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Comment by skhr0680 | Hacker News Reader

People need to stop blindly trusting Wikipedia. I have seen sourced facts that failed a sniff test, and checking the source the article contradicted the source it linked to, and that’s only the times I noticed. Couple that with the amount of other sites and media that copy off Wikipedia (citogenesis) and BS spreads like wildfire.

“Why do you still use Wikipedia?” because the good parts are a great human achievement and even the OK parts can be adequate as a broad outline of a topic.

“Why don’t you just fix it?” I try, but it’s hard when I have a busy day and my edit will be reverted within minutes by a full-time Wikipedian / Expert Wikipedia Rules Lawyer and self-appointed lord of said article.

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> “Why don’t you just fix it?” I try, but it’s hard when I have a busy day and my edit will be reverted within minutes by a full-time Wikipedian / Expert Wikipedia Rules Lawyer and self-appointed lord of said article.

Reddit has fallen to this same problem with subreddit moderators. A subreddit moderator can remove posts and comments they don't want anyone to see.

A lot of the popular subreddits and many of the more obscure subreddits are moderator-crafted echo chambers. Some moderators have unbelievable amounts of free time to observe the subreddit and surgically remove discussions they disagree with.

Worse, it's all invisible. These subreddits become an extension of what the moderators want without the moderators having to show their actions at all. When you visit a subreddit, you could be reading a carefully constructed echo chamber of a single moderator and have no idea.

I think the Reddit situation would be very different if it had a "showdead" style option that let readers see removed comments.

Yep. There’s clearly a reward structure being created to silence contrary information.

> a "showdead" style option that let readers see removed comments.

If it had this option, why even allow the moderation at all?

Same reason as for HN, to allow transparency of moderation?

I.e. we (mods and flagging users) remove stuff, but for those who wonder (and have a small amount of "karma"?) they can always use showdead to see what they are missing out on and even vouch for things that have been killed for no good reason.

This works beautifully here, except for stories where it seems a few can kill it with next to no trace except in the server logs. (You sometimes find them in /active even after they are flagged off the front page.)

>Reddit has fallen to this same problem with subreddit moderators. A subreddit moderator can remove posts and comments they don't want anyone to see. A lot of the popular subreddits and many of the more obscure subreddits are moderator-crafted echo chambers.

Coz it's cheaper to pay moderators with a power trip than with money.

I've yet to see a viable solution to this economic dilemma.

* Decentralized moderation tends to end up meaning no moderation coz normal users are not really motivated to clean up spam, etc.

* Free centralized moderation like reddit does inevitably means the space becomes a fiefdom from people who have their own reasons for doing grunt work for free (e.g. pushing their agenda, marketing, etc).

* Paid moderation isn't usually something people are willing to pay for.

> Paid moderation isn't usually something people are willing to pay for.

Is there any reason to think that paid moderation wouldn't lead to its own (possibly worse) biases?

I guess the reason would be that they could take away your pay.

But who is "they"? The one who pays the piper picks the tune.

Hacker News has paid moderators, and seems to be higher signal than Reddit.

HN moderation is pretty terrible considering the slow amount of posts per day

What's wrong with it?

What works on a slow / low volume site (HN) doesn't necessarily work well on a high volume site such as Reddit.

Is that actually due to moderation?

Normal users browse new and vote for good content. This works pretty well!

Could you designate a bunch of people as mini moderators and have the majority vote of mini mods decide moderation?

Then have one moderator curate the list of mini mods. By spreading the work out, more actual time can be spent on the decision and feedback given.

That sounds like a good idea, but in practice it turns into an unmanageable disaster of petty removals and biased moderation.

r/science has something like 1500 moderators, most of which only have the power to remove comments. The rules are applied seemingly at random, and the problematic posts/titles are rarely actually fixed, they just have a sea of [removed] under them. This makes the biased posts even worse as the comments correcting them and the discussion about it disappears.

That explains it why /r/science is such a graveyard! Thank you!

It sounds like if any of the 1500 mods dislike a comment, then that comment disappears. That's extremely biased towards removing comments.

My suggestion would have those 1500 mini mods vote "keep" or "remove" - majority wins. The main mod can look at contentious votes and override the mini mods decisions. Further the main mod can remove mini mods that are voting poorly.

The solution is found in proper accounting.

Hrmmm... Reddit pays mods? It would be very interesting to know how much they get paid by reddit. We didn't know how much Twitch streamers made until that info was leaked this year, and it encouraged many others to stop wasting their time on the platform in hopes of fairness.

