Comment by waltpad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by waltpad | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I find it strange that the writer presents Wikipedia as a well defined entity: it is possible for anyone (including the writer) to amend a Wikipedia article. This may even be done anonymously.

The writer goes on to describe various issues about various articles, which could be brought up directly in the discussion sections of these articles, as well as possible solutions for these issues.

However, the first few lines point out something really interesting: Wikipedia doesn't seem to look for facts, but rather to describe point of views. If you are familiar with stackoverflow, the main policy there is to only provide factual information. Any opinion-based question or answer are at the least frowned upon, and usually rejected (though it may also depends on a sub-topic local behaviour). However, I believe that this policy wasn't devised from the beginning, but rather refined over time, considering that the entries at the dawn of the site were much less restricted on that ground. Wikipedia seems to be much more open to opinions, in a "neutral" way, which they explain by giving each opinion as much coverage has it is popular (and thus accepted). So, does it mean that if the "flat Earth" theory (which is given as an example in the Wikipedia page) was much more popular, it would be prevalent in the article about Earth?

So mainstream ideas will be described in much more details than so-called alternate views. For me, this seems somewhat counter-intuitive. I would want to have an encyclopedia which compiles facts, rather than opinions. Am I missing something?

Something doesn't need to be a 'well defined entity' to speak about it meaningfully. "Most Wikipedia articles are less than 20k words". Is that not a meaningful statement? "But, anyone can edit articles" What does that have to do with how Wikipedia is in 2020, 19 years into the project? Emergent tendencies exist.

> I would want to have an encyclopedia which compiles facts, rather than opinions. Am I missing something?

That 'fact' and 'opinion' aren't clean categories.

For anyone interested in reading more Wikipedia criticism, I recommend this essay by Jaron Lanier

https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-digital-maois...

> Something doesn't need to be a 'well defined entity' to speak about it meaningfully.

True, what I meant is that the writer accuses Wikipedia of some sort of agenda, but it's not just one group of people, but many factions with opposite goals, including the one described in the meta pages. Although not being a well defined entity doesn't preclude discussing it, there are things that cannot be said about it because of that.

Another thing that the writer says is that Wikipedia failed, as if it reached an irrevocable state, but Wikipedia is all but in a well defined state (unless you count this as a well defined state, but then we might end up in a Russel paradox), it's content is constantly fluctuating, even if slowly so. When you speak of emergent tendencies, I find the idea compelling, but I wonder if this compatible with a constantly changing set of editors. And even if it is, perhaps this trend is like a disease, and at some point (like in evolutionary algorithms), a cure will emerge?

> That 'fact' and 'opinion' aren't clean categories.

Indeed, perhaps I was guilty of the same mistake as the writer? However, it is possible to find many pages with annotations criticizing the page content for lack of references or sources. I see that as an attempt to implement fact checking.

> When you speak of emergent tendencies, I find the idea compelling, but I wonder if this compatible with a constantly changing set of editors.

Crowds, for example, behave similarly even if you shuffle around who is in the crowd.

> However, it is possible to find many pages with annotations criticizing the page content for lack of references or sources. I see that as an attempt to implement fact checking.

You seem to be operating under the assumption that if we only threw more manpower at Wikipedia we could incrementally improve it to perfection. That seems implausible to me for various reasons.

From the essay I linked,

"A core belief of the wiki world is that whatever problems exist in the wiki will be incrementally corrected as the process unfolds. This is analogous to the claims of Hyper-Libertarians who put infinite faith in a free market, or the Hyper-Lefties who are somehow able to sit through consensus decision-making processes. In all these cases, it seems to me that empirical evidence has yielded mixed results. Sometimes loosely structured collective activities yield continuous improvements and sometimes they don't. Often we don't live long enough to find out. Later in this essay I'll point out what constraints make a collective smart. But first, it's important to not lose sight of values just because the question of whether a collective can be smart is so fascinating. Accuracy in a text is not enough. A desirable text is more than a collection of accurate references. It is also an expression of personality."

> Crowds, for example, behave similarly even if you shuffle around who is in the crowd.

Indeed, but the issue is that the Wikipedia editors are not a crowd, it's a crowd of crowds. What's the behaviour of that? And can we compare this context with those used for whichever experiment was used to come to that claim I'm citing above.

> You seem to be operating under the assumption that if we only threw more manpower at Wikipedia we could incrementally improve it to perfection. That seems implausible to me for various reasons.

My idea actually was that overtime, editors would improve in their way of doing that task. However, admittedly, they would have to hang around long enough for this to happen. Maybe that's what "Hyper-Libertarians" have in mind as well? That by default humans are trying to get better at what they do, and thus the system can only improve?

> It is also an expression of personality.

That's a point I disagree with: I don't believe that an encyclopedia article should show personality, but quite the contrary. For me, an encyclopedia is something like a dictionary with a more in depth treatment of the topics. It is first and foremost a compilation of informations.

Have you actually tried editing a Wikipedia article? I guarantee it will be changed back within about 5 minutes

Actually, I did that, numerous times, although it was mostly to do spelling correction or in one case linking to external pages trying to leverage Wikipedia's SEO(?) value (ie. the external pages were discussing the topic in the wiki page in order to promote their own business, which wasn't related at all), which shows that it's clearly easy to get Wikipedia to fulfill its purpose.

So all in all what I did was minor editing, perhaps it doesn't count as what you would mean as an edit immediately reverted by other editors. I have no doubt that there are factions monitoring pages of strategic value, it makes sense for a website of that importance culturally. But it also means that the Wikipedia core community must always remain vigilant about these unfortunate slides.

That is if the article isn't locked for editing by approved editors only and you can actually edit it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com