| ▲ | falcor84 6 hours ago |
| There are agendas there, just like in every human endeavor, but it definitely hasn't been "hijacked", it's still by far the best single repository of human knowledge out there. If I had to choose one website to take with me to a desert island, it's an obvious choice. We should keep talking about the issues and improving things, but don't throw out the baby with bathwater. |
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| ▲ | plastic-enjoyer 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > We should keep talking about the issues and improving things, but don't throw out the baby with bathwater. Yeah, I wonder what solution people propose that claim that Wikipedia is 'hijacked' or 'compromised' and pushing agendas?
While Wikipedia is not perfect, it is the best encyclopedia we currently have, mostly due to collective efforts and maintainers that care about the state of Wikipedia. I would even say that it is a good thing that there is this transparency, that states and capital are trying to influence Wikipedia because then you know that you may take some articles with a grain of salt or can actively push against it.
Every alternative to Wikipedia that I have seen so far is one that claims to be more truthful than the original, but in the end these are platforms that push agendas without the transparency and attempt to further obscure power relations under the pretext of truth. Every alternative to Wikipedia will have to solve the problems that Wikipedia already has to be a better alternative. However, I do think these are fundamental unsolvable problems
and everyone who claims to have solved this is part of a power struggle over who defines what is considered true. |
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| ▲ | whatox 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | More transparency around the admins and the hierarchy above it would be a good start, as would some kind of countervailing pressure to the ballooning of meta rules (bylaws). For instance: - Oppose the "Super Mario" effect: if admins do something ordinary users would get banned for, they get banned too, they don't just lose their admin title. - Implement restrictions on Arb Com to make it worthy of its "supreme court" moniker. Provide prior notice, allow representation, access to evidence ahead of the case, and require the Arb Com to disclose the logic of any automated scripts they use for mass judging (e.g. counting proportion of edits being reverts, or that counts every change to a reference as "reference vandalism"). Grant defendants the ability to force the Committee's judgment to be disclosed to the public, with PII redacted if necessary. - Require that precedent be recorded for unclear meta rules: what counts as a violation of e.g. canvassing? When do reversions become evidence or proof of "ownership"? - Create an independent appeals body for Arb Com decisions. Like the Arb Com itself, the logic or source code for any scripts they use to aid their decisions, should be public. Ideally, choose the independent appeals body by different means than the Arb Com itself is chosen, e.g. by random selection of users with a certain activity level, independent of the ordinary admin track. - Grant all users the right to be forgotten (courtesy vanishing), not just users in good standing, so that users bullied off the platform can remove their proverbial stockade. - Create a mechanism that forces rules to be refactored or reduced in scope. Just spitballing, one possible way might be to limit the growth of any given WP: page per unit time, require negative growth for some of them, or in some way reward editors who reduce their extent. There may be fundamental unsolvable problems, but that doesn't mean the current system can't be improved. | |
| ▲ | flir 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Every discussion about wikipedia, everywhere, now attracts comments from accounts with a poor history claiming it's biased. I assume bad faith. | | |
| ▲ | philistine 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It is a great example of the shaping of opinions the OP claims Wikipedia suffers from. It is a textbook example of the way the detractors of Wikipedia comport themselves. Accuse the site of of exactly what you’re doing at this exact moment. | |
| ▲ | brap 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Do I have poor history? | | |
| ▲ | flir 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Probably no worse than mine. But you've got to admit, it's a heuristic that saves time. |
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| ▲ | nephihaha an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia was very much hijacked. As was the Lowland Scots one, except in the second case the individual made the news. The Gaelic one has a German guy running it who has several vanity articles and has chased most other users off apart from some government employees. |
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| ▲ | b65e8bee43c2ed0 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| it absolutely has been. like every online community, Wikipedia is extremely vulnerable to the terminally online and/or the mentally ill, to whom everything is political. like clockwork, every remotely political article cites opinions only from a certain perspective, often quoting glorified nobodies to assert the narrative the '''editors''' want to present. dissenting opinions, no matter how overwhelmingly common among the real people, are mentioned in passing at best and often derisively. |
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| ▲ | dataflow 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Links to examples would go a long way. | | | |
| ▲ | philistine 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > mentally ill Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That Wikipedia has been co-opted by mentally ill people is an extraordinary claim. You should provide more than feelings. | | |
| ▲ | nephihaha an hour ago | parent [-] | | Wikipedia's model does favour autistic* people and those with a lot of time on their hands. You can see this in the sheer volume of some contributions, their focuses and the invention of obscure rules and Wikipedia specific jargon e.g. peacock terms etc. * ASD is not a mental illness but it can produce quirky and obsessive behaviour. |
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| ▲ | komali2 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If you can download the Talk pages and edit history, you probably have enough information to, on average, mostly be dealing with objective fact. |
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| ▲ | pydry 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think for anything controversial we need a completely different model. Officially wikipedia is NPOV but an especially contentious and murky political mudfight decides what counts as a "citeable" source and what doesnt and what counts as notable and what doesnt. It also has an incredibly strong western bias. Every government, corporation and billionaire pays somebody to participate in that fight as well, using every dirty trick they can. Until we have a model that can sidestep these politics (which Wikipedia seemingly has no real desire to do) and aggregate sources objectively I think it will continue to suck. |
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| ▲ | falcor84 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I agree with the issues, but it definitely doesn't suck if compared to every single other massive endeavor out there. As I see it, it's like that quote about democracy - it's the worst way to attempt to catalogue human knowledge, except for all those other forms that have been tried. > It also has an incredibly strong western bias. What's the issue with that? Why shouldn't English Wikipedia have a strong Western bias? I've explored and participated in several other Wikipedias and other collaborative projects, and each is biased towards the worldviews common to the culture that its main editors come from. I don't think there's a way to have an encyclopedic project without any cultural bias at all (if such a platonic ideal could even be properly defined), and seeing how Western values include a significant focus on pluralism, freedom of expression and scientific inquiry, I think this situation is much better than the alternatives. | | |
| ▲ | pydry 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | >I agree with the issues, but it definitely doesn't suck if compared to every single other massive endeavor out there. Compared to what? I dont really see much aggregation being done at all on Wikipedia's scale. >What's the issue with that? It's supposed to be impartial and objective and it sells itself as such but if you see how the sausage is made it is patently the exact opposite. >I don't think there's a way to have an encyclopedic project without any cultural bias at all I think it's perfectly possible to have an encyclopedia which is more liberal about allowing more sources to be used and which provides tools and metadata about those sources and gives tools to the user allowing them to filter accordingly. Whereas "Blessing" one group of sources and condemning another will inevitably turn it into a propaganda outlet for whomever controls it. You might think that this is the only way but that represents more of a failure of imagination than a lack of options. |
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| ▲ | nephihaha an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | The way some billionaires are described on Wikipedia you'd think they were saints. Even though most of their philanthropy is a tax write-off and goal-orientated (producing good publicity for them or pushing society in a direction they want). |
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| ▲ | slfreference 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| But by claiming one thing and doing the exact opposite (on a statistical quantitative basis), Wikipedia and all other western outlets have become just a front for propaganda which is also the reason why I don't believe in "Persecution of Uyghurs in China" German Scholars Reveal Shocking TRUTH About China’s Xinjiang Province https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fp-MZsRhKM |