I think a lot people underestimate how arbitrary some editorial decisions on wikipedia can be. Yeah perfect is the enemy of the good but imperfect is still imperfect. Can’t say I’m a fan of jj mccullough‘s opinions on some stuff but his video on wikipedia is good https://youtu.be/-vmSFO1Zfo8?si=0mS24EVODwLrPJ3T
I don’t feel as strongly as he does but ever since watching I just don’t see much value in starting with Wikipedia when researching something. He also points out how a lot content creators default to referencing it. After realising how much of history or geography YouTube is just regurgitating Wikipedia articles, it kind of ruined those kinds of videos for me, and this was before AI. So now I try spend more time reading books or listening to audiobooks on a topics I’m interested instead.
Like I still use Wikipedia for unserious stuff or checking if a book I was recommended was widely criticised or something but that’s it really.
It’s also just not a good learning resource, like if you ever wanted to study a mathematics topic, wikipedia might be one of the worst resources. Like Wikipedia doesn’t profess to be a learning resource and more a overview resource but even the examples they use sometimes are just kind of unhelpful. Here’s an example on the Fourier Transform https://youtu.be/33y9FMIvcWY?si=ys8BwDu_4qa01jso
> I think a lot people underestimate how arbitrary some editorial decisions on wikipedia can be.
You can say that about Encyclopedia Brittanica or any of the old-school encyclopedias too. You can say that about the news desks at ABC, CBS, CNN, etc. You can say that about the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, etc.
I don't think people tend to blindly trust Wikipedia any more than they do for other sources of information. YouTube is full of garbage Wikipedia-regurgitating articles because Wikipedia is an easy, centralized source to scrape, not because of any level of trust they put in it.
I find this type of snap negative reaction boring, tiring, and unhelpful. It's disappointing that they often end up as top comments here. (Human psychology at work.)
My take: I expect that Wikipedia is more unbiased and a better reflection of reality then most -- maybe even all -- other sources of information on the Internet. On average! There are certainly crap articles, just like anywhere else.
If you look at the news in a democratic country vs an authoritarian one, you may easily walk away with the impression that the former is in a state of perpetual chaos, because of all the scandals, protests, resignations and snap elections. The authoritarian country will look like a paragon of stability in contrast. New infrastructure projects, record economic growth, seditious officials swiftly trialed and imprisoned. There is barely any conflict and the ones that do exist get solved quickly.
But unless you are a total mark, you should know that the stability is just a facade. That infrastructure project only went through because locals who opposed got beaten up by the cops, the economics data was cooked up by statisticians who fear the consequence of telling the truth and the seditious officials are only at the receiving end of justice because they lost the power struggle within the party. But of course you don’t know any of that, because why would the state let you?
Wikipedia, like democracies, run on transparency. This is why you get to read the editing history and talk page of any Wikipedia page and walk away with the impression that Wikipedia is uniquely full of drama. You never feel the same about the New York Times or the BBC because they run more like autocracies and keep everything inside. If we get a chance to read the internal emails of establishment media we will walk away with a very different impression.
I disagree, I know the opinion of WSJ, WP, FT or national like france24,DW, BBC, RT,AJ
Or at least know is always opinion Base, the facts are selected in a subjecive way.
Is way harder to know how opinionated Wikipedia is, and everything make them sound like their opinion is only base on facts but isn't.
> I think a lot people underestimate how arbitrary some editorial decisions on wikipedia can be.
I think it is true for all information we consume. One of the very important skills to learn in life is to think critically. Who wrote this? When? What would be their bias?
Text is written by humans (or now sometimes LLMs), and humans are imperfect (and LLMs are worth what they are worth).
Many times Wikipedia is more than enough, sometimes it is not. Nothing is perfect, and it is very important to understand it.
Also, I think for 99% of Wikipedia, there isn't much need to worry about Biases. It's about an uncontroversial chemical compound, a tiny village, a family of bacteria and so on. Knowledge isn't all subjective and prone to bias.
My point was mostly, people just aren’t as aware of issues with it compared to other forms of media. Issues in other forms of media don’t change that or make it less of an issue.
At the end of the day you’re gonna to consume information from somewhere, it’ll have shortcomings but you’re still better off knowing that going in.
On bias’ of authors: I actually think people fixate a bit too much on bias of an author to the point it’s a solely used as a speculative reason to dismiss something asuntrue. If the claims made by the author are consistent with other information and others trusted sources it’s just irrelevant. I feel people online to readily get hung up motivations and it’s sometimes a crotch for a readers inability to engage with ideas they find uncomfortable.
Like if a private company sponsors a study with a finding that aligns with their business interests, that actually doesn’t mean it’s false. It’s false if no one can reproduce their results. I mean you’d definitely want to verify other sources knowing this, but also researches have their own reputation to preserve as well. In reality the truth ends up being more boring than people anticipate.
But obviously it matters when claims can’t be verified or tested but I find online there’s an overemphasis of this online.
Idk if this how it came off but just tbc my point also wasn’t indirectly promoting traditional media.
I think a lot if ppl are rightly sceptical of traditional media, but I feel I see more people giving Wikipedia a pass or placing it on a higher pedestal as a resource than it should be at times.
Admittedly I think I would prefer Wikipedia to traditional media in most cases. Although that wasn’t really what I was getting at
It's funny how the more accurate a source gets the more it draws in people desiring accuracy.
Then this rather small cohort of high precision people express frustrations without providing the context of accuracy against the masses preferred methods (TikTok, cable news, broadcast, truth social)
So now the water is muddled and people and Ais are mistrained because an "absolute scale" is not used when discussing accuracy.
JJ McCullough‘s gripe seems to be that wikipedia is kind of a mediocre summary of the information on a topic. But I'm not sure you should expect much more. You can always go to individual sources if you want that.
Reading (the right) books is definitely the best way to learn about a topic, but its not great for quickly looking up random stuff. Books can spread misinformation too, from Malleus Maleficarum to Erich von Däniken.
It is useful for quickly looking up simple facts, and provides a list of sources.
The video makes some interesting criticisms. The lack of diversity is not surprising. Dominated by white, male, American's with time on their hands! how would have thought that? Its very obviously American dominated (at least the English version).
I once partly cross verify a virologist's lecture. He confused a brother of an important scientist who made an important discovery. I have no doubt that he knows what he's talking about when it comes to viruses.
All in all, checking other sources to see if they lines up is a pain and labor intensive, never mind actually checking to see if the references are actually sound evidence.
Most people don't even have the reading level for full comprehension of a wiki article, let alone being able to discern the nuance of some aspects of the topic.
> Yeah perfect is the enemy of the good but imperfect is still imperfect.
This assumes perfection is attainable. I'd like to see your idea of a "perfect" book or article on some topic.
