4 ms·

Wikipedia is surely a formidable source of knowledge, but > Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion. You are romanticizing. Wikip

Wikipedia is surely a formidable source of knowledge, but > Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion. You are romanticizing. Wikipedia is a corporation, just like Work or University, and I personally assume anything corporate is being manipulated by the owners or the ruling oligarchy because they are structurally unreliable. This is especially veritable for Wikipedia. Create an account there and try to go deeper into the articles about politics, literature and war.

shevy-java 9mo ago
> Wikipedia is a corporation, and I personally assume anything corporate is being manipulated by the owners or the ruling oligarchy because they are structurally unreliable. Many articles are fine. I don't think you can equate this to all of Wikipedia automatically.
tb_technical 9mo ago
The remote viewing article keeps being reverted as pseudoscientific when original research conducted by the CIA is cited. Such citations are removed swiftly. Any changes are denied or rolled back. The rationale is that, even though the documents themselves are a primary source from an organization that poured significant resources into researching the phenomenon of remote viewing, the individual posting the declassified document isn't an authority on the subject. Apparently if youre not a doctor, you can't read primary sources? Many such cases. Wikipedia is absolutely a powerful resource, but it it's clearly controlled by moderators with a bias, and there's no incentive to challenge said bias or consider alternative worldviews.
- gcanyon 9mo ago
  I haven’t looked at the article in question, but is there enough material to make an article specifically about the CIA research programs?
  - tb_technical 9mo ago
    There already is a separate wikipedia article about the specific program. It is an extensive article. If you look up "Stargate CIA" in any search engine you'll find it easily. There is a large amount of data on this topic. Literally hundreds of pages of reports and summaries of experiments written over decades of effort (if memory serves). The CIA was trying to use the phenomenon to view distant targets with mediums. It was deemed ineffective, and discontinued in the 90s. Even today there are people attempting to replicate remote viewing and prove it as a phenomenon. For the record, I do not believe this phenomenon is as effective as is claimed. Regardless there is a chance that remote viewing (also known as astral projection) is just something the human brain commonly imagines in some populations. It might be an emergent property of human brains reacting to certain input stimulus, like ASMR. Regardless, the article written about remote viewing as a concept should be allowed to cite documents about how the Stargate program defined and tested remote viewing (their methodologies, etc). But editors, like all humans, have bias. There was a similar kerfuffle that happened about a decade and a half ago about homeopathy. It lead to an edit thread where one of the founders of Wikipedia was cursing about how fake something was. The only objection I have to this, is that primary sources relevant to an article should be allowed to be cited. If a study, whitepaper, or report is widely discredited - include that too. The sum of human knowledge needs to include what we know to be false as well.
    - mrguyorama 9mo ago
      The wikipedia remote viewing article directly points to "Stargate" right now
- seawsurf 9mo ago
  I remember people saying that the article about Carl Jung was not worth contributing anymore because of his fascist sympathies with nazism. I don't know what to make of that. I've experienced something similar about users downplaying on talk pages the atrocities done by the Soviet Government, like the Holodomor famine or the Katyn Massacre, in contrast to the atrocities done by the Nazis. Controversial and relatively unknown subjects are easier to be attacked and ignored on wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
  - tb_technical 9mo ago
    Editors have biases. The best we can do is shine a spotlight on them. People are opposed to this, of course. No one likes to be reminded of how they're limited - and people get really nasty when you accuse them of being a dishonest interlocutor.
- nephihaha 9mo ago
  They have a bee in their bonnet about pseudoscience and paranormal subject matter. It has never dawned on some of them that you can take an interest in a subject without believing it, or endorsing it. As I said elsewhere, hoaxers and fraudsters are interesting figures in their own right. With something like remote viewing, it is undeniable that the USA, USSR and PRC all conducted research into it during the Cold War, which is documented. Someone might be more interested in that fact than getting a "Here be dragons" warning.
  - cindyllm 9mo ago
    [dead]
GuinansEyebrows 9mo ago
> Wikipedia is a corporation nitpick: WMF (the org that develops and hosts Wikipedia and its related services like Wikimedia Commons) is a non-profit foundation, not the classic type of profit-driven corporation that your post implies.
- xmprt 9mo ago
  I don't think corporation implies for-profit. In my eyes, corporation refers to a large organization with some self-serving motivation which is not necessarily just money. Being a non-profit just so happens to be the best vehicle for this motivation but it doesn't mean that the motivation doesn't exist.
  - GuinansEyebrows 9mo ago
    at least in america, in common discussion outside of legal/highly wonky circles, referring to an organization as a corporation almost always implies a for-profit corporation, with (literally) vanishingly few examples of the contrary in popular knowledge (RIP CPB, may you return someday).
    - xmprt 9mo ago
      Would you consider OpenAI a corporation despite it being a non-profit?
      - GuinansEyebrows 9mo ago
        the for-profit pbc arm, yes, absolutely.
- seawsurf 9mo ago
  Well, I prefer to be skeptical of any corporation, regardless if it is non-profit or not, until proven otherwise with substantial transparency on their methods of moderation and control. There is a lack of transparency on Wikipedia. The rules are nebulous and prone to abuse by veteran users and the oligarchs aggregating on political articles.
wwweston 9mo ago
> Wikipedia is a corporation, just like Work or University “Work” and “University” are so wildly different as institutions that to use them this way makes it perfectly clear how little merit your point has. It’s an empty character attack - possibly a reflection of your own - meant to appeal only to the worst despairing suspicions of others. It does nothing to illuminate specific dynamics of group knowledge negotiation. Anyone who has participated knows there can be conflict and abuse — and more about how that’s addressed than someone throwing drive-by distrust.
- seawsurf 9mo ago
  > "Work” and “University” are so wildly different as institutions that to use them this way makes it perfectly clear how little merit your point has. I disagree. Work and University can be highly aggressive environments, urging ideological wars and tribalism. > It’s an empty character attack - possibly a reflection of your own - Well, this got personal very quickly.
  - surgical_fire 9mo ago
    Ideological wars are everywhere, especially if you are willing to make them up. Any collaborative effort will involve politics, and by politics I mean the actual definition. Per Wikipedia: > set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of status or resources. It's important to recognize this, because the option is becoming an hermit or just accepting fully what others decide for you.
    - seawsurf 9mo ago
      I know this, I've experienced this. There is not a concrete source for what I'm saying here. I remember reading the article about a nudist family photographer. The English Wikipedia article was highlighting the controversy about child pornography that came with it, almost trying to demonize the guy, while the German article was actually trying to go beyond and develop the article. There are enormous discrepancies on that website. Wikipedia has some bizarre articles and rules. I can only provide some pieces and bits of anecdotes.
saghm 9mo ago
At least in the US, most universities are also not for profit. I'd argue that Wikipedia and universities have more in common than either do with for profit companies, so I'm not convinced your examples clarify why it makes more sense to lump all of them together.
- seawsurf 9mo ago
  It was badly worded. I don't even know how to express this properly. It has been many years since I edited on Wikipedia, and it was on both english and portuguese. But the point that I was trying to make is that they are institutions with ideological norms and if you start deviating from them and start hammering on controversial and dangerous ideas and topics, or even just discovering and mentioning them, you can be silenced very easily. And I don't agree with you that US universities are not for profit entities, might be on paper, I don't know. Some of them can bind the students to a long life of debt no?
msla 9mo ago
A "corporation" is any time two or three people gather together in something's name. It's any kind of, well, corporate entity, a single thing comprised of multiple people. A school is a corporation, a town is a corporation (seriously, many municipalities are legally incorporated), a marriage is a very limited corporation, and a business is also a corporation. So, yes, Wikipedia is a corporation, and it should be proud of the fact it can keep so many people working towards a common goal.

