I did not watch the interview, but it seems that Sanger has been critical of Wikipedia essentially since a little before his departure. He called it “broken beyond repair” in 2007, mentioning that it doesn’t respect authority or expert opinion enough (yes, I read this on his Wikipedia entry).
I knew it was going to be Sanger based on just the title.
"Trust but verify" is a good strategy for Wikipedia; the idea that Wikipedia as a whole is "partisan" is kind of ridiculous, but there's no denying that it's not uncommon to be out-edited by someone with more zeal and spare time on their hands, and these people are not necessarily always there with the best of intentions. This has always been the case, since day 1, and these slants exist in all directions.
If you read the accompanying article[1] Sanger wrote then it's plenty clear that he's coming at this from a very partisan stand; that's not necessarily a bad thing, although personally, I think Sanger's anger that Wikipedia doesn't give equal merit to Tucker Carlson's unhinged conspiracy theory that the Jan 6th riots were organised by the FBI to be ... well, unhinged. He's also angry it only presents the "Established" view on climate change.
We can discus the merits of what he's saying at length, but at the core it points to a fundamental problem: people have profoundly different views on reality that are impossible to unify. This has always been the case to some degree; any article will have to curate the information, or you'll end up with the weirdest quackery in any medical article. But things have moved so far apart that you'll soon become Adolf Stalin: for the left you'll be Adolf Hitler and for the right you'll be Joseph Stalin. I'm not even joking, I've seen this happen on a number of occasions. It's unworkable.
Interestingly, Sanger's entire Citizendium project was based around this fact: "give due weight to the experts", but now he's criticizing that Wikipedia is only reporting "the facts from The Establishment". Hmmkay.
Personally I mostly see Larry Sanger as Wikipedia's Eric S. Raymond: once did some okay-ish work, now an unhinged conspiracy theorist not worth paying too much attention to, but still riding on the glory of this thing he did 20 years ago.
Yeah, Sanger's gone batshit, and it makes me regret ever contributing to Wikipedia. What's really interesting is the pattern: First he was skeptical of WP's ability to crowdsource its editing, then he felt that WP's NPOV was biased but wouldn't explain how, then he tried to get some sort of special paid editors to be even more neutral somehow? And now we're here, where it turns out that his complaints about neutrality were smokescreens for latent delusions and politically-motivated departures from reality.
Maybe Sanger couldn't handle the fact that a community can produce thousands of free Featured Articles (community-verified high-quality WP articles) while he ran out of money trying to produce a few dozen.
> Sanger's gone batshit, and it makes me regret ever contributing to Wikipedia
Sanger left Wikipedia over 20 years ago, he only worked on it in its first first year from earlier 2001 to early 2002.
Besides, Sanger has always been a bit of a cook, on CZ he just outright rejected feminism as an academic field because it was too left-wing, never mind his love for all sorts of pseudoscience on CZ. It's hilarious, because he started an entire site based on expertise, and then just rejected this expertise if he didn't like it in all sorts of fields.
This is the man that's we're supposed to take serious when he talks about Wikipedia? Pull me another one. Wikipedia has its fair share of issues, but CZ was outright and openly partisan in a way that Wikipedia never has been.
A lot of it was scrubbed of nonsense after he left, but by then he already managed to chase off most experts he had initially recruited and the project was pretty much dead (I'm amazed it's still online today though, although the only real edits in the last 30 days is one person editing the Peter Jackson page).
There's this little thing called prior history. This video may be new but the opinions espoused by Sanger are not. SirensOfTitan mentions as much in his comment. You only need to watch the first few seconds to realize his opinion hasn't changed. Sanger complains about trolls on the site but Sanger himself is a bit of a troll as he once reported the wiki commons org to the FBI for hosting child porn, it turned out to be depictions of child abuse but not actually porn. Many accused him of doing this simply because his own wikipedia alternatives were failing at the time.
I'm saying that SirensOfTitan's comment adds nothing that isn't already present in the linked video (and he freely admits that he didn't watch it) and therefore really serves no purpose (other than to boast, "I know things about this topic already _and_ I don't even need to watch the video".)
Your defense of SirensOfTitan's comment's supposed utility is to make your own tangential point which does nothing to argue that the original comment is valuable.
So I maintain: What was the point of SiresOfTitan's comment?
The point is when someone has already established themselves as an idiot its pretty easy to dismiss them. The utility SirensOfTitan's comment is informing us that the person in question has already established himself to be an idiot. It is therefore relevant because anything the video says is already suspect, it can easily be dismissed. You don't have to go far in the video to establish this as the first statement in the video is a balance fallacy.
> What implications does this have for the concept of redemption?
