Hacker News Reader

Comment by ok_dad | Hacker News Reader

The original rule when I was a lad (when wikipedia was a baby) was, "don't trust stuff on the internet, especially Wikipedia where people can change it at will."

Today they might have better trust for Wikipedia-- and I know I use it as a source of truth for a lot of things-- but back in my day teachers were of the opinion that it couldn't be trusted. This was for like middle and high school, not college or university, so we would cite encyclopedias and that sort of thing, since we weren't reading cutting edge papers back then (maybe today kids read them, who knows).

Edit: Also, I think the GP comment was proven correct by all of the replies claiming that Wikipedia was never controversial because it was very clear to everyone my age when Wikipedia was created/founded that teachers didn't trust the internet nor Wikipedia at the time.

View on HN

There was a period of time where Wikipedia was more scrutinized than print encyclopedias because people did not understand the power of having 1000s of experts and the occasional non-experts editing an entry for free instead of underpaying one sudo-expert. They couldn't comprehend how an open source encyclopedia would even work or trust that humans could effectively collaborate on the task. They imagined that 1000s of self-interested chaos monkeys would spend all of their energy destroying what 2-3 hard working people has spent hours creating instead of the inverse. Humans are very pessimistic about other humans. In my experience when humans are given the choice to cooperate or fight, most choose to cooperate.

All of that said, I trust Wikipedia more than I trust any LLMs but don't rely on either as a final source for understanding complex topics.

> the power of having 1000s of experts and the occasional non-experts editing an entry

When Wikipedia was founded, it was much easier to change articles without notice. There may not have been 1000s of experts at the time, like there are today. There's also other things that Wikipedia does to ensure articles are accurate today that they may not have done or been able to do decades ago.

I am not making a judgment of Wikipedia, I use it quite a bit, I am just stating that it wasn't trusted when it first came out specifically because it could be changed by anyone. No one understood it then, but today I think people understand that it's probably as trustworthy or moreso than a traditional encyclopedia is/was.

> In my experience when humans are given the choice to cooperate or fight, most choose to cooperate.

Personally, my opinion of human nature falls somewhere in the middle of those two extremes.

I think when humans are given the choice to cooperate or fight, most choose to order a pizza.

A content creator I used to follow was fond of saying "Chill out, America isn't headed towards another civil war. We're way too fat and lazy for that."

Even ordering a pizza requires the cooperation of a functioning telecom system, a pizza manufacturer, a delivery person, a hungry customer...

Sure but I hope you get my point. Fighting takes effort, cooperation takes effort. Most people have other things to worry about and don't care about whatever it is you're fighting or cooperating over. People aren't motivated enough to try and sabotage the wikipedia articles of others. Even if they could automate it. There's just nothing in it for them.

The opposite of love and hatered is apathy.

For better or worse, it's also what makes for reliable systems.

> "They imagined that 1000s of self-interested chaos monkeys would spend all of their energy destroying what 2-3 hard working people has spent hours creating instead of the inverse."

Isn't that exactly what happens on any controversial Wikipedia page?

There's not that many controversial topics at any given time. One of Wikipedia's solutions was to lock pages until a controversy subsided. Perma-controversy has been managed in other ways, like avoiding the statement of opinion as fact, the use of clear and uncontroversial language, using discussion pages to hash out acceptable and unacceptable content, competent moderators... Rage burns itself and people get bored with vandalism.

It doesn't always work. There are many topics that are perpetual edit wars because both (multiple) sides see the proliferation of their perspective as a matter of life and death. In many cases, one side is correct in this assessment and the others are delusional, but it's not always easy to align the side that's correct with the people who effectively control the page, because editors indeed do have their own biases (whether because of ideology, a philosophy, a political party, a nation, or whatever else). For those topics, Wikipedia can never be a source of "truth".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com