In the 2000s, in the tech world, the open source successes that were being talked about was always Apache and Linux.
When Wikipedia started gaining a bit of traction, everyone made fun of it. It was the butt of jokes in all the prime time comedy shows. And I always felt like telling the critics - "Don't you see what is happening? People all over the world are adding their own bits of knowledge and creating this huge thing way beyond what we've seen till now. It's cooperation on an international scale! By regular people! This is what the internet is all about. People, by the thousands, are contributing without asking for anything else in return. This is incredible! "
A few years later, Encyclopedia Britannica, stopped their print edition. A few years after that I read that Wikipedia had surpassed even that.
The amount of value Wikipedia brings to the world is incalculable.
And I'm very fortunate to be alive at a time where I can witness something at this scale. Something that transcends borders and boundaries. Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion. Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world.
If I want to look something up, I always check out wikipedia first. Its not always accurate, but its invariably a lot more accurate on most topics than random information across the web. Its also pretty easy to spot bad quality wiki articles once you get the gist of the site
Its amazing that wikipedia exists - there've been multiple hardcore attempts to kill it over the years for profit, but its still managing to go
Wikipedia is often the last on my goto resources to consult. The information is huge, but writing quality or style often irks me more than I can stand. I I always check Britannica first. If it's not there, then I move on.
While studying a neuroscience-adjacent MSc at UCL in London during the mid-2010s, senior academics would regularly recommend Wikipedia as an excellent primer for neuroanatomy. They wouldn't do it for people on actual neuroscience courses, who needed to know things in more detail, but they were very complimentary about the accuracy of the information on there.
I find math topics to be insufferable. They are written to be as theoretical as possible and borderline useless if you do not already know the topic at hand.
To give a different opinion, the math topics are actually what I like most. When I'm looking for something on Wikipedia, I want to get a precise definition and related concepts. I don't think it's Wikipedia's job to teach me the material, there's other resources for that.
It's extremely difficult to write math articles for a general audience which are both accessible and accurate, and the number of excellent writers working on Wikipedia math articles is tiny.
Please get involved if you want to see improvement. There are some math articles which are excellent: readable, well illustrated, appropriately leveled, comprehensive; but there are many, many others which are dramatically underdeveloped, poorly sourced, unillustrated, confusing, too abstract, overloaded with formulas, etc.
there are many math teachers teaching math to people who don't know the subject, basically all mathemeticians. and wikipedia has guidelines for how to serve the audience, the math articles ignore it.
I (got into and) went to MIT (and graduated several times) in engineering and also in finance. I am way beyond the average wikipedia reader in math knowledge. the mathematics wiki articles are imho worthless. the challenge is not how to write articles that are explanatory and reasonable, the challenge is all the gatekeeping of the wiki editors who make it the way it is, that is an unreasonable fight. I tried to make a change a couple of weeks ago to correct an error that was in an article. I got reverted by a person who wanted to collaborate on making the article more abstruse as a solution. "but the error" I said. It's still there.
The thing about Wikipedia is that no one cares what you have done outside Wikipedia. It is like showing up at a new work place and saying something that is factually correct, it can go any way.
I have a fair amount of edits on Wikipedia and the wikis that preceded it. Whenever I read this sentiment here I never really understand what the problem is. I never have it myself. The only fight I have been involved in was if Wikipedia should have an article on Bitcoin. Which was not obvious in the beginning.
You could always link to the article and we can have a look. I have no clout on Wikipedia but I do understand why facts can be problematic in any text book. It once took me a week to correct an article about a Russian author.
Absolutely. I do not know the current status, so don’t kill me if now is much better, because is just an example from many. But take fourier series. I remember going into the article, and instead of starting with something lime “helps to decompose functions in sums of sin and cos”, started with “the forier transform is defined as (PUM the integral for with Euler formula) continues: is easy to show the integral converges according to xxx criterion, as long as the function is…” you get the idea. Had I not know what FT is, I would’ve not undestand anything
Articles in biology, from which I understand nothing, are a wall for me. I could never understand anything biology related. Also for example, in Spanish, don’t ask me why, any plant or animal is always under the latin scientific name, and you have to search the whole article to find the “common” name of the thing.
The articles about Fourier series and Fourier transform currently begin with:
> A Fourier series is a series expansion of a periodic function into a sum of trigonometric functions. The Fourier series is an example of a trigonometric series. By expressing a function as a sum of sines and cosines, many problems involving the function become easier to analyze because trigonometric functions are well understood.
and
> In mathematics, the Fourier transform (FT) is an integral transform that takes a function as input, and outputs another function that describes the extent to which various frequencies are present in the original function. The output of the transform is a complex valued function of frequency. The term Fourier transform refers to both the mathematical operation and to this complex-valued function. When a distinction needs to be made, the output of the operation is sometimes called the frequency domain representation of the original function. The Fourier transform is analogous to decomposing the sound of a musical chord into the intensities of its constituent pitches.
I find it the other way around. I remember vividly that the textbook I was using for proving Gödel's first incompleteness theorem was insufferable and dense. Wikipedia gave a nice and more easily understood proof sketch. Pedagogically it’s better to provide a proof sketch for students to turn it into a full proof anyways.
The introductory paragraph in Simple English is: 'A diamond (from the ancient Greek αδάμας – adámas "unbreakable") is a re-arrangement of carbon atoms (those are called allotropes).' Seriously?
Compare with the Britannica one: 'diamond, a mineral composed of pure carbon. It is the hardest naturally occurring substance known; it is also the most popular gemstone. Because of their extreme hardness, diamonds have a number of important industrial applications.'
Britannica concisely summarizes the basic knowledge about diamonds in an easy-to-read short paragraph.
The thing is - Britannica is a lot smaller. Also - wikipedia is updated almost immediately for significant events where Brittanica would only be updated sometimes.
Wikipedia is uneven, some popular topics are well covered and have good info, others are outdated, biased, often written by one person with agenda.
I prefer the real encyclopedias. Britannica or other. The quality was so much better. For me would be hard to believe, anybody with actual experience using britannica can prefer wiki from the explanation quality pov. Of course the wiki has many advantages too. Before LLM I used it for helping with translation, for example. The direct links to web resources, etc. I like having both. I do certainly not want a world where wikipedia has the monopoly of truth, or truth is something “democratic” please understand it correctly, democracy is good, just that in knowledge I’ve seen so often the most popular belief is sometimes wrong.
I'm reading the Diamond article you liked and I cannot understand for the lift of me what you wanted? The Brittanica article seems substantially poorer. Note also that a key feature of Wikipedia is the hyperlinks! If you don't know what a "crystalline structure" is, or you want to know more about "hardness", you're welcome to click the links and dive further!
The wikipedia is more information dense, but that's not always what I want in a general purpose reference. Also hyperlinks are good if you want to read the article. But I don't want to have to click through hyperlinks, and thereby lose focus. Sometimes I just want to know just enough to complete the context in which some thing was mentioned. In the opening sentence there's a whole phrase "solid form of the element carbon" hyperlinked - to what is not immediately clear - but curiosity peaks the mind and I see that it's to an article on carbon allotropes. Later on it says it's "metastable" so I need to know what that means, but it just links to an article that's equally obstruse and so I have to go on an endless rabbit hole of hyperlinks. Britannica usually explains briefly in parentheses what some piece of jargon means.
Let me point out, that for me personally, for many years, hyperlinks in Wikipedia were the worst feature. I hated that! Anytime I started looking for something, I would start following links ad infinitum. Was extremely distracting. Instead of a little inline definition, for everything is a link. There is a good balance between linking to the definition of each word, and just inlining the definition.
Anyway, at some I disciplined myself to not follow the links. But sometimes the definition really needs following them.
If the choice is between Wikipedia vs random information accross the web, then Wikipedia is undoubtedly better. But it doesn't have to be that, on many topics there are reputable sources to consult first.
“atlanticist” - the culture of the enlightenment and the good that’s come from it.
Wikipedia does hold ideals, that access to knowledge is a net good, that people can cooperate both in contribution and review without a dominating magisterial authority. That rational dialogue and qualification and refinement is possible, and that it’s possible to correct for bias, and see the difference between bias and agenda.
Like those whose anti-enlightenment agenda is revealed when they use “atlanticist” as a slur.
No. One can beleive in the enlightenment ideals without placing north america, europe, and the relations between them as the most important thing.
For example - one could argue (quite successfully) that the US and Europe propping up dictators in south america and middle east to secure easy access to oil against the wishes and election results of those nations is opposed to many enlightenment ideals, but it is still atlanticism by prioritizing north american and european relations and preservation of values within their little bubble.
Also, just because there was much good resulting from enlightenment thinking, we also got things like the slave trade, the belgian congo, various genocides and so on from it... all of which are pretty bad.
The very notion that the enlightenment had all the answers and that there is nothing more to improve or learn is itself anti-enlightenment.
(I know there were abolitionists in the enlightnement,and examples of people opposed to all the other bad ideas i mentioned, but there are plenty of people who "rationally" argued for them too)
"The slave trade" refers to the transatlantic slave trade, not slavery in general. (Though I would question whether that really qualifies as a "product of the enlightenment": post hoc ergo propter hoc, and all that.)
Is there another public source for encyclopedia-type articles that is better for geopolitical content? For example, if I have a philosophy question I'll often consult the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy instead of Wikipedia.
If there isn't a more neutral public source -- if there are only sources with different biases, or if the better sources are behind paywalls -- then I think that Wikipedia is still doing pretty well even for contentious geopolitical topics.
Usually disputes are visible on the Talk page, regardless of whatever viewpoint may prevail in the main article. It can also be useful to jump back to years-old revisions of articles, if there are recent world events that put the subject of the article in the news.
Apart from Wikipedia, speaking more generally, I think that articles with a strong editorial bias still provide useful information to an alert reader. I can read articles from Mother Jones, Newsmax, Russia Today, the BBC, Times of India, etc. and find different political and/or geopolitical slants to what is written about and how it is reported. I can also learn a lot even when I strongly disagree with the narrative thrust of what is reported. The key thing is to take any particular article or publication as only circumstantial evidence for an underlying reality, and to avoid falling into complacency even when (or especially when) the information you're reading aligns with what you already believe to be true.
Wikipedia has been the proto-Reddit for a long time, that is, it was relatively easy for ideological bubbles to manufacture the Chomskyian Consent, just by being early adopters.
As such it rapidly developed into heavily biased page, as Wikipedia‘s co-founder Larry Sanger keeps pointing out.
It helps if you are proficient in multiple languages so you can at least „hop“ between the (some) bubbles. But the gatekeeping is always there.
I know sometime around Trump's first presidency, in Bill Clinton's Wikipedia entry, under the Impeachment section they added in a picture of Trump and Clinton shaking hands, apropos of nothing in the surrounding text.
I fondly remember visiting Wikipedia HQ in Jan 2012. It was amazing to see how small their "operation" was :)
Back then they had 474M monthly unique visitors, 83,444 active contributors and a staff of less than 100. I'm still blown away by the collaboration. To me, that was the promise of "Web 2.0".
On the kitchen door they hung xkcd 903, 906 and another webcomic mentioning that only 13% of updates to Wikipedia are from women (can't find the source). The wifi password back then was "knowledgeshouldbefree" (maybe it still is?)
I'm not sure about that. I think people who are experts in specific areas (and/or are obsessed with those topics) are the ones contributing to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is one of the greatest projects people have indeavored on. It has certainly surpassed the pyramids as one of the great wonders of the world, in usefulness, size and scope and human hours.
Wikipedia is extremely biased and has a lot of deliberate misinformation, so I wouldn't trust it for anything except as a basic starting point for information gathering alongside a web search. Wikipedia's founder itself has denounced it for its bias.
Wikipedia is surely a formidable source of knowledge, but
> Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion.
You are romanticizing.
Wikipedia is a corporation, just like Work or University, and I personally assume anything corporate is being manipulated by the owners or the ruling oligarchy because they are structurally unreliable. This is especially veritable for Wikipedia. Create an account there and try to go deeper into the articles about politics, literature and war.
> Wikipedia is a corporation, just like Work or University
“Work” and “University” are so wildly different as institutions that to use them this way makes it perfectly clear how little merit your point has.
It’s an empty character attack - possibly a reflection of your own - meant to appeal only to the worst despairing suspicions of others. It does nothing to illuminate specific dynamics of group knowledge negotiation.
Anyone who has participated knows there can be conflict and abuse — and more about how that’s addressed than someone throwing drive-by distrust.
Ideological wars are everywhere, especially if you are willing to make them up.
Any collaborative effort will involve politics, and by politics I mean the actual definition. Per Wikipedia:
> set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of status or resources.
It's important to recognize this, because the option is becoming an hermit or just accepting fully what others decide for you.
I know this, I've experienced this. There is not a concrete source for what I'm saying here.
I remember reading the article about a nudist family photographer. The English Wikipedia article was highlighting the controversy about child pornography that came with it, almost trying to demonize the guy, while the German article was actually trying to go beyond and develop the article. There are enormous discrepancies on that website.
Wikipedia has some bizarre articles and rules. I can only provide some pieces and bits of anecdotes.
At least in the US, most universities are also not for profit. I'd argue that Wikipedia and universities have more in common than either do with for profit companies, so I'm not convinced your examples clarify why it makes more sense to lump all of them together.
It was badly worded. I don't even know how to express this properly. It has been many years since I edited on Wikipedia, and it was on both english and portuguese. But the point that I was trying to make is that they are institutions with ideological norms and if you start deviating from them and start hammering on controversial and dangerous ideas and topics, or even just discovering and mentioning them, you can be silenced very easily.
And I don't agree with you that US universities are not for profit entities, might be on paper, I don't know. Some of them can bind the students to a long life of debt no?
nitpick: WMF (the org that develops and hosts Wikipedia and its related services like Wikimedia Commons) is a non-profit foundation, not the classic type of profit-driven corporation that your post implies.
I think this deserves more than a nitpick. WMF also doesn't dictate the actions of the volunteer community, and neither does the board. The content of Wikipedia is fully volunteer created and maintained, and admin actions are also handled by the volunteer community.
The foundation is there to provide technical, legal, and community support. In some cases this is funding for community events, in other cases, this includes funding towards making the editor community more diverse. In most cases, though, it's keeping a staff of folks that maintain and improve the software, and defend the project legally.
So, no Wikipedia isn't a corporation. It's more of a commune.
I think it would be hard to say it's an oligarchy. There's 450 or so active admins (and around 900 total), and really, they don't truly have that much power. The vast majority of decisions on Wikipedia are made by editors, and on occasion admins get involved.
This isn't a country with some ruling class. 450 people aren't in cahoots to stop you from editing.
Well, I prefer to be skeptical of any corporation, regardless if it is non-profit or not, until proven otherwise with substantial transparency on their methods of moderation and control.
There is a lack of transparency on Wikipedia. The rules are nebulous and prone to abuse by veteran users and the oligarchs aggregating on political articles.
Hold on, their moderation methods are as transparent as could possibly be. Every article has a dedicated page where every decision has a reason and more often than not an overwhelming amount of discussion. Their overall policy is similarly debated publicly.
Is it overwhelming? Oh yes. Tough to change? Probably also yes without dedication and sound reasoning. But opaque? Certainly doesn't fail that criteria.
It certainly becomes opaque when it is a labyrinth of links and documents that you need to read and follow through. It does not help when these same rules can be abused to death by veteran users.
At a certain point, no one really knows the devil's dance happening at the top of the moderation ladder and you end up wasting a lot of lifetime on these dead talk pages.
I don't really see how it's possible to be transparent about decisions for something this large without it being somewhat complex to follow the paper trail. If enough stuff from a discussion is written down, it's going to be complex. If the discussions aren't recorded in a publicly accessible way, that's clearly even less transparent. And if the scope of the discussions for something as large as Wikipedia haven't scaled with proportion to the amount of content being discussed, most of the decisions would probably not have been discussed at all, either due to individuals making them on their own (which is not particularly transparent, since there's no visibility into how they reached those decisions), or it was automated in some way (which is at most only as transparent as it would be to have the human who implemented the automation directly in charge of making the decisions, but in practice often is the least transparent option of all because most of the time automated moderation is almost always relying on ML or something similar).
I don't think corporation implies for-profit. In my eyes, corporation refers to a large organization with some self-serving motivation which is not necessarily just money. Being a non-profit just so happens to be the best vehicle for this motivation but it doesn't mean that the motivation doesn't exist.
at least in america, in common discussion outside of legal/highly wonky circles, referring to an organization as a corporation almost always implies a for-profit corporation, with (literally) vanishingly few examples of the contrary in popular knowledge (RIP CPB, may you return someday).
A "corporation" is any time two or three people gather together in something's name. It's any kind of, well, corporate entity, a single thing comprised of multiple people. A school is a corporation, a town is a corporation (seriously, many municipalities are legally incorporated), a marriage is a very limited corporation, and a business is also a corporation. So, yes, Wikipedia is a corporation, and it should be proud of the fact it can keep so many people working towards a common goal.
> Wikipedia is a corporation, and I personally assume anything corporate is being manipulated by the owners or the ruling oligarchy because they are structurally unreliable.
Many articles are fine. I don't think you can equate this to all of Wikipedia automatically.
The remote viewing article keeps being reverted as pseudoscientific when original research conducted by the CIA is cited. Such citations are removed swiftly. Any changes are denied or rolled back.
The rationale is that, even though the documents themselves are a primary source from an organization that poured significant resources into researching the phenomenon of remote viewing, the individual posting the declassified document isn't an authority on the subject.
Apparently if youre not a doctor, you can't read primary sources?
Many such cases.
Wikipedia is absolutely a powerful resource, but it it's clearly controlled by moderators with a bias, and there's no incentive to challenge said bias or consider alternative worldviews.
I remember people saying that the article about Carl Jung was not worth contributing anymore because of his fascist sympathies with nazism. I don't know what to make of that.
I've experienced something similar about users downplaying on talk pages the atrocities done by the Soviet Government, like the Holodomor famine or the Katyn Massacre, in contrast to the atrocities done by the Nazis.
Controversial and relatively unknown subjects are easier to be attacked and ignored on wikipedia.
Editors have biases. The best we can do is shine a spotlight on them.
People are opposed to this, of course. No one likes to be reminded of how they're limited - and people get really nasty when you accuse them of being a dishonest interlocutor.
There already is a separate wikipedia article about the specific program. It is an extensive article. If you look up "Stargate CIA" in any search engine you'll find it easily.
There is a large amount of data on this topic. Literally hundreds of pages of reports and summaries of experiments written over decades of effort (if memory serves). The CIA was trying to use the phenomenon to view distant targets with mediums. It was deemed ineffective, and discontinued in the 90s. Even today there are people attempting to replicate remote viewing and prove it as a phenomenon.
For the record, I do not believe this phenomenon is as effective as is claimed. Regardless there is a chance that remote viewing (also known as astral projection) is just something the human brain commonly imagines in some populations. It might be an emergent property of human brains reacting to certain input stimulus, like ASMR.
Regardless, the article written about remote viewing as a concept should be allowed to cite documents about how the Stargate program defined and tested remote viewing (their methodologies, etc). But editors, like all humans, have bias.
There was a similar kerfuffle that happened about a decade and a half ago about homeopathy. It lead to an edit thread where one of the founders of Wikipedia was cursing about how fake something was.
The only objection I have to this, is that primary sources relevant to an article should be allowed to be cited. If a study, whitepaper, or report is widely discredited - include that too. The sum of human knowledge needs to include what we know to be false as well.
> It was Larry Sanger who chanced upon the critical concept of combining the three fundamental elements of Wikipedia, namely an encyclopedia, a wiki, and essentially unrestricted editorial access to the public during a dinner meeting with an old friend Ben Kovitz in January 2, 2001. Kovitz a computer programmer and introduced Sanger to Ward Cunningham's wiki, a web application which allows collaborative modification, extension or deletion of its content and structure. The name wiki has been derived from the Hawaiian term which meant quick. Sanger feeling that the wiki software would facilitate a good platform for an online encyclopedia web portal, proposed the concept to Wales to be applied to Nupedia. Wales intially skeptic about the idea decided to give it a try later.
> The credit for coining the term Wikipedia goes to Larry Sanger. He initially conceived the concept of a wiki-based encyclopedia project only as a means to accelerate Nupedia's slow growth. Larry Sanger served as the "chief organiser" of Wikipedia during its critical first year of growth and created and enforced many of the policies and strategy that made Wikipedia possible during its first formative year. Wikipedia turned out to contain 15,000 articles and upwards to 350 Wikipedians contributing on several topics by the end of 2001.
He may not be with the project now, but don't airbrush him out of history.
Without context, it looks like the interviewer was a jerk and ambushed him.
I've seen plenty of stalling like that on major news programs, and the interviewer always knows to move on (and possibly edit something in to provide context.)
---
That being said, "who started what" and "who had what idea" are silly topics to obsesses about. It always come down to who put the long-term work in. I think Wales was "in the right" to walk off; or at least say something like "I can't tell the story accurately, so please move on to a different question."
The interview started with the most mundane question "Who are you?", and the very first sentence of Wales is either a lie or misleading. The journalists asks for clarification (thats a journalists job, btw), and in his second sentence of the interview Wales insults the journalist. I'm pretty sure who is the jerk here.
It also was Wales who bought up the topic, not the journalist. If he considers it a stupid topic he does not want to talk about, why is it the very first thing he talks about?
Sanger was originally hired to edit Nupedia, a web encyclopedia project with a strict peer review process, and only worked for Wales for about a year. Wikipedia was started as a side project (with Sanger contributing to the concept and some early organizing), but Wikipedia quickly became much more successful while Nupedia basically never got off the ground. My impression is that Sanger wanted to impose his own vision on Wikipedia, but couldn't because the community of volunteer editors disagreed, and when Wales stopped paying him as a full time Nupedia editor (Wales's company was tight on cash at that time), he stopped any involvement. This was long before most of the actual work of Wikipedia happened, and that should have been the end of the story.
