What Wikipedia Did
twitter.com
twitter.com
Others used web technology to create vast noise chambers of nothingness, deceit and paranoia.
Wikipedia shows that having a bit of faith in moral principles and affinity for the good side of humanity can readily turn technology into a force for good.
This puts to shame and exposes the shallowness and enormous wastefulness of most all other tech efforts out there.
Ofcourse with such dramatic success there are emergent challenges. Developing ground truth on divisive issues that tear humanity apart is highly non-trivial.
But the miracle stands and is asking from all of us to turn faith into science, find ways to replicate the essence of Wikipedia across all domains.
How do we prevent such scumbags from rising to the top:
Aptitude / personality tests in high-school? Perhaps people can become better over time.
Trust our elders / benevolent dictators for life? People can also become worse over time, lose their empathy for others once they are higher up the ladder.
It is a wicked problem to design systems that can resist / repel malign actors.
Full credit to all involved in Wikipedia for fighting the good fight.
Back in the 90s we all thought the internet would be the killer app to solve this problem once and for all, but look how that turned out.
Now a modern "king" has immense power and resources to affect everyone with very few easily replaceable lieutenants to dilute it, and AI is bound to be a magnifier of that power. They also have more insight into the population than a 15th century King could ever do -- they didn't know you existed, but a modern king knows everything from your movements to your shopping habits. From face recognition to tracking your browser's fingerprints that information is stored and logged permanently, to be mined and used whenever the kings want.
It's the 50 cent thing, most people are not willing to pay the price to be the boss.
If regular people were willing to lead, everybody else could follow them and narcissists and psychopaths had time to heal their souls.
Hence the miracle might be in having the courage not to run ads and not locking everything beyond a paywall, updating the phrase: build it, don't run ads/paywall it, they will come, it will be great.
† Wikipedia is amazing, don't get me wrong.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International#D%C...
Capitalism cannot unlock the potential of the web the way Wikipedia, project Gutenberg, Stack Overflow, Internet Archive, the Pirate bay and open source software has done.
Humans are social and moral beings. Our motivations are not limited to profit maximization and rent seeking. Micro-economics can never explain Wikipedia.
Luckily you can just log in to the communist internet, invented before the capitalist one and with way better content and potential. Right?
I'm just noting the that the most valuable websites on the internet are relatively nonprofit.
I merely illustrated that the web was invented and ran by a capitalist society, the internet you see today is a product of capitalism, the good parts and the bad ones.
Unless you can link me websites created and ran from countries with different systems - that you had in mind as being superior.
Huh? Capitalism is literally a state of economic freedom. People accumulate capital via consensual economic transactions, then decide what to do with it (stuff like funding Wikipedia!). How is this contrary to a free society?
Now if, for example, Hacker News would ask me to pay 0.001 USD to receive this specific stream of bytes, I guess that would be "capitalist internet". Perhaps it would be a good idea, who knows, I'd sure like to be paid for putting content out there for large language models to sweep in.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#System_...
... This is why I love Wikipedia. It teaches me new things every day.
It's the same with reddit.
Sure, running Reddit isn't cheap. But the value it generates dramatically outweigh the costs. Despite this, it's difficult to finance it without making the site considerably worse.
They aren't corporate projects.
I know this can be a touchy subject for people on the American left, but there is likely a reason human history has not produced a whole lot of organisations with independent governance outside of capitalism. At least I think you will be hard pressed to find examples of it if you go looking. I know because I’m a left leaning Scandinavian who spent a lot of my youth looking (including a minor in history).
That being said, organisations like Twitter are the worst examples of capitalism. At least in my opinion, in that they are companies that do not generate a profit. But instead plan to, somehow, sometime, generate a profit for their investors. It’s essentially like running a non-profit organisation without any of the moral obligations. Obviously a very cool idea here on HN considering this is a venture capitalist site, but maybe not so good for humanity as a whole.
The reason is that capitalism actively undermines any competing type of organization. Organizations which build sustainable and ethical products or services are quickly driven out of market when capitalism offers competing products or services for free.
While carefully airbrushed from public discourse the very function of capitalism is absolutely predicated on the legitimacy and protection granted by the collective. Every time an "important sector" gets bailed out you have a direct confirmation of our deep inter-dependencies. Privatizing profit and socializing loss is proof of the deep prevailing immorality of the "system". Yet there is nothing that says that all those financial inventions must degenerate into obsessive profit-seeking.
Capitalism is a broad set of contractual arrangements, information flows, monetary accounting and the like, that facilitate economic function. Almost everything in this toolkit is configurable (via legislation and regulation, but even more so by widely adopted moral behavior) to the most minute detail. You could have for-profit employee owned corporations for example (they do exist and they work just fine).
Blaming "generic" capitalist tools is similar to blaming digital tech as such. Both are manifestations of "social tech" but what you do with them depends on your moral sandbox. You can legitimately blame php for its limitations as a technology. But you can use php to write mediawiki or to write facebook. You can piggy-bag on PageRank or LLM to sell targeted ads or opt to empower every person alive with new and powerful information processing tools.
