Hacker News Reader

Comment by mm321 | Hacker News Reader

Let's say I bought wikipedia and can manipulate definitions, now what? If I use this power then wikipedia looses credibility and all the darn money turns into dust.

View on HN

You don’t use it, you let other actors use it while you simply rent it out to them. Maybe some Turkish organizations who are pro-Erdogan use Turkish Wikipedia to manipulate Turkish speakers. All the while, people on the other Wikipedia instances don’t notice and lend credibility to the platform.

When we in the West heard about Dragonfly we didn’t stop trusting our own Google results.

This is already happening. Various local wiki sites (including my country) have become infested by right wing conspiracy theorists, but even though it gains media attention, the Wikipedia "court" labels it as independence by local contributors.

Meanwhile kids are learning that the Holocaust wasn't all that bad.

Imagine this happens, but you can't correct these Holocaust deniers because they bought an edit that will remain for at least 6 months. This is what Wikipedia could be selling.

That sounds like a very poor business model - they can and do that for free already. Publicists have been caught making spin edits numerous times already.

> That sounds like a very poor business model - they can and do that for free already.

I might have been unclear, or I'm misunderstanding you, but charging people for something that used to be free is a great business model, since Wikipedia is so big and is so trusted that it's not realistic to go somewhere else or start a new wiki and hope it gets just as big and trusted.

another layer of indirection - people will notice this process and wikipedia looses all credibility; same result.

Not necessarily. They could argue that they're a platform, just like Facebook or Twitter, and claim they want to be neutral. Facebook and Twitter have taken flak, but all in all, people still trust the core features of these platforms. Even if Wikipedia sold the right to edit Turkish Wikipedia to a pro-Erdogan organization I would still probably trust the article about set theory on English Wikipedia.

It's already happening on a small scale and nobody seems to care all that much. It's also not like there's a viable alternative to look up stuff..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com