Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
While Wikipedia's model seems far better than an individual publishing house's encyclopedia one where they can draw editors from millions of people throughout the world and are not bound by ads or sales to keep them afloat, in terms of editing it hasn't been working well.
Not every editor has equal power on Wikipedia. The more you have stayed on the site and the more time you spend on the site, you tend to have more say on what gets inside the articles. I have seen talk pages where the same three editors who seem to be part of the same echo chamber discussing issues preventing any alternative opinion or tone to come in the article. A behaviour very similar to Reddit where some subreddit moderators can sustain echo chambers by moderating anything not falling in line. In Wikipedia's case this often even leads to some sources getting picked over the other specially when it comes to media or books.
Is it possible to break the grasp of "editors" or is every user curated platform doomed to reach this state?
300 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 333 ms ] threadIncreasing the number of pages should increase the number of pages that are controversial, problematic, or "echo-chambers" in absolute terms.
Are they increasing as a proportion? Is this diminishing the utility of the site in aggregate?
On the other hand, people who have unhealthy lives become totally invested in that forum or space because it's literally all they have and guard it like a mother hen guards their eggs. In Wikipedia they create a huge bureaucracy which excludes all but the most determined of users. That intensity drives away all casual users.
On the other hand I once made an edit to a Wikipedia page from an IP address - I removed an unsourced claim from the Ron Paul page - and didn't find my edit reverted or blocked in any way.
So while I have heard of the issue of frighteningly intense editors camping pages as though their life depended on it and demanding all changes be proven to the nth degree it doesn't seem to permeate the entire site.
First is that "Reality has a well-known liberal bias". Which means lots of people want a "neutral point of view" which reflects their own opinion.
Secondly, there are lots of trolls and bad-faith actors. So a bureaucracy needs to be built up to deal with it in a structured and consistent (not necessarily fair) way.
Thirdly, what can incentivise people? Most editors aren't paid. Introducing money just leads to corruption. So you end up with fake Internet points which can be gamed.
Penultimately, can you appeal? I've had changes reverted, appealed, and reinstated. You can go all the way up the bureaucracy if you want to break out of the echo chamber.
Finally, fork it. If you think you have a better way of doing things - and can't make internal changes - go run your own Wiki and see how long your system lasts without falling to bias.
Uh...what? Where is the proof of this?
Which is why objective, quality journalism is so critical to a democracy.
Or, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan (and Schlesinger et al.) succinctly put it, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."
I took Schlafly for a 'merican bananas conservative but its looking like there's some connection to Kreml there..
You should check out the "Conservative Bible Project" ( https://www.conservapedia.com/Conservative_Bible_Project ) and check its edit history.
Not sure what you mean by that. Corruption exists with or without paid labor, and I cannot for the life or me think how paying the people who do the lion's share of work at Wikipedia would increase the corruption there. Can you explain what you mean?
Is the information on this page perfect? Obviously not. But this single page probably represents the best up-to-date summary of information you will find on the internet. And I can only imagine the thankless work volunteer editors put into making it coherent and readable - free from random garbage and conspiracy theories.
I guess I'm not the only one doing this, because there's this meme trend of making video edits of these articles. Pretty much captures how it feels to read them if you're into it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48hGOxw2heg
For example: "Several countries which are historically neutral, such as Switzerland and Singapore have agreed to sanctions."
Clearly a misrepresentation of Swiss neutrality. The news outlets all over the world posted this and various similar claims over the last week and wiki picks it up. Some news articles even straight out tell you that Switzerland ditched its neutrality and "picked a side" in this war. It could not be more wrong. But Wikipedia doesn't care about right or wrong it just repeats what a subset of sources say even if its like in this case obviously propaganda.
This implies that Switzerland neutrality is somehow relevant while in reality it is not. It implies sanctions DESPITE neutrality.
https://www.eda.admin.ch/eda/en/fdfa/fdfa/aktuell/newsuebers...
I think what your arguing here is semantics, as opposed to something that’s “factually incorrect”.
The problem you describe is one Wikipedia suffers from. If the conventional wisdom is wrong then Wikipedia will be wrong. And it will never be the first declare the conventional wisdom was wrong, the majority needs to change their mind before it will.
It’s a downside of requiring citations to support statements. But probably unavoidable.
its literally the assignment of meaning to those words. which is really pretty close to arguing about the truth of the sentence
just to argue semantics
Either this is an entertainment piece and they can write it how they want (but it shouldn’t be mentioned on a wiki page) or it’s a news piece and should be without these kind of “suggestive but not exactly saying it” articles that blur the line between non-news and deniability thereof.
The only thing it would have cost them to not mention Switzerland’s neutrality would be clicks/money. 0% truth would have been lost writing the context properly.
Anyway the overall conclusion people get when reading the statement that neutral countries DESPITE being neural joined sanctions (picked a side/no longer neutral) and that is wrong especially in case of Switzerland.
Its not semantics its factually wrong because if there would be an attempt to connect "Swiss neutrality" to the sanctions it would be the other way around. I.e. to stay true to the concept Switzerland would have to join sanctions because other wise it could be used to circumvent the sanctions from others which then could theoretically interfere with the idea behind Swiss neutrality especially if Switzerland or companies there would profit from this.
>The problem you describe is one Wikipedia suffers from. If the conventional wisdom is wrong then Wikipedia will be wrong. And it will never be the first declare the conventional wisdom was wrong, the majority needs to change their mind before it will.
Indeed but its not just that, even if something is know (or known to be wrong) if no one in the accepted sources group actually explicitly write it out then there is no source and you can not add it to Wikipedia. The Wikipedia editors also like to write X as if it is a fact then if the is a source opposing it they write the opposition as a quote from the given author or source.
Also sanctions are not "for" picking sides but for punishing wrongdoings (in this case breaking international law) they could easily put sanction on "both" sides if appropriate, in fact there are already sanction in place because of the Swiss neutrality, Swiss companies can not sell/export military equipment to Ukraine (or Russia).
The fact that other counties can be used to circumvent sanction is false argument. Switzerland is the financial hub of Europa and could diminish the effect the sanction have. Beside that the sanctions are designed to have an effect despite possible circumvention.
