In addition to the more concrete reasons, abstractly they're getting a bit of extra usage out of the namespace by segmenting it. A 9ZZZ999-type license plate is not just any license plate — it's specifically an ordinary private vehicle (as opposed to a state-owned vehicle or a trailer) that was registered in California between 1980 and 2026, and both of those facts are durably encoded in the number. Notably, both of these are also very human-readable facts, which for most of the existence of the car bureaucracy was extremely germane. The CA DMV got its digital-records act together in the 1990s (this is from memory, it might have been in the Bush years but it certainly wasn't in the '80s and it was a done deal by the Obama era) but there was a long time before that when "just plug it into the DB" was not an option because the DB was a filing cabinet and the query engine was a human digging through it.
I am going to say a thing I say a lot: please edit Wikipedia. It is easier to do than you probably think! Wikipedia's biggest constraint is no longer money or server space, it's editor time (especially since LLM-based garbage is a force multiplier on disruptive editing that does not have a corresponding improvement to good-faith editing). Any topic area you know about and/or care about can benefit from your attention. Fixing typos is valuable. Adding photos is valuable. Flagging vandalism is valuable. Please edit Wikipedia.
I have in the past, but three things put me off doing so now;
Pages where I can spot inconsistencies are often controversial, with long dense discussion pages, edits here are almost impossible beyond trivial details. I dont mind fixing trivia, but not if the actual improvement I think I can make is rejected.
There is a bit of a deletionist crusade to keep some topics small, for example, Ive had interesting trivia about a cameras development process simply deleted. Maybe it is truly for the better, but it is not really that easy to add to the meat of the project, without someone else's approval.
Third, the begging banners really feel a bit gross; I know the size of the endowment, and how long it would be able to sustain the project (forever essentially)... It really feels like the foundation is using the Wikipedia brand to funnel money to irrelevant pet causes. This really puts me off contributing.
I made an edit last year, it immediately got reverted and I got a banner on my user page for vandalism. I complained about that, other people agreed with me but the person who reverted my edits never responded. So there it sits.
The only few times I tried to make small edits, typo corrections, or similar, they just got immediately reverted as vandalism. So when I found a page that is largely wrong about a relatively obscure historical figure that I actually know a lot about and have plenty of source material for, I didn't really feel motivated to put the work in to clean it up.
I made a small edit to fix a mistake once and it didn’t get called vandalism but I sort of got a harsh message telling I did it wrong and didn’t follow processes
There must be some admin-level expectations of how things should be done but the editor flow gives you zero warning or indication. This was a while back so maybe they changed the flow
If there's a dispute and the person you're having a dispute with never materialises to argue their side of the argument, you're fine to just revert the banner.
But any time you try to write them down, people will come along and interpret them to their own advantage, sometimes outright in the opposite direction. That's a people problem, to some extent, not purely a Wikipedia problem.
> The base rules are actually not very complicated.
> But any time you try to write them down, people will come along and interpret them to their own advantage, sometimes outright in the opposite direction.
I think this a feature/bug of a (litigious) society that works on the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law.
I've had basic facts about mathematics which are wrong deleted in revisions by editors with no knowledge of the subject beyond having asked ChatGPT (which repeats the wrong shit on Wikipedia). It's hard to be worth it. Wikipedia's biggest problem is the editors.
Wikipedia is really, really bad at mathematics. The tone is all over the place, from “plagiarized from an undergrad textbook” to “crackpot with an axe to grind against Cantor.”
I think the "deletionist" tendency is one of the biggest problems with Wikipedia. At least it's the main thing that prevents me from making significant contributions. I say tendency, but maybe it really is more of a crusade. Deletion and rejection definitely seem to be the default "predisposition." I've seen a lot of examples of apparently well meaning contributors being pushed away by the need to establish "notability" for a subject and the expectation that all information must be referenced to a fairly limited number of approved reliable sources. These are norms which have been built over a long period of time so it would be incredibly difficult to change them now.
Exactly. It makes it basically impossible to get niche industry/trade information and history onto wikipedia unless it was so newsworthy it's covered everywhere.
Yet when I (or others) are trying to raise the issue on certain Reddit communities in addition to Lemmy people there still prefer to bury their heads in the sand. Often they'll simply resort to personal attacks and so on just to avoid facing the fact that Wikipedia is not as infalliable as they think at all.
I think the ongoing hosting cost of any given article is incredibly close to zero with the exception of a very tiny fraction of popular articles. The popular ones obviously deserve to be there as evidenced by their popularity alone. Maybe there is something I'm not taking into account but I have a hard time seeing the meaningful cost of some obscure wiki page merely existing.
> Maybe there is something I'm not taking into account but I have a hard time seeing the meaningful cost of some obscure wiki page merely existing.
The thing you're not taking into account is that every article that exists takes up some amount of editor time, which is why it's good when more people participate in Wikipedia. You are correct that the server/bandwidth cost of almost all articles rounds off to zero. That leaves just the cost in "an actual human looked at this and okayed it," which has different scaling characteristics.
If that's the intention, fine. But don't be surprised when no one but the most committed politicians want to bother trying to contribute to the project.
I've also edited random things in the past. Like inaccuracies in Comp.Sci. topics.
