Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/717322/wikipedia-attacks-neutrality-history-jimmy-wales

by leotravis10 • 11 months ago

602 420 11 months ago

krunck• 11 months ago

djoldman• 11 months ago

Wikipedia is the largest compendium of human knowledge ever assembled, with more than 7 million articles in its English version, the largest and most developed of 343 language projects.

but:

The collections of the Library of Congress include more than 32 million catalogued books and other print materials in 470 languages; more than 61 million manuscripts; the largest rare book collection in North America ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress#Holdings

Jordan-117• 11 months ago

To me, "compendium" means a single organized reference, not a collection of many different individual works. More encyclopedia than library.

dmbche• 11 months ago

From Merriam Webster:

COMPENDIUM Brief summary of a larger work or of a field of knowledge : abstract

The library is more extensive, but they don't have the same goals. I'd even argue that part of Wikipedia's quality is it's ability to remain small relative to the knowledge it summarises.

Cthulhu_7• 11 months ago

Different things though; "catalogued books and other print materials" is not the same as "compendium of human knowledge". The former is an archive, the latter is an encyclopedia.

You won't find a 1920's copy of a newspaper in Wikipedia, but you will find articles about events from then that link to said newspaper.

Both are super important though, Wikipedia can't exist as it does now without archives (digitized or at the very least referentiable).

zahlman10• 11 months ago

Those who object to this comparison might also consider that Stack Overflow hosts about 24 million publicly visible questions. And that's just (in theory) about programming!

glimshe• 11 months ago

The "largest compendium of human knowledge ever assembled" isn't Wikipedia. It's Anna's Archive.

Especially relevant when reading this from a paywalled article.

gosub100• 11 months ago

True but we are in dire need of a killer search engine for it. We're hopefully just a couple years away from a great self-hosted search and life-like TTS for massive ebook collections.

bawolff7• 11 months ago

There has been this trend recently of calling Wikipedia the last good thing on the internet.

And i agree its great, i spend an inordinate amount of my time on Wikimedia related things.

But i think there is a danger here with all these articles putting Wikipedia too much on a pedestal. It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws.

The true best part of Wikipedia is that its a work in progress and people are working to make it a little better everyday. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact we aren't there yet. We'll never be "there". But hopefully we'll continue to be a little bit closer every day. And that is what makes Wikipedia great.

potato3732842• 11 months ago

When you put something on a pedestal it almost always eventually gets co-opted by people who's goals are not noble enough to build a pedestal themselves and who are seeking a ready made pedestal from which to spew their garbage.

Of all the demographics who should understand this, you'd think that people complaining about the failure of all the other institutions would be high on the list.

mdp2021• 11 months ago

It's a miracle that the model of voluntary contribution from random agents and imperfect overview partially worked.

The science that could emerge by studying the phenomenon could constitute a milestone.

bryanlarsen• 11 months ago

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.

ozim2• 11 months ago

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.

e3bc54b2• 11 months ago

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

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 11 months ago

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

xorvoid• 11 months ago

I would say this is all we really should reasonably expect from our knowledge consensus systems. In fact it’s the same values that “science” stands on: do our best everyday and continue to try improving.

It’s a bit hard for me to imagine something better (in practice). It’s easy to want more or feel like reality doesn’t live up to one’s idealism.

But we live here and now in the messiness of the present.

Viva la Wikipedia!

abnercoimbre• 11 months ago

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.

visarga3• 11 months ago

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.

thaumasiotes2• 11 months ago

I would say this is all we really should reasonably expect from our knowledge consensus systems.

Compare this text from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_configuration :

> The most common labeling method uses the descriptors R or S and is based on the Cahn–Ingold–Prelog priority rules. R and S refer to rectus and sinister, Latin for right and left, respectively.[2]

This claim is actually repeated further down in the article. The fact that it is false was noted on the talk page seven years ago, but this seems to bother no one. After all, there's a citation.

I think we can reasonably expect more. Wikipedia reliably fails at very, very easy problems of "knowledge consensus".

mmphosis• 11 months ago

Wikipedia is my default search engine.

balder19912• 11 months ago

Wikipedia is my default search engine

https://paste.sr.ht/~awal/2310cfca431e9f723df281d02558eaebd7...

ThinkingGuy• 11 months ago

Mine, too. 1. Wikipedia for general knowledge questions ("What languages are spoken in Nigeria?") 2. Wolfram Alpha for time/date/number questions ("How many days until 2026-07-01?") 3. Mapquest for driving directions 4. DuckDuckGo for everything else

IAmBroom7• 11 months ago

To say "It isn't perfect" is simply to admit it's a human endeavor.

mrandish• 11 months ago

I agree with both your points. Wikipedia is extremely useful because it's generally very good - and it's also not perfect.

I'll add I don't think it can be any closer to "perfect" than it is because the same fundamental traits which lead to its imperfections also enable its unique value - like speed, breadth, depth and broad perspectives. The only areas where it might very occasionally not be ideal tend to be contentious political and culture war topics or newer niche articles with low traffic. Basically topics where some people care too much and those where not enough people care at all.

But this isn't as big a downside as it might be because anyone can look at an article's talk page and edit history and immediately see if it's a contentiously divisive topic or, on the other end of the spectrum, see when there's been little to no discussion.

SlowTao4• 11 months ago

The last good place is https://neal.fun

aftbit• 11 months ago

Excellence is never finished:

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/64d6548c19f38a...

obscure-enigma• 11 months ago

the fact that anyone can be an editor on Wikipedia scares me. I mostly use it for STEM, current affairs and timelines, stuff that can't be easily fiddled—unlike topics around history & politics. These are highly baised on wikipedia. For instance, look at wikipediocracy.com

adonovan• 11 months ago

Agreed. It's funny how only a couple of years ago we all told schoolchildren "stop citing Wikipedia, anyone can edit it, read an actual book!" yet now in this benighted era of AI we urge them to consult Wikipedia for "the truth" because it's not the hallucination of a machine.

Yes, it has its flaws, but I plan to keep on editing and donating.

nostromo• 11 months ago

If you choose to donate, know that a small fraction of your donation goes to Wikipedia. Most of your donation goes to unrelated projects.

Wikipedia could function forever without another donation if they wanted to.

citizenpaul3• 11 months ago

I'm not so sure I go there less and less. Wikipedia is very biased and turf guarded against negative factually true information even when it meets all requirements it will often be taken down automatically with no recourse. Many pages are functionally not editable because of turf guarding.

Anything vaguely sociopolitical is functionally censored on it and wikipedia does nothing about it even if they don't support it.

LastTrain6• 11 months ago

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

lucideer4• 11 months ago

Firstly let me agree with both current sibling commenters: zero bias is impossible & the brand & extent of Wikipedia's biases is distinctly bad.

That said, I find Wikipedia's biases predictable, avoidable (topic specific) & also very interesting as a sociological study in itself.

