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thunderbong 6 hours ago

In the 2000s, in the tech world, the open source successes that were being talked about was always Apache and Linux.

When Wikipedia started gaining a bit of traction, everyone made fun of it. It was the butt of jokes in all the prime time comedy shows. And I always felt like telling the critics - "Don't you see what is happening? People all over the world are adding their own bits of knowledge and creating this huge thing way beyond what we've seen till now. It's cooperation on an international scale! By regular people! This is what the internet is all about. People, by the thousands, are contributing without asking for anything else in return. This is incredible! "

A few years later, Encyclopedia Britannica, stopped their print edition. A few years after that I read that Wikipedia had surpassed even that.

The amount of value Wikipedia brings to the world is incalculable.

And I'm very fortunate to be alive at a time where I can witness something at this scale. Something that transcends borders and boundaries. Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion. Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world.

Thank you, Wikipedia.

20k 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If I want to look something up, I always check out wikipedia first. Its not always accurate, but its invariably a lot more accurate on most topics than random information across the web. Its also pretty easy to spot bad quality wiki articles once you get the gist of the site

Its amazing that wikipedia exists - there've been multiple hardcore attempts to kill it over the years for profit, but its still managing to go

jbki 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Wikipedia is often the last on my goto resources to consult. The information is huge, but writing quality or style often irks me more than I can stand. I I always check Britannica first. If it's not there, then I move on.

lostlogin 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Does this relate to a particular domain or field? I find it so good, and on the rare occasion I’ve found something wrong, I’ve fixed it.

frereubu 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

While studying a neuroscience-adjacent MSc at UCL in London during the mid-2010s, senior academics would regularly recommend Wikipedia as an excellent primer for neuroanatomy. They wouldn't do it for people on actual neuroscience courses, who needed to know things in more detail, but they were very complimentary about the accuracy of the information on there.

0cf8612b2e1e 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I find math topics to be insufferable. They are written to be as theoretical as possible and borderline useless if you do not already know the topic at hand.

jacobolus 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's extremely difficult to write math articles for a general audience which are both accessible and accurate, and the number of excellent writers working on Wikipedia math articles is tiny.

Please get involved if you want to see improvement. There are some math articles which are excellent: readable, well illustrated, appropriately leveled, comprehensive; but there are many, many others which are dramatically underdeveloped, poorly sourced, unillustrated, confusing, too abstract, overloaded with formulas, etc.

f1shy 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Absolutely. I do not know the current status, so don’t kill me if now is much better, because is just an example from many. But take fourier series. I remember going into the article, and instead of starting with something lime “helps to decompose functions in sums of sin and cos”, started with “the forier transform is defined as (PUM the integral for with Euler formula) continues: is easy to show the integral converges according to xxx criterion, as long as the function is…” you get the idea. Had I not know what FT is, I would’ve not undestand anything

Articles in biology, from which I understand nothing, are a wall for me. I could never understand anything biology related. Also for example, in Spanish, don’t ask me why, any plant or animal is always under the latin scientific name, and you have to search the whole article to find the “common” name of the thing.

jacobolus 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The articles about Fourier series and Fourier transform currently begin with:

> A Fourier series is a series expansion of a periodic function into a sum of trigonometric functions. The Fourier series is an example of a trigonometric series. By expressing a function as a sum of sines and cosines, many problems involving the function become easier to analyze because trigonometric functions are well understood.

and

> In mathematics, the Fourier transform (FT) is an integral transform that takes a function as input, and outputs another function that describes the extent to which various frequencies are present in the original function. The output of the transform is a complex valued function of frequency. The term Fourier transform refers to both the mathematical operation and to this complex-valued function. When a distinction needs to be made, the output of the operation is sometimes called the frequency domain representation of the original function. The Fourier transform is analogous to decomposing the sound of a musical chord into the intensities of its constituent pitches.

