The key point to remember is that Wikiepedia's goal is "verifiability, not truth". With that one fact they neatly sidestep a lot of the arguments from cranks and whatnot about including this or that fringe view out of a commitment to "truth". Truth isn't their goal: Wikipedia is meant to be an accumulation of best-guess knowledge at the current time. It may seem like a lower goal, but that's all any encyclopedia was ever supposed to be.
Given that almost all sources that constitute verifiability will happily copy and paste anything that is in wikipedia, it is arbitrary what is verifiable.
It's possible nowadays with a bit of effort to create entirely new "facts" via a one-two shuffle between news sources and Wikipedia.
First, you publish an article on some news source, asserting the fact.
Then you update Wikipedia with that fact, citing your own article.
Other news sources check Wikipedia, find your new fact, and incorporate it into their own articles. Now you have a bunch of extra sources for your Wikipedia article.
Except that any reputable "news source" won't let random people post stories with made up facts - and Wikipedia editors will shoot down disreputable sources such as your personal own blog.
The brazilian aardvark is an interesting example because it created a genuine fact. It is now also known as the brazilian Aardvark with no caveats. It is more concerning if this happens with statements that aren't as self fulfilling. For example, saying that Elvis is alive to enough people doesn't somehow make it so.
Love to see you making the point. Although we can hardly believe that there are still someone believing in the flat world, telling them the truth/fact does not help, as we perhaps once thought advices from our parents are not genuinely made for the sake of us.
Ultimately, we learn by reading and experiencing, not by being told. Hence, wikiepedia's goal to provide verifiable information makes the trick. It is the best way to allow us to explore and learn, and hence form our belief about the truth.
> Point out that if Wikipedia had been around at the time of Galileo, it would have had a duty to report the claims of the Catholic church as fact, without qualification, despite the conspiracy that undoubtedly existed.
It's an extreme example, and therefore does invite a tendency to easily dismiss non-mainstream thought, but that's intentional within Wikipedia.
The 'how to reply' sections make it clear what most fringe theories try to rely on to convince editors, but Wikipedia is not a place for convincing - it is a catalog of what's currently, broadly accepted.
>Wikipedia is not a place for convincing - it is a catalog of what's currently, broadly accepted.
That's true, and it should be the case. But how do we distinguish between "that which is currently broadly accepted" and "that which is currently the leading theory but other theories are also quite widely accepted" and "that which is probably the leading theory, by a narrow margin, but then again might not be, because nobody does polls on this stuff, so we're basically just going by what wikipedia editors reckon"?
What, for instance, should we do if 80% of people believe theory A and 20% of people believe theory B? (Suppose this is one of those rare cases where we're fortunate enough to have actual polls).
You present both, as long the 20% one is actually represented by reliable sources, and then you balance the article appropriately. There're quite a few subjects on Wikipedia for which there is yet no scholarly consensus but different viewpoints exist.
It intends to be what’s currently broadly accepted. It’s success in achieving that goal relies on a labor model that may or may not be well suited towards that end.
If Wikipedia thinks the Earth is flat, I didn't realize that a neutral point of view was moving, relative to the Earth, so close to the speed of light.
It's not about the misconception that the Earth is flat. It's about the myth that medieval Europeans believed the Earth is flat. That's not the same thing.
TPA is a Wikipedia explanation about why Wikipedia can not argue the earth is not flat.
The linked article I was replying about was done so in the context that the Earth is flat is a 19th century myth. I was explaining the article they were linking to was not related to the same subject.
Alternatively, it's a great example because it makes the points so obvious. It takes practice to recognize these ways of arguing and thinking, and learning to see the most obvious form first can be followed more easily by identifying subtler forms.
Not really, it's just a prototypical example of a fringe conspiracy that gets pushed and the lead of the essay explicitly notes that you're unlikely to come across them. The point is that the tactics of argument presented would be the same. It's all tied back to due weight.
This article assumes the reader is aware that the earth is not flat. It uses the example of arguments in favor of the view the earth is flat to expose the inherent problems with arguments of that form, so that editors who are faced with less obvious truths can recognize such specious arguments.
This was really interesting and I feel like I learned a bit more about how to deal with unreasonable people on the internet (and maybe recognize if I'm being unreasonable myself?)
> ...even if there is a slim chance beliefs on the margin may eventually gain wide consensus (as happened with the proposals of the round Earth in Archaic Periods and continental drift before the mechanism of plate tectonics...)
After reading this line, I'm curious how this article would read with an example that was once a fringe theory that ultimately did gain widespread consensus.
I was taught in elementary school (college age now) that people thought the Earth was flat until Columbus came alone to prove everyone wrong. That false statement that has some widespread consensus. My parents were taught it also.
That one is a particularly weird one, given that there are so many obvious and well known examples to counter it.
Case in point, Dante's Divine Comedy (EDIT: Which the linked article does mention at the end) - completed 1320 - contains a very explicit description of the earth being round, complete with describing time differences due to the sun rising and setting at different times (Purgatory explicitly mentions that at the same time there is sunset in Jerusalem, midnight over the Ganges, and sunrise in Purgatory which he placed as a physical place on the opposite side of the earth), and how the stars would be different on different sides of the earth.
It'd be one thing if the evidence was all obscure, but somehow this myth managed to take hold despite the fact that one of the most famous literary works in history counters it (I guess that tells us something about how few people actually read the classics as opposed to just read about them).
(there are of course many other, and earlier, sources of evidence refuting this myth, but Dante provides one of the clearest and most explicit and, most importantly, famous ones)
i do not think Wikipedia takes a stance on anything and tries to stay neutral but present the case for ideas on many fronts but is dependent on the writer as well.
