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Shared in Technology@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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shalafi@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Great article OP! First time I’d heard Wikipedia was in decline. I can’t see it ever going away.
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antonim@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Yes, the readership is not doing well. It won’t go away any time soon, but one day it might end up a ghost town. If everything develops linearly, which it might not.
Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
And yet… it’s orders of magnitude better than anything that came before it, and nobody’s found a better way to do it.
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antonim@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Do you mean print encyclopedias? If so, heavy disagree.
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scratchee@feddit.uk 3 days ago
Less errors, more content, more up to date, more accessible. That said, I’ll admit the smell of a rarely opened tome is missed.
jqubed@lemmy.world 3 days ago
TL;DR: This is largely a review/summary of The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia by Richard Cooke
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IlCaviale@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Wikipedia is and has been shit ever since it was created. It’s where institutions go to write down their propaganda so it sounds authoritative. In fact it’s the precursor to AI in that sense. It’s credentialism all the way down. If something is said somewhere by anyone, then it becomes a source. Unless that source is not approved of, and especially if that source is approved of. If a page isn’t under constant scrutiny, state actors and “trolls” will gradually alter until it says nothing conclusive at all. Everything must be up in the air, everything must be “neutral” when language itself is political… Also think about the incentives. You’re a government. You have people working full time to redact history. You CAN and you WILL threaten people who write the wrong version of history. This is not even hidden, see: en.wikipedia.org/…/Timeline_of_Wikipedia–U.S._gov…
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Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 days ago
its only shit if you use it as a source/citation, which it is not a SOURCE at all. academia does not allow wikipedia to be cited. you can use the links it provides to actual sources, or you can search it yourself.
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antonim@lemmy.world 3 days ago
The way it’s usually treated by laymen, as here, Sapir-Whorf theory is pseudoscience, and you’re not even really talking about language but about information. As for Wittgenstein, you’re grossly banalising his work.
This is not even hidden
Yeah. Really makes you think…
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AmbiguousCabbage@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
Just quickly skimming the article you linked, I’m not seeing evidence that wikipedia is “shit”, just that there have been many attempts by governments and other powerful people to influence its content, which shouldn’t be surprising to anyone given how popular it is. Are there examples you could point to of those attempts being successful? (Including particular examples you want to highlight in that article; again I only skimmed it on a small screen.)
It also seems strange to link to a wikipedia article to support the claim that wikipedia is shit.
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givesomefucks@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Sounds like the only real problem is all those jackass “deletionists”…
If an article is so niche no one ever looks at it, then it eats up zero bandwidth. Just the data storage for a small text file.
Nothing should ever be deleted, there’s no fucking benefit to that
If they weren’t acting up, then activity dying down wouldn’t matter
It’s the biggest repository of human knowledge ever, it existing and being freely accessible to the planet is massive.
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antonim@lemmy.world 3 days ago
It’s the biggest repository of human knowledge ever
Internet Archive and Libgen are incomparably bigger.
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non_burglar@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I mean, a municipal dump contains arguably many more printed words than Wikipedia, but that doesn’t mean it contains more information, nor is it easily cataloged for access.
I’m noticing a pattern of you reducing arguments down to meaningless and out-of-context metrics in this entire comment section.
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givesomefucks@lemmy.world 3 days ago
The reason I down voted you is you’re ignoring duplicative information…
And mainly because instead of asking questions to learn, you just went off with a halfbaked thought and presented it like it was fact.
Do better
thehatfox@lemmy.world 3 days ago
But if they stop keep deleting “niche” content from Wikipedia, then people won’t have to use Fandom instead.
You know, the commercial, ad infested wiki that was also founded by a Wikipedia co-founder.
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Zedstrian@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
I don’t like Fandom (I prefer the old name Wikia) anymore than you do, but in-universe topics for niche fandoms simply don’t belong on Wikipedia; they would make it harder for editors to focus copyediting time on articles that matter far more to most people.
There are nonprofit wiki farm alternatives to Fandom that are a better solution to that problem.
Tehdastehdas@piefed.social 3 days ago
For example this interesting article
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Exocortex&oldid=813869381
was deleted with the reason “mostly unsourced speculation/science-fiction”.
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frongt@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Just the data storage for a small text file.
That’s not true. It’s an entry in a database. That means it has to be indexed for search, and counted for “all pages where…” types of queries. It has to be replicated between database shards. You scale up your number of records, and you start hitting database, application, and operating system limits.
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Zedstrian@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
If non-notable articles were never deleted, millions of people and companies would create articles about themselves for promotion.
Damaskox@lemmy.world 2 days ago
A genuine question: Is a Wikipedia article supposed to be written from an objective perspective?