In the 2000s, in the tech world, the open source successes that were being talked about was always Apache and Linux.
When Wikipedia started gaining a bit of traction, everyone made fun of it. It was the butt of jokes in all the prime time comedy shows. And I always felt like telling the critics - "Don't you see what is happening? People all over the world are adding their own bits of knowledge and creating this huge thing way beyond what we've seen till now. It's cooperation on an international scale! By regular people! This is what the internet is all about. People, by the thousands, are contributing without asking for anything else in return. This is incredible! "
A few years later, Encyclopedia Britannica, stopped their print edition. A few years after that I read that Wikipedia had surpassed even that.
The amount of value Wikipedia brings to the world is incalculable.
And I'm very fortunate to be alive at a time where I can witness something at this scale. Something that transcends borders and boundaries. Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion. Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world.
Thank you, Wikipedia.
https://wikipedia25.org/en/the-first-day
> Founder Jimbo Wales on a challenge overcome
Aren't you forgetting someone, Jimmy? Your co-founder Larry Sanger, perhaps?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger
Let's check one of the citations from the History of Wikipedia page: https://www.mid-day.com/lifestyle/health-and-fitness/article...
> It was Larry Sanger who chanced upon the critical concept of combining the three fundamental elements of Wikipedia, namely an encyclopedia, a wiki, and essentially unrestricted editorial access to the public during a dinner meeting with an old friend Ben Kovitz in January 2, 2001. Kovitz a computer programmer and introduced Sanger to Ward Cunningham's wiki, a web application which allows collaborative modification, extension or deletion of its content and structure. The name wiki has been derived from the Hawaiian term which meant quick. Sanger feeling that the wiki software would facilitate a good platform for an online encyclopedia web portal, proposed the concept to Wales to be applied to Nupedia. Wales intially skeptic about the idea decided to give it a try later.
> The credit for coining the term Wikipedia goes to Larry Sanger. He initially conceived the concept of a wiki-based encyclopedia project only as a means to accelerate Nupedia's slow growth. Larry Sanger served as the "chief organiser" of Wikipedia during its critical first year of growth and created and enforced many of the policies and strategy that made Wikipedia possible during its first formative year. Wikipedia turned out to contain 15,000 articles and upwards to 350 Wikipedians contributing on several topics by the end of 2001.
He may not be with the project now, but don't airbrush him out of history.
It's a very touchy subject for Wales. It caused him to walk out of an interview after 48 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uswRbWyt_pg
Without context, it looks like the interviewer was a jerk and ambushed him.
I've seen plenty of stalling like that on major news programs, and the interviewer always knows to move on (and possibly edit something in to provide context.)
---
That being said, "who started what" and "who had what idea" are silly topics to obsesses about. It always come down to who put the long-term work in. I think Wales was "in the right" to walk off; or at least say something like "I can't tell the story accurately, so please move on to a different question."
The interview started with the most mundane question "Who are you?", and the very first sentence of Wales is either a lie or misleading. The journalists asks for clarification (thats a journalists job, btw), and in his second sentence of the interview Wales insults the journalist. I'm pretty sure who is the jerk here.
It also was Wales who bought up the topic, not the journalist. If he considers it a stupid topic he does not want to talk about, why is it the very first thing he talks about?
Sanger was originally hired to edit Nupedia, a web encyclopedia project with a strict peer review process, and only worked for Wales for about a year. Wikipedia was started as a side project (with Sanger contributing to the concept and some early organizing), but Wikipedia quickly became much more successful while Nupedia basically never got off the ground. My impression is that Sanger wanted to impose his own vision on Wikipedia, but couldn't because the community of volunteer editors disagreed, and when Wales stopped paying him as a full time Nupedia editor (Wales's company was tight on cash at that time), he stopped any involvement. This was long before most of the actual work of Wikipedia happened, and that should have been the end of the story.
But ever since, Sanger has been trash talking Wikipedia as a project and community ("broken beyond repair") and trying to undermine it. A few years later he started a competing project (which was predictably a total failure). For two decades he has been promoting himself as "cofounder of Wikipedia". Interviewer after interviewer asks the same lazy questions about the subject, without ever adding any new insight. (You can see that Sanger's ghost is chasing Wikipedia even into this discussion.)
It's beating a dead horse, and entirely off the topic of what the interview was supposed to be about. Answering the question clearly and accurately takes a lot of time and finesse, which is wasted on the interviewer and most of the audience. Wales clearly screwed up in that interview, but it's not hard to see where he's coming from, psychologically.
"So, who are you?" "Stupid question."
What an interview! I had never seen this clip before, it's really something. Facts and context are important for sure, but as someone who isn't clued in on the Sanger drama, Wales could not possibly have made himself look worse. And in under a minute!
As you said, the interviewer is in the right, carrying out the job of interviewing, by pushing Wales as he did. To call him a "jerk" is silly, I think.
> That being said, "who started what" and "who had what idea" are silly topics to obsesses about. It always come down to who put the long-term work in.
So Wales can write Sanger out of the history of Wikipedia, despite evidence strongly showing that Sanger originated the idea, the name, the policies, and indeed that Sanger was the primary driving force for years. And everyone’s is supposed to accept this historical revision because who created it is a “silly topic”.
Is it also a silly topic when Wales claims credit? Or only when someone questions his assertion?
Journalism can't be deferential to it's subjects. Jimmy is a CEO of a company with lots of money and tons of access to the media. If he can't successfully prepare himself for the obvious then I can't feel bad for him.
Agreed.
In fact, journalists should be less deferential to every CEO. Those should be treated with the highest degree of scrutiny.
>It always come down to who put the long-term work in.
Exactly. Kudo to the wikimedia community!
I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask "who had what idea".
I really hate gotcha questions like "who are you".
Oh. Wow. I had no idea Jimmy Wales was like that. Enlightening.
looks like interviewer asks question not in a good faith
After watching this I kind of disagree. Wales said he didn’t care multiple times. Calling it the “dumbest question” is childish, yes. Walking out of an interview that was going nowhere is not childish.
I personally think writing Sanger out of Wikipedia history (as in this 25 year celebration montage thing) is quite lame. But I also think pressing Wales on this when he says “you can say whatever you want” is also quite lame. No one is obligated to sit with an interviewer while the interviewer tries to pick a fight.
There's context. Hank Green talked about it in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zi0ogvPfCA, but in short, paraphrasing, and adding my own thoughts:
Jimmy Wales has been poked at with the question of whether he should call himself a founder or specifically co-founder for a long time, by right-wingers who think Wikipedia is too woke, and want to irritate and discredit him as much as possible, and instead raise up his co-founder Larry Sanger. Sanger has right-wing views and a habit of accusing any article as biased that doesn't praise Trump and fundamentalist Christian values, and takes these as proof that Wikipedia has a left lean.
The interview Wales walked out of was for his book tour. I imagine it's the umpteenth interview that week with the same question asked for the same transparently bad-faith reasons, trying to bend the interview away from his book and into right-wing conspiracy theory land.
Wales actually covers this at length in his book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Rules_of_Trust
He himself admits it's a complicated situation, and argues both his own and Sanger's position.
Combined with the context provided by all the parent comments here, it's quite difficult to argue good faith given the interview was also specifically on the book tour. There are many different and actually productive ways the interview could have talked about the conflict between Wales and Sanger.
> Not surprising! Are we setting aside how deceitful his answer his? Claiming all credit for a collaborative accomplishment -- which he does by adopting the "founder" title -- would rightfully provoke "poking" by interviewers.
I went down the rabbit hole on this a while back and came away with the impression that it's complicated. And whether or not Wales is being deceitful hinges on pedantic arguments and mincing of words. Should Wales be referred to as "a founder", "co-founder", or "one of the founders"? It's not as if he's titling himself "sole founder". And Sanger is still list on his Wiki page and the Wikipedia pages as a Founder.
It should also be noted that Sanger was hired by Wales to manage Nupedia, and that Wikipedia was created as a side-project of Nupedia for the purpose to generating content for Nupedia. Does the fact that Sanger was an employee of Wales, and that Wikipedia only exists because Sanger was tasked with generating content for Nupedia impact his status as a founder? Would Sanger or Wales have gone on to create a wiki without the other?
Can Steve Jobs claim to be the creator of the iPhone since he was CEO at the time it was created at Apple?
At the end of the day Sanger was present at the ground breaking of Wikipedia but was laid off and stopped participating in the project entirely after a year. He didn't spend 25 years fostering and growing the foundation. He did however try to sabotage or subvert the project 5 years later when it was clear that it was a success. Interestingly he tried to fork it to a project that had strong editorial oversight from experts like Nupedia which flies in the face of the ethos of Wikipedia.
The inability of wealthy people to take responsibility for themselves and instead blame their own bad behavior on the mere existence of Trump is getting exceptionally thin.
Credit your co-founders. Even if you don't agree with them anymore. There's no excuse not to.
If you've been asked the question a lot then you should be _very good_ at answering it by now.
yes, but question can be done in different ways. and tilo jung always at least, not cared, if his questions are offensive... or trying to up the interviewed person
a group of people seems to think, that journalists should trip up people, like in interrogations, instead of being hard in the topic but nice in the tone.
Wikipedia is literally a spin-off of a porn company.
From that point on, where it came from or who founded it is not so important. The question is how it acts today.
It is a highly-political organization supporting lot of “progressive” ideas, California-style. So if you like reading politically biased media it may be for you.
If you are seeking for a global view you better ask different LLMs for arguments and counter-arguments on a subject.
EDIT: a couple downvotes denying the influence of specific “Wikipedia ideology” and politics.
Take a chance to edit articles and you will see how tedious it is.
There is also a lot of legal censorship. Celebrities putting pressure on removing info, or lobbies, or say things that are illegal or very frowned upon (for example questioning homosexuality, or the impact of certain wars).
Sometime it is legality, ideology, politics, funding, pressure, etc.
This is why you need to use different sources.
For the last part I agree with you, the LLMs tend to say what you like to hear. The echo chamber problem also exists, pushing them to say pros and cons is not perfect, but helps to make an opinion (and also "unaligned" models).
Facts are very skewed by the environment: in the case you push too much in one direction that is too controversial or because the politicians disagree too much with you; there can be plenty of negative consequences:
- your website gets blocked, or you get publicly under pressure, or you lose donations, you lose grants, your payment providers blocks you, you lose audience, you can get a fine, you can go to jail, etc.
Many different options.
There is asymmetry here:
We disagree, you have one opinion, what happens if both of us fight for 10 months, 24/7 debating "what is the truth ?" on that topic.
- You have that energy and time (because it's your own page, or your mission where you are paid by your company, or because this topic is personally important to you, etc)
- I don't have time or that topic is not *that* important for me.
- Consequence: Your truth is going to win.
The tricky part: there are also truths that cannot be sourced properly, but are still facts (ex: famous SV men still offering founders today investment against sex). Add on top of that, legal concerns, and it becomes a very difficult environment to navigate. Even further, it's always doable to find or fabricate facts, and the truth wins based on the amount of energy, power and money that the person has.
> It is tedious because you must edit with facts, not ideology.
Not just because you must edit with facts. If your opposition outnumbers you and/or they have more energy to spend than you, they can grind you down with bad-faith arguments and questions for clarification.
The way this goes is that they edit an article to insert their POV. You edit/revert it. They open a talk page discussion about the subject. Suppose their edit is "marine animals are generally considered cute throughout the world" with a reference to a paper by an organization in favor of seals. You revert it by saying this is NPOV. They open a talk page question asking where the organization has been declared to be partisan. Suppose you do research and find some such third-party statement that "the Foundation for Animal Aesthetics is organized by proponents of marine animals". Then they ask how this third party is accurate, or whether "organized by proponents" necessarily implies that they're biased.
This can go on more or less forever until someone gives up. The attack even has a name on Wikipedia itself: "civil POV pushing". It works because few Wikipedia admins are subject matter experts, so they police behavior (conduct) more than they police subject accuracy.
Civil POV pushers can thus keep their surface conduct unobjectionable while waiting for the one they are actioning against to either give up or to get angry enough to make a heated moment's conduct violation. It's essentially the wiki version of sealioning.
In short, a thousand "but is really two plus two equal to four?" will overcome a single "You bastard, it is four and you're deliberately trolling me", because the latter is a personal insult.
> It is tedious because you must edit with facts, not ideology.
Wikipedia is ideological. Even when the articles stick to the facts (which they often don't), editors will selectively omit inconvenient (but factually true) information to push their ideology.