shevy-java 9mo ago

> Wikipedia is a corporation, and I personally assume anything corporate is being manipulated by the owners or the ruling oligarchy because they are structurally unreliable. Many articles are fine. I don't think you can equate this to all of Wikipedia automatically.

tb_technical 9mo ago

The remote viewing article keeps being reverted as pseudoscientific when original research conducted by the CIA is cited. Such citations are removed swiftly. Any changes are denied or rolled back. The rationale is that, even though the documents themselves are a primary source from an organization that poured significant resources into researching the phenomenon of remote viewing, the individual posting the declassified document isn't an authority on the subject. Apparently if youre not a doctor, you can't read primary sources? Many such cases. Wikipedia is absolutely a powerful resource, but it it's clearly controlled by moderators with a bias, and there's no incentive to challenge said bias or consider alternative worldviews.

gcanyon 9mo ago
I haven’t looked at the article in question, but is there enough material to make an article specifically about the CIA research programs?
- tb_technical 9mo ago
  There already is a separate wikipedia article about the specific program. It is an extensive article. If you look up "Stargate CIA" in any search engine you'll find it easily. There is a large amount of data on this topic. Literally hundreds of pages of reports and summaries of experiments written over decades of effort (if memory serves). The CIA was trying to use the phenomenon to view distant targets with mediums. It was deemed ineffective, and discontinued in the 90s. Even today there are people attempting to replicate remote viewing and prove it as a phenomenon. For the record, I do not believe this phenomenon is as effective as is claimed. Regardless there is a chance that remote viewing (also known as astral projection) is just something the human brain commonly imagines in some populations. It might be an emergent property of human brains reacting to certain input stimulus, like ASMR. Regardless, the article written about remote viewing as a concept should be allowed to cite documents about how the Stargate program defined and tested remote viewing (their methodologies, etc). But editors, like all humans, have bias. There was a similar kerfuffle that happened about a decade and a half ago about homeopathy. It lead to an edit thread where one of the founders of Wikipedia was cursing about how fake something was. The only objection I have to this, is that primary sources relevant to an article should be allowed to be cited. If a study, whitepaper, or report is widely discredited - include that too. The sum of human knowledge needs to include what we know to be false as well.
  - mrguyorama 9mo ago
    The wikipedia remote viewing article directly points to "Stargate" right now
seawsurf 9mo ago
I remember people saying that the article about Carl Jung was not worth contributing anymore because of his fascist sympathies with nazism. I don't know what to make of that. I've experienced something similar about users downplaying on talk pages the atrocities done by the Soviet Government, like the Holodomor famine or the Katyn Massacre, in contrast to the atrocities done by the Nazis. Controversial and relatively unknown subjects are easier to be attacked and ignored on wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
- tb_technical 9mo ago
  Editors have biases. The best we can do is shine a spotlight on them. People are opposed to this, of course. No one likes to be reminded of how they're limited - and people get really nasty when you accuse them of being a dishonest interlocutor.
nephihaha 9mo ago
They have a bee in their bonnet about pseudoscience and paranormal subject matter. It has never dawned on some of them that you can take an interest in a subject without believing it, or endorsing it. As I said elsewhere, hoaxers and fraudsters are interesting figures in their own right. With something like remote viewing, it is undeniable that the USA, USSR and PRC all conducted research into it during the Cold War, which is documented. Someone might be more interested in that fact than getting a "Here be dragons" warning.
- cindyllm 9mo ago
  [dead]