But ever since, Sanger has been trash talking Wikipedia as a project and community ("broken beyond repair") and trying to undermine it. A few years later he started a competing project (which was predictably a total failure). For two decades he has been promoting himself as "cofounder of Wikipedia". Interviewer after interviewer asks the same lazy questions about the subject, without ever adding any new insight. (You can see that Sanger's ghost is chasing Wikipedia even into this discussion.)
It's beating a dead horse, and entirely off the topic of what the interview was supposed to be about. Answering the question clearly and accurately takes a lot of time and finesse, which is wasted on the interviewer and most of the audience. Wales clearly screwed up in that interview, but it's not hard to see where he's coming from, psychologically.
What an interview!
I had never seen this clip before, it's really something. Facts and context are important for sure, but as someone who isn't clued in on the Sanger drama, Wales could not possibly have made himself look worse. And in under a minute!
As you said, the interviewer is in the right, carrying out the job of interviewing, by pushing Wales as he did. To call him a "jerk" is silly, I think.
> That being said, "who started what" and "who had what idea" are silly topics to obsesses about. It always come down to who put the long-term work in.
So Wales can write Sanger out of the history of Wikipedia, despite evidence strongly showing that Sanger originated the idea, the name, the policies, and indeed that Sanger was the primary driving force for years. And everyone’s is supposed to accept this historical revision because who created it is a “silly topic”.
Is it also a silly topic when Wales claims credit? Or only when someone questions his assertion?
Journalism can't be deferential to it's subjects. Jimmy is a CEO of a company with lots of money and tons of access to the media. If he can't successfully prepare himself for the obvious then I can't feel bad for him.
After watching this I kind of disagree. Wales said he didn’t care multiple times. Calling it the “dumbest question” is childish, yes. Walking out of an interview that was going nowhere is not childish.
I personally think writing Sanger out of Wikipedia history (as in this 25 year celebration montage thing) is quite lame. But I also think pressing Wales on this when he says “you can say whatever you want” is also quite lame. No one is obligated to sit with an interviewer while the interviewer tries to pick a fight.
You missed the part where Wales called a fact an "opinion". Wales could have said "I don't dispute the facts of that case. I see myself as the founder, but I won't argue against other interpretations. Lets move past it." Instead he immediately became defensive, even angry.
The interviewer is right to press on the basic facts and Wales was wrong to ragequit, especially since the exchange lasted less than 45 seconds(!)
I don't see this as a political victim issue: I can see Sanger as an asshole while also seeing Wales as weak.
> You missed the part where Wales called a fact an "opinion".
Has Wales actually disputed the objective facts of the matter?
I did not take his comment to mean “it’s an opinion whether Sanger worked on Wikipedia from the beginning” but “it’s an opinion whether that qualifies him as a cofounder”.
> Wales could have said "I don't dispute the facts of that case. I see myself as the founder, but I won't argue against other interpretations. Lets move past it."
That is essentially what he said. He called himself the founder, then when the interviewer probed, said it’s a dumb question, then said he doesn’t care, then said the interviewer can frame it however he wants, then said again that he doesn’t care.
He said what you think he should’ve said. He just didn’t use your exact words.
> The interviewer is right to press on the basic facts and Wales was wrong to ragequit, especially since the exchange lasted less than 45 seconds(!)
What “basic facts” did he press on? I heard no facts or questions about facts. He used the word “facts” while pressing Wales specifically about calling himself the founder.
Jimmy Wales has been poked at with the question of whether he should call himself a founder or specifically co-founder for a long time, by right-wingers who think Wikipedia is too woke, and want to irritate and discredit him as much as possible, and instead raise up his co-founder Larry Sanger. Sanger has right-wing views and a habit of accusing any article as biased that doesn't praise Trump and fundamentalist Christian values, and takes these as proof that Wikipedia has a left lean.
The interview Wales walked out of was for his book tour. I imagine it's the umpteenth interview that week with the same question asked for the same transparently bad-faith reasons, trying to bend the interview away from his book and into right-wing conspiracy theory land.
> Jimmy Wales has been poked at with the question of whether he should call himself a founder or specifically co-founder
Not surprising! Are we setting aside how deceitful his answer his? Claiming all credit for a collaborative accomplishment -- which he does by adopting the "founder" title -- would rightfully provoke "poking" by interviewers. I can't imagine an interview not addressing a question that is so pertinent to Wales' notoriety. They literally cannot properly introduce him without confronting it! To say those interviewers are acting in "transparently bad-faith" comes across to me as plainly biased.
Sanger's politics don't change this, either. It might be the case that you have to concede on this to people you politically disagree with.
He himself admits it's a complicated situation, and argues both his own and Sanger's position.
Combined with the context provided by all the parent comments here, it's quite difficult to argue good faith given the interview was also specifically on the book tour. There are many different and actually productive ways the interview could have talked about the conflict between Wales and Sanger.
> Not surprising! Are we setting aside how deceitful his answer his? Claiming all credit for a collaborative accomplishment -- which he does by adopting the "founder" title -- would rightfully provoke "poking" by interviewers.
I went down the rabbit hole on this a while back and came away with the impression that it's complicated. And whether or not Wales is being deceitful hinges on pedantic arguments and mincing of words. Should Wales be referred to as "a founder", "co-founder", or "one of the founders"? It's not as if he's titling himself "sole founder". And Sanger is still list on his Wiki page and the Wikipedia pages as a Founder.
It should also be noted that Sanger was hired by Wales to manage Nupedia, and that Wikipedia was created as a side-project of Nupedia for the purpose to generating content for Nupedia. Does the fact that Sanger was an employee of Wales, and that Wikipedia only exists because Sanger was tasked with generating content for Nupedia impact his status as a founder? Would Sanger or Wales have gone on to create a wiki without the other?
Can Steve Jobs claim to be the creator of the iPhone since he was CEO at the time it was created at Apple?
At the end of the day Sanger was present at the ground breaking of Wikipedia but was laid off and stopped participating in the project entirely after a year. He didn't spend 25 years fostering and growing the foundation. He did however try to sabotage or subvert the project 5 years later when it was clear that it was a success. Interestingly he tried to fork it to a project that had strong editorial oversight from experts like Nupedia which flies in the face of the ethos of Wikipedia.
> And whether or not Wales is being deceitful hinges on pedantic arguments and mincing of words.
A big piece of this is that “founder” is actually a very unusual title to use here. Normally someone would “create a product” and “found a company”. Wikipedia is not a company. It’s not even the name of the foundation. It’s a product.
It’s kind of like Steve Jobs saying he founded the iPhone.
> He didn't spend 25 years fostering and growing the foundation.
Which isn’t however relevant to the title “founder”.
The inability of wealthy people to take responsibility for themselves and instead blame their own bad behavior on the mere existence of Trump is getting exceptionally thin.
Credit your co-founders. Even if you don't agree with them anymore. There's no excuse not to.
If you've been asked the question a lot then you should be _very good_ at answering it by now.
yes, but question can be done in different ways. and tilo jung always at least, not cared, if his questions are offensive... or trying to up the interviewed person
a group of people seems to think, that journalists should trip up people, like in interrogations, instead of being hard in the topic but nice in the tone.
Wikipedia is literally a spin-off of a porn company.
From that point on, where it came from or who founded it is not so important. The question is how it acts today.
It is a highly-political organization supporting lot of “progressive” ideas, California-style. So if you like reading politically biased media it may be for you.
If you are seeking for a global view you better ask different LLMs for arguments and counter-arguments on a subject.
EDIT: a couple downvotes denying the influence of specific “Wikipedia ideology” and politics.
Take a chance to edit articles and you will see how tedious it is.
There is also a lot of legal censorship. Celebrities putting pressure on removing info, or lobbies, or say things that are illegal or very frowned upon (for example questioning homosexuality, or the impact of certain wars).
Sometime it is legality, ideology, politics, funding, pressure, etc.
It is tedious because you must edit with facts, not ideology.
But we now live in a world where people agree that ideology should be able to change facts.
> or the impact of certain wars
Exactly, like China wanting to completely censor anything regarding the Tiananmen Square protests.
> for example questioning homosexuality
I don't know what you have to question about this.
>If you are seeking for a global view you better ask different LLMs for arguments and counter-arguments on a subject.
All the LLM I've tested have a strong tendency to increase your echo chamber and not try to change your opinion on something.
>This is why you need to use different sources.
Only if deep down, you're ready to change your POV on something, otherwise you're just wasting time and ragebaiting yourself.
Although I admit, it can still be entertaining to read some news to discover how they're able to twist reality.
> It is tedious because you must edit with facts, not ideology.
Wikipedia is ideological. Even when the articles stick to the facts (which they often don't), editors will selectively omit inconvenient (but factually true) information to push their ideology.
There are many examples of edit wars between people fighting political battles, but I don’t think your link is one of them. I think how he treated his dog was cruel and I believe how he responded by lying and gaslighting his audience was disgusting, but that doesn’t mean it belongs on Wikipedia. In your link I don’t see Hasan white knights protecting their master from bad publicity, I see Hasan haters trying to bludgeon the change into the article by ignoring any objection and just reverting edits. It was frustrating to read people bringing up the same Forbes article and not reading the reason why it wasn’t suitable. Again, I dislike Hasan in general and especially for this, but if this was so important then why hasn’t any major news outlet written about it? You may disagree about what does and doesn’t belong on Wikipedia, and I have my own objections, but I truly don’t believe the rules were designed by a left leaning cabal to make their favorite Twitch streamer avoid egg on their face.
For the last part I agree with you, the LLMs tend to say what you like to hear. The echo chamber problem also exists, pushing them to say pros and cons is not perfect, but helps to make an opinion (and also "unaligned" models).
Facts are very skewed by the environment:
in the case you push too much in one direction that is too controversial or because the politicians disagree too much with you; there can be plenty of negative consequences:
- your website gets blocked, or you get publicly under pressure, or you lose donations, you lose grants, your payment providers blocks you, you lose audience, you can get a fine, you can go to jail, etc.
Many different options.
There is asymmetry here:
We disagree, you have one opinion, what happens if both of us fight for 10 months, 24/7 debating "what is the truth ?" on that topic.
- You have that energy and time (because it's your own page, or your mission where you are paid by your company, or because this topic is personally important to you, etc)
- I don't have time or that topic is not *that* important for me.
- Consequence: Your truth is going to win.
Sources are naturally going to be curated to support your view. At the end, the path of least resistance is to go with the flow.
The tricky part: there are also truths that cannot be sourced properly, but are still facts (ex: famous SV men still offering founders today investment against sex). Add on top of that, legal concerns, and it becomes a very difficult environment to navigate.
Even further, it's always doable to find or fabricate facts, and the truth wins based on the amount of energy, power and money that the person has.
According to an American poll that surveyed 416 people residing across Greenland on their support for joining the United States.
57.3% wants to join the US.
A "fabricated fact" (or "alternative fact" if you prefer) is an oxymoron. Actual truth, as opposed to a vibe or what people are basing their decisions on these days, is orthogonal to "the amount of energy, power and money that the person has." Deriving or identifying actual facts and truth is hard (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method) and always subject to change based on new data, so lots of people don't do it -- it's much easier to just make shit up and confirms biases.
If I ask 10 people what they think of something and 60% says "no" and if I ask another 10 people and 90% says "yes" there's no relation between the 60% and the 90%, like at all.
Or as Homer said it "Anybody can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 40% of people know that."
> It is tedious because you must edit with facts, not ideology.
Not just because you must edit with facts. If your opposition outnumbers you and/or they have more energy to spend than you, they can grind you down with bad-faith arguments and questions for clarification.
The way this goes is that they edit an article to insert their POV. You edit/revert it. They open a talk page discussion about the subject. Suppose their edit is "marine animals are generally considered cute throughout the world" with a reference to a paper by an organization in favor of seals. You revert it by saying this is NPOV. They open a talk page question asking where the organization has been declared to be partisan. Suppose you do research and find some such third-party statement that "the Foundation for Animal Aesthetics is organized by proponents of marine animals". Then they ask how this third party is accurate, or whether "organized by proponents" necessarily implies that they're biased.
This can go on more or less forever until someone gives up. The attack even has a name on Wikipedia itself: "civil POV pushing". It works because few Wikipedia admins are subject matter experts, so they police behavior (conduct) more than they police subject accuracy.
Civil POV pushers can thus keep their surface conduct unobjectionable while waiting for the one they are actioning against to either give up or to get angry enough to make a heated moment's conduct violation. It's essentially the wiki version of sealioning.
In short, a thousand "but is really two plus two equal to four?" will overcome a single "You bastard, it is four and you're deliberately trolling me", because the latter is a personal insult.
You make your slant against Wikipedia immediately obvious by attempting to smear it. You lazily link it with porn, but you're not making an actual point.
> Wikipedia is literally a spin-off of a porn company.
Thinking this is relevant is a very revealing position. It shines some very strong light on your ideological biases and, yes, your agenda, which I feel certain you will feel obligated to deny as a defensive measure. You are showing your hand in ways I don't think you realize.
It gave me an idea, a tool to analyze history of Hackernews user comments and determine what they are up to, what ideas they are pushing, etc. Would be cool and horrible at the same time (so if anyone wants to be on the first page of HN and has a couple of LLM credits somewhere)
Yup, there's a wonderful, presumably LLM generated, response to somebody explaining how trademark law actually works, the LLM response insists that explanation was all wrong and cites several US law cases. Most of the cases don't exist, the rest aren't about trademark law or anywhere close. But the LLM isn't supposed to say truths, it's a stochastic parrot, it makes what looks most plausible as a response. "Five" is a pretty plausible response to "What is two plus three?" but that's not because it added 2 + 3 = 5
"Five" is not merely "plausible". It is the uniquely correct answer, and it is what the model produces because the training corpus overwhelmingly associates "2 + 3" with "5" in truthful contexts.
And the stochastic parrot framing has a real problem here: if the mechanism reliably produces correct outputs for a class of problems, dismissing it as "just plausibility" rather than computation becomes a philosophical stance rather than a technical critique. The model learned patterns that encode the mathematical relationship. Whether you call that "understanding" or "statistical correlation" is a definitional argument, not an empirical one.
The legal citation example sounds about right. It is a genuine failure mode. But arithmetic is precisely where LLMs tend to succeed (at small scales) because there is no ambiguity in the training signal.
In everyday life, you cannot read 20 books about a topic about everything you are curious about, but you can ask 5 subject-experts (“the LLMs”) in 20 seconds
some of them who are going to check on some news websites (most are also biased)
Then you can ask for summaries of pros and cons, and make your own opinions.
Are they hallucinating ? Could be. Are they lying ? Could be. Have they been trained on what their masters said to say ? Could be.
But multiplying the amount of LLMs reduce the risk.
For example, if you ask DeepSeek, Gemini, Grok, Claude, GLM-4.7 or some models that have no guardrails, what they think about XXX, then perhaps there are interesting insights.
To further this, articles also have an edit history and talk page. Even if one disagrees with consensus building or suspects foul play and they're really trying to get to the bottom of something, all the info is there on Wikipedia!
If one just wants a friendly black box to tell them something they want to hear, AI is known to do that.
Right. Try clicking those sources, half the time there is zero relation to the sentence. LLMs just output what they want to say, and then sprinkle in what the web search found on random sentences.
And not just bottom of the barrel LLMs. Ask Claude about Intel PIN tools, it will merrily tell you that it "Has thread-safe APIs but performance issues were noted with multi-threaded tools like ThreadSanitizer" and then cite the Disney Pins blog and the DropoutStore "2025 Pin of the Month Bundle" as an inline source.
Enamel pins. That's the level of trust you should have when LLMs pretend to be citing a source.
I think he plays a good role as a lightning rod for all the MAGA morons to attack, rather than going after contributors. It's better that Musk has a tantrum at Jimmy rather than doxing some poor editor on X.
Sad that he has to play that role, but this is where we are at the moment.
Wow, thanks for the video actually. For a long time I felt he was complete jerk but I felt it was maybe biased propaganda. The mere fact he couldn't answer a basic question and explain for all those who don't know, but rather stormed out like a 4 year old child, only proves what I felt about him prior.
Pffft hahaha. Looks like interviewer was inexperienced AND hit a touchy subject. It's like trying to have a casual conversation about dating with someone who's secretly gay.
I'd say his lack of acknowledgment of Larry Sanger is actually quite useful, as it is a perfect and irrefutable example that Wikipedia has no qualms with omitting information and twisting the truth to serve a narrative.
> In late 2005, Wales edited his biographical entry on the English Wikipedia. Writer Rogers Cadenhead drew attention to logs showing that in his edits to the page, Wales had removed references to Sanger as the co-founder of Wikipedia.[53][54] Sanger commented that "having seen edits like this, it does seem that Jimmy is attempting to rewrite history. But this is a futile process because, in our brave new world of transparent activity and maximum communication, the truth will out."[20][55] Wales was also observed to have modified references to Bomis in a way that was characterized as downplaying the sexual nature of some of his former company's products.[16][20] Though Wales argued that his modifications were solely intended to improve the accuracy of the content,[20] he apologized for editing his biography, a practice generally discouraged on Wikipedia.[20][55]
Wikipedia is extremely biased and has a lot of deliberate misinformation, so I wouldn't trust it for anything except as a basic starting point for information gathering alongside a web search. Wikipedia's founder itself has denounced it for its bias.
>He may not be with the project now, but don't airbrush him out of history.
I don't want to defend Jimbo Wales (he's very touchy about the subject), but to be honest, even if he's a founder, Larry Sanger didn't contribute much to what Wikipedia today is.
If someone builds a free knowledge-repository platform and makes it available for worldwide use, and if that platform takes off to become commonly used globally, then I think some credit is due to such founder and innovator.
Larry Singer was essentially running Wikipedia in the early days though, until he was laid off, so in some sense we could think of him as a co-founder who was ousted. It's true that he didn't contribute much (as an unpaid volunteer) after that though.
I think Wikipedia is the only place where an early employee who left relatively quickly would be considered a "co-founder". If this was a tech company i dont think Larry would be considered a co-founder.
I think the thing is a soar subject because Wikipedia essentially rejected all of Sangar's ideas, but he's still kind of riding on its coattails.
It's his newer baby. Clearly it's a clone of Wikipedia, without the content of course. If Wikipedia ever goes wrong, it's nice to know that we have an alternative.
Wikipedia itself says Larry Sanger "co-founded" Wikipedia, but I don't quite understand why. If you get into the details, he was Wales' employee at the time, and made initial version of Wikipedia while being paid as such. So I'm tentatively with Wales on that ATM.
> Employing someone doesn't let you pass off their achievements as your own.
Doesn't it? That's basically how tech companies work. You can tell he's written an initial version of Wikipedia, but founder is emphatically not an employee.
That's not how fame and credit for some novel thing is shared. The minds of two people were vital to its success, and we don't fold that into one because of business structure.
Who left extremely early on in the project, went to create a poorly conceived and failed competitor, then spent the next 23ish years shitting on Wikipedia? Why does he deserve any credit?
Because he co-founded it, duh. Even if your father abandons your family on your second birthday, to start another family, he's still your dad, no matter how much you hate him.
This website purports to tell us how Wikipedia came to be, 25 years ago. Why not tell it honestly?
> Even if your father abandons your family on your second birthday, to start another family, he's still your dad, no matter how much you hate him.
I think if you asked anyone in that situation, they probably wouldn't call them their dad, so yeah, this is indeed a good example.
Larry Sanger is effectively an abusive parent who did their best to try to ensure Wikipedia didn't survive. Him being there for the birth doesn't mean much.
Indeed, but no matter how much you don't want your dad to be your dad, he is your dad, which was also my point.
Without Sanger, Wikipedia:
- wouldn't be called "Wikipedia"
- wouldn't be editable without first opening an account
- wouldn't have NPOV as a fundamental policy
In short, it wouldn't be Wikipedia.
The community he incubated grew and took Wikipedia onwards to what it is today, even if he disagrees with that direction and plugs his own massively less popular encyclopedia.
Neither Larry nor Jimbo "are" Wikipedia. Wikipedia's editors are Wikipedia, and if they collectively agree with any of Larry's policy ideas, they'll adopt them in time.
I used to glibly agree with what you said, because back in the early 2000s it was primarily the right-wing nutters being fed a diet of Fox News bullshit that were deranged from reality... "reality has a liberal bias", right? Remember the crackpot Conservapedia? But these days I find plenty of equal opportunity derangement from terrible news sources chasing clicks, promoting FOMO, anxiety and keeping their readers/viewers addicted. No political flavour of bullshit belongs on Wikipedia.
His nine theses are basically a how-to guide for replacing democratic consensus with culture war bullshit. He clearly wants to bend the process to match his perception of the world rather than update his understanding of the world to match the facts.
The process Wikipedia uses to produce articles that present facts with without editorializing has clearly worked fairly well. Obviously we have a more difficult time reaching consensus on contentious topics but in general the system works quite well.
I don't understand how you could read the nine theses essays and think they are anything but reasonable. Even if you disagree with his politics, the results of his suggestions would almost certainly make Wikipedia more pluralistic, welcoming and neutral.
> Because they have all been tried before and had the opposite affect.
Did you even read the document? Claiming that Wikipedia has implemented all of these suggestions in the past is just plainly false. If you disagree with the documents contents, why don't you provide a substantive argument instead of just belittling efforts at changing the status quo?
