> Wikipedia is the largest compendium of human knowledge ever assembled, with more than 7 million articles in its English version, the largest and most developed of 343 language projects.
but:
> The collections of the Library of Congress include more than 32 million catalogued books and other print materials in 470 languages; more than 61 million manuscripts; the largest rare book collection in North America ...
COMPENDIUM
Brief summary of a larger work or of a field of knowledge : abstract
The library is more extensive, but they don't have the same goals. I'd even argue that part of Wikipedia's quality is it's ability to remain small relative to the knowledge it summarises.
Different things though; "catalogued books and other print materials" is not the same as "compendium of human knowledge". The former is an archive, the latter is an encyclopedia.
You won't find a 1920's copy of a newspaper in Wikipedia, but you will find articles about events from then that link to said newspaper.
Both are super important though, Wikipedia can't exist as it does now without archives (digitized or at the very least referentiable).
Those who object to this comparison might also consider that Stack Overflow hosts about 24 million publicly visible questions. And that's just (in theory) about programming!
There has been this trend recently of calling Wikipedia the last good thing on the internet.
And i agree its great, i spend an inordinate amount of my time on Wikimedia related things.
But i think there is a danger here with all these articles putting Wikipedia too much on a pedestal. It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws.
The true best part of Wikipedia is that its a work in progress and people are working to make it a little better everyday. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact we aren't there yet. We'll never be "there". But hopefully we'll continue to be a little bit closer every day. And that is what makes Wikipedia great.
I agree with both your points. Wikipedia is extremely useful because it's generally very good - and it's also not perfect.
I'll add I don't think it can be any closer to "perfect" than it is because the same fundamental traits which lead to its imperfections also enable its unique value - like speed, breadth, depth and broad perspectives. The only areas where it might very occasionally not be ideal tend to be contentious political and culture war topics or newer niche articles with low traffic. Basically topics where some people care too much and those where not enough people care at all.
But this isn't as big a downside as it might be because anyone can look at an article's talk page and edit history and immediately see if it's a contentiously divisive topic or, on the other end of the spectrum, see when there's been little to no discussion.
the fact that anyone can be an editor on Wikipedia scares me. I mostly use it for STEM, current affairs and timelines, stuff that can't be easily fiddled—unlike topics around history & politics. These are highly baised on wikipedia.
For instance, look at wikipediocracy.com
Agreed. It's funny how only a couple of years ago we all told schoolchildren "stop citing Wikipedia, anyone can edit it, read an actual book!" yet now in this benighted era of AI we urge them to consult Wikipedia for "the truth" because it's not the hallucination of a machine.
Yes, it has its flaws, but I plan to keep on editing and donating.
I'm not so sure I go there less and less. Wikipedia is very biased and turf guarded against negative factually true information even when it meets all requirements it will often be taken down automatically with no recourse. Many pages are functionally not editable because of turf guarding.
Anything vaguely sociopolitical is functionally censored on it and wikipedia does nothing about it even if they don't support it.
What are people regularly using Wikipedia for that the bias is that terrible? Are you exclusively looking up controversial conflicts, right wing leaders and climate change? I just have never had my everyday curiosity cross paths with only those things which are controversial by Wikipedia standards.
Also I find a lot of people’s disagreements usually come down to “ok, I see that the information that I thought was censored is actually available but not in the format that I prefer”
And if you’re looking for objective information about the Israel Palestine conflict you’re hardly going to get it anywhere.
I used to edit for wikipedia. I saw a "problem" where a specific troll factory was pushing a particular narrative which is factually contrary to international law.
I held out for as long as I could but it was emotionally draining
Articles about some chemical process are fine, indeed often excellent.
Everything where facts get filtered and presented, is bad. Read about real world events - especially where different groups or countries were involved - in three different languages on Wikipedia, and you'd think three different universes exist.
Wikipedia has gone too far from being what it was meant to be. I can agree it is the "last good thing on the internet" with the caveat - "for some people".
Is is neither objective, thus not scientific, nor complete in terms of depth of the information. All of this happens because of invading obsession with "modern" ideologies that pollute and distort the pure knowledge gathering, which is a very complex matter itself that becomes a mission impossible in the case of Wikipedia.
I used to contribute semi-regularly to Wikipedia in the past, but tried contributing recently & found the experience to be off-putting (to put it mildly).
