I am surprised that the comments haven't mentioned the role of SEO in Wikipedia's growth and defensibility.
Wikipedia's habit of deep interlinking helped it rank back in the early aughts when the SEO rules were rather simple. Add to that the subdomain-driven localization strategy and many other moves that were considered SEO best practices back in those years when the on-page factors used to matter.
But that was just the start. Wikipedia killed it in SEO when it was easy to do so, but it also did one other thing that most SEO-driven sites (eg: About) didn't do correctly - it cared deeply about the content quality and also resisted to run ads (anyone remember Jason Calacanis' articles on how they are leaving $100m on the table? See [1]). So when Panda came around, Google correctly rewarded Wikipedia with #1 rankings for over 50% of its terms (!!), and Jason Calacanis had to shut down Mahalo which got destroyed by Panda.
Wikipedia's dominance continues because it's basically impossible to overcome its lead in inbound links and domain authority. Add to that a surprisingly under-the-radar company culture which has avoided any major blow ups despite its community wielding so much leverage over the world's education and having to make a lot of difficult calls on a daily basis.
It is somehow sad that "caring about content quality" is considered SEO and not just making a good website.
I think more than half the things you mentioned are only good SEO because search engines want to send people to websites they will like reading. I think when that is the case, we should be crediting people for making good websites, not good SEO.
Yeah, looking at it from a purely SEO perspective always makes decisions look kinda shady, as in they're trying to game some algorithm in order to gain more exposure. Wikipedia's biggest SEO factor has to be the massive amount of backlinks it gets. Those are purely organic and happen simply because it is generally the best authority on most any topic. It's more of a testament to how genuinely good Google's algorithm has become rather than some masterplan by Wikipedia.
Once you have 150 million inbound links, the strategy choices are easy - focus on content quality! But you have to remember what Day 1 was looking like: a tiny community, no inbound links, and a fair amount of other encyclopedia competitors trying to attract authors. Now the strategy choices are quite interesting - at the beginning of a startup you have just enough energy/runway to "kill it" in one area. Which one do you focus on? Generating the world's best content alone without the heavy lifting they've done on deep interlinking and other SEO-friendly moves wouldn't have cut it.
Further down in the comments you'll find a research paper [1] that analyzed why Wikipedia succeeded where others failed. I am not sure I bought into the conclusion (which prompted my initial comment), but at least it has a comprehensive listing of all the main players at the time:
Yes, I believe that Wikipedia and its authors never put much thought into SEO. They just think about how to best structure the information and make heavy use of links, which also happens to be a good strategy for SEO.
The Google search rank algorithms changed a lot more than the overall structure of a good Wikipedia article in the last 20 years.
Have you ever encountered on Wikipedia a sentence like this:
"...because a <a>blue</a> <a>whale</a> did..."
rather than
"...because a <a>blue whale</a> did..."
Obviously, the latter version would have been more useful, and I find it difficult to believe that a human being would have made such a mistake. Don't get me wrong - such instances are rare, but they do happen and are an indicator that not all links are generated manually. I don't know what they are using today (if anything), but as someone else pointed out, in the early days they used UseModWiki to ensure a high level of deep interlinking. We can argue that this was done to improve the UX, but the level of ambition that went into it signals that they also saw it as a strategic move (and they would have been right to assume that - 20 years ago, a highly interlinked site was likely the best bang for the buck in SEO when it came to how to prioritize your time and resources).
SEO changed dramatically over the last 20 years. Thankfully, we are today exactly at a point that you described (it all started with Panda in 2011). As you'll see below, getting there was not just a technological challenge, but also one of fixing misaligned incentives.
Prior to 2011, Google enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship with content farms which splattered their pages with AdSense ads (and Google ranked them highly). Can you imagine how it must have sounded for the Panda engineers to pitch to Sergey and Larry that they wanted to replace all those highly monetized websites with Wikipedia?
Matt Cutts commented that "with Panda, Google took a big enough revenue hit via some partners that Google actually needed to disclose Panda as a material impact on an earnings call. But I believe it was the right decision to launch Panda, both for the long-term trust of our users and for a better ecosystem for publishers."
“Google Panda is a major change to Google's search results ranking algorithm that was first released in February 2011. The change aimed to lower the rank of "low-quality sites" or "thin sites", in particular "content farms", and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results.”
Back in the early to mid 2000s, I learned web design/development by volunteering to create websites for charities/NGOs. In the process, I
* ensured that the code (HTML and CSS, only basic non-AJAX, JavaScript) was standards-compliant (at the time, XHTML [1] was “the big thing”)
* implemented basic usability guidelines as advocated by Jakob Nielsen [2] in his Alertbox newsletter and
* followed Mark Pilgrim’s suggestions in his Dive Into Accessibility
Carrying out the above and simply focussing on quality content was enough to rank highly in Google’s search engine results and I never had the need nor inclination to do any research into SEO. Back then the mantra in the web development books was that “content is king” – and Google reflected this philosophy. Sadly, the Web has changed a lot in the intervening years.
Equivalently, the challenge in running a search engine is to decrease the divergence between “what makes a website good” and “what makes us rank you higher”.
> So when Panda came around, Google correctly rewarded Wikipedia with #1 rankings for over 50% of its terms (!!), and Jason Calacanis had to shut down Mahalo which got destroyed by Panda.
For context, this is the type of content that Mahalo was producing to try to game SEO:
Game how? Pretty girl says she will show how to mix a drink. Then proceeds to show how to mix a drink. Not ending world hunger or anything, but nothing deceitful here at least. Maybe I'm missing something
> Game how? Pretty girl says she will show how to mix a drink. Then proceeds to show how to mix a drink. Not ending world hunger or anything, but nothing deceitful here at least. Maybe I'm missing something
IIRC, those videos are pretty famous because the pretty girl was not actually any good at mixing drinks:
> JaNee Nyberg Once Made the World’s Worst Old Fashioned. Jim Beam Just Gave Her a Shot at Redemption.
> The world’s worst Old Fashioned was made on a quiet summer morning in 2010, in a dot com startup’s shoddily decorated conference room in Santa Monica. Mahalo.com had hired JaNee Nyberg to host a series of 50 cocktail tutorial videos that they would then upload to their YouTube channel. In the series’ most infamous video, the actress, model, and part-time bartender slops together an Old Fashioned using no bitters, a giant orange wedge, a ton of ice, and an entire pint glass of bourbon. Now, everyone makes an Old Fashioned a little bit differently—here’s Esquire’s official recipe—but Nyberg’s way was definitely wrong and totally hilarious.
it's not awful, it's just not very high quality content. the instructions are more or less correct, but she does a lot of triggering things in the video, like not measuring the whiskey at all. if I ordered a mint julep in a bar and the bartender made it the way she does, I would not order one at that bar again. if it was expensive, I might ask for my money back or a simpler drink.
the guy explains why he does things the way he does them and why you might do it differently depending on your tastes. unlike the first, this video manages to be more informative than simply reading its script as text.
you might accuse them of clickbaiting by using an attractive woman instead of someone who knows how to make a proper drink, but yeah I don't really see this as "gaming SEO" per se.
edit: I have now spent entirely too much time researching these videos and I feel bad for criticizing her. apparently she was an actual bartender but had to make a hundred of these videos in two days without any of the proper tools or even a script. https://punchdrink.com/articles/where-is-she-now-janee-mahal...
Went back an read the comments on that video. Youtube comments are gold sometimes.
Edit: Watched a few more. I get the impression that theese videos are actually made as gags. She says various measurements for the alcohol (like 2 ounces) but consistently just tops up the whole pint glass.
Edit 2: I may need to reevaluate the "not SEO gaming" stance.
I also went back to watch some more and I really hope you're right about them being gags. the old fashioned video is more like a "how not to" guide: gross cherries, muddling a whole orange slice with peel (wtf), spilling the drink everywhere in a needless mixing step, etc.
Wikipedia's page views, though, are relatively flat since 2016. I suspect, in large part, because of Google's move to expose Wikipedia content on Google pages, removing the need to follow any links to Wikipedia for many queries.
I dont think they did any of those things because of SEO, but because it was the obvious way to do it.
Deep interlinking - originally it used software called UseModWiki, which would automatically make a link if a page name existed for the word you just used.
subdomains - if you want to make a separate site for each language, that is the onvious way to do it
good content- why would anyone intentionally want to make a site with shitty content unless you are making $$$ off it (and wikipedia wasnt)
> Add to that a surprisingly under-the-radar company culture which has avoided any major blow ups despite its community wielding so much leverage over the world's education and having to make a lot of difficult calls on a daily basis.
There's been and still is plenty of controversy regarding both the Wikimedia Foundation and its relationship to the community of volunteers. In fact I'd say the whole thing's kind of rotten, because of many complicated issues.
I am aware of many of their issues, especially on smaller international sites. But even so, on a risk-adjusted basis I think they've managed to avoid more drama than other teams would have pulled off given the environment they are in.
That is interesting. As someone who used to work for the wikimedia foundation, it felt like there was a constant stream of drama. I guess when you are in the middle of it, it feels more intense than it actually is.
I think it's that we get drama which is big to us, but it rarely splashes outside the Foundation and the community to become common knowledge... and the dedicated community remains fairly insular.
Maybe this will be the hidden drawback of the current work to improve talk pages -- all the wikidrama will become more visible to the world!
Wikipedia drama generally seems to happen less often and affect fewer “big” personalities and their money, than say Youtube and Google giving their content creators whiplash over whatever the new policy change is.
> Add to that a surprisingly under-the-radar company culture which has avoided any major blow ups despite its community wielding so much leverage over the world's education and having to make a lot of difficult calls on a daily basis.
That's because Wikimedia Foundation is quietly focusing on the tech and keeping the site up and running while mostly letting the community govern itself.
The few times the Foundation tried to override the community, it didn't go well.
That's one version. Another version, that I know will go over very well here, is that some have invested a lot of money to bring high quality, accessibly-written off-line content by experts in the field to the Web, only for Wikipedia editors to poorly rewrite it in thousands of articles and rank over the original content in Google. And then Wikipedia started using non-follow links so the original sites got no benefit whatsoever.
I find it often has the opposite problem. High quality, accessibly-written off-line content by experts in the field is synthesised on Wikipedia by someone with good understanding of the subject, but then other editors delete large swathes of it for not citing every line and replace it with considerably more dubious explanations of the subject sourced to news articles and partisan think tanks which put all their content online.
> high quality, accessibly-written off-line content by experts in the field to the Web
Where is this content? It sounds like you’re alluding to something obvious but I honestly have no idea, and would like to know where to find it if it does exist.
No kidding. I remember trying to find high quality educational content on the web before wikipedia. For certain subjects it existed, but it was few and far between, and of very mixed quality (how do you know how much trust to put on some geocitirs page)?
>(how do you know how much trust to put on some geocitirs page)
The same way you learn to "trust" anything, including Wikipedia - by verifying sources.
