I think a lot people underestimate how arbitrary some editorial decisions on wikipedia can be. Yeah perfect is the enemy of the good but imperfect is still imperfect. Can’t say I’m a fan of jj mccullough‘s opinions on some stuff but his video on wikipedia is good https://youtu.be/-vmSFO1Zfo8?si=0mS24EVODwLrPJ3T
I don’t feel as strongly as he does but ever since watching I just don’t see much value in starting with Wikipedia when researching something. He also points out how a lot content creators default to referencing it. After realising how much of history or geography YouTube is just regurgitating Wikipedia articles, it kind of ruined those kinds of videos for me, and this was before AI. So now I try spend more time reading books or listening to audiobooks on a topics I’m interested instead.
Like I still use Wikipedia for unserious stuff or checking if a book I was recommended was widely criticised or something but that’s it really.
It’s also just not a good learning resource, like if you ever wanted to study a mathematics topic, wikipedia might be one of the worst resources. Like Wikipedia doesn’t profess to be a learning resource and more a overview resource but even the examples they use sometimes are just kind of unhelpful. Here’s an example on the Fourier Transform https://youtu.be/33y9FMIvcWY?si=ys8BwDu_4qa01jso
> I think a lot people underestimate how arbitrary some editorial decisions on wikipedia can be.
I think it is true for all information we consume. One of the very important skills to learn in life is to think critically. Who wrote this? When? What would be their bias?
Text is written by humans (or now sometimes LLMs), and humans are imperfect (and LLMs are worth what they are worth).
Many times Wikipedia is more than enough, sometimes it is not. Nothing is perfect, and it is very important to understand it.
Also, I think for 99% of Wikipedia, there isn't much need to worry about Biases. It's about an uncontroversial chemical compound, a tiny village, a family of bacteria and so on. Knowledge isn't all subjective and prone to bias.
My point was mostly, people just aren’t as aware of issues with it compared to other forms of media. Issues in other forms of media don’t change that or make it less of an issue.
At the end of the day you’re gonna to consume information from somewhere, it’ll have shortcomings but you’re still better off knowing that going in.
On bias’ of authors: I actually think people fixate a bit too much on bias of an author to the point it’s a solely used as a speculative reason to dismiss something asuntrue. If the claims made by the author are consistent with other information and others trusted sources it’s just irrelevant. I feel people online to readily get hung up motivations and it’s sometimes a crotch for a readers inability to engage with ideas they find uncomfortable.
Like if a private company sponsors a study with a finding that aligns with their business interests, that actually doesn’t mean it’s false. It’s false if no one can reproduce their results. I mean you’d definitely want to verify other sources knowing this, but also researches have their own reputation to preserve as well. In reality the truth ends up being more boring than people anticipate.
But obviously it matters when claims can’t be verified or tested but I find online there’s an overemphasis of this online.
Critical thinking does not mean that you dismiss the information. It just means that you take the potential bias into account.
The media are often pretty bad at doing this: they will often make some kind of average on what is being said, like "the scientific consensus says that cigarettes are killing you, but a study sponsored by Philip Morris says that they are not, so... well we don't know". Where actually it should be pretty obvious that Philip Morris is extremely biased on that, and the scientific consensus is not.
Not every voice is worth the same. During covid, there was a tendency to relay all kinds of opinions, without making the difference between actual experts and non-experts. Sometimes even saying "this person is a doctor, so they know", which is wrong: being a doctor doesn't make you an expert on coronaviruses or epidemiology.
Whenever we get information, we should think about how much trust we can put into it, how biased the authors maybe (consciously or not), etc. Elon Musk saying that going to Mars can help humanity is not worth much. Because he is rich and successful does not make him right. Yet many people relay "Musk predicts that [...]", as some kind of truth.
I guess I had public discourse in mind when I was saying people to readily invoke claims of bias. Also alternative media which tends to be on the other extreme of being overly cynical.
If PM appeared on the news obviously no one would believe them.
That said in Australia we in the last few years we’ve increased the cigarette tax, smoking hasn’t really decreased, but treasury has reported decreased revenue. It clearly looks like the tax has been increased too high if sellers are illegally selling untaxed cigarettes.
It would be very dumb of a cigarette company like PM to come out and point this out (as it would just be a springboard for proponents of the tax to play attack others pointing it out the issue atm), but if they did, it wouldn’t mean it’s not happening. Even if they have a bias it would be irrelevant.
Speculation around bias is just treated too much of smoking gun, and claims of it are more often motivated reasoning not critical thinking.
Small typo though: I believe you meant "crutch" not "crotch" in:
> feel people online to readily get hung up motivations and it’s sometimes a crotch for a readers inability to engage with ideas they find uncomfortable.
> people just aren’t as aware of issues with it compared to other forms of media.
Really? I'd think it would be the opposite. Wikipedia has always been decried by academics (and primary school teachers) as "not a real encyclopedia", without giving anywhere near as much of a critical eye toward other sources of information.
Sure, I think Wikipedia's reputation and public image has gotten better over the years, but that stigma of it being created and written by "unprofessional anonymous people" is still there to some extent.
And regardless, the kind of person who is going to watch Fox News or CNN without applying any critical thought to what they hear there... well, probably is going to do the same for Wikipedia pages, or any other source of information.
I think academics are too critical for a source of general surface level knowledge. But it’s no substitute for primary sources
I don’t think the problem is anyone can jump on and edit Wikipedia, they have process, but it’s the processes, informal institution’s, where the issues I’m referring arise. The average person hears there a process and assume this means it’s legitimate and flawless and are over confident in its quality.
It’s a great resource but I tin it’s helpful to be realistic about its limitations.
The problem with Wikipedia as an Academic source is that it's impossible to cite. You have no idea whether the information on there today is going to be there tomorrow or was there yesterday.
> I think a lot people underestimate how arbitrary some editorial decisions on wikipedia can be.
You can say that about Encyclopedia Brittanica or any of the old-school encyclopedias too. You can say that about the news desks at ABC, CBS, CNN, etc. You can say that about the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, etc.
I don't think people tend to blindly trust Wikipedia any more than they do for other sources of information. YouTube is full of garbage Wikipedia-regurgitating articles because Wikipedia is an easy, centralized source to scrape, not because of any level of trust they put in it.
I find this type of snap negative reaction boring, tiring, and unhelpful. It's disappointing that they often end up as top comments here. (Human psychology at work.)
My take: I expect that Wikipedia is more unbiased and a better reflection of reality then most -- maybe even all -- other sources of information on the Internet. On average! There are certainly crap articles, just like anywhere else.
If you look at the news in a democratic country vs an authoritarian one, you may easily walk away with the impression that the former is in a state of perpetual chaos, because of all the scandals, protests, resignations and snap elections. The authoritarian country will look like a paragon of stability in contrast. New infrastructure projects, record economic growth, seditious officials swiftly trialed and imprisoned. There is barely any conflict and the ones that do exist get solved quickly.
But unless you are a total mark, you should know that the stability is just a facade. That infrastructure project only went through because locals who opposed got beaten up by the cops, the economics data was cooked up by statisticians who fear the consequence of telling the truth and the seditious officials are only at the receiving end of justice because they lost the power struggle within the party. But of course you don’t know any of that, because why would the state let you?
Wikipedia, like democracies, run on transparency. This is why you get to read the editing history and talk page of any Wikipedia page and walk away with the impression that Wikipedia is uniquely full of drama. You never feel the same about the New York Times or the BBC because they run more like autocracies and keep everything inside. If we get a chance to read the internal emails of establishment media we will walk away with a very different impression.
I’ve said to a few other replies, but tbc I wasn’t promoting other mediums as alternatives.
> I don't think people tend to blindly trust Wikipedia any more than they do for other sources of information
I actually disagree or at least I think the extent to which people do is higher than it warrants. Especially to the degree people invoke it’s contents online
> I find this type of snap negative reaction boring, tiring, and unhelpful.
I didn’t ask for this to be the top comment, nor did I make you read it. I also don’t think it’s useless, just less useful than its proponents claim it is. And I think people do themselves a disservice in not looking beyond it when looking into a topic
I disagree, I know the opinion of WSJ, WP, FT or national like france24,DW, BBC, RT,AJ
Or at least know is always opinion Base, the facts are selected in a subjecive way.
Is way harder to know how opinionated Wikipedia is, and everything make them sound like their opinion is only base on facts but isn't.
It's funny how the more accurate a source gets the more it draws in people desiring accuracy.
Then this rather small cohort of high precision people express frustrations without providing the context of accuracy against the masses preferred methods (TikTok, cable news, broadcast, truth social)
So now the water is muddled and people and Ais are mistrained because an "absolute scale" is not used when discussing accuracy.
Idk if this how it came off but just tbc my point also wasn’t indirectly promoting traditional media.
I think a lot if ppl are rightly sceptical of traditional media, but I feel I see more people giving Wikipedia a pass or placing it on a higher pedestal as a resource than it should be at times.
Admittedly I think I would prefer Wikipedia to traditional media in most cases. Although that wasn’t really what I was getting at
Most people don't even have the reading level for full comprehension of a wiki article, let alone being able to discern the nuance of some aspects of the topic.
> Yeah perfect is the enemy of the good but imperfect is still imperfect.
This assumes perfection is attainable. I'd like to see your idea of a "perfect" book or article on some topic.
I think you’re assuming I’m calling for perfection and suggesting people abstain from something less than perfect, we live in reality most things aren’t perfect.
Even if Wikipedia was the least worse resource people would still do themselves a disservice in ignoring issues with it. Acknowledging issues isn’t the same as dismissing it entirely.
How is this elitist? These other resources are more accessible than ever, no gate keepers are keeping anyone from looking at them. I’m also not making any judgments about anyone who uses Wikipedia either.
JJ McCullough‘s gripe seems to be that wikipedia is kind of a mediocre summary of the information on a topic. But I'm not sure you should expect much more. You can always go to individual sources if you want that.
I've seen proudly uneducated people with no understanding take sledgehammers to history and real knowledge, and so I have no illusions about how Wikipedia is horrible, unfair, unprofessional, mercurial, and vulnerable to manipulation.
I would've gladly paid more in taxes to make Encyclopædia Britannica an international non-profit public service delivered in web form to all so long as each area were managed and curated with subject matter expert input.
I think if anything if Wikipedia contributes to encouraging someone take an interest in these things like this, despite not in school, that’s definitely a positive.
But if these are moderators on Wikipedia that sounds pretty bad, but even that would surprise me.
It’s tricky cause I think being dependent on funding would also expose it to censorship risk. Like if it was funded by the UN then it’s remit might be limited by what some more influential nations would allow. At the same time you might end up with higher quality resources in the less controversial topics of what’s allowed? But also alternatively bias ones on politically controversial topics.
If it was funded by individual nations it’s same problem possibly worse, if it’s funded by “benevolent” individuals there’s a risk it becomes tool to propagate their personal ideology. Even if it doesn’t, it would probably affect the reputation of the publication.
So in this respect I think this is one case where Wikipedia has some obvious appeal. I think they may need to elevate their standards in their moderation. It feels a bit elitist but maybe some kind of signal for qualifications in a field, or at least specific fields (like natural sciences).
That said political interference aside, some fields are very subjective or operate on lines of thinking that’s can’t be challenged through falsification, are last in the social sciences. Like history can be very political.
Maybe a nonfree encyclopaedia isn’t so bad if it’s free from these issues, but can it even be sustained by a market? idk
Reading (the right) books is definitely the best way to learn about a topic, but its not great for quickly looking up random stuff. Books can spread misinformation too, from Malleus Maleficarum to Erich von Däniken.
It is useful for quickly looking up simple facts, and provides a list of sources.
The video makes some interesting criticisms. The lack of diversity is not surprising. Dominated by white, male, American's with time on their hands! how would have thought that? Its very obviously American dominated (at least the English version).
I once partly cross verify a virologist's lecture. He confused a brother of an important scientist who made an important discovery. I have no doubt that he knows what he's talking about when it comes to viruses.
All in all, checking other sources to see if they lines up is a pain and labor intensive, never mind actually checking to see if the references are actually sound evidence.
It's not supposed to be a learning source, it's not supposed to be an exhaustive reference on topics, it's not supposed to replace books and it has to be editorialized a lot to match the format.
It's by far the best encyclopedia ever created by mankind, on all metrics, but it's fundamentally an encyclopedia and nothing else.
And similarly about History and Geography YouTube, the problem isn't that they are regurgitated from Wikipedia, it's just YouTube is an entertainment platform.
holy heck there is so much wrong about this video. i can't believe "internet influencers" can just turn on their cameras and spew so much untruth without a care in the world...
comparatively wikipedia is imperfect, but much better than this kind of slop.
Feel free to actually articulate the actual issues you’re referring to.
It’s been a while since I watched it but the thing I remember taking away was you can do a lot better than Wikipedia, and he encouraged people to spend more time looking at primary sources for deeper research, and points out how it’s the basis of a lot of slop on YouTube.
This article is talking about Portal:Current Events on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events). The current events articles are fantastic! Normal newspaper articles are status updates. Current events articles synthesize news to present the current, comprehensive understanding about an event. It’s cool to monitor how current events articles evolve over time.
I would love to see news sites copying at least some of the technology of wikipedia. First and foremost every article should be versioned and it should be easy to see diffs. Every version of a news article should have a permanent link to it. Why don‘t news agencies use git for example?
Also news articles should be written using a markup language that is easy to parse and easy to read by AI agents. Instead most of them still write articles in word and convert it from docx into HTML or PDF. That usually generates terrible documents that break accessibility.
And of course a common markup language for news articles would enable many applications. But I guess we will land on Mars before we can have something like that.
More professional organisations definitely have some kind of CMS, with potentially their own version management (at least for what’s published). But I also don’t think we can fault people for preparing their piece in their preferred writing tool.
I just can’t see existing news agencies doing this of their own volition. As Generating stories themselves is what keeps news agencies in business.
Unless they had a new competitor who had who kept running rings around them with all three features. But it’s going to come back to having better stories or better long form pieces (depending on the publications niche), as that’s ultimately why someone visits their site.
I could however see some 3rd party doing this like an extension that overlays someone’s site or acts as alternative presentation of their content.
When there's some big ongoing thing in the news there'll be many articles on that same topic on news websites and sometimes you can't even find the original one that tells what actually happened. Wikipedia's article on it is usually a great summary
Yes, and sometimes they are very different. I was surprised to see the German Wikipedia had a couple of articles on Scottish history that were better than the English language one!
News, influencers, Wikipedia, almost all information we consume nowadays is intentional. And not even getting into billions poured into American colleges by the same people.
When I was working in the heart of conservative online media in West Palm Beach—nestled between Rush Limbaugh’s studio, Mar-a-Lago, and Newsmax—targeting Evangelical Christians in the Bible Belt, my salary (and the direction things eventually went) was being paid for by the Saudis. At the time, the propaganda was mostly “pro-oil” and “climate change is a hoax.” Around that same period, those same Saudis bought a 10% stake in Fox News and helped shape the narrative for millions of Christians who tune in and treat it like their main source of news.
So yeah, if you were ever curious where the profits go every time you fill up your car with gas… there.
I thought I was just building media websites. I didn’t even see the content until after six months. I put in my one month notice, finished what I was working on, and left. The amount of money they offered me to stay was ridiculous. I don’t blame people at Fox News for bending the knee and taking that Saudi money -- I just couldn’t make myself do it.
“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” A lot of people are going to spend eternity in hell for propaganda and lies.
