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Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
198 points by actuator on March 5, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 290 comments
Hi, not sure whether this is a good topic to discuss here or not but I keep seeing issues with Wikipedia which are getting worse with time, with regards to neutrality and editorialisation.

While Wikipedia's model seems far better than an individual publishing house's encyclopedia one where they can draw editors from millions of people throughout the world and are not bound by ads or sales to keep them afloat, in terms of editing it hasn't been working well.

Not every editor has equal power on Wikipedia. The more you have stayed on the site and the more time you spend on the site, you tend to have more say on what gets inside the articles. I have seen talk pages where the same three editors who seem to be part of the same echo chamber discussing issues preventing any alternative opinion or tone to come in the article. A behaviour very similar to Reddit where some subreddit moderators can sustain echo chambers by moderating anything not falling in line. In Wikipedia's case this often even leads to some sources getting picked over the other specially when it comes to media or books.

Is it possible to break the grasp of "editors" or is every user curated platform doomed to reach this state?




I'm not sure if I share the same assessment. I am amazed at how robust your typical Wikipedia page is despite the chaos that goes into writing it. Given that it's not possible to make a version of reality that everyone is happy with, I think Wikipedia comes pretty dang close.


As an example, I want to point people to the page I have been spending a lot of time on as of late: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukrai...

Is the information on this page perfect? Obviously not. But this single page probably represents the best up-to-date summary of information you will find on the internet. And I can only imagine the thankless work volunteer editors put into making it coherent and readable - free from random garbage and conspiracy theories.


Articles on conflicts are usually shockingly well written. I spend a lot of time reading them, at least in part for entertainment. The one on the Congo Crisis is fantastic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Crisis

I guess I'm not the only one doing this, because there's this meme trend of making video edits of these articles. Pretty much captures how it feels to read them if you're into it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48hGOxw2heg


If you check out previous comments from the OP, I think you'll find it's entries like that they're upset about.


Even more amazingly the invasion article on the Russian wikipedia was really good as well (as of a few days ago).


Did this change or was it a few days ago that you last checked?


The latter


I didn't read it all but wasn't hard to find "mistakes" in that wiki article

For example: "Several countries which are historically neutral, such as Switzerland and Singapore have agreed to sanctions."

Clearly a misrepresentation of Swiss neutrality. The news outlets all over the world posted this and various similar claims over the last week and wiki picks it up. Some news articles even straight out tell you that Switzerland ditched its neutrality and "picked a side" in this war. It could not be more wrong. But Wikipedia doesn't care about right or wrong it just repeats what a subset of sources say even if its like in this case obviously propaganda.


I don't really think it's Wikipedia's job to litigate the truthfulness of such claims -- it's about consensus, not about "truth." Assigning Wikipedia the job of deciding what is true and what is not beyond just summarizing mainstream consensus and Wikipedia ends up having to take many more political stances and the project could quickly break down.


I didn't say its Wikipedia fault or that they did anything other than what they claim to do "pick up the stuff form other places".

But wrong is still wrong and wrong is not useful. And even thou I know its wrong I have no way to fix it despite the idea of Wikipedia that anyone could correct everything. But I can't because I would need to find an article (from an accepted source) which opposes this exact claim. And even then if there are 5 sources for something that is wrong and 1 source pointing out that it is wrong, Wikipedia will at best report this as neutral as it gets which boils down to "The majority says [insert wrong statement here]". This IS neutral and in it self correct but the wrong statement is still there anyway. This is just the fundamental way how Wikipedia works.


If Wikipedia wasn't about truth, nobody would use it.

And if the consensus is particularly bad on a subject and the people editing the Wikipedia page are cooperative, they'll usually be able to find a rule intepretation that allows the consensus statements not to count (for insatnce, claiming that a generally reliable source isn't reliable for this particular statement).


Can you elaborate with sources for someone who have only read the main stream media about this?


"Several countries which are historically neutral, such as Switzerland [...] have agreed to sanctions."

This implies that Switzerland neutrality is somehow relevant while in reality it is not. It implies sanctions DESPITE neutrality.

https://www.eda.admin.ch/eda/en/fdfa/fdfa/aktuell/newsuebers...


I get it - you feel the word “neutrality” should only be used to mean military neutrality - and you’re annoyed that Wikipedia has used a broader definition used by various media outlets.

I think what your arguing here is semantics, as opposed to something that’s “factually incorrect”.

The problem you describe is one Wikipedia suffers from. If the conventional wisdom is wrong then Wikipedia will be wrong. And it will never be the first declare the conventional wisdom was wrong, the majority needs to change their mind before it will.

It’s a downside of requiring citations to support statements. But probably unavoidable.


It doesn’t have to do with military neutrality. The sentence implies that Switzerland due to their neutral status never or almost never agree to sanctions of any kind. However their neutral status has never been an indication of that. It clearly reads as sanctions despite historical neutrality.

Either this is an entertainment piece and they can write it how they want (but it shouldn’t be mentioned on a wiki page) or it’s a news piece and should be without these kind of “suggestive but not exactly saying it” articles that blur the line between non-news and deniability thereof.

The only thing it would have cost them to not mention Switzerland’s neutrality would be clicks/money. 0% truth would have been lost writing the context properly.


the assignment of semantics to a sentence isn't the imposition of some kind of subjective interpretation of some words that we shouldn't get bogged down in

its literally the assignment of meaning to those words. which is really pretty close to arguing about the truth of the sentence

just to argue semantics


"Swiss neutrality" is its own "thing" its not the same as "military neutrality" its a very broad concept that does include military neutrality but many more things that aren't part of the dictionary definition of the word "neutrality". I would point you to the wiki article that explains it but its very bad.

Anyway the overall conclusion people get when reading the statement that neutral countries DESPITE being neural joined sanctions (picked a side/no longer neutral) and that is wrong especially in case of Switzerland.

Its not semantics its factually wrong because if there would be an attempt to connect "Swiss neutrality" to the sanctions it would be the other way around. I.e. to stay true to the concept Switzerland would have to join sanctions because other wise it could be used to circumvent the sanctions from others which then could theoretically interfere with the idea behind Swiss neutrality especially if Switzerland or companies there would profit from this.

>The problem you describe is one Wikipedia suffers from. If the conventional wisdom is wrong then Wikipedia will be wrong. And it will never be the first declare the conventional wisdom was wrong, the majority needs to change their mind before it will.

Indeed but its not just that, even if something is know (or known to be wrong) if no one in the accepted sources group actually explicitly write it out then there is no source and you can not add it to Wikipedia. The Wikipedia editors also like to write X as if it is a fact then if the is a source opposing it they write the opposition as a quote from the given author or source.


Russia has many countries from Israel to India to China to circumvent sanctions. Using that as the reasoning for the sanction is great political cover but it clearly showed Switzerland picked a side in this conflict.


Thats your opinion and you have zero evidence for it. While I have the official statement from the Swiss gov + the timeline of their actions. BTW they declined sanctions and only after the EU sanction where in place and they reviews them they decided to join (most) sanctions. There reason for the change were the actions of others (and not a 180° switch in foreign politics) its obvious and well documented.

Also sanctions are not "for" picking sides but for punishing wrongdoings (in this case breaking international law) they could easily put sanction on "both" sides if appropriate, in fact there are already sanction in place because of the Swiss neutrality, Swiss companies can not sell/export military equipment to Ukraine (or Russia).

The fact that other counties can be used to circumvent sanction is false argument. Switzerland is the financial hub of Europa and could diminish the effect the sanction have. Beside that the sanctions are designed to have an effect despite possible circumvention.


A bigger issue I see with that Wikipedia page is it doesn't list the blocking of regulatory approval of the finished Nord Stream 2 as a cause. It's only mentioned way down and more like "wet streets cause rain".

Of course, even Russian propaganda doesn't mention it. Sending kids to die to a neighbor country because of a gas pipeline doesn't have the same ring to it. They go with some kind of motherland nonsense. It's just money. Always is.


Agreed. It could at least say "Switzerland, which considered itself neutral for other conflicts...." instead of declaring it as factually "historically neutral."


Are you disputing that Switzerland is historically neutral?


I will. They clearly aided and abetted the Germans government over citizens Germany was oppressing/killing during World War II.


Switzerland was neutral during WWII. You may just have a simplistic idea of what Swiss neutrality means. It certainly does not mean that the well-being of their own people is sacrificed for some kind of morally righteous "neutral" foreign politics. The people in power back then hat to carefully balance their actions and they had a lot to loose, in hindsight they did incredibly well.


No absolutely not. But the Swiss neutrality is a broad concept/principle not a strictly defined set of actions that the gov can or can not do.

The sanction against Russia for example are not in conflict with the neutrality principle despite the media reporting pretending that this is somehow "unexpected" or "a first" or "clearly picking a side" or even "ditching neutrality because Russia so bad". This is either the media sacrificing truth for click bait headlines or straight out propaganda but its in "Wikipedia trusted" media so Wikipedia picks that up because that what it should do.

So now you have people thinking Switzerland somehow after 200 year of being neutral sides with EU/NATO whatever against Russia. And if people point out that this is not true, people point to Wikipedia. That is the dilemma. Wikipedia doesn't say its a source for truth but people use it as such anyway.


A week before they sanctioned those on the EU list the Swiss government had declined to apply any sanctions, citing Switzerland’s neutrality as the reason.

According to Reuters:

> Switzerland has steered clear of imposing sanctions in a string of crises, including when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. Up to now, the exception has been sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council, which it has to implement under international law.

So certainly it seems like they are “taking sides” here more than ever before. Seems like a change in what they consider being neutral to be.


Its exactly the other way around the sanctions of others pushed them in a non-neutral position where they would allow Russia to circumvent sanctions through Switzerland and Switzerland would profit from this war. THAT is the reason why they joined the sanctions not to "take sides" but to stay neutral according to the Swiss neutrality principle which is not some kind of banal neutrality people think it is that basically assumes Switzerland just pretends nothing happens if its outside their border. That would be ignorance not neutrality.

Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30576264


I tend to agree. Wikipedia does a fantastic job of trying to stay objective. I think the real root here is that the last decade has led to a bifurcation of "facts" across partisan lines. There are realms of discourse where people just don't think it's appropriate to present unrefuted fact A without also presenting perspective B, even if the support for B is mostly just spin. So someone reads an article on A and thinks it's "biased" because it doesn't lead to the readers' own opinions.

But that's not something Wikipedia can solve, and I think they do what they can about as well as is possible. Here's a good example page of the effect, check out some of the edit wars on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_masks_during_the_COVID-19...

The result is a little jumbled, with some contradictory spin still lurking in sentences here and there. But for the most part the article has limited itself to an objective treatment, and done well.


The face mask article example you gave is actually one of the ones which would be less affected by established editor bias as there would be more editors from different regions participating in editing it.

Moreover claims by health organisations like WHO can be used to prove or disprove the efficacy of masks. But this is a luxury articles that are dealing with established authorities publishing information have.

Articles on persons and social issues tend to mostly not have any such authority and the debate is mostly generated through opinion.


Do you have an example? I mean, I'm sure there's a terrible-but-forgotten-and-ignored page in there, but in my experience Wikipedia's rules about citation and notability work very well to limit expressions of opinion in the pages.

Are you absolutely sure you aren't just expressing the effect I noted? You got mad because a page listed facts, but not the "right" facts?


No, I am fine with the facts being listed and with the page in contention, I wasn't even discussing the presence or omission of the fact.

My concern was with the weightage the said fact had in the overall article. The weightage of the said issue in the summary and article, seems to far outweigh what it deserved.


I agree. While some articles may seem to have a slant in emphasis, I can't recall a time when credible information contrary to the slant was omitted or distorted. That's much better than I can say for just about any other source I read online.

I remain an avid wikipedia reader.


> some articles may seem to have a slant in emphasis

The editorial slant which sets the tone of the article also colours the thoughts of the reader, it is not just dissemination or omission of facts. Moreover, editors do tend to give more weightage to some sources than the other if they are reporting on the same issue.


> The editorial slant which sets the tone of the article also colours the thoughts of the reader, it is not just dissemination or omission of facts.

Yes, but as I said, Wikipedia is much less bad in this respect than any other source. If I have the sources, at least I can do my own digging. With most other sources I have to assume there is information contrary to the slant that is being swept under the rug, and I won't immediately know where to find that information.

> editors do tend to give more weightage to some sources than the other if they are reporting on the same issue.

Sometimes there is good reason to do this. Some sources are more credible than others.

If editors didn't exercise judgment in selection of sources, Wikipedia would just be a disinformation playground dominated by the most energetic propagandists.


> Some sources are more credible than others.

I am not saying we should trust DailyMail more than BBC. My issue is with sources where the lines are more blurry.

Say, they will not publish outright misinformation but they will definitely have a editorial stance which colours their coverage.

> If editors didn't exercise judgment in selection of sources, Wikipedia would just be a disinformation playground dominated by the most energetic propagandists

Agreed. But how do we rank which sources are better than the other. Sure, remove ones which publish outright misinformation but after that how do you rank them.

The source will be discussed in WP:NEWSORG boards, the people weighing in on the discussion will be established editors of the site. They will more likely tend to rate sources which fit their echo chambers better higher than others. The same sources will get more weightage in Wikipedia articles. When argued against, Wikipedia editors will cite it is trusted more. It is a self fulfilling loop.

This is why my original question was, is any user curated platform doomed to reach this state.


If you have genuine issues with any part of the existing rating in WP:RSP, it's entirely appropriate to raise that on the talk page. "I think this source should be ranked higher/lower than it currently is, and here's evidence" is a valid concern. Wikipedians are well aware that verifiability standards may reinforce biases in article coverage, and some have even proposed (though not very seriously) that doing away with verifiability altogether may be better than the alternative of being left with a systemically biased encyclopedia.


