Comment by jjmarr

Comment by jjmarr 17 hours ago

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A month after that article was published (and shortly after the article was posted on Wikipedia), the Arbitration Committee opened a sua sponte case to review the topic area despite the substance of that article being "Icewhiz was right".[1] It resulted in bans of Icewhiz' enemies for distorting the Holocaust topic area. I think moderators on pretty much any other website would laugh and ignore an article like that as being whining from a user they banned.

I agree that Icewhiz is an Emmanuel Goldstein-like figure at this point who's used by pro-Hamas editors/ultranationalists. A bunch of those pro-Palestinian editors that loved to complain about Icewhiz to deflect from their own behaviour were topic-banned from Israel-Palestine area a few months ago in January.[2]

It's challenging to deal with the Israel-Palestine conflict on any website that allows for user contributions. There's astroturfing and nation-state backed influence operations from probably a dozen countries. I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...

kurtreed2 15 hours ago

> 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.

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  • krisoft 9 hours ago

    > There's a survivorship bias in play here as we don't have a good other sample or more to compare to.

    It is not survivorship bias to point out that the survivor survived.

    > Even Google's Knol project, which was intended to be a Wikipedia competitor, faltered after a few years.

    Not “faltering after a few years” is part of “succesfully navigating that minefield”. If you fall out of the “race” no matter how good your policies would be otherwise you won’t be a reliable source of information. Because your can’t be if you no longer exists.

    This is not a statement about what could have worked, this is a statement about what did work. And there survival is a necessary ingredient of success.

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    • kurtreed2 2 hours ago

      It is indeed a survivorship bias since we have no good other sample in the form of competitor to compare to, like how Pepsi is to Coca-Cola. Which part of my statement you find difficult to understand?

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  • santoshalper 9 hours ago

    But there is a survivorship bias because doing what Wikipedia does is almost impossible.

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breppp 10 hours ago

> 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

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  • kurtreed2 2 hours ago

    That's right. They only survived because competitions were crushed out with both network effects, and the help of Google which reportedly prioritizes Wikipedia in search results while downranking any others which could challenge Wikipedia.

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immibis 5 hours ago

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

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