Saudis are invested in a huge range of things in America. It has historical roots in the petrodollar. The basic deal of it that that they would only sell their oil in USD, which gave the USD a de facto backing after we defaulted in Bretton Woods (which was a de jure gold backing). That gave the USD a huge chunk of stability and in exchange we agreed to sell them weapons and broadly support them, while in exchange they were also asked to purchase US treasuries and assets with surplus revenues.
Over time this led to Saudis being involved in just about everything. For instance the biggest owner of 'old Twitter' under Dorsey was Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud. Needless to say the zeitgeist on old Twitter and Saudi Arabia have basically nothing in common, so you're probably seeing ideological motivation where the real motivation is generally just monetary. Not every country is conspiring to subvert other countries to their ideology.
Basically Saudia Arabia is filthy rich because of oil, but they fully understand that even if we continue burning oil until we run out, we will run out, within the lifetime of some people living today. So they have to migrate their economy away from oil and, on the timeline for such a revolutionary shift, they have very little time left. This is likely what MBS sees as what will define his legacy.
Because I believe in understanding, forgiveness, and redemption.
I have a responsibility not to lie and kill, as commanded in the Bible. I also have a responsibility to tell people not to lie and kill, as commanded in the Bible.
At the same time, our understanding of the science of the mind, as described by Carol Dweck in "Mindset", is that people are not fixed and can change. That is why understanding, forgiveness, and redemption matter. They are essential for helping other people through the process of repentance -- the changing of a mindset.
Can you not understand, forgive, and believe in redemption, but also judge?
"I understand why you took oil money from the royal family famous for murdering journalists; money is nice to have. However, I judge you for it and will not associate with you until you redeem yourself through seeking forgiveness and changing your behavior."
I was introduced to Maslow's hierarchy of needs 25 years ago around the same time I read about Pavlov's dogs.
The need to belong is extraordinarily motivating. It became obvious that the cults leveraged the need in the individual to belong to a group by accepting the person without judgement first rather than attacking the person they are trying bring into their group pushing them away.
I get told this a lot by liberals, that it's wrong that I shouted in a cop's face that he's a fascist pig and a traitor to the people, now he'll never support my cause, but I'm not really sure I agree. The cop, and the nazis he's protecting from me, will never join "my group" in ten million years, no matter how nice I am to them. Do you believe otherwise?
Yeah I get what you mean, but it’s not really about converting the cop into “your group.”
It’s about what your actions do to everyone watching, and what it does to you.
Plato makes the point that you don’t make a dog better by beating it. You just make it worse. Same with people. You’re not persuading, you’re escalating.
If the goal is change, you don’t have to be nice, but you do have to be effective!
Well, let's explore the topic then, because for example aforementioned cults will use protest or other uncomfortable situations to solidify indoctrination. See: Mormons and Jehovah's witnesses sending people door to door to proselytize knowing full well the majority of people will be annoyed by this, which will Other the proselytizers and make them feel like the church members are the only people who they're safe around. Or the "God Hates F*s" Church doing their protests. Taken to the extreme: the Cultural Revolution's struggle sessions, designed explicitly to make as many people as possible feel that they were culpable alongside the Party. So, maybe not great for the opponents or the observers, but very good at solidifying the base itself.
Personally I'm not interested in running a cult, but I'm very interested in anything that empowers people.
In the case of an anti ICE protest where we shout mean things at the gestapo, a couple side effects include the empowerment of participants and locals. See for example how the dynamic shifts for the woman sheltering a door dash driver from ICE once more neighbors start showing up: https://www.reddit.com/r/minnesota/comments/1q8vvwa/st_paul_...
In the case of the various anti Nazi protests I've been to (proud boy rallies) it's also been good for generating images of just how many people are in opposition to racists.
It's not necessarily always about persuading, sometimes it's more about, well I suppose "circling the wagons?" Solidifying community support, demonstrating capabilities, empowering people and communities, and disempowering, defanging, or scaring racists and fascists. Finally, it's great for recruitment: fed up liberals turn up to their first protest, get one hell of an adrenaline rush screaming at cops and running away from tear gas, and then may later ask the person pouring milk onto their face how they can help outside of protesting. In that sense the cop's escalations, while barbaric and inexcusable, are the unconvincing escalation you mentioned that in fact helps us.
But for you then, I'm not sure your opinions on ICE as gestapo but perhaps humor my position on their danger, how would you instruct anti-fascists to operate in the USA right now in the face of ICE raids? The original idea is, what, applying Christian values? Jesus threw out the merchants and moneychangers, did he not? For certain people, he decided he wasn't in the business of forgiveness.
For what it's worth, I generally agree with what you're saying, my goal in conversation is always to just pull people left. I just have a practical and situationally pragmatic limit.
Looks like Prince Alwaleed bin Talal's ownership of Fox was between 5.5% to 7% during the two-decade period of 1997 ~ 2017. He divested during an anti-corruption purge.
What level of moral compromise is acceptable in this world to take whatever money is offered? Presumably the job of hitman is unacceptable? Where's the line drawn?
Personally I'd say that lying to perpetuate a system that is leading to various populous parts of the world becoming uninhabitable is on the wrong side of that line.
There are agendas there, just like in every human endeavor, but it definitely hasn't been "hijacked", it's still by far the best single repository of human knowledge out there. If I had to choose one website to take with me to a desert island, it's an obvious choice.
We should keep talking about the issues and improving things, but don't throw out the baby with bathwater.
> We should keep talking about the issues and improving things, but don't throw out the baby with bathwater.
Yeah, I wonder what solution people propose that claim that Wikipedia is 'hijacked' or 'compromised' and pushing agendas?
While Wikipedia is not perfect, it is the best encyclopedia we currently have, mostly due to collective efforts and maintainers that care about the state of Wikipedia. I would even say that it is a good thing that there is this transparency, that states and capital are trying to influence Wikipedia because then you know that you may take some articles with a grain of salt or can actively push against it.
Every alternative to Wikipedia that I have seen so far is one that claims to be more truthful than the original, but in the end these are platforms that push agendas without the transparency and attempt to further obscure power relations under the pretext of truth.
Every alternative to Wikipedia will have to solve the problems that Wikipedia already has to be a better alternative. However, I do think these are fundamental unsolvable problems
and everyone who claims to have solved this is part of a power struggle over who defines what is considered true.
More transparency around the admins and the hierarchy above it would be a good start, as would some kind of countervailing pressure to the ballooning of meta rules (bylaws). For instance:
- Oppose the "Super Mario" effect: if admins do something ordinary users would get banned for, they get banned too, they don't just lose their admin title.
- Implement restrictions on Arb Com to make it worthy of its "supreme court" moniker. Provide prior notice, allow representation, access to evidence ahead of the case, and require the Arb Com to disclose the logic of any automated scripts they use for mass judging (e.g. counting proportion of edits being reverts, or that counts every change to a reference as "reference vandalism"). Grant defendants the ability to force the Committee's judgment to be disclosed to the public, with PII redacted if necessary.
- Require that precedent be recorded for unclear meta rules: what counts as a violation of e.g. canvassing? When do reversions become evidence or proof of "ownership"?
- Create an independent appeals body for Arb Com decisions. Like the Arb Com itself, the logic or source code for any scripts they use to aid their decisions, should be public. Ideally, choose the independent appeals body by different means than the Arb Com itself is chosen, e.g. by random selection of users with a certain activity level, independent of the ordinary admin track.
- Grant all users the right to be forgotten (courtesy vanishing), not just users in good standing, so that users bullied off the platform can remove their proverbial stockade.
- Create a mechanism that forces rules to be refactored or reduced in scope. Just spitballing, one possible way might be to limit the growth of any given WP: page per unit time, require negative growth for some of them, or in some way reward editors who reduce their extent.
There may be fundamental unsolvable problems, but that doesn't mean the current system can't be improved.
It is a great example of the shaping of opinions the OP claims Wikipedia suffers from. It is a textbook example of the way the detractors of Wikipedia comport themselves.
Accuse the site of of exactly what you’re doing at this exact moment.
it absolutely has been. like every online community, Wikipedia is extremely vulnerable to the terminally online and/or the mentally ill, to whom everything is political. like clockwork, every remotely political article cites opinions only from a certain perspective, often quoting glorified nobodies to assert the narrative the '''editors''' want to present. dissenting opinions, no matter how overwhelmingly common among the real people, are mentioned in passing at best and often derisively.
I went to Wikimania in London and the community who turned up were pretty middle of the road types. Mostly retired males doing after it they'd finished with their prior job in a variety of fields.
For example, this article goes over disinformation by polish nationalists on Holocaust related articles. There's a chart with 10 editors accounting for 50% of the edits and another chart that shows disproportionately citing authors that in reality are not academically are under-cited
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That Wikipedia has been co-opted by mentally ill people is an extraordinary claim. You should provide more than feelings.
Wikipedia's model does favour autistic* people and those with a lot of time on their hands. You can see this in the sheer volume of some contributions, their focuses and the invention of obscure rules and Wikipedia specific jargon e.g. peacock terms etc.
* ASD is not a mental illness but it can produce quirky and obsessive behaviour.
The Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia was very much hijacked. As was the Lowland Scots one, except in the second case the individual made the news. The Gaelic one has a German guy running it who has several vanity articles and has chased most other users off apart from some government employees.
I think for anything controversial we need a completely different model.
Officially wikipedia is NPOV but an especially contentious and murky political mudfight decides what counts as a "citeable" source and what doesnt and what counts as notable and what doesnt.
It also has an incredibly strong western bias.
Every government, corporation and billionaire pays somebody to participate in that fight as well, using every dirty trick they can.
Until we have a model that can sidestep these politics (which Wikipedia seemingly has no real desire to do) and aggregate sources objectively I think it will continue to suck.
I agree with the issues, but it definitely doesn't suck if compared to every single other massive endeavor out there. As I see it, it's like that quote about democracy - it's the worst way to attempt to catalogue human knowledge, except for all those other forms that have been tried.
> It also has an incredibly strong western bias.
What's the issue with that? Why shouldn't English Wikipedia have a strong Western bias? I've explored and participated in several other Wikipedias and other collaborative projects, and each is biased towards the worldviews common to the culture that its main editors come from. I don't think there's a way to have an encyclopedic project without any cultural bias at all (if such a platonic ideal could even be properly defined), and seeing how Western values include a significant focus on pluralism, freedom of expression and scientific inquiry, I think this situation is much better than the alternatives.
>I agree with the issues, but it definitely doesn't suck if compared to every single other massive endeavor out there.
Compared to what? I dont really see much aggregation being done at all on Wikipedia's scale.
>What's the issue with that?
It's supposed to be impartial and objective and it sells itself as such but if you see how the sausage is made it is patently the exact opposite.
>I don't think there's a way to have an encyclopedic project without any cultural bias at all
I think it's perfectly possible to have an encyclopedia which is more liberal about allowing more sources to be used and which provides tools and metadata about those sources and gives tools to the user allowing them to filter accordingly.
Whereas "Blessing" one group of sources and condemning another will inevitably turn it into a propaganda outlet for whomever controls it. You might think that this is the only way but that represents more of a failure of imagination than a lack of options.
The way some billionaires are described on Wikipedia you'd think they were saints. Even though most of their philanthropy is a tax write-off and goal-orientated (producing good publicity for them or pushing society in a direction they want).
But by claiming one thing and doing the exact opposite (on a statistical quantitative basis), Wikipedia and all other western outlets have become just a front for propaganda which is also the reason why I don't believe in "Persecution of Uyghurs in China"
German Scholars Reveal Shocking TRUTH About China’s Xinjiang Province
That video's main gripe seems to be that western media gloss over things being kicked off by islamic terrorists but from the Wikipedia:
>...Uyghur terrorists killed dozens of Han Chinese in coordinated attacks from 2009 to 2016. These included the September 2009 Xinjiang unrest, the 2011 Hotan attack, the 2014 Kunming attack, the April 2014 Ürümqi attack, and the May 2014 Ürümqi attack. The attacks were conducted by Uyghur separatists, with some orchestrated by the Turkistan Islamic Party (a UN-designated terrorist organization)...
"The US government hates China and also hates Muslims but suddenly cares about Muslims in China" - forgot who quoted this. Compare US stance on Gaza. If media can ban discussions on gaza, can't it invent phantom genocide in Xinjiang Province? Something to think about.
Also let's not forget "Persecution of Uyghurs in China" use to be titled "Uyghur Genocide" or some variation thereof for years. Never mind plurality of UN countries has recognized PRC actions in XJ as counter extremist/terrorists, or even among western bloc most countries did not label it as "genocide", bu somehow wiki and captured editors went with the genocide framing, aka, fucking we lie, we cheat, we steal Mike Pompeo serving as secretary of state for US geopolitical interest designation during sino-us coldwar. Because Wiki NPOV isn't based on reality but "reliable sources" which just happen to be western aligned that parrot each other to manufacture consensus / propaganda. Even "persecution of Uyghurs" still biased considering plurality of world still considers PRC actions in XJ as de-deradicalization / counterterrorism, and the numbers have only swung more in PRC favour over time - geopolitical reality is "Chinese War on Terrorism" whose causalities paled in comparison to wiki's "(Global) War on Terrorism" that would otherwise be characterized as "genocide/persecution of Iraqis/Afghans" which killed and displaced millions. Wonder if Obama would have gotten a Nobel Peace prize if that article title existed.
internet altered the way society communicates and why, a lot of discussions now end up by "show me your sources" aka "what is the truth" and it's often centralized into some accepted source like wikipedia
where there simple single point of 'truth' like that before ?
my 2cents is that humans are not meant to live in one global absolute truth and we all lived in relative fuzzy reality before, it was slow and imperfect but not as easy to tamper with
Showing sources is not a bad thing. The harm is not questioning sources. A lot of people rely on poor sources. Whatever what the first result in Google historically, and now LLM summaries.
maybe my viewpoint is weird but i think this distorted human interactions on multiple domains.
of course we all wanted to communicate faithful information, but now any discussion turns into a religious difference, and the escape is of course "who has the truest source". people don't necessarily understand the content, they just defer the validity to an official third party, so basically we're back to zero.. but we're all debating everything now.
and it makes me think that locally, we chatting, was never meant to exchange rigorous information, but mostly to share opinions lightly, more emotional than rigorous and scientific
We still live in that fuzzy reality. Not much has changed.
It doesnt really matter if the whole world has access to the same information if the whole world trusts completely different sources.
For better or worse we trust those sources exclusively because of tribal affinity.
I doubt many people in the US could be persuaded to trust Global Times over the New York Times even if you could prove it had a better prediction track record. Wrong tribe.
And now it's given by the mainstream media, which is mostly owned by a few very rich people and pushes the same type of propaganda as before (but now globally).
There was a point where I would agree with that, but we seem to be moving past that. The "truth" seems to be coming more from social media influencers than mainstream media now.
> Colleges are political, and donations are made to assure they keep on being political.
Ok, to clarify:
> > And not even getting into billions poured into American colleges by the same people.
Which American colleges, by what people, and what does "being political" mean? Maybe I'm very ignorant of the USA, are these just known things to Americans?
You need only to look at how many actual well credentialed doctors get their Wiki pages smeared with words like "misinformation spreader" for dissenting against covid narratives
It seems today that he was just wrong and used to make "dubious" clinical trials.
> As of 2025, 46 of Raoult's research publications have been retracted, and at least another 218 of his publications have received an expression of concern from their publishers, due to questions related to ethics approval for his studies.
Raoult's case is so strange.. he's not the usual fringe doctor, up until covid, he had a center seat in national health institution and everybody around him was listening. I still don't get why nobody was wary of him there..
> Anyone with two braincells could see it at the time.
It seems a captain obvious now but it wasn't so at the time. (Or maybe my.braincells.count() < 2)
Many people listened because he wasn't some youtuber doing his research, he was the head of the "Infectious and Tropical Emergent Diseases Research Unit" ad the Faculty of Medicine of Marseille.