People don't change without an impetus to change. Since the majority of the complaints that Sanger has had with wikipedia can be equated to the false balance logical fallacy and Sanger opens the video with the false balance logical fallacy then Sanger has continued to establish that he is in fact an idiot. Pretty easy to dismiss. You can declare me to be an idiot. You clearly don't care what anyone has to say, you seem to have an agenda, I don't know what it is or why you're so hot under the collar about this but I could call you an idiot as well and dismiss what you have to say. As a matter of fact...
reposts often get flagged (EDIT: and if there is only one comment on a submission, which has link to a HN submission, and it gets flagged, that adds the [dupe] tag without moderator intervention, so this is an official mechanism)
So are there any tools helping readers discover wikipedia page's credibility issues? e.g. diff highlighting sentences with frequent edit wars, NLP models digest why it was edited, etc.
Well, a page being locked for editing is usually a sign that one side has decided the narrative and no further input distracting from it will be tolerated. And a clear indication to take the article with a mountain of salt.
Many people take Wikipedia as source of truth and use its content as authoritive work on every matter.
We can easy that we take everything with a grain of salt, but that doesn't mean general public takes same care.
I don't think this should just be dismissed off hand. We shoudln't put our complete trust on any company especially if that means stifiling people's speech because it differs from the "official truth"
Wikis often get cited in political debates with USA friends, i also think most of the political related subjects are consistently left leaning much like academic thought leaders.
But for non-political subjects, wiki is still great IMO.
In this video, and articles on his website he seems mostly concerned that views about Trump on wikipedia are biased, and there's not enough information that's critical of Biden. Essentially that there's a left wing bias to wikipedia that represents the "establishment" view:
He says this seemingly as a "liberty loving conservative". I don't find the arguments about these particular topics very compelling. And these article are naturally politically charged...
I'd be more interested in a discussion of bias in less politically charged articles, because I'm sure this also exists to some degree.
Not to mention his arguments can easily be broken down and expressed as logical fallacies such as false balance. For a professor of epistemology he sure seems to fail in his ability to justify his statements.
An eye-opening exercise you can engage in (by either using machine translation or appropriate language skills) is to look at articles of political significance to other countries in the respective language (and, if you are feeling brave, the talk pages as well). For instance, if you look at the jp.wikipedia articles on key WWII atrocities that Japan has been accused (and, in our historiography, convicted) of, you could walk away with the impression that everything from Nanjing to Unit 731 is a thoroughly discredited conspiracy theory.
It's not that the sources that en.wikipedia uses to arrive at the opposite conclusion are even banned or neglected, or the reliable source policy is different at all - the difference is largely achieved by structure, prioritisation and editorialising, such as immediately offsetting every statement at odds with the narrative end with a healthy dose of FUD (e.g. the Unit 731 article's mention of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshio_Shinozuka is a four-line paragraph of which the last two lines are to the effect of "however, his statement has been cast into doubt because POWs in China have been known to be brainwashed into self-criticism, and moreover Unit 731 did not have a Youth Brigade at the time") while letting the ones in agreement stand uncritically. Looking at the talk page, it is clear that the articles tend to be maintained in that state by a number of opinionated power users who have far more devotion and domain knowledge than any drive-by editor in disagreement can bring to the table, which is basically the same thing as the English Wikipedia is being frequently accused of (though perhaps more stark here because they look to be so obviously in the wrong to the Anglo-American observer).
I do wonder how this problem could be solved in a systematic way. It does seem to me that the effect of powers users who feel ownership of an article or topic is basically universally negative the moment the article becomes a subject of political controversy (as the power users tend to use their power to defend the undue weight given to their preferred viewpoint, at the expense of the NPOV ideal), and this perhaps would suggest that a sort of no-questions-asked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism mechanism might be good (make it so any editor that becomes too prominent can and will be easily banned from editing an article; if they are actually right, then surely others will take their place in defending their position), but it is also easy to imagine that this rule would be gamed to detrimental effect by off-site canvassers (say, a real-world club of homeopaths could over time muster enough warm bodies to outright take over some article on medicine).
They unfairly blocked opindia as a valid source on their site despite opindia being the BBC of India. Stating it had a few inaccurate articles which were corrected. Yet they never punished other outlets like thewire or print India for false news that was then corrected. Wikipedia is fast losing its reputation of credibility and has become politically partisan.
29 comments
[ 7.2 ms ] story [ 76.1 ms ] threadVery interesting concept, but it went nowhere.
"Trust but verify" is a good strategy for Wikipedia; the idea that Wikipedia as a whole is "partisan" is kind of ridiculous, but there's no denying that it's not uncommon to be out-edited by someone with more zeal and spare time on their hands, and these people are not necessarily always there with the best of intentions. This has always been the case, since day 1, and these slants exist in all directions.
If you read the accompanying article[1] Sanger wrote then it's plenty clear that he's coming at this from a very partisan stand; that's not necessarily a bad thing, although personally, I think Sanger's anger that Wikipedia doesn't give equal merit to Tucker Carlson's unhinged conspiracy theory that the Jan 6th riots were organised by the FBI to be ... well, unhinged. He's also angry it only presents the "Established" view on climate change.