I think people adopt non-profit status to immunize against a metastasized environment where anything but the most rapacious behavior is dead on arrival. But it really does not have to be this way and it wasn't always that way (in space and time). In a sense it is an extreme measure which realistically and unfortunately (in the short term at least) cannot become the norm. We really ought to fix capitalism. Even if our digital sphere was a benign utopia, we face horrendous environmental sustainability problems that the current version of capitalism has absolutely no idea how to fix. Hopefully there will be a well researched and objective Wikipedia article on how to do this :-)
Let me counter, as someone that's edited wikipedia articles: I have no interest in having power over other people. In fact I actively work against hierarchical power structures, which I find inherently unethical. Many others I've met in the weird niche community of hackers and wikipedia editors share these values.
I edit wikipedia articles for a variety of reasons. Off the top of my head: something written was factually incorrect (a date off, a mandarin word mistranslated, etc) and I feel an obsessive desire to make the documentation correct; there was no information on a subject I care about and so I wrote some because I really like documentation; the article on a band hadn't been updated to include their new album so I added it because I like the band and I want to make sure people know about the new album; the article wasn't written clearly enough and I worried about non native english speakers who find it and might misunderstand what was written.
I really don't understand either how editing a wikipedia article gives you power over someone. They can just edit it back, or ignore the article.
Edit: Thinking on it, I edit wikipedia articles maybe for the same reason I have a freesound.org account I upload my audio recordings to: I just really like having an internet full of useful and interesting stuff for people and contributing to that.
> I really don't understand either how editing a wikipedia article gives you power over someone
It is impossible for me to take this comment at face value. I don't believe that it is not immediately obvious to you how exerting editorial control over the 7th most visited site on the internet, a site that is aiming to represent "the sum of all human knowledge", represents a significant source of power to influence society.
It's great that you've enjoyed the process of contributing minor edits, and content to niche fields. But you can't ignore the fact that a majority of the content comes from a tiny minority of the userbase, and that their motives demonstrably resolve around a desire to control information in many cases.
[0]: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4228b090-8900-4a29-baa3-66...
> Based on empirical data drawn from a series of interviews and an exhaustive analysis of its cases between 2004 and 2020, this paper examines the ways in which the Arbitration Committee handles conduct-related disputes between editors, and the impact of social capital, summarily defined as the “capital captured through social relations” (Lin 2001, 19), on this process. My empirical material indicates that the Arbitration Committee not only examines the merits of the claims made by the disputants, but also and more crucially facilitates a social contest by considering the position of each disputant within the community of editors. Ultimately, the Arbitration Committee seeks to “cancel” these disputes in order to preserve Wikipedia’s social fabric.
As long as the different groups are on equal footing and there is a fair way to resolve disputes, the invisible hand should guide the article to something fair.
I think this has been borne out in practise for the most part.
That very much depends on the subject matter. Subjects that are at all politically or socially controversial are very likely to be under the control of one or the other side. If it's a "boring" subject that lots of people are interested in, then the page will probably be fairly balanced.
A better Wikipedia would have epistemological relativity as a central mechanic, while simultaneously relaxing the rules on acceptable sources. Implementing that in a way that doesn't compromise UX would be difficult, but it's a technical problem more than anything.
Not everything is an opinion. For example my physical height is a fact. How many versions of truths are there about it?
https://www.gq.com/story/nba-player-heights
But my point isn’t that all information on Wikipedia is factually incorrect. It contains a lot of useful information. My point is that the process for revolving controversies doesn’t simply focus on facts, or merit, or anything similar to scientific or academic rigour, as it is often influenced more by the politics of the Wikipedia editors social hierarchy.
Also prove your last statement that a significant amount of Wikipedia editors are influenced by political
> prove your last statement that a significant amount of Wikipedia editors are influenced by political
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4228b090-8900-4a29-baa3-66...
> Based on empirical data drawn from a series of interviews and an exhaustive analysis of its cases between 2004 and 2020, this paper examines the ways in which the Arbitration Committee handles conduct-related disputes between editors, and the impact of social capital, summarily defined as the “capital captured through social relations” (Lin 2001, 19), on this process. My empirical material indicates that the Arbitration Committee not only examines the merits of the claims made by the disputants, but also and more crucially facilitates a social contest by considering the position of each disputant within the community of editors. Ultimately, the Arbitration Committee seeks to “cancel” these disputes in order to preserve Wikipedia’s social fabric.
Here you go, there’s some empirical evidence that proves it. This describes a _political process_ where controversies are resolved according to the _politics_ of Wikipedia editing. I am not talking strictly about something like democrats vs republicans, or whatever your own narrow view of politics entails, as I suspect you may have presumed.
It doesn't matter how hard it is to determine his height, if it's wrong on Wikipedia, or if it's controversial. If the height is incorrect on Wikipedia it's not true or a fact. If two sources have his height and they are different only one is true, which one? No idea but there aren't multiple truths.
This line of thought is a way to muddy the difference between opinions and facts. A good opinion is one that is based on factual information, if you can claim there are multiple true but contradictory facts (like his height) it allows you have an opinion that might otherwise be based on nothing or false information.
The difference between an opinion and a fact is an opinion can't be falsified[1]. It's possible to find out his height[2], therefore there is only one truth, and other "truths" would turn out to be false.
-------
The paper you supplied shows social capital helps with the arbitration committee and talks about some inner circle of people who coordinate. You're right, this does prove your point and I did assume that you were talking about the more common current use of politics. I was too focused on the "facts" part of our discussion and read too quickly. That's my fault.
