Wikipedia in years. And young folks rather ask Chatgpt for their homework instead of Wikipedia. And that’s the crux. Llms are vacuuming the content of Wikipedia, just like Google is doing the same with Web content.

Aachen 1y ago
It's dirt cheap to host text contributed by volunteers compared to audiovisual media or newspapers written by paid people Which is not to say free and without challenges, definitely not at Wikipedia's scale, but compared to how much donation money they get it's peanuts, not even the same ballpark (the vast majority of the money they get via Wikipedian beg banners goes to projects other than Wikipedia) Also, personal opinion but > I haven’t opened Wikipedia in years. sounded like someone proudly telling a group of supposedly cool friends how they don't read stuffy books anymore now that they've discovered one-page summaries online. This might fall on deaf ears but there's value in reading the actual thing including following references where relevant

Labo333 1y ago

archive.is breaks the styling and doesn't execute the js But archive.org has the subscription popup... https://web.archive.org/web/20250905062805/https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/717322/wikipedia-attacks-neutrality-history-jimmy-wales https://web.archive.org/web/20250905062805/https://www.theve...

marsven_422 1y ago

[dead]

david-james-2 1y ago

Reading the article made me think about other examples of Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP). The Wikipedia page on CBBP lists examples like Linux and OpenStreetMap. Although CBPP shares a lot with general User-generated content (UGC) and the open source model, maybe mechanisms that make it work is a little different. The article points out system-side elements like "Talk page" and human-side elements like policies and guidelines. I wonder if there are any studies on this subject.

1970-01-01 1y ago

We need a new metric to complement system uptime: "link lifetime" I have an email, old enough to vote, that I received from an engineer. They wrote "Wikipedia is a good site for learning how our new RAID array works. People need to change their mind about Wikipedia. Just because anyone can make a page doesn't mean the information is wrong." If they had sent me any other link, all this info would be behind a paywall, login, or would simply 404 today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels

sharpshadow 1y ago

To be very specific I was told that the hand does not go over the head when doing a nazi salute.

Quarrelsome 1y ago
I just imagine a hypothetical future where a party funded by the richest man in the world goes full fascist and we trot out the "who could have known?". We get out the protractors or simply admit that it was a Nazi salute. Its the lack of clarity or apology, he never said that it wasn't, he never apologised or said "oh yeah, i didnt mean that" or he even could have brushed it off as a joke or trolling to evoke a reaction. But he never did, he just said people were overreacting. Combined with his public support for groups like AfD and Patriotic Alternative UK, it seems pretty obvious that he's a Nazi. If anything this subject shows a clear divide between US and European reaction, given how he's now overwhelmingly persona non grata in Europe since that. The US has this bizarre tribalism in its politics, where half its electorate deny the reality that an government official (as he started his doge role at the time) is glorifying the symbols of America's greatest adversary in the world's most destructive war.

Prime_Axiom 1y ago

Appreciate the archive link, don’t know how to directly reply to a comment.

zahlman 1y ago
Don't you see the "reply" link underneath each comment?
- Prime_Axiom 1y ago
  There wasn’t one, I took a screenshot to make sure I wasn’t missing it. It was the newest comment by krunck that had the button missing.
  - zahlman 1y ago
    It does seem to be missing from individual comments on rare occasions. I've assumed this to be a bug in the past. Maybe refreshing helps?
- Aachen 1y ago
  I assume moderators disable comments (automatically or manually) on such dummy posts because they usually don't contribute to the conversation, such as by posting just "thank you" or some comment about the article that'd be better suited as a top-level comment (Not that I necessarily agree with this practice. Don't decapitate the messenger)

damnesian 1y ago

It was inevitable that the ideologues who fancy themselves responsible leaders would attack the relative openness of Wikipedia. This makes it all the more important that you DONATE to help maintain it. I put my $2 in every month, every bit helps to fortify the bastions against invaders. In a world run by criminals, telling the truth becomes a crime.

rc_mob 1y ago
oookay. I hear ya. Will do.