As a recent, first-hand example of this, witness the highly ideologically motivated Wikipedia editors actively suppressing discussion of Hasan Piker's dog abuse/shock collar scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Hasan_Piker&...
It gave me an idea, a tool to analyze history of Hackernews user comments and determine what they are up to, what ideas they are pushing, etc. Would be cool and horrible at the same time (so if anyone wants to be on the first page of HN and has a couple of LLM credits somewhere)
It's more to show that it doesn't matter much in the end where the project comes from, but rather where the project is going
> This is why you need to use different sources.
This knife cuts both ways.
The LLMs I use all supply references.
LLMs disclose sources now.
LLMs have their issues too.
In everyday life, you cannot read 20 books about a topic about everything you are curious about, but you can ask 5 subject-experts (“the LLMs”) in 20 seconds
some of them who are going to check on some news websites (most are also biased)
Then you can ask for summaries of pros and cons, and make your own opinions.
Are they hallucinating ? Could be. Are they lying ? Could be. Have they been trained on what their masters said to say ? Could be.
But multiplying the amount of LLMs reduce the risk.
For example, if you ask DeepSeek, Gemini, Grok, Claude, GLM-4.7 or some models that have no guardrails, what they think about XXX, then perhaps there are interesting insights.
> Wikipedia is literally a spin-off of a porn company.
What? If Bomis was a porn company then Reddit is a porn company.
Edit: I take it back. It looks like Bomis was more directly pushing soft core porn than I realized.
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IMO Wales has been sitting on that chair for too long. He should retire.
It would also be better for Wikipedia to not have any "public face". I don't want fake-heroes; I want accurate, objective content.
I think he plays a good role as a lightning rod for all the MAGA morons to attack, rather than going after contributors. It's better that Musk has a tantrum at Jimmy rather than doxing some poor editor on X.
Sad that he has to play that role, but this is where we are at the moment.
Fair. Not sure if I agree or not, but an interesting perspective for sure. Would love to hear exactly why and how your comment is triggering people her..
Wow, thanks for the video actually. For a long time I felt he was complete jerk but I felt it was maybe biased propaganda. The mere fact he couldn't answer a basic question and explain for all those who don't know, but rather stormed out like a 4 year old child, only proves what I felt about him prior.
Your comment is a great example of someone deciding on a conclusion first, then backfilling a justification using minimal evidence—in this case, a single data point—to validate an existing suspicion or bias. With that standard, you can make virtually any public or semi-public figure look bad if you’re willing to cherry-pick a small enough slice of information.
> cherry-pick a small enough slice of information
[...] For a long time [...]
Pffft hahaha. Looks like interviewer was inexperienced AND hit a touchy subject. It's like trying to have a casual conversation about dating with someone who's secretly gay.
It’s the style of the interviewer. It works really well for Tilo in many cases at least. He is good as confusing and making you so uncomfortable that loos your media training. He does things that are questionable in normal life but meant more great fact finding. As we see, this does not always work. He has more or less made a career of bing a bit to close and a bit too unpleasant to the people who agree tho be interviewed.
What context may also have been lost is that the interview format is self described as somewhat naive and simple. I think the “who are you” question is his standard opening move. The interview series literally advertises to be for the “disinterested” sure you can hate it but you cannot feel tricked…
I'd say his lack of acknowledgment of Larry Sanger is actually quite useful, as it is a perfect and irrefutable example that Wikipedia has no qualms with omitting information and twisting the truth to serve a narrative.
Wikimedia, maybe, but Wikipedia itself acknowledges it in the lead paragraph:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
> Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales
> Most notably, he co-founded Wikipedia
Wikipedia shows integrity even when its co-founder does not:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales#Co-founder_status_...
> In late 2005, Wales edited his biographical entry on the English Wikipedia. Writer Rogers Cadenhead drew attention to logs showing that in his edits to the page, Wales had removed references to Sanger as the co-founder of Wikipedia.[53][54] Sanger commented that "having seen edits like this, it does seem that Jimmy is attempting to rewrite history. But this is a futile process because, in our brave new world of transparent activity and maximum communication, the truth will out."[20][55] Wales was also observed to have modified references to Bomis in a way that was characterized as downplaying the sexual nature of some of his former company's products.[16][20] Though Wales argued that his modifications were solely intended to improve the accuracy of the content,[20] he apologized for editing his biography, a practice generally discouraged on Wikipedia.[20][55]
Jimmy Wales isn't Wikimedia. He's the co-founder of Wikipedia, and an honorary board member. He doesn't serve any official capacity.
I'm not saying Jimmy Wales is Wikimedia.
This promotional website is created by the Wikimedia Foundation (it says so in the About page), and "has no qualms with omitting information" (GGP's claim), as it fails to mention that Jimmy Wales is co-founder of Wikipedia alongside Larry Sanger. By contrast, Wikipedia does not omit this fact.
In order to find this useful you would have to believe that Jimmy Wales writes the articles on Wikipedia which is a ridiculous notion.
Rich people don't write articles on Wikipedia. They pay other people to do so. Some of the articles on billionaires read like hagiographies.
Except Larry Sanger still has a Wikipedia page[1], that even starts so:
> Lawrence Mark Sanger (/ˈsæŋər/; born July 16, 1968) is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded Wikipedia
It's actually the greatest testament to Wikipedia's neutrality. Even its founder is completely powerless to control it.
Wikipedia is extremely biased and has a lot of deliberate misinformation, so I wouldn't trust it for anything except as a basic starting point for information gathering alongside a web search. Wikipedia's founder itself has denounced it for its bias.
>He may not be with the project now, but don't airbrush him out of history.
I don't want to defend Jimbo Wales (he's very touchy about the subject), but to be honest, even if he's a founder, Larry Sanger didn't contribute much to what Wikipedia today is.
Larry Singer was essentially running Wikipedia in the early days though, until he was laid off, so in some sense we could think of him as a co-founder who was ousted. It's true that he didn't contribute much (as an unpaid volunteer) after that though.
If someone builds a free knowledge-repository platform and makes it available for worldwide use, and if that platform takes off to become commonly used globally, then I think some credit is due to such founder and innovator.
> Your co-founder Larry Sanger, perhaps?
Who left extremely early on in the project, went to create a poorly conceived and failed competitor, then spent the next 23ish years shitting on Wikipedia? Why does he deserve any credit?
Because he co-founded it, duh. Even if your father abandons your family on your second birthday, to start another family, he's still your dad, no matter how much you hate him.
This website purports to tell us how Wikipedia came to be, 25 years ago. Why not tell it honestly?
> Even if your father abandons your family on your second birthday, to start another family, he's still your dad, no matter how much you hate him.
I think if you asked anyone in that situation, they probably wouldn't call them their dad, so yeah, this is indeed a good example.
Larry Sanger is effectively an abusive parent who did their best to try to ensure Wikipedia didn't survive. Him being there for the birth doesn't mean much.
> no matter how much you don't want your dad to be your dad, he is your dad
Someone biologically being your parent, doesn't mean you're required to call them your dad.
The claims around whether these things would be true or not are questionable. We don't know whether these things were solely his decision or not, or if others were involved in the process. We don't know that his early involvement lead to the success of the project or not.
I added HTTPS infrastructure to wikimedia foundation sites. Even if I weren't there, that would have eventually happened, though potentially much later. I moved wikimedia from svn to git, for development, and maybe that never would have happened and some other source control system would have been used, but would that have led to failure of the project? Almost certainly not.
You're giving this person far too much credit, especially as they've spent decades trying to destroy something they "created".
I think Wikipedia is the only place where an early employee who left relatively quickly would be considered a "co-founder". If this was a tech company i dont think Larry would be considered a co-founder.
I think the thing is a soar subject because Wikipedia essentially rejected all of Sangar's ideas, but he's still kind of riding on its coattails.
A founder only has to be there for the beginning. "Early employee" and "left relatively quickly" would not disqualify him.
I know little about Sanger but he wouldn't be the first person to have been written out. Elon Musk's partner in early PayPal suffered that fate.
Wikipedia itself says Larry Sanger "co-founded" Wikipedia, but I don't quite understand why. If you get into the details, he was Wales' employee at the time, and made initial version of Wikipedia while being paid as such. So I'm tentatively with Wales on that ATM.
Employing someone doesn't let you pass off their achievements as your own.
If Wales had anyone else, or had gone it alone, it's unlikely Wikipedia would be what it is today.
> Employing someone doesn't let you pass off their achievements as your own.
Doesn't it? That's basically how tech companies work. You can tell he's written an initial version of Wikipedia, but founder is emphatically not an employee.
That's not how fame and credit for some novel thing is shared. The minds of two people were vital to its success, and we don't fold that into one because of business structure.
Please tell the founders of various companies I've developed novel things for that my name should be at the top with theirs :p
"founder" is a weasel word that doesn't belong on Wikipedia.
Does the OP site give anyone credit for anything, except crediting Jimmy Wales and "volunteers"?
A monument to vanity.
If you're looking for something interesting, check out https://www.citizendium.com
It's his newer baby. Clearly it's a clone of Wikipedia, without the content of course. If Wikipedia ever goes wrong, it's nice to know that we have an alternative.
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Clearly there's no love lost between the two co-founders, but if either of them had been missing, Wikipedia wouldn't be what it is today.
Larry may have left the project, but sticks his oar in frequently, see for example the Nine Theses he posted to Wikipedia last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Nine_Theses
Neither Larry nor Jimbo "are" Wikipedia. Wikipedia's editors are Wikipedia, and if they collectively agree with any of Larry's policy ideas, they'll adopt them in time.
I used to glibly agree with what you said, because back in the early 2000s it was primarily the right-wing nutters being fed a diet of Fox News bullshit that were deranged from reality... "reality has a liberal bias", right? Remember the crackpot Conservapedia? But these days I find plenty of equal opportunity derangement from terrible news sources chasing clicks, promoting FOMO, anxiety and keeping their readers/viewers addicted. No political flavour of bullshit belongs on Wikipedia.
His nine theses are basically a how-to guide for replacing democratic consensus with culture war bullshit. He clearly wants to bend the process to match his perception of the world rather than update his understanding of the world to match the facts.
The process Wikipedia uses to produce articles that present facts with without editorializing has clearly worked fairly well. Obviously we have a more difficult time reaching consensus on contentious topics but in general the system works quite well.
Because they have all been tried before and had the opposite affect.
Anyone who likes them should make their own site to try and see. Oh wait, sangar already did that multiple times and it crashed and burned every time.
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I can't be the only one who feels that Wikipedia's quality has really started to go downhill over the past 5 or so years. I've noticed more and more articles which read as ridiculously partisan, usually around subjects with any link to politics or current events.
That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the US, but I get the impression that the sites neutrality policies have gradually been chipped away by introducing concepts like "false balance" as an excuse to pick a side on an issue. I could easily see that causing the site to slowly decline like StackOverflow did, most people don't want to deal with agenda pushing.
Fortunately articles related to topics like science and history haven't been significantly damaged by this yet. Something to watch carefully.
I didn't notice this, in fact, I still find Wikipedia to be remarkably neutral on controversial topics. It is very explicit about not being a news website, and yet, that's where I find the best coverage for hot topics like the war in Ukraine and Gaza, Black Lives Matter, protests in Hong-Kong, etc... For instance, most western media completely disregard the Russian side of the Ukraine war, not Wikipedia, where you have both points of views shown side by side, as well as international reactions, and most importantly, sources.
It is not perfect of course, small topics and non-English Wikipedias usually show more bias, and not just about controversial topics. Even on scientific articles, you may find some guy who considers himself the king of the Estonian Striped Beetle and will not tolerate any other ideas than his, driving away other contributors because they have better things to do than go to war to defend beetle truths.
You are getting bad information. The Wikipedia pages on those specific topics (Ukraine, Gaza, BLM) is known to be have been manipulated by groups of editors acting in coordination to advance political narratives.
Is there a single source that is not manipulated on these topics? For example in Ukraine, it is very obvious that both western mainstream media and Russian mainstream media are little more than propaganda for their respective camps.
The good thing with Wikipedia (the English version in particular) is that both sides try to manipulate it, in addition to those who really want to say the truth, so in the end, it is relatively neutral. And if you want to go further, there are citations, which is maybe the most important aspect of Wikipedia compared to traditional media, including encyclopedias.
Wikipedia is not perfect, but it does its best to resist manipulation: citations, all activity is recorded and publicly available, etc...
Non-English Wikipedias have more bias, because they are smaller and also because unlike the English version that is used worldwide, even by non-English speakers, the non-English ones are often tied to specific countries. For example, I think I remember seeing the Arabic Wikipedia as being explicitly pro-Palestine, I guess the opposite is true for the Hebrew version.
