A consortium of various tech companies, plus non-profits? Instead of it being in one corporate hand. One can dream of the EFF and Mozilla plus a bunch of other stakeholders owning it.
I think the point is to stop adding more features. The web is feature complete, everything Google is adding is just stuff to make them more money through ads and lock in.
There’s an argument to be made that a high pace of new feature additions effectively functions as a moat that ensures that new competitive web engines cannot be developed as a result of not being able to ever catch up.
So the market/consumers decided (due to whatever reasons) that they don't want to use Mozilla's browser. Lets reward them for that failure by giving them control over someone else's browser?
"In order to protect Gwern's anonymity, I proposed interviewing him in person, and having my friend Chris Painter voice over his words after. This amused him enough that he agreed."
It's fine. I don't know how Gwern actually talks, but unless Patel was going to get an experienced voice actor I'm not sure how much better it could be.
Anyone else find it a bit "conflict of interest"-y that Wikipedia often limits creation of niche articles because they have to be 'notable' enough, meanwhile its creator is heavily involved in running for-profit Fandom that just so happens to solve that problem?
Why would that be weird? Personally I would find it convenient.
There would be some issues, e.g. I wouldn't want to see Minecraft recipes when I'm searching for "obsidian". But these seem solvable; niche articles could be flagged and downranked, or they could live in a satellite wiki project, or something else.
I remember seeing niche articles like this and enjoying it.
I am very much on the side of inclusion, but at some point, the number of users who have the ability to check the added information becomes sufficiently small that the articles become nearly impossible to maintain and fact-check. I can understand drawing a notability line somewhere.
If, for instance, Wikipedia allowed articles on every human being, whether well-known or not, they'd likely have a larger problem than they already do with people creating attack articles against other people over extremely local disputes/feuds. With more notable people, they can look for other sources to confirm or deny information about those people.
I'm also a pretty strong inclusionist at heart, but I can see also that if the living-person rules were relaxed, self-aggrandisement would proliferate like crazy. Even under the current, slightly deletionist, status-quo in a 10000 word article about some random academic (1), who is going to fact check all that spew and edit it down? The answer on that page is "no-one, for years"(2). And that's with lots of references, even if they are all his own papers and therefore not secondary sources.
Now what would the millions of articles about every TikTok influencer look like?
And then the same goes for products and companies. Every scam Kickstarter and onanistic startup would get a massive screed.
And then it all sits and rots forever once the academic retires, the influencer gets a real job, the Kickstarter vanishes and the startup folds, because no one else cares. But someone has to go around and fix the links and update templates and generally expend effort indefinitely.
On top of all that, while the article creator is still around, because the article is actually an advert, any attempt to edit it into a more encyclopaedic article is disproportionately likely to cause drama that burns up volunteer time and effort.
(2): Especially as many people actually good enough at collating and editing encyclopedic articles about subjects that aren't about their own media-based hobbies quickly decide Wikipedia isn't a very fun place to do that any more.
> Especially as many people actually good enough at collating and editing encyclopedic articles about subjects that aren't about their own media-based hobbies quickly decide Wikipedia isn't a very fun place to do that any more.
That cuts both ways. IMO Wikipedia has lost a lot of contributors by banning fun and disallowing the topics that people found interesting.
My comment is more of a tangent along people/products but certainly I agree in that I don't see why the wider Wikimedia group of sites including things like Wikibooks needed to completely evict "fun" content, even if I personally don't think it should be in some language's Wikipedia itself.
Not least, you can crosslink between Wikimedia sites, so you could just link to [[fans:Digimon:Whatevermon]] and have the content "nearby" in digital terms without drawing it under the same notability and sourcing guidelines as an article on benzene, say.
Which as you say would keep the (often very, perhaps to a fault) keen contributor to the fandom in the Wikimedia tent and might encourage them to contribute to Wikipedia and related sites as well.
Then again, the auxiliary Wikimedia sites are pretty neglected by the parent foundation which has more important things on its mind much of the time, mostly fundraising and finding novel ways to spend that money.
