Wikipedia Survives While the Rest of the Internet Breaks

That's some of it, but certainly Wikipedia's editorial discussions differ from most forums in that its objective remains neutral, with worldwide access.

If the number of editors were limited, it could easily develop bias (see your own Facebook page for examples).

If the subject matters were limited, it could develop bias (WikiSolarEnergy wouldn't tend to attract anti-solar-energy types).

I routinely edit articles on Wikipedia without even logging in. The controversial articles, where you are likely to run into problems, are a small minority of what's there.

All my random edits go through and stick around. Probably because they're relatively simple. A table with data up until 2020, and I update it with sources up until 2024? Never had it removed.

I seldomly add much beyond such things though.

Clever. I had to read that repeatedly to get it.

Cf: The difference between theory and practice is: "Practice works, in theory."

Same with Communism. It works in practice, in theory, it can never work. /s

Uh.. <raises hand> I might be one of the few people who actually knows a bunch of the theory on why wikipedia works (properly). I had to do a bunch of research while working on wikipedia mediation and policies stuff, a long time ago.

I never got around to writing it all out though. Bits of it can be found in old policy discussions on bold-reverse-discuss, consensus, and etc.

I guess the first thing to realize is that wikipedia is split into a lot of pages, and n_editors for most pages in the long tail is very very low, so most definitely below n_dunbar[]; and really can be edited almost the same way wikipeida used to be back in 2002. At the same time a small number of pages above n_dunbar get the most attention and are the most messy to deal with.

Aaron Swartz actually did a bunch of research into some of the base statistics too, and he DID publish stuff online... let me look that up...

http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/whowriteswikipedia/

and especially * http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number (note I'm using lossely in empirical sense, where an online page might have a much lower actual limit than 150)

I'm not sure one can compare an hour of watching TV to an hour of researching and writing, the former is essentially mindless idling that does not take any mental effort. I wonder if there's a measurable difference in brain energy consumption, but probably not.

It’s possible to both criticise Wikipedia and celebrate it.

FWIW, i don't think of my comment as a criticism, Wikipedia is beautiful because of what it is. We should celebrate it as it is.

In my view it is very much the journey towards an unatainable goal that makes Wikipedia so inspiring. The Wikipedian's themselves admit it is a work in progress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_a_work_...

I think that's part of what makes Wikipedia beautiful.

In some ways it makes me think of the religious monolouge from the tv show babylon5 https://youtu.be/JjnpTcvGvts?si=6jdzDxVXOt--LNHC

> Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it.

> it

What is "it", if not truth?

> Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it.

I don't quite agree with this, unless what you mean is that there's no procedure we can follow which generates knowledge without the possibility of error. This doesn't mean that there's no such thing as truth, or that we can't generate knowledge. It just means that we can never guarantee that our knowledge doesn't contain errors. Another way to put this (for the philosophers among us) is that there is no way to justify a belief (such as a scientific theory) and as such there is no such thing as "justified true belief." But again, this doesn't mean that we cannot generate knowledge about the world.

It's not a coincidence that somebody might insult philosophy as a discipline and then drop some freshman dorm room level epistemology as evidence. If you don't know anything about a topic, it is very easy to dismiss it.

All you've accomplished here is to repackage the tired "there are no absolute truths" meme

Reading your comment, my mind is immediately awash with the endless sea of memories I cherish so dearly of discussions I've had with economists, psychologists, computer scientists, social scientists, political scientists, and of course let's not forget the physicists, chemists, biologists and mathematicians, and every scientist ever in fact, in which they, at all times, without fail, insisted on avoiding dogmatic truth!

Not like those hair-brained philosophers!

Sigh. One would have to possess an impressive level of ignorance in the history of philosophy and science in order to hold such a view. What would Raymond Smullyan, or Bertrand Russell, or Henri Poincaré, or who knows how many others, have to say about this remark, I wonder.

That’s a bad take. Science does seek Truth. Take physics’ equations and the universal constants for example. Don’t act like there’s not objective, truthful realities that are undiscovered.

Social “sciences”, humanities, and psychology maybe different

> Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it.

That’s not accurate. Science is orthogonal to belief in ultimate truth, and scientists have very diverse opinions on that point. Science is about finding more useful models to predict future observations, but whether and how that relates to truth is a question outside of the domain of science.

Scientists are trying to make predictions about the future based on past experiences (inductive reasoning).

Philosophers aren't necessarily trying to do that.