I've watched one of his interviews where he stated that people survived in his unit with hydroxychloroquine and that he had numbers to prove it.
When you look at his credentials, and my.braincells.count(), it was hard to identify it as misinformation.
I definitely exaggerated with my "two braincells". Even the french president said about the guy "we need more people like him" (although I wouldn't say he's that smart himself...).
But even without being knowledgeable about statistics, there were a lot of very serious people giving very good arguments against his results. You just had to see them. And seeing all the Facebook doctors lunatics instantly side with Raoult and defend him tooth and nail should definitely raise some red flags...
They probably mean people like Robert Malone [1], who - despite being well accomplished in a related field - spread verifiably wrong information about vaccines on social media during the pandemic. There are many people like him who showed past accomplishments in a related field, but were totally out of their depth when interviewed about covid on the Joe Rogan podcast or similar.
Yet in officialdom, that kind of thing was perfectly acceptable. In Scotland we had a dentist running Covid lockdown, which is ironic since public dental services were decimated by it and never recovered.
You can simply do a Wikipedia search for "misinformation doctor" and get plenty of results, even with its search system, let alone if you use a search engine to power the search.
I would think that posting any particular person would descend in to a pointless argument over whether those claims are merited. Do you have some better reason to want a particular name?
If there is misinformation on Wikipedia it can be corrected. Unless you are claiming that all hits for "misinformation doctor" are incorrect, a few examples to verify and correct would be helpful.
I can point you to several pages that are protected by groups of interested admins that will make changing even blatantly obvious misinformation impossible, let alone contentious stuff.
Have you ever tried changing something on Wikipedia regarding politics (which now includes several health issues) or religion?
Edit: also, I did write "I would think that posting any particular person would descend in to a pointless argument over whether those claims are merited." and yet you're suggesting I get into that argument. I quite clearly don't want to because it's pointless, and we had years of it anyway.
> I can point you to several pages that are protected by groups of interested admins that will make changing even blatantly obvious misinformation impossible, let alone contentious stuff.
Some 'misinformation' is hard to correct because the corrections are reversed by those who are intent on spreading the 'misinformation'. This is especially prevalent around contentious and/or politically sensitive subjects like the mentioned SARS2-related cases. This is what makes it hard to trust articles on such subjects on Wikipedia.
If this is quite widespread, it should be fairly straightforward to point to an example of a page that's being defaced with misinformation, which would include an edit history and perhaps a Talk page documenting whatever sides to the debate there is that's preventing consensus.
I don't disagree that weird bullshit occasionally happens on Wikipedia, but I have noticed that as soon as light is cast on it, it usually evaporates and a return to factual normality is established.
My go-to example is the "Constitution" of Medina[1]
> It is widely considered to be one of the first written constitutions of mankind.
Now go to the page on constitutions in history[2] and see how far down the list that one is.
Now go back to the Constitution of Medina (itself an example of misinformation, since it should be charter or even more precisely, treaty, but those protecting the page have meddled with the title too) and look at the reference it uses[3] and what it says to get a feel for the kind of "reference" that is being used there, and then try and update said Wikipedia page by removing the parts about its being the first.
The talk pages of both show that invested groups have been trying to force their views, and they've done it quite successfully.
Let us all know how you get on with that, and then I'll point you to the next example, and the next example…
Some other notable things to check are co-founder Larry Sanger's 9 theses[4], and the news that broke yesterday about a PR firm doing "Wikilaundering"[5].
I don't really understand how you've come to that conclusion. If you look at the protection log[1], Constitution of Medina was protected in 2016 for a bit under a month, and never outside of that. The "earliest constitution" was also discussed in 2016[2][3], and there was consensus not to include the claim. Then, in November 2025, it was re-added by a new editor who made no other edits[4].
Looking at the talk page of Constitution, it was discussed exactly once, in 2005[5].
>> those protecting the page have meddled with the title too
> Why is this "consensus not to include the claim" relevant when the claim was already included?
Because anyone can dispute anything. But saying it's some kind of agenda by a group of admins is incorrect.
It's funny how every source of knowledge converges to the same thing: mass media. Telling you what to think and trying to influence your behaviour rather than trying to inform you.
Using facts, omitting facts or emphasising particular facts over others in order to mislead you. The scientific journals are now included with their anonymous editorials. Peer review is pretty much the same as fact-checking.
Contrast this with good fiction, which employs falsehoods to point towards the truth: truth which cannot easily be verified but which is our real bread and butter.
It clarifies exactly what that means. It doesn’t say that the information have to pass the test of time. Only that it is not a place of original reporting, unsourced gossip, etc.
I suggest everybody here take a look at Matthew White's excellent WikiWatch. Despite the last entry being 2006, it is still a very valuable criticism of Wikipedia today.
In the UK I would say most people are proud of the BBC^; many people I speak to are smug when comparing it to e.g. Fox News, CNBC, etc... I think this is a big mistake, and that the USA system is actually better.
It's impossible for one news source to be unbiased, and the delusion that it is unbiased is dangerous. If you truly believe a source is "the truth" and unbiased it allows you to switch off any critical thinking; the information bypasses any protections you have.
Much better to have many news sources where the bias is evident and the individual has to synthesise an opinion themselves (not claiming this is perfect by any means, but a perfect system does not exist).
It is obviously the case that Wikipedia is biased, and I think competition is a great thing. We would be better served by a market of options to use our own faculties than a false sense of comfort in a fake truth.
^though many are refusing to pay the (almost) legally mandatory "tv-license".
I agree we need multiple news sources, but the UK has multiple news sources. What the BBC adds is one with a different funding model so different biases. I do not think this works as well as it did historically.
As for unwillingness to pay the license fee, the biggest issue is the rise of streaming alternatives. It reduced the BBC from providing about half of available TV to being one among many providers so the license fee no longer feels like good value for money.
Its not mandatory. I have never owned a TV. If you do not watch broadcast TV or Iplayer you do not have to have a TV license.
I also think Capita's aggressive scare tactics in trying to get people to pay the license fee have created a lot of hostility towards the BBC.
I think a significant part of the pushback against the TV license is that it pays for the BBC, I believe many people are of the opinion that they'd be perfectly happy not having the BBC and not paying the licence fee. A significant portion of the people paying for the BBC have never watched anything on it.
I am not proud of the BBC at all. I have boycotted their licence fee for almost as long as Wikipedia has been around.
If you want to know who the UK is going to war with next, watch the BBC.
Their news is horrendously biased when it comes to the British royal family. They have an institutional bias against Scottish independence since it would cut 10% of their licence fee. (Their provision to areas outside the Home Countries is a disgrace and patronising.)
Some people seems to confuse, willingly or not, unbiased with targeting neutral point of view, free of any perspective.
We can step back from a debate and reports who's saying what, but this is still reporting ongoing debate. And still involving attention within its considerations, which do change our mental process as much as performative effects can go. That's as opposed to remain completely unaware the debate could be even be considered.
no one is going out of ontological constraints and brings absolute truth from transexistential considerations.
No one who regularly watches biased news sources does so while acknowledging the constant bias. And I don’t think most people think the BBC is unbiased, it’s constantly attacked as having bias to both sides of the aisle ironically. The BBC is far from perfect but it’s in a different league to Fox News to the point that it feels disingenuous to suggest you’d be better off watching Fox News while telling yourself that you’re filtering out the bias.
Really? News coverage on Wikipedia is a lot more reliable than (say) Fox News. Breaking news events in particular get a lot of eyeballs and while you obviously can't take everything as gospel, genuinely wrong info is usually purged pretty quickly.
Most news outlets get their news either from press releases or press agencies. It means you effectively get the same talking points across different outlets.
Fox is designed to promote Republican viewpoints and MSNBC to promote Democrat ones. They present little outside them and are usually telling the same small selection of stories from different angles.
Wow, I would expect there would at least be a single mention of "born Dagny Benedict" somewhere at the beginning of the background section as is typical in other pages. If this is intentional, to omit this entirely seems like it unnecessarily politicizes the issue rather than documenting the history of a person.
> Wow, I would expect there would at least be a single mention of "born Dagny Benedict" somewhere at the beginning of the background section as is typical in other pages. If this is intentional, to omit this entirely seems like it unnecessarily politicizes the issue rather than documenting the history of a person.
It's all very 1984-esque; I'm seeing shades of "We were never/always at war with Oceania/Eurasia".
This is revisionist history, and the scrubbing of previously correct but now incorrect "history" should be viewed with suspicion.
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth.
> It's all very 1984-esque; I'm seeing shades of "We were never/always at war with Oceania/Eurasia".
This is a hilarious take.
There's little things less “1984-esque” than a small self-structured collective organization enforcing the preference of an individual on how they should be named.
It's the opposite of “a dictatorship imposing its views on individuals through propaganda”, it's a collective of people helping an individual, dead for not being as society wanted them to be, have their personal wish fulfilled even after death. People who want to dead name the victim, are the one who want to erase the individual to make it fit the mold of society, they are the totalitarian hivemind, they are the Tom Parsons of our reality.
Orwell being a lifelong anarchist socialist, there's very little doubt on which side he'd be in that debate.
You’re hitting the wrong aspect of the problem. You should use someone’s old name when it’s absolutely necessary, not as a matter of course. People change their name for a reason after all, and if their latest one suffices, let it be.
In the case of this person, they were not notable under their birth name. Unfortunately, their transgender status is the whole reason they’re notable, and the article clearly states that they are. I don’t need that person’s old name to understand the situation.
Pretty much every married woman (who changed/added to her last name) has her birth name written there, even if she was never notable/known as Knavs or Skłodowska.
More info is usually better than less info, if you personally don't need to know something, that does not mean that that info should be removed.
This is strictly untrue for an Encyclopedia, which seeks to present only a summation of relevant and highly notable information about a person, making it far different than e.g. a biography.
Most people, who adopt a different married name, don't do so because they consider their former name to be offensive or insulting.
If I'm proud of my name, you should include it. If I'm ashamed of my name, you should omit it, unless it's important context or information. You have to have a clear articulable reason above, it's a real detail.
> Pretty much every married woman (who changed/added to her last name) has her birth name written there, even if she was never notable/known as Knavs or Skłodowska.
None of them changed their name on purpose nor rejected it, the comparison is moot.
> If this is intentional, to omit this entirely seems like it unnecessarily politicizes the issue rather than documenting the history of a person.
I feel as if you're trying to inject a political motivation about the decision to omit that detail when a simpler one is better. If something of little note is offensive to the person you're talking about, it's disrespectful to them as a person, to their humanity, to mention it.
E.g. You would only mention someone was born, to parents who were avid members of the KKK, if and only if, their life story related in some way.
Otherwise you're trying to introduce some preexisting bias that doesn't belong. In this example, if this person left their community to fight racism. The information about the set of likes reasons they got involved, are worth the bias of introducing the assumptions you're reasonably allowed to make about their parents.
If they find that religion offensive, and spent their life exclusively on epidemiology, it's wrong to include that detail, true or not.
Then, do consider the "political" aspect, that has led to the deadname policy that Wikipedia has. Many people, who for their own cultural reasons, want to disrespect someone, will refuse to address or refer to some individual the way they want to be. That behavior is no different from calling some one fuckface, and refusing to address them differently. You've selected something they find offensive, in order to bully and harass them, needlessly. Given that toxic reality, for cases like this, it's better to defer to not mentioning the name they were given at birth, because that detail might be used against them. Again, there might be some stronger reason you would want to include it. But it's better to err on the side of respecting the individual.
There's a tricky ethical question here: if someone changed their name and ask for not being called their former name ever again, you can either ignore their will, which is rude, or chose to follow it but then you are doing a disservice to the public's understanding.
The secind option used to be the norm on wikipedia even 15 years ago, but Anti-trans activists using dead-naming as a slur against trans people triggered the shift from the second option to the first.
As usual assholes are why we can't have nice things.
> There's a tricky ethical question here: if someone changed their name and ask for not being called their former name ever again, you can either ignore their will, which is rude, or chose to follow it but then you are doing a disservice to the public's understanding.
Calling somebody with his former name and mentioning his former name in a Wikipedia page are two completely different things. Using the fact that the former is seen as rude by some to avoid the second is in my opinion just an example of the level of extremism of the pro-trans activists.
But if in fact it made sense, shouldn't we completely remove any reference of the previous name also from the pages of people like Yusuf Islam [1] or Muhammad Ali [2] ?
Many married women are known under their husbands last names, from Maria Salomea Skłodowska, Betty Marion Ludden to Melanija Knavs. Some celebrities even use stage names, such as Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta.
Many of these women are not really known under those names, but somehow, they're still listed on their wiki pages.
Most of the married women on Wikipedia didn't get the choice of keeping their own name, so we cannot really compare it to someone who changed their name.
Same for stage names, people don't use stage name because they want to escape their former name, they use stage names because it's cool.
And when people use a pseudonym and want to keep their real identity secret for personal reasons, their name doesn't appear on Wikipedia, and nobody is ever complaining about that! It's as if people were obsessed by trans people in particular…
But it's not a secret, the name has been mentioned in mainsteam media on multiple occasions, and even here, in this thread on HN.
> It's as if people were obsessed by trans people in particular…
Yet, they keep every other name on wikipedia, especially if we're talking about peoples legal names, except if the person was trans for some reason. Wikipedia is the one making exceptions here for one group in particular.
Nope. When it's an unknown transgender person who died for being themselves, perhaps it's stupid to put the older name there. World renown Ellen Page is deadnamed right there at the top. Because they were known for decades worldwide under that name.
The goal of an encyclopedia is to have a high signal/noise ratio. If you put literally everything on a subject on its page there, it becomes fundamentally useless.
And in that particular case, the only people you satisfy by putting the info there, are the bullies who caused their suicide.
> But it's not a secret, the name has been mentioned in mainsteam media on multiple occasions, and even here, in this thread on HN.
Most pseudonyms aren't real secrets either, plenty of people knew the real name or face of people posting under a pseudonym but that doesn't make it OK to post it on Wikipedia.
> Yet, they keep every other name on wikipedia, especially if we're talking about peoples legal names
Ah yes, “every other” except for the ones they don't. We've already talked about people with pseudonyms right here!
> Wikipedia is the one making exceptions here for one group in particular.
One group that happened to be harassed (and, unfortunately often, assaulted) for having changed their name in the first place, hence the “exception”: the group is exceptionally vulnerable.
In the Universe, yes. In the closed system of Wikipedia, no, it's a well defined term with clearly established criteria, tested over the years on thousands of Talk pages on controversial pages, of how to achieve consensus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
> Calling somebody with his former name and mentioning his former name in a Wikipedia page are two completely different things
Except when people keep vandalizing Wikipedia renaming people there with their dead name. And yes it happens over and over and over again.
Because the most active extremists on the topic are by far the anti-trans crowd. (And it's not even close, there are trans people assaulted every week, sometimes going as far as murder this is extremism).
And again, Wikipedia keeps mentioning the former name when it's necessary (look for Bradley Manning on Wikipedia, the page redirects to Chelsea Manning but the old name is state because it's important).
According to MOS:GENDERID [1], a person's former name can be used when they were notable under that name. You're trying to make it out as if there's some nefarious double standard when there's not, editors just want Wikipedia to be clear and encyclopedic.
It's incredible that in a discussion about brutal violence against a child, the child victim is being painted as the "extremist"!
The use of the masculine pronoun here when we're referring to someone who transitioned from male kind of gives away that you're probably less concerned with searchability and preservation of history, and more concerned with promoting a transphobic agenda. I suppose it's possible you were using it as a generic pronoun, but in that case I would have expected "they." Am I wrong?