I love Wikipedia, but I don't blindly assume it to be the ground truth in anything (if such truth even exists), especially in the "long-tail" of subject matter.
There's different levels of "trust". With Wikipedia i know roughly what i am getting. I can make an informed decision as to how much to trust it and how much to do further research depending on the application i need it for. After all, sometimes i just need knowledge with a decent chance of being true, where other times I need to be really sure. Wikipedia provides a relatively consistent experience (varrying somewhat with how obscure a page is). Random geocities sites do not give me that consistency, so I cannot make an informed guess as to how correct the page is.
There are fairly predictable quirks about Wikipedia:
- Articles in areas of math written in impenetrable jargon
- Encyclopedic articles about obscure, trivial subjects
- Stubs about relatively important individuals
- Tug-of-war entries about current events
- Random endless lists
- A lot of procedural fighting about original research, notability, etc.
But, as you say, a way to get pointers to or a quick take on a topic, it's pretty good. Am I going to take anything Wikipedia says to the bank without double-checking? Probably not. And, if you look deeply enough into some topics, you find a lot of circular references to some other single source of information. But overall, it's a good go-to reference.
With Wikipedia, you very soon develop a sense of gauging maturity of the article just from a quick glance. More often than not, the editors would even put maturity warnings for you.
If something looks dubious you can even dive into revision list to spot the problems.
This is more than can be said for nearly any other source out there.
I do agree with that point, that for most topics there exists better quality content elsewhere. But finding it and verifying, that it is not made up, is the reason I also use mainly wikipedia first for researching a new topic. And then proceed to more detailed pages, sometimes linked in wikipedia.
If you want to understand suicide in the UK you need to know, at a minimum, about ONS, NCISH, Fingertips, and then coroners for England and Wales and whatever the equivalent is for Scotland and Northern Ireland.
The best way to find out about these is to speak to someone who works in suicide prevention, so that would be people working for local authority suicide prevention partnership boards (they can have different names in different areas), or people working for NCISH or MASH or ONS, or people on Twitter. But if you can't do that you can sort of get some of the information from Wikipedia. It's a struggle though because the page is a poorly laid out mishmash of information, mostly written by people who don't understand the subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_Kingdom
I hate to be that guy, but if the content on Wikipedia is wrong, why not fix it? Unlike other profit-driven community sites (cough, Fandom, cough) you'll actually be helping other people.
It's not possible to fix information on Wikipedia by using primary sources (the Judiciary website, the ONS data, the NCISH reports), you have to use secondary sources such as newspaper reports. Since newspapers get this stuff wrong too wikipedia will only allow incorrect information.
And that's Wikipedia working as intended. If you're unfortunate you'll run up against someone who i) doesn't know anything at all about the topic, ii) has misunderstood some poorly reported document, and iii) has more free time than you. It's exhausting dealing with these people and I simply have better things to do with my time.
> It's not possible to fix information on Wikipedia by using primary sources
You're confusing "original research" (something you've personally researched and have not published elsewhere) with primary sources. Primary sources are absolutely suitable for Wikipedia, it's only original research that is disallowed.
Well, that kind of shows the issue, right? I’m talking about what happened many years ago (nofollow links were added in 2005) - companies learned their lesson and wouldn’t try to pay expert writers and editors for reference-type content for web use anymore. Here is content that’s somewhat similar: encyclopedia.com.
By the way, I think Google and its easily-gamed algorithms that rewarded regurgitated content and mega-sites is more to “blame” here than Wikipedia itself for how it went down.
I don't like Wikimedia nor the Wikipedias, but I don't get your point and I think you're incorrect (unless you're talking about Wikipedia's early days).
The way Wikipedia should work is by sourcing verifiable facts from reputable sources, and copyright violations are not allowed. I don't understand to what are you referring with "high quality, accessibly-written off-line content"? Britannica isn't high-quality and journalism isn't written by experts in the field.
Wikipedia is a fascinating story of well earned success and growth without the reigns of vc dominating its trajectory. I imagine they have had a lot of tricky decision making. I’m curious what their process has been (as someone who uses Wikipedia but really doesn’t know things are running behind the scenes).
It's sort of complicated -- there's an ideological nonprofit called the Wikimedia Foundation that hosts all the various WikiProjects and maintains the software that's used (mostly mediawiki and some associated services). When you see those banner ads on wikis for donations, that's who you're donating to.
However, the Foundation is very hands-off about the content of wikis, which tend to run on "consensus"[0] with the editing-community for that wiki. That establishes the policies for the wiki, and often influences the technical decision-making for specific wikis. Also, the Foundation writes mediawiki extensions for a bunch of non-core behavior, but the individual wiki communities take a strong hand in whether they're enabled for that wiki. It's why the WYSIWYG editing environment (VisualEditor) is so inconsistently available between wikis, for instance.
Some wiki communities have a fairly fraught relationship with the Foundation, generally if they feel like they're being pushed into things. There have been controversies about things like the Foundation banning abusive users project-wide, or Foundation employees editing wikis from their staff-affiliated accounts. It's generally very inside-baseball though, and if you're outside the community it's hard to hear about.
You mean they tried to make a useful site. During that period search engines were new, and people didn't yet start search result optimization hacking. Which meant ranking was still a good proxy for site quality and not for optimization hacking.
The conscious choice to leave the money on the table is exactly the same. Instead of optimizing for cash value which is just a proxy for real value, wikipedia optimized for quality encyclopedic knowledge distribution.
I hate to disagree, but SEO as an industry was booming pretty early on. I remember going to a conference in 2001 that was massively popular. The type of stuff you'd learn there was pretty outrageous and very very black hat (so much so, that people sharing those tips were too self-conscious to reveal their identities, hence the term black hat).
My point is - you could very much do very well back in those days regardless of your content quality (which consequently trended down and gave rise to content farms). It's only in the last 10 years (and particularly starting in 2014 based on my experience with my own content) that the content quality became a true proxy for ranking, and vice versa.
As a side note, these days, you still have SEO conferences, but the stuff you learn there is so diversified that people have started calling it content marketing and other names. The perhaps most useful gathering is SEOktoberfest, it's invite only and they admit only 30 attendees. Never been there, but I've heard it's worth the six grand that it costs to get in as a first-time attendee (I am not affiliated with it in any shape or form).
I agree. You go back 10 years and SEO was pretty much synonymous with black hat SEO.
These days, there still are a fair number of mostly low quality content farms. But there's also high quality content marketing. The latter still definitely is aware of things like page views, how far people read through an article, what type of headlines seem to be most effective, and so forth. It starts with good content that readers are interested in though.
I’m not sure how it’s done now, but Wikipedia had special promotion on Google ranking (which would have probably set lower manually if it would run ads, while people would stop comtributing content).
That guy who wants to run ads on it sounds like a really evil person: he doesn’t get it that Wikipedia changed the world already, it doesn’t need to do ,,more good’’.
You've got it backwards; they didn't "kill it" on SEO by making good content, good content was rewarded with high ranking search results. Even this is questionable now that google et al purposely present just enough of wikipedia's content directly in the search results to discourage you from leaving google. So in the end they (a) display ads and (b) don't get the revenue. THis is a win?
>>"[..] cared deeply about the content quality and also resisted to run ads [..]"
Do I remember wrong? because I remember they (the Wikipedia organization) were going to run ads at some point but it was strongly rejected by the community. I think there was even some fork because of that.
I don't think Wikipedia ever seriously considered running ads, but Wikitravel did fork over this, and the ad-free fork (Wikivoyage) eventually joined Wikipedia's parent Wikimedia.
If you mention some site is good in SEO it generally implies that compared to content quality, it gets better ranking in search engine. Here what you are saying is the quality is better and it is a good thing that SEO is same as have good quality content.
In grad school back in like 2007 I took a 2-credit class called "The History of Nuclear Enterprise" taught by one of those long white-haired Doc Brown type professors. The final project was for each of us to make Wikipedia pages describing some important topic that wasn't covered yet. I made one on the university's nuclear reactor which had just been shut down. I dug through many linear feet of archived info, scanning photos and collecting various info for the page. It was super rewarding. I was hooked.
Variously since then I have gone deep into some fringe but important-to-some topic and found hard-to-find sources. I've found it effective to collect and present this information in Wikipedia pages.
Like a few months ago I made the page for the Aircraft Reactor Experiment [1], the world's first molten salt-fueled nuclear reactor, built and operated with intent to make nuclear-powered long-range aircraft. I'm pretty proud of the page, and go back to use it somewhat regularly. Having the platform of Wikipedia inspires me to go the slight extra mile in personal research in a way that can be used by everyone.
Wikipedia is especially great for elderly as contributors IMHO: lots of experience, knowledge and time. Often they even are bored or lack a "sense of purpose" and community (social connections are the rarer the older we get). Wikipedia adds all that. If Wikipedia would tech-ipo as the likes of WeWork, it would probably be "The Purpose Company". Thank you.
I'm from Germany (2nd biggest Wikipedia) and proud to say 50%+ of my school and university education would not have been possible with excellent articles in BOTH english and german language. Often the english one was great, but the german one better (think WWII topics, german cars, ...) and vice versa (most of the cases hehe). And: it might be a good pointer for learning a language as well, reading about stuff you deeply care about.
It can be quite fun also starting a page and watching it grow. I started the page for covid testing early in the pandemic with a pretty crappy stub and it's now got hundreds of edits from other people and a lot of info.
I have never been able to find a wikipedia topic I could contribute to. The problem is the topics which don't have pages on wikipedia also don't tend to have a lot of referencable information on the internet.
In fact, they're valuable in that most editors won't use them. (That said, they're also sort of a quirk with respect to verifiability in that, as a practical matter, almost no one is actually check the citation of an obscure book or an old offline magazine.)
I think I'm a bit special in that in my field (nuclear power), many of the smartest people in the world worked hard with vast funding between 1940 and 1960. Later the field got less popular and most people with knowledge of that stuff died. But today lots of investors and technologists are digging back into it to help fight climate change. So there are all these absolute gems in huge technical reports that were declassified in the 1960s and 70s that people are keenly interested in understanding and cataloging.
In my experience, notability probably isn't likely to be a big issue for an obscure topic that is well-referenced. (Although it's always a possibility given some of the Wikipedians out there.)
It's generally more of a problem with people. In part this is because notability is so context-dependent. Every professor at a college or professional football player or senior executive at a large company is notable at some level. Most restaurants have been reviewed once or twice somewhere. But the amount of publicly available information about many of these things is probably fairly limited, especially from third parties.
Ah good stuff - I love Wikipedia more than almost any other non-living thing that has been created in my lifetime. If you had told me the idea as a pitch 20 years ago I would have assumed you were capital I insane for thinking it would work.
It was pretty fresh when I was in college and I remember my professors all being pretty explicit about not using it as a source. Thought I had figured out the world’s biggest life hack when I started using the sources listed on Wikipedia as my sources for papers.