And if the consensus is particularly bad on a subject and the people editing the Wikipedia page are cooperative, they'll usually be able to find a rule intepretation that allows the consensus statements not to count (for insatnce, claiming that a generally reliable source isn't reliable for this particular statement).
But wrong is still wrong and wrong is not useful. And even thou I know its wrong I have no way to fix it despite the idea of Wikipedia that anyone could correct everything. But I can't because I would need to find an article (from an accepted source) which opposes this exact claim. And even then if there are 5 sources for something that is wrong and 1 source pointing out that it is wrong, Wikipedia will at best report this as neutral as it gets which boils down to "The majority says [insert wrong statement here]". This IS neutral and in it self correct but the wrong statement is still there anyway. This is just the fundamental way how Wikipedia works.
The sanction against Russia for example are not in conflict with the neutrality principle despite the media reporting pretending that this is somehow "unexpected" or "a first" or "clearly picking a side" or even "ditching neutrality because Russia so bad". This is either the media sacrificing truth for click bait headlines or straight out propaganda but its in "Wikipedia trusted" media so Wikipedia picks that up because that what it should do.
So now you have people thinking Switzerland somehow after 200 year of being neutral sides with EU/NATO whatever against Russia. And if people point out that this is not true, people point to Wikipedia. That is the dilemma. Wikipedia doesn't say its a source for truth but people use it as such anyway.
According to Reuters:
> Switzerland has steered clear of imposing sanctions in a string of crises, including when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. Up to now, the exception has been sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council, which it has to implement under international law.
So certainly it seems like they are “taking sides” here more than ever before. Seems like a change in what they consider being neutral to be.
Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30576264
Of course, even Russian propaganda doesn't mention it. Sending kids to die to a neighbor country because of a gas pipeline doesn't have the same ring to it. They go with some kind of motherland nonsense. It's just money. Always is.
I remain an avid wikipedia reader.
The editorial slant which sets the tone of the article also colours the thoughts of the reader, it is not just dissemination or omission of facts. Moreover, editors do tend to give more weightage to some sources than the other if they are reporting on the same issue.
Yes, but as I said, Wikipedia is much less bad in this respect than any other source. If I have the sources, at least I can do my own digging. With most other sources I have to assume there is information contrary to the slant that is being swept under the rug, and I won't immediately know where to find that information.
> editors do tend to give more weightage to some sources than the other if they are reporting on the same issue.
Sometimes there is good reason to do this. Some sources are more credible than others.
If editors didn't exercise judgment in selection of sources, Wikipedia would just be a disinformation playground dominated by the most energetic propagandists.
I am not saying we should trust DailyMail more than BBC. My issue is with sources where the lines are more blurry.
Say, they will not publish outright misinformation but they will definitely have a editorial stance which colours their coverage.
> If editors didn't exercise judgment in selection of sources, Wikipedia would just be a disinformation playground dominated by the most energetic propagandists
Agreed. But how do we rank which sources are better than the other. Sure, remove ones which publish outright misinformation but after that how do you rank them.
The source will be discussed in WP:NEWSORG boards, the people weighing in on the discussion will be established editors of the site. They will more likely tend to rate sources which fit their echo chambers better higher than others. The same sources will get more weightage in Wikipedia articles. When argued against, Wikipedia editors will cite it is trusted more. It is a self fulfilling loop.
This is why my original question was, is any user curated platform doomed to reach this state.
Also, I am not sure how we can verifiably prove that the editorial stance of one source is either day pro or against something, so it should be rated higher or lower, and if equal whose tone do we go with. As wiki editorialisation of news events is not preferred, you will have to go with existing editorialisation in media
But that's not something Wikipedia can solve, and I think they do what they can about as well as is possible. Here's a good example page of the effect, check out some of the edit wars on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_masks_during_the_COVID-19...
The result is a little jumbled, with some contradictory spin still lurking in sentences here and there. But for the most part the article has limited itself to an objective treatment, and done well.
Moreover claims by health organisations like WHO can be used to prove or disprove the efficacy of masks. But this is a luxury articles that are dealing with established authorities publishing information have.
Articles on persons and social issues tend to mostly not have any such authority and the debate is mostly generated through opinion.
Are you absolutely sure you aren't just expressing the effect I noted? You got mad because a page listed facts, but not the "right" facts?
My concern was with the weightage the said fact had in the overall article. The weightage of the said issue in the summary and article, seems to far outweigh what it deserved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira...
>"Almost no one is not no one, and simply the "fact" it was Hunter's laptop does not in itself establish anything improper, unless someone is upset about porn. We have no knowledge of its chain of custody. For all anyone knows, his laptop was snatched and flown to an SVR lab in Moscow for "enhancement" before being given to Rudy/Bannon. The Politico piece was not picked up by any other reliable source, it relies exclusively on an assertion by some unnamed guy whose credibility is unknown, hence it is REDFLAG and UNDUE"
After ignoring articles from the guardian, politico, the nyt just because it's supposedly not relevant. And even if it was actually hunter's laptop who care right? It has nothing to do with the article centered on the claims that it was his laptop. I think ultimately this is just unconsequential, and the hunter story does not really matter, but if you contrast it with the wiki page on the russian links with trump, the extreme selectivity in sources somehow just... disappear. Keep in mind that no one is actually contesting that the contents of the laptop are actually from hunter at this point except for Wikipedia. Even the emails have been pretty conclusively proven to be his.
The problem is that it leads to just more preaching to the choir; usually wikipedia is pretty good at neutrality in the tone of it's articles (even when those are biaised, which is normal). But with such a blatant attempt at mental gymnastics through the entire article, you end up convincing no one that the info is actually legit or credible. A lot of recent political articles end up being written in a manner much more similar to a smug RationalWiki article than to an actual encyclopedic text
Unimportant articles will draw a different crowd than more important articles. Those different groups will have different standards for sources and tone/bias.
What changes have you made to that article that were rejected / rolled back? How long have you been making edits to it?
Like many others on here, I prefer to go directly to multiple biased sources like npr, CNN, breitbart, nypost because I understand their bias and can sort through it to tease out information.