If someone uses "he" word it does not means antitransism. My point is that trying to euphemize "he" word is anistraightism. And I am even not an antigayist.
If your words can be reversed so easily it means that you have no idea but a pure propaganda instead. Famous anti-white-straight-man-ism seems as a dangerous thing to me, so I oppose this unfamous Davos-protracted diversity woke ideology.
We're talking about the male pronoun used in the context of a discussion of a trans woman, not some kind of men's rights thing. Did you think I was arguing that saying "he" is bad because all men are evil or something? That's how faithless your interpretation of the arguments of non transphobic people has become?
> Woke is essentually anti-nationalism and anti-white-suppremacism.
Then, depending on your definition of nationalism, it sounds like it's an unimpeachably good thing to be Woke, so I'm super confused where you're coming from here.
To be clear: I was saying that the OP was purposefully misgendering Nex Benedict in order express their transphobia.
Wake up, please. Noone else except of white suprematist will support your protransism, think about it. Analyze what nations typically are against it and who will protect you in the special place where you have written that comment when the yellows will come. It is OK to be transgender, but only while you are protected. White suprematists may protect transgender values but they need a freedom to be free from that kind of euphemization you are spreading.
I personally prefer not having other people decide for me which facts are and aren't relevant, I think that is unhelpful and potentially dangerous (some people think what happened in Tienanmen Square isn't relevant to the general population, do you agree?).
For a transgender person, I may have known them before they transitioned for example and may not necessarily be familiar with their new name, that's a reason off the top of my head that it would be relevant to me but not necessarily you.
> I personally prefer not having other people decide for me which facts are and aren't relevant,
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't any presentation of information prepared by humans, information wherein someone else decided which facts were relevant? The only way around this I can think of is personal performance of all experimentation in human history from first principles. Unfortunately you will probably need to learn those first principles through reading things written by other humans.
> I personally prefer not having other people decide for me which facts are and aren't relevant
Then don't read an encyclopedia, because the entire raison d'être of that medium is about distilling “broadly useful” facts about the world, with no pretense of exhaustiveness.
Reading any encyclopedia, for that matters. The job of an encyclopedist is literally to distill “generally useful” information, it has never been about being exhaustive.
> I personally prefer not having other people decide for me which facts are and aren't relevant, I think that is unhelpful and potentially dangerous (some people think what happened in Tienanmen Square isn't relevant to the general population, do you agree?).
I couldn't agree more, it's wrong to decide what facts someone else is allowed to know. Please tell me the most embarrassing details of your life?
Perhaps there's nuance and different standards we can apply when talking about individuals, especially individuals who have been bullied or abused? Than the standards we apply when a powerful group is trying to cover up a violent attack against another?
> For a transgender person, I may have known them before they transitioned for example and may not necessarily be familiar with their new name, that's a reason off the top of my head that it would be relevant to me but not necessarily you.
I have a very hard time understanding this example, you're concerned that you, who knew this person but only knew their older name, won't be able to find thier wikipedia page via searching for their old name? Which is true because their old name isn't listed on the page itself?
I don't find that very compelling, did you mean something different?
Its omitting information which seems antithetical to the whole point of Wikipedia. It makes it harder to find other sources of information on someone. it makes it harder to make connections between things you know.
Its really not very different from a Wikipedia article using an author's pseudonym mentioning their real name.
Should all Wikipedia articles on people omit information that the subject of the article does not want mentioned? Even if they find it distressing?
> Its omitting information which seems antithetical to the whole point of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia isn't a database of private information on individuals. On most celebrities pages you won't find their infidelities record either, unless it has some historical relevance.
> Its really not very different from a Wikipedia article using an author's pseudonym mentioning their real name.
In fact, when an author made it publicly clear that they didn't want their real name be known, Wikipedia usually respect their choice (until their real name stops being private information and gets historical relevance).
And somehow anti-trans activists seem to care much less. How surprising, really.
> The secind option used to be the norm on wikipedia even 15 years ago, but Anti-trans activists using dead-naming as a slur against trans people triggered the shift from the second option to the first.
Just to clarify, I think you mistook the order of the first option and the second option? I was confused by this statement
There's no such thing “as neutral account of factual events”, it's a “map and territory” thing, you always have to weight if something is relevant and this is always a subjective exercise.
And then you have to ponder the relevance with whether or not publishing may cause harm.
Let's take an example, unrelated to the topic: why aren't the addresses of stars, or the identification number of billionaires personal jets, listed on Wikipedia? Because it's not relevant, and can be harmful.
And it's the same thing for trans people's name. Most of the time, their birth name is irrelevant and can even be harmful. But sometimes, when it's important, the name will still be there, with the redirection and all, see https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning
And, by the way, this isn't a Wikipedia thing, this is how press right works! Newspapers get sued all the time for mentioning irrelevant personal information about people, and lose.
Your examples are not equivalent at all. Why do you think the person was bullied? It's additional information that makes the picture clear, which is the purpose of an encyclopedia.
Any information which is relevant to the subject of article and brings clarity should not be censored, ideally.
Also if you could understand what I'm saying, you would realise I'm not asking to put birth names of every trans person with a wikipedia article in their article. Because it's not relevant.
You keep mentioning "harm" but never exactly describe what harm? What more harm can you imagine for a person who committed suicide due to bullying?
It is not known why she committed suicide, as she did not leave a note. Bullying is unlikely to be the full picture. What most accounts of her life omit is the considerable trauma she experienced as a young child: she was repeatedly raped by her father, a crime for which he was arrested and convicted.
The Wikipedia article skims over this, instead focusing on the trans and bullying aspects. This will have been a deliberate editorial choice as well.
Thanks for more context. Yeah the article seems very neutered (I think it's fair to say lying by omission, especially to me who just learn about the incident through this thread/this article). I think that's the whole argument. Wikipedia is not news and you cannot get first hand full context picture from it.
Instead, like everything else, it's another opinionated aggregator of information.
Because they weren't behaving as their surrounding wanted them to. The reason was given in the article. You don't need to know the birth certificate name of that kid to talk about that.
In fact, the very people asking the most loudly for using this name are the crowd that bullied them alive.
I got some additional context from another reply. Your replies are vague and don't clear things for me. Just like the article.
In your earlier reply you said relevancy of something was subjective. No. Inference of facts from given information by each person may be subjective. But the information itself, must never be influenced by the subjectivity stemming from the information provider.
I get that revealing some information which maybe considered sensitive will be used by awful people. But that doesn't apply here. You cannot withhold information on the pretense that it will be used maliciously. Otherwise it's no different that dystopian stories of catching criminals before they commit crime.
The page is protected, the general public can't edit it.
There was already discussion on the talk page, "Should Nex's given name be included?" with consensus of "no." That discussion was archived, but you can see it here [0].
From what I can see, the word "Dagny" has been retroactively redacted from all history of the page and its talk page.
This fact per se is not enough 1984, but the reason of that, end especially the power standing at the very beginning of that reasoning is certainly like that.
1984 describes the practice of retroactively editing publication to erase facts from history.
Wikipedia is retroactively scrubbing not only articles but also their discussion and their editing history to erase facts that are thought to be inconvenient.
This is a naive take that belies the reality of pages with a lot of traffic, and is the reason why there can be controversial discussions in the talk pages. I know nothing about the history of this page, which is why I said "if it's intentional" regarding any deliberate scrubbing.
Not when someone with connections and better knowledge of the WP bylaws weaponizes the Arb Com against you.
Here are some of the things you can get banned for:
- Having a too large fraction of your edits be reverts.
- Updating raw references to <ref cite> references (without changing the contents of the reference).
- Saying something on a forum that could be construed as telling people to edit a particular article in a particular way.
The Arb Com doesn't have to open up a public discussion about the matter. They can simply pronounce judgment in private and ban you. There's no prior notice, no representation, and no independent appeal. For a "supreme court", that's quite a low bar.
The guidelines on gender identity are based on the BLP policies [1], which call for taking harm into account and not going into excess detail on someone's personal life.
Everything people are upset over in this thread is explained clearly in the BLP section on privacy, the gender identity section of the Manual of Style [2], and this essay on gender identity [3].
This particular example is completely clear-cut. Sources didn't cover them at all under any previous names because they're only known from one event. Someone who isn't transgender would be covered the exact same way. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a gossip rag.
Benedict became notable because of her death; Biographies of Living Persons has a privacy section that gives reasoning. These reasons, e.g. identity theft, complaint from the person, harassment, can not apply to a deceased person.
News articles did cover Benedict under the name Dagny.
As far as policies go, this page should be titled "Suicide of Nex Benedict" according to this policy [0], yet the talk on that subject ended with "closed with no consensus to move." [1]
This does speak to the selective application and selective enforcement of policies on Wikipedia. But I was most concerned to learn about how scrubbing the histories of pages is official policy itself.
Admittedly I do not know how much of a sensitive issue this is, but I find it surprising that the name given at birth is not mentioned anywhere on the Wikipedia page, even though in other cases of name change usually "Name (born Old Name)" is written.
I often find myself clicking a link that takes me to an anchor on another page that no longer exists. Surely a system could be implemented to remove these?
"Unlike Wikipedia, Grokipedia centralizes its editing process. Users can submit suggested edits to Grokipedia, but instead of assigning a group of volunteer community editors to decide on the edits, xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, controls whether or not a certain edit is approved and implemented on the website."
I started reading the Grokipedia page on the "Russian invasion of Ukraine". Immediately after the abstract, it starts talking about the "9th century Kyivan Rus" which seems like irrelevant information to a conflict over a millenia later, but then you realize it's exact same thing that Putin started with in his interview with Tucker Carlson to push the 'Ukraine isn't a real country' narrative.
>Alternativa Estudiantil
Alternativa Estudiantil is a Spanish patriotic student movement founded in September 2023 to counter perceived left-wing and woke dominance in universities, positioning itself as a conservative alternative emphasizing national identity and meritocracy.[1]
after 25 years wikipedia showed what it truly was created for, by selling the content for training. otherwise - okay, this was a cool project, perhaps we need better. like federated, crypto-signed articles that once collected together, @atproto style, produce the article with notable changes to it.
Their enterprise offering is more for fresh retrieval than training. For training, you can just download the free database dump — one you would inadvertently end up recreating if you were to use their enterprise APIs in a (pre-)training pipeline.
I’m using a harsh allegory to express massive discontent by the fact that someone was catering to user content for 25 years only for this content to become training corpus.
It is perhaps not that Wikipedia in particular been created for this, that much we hope for, but nowadays it seems such public services are best monetised in this way. I have an actual memory from when Wikipedia started and the enthusiasm of millions of people for it.
And no, I’m not alright with the fact so many people contributed effort AND money to this project only for Jimmy to figure how to sell it better to big corpo.
Seems unfair, as it seems unfair to get these downvotes. Like nobody liked the fact MS bought and used all of GitHub to create copilot, so how is this different?
I think a lot people underestimate how arbitrary some editorial decisions on wikipedia can be. Yeah perfect is the enemy of the good but imperfect is still imperfect. Can’t say I’m a fan of jj mccullough‘s opinions on some stuff but his video on wikipedia is good https://youtu.be/-vmSFO1Zfo8?si=0mS24EVODwLrPJ3T
I don’t feel as strongly as he does but ever since watching I just don’t see much value in starting with Wikipedia when researching something. He also points out how a lot content creators default to referencing it. After realising how much of history or geography YouTube is just regurgitating Wikipedia articles, it kind of ruined those kinds of videos for me, and this was before AI. So now I try spend more time reading books or listening to audiobooks on a topics I’m interested instead.
Like I still use Wikipedia for unserious stuff or checking if a book I was recommended was widely criticised or something but that’s it really.
It’s also just not a good learning resource, like if you ever wanted to study a mathematics topic, wikipedia might be one of the worst resources. Like Wikipedia doesn’t profess to be a learning resource and more a overview resource but even the examples they use sometimes are just kind of unhelpful. Here’s an example on the Fourier Transform https://youtu.be/33y9FMIvcWY?si=ys8BwDu_4qa01jso
> I think a lot people underestimate how arbitrary some editorial decisions on wikipedia can be.
I think it is true for all information we consume. One of the very important skills to learn in life is to think critically. Who wrote this? When? What would be their bias?
Text is written by humans (or now sometimes LLMs), and humans are imperfect (and LLMs are worth what they are worth).
Many times Wikipedia is more than enough, sometimes it is not. Nothing is perfect, and it is very important to understand it.
Also, I think for 99% of Wikipedia, there isn't much need to worry about Biases. It's about an uncontroversial chemical compound, a tiny village, a family of bacteria and so on. Knowledge isn't all subjective and prone to bias.
One issue with Wikipedia is that the "who when what bias" can change drastically between articles or fields, making it hard to actually answer.
For traditional news media, editorial boards and author bias are much more consistent over time and across articles.
My point was mostly, people just aren’t as aware of issues with it compared to other forms of media. Issues in other forms of media don’t change that or make it less of an issue.
At the end of the day you’re gonna to consume information from somewhere, it’ll have shortcomings but you’re still better off knowing that going in.
On bias’ of authors: I actually think people fixate a bit too much on bias of an author to the point it’s a solely used as a speculative reason to dismiss something asuntrue. If the claims made by the author are consistent with other information and others trusted sources it’s just irrelevant. I feel people online to readily get hung up motivations and it’s sometimes a crotch for a readers inability to engage with ideas they find uncomfortable.
Like if a private company sponsors a study with a finding that aligns with their business interests, that actually doesn’t mean it’s false. It’s false if no one can reproduce their results. I mean you’d definitely want to verify other sources knowing this, but also researches have their own reputation to preserve as well. In reality the truth ends up being more boring than people anticipate.
But obviously it matters when claims can’t be verified or tested but I find online there’s an overemphasis of this online.
Critical thinking does not mean that you dismiss the information. It just means that you take the potential bias into account.
The media are often pretty bad at doing this: they will often make some kind of average on what is being said, like "the scientific consensus says that cigarettes are killing you, but a study sponsored by Philip Morris says that they are not, so... well we don't know". Where actually it should be pretty obvious that Philip Morris is extremely biased on that, and the scientific consensus is not.
Not every voice is worth the same. During covid, there was a tendency to relay all kinds of opinions, without making the difference between actual experts and non-experts. Sometimes even saying "this person is a doctor, so they know", which is wrong: being a doctor doesn't make you an expert on coronaviruses or epidemiology.
Whenever we get information, we should think about how much trust we can put into it, how biased the authors maybe (consciously or not), etc. Elon Musk saying that going to Mars can help humanity is not worth much. Because he is rich and successful does not make him right. Yet many people relay "Musk predicts that [...]", as some kind of truth.
I guess I had public discourse in mind when I was saying people to readily invoke claims of bias. Also alternative media which tends to be on the other extreme of being overly cynical.
If PM appeared on the news obviously no one would believe them.
That said in Australia we in the last few years we’ve increased the cigarette tax, smoking hasn’t really decreased, but treasury has reported decreased revenue. It clearly looks like the tax has been increased too high if sellers are illegally selling untaxed cigarettes.
It would be very dumb of a cigarette company like PM to come out and point this out (as it would just be a springboard for proponents of the tax to play attack others pointing it out the issue atm), but if they did, it wouldn’t mean it’s not happening. Even if they have a bias it would be irrelevant.
Speculation around bias is just treated too much of smoking gun, and claims of it are more often motivated reasoning not critical thinking.
I couldn't agree more with this.
Small typo though: I believe you meant "crutch" not "crotch" in:
> feel people online to readily get hung up motivations and it’s sometimes a crotch for a readers inability to engage with ideas they find uncomfortable.
