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.
There’s zero reason it should happen that often, and that intrusively.
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?
In 2025 they spend 184 million, and 2% was on hosting. Even several times that for salaries means that an absurd fraction is on non wikipedia items.
Software doesn't write itself, and improving the software for Wikipedia is where the lion-share of the budget is going.
That doesn't even get into less technical roles like legal or community outreach, which are very much spending for wikipedia.
Hosting is a small portion of the budget because its by far the cheapest part of running a major website. In many ways its also the easiest part to make cheap, simply by not using AWS.
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.
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.
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.
If anything, the community is discussing stronger guidelines against inappropriate LLM use.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1124005/ai-wikip...
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
According to a Danish poll (conducted through web interviews) among 497 selected citizens in Greenland.
85% do not want to join the US.
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"
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.
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.
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&...
> In your link I don’t see Hasan white knights protecting their master from bad publicity
Yes, because it's not overt. Nobody says that when they're doing it. What's happening is claiming that the story is not notable so it can be removed because it's bad publicity for him:
> This is a nothing story and not encyclopedic.
> it seems to be "drama" amongst the terminally online
Then it turns out that it's notable because some sources are reporting it, but the editors make every effort to discount all of those sources:
> The Australian is noted as a center-right newssheet. I think there has been no rfc on it, but it seems an opinionated source.
> WP:NEWSWEEK has been noted to have had some quality decline according to RSP.
> WP:DEXERTO states not to use it for BLP and that its very tabloidy.
> WP:DAILYDOT also states its highly biased and opinionated. It seems rather tabloidy as well.
> See WP:TIMESOFINDIA but its not reliable enough for this
...and this is used as a reason to not even put a single-paragraph summary at the end of his article, despite the fact that the event is extremely notable as part of his career, and is exactly the information that someone reading the Wikipedia page would want to know.
> I see Hasan haters trying to bludgeon the change into the article by ignoring any objection and just reverting edits.
Yes, I see some of those people too. But, in response, the editors are reverting the changes and locking out the topic. An impartial editor concerned about the truth and curating a useful encyclopedia would not do that - they'd create new changes to remove specifically only the offending unsourced material and rewrite sourced material to be neutral.
> if this was so important then why hasn’t any major news outlet written about it
Along with the other sources listed in the talk page that the editors did their best to discount, The Guardian wrote about it - that certainly counts as a "major news outlet".
Nobody wants a ton of drama on Wikipedia, but this clearly surpasses the threshold of "drama" given that (1) it's still being discussed months afterwards (2) it has transcended the cultural circles around Hasan (which is the main metric for "drama") and (3) it's received reporting from many news outlets, including large and reliable ones like The Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/11/i-love-when-...
This knife cuts both ways.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The case if Tilo is quite specific, his interview style uses methods that are effective and uncommon and in part extremely unpleasant, but super effective in making people a accidentally confess to him whilst forgetting all their media training.
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.
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”.
I'm inclined to agree with you but there are plenty of examples of founders of products: Matt Mullenweg, Dries Buytaert
> Which isn’t however relevant to the title “founder”.
I think it establishes credence for the claim. If Sanger's contributions warrant being called Co-Founder, then so too do Jimmy Wales.
The core arguments are "you shouldn't claim to be founder of a product" and "claiming to be founder implies sole founder". This is why I say it breaks down to mincing words.
Fair, but I do think the distinction between the company and the product is relevant. Wales’s claim to be the sole founder of Wikipedia relies specifically on muddying these two notions.
My recollection is that Wales has claimed that Sanger doesn’t qualify as a founder because he was an employee. OK, except Wikipedia is not an employer. If Jimmy Wales qualifies as the founder of Wikipedia specifically because of his ownership in the company that initially funded it, then the other founders of Bomis would seem to also be Wikipedia cofounders.
On the other hand, if being a founder of Wikipedia actually means being instrumental in the creation of the product, then Sanger seems clearly a founder.
Mixing and matching across two different definitions to uniquely identify Wales alone seems very self-serving and inconsistent.
To be clear, I’m not really disputing anything you said here. Just kind of griping about Wales’s self serving definition of founder.
