Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

lifeisstillgood

There are a lot of lessons to learn here

1. The Streisand effect. No-one on HN gave a monkeys about this dodgy news agency till today. Now half of us have read the archive about how they promote propaganda & fake news. Your reputation takes a hit

2. There is no absolute definition of “freedom”. Wikipedia is a fantastic resource for humanity in general and I think should be defended. But as more and more of humanity come to live more and more online, then the legal and cultural norms will shift and shuffle - courts for two hundred years have assumed they can order anyone in their jurisdiction around and often not in their jurisdiction- and that’s kind of the point of courts. So what is freedom? It’s what we the demos and the courts agree …

3. An example is in the order (I mean on the Streisand effect - when the %#}#% hell would I ever read a court order from India ?!) - it says “herein to take down/delete” - this bespeaks a failure to understand the world on the level of “who are the Beatles”. Take down - fine this is part of how we agree norms and limits of courts. Delete. Are you kidding me. Does that imply from everywhere else? Wow.

Wikipedia looks like a fantastic resource, but it's not really a reliable source of information. Everyone can write things there, including people with biases and conflicting interests. Their rules about editing are really annoying and unfair, they don't care about facts.

I enjoy reading Wikipedia sometimes, but it's a broken system, a lot of truths missing in it's articles because of crap editors and political propaganda. Also it's admins are toxic and abuse their little power they have over every editor there.

Try editing some articles there, and you will see the dark side of Wikipedia.

> Wikipedia looks like a fantastic resource, but it's not really a reliable source of information.

It's about as reliable it gets. It cites sources, has whole history available, has little conflicts of interest and has transparent editorial guidelines and process.

Many people are probably shocked to find views in WP that aren't aligned with what their newsmedia reports and frames.

Wikipedia is often wrong once you stray from mainstream topics. Subspecialties often have 1-2 super-contributors, whose blind spots and misunderstandings become part of Wikipedia. Plenty of articles also have no actual citations of their technical content.

And some of the actual citations are to easily hyperlinked pop science articles and opinion pieces, sometimes actually replacing more accurate unsourced material...

Nobody says Wikipedia is perfect. The fact that you can point out that certain content are wrong proves what the GP said — “[It] has whole history available, has little conflicts of interest and has transparent editorial guidelines and process.”

It’s also worth pointing out that it could be you who has blind spots, not the contributors. And if you’re certain they are wrong you can always try to correct them, or create a competing topic?

> Wikipedia is often wrong once you stray from mainstream topics.

So it’s a good source for topics with the largest audience. That alone shows how beneficial it can be. At the very least, it’s a good starting point for further research.

> And if you’re certain they are wrong you can always try to correct them, or create a competing topic?

I’ve tried that before, and it’s often not worth the time. The lord of the article is often an expert Wikipedia Editor and rules lawyer with endless time to argue and revert even when they have no expert or even basic knowledge about the subject.

In order to maintain some semblance of process, Wikipedia has to approximate what is true by relying on the consensus from reputable sources, not reality itself. This means that experts are often not who you want editing an article, because experts are often poorly positioned to know what the general public knows, and what consensus is from outside their area of expertise. E.g., I have published research that contradicts information on Wikipedia, and while I am of course convinced I and my co-authors are right while Wikipedia is wrong, I would much rather have that state of affairs than a world where Wikipedia is written by everyone with a paper on a subject, and the line is drawn at whoever was the most recent editor.

That's the propaganda Wikipedia wants you to think, citing itself.

In practice, it doesn't work. The bias and delusional behavior of the editors is infectious, widespread, and has even been criticized by Wikipedia's own co-founder Larry Sanger as being overrun by "left-wing propaganda essays." He even went as far as to call it the "most biased encyclopedia in history" in an interview with Glenn Greenwald. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR6dO8U8okk)

Frankly, it does seem (following stereotypes) that left-wing people have a stronger tendency to be writers from being white-collar; while more right-wing folks are too busy with blue-collar jobs and physical labor to be writing rebuttals. A very simple example is how Wikipedia approves Vox, Slate, The Nation, Mother Jones, Jezebel, The Atlantic, Gizmodo, and Jacobin as sources, but Fox News is considered "unreliable." Permitting Jacobin and Jezebel, but not Fox, is delusional. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...)