Cheers, yeah I did, I think missed that while tired
> people just aren’t as aware of issues with it compared to other forms of media.
Really? I'd think it would be the opposite. Wikipedia has always been decried by academics (and primary school teachers) as "not a real encyclopedia", without giving anywhere near as much of a critical eye toward other sources of information.
Sure, I think Wikipedia's reputation and public image has gotten better over the years, but that stigma of it being created and written by "unprofessional anonymous people" is still there to some extent.
And regardless, the kind of person who is going to watch Fox News or CNN without applying any critical thought to what they hear there... well, probably is going to do the same for Wikipedia pages, or any other source of information.
I think academics are too critical for a source of general surface level knowledge. But it’s no substitute for primary sources
I don’t think the problem is anyone can jump on and edit Wikipedia, they have process, but it’s the processes, informal institution’s, where the issues I’m referring arise. The average person hears there a process and assume this means it’s legitimate and flawless and are over confident in its quality.
It’s a great resource but I tin it’s helpful to be realistic about its limitations.
The problem with Wikipedia as an Academic source is that it's impossible to cite. You have no idea whether the information on there today is going to be there tomorrow or was there yesterday.
> I think a lot people underestimate how arbitrary some editorial decisions on wikipedia can be.
You can say that about Encyclopedia Brittanica or any of the old-school encyclopedias too. You can say that about the news desks at ABC, CBS, CNN, etc. You can say that about the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, etc.
I don't think people tend to blindly trust Wikipedia any more than they do for other sources of information. YouTube is full of garbage Wikipedia-regurgitating articles because Wikipedia is an easy, centralized source to scrape, not because of any level of trust they put in it.
I find this type of snap negative reaction boring, tiring, and unhelpful. It's disappointing that they often end up as top comments here. (Human psychology at work.)
My take: I expect that Wikipedia is more unbiased and a better reflection of reality then most -- maybe even all -- other sources of information on the Internet. On average! There are certainly crap articles, just like anywhere else.
If you look at the news in a democratic country vs an authoritarian one, you may easily walk away with the impression that the former is in a state of perpetual chaos, because of all the scandals, protests, resignations and snap elections. The authoritarian country will look like a paragon of stability in contrast. New infrastructure projects, record economic growth, seditious officials swiftly trialed and imprisoned. There is barely any conflict and the ones that do exist get solved quickly.
But unless you are a total mark, you should know that the stability is just a facade. That infrastructure project only went through because locals who opposed got beaten up by the cops, the economics data was cooked up by statisticians who fear the consequence of telling the truth and the seditious officials are only at the receiving end of justice because they lost the power struggle within the party. But of course you don’t know any of that, because why would the state let you?
Wikipedia, like democracies, run on transparency. This is why you get to read the editing history and talk page of any Wikipedia page and walk away with the impression that Wikipedia is uniquely full of drama. You never feel the same about the New York Times or the BBC because they run more like autocracies and keep everything inside. If we get a chance to read the internal emails of establishment media we will walk away with a very different impression.
I’ve said to a few other replies, but tbc I wasn’t promoting other mediums as alternatives.
> I don't think people tend to blindly trust Wikipedia any more than they do for other sources of information
I actually disagree or at least I think the extent to which people do is higher than it warrants. Especially to the degree people invoke it’s contents online
> I find this type of snap negative reaction boring, tiring, and unhelpful.
I didn’t ask for this to be the top comment, nor did I make you read it. I also don’t think it’s useless, just less useful than its proponents claim it is. And I think people do themselves a disservice in not looking beyond it when looking into a topic
I disagree, I know the opinion of WSJ, WP, FT or national like france24,DW, BBC, RT,AJ Or at least know is always opinion Base, the facts are selected in a subjecive way.
Is way harder to know how opinionated Wikipedia is, and everything make them sound like their opinion is only base on facts but isn't.
I think people underestimate how arbitrary editorial decisions are for any media.
Things like PBS and Wikipedia might have biases, but idk if it's realistic to expect better.
It's funny how the more accurate a source gets the more it draws in people desiring accuracy.
Then this rather small cohort of high precision people express frustrations without providing the context of accuracy against the masses preferred methods (TikTok, cable news, broadcast, truth social)
So now the water is muddled and people and Ais are mistrained because an "absolute scale" is not used when discussing accuracy.
Idk if this how it came off but just tbc my point also wasn’t indirectly promoting traditional media.
I think a lot if ppl are rightly sceptical of traditional media, but I feel I see more people giving Wikipedia a pass or placing it on a higher pedestal as a resource than it should be at times.
Admittedly I think I would prefer Wikipedia to traditional media in most cases. Although that wasn’t really what I was getting at
I very rarely watch PBS (I don't live stateside), but it is extremely biased. I lasted one and a half documentaries on the free trial.
I've seen plenty of their other content elsewhere. Maybe it doesn't resonate with non-Americans.
Can you provide concrete examples? Like what was the documentary about and why did you feel it was biased?
This just reads like out-of-touch elitism, sorry.
Most people don't even have the reading level for full comprehension of a wiki article, let alone being able to discern the nuance of some aspects of the topic.
> Yeah perfect is the enemy of the good but imperfect is still imperfect.
This assumes perfection is attainable. I'd like to see your idea of a "perfect" book or article on some topic.
I think you’re assuming I’m calling for perfection and suggesting people abstain from something less than perfect, we live in reality most things aren’t perfect.
Even if Wikipedia was the least worse resource people would still do themselves a disservice in ignoring issues with it. Acknowledging issues isn’t the same as dismissing it entirely.
How is this elitist? These other resources are more accessible than ever, no gate keepers are keeping anyone from looking at them. I’m also not making any judgments about anyone who uses Wikipedia either.
JJ McCullough‘s gripe seems to be that wikipedia is kind of a mediocre summary of the information on a topic. But I'm not sure you should expect much more. You can always go to individual sources if you want that.
I think that’s fair. Though I think the sources sometimes also aren’t at great times.
I've seen proudly uneducated people with no understanding take sledgehammers to history and real knowledge, and so I have no illusions about how Wikipedia is horrible, unfair, unprofessional, mercurial, and vulnerable to manipulation.
I would've gladly paid more in taxes to make Encyclopædia Britannica an international non-profit public service delivered in web form to all so long as each area were managed and curated with subject matter expert input.
I think if anything if Wikipedia contributes to encouraging someone take an interest in these things like this, despite not in school, that’s definitely a positive.
But if these are moderators on Wikipedia that sounds pretty bad, but even that would surprise me.
It’s tricky cause I think being dependent on funding would also expose it to censorship risk. Like if it was funded by the UN then it’s remit might be limited by what some more influential nations would allow. At the same time you might end up with higher quality resources in the less controversial topics of what’s allowed? But also alternatively bias ones on politically controversial topics.
If it was funded by individual nations it’s same problem possibly worse, if it’s funded by “benevolent” individuals there’s a risk it becomes tool to propagate their personal ideology. Even if it doesn’t, it would probably affect the reputation of the publication.
So in this respect I think this is one case where Wikipedia has some obvious appeal. I think they may need to elevate their standards in their moderation. It feels a bit elitist but maybe some kind of signal for qualifications in a field, or at least specific fields (like natural sciences).
That said political interference aside, some fields are very subjective or operate on lines of thinking that’s can’t be challenged through falsification, are last in the social sciences. Like history can be very political.
Maybe a nonfree encyclopaedia isn’t so bad if it’s free from these issues, but can it even be sustained by a market? idk
Reading (the right) books is definitely the best way to learn about a topic, but its not great for quickly looking up random stuff. Books can spread misinformation too, from Malleus Maleficarum to Erich von Däniken.
It is useful for quickly looking up simple facts, and provides a list of sources.
The video makes some interesting criticisms. The lack of diversity is not surprising. Dominated by white, male, American's with time on their hands! how would have thought that? Its very obviously American dominated (at least the English version).
I once partly cross verify a virologist's lecture. He confused a brother of an important scientist who made an important discovery. I have no doubt that he knows what he's talking about when it comes to viruses.
All in all, checking other sources to see if they lines up is a pain and labor intensive, never mind actually checking to see if the references are actually sound evidence.
Spanish Wikipedia is dominated by folks from Spain, despite Spain being a minority of Spanish speakers.
The Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia is dominated by a German. As was the Greenlandic one before he decided to dismantle it.
Yes, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.
It's not supposed to be a learning source, it's not supposed to be an exhaustive reference on topics, it's not supposed to replace books and it has to be editorialized a lot to match the format.
It's by far the best encyclopedia ever created by mankind, on all metrics, but it's fundamentally an encyclopedia and nothing else.
And similarly about History and Geography YouTube, the problem isn't that they are regurgitated from Wikipedia, it's just YouTube is an entertainment platform.
> jj mccullough‘s opinions
holy heck there is so much wrong about this video. i can't believe "internet influencers" can just turn on their cameras and spew so much untruth without a care in the world...
comparatively wikipedia is imperfect, but much better than this kind of slop.
Feel free to actually articulate the actual issues you’re referring to.
It’s been a while since I watched it but the thing I remember taking away was you can do a lot better than Wikipedia, and he encouraged people to spend more time looking at primary sources for deeper research, and points out how it’s the basis of a lot of slop on YouTube.
Seems like he's recommending secondary sources over Wikipedia as a tertiary source.
That’s probably more correct actually, I guess primary source would be talking to witnesses or the subjects themselves.
This article is talking about Portal:Current Events on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events). The current events articles are fantastic! Normal newspaper articles are status updates. Current events articles synthesize news to present the current, comprehensive understanding about an event. It’s cool to monitor how current events articles evolve over time.
I would love to see news sites copying at least some of the technology of wikipedia. First and foremost every article should be versioned and it should be easy to see diffs. Every version of a news article should have a permanent link to it. Why don‘t news agencies use git for example? Also news articles should be written using a markup language that is easy to parse and easy to read by AI agents. Instead most of them still write articles in word and convert it from docx into HTML or PDF. That usually generates terrible documents that break accessibility. And of course a common markup language for news articles would enable many applications. But I guess we will land on Mars before we can have something like that.
More professional organisations definitely have some kind of CMS, with potentially their own version management (at least for what’s published). But I also don’t think we can fault people for preparing their piece in their preferred writing tool.
I just can’t see existing news agencies doing this of their own volition. As Generating stories themselves is what keeps news agencies in business.
Unless they had a new competitor who had who kept running rings around them with all three features. But it’s going to come back to having better stories or better long form pieces (depending on the publications niche), as that’s ultimately why someone visits their site.
I could however see some 3rd party doing this like an extension that overlays someone’s site or acts as alternative presentation of their content.
When there's some big ongoing thing in the news there'll be many articles on that same topic on news websites and sometimes you can't even find the original one that tells what actually happened. Wikipedia's article on it is usually a great summary
Although, due to Wikipedia's own policy, that it must cite other reliable sources, it can never be a source of first-hand news.
Wikipedia's main form of academic critique is to "verify" content through a Google search.
Comparing the same article in different languages sometimes gets very educational.
Yes, and sometimes they are very different. I was surprised to see the German Wikipedia had a couple of articles on Scottish history that were better than the English language one!
Wikipedia has long been hijacked to serve agendas. The “truth” is whatever the highest bidder wants it to be.
Most recently hijacked by the Qatar dictatorship: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/16/pr-firm-p...
News, influencers, Wikipedia, almost all information we consume nowadays is intentional. And not even getting into billions poured into American colleges by the same people.
When I was working in the heart of conservative online media in West Palm Beach—nestled between Rush Limbaugh’s studio, Mar-a-Lago, and Newsmax—targeting Evangelical Christians in the Bible Belt, my salary (and the direction things eventually went) was being paid for by the Saudis. At the time, the propaganda was mostly “pro-oil” and “climate change is a hoax.” Around that same period, those same Saudis bought a 10% stake in Fox News and helped shape the narrative for millions of Christians who tune in and treat it like their main source of news.
So yeah, if you were ever curious where the profits go every time you fill up your car with gas… there.
I thought I was just building media websites. I didn’t even see the content until after six months. I put in my one month notice, finished what I was working on, and left. The amount of money they offered me to stay was ridiculous. I don’t blame people at Fox News for bending the knee and taking that Saudi money -- I just couldn’t make myself do it.
“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” A lot of people are going to spend eternity in hell for propaganda and lies.
Saudis are invested in a huge range of things in America. It has historical roots in the petrodollar. The basic deal of it that that they would only sell their oil in USD, which gave the USD a de facto backing after we defaulted in Bretton Woods (which was a de jure gold backing). That gave the USD a huge chunk of stability and in exchange we agreed to sell them weapons and broadly support them, while in exchange they were also asked to purchase US treasuries and assets with surplus revenues.
Over time this led to Saudis being involved in just about everything. For instance the biggest owner of 'old Twitter' under Dorsey was Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud. Needless to say the zeitgeist on old Twitter and Saudi Arabia have basically nothing in common, so you're probably seeing ideological motivation where the real motivation is generally just monetary. Not every country is conspiring to subvert other countries to their ideology.
Basically Saudia Arabia is filthy rich because of oil, but they fully understand that even if we continue burning oil until we run out, we will run out, within the lifetime of some people living today. So they have to migrate their economy away from oil and, on the timeline for such a revolutionary shift, they have very little time left. This is likely what MBS sees as what will define his legacy.
Saudis controlled media by assassinating of Jamal Khashoggi. Yes, that is proof the Saudis kill to control media.
> I don’t blame people at Fox News for bending the knee and taking that Saudi money
i do, and i judge people who take money to push harmful things. i don't see why this is bad.
Because I believe in understanding, forgiveness, and redemption.
I have a responsibility not to lie and kill, as commanded in the Bible. I also have a responsibility to tell people not to lie and kill, as commanded in the Bible.
At the same time, our understanding of the science of the mind, as described by Carol Dweck in "Mindset", is that people are not fixed and can change. That is why understanding, forgiveness, and redemption matter. They are essential for helping other people through the process of repentance -- the changing of a mindset.
Can you not understand, forgive, and believe in redemption, but also judge?
"I understand why you took oil money from the royal family famous for murdering journalists; money is nice to have. However, I judge you for it and will not associate with you until you redeem yourself through seeking forgiveness and changing your behavior."
I was introduced to Maslow's hierarchy of needs 25 years ago around the same time I read about Pavlov's dogs.
The need to belong is extraordinarily motivating. It became obvious that the cults leveraged the need in the individual to belong to a group by accepting the person without judgement first rather than attacking the person they are trying bring into their group pushing them away.
The leaders who understand that are winning.
I get told this a lot by liberals, that it's wrong that I shouted in a cop's face that he's a fascist pig and a traitor to the people, now he'll never support my cause, but I'm not really sure I agree. The cop, and the nazis he's protecting from me, will never join "my group" in ten million years, no matter how nice I am to them. Do you believe otherwise?
Yeah I get what you mean, but it’s not really about converting the cop into “your group.”
It’s about what your actions do to everyone watching, and what it does to you.
Plato makes the point that you don’t make a dog better by beating it. You just make it worse. Same with people. You’re not persuading, you’re escalating.
If the goal is change, you don’t have to be nice, but you do have to be effective!
Well, let's explore the topic then, because for example aforementioned cults will use protest or other uncomfortable situations to solidify indoctrination. See: Mormons and Jehovah's witnesses sending people door to door to proselytize knowing full well the majority of people will be annoyed by this, which will Other the proselytizers and make them feel like the church members are the only people who they're safe around. Or the "God Hates F*s" Church doing their protests. Taken to the extreme: the Cultural Revolution's struggle sessions, designed explicitly to make as many people as possible feel that they were culpable alongside the Party. So, maybe not great for the opponents or the observers, but very good at solidifying the base itself.