I used to like Wikipedia but I'm changing my mind. One thing amongst many others was seeing some company that competed with the startup I worked in basically introduce marketing material into the site. It just feels like it's too big and there are too many interests that want to distort things. I was surprised to see some article recently removed effectively rewriting history and directing to some alternative version. I just checked again and it's been restored but it just seems like the wild west.
I'd need some serious convincing to restore my trust in it. There are still some good technical/science articles I guess. It kind of sucks that instead of getting more reliable information on the Internet we're trending towards not being to trust anything. It's not clear how we fix this since reliability can not be equal to popularity.
> It just feels like it's too big and there are too many interests that want to distort things. I was surprised to see some article recently removed effectively rewriting history and directing to some alternative version. I just checked again and it's been restored but it just seems like the wild west.
In fairness, this does mean the system is working.
Yeah- Maybe it's "eventually working". It's hard to trust when it seems so fluid. Maybe there needs to be some mechanics to make it harder to change. Something like being able to suggest changes/corrections but having those come out on some schedule after a review? (thinking software release process here). Quarterly Wikipedia releases? Creating some "core" of Wikipedia that is subject to tougher editorial standards?
Its definitely an eventual consistency kind of model.
There was some attempts at change review (called "pending changes") that is used on very continous articles, but it never really scaled that well. I think its more popular on german wikipedia.
Wikipedia is so dominant that it has kind of smoothered all alternative models. Personally i feel like its kind of like democracy: the worst system except for all the other systems. All things are transient though, i'm sure eventually someone will come up with something superior that will take over, just like wikipedia took over from encyclopedia briticana.
It will unnerve you to know, that this is the state of the art, and the information environment we run in, is incredibly fragile at the speeds at which it is moving.
It may also hearten you to know, that small, consistent actions like yours, make these collective systems run.
Control theory (among others) says that a more rapid cycle actually often improves reliability and accuracy of a system. (If on average an iteration will converge on a set point/objective, then more/faster iterations will converge more rapidly, or become stable past some threshold). People keep trying to slow Wikipedia down though. They do succeed somewhat, and that actually hurts accuracy and engagement.
Perhaps we should trust it more because it is fluid and that fluidity is documented (see the history and talk tabs for any given article). Historically, reputable sources depended upon, to a very large degree, the authority of the author. The reader typically had little to no insight into what was generally agreed upon and where there was some debate. How the Wikipedia exposes that may be imperfect, but it is better than nothing.
Harder to change doesn't make it more or less correct, just means wrong information sticks around longer.
Because revision history is kept and changes are instant, it's easy to fix bad changes.
For topics that see extensive astroturfing, they can be restricted.
It’s worth remembering that the entire point of a wiki is that it’s quick and easy to make a change (the name means “quick” in Hawaiian). Being quick and easy to change was the defining quality of Wikipedia and its advantage over more rigid traditional encyclopaedias. These days editing Wikipedia seems like you have to fight bureaucracy and rules lawyering, and doesn’t seem very wiki-like at all.
But a review process can make it both harder to change and more correct. A delay in impacting the official version makes it harder for people to vandalize.
We do this in software all the time.
In software if there's a critical bug sometimes we accelerate a fix. We can have a process like that for "wrong information". But you'd think most articles about established topics should not see a lot of churn. Yes- Sometimes they find a new fossil that calls some preexisting science into question, but these are relatively rare events and we can deal with that e.g. by putting a note on the relevant topic while the new article gets worked on.
Basically every other complaint in this thread is that editing is impossible because everything is reverted. Your issue seems like an impossible one to cleanly solve
Not everything meets Wikipedia editorial goals, but you still have a lot more of latitude in Wikibooks and Wikiversity, the latter also admitting original researches.
I've tried to contribute to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects but they block Tor, e-mailing admins to get an account manually created always results in them telling you to follow some other process, but that process is only for "established editors", so it seems there's no realistic way for me to contribute.
It really feels that way because that's what they're doing. There's a legit non-profit internet encyclopedia barnacled with a bunch of generic left wing political stuff, except the barnacle is bigger than the boat.
Yeah I stopped donating to Wikipedia once I learned where the money goes.
Even if it ends up supporting causes I agree with, why would I need the Wikimedia Foundation as an intermediary? I could just give money directly to the causes!
I've done a fair bit of editing over almost 20 years. Some of my photos are featured in small articles, and I've only had a few of my edits reverted, always for sensible reasons. It's easy to get started, and the pitfalls (chiefly, adding commentary without a source) are well documented.
So on that basis, I agree. Please edit. It's easy. Start small.
That said, I've watched entire articles vanish under the banner of non-notability, which were clearly notable if one bothered to find some citations. The deletionists have a process and a timeline, while the contributions come slowly and sporadically. This asymmetry is a cancer. If there's a treadmill belt pushing articles off the site which fail to run fast enough, then it's impossible for small articles, which are just learning to crawl, to survive long enough to survive. It's not a test of notability, it's a test of Wiki-savvy among an article's supporters.
