Comment by jjmarr

> by contesting the very existence of articles on individual episodes of TV shows, software, or video games, which are all completely uncontroversial on the English one.

In the first year or so of the english Wikipedia, I was very engaged in adding content but never really tried to engage with the community. I started adding articles about my topic of interest at the time, which was New York 80s punk and hardcore bands. Soon, I had the lot of my articles deleted for "lacking relevance".

I haven't been contributing much since.

The German Wikipedia is the main reason I keep my country setting on DDG off. That way I get en.wikipedia.org results first.

> Last time I checked, they only just accepted the redesign (the one that greatly improves legibility), after vetoing it for years. What a psychotic way to run an encyclopedia

I once asked on (then) Twitter why they kept that crappy design, and got the most depressing NIMBY answers on even making the new design optional. That really killed any rest of hope I had for the German Wikipedia. Glad to hear that at least that tiny improvement made it.

Is the eV still in that renovated building near the Chinese embasy, playing cards every Wednesday near the river?

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I saw horrendous violations to related to Bolsonaro related politicians. Seems like everybody does it then.

In my case I saw that they even invent new rules if needed to remove things. Completely compromised.

It reminds me a bit of campus preachers. They would go to great lengths to describe just how fallen they were before they found Jesus. By inflating how fallen they were, it made for a more dramatic, and to some people, more affirming message of the power of the Gospel. I don't doubt the people felt transformed, but they were motivated my narrative purpose as much as by factual history.

Nah she's just going where the money is. Look at how that page is all about telling her core market what they want to hear, and that she's happy to accept their money for a speaking engagement.

Social Justice Warrior. The acronym has been around for a long time.

It's a term for anyone from a centrist liberal to a Greenpeace activist, with the implication that having left-of-median politics and understanding race and demography as anything other than biological essentialism makes you an utter loon. It is really only used by people who would describe themselves as "anti-woke".

The person he's referencing, specifically, got really pilled by evangelical Christianity and believes that anyone advocating for liberal causes has created a religion out of nebulous cultural values, unmoored from god. She blames the "cult of SJW" for the kind of character assassination she claims to have done, that it was the force of rootless bolshevism that was responsible for her supposedly destroying lives and careers by making up(?) relationships and cultural crimes on whole webs of Wikipedia articles.

It's the word for "woke activist" from 10 years ago.

Social Justice Warrior but it’s worth noting that actually the acronym has cultural connotations that the words alone do not

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> Wikipedia is a joke when it comes to politics.

What isn't a joke when it comes to politics? The only way to be informed about politics I have found is to regularly read news from several different media sites paying careful attention when they talk about the same issue. This way you learn their biases and how to interpret their news articles, you get the ability to guess what really happens, not just their takes on it.

As a long-term editor, this is pretty off base. The discussion [1] that led to Grayzone being deprecated had almost nothing to do with Israel/Palestine. Meanwhile most Israel/Palestine articles are driven by Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, and similar sources, while many Jewish sources (ADL, Jewish Chronicle, NGO Monitor, etc) are banned or restricted.

One example of a heavily debated neutrality issue was the opening paragraph of the Zionism article, which ended up like this. Surely noone would call this remotely pro-Israel? "Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not...

They spent basically two years rejecting the renaming of "Israel-Hamas war" into "Gaza war" (it has now been renamed) even though the full scope of the war was apparent after just a few months. It was very important to maintain the narrative that the only victims were Hamas. They protected the page so you couldn't request a rename without being a verified user.

On Wikipedia, every edit can be hidden so that even admins can't access it.[1]

Therefore, if legal problems arise with these pages, they probably will just delete the legally problematic info and hide every edit done before.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Oversight

There are a whole bunch of little utilities like browser extensions and bookmarklets and even an entire in-house cloud infrastructure that is used for hosting various kinds of bots and web-based tools for automating workflows. It's all very ad-hoc, crude and not very well organized or publicized. There have been a few efforts over the years to create a repository for all of the little tools to help with exposure and some level of vetting for security risks. I'm not sure any of those projects were ever successful (or even made it past the planning stage) but there has been some appetite for improving that ecosystem.

She tried to add herself to a list called “professional Canadian painter”, and from what I see, she is a professional Canadian painter for 10+ years.