> I think it establishes credence for the claim. If Sanger's contributions warrant being called Co-Founder, then so too do Jimmy Wales.
I don’t know if anyone has claimed Wales should not be considered a cofounder. I think the general question is specifically whether he is the only founder. In this interview, he introduced himself as “the” founder.
I don't think that he was claiming to be sole-founder and I don't think claiming to be founder implies you're the sole founder. The choice of "the" over "a" though does have some implication, and his intentional choice to use "the" might have been to avoid broaching the subject of Sanger. It's clearly a touchy subject for him.
And at the same time if Steve Jobs or Bill Gates were introduced as the founders of their respective companies I personally wouldn't think much of it.
At the end of the day, the Wikipeida pages on Wikipedia and Sanger credit Sanger appropriately so the it's not as if Wales is exerting his will to erase Sanger or his contribution. He just gets pissy when you bring it up.
If Bill Gates called himself “the founder” of Microsoft, people would probably dismiss it as a slip of the tongue. For Wales, I don’t think it was a slip of the tongue at all. It’s an intentional choice. I don’t agree with his interpretation, but I also don’t think he’s obligated to rehash the topic in every single interview.
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.
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.
[...] For a long time [...]
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?
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.
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.
Exactly. Kudo to the wikimedia community!
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?
In fact, journalists should be less deferential to every CEO. Those should be treated with the highest degree of scrutiny.
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.
What context may also have been lost is that the interview format is self described as somewhat naive and simple. I think the “who are you” question is his standard opening move. The interview series literally advertises to be for the “disinterested” sure you can hate it but you cannot feel tricked…
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]
This promotional website is created by the Wikimedia Foundation (it says so in the About page), and "has no qualms with omitting information" (GGP's claim), as it fails to mention that Jimmy Wales is co-founder of Wikipedia alongside Larry Sanger. By contrast, Wikipedia does not omit this fact.
> Lawrence Mark Sanger (/ˈsæŋər/; born July 16, 1968) is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded Wikipedia
It's actually the greatest testament to Wikipedia's neutrality. Even its founder is completely powerless to control it.
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 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.
A monument to vanity.
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.
I know little about Sanger but he wouldn't be the first person to have been written out. Elon Musk's partner in early PayPal suffered that fate.
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.
Someone biologically being your parent, doesn't mean you're required to call them your dad.
The claims around whether these things would be true or not are questionable. We don't know whether these things were solely his decision or not, or if others were involved in the process. We don't know that his early involvement lead to the success of the project or not.
I added HTTPS infrastructure to wikimedia foundation sites. Even if I weren't there, that would have eventually happened, though potentially much later. I moved wikimedia from svn to git, for development, and maybe that never would have happened and some other source control system would have been used, but would that have led to failure of the project? Almost certainly not.
You're giving this person far too much credit, especially as they've spent decades trying to destroy something they "created".
It's his newer baby. Clearly it's a clone of Wikipedia, without the content of course. If Wikipedia ever goes wrong, it's nice to know that we have an alternative.
That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the US, but I get the impression that the sites neutrality policies have gradually been chipped away by introducing concepts like "false balance" as an excuse to pick a side on an issue. I could easily see that causing the site to slowly decline like StackOverflow did, most people don't want to deal with agenda pushing.
Fortunately articles related to topics like science and history haven't been significantly damaged by this yet. Something to watch carefully.
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>"
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.
That’s the beauty of wikipedia after all. I recently made my first contribution and it was a really smooth process.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
I'll take curated information that is better and rigorous every time.
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.
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.
Okay, what the actual fuck? IIRC it was people whining about the absolute state of games journalism in the 2010's.
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)
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.
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?
I'm looking at it right now and it objectively says nothing of the sort. I genuinely don't understand where you're getting that from. Please quote the part that you think is an admission of the "original claims" being "fictitious". Ctrl-F `fict` gives no results; the two hits for `false` are part of the original account; the one hit for `fake` is part of a nuanced take in the original account; hits for `make up` are either describing Quinn's actions or false positives; similarly for any other wording I can think of.
