All of euserx's Comments + Replies

It's quite ironic that you say that at the same time as speaking against actions that are about making it harder to game Wikipedia by malicious actors. 

Wikipedia isn't perfect but all decisions have their tradeoffs and when you don't think about those, that's not really the basis for improving anything. 

The Arbitration Committee (Arbcom) of Wikipedia was given a fair chance to actually stop the Holocaust distortion problem by banning all the ultranationalist distortionists from the topic area. The actually doled out measures were far lenient than... (read more)

Do you know if a competitor could legally start by copying Wikipedia's articles? That would make competing projects much more viable.

There's already one which did exactly that a year ago - Justapedia. Founder is Betty Wills who is surprisingly an established contributor in Wikipedia itself. As far as I understand they're experimenting ways that will prevent them from Wikipedia's mistakes again, such as reformative/preventative enforcement approach and a binding commitment favoring the idea of inclusionism.

Why divide efforts if the same forces will create the same problems? 

The same way as how it's better to distribute power among companies in a market and let them compete with each other, rather than concentrating these among a company which then will become a monopoly which the end result inevitably involves abuses of power, i.e. enshittification. If readers don't like how a particular encyclopedia is going, they can at least vote with their feet and switch to another platform so much that the former will have to adapt to changes that could make them become appealing to readers again.

Communities are made up of people who have subjective experiences. It's nothing that you can't prevent. 

Wikipedia is a place where that happens because of the high-quality level that Wikipedia has.

Wikipedia is also pretty much the only place where human history can be written and edited which affects the knowledge of future generations. That alone had given it so much strategic value and incentives for all sorts of actors to control or game it, however there's as if the higher echelons are trapped in office politics and doesn't really seem to re... (read more)

Okay. So you say that there is a fear of undue manipulation behind so-called deletionism, however that alone is vulnerable to subjective interpretation as well, same as the interpretation of notability. From experience and that of others like the OP there are cases that even if given information fits well up to the standards of neutrality, verifiably, notability, not a copyright violation, relevant enough and doesn't present issues in terms of "biographical of living persons", they are still left out on pertaining articles or topics by the whims of "VNOT" ... (read more)

I'm a little worried I wont be able to hold them together. Nightmares where everyone splits off into a bunch of cults, treading on each others' namespaces, diverging into babel.

Unfortunately it might have boiled over weeks ago, when a WikiConference event in Toronto Reference Library was hit by a phony bomb threat, reportedly by disgruntled user(s) who were treated badly there.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/bomb-threat-toronto-reference-library-1.7026287

https://twitter.com/AustinReporting/status/1723351006975582613

One thing that was proposed somewhere in the Wikimedia's internal mailing list is to introduce a reliability metrics level for all articles in Wikipedia and be prominently displayed to all readers. That could be a sensible compromise approach instead of subjecting it to the binary dillema of festering malicious manipulation through inclusion and making the whole "systemic bias" issue more serious by not including or censoring given topics.

I have to agree with both the original creator of the post (since it is released under public domain elsewhere an... (read more)

That's a very interesting suggestion that many have thought about!

A journalist has uncovered two dozen Weinstein type scandals on Wikipedia perpertrated by admins and users which could do far larger reputational damage against Wikipedia movement itself if published in the media. The damage though, might made what FTX did to EA look like peanuts.

https://rdrama.net/post/215764/there-are-two-dozen-sexual-harassment

Edit: Interesting investigation on the Brooklyn professor, although I have to disagree on the notion as expressed below.

The success in spinning the WP articles at the height of the Salazar war, where even fe

Wikipedia as a concept itself is great, however there are ample evidences that Wikipedia as a community has lost track to its original ideals and seemingly turned it into a toxic place where people compete to be mean with each other.

A journalist has uncovered two dozen Weinstein type scandals on Wikipedia perpertrated by admins and users which could do far larger reputational damage against Wikipedia movement itself if published in the media. The damage though, might made what FTX did to EA look like peanuts.

https://rdrama.net/post/215764/there-are-two-dozen-sexual-harassment

It was indeed intermixed in some sections. The crux of it is to recognise that Wikipedia functions as a monopoly in knowledge market nowadays, and the solution is to assist the rise of a few new general-reference encyclopedias who will share the knowledge market with Wikipedia, as a minimum. 

Confirming confirmed :p