Personally I'm not interested in running a cult, but I'm very interested in anything that empowers people.
In the case of an anti ICE protest where we shout mean things at the gestapo, a couple side effects include the empowerment of participants and locals. See for example how the dynamic shifts for the woman sheltering a door dash driver from ICE once more neighbors start showing up: https://www.reddit.com/r/minnesota/comments/1q8vvwa/st_paul_...
In the case of the various anti Nazi protests I've been to (proud boy rallies) it's also been good for generating images of just how many people are in opposition to racists.
It's not necessarily always about persuading, sometimes it's more about, well I suppose "circling the wagons?" Solidifying community support, demonstrating capabilities, empowering people and communities, and disempowering, defanging, or scaring racists and fascists. Finally, it's great for recruitment: fed up liberals turn up to their first protest, get one hell of an adrenaline rush screaming at cops and running away from tear gas, and then may later ask the person pouring milk onto their face how they can help outside of protesting. In that sense the cop's escalations, while barbaric and inexcusable, are the unconvincing escalation you mentioned that in fact helps us.
But for you then, I'm not sure your opinions on ICE as gestapo but perhaps humor my position on their danger, how would you instruct anti-fascists to operate in the USA right now in the face of ICE raids? The original idea is, what, applying Christian values? Jesus threw out the merchants and moneychangers, did he not? For certain people, he decided he wasn't in the business of forgiveness.
For what it's worth, I generally agree with what you're saying, my goal in conversation is always to just pull people left. I just have a practical and situationally pragmatic limit.
If they don't repent, does this still work?
Looks like Prince Alwaleed bin Talal's ownership of Fox was between 5.5% to 7% during the two-decade period of 1997 ~ 2017. He divested during an anti-corruption purge.
They hate Muslims, but they love money and theocracy more, and Saudis are top of the world in both.
No wonder Terrorism is supported by oil money.
What level of moral compromise is acceptable in this world to take whatever money is offered? Presumably the job of hitman is unacceptable? Where's the line drawn?
Personally I'd say that lying to perpetuate a system that is leading to various populous parts of the world becoming uninhabitable is on the wrong side of that line.
unquestionably. i'm not sure when we all decided to be hush-hush about people doing ethically dubious work.
i'm allowed to judge you based on who you take money from.
There are agendas there, just like in every human endeavor, but it definitely hasn't been "hijacked", it's still by far the best single repository of human knowledge out there. If I had to choose one website to take with me to a desert island, it's an obvious choice.
We should keep talking about the issues and improving things, but don't throw out the baby with bathwater.
> We should keep talking about the issues and improving things, but don't throw out the baby with bathwater.
Yeah, I wonder what solution people propose that claim that Wikipedia is 'hijacked' or 'compromised' and pushing agendas? While Wikipedia is not perfect, it is the best encyclopedia we currently have, mostly due to collective efforts and maintainers that care about the state of Wikipedia. I would even say that it is a good thing that there is this transparency, that states and capital are trying to influence Wikipedia because then you know that you may take some articles with a grain of salt or can actively push against it. Every alternative to Wikipedia that I have seen so far is one that claims to be more truthful than the original, but in the end these are platforms that push agendas without the transparency and attempt to further obscure power relations under the pretext of truth.
Every alternative to Wikipedia will have to solve the problems that Wikipedia already has to be a better alternative. However, I do think these are fundamental unsolvable problems and everyone who claims to have solved this is part of a power struggle over who defines what is considered true.
More transparency around the admins and the hierarchy above it would be a good start, as would some kind of countervailing pressure to the ballooning of meta rules (bylaws). For instance:
- Oppose the "Super Mario" effect: if admins do something ordinary users would get banned for, they get banned too, they don't just lose their admin title.
- Implement restrictions on Arb Com to make it worthy of its "supreme court" moniker. Provide prior notice, allow representation, access to evidence ahead of the case, and require the Arb Com to disclose the logic of any automated scripts they use for mass judging (e.g. counting proportion of edits being reverts, or that counts every change to a reference as "reference vandalism"). Grant defendants the ability to force the Committee's judgment to be disclosed to the public, with PII redacted if necessary.
- Require that precedent be recorded for unclear meta rules: what counts as a violation of e.g. canvassing? When do reversions become evidence or proof of "ownership"?
- Create an independent appeals body for Arb Com decisions. Like the Arb Com itself, the logic or source code for any scripts they use to aid their decisions, should be public. Ideally, choose the independent appeals body by different means than the Arb Com itself is chosen, e.g. by random selection of users with a certain activity level, independent of the ordinary admin track.
- Grant all users the right to be forgotten (courtesy vanishing), not just users in good standing, so that users bullied off the platform can remove their proverbial stockade.
- Create a mechanism that forces rules to be refactored or reduced in scope. Just spitballing, one possible way might be to limit the growth of any given WP: page per unit time, require negative growth for some of them, or in some way reward editors who reduce their extent.
There may be fundamental unsolvable problems, but that doesn't mean the current system can't be improved.
Every discussion about wikipedia, everywhere, now attracts comments from accounts with a poor history claiming it's biased. I assume bad faith.
It is a great example of the shaping of opinions the OP claims Wikipedia suffers from. It is a textbook example of the way the detractors of Wikipedia comport themselves.
Accuse the site of of exactly what you’re doing at this exact moment.
Do I have poor history?
Probably no worse than mine. But you've got to admit, it's a heuristic that saves time.
it absolutely has been. like every online community, Wikipedia is extremely vulnerable to the terminally online and/or the mentally ill, to whom everything is political. like clockwork, every remotely political article cites opinions only from a certain perspective, often quoting glorified nobodies to assert the narrative the '''editors''' want to present. dissenting opinions, no matter how overwhelmingly common among the real people, are mentioned in passing at best and often derisively.
I went to Wikimania in London and the community who turned up were pretty middle of the road types. Mostly retired males doing after it they'd finished with their prior job in a variety of fields.
Links to examples would go a long way.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...
For example, this article goes over disinformation by polish nationalists on Holocaust related articles. There's a chart with 10 editors accounting for 50% of the edits and another chart that shows disproportionately citing authors that in reality are not academically are under-cited
> mentally ill
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That Wikipedia has been co-opted by mentally ill people is an extraordinary claim. You should provide more than feelings.
Wikipedia's model does favour autistic* people and those with a lot of time on their hands. You can see this in the sheer volume of some contributions, their focuses and the invention of obscure rules and Wikipedia specific jargon e.g. peacock terms etc.
* ASD is not a mental illness but it can produce quirky and obsessive behaviour.
If you can download the Talk pages and edit history, you probably have enough information to, on average, mostly be dealing with objective fact.
The Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia was very much hijacked. As was the Lowland Scots one, except in the second case the individual made the news. The Gaelic one has a German guy running it who has several vanity articles and has chased most other users off apart from some government employees.
I think for anything controversial we need a completely different model.
Officially wikipedia is NPOV but an especially contentious and murky political mudfight decides what counts as a "citeable" source and what doesnt and what counts as notable and what doesnt.
It also has an incredibly strong western bias.
Every government, corporation and billionaire pays somebody to participate in that fight as well, using every dirty trick they can.
Until we have a model that can sidestep these politics (which Wikipedia seemingly has no real desire to do) and aggregate sources objectively I think it will continue to suck.
I agree with the issues, but it definitely doesn't suck if compared to every single other massive endeavor out there. As I see it, it's like that quote about democracy - it's the worst way to attempt to catalogue human knowledge, except for all those other forms that have been tried.
> It also has an incredibly strong western bias.
What's the issue with that? Why shouldn't English Wikipedia have a strong Western bias? I've explored and participated in several other Wikipedias and other collaborative projects, and each is biased towards the worldviews common to the culture that its main editors come from. I don't think there's a way to have an encyclopedic project without any cultural bias at all (if such a platonic ideal could even be properly defined), and seeing how Western values include a significant focus on pluralism, freedom of expression and scientific inquiry, I think this situation is much better than the alternatives.
>I agree with the issues, but it definitely doesn't suck if compared to every single other massive endeavor out there.
Compared to what? I dont really see much aggregation being done at all on Wikipedia's scale.
>What's the issue with that?
It's supposed to be impartial and objective and it sells itself as such but if you see how the sausage is made it is patently the exact opposite.
>I don't think there's a way to have an encyclopedic project without any cultural bias at all
I think it's perfectly possible to have an encyclopedia which is more liberal about allowing more sources to be used and which provides tools and metadata about those sources and gives tools to the user allowing them to filter accordingly.
Whereas "Blessing" one group of sources and condemning another will inevitably turn it into a propaganda outlet for whomever controls it. You might think that this is the only way but that represents more of a failure of imagination than a lack of options.
The way some billionaires are described on Wikipedia you'd think they were saints. Even though most of their philanthropy is a tax write-off and goal-orientated (producing good publicity for them or pushing society in a direction they want).
But by claiming one thing and doing the exact opposite (on a statistical quantitative basis), Wikipedia and all other western outlets have become just a front for propaganda which is also the reason why I don't believe in "Persecution of Uyghurs in China"
German Scholars Reveal Shocking TRUTH About China’s Xinjiang Province
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fp-MZsRhKM
That video's main gripe seems to be that western media gloss over things being kicked off by islamic terrorists but from the Wikipedia:
>...Uyghur terrorists killed dozens of Han Chinese in coordinated attacks from 2009 to 2016. These included the September 2009 Xinjiang unrest, the 2011 Hotan attack, the 2014 Kunming attack, the April 2014 Ürümqi attack, and the May 2014 Ürümqi attack. The attacks were conducted by Uyghur separatists, with some orchestrated by the Turkistan Islamic Party (a UN-designated terrorist organization)...
"The US government hates China and also hates Muslims but suddenly cares about Muslims in China" - forgot who quoted this. Compare US stance on Gaza. If media can ban discussions on gaza, can't it invent phantom genocide in Xinjiang Province? Something to think about.
Also let's not forget "Persecution of Uyghurs in China" use to be titled "Uyghur Genocide" or some variation thereof for years. Never mind plurality of UN countries has recognized PRC actions in XJ as counter extremist/terrorists, or even among western bloc most countries did not label it as "genocide", bu somehow wiki and captured editors went with the genocide framing, aka, fucking we lie, we cheat, we steal Mike Pompeo serving as secretary of state for US geopolitical interest designation during sino-us coldwar. Because Wiki NPOV isn't based on reality but "reliable sources" which just happen to be western aligned that parrot each other to manufacture consensus / propaganda. Even "persecution of Uyghurs" still biased considering plurality of world still considers PRC actions in XJ as de-deradicalization / counterterrorism, and the numbers have only swung more in PRC favour over time - geopolitical reality is "Chinese War on Terrorism" whose causalities paled in comparison to wiki's "(Global) War on Terrorism" that would otherwise be characterized as "genocide/persecution of Iraqis/Afghans" which killed and displaced millions. Wonder if Obama would have gotten a Nobel Peace prize if that article title existed.
it's one crucial topic imo
internet altered the way society communicates and why, a lot of discussions now end up by "show me your sources" aka "what is the truth" and it's often centralized into some accepted source like wikipedia
where there simple single point of 'truth' like that before ?
my 2cents is that humans are not meant to live in one global absolute truth and we all lived in relative fuzzy reality before, it was slow and imperfect but not as easy to tamper with
Showing sources is not a bad thing. The harm is not questioning sources. A lot of people rely on poor sources. Whatever what the first result in Google historically, and now LLM summaries.
maybe my viewpoint is weird but i think this distorted human interactions on multiple domains.
of course we all wanted to communicate faithful information, but now any discussion turns into a religious difference, and the escape is of course "who has the truest source". people don't necessarily understand the content, they just defer the validity to an official third party, so basically we're back to zero.. but we're all debating everything now.
and it makes me think that locally, we chatting, was never meant to exchange rigorous information, but mostly to share opinions lightly, more emotional than rigorous and scientific
We still live in that fuzzy reality. Not much has changed.
It doesnt really matter if the whole world has access to the same information if the whole world trusts completely different sources.
For better or worse we trust those sources exclusively because of tribal affinity.
I doubt many people in the US could be persuaded to trust Global Times over the New York Times even if you could prove it had a better prediction track record. Wrong tribe.
Not so long ago, the "truth" was mainly given by the priest or the mayor.
For priest or the mayor read "trusted or official sources" nowadays. I believe that is the current euphemism.
And now it's given by the mainstream media, which is mostly owned by a few very rich people and pushes the same type of propaganda as before (but now globally).
There was a point where I would agree with that, but we seem to be moving past that. The "truth" seems to be coming more from social media influencers than mainstream media now.
It's kind of a shit show.
> It's kind of a shit show.
Where we all have a different definition of "mainstream media".
I’m continually impressed by Wikipedia’s quality controls. In my experience people underestimate them.
I don't underestimate them, I just don't think they are good. I've been on Wikipedia for at least twenty years.
> And not even getting into billions poured into American colleges by the same people.
What does this mean?
Colleges are political, and donations are made to assure they keep on being political.
> Colleges are political, and donations are made to assure they keep on being political.
Ok, to clarify:
> > And not even getting into billions poured into American colleges by the same people.
Which American colleges, by what people, and what does "being political" mean? Maybe I'm very ignorant of the USA, are these just known things to Americans?
You need only to look at how many actual well credentialed doctors get their Wiki pages smeared with words like "misinformation spreader" for dissenting against covid narratives
Can you provide an example?
Dr Raoult was very vocal in France about hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for covid 19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didier_Raoult
It seems today that he was just wrong and used to make "dubious" clinical trials.
> As of 2025, 46 of Raoult's research publications have been retracted, and at least another 218 of his publications have received an expression of concern from their publishers, due to questions related to ethics approval for his studies.
Raoult's case is so strange.. he's not the usual fringe doctor, up until covid, he had a center seat in national health institution and everybody around him was listening. I still don't get why nobody was wary of him there..
In this case, he was actually spreading misinformation. Anyone with two braincells could see it at the time.
> Anyone with two braincells could see it at the time. It seems a captain obvious now but it wasn't so at the time. (Or maybe my.braincells.count() < 2)
Many people listened because he wasn't some youtuber doing his research, he was the head of the "Infectious and Tropical Emergent Diseases Research Unit" ad the Faculty of Medicine of Marseille.
I've watched one of his interviews where he stated that people survived in his unit with hydroxychloroquine and that he had numbers to prove it.
When you look at his credentials, and my.braincells.count(), it was hard to identify it as misinformation.
I definitely exaggerated with my "two braincells". Even the french president said about the guy "we need more people like him" (although I wouldn't say he's that smart himself...).
But even without being knowledgeable about statistics, there were a lot of very serious people giving very good arguments against his results. You just had to see them. And seeing all the Facebook doctors lunatics instantly side with Raoult and defend him tooth and nail should definitely raise some red flags...
They probably mean people like Robert Malone [1], who - despite being well accomplished in a related field - spread verifiably wrong information about vaccines on social media during the pandemic. There are many people like him who showed past accomplishments in a related field, but were totally out of their depth when interviewed about covid on the Joe Rogan podcast or similar.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Malone
Yet in officialdom, that kind of thing was perfectly acceptable. In Scotland we had a dentist running Covid lockdown, which is ironic since public dental services were decimated by it and never recovered.
You can simply do a Wikipedia search for "misinformation doctor" and get plenty of results, even with its search system, let alone if you use a search engine to power the search.
I would think that posting any particular person would descend in to a pointless argument over whether those claims are merited. Do you have some better reason to want a particular name?
If there is misinformation on Wikipedia it can be corrected. Unless you are claiming that all hits for "misinformation doctor" are incorrect, a few examples to verify and correct would be helpful.
