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admiralspoo

Its reputation is severely declining, especially on topics relating to current events, figures, or politics.

It, however, remains excellent for technical knowledge.

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This is a current event that is extremely political:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_United_States_Capitol_pro...

It cites 462 sources and the parts I read are at least as objective as any news outlet.

I know that Wikipedia editors lean left. I'd be interested to see examples of this bias in Wiki entries though.

One random example I ran across recently of note to HN crowd - the creator of Javscript and Brave, Founder of Mozilla Brendan Eich.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich

Under known for it says, “Known for JavaScript, opposition to same-sex marriage”

Really? I’m as gay as they come but this just gives me scarlet letter vibes. I sincerely doubt people know this guy for his work opposing ssm (of which there wasn’t any, he was just opposed to it back in the day). People do know firefox, brave, mozilla etc though. In the talk page it is clear there are a couple editors with a vendetta against this guy or something.

Maybe an example of personal bias more than a left/right thing but I still found it kinda weird.

> Really? I’m as gay as they come but this just gives me scarlet letter vibes.

I agree, I sure wouldn't want to be known for inventing JavaScript. And the name wasn't even his idea. How unfair!

The Wikipedia page dedicates an entire section to explaining that comment, under "Appointment to CEO, controversy and resignation". He was forced out of the CEO position for this political view. It was a pretty significant news story, and I think they are right for including this as part of what he is known for (particularly outside the HN community).

I mean, it's what he's known for. It was a very big deal when it was discovered that he opposed and donated against gay marriage. He resigned as CEO of Mozilla over it.

Many people outside of internet communities like HN first learned his name when this all went down. Creator of JS wasn't as big a deal to most people at the time as CEO of a major non profit internet company opposing one of the biggest human rights issues of our time.

> as CEO of a major non profit internet company opposing one of the biggest human rights issues of our time.

Obama, the president of the united states opposed same sex marriage at the time of the donations, as did most americans. I hardly fight it noteworthy considering how widespread it was.

Lots of people opposed it at the time. That’s pretty much required in order for it to be one of the biggest human rights issues at the time.

Which is exactly my point

The thing of opposing same sex marriage itself isn't noteworthy. The fact it was widely discussed in the context of Brendan Eich particularly was noteworthy. Obama opposing that has nothing to do with what Brendan Eich is "known for" - Obama is known for plenty of things, lots of which are on his wikipedia page.

They are saying he's famous for it, not that other people did or did not do it, nor are they saying its a good or bad thing that he is famous for it.

The world is an unfair place. Sometimes its hypocritical. Saying that he should not be famous for it has no bearing on whether or not he is actually famous for it.

I think he is known for being the creator of Brave nowadays, and most likely that's how he will be remembered, thanks to the SJW-leftist overreaction to his rather insignificant donation of $1000, and his own subsequent creative output while working on Brave of course.

I'm surprised by the claim that he's known for Brave and that Brave will be remembered.

Outside of HN-types I don't think Brave is known literally at all, much less who is involved in the project.

I guess he's known for it in the sense that he made a $1000 donation to support prop 8 and a bunch of people overreacted and he had to resign. Really, he's known for a specific controversy around gay marriage.

Just an anecdote, but those are the top 2 and only 2 things I know him for. Didn’t know (or at least remember) that he created Brave or was involved with Mozilla. I’d be willing to bet that, indeed, those are the top 2 things he is known for.

Same for me. Definitely would be an interesting family fortunes/family feud question

It would have to be a special "software engineer" edition of family fortunes otherwise 99% of contestants wouldn't have a clue who he is.

He lost his job at Mozilla as a result of it being widespread knowledge.

It's an objective fact that he is known for it.

I think you misunderstand the purpose of a summary of a person . It isn't P(think of this subject | think of this person), it's P(think of this person | think of this subject).

Likewise, in a summary of a subject, a person would show up if P(think of this subject | think of this person) shows up.

So, for instance, Nelson Mandela shows up in the intro to Apartheid and vice versa; Pi shows up in Fabrice Bellard, but Bellard doesn't show up in Pi; Poor Richard's Almanack links to Benjamin Franklin but Benjamin Franklin doesn't mention PRA in its summary.

Mostly the handiwork of an editor, David Gerard, who is obsessed with me and has no encyclopedic perspective, just anger and agenda. One reason among many not to support Wikipedia.

It was even worse before. When I read it, the opening line suggested that all of the rioters collectively murdered that cop. I think that was a little too biased for wikipedia. Does anyone have the revision?

„(...) Summoned by Trump,[25] thousands of supporters gathered in Washington, D.C., on January 5 and 6 to demand that Vice President Mike Pence and Congress reject Biden's victory.[26][27][28] The rioters quickly became extremely violent, assaulting a police officer who later died, erecting a gallows on the Capitol grounds, assaulting the press, and desiring to take hostage and harm lawmakers such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Pence, the latter for refusing to invalidate Biden's victory.[29]“

Yeah, a good example. Having seen 50 solid minutes of raw footage, describing it them as "extremely violent" is about as accurate as describing BLM protestors as criminals (e.g. it describes a very small minority).