> Claiming that Wikipedia has implemented all of these suggestions in the past is just plainly false
I'm claiming people, not necessarily wikipedia, have tried them. However many have been tried by Wikipedia too.
> just belittling efforts at changing the status quo?
The status quo is pretty good. Change for change sake is an anti-pattern.
Regardless, i think people who like these ideas should try them, on their own site. I suspect they will quickly find out why Wikipedia does not want to do them.
After all, martin luther didnt just whine that the pope wouldnt listen to him, he made his own thing.
The English intro talks a lot about medical advantages of the procedure: "reduced rates of sexually transmitted infections and urinary tract infections. This includes reducing the incidence of cancer-causing forms of human papillomavirus (HPV) and reducing HIV transmission among heterosexual men in high-risk populations by up to 60%; ... Neonatal circumcision decreases the risk of penile cancer.[14] ... Some medical organizations take the position that it carries prophylactic health benefits that outweigh the risks," and has one sentence of it being controversial worldwide "others hold that its medical benefits are not sufficient to justify it."
The German one has not a single sentence in the intro about advantages, but a whole paragraph on how it's controversial. "Die Zirkumzision als Routineeingriff ist besonders bei Minderjährigen umstritten, ... Von vielen Kinderschutzverbänden und einem Teil der Ärzteorganisationen wird die nicht medizinisch begründete Beschneidung abgelehnt, da sie den Körper irreversibel verändere und bei nicht einwilligungsfähigen Jungen nicht im Einklang mit Gesundheitsschutz und Kindeswohl stehe.[6] Im angelsächsischen Bereich gibt es schon länger eine gesellschaftliche Debatte zwischen Gruppen von Gegnern der Beschneidung („Intaktivisten“-Bewegung) und Befürwortern. Umstritten sind insbesondere medizinischer Nutzen und Risiken, bei Kindern auch ethische und rechtliche Aspekte sowie die Beurteilung im Hinblick auf die Menschenrechte, vor allem das Recht auf körperliche Unversehrtheit."
I'm not sure who's right, but it's hard to not see some bias here.
I love Wikipedia and think it's one of the greatest resources on the Internet, but there's absolutely a lot of bias in Wikipedia. Even within the same language, I think a lot of it has to do with how many people have or are contributing to a page, whether there's a recent event affecting it, how polarizing or political the subject, etc. But it's not hard to find examples of straight up opinions or very incomplete narratives.
I've also noticed huge differences between two different language versions of the same articles. (English/Spanish specifically). Sometimes they even feel independently written.
Of course, we should all do our part to improve these things when we spot them, if we're able.
It's impossible to write completely neutrally. Editorial decisions like what information to include or exclude, what sources to cite, what order to present information in, what illustrations to use cannot be avoided and inherently present some kind of narrative.
It absolutely is possible to write completely neutrally. All it takes is for the writer to be aware/honest of their biases and to have a goal of achieving a neutral perspective. Of course the goal of most writing is explicitly to not be neutral.
Take the example of circumcision. You could probably write a mere definition of circumcision neutrally, sure.
But do you include cultural practices of circumcision? Do you include criticism? If so, how many column inches do you dedicate to either? Which comes first? That surely is going to determine whether the article appears to support or oppose, which is basically the issue in the comment above.
But beyond that, do you group female circumcision in the same article as male circumcision? If not, you are tacitly approving of male circumcision by separating it from disapproved of practice. If so, surely you need to explain the difference in social and legal acceptability. If you do that without noting controversy, then you are implying the social acceptance of male circumcision is universal. If you note controversy, then you are necessarily elevating that to noteworthyness.
Literally the first thing you will learn in journalism school is that there is no such thing as "objective neutrality". Even deciding what story to cover includes bias.
Any attempt to "eliminate" all bias would just introduce massive bias. The only solution is building a healthier democratic community.
A major reason people are obsessed with bias on wikipedia is because it is the only usable encyclopedia now. Back then even just in the US and published in english there were more than a dozen different encyclopedias competing with different scopes, intended audiences, viewpoints, arrangements, features, editorial policies, etc. And the publishers were more diverse and not monopolistic. There simply wasn't a need for any single one of them to be bias-free.
> I do believe that Wikipedia is one of the least biased sources out there, but there is definitely bias
I think this is the wrong way to look at bias. Bias isnt a binary, instead its a journey to try and get succesively less and less biased. You can never achieve absolute unbiasedness, you can just try to journey closer.
> The German one has not a single sentence in the intro about advantages, but a whole paragraph on how it's controversial.
No, they do have a sentence on that right before, talking about how sometimes it can make sense as a medical procedure:
> Die Zirkumzision ist eine von mehreren Behandlungsmöglichkeiten (s. z. B. Triple Inzision), die beispielsweise bei schweren Formen der pathologischen Phimose als indiziert gilt, wenn Behandlungsalternativen nicht erfolgversprechend sind oder zuvor keinen Heilungserfolg brachten.
I'd say overall the German one is a bit more balanced, if maybe not in the opening paragraphs. It goes over pretty much all of the benefits in similar detail to the English one, while spending much more words on "adverse effects" (which the English one spends very few words on in comparison, and no pictures at all).
Generally it seems that the English one does its very best to gloss over anything graphic, while the German one spares no detail - a product of underlying cultural attitudes no doubt. English Wikipedia would probably consider many of the contents of the German article "gratuitous detail", while German Wikipedia prefers a "factual and explicit" clinical style.
This is a very interesting take, however, it makes it a bit ironic to compare wikipedia across topics and domains.
Like, right here, let's not ask the question "Why is wikipedia deciding that gratuitous detail is consideration" for one page, and instead point out the amount of inconsistency in this regard on other surgical procedures (coronary bypass is tame, kidney transplant is not), and on non-medical topics, such as the absolute inscrutable travesty that is every single Mathematics Wikipedia page and how all of it amount to post-graduate oneupmanship competitions at this point.
If something looks controversial for my tastes, I track when the change was made and look for last version before dubious content was added. And so, I've seen edits done to media-related articles which introduced sections that weren't present in some cases for even 20 years. Sections being replaced or included because there was a need for including particular bias prevalent in the namely United States sociopolitical scene in last 15 years. My country's wiki did suffer as well and there are ongoing edits replacing grammar to fit unjustified trends that damage our language. In the past hot topics which were controversial IRL were including "the Catholic Church's position" - now that's largely gone. Then, it's even impossible to edit articles without being logged in because the most popular ISP has blocked all IP ranges - all because a "trend" of vandalism that happen around 24 to 25 years ago, and which supposedly happens again according to the message presented.
My contributions weren't large and I stopped doing these quickly because fighting people who unload their complexes on the Internet on total strangers weren't worth trying to improve articles about e.g. Milky Way galaxy or some generic local non-political stuff.
Wikipedia looks good on a paper and surely it works for trivial stuff people all around the world can agree upon. But it fails whenever there's a possibility of endorsing a point of view, which is always disguised as "neutral", which applies to probably 80% of articles on English Wikipedia alone. It suffers same degradation as nearly every place on the Internet - just not from the usual ads and tracking .
It is not possible to have unbiased communication. Whenever you communicate with someone, you do it because you think it's important that the other person hears what you're about to say. This means that you filter all communication through your own moral system, which obviously has biases. When people say "this is unbiased" they usually mean "this matches the biases of my culture". Wikipedia illustrates this very well because both cultures can claim "obviously the article in my language is unbiased, while the other one is weird".
So in a way, I'd argue that Wikipedia having different biases in different language versions actually proves that it's quite unbiased. If all languages had exactly the same content, the most likely explanation would've been that one culture dominates, and the rest are just translations.
I'd love to see someone make a less biased encyclopedia. It's easy to throw stones. I think people hate that there is an open and valuable source of information on the internet that isn't monetized.
It also shows that it isn't perfectly organized, that it isn't an ideal model for knowledge aggregation. If it's ideal for it to be globally consistent, then it doesn't have that. If it's ideal for it to be adapted to different cultures, then it doesn't have that either, because the divisions are based only on language. However, Wikipedia it is really an amazing place, and it should continue to be preserved and improved.
I can't be the only one who feels that Wikipedia's quality has really started to go downhill over the past 5 or so years. I've noticed more and more articles which read as ridiculously partisan, usually around subjects with any link to politics or current events.
That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the US, but I get the impression that the sites neutrality policies have gradually been chipped away by introducing concepts like "false balance" as an excuse to pick a side on an issue. I could easily see that causing the site to slowly decline like StackOverflow did, most people don't want to deal with agenda pushing.
Fortunately articles related to topics like science and history haven't been significantly damaged by this yet. Something to watch carefully.
I didn't notice this, in fact, I still find Wikipedia to be remarkably neutral on controversial topics. It is very explicit about not being a news website, and yet, that's where I find the best coverage for hot topics like the war in Ukraine and Gaza, Black Lives Matter, protests in Hong-Kong, etc... For instance, most western media completely disregard the Russian side of the Ukraine war, not Wikipedia, where you have both points of views shown side by side, as well as international reactions, and most importantly, sources.
It is not perfect of course, small topics and non-English Wikipedias usually show more bias, and not just about controversial topics. Even on scientific articles, you may find some guy who considers himself the king of the Estonian Striped Beetle and will not tolerate any other ideas than his, driving away other contributors because they have better things to do than go to war to defend beetle truths.
You are getting bad information. The Wikipedia pages on those specific topics (Ukraine, Gaza, BLM) is known to be have been manipulated by groups of editors acting in coordination to advance political narratives.
Is there a single source that is not manipulated on these topics? For example in Ukraine, it is very obvious that both western mainstream media and Russian mainstream media are little more than propaganda for their respective camps.
The good thing with Wikipedia (the English version in particular) is that both sides try to manipulate it, in addition to those who really want to say the truth, so in the end, it is relatively neutral. And if you want to go further, there are citations, which is maybe the most important aspect of Wikipedia compared to traditional media, including encyclopedias.
Wikipedia is not perfect, but it does its best to resist manipulation: citations, all activity is recorded and publicly available, etc...
Non-English Wikipedias have more bias, because they are smaller and also because unlike the English version that is used worldwide, even by non-English speakers, the non-English ones are often tied to specific countries. For example, I think I remember seeing the Arabic Wikipedia as being explicitly pro-Palestine, I guess the opposite is true for the Hebrew version.
There is pretty much no way this was ever not going to happen, given Wikipedia's position and structure. It is a massive repository of knowledge, that is consulted by millions if not billions of people around the world on a regular basis, that is (in theory) editable by anyone and that has articles on just about every conceivable topic, including many politically charged ones. There must be immense pressure to use it to propagate all kinds of narratives. Given all of that, I think it does as good a job as can be expected of remaining objective, but absolutely you need to be careful when reading articles on politically charged topics (which is true of all media).
Wikipedia was always insufficiently neutral about political or social topics. At a bare minimum, you need to check whether there are any highlighted controversies in the article talk page.
Wikipedia itself knows how much shit it's in. Every ongoing conflict and culture-war issue is a "contentious topic", which is Wikipedia code for "editors are at each others' throats"
> Q1: Why does this article state that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, even though this is heavily contested and neither the ICJ nor the ICC have issued a final judgment?
> A1: A September 2025 request for comment (RfC) decided to state, in Wikipedia's own voice, that it is a genocide. The current lead is the result of later discussion on the specific wording.
This whole affair should get much more attention. If one topic on Wikipedia can be so manipulated, any topic on Wikipedia can, and it's no longer a reliable source of knowledge.
I hope The Wikimedia Foundation can get its act together, and I admire the courage of Jimmy Wales for speaking up about this, but I've also stopped donating. I want no part of this.
I would say it absolutely violates the NPOV policy, and it's worth noting that both Wikipedia founders share this view [1] [2]. It's the only thing they've agreed on in many years.
Ultimately it's just a numbers game - Wikipedia almost always follows consensus, even when the consensus is to (effectively, without admission) throw neutrality or other rules out the window.
Do you have suggestion of better repository of knowledge gathering, which achieve better level of neutrality than Wikipedia on every matter it covers, or throw right into your face that the article doesn’t meet consensual neutral POV?
Some of this has to do with concerted and long-running campaigns of coordinated editing (against wikipedia rules) to push a one-sided political narrative. Most notably this happened and continues to be done by Israel-eliminationists[0]. Wikipedia eventually acknowledged the problem and banned a couple of the worst offenders[1] but that's a drop in the bucket as far as I'm concerned. I read it less and less these days and don't consult it at all for anything controversial ("controversial" meaning "topics that leftists have strong opinions about").
Sadly, a system like Wikipedia is hard to defend against persistent coordinated attacks by people who have lots of time.
Fully agreed. The Talk pages are a very interesting read these days. I things continue down this path I think Wikipedia will be a lot less relevant in the coming years, at least for current events and things related to the on-going culture war.
> I can't be the only one who feels that Wikipedia's quality has really started to go downhill over the past 5 or so years. I've noticed more and more articles which read as ridiculously partisan, usually around subjects with any link to politics or current events.
I would say this started over a decade ago. Otherwise I completely agree.
Oh dear, you need to learn about the GamerGate incident which started August 2012. All the extreme division and online manipulation through the collaborative creation of false narratives started right there, with that issue, before contaminating the entire political landscape.
It's the Eternal September of our generation, and it's not recognised enough as such. Before that, the internet was a different place.
> Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture
Okay, what the actual fuck? IIRC it was people whining about the absolute state of games journalism in the 2010's.
GamerGate was about ethics in games journalism roughly as much as the Arab Spring was about a street vendor having his cart confiscated.
That was their initial spark, but it kicked off a ding-dong battle for years. You could argue it's still going today, given places like /v/ and ResetEra are still fighting it, games like Dustborn and Concord are pilloried, and the "Sweet Baby Inc. detected" Steam curator exists to list games that have taken that company's advice.
I was there, it was as Wikipedia describes it. Read the talk page.
Edit: the replies to this comment demonstrate why this problem is intractable: people are very emotionally invested into their idea of how things unfolded, and outright reject other perspectives with little more than a "nuh-uh!".
I was there as well. It was absolutely not as Wikipedia describes it. If the claim was that some people participating in GG did so because they were sexist, fair enough. That was true and unavoidable because you get crazies in every group. But that was not some kind of universal thing, such that Wikipedia should be describing the movement unambiguously as "misogynistic".
It absolutely matched the Wikipedia summary. There is a ton of evidence linked supporting each point: it was a hate mob from the moment Eron Gjoni decided his ex should be punished for breaking up with him.
It all started with his post, attacking her relationship with Grayson, who never reviewed her games. Even he later admitted that the original claims were fictitious but that did nothing to stop the attacks – if you look at the threats she received or the online statements the attackers made, they cared a LOT more about her alleged infidelity or what they perceived as unfair privileges for women in the gaming industry than anything about journalism.
This was later added to his post:
> To be clear, if there was any conflict of interest between Zoe and Nathan regarding coverage of Depression Quest prior to April, I have no evidence to imply that it was sexual in nature.
He even told Boston Magazine that this was the hook he used to get attention, with what he knew was a high likelihood of attacks:
> As Gjoni began to craft “The Zoe Post,” his early drafts read like a “really boring, really depressing legal document,” he says. He didn’t want to merely prove his case; it had to read like a potboiler. So he deliberately punched up the narrative in the voice of a bitter ex-boyfriend, organizing it into seven acts with dramatic titles like “Damage Control” and “The Cum Collage May Not Be Accurate.” He ended sections on cliffhangers, and wove in video-game analogies to grab the attention of Quinn’s industry colleagues. He was keenly aware of attracting an impressionable readership. “If I can target people who are in the mood to read stories about exes and horrible breakups,” he says now, “I will have an audience.”
> One of the keys to how Gjoni justified the cruelty of “The Zoe Post” to its intended audience was his claim that Quinn slept with five men during and after their brief romance. In retrospect, he thinks one of his most amusing ideas was to paste the Five Guys restaurant logo into his screed: “Now I can’t stop mentally referring to her as Burgers and Fries,” he wrote. By the time he released the post into the wild, he figured the odds of Quinn’s being harassed were 80 percent.
> Even he later admitted that the original claims were fictitious
No, he did not. And nobody was claiming that Grayson reviewed Quinn's games beyond like a day or two of confusion, and none of the arguments made relied on that being the case.
> what they perceived as unfair privileges for women in the gaming industry than anything about journalism.
This is a false dichotomy. The entire point was that the journalism had a role in creating those privileges.
No, they aren't. They're your interpretation of Boston Magazine's spin (and it's really, really obvious purely from the style of the prose that it's a complete hit piece that chose its conclusion ahead of time). The article provides no evidence of any such words. Because there is no such evidence, because he said nothing of the sort.
> They spent a year lying about her “unethical” actions justifying all of the abuse
That is, again, objectively not what happened. Any claims WRT Quinn were evidenced, and were also irrelevant to the large majority of what was going on. (What was actually going on, not what sources like the ones you prefer chose to focus on.)
Well no, I was also around but not particularly interested at the time. This looks like a classic case of the media trying to close ranks and smear their critics.
Funny enough, it would the movement stopped being about harassing women the moment the media stopped writing about it, advocates kept on going, criticizing ideological push into videogames to this day. At the same time by now both Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian have been shown to be grifters who really knew jackshit but how to play a crowd.
I was also there, and I say it was very much not as Wikipedia describes it and the narrative is practically libelous. I would tell you to read as much of the archived back-room nonsense as I did (not just the talk page archives but internal Wikipedia government stuff), but even if could be unearthed this much later nobody deserves the trauma.
Fun thing about that. Whenever someone starts going off about how Zoe Quinn was supposedly mistreated and how that supposedly launched a "right-wing backlash against feminism" and a "misogynistic online harassment campaign", quiz them about the "jilted boyfriend" (as they typically put it) who wrote the post that supposedly set everything off. With remarkable consistency, they don't know his name (Eron Gjoni) or anything about his far-left political views, and will refuse to say the name if you ask. They have never read the post and have no idea what it says, and will at most handwave at incredibly-biased third-hand summaries.
GG wasn't constrained to Gjoni, it was the reaction to his posting. One guy saying "I'm on this team" does not define the characteristics of the resulting events.
You miss the point. It's about those people being misinformed, unwilling to look into matters independently, and selective in the application of their supposed ideological principles.
Does "someone doesn't know trivia about the inflection point" really demonstrate any of those things?
Like, if I asked you whether the anger at Depression Quest was downstream of a long-standing meme-feud on /v/ about whether visual novels are videogames and you didn't know that, that doesn't really mean anything about your understanding of anything other than /v/ culture wars of the 2010s.
I mean, c'mon, "five guys burgers and fries"?
The whole thing springs out of "someone who made a thing we don't like" and "an excuse to attack" - the lack of any actual ethical breaches in the coverage of Depression Quest should be immediately disqualifying.
Among other things, I think it suggests that my opinion about what happened, as someone who does know those things from distinctly remembering them and having had them be personally relevant at the time, should be taken more seriously than that of people telling me over a decade later what happened based on some combination of { the Wikipedia article, their own worldview, what their friends have said about it, more recent news articles from aggrieved people who cite it as part of a grand conspiracy theory about contemporary right-wing politics }.
If your grievance is "people don't take me seriously in arguments", then you could try deploying sources. There's probably still plenty of /v/ archives from back in the day, right?
But I think "people trust contemporary and retrospective reporting more than me, a guy who self-identifies as having a skin-in-the-game perspective" shouldn't be very surprising.
And, if it means anything, I was reading /v/ at the time, too, was initially sympathetic, and eventually realized it was all just an extension of existing /v/ grievance politics (from my perspective) - "people who disagree with us or make things we don't like are getting attention, which is evil".
I was there for threads where people were seething about positive coverage around Depression Quest before the "Zoe Post" blow-up, which was purely "we don't like that people enjoy experiences that don't suit our tastes".
At some point I realized that there just wasn't any actual ethical issues to speak of around the Depression Quest coverage, and it was just more /v/ seething about outlets liking things they didn't.
> If your grievance is "people don't take me seriously in arguments", then you could try deploying sources. There's probably still plenty of /v/ archives from back in the day, right?
I spent years trying to do this. It took inordinate amounts of time and mental energy, made exactly zero difference to the beliefs of my interlocutors no matter how well reasoned and evidenced, and additionally got me dismissed as some weirdo who cares too much (by people who clearly cared too much, but were annoyed that I disagreed with them).
I am not getting back into that now and am only willing to discuss this in the most top-level generalities. It was genuinely traumatic.
> At some point I realized that there just wasn't any actual ethical issues to speak of around the Depression Quest coverage, and it was just more /v/ seething about outlets liking things they didn't.
You keep talking about /v/. I don't understand why. The main discussion was on Reddit. And they showed concrete evidence of new ethical issues regularly.
>You keep talking about /v/. I don't understand why.
Given that you find not knowing the blog post guy's name disqualifying, this is extremely funny. The ground level of the whole shitshow wasn't /r/KiA.
(I'd love to see a scrap of evidence that /r/KiA did anything beyond "we did it reddit"-style conspiracy posting and going "hmm this dev is queer, is this an ethics issue?", but given that this was apparently traumatic for you, I won't force the issue)
The GamerGate article is probably the best example of Wikipedia's blatant political bias.
There are many biased articles out there, of course, but not many manage to misrepresent past events to such an extreme that it borders on comical. It reads like it was written by Zoe Quinn herself. Maybe it was.
GamerGate was about journalism in the same way that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was to protect the rights of ethnic Russian minorities in that country. The GamerGate people used ethics as an excuse because that sounds a lot more reasonable than “hate mob riled up by a bitter ex”, but it fell apart as soon as you looked at the evidence (e.g. they were most focused on attacking a developer over a relationship with someone who never reviewed her games), where they went for support (right-wing agitators with low journalistic ethics), and all of the real issues they ignored between huge gaming companies and the major media outlets.