I also have long been frustrated with certain areas of Wikipedia that I feel struggle so significantly with NPV that they're rendered beyond useless, likely net harmful. (These are not the topics I've attempted contributing to recently, I wouldn't dare).
I'm continuously annoyed by the contrast of their overbearing donation pushes with the overspends in their published reports.
BUT all that said I do sometimes need reminding in today's world how much of a miracle Wikipedia still is. Not something to be taken for granted. And on the overspends: this is hard to qualify given there's really no comparable projects in existence. Maybe this is just the price we need to pay.
I was thinking the other day about which websites might still exist in 100 years on whatever the web becomes, and Wikipedia to me seemed the most likely. It manages to be both stable and flexible. Functionally it's almost identical in all important ways to how it was ~25 years ago, but organisationally it has adapted to handle the incredible increase in scale. It is certainly flawed, because it's made by humans, but I think it may be the web's greatest achievement.
I would say that OpenStreetMap is also a pretty good thing on the internet. Maybe not quite as impactful, and I'd say less well run, and rougher around the edges, but it's largely resisted being taken over by evil corporations or heavily influenced in bad directions.
This doesn't make sense because Wikipedia is a collection of sources, most of which are on the internet. If would be surprising if Wikipedia was a good thing but the online sources it uses are bad.
I've heard it expressed as "the last good thing on the internet" many times, but it never occurred to me to interpret that to mean it has attained perfection in some regard. I always took it to mean that it has thus far evaded the enshitification trends.
It suffers similar to stackoverflow in terms of making it excessively hard to contribute to something you really do know a lot about. I don't really see a solution for hot topics like isreal-palestine. However, I should be able to improve a page on some physics subject I'm an expert in that has been turned into an obvious ad for some professor's niche work.
> It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws.
I don't know that the attackers against Wikipedia are advocating for a modest point like that, which I would think even proponets accept as a truism. I think Wikipedia is just another variation on institutional knowledge, and, as the world descends into misinformation and authoritarianism, it was inevitable it too would be attacked for perceived "bias."
Everything from global warming to vaccines, to newer and newer frontiers we never would have guessed, like hurricane trajectories or drones or air traffic, have fallen one after another to a kind of reactionary skepticism, resentful of the fact that these domains are controlled by real facts, and not merely participatory collective storytelling. There are some things left, that we problaby think could never get politicized, that will be. Pickleball rules? Quantum mechanics? Baseball history? Soon longstanding uncontroversial claims belonging to those are going to fall into the category of essentially contested concepts.
So Wikipedia, with ordinary and lonstanding requirements for reliable sourcing, and decades of policy on what that means in reaction to countlessly many debates, is resilient against the kind of recreational, hedonic skepticism that the masses use to dismantle other knowledge claims.
So "well wikipedia's not perfect" kind of rubs me the wrong way because it seems like it implies we should be more welcoming of this attitude of hedonic skepticism, which has been so destructive. I think it should be celebrated. Authoritative factual validity, and the norms that make it possible, used to be uncontroversial. And thus far, social media misinformation has outcompeted fact checkers, but not (yet) Wikipedia. I feel like that's never been more important.
For me the real power of Wikipedia lies in its local language editions. English articles often reflect only positive perspective, while local versions bring fresh viewpoints. Local language have sharper criticism that gets toned down in English.
Honestly Wikipedia+Archive.org remaining online have national security implications (not just USA, but any democracy). Though I'd wager the current administration would take a different view.
In the past few years I've noticed more and more issues on Wikipedia. It has never been perfect, but in the past it seemed like anything without sufficient sources would quickly get flagged as "citation needed" or questionable statements would get a warning label slapped on them.
Now, I can visit pages for certain medical conditions that contain completely unsourced claims with no "citation needed" nor any warnings. When I try to search for it, I often trace it back to alternative medicine or pseudoscience influencers.
The sad part is that when I've tried to remove obviously flimsy information, someone will immediately come along and add it back. Unless you're ready to spend months in a Wikipedia edit war with someone who obsesses over a page, there's no point in even trying. These people know the rules and processes and will use every one of them against you. When that fails, they'll try to pull rank. If that fails, they'll just quietly continue editing and rewriting (possibly from alt accounts) until you get too tired to fight the battle any more.