Huh. I was just posting the quote that gp referred to, supposedly implying that the mob as a whole killed a police officer. The text is not written like that, and overall pretty dry and factual. We can argue about the one adverb „extremely“ in front of violent, but that’s not even that much of a stretch (people died).

An actually biased text would have used different words, like calling the mob a group of organized fascist insurgents intent on a coup d‘etat, commanded to do so by Trump. Even that would still be arguably correct.

The revision he posted was not the one I was talking about. There was another revision that directly said the mob killed the officer.

This might not be quite the examples you're looking for, but here's a study of Wikipedia's leftward bias from Harvard: https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/41946110/greenst...

Are you sure? That article talks about how unbiased Wikipedia is:

>Our study finds that crowd-based knowledge production does not result in articles with more biased than articles produced by experts when the crowd-based articles are substantially revised.

> when the crowd-based articles are substantially revised.

You literally just had to keep reading to find the cases where they do show bias

That's just saying that highly-trafficked, highly-edited articles are going to be less biased than articles with fewer contributors or sources. That... just makes sense, to me; the more visible or relevant an article, the more people (and potentially experts) will weigh in, and the more crowd consensus will drive out the more blatant biases.

It also mentions there a bias in both directions, depending on the topic. Plus, it only considers US viewpoints/political alignments, and not Canadian, British, Australian, or other countries.

Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, also gives a number of examples of Wikipedia's bias in this article:

https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

Yikes, yeah, that's a good example of bias. The main bias being describing a group doing something that only a tiny minority did. It's not as bad as saying things like "Muslims then bombed the world trade center", but it's still pretty bad.

Based on the 50 minutes of raw footage I've seen, a description of "mostly peaceful" wouldn't be too far off.

Hard disagree. If anything I'd say its value and reputation for current events and politics are higher than ever.

Please substantiate your unfair attack.

Also: there's a typo in your comment. First word should be "Its", and not "It's".

I don't think its hard to believe. Trust in media is at record lows. Since Wikipedia just repeats what the mainstream media says via its policy of using "reliable secondary sources", then wouldn't it follow that trust in Wikipedia would follow?

> Since Wikipedia just repeats what the mainstream media says

Citation needed.

I mean, anyone who has ever edited wikipedia can tell you. If you restrict your sources to ABC, CBS, CNN, NYT and friends, your article is going to read like a mainstream media story. And as the media gets more and more hysterical that starts to reflect on the quality of their articles.

> anyone who has ever edited wikipedia can tell you

Citation needed. Come on. You're retorting request for data on an anecdote with "other people also have anecdotes"

Okay okay. If you want to know how wikipedia feels about different news sources, they have a very nice article about it. It's even color coded. Green is considered reliable. Red is considered unreliable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...

So for instance, Wikipedia is seriously lacking in its cryptocurrency articles because you can't use coindesk or coin telegraph, even though they provide better coverage than CNBC and Bloomberg.

Interestingly enough the talk page is quite good to learn about current events and see every view. Though it is obvious that some mods and admins have an agenda; to be honest I didn't even realize it till I saw the war over Kamala's wiki page, super shady stuff.

What are you talking about? I just skimmed the Kamala Harris talk page and it's all bickering about trivial edits as far as I saw.

This was just before she announced her candidacy, I saw some interesting posts on Reddit. I can't say for certain what exactly happened but it was just super fishy.

Some further reading : https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/gni8t5/using_wi...

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/02/kamala-harris-wikipedia/

https://old.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/hk6eo3/kamala_ha... (check other discussions also)

I hope that gives a good starting point.

PS: I don't have a horse in this race, I just know my trust in wikipedia was shaken.

The moderation team constantly admonished the person making the edits, eventually ruling they had a conflict of interest and were not allowed to edit posts about Harris and some other politicians. They acted slower than fast paced politics, but ultimately seemed to do the right things.

Current events are so divisive and many times no one has a clear picture of what's happening that I can't see how someone objectively assesses a current event news outlet as lacking reputation without prior incidents.

Someone on hacker news commented about how they started watching the news 2 weeks after it was broadcast and mentioned how a massive amount of the breaking news ended up being false when viewed later with the full set of information. It would probably be beneficial if wikipedia simply didn't allow brand new news that couldn't be solidly confirmed.

But without characterizing what exactly "brand new" is, you could implement this prohibition without having the correct effect of maintaining veracity and consistency.

And would you treat different events differently? Would you have to wait, for instance, for classified documents to be released so that you could say you have the bigger picture?