GuinansEyebrows 9mo ago

> Wikipedia is a corporation nitpick: WMF (the org that develops and hosts Wikipedia and its related services like Wikimedia Commons) is a non-profit foundation, not the classic type of profit-driven corporation that your post implies.

xmprt 9mo ago
I don't think corporation implies for-profit. In my eyes, corporation refers to a large organization with some self-serving motivation which is not necessarily just money. Being a non-profit just so happens to be the best vehicle for this motivation but it doesn't mean that the motivation doesn't exist.
- GuinansEyebrows 9mo ago
  at least in america, in common discussion outside of legal/highly wonky circles, referring to an organization as a corporation almost always implies a for-profit corporation, with (literally) vanishingly few examples of the contrary in popular knowledge (RIP CPB, may you return someday).
  - xmprt 9mo ago
    Would you consider OpenAI a corporation despite it being a non-profit?
    - GuinansEyebrows 9mo ago
      the for-profit pbc arm, yes, absolutely.
seawsurf 9mo ago
Well, I prefer to be skeptical of any corporation, regardless if it is non-profit or not, until proven otherwise with substantial transparency on their methods of moderation and control. There is a lack of transparency on Wikipedia. The rules are nebulous and prone to abuse by veteran users and the oligarchs aggregating on political articles.

wwweston 9mo ago

> Wikipedia is a corporation, just like Work or University “Work” and “University” are so wildly different as institutions that to use them this way makes it perfectly clear how little merit your point has. It’s an empty character attack - possibly a reflection of your own - meant to appeal only to the worst despairing suspicions of others. It does nothing to illuminate specific dynamics of group knowledge negotiation. Anyone who has participated knows there can be conflict and abuse — and more about how that’s addressed than someone throwing drive-by distrust.

seawsurf 9mo ago
> "Work” and “University” are so wildly different as institutions that to use them this way makes it perfectly clear how little merit your point has. I disagree. Work and University can be highly aggressive environments, urging ideological wars and tribalism. > It’s an empty character attack - possibly a reflection of your own - Well, this got personal very quickly.
- surgical_fire 9mo ago
  Ideological wars are everywhere, especially if you are willing to make them up. Any collaborative effort will involve politics, and by politics I mean the actual definition. Per Wikipedia: > set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of status or resources. It's important to recognize this, because the option is becoming an hermit or just accepting fully what others decide for you.
  - seawsurf 9mo ago
    I know this, I've experienced this. There is not a concrete source for what I'm saying here. I remember reading the article about a nudist family photographer. The English Wikipedia article was highlighting the controversy about child pornography that came with it, almost trying to demonize the guy, while the German article was actually trying to go beyond and develop the article. There are enormous discrepancies on that website. Wikipedia has some bizarre articles and rules. I can only provide some pieces and bits of anecdotes.

saghm 9mo ago

At least in the US, most universities are also not for profit. I'd argue that Wikipedia and universities have more in common than either do with for profit companies, so I'm not convinced your examples clarify why it makes more sense to lump all of them together.

seawsurf 9mo ago
It was badly worded. I don't even know how to express this properly. It has been many years since I edited on Wikipedia, and it was on both english and portuguese. But the point that I was trying to make is that they are institutions with ideological norms and if you start deviating from them and start hammering on controversial and dangerous ideas and topics, or even just discovering and mentioning them, you can be silenced very easily. And I don't agree with you that US universities are not for profit entities, might be on paper, I don't know. Some of them can bind the students to a long life of debt no?

msla 9mo ago

A "corporation" is any time two or three people gather together in something's name. It's any kind of, well, corporate entity, a single thing comprised of multiple people. A school is a corporation, a town is a corporation (seriously, many municipalities are legally incorporated), a marriage is a very limited corporation, and a business is also a corporation. So, yes, Wikipedia is a corporation, and it should be proud of the fact it can keep so many people working towards a common goal.