Comment on MAGA Puts Wikipedia in Its Crosshairs
FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 1 day ago
Wikipedia has been shit for a long time, and it should be banned as being used as a source for anything serious. There are thousands of recorded, proven cases of incorrect and malicious updates to pages on there.
As with most things, it started off great and then went to hell.
Remember - the co-founder of wikipedia says that it has “abandoned neutrality” and has been taken over as a tool to push political agendas by one side.
so what? he’s also anti vax. why is the co-founder’s opinion on this any more relevant than anyone else’s? the guy is not involved with wikipedia anymore.
you could also frame this as saying wikipedia stopped trying to maintain a false balance.
I there a technical term (or psychological or like a fallacy) for when someone sees something really good but not perfect and thus believes that the slightest bad thing they detect makes it all totally worthless?
yes, it’s called the nirvana fallacy.
So lets Start our own #Wikipedia? #LibrePedia? yes in German its #Schwarzseher means if someone is pessimistic sees everything negative (basically the opposite of optimist)
@wordmark @Valmond @FreedomAdvocate Wikipedia is not written by an agency or organisation. It's written by us. We decide what's in it. It's like democracy: You have to work on keeping it, else it gets lost.
One advantage of #Wikipedia is, that it is a central source of information for everyone. If we loose that and everyone has their own source of information without the need of arguing what the truth is, societies gets more fractured.
Wikipedia is already fractured into different languages.
@wordmark @Valmond @FreedomAdvocate I agree that the mechanisms of Wikipedia to discuss, to argue and to find truth are not good. In the end it's an old website that hasn't changed much. The biggest innovation was WikiData, which isn't used as much as it should be in the Wikipedia.
So what we need is a system that works differently, but as centrally and openly as Wikipedia. We don't need another instance, where just a different group of people writes the texts.
Wikipedia has been shit for a long time
it started off great and then went to hell
This becomes obviously and extremely dumb once you try to imagine how this “going to hell” actually looks like. What you’re saying is, if you opened a Wikipedia article 15 or 20 years ago, you’d find “great” content, but in the meantime that article has become “shit”. Pure nonsense.
In an another comment you say it’s bad that you have to double check the sources. But when it started, Wikipedia barely used sources at all! Just look at some random articles from the early days and see for yourself. These days an overabundance of sources could well be more of a problem for editors of big article.
There are thousands of recorded, proven cases of incorrect and malicious updates to pages on there.
Thousands? Probably tens, even hundred of thousands! You know how they’re “recorded and proven” most of the time? Through the built-in system that tracks every change since the site was created, and allows editors to check who did what, verify and reverse the bad edits.
The co-founder also said Wikipedia is “broken beyond repair”… back in 2007. Already in 2006 he founded a website that he wanted to compete with WP. Is that before or after your “went to hell” era? My impression is, the guy is just butthurt the project has grown beyond him.
As a relatively active WP editor, I agree that you absolutely shouldn’t take it for granted, and there’s a lot of absolutely frustrating crap on there, and there’s much that one would want to see fixed and improved structurally. But I really can’t tolerate this sort of nonsensical criticism.
You use Wikipedia as a starting step and pivor from there to the cited sources and secondary sources.
Sure, I agree - but that doesn’t change the fact that Wikipedia as anything other than a link aggregator is trash for anything remotely subjective.
EightBitBlood@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Practicing due diligence to make sure Wikipedia’s sources are legit isn’t difficult. You can check the sources listed on ever single Wikipedia entry yourself for bias. It’s not like they hide their sources. That alone is what makes it so valuable. Anyone trying to push a narrative can easily see it sourced as bullshit.
Kind of like how the article you linked is a worthless, factless, opinion piece about Wikipedia becoming “woke” due to the feelings of Larry Sanger being hurt. Nothing that article says is based on anything factual, and the only studies mentioned are wildly taken out of context.
Wikipedia let’s me do that analysis for myself, so I don’t get tricked into thinking an obvious piece of propaganda is real.
FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 1 day ago
I agree with you that Wikipedia is good for finding sources and reading and coming to your own conclusions, but that’s not really the point of Wikipedia. If you can’t trust/believe the actual text of the pages and have to go and read every single linked article yourself then it defeats the purpose. It’s like getting cliff notes but having to go and read the full textbooks anyway.
The co-founders opinion is pretty important in the matter.
undrwater@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s always been a jumping-off point, not a primary source. It’s still fantastic that way.
FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 1 day ago
Unfortunately that’s not how it’s used. It’s used as a primary source most of the time even on here.