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Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

(www.washingtonpost.com)
754 points coloneltcb | 8 comments | 25 Apr 25 23:03 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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sedev ◴[26 Apr 25 03:04 UTC] No.43800538[source]▶
I am going to say a thing I say a lot: please edit Wikipedia. It is easier to do than you probably think! Wikipedia's biggest constraint is no longer money or server space, it's editor time (especially since LLM-based garbage is a force multiplier on disruptive editing that does not have a corresponding improvement to good-faith editing). Any topic area you know about and/or care about can benefit from your attention. Fixing typos is valuable. Adding photos is valuable. Flagging vandalism is valuable. Please edit Wikipedia.
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flask_manager ◴[26 Apr 25 03:18 UTC] No.43800627[source]▶
I have in the past, but three things put me off doing so now;

Pages where I can spot inconsistencies are often controversial, with long dense discussion pages, edits here are almost impossible beyond trivial details. I dont mind fixing trivia, but not if the actual improvement I think I can make is rejected.

There is a bit of a deletionist crusade to keep some topics small, for example, Ive had interesting trivia about a cameras development process simply deleted. Maybe it is truly for the better, but it is not really that easy to add to the meat of the project, without someone else's approval.

Third, the begging banners really feel a bit gross; I know the size of the endowment, and how long it would be able to sustain the project (forever essentially)... It really feels like the foundation is using the Wikipedia brand to funnel money to irrelevant pet causes. This really puts me off contributing.

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1. YZF ◴[26 Apr 25 05:23 UTC] No.43801154[source]▶
I've also edited random things in the past. Like inaccuracies in Comp.Sci. topics.

I used to like Wikipedia but I'm changing my mind. One thing amongst many others was seeing some company that competed with the startup I worked in basically introduce marketing material into the site. It just feels like it's too big and there are too many interests that want to distort things. I was surprised to see some article recently removed effectively rewriting history and directing to some alternative version. I just checked again and it's been restored but it just seems like the wild west.

I'd need some serious convincing to restore my trust in it. There are still some good technical/science articles I guess. It kind of sucks that instead of getting more reliable information on the Internet we're trending towards not being to trust anything. It's not clear how we fix this since reliability can not be equal to popularity.

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2. bawolff ◴[26 Apr 25 05:32 UTC] No.43801181[source]▶
> It just feels like it's too big and there are too many interests that want to distort things. I was surprised to see some article recently removed effectively rewriting history and directing to some alternative version. I just checked again and it's been restored but it just seems like the wild west.

In fairness, this does mean the system is working.

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3. YZF ◴[26 Apr 25 06:17 UTC] No.43801352[source]▶
Yeah- Maybe it's "eventually working". It's hard to trust when it seems so fluid. Maybe there needs to be some mechanics to make it harder to change. Something like being able to suggest changes/corrections but having those come out on some schedule after a review? (thinking software release process here). Quarterly Wikipedia releases? Creating some "core" of Wikipedia that is subject to tougher editorial standards?

Not sure.

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4. terribleperson ◴[26 Apr 25 07:20 UTC] No.43801585{3}[source]▶
Harder to change doesn't make it more or less correct, just means wrong information sticks around longer. Because revision history is kept and changes are instant, it's easy to fix bad changes. For topics that see extensive astroturfing, they can be restricted.
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5. bawolff ◴[26 Apr 25 07:47 UTC] No.43801679{3}[source]▶
Its definitely an eventual consistency kind of model.

There was some attempts at change review (called "pending changes") that is used on very continous articles, but it never really scaled that well. I think its more popular on german wikipedia.

Wikipedia is so dominant that it has kind of smoothered all alternative models. Personally i feel like its kind of like democracy: the worst system except for all the other systems. All things are transient though, i'm sure eventually someone will come up with something superior that will take over, just like wikipedia took over from encyclopedia briticana.

6. card_zero ◴[26 Apr 25 08:47 UTC] No.43801952{3}[source]▶
Mechanics like that exist for when warring over a page escalates. See the old essay (20 years old now!) "The Wrong Version": https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wrong_Version
7. JimDabell ◴[26 Apr 25 09:11 UTC] No.43802049{4}[source]▶
It’s worth remembering that the entire point of a wiki is that it’s quick and easy to make a change (the name means “quick” in Hawaiian). Being quick and easy to change was the defining quality of Wikipedia and its advantage over more rigid traditional encyclopaedias. These days editing Wikipedia seems like you have to fight bureaucracy and rules lawyering, and doesn’t seem very wiki-like at all.
8. intended ◴[26 Apr 25 13:01 UTC] No.43803225{3}[source]▶
It will unnerve you to know, that this is the state of the art, and the information environment we run in, is incredibly fragile at the speeds at which it is moving.

It may also hearten you to know, that small, consistent actions like yours, make these collective systems run.