This is cute, but kind of an example of Wikipedia's off-mission bloat. It irks me that they constantly fundraise when most of it is not needed for Wikipedia proper, but rather used for initiatives people know less about and may not fund if they knew.
Slightly off topic, but now that long context machine translation is roughly on-par with humans: are there any official efforts from Wikipedia, to translate the "best" or "most complete" language version of each article to all other languages? I'd imagine that the effort of getting all languages up to the same standards are just an impossible one and people from "lower-resource" languages would benefit a lot.
> It was Larry Sanger who chanced upon the critical concept of combining the three fundamental elements of Wikipedia, namely an encyclopedia, a wiki, and essentially unrestricted editorial access to the public during a dinner meeting with an old friend Ben Kovitz in January 2, 2001. Kovitz a computer programmer and introduced Sanger to Ward Cunningham's wiki, a web application which allows collaborative modification, extension or deletion of its content and structure. The name wiki has been derived from the Hawaiian term which meant quick. Sanger feeling that the wiki software would facilitate a good platform for an online encyclopedia web portal, proposed the concept to Wales to be applied to Nupedia. Wales intially skeptic about the idea decided to give it a try later.
> The credit for coining the term Wikipedia goes to Larry Sanger. He initially conceived the concept of a wiki-based encyclopedia project only as a means to accelerate Nupedia's slow growth. Larry Sanger served as the "chief organiser" of Wikipedia during its critical first year of growth and created and enforced many of the policies and strategy that made Wikipedia possible during its first formative year. Wikipedia turned out to contain 15,000 articles and upwards to 350 Wikipedians contributing on several topics by the end of 2001.
He may not be with the project now, but don't airbrush him out of history.
Who left extremely early on in the project, went to create a poorly conceived and failed competitor, then spent the next 23ish years shitting on Wikipedia? Why does he deserve any credit?
It's his newer baby. Clearly it's a clone of Wikipedia, without the content of course. If Wikipedia ever goes wrong, it's nice to know that we have an alternative.
I can't be the only one who feels that Wikipedia's quality has really started to go downhill over the past 5 or so years. I've noticed more and more articles which read as ridiculously partisan, usually around subjects with any link to politics or current events.
That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the US, but I get the impression that the sites neutrality policies have gradually been chipped away by introducing concepts like "false balance" as an excuse to pick a side on an issue. I could easily see that causing the site to slowly decline like StackOverflow did, most people don't want to deal with agenda pushing.
Fortunately articles related to topics like science and history haven't been significantly damaged by this yet. Something to watch carefully.
Fully agreed. The Talk pages are a very interesting read these days. I things continue down this path I think Wikipedia will be a lot less relevant in the coming years, at least for current events and things related to the on-going culture war.
Aside from AI, Wikipedia’s greatest upcoming challenge will be censorship as Western governments start to adopt various traits of Eastern dictatorships.
Which includes a section about Wikipedia in the age of AI: New partnerships with tech companies support Wikipedia’s sustainability
> several companies — including Ecosia, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Pleias, and ProRata — became new Wikimedia Enterprise partners, joining existing partners such as Amazon, Google, and Meta.
It's really remarkable how, every single time Wikipedia comes up on HN, there's a bunch of comments about bias and such... and yet never a single example is ever linked.
Surely people don't think sources such as Mother Jones are more 'reliable' than The New York Post, Fox News, or The Heritage Foundation? Not a coincidence there.
Having such obvious biases does nothing but damage the Wikipedia brand, and at this point has me anticipating Ai replacements.
The English intro talks a lot about medical advantages of the procedure: "reduced rates of sexually transmitted infections and urinary tract infections. This includes reducing the incidence of cancer-causing forms of human papillomavirus (HPV) and reducing HIV transmission among heterosexual men in high-risk populations by up to 60%; ... Neonatal circumcision decreases the risk of penile cancer.[14] ... Some medical organizations take the position that it carries prophylactic health benefits that outweigh the risks," and has one sentence of it being controversial worldwide "others hold that its medical benefits are not sufficient to justify it."
The German one has not a single sentence in the intro about advantages, but a whole paragraph on how it's controversial. "Die Zirkumzision als Routineeingriff ist besonders bei Minderjährigen umstritten, ... Von vielen Kinderschutzverbänden und einem Teil der Ärzteorganisationen wird die nicht medizinisch begründete Beschneidung abgelehnt, da sie den Körper irreversibel verändere und bei nicht einwilligungsfähigen Jungen nicht im Einklang mit Gesundheitsschutz und Kindeswohl stehe.[6] Im angelsächsischen Bereich gibt es schon länger eine gesellschaftliche Debatte zwischen Gruppen von Gegnern der Beschneidung („Intaktivisten“-Bewegung) und Befürwortern. Umstritten sind insbesondere medizinischer Nutzen und Risiken, bei Kindern auch ethische und rechtliche Aspekte sowie die Beurteilung im Hinblick auf die Menschenrechte, vor allem das Recht auf körperliche Unversehrtheit."