The thing that I find the most distasteful is any source that purports to be unbiased, but uses subtle language tricks to skew their readers towards a conclusion.
I find such things to be the most toxic, and avoid them.
I don't agree with the other commenters on here that argue "it's mostly good", so that makes it ok.
When there's a hidden bias, it makes it much more difficult to tease through the information to find something that resembles the truth.
Breitbart is an editorial/propaganda magazine, not a news source. Why would you go there for anything?
CNN was openly anti-Trump for the entire administration, as in, instructions were literally passed down that reporting should be slanted in such a way as to taint him.
It isn't a case of having to think they have a bias, it's a case of literally being told that bias is part of their policy.
It wasn't hard to spot, either. Their reportage during the Trump administration was absurd. You'd have headlines and first-paragraphs that were contradicted by the entire rest of the article; the headline and intro para made Trump look bad, the rest of the article begrudgingly attempted to convey the facts. It was utter nonsense.
Interesting. Do you have a link to the evidence of these instructions? I'd like to read them.
I think that label can be applied to most "news" sources these days.
To answer your question specifically though, it is because they report on events that other places don't, based on their particular bias.
>absolutely no reason other than some editors going all "nuh uh"
They're almost certainly paid to keep that content on the talk page and off the article.
Once you're in the partisan politics bubble normal procedures and safeguards break down because there are absurd amounts of money being spent.
I looked at that talk page and it's just painful.
"It isn't his laptop"
"It isn't not proven to be not his laptop"
"Even if it is his laptop, it isn't his files"
"It isn't not proven to be not his files"
Just admit that it could be genuine or it could be a disinfo campaign. Ugh.
Citation needed
I would like to see the problem.
I assume OP has a particular set of issues that they are not in agreement with the majority of experts on.
What leads you to believe you can so easily spot a biased article? Everyone believes they're a neutral arbiter.
It means:
- presented as a fact, rather than as the opinion of a scholar/researcher/etc. (meaning Wikipedia says it is true without citing anyone else)
- ignoring a significant controversy or dissent
- describing uncertain information as certain
- perpetuating the myth that science is settled and can't be updated with new information
I'm deliberately avoiding giving examples because it seems logical to assume that I'd merely reflect my own culture war positions with respect to any such example and thereby generate more heat than light.
Overall though I still think wikipedia turns out pretty reasonably as a whole even given having seen a number of situations where I disagreed with the outcome.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/02/24/wikipedia...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/02/02/169470/computati...
https://thecritic.co.uk/the-left-wing-bias-of-wikipedia/
To me, experts are people who have spent a lot of time studying something firsthand, have turned over their research in a transparent way, who submit their work to criticism by their peers and the public, and who have no hidden financial backing from a biased party.
Encyclopedias are, by definition, fairly superficial. You could also sit down and nitpick Britannica. The quality of writing is better because they actually have a professional staff, but they have to make all the same hard choices about what to include and objectivity.
Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg come to mind. Wikipedia might be an encyclopedia, but those are the libraries.
You will see the amount of information missing from the wiki page.(compare with Serrapeptidase entry on say drugs.com).
Then look at the Talk page of the entry. You'll see the editorial battle there with some "power editors" squashing any attempt to correct the page.
It showed me the type of politics and game that can happen behind wikipedia. I really dont care, I just click back and looked at the other better Google results. It's only kind of sad, given wikipedia"s origins/mission (im old enough to remember when wikipedia was created. It's one of the few remnants of the "old" web)
I have heard that Wikipedia is "broken" before, but without specific examples the complaint comes across as hollow. And if you do have specific examples, then I think it gives people the chance to investigate your claims.
It has WP:ANI, but it is hard to go against established editors, if they are not writing outright lies or doing harassment. Say, if I want to edit a line from a summary of the Wikipedia page on a person which unfairly represents a person and the established editor thinks it makes sense, then I can't do anything. They are not writing misinformation as they will often have a source for it, but the tone and representation of that on the Wikipedia article can still be unfair.
I would give specific examples here but then I would be accused of trying to influence talk pages with publicity on social media/forums. Moreover, as some of the talk pages have my comments, I don't want my online personas to be linked.
Of course you can. You can argue for your prferred wording on the talk page for the individual article, and a compromise can be reached. This is how this stuff works. Talk pages are critical to dealing with even the slightest amount of controversy, "reverts" are supposed to be emergency actions only.
I did try to argue for that but I was shut down as there was no way to agree what a fair representation is.
but then people would be able to assess your claims based on the evidence, and your hyperbole might not work out?
You've alluded to discussions you claim to have had, and made claims about the people you argued with. (I bet I was one of them.) Are you able to at least link those?
Your repeated refusal to say what you're talking about gives the impression you're blowing smoke.
One solution would be to teach people to check multiple sources, and each political camp can put their own version of "truth" and people could read all the versions and decide .
I am curious what type of pages bothers people that they need to endlessly fight on attempting to edit them, my bias as a non american is that is about the americans and their political/cultural war and maybe a few nationalists trying to change historical facts on some pages.
For an easy one (among millions) just compare The New York Times Wikipedia article to the article for The Epoch Times. "Oh, but The Epoch Times is right wing, so..."
How can I compare the Ochs-Sulzberger family to the Falun Gong? Well I just did. They're both made up of humans with opinions.
Although clearly a lefty news organization, I don't see the NY Times as a "wing" on that easy left-right spectrum we all seem to love. NYT has had many writers and done some excellent work along the way. In the aggregate their ideology is more in support of population density (cities), industrialism and technology - with some hostility towards more pastoral living, herding animals for food, etc.
I honestly wouldn't imagine the major editorial cleavage in tech websites is partisan at all, but rather the privacy-convenience cleavage. I would expect a consumer goods focused website to likely cater to people who are less privacy oriented. I am not sure this would be remarkable or something I'd put in an article. The "break up big tech" agenda is mostly a liberal consensus versus left+right angle, but even then I find it pretty unlikely that the site's coverage goes beyond relatively mild critical reporting; I know I've never in my life seen someone link a The Verge editorial as a contribution to a political debate. I think they published some of the mistakenly public financial documents from the Epic v. Apple case. I'm not sure which of Epic or Apple is meant to be the "left wing" perspective. I remain flummoxed.
