And i agree its great, i spend an inordinate amount of my time on Wikimedia related things.
But i think there is a danger here with all these articles putting Wikipedia too much on a pedestal. It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws.
The true best part of Wikipedia is that its a work in progress and people are working to make it a little better everyday. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact we aren't there yet. We'll never be "there". But hopefully we'll continue to be a little bit closer every day. And that is what makes Wikipedia great.
It’s a bit hard for me to imagine something better (in practice). It’s easy to want more or feel like reality doesn’t live up to one’s idealism.
But we live here and now in the messiness of the present.
Viva la Wikipedia!
Compare this text from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_configuration :
>> The most common labeling method uses the descriptors R or S and is based on the Cahn–Ingold–Prelog priority rules. R and S refer to rectus and sinister, Latin for right and left, respectively.[2]
This claim is actually repeated further down in the article. The fact that it is false was noted on the talk page seven years ago, but this seems to bother no one. After all, there's a citation.
I think we can reasonably expect more. Wikipedia reliably fails at very, very easy problems of "knowledge consensus".
Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it. But philosophers still talk about Truth, they didn't get the message. As long as we are using leaky abstractions - which means all the time - we can't capture Truth. There is no view from nowhere.
Anything vaguely sociopolitical is functionally censored on it and wikipedia does nothing about it even if they don't support it.
That said, I find Wikipedia's biases predictable, avoidable (topic specific) & also very interesting as a sociological study in itself.
Firstly, it reminds us of inherent bias in (mostly colonial-written) paper encyclopedia of the past. There has never been an unbiased encyclopedia written & seeing the biases fully sourced & rapidly evolving in realtime serves as an excellent crystallisation of slower processes in previous works: highlighting that many of the historical "facts" we all grew up with were ultimately fed to us by similarly biased groups.
I've also come to the slow realisation that this may be a fundamentally unsolvable problem & that simply categorising it as "biased beyond repair" & continuing to handle it in that manner may be the best thing we can do.
Can you make such an example?
Also I find a lot of people’s disagreements usually come down to “ok, I see that the information that I thought was censored is actually available but not in the format that I prefer”
And if you’re looking for objective information about the Israel Palestine conflict you’re hardly going to get it anywhere.
I also have long been frustrated with certain areas of Wikipedia that I feel struggle so significantly with NPV that they're rendered beyond useless, likely net harmful. (These are not the topics I've attempted contributing to recently, I wouldn't dare).
I'm continuously annoyed by the contrast of their overbearing donation pushes with the overspends in their published reports.
BUT all that said I do sometimes need reminding in today's world how much of a miracle Wikipedia still is. Not something to be taken for granted. And on the overspends: this is hard to qualify given there's really no comparable projects in existence. Maybe this is just the price we need to pay.
1. I suspect the NPV problem may be a fundamentally unsolvable problem (or at least one that would literally take a global paradigm shift in how all societies are structured to do so). This seems outside of Wikipedia's control. Attempting any draconian measures to tackle it might have negative knock-on effects on many of the other assets that give Wikipedia it's value.
2. The spending problem, as I said, is subjective & might simply be a case of efficiency being incompatible with an organisational culture that produces such a miraculous thing. I honestly suspect the opposite is true: I personally think the overspends are indicative of organisational disfunction that could seriously hurt the project in the longer term, but that's pure gut feeling on my part, based on nothing of substance. Who knows.
3. The increasing difficulty in contributing (80% of edits coming from 1% of editors) on the other hand is - imo - a potentially terminal problem & one that needs to be addressed urgently if we want to keep this resource alive.
In the past, Wikipedia vandalism was a rite-of-passage of school & college kids. This obviously needs counter-measures but it really feels like today's Wikipedia has gone so far in the opposite direction as to entirely dissuade new contributors. Old Wikipedia used to be filled with User: namespaced subpages with long form essays on the ever running debate between deletionism & inclusionism. In today's Wikipedia, the inclusionists have emigrated, tired of battle, & the remaining deletionists bravely prevent any budding new contributor from having a positive welcoming community experience by quickly auto-deleting their WIP stubs or moving them into esoteric red-taped namespaced processes nobody knows how to navigate. It's a deeply unwelcoming environment for new users, especially young people. I'd love to see an age profile of the population of frequent editors.