Firstly, it reminds us of inherent bias in (mostly colonial-written) paper encyclopedia of the past. There has never been an unbiased encyclopedia written & seeing the biases fully sourced & rapidly evolving in realtime serves as an excellent crystallisation of slower processes in previous works: highlighting that many of the historical "facts" we all grew up with were ultimately fed to us by similarly biased groups.

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.

ragazzina• 11 months ago

factually true information [...] meets all requirements [...] it will be taken down

Can you make such an example?

techpineapple5• 11 months ago

What are people regularly using Wikipedia for that the bias is that terrible? Are you exclusively looking up controversial conflicts, right wing leaders and climate change? I just have never had my everyday curiosity cross paths with only those things which are controversial by Wikipedia standards.

Also I find a lot of people’s disagreements usually come down to “ok, I see that the information that I thought was censored is actually available but not in the format that I prefer”

And if you’re looking for objective information about the Israel Palestine conflict you’re hardly going to get it anywhere.

2Gkashmiri3• 11 months ago

I used to edit for wikipedia. I saw a "problem" where a specific troll factory was pushing a particular narrative which is factually contrary to international law.

I held out for as long as I could but it was emotionally draining

throwaway20373• 11 months ago

    > factually contrary to international law

Can you provide us with more specifics? I am curious to hear more.

kortilla• 11 months ago

What does that mean? Laws don’t define truth.

chris_wot7• 11 months ago

It's also full of bullies and those who are drinking from the cool-aid.

KingOfCoders• 11 months ago

"It isn't perfect."

Articles about some chemical process are fine, indeed often excellent.

Everything where facts get filtered and presented, is bad. Read about real world events - especially where different groups or countries were involved - in three different languages on Wikipedia, and you'd think three different universes exist.

throwaway20373• 11 months ago

    > Read about real world events - especially where different groups or countries were involved - in three different languages on Wikipedia, and you'd think three different universes exist.

Can you give a clear example? I would like to read it for myself.

BlueTemplar4• 11 months ago

It isn't so much as bad, as inevitable. And as you say, Wikipedia has the built-in antidote with the other language versions and the Talk pages.

socalgal2• 11 months ago

people are also working to o make it worse everyday. We’re lucky the people working to make it better are winning. It it’s a hard battle

yehat• 11 months ago

Wikipedia has gone too far from being what it was meant to be. I can agree it is the "last good thing on the internet" with the caveat - "for some people". Is is neither objective, thus not scientific, nor complete in terms of depth of the information. All of this happens because of invading obsession with "modern" ideologies that pollute and distort the pure knowledge gathering, which is a very complex matter itself that becomes a mission impossible in the case of Wikipedia.

lucideer4• 11 months ago

I used to contribute semi-regularly to Wikipedia in the past, but tried contributing recently & found the experience to be off-putting (to put it mildly).

I also have long been frustrated with certain areas of Wikipedia that I feel struggle so significantly with NPV that they're rendered beyond useless, likely net harmful. (These are not the topics I've attempted contributing to recently, I wouldn't dare).

I'm continuously annoyed by the contrast of their overbearing donation pushes with the overspends in their published reports.

BUT all that said I do sometimes need reminding in today's world how much of a miracle Wikipedia still is. Not something to be taken for granted. And on the overspends: this is hard to qualify given there's really no comparable projects in existence. Maybe this is just the price we need to pay.

lucideer4• 11 months ago

To add a thought on tackling the listed faults:

1. I suspect the NPV problem may be a fundamentally unsolvable problem (or at least one that would literally take a global paradigm shift in how all societies are structured to do so). This seems outside of Wikipedia's control. Attempting any draconian measures to tackle it might have negative knock-on effects on many of the other assets that give Wikipedia it's value.

2. The spending problem, as I said, is subjective & might simply be a case of efficiency being incompatible with an organisational culture that produces such a miraculous thing. I honestly suspect the opposite is true: I personally think the overspends are indicative of organisational disfunction that could seriously hurt the project in the longer term, but that's pure gut feeling on my part, based on nothing of substance. Who knows.

3. The increasing difficulty in contributing (80% of edits coming from 1% of editors) on the other hand is - imo - a potentially terminal problem & one that needs to be addressed urgently if we want to keep this resource alive.

In the past, Wikipedia vandalism was a rite-of-passage of school & college kids. This obviously needs counter-measures but it really feels like today's Wikipedia has gone so far in the opposite direction as to entirely dissuade new contributors. Old Wikipedia used to be filled with User: namespaced subpages with long form essays on the ever running debate between deletionism & inclusionism. In today's Wikipedia, the inclusionists have emigrated, tired of battle, & the remaining deletionists bravely prevent any budding new contributor from having a positive welcoming community experience by quickly auto-deleting their WIP stubs or moving them into esoteric red-taped namespaced processes nobody knows how to navigate. It's a deeply unwelcoming environment for new users, especially young people. I'd love to see an age profile of the population of frequent editors.

ascorbic• 11 months ago

I was thinking the other day about which websites might still exist in 100 years on whatever the web becomes, and Wikipedia to me seemed the most likely. It manages to be both stable and flexible. Functionally it's almost identical in all important ways to how it was ~25 years ago, but organisationally it has adapted to handle the incredible increase in scale. It is certainly flawed, because it's made by humans, but I think it may be the web's greatest achievement.

stevage2• 11 months ago

I would say that OpenStreetMap is also a pretty good thing on the internet. Maybe not quite as impactful, and I'd say less well run, and rougher around the edges, but it's largely resisted being taken over by evil corporations or heavily influenced in bad directions.

torium2• 11 months ago

Torrents are also a good thing on the internet.

trollbridge• 11 months ago

Basically. Things that don’t rely either ads or data collection.

jowea2• 11 months ago

The difference is that there are corporate alternatives to OSM, and they're popular. The closest alternative to Wikipedia is asking an LLM to read Wikipedia for you.

rstarast• 11 months ago

Add musicbrainz to the list. It was weirdly comforting to rediscover it 15 years later with nothing really having changed (for better and worse)

fngjdflmdflg• 11 months ago

This doesn't make sense because Wikipedia is a collection of sources, most of which are on the internet. If would be surprising if Wikipedia was a good thing but the online sources it uses are bad.

phantomathkg• 11 months ago

Wikipedia can be bad because it is edited by human. And because it is edited by human, the side that has more people will win.

For example, Wikipedia has a Chinese issue. [1]

Because both Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese both live under the Chinese language in Wiki (And we have a dropdown within Chinese wiki to choose what regional variants we want to read). There's a constant wiki edit war. This is not only happened to the political topic, but also how something should be phased. Even though Chinese officially ban access to Wikipedia by the Great Firewall, enough people VPN and manage to edit wiki pages by pages, and more annoyingly, there are more wiki admin coming from PRC than Taiwan/Hong Kong/Macau etc.