There are sophisticated institutions in our society that are devoted to evaluating facts, and none of them have a definition of a fact that is as rigid as yours. The criminal justice system is one, they only require proof "beyond reasonable doubt" (as subjectively decided by a jury or judge) to establish a fact. The academic system is another, and their standard for establishing a fact is arguably lower, as they rely on a (perhaps similar) peer evaluation process.
It's not possible to have a fact with the characteristics you're describing. All facts can be subject to legitimate controversy.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_trilemma
I was implying "true fact" because I didn't know that it has a definition "a statement that can be proven true or false". An opinion can't be falsified right? So there's still a clear difference even though I wasn't using "fact" incorrectly.*
Let me rewind to the statement I replied to ""promote their own views as the truth (for whatever reason they have for doing that), and suppress all opposing views."
What I don't understand and you can help me with (I'm not being sarcastic at all) is that how can you push views (opinions) using truths (proven facts?) over another view without at least one of the following
1. False facts, fake sources, and other out of bounds actions 2. Omission of information
Because I think I'm beginning to understand what you might be saying. Is it that someone would want to push a view by only adding facts that could cause someone to come to a conclusion but leaving out other information that might sway them to another conclusion?
If that's true wouldn't that occur less often than other sources of information because those other sources of information are created once by a small set of authors? Books, blogs, news articles, etc. If so then isn't Wikipedia the best option?
* I think I've gotten so used to saying "fact" to mean "proven fact" obviously if that was the case there would be no way to describe incorrect facts. I'm sorry, I do appreciate your patience. I have a habit of assuming other people know what I mean.
The role of the fact validator is to evaluate the proof, and decide whether it meets a subjective criteria that elevates it to the level of fact. Controlling this process allows the fact validator to decide which information is fact, and which is not. Even when you have a rigid criteria for evaluating facts, the criteria itself is going to be subjective and opinionated, and no matter how much you try to control it, the fact validator will have some leeway in interpreting the criteria and how it applies differently for different facts.
This is one of the roles of a jury. When a jury is presented with conflicting accounts of facts (as they often are), one of their jobs is to review the evidence and come to a consensus on which facts (in their opinion) are true.
There's also the issue that statements of fact, and statements of opinion are not quite that clear cut. Consider the statement "He attempted to undermine the process", which is the sort of thing I could hypothetically imagine a fact checker attempting to validate. It's a statement of opinion that potentially alludes to statements of fact. If you break it down into how you might reach that conclusion, you'd have: "He did a thing" this is a statement of fact (whether it's "proven" or not). "The thing he did undermined the process" this is more of a statement of opinion, as it presupposes what the process is intended to do, and how the thing he did influenced that. "It was his intention for this thing that he did to undermine the process" and this is unambiguously an opinion as all cases of attributing a motive are naturally opinionated.
But keep in mind that this whole argument I'm making is based upon the idea that there are no universal truths (which relates to philosophical ideas like relativism and absurdism). These ideas have their critics (such as Plato who criticised Socrates' interpretation of them), but I've never heard any satisfactory (according to me) explanation of how you might go about proving a universal truth (with universalist ideas typically only being embraced by religion, and perhaps ironically the anti-religion moral universalist camp, people like Richard Dawkins)
So Wales being under attack on Twitter is sad but doesn't necessarily represent "public opinion".
I think we are in the last days of major figures like Jimmy Wales still treating Twitter as a respectable arena for public engagement.
I don't really go to Twitter, so I don't know, but am curious: Is this an established fact? A quick search did not show anything official confirming this.
> Prioritized rankings in conversations and search: Tweets that you interact with will receive a small boost in their ranking. Additionally, your replies will receive a boost that ranks them closer to the top. Twitter Blue subscribers will appear in the Verified tab within other users’ notifications tab which highlights replies, mentions, and engagement from Blue subscribers.
The rationale was that paying $8/month is the best way to filter out bots, but...
At least it is somewhat honest and not, oh, we didn't meant to do this, in our effort to convince more people into paying.
Important things will still probably reach me in embedded shape or quote on other sites, but currently I cannot remember a single tweet at all, that not reading it, would have changed my life for the worse.
So no doubt good content is hidden underneath, but all this drama makes it not worth it for me.
But if this is what is happening to the prioritisation of replies it might actually be a useful change.
Any ideas?
>A notorious Russian "troll factory" had a $1.25 million [monthly] budget in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election to interfere in the US political system, according to charges filed by the Department of Justice.
https://www.businessinsider.com/russian-troll-farm-spent-mil...
And the official site also mostly just says, that mainly you have to pay and have a phone number. No sentence that they actually verify you are a living human being.
"Only accounts actively subscribed to Twitter Blue are eligible to receive the blue checkmark.
Our team uses an eligibility criteria on when the checkmark is given to ensure we maintain the integrity of the platform. Your account must meet the following criteria to receive or retain the blue checkmark:
Complete: Your account must have a display name and profile photo
Active use: Your account must be active in the past 30 days to subscribe to Twitter Blue
Security: Your account must be older than 30 days upon subscription and have a confirmed phone number
Non-Deceptive:
Your account must have no recent changes to your profile photo, display name, or username (@handle)
Your account must have no signs of being misleading or deceptive
Your account must have no signs of engaging in platform manipulation and spamhttps://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit...
It's not like a fuzzy statistical boost, it's literally just all Blue replies come above all non-Blue replies. The only exception is that a non-Blue reply can sometimes get boosted in order to be able to show a blue 2nd-level reply.