I think it deep da on your age. Some among us who are older remember what it used to be like when people were much less political and less activism was occurring. These days basic concrete facts are subject to debate.
Though most of the fake news anti vax type stuff is not on Wikipedia but spreads more through the likes of Facebook and Reddit. Wikipedia is pretty conservative about sources and evidence.
Conservative in the traditional sense of the term, i.e. a longstanding mainstream source. If we're considering media companies as the source of the reference, ethics and impartiality simply no longer exist.
Wikipedia is riddled with far more and far deeper types of errors, I do edit Wikipedia daily but am quite disillusioned with it. Even articles on major topics can include made-up paragraphs that no one notices for years, errors caused by an editor's misunderstanding of what the source is actually saying, and errors that slowly accumulate through various editors' well meaning copy-editing.
It's good for surface level stuff. The apolitical superficial knowledge is where wikipedia excels.
> I find it frustrating when friends say it's unreliable/not to be trusted.
In terms of depth and breadth of knowledge of topics, it is sorely lacking. And it is highly untrustworthy when it comes to anything remotely political/historical/economic/etc - which are ultimately all political.
> Of course it's not perfect, but I've learned plenty enough from it to be well worth the trade-off
Definitely. It has it's uses like everything. But it is extremely flawed.
Doesn't even have to be political. Moneyed interests and fanboys and cultists use Wikipedia for PR and similar all the time. See Falun Gong, for example.
There are also groups of Wikipedia "editors" who coordinate off-wiki to influence its workings. (Sock-puppeting and meat-puppeting)
Even if we disregarded all the malicious actors, harmful incompetence is rampant on Wikipedia.
And I was just talking about the English Wikipedia here, there are many "small" Wikipedias which are much much worse.
I haven't checked the page on Falun Gong for some time, but there was a concerted and largely successful effort to depict Falun Gong as in its own propaganda on many related Wikipedia pages. Some related info:
This is just an example of the issue of Wikipedia processes being too vulnerable to abuse, in contrast to the rose-tinted glasses view that most HN commenters view Wikipedia.
The obvious reason for this in this case is that people interested in contributing to articles about the Falun Gong are mostly already followers of Falun Gong. Stuff like this is all around Wikipedia. A related issue that I already indicated in another comment here is how most well-meaning contributors very soon learn to keep off certain controversial or well guarded pages, because it's simply not enjoyable to constantly fight over the content. The fact is: resolving disputes takes much time and usually the party with more time on their hands and more "meat-puppets" and allies wins. Also, making enemies from among the "editors" is both unpleasant and inconvenient for possible future efforts on Wikipedia.
One other reason for this is that discussion threads on Wikipedia can become incredibly large and involved very quickly. Typically a comment on Wikipedia will reference "diffs", which are changes elsewhere on Wikipedia (each with their own context and possibly requiring domain knowledge to understand them), or they can reference actual off-Wiki sources (e.g., a published book). Then someone else will respond to that comment with references to other stuff, and soon it is simply not manageable to keep track of everything. Everyone only has a fixed amount of free time and attention span, so very often things which shouldn't be taken at face value are taken at face value. On the other hand, meticulously checking something argued in bad faith expends time that could have been spent elsewhere. Walls of text and deep chains of references will scare a proportion of people outright before even engaging the discussion.
Another reason is that the assumption of good faith on part of the contributors is deeply embedded in Wikipedia. Not assuming good faith is actually forbidden on Wikipedia, and this is enforced. This might sound like a good idea (maybe it even is a good idea, it's hard to say), but in effect it just adds to the complicated minefield of vague rules breaking which can get one sanctioned on WP, but it isn't clear it actually does anything to improve the (low) standards of discourse on Wikipedia.
Apart from the rule that everybody has to assume good faith, the Wikipedia processes themselves are built on the assumption of good faith: the idea with Wikipedia is that everyone can talk out the differences in their opinions to establish "consensus",[N0] but malicious people can be severely disruptive in a discussion without doing anything that would cause them to be punished in any way on Wikipedia. E.g., someone makes a misleading comment (perhaps by taking things out of context, perhaps by exploiting some subtle semantics) and now people have to respond to them, which can take much more effort than it takes to make those comments. And there are accounts which do this all the time.
Another (smaller, perhaps) issue, which is actually fixable with better tech, is that although Wikipedia discussion threads usually logically have a tree structure, in actuality it's all unstructured Wiki-markup. This means that it's possible for the tree structure to become malformed, causing the discussions to become even less readable. Even if everything is structured correctly, it's often difficult to tell where does a comment end without reading it in its entirety, which is again caused by the lack of structure in the comments, every Talk page is just a single blob of Wiki-markup editable by any participant.
Thus, if you want to disrupt Wikipedia, the real way forward is not vandalism, it's arguing in bad faith with inpenetrable walls of text while being "civil". Bonus points for finding comrades to help you in a concerted effort.
Changing anything can be a tremendous effort on Wikipedia, but trying to change something while being opposed by an organized (off-wiki) and vigilant group, especially if they are malicious... I fear the whole project simply does/will not scale because of this. Organized groups will sadly keep their control of some topics/pages, and my fear is this situation will only get worse as Wikipedia's scope increases.
[N0] What consensus actually means on Wikipedia is another issue entirely, and it's often completely abitrary - whoever happens to "close" the Request for Comments (RfC - the process used for "determining consensus" on Wikipedia) can effectively create the "consensus" themselves.
It’s an encyclopedia. For facts, it can by definition only touch the surface. For subjective debates and subjects (like politics) it can by definition only give a high level overview of the different points of view.
Saying it’s “extremely flawed” is like saying Superman is weak because he’s vulnerable to Kryptonite.
You would be right, if Wikipedia would not cover the opinions/subjective topics as well. Nowadays it is often used as a column for some higher-up contributors/journalists.
It is still valuable for the scientific topics and I would not call that superficial at all, but you need to be very critical of anything that goes further than that. And actually even for the scientific topics you need to be aware if PR is involved with the article, because then you have to take anything with a grain of salt as well.
I remember when it came out, I think I read about it on Slashdot. I dismissed it at the time as a utopian ideal that would never work in the real world.
Until you find that every link in the references for an article is either dead or directly contradicts the article. I’ve run into both many times doing research.
Same. I recently subscribed to donate 10$ each month. I urge everyone to do the same. Even 1$/month imo is enough, as long as you’re contributing back!
Having looked into it a bit, I've been severely disappointed that we have no good theory of why Wikipedia works. There are lots of putative explanations, but they all predict the successful existence of all sorts of collaborative projects that we don't actually see. Wikipedia is such a treasure, and it would be extremely valuable to know more about how it works so we can replicate aspects of it for other projects.
Something that cannot be overstated enough - but is going to be severely underrated - is the community. Wikipedia has countless pages on codes of conduct and its own internal rule system that are actually coming from the editors, from experience, rather than handed down by a lawyer. Wikipedia generally understands and accepts the messier sides of democratic editing: people get emotional, trolls, biases, arguments, etc. and it approaches it all with honesty, straightforwardness, and even humor.
You can list all the philosophical, technical, or economic reasons you want (and surely those are important to consider) but in my mind the community of real, living humans with (yes) opinions but that have recourse and clarity to correct those is invaluable. I have never seen a community with such professionalism and due diligence (almost every single troll edit I have seen is immediately reverted) as Wikipedia editors.
There is also something to be said about the “culture” where trolling is not rewarded. By and large, vandalizing Wikipedia is not “cool,” people don’t rejoice for it because I think everyone feels at least a little bit of attachment or debt to Wikipedia. It’s helped us all learn more than we probably ever could before and been there through schoolwork, essays, reference reading, and general curiosity. It’s such a special corner of the Internet and I think “replicating aspects of it” won’t work, at least not the way you want. Wikipedia is a holistic being, it’s a community of people, yet also a resource, and even a culture, so any similar project needs to do the genuinely hard, slow, and boring work (something Wikipedia embraces - that most of the process is routine grammatical fixes, meta cleanup, rewriting, etc. over genuinely adding increasingly more information) of cultivating those higher standards and community outreach.
You're correct that Wikipedia has the blatant vandalism problem more-or-less covered. However, I'm not so enthusiastic about he culture. In a lot of cases, it ends up being "obsessives, fight!" with the weapon of rules-lawyering, which is just exhausting for anyone who isn't an obsessive.
The end-result is often OK, but often jumbled and confusing, and it often feels like getting taught a subject by someone who's just a year or two ahead of you. You definitely feel you can learn something, but the person teaching you doesn't necessarily have very good command of the material themselves.
It's position in society is also weird. It has authority, but that authority can be abused. I once ran into a Wikipedian who had been busy for several years promoting a religious philosophy in a little neglected corner of Wikipedia, by gluing together little disconnected fragments to make a build up the wiki page for it. It was definitely badly done original research, but he successfully tapped the authority of Wikipedia.
Cultures do not materialize randomly. Attributing it all to culture and then not identifying what fosters and preserves the culture just passes the buck.
That's some baseline sources off the top of my head. There's a lot more written about this. It seems like there are several concepts working together that a lot of people find un-intuitive.
* In the main, human beings are honest. In fact mathematics predicts it must be so. (Game theory)
* Humans "automagically" cooperate if their numbers are small (under Dunbar's number), but fail to do so over that number.
* If you can keep the number of cooperating people under control, you can take advantage of this.
* Conversely, if something needs attention, the ability to rapidly recruit them to the point needing attention is paramount (see eg. smart mobs)
Partly by accident, partly by design, wiki engines exploit the above 3 elements. At first approximation, as long as >>51% of users are honest, the wiki will continue to function. The measured value on operational wikis is something like 60-80%.
I've read a fair amount about the history of wikipedia. Giving me a dump of facts does not amount to an explanation, and I don't find the theories you give to actually be explanatory.
Sorry if it’s obvious, but why don’t people think Wikipedia should work in theory? Isn’t it just tapping into the need to tell people things you know and feel good about how smart you are?
Or is the concern not around how content is submitted but more around how disputes are resolved?
I would have expected it to be destroyed by vandals, marketeers and trolls, and that nutcases and people with alternative facts would have crowded out actually knowledgeable people.
For every person with a deep insight in a subject, there are fifty people who think they have a deep insight, and it is hard to tell the difference from the outside.
My concern was not that nobody would contribute, but that the wrong people would contribute.
Also "neutral point of view" is impossible, as any writer knows.
It is surprising and amazing the Wikipedia works so well. Although I'm sure they use a lot of resources on combating trolls and manipulation.
Neutrality in context really means covering all the significant points of view that are supported by reliable sources. The tricky concepts are the notions of undue weight (you really can't document everything anyone has ever said about Aristotle, for instance), and where to draw the line on what sources are regarded as reliable.
Wikipedia has a bunch of power user tools that are not very clear to the average user. Power users also have the ability to lock hot topic pages so only other power users can touch them.