I've seen proudly uneducated people with no understanding take sledgehammers to history and real knowledge, and so I have no illusions about how Wikipedia is horrible, unfair, unprofessional, mercurial, and vulnerable to manipulation.
I would've gladly paid more in taxes to make Encyclopædia Britannica an international non-profit public service delivered in web form to all so long as each area were managed and curated with subject matter expert input.
holy heck there is so much wrong about this video. i can't believe "internet influencers" can just turn on their cameras and spew so much untruth without a care in the world...
comparatively wikipedia is imperfect, but much better than this kind of slop.
Feel free to actually articulate the actual issues you’re referring to.
It’s been a while since I watched it but the thing I remember taking away was you can do a lot better than Wikipedia, and he encouraged people to spend more time looking at primary sources for deeper research, and points out how it’s the basis of a lot of slop on YouTube.
This article is talking about Portal:Current Events on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events). The current events articles are fantastic! Normal newspaper articles are status updates. Current events articles synthesize news to present the current, comprehensive understanding about an event. It’s cool to monitor how current events articles evolve over time.
I suggest everybody here take a look at Matthew White's excellent WikiWatch. Despite the last entry being 2006, it is still a very valuable criticism of Wikipedia today.
>just about every link to a Wikipedia page created in the past quarter-century still works
Not so sure about this; page titles change and redirects get removed. I'm thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Nex_Benedict where initial news articles and her obituary used her birth name, Dagny Benedict, but soon this name was scrubbed from the wikipedia page, as well as its talk page and redirects, on the policy of deadnames.
Wow, I would expect there would at least be a single mention of "born Dagny Benedict" somewhere at the beginning of the background section as is typical in other pages. If this is intentional, to omit this entirely seems like it unnecessarily politicizes the issue rather than documenting the history of a person.
> Wow, I would expect there would at least be a single mention of "born Dagny Benedict" somewhere at the beginning of the background section as is typical in other pages. If this is intentional, to omit this entirely seems like it unnecessarily politicizes the issue rather than documenting the history of a person.
It's all very 1984-esque; I'm seeing shades of "We were never/always at war with Oceania/Eurasia".
This is revisionist history, and the scrubbing of previously correct but now incorrect "history" should be viewed with suspicion.
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth.
You’re hitting the wrong aspect of the problem. You should use someone’s old name when it’s absolutely necessary, not as a matter of course. People change their name for a reason after all, and if their latest one suffices, let it be.
In the case of this person, they were not notable under their birth name. Unfortunately, their transgender status is the whole reason they’re notable, and the article clearly states that they are. I don’t need that person’s old name to understand the situation.
> If this is intentional, to omit this entirely seems like it unnecessarily politicizes the issue rather than documenting the history of a person.
I feel as if you're trying to inject a political motivation about the decision to omit that detail when a simpler one is better. If something of little note is offensive to the person you're talking about, it's disrespectful to them as a person, to their humanity, to mention it.
E.g. You would only mention someone was born, to parents who were avid members of the KKK, if and only if, their life story related in some way.
Otherwise you're trying to introduce some preexisting bias that doesn't belong. In this example, if this person left their community to fight racism. The information about the set of likes reasons they got involved, are worth the bias of introducing the assumptions you're reasonably allowed to make about their parents.
If they find that religion offensive, and spent their life exclusively on epidemiology, it's wrong to include that detail, true or not.
Then, do consider the "political" aspect, that has led to the deadname policy that Wikipedia has. Many people, who for their own cultural reasons, want to disrespect someone, will refuse to address or refer to some individual the way they want to be. That behavior is no different from calling some one fuckface, and refusing to address them differently. You've selected something they find offensive, in order to bully and harass them, needlessly. Given that toxic reality, for cases like this, it's better to defer to not mentioning the name they were given at birth, because that detail might be used against them. Again, there might be some stronger reason you would want to include it. But it's better to err on the side of respecting the individual.
There's a tricky ethical question here: if someone changed their name and ask for not being called their former name ever again, you can either ignore their will, which is rude, or chose to follow it but then you are doing a disservice to the public's understanding.
The secind option used to be the norm on wikipedia even 15 years ago, but Anti-trans activists using dead-naming as a slur against trans people triggered the shift from the second option to the first.
As usual assholes are why we can't have nice things.
The guidelines on gender identity are based on the BLP policies [1], which call for taking harm into account and not going into excess detail on someone's personal life.
Everything people are upset over in this thread is explained clearly in the BLP section on privacy, the gender identity section of the Manual of Style [2], and this essay on gender identity [3].
This particular example is completely clear-cut. Sources didn't cover them at all under any previous names because they're only known from one event. Someone who isn't transgender would be covered the exact same way. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a gossip rag.
Benedict became notable because of her death; Biographies of Living Persons has a privacy section that gives reasoning. These reasons, e.g. identity theft, complaint from the person, harassment, can not apply to a deceased person.
News articles did cover Benedict under the name Dagny.
As far as policies go, this page should be titled "Suicide of Nex Benedict" according to this policy [0], yet the talk on that subject ended with "closed with no consensus to move." [1]
This does speak to the selective application and selective enforcement of policies on Wikipedia. But I was most concerned to learn about how scrubbing the histories of pages is official policy itself.
Admittedly I do not know how much of a sensitive issue this is, but I find it surprising that the name given at birth is not mentioned anywhere on the Wikipedia page, even though in other cases of name change usually "Name (born Old Name)" is written.
I often find myself clicking a link that takes me to an anchor on another page that no longer exists. Surely a system could be implemented to remove these?
News, influencers, Wikipedia, almost all information we consume nowadays is intentional. And not even getting into billions poured into American colleges by the same people.
When I was working in the heart of conservative online media in West Palm Beach—nestled between Rush Limbaugh’s studio, Mar-a-Lago, and Newsmax—targeting Evangelical Christians in the Bible Belt, my salary (and the direction things eventually went) was being paid for by the Saudis. At the time, the propaganda was mostly “pro-oil” and “climate change is a hoax.” Around that same period, those same Saudis bought a 10% stake in Fox News and helped shape the narrative for millions of Christians who tune in and treat it like their main source of news.
So yeah, if you were ever curious where the profits go every time you fill up your car with gas… there.
I thought I was just building media websites. I didn’t even see the content until after six months. I put in my one month notice, finished what I was working on, and left. The amount of money they offered me to stay was ridiculous. I don’t blame people at Fox News for bending the knee and taking that Saudi money -- I just couldn’t make myself do it.
“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” A lot of people are going to spend eternity in hell for propaganda and lies.