I have tried making an effort for this in the past but it didn't work as there was no opposition but there wasn't much support as well.

Also, I am not sure how we can verifiably prove that the editorial stance of one source is either day pro or against something, so it should be rated higher or lower, and if equal whose tone do we go with. As wiki editorialisation of news events is not preferred, you will have to go with existing editorialisation in media


"Some support but no opposition" qualifies as consensus, at least provisionally. So you should be WP:BOLD and just edit the policy page directly. People might be upset and revert you, but you won't be in the wrong because you did after all seek consensus on talk, and they didn't object.


editors trying this on WP:RSP get reverted in short order


Even after arguing for the change on the appropriate talk/noticeboard pages and getting qualified support and zero opposition? I'm not sure this has ever been tried properly, but I see no reason why it wouldn't work.


I've got a good counter example: Thwme wikipedia entry on Serrapeptidase is a disgrace. The talk page is very enlightening: a couple of "powerful" editors took the page and created a narrative they want to show. While lots of people are showing plenty of evidence around the web showing other points of view. The result is a very poorly informative wiki page that lacks a lot of the information that can be found in all web sites from the first page results of a Google search.


This is a good example of an amazingly bad article with the worst type of wiki lawyering on the talk page. It basically still has the same conclusion in the lead as when it was originally created, and most of the claims/leaks against Hunter were considered "false"/dinsinfo... But now that those laptop leaks were either confirmed by different reputable sources, it more or less indirectly calls most of the claims true yet still ends up labeling everything a conspiracy theory for absolutely no reason other than some editors going all "nuh uh"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira...

>"Almost no one is not no one, and simply the "fact" it was Hunter's laptop does not in itself establish anything improper, unless someone is upset about porn. We have no knowledge of its chain of custody. For all anyone knows, his laptop was snatched and flown to an SVR lab in Moscow for "enhancement" before being given to Rudy/Bannon. The Politico piece was not picked up by any other reliable source, it relies exclusively on an assertion by some unnamed guy whose credibility is unknown, hence it is REDFLAG and UNDUE"

After ignoring articles from the guardian, politico, the nyt just because it's supposedly not relevant. And even if it was actually hunter's laptop who care right? It has nothing to do with the article centered on the claims that it was his laptop. I think ultimately this is just unconsequential, and the hunter story does not really matter, but if you contrast it with the wiki page on the russian links with trump, the extreme selectivity in sources somehow just... disappear. Keep in mind that no one is actually contesting that the contents of the laptop are actually from hunter at this point except for Wikipedia. Even the emails have been pretty conclusively proven to be his.

The problem is that it leads to just more preaching to the choir; usually wikipedia is pretty good at neutrality in the tone of it's articles (even when those are biaised, which is normal). But with such a blatant attempt at mental gymnastics through the entire article, you end up convincing no one that the info is actually legit or credible. A lot of recent political articles end up being written in a manner much more similar to a smug RationalWiki article than to an actual encyclopedic text


>This is a good example of an amazingly bad article with the worst type of wiki lawyering on the talk page.

>absolutely no reason other than some editors going all "nuh uh"

They're almost certainly paid to keep that content on the talk page and off the article.

Once you're in the partisan politics bubble normal procedures and safeguards break down because there are absurd amounts of money being spent.

I looked at that talk page and it's just painful.

"It isn't his laptop"

"It isn't not proven to be not his laptop"

"Even if it is his laptop, it isn't his files"

"It isn't not proven to be not his files"

Just admit that it could be genuine or it could be a disinfo campaign. Ugh.


That makes me wonder what is the use in including anything political except blunt facts for a place like Wikipedia. If they want to do “political history” then I’d just have an open dump site of any kindling people want to add to the “discussion” and leave it at that. Basically just an archive of propaganda at worst.


it's always fun to find a page like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Night_(video_game) where a quarter or more of the content is some "Controversy" that everyone has long since forgotten, but at the time it was Crucially Important that the Facts of this Controversy be Documented, so it's given undue weight in terms of percentage of the overall article.


> the extreme selectivity in sources somehow just... disappear

Unimportant articles will draw a different crowd than more important articles. Those different groups will have different standards for sources and tone/bias.

What changes have you made to that article that were rejected / rolled back? How long have you been making edits to it?


The only thing this sort of obvious political bias does is discredit Wikipedia and push readers to less reputable sites for information.

Like many others on here, I prefer to go directly to multiple biased sources like npr, CNN, breitbart, nypost because I understand their bias and can sort through it to tease out information.

The thing that I find the most distasteful is any source that purports to be unbiased, but uses subtle language tricks to skew their readers towards a conclusion.

I find such things to be the most toxic, and avoid them.

I don't agree with the other commenters on here that argue "it's mostly good", so that makes it ok.

When there's a hidden bias, it makes it much more difficult to tease through the information to find something that resembles the truth.


It is mostly good, but the bad parts aren't evenly distributed. There are a couple specific categories of articles where Wikipedia can be bad. Anything political involving people on the Internet is guaranteed to produce a good or bad article depending mostly on which people on the Internet manage to edit the Wikipedia article. Anything political at all from the past couple of years beyond bare facts like "was this person convicted in court", for the same reasons. There's also subjects that not a lot of people care about, which can be good or bad depending on how competent the 1 or 2 people who edit the article are.


What bias do you think CNN has? Genuinely curious which part of the spectrum you think they belong to, because I could make arguments for either side.

Breitbart is an editorial/propaganda magazine, not a news source. Why would you go there for anything?


>What bias do you think CNN has?

CNN was openly anti-Trump for the entire administration, as in, instructions were literally passed down that reporting should be slanted in such a way as to taint him.

It isn't a case of having to think they have a bias, it's a case of literally being told that bias is part of their policy.

It wasn't hard to spot, either. Their reportage during the Trump administration was absurd. You'd have headlines and first-paragraphs that were contradicted by the entire rest of the article; the headline and intro para made Trump look bad, the rest of the article begrudgingly attempted to convey the facts. It was utter nonsense.


> CNN was openly anti-Trump for the entire administration, as in, instructions were literally passed down that reporting should be slanted in such a way as to taint him.

Interesting. Do you have a link to the evidence of these instructions? I'd like to read them.


There was an incident with a whistleblower - a CNN reporter - recorded in a restaurant relating how there'd be a narrative line passed down from the top every day. You'll have to dig it up as I can't remember the guy's name. Was relatively widely reported.


> Breitbart is an editorial/propaganda magazine, not a news source. Why would you go there for anything?

I think that label can be applied to most "news" sources these days.

To answer your question specifically though, it is because they report on events that other places don't, based on their particular bias.


> But now that those laptop leaks were either confirmed by different reputable sources

Citation needed


The citations are in the talk page of the article I linked. And a few of them are even at the end of the lead paragraph of the main page. The entire comment was about the citations that are in the article but still ignored in the main body ;)


I think overall the wikipedia model has shown itself to be decently working.

But (anecdata) I have my gripes with the way it handles evidence.

My SO has a person (died already) in her family with a (relatively) short wikipedia entry. There are factual errors in the article. We know that, because we have original documents showing that the "facts" reportet in the entry are wrong.

Due to the fact that the documents cannot be published online without breaking copyright laws we can't point to a correction.

She communicated with an editor (or whatever his role was, but he had the right to approve or deny changes to the entry) who stated he could only allow changes to the "facts" if my SO could point to an online source (a credible one he said). Else he would deny changing anything. Or she should upload the documents to wikipedia if she had copyright on them.

He didn't accept the idea to send the documents to him as proof. He made it clear that it is either the wikipedia way of determining the truth or none.

We stopped. Since then I am asking myself how much of wikipedia is actually wrong and actively or passively denied from correction by these gate keepers.

Wikipedia could offer a way to upload documents for editors to review without automatically making them publicly available. This would enable fact checking and correction.

I had heard of it before but since this personal experience with German Wikipedia's "Blockwart" mentality I will never consider them a valid organisation for donations.


> an editor [...] stated he could only allow changes to the "facts" if my SO could point to an online source (a credible one he said).

That's plainly false, how many Wikipedia articles have (annoying, I'll admit) offline references to books, papers, and other things that are only available under specific terms and conditions, typically after some payment? You don't have to own anything's copyright to reference it. (In many jurisdictions you'd also be allowed to publish excerpts as fair use, that would make this easier but that's not a prerequisite here anyway.)

And does Wikipedia even have an approval system? I thought either you have permission to edit a page or you don't (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=COVID-19&action=e...). This whole situation sounds quite odd.

Not that I haven't dealt with overzealous page protectors myself that have some "I did a million-and-one edits and am holier than thou" status and will revert anything that changes their perception of the world. I don't disbelieve the situation in general, just those details seem odd to me.


> That's plainly false,

Thanks for denying experience. You could have said: "That should not be the case."

But yet he kept denying changes.

> offline references to books, papers, and other things that are only available under specific terms and conditions, typically after some payment

I was talking about birth certificates, official but personal documents, things like birthday greetings personally signed by Erich Honecker, a Radio interview done in the 70ies at a GDR radio station were only one last tape of the recording exists in family archives.

Nothing of that is anyhow publicly available.

Whenever we proposed changes we were shut down by this person. They felt (or were - I have too little insights into the hierarchy of Wikipedia and don't want to actually) to be righteously empowered to change back any change were one could not provide citable proof. And that is actually a point I agree with.

But he also was not willing to accept/provide a way to proof how "facts" in the entry were wrong.

If they were missing I wouldn't have an issue. But they were already wrong in the cited source and we had the original documents to proof that. He just wasn't willing to look at them.


> > That's plainly false

I think this was referring to the claim by the other editor - that he "could only allow the changes if ...", was false. Not to your whole comment


> Nothing of that is anyhow publicly available.

Therein the problem.

Your situation sucks, and I'm genuinely sorry about it.

But I'm not sure I can think of a way to change that policy that would be a net win overall.

If anything I feel like you're more collateral damage of copyright law than wikipedia policy here, but I understand that even assuming I'm right about that, that doesn't make the specifics sucks any less.

Bah.


> Thanks for denying experience

That's not what I meant. Was already thinking whether this was clear enough or if I should edit... apparently I should have edited. Apologies.

I meant it the way that pxeger1 mentioned in their sibling comment: the person denying your (SO's) edits was saying something that is clearly not true.


Thanks for clarification. Very much appreciated.


Since this person is family, you can issue a publicly-available statement, e.g. on a website, and it will most likely qualify as a reliable source by Wikipedia's policies. The point is that Wikipedia must never be a primary source for what it writes about; it just always be able to point at a source for what it says. Wikipedians' job is to broadly evaluate and curate sources, not guess at the truth of any individual statement.


Yeah I could do this. But I could also just accept the fact that Wikipedia isn't even willing to delete contested information when offered proof.

I don't need the facts to be in the entry. I don't care. I only care about the fake facts in there and ask myself how much of the rest of Wikipedia is also riddled with falsehoods and nobody would want to remove that if shown actual state documents that show what is wrong.

I did not want it to become a primary source. I just hoped they would remove information that has new evidence not known to the original source.


There are problems with the approach of requiring third party reputable sources, for example the problems you are running into. There are associated costs, some published information will be wrong. There are also problems with the alternatives - e.g. primary sources providing motivated misinformation or volunteer editors being fooled by bad sources.

It's easy to find problems with wikipedia's current model, but harder, I think, to argue that their model is the wrong choice.


Evaluating the quality of a source was one of the most difficult and also most important skills we were taught in university.

Do I still get it wrong. Oh dear, yes. Did I learn how important it was? Oh yes.

I especially learned to qualify what I wrote and to mark when a source could not perfectly be trusted, but the argument/point of view was interesting to discuss nonetheless.

Why can't Wikipedia at least either remove false information once provided credible sources. Or at least somehow mark the relevant section/parts with a disclaimer so that readers are at least aware that something might be suspicious.

Could it be gamed? Weaponized? Probably. Would it be helpful to readers? Maybe.

But how is the current situation better?


If they don’t have a reliable source for the incorrect fact, it should be removed.

If they do have a “reliable” source for the incorrect fact, could you write to that source and get it corrected there?


As I have just written in another comment:

But they were already wrong in the cited source and we had the original documents to proof that. He just wasn't willing to look at them.

To add to that - the source is a digitized out of print book that will probably never have another edition or printing.

I could start a website or create a blog post with parts of the proof documents and maybe even sound snippets from an old interview (and part of old Stasi documents as well to make the point and that to be referenced by Wikipedia as a new source.

But why would I need to go to these lengths if I could provide proof to Wikipedia more easily if they wanted and have them at least remove the wrong parts. Even if they would not include the corrected things.


I feel your frustration but I don't think I want a Wikipedia with secret citations and an editor voucher system. Such a scheme would not be in the spirit of Wikipedia, which is nominally supposed to be verifiable and editable by any reader, and could only reinforce the gatekeeping mentality of its editors.


Get a quasi-referencable source like a Forbes blog written, and later refer to it.

Wikipedia is great for a low level consensus, but if you actually know anything about many of the subjects it’s hilariously bad.


So Gell-Mann Amnesia applies there as in most other journalism.


This is an unfortunate situation for sure, but I think I still agree with how they responded. What if they had accepted your evidence? The page still has no publicly visible references, so I (the user) have to just take the editor's word that the article is correct - I have no way to verify that information myself.


I agree. They could however remove the wrong parts.

This way they would not have the user need to trust unverifiable claims but also protect the user from learning falsehoods.


Yeah, I think that's a fair criticism.


What do you want Wikipedia to do in that circumstance, though? Just accept uncited facts based on the promise of someone on the internet? The problem with your SO's relative isn't that Wikipedia is doing something incorrect, it's that the historical record is wrong. And that sucks, but it's not something an encyclopedia is going to be able to solve. That's why we have historians.