I suspect it might have to do with the early adopters, who were not shitheads and as far as I learned, they are not soft on protecting their turf against vandals and other idiots. That created also lots of collateral damage and criticism, the loudest critic on wikipedis I usually hear is that they are too strict and eager on banning and locking articles.
> For every person with a deep insight in a subject, there are fifty people who think they have a deep insight, and it is hard to tell the difference from the outside.
If it’s hard to tell the difference from the outside, how do we know which one we got?
But it’s trivial to revert edits that don’t have valid citations. Tons of idiots do put shit in there all of the time but a pretty simple set of guidelines allows trivial reverts.
Really just generally how Wikipedia works relatively well.
And you're right. It's never been entirely clear why Wikipedia succeeded vs. others although there are various theories.[1] Certainly there have been failures: Goggle Knol and, at this point I think it's fair to say, Quora.
> Isn’t it just tapping into the need to tell people things you know and feel good about how smart you are?
As I said: this putative explanation predicts we would have all sorts of great free things that we don't have, e.g., free reliable news, free trustworthy product reviews, good documentation for python libraries, etc., etc. Yes, it's possible to tell a bunch of just-so stories, but the number of free parameters you need always exceeds the amount of data explained.
In the early days most people outside of wikipedia assumed that nobody would contribute to such a project without being compensated, that wikipedia is a communist pipe dream etc. The quote is meant as a play on the quote how communism works in theory but not in practise.
Why would it be called a communist pipe dream? It’s not mandated by the government and doesn’t use tax revenue.
Open source already existed and was thriving so I’m still not getting why there was any doubt. Seems like it would have just been FUD from the encyclopedia industry and people who didn’t know about open source.
There could be a useful transferable lesson here. Any endeavour which has a really big risk attached to it (here, the risk of vandalism) can still be a success if you deploy sufficient mitigations, countermeasures and vigilance against that risk.
* Wikipedia works in theory, but not in practice (as soon as you scratch the surface). - The problem is that there are many good pages, but that just lulls one out of the necessary skepticism.
* Try the Wikipedia sources that are hopefully on the bottom of each page instead. Also search on Stack Exchange and Reddit for book recommendations.
* Wikipedia: the Internet’s greatest reason to feel pessimistic about the state of disinformation and propaganda
EDIT: my comment is definitely more substantive and thoughtful than the one it is responding to, so I would appreciate if the downvoters could likewise reply to this comment, in addition to down-voting it.
I'll add my own anecdote. I have donated to Wikipedia sporadically over the years, and they asked me to take part in a sort of round table interview / qualitative study.
In a room of other Wikipedia donators, maybe 1/3 of the people there didn't know that the information was entirely community driven, and when they learned, a handful of didn't think it was a good idea!
It just shows how much Wikipedia is just taken for granted, when in reality so so much effort goes in to keeping it free, ad free, open, and accessible to everyone.
Apologies, the distinction wasn't some Vs all, it was that they hadn't even considered how the information got there. Then when they found out, they were immediately sceptical of the idea. Which was hilarious.
But also, unless you have a much better understanding than me, it is community driven. Even those who have some official capacity at Wikipedia only got there through countless hours of being a good community member
There is a small group of core "editors". I am not aware of the dynamics within that group, but obviously it is sanctioned and directed by the Wikimedia foundation (certainly through setting policy and allocating budget, but likely also through other forms of direction and interaction). This sets the historical, political and ontological outlook of Wikipedia, in very broad strokes; and decides the actual content on a huge number of articles.
Of course, lay "editors" contribute a huge amount of text, but that's not the "driving" part.
2017 - 'Researchers found that 77 percent of Wikipedia articles are written by 1 percent of Wikipedia editors, and they think this is probably for the best.'
I was originally enthusiastic about the 'wisdom of the crowds' and its potential. The Internet was a great experiment with unknown possibilities. I edited Wikipedia and talked about its potential.
I was skeptical at the same time - it was an experiment, not a revelation. I used to tell people, 'I don't know how Wikipedia could work, but it seems to'. I'd apply 'The Cathedral and the Bizarre' concept to it, and 'with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow' (even though those ideas were intended for open source software).
The 'wisdom of the crowds' depends on good faith from the members of the crowd. Otherwise you get the manipulation of the crowds and propaganda of the faux crowds. One serious concern I had was that, if economics predicts human behavior to some extent, Wikipedia could be a victim of its own success: The more readers and influence it had, the more likely people would try to use that power. I first saw it happening in 2006, in the page on the Duke University lacrosse team's sexual assault case. Many editors clearly engaged in rewriting history in order to advocate for the lacrosse players; many had names clearly asserting affinity for Duke U., such as 'bluedevil'. That seizure of power was highly disturbing; has Wikipedia developed better means to prevent it now?
Of course, the focus on using the 'wisdom of the crowds' to manipulate has shifted to other platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. I stopped using Wikipedia years ago, other than to lookup basic facts that have little significance to me. I use Britannica (or other expert sources), which IMHO is very good and often very well written. While there is some benefit to 'wisdom of the crowds', I never know if that's what I'm getting at Wikipedia. As for the expert approach,
In matters of science, the authority of thousands is not worth the humble reasoning of one single person.
It currently says that "three men's lacrosse team members were falsely accused of rape", and that the prosecutor of the case was "disbarred for "dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation".
So either there is a massive conspiracy, or those editors were perhaps not as unreasonable as the previous poster makes them out to be.
> In general Wikipedia does have mechanisms to deal with this sort of thing, but admins don't always catch on early enough.
I'm not convinced that it works, but regardless, 'not early enough' is effectively not at all. It's like the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust suit against Microsoft - Netscape and others were long out of business. 'Justice delayed is justice denied.'
The comment below by arp242 demonstrates it: There was a massive campaign on the lacrosse players' behalf and if the campaign succeeds, it becomes circular: That becomes the truth that arp242 believes.
There's no evidence that the accusations were false (last I knew), they were just never brought to court; she never had her day in court. (What was the defense so worried about?). You know what they tell victims like the person allegedly raped: 'Nobody will believe you. You're nothing, we're powerful. We can do whatever we want to you.'. Duke University is a powerful institution; some of the lacrosse players parents were Beltway PR consultants, IIRC. Their position was all over the news; the U.S. Attorney General took a position in a local county DA's sexual assault case of no other merit but its publicity. People in power (and on HN) identify with Duke students, not strippers. What will a stripper do in the face of that? Call up her friends in the CNN newsroom? Look at the things DAs do and never get disbarred. What it takes is bringing charges against the powerful. Wikipedia was part of that.
> There's no evidence that the accusations were false
This is quite the comment; do you need evidence to prove someone's innocence? Last I checked, this isn't really how the legal system works. This does let some crimes go unpunished, which is terrible, but the alternative is much worse.
If you want to claim that the disbarment of Nifong was done for political reasons then you're going to have to do a hell of a lot better than some vague story about "the university is powerful" and "Beltway influence". Among other things, he withheld DNA evidence and lied about the facts of the case. Even Nifong himself agreed that disbarment was an appropriate judgement.
>> There's no evidence that the accusations were false
> This is quite the comment; do you need evidence to prove someone's innocence?
I didn't say whether they were innocent or guilty; you can see above what I said. As the charges and evidence were never heard in a public forum, we don't know much about them.
I think the rest of the parent comment reinforces my view about the power of the communications machine aligned against one woman with few resources and a local DA.
I just opened up google maps and zoomed in on a random town: Mt. Pleasant Iowa. If I search it on google, on the top of the page is a snippet from Wikipedia. The top result is a link to Wikipedia. The second is the actual town website.
This is what I find fascinating about the project. We’re more interested in reading a secondary source compiled by random people, than the actual primary source! I think it says a lot about the nice interface it has.
I took a look at those two pages and they are not equivalent. Wikipedia lists out a bunch of facts, demographics, and important details on the area. The towns own site is not to focused on collecting facts but more on directing people in the area to info they would need like where to pay a parking ticket or what events are on. I couldn't even find most of the info on the wikipedia page on the towns own site.
Wikipedia is the best overall source of human-readable information.
The Mt Pleasant site talks about the frequency (but not date) of meetings from the parks and recreation department, while Wikipedia actually has the location and the reasons why the town is notable.
Indeed. As great as wiki is (and it is, I use their data dumps), it's content at scale just like G is search and FB is for social. Scaled content. There has been a few occasions in search where I would've expected the local/primary sources to be favoured. Think if you said to someone 'give me a website where I could read more about X', wiki can be the lazy and probably correct answer.
They have extensive tables on adult participation.
Two editors would not let this data into the sport in Australia article. The reason was fairly obvious, it shows that soccer/football is the most played team sport in Australia. Roy Morgan, a statistical agency also had similar figures. Some Australians don't like the fact that soccer/football is by far the most played team sport in Australia according to to the Ausplay Survey and Roy Morgan.
There was much time spent in the talk pages spent asking these two what would be acceptable for quoting these sporting statistics. The answer was nothing.
If you can't get fairly unobjectionable material like that into wikipedia what else is being blocked?
As can be expected when you're told that "the reason was fairly obvious" and that reason is somewhat nefarious, that reason is not the one given by anybody involved. Instead, people took issue with the methodology used to gather the data.
(I have no idea if that criticism is legitimate, nor do I have any other horse in this race, nor do I care the least bit about the popularity of horse racing in Australia which, yes, happens to be part of that debate.)
Check out how they ignore that the suggestion that if they take issue with those statistics they should take issue with the statistics that were currently in the article, notably cricket playing figures from Cricket Australia which, while they might be worth including, should have cautionary notes on them.
As someone who has spent a lot of time contributing to all manner of Australian sports articles across all codes, I recognise several of the contributors there and can assure you that they don't have some kind of secret nefarious agenda. They just - like I - are very skeptical of data claiming things like "42.6% of Australians have participated in walking". Regardless of whether or not that's actually true under their defined methodology (presumably it is), it's probably a pretty good indicator that their methodology is of extremely questionable use, and that other data may have equally (but less obviously) misleading data.
I will note that the existing participation section of that article states that soccer has a higher participation rate than any other team sport amongst males (netball being higher for females), so it's extremely clearly that editors aren't objecting to the tables' inclusions on that claim alone, given that it's made in the article either way.
Agenda-pushing is quite common on Wiki, especially around controversial areas. You can read all about it on the Talk page for each article. The hope is that it all balances out in the end, but this does become harder to guarantee as high-quality, reliable sources for some points of view are getting increasingly thin and hard to find, both online and offline. (I'm aware that Larry Sanger among others has complained about this development, but it is a genuinely hard problem to solve as we can't just get rid of all sourcing standards in the service of less-represented viewpoints.)
Oh, it's not even subtle. Here's a game you can play: compare an article with the same article in another language. If you don't speak another language then use google translate. You'll see where the agenda pushing is.
The most interesting thing of these differences is that they're saying the same thing,but the agenda is clear in that saying the same thing is more positive or negative depending on the language.
