> This points out several valid issues with Wikipedia
Are their issues really that valid?
> For example in 2012, a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation UK used his position to place his PR client on Wikipedia's front page 17 times within a month. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales made extensive edits to the article about himself, removing mentions of co-founder Larry Sanger. In 2007, a prolific editor who claimed to be a graduate professor and was recruited by Wikipedia staff to the Arbitration Committee was revealed to be a 24-year-old college dropout. These are only a few examples
From their examples, it seems like the issue that spurred the development of Ibis was that a few individuals compromised a select set of articles.
They seem like nitpicks to me.
I think more motivation is needed to justify why to abandon Wikipedia. It will be no small undertaking for them to rebuild the world's largest and comprehensive knowledge repository.
A particular problem with Wikipedia is the by definition one-sided view of charged issues. In a single language like Vietnamese, where the majority of native speakers locate in a single country with heavy censorship and brainwashed by propaganda, articles about social, political matters and people can be very one-sided and certainly can not be up to the standard of an encyclopedia. Change is extremely difficult due to the long term moderators, who obviously have agendas.
In such situations, an alternative version/server might be a solution. For example, a social.vn.wiki could specialize in alternative views on socio-political issues in Vietnamese and be moderated differently. I can imagine new Wikipedia hubs where content changes are monitored by AI to detect manipulation attempts and obviously false content. I also can imagine a new Wikipedia, where the reader can up vote/down vote an article instead of actively change it. For heavy moderated contents, this could be a better alternative to a edit war.
I'm not sure that federations can solve this problem because of their inherent dynamics. But living in a world where the well of knowledge is poisoned can feel quite suffocating. Federation at least allows alternatives to exist.
> and certainly can not be up to the standard of an encyclopedia
This is a common expressed sentiment. When I read it, I find myself wondering if the people expressing it have ever used an encyclopaedia. I old enough to have grow up with them. Mum and dad brought two of the in fact.
One was called something like "World Book". You couldn't possibly be reffering to that. It had 24 volumes lavishly illustrated. I remember one illustration in particular. It was a nuclear powered plane. I still the scowl on dad's face when he saw it.
We then got the Britannica. Undeniably very good. But it was just 24 books. When you have to cover every topic on the planet in that space you only get a good summary on each one. It cost thousands, maybe tens of thousands in today's money, and was of course out of date the day it was delivered. It was great for background information, but it wasn't detailed enough for even a high school project - you have to supplement it with the school library.
To put numbers on the difference. Britannica has 40 million words, the English Wikipedia has around 4.7 billion - about 100 times more. In Wikipedia articles the have seen a bit of activity for a decade or so (just about every topic Britannica covers would be in that category on Wikipedia) most of them will be as good as Britannica and importantly, have far better references.
Or to put it another way, I don't think the kids of today know how far we've come since the age of dead trees.
This is really interesting because it's a very Western point of view.
SE Asian countries are big on social hierarchy and social cohesion. In the West, we view this as these countries repressing their citizens, because that would have to be the situation for a Western country to behave like this. It's not so clear-cut there. SE Asia has a very strong, very ancient culture that is different to Western culture. We don't get to just say "you should do things our way".
One major difference is their attitude to authority: in the West if you disagree with your boss you are expected to say so, possibly in private. In SE Asia that would be unbelievably rude and disrespectful, even in private. This attitude flows out to government and leadership; criticising a leader is incredibly rude. They prioritise everyone getting along rather than The Truth [0].
SE Asia has no "free speech" media any more [1], partly for this reason. Their culture just doesn't prioritise this as value. I would expect their Wikipedia entries to reflect this, too.
[0] and given the shitshow of Western democracies lately, I'm not convinced our priorities are working so much better.
[1] you can argue this, it depends on your definition of any of the words in this sentence. But we can agree that the vast majority of media in SE Asia is directly controlled by government one way or another, and the remainder is indirectly controlled.
> This is really interesting because it's a very Western point of view.
There's lots of democracies in Asia and they manage pretty well. "It's not our culture" is the one of the laziest excuse of dictators and despots to keep their seats. And no it's very clear cut, in those dictatorship, if you publish anything the government doesn't like, you end up in a torture camp, that's as clear cut as you can be.
From my limited experience with the area, what Marcus says also matches what I've seen of democratic societies like Japan. I cannot offer any detailed insights into this, but a way to test the opposing hypotheses would be to see if democratic countries in SE Asia present the same cultural basis that Marcus described.
You don't need to look as far as Vietnamese Wikipedia to see ideology creeping in. I noticed weirdly forced extreme-left concepts in a lot of French and English pages, to the point it lowered my trust in the whole website.
Your post raises an interesting point where 95+% of speakers of one language live in one country without anything resembling free speech. It is probably unavoidable. A better solution would be a parallel VN lang Wiki that is moderated by people offshore.
> A particular problem with Wikipedia is the by definition one-sided view of charged issues.
This is a wide brush stroke. Certainly on the English language version, there is a wide set of views offered for controversial topics. Do you make this claim only for VN land Wiki, or all Wikis?
I've taken a deeper look into the listed issues since writing my comment, and you're absolutely right:
- the named scandals occurred in 2012, 2005, and 2007 respectively, so more then a decade ago. For reference, the linked Ibis page was written about 7 months ago,
- the "Wikipedia: Rotten to the Core" article was written by a RT employee in 2018, and is hosted on a website that is no longer online. It doesn't make any compelling points against Wikipedia, and does not seem to take itself very seriously given the "red wikipedia with horns" image.
While centralizing moderation can be problematic, I'm not so convinced it actually is in Wikipedia's case.
Please see the recent grooming gangs article on the UK scandal of the same name. This is a good recent example of bad behaviour on wikipedia by activists looking to subvert the truth.
There are several articles on that topic. Perhaps it would be better if you were more explicit about which article or articles, and what the bad behaviour is.
Moderation and admin bias is is real thing. In the US Wikipedia id say it leans left but is generally factual.
The Portuguese Wikipedia has had huge issues with bias in favor of right wing politicians, and I’ve had to fight users, mods etc to add corruption scandals to the Wikipedia pages of Portuguese politicians. Eventually I couldn’t keep them up and they were almost all deleted.
Are their issues really that valid?
> For example in 2012, a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation UK used his position to place his PR client on Wikipedia's front page 17 times within a month. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales made extensive edits to the article about himself, removing mentions of co-founder Larry Sanger. In 2007, a prolific editor who claimed to be a graduate professor and was recruited by Wikipedia staff to the Arbitration Committee was revealed to be a 24-year-old college dropout. These are only a few examples
From their examples, it seems like the issue that spurred the development of Ibis was that a few individuals compromised a select set of articles.
They seem like nitpicks to me.
I think more motivation is needed to justify why to abandon Wikipedia. It will be no small undertaking for them to rebuild the world's largest and comprehensive knowledge repository.
reply