They could see the evidence and remove the contested source. In this case they would remove a part from the entry. People wouldn't learn falsehoods. I think this would at least be better than knowingly spreading fake knowledge.

I would have welcomed that approach. And applauded them. But once he decided to let wrong facts stay as part of the entry this was a lost cause to me.

As said. I would have been more than fine if they had just deleted these parts.


Now more than ever, Wikipedia must be publicly verifiable. That means that any claim can be checked by anyone with an Internet connection and a library card. Imagine if contested articles contained controversial facts on the basis of secret evidence? The editor made the right call.


But if the editors receive proof that a statement article is wrong, but that information can't be published on the Internet for copyright or other reasons, that means it is proven that the source of the information is wrong, so that source should be removed as unreliable at least in this case. If the rules of Wikipedia don't allow unsourced information, they don't prevent removing incorrect information that has been shown to be incorrect. So they could nuke the bad information. If, after that, nothing is left, they can remove the entire article.


The problem is that results in some users with privileged knowledge and other users without. The OP has been using language like "they" to refer to editors as some unified, privileged bloc but that is incorrect, and part of the issue. (If they have found some specific users to be "gatekeeping" content, that is a problem and there exist mechanisms to redress that[0].)

Ultimately, if the OP wants "the editors" to see information to add to the article, they will effectively be publishing the information publicly, since anyone can be an editor, and there is no mechanism for protected sources that are available to only some special cadre.

That breaks the Wikipedia model -- in article namespace, everyone should be able to review the same source information. The concept here is called "verifiability" for a reason. Wikipedia's strength is that you can ultimately go check and confirm the source.

By writing articles from privileged information, Wikipedia effectively becomes a primary source on a subject, which is a big no-no for an encyclopedia in general, and for Wikipedia specifically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research

It can be frustrating, but it is a necessary minimum. As to perceived accuracy, Wikipedia has a General Disclaimer[1] for a reason.

If this all makes you less trustful of Wikipedia... good! I can't speak for every wikipedian, but I personally welcome skepticism and encourage users to verify anything they have doubts on.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Access... specifically allows the use of sources that are hard to access. The rule here wasn't that it couldn't be used because it was hard to access, but that it couldn't be used because it wasn't published at all.

Furthermore, any sane editor would allow use of this information under Ignore All Rules (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules ), which is specifically there because sometimes the rules don't produce good results.


There is no particular group who are "the editors". You are "the editors". So am I, and I have no idea about this situation. That's why articles need publicly-accessible sources.

Now, if there's something in the article that is (1) wrong and (2) unsourced, then that should be removed from the article. (And if someone re-adds unsourced material to an article, then there are process to deal with that). But if there are no public sources for information it does not go in the encyclopedia.


Thanks. Exactly my thought on a valid approach. One not taken by this person in this case.


> the documents cannot be published online without breaking copyright laws

Can you not excerpt them to the point that the quotes would qualify for fair use? Another option is contacting the source that was cited and see if they'd post a correction.

The other side of this is that family members aren't unbiased parties, so any facts they want corrected really need to be from verifiable sources--sources better than whichever source was already quoted.


At Wikipedia's scale, the red tape is more of a safety harness than anything


This seems like something the Commons Volunteer Response Team (VRT, previously OTRS) can help with. You can send them the documents and they can vouch that they say what was claimed, but without having to publish the material against the licence.

I have used this for license confirmations, not for fact checking, but they do Biographies of Living Persons work so they might be able to help.


Wikipedia's whole system is not designed for interested first-party to intervene. They do ALL. THE. TIME. but it's not built for that.

At this point you need to fight fire with fire. Everything you know that is factually wrong needs to be investigated; are there credible sources for those lies? Can those sources be discredited?

It takes a mountain of work to fight casual lies, unfortunately.


This is unfortunate, but what can Wikipedia do.

They can’t allow you upload your own proof, and then have citations on Wikipedia pointing to Wikipedia.

The only way they can really do it is to insist on citations to reliable sources. That sucks when there is nothing true about it out there, but without those rules you could just write anything at all , they need some rules.


Moat of it is outdated.

I think of wikipedia as the old encyclopedia books where they are just snapshots of reality.


You think the facts on the page should change because "trust me bro"? Come on. I don't know you from Adam.


I think Wikipedia is mostly good contentwise.

Of course there are two extremes where there are problems: disputed topics (especially contemporary political topics) and niche topics receiving little to no attention.

I think for both an improvment can be made by improving the view on the editing history. Showing what kind of editors (new accounts or ong term members? Editing only few articles or across the board? etc.) do what kind of editing. Maybe even broken down to article sections ("this section sees lots of change by new editors, while that section is stable")

But not sure how that would really look like to be usable more or less intuitively.


> Of course there are two extremes where there are problems: disputed topics (especially contemporary political topics) and niche topics receiving little to no attention.

An unusual third extreme, where things are so wrong, so entrenched and so unchecked that they have the potential to not just misrepresent truth but also change it.

I refer you to the story of the Scots Language Wikipedia:

https://www.engadget.com/scots-wikipedia-230210674.html


(Reparented from another content thread) Agreed. Wikipedia's strength is its long tail of niche articles. However, once one gets off "popular" articles, the quality bounds rapidly spread.

But that seems inherent to having an article for which there are only 1-2 editors, as opposed to 10+ frequently reviewing.

So better UX is probably the best "solution." I.e. pulling editor count, frequency, and reputation into the reader-visible part of the page.


Yeah, the smaller articles are usually written by a single person who has spent an inordinate amount of time in the domain of the article and the article is good.

I started this article recently and was very impressed by how everyone came together to reach a consensus on a very niche topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qeqertaq_Avannarleq

But then the other day I noticed that a page about a certain very popular K-Pop band was missing one of their major releases, so I added it, but then got into a pissing war with an editor of that niche who argued that the band's own Instagram page was not a valid source for information on their releases?!


The reason that someone said the band's Instagram page isn't a valid source for information about the band is because of the rules about self-published sources. The rules were patched at some point with a narrow exception, to allow sources for things like a band listing their own releases (see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:ABOUTSE... ) but it's easy for rules lawyers to insist that that patch doesn't apply. And people with OCD really don't like narrow exceptions.


> However, once one gets off "popular" articles, the quality bounds rapidly spread

The issues I have seen are mostly with these sorts of articles itself. Popular articles tend to be overall much more fair because of massive participation.

But once you go into articles which are about less popular things or contentious topics or from highly polarised areas, there is either frequent vandalism or chokehold control by few editors which makes it impossible to have even a good discussion if you think the content can be presented better.


> I think Wikipedia is mostly good contentwise.

Wikipedia politics is insane[1], and this power hunger can lead to objectively incorrect information being defended and sustained.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_cabals


>This page contains material that is kept because it is considered humorous. Such material is not meant to be taken seriously.


What exactly is this? What are cabals? I'm so confused!!!


In this context, it's how a group of people manage to take control of some portion of a website (especially where crowdsourcing is concerned).


Sorry, I am not quite sure what the problem is? I think Wikipedia is great from my day to usage. Can you point me to specific examples where the output is bad due to this?

I would like to see the problem.


I personally haven't seen a biased Wikipedia article in a very long time. It is absolutely astounding to me and seems like one of the great successes of internet culture.

I assume OP has a particular set of issues that they are not in agreement with the majority of experts on.


>I personally haven't seen a biased Wikipedia article in a very long time.

What leads you to believe you can so easily spot a biased article? Everyone believes they're a neutral arbiter.


"Biased" to me doesn't mean "I disagree".

It means:

- presented as a fact, rather than as the opinion of a scholar/researcher/etc. (meaning Wikipedia says it is true without citing anyone else)

- ignoring a significant controversy or dissent

- describing uncertain information as certain

- perpetuating the myth that science is settled and can't be updated with new information


Pages with culture war elements will inevitably be impacted by the culture war positions of the active editors in the area in question affecting how strictly a given source is judged for quality.

I'm deliberately avoiding giving examples because it seems logical to assume that I'd merely reflect my own culture war positions with respect to any such example and thereby generate more heat than light.

Overall though I still think wikipedia turns out pretty reasonably as a whole even given having seen a number of situations where I disagreed with the outcome.


“Experts” just depends on who you draw on as an expert:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/02/24/wikipedia...

https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/02/02/169470/computati...

https://thecritic.co.uk/the-left-wing-bias-of-wikipedia/


I don't have a set of experts in my mind.

To me, experts are people who have spent a lot of time studying something firsthand, have turned over their research in a transparent way, who submit their work to criticism by their peers and the public, and who have no hidden financial backing from a biased party.


Yeah, I don't get it either. It's not perfect, but it might be the only web institution that hasn't broken down over time, and has done an impressive job of holding itself to quality standards given the absurdly large scale.

Encyclopedias are, by definition, fairly superficial. You could also sit down and nitpick Britannica. The quality of writing is better because they actually have a professional staff, but they have to make all the same hard choices about what to include and objectivity.


> the only web institution that hasn't broken down over time, and has done an impressive job of holding itself to quality standards given the absurdly large scale.

Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg come to mind. Wikipedia might be an encyclopedia, but those are the libraries.


Look at the Serrapeptidase entry. Then do a cursory search on google on the same and then on google scholar.

You will see the amount of information missing from the wiki page.(compare with Serrapeptidase entry on say drugs.com).

Then look at the Talk page of the entry. You'll see the editorial battle there with some "power editors" squashing any attempt to correct the page.


I've looked at the talk page and there are no proposals for actionable changes to the article. With these controversial or WP:OWN'd articles, you really need to post the equivalent of a pull request: "I want to change text A to B, supported by reliable references X, Y and Z". If nobody at all replies, post also to the related WikiProject talk pages to solicit comments from a broader audience. If no one disagrees even then, then you can be WP:BOLD and make the edit, since you'll be able to point out that you were looking for a proper consensus.


I've no idea at all about wikipedia inner workings. I'm mostly just an occasional reader. I was just surprised at how little information it had about Serrapeptidase when I saw it and curiously checked the talk page.

It showed me the type of politics and game that can happen behind wikipedia. I really dont care, I just click back and looked at the other better Google results. It's only kind of sad, given wikipedia"s origins/mission (im old enough to remember when wikipedia was created. It's one of the few remnants of the "old" web)


Get the Wikimedia Foundation to spend money on the technical foundation of the sites, rather than spraying millions up the wall of "racial justice". That's not me making a strawman by going straight to "omg, the SJWs", it's a exact phrase from the 3rd paragraph of the 4.5 million Knowledge Equity Fund page [1].

That, and executive pay, is where donations go, not to keeping the lights on. The running cost to keeping the servers running is about the same as that fund. It certainly isn't the case that engineering is "done" either, as the open bug count is growing constantly and huge swathes of the software aren't maintained and don't even have maintainers[2]. Just minor things of no importance to modern didactics like, you know, functional video support and rarely used, obscure, functions like uploading.

They have more important things to do like weird elections and appointing cryptobro "disrupters" to the board.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund

[2] https://mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers


From the first link:

>The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and privilege to create an environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of communities of color worldwide.

What an interesting signaling statement. If you did not know what "racial equity" was, imagine trying to parse out what it is from that statement.

Imagine reading this phrase out loud to anybody not already involved in this debate. Would this help them understand what "racial equity" was? If you read this statement to any of my family or friends, who live in the middle of the country, they would probably conclude that this was some sort of racist propaganda thing, and wouldn't want to talk to whoever brought it up anymore.

I mean the fact that the foundation which is supposed to also be providing information to the world is also proudly publishing things like that should be pretty revelatory.


Absolutely 100%. I can't tell you how many companies I've lost respect for because they've hopped on the virtue-signalling PR bandwagon. It couldn't be more obvious they don't even believe what they're saying but it's in vouge these days so they plow forward anyways. The added bonus of some casual anti-white/anti-european hatred is the cherry on top.


Interestingly, from the Universal Code of Conduct [1]

> Note: The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct


I just always find it funny that 'Eurocentricity' is one of the problems, given the whole movement is AMERICA-CENTRIC as hell. We've even co-opted what being 'Eurocentric' means! Talk about arrogance!


I think waaay too many people are unknowingly hanging around other people they like too much and it causes their circle to double down on crazy.


Your friends and family probably wouldn't participate in a debate about how to build an encyclopaedia that is representative of the world, not just the world according to a bunch of mostly middle class white nerds. If they did have an interest in such a debate, I am sure they would be capable of processing that statement.

There's nothing intellectually controversial about Wikipedia's statement, to argue against it on the basis that it's impossible to parse seems anti-intellectual rather than... actually challenging the content of the statement.

You may wish to argue that Wikipedia can simultaneously be an encyclopaedia that represents the world AND be an encyclopaedia mostly written by middle class white people, but that's a point that requires much more discussion than a hand-wavey statement about how this discussion isn't relevant to your friends and family.


If the content of the encyclopedia is meant to be a representation of objective facts, then why on earth could it matter what the race of the people writing it is?

This sounds like straight up Nazi propaganda. The idea that races are so different that we literally inhabit separate realities is insane levels of bigotry.


The hyperbole isn’t helpful. As has been highlighted time and time again, Wikipedia is the work of a relatively small amount of people and there is a great deal of bias because humans suffer from bias — regardless of their intentions.

“History is written by the victors” is a famous phrase a reason — facts are a representation of the information we are most confident in, not truth.


"History's written by the victors" seems like a stretch that's only kinda truth-adjacent in some situations, e.g. where one side gets wiped out and there're no third-party observers, etc.. But, it doesn't hold in most cases, e.g. in World War 1 or 2, nor basically any modern war, where most of the losing side survives and tells its stories too. Heck, in the US, some folks complain about how much the loser of the American Civil War got to push its narratives. [From StackExchange's History site](https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/5597/is-history-... ).

