Comment by sinuhe69 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sinuhe69 | Hacker News Reader

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A particular problem with Wikipedia is the by definition one-sided view of charged issues. In a single language like Vietnamese, where the majority of native speakers locate in a single country with heavy censorship and brainwashed by propaganda, articles about social, political matters and people can be very one-sided and certainly can not be up to the standard of an encyclopedia. Change is extremely difficult due to the long term moderators, who obviously have agendas.

In such situations, an alternative version/server might be a solution. For example, a social.vn.wiki could specialize in alternative views on socio-political issues in Vietnamese and be moderated differently. I can imagine new Wikipedia hubs where content changes are monitored by AI to detect manipulation attempts and obviously false content. I also can imagine a new Wikipedia, where the reader can up vote/down vote an article instead of actively change it. For heavy moderated contents, this could be a better alternative to a edit war.

I'm not sure that federations can solve this problem because of their inherent dynamics. But living in a world where the well of knowledge is poisoned can feel quite suffocating. Federation at least allows alternatives to exist.

> and certainly can not be up to the standard of an encyclopedia

This is a common expressed sentiment. When I read it, I find myself wondering if the people expressing it have ever used an encyclopaedia. I old enough to have grow up with them. Mum and dad brought two of the in fact.

One was called something like "World Book". You couldn't possibly be reffering to that. It had 24 volumes lavishly illustrated. I remember one illustration in particular. It was a nuclear powered plane. I still the scowl on dad's face when he saw it.

We then got the Britannica. Undeniably very good. But it was just 24 books. When you have to cover every topic on the planet in that space you only get a good summary on each one. It cost thousands, maybe tens of thousands in today's money, and was of course out of date the day it was delivered. It was great for background information, but it wasn't detailed enough for even a high school project - you have to supplement it with the school library.

To put numbers on the difference. Britannica has 40 million words, the English Wikipedia has around 4.7 billion - about 100 times more. In Wikipedia articles the have seen a bit of activity for a decade or so (just about every topic Britannica covers would be in that category on Wikipedia) most of them will be as good as Britannica and importantly, have far better references.

Or to put it another way, I don't think the kids of today know how far we've come since the age of dead trees.

This is really interesting because it's a very Western point of view.

SE Asian countries are big on social hierarchy and social cohesion. In the West, we view this as these countries repressing their citizens, because that would have to be the situation for a Western country to behave like this. It's not so clear-cut there. SE Asia has a very strong, very ancient culture that is different to Western culture. We don't get to just say "you should do things our way".

One major difference is their attitude to authority: in the West if you disagree with your boss you are expected to say so, possibly in private. In SE Asia that would be unbelievably rude and disrespectful, even in private. This attitude flows out to government and leadership; criticising a leader is incredibly rude. They prioritise everyone getting along rather than The Truth [0].

SE Asia has no "free speech" media any more [1], partly for this reason. Their culture just doesn't prioritise this as value. I would expect their Wikipedia entries to reflect this, too.

[0] and given the shitshow of Western democracies lately, I'm not convinced our priorities are working so much better.

[1] you can argue this, it depends on your definition of any of the words in this sentence. But we can agree that the vast majority of media in SE Asia is directly controlled by government one way or another, and the remainder is indirectly controlled.

The dictators who put people who criticize them in prison, love people like you.

Why? I criticise dictators freely. I'm a Westerner.

The point I'm making, and you clearly missed completely, is that other people think differently to us.

There's selection bias. People self censor, so as not to disappear in prison. Others disappear in prison for real.

You'll hear the voices primarily of the dictators' supporters.

From my limited experience with the area, what Marcus says also matches what I've seen of democratic societies like Japan. I cannot offer any detailed insights into this, but a way to test the opposing hypotheses would be to see if democratic countries in SE Asia present the same cultural basis that Marcus described.

There are no democratic countries in SE Asia (which is in an indication by itself) unfortunately. Vietnam and Laos are communist, Cambodia is a dictatorship, Thailand is a monarchy, Myanmar is rolls dice a military dictatorship this year. Malaysia is an elective Monarchy. You have to get down to Singapore to get to something like a functioning democracy.

I haven't been to Japan yet, so can't speak to that. Fascinating that you see the same attitude there, though.

Hi Marcus, look here:

> Thailand sentences man to record 50 years in prison for insulting the monarchy

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/19/asia/thailand-man-sentenc...

I guess you know about those things, just thought it's an interesting (and sad) example of what can make people go quiet and pretend they're happy.

You've been to lots of co-working spaces in SE Asia? I was thinking that then you'll meet relatively well-off people who have fewer things to complain about, that might be another source of selection bias? But what do I know.

@majewsky

Japan is a pretty homogenous country? I'd think that can work better and be one reason for a more satisfied-with-the-government mindset? (But maybe there's more)

Compared to e.g. the US with different groups of people sometimes hating each other

No, I actually worked in Cambodia alongside Khmer folks (as well as working in a bunch of co-working spaces elsewhere in the region). And sure, they were probably lying to me about things (but that's part of the difference I found - the truth is less important than in the West [0])

And yes, you could probably get a long jail sentence in Cambodia for publicly criticising Hun Sen. The thing I found interesting is that that's a symptom, not the cause. The cause is that they're a very authoritarian culture who consider it very rude (our best approximation of the emotion) when people criticise leaders. At least that was the conclusion I came to during my time there. As you say, I'm a tourist so what do I know?

I do find it fascinating that we have such a resistance to understanding that different people have different attitudes to the world and different ways of thinking about it.

[0] I moved to Berlin a few years later, and the difference was dramatic: Berliners have a reputation for being rudely abrupt even amongst Germans. They do not sugar-coat anything lol.

Ok thanks for explaining :-)

thanks for the civility :)

Yeah, if they were Western societies, this is exactly right and that's what a dictator would need to do to stop people criticising them.

But these are not Western societies. In SE Asian countries, you don't criticise your boss, even in private. Not because your boss will retaliate, but because it's incredibly rude. I worked for a while in Cambodia and it became clear that for the Khmer saying "I disagree with you, boss" was the equivalent of an American taking a dump on the boss's desk.

This behaviour is not driven by fear, but by an idea of social cohesion, social harmony, that we in the West don't have and don't understand.

> This is really interesting because it's a very Western point of view.

There's lots of democracies in Asia and they manage pretty well. "It's not our culture" is the one of the laziest excuse of dictators and despots to keep their seats. And no it's very clear cut, in those dictatorship, if you publish anything the government doesn't like, you end up in a torture camp, that's as clear cut as you can be.

Your post raises an interesting point where 95+% of speakers of one language live in one country without anything resembling free speech. It is probably unavoidable. A better solution would be a parallel VN lang Wiki that is moderated by people offshore.

    > A particular problem with Wikipedia is the by definition one-sided view of charged issues.

This is a wide brush stroke. Certainly on the English language version, there is a wide set of views offered for controversial topics. Do you make this claim only for VN land Wiki, or all Wikis?

> A particular problem with Wikipedia is the by definition one-sided view of charged issues

This is a problem everywhere, even in Europe. There are a lot of articles written by people employed by the state or mainstream media.

You don't need to look as far as Vietnamese Wikipedia to see ideology creeping in. I noticed weirdly forced extreme-left concepts in a lot of French and English pages, to the point it lowered my trust in the whole website.

Examples please.

Anything to do with Zionism is a great starting point.

When I said examples I was looking for a link to a paragraph. Instead, you gave me the same vague shit as the person I was talking to.

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