I question if prohibition is really the right way to go. Wikipedia proved to be effective long term. Let them keep doing what is working. Maybe just warn the reader the subject or event is recent or currently developing and let the reader decide for himself whether to use that information or not.

Truly we need a low-pass filter to handle current events.

This will invariably induce bias or render the debate too shallow to be productive, maybe even at a cost of manufacturing consent.

Wikipedia already filters content, they only take more time. If you need some outlet with immediately curated information, I think you should look elsewhere, because this is not what wikipedia is for, the way I see it.

We are actually in agreement! I probably did not express myself properly - I don't want current events to be covered by Wikipedia. A delay is preferable.

This. Wikipedia severely locks out content creators to provide balanced views on politics.

It’s no secret the current content creators lean towards one side of the isle.

What does balanced mean? It's supposed to be well-cited not balanced

It has to be balanced and accurate. You can be 100% accurate and be incredibly misleading by omission or overemphasis.

https://accountablejournalism.org/ethics-codes/guidelines-on...

It means the Wikipedia article on Thalidomide can’t leave out the section on all of the harm it caused, despite the rest being well-cited.

But all the citations are going to mention that or it's just another chemical.

The average HN-er seems be more right wing than in most comment sections, so I was curious whether balanced means "fits my politics" or the more subtle "I'm only asking questions about the election"-ing on individual articles e.g. I could see the length of the Trump-Russia article annoying a few people here who seem to believe it's completely made up

> But all the citations are going to mention that or it's just another chemical.

No they aren’t. All you need to do is cite all of the material that was used for its initial approval before they knew about the problems.

Another example to help illustrate. The Boeing 737 MAX had a well-cited full article before the MCAS issues were known. Unbalanced moderation could just revert any future edits that tried to add in the issues.

> The average HN-er seems be more right wing than in most comment sections

Don’t do this shit. It makes for such boring reading. All you’re stating is that you have confirmation bias and don’t like seeing ideas you disagree with. There are thousands of comments all over about how HN is right-wing, left-wing etc with no evidence beyond anecdotes.

If it were biased right-wing the top comments on the Parler bands would not be lauding the decisions to ban them. If it were biased right wing, there wouldn’t be so many articles about basic income, etc either.

> All you’re stating is that you have confirmation bias and don’t like seeing ideas you disagree with.

Well ideas that I think are factually wrong, yes. HN is the only place on the internet where I find myself regularly having to prove that Julian Assange isn't necessarily a saint and that Donald Trump is corrupt.

Also, if (let's say you're right) it is merely confirmation bias - surely that means that we can infer that I have at least identified a difference, which given that I am an almost card-carrying capitalist should illuminate that I'm not marx-reading perpetual-protestor.

Hackernews doesn't have a partisan right-wing (it's poor terminology, but it's getting late) bias, but there is an extremely contrarian streak in the bowels of almost any not-yet flagged thread involving politics. For example, the Parler thread is not flagged, the Capitol Attack thread was flagged almost immediately and then dang resurrected it.

I recognize by name quite a few people on this site, I'm able to read the room. After all I'm still here at least every day.

Also, Basic Income is not left-wing policy in any way at all unless your litmus test for that is caring about poor people at all - it's effectively submitting to the free market which isn't exactly sporting for most socialists.

> Basic Income is not left-wing policy in any way at all unless your litmus test for that is caring about poor people at all - it's effectively submitting to the free market which isn't exactly sporting for most socialists.

This is pathetic goal post shifting at best. UBI is literally the government giving you enough money to never have to work again. It’s supposed to cover housing, food, and medical expenses. This is far more ambitious than any of the other “socialist” proposals from the likes of Bernie Sanders and co.

> Capitol Attack thread was flagged almost immediately and then dang resurrected it.

Because there is essentially nothing productive to discuss there. Emerging events are almost always flagged. BLM protests, CHAZ, shootings, etc. all end up flagged almost right away because there is little insight in the comments and mostly knee jerk stupidity.

> For example, the Parler thread is not flagged

You mean the one where the top comment is about how it was such a great move? Isn’t that pretty solid evidence of bias in the opposite direction you imply?

> HN is the only place on the internet where I find myself regularly having to prove that Julian Assange isn't necessarily a saint and that Donald Trump is corrupt.

I’m gonna go ahead an call bullshit on this one. You’re either replying to already down-modded comments or bringing up irrelevant info. Could it be that you’re just overreacting to comments still being visible even though they aren’t popular?

The goal isn't "balance" - it's accuracy. Turns out that's tough for some sides, particularly those that eschew reality, to follow or understand.

You can be 100% accurate and be incredibly misleading by omission or overemphasis, that is what ‘balance’ is for and refers to.

https://accountablejournalism.org/ethics-codes/guidelines-on...

In Wikipedia parlance, this is called "due weight" and "neutral point of view".

