Wikipedia cofounder: I no longer trust the website I created | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia cofounder: I no longer trust the website I created

unherd.com

68 pointselsewhen33 comments

I think having standards around what sources are acceptable is sort of a required feature if you want to be a reliable source of facts. There will always be people upset that their particular worldview doesn't fit in a place that is trying to be a factual description of reality. If you're upset about eastern medicine not being taken seriously enough do some double blind properly constructed studies showing why it's effective. If it isn't effective don't expect it to be taken seriously as medicine.

You completely missed the point. COMPLETELY. The reality is that tons of studies are faked daily and "facts" change based on politics. Also big companies and powerful people have their info changed. Like Kamala Harris who had all the negative shit she did removed before the election. For example locking innocent people in jail and not letting them go when she knew they were innocent.

Negative shit, liiiiike for/with which company?

That sounds like a Trumpian oversimplification designed to be a character assassination attempt.

The sad reality is that the scientific methods are just as corrupt and misleading as any other source. There are countless articles on these so called "peer reviewed" articles being accepted without single person even reading the abstract. My all time favorite is[0]

[0]:https://www.vox.com/2014/11/21/7259207/scientific-paper-scam

Some five-year-old stunt doesn’t proof anything, least of all that there is any alternative. What would you replace peer review with? Some guy publishing straight-into-camera rants on YouTube?

>Some five-year-old stunt doesn’t proof anything

If they haven't spotted such a blatant mistake do you think they will spot subtle lies that have been inserted on purpose to sway opinion/serve as ammo for some journalist who knows its audience can be misled by merely mentioning its a study from an "academic journal".

I don't know the solution to be honest. What I know however is that unless you are an expert in a topic, your chances of knowing what's true and what's not is very slim.

There are good journals with a strict vetting process and there are predatory journals where the "peer review" is just a rubber stamp iif you pay the publication fees. And there are many levels in between.

So in an Internet discussion, I try to use "published in a serious peer review journal". But it's very difficult to know if a journal is serious unless you are an specialist in that area.

There are indices that somewhat measure the quality, but for example a citation index or 1.5 is a lot in Math but low in Physics, so you don't know unless you are an specialist in the area.

There are tricks that are useful to detect bad journals, like looking at the rest of the articles published in the journal. A lot of single author articles is a red flag. Weird titles like "Using General relativity to prove that Sunspots are Conscious" is another red flag.

>There are good journals with a strict vetting process

This is a myth. Vetting process cannot help if the persons involved are corrupt.

Getting a "good reputation" might be just the first step in the journey to corruption.

You seem to think "peer review" is something magical and absolutely necessary for science, when in fact all it does is give your peers and grant rivals heads up on what you are publishing/researching so they can decide if they want to A) allow you to publish B) try and publish their research before you C) just veto your paper and claim it is not good.

People usually think of the scientific method as

1) make an observation that describes a problem, 2) create a hypothesis, 3) test the hypothesis, and 4) draw conclusions and refine the hypothesis.

and stuff along those lines. Paying journals to publish your stuff isn't really science - it's vering more into business and politics.

I don't mind articles being policed edited with propaganda so much.

What I do mind, is talk pages being policed and edited. This is new!

It used to be the case that if you visited a controversial article that didnt quite pass the "sniff test", you could then go to its talk pages and witness all the controversy laid bare, and make up your own mind on something.

Now there's some very inventive archiving and cleaning up and even censoring of people's comments in place, it feels like people getting "disappeared".

It's not just archivebot doing it? Can you give an example?

My biggest problem with Wikipedia now is not the bias. I can read through it and I never even made the assumption Wikipedia is trustworthy on political issues.

My problem is that the Wikimedia foundation is becoming more corrupt. They receive loads of money on donations but they need much less, so they spend it on events and paychecks for their friends. My stance is that if you want to help them do not donate now. Their spending is easily 10x inflated even if you account that they are one of the most visited websites on the Internet

The bias is very visible with articles that have national interest, e.g. the ones that describe things like massacres commited by certain governments.

Smaller articles are fine, those are less likely to be corrupted by persistent and small attempts at changing the narrative

Is there further proof than this?

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/sue-gardner-log-rolling-corru...

Wikipedia was never intended to be a be an arbitrator of truth. It is an encyclopedia that anyone can edit and it's only purpose is to serve as a repository for information on many subjects or on many aspects of one subject.

Opinions aside, it does an excellent job of that.

Have you ever tried to correct something on Wikipedia?

I did, many times its reverted by some account that has more rights than you due to the fact that he wrote more than you.

The system rewards people who write more with more power so the people who already wrote most of it also decide who or what can be added. Its a repository for information but its selected by people who have an aligned bias.

>it does an excellent job of that.

For the most part yes. If i want to read something about an animal, a chemical, a city etc. its perfectly fine. If its about politics related stuff its not. Historical stuff is also questionable sometimes.