Anyway, critique of that quote aside, how's it relevant to Wikipedia?


The quote is relevant because it demonstrates that it is widely understood that history (“facts”) is not an absolute truth, but a collection of ostensibly-true pieces of information disseminated by one party.

To say that Wikipedia is not representative of its editors, is to say that history is not representative of the victors.

To pick an example of a group that is somewhat insular: if the majority of Wikipedia editors were Chinese, would Wikipedia look as it does today? Would Wikipedia be an equally-as-accurate reflection on the west as Wikipedia is today?


> To pick an example of a group that is somewhat insular: if the majority of Wikipedia editors were Chinese, would Wikipedia look as it does today? Would Wikipedia be an equally-as-accurate reflection on the west as Wikipedia is today?

There's a Chinese Wikipedia site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Wikipedia

However, even the English-Wikipedia's articles on China are likely to be disproportionately influenced by Chinese posters, even if they're a minority of the overall contribution-base.

That said, what's the potential relevance here? Is this purely about articles on politics, or..?


Sure does sound like racism to me, just like Reddit's stance that you can't be racist against white people.


This could almost be taken word for word from an article about Mozilla.

People who think 'social justice' is a bad thing seem to set really high standards for the open, independant organisations they say they support, and they're not afraid to give them some extreme tough love and undermine them at every step if they don't follow their priorities.


Social justice isn't a bad thing. Social justice instead of actually fulfilling your primary goal is. If all the bugs are closed, the product is beautiful and there's still money sloshing about, then fill your boots.

Also, make sure that your donors know their donation is going to go to racial education of Arab journalists (grantee #1), and not to paying developers and server bills. The begging banners on Wikimedia sites fail to mention that there's already 9 figure surplus, and yet the engineering teams will not see any of it no matter what you give, and their money isn't going to actually end up helping a wiki at all.

If I wanted to donate to racial justice in media, I can send the money to the Media Foundation for West Africa (grantee #5), the Borealis Racial Equity in Journalism Fund (#2) or any of the others myself.


I think it's a bad thing by itself. With the wikipedia example - anyone can edit, editors can by anonymous or psuedonomous, and there is no preference, implicit or explicit, for race and gender. Over the years wikipedia has been built up, by volunteers, into an amazing and valuable resource.

Now, the organization controlling their work and this global good, decides that aggregate race and gender statistics are a problem. Wikipedia is a little too white, and a little too male, and that's a bad thing!

Imagine applying this reason to any other organization and any other race and gender combination. Here's a crazy idea - if you want to reduce race and gender based prejudice, start by not having clear race and gender prejudices yourself.


Instead of treating it as a nice-to-have when everything else is perfect, maybe consider that pursuing social justice will help you fulfill your primary goal?


I think you're both right.

Social justice INSTEAD of one's primary mission is a terrible idea. This happens when social justice initiatives are put in place to help the careers of people running them instead of the organization. That's when you get issues like the displeasure when I tried asking how many poor white people went to our graduate school in a racism discussion. My interest was in knowing whether it was first-order/direct racism resulting in an underrepresentation of POC or second-order/indirect racism (via classism and POC being more likely to be in poverty). Different causes would mean different solutions, but examining the issue wasn't the actual point. The POINT was so we could all stand up and declare ourselves good people + put it on our CVs.

Social justice in addition to a primary mission is very useful, because getting different people in the room means you think of way more things and identify new ways to carry out your mission.


They didn’t get my donations saying they’re gonna bring about racial justice. They said this is what is needed to keep Wikipedia without ads and that they’re suffering. Misleading is an understatement.


I don't think this is a social justice thing. I personally would be just as annoyed about any other cause. Wikipedia donations shouldn't be championing any cause that isn't open access to information, no matter what side of the political spectrum it's on. Especially if it's to the point that Wikipedia itself is being left to rot in favor of unrelated causes.


The thing being complained about is literally them executing their stated mission:

> This pilot initiative is rooted in our strategic direction, where Knowledge Equity emerged in 2017 as one of two key pillars of focus in order for us to achieve our vision for 2030. Knowledge equity acknowledges that we can’t achieve free knowledge if there are societal or economic barriers that prevent some people’s ability to share and contribute to knowledge. With this focused fund, we will invest in organizations working to address systems of racial bias and inequality around the world, with the goal of creating a more inclusive, representative future for free knowledge.


This is a motte and bailey argument. The motte here is that people living in unjust situations will likely be unable or less able to contribute to the Wikipedia project, which is true. The bailey is that donation funds are being funneled into these initiatives rather than improving Wikipedia itself (see other comments about bug counts and features lacking in Wikipedia, which are not being addressed). The Knowledge Equity fund may or may not improve "racial justice," however they define that - but the strategic goal of improving free access to the world's knowledge is almost certainly better reached by direct improvements to the Wikipedia software and development, and support of open access and free speech causes rather than racially-focused ones (such as, for example, support for Alexandra Elbakyan's endeavors to keep Sci-Hub operational, or speech protection in more repressive governments).


My favourite irony with the WMF's love of funding racial justice [1] is that one thing that does not work well at all in MediaWiki is the mobile editing interface [2]. It's basically just plain text and you're expected to type in the syntax manually on a phone, and also all the links to the talk, history and other pages are hidden when editing. Guess which countries disproportionately use mobile devices and don't have as much access to actual computers.

[1] Not my emphasis: the KEF seems very much racial rather then social. Social justice that cuts across "class" lines rather than race lines seems much inherently fairer to me, since the point is to offset disadvantages, and race is a proxy of disadvantage, while "class" is almost a direct statement of how disadvantaged you are.

[2] The reading interface is quite good, though certainly could be better (hidden ToCs in articles?).


> the mobile editing interface

They used to have a formalized project aimed at improving this, but it seems that work on it stopped mid-2019. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Advanced_mobile_c... Their stated (as of 2019) workflow requires going to site settings and turning on a special "Advanced" interface in order to get something that's not broken. Awful.


It's worth noting that the bias in Wikipedia editorship is very real, and persists even after controlling for obvious causal factors such as Internet access. This is why "knowledge equity" was identified as a key part of Wikimedia projects' future strategy. Of course, trying to single-handedly solve "systems of racial bias and inequality around the world" is a pointless, Sisyphean task: what they ought to do in the first place is identify what factors make it harder for minorities and the socially marginalized to contribute to Wiki projects, specifically, and address these things. But Wikimedia is not a very evidence-driven organization, so they'd rather content themselves with these pointless and self-defeating platitudes.


> At the same time, we recognize this is work that we as a movement cannot do alone. Our projects can only do so much when, for example, academic and mass media representation of marginalized communities remains insufficient, which in turn limits citations and primary sources for us to build from.

The document linked above has some very pragmatic and boring goals like:

* Supporting media and journalism efforts focused on people of color around the world, in order to expand reliable media sources covering these communities

* Addressing unequal internet access

* Improving digital literacy skills that impede access to knowledge

* Investing in non-traditional records of knowledge (i.e. oral histories)

What do you think they're doing that's so wooly and vague and useless?


These "goals" are far from narrowly targeted towards fixing the critical issue of biased minority editorship. We don't even know what exactly might deter marginalized people from contributing. Perhaps they're turned away by all the pointless wikilawyering, in which case the most effective solution would look very different from what the WMF is proposing here.

Supporting minority media is a job for minorities, who will be far more keenly aware of what media are worth supporting and what are not. Writing down oral history is great, but is properly a job for academia, not for WMF projects (with the singular and notable exception of Wikijournal, which is a primary source of publishable research). Other listed things are similarly beside the point, e.g. as argued above wrt. Internet access.


This is a grant giving programme in which they support vital projects that need to be done outside Wikimedia to further their mission and work with outside groups with proven experience in those areas to enable that. So, stuff inside wikipedia, is by definition not going to be in this list, and they are explicitly not doing any of these things themselves, because it's not their focus or skillset. Why are you assuming these tasks won't be done by minorities and/or academics as appropriate? Those both seem highly likely to be involved unless I'm missing something.


Np, this is gaslighting.

"If you don't agree with our objectives, you are the enemy!"

Disagreeing with specific elements of social justice, particularly statements like:

"The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and privilege to create an environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of communities of color worldwide."

Etc. is not 'being against social justice'.

The distinction is quite important, in fact, it's kind of 'the point'.

Most people agree with basic elements of social justice.

How many people are opposed to women voting? To women having 'equal opportunity'? Etc.

We're now into a war of opportunity and outcomes, which is a different kind of playing field.

I think Wikepedia generally does a good job overall, and it's probably fairly hard to do, that said, there is bias.


Spoken like a true Culture citizen.


Since you're familiar enough with the activities of the knowledge equity fund to be confident that it's a waste, can you fill in more detail about which grants that it has issued that ended up being wasteful? I understand that you're not "going straight to OMG, the SJWs", so surely you have some knowledge of how these millions of dollars were allocated and at least some vague understanding of their particular failures.

Unless of course you read "racial equity" and assumed that there could not possibly be a valuable distribution of funds based on that idea. Assuming that's not the case, could you give an example of a grant writing fund that ostensibly supports the idea and has created value?


Just from the grants on that page, none of them are designed to actually result in concrete wiki-relevant activity. This is, apparently, deliberate[1].

The metrics of success are not defined in a measurable way with respect to the wiki projects; whatever they do result in won't be published until the end of the year. Maybe we will see 4.5 million worth of value. Maybe we will not.

I'm not saying that it's a waste in absolute terms: the initiatives are likely a net good to humanity. But I don't think they are going to improve Wikipedia very much when the money is withheld from the platform itself. Yes, that's a false dichotomy, because if you have enough cash, you can have both racial justice funds and engineering excellence. But somewhere a decision was made that one is more important than the other, and I suggest that if you can have only one, going the other way will help Wikipedia more.

And no, I don't have an example of an racial justice grant that resulted in a value, but I don't claim that they are axiomatically without it.

The WMF does do quite a few other grants that I think have been and are valuable in wiki-adjacent areas. A lot of Wikipedian in Residences are very interesting, and these can have vast potential for increasing access to non-Western cultural resources. Something that I'd say is more in the WMF wheelhouse.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knowledge_Equity_Fund#W...


Thanks for the link! I can see being sceptical about the fund given the somewhat nebulous nature of the descriptions of their grants, and I look forward to seeing how they shake out by the end of the year. The reason why I asked is because it seemed like a strong position to take to say that the money was being "sprayed up the wall" given the little information we have about the outcomes of the fund. ?

That being said, "what is best for Wikipedia" is in itself a nebulous proposition in the first place because different people have different requirements and visions for the project. Personally to me, the investments in investigative journalism (1) seem like they could have a direct value contribution since it could expand original reporting of facts for the site. That is of course debatable, but we'll see.

Thanks for clarifying!

1 https://medium.com/freely-sharing-the-sum-of-all-knowledge/p...


That's a few too many passive aggressive questions to be asking with a sockpuppet account. If you could rewrite it to be less leading and resentful, I think the GP would be more willing to engage.


I'm not really sure how I am supposed to retroactively go back in time and register earlier.

Since you are handing out free advice, is it normally considered polite or helpful here to accuse people of using fake accounts? Is assuming that a person speaking with confidence about a topic may have some direct knowledge of that topic somehow rude or against the rules?

If you're speaking confidently on behalf of the person that I was responding to, are you sure that you reflect their opinion faithfully? If the GP wanted to say "I refuse to give more details about the fund due to the phrasing of your request for details," surely they could have typed that themselves.

Namaste!


Since you arent a sockpuppet and just new, do you really feel confident to have hit the right tone here, even after somebody gave you a heads up how a conversation is more likely to be fruitful?

You dont need to speak on behalf of OP to give you a heads up about a common problem with your approach, its pretty universal. Picture it this way, there is list of common problems which make a sensible discussion less likely. Which might be overlooked if you havent heard about it before. For example your sentences being too convoluted or having a bad structure. Another one of those is needlessly escalating a conversation.

That kind of boils down to what the aim of your post is. If its not aimed at having a fruitful engaging conversation that might proof your wrong, then you are either doing it for yourself or to set an atmosphere. Which is where the assumption of a sockpuppet comes from.

Differently put, what good does your post if its not aimed at getting somebody to engage in a meaningful way? And if that is your aim, you might want to take his advice, you generally get better results.


>do you really feel confident to have hit the right tone here, even after somebody gave you a heads up how a conversation is more likely to be fruitful?

Considering that the person whom I was addressing responded to my post in a productive manner and we were able to have a civil and thoughtful exchange... Yes?

Do you think it's productive to police the conversations of others in a way that is entirely off topic to the threads? I understand that neither you nor hitekker enjoyed my wording. In the future, when I am speaking to you about a topic in a thread, I'll try to imagine what one's reaction might be if they interpret it as meaning offense before I post. I can't guarantee that I'll always be able to align with your preferred style of decorum, especially since I'm not sure what the rules are here; my post was bad and hitekker's post (an unprovoked off-topic personal attack on me under the auspices of speaking for another person who didn't appear to share their sentiment in the first place) was good.

I won't be engaging any further on the minutae of posting best practices in the discussion thread for the future of the wikimedia project. Have a nice day!


Different registers of english are an interesting conversational issue.

Your phrasing read to me as being close to passive aggressive, but had I been the author of the top level post you were replying to I would have assumed good faith too.

My most common failure mode in HN comments is coming across as more combative than I intended because I tend towards blunt in my communication style. If you look at my comments, you'll note quite a few have a disclaimer in a parenthetical at the end to try and avoid that happening.