And there is an entire discussion about that, a vote and 17 citations!
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1276887484#Langua...
When you can't eliminate bias completely, as I think it is the case here, the next best thing is transparency, and you can hardly get better than that! Maybe no other dictionaries or encyclopedias describe it like that, but no other dictionaries or encyclopedias give so much detail on why it is described the way they do.
In the end "Zionism" is just a word, the meaning of it is what people make it to be, not what dictionaries or encyclopedias say it is, and considering the current situation, it means different things if you ask different people, so bias is unavoidable. Of course, if it is etymology you are after, the Wikipedia article covers that too, with plenty of citations.
Yes, of course there are sources that aren’t actively manipulated by groups of activist editors whose goals are to obscure the truth. Have you tried ChatGPT?
Wikipedia was always insufficiently neutral about political or social topics. At a bare minimum, you need to check whether there are any highlighted controversies in the article talk page.
Wikipedia itself knows how much shit it's in. Every ongoing conflict and culture-war issue is a "contentious topic", which is Wikipedia code for "editors are at each others' throats"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contentious_topics#L...
They have a giant pile of editors banned from topics until they can play nice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editing_restrictions...
But you do give a great tip: at minimum, check the talk page. If it's longer than the article itself, run away.
Some articles are so far gone, even the talk page is locked down like Fort Knox. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide
That page even has an FAQ!
> Q1: Why does this article state that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, even though this is heavily contested and neither the ICJ nor the ICC have issued a final judgment?
> A1: A September 2025 request for comment (RfC) decided to state, in Wikipedia's own voice, that it is a genocide. The current lead is the result of later discussion on the specific wording.
this is so crazy. How does this accord with wikipedia's NOR & NPV stances?
This is a case of "if you abandon your convictions when it's inconvenient, you never really had convictions in the first place."
I also have stopped donating. I replied to a WM Foundation email explaining why and they said they don't have editorial control over wikipedia, i.e. their hands are tied. Well OK, but I'm not giving money to fund the promulgation of Jew hatred and blood libel. Sad state of affairs! I've given for years.
I would say it absolutely violates the NPOV policy, and it's worth noting that both Wikipedia founders share this view [1] [2]. It's the only thing they've agreed on in many years.
Ultimately it's just a numbers game - Wikipedia almost always follows consensus, even when the consensus is to (effectively, without admission) throw neutrality or other rules out the window.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide/Archive_22#...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide/Archive_22#...
Do you have suggestion of better repository of knowledge gathering, which achieve better level of neutrality than Wikipedia on every matter it covers, or throw right into your face that the article doesn’t meet consensual neutral POV?
There is pretty much no way this was ever not going to happen, given Wikipedia's position and structure. It is a massive repository of knowledge, that is consulted by millions if not billions of people around the world on a regular basis, that is (in theory) editable by anyone and that has articles on just about every conceivable topic, including many politically charged ones. There must be immense pressure to use it to propagate all kinds of narratives. Given all of that, I think it does as good a job as can be expected of remaining objective, but absolutely you need to be careful when reading articles on politically charged topics (which is true of all media).
Some of this has to do with concerted and long-running campaigns of coordinated editing (against wikipedia rules) to push a one-sided political narrative. Most notably this happened and continues to be done by Israel-eliminationists[0]. Wikipedia eventually acknowledged the problem and banned a couple of the worst offenders[1] but that's a drop in the bucket as far as I'm concerned. I read it less and less these days and don't consult it at all for anything controversial ("controversial" meaning "topics that leftists have strong opinions about").
Sadly, a system like Wikipedia is hard to defend against persistent coordinated attacks by people who have lots of time.
0: https://aish.com/weaponizing-wikipedia-against-israel/ 1: https://www.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/article-833180
> I can't be the only one who feels that Wikipedia's quality has really started to go downhill over the past 5 or so years. I've noticed more and more articles which read as ridiculously partisan, usually around subjects with any link to politics or current events.
I would say this started over a decade ago. Otherwise I completely agree.
Oh dear, you need to learn about the GamerGate incident which started August 2012. All the extreme division and online manipulation through the collaborative creation of false narratives started right there, with that issue, before contaminating the entire political landscape.
It's the Eternal September of our generation, and it's not recognised enough as such. Before that, the internet was a different place.
That was 2014, not 2012; and I was trying not to mention it.
You're right, I mistyped it.
> Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture
Okay, what the actual fuck? IIRC it was people whining about the absolute state of games journalism in the 2010's.
GamerGate was about ethics in games journalism roughly as much as the Arab Spring was about a street vendor having his cart confiscated.
That was their initial spark, but it kicked off a ding-dong battle for years. You could argue it's still going today, given places like /v/ and ResetEra are still fighting it, games like Dustborn and Concord are pilloried, and the "Sweet Baby Inc. detected" Steam curator exists to list games that have taken that company's advice.
Basically Wikipedia has a failure point in which if media creates a narrative that's what passes as valid.
I was there as well. It was absolutely not as Wikipedia describes it. If the claim was that some people participating in GG did so because they were sexist, fair enough. That was true and unavoidable because you get crazies in every group. But that was not some kind of universal thing, such that Wikipedia should be describing the movement unambiguously as "misogynistic".
Well no, I was also around but not particularly interested at the time. This looks like a classic case of the media trying to close ranks and smear their critics.
I was also there, and I say it was very much not as Wikipedia describes it and the narrative is practically libelous. I would tell you to read as much of the archived back-room nonsense as I did (not just the talk page archives but internal Wikipedia government stuff), but even if could be unearthed this much later nobody deserves the trauma.
The GamerGate article is probably the best example of Wikipedia's blatant political bias.
There are many biased articles out there, of course, but not many manage to misrepresent past events to such an extreme that it borders on comical. It reads like it was written by Zoe Quinn herself. Maybe it was.
Or, you know, people had long been unhappy with the poor state of game reviews and the incident in question prompted broad complaints. Rather than accept criticism the journalists in focus instead decided to use their platforms to smear their critics as a sexist hate mob.
GG wasn't constrained to Gjoni, it was the reaction to his posting. One guy saying "I'm on this team" does not define the characteristics of the resulting events.
In the last 2-3 years, every contribution I made has been reverted by a reviewer or editor, either giving some excuse like lack of references, or none at all. Ceased to contribute to articles, and financially as well.
Wikipedia has a number of notorious and strange editors who have taken it over as if it was their personal kingdom, where they censor and revert at their pleasure. It's their Wikipedia versus for the public. MrOllie is among the most infamous (somehow has over 258,000 edits - WTH) of this type of editor (or sadistic censor), with a number of articles and posts elsewhere on the Internet about him[1][2].
Complaints about him seem to do nothing, as he appears to have support and students of his brand of sadism and censorship. For instance, Remsense (over 97,000 edits). The group that they are part of, backs each other up and gangs up on others, to make sure they'll get their way.
[1] https://thomashgreco.medium.com/artificial-intelligence-bots...
> That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the US,
Not really. The phenomenon exists in other languages Wikipedias. I think it is related to the fact that NGOs that "shape" political discourse and politicians have become "sensible" to the text in Wikipedia pages.
It is always good, when you read Wikipedia, to "follow the money", i.e. look at the sources, see if they make sense.
In the last 5 years, a lot of online platforms, HN also, are used by state actors to spread propaganda and Wikipedia is perfect for that because it presents itself as a "neutral" source.
Fully agreed. The Talk pages are a very interesting read these days. I things continue down this path I think Wikipedia will be a lot less relevant in the coming years, at least for current events and things related to the on-going culture war.
Example?
I haven’t noticed this.
There's a reason why historians tend to view anything more recent than 10-20 years ago as politics. If you don't want to get embroiled in political debates, stick to stuff old enough to be history. There's still politics there, but it's less raw.
Wikipedia doesn't restrict itself to topics that are older than ten years ago, so some of their material is necessarily going to be viewed as political.
e.g. Wikipedia has a stand-alone page on Elon Musk's Nazi salute[1].
{Edit: It's worth noting here that Wikipedia also maintains separate pages for things like Bill Clinton's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein[3].}
This particular page is very interesting because of the sheer amount of political blow-back it's caused for Wikipedia. If you're a Republican, this one page may be the biggest reason you might view Wikipedia as having become "ridiculously partisan". As a direct result of this page, and the refusal to remove or censor it, Musk is now taking aim at Wikipedia and calling for a boycott[2]. He also had his employees produce Grokipedia which, notably, does not include a page on his Nazi salute.
Musk may have had a public falling out with Trump, but he is still very much plugged into the Republican party. He's about to throw a lot of money at the mid-term elections. So, naturally, one hand washes the other and Wikipedia is on every good Republican's hit list. The kicker is that a lot of Republicans, who don't like Musk and think he's a Nazi/idiot, are going to feel a lot of Musk-instigated pressure from their own party to target Wikipedia.
This is the price Wikipedia pays for including recent events and refusing to bow to demands for censorship.
__________________
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy
[2]https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2025/01/29/why-elon...
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_Bill_Clinton_a...
Disclosure: I'm Canadian and am neither a Republican or a Democrat.
I'm also not American so I'm not well-versed in this topic, but perhaps to raise the obvious:
Does Wikipedia really need a page running for thousands of words on Musk allegedly making a Nazi salute?
It's longer than some of the content on major historical figures, yet this is a subject that I'd be surprised to see mentioned again after a few years have passed.
Considering that the subject matter is highly sensitive and concerns a living person I'm surprised that such an article was allowed at all.
It shows a recency bias, which is probably unavoidable. I'd hope that, as time passes, there are mechanisms to archive (not delete!) pages that seem unimportant. However, while this level of coverage may present a noise problem for average users, it will be a gift to future historians. How much material about the historical figures you mention was simply lost?
That being said, there should be absolutely no regard for "sensitivity" or the fact that Musk is a living person. He is a public figure wielding a ridiculous amount of resources to reshape the world as he sees fit. Regardless of his virtues or shortcomings, his power makes him somebody that should be watched closely. He helped shape the last U.S. election, played a key role in this presidency, and promises to continue his influence in the mid-terms. It matters if he's a Nazi.
Kudos to Wikipedia for leaving that page up.
> If this much effort were being put into writing about government policy I'd totally agree with you, but this level of detail is uncharacteristic even for Wikipedia.
Honestly, I think you're very much underestimating how much Wikipedia writes about government policy - but perhaps more to the point, it's trivial to find articles about controversies regarding the "other side" that are also quite well furnished, e.g.:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_tan_suit_controve...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_Go_Brandon
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Did_That!
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_White_House_cocaine_incid...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Township_High_School_District_...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_name_Geronimo_controversy
So I don't think there's much of an argument to say that they're being particularly biased in doing this (you might believe that none, or almost none of these articles at all should exist, but that's a different issue).
Friendly reminder that we all have the power to improve this! Become an editor and If you come across a problematic article, you can make improvements, or even just flag it as needing work. I know this is not a small ask, and can feel discouraging if you see more issues than you have time to address or your edits are not accepted, but when you consider the relatively small number of editors and the huge number of readers (not to mention AI’s being built on it) it is likely one of the more significant differences you can make towards improving the greater problem polarization.
The impression I've had from trying to contribute in the past has been that some editors will fight tooth and nail to prevent changes to an article they effectively own. The maze of rules and regulations makes it far too easy to simply block changes by dragging everything through protracted resolution processes.
Even something as clear-cut as "the provided source doesn't support this claim at all" becomes an uphill struggle to correct. When it comes to anything related to politics this problem is also exaggerated by editors selectively opposing changes based on whether they apply a desired slant to the text.
I have a personal interest in getting fixes into Wikipedia. If you'll share here a couple of examples I can attempt a fix. Here are some stories of what I've done in the past where people mentioned that they've struggled with corrections (one says he was banned, another said his article was deleted, and the third said he couldn't get it corrected - I solved all of these):
https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2024-10-17/Path_Depende...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40655989
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Weierstrass_function#Accu...
One thing I should clarify is that Wikipedia's purpose is to aggregate the current general view on things. So even if you know something is true personally, you cannot put it in unless you can find a reliable place where someone has documented it. In the cases I have there I had to first find the appropriate backing references before I could make something happen so it's not a trivial fix. Getting Makoto Matsumoto in there took me many hours because I know only a tourist's amount of Japanese.
I've also edited controversial articles (the Mannheim stabbing, one of the George Floyd incident related convicts) successfully.