I've had the same experience on stuff I'm either an expert in or even an original source.

Excellent job? That's what is under debate and asserting that it does, adds zero content to the discussion.

Wikipedia: Since Sanger's departure from Wikipedia, he has been critical of the project, describing it in 2007 as being "broken beyond repair".[2]

Poor guy is really beating a dead horse about "left wing" Wikipedia. Oddly, he doesn't seem to be working on Conservapedia [https://www.conservapedia.com/Larry_Sanger] but something called Encyclosphere

[2] https://www.itnews.com.au/news/wikipedia-broken-beyond-repai...

Funny thing is that you're completely okay with the lies the left pushes all day long. You don't want two sides

I never said anything like that. You jumped to a conclusion. He lost the battle a long time ago. Wikipedia is huge and hard to steer. I put "left wing" in quotes because that seems to be his sentiment. Unfortunately for conservatives, internet savvy people like those who edit Wikipedia seem to be overwhelmingly liberal. I'd be ok if Wikipedia was more balanced, but that's just not the way it is. Like Marlo Stanfield said in The Wire; "You want it one way, but it's another."

There's a few more Sanger "Wikipedia but better I promise" projects you missed -- Digital Universe, Infobitt, and Everipedia. Not that any of them amounted to anything.

But I think you've hit upon an important point here -- Sanger has been coasting off his early involvement with Wikipedia for the last 20 years. At this point, the Wikipedia project owes much more to the editors who have been working on it for the past 20 years than it does to him.

I can think of a couple of one hit wonders in the music world who also need to let it go. That's the vibe I get. Enjoy your claim to fame and be glad you have one.

You are absolutely correct that it was built mostly by contributing editors and belongs to all of us. I feel it will be one of the top 5 things people recognize about the early internet centuries from now. Too bad Sanger doesn't enjoy that.

yes, it's absolutely politically biased & censored, some "power-editors" are former employees of wikimedia, you have no chance to add an alternative view/source on an article where they have some left-wing agenda to promote

Wikipedia has clear woke and left wing bias.

But there is zero proof I've seen it's worse than 10 or 20 years ago. Which would be amazing if it's held that tide back. It would be far better than encyclopedias for bias as well.

It's taken a decade+ but the entry for a siphon seems like it's finally correct (It's closer than it was anyway). That's no small feat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siphon

Quantifiable evidence is needed to make this point. I agree it's under constant growing attack but so far it looks like it's doing really well.

Is there any reasonable evidence for this? I've seen this claim repeated many times but if it's such an ultimate truth there must be some actual evidence for it. When I read Wikipedia i find individual bias in articles - say American folk heros are portrayed very favourably. Company pages will be filled with twisted narratives. Scientology pages are battlegrounds as their stooges fight for every word. But I cant see any inherent left wing bias. If anything I (as a European) would say English Wikipedia is right-wing biased and overly religious as that reflects the slanted american political spectrum - but again my personal perception from the articles I've read and I would be able to find examples but have no objective evidence for this.

Looking at the default.

Editing for free is more left wing. Deep research is more left wing. Journalists who write many of the sources are more left wing.

Surveys show more people edit from left wing locations (But not entirely) and to your comment - "Counties with high religious adherence also have a low level of Wikipedia-editing activity" - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/where...

Conservapedia is a failure, it's not something the right is good at.

Personally I can find left wing bias easily on Wiki, right wing bias is harder to find for myself. I don't have any reason to think Wikipedia has a right wing bias issue of the same scale.

An idea it's more US centric and the US is more right than Europe and that comes out, would be a good theory, I'm not sold but open to it.

To your example Scientology , the intro sentence is biased, it's a left wing bias, the right would not word their bias (which they have) that way -

"Scientology is a set of beliefs and practices invented by American author L. Ron Hubbard, and an associated movement. It has been variously defined as a cult, a business or a new religious movement"

Strangely Conservapedia is better - "Scientology is a new religion[1] established in the United States by science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard in 1954."

German Wikipedia is good (Translated)- Scientology is a New Religious Movement whose teaching goes back to the writings of the American writer L. Ron Hubbard

Wikipedia is terrible currently.

Your comment is literally pure, unexplained opinion.

I regularly find Wikipedia entries helpful and factual. How is that terrible?

"Terrible" might be a little extreme but it's a little hard to argue that Wikipedia has not seen better days. The moderation culture has seemingly been taken over by deletionists who seem more concerned about some arbritary metric of "notability" than if an article is of high quality.

https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism

Broken links on some references

Plenty statements with citations that don't really support the claims made directly but instead paraphrase the claims in the introduction of some paper (turtles all the way down)

Article size has grown whilst increasing noise to signal ratio (I guess you could call it an opinion)

Influence by certain groups with a selfish interest in editing the content, and more authority given to established editors

Those are the ones that come to mind at the moment

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