The best way to make a new article actually stick around, is to basically build the whole thing elsewhere, which takes weeks or months of effort for a single person since it's not collaborative, then plonk it into Wikipedia fully formed, and maybe, just maybe, it might have enough citations to pass the test of notability. But this means that, from the outset, it represents a single author's viewpoint.
Deletionists eviscerate what makes Wikipedia interesting, and they're the main reason I haven't edited more.
This needs to be talked by a lot! However per my experiences and those of others if you go to either the "front page of the internet" or Lemmy the competitor you'll get side-eyed and harassed by people who thinks that you're a "far-right obscurantist" for simply criticizing Wikipedia.
I tried to get interested in Wikipedia and the crazy level of gatekeeping over topics these editors had no clue about was frustrating to me. They don’t know what is notable and they have no business telling people what to do in many instances (esp with more obscure topics).
Interesting how so many people are answering that they've had trouble!
How about I look at some of those cases? Especially if it's relatively recent, I can take a look. Leave me a message here, or at my email address (see my HN info) , or on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Kim_Bruning
I'm not very active anymore, but I'll check in the next couple of days and see what I can do. Really to be able to help I generally need links to revisions, but if you have a username, a page, and a reasonably short time frame (a concrete date) I might be able to figure out the relevant revisions from there.
To onlookers: When I investigate cases like this, there's often a "catch." Sometimes contributors really did break Wikipedia policies — and just don’t mention that part when telling their side of the story.
Now I'm certainly not saying every case is like that, so I will look, and if you don't get what the issue was, I'll try to explain. In some cases if it was recent and it somehow wasn't fair, I might even be able to'fix' it within the bounds of Wikipedia policy.
Please note that, although there are scores of anecdotes in this thread, precisely none of them link to any examples or give enough details to find them. It’s always like this with Wikipedia detractors; I don’t know why, but it is. Complaints and horror stories galore, but nobody will link to any of it, preventing anybody from investigating what actually happened.
There are a couple of legitimate reasons. Raising the issue internally only brings ire and attention by admins and shadow groups. I tried doing this via the WMF village pump , technical pumps, admin pages and only drew more attacks.
Raising the issues externally comes off as petty, because the “evidence” consists of 50+ pages of inane bickering on talk pages, community post , etc with no clear narrative or verdict. It’s a unique community that leans heavily on hyper-bureaucratic and bespoke debates.
I could share > 5 severe cases that required weeks of effort to “resolve” . It would require nearly as much effort for anyone to draw conclusions from.
There are some index pages of some of the more notable conflicts & debates. If you can indicate that digging that up would be worth my time to help you understand more, I may be willing to help you out.
I was mostly looking for specific interactions to dig in to, but if you have a link or two for me to take a peek, we'll both know if it's worth it soon enough. You don't have to dig deep straight away.
There's no such policy , but it's abused as a way to censor criticism over behavior, which itself is a policy (RUCD)
There were a couple instances where user conduct concerns were raised on their talk page (in accordance with RUCD), and that user used USERTALKSTOP to censor the concerns. The outcome is that me and the other users who were raising concerns received a temporary ban (one permanent), instead of the concerns themselves being attended to and addressed.
Worse than the ban was the hours and hours of inane dialog on admin pages, defending your edit history, account history, intentions, etc. And the UI is clumsier and noisier than the worst 1990s web BBs
You can see how a seemingly benign non-policy can be abused to censor even well-intended volunteers.
Because we/they have detached from the issue. It was a bad experience and thus it gets pushed aside. I also have my wikipedia deletionist story - the German wikipedia is among the worst there, way worse than the us-american - but it's not like I will keep an account active on a project with those awful people. So linking it isn't even all that easy.
>although there are scores of anecdotes in this thread, precisely none of them link to any examples or give enough details to find them
In the past, when I've tried to keep receipts on this sort of thing (which requires an extraordinary amount of effort, and is often only possible if you've anticipated that there would be a need to do so - since content is often deleted or archived without warning, and nobody ever enters an argument on the Internet with the expectation of talking about that specific argument years later) and actually presented evidence, I've been accused being "creepy" or various other forms of misconduct, and the argument is still not taken any more seriously. I've given up on presenting evidence of this sort of thing because the people who ask for it are not being intellectually honest, in my extensive experience. They don't care if you can actually prove what you're saying; they will ignore you anyway.
If the evidence has merely been “archived”, it would still be possible to find and link to, no?
And even if, as you say, all the evidence has been completely deleted, an honest critique would at least point out the exact article in question, and summarize the details of the attempted changes.
But all the criticism in this thread (and elsewhere) always lack this. It is a mystery.
Finding things again is a lot of work. There's similarly "always" this selective demand for rigor that faces complainants such as myself. I don't owe you my time. Often these complaints are motivated by recollections of years-old incidents - sometimes by many such incidents.
There are multiple entire websites out there criticizing Wikipedia and what they have to say tends to revolve around the editing process, specifically the social/cultural aspects. Have you attempted to research this yourself?
e: another comment elsewhere on this post brought up another source: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik... . I've read a bit of it and can generally endorse what's being said there. In particular, some specific usernames are cited and I recognize most of them, which in itself is telling. Other comments here suggested that Sanger's personal views are less than scientific, to say the least. I have not looked into this personally, but I don't think this in any way negates the argument about bias. (Nor is any political camp immune to pseudoscience.)
