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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

Scary when you consider that "winning" this game means you get to control the interpretation of facts.

Yes but interestingly it's also somewhat calming because the "winners" tend to see winning as the goal. Maliciously changing facts is almost never their goal because Wikipedia itself is their main (maybe obsessive) focus. It might not be good for them but it's not that dangerous for us readers.

That just means they are enforcing their biases on the information. Winning doesn't mean they got it correct, just that they achieved control of the narrative.

That's going to push the means of winning to editing towards the collective biases of the majority of wikipedia editors. Just consider the fact that at various times in our history that commonly accepted knowledge was that the Earth was flat, the Sun, Moon and Stars revolved around it and that slaves were property instead of people.

Effectively this is a proof that mob-sourced information tends towards the mob's interpretation of information and is not necessarily the truth.

I think a lot of people reading Wikipedia forget this and makes me disagree with your last statement -- there's a high potential for danger to the reader if the prevailing mob opinion is outwardly destructive or self-destructive.

That's just what encyclopedias are though, the collective mentality of it's editors, their ideology, so to speak. You were never free to just consume encyclopedias, they were always meant to be understood in the context of their creation. What makes Wikipedia different from its competitors is the sheer diversity of editors contributing.

fine, except that Wikipedia editors aren't diverse.

Encyclopedias usually have lots of competition, outside of niche areas.

Wikis sort of have this backwards. There's lots of competition in the niches but there's not much competition with Wikipedia itself. The risk is in it being a singular body of knowledge.

Sure, that's a good point and I absolutely agree that Wikipedia will neither be unbiased nor always very accurate. My idea was simply to refute the statement that somebody actively controls the world's knowledge in intentionally malicious ways, which would imo be worse than unwillingly reproducing your own biases.

Bias is inherent to the Wikipedia model, at least if you view its content as simply facts. It's not so much a collection of facts as it is a collection of statements corroborated by published sources.

Wikipedia trust peaked years ago, it's been steadily down-trending since.

Yes, but that means your enemy is always lies and misinformation.

That seems like an overly generous interpretation of Wikipedia. A great many well sourced factual corrections get reverted because that’s effectively the default option and much faster than actually editing new content to fit existing guidelines. Trying to do a good job also means slowing down and thus having fewer edits.

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