this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2021
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23
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?

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 years ago (4 children)

I would say the main problem with Wikipedia is the fact that it is all controlled by a single organisation in the United States. So no matter where someone lives or which language of Wikipedia they want to contribute to, in the end that organisation in the United States can decide whether or not it is acceptable. That might not be so bad for things like math or science, where an objective truth exists. But when it comes to topics like politics, there are many groups who hold different opinions, and it is impossible to give an objective truth.

The best way to solve this problem is likely with completely separate wiki instances run by different countries, organisations or political groups. These could use ActivityPub to federate with each other, and share some of the articles. For example, articles about math could be shared across most instances, while each instance might have its own version of an article for a controversial political topic.

Implementing something like that seems very hard though, and so far I dont think anyone has tried to implement a federated wiki.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 years ago (2 children)

Ward Cunningham the original wiki inventor has also invented a federated wiki. Seems to be quite dead though.

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

The layout/ux is really complicated, most people would probably not use it for that reason alone.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 years ago

Yes, but there's worse: to edit a page, you need to host an instance of the wiki yourself.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 years ago (1 children)

I wonder how that would handle article conflicts.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 years ago

I think it works using forks, which means several versions can coexist. You can accept or decline a fork of another user on your instance.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago

To be honest Wikipedia has done a pretty good job of keeping most things civil and respectful without going into US propaganda. Also, it should be noted that differences do de facto exists between languages.

[–] [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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 years ago (1 children)

I don't think that Wikipedia being hard to edit due to too many rules is a bad thing, editing a Wiki article should be a well defined process. I do think that there should be many different ways of contributing to Wikipedia.

On your second point, we must "advertise" not only wikipedia as a resource, but also contributing to Wikipedia globally. Lots of people seem to not know that you can edit Wikipedia content.

And for your last point, when dealing with remote written content, personal experience cannot be taken as a source. So you need to rely on the scientific way of addressing sources.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 years ago (4 children)

If the article in question is something that needs sources that are scientific. What if you want to update a page about a band (for example) you are actually in, are you then not one of the valid sources? (I think @[email protected] is referring to this).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 years ago

In deed that was one of the thing I got in mind. I don't think the academic writing rules can be applied to any topic the same way.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago

The main issue is that it needs to be verifiable. If you do original research and write on the basis of your own knowledge, there's no (easy) way for anyone else to verify that what you wrote is true. The trust is on that one person who claims to have experience with what they wrote. @[email protected] mentioned the second main issue which is bias. If you're writing about a topic that is close to you that has multiple viewpoints, what you're writing is most likely going to be biased toward that view. Wikipedia can't just have "the truth" about a topic that people disagree about through consensus. It's job is to only list the different viewpoint and to tell how prevalent those viewpoints are.

If the topic is notable, you're likely to find a good source that talks about that topic, if you can't find a source for that (regardless of how true you think that fact is), then too bad.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 years ago

Oh that makes sense. In that case I guess Wikipedia could use a way to verify "original source" of information. if they don't have that already

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

I think the idea is to try to get less bias. A lot of French MPs offices edit their MPs page, sometimes not even malicious but sometimes just reorganising critiques or whatever. Wikipedia has had to ban a couple of IP adresses because of this.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

In a lot of cases that makes indeed sense, that if i create a personal wikipedia page and declare myself person awesome the awesomenest and emperor of the world that that will not fly. But academic writing rules can't be fully translated to be talking about people, or groups, or particular things. It really depends on the topic which ruleset you can apply (and i guess Wikipedia is trying to do that).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago

I suppose you could say that an academic could write a paper about it then use that as their source? Maybe a form of verified accounts could be implemented into wikipedia in a sort of test run.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (1 children)

My professors always told me this: when doing any serious research, only use Wikipedia for the linked sources, and read those instead of the article.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 years ago (1 children)

The way wikipedia chooses its sources is also very problematic. Many good sources are not allowed at all. This comment has some details.

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

That IS alarming. I guess because I only really use it for science and technology research, I haven't really noticed.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago)

Not sure if everyone already saw this, but it seems relevant:

Wikipedia’s 1%: Purdue study reveals most content is from small group of editors

Sorin Adam Matei, a professor in Purdue University’s Brian Lamb School of Communication, and Brian Britt, assistant professor in the South Dakota State University Department of Journalism and Mass Communication and a Purdue graduate, sought to define just who is providing the massive amount of content. They had access to every edit made to every article from Wikipedia’s first 10 years, 2001-2010.

...

The book presents some interesting findings about the way in which a new elite has emerged in the world of communication and about the way in which social media groups evolve,” Matei says. “Adhocracy – the idea that crowdsourcing projects like Wikipedia aren’t these decentralized and spontaneous ventures – is orchestrated by an organizational system that combines a stable power hierarchy with individual mobility.”​

https://www.purdue.edu/research/features/stories/80-of-wikipedias-content-created-by-1-of-writerseditors-purdue-study/

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 years ago (1 children)

great question!

i use wikipedia all the time. i think the biggest issue, by far, is bias. it is a huge hurdle. even if the articles cited only scientific journals, there would still be lots of ingrained bias (who conducted the study? what were their methods? who paid for it? how reliable is the journal? have the results been reproduced? why was this study cited instead of a different one? etc)

perhaps a way to address bias would to be seeking out multiple sources that contradict each other. then when the article is written, if these opposing sources have the same information, that is presented with all sources cited. if the sources contradict each other, the information is presented individually. ex.: "[source] reported [information] [citation]. However, [different source] reported [different information] [citation]"

a second way, along the lines of what you have suggested, would be getting more people involved (translators included!) i don't know what the best answer is but i do know that it can absolutely be improved!

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

That must be the best solution - change the format so articles naturally have different sections with different perspectives on the same issue.

Instead of "mark this article as biased so it can be fixed" the true online encyclopaedia of knowledge will have "this article is biased - as a section with an opposing, complementary perspective"

This is brilliant. Somebody make this.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 years ago (1 children)

This is exactly why climate change denying became popular and acceptable, because the media thought they had to represent counter arguments for everything, no matter how big the consensus among scientists was. Adding different viewpoints just for the sake of it will not fix biases but introduce other ones.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 years ago

That bias is called “undue weight”. Wikipedia has a policy to avoid it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 years ago (2 children)

The real problem is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 years ago

Wow this is very interesting, in the first years they barely managed to spend 50% of their income, and even now its only 75%. So their net assets have gone up by double digit percentages every single year. I wonder which bank holds all that money.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago

I'm not one to be overly optimistic about using interesting and investment profits to fund stuff but when less than 6% of spending is used on the absolutely necessary then indeed that could be a good idea. Quite clearly it seems like they could even save up to have 10,20,30 years in the next couple of years. I had no idea they were spending so much money (a lot I'm sure justified) yet still that's pretty disgusting to donors imo. I will not be donating anytime soon for sure.