I checked the article on Vox Media. It characterizes Vox Media as a company that was created to combine SB Nation and The Verge, and then added other not obviously related content verticals, all of which are named and linked. The only part of the article that really comments on inner workings is the "Corporate Affairs" section, which seems to be written in a fair and neutral way and notes that the staff of Vox Media unionized. Is this what a "lefty" business is? I'm not sure?
The main takeaway is that they run a bunch of websites I've never heard of and will never read. I did click on the Vox article. Vox is a politics website, and its politics are described as "left-of-center" (I don't know what this means) and progressive, the former citing a Poli Sci 101 textbook I've never heard of and the latter citing a WSJ attack piece. This seems reasonable to me, it seems to be what you're asking for.
I'm not really sure I find this to be wild or surprising. You might be right, again, I have no idea, I don't care about Vox Media and I don't read the Verge. But your point doesn't really strike me as obvious having wasted 20-30 minutes reading Wikipedia articles that are supposed to be evidently biased.
I'm not even arguing (although I could) that one is more correct. The New York Times prints an order of magnitude more physical newspapers (roughly 300,000 to the Epoch Time's 30,000), and is thus obviously more notable.
Edit: Those numbers are for the English language edition in the US
The Shen Yun Performing Arts people are pre-Communism traditionalist Chinese. Which is on the outs culturally, I get it. They're just people though, ultimately.
Do you not see the "weirdos vs normal people" problem that permeates media in essentially all cultures? This technique is on its face illegitimate, as it is designed to get you to not dig deeper into contentious issues. I don't care what side or "wing" is doing it.
The main Wikipedia owners then choose, like they do now, which editor they support as default.
Forking the whole wiki just to present your own version of a few pages isn't useful. Even the basics aren't there, like being discoverable or an easy way to track upstream changes.
Can you point out any real issues in their articles? Any widespreaded misinformation or actual issue? Most complaints I always see are usually about disputable details, not about actual problems.
Every now and then there are groups that try to gain control of an article or group of articles on Wikipedia (especially around big current events) and then they start looking for ways to game the system all the while bitching about how Wikipedia is 'broken'.
The way I see it: Wikipedia is imperfect, but not broken, and it has developed a pretty impressive array of defenses against being overtly gamed.
I'd go one step further: specific examples are still meaningless. On a site with editors from every country and region on the world and millions of articles (not each one equally popular and viewed/vetted by other editors), of course you'll find examples for any point of view.
I'm also afraid it might then become a conversation about those specific examples. Proving systemic bias is unfortunately not trivial here. Without looking into examples at all, though, it's indeed a meaningless conversation that OP is creating.
"Male circumcision significantly reduces the risk of HIV infection among heterosexual men in sub-Saharan Africa." "The highest quality evidence indicates that circumcision has no impact on sexual function, sensation, or pleasure." Mentioned in the first two paragraphs. The fact that many believe that male circumcision is a grave violation of boys' rights to body autonomy is not.
That said, that article could certainly be improved on.
I have my own pet peeves about Wikipedia and even about some articles, but I don't think it is 'structurally broken', that requires a different level of evidence.
For reference, how many people believe that? Like, is it a view held by 50% of the population, 10% of the population, or is it more of a niche view, or..?
Because when we get down to stuff that <10% of the population believes, things get super-weird.
---
Tried looking it up; appears to be a niche perspective. A significant minority of the population doesn't favor circumcision, but there doesn't seem to be much about folks having a huge problem with it. Also, it appears that, among men who were/weren't circumcised, it's more common for men who were circumcised to be happy about their parents' decision (from Questions 5 and 6 of [this survey [PDF]](http://cdn.yougov.com/cumulus_uploads/document/ugf8jh0ufk/to... )).
> Between 10,000 and 15,000 boys are circumcised in the Netherlands each year, mostly for religious reasons and not always with an anesthetic, according to the Royal Dutch Medical Association (KNMG) which represents surgeons, pediatricians, general practitioners and urologists.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dutch-circumcision-health...
You can find similar views expressed by many medical associations around the world (https://www.thelocal.dk/20161205/danish-doctors-come-out-aga... https://www.thelocal.se/20090725/20900/ https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-5142149) I believe the American Pediatrics Association is the only major one that has come out in favor of circumcision. Their statement is along the lines of "the benefits slightly outweigh the risks". Americans may be cool with genital cutting but in the rest of the world the procedure is very controversial.
Don't get me wrong -- I appreciate that you can show that there're advocacy groups in that arena. But there're groups who advocate 9/11 conspiracy-theories, aliens, anti-vaccination, flat-Earth, mysticism, etc., so the mere existence of advocacy groups doesn't seem like a distinction from such things.
Instead, is there some sort of poll/survey -- non-American, if you prefer -- that demonstrates that a significant portion of some population holds such strong views against circumcision?
To note it: If you want to get Wikipedia to change its presentation, presenting such evidence might help out. Because, it really does seem like you're advocating a niche belief; but, if you can demonstrate that it's held by a significant portion of people on Earth, then that might change stuff.
However, this is not about circumcision per se. My point is that Wikipedia's presentation of circumcision is a product of the article's guardians who. You can look at the article's talk page and see for yourself that plenty of people have complained about the article's slanted coverage but no one has been able to do anything about it due to the opposition of the guardians. This is how it works on almost any article about any remotely controversial topic. Just being right is not enough when you're up against an experienced editor that knows all the rules and have a vested interest in pushing a certain view.
I asked if it was a niche-perspective because that'd seem relevant to if it'd be notable enough to go into one of the first two paragraphs.
I know, many people will possibly agree that this problem exists - but that sort of empirical observation isn't all that useful. If you want to try a method to fix it - any method at all - you need to first have a reliable way to measure whether it actually improves things.
And for that you first need to find a way to actually measure this - in a reliable, repeatable, unbiased way. You need to find a way to measure all of Wikipedia for this sort of problem. Not just the current state - but through the change history for any arbitrary point in the past as well.