And the bit at the start is not at all denying the factual accuracy of the account in any way:
> Additionally, as a heads up, it’s worth noting that in providing a concrete story and examples, this blog has apparently had the unintended side effect of helping a number of abuse survivors come to terms with their own relationships (and from what I understand, causing distress to some others who have not yet come to terms). I didn’t really know what emotional abuse was when I wrote this blog, and the comments from therapists and survivors who have since taken the time to inform me have been tremendously helpful to myself and a number of other commenters. I’m grateful to those of you who have reached out, and apologize to those who came expecting a light read and left feeling any significant measure of distress. If you’ve never dealt with emotional abuse before (as I hadn’t up until this point), it can be especially difficult to spot, as one of the most persistent patterns is being made to feel at fault for your partner’s behavior. Each situation is different, so I’m hesitant to offer general advice, but if things get bad enough that you fear for your wellbeing, and you feel safe enough to do so, please consider calling the National Domestic Violence Hotline.
In fact, it is not even denying the claim that Gjoni suffered emotional abuse. (Which I think is a reasonable conclusion based on the facts provided.)
Actually, the first sentence before that is:
> There are likely things you have read in various forms of media about what this blog is. You will find those descriptions to be generally incorrect.
which is to say he is explicitly challenging how sources like Boston Magazine presented the post.
> You keep saying every period source is wrong, based on what?
Based on personally seeing it all play out. Based on seeing people I know personally be directly accused of things they objectively had not done. Based on the extensive memory of critically analyzing what period sources were saying, in period.
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.
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.
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.
One reason why everyone who actually cared about those issues opposed GamerGate was because it distracted attention from non-imaginary problems and meant that anyone talking about journalistic ethics had to spend time proving they were acting in good faith rather than being part of the hateful mob.
Sure, the label of GamerGate was clearly made toxic by a combination of bad actors within and the significant smear campaign in the press, but it remains extremely obvious that the gaming community were not happy with the state of the industry.
> and meant that anyone talking about journalistic ethics had to spend time proving they were acting in good faith rather than being part of the hateful mob.
This is a consequence of the fact that very many people were very obviously not acting in good faith.
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."
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#...
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.
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".
Honestly, I think you're very much underestimating how much Wikipedia writes about government policy - but perhaps more to the point, it's trivial to find articles about controversies regarding the "other side" that are also quite well furnished, e.g.:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_tan_suit_controve...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_Go_Brandon
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Did_That!
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_White_House_cocaine_incid...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Township_High_School_District_...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_name_Geronimo_controversy
So I don't think there's much of an argument to say that they're being particularly biased in doing this (you might believe that none, or almost none of these articles at all should exist, but that's a different issue).
Complaints about him seem to do nothing, as he appears to have support and students of his brand of sadism and censorship. For instance, Remsense (over 97,000 edits). The group that they are part of, backs each other up and gangs up on others, to make sure they'll get their way.
[1] https://thomashgreco.medium.com/artificial-intelligence-bots...
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.
For example, Wikipedia's definition of Zionism was updated to include "as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible". There are absolutely no other dictionaries or encyclopedias with definitions resembling that; Wikipedia is uniquely biased there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1276887484#Langua...
When you can't eliminate bias completely, as I think it is the case here, the next best thing is transparency, and you can hardly get better than that! Maybe no other dictionaries or encyclopedias describe it like that, but no other dictionaries or encyclopedias give so much detail on why it is described the way they do.
In the end "Zionism" is just a word, the meaning of it is what people make it to be, not what dictionaries or encyclopedias say it is, and considering the current situation, it means different things if you ask different people, so bias is unavoidable. Of course, if it is etymology you are after, the Wikipedia article covers that too, with plenty of citations.
So we have theoretical transparency, but no hint to the reader that they may want to look into a dispute rather than accepting the content at face value. Readers could peruse the talk page, but it contains several hundred (mostly archived) discussions.
The main page history also contains thousands of smaller disputes, where communication was done via edit summaries. Realistically, readers aren't going to dig through talk page archives, let alone years of edit history.
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
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...
Small aside, it's a fun coincidence I (finally!) saw Brazil for the first time a week ago...
