Hello everyone!
euserx
Karma: −1
Do you know if a competitor could legally start by copying Wikipedia’s articles? That would make competing projects much more viable.
There’s already one which did exactly that a year ago—Justapedia. Founder is Betty Wills who is surprisingly an established contributor in Wikipedia itself. As far as I understand they’re experimenting ways that will prevent them from Wikipedia’s mistakes again, such as reformative/preventative enforcement approach and a binding commitment favoring the idea of inclusionism.
Why divide efforts if the same forces will create the same problems?
The same way as how it’s better to distribute power among companies in a market and let them compete with each other, rather than concentrating these among a company which then will become a monopoly which the end result inevitably involves abuses of power, i.e. enshittification. If readers don’t like how a particular encyclopedia is going, they can at least vote with their feet and switch to another platform so much that the former will have to adapt to changes that could make them become appealing to readers again.
Communities are made up of people who have subjective experiences. It’s nothing that you can’t prevent.
Wikipedia is a place where that happens because of the high-quality level that Wikipedia has.
Wikipedia is also pretty much the only place where human history can be written and edited which affects the knowledge of future generations. That alone had given it so much strategic value and incentives for all sorts of actors to control or game it, however there’s as if the higher echelons are trapped in office politics and doesn’t really seem to realise what sort of implications are going to occur if they let themselves be gamed by malicious actors, which is exactly what happened during the Holocaust distortion scandal which was uncovered by Shira Klein and Jan Grabowski.
Think about this, if people decide to stop using Facebook for any reason because they hate Mark Zuckerberg and his policies, there are off-ramps like Reddit and Twitter to switch to. Not the case for Wikipedia, where no meaningful redresses had existed for a very long time are possible if they fall out with Wikipedia for some reason. Practically almost all of general-level knowledges we learn on the Internet comes in whole or in part from Wikipedia. The analogy about the restaurant in the food desert by OP sounds about right.
After all, despite backbreaking efforts by Jess Wade, Wikipedia still has systemic biases against female figures, such as usage of citations.
Power is a strong source for corruption, no exceptions. It’s amplified in a large magnitude on Wikipedia which acts like a monopoly on the knowledge market. The other day a journalist has uncovered two dozen Weinstein type scandals on Wikipedia perpertrated by admins and users which could do far larger reputational damage against Wikipedia movement itself if published in the media.
In terms of off-ramps and alternatives there exist two platforms now—Encycla and Justapedia.
Edit: Since Gwern has commented here as well here is their essay expressing concerns about the dominance of deletionism at Wikipedia.
Okay. So you say that there is a fear of undue manipulation behind so-called deletionism, however that alone is vulnerable to subjective interpretation as well, same as the interpretation of notability. From experience and that of others like the OP there are cases that even if given information fits well up to the standards of neutrality, verifiably, notability, not a copyright violation, relevant enough and doesn’t present issues in terms of “biographical of living persons”, they are still left out on pertaining articles or topics by the whims of “VNOT” leaving rooms or holes for groups of editors to exclude certain information simply because they “don’t like it”.
People are bound to have radically different views on any minutae at any given moment. Squeeze them altogether in one place means that they are bound to generate large conflicts and issues, which Wikipedia is currently facing since it’s pretty much the only place where people can “change or dictate history”.
I have to agree with StartAtTheEnd that the three major factors behind biased or otherwise inadequate articles which are prone to edit conflicts are: Emotional, ideological/political, and economic.
I’m a little worried I wont be able to hold them together. Nightmares where everyone splits off into a bunch of cults, treading on each others’ namespaces, diverging into babel.
Unfortunately it might have boiled over weeks ago, when a WikiConference event in Toronto Reference Library was hit by a phony bomb threat, reportedly by disgruntled user(s) who were treated badly there.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/bomb-threat-toronto-reference-library-1.7026287
https://twitter.com/AustinReporting/status/1723351006975582613
One thing that was proposed somewhere in the Wikimedia’s internal mailing list is to introduce a reliability metrics level for all articles in Wikipedia and be prominently displayed to all readers. That could be a sensible compromise approach instead of subjecting it to the binary dillema of festering malicious manipulation through inclusion and making the whole “systemic bias” issue more serious by not including or censoring given topics.
I have to agree with both the original creator of the post (since it is released under public domain elsewhere and I simply copied it to here) and mako yass that notability is genuinely subjective. There are even large differences in the minutae on how to treat information that are edge-case reliable; some advocate exclusion while some advocate conditional inclusion with in-line citation and so on.
That’s a very interesting suggestion that many have thought about!