The excuse was as believable as someone saying they were super concerned about ethics in tech journalism, but then never said a word about a huge tech company and spent all of their time badgering the Temple OS guy for sharing a meal with an OS News writer.
Or, you know, people had long been unhappy with the poor state of game reviews and the incident in question prompted broad complaints. Rather than accept criticism the journalists in focus instead decided to use their platforms to smear their critics as a sexist hate mob.
If that was really their motive, they sure picked an odd way to express it by focusing their efforts on attacking one woman with very little power in the industry while ignoring the actual game media outlets and huge companies. It’s like claiming you’re an environmental activist but instead of even talking about Exxon you’re busy making death threats to the local pet store claiming their organic kibble isn’t really organic.
That's it though, at the time there were plenty of complaints about the media outlets and publishers. Your problem is that the only people reporting on this to the wider public were the very journalists that the group were criticising.
GamerGate wasn’t doing that work and they distracted mightily from it. For example, the much-hated Kotaku was actually doing reporting which got them black listed so not only was GamerGate not contributing there, they were actually harming the people who were:
That Kotaku piece was a full year after GamerGate, if anything people might question whether it'd have happened if GamerGate hasn't drawn attention to these problems.
GamerGate was still going strong in 2015, and did absolutely nothing to help stories like that. The people attacking journalists don’t get to take credit for their targets’ work.
In the last 2-3 years, every contribution I made has been reverted by a reviewer or editor, either giving some excuse like lack of references, or none at all. Ceased to contribute to articles, and financially as well.
> That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the US,
Not really. The phenomenon exists in other languages Wikipedias. I think it is related to the fact that NGOs that "shape" political discourse and politicians have become "sensible" to the text in Wikipedia pages.
It is always good, when you read Wikipedia, to "follow the money", i.e. look at the sources, see if they make sense.
In the last 5 years, a lot of online platforms, HN also, are used by state actors to spread propaganda and Wikipedia is perfect for that because it presents itself as a "neutral" source.
There's a reason why historians tend to view anything more recent than 10-20 years ago as politics. If you don't want to get embroiled in political debates, stick to stuff old enough to be history. There's still politics there, but it's less raw.
Wikipedia doesn't restrict itself to topics that are older than ten years ago, so some of their material is necessarily going to be viewed as political.
e.g. Wikipedia has a stand-alone page on Elon Musk's Nazi salute[1].
{Edit: It's worth noting here that Wikipedia also maintains separate pages for things like Bill Clinton's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein[3].}
This particular page is very interesting because of the sheer amount of political blow-back it's caused for Wikipedia. If you're a Republican, this one page may be the biggest reason you might view Wikipedia as having become "ridiculously partisan". As a direct result of this page, and the refusal to remove or censor it, Musk is now taking aim at Wikipedia and calling for a boycott[2]. He also had his employees produce Grokipedia which, notably, does not include a page on his Nazi salute.
Musk may have had a public falling out with Trump, but he is still very much plugged into the Republican party. He's about to throw a lot of money at the mid-term elections. So, naturally, one hand washes the other and Wikipedia is on every good Republican's hit list. The kicker is that a lot of Republicans, who don't like Musk and think he's a Nazi/idiot, are going to feel a lot of Musk-instigated pressure from their own party to target Wikipedia.
This is the price Wikipedia pays for including recent events and refusing to bow to demands for censorship.
I'm also not American so I'm not well-versed in this topic, but perhaps to raise the obvious:
Does Wikipedia really need a page running for thousands of words on Musk allegedly making a Nazi salute?
It's longer than some of the content on major historical figures, yet this is a subject that I'd be surprised to see mentioned again after a few years have passed.
Considering that the subject matter is highly sensitive and concerns a living person I'm surprised that such an article was allowed at all.
It shows a recency bias, which is probably unavoidable. I'd hope that, as time passes, there are mechanisms to archive (not delete!) pages that seem unimportant. However, while this level of coverage may present a noise problem for average users, it will be a gift to future historians. How much material about the historical figures you mention was simply lost?
That being said, there should be absolutely no regard for "sensitivity" or the fact that Musk is a living person. He is a public figure wielding a ridiculous amount of resources to reshape the world as he sees fit. Regardless of his virtues or shortcomings, his power makes him somebody that should be watched closely. He helped shape the last U.S. election, played a key role in this presidency, and promises to continue his influence in the mid-terms. It matters if he's a Nazi.
To my view it looks more like an attempt to inflate a minor controversy by excessively documenting it. If this much effort were being put into writing about government policy I'd totally agree with you, but this level of detail is uncharacteristic even for Wikipedia.
> That being said, there should be absolutely no regard for "sensitivity" or the fact that Musk is a living person
Wikipedia always had particularly strong rules about how living persons are supposed to be covered. I wouldn't agree with making exceptions just because I dislike a powerful individual.
In terms of leaving the page up: I don't expect Wikipedia to be censored, but looking at this page the content unavoidably comes across as something that'd only merit a couple of lines on the main article. Instead you have a literal essay just to record "those aligned with the left believe that Musk made a Nazi salute, those aligned with the right say that he didn't".
Is it radicalised to want even a basic premise of neutrality in an encyclopedia?
Despite not being particularly political, even I raise an eyebrow when an article opens with "____ is a <negative label>, <negative label>, <negative label> known for <controversial statement>"
I want an improvement upon "Encyclopedia Brittanica". If we have to have governments around the world fund a nonprofit educational equivalent of that, then I'm all for it but we can't keep depending upon a least-common denominator "central public knowledge repository" that's an improperly-managed, easily-manipulated, often incomplete and inaccurate mobacracy fed by largely unknown randos, enough of whom aren't doing so for honest purposes and too many are foolish/crazy/unreliable enough to curate and preserve worthwhile information consistently.
Indeed, neutral point of view is one of the most important principles of Wikipedia [1]. I only recall phrasing like that being used used in very clear-cut cases, like the word "pseudoscience" in the article on homeopathy. If you don't think something is neutral, the guideline "be bold" [2] encourages you to edit it. You don't have to wait for somebody else to.
I've never seen an article like that, other than for people like Epstein, who are primarily famous for their crimes. I just went and checked the pages of some famous people where you might expect this kind of treatment if Wikipedia were indeed biased in the way people seem to think (like Donald Trump or Ted Cruz), and they're not like that.
There are a lot of comments in this thread talking about a strong bias in Wikipedia, but I don't see any examples. I have no doubt that there are some articles that are biased, particularly in less popular areas that get less attention, but overall, Wikipedia does a great job maintaining a neutral point of view in its articles.
I do get the impression that what people perceive as bias is often simply neutrality. If you think yourself the victim of an evil cabal of your political opponents, then a neutral description of the facts might seem like an attack.
To be honest I don't keep a list of examples, I usually raise an eyebrow and move on. It's typically on pages for smaller public figures where you get some extremely questionable descriptions.
It's also definitely a thing for contentious topics, a while back I tried to look up some info on the Gaza war and some of the pages were a complete battleground. I feel that there was a time when Wikipedia leaned away from using labels like "terrorist", but their modern policy seems to be that if you can find a bunch of news articles that say so then that's what the article should declare in Wikipedia's voice.
> Is it radicalised to want even a basic premise of neutrality in an encyclopedia?
Facts are not neutral or "balanced".
And your whole phrasing smells of someone who doesn't want to be challenged with facts which are against you worldview, which is pretty much against the whole purpose of Wikipedia.
> Despite not being particularly political, even I raise an eyebrow when an article opens with "____ is a <negative label>, <negative label>, <negative label> known for <controversial statement>"
Without giving the actual example, there seems nothing wrong with this in general. Could be important, could be overrated. But at least I assume it's true, because wrong claims would be a valid problem.
I mean... this is a very real phenomenon, but probably not in the way you're thinking of.
There are many simple statements of fact that, 15 or 20 years ago, were as universally uncontroversial as "the sky is blue", but today are considered radically controversial political opinions, and will get you banned for most online platforms if you dare utter them.
Exactly, you don't think it's true because you don't believe they're facts, you've been radicalized into believing they're "dogwhistles" (a term only used by radicalized people, by the way - if you keep hearing dogwhistles, you might just be a dog.)
Friendly reminder that we all have the power to improve this! Become an editor and If you come across a problematic article, you can make improvements, or even just flag it as needing work. I know this is not a small ask, and can feel discouraging if you see more issues than you have time to address or your edits are not accepted, but when you consider the relatively small number of editors and the huge number of readers (not to mention AI’s being built on it) it is likely one of the more significant differences you can make towards improving the greater problem polarization.
The impression I've had from trying to contribute in the past has been that some editors will fight tooth and nail to prevent changes to an article they effectively own. The maze of rules and regulations makes it far too easy to simply block changes by dragging everything through protracted resolution processes.
Even something as clear-cut as "the provided source doesn't support this claim at all" becomes an uphill struggle to correct. When it comes to anything related to politics this problem is also exaggerated by editors selectively opposing changes based on whether they apply a desired slant to the text.
I have a personal interest in getting fixes into Wikipedia. If you'll share here a couple of examples I can attempt a fix. Here are some stories of what I've done in the past where people mentioned that they've struggled with corrections (one says he was banned, another said his article was deleted, and the third said he couldn't get it corrected - I solved all of these):
One thing I should clarify is that Wikipedia's purpose is to aggregate the current general view on things. So even if you know something is true personally, you cannot put it in unless you can find a reliable place where someone has documented it. In the cases I have there I had to first find the appropriate backing references before I could make something happen so it's not a trivial fix. Getting Makoto Matsumoto in there took me many hours because I know only a tourist's amount of Japanese.
I've also edited controversial articles (the Mannheim stabbing, one of the George Floyd incident related convicts) successfully.
Anyway that's my resume. Bring me the work you need done and once I've got a moment I'll see what I can do (no guarantees, I have a little baby to care for).
> One thing I should clarify is that Wikipedia's purpose is to aggregate the current general view on things. So even if you know something is true personally, you cannot put it in unless you can find a reliable place where someone has documented it. In the cases I have there I had to first find the appropriate backing references before I could make something happen so it's not a trivial fix.
This is where I would disagree, the model really doesn't work for politics and current events. In those topics Wikipedia may be better described as "The world according to a handful of (mostly US-based) news outlets". There's been a prolonged effort to deprecate sources, particularly those which lean to the right, so it's increasingly difficult to portray a neutral perspective reflecting multiple interpretations of the same topic. Instead excessive weight is given to what a majority of a select group of online sources say, and that's not necessarily trustworthy.
Most obviously it's a model which will fall flat when trying to document criticism of the press.
When you say you disagree, I assume you mean that you disagree that Wikipedia's approach is good. I don't think I was making that claim, however. I have no value position on Wikipedia's approach except that I appear to endorse it by participating. There are certainly true things that Wikipedia will not contain because they are insufficiently described in sources that Wikipedians find acceptable. But nonetheless that is Wikipedia's purpose: to find a list of sources that generally report fact, and to aggregate them.
Like any consensus-based thing it's pretty loose. It's unlikely that EN wikipedia had much of a position on the reliability of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, for instance.
As an example, when I resurrected the Makoto Matsumoto article, I mirrored it to my personal wiki[0] in case it is deleted from the original. Another loss I lament is that of Chinese Numbered Policies[1] which I think is a genuinely interesting list and a meaningful categorization that I will eventually re-create on my personal wiki.
I'm a Wikipedia inclusionist which means I want as many true things there as possible in a way that represents the truth as accurately as possible, but it's a collaborative effort and that means that sometimes I don't get what I want.
Any way, as you can see from my earlier experience, I seem to have a skill of getting facts into Wikipedia when others do not, and I have a personal desire to see them there as well. So if you want to list a couple of the examples you had trouble with I can see if I can help. I know you said "politics and current events", but hopefully there are non-emergent situations that you can describe because evolving situations require more attention than I'm able to apply at the moment. I will still try, though. As an example, the Salvadoran Gang Crackdown had some ridiculous language on it that I removed[3] that was clearly an attempt to insert a left-wing (as it is in the US) political slant.
To be clear, I have no affiliation with Wikipedia (beyond the fact that as an auto-confirmed user I have the user privilege to create articles without going through AfC). I just have a personal interest in fact recording[2].
I meant that I disagree that Wikipedia is really trying to give a general view of events. That might have been the original intention, but it's not what it's doing in practice.
It does all hinge on that important list of acceptable vs unacceptable sources. In the last few decades there's been an increasing trend for news outlets to take a political position and decline to report on stories which would damage that position, which becomes most obvious whenever the US holds an election.
I think the reality is that any group will develop certain norms for this. I have a personal interest in making sure that Wikipedia's norms don't diverge too far from fact, but even that is limited because I have other things in my life to do. I think it's probably the most accurate mainstream aggregator there is, which is valuable in its own sense, so if I can make it a little better with a little effort I will usually try. But I wouldn't say that this means it's anywhere near flawless.
Speaking of norms, the Hacker News community will flag and downvote any comments of mine that mention that our 10 month old did not receive the COVID-19 vaccine. I think that's clear evidence of some kind of political bias. But that's this community's norms. I don't care as much to convince them as I do to fix Wikipedia.
Anyway, I understand if your experience trying to correct Wikipedia might have been at a different time, so you may not recall right now, but if you ever recall, my email is in my profile. I collect a list of these things and when I have a spare moment I try to make some progress.
> When it comes to anything related to politics this problem is also exaggerated by editors selectively opposing changes based on whether they apply a desired slant to the text.
This is amplified by the fact that active editors socialize with each other heavily behind the scenes, and over a period of many years you end up with a core group that all desire to apply the same slant.
The trick these days is to calmly make your case on the talk page first for anything that might be even slightly controversial, before you attempt any editing. So if someone wants to "own" the article they have to engage on the same terms, or you can just point out the lack of opposition and make the edit yourself.
That's the thing though, expecting users to have a discussion over even minor changes is extremely off-putting for most potential editors.
I've also noticed that a few of these editors seem to be deliberately abrasive towards new users, perhaps with the hope that they'll break a rule by posting insults in frustration. The moment that happens those editors quickly run to the site administration and try to get said user banned. Wikipedia's policies are increasingly treated as a weapon to beat down dissent rather than a guide on how to contribute positively.
this attitude is exactly why and how those "deranged redditor activists" (we're from the superior hacker news, of course, where there is no controversy or activists or differences in opinion) took and maintain control.
Utopian lionization that doesn't reflect reality or the bullshit. Unqualified people have the power to tell experts who were there that their contributions are insignificant, wrong, or that details don't matter. That's just stupid and pointless, and so less people contribute to hostile and idiotic half-assery.
I'll take curated information that is better and rigorous every time.
> Friendly reminder that we all have the power to improve this! Become an editor and If you come across a problematic article, you can make improvements, or even just flag it as needing work.
This works very well when there's a clear non-partisan issue with the text, like a logical inconsistency or the citation doesn't line up with the claim or the prose is just sloppy or unnatural.
If someone is trying to push biased sources, good luck.
The I-swear-it-isn't-a-cabal of highly-active editors knows policy better than you do, and they will continue to conveniently know policy better than you do no matter how much time you spend studying it. (And if you study it and then try to do your business anonymously, they will consider it suspicious that you know anything about policy and demand that you log in to your nonexistent long-standing account.) And that policy allows them to use highly biased sources because they are on they "reliable sources" list, except it isn't really a single list but rather some sources are restricted in applicability, unless it's one of them using it inappropriately. And the bias of those sources doesn't disqualify them as long as it's properly taken into consideration by whatever arcane rules, except this doesn't happen in practice and nobody will care if you point out them doing it, as long as it serves their purposes.
Meanwhile, the way sources get approved as reliable is generally that they agree with other reliable sources. Good luck trying to convince people that a source has become unreliable. You aren't going to be able to do it by pointing out things they've repeatedly objectively gotten wrong, for example. But they'll happily spend all day listing every article they can find that an ideologically opposed source has ever gotten wrong (according to them, no evidence necessary).
And it all leans in the same direction because the policy-makers all lean in the same direction. Because nobody who opposes them will survive in that social environment. There are entire web sites out there dedicated to cataloging absurd stuff they allowed their friends to get away with over years and years, just because of ideological agreement, where people who dispute a Wikipedia-established narrative on a politically charged topic will be summarily dismissed as trolls.
On top of that they will inject additional bias down to the level of individual word-choice level. They have layers and layers of policy surrounding, for example, when to use words like "killing", "murder", "assassination" and "genocide" (or "rioting" vs "unrest" vs "protest"); but if you compare article titles back and forth there is no consistency to it without the assumption of endemic political bias.
WP:NOTNEWS is, as far as I can tell, not a real policy at all, at least not if there's any possible way to use the news story to promote a narrative they like.
And if the article is about you, of course you aren't a reliable source. If the Wikipedians don't like you, and their preferred set of reliable sources don't like you, Wikipedia will just provide a positive feedback loop for everything mainstream media does to make you look bad. This will happen while they swear up and down that they are upholding WP:BLP.
I've been watching this stuff happen, and getting burned by it off and on, for years and years.
Man, I know what you are talking about through and through. Happens all the time on the political Right/Left pages, controversial authors of classical literature, WWII atrocities, and the list goes on. Scientific and Movie or Art articles are way better to discover interesting stuff.
The stalking, censorship, and unwillingness to contribute to topics deemed as "controversial" is unreal. People might not believe, but wikipedia truly is one hell of a cesspool.
There is just too much bureaucracy for beginner editors nowadays. The whole baptism of fire that you need to undergo to be part of the oligarchy is just not worth the hassle.
On Twitter/X "for you" feed, I'm frequently served posts by handles that are openly hostile toward Wikipedia. The most often cited reason is excessive fundraising / bloat (previously it was bias). But in my opinion, whatever bloat the Wikipedia organization suffers from, it is still a better alternative than all the other ad/engagement driven platforms.
For a top-10 Internet website it's not "bloated" at all, if anything it's still running on a shoestring budget. And the fundraising ends up supporting a huge variety of technical improvements and less known "sister" projects that are instrumental in letting the community thrive and be relevant for the foreseeable future. Sure, you could keep the existing content online for a lot less than what they're asking for, but that's not what folks are looking for when they visit the site. Keeping a thriving community going takes a whole lot of effort especially in this day and age, where a vast majority of people just use the Internet for 100% casual entertainment, not productive activity.
To be clear, I'm not hating on Wikipedia, just their (IMO) overly-strong push for donations.
The first word in my OP was "Except", and that was genuine -- I agree with the parent post, just outside of this one gripe. I definitely get value from it -- either directly through visits, or indirectly through it training LLMs I use.
And I don't mind them asking for support. I just disagree with how they ask, and how often they ask.
I feel like a simple persistent yet subtle "Support Wikipedia" link/button may be just as effective, and at the very most, a 30-pixel high banner once a year or so.
Maybe they've done tests, and maybe this is effective for them, but it feels like there are much subtler ways that may be effective enough.
I have supported sites and services much smaller than Wikipedia, with much less intrusive begging. But maybe that's not the case for others.
To repurpose Winston Churchill's quote on democracy, "Wikipedia is the worst form of encyclopaedia, apart for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
It's a weird thing to hate on Wikipedia for since in general it's one of the cleaner sites I visit. The absolute garbage of the Fandom wikis shows just how bad it could be.
Eh out of all the nonprofits that incessantly fundraise, Wikipedia gets a pass the most. Nobody else can compete with their vast utility to just about everyone.
The controversy is 95% of spending, including 90% of staff, is on things with no relation to wikipeida that few care about, with exponentially growing costs, which they imply is needed to keep the wiki alive despite how cheap it actually is to run.
There are things to criticize wmf spending on, but the above is absolute bullshit. It is simply not true that "95% of spending, including 90% of staff, is on things with no relation to wikipeida".
By now they should be sitting on a billion dollars that safely yields a forever self-funding annual income ($30m-$50m) that would pay for all of their necessary expenses. They would no longer require any donations. It's grotesque and wildly irresponsible how they're managing the organization. If LLMs become the center of knowledge resources going forward (which they will), Wikipedia's funding will decline as their traffic declines, and they'll collapse into a spiral of cut-backs, as they operate on a present structure that burns most of its financial capability annually (this opens them up to a shock to the system on inflection, which is happening now).
LLM's can't just be "the center of knowledge" on their own, they need to learn and be trained if they are to be useful. A whole lot of LLM knowledge comes from Wikipedia to begin with.
Tailwind docs are also the source of, duh, docs. People browse them way less and as a result Tailwind gets way less funding.
The problem is that Wikipedia should be set for life at this point, and they insist on rejecting that notion. There may be a future in which Wikipedia closes, and if that comes to pass it will due to wanton disregard for people's goodwill.
statements on wikipedia are summarized from sources, LLMs once trained on wikipedia to summarize, can then summarize on their own from the source material, and probably with less bias
There are many others though. The 'Solana_(blockchain_platform)' page is mainly a hit piece. When I used to edit Wikipedia, an admin told me that the amount of developers was not a relevant measure for a blockchain platform (!) and that 'proof of history' (using verifiable delay functions to sync clocks then creating an equivalent of Time Division Multiple Access to coordinate a distributed system) was not real (!!). At the time, the introduction to the page was mainly focused on FTX (who invested in Solana Lab's 5th round) and Melania Trump (who launched a token on the platform, amongst many more well known/more liked people and orgs that had done things on Solana, eg Def Jam, Lollapalooza, Instagram, Stripe, Visa, etc) which apparently were not relevant.
Wikipedia's cofounder Larry Sanger has a list of many more.
Corporate editors, boiler room political operations, and random conspiracy cranks are given a bothsideism platform to edit and narrate facts in their favor.