Whether or not adopting a similar approach would be remotely useful to you, I genuinely have no idea.


there should be a pie chart specifying where the Wikipedia budget is going


Close enough[1]? That breakdown doesn't seem too unreasonable, the 'community' bucket is large, but not larger than 'direct support to websites' (which I take to mean Keeping The Lights On). The overhead for admin and fundraising looks fairly typical for a nonprofit.

1: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annu...


Yes, remember that Wikipedia, just like other big "nonprofits" abuse that meaning to make money. This isn't some org comprised of engineers and servers. It's a few engineers, some servers, and mostly warm bodies that are incentivizes to come up to contrived problems to justify their existence. It's very similar to modern U.S. academia.


I'm not a huge fan of Wikimedia's fundraising copy, but their budget is well documented, and their spend is relatively good, in comparison to other non-profits (and especially in comparison to for-profits of similarly-sized web properties).

You've conveniently left out links to the financial reports [1], which have annual plans, audited financial statements, form 990s, Q&As, etc. It also proves that your claim that keeping the servers running costs around the same as the knowledge equity fund is bullshit, unless you don't count paying engineering staff. Even the cost of the equipment, and the hosting itself is quite a bit more than the cost of this program. As a whole, this program is 2% of their budget for the year.

In terms of the engineering, you can't look at a list of growing bug counts to determine project health. A growing list of bugs could simply a byproduct of growth of the overall project. Listing that without any analysis of open vs close ratios is lazy at best, and disingenuous at worst. Also, a number of the projects on that maintainers list are community maintained, or don't have a need for change (I wrote OAuthAuth, for instance, and can tell you it doesn't need active development).

[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/


I was ashamed when I learnt Wikipedia artificially funds the writing of pages of women, so they try to reach equal numbers to men. I wouldn’t be ashamed if the criteria for admissibility were equal, but barely being a researcher with published papers is enough, while men with entire books on the subject get rejected.

Talk about rewriting history…


> while men with entire books on the subject get rejected.

Ok, I'll bite. Giving incentives to increase the number of pages about women, does not impact in any way the number of existing pages about men.


Lets say you have a company that requires a level of technical skill to work at, and instead of hiring for that technical skill, you hire them based on being blue. Everyone else, including those who are blue, know you are doing this because the individual is clearly not ready for that work. This creates resentment, which creates discrimination.

You have to promote natural systems, not artificial ones, or you create further inequality. A natural solution in this case would be to create a policy where anyone whom is an authority on a subject can write about it on Wikipedia, and they can write even conflicting opinions. That can all be put together. If woman are paid, men are paid, etc.


Or you maintain the same hiring standards, but do more work to ensure your candidate pool, which historically is 99% not blue, actually contains some blue people, which naturally leads to more blue people on the team. These blue people are just as qualified as anyone else, and their presence keeps people from building idiotic ideas like “the only reason blue people can be hired is if we lower our standards,” since everyone who works with them can see that they are talented and deserve to be there.

The idea that the only way to promote equity is through lowering standards is a pernicious and unrealistic strawman.


>The idea that the only way to promote equity is through lowering standards is a pernicious and unrealistic strawman.

Any metric is a goal. Boss says we have a program that focuses upon hiring minorities and wants a % that check off some boxes to ward off title IX suits and make them look good. Hr really wants to see new hires for this reason too. You open up interviews, candidates can't meet the standards. Your boss says they really want to get those numbers up. Do you A. Do your job and hire, or do you B. Not do your job?

By definition minorities are a scarce resource. Industry wants a disproportionate amount in comparison to the available pool that meets requirements. Some are perfectly capable, sometimes the best, but the company isn't looking for 1, they want dozens to hundreds.

Therefore, to meet the requirements you will have to modify the process, and that is overwhelmingly done by making it easier. That's not how it should be, but that's how it's done because it is the easiest method. People respond to incentives.


I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, especially at large companies, but it is much less common at smaller companies and startups in my experience, where I’ve consistently had colleagues from underrepresented populations who were among the smartest people I’ve ever worked with.

What I am doing is arguing against the idea that it’s the way things have to be or the way they always are, and I’m particularly arguing assuming that any given person was hired for that reason.

Assuming your colleague must be less talented than you because of some hypothetical hiring process that you in all likelihood aren’t even privy to is exactly the kind of ego-assuaging, prejudicial arrogance people in our field are so prone to.

Such assumptions also only make the field more hostile for everyone who’s not of the typical profile, because they have to fight constantly to prove that they belong in a way that Jimmy the drinking bud of the hiring manager for some reason doesn’t.

People get hired for the wrong reasons all the time. I don’t think “diversity quota hire” is meaningfully more or less common than hiring for nepotism, or subconscious biases about looks or height, or just because someone is a smooth talker. Focusing on this one thing both hurts the industry and distracts from what we should really be doing, which is assuming our colleagues are just as smart and talented as we are and working from there. If someone is a bad hire, they’re a bad hire. It happens all the time, and we can deal with it on that individual level rather than letting our assumptions color the entire group.

(Generalized “you” throughout, not saying anything about you personally.)


I believe what the parent post is hinting at is that this is likely to impact the notability treshold - which would require some proof in order to start the discussion.


If you look at where the money is going, it seems a mix of orgs working to create new citable sources about under-covered topics (good, and surely in line with an encyclopaedia’s mission), and orgs who are going to “study” “issues” (highly questionable value).


Is that true? I have been told that money given to Wikipedia went towards wikipedia only, and those other activities were separate. I can't find a definite answer in their public reports and plans though.


> It certainly isn't the case that engineering is "done" either, as the open bug count is growing constantly and huge swathes of the software aren't maintained and don't even have maintainers[2].

Wikipedia is moving to Vue.


They haven't even finished moving to OOUI.

Actually, if they'd just bothered to document OOUI properly in the first place, would they need to move?

As it is, they'll now have three concurrent systems (jQuery, OOUI and Vue). It's like GTK 2,3,4 all over again.


They're not "moving" to Vue. They plan to build some optional JS-based components on Vue, since the alternative of purely handcrafted code is unappealing. And even then, that code can probably be refactored to use the vastly superior Svelte once the dev team's weird hostility to workflows based on ahead-of-time code generation is addressed.


That's almost just like doing something to fix things.


Without specific examples this is pretty meaningless.

Every now and then there are groups that try to gain control of an article or group of articles on Wikipedia (especially around big current events) and then they start looking for ways to game the system all the while bitching about how Wikipedia is 'broken'.

The way I see it: Wikipedia is imperfect, but not broken, and it has developed a pretty impressive array of defenses against being overtly gamed.


Here is a specific example: Circumcision It has the features OP complains about. Content controlled by a small number of "guardians" who knows every Wikipedia rule and policy in existence and uses them to keep outsiders out. A shockingly biased tone that omits every dissenting source. The article's guardians call them "anti-circumcisionists" and in their view, the critics objects are as valid as 9/11 conspiracy theorists'.

"Male circumcision significantly reduces the risk of HIV infection among heterosexual men in sub-Saharan Africa." "The highest quality evidence indicates that circumcision has no impact on sexual function, sensation, or pleasure." Mentioned in the first two paragraphs. The fact that many believe that male circumcision is a grave violation of boys' rights to body autonomy is not.


I was asking the OP because I want to get an idea of what kind of articles they believe are evidence of the fact that Wikipedia is broken, not because I doubt that any such articles exist. Specifically to see what kind of angle they have. Once you report something like this to a forum like HN as being a serious enough problem that it warrants a discussion I think that party should bring their own evidence, because chances are they are just unable to push their own agenda on some pet subject. If I were to come to the conclusion that Wikipedia is broken and I'd post it to HN I would make sure to bring ample evidence.

That said, that article could certainly be improved on.

I have my own pet peeves about Wikipedia and even about some articles, but I don't think it is 'structurally broken', that requires a different level of evidence.


I see your point but I'm not sure one can produce the kind of evidence you are requiring. My areas of expertise allows me to evaluate at most 100 Wikipedia articles on mostly technical subjects. But Wikipedia contains millions of articles so I can only judge the quality or whether an agenda is being pushed on less than 0.1% of all articles. For the remaining 99.9% I can't tell since I don't know everything about everything.


> The fact that many believe that male circumcision is a grave violation of boys' rights to body autonomy is not.

For reference, how many people believe that? Like, is it a view held by 50% of the population, 10% of the population, or is it more of a niche view, or..?

Because when we get down to stuff that <10% of the population believes, things get super-weird.

---

Tried looking it up; appears to be a niche perspective. A significant minority of the population doesn't favor circumcision, but there doesn't seem to be much about folks having a huge problem with it. Also, it appears that, among men who were/weren't circumcised, it's more common for men who were circumcised to be happy about their parents' decision (from Questions 5 and 6 of [this survey [PDF]](http://cdn.yougov.com/cumulus_uploads/document/ugf8jh0ufk/to... )).


> Dutch doctors want politicians and human rights groups to speak out and discourage the practice of male circumcision in the Netherlands because they say it is a “painful and harmful ritual,” and a violation of children’s rights.

> Between 10,000 and 15,000 boys are circumcised in the Netherlands each year, mostly for religious reasons and not always with an anesthetic, according to the Royal Dutch Medical Association (KNMG) which represents surgeons, pediatricians, general practitioners and urologists.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dutch-circumcision-health...

You can find similar views expressed by many medical associations around the world (https://www.thelocal.dk/20161205/danish-doctors-come-out-aga... https://www.thelocal.se/20090725/20900/ https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-5142149) I believe the American Pediatrics Association is the only major one that has come out in favor of circumcision. Their statement is along the lines of "the benefits slightly outweigh the risks". Americans may be cool with genital cutting but in the rest of the world the procedure is very controversial.


I appreciate that you're able to show that some people hold such beliefs, but the numbers I'm finding suggest that it's still less common than beliefs in, say, 9/11-conspiracy theories.

Don't get me wrong -- I appreciate that you can show that there're advocacy groups in that arena. But there're groups who advocate 9/11 conspiracy-theories, aliens, anti-vaccination, flat-Earth, mysticism, etc., so the mere existence of advocacy groups doesn't seem like a distinction from such things.

Instead, is there some sort of poll/survey -- non-American, if you prefer -- that demonstrates that a significant portion of some population holds such strong views against circumcision?

To note it: If you want to get Wikipedia to change its presentation, presenting such evidence might help out. Because, it really does seem like you're advocating a niche belief; but, if you can demonstrate that it's held by a significant portion of people on Earth, then that might change stuff.


I don't understand how you can compare national medical associations with 9/11-conspiracy theorists? 86% (https://nyheder.tv2.dk/samfund/2020-09-01-partier-kraever-fo...) of all Danes and 62% of all Britons (https://eachother.org.uk/uk-ban-male-infant-circumcision/), and 64% of all Swiss (https://www.thelocal.ch/20120731/majority-of-swiss-want-reli...) want to outlaw circumcision. The idea that a child's right to body autonomy takes precedence over its parents desire to have elective surgery performed on their genitals is certainly not a fringe view in many Western countries.

However, this is not about circumcision per se. My point is that Wikipedia's presentation of circumcision is a product of the article's guardians who. You can look at the article's talk page and see for yourself that plenty of people have complained about the article's slanted coverage but no one has been able to do anything about it due to the opposition of the guardians. This is how it works on almost any article about any remotely controversial topic. Just being right is not enough when you're up against an experienced editor that knows all the rules and have a vested interest in pushing a certain view.


How did you jump from the view being "niche" or "minority" to it being irrelevant?


The comment that I was responding to complained that the first two paragraphs of a Wikipedia article didn't mention a perspective that they considered important.

I asked if it was a niche-perspective because that'd seem relevant to if it'd be notable enough to go into one of the first two paragraphs.


> Without specific examples this is pretty meaningless.

I'd go one step further: specific examples are still meaningless. On a site with editors from every country and region on the world and millions of articles (not each one equally popular and viewed/vetted by other editors), of course you'll find examples for any point of view.

I'm also afraid it might then become a conversation about those specific examples. Proving systemic bias is unfortunately not trivial here. Without looking into examples at all, though, it's indeed a meaningless conversation that OP is creating.


I think you overestimate who actually write and edits articles on Wikipedia. Its a very very very small group of people who does 80% and then an other small group who does 19% and then you have the millions of random people with internet who have contributed something.


There are a few problems that need to be dealt with.

First is that "Reality has a well-known liberal bias". Which means lots of people want a "neutral point of view" which reflects their own opinion.

Secondly, there are lots of trolls and bad-faith actors. So a bureaucracy needs to be built up to deal with it in a structured and consistent (not necessarily fair) way.

Thirdly, what can incentivise people? Most editors aren't paid. Introducing money just leads to corruption. So you end up with fake Internet points which can be gamed.

Penultimately, can you appeal? I've had changes reverted, appealed, and reinstated. You can go all the way up the bureaucracy if you want to break out of the echo chamber.

Finally, fork it. If you think you have a better way of doing things - and can't make internal changes - go run your own Wiki and see how long your system lasts without falling to bias.


> Introducing money just leads to corruption.

Not sure what you mean by that. Corruption exists with or without paid labor, and I cannot for the life or me think how paying the people who do the lion's share of work at Wikipedia would increase the corruption there. Can you explain what you mean?


> First is that "Reality has a well-known liberal bias".

Uh...what? Where is the proof of this?


He is quoting political comedian Stephen Colbert, referring to the fact that different political groups all independently believe that their perspective is actually a reflection of reality.


To the contrary-- his neocon character is admitting that his perspective does not align with reality. That's a much more scathing critique of the neocons than the generic upshot you wrote above.


And it is! If everyone's reality == their politically-oriented news.

Which is why objective, quality journalism is so critical to a democracy.

