The Campaign to Delegitimize Wikipedia | Hacker News Reader

The Campaign to Delegitimize Wikipedia

theatlantic.com

Whatever else you may think of Jimmy Wales, the fact that he has resisted temptation to turn Wikipedia into a mega-profitable ad-powered site or sell to Google or someone else is pretty unprecedented in recent tech history. Could have easily joined the "tres commas club".

Apparently it was a strike by Spanish contributors that stopped his original plan to use adverts, so props to them.

https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-spanish-fork/

I was always mildly suspicious of Jimmy Wales but he seems to have done well. Considering what a grifter his co-founder Larry Sager has become, he's a saint by comparison.

I didn't know about that, thanks for the link; major kudos to them. Still, Wales has had many opportunities to "sell out".

* Larry Sanger, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger

How is he a grifter? I don't see any mentions of bitcoin or ai in his wiki.

Jimmy wales has a masters in finance. Larry Sanger has a PhD in philosophy.

Who would you trust more a guy with a finance degree or a guy with a PD in philosophy with great interest in ethics?

He's always dabbled in right-wing culture war type stuff with his various Wikipedia alternatives but more recently he's been into QAnon and anti-vax stuff.

I'd got the impression he was doing it partly to get right-wing funding for his various projects but maybe he's a true believer and I'm doing him a great disservice by calling him a grifter and not a lunatic.

Molly White, a prolific Wikipedia editor, has written a good overview of how information source reliability is handled in practice: https://www.citationneeded.news/elon-musk-and-the-rights-war.... There's a process for how decisions about source legitimacy and reliability are made, and these "decisions aren’t made lightly and are frequently revisited: there have been over fifty discussions about the Daily Mail’s reliability, for example, with both sides being vehemently argued".

https://archive.is/2025.02.08-005538/https://www.theatlantic...

https://archive.ph/2025.02.08-005538/https://www.theatlantic...

In general, yes, Elon and friends are correct. There are numerous articles on the topic. As long as Elon and friends don't offer solutions, they can remain so, otherwise mockery and some good laughs will likely be in order.

The only functioning large-scale Odonian syndic, after all the promise of the early valley. It provides immense value to dispossessed peoples across our world. Of course the propertarians wish to discredit and destroy it!

Since about 2014 I have zero trust in English Wikipedia on anything remotely connected to politics, history or philosophy, and partially culture. It has been working very hard to appear neutral but be very far from neutral.

true neutrality is impossible since we all have some inherent biases, but it does cite its sources, which is important and allows you to then decide if you want to trust the source or not

also, for a lot of people "not neutral" means "it says stuff I don't agree with"

Do you have any examples of what where it is very far from neutral? How do you define neutral?

Fair enough. Many editors like myself are still getting skeleton articles written on government and law, and I'm doubtful the politics articles could've ever been that good without such basic information.

Given Musk's self professed commitment to free speech he should be ok with outlets having a different slant to his own.

Calling for journalists to be fired for publishing facts doesn't say much for "dedication to free speech", does it. (Not that I thought it was anything but a cover.)

he’s committed to free speech as much as dj khaled is committed to his diet

Wikipedia is as legitimate as they get, but that doesn't mean it's perfect. Readers should be aware of its bias in which sources it allows (which has knock-on effects on which facts and stories cannot be included because no "reliable" sources report on them, while left-leaning sources are unmotivated to report them):

Wikipedia’s list of deprecated sources currently contains 16 right-leaning sources: Breitbart, the Daily Caller, the Daily Mail, the Daily Star, the Epoch Times, FrontPage Magazine, the Gateway Pundit, Infowars, LifeSiteNews, News of the World, One America News Network, the Sun, Taki’s Magazine, VDare, WorldNetDaily, and Zero Hedge – and just one left-leaning source, Occupy Democrats. Other politically biased sources have also been deprecated, but it is harder to position them on the left-right political axis, such as media companies controlled by the Russian or Chinese government.

...

but a similar standard has not been applied to lower quality, left-leaning sources such as CounterPunch, AlterNet, and the Daily Kos.

