Wikipedia does a pretty decent job of eventually being correct, at any given time it can be outrageously inaccurate.

Yeah, I agree with this. I work at a high end engineering company, and some engineers have gotten into trouble using things like materials properties that they got from Wikipedia and turned out to be wrong, with unfortunate results. By policy, if we don’t know something like that we’re supposed to ask our tech library to get us the information, and that’s why.

A bunch of wikipedia sources are already archived on the wayback machine, anything cited to like pre-2010, online, there’s a good chance it got taken down or changed in the last 13 years.

Archive.org bots replace dead links with working alternatives a lot nowadays. All the more reason to support that modern museum

In that case, try using an archived version of the webpage, for example at the Wayback Machine

And here I am fixing missing sources on some wiki articles just yesterday.

I feel like news sources used to link to their sources too, but now it seems to be an infinite chain of links to their own articles, never directly taking you to the first hand source of information (unless they are the source).

The thing is, if the place you’re getting your information from doesn’t list it’s sources, you can’t trust it. Whenever I’m researching a thing on the internet and I find an article or a paper, I don’t just stop there, I check where they got their info, then I find that source and read it. I follow it all the way back until I find the primary source.

Like the other day I was writing a paper about a particular court case. In the opinions, as in most cases, they use precedent and cite prior cases. So I found the other cases that referred to the thing I was writing about, and it turns out they were also just using prior cases. I had to go 6 deep before I found them referencing the actual constitution for one of them. On another I found it interesting that the most recent use case was so far removed from what the original one was about and it was could probably be questionable to even use it as precedent if they had used the original instead of another case.

Anyway, the point is, always check sources. If anyone says anything on the internet, assume it’s just their opinion until you check and follow the sources…

And very often it’s dead links or sources that don’t say what the article pretends…

Depends

Coffman finds her next target in the footnotes of the article about the tank division. This one’s name is Franz Kurowski, and he seems to pop up all over the place. Kurowski served in the Luftwaffe. After the war, he tried his hand at all sorts of popular writing, often with a pseudonym to match: Jason Meeker and Slade Cassidy for his crime fiction and westerns, Johanna Schulz and Gloria Mellina for his chick lit. But his accounts of the Second World War made him famous under his own name. Kurowski’s stories weren’t subtle. As the German historian Roman Töppel writes in a critical essay: “They depict war as a test of fate and partly as adventure. German war crimes are left out—much unlike allied war crimes.”

To understand this dubious chronicler better, Coffman goes to Google, where she comes upon a book called The Myth of the Eastern Front. It describes how, in the immediate aftermath of the war, characters like Kurowski worked to rehabilitate the image of the German army—to argue that a few genocidal apples had spoiled the barrel. With a guy like Hitler to pin the blame on, the rest was easy. The so-called “myth of the clean Wehrmacht” took root on both sides of the Atlantic: German society needed to believe that not everyone who wore a gray uniform was evil, and the Americans were courting every anti-Communist ally they could find. Then, in the mid-1990s, a museum exhibit cataloging the crimes of the Nazi-era military traveled throughout Germany. An odd situation emerged: Germans began to speak more honestly about the Wehrmacht than non-Germans did.

When Coffman reads this, something clicks. She is dealing with a poisonous tree here. She shouldn’t be throwing out individual pieces of fruit. She should be chopping it off at the trunk. She starts to pivot from history (the facts themselves) to historiography (the way they’re gathered). She begins to use Wikipedia to document the false historical narrative, and its purveyors, and then make the fight about dubious sources rather than specific articles.

https://www.wired.com/story/one-womans-mission-to-rewrite-nazi-history-wikipedia/

How dare you hurt another editor’s feelings with your facts!

at least Wikipedia is human-curated.

I don’t know if you’re making fun of me, but, seriously, for me Wikipedia is an enormously valuable resource, much more than, for instance, YouTube (which I use, maybe, twice per year).

