Asklemmy

44847 readers

1619 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

How can we fix Wikipedia? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

31 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I LOVE Wikipedia, I think it's one of the best websites of the internet.

But the fact is that Wikipedia has many flaws:

Editing became very hard on Wikipedia based on the amount of rules to respect
Wikipedia is biased, many cultures and minorities are not well represented among editors and pages.
Wikipedia is a dependence, I can't imagine Wikipedia disappear, I think it already changed the way people see knowledge, not as something fixed anymore, but as something dynamic that changes and evolve.
Wikipedia 'sources admission' are also very... Weird. Because you can be a professional in a special field, it doesn't mean your contribution will be accepted, just because your source is not coming from a 'reliable source', even if YOU are this reliable source.

There are other problems as well, but I think those are the most important ones.

What do you think about it? If you could change anything or everything to Wikipedia, what would you do?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 years ago (1 children)

You may be interested in these articles:

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/11/meet-wikipedias-ayn-rand-loving-founder-and-wikimedia-foundations-regime-change-operative-ceo/

https://medium.com/@kamy1/racist-wikipedia-da005c564d13

We also have a work in progress at prolewiki: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia, with more sources in the references tab.

Wikipedia was designed to be all you listed and more. One thing they didn't touch on in those two articles (IIRC, it's been a while since I read them) is that Wikipedia doesn't allow primary sources, but that just means you need someone to cite you. If a newspaper publishes your story, then you can cite yourself through that paper. Likewise if you write an opinion piece. There was kind of a scandal a few months ago when we found out several journalists got their stories fed straight from the CIA or NSA, and pretty much printed whatever these agencies told them to print. This is an example of a primary source that can make its way on Wikipedia for the benefit of the CIA. And of course there's all the disallowed sources such as the Grayzone, just because they printed a couple unflattering stories on Wikipedia (such as the one linked above).

Anyway, I doubt much can be salvaged from Wikipedia. If the foundation or Jimmy Wales wanted to save it, they would remove all administrators and create new policies. It requires uprooting the whole establishment at wikipedia. Wales is aware of these issues and clearly doesn't care about them, so I don't see wikipedia changing any time soon.

However, projects such as prolewiki and other wikis aim to build their own base of knowledge free from wikipedia. While they still depend on wikimedia software, I think this is a step in the right direction so as to break away from wikipedia's monopoly.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 years ago

That 2-part grayzone article is a great intro for why wikimedia cannot be trusted when it comes to politics or anything that goes against its pro-US bias.