It seems to me that reddit mods, and even the platform, often do(does) side deals with certain accounts to allow and help posts to reach the front page as well, while reddit also fosters this with paid promotions on the site. Lots of things that make it to the front page are not likeable, but somehow embedded with political and marketing messages, that's what corrupted the overall experience of browsing reddit for me... Not proven fact, but my opinion as a web developer mind you.

People play with anonymity that social media can provide to make money, now companies also do it. If transparency isn't practiced on the corporate side, everything online becomes a carefully controlled reality show while the shady deals go on behind the curtains.

Reddit removing public metrics, like displaying both upvotes and downvotes next to each other allows brigading to go on unchecked, and it enables an ideal that certain things are popular or likeable without dispute... The ideal that things make it to the front page because they are favorable, controversial, or popular is a big lie in itself especially if the numbers aren't truly accurate and/or transparent.

I am a mod on a subreddit that has public mod logs. There is a bot with mod permissions that logs every action any moderator takes including saving the content of erased posts and makes it publicly available.

I think more subreddits should use a tool like this.

As a general rule of thumb, this is a truth worth remembering about online fora in general:

In general, the voices with the most power aren't the most correct; they're the boxes with the most time (leisure or paid) to dedicate to being online.

You can subscribe reddit subs with RSS and fetch aggressively, this way you will see all comments and posts before the mods had time to delete them.

In this regard Reddit is no different than traditional forums where a mod would ban you for liking the wrong flavor of ice cream. And why should it be? If you want your non-crappy version of a subreddit, then go create it. The truth is that people who want to volunteer their time to mod a subreddit are mainly doing it to power trip, with some rare exceptions.

Problem is moderators can straight up ban you from posting anymore comments in a sub, and most do if they delete one of your comments. Try to talk about politics in any political tangent subreddit long enough and you will eventually get the boot because no sane person lines up with 100% perfect match to a certain political viewpoint

At least Wikipedia has its edit history. Or is that also editable by "Wikipedia Gods" nowadays?

> full-time Wikipedian / Expert Wikipedia Rules Lawyer and self-appointed lord of said article.

So absolutely true. These people are insufferable. Any time I've made a non-trivial edit to Wikipedia I usually end up clashing with these people. It really sucks because a lot of the time, they don't argue in good faith, and throw every rule in the book at you to get their way, while hiding behind a facade of impartial rule-abiding.

So frustrating, and has drastically lowered my confidence in Wikipedia.

Also, it's fun to note the "lords" of various general topics. Find an article about a person in the right-wing political sphere and you're very likely to find the same small set of "Wikipedian" toadies ruling over it with an iron fist. I'm sure the same goes for many other topics that aren't about politics.

This has been my experience also. These people get a mediocum of power and let it go to their heads.

It’s not even just controversial topics or politics: people try to control the pettiest things. I used to be active there, and it was a struggle to add “timelines” of band members to some old rock acts even though it was already in place in most of the site, because a classic-rock fan disliked them. There is also one specific user who gets to pick who is metal and who isn’t, and reverts addition to lists for bands who aren’t “metal enough” for him like Rammstein or Nu-Metal.

Even with sources and pushback from other moderators, it’s hard to compete with people with an agenda and a lot of time.

> Even with sources and pushback from other moderators, it’s hard to compete with people with an agenda and a lot of time.

Exactly! This, writ large, is why a small disciplined group can take over a bureaucracy that allows open participation in decision making processes.

You see this, for example, in everything from city council meetings to the state department.

Which explains why bureaucracies always end up with some ideological litmus test of us vs them applied to screen out who is allowed to participate, whether because the bureaucracy doesn't want to be taken over by an ideological group, or whether it has already been taken over by an ideological group, the ends result is the same -- every bureaucracy develops an ideology that it defends.

Taking this back to wikipedia, we see why no project like wikipedia can actually be "neutral". At best you can have a variety of ideological biases for different topics, with the most fanatical group's ideology dominating any given topic.

/rant

The article certainly betrays an ideological alignment that is routinely denied by those who moderate Wikipedia, but nonetheless is often fairly obvious.

But my general attitude toward Wikipedia is not to take it too seriously. These moderators are also generally randos with no credibility anyway, and they know it, hence their style of moderation.

Also, I would much rather have an encyclopedia with individual or a limited number of authors per article (like SEP does). If there is significant divergence on a subject, those divergences can be represented as alternate articles. What you don't want to do is pretend to have a "neutral" body of knowledge just because you have some article edited by an anonymous, unbounded committee and moderated by an asshole.