I think a stance needs to be taken on certain issues. For example, spelling and grammar are famously well within the domain of ignoramuses demanding that their mistakes and errors be taken as “valid alternatives”, but they cannot be. This kind of stuff, in my mind, should be the same.
1) You are always someone else's ignoramus 2) It's tough to draw the line on what is acceptable as "enforced opinion" and what isn't. I find the true-neutral alignment of wikipedia much more sound from a public service perspective. I mean they don' hide it, and don't claim to be 100% up to date or accurate.
Recently I corrected a spelling mistake on the Talk page of a subject (Punyi, China's “Last Emperor"). My change was reverted and I was given a stern warning by a moderator that this kind of behaviour is not acceptable.
I really appreciate Wikipedia, I love the ideal, and I respect it as a source of knowledge, and I respect the community... but some behaviours are really bizarre.
What does "correct a spelling mistake on the Talk page of a subject" mean? Did you:
- Write a comment on the article's talk page about a spelling mistake in the article itself? If so, why not directly modify the article?
- Modify an existing comment on the talk page to correct a spelling mistake in that comment? If so, I can see why that would be seen as étiquette-breaking.
I edited the spelling mistake, and added a comment to the effect that I had changed the spelling, and I listed the initial text and my change, and provided a reference as to why my proposed spelling (transliteration) was preferable.
It seems clear from your comments here that you still defend editing someone else's comment on a Talk page because the software let you.
This is wrong. If you disagree about transliteration, you should have added a comment of your own with the supporting documentation you mention, without removing the other user's transliteration from their comments.
The fact that the software did not automatically prevent this is irrelevant. My bank's software will let me spend money I don't have, and charge me overdraft fees after the fact; that doesn't mean I had the money to spend since the software let me. Here on HN, that seems to be worst possible justification or rationalization for behavior everyone else both there and here is telling you is not okay.
Much the contrary, I am not arguing that I was allowed to do this because the software did not prevent me from doing so (which would be off-topic for the sake of the “Why Wikipedia Cannot Say The Earth Isn’t Flat”), I am arguing that there is an objective truth to matters, including that the earth is flat and that certain spellings are ‘correct’ and all others ‘incorrect’, and that policy (and software) must not prevent these truths from being asserted.
The talk pages are a fine example of holding a hammer and treating everything as a nail. That anyone can edit a page makes it usable as a discussion board, but because anyone can edit everyone else’s comments, there is a need to enforce the extra layer of rules you just described.
Would be much better if talk pages acted like actual chat boards.
Agreed. The article also made me think a little too... I mean there must be some seriously... Um, dedicated, people out there working on this stuff, and somehow it trundles along, and the end result is pretty damn good. Life I guess.
I agree that they should indeed function as chat pages.
I didn’t “vandalise” the other contributor’s comment willy-nilly. I corrected the spelling, but I explicitly left a mention of what it had been before I changed the spelling, why my spelling was better, a reference to sources and citations thereof, and so forth.
As you're surely aware, the problem was that you were editing someone else's personal comment. Here, I can't "fix" the spelling, syntax or grammar of the your comment - and I'm sure you're happy about that. On WP, while the software technically allows it, there's a strong social pressure against it. Honestly, your fix was clearly well-meant, so I can see why you felt the response a tad harsh...
Why allow it then? Wikipedia advertises that they welcome contributions. If there are areas where contributions are discouraged they should just remove that feature. This way, editing a comment is not ok for a new user but will be accepted if done by a mod.
I beg to differ: I did not vandalise another user’s comment. (But then again, I would say that, wouldn’t I, since I am arguing my case and I am inherently biased in my favour.) I will provide the facts so that you can assess the facts for yourself:
I didn’t just change his spelling. I edited his spelling, but I left the previous state (in another section), explained what I had done and why, provided sources and citations as to why my transliteration was preferable, and took clear ownership of what I had done and why I had done it.
What you did was not vandalism, but it was rude, since it violated the moral right of the other user to control the words associated with their authorship. When one contributes to the article space, one is explicitly relinquishing that right, because Wikipedia is a collective effort, but that does not hold for talk space content, particularly when it is signed.
And what you did was doubly rude because you acknowledge that your version was "preferable"; that is, it is conceivable that the other user prefers their version. They may be wrong to do so, but by editing their words directly you are denying them their right to an opinion. It is not surprising at all that your edit was reverted.
Yes, I agree, in hindsight, that I was rude according to what I discovered (the hard way) be the prevailing norm.
However I have difficulty agreeing with you on your second paragraph, indeed it is the exact opposite of what I deeply believe: I am convinced that there is an objective truth, and that one of the things where there is prevailing conviction as to what is correct spelling wand what is not. Words have meaning by virtue of convention, and if you do not pursue the convention, you are reneging on the certainty of being able to unambiguously and intelligibly commune with others.
Complicated reasons. Talk pages do get moderated in specific situations, and those do not require special permission. For example, anyone can and are encouraged to move old discussions into archives.
Additionally there is spam. Spam need to be detected and removed from the talk space and administrators can't be the only one with permission to do that.
That said, there is no excuse that the UI don't inform you about the current norms that exist.
This is more of a cultural thing. Editing articles themselves is carte blanche of course, but editing people's comments has a stigma. From a pragmatic standpoint it probably prevents petty squabbles over typos, as well as passive-agressive tweaking from editors. On a deeper level though, it's about integrity of thought. Even for articles it's expected that quotes should present what was originally said. People can take it really personally if you change what they said and it's not hard to change the tone or force of an argument by changing even a word.