I'm not sure who's right, but it's hard to not see some bias here.
> The German one has not a single sentence in the intro about advantages, but a whole paragraph on how it's controversial.
No, they do have a sentence on that right before, talking about how sometimes it can make sense as a medical procedure:
> Die Zirkumzision ist eine von mehreren Behandlungsmöglichkeiten (s. z. B. Triple Inzision), die beispielsweise bei schweren Formen der pathologischen Phimose als indiziert gilt, wenn Behandlungsalternativen nicht erfolgversprechend sind oder zuvor keinen Heilungserfolg brachten.
I'd say overall the German one is a bit more balanced, if maybe not in the opening paragraphs. It goes over pretty much all of the benefits in similar detail to the English one, while spending much more words on "adverse effects" (which the English one spends very few words on in comparison, and no pictures at all).
Generally it seems that the English one does its very best to gloss over anything graphic, while the German one spares no detail - a product of underlying cultural attitudes no doubt. English Wikipedia would probably consider many of the contents of the German article "gratuitous detail", while German Wikipedia prefers a "factual and explicit" clinical style.
Any attempt to "eliminate" all bias would just introduce massive bias. The only solution is building a healthier democratic community.
A major reason people are obsessed with bias on wikipedia is because it is the only usable encyclopedia now. Back then even just in the US and published in english there were more than a dozen different encyclopedias competing with different scopes, intended audiences, viewpoints, arrangements, features, editorial policies, etc. And the publishers were more diverse and not monopolistic. There simply wasn't a need for any single one of them to be bias-free.
In the 2000s, in the tech world, the open source successes that were being talked about was always Apache and Linux.
When Wikipedia started gaining a bit of traction, everyone made fun of it. It was the butt of jokes in all the prime time comedy shows. And I always felt like telling the critics - "Don't you see what is happening? People all over the world are adding their own bits of knowledge and creating this huge thing way beyond what we've seen till now. It's cooperation on an international scale! By regular people! This is what the internet is all about. People, by the thousands, are contributing without asking for anything else in return. This is incredible! "
A few years later, Encyclopedia Britannica, stopped their print edition. A few years after that I read that Wikipedia had surpassed even that.
The amount of value Wikipedia brings to the world is incalculable.
And I'm very fortunate to be alive at a time where I can witness something at this scale. Something that transcends borders and boundaries. Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion. Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world.
I'm not sure about that. I think people who are experts in specific areas (and/or are obsessed with those topics) are the ones contributing to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is extremely biased and has a lot of deliberate misinformation, so I wouldn't trust it for anything except as a basic starting point for information gathering alongside a web search. Wikipedia's founder itself has denounced it for its bias.
I fondly remember visiting Wikipedia HQ in Jan 2012. It was amazing to see how small their "operation" was :)
Back then they had 474M monthly unique visitors, 83,444 active contributors and a staff of less than 100. I'm still blown away by the collaboration. To me, that was the promise of "Web 2.0".
On the kitchen door they hung xkcd 903, 906 and another webcomic mentioning that only 13% of updates to Wikipedia are from women (can't find the source). The wifi password back then was "knowledgeshouldbefree" (maybe it still is?)
"People, by the thousands, are contributing without asking for anything else in return. This is incredible!"
It's unpaid labour, and has created a precedent elsewhere. It seems to be okay in our society to have lots of unpaid labour but not unpaid bills. A lot of Wikipedia's content is monetised elsewhere as is IMDB's.
Then there is Wikipedia's odd circular relationship with Google. Articles are "verified" (sic) by Google but Wikipedia is where most Google searches now lead.
"Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world."
That view is extremely optimistic. There are still umpteen gaps and biases on Wikipedia, some of which have been created by the administrators themselves.
It's getting really hard now. I've been editing since day one. Recently I had awful trouble getting a new article accepted. I gave up for some months and came back and it was accepted first time.
Apparently you can pay a high-ranking Wikipedia editor to massage your article into the site. I know a Hollywood producer who paid to get himself listed.
What amazes me most, though, is that I still find new subjects to write about that don't exist yet on Wikipedia.