According to Ad Fontes Media‘s widely-used media bias chart (which is commonly cited in discussions on the reliable sources noticeboard), CounterPunch, AlterNet, and the Daily Kos are all less reliable than the Daily Mail. This is significant because the Daily Mail, a deprecated right-leaning source, is often used as a benchmark for judging whether other right-leaning sources should be deprecated. All three of these left-wing sources are widely used at Wikipedia.

https://thecritic.co.uk/the-left-wing-bias-of-wikipedia/

This is caused by how a source is deprecated. You have source deprecated by RfC, following a discussion/controversy (half of the examples probably came from the Sandy Hook edit war).

Then you have sources, the vast majority, that are de facto deprecated, hence are not on any list. If as an example, Counterpunch and AlterNet are never cited except following the 'verifiability policy', they are de facto deprecated, and if it's the case, the author never bothered researching his subject or even reading Wikipedia rules. Which would explain why thecritic is also de facto deprecated.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deprecated_sources

That thecritic article claims the listed questionable left leaning sites are heavily cited, is that not true then? Is there a way to search for this effectively?

The only page i found AlterNet cited was AlterNet itself, so i would guess no. If only the article provided sources, or at least example, but i guess it's too much to ask

To be honest, it's quite easy, wiki moderators use custom search engines to improve links (especially on heavily discussed or heavily viewed article), here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Advanced_source_sear...

if one of the engine return AlterNet or CounterPunch articles on political questions, it's probably "heavily used". If not, the author is a probably a liar, the editor certainly don't check articles and the publication is surely as worthless as AlterNet.

I checked the article again and it says the following right after the quoted part:

> An external links search shows around 2,580 [1] Wikipedia pages linking to CounterPunch, around 2,400 [2] linking to the Daily Kos, and around 1,640 [3] linking to AlterNet.

[1] https://archive.is/PWPNB

[2] https://archive.is/R19OZ

[3] https://archive.is/kNtgq

Considering how many pages there are on Wikipedia, and how many of these results are notes and talk pages, I think one can conclusively determine that these sites are in fact not "widely used" sources.

This isn't to say they're aren't questionable or shouldn't be filtered against of course (nor that they are and should be).

The problem I have with this kind of bias evaluation is fairly straightforward: what if a group of people aligned in a particular way engages in more "untrustworthy" speech than their counterparts? Follows then that a filtering that aimed to curb untrustworthy content would now be disproportionately filtering against their content in general, so now they can point at the filtering and call it biased, and even pass the smell test as far as the numbers are concerned.

Very curious things start happening when we look through lenses like these. It's very difficult to effectively discuss unfortunately too, without getting into any catfights.

> The problem I have with this kind of bias evaluation is fairly straightforward: what if a group of people aligned in a particular way engages in more "untrustworthy" speech than their counterparts?

The article takes this into account: "but a similar standard has not been applied to lower quality, left-leaning sources such as CounterPunch, AlterNet, and the Daily Kos."

That is fine, but I think it's still important to recognize this. In my initial reading, the numbers comparison stood out a lot more from the thread starter's comment than the rest for example, which is a problem if perpetuated without the rest. In a sense, mentioning the numbers in the way it was mentioned almost invites misinterpretation, I'd say.

The amount of deprecated sources doesn’t tell you anything about any bias without the number of allowed sources.

Here's the list, have a browse and try to find any that are (US) conservative and green ("generally reliable").

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

There's a few economically conservative sources (Economist, WSJ, etc) but I don't think there's any politically conservative ones.

The source bias is a big problem but it goes beyond that. The various groups of people who have power within Wikipedia simply create content with their personal bias. Look at how easily Wikipedia editors throw the conspiracy theory label on everything they disagree with politically, for example.

While there is plenty of baloney on the left, like quantum consciousness and crystals etc. it isn't held up as being proudly wrong. Biden's HHS secy. wasn't a Reiki Master even if Reiki Masters are leftish. RFK Jr. is proudly a kook, regardless of how right or left he is.

It just isn't symmetrical.

Wikipedia is so obviously biased that its founder even talked about it a few years back. The editor cabal, rules on sources, the incorporation of guidelines that use progressive stances, etc all create this skew.

Doesn't seem biased to me and I use it all the time. I don't expect it to reflect the gospel truth, but it cites sources so I can always look those up (and I do) to see where that piece of information is coming from. Plenty of stuff on there I disagree with but still way better than anything else out there.

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