Or, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan (and Schlesinger et al.) succinctly put it, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."


There's no "proof." It's a joke made by comedian Steven Colbert (in character as a self-parody of a Conservative and right-wing pundit) during the 2006 White House correspondents' dinner, mocking the Bush Administration's low approval rating as "reality" having a "liberal bias." In the context of post-Trump politics, the joke would be to dismiss unfavorable poll numbers as "reality" being "fake news."


It's a common expression. I think Stephen Colbert may have been the first to use it.


It's a famous Stephen Colbert quote. Google for the video.


[flagged]


not sure if /s or not, but the first page is literally "Overcoming homosexuality". wtf?


It was founded by Andrew Schlafly ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Schlafly ), son of Phyllis Schlafly.

You should check out the "Conservative Bible Project" ( https://www.conservapedia.com/Conservative_Bible_Project ) and check its edit history.


conservapedia is 100% real and not satire.


Their pages on Putin/Ukraine/The Ukraine Crisis were enlightening reads. Not as much on the topics themselves as on the sites authorship.

I took Schlafly for a 'merican bananas conservative but its looking like there's some connection to Kreml there..


I know i will f(l)agged for this. But have some kind on me, it's just my opinion at the end. I know, through my work, some homo lads. The are not well, most of then needs some kind of help. But criminalizing this was the worst idea we ever have: some of my greatest idols were gay or least post as them: Wilde, Melville, Petronius, Capote... Some of them suffers the criminalization, some of them lived in a period when being gay was not a crimen or was not different at all. Edit: Freddie, I miss you as hell, man.


Yet, 'the facts of life are conservative'.


What are the examples of "Wikipedia [...] getting worse with time, with regards to neutrality and editorialisation"?


I might reframe the discussion slightly. Wikipedia is growing with respect to time (that would seem factually-verifiable if the number of topics with a Wiki page is larger in each successive year).

Increasing the number of pages should increase the number of pages that are controversial, problematic, or "echo-chambers" in absolute terms.

Are they increasing as a proportion? Is this diminishing the utility of the site in aggregate?


When you go down to regional variants of Wikipedia it gets even worse. In Latin America the editors that fully control political articles are hilariously aligned with government entities. You'd get unsourced phrases like "the arrival of president X started a movement of improvement after the crisis caused by the economic policies of president Y", in practically every politically relevant article. The tonal shift with English Wikipedia is massive, but the editors are so many and versed in such obscure rulings that it's enormously difficult to get anything that goes against their propaganda to stick, even if it's demonstrably true stuff.


I still send them money (even though they have plenty of money) because I feel that despite its human flaws, it's still a better objective representation of 'the facts' than any other source on the planet. If, in fact, the editors are biased, but still represent a more objective viewpoint than those given to greater speculative possibilities, the public is still better served than if they are subjected to a cacophony of unsupported opinions.


The first step to fixing a problem, is to understand the problem.

I know, many people will possibly agree that this problem exists - but that sort of empirical observation isn't all that useful. If you want to try a method to fix it - any method at all - you need to first have a reliable way to measure whether it actually improves things.

And for that you first need to find a way to actually measure this - in a reliable, repeatable, unbiased way. You need to find a way to measure all of Wikipedia for this sort of problem. Not just the current state - but through the change history for any arbitrary point in the past as well.

Then do some thorough data analysis, trying to learn as much about the problem as you can. That's your best bet for actually solving the problem.


>many people will possibly agree that this problem exists

>a reliable way to measure whether it actually improves things

After the process has been carried out, it is measured as successful if less people agree the problem exists. Very simple, very quantifiable.

>Then do some thorough data analysis, trying to learn as much about the problem as you can.

No, that's not necessary. That seems more like gatekeeping and wikilawyering, which is basically the actual problem - entrenched power networks refusing to let anybody consider changing things without first having produced ten man-years worth of proof.

You don't solve the problem by doing what the problem tells you that you must do in order to be allowed to solve it.


You can't. Anything that is editorialized will skew to an extreme over time. In the past, wikipedia was bad because its quality of information was generally terrible.

"Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a general algorithm to solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs cannot exist."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

Alan Turing did no such thing, but that's wikipedia for you. On topics you know nothing about, it feels like wikipedia is great. But on topics you have some knowledge/expertise, wikipedia reveals itself to be amateurish nonsense.

Now throw in politics and it isn't good for anything but superficial knowledge in a narrow band of non-political topics. And that's not touching on the problems of limiting the sources to select news/media sources which exacerbates the problem. If you have time to waste, use waybackmachine to compare the wikipedia pages of "controversial" figures and see how noticeably those pages have been changed in a consistent manner.

The only thing you can do is set up competing wikipedias. My hope is major countries around the world set up their own wikipedias ( hopefully with english translations ) because I don't see anyone competing with wikipedia in the US.


I worked on the Halting problem article a bit. The article has a "more footnotes needed" warning at the top - nobody is claiming the article is good. But at least the history section is well-sourced, so it's clear that the 1936 proof refers to Turing's paper "On Computable Numbers With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem". There is a summary at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing%27s_proof.


> Anything that is editorialized will skew to an extreme over time

It is exactly why Actuator’s point in the OP was actually incorrect.

> While Wikipedia's model seems far better than an individual publishing house's encyclopedia

The illusion of an unbiased “encyclopedia for the world” has harmed the decentralization of information. It has actually created a unipolarity much like we see elsewhere around the world.

It would be far better to have multiple different encyclopedia companies that could compete and perhaps even specialize in certain areas.

But how do we keep the convenience of having them all connected? That is what Larry Sanger has been working on[1]. A federated network of encyclopedias that use the same data formats.

[1]: https://encyclosphere.org/


Care to tell us who did prove it then?

While the 1936 paper, "On Computable Numbers", doesn't explicitly mention the halting problem, it does cover the Entscheidungsproblem, and that the halting problem is undecidable follows trivially from that.


"Jack Copeland (2004) attributes the introduction of the term halting problem to the work of Martin Davis in the 1950s.[1]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

Martin Davis did in the early 1950s after Turing's death.

> and that the halting problem is undecidable follows trivially from that.

Trivially? Took nearly 2 decades after Turing published his paper for Martin Davis to come up with the halting problem. And it required a reformulation of the Turing machine itself. Today, we view 'good' Turing machines as those that stop/halt. Turing viewed 'good' Turing machines as those that continued forever ( aka never stops ).


If you can solve the halting problem, then you can apply it to a solution checker that works by enumerating potential solutions and halting when it finds one. Therefore, if you've solved the halting problem then you've also solved the Entscheidungsproblem, and since the latter is impossible, it follows that the premise of having a solution to the halting problem is false.

Yes, that does seems trivial to me. Although maybe that just shows the brilliance of the people who came up with it and made it sound simple.

Did Turing's original machine not have a halting state? That does change things. You can hardly express the halting problem if you don't have the concept of halting.


Using your logic, Alonzo Church should be credited with the Turing machine and the halting problem since he solved Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem before Turing did. If everything follows trivially from an answer to the same question, then Turing's solution follows trivially from Church.

Not sure why you are fixated on the Entscheidungsproblem. Turing's claim to fame isn't the entscheidungsproblem. If it were, nobody would know who Turing is because Church already solved the entscheidungsproblem. His contribution are the theoretical concept of Turing machines ( universal turing machines especially ) and computable numbers.

> Did Turing's original machine not have a halting state?

Are you asking me?

> You can hardly express the halting problem if you don't have the concept of halting.

He did have a concept of halting. He called them circular/unsatisfactory.

Did you even read his paper?


I did read the paper, 30 years ago.


I would recommend making those points on the article's talk page instead of (or in addition to) on here.


Why? I'm not a fan of wikipedia and don't wish to use my time to assist it in any way whatsoever. I've grown weary of wikipedia and much of tech/social media that profits off of free labor essentially.


The pages on Verlet integration are also quite poor. If you follow the sources, they sometimes directly contradict the article text.


I think this has to be solved culturally. Wikipedia would have to have a radical cultural dedication against "cliques" and sectarianism and towards openness.

I also don't like the maxime of Wikipedia to prefer "sourced" information, rather than "true" information. Something can be wrong, but if reputable sources claim it, then it goes in WP. I know in the English speaking world the term "truth" has gotten some problematic connotations recently, but frankly I find that disturbung. I really would prefer a site that goes for the truth, and when there is no agreement then I want them to detail the disagreement (with correct proportions to prevent "false balance") and then I want to discuss the fuck out. I feel in Wikipedia, too often the "admins" (i.e. the established editors) decide on a whim.

Finally I think deletionism is the plaque, and we need an inclusionist wikipedia. This is not just because I want to read articles about Pokemon, or because I believe disk space is cheap. I personally think there is a fundamental philosophical or political argument pro inclusionism.


I'm, time to time, sending some money to the foundation. The work are great and help people a lot. But I know there are biased pages... But I'm not sure we are in the same page here: can you post some of the pages you found violates neutrality? Edit: Also the best way to fix wikipedia always will be reading more books, specially from the XX century. Maybe I'm a XX's century biased person.


I am a casual wikipedia page contributor, and have been since the earliest days. I tend to agree there is a problem with 'page guarding' and collusion between long-time editors. Its annoying to see the political litmus tests take a large part of these threads. With all that said..

I believe there is a strong and non-obvious aspect to Wikipedia evolution, that is exemplified by an anecdote: When I started doing "family history in New England" research in the 1990s, the Daughters of the American Revolution publications, in hardback volumes, was considered good sourcing, with some caveats .. In the space of five years, in the 1990s, the "facts" printed in impressive DAR fashion, were shredded, in not a few cases. There simply had never been the ability to check and cross-check, so quickly, over such vast numbers of resources. Truth in family history is evasive sometimes, but tends towards very verifiable. The Internet itself, and the eyes and minds of millions of participants, just created an information environment that had never existed; library of Alexandria on steroids, if you want to be colorful.

So now, decades into the process of Wikipedia, we find out that there are not one kind of fact, there is not one kind of editor, and the attention economy is more real than ever. Mix in human nature, and there is a sort of unsolvable situation.

so what to do? admit imperfection, don't waste pages on obviously irreconcilable situations like "the son of the current Presidential candidate of the USA and allegations", I mean sure, but not dominating the response here; and then do find the cases where the process can be evolved, like breaking up smug cliques of editors, when it needs to happen.. fairly, periodically perhaps.. whatever..

Wikipedia -- amazing feature of the entire Internet


> I have seen talk pages where the same three editors who seem to be part of the same echo chamber discussing issues preventing any alternative opinion or tone to come in the article.

This pretty much describes the problem with Wikipedia, but it's highly cryptic because possibly 95% of people are never going to realize this because I don't think they even know a Talk page exists for every article. I read lots of scientific articles and I always visit the Talk pages even when I haven't spotted any errors in the article content. There's tons of crazy petty shit that goes on between the people who edit Wikipedia articles. Whether something is considered a valid source for citation depends on which part of Wikipedia's inner circle you're talking to; in some articles, contributors are shouted down because "blogs aren't authoritative" even when they're the subject falls outside mainstream media and blogs are most proximal to the subject, but in other cases I've seen blogs be considered to be perfectly adequate when it's totally inappropriate. When it comes to anything even remotely tied to news and current events, you might as well skip Wikipedia and just read MSM news articles because those are really what Wikipedia largely considers "authoritative" no matter how biased the mainstream articles actually are. I've even seen totally legit edits and sources being ultimately rejected after a person answers every question of the [obstinate] editor because "nuh uh".

Sadly, I cannot edit Wikipedia myself even though I've never even tried doing so. Even if I'm not using a VPN, it just flat out rejects my IP from even attempting to sign up.

This is how Wikipedia can either fix itself or how someone can replace Wikipedia:

- Be run by an accountable benevolent dictator who can ultimately veto any form of democracy present in the system; ultimately everything hinges on management no matter how the system is configured

- Charge people money to edit Wikipedia (imo this would fix many of the content moderation problems on the internet as a whole at the cost of fewer active users)

- Be transparent about who is in charge (Wikipedia obfuscates this with a facade that suggests that users are no different from one another, which is anything but the truth in 2022)

- Refine official policies around authoritative sources, because right now any existing policies aren't working very well


A formal ban on editors being members/volunteers/associated-with state-related propaganda outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) would be good. It wouldn't stop anything underhanded, but at least they would not be able to lie to themselves that they were doing nothing wrong.


The first thing to do is to stop writing loud clickbait titles. And I don't mean on Wikipedia.


In Germany this was talked already over quite a few years ago.

Wikipedia would have to make it easy to clone parts of its websites to your own service so you can change the parts which are important to you. and then basically the most surfed-on-site wins.

but atm you either fetch the database and set it up with everything.. or .. no idea.

but nobody liked that model either.

we'd need wikipedia with more-git-like backend i think, some guy wrote "levitation" for that, but there would be still a need of setting it up as service and declare which parts are important for you and for which you redirect yourself from your service to the real wikipedia.


We all know Wikipedia is not perfect, wrong information can be in there, so is it relevant that some bullshit political things is not perfectly represented?

One solution would be to teach people to check multiple sources, and each political camp can put their own version of "truth" and people could read all the versions and decide .

I am curious what type of pages bothers people that they need to endlessly fight on attempting to edit them, my bias as a non american is that is about the americans and their political/cultural war and maybe a few nationalists trying to change historical facts on some pages.


I'm assuming this is only coincidentally coming shortly after Russia's threat of a ban on them?


Well I suppose another "Who watches the watchmen" type site can be built to report on bias issues/irresponsible editors. But ideally Wikipedia itself would build some internal mechanism for dealing with disputes. Has it done so?