Articles about some chemical process are fine, indeed often excellent.
Everything where facts get filtered and presented, is bad. Read about real world events - especially where different groups or countries were involved - in three different languages on Wikipedia, and you'd think three different universes exist.
> Read about real world events - especially where different groups or countries were involved - in three different languages on Wikipedia, and you'd think three different universes exist.
The science that could emerge by studying the phenomenon could constitute a milestone.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080604020024/http://www.hereco...
> So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.
> And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus
Contrast that with the rest of the internet, which mostly rewards radicalization and nudges people towards it.
Which is good in ways. Though random phase is song of the past.
Yes, it has its flaws, but I plan to keep on editing and donating.
Wikipedia could function forever without another donation if they wanted to.
I'll add I don't think it can be any closer to "perfect" than it is because the same fundamental traits which lead to its imperfections also enable its unique value - like speed, breadth, depth and broad perspectives. The only areas where it might very occasionally not be ideal tend to be contentious political and culture war topics or newer niche articles with low traffic. Basically topics where some people care too much and those where not enough people care at all.
But this isn't as big a downside as it might be because anyone can look at an article's talk page and edit history and immediately see if it's a contentiously divisive topic or, on the other end of the spectrum, see when there's been little to no discussion.
Of all the demographics who should understand this, you'd think that people complaining about the failure of all the other institutions would be high on the list.
I held out for as long as I could but it was emotionally draining
> factually contrary to international law
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/64d6548c19f38a...
For example, Wikipedia has a Chinese issue. [1]
Because both Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese both live under the Chinese language in Wiki (And we have a dropdown within Chinese wiki to choose what regional variants we want to read). There's a constant wiki edit war. This is not only happened to the political topic, but also how something should be phased. Even though Chinese officially ban access to Wikipedia by the Great Firewall, enough people VPN and manage to edit wiki pages by pages, and more annoyingly, there are more wiki admin coming from PRC than Taiwan/Hong Kong/Macau etc.
So you cannot assume Wikipedia is neutral.
https://paste.sr.ht/~awal/2310cfca431e9f723df281d02558eaebd7...
I don't know that the attackers against Wikipedia are advocating for a modest point like that, which I would think even proponets accept as a truism. I think Wikipedia is just another variation on institutional knowledge, and, as the world descends into misinformation and authoritarianism, it was inevitable it too would be attacked for perceived "bias."
Everything from global warming to vaccines, to newer and newer frontiers we never would have guessed, like hurricane trajectories or drones or air traffic, have fallen one after another to a kind of reactionary skepticism, resentful of the fact that these domains are controlled by real facts, and not merely participatory collective storytelling. There are some things left, that we problaby think could never get politicized, that will be. Pickleball rules? Quantum mechanics? Baseball history? Soon longstanding uncontroversial claims belonging to those are going to fall into the category of essentially contested concepts.
So Wikipedia, with ordinary and lonstanding requirements for reliable sourcing, and decades of policy on what that means in reaction to countlessly many debates, is resilient against the kind of recreational, hedonic skepticism that the masses use to dismantle other knowledge claims.
So "well wikipedia's not perfect" kind of rubs me the wrong way because it seems like it implies we should be more welcoming of this attitude of hedonic skepticism, which has been so destructive. I think it should be celebrated. Authoritative factual validity, and the norms that make it possible, used to be uncontroversial. And thus far, social media misinformation has outcompeted fact checkers, but not (yet) Wikipedia. I feel like that's never been more important.
They have their NPOV[1] policy, and seem impressively unbiased to me, given the various divisive situations they have to try to cover.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_v...
As a non American this is very obvious to me.
Even Reuters that was supposedly meant to be a non-biased media outlet is clearly left-leaning at this point
Wikipedia says (or said, I guess - I haven't checked) that it unambiguously *was* a slur then too. As evidence, it cites a study of 17th century literature that notes redskins were more likely to be villains than heros in a small sample of 80 books and a diary entry about a sign outside a small town that said "Indian / Redskin scalps - $1" or some such. I don't recall the details.
The point is there wasn't one cited source that showed redskin specifically was a slur, only general evidence that white settlers were racist against Native Americans. Clear WP:SYNTH violation.