3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
[deleted]
kccqzy 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I find it the other way around. I remember vividly that the textbook I was using for proving Gödel's first incompleteness theorem was insufferable and dense. Wikipedia gave a nice and more easily understood proof sketch. Pedagogically it’s better to provide a proof sketch for students to turn it into a full proof anyways.

jbki 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

johnisgood 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What about https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond?

layer8 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The introductory paragraph in Simple English is: 'A diamond (from the ancient Greek αδάμας – adámas "unbreakable") is a re-arrangement of carbon atoms (those are called allotropes).' Seriously?

Compare with the Britannica one: 'diamond, a mineral composed of pure carbon. It is the hardest naturally occurring substance known; it is also the most popular gemstone. Because of their extreme hardness, diamonds have a number of important industrial applications.'

Britannica concisely summarizes the basic knowledge about diamonds in an easy-to-read short paragraph.

f1shy 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I prefer the real encyclopedias. Britannica or other. The quality was so much better. For me would be hard to believe, anybody with actual experience using britannica can prefer wiki from the explanation quality pov. Of course the wiki has many advantages too. Before LLM I used it for helping with translation, for example. The direct links to web resources, etc. I like having both. I do certainly not want a world where wikipedia has the monopoly of truth, or truth is something “democratic” please understand it correctly, democracy is good, just that in knowledge I’ve seen so often the most popular belief is sometimes wrong.

Romario77 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The thing is - Britannica is a lot smaller. Also - wikipedia is updated almost immediately for significant events where Brittanica would only be updated sometimes.

Wikipedia is uneven, some popular topics are well covered and have good info, others are outdated, biased, often written by one person with agenda.

johnisgood 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I prefer the Britannica one, too.

jbki 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I in fact sometimes do switch to simple english

andrepd 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm reading the Diamond article you liked and I cannot understand for the lift of me what you wanted? The Brittanica article seems substantially poorer. Note also that a key feature of Wikipedia is the hyperlinks! If you don't know what a "crystalline structure" is, or you want to know more about "hardness", you're welcome to click the links and dive further!

jbki 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The wikipedia is more information dense, but that's not always what I want in a general purpose reference. Also hyperlinks are good if you want to read the article. But I don't want to have to click through hyperlinks, and thereby lose focus. Sometimes I just want to know just enough to complete the context in which some thing was mentioned. In the opening sentence there's a whole phrase "solid form of the element carbon" hyperlinked - to what is not immediately clear - but curiosity peaks the mind and I see that it's to an article on carbon allotropes. Later on it says it's "metastable" so I need to know what that means, but it just links to an article that's equally obstruse and so I have to go on an endless rabbit hole of hyperlinks. Britannica usually explains briefly in parentheses what some piece of jargon means.

f1shy 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Let me point out, that for me personally, for many years, hyperlinks in Wikipedia were the worst feature. I hated that! Anytime I started looking for something, I would start following links ad infinitum. Was extremely distracting. Instead of a little inline definition, for everything is a link. There is a good balance between linking to the definition of each word, and just inlining the definition.

Anyway, at some I disciplined myself to not follow the links. But sometimes the definition really needs following them.

mettamage 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Hmm, I think this is an area where LLMs can be quite useful to make a wikipedia article more approachable.

f1shy 4 hours ago | parent [-]

But dangerous, as the LLMs are trained on wikipedia.

duozerk 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion

Religion maybe, and Wikipedia is indeed pretty awesome for many topics, but politics is THE bad example here.

Much of the political - especially geopolitical - content on Wikipedia has a tremendous atlanticist bias.

wwweston 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

“atlanticist” - the culture of the enlightenment and the good that’s come from it.

Wikipedia does hold ideals, that access to knowledge is a net good, that people can cooperate both in contribution and review without a dominating magisterial authority. That rational dialogue and qualification and refinement is possible, and that it’s possible to correct for bias, and see the difference between bias and agenda.

Like those whose anti-enlightenment agenda is revealed when they use “atlanticist” as a slur.

sophacles 3 hours ago | parent [-]

No. One can beleive in the enlightenment ideals without placing north america, europe, and the relations between them as the most important thing.

For example - one could argue (quite successfully) that the US and Europe propping up dictators in south america and middle east to secure easy access to oil against the wishes and election results of those nations is opposed to many enlightenment ideals, but it is still atlanticism by prioritizing north american and european relations and preservation of values within their little bubble.