We can discus the merits of what he's saying at length, but at the core it points to a fundamental problem: people have profoundly different views on reality that are impossible to unify. This has always been the case to some degree; any article will have to curate the information, or you'll end up with the weirdest quackery in any medical article. But things have moved so far apart that you'll soon become Adolf Stalin: for the left you'll be Adolf Hitler and for the right you'll be Joseph Stalin. I'm not even joking, I've seen this happen on a number of occasions. It's unworkable.
Interestingly, Sanger's entire Citizendium project was based around this fact: "give due weight to the experts", but now he's criticizing that Wikipedia is only reporting "the facts from The Establishment". Hmmkay.
Personally I mostly see Larry Sanger as Wikipedia's Eric S. Raymond: once did some okay-ish work, now an unhinged conspiracy theorist not worth paying too much attention to, but still riding on the glory of this thing he did 20 years ago.
[1]: https://larrysanger.org/2021/06/wikipedia-is-more-one-sided-...
Maybe Sanger couldn't handle the fact that a community can produce thousands of free Featured Articles (community-verified high-quality WP articles) while he ran out of money trying to produce a few dozen.
Sanger left Wikipedia over 20 years ago, he only worked on it in its first first year from earlier 2001 to early 2002.
Besides, Sanger has always been a bit of a cook, on CZ he just outright rejected feminism as an academic field because it was too left-wing, never mind his love for all sorts of pseudoscience on CZ. It's hilarious, because he started an entire site based on expertise, and then just rejected this expertise if he didn't like it in all sorts of fields.
This is the man that's we're supposed to take serious when he talks about Wikipedia? Pull me another one. Wikipedia has its fair share of issues, but CZ was outright and openly partisan in a way that Wikipedia never has been.
A lot of it was scrubbed of nonsense after he left, but by then he already managed to chase off most experts he had initially recruited and the project was pretty much dead (I'm amazed it's still online today though, although the only real edits in the last 30 days is one person editing the Peter Jackson page).
The little fact you drop here for some reason is right there in the video description.
I'm saying that SirensOfTitan's comment adds nothing that isn't already present in the linked video (and he freely admits that he didn't watch it) and therefore really serves no purpose (other than to boast, "I know things about this topic already _and_ I don't even need to watch the video".)
Your defense of SirensOfTitan's comment's supposed utility is to make your own tangential point which does nothing to argue that the original comment is valuable.
So I maintain: What was the point of SiresOfTitan's comment?
Aside from the obvious problems of how to determine “established oneself as an idiot”, what implications does this have for the concept of redemption?
People don't change without an impetus to change. Since the majority of the complaints that Sanger has had with wikipedia can be equated to the false balance logical fallacy and Sanger opens the video with the false balance logical fallacy then Sanger has continued to establish that he is in fact an idiot. Pretty easy to dismiss. You can declare me to be an idiot. You clearly don't care what anyone has to say, you seem to have an agenda, I don't know what it is or why you're so hot under the collar about this but I could call you an idiot as well and dismiss what you have to say. As a matter of fact...
But for non-political subjects, wiki is still great IMO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Reality_has_a_well_known_lib...
https://larrysanger.org/2021/06/wikipedia-is-more-one-sided-...
He says this seemingly as a "liberty loving conservative". I don't find the arguments about these particular topics very compelling. And these article are naturally politically charged...
I'd be more interested in a discussion of bias in less politically charged articles, because I'm sure this also exists to some degree.
It's not that the sources that en.wikipedia uses to arrive at the opposite conclusion are even banned or neglected, or the reliable source policy is different at all - the difference is largely achieved by structure, prioritisation and editorialising, such as immediately offsetting every statement at odds with the narrative end with a healthy dose of FUD (e.g. the Unit 731 article's mention of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshio_Shinozuka is a four-line paragraph of which the last two lines are to the effect of "however, his statement has been cast into doubt because POWs in China have been known to be brainwashed into self-criticism, and moreover Unit 731 did not have a Youth Brigade at the time") while letting the ones in agreement stand uncritically. Looking at the talk page, it is clear that the articles tend to be maintained in that state by a number of opinionated power users who have far more devotion and domain knowledge than any drive-by editor in disagreement can bring to the table, which is basically the same thing as the English Wikipedia is being frequently accused of (though perhaps more stark here because they look to be so obviously in the wrong to the Anglo-American observer).
I do wonder how this problem could be solved in a systematic way. It does seem to me that the effect of powers users who feel ownership of an article or topic is basically universally negative the moment the article becomes a subject of political controversy (as the power users tend to use their power to defend the undue weight given to their preferred viewpoint, at the expense of the NPOV ideal), and this perhaps would suggest that a sort of no-questions-asked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism mechanism might be good (make it so any editor that becomes too prominent can and will be easily banned from editing an article; if they are actually right, then surely others will take their place in defending their position), but it is also easy to imagine that this rule would be gamed to detrimental effect by off-site canvassers (say, a real-world club of homeopaths could over time muster enough warm bodies to outright take over some article on medicine).
There’s no reason to expect truth to prevail in an environment where it doesn’t have an adaptive advantage.