"Bothsidesism" is a tired argument. Somehow if you don't think that one side of a debate is utter evil and the other side is as pure as the driven snow, you're engaging in "bothsidesism" if you acknowledge there are any shades of gray in the world. Which is a childish argument for anyone older than a high school sophomore.
"Bothsidesism" is a lie that is used to avoid criticizing one side when the other side is also bad. Just because one side is awful does not grant the other side a free pass to be immune from criticism or to get their way on everything. The idea of "bothsidesism" forces a false dichotomy and then forces you to pick a side, when there are almost always more than two choices. It's what partisans use to beat down people who say "I pick 'None Of The Above,' because you both suck."
You define it that way but that's only you as far as I know - I haven't seen that definition or had that experience - and it ignores the actual bothsidesism problem, which is certainly not a lie IME.
I have been a fan of Wikipedia since I first learned about it, about six months after it launched. What a concept! Anyone can edit, citations are required, revisions are kept indefinitely. That's a recipe for building a clearinghouse of human knowledge with the power of iteration.
But I am also a non-fiction researcher/writer, and I experience some problems caused by Wikipedia:
1) I like to dig deep into historical stories--newspapers, archives, court records, FOIA requests--and I try to produce high quality, well-sourced articles about historic events. Inevitably, someone updates the Wikipedia article(s) to include new information I have surfaced, which exiles my article to the digital dustbin in favor of Wikipedia. Occasionally the Wikipedia editors cite my article in their updates, but much more often they just cite the sources that I cited, and skip over my contribution. It can be painful for my hard work to become irrelevant so rapidly.
2) Multiple of my writings have been plagiarized on Wikipedia by careless editors over the years, and I have been subsequently accused of plagiarizing from Wikipedia. That is unpleasant.
For a recent example, in 2006 I wrote an article about Doble Steam Cars[1]. A few months ago I had reason to visit the Doble steam car Wikipedia entry[2], and as I was reading, I realized that a large portion of the text was an uncanny, nearly verbatim copy of my article. I looked at the revision history, and found that a wiki editor had copied my text to revamp the article just a few months after I wrote mine in 2006. I visited /r/wikipedia and asked how to best handle this, and the Wikipedia editors there determined that it was indeed a violation, and they decided to revdelete almost 20 years of edits to purge the violation. It was quite something to behold.
To be clear, I am not happy that the huge revdelete resulted in so many lost subsequent good faith edits. But it's impressive that it was possible to roll it back so quickly and cleanly.
This is cute, but kind of an example of Wikipedia's off-mission bloat. It irks me that they constantly fundraise when most of it is not needed for Wikipedia proper, but rather used for initiatives people know less about and may not fund if they knew.
I don't begrudge them the odd party, anniversary, meetup.
And some of their subprojects are a great idea and could go much further -- it'd be fantastic to have a Wikipedia atlas, for example. The WikiMiniAtlas on geolocated articles is nice but it could be so much better.
But as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER it's a huge concern that they're blowing money pretty much at the rate they get it, when they should be saving it for the future, and be pickier and choosier about what they're funding at any given time.
That is a nice start, a rendering of GIS wikidata. Perhaps ask Wikimedia Foundation for funding :)
What I'd like to see is a more intimate marrying of OSM data and Wikipedia data. For example, if I go to zoom level 12 centred on London, UK on your page, there are about 80 text labels on the OSM layer itself. At minimum this is going to need OSM vector tiles. I'd expect to be able to click any of the OSM labels for the corresponding Wikipedia article, as well as adding in POIs for articles that don't have corresponding OSM links. And then you need OSM rendering style rules about which POIs you show at each zoom level, based on whether labels will run into each other or not.
The problem right now is that the WikiMiniAtlas treats all things, whether large areas or individual POIs, as POIs.
i feel like that's a bit silly, the other projects are listed on the donation page (https://donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/FAQ) and tbh you are unlikely to be donating to the wikimedia foundation without being aware of (at least some of?) the rest
Honestly, most of the other projects get almost none of the resources (other then maybe wikidata and commons, but both of those are directly used by wikipedia)
I wonder whether the emergence of a single, true Wikipedia competitor would actually put an end to this never-ending fundraising criticism (since people could simply donate to the competitor as a form of protest)
Projects like Wikipedia never have meaningful competition, because the social dynamics invariably converge to a single platform eating everything else.
Wikipedia is already dead, they just don't know it yet. They'll get Stackoverflowed.
The LLMs have already guaranteed their zombie end. The HN crowd will be comically delusional about it right up to the point where Wikimedia struggles to keep the lights on and has to fire 90% of its staff. There is no scenario where that outcome is avoided (some prominent billionaire will step in with a check as they get really desperate, but it won't change anything fundamental, likely a Sergey Brin type figure).
The LLMs will do to Wikipedia, what Wikipedia & Co. did to the physical encyclopedia business.
You don't have to entirely wipe out Wikipedia's traffic base to collapse Wikimedia. They have no financial strength what-so-ever, they burn everything they intake. Their de facto collapse will be extremely rapid and is coming soon. Watch for the rumbles in 2026-2027.
Wikipedia is not even in the game you are describing here. Wikipedia does not need billions of users clicking on ads to convince investors in yet another seed. They are an encyclopedia, and if fewer people will visit, they will still be an encyclopedia. Their costs are probably very strongly correlated with their number of visitors.
This. I'm really bothered by the almost cruel glee with which a lot of people respond to SO's downfall. Yeah, the moderation was needlessly aggressive. But it was successful at creating a huge repository of text-based knowledge which benefited LLMs greatly. If SO is gone, where will this come from for future programming languages, libraries, and tools?
This always feels to me like, an elephant in the room.
I’d love to read a knowledgeable roundup of current thought on this. I have a hard time understanding how, with the web becoming a morass of SEO and AI slop - with really no effort being put into to keeping it accurate - we’ll be able to train LLMs to the level we do today in the future.
You talk about news here like it's some irrefutable ether LLMs can tap into. Also I'd think newspapers and scientific papers cover extremely little of what the average person uses an LLM to search for.
If you use wikipedia as a starting point, and actually check reference material critically, it's invaluable in my opinion.
We used to have to pay lots of money for encyclopedias for less quality.
My hope is that while I think the website/webapp itself doesn't need much change, if they moved the back-end to a distributed system, like ipfs perhaps? that would be amazing. Even if wikipedia is blocked, or tampered with, arbitrary people around the world would have mirrors of pages here and there. They could store it just as it is now, and simply expose the data via ipfs and change the webapp to use their own ipfs http gateway.
The unthinkable can happen. I wondered if the burning of the library of alexandria was something people thought was in the realm of practical possibility back then?
My first "contributions" were 2004, I was 10 years old and supposed to write a text about Mozart. Somehow I noticed the edit button and started vandalizing the page, as I didn't understood what Wikipedia was meant to be. Some patient wikipedian kept reverting and reporting my IP addresses during that day. It's both incredible to see how old and young Wikipedia is, if we'd say there was a "World Wide Web Heritage" project, Wikipedia and the contributors are truly the first thing that comes to mind.
It's getting really hard now. I've been editing since day one. Recently I had awful trouble getting a new article accepted. I gave up for some months and came back and it was accepted first time.
Apparently you can pay a high-ranking Wikipedia editor to massage your article into the site. I know a Hollywood producer who paid to get himself listed.
What amazes me most, though, is that I still find new subjects to write about that don't exist yet on Wikipedia.
I was close to finishing school when Wikipedia came up. A lot of complaints and concerns about LLMs today echo remarks about Wikipedia back then. Kids won’t learn anything, they will just copy and paste! The information is unreliable, our kids will stop thinking critically or learning how to research!
While I don’t mean to equate both, I find the resemblance in this case striking.
> A lot of complaints and concerns about LLMs today echo remarks about Wikipedia back then.
I have also noticed this.
How LLMs can never be trusted because they are stochastic sounds very similar to how Wikipedia can never be trusted because it sometimes has a bad-faith edit.
Or how the people that don't believe information should be free are very active in both the anti-Wikipedia and anti-llm crowds. And use much of the same talking points.
While Wikipedia is terribly inaccurate and heavily biased, it can be a useful starting point for information on a topic. You have to take advantage of the links to other sources on the page, which often have a different conclusion than what is presented in the article!
I always like to point people to Simple Wikipedia - https://simple.wikipedia.org/. You can also change the (lang).wikipedia.org URL to simple.wikipedia.org and a lot of the time you get a great, simple language explanation that's better for a quick overview of a topic than the regular page.
Slightly off topic, but now that long context machine translation is roughly on-par with humans: are there any official efforts from Wikipedia, to translate the "best" or "most complete" language version of each article to all other languages? I'd imagine that the effort of getting all languages up to the same standards are just an impossible one and people from "lower-resource" languages would benefit a lot.
Not quite, the official in-development project wrt. this area is Abstract Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia which plans to develop a human-editable structural interlanguage for encyclopedic content that can then be automatically "rendered" to existing natural languages, as opposed to just starting from an existing "best or most complete" natural-language text.
This avoids the unreliability of existing "neural/ML" approaches, replacing them with something that might see contributions from bots as part of developing the support for specific content or languages (similar to what happens with Wikidata today) but can always be comprehensively understood by humans if need be.
At least using Irish as an example, the state of machine translation is still far far behind proper translation unfortunately and wouldn't be up to scratch
I think it's optimal for this to be done at read-time rather than write-time. En Wikipedia is the most comprehensive but there are many articles in language Wikipedias that are far more complete. Rather than attempting to keep these branches of knowledge in sync, it is probably better to have some mechanism to pull them all together when someone wants to read a synthesis.
You're not the first to have the idea. For languages that are only sparsely represented in the LLMs' training data, this has actually done a lot of damage. The LLMs spew out a bunch of hallucinations, and there aren't enough qualified human editors to review it, so the human record of that language itself becomes tainted.
If you do not know of a single Wikipedia article that you judge to be politically biased, then that says more about you and your gullibility than it does about me.
The point is not that Wikipedia is completely unbiased. That's an obvious impossibility - for any encyclopedia.
The point is that accusations of "noticeable bias on any topic that has political implications" is the kind of accusation made by someone simply trying to sow distrust in information, writ large. It's increasingly common.
BuzzFeed, Salon and PinkNews being used as reliable sources should be everything you need to know about WP.
Or read some of the more critical viewpoints against the Wikipedia editor bureaucracy (that shields itself with a laughable "Anybody can edit Wikipedia! We don't exist! Don't look at the man behind the curtain") like https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
It's a miracle that in a world where everything becomes a service, proprietary and cloud based, you can download a collective human knowledge (while some argue it's biased, not truth-based and consensus ran - yes, but I think it's one of the best outcome for a socially constructed knowledge).
This. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, while some of the content needs to be updated periodically, it also has A LOT of content that will stay relevant pretty much forever.
I've often found it's bare bone utilitarian and efficient design a breath of fresh air compared to most of what's online today. That, and their philosophy of being donation based to keep the lights on.
The biggest complaint about Wikipedia I have is that they do not allow edits via VPNs, even for the registered users. These days VPN is a necessity in many places, thus it limits a big amount of potential contributors.
Aside from AI, Wikipedia’s greatest upcoming challenge will be censorship as Western governments start to adopt various traits of Eastern dictatorships.
For all of its ubiquity, Wikipedia is a single fragile organization in an increasingly unstable political landscape.
I hope that efforts are being made to make sure that its content is not only being archived in many places, but also that the know-how to reboot Wikipedia's hosting from its dumps (software, infrastructure deployment and all) is being actively preserved by people independent of the organization.
I hadn’t heard of Grokipedia so based on the positive comments in this thread, I thought I’d try it out – only to discover that its search feature sucks.
I’ve just finished watching a HBO TV show on Blu-Ray called “The Night of” so I tried searching for it on Grokipedia. It failed to find an article about the TV series in the first 60 search results (regardless of whether I used double quotes or appended the words “TV” or “series”). After multiple attempts, I gave up.
On the other hand, when I typed the three words into Wikipedia’s search, the TV show was the second search result.
In the last 2 years, Wikipdia's quality declined. For me this was evident when they suddenly changed the UI. The new UI is more annoying. Perhaps it is nicer for Average Joe people, but for powerusers it is just annoying to use now. But this is not the only problem: many articles have a low quality, or they are so complicated that Average Joe doesn't understand them, which is ironic considering the UI was most likely changed to appease Average Joe.
I am also displeased with the constant pop-up or slide-in widgets. This is a general curse for browsers that ublock origin prevented. I hate this. My browser should not allow for any such slide-in banner. I am never interested in anything written there - usually it is a "gimme more money", but even if it is not, I simply don't CARE what is written on it. Even python used this, on their homepage, where they are even so cheeky that you can not fully disable this thing, unless you block it with ublock origin.
I feel that too many websites fail the user now. Wikipedia does too. The intrinsic quality is still better than the AI slop spam that Google amplified world wide, while also ruining Google search, but the quality used to be better in the past, on Wikipedia.
> For me this was evident when they suddenly changed the UI. The new UI is more annoying.
In case you are unaware, if you're logged in, you can go into the user preferences and change the Appearance to one of the older themes, such as Vector Legacy (2010).
Which includes a section about Wikipedia in the age of AI: New partnerships with tech companies support Wikipedia’s sustainability
> several companies — including Ecosia, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Pleias, and ProRata — became new Wikimedia Enterprise partners, joining existing partners such as Amazon, Google, and Meta.
On the contrary, this thread seems to have a large number of users who can't handle criticism of Wikipedia without responding with unfounded assumptions and insinuations about the critic
What does "challenged Wikipedia so thoroughly" mean?
(My impression is that Grokipedia was announced, everyone looked it and laughed because it was so obviously basically taking content from Wikipedia and making it worse, and since then it's largely been forgotten. But I haven't followed it closely and maybe that's all wrong.)
Sumary: it's a copy of Wikipedia, but without the bits Musk disagrees with. Perhaps it also has some other sources, but the articles I looked up when it was announced, were verbatim copies from Wikipedia, with some bits missing. My suspicion was that they instructed their LLM ("Grok". I wonder why it wasn't called X or Grox. Anyway...) to synthesize the article from the edits, leaving out those that were rated "liberal", with the error margin on the conservative side (pun intended).
> the persistent editorial and corporate bias and intellectual dishonesty
Musk is explicitly partisan and has repeatedly manipulated Grok's output to suit his agenda. How could you possibly consider Grok a worthwhile alternative if you take issue with intellectual dishonesty and corporate bias?
Has it? I think to challenge you have to show some comparable usage numbers. Its certainly an impressive technical feat to have this AI-based wiki project, but does anyone actually use it?
I mean that genuinely. I don't know any usage numbers for Grok. Is it even 1% of Wiki? Is it 50%? Is it more?
It's consistently better in content quality, for everything that I've used it for. I've seen conversations complaining about it that effectively reek of either anti-Musk or anti-AI bias, and when I dig in, I haven't found any legitimate bad information or arbitrary bias in the articles themselves.
It's not yet as comprehensive, with ~6 million articles compared to Wikipedia's ~7 million, and the UI isn't as good, with a lot of polish and convenience and fun features in Wikipedia that are noticeably absent.
It's qualitatively better in significant ways, and when you compare and contrast articles for which there's a difference, you start to get a feel for the ways in which Wikipedia has failed.
Being anti-Musk is a shibboleth and article of faith for a lot of people, so they can't engage with anything he's involved in on an objective level. Grokipedia isn't used by as many people for that and other reasons. From the last couple months of using it, I've found it to be an objectively better tool.
I've gone in and made corrections in places I have knowledge of, and the process and transparency of those types of edits are awesome. It just works, no drama, no dealing with digital tinpot tyrants, and if there's evidence you're wrong about a thing, the bot will actually counter your suggestion and stick to its parameters and standards.
It's not perfect by any means, but it's a damn sight better than Wikipedia.
Grokipedia is impressive. All edits to the original Wikipedia article are shown, along with source links for the edit. All anyone has to do is to look at a wikipedia article and the Grokipedia article side by side to see that Grok is usually able to make significant improvements to articles, adding important context, improving explanations and removing bias. Don't knock it 'til you've tried it. If you haven't tried it because of a hatred of Elon Musk... well... who's the biased one?
It's really remarkable how, every single time Wikipedia comes up on HN, there's a bunch of comments about bias and such... and yet never a single example is ever linked.
Surely people don't think sources such as Mother Jones are more 'reliable' than The New York Post, Fox News, or The Heritage Foundation? Not a coincidence there.
Having such obvious biases does nothing but damage the Wikipedia brand, and at this point has me anticipating Ai replacements.
This is the comment on the Mother Jones entry:
"There is consensus that Mother Jones is generally reliable. Almost all editors consider Mother Jones a biased source, so its statements (particularly on political topics) may need to be attributed. Consider whether content from this publication constitutes due weight before citing it in an article."
They acknowledge it is a biased source and they make a distinction between reliability and bias. Not familiar with the publication.
To elaborate slightly, note that "reliable" is sort of Wikipedia jargon. When it applies to a news organization, it means that statements of fact are likely to be correct... or at least, not intentionally incorrect, because errors do happen. So a source can be reliable and biased at the same time, which means that if it says a thing happened you can largely trust that it really did happen... but any interpretation of that might be slanted, and so shouldn't be trusted.
The New York Post isn't "reliable" because it's a tabloid that doesn't care overmuch about fact-checking what it publishes (and, worse, has a history of just making stuff up sometimes). So the Wikipedia position is that you can't trust a citation to the NY Post without finding something else to corroborate it -- at which point you might as well just cite the corroborating reliable source instead.
Whereas Mother Jones will absolutely mostly publish articles which say good things about progressives and bad things about conservatives, but those things will all be true. Their bias comes in the form of selectively presenting these things -- they're unlikely to bother posting a "Ted Cruz just did a good thing" article -- and in their color commentary / opinion pieces, not in the form of just making things up.
> Surely people don't think sources such as Mother Jones are more 'reliable' than The New York Post, Fox News, or The Heritage Foundation?
That seems based on a premise that I don't grasp. Why is Mother Jones more or less reliable than those sources? Are those sources reliable in your opinion?
My impression is that you have a strong opinion and are assuming everyone shares it.
When Wikipedia started gaining a bit of traction, everyone made fun of it. It was the butt of jokes in all the prime time comedy shows. And I always felt like telling the critics - "Don't you see what is happening? People all over the world are adding their own bits of knowledge and creating this huge thing way beyond what we've seen till now. It's cooperation on an international scale! By regular people! This is what the internet is all about. People, by the thousands, are contributing without asking for anything else in return. This is incredible! "
A few years later, Encyclopedia Britannica, stopped their print edition. A few years after that I read that Wikipedia had surpassed even that.
The amount of value Wikipedia brings to the world is incalculable.
And I'm very fortunate to be alive at a time where I can witness something at this scale. Something that transcends borders and boundaries. Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion. Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world.
Thank you, Wikipedia.
Its amazing that wikipedia exists - there've been multiple hardcore attempts to kill it over the years for profit, but its still managing to go
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_quantum_mechan...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_general_relati...
Please get involved if you want to see improvement. There are some math articles which are excellent: readable, well illustrated, appropriately leveled, comprehensive; but there are many, many others which are dramatically underdeveloped, poorly sourced, unillustrated, confusing, too abstract, overloaded with formulas, etc.
there are many math teachers teaching math to people who don't know the subject, basically all mathemeticians. and wikipedia has guidelines for how to serve the audience, the math articles ignore it.
I (got into and) went to MIT (and graduated several times) in engineering and also in finance. I am way beyond the average wikipedia reader in math knowledge. the mathematics wiki articles are imho worthless. the challenge is not how to write articles that are explanatory and reasonable, the challenge is all the gatekeeping of the wiki editors who make it the way it is, that is an unreasonable fight. I tried to make a change a couple of weeks ago to correct an error that was in an article. I got reverted by a person who wanted to collaborate on making the article more abstruse as a solution. "but the error" I said. It's still there.
I have a fair amount of edits on Wikipedia and the wikis that preceded it. Whenever I read this sentiment here I never really understand what the problem is. I never have it myself. The only fight I have been involved in was if Wikipedia should have an article on Bitcoin. Which was not obvious in the beginning.
You could always link to the article and we can have a look. I have no clout on Wikipedia but I do understand why facts can be problematic in any text book. It once took me a week to correct an article about a Russian author.
Articles in biology, from which I understand nothing, are a wall for me. I could never understand anything biology related. Also for example, in Spanish, don’t ask me why, any plant or animal is always under the latin scientific name, and you have to search the whole article to find the “common” name of the thing.
> A Fourier series is a series expansion of a periodic function into a sum of trigonometric functions. The Fourier series is an example of a trigonometric series. By expressing a function as a sum of sines and cosines, many problems involving the function become easier to analyze because trigonometric functions are well understood.
and
> In mathematics, the Fourier transform (FT) is an integral transform that takes a function as input, and outputs another function that describes the extent to which various frequencies are present in the original function. The output of the transform is a complex valued function of frequency. The term Fourier transform refers to both the mathematical operation and to this complex-valued function. When a distinction needs to be made, the output of the operation is sometimes called the frequency domain representation of the original function. The Fourier transform is analogous to decomposing the sound of a musical chord into the intensities of its constituent pitches.
Compare with the Britannica one: 'diamond, a mineral composed of pure carbon. It is the hardest naturally occurring substance known; it is also the most popular gemstone. Because of their extreme hardness, diamonds have a number of important industrial applications.'
Britannica concisely summarizes the basic knowledge about diamonds in an easy-to-read short paragraph.
Wikipedia is uneven, some popular topics are well covered and have good info, others are outdated, biased, often written by one person with agenda.
Anyway, at some I disciplined myself to not follow the links. But sometimes the definition really needs following them.