I have heard that Wikipedia is "broken" before, but without specific examples the complaint comes across as hollow. And if you do have specific examples, then I think it gives people the chance to investigate your claims.


There was a site like this about 10 years ago, it contained some bizarre examples but i dont know if it was accurate. Perhaps it needed fact checking!


> But ideally Wikipedia itself would build some internal mechanism

It has WP:ANI, but it is hard to go against established editors, if they are not writing outright lies or doing harassment. Say, if I want to edit a line from a summary of the Wikipedia page on a person which unfairly represents a person and the established editor thinks it makes sense, then I can't do anything. They are not writing misinformation as they will often have a source for it, but the tone and representation of that on the Wikipedia article can still be unfair.

I would give specific examples here but then I would be accused of trying to influence talk pages with publicity on social media/forums. Moreover, as some of the talk pages have my comments, I don't want my online personas to be linked.


> Say, if I want to edit a line from a summary of the Wikipedia page on a person which unfairly represents a person and the established editor thinks it makes sense, then I can't do anything.

Of course you can. You can argue for your prferred wording on the talk page for the individual article, and a compromise can be reached. This is how this stuff works. Talk pages are critical to dealing with even the slightest amount of controversy, "reverts" are supposed to be emergency actions only.


> You can argue for your prferred wording on the talk page for the individual article, and a compromise can be reached. This is how this stuff works. Talk pages are critical to dealing with even the slightest amount of controversy, "reverts" are supposed to be emergency actions only.

I did try to argue for that but I was shut down as there was no way to agree what a fair representation is.


There are established policies for that, actually. Ideally, the 'lead' section should accurately summarize what's already stated in the article and supported by appropriate sources.


> I would give specific examples here but

but then people would be able to assess your claims based on the evidence, and your hyperbole might not work out?

You've alluded to discussions you claim to have had, and made claims about the people you argued with. (I bet I was one of them.) Are you able to at least link those?

Your repeated refusal to say what you're talking about gives the impression you're blowing smoke.


Skimming the revision history of any non-recent nontechnical page shows you that the editing process, rather than revealing a steady dialectical progress, is just a constant back-and-forth churn of competing systems of thought. The winner is the one who can sacrifice the most time for vigilance and simulating an appearance of reasonableness. Of course moderation mitigates this state of affairs somewhat, but by the nature of Wikipedia, the ideal of impartiality, moderation cannot mediate truth; it can only raise the cost of contribution. As a result Wikipedia's model resembles proof-of-work, ceding governance to the fiercest advocates and wasting lots of energy.

I believe we'd be better off with real intellectual diversity. Replace the melting-pot model with a federation, a la mastodon, where any topic can be represented by multiple articles from different wikis that have different specialties. The indexing needs to be federated as well, as different groups will want to in-/exclude different alternatives. But just relieving the single pressure point that Wikipedia represents should offer huge benefits to the ecosystem.


Humor (sort of): https://medium.com/@johnlakness/case-study-decentralizing-th...

My idea for this specifically is to make a pijul repository for Wikipedia, and then a staking/delegation/voting mechanism for acceptance of each vertex in the hash tree. At each level of the tree, a user would be presented with versioning options based on maximum aggregation of unique voters, like in hierarchical clustering, which will roughly define the ‘tribes’ of viewpoints. It would also be possible to render from a specific hash. I would hope to build a user interface with maximum flexibility to explore across ‘versions’ and encourage voting and merges across clusters.

I’ve also considered using randomization, as in, selecting a hash to render with probability equal to the vote within the user’s cluster. This would be to prevent too much separation among the clusters.


I'm not really a power user but I have been editing on and off for well over a decade, so perhaps I'm part of the insider group you think is too powerful. That said, I don't share the perception that these problems are as bad or widespread as you say. There are certain topics, such as Middle East politics, where there's such a critical mass of people who are just there to push an agenda that to maintain order there need to be actual admin-imposed restrictions. And there are some topics where individuals or small groups keep the article's tone and content under tight control, but that's usually because the topic is obscure enough that few people are interested enough to force changes through. Popular or politically charged topics have so many people contributing that it's virtually impossible to create a Reddit-style echo chamber, more often the problem is articles that consist of a jumble of contradictory propaganda. I think overall Wikipedia works well: even on today's highly politicized topics like COVID-19 vaccines and Ukraine/Russia, on Wikipedia you can read about the dissenting views, not free from refutation but considerably more free from the blanket statements, false equivalences, and even self-censorship that the news media treats these topics with.

Of course, Wikipedia isn't apolitical: since the beginning it's been full of people who consider themselves critical thinkers and skeptics interested in spreading the truth as science tells it, which is itself an ideology that is necessarily opposed to political or religious ideologies which assert some truth that can't be refuted or proven by evidence, and of course to conspiracy theorists who openly detest science and expertise. So yes, people and organizations who make enemies of Wikipedia's ideology won't get nice or even 100% fair treatment in Wikipedia articles. Anyone who sees this as some new development due to recent political currents wasn't paying attention during the 2000s. If you see it as a problem, you're free to follow in the footsteps of widely mocked sites like RationalWiki or Conservapedia and create a wiki that favors your ideology instead. I think it's telling that even people who lean more left or right wing still rely on Wikipedia rather than those places.


> is every user curated platform doomed to reach this state?

One hypothesis is that, yes: you're hitting on an intrinsic aspect of human nature.

A possible remedy would be to set up curated sites across the spectrum, and query a 'millepedia' front end to ask: "Who is the all-time worst political figure, and why is it $GUY_I_DISDAIN?"


There is nothing to fix, as you can see from the comments here most of NH thinks Wikipedia is neutral and objective and what not. This is the actual problem. People haven't figured out yet how bad it is because there is simply nothing that comes even close to an alternative to Wikipedia.


You need a culture that supports truth. You will not be able to do this with policy changes.

For instance, this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira...

>The Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory is a series of unevidenced claims centered on the false allegation that while Joe Biden was vice president of the United States, he engaged in corrupt activities relating to the employment of his son Hunter Biden by the Ukrainian gas company Burisma.

This is not a statement of fact, but an opinion of the person writing it. The fact of corruption is the question at hand.

The Vice President's son was being paid $1,000,000/yr to sit on the board of a foreign gas company.

That isn't a disputed. Joe and Hunter Biden don't dispute this.

This article should be listing the basis of accusations against Hunter, and listing refutations to those accusations.

Instead, this reads like an opinion piece/defense/misdirection.

Wikipedia should have a culture that reflexively recoils at stuff like this. I should have no idea what the political leanings of the editors at wikipedia have, but I do, and they make it obvious.


>>The Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory is ...

> This is not a statement of fact, but an opinion

Actually the way Wikipedia articles work, this is a definition. They are taking various articles about similar topics (in the citation link at the end), and coming up with a single topic name and its definition. Sometimes it's hard to accomplish this and you have to settle for a vague definition, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_number is defined to allow starting at 0 or at 1.

As far as the $1,000,00/yr salary, that's mentioned on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden#Burisma_Holdings. But it's not relevant to the conspiracy theory so it's not mentioned there. I think you could add it, just copy the source.


Could you please point to an example where you feel the article isn't neutral?


Many people asking for examples.

For an easy one (among millions) just compare The New York Times Wikipedia article to the article for The Epoch Times. "Oh, but The Epoch Times is right wing, so..."

How can I compare the Ochs-Sulzberger family to the Falun Gong? Well I just did. They're both made up of humans with opinions.


I'm interpreting your comment as, "Wikipedia isn't far right enough for my tastes." Is that accurate? Do you know of any examples where Wikipedia leans farther right than left?


Or you could see it as "poisoning the well" - an approach so common and accepted that neither of you see it, apparently.

Although clearly a lefty news organization, I don't see the NY Times as a "wing" on that easy left-right spectrum we all seem to love. NYT has had many writers and done some excellent work along the way. In the aggregate their ideology is more in support of population density (cities), industrialism and technology - with some hostility towards more pastoral living, herding animals for food, etc.


I just read through both articles but I don't understand the point you're making. Is it that the NYT article is more fleshed out and talks about their various print products? You can add such a section to the Epoch Times.


Because of a different thread I thought of another subtle, yet similar example. Look at the Wikipedia entry for The Verge. It's a media product, a tech news site, all good. But it's a "left wing" site on the merits. Not a single mention of that in the Wikipedia article. There's a little bit of discussion about tabloid-style content on the Talk page, but it doesn't go anywhere. Even the Vox Media Wikipedia article makes no mention of this being a lefty business. Wild, isn't it?


I'm not sure I really understand. I don't read the Verge (because consumer product journalism is deeply uninteresting and I don't want to rot my brain), but I'll take your word that it is a "left wing" site (I don't know what this means) on "the merits" (I also don't know what this means). I would expect this to show up on the Wikipedia page if it was a notable fact about the site -- if they had broken some "left wing" news story (again, I don't know what this means) or if they staked out some powerful "left wing" editorial (again, I don't know what this means). Overall, whether or not the writers happen to be "left wing", "right wing", or otherwise doesn't strike me as a hugely relevant thing on its face. The other thing is that given that I presume the site is not avowedly "left wing", the characterization of the site as "left wing" would have to involve either original argumentation or secondary sourcing.

I honestly wouldn't imagine the major editorial cleavage in tech websites is partisan at all, but rather the privacy-convenience cleavage. I would expect a consumer goods focused website to likely cater to people who are less privacy oriented. I am not sure this would be remarkable or something I'd put in an article. The "break up big tech" agenda is mostly a liberal consensus versus left+right angle, but even then I find it pretty unlikely that the site's coverage goes beyond relatively mild critical reporting; I know I've never in my life seen someone link a The Verge editorial as a contribution to a political debate. I think they published some of the mistakenly public financial documents from the Epic v. Apple case. I'm not sure which of Epic or Apple is meant to be the "left wing" perspective. I remain flummoxed.

I checked the article on Vox Media. It characterizes Vox Media as a company that was created to combine SB Nation and The Verge, and then added other not obviously related content verticals, all of which are named and linked. The only part of the article that really comments on inner workings is the "Corporate Affairs" section, which seems to be written in a fair and neutral way and notes that the staff of Vox Media unionized. Is this what a "lefty" business is? I'm not sure?

The main takeaway is that they run a bunch of websites I've never heard of and will never read. I did click on the Vox article. Vox is a politics website, and its politics are described as "left-of-center" (I don't know what this means) and progressive, the former citing a Poli Sci 101 textbook I've never heard of and the latter citing a WSJ attack piece. This seems reasonable to me, it seems to be what you're asking for.

I'm not really sure I find this to be wild or surprising. You might be right, again, I have no idea, I don't care about Vox Media and I don't read the Verge. But your point doesn't really strike me as obvious having wasted 20-30 minutes reading Wikipedia articles that are supposed to be evidently biased.


You can argue for this change yourself, if you have sources that are not too fringe. Though you'd probably have to phrase it properly. Who exactly has described these sites as left-wing, and where?


You're making my point for me.


Well, the New York Times (for all it's numerous flaws) is the most prominent newspaper in the United States. Epoch Times is run by a Chinese dissident cult. Obviously there's going to be different treatment.

I'm not even arguing (although I could) that one is more correct. The New York Times prints an order of magnitude more physical newspapers (roughly 300,000 to the Epoch Time's 30,000), and is thus obviously more notable.

Edit: Those numbers are for the English language edition in the US


I made no mention of notability, it's such an obvious point that it doesn't need to be made.

The Shen Yun Performing Arts people are pre-Communism traditionalist Chinese. Which is on the outs culturally, I get it. They're just people though, ultimately.

Do you not see the "weirdos vs normal people" problem that permeates media in essentially all cultures? This technique is on its face illegitimate, as it is designed to get you to not dig deeper into contentious issues. I don't care what side or "wing" is doing it.


Everyone is just people. Not everyone deserves the same level of depth on Wikipedia.


It is not an issue of depth. Wikipedia is a hive of mimetic scapegoating, and it doesn't hold the patent on that problem. And this usually, ultimately, leads to real world violence.


It's easy to find thousands of 'stub' to 'start'-class articles that obviously need lots more content and/or citations. They may be less 'important' or trendy, and hopefullly less 'opinionated', and unlikely to be on 'watch list's.

There you'll run into less-to-no helicopter parents, and stand a much-better chance of creating most of a great article before they show up. Load up on good citation prospects for solid content.

Over to the left on any page you can see how many visits/day it's been getting - that can help you stay away from them.


You speak in vague generalizations about bad things you have seen. Since Wikipedia preserves all history, it should be no problem for you, then, to provide links to these things, would it?


We can summarize most comments here as either:

-I agree with how articles are written, so Wikipedia isn't that bad - maybe still a little rough around the edges, but all things considered I trust it.

-I disagree with how articles are written, and the problems are unsolvable within Wikipedia.

Allowing different editors to one article has not resolved this difference. Given that we are approaching 20 years of Wikipedia being widely popular on the 'Net and this problem has persisted, a solution likely requires something on the technical level of the site, itself, (or, more likely, a new site outside of the Wikimedia Foundation) that changes fundamentally how it operates.

To the extent that competition exists for encyclopedic wikis, the ones I have discovered use some version of a preferred view on what articles should be published and what sources are acceptable, so they are essentially using a nearly identical process as Wikipedia, thus suffer from the same problems.

Imagine if GitHub maintained editable standards through a "volunteer" bureaucracy for what software could be published to the site; what a software can do; what language is used for a given software; deciding which libraries are permitted for use in a project; not permitting "duplicate" software, even when they share the same name (users and projects still maintain unique names). To summarize, this version of GitHub would suck and nobody would use it, but this is analogous to how Wikipedia is managed.

Since the problem revolves around how a single article is to be created, edited, and sourced, and given the difficulty just in this concept, the rather obvious solution is to have multiple articles for a given topic where each is created, edited, and sourced however the maintainers of such articles desire.