Tried to make my own changes, got immediately reverted. Tried to start on the talk page, got totally filibustered by two editors who has the page and a hundred other racism adjacent pages on their watchlist and whose edit history was basically just those handful of pages. Started reading about internal wikipedia boards I could appeal to. Stopped and logged off.
Once you start noticing things like that and start double checking, you find such minor distortions in a lot of political adjacent Wikipedia pages.
Another good example is to grab five super murderous left wing dictators and five super murderous right wing dictators and read the summary section. Use a pen or a highlighter and classify each sentence as positive, negative, or neutral.
And being fair, if there's one weakness in a site which relies on several sources agreeing on something it surely is when those sources are colluding on something, but the end result is a page rife with misinformation.
This is prevalent in culture wars stuff, Keffals article "graciously" fails to mention how she frequently lied and instigated vast amounts of harassment towards herself or how she basically spent the GoFundMe money she campaigned for on heroin. If the media spins a narrative, Wikipedia doesn't really have a counter to that in any way.
I'm not sure if there's anything else out there that's better at giving a fairly neutral summary of political controversies?
It reminds me of the Churchill quote "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"
https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/is-wikipedia-politically-...
but:
> The collections of the Library of Congress include more than 32 million catalogued books and other print materials in 470 languages; more than 61 million manuscripts; the largest rare book collection in North America ...
COMPENDIUM Brief summary of a larger work or of a field of knowledge : abstract
The library is more extensive, but they don't have the same goals. I'd even argue that part of Wikipedia's quality is it's ability to remain small relative to the knowledge it summarises.
You won't find a 1920's copy of a newspaper in Wikipedia, but you will find articles about events from then that link to said newspaper.
Both are super important though, Wikipedia can't exist as it does now without archives (digitized or at the very least referentiable).
In a world run by criminals, telling the truth becomes a crime.
It's only when a subject becomes popular that the propaganda gets recognized and rectified.
A lot of wiki pages about smaller companies only list the good things (fundraising, tech, etc.) and omit any controversies. The deliberate omissions due to bias are even more insidious than weasel words or other forms of poor journalism.
Fwiw I truly believe in Wikipedia and donate every year, but calling it "perfect" would be extremely dangerous (and false!)
* A sketchy online university that was clearly manipulating their Wikipedia page with lots of positive information about themselves to suppress info about their active lawsuits and controversies
* On medical topics: non scientific, baseless claims about the efficacy of various herbal treatments, vitamin supplements, or other snake oil treatments.
* On various fringe politicians. Someone clearly rewrites the article or adds additional things to the article with claims about what the politician has done or not done or wants to do, but these claims are arguably not fact based.
Now these things usually don't last for a long time. They do get rolled back or removed. But it doesn't have to be on there long for it to be utilized. For example, someone just needs to modify the Wikipedia page long enough to get through their active lawsuits, or the snake oil salesman just needs their info up on Wikipedia for long enough to use it to increase their perceived authenticity to trick some seniors. There is such a constant stream of bad actors trying to put this stuff out there that you'll see it eventually, and it doesn't even have to be up there for long for it to be harmful.
So I re-read the entire page, this time looking for signs it was written by marketing rather as a factual document. Of course it was exactly that. Only the engineers deep in the bowels of the organisations developing 5G knew how it would perform at that stage, and evidently they weren't contributing to Wikipedia. Until the man on the street had experience with 5G, the marketing people were going to use the Wikipedia page on it as an advertising platform.
So I'm in agreement with the OP. From what what I can see a Wikipedia page that only has a few contributors it is no better than any other page about the same subject on the internet. The breath and depth of a Wikipedia page on a subject arises because of the wisdom of the crowds contributing to it. If there is no crowd, it's possible there is no wisdom.
Fortunately Wikipedia does have one other advantage over a random Internet page - you can tell when the have been lots of contributions. There is an audit trail of changes, and you can get a feel for the contentious points by reading the Talk page. That contrasts to getting the same information from an LLM, where you have no idea if you are being bullshitted.
As you might predict from all that, the Wikipedia page on 5G is very good now.