Then do some thorough data analysis, trying to learn as much about the problem as you can. That's your best bet for actually solving the problem.
>a reliable way to measure whether it actually improves things
After the process has been carried out, it is measured as successful if less people agree the problem exists. Very simple, very quantifiable.
>Then do some thorough data analysis, trying to learn as much about the problem as you can.
No, that's not necessary. That seems more like gatekeeping and wikilawyering, which is basically the actual problem - entrenched power networks refusing to let anybody consider changing things without first having produced ten man-years worth of proof.
You don't solve the problem by doing what the problem tells you that you must do in order to be allowed to solve it.
That, and executive pay, is where donations go, not to keeping the lights on. The running cost to keeping the servers running is about the same as that fund. It certainly isn't the case that engineering is "done" either, as the open bug count is growing constantly and huge swathes of the software aren't maintained and don't even have maintainers[2]. Just minor things of no importance to modern didactics like, you know, functional video support and rarely used, obscure, functions like uploading.
They have more important things to do like weird elections and appointing cryptobro "disrupters" to the board.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund
[2] https://mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers
Wikipedia is moving to Vue.
Actually, if they'd just bothered to document OOUI properly in the first place, would they need to move?
As it is, they'll now have three concurrent systems (jQuery, OOUI and Vue). It's like GTK 2,3,4 all over again.
Talk about rewriting history…
Ok, I'll bite. Giving incentives to increase the number of pages about women, does not impact in any way the number of existing pages about men.
You have to promote natural systems, not artificial ones, or you create further inequality. A natural solution in this case would be to create a policy where anyone whom is an authority on a subject can write about it on Wikipedia, and they can write even conflicting opinions. That can all be put together. If woman are paid, men are paid, etc.
The idea that the only way to promote equity is through lowering standards is a pernicious and unrealistic strawman.
Any metric is a goal. Boss says we have a program that focuses upon hiring minorities and wants a % that check off some boxes to ward off title IX suits and make them look good. Hr really wants to see new hires for this reason too. You open up interviews, candidates can't meet the standards. Your boss says they really want to get those numbers up. Do you A. Do your job and hire, or do you B. Not do your job?
By definition minorities are a scarce resource. Industry wants a disproportionate amount in comparison to the available pool that meets requirements. Some are perfectly capable, sometimes the best, but the company isn't looking for 1, they want dozens to hundreds.
Therefore, to meet the requirements you will have to modify the process, and that is overwhelmingly done by making it easier. That's not how it should be, but that's how it's done because it is the easiest method. People respond to incentives.
What I am doing is arguing against the idea that it’s the way things have to be or the way they always are, and I’m particularly arguing assuming that any given person was hired for that reason.
Assuming your colleague must be less talented than you because of some hypothetical hiring process that you in all likelihood aren’t even privy to is exactly the kind of ego-assuaging, prejudicial arrogance people in our field are so prone to.
Such assumptions also only make the field more hostile for everyone who’s not of the typical profile, because they have to fight constantly to prove that they belong in a way that Jimmy the drinking bud of the hiring manager for some reason doesn’t.
People get hired for the wrong reasons all the time. I don’t think “diversity quota hire” is meaningfully more or less common than hiring for nepotism, or subconscious biases about looks or height, or just because someone is a smooth talker. Focusing on this one thing both hurts the industry and distracts from what we should really be doing, which is assuming our colleagues are just as smart and talented as we are and working from there. If someone is a bad hire, they’re a bad hire. It happens all the time, and we can deal with it on that individual level rather than letting our assumptions color the entire group.
(Generalized “you” throughout, not saying anything about you personally.)
People who think 'social justice' is a bad thing seem to set really high standards for the open, independant organisations they say they support, and they're not afraid to give them some extreme tough love and undermine them at every step if they don't follow their priorities.
Also, make sure that your donors know their donation is going to go to racial education of Arab journalists (grantee #1), and not to paying developers and server bills. The begging banners on Wikimedia sites fail to mention that there's already 9 figure surplus, and yet the engineering teams will not see any of it no matter what you give, and their money isn't going to actually end up helping a wiki at all.
If I wanted to donate to racial justice in media, I can send the money to the Media Foundation for West Africa (grantee #5), the Borealis Racial Equity in Journalism Fund (#2) or any of the others myself.
Now, the organization controlling their work and this global good, decides that aggregate race and gender statistics are a problem. Wikipedia is a little too white, and a little too male, and that's a bad thing!
Imagine applying this reason to any other organization and any other race and gender combination. Here's a crazy idea - if you want to reduce race and gender based prejudice, start by not having clear race and gender prejudices yourself.
Social justice INSTEAD of one's primary mission is a terrible idea. This happens when social justice initiatives are put in place to help the careers of people running them instead of the organization. That's when you get issues like the displeasure when I tried asking how many poor white people went to our graduate school in a racism discussion. My interest was in knowing whether it was first-order/direct racism resulting in an underrepresentation of POC or second-order/indirect racism (via classism and POC being more likely to be in poverty). Different causes would mean different solutions, but examining the issue wasn't the actual point. The POINT was so we could all stand up and declare ourselves good people + put it on our CVs.
Social justice in addition to a primary mission is very useful, because getting different people in the room means you think of way more things and identify new ways to carry out your mission.
> This pilot initiative is rooted in our strategic direction, where Knowledge Equity emerged in 2017 as one of two key pillars of focus in order for us to achieve our vision for 2030. Knowledge equity acknowledges that we can’t achieve free knowledge if there are societal or economic barriers that prevent some people’s ability to share and contribute to knowledge. With this focused fund, we will invest in organizations working to address systems of racial bias and inequality around the world, with the goal of creating a more inclusive, representative future for free knowledge.
[1] Not my emphasis: the KEF seems very much racial rather then social. Social justice that cuts across "class" lines rather than race lines seems much inherently fairer to me, since the point is to offset disadvantages, and race is a proxy of disadvantage, while "class" is almost a direct statement of how disadvantaged you are.
[2] The reading interface is quite good, though certainly could be better (hidden ToCs in articles?).
They used to have a formalized project aimed at improving this, but it seems that work on it stopped mid-2019. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Advanced_mobile_c... Their stated (as of 2019) workflow requires going to site settings and turning on a special "Advanced" interface in order to get something that's not broken. Awful.