Do you recall a couple? It's one of my minor hobbies when I'm bored to try to find sources and fix Wikipedia articles that others have trouble with. As examples that this is a good faith attempt and not the usual online comment technique of "oh yeah? show me!", here are some stories of edits I got in that others said they had trouble with:
If you still have the desire to have some of these fixed, post here and I'll put it in my queue and get to it at some point. If you don't want the resulting interaction from other commenters here, send it to my email (in profile).
Wikipedia is ultimately a consensus summarizer frequently mistaken for a truth-seeker. So you have to make the case for something being true somewhere where the experts live, and then Wikipedia can express the experts' opinion. But crucially, it is not truth-seeking on its own.
The article criticizes doxxing but well-known Wikipedia editors doxx each other all the time... There's a site called Wikipediocracy that's been around for 20 years and an Arbitrator (Wiki's Supreme Court) was suspended for leaking secret deliberations to the "private" section of the forum—just make an account and you can see it too.
According to that Arbitrator, Wikimedia gave a legal opinion that he violated the law in doing so:
"Well, I got a result today: the ombuds commisssion found that I did indeed violate the access to nonpublic data policy, and has issued a final warning to me. Apparently mailing list comments are, "under a contemporary understanding of privacy law and the policies in question," nonpublic data on the same level as CU data or supressed libel."
Wasn't the first time he did it either... Officially, community guidelines only apply on the site itself. Once you get into the Discords or forums, doxxing is common and tolerated. Admins and arbitrators are happy to participate on those forums under their Wikipedia usernames because they feel like they need doxx to take action against those trying to harm Wikipedia. And because it (usually) isn't them doing the doxxing, it's ok. There's even an "alt-right identification thread" where established editors can request doxxing from people who don't link their accounts onwiki.
Generally this targets newer editors who aren't in a clique yet. e.g. The person who made "Wikipedia and Antisemitism" got doxxed. Once you get to a certain level, you are expected to participate in these "offwiki" forums to get anything done.
Some people try to complain about it but it doesn't end well. Generally you don't want to fuck with them because by the time you find out about Wikipediocracy, you've already revealed too much and are doxxable. & unlike nation-state actors they have inside information and understand the site.
If you do choose to edit Wikipedia, use a burner email and only edit during the same one or two hours of the day so they can't track timezones. & don't post any photos or information on where you live nor attend meetups.
There are some good people but once you get deeply involved it is a toxic community. Sorry for the rant but it pisses me off whenever people talk about how great the Wikipedia community is as someone who's into the internal shit. it's the worst place to get involved in "free culture".
I think I've agree with you on this one. Even on Wikipedia there's a ton of pages like SPI pages which can be indistinguishable from actual malicious doxxings.
Not to mention that there a whole load of #MeToo scandals which would doom Wikipedia if exposed to the media.
This is because of the lack of a profit motive and sane expectations on salary from the people running the Wikimedia project.
I think that starting in the 1980s, people started to expect anything involving information technology created immediately-accountable monetary value on a massive scale after seeing the fortunes of people like Gates, Wozniak, Jobs, et al. This was further boosted by the Dotcom bubble.
The fact is, a significant fraction of IT is indeed profitable, but applying the model of perpetual growth is not appropriate for all of that significant fraction, and there's the other fraction of the IT world that isn't directly profitable. More people need to realize that their work falls in the latter two fractions instead of the first.
I've started to think that the fact that Wikipedia will change its descriptions of reality based on whoever is willing to spend the time and money to subvert it is a feature when it comes to survival. When the final sci-fi authoritarian dictatorship comes down, Wikipedia will happily explain that it was always here, and that Eastasia was always the enemy.
An unexpected side-effect for me after I started subscribing to Kagi a few months ago, at a low tier with limited searches, is that I made sure to configure all my browsers with keywords for Wikipedia searches and I use those a lot, knowing that what I will end up with after searching is probably going to be the Wikipedia page anyway. No point wasting precious limited monthly searches.
Wikipedia has plenty of propaganda. It's often at the fringes of knowledge, in niche subjects where there isn't yet an established group of proponents and detractors. It can be quite subtle too, will fool most laypeople, even those who are otherwise intellectually savvy.
It's only when a subject becomes popular that the propaganda gets recognized and rectified.
> Because Wikipedia was under a Creative Commons license, anyone who didn’t like the way the project was run could copy it and start their own, as a group of Spanish users did when the possibility of running ads was raised in 2002.