Saudis are invested in a huge range of things in America. It has historical roots in the petrodollar. The basic deal of it that that they would only sell their oil in USD, which gave the USD a de facto backing after we defaulted in Bretton Woods (which was a de jure gold backing). That gave the USD a huge chunk of stability and in exchange we agreed to sell them weapons and broadly support them, while in exchange they were also asked to purchase US treasuries and assets with surplus revenues.
Over time this led to Saudis being involved in just about everything. For instance the biggest owner of 'old Twitter' under Dorsey was Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud. Needless to say the zeitgeist on old Twitter and Saudi Arabia have basically nothing in common, so you're probably seeing ideological motivation where the real motivation is generally just monetary. Not every country is conspiring to subvert other countries to their ideology.
Basically Saudia Arabia is filthy rich because of oil, but they fully understand that even if we continue burning oil until we run out, we will run out, within the lifetime of some people living today. So they have to migrate their economy away from oil and, on the timeline for such a revolutionary shift, they have very little time left. This is likely what MBS sees as what will define his legacy.
Looks like Prince Alwaleed bin Talal's ownership of Fox was between 5.5% to 7% during the two-decade period of 1997 ~ 2017. He divested during an anti-corruption purge.
What level of moral compromise is acceptable in this world to take whatever money is offered? Presumably the job of hitman is unacceptable? Where's the line drawn?
Personally I'd say that lying to perpetuate a system that is leading to various populous parts of the world becoming uninhabitable is on the wrong side of that line.
There are agendas there, just like in every human endeavor, but it definitely hasn't been "hijacked", it's still by far the best single repository of human knowledge out there. If I had to choose one website to take with me to a desert island, it's an obvious choice.
We should keep talking about the issues and improving things, but don't throw out the baby with bathwater.
> We should keep talking about the issues and improving things, but don't throw out the baby with bathwater.
Yeah, I wonder what solution people propose that claim that Wikipedia is 'hijacked' or 'compromised' and pushing agendas?
While Wikipedia is not perfect, it is the best encyclopedia we currently have, mostly due to collective efforts and maintainers that care about the state of Wikipedia. I would even say that it is a good thing that there is this transparency, that states and capital are trying to influence Wikipedia because then you know that you may take some articles with a grain of salt or can actively push against it.
Every alternative to Wikipedia that I have seen so far is one that claims to be more truthful than the original, but in the end these are platforms that push agendas without the transparency and attempt to further obscure power relations under the pretext of truth.
Every alternative to Wikipedia will have to solve the problems that Wikipedia already has to be a better alternative. However, I do think these are fundamental unsolvable problems
and everyone who claims to have solved this is part of a power struggle over who defines what is considered true.
it absolutely has been. like every online community, Wikipedia is extremely vulnerable to the terminally online and/or the mentally ill, to whom everything is political. like clockwork, every remotely political article cites opinions only from a certain perspective, often quoting glorified nobodies to assert the narrative the '''editors''' want to present. dissenting opinions, no matter how overwhelmingly common among the real people, are mentioned in passing at best and often derisively.
The Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia was very much hijacked. As was the Lowland Scots one, except in the second case the individual made the news. The Gaelic one has a German guy running it who has several vanity articles and has chased most other users off apart from some government employees.
I think for anything controversial we need a completely different model.
Officially wikipedia is NPOV but an especially contentious and murky political mudfight decides what counts as a "citeable" source and what doesnt and what counts as notable and what doesnt.
It also has an incredibly strong western bias.
Every government, corporation and billionaire pays somebody to participate in that fight as well, using every dirty trick they can.
Until we have a model that can sidestep these politics (which Wikipedia seemingly has no real desire to do) and aggregate sources objectively I think it will continue to suck.
But by claiming one thing and doing the exact opposite (on a statistical quantitative basis), Wikipedia and all other western outlets have become just a front for propaganda which is also the reason why I don't believe in "Persecution of Uyghurs in China"
German Scholars Reveal Shocking TRUTH About China’s Xinjiang Province
internet altered the way society communicates and why, a lot of discussions now end up by "show me your sources" aka "what is the truth" and it's often centralized into some accepted source like wikipedia
where there simple single point of 'truth' like that before ?
my 2cents is that humans are not meant to live in one global absolute truth and we all lived in relative fuzzy reality before, it was slow and imperfect but not as easy to tamper with
Showing sources is not a bad thing. The harm is not questioning sources. A lot of people rely on poor sources. Whatever what the first result in Google historically, and now LLM summaries.
We still live in that fuzzy reality. Not much has changed.
It doesnt really matter if the whole world has access to the same information if the whole world trusts completely different sources.
For better or worse we trust those sources exclusively because of tribal affinity.
I doubt many people in the US could be persuaded to trust Global Times over the New York Times even if you could prove it had a better prediction track record. Wrong tribe.
You need only to look at how many actual well credentialed doctors get their Wiki pages smeared with words like "misinformation spreader" for dissenting against covid narratives
I would love to see news sites copying at least some of the technology of wikipedia. First and foremost every article should be versioned and it should be easy to see diffs. Every version of a news article should have a permanent link to it. Why don‘t news agencies use git for example?
Also news articles should be written using a markup language that is easy to parse and easy to read by AI agents. Instead most of them still write articles in word and convert it from docx into HTML or PDF. That usually generates terrible documents that break accessibility.
And of course a common markup language for news articles would enable many applications. But I guess we will land on Mars before we can have something like that.
More professional organisations definitely have some kind of CMS, with potentially their own version management (at least for what’s published). But I also don’t think we can fault people for preparing their piece in their preferred writing tool.
I just can’t see existing news agencies doing this of their own volition. As Generating stories themselves is what keeps news agencies in business.
Unless they had a new competitor who had who kept running rings around them with all three features. But it’s going to come back to having better stories or better long form pieces (depending on the publications niche), as that’s ultimately why someone visits their site.
I could however see some 3rd party doing this like an extension that overlays someone’s site or acts as alternative presentation of their content.
When there's some big ongoing thing in the news there'll be many articles on that same topic on news websites and sometimes you can't even find the original one that tells what actually happened. Wikipedia's article on it is usually a great summary
Yes, and sometimes they are very different. I was surprised to see the German Wikipedia had a couple of articles on Scottish history that were better than the English language one!
It's funny how every source of knowledge converges to the same thing: mass media. Telling you what to think and trying to influence your behaviour rather than trying to inform you.
Using facts, omitting facts or emphasising particular facts over others in order to mislead you. The scientific journals are now included with their anonymous editorials. Peer review is pretty much the same as fact-checking.
Contrast this with good fiction, which employs falsehoods to point towards the truth: truth which cannot easily be verified but which is our real bread and butter.
Really? News coverage on Wikipedia is a lot more reliable than (say) Fox News. Breaking news events in particular get a lot of eyeballs and while you obviously can't take everything as gospel, genuinely wrong info is usually purged pretty quickly.
