I wonder if language and other cultural fields are the only areas where Linus’s law are impossible to safely apply. Programming seems quite easy by comparison.
Comment on How AI and Wikipedia have sent vulnerable languages into a doom spiral
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 5 days ago
As soon as you leave the big languages, esp. English, Wikipedia can be very problematic for all sorts of reasons.
Mostly because of a lack of eyeballs.
But it doesn’t end with merely badly written/generated content but also with narrative manipulation that - unlike in the English version - remains unchallenged.
Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
squaresinger@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Hmm, the law begins with “Given enough eyeballs”. So it’s explicitly not about small-language Wikipedia sites having too few editors.
It also doesn’t talk about finding consensus. “All bugs are shallow” means that someone can see the solution. In software development, that’s most often quite easy, especially when it comes to bugfixes. It’s rarely difficult to verify whether the solution to a bug works or not. So in most cases if someone finds a solution and it works, that’s good enough for everyone.
In cultural fields, that’s decidedly not the case.
For most of society’s problems, there are hardly any new solutions. We have had the same basic problems for centuries and pretty much “all” the solutions have been proposed decades or centuries ago.
How to make government fair? How to get rid of crime? How to make a good society?
These things have literally been issues since the first humans learned to speak.
That’s why Linus’ law doesn’t really apply here. We all want different things and there’s no fix that satisfies all requirements or preferences.
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 4 days ago
For most of society’s problems, there are hardly any new solutions. We have had the same basic problems for centuries and pretty much “all” the solutions have been proposed decades or centuries ago.
That’s because people generally don’t know or understand these solutions. One can’t raise above separate human’s ability to understand any system. And I mean any. Doesn’t mean a housewife has to know electrical engineering, but enough people in any group reliant upon any system should have passive knowledge and understanding.
So, thanks to AI translators and such, I can now link kvant.digital here.
The very first problem in the very first issue of that journal is very enlightening.
Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
Wikipedia (from my understanding) was built off similar doctrine as Linus’ law for iterative improvement where the dedicated and the many culled the misinformation and the outdated.
I wonder what would be a viable alternative for delicate situations like these where “hugs of death” (too many eager users who don’t understand the damage they’re causing) are occurring due to the current model for niche cultural systems like these. Maybe a council established group of authors and editors based on their background and qualifications?
squaresinger@lemmy.world 4 days ago
That’s kinda what Wikipedia does. They have a quite elaborate review process before stuff goes live: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reviewing
In the English Wikipedia, that process is working quite well. But in e.g. the Welsh Wikipedia or other tiny languages, they might only have a handful of reviewers in total. There’s no way that such a small group of people could be knowledgeable in all subjects.
Welsh Wikipedia, for example, has less than 200 total active users, and there are dozens of small language or dialect Wikipedias that have <30 active users.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
I don’t think there’s an actual solution for this issue until AI translations become so good that there’s no need for language-specific content any more. If that ever happens.
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 4 days ago
Sorry, but English-speaking countries have basically invented “narrative manipulation”. For most of history it was normal that there are many competing narratives from interested parties on anything. But such sophistication at making one side’s narrative seem impartial, perpetually contested and self-healing has never been achieved before.
It’s as if you paint a lake red, it’s expensive, and people may get used to it and even believe that’s kinda normal, but one can still see that it’s just one lake. If you paint the world oceans red, so that it rains red and mists red, that’s far more persuasive, and that’s what the “collective West” has achieved.
To make a lake painted red seem normal, you need to prevent most of your population from looking at other lakes. But when you’ve managed to paint the ocean red, you don’t need to limit them at all. The fence and the punishment would hurt trust, but without them your and other people looking at the red oceans and rains will think they are also free.
Despite being just one alliance of former and current colonizing powers on this planet.
It’s very sad to live in an era of frustration where we can see that it can’t reform itself further in humanist direction, than it already has by about year 1988.
Sort of like a planetwide revolutionary situation by Lenin, where the dominating powers can’t keep the order the old way (that persuasion still slowly dies), and the dominated can’t live the old way. But, as we know, revolutionary situations by Lenin generally don’t lead to what one would hope for.
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 4 days ago
You have no idea how wrong you are. I could claim it was the roman catholic church and there’d probably still be older examples.
Nothing against you personally, but this is not the edgy take you think it is.
No, the point is that there are countries where people speak these languages and they want to read things in their own language. Sheesh.
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 4 days ago
“Basically invented” here meant the last huge leap, to having one cluster of narratives perceived as “normal and clean” almost globally. Of course literally not. The roman catholic church didn’t have such means.
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 3 days ago
That is not what “basically invented” means.
moving goalposts