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Prolific Wikipedia editors are threatening to go on strike
- hootz 5mo agoCan Wikipedia be forked?
- colesantiago 5mo agoIt should be. We should do a hard fork of Wikipedia and call it Openpedia or Openwiki probably.
- Taronar 5mo agoPeople often download it into offline storage, i dont see why we couldnt just make our own.
- pickleglitch 5mo agoWho's this "we" exactly? Who's going to host the infrastructure? I don't think it would be so trivial to "just make our own."
- jazzyjackson 5mo agoKiwix and Protocol Labs have a mirror hosted on IPFS: https://ipfs.kiwix.org/ https://ipfs.kiwix.org/ There's Internet In a Box and various other offline self hosted interfaces. But of course there's a big difference between a mirror of the content and the whole community which updates and creates the content.
- II2II 5mo agoThere are various reasons to avoid a fork. Having the resources to maintain such a site, spreading resources thin, and moving over or rebuilding a community of trusted editors are among them. That said, I am one of the people who downloaded a copy of Wikipedia. It wasn't with the intent of working it. Rather, it was to wait out any political strife (since that is bound to happen with such a large and diverse audience).
- jccalhoun 5mo agoIt has been a few times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_forks_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_forks_of_Wikip...
- hootz 5mo agoThey seem to be specialized forks though, not actual recreations of the entire Wikipedia. We should have like an actual Mediawiki instance that forks the current Wikipedia content and maybe also leeches contributions off of it for some time to keep it up to date.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- altilunium 5mo agokeywords : miraheze, wikioasis
- 948382828528 5mo ago[dead]
- ltbarcly3 5mo ago:thumbs-up:
- 1970-01-01 5mo ago>The union Wiki Workers United, which has not yet been recognized, declined a request for an interview. So, how can they strike when they're all volunteering? What exactly is their Trump-card secret strategy against full replacement? The article didn't even bother addressing the fundamental problem here.
- guerrilla 5mo ago> What exactly is their Trump-card secret strategy against full replacement? They are the value. Good luck finding volunteers to replace them.
- paleotrope 5mo agoI'm sure there are plenty of reddit moderators ready to take it up if needed.
- tecleandor 5mo agoWell, it's not exactly the same. It's not a forum (not that a forum is easy, but it's completely different). If you just substitute most Wikipedia editors, with no handover process, I assure you it's going to be a mess.
- kapluni 5mo agoIt’s a mess already. Just look up their definition of NPOV and compare it to what passes for neutrality in articles.
- embedding-shape 5mo agoThere are no points to be earned on Wikipedia, so redditors surely aren't interested until it gets completely gamified.
- paleotrope 5mo agoIt's a different type of game on wikipedia.
- RickJWagner 5mo ago[flagged]
- embedding-shape 5mo agoSo "trust" is only possible when it's 100% unbiased? Then nothing is "trustworthy" as nothing can be 100% unbiased in a encyclopedia? I'd say something could be biased in some ways, unbiased in others, yet still be trustworthy, but that's a lot of nuance all at once.
- kapluni 5mo agoBastion is pretty high praise. A lot of bias riding on the trust for the brand is the problem . Because the lies there have a much higher impact than lies on a Reddit post.
- RickJWagner 5mo agoAdding this for readers curious about the Manhattan Institutes methods and findings. Are there any studies that show different results? https://manhattan.institute/article/is-wikipedia-politically-biased https://manhattan.institute/article/is-wikipedia-politically...
- lorecore 5mo agoThe Manhattan Institute is hardly a non-biased source. It was literally founded by the director of the CIA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Casey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Casey
- slater 5mo agoAnd this "institute" is currently chaired by Betsy Devos. Good lord.
- chadgpt3 5mo agoWho are the Manhattan Institute and Larry Sanger? What are their biases? I know Elon finds it very biased, so he created Grokipedia, but that says a lot more about Elon than about Wikipedia.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- sourcegrift 5mo ago[flagged]
- josefritzishere 5mo agoWhether they are paid or not, this represents an existential threat to Wikipedia. Without an army of competent editors, Wikipedia just becomes garbage propaganda like Grokipedia.
- SanjayMehta 5mo ago[flagged]
- speedgoose 5mo agoSure but one is a lot less trustworthy than the other.