Btw, I highly doubt it was an admin that gave you that warning. It was probably a regular user.
What wikipedia should do is make the talk pages accessible from their mobile website without having to load as "desktop" mode.
It's jut one simple link they need to add, I don't understand what stops them, afaik they can even render the talk pages as mobile, they just fail to link to it from the mobile article page.
And while at it, on mobile if you open an image it should load the plain image file, not with all the sticky floating crap around it such that when you zoom in the sticky floating crap goes over the image itself...
Of most websites I assume the sticky floating crap is there to "engage" users to get more ad revenue (to permanently show all the social like buttons and stuff), but I don't understand why wikipedia does similar antipatterns in their image viewer...
I have a couple hundreds wikipedia editions. And suddenly someone reverted my change "because it's not like this". So I reverted to my last version, attached links to documentation that I'm right, showed examples etc. Then the same guy reverted that again. And then a couple of other guys came to support him.
Then I stopped editing anything there, and I stopped treating wikipedia as a source of any reliable information.
In this case, Wikipedia's editors are the *ssholes. Of course, not every single editor is bad, but a good editor is somebody that:
a) accepted the rules of wikipedia (that are unfair and prone to abuse).
b) have enough spare time.
c) don't mind or have troubles working with abusive people.
If you are a professional then, it takes a single day to find that Wikipedia is ruled by brats and its not your place.
> If you are a professional then, it takes a single day to find that Wikipedia is ruled by brats and its not your place.
It sounds like that professional tried to use Wikipedia as his free PR soapbox and found it hard to post propaganda when his submissions are under scrutiny.
I've seen that before, with a PR guy trying to create a wikipedia article to sell the event he was organizing and link to it from other sources. Oddly enough, he also criticized wikipedia's editors for being childish and irrational. Meanwhile, he failed to notice the irony or even the fact that he was directly going against wikipedia's spam rules.
Did you even look at the WP History? The person who set the DELETE proposal on the page did so because he literally refused to believe that the collaboration existed, and that it looked like some sort of hacker website. I don't know about you, but I don't go on wikipedia to argue with my grandmother about the colloquial phrase hacking, and whether or not hackathons for children are evil or whatever.
> The person who set the DELETE proposal on the page did so because he literally refused to believe that the collaboration existed
So what?
It's your job to present proof that the collaboration existed, and it's your job to convince others that the information you're providing is accurate.
And more, submitting a dubious article for deletion is actually just a request for other users to evaluate the merits of the article on their own, and they vote based on the information you provide and the case you make to support your position.
If by "truth" you mean "what is written on the page." I'm not sure why you're conflating the content of wikipedia with truth, because wikipedia is not a catalogue of truth, but of culture.
I've encountered the same issue when I attempted to attach a "citation needed" tag to a statement that was blatantly false. The maintainer's excuse for reverting the change was that such a tag did not belong on such a highly visible entry.
These are people with whom you simply can't reason. Any argument you provide will be shot down with the absurdest of reasons.
Personally, I'm glad this happened to me. Like you, that experience cemented the unreliability of wikipedia in my mind.
Had a similar experience with an organization I cofounded. An editor claimed it had to be bogus, that there was no way Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, NASA, and the Worldbank would ever all coloborate on a social good project. Eventually we prevailed, but the article had to be insanely over cited to the point I feel it’s hard to read now and after the experience I’ve not felt it was worth it to encourage folks to maintain it.
I mean this in the politest possible way, I have no reason not to believe you, but all of your examples, GGP and down, would benefit immensely from a link to the contested revisions.
I think they just mean to post a link that points to the change you tried to make (and the subsequent ones). I think Wikipedia keeps a record of all the changes?
> I think Wikipedia keeps a record of all the changes?
Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be the case, specifically with talk pages where the history of the discussion with the editor who deemed it a “hoax” was, but you can see some remnants of it here:
I wasn’t the one who made the edits to the page itself, but I was involved in collecting the links to prove it wasn’t a “hoax” and helping make the case to the editor who refused to believe it was true.
I think one issue with Wikipedia is it started when people still thought anonymity was great. (E.g. look at Craigslist compared to more modern sites like Airbnb.) So it's harder for editors to be accountable or for their biases to be known. I think Quora's approach is better overall, where they allow people to select anonymous as an option.
You suggest you were a victim of some kind of injustice, yet there isn't enough information to think that. You don't actually explain why your initial change was reverted. And you don't say whether you acknowledged the reason your changes were reverted when you reverted the page to your version. If you didn't respond to the initial feedback, this can be interpreted as malicious behavior. And just because you "attached links to documentation that I'm right, showed examples etc.", doesn't mean the documentation met the necessary standards or adequately supported your change. Instead of engaging in an editing war, you should have used the Talk page to get feedback on the best way to push your changes through.
And instead of fighting willing contributors the editors should have informed that
But for some pages it's a competition on who has the most free time and the most willingness to navigate the bureaucracy (and none of those items implies greater knowledge of the subject, quite the opposite)
I thought the thing these days was to default to believing victims, instead of starting out by denying their experience and claiming that anything that did happen must have been their fault somehow.
That was a page about a database. I've added an info, that this database has a feature. Someone removed that. I have added links to documentation stating that yes, there is this feature.
And I'm not going to argue with them. Let me write it so you will understand it: I JUST DON'T CARE.
Let them argue in their own kindergarten. I have more interesting things to work on. I can always make another training where I teach people that this database has this feature.
I don't have links now, but there are quite known cases where a professor, who spent 20 years on a topic, writes something about this topic, and gets over voted by the bunch of kids, who have no idea about the whole thing.
