Instead of individual, centralized websites there will be an interconnected network of encyclopedias. This means the same topic can be treated in completely different ways. For example geology.wiki/article/Mountain may be completely different different from poetry.wiki/article/Mountain. There can be Ibis instances strictly focused on a particular topic with a high quality standard, and others covering many areas in layman’s terms.
I don’t think something like this exists yet(?), so it’ll be cool to see how this will be like.
Which also means that marxist.wiki/article/communism will be completely different from libertarian.wiki/article/communism. I think I will take Wikipedia’s attempt at impartiability over a “wikipedia” destined to just devolve into islands of “alternative facts”
You won’t find any encyclopedia (or anything really) you can use then since everything is biased towards something. Wikipedia has a massive neoliberal bias for example. And a heavily biased leadership as linked in this post.
I would love to read both a marxist.wiki/article/communism and a libertarian.wiki/article/communism - opinions are great, fine & dandy, but at the end of the day, I don’t want a marxist/grasshopper vs. a libertarian/grasshopper, and I DEFINITELY do not want a conservative/vaccine vs. a liberal/vaccine each feeding misinformation from a slightly different and both-sides-incorrect approach. The enormous EFFORTS that go into finding neutral and balanced information are worthwhile, imho, as is having a central repository that would not need to be individually updated hundreds or thousands of times.
A mirroring/backup process would just as easily perform the same stated goal of preserving human knowledge - and these are already done. Arguably the federation model works best for social media, a bit less so I am told for Mastodon, but I think would not work well at all for an encyclopedia style.
But don’t mind me, I am simply grieving the death of facts and reason over here… - the fact that we would even want to contemplate different “alternative (sets of) facts” at all means that we already have lost something that was once good. :-(
Everyone has implicit biases. It takes a huge amount of effort to work past them and write content that is considered unbiased. The latter is a group effort to achieve consensus, which even in the hard sciences is often difficult, but Wikipedia has had fantastic successes there - e.g. look at any controversial subject (someone mentioned BP, and how half the page was about their “controversies”, which does not say that they are true, nor false, but acknowledges that they exist all the same - most people, with the exclusion of the BP execs I am sure - would consider that to be a state that is unbiased).
In fact, the OP brings up a major source of bias to begin with: if someone wants to federate a blogging website, why would we even talk about it - just DO IT!:-) However, the name “Wikipedia” was mentioned b/c it is popular. This introduces a bias whereby the rest of the discussion will be predicated upon the lines of what Wikipedia is vs. what it is not. Even though the OP made it clear that “Wikipedia” is not the goal of that project at all. Even dragging its name into it has thus introduced a source of bias, rather than allowing everyone here to discuss the merits of this proposal on its own, as if made from scratch rather than a Wikipedia-clone (“good” connotations?) or Wikipedia-wanna-be (“bad” ones?) or Wikipedia-whatever.
Are you of the opinion that people don’t already use internet resources, libraries, interviews and other
educational avenues to inform themselves? Many here seem to be needing an education on how to use Wikipedia responsively, they seem to think that one is unable to engage with a wikipedia article critically.
I just checked the article for BP, as one of the blogs linked here claimed that over 44% of BP’s wikipedia page was corporate speak. The ‘controversies’ section is one third to half the wikipedia page in length. As a jumping-off point for further study, it is perfectly adequate.
Are you sure that you meant that to respond to me - and not e.g. the xkcd comic one below?
Fwiw I totally agree with you, and I think that’s a fantastic example that you brought forth - kudos b/c I think a specific example really does add something to this conversation. Just as it does so on many wikipedia pages. There are ways to phrase most things that can be agreed upon by most people, by wrapping it in the proper context.
At a guess then, they do not think that the language describing communism is extreme enough, and so want to bypass working together to achieve consensus and instead strike off and make their own internet. But I could be wrong. Then again, the burden of clearly explaining what they want to do is on them, so if so, I don’t take all of that blame.:)
Ik I’m late to the party, but I think this would be soooo much better than Wikipedia for finding useful information on niche or controversial topics.
Instead of being limited to Wikipedia’s contributors and having to accommodate or guess their biases, and have a terrible, incomplete “controversies” section on every page, you could browse the same page across instances whose biases are much more explicit and see what each group determines is most important about the topic.
Instead of having to find a single mutually agreed upon article where each “faction” has their own set of issues with the content, you can now browse pages that each of those factions feel best represent their POV, and use the sum of them to form an opinion where no information is omitted.
Obviously lots of instances will have complete bullshit, but it’s likely enough that you will find instances that have well-sourced material from a diverse breadth of viewpoints, and can pick an instance that federates to your preferred criteria for quality. Misinfo will exist regardless, and if they get it from a federated wiki, it will probably be at least marginally better quality or better cited than the Facebook or Reddit posts they were getting it from before.
It would be useful for the “what does X group think about Y” aspect alone.
There’s also nothing stopping diverse, consensus-based instances from popping up. Or lots of niche academic instances with greater depth on their areas of expertise.