Wikipedia is not a place to catch up on the latest news or scandals as this stuff is usually hotly debated and often the truth isn't known for some time anyway. They usually do have pretty good summaries of the issues years after they have happened and all investigations / biases have finished.

I use wikipedia several times daily and find the information to be super useful and seemingly accurate. I find the wikipedia information on chemicals and plants to be super useful.

Agreed. I recently learned its CEO has a rather shady past, see e.g. here:

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/11/meet-wikipedias-ayn-rand-...

and I've always felt a strong pro-establishment bias on political matters. I can't say I'm an expert on Wikipedia in any way, but I wish the Wikimedia foundation as an organization would get some critical press coverage - at least as much as Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple etc (which is not enough).

What sources do you have on the decline of it's reputation?

Yep, it nicely demonstrates how much cooperating strangers can achieve in a few years... and how much of that is tarnished by petty political and ideological disputes these days, due to lack of ethical standards and education.

100%. Wikipedia is an excellent recourse for anything non political, especially scientific and technical information.

It’s not very good as a learning resource for mathematics.

That’s pretty minor, but it is the main point about Wikipedia that I wish were better (I know, I’m free to help out...).

I can barely believe I'm reading this comment! Wikipedia is my first and almost always only stop whenever I want to learn something related to math.

Yes I had the same thought, then I guessed parent might be referring to how wiki doesn't present topics in a way that's easily digestible for someone approaching new topics in math, which I can get behind. It is an encyclopedia after all.

Sometimes the "simple English" version is better than the "full" English version - perhaps especially for mathematics.

I came here to post that simple wikipedia exists :) . Just to prove your point, have a look at the simple page for "Prime number" [0] and the regular page for the same [1]

If I were just starting out with mathematics, I'd be rather intimidated by the regular page. I find the simple version to be the right start for any topic and then move on to the regular one.

[0] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number

What do you think are the problems with the regular page?

I just skimmed it, and it seems to me like high-school level math is more than enough to understand what the page is saying (at least superficially).

I get the idea behind simple.wikipedia.org, but more often than not it's just a dumbed down version of the main article that uses worse English (which is obvious, since it presumably has less contributors than en.wiki, but that doesn't help your average reader)

@qsort: To give you an analogy, think of the "original" wikipedia article as the equivalent of an academic paper. It is absolutely the right level of detail for a particular audience (with references and links and even fancy language) whereas the simple wikipedia article is the equivalent of a NYT article introducing the same idea and probably going a bit deeper.

As a further analogy, if I had to learn about Covid-19, I'd likely start with NYT (no affiliation) and then move onto Nature/Science/BMJ

This is slightly distressing — I’m fascinated by a lot of complicated math concepts that are far above my comprehension level, and Wikipedia is high on the list of places I check.

Do you have any suggestions of better sites to read?

It's a good reference, though. Even the articles that are obviously copied and pasted from someone's homework tend to at least be useful places to find references.

Why do you say that? Are there examples of inaccuracies in it's mathematics articles? What do you wish were better about it? What IS better than it?

In order to understand most Wikipedia mathematics articles you need to already be well versed in the topic you're looking up. Even after finishing a Physics degree I struggle to understand the derivations of common physics equations because they use far more advanced concepts than necessary to demonstrate their point.

So, should it have all the foundational build-ups to get to an understanding of the topic? I think that'd be amazing but quite difficult given it took you however many years to get that degree, and I can barely get a computer to do basic arithmetic for me.

That's not my point. My point is that to understand a fairly rudimentary topic using only Wikipedia you already have to understand post-grad mathemarics concepts because the derivation and terminology is needlessly contrived because the editors are usually post-grads writing as though the article is for other post-grads. There are countless examples but I'm on my phone at the moment.

Hmm. Maybe these post-grads are on their phone too writing about very complicated mathematics that to a post-grad might seem rudimentary.

The beauty is that nothing prevents YOU from adding clarity to these "needlessly contrived" concepts... so what's stopping folks like you from contributing?

I'd be far too worried about being incorrect when describing a derivation. I also studied physics not maths but the same goes for physics articles.

I think post-docs are probably better suited for accurate explanations but at the same time they are (at least, fairly often) not as good at explaining a concept using a simpler framework.

The other problem is that because different editors write maths articles, related concepts can use fairly different terminology or concepts with similar derivations use different derivations leading to possible confusion about how concepts are related.

It's not that the mathematics wiki articles are wrong, it's that they aren't particularly well organized to accommodate all skill levels. If you don't already know what concepts you're looking for it can be a jumble. That said, wiki plus textbook is better than either alone.

What should they do differently?

You're missing some crucial facts:

* Politics (and similar stuff) can creep into any topic

* It takes a lot of effort to verify a Wikipedia article and assess neutral point of view and other stuff. My point is that you won't know that you're reading a biased or hoax article while you're reading it.

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