So you cannot assume Wikipedia is neutral.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59081611

pohl• 11 months ago

I've heard it expressed as "the last good thing on the internet" many times, but it never occurred to me to interpret that to mean it has attained perfection in some regard. I always took it to mean that it has thus far evaded the enshitification trends.

chermi• 11 months ago

It suffers similar to stackoverflow in terms of making it excessively hard to contribute to something you really do know a lot about. I don't really see a solution for hot topics like isreal-palestine. However, I should be able to improve a page on some physics subject I'm an expert in that has been turned into an obvious ad for some professor's niche work.

glenstein3• 11 months ago

It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws.

I don't know that the attackers against Wikipedia are advocating for a modest point like that, which I would think even proponets accept as a truism. I think Wikipedia is just another variation on institutional knowledge, and, as the world descends into misinformation and authoritarianism, it was inevitable it too would be attacked for perceived "bias."

Everything from global warming to vaccines, to newer and newer frontiers we never would have guessed, like hurricane trajectories or drones or air traffic, have fallen one after another to a kind of reactionary skepticism, resentful of the fact that these domains are controlled by real facts, and not merely participatory collective storytelling. There are some things left, that we problaby think could never get politicized, that will be. Pickleball rules? Quantum mechanics? Baseball history? Soon longstanding uncontroversial claims belonging to those are going to fall into the category of essentially contested concepts.

So Wikipedia, with ordinary and lonstanding requirements for reliable sourcing, and decades of policy on what that means in reaction to countlessly many debates, is resilient against the kind of recreational, hedonic skepticism that the masses use to dismantle other knowledge claims.

So "well wikipedia's not perfect" kind of rubs me the wrong way because it seems like it implies we should be more welcoming of this attitude of hedonic skepticism, which has been so destructive. I think it should be celebrated. Authoritative factual validity, and the norms that make it possible, used to be uncontroversial. And thus far, social media misinformation has outcompeted fact checkers, but not (yet) Wikipedia. I feel like that's never been more important.

BrtByte3• 11 months ago

What makes it remarkable isn't that it gets everything right, but that it's constantly trying to

NeliX4• 10 months ago

For me the real power of Wikipedia lies in its local language editions. English articles often reflect only positive perspective, while local versions bring fresh viewpoints. Local language have sharper criticism that gets toned down in English.

hungmung3• 11 months ago

Honestly Wikipedia+Archive.org remaining online have national security implications (not just USA, but any democracy). Though I'd wager the current administration would take a different view.

em-bee• 11 months ago

what are the implications?

hungmung3• 11 months ago

We've always been at war with Eurasia. Not all threats are external.

IAmBroom7• 11 months ago

I can see the national security implications for countries like Russia and China, that are widely known for pushing false histories backed up with state punishment, but in high-functioning democracies the state does not control public speech.

jacobgkau2• 11 months ago

national security implications (not just USA, but any democracy)

That's not really "national," is it?

hungmung3• 11 months ago

National security doesn't just refer to USA...?

France has national security considerations, just like the UK, Uruguay and Uganda. They'd all benefit from having open access to verifiable information.

GartzenDeHaes• 11 months ago

Getting ready for doomsday? You need a solar powered, wifi-enabled, offline wikipedia server.

https://piwithvic.com/offline-wikipedia-with-kiwix/

cormorant• 11 months ago

There are mirrors and backups of Wikipedia. Archive.org has no substitute.

zahlman10• 11 months ago

archive.today at least allows people to preserve snapshots of selected websites, which is often important for being able to demonstrate that mainstream sources have edited or deleted content without proper acknowledgment.

Interestingly enough, Wikipedia once (I haven't checked if it's still in effect) blacklisted links to there, with compelling evidence (if you read any of the discussion behind the scenes) that it was actually about certain admins and power users trying to maintain control over the bias in main-space article content.

Aurornis• 11 months ago

In the past few years I've noticed more and more issues on Wikipedia. It has never been perfect, but in the past it seemed like anything without sufficient sources would quickly get flagged as "citation needed" or questionable statements would get a warning label slapped on them.

Now, I can visit pages for certain medical conditions that contain completely unsourced claims with no "citation needed" nor any warnings. When I try to search for it, I often trace it back to alternative medicine or pseudoscience influencers.

The sad part is that when I've tried to remove obviously flimsy information, someone will immediately come along and add it back. Unless you're ready to spend months in a Wikipedia edit war with someone who obsesses over a page, there's no point in even trying. These people know the rules and processes and will use every one of them against you. When that fails, they'll try to pull rank. If that fails, they'll just quietly continue editing and rewriting (possibly from alt accounts) until you get too tired to fight the battle any more.

ars• 11 months ago

I've noticed this exact same thing. And I too just gave up. People have their pet causes and they force the article to match, and normal, non-obsessed people give up.

Any controversial topic should never be read on Wikipedia, it will not be accurate.

mothballed4• 11 months ago

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&...

pessimizer3• 11 months ago

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.

zozbot234• 11 months ago

The sad part is that when I've tried to remove obviously flimsy information, someone will immediately come along and add it back.

The trick is to write about your proposed edit on the talk page and wait a few days. If nobody has complained, you make the edit and write "see talk" in the edit summary. The notion that you should push an edit first and wait for someone to revert you just doesn't work in practice except for trivial typo fixes. Discuss your edit in depth, then push it once you have a presumed near-consensus for it.

Kim_Bruning4• 11 months ago

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?

arjie• 11 months ago

Do you recall a couple? It's one of my minor hobbies when I'm bored to try to find sources and fix Wikipedia articles that others have trouble with. As examples that this is a good faith attempt and not the usual online comment technique of "oh yeah? show me!", here are some stories of edits I got in that others said they had trouble with:

- https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2024-10-17/Path_Depende...

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40655989

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Weierstrass_function#Accu...

And my personal favourite is recently when the most ridiculous thing was added to Bukele's Gang Crackdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_c...

If you still have the desire to have some of these fixed, post here and I'll put it in my queue and get to it at some point. If you don't want the resulting interaction from other commenters here, send it to my email (in profile).

Wikipedia is ultimately a consensus summarizer frequently mistaken for a truth-seeker. So you have to make the case for something being true somewhere where the experts live, and then Wikipedia can express the experts' opinion. But crucially, it is not truth-seeking on its own.

Wikipedianon5• 11 months ago

The article criticizes doxxing but well-known Wikipedia editors doxx each other all the time... There's a site called Wikipediocracy that's been around for 20 years and an Arbitrator (Wiki's Supreme Court) was suspended for leaking secret deliberations to the "private" section of the forum—just make an account and you can see it too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

According to that Arbitrator, Wikimedia gave a legal opinion that he violated the law in doing so:

"Well, I got a result today: the ombuds commisssion found that I did indeed violate the access to nonpublic data policy, and has issued a final warning to me. Apparently mailing list comments are, "under a contemporary understanding of privacy law and the policies in question," nonpublic data on the same level as CU data or supressed libel."

https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=350266#p350...