Russian > Gab is an English-speaking social network . Gab is described as being tolerant of different patriotic groups [5] and a safe haven for communities that would be restricted or blocked on other social networks [6] . The Gab groups can be characterized as patriotic, white supremacist and alternative right [5] . The site allows each user to forward a message to 3000 other users, which are called "gebs" [7] . It has been revealed that Gab is generally a favorite platform for people with conservative, libertarian , patriotic views. [8]
English > Gab is an American alt-tech social networking service known for its far-right and extremist userbase.[3][4][5][6] Widely described as a haven for extremists including neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the alt-right, it has attracted users and groups who have been banned from other social networks.[7][8][18] Gab claims to promote free speech and individual liberty, though these statements have been criticized as being a shield for its alt-right and extremist ecosystem.[16][19][20] Antisemitism is prominent among the site's content, and the company itself has engaged in antisemitic commentary on Twitter.[22][23][24] Researchers have written that Gab has been "repeatedly linked to radicalization leading to real-world violent events".[25]
Really interesting how language and national propaganda propagates through stuff like this.
An issue is that most well-meaning contributors very soon learn to keep off controversial pages, because it's simply not enjoyable to constantly fight over the content. The fact is: resolving disputes takes much time and usually the party with more time on their hands and more "meat-puppets" and allies wins. Also, making enemies from among the "editors" is both unpleasant and inconvenient for possible future efforts on Wikipedia.
If the percentage of pages that are considered controversial grows every year... wouldn’t that eventually mean every page will be controversial and thus not attract well-meaning contributors?
I don't think so. There is a vast number of pages describing things like astronomical objects, types of tropical fish, species of fungus, etc. Conversations among editors about articles in those long tails tend to be friendly and civil. Just stay away from articles about "My Little Pony".
Not even that subtle. For instance, declaring that Taiwan is a country despite the fact that it isn’t recognized as such by most of the world. That was such a big deal that it was met with triumph by Taiwanese media: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3948149
Don’t get me wrong, I support the cause of Taiwanese independence, but facts are facts. I also think that the Basque Country should be independent, and yet it would be factually incorrect to claim that it’s a country.
Surely if anyone's pushing an agenda of the Taiwan issue it's the geopolitical entities that have extremely strong financial incentives to do so.
If you define "country" as being an entity recognised as a country by some percentage of other countries, then sure, you'd exclude Taiwan. But Wikipedia worked out pretty quickly that this is a terrible definition when a thousand microstates all recognised each other but didn't recognise any "actual countries", and then claimed that Belgium no longer existed. So instead they use a policy of "does this geopolitical entity operate in the way that humans typically understand countries to operate". Taiwan passes that check.
Either the entities themselves, or good faith individuals that are so exposed to the storytelling of one of the two parties as to consider it factual truth instead of just one of the possible ways to look at the world.
That being said, I imagine that if for the US the issue is so important as to repeatedly send their warships all the way to the South China Sea for it, trying to exercise some influence over the content of a wiki page would be quite a low-hanging fruit in comparison.
The „cause of Taiwanese independence“. That’s a bit silly, since it’s really the PRC that split off from China and Taiwan is the continuation of the old republic. Did Taiwan in the 70s, when other countries changed their ties to China to recognize the PRC but not Taiwan, on the pressure of the more powerful PRC, suddenly lose its Independence? All the complicated history and political issues you can read about on Wikipedia btw.
I just read it, and am not sure how else it could be written... do you expect Wikipedia to treat unsubstantiated conspiracy theories as anything but that? Are they supposed to pretend a conspiracy theory is possible out of 'fairness'?
Are you also upset that they don't have a section on the Earth page saying the world might be flat?
You can look for any slightly controversial company and find that their wiki pages skimp on the details of such controversies and minimize them as mostly resolved
I did some work [0] at the Stanford Internet Observatory that somewhat supports OP's claim. We found that while Wikipedia is generally very good at maintaining neutrality, some bad edits slip through the cracks.
Some people believe "Neutral Point of View" means you are supposed to write articles about serial killers in such a way that reading them would have no impact on your willingness to let them marry your son.
That's not what it means though. It just means that you write a statement in such a way that everyone agrees it is true.
"the sky is green" , is obviously not likely to be accepted by many people.
'In his science fiction story foobarbaz written in 2002, John Smith asked: What if people said "The Sky Is Green"?'
In this case, we can agree that the story is written, we can look it up in the library. (I made up the title in this case).
NPOV and consensus intersect here: Consensus is reached when no-one disagrees, and NPOV is defined as a point of view that no one could possibly disagree with.
I thought it was pretty well known that Wikipedia has been gamed repeatedly over the years. From companies to individuals. Generally speaking in the LONG TERM, things get corrected. But they are definitely not perfect and their editors have bias whether intentional or not.
But that’s sort of how the whole thing tends to work. If a topic is niche and one sided, you’ll get your small filter bubble which doesn’t really hurt anyone. If it’s controversial, the writing will tend towards the careful middle. It’s not perfect but works as well as anything its size could.
Glib statements by comedians are not a good foundation for truth seeking. They are however great at maintaining emotional protection over one's viewpoints.
It's crazy how editing still hasn't improved much on mobile. Compare it with the desktop editor. I guess people don't really do much editing on mobile?
The popup cards when you mouse over an internal link that they added semi-recently are an awesome addition, though. Great melding of the old interface with a highly useful newer feature, in my opinion.
Most importantly it hasnt adopted the Like/Follower count based Reward system that lot of people in the tech world have mindlessly included all over the place.
Try running any org with a Like and Follower count based reward system and check what surfaces and who pays a prices.
I think we can't overstate the deep impact Wikipedia had in the past 20 years. The initial idea was so counter-initiative. I thought it would fail due to vandalism. But despite that, it thrived, and somehow it became a great source of knowledge.
I remember there was definitely a lot more vandalism back then, it just so happened that the number of volunteers started to outweigh the abusers by quite a bit.
I think moderation tooling got better over the years: being able to revert edits quickly, tracking users/IPs known for vandalism, locking articles, reporting someone etc.
In my experience the vandalism was mainly due to people taken by the novelty of being able to edit the site. The vast majority isn't determined to sabotage the site and therefore it's easily overcome by determined maintainers.
The ability to vandalise is actually an essential part of Wikipedia's success, in my opinion. Most users will not continue to vandalise and some will become valuable editors after seeing how easy it is to contribute and that their changes make a real and instant difference.
Is there an easy way to browse past versions of Wikipedia? I’m aware of the Wayback Machine, but that only works for a particular article.
I ask because it’s become increasingly obvious that articles are changed to fit the contemporary zeitgeist. Writers that died a century ago are recast into different people, depending on the popular ideology of the day. The choice of acceptable sources is also pretty disappointing. This problem is unique to the internet and doesn’t exist with hardback encyclopedias; one can still buy a hardback set of Britannica circa 1900.
Once 2050 comes around, I’d like to be able to read the 2010 version of Wikipedia, not the one deemed acceptable by the powers that be.
Not super easily, but the entire site can be downloaded from https://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html so you can make your own copy and do what you want (technically this is a little involved. File formats are not the most convinent)
Wikipedia is also amazing because the foundation publishes a lot of detail about engineering and technical operations on Wikitech (https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page). I’ve learned so much about DevOps just reading their docs and publicly released code. They also publish minutes of their Scrum of Scrums and Google Summer of Code projects. And they have historical info about key initiatives & growth. All worth exploring if you’re running a website/startup.
Can’t donate in good conscience though because they do somewhat have a general tone and worldview that seems to be pervasive and heavily moderated. Wish there was a forkable version of Wikipedia so all views and angles can be allowed to co-exist, no need for a digital encyclopedia to be so skeuomorphic.
You're basically describing Google Knol. What you end up with is a bunch of people publishing often self-promotional, biased, or just plain bad articles.
One reason Wikipedia was able to grow so quickly was because of its scale. Instead of relying on a few posh journal editors like Britannica, anyone could contribute. And while you have edge cases of people trolling and some misinformation, you also have a much larger labour pool of people dedicated to helping, not for a paycheque, but their own personal reasons.
Wikipedia was originally intended to be a smaller sandbox area for Nupedia, the expert-authored encyclopedia from Bomis (Jimmy Wales's company). Of course, Wikipedia turned out to be much more successful.
But there were other collaborative Internet encyclopedia projects that didn't do so well. Benjamin Mako Hill has a paper exploring what made Wikipedia succeed while the rest failed:
Yeah, it seems to be some sort of snowball effect. If you're lucky and have a few initial users, then you can grow faster, acquire more users, and beat the competition.
> One reason Wikipedia was able to grow so quickly was because of its scale.
I've carefully studied all three definitions of "scale" my dictionary offers up, and come to the conclusion that this sentence either means absolutely nothing ("It is big because it is big"), or something really strange ("Wikipedia grew because of its plate-like skin coverings").
Sorry, that was a bit unclear on my part. I was alluding to scale as in Wikipedia's massive pool of available editors being able to publish more content than competitors, thereby driving more traffic.
(But of course, we all know that Wikipedia is run by the lizard people with the aforementioned plate-like skin coverings.)
It's funny. We just showed our kids the Pixar movie "Monsters Inc", which I hadn't realized was also 20 years old until the movie ended and the info screen came up. I think of it as a contemporary movie, "not that old".
But I think of Wikipedia as having always existed.
Funny how memory works.
Also, I've lived longer with Wikipedia than without.
I remember going first in 2002, a lot of pages were just lists like all the popes or cereals by general mills.
I thought "yeah right, who's going to write an article on like pope pius x and cheerios. nice project but not happening"
It was the second time I had seen a wiki, the first was on vim.org where I changed something in 2001 or so because I just didn't believe the concept was real.
I think I get in on the ground of a bunch of things but I'm just incredulous and not enthusiastic about them. Like all those bitcoins I didn't care about...
It's a problem I should probably work on. I should be more excited about things. Just have to figure out how to get there.
Not anyone could edit the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Ford was researching earth for 15 years and an editor cut his submission down to "mostly harmless"...
I was one of the first administrators on one of the non-English versions and saw it grow from "this cannot possibly compete with Encyclopedia Britannica etc." to "OMG, what would the world do without Wikipedia?".
I continue to be blown away by Wikipedia, and the fact that it not only works but continually gets better over time. Hats off to Wikipedia management and the fact they have stayed true to their mission.
Please remember to continue to support them, through donations or any other means that you can!
Wikipedia feels so skeuomorphic now with single pages like a real Encyclopedia. Rather than having an “edit battle” over a single page and then having them always being locked down why don’t we have an “Omnipedia” where people can just fork a page if there is a legitimate alternative angle on something? We have the technology, just need a clever UI for visually browsing the various forks and a way of preventing the forks from becoming duplicates of the same alternative.
One interesting thing with interesting implications regarding the (Wikimedia Foundation and its) Wikipedias is that getting to know them/it and how it functions is very involved.
