Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

Indeed, Wikipedia really is worth celebrating. While I sympathize with the GP, we should avoid devolving into purity spirals or we'll never have moments of joy.

> In fact it’s the same values that “science” stands on: do our best everyday and continue to try improving.

Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it. But philosophers still talk about Truth, they didn't get the message. As long as we are using leaky abstractions - which means all the time - we can't capture Truth. There is no view from nowhere.

There is no such thing as unbiased. Maybe it simply doesn’t match your bias.

All the more reason to debate among ourselves.

One of the greatest risks is to have a precieved threat make everyone think they have to close ranks and stifle all debate. That is how projects (or even societies) die.

Do you not realize that ridiculously straw-manning people with different beliefs than you as horrible, evil, hateful, truth-hating extremists .. is the very "extremism" and "attempting to destroy ideological opponents" that you're supposedly fighting against? How do you not see the irony?

The zeroeth law of Wikipedia – The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.

To me the key highlight of the article is the finding that editors generally start fairly radical and neutralize over time. Only really passionate people are willing to put the effort into Wikipedia articles which correlates well with radical opinions. But over time working as Wikipedia editors tends to de-radicalize people's work.

Contrast that with the rest of the internet, which mostly rewards radicalization and nudges people towards it.

I think “random agents” was only at start. I don’t think you as a random person can edit much there anymore.

Which is good in ways. Though random phase is song of the past.

You may find this interesting!

https://web.archive.org/web/20080604020024/http://www.hereco...

> So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

> And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus

> Much of Wikipedia is pop culture, I wouldn’t call that knowledge.

Why?

Leaving out that your comment is opinionated and objectively wrong, pop culture is also knowledge.

It's handy to have a neutral place I can look up books or passages of the Christian Bible so that I have a reference point when talking to people about it

All culture was once pop

Honestly it's the first place I look when I must implement some network protocol.

[citation needed]

Just because the policies are supposed to be neutral doesn't mean the resulting work is guaranteed to be truly neutral. Whether something is definitely a fact or an opinion can be very fluid, and you can play a lot with the amount of attention each viewpoint gets. Even a "neutral" article can end up reading completely differently when one viewpoint is very detailed and described in a fact-like way, while another only gets a short summary which reads as if it is a fringe opinion. And even when you are trying to be neutral, it is incredibly hard to avoid your output from getting shaped by the culture you are surrounded with.

The editors mostly reference left-leaning media outlets when it comes to political topics, without providing a counterbalance from right-leaning sources, assuming it were a truth-seeking endeavor.

As a non American this is very obvious to me.

Even Reuters that was supposedly meant to be a non-biased media outlet is clearly left-leaning at this point

I don't know how much you know about the Washington Redskins naming controversy. There's little doubt that "redskin" is a slur today - Native Americans say so, and it's kind of up to them. The status in the 17th and 18th century is a bit less clear IMHO.

Wikipedia says (or said, I guess - I haven't checked) that it unambiguously *was* a slur then too. As evidence, it cites a study of 17th century literature that notes redskins were more likely to be villains than heros in a small sample of 80 books and a diary entry about a sign outside a small town that said "Indian / Redskin scalps - $1" or some such. I don't recall the details.

The point is there wasn't one cited source that showed redskin specifically was a slur, only general evidence that white settlers were racist against Native Americans. Clear WP:SYNTH violation.

Tried to make my own changes, got immediately reverted. Tried to start on the talk page, got totally filibustered by two editors who has the page and a hundred other racism adjacent pages on their watchlist and whose edit history was basically just those handful of pages. Started reading about internal wikipedia boards I could appeal to. Stopped and logged off.

Once you start noticing things like that and start double checking, you find such minor distortions in a lot of political adjacent Wikipedia pages.

Another good example is to grab five super murderous left wing dictators and five super murderous right wing dictators and read the summary section. Use a pen or a highlighter and classify each sentence as positive, negative, or neutral.

It is 7:29am here and already this is enough internet for the day.

I always found the warning text for people who upload dick pics pretty amusing https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Nopenis

Got any notable examples? All the history is publc so it should be easy to link to, presumably.

Not the OP but I'll back him up, and I'll edit this comment when I come across them. They're pretty common. If the domain of knowledge is niche and the page is absolutely huge, that's a good sign to start looking for editoralizations and slants.