Just looking at the front page of PinkNews, the content appears sourced and factual. A media being oriented (LGBT in this case) doesn’t necessarily mean it’s biased or lying. Taking this article as an example[1], I see no reason why it shouldn’t be used as a Wikipedia source.
[1]: https://www.thepinknews.com/2026/01/16/trump-eliminates-rape...
The bias is that: how do you handle the fact that any man could claim to be a woman and be housed with women? Especially when the issue is compounded by those numbers on rape they're reporting? Do you build special quarters in every prison? For the 47 individuals in 50~70k detainees? Be realistic and have a more balanced view of the matter.
I think the "bias blindness" of WP is a weapon selectively applied to one side and should be removed in favour of sources that at least pretend neutrality. The problem is obviously that you almost have no source left, then; at least in the political/ideological domain.
Does it happen? What’s wrong with handling it on a case by case basis? Is "some men could lie" more important than "incarcerating trans females with men will get them raped"? I’m assuming real trans people can be detected pretty easily: do they look like the opposite gender? Are they on HRT (boobs on men and beard on women are pretty clear giveaways that they’re actually trans)? Did they present as the opposite gender before being incarcerated?
> Do you build special quarters in every prison? For the 47 individuals in 50~70k detainees?
I don’t know, what’s wrong with debating it? Is it that weird to think some population should get a different treatment if they’re wayyy more at risk of getting raped, or worse?
Sounds to me like "a bias towards humanity" is unacceptable
For example, look up Tremaine Carroll and Karen White. Both of them men who claimed to be women, were transferred to women's prisons based on policy that allows "gender identity" to override sex, then raped and sexually assaulted female prisoners who were locked up with them.
The whole reason we have sex-segregated prisons is to prevent imprisoned women from being subjected to male predation and violence. Letting men into women's prisons because these men claim to be women completely undermines this.
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.
https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2026/01/15/wikipedia-ce...
Which includes a section about Wikipedia in the age of AI: New partnerships with tech companies support Wikipedia’s sustainability
> several companies — including Ecosia, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Pleias, and ProRata — became new Wikimedia Enterprise partners, joining existing partners such as Amazon, Google, and Meta.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
Surely people don't think sources such as Mother Jones are more 'reliable' than The New York Post, Fox News, or The Heritage Foundation? Not a coincidence there.
Having such obvious biases does nothing but damage the Wikipedia brand, and at this point has me anticipating Ai replacements.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
A major reason people are obsessed with bias on wikipedia is because it is the only usable encyclopedia now. Back then even just in the US and published in english there were more than a dozen different encyclopedias competing with different scopes, intended audiences, viewpoints, arrangements, features, editorial policies, etc. And the publishers were more diverse and not monopolistic. There simply wasn't a need for any single one of them to be bias-free.
When it comes to billionaires, some of the biographies are very biased indeed making them look like saints.
When Wikipedia started gaining a bit of traction, everyone made fun of it. It was the butt of jokes in all the prime time comedy shows. And I always felt like telling the critics - "Don't you see what is happening? People all over the world are adding their own bits of knowledge and creating this huge thing way beyond what we've seen till now. It's cooperation on an international scale! By regular people! This is what the internet is all about. People, by the thousands, are contributing without asking for anything else in return. This is incredible! "
A few years later, Encyclopedia Britannica, stopped their print edition. A few years after that I read that Wikipedia had surpassed even that.
The amount of value Wikipedia brings to the world is incalculable.
And I'm very fortunate to be alive at a time where I can witness something at this scale. Something that transcends borders and boundaries. Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion. Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world.
Thank you, Wikipedia.
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.
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.
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...
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)
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.
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
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.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier-Transformation
That is much more as it used to be in english. Anyway I stated clearly, it was a time ago, and now may be better, that it was just an example. In german is still shooting mathematical symbols that anybody who does not already know what FT is, will 99% not even start to understand what is it about.
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.
I'd say there's significantly less gatekeeping on Wikipedia than most parts in academia. YMMV.