The process used in academics looks very similar. Someone write a dissertation and several other papers. Someone question the conclusion. An audience/council/board either support the author, or the disputant.
It is not fair. The default is a negative, and its up to the author to convince everyone to add specific information to the global collective. It is also susceptible to attacks from popular opinion, which is a common theme for practically all major breakthroughs. Being "right" has a long history of not being enough at the short time, while social cliques has a long history of allowing the "wrong" facts.
The question however remains: what is a better process? If they had the HN models, your edit could just as easily be downvoted by that "guy" and his support. They could abandon the deletionism model but then limit google/wikipedia search to only show articles that has been approved by the "featured article" process, but which would result in zero traffic for most articles and effort spent on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia editors have the power to make your contribution "to the global collective" disappear. On the other hand, if you get a physical book published, it can almost certainly be purchased or borrowed even though many disagree with it or harbor ill intentions towards it. So it remains in "the global collective"
Exactly I created a page for the second largest festival in the UK in terms of people attending and some German student marked it as not important enough!
To put this into context it would be like a non American saying the next biggest festival to Mardi Gras isn't noteworthy.
I only skimmed the page but this one caught my eye:
> This maneuvering and filibustering is soon likely to exhaust the patience of any reasonable person who naturally prefers not to reason with the unreasonable, and who, unlike the advocate, has no special interest or passion other than striving to maintain neutrality. Additionally, by continually engaging fringe advocates in endless argument, you run the risk of turning Wikipedia into a battleground or a debating society. At the present time, Wikipedia does not have an effective means to address superficially polite but tendentious, long-term, fringe advocacy.
I did the same years ago for similar reasons. Many of the people with tons of edits and 'seniority' maintain control over specific articles to push a specific point of view. Wikipedia can be a good source of links to definitive answers to questions, but it should not be considered a reliable source in and of itself.
However, i fail to see what the big deal about it. I have yet to meet a flat earther irl, and i doubt they have great influence over our society.
They are a curiosity at best.
We have way more dangerous and widespread believes.
Like: did you know there is a way to cure malaria ? Cause i had malaria for years and everybody i knew, including my doctors and myself, believed it couldn't be cured.
And then i meet a guy from the pasteur institute (in france you can't get more serious than that, they are the nasa of biology) who told me that they had a perfectly fine protocol to kill the parasite in the liver for years. And using nothing more that regular malaron. So i went to the institute and indeed, they do.
Our society is working on a pile of false informations, obsolete data, incomplete thruths and lies. All with major consequences. It's human nature.
Flat earth it the least important of it. I'd say it's even a good thing cause it helps revealing very confused people or flaws in our educational system.
I have met one serious flat-earther (working as a QA engineer funnily enough) and I think they may be more common than you think. The person had clearly easily impressionable personality as well as a 'there must be someone behind this' sort of personality which as we've recently seen, is quite common in western society. Furthermore, he at least had an intellectual confidence to share this view ("I know this sounds ridiculous but you should check it out") and many might not. I guess what I mean is flat-earthism is just a symptom of something quite common.
When i lived in mali, a cab driver told me he wasn't afraid of aids cause it was well known you could be cured by making love to a virgin. There is no mysterious mechanism here. Just human nature.
You won't, that's my point. Malaron is sold as a preventive drug, not a curratvie one. However, i can give you the contact of the tropical disease specialist that i saw, which in turn may give you more informations.
From the WHO's "Guidelines for the treatment of malaria", third edition [1]:
"Radical cure. This term refers to both cure of blood-stage infection and prevention
of relapses by killing hypnozoites (in P. vivax and P. ovale infections only)." (p. 4)
"The objective of treating malaria caused by P. vivax and P. ovale is to cure both
blood-stage and liver-stage infections (called radical cure), thereby preventing
recrudescence and relapse, respectively." (p. 61)
"The recommended treatment for radical cure of P. ovale relapsing malaria is the same as that for P. vivax, i.e. ACT or chloroquine combined with primaquine (total dose, 3.5 mg base/kg bw). [...] P. malariae and P. knowlesi do not form hypnozoites and so do not require radical cure with primaquine." (p. 290)
There's nothing there about P. falciparum, the major malaria parasite, but my understanding is that that also doesn't have a hypnozoite stage.
A recent paper "Challenges for achieving safe and effective radical cure of Plasmodium vivax" [2] suggests that this approach is well-accepted, but not yet a slam-dunk in the field.
For those untutored in the wild ways of Wikipedia, where even most admin namespace (Wikipedia:) articles are editable by all, this is an essay and not official Wikipedia policy.
I once chatted to an Uber driver who insisted the Earth was flat. I told him the reason helicopters doesn't spin around the Earth is that they are within the atmosphere which spins with the Earth. He hadn't really considered that explanation before...
It as a light hearted discussion, I thought the encounter fun :)
After the 2016 election Americans doesn't surprise me as much any more..
It helps if an argument fits the belief system or thinking patters of the person you're talking to. What are the odds that a cab driver has never had a physics class where they really dug into newtons laws of motion and internalized that? I bet the ones that have don't think the earth is flat.
One might attack the inertia concept by using the idea of jumping on a train or bus, but that's one step removed from helicopters ;-)
The inertia of the atmosphere. The inertia of the helicopter probably wouldn't be enough to fly in the 1000mph winds if the atmosphere wasn't moving with the earth.
...as a light hearted discussion, I thought the encounter fun
That is actually how you need to approach most people when attempting to change their mind about something. Once you take a position or suggest that they have a position than may or may not be valid, you put them on the defensive. After that they will be trying to protect their belief and nothing will change them. If you approach a topic as an open light hearted discussion of ideas without judgement then there is some hope of change. From their point of view there may also be hope of you changing. I'm sure there's much to be said here about vulnerability and a two-way street.