This is what I'm getting at: I tried to present some criticism of Wikipedia in this discussion. However, a lot of my comments are kind of vague because I failed to give specific examples. Consider why this is so:
Discussing a specific example would require both some (sometimes rare) knowledge of the subject at hand and knowledge of the arcane processes through which a Wikipedia is governed and through which the disputes are resolved.
This means that I would need to invest a lot of time explaining everything for someone to be able to understand the example, but, on the other hand, almost nobody (if not perhaps already a Wikipedian and familiar with the subject matter) would be willing to invest enough time to really understand the example and all the connected issues anyway.
Thus substantial criticism of Wikipedia and its processes never gets to the public at large. I think that even most of Wikipedia's contributors hold little understanding of how Wikipedia actually works (socially) because the majority are very casual. And don't get me started on the incompetent contributors who meddle with articles and topics that they don't know enough about.
Another issue is that Wikipedians probably won't want to associate their Wikipedia identity with their HN identity (and similar).
Wait so your criticism of wikipedia is it is too complicated to understand and you can't effectively criticize wikipedia if you dont understand it?
That's certainly a criticism i haven't heard before. I suppose in a way its true - wikipedia has its own culture, norms, etc, both written and unwritten, which can be hard to penetrate for an outsider (i would argue that WMF also struggles with that). But i think any large online community is going to have that. Heck, actual anthropologists have written actual books on the culture of debian, i dont see why wikipedia would be any less complicated.
> Another issue is that Wikipedians probably won't want to associate their Wikipedia identity with their HN identity (and similar).
And that is an issue because? [For the record my wikipedia username is the same as my HN username, and i know other people for which that is also true]
I've recently installed Wikipedia app on my tablet and I have to admit it's amazing, I prefer it over the web version. Cleaner look, customisable home page, tabs within app and especially ability to create lists of articles and saving them for offline use is something I've always wanted.
I used to read book while eating(it's my lifelong habit) now I replace it with Wikipedia. Learn something new here and there everyday(mostly old history stuff)
Nothing beats its rabbit hole and its barebone-but-focused interface. It does not replace any in-depth source of any topic you want to learn, of course.
Do anybody has any hypothesis on why there hasn't been any successful Wikipedia copycat? I know Google attempted their variant called Knol(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol).
Because a clone would have to be significantly better to convince the community and users to switch.
There simply was none. And it is a huge amount of work to try and as far as I know, mainly those people try this in seriousnes (and some success), who are not happy with wikipedia because they don't like alternative facts. So I think I have seen alt-right and esoteric wikipedia clones somewhere, but for some reason they have not wide success.
Usually when you build a clone, you base it on fixing the problems of the original? What problems in wikipedia could a clone possibly fix since the main issues with wikipedia is getting people to agree on what should be included and I don't see how that could be solved.
For example, a fork could make all articles into rabbit holes like:
- really simple and short article
- expanded version of the same article
- even more expanded version
- ...
With an easy (contextual!) navigation up and down the stack.
The benefit would be faster learning.
The initial levels would be clearly marked that they contain simplifications to the point of being half-truths and the version that is 100% "honest" would be also clearly marked. (For the cases when the truth is so complex that it becomes clearly anti-educational. I don't mean controversial/political topics.)
Of all the institutions on the web, Wikipedia has remained my #1 most trusted source with the least sense of corruption. Remarkable, really. If we want to know how to restore the web, we may want to learn how Wikipedia has remained so reputable for so long and model it.
10-20 years seem to be the right timeframe for long-term thinking. It is long enough that a kernel of an idea can become world changing in that time frame. Yet not so long that present people would have no ability to predict future trends.
I believe Wikipedia is not only the greatest and most perfect website to exist, but also one of the greatest accomplishments of humankind.
I rarely use such strong, ostensibly hyperbolic language without sarcasm, but I couldn't be more sincere and genuine with that statement.
It exemplifies the information age, and the "purpose" of the internet - networked information transfer. The design is simple and usable to an almost miraculous degree. The distributed sourcing of information with mind-blowing moderation is pioneering and of upmost respectability.
Its ability to endure through the onslaught of addictive capitalist pressures and sheer ethical reasonableness is something very special, resisting ads for the sake and benefit of humanity, I almost want to cry just writing about it.
I could say so much more, but what I want to get to is - Thank you Wikipedia. You have changed countless lives and spread unthinkable knowledge to unfathomable futures. Hard to believe it's only been 20 years, I can't imagine a universe without you.
Please donate if you use Wikipedia. The world needs it.
Congratulations to the hive of villainy, embezzlement, and political propaganda on incidentally creating the largest trove of human knowledge on the backs of unpaid and underappreciated editors.
Agree though that on the rare occasion I skim an article falling within one of my areas of expertise, I'm usually left very disappointed, puzzled about the mindset of editors seeing themselves nevertheless as domain experts going by the authoritative tone of Wikipedia articles.
The Gell-Mann amnesia effect makes me then appreciate articles out of my area of expertise again. That, and the fact that most sites when read in EU greet you with annoying cookie dialogs, something I wish search engines would indicate in advance in order for me to spare me visiting it (a turning away effect I wish was studied and quantified somewhere as it vastly changed my browsing habits).
Under known for it says, “Known for JavaScript, opposition to same-sex marriage”
Really? I’m as gay as they come but this just gives me scarlet letter vibes. I sincerely doubt people know this guy for his work opposing ssm (of which there wasn’t any, he was just opposed to it back in the day). People do know firefox, brave, mozilla etc though. In the talk page it is clear there are a couple editors with a vendetta against this guy or something.
Maybe an example of personal bias more than a left/right thing but I still found it kinda weird.
I mean, it's what he's known for. It was a very big deal when it was discovered that he opposed and donated against gay marriage. He resigned as CEO of Mozilla over it.
Many people outside of internet communities like HN first learned his name when this all went down. Creator of JS wasn't as big a deal to most people at the time as CEO of a major non profit internet company opposing one of the biggest human rights issues of our time.
> as CEO of a major non profit internet company opposing one of the biggest human rights issues of our time.
Obama, the president of the united states opposed same sex marriage at the time of the donations, as did most americans. I hardly fight it noteworthy considering how widespread it was.
The thing of opposing same sex marriage itself isn't noteworthy. The fact it was widely discussed in the context of Brendan Eich particularly was noteworthy. Obama opposing that has nothing to do with what Brendan Eich is "known for" - Obama is known for plenty of things, lots of which are on his wikipedia page.
They are saying he's famous for it, not that other people did or did not do it, nor are they saying its a good or bad thing that he is famous for it.
The world is an unfair place. Sometimes its hypocritical. Saying that he should not be famous for it has no bearing on whether or not he is actually famous for it.
I think he is known for being the creator of Brave nowadays, and most likely that's how he will be remembered, thanks to the SJW-leftist overreaction to his rather insignificant donation of $1000, and his own subsequent creative output while working on Brave of course.
I guess he's known for it in the sense that he made a $1000 donation to support prop 8 and a bunch of people overreacted and he had to resign. Really, he's known for a specific controversy around gay marriage.
Can you delete all this garbage that I posted? When I'm in a better state of mind, I usually just write this kind of garbage in a text box, and delete instead of hitting reply just so it's out of my head. Had a bad night. Sorry.
Just an anecdote, but those are the top 2 and only 2 things I know him for. Didn’t know (or at least remember) that he created Brave or was involved with Mozilla. I’d be willing to bet that, indeed, those are the top 2 things he is known for.
The Wikipedia page dedicates an entire section to explaining that comment, under "Appointment to CEO, controversy and resignation". He was forced out of the CEO position for this political view. It was a pretty significant news story, and I think they are right for including this as part of what he is known for (particularly outside the HN community).
I think you misunderstand the purpose of a summary of a person . It isn't P(think of this subject | think of this person), it's P(think of this person | think of this subject).
Likewise, in a summary of a subject, a person would show up if P(think of this subject | think of this person) shows up.
So, for instance, Nelson Mandela shows up in the intro to Apartheid and vice versa; Pi shows up in Fabrice Bellard, but Bellard doesn't show up in Pi; Poor Richard's Almanack links to Benjamin Franklin but Benjamin Franklin doesn't mention PRA in its summary.
Mostly the handiwork of an editor, David Gerard, who is obsessed with me and has no encyclopedic perspective, just anger and agenda. One reason among many not to support Wikipedia.
It was even worse before. When I read it, the opening line suggested that all of the rioters collectively murdered that cop. I think that was a little too biased for wikipedia. Does anyone have the revision?
„(...) Summoned by Trump,[25] thousands of supporters gathered in Washington, D.C., on January 5 and 6 to demand that Vice President Mike Pence and Congress reject Biden's victory.[26][27][28] The rioters quickly became extremely violent, assaulting a police officer who later died, erecting a gallows on the Capitol grounds, assaulting the press, and desiring to take hostage and harm lawmakers such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Pence, the latter for refusing to invalidate Biden's victory.[29]“
Yeah, a good example. Having seen 50 solid minutes of raw footage, describing it them as "extremely violent" is about as accurate as describing BLM protestors as criminals (e.g. it describes a very small minority).
Huh. I was just posting the quote that gp referred to, supposedly implying that the mob as a whole killed a police officer. The text is not written like that, and overall pretty dry and factual. We can argue about the one adverb „extremely“ in front of violent, but that’s not even that much of a stretch (people died).
An actually biased text would have used different words, like calling the mob a group of organized fascist insurgents intent on a coup d‘etat, commanded to do so by Trump. Even that would still be arguably correct.
Are you sure? That article talks about how unbiased Wikipedia is:
>Our study finds that crowd-based knowledge production does not result in articles with
more biased than articles produced by experts when the crowd-based articles are substantially
revised.
That's just saying that highly-trafficked, highly-edited articles are going to be less biased than articles with fewer contributors or sources. That... just makes sense, to me; the more visible or relevant an article, the more people (and potentially experts) will weigh in, and the more crowd consensus will drive out the more blatant biases.
It also mentions there a bias in both directions, depending on the topic. Plus, it only considers US viewpoints/political alignments, and not Canadian, British, Australian, or other countries.
Yikes, yeah, that's a good example of bias. The main bias being describing a group doing something that only a tiny minority did. It's not as bad as saying things like "Muslims then bombed the world trade center", but it's still pretty bad.
Based on the 50 minutes of raw footage I've seen, a description of "mostly peaceful" wouldn't be too far off.
I don't think its hard to believe. Trust in media is at record lows. Since Wikipedia just repeats what the mainstream media says via its policy of using "reliable secondary sources", then wouldn't it follow that trust in Wikipedia would follow?
I mean, anyone who has ever edited wikipedia can tell you. If you restrict your sources to ABC, CBS, CNN, NYT and friends, your article is going to read like a mainstream media story. And as the media gets more and more hysterical that starts to reflect on the quality of their articles.