Wikipedia and the Khan academy are my two best examples for the potential of the internet. Each is an incredible feat that took a simple vision and took it far beyond what I ever thought possible.
Wikipedia has one great feature... you can see all the editing history.
Something happened, a war started, someone did X, someone else did Y... you open wikipedia, see all the "current situation" bias, open the history tab and look at the article from before <the thing> happened.
92 comments
[ 6.7 ms ] story [ 91.1 ms ] threadbut:
> The collections of the Library of Congress include more than 32 million catalogued books and other print materials in 470 languages; more than 61 million manuscripts; the largest rare book collection in North America ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress#Holdings
COMPENDIUM Brief summary of a larger work or of a field of knowledge : abstract
The library is more extensive, but they don't have the same goals. I'd even argue that part of Wikipedia's quality is it's ability to remain small relative to the knowledge it summarises.
You won't find a 1920's copy of a newspaper in Wikipedia, but you will find articles about events from then that link to said newspaper.
Both are super important though, Wikipedia can't exist as it does now without archives (digitized or at the very least referentiable).
Especially relevant when reading this from a paywalled article.
And i agree its great, i spend an inordinate amount of my time on Wikimedia related things.
But i think there is a danger here with all these articles putting Wikipedia too much on a pedestal. It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws.
The true best part of Wikipedia is that its a work in progress and people are working to make it a little better everyday. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact we aren't there yet. We'll never be "there". But hopefully we'll continue to be a little bit closer every day. And that is what makes Wikipedia great.
I'll add I don't think it can be any closer to "perfect" than it is because the same fundamental traits which lead to its imperfections also enable its unique value - like speed, breadth, depth and broad perspectives. The only areas where it might very occasionally not be ideal tend to be contentious political and culture war topics or newer niche articles with low traffic. Basically topics where some people care too much and those where not enough people care at all.
But this isn't as big a downside as it might be because anyone can look at an article's talk page and edit history and immediately see if it's a contentiously divisive topic or, on the other end of the spectrum, see when there's been little to no discussion.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/64d6548c19f38a...
Yes, it has its flaws, but I plan to keep on editing and donating.
Anything vaguely sociopolitical is functionally censored on it and wikipedia does nothing about it even if they don't support it.
Also I find a lot of people’s disagreements usually come down to “ok, I see that the information that I thought was censored is actually available but not in the format that I prefer”
And if you’re looking for objective information about the Israel Palestine conflict you’re hardly going to get it anywhere.
I held out for as long as I could but it was emotionally draining
Articles about some chemical process are fine, indeed often excellent.
Everything where facts get filtered and presented, is bad. Read about real world events - especially where different groups or countries were involved - in three different languages on Wikipedia, and you'd think three different universes exist.
I also have long been frustrated with certain areas of Wikipedia that I feel struggle so significantly with NPV that they're rendered beyond useless, likely net harmful. (These are not the topics I've attempted contributing to recently, I wouldn't dare).
I'm continuously annoyed by the contrast of their overbearing donation pushes with the overspends in their published reports.
BUT all that said I do sometimes need reminding in today's world how much of a miracle Wikipedia still is. Not something to be taken for granted. And on the overspends: this is hard to qualify given there's really no comparable projects in existence. Maybe this is just the price we need to pay.
I don't know that the attackers against Wikipedia are advocating for a modest point like that, which I would think even proponets accept as a truism. I think Wikipedia is just another variation on institutional knowledge, and, as the world descends into misinformation and authoritarianism, it was inevitable it too would be attacked for perceived "bias."
Everything from global warming to vaccines, to newer and newer frontiers we never would have guessed, like hurricane trajectories or drones or air traffic, have fallen one after another to a kind of reactionary skepticism, resentful of the fact that these domains are controlled by real facts, and not merely participatory collective storytelling. There are some things left, that we problaby think could never get politicized, that will be. Pickleball rules? Quantum mechanics? Baseball history? Soon longstanding uncontroversial claims belonging to those are going to fall into the category of essentially contested concepts.
So Wikipedia, with ordinary and lonstanding requirements for reliable sourcing, and decades of policy on what that means in reaction to countlessly many debates, is resilient against the kind of recreational, hedonic skepticism that the masses use to dismantle other knowledge claims.
