5 ms·

I have never been a wikipedia contributor (let alone a mod), but their points seem fair. Maybe not fair for the particular case, but fair for the general case.

I have never been a wikipedia contributor (let alone a mod), but their points seem fair. Maybe not fair for the particular case, but fair for the general case. People who ridicule wikipedia policies should at least acknowledge that the modern internet is a very low trust society with millions of bad actors trying to push their agenda at the expense of others. And now with AI bots running amok the headache increases tenfold. What can an open contribution encyclopedia do in this low trust environment other than enforcing strict, rigid rules? People seem to focus in the particular case but miss the general case. An example tweet from the article by Casey Muratori: I tell Jimmy Wales that JangaFX was written in Odin. He asks for a source. A JangaFX founder replies to him and confirms that it was. Jimmy ignores his (and my) response, while replying to later posts in the thread: Maybe the JangaFX founder is a very trustworthy fellow, sure, but does this reasoning work for EVERY founder and CEO of a company? Can it become a general policy? Another tweet talks about github stars...

stymaar 3mo ago
Also, how are we supposed to know that JangaFX is a real company, and its CEO a real person? Creating fake companies and persona is not particularly high effort today, if that's all it takes for a pet project to be featured on Wikipedia, it's going to end up full of crap real quick.
- embedding-shape 3mo ago
  How do you YCombinator is a real company unless you met pg? Look at it being well known with real useable products, might be something to try to look for...
  - DiogenesKynikos 3mo ago
    Because plenty of secondary sources have covered it. Wikipedia's philosophy is that it summarizes reliable secondary sources. You're asking for Wikipedia to change its fundamental philosophy so that editors go out and gather primary evidence themselves, debate it, and then deduce what's true by themselves. That would work if Wikipedia were edited by a select group of highly qualified people you can trust, but it's not. It's edited by literally anyone who signs up. So the rules are strict: find a secondary source, or else don't include the info.
    - stymaar 3mo ago
      I'm 95% sure the account you're replying to is a karma-farming bot (15k karma in just 8 month is a lot), which makes its comment spectacularly ironic.
      - embedding-shape 3mo ago
        Lol, thanks if nothing else, I suppose, I do have quite some freetime at my hands. Mind pointing out comments by me seems non-humanly written? 95% is high confidence so assuming you have some examples at hand here.
      - bryanrasmussen 3mo ago
        I'm just wondering - what is the benefit of a karma-farming bot? I mean I get the benefits of bots on bluesky and twitter and Instagram etc. because you can turn high engagement into money!! I figured bots here were because people maybe were trying out AI tools, scripts, or because keeping their business visible to people who might be interested. But what benefit can you derive from the Karma.I have pretty good Karma and it hasn't done anything for me that I'm aware of?
        embedding-shape 3mo ago
        You can influence the general sentiment in the thread, have the last word everywhere when terms/companies and so on are mentioned. Manipulation goes way beyond just "score goes up", sometimes introducing a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt is enough to derail entire submissions.
        bryanrasmussen 3mo ago
        OK, but does the Karma help those goals?
        embedding-shape 3mo ago
        Yes, apparently some people (like stymaar) do look at user's profile and look at those numbers to decide how they feel about things. Sometimes high karma can be a sign of trust or a established profile, sometimes (like in this case coupled with relatively recent registration date) it comes of as a signal of suspicion.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- dismalaf 3mo ago
  They do have products you can buy, download and use... And plenty of people on YouTube have made videos reviewing or showing how to use their products.
- torginus 3mo ago
  > Also, how are we supposed to know that JangaFX is a real company, and its CEO a real person? From the page: https://jangafx.com/legal/end-user-license-agreement https://jangafx.com/legal/end-user-license-agreement JangaFX, LLC, a North Carolina Limited Liability Company located at PO BOX 27...
  - stymaar 3mo ago
    What does that prove exactly?
willdr 3mo ago
Yes, I tried saying this to both GingerBill and Casey on Twitter but they were unreceptive. I understand their frustrations and I think Wikipedia does have sourcing gaps for projects like Odin. But you can't really understand the spam problem until you've seen it firsthand, and general case notability requirements are one of the first lines of defence against bad actors.
- tux3 3mo ago
  And notability isn't just for spam, the core difficulty with Wikipedia is that people disagree about what should be written in articles. The site only functions because of a masterful Jiu-jitsu move where we redirect heated arguments about what Wikipedia should say into heated arguments about which Reliable Source to cite. That's the fundamental underlying reason behind all the rules and all the deletion discussions. It's not that the article isn't important, it's not that the content is wrong or not useful or that we don't want it. It's that Wikipedia would be pure chaos if it let people just write without sources, and the fights over content would never end. Notability just boils down to "can we find enough reliable sources to write an article we can verify and stand behind?". Just quoting what authors of the topic say about their own work would of course fall a little short of what people expect from an encyclopedia.
  - fragmede 3mo ago