If you scroll through replies you'll often find a bunch of zero-like replies like "lol" and "me too" from Blue users, then below that a handful of insightful replies with dozens of likes, from non-Blue users. You can see why the latter are not gonna keep posting those replies much longer.
Even before Musk took over twitter was a very specific, very tiny, slice of the English speaking world.
There was a film theory a few months ago which looked at movies and trending on twitter, and dug a little deeper. Twitter for exmaple completely ignored major cultural phenomenon like Yellowstone, but really bigged up stuff the vast majority of the world doesn't care about ("the Snyder cut")
Presumably this applies to pretty much any subject.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMTazviRabg
https://www.summarize.tech/www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMTazviRa...
The response from @GSR6669 resonates with me:
> Wikipedia suspended edits & changed the definition of recession at request of the US Government. Everyone likes to poke holes in Elon’s Twitter yet no choice is infallible.
> Throwing rocks in a glass house is what makes you a real hypocrite though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Recession&action=...
The thing is, everybody is politically motivated, whether your actions directly affect an organized political party or not. Labeling these specific edits as such is not really saying anything. If there is clearer evidence of a pattern then sure, let's have at it. Until then I remain unconvinced that there is any sort of conspiracy involved here.
Was also corrected by people replying pointing out that this didn't actually happen.
Wikipedia is being corrupted and you should be aware of it. Having a (single) source of truth* has to end like this.
edit: *: More precisely institutions and people treating it like a single source of truth.
Why?
Using Wikipedia as an example: Everyone can edit Wikipedia, however if your edit survives is determined by a hierarchical structure that involves people (with an opinion). It doesn't need a big conspiracy, but only a few people that select which people may act on their behalf. A concrete example would be the Wikipedian Feliks in German Wikipedia who is by now convicted of defamation (via Wikipedia) and still remains part of the "Politburo" of Wikipedia altho obviously violating the official ethos.
In regards to changing Wikipedia, try removing opinions (or just circular citation) from an entry of Feliks or Kopilot (or anyone of the Politburo) and look what happens. Most likely your account is gone, but if you're lucky your edit is just reverted.
Much of it is how Wikipedia is being treated. It is/was an excellent reference book for quickly looking up information about a topic - well, just like an encyclopedia, however it's bad as a source of truth.
Does the topic matter? Is it binary? Why is it a good or bad source of truth, not some level of trust?
Nitpicks
You talk about circular references, I assume you mean someone cites wikipeida which then cites...something else? Either way Wikipeidia isn't a primary source and if someone uses it as one they are wrong and that's the fault of the person.
How would someone defame someone on Wikipedia without providing false sources or no source at all. If they did it could be discovered and changed. This could happen on social media, news organizations, books, or in person. What source of information is immune to this ? (If none are then I don't believe it's a valid criticism)
You say that people who want to corrupt will be attracted to it. Aren't there protections against that? Does it happen often? Is it so frequent that you have zero trust or you think it's "bad source of truth"
In my opinion none.
> You say that people who want to corrupt will be attracted to it. Aren't there protections against that? Does it happen often? Is it so frequent that you have zero trust or you think it's "bad source of truth"
Why are people so obsessed with a source of truth? We never had that and we still don't disregard how much we pretend that we have or wish we had one. It's not the first time in history we pretended that one exists either, but it usually ends bad.
I say this because I'm not sure what functionally is meant by "having a bit of faith in moral principles."
When it fails, pages get locked. Misbehavior is corrected by going to the last good state, not by trying to move forward.
Wikipedia succeeds by not being social media. It doesn't want engagement. It doesn't care if you leave. It enforces ego-less-ness by not showing you names; it doesn't want your contributions, especially not on general topics that people enjoy "debating".
That's hard to replicate elsewhere, because it has done that thing well. It's the go-to source for that kind of interaction.
I believe also it's possible to have a social media network that is non-commercial and is successful because it has no need to pump engagement to chase endless growth.
Although i suppose the ongoing abstract wikipedia stuff is an example of that.
By and large i dont think there has been much in way of expansion attempts. Most of them are from long ago.
Wikipedia aims for a read only state and will happily throw out any contribution even slightly out of line since that's not its mission. It's anti-social.
Short version. The original Tradgedy of the Commons paper that much modern economic theory rests upon and that is a key pillar that justifies the value of privatisation has found to have been made up.
Elinor Ostrom spent over 20 years debunking that there’s nothing you can do, and distilled a set of principals that any community can enact to protect and preserve a commons.
By example, here’s Mozilla led research on ‘A Practical Framework for Applying Ostrom’s Principles to Data Commons Governance’
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/a-practical-framework...
None of modern economic theory rests upon that paper. Literally the only thing that rests on it is the name of a scenario in game theory, and... it’s not even the dominant name, just an alternate for Prisoner’s Dilemma.
(A lot of social science, and not just economics, applies that scenario, but that doesn’t rest on the paper, but on rational choice theory, or some variation thereon.)
This was what was espoused by the (debunked) paper and remains a pillar of contemporary neo-liberal ideology.
“Privatization” is a government policy, not “modern economic theory”, and to the extent that policy is based on that broad concept of a general effect of which the essay purported to document an example (rather than specific analysis of the domain being privatized), that essay is not the basis (it neither introduced the concept—which was much older—nor was is it the sole purported example).