Wasn't the first time he did it either... Officially, community guidelines only apply on the site itself. Once you get into the Discords or forums, doxxing is common and tolerated. Admins and arbitrators are happy to participate on those forums under their Wikipedia usernames because they feel like they need doxx to take action against those trying to harm Wikipedia. And because it (usually) isn't them doing the doxxing, it's ok. There's even an "alt-right identification thread" where established editors can request doxxing from people who don't link their accounts onwiki.

Generally this targets newer editors who aren't in a clique yet. e.g. The person who made "Wikipedia and Antisemitism" got doxxed. Once you get to a certain level, you are expected to participate in these "offwiki" forums to get anything done.

Some people try to complain about it but it doesn't end well. Generally you don't want to fuck with them because by the time you find out about Wikipediocracy, you've already revealed too much and are doxxable. & unlike nation-state actors they have inside information and understand the site.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...

If you do choose to edit Wikipedia, use a burner email and only edit during the same one or two hours of the day so they can't track timezones. & don't post any photos or information on where you live nor attend meetups.

There are some good people but once you get deeply involved it is a toxic community. Sorry for the rant but it pisses me off whenever people talk about how great the Wikipedia community is as someone who's into the internal shit. it's the worst place to get involved in "free culture".

howenterprisey4• 11 months ago

Hi. I was an arbitrator who voted to suspend that arbitrator. There was no doxxing involved, which anyone can verify. Barely anything else in your comment is correct either. Doxxing is an issue but from where I sit it's much worse from people outside Wikipedia.

IAmBroom7• 11 months ago

Also, the poster "Wikipedianon" makes Tu Quoque fallacies. The fact that some Wikipedia editors have engaged in doxxing of others doesn't make it less of a problem for the government to do so.

Unsurprisingly, "Wikipedianon" is a hit-and-run profile created just for this post, AFAICT.

Wikipedianon5• 11 months ago

Beeblebrox leaked internal mailing list messages to a forum known for doxxing in violation of the NDA they signed.

i know that Beeblebrox did not doxx anyone and I said that in my comment. my point is leaking information to a doxxing forum sends the wrong message and is dangerous.

Maybe you should create an account and look at the "Wikimedian Folks Too Embarrassing for Public Viewing" forum and get back to me. Or do something about it before the Trump administration uses this as an excuse to censor enwiki. Either way here are some excerpts if you don't want to.

From the first page, here's an active editor (iii, known as jps or ජපස) doxxing someone about UFOs. I took out the names to be polite but it's all there:

https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=14172

"Is [username 1] (T-C-L) an alt account of [username 2] (T-C-L)?

For those who are not aware, [username2] is the name of an account used by one [redacted] on various platforms up until about 2024 when he more or less abandoned them. That account also was involved in the ongoing game of accusing [redacted] (T-H-L) of being [redacted] (T-C-L) which is about as fairly ludicrous an attempt at matching a Wikipedia username as I've ever seen.

Anyway, I feel like maybe he thought "If [__] can do it, so can I." And maybe that's the origin of the VPP.

Oh, this is about UFOs. Yeah, I'm in the shit. Maybe someone can link to some other stuff for you to read, but I just want to drop this here because I have nowhere else I get to speculate on these matters and everyone loves a good conspiracy theory data dump from time to time "

Here's the thread "Who is Wikipedia editor i.am.qwerty"

https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=13821

"I.am.a.qwerty (T-C-L) gathered up a bunch of those articles and some earlier material to create Wikipedia and antisemitism..."

It goes on:

"But who is I.am.a.qwerty? Let's suppose, just for the sake of argument, that I.a.am.a.qwerty is a PhD student named [real name]. Specifically, this [real name]:"

    "[real name] is a PhD candidate [major] at [university name]. He received his BA (Hons) in [major] from [university]. Previously [real name] received his rabbinical ordination from the [other school] in [location] in [year]. [real name] is also the [job title] at [organization]."

I can't imagine any other community tolerating its members going on KiwiFarms and encouraging doxxing of other community members, so long as they didn't technically engage in it. But Wikipedia does.

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 11 months ago

This comment is farcical. Supposing you are right and that there was "no doxxing involved", it's still impossible for an outsider like most of us here, to verify it. Especially if there is such a thing as non-public discourse of any kind.

It is not a transparent organization, and it does not even pay lip service to the effort of transparency. It is large enough of an organization that it is an absurd claim, on its face, that there are not cliques and factions who would do such things if it were at all possible.

You investigated yourselves and found no evidence of wrongdoing.

kurtreed2• 11 months ago

I think I've agree with you on this one. Even on Wikipedia there's a ton of pages like SPI pages which can be indistinguishable from actual malicious doxxings.

Not to mention that there a whole load of #MeToo scandals which would doom Wikipedia if exposed to the media.

https://www.reddit.com/r/JustWikipediaThings/wiki/scandals

lenerdenator• 11 months ago

This is because of the lack of a profit motive and sane expectations on salary from the people running the Wikimedia project.

I think that starting in the 1980s, people started to expect anything involving information technology created immediately-accountable monetary value on a massive scale after seeing the fortunes of people like Gates, Wozniak, Jobs, et al. This was further boosted by the Dotcom bubble.

The fact is, a significant fraction of IT is indeed profitable, but applying the model of perpetual growth is not appropriate for all of that significant fraction, and there's the other fraction of the IT world that isn't directly profitable. More people need to realize that their work falls in the latter two fractions instead of the first.

pessimizer3• 11 months ago

I've started to think that the fact that Wikipedia will change its descriptions of reality based on whoever is willing to spend the time and money to subvert it is a feature when it comes to survival. When the final sci-fi authoritarian dictatorship comes down, Wikipedia will happily explain that it was always here, and that Eastasia was always the enemy.

IAmBroom7• 11 months ago

Its (relatively short) history suggests otherwise, so far.

pessimizer3• 11 months ago

It certainly does not. It is not dependable for any subject that anybody or any government that commands any significant resources has any interest in. I'm sure there's somebody right this second guarding distortions on some obscure page about some scientific phenomenon that 99.999% of people have never heard of because their investment depends on it.

The political model doesn't work at all. If you just count the votes of the people who show up to vote, the Party will hire buses and empty the retirement homes and homeless shelters. Maybe you can fight this irl if everyone knows there's an election, but nobody knows when there's a war on a talk page.

mediumsmart2• 11 months ago

Wikipedia broke some time ago in order to be allowed to survive. There are still things that can be looked up there and taken at face value.

soupfordummies• 11 months ago

I read this comment three times and I still don't understand what you're trying to say. Not trying to be rude, just saying.

mediumsmart2• 11 months ago

In my opinion some years back Wikipedia broke meaning that it was no longer impartial by default. It’s no biggie and was to be expected given its scale and perceived authority. Just saying. You could watch manufacturing consent maybe to understand the comment but you don’t have to.