How do we rate biases, and what’s the rank of Wikipedia along the diverse methodologies to do so?
Also note that the issue is biases in there whole generality. Most data produced by the universe will just not attract interest of most human beings. Or at least, as finite beings, we have to pounder where we put our attention and can’t afford to study every single topic with the same level of scrutiny.
To offer a counter-example to the many anecdotes about being gatekept(?) by veteran Wikipedia editors: I have the opposite experience.
I occasionally contribute to various topics, and in many cases experienced editors silently fixed formatting errors I made, allowing me to focus on contributing to Wikipedia without having to keep up with the best practices.
I also participated in a deletion discussion once, and - despite being inexperienced and in the minority position (keep) - the experienced editors considered my arguments and responded to them.
I agree with this as well ( I wrote a critical comment above). I’ve had the most enjoyment fixing typography & typos (aka copy editing). It feels more like a casual (video) game that way.
Some of my edits to technical articles were well received.
You’re right it’s good to highlight the good and bad, but given the amount of goodwill that was burned , the bad did outweigh the good for me.
I created a page, it got declined because the guy who two films have been made about didn't count as important enough. I kind of get it, but still, did kill the energy slightly.
The notability requirement is a real bane, but it also kind of makes sense when there's really insufficient manpower for the articles they already have.
But then, maybe they'd have more manpower if they loosened the notability requirement.
The general notability guideline is another thing that's effectively downstream of "there's not enough editor time to keep everything up to basic standards." If Wikipedia had 10x the editor-hours it does now, notability requirements would de facto loosen, because there would be enough editor-hours to keep the extra articles useful. Seriously, editor time is the major bottleneck of Wikipedia.
If you care about a topic and want to edit Wikipedia but do not want to deal with the process, you can simply talk about what you want to change on the discussion page. Is there an equivalent workaround when it comes to creating new pages?
You can create a page as an anonymous user. The content and subject is much, more more important than the fact of being created as an anonymous user. If that's the process you want to avoid, there's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creatio... but that one is more geared towards people who are already engaged with Wikipedia. An outsider saying "well, someone, but not me, should do something about this problem," is just as welcome on Wikipedia as it is anywhere else.
What's the issue with naming the person if you think there should be an encyclopedic article about said person?
If it's about anonymity / not wanting to publicly link your HN and Wikipedia profiles, well fine, but the fact that there are two films about a person does not say much.
Oh, it was just because it didn't matter to the conversation. It was about Bernie Jordan who left his nursing home to attend a D-Day event. I created the article because both films imply the nursing home prevented him, but in actuality they went to great lengths to help him.
Reading the article about the movie, I can kind of see both sides here.
Probably a veteran Wikipedia contributor could draw the lines best, but it seems reasonable to say that the incident itself would not be relevant enough unless it had been made into a movie.
The article about the movie clearly states that it's a true story.
i mean, there are often "curiosity" stories reported by multiple newspapers that are still not really historical events warranting their own article.
I'd draw the line depending on the volume of coverage and publicity in such cases.
And this case doesn't appear to me as if it was a major cultural thing that everyone knew about when it happened (unless they were interested in the movie).
I'm not in the US though, so I can only tell what I see in search results and that the story hasn't really crossed the atlantic into any notable publicity here.
I’ve tried, but every article even the most inconsequential seems to have an angry bird in the roost enforcing whatever their particular vision of the article is.
It's even worse when you add a source and you get reverted for reasons quite clearly disproven in your source. I had to make a single edit three times because it got undone twice by two separate administrators. A less stubborn person would've just given up on the first baseless revert and never edited Wikipedia again.
When it finally got through, were they nice to you at least? (They'd better have been!)
And, it probably wasn't administrators, unless you specifically looked. You do sometimes have to be a bit insistent, you're quite right. If someone reverts you, it's often not personal. Ask on the talk page why they reverted, and if no one says anything for 24 hours (definitely wait this long), just try your edit (or a better one!) again.
I wrote an essay on this once that still gets used a lot on wiki (misquoted even more often). The original version of the essay had a few more tricks up its sleeve -but- if you do it this way you're not likely to get in trouble at least. And otherwise now you know someone you can ask for help.
>When it finally got through, were they nice to you at least?
Not really. They continued to grumble about being "stuck" with the data on the talk page because they couldn't find any source to refute it, and the last edit one of them made about it was "Since I can't find any source to refute this (everyone seems to use it without question), let's at least sort the data correctly".
>And, it probably wasn't administrators, unless you specifically looked.
I did look! One of them is still an administrator and the other one is currently a "former administrator". I think I remember the other one being an admin back then too, but I could be misremembering.
Sounds like stackoverflow defenders. I'm another person who tried about 5-7 times over the years to do larger improvements all for it to go to waste. Minor edits many times survive but even those I stopped doing because of the sour effect of the larger ones getting denied.
> please edit Wikipedia. It is easier to do than you probably think!
Last time I tried to do that, I flagged a citation that went to a book saying the opposite of what wikipedia was citing it in support of as "failed verification".
This attracted the attention of an editor, who showed up to revert my flag, explaining that as long as the book exists, that's good enough.