The document linked above has some very pragmatic and boring goals like:
* Supporting media and journalism efforts focused on people of color around the world, in order to expand reliable media sources covering these communities
* Addressing unequal internet access
* Improving digital literacy skills that impede access to knowledge
* Investing in non-traditional records of knowledge (i.e. oral histories)
What do you think they're doing that's so wooly and vague and useless?
Supporting minority media is a job for minorities, who will be far more keenly aware of what media are worth supporting and what are not. Writing down oral history is great, but is properly a job for academia, not for WMF projects (with the singular and notable exception of Wikijournal, which is a primary source of publishable research). Other listed things are similarly beside the point, e.g. as argued above wrt. Internet access.
"If you don't agree with our objectives, you are the enemy!"
Disagreeing with specific elements of social justice, particularly statements like:
"The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and privilege to create an environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of communities of color worldwide."
Etc. is not 'being against social justice'.
The distinction is quite important, in fact, it's kind of 'the point'.
Most people agree with basic elements of social justice.
How many people are opposed to women voting? To women having 'equal opportunity'? Etc.
We're now into a war of opportunity and outcomes, which is a different kind of playing field.
I think Wikepedia generally does a good job overall, and it's probably fairly hard to do, that said, there is bias.
>The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and privilege to create an environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of communities of color worldwide.
What an interesting signaling statement. If you did not know what "racial equity" was, imagine trying to parse out what it is from that statement.
Imagine reading this phrase out loud to anybody not already involved in this debate. Would this help them understand what "racial equity" was? If you read this statement to any of my family or friends, who live in the middle of the country, they would probably conclude that this was some sort of racist propaganda thing, and wouldn't want to talk to whoever brought it up anymore.
I mean the fact that the foundation which is supposed to also be providing information to the world is also proudly publishing things like that should be pretty revelatory.
There's nothing intellectually controversial about Wikipedia's statement, to argue against it on the basis that it's impossible to parse seems anti-intellectual rather than... actually challenging the content of the statement.
You may wish to argue that Wikipedia can simultaneously be an encyclopaedia that represents the world AND be an encyclopaedia mostly written by middle class white people, but that's a point that requires much more discussion than a hand-wavey statement about how this discussion isn't relevant to your friends and family.
This sounds like straight up Nazi propaganda. The idea that races are so different that we literally inhabit separate realities is insane levels of bigotry.
“History is written by the victors” is a famous phrase a reason — facts are a representation of the information we are most confident in, not truth.
Anyway, critique of that quote aside, how's it relevant to Wikipedia?
To say that Wikipedia is not representative of its editors, is to say that history is not representative of the victors.
To pick an example of a group that is somewhat insular: if the majority of Wikipedia editors were Chinese, would Wikipedia look as it does today? Would Wikipedia be an equally-as-accurate reflection on the west as Wikipedia is today?
There's a Chinese Wikipedia site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Wikipedia
However, even the English-Wikipedia's articles on China are likely to be disproportionately influenced by Chinese posters, even if they're a minority of the overall contribution-base.
That said, what's the potential relevance here? Is this purely about articles on politics, or..?
> Note: The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct
Unless of course you read "racial equity" and assumed that there could not possibly be a valuable distribution of funds based on that idea. Assuming that's not the case, could you give an example of a grant writing fund that ostensibly supports the idea and has created value?
1: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annu...
Since you are handing out free advice, is it normally considered polite or helpful here to accuse people of using fake accounts? Is assuming that a person speaking with confidence about a topic may have some direct knowledge of that topic somehow rude or against the rules?
If you're speaking confidently on behalf of the person that I was responding to, are you sure that you reflect their opinion faithfully? If the GP wanted to say "I refuse to give more details about the fund due to the phrasing of your request for details," surely they could have typed that themselves.
Namaste!
You dont need to speak on behalf of OP to give you a heads up about a common problem with your approach, its pretty universal. Picture it this way, there is list of common problems which make a sensible discussion less likely. Which might be overlooked if you havent heard about it before. For example your sentences being too convoluted or having a bad structure. Another one of those is needlessly escalating a conversation.
That kind of boils down to what the aim of your post is. If its not aimed at having a fruitful engaging conversation that might proof your wrong, then you are either doing it for yourself or to set an atmosphere. Which is where the assumption of a sockpuppet comes from.
Differently put, what good does your post if its not aimed at getting somebody to engage in a meaningful way? And if that is your aim, you might want to take his advice, you generally get better results.
Considering that the person whom I was addressing responded to my post in a productive manner and we were able to have a civil and thoughtful exchange... Yes?
Do you think it's productive to police the conversations of others in a way that is entirely off topic to the threads? I understand that neither you nor hitekker enjoyed my wording. In the future, when I am speaking to you about a topic in a thread, I'll try to imagine what one's reaction might be if they interpret it as meaning offense before I post. I can't guarantee that I'll always be able to align with your preferred style of decorum, especially since I'm not sure what the rules are here; my post was bad and hitekker's post (an unprovoked off-topic personal attack on me under the auspices of speaking for another person who didn't appear to share their sentiment in the first place) was good.
I won't be engaging any further on the minutae of posting best practices in the discussion thread for the future of the wikimedia project. Have a nice day!
Your phrasing read to me as being close to passive aggressive, but had I been the author of the top level post you were replying to I would have assumed good faith too.
My most common failure mode in HN comments is coming across as more combative than I intended because I tend towards blunt in my communication style. If you look at my comments, you'll note quite a few have a disclaimer in a parenthetical at the end to try and avoid that happening.
Whether or not adopting a similar approach would be remotely useful to you, I genuinely have no idea.
The metrics of success are not defined in a measurable way with respect to the wiki projects; whatever they do result in won't be published until the end of the year. Maybe we will see 4.5 million worth of value. Maybe we will not.
I'm not saying that it's a waste in absolute terms: the initiatives are likely a net good to humanity. But I don't think they are going to improve Wikipedia very much when the money is withheld from the platform itself. Yes, that's a false dichotomy, because if you have enough cash, you can have both racial justice funds and engineering excellence. But somewhere a decision was made that one is more important than the other, and I suggest that if you can have only one, going the other way will help Wikipedia more.