Anyway that's my resume. Bring me the work you need done and once I've got a moment I'll see what I can do (no guarantees, I have a little baby to care for).
When you say you disagree, I assume you mean that you disagree that Wikipedia's approach is good. I don't think I was making that claim, however. I have no value position on Wikipedia's approach except that I appear to endorse it by participating. There are certainly true things that Wikipedia will not contain because they are insufficiently described in sources that Wikipedians find acceptable. But nonetheless that is Wikipedia's purpose: to find a list of sources that generally report fact, and to aggregate them.
Like any consensus-based thing it's pretty loose. It's unlikely that EN wikipedia had much of a position on the reliability of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, for instance.
As an example, when I resurrected the Makoto Matsumoto article, I mirrored it to my personal wiki[0] in case it is deleted from the original. Another loss I lament is that of Chinese Numbered Policies[1] which I think is a genuinely interesting list and a meaningful categorization that I will eventually re-create on my personal wiki.
I'm a Wikipedia inclusionist which means I want as many true things there as possible in a way that represents the truth as accurately as possible, but it's a collaborative effort and that means that sometimes I don't get what I want.
Any way, as you can see from my earlier experience, I seem to have a skill of getting facts into Wikipedia when others do not, and I have a personal desire to see them there as well. So if you want to list a couple of the examples you had trouble with I can see if I can help. I know you said "politics and current events", but hopefully there are non-emergent situations that you can describe because evolving situations require more attention than I'm able to apply at the moment. I will still try, though. As an example, the Salvadoran Gang Crackdown had some ridiculous language on it that I removed[3] that was clearly an attempt to insert a left-wing (as it is in the US) political slant.
To be clear, I have no affiliation with Wikipedia (beyond the fact that as an auto-confirmed user I have the user privilege to create articles without going through AfC). I just have a personal interest in fact recording[2].
0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Makoto_Matsumoto
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AArticles_for_delet...
2: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Observation_Dharma
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_c...
> When it comes to anything related to politics this problem is also exaggerated by editors selectively opposing changes based on whether they apply a desired slant to the text.
This is amplified by the fact that active editors socialize with each other heavily behind the scenes, and over a period of many years you end up with a core group that all desire to apply the same slant.
The trick these days is to calmly make your case on the talk page first for anything that might be even slightly controversial, before you attempt any editing. So if someone wants to "own" the article they have to engage on the same terms, or you can just point out the lack of opposition and make the edit yourself.
That's the thing though, expecting users to have a discussion over even minor changes is extremely off-putting for most potential editors.
I've also noticed that a few of these editors seem to be deliberately abrasive towards new users, perhaps with the hope that they'll break a rule by posting insults in frustration. The moment that happens those editors quickly run to the site administration and try to get said user banned. Wikipedia's policies are increasingly treated as a weapon to beat down dissent rather than a guide on how to contribute positively.
Yep. Wikipedia editors too often resemble US police officers: stupid and drunk with power.
I gave them a fair shot a couple of times, but they're unreasonable and unmoved to listen to reason or experience they don't actually possess.
I'm not going into an edit war with some deranged redditor activist.
this attitude is exactly why and how those "deranged redditor activists" (we're from the superior hacker news, of course, where there is no controversy or activists or differences in opinion) took and maintain control.
Utopian lionization that doesn't reflect reality or the bullshit. Unqualified people have the power to tell experts who were there that their contributions are insignificant, wrong, or that details don't matter. That's just stupid and pointless, and so less people contribute to hostile and idiotic half-assery.
I'll take curated information that is better and rigorous every time.
> Friendly reminder that we all have the power to improve this! Become an editor and If you come across a problematic article, you can make improvements, or even just flag it as needing work.
This works very well when there's a clear non-partisan issue with the text, like a logical inconsistency or the citation doesn't line up with the claim or the prose is just sloppy or unnatural.
If someone is trying to push biased sources, good luck.
The I-swear-it-isn't-a-cabal of highly-active editors knows policy better than you do, and they will continue to conveniently know policy better than you do no matter how much time you spend studying it. (And if you study it and then try to do your business anonymously, they will consider it suspicious that you know anything about policy and demand that you log in to your nonexistent long-standing account.) And that policy allows them to use highly biased sources because they are on they "reliable sources" list, except it isn't really a single list but rather some sources are restricted in applicability, unless it's one of them using it inappropriately. And the bias of those sources doesn't disqualify them as long as it's properly taken into consideration by whatever arcane rules, except this doesn't happen in practice and nobody will care if you point out them doing it, as long as it serves their purposes.
Meanwhile, the way sources get approved as reliable is generally that they agree with other reliable sources. Good luck trying to convince people that a source has become unreliable. You aren't going to be able to do it by pointing out things they've repeatedly objectively gotten wrong, for example. But they'll happily spend all day listing every article they can find that an ideologically opposed source has ever gotten wrong (according to them, no evidence necessary).
And it all leans in the same direction because the policy-makers all lean in the same direction. Because nobody who opposes them will survive in that social environment. There are entire web sites out there dedicated to cataloging absurd stuff they allowed their friends to get away with over years and years, just because of ideological agreement, where people who dispute a Wikipedia-established narrative on a politically charged topic will be summarily dismissed as trolls.
On top of that they will inject additional bias down to the level of individual word-choice level. They have layers and layers of policy surrounding, for example, when to use words like "killing", "murder", "assassination" and "genocide" (or "rioting" vs "unrest" vs "protest"); but if you compare article titles back and forth there is no consistency to it without the assumption of endemic political bias.
WP:NOTNEWS is, as far as I can tell, not a real policy at all, at least not if there's any possible way to use the news story to promote a narrative they like.
And if the article is about you, of course you aren't a reliable source. If the Wikipedians don't like you, and their preferred set of reliable sources don't like you, Wikipedia will just provide a positive feedback loop for everything mainstream media does to make you look bad. This will happen while they swear up and down that they are upholding WP:BLP.
I've been watching this stuff happen, and getting burned by it off and on, for years and years.
Man, I know what you are talking about through and through. Happens all the time on the political Right/Left pages, controversial authors of classical literature, WWII atrocities, and the list goes on. Scientific and Movie or Art articles are way better to discover interesting stuff.
The stalking, censorship, and unwillingness to contribute to topics deemed as "controversial" is unreal. People might not believe, but wikipedia truly is one hell of a cesspool.
There is just too much bureaucracy for beginner editors nowadays. The whole baptism of fire that you need to undergo to be part of the oligarchy is just not worth the hassle.
It’s more likely that you became more radicalized so what used to read as neutral seems partisan now.
Is it radicalised to want even a basic premise of neutrality in an encyclopedia?
Despite not being particularly political, even I raise an eyebrow when an article opens with "____ is a <negative label>, <negative label>, <negative label> known for <controversial statement>"
Please provide an example so we can evaluate what makes even someone as non-political and neutral as you raise an eyebrow.
I want an improvement upon "Encyclopedia Brittanica". If we have to have governments around the world fund a nonprofit educational equivalent of that, then I'm all for it but we can't keep depending upon a least-common denominator "central public knowledge repository" that's an improperly-managed, easily-manipulated, often incomplete and inaccurate mobacracy fed by largely unknown randos, enough of whom aren't doing so for honest purposes and too many are foolish/crazy/unreliable enough to curate and preserve worthwhile information consistently.
Can you please provide an example?
That’s not my perception at all, but if you find an article like that please change it!
That’s the beauty of wikipedia after all. I recently made my first contribution and it was a really smooth process.
I've never seen an article like that, other than for people like Epstein, who are primarily famous for their crimes. I just went and checked the pages of some famous people where you might expect this kind of treatment if Wikipedia were indeed biased in the way people seem to think (like Donald Trump or Ted Cruz), and they're not like that.
There are a lot of comments in this thread talking about a strong bias in Wikipedia, but I don't see any examples. I have no doubt that there are some articles that are biased, particularly in less popular areas that get less attention, but overall, Wikipedia does a great job maintaining a neutral point of view in its articles.
I do get the impression that what people perceive as bias is often simply neutrality. If you think yourself the victim of an evil cabal of your political opponents, then a neutral description of the facts might seem like an attack.
To be honest I don't keep a list of examples, I usually raise an eyebrow and move on. It's typically on pages for smaller public figures where you get some extremely questionable descriptions.
It's also definitely a thing for contentious topics, a while back I tried to look up some info on the Gaza war and some of the pages were a complete battleground. I feel that there was a time when Wikipedia leaned away from using labels like "terrorist", but their modern policy seems to be that if you can find a bunch of news articles that say so then that's what the article should declare in Wikipedia's voice.
Indeed, neutral point of view is one of the most important principles of Wikipedia [1]. I only recall phrasing like that being used used in very clear-cut cases, like the word "pseudoscience" in the article on homeopathy. If you don't think something is neutral, the guideline "be bold" [2] encourages you to edit it. You don't have to wait for somebody else to.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold
> Is it radicalised to want even a basic premise of neutrality in an encyclopedia?
Facts are not neutral or "balanced".
And your whole phrasing smells of someone who doesn't want to be challenged with facts which are against you worldview, which is pretty much against the whole purpose of Wikipedia.
> Despite not being particularly political, even I raise an eyebrow when an article opens with "____ is a <negative label>, <negative label>, <negative label> known for <controversial statement>"
Without giving the actual example, there seems nothing wrong with this in general. Could be important, could be overrated. But at least I assume it's true, because wrong claims would be a valid problem.
I mean... this is a very real phenomenon, but probably not in the way you're thinking of.
There are many simple statements of fact that, 15 or 20 years ago, were as universally uncontroversial as "the sky is blue", but today are considered radically controversial political opinions, and will get you banned for most online platforms if you dare utter them.
No, I don’t think that’s true, and I don’t think you could produce a single example.
Keep in mind that stating a fact and dogwhistling are not the same thing.
Still not hearing any examples, just ideology!
Can you list some specific examples? Do Wikipedia articles on these topics adhere to the facts, or do they take a political stance?
[dead]
I do believe that Wikipedia is one of the least biased sources out there, but there is definitely bias. Here is a concrete example. Compare the introduction paragraph of the English circumcision article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision) with the German one (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zirkumzision).
The English intro talks a lot about medical advantages of the procedure: "reduced rates of sexually transmitted infections and urinary tract infections. This includes reducing the incidence of cancer-causing forms of human papillomavirus (HPV) and reducing HIV transmission among heterosexual men in high-risk populations by up to 60%; ... Neonatal circumcision decreases the risk of penile cancer.[14] ... Some medical organizations take the position that it carries prophylactic health benefits that outweigh the risks," and has one sentence of it being controversial worldwide "others hold that its medical benefits are not sufficient to justify it."
The German one has not a single sentence in the intro about advantages, but a whole paragraph on how it's controversial. "Die Zirkumzision als Routineeingriff ist besonders bei Minderjährigen umstritten, ... Von vielen Kinderschutzverbänden und einem Teil der Ärzteorganisationen wird die nicht medizinisch begründete Beschneidung abgelehnt, da sie den Körper irreversibel verändere und bei nicht einwilligungsfähigen Jungen nicht im Einklang mit Gesundheitsschutz und Kindeswohl stehe.[6] Im angelsächsischen Bereich gibt es schon länger eine gesellschaftliche Debatte zwischen Gruppen von Gegnern der Beschneidung („Intaktivisten“-Bewegung) und Befürwortern. Umstritten sind insbesondere medizinischer Nutzen und Risiken, bei Kindern auch ethische und rechtliche Aspekte sowie die Beurteilung im Hinblick auf die Menschenrechte, vor allem das Recht auf körperliche Unversehrtheit."
I'm not sure who's right, but it's hard to not see some bias here.
I love Wikipedia and think it's one of the greatest resources on the Internet, but there's absolutely a lot of bias in Wikipedia. Even within the same language, I think a lot of it has to do with how many people have or are contributing to a page, whether there's a recent event affecting it, how polarizing or political the subject, etc. But it's not hard to find examples of straight up opinions or very incomplete narratives.
I've also noticed huge differences between two different language versions of the same articles. (English/Spanish specifically). Sometimes they even feel independently written.
Of course, we should all do our part to improve these things when we spot them, if we're able.
It's impossible to write completely neutrally. Editorial decisions like what information to include or exclude, what sources to cite, what order to present information in, what illustrations to use cannot be avoided and inherently present some kind of narrative.
It absolutely is possible to write completely neutrally. All it takes is for the writer to be aware/honest of their biases and to have a goal of achieving a neutral perspective. Of course the goal of most writing is explicitly to not be neutral.