Wikipedia could improve noticeably by just preventing the existing editors from making edits.
I edited mostly a single page many years ago. It wasn't a controversial subject really, just one where there is a lot of garbage popular history and some light revisionism that made it a bit of an effort to remove unreliable sources and add some better sources. Never any issues or fights over it, but I got bored eventually and just let it be.
Recently I edited a page or two, then tried to edit more, but everything is so complex now. All the special markup and stuff to consider is really off-putting. Took me forever to figure out how to properly fix the year of death of a person and some other data I just ignored because it was too much red tape. Wish it was more simple plain text. Makes quick drive-by edits too much work.
They could maybe explain it better with some short youtube videos?
For citations you an usually delete the old stuff and then click 'Templates' to insert a new one. For "cite web" you can just enter the url and click the magnifying glass symbol and it automatically fills the rest.
I tried on a completely uncontroversial page that documented a certain idiom and examples of where it was used.
My edit was reverted, twice, because apparently there is no such thing as a notable source for lines from a 1980s British TV episode, not even a fan website that has a transcript for all of them. Gave up after that.
Sounds like that might have been a copyright issue? In the UK a transcript of a show would need permission of the writers/owners to be reproduced. I can see Wikipedia would be sensible to disallow infringing works as being bad sources.
Ironically an excerpt of the script/transcript would be allowed by UK copyright - but a site with only excerpts would probably but be a good source for Wikipedia's purposes.
Curious, as a longtime editor, what's gotten harder for you recently?
As a casual, very infrequent editor, I echo everyone else's complaints that it's intimidating to have your additions reverted by the old guard who seem to have an increasingly particular vision of the site.
21 years of editing, that's awesome! I'm curious though, what's changed? If I were to maybe guess, I'd imagine it coincides with the rising temperature of the online culture war?
You tend to have to get all your ducks 100% in a row before you edit or create. It used to be I could author a new article with some decent solid sources and there would be no argument. Then someone later would come and fix any deficiencies and maybe switch out the sources for better ones.
Basically, it's become "perfect is the enemy of good."
> Fixing typos is valuable. Adding photos is valuable. Flagging vandalism is valuable. Please edit Wikipedia.
Wise that you omit adding other credible sources that do not agree with the main editor's views. What you're describing sounds like already preserving their work, no matter if it happens to be provide info based on multiple convergent sources or not.
Since so many commenters here have bad experiences, I'll provide a counterweight. I've made numerous edits and have run into little to no resistance. I'm sure asking people on a forum does not evoke a representative response.
People say "propaganda machine" but I have yet to see much example of that. The Trumpists don't like it because it fact checks their lies but I'm not sure it's fair to call that propaganda? Any examples like a link to an article or section that you feel is propaganda?
Many people here decry Wikipedia as biased, impossible to edit and other bad things.
But none of the comments point out the actual article that they wanted to edit.
Ironically, presumably to remain anonymous. Anonymity and pseudonymity are directly attacked in the letter this article is about.
Wikipedia sure isn't perfect, but so far, when commenters attack it with fundamental vitriol, I've always found these people to have a political agenda.
I tried volunteering and contributed a few thousand edits, and ended up brigaded into hours of silly reviews by sock puppets and their crony admins. The bureaucracy is nuttier than a Monty python sketch. Endless futile debates on talk pages.
It’s not supposed to have many rules (according to the Jimbo gospel), but admins apply policy pages as law , and given how many inane and convoluted policies there are, you can be censured for practically anything with the right quote. You can see these sockpuppet brigades watching and pouncing on the edit history of any semi controversial page.
It’s a pathetic monoculture that lacks any self awareness or sense of introspection. Critical discussions are quickly shut down and the authors are put into a penalty box.
Leadership needs to address the power dynamics, and come up with a better self regulating structure. Editors need to identify themselves and their agenda. Networks & brigades need to be monitored and shutdown using activity tracking.
Wikipedia’s social network is operating with 1990s era protocols but their influence via syndication on every common news surface means they are way too influential. Google, Alexa, LLMs and mainstream media all syndicate Wikipedia content as gospel. But the content is completely unregulated.
It’s not easy to do at all. They have extensive blacklists to reputable conservative papers, and I’ve been cussed out for trying to link things. There are a lot of topics that can’t even be discussed because the pro-left bias is too strong that any reputable source is banned, and many non-political pages which are monitored so tightly by a single individual it’s impossible to edit.
Have you tried using sources that aren't explicitly "conservative papers"? And if so, have you considered the lack of evidence found outside of overtly biased sources might indicate the position you are defending is not defensible outside of a strictly partisan perspective and worldview, and is buoyed only by other strictly partisan sources?
On many occasions, right-wing Internet acquaintances have given me a link to a story in a conservative news source; I would try to look up other coverage with a search engine, and I would find exclusively conservative sources discussing what happened, even though it was clearly verifiable fact that the the thing in question had in fact happened.