So "well wikipedia's not perfect" kind of rubs me the wrong way because it seems like it implies we should be more welcoming of this attitude of hedonic skepticism, which has been so destructive. I think it should be celebrated. Authoritative factual validity, and the norms that make it possible, used to be uncontroversial. And thus far, social media misinformation has outcompeted fact checkers, but not (yet) Wikipedia. I feel like that's never been more important.
That's not really "national," is it?
https://piwithvic.com/offline-wikipedia-with-kiwix/
Now, I can visit pages for certain medical conditions that contain completely unsourced claims with no "citation needed" nor any warnings. When I try to search for it, I often trace it back to alternative medicine or pseudoscience influencers.
The sad part is that when I've tried to remove obviously flimsy information, someone will immediately come along and add it back. Unless you're ready to spend months in a Wikipedia edit war with someone who obsesses over a page, there's no point in even trying. These people know the rules and processes and will use every one of them against you. When that fails, they'll try to pull rank. If that fails, they'll just quietly continue editing and rewriting (possibly from alt accounts) until you get too tired to fight the battle any more.
- https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2024-10-17/Path_Depende...
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40655989
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Weierstrass_function#Accu...
And my personal favourite is recently when the most ridiculous thing was added to Bukele's Gang Crackdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_c...
If you still have the desire to have some of these fixed, post here and I'll put it in my queue and get to it at some point. If you don't want the resulting interaction from other commenters here, send it to my email (in profile).
Wikipedia is ultimately a consensus summarizer frequently mistaken for a truth-seeker. So you have to make the case for something being true somewhere where the experts live, and then Wikipedia can express the experts' opinion. But crucially, it is not truth-seeking on its own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
According to that Arbitrator, Wikimedia gave a legal opinion that he violated the law in doing so:
"Well, I got a result today: the ombuds commisssion found that I did indeed violate the access to nonpublic data policy, and has issued a final warning to me. Apparently mailing list comments are, "under a contemporary understanding of privacy law and the policies in question," nonpublic data on the same level as CU data or supressed libel."
https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=350266#p350...
Wasn't the first time he did it either... Officially, community guidelines only apply on the site itself. Once you get into the Discords or forums, doxxing is common and tolerated. Admins and arbitrators are happy to participate on those forums under their Wikipedia usernames because they feel like they need doxx to take action against those trying to harm Wikipedia. And because it (usually) isn't them doing the doxxing, it's ok. There's even an "alt-right identification thread" where established editors can request doxxing from people who don't link their accounts onwiki.
Generally this targets newer editors who aren't in a clique yet. e.g. The person who made "Wikipedia and Antisemitism" got doxxed. Once you get to a certain level, you are expected to participate in these "offwiki" forums to get anything done.
Some people try to complain about it but it doesn't end well. Generally you don't want to fuck with them because by the time you find out about Wikipediocracy, you've already revealed too much and are doxxable. & unlike nation-state actors they have inside information and understand the site.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...
If you do choose to edit Wikipedia, use a burner email and only edit during the same one or two hours of the day so they can't track timezones. & don't post any photos or information on where you live nor attend meetups.
There are some good people but once you get deeply involved it is a toxic community. Sorry for the rant but it pisses me off whenever people talk about how great the Wikipedia community is as someone who's into the internal shit. it's the worst place to get involved in "free culture".
Not to mention that there a whole load of #MeToo scandals which would doom Wikipedia if exposed to the media.
https://www.reddit.com/r/JustWikipediaThings/wiki/scandals
I think that starting in the 1980s, people started to expect anything involving information technology created immediately-accountable monetary value on a massive scale after seeing the fortunes of people like Gates, Wozniak, Jobs, et al. This was further boosted by the Dotcom bubble.
The fact is, a significant fraction of IT is indeed profitable, but applying the model of perpetual growth is not appropriate for all of that significant fraction, and there's the other fraction of the IT world that isn't directly profitable. More people need to realize that their work falls in the latter two fractions instead of the first.
It's only when a subject becomes popular that the propaganda gets recognized and rectified.
https://x.com/therabbithole84/status/1957598712693452920?s=4...
Correction on this: Wikipedia was GFDL until 2009. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Licensing_update .
Something happened, a war started, someone did X, someone else did Y... you open wikipedia, see all the "current situation" bias, open the history tab and look at the article from before <the thing> happened.