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Comment by vaylian | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia has been introduced as the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Anyone can publish problematic material or false information. But it's also Wikipedia's greatest strength that it has been so open to basically everyone and that gave us a wide range of really good articles that rivaled the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Wikipedia is a product of the free internet. It is a product of a world that many politicians still don't understand. But those politicians still make laws that do not make sense, because they believe that something has to be done against those information crimes. And they also do it to score brownie points with their conservative voting base.

The internet has it's problems, no doubt about that. But what these laws do is to throw the baby out with the bath water. Actually, the water probably stays in, because it's not like those laws solve anything.

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Attributing the actions being taken by the UK (and much of the EU) to a lack of understanding is a quite generous interpretation. That may have been true a generation ago, but it's not now.

Many of us think that they understand a free internet very well, specifically the threats it places on their uses (and abuses) of power, and that the laws are quite well designed to curtail that. The UK currently, without identity verification, arrests 30 people per day for things they say online.

I feel that the left and the right are tag teaming on this topic. Both sides want to track who says what on the internet for their own purposes.

I’ll add to this, no politician is on your side unless it means getting your vote to keep them in power. It’s hard to be an actual good person and get too far up in politics, especially in today’s environment.

So, yes, I believe they both want tracking to exist, because they both benefit massively from it.

I would add, some politicians are on your side on select matters, most are not.

Sad thing is people ignore a politician's actions and keep applying Yes or No to their marketing statements. They use social engineering wording just to get votes and then they will ignore that standing to support their own action of legislation crafting and voting.

By block and limiting access to information, such as Wikipedia, they are advocating for a dumb populous. Irony is that in order to have a strong national security, an educated populous is needed. They are the ones see beyond the easily deployed social engineering tactics and are better at filtering out misinformation.

I think it is a bit simpler than that.

People don't like their worldview challenged, no matter their ideology.

Politicians exploit this by offering ways to "help", but at the cost of transferring more power away from the people.

At the moments at least, it's Labour who are defending this law and implementing it, and Reform who are against it. So very much not a tag team.

Wikipedia has been introduced as the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Anyone can publish problematic material or false information.

But the top articles are always perma-locked and under curation. Considering how much traffic those articles receive relative to the more esoteric articles, the surface area of vandalizable articles that a user is exposed to is relatively low. Also to that end, vandalism has a low effort-to-impact ratio.

n=1 I’ve used Wikipedia for many years with no immediately noticeable false information. And of course all the “citation needed” marks are there. I trust Wikipedia to be correct, I expect it to be correct, and Wikipedia has earned my trust. Maybe I don’t read it enough to see any vandalism.

Compared to LLMs, it’s extremely striking to see the relative trust / faith people have in it. It’s pretty sad to see how little the average person values truth and correctness in these systems, how untrusted Wikipedia is to some, and how overly-trusted LLMs are in producing factually correct information to others.

No false information doesn't mean there isn't any bias. The same facts can be used to come to wildly different conclusions and can also just be omitted when inconvenient.

> world that many politicians still don't understand. But those politicians still make laws that do not make sense,

Nah, politicians understand it, they just understand it differently than us do - and they make laws in accordance to that understanding.

Don't give them the same excuse you give to children, they are adults.

> And they also do it to score brownie points with their conservative voting base.

Care to remind me what side of the political spectrum was desperately trying to silence all health-related discourse that did not match the government's agenda just a few years ago?

By "conservative" I mean less digitally-minded people who are typically older. You have these people on the left, in the center and on the right along the classical political axis.

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