And no, I don't have an example of an racial justice grant that resulted in a value, but I don't claim that they are axiomatically without it.
The WMF does do quite a few other grants that I think have been and are valuable in wiki-adjacent areas. A lot of Wikipedian in Residences are very interesting, and these can have vast potential for increasing access to non-Western cultural resources. Something that I'd say is more in the WMF wheelhouse.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knowledge_Equity_Fund#W...
That being said, "what is best for Wikipedia" is in itself a nebulous proposition in the first place because different people have different requirements and visions for the project. Personally to me, the investments in investigative journalism (1) seem like they could have a direct value contribution since it could expand original reporting of facts for the site. That is of course debatable, but we'll see.
Thanks for clarifying!
1 https://medium.com/freely-sharing-the-sum-of-all-knowledge/p...
You've conveniently left out links to the financial reports [1], which have annual plans, audited financial statements, form 990s, Q&As, etc. It also proves that your claim that keeping the servers running costs around the same as the knowledge equity fund is bullshit, unless you don't count paying engineering staff. Even the cost of the equipment, and the hosting itself is quite a bit more than the cost of this program. As a whole, this program is 2% of their budget for the year.
In terms of the engineering, you can't look at a list of growing bug counts to determine project health. A growing list of bugs could simply a byproduct of growth of the overall project. Listing that without any analysis of open vs close ratios is lazy at best, and disingenuous at worst. Also, a number of the projects on that maintainers list are community maintained, or don't have a need for change (I wrote OAuthAuth, for instance, and can tell you it doesn't need active development).
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/
Of course there are two extremes where there are problems: disputed topics (especially contemporary political topics) and niche topics receiving little to no attention.
I think for both an improvment can be made by improving the view on the editing history. Showing what kind of editors (new accounts or ong term members? Editing only few articles or across the board? etc.) do what kind of editing. Maybe even broken down to article sections ("this section sees lots of change by new editors, while that section is stable")
But not sure how that would really look like to be usable more or less intuitively.
But that seems inherent to having an article for which there are only 1-2 editors, as opposed to 10+ frequently reviewing.
So better UX is probably the best "solution." I.e. pulling editor count, frequency, and reputation into the reader-visible part of the page.
The issues I have seen are mostly with these sorts of articles itself. Popular articles tend to be overall much more fair because of massive participation.
But once you go into articles which are about less popular things or contentious topics or from highly polarised areas, there is either frequent vandalism or chokehold control by few editors which makes it impossible to have even a good discussion if you think the content can be presented better.
I started this article recently and was very impressed by how everyone came together to reach a consensus on a very niche topic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qeqertaq_Avannarleq
But then the other day I noticed that a page about a certain very popular K-Pop band was missing one of their major releases, so I added it, but then got into a pissing war with an editor of that niche who argued that the band's own Instagram page was not a valid source for information on their releases?!
An unusual third extreme, where things are so wrong, so entrenched and so unchecked that they have the potential to not just misrepresent truth but also change it.
I refer you to the story of the Scots Language Wikipedia:
https://www.engadget.com/scots-wikipedia-230210674.html
Wikipedia politics is insane[1], and this power hunger can lead to objectively incorrect information being defended and sustained.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_cabals
But (anecdata) I have my gripes with the way it handles evidence.
My SO has a person (died already) in her family with a (relatively) short wikipedia entry. There are factual errors in the article. We know that, because we have original documents showing that the "facts" reportet in the entry are wrong.
Due to the fact that the documents cannot be published online without breaking copyright laws we can't point to a correction.
She communicated with an editor (or whatever his role was, but he had the right to approve or deny changes to the entry) who stated he could only allow changes to the "facts" if my SO could point to an online source (a credible one he said). Else he would deny changing anything. Or she should upload the documents to wikipedia if she had copyright on them.
He didn't accept the idea to send the documents to him as proof. He made it clear that it is either the wikipedia way of determining the truth or none.
We stopped. Since then I am asking myself how much of wikipedia is actually wrong and actively or passively denied from correction by these gate keepers.
Wikipedia could offer a way to upload documents for editors to review without automatically making them publicly available. This would enable fact checking and correction.
I had heard of it before but since this personal experience with German Wikipedia's "Blockwart" mentality I will never consider them a valid organisation for donations.
Wikipedia is great for a low level consensus, but if you actually know anything about many of the subjects it’s hilariously bad.
If they do have a “reliable” source for the incorrect fact, could you write to that source and get it corrected there?
But they were already wrong in the cited source and we had the original documents to proof that. He just wasn't willing to look at them.
To add to that - the source is a digitized out of print book that will probably never have another edition or printing.
I could start a website or create a blog post with parts of the proof documents and maybe even sound snippets from an old interview (and part of old Stasi documents as well to make the point and that to be referenced by Wikipedia as a new source.
But why would I need to go to these lengths if I could provide proof to Wikipedia more easily if they wanted and have them at least remove the wrong parts. Even if they would not include the corrected things.
This way they would not have the user need to trust unverifiable claims but also protect the user from learning falsehoods.
I would have welcomed that approach. And applauded them. But once he decided to let wrong facts stay as part of the entry this was a lost cause to me.
As said. I would have been more than fine if they had just deleted these parts.
I don't need the facts to be in the entry. I don't care. I only care about the fake facts in there and ask myself how much of the rest of Wikipedia is also riddled with falsehoods and nobody would want to remove that if shown actual state documents that show what is wrong.
I did not want it to become a primary source. I just hoped they would remove information that has new evidence not known to the original source.
It's easy to find problems with wikipedia's current model, but harder, I think, to argue that their model is the wrong choice.
Do I still get it wrong. Oh dear, yes. Did I learn how important it was? Oh yes.
I especially learned to qualify what I wrote and to mark when a source could not perfectly be trusted, but the argument/point of view was interesting to discuss nonetheless.
Why can't Wikipedia at least either remove false information once provided credible sources. Or at least somehow mark the relevant section/parts with a disclaimer so that readers are at least aware that something might be suspicious.