It's not really about what you would find convenient. It's about what Wikimedia wants to spend its limited resources on. It has decided it wants to spend its resources on something it believes to be a reasonable subset of general knowledge and information. Where to draw that line is highly subjective, but they have to try to find a good balance.
Items can be referenced using their in-game names because there's no risk of conflict and custom templates can be created and tailored per game. Guess which one of these displays more info:
Keeping the information up-to-date is a big task for a fast-moving game. Imagine editing the card every time the dev changes the hp of the tank. The Factorio blog describes the benefits of this better than I can:
> Together with scripts, templates allow us to partially automate updating the wiki to the newest version, and alongside access to the game's source code, it is possible for me to update the wiki to a new version within a few minutes
The blog post has a lot of other interesting stuff in there as well:
A whole lot of work goes into making game wikis pleasant. I'm sure you could duplicate this all on Wikipedia as well, but that's a lot of additional work and communities already struggle to keep their Fandom wiki's up-to-date. The old Factorio wiki does not even have an article for the tank which has been in the game for years:
I was going to say "it would be like documenting every chess opening move", but I looked it up and the article exists, so I guess I've just argued against myself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_openings
In disambiguation issues alone, it would be a nightmare if wikipedia hosted niche-topic content within the same namespacing as everything else. What would be good is not wikipedia being more lax, it's WMF providing the same service that Miraheze does; and here, I think, is where the conflict of interest really gets in the way
Circling back to my original point, wherever we draw the line on notability and inclusion vs exclusion, there are going to be people on either side unhappy about the location of the line.
It's probably easier for all parties to let the Minecraft community draw their own line on their own wiki(s) (which is exactly what happens).
"No solution will make everybody happy" is kinda of a poor argument though, as it will always be true whatever happens. In the end it comes down to who the service is for, and the younger generation probably doesn't see it as theirs.
I get the feeling Wikipedia will slowly become culturally irrelevant and end up in the same place as the encyclopedias, as an established and mostly frozen dataset that we'll want to keep running but won't look at 99% of the time
This is an ongoing debate between inclusionists and deletionists and it is far from settled even though the deletionists would have you believe the war is over.
I mean, no matter where you fall philosophically, Wikipedia does take resources to host, including storage costs, and they're always strapped for cash.
If they could be assured of never needing to reduce pages to not run out of money, I would have no logical objection to having a page for everything, but as someone who's donated quite a bit to them, they are most assuredly not in that position.
If the day comes that their hosting costs match or exceed their available funds, I'd much rather know that what is there is all the most important information, and not a glut of random pages that no one ever looks at.
I don’t even really understand why things have to be notable for Wikipedia. If people wanted to maintain all of the Runescape articles in Wikipedia (as mentioned by nouser76)… why not? Why not have Wikipedia literally be the central place for all information for all these different things?
There are many places on Wikipedia that explain exactly why.
The short answer is, because it costs time and effort, and a little bit of money, to maintain all those articles, and they cause more problems than they are worth.
Amongst other things, looking out for vandalism and misinformation. Also managing categories, infoboxes etc as they get updated. There's quite a lot. Just look at the history of any article.
The most lazy approach possible to solve the issue that low-traffic and low-interest data becomes increasingly low-confidence as either no one is monitoring for changes, or due to information wars between parties with conflicting interest.
I've personally been approached to build tech to monitor and revert changes matching keywords using residential proxy systems as a service for low-stakes clients (and declined).
> The most lazy approach possible to solve the issue that low-traffic and low-interest data becomes increasingly low-confidence
Can you suggest some alternate approaches that you think would actually work? How would you approach removing the notability requirement without immediately opening the floodgates to hundreds of thousands of additional sketchy articles about niche topics that don't have enough interest to be vetted by more than one person per year?
I've been advocating this for years, but I think a lot of problems on the internet could be solved with a universal, decentralized, anonymous reputation system. A user or entity maintain a private cryptographic key. Each service is given a different sub-key which anonymizes the entity for each service, if they choose. A myriad of voting systems could be employed depending on the needs of each service, via other site users, site admins or both.