In general, it is not uncommon to come across slantedness issues. Is it completely 100% clear that Doi has come on and maliciously added his papers? Not quite, but good propaganda wouldn't be either, and would actually be far less suspicious-looking.
You'll see "xy atrocity had caused the deaths of this many people*", where the additional note will say something like "The numbers reported in this study have been challenged by many scholars on the subject and has been accused of invalid methods".
It's super common with history around Communist countries, because for a lot of folks in the west, the black book of communism is taken as fact when it's far from it, and you have groups like the Victims of Communism memorial foundation that have huge coffers for pushing the black book line.
Wikipedia is good for casual research, and in practice, I found the English Wikipedia very reliable, at least for scientific topics, but it is also pretty good on big controversial subjects. Reliability only starts to drop on minor subjects.
But educators want you to go beyond that. Here, Wikipedia is just a starting point, with its best feature being citations.
Obviously popular articles are great -- they have so many eyeballs and editors that they're not just quite accurate, but often more comprehensive than other sources (in terms of describing competing schools of thought, for example).
But when you really drill down into more niche articles, there's a tremendous amount of information that is uncited or not found in the citation, has glaring omissions, and/or is just plain wrong. These are the kinds of articles that get 1 edit every six months.
It's those latter articles that are the reason Wikipedia is too unreliable to cite.
(Also, Wikipedia is a tertiary source, as it is meant to only cite secondary sources, not primary sources.)
Blew my mind.
I'd love to see your daughter submit something extremely wrong with citations from nonsense on the internet.
At the end though, most of us are guilty of such behavior from time to time.
So even if Wikipeda isn't permitted as a direct source for students, it's a great place to find other sources for claims and facts about almost any topic. That's how I taught my kids to use it in school. It's a ready-made bibliography on almost anything.
Why? It's really not reliable. It doesn't have any decent standards for sources. Any controversial topic is a constant edit war. Wikipedia is only good when you're okay if info turn out to be false.
I suspect that the bulk of readers don't give a second thought to Wikipedia's Magisterium.
Correction on this: Wikipedia was GFDL until 2009. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Licensing_update .
OpenStreetMap's licence change was much more difficult. Agreement had to be sought from all editors and for the few that didn't respond their work was removed. We actually replaced the work of most non-responders before the licence change though.
In cases like those, what has gone wrong is a mix of apophenia and people protecting their own turf. Elaborate classification systems are created that are internally consistent but have no relationship to reality.
Something happened, a war started, someone did X, someone else did Y... you open wikipedia, see all the "current situation" bias, open the history tab and look at the article from before <the thing> happened.
Unlike most user contributed sites it's happy to throw stuff away. It does grow but it doesn't care about growing fast. That's great but it's a hard formula to replicate.
One important piece of even trying to replicate that is its nature as a nonprofit. Any profit-seeking organization trying to grow a user-contribution based site will prefer content and moderation pipelines that drive engagement over quality.
Certainly that's not a great way to make money. Not if you're depending on people to spend a lot of time seeking new content (and be shown ads).
It really doesn't. Granted, it could be a lot worse.
Now, I can visit pages for certain medical conditions that contain completely unsourced claims with no "citation needed" nor any warnings. When I try to search for it, I often trace it back to alternative medicine or pseudoscience influencers.
The sad part is that when I've tried to remove obviously flimsy information, someone will immediately come along and add it back. Unless you're ready to spend months in a Wikipedia edit war with someone who obsesses over a page, there's no point in even trying. These people know the rules and processes and will use every one of them against you. When that fails, they'll try to pull rank. If that fails, they'll just quietly continue editing and rewriting (possibly from alt accounts) until you get too tired to fight the battle any more.
The trick is to write about your proposed edit on the talk page and wait a few days. If nobody has complained, you make the edit and write "see talk" in the edit summary. The notion that you should push an edit first and wait for someone to revert you just doesn't work in practice except for trivial typo fixes. Discuss your edit in depth, then push it once you have a presumed near-consensus for it.
- https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2024-10-17/Path_Depende...
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40655989
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Weierstrass_function#Accu...
And my personal favourite is recently when the most ridiculous thing was added to Bukele's Gang Crackdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_c...
If you still have the desire to have some of these fixed, post here and I'll put it in my queue and get to it at some point. If you don't want the resulting interaction from other commenters here, send it to my email (in profile).