- margalabargala 5mo ago> For most topics the results are the same Sure, it frequently won't deliberately lie to you. It often does not replace facts with a party line statement. Wikipedia is far more trustworthy.
- SanjayMehta 5mo agoStrongly disagree. Wikipedo editors are allegedly "humans making an impartial judgement call." Grokipedia is just an algorithm. Humans without ethics are worse than a badly designed algorithm.
- margalabargala 5mo agoYou've now made the claim that wikipedia editors are without ethics. I see you also included all evidence to back up this baseless claim.
- dangus 5mo ago> Neither are trustworthy. Since we’ve all forgotten media literacy, what makes Wikipedia trustworthy is that sources are cited and you can inspect those sources yourself to make a judgement call on the topic at hand. There was never any such thing as blind trust. We learned in grade school how to evaluate sources and what types of sources are out there (primary and secondary sources, etc). There is some level of trust in being open, transparent, and without a profit motive. But we recognize as educated people that truth is a matter of perspective, and we can build a complete picture by compiling different perspectives. But then people like you roll in tossing casual accusations around and I guess your intention is to steer people to far less trustworthy sources than Wikipedia.
- SanjayMehta 5mo ago[flagged]
- palijer 5mo agoI think you're going to need to elaborate a fair amount on that take... That runs contrary to the general concensus that having freely and easily accessible information is good for people.
- bigfishrunning 5mo agoI think the problem that GP is referring to is that Wikipedia is currently treated as a primary source of truth with probably more trust then it should have. When it started (in the '00s) every high-school librarian incessantly warned paper-writing students to verify anything you found on Wikipedia. Eventually, we all got complacent and I believe that general attitude has mostly evaporated. Wikipedia's requirement for citations absolutly helped with this (and is a good thing) but I don't know how well those citations are vetted. I agree that Wikipedia is good for society, and I hope it continues to exist, but I think some skepticism of it is healthy.
- soco 5mo agoI don't think this is what the OP claimed up here. Anyway, you're absolutely right, and also I don't see any message on this page claiming we should take Wikipedia without skepticism.
- britta 5mo agoI appreciate that this article actually cites some of the relevant discussions. Wikipedia community processes are unusual in that they are largely public, including that foundation staff members respond to community questions in public, so you can read a lot of the backstory yourself. Here are a few links. Main discussion about Community Tech team on the Village Pump (discussion board): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#WMF_Community_Tech_team_has_been_disbanded,_engineers_laid_off https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#W... * Response from the WMF (21 May): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#Response_from_the_WMF_(21_May) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#R... * Note from the Wikimedia Foundation on unionization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#Note_from_the_Wikimedia_Foundation_on_unionization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#N... * Response from the WMF (22 May): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#Response_from_the_WMF_(22_May) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#R... * WWU statement (May 23): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#WWU_statement_(May_23) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#W... * Response from WMF 24 May: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#Response_from_WMF_24_May https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#R... The 24 May statement includes "I know many of you asked why we cannot just guarantee people new roles...we have 4 countries represented, with a wide variance in required actions. I want to note one specific requirement that came from these laws: we could not pre-select certain staff for new roles, as that would appear to be circumventing legally required processes in some countries." Discussion about proposed direction for Community Wishlist: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist#Proposed_direction_for_Wishlist https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist#Prop...
- zozbot234 5mo agoDiscussed before at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48285592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48285592
- NordStreamYacht 5mo ago[flagged]
- jmclnx 5mo agoThe fire people doing real work. Without those 6 people, what paid people work at wikipedia ? Just fund raisers and managers ? That seems to be how non-profits evolve these days, fund raisers and management get most of the $ raised. So it looks like the WF is going in that direction to me. I wish the editors good luck.
- frenchtoast8 5mo agoWMF has over 600 staff, and 6 were recently laid off from a specific team. The criticism isn’t that no one is doing work at WMF but instead a) The team affected by the layoff was responsible for implementing ideas from the community, and this historically has not had much traction. This decision sends a signal that WMF does not care about community input. b) Most of the people laid off were prominent in a union, and the community thinks this is unfair retaliation that a mission focused non profit shouldn’t stoop to.
- ChrisArchitect 5mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48285592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48285592
- gjvc 5mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ChrisArchitect https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ChrisArchitect