> This was what was espoused by the (debunked) paper and remains a pillar of contemporary neo-liberal ideology.
It was a pillar of liberal ideology long before the essay was written, it never rested on the essay and, in any case, ideology isn’t the same as economic theory (Austrian school aside.)
I think we’re at semantics.
If you mean the 2009 one for work that included one of the many dismantlings of both the underlying essay you are you are talking about and the broader principal it addresses, sure, but that further rebuts, rather than supports, your argument that modern economic theory is based on that essay.
Every time I have tried to edit anything in Wikipedia I have run into a very ego-driven community of long-term editors who don't much care for outsiders playing in their sandbox. The levels of "proof" and "citation" demanded to make even the smallest correction, often far beyond anything backing the preexisting copy, means only those with ego-driven determination are likely to have their edits stick. I do care a little that a wikipedia article is incorrect about a topic related to my profession. But I don't care enough to engage some armchair lawyer/soldier in an epic back-and-forth debate over a period of days/weeks. So I back off and just let the errors sit.
I've made substantive changes to either little known but contentious or moderately well known pages - and my changes largely persisted.
Technical communities also value professional credentials and prestige as a blockbuster, so it may be helpful to reveal your professional achievements.
Wikipedia generally does not (if anything it would probably count against you as most people who bring that sort of thing up are lying about them anyways).
Sometimes people are unfairly reverted, but often people are reverted for good reason and have problems accepting that their edit simply was not a positive change to the page.
That being said.
Wikipedia isn't the truth. I know this for a fact, because there are historical articles that I was there to witness that are not even close to being documented correctly by Wikipedia.
Wikipedia simply collates narratives that can be drawn from citable evidence. Still, their definition of citable evidence is about as workable as I can imagine.
If one doesn't like it, one is invited to get your side of the story published in a reputable source, and then cited. It outsources the process of fact-checking to the free press, such as it exists on the internet.
There is a clip from Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom that humorously illustrates[0].
[0] https://youtu.be/3wla-vK4Buw
I still think Wikipedia is better than we probably deserve and I'm glad we are training training AI on it. I also hope that they are trained on the edit discussions, because that is the AI that's going to really understand humanity.
This is likely similar to the force that keeps StackOverflow from growing and staying useful. StackOverflow is basically "Answers to programming questions as if it were still 2009" because any new content gets quickly removed as "duplicate" of content that existed a decade ago.
I've seen the same thing happen on OpenStreetMap. You make an edit, and some old-timer comes in and just reverts it. I even once got an angry message there where someone "claimed" an area in a city for himself.
I'm not a Redditor, but I understand Reddit has similar problems with mods.
Not sure the solution. It's hard to develop a community of passionate volunteers, but every time a platform does build this community up, the content calcifies under an inflexible cabal of power-mad volunteers.
I'm sorry this happened to you. Usually, edits are only reverted if the are 'bad', e.g. the one edit I reverted this morning, where a user added some buildings in India and some buildings in the ocean close to Greenland; https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/136040657
If you've copied data from another map into OpenStreetMap this might also be a cause for a revert, otherwise `some old-timer` should absolutely not revert your edit. Do you care to link us to the edit that was reverted and to the user that sent you an angry message, because such things should not happen in our community! (If desired, you can also message me thought the internal OSM messaging system, same username).
I talk to people about how the site is growing, and it is slowly, but I let them know that I doubt it will "catch on" for probably a decade, because any type of fast growth involves purchasing data (with costs/limitations) instead of getting it for free from everyday golfers.
>>But the miracle stands and is asking from all of us to turn faith into science, find ways to replicate the essence of Wikipedia across all domains.
Yup. Much of golf business seems to be pretty extractive to me, and the game is already too fucking expensive, I can currently run it very cheaply, and it's a fun hobby that's been rewarding seeing people use it more and more.
If anyone is interested: https://golfcourse.wiki
I think it's more than "faith in principles". The principles of wikipedia wouldn't have mattered at all if it was taken over by trump stans in the early days. What makes Wikipedia great, in my opinion, is the same thing that made early open source great. There is no clout of fame, it's not a high octane competitive environment where people have to constantly posture to appear unmovable. It's a collection of weirdos all nerding out over collecting all the information. It's a bunch of librarians writing stuff for completely internally motivated reasons.
I don't get the impression that the people who edit Wikipedia really care about the readers at all. They allow us to enter the temple they built for themselves, but we aren't guests, we're just onlookers.
This protects both the temple itself from dabblers, but also the temple's caretakers from those who could be considered to care too little. The best example of this quasi-religious calling, IMO, has got to be the Star Trek Into Darkness thing [0][1], temple-politics which has earned a place in the temple itself.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Star_Trek_Into_Darkn...
Websites of that sort are much cheaper to run than more interactive web applications, and are therefore better suitable for a non-profit model. For the vast majority of user requests, you just serve a static page from a cache. I suspect that most requests don't even touch Wikipedia's PHP code or database.
The same is true for Hacker News (which entirely runs on one or two machines) and Stackoverflow, which runs on a dozen or so. Wikipedia is a lot bigger so the number of machines is probably somewhat bigger too, but it's still not comparable to social-media websites or even messaging apps like Signal.
[1] https://amp.dw.com/en/india-tightens-grip-on-social-media-wi...
[2] https://qz.com/india-sought-more-twitter-censorship-than-mos...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/05/twitter-accuse...