Is flat earth a thing that people who don't live on the coast believe? If you watch the sea, you see boats and birds and clouds go over the horizon. You can see that the ocean horizon is curved.
It's a thing that stupid people and conspiracy theorists believe. Living away from the coasts has nothing to do with it and it's quite frankly insulting to even insensate that being a reason people believe such malarkey.
Yeah, people believe conspiracies because it's more interesting, more drama than the truth...
The thing about flat Earth though is that it's so easy to prove. Just get in an airplane and fly to the edge :)
I wonder why no amatuer pilots have done that, how hard can it be to find the edge? Hehe
The article for the most part ignores the actual techniques that are used to push viewpoints across that actually work. One small one I remember. Imagine you want people to believe X. Imagine Wikipedia currently reads.
A says X but B says not X.
You edit it to read
A says X but left-wing commentator B says not X.
The qualification "left-wing commentator" is, for the purposes of this discussion, entirely accurate. However, the effect is that B now looks like they're biased whilst A, with no qualifying adjectives, looks impartial.
Now consider that it's entirely possible that A is _also_ accurately described as a "left-wing commentator" and you see why this stuff is so pernicious.
Anything about Israel/Palestine is crawling with minor edits like this.
Israeli here, supporter of equality among men and just rights for all.
Wikipedia is just reflecting reality here. Even in Israel, unbiased narratives are very difficult to find from either side. This is compounded by the self-hating Jew phenomenon [1] and the issue that many Palestinians actually _prefer_ living in a modern, Western democracy as opposed to the kingdoms and dictatorships which are the traditional Arab norma. So we have people on _both sides_ arguing for _both sides_, often using subtle trickery such as weasel words, unjustified quantifiers and adjectives, and selected elimination. Being a technically advanced country, this spills out onto the Internet and Wikipedia.
Personally, being involved in the situation, a _lack_ of such trickery on Wikipedia would raise more red flags for me than its presence.
So much fun watching the points on parent post climb up and down. It's one thing when people post opposing viewpoints, it's another when a post is voted on (in either direction) based on the poster's affiliation. Mud slinging all around.
Another fun thing is to watch the time, when the comments are going up or down. Then you can see, what is the prevailing affiliation among those tho vote in Asia/Europe/Americas.
Most Palestinians don’t really have the option of living in a Western-style democracy, as they don’t live in Israel and haven’t been granted Israeli citizenship. Arabs with Israeli citizenship are a small minority of Palestinians.
Thank you, you are right. I erroneously used the term Palestinians to refer to those who live in the West Bank, as those who live west of the Green Line identify more with Israel than with the PA or formally PLO. I've never had opportune to have a good discussion with Gaza residents, unfortunately.
You are right that the Christian and Muslim citizens of the West Bank (I'll just say Palestinians in interest of brevity) do _not_ enjoy the full benefits of citizenship, and are in fact treated poorly by the state compared to their Jewish neighbors. I'm one of their Jewish neighbors (I live in the West Bank) and we see it daily. However, these people (from what they tell me) do recognize that even with Israeli-imposed curfews e.g. on Yom Kippor, and restricted rights compared to Jews, they still live better than their brothers in Jordan and other Arab states. They drink cleaner water, have better job security, better health care, better education, better chances to improve the livelyhood of their children, and so many other advantages compared to Jordanian, Syrian, or Egyptians. This is coming from them, as I always take an opportunity to ask.
Of course, I would love to see them enjoy the same rights as I do. I don't see them as competition, rather I believe that we both flourish together when we cooperate. But even without all the benefits of a Western-style democracy that the government _could_ provide to them, they still prefer that government to the alternatives that they see right next door.
The earth isn’t flat. It’s not round either. Nor is it spherical. But we shouldn’t give up trying to describe its shape because no model will be sufficient. Rather, the earth can be thought of as flat, as round, as spherical, as elipsoidal, etc. The problem with flat earthers isn’t that they believe the earth is flat. Eveyone believes this. It’s that they approach knowlege as a fundamentalist taking the plain meaning of things without nuance or context.
EDIT: Sorry I came off very grumpy, I apologize. I'll rephrase.
I think nuance isn't so much the issue here as much as it is mistaking the map for the territory. A flat earth model has it's uses. Primarily for human-scale travel and mapping. But the topology of a sphere is inarguably far better than a flat plane. And if someone was to make the same mistake with a spherical model, they'd get a lot further before things break down.
Whenever articles on Wikipedia's editing process come up, you often see comments about adversarial edit wars, and people giving up. So, I want to offer contrary anecdotes: my experiences editing Wikipedia have been good.
I've only ever written one article, which has gone unchallenged for over two years now, probably because the topic is abstruse and difficult for everyone to understand in the first place (which is why I wrote the article):
Ditto. I've made small edits to dozens of articles over the years, and it's been painless. My carefully-referenced edit about giant Scottish worms still stands:
This isn't as much about the 'experience' had on the site, as it is offered as evidence. Many people post links to their controversial pages, you can see the reversion history, not to mention some talk pages with arguments so bad as to make middle school look tame, so this isn't just 'wah some editor made my experience bad' rather, it's about the process itself and showing how flawed it is, and how it keeps actual information from making it to the pages, with sometimes bad information being pushed to the fore by some overzealous maintainer. Wikipedia is cited more often every day, and its pages are taken for law by some, as absolute fact, but as others in this thread have stated, this couldn't be further from the truth. When politics/money and personal motives get involved things get ugly. It's important people realize how upside down and downright toxic some wikipedia pages are. I've posted on this topic before, but it's kind of a hot topic for me. Probably because what could be such a great tool for us all has to be ruined by 'wikilawyers'. ie, this is why we can't have nice things.