_dke7• 11 months ago

Important recent context - just a few days ago House Republicans asked Wikipedia to reveal the name of some editors: https://truthout.org/articles/house-republicans-investigate-...

Jean-Papoulos• 11 months ago

Putting bibles everywhere, removing books from libraries, now getting the names of wikipedians... They're going slowly, but they're going surely.

SlowTao4• 11 months ago

They have been playing the long game for decades, the speed up in recent times feels like they realised the windows was closing and they need to lock things down before many wise up.

Cthulhu_7• 11 months ago

I can't claim I was part of the original internet users, but this is part of why anonymity was so important to them. I'm pretty open about my real life on here and other channels, and some people IRL know my real name. But I would regret it if an organization, government or employer attaches consequences to my online behaviour.

3036e4• 11 months ago

An unexpected side-effect for me after I started subscribing to Kagi a few months ago, at a low tier with limited searches, is that I made sure to configure all my browsers with keywords for Wikipedia searches and I use those a lot, knowing that what I will end up with after searching is probably going to be the Wikipedia page anyway. No point wasting precious limited monthly searches.

manquer• 11 months ago

Kagi does not count bangs as part of monthly usage - for wiki that would be !w search term

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/plan-types.html#how-searche...

BlueTemplar4• 11 months ago

I'm still puzzled after all these years : why would anyone use search engine bangs instead of directly configuring custom searches from their browser's URL bar ?

glitchc2• 11 months ago

Wikipedia has plenty of propaganda. It's often at the fringes of knowledge, in niche subjects where there isn't yet an established group of proponents and detractors. It can be quite subtle too, will fool most laypeople, even those who are otherwise intellectually savvy.

It's only when a subject becomes popular that the propaganda gets recognized and rectified.

voxl2• 11 months ago

And? Share an example. This reads like conspiratorial thinking without any evidence.

Andrex• 11 months ago

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!)

blululu• 11 months ago

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.

NathanKP• 11 months ago

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.

rstuart4133• 11 months ago

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.

zappb• 11 months ago

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

euclaise• 11 months ago

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

dyauspitr• 11 months ago

It says on there that the mRNA vaccine doesn’t kill you.

matusp• 11 months ago

Many countries in Eastern Europe have radically different interpretations of history. The nationalists from each country will try to establish their own ethnicity for persons of interest. They will try to add editorial comments or hyperpartisan sources to all kinds of historical articles. There are edit wars about what language to use for what city in what era. I would guess that this is the case for many other regions of the world.

MSFT_Edging• 11 months ago

Many historical atrocities with death counts is a common one I'll run into.

You'll see "xy atrocity had caused the deaths of this many people*", where the additional note will say something like "The numbers reported in this study have been challenged by many scholars on the subject and has been accused of invalid methods".

It's super common with history around Communist countries, because for a lot of folks in the west, the black book of communism is taken as fact when it's far from it, and you have groups like the Victims of Communism memorial foundation that have huge coffers for pushing the black book line.

oceansky• 11 months ago

Look up the page on ICE, it's straight up propaganda.

jandrusk• 11 months ago

They’ve always have had a leftist bias like most of big tech.

https://x.com/therabbithole84/status/1957598712693452920?s=4...

slater2• 11 months ago

aka, biased towards reality

pityJuke• 11 months ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/?redirect=no&title=Reality_has_a_...

hulium2• 11 months ago

That's a fake Wikipedia screenshot! That line doesn't exist in the actual article and didn't at the time when that tweet was written, and does not even fit in the context. To me, this is at best an example for how much higher the quality is on Wikipedia than in average social media like X.

BenjiWiebe2• 11 months ago

Amazing. And it's listed as having 23.7K views. I suppose far less than 1% of those people would have taken the time to see if that was real or fake.

EDIT That line did exist in the past. It was there one year ago. Can someone more skilled in Wikipedia find and link the revision where it was removed? Bonus points for finding when it was added. Thanks in advance.

Agraillo• 11 months ago

The edit did exist. So the phrase "Multiple studies have found a left-wing bias at Wikipedia" can be found last in the edit (4 February 2025) [1] and was removed by the editor Aquillion with the explanation [2]

     Not seeing anything in this source that supports this language; they summarize no other sources that I could see, and their own conclusions are more complex than this (as covered further down the article.)

I think that the one who previously introduced the phrase should have either not stated 'Multiple studies' or provided information about other studies. I suspect that a single research is usually not enough to be mentioned in an article

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ideological_bias_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ideological_bias_...

testplzignore• 11 months ago

Because Wikipedia was under a Creative Commons license, anyone who didn’t like the way the project was run could copy it and start their own, as a group of Spanish users did when the possibility of running ads was raised in 2002.

Correction on this: Wikipedia was GFDL until 2009. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Licensing_update .

globular-toast• 11 months ago

If I remember correctly, the licence change was achieved by the FSF releasing a special version of the GFDL allowing the change, taking advantage of the "any later version" part of the original licence.

OpenStreetMap's licence change was much more difficult. Agreement had to be sought from all editors and for the few that didn't respond their work was removed. We actually replaced the work of most non-responders before the licence change though.

jacquesm• 11 months ago

Wikipedia and the Khan academy are my two best examples for the potential of the internet. Each is an incredible feat that took a simple vision and took it far beyond what I ever thought possible.

guidedlight• 11 months ago

Says an article with a paywall.

intermerda2• 11 months ago

We live in a society.

ajsnigrutin• 11 months ago

Wikipedia has one great feature... you can see all the editing history.

Something happened, a war started, someone did X, someone else did Y... you open wikipedia, see all the "current situation" bias, open the history tab and look at the article from before <the thing> happened.

Whoppertime• 11 months ago

Wikipedia is a good source for certain kinds of information. If you ask it about anything political it's going to be from a certain slant and the most informative part of the page will be the Talk page which explains what people would like on the page that isn't there, or shouldn't be on the page but is

savef• 11 months ago

What examples of this are there? I've usually found Wikipedia to be quite equal opportunity, well rounded, and factual.

They have their NPOV[1] policy, and seem impressively unbiased to me, given the various divisive situations they have to try to cover.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_v...

crote2• 11 months ago

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.

krmboya• 11 months ago

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

will42742• 11 months ago

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.

ljsprague3• 11 months ago

Race and IQ stuff.

Levitz4• 11 months ago

The article for Gamergate is basically an entire page ultimately sourcing from games journalism outlets when it was explicitly about calling out games journalism and collusion in the industry.

And being fair, if there's one weakness in a site which relies on several sources agreeing on something it surely is when those sources are colluding on something, but the end result is a page rife with misinformation.

This is prevalent in culture wars stuff, Keffals article "graciously" fails to mention how she frequently lied and instigated vast amounts of harassment towards herself or how she basically spent the GoFundMe money she campaigned for on heroin. If the media spins a narrative, Wikipedia doesn't really have a counter to that in any way.

fishmicrowaver• 11 months ago

Yeah check out the Talk archives for the Human Anus page. It's like 20 years of hole fetishists and people trying to upload their own.

