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Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

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598 points leotravis10 | 5 comments | 04 Sep 25 15:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.598s | source
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bawolff ◴[04 Sep 25 16:49 UTC] No.45129304[source]▶
There has been this trend recently of calling Wikipedia the last good thing on the internet.

And i agree its great, i spend an inordinate amount of my time on Wikimedia related things.

But i think there is a danger here with all these articles putting Wikipedia too much on a pedestal. It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws.

The true best part of Wikipedia is that its a work in progress and people are working to make it a little better everyday. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact we aren't there yet. We'll never be "there". But hopefully we'll continue to be a little bit closer every day. And that is what makes Wikipedia great.

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1. KingOfCoders ◴[05 Sep 25 06:03 UTC] No.45135426[source]▶
"It isn't perfect."

Articles about some chemical process are fine, indeed often excellent.

Everything where facts get filtered and presented, is bad. Read about real world events - especially where different groups or countries were involved - in three different languages on Wikipedia, and you'd think three different universes exist.

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2. throwaway2037 ◴[05 Sep 25 06:43 UTC] No.45135625[source]▶

    > Read about real world events - especially where different groups or countries were involved - in three different languages on Wikipedia, and you'd think three different universes exist.
Can you give a clear example? I would like to read it for myself.
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3. BlueTemplar ◴[05 Sep 25 07:06 UTC] No.45135768[source]▶
It isn't so much as bad, as inevitable. And as you say, Wikipedia has the built-in antidote with the other language versions and the Talk pages.
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4. zahlman ◴[05 Sep 25 13:21 UTC] No.45138259[source]▶
> And as you say, Wikipedia has the built-in antidote with the other language versions and the Talk pages.

The Talk pages are just a first introduction to the sheer madness behind the scenes; one quickly starts to realize that relative few people are calling the shots in a lot of places and that their personal biases are causing serious problems. The "Reliable Sources" policy would be atrocious enough already (there are no objective processes for challenging a source's inclusion or exclusion from the informal list on a given topic, only political ones) without the "power user" editors who are clearly abusing it.

5. ◴[05 Sep 25 15:56 UTC] No.45140014[source]▶