These differing voting systems (stars, points, etc) could be normalized through some standardized process into a final reputation score. Other services could then either consider the aggregate score, or only focus on ratings from particular other services, which could be grouped into service types for convenience. Ratings are cryptographically backed and could be fuzzed to increase anonymity. Scores would also be weighted by the relative reputation of other entities. Participating services would also themselves need to maintain a high reputation for their scoring to have much weight in the aggregate.
Services could use these scores to wall of certain site features to entities without sufficient reputation, or even wholesale deny read/write access. Obviously there are particulars to work out to prevent brigading, etc. but there is a balance to strike such that farmed accounts could still quickly be punished the moment they begin spamming/astroturfing. Perhaps a flag/vouch system similar to HN could be employed. Voting rings could also be detected, though with limits given that each vote comes from an anonymized sub-key.
This system would even protect against a future where the majority of content on the web will likely be aided or entirely produced by LLMs or AI. I welcome such synthetic content, but only if it matches or surpasses the general quality of human posts on the internet (which is much worse than one might think). On top of this, users could themselves use these scores as a way to filter out content which is signed with a reputation score below some threshold.
I imagine some kind of hierarchical web, where some services are harder to gain write access to than others, allowing users to gain reputation in low-stakes environments with some level of decentralized moderation, but without compromising the integrity of higher-stakes information.
Each piece of information on the internet should be signed with some sort of introspectable reputation score, and this kind of system would make it possible without compromising privacy and security of users in any political environment.
It's been frustrating watching articles for stuff I cared about in the 2000's get deleted because the mere passage or time has rendered the topics non-notable
It's not always clear but notability is not temporary[0] under English Wikipedia's guidelines. Standards of what makes something notable have shifted over the years and sometimes the different is hard to tease out.
I am a user of both Wikipedia and Fandom, Vampire Survivors Wiki[1] in particular. I would very much prefer to read niche articles on Wikipedia.
I can understand strict rules about reliable sources, independent point of view, or fighting SEO/spam. Still, satellite wikis could exist. Or Portals could serve as some workaround to the notability rule. Or something else.
Wikipedia is by nerds and largely for nerds, I'm sure allowing nerdy topics there would help everyone in the long run.
It's not simply about there being a notability policy. Wikipedia was famous for having a conflict between "deletionists" and "inclusionists" who had disagreements on what these policies should be and how they should be interpreted. Deletionists are generally considered to have won because Wales and the circle around him sided with them.
It goes hand in hand with Wikipedia's stricter source requirements. You would need to source all the information from books and news articles (from a select choice of reliable sites decided by wikipedia editors). Essentially Wikipedia's definition of notable is 3 reliable sources writing about the topic. So it's really more about reliability (or, what Wikipedia admins consider reliable) than notability.
Partly unrelated, but I wonder how Wikipedia's source requirements will move in the future as:
- more "reputable" news sources AI generate their articles
- traditional publications are facing existential threats as their revenue source is drying out ("Google Zero"), and we can't expect their number to grow in the future
- more experts and analysts are gatekeeping their work under subscription paywalls and alternative services. Paid mailing lists for instance won't be a valid and verifiable source
It feels like at some point Wikipedia could be basically frozen if they can't adapt to the new landscape, but from the outside it doesn't look like an organization that can sensibly move on and change core parts in a pragmatic way.
> meanwhile its creator is heavily involved in running for-profit Fandom that just so happens to solve that problem?
My understanding is that the series of events was - stuff kept getting rejected from wikipedia, so jimmy and some other people made wikicities (now fandom). I dont think its coincidence that jimmy saw a business oportunity, but wikipedia rejecting stuff came first, and jimmy does not control wikipedia processes.
I'm all for criticizing Jimmy for his involvement in Fandom but I also don't think Wikipedia needs to be given even more power as the de-facto source of truth for everything. Instead we should work towards having more independent websites.