"If there is misinformation on Wikipedia it can be corrected."
It depends on its nature.
I can point you to several pages that are protected by groups of interested admins that will make changing even blatantly obvious misinformation impossible, let alone contentious stuff.
Have you ever tried changing something on Wikipedia regarding politics (which now includes several health issues) or religion?
Edit: also, I did write "I would think that posting any particular person would descend in to a pointless argument over whether those claims are merited." and yet you're suggesting I get into that argument. I quite clearly don't want to because it's pointless, and we had years of it anyway.
> I can point you to several pages that are protected by groups of interested admins that will make changing even blatantly obvious misinformation impossible, let alone contentious stuff.
Please do.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46664426
Responded there.
Some 'misinformation' is hard to correct because the corrections are reversed by those who are intent on spreading the 'misinformation'. This is especially prevalent around contentious and/or politically sensitive subjects like the mentioned SARS2-related cases. This is what makes it hard to trust articles on such subjects on Wikipedia.
If this is quite widespread, it should be fairly straightforward to point to an example of a page that's being defaced with misinformation, which would include an edit history and perhaps a Talk page documenting whatever sides to the debate there is that's preventing consensus.
I don't disagree that weird bullshit occasionally happens on Wikipedia, but I have noticed that as soon as light is cast on it, it usually evaporates and a return to factual normality is established.
My go-to example is the "Constitution" of Medina[1]
> It is widely considered to be one of the first written constitutions of mankind.
Now go to the page on constitutions in history[2] and see how far down the list that one is.
Now go back to the Constitution of Medina (itself an example of misinformation, since it should be charter or even more precisely, treaty, but those protecting the page have meddled with the title too) and look at the reference it uses[3] and what it says to get a feel for the kind of "reference" that is being used there, and then try and update said Wikipedia page by removing the parts about its being the first.
The talk pages of both show that invested groups have been trying to force their views, and they've done it quite successfully.
Let us all know how you get on with that, and then I'll point you to the next example, and the next example…
Some other notable things to check are co-founder Larry Sanger's 9 theses[4], and the news that broke yesterday about a PR firm doing "Wikilaundering"[5].
That's just the tip of the iceberg.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Medina
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution#History_and_devel...
[3] https://journalijcar.org/issues/first-written-constitution-w...
[4] https://larrysanger.org/nine-theses/#1-end-decision-making-b...
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/16/pr-firm-p...
I don't really understand how you've come to that conclusion. If you look at the protection log[1], Constitution of Medina was protected in 2016 for a bit under a month, and never outside of that. The "earliest constitution" was also discussed in 2016[2][3], and there was consensus not to include the claim. Then, in November 2025, it was re-added by a new editor who made no other edits[4]. Looking at the talk page of Constitution, it was discussed exactly once, in 2005[5].
So, next example?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution_n... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Constitution_of_Medina/Ar... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Constitution_of_M... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Constitution/Archive_1#Fi...?
Why is the protection of a page relevant?
Why is this "consensus not to include the claim" relevant when the claim was already included?
Why did it have to go to dispute at all?
> So, next example?
Please.
> Why is the protection of a page relevant?
>> those protecting the page have meddled with the title too
> Why is this "consensus not to include the claim" relevant when the claim was already included? Because anyone can dispute anything. But saying it's some kind of agenda by a group of admins is incorrect.
> Why did it have to go to dispute at all? Because someone disputed it. Though, really, it may not have been necessary in this case. You may also refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/One_against_man...
worse yet, you might read some topics and won't expect them to be poisoned with misinformation. Like the Holocaust history in Poland
https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/history_news_articles/151... https://slate.com/technology/2023/04/how-wikipedia-covers-th...
It's funny how every source of knowledge converges to the same thing: mass media. Telling you what to think and trying to influence your behaviour rather than trying to inform you.
Using facts, omitting facts or emphasising particular facts over others in order to mislead you. The scientific journals are now included with their anonymous editorials. Peer review is pretty much the same as fact-checking.
Contrast this with good fiction, which employs falsehoods to point towards the truth: truth which cannot easily be verified but which is our real bread and butter.
Keep in mind that Wikipedia itself tells you that "Wikipedia is not a newspaper"
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:NOTNEWS...
While having an "In the news" section on the front page
It clarifies exactly what that means. It doesn’t say that the information have to pass the test of time. Only that it is not a place of original reporting, unsourced gossip, etc.
Those two statements don't contradict each other.
Which is fine and not contradictory. It is not a newspaper (like HN) but it may overlap with some mainstream news (also like HN).
Is there an RSS version of the weekly newsletter about Wikipedia articles?
You can use https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to turn it into RSS
I suggest everybody here take a look at Matthew White's excellent WikiWatch. Despite the last entry being 2006, it is still a very valuable criticism of Wikipedia today.
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/wikiwoo.htm
It seems a shame Weeklypedia doesn't have an RSS feed.
Huh, TIL about https://weekly.hatnote.com/
This is fascinating, thanks for mentioning it!
The post you're commenting on literally starts with the description of this newsletter
> will ensure everyone has access to trustworthy knowledge for everyone for generations to come.
Maybe to trustworthy propaganda, just like this website.
WikiMedia has agreed to promote the UN's SDGs. There was a discussion on it several years ago. It was more or less presented as a fait accompli.
Wikipedia is not a newspaper. Please stop trying to update it with information less than a week old.
I prefer subject experts over Wikipedia.
Britannica's online format suits it very well
I’m going to reject the premise—this is not “news”, but “recent events”.
In the UK I would say most people are proud of the BBC^; many people I speak to are smug when comparing it to e.g. Fox News, CNBC, etc... I think this is a big mistake, and that the USA system is actually better.
It's impossible for one news source to be unbiased, and the delusion that it is unbiased is dangerous. If you truly believe a source is "the truth" and unbiased it allows you to switch off any critical thinking; the information bypasses any protections you have.
Much better to have many news sources where the bias is evident and the individual has to synthesise an opinion themselves (not claiming this is perfect by any means, but a perfect system does not exist).
It is obviously the case that Wikipedia is biased, and I think competition is a great thing. We would be better served by a market of options to use our own faculties than a false sense of comfort in a fake truth.
^though many are refusing to pay the (almost) legally mandatory "tv-license".
I agree we need multiple news sources, but the UK has multiple news sources. What the BBC adds is one with a different funding model so different biases. I do not think this works as well as it did historically.
As for unwillingness to pay the license fee, the biggest issue is the rise of streaming alternatives. It reduced the BBC from providing about half of available TV to being one among many providers so the license fee no longer feels like good value for money.
Its not mandatory. I have never owned a TV. If you do not watch broadcast TV or Iplayer you do not have to have a TV license.
I also think Capita's aggressive scare tactics in trying to get people to pay the license fee have created a lot of hostility towards the BBC.
I think a significant part of the pushback against the TV license is that it pays for the BBC, I believe many people are of the opinion that they'd be perfectly happy not having the BBC and not paying the licence fee. A significant portion of the people paying for the BBC have never watched anything on it.
I am not proud of the BBC at all. I have boycotted their licence fee for almost as long as Wikipedia has been around.
If you want to know who the UK is going to war with next, watch the BBC.
Their news is horrendously biased when it comes to the British royal family. They have an institutional bias against Scottish independence since it would cut 10% of their licence fee. (Their provision to areas outside the Home Countries is a disgrace and patronising.)
Some people seems to confuse, willingly or not, unbiased with targeting neutral point of view, free of any perspective.
We can step back from a debate and reports who's saying what, but this is still reporting ongoing debate. And still involving attention within its considerations, which do change our mental process as much as performative effects can go. That's as opposed to remain completely unaware the debate could be even be considered.
no one is going out of ontological constraints and brings absolute truth from transexistential considerations.
No one who regularly watches biased news sources does so while acknowledging the constant bias. And I don’t think most people think the BBC is unbiased, it’s constantly attacked as having bias to both sides of the aisle ironically. The BBC is far from perfect but it’s in a different league to Fox News to the point that it feels disingenuous to suggest you’d be better off watching Fox News while telling yourself that you’re filtering out the bias.
BBC has very little credibility in the developing world
Oh goodness, if wiki is news, then it's the most biased and easily editable news outside of Winston Smith and the Ministry of Truth.
> the most biased
Is it biased because it doesn't reflect your opinion or are the facts also biased?
Really? News coverage on Wikipedia is a lot more reliable than (say) Fox News. Breaking news events in particular get a lot of eyeballs and while you obviously can't take everything as gospel, genuinely wrong info is usually purged pretty quickly.
Genuine info inconvenient to the far-left editors is usually purged pretty quickly.
Most news outlets get their news either from press releases or press agencies. It means you effectively get the same talking points across different outlets.
Fox is designed to promote Republican viewpoints and MSNBC to promote Democrat ones. They present little outside them and are usually telling the same small selection of stories from different angles.
[flagged]
Wikipedia has over 7,000,000 articles, and grokipedia only about 6,000,000. Or is that not what you meant?
jfc
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Wow, I would expect there would at least be a single mention of "born Dagny Benedict" somewhere at the beginning of the background section as is typical in other pages. If this is intentional, to omit this entirely seems like it unnecessarily politicizes the issue rather than documenting the history of a person.
> Wow, I would expect there would at least be a single mention of "born Dagny Benedict" somewhere at the beginning of the background section as is typical in other pages. If this is intentional, to omit this entirely seems like it unnecessarily politicizes the issue rather than documenting the history of a person.
It's all very 1984-esque; I'm seeing shades of "We were never/always at war with Oceania/Eurasia".
This is revisionist history, and the scrubbing of previously correct but now incorrect "history" should be viewed with suspicion.
-----------------------------------------------------
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth.
> It's all very 1984-esque; I'm seeing shades of "We were never/always at war with Oceania/Eurasia".
This is a hilarious take.
There's little things less “1984-esque” than a small self-structured collective organization enforcing the preference of an individual on how they should be named.
It's the opposite of “a dictatorship imposing its views on individuals through propaganda”, it's a collective of people helping an individual, dead for not being as society wanted them to be, have their personal wish fulfilled even after death. People who want to dead name the victim, are the one who want to erase the individual to make it fit the mold of society, they are the totalitarian hivemind, they are the Tom Parsons of our reality.
Orwell being a lifelong anarchist socialist, there's very little doubt on which side he'd be in that debate.
You’re hitting the wrong aspect of the problem. You should use someone’s old name when it’s absolutely necessary, not as a matter of course. People change their name for a reason after all, and if their latest one suffices, let it be.
In the case of this person, they were not notable under their birth name. Unfortunately, their transgender status is the whole reason they’re notable, and the article clearly states that they are. I don’t need that person’s old name to understand the situation.
Pretty much every married woman (who changed/added to her last name) has her birth name written there, even if she was never notable/known as Knavs or Skłodowska.
More info is usually better than less info, if you personally don't need to know something, that does not mean that that info should be removed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melania_Trump
> More info is usually better than less info
This is strictly untrue for an Encyclopedia, which seeks to present only a summation of relevant and highly notable information about a person, making it far different than e.g. a biography.
Most people, who adopt a different married name, don't do so because they consider their former name to be offensive or insulting.
If I'm proud of my name, you should include it. If I'm ashamed of my name, you should omit it, unless it's important context or information. You have to have a clear articulable reason above, it's a real detail.
> Pretty much every married woman (who changed/added to her last name) has her birth name written there, even if she was never notable/known as Knavs or Skłodowska.
None of them changed their name on purpose nor rejected it, the comparison is moot.
> If this is intentional, to omit this entirely seems like it unnecessarily politicizes the issue rather than documenting the history of a person.
I feel as if you're trying to inject a political motivation about the decision to omit that detail when a simpler one is better. If something of little note is offensive to the person you're talking about, it's disrespectful to them as a person, to their humanity, to mention it.
E.g. You would only mention someone was born, to parents who were avid members of the KKK, if and only if, their life story related in some way.
Otherwise you're trying to introduce some preexisting bias that doesn't belong. In this example, if this person left their community to fight racism. The information about the set of likes reasons they got involved, are worth the bias of introducing the assumptions you're reasonably allowed to make about their parents.
If they find that religion offensive, and spent their life exclusively on epidemiology, it's wrong to include that detail, true or not.
Then, do consider the "political" aspect, that has led to the deadname policy that Wikipedia has. Many people, who for their own cultural reasons, want to disrespect someone, will refuse to address or refer to some individual the way they want to be. That behavior is no different from calling some one fuckface, and refusing to address them differently. You've selected something they find offensive, in order to bully and harass them, needlessly. Given that toxic reality, for cases like this, it's better to defer to not mentioning the name they were given at birth, because that detail might be used against them. Again, there might be some stronger reason you would want to include it. But it's better to err on the side of respecting the individual.
There's a tricky ethical question here: if someone changed their name and ask for not being called their former name ever again, you can either ignore their will, which is rude, or chose to follow it but then you are doing a disservice to the public's understanding.
The secind option used to be the norm on wikipedia even 15 years ago, but Anti-trans activists using dead-naming as a slur against trans people triggered the shift from the second option to the first.
As usual assholes are why we can't have nice things.
> There's a tricky ethical question here: if someone changed their name and ask for not being called their former name ever again, you can either ignore their will, which is rude, or chose to follow it but then you are doing a disservice to the public's understanding.
Calling somebody with his former name and mentioning his former name in a Wikipedia page are two completely different things. Using the fact that the former is seen as rude by some to avoid the second is in my opinion just an example of the level of extremism of the pro-trans activists.
But if in fact it made sense, shouldn't we completely remove any reference of the previous name also from the pages of people like Yusuf Islam [1] or Muhammad Ali [2] ?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Stevens
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Ali
Notability. Those two celebrities were known for a very long time under their old name. To prevent confusion, their old name is shown.
The victim of a crime was not notable before their name change.
Many married women are known under their husbands last names, from Maria Salomea Skłodowska, Betty Marion Ludden to Melanija Knavs. Some celebrities even use stage names, such as Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta.
Many of these women are not really known under those names, but somehow, they're still listed on their wiki pages.
Most of the married women on Wikipedia didn't get the choice of keeping their own name, so we cannot really compare it to someone who changed their name.
Same for stage names, people don't use stage name because they want to escape their former name, they use stage names because it's cool.
And when people use a pseudonym and want to keep their real identity secret for personal reasons, their name doesn't appear on Wikipedia, and nobody is ever complaining about that! It's as if people were obsessed by trans people in particular…
But it's not a secret, the name has been mentioned in mainsteam media on multiple occasions, and even here, in this thread on HN.
> It's as if people were obsessed by trans people in particular…
Yet, they keep every other name on wikipedia, especially if we're talking about peoples legal names, except if the person was trans for some reason. Wikipedia is the one making exceptions here for one group in particular.
> Yet, they keep every other name on wikipedia
Nope. When it's an unknown transgender person who died for being themselves, perhaps it's stupid to put the older name there. World renown Ellen Page is deadnamed right there at the top. Because they were known for decades worldwide under that name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliot_Page
Why stupid? I mean... what do we gain by removing that info? Isn't more info better?
Melanija Knavs was not known under that name, and it's still there.
> Isn't more info better?
No.
The goal of an encyclopedia is to have a high signal/noise ratio. If you put literally everything on a subject on its page there, it becomes fundamentally useless.
And in that particular case, the only people you satisfy by putting the info there, are the bullies who caused their suicide.
> But it's not a secret, the name has been mentioned in mainsteam media on multiple occasions, and even here, in this thread on HN.
Most pseudonyms aren't real secrets either, plenty of people knew the real name or face of people posting under a pseudonym but that doesn't make it OK to post it on Wikipedia.