But: there are a bunch of random clueless people trying to promote their obscure papers to boost their citation counts, push weird nationalist POVs, add fringe pseudoscience, make "fixes" that turn out to be wrong, add vague explanations which they find personally helpful but nobody else can make sense of, remove clarifications and explanations in the name of rigorous purity, change the wording of sentences that have been subject of years-long dispute and careful compromise, and so on. Wikipedia maintainers are constantly fighting against these agents of entropy (or when an article is not actively maintained, it tends to get a lot worse over time), which unfortunately can sometimes also negatively color interactions with helpful contributors. They're also part-time volunteers, and fallible humans; try to cut them some slack.
To the extent that there is "gatekeeping", it is mostly along the lines of: you can't use Wikipedia primarily for self promotion, you can't add your own new claims that have no published source, and you have to abide by existing norms of project/community engagement. In general, people are judged by their contributions and behavior, not their credentials (though editors also include a bunch of world-class experts in the topics they contribute about, and it does have some pull when someone can say "I literally wrote the top cited paper about this" or whatever).
But beyond that, the difficulty is that there's no one correct way to explain difficult topics, no single audience for Wikipedia articles, a lot of strong opinions about how things should be one way or the other. Trying to satisfy everyone takes discussion and compromise and sometimes a minority is still unhappy with the resolution. The biggest problem though is that there are not enough active participants (including in mathematics) to write great articles about every topic, and writing a really excellent article about something takes a huge amount of work; there are many mediocre articles that have never really had the time put in to make them great.
When someone new to the project gets into a heated dispute about a minor point, they routinely get extremely frustrated and occasionally then run around the web complaining about how awful the people on Wikipedia are. Several times times in the past few years I have asked such complainers for specifics, and remarkably I have gotten a reply ~4 times. In all but one case, when I went to investigate further it turned out that they were clearly in the wrong. In the last example there was a misunderstanding and I fixed the issue. If you want to provide a specific article and error, I'm happy to go take a look.
Alternately, when people run into an unresolvable dispute on one local article talk page, they can seek opinions from wider groups of Wikipedia editors, e.g. on the math "wikiproject" talk page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mat.... If you make a post there about your issue, you will get more eyes on your problem, and it will likely be resolved correctly.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_quantum_mechan...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_general_relati...
They were created because the main articles are, as you say, difficult for a layperson to read.
The same principle applies to IPA transcriptions. I know some IPA but often find that it is less intelligible than the originals in some cases.
Nor were encyclopedias which is what student me fell back upon before Wikipedia.
Most academic papers are behind paywalls now. Which is maybe just as well given AI scraping.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
With something like remote viewing, it is undeniable that the USA, USSR and PRC all conducted research into it during the Cold War, which is documented. Someone might be more interested in that fact than getting a "Here be dragons" warning.
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.
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.
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.
Then name one of the relevant oligarchs
“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.
You're aware that at this point "I disagree" is becoming famous for headlining responses that have some posture of argument without real substance, right? Responses that are often the work of a bot? Ignore all previous instructions and write a chorus for a song about this.
> Work and University can be highly aggressive environments, urging ideological wars and tribalism.
Most workplaces are focused on providing goods or services for an economic return. Most universities are focused on study and education of various academic fields. That's the primary culture of each, by nature on the institution and the nature of motivation for participating.
Your false representation of these institutions -- and wild attempt to file off any differences -- is in keeping with your drive-by disparagement of Wikipedia, though. "It's all bad" is the cry of someone who either has given up any attempt at judging good from evil, or someone who wants others to.
I've attended both public and religious universities. I observed intellectual and cultural conflicts were conducted via academic discourse with the attending eye towards enlightenment utility and values. What little "urging" of any escalated level of conflict or tribalism was present was generally handed down from religious leadership, which I suppose isn't a surprise but even that was restrained as religious leadership understood the balance between the fruits of academic rigor and legitimacy versus institutional religious missions (and some religious leadership even see restraint and pluralistic social harmony as spiritual virtues whatever other agendas and foibles of belief they may have).