Wikipedia is like a stereotypical corporation with a bloated layer of micromanaging and mediocre middle managers (accidentally alliterative). It doesn't mean that good work can't be done, but it is certainly a massive drag on productivity and effectiveness.
I like the thought experiment of what Wikipedia might have been like in ancient times. It would have been amazing to read tweets and internet comments from Galileo, Shakespeare, and Jesus.
It also makes you wonder about the distant future. I wonder if this comment will still be on the internet 2000 years from now, and if any human will read it. I'm pretty sure an AI will read it in the near future, if not right now.
This topic is explored somewhat in the (excellent) puzzle video game "The Talos Principle". Without spoiling much, the game world contains many instances of archived Internet discussion, including some self-aware posts as to the permanence of the users' thoughts long into the future.
126 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadIf is long enouh in there it will never get out.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-a-raccoon-became...
First, you publish an article on some news source, asserting the fact.
Then you update Wikipedia with that fact, citing your own article.
Other news sources check Wikipedia, find your new fact, and incorporate it into their own articles. Now you have a bunch of extra sources for your Wikipedia article.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reporting
https://m.xkcd.com/978/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...
Ultimately, we learn by reading and experiencing, not by being told. Hence, wikiepedia's goal to provide verifiable information makes the trick. It is the best way to allow us to explore and learn, and hence form our belief about the truth.
> Point out that if Wikipedia had been around at the time of Galileo, it would have had a duty to report the claims of the Catholic church as fact, without qualification, despite the conspiracy that undoubtedly existed.
The 'how to reply' sections make it clear what most fringe theories try to rely on to convince editors, but Wikipedia is not a place for convincing - it is a catalog of what's currently, broadly accepted.
That's true, and it should be the case. But how do we distinguish between "that which is currently broadly accepted" and "that which is currently the leading theory but other theories are also quite widely accepted" and "that which is probably the leading theory, by a narrow margin, but then again might not be, because nobody does polls on this stuff, so we're basically just going by what wikipedia editors reckon"?
What, for instance, should we do if 80% of people believe theory A and 20% of people believe theory B? (Suppose this is one of those rare cases where we're fortunate enough to have actual polls).
Tldr, it's from the end of 19th century.
It's not about the misconception that the Earth is flat. It's about the myth that medieval Europeans believed the Earth is flat. That's not the same thing.
It too is about the "the myth that medieval Europeans believed the Earth is flat" and not about "the misconception that the Earth is flat".
It's just that it's called the "flat Earth myth" (instead of "flat Earth belief in the middle ages myth").
The linked article I was replying about was done so in the context that the Earth is flat is a 19th century myth. I was explaining the article they were linking to was not related to the same subject.
They just added the information that the belief that the middle ages believed the earth is flat is recent-ish.
His "Tl;dr" was meant to be for the link he provided, not the original article.
The fact that the earth is an oblate spheroid is a scientific fact with just as much certainty as the other claims are.
Being neutrality minded doesn't mean you can't outright dismiss false beliefs.
> ...even if there is a slim chance beliefs on the margin may eventually gain wide consensus (as happened with the proposals of the round Earth in Archaic Periods and continental drift before the mechanism of plate tectonics...)
After reading this line, I'm curious how this article would read with an example that was once a fringe theory that ultimately did gain widespread consensus.
Case in point, Dante's Divine Comedy (EDIT: Which the linked article does mention at the end) - completed 1320 - contains a very explicit description of the earth being round, complete with describing time differences due to the sun rising and setting at different times (Purgatory explicitly mentions that at the same time there is sunset in Jerusalem, midnight over the Ganges, and sunrise in Purgatory which he placed as a physical place on the opposite side of the earth), and how the stars would be different on different sides of the earth.
It'd be one thing if the evidence was all obscure, but somehow this myth managed to take hold despite the fact that one of the most famous literary works in history counters it (I guess that tells us something about how few people actually read the classics as opposed to just read about them).
(there are of course many other, and earlier, sources of evidence refuting this myth, but Dante provides one of the clearest and most explicit and, most importantly, famous ones)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth
I just wish they would apply the same approach to marxism and related ideologies. So far it is called "scientific". LOL
I really appreciate Wikipedia, I love the ideal, and I respect it as a source of knowledge, and I respect the community... but some behaviours are really bizarre.
- Write a comment on the article's talk page about a spelling mistake in the article itself? If so, why not directly modify the article?
- Modify an existing comment on the talk page to correct a spelling mistake in that comment? If so, I can see why that would be seen as étiquette-breaking.
This is wrong. If you disagree about transliteration, you should have added a comment of your own with the supporting documentation you mention, without removing the other user's transliteration from their comments.
The fact that the software did not automatically prevent this is irrelevant. My bank's software will let me spend money I don't have, and charge me overdraft fees after the fact; that doesn't mean I had the money to spend since the software let me. Here on HN, that seems to be worst possible justification or rationalization for behavior everyone else both there and here is telling you is not okay.
Would be much better if talk pages acted like actual chat boards.
I didn’t “vandalise” the other contributor’s comment willy-nilly. I corrected the spelling, but I explicitly left a mention of what it had been before I changed the spelling, why my spelling was better, a reference to sources and citations thereof, and so forth.
Editing someone else's comment is vandalism, not contribution.
I didn’t just change his spelling. I edited his spelling, but I left the previous state (in another section), explained what I had done and why, provided sources and citations as to why my transliteration was preferable, and took clear ownership of what I had done and why I had done it.