Every source you list as "approved" either isn't listed as perennial at all (which makes me wonder, how did it end up on your list?), or has explicit carve-outs saying that statements need to be attributed due to bias. Meanwhile, Fox has had thorough discussion showing that there are substantial problems with their factual reporting on politics and science, that using them as attributed opinion sources is still fine, and that non-politics or science reporting should be examined critically but can be used. Particularly given the documents now publicly available on their handling of election coverage pretty clearly demonstrating an intentional distinction between what they think is true behind closed doors vs. reporting presented as reality (a distinction they ultimately had to admit in court), what grounds is there to dispute this policy?

Maybe you could clarify your concern by pointing to something where the public consensus from reputable sources is distinct from what Wikipedia presents, by matter of policy?

I am not going to value the other sources, as I don't know some of them, but considering Fox News "unreliable" is even tame. You are better informed if you simply not watch news at all:

https://web.archive.org/web/20241001193736/https://www.busin...

> experts are often not who you want editing an article, because experts are often poorly positioned to know what the general public knows, and what consensus is from outside their area of expertise.

I would argue the opposite, since consensus from reputable sources is not the same as consensus of the general public, and unless it's a subject of study in multiple fields, the consensus in their field is their area of expertise.

Academic scholarship is generally preferred over lay sources, though there are caveats and individual instances of primary research are rarely considered indicative of consensus (usually review articles and other secondary sources are significantly preferred). However, if you do disagree with any information on Wikipedia, even if it's based on only your own primary research, I would strongly encourage you to at least tag the statements with a {{dubious}} or {{disputed inline}}[1] tag so that it can be discussed, or make an edit request[2] if you're not comfortable making the change yourself.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Disputed_inline [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_requests

> It’s also worth pointing out that it could be you who has blind spots, not the contributors. And if you’re certain they are wrong you can always try to correct them, or create a competing topic?

No, it's not me who has the blind spots in the cases I have seen, sorry. Also, they are not worth the work to correct, since the overlord of the niche is usually someone with far too much time on their hands to argue, even when presented with incontrovertible proof. They also often have "Wikipedia editing" as a hobby, and know all the nitpicking rules of the site that they will use against you if you encroach on their domain. And yes, I tried this once for an obvious error in a math article (with no citation in the original article, mind you).

> So it’s a good source for topics with the largest audience.

Also not for topics of any political bent, but sure, if your target audience is at a high school level or below and you can separate out the facts from the editorialization, it's not bad.

At this point, I want Encyclopedia Britannica back. I would take it any day of the week over Wikipedia. The golden age of Wikipedia, when that was reversed, seems to be over.

Britannica still exists. You can find it at https://www.britannica.com/

Name and shame the specific articles and the specific data - I don't like it when people cast vague aspersions - it makes it difficult to refute or to corroborate rendering further discussion effectively meaningless.

Tangentially, I use Wikipedia strictly for topics of a scientific nature and usually find that it's relatively accurate.

You, and everyone else, are welcome to flag or fix every single one of these that are found.

Or just go somewhere else for our information. That seems easier.

I'm honestly more concerned with how Wikipedia handles mainstream topics - i.e. the ones its editors are likely to have strong opinions about. Misunderstandings can be corrected with time, dogma on the other hand actively fights any correction.

I’ll take Britannica any day.

I would take almost ANY real encyclopaedia, any day, for very general topics. For specifics, I would go to specific literature, or just google it to find sources myself. Often what I search is either wrong, or for example math or physics things are written in a sooo complex form, that I just cannot do anything with it.

Totally agree.

The key point, which perfectionists miss or more likely just don't agree with, is about being less wrong. WP is time and again show to be less wrong than supposedly trusted or more formal resources.

When it started many people would look to the Encyclopedia Britannica as more reliable yet research showed that on average it contained more errors and that's with the occasional inexperienced/ rogue editor on the WP side.

EDIT: fixed my own typo! (relatable -> reliable)

I would change that wording to say that: it's mostly reliable, but not perfect and not as objective as it purports to be.

I mostly fact check and do notable research for obscure Wikipedia articles. This is usually a no drama environment sure I have helped delete articles that later became notable and removed true facts lacking sources. Many of these things have fixed themselves over time. My biggest fear with Wikipedia is citogenesis https://xkcd.com/978/ I have found one in a major news paper, this took three months to take down.

I edit a bit and it seems mostly accurate but I've followed covid origins for a while and the bit "While other explanations, such as speculations that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory have been proposed, such explanations are not supported by evidence." isn't really true. There is evidence but for some reason they only want to cite papers from the scientific establishment saying the scientific establishment is innocent.