Often they’d pass it off as a “glitch” that fixed itself after the election.
Twitter had been arguably the best tech company for censorship resistance. They're the only company that routinely fought the US government in court to protect user privacy.
https://twitter.com/lumendatabase/status/1651578251599310849
This happens in the US, too. They're all required by law to hand over any and all information the government wants. And through a million different ways of pressure and influence, they're effectively forced to do basically anything the US government wants. The ever looming threat of "it'd be a real shame if section 230 went away" makes them do anything.
The Wikimedia Foundation resists requests from foreign governments to unmask editors, but sometimes they’ve already publicly identified themselves or been discovered because of state surveillance / control of ISPs.
Governments using this tactic to silence the most active Wikipedia editors and create a chilling effect is a really serious threat to Wikipedia, and we need better technical tools for helping Wikipedians stay anonymous.
The biggest thing HN folks can do here is contribute (code or dollars) to projects like Tor. Unfortunately since Tor is really complex to use and the source of so much spam and abuse, it’s just not very effective today at protecting people from state actors.
You have to be willing to be blocked every now and then if you want to win the larger anti-censorship game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy
If you read the policy, you'll find that a government request is not a valid reason for a Wikipedia administrator to protect ("lock") an article.
The moment someone leaks the jig is up, and at least some of the bribed group would probably be very ideologically opposed which makes them difficult to bribe.
Not sure what's happening with the more usual discussions. Too tired to keep up with whatever's happening there.
I assume with the goal of the article being locked to before information you want to suppress got added, but that seems difficult to control. Unless you also identify and subvert moderators.
I had some examples linked, but I worry their inclusion would derail the discussion. To be clear - I love Wikipedia, I use it every day. It's abundantly clear though that it doesn't represent anything close to a neutral perspective, it represents the exact politics of the kind of person who you would imagine would become a Wikipedia editor.
Like everything, wikipedia is certainly shaped, both consiously and unconciously by the people who write it.
Anyways, i think whether or not it is "neutral" is kind of the wrong question, because nothing really is in the absolute. The interesting question is how is it relative to other information sources. Ancedotally i think its pretty good, but this is a terrible question to answer ancedotally as that might just mean i agree with its biases or i just look at the right parts of wikipedia (wikipedia's quality is hardly uniform across all topics)
>Musk:Did your brain fall out of your head, Yglesias? The choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?
I would say the former so it would be obvious to everyone in Turkey something is wrong on Twitter. So he is hiding the censorship.
That said, he has shown weakness and it is obvious that he doesn’t think Twitter is as strong as he makes it out to be. Otherwise he would have bargained with the fact that completely blocking twitter also affects the censor himself. Or… maybe he sees Erdogan as a better candidate for Twitter than the alternative?
What proof is there that Elon is a great engineer? What has he invented or developed? As to whether he's also a great businessman the jury is still out on that one. He's a great salesman and a marketing genius, I'll give you that.
Obviously they can't. Better to know before you rely on a censored medium.
It sounds like it's been blessed by the current government as soon as an unknown set of Turkey-related content has been removed by threats from that government. I'm not sure that is better than no access to twitter at all.
And I have come to the realisation that while I would obviously prefer there be NO censorship, it's better for a govt to selectively block website links, rather than allow them to whole sale block entire websites. (a lesser of two evils, in other words.)
Obviously I am using a VPN (a free one because no money, thank you Proton VPN), but it's extremely annoying to spin up a VPN just to see an ordinary tweet that has no political bent, like if there is a road block or other routine information one uses twitter for.
I would much rather spin up TOR or a VPN for the occasional tweet, rather than be forced to rely on alternative paths for all the time, because our govt HAS been known to be extremely pig-headed; our govt banned YouTube for like 6 years. At some point, you just hope to pass through the day.
(Also, while I might not respect my private data enough to use a free VPN, I am still not stupid enough to log in using one, whatever difference that makes, so yeah...hopefully the ban ends before I get signed out from services)
In other news, I was trying to install the google cloud cli, and it couldn't install because of a time out (wouldn't happen on vpn, so definitely a block thing) so again, I would much rather company do the censorship (clean and exact) rather than the clumsy attempts by govt which end up blocking random associated things in it's shade.
____
That said, real egg on elon's face regardless. For the love of *, you have a new twitter ceo now, just leave the damn thing and go back to the rockets dammit.
So they can claim the internet is "open" but it's molasses slow.
You see this with China for instance, which he doesn't criticize.
Not that it'd show up anyways unless Jimmy pays $8. Elon changed it so that paychecks are ranked higher in replies than normal users.
I find I start to become ruder and less considerate if I spend even a few days on reddit, never mind 10+ years on twitter. you need a break. you need to hang around normal people who have a filter and don’t just mindlessly agree with you or angrily shout at you for being wrong. you don’t need to be financially and pridefully locked into a death bond with the system that provides the drug
maybe this is why he tried to back out of the purchase. a moment of clarity perhaps
Wikipedia is an institution that has improved my life and I think that deserves investment.
As Wikipedia would say... [citation neeeded].
If users support these organisations, they can donate directly, especially given that most Wikimedia donors have no idea their money is not being spent on Wikipedia itself.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/14/Wikim...
She made a total of $798,632 that year.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/14/Wikim...
Another manager who had been there for less than two-and-a-half years got $324,748 in severance, more than 100% of her salary in her last full year of employment ...
