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Comment by aakjsdfajsdfh | Hacker News Reader

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I suspect if you comment receives downvotes, it will be because it is verging on the incomprehensible. Seriously - I read it 3 times and I only have the haziest of ideas as to what you are trying to get at.

Concur. I'm likely sympathetic to whatever aakj is trying to get at, but the post could really, really use edits or a more coherently formatted repost.

Maybe as a slight input to why your comment would get downvoted: You're expressing a few semi-related frustrations, but it reads pretty incoherent, since you seem to assume folks already know the concepts you're talking about and agree with that worldview.

As such you're not really making sense, and human to human suggest the following: Try to get a different perspective and mingle more with offline people. The whole culture war topics and politics can really lead you down a crappy path, and it doesn't really reflect most of reality.

I hope this comes across as compassionate.

thanks. there's plenty pro-constructivism in my humanist-marxist circles. They are either openly hypocrites or too young still (like utilitarianism, it is a good thing if possible after all)

But yeah, if you don't still agree it is fringe, and still think so after reading the only link on my comment, then you might as well downvote me. But that is one i'd take gladly.

it is just an intro though. my point is that they are posting several academic articles on that one wikipedia which hunt "succcess" story. and somehow i've seen all of them on the front page here.

Do you in general assume that to be a pro-constructivist or humanist-marxist, one has to be a hypocrite or too young still?

What in constructivism is bugging you? The basic idea is that concepts get their meaning through their relations to other concepts. I find that a very reasonable perspective.

What's the problem with constructivism? Should wikipedia be somehow restricted to e.g. positivist or objectivist or perhaps platonian views of knowledge?

There's plenty of criticism of identity politics in wikipedia (and from the left as well). Wikipedia's philosophical origins are objectivistic if something, but I don't think this shows either.

I downvoted you because you don't make sense. Maybe rephrase and use proper capitalization?

TL;DR: Parent is first asserting that “______ is just a construct” people are trying to make Wikipedia a “______ is just a construct”-opedia.

Then the rest seems just a construct-ed rant.

Where's this coming from?

The paper examines "institutional" change of Wikipedia, showing how its content transformed over time from lending credence to fringe theories to actively debunking them.

This transformation occurred due to the ambiguity of Wikipedia's "Neutral Point of View" (NPOV) guideline, which was open to different interpretations.

There were two camps of editors - the "Anti-Fringe" camp pushed for firmly anti-pseudoscience interpretations of NPOV, while the "Pro-Fringe" camp pushed for more neutrality towards fringe theories.

Early disputes over NPOV were frequently resolved in favor of the Anti-Fringe camp, empowering them while demoralizing the Pro-Fringe camp.

The Pro-Fringe editors gradually exited Wikipedia over time, leaving the Anti-Fringe camp with more power to reinterpret NPOV in an anti-fringe manner.

The paper suggests similar dynamics may drive change in other groups like political parties, social movements, bureaucracies, etc. Losers choose to leave rather than keep fighting uphill battles.

Neither the paper, nor the rant, mention one hypothesis for why academia's paradoxically groupthink radicalism may have an outsized or disproportionate influence on Wikipedia: the evergreen activity from teachers everywhere assigning "edit a Wikipedia article" to each new class of haven't yet experienced the real world students and the self-selecting cohort of those who see an outlet for an introverted form of activism that then persists for perhaps a decade among a subset.

The AI commenter is the only one who read the article in this entire comment section. kudos.

But yeah, see how the paper (and your summary) is full of holes? What creates the incentive so that one group become larger than the other? things do not happen in a vaccum, only in this paper I guess. or "endogenously" which might be their code word for "i don't want to investigate who paid for this".

basically, there's one law that can be interpreted two ways (wikipedia NPOV or US abortion law). They argue that if everyone agrees A is better than B and start to push for the A interpretation, the people who likes the B interpretation will just magically go home. Excellent. Who thought it was so easy?

Now, the question I wanted to pose is: why 4 papers in this month alone held this obviously flawed argument, using wikipedia NPOV case as their case study?

Having read the whole article I wanted to reply but know most of HN would not, so needed a recap to reply to you. Yes, recap was by Claude 2 100k because it's a long article and it types faster than I do. :-)

Now:

> What creates the incentive so that one group become larger than the other? things do not happen in a vaccum, only in this paper I guess. or "endogenously" which might be their code word for "i don't want to investigate who paid for this".

You don't need conspiracy to explain the "endogenous" results of democratic processes. They go like this.

> Now, the question I wanted to pose is: why 4 papers in this month alone held this obviously flawed argument, using wikipedia NPOV case as their case study?

Because (a) like 12 people work in academia and they're all at the same conference, and (b) how tenure works.

It's not a conspiracy so much as a "that guy talking about that idea by the punchbowl is going to get credit, I should do that and also get credit" lack of creativity. I think I also used the word "groupthink" above.

> there is a campaign to push wikipedia as a constructivist paradise.

There is also (I think) a campaign to destroy Wikipedia so that we are forced to use for-profit enshittified resources.

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