Hacker News Reader

Comment by adolph | Hacker News Reader

Bye bye Wikipedia, it was nice while it lasted, looks like you got taken over by the totalitarians.

[The Wikimedia Foundation’s (WMF) Trust and Safety team] have reiterated that they are not willing to reconsider the ban, nor will they turn the full evidence over to the community or ArbCom for review.

View on HN

I guess I'm not surprised. Articles on contentious topics have always had people trying to control the narrative. As Wikipedia got more and more widely trusted/respected, you'd imagine that people would pay money to do it.

I assume there have already been attempts at decentralized, more democratic versions of it?

I am not sure what do you mean by "decentralized, more democratic versions of it", but one problem with that plan is that Google is going to put x.wikipedia.org in the first place in search results (where x is your country code).

The wiki ecosystem is relatively easy to decentralize - just start more wikis! The Wikipedia naming scheme is well known, so it's trivial to match articles about the same subject; and their content is released under an open license. There's also a well-known "InterWiki" standard, making links inbetween different wikis easier.

Wikipedia certainly has its issues in regards to bias on many topics, and I can see the allure of decentralization, but I wonder if it's really the solution. It seems to me like it would just make things worse Instead of each side policing each other and helping keep bias to a minimum, it would likely result in multiple extremely biased "versions" of the truth, with each version treated as gospel by its respective fans while dismissing all others.

Imagine two people arguing about the validity of climate change, with one of them citing ExxonPedia.org and another citing GreenPeacePedia.org. It would be a nightmare.

> Imagine two people arguing about the validity of climate change, with one of them citing ExxonPedia.org and another citing GreenPeacePedia.org. It would be a nightmare.

True, but one of them will be loved by Google, so their side will be widely visible, while the other will not. I don't see any incentive for the side in control of Wikipedia to not want this.

You are confusing (the English) Wikipedia with the Wikimedia Foundation, the corporation that owns all the Wikipedias and other Wikimedia projects, like Wiktionary, Wikidata, Wikiversity, etc.

What takeover? The WMF seems to be the same as always, and Jimmy Wales is still the boss. Wikipedia seems to work despite (or because?) of that style of leadership.

That happended years ago, when the inclusionists lost to the deletionists; this just a natural slow progression of leeching out anything good or useful.

Could you expand on your comment, I am interested in Wikimedia communities? To be honest, I am probably not the only one who thinks that you just want every manga character ever to have its own Wikipedia page after reading "when the inclusionists lost to the deletionists".

I was thinking of giving Pokemon as a sepecific case, but yes, manga characters would also work.

> I am interested in Wikimedia communities

Sorry to disappoint, I wasn't very involved even before they started gutting the non-politics stuff. I just saw the good articles start disappearing and picked up enough discussion to know what the people at fault were called.

The math and science articles seem to be holding out, at least, although I notice they axed Binary_lambda_calculus a couple years ago, so I'm not optimistic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com