    Except for the citogensis problem. https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/ what's the gate being kept and by whom?
    - amiga386 3mo ago
      The gate is reliable secondary sources. These sources, for the most part, don't check their facts using Wikipedia. These sources also tend to have feedback mechanisms, so if they have make a mistake, their response is to correct it in a timely fashion. This is what makes them reliable in Wikipedians' judgement. A publication that regularly made errors, or published claims regardless of veracity, or left errors in place even after being notified of them, would quickly lose its "reliable" badge. Wikipedians even track the downfall of a reliable source becoming an unreliable one, and say you can only cite articles from the time period the source was reliable. And Wikipedia itself is ready and waiting to remove citogenesis and prevent it coming back, the moment it's no longer in a reliable source. So while citogenesis can happen, it's detected and resolved over time, it's not some "gotcha".
ozgrakkurt 3mo ago
But is trusting the CEO worse than trusting newspapers? Argument of Casey was that it is not.
- pwdisswordfishq 3mo ago
  Trusting a rando who claims to be the CEO of a company nobody heard of is worse, yes.
  - SanjayMehta 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    - svat 3mo ago
      No they are not, which is why Wikipedia doesn't rely on them. All information on Wikipedia is supposed to be verifiable via a reliable secondary source (books, newspapers, etc from publishers with a reputation), so anything written by any editor can, if unverifiable, be removed by any other editor, anonymous or not.
      - baranul 3mo ago
        Agree. That's what some people seem to not understand or overlook.
DiogenesKynikos 3mo ago
Wikipedia's core policy is verifiability, not truth. If you put a factual statement into an article, you're required to have a written source that Wikipedia can cite. "Someone who says they're the CEO said so on the talk page" doesn't cut it. If the CEO really wants to get this info into Wikipedia, they can go give an interview to a reputable newspaper, news website, magazine, etc., and then Wikipedia can cite that. Which brings me to the second policy: notability. If JangaFX is really notable enough to have a Wikipedia page, then surely there will be plenty of coverage of it in secondary sources, so Wikipedia won't have to rely on talk-page statements by random editors claiming to be the CEO.
- SanjayMehta 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - thunderfork 3mo ago
    Cited sources are as-close-to-truthful-as-one-can-manage. This is how one avoids having the truthiness of the editors matter.
    - youarenaive343 3mo ago
      It's just shifting the problem from one dimension to another, not actually solving it.
      - DiogenesKynikos 3mo ago
        Shifting the problem from anonymous Wikipedia editors to newspapers and magazines is a big improvement.
- mopsi 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - DiogenesKynikos 3mo ago
voidifremoved 3mo ago
Self published uncontroversial statements of fact about individuals or companies are permitted but they don't establish notability, which is the whole issue here. You need broad third party coverage to decide if you should even have an article or topic, and then you can source details to blogs or tweets if it's justifiable.
- mistrial9 3mo ago
  except for hundreds of early actors who put themselves and their pet projects in, early days. Some grifters like Bernt Wahl in Berkeley for example.. source: contributed documentation to a City of Berkeley disciplinary hearing
mike_hock 3mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck Apparently that one is "notable" but Odin is not. "The rules" are on the hook to justify their existence by providing reasonable and desirable outcomes, they're not a purpose unto themselves. If your rules are shown to be buggy, fix your rules.
- narnarpapadaddy 3mo ago
  Rules are only “good” or “bad” in the context of the alternatives. What’s the alternative?
- kemayo 3mo ago
  Makes sense. The Brainfuck article has a bunch of citations to published journals and books, so it's notable -- people are talking about it in ways that Wikipedia recognizes. That's what "notability" means -- "are unrelated trustworthy people talking about it?" This is the Odin article as it existed when it was deleted by that AfD: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Odin_(programming_language)&oldid=1347982297 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Odin_(progr... The references aren't good. I don't have any pre-existing opinion of Odin, since I had never heard of it before I saw this HN post, and those references don't convince me that it matters to anyone. I'm fairly inclusionist, so I'd personally think it's worth keeping the article if they could point to Odin being used by any notable project, or by a bunch of small projects. But the only user it claims for the language is a company I'd never heard of that doesn't have a wikipedia article.
- strenholme 3mo ago
  >Apparently [Brainfuck] is "notable" but Odin is not Brainfuck has been extensively discussed in the following journal papers: https://doi.org/10.1080%2F07350198.2020.1727096 https://doi.org/10.1080%2F07350198.2020.1727096 https://doi.org/10.7559%2Fcitarj.v9i3.432 https://doi.org/10.7559%2Fcitarj.v9i3.432 If you can find two journal papers which extensively discuss the Odin programming language, I assure you that it will survive any Wikipedia deletion discussion. I’m saying this as someone who, 13 years ago, had a very stressful week when my tiny little open source project (MaraDNS) was on the Wikipedia deletion block.[1] I added references to the deletion discussion, and as a result, it survived the discussion without a single vote to delete it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/MaraDNS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