Okay okay. If you want to know how wikipedia feels about different news sources, they have a very nice article about it. It's even color coded. Green is considered reliable. Red is considered unreliable.
So for instance, Wikipedia is seriously lacking in its cryptocurrency articles because you can't use coindesk or coin telegraph, even though they provide better coverage than CNBC and Bloomberg.
Interestingly enough the talk page is quite good to learn about current events and see every view. Though it is obvious that some mods and admins have an agenda; to be honest I didn't even realize it till I saw the war over Kamala's wiki page, super shady stuff.
This was just before she announced her candidacy, I saw some interesting posts on Reddit. I can't say for certain what exactly happened but it was just super fishy.
The moderation team constantly admonished the person making the edits, eventually ruling they had a conflict of interest and were not allowed to edit posts about Harris and some other politicians. They acted slower than fast paced politics, but ultimately seemed to do the right things.
Current events are so divisive and many times no one has a clear picture of what's happening that I can't see how someone objectively assesses a current event news outlet as lacking reputation without prior incidents.
Someone on hacker news commented about how they started watching the news 2 weeks after it was broadcast and mentioned how a massive amount of the breaking news ended up being false when viewed later with the full set of information. It would probably be beneficial if wikipedia simply didn't allow brand new news that couldn't be solidly confirmed.
But without characterizing what exactly "brand new" is, you could implement this prohibition without having the correct effect of maintaining veracity and consistency.
And would you treat different events differently? Would you have to wait, for instance, for classified documents to be released so that you could say you have the bigger picture?
I question if prohibition is really the right way to go. Wikipedia proved to be effective long term. Let them keep doing what is working. Maybe just warn the reader the subject or event is recent or currently developing and let the reader decide for himself whether to use that information or not.
This will invariably induce bias or render the debate too shallow to be productive, maybe even at a cost of manufacturing consent.
Wikipedia already filters content, they only take more time. If you need some outlet with immediately curated information, I think you should look elsewhere, because this is not what wikipedia is for, the way I see it.
We are actually in agreement! I probably did not express myself properly - I don't want current events to be covered by Wikipedia. A delay is preferable.
But all the citations are going to mention that or it's just another chemical.
The average HN-er seems be more right wing than in most comment sections, so I was curious whether balanced means "fits my politics" or the more subtle "I'm only asking questions about the election"-ing on individual articles e.g. I could see the length of the Trump-Russia article annoying a few people here who seem to believe it's completely made up
> But all the citations are going to mention that or it's just another chemical.
No they aren’t. All you need to do is cite all of the material that was used for its initial approval before they knew about the problems.
Another example to help illustrate. The Boeing 737 MAX had a well-cited full article before the MCAS issues were known. Unbalanced moderation could just revert any future edits that tried to add in the issues.
> The average HN-er seems be more right wing than in most comment sections
Don’t do this shit. It makes for such boring reading. All you’re stating is that you have confirmation bias and don’t like seeing ideas you disagree with. There are thousands of comments all over about how HN is right-wing, left-wing etc with no evidence beyond anecdotes.
If it were biased right-wing the top comments on the Parler bands would not be lauding the decisions to ban them. If it were biased right wing, there wouldn’t be so many articles about basic income, etc either.
> All you’re stating is that you have confirmation bias and don’t like seeing ideas you disagree with.
Well ideas that I think are factually wrong, yes. HN is the only place on the internet where I find myself regularly having to prove that Julian Assange isn't necessarily a saint and that Donald Trump is corrupt.
Also, if (let's say you're right) it is merely confirmation bias - surely that means that we can infer that I have at least identified a difference, which given that I am an almost card-carrying capitalist should illuminate that I'm not marx-reading perpetual-protestor.
Hackernews doesn't have a partisan right-wing (it's poor terminology, but it's getting late) bias, but there is an extremely contrarian streak in the bowels of almost any not-yet flagged thread involving politics. For example, the Parler thread is not flagged, the Capitol Attack thread was flagged almost immediately and then dang resurrected it.
I recognize by name quite a few people on this site, I'm able to read the room. After all I'm still here at least every day.
Also, Basic Income is not left-wing policy in any way at all unless your litmus test for that is caring about poor people at all - it's effectively submitting to the free market which isn't exactly sporting for most socialists.
> Basic Income is not left-wing policy in any way at all unless your litmus test for that is caring about poor people at all - it's effectively submitting to the free market which isn't exactly sporting for most socialists.
This is pathetic goal post shifting at best. UBI is literally the government giving you enough money to never have to work again. It’s supposed to cover housing, food, and medical expenses. This is far more ambitious than any of the other “socialist” proposals from the likes of Bernie Sanders and co.
> Capitol Attack thread was flagged almost immediately and then dang resurrected it.
Because there is essentially nothing productive to discuss there. Emerging events are almost always flagged. BLM protests, CHAZ, shootings, etc. all end up flagged almost right away because there is little insight in the comments and mostly knee jerk stupidity.
> For example, the Parler thread is not flagged
You mean the one where the top comment is about how it was such a great move? Isn’t that pretty solid evidence of bias in the opposite direction you imply?
> HN is the only place on the internet where I find myself regularly having to prove that Julian Assange isn't necessarily a saint and that Donald Trump is corrupt.
I’m gonna go ahead an call bullshit on this one. You’re either replying to already down-modded comments or bringing up irrelevant info. Could it be that you’re just overreacting to comments still being visible even though they aren’t popular?
Wikipedia is not a place to catch up on the latest news or scandals as this stuff is usually hotly debated and often the truth isn't known for some time anyway. They usually do have pretty good summaries of the issues years after they have happened and all investigations / biases have finished.
I use wikipedia several times daily and find the information to be super useful and seemingly accurate. I find the wikipedia information on chemicals and plants to be super useful.
and I've always felt a strong pro-establishment bias on political matters. I can't say I'm an expert on Wikipedia in any way, but I wish the Wikimedia foundation as an organization would get some critical press coverage - at least as much as Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple etc (which is not enough).
Yep, it nicely demonstrates how much cooperating strangers can achieve in a few years... and how much of that is tarnished by petty political and ideological disputes these days, due to lack of ethical standards and education.
Yes I had the same thought, then I guessed parent might be referring to how wiki doesn't present topics in a way that's easily digestible for someone approaching new topics in math, which I can get behind. It is an encyclopedia after all.
I came here to post that simple wikipedia exists :) . Just to prove your point, have a look at the simple page for "Prime number" [0] and the regular page for the same [1]
If I were just starting out with mathematics, I'd be rather intimidated by the regular page. I find the simple version to be the right start for any topic and then move on to the regular one.
What do you think are the problems with the regular page?
I just skimmed it, and it seems to me like high-school level math is more than enough to understand what the page is saying (at least superficially).
I get the idea behind simple.wikipedia.org, but more often than not it's just a dumbed down version of the main article that uses worse English (which is obvious, since it presumably has less contributors than en.wiki, but that doesn't help your average reader)
@qsort:
To give you an analogy, think of the "original" wikipedia article as the equivalent of an academic paper. It is absolutely the right level of detail for a particular audience (with references and links and even fancy language) whereas the simple wikipedia article is the equivalent of a NYT article introducing the same idea and probably going a bit deeper.
As a further analogy, if I had to learn about Covid-19, I'd likely start with NYT (no affiliation) and then move onto Nature/Science/BMJ
It's a good reference, though. Even the articles that are obviously copied and pasted from someone's homework tend to at least be useful places to find references.
This is slightly distressing — I’m fascinated by a lot of complicated math concepts that are far above my comprehension level, and Wikipedia is high on the list of places I check.
Do you have any suggestions of better sites to read?
In order to understand most Wikipedia mathematics articles you need to already be well versed in the topic you're looking up. Even after finishing a Physics degree I struggle to understand the derivations of common physics equations because they use far more advanced concepts than necessary to demonstrate their point.
So, should it have all the foundational build-ups to get to an understanding of the topic? I think that'd be amazing but quite difficult given it took you however many years to get that degree, and I can barely get a computer to do basic arithmetic for me.
That's not my point. My point is that to understand a fairly rudimentary topic using only Wikipedia you already have to understand post-grad mathemarics concepts because the derivation and terminology is needlessly contrived because the editors are usually post-grads writing as though the article is for other post-grads. There are countless examples but I'm on my phone at the moment.
Hmm. Maybe these post-grads are on their phone too writing about very complicated mathematics that to a post-grad might seem rudimentary.
The beauty is that nothing prevents YOU from adding clarity to these "needlessly contrived" concepts... so what's stopping folks like you from contributing?
I'd be far too worried about being incorrect when describing a derivation. I also studied physics not maths but the same goes for physics articles.
I think post-docs are probably better suited for accurate explanations but at the same time they are (at least, fairly often) not as good at explaining a concept using a simpler framework.
The other problem is that because different editors write maths articles, related concepts can use fairly different terminology or concepts with similar derivations use different derivations leading to possible confusion about how concepts are related.
It's not that the mathematics wiki articles are wrong, it's that they aren't particularly well organized to accommodate all skill levels. If you don't already know what concepts you're looking for it can be a jumble. That said, wiki plus textbook is better than either alone.
* Politics (and similar stuff) can creep into any topic
* It takes a lot of effort to verify a Wikipedia article and assess neutral point of view and other stuff. My point is that you won't know that you're reading a biased or hoax article while you're reading it.
I've been funding Wikipedia for years and use it several times daily. It has indeed grown into an amazing source of knowledge documenting this world. However there are insidious problems building up. For example, I've noticed that they are starting to encode a lot of biases into its articles, particularly on topics that are part of the political sphere. These articles often reflect a US progressive-left worldview rather than a balanced view that reflects differing opinions from multiple sides of the aisle. There is also a distinct Western and English cultural bias in how articles describe and frame other countries, other cultures, and other religions.
I'm not sure what the fix is for these issues, but it does mean that I seek out opposing perspectives elsewhere when I read articles that concern such topics. It'll probably always be important for readers to seek multiple perspectives, including ones they disagree with, instead of blindly trusting Wikipedia to be correct. After all, it is written by humans.
Could you share an example of a biased article? I haven’t really noticed that (at least for the visible, high profile articles) - the coverage has been as balanced as anywhere.
Where it might get “extreme” is on niche topics that few people care about. For example I remember some articles associated with the whole “audiophile” scene were claiming some silly things without much evidence behind them, but that’s pretty innocuous in my view.
I cannot judge if it's biased (in the way meant in this thread), but there is a rather weird statement right in the first section, "Factors that affect decisions":
> In psychology, the parental investment theory suggests that basic differences between males and females in parental investment have great adaptive significance and lead to gender differences in mating propensities and preferences.[10]
First, the reference is to a text book. That's not good. Second, the theory is not not widely accepted, and did receive criticism. It's certainly not an established fact. Third, the statement's prominent place, and lack of further qualification, suggests that human parents should take care of the amount care men and women invest in parenting, but that's not at all what the theory is about. The article linked explains that very clearly.
