If Wikipedia was not real, it would sound like a naive utopian thing you’d read in a bad paperback. Multi-language repository of basically all human knowledge that’s extremely resistant to government capture and contributed by volunteers totally transparently? Bullshit. And yet … there it is.

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eru an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Wikipedia might be resistant to government capture. But it's rather vulnerable to other forms of capture.

See https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashe... and https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...

Having said that I agree that Wikipedia is a tremendous achievement, and despite the wards it's amazing that it works as well as it does.

If you permit me to go on a tangent: Wikipedia is also interesting as a test case for our definitions of (economic) 'productivity'. By any common sense notion of productivity, Wikipedia was and is an enormous triumph: the wiki models harvests volunteers' time and delivers a high quality encyclopedia for free to customers. By textbook definitions, Wikipedia tanked productivity in the encyclopedia sector because these definitions essentially put revenue in the numerator and various measures of resources expended in the denominator---and Wikipedia's numerator is approximately zero dollars.

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parpfish 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

to me it feels like something that would be a 'wonder' you could construct in one of the civilization games. and i love that there's something that awe-inspiring just... sitting there for free on my computer.

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rendall an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Wikipedia is not resistant to capture. It is structurally exposed to coordinated editing groups, and the platform has no robust way to detect or neutralize them. On politically or strategically important pages, especially where state or financial interests are involved, organized paid editors can and do shape coverage, dominate talk pages, and crowd out dissenting contributions.

There have been many editing scandals over the years. While one could argue that editing cabals being caught and banned demonstrates that Wikipedia has structural resistance to such behavior, the scandals that become public are, almost by definition, the ones that were clumsy enough to get caught. The mechanisms that appear robust largely work only against amateurish, poorly hidden or commercially indiscreet operations. What they do not reliably detect are long-term, well-resourced, politically motivated or state-aligned editing groups that behave patiently, avoid obvious sockpuppeting footprints, and stay within procedural boundaries while still dominating page direction.

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SilverElfin an hour ago | parent [-]

There’s also the rules of Wikipedia. Things like what constitutes a “source” really skew things. Lots of worthy sources aren’t a mainstream news outlet or academic journal, but are excluded. This creates biases of its own.

Wikipedia is great in many ways, but I would say it’s not really designed to be neutral.

	▲	rendall an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Wikipedia’s sourcing rules are a big part of the problem. Reliable sources on Wikipedia mostly means prestige, center-left Anglosphere media and a narrow slice of academic publishing. In practice that gives generalist news outlets more epistemic weight than field-specific experts, and it excludes large amounts of accurate but unfashionable or non-English material. The result is a replication of whatever biases are already baked into mainstream journalism. The gatekeeping also isn’t democratic. A small, durable cluster of editors on WP:RSN effectively decides which sources are allowed, banned, or given special status. They aren’t vetted for expertise and don’t need to disclose conflicts of interest, yet their decisions propagate across thousands of articles. If a coordinated group influences RSN, they can shape whole domains simply by defining which sources count as "real." WP:NPOV becomes a matter of which media ecosystems have the loudest megaphone, not which sources are actually most accurate. Control the allowed sources and you control the encyclopedia.