During the Rittenhouse trial, I watched trial coverage live, then evaluated what various news outlets were saying about what happened. Unironically, Fox News was objectively far more truthful and accurate than every left-wing source. I caught left-wing sources trying to push disproven and dubious narratives - in particular, the "taking an illegal firearm across state lines" bit - long after anyone had an excuse, even after the basic issues with that story had already been debunked by other left-wing sources. Shortly after the verdict dropped, Al Jazeera Plus put out an absurd, naked propaganda piece trying to paint the DA as a hero unjustly thwarted, with imagery showing complete ignorance to and/or resistance of the proven facts of the case.
(As a reminder: this is a DA who didn't check a firearm personally before pointing it at the jury, in order to try to make a ridiculous point about how Rittenhouse might possibly have been holding the weapon, while clearly having no actual idea how to hold and aim it properly. Who then made a closing statement baldly asserting falsehoods about the basics of how firearms work that had been disproved immediately prior. Who had previously made repeated, blatant attempts to violate Rittenhouse's Fifth Amendment rights and introduce evidence that had been very clearly excluded from consideration in pre-trial hearings.)
I have witnessed supposedly respected, mainstream sources (with a rarely acknowledged left-wing bias and an axe to grind) smear people I've personally met, and movements and groups that include people I personally know and care about (especially movements that have nothing to do with the traditional left-right axis but which certain leftists have decided to label as "right-wing" for their own reasons).
The bias built in to Wikipedia's "reliable sources" policy is self-reinforcing. You can't get conservative sources added even if what they're saying is provably true, or "liberal" (an absurd abuse of the term, but that's the American jargon now) sources excluded even if what they're saying is provably false, because a) the latter agree with each other; b) a new source needs vetting, which generally involves agreeing with existing sources; c) there is no objective standard for accuracy or reliability.
You present your comment as though you imagine that "sources that aren't explicitly conservative" are, thereby, not also "overtly biased". A lot of people seem to believe this, but it's not at all true. The fact that you frame this in terms of "defending positions" is also telling, for me.
You actually highlight the problem very well. Any group of people can make their own websites, publish their own papers, produce their own films, cross-refencing each other all along the way, thereby creating the illusion their their alternate reality, though largely fabricated, is as true as the real world we all live in. But it isn't. The "facts" within that sphere are only supported by other "facts" within that same sphere, and they fail to connect to the larger, long-standing and global web of data, research and opinion that are far more diverse, well-documented and debated. And by failing to connect, or only tenuously connecting, to the larger conversation they are rendered irrelevant, except for their use as a weapon towards personal or political ends.
The problem is that you tried to attribute this behaviour to conservative sources specifically, in order to rebuke someone else here, but in reality this is not a specific trait of conservative sources.
I just fucking said that. Any sphere, if sufficiently disconnected from or contradictory to the mass of human knowledge, is highly suspect at best. Most likely it's complete garbage. Pollution that hinders the healthy advancement of human knowledge.
That's a strange choice of words. Divergence from human beliefs is perfectly legal, because beliefs are fallible. How can you possibly be ignorant about this when you just now described an echo chamber yourself?
I used to edit wikipedia until I got permanently "community banned" because of some poor choices of words and even my apologies were ignored. The site is full of people who are chronically online and like to witch hunt and destroy people's lives. That wasn't the case almost two decades ago when I started using the site, but now it's full of the type of people that passionately use reddit and bluesky and that were formerly on twitter. (It's worth noting that a "community ban" is a special type of ban that's basically a lynch mob where a bunch of people dog pile and if there's enough "consensus" you get banned, which can happen by the person proposing it simply calling forth all their friends. And this type of ban is considered "stronger" than an actual administrator ban so cannot be overturned by an administrator. It's mob violence at its finest.)
I was a very active editor who'd been using the site for a very long time, but they don't care. One major mistake and you're gone forever.
The site also has a huge bias toward "media" sources rather than actual scientific content or primary sources in general. They treat the media as vetters of the truth and ignore all of the group-think/mass delusion that is common among mainstream media where they all re-report each others stories. That causes a huge blind spot. It didn't used to be that way too, it used to be that most notable sources were books, but nowaydays with everything online and the quality of media reporting going down and down it's caused Wikipedia itself to decline in quality.
I used to encourage people to edit Wikipedia like you, no longer. The site needs a hard fork, at least for the english speaking site.
I used to edit Wikipedia actively. I was was active on the conflict of interest notice board and involved in pushing back against a few self-promotional scams. The worst one involved the "binary options" industry, before it was shut down.
"Better Place", a hype-based electric car startup that went bankrupt, was another.
A few years previous, most heavy promotion on Wikipedia was music-related. Then business hype dominated. Then political hype took over. Trying to push back in the "post truth" era is valuable but painful.
It was worth doing for a while. But not for too long. It's wearing.
I'll add: please edit in areas where you are an expect. Over the last 20 years I have racked up a few thoudand edits, rewrites, new articles, etc.. Don't contribute to the low effort noise everyone is screaming about. In a century an edit in transcendental number theory with a citation is going to be a lot more important than whatever the current culture war is.
Years ago I tried adding a weblink directing to a community, to an article about a game, where there were already weblinks to other communities, which were in no way any more official or proper than the community I linked to, but this edit never made it into the page, because someone played gatekeeper there, probably a person of the already linked communities. Since then I don't even bother editing wiki any longer. It is gatekeeping by people with their own agenda. What else I read about edit wars did not inspire confidence either.