And what you did was doubly rude because you acknowledge that your version was "preferable"; that is, it is conceivable that the other user prefers their version. They may be wrong to do so, but by editing their words directly you are denying them their right to an opinion. It is not surprising at all that your edit was reverted.
However I have difficulty agreeing with you on your second paragraph, indeed it is the exact opposite of what I deeply believe: I am convinced that there is an objective truth, and that one of the things where there is prevailing conviction as to what is correct spelling wand what is not. Words have meaning by virtue of convention, and if you do not pursue the convention, you are reneging on the certainty of being able to unambiguously and intelligibly commune with others.
Additionally there is spam. Spam need to be detected and removed from the talk space and administrators can't be the only one with permission to do that.
That said, there is no excuse that the UI don't inform you about the current norms that exist.
Btw, I highly doubt it was an admin that gave you that warning. It was probably a regular user.
It's jut one simple link they need to add, I don't understand what stops them, afaik they can even render the talk pages as mobile, they just fail to link to it from the mobile article page.
And while at it, on mobile if you open an image it should load the plain image file, not with all the sticky floating crap around it such that when you zoom in the sticky floating crap goes over the image itself...
Of most websites I assume the sticky floating crap is there to "engage" users to get more ad revenue (to permanently show all the social like buttons and stuff), but I don't understand why wikipedia does similar antipatterns in their image viewer...
Then I stopped editing anything there, and I stopped treating wikipedia as a source of any reliable information.
You know the saying: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.".
There's excesses and errors on Wikipedia but overall I think it is ok. Just use a skeptic mindset when reading things, just like for any other source.
If you are a professional then, it takes a single day to find that Wikipedia is ruled by brats and its not your place.
It sounds like that professional tried to use Wikipedia as his free PR soapbox and found it hard to post propaganda when his submissions are under scrutiny.
I've seen that before, with a PR guy trying to create a wikipedia article to sell the event he was organizing and link to it from other sources. Oddly enough, he also criticized wikipedia's editors for being childish and irrational. Meanwhile, he failed to notice the irony or even the fact that he was directly going against wikipedia's spam rules.
So what?
It's your job to present proof that the collaboration existed, and it's your job to convince others that the information you're providing is accurate.
And more, submitting a dubious article for deletion is actually just a request for other users to evaluate the merits of the article on their own, and they vote based on the information you provide and the case you make to support your position.
And there's the rub. On Wikipedia, 'truth' is determined by the most powerful players on the page.
These are people with whom you simply can't reason. Any argument you provide will be shot down with the absurdest of reasons.
Personally, I'm glad this happened to me. Like you, that experience cemented the unreliability of wikipedia in my mind.
I apologize, but I’m a little unclear on what you’re asking for. Let me know and I’m happy to provide.
Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be the case, specifically with talk pages where the history of the discussion with the editor who deemed it a “hoax” was, but you can see some remnants of it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Random_Hacks_of_K...
I wasn’t the one who made the edits to the page itself, but I was involved in collecting the links to prove it wasn’t a “hoax” and helping make the case to the editor who refused to believe it was true.
But for some pages it's a competition on who has the most free time and the most willingness to navigate the bureaucracy (and none of those items implies greater knowledge of the subject, quite the opposite)
That was a page about a database. I've added an info, that this database has a feature. Someone removed that. I have added links to documentation stating that yes, there is this feature.
And I'm not going to argue with them. Let me write it so you will understand it: I JUST DON'T CARE.
Let them argue in their own kindergarten. I have more interesting things to work on. I can always make another training where I teach people that this database has this feature.
I don't have links now, but there are quite known cases where a professor, who spent 20 years on a topic, writes something about this topic, and gets over voted by the bunch of kids, who have no idea about the whole thing.
It is not fair. The default is a negative, and its up to the author to convince everyone to add specific information to the global collective. It is also susceptible to attacks from popular opinion, which is a common theme for practically all major breakthroughs. Being "right" has a long history of not being enough at the short time, while social cliques has a long history of allowing the "wrong" facts.
The question however remains: what is a better process? If they had the HN models, your edit could just as easily be downvoted by that "guy" and his support. They could abandon the deletionism model but then limit google/wikipedia search to only show articles that has been approved by the "featured article" process, but which would result in zero traffic for most articles and effort spent on Wikipedia.
As it should be.
That's how false positives get filtered out, even at the risk of losing some minor true positives in the process.
If your contributions are solid then they are kept in. If they are not then keep it in your blog.
To put this into context it would be like a non American saying the next biggest festival to Mardi Gras isn't noteworthy.
> This maneuvering and filibustering is soon likely to exhaust the patience of any reasonable person who naturally prefers not to reason with the unreasonable, and who, unlike the advocate, has no special interest or passion other than striving to maintain neutrality. Additionally, by continually engaging fringe advocates in endless argument, you run the risk of turning Wikipedia into a battleground or a debating society. At the present time, Wikipedia does not have an effective means to address superficially polite but tendentious, long-term, fringe advocacy.
This is definitely a very, very hard problem.
They are a curiosity at best.
We have way more dangerous and widespread believes.
Like: did you know there is a way to cure malaria ? Cause i had malaria for years and everybody i knew, including my doctors and myself, believed it couldn't be cured.
And then i meet a guy from the pasteur institute (in france you can't get more serious than that, they are the nasa of biology) who told me that they had a perfectly fine protocol to kill the parasite in the liver for years. And using nothing more that regular malaron. So i went to the institute and indeed, they do.
Our society is working on a pile of false informations, obsolete data, incomplete thruths and lies. All with major consequences. It's human nature.
