I tried for years to edit wikipedia but I came up against the power and arrogance of the managers or admins..........many times I provided articles and sources proving my changes but they blocked me without discussion. They used and use sources that suit them, for example the Southern Poverty Law Center. Another thing I noticed frequently when I was editing wikipedia is that going to see the profiles of these administrators who were blocking me, almost all of them in their description called themselves Marxists or liberals, or feminists or anti-fascists.
Hi Matt, old friend and long time subscriber to your newsletter. I didn't realize there was two-way communication, but I'd love to be in touch. I have some articles you may enjoy about the wiki genre. How does one send you something these days?
I'm MatthewParrott on both Twitter and Telegram. You can DM me on twitter or you can join the discussion page on my telegram and request a direct chat. Love to hear from you!
Yeah, the network effect has cemented Wiki as the go to for the foreseeable future at least for text based. Everybody (at least politically aware) knows they’re heavily biased when it comes to controversial topics, but as you say, 90 percent of all the other stuff is great.
I think a good thing to come out of discourse surrounding Wiki is that “Wikipedia” has sort of become a term of derision in debate.
“Oh really? Where’d you get that? Wikipedia? 🙄”
“Get a load of these dorks trying to out-Wikipedia each other lol”
I do think Grok and LLM’s in general are going to put a large dent into the attention paid to Wiki but people generally use these things for different reasons. I still use the practicality useless Google search engine from time to time for very specific reasons because I know it will get me the information I want faster than ask ChatNPC or Wiki.
Vox Day launched a project to do this back in 2016.
> Later, it is planned to allow anyone to edit almost all articles, similar to Wikipedia. Exceptions would be articles vulnerable to frequent vandalism or "edit wars", but, in those cases, the articles themselves could be "forked" to allow different viewpoints to express themselves (unlike Wikipedia).
Wikipedia is a place of bias, mediocrity, and control freaks. Although not everything on there is trash, the decent content is there despite how it's run, not because of. It's more of an online game pretending to be an encyclopedia than anything else, one major difference being that there's no editorial board, thus no experts to appeal to regarding content. The policies and consensus-building make it really easy for people to game the system and treat articles as their personal territory, which happens all the time on there. I've tried adding content from RS, including scholarly journals, and been rejected and told to fuck off because people on there don't personally like what the RS say, lol. It really is that unprofessional. As for bias, just check the articles for Hillary vs Trump, or the soapbox rant that is the Gamergate article, or the articles for fascism vs communism (I wonder if anyone would describe the Holocaust as "excess mortality", kek). And then the retarded format changes, I could go on.
One important thing: please DO NOT donate any money to Wikipedia whatsoever! They have rich donors, a source of income from the ad-ridden Wikia/Fandom site also owned by WMF, and shady accounting. They are of course not forthcoming about all this. Besides, all that content is archived and mirrored in any case.
As another commenter said, Infogalactic is a decent alternative I've been using, and I encourage others to use it too. But, Wikipedia still dominates as a nexus of traffic, partly because it serves as a mouthpiece for the power structure -- the very thing that makes it shittier helps reinforce its dominance. Ultimately, the failings of Wikipedia reflect the larger failings of the managerial western liberal order.
As for Grokipedia, very interesting idea! Maybe various alternatives, such as Infogalactic, Conservapedia, Metapedia, and so on, can all be brought together under such a structure. Being able to tab across different worldviews would be a great feature indeed.
Now do this again, but for the entire modern world, though.
I tried for years to edit wikipedia but I came up against the power and arrogance of the managers or admins..........many times I provided articles and sources proving my changes but they blocked me without discussion. They used and use sources that suit them, for example the Southern Poverty Law Center. Another thing I noticed frequently when I was editing wikipedia is that going to see the profiles of these administrators who were blocking me, almost all of them in their description called themselves Marxists or liberals, or feminists or anti-fascists.
Hi Matt, old friend and long time subscriber to your newsletter. I didn't realize there was two-way communication, but I'd love to be in touch. I have some articles you may enjoy about the wiki genre. How does one send you something these days?
I'm MatthewParrott on both Twitter and Telegram. You can DM me on twitter or you can join the discussion page on my telegram and request a direct chat. Love to hear from you!
Yeah, the network effect has cemented Wiki as the go to for the foreseeable future at least for text based. Everybody (at least politically aware) knows they’re heavily biased when it comes to controversial topics, but as you say, 90 percent of all the other stuff is great.
I think a good thing to come out of discourse surrounding Wiki is that “Wikipedia” has sort of become a term of derision in debate.
“Oh really? Where’d you get that? Wikipedia? 🙄”
“Get a load of these dorks trying to out-Wikipedia each other lol”
I do think Grok and LLM’s in general are going to put a large dent into the attention paid to Wiki but people generally use these things for different reasons. I still use the practicality useless Google search engine from time to time for very specific reasons because I know it will get me the information I want faster than ask ChatNPC or Wiki.
Vox Day launched a project to do this back in 2016.
> Later, it is planned to allow anyone to edit almost all articles, similar to Wikipedia. Exceptions would be articles vulnerable to frequent vandalism or "edit wars", but, in those cases, the articles themselves could be "forked" to allow different viewpoints to express themselves (unlike Wikipedia).
> https://infogalactic.com/info/Infogalactic
- Chrome/Brave Plug-in: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/infogalactic-transporter/majmoinlepbjapaaljlhlfhlmbblaeip
- Firefox Plug-in: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/infogalactic-transporter/
Wikipedia is a place of bias, mediocrity, and control freaks. Although not everything on there is trash, the decent content is there despite how it's run, not because of. It's more of an online game pretending to be an encyclopedia than anything else, one major difference being that there's no editorial board, thus no experts to appeal to regarding content. The policies and consensus-building make it really easy for people to game the system and treat articles as their personal territory, which happens all the time on there. I've tried adding content from RS, including scholarly journals, and been rejected and told to fuck off because people on there don't personally like what the RS say, lol. It really is that unprofessional. As for bias, just check the articles for Hillary vs Trump, or the soapbox rant that is the Gamergate article, or the articles for fascism vs communism (I wonder if anyone would describe the Holocaust as "excess mortality", kek). And then the retarded format changes, I could go on.
One important thing: please DO NOT donate any money to Wikipedia whatsoever! They have rich donors, a source of income from the ad-ridden Wikia/Fandom site also owned by WMF, and shady accounting. They are of course not forthcoming about all this. Besides, all that content is archived and mirrored in any case.
As another commenter said, Infogalactic is a decent alternative I've been using, and I encourage others to use it too. But, Wikipedia still dominates as a nexus of traffic, partly because it serves as a mouthpiece for the power structure -- the very thing that makes it shittier helps reinforce its dominance. Ultimately, the failings of Wikipedia reflect the larger failings of the managerial western liberal order.
As for Grokipedia, very interesting idea! Maybe various alternatives, such as Infogalactic, Conservapedia, Metapedia, and so on, can all be brought together under such a structure. Being able to tab across different worldviews would be a great feature indeed.