Most news outlets get their news either from press releases or press agencies. It means you effectively get the same talking points across different outlets.
Fox is designed to promote Republican viewpoints and MSNBC to promote Democrat ones. They present little outside them and are usually telling the same small selection of stories from different angles.
In the UK I would say most people are proud of the BBC^; many people I speak to are smug when comparing it to e.g. Fox News, CNBC, etc... I think this is a big mistake, and that the USA system is actually better.
It's impossible for one news source to be unbiased, and the delusion that it is unbiased is dangerous. If you truly believe a source is "the truth" and unbiased it allows you to switch off any critical thinking; the information bypasses any protections you have.
Much better to have many news sources where the bias is evident and the individual has to synthesise an opinion themselves (not claiming this is perfect by any means, but a perfect system does not exist).
It is obviously the case that Wikipedia is biased, and I think competition is a great thing. We would be better served by a market of options to use our own faculties than a false sense of comfort in a fake truth.
^though many are refusing to pay the (almost) legally mandatory "tv-license".
I agree we need multiple news sources, but the UK has multiple news sources. What the BBC adds is one with a different funding model so different biases. I do not think this works as well as it did historically.
As for unwillingness to pay the license fee, the biggest issue is the rise of streaming alternatives. It reduced the BBC from providing about half of available TV to being one among many providers so the license fee no longer feels like good value for money.
Its not mandatory. I have never owned a TV. If you do not watch broadcast TV or Iplayer you do not have to have a TV license.
I also think Capita's aggressive scare tactics in trying to get people to pay the license fee have created a lot of hostility towards the BBC.
I think a significant part of the pushback against the TV license is that it pays for the BBC, I believe many people are of the opinion that they'd be perfectly happy not having the BBC and not paying the licence fee. A significant portion of the people paying for the BBC have never watched anything on it.
I am not proud of the BBC at all. I have boycotted their licence fee for almost as long as Wikipedia has been around.
If you want to know who the UK is going to war with next, watch the BBC.
Their news is horrendously biased when it comes to the British royal family. They have an institutional bias against Scottish independence since it would cut 10% of their licence fee. (Their provision to areas outside the Home Countries is a disgrace and patronising.)
Some people seems to confuse, willingly or not, unbiased with targeting neutral point of view, free of any perspective.
We can step back from a debate and reports who's saying what, but this is still reporting ongoing debate. And still involving attention within its considerations, which do change our mental process as much as performative effects can go. That's as opposed to remain completely unaware the debate could be even be considered.
no one is going out of ontological constraints and brings absolute truth from transexistential considerations.
No one who regularly watches biased news sources does so while acknowledging the constant bias. And I don’t think most people think the BBC is unbiased, it’s constantly attacked as having bias to both sides of the aisle ironically. The BBC is far from perfect but it’s in a different league to Fox News to the point that it feels disingenuous to suggest you’d be better off watching Fox News while telling yourself that you’re filtering out the bias.
It clarifies exactly what that means. It doesn’t say that the information have to pass the test of time. Only that it is not a place of original reporting, unsourced gossip, etc.
"Unlike Wikipedia, Grokipedia centralizes its editing process. Users can submit suggested edits to Grokipedia, but instead of assigning a group of volunteer community editors to decide on the edits, xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, controls whether or not a certain edit is approved and implemented on the website."
I started reading the Grokipedia page on the "Russian invasion of Ukraine". Immediately after the abstract, it starts talking about the "9th century Kyivan Rus" which seems like irrelevant information to a conflict over a millenia later, but then you realize it's exact same thing that Putin started with in his interview with Tucker Carlson to push the 'Ukraine isn't a real country' narrative.
>Alternativa Estudiantil
Alternativa Estudiantil is a Spanish patriotic student movement founded in September 2023 to counter perceived left-wing and woke dominance in universities, positioning itself as a conservative alternative emphasizing national identity and meritocracy.[1]
after 25 years wikipedia showed what it truly was created for, by selling the content for training. otherwise - okay, this was a cool project, perhaps we need better. like federated, crypto-signed articles that once collected together, @atproto style, produce the article with notable changes to it.
Their enterprise offering is more for fresh retrieval than training. For training, you can just download the free database dump — one you would inadvertently end up recreating if you were to use their enterprise APIs in a (pre-)training pipeline.
I think a lot people underestimate how arbitrary some editorial decisions on wikipedia can be. Yeah perfect is the enemy of the good but imperfect is still imperfect. Can’t say I’m a fan of jj mccullough‘s opinions on some stuff but his video on wikipedia is good https://youtu.be/-vmSFO1Zfo8?si=0mS24EVODwLrPJ3T
I don’t feel as strongly as he does but ever since watching I just don’t see much value in starting with Wikipedia when researching something. He also points out how a lot content creators default to referencing it. After realising how much of history or geography YouTube is just regurgitating Wikipedia articles, it kind of ruined those kinds of videos for me, and this was before AI. So now I try spend more time reading books or listening to audiobooks on a topics I’m interested instead.
Like I still use Wikipedia for unserious stuff or checking if a book I was recommended was widely criticised or something but that’s it really.
It’s also just not a good learning resource, like if you ever wanted to study a mathematics topic, wikipedia might be one of the worst resources. Like Wikipedia doesn’t profess to be a learning resource and more a overview resource but even the examples they use sometimes are just kind of unhelpful. Here’s an example on the Fourier Transform https://youtu.be/33y9FMIvcWY?si=ys8BwDu_4qa01jso
> I think a lot people underestimate how arbitrary some editorial decisions on wikipedia can be.
You can say that about Encyclopedia Brittanica or any of the old-school encyclopedias too. You can say that about the news desks at ABC, CBS, CNN, etc. You can say that about the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, etc.
I don't think people tend to blindly trust Wikipedia any more than they do for other sources of information. YouTube is full of garbage Wikipedia-regurgitating articles because Wikipedia is an easy, centralized source to scrape, not because of any level of trust they put in it.
I find this type of snap negative reaction boring, tiring, and unhelpful. It's disappointing that they often end up as top comments here. (Human psychology at work.)
My take: I expect that Wikipedia is more unbiased and a better reflection of reality then most -- maybe even all -- other sources of information on the Internet. On average! There are certainly crap articles, just like anywhere else.
If you look at the news in a democratic country vs an authoritarian one, you may easily walk away with the impression that the former is in a state of perpetual chaos, because of all the scandals, protests, resignations and snap elections. The authoritarian country will look like a paragon of stability in contrast. New infrastructure projects, record economic growth, seditious officials swiftly trialed and imprisoned. There is barely any conflict and the ones that do exist get solved quickly.