stymaar 3mo ago

Also, how are we supposed to know that JangaFX is a real company, and its CEO a real person? Creating fake companies and persona is not particularly high effort today, if that's all it takes for a pet project to be featured on Wikipedia, it's going to end up full of crap real quick.

embedding-shape 3mo ago
How do you YCombinator is a real company unless you met pg? Look at it being well known with real useable products, might be something to try to look for...
- DiogenesKynikos 3mo ago
  Because plenty of secondary sources have covered it. Wikipedia's philosophy is that it summarizes reliable secondary sources. You're asking for Wikipedia to change its fundamental philosophy so that editors go out and gather primary evidence themselves, debate it, and then deduce what's true by themselves. That would work if Wikipedia were edited by a select group of highly qualified people you can trust, but it's not. It's edited by literally anyone who signs up. So the rules are strict: find a secondary source, or else don't include the info.
  - stymaar 3mo ago
    I'm 95% sure the account you're replying to is a karma-farming bot (15k karma in just 8 month is a lot), which makes its comment spectacularly ironic.
    - embedding-shape 3mo ago
      Lol, thanks if nothing else, I suppose, I do have quite some freetime at my hands. Mind pointing out comments by me seems non-humanly written? 95% is high confidence so assuming you have some examples at hand here.
    - bryanrasmussen 3mo ago
      I'm just wondering - what is the benefit of a karma-farming bot? I mean I get the benefits of bots on bluesky and twitter and Instagram etc. because you can turn high engagement into money!! I figured bots here were because people maybe were trying out AI tools, scripts, or because keeping their business visible to people who might be interested. But what benefit can you derive from the Karma.I have pretty good Karma and it hasn't done anything for me that I'm aware of?
      - embedding-shape 3mo ago
        You can influence the general sentiment in the thread, have the last word everywhere when terms/companies and so on are mentioned. Manipulation goes way beyond just "score goes up", sometimes introducing a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt is enough to derail entire submissions.
        bryanrasmussen 3mo ago
        OK, but does the Karma help those goals?
        embedding-shape 3mo ago
        Yes, apparently some people (like stymaar) do look at user's profile and look at those numbers to decide how they feel about things. Sometimes high karma can be a sign of trust or a established profile, sometimes (like in this case coupled with relatively recent registration date) it comes of as a signal of suspicion.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
dismalaf 3mo ago
They do have products you can buy, download and use... And plenty of people on YouTube have made videos reviewing or showing how to use their products.
torginus 3mo ago
> Also, how are we supposed to know that JangaFX is a real company, and its CEO a real person? From the page: https://jangafx.com/legal/end-user-license-agreement https://jangafx.com/legal/end-user-license-agreement JangaFX, LLC, a North Carolina Limited Liability Company located at PO BOX 27...
- stymaar 3mo ago
  What does that prove exactly?

willdr 3mo ago

Yes, I tried saying this to both GingerBill and Casey on Twitter but they were unreceptive. I understand their frustrations and I think Wikipedia does have sourcing gaps for projects like Odin. But you can't really understand the spam problem until you've seen it firsthand, and general case notability requirements are one of the first lines of defence against bad actors.

tux3 3mo ago
And notability isn't just for spam, the core difficulty with Wikipedia is that people disagree about what should be written in articles. The site only functions because of a masterful Jiu-jitsu move where we redirect heated arguments about what Wikipedia should say into heated arguments about which Reliable Source to cite. That's the fundamental underlying reason behind all the rules and all the deletion discussions. It's not that the article isn't important, it's not that the content is wrong or not useful or that we don't want it. It's that Wikipedia would be pure chaos if it let people just write without sources, and the fights over content would never end. Notability just boils down to "can we find enough reliable sources to write an article we can verify and stand behind?". Just quoting what authors of the topic say about their own work would of course fall a little short of what people expect from an encyclopedia.
- fragmede 3mo ago
  Except for the citogensis problem. https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/ what's the gate being kept and by whom?
  - amiga386 3mo ago
    The gate is reliable secondary sources. These sources, for the most part, don't check their facts using Wikipedia. These sources also tend to have feedback mechanisms, so if they have make a mistake, their response is to correct it in a timely fashion. This is what makes them reliable in Wikipedians' judgement. A publication that regularly made errors, or published claims regardless of veracity, or left errors in place even after being notified of them, would quickly lose its "reliable" badge. Wikipedians even track the downfall of a reliable source becoming an unreliable one, and say you can only cite articles from the time period the source was reliable. And Wikipedia itself is ready and waiting to remove citogenesis and prevent it coming back, the moment it's no longer in a reliable source. So while citogenesis can happen, it's detected and resolved over time, it's not some "gotcha".