Wikipedia is ultimately a consensus summarizer frequently mistaken for a truth-seeker. So you have to make the case for something being true somewhere where the experts live, and then Wikipedia can express the experts' opinion. But crucially, it is not truth-seeking on its own.
Any controversial topic should never be read on Wikipedia, it will not be accurate.
People are paid whole-ass salaries to edit Wikipedia (and to become mods on Reddit.) They masquerade as (a dozen different) obsessed weirdos, but they are just normal middle-class people who are being paid to lie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&...
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/plan-types.html#how-searche...
Ad driven sites broke the internet; they might have broken society to some degree as well.
The political model doesn't work at all. If you just count the votes of the people who show up to vote, the Party will hire buses and empty the retirement homes and homeless shelters. Maybe you can fight this irl if everyone knows there's an election, but nobody knows when there's a war on a talk page.
Although CBPP shares a lot with general User-generated content (UGC) and the open source model, maybe mechanisms that make it work is a little different.
The article points out system-side elements like "Talk page" and human-side elements like policies and guidelines.
I wonder if there are any studies on this subject.
I have an email, old enough to vote, that I received from an engineer. They wrote "Wikipedia is a good site for learning how our new RAID array works. People need to change their mind about Wikipedia. Just because anyone can make a page doesn't mean the information is wrong."
If they had sent me any other link, all this info would be behind a paywall, login, or would simply 404 today.
That's not really "national," is it?
France has national security considerations, just like the UK, Uruguay and Uganda. They'd all benefit from having open access to verifiable information.
Interestingly enough, Wikipedia once (I haven't checked if it's still in effect) blacklisted links to there, with compelling evidence (if you read any of the discussion behind the scenes) that it was actually about certain admins and power users trying to maintain control over the bias in main-space article content.
I think that starting in the 1980s, people started to expect anything involving information technology created immediately-accountable monetary value on a massive scale after seeing the fortunes of people like Gates, Wozniak, Jobs, et al. This was further boosted by the Dotcom bubble.
The fact is, a significant fraction of IT is indeed profitable, but applying the model of perpetual growth is not appropriate for all of that significant fraction, and there's the other fraction of the IT world that isn't directly profitable. More people need to realize that their work falls in the latter two fractions instead of the first.
Which is not to say free and without challenges, definitely not at Wikipedia's scale, but compared to how much donation money they get it's peanuts, not even the same ballpark (the vast majority of the money they get via Wikipedian beg banners goes to projects other than Wikipedia)
Also, personal opinion but
> I haven’t opened Wikipedia in years.
sounded like someone proudly telling a group of supposedly cool friends how they don't read stuffy books anymore now that they've discovered one-page summaries online. This might fall on deaf ears but there's value in reading the actual thing including following references where relevant
Wow, she was ahead of her time, no? I admit to have never contributed to Wikipedia, that is about to change.
But archive.org has the subscription popup...
https://web.archive.org/web/20250905062805/https://www.theve...
https://slate.com/technology/2021/03/japanese-wikipedia-misi...
(Even tinier is the Limburgian dialect that have their own Wikipedia. It seems to mostly be an exercise in how to write this spoken language than to make actually useful articles with unique content. Literally nobody can read that who can't also read Dutch, since it has no spelling or even a dictionary that'd work for more than a few square kilometres. But I digress)
The Germans on the other hand, I've been amazed that there exists, not infrequently, articles in German with more information than in English. It seems like such a shame to me to put all this effort into a niche language, yet it's there. There are well-maintained silos of information out there if you know where to find them!
- https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
- https://www.piratewires.com/p/wikipedia-editors-cant-decide-...
- https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-wikipedia-s-pro-hamas-edit...
It's similar to the problem on Reddit, I wouldn't trust it on any topic that is even mildly controversial. Wikipedia will have a strong progressive left slant it launders carefully through seemingly neutral language and selective sourcing.
Honestly it's gotten worse over the years too - makes me see more value in printed encyclopedia, they go out of date but at least they represent a slice of time. They're not endlessly revised to meet some false ideology that has edit power at present.