SlowTao4• 11 months ago

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

bawolff7• 11 months ago

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

bad_username• 11 months ago

Not only politics, also articles on philosophy and history are very hard to trust, due to the slant.

tim333• 11 months ago

If you ask it about anything political it's going to be from a certain slant

I'm not sure if there's anything else out there that's better at giving a fairly neutral summary of political controversies?

It reminds me of the Churchill quote "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"

Gareth3213• 11 months ago

Ground.news is quite good. It provides a bias meter next to publications, and offers a blind spot tool so one doesn't only see one side of a report or discussion. Wikipedia doesn't have such a counter-measure. Most of the political pages have been entirely captured and there are no mechanisms promote neutrality. On the contrary. WikiProjects, Arbitration Committees, and Administrators are all very entrenched positions and once the scales tipped towards a left wing American political bias, there is no way to tip them back.

voldacar• 11 months ago

A quantitative look which might interest you:

https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/is-wikipedia-politically-...

gcanyon2• 11 months ago

Cites please. Seriously, if there is a chronically-biased Wikipedia page I would very much like to know about it.

BrtByte3• 11 months ago

Compared to opaque algorithms and AI-generated summaries, Wikipedia still feels like a relatively honest mess

bloomingeek• 11 months ago

<In 1967, Hannah Arendt published an essay in The New Yorker about what she saw as an inherent conflict between politics and facts.

Wow, she was ahead of her time, no? I admit to have never contributed to Wikipedia, that is about to change.

throw48472852• 11 months ago

The corners where Wikipedia breaks down are niche but fascinating. Check out the list of superhero movies (not Marvel or DC). Or any page that contains information on Video Game Console Generations.

In cases like those, what has gone wrong is a mix of apophenia and people protecting their own turf. Elaborate classification systems are created that are internally consistent but have no relationship to reality.

alex1138• 11 months ago

I can't defend Wiki any further after their politicization

How about not calling Peter McCullough or Ryan Cole or Pierre Kory misinformation spreaders about covid when they were right the whole time

Larry Sanger was correct

Edit: (I know we're not supposed to comment on downvotes but I seriously don't care) Those of you who insta-downvote stuff like this should not enjoy the privileges of the karma system on HN that allows you to downvote

(Further - how many of you actually work for big tech? Do you think it's ok to censor doctors like has been going on the last few years? Do you have any qualities of personal reflection, whatsoever?)

intermerda2• 11 months ago

How about not calling Peter McCullough or Ryan Cole or Pierre Kory misinformation spreaders about covid when they were right the whole time

What were they right about? I'm looking at Peter McCullough's Wikipedia article and some of the things he's claimed include young people don't need the vaccine, there is no evidence of asymptomatic spread of COVID-19, and COVID-19 pandemic was planned, etc.

Is this what you're saying they were right about the whole time? The pandemic was planned?

Antibabelic• 11 months ago

The goal of Wikipedia has always been to summarize what mainstream secondary sources say, not what is "true" or "right" according to your or some other editor's personal opinion. See WP:DUE, WP:VNT and WP:RGW

lp0_on_fire2• 11 months ago

It literally styles itself as an encyclopedia, not a collection of summaries by "mainstream secondary sources".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars

Wikipedia combines many features of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers. Wikipedia is not a soapbox, an advertising platform, a social network, a vanity press, an experiment in anarchy or democracy, an indiscriminate collection of information, nor a web directory. It is not a dictionary, a newspaper, an instruction manual, nor a collection of source documents or media files, although some of its fellow Wikimedia projects are.

hoshi73• 11 months ago

Many call Wikipedia "the last good place on the internet", but that's really only true of the English edition. Non-English versions are generally filled with political misinformation and propaganda from people trying to politicize a nation's history, which, frankly, makes them not worth bothering with:

https://slate.com/technology/2021/03/japanese-wikipedia-misi...

Aachen3• 11 months ago

The difference between English, Dutch, and German Wikipedias is also very interesting. I used to never open the Dutch one unless there was a near-zero chance of the English one having any article on the topic at all (like how to make vlaai or idk). It has way fewer articles, has virtually no references for anything, is written more casually by fewer people, and everyone who needs information in the Netherlands speaks English (under 55yo) or German (over 55yo) or both (those in border-nearing retail) so nobody bothers

(Even tinier is the Limburgian dialect that have their own Wikipedia. It seems to mostly be an exercise in how to write this spoken language than to make actually useful articles with unique content. Literally nobody can read that who can't also read Dutch, since it has no spelling or even a dictionary that'd work for more than a few square kilometres. But I digress)

The Germans on the other hand, I've been amazed that there exists, not infrequently, articles in German with more information than in English. It seems like such a shame to me to put all this effort into a niche language, yet it's there. There are well-maintained silos of information out there if you know where to find them!

jfengel2• 11 months ago

I was surprised that Wikipedia wasn't immediately overrun by trolls, griefers, and spammers. I'm still not entirely sure how it avoids that, though I've got some speculations.

Unlike most user contributed sites it's happy to throw stuff away. It does grow but it doesn't care about growing fast. That's great but it's a hard formula to replicate.

idle_zealot• 11 months ago

That's great but it's a hard formula to replicate

One important piece of even trying to replicate that is its nature as a nonprofit. Any profit-seeking organization trying to grow a user-contribution based site will prefer content and moderation pipelines that drive engagement over quality.

rafram2• 11 months ago

Because contributions from new users are immediately reviewed by legions of volunteer cops who are eager to revert vandalism, and most wannabe vandals don’t have the sense to make a couple legitimate edits before vandalizing.

jfengel2• 11 months ago

Can you imagine any other crowdsourced site who was willing to subject new users to so much scrutiny, and err on the side of deleting contributions?

Certainly that's not a great way to make money. Not if you're depending on people to spend a lot of time seeking new content (and be shown ads).

zahlman10• 11 months ago

I'm still not entirely sure how it avoids that

It really doesn't. Granted, it could be a lot worse.

ProllyInfamous• 11 months ago

My blue-collar journey with LLMs began Summer 2022, after watching Yannic's GPT 4-chan video [0] — visiting simple GPT-2 iterations (e.g. http://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com — which still exists and is a fantastic linguist's homepage — &al CRAIYON &c).

My most-shocking LLM interaction so-far ties with when http://www.perplexity.ai cited my recent wikipedia edit (from my two decade+ account) in answering a question about transistor density... less than one day after I had made the update it cited [1]. Like I am nobody why tf are you listening to me?!?

This ties with having sat with a published author of a non-fiction war chronicle as we discussed his books, himself, and his world (with a computer, me typing / brainstorming).

Among many other reconfigurations of muh'brain.

[0] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/efPrtcLdcdM

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count

I am just the electrician.