Nor were encyclopedias which is what student me fell back upon before Wikipedia.
Religion maybe, and Wikipedia is indeed pretty awesome for many topics, but politics is THE bad example here.
Much of the political - especially geopolitical - content on Wikipedia has a tremendous atlanticist bias.
Wikipedia does hold ideals, that access to knowledge is a net good, that people can cooperate both in contribution and review without a dominating magisterial authority. That rational dialogue and qualification and refinement is possible, and that it’s possible to correct for bias, and see the difference between bias and agenda.
Like those whose anti-enlightenment agenda is revealed when they use “atlanticist” as a slur.
For example - one could argue (quite successfully) that the US and Europe propping up dictators in south america and middle east to secure easy access to oil against the wishes and election results of those nations is opposed to many enlightenment ideals, but it is still atlanticism by prioritizing north american and european relations and preservation of values within their little bubble.
Also, just because there was much good resulting from enlightenment thinking, we also got things like the slave trade, the belgian congo, various genocides and so on from it... all of which are pretty bad.
The very notion that the enlightenment had all the answers and that there is nothing more to improve or learn is itself anti-enlightenment.
(I know there were abolitionists in the enlightnement,and examples of people opposed to all the other bad ideas i mentioned, but there are plenty of people who "rationally" argued for them too)
If there isn't a more neutral public source -- if there are only sources with different biases, or if the better sources are behind paywalls -- then I think that Wikipedia is still doing pretty well even for contentious geopolitical topics.
Usually disputes are visible on the Talk page, regardless of whatever viewpoint may prevail in the main article. It can also be useful to jump back to years-old revisions of articles, if there are recent world events that put the subject of the article in the news.
Apart from Wikipedia, speaking more generally, I think that articles with a strong editorial bias still provide useful information to an alert reader. I can read articles from Mother Jones, Newsmax, Russia Today, the BBC, Times of India, etc. and find different political and/or geopolitical slants to what is written about and how it is reported. I can also learn a lot even when I strongly disagree with the narrative thrust of what is reported. The key thing is to take any particular article or publication as only circumstantial evidence for an underlying reality, and to avoid falling into complacency even when (or especially when) the information you're reading aligns with what you already believe to be true.
As such it rapidly developed into heavily biased page, as Wikipedia‘s co-founder Larry Sanger keeps pointing out.
It helps if you are proficient in multiple languages so you can at least „hop“ between the (some) bubbles. But the gatekeeping is always there.
Like if the complaint is that Wikipedia is biased against pseudoscience like naturopathy, i consider that a good thing.
PS: I had to look up „atlanticist“, did this on Wikipedia. (giggle!)
I just checked and it's still there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Clinton&diff...
Link to the section in question:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Clinton&diff...
Still there as of now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Clinton&oldi...
Back then they had 474M monthly unique visitors, 83,444 active contributors and a staff of less than 100. I'm still blown away by the collaboration. To me, that was the promise of "Web 2.0".
On the kitchen door they hung xkcd 903, 906 and another webcomic mentioning that only 13% of updates to Wikipedia are from women (can't find the source). The wifi password back then was "knowledgeshouldbefree" (maybe it still is?)
https://xkcd.com/903/
https://xkcd.com/906/
I'm not sure about that. I think people who are experts in specific areas (and/or are obsessed with those topics) are the ones contributing to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is amazing.
> Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion.
You are romanticizing.
Wikipedia is a corporation, just like Work or University, and I personally assume anything corporate is being manipulated by the owners or the ruling oligarchy because they are structurally unreliable. This is especially veritable for Wikipedia. Create an account there and try to go deeper into the articles about politics, literature and war.
“Work” and “University” are so wildly different as institutions that to use them this way makes it perfectly clear how little merit your point has.
It’s an empty character attack - possibly a reflection of your own - meant to appeal only to the worst despairing suspicions of others. It does nothing to illuminate specific dynamics of group knowledge negotiation.
Anyone who has participated knows there can be conflict and abuse — and more about how that’s addressed than someone throwing drive-by distrust.
I disagree. Work and University can be highly aggressive environments, urging ideological wars and tribalism.
> It’s an empty character attack - possibly a reflection of your own -
Well, this got personal very quickly.
Any collaborative effort will involve politics, and by politics I mean the actual definition. Per Wikipedia:
> set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of status or resources.
It's important to recognize this, because the option is becoming an hermit or just accepting fully what others decide for you.
I remember reading the article about a nudist family photographer. The English Wikipedia article was highlighting the controversy about child pornography that came with it, almost trying to demonize the guy, while the German article was actually trying to go beyond and develop the article. There are enormous discrepancies on that website.
Wikipedia has some bizarre articles and rules. I can only provide some pieces and bits of anecdotes.
And I don't agree with you that US universities are not for profit entities, might be on paper, I don't know. Some of them can bind the students to a long life of debt no?
nitpick: WMF (the org that develops and hosts Wikipedia and its related services like Wikimedia Commons) is a non-profit foundation, not the classic type of profit-driven corporation that your post implies.
The foundation is there to provide technical, legal, and community support. In some cases this is funding for community events, in other cases, this includes funding towards making the editor community more diverse. In most cases, though, it's keeping a staff of folks that maintain and improve the software, and defend the project legally.
So, no Wikipedia isn't a corporation. It's more of a commune.
This isn't a country with some ruling class. 450 people aren't in cahoots to stop you from editing.
There is a lack of transparency on Wikipedia. The rules are nebulous and prone to abuse by veteran users and the oligarchs aggregating on political articles.
Is it overwhelming? Oh yes. Tough to change? Probably also yes without dedication and sound reasoning. But opaque? Certainly doesn't fail that criteria.
At a certain point, no one really knows the devil's dance happening at the top of the moderation ladder and you end up wasting a lot of lifetime on these dead talk pages.
It is a bureaucratic nightmare.
Many articles are fine. I don't think you can equate this to all of Wikipedia automatically.
The rationale is that, even though the documents themselves are a primary source from an organization that poured significant resources into researching the phenomenon of remote viewing, the individual posting the declassified document isn't an authority on the subject.
Apparently if youre not a doctor, you can't read primary sources?
Many such cases.
Wikipedia is absolutely a powerful resource, but it it's clearly controlled by moderators with a bias, and there's no incentive to challenge said bias or consider alternative worldviews.
I've experienced something similar about users downplaying on talk pages the atrocities done by the Soviet Government, like the Holodomor famine or the Katyn Massacre, in contrast to the atrocities done by the Nazis.
Controversial and relatively unknown subjects are easier to be attacked and ignored on wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
People are opposed to this, of course. No one likes to be reminded of how they're limited - and people get really nasty when you accuse them of being a dishonest interlocutor.
There is a large amount of data on this topic. Literally hundreds of pages of reports and summaries of experiments written over decades of effort (if memory serves). The CIA was trying to use the phenomenon to view distant targets with mediums. It was deemed ineffective, and discontinued in the 90s. Even today there are people attempting to replicate remote viewing and prove it as a phenomenon.
For the record, I do not believe this phenomenon is as effective as is claimed. Regardless there is a chance that remote viewing (also known as astral projection) is just something the human brain commonly imagines in some populations. It might be an emergent property of human brains reacting to certain input stimulus, like ASMR.
Regardless, the article written about remote viewing as a concept should be allowed to cite documents about how the Stargate program defined and tested remote viewing (their methodologies, etc). But editors, like all humans, have bias.
There was a similar kerfuffle that happened about a decade and a half ago about homeopathy. It lead to an edit thread where one of the founders of Wikipedia was cursing about how fake something was.
The only objection I have to this, is that primary sources relevant to an article should be allowed to be cited. If a study, whitepaper, or report is widely discredited - include that too. The sum of human knowledge needs to include what we know to be false as well.
And fails spectacularly.
> Founder Jimbo Wales on a challenge overcome
Aren't you forgetting someone, Jimmy? Your co-founder Larry Sanger, perhaps?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger
Let's check one of the citations from the History of Wikipedia page: https://www.mid-day.com/lifestyle/health-and-fitness/article...
> It was Larry Sanger who chanced upon the critical concept of combining the three fundamental elements of Wikipedia, namely an encyclopedia, a wiki, and essentially unrestricted editorial access to the public during a dinner meeting with an old friend Ben Kovitz in January 2, 2001. Kovitz a computer programmer and introduced Sanger to Ward Cunningham's wiki, a web application which allows collaborative modification, extension or deletion of its content and structure. The name wiki has been derived from the Hawaiian term which meant quick. Sanger feeling that the wiki software would facilitate a good platform for an online encyclopedia web portal, proposed the concept to Wales to be applied to Nupedia. Wales intially skeptic about the idea decided to give it a try later.
> The credit for coining the term Wikipedia goes to Larry Sanger. He initially conceived the concept of a wiki-based encyclopedia project only as a means to accelerate Nupedia's slow growth. Larry Sanger served as the "chief organiser" of Wikipedia during its critical first year of growth and created and enforced many of the policies and strategy that made Wikipedia possible during its first formative year. Wikipedia turned out to contain 15,000 articles and upwards to 350 Wikipedians contributing on several topics by the end of 2001.
He may not be with the project now, but don't airbrush him out of history.
I've seen plenty of stalling like that on major news programs, and the interviewer always knows to move on (and possibly edit something in to provide context.)
---
That being said, "who started what" and "who had what idea" are silly topics to obsesses about. It always come down to who put the long-term work in. I think Wales was "in the right" to walk off; or at least say something like "I can't tell the story accurately, so please move on to a different question."
It also was Wales who bought up the topic, not the journalist. If he considers it a stupid topic he does not want to talk about, why is it the very first thing he talks about?
But ever since, Sanger has been trash talking Wikipedia as a project and community ("broken beyond repair") and trying to undermine it. A few years later he started a competing project (which was predictably a total failure). For two decades he has been promoting himself as "cofounder of Wikipedia". Interviewer after interviewer asks the same lazy questions about the subject, without ever adding any new insight. (You can see that Sanger's ghost is chasing Wikipedia even into this discussion.)
It's beating a dead horse, and entirely off the topic of what the interview was supposed to be about. Answering the question clearly and accurately takes a lot of time and finesse, which is wasted on the interviewer and most of the audience. Wales clearly screwed up in that interview, but it's not hard to see where he's coming from, psychologically.
What an interview! I had never seen this clip before, it's really something. Facts and context are important for sure, but as someone who isn't clued in on the Sanger drama, Wales could not possibly have made himself look worse. And in under a minute!
As you said, the interviewer is in the right, carrying out the job of interviewing, by pushing Wales as he did. To call him a "jerk" is silly, I think.
So Wales can write Sanger out of the history of Wikipedia, despite evidence strongly showing that Sanger originated the idea, the name, the policies, and indeed that Sanger was the primary driving force for years. And everyone’s is supposed to accept this historical revision because who created it is a “silly topic”.
Is it also a silly topic when Wales claims credit? Or only when someone questions his assertion?
Exactly. Kudo to the wikimedia community!
In fact, journalists should be less deferential to every CEO. Those should be treated with the highest degree of scrutiny.
I personally think writing Sanger out of Wikipedia history (as in this 25 year celebration montage thing) is quite lame. But I also think pressing Wales on this when he says “you can say whatever you want” is also quite lame. No one is obligated to sit with an interviewer while the interviewer tries to pick a fight.
The interviewer is right to press on the basic facts and Wales was wrong to ragequit, especially since the exchange lasted less than 45 seconds(!)
I don't see this as a political victim issue: I can see Sanger as an asshole while also seeing Wales as weak.
Has Wales actually disputed the objective facts of the matter?
I did not take his comment to mean “it’s an opinion whether Sanger worked on Wikipedia from the beginning” but “it’s an opinion whether that qualifies him as a cofounder”.
> Wales could have said "I don't dispute the facts of that case. I see myself as the founder, but I won't argue against other interpretations. Lets move past it."
That is essentially what he said. He called himself the founder, then when the interviewer probed, said it’s a dumb question, then said he doesn’t care, then said the interviewer can frame it however he wants, then said again that he doesn’t care.
He said what you think he should’ve said. He just didn’t use your exact words.
> The interviewer is right to press on the basic facts and Wales was wrong to ragequit, especially since the exchange lasted less than 45 seconds(!)
What “basic facts” did he press on? I heard no facts or questions about facts. He used the word “facts” while pressing Wales specifically about calling himself the founder.
Jimmy Wales has been poked at with the question of whether he should call himself a founder or specifically co-founder for a long time, by right-wingers who think Wikipedia is too woke, and want to irritate and discredit him as much as possible, and instead raise up his co-founder Larry Sanger. Sanger has right-wing views and a habit of accusing any article as biased that doesn't praise Trump and fundamentalist Christian values, and takes these as proof that Wikipedia has a left lean.
The interview Wales walked out of was for his book tour. I imagine it's the umpteenth interview that week with the same question asked for the same transparently bad-faith reasons, trying to bend the interview away from his book and into right-wing conspiracy theory land.
Not surprising! Are we setting aside how deceitful his answer his? Claiming all credit for a collaborative accomplishment -- which he does by adopting the "founder" title -- would rightfully provoke "poking" by interviewers. I can't imagine an interview not addressing a question that is so pertinent to Wales' notoriety. They literally cannot properly introduce him without confronting it! To say those interviewers are acting in "transparently bad-faith" comes across to me as plainly biased.
Sanger's politics don't change this, either. It might be the case that you have to concede on this to people you politically disagree with.
He himself admits it's a complicated situation, and argues both his own and Sanger's position.
Combined with the context provided by all the parent comments here, it's quite difficult to argue good faith given the interview was also specifically on the book tour. There are many different and actually productive ways the interview could have talked about the conflict between Wales and Sanger.
I went down the rabbit hole on this a while back and came away with the impression that it's complicated. And whether or not Wales is being deceitful hinges on pedantic arguments and mincing of words. Should Wales be referred to as "a founder", "co-founder", or "one of the founders"? It's not as if he's titling himself "sole founder". And Sanger is still list on his Wiki page and the Wikipedia pages as a Founder.
It should also be noted that Sanger was hired by Wales to manage Nupedia, and that Wikipedia was created as a side-project of Nupedia for the purpose to generating content for Nupedia. Does the fact that Sanger was an employee of Wales, and that Wikipedia only exists because Sanger was tasked with generating content for Nupedia impact his status as a founder? Would Sanger or Wales have gone on to create a wiki without the other?
Can Steve Jobs claim to be the creator of the iPhone since he was CEO at the time it was created at Apple?
At the end of the day Sanger was present at the ground breaking of Wikipedia but was laid off and stopped participating in the project entirely after a year. He didn't spend 25 years fostering and growing the foundation. He did however try to sabotage or subvert the project 5 years later when it was clear that it was a success. Interestingly he tried to fork it to a project that had strong editorial oversight from experts like Nupedia which flies in the face of the ethos of Wikipedia.
A big piece of this is that “founder” is actually a very unusual title to use here. Normally someone would “create a product” and “found a company”. Wikipedia is not a company. It’s not even the name of the foundation. It’s a product.
It’s kind of like Steve Jobs saying he founded the iPhone.
> He didn't spend 25 years fostering and growing the foundation.
Which isn’t however relevant to the title “founder”.
Credit your co-founders. Even if you don't agree with them anymore. There's no excuse not to.
If you've been asked the question a lot then you should be _very good_ at answering it by now.
a group of people seems to think, that journalists should trip up people, like in interrogations, instead of being hard in the topic but nice in the tone.
From that point on, where it came from or who founded it is not so important. The question is how it acts today.
It is a highly-political organization supporting lot of “progressive” ideas, California-style. So if you like reading politically biased media it may be for you.
If you are seeking for a global view you better ask different LLMs for arguments and counter-arguments on a subject.
EDIT: a couple downvotes denying the influence of specific “Wikipedia ideology” and politics.
Take a chance to edit articles and you will see how tedious it is.
There is also a lot of legal censorship. Celebrities putting pressure on removing info, or lobbies, or say things that are illegal or very frowned upon (for example questioning homosexuality, or the impact of certain wars).
Sometime it is legality, ideology, politics, funding, pressure, etc.
This is why you need to use different sources.
But we now live in a world where people agree that ideology should be able to change facts.
> or the impact of certain wars
Exactly, like China wanting to completely censor anything regarding the Tiananmen Square protests.
> for example questioning homosexuality
I don't know what you have to question about this.
>If you are seeking for a global view you better ask different LLMs for arguments and counter-arguments on a subject.
All the LLM I've tested have a strong tendency to increase your echo chamber and not try to change your opinion on something.
>This is why you need to use different sources.
Only if deep down, you're ready to change your POV on something, otherwise you're just wasting time and ragebaiting yourself. Although I admit, it can still be entertaining to read some news to discover how they're able to twist reality.
Wikipedia is ideological. Even when the articles stick to the facts (which they often don't), editors will selectively omit inconvenient (but factually true) information to push their ideology.
As a recent, first-hand example of this, witness the highly ideologically motivated Wikipedia editors actively suppressing discussion of Hasan Piker's dog abuse/shock collar scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Hasan_Piker&...
Facts are very skewed by the environment: in the case you push too much in one direction that is too controversial or because the politicians disagree too much with you; there can be plenty of negative consequences:
- your website gets blocked, or you get publicly under pressure, or you lose donations, you lose grants, your payment providers blocks you, you lose audience, you can get a fine, you can go to jail, etc.
Many different options.
There is asymmetry here:
Sources are naturally going to be curated to support your view. At the end, the path of least resistance is to go with the flow.The tricky part: there are also truths that cannot be sourced properly, but are still facts (ex: famous SV men still offering founders today investment against sex). Add on top of that, legal concerns, and it becomes a very difficult environment to navigate. Even further, it's always doable to find or fabricate facts, and the truth wins based on the amount of energy, power and money that the person has.
You appear to be using unusual definitions of "fact" and "truth", more akin to "assertions" and "vibe". I'll stick with the traditional definitions.
[1] https://patriotpolling.com/our-polls/f/greenland-supports-jo...
[2] https://www.politico.eu/article/greenland-poll-mute-egede-do... What is the actual truth ? Who knows.A "fabricated fact" (or "alternative fact" if you prefer) is an oxymoron. Actual truth, as opposed to a vibe or what people are basing their decisions on these days, is orthogonal to "the amount of energy, power and money that the person has." Deriving or identifying actual facts and truth is hard (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method) and always subject to change based on new data, so lots of people don't do it -- it's much easier to just make shit up and confirms biases.
If I ask 10 people what they think of something and 60% says "no" and if I ask another 10 people and 90% says "yes" there's no relation between the 60% and the 90%, like at all.
Or as Homer said it "Anybody can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 40% of people know that."
My favorite is: "Numbers are fragile creatures, and if you can torture them enough, you can make them say whatever you want"
Not just because you must edit with facts. If your opposition outnumbers you and/or they have more energy to spend than you, they can grind you down with bad-faith arguments and questions for clarification.
The way this goes is that they edit an article to insert their POV. You edit/revert it. They open a talk page discussion about the subject. Suppose their edit is "marine animals are generally considered cute throughout the world" with a reference to a paper by an organization in favor of seals. You revert it by saying this is NPOV. They open a talk page question asking where the organization has been declared to be partisan. Suppose you do research and find some such third-party statement that "the Foundation for Animal Aesthetics is organized by proponents of marine animals". Then they ask how this third party is accurate, or whether "organized by proponents" necessarily implies that they're biased.
This can go on more or less forever until someone gives up. The attack even has a name on Wikipedia itself: "civil POV pushing". It works because few Wikipedia admins are subject matter experts, so they police behavior (conduct) more than they police subject accuracy.
Civil POV pushers can thus keep their surface conduct unobjectionable while waiting for the one they are actioning against to either give up or to get angry enough to make a heated moment's conduct violation. It's essentially the wiki version of sealioning.
In short, a thousand "but is really two plus two equal to four?" will overcome a single "You bastard, it is four and you're deliberately trolling me", because the latter is a personal insult.
This knife cuts both ways.
Thinking this is relevant is a very revealing position. It shines some very strong light on your ideological biases and, yes, your agenda, which I feel certain you will feel obligated to deny as a defensive measure. You are showing your hand in ways I don't think you realize.
What? If Bomis was a porn company then Reddit is a porn company.
Edit: I take it back. It looks like Bomis was more directly pushing soft core porn than I realized.
I don't think LLMs can be faulted on their enthusiasm for supplying references.
And the stochastic parrot framing has a real problem here: if the mechanism reliably produces correct outputs for a class of problems, dismissing it as "just plausibility" rather than computation becomes a philosophical stance rather than a technical critique. The model learned patterns that encode the mathematical relationship. Whether you call that "understanding" or "statistical correlation" is a definitional argument, not an empirical one.
The legal citation example sounds about right. It is a genuine failure mode. But arithmetic is precisely where LLMs tend to succeed (at small scales) because there is no ambiguity in the training signal.
In everyday life, you cannot read 20 books about a topic about everything you are curious about, but you can ask 5 subject-experts (“the LLMs”) in 20 seconds
some of them who are going to check on some news websites (most are also biased)
Then you can ask for summaries of pros and cons, and make your own opinions.
Are they hallucinating ? Could be. Are they lying ? Could be. Have they been trained on what their masters said to say ? Could be.
But multiplying the amount of LLMs reduce the risk.
For example, if you ask DeepSeek, Gemini, Grok, Claude, GLM-4.7 or some models that have no guardrails, what they think about XXX, then perhaps there are interesting insights.
If one just wants a friendly black box to tell them something they want to hear, AI is known to do that.
And not just bottom of the barrel LLMs. Ask Claude about Intel PIN tools, it will merrily tell you that it "Has thread-safe APIs but performance issues were noted with multi-threaded tools like ThreadSanitizer" and then cite the Disney Pins blog and the DropoutStore "2025 Pin of the Month Bundle" as an inline source.