Take the example of circumcision. You could probably write a mere definition of circumcision neutrally, sure.
But do you include cultural practices of circumcision? Do you include criticism? If so, how many column inches do you dedicate to either? Which comes first? That surely is going to determine whether the article appears to support or oppose, which is basically the issue in the comment above.
But beyond that, do you group female circumcision in the same article as male circumcision? If not, you are tacitly approving of male circumcision by separating it from disapproved of practice. If so, surely you need to explain the difference in social and legal acceptability. If you do that without noting controversy, then you are implying the social acceptance of male circumcision is universal. If you note controversy, then you are necessarily elevating that to noteworthyness.
There's no way out of it.
well said, reminds me of the Kuleshov Effect[0]
Literally the first thing you will learn in journalism school is that there is no such thing as "objective neutrality". Even deciding what story to cover includes bias.
There are some subjects which various groups cannot agree upon by definition and nature.
Have you ever taken a media class? It really isn’t.
> I do believe that Wikipedia is one of the least biased sources out there, but there is definitely bias
I think this is the wrong way to look at bias. Bias isnt a binary, instead its a journey to try and get succesively less and less biased. You can never achieve absolute unbiasedness, you can just try to journey closer.
And yes, wikipedia is far from perfect.
Any attempt to "eliminate" all bias would just introduce massive bias. The only solution is building a healthier democratic community.
A major reason people are obsessed with bias on wikipedia is because it is the only usable encyclopedia now. Back then even just in the US and published in english there were more than a dozen different encyclopedias competing with different scopes, intended audiences, viewpoints, arrangements, features, editorial policies, etc. And the publishers were more diverse and not monopolistic. There simply wasn't a need for any single one of them to be bias-free.
> The German one has not a single sentence in the intro about advantages, but a whole paragraph on how it's controversial.
No, they do have a sentence on that right before, talking about how sometimes it can make sense as a medical procedure:
> Die Zirkumzision ist eine von mehreren Behandlungsmöglichkeiten (s. z. B. Triple Inzision), die beispielsweise bei schweren Formen der pathologischen Phimose als indiziert gilt, wenn Behandlungsalternativen nicht erfolgversprechend sind oder zuvor keinen Heilungserfolg brachten.
I'd say overall the German one is a bit more balanced, if maybe not in the opening paragraphs. It goes over pretty much all of the benefits in similar detail to the English one, while spending much more words on "adverse effects" (which the English one spends very few words on in comparison, and no pictures at all).
Generally it seems that the English one does its very best to gloss over anything graphic, while the German one spares no detail - a product of underlying cultural attitudes no doubt. English Wikipedia would probably consider many of the contents of the German article "gratuitous detail", while German Wikipedia prefers a "factual and explicit" clinical style.
This is a very interesting take, however, it makes it a bit ironic to compare wikipedia across topics and domains.
Like, right here, let's not ask the question "Why is wikipedia deciding that gratuitous detail is consideration" for one page, and instead point out the amount of inconsistency in this regard on other surgical procedures (coronary bypass is tame, kidney transplant is not), and on non-medical topics, such as the absolute inscrutable travesty that is every single Mathematics Wikipedia page and how all of it amount to post-graduate oneupmanship competitions at this point.
It become heavily biased in last years indeed.
If something looks controversial for my tastes, I track when the change was made and look for last version before dubious content was added. And so, I've seen edits done to media-related articles which introduced sections that weren't present in some cases for even 20 years. Sections being replaced or included because there was a need for including particular bias prevalent in the namely United States sociopolitical scene in last 15 years. My country's wiki did suffer as well and there are ongoing edits replacing grammar to fit unjustified trends that damage our language. In the past hot topics which were controversial IRL were including "the Catholic Church's position" - now that's largely gone. Then, it's even impossible to edit articles without being logged in because the most popular ISP has blocked all IP ranges - all because a "trend" of vandalism that happen around 24 to 25 years ago, and which supposedly happens again according to the message presented.
My contributions weren't large and I stopped doing these quickly because fighting people who unload their complexes on the Internet on total strangers weren't worth trying to improve articles about e.g. Milky Way galaxy or some generic local non-political stuff.
Wikipedia looks good on a paper and surely it works for trivial stuff people all around the world can agree upon. But it fails whenever there's a possibility of endorsing a point of view, which is always disguised as "neutral", which applies to probably 80% of articles on English Wikipedia alone. It suffers same degradation as nearly every place on the Internet - just not from the usual ads and tracking .
It is not possible to have unbiased communication. Whenever you communicate with someone, you do it because you think it's important that the other person hears what you're about to say. This means that you filter all communication through your own moral system, which obviously has biases. When people say "this is unbiased" they usually mean "this matches the biases of my culture". Wikipedia illustrates this very well because both cultures can claim "obviously the article in my language is unbiased, while the other one is weird".
So in a way, I'd argue that Wikipedia having different biases in different language versions actually proves that it's quite unbiased. If all languages had exactly the same content, the most likely explanation would've been that one culture dominates, and the rest are just translations.
I'd love to see someone make a less biased encyclopedia. It's easy to throw stones. I think people hate that there is an open and valuable source of information on the internet that isn't monetized.
Wikipedia is a treasure
It also shows that it isn't perfectly organized, that it isn't an ideal model for knowledge aggregation. If it's ideal for it to be globally consistent, then it doesn't have that. If it's ideal for it to be adapted to different cultures, then it doesn't have that either, because the divisions are based only on language. However, Wikipedia it is really an amazing place, and it should continue to be preserved and improved.
This suggests one article or the other is incomplete.
To have evidence of bias, you would have to show that a paragraph like the one in the English article would be rejected for the German one.
Re bias, it does depend which areas you are talking about. Some areas are better served than others.
When it comes to billionaires, some of the biographies are very biased indeed making them look like saints.
Wikipedia is and continues to be the best thing that happened to the internet. A shining example of an open platform that works.
Except for their unnecessarily incessant fund raising.
There’s zero reason it should happen that often, and that intrusively.
On Twitter/X "for you" feed, I'm frequently served posts by handles that are openly hostile toward Wikipedia. The most often cited reason is excessive fundraising / bloat (previously it was bias). But in my opinion, whatever bloat the Wikipedia organization suffers from, it is still a better alternative than all the other ad/engagement driven platforms.
For a top-10 Internet website it's not "bloated" at all, if anything it's still running on a shoestring budget. And the fundraising ends up supporting a huge variety of technical improvements and less known "sister" projects that are instrumental in letting the community thrive and be relevant for the foreseeable future. Sure, you could keep the existing content online for a lot less than what they're asking for, but that's not what folks are looking for when they visit the site. Keeping a thriving community going takes a whole lot of effort especially in this day and age, where a vast majority of people just use the Internet for 100% casual entertainment, not productive activity.
To be clear, I'm not hating on Wikipedia, just their (IMO) overly-strong push for donations.
The first word in my OP was "Except", and that was genuine -- I agree with the parent post, just outside of this one gripe. I definitely get value from it -- either directly through visits, or indirectly through it training LLMs I use.
And I don't mind them asking for support. I just disagree with how they ask, and how often they ask.
I feel like a simple persistent yet subtle "Support Wikipedia" link/button may be just as effective, and at the very most, a 30-pixel high banner once a year or so.
Maybe they've done tests, and maybe this is effective for them, but it feels like there are much subtler ways that may be effective enough.
I have supported sites and services much smaller than Wikipedia, with much less intrusive begging. But maybe that's not the case for others.
To repurpose Winston Churchill's quote on democracy, "Wikipedia is the worst form of encyclopaedia, apart for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
It's a weird thing to hate on Wikipedia for since in general it's one of the cleaner sites I visit. The absolute garbage of the Fandom wikis shows just how bad it could be.
For your own sake, get out of Xitter.
There's a reason why nonprofits have fundraising events throughout the year instead once. Keep engagement going with donors is important.
I agree, but this has to be one of the least consequential problems an encyclopedia might have.
Eh out of all the nonprofits that incessantly fundraise, Wikipedia gets a pass the most. Nobody else can compete with their vast utility to just about everyone.
Except for their unnecessarily incessant fund raising. [citation needed]
Fixed.
The controversy is 95% of spending, including 90% of staff, is on things with no relation to wikipeida that few care about, with exponentially growing costs, which they imply is needed to keep the wiki alive despite how cheap it actually is to run.
By now they should be sitting on a billion dollars that safely yields a forever self-funding annual income ($30m-$50m) that would pay for all of their necessary expenses. They would no longer require any donations. It's grotesque and wildly irresponsible how they're managing the organization. If LLMs become the center of knowledge resources going forward (which they will), Wikipedia's funding will decline as their traffic declines, and they'll collapse into a spiral of cut-backs, as they operate on a present structure that burns most of its financial capability annually (this opens them up to a shock to the system on inflection, which is happening now).
LLM's can't just be "the center of knowledge" on their own, they need to learn and be trained if they are to be useful. A whole lot of LLM knowledge comes from Wikipedia to begin with.
You go ahead an tell users that.
Tailwind docs are also the source of, duh, docs. People browse them way less and as a result Tailwind gets way less funding.
The problem is that Wikipedia should be set for life at this point, and they insist on rejecting that notion. There may be a future in which Wikipedia closes, and if that comes to pass it will due to wanton disregard for people's goodwill.
statements on wikipedia are summarized from sources, LLMs once trained on wikipedia to summarize, can then summarize on their own from the source material, and probably with less bias
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Any particular example you could provide to support this wild claim ?
I don't think it's particularly wild - Jimmy Wales talked about the pages to do with Gaza before he locked them due to his concerns: https://nypost.com/2025/11/03/business/wikipedia-co-founder-... or https://gizmodo.com/wikipedia-gaza-genocide-locked-200068099....
There are many others though. The 'Solana_(blockchain_platform)' page is mainly a hit piece. When I used to edit Wikipedia, an admin told me that the amount of developers was not a relevant measure for a blockchain platform (!) and that 'proof of history' (using verifiable delay functions to sync clocks then creating an equivalent of Time Division Multiple Access to coordinate a distributed system) was not real (!!). At the time, the introduction to the page was mainly focused on FTX (who invested in Solana Lab's 5th round) and Melania Trump (who launched a token on the platform, amongst many more well known/more liked people and orgs that had done things on Solana, eg Def Jam, Lollapalooza, Instagram, Stripe, Visa, etc) which apparently were not relevant.
Wikipedia's cofounder Larry Sanger has a list of many more.
A nitpick: Jimmy Wales did not lock the page. He is not an administrator on the site, and doed not have the rights necessary to lock any pages.
Citing sources to support claims? Sounds pretty "Wokipedia" to me. /s
Corporate editors, boiler room political operations, and random conspiracy cranks are given a bothsideism platform to edit and narrate facts in their favor.
https://en.ejo.ch/public-relations/manipulation-wikipedia
https://imemc.org/article/59294/
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2026-01-14/lon...
https://avim.org.tr/en/Analiz/THE-DARKNESS-BEYOND-WIKIPEDIA-...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/congress-opens-inves...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.13990
https://www.isdglobal.org/isd-publications/identifying-sock-...
https://www.city-journal.org/article/policing-wikipedia
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/oct/30...
https://www.techdirt.com/2007/08/14/diebold-disney-many-othe...
"Bothsidesism" is a tired argument. Somehow if you don't think that one side of a debate is utter evil and the other side is as pure as the driven snow, you're engaging in "bothsidesism" if you acknowledge there are any shades of gray in the world. Which is a childish argument for anyone older than a high school sophomore.
"Bothsidesism" is a lie that is used to avoid criticizing one side when the other side is also bad. Just because one side is awful does not grant the other side a free pass to be immune from criticism or to get their way on everything. The idea of "bothsidesism" forces a false dichotomy and then forces you to pick a side, when there are almost always more than two choices. It's what partisans use to beat down people who say "I pick 'None Of The Above,' because you both suck."
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I have been a fan of Wikipedia since I first learned about it, about six months after it launched. What a concept! Anyone can edit, citations are required, revisions are kept indefinitely. That's a recipe for building a clearinghouse of human knowledge with the power of iteration.
But I am also a non-fiction researcher/writer, and I experience some problems caused by Wikipedia:
1) I like to dig deep into historical stories--newspapers, archives, court records, FOIA requests--and I try to produce high quality, well-sourced articles about historic events. Inevitably, someone updates the Wikipedia article(s) to include new information I have surfaced, which exiles my article to the digital dustbin in favor of Wikipedia. Occasionally the Wikipedia editors cite my article in their updates, but much more often they just cite the sources that I cited, and skip over my contribution. It can be painful for my hard work to become irrelevant so rapidly.