I remember in the mid-aughts my brother hacked his iPod — the wheel kind, this was pre-iPhone — to hold the entirety of the text of English Wikipedia at the time.

How much data does it use?

Even less so if you exclude images

Is there an easy way of doing a full backup?

That’s interesting

That’s only the text without any media. If you wanted to save all media on Wikimedia Commons, that would be about 420tb.

But there aren’t on YouTube :-P

Could work like the underground networks in Cuba (I say underground but apparently there’s wires everywhere?)

you “bought” kiwix? AFAIK it’s free

Wikipedia has a claimed positive-bias, in which negative things are often left out of the article. This is more true the lower profile the page is.

And Wikipedia has an overall left-bias, because of the demographic of contributors.

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Wikipedia completely slanders people it doesnt like. For example Daniele Ganser who helped to reveal Operation Gladio.

Their profile was banned last time I looked about a year ago. My profile I deleted because it was permanently tainted by that asshole spamming my talk page.

I remember posting about it on Reddit back when it happened a few years ago, and everyone in the comments told me how they’ve had similar experiences. Really just made me weary about trusting Wikipedia. I mean sure, if they get the date of a movie wrong that’s fine, but as for more serious topics, I just can’t really trust it.

Even sources can be garbage. I’ve seen plenty of blog spam cited as sources, which means nothing.

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It’s also a lie.

I think assuming a better alternative will appear is a bad idea. Most likely some company sees an opening to control the information and monetize it. They can’t really now because Wikipedia is the default, but I don’t doubt someone would try if they see the hold Wikipedia has falter.

It doesn’t need to die for a new alternative to pop up.

I just doubt any alternative will be as good as the one we have now.

That sucks, but I also kind of empathize with wiki mods, cause it’s really hard to know when to cut stuff down. I remember seeing a while back a bunch of people that migrated out from wikipedia to some completely unknown new wiki nobody will ever hear about, because they were working on chronicling all the roads in america with screenshots and notes of location and historical details about it all. Wikipedia didn’t really get it, as it’s more like a kind of academic and news aggregate, and there was nothing really there to aggregate, it was just an infodump of a bunch of different stuff. If wikipedia was a 1-1 map of the world, then it would be the size of the world. Or bigger, if you include historical stuff. No way you’re fitting all that on a 102 gig drive, or whatever the size of wikipedia is. Plus there’s hosting costs to consider, so it’s not like they could do that even if they really wanted.

Tbh those pieces of trivia don’t feel like encyclopedic information in the first place. A reader need not know specific intro songs to have an encyclopedic overview of wrestling, just that intro songs are often used.

A list containing the specific intro songs is vastly more suited for a fandom repository than an encyclopedia.

They still exist. They just do not have James O’Keefe who was shit canned.

They’ve got the permissions set up on the work chat server to allow anyone to create chats at will. Those chats can be public (listed in the search and anyone can join with a click) or private (can’t be joined without an invite from the owner of the channel).

And they don’t discourage non-work-related chats for… team building reasons, probably? There’s one for “Video Games” for instance.

I know the guy who made the “coronavirus” chat and he 100% did not intend it for conspiracy theories. The whole IT department was in the process of going remote when that chat was created and that chat was intended for everything from helpful tips for working remotely to news/rumors about when/if we might be going back to the office to news about death rate statistics and such.

And this conspiracy guy had (still has, actually) a deep-seated need to proselatize for the conspiracy of the week 24/7/365. So he just decided that was as good a pulpit as any.

Shortly after the shitstorm started, three levels of management above both me and Conspiracy McGee entered the chat. They didn’t end up doing anything. (It fizzled before they had to take action.) But I’m sure they all had their fingers hovering about 2mm above the “shut that shit down” button.

Now, all that said, there is a chat on the work chat server dedicated to the conspiracy podcast “No Agenda.” And I’m pretty certain it was created by Conspiracy McGee. And I’m pretty sure my/his direct boss is in the No Agenda chat.