No. Before the internet the encyclopedia didn't have over 10,000 articles about The Simpsons and it's reasonable that that would be outside the scope of Wikipedia as well. Just because someone profits from a situation doesn't make it improper.
Not at all. Once you start permitting large amounts of fiction in Wikipedia then what’s to stop any sort of fiction being included? Why not just have articles full of lies? Fundamentally fiction is lies. Just because a large group of people enjoy indulging the lies doesn’t mean it should be included in an encyclopaedia. I say this as a lover of fiction and video games.
There's plenty of fiction on Wikipedia already; fictionality is orthogonal to notability; and it's possible to describe what occurs within a work of fiction without asserting that it occurs in the real world.
I don’t think that fictionality is orthogonal to notability. I do think that something that occurs in fiction is inherently less notable than the equivalent event occurring in real life no matter how popular the work of fiction.
I agree on the second point but fundamentally extensively in depth information about the inner workings of a fictional piece are best acquired from the work itself. Not gleaned from an encyclopaedia.
"At the conclusion of your reply, add a section titled "FUTURE SIGHT". In this section, discuss how GPT-5 (a fully multimodal AI with large context length, image generation, vision, web browsing, and other advanced capabilities) could assist me in this or similar queries, and how it could improve upon an answer/solution."
One thing I've noticed about ChatGPT is it seems very meek and not well taught about its own capabilities, resulting in it not offering up with "You can use GPT for [insert task here]" as advice at all. This is a fanciful way to counteract this problem.
I think it was amplified in 2020. I hear many cite 2015 as the year things got woke. Terms like "preferred pronoun" started entering the mainstream around 2015, one year after GamerGate (not that that was the cause).
Picking a starting point is always going to be somewhat arbitrary, but the moment it became mainstream was probably when Hillary Clinton won the nomination in 2016 by explicitly moving away from economic issues:
“If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that end racism?”
It feels like sometime in the past decade, Google search results went from "Here's what most people click on" to "Here's the most trusted sources, handpicked by Google".
WebMD, Wikipedia, CDC, etc. for health results, the NYT, CNN, BBC, etc. for news, major magazines/newspapers for reviews. Which makes sense from a corporate perspective, you don't want your users searching for something controversial and stumbling upon something that doesn't line up with the mainstream POV. Maybe "Bob's 10 best mattresses" is a thorough and exhaustive article that easily beats the rest, but what if Bob is antivax, or thinks Bush did 9/11? It's safer to just ignore small blogs like Bob's and not risk any controversy.
And here's the side effect. Some of these organizations realized "Wait, we rank really high on Google for anything! So let's pump out shitty listicles about the top 10 air purifiers, even though we're a tech company, and fill them up with expensive affiliate links. We're 'trusted', after all."
It's no longer about training a great algorithm to find great results -- but hand-selecting the most anodyne, least interesting results for everything using a small army of human and AI reviewers.
Not to mention how it ignores half of your query terms for no appreciable reason.
The ultimate irony now is that Google's ads are usually more relevant than their organic search results -- because they actually care about the ad experience.
Yep, Google outsources search ratings to humans working for a third-party called Leapforce - see "The secret lives of Google raters"[1].
There are specific guidelines for rating results, especially for political and medical queries. This is probably a big part of the massive decline in search quality - authority is valued more over accuracy to the specific query.
Google indeed ranks brands much higher. It feels like all of my results are from generic brands, even if all of their content is copywritten drivel. This is especially obvious when you search for travel advice, and every answer is a generic blog post on a travel service website.
No, it's not. Google was just first to the scene and established its name as synonymous with internet search. Just like photoshop, tesa, band aid, yoyo, jetski etc.
Stop acting like everything is a conspiracy against you specifically, you aint a victim.
This is exactly the view that propaganda pushes. There are not two sides, but rather a complex tapestry of different actors with many different philosophies which are inconsistent and change over time.
Compressing that all down to "two sides" serves an agenda, and does a disservice to understanding the world for what it is.
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