Wikipedia isn't supposed to be a source, so "reliable" here has to mean "reliably presenting a full range of notable sources". No editor should be saying you can rely on claims found in Wikipedia, except in the sense of relying that the claims are in the sources.

(Except the claim as stated isn't always in the source anyway. Best to check.)

I wonder if there's room in using AI to gather past edits of someone, as part of vetting, and use the sentiment analysis to check how neutral their biases are.

I'd interpret it as a bit of Hyperbole, I don't think the specific number is significant. Perhaps "several" would be a better choice of a quantifier.

On articles that are either controversial or cover some kind of current events, I often find more value from reading the edit history and the discussions than from the article itself.

> I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia.

There's a survivorship bias in play here as we don't have a good other sample or more to compare to. After Wikipedia went big in the 2000s it was for a very long time a de-facto monopoly for people seeking out reference information on the Internet. Even Google's Knol project, which was intended to be a Wikipedia competitor, faltered after a few years. Same goes for Everipedia as well.

> I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia.

I don't believe this is the case, the Israeli/Palestine are restricted to long-time contributors, so the articles are either messy and unmaintained due to lack of editors, or worse, edited only by members of influence campaigns who have scared away everyone else

Link [2] doesn't appear to say what someone did wrong but you cite it as evidence for some people doing something wrong

The entire story of gamergate was a campaign where the ethical problems of the gaming journalism were exposed.

Why would the journalists directly involved in that campaign be allowed to just directly malign and smear their critics and then have that be taken as fact, with no comment whatsoever to their involvement or other sources that disagreed or commented on this? Because that article stands as a beacon of unfairness and misinformation.

The idea that it's impossible to solve this problem is false. Like i mentioned, just check other languages for that article, they were not as completely destroyed by bias.

This is a lie. Wikipedia directly excluded reliable sources that countered and only cites sources that are as biased as possible for that article. Like i said, literally just switch the language to japanese, translate back to english and you will get a completely different set of information that is far less biased.

Gamergate is also not a misogynist harassment campaign. Please don't spread lies and misinformation, thanks and try to be more honest and less of an idealogue.

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> You'll get a bunch of leftist (because they don't have jobs) volunteer moderators with an agenda.

What do you consider a leftist? Why do you think they don't have jobs?

I am not a right ring perspective, i'm left, but because i'm an honest person i'm simply able to point out an article that is composed solely of extremist lies and misinformation. Wikipedia is not the only source and if you fully research the topic you will quickly realize how bad that article is.

The pro-gamergate editors were completely shut out of that article eventually and the article doesn't even mention any perspectives from the other side, it's an obviously biased on it's face article and i'm not sure why you can't just acknowledge that this system is flawed sometimes.

I agree with your premise that WMF has far better anti bias processes than reddit, reddit is a literal worst case scenerio for bias. I disagree with the idea that it's perfect though so i brought up a clear example of an extremely biased article that is still messed up to this day. I do suggest swapping to the japanese wiki article and just comparing the quality of information, it's really cool.

Also i vouched for your post, not sure why it was flagged, mine was as well.

Is that like a secret Signal chat for the defense secretary's family?

You’re telling me there was a secret… listserv?! Truly, this conspiracy goes all the way to the top.

Thank you.

More and more, especially in engineering, I am in contact with people who just want everything to be easy to understand in TikTok length video clips or short posts.

Some things are hard to understand, dynamic systems especially, black or white answers do not exist.

(Sorry for the slightly off-topic/meta rant. This hit a nerve by me.)

Oh in general for sure, but my first (attempted?) edit for Wikipedia was 20 years ago so I am not a completely newb.

And this is kind of like a court decision.

But in a real court, I can see the verdict and the laws that were broken. All in complicated, but readable english. Which makes it clear (usually). But in wikipedia to understand a indefinite ban, I have to understand global wiki community dynamics first? I am a bit reminded of Kafka - The Trial.

The problem is controversies can be embellished. In this case, the controversy focused on a minor detail among hundreds of others in a nearly two hour long film.

Is there guidance on what makes a controversy 'notable', or can anything be listed there? E.g. "Nobody blogger and her Twitter army were upset about $thing" - does that qualify? Nearly anything can be controversial, or have fabricated controversies. You see this a lot on political articles.