Discussion on the Wikimedia mailing list:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
Promises have been made for years that the Endowment, held by the Tides Foundation, would "soon" be registered as a separate 501c3 nonprofit org and start filing public accounts ... still hasn't happened.
Fascist ideology doesn't want the idea of truth to exist and Wikipedia weighing in and saying "this is the best approximation of truth we got" is a small but powerful assault against fascist ideology.
The purpose of free speech is to protect speaking truth to power. If there is no conception of what truth is then how can one speak truth to power?
"Dubious donations" seems like the epitome of FUD.
I think it’s exactly what Wikipedia tries to do. But given the scale of things its not going to get it right every time.
You said "also they redonate..." so you seem to consider that a separate issue. Thus, what "harm" have you found wikipedia to have done, specifically?
If you donate to an organization that doesn't need the money, you might as well assume that money will be wasted on something with the similar societal benefit as a party full of hookers and blow.
Yes, wikipedia's hosting costs increased over time from when it was a tiny site that was down constantly and super slow, to a top website with multiple data centers and high reliability.
It would be a red flag if that didn't happen.
Also, slightly tangential, but the little blurb at the top of that essay is my favorite kind of Wikipedia-y snark:
> "WP:CANCER" redirects here. For editors who improve Wikipedia's articles about actual physical cancer, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Hematology-oncology task force.
You can actually download the whole thing if you want.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikim...
$100 million or so are now spent on salaries.
It should be noted that when you run your own data center that means that money that would have gone to AWS as a "hosting cost" now gets spread around to other sections. Its cheaper overall but shows up in different sections.
There are things i disagree with about how wmf spends its money, but just saying it spends too much money without breaking it down is meaningless. As an absolute number it is way lower than comparable websites. Maybe its spent on wrong things, but to be convincing you need to actual talk about how its wrong. Saying zOMG WMF pays about 1% of what equivalent companies pay in salaries,is not convincing that they are overspending.
Plus the now-cancelled Knowledge Equity Fund disaster seems to have been their brainchild. I know, nobody is perfect, cock-ups happen everywhere, etc. But the conduct and transparency around money just has never been that stellar at Wikimedia. (The Endowment has made it worse.)
The other aspect is that Wikimedia has always made it sound like they needed money to keep Wikipedia up and running, while having eight-figure surpluses year after year and continually growing their headcount. At least that has now somewhat improved for the moment, but it took a revolt by Wikipedians to make it so:
https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-fou...
Left to their own devices, the Wikimedia Foundation would just have continued what they were doing all along.
In my personal opinion, the real waste at wmf is being penny wise and pound foolish (or to give the appearence of being penny wise). That and the rotating door of poor upper management has everyone working in circles and at cross purposes from each other. Its an organization that doesn't know what its trying to achieve so doesn't achieve it. Many of its problems could probably be solved by spending more money doing less things but doing them better.
Jimbo still has my vote though.
Even such rare occasions when this is the case is incomparable to the sheer mountain of value that Wikipedia represents to everybody in the society who has any desire for any education.
Wikipedia have red and even black-listed virtually every anti-war / anti-imperialist news source. At the same time, they continue to greenlight obvious propaganda and false news purveyors.
Since reading through the facts listed here [0], the claim that Wikipedia "treat freedom of expression as a principle" rings very hollow.
0 - https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wikipedia-formally-censor...
I'll add another one; the way anything related to the origins of Covid-19 was handled was disgraceful. Yes, the way Facebook et al handled it was just as disgraceful, but the idea of Wikipedia is that they're above that.
So checked their articles and found this recent one about the US-Ukraine leak: https://thegrayzone.com/2023/04/07/leaked-documents-us-nato-...
"Neither the New York Times nor the “military analysts” it cited explain how the documents were altered, or why they have the appearance of tampering."
Thankfully they provide the leaked document (The black box "TOTAL ASSESSED LOSSES"): https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04...
And the numbers are VERY poorly photoshopped: The doctored text does not align with the rest. Character position, height and spacing suddenly change (look at the "71.5k" alone). The russian aircraft losses have a numbers photoshopped out (from "7x fighter/bomber; 8x rotary wing" to "7 fighter/bomber; 8 rotary wing".
So would agree with Wikipedia, that The GRAYZONE is NOT reliable.
> ... because the leaked documents have arrived in the form of photographs of printed documents, rather than original files, the possibility of forgery or alteration must be considered.
And you may have misread that other quote you posted: It's saying the documents "have the appearance of tampering."
They also questioned the authenticity multiple times, making it very clear that authenticity had not been confirmed:
> Though they resemble those described by the Times, we can not confirm their authenticity.
And again, further on:
> If the documents were partially faked, were they disseminated to help Russia advance its public relations goals, perhaps by minimizing their casualty numbers or inflating those of their foe? They certainly would not be fooling anyone at the Department of Defense, since they obviously have the original files on hand.
... Looks to me like they reported the news accurately, making no claims about authenticity whatsoever.
The only significant difference I can see between that article and CNN's reporting of the same day [0] is that Grayzone actually showed the documents.
0 - https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/07/politics/ukraine-document...
> There is also the possibility that they are one hundred percent authentic. If so, Ukraine and its Western patrons may have more serious problems than a few leaked documents.
Again, the figures are badly photoshopped, they are one hundred percent NOT authentic.