But unless you are a total mark, you should know that the stability is just a facade. That infrastructure project only went through because locals who opposed got beaten up by the cops, the economics data was cooked up by statisticians who fear the consequence of telling the truth and the seditious officials are only at the receiving end of justice because they lost the power struggle within the party. But of course you don’t know any of that, because why would the state let you?
Wikipedia, like democracies, run on transparency. This is why you get to read the editing history and talk page of any Wikipedia page and walk away with the impression that Wikipedia is uniquely full of drama. You never feel the same about the New York Times or the BBC because they run more like autocracies and keep everything inside. If we get a chance to read the internal emails of establishment media we will walk away with a very different impression.
I disagree, I know the opinion of WSJ, WP, FT or national like france24,DW, BBC, RT,AJ Or at least know is always opinion Base, the facts are selected in a subjecive way.
Is way harder to know how opinionated Wikipedia is, and everything make them sound like their opinion is only base on facts but isn't.
> I think a lot people underestimate how arbitrary some editorial decisions on wikipedia can be.
I think it is true for all information we consume. One of the very important skills to learn in life is to think critically. Who wrote this? When? What would be their bias?
Text is written by humans (or now sometimes LLMs), and humans are imperfect (and LLMs are worth what they are worth).
Many times Wikipedia is more than enough, sometimes it is not. Nothing is perfect, and it is very important to understand it.
Also, I think for 99% of Wikipedia, there isn't much need to worry about Biases. It's about an uncontroversial chemical compound, a tiny village, a family of bacteria and so on. Knowledge isn't all subjective and prone to bias.
One issue with Wikipedia is that the "who when what bias" can change drastically between articles or fields, making it hard to actually answer.
For traditional news media, editorial boards and author bias are much more consistent over time and across articles.
My point was mostly, people just aren’t as aware of issues with it compared to other forms of media. Issues in other forms of media don’t change that or make it less of an issue.
At the end of the day you’re gonna to consume information from somewhere, it’ll have shortcomings but you’re still better off knowing that going in.
On bias’ of authors: I actually think people fixate a bit too much on bias of an author to the point it’s a solely used as a speculative reason to dismiss something asuntrue. If the claims made by the author are consistent with other information and others trusted sources it’s just irrelevant. I feel people online to readily get hung up motivations and it’s sometimes a crotch for a readers inability to engage with ideas they find uncomfortable.
Like if a private company sponsors a study with a finding that aligns with their business interests, that actually doesn’t mean it’s false. It’s false if no one can reproduce their results. I mean you’d definitely want to verify other sources knowing this, but also researches have their own reputation to preserve as well. In reality the truth ends up being more boring than people anticipate.
But obviously it matters when claims can’t be verified or tested but I find online there’s an overemphasis of this online.
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I think people underestimate how arbitrary editorial decisions are for any media.
Things like PBS and Wikipedia might have biases, but idk if it's realistic to expect better.
Idk if this how it came off but just tbc my point also wasn’t indirectly promoting traditional media.
I think a lot if ppl are rightly sceptical of traditional media, but I feel I see more people giving Wikipedia a pass or placing it on a higher pedestal as a resource than it should be at times.
Admittedly I think I would prefer Wikipedia to traditional media in most cases. Although that wasn’t really what I was getting at
I very rarely watch PBS (I don't live stateside), but it is extremely biased. I lasted one and a half documentaries on the free trial.
I've seen plenty of their other content elsewhere. Maybe it doesn't resonate with non-Americans.
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It's funny how the more accurate a source gets the more it draws in people desiring accuracy.
Then this rather small cohort of high precision people express frustrations without providing the context of accuracy against the masses preferred methods (TikTok, cable news, broadcast, truth social)
So now the water is muddled and people and Ais are mistrained because an "absolute scale" is not used when discussing accuracy.
JJ McCullough‘s gripe seems to be that wikipedia is kind of a mediocre summary of the information on a topic. But I'm not sure you should expect much more. You can always go to individual sources if you want that.
Reading (the right) books is definitely the best way to learn about a topic, but its not great for quickly looking up random stuff. Books can spread misinformation too, from Malleus Maleficarum to Erich von Däniken.
It is useful for quickly looking up simple facts, and provides a list of sources.
The video makes some interesting criticisms. The lack of diversity is not surprising. Dominated by white, male, American's with time on their hands! how would have thought that? Its very obviously American dominated (at least the English version).
I once partly cross verify a virologist's lecture. He confused a brother of an important scientist who made an important discovery. I have no doubt that he knows what he's talking about when it comes to viruses.
All in all, checking other sources to see if they lines up is a pain and labor intensive, never mind actually checking to see if the references are actually sound evidence.
Spanish Wikipedia is dominated by folks from Spain, despite Spain being a minority of Spanish speakers.
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This just reads like out-of-touch elitism, sorry.
Most people don't even have the reading level for full comprehension of a wiki article, let alone being able to discern the nuance of some aspects of the topic.
> Yeah perfect is the enemy of the good but imperfect is still imperfect.
This assumes perfection is attainable. I'd like to see your idea of a "perfect" book or article on some topic.
I've seen proudly uneducated people with no understanding take sledgehammers to history and real knowledge, and so I have no illusions about how Wikipedia is horrible, unfair, unprofessional, mercurial, and vulnerable to manipulation.
I would've gladly paid more in taxes to make Encyclopædia Britannica an international non-profit public service delivered in web form to all so long as each area were managed and curated with subject matter expert input.
> jj mccullough‘s opinions
holy heck there is so much wrong about this video. i can't believe "internet influencers" can just turn on their cameras and spew so much untruth without a care in the world...
comparatively wikipedia is imperfect, but much better than this kind of slop.
Feel free to actually articulate the actual issues you’re referring to.
It’s been a while since I watched it but the thing I remember taking away was you can do a lot better than Wikipedia, and he encouraged people to spend more time looking at primary sources for deeper research, and points out how it’s the basis of a lot of slop on YouTube.
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This article is talking about Portal:Current Events on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events). The current events articles are fantastic! Normal newspaper articles are status updates. Current events articles synthesize news to present the current, comprehensive understanding about an event. It’s cool to monitor how current events articles evolve over time.
I suggest everybody here take a look at Matthew White's excellent WikiWatch. Despite the last entry being 2006, it is still a very valuable criticism of Wikipedia today.
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/wikiwoo.htm
>just about every link to a Wikipedia page created in the past quarter-century still works
Not so sure about this; page titles change and redirects get removed. I'm thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Nex_Benedict where initial news articles and her obituary used her birth name, Dagny Benedict, but soon this name was scrubbed from the wikipedia page, as well as its talk page and redirects, on the policy of deadnames.