I used to, until entire notable topics within a certain culture were deleted as "not notable" by editors unfamiliar with the topics.
"not notable" is the cancer within wikipedia. You can't claim to be the sum of human knowledge but also arbitrarily remove articles to meet some imaginary criteria.
For most things the talk pages will explain why it is restricted, but if someone forgot to put a notice there, there's also a giant list of "the following topic areas reliably attract disruptive editing and get people angry, so admins move much more quickly to restrict editing than they would otherwise." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_sanctions#Ac...
wikipedia means different things depending where you are. Content in English looks a lot better than browsing content in other languages like Spanish, French, Italian, ... Especially when it is about non Tech subjects in these languages, there seems to be a strong difference in quality, and the utility you get from Wikipedia varies with how many languages you speak.
My biggest beef is that any contributions volunteers make will be stolen by sama and similar scam artists & SV dweebs so they can improve their AI (and while Wikipedia is free AI which requires login/authentication and maybe even paid subscription in future).
I tried making some contributions and ended up getting totally put off by passive-aggressive rules-lawyering and BS. There is a certain sort of person who edit-squats pages and fights remorselessly over every change and it just wasn’t worth the time and emotional energy to try to get over that hump.
I've seen such bad editing lately. Basic grammar rules being missed/capitalization issues, personal opinions and hearsay cited as "fact", lack of references. Seemingly unrelated topics except in whoever made an edits eyes.
So yeah, you don't even have to be an expert. What's weird is that there IS a lot of edits by ideologues of many kind. And it doesn't have to be "foreign agents" and this Trump attack reeks so hard of yet another attempt at authoritarian control and NewSpeak. Biden gave in with the TikTok to Trumps initial games, and now it just feeds the game. We have to resist this sort of thing from below.
I wish people had a good "sniffer" for bullshit. I'm not saying I'm perfect (we all have our blind spots) but after a while you can tell when certain things are trying to put a spin on something... It's especially odious when it comes to national identities trying to put a spin or tie either themselves or their enemies to a particular view point. The worst part is it's not necessarily obvious, to a lot of people if you don't have the knowledge, or the ability to critique and ask questions.
So we need people to keep asking questions for sure, and sniffing out this sort of thing. But it has to not be "IN THE NAME OF NATIONAL SECURITY" but rather "IN THE NAME OF OPEN KNOWLEDGE FOR ALL". Otherwise you just become a front or spokesthing for a given state, and that's no better than fucking Pravda.
First, my (quite correct) edits in existing pages have been reversed within minutes. No explanation as to why (I assume because I was not "known" enough). I have heard this complaint numerous times.
Second, when I tried to create a page about a system that I had originally authored, has become a well-known, worldwide tool, managed by a large team that does not include me, the page was rejected. I think it was because I had been involved in the creation of the tool.
I decided that it wasn't worth it. I didn't get upset, but it was clear that my input wasn't wanted.
"But this means his pro and con opinions don't match typical opinions and this makes him polarizing. And hence some people will flag his articles reflexively or post reflexive dismissals. And Hacker News is heavily weighted to downrank polarizing articles."
The downranking is particularly weird since HN's professed norms go extremely hard on something along the lines of "you should take atypical opinions seriously since they're more likely to contain new information than opinions that are conventional-wisdom-with-a-few-little-sprinkles-on-top." Sometimes the HN audience is very diligent about this norm. Reactions to Gruber's writing from the HN crown often show marked deficiencies in adherence to this norm. I'm not sure what, if anything, should be done about that by Gruber or HN's moderators, but I do believe that the problem is not located in Gruber's writing.
> The downranking is particularly weird since HN's professed norms go extremely hard on something along the lines of "you should take atypical opinions seriously since they're more likely to contain new information than opinions that are conventional-wisdom-with-a-few-little-sprinkles-on-top."
HN's "professed norms" (i.e., the guidelines) do not state that, and opinions, atypical or otherwise, have zero information content beyond the information that so-and-so holds such-and-such opinion.
Atypical opinions may be, on average, more likely to be accompanied by intellectually interesting arguments, but that's, at best, a loose correlation, not an iron law that where one thing occurs the other will also.
This is not at all weird if you are a HN user with somewhat unpopular opinions. The HN guidelines say flag something if it's egregious. People end up treating flagging as a stronger version of downvotes.
My most recent experience being flagged matches this up: I was presenting an argument that Chrome's manifest V3 is a good thing and it was flagged to death. I have no doubt that some users just flag this kind of opinion reflexively.
People openly admit[1] to abusing the flagging system as their own automated mega-downvote to try to steer[2] the topics towards ones they like and away from ones they don't like.
An important part of the historical context here is that the black community in America has a lot of scar tissue around sketchy investment opportunities, and those scars go back, oh, call it 160 years (i.e. the Reconstruction era). When you have a community that is suffering from widespread generational poverty, as the black community in America broadly is, that community naturally tends to be very eager for opportunities for generating wealth — especially opportunities that present themselves as "This is it! This is your chance to buy into the American Dream, legitimately and officially, no messing around with crime, sports, or the music industry, you're going to have Investment Opportunities, you will be stockholders, this is what prudent people do to accumulate wealth and provide for their children & grandchildren."