A journalist has uncovered two dozen Weinstein type scandals on Wikipedia perpertrated by admins and users which could do far larger reputational damage against Wikipedia movement itself if published in the media. The damage though, might made what FTX did to EA look like peanuts.
https://rdrama.net/post/215764/there-are-two-dozen-sexual-harassment
Edit: Interesting investigation on the Brooklyn professor, although I have to disagree on the notion as expressed below.
The success in spinning the WP articles at the height of the Salazar war, where even federal judges were getting removed, would indeed thrill the Lannan Foundation (even though Lerner’s self-confessed violation of multiple WP policies, repeat ban evasion, sockpuppeting, and IP hopping are all clearcut violation of the CFAA, which is a federal criminal act, BTW, and if they did any advocacy for Judge Lamberth, or for/against any other politicians involved, then they may have crossed the red line for a 501(c)3 which is allowed to advocate politics but not do anything that is for/against specific candidates on pain of forfeiting nonprofit status, and I imagine all sorts of interesting consequences like perjury on the Form 990s).
If CFAA is used to prosecute the Brooklyn professor for violating the terms of services pertaining to ban evasion or sockpuppetry, many dangerous slippery slopes are going to be created as other tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, TikTok and Snapchat will find incentive to abuse it to the fullest. On Reddit there exists a federated environment where volunteer-moderators controls subreddits instead of staffmembers; most of them had no specialized training and are prone to so-called “powertripping”.
Here’s a gedankenexperiment. You post off the cuff remarks on topical subreddits that doesn’t have alternatives elsewhere on Reddit, and a mod bans you for no or spurious reasons because they don’t agree with you, or something. You appeal it to mods and Reddit but to no avail as the former proceeds to mute you. You let it slide for now until one day you got a neccessity to post there again, maybe seeking help, or maybe countering someone who was posting disinformation there after seeing no other commenters on there yet. Congratulations! You just technically violate the CFAA!
So what then? Getting disproportionately punished by Reddit and the USG like what happened to Aaron Swartz? Many of you may have now forgotten that Aaron Swartz committed suicide because of disproportionate lifetime punishments in the form of felonies after simply downloading some files from JSTOR past usage quotas? The Internet is going to be a CCP-style dystopia if such an argument is allowed to pass in the court. That argument advocating for disproportionate punishment is what costed Aaron Swartz his life.
Wikipedia as a concept itself is great, however there are ample evidences that Wikipedia as a community has lost track to its original ideals and seemingly turned it into a toxic place where people compete to be mean with each other.
A journalist has uncovered two dozen Weinstein type scandals on Wikipedia perpertrated by admins and users which could do far larger reputational damage against Wikipedia movement itself if published in the media. The damage though, might made what FTX did to EA look like peanuts.
https://rdrama.net/post/215764/there-are-two-dozen-sexual-harassment
It was indeed intermixed in some sections. The crux of it is to recognise that Wikipedia functions as a monopoly in knowledge market nowadays, and the solution is to assist the rise of a few new general-reference encyclopedias who will share the knowledge market with Wikipedia, as a minimum.
Wikipedia is not so great, and what can be done about it.
Confirming confirmed :p
The Arbitration Committee (Arbcom) of Wikipedia was given a fair chance to actually stop the Holocaust distortion problem by banning all the ultranationalist distortionists from the topic area. The actually doled out measures were far lenient than expected with Piotrus, the ringleader of the distortionists, walking off scots-free, although with all fairness some such as Volunteer Marek received bans from the topic area.
This Telegraph feature article begs to differ. Wikipedia has been used as contents for eternal disks in space missions, court judgements and even is part of a trope in Andy Weir’s Hail Mary where it’s implicitly touted as the sum and representative of human civilization when the astronaut gives a copy of it to the fictional aliens from the Epsilon Eridani system. No other encyclopedia, not even the Britannica which has far less entries yet are higher in quality, enjoys that kind of treatment. With that I stand by the OP and other’s belief that Wikipedia acts like a monopoly on knowledge, at least on the Internet.
It doesn’t mean that it’s not worth a try though. In fact this could be one of the best candidates for cause prioritization. After all the community issues have boiled over weeks ago, when a WikiConference event in Toronto Reference Library was hit by a phony bomb threat, reportedly by disgruntled user(s) who were treated badly there.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/bomb-threat-toronto-reference-library-1.7026287
https://twitter.com/AustinReporting/status/1723351006975582613
There’s also an unpublished book detailing Wikipedia problems and scandals by Eric Barbour, which was reviewed by Larry Sanger and Andreas Kolbe (yes, that one!) and which summaries can be viewed here. It’s not just an imperfect institution; it’s a corrupt one. WMF is unexpectedly litigation happy against anyone, especially investigative journalists who dared to lift their veils and hence the book and the general idea that “Wikipedia has a bad side too” remains largely absent in mainstream discourse so far.