Wow, I would expect there would at least be a single mention of "born Dagny Benedict" somewhere at the beginning of the background section as is typical in other pages. If this is intentional, to omit this entirely seems like it unnecessarily politicizes the issue rather than documenting the history of a person.
> Wow, I would expect there would at least be a single mention of "born Dagny Benedict" somewhere at the beginning of the background section as is typical in other pages. If this is intentional, to omit this entirely seems like it unnecessarily politicizes the issue rather than documenting the history of a person.
It's all very 1984-esque; I'm seeing shades of "We were never/always at war with Oceania/Eurasia".
This is revisionist history, and the scrubbing of previously correct but now incorrect "history" should be viewed with suspicion.
-----------------------------------------------------
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth.
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You’re hitting the wrong aspect of the problem. You should use someone’s old name when it’s absolutely necessary, not as a matter of course. People change their name for a reason after all, and if their latest one suffices, let it be.
In the case of this person, they were not notable under their birth name. Unfortunately, their transgender status is the whole reason they’re notable, and the article clearly states that they are. I don’t need that person’s old name to understand the situation.
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> If this is intentional, to omit this entirely seems like it unnecessarily politicizes the issue rather than documenting the history of a person.
I feel as if you're trying to inject a political motivation about the decision to omit that detail when a simpler one is better. If something of little note is offensive to the person you're talking about, it's disrespectful to them as a person, to their humanity, to mention it.
E.g. You would only mention someone was born, to parents who were avid members of the KKK, if and only if, their life story related in some way.
Otherwise you're trying to introduce some preexisting bias that doesn't belong. In this example, if this person left their community to fight racism. The information about the set of likes reasons they got involved, are worth the bias of introducing the assumptions you're reasonably allowed to make about their parents.
If they find that religion offensive, and spent their life exclusively on epidemiology, it's wrong to include that detail, true or not.
Then, do consider the "political" aspect, that has led to the deadname policy that Wikipedia has. Many people, who for their own cultural reasons, want to disrespect someone, will refuse to address or refer to some individual the way they want to be. That behavior is no different from calling some one fuckface, and refusing to address them differently. You've selected something they find offensive, in order to bully and harass them, needlessly. Given that toxic reality, for cases like this, it's better to defer to not mentioning the name they were given at birth, because that detail might be used against them. Again, there might be some stronger reason you would want to include it. But it's better to err on the side of respecting the individual.
There's a tricky ethical question here: if someone changed their name and ask for not being called their former name ever again, you can either ignore their will, which is rude, or chose to follow it but then you are doing a disservice to the public's understanding.
The secind option used to be the norm on wikipedia even 15 years ago, but Anti-trans activists using dead-naming as a slur against trans people triggered the shift from the second option to the first.
As usual assholes are why we can't have nice things.
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the current one is better, sounds like eggs benedict
The guidelines on gender identity are based on the BLP policies [1], which call for taking harm into account and not going into excess detail on someone's personal life.
Everything people are upset over in this thread is explained clearly in the BLP section on privacy, the gender identity section of the Manual of Style [2], and this essay on gender identity [3].
This particular example is completely clear-cut. Sources didn't cover them at all under any previous names because they're only known from one event. Someone who isn't transgender would be covered the exact same way. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a gossip rag.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_livin...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Biog...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Gender_identity
Benedict became notable because of her death; Biographies of Living Persons has a privacy section that gives reasoning. These reasons, e.g. identity theft, complaint from the person, harassment, can not apply to a deceased person.
News articles did cover Benedict under the name Dagny.
As far as policies go, this page should be titled "Suicide of Nex Benedict" according to this policy [0], yet the talk on that subject ended with "closed with no consensus to move." [1]
This does speak to the selective application and selective enforcement of policies on Wikipedia. But I was most concerned to learn about how scrubbing the histories of pages is official policy itself.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Choosing_article_tit...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Death_of_Nex_Benedict/Arc...
Admittedly I do not know how much of a sensitive issue this is, but I find it surprising that the name given at birth is not mentioned anywhere on the Wikipedia page, even though in other cases of name change usually "Name (born Old Name)" is written.
Their guidelines on using dead names says why that is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Biog...
I often find myself clicking a link that takes me to an anchor on another page that no longer exists. Surely a system could be implemented to remove these?
Wikipedia has long been hijacked to serve agendas. The “truth” is whatever the highest bidder wants it to be.
Most recently hijacked by the Qatar dictatorship: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/16/pr-firm-p...
News, influencers, Wikipedia, almost all information we consume nowadays is intentional. And not even getting into billions poured into American colleges by the same people.
When I was working in the heart of conservative online media in West Palm Beach—nestled between Rush Limbaugh’s studio, Mar-a-Lago, and Newsmax—targeting Evangelical Christians in the Bible Belt, my salary (and the direction things eventually went) was being paid for by the Saudis. At the time, the propaganda was mostly “pro-oil” and “climate change is a hoax.” Around that same period, those same Saudis bought a 10% stake in Fox News and helped shape the narrative for millions of Christians who tune in and treat it like their main source of news.
So yeah, if you were ever curious where the profits go every time you fill up your car with gas… there.
I thought I was just building media websites. I didn’t even see the content until after six months. I put in my one month notice, finished what I was working on, and left. The amount of money they offered me to stay was ridiculous. I don’t blame people at Fox News for bending the knee and taking that Saudi money -- I just couldn’t make myself do it.
“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” A lot of people are going to spend eternity in hell for propaganda and lies.
Saudis are invested in a huge range of things in America. It has historical roots in the petrodollar. The basic deal of it that that they would only sell their oil in USD, which gave the USD a de facto backing after we defaulted in Bretton Woods (which was a de jure gold backing). That gave the USD a huge chunk of stability and in exchange we agreed to sell them weapons and broadly support them, while in exchange they were also asked to purchase US treasuries and assets with surplus revenues.
Over time this led to Saudis being involved in just about everything. For instance the biggest owner of 'old Twitter' under Dorsey was Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud. Needless to say the zeitgeist on old Twitter and Saudi Arabia have basically nothing in common, so you're probably seeing ideological motivation where the real motivation is generally just monetary. Not every country is conspiring to subvert other countries to their ideology.
Basically Saudia Arabia is filthy rich because of oil, but they fully understand that even if we continue burning oil until we run out, we will run out, within the lifetime of some people living today. So they have to migrate their economy away from oil and, on the timeline for such a revolutionary shift, they have very little time left. This is likely what MBS sees as what will define his legacy.
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> I don’t blame people at Fox News for bending the knee and taking that Saudi money
i do, and i judge people who take money to push harmful things. i don't see why this is bad.
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Looks like Prince Alwaleed bin Talal's ownership of Fox was between 5.5% to 7% during the two-decade period of 1997 ~ 2017. He divested during an anti-corruption purge.