You can't get to capital T truth via inductive reasoning like science uses. Just because the apple fell from the tree every single previous time, does not necessarily imply that it is going to fall down next time.

But if you are after other forms of reasoning its possible. 1+1 will always equal 2. Why? Because you (implicitly) specified the axioms before hand and they imply the result. Talking about capital T truth is possible in such a situation.

So its perfectly reasonable for philosophers to still be after capital T truth. They are doing different things and using different methods than scientists do.

I understand the spirit of what you're saying, but I think this phrasing can be abused by burn-it-all-down skeptics, and I would prefer to say the notion of forward iteration depends on there being some such real thing as truth. The "relativity of wrong" essay by Isaac Asimov, recently upvoted on HN, captures the idea pretty well imo.

Yeah sure, all scientists have the same opinion on that matter, while all philosophers have a different obsolete dogmatic view, both camp are perfectly disjoint, and only the first one is acquired this fundamental truth^W continuously improving model always closer to truth^W something relative to something else and disconnected of any permanent absolute.

> 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.

When philosophers talk about 'Truth', they aren't searching for a perfect static artifact. They're investigating the concept itself, which is very necessary.

The entire project of model-building would be meaningless if there were no external reality to approximate. What is it that this "series of better and better models" is converging toward?

> The fact that it is false was noted on the talk page seven years ago, but this seems to bother no one.

From the talk page:

"This is inaccurate, as the linked Wikitionary page defines rectus as straight, not right"

From the Wiktionary page referenced: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rectus

   - led straight along, drawn in a straight line, straight, upright. 
   - (in general) right, correct, proper, appropriate, befitting.
   - (in particular) morally right, correct, lawful, just, virtuous, noble, good, proper, honest.

The rest of talk page comment: "I was told during my education that the rectus-right definition was used by Robert Sidney Cahn as an excuse to use his own initials, although I cannot find a source to back that up."

So, the wiktionary page literally defines it as right, and we see that it's not about direction but about being correct or incorrect. And then the follow up has literally no source to back it up.

So... "I think we can reasonably expect more."

The first claim is debunked. The second claim has nothing to back it up.

Is your proposal then to accept lies and claims without evidence?

Source? (Particularly for that last part.)

There is a difference between unintentionally introducing a bias and propaganda . The latter is a guided by professionals. It is not an accident.

It's impossible to produce such material with a complete lack of bias, sure.

I know of at least of one case in which a person publicly admits he is using Wikipedia to promote their political stances and who is right now at the center of an arbitration case in which he intends to silence opposition.

This is not that.

>I've also come to the slow realisation that this may be a fundamentally unsolvable problem & that simply categorising it as "biased beyond repair" & continuing to handle it in that manner may be the best thing we can do.

Is it a case of rot then? Or maybe I'm just biased, but I get the feel it wasn't always like this. It was never ideal, sure, but it used to be that I was wary of the site when checking, say, contemporary politics. Now it's a good chunk of recorded history instead.

A very simple example are ongoing cases where the identity of a perpetrator has been released by smaller or local agencies but not by larger ones. There are countless, countless other examples too, I can walk you through some others if it’ll be helpful.

Wikipedia doesn’t treat all sources as being equal, so even in cases where there’s no reasonable doubt towards a claim’s veracity, if the correct source hasn’t already claimed it, editors are liable to revert your edit.

Obviously this is a phenomenon that occurs much more often in ongoing or politically sensitive stories. That said, it’s important for people to understand the flaws in Wikipedias method of epistemology.

I can, but perhaps not with the specificity that you'd like. I should also preface this by saying I was involved in a community which is often stereotyped and denigrated by those on the "online left." When I was younger my parents divorced and my dad was treated very badly by the courts, by friends, and by society. He is a good man and I saw the ways in which he was systematically marginalised and outright discriminated against. It helped me understand why male suicide is so high. This led me to learning more about the men's rights movement. Nothing like the "manosphere," men's rights is interested in the many issues men face as a group; the various ways in which society and the law discriminate, and how men might adapt and help each other through some very difficult periods. For many men, it is mostly a support group. A place where they can talk about how they were raped and then the police laughed at them at the station. Or about how the judge awarded their wife full custody of their three children because she lied about being abused. Or about how they lost limbs in unsafe workplaces and no one cared. Or about how they feel suicidal. Etc. I organised support groups online and in real life. It was very positive and I believe we helped many men through some very dark times.