> Yet, they keep every other name on wikipedia, especially if we're talking about peoples legal names
Ah yes, “every other” except for the ones they don't. We've already talked about people with pseudonyms right here!
> Wikipedia is the one making exceptions here for one group in particular.
One group that happened to be harassed (and, unfortunately often, assaulted) for having changed their name in the first place, hence the “exception”: the group is exceptionally vulnerable.
Notability is subjective
In the Universe, yes. In the closed system of Wikipedia, no, it's a well defined term with clearly established criteria, tested over the years on thousands of Talk pages on controversial pages, of how to achieve consensus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
> Calling somebody with his former name and mentioning his former name in a Wikipedia page are two completely different things
Except when people keep vandalizing Wikipedia renaming people there with their dead name. And yes it happens over and over and over again.
Because the most active extremists on the topic are by far the anti-trans crowd. (And it's not even close, there are trans people assaulted every week, sometimes going as far as murder this is extremism).
And again, Wikipedia keeps mentioning the former name when it's necessary (look for Bradley Manning on Wikipedia, the page redirects to Chelsea Manning but the old name is state because it's important).
According to MOS:GENDERID [1], a person's former name can be used when they were notable under that name. You're trying to make it out as if there's some nefarious double standard when there's not, editors just want Wikipedia to be clear and encyclopedic.
It's incredible that in a discussion about brutal violence against a child, the child victim is being painted as the "extremist"!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Biog...
People are downvoting factual comments like this then talk about “trans-activist extremism”…
Strong “Don't contradict my opinions with facts” vibe.
> level of extremism of the pro-trans activists
What on earth are you talking about?
Sometimes it easier to downvote that Earthian than to argue.
The use of the masculine pronoun here when we're referring to someone who transitioned from male kind of gives away that you're probably less concerned with searchability and preservation of history, and more concerned with promoting a transphobic agenda. I suppose it's possible you were using it as a generic pronoun, but in that case I would have expected "they." Am I wrong?
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So, you don't think I'm wrong? The OP used "he" because they have a transphobic agenda?
> because we use to call a person who will always have hairs on his face as "male".
We may not have solved the question, "what is a woman," but you have brilliantly solved the question, "what is a man": a human with eyebrows.
If someone uses "he" word it does not means antitransism. My point is that trying to euphemize "he" word is anistraightism. And I am even not an antigayist.
If your words can be reversed so easily it means that you have no idea but a pure propaganda instead. Famous anti-white-straight-man-ism seems as a dangerous thing to me, so I oppose this unfamous Davos-protracted diversity woke ideology.
We're talking about the male pronoun used in the context of a discussion of a trans woman, not some kind of men's rights thing. Did you think I was arguing that saying "he" is bad because all men are evil or something? That's how faithless your interpretation of the arguments of non transphobic people has become?
Can you define "woke?"
I think you are saying that "he" because you support woke ideology. It is clearly visible since you were talking about trans values also.
If you need me to repeat - I will repeat: I am not antigayist and I am not anti-transist.
Woke is essentually anti-nationalism and anti-white-suppremacism.
> Woke is essentually anti-nationalism and anti-white-suppremacism.
Then, depending on your definition of nationalism, it sounds like it's an unimpeachably good thing to be Woke, so I'm super confused where you're coming from here.
To be clear: I was saying that the OP was purposefully misgendering Nex Benedict in order express their transphobia.
Wake up, please. Noone else except of white suprematist will support your protransism, think about it. Analyze what nations typically are against it and who will protect you in the special place where you have written that comment when the yellows will come. It is OK to be transgender, but only while you are protected. White suprematists may protect transgender values but they need a freedom to be free from that kind of euphemization you are spreading.
"if someone changed their name and ask for not being called their former name ever again"
Writing someone was called XYZ, is not calling the person by that name again. It is just stating a historic fact.
Not all historic facts are relevant. Using someone’s old name when relevance can be achieved by stating the person was transgender is preferable.
I personally prefer not having other people decide for me which facts are and aren't relevant, I think that is unhelpful and potentially dangerous (some people think what happened in Tienanmen Square isn't relevant to the general population, do you agree?).
For a transgender person, I may have known them before they transitioned for example and may not necessarily be familiar with their new name, that's a reason off the top of my head that it would be relevant to me but not necessarily you.
> I personally prefer not having other people decide for me which facts are and aren't relevant,
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't any presentation of information prepared by humans, information wherein someone else decided which facts were relevant? The only way around this I can think of is personal performance of all experimentation in human history from first principles. Unfortunately you will probably need to learn those first principles through reading things written by other humans.
> I personally prefer not having other people decide for me which facts are and aren't relevant
Then don't read an encyclopedia, because the entire raison d'être of that medium is about distilling “broadly useful” facts about the world, with no pretense of exhaustiveness.
> I personally prefer not having other people decide for me which facts are and aren't relevant
Then reading Wikipedia probably isn't a great idea.
Reading any encyclopedia, for that matters. The job of an encyclopedist is literally to distill “generally useful” information, it has never been about being exhaustive.
> I personally prefer not having other people decide for me which facts are and aren't relevant, I think that is unhelpful and potentially dangerous (some people think what happened in Tienanmen Square isn't relevant to the general population, do you agree?).
I couldn't agree more, it's wrong to decide what facts someone else is allowed to know. Please tell me the most embarrassing details of your life?
Perhaps there's nuance and different standards we can apply when talking about individuals, especially individuals who have been bullied or abused? Than the standards we apply when a powerful group is trying to cover up a violent attack against another?
> For a transgender person, I may have known them before they transitioned for example and may not necessarily be familiar with their new name, that's a reason off the top of my head that it would be relevant to me but not necessarily you.
I have a very hard time understanding this example, you're concerned that you, who knew this person but only knew their older name, won't be able to find thier wikipedia page via searching for their old name? Which is true because their old name isn't listed on the page itself?
I don't find that very compelling, did you mean something different?
Its omitting information which seems antithetical to the whole point of Wikipedia. It makes it harder to find other sources of information on someone. it makes it harder to make connections between things you know.
Its really not very different from a Wikipedia article using an author's pseudonym mentioning their real name.
Should all Wikipedia articles on people omit information that the subject of the article does not want mentioned? Even if they find it distressing?
> It makes it harder to find other sources of information on someone
No it doesn't. Googling or searching on Wikipedia for either name yields the same page.
> Its omitting information which seems antithetical to the whole point of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia isn't a database of private information on individuals. On most celebrities pages you won't find their infidelities record either, unless it has some historical relevance.
> Its really not very different from a Wikipedia article using an author's pseudonym mentioning their real name.
In fact, when an author made it publicly clear that they didn't want their real name be known, Wikipedia usually respect their choice (until their real name stops being private information and gets historical relevance).
And somehow anti-trans activists seem to care much less. How surprising, really.
> The secind option used to be the norm on wikipedia even 15 years ago, but Anti-trans activists using dead-naming as a slur against trans people triggered the shift from the second option to the first.
Just to clarify, I think you mistook the order of the first option and the second option? I was confused by this statement
I don't think what should be neutral account of factual events should take into account if it would be rude to an individual.
There's no such thing “as neutral account of factual events”, it's a “map and territory” thing, you always have to weight if something is relevant and this is always a subjective exercise.
And then you have to ponder the relevance with whether or not publishing may cause harm.
Let's take an example, unrelated to the topic: why aren't the addresses of stars, or the identification number of billionaires personal jets, listed on Wikipedia? Because it's not relevant, and can be harmful.
And it's the same thing for trans people's name. Most of the time, their birth name is irrelevant and can even be harmful. But sometimes, when it's important, the name will still be there, with the redirection and all, see https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning
And, by the way, this isn't a Wikipedia thing, this is how press right works! Newspapers get sued all the time for mentioning irrelevant personal information about people, and lose.
Your examples are not equivalent at all. Why do you think the person was bullied? It's additional information that makes the picture clear, which is the purpose of an encyclopedia.
Any information which is relevant to the subject of article and brings clarity should not be censored, ideally.
Also if you could understand what I'm saying, you would realise I'm not asking to put birth names of every trans person with a wikipedia article in their article. Because it's not relevant.
You keep mentioning "harm" but never exactly describe what harm? What more harm can you imagine for a person who committed suicide due to bullying?
It is not known why she committed suicide, as she did not leave a note. Bullying is unlikely to be the full picture. What most accounts of her life omit is the considerable trauma she experienced as a young child: she was repeatedly raped by her father, a crime for which he was arrested and convicted.
The Wikipedia article skims over this, instead focusing on the trans and bullying aspects. This will have been a deliberate editorial choice as well.
Thanks for more context. Yeah the article seems very neutered (I think it's fair to say lying by omission, especially to me who just learn about the incident through this thread/this article). I think that's the whole argument. Wikipedia is not news and you cannot get first hand full context picture from it.
Instead, like everything else, it's another opinionated aggregator of information.
> Why do you think the person was bullied?
Because they weren't behaving as their surrounding wanted them to. The reason was given in the article. You don't need to know the birth certificate name of that kid to talk about that.
In fact, the very people asking the most loudly for using this name are the crowd that bullied them alive.
I got some additional context from another reply. Your replies are vague and don't clear things for me. Just like the article.
In your earlier reply you said relevancy of something was subjective. No. Inference of facts from given information by each person may be subjective. But the information itself, must never be influenced by the subjectivity stemming from the information provider.
I get that revealing some information which maybe considered sensitive will be used by awful people. But that doesn't apply here. You cannot withhold information on the pretense that it will be used maliciously. Otherwise it's no different that dystopian stories of catching criminals before they commit crime.
> Otherwise it's no different that dystopian stories of catching criminals before they commit crime.
This comparison is so lazy it convinced me to step out of this discussion.
Good day.
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The page is protected, the general public can't edit it.
There was already discussion on the talk page, "Should Nex's given name be included?" with consensus of "no." That discussion was archived, but you can see it here [0].
From what I can see, the word "Dagny" has been retroactively redacted from all history of the page and its talk page.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Death_of_Nex...
> From what I can see, the word "Dagny" has been retroactively redacted from all history of the page and its talk page.
If this doesn't sound 1984-esque I don't know what does.
This fact per se is not enough 1984, but the reason of that, end especially the power standing at the very beginning of that reasoning is certainly like that.
1984 describes an insurmountably established Soviet-esque state with omniscient surveillance and omnipotent monopoly on violence.
We're discussing a FOSS website that many people use.
There's quite literally nothing stopping you from making "unwoke" Wikipedia or whatever. You probably could even get Elon Musk to signal boost it.
> 1984 describes
1984 describes the practice of retroactively editing publication to erase facts from history.
Wikipedia is retroactively scrubbing not only articles but also their discussion and their editing history to erase facts that are thought to be inconvenient.
Feels reducto ad absurdum. Every encyclopedia does this when it turns a person with fifty biographies about them into a one page encyclopedia entry.
This is a naive take that belies the reality of pages with a lot of traffic, and is the reason why there can be controversial discussions in the talk pages. I know nothing about the history of this page, which is why I said "if it's intentional" regarding any deliberate scrubbing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie...
EDIT: On further inspecting the page history, this definitely looks intentional, or at least is a controversial page.
Not when someone with connections and better knowledge of the WP bylaws weaponizes the Arb Com against you.
Here are some of the things you can get banned for:
- Having a too large fraction of your edits be reverts.
- Updating raw references to <ref cite> references (without changing the contents of the reference).
- Saying something on a forum that could be construed as telling people to edit a particular article in a particular way.
The Arb Com doesn't have to open up a public discussion about the matter. They can simply pronounce judgment in private and ban you. There's no prior notice, no representation, and no independent appeal. For a "supreme court", that's quite a low bar.
Wikipedia is very much an oligarchy. Shared IPs are often blocked from editing and pages locked.
The guidelines on gender identity are based on the BLP policies [1], which call for taking harm into account and not going into excess detail on someone's personal life.
Everything people are upset over in this thread is explained clearly in the BLP section on privacy, the gender identity section of the Manual of Style [2], and this essay on gender identity [3].
This particular example is completely clear-cut. Sources didn't cover them at all under any previous names because they're only known from one event. Someone who isn't transgender would be covered the exact same way. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a gossip rag.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_livin...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Biog...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Gender_identity
Benedict became notable because of her death; Biographies of Living Persons has a privacy section that gives reasoning. These reasons, e.g. identity theft, complaint from the person, harassment, can not apply to a deceased person.
News articles did cover Benedict under the name Dagny.
As far as policies go, this page should be titled "Suicide of Nex Benedict" according to this policy [0], yet the talk on that subject ended with "closed with no consensus to move." [1]
This does speak to the selective application and selective enforcement of policies on Wikipedia. But I was most concerned to learn about how scrubbing the histories of pages is official policy itself.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Choosing_article_tit...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Death_of_Nex_Benedict/Arc...
Admittedly I do not know how much of a sensitive issue this is, but I find it surprising that the name given at birth is not mentioned anywhere on the Wikipedia page, even though in other cases of name change usually "Name (born Old Name)" is written.
Their guidelines on using dead names says why that is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Biog...
I often find myself clicking a link that takes me to an anchor on another page that no longer exists. Surely a system could be implemented to remove these?
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https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/elon-musk/elon-musk-grokipedia-...
"Unlike Wikipedia, Grokipedia centralizes its editing process. Users can submit suggested edits to Grokipedia, but instead of assigning a group of volunteer community editors to decide on the edits, xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, controls whether or not a certain edit is approved and implemented on the website."
So you could as well call it "Muskipedia"
https://grokipedia.com/page/Elon_Musk
If this looks like a "genuinely bias-free" page to you, I don't know what to tell you.
I started reading the Grokipedia page on the "Russian invasion of Ukraine". Immediately after the abstract, it starts talking about the "9th century Kyivan Rus" which seems like irrelevant information to a conflict over a millenia later, but then you realize it's exact same thing that Putin started with in his interview with Tucker Carlson to push the 'Ukraine isn't a real country' narrative.
can you provide a few examples where grokipedia outshines wikipedia?
Are you joking?
>Alternativa Estudiantil Alternativa Estudiantil is a Spanish patriotic student movement founded in September 2023 to counter perceived left-wing and woke dominance in universities, positioning itself as a conservative alternative emphasizing national identity and meritocracy.[1]
A random article in the "edit approved by Grok".
Genuinely bias-free my ass.
after 25 years wikipedia showed what it truly was created for, by selling the content for training. otherwise - okay, this was a cool project, perhaps we need better. like federated, crypto-signed articles that once collected together, @atproto style, produce the article with notable changes to it.
Their enterprise offering is more for fresh retrieval than training. For training, you can just download the free database dump — one you would inadvertently end up recreating if you were to use their enterprise APIs in a (pre-)training pipeline.
Context: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/wikipedia-will-share-cont...
tl;dr: Wikipedia is CC and has public APIs, but AI companies have recently started paying for "enterprise" high-speed access.
Notably, the enterprise program started in 2021 and Google has been paying since 2022.
You’re saying Wikipedia was created 25 years ago to sell its content to train LLMs that didn’t even exist?! I doubt it…
I’m using a harsh allegory to express massive discontent by the fact that someone was catering to user content for 25 years only for this content to become training corpus.
It is perhaps not that Wikipedia in particular been created for this, that much we hope for, but nowadays it seems such public services are best monetised in this way. I have an actual memory from when Wikipedia started and the enthusiasm of millions of people for it.
And no, I’m not alright with the fact so many people contributed effort AND money to this project only for Jimmy to figure how to sell it better to big corpo.
Seems unfair, as it seems unfair to get these downvotes. Like nobody liked the fact MS bought and used all of GitHub to create copilot, so how is this different?
“Jimmy Wales is even more of a visionary than we thought”