As an academic I love this. On Wikipedia there’s actually fights among different expert disciplines going on. It is better to allow different instances operated by different discipline summarize knowledge from their own perspective.
To be fair, those are good faith arguments with the goal being to determine the real, objective truth. Hopefully.
That is not how this tool would be used, in the hands of people not trained in the art of socratic discourse. Just imagine how the situation in Gaza would end up being described.
I can respect your comment. The problem with Wikipedia’s scholarly articlesI wanted to raise was that some group of researchers (or businesses) wash away others’ views. In other times, mathematicians try to satisfy everyone from different disciplines, and write a very abstract article that covers everyone’s view yet is too academic and hardly readable to most readers who actually need Wikipedia.
The goal of academic research is to inform the best and brightest of the real information. For e.g. academic extensions to how nuclear power works, or for engineers to have a working basis to build a viable power plant, and so on.
The goal of an encyclopedia though is arguably different: to make people “feel” informed, without necessarily being so? Or at least to serve as a starting point for further studies, maybe?
Science marches ever onwards, and eventually that gets collected into textbooks, and even later into encyclopedias. Or maybe now we’re working from a new model where it could skip that middle step? But science still seems leagues ahead of explanations to the masses, and whereas in science the infighting is purposeful and helpful (to a degree), the infighting of making something explainable in a clearer manner to more people is also purposeful and helpful, though federating seems to me to be giving up on making a centralized repository of knowledge, i.e. the very purpose of an “encyclopedia”?
Science reporting must be decentralized, but encyclopedias have a different purpose and so should not be, maybe? At least not at the level of Wikipedia.
Fair. Though that capability - e.g. the identical wikia software, implementing the MediaWiki protocol - already exists. Maybe federating it would somehow improve it, though it would also open it up to have greater vulnerabilities especially when non-scientists get involved, e.g. a w/article/conservative/vaccine vs. a w/article/real/vaccine. Scientists can handle these controversies, but people who do not have the base knowledge with which to properly understand, e.g. ivermectin, are not going to be able to distinguish between the truth vs. the lies.
So the people that would put it to the best use don’t absolutely need it - sure it would be nice but peer-reviewed articles already exist - while the ones for whom it would be most damaging are almost certainly going to be the primary target audience.
I don’t think something like this exists yet(?), so it’ll be cool to see how this will be like.
Which also means that marxist.wiki/article/communism will be completely different from libertarian.wiki/article/communism. I think I will take Wikipedia’s attempt at impartiability over a “wikipedia” destined to just devolve into islands of “alternative facts”
But then again, you could say this about Lemmy and Reddit too.
Lemmy took 5 years to get to this point. Let’s give this a few years and see how it turns out.
I am okay with bias in my social media.
Far less so in my encyclopedia.
You won’t find any encyclopedia (or anything really) you can use then since everything is biased towards something. Wikipedia has a massive neoliberal bias for example. And a heavily biased leadership as linked in this post.
I would love to read both a marxist.wiki/article/communism and a libertarian.wiki/article/communism - opinions are great, fine & dandy, but at the end of the day, I don’t want a marxist/grasshopper vs. a libertarian/grasshopper, and I DEFINITELY do not want a conservative/vaccine vs. a liberal/vaccine each feeding misinformation from a slightly different and both-sides-incorrect approach. The enormous EFFORTS that go into finding neutral and balanced information are worthwhile, imho, as is having a central repository that would not need to be individually updated hundreds or thousands of times.
A mirroring/backup process would just as easily perform the same stated goal of preserving human knowledge - and these are already done. Arguably the federation model works best for social media, a bit less so I am told for Mastodon, but I think would not work well at all for an encyclopedia style.
But don’t mind me, I am simply grieving the death of facts and reason over here… - the fact that we would even want to contemplate different “alternative (sets of) facts” at all means that we already have lost something that was once good. :-(
@OpenStars @Alsephina are you assuming that there is any writing free of bias?
Everyone has implicit biases. It takes a huge amount of effort to work past them and write content that is considered unbiased. The latter is a group effort to achieve consensus, which even in the hard sciences is often difficult, but Wikipedia has had fantastic successes there - e.g. look at any controversial subject (someone mentioned BP, and how half the page was about their “controversies”, which does not say that they are true, nor false, but acknowledges that they exist all the same - most people, with the exclusion of the BP execs I am sure - would consider that to be a state that is unbiased).
In fact, the OP brings up a major source of bias to begin with: if someone wants to federate a blogging website, why would we even talk about it - just DO IT!:-) However, the name “Wikipedia” was mentioned b/c it is popular. This introduces a bias whereby the rest of the discussion will be predicated upon the lines of what Wikipedia is vs. what it is not. Even though the OP made it clear that “Wikipedia” is not the goal of that project at all. Even dragging its name into it has thus introduced a source of bias, rather than allowing everyone here to discuss the merits of this proposal on its own, as if made from scratch rather than a Wikipedia-clone (“good” connotations?) or Wikipedia-wanna-be (“bad” ones?) or Wikipedia-whatever.