A lot of wiki pages about smaller companies only list the good things (fundraising, tech, etc.) and omit any controversies. The deliberate omissions due to bias are even more insidious than weasel words or other forms of poor journalism.

Fwiw I truly believe in Wikipedia and donate every year, but calling it "perfect" would be extremely dangerous (and false!)

This is not exactly propaganda in the typical sense, but it clearly is the case that people successfully edit Wikipedia to further objectives. As an example, the Wikipedia page for Meta-analysis (which isn't even that obscure of a topic) currently contains content that seems to plausibly be trying to promote Suhail Doi's methods, and it seems that it has been like this for a number of years. It cites 5 papers from him, more than anyone else, of which the largest has 297 citations. It has a subsection devoted to his method of meta-analysis, despite it being a rather obscure and rarely used method. There have been additional subsections added over time, which also focus on somewhat obscure areas, but frankly these additions are sketchy in similar ways.

In general, it is not uncommon to come across slantedness issues. Is it completely 100% clear that Doi has come on and maliciously added his papers? Not quite, but good propaganda wouldn't be either, and would actually be far less suspicious-looking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-analysis

I've seen this regularly on fringe articles that are clearly being manipulated. I don't have direct links right now, but things I have seen in the past:

* A sketchy online university that was clearly manipulating their Wikipedia page with lots of positive information about themselves to suppress info about their active lawsuits and controversies

* On medical topics: non scientific, baseless claims about the efficacy of various herbal treatments, vitamin supplements, or other snake oil treatments.

* On various fringe politicians. Someone clearly rewrites the article or adds additional things to the article with claims about what the politician has done or not done or wants to do, but these claims are arguably not fact based.

Now these things usually don't last for a long time. They do get rolled back or removed. But it doesn't have to be on there long for it to be utilized. For example, someone just needs to modify the Wikipedia page long enough to get through their active lawsuits, or the snake oil salesman just needs their info up on Wikipedia for long enough to use it to increase their perceived authenticity to trick some seniors. There is such a constant stream of bad actors trying to put this stuff out there that you'll see it eventually, and it doesn't even have to be up there for long for it to be harmful.

I came across a similar thing when I first read the Wikipedia page on 5G was it was in development. I read it after learning an early phones 5G power consumption was through the roof, and I was trying to figure out what benefits 5G had. I was accepting everything I read at face value, until I came across the section waxing lyrical about 30GHz. I knew 30GHz was stopped by glass, or a human hand, and so was more or less useless in a mobile phone.

So I re-read the entire page, this time looking for signs it was written by marketing rather as a factual document. Of course it was exactly that. Only the engineers deep in the bowels of the organisations developing 5G knew how it would perform at that stage, and evidently they weren't contributing to Wikipedia. Until the man on the street had experience with 5G, the marketing people were going to use the Wikipedia page on it as an advertising platform.

So I'm in agreement with the OP. From what what I can see a Wikipedia page that only has a few contributors it is no better than any other page about the same subject on the internet. The breath and depth of a Wikipedia page on a subject arises because of the wisdom of the crowds contributing to it. If there is no crowd, it's possible there is no wisdom.

Fortunately Wikipedia does have one other advantage over a random Internet page - you can tell when the have been lots of contributions. There is an audit trail of changes, and you can get a feel for the contentious points by reading the Talk page. That contrasts to getting the same information from an LLM, where you have no idea if you are being bullshitted.

As you might predict from all that, the Wikipedia page on 5G is very good now.

It’s not a niche topic, but anything to do with Iran tends to censor the bad things going on there.

This is kind of an unreasonable request. The OP is making claim of a general trend not obscure and subtle bias on any single article. Informally the claim feels true from my experience with Wikipedia and it makes sense that a small number of editors would have a wider bias. Just think central limit theorem here.

I think it's important to edit early and often, but it certainly can't hurt to also explain your edits on the talk page. Bonus points if the other side makes no explanations, you get to "rv unexplained edit, see talk page". Just look in on the article every couple of days for a while to see what sticks and what doesn't. Originally when I started editing, more often than not people would have improved and built on my edits, rather than fought them. But you may need to be a bit (un)lucky these days?

> People have their pet causes

People are paid whole-ass salaries to edit Wikipedia (and to become mods on Reddit.) They masquerade as (a dozen different) obsessed weirdos, but they are just normal middle-class people who are being paid to lie.

I noticed this during the election. As soon as Kamala become the contender, it was edited out that her father was described as a "marxist scholar" by a college newspaper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&...