BrenBarn• 11 months ago

Don't jinx it.

jl63• 11 months ago

Wikipedia is fabulous. I wish educators would stop telling people that it’s not reliable, and start using it to teach media literacy - which, for wiki purposes, is essentially to read the talk page to see what viewpoints have been included and excluded and why.

makeitdouble• 11 months ago

Aren't they exactly teaching students media literacy by warning them Wikipedia is not reliable ?

jl63• 11 months ago

No, because media literacy is not about sorting the world into “reliable” and “unreliable”, it’s about understanding a text in its full context.

scandox2• 11 months ago

My daughter's teacher told her class that Wikipedia is unreliable because it's just made up by volunteers. So I asked her where they should find information and she said other sites on the internet that can't just be edited by anyone.

Blew my mind.

jl63• 11 months ago

I can’t count how many times I’ve heard “Wikipedia is unreliable because it can be edited by anyone”. I tend to think that Wikipedia converges on reliable because it can be edited by anyone.

jajko2• 11 months ago

Simple phrases heard elsewhere which make the person feel for 5s like a really smart experienced one in given topic, while being the opposite. A very common trait in large part of population, any population, which usually comes in pair with lack of critical thinking inward & outward.

At the end though, most of us are guilty of such behavior from time to time.

Nition• 11 months ago

I have sometimes thought about firing up my old Encarta 98 CD. A bit outdated now though.

Cthulhu_7• 11 months ago

This is the argument used for almost 25 years (...yes), did the teacher never get updated?

I'd love to see your daughter submit something extremely wrong with citations from nonsense on the internet.

thefz2• 11 months ago

Had a colleague make the same point on open source, "don't trust code everyone can modify". He was a bottom tier programmer at best.

SoftTalker• 11 months ago

The thing about Wikipedia is that every claim is sourced. And those that aren't are usually noted with a "Citation Needed" disclaimer.

So even if Wikipeda isn't permitted as a direct source for students, it's a great place to find other sources for claims and facts about almost any topic. That's how I taught my kids to use it in school. It's a ready-made bibliography on almost anything.

jowea2• 11 months ago

Did the teacher teach how to recognize a reliable other site?

roflmaostc• 11 months ago

totally agree. But in best case you check the reference Wikipedia is referencing which is usually the first source of a fact.

GuB-42• 11 months ago

When educators say that Wikipedia is not reliable, what they usually mean is that serious work should be based on primary sources, not secondary sources like Wikipedia or any other encyclopedia.

Wikipedia is good for casual research, and in practice, I found the English Wikipedia very reliable, at least for scientific topics, but it is also pretty good on big controversial subjects. Reliability only starts to drop on minor subjects.

But educators want you to go beyond that. Here, Wikipedia is just a starting point, with its best feature being citations.

Gander5739• 11 months ago

Wikipedia and other encyclopedias are tertiary sources.

crazygringo2• 11 months ago

No, they genuinely mean it's unreliable.

Obviously popular articles are great -- they have so many eyeballs and editors that they're not just quite accurate, but often more comprehensive than other sources (in terms of describing competing schools of thought, for example).

But when you really drill down into more niche articles, there's a tremendous amount of information that is uncited or not found in the citation, has glaring omissions, and/or is just plain wrong. These are the kinds of articles that get 1 edit every six months.

It's those latter articles that are the reason Wikipedia is too unreliable to cite.

(Also, Wikipedia is a tertiary source, as it is meant to only cite secondary sources, not primary sources.)

AdventureMouse• 11 months ago

Compared to an encyclopedia, Wikipedia is unreliable. That doesn’t mean that Wikipedia isn’t useful. But there is a hidden danger with Wikipedia being mostly reliable - people lower their guard and end up consuming misinformation without realizing.

navigate8310• 11 months ago

As a general site awareness program, Wikipedia, needs to highlight people to go and read the talk page. Many users are not able to appreciate this vibrant section of the website and assume facts of the article at face value.

sjapkee• 11 months ago

I wish educators would stop telling people that it’s not reliable

Why? It's really not reliable. It doesn't have any decent standards for sources. Any controversial topic is a constant edit war. Wikipedia is only good when you're okay if info turn out to be false.

xwkd• 11 months ago

Critical thinking requires that the sources themselves are evaluated for bias. Anecdotally, I've come across several articles for which the bulk of citations all come from one source, and that source is a heavily political "newspaper" article. This is true for topics that are hot on all sides of whatever spectrum or division they tend to land. If Wikipedia is going to be taught to be used as a tool for research, then its governance structure should be taught and critically evaluated. The bias of the board of the Wikimedia Foundation should be taken into account.

I suspect that the bulk of readers don't give a second thought to Wikipedia's Magisterium.

lz400• 11 months ago

This reminds me of donating again, thanks

emsign• 11 months ago

Oh, just wait til MAGA sycophants feel threatened by Wikipedia. It'll be a war against the online encyclopedia like none before. I'm actually anxious that might happen at any time. For instance when Trump runs out of enemies to scapegoat.

monksy• 11 months ago

Once they do, I'm sure we'll see blackouts that are similar to most dictatorships. (i.e. metal themed pages in Turkey, FB/Google in China, etc)

input_sh• 11 months ago

Oh it already started, the ADL convinced House Republicans to launch an investigation into Wikipedia because of its "anti-Israel bias": https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5473331-wikipedia-bias-pr...

One of the requests in the letter (https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/08272...) is to de-anonymise some of the Wikipedia editors.

seyz• 11 months ago

Opening the page... eyes burned... closing the page. Ouch.

blackhaz• 11 months ago

Would the Age of Encyclopaediae be next, with human information safeguarded by the selected, several giant egregors taking shape and competing for world views?

maeln• 11 months ago

In an age of accelerating hypercapitalism causing rabid enshittification, non-profit and volunteer website and servicice might struggle, but they remain the only becon of quality.

submeta• 11 months ago

Does it survive though? I haven’t opened Wikipedia in years. And young folks rather ask Chatgpt for their homework instead of Wikipedia. And that’s the crux. Llms are vacuuming the content of Wikipedia, just like Google is doing the same with Web content.

Aachen3• 11 months ago

It's dirt cheap to host text contributed by volunteers compared to audiovisual media or newspapers written by paid people

Which is not to say free and without challenges, definitely not at Wikipedia's scale, but compared to how much donation money they get it's peanuts, not even the same ballpark (the vast majority of the money they get via Wikipedian beg banners goes to projects other than Wikipedia)

Also, personal opinion but

I haven’t opened Wikipedia in years.

sounded like someone proudly telling a group of supposedly cool friends how they don't read stuffy books anymore now that they've discovered one-page summaries online. This might fall on deaf ears but there's value in reading the actual thing including following references where relevant

Labo333• 11 months ago

archive.is breaks the styling and doesn't execute the js

But archive.org has the subscription popup...

https://web.archive.org/web/20250905062805/https://www.theve...

david-james-2• 11 months ago

Reading the article made me think about other examples of Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP). The Wikipedia page on CBBP lists examples like Linux and OpenStreetMap.