2) Multiple of my writings have been plagiarized on Wikipedia by careless editors over the years, and I have been subsequently accused of plagiarizing from Wikipedia. That is unpleasant.
For a recent example, in 2006 I wrote an article about Doble Steam Cars[1]. A few months ago I had reason to visit the Doble steam car Wikipedia entry[2], and as I was reading, I realized that a large portion of the text was an uncanny, nearly verbatim copy of my article. I looked at the revision history, and found that a wiki editor had copied my text to revamp the article just a few months after I wrote mine in 2006. I visited /r/wikipedia and asked how to best handle this, and the Wikipedia editors there determined that it was indeed a violation, and they decided to revdelete almost 20 years of edits to purge the violation. It was quite something to behold.
To be clear, I am not happy that the huge revdelete resulted in so many lost subsequent good faith edits. But it's impressive that it was possible to roll it back so quickly and cleanly.
[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/the-last-great-steam-car/
This is cute, but kind of an example of Wikipedia's off-mission bloat. It irks me that they constantly fundraise when most of it is not needed for Wikipedia proper, but rather used for initiatives people know less about and may not fund if they knew.
I don't begrudge them the odd party, anniversary, meetup.
And some of their subprojects are a great idea and could go much further -- it'd be fantastic to have a Wikipedia atlas, for example. The WikiMiniAtlas on geolocated articles is nice but it could be so much better.
But as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER it's a huge concern that they're blowing money pretty much at the rate they get it, when they should be saving it for the future, and be pickier and choosier about what they're funding at any given time.
I made “Wikidata Atlas” several weeks ago. [1] [2]
That is a nice start, a rendering of GIS wikidata. Perhaps ask Wikimedia Foundation for funding :)
What I'd like to see is a more intimate marrying of OSM data and Wikipedia data. For example, if I go to zoom level 12 centred on London, UK on your page, there are about 80 text labels on the OSM layer itself. At minimum this is going to need OSM vector tiles. I'd expect to be able to click any of the OSM labels for the corresponding Wikipedia article, as well as adding in POIs for articles that don't have corresponding OSM links. And then you need OSM rendering style rules about which POIs you show at each zoom level, based on whether labels will run into each other or not.
The problem right now is that the WikiMiniAtlas treats all things, whether large areas or individual POIs, as POIs.
Thank you for this link, I was looking for something with that data in a clean format for some time!
i feel like that's a bit silly, the other projects are listed on the donation page (https://donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/FAQ) and tbh you are unlikely to be donating to the wikimedia foundation without being aware of (at least some of?) the rest
I promise you that 99% of normal people have no idea what the Wikimedia foundation is and think that they're just donating to "fund Wikipedia".
are normal people donating to wikipedia tho
Yes, the ads are essentially a guilt tax on normies who remember Wikipedia helped them in high school
Honestly, most of the other projects get almost none of the resources (other then maybe wikidata and commons, but both of those are directly used by wikipedia)
I wonder whether the emergence of a single, true Wikipedia competitor would actually put an end to this never-ending fundraising criticism (since people could simply donate to the competitor as a form of protest)
Projects like Wikipedia never have meaningful competition, because the social dynamics invariably converge to a single platform eating everything else.
Wikipedia is already dead, they just don't know it yet. They'll get Stackoverflowed.
The LLMs have already guaranteed their zombie end. The HN crowd will be comically delusional about it right up to the point where Wikimedia struggles to keep the lights on and has to fire 90% of its staff. There is no scenario where that outcome is avoided (some prominent billionaire will step in with a check as they get really desperate, but it won't change anything fundamental, likely a Sergey Brin type figure).
The LLMs will do to Wikipedia, what Wikipedia & Co. did to the physical encyclopedia business.
You don't have to entirely wipe out Wikipedia's traffic base to collapse Wikimedia. They have no financial strength what-so-ever, they burn everything they intake. Their de facto collapse will be extremely rapid and is coming soon. Watch for the rumbles in 2026-2027.
SO was supposed to be much the same, though. I guess you really do have to get directly funded by users for the model to work.
This. I'm really bothered by the almost cruel glee with which a lot of people respond to SO's downfall. Yeah, the moderation was needlessly aggressive. But it was successful at creating a huge repository of text-based knowledge which benefited LLMs greatly. If SO is gone, where will this come from for future programming languages, libraries, and tools?
Newspapers, scientific papers and soon, real-world interactions.
News is the main feed of new data and that can be an infinite incremental source of new information
This always feels to me like, an elephant in the room.
I’d love to read a knowledgeable roundup of current thought on this. I have a hard time understanding how, with the web becoming a morass of SEO and AI slop - with really no effort being put into to keeping it accurate - we’ll be able to train LLMs to the level we do today in the future.
Most people went to SO because they had to for their job. Most people go to Wikipedia because they want to, for curiosity and learning.
LLMs will use Wikipedia the same way humans use it
And they have a huge endowment fund now too that more than covers the cost of Wikipedia...
They, just like some newspapers, try to present themselves as neutral, not tied to any interest.
Like Hackernews, supposedly neutral.
The main issue with neutral people is that we do not know in which camp they are.
> The main issue with neutral people is that we do not know in which camp they are.
And that's a good thing, 'cause it means they're living to their standards.
If you use wikipedia as a starting point, and actually check reference material critically, it's invaluable in my opinion.
We used to have to pay lots of money for encyclopedias for less quality.
My hope is that while I think the website/webapp itself doesn't need much change, if they moved the back-end to a distributed system, like ipfs perhaps? that would be amazing. Even if wikipedia is blocked, or tampered with, arbitrary people around the world would have mirrors of pages here and there. They could store it just as it is now, and simply expose the data via ipfs and change the webapp to use their own ipfs http gateway.
The unthinkable can happen. I wondered if the burning of the library of alexandria was something people thought was in the realm of practical possibility back then?
My first "contributions" were 2004, I was 10 years old and supposed to write a text about Mozart. Somehow I noticed the edit button and started vandalizing the page, as I didn't understood what Wikipedia was meant to be. Some patient wikipedian kept reverting and reporting my IP addresses during that day. It's both incredible to see how old and young Wikipedia is, if we'd say there was a "World Wide Web Heritage" project, Wikipedia and the contributors are truly the first thing that comes to mind.
Wonderful website!
Every time I try to contribute, I get censored by some gatekeeper. It feels as open and inviting nowadays as StackOverflow.
It's getting really hard now. I've been editing since day one. Recently I had awful trouble getting a new article accepted. I gave up for some months and came back and it was accepted first time.
Apparently you can pay a high-ranking Wikipedia editor to massage your article into the site. I know a Hollywood producer who paid to get himself listed.
What amazes me most, though, is that I still find new subjects to write about that don't exist yet on Wikipedia.
Paying to create an article is a scam:
It's more nuanced than that. Wikipedia allows payments in some situations as long as they are public:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Connected_contributor...
The editor who massaged the article in question has it somewhere on his profile that he accepts payments and has a list of articles he has taken payment for.
Could you provide their username, please? I'd ba interested.
I was close to finishing school when Wikipedia came up. A lot of complaints and concerns about LLMs today echo remarks about Wikipedia back then. Kids won’t learn anything, they will just copy and paste! The information is unreliable, our kids will stop thinking critically or learning how to research!
While I don’t mean to equate both, I find the resemblance in this case striking.
> A lot of complaints and concerns about LLMs today echo remarks about Wikipedia back then.
I have also noticed this.
How LLMs can never be trusted because they are stochastic sounds very similar to how Wikipedia can never be trusted because it sometimes has a bad-faith edit.
Or how the people that don't believe information should be free are very active in both the anti-Wikipedia and anti-llm crowds. And use much of the same talking points.
Have publishers have sued Wikipedia too?
They are not necessarily complaints about wikipedia, more about internet in general.
Also, the young wikipedia was very different from what it is today.
Aside from AI, Wikipedia’s greatest upcoming challenge will be censorship as Western governments start to adopt various traits of Eastern dictatorships.
For all of its ubiquity, Wikipedia is a single fragile organization in an increasingly unstable political landscape.
I hope that efforts are being made to make sure that its content is not only being archived in many places, but also that the know-how to reboot Wikipedia's hosting from its dumps (software, infrastructure deployment and all) is being actively preserved by people independent of the organization.
I always like to point people to Simple Wikipedia - https://simple.wikipedia.org/. You can also change the (lang).wikipedia.org URL to simple.wikipedia.org and a lot of the time you get a great, simple language explanation that's better for a quick overview of a topic than the regular page.
It's a miracle that in a world where everything becomes a service, proprietary and cloud based, you can download a collective human knowledge (while some argue it's biased, not truth-based and consensus ran - yes, but I think it's one of the best outcome for a socially constructed knowledge).
Slightly off topic, but now that long context machine translation is roughly on-par with humans: are there any official efforts from Wikipedia, to translate the "best" or "most complete" language version of each article to all other languages? I'd imagine that the effort of getting all languages up to the same standards are just an impossible one and people from "lower-resource" languages would benefit a lot.
On enwiki there is a big problem with bad LLM edits at the moment, so it's probably not the right time for this idea.
If anything, the community is discussing stronger guidelines against inappropriate LLM use.
Not quite, the official in-development project wrt. this area is Abstract Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia which plans to develop a human-editable structural interlanguage for encyclopedic content that can then be automatically "rendered" to existing natural languages, as opposed to just starting from an existing "best or most complete" natural-language text.
This avoids the unreliability of existing "neural/ML" approaches, replacing them with something that might see contributions from bots as part of developing the support for specific content or languages (similar to what happens with Wikidata today) but can always be comprehensively understood by humans if need be.
> human-editable structural interlanguage
This won't work, and it would fail the same way as Semantic Web. Too much human labor needed.
The same could be said for Wikipedia before it was created.
If people want AI-translated versions of Wikipedia articles from other languages, they can trivially request that from the AI themselves.
At least using Irish as an example, the state of machine translation is still far far behind proper translation unfortunately and wouldn't be up to scratch
Yep exactly this, and some languages still haven't been fully digitised https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/a3369c56-abaa-4b67-a1...
I think it's optimal for this to be done at read-time rather than write-time. En Wikipedia is the most comprehensive but there are many articles in language Wikipedias that are far more complete. Rather than attempting to keep these branches of knowledge in sync, it is probably better to have some mechanism to pull them all together when someone wants to read a synthesis.
Well they made https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation
You're not the first to have the idea. For languages that are only sparsely represented in the LLMs' training data, this has actually done a lot of damage. The LLMs spew out a bunch of hallucinations, and there aren't enough qualified human editors to review it, so the human record of that language itself becomes tainted.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1124005/ai-wikip...
Wikipedia is overall excellent, and it has certainly brought enormous value to me throughout the years.
But it is noticeably biased on any topic that has political implications.
History and many fields of science also have political implications, and you’ll find just as much editorial slant there, too
This would be the reality-based editorial slant, then? What are you proposing as an alternative?
“Reality-based” is rather smug, isn’t it?
Can't wait for the specific examples
What for? To start a flame war? No one is going to get convinced one way or the other.
Which was why I just wanted to point out that while I think Wikipedia is a net good overall, it is not without blemishes.
> Makes claim.
> Is asked for evidence.
> Refuses.
Brilliant work. These kinds of posts should be bannable.
The point is not that Wikipedia is completely unbiased. That's an obvious impossibility - for any encyclopedia.
The point is that accusations of "noticeable bias on any topic that has political implications" is the kind of accusation made by someone simply trying to sow distrust in information, writ large. It's increasingly common.
Being asked for an example or two isn't weird.
This kind of bias is a statistical measure; typically you can't prove or disprove it using a single sample.
It's about larger patterns, which things are talked about and (crucially) which are not. How much attention is given to things and not.
Ok, can’t wait for specific examples illustrating the larger patterns
I don’t know, is the "Wikipedia is left biased but I can’t produce a single piece of evidence" rhetoric a joke?
So many parroting the same "bias" line here, yet not a single example has been linked.
There’s about fourteen or so in other threads. I posted a couple:
should have a fate similar to stackoverflow: less contributors, worse (or stale) content, less visits
I’ll be curious to see how true this turns out to be.
I stopped visiting SO frequently years ago, even before LLMs.
But I still visit Wikipedia. I often just want to read about X, vs. asking AI questions about X.
This. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, while some of the content needs to be updated periodically, it also has A LOT of content that will stay relevant pretty much forever.