The next problem of course is this generating an incredible number of articles, each predictably with its maintainer-guard dog. The way to make this usable could be through implementing "universes" of articles. Some universes could operate on some revision of the current Wikipedia and its bureaucracy, others may be purely top-down, hand-curated lists, or could include multiple universes.

This is one sort of way to deal with what is effectively fundamental problems with observing the Universe combined with aspects of the human experience.


At least you can be an author there. I am for whatever reason geoblocked from writing anything (I never spammed, probably a country-wide block) and when I use VPN (either shared or my own instance) then I'm blocked again for potential spam because of, again, IP block (this time cloud provider or VPN IP).

I believe I can have a positive contribution to Wikipedia but they never allowed me to write, since like, 10 years.


You’re probably just unluckily stuck on an IP range that’s been responsible for vandalism or similar in past.

Did you request an unblock?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:I_have_been_blocked


I don't (and can't) have a static IP because I constantly move between several places, usually on mobile hotspot or stuck to LTE modem where in one of the places aı live there isn't fiber or VDSL, and my ISP doesn't offer static IP over LTE.


Wikipedia is fine. Doesn’t need fixing.

What changes have you made to Wikipedia that you’ve encountered difficulty with.


Can you provide links to any talk pages that showcase issues with neutrality and editorialization?


Instead of edit wars allow forking. So allow for multiple versions of articles with metalevel descriptions about the difference. This way we could have actual conversations about where the different perspectives come from and who has the better arguments.


I think this would be very confusing.

You basically legitimise lies on one page by giving them equal status as the truth.


Which you can point out one level higher. All it would do is to allow actual conversation and getting an overview of existing perspectives. This would allow to actually point out holes in peoples worldview which are normally glossed over.

The problem with the "legitimizing lies" perspective is that i havent seen a perfect truth machine lie around. Plus there being incentives to have you belief you already found a convenient truth. You iteratively improve through finding (or getting pushed into) errors in your perspective. Thats something we can help each other with, and i havent seen a better alternative. As far as i can tell, they are all quite a bit worse.

I think all it is is a complexity problem. Which you can tackle with better tooling. Just not one that thinks for us but that makes discourse more efficient.

edit: Differently put, i think the problem is that nobody bothered to explain to me well enough how stupid i am. And i dont see why i should be attached to remaining stupid. Unfortunately however there dont seem to be any spare smart people for the task so we dummies might have to figure something out together.


> I have seen talk pages where the same three editors who seem to be part of the same echo chamber discussing issues preventing any alternative opinion or tone to come in the article.

I believe I am part of such a cabal, despite my contributions on Wikipedia totaling about half a dozen in the past decade. Why would I be part of such a cabal? Well, first, I have no contact whatsoever with the other editor other than edits made with the same purpose — and that purpose is to deflect an attempt by other editors to erase the details of a (well-sourced) historical event from Wikipedia and replace it with alternative facts more amenable to certain political ideologies. I (and my fellow cabalist) have explained in detail on the talk page that the other editors were pushing a fringe position which was not backed by any reliable sources, and with this justification I have removed every edit made by those editors attempting to change the facts in the article, even to the point of removing tags they add to the article indicating that there is a dispute as to its accuracy! And yet I believe I am in the right, due to overwhelming evidence of the correctness of the article's contents, and incorrectness of the position being pushed by (what I see as) rogue editors.

The thing is, probably every single such cabal is maintained with essentially identical motivations, at least in the eyes of the cabalists. If even some fraction of us are correct, it shows that you have to choose between cabals and an encyclopedia of misinformation and propaganda. Except, of course, haha, there's no choice at all, because some portion of the cabals are pushing misinformation and propaganda. In my view the Wikipedia experiment has failed, and not merely in some contingent way but in a way that shows that the concept cannot be executed as imagined, an "encyclopedia anyone can edit". Some [substantial?] portion of the information contained will be misinformation, for the same reasons that misinformation exists at all.

Unfortunately, insofar as Wikipedia seems to have displaced many other sources of information (which, to be fair, needn't have been any more reliable — a traditional encyclopedia no doubt contained misinformation spread by the editors, with the only saving grace being a relative dearth of information limiting impact), I fear that it will prove to have been the greatest setback to the aggregation of accurate human knowledge so far in the history of humanity.


Support multiple competing Wikipedia-type online encyclopedias.


You think that's bad? All the actual contributors of content are chased off by those who tweak the site. What can I say, it's going to only get worse.


This seems to be the general case for user-contributed sites. People who are fans of a subject (be it football or model trains) may consistently use such sites but generally aren't invested enough to create content or do much beyond argue briefly when they feel something is totally incorrect, generally healthy people have healthy lives and don't get intensely invested in curating an internet forum.

On the other hand, people who have unhealthy lives become totally invested in that forum or space because it's literally all they have and guard it like a mother hen guards their eggs. In Wikipedia they create a huge bureaucracy which excludes all but the most determined of users. That intensity drives away all casual users.

On the other hand I once made an edit to a Wikipedia page from an IP address - I removed an unsourced claim from the Ron Paul page - and didn't find my edit reverted or blocked in any way.

So while I have heard of the issue of frighteningly intense editors camping pages as though their life depended on it and demanding all changes be proven to the nth degree it doesn't seem to permeate the entire site.


As the old saying goes: "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People."


These are normal problems in every society. A certain level of control and moderation is necessary to reach functionality and quality. But this means people gain power, might misuse it, but also gain haters who just don't like the result independent of its quality. This is also nothing new. Complaints over Wikipedia's system and quality are existing since the beginning. This is normal because any system has their grind, their winners and losers. It doesn't mean the system is bad, or is producing bad results.

Can you point out any real issues in their articles? Any widespreaded misinformation or actual issue? Most complaints I always see are usually about disputable details, not about actual problems.


At the end of the day, Wikipedia is just another source of "but I read it on the Internet!" Take it with a grain of salt.


1. stop cooperating with three-letter agencies (probably, impossible?) 2. limit powers / volume of moderation


> Wikipedia

Would be interested to know any future planned scope of work. What are the current big issues needing resolving?


You can’t. You can only wait for it to collapse under its own problems, if such a time comes.


Re-write MediaWiki in Rust.


This meme is considered harmful.


Bias I've seen in politically charged articles:

- Only allowing "reliable sources", and defining that based on criteria which essentially excludes any right wing publication, even when the unreliable source has irrefutable evidence of the claim (video, etc). Similarly, citing claims from 'reliable' sources that are misleading, or slightly incorrect (you don't need to look at many news articles to find an example of this)

- Using social academic sources, like gender studies, to cite things that are literally just opinions. Social sciences have a lot of these publications putting forth claims, that are basically citing each other in a circle, with the root claim being someone's opinion (usually grievance studies).

- Citing lack of 'relevance' to stifle any claim that doesn't fall under the above two. Who decides what's relevant? Well that's the trick; there's no objective criteria, so the power mods decide it.


It should be possible to fork pages. If an active editor doesn't like edits they can publish their own version.

The main Wikipedia owners then choose, like they do now, which editor they support as default.


You can already do this by just forking all of Wikipedia, as many people have done.


Technically yes, but the UX leaves a lot to be desired.

Forking the whole wiki just to present your own version of a few pages isn't useful. Even the basics aren't there, like being discoverable or an easy way to track upstream changes.


maybe a contradictory bot farm ... something that can dig wide data graphs on wikipedia to point at inconsistencies and provide more fixes


This is partly the mission of Wikidata, for example if the two language wikipedias involved in a historical war can agree on the date it started and ended, and so do all the non-combatents, thats a good sign that there isn't mistakes or intentional bias.


You can be consistently wrong though.


care to give some examples?


Wikipedia is very good.


Ban the deletionists


Reddit useless for good discussion and has been since covid started.


No, Wikipedia cannot be fixed.

And the reason it cannot be fixed rests on the very nature of humanity and communication, which is that many times, people tend to be prideful, stupid and inarticulate. Thus, one does not "fix" a bad Wikipedia article so much as one outlasts the bad editors who keep writing crap and/or deliberately suppress opposing views.

An example of that would be the Wiki article for "Fact", which can be viewed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact Look at the talk page for this same article - and then look at the revision history for the article itself. Some literally absurd explanations for the meaning of the word "Fact" were kept in the article for far too long.

Oddly enough, there's another English Wiki out there, a "simple" one and they too have an article about "Fact", but with a much less cluttered talk page https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact Why is this talk page (and article) it less cluttered? It's because there are fewer people there, and thus less persons pridefully defending their obvious errors.

So then how does one write the "lede" sentence/paragraph for such an article? Anyone who thinks can tell you that the word "fact" has a very broad application and a number of application-specific variations in meaning. However, a skilled writer, if allowed by the resident Wiki editors, could post a simple but apropos opening blurb. Where I do so so, I would say this "A fact is an item of information offered up as a genuine portrayal of an actuality. When offered by a bona fide reliable source, it's generally accepted as true, unless otherwise disproved".

Now, given that I'm the author of this blurb, and given that I too tend to be prideful and defensive of that which I write (and feel is true), am I the best arbiter of of the truth, precision and applicability of my blurb? The answer of course, is no, I am not. But neither is the mosh pit known as "Wikipedia".

Instead, what Wikipedia is a brute force battle royal; an extended donnybrook which plays out over weeks and months. And what do people do when caught up in a massive, extended brawl? They join forces and pile on the opposition to defeat them. And at any given moment, that's also what Wikipedia is: It's a small network of entrenched editors who stay aligned with themselves, fighting off all interlopers via the means of "Admin" status and collective self congratulatory behavior.

In fact, some of them go so far as to apply to themselves a user name which exalts them and seeks to place them beyond question. Here's a user account which is a great example of that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Neutrality

As reflected by this user's Contributions history, User:Neutrality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Neutrali... is one of the long-time guardians of the status-quo at Wikipedia.

And as clearly evidenced by his Contributions history, by being a long-time editor who is part of the Wikipedia "Admin" club, User:Neutrality, has virtually unfettered leeway to edit, revert and opine; while at the same time, disallowing any effective rebuttal.

So no, the biases and other problems at Wikipedia cannot be fixed, not unless more people across a broader political mindset join and work their way up to Admin, so as to offset the entrenched left-leaning cabal which runs things there.

As George Carlin used to say "It's a big club, and you ain't in it"


So Wikipedia has a bunch of problems, it looks like you are focused on the political problem. By this, we must be careful to say that we don't mean the American political problem that is embedded on Wikipedia[1]. The problem you are having is that a particular Wikipedia political system exists separately from all that. Like, there is an artificial politics of contribution, there are committees and meetings and weird agreements about this is acceptable but that is not, elections and moderators and so forth. That is the problem you identify. Call it a LARP. You wanted to contribute or correct information and you find yourself LARPing as a senator to get it through.

Open source software gives a way to address those political issues. So, they exist in OSS, some open source projects get these elaborate governance structures, they invent a governance LARP with elections and democracy etc. But some OSS projects have not had this.

Cantrill offers an interesting insight about this in his talks... He points out that merge algorithms give a powerful way to fight this, because once you have a merge algorithm you can allow two realities to exist simultaneously. He says the LARP is a result of being “forkaphobic”, afraid of allowing the project to splinter into two identical projects. Whereas, he says, if you look at the Linux kernel, Torvalds can tell you you're full of shit and you can do the thing anyway on your own branch and people can be like “that's actually really interesting” and Torvalds can admit he was wrong.

So the fundamental thing you have to solve is allowing an article to exist in two independent states that get merged together at the end. And if you can solve this then you do not need a political structure to get everybody to agree because your technological process tolerates disagreement.

1. By the American political problem I mean this particular construction of right-vs-left where divisiveness reigns and nobody agrees on even basic facts... there is some of that, but it's not the problem you're having. 2. Some other problems include:

- Wikipedia articles are typically extremely long. This is necessary because they do not have hierarchy but instead kind of cross-link to their peers which prevents any other way of attaining good depths in education. Information is routinely repeated in many pages.

- Encyclopedias are biased to a sort of declarative information, whereas in most cases you really want to provide imperative information: think of what would happen to a university if we forbade labs, recitation sections, homework/exercises, practice tests, instead you must learn everything from lecture without ever assembling a circuit yourself. Who is gonna learn electrical engineering there? But Wikipedia is a fount of information about electrical engineering components, mathematical topics, there are physics articles. Sigh.

- And then in terms of accessibility, Wikipedia has not solved the hard problem of allowing users to distribute computations in some vulgar programming language (Excel, HyperCard) similarly to how they enable typesetting in a vulgar markup language. As a result there is nothing interactive, there is barely any video or audio, everything must be textbook-serializable. Which makes it hard for us to have a volunteer effort of, here is a 150-word card on a topic, here are the deeper dives you can go into, here is how you can interactively play with this concept, here is some volunteer reading it to you so that you don't need a screen reader, here are examples to test whether you have understood the idea, etc. You want the same idea to have many different perspectives.


I think most of the conflicts are because the left-wing and the right-wing are incompatible moral philosophies. Because Wikipedia content is completely public, I'd like a forking model where the left-wing and right-wing maintain independent versions. Viewer apps can provide ways to read both for people interested in all sides (like allsides.com).


It has been attempted: https://www.conservapedia.com/Climate-change


Get rid of anonymous edits.


https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22R...


A big part of the value in Wikipedia is that an anonymous person can fix grammar and things like that without having to register.


Let 1,000,000 little Wikipedias sprout. Eventually the garbage model of the original will be forgotten.


Can you provide some substantial ideas about what you would like to see different and what makes the current model "garbage"? Otherwise it's not clear what you're advocating for.


nah i'm good




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