Also, just because there was much good resulting from enlightenment thinking, we also got things like the slave trade, the belgian congo, various genocides and so on from it... all of which are pretty bad.

The very notion that the enlightenment had all the answers and that there is nothing more to improve or learn is itself anti-enlightenment.

(I know there were abolitionists in the enlightnement,and examples of people opposed to all the other bad ideas i mentioned, but there are plenty of people who "rationally" argued for them too)

philipkglass 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is there another public source for encyclopedia-type articles that is better for geopolitical content? For example, if I have a philosophy question I'll often consult the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy instead of Wikipedia.

If there isn't a more neutral public source -- if there are only sources with different biases, or if the better sources are behind paywalls -- then I think that Wikipedia is still doing pretty well even for contentious geopolitical topics.

Usually disputes are visible on the Talk page, regardless of whatever viewpoint may prevail in the main article. It can also be useful to jump back to years-old revisions of articles, if there are recent world events that put the subject of the article in the news.

Apart from Wikipedia, speaking more generally, I think that articles with a strong editorial bias still provide useful information to an alert reader. I can read articles from Mother Jones, Newsmax, Russia Today, the BBC, Times of India, etc. and find different political and/or geopolitical slants to what is written about and how it is reported. I can also learn a lot even when I strongly disagree with the narrative thrust of what is reported. The key thing is to take any particular article or publication as only circumstantial evidence for an underlying reality, and to avoid falling into complacency even when (or especially when) the information you're reading aligns with what you already believe to be true.

defjm 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Could you provide an example article from Wikipedia for such bias?

PS: I had to look up „atlanticist“, did this on Wikipedia. (giggle!)

hbn 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I know sometime around Trump's first presidency, in Bill Clinton's Wikipedia entry, under the Impeachment section they added in a picture of Trump and Clinton shaking hands, apropos of nothing in the surrounding text.

I just checked and it's still there.

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

Are you talking about English Wikipedia, or all of the Wikipedia sites?

MarsIronPI 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In general my impression is that the longer the article title is, the more slanted the article itself is.

woodpanel 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Wikipedia has been the proto-Reddit for a long time, that is, it was relatively easy for ideological bubbles to manufacture the Chomskyian Consent, just by being early adopters.

As such it rapidly developed into heavily biased page, as Wikipedia‘s co-founder Larry Sanger keeps pointing out.

It helps if you are proficient in multiple languages so you can at least „hop“ between the (some) bubbles. But the gatekeeping is always there.

bawolff 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Larry Sanger is not the most convincing on this topic due to how he keeps using conspiracy theories as examples of things Wikipedia is biased against.

Like if the complaint is that Wikipedia is biased against pseudoscience like naturopathy, i consider that a good thing.

woodpanel 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Classical Wikipedia author move right there

behringer 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wikipedia is one of the greatest projects people have indeavored on. It has certainly surpassed the pyramids as one of the great wonders of the world, in usefulness, size and scope and human hours.

ilhanomar 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[dead]

drysine 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world.

And fails spectacularly.

weslleyskah 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

wwweston 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

weslleyskah 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> "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 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

weslleyskah 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

tb_technical 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

weslleyskah 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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/Katyn_massacre

tb_technical 4 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

gcanyon 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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 4 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

GuinansEyebrows 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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 4 hours ago | parent [-]

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).

weslleyskah 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

OvidNaso an hour ago | parent [-]

Hold on, their moderation methods are as transparent as could possibly be. Every article has a dedicated page where every decision has a reason and more often than not an overwhelming amount of discussion. Their overall policy is similarly debated publicly.

Is it overwhelming? Oh yes. Tough to change? Probably also yes without dedication and sound reasoning. But opaque? Certainly doesn't fail that criteria.

weslleyskah an hour ago | parent [-]

It certainly becomes opaque when it is a labyrinth of links and documents that you need to read and follow through. It does not help when these same rules can be abused to death by veteran users.

At a certain point, no one really knows the devil's dance happening at the top of the moderation ladder and you end up wasting a lot of lifetime on these dead talk pages.

It is a bureaucratic nightmare.

shevy-java 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.