Although CBPP shares a lot with general User-generated content (UGC) and the open source model, maybe mechanisms that make it work is a little different.

The article points out system-side elements like "Talk page" and human-side elements like policies and guidelines.

I wonder if there are any studies on this subject.

1970-01-01• 11 months ago

We need a new metric to complement system uptime: "link lifetime"

I have an email, old enough to vote, that I received from an engineer. They wrote "Wikipedia is a good site for learning how our new RAID array works. People need to change their mind about Wikipedia. Just because anyone can make a page doesn't mean the information is wrong."

If they had sent me any other link, all this info would be behind a paywall, login, or would simply 404 today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels

sharpshadow• 11 months ago

To be very specific I was told that the hand does not go over the head when doing a nazi salute.

Quarrelsome• 11 months ago

I just imagine a hypothetical future where a party funded by the richest man in the world goes full fascist and we trot out the "who could have known?". We get out the protractors or simply admit that it was a Nazi salute.

Its the lack of clarity or apology, he never said that it wasn't, he never apologised or said "oh yeah, i didnt mean that" or he even could have brushed it off as a joke or trolling to evoke a reaction. But he never did, he just said people were overreacting.

Combined with his public support for groups like AfD and Patriotic Alternative UK, it seems pretty obvious that he's a Nazi. If anything this subject shows a clear divide between US and European reaction, given how he's now overwhelmingly persona non grata in Europe since that. The US has this bizarre tribalism in its politics, where half its electorate deny the reality that an government official (as he started his doge role at the time) is glorifying the symbols of America's greatest adversary in the world's most destructive war.

Prime_Axiom2• 11 months ago

Appreciate the archive link, don’t know how to directly reply to a comment.

zahlman10• 11 months ago

Don't you see the "reply" link underneath each comment?

Prime_Axiom2• 11 months ago

There wasn’t one, I took a screenshot to make sure I wasn’t missing it. It was the newest comment by krunck that had the button missing.

Aachen3• 11 months ago

I assume moderators disable comments (automatically or manually) on such dummy posts because they usually don't contribute to the conversation, such as by posting just "thank you" or some comment about the article that'd be better suited as a top-level comment

(Not that I necessarily agree with this practice. Don't decapitate the messenger)

damnesian• 11 months ago

It was inevitable that the ideologues who fancy themselves responsible leaders would attack the relative openness of Wikipedia. This makes it all the more important that you DONATE to help maintain it. I put my $2 in every month, every bit helps to fortify the bastions against invaders.

In a world run by criminals, telling the truth becomes a crime.

rc_mob2• 11 months ago

oookay. I hear ya. Will do.

arminiusreturns• 11 months ago

Wikipedia is hasbara central, yall are drinking too much of the simp-juice.

maskil• 11 months ago

Wikipedia is completely unreliable on any area of controversy, there are armies of editors who are skilled in fitting the articles to their agenda.

gcanyon2• 11 months ago

conservatives… claim[ing] Wikipedia has strayed from its neutrality principle by making judgments about the reliability of sources. Instead, … it should present all views equally, including things “many Republicans believe,”

That is some 1984-level “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength" argument. If those “news” sources want people to stop calling them liars, they should stop lying.

homefree4• 11 months ago

Wikipedia has major issues - there are a lot of topics with coordinated editing from bad actors. The verge article is paywalled so I can't read more than the first page + headline, but I can guess the case it makes.

- https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...

- https://www.piratewires.com/p/wikipedia-editors-cant-decide-...

- https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-wikipedia-s-pro-hamas-edit...

It's similar to the problem on Reddit, I wouldn't trust it on any topic that is even mildly controversial. Wikipedia will have a strong progressive left slant it launders carefully through seemingly neutral language and selective sourcing.

Honestly it's gotten worse over the years too - makes me see more value in printed encyclopedia, they go out of date but at least they represent a slice of time. They're not endlessly revised to meet some false ideology that has edit power at present.

techpineapple5• 11 months ago

But what is better? I mean yes, reading 20 sources on a topic and coming to your own conclusions about an issue is the right answer, but the fact that Wikipedia published its edit history and discussions page makes it seem better than then what everything?

Almost every book you read about Israel Palestine will probably be biased in some way, certainly the news will be. It feels like perfect being the enemy of good. Like sure it’s a mess like all compendiums of human knowledge, but also seems massively better than the alternative.

Your point about the encyclopedia seems strange, sure it’s likely to be less accurate less complete and more biased, but it’s narratively interesting is like? What are you trying to accomplish than that that’s better?

Annoyance at Wikipedia feels nihilistic. Like “it’s not perfect so why try”. “I’d rather read things where I think I know what the bias is (but probably don’t”

homefree4• 11 months ago

I seek out individuals I think are smart from a variety of places and read a lot - I'm not sure if there's another way. The more I do this, the more I have a general dislike for wikipedia.

The problem with wikipedia is it pretends to be above the fray and as a result it's deceptive. People think they're getting a neutral topic overview when they're actually getting something that's been designed to persuade based on the editors that control it and the editors are generally bad power hungry reddit mod types with extreme bias. It's particularly insidious because the people reading wikipedia are the least able to detect this deception. It launders their pet ideology through pseudo neutrality.

I think most alternative options are better.

The encyclopedia point is at least it is a static record from a point in time vs. a sort of "we were always at war with Eurasia" kind of fluid that bends to the times.

KebabKanaken• 11 months ago

Wikipedia is, from an political bias and data quality POV, bad enough. Couple that with the endowment-enabled grifters of the WMF doing their usual donation blood drive twice a year, and you puke in disgust.

mrkramer2• 11 months ago

I remember when teachers in school use to tell us that Wikipedia sucks because there in no scientific peer review. They couldn't wrap their heads around the concept of casual crowdsourcing.

krapp• 11 months ago

They couldn't wrap their heads around the concept of casual crowdsourcing.

I'm sure they could, most teachers aren't idiots. And they were correct that "casual crowdsourcing" is not a fitting replacement for peer review.

And in fact, the current moderation policies for Wikipedia only work in so far as they use peer-review type processes, such as requiring "notability" and multiple sources, and preferring expertise in a field. Of course, if you're in a relevant field you shouldn't use Wikipedia as a primary source since you would presumably have access to whatever sources the wiki itself cites in the articles.

mrkramer2• 11 months ago

If I were to make Wikipedia once again from the ground up I would put more attention into building reputation system of contributors. If you have more reputation you are allowed to edit something and/or your edit has more weight.

doron2• 11 months ago

You take the advertising driven paradigm out of the equation, and a website might be worth something more than rage clicks and doom scrolling machine, who knew?!

Ad driven sites broke the internet; they might have broken society to some degree as well.

BrtByte3• 11 months ago

The tragedy is that we all rely on Wikipedia, but very few of us contribute to it

Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

Related Stories