Anything even slightly controversial across political lines cannot be trusted. Math and technical topics that don't address any drama or controversy are usually fine for reference, but there are almost always better resources if you're trying to learn about a topic from scratch.

Out of curiosity: was it marked as possible citogenesis during that period? How did the situation resolve itself?

No. I usually edit directly in Wikipedia, my edits are sourced and uncontroversial I try not to deal with the bureaucracy. I took the time to contact the original news outlet and they did the correction pretty fast, Wikipedia had been referencing a secondary sources and those were not that helpful. About five emails, maybe four hours of my time.

There has been a little bit of furor in some circles in Japan, regarding the status of Yasuke, who was a favorite of Oda Nobunaga, whether he was a samurai or not. Around September of 2015, a user by the name tottoritom made numerous edits to the Yasuke article, citing to yet-to-be-published papers by Thomas Lockley. Coincidentally, tottoritom's user page introduces himself as Thomas Lockley too, and Lockley happened to also have lived in Tottori. After some time, the citations were changed to refer to a book that Lockley published in Japan (in Japanese). (Now, if the two are indeed one and same person, he has broken a Wikipedia rule on not publishing original research.)

The book become a basis for a romanticized novel he published for western audiences, which I believe inspired the production of Netflix animation for the same character. From then on, the view that Yasuke was a samurai gained foothold, which caught some Japanese historians off-guard.

He's also had his hand on the Britannica article of the same title, and now Wikipedia cites the Britannica article too, thus completing the cycle.

I find it odd that Yasuke would be a Samurai, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi, one of the three unifiers and a general under Nobunaga, was not.

After unifying Japan in 1590, Toyotomi Hideyoshi did not become Shogun because he was born a peasant. Only Samurai could become Shogun, and Hideyoshi was famously not one. You couldn't become a samurai, you had to be born one.

It sounds like you're accusing Wikipedia of being both too easy to edit ("everyone can write things there") and too restrictive about who can edit ("they don't care about facts... Crap editors and political propaganda.") It sounds like your real criticism is that Wikipedia has biases and won't let you correct them. Can you provide links to some examples of bias on Wikipedia so that we can make up for ourselves how bad this is?

> Can you provide links to some examples of bias on Wikipedia so that we can make up for ourselves how bad this is?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...

Here is an example of a Wikipedia admin who spent years harassing a blogger (and a community the blogger belongs to), and it took a lot of effort and a lot of luck to make other admins admit that this was a bad thing and that it should stop.

(This is not the worst example I know of, but it is an example where Wikipedia changed its mind later, so you can agree that this was bad even if you trust Wikipedia.)

David Gerard strikes again

One very recent anecdotal example involving narwhals:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0L-3FfkXfM

Let's just say Wikipedia made an absurd lie, for years from an obvious misunderstanding, and a viciously protective editor got involved...

> Wikipedia looks like a fantastic resource, but it's not really a reliable source of information. Everyone can write things there, including people with biases and conflicting interests. Their rules about editing are really annoying and unfair, they don't care about facts.

This is what lecturers and teachers a tell us.

Yet it’s far and away the most accurate and comprehensive resource I know of. When I search the few topics I think I deeply understand, it’s very rarely wrong. I corrected the last error I found. It was a small one and wouldn’t have tripped the unwary.

Something can be technically correct, yet unreliable. How? Simply by reporting with a bias. The easiest example would be to look at a left (or right) leaning but accurate news organization like Vox or WSJ - they’re absolutely great at many topics, but read only one of the two and you’d have a slightly distorted view of everything. Being unbiased is incredibly hard even for newspapers, let alone a volunteer run org.

For a more specific example of wiki’s biases, think of the average Reddit bias - like their insistence of “if you can’t prove it it doesn’t exist”. A lot of people in the world would be very sad if they learnt that their god supposedly vanished.

Streisand effect is oversold.

It is temporary as heck. People will forget about anything, no matter the extent of Streisand effect and go onto the next tictok video or whatever.

Who gives a flying fk anyways about an article on wikipedia.

This seems to have an obvious counterexample?

The name of the Streisand effect is from exactly the situation of a photo nobody cared about of Streisand's house from decades ago. The fact that it can be superficially referenced is evidence of its longevity.

Not sure. Hardly anyone would remember if Streisand was a singer or actor or whoever. Now her name is mostly tied to Streisand effect, not the art she had produced.

I agree with your point of view. Maybe it was effective when it was the first effect. Like the million pixel website. Now there are million balls in the air. There are lot of current things going on. People will move on when they get tired. And the only memory they will have is "something happened".

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