>Also, it's fun to note the "lords" of various general topics. Find an article about a person in the right-wing political sphere and you're very likely to find the same small set of "Wikipedian" toadies ruling over it with an iron fist. I'm sure the same goes for many other topics that aren't about politics.

These people are effectively activists who use wikipedia's reputation for objectivity to disguise what amounts to propaganda. The network of bullies lean almost exclusively in one political direction and any remotely political article will be immediately swarmed if edited with wrongthink - regardless of how well it is sourced. It's not just dishonest, it's dangerous that people are coming to wikipedia, reading articles with subtle but overwhelming bias, and leaving with the impression that they read something objective. Just check the talk page for anything adjacent to politics - you will inevitably see rabidly left leaning full time editors piling onto any remotely right of center edits.

It's particularly bad in the German Wikipedia. Compared to the situation there the English language version is downright welcoming.

Yes, our “Blockwärter” do this for a decade now. If they don’t know something, it doesn’t exist and also isn’t “relevant” enough for Wikipedia. It’s a shame.

Even for things you'd think were uncontroversial, they are insufferable. A number of years ago I tried to fix some really obvious errors in the article that described the small(ish) company I worked for. I sourced my changes, generally with links to the authoritative source, and still most of them got reverted. By someone who had no actual connection to the company, even.

I still browse wikipedia on occasion, due to ease of finding things, but I read everything with a very critical eye and keep in mind that I'm only getting one carefully curated version of reality. And it may be false even so.

Wikipedia has a moderately frustrating anti-elite / anti-self-promotion bias that will result in the site maintaining erroneous information added by natural third parties over true information added by those directly involved.

Doesn't matter how true it is... If you're an employee of the company and get found out, your edits get reverted.

Good point. I believe primary sources are flat-out banned, which could explain why those links didn't cut the mustard.

No, primary sources are not banned on Wikipedia.

The kinds of things I offered corrections on were simple and sourced off public filings. Like the relationship of the company with another -- our company bought another, but wikipedia claimed the other company bought ours. Another obvious mistake was the picture of our building. They put a picture of the building next door. There were a number of really egregious mistakes that I tried to correct, but I got a no-comment reversion of almost all of them.

And in case you were wondering, at no time did I identify myself as an employee (and I was just a software guy anyway, not part of the marketing group), nor did they suggest that they knew I was.

Some of those reversions are automatic or semi-automatic. If you did the edits from a corporate IP address, for example, people will run that stuff down, conclude the edits are conflict-of-interest (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ/Organizations), and revert them regardless of content. It appears that what Wikipedia considers the correct course of action in that circumstance is to highlight the error on the talk page and let someone else fix it.

Wikipedia is useful for the lists of references at the end of articles and for finding public domain or CC licensed images. But there’s never a good reason to look at the text of a Wikipedia article.

And, as you’ve found out, trying to improve the cesspool is a waste of time.

Absolutely right. What doesn't help here is when the Wikimedia PR machine minimizes and whitewashes problems, as it did in the Wikimedia blog post about this incident, making everyone think that Wikipedia is of uniformly stellar quality, better than Britannica and all the rest of it ... When the reality is that Wikipedia quality can and does vary tremendously from one article to the next, even from one paragraph to the next, and reader caution is always indicated. (For six or seven years, this specific article contained two different birth dates—one in the infobox, one in the lead paragraph. Nobody noticed or cared. Then someone picked up on the discrepancy and made both dates the same—wrong.)

I've had a few experiences with Wikipedia that left me with a sour taste. I can't remember details but there was a pretty big error on the Lancia page that I fixed, which somebody at Wikipedia changed back. This wasn't the first time but it was so long ago I can't remember what else I corrected.

Upshot was reverting to my old Microsoft Encarta disks, until I discovered Britannica. €100 a year and I have it all, and it's all from an organization that stakes its reputation on accuracy.

Even more useful now that my boy benefits.

This is the reason that Wikipedia turned out to be the exact type of failure that it was widely predicted to become. The crowd-sourcing concept leads to a diffusion of responsibility. A similar effect leads to thoughtless mob action in real crowds.

> “Why do you still use Wikipedia?”

It has mistakes, just like any other human-made source of knowledge too.

it's not like we have a god-given encyclopedia which is known to be completely right. I can use Google, DDG, or the library instead of wikipedia, and there's also chances that the sources there are mistaken or outdated too.

I mean your criticism in the abstract applies to basically any source. The argument is very general and applies to everything out there!

Hell, for contentious articles given you have antagonistic co-authors it’s more likely to be fact checked than in the Wapo “2 Pinocchios” echo chamber.