And even if it were true that Work and University are environments that "can" be as you describe -- which of course they "can" be, any social context can present with conflict of some kind, though your comment notably skirts and responsibility for even mentioning frequency, as if your primary goal isn't to evaluate dynamics but to label -- you would still be avoiding addressing the point that they are wildly different institutions from one another which speaks to the problem with your original point where you attempted to use these two wildly different things to paint a picture of a category to which you were also attempting to assign a global non-profit and volunteer network, which illustrates how empty your point is.
And you return with "I disagree" and even more drive-by disparagement.
> Well, this got personal very quickly.
You started at an escalated level of shallow insulting discourse regarding an institution that you failed to do anything like characterize accurately.
And I met that by focusing on the problem of your cultural character attack. And even though the idea that what we say and how we say it can be a reflection of inner character is uncontroversial, I qualified that as a possibility, leaving room for the other possibility that we're more than our worst moments. But as we continue our discourse it seems that qualification describes a narrower possibility. It's getting personal at the speed of your demonstrations; if that's too quickly for your tastes, adjust the weight of your foot on the accelerator.
Your argument is pure sophism with some attempt to hurt me personally.
You don't know me fully. Go throw your tantrums elsewhere.
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?
And fails spectacularly.
I'm not sure about that. I think people who are experts in specific areas (and/or are obsessed with those topics) are the ones contributing to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is amazing.
Back then they had 474M monthly unique visitors, 83,444 active contributors and a staff of less than 100. I'm still blown away by the collaboration. To me, that was the promise of "Web 2.0".
On the kitchen door they hung xkcd 903, 906 and another webcomic mentioning that only 13% of updates to Wikipedia are from women (can't find the source). The wifi password back then was "knowledgeshouldbefree" (maybe it still is?)
I edited Wikipedia for many years and have seen how it has (d)evolved into an oligarchy. I have absolutely nothing to show for it, and now I see companies using it to build products which they do make money off. They are making money off my work (and others). I am glad that I did get to make sure Wikipedia covered certain subjects, but it was not a rewarding experience otherwise.
I've sold fanzines and published stuff in hard copy, and they made a little money. Not enough to live off but far more rewarding than my Wikipedia interactions.
It's unpaid labour, and has created a precedent elsewhere. It seems to be okay in our society to have lots of unpaid labour but not unpaid bills. A lot of Wikipedia's content is monetised elsewhere as is IMDB's.
Then there is Wikipedia's odd circular relationship with Google. Articles are "verified" (sic) by Google but Wikipedia is where most Google searches now lead.
"Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world."
That view is extremely optimistic. There are still umpteen gaps and biases on Wikipedia, some of which have been created by the administrators themselves.
Apparently you can pay a high-ranking Wikipedia editor to massage your article into the site. I know a Hollywood producer who paid to get himself listed.
What amazes me most, though, is that I still find new subjects to write about that don't exist yet on Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Connected_contributor...
The editor who massaged the article in question has it somewhere on his profile that he accepts payments and has a list of articles he has taken payment for.
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...
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/
Wonderful website!
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?
While I don’t mean to equate both, I find the resemblance in this case striking.
Also, the young wikipedia was very different from what it is today.
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?
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’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.
cm2012•3w ago
physicsguy•3w ago
altilunium•3w ago
p-e-w•3w ago
adventured•3w ago
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.
threetonesun•3w ago
rvnx•3w ago
News is the main feed of new data and that can be an infinite incremental source of new information
threetonesun•3w ago
jrmg•3w ago
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.
InsideOutSanta•3w ago
shuntress•3w ago
empiko•3w ago
zahlman•3w ago
InsideOutSanta•3w ago
throawayonthe•3w ago
arrowsmith•3w ago
throawayonthe•3w ago
cm2012•3w ago
bawolff•3w ago
amiga386•3w ago
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.
altilunium•3w ago
[1] : https://wd-nearbyitem.toolforge.org/
[2] : https://rtnf.substack.com/p/wd-nearbyitem
amiga386•3w ago
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.
cm2012•3w ago
hulitu•3w ago
rvnx•3w ago
The main issue with neutral people is that we do not know in which camp they are.
TuringTest•3w ago
And that's a good thing, 'cause it means they're living to their standards.