Do you know if a competitor could legally start by copying Wikipedia's articles? That would make competing projects much more viable.
There's already one which did exactly that a year ago - Justapedia. Founder is Betty Wills who is surprisingly an established contributor in Wikipedia itself. As far as I understand they're experimenting ways that will prevent them from Wikipedia's mistakes again, such as reformative/preventative enforcement approach and a binding commitment favoring the idea of inclusionism.
Why divide efforts if the same forces will create the same problems?
The same way as how it's better to distribute power among companies in a market and let them compete with each other, rather than concentrating these among a company which then will become a monopoly which the end result inevitably involves abuses of power, i.e. enshittification. If readers don't like how a particular encyclopedia is going, they can at least vote with their feet and switch to another platform so much that the former will have to adapt to changes that could make them become appealing to readers again.
Communities are made up of people who have subjective experiences. It's nothing that you can't prevent.
Wikipedia is a place where that happens because of the high-quality level that Wikipedia has.
Wikipedia is also pretty much the only place where human history can be written and edited which affects the knowledge of future generations. That alone had given it so much strategic value and incentives for all sorts of actors to control or game it, however there's as if the higher echelons are trapped in office politics and doesn't really seem to realise what sort of implications are going to occur if they let themselves be gamed by malicious actors, which is exactly what... (read more)
Okay. So you say that there is a fear of undue manipulation behind so-called deletionism, however that alone is vulnerable to subjective interpretation as well, same as the interpretation of notability. From experience and that of others like the OP there are cases that even if given information fits well up to the standards of neutrality, verifiably, notability, not a copyright violation, relevant enough and doesn't present issues in terms of "biographical of living persons", they are still left out on pertaining articles or topics by the whims of "VNOT" leaving rooms or holes for groups of editors to exclude certain information simply because they "don't like it".
People are bound to have... (read more)
I'm a little worried I wont be able to hold them together. Nightmares where everyone splits off into a bunch of cults, treading on each others' namespaces, diverging into babel.
Unfortunately it might have boiled over weeks ago, when a WikiConference event in Toronto Reference Library was hit by a phony bomb threat, reportedly by disgruntled user(s) who were treated badly there.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/bomb-threat-toronto-reference-library-1.7026287
https://twitter.com/AustinReporting/status/1723351006975582613
One thing that was proposed somewhere in the Wikimedia's internal mailing list is to introduce a reliability metrics level for all articles in Wikipedia and be prominently displayed to all readers. That could be a sensible compromise approach instead of subjecting it to the binary dillema of festering malicious manipulation through inclusion and making the whole "systemic bias" issue more serious by not including or censoring given topics.
I have to agree with both the original creator of the post (since it is released under public domain elsewhere and I simply copied it to here) and mako yass that notability is genuinely subjective. There are even large differences in the minutae on how to treat information that are edge-case reliable; some advocate exclusion while some advocate conditional inclusion with in-line citation and so on.
That's a very interesting suggestion that many have thought about!
A journalist has uncovered two dozen Weinstein type scandals on Wikipedia perpertrated by admins and users which could do far larger reputational damage against Wikipedia movement itself if published in the media. The damage though, might made what FTX did to EA look like peanuts.
https://rdrama.net/post/215764/there-are-two-dozen-sexual-harassment
Edit: Interesting investigation on the Brooklyn professor, although I have to disagree on the notion as expressed below.
... (read more)The success in spinning the WP articles at the height of the Salazar war, where even federal judges were getting removed, would indeed thrill the Lannan Foundation (even though Lerner's self-confessed violation of multiple WP policies, repeat ban evasion, sockpuppeting, and IP hopping are all clearcut violation of the CFAA, which
Wikipedia as a concept itself is great, however there are ample evidences that Wikipedia as a community has lost track to its original ideals and seemingly turned it into a toxic place where people compete to be mean with each other.
A journalist has uncovered two dozen Weinstein type scandals on Wikipedia perpertrated by admins and users which could do far larger reputational damage against Wikipedia movement itself if published in the media. The damage though, might made what FTX did to EA look like peanuts.
https://rdrama.net/post/215764/there-are-two-dozen-sexual-harassment
Note: This post originally appeared in Reddit's /r/trueunpopularopinion sub as Wikipedia is not so great, and is overrated written by a user there. It is explicitly released under CC0 public domain by them.
You all have heard by now that Elon Musk said that Wikipedia has a "left wing bias" when the article about Twitter Files had been suggested for deletion. This has been received with mixed responses from liberals and conservatives alike; the former dismissing it as "an attack on free knowledge" and the latter cheering the move as "against censorship" and vindication of their beliefs that Big Tech is biased against them.
True, Wikipedia is supposedly editable by anyone around the world... (read 4549 more words →)
The Arbitration Committee (Arbcom) of Wikipedia was given a fair chance to actually stop the Holocaust distortion problem by banning all the ultranationalist distortionists from the topic area. The actually doled out measures were far lenient than expected with Piotrus, the ringleader of the distortionists, walking off scots-free, although with all fairness some such as Volunteer Marek received bans from the topic area.
... (read more)