Are you of the opinion that people don’t already use internet resources, libraries, interviews and other educational avenues to inform themselves? Many here seem to be needing an education on how to use Wikipedia responsively, they seem to think that one is unable to engage with a wikipedia article critically. I just checked the article for BP, as one of the blogs linked here claimed that over 44% of BP’s wikipedia page was corporate speak. The ‘controversies’ section is one third to half the wikipedia page in length. As a jumping-off point for further study, it is perfectly adequate.
Are you sure that you meant that to respond to me - and not e.g. the xkcd comic one below?
Fwiw I totally agree with you, and I think that’s a fantastic example that you brought forth - kudos b/c I think a specific example really does add something to this conversation. Just as it does so on many wikipedia pages. There are ways to phrase most things that can be agreed upon by most people, by wrapping it in the proper context.
At a guess then, they do not think that the language describing communism is extreme enough, and so want to bypass working together to achieve consensus and instead strike off and make their own internet. But I could be wrong. Then again, the burden of clearly explaining what they want to do is on them, so if so, I don’t take all of that blame.:)
Reading the links in this post alone shows wikipedia is already one of those biased islands lol
And with this system you will definitely see other attempts at impartial wikis too.
@Quacksalber @Alsephina Wikipedia is already filled with a LOT of fake information and biased
Ik I’m late to the party, but I think this would be soooo much better than Wikipedia for finding useful information on niche or controversial topics.
Instead of being limited to Wikipedia’s contributors and having to accommodate or guess their biases, and have a terrible, incomplete “controversies” section on every page, you could browse the same page across instances whose biases are much more explicit and see what each group determines is most important about the topic.
Instead of having to find a single mutually agreed upon article where each “faction” has their own set of issues with the content, you can now browse pages that each of those factions feel best represent their POV, and use the sum of them to form an opinion where no information is omitted.
Obviously lots of instances will have complete bullshit, but it’s likely enough that you will find instances that have well-sourced material from a diverse breadth of viewpoints, and can pick an instance that federates to your preferred criteria for quality. Misinfo will exist regardless, and if they get it from a federated wiki, it will probably be at least marginally better quality or better cited than the Facebook or Reddit posts they were getting it from before.
It would be useful for the “what does X group think about Y” aspect alone.
There’s also nothing stopping diverse, consensus-based instances from popping up. Or lots of niche academic instances with greater depth on their areas of expertise.
Removed by mod
As an academic I love this. On Wikipedia there’s actually fights among different expert disciplines going on. It is better to allow different instances operated by different discipline summarize knowledge from their own perspective.
To be fair, those are good faith arguments with the goal being to determine the real, objective truth. Hopefully.
That is not how this tool would be used, in the hands of people not trained in the art of socratic discourse. Just imagine how the situation in Gaza would end up being described.
Avoiding conflict is not always a useful aim.
I can respect your comment. The problem with Wikipedia’s scholarly articlesI wanted to raise was that some group of researchers (or businesses) wash away others’ views. In other times, mathematicians try to satisfy everyone from different disciplines, and write a very abstract article that covers everyone’s view yet is too academic and hardly readable to most readers who actually need Wikipedia.
The goal of academic research is to inform the best and brightest of the real information. For e.g. academic extensions to how nuclear power works, or for engineers to have a working basis to build a viable power plant, and so on.
The goal of an encyclopedia though is arguably different: to make people “feel” informed, without necessarily being so? Or at least to serve as a starting point for further studies, maybe?
Science marches ever onwards, and eventually that gets collected into textbooks, and even later into encyclopedias. Or maybe now we’re working from a new model where it could skip that middle step? But science still seems leagues ahead of explanations to the masses, and whereas in science the infighting is purposeful and helpful (to a degree), the infighting of making something explainable in a clearer manner to more people is also purposeful and helpful, though federating seems to me to be giving up on making a centralized repository of knowledge, i.e. the very purpose of an “encyclopedia”?
Science reporting must be decentralized, but encyclopedias have a different purpose and so should not be, maybe? At least not at the level of Wikipedia.
If you’re correct, to me the usefulness of Wikipedia is actually different from that of encyclopedia, and the pattern I’m arguing goes against that.
Fair. Though that capability - e.g. the identical wikia software, implementing the MediaWiki protocol - already exists. Maybe federating it would somehow improve it, though it would also open it up to have greater vulnerabilities especially when non-scientists get involved, e.g. a w/article/conservative/vaccine vs. a w/article/real/vaccine. Scientists can handle these controversies, but people who do not have the base knowledge with which to properly understand, e.g. ivermectin, are not going to be able to distinguish between the truth vs. the lies.
So the people that would put it to the best use don’t absolutely need it - sure it would be nice but peer-reviewed articles already exist - while the ones for whom it would be most damaging are almost certainly going to be the primary target audience.