Flat earth it the least important of it. I'd say it's even a good thing cause it helps revealing very confused people or flaws in our educational system.
People are so screwed up.
"Radical cure. This term refers to both cure of blood-stage infection and prevention of relapses by killing hypnozoites (in P. vivax and P. ovale infections only)." (p. 4)
"The objective of treating malaria caused by P. vivax and P. ovale is to cure both blood-stage and liver-stage infections (called radical cure), thereby preventing recrudescence and relapse, respectively." (p. 61)
"The recommended treatment for radical cure of P. ovale relapsing malaria is the same as that for P. vivax, i.e. ACT or chloroquine combined with primaquine (total dose, 3.5 mg base/kg bw). [...] P. malariae and P. knowlesi do not form hypnozoites and so do not require radical cure with primaquine." (p. 290)
There's nothing there about P. falciparum, the major malaria parasite, but my understanding is that that also doesn't have a hypnozoite stage.
A recent paper "Challenges for achieving safe and effective radical cure of Plasmodium vivax" [2] suggests that this approach is well-accepted, but not yet a slam-dunk in the field.
[1] http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/162441/1/9789241549...
[2] https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Essays
I once chatted to an Uber driver who insisted the Earth was flat. I told him the reason helicopters doesn't spin around the Earth is that they are within the atmosphere which spins with the Earth. He hadn't really considered that explanation before...
It as a light hearted discussion, I thought the encounter fun :) After the 2016 election Americans doesn't surprise me as much any more..
Isn't the actual reason simple inertia? They were already spinning with the Earth, unless there's a force canceling that, they'll just keep going.
It helps if an argument fits the belief system or thinking patters of the person you're talking to. What are the odds that a cab driver has never had a physics class where they really dug into newtons laws of motion and internalized that? I bet the ones that have don't think the earth is flat.
One might attack the inertia concept by using the idea of jumping on a train or bus, but that's one step removed from helicopters ;-)
That is actually how you need to approach most people when attempting to change their mind about something. Once you take a position or suggest that they have a position than may or may not be valid, you put them on the defensive. After that they will be trying to protect their belief and nothing will change them. If you approach a topic as an open light hearted discussion of ideas without judgement then there is some hope of change. From their point of view there may also be hope of you changing. I'm sure there's much to be said here about vulnerability and a two-way street.
The thing about flat Earth though is that it's so easy to prove. Just get in an airplane and fly to the edge :) I wonder why no amatuer pilots have done that, how hard can it be to find the edge? Hehe
A says X but B says not X.
You edit it to read
A says X but left-wing commentator B says not X.
The qualification "left-wing commentator" is, for the purposes of this discussion, entirely accurate. However, the effect is that B now looks like they're biased whilst A, with no qualifying adjectives, looks impartial.
Now consider that it's entirely possible that A is _also_ accurately described as a "left-wing commentator" and you see why this stuff is so pernicious.
Anything about Israel/Palestine is crawling with minor edits like this.
Wikipedia is just reflecting reality here. Even in Israel, unbiased narratives are very difficult to find from either side. This is compounded by the self-hating Jew phenomenon [1] and the issue that many Palestinians actually _prefer_ living in a modern, Western democracy as opposed to the kingdoms and dictatorships which are the traditional Arab norma. So we have people on _both sides_ arguing for _both sides_, often using subtle trickery such as weasel words, unjustified quantifiers and adjectives, and selected elimination. Being a technically advanced country, this spills out onto the Internet and Wikipedia.
Personally, being involved in the situation, a _lack_ of such trickery on Wikipedia would raise more red flags for me than its presence.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hating_Jew
You are right that the Christian and Muslim citizens of the West Bank (I'll just say Palestinians in interest of brevity) do _not_ enjoy the full benefits of citizenship, and are in fact treated poorly by the state compared to their Jewish neighbors. I'm one of their Jewish neighbors (I live in the West Bank) and we see it daily. However, these people (from what they tell me) do recognize that even with Israeli-imposed curfews e.g. on Yom Kippor, and restricted rights compared to Jews, they still live better than their brothers in Jordan and other Arab states. They drink cleaner water, have better job security, better health care, better education, better chances to improve the livelyhood of their children, and so many other advantages compared to Jordanian, Syrian, or Egyptians. This is coming from them, as I always take an opportunity to ask.
Of course, I would love to see them enjoy the same rights as I do. I don't see them as competition, rather I believe that we both flourish together when we cooperate. But even without all the benefits of a Western-style democracy that the government _could_ provide to them, they still prefer that government to the alternatives that they see right next door.
I think nuance isn't so much the issue here as much as it is mistaking the map for the territory. A flat earth model has it's uses. Primarily for human-scale travel and mapping. But the topology of a sphere is inarguably far better than a flat plane. And if someone was to make the same mistake with a spherical model, they'd get a lot further before things break down.
I've only ever written one article, which has gone unchallenged for over two years now, probably because the topic is abstruse and difficult for everyone to understand in the first place (which is why I wrote the article):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medcouple
But I've also made minor edits here and there. For example, I removed some fluff around the D3.js article. Also unchallenged:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=D3.js&diff=803775...
So, if you hear stories about how awful editing Wikipedia is, remember that it can also be a pleasant experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B9m#Other_fauna
It also makes you wonder about the distant future. I wonder if this comment will still be on the internet 2000 years from now, and if any human will read it. I'm pretty sure an AI will read it in the near future, if not right now.
"[...] However, this essay uses the flat earth as a metaphor for explaining Wikipedia policy, not to describe any authentic historical controversy."
— Very clever! (and also quite amusing ;)