Words are written by people…

It's not just that Wikipedia is vulnerable to human error just like anything else, it seems to be driven by activists. Larry Sanger, one of Wikipedia's co-founders, has been trying to warn people that his own creation has been bastardized.

I still use Wikipedia for pure STEM subjects, but beyond that, I wouldn't trust it.

Even for pure STEM subjects, the further you go into esoterica, the less checking there can be on it. I remember one instance, mainly because it added an hour or two to a problem set in grad school.

(Apologies for any errors, as it's been the better part of a decade since then.) Wikipedia gave simplified formulas for the asymptomatic forms of the modified Bessel functions, and each formulas they gave were correct. However, each simplification used a different branch cut, so subtracting two of the asymptomatic forms wouldn't give the correct result. Tracing back that error, and why I was consistently off by a factor of 2*pi took a long time.

Here's a pretty good interview Larry did on Tim Pools show about 7 months ago, outlining just how bad it is. It's a topical show and not 100% focused on Larry though. Tim also outlines how hard it is to correct factually inaccurate information on what people write about him in his wiki entry (stating he created a "blimp" etc). Also goes into the fake, circular references and activists gaming the system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWQaVx5mGco

I fail to see how this effect would be less pronounced than, say, newspaper editors determining the overall voice of how they cover things.

Im not declaring that Wikipedia is objective, but I don’t honestly believe it’s worse than other sources of info (beyond like… really digging into a primary source of a subject? And even then)

It's not exactly the credibility that's the problem. There are dedicated editors on Wikipedia that are not only removing updates to articles, but are putting up false information, and are hiding behind Section 230 to avoid any repercussions. At the very least, regular news agencies have to issue corrections, or face lawsuits (granted, regular news agencies frequently put out false information and issue corrections only after everyone has already read the article).

The way Wikipedia generates its content though is susceptible to particular problems that traditional sources did not have. Multiple people—all differing in age (from 7 to 100+), educational status and subject matter knowledge—all editing the same article, often without reading all the parts of it that the others have written.

The amount of scrutiny individual Wikipedia articles receive differs vastly–the article on a top politician or a top science topic like a major planet will have hundreds of eagle-eyed watchers, while more obscure articles like the one discussed here may not be watched at all, and then anything goes. (This article for example had two different birth dates for six years, and then someone made them consistent—both wrong!)

Here are some more examples of the sorts of errors that are specific to a crowd-sourced work like Wikipedia:

https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday...

Few if any of these—like intentional hoaxes and undetected vandalism or a completely ignorant writer merely pretending to know a topic, by copying another text and then changing the name of one chemical substance in it to make it sound like the text was written about this substance—could or would have occurred in the traditional process of writing a reference work.

Traditional works have different problems, of course—instant obsolescence being one of them—and even the biggest ones have a far smaller scope than Wikipedia. But readers should bear in mind just how the Wikipedia sausage is made. Many seem to somehow believe that the Wikipedia process is, in terms of the results it produces, just like an orderly process with a professional writer and editors and fact checkers that try to verify everything before publication. That is not how crowdsourcing works.

Wikipedia avoids original research which in practice severely limits it’s accuracy. At best it’s an imperfect copy of whatever the original source was before adding its own slant and errors.

Google trusts Wikipedia. And that's sort of the problem with this case. Google was showing this guys picture on the search results page in an infobox as a serial killer.

Completely agree with this. Some of the locked topics are the worst too. They end up locked because people are fighting to include more information that’s not being allowed. It’s a huge problem.

Wikipedia is steadily trending towards Gell Man Amnesia at scale for any remotely contentious topic.

Considering how Wikipedia considers newspapers to be reliable sources, this should be expected.

Certain newspapers, but not all... Specially if they don't lean the way most prolific author on article wants.

this is concerning.

i can't say we can predict where all this is going or what will come out of this case. but wikipedia seems to have too much power over what constitute the "truth".

i recently read a book on cognitive science that has most of their sources from wikipedia.

At this point I rarely consider directly editing an article. If it seems that the edit would be palatable to the prevailing dogma I suggest it on the talk page. This allows whichever editor to claim it as their own and phrase it accordingly.

>my edit will be reverted within minutes

Post a link. I'm doing some research on this. Ideally we'd get rid of the ability to revert people most of the time, and only let people improve the edit by adding sources and such.

People need to stop blindly trusting. ~ I simply dropped the last word. Just a thought.

Wikipedia pages are also subject to PR fights and lobbying: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22653716>

Would you happen to know if anyone is cataloging these false facts?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com