So, I guess the short answer to your question is that they don’t want to shut down non-work-related chats so as to pay some lip service to team building and not appear too draconian (while at the same tacitly encouraging a culture in which it’s not really acceptable to spend too much time in those chats rather than furiously typing code). And the company’s management is sufficiently right-wing as to not get that allowing conspiracy theorists to conspiracy theorist is eventually going to backfire on them, so they don’t see it as dangerous. So they see it not much unlike having a chat about the latest Mario Kart game or the Marvel Cinematic Universe or whatever.

Hopefully that answers somewhat.

You’d be impressed by how good I was at finding PDFs of original articles on random sites. Turns out that when you go to grad school in the third world and don’t have access to the journals in the same way as you are accustomed, you learn how to do it for yourself.

I’d definitely be careful about made up stuff, but this sounds like an interesting idea.

I think it definitely was a huge breakdown in academic’s to adapt to new technology, and it is at the core of a lot of the societal problems we face today. Of course, a lot of the reasons for this were by design at the hands of a few corporate actors, and they share a lot of culpability.

There are philosophical underpinnings too - a lot of academics are still caught up on modernism (which would rightfully distrust new internet sources in favor of legacy sources of proven idealistic knowledge) vs. Postmodernism, which would provide a framework to recognize the truth in these systems.

One thing to keep in mind is that computers and the internet are still extremely new, and we are still figuring them out. It has only been a decade and a half where everyone has a general purpose, internet connected computer in their pocket.

There’s still good and plenty fuckery that can happen with citing books, though. Depending on the obscurity of the book, whether or not it’s out of print, or just has been outright destroyed, it might be really hard to access a copy, and check the source, especially if someone doesn’t have access to the internet archive or library genesis, i.e. digital scans of said book. There are reprints and new editions, sometimes not noted by the author of the citation (the author might have no way of knowing, depends), which can change or remove quoted passages. The internet also contains the ability to mass copy anything you want, and cite that copy, like what the internet archive does with the wayback machine, so if you have a citation of a webpage it’s probably a good idea to copy that in time and then spread it around anyways just for the sake of posterity and accessibility, especially if it’s obscure or is likely to be changed or removed. Same as you might for a book, except much easier, it’s much harder to copy a whole book in context and spread that around compared to a webpage.

“Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 14% of people know that.”
-Homer Simpson

My kind of bias, or the wrong kind?

Tbf the gamergate saga basically caused the infrastructure to have a rolling panic attack over how that such a large movement to insert misinformation against any effort to correct it.

Just call then out on it in talk by mentioning why you would add it.

Alternatively make an upgraded English-only wiki alternative with way larger article max sizes so we can finally evolve it past 2005. And start using YouTube links and not (just) a native video player. And start quoting/including entire chapters from relevant books.

Which religious orgs?

I haven’t participated in wikipedia enough to see how these turf wars play out. I’ve heard that, unsurprisingly, there are groups that control pages, some opposed and some unopposed. It’s a really interesting thing to me.

I’m afraid of politics, generally speaking. But I bet it would be interesting to be a part of all that.

I consider it a separate concept.

Definitely not wiremin! it’s scam

Look at their website, they keep babbling about their “protocol”, but all you can find about this supposed protocol is marketing speak, no real technical specification or paper, no code, nothing. How does this thing actually run? Nobody knows.

It’s proprietary, which alone is enough reason to run away from it. And seeing that the dev’s email is gmail, we can be sure they don’t give a fuck about privacy or decentralization.

It seems that this decentralized style starts to be a new trend?

First this Fediverse/Lemmy I heard about. Then The Matrix (messaging platform). And now these Mastodon & WreMin.

Well, if that prevents or slows down the corrupted law of enshittification, then I’m approving it!

Damn, this is genious. My future kids are going to learn so much cool stuff branded as “loopholes”.