They hate Muslims, but they love money and theocracy more, and Saudis are top of the world in both.
No wonder Terrorism is supported by oil money.
What level of moral compromise is acceptable in this world to take whatever money is offered? Presumably the job of hitman is unacceptable? Where's the line drawn?
Personally I'd say that lying to perpetuate a system that is leading to various populous parts of the world becoming uninhabitable is on the wrong side of that line.
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There are agendas there, just like in every human endeavor, but it definitely hasn't been "hijacked", it's still by far the best single repository of human knowledge out there. If I had to choose one website to take with me to a desert island, it's an obvious choice.
We should keep talking about the issues and improving things, but don't throw out the baby with bathwater.
> We should keep talking about the issues and improving things, but don't throw out the baby with bathwater.
Yeah, I wonder what solution people propose that claim that Wikipedia is 'hijacked' or 'compromised' and pushing agendas? While Wikipedia is not perfect, it is the best encyclopedia we currently have, mostly due to collective efforts and maintainers that care about the state of Wikipedia. I would even say that it is a good thing that there is this transparency, that states and capital are trying to influence Wikipedia because then you know that you may take some articles with a grain of salt or can actively push against it. Every alternative to Wikipedia that I have seen so far is one that claims to be more truthful than the original, but in the end these are platforms that push agendas without the transparency and attempt to further obscure power relations under the pretext of truth.
Every alternative to Wikipedia will have to solve the problems that Wikipedia already has to be a better alternative. However, I do think these are fundamental unsolvable problems and everyone who claims to have solved this is part of a power struggle over who defines what is considered true.
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it absolutely has been. like every online community, Wikipedia is extremely vulnerable to the terminally online and/or the mentally ill, to whom everything is political. like clockwork, every remotely political article cites opinions only from a certain perspective, often quoting glorified nobodies to assert the narrative the '''editors''' want to present. dissenting opinions, no matter how overwhelmingly common among the real people, are mentioned in passing at best and often derisively.
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The Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia was very much hijacked. As was the Lowland Scots one, except in the second case the individual made the news. The Gaelic one has a German guy running it who has several vanity articles and has chased most other users off apart from some government employees.
If you can download the Talk pages and edit history, you probably have enough information to, on average, mostly be dealing with objective fact.
I think for anything controversial we need a completely different model.
Officially wikipedia is NPOV but an especially contentious and murky political mudfight decides what counts as a "citeable" source and what doesnt and what counts as notable and what doesnt.
It also has an incredibly strong western bias.
Every government, corporation and billionaire pays somebody to participate in that fight as well, using every dirty trick they can.
Until we have a model that can sidestep these politics (which Wikipedia seemingly has no real desire to do) and aggregate sources objectively I think it will continue to suck.
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But by claiming one thing and doing the exact opposite (on a statistical quantitative basis), Wikipedia and all other western outlets have become just a front for propaganda which is also the reason why I don't believe in "Persecution of Uyghurs in China"
German Scholars Reveal Shocking TRUTH About China’s Xinjiang Province
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fp-MZsRhKM
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it's one crucial topic imo
internet altered the way society communicates and why, a lot of discussions now end up by "show me your sources" aka "what is the truth" and it's often centralized into some accepted source like wikipedia
where there simple single point of 'truth' like that before ?
my 2cents is that humans are not meant to live in one global absolute truth and we all lived in relative fuzzy reality before, it was slow and imperfect but not as easy to tamper with
Showing sources is not a bad thing. The harm is not questioning sources. A lot of people rely on poor sources. Whatever what the first result in Google historically, and now LLM summaries.
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Not so long ago, the "truth" was mainly given by the priest or the mayor.
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We still live in that fuzzy reality. Not much has changed.
It doesnt really matter if the whole world has access to the same information if the whole world trusts completely different sources.
For better or worse we trust those sources exclusively because of tribal affinity.
I doubt many people in the US could be persuaded to trust Global Times over the New York Times even if you could prove it had a better prediction track record. Wrong tribe.
I’m continually impressed by Wikipedia’s quality controls. In my experience people underestimate them.
I don't underestimate them, I just don't think they are good. I've been on Wikipedia for at least twenty years.
> And not even getting into billions poured into American colleges by the same people.
What does this mean?
Colleges are political, and donations are made to assure they keep on being political.
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You need only to look at how many actual well credentialed doctors get their Wiki pages smeared with words like "misinformation spreader" for dissenting against covid narratives
Can you provide an example?
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I would love to see news sites copying at least some of the technology of wikipedia. First and foremost every article should be versioned and it should be easy to see diffs. Every version of a news article should have a permanent link to it. Why don‘t news agencies use git for example? Also news articles should be written using a markup language that is easy to parse and easy to read by AI agents. Instead most of them still write articles in word and convert it from docx into HTML or PDF. That usually generates terrible documents that break accessibility. And of course a common markup language for news articles would enable many applications. But I guess we will land on Mars before we can have something like that.
More professional organisations definitely have some kind of CMS, with potentially their own version management (at least for what’s published). But I also don’t think we can fault people for preparing their piece in their preferred writing tool.
I just can’t see existing news agencies doing this of their own volition. As Generating stories themselves is what keeps news agencies in business.
Unless they had a new competitor who had who kept running rings around them with all three features. But it’s going to come back to having better stories or better long form pieces (depending on the publications niche), as that’s ultimately why someone visits their site.
I could however see some 3rd party doing this like an extension that overlays someone’s site or acts as alternative presentation of their content.
Although, due to Wikipedia's own policy, that it must cite other reliable sources, it can never be a source of first-hand news.
Wikipedia's main form of academic critique is to "verify" content through a Google search.
When there's some big ongoing thing in the news there'll be many articles on that same topic on news websites and sometimes you can't even find the original one that tells what actually happened. Wikipedia's article on it is usually a great summary
Comparing the same article in different languages sometimes gets very educational.
Yes, and sometimes they are very different. I was surprised to see the German Wikipedia had a couple of articles on Scottish history that were better than the English language one!
It's funny how every source of knowledge converges to the same thing: mass media. Telling you what to think and trying to influence your behaviour rather than trying to inform you.
Using facts, omitting facts or emphasising particular facts over others in order to mislead you. The scientific journals are now included with their anonymous editorials. Peer review is pretty much the same as fact-checking.
Contrast this with good fiction, which employs falsehoods to point towards the truth: truth which cannot easily be verified but which is our real bread and butter.
Oh goodness, if wiki is news, then it's the most biased and easily editable news outside of Winston Smith and the Ministry of Truth.
> the most biased
Is it biased because it doesn't reflect your opinion or are the facts also biased?