Apologies for the preamble, but I wanted to provide some context. In the 2000s, I began updating the Men's Rights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_rights_movement) Wikipedia page. Mostly statistics around things like suicide, homelessness, likelihood of being assaulted and murdered, disparities in the educational systems and courts, the high rates of workplace death and injury, etc. Always cited with peer reviewed or governmental data, and sometimes with "accepted" news articles. My goal was to inform people about the facts. Some time in the late 2000s and early 2010s, questionable edits began happening. For example, suicide statistics were removed periodically. The reasons were generally specious. Sometimes arguing about semantics. Sometimes the source. Sometimes procedural. One editor argued that the statistics should be contained as a subsection of the Feminism page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism), for example. They also tried to remove the page entirely. I began to notice that the people making the edits were frequent editors of related pages like Feminism.

It is at this point that I should point out that feminists and men's rights advocates don't always see eye to eye.

The questionable edits became malicious edits. Administrators began selectively enforcing rules. For example, applying a higher standard for sources on the Men's Rights page than they do on the Feminism page. They applied a banner at the very top of the page directing people to a feminist friendly page called the "men's liberation movement." They removed countless statistics and examples of inequalities in law and education. They changed the language in all sections to suggest or imply that the people involved in the movement are incorrect or mistaken. For example, the entire second paragraph (of only two) in the introduction is a refutation of the movement. Compare with the Feminism page. Criticisms are now located at the very bottom of the page in a sub-sub-section which doesn't even have its own anchor. It's a few small paragraphs now on a page with tens of thousands of words. In the "Suicide" section now they include, "studies have also found an over-representation of women in attempted or incomplete suicides and men in complete suicides." Just to make sure that no one could make the mistake of caring about men, *unless it's framed in relation to how women might be affected.*

I could go on but the stark differences between these pages should be extremely clear. They have not been edited for clarity or truth, but for ideological reasons. This is just one of millions of pages on which ideological wars are being waged. Unfortunately, the war is lost. WikiProjects, Arbitration Committees, and Administrators are all some version of far to extremely far left wing Americans. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger now calls the site "propaganda." (https://www.foxnews.com/media/wikipedia-co-founder-larry-san...) It's clear that many like this bias, but for those of us who used to be involved, we can confidently tell you that you should never, ever take what Wikipedia has to say at face value. It is much closer to propaganda than it is factual.

No. I've found this is one of those things that people simply have to see for themselves. I'd encourage you to try to make some edits and see what happens.

Its simply impossible to edit a public figures page at this point if you want an easy fail case to try.

now you can look it up yourself, i wont give links or anything. "kashmir" as is name, is an international dispute for control over a region between india and pakistan with the natives of that land wanting independence.

What UN recognized definition of the place is "india administered kashmir" and "pakistan administered kashmir" that is split between the two till the time the issue is resolved before the UN. This is a internationally accepted definition that encompasses the situation being active.

what indian based troll factory does is, unilaterally call it "indian UT of jammu and kashmir" and "pakistan occupied kashmir".

I resisted for as much i could, i would revert the edits and they would be back, i would give evidence of the same in order to maintain status quo but sadly i could not keep up. i was overrun and it felt like being eaten by a mob of hungry zombies.

will of the people does? what is truth?

> And as you say, Wikipedia has the built-in antidote with the other language versions and the Talk pages.

The Talk pages are just a first introduction to the sheer madness behind the scenes; one quickly starts to realize that relative few people are calling the shots in a lot of places and that their personal biases are causing serious problems. The "Reliable Sources" policy would be atrocious enough already (there are no objective processes for challenging a source's inclusion or exclusion from the informal list on a given topic, only political ones) without the "power user" editors who are clearly abusing it.

It's staggering how many articles get deleted despite having a dozen citations and at least some level of notability.

Even more concerning is that the deletion "consensus" is often formed by just half a dozen people who almost always cast a deletion vote.

I pop into AFD discussions occasionally and try to put my thumb on the scale but always end up disappointed with the results.

Someone should make a "Deleted From Wikipedia" website composed of nothing but Wikipedia articles that were deleted due to supposedly insufficient coverage/notability.

I’ve had a similar experience. I’ve edited Wikipedia pages for ages. I was able to create Wikipedia pages a while ago. Recently, I tried to create a page (“quantity controls”, a less well known relative of price controls in economics) and it got deleted for bullshit reasons.

Me getting free movies and music, piracy good

Meta getting free books to train an LLM, piracy bad