In the last 2 years, Wikipdia's quality declined. For me this was evident when they suddenly changed the UI. The new UI is more annoying. Perhaps it is nicer for Average Joe people, but for powerusers it is just annoying to use now. But this is not the only problem: many articles have a low quality, or they are so complicated that Average Joe doesn't understand them, which is ironic considering the UI was most likely changed to appease Average Joe.
I am also displeased with the constant pop-up or slide-in widgets. This is a general curse for browsers that ublock origin prevented. I hate this. My browser should not allow for any such slide-in banner. I am never interested in anything written there - usually it is a "gimme more money", but even if it is not, I simply don't CARE what is written on it. Even python used this, on their homepage, where they are even so cheeky that you can not fully disable this thing, unless you block it with ublock origin.
I feel that too many websites fail the user now. Wikipedia does too. The intrinsic quality is still better than the AI slop spam that Google amplified world wide, while also ruining Google search, but the quality used to be better in the past, on Wikipedia.
60 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 72.9 ms ] thread> Founder Jimbo Wales on a challenge overcome
Aren't you forgetting someone, Jimmy? Your co-founder Larry Sanger, perhaps?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger
Let's check one of the citations from the History of Wikipedia page: https://www.mid-day.com/lifestyle/health-and-fitness/article...
> It was Larry Sanger who chanced upon the critical concept of combining the three fundamental elements of Wikipedia, namely an encyclopedia, a wiki, and essentially unrestricted editorial access to the public during a dinner meeting with an old friend Ben Kovitz in January 2, 2001. Kovitz a computer programmer and introduced Sanger to Ward Cunningham's wiki, a web application which allows collaborative modification, extension or deletion of its content and structure. The name wiki has been derived from the Hawaiian term which meant quick. Sanger feeling that the wiki software would facilitate a good platform for an online encyclopedia web portal, proposed the concept to Wales to be applied to Nupedia. Wales intially skeptic about the idea decided to give it a try later.
> The credit for coining the term Wikipedia goes to Larry Sanger. He initially conceived the concept of a wiki-based encyclopedia project only as a means to accelerate Nupedia's slow growth. Larry Sanger served as the "chief organiser" of Wikipedia during its critical first year of growth and created and enforced many of the policies and strategy that made Wikipedia possible during its first formative year. Wikipedia turned out to contain 15,000 articles and upwards to 350 Wikipedians contributing on several topics by the end of 2001.
He may not be with the project now, but don't airbrush him out of history.
Who left extremely early on in the project, went to create a poorly conceived and failed competitor, then spent the next 23ish years shitting on Wikipedia? Why does he deserve any credit?
It's his newer baby. Clearly it's a clone of Wikipedia, without the content of course. If Wikipedia ever goes wrong, it's nice to know that we have an alternative.
That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the US, but I get the impression that the sites neutrality policies have gradually been chipped away by introducing concepts like "false balance" as an excuse to pick a side on an issue. I could easily see that causing the site to slowly decline like StackOverflow did, most people don't want to deal with agenda pushing.
Fortunately articles related to topics like science and history haven't been significantly damaged by this yet. Something to watch carefully.
But it is noticeably biased on any topic that has political implications.
https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2026/01/15/wikipedia-ce...
Which includes a section about Wikipedia in the age of AI: New partnerships with tech companies support Wikipedia’s sustainability
> several companies — including Ecosia, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Pleias, and ProRata — became new Wikimedia Enterprise partners, joining existing partners such as Amazon, Google, and Meta.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
Surely people don't think sources such as Mother Jones are more 'reliable' than The New York Post, Fox News, or The Heritage Foundation? Not a coincidence there.
Having such obvious biases does nothing but damage the Wikipedia brand, and at this point has me anticipating Ai replacements.
The English intro talks a lot about medical advantages of the procedure: "reduced rates of sexually transmitted infections and urinary tract infections. This includes reducing the incidence of cancer-causing forms of human papillomavirus (HPV) and reducing HIV transmission among heterosexual men in high-risk populations by up to 60%; ... Neonatal circumcision decreases the risk of penile cancer.[14] ... Some medical organizations take the position that it carries prophylactic health benefits that outweigh the risks," and has one sentence of it being controversial worldwide "others hold that its medical benefits are not sufficient to justify it."
The German one has not a single sentence in the intro about advantages, but a whole paragraph on how it's controversial. "Die Zirkumzision als Routineeingriff ist besonders bei Minderjährigen umstritten, ... Von vielen Kinderschutzverbänden und einem Teil der Ärzteorganisationen wird die nicht medizinisch begründete Beschneidung abgelehnt, da sie den Körper irreversibel verändere und bei nicht einwilligungsfähigen Jungen nicht im Einklang mit Gesundheitsschutz und Kindeswohl stehe.[6] Im angelsächsischen Bereich gibt es schon länger eine gesellschaftliche Debatte zwischen Gruppen von Gegnern der Beschneidung („Intaktivisten“-Bewegung) und Befürwortern. Umstritten sind insbesondere medizinischer Nutzen und Risiken, bei Kindern auch ethische und rechtliche Aspekte sowie die Beurteilung im Hinblick auf die Menschenrechte, vor allem das Recht auf körperliche Unversehrtheit."