Really? News coverage on Wikipedia is a lot more reliable than (say) Fox News. Breaking news events in particular get a lot of eyeballs and while you obviously can't take everything as gospel, genuinely wrong info is usually purged pretty quickly.
Most news outlets get their news either from press releases or press agencies. It means you effectively get the same talking points across different outlets.
Fox is designed to promote Republican viewpoints and MSNBC to promote Democrat ones. They present little outside them and are usually telling the same small selection of stories from different angles.
Wikipedia is not a newspaper. Please stop trying to update it with information less than a week old.
Is there an RSS version of the weekly newsletter about Wikipedia articles?
You can use https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to turn it into RSS
I’m going to reject the premise—this is not “news”, but “recent events”.
It seems a shame Weeklypedia doesn't have an RSS feed.
Huh, TIL about https://weekly.hatnote.com/
This is fascinating, thanks for mentioning it!
The post you're commenting on literally starts with the description of this newsletter
In the UK I would say most people are proud of the BBC^; many people I speak to are smug when comparing it to e.g. Fox News, CNBC, etc... I think this is a big mistake, and that the USA system is actually better.
It's impossible for one news source to be unbiased, and the delusion that it is unbiased is dangerous. If you truly believe a source is "the truth" and unbiased it allows you to switch off any critical thinking; the information bypasses any protections you have.
Much better to have many news sources where the bias is evident and the individual has to synthesise an opinion themselves (not claiming this is perfect by any means, but a perfect system does not exist).
It is obviously the case that Wikipedia is biased, and I think competition is a great thing. We would be better served by a market of options to use our own faculties than a false sense of comfort in a fake truth.
^though many are refusing to pay the (almost) legally mandatory "tv-license".
I agree we need multiple news sources, but the UK has multiple news sources. What the BBC adds is one with a different funding model so different biases. I do not think this works as well as it did historically.
As for unwillingness to pay the license fee, the biggest issue is the rise of streaming alternatives. It reduced the BBC from providing about half of available TV to being one among many providers so the license fee no longer feels like good value for money.
Its not mandatory. I have never owned a TV. If you do not watch broadcast TV or Iplayer you do not have to have a TV license.
I also think Capita's aggressive scare tactics in trying to get people to pay the license fee have created a lot of hostility towards the BBC.
I think a significant part of the pushback against the TV license is that it pays for the BBC, I believe many people are of the opinion that they'd be perfectly happy not having the BBC and not paying the licence fee. A significant portion of the people paying for the BBC have never watched anything on it.
I am not proud of the BBC at all. I have boycotted their licence fee for almost as long as Wikipedia has been around.
If you want to know who the UK is going to war with next, watch the BBC.
Their news is horrendously biased when it comes to the British royal family. They have an institutional bias against Scottish independence since it would cut 10% of their licence fee. (Their provision to areas outside the Home Countries is a disgrace and patronising.)
Some people seems to confuse, willingly or not, unbiased with targeting neutral point of view, free of any perspective.
We can step back from a debate and reports who's saying what, but this is still reporting ongoing debate. And still involving attention within its considerations, which do change our mental process as much as performative effects can go. That's as opposed to remain completely unaware the debate could be even be considered.
no one is going out of ontological constraints and brings absolute truth from transexistential considerations.
No one who regularly watches biased news sources does so while acknowledging the constant bias. And I don’t think most people think the BBC is unbiased, it’s constantly attacked as having bias to both sides of the aisle ironically. The BBC is far from perfect but it’s in a different league to Fox News to the point that it feels disingenuous to suggest you’d be better off watching Fox News while telling yourself that you’re filtering out the bias.
BBC has very little credibility in the developing world
I prefer subject experts over Wikipedia.
Britannica's online format suits it very well
Keep in mind that Wikipedia itself tells you that "Wikipedia is not a newspaper"
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:NOTNEWS...
While having an "In the news" section on the front page
It clarifies exactly what that means. It doesn’t say that the information have to pass the test of time. Only that it is not a place of original reporting, unsourced gossip, etc.
Those two statements don't contradict each other.
Which is fine and not contradictory. It is not a newspaper (like HN) but it may overlap with some mainstream news (also like HN).
> will ensure everyone has access to trustworthy knowledge for everyone for generations to come.
Maybe to trustworthy propaganda, just like this website.
WikiMedia has agreed to promote the UN's SDGs. There was a discussion on it several years ago. It was more or less presented as a fait accompli.
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Wikipedia has over 7,000,000 articles, and grokipedia only about 6,000,000. Or is that not what you meant?
jfc
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Grokipedia (https://grokipedia.com/) represents the most promising attempt in ages to build a genuinely bias-free online encyclopedia.
Ironically, trying it fairly requires you to first suspend your own biases regarding its owner.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/elon-musk/elon-musk-grokipedia-...
"Unlike Wikipedia, Grokipedia centralizes its editing process. Users can submit suggested edits to Grokipedia, but instead of assigning a group of volunteer community editors to decide on the edits, xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, controls whether or not a certain edit is approved and implemented on the website."
So you could as well call it "Muskipedia"
https://grokipedia.com/page/Elon_Musk
If this looks like a "genuinely bias-free" page to you, I don't know what to tell you.
I started reading the Grokipedia page on the "Russian invasion of Ukraine". Immediately after the abstract, it starts talking about the "9th century Kyivan Rus" which seems like irrelevant information to a conflict over a millenia later, but then you realize it's exact same thing that Putin started with in his interview with Tucker Carlson to push the 'Ukraine isn't a real country' narrative.
can you provide a few examples where grokipedia outshines wikipedia?
Are you joking?
>Alternativa Estudiantil Alternativa Estudiantil is a Spanish patriotic student movement founded in September 2023 to counter perceived left-wing and woke dominance in universities, positioning itself as a conservative alternative emphasizing national identity and meritocracy.[1]
A random article in the "edit approved by Grok".
Genuinely bias-free my ass.
after 25 years wikipedia showed what it truly was created for, by selling the content for training. otherwise - okay, this was a cool project, perhaps we need better. like federated, crypto-signed articles that once collected together, @atproto style, produce the article with notable changes to it.
Their enterprise offering is more for fresh retrieval than training. For training, you can just download the free database dump — one you would inadvertently end up recreating if you were to use their enterprise APIs in a (pre-)training pipeline.
Context: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/wikipedia-will-share-cont...
tl;dr: Wikipedia is CC and has public APIs, but AI companies have recently started paying for "enterprise" high-speed access.
Notably, the enterprise program started in 2021 and Google has been paying since 2022.
You’re saying Wikipedia was created 25 years ago to sell its content to train LLMs that didn’t even exist?! I doubt it…
“Jimmy Wales is even more of a visionary than we thought”