According to their own stats (visible in the graph some folds down), it seems to have a fairly steady rate of edits. As for visits, it looks quite constant as well https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wik...
So activity is plateauing.
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Buried in this mix of 25-year commemoration pages, the release they put out today:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2026/01/15/wikipedia-ce...
Which includes a section about Wikipedia in the age of AI: New partnerships with tech companies support Wikipedia’s sustainability
> several companies — including Ecosia, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Pleias, and ProRata — became new Wikimedia Enterprise partners, joining existing partners such as Amazon, Google, and Meta.
Despite everything we now know about Wikipedia, I still think it’s one of the better websites of the early 00s.
While Wikipedia is terribly inaccurate and heavily biased, it can be a useful starting point for information on a topic. You have to take advantage of the links to other sources on the page, which often have a different conclusion than what is presented in the article!
The people who built Wikipedia, technically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
I hadn’t heard of Grokipedia so based on the positive comments in this thread, I thought I’d try it out – only to discover that its search feature sucks.
I’ve just finished watching a HBO TV show on Blu-Ray called “The Night of” so I tried searching for it on Grokipedia. It failed to find an article about the TV series in the first 60 search results (regardless of whether I used double quotes or appended the words “TV” or “series”). After multiple attempts, I gave up.
On the other hand, when I typed the three words into Wikipedia’s search, the TV show was the second search result.
Still in beta. It's apparently going to be called 'Encyclopedia Galactica' when released.
It's so much better and worse than Wikipedia at the same time.
Wouldn't touch that piece of shit if you paid me.
It's not that it doesn't have potential. But I hope the other players take up the mantle and auto-generate alternatives.
The stench of Mr Elon Musk is just too strong with Grokipedia (scrape that, bitch)
The biggest complaint about Wikipedia I have is that they do not allow edits via VPNs, even for the registered users. These days VPN is a necessity in many places, thus it limits a big amount of potential contributors.
If a VPN is necessary, you can ask for an exemption.
I've often found it's bare bone utilitarian and efficient design a breath of fresh air compared to most of what's online today. That, and their philosophy of being donation based to keep the lights on.
I really dislike this "scrolling" type of websites. I find them overlapping with other texts and quite difficult to navigate.
Since we as a culture will be forgotten, a reminder that the catalan wikipedia was the 2nd one to have an article after the english version :)
Wikipedia could do a lot by reminding people of their own rule: that Wikipedia is not a source to be cited - more often.
I'm noticing a distinct lack of Guy Standing sitting in the "Weird and wonderful Wikipedia" section.
Maybe I can prompt an LLM to translate this flying div monstrosity into a flat page I can read.
In the last 2 years, Wikipdia's quality declined. For me this was evident when they suddenly changed the UI. The new UI is more annoying. Perhaps it is nicer for Average Joe people, but for powerusers it is just annoying to use now. But this is not the only problem: many articles have a low quality, or they are so complicated that Average Joe doesn't understand them, which is ironic considering the UI was most likely changed to appease Average Joe.
I am also displeased with the constant pop-up or slide-in widgets. This is a general curse for browsers that ublock origin prevented. I hate this. My browser should not allow for any such slide-in banner. I am never interested in anything written there - usually it is a "gimme more money", but even if it is not, I simply don't CARE what is written on it. Even python used this, on their homepage, where they are even so cheeky that you can not fully disable this thing, unless you block it with ublock origin.
I feel that too many websites fail the user now. Wikipedia does too. The intrinsic quality is still better than the AI slop spam that Google amplified world wide, while also ruining Google search, but the quality used to be better in the past, on Wikipedia.
> For me this was evident when they suddenly changed the UI. The new UI is more annoying.
In case you are unaware, if you're logged in, you can go into the user preferences and change the Appearance to one of the older themes, such as Vector Legacy (2010).
> For me this was evident when they suddenly changed the UI.
That reminds me of this thread, where clearly new interface wasn't fondly received: https://old.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/10fdfal/wikipedi...
The key point to remember about Wikipedia is that it was mostly built using unpaid labour, but is used to create paid content elsewhere.
i remember using wiki for the first time. I can't imagine the internet without it.
25 years of ranking in the cash and yet constantly begging for money. It's a cushy gig for the employees.
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How would they go about that?
Well, wiki is a Hawaiian word, so let's start with tariffs on Hawaii and then move to invade.
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> Most would agree
Apparently more people disagree with you than you thought. Calling them bots is empty criticism and I think against HN guidelines.
On the contrary, this thread seems to have a large number of users who can't handle criticism of Wikipedia without responding with unfounded assumptions and insinuations about the critic
Thank god HN still isn't quite at the point where the "most" drowns out every dissenting opinion until every discussion is an echo chamber.
You misspelled "vital for manufacturing consent".
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What does "challenged Wikipedia so thoroughly" mean?
(My impression is that Grokipedia was announced, everyone looked it and laughed because it was so obviously basically taking content from Wikipedia and making it worse, and since then it's largely been forgotten. But I haven't followed it closely and maybe that's all wrong.)
This whole thread reeks of Grok astro and challenging Wikipedia. There are fair criticisms of Wikipedia, but I am smelling something fishy.
> It's remarkable that Grokipedia has challenged Wikipedia so thoroughly, at only 80 days old with 25 years of Wikipedia.
No?? In what world do you live?
Using Grokipedia would literally be asking for partisan propaganda, Musk doesn't even hide it
This comment is the first time that I have heard about Grokipedia.
Sumary: it's a copy of Wikipedia, but without the bits Musk disagrees with. Perhaps it also has some other sources, but the articles I looked up when it was announced, were verbatim copies from Wikipedia, with some bits missing. My suspicion was that they instructed their LLM ("Grok". I wonder why it wasn't called X or Grox. Anyway...) to synthesize the article from the edits, leaving out those that were rated "liberal", with the error margin on the conservative side (pun intended).
> the persistent editorial and corporate bias and intellectual dishonesty
Musk is explicitly partisan and has repeatedly manipulated Grok's output to suit his agenda. How could you possibly consider Grok a worthwhile alternative if you take issue with intellectual dishonesty and corporate bias?
Apparently some people on this site think there’s such a thing as unbiased information.
Has it? I think to challenge you have to show some comparable usage numbers. Its certainly an impressive technical feat to have this AI-based wiki project, but does anyone actually use it?
I mean that genuinely. I don't know any usage numbers for Grok. Is it even 1% of Wiki? Is it 50%? Is it more?
It's consistently better in content quality, for everything that I've used it for. I've seen conversations complaining about it that effectively reek of either anti-Musk or anti-AI bias, and when I dig in, I haven't found any legitimate bad information or arbitrary bias in the articles themselves.
It's not yet as comprehensive, with ~6 million articles compared to Wikipedia's ~7 million, and the UI isn't as good, with a lot of polish and convenience and fun features in Wikipedia that are noticeably absent.
It's qualitatively better in significant ways, and when you compare and contrast articles for which there's a difference, you start to get a feel for the ways in which Wikipedia has failed.
Being anti-Musk is a shibboleth and article of faith for a lot of people, so they can't engage with anything he's involved in on an objective level. Grokipedia isn't used by as many people for that and other reasons. From the last couple months of using it, I've found it to be an objectively better tool.
I've gone in and made corrections in places I have knowledge of, and the process and transparency of those types of edits are awesome. It just works, no drama, no dealing with digital tinpot tyrants, and if there's evidence you're wrong about a thing, the bot will actually counter your suggestion and stick to its parameters and standards.
It's not perfect by any means, but it's a damn sight better than Wikipedia.
Got any examples of articles to demonstrate that difference?
AI-slop tainted by a billionaire wanker.
Translation: I'll never use grokipedia while I have access to better alternatives.
Grokipedia is impressive. All edits to the original Wikipedia article are shown, along with source links for the edit. All anyone has to do is to look at a wikipedia article and the Grokipedia article side by side to see that Grok is usually able to make significant improvements to articles, adding important context, improving explanations and removing bias. Don't knock it 'til you've tried it. If you haven't tried it because of a hatred of Elon Musk... well... who's the biased one?
There is nothing impressive about an AI slop Wikipedia rewrite by a radicalized eccentric billionaire.
The Wikipedia "reliability" list shows wild, almost laughable biases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
Surely people don't think sources such as Mother Jones are more 'reliable' than The New York Post, Fox News, or The Heritage Foundation? Not a coincidence there.
Having such obvious biases does nothing but damage the Wikipedia brand, and at this point has me anticipating Ai replacements.
This is the comment on the Mother Jones entry: "There is consensus that Mother Jones is generally reliable. Almost all editors consider Mother Jones a biased source, so its statements (particularly on political topics) may need to be attributed. Consider whether content from this publication constitutes due weight before citing it in an article."
They acknowledge it is a biased source and they make a distinction between reliability and bias. Not familiar with the publication.
To elaborate slightly, note that "reliable" is sort of Wikipedia jargon. When it applies to a news organization, it means that statements of fact are likely to be correct... or at least, not intentionally incorrect, because errors do happen. So a source can be reliable and biased at the same time, which means that if it says a thing happened you can largely trust that it really did happen... but any interpretation of that might be slanted, and so shouldn't be trusted.
The New York Post isn't "reliable" because it's a tabloid that doesn't care overmuch about fact-checking what it publishes (and, worse, has a history of just making stuff up sometimes). So the Wikipedia position is that you can't trust a citation to the NY Post without finding something else to corroborate it -- at which point you might as well just cite the corroborating reliable source instead.
Whereas Mother Jones will absolutely mostly publish articles which say good things about progressives and bad things about conservatives, but those things will all be true. Their bias comes in the form of selectively presenting these things -- they're unlikely to bother posting a "Ted Cruz just did a good thing" article -- and in their color commentary / opinion pieces, not in the form of just making things up.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
> Surely people don't think sources such as Mother Jones are more 'reliable' than The New York Post, Fox News, or The Heritage Foundation?
That seems based on a premise that I don't grasp. Why is Mother Jones more or less reliable than those sources? Are those sources reliable in your opinion?
My impression is that you have a strong opinion and are assuming everyone shares it.
It's really remarkable how, every single time Wikipedia comes up on HN, there's a bunch of comments about bias and such... and yet never a single example is ever linked.
There are examples listed on this page and in many discussions.
If I want to look something up, I always check out wikipedia first. Its not always accurate, but its invariably a lot more accurate on most topics than random information across the web. Its also pretty easy to spot bad quality wiki articles once you get the gist of the site
Its amazing that wikipedia exists - there've been multiple hardcore attempts to kill it over the years for profit, but its still managing to go
Wikipedia is often the last on my goto resources to consult. The information is huge, but writing quality or style often irks me more than I can stand. I I always check Britannica first. If it's not there, then I move on.
Does this relate to a particular domain or field? I find it so good, and on the rare occasion I’ve found something wrong, I’ve fixed it.
While studying a neuroscience-adjacent MSc at UCL in London during the mid-2010s, senior academics would regularly recommend Wikipedia as an excellent primer for neuroanatomy. They wouldn't do it for people on actual neuroscience courses, who needed to know things in more detail, but they were very complimentary about the accuracy of the information on there.
It's extremely difficult to write math articles for a general audience which are both accessible and accurate, and the number of excellent writers working on Wikipedia math articles is tiny.
Please get involved if you want to see improvement. There are some math articles which are excellent: readable, well illustrated, appropriately leveled, comprehensive; but there are many, many others which are dramatically underdeveloped, poorly sourced, unillustrated, confusing, too abstract, overloaded with formulas, etc.
Out of interest, would you consider these articles to be approachable to a non-mathematician?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_quantum_mechan...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_general_relati...
They were created because the main articles are, as you say, difficult for a layperson to read.
Absolutely. I do not know the current status, so don’t kill me if now is much better, because is just an example from many. But take fourier series. I remember going into the article, and instead of starting with something lime “helps to decompose functions in sums of sin and cos”, started with “the forier transform is defined as (PUM the integral for with Euler formula) continues: is easy to show the integral converges according to xxx criterion, as long as the function is…” you get the idea. Had I not know what FT is, I would’ve not undestand anything
Articles in biology, from which I understand nothing, are a wall for me. I could never understand anything biology related. Also for example, in Spanish, don’t ask me why, any plant or animal is always under the latin scientific name, and you have to search the whole article to find the “common” name of the thing.
I agree with your comments on mathematics. The articles are seemingly accurate in that field, but not usable by laypeople.
The same principle applies to IPA transcriptions. I know some IPA but often find that it is less intelligible than the originals in some cases.