I'm not sure who's right, but it's hard to not see some bias here.
No, they do have a sentence on that right before, talking about how sometimes it can make sense as a medical procedure:
> Die Zirkumzision ist eine von mehreren Behandlungsmöglichkeiten (s. z. B. Triple Inzision), die beispielsweise bei schweren Formen der pathologischen Phimose als indiziert gilt, wenn Behandlungsalternativen nicht erfolgversprechend sind oder zuvor keinen Heilungserfolg brachten.
I'd say overall the German one is a bit more balanced, if maybe not in the opening paragraphs. It goes over pretty much all of the benefits in similar detail to the English one, while spending much more words on "adverse effects" (which the English one spends very few words on in comparison, and no pictures at all).
Generally it seems that the English one does its very best to gloss over anything graphic, while the German one spares no detail - a product of underlying cultural attitudes no doubt. English Wikipedia would probably consider many of the contents of the German article "gratuitous detail", while German Wikipedia prefers a "factual and explicit" clinical style.
A major reason people are obsessed with bias on wikipedia is because it is the only usable encyclopedia now. Back then even just in the US and published in english there were more than a dozen different encyclopedias competing with different scopes, intended audiences, viewpoints, arrangements, features, editorial policies, etc. And the publishers were more diverse and not monopolistic. There simply wasn't a need for any single one of them to be bias-free.
When it comes to billionaires, some of the biographies are very biased indeed making them look like saints.
When Wikipedia started gaining a bit of traction, everyone made fun of it. It was the butt of jokes in all the prime time comedy shows. And I always felt like telling the critics - "Don't you see what is happening? People all over the world are adding their own bits of knowledge and creating this huge thing way beyond what we've seen till now. It's cooperation on an international scale! By regular people! This is what the internet is all about. People, by the thousands, are contributing without asking for anything else in return. This is incredible! "
A few years later, Encyclopedia Britannica, stopped their print edition. A few years after that I read that Wikipedia had surpassed even that.
The amount of value Wikipedia brings to the world is incalculable.
And I'm very fortunate to be alive at a time where I can witness something at this scale. Something that transcends borders and boundaries. Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion. Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world.
Thank you, Wikipedia.
I'm not sure about that. I think people who are experts in specific areas (and/or are obsessed with those topics) are the ones contributing to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is amazing.
Back then they had 474M monthly unique visitors, 83,444 active contributors and a staff of less than 100. I'm still blown away by the collaboration. To me, that was the promise of "Web 2.0".
On the kitchen door they hung xkcd 903, 906 and another webcomic mentioning that only 13% of updates to Wikipedia are from women (can't find the source). The wifi password back then was "knowledgeshouldbefree" (maybe it still is?)
https://xkcd.com/903/
https://xkcd.com/906/
It's unpaid labour, and has created a precedent elsewhere. It seems to be okay in our society to have lots of unpaid labour but not unpaid bills. A lot of Wikipedia's content is monetised elsewhere as is IMDB's.
Then there is Wikipedia's odd circular relationship with Google. Articles are "verified" (sic) by Google but Wikipedia is where most Google searches now lead.
"Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world."
That view is extremely optimistic. There are still umpteen gaps and biases on Wikipedia, some of which have been created by the administrators themselves.
Apparently you can pay a high-ranking Wikipedia editor to massage your article into the site. I know a Hollywood producer who paid to get himself listed.
What amazes me most, though, is that I still find new subjects to write about that don't exist yet on Wikipedia.
I am also displeased with the constant pop-up or slide-in widgets. This is a general curse for browsers that ublock origin prevented. I hate this. My browser should not allow for any such slide-in banner. I am never interested in anything written there - usually it is a "gimme more money", but even if it is not, I simply don't CARE what is written on it. Even python used this, on their homepage, where they are even so cheeky that you can not fully disable this thing, unless you block it with ublock origin.
I feel that too many websites fail the user now. Wikipedia does too. The intrinsic quality is still better than the AI slop spam that Google amplified world wide, while also ruining Google search, but the quality used to be better in the past, on Wikipedia.
That reminds me of this thread, where clearly new interface wasn't fondly received: https://old.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/10fdfal/wikipedi...