There is also the following paragraph that tries to lend the photoshopped figures credibility:
> Perhaps the most notable piece of information contained in the leaked documents relates to military death tolls, with Ukrainian and Russian losses estimated at about a 4:1 ratio. According to one document, 71,500 Ukrainian troops have been killed in action. That figure is close to the 100,000 KIA’s cited by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in a November 2022 speech, before her comments were retracted. It also tracks closely with statements by one of Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zelensky’s top advisers, Mykhailo Podolyak, who told the BBC in June of last year that Ukraine was losing between 100 and 200 soldiers per day (200 deaths per day over the course of 370 days between the launch of Russia’s military operation and the date of the documents would total 74,000.)
You’re complaining they’re not so left wing they’re pro Russia.
On the face of it they seem to be doing the right thing cos both extremes are pissed off with them.
Where did I do that?
> they seem to be doing the right thing cos both extremes are pissed off with them.
That's not the test of what's right, actually.
"We could post what the government in Turkey sent us. Will do."
They were too straightforward. Suppression is just around the corner you only need outsource it to “non” governmental orgs.
Elon Musk loves to claim that he's a "free speech" absolutist, but he quite clearly isn't. He supports the "free speech" of autocrats and of the extreme right, but he has no problem obeying censorship requests when they come from right-wing governments, and he proactively censors people and content he simply disagrees with.
The reason he's not fighting Erdogan's censorship request is because he agrees with it. He would fight it if it came from a more progressive government.
It's even worse than that: it is "mostly edited and authored" by people who think they're polymaths.
Meanwhile, wouldn't it be amazing for world eduction if the use of a translation-optimised version of GPT 4 were donated to the Wikimedia foundation for bulk-translating English Wikipedia into a hundred or more rare languages?
Also, can you image what a step-change it would bring to Wikipedia if it had an impartial AI performing some editorial functions? E.g.: verifying references by actually reading them, checking if the article content is contradictory to references, checking if the article contradicts another article, etc...
With extensions of LLM models that can store additional context in vector databases, really interesting things could be done by putting all of Wikipedia in every language into such a database and having that available during edits.
Wiki-clippy: "I see you're adding a passage about Düsseldorf. Note that the German-language article mentions that..."
[0] https://blog.khanacademy.org/harnessing-ai-so-that-all-stude...
Wikimedia is perfectly capable of deploying LLMs without external help.
Currently, GPT 4 blows everything else out of the water, there is simply no comparison.
More importantly, the limited context size of the open-source models precludes them from being used for this type of task. It takes well over 10K tokens to load some of the longer Wiki pages, let alone the page, a prompt, a reference, and the output. The GPT 4 32K model could handle most such scenarios.
would the same thing work in Brazil?
When given a choice between misinformation and no information, he chose misinformation. Can anyone really argue from a ethical standpoint that it was the best decision?
what world do you live in
My point is Musk could have easily done what a non-profit organization like Wikipedia could do viz. dragging the Turkish government to their supreme court, which is what the article is about.
What a shithole.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1499976967105433600
Did Twitter ad money really change all of his principles?
That makes it better but in the long run, Twitter needs to get into better hands than Musks or it will (hopefully) just break down. Or maybe go down a long road into irrelevancy like Facebook did.
There are other sites that can do that, like archive.org or github.
2. you can still use twitter to share information in turkey, this will inevitably help people elect who they want to elect
3. twitter is not the only website to have received this request but they are the only site to publicize it.
4. musk is releasing the request that no one else is willing to even tell you about
5. wikipedia is filled with political censorship that vilifies people for their beliefs, views, and opinions. who is the real monster here?
A really good example of where this happened is the Toxic Masculinity article, which evolved over time to be a bit more... "Contemporarily woke"[1] instead of purely psychological (last time I checked).
Similar thing happened to a lot of trans articles that tend to advertise benefits of transitioning (and don't get me wrong, there are many life changing benefits for people with gender dysmorphia, I'm not disputing them), but diminish criticism of lack of process and due diligence in clinics prior to green lighting transition, and citations being removed (under pretense of transphobia and the source being biased), etc. Trans representation in related history articles is also being embellished through subtle linguistic edits; they're not wrong per se, but are still deceitful word games (which I think just makes everyone more distrusting and sceptical as is evident from that thread).
I do think the woke neurosis will settle down eventually, and we'll have increased our "decency" baseline in society thanks to it, since all historic movement were riddled with bad actors, but it's still difficult to watch an otherwise good movement soil itself like this, and as an extension influence Wikipedia.
So in certain "niche" categories where things are largely a matter of opinion, it's a bit of a wild west unfortunately. I waged a small edit war in the past, only to be burnt out. I do care about the topics outlined here, but I'm not pathologically online (alas, but apparently I am enough to post this comment) to dedicate so much of my free time on playing edit pong with an on-line asshole (I'm sure their intentions are for the net good since they're technically arguing for things I want in society myself, but I don't like that it comes at the cost of candor and increased overall social outrage and distrust)
[1]: I think being woke in the traditional, pre social-media era was a good thing. Now it's just performative due to communal narcissists infiltrating, abusing and feeding of socially vulnerable demographics. Ie, being woke is good, but performative wokeness is a shield people now use online to be bullies, unfortunately.
In the US, the Parler social media company was driven out of business despite following the law based on accusations with no chance of trial. Of course it is not done by the government. But citizens cheer it on and demand censorship over political opponents.