The black community in America has been presented with many such opportunities. How many of them were legitimate? Nobody has a really solid number, for hopefully obvious reasons, but whatever the real rate of legitimate opportunities that sound like the above is, it's low enough that 160-ish years of it have left the black community in America still suffering from widespread generational poverty. Particularly there is a pattern in economic-bubble periods where members of the black community buy in near the top (because the growth of a bubble is driven by existing capital flowing into it and the black community has less capital, while whatever activity is inflating the bubble seeks out large clumps of capital first, as any growing sector does), end up as bagholders (because they bought in near the top of a bubble), and suffer disproportionately (because they had less capital, and so a given absolute loss is a bigger percentage of their capital than for wealthier communities). There have also, of course, been periods of undisguised racial violence, which have always involved theft as one form the violence takes. All of this leaves the black community in America with noteworthy long-term scars around the topic of investment opportunities particularly marketed to them — and yet, what are they supposed to do, give up on pursuing the American Dream, especially when someone promises up and down that this is it, they can leave behind the sordid stuff, this truly is the pathway to affluence, safety, and respectability?
I have never been to Chicago and I know nothing about Bally's. All I know is that while history rarely outright repeats itself, it quite often rhymes.
It's kind of disconcerting to see the "black establishment" (aldermen, churches, etc.) on board with this. Do they really think this is a good idea? Is it that they received enough donations to make them think so?
Unfortunately that well-worn example usually only proves that "false positive" as a technical term fails to match people's intuitions. The underlying problem about the base rate is important to teach, but it's easy for well-meaning people to try and teach the base rate lesson but fail by instead teaching a bullshit gotcha about the definition of "false positive."
I'm glad your proposed solution was "Spend a few hours monkeying around in Jekyll to make dates radically less prominent [and] somehow alter the URL structure to take them out of URLs" — my conscience is repulsed by the thought of removing the date information entirely. It should be there for people who are actively seeking it out.
A lot of textual analysis is fairly mundane — it's the equivalent of a document allegedly from 1962 saying "when Reagan became President" or being typeset with LaTeX or referring to "selfies". Specialists, of course, can pull off much more sophisticated versions of this kind of thing ("that is a phrase that never appears elsewhere in the Pauline corpus and also it doesn't fit with Paul's soteriology and also it's from the wrong dialect of Greek, therefore it's probably not authentic").
Heh. Yes. Like "three of the Gospels were derived from a lost document called 'Q' "
How TF can they prove that to anyone who's not a specialist like them? And how can they ever be sure they're right, barring some new ancient text being discovered?
They can construct various internally-consistent models of what's going on, debate the merits of those models, and check them against the available evidence while doing their best to procure and evaluate new evidence. It's not fundamentally dissimilar from what, say, particle physicists do. The raw materials are different and so the research toolkit necessarily reflects those differences, but serious fields of intellectual inquiry all resemble each other in these fundamental ways.
Since you mentioned Q particularly, I remember the college course in which I learned about it was using Stevan Davies' New Testament Fundamentals, which my college-aged self was able to come to grips with pretty readily. For me that answers the question of "how do they prove that to anyone who's not a specialist" — they can publish a (relatively slim!) undergraduate textbook that incorporates the theory.
ok, thanks. The difference, though, is that even in astronomy (a non-experimental science) they can always do new observations, more precise ones, different parts of the spectrum, etc. etc. With ancient texts, there's no new data. That's the difference.
I actually hosted Svante Pääbo at Google, and he said that in his youth he was really interested in Egyptology, but then he shifted to recovering ancient DNA. 20 years later he had a reunion with his old Egyptology friends. They were still arguing about the same things.
Archaeology (as well as new technology that allows us to interpret archaeological finds in different/more interesting ways) is constantly providing new data that changes our understanding of the ancient world. To return to the original article, certainly Gibbon was a product of his time and his narrative relies heavily on a number of unsupported biases, but he also didn't have access to the last few hundred years of archaeological evidence which has totally transformed what we know about the Roman Empire.
Hand-waving. Are you seriously comparing "the last few hundred years of archaeological evidence" to the advances made by the Hubble and the James Webb, or other progress in astrophysics in the last 90 years?
They do have a trickle of new information. Gibbon probably IS outdated. But don't try to say that archaeology is anywhere close to other sciences.
I'm not really sure I understand your point - isn't it self-evident that there is new data available to different fields at different rates at different times? And that when there are fewer available data points, each newly available data point has more potential to totally shake up a field? We can quibble over what a "trickle" means, but to use an example from my own graduate research (Chinese Literature), pretty much every piece of scholarly research written a hundred years ago is now considered wrong, totally outdated, or requiring huge caveats. I personally wouldn't call that a trickle.
When you don't have a lot of data, you have to torture what you have more and more. That makes the discipline not "science" but "sciencey." Just like economics is not science but sciencey.
We might as well call any theoretical discipline like math or computer science “not science” then, but somehow I doubt that’ll persuade you since you appear to have a priori decided on the relative validity of a bunch of disciplines anyways.