Enamel pins. That's the level of trust you should have when LLMs pretend to be citing a source.
Or is that something you made up?
It would also be better for Wikipedia to not have any "public face". I don't want fake-heroes; I want accurate, objective content.
Sad that he has to play that role, but this is where we are at the moment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
> Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales
> Most notably, he co-founded Wikipedia
Wikipedia shows integrity even when its co-founder does not:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales#Co-founder_status_...
> In late 2005, Wales edited his biographical entry on the English Wikipedia. Writer Rogers Cadenhead drew attention to logs showing that in his edits to the page, Wales had removed references to Sanger as the co-founder of Wikipedia.[53][54] Sanger commented that "having seen edits like this, it does seem that Jimmy is attempting to rewrite history. But this is a futile process because, in our brave new world of transparent activity and maximum communication, the truth will out."[20][55] Wales was also observed to have modified references to Bomis in a way that was characterized as downplaying the sexual nature of some of his former company's products.[16][20] Though Wales argued that his modifications were solely intended to improve the accuracy of the content,[20] he apologized for editing his biography, a practice generally discouraged on Wikipedia.[20][55]
I don't want to defend Jimbo Wales (he's very touchy about the subject), but to be honest, even if he's a founder, Larry Sanger didn't contribute much to what Wikipedia today is.
I think the thing is a soar subject because Wikipedia essentially rejected all of Sangar's ideas, but he's still kind of riding on its coattails.
It's his newer baby. Clearly it's a clone of Wikipedia, without the content of course. If Wikipedia ever goes wrong, it's nice to know that we have an alternative.
If Wales had anyone else, or had gone it alone, it's unlikely Wikipedia would be what it is today.
Doesn't it? That's basically how tech companies work. You can tell he's written an initial version of Wikipedia, but founder is emphatically not an employee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
Who left extremely early on in the project, went to create a poorly conceived and failed competitor, then spent the next 23ish years shitting on Wikipedia? Why does he deserve any credit?
This website purports to tell us how Wikipedia came to be, 25 years ago. Why not tell it honestly?
I think if you asked anyone in that situation, they probably wouldn't call them their dad, so yeah, this is indeed a good example.
Larry Sanger is effectively an abusive parent who did their best to try to ensure Wikipedia didn't survive. Him being there for the birth doesn't mean much.
Without Sanger, Wikipedia:
- wouldn't be called "Wikipedia"
- wouldn't be editable without first opening an account
- wouldn't have NPOV as a fundamental policy
In short, it wouldn't be Wikipedia.
The community he incubated grew and took Wikipedia onwards to what it is today, even if he disagrees with that direction and plugs his own massively less popular encyclopedia.
A monument to vanity.
Larry may have left the project, but sticks his oar in frequently, see for example the Nine Theses he posted to Wikipedia last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Nine_Theses
Neither Larry nor Jimbo "are" Wikipedia. Wikipedia's editors are Wikipedia, and if they collectively agree with any of Larry's policy ideas, they'll adopt them in time.
I used to glibly agree with what you said, because back in the early 2000s it was primarily the right-wing nutters being fed a diet of Fox News bullshit that were deranged from reality... "reality has a liberal bias", right? Remember the crackpot Conservapedia? But these days I find plenty of equal opportunity derangement from terrible news sources chasing clicks, promoting FOMO, anxiety and keeping their readers/viewers addicted. No political flavour of bullshit belongs on Wikipedia.
The process Wikipedia uses to produce articles that present facts with without editorializing has clearly worked fairly well. Obviously we have a more difficult time reaching consensus on contentious topics but in general the system works quite well.
Anyone who likes them should make their own site to try and see. Oh wait, sangar already did that multiple times and it crashed and burned every time.
Did you even read the document? Claiming that Wikipedia has implemented all of these suggestions in the past is just plainly false. If you disagree with the documents contents, why don't you provide a substantive argument instead of just belittling efforts at changing the status quo?
I'm claiming people, not necessarily wikipedia, have tried them. However many have been tried by Wikipedia too.
> just belittling efforts at changing the status quo?
The status quo is pretty good. Change for change sake is an anti-pattern.
Regardless, i think people who like these ideas should try them, on their own site. I suspect they will quickly find out why Wikipedia does not want to do them.
After all, martin luther didnt just whine that the pope wouldnt listen to him, he made his own thing.
The English intro talks a lot about medical advantages of the procedure: "reduced rates of sexually transmitted infections and urinary tract infections. This includes reducing the incidence of cancer-causing forms of human papillomavirus (HPV) and reducing HIV transmission among heterosexual men in high-risk populations by up to 60%; ... Neonatal circumcision decreases the risk of penile cancer.[14] ... Some medical organizations take the position that it carries prophylactic health benefits that outweigh the risks," and has one sentence of it being controversial worldwide "others hold that its medical benefits are not sufficient to justify it."
The German one has not a single sentence in the intro about advantages, but a whole paragraph on how it's controversial. "Die Zirkumzision als Routineeingriff ist besonders bei Minderjährigen umstritten, ... Von vielen Kinderschutzverbänden und einem Teil der Ärzteorganisationen wird die nicht medizinisch begründete Beschneidung abgelehnt, da sie den Körper irreversibel verändere und bei nicht einwilligungsfähigen Jungen nicht im Einklang mit Gesundheitsschutz und Kindeswohl stehe.[6] Im angelsächsischen Bereich gibt es schon länger eine gesellschaftliche Debatte zwischen Gruppen von Gegnern der Beschneidung („Intaktivisten“-Bewegung) und Befürwortern. Umstritten sind insbesondere medizinischer Nutzen und Risiken, bei Kindern auch ethische und rechtliche Aspekte sowie die Beurteilung im Hinblick auf die Menschenrechte, vor allem das Recht auf körperliche Unversehrtheit."
I'm not sure who's right, but it's hard to not see some bias here.
I've also noticed huge differences between two different language versions of the same articles. (English/Spanish specifically). Sometimes they even feel independently written.
Of course, we should all do our part to improve these things when we spot them, if we're able.
But do you include cultural practices of circumcision? Do you include criticism? If so, how many column inches do you dedicate to either? Which comes first? That surely is going to determine whether the article appears to support or oppose, which is basically the issue in the comment above.
But beyond that, do you group female circumcision in the same article as male circumcision? If not, you are tacitly approving of male circumcision by separating it from disapproved of practice. If so, surely you need to explain the difference in social and legal acceptability. If you do that without noting controversy, then you are implying the social acceptance of male circumcision is universal. If you note controversy, then you are necessarily elevating that to noteworthyness.
There's no way out of it.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_effect
A major reason people are obsessed with bias on wikipedia is because it is the only usable encyclopedia now. Back then even just in the US and published in english there were more than a dozen different encyclopedias competing with different scopes, intended audiences, viewpoints, arrangements, features, editorial policies, etc. And the publishers were more diverse and not monopolistic. There simply wasn't a need for any single one of them to be bias-free.
I think this is the wrong way to look at bias. Bias isnt a binary, instead its a journey to try and get succesively less and less biased. You can never achieve absolute unbiasedness, you can just try to journey closer.
And yes, wikipedia is far from perfect.
No, they do have a sentence on that right before, talking about how sometimes it can make sense as a medical procedure:
> Die Zirkumzision ist eine von mehreren Behandlungsmöglichkeiten (s. z. B. Triple Inzision), die beispielsweise bei schweren Formen der pathologischen Phimose als indiziert gilt, wenn Behandlungsalternativen nicht erfolgversprechend sind oder zuvor keinen Heilungserfolg brachten.
I'd say overall the German one is a bit more balanced, if maybe not in the opening paragraphs. It goes over pretty much all of the benefits in similar detail to the English one, while spending much more words on "adverse effects" (which the English one spends very few words on in comparison, and no pictures at all).
Generally it seems that the English one does its very best to gloss over anything graphic, while the German one spares no detail - a product of underlying cultural attitudes no doubt. English Wikipedia would probably consider many of the contents of the German article "gratuitous detail", while German Wikipedia prefers a "factual and explicit" clinical style.
Like, right here, let's not ask the question "Why is wikipedia deciding that gratuitous detail is consideration" for one page, and instead point out the amount of inconsistency in this regard on other surgical procedures (coronary bypass is tame, kidney transplant is not), and on non-medical topics, such as the absolute inscrutable travesty that is every single Mathematics Wikipedia page and how all of it amount to post-graduate oneupmanship competitions at this point.
If something looks controversial for my tastes, I track when the change was made and look for last version before dubious content was added. And so, I've seen edits done to media-related articles which introduced sections that weren't present in some cases for even 20 years. Sections being replaced or included because there was a need for including particular bias prevalent in the namely United States sociopolitical scene in last 15 years. My country's wiki did suffer as well and there are ongoing edits replacing grammar to fit unjustified trends that damage our language. In the past hot topics which were controversial IRL were including "the Catholic Church's position" - now that's largely gone. Then, it's even impossible to edit articles without being logged in because the most popular ISP has blocked all IP ranges - all because a "trend" of vandalism that happen around 24 to 25 years ago, and which supposedly happens again according to the message presented.
My contributions weren't large and I stopped doing these quickly because fighting people who unload their complexes on the Internet on total strangers weren't worth trying to improve articles about e.g. Milky Way galaxy or some generic local non-political stuff.
Wikipedia looks good on a paper and surely it works for trivial stuff people all around the world can agree upon. But it fails whenever there's a possibility of endorsing a point of view, which is always disguised as "neutral", which applies to probably 80% of articles on English Wikipedia alone. It suffers same degradation as nearly every place on the Internet - just not from the usual ads and tracking .
To have evidence of bias, you would have to show that a paragraph like the one in the English article would be rejected for the German one.
So in a way, I'd argue that Wikipedia having different biases in different language versions actually proves that it's quite unbiased. If all languages had exactly the same content, the most likely explanation would've been that one culture dominates, and the rest are just translations.
Wikipedia is a treasure
That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the US, but I get the impression that the sites neutrality policies have gradually been chipped away by introducing concepts like "false balance" as an excuse to pick a side on an issue. I could easily see that causing the site to slowly decline like StackOverflow did, most people don't want to deal with agenda pushing.
Fortunately articles related to topics like science and history haven't been significantly damaged by this yet. Something to watch carefully.
It is not perfect of course, small topics and non-English Wikipedias usually show more bias, and not just about controversial topics. Even on scientific articles, you may find some guy who considers himself the king of the Estonian Striped Beetle and will not tolerate any other ideas than his, driving away other contributors because they have better things to do than go to war to defend beetle truths.
The good thing with Wikipedia (the English version in particular) is that both sides try to manipulate it, in addition to those who really want to say the truth, so in the end, it is relatively neutral. And if you want to go further, there are citations, which is maybe the most important aspect of Wikipedia compared to traditional media, including encyclopedias.
Wikipedia is not perfect, but it does its best to resist manipulation: citations, all activity is recorded and publicly available, etc...
Non-English Wikipedias have more bias, because they are smaller and also because unlike the English version that is used worldwide, even by non-English speakers, the non-English ones are often tied to specific countries. For example, I think I remember seeing the Arabic Wikipedia as being explicitly pro-Palestine, I guess the opposite is true for the Hebrew version.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contentious_topics#L...
They have a giant pile of editors banned from topics until they can play nice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editing_restrictions...
But you do give a great tip: at minimum, check the talk page. If it's longer than the article itself, run away.
Some articles are so far gone, even the talk page is locked down like Fort Knox. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide
That page even has an FAQ!
> Q1: Why does this article state that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, even though this is heavily contested and neither the ICJ nor the ICC have issued a final judgment?
> A1: A September 2025 request for comment (RfC) decided to state, in Wikipedia's own voice, that it is a genocide. The current lead is the result of later discussion on the specific wording.
This is a case of "if you abandon your convictions when it's inconvenient, you never really had convictions in the first place."
I hope The Wikimedia Foundation can get its act together, and I admire the courage of Jimmy Wales for speaking up about this, but I've also stopped donating. I want no part of this.
Ultimately it's just a numbers game - Wikipedia almost always follows consensus, even when the consensus is to (effectively, without admission) throw neutrality or other rules out the window.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide/Archive_22#...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide/Archive_22#...
Sadly, a system like Wikipedia is hard to defend against persistent coordinated attacks by people who have lots of time.
0: https://aish.com/weaponizing-wikipedia-against-israel/ 1: https://www.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/article-833180
I would say this started over a decade ago. Otherwise I completely agree.
It's the Eternal September of our generation, and it's not recognised enough as such. Before that, the internet was a different place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate
Okay, what the actual fuck? IIRC it was people whining about the absolute state of games journalism in the 2010's.
That was their initial spark, but it kicked off a ding-dong battle for years. You could argue it's still going today, given places like /v/ and ResetEra are still fighting it, games like Dustborn and Concord are pilloried, and the "Sweet Baby Inc. detected" Steam curator exists to list games that have taken that company's advice.
Edit: the replies to this comment demonstrate why this problem is intractable: people are very emotionally invested into their idea of how things unfolded, and outright reject other perspectives with little more than a "nuh-uh!".
There was no such moment in the first place.
This was later added to his post:
> To be clear, if there was any conflict of interest between Zoe and Nathan regarding coverage of Depression Quest prior to April, I have no evidence to imply that it was sexual in nature.
He even told Boston Magazine that this was the hook he used to get attention, with what he knew was a high likelihood of attacks:
> As Gjoni began to craft “The Zoe Post,” his early drafts read like a “really boring, really depressing legal document,” he says. He didn’t want to merely prove his case; it had to read like a potboiler. So he deliberately punched up the narrative in the voice of a bitter ex-boyfriend, organizing it into seven acts with dramatic titles like “Damage Control” and “The Cum Collage May Not Be Accurate.” He ended sections on cliffhangers, and wove in video-game analogies to grab the attention of Quinn’s industry colleagues. He was keenly aware of attracting an impressionable readership. “If I can target people who are in the mood to read stories about exes and horrible breakups,” he says now, “I will have an audience.”
> One of the keys to how Gjoni justified the cruelty of “The Zoe Post” to its intended audience was his claim that Quinn slept with five men during and after their brief romance. In retrospect, he thinks one of his most amusing ideas was to paste the Five Guys restaurant logo into his screed: “Now I can’t stop mentally referring to her as Burgers and Fries,” he wrote. By the time he released the post into the wild, he figured the odds of Quinn’s being harassed were 80 percent.
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2015/04/28/gamergate/2/
No, he did not. And nobody was claiming that Grayson reviewed Quinn's games beyond like a day or two of confusion, and none of the arguments made relied on that being the case.
> what they perceived as unfair privileges for women in the gaming industry than anything about journalism.
This is a false dichotomy. The entire point was that the journalism had a role in creating those privileges.
Those were his words, I’m not sure why you’d expect your assertion to be more credible.
> nobody was claiming that Grayson reviewed Quinn's games beyond like a day or two of confusion
They spent a year lying about her “unethical” actions justifying all of the abuse, and it all traced back to that foundational lie.
No, they aren't. They're your interpretation of Boston Magazine's spin (and it's really, really obvious purely from the style of the prose that it's a complete hit piece that chose its conclusion ahead of time). The article provides no evidence of any such words. Because there is no such evidence, because he said nothing of the sort.
> They spent a year lying about her “unethical” actions justifying all of the abuse
That is, again, objectively not what happened. Any claims WRT Quinn were evidenced, and were also irrelevant to the large majority of what was going on. (What was actually going on, not what sources like the ones you prefer chose to focus on.)
They’re literally the words he updated his blogpost to add.
> That is, again, objectively not what happened.
Cool story, do you have any sources? You keep saying every period source is wrong, based on what?
Fun thing about that. Whenever someone starts going off about how Zoe Quinn was supposedly mistreated and how that supposedly launched a "right-wing backlash against feminism" and a "misogynistic online harassment campaign", quiz them about the "jilted boyfriend" (as they typically put it) who wrote the post that supposedly set everything off. With remarkable consistency, they don't know his name (Eron Gjoni) or anything about his far-left political views, and will refuse to say the name if you ask. They have never read the post and have no idea what it says, and will at most handwave at incredibly-biased third-hand summaries.
I'm pretty sure I've even had this happen on HN.
Like, if I asked you whether the anger at Depression Quest was downstream of a long-standing meme-feud on /v/ about whether visual novels are videogames and you didn't know that, that doesn't really mean anything about your understanding of anything other than /v/ culture wars of the 2010s.
I mean, c'mon, "five guys burgers and fries"?
The whole thing springs out of "someone who made a thing we don't like" and "an excuse to attack" - the lack of any actual ethical breaches in the coverage of Depression Quest should be immediately disqualifying.
But I think "people trust contemporary and retrospective reporting more than me, a guy who self-identifies as having a skin-in-the-game perspective" shouldn't be very surprising.
And, if it means anything, I was reading /v/ at the time, too, was initially sympathetic, and eventually realized it was all just an extension of existing /v/ grievance politics (from my perspective) - "people who disagree with us or make things we don't like are getting attention, which is evil".
I was there for threads where people were seething about positive coverage around Depression Quest before the "Zoe Post" blow-up, which was purely "we don't like that people enjoy experiences that don't suit our tastes".
At some point I realized that there just wasn't any actual ethical issues to speak of around the Depression Quest coverage, and it was just more /v/ seething about outlets liking things they didn't.
I spent years trying to do this. It took inordinate amounts of time and mental energy, made exactly zero difference to the beliefs of my interlocutors no matter how well reasoned and evidenced, and additionally got me dismissed as some weirdo who cares too much (by people who clearly cared too much, but were annoyed that I disagreed with them).
I am not getting back into that now and am only willing to discuss this in the most top-level generalities. It was genuinely traumatic.
> At some point I realized that there just wasn't any actual ethical issues to speak of around the Depression Quest coverage, and it was just more /v/ seething about outlets liking things they didn't.
You keep talking about /v/. I don't understand why. The main discussion was on Reddit. And they showed concrete evidence of new ethical issues regularly.
Given that you find not knowing the blog post guy's name disqualifying, this is extremely funny. The ground level of the whole shitshow wasn't /r/KiA.
(I'd love to see a scrap of evidence that /r/KiA did anything beyond "we did it reddit"-style conspiracy posting and going "hmm this dev is queer, is this an ethics issue?", but given that this was apparently traumatic for you, I won't force the issue)
There are many biased articles out there, of course, but not many manage to misrepresent past events to such an extreme that it borders on comical. It reads like it was written by Zoe Quinn herself. Maybe it was.
The excuse was as believable as someone saying they were super concerned about ethics in tech journalism, but then never said a word about a huge tech company and spent all of their time badgering the Temple OS guy for sharing a meal with an OS News writer.
https://kotaku.com/a-price-of-games-journalism-1743526293
Even if they had also been involved, it would not excuse the abusive behavior.
Not really. The phenomenon exists in other languages Wikipedias. I think it is related to the fact that NGOs that "shape" political discourse and politicians have become "sensible" to the text in Wikipedia pages.
It is always good, when you read Wikipedia, to "follow the money", i.e. look at the sources, see if they make sense.
In the last 5 years, a lot of online platforms, HN also, are used by state actors to spread propaganda and Wikipedia is perfect for that because it presents itself as a "neutral" source.
Wikipedia doesn't restrict itself to topics that are older than ten years ago, so some of their material is necessarily going to be viewed as political.
e.g. Wikipedia has a stand-alone page on Elon Musk's Nazi salute[1].
{Edit: It's worth noting here that Wikipedia also maintains separate pages for things like Bill Clinton's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein[3].}
This particular page is very interesting because of the sheer amount of political blow-back it's caused for Wikipedia. If you're a Republican, this one page may be the biggest reason you might view Wikipedia as having become "ridiculously partisan". As a direct result of this page, and the refusal to remove or censor it, Musk is now taking aim at Wikipedia and calling for a boycott[2]. He also had his employees produce Grokipedia which, notably, does not include a page on his Nazi salute.
Musk may have had a public falling out with Trump, but he is still very much plugged into the Republican party. He's about to throw a lot of money at the mid-term elections. So, naturally, one hand washes the other and Wikipedia is on every good Republican's hit list. The kicker is that a lot of Republicans, who don't like Musk and think he's a Nazi/idiot, are going to feel a lot of Musk-instigated pressure from their own party to target Wikipedia.
This is the price Wikipedia pays for including recent events and refusing to bow to demands for censorship.
__________________
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy
[2]https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2025/01/29/why-elon...
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_Bill_Clinton_a...
Disclosure: I'm Canadian and am neither a Republican or a Democrat.
Does Wikipedia really need a page running for thousands of words on Musk allegedly making a Nazi salute?
It's longer than some of the content on major historical figures, yet this is a subject that I'd be surprised to see mentioned again after a few years have passed.
Considering that the subject matter is highly sensitive and concerns a living person I'm surprised that such an article was allowed at all.
That being said, there should be absolutely no regard for "sensitivity" or the fact that Musk is a living person. He is a public figure wielding a ridiculous amount of resources to reshape the world as he sees fit. Regardless of his virtues or shortcomings, his power makes him somebody that should be watched closely. He helped shape the last U.S. election, played a key role in this presidency, and promises to continue his influence in the mid-terms. It matters if he's a Nazi.
Kudos to Wikipedia for leaving that page up.
> That being said, there should be absolutely no regard for "sensitivity" or the fact that Musk is a living person
Wikipedia always had particularly strong rules about how living persons are supposed to be covered. I wouldn't agree with making exceptions just because I dislike a powerful individual.