Almost every book you read about Israel Palestine will probably be biased in some way, certainly the news will be. It feels like perfect being the enemy of good. Like sure it’s a mess like all compendiums of human knowledge, but also seems massively better than the alternative.
Your point about the encyclopedia seems strange, sure it’s likely to be less accurate less complete and more biased, but it’s narratively interesting is like? What are you trying to accomplish than that that’s better?
Annoyance at Wikipedia feels nihilistic. Like “it’s not perfect so why try”. “I’d rather read things where I think I know what the bias is (but probably don’t”
The problem with wikipedia is it pretends to be above the fray and as a result it's deceptive. People think they're getting a neutral topic overview when they're actually getting something that's been designed to persuade based on the editors that control it and the editors are generally bad power hungry reddit mod types with extreme bias. It's particularly insidious because the people reading wikipedia are the least able to detect this deception. It launders their pet ideology through pseudo neutrality.
I think most alternative options are better.
The encyclopedia point is at least it is a static record from a point in time vs. a sort of "we were always at war with Eurasia" kind of fluid that bends to the times.
(Not that I necessarily agree with this practice. Don't decapitate the messenger)
I'm sure they could, most teachers aren't idiots. And they were correct that "casual crowdsourcing" is not a fitting replacement for peer review.
And in fact, the current moderation policies for Wikipedia only work in so far as they use peer-review type processes, such as requiring "notability" and multiple sources, and preferring expertise in a field. Of course, if you're in a relevant field you shouldn't use Wikipedia as a primary source since you would presumably have access to whatever sources the wiki itself cites in the articles.
Especially relevant when reading this from a paywalled article.
That is some 1984-level “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength" argument. If those “news” sources want people to stop calling them liars, they should stop lying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
According to that Arbitrator, Wikimedia gave a legal opinion that he violated the law in doing so:
"Well, I got a result today: the ombuds commisssion found that I did indeed violate the access to nonpublic data policy, and has issued a final warning to me. Apparently mailing list comments are, "under a contemporary understanding of privacy law and the policies in question," nonpublic data on the same level as CU data or supressed libel."
https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=350266#p350...
Wasn't the first time he did it either... Officially, community guidelines only apply on the site itself. Once you get into the Discords or forums, doxxing is common and tolerated. Admins and arbitrators are happy to participate on those forums under their Wikipedia usernames because they feel like they need doxx to take action against those trying to harm Wikipedia. And because it (usually) isn't them doing the doxxing, it's ok. There's even an "alt-right identification thread" where established editors can request doxxing from people who don't link their accounts onwiki.
Generally this targets newer editors who aren't in a clique yet. e.g. The person who made "Wikipedia and Antisemitism" got doxxed. Once you get to a certain level, you are expected to participate in these "offwiki" forums to get anything done.
Some people try to complain about it but it doesn't end well. Generally you don't want to fuck with them because by the time you find out about Wikipediocracy, you've already revealed too much and are doxxable. & unlike nation-state actors they have inside information and understand the site.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...
If you do choose to edit Wikipedia, use a burner email and only edit during the same one or two hours of the day so they can't track timezones. & don't post any photos or information on where you live nor attend meetups.
There are some good people but once you get deeply involved it is a toxic community. Sorry for the rant but it pisses me off whenever people talk about how great the Wikipedia community is as someone who's into the internal shit. it's the worst place to get involved in "free culture".
It is not a transparent organization, and it does not even pay lip service to the effort of transparency. It is large enough of an organization that it is an absurd claim, on its face, that there are not cliques and factions who would do such things if it were at all possible.
You investigated yourselves and found no evidence of wrongdoing.
Unsurprisingly, "Wikipedianon" is a hit-and-run profile created just for this post, AFAICT.
i know that Beeblebrox did not doxx anyone and I said that in my comment. my point is leaking information to a doxxing forum sends the wrong message and is dangerous.
Maybe you should create an account and look at the "Wikimedian Folks Too Embarrassing for Public Viewing" forum and get back to me. Or do something about it before the Trump administration uses this as an excuse to censor enwiki. Either way here are some excerpts if you don't want to.
From the first page, here's an active editor (iii, known as jps or ජපස) doxxing someone about UFOs. I took out the names to be polite but it's all there:
https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=14172
"Is [username 1] (T-C-L) an alt account of [username 2] (T-C-L)?