Could it be gamed? Weaponized? Probably. Would it be helpful to readers? Maybe.
But how is the current situation better?
That's plainly false, how many Wikipedia articles have (annoying, I'll admit) offline references to books, papers, and other things that are only available under specific terms and conditions, typically after some payment? You don't have to own anything's copyright to reference it. (In many jurisdictions you'd also be allowed to publish excerpts as fair use, that would make this easier but that's not a prerequisite here anyway.)
And does Wikipedia even have an approval system? I thought either you have permission to edit a page or you don't (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=COVID-19&action=e...). This whole situation sounds quite odd.
Not that I haven't dealt with overzealous page protectors myself that have some "I did a million-and-one edits and am holier than thou" status and will revert anything that changes their perception of the world. I don't disbelieve the situation in general, just those details seem odd to me.
Thanks for denying experience. You could have said: "That should not be the case."
But yet he kept denying changes.
> offline references to books, papers, and other things that are only available under specific terms and conditions, typically after some payment
I was talking about birth certificates, official but personal documents, things like birthday greetings personally signed by Erich Honecker, a Radio interview done in the 70ies at a GDR radio station were only one last tape of the recording exists in family archives.
Nothing of that is anyhow publicly available.
Whenever we proposed changes we were shut down by this person. They felt (or were - I have too little insights into the hierarchy of Wikipedia and don't want to actually) to be righteously empowered to change back any change were one could not provide citable proof. And that is actually a point I agree with.
But he also was not willing to accept/provide a way to proof how "facts" in the entry were wrong.
If they were missing I wouldn't have an issue. But they were already wrong in the cited source and we had the original documents to proof that. He just wasn't willing to look at them.
I think this was referring to the claim by the other editor - that he "could only allow the changes if ...", was false. Not to your whole comment
Therein the problem.
Your situation sucks, and I'm genuinely sorry about it.
But I'm not sure I can think of a way to change that policy that would be a net win overall.
If anything I feel like you're more collateral damage of copyright law than wikipedia policy here, but I understand that even assuming I'm right about that, that doesn't make the specifics sucks any less.
Bah.
That's not what I meant. Was already thinking whether this was clear enough or if I should edit... apparently I should have edited. Apologies.
I meant it the way that pxeger1 mentioned in their sibling comment: the person denying your (SO's) edits was saying something that is clearly not true.
Furthermore, any sane editor would allow use of this information under Ignore All Rules (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules ), which is specifically there because sometimes the rules don't produce good results.
Ultimately, if the OP wants "the editors" to see information to add to the article, they will effectively be publishing the information publicly, since anyone can be an editor, and there is no mechanism for protected sources that are available to only some special cadre.
That breaks the Wikipedia model -- in article namespace, everyone should be able to review the same source information. The concept here is called "verifiability" for a reason. Wikipedia's strength is that you can ultimately go check and confirm the source.
By writing articles from privileged information, Wikipedia effectively becomes a primary source on a subject, which is a big no-no for an encyclopedia in general, and for Wikipedia specifically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research
It can be frustrating, but it is a necessary minimum. As to perceived accuracy, Wikipedia has a General Disclaimer[1] for a reason.
If this all makes you less trustful of Wikipedia... good! I can't speak for every wikipedian, but I personally welcome skepticism and encourage users to verify anything they have doubts on.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer
Now, if there's something in the article that is (1) wrong and (2) unsourced, then that should be removed from the article. (And if someone re-adds unsourced material to an article, then there are process to deal with that). But if there are no public sources for information it does not go in the encyclopedia.
Can you not excerpt them to the point that the quotes would qualify for fair use? Another option is contacting the source that was cited and see if they'd post a correction.
The other side of this is that family members aren't unbiased parties, so any facts they want corrected really need to be from verifiable sources--sources better than whichever source was already quoted.
At this point you need to fight fire with fire. Everything you know that is factually wrong needs to be investigated; are there credible sources for those lies? Can those sources be discredited?
It takes a mountain of work to fight casual lies, unfortunately.
I have used this for license confirmations, not for fact checking, but they do Biographies of Living Persons work so they might be able to help.
They can’t allow you upload your own proof, and then have citations on Wikipedia pointing to Wikipedia.
The only way they can really do it is to insist on citations to reliable sources. That sucks when there is nothing true about it out there, but without those rules you could just write anything at all , they need some rules.
I think of wikipedia as the old encyclopedia books where they are just snapshots of reality.
This pretty much describes the problem with Wikipedia, but it's highly cryptic because possibly 95% of people are never going to realize this because I don't think they even know a Talk page exists for every article. I read lots of scientific articles and I always visit the Talk pages even when I haven't spotted any errors in the article content. There's tons of crazy petty shit that goes on between the people who edit Wikipedia articles. Whether something is considered a valid source for citation depends on which part of Wikipedia's inner circle you're talking to; in some articles, contributors are shouted down because "blogs aren't authoritative" even when they're the subject falls outside mainstream media and blogs are most proximal to the subject, but in other cases I've seen blogs be considered to be perfectly adequate when it's totally inappropriate. When it comes to anything even remotely tied to news and current events, you might as well skip Wikipedia and just read MSM news articles because those are really what Wikipedia largely considers "authoritative" no matter how biased the mainstream articles actually are. I've even seen totally legit edits and sources being ultimately rejected after a person answers every question of the [obstinate] editor because "nuh uh".
Sadly, I cannot edit Wikipedia myself even though I've never even tried doing so. Even if I'm not using a VPN, it just flat out rejects my IP from even attempting to sign up.
This is how Wikipedia can either fix itself or how someone can replace Wikipedia:
- Be run by an accountable benevolent dictator who can ultimately veto any form of democracy present in the system; ultimately everything hinges on management no matter how the system is configured
- Charge people money to edit Wikipedia (imo this would fix many of the content moderation problems on the internet as a whole at the cost of fewer active users)
- Be transparent about who is in charge (Wikipedia obfuscates this with a facade that suggests that users are no different from one another, which is anything but the truth in 2022)
- Refine official policies around authoritative sources, because right now any existing policies aren't working very well