In terms of leaving the page up: I don't expect Wikipedia to be censored, but looking at this page the content unavoidably comes across as something that'd only merit a couple of lines on the main article. Instead you have a literal essay just to record "those aligned with the left believe that Musk made a Nazi salute, those aligned with the right say that he didn't".
Despite not being particularly political, even I raise an eyebrow when an article opens with "____ is a <negative label>, <negative label>, <negative label> known for <controversial statement>"
That’s the beauty of wikipedia after all. I recently made my first contribution and it was a really smooth process.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold
There are a lot of comments in this thread talking about a strong bias in Wikipedia, but I don't see any examples. I have no doubt that there are some articles that are biased, particularly in less popular areas that get less attention, but overall, Wikipedia does a great job maintaining a neutral point of view in its articles.
I do get the impression that what people perceive as bias is often simply neutrality. If you think yourself the victim of an evil cabal of your political opponents, then a neutral description of the facts might seem like an attack.
It's also definitely a thing for contentious topics, a while back I tried to look up some info on the Gaza war and some of the pages were a complete battleground. I feel that there was a time when Wikipedia leaned away from using labels like "terrorist", but their modern policy seems to be that if you can find a bunch of news articles that say so then that's what the article should declare in Wikipedia's voice.
Facts are not neutral or "balanced".
And your whole phrasing smells of someone who doesn't want to be challenged with facts which are against you worldview, which is pretty much against the whole purpose of Wikipedia.
> Despite not being particularly political, even I raise an eyebrow when an article opens with "____ is a <negative label>, <negative label>, <negative label> known for <controversial statement>"
Without giving the actual example, there seems nothing wrong with this in general. Could be important, could be overrated. But at least I assume it's true, because wrong claims would be a valid problem.
There are many simple statements of fact that, 15 or 20 years ago, were as universally uncontroversial as "the sky is blue", but today are considered radically controversial political opinions, and will get you banned for most online platforms if you dare utter them.
Keep in mind that stating a fact and dogwhistling are not the same thing.
Even something as clear-cut as "the provided source doesn't support this claim at all" becomes an uphill struggle to correct. When it comes to anything related to politics this problem is also exaggerated by editors selectively opposing changes based on whether they apply a desired slant to the text.
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...
One thing I should clarify is that Wikipedia's purpose is to aggregate the current general view on things. So even if you know something is true personally, you cannot put it in unless you can find a reliable place where someone has documented it. In the cases I have there I had to first find the appropriate backing references before I could make something happen so it's not a trivial fix. Getting Makoto Matsumoto in there took me many hours because I know only a tourist's amount of Japanese.
I've also edited controversial articles (the Mannheim stabbing, one of the George Floyd incident related convicts) successfully.
Anyway that's my resume. Bring me the work you need done and once I've got a moment I'll see what I can do (no guarantees, I have a little baby to care for).
This is where I would disagree, the model really doesn't work for politics and current events. In those topics Wikipedia may be better described as "The world according to a handful of (mostly US-based) news outlets". There's been a prolonged effort to deprecate sources, particularly those which lean to the right, so it's increasingly difficult to portray a neutral perspective reflecting multiple interpretations of the same topic. Instead excessive weight is given to what a majority of a select group of online sources say, and that's not necessarily trustworthy.
Most obviously it's a model which will fall flat when trying to document criticism of the press.
Like any consensus-based thing it's pretty loose. It's unlikely that EN wikipedia had much of a position on the reliability of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, for instance.
As an example, when I resurrected the Makoto Matsumoto article, I mirrored it to my personal wiki[0] in case it is deleted from the original. Another loss I lament is that of Chinese Numbered Policies[1] which I think is a genuinely interesting list and a meaningful categorization that I will eventually re-create on my personal wiki.
I'm a Wikipedia inclusionist which means I want as many true things there as possible in a way that represents the truth as accurately as possible, but it's a collaborative effort and that means that sometimes I don't get what I want.
Any way, as you can see from my earlier experience, I seem to have a skill of getting facts into Wikipedia when others do not, and I have a personal desire to see them there as well. So if you want to list a couple of the examples you had trouble with I can see if I can help. I know you said "politics and current events", but hopefully there are non-emergent situations that you can describe because evolving situations require more attention than I'm able to apply at the moment. I will still try, though. As an example, the Salvadoran Gang Crackdown had some ridiculous language on it that I removed[3] that was clearly an attempt to insert a left-wing (as it is in the US) political slant.
To be clear, I have no affiliation with Wikipedia (beyond the fact that as an auto-confirmed user I have the user privilege to create articles without going through AfC). I just have a personal interest in fact recording[2].
0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Makoto_Matsumoto
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AArticles_for_delet...
2: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Observation_Dharma
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_c...
It does all hinge on that important list of acceptable vs unacceptable sources. In the last few decades there's been an increasing trend for news outlets to take a political position and decline to report on stories which would damage that position, which becomes most obvious whenever the US holds an election.
Speaking of norms, the Hacker News community will flag and downvote any comments of mine that mention that our 10 month old did not receive the COVID-19 vaccine. I think that's clear evidence of some kind of political bias. But that's this community's norms. I don't care as much to convince them as I do to fix Wikipedia.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46564106
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45717802 (this one was flagged but someone must have vouched for it)
Anyway, I understand if your experience trying to correct Wikipedia might have been at a different time, so you may not recall right now, but if you ever recall, my email is in my profile. I collect a list of these things and when I have a spare moment I try to make some progress.
This is amplified by the fact that active editors socialize with each other heavily behind the scenes, and over a period of many years you end up with a core group that all desire to apply the same slant.
I've also noticed that a few of these editors seem to be deliberately abrasive towards new users, perhaps with the hope that they'll break a rule by posting insults in frustration. The moment that happens those editors quickly run to the site administration and try to get said user banned. Wikipedia's policies are increasingly treated as a weapon to beat down dissent rather than a guide on how to contribute positively.
I gave them a fair shot a couple of times, but they're unreasonable and unmoved to listen to reason or experience they don't actually possess.
I'll take curated information that is better and rigorous every time.
This works very well when there's a clear non-partisan issue with the text, like a logical inconsistency or the citation doesn't line up with the claim or the prose is just sloppy or unnatural.
If someone is trying to push biased sources, good luck.
The I-swear-it-isn't-a-cabal of highly-active editors knows policy better than you do, and they will continue to conveniently know policy better than you do no matter how much time you spend studying it. (And if you study it and then try to do your business anonymously, they will consider it suspicious that you know anything about policy and demand that you log in to your nonexistent long-standing account.) And that policy allows them to use highly biased sources because they are on they "reliable sources" list, except it isn't really a single list but rather some sources are restricted in applicability, unless it's one of them using it inappropriately. And the bias of those sources doesn't disqualify them as long as it's properly taken into consideration by whatever arcane rules, except this doesn't happen in practice and nobody will care if you point out them doing it, as long as it serves their purposes.
Meanwhile, the way sources get approved as reliable is generally that they agree with other reliable sources. Good luck trying to convince people that a source has become unreliable. You aren't going to be able to do it by pointing out things they've repeatedly objectively gotten wrong, for example. But they'll happily spend all day listing every article they can find that an ideologically opposed source has ever gotten wrong (according to them, no evidence necessary).
And it all leans in the same direction because the policy-makers all lean in the same direction. Because nobody who opposes them will survive in that social environment. There are entire web sites out there dedicated to cataloging absurd stuff they allowed their friends to get away with over years and years, just because of ideological agreement, where people who dispute a Wikipedia-established narrative on a politically charged topic will be summarily dismissed as trolls.
On top of that they will inject additional bias down to the level of individual word-choice level. They have layers and layers of policy surrounding, for example, when to use words like "killing", "murder", "assassination" and "genocide" (or "rioting" vs "unrest" vs "protest"); but if you compare article titles back and forth there is no consistency to it without the assumption of endemic political bias.
WP:NOTNEWS is, as far as I can tell, not a real policy at all, at least not if there's any possible way to use the news story to promote a narrative they like.
And if the article is about you, of course you aren't a reliable source. If the Wikipedians don't like you, and their preferred set of reliable sources don't like you, Wikipedia will just provide a positive feedback loop for everything mainstream media does to make you look bad. This will happen while they swear up and down that they are upholding WP:BLP.
I've been watching this stuff happen, and getting burned by it off and on, for years and years.
The stalking, censorship, and unwillingness to contribute to topics deemed as "controversial" is unreal. People might not believe, but wikipedia truly is one hell of a cesspool.
There is just too much bureaucracy for beginner editors nowadays. The whole baptism of fire that you need to undergo to be part of the oligarchy is just not worth the hassle.
There’s zero reason it should happen that often, and that intrusively.
The first word in my OP was "Except", and that was genuine -- I agree with the parent post, just outside of this one gripe. I definitely get value from it -- either directly through visits, or indirectly through it training LLMs I use.
And I don't mind them asking for support. I just disagree with how they ask, and how often they ask.
I feel like a simple persistent yet subtle "Support Wikipedia" link/button may be just as effective, and at the very most, a 30-pixel high banner once a year or so.
Maybe they've done tests, and maybe this is effective for them, but it feels like there are much subtler ways that may be effective enough.
I have supported sites and services much smaller than Wikipedia, with much less intrusive begging. But maybe that's not the case for others.
Fixed.
https://www.dailydot.com/news/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraisi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
They have no actual "product" to sell and no ads.
At the same time I imagine a huge amount of traffic, that has surely gotten much much worse with the AI "renaissance" we're going through.
They have staff, etc.. So what's the deal with all the wikipedia hate lately?
Tailwind docs are also the source of, duh, docs. People browse them way less and as a result Tailwind gets way less funding.
The problem is that Wikipedia should be set for life at this point, and they insist on rejecting that notion. There may be a future in which Wikipedia closes, and if that comes to pass it will due to wanton disregard for people's goodwill.
There are many others though. The 'Solana_(blockchain_platform)' page is mainly a hit piece. When I used to edit Wikipedia, an admin told me that the amount of developers was not a relevant measure for a blockchain platform (!) and that 'proof of history' (using verifiable delay functions to sync clocks then creating an equivalent of Time Division Multiple Access to coordinate a distributed system) was not real (!!). At the time, the introduction to the page was mainly focused on FTX (who invested in Solana Lab's 5th round) and Melania Trump (who launched a token on the platform, amongst many more well known/more liked people and orgs that had done things on Solana, eg Def Jam, Lollapalooza, Instagram, Stripe, Visa, etc) which apparently were not relevant.
Wikipedia's cofounder Larry Sanger has a list of many more.
https://en.ejo.ch/public-relations/manipulation-wikipedia
https://imemc.org/article/59294/
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2026-01-14/lon...
https://avim.org.tr/en/Analiz/THE-DARKNESS-BEYOND-WIKIPEDIA-...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/congress-opens-inves...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.13990
https://www.isdglobal.org/isd-publications/identifying-sock-...
https://www.city-journal.org/article/policing-wikipedia
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/oct/30...
https://www.techdirt.com/2007/08/14/diebold-disney-many-othe...
What relevance does that have to truth? I'm tired of online disinformation; should I say it's a tired issue and therefore irrelevant?
Denial that bothsidesism exists, or being tired of dealing with the problem, is irrelevant.
But I am also a non-fiction researcher/writer, and I experience some problems caused by Wikipedia:
1) I like to dig deep into historical stories--newspapers, archives, court records, FOIA requests--and I try to produce high quality, well-sourced articles about historic events. Inevitably, someone updates the Wikipedia article(s) to include new information I have surfaced, which exiles my article to the digital dustbin in favor of Wikipedia. Occasionally the Wikipedia editors cite my article in their updates, but much more often they just cite the sources that I cited, and skip over my contribution. It can be painful for my hard work to become irrelevant so rapidly.
2) Multiple of my writings have been plagiarized on Wikipedia by careless editors over the years, and I have been subsequently accused of plagiarizing from Wikipedia. That is unpleasant.
For a recent example, in 2006 I wrote an article about Doble Steam Cars[1]. A few months ago I had reason to visit the Doble steam car Wikipedia entry[2], and as I was reading, I realized that a large portion of the text was an uncanny, nearly verbatim copy of my article. I looked at the revision history, and found that a wiki editor had copied my text to revamp the article just a few months after I wrote mine in 2006. I visited /r/wikipedia and asked how to best handle this, and the Wikipedia editors there determined that it was indeed a violation, and they decided to revdelete almost 20 years of edits to purge the violation. It was quite something to behold.
To be clear, I am not happy that the huge revdelete resulted in so many lost subsequent good faith edits. But it's impressive that it was possible to roll it back so quickly and cleanly.
[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/the-last-great-steam-car/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doble_steam_car
And some of their subprojects are a great idea and could go much further -- it'd be fantastic to have a Wikipedia atlas, for example. The WikiMiniAtlas on geolocated articles is nice but it could be so much better.
But as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER it's a huge concern that they're blowing money pretty much at the rate they get it, when they should be saving it for the future, and be pickier and choosier about what they're funding at any given time.
[1] : https://wd-nearbyitem.toolforge.org/
[2] : https://rtnf.substack.com/p/wd-nearbyitem
What I'd like to see is a more intimate marrying of OSM data and Wikipedia data. For example, if I go to zoom level 12 centred on London, UK on your page, there are about 80 text labels on the OSM layer itself. At minimum this is going to need OSM vector tiles. I'd expect to be able to click any of the OSM labels for the corresponding Wikipedia article, as well as adding in POIs for articles that don't have corresponding OSM links. And then you need OSM rendering style rules about which POIs you show at each zoom level, based on whether labels will run into each other or not.
The problem right now is that the WikiMiniAtlas treats all things, whether large areas or individual POIs, as POIs.
The LLMs have already guaranteed their zombie end. The HN crowd will be comically delusional about it right up to the point where Wikimedia struggles to keep the lights on and has to fire 90% of its staff. There is no scenario where that outcome is avoided (some prominent billionaire will step in with a check as they get really desperate, but it won't change anything fundamental, likely a Sergey Brin type figure).
The LLMs will do to Wikipedia, what Wikipedia & Co. did to the physical encyclopedia business.
You don't have to entirely wipe out Wikipedia's traffic base to collapse Wikimedia. They have no financial strength what-so-ever, they burn everything they intake. Their de facto collapse will be extremely rapid and is coming soon. Watch for the rumbles in 2026-2027.
I’d love to read a knowledgeable roundup of current thought on this. I have a hard time understanding how, with the web becoming a morass of SEO and AI slop - with really no effort being put into to keeping it accurate - we’ll be able to train LLMs to the level we do today in the future.
News is the main feed of new data and that can be an infinite incremental source of new information
The main issue with neutral people is that we do not know in which camp they are.
And that's a good thing, 'cause it means they're living to their standards.
We used to have to pay lots of money for encyclopedias for less quality.
My hope is that while I think the website/webapp itself doesn't need much change, if they moved the back-end to a distributed system, like ipfs perhaps? that would be amazing. Even if wikipedia is blocked, or tampered with, arbitrary people around the world would have mirrors of pages here and there. They could store it just as it is now, and simply expose the data via ipfs and change the webapp to use their own ipfs http gateway.
The unthinkable can happen. I wondered if the burning of the library of alexandria was something people thought was in the realm of practical possibility back then?
Wonderful website!
Apparently you can pay a high-ranking Wikipedia editor to massage your article into the site. I know a Hollywood producer who paid to get himself listed.
What amazes me most, though, is that I still find new subjects to write about that don't exist yet on Wikipedia.
While I don’t mean to equate both, I find the resemblance in this case striking.
I have also noticed this.
How LLMs can never be trusted because they are stochastic sounds very similar to how Wikipedia can never be trusted because it sometimes has a bad-faith edit.
Or how the people that don't believe information should be free are very active in both the anti-Wikipedia and anti-llm crowds. And use much of the same talking points.
Have publishers have sued Wikipedia too?
Also, the young wikipedia was very different from what it is today.
If anything, the community is discussing stronger guidelines against inappropriate LLM use.
This avoids the unreliability of existing "neural/ML" approaches, replacing them with something that might see contributions from bots as part of developing the support for specific content or languages (similar to what happens with Wikidata today) but can always be comprehensively understood by humans if need be.
This won't work, and it would fail the same way as Semantic Web. Too much human labor needed.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1124005/ai-wikip...
But it is noticeably biased on any topic that has political implications.
Which was why I just wanted to point out that while I think Wikipedia is a net good overall, it is not without blemishes.
> Is asked for evidence.
> Refuses.
Brilliant work. These kinds of posts should be bannable.
The point is that accusations of "noticeable bias on any topic that has political implications" is the kind of accusation made by someone simply trying to sow distrust in information, writ large. It's increasingly common.
Being asked for an example or two isn't weird.
It's about larger patterns, which things are talked about and (crucially) which are not. How much attention is given to things and not.
Or read some of the more critical viewpoints against the Wikipedia editor bureaucracy (that shields itself with a laughable "Anybody can edit Wikipedia! We don't exist! Don't look at the man behind the curtain") like https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
I stopped visiting SO frequently years ago, even before LLMs.
But I still visit Wikipedia. I often just want to read about X, vs. asking AI questions about X.
I hope that efforts are being made to make sure that its content is not only being archived in many places, but also that the know-how to reboot Wikipedia's hosting from its dumps (software, infrastructure deployment and all) is being actively preserved by people independent of the organization.
I’ve just finished watching a HBO TV show on Blu-Ray called “The Night of” so I tried searching for it on Grokipedia. It failed to find an article about the TV series in the first 60 search results (regardless of whether I used double quotes or appended the words “TV” or “series”). After multiple attempts, I gave up.
On the other hand, when I typed the three words into Wikipedia’s search, the TV show was the second search result.
It's not that it doesn't have potential. But I hope the other players take up the mantle and auto-generate alternatives.
The stench of Mr Elon Musk is just too strong with Grokipedia (scrape that, bitch)
I am also displeased with the constant pop-up or slide-in widgets. This is a general curse for browsers that ublock origin prevented. I hate this. My browser should not allow for any such slide-in banner. I am never interested in anything written there - usually it is a "gimme more money", but even if it is not, I simply don't CARE what is written on it. Even python used this, on their homepage, where they are even so cheeky that you can not fully disable this thing, unless you block it with ublock origin.
I feel that too many websites fail the user now. Wikipedia does too. The intrinsic quality is still better than the AI slop spam that Google amplified world wide, while also ruining Google search, but the quality used to be better in the past, on Wikipedia.
In case you are unaware, if you're logged in, you can go into the user preferences and change the Appearance to one of the older themes, such as Vector Legacy (2010).
That reminds me of this thread, where clearly new interface wasn't fondly received: https://old.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/10fdfal/wikipedi...
https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2026/01/15/wikipedia-ce...
Which includes a section about Wikipedia in the age of AI: New partnerships with tech companies support Wikipedia’s sustainability
> several companies — including Ecosia, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Pleias, and ProRata — became new Wikimedia Enterprise partners, joining existing partners such as Amazon, Google, and Meta.
Apparently more people disagree with you than you thought. Calling them bots is empty criticism and I think against HN guidelines.
(My impression is that Grokipedia was announced, everyone looked it and laughed because it was so obviously basically taking content from Wikipedia and making it worse, and since then it's largely been forgotten. But I haven't followed it closely and maybe that's all wrong.)
No?? In what world do you live?
Using Grokipedia would literally be asking for partisan propaganda, Musk doesn't even hide it
Musk is explicitly partisan and has repeatedly manipulated Grok's output to suit his agenda. How could you possibly consider Grok a worthwhile alternative if you take issue with intellectual dishonesty and corporate bias?
I mean that genuinely. I don't know any usage numbers for Grok. Is it even 1% of Wiki? Is it 50%? Is it more?
It's not yet as comprehensive, with ~6 million articles compared to Wikipedia's ~7 million, and the UI isn't as good, with a lot of polish and convenience and fun features in Wikipedia that are noticeably absent.
It's qualitatively better in significant ways, and when you compare and contrast articles for which there's a difference, you start to get a feel for the ways in which Wikipedia has failed.
Being anti-Musk is a shibboleth and article of faith for a lot of people, so they can't engage with anything he's involved in on an objective level. Grokipedia isn't used by as many people for that and other reasons. From the last couple months of using it, I've found it to be an objectively better tool.
I've gone in and made corrections in places I have knowledge of, and the process and transparency of those types of edits are awesome. It just works, no drama, no dealing with digital tinpot tyrants, and if there's evidence you're wrong about a thing, the bot will actually counter your suggestion and stick to its parameters and standards.
It's not perfect by any means, but it's a damn sight better than Wikipedia.
Translation: I'll never use grokipedia while I have access to better alternatives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
Surely people don't think sources such as Mother Jones are more 'reliable' than The New York Post, Fox News, or The Heritage Foundation? Not a coincidence there.
Having such obvious biases does nothing but damage the Wikipedia brand, and at this point has me anticipating Ai replacements.
They acknowledge it is a biased source and they make a distinction between reliability and bias. Not familiar with the publication.
The New York Post isn't "reliable" because it's a tabloid that doesn't care overmuch about fact-checking what it publishes (and, worse, has a history of just making stuff up sometimes). So the Wikipedia position is that you can't trust a citation to the NY Post without finding something else to corroborate it -- at which point you might as well just cite the corroborating reliable source instead.
Whereas Mother Jones will absolutely mostly publish articles which say good things about progressives and bad things about conservatives, but those things will all be true. Their bias comes in the form of selectively presenting these things -- they're unlikely to bother posting a "Ted Cruz just did a good thing" article -- and in their color commentary / opinion pieces, not in the form of just making things up.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
That seems based on a premise that I don't grasp. Why is Mother Jones more or less reliable than those sources? Are those sources reliable in your opinion?
My impression is that you have a strong opinion and are assuming everyone shares it.