Why it was placed there is a mystery, but it's not been a neutral, well-informed edit.
> Second, the theory is not not widely accepted, and did receive criticism.
Then contribute a link to that criticism? AFAIK that's the normal policy on widely criticized statements that are still popular enough that they should be mentioned.
One example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th..., which is about a term called "Cultural Marxism" which has been used by some mainstream right-leaning people as well as some right-leaning extremists (particularly in the past). If you look at the article itself, it titles this article as a "conspiracy theory" and specifically features the conspiracy theory version of "Cultural Marxism" in its opening sentences. However, the term as commonly used in modern times, does not refer to that particular conspiracy theory but is more like a shorthand for leftist ideology that features collectivism, particularly when it infiltrates academic institutions (and not the notion of a coordinated mass conspiracy).
From a quick Google search, I was able to find other articles that draw this distinction clearly (example https://spectator.us/whats-wrong-cultural-marxism/). However, the Wikipedia article doesn't draw this distinction well, and it seems intent on casting the phrase "Cultural Marxism" as racist, and so it features the worst interpretation of it. It sources articles that are also written primarily to repudiate right-wing political figures or intellectuals like Jordan Peterson. The related debate and edit wars are apparent when you look at the "Talk" page for this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cultural_Marxism_conspira.... Note that the Talk page mentions the article is controversial, is in dispute, that there have been attempts to recruit editors to change the article, there have been circular sources introduced, and so forth.
That's just one example, but if you dig deep enough into any topic that has a left- and right- perspective and a Wikipedia article, you'll find the same. Wikipedia is, in my view, developing a US-centric English-centric left-leaning bias. All that said, I still love Wikipedia and will continue to use it everyday. I just worry that like all human-centric institutions, it is itself a target, a theater of battle in the on-going ideological wars.
It's interesting to contrast that with the article on Neoliberalism.
Both are terms that are generally used to disparage views of others. Except for the new 'Neoliberal' clique who are centre left most people described as Neoliberals don't describe themselves that way. Just as what many right of centre would term as 'Cultural Marxists' wouldn't describe themselves that way.
I'm not a fan of the label 'neoliberalism' (outside of IR
theory where it's well-defined and different) and think it's often a marker for poor quality partisan analysis, but the fact is it's simply prepending a 'neo' in front of the well established and broad classical liberal school of thought to distinguish it from the colloquial US use of 'liberal' to mean 'left wing'. And most of the people referred to wouldn't argue with the idea their ideas are in the ideological tradition of Adam Smith, even as they take great issue with some of the nonsense written about their motives and ideals and argue a label so broad that the entire EU political project and most of its opponents falls into it isn't particularly useful for understanding politics or economics.
That's quite different from referring to the other side of a debate on sexuality as 'Cultural Marxism', despite Marx having had zero interest in sexuality, many self-proclaimed Marxist states having conservative policies on it and few people on that side of the debate having any interest in Marx. At best, you could argue right wingers describing their culture war opponents as Marxists are trying to invoke the spirit of Joe McCarthy rather than Lyndon LaRouche's ridiculous Frankfurt School conspiracy theory and literal Nazi origins of the term.
My feeling is that "neoliberalism" is a term with a greater degree of academic formality behind it, as well as consensus in terms of definition. I don't think it was originally pejorative, although it has come to be used as an insult, in the same way "Boomer" has. The term "Cultural Marxists" is probably pejorative to those it targets, although I've seen its use as a shorthand for a collection of ideas the right finds disagreeable, rather than a pejorative. It's a term that feels self-describing and immediately obvious to those who use it, but it does not have an academic foundation like "neoliberal" does. And its definition has varied over time, which is the cause of the current lack of consensus on what it refers to. As a result, each political side I think uses the definition that most favors their own ideological bias.
The article about the conspiracy theory has a disambiguating note pointing to "Marxist cultural analysis" as a more common term for the non-conspiratorial use of "Cultural Marxism". The remaining question is whether the conspiratorial use is significant/common enough that it deserves to be treated as the "default", and that's an editorial question that could be argued from either side. It's an uncomfortable situation to be sure, but there's no blatant political bias here.
I'm not sure what your point is. That sentence is entirely correct with reference to the conspiracy theory - there's no actual conspiracy or "intellectual tendency" to conspire along the posited lines. Marxist cultural analysis is a rather different animal; to be sure, there are genuinely weird interactions between it and e.g. radical Maoist politics/worldviews which push some proponents of either towards an ideological extreme that's somewhat reminiscent of the 'Cultural Marxist' claims ("Destroy the Four Olds!") - but even then, that's a random/contingent political equilibrium; not a willful conspiracy or even a well-defined "intellectual tendency".
I think the point is that these articles don't prove anything of the kind. The first one "examines the ways in which Cultural Marxism has moved from the ‘fringe’ to the ‘mainstream’", paying "particular attention to the localised use of the conspiracy in the ‘Safe Schools’ controversy of 2016–2017, whereby Cultural Marxist tropes were imbued with local concerns about sexuality and gender issues". The second one "argues that “Cultural Marxism” is an antisemitic conspiracy theory", focusing "on three of the main proponents", and shows that it "misrepresents the Frankfurt School’s ideas and influence", the latter not being obvious from a quick reading.
> These articles often reflect a US progressive-left worldview rather than a balanced view that reflects differing opinions from multiple sides of the aisle. There is also a distinct Western and English cultural bias in how articles describe and frame other countries, other cultures, and other religions.
The problem is real as I've mentioned elsewhere, but it's overwhelmingly a sourcing problem. There simply aren't many sources about non-Western or traditionalist (as opposed to modern/progressive) worldviews.
Saying that (en.)wikipedia has a US progressive-left worldview is subtly misleading.
Specifically en.wikipedia.org has a western (US/UK sphere of influence) worldview.
This is because en.wikipedia is/can be edited by everyone who speaks English: not just the USA, not just regular English speaking countries, but also all those countries that teach children English as a second language, (and a not insignificant smattering of people who learn English outside of school too)
When you compare countries around the world, The United States of America is said to lean rather right of center.
Thus from a US perspective you would expect en.wikipedia to appear to indeed be a bit on the left.
(this is not a comprehensive answer, but it does cover a lot of the ground)
> When you compare countries around the world, The United States of America is said to lean rather right of center.
I'm not sure that this is the case. Maybe with respect to English-speaking countries, the U.S. leans more capitalistic which some people would call "right". But U.S. society/worldview is nonetheless far more liberal, socially progressive and open to diverse views than most countries around the world.
So are you saying that the world has stood still, and that western thought in general and America in particular have not had any sort of positive influence on the world since 1776? ;-)
I honestly don't understand what your satire is trying to say, and would agree with zozbot234's pretty straight forward reply: the US is probably lean right among Western countries, but compared to all the countries in the world, it's not. Most of Asian and African countries lean much more "right" compared to the US, as a starter.
Specifically -as a nearly trivial statement- en.wikipedia is predominantly edited by those people who can write in English.
These can be:
* Native speakers: From eg. USA, UK, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland.
* People who speak English as a second language (which is most of the western world including western Europe)
In general out of this set of countries, the USA tends to be fairly (economically) conservative and right-leaning. (Compare with eg. Netherlands, Norway, Germany, France, Canada, New Zealand, etc. )
What makes you say that countries in eg. Asia are more right leaning than the USA? That surprises me a bit.
Of out this set of countries, I agree; but she/he specifically quoted a sentence from your original comment, therefore I think his/her observation is fine.
> What makes you say that countries in eg. Asia are more right leaning than the USA
Ah! Which country are you in, if I may ask? I'd like to look it up!
(In return: I'm currently in Germany, Netherlands. These countries are considerably left of the USA in terms of eg socialized health care and education, views on woman's rights, and general permissiveness and openness to new ideas.)
What do you consider right/left wing in this context, and how is the country you are in right wing? (Perhaps you're in Singapore or so?)
I think I'd better explain the "1776" comment a bit better:
America was not the only country to have a great revolution. Starting almost a century earlier, and (in part following america's example) up to this day, many countries have seen revolutions or reforms. The world has continued to evolve and grow.
Americans are often taught of American exceptionalism, that an enlightened America is (was) alone in the dark.
Perhaps (nearly) so in 1776; But the fact today is that America is no longer the only nation with a liberal world view, social progressiveness and openness to diverse views. Now many other nations stand beside it or even ahead of it. This is not a bad problem to have of course (or even a problem at all! )
I really do hate Wikipedia and almost never use it. It's a collection of poorly spun word-salad stolen loosely from third-parties. And the aim isn't on quality but to satisfy the editors compulsive need to contribute to Wikipedia's ever-growing rat's nest of non-sense... just because. In every article there will always be a historical section probably about 3/4ths the articles width that you just skip over (it's useless.) Then, maybe if you're lucky there will be some notes of value.
These notes are almost always useless for two reasons:
1. They are never detailed enough to do anything with.
2. They usually assume massive amounts of prior audience knowledge. To the point where said audience wouldn't need the website.
So they have the unique distinction of being useless to both beginners and expert audiences (quite the feat if you think about.) In the end after you've realized whatever article you're reading is useless (mostly all of them) you'll leave and do what you should have done in the first place: your own research.
I really do wish there was a way to block results in Google. Wikipedia and it's merry band of 13-yo editors would be the first to go.
I think it sometimes depends on the area you are looking for information in.
In general an encyclopedia helps you solve the search paradox (That is: You can't find anything unless you already know something about it).
* If you use it to find information about things you are already very familiar with, you'll be disappointed.
* If you use it directly as a source for things you are not familiar with, you will be mislead.
However, if you use your encyclopedia (Britannica , Wikipedia, Encarta) as a jumping off point to find search terms and sources, you'll find it to be most useful indeed.
In short, an encyclopedia is more like a richer dictionary, rather than a primary source of truth. (it isn't called a tertiary source for nothing!)
Wikipedia's habit of deep interlinking helped it rank back in the early aughts when the SEO rules were rather simple. Add to that the subdomain-driven localization strategy and many other moves that were considered SEO best practices back in those years when the on-page factors used to matter.
But that was just the start. Wikipedia killed it in SEO when it was easy to do so, but it also did one other thing that most SEO-driven sites (eg: About) didn't do correctly - it cared deeply about the content quality and also resisted to run ads (anyone remember Jason Calacanis' articles on how they are leaving $100m on the table? See [1]). So when Panda came around, Google correctly rewarded Wikipedia with #1 rankings for over 50% of its terms (!!), and Jason Calacanis had to shut down Mahalo which got destroyed by Panda.
Wikipedia's dominance continues because it's basically impossible to overcome its lead in inbound links and domain authority. Add to that a surprisingly under-the-radar company culture which has avoided any major blow ups despite its community wielding so much leverage over the world's education and having to make a lot of difficult calls on a daily basis.
Well done.
[1] https://calacanis.com/2006/10/28/wikipedia-leaves-100m-on-th...