ozgrakkurt 3mo ago

But is trusting the CEO worse than trusting newspapers? Argument of Casey was that it is not.

pwdisswordfishq 3mo ago
Trusting a rando who claims to be the CEO of a company nobody heard of is worse, yes.
- SanjayMehta 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - svat 3mo ago
    No they are not, which is why Wikipedia doesn't rely on them. All information on Wikipedia is supposed to be verifiable via a reliable secondary source (books, newspapers, etc from publishers with a reputation), so anything written by any editor can, if unverifiable, be removed by any other editor, anonymous or not.
    - baranul 3mo ago
      Agree. That's what some people seem to not understand or overlook.

DiogenesKynikos 3mo ago

Wikipedia's core policy is verifiability, not truth. If you put a factual statement into an article, you're required to have a written source that Wikipedia can cite. "Someone who says they're the CEO said so on the talk page" doesn't cut it. If the CEO really wants to get this info into Wikipedia, they can go give an interview to a reputable newspaper, news website, magazine, etc., and then Wikipedia can cite that. Which brings me to the second policy: notability. If JangaFX is really notable enough to have a Wikipedia page, then surely there will be plenty of coverage of it in secondary sources, so Wikipedia won't have to rely on talk-page statements by random editors claiming to be the CEO.

SanjayMehta 3mo ago
[flagged]
- thunderfork 3mo ago
  Cited sources are as-close-to-truthful-as-one-can-manage. This is how one avoids having the truthiness of the editors matter.
  - youarenaive343 3mo ago
    It's just shifting the problem from one dimension to another, not actually solving it.
    - DiogenesKynikos 3mo ago
      Shifting the problem from anonymous Wikipedia editors to newspapers and magazines is a big improvement.
mopsi 3mo ago
[flagged]
- DiogenesKynikos 3mo ago

voidifremoved 3mo ago

Self published uncontroversial statements of fact about individuals or companies are permitted but they don't establish notability, which is the whole issue here. You need broad third party coverage to decide if you should even have an article or topic, and then you can source details to blogs or tweets if it's justifiable.

mistrial9 3mo ago
except for hundreds of early actors who put themselves and their pet projects in, early days. Some grifters like Bernt Wahl in Berkeley for example.. source: contributed documentation to a City of Berkeley disciplinary hearing

mike_hock 3mo ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck Apparently that one is "notable" but Odin is not. "The rules" are on the hook to justify their existence by providing reasonable and desirable outcomes, they're not a purpose unto themselves. If your rules are shown to be buggy, fix your rules.

narnarpapadaddy 3mo ago
Rules are only “good” or “bad” in the context of the alternatives. What’s the alternative?
kemayo 3mo ago
Makes sense. The Brainfuck article has a bunch of citations to published journals and books, so it's notable -- people are talking about it in ways that Wikipedia recognizes. That's what "notability" means -- "are unrelated trustworthy people talking about it?" This is the Odin article as it existed when it was deleted by that AfD: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Odin_(programming_language)&oldid=1347982297 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Odin_(progr... The references aren't good. I don't have any pre-existing opinion of Odin, since I had never heard of it before I saw this HN post, and those references don't convince me that it matters to anyone. I'm fairly inclusionist, so I'd personally think it's worth keeping the article if they could point to Odin being used by any notable project, or by a bunch of small projects. But the only user it claims for the language is a company I'd never heard of that doesn't have a wikipedia article.
strenholme 3mo ago
>Apparently [Brainfuck] is "notable" but Odin is not Brainfuck has been extensively discussed in the following journal papers: https://doi.org/10.1080%2F07350198.2020.1727096 https://doi.org/10.1080%2F07350198.2020.1727096 https://doi.org/10.7559%2Fcitarj.v9i3.432 https://doi.org/10.7559%2Fcitarj.v9i3.432 If you can find two journal papers which extensively discuss the Odin programming language, I assure you that it will survive any Wikipedia deletion discussion. I’m saying this as someone who, 13 years ago, had a very stressful week when my tiny little open source project (MaraDNS) was on the Wikipedia deletion block.[1] I added references to the deletion discussion, and as a result, it survived the discussion without a single vote to delete it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/MaraDNS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...