For those who are not aware, [username2] is the name of an account used by one [redacted] on various platforms up until about 2024 when he more or less abandoned them. That account also was involved in the ongoing game of accusing [redacted] (T-H-L) of being [redacted] (T-C-L) which is about as fairly ludicrous an attempt at matching a Wikipedia username as I've ever seen.
Anyway, I feel like maybe he thought "If [__] can do it, so can I." And maybe that's the origin of the VPP.
Oh, this is about UFOs. Yeah, I'm in the shit. Maybe someone can link to some other stuff for you to read, but I just want to drop this here because I have nowhere else I get to speculate on these matters and everyone loves a good conspiracy theory data dump from time to time "
Here's the thread "Who is Wikipedia editor i.am.qwerty"
https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=13821
"I.am.a.qwerty (T-C-L) gathered up a bunch of those articles and some earlier material to create Wikipedia and antisemitism..."
It goes on:
"But who is I.am.a.qwerty? Let's suppose, just for the sake of argument, that I.a.am.a.qwerty is a PhD student named [real name]. Specifically, this [real name]:"
"[real name] is a PhD candidate [major] at [university name]. He received his BA (Hons) in [major] from [university]. Previously [real name] received his rabbinical ordination from the [other school] in [location] in [year]. [real name] is also the [job title] at [organization]."
Not to mention that there a whole load of #MeToo scandals which would doom Wikipedia if exposed to the media.
https://x.com/therabbithole84/status/1957598712693452920?s=4...
EDIT That line did exist in the past. It was there one year ago. Can someone more skilled in Wikipedia find and link the revision where it was removed? Bonus points for finding when it was added. Thanks in advance.
Not seeing anything in this source that supports this language; they summarize no other sources that I could see, and their own conclusions are more complex than this (as covered further down the article.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ideological_bias_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ideological_bias_...
One of the requests in the letter (https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/08272...) is to de-anonymise some of the Wikipedia editors.
My most-shocking LLM interaction so-far ties with when http://www.perplexity.ai cited my recent wikipedia edit (from my two decade+ account) in answering a question about transistor density... less than one day after I had made the update it cited [1]. Like I am nobody why tf are you listening to me?!?
This ties with having sat with a published author of a non-fiction war chronicle as we discussed his books, himself, and his world (with a computer, me typing / brainstorming).
Among many other reconfigurations of muh'brain.
[0] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/efPrtcLdcdM
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
I am just the electrician.
Its the lack of clarity or apology, he never said that it wasn't, he never apologised or said "oh yeah, i didnt mean that" or he even could have brushed it off as a joke or trolling to evoke a reaction. But he never did, he just said people were overreacting.
Combined with his public support for groups like AfD and Patriotic Alternative UK, it seems pretty obvious that he's a Nazi. If anything this subject shows a clear divide between US and European reaction, given how he's now overwhelmingly persona non grata in Europe since that. The US has this bizarre tribalism in its politics, where half its electorate deny the reality that an government official (as he started his doge role at the time) is glorifying the symbols of America's greatest adversary in the world's most destructive war.
How about not calling Peter McCullough or Ryan Cole or Pierre Kory misinformation spreaders about covid when they were right the whole time
Larry Sanger was correct
Edit: (I know we're not supposed to comment on downvotes but I seriously don't care) Those of you who insta-downvote stuff like this should not enjoy the privileges of the karma system on HN that allows you to downvote
(Further - how many of you actually work for big tech? Do you think it's ok to censor doctors like has been going on the last few years? Do you have any qualities of personal reflection, whatsoever?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars
> Wikipedia combines many features of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers. Wikipedia is not a soapbox, an advertising platform, a social network, a vanity press, an experiment in anarchy or democracy, an indiscriminate collection of information, nor a web directory. It is not a dictionary, a newspaper, an instruction manual, nor a collection of source documents or media files, although some of its fellow Wikimedia projects are.
What were they right about? I'm looking at Peter McCullough's Wikipedia article and some of the things he's claimed include young people don't need the vaccine, there is no evidence of asymptomatic spread of COVID-19, and COVID-19 pandemic was planned, etc.
Is this what you're saying they were right about the whole time? The pandemic was planned?