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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

The article is way way too long. Who would read +20 pages on a single Wikipedia editor? Feels obsessive if you need +20 pages to make a case.

But on the first issue brought up in the article -- I am not going to read all the rest, too long:

Removing things cited to Free Beacon seems fair game. It isn't a reliable source. I know it hurts when your favourite site is declared as unreliable, but it happens to both extreme left and right rags.

There is a list of potential sources on Wikipedia and collective decisions about their reliability here:

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

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It's way too much, but it's pretty funny that David Gerard is the target of an obsessive hit piece.

The first section on reliable sources isn't the primary focus of the article. It mainly serves to contrast how Gerard was willing to ignore rules on original research and conflicts of interest when it suited him. The post from another Wikipedia admin when he finally got banned is gold:

> “Seriously, everyone, what the fuck is wrong with us? … Reading through this discussion it seems that David has called the subject a neo-nazi, has significantly contributed to a NYT article described by other sources as a “hit piece”, disingenuously used Wikipedia to push his [point of view] despite a [conflict of interest] obvious to anyone with eyes, and we as a community are incapable of doing anything other than a warning? What the fuck is wrong with us?”

> After seven years, someone finally saw what was going on.

> The ban passed.

No org or entity is perfect but Wikipedia attracts an unusual amount of ire.

Wikipedia is a nearly impossible project and I can not believe it actually ends up working.

While simple articles are no brainer, Wikipedia has to deal with articles that are at the intersections of different interest groups who both are trying to control the presentation of facts. It is these articles where partisans are rampant and most engaged.

You'll never be able to make everyone happy on those articles at the intersections of different partisans.

Fortunately keeping people happy isn't the purpose of wikipedia, and it's good that the editors haven't lost sight of that.

It isn't a matter of keeping people happy. It's that 'facts' and 'truth' aren't as obvious and straightforward as people believe.

Take something as innocuous as calculus. Who discovered it? British say newton did. The germans credit leibniz. What should the editors do? Flip a coin. Credit both? Credit neither since neither discovered the concept of 'the limit'.

It's like this but far worse for many topics.

Everything seems simple because we lived in our own national propaganda ecosystem. But with the internet, wikipedia must try to pick 'truths' out of many 'truths'.

Well that one's quite easy. It currently has:

>developed in the late 17th century by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently of each other

But yeah other things are trickier. I follow the covid lab origin stuff and that's a bit of a mess.

> Well that one's quite easy. It currently has:

My comment already addressed that: '... Credit both? Credit neither since neither discovered the concept of 'the limit'.'

Neither newton nor leibniz discovered what we call calculus. If we are going to credit them for discovering calculus, we might as well credit the ancient greeks who developed similar 'calculus' and from whom both were 'inspired'.

> But yeah other things are trickier.

No. Even the simplest is tricky. As you just proved.

Agreed, but it's a technical problem that can be solved.

We've started the solution with ScrollSets (https://breckyunits.com/scrollsets.html), which power PLDB.io, among others.

Orders of magnitude smaller than Wikipedia and Mediawiki, but the thing about compounding...

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