I find it the other way around. I remember vividly that the textbook I was using for proving Gödel's first incompleteness theorem was insufferable and dense. Wikipedia gave a nice and more easily understood proof sketch. Pedagogically it’s better to provide a proof sketch for students to turn it into a full proof anyways.
i don't know how many upvotes you've gotten, but it's not enough. or to put it mathematically, megadittoes!
To give a different opinion, the math topics are actually what I like most. When I'm looking for something on Wikipedia, I want to get a precise definition and related concepts. I don't think it's Wikipedia's job to teach me the material, there's other resources for that.
What about https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond?
I'm reading the Diamond article you liked and I cannot understand for the lift of me what you wanted? The Brittanica article seems substantially poorer. Note also that a key feature of Wikipedia is the hyperlinks! If you don't know what a "crystalline structure" is, or you want to know more about "hardness", you're welcome to click the links and dive further!
Hmm, I think this is an area where LLMs can be quite useful to make a wikipedia article more approachable.
But dangerous, as the LLMs are trained on wikipedia.
"Its not always accurate"
Nor were encyclopedias which is what student me fell back upon before Wikipedia.
If the choice is between Wikipedia vs random information accross the web, then Wikipedia is undoubtedly better. But it doesn't have to be that, on many topics there are reputable sources to consult first.
There is very little "random information" on the internet which you can find easily anymore. The blogosphere is cordoned off by search engines as are personal websites most of the time.
Most academic papers are behind paywalls now. Which is maybe just as well given AI scraping.
> Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion
Religion maybe, and Wikipedia is indeed pretty awesome for many topics, but politics is THE bad example here.
Much of the political - especially geopolitical - content on Wikipedia has a tremendous atlanticist bias.
“atlanticist” - the culture of the enlightenment and the good that’s come from it.
Wikipedia does hold ideals, that access to knowledge is a net good, that people can cooperate both in contribution and review without a dominating magisterial authority. That rational dialogue and qualification and refinement is possible, and that it’s possible to correct for bias, and see the difference between bias and agenda.
Like those whose anti-enlightenment agenda is revealed when they use “atlanticist” as a slur.
No. One can beleive in the enlightenment ideals without placing north america, europe, and the relations between them as the most important thing.
For example - one could argue (quite successfully) that the US and Europe propping up dictators in south america and middle east to secure easy access to oil against the wishes and election results of those nations is opposed to many enlightenment ideals, but it is still atlanticism by prioritizing north american and european relations and preservation of values within their little bubble.
Also, just because there was much good resulting from enlightenment thinking, we also got things like the slave trade, the belgian congo, various genocides and so on from it... all of which are pretty bad.
The very notion that the enlightenment had all the answers and that there is nothing more to improve or learn is itself anti-enlightenment.
(I know there were abolitionists in the enlightnement,and examples of people opposed to all the other bad ideas i mentioned, but there are plenty of people who "rationally" argued for them too)
"The slave trade" refers to the transatlantic slave trade, not slavery in general. (Though I would question whether that really qualifies as a "product of the enlightenment": post hoc ergo propter hoc, and all that.)
Is there another public source for encyclopedia-type articles that is better for geopolitical content? For example, if I have a philosophy question I'll often consult the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy instead of Wikipedia.
If there isn't a more neutral public source -- if there are only sources with different biases, or if the better sources are behind paywalls -- then I think that Wikipedia is still doing pretty well even for contentious geopolitical topics.
Usually disputes are visible on the Talk page, regardless of whatever viewpoint may prevail in the main article. It can also be useful to jump back to years-old revisions of articles, if there are recent world events that put the subject of the article in the news.
Apart from Wikipedia, speaking more generally, I think that articles with a strong editorial bias still provide useful information to an alert reader. I can read articles from Mother Jones, Newsmax, Russia Today, the BBC, Times of India, etc. and find different political and/or geopolitical slants to what is written about and how it is reported. I can also learn a lot even when I strongly disagree with the narrative thrust of what is reported. The key thing is to take any particular article or publication as only circumstantial evidence for an underlying reality, and to avoid falling into complacency even when (or especially when) the information you're reading aligns with what you already believe to be true.
Wikipedia has been the proto-Reddit for a long time, that is, it was relatively easy for ideological bubbles to manufacture the Chomskyian Consent, just by being early adopters.
As such it rapidly developed into heavily biased page, as Wikipedia‘s co-founder Larry Sanger keeps pointing out.
It helps if you are proficient in multiple languages so you can at least „hop“ between the (some) bubbles. But the gatekeeping is always there.
Larry Sanger is not the most convincing on this topic due to how he keeps using conspiracy theories as examples of things Wikipedia is biased against.
Like if the complaint is that Wikipedia is biased against pseudoscience like naturopathy, i consider that a good thing.
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Are you talking about English Wikipedia, or all of the Wikipedia sites?
In general my impression is that the longer the article title is, the more slanted the article itself is.
Could you provide an example article from Wikipedia for such bias?
PS: I had to look up „atlanticist“, did this on Wikipedia. (giggle!)
I know sometime around Trump's first presidency, in Bill Clinton's Wikipedia entry, under the Impeachment section they added in a picture of Trump and Clinton shaking hands, apropos of nothing in the surrounding text.
I just checked and it's still there.
Here's the change, which happened on December 5, 2016, a few weeks after Trump was elected the first time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Clinton&diff...
Link to the section in question:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Clinton&diff...
Still there as of now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Clinton&oldi...
So what?
Wikipedia is one of the greatest projects people have indeavored on. It has certainly surpassed the pyramids as one of the great wonders of the world, in usefulness, size and scope and human hours.
I fondly remember visiting Wikipedia HQ in Jan 2012. It was amazing to see how small their "operation" was :)
Back then they had 474M monthly unique visitors, 83,444 active contributors and a staff of less than 100. I'm still blown away by the collaboration. To me, that was the promise of "Web 2.0".
On the kitchen door they hung xkcd 903, 906 and another webcomic mentioning that only 13% of updates to Wikipedia are from women (can't find the source). The wifi password back then was "knowledgeshouldbefree" (maybe it still is?)
https://xkcd.com/903/
https://xkcd.com/906/
Because they don't pay 99.9% of the people who effectively work for them.
What's your point? I think it's amazing that people are contributing to a shared knowledge base without needing payment.
If no one gets paid, no one can pay for anything. What are they supposed to live off? Thin air, welfare/benefits or inherited money. At least the people who write Britannica get to make a living.
I edited Wikipedia for many years and have seen how it has (d)evolved into an oligarchy. I have absolutely nothing to show for it, and now I see companies using it to build products which they do make money off. They are making money off my work (and others). I am glad that I did get to make sure Wikipedia covered certain subjects, but it was not a rewarding experience otherwise.
I've sold fanzines and published stuff in hard copy, and they made a little money. Not enough to live off but far more rewarding than my Wikipedia interactions.
"By regular people!"
I'm not sure about that. I think people who are experts in specific areas (and/or are obsessed with those topics) are the ones contributing to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is amazing.
"People, by the thousands, are contributing without asking for anything else in return. This is incredible!"
It's unpaid labour, and has created a precedent elsewhere. It seems to be okay in our society to have lots of unpaid labour but not unpaid bills. A lot of Wikipedia's content is monetised elsewhere as is IMDB's.
Then there is Wikipedia's odd circular relationship with Google. Articles are "verified" (sic) by Google but Wikipedia is where most Google searches now lead.
"Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world."
That view is extremely optimistic. There are still umpteen gaps and biases on Wikipedia, some of which have been created by the administrators themselves.
>Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world.
And fails spectacularly.
Wikipedia is surely a formidable source of knowledge, but
> Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion.
You are romanticizing.
Wikipedia is a corporation, just like Work or University, and I personally assume anything corporate is being manipulated by the owners or the ruling oligarchy because they are structurally unreliable. This is especially veritable for Wikipedia. Create an account there and try to go deeper into the articles about politics, literature and war.
> Wikipedia is a corporation, just like Work or University
“Work” and “University” are so wildly different as institutions that to use them this way makes it perfectly clear how little merit your point has.
It’s an empty character attack - possibly a reflection of your own - meant to appeal only to the worst despairing suspicions of others. It does nothing to illuminate specific dynamics of group knowledge negotiation.
Anyone who has participated knows there can be conflict and abuse — and more about how that’s addressed than someone throwing drive-by distrust.
> "Work” and “University” are so wildly different as institutions that to use them this way makes it perfectly clear how little merit your point has.
I disagree. Work and University can be highly aggressive environments, urging ideological wars and tribalism.
> It’s an empty character attack - possibly a reflection of your own -
Well, this got personal very quickly.
I know this, I've experienced this. There is not a concrete source for what I'm saying here.
I remember reading the article about a nudist family photographer. The English Wikipedia article was highlighting the controversy about child pornography that came with it, almost trying to demonize the guy, while the German article was actually trying to go beyond and develop the article. There are enormous discrepancies on that website.
Wikipedia has some bizarre articles and rules. I can only provide some pieces and bits of anecdotes.
Instead of romanticizing all the way, I was clearly discussing about the bureaucratic chaos, discrepancies between articles in foreign languages and corrupt political environment that Wikipedia has become for beginner editors, specifically on articles related to literature, politics, and the WW2 atrocities.
Your argument is pure sophism with some attempt to hurt me personally.
You don't know me fully. Go throw your tantrums elsewhere.
> Wikipedia is a corporation
nitpick: WMF (the org that develops and hosts Wikipedia and its related services like Wikimedia Commons) is a non-profit foundation, not the classic type of profit-driven corporation that your post implies.
I think this deserves more than a nitpick. WMF also doesn't dictate the actions of the volunteer community, and neither does the board. The content of Wikipedia is fully volunteer created and maintained, and admin actions are also handled by the volunteer community.
The foundation is there to provide technical, legal, and community support. In some cases this is funding for community events, in other cases, this includes funding towards making the editor community more diverse. In most cases, though, it's keeping a staff of folks that maintain and improve the software, and defend the project legally.
So, no Wikipedia isn't a corporation. It's more of a commune.
I think it would be hard to say it's an oligarchy. There's 450 or so active admins (and around 900 total), and really, they don't truly have that much power. The vast majority of decisions on Wikipedia are made by editors, and on occasion admins get involved.
This isn't a country with some ruling class. 450 people aren't in cahoots to stop you from editing.
>But they sure have oligarchies.
Then name one of the relevant oligarchs
Well, I prefer to be skeptical of any corporation, regardless if it is non-profit or not, until proven otherwise with substantial transparency on their methods of moderation and control.
There is a lack of transparency on Wikipedia. The rules are nebulous and prone to abuse by veteran users and the oligarchs aggregating on political articles.
It certainly becomes opaque when it is a labyrinth of links and documents that you need to read and follow through. It does not help when these same rules can be abused to death by veteran users.
At a certain point, no one really knows the devil's dance happening at the top of the moderation ladder and you end up wasting a lot of lifetime on these dead talk pages.
It is a bureaucratic nightmare.
I don't think corporation implies for-profit. In my eyes, corporation refers to a large organization with some self-serving motivation which is not necessarily just money. Being a non-profit just so happens to be the best vehicle for this motivation but it doesn't mean that the motivation doesn't exist.
Would you consider OpenAI a corporation despite it being a non-profit?
At least in the US, most universities are also not for profit. I'd argue that Wikipedia and universities have more in common than either do with for profit companies, so I'm not convinced your examples clarify why it makes more sense to lump all of them together.
It was badly worded. I don't even know how to express this properly. It has been many years since I edited on Wikipedia, and it was on both english and portuguese. But the point that I was trying to make is that they are institutions with ideological norms and if you start deviating from them and start hammering on controversial and dangerous ideas and topics, or even just discovering and mentioning them, you can be silenced very easily.
And I don't agree with you that US universities are not for profit entities, might be on paper, I don't know. Some of them can bind the students to a long life of debt no?
A "corporation" is any time two or three people gather together in something's name. It's any kind of, well, corporate entity, a single thing comprised of multiple people. A school is a corporation, a town is a corporation (seriously, many municipalities are legally incorporated), a marriage is a very limited corporation, and a business is also a corporation. So, yes, Wikipedia is a corporation, and it should be proud of the fact it can keep so many people working towards a common goal.
The remote viewing article keeps being reverted as pseudoscientific when original research conducted by the CIA is cited. Such citations are removed swiftly. Any changes are denied or rolled back.
The rationale is that, even though the documents themselves are a primary source from an organization that poured significant resources into researching the phenomenon of remote viewing, the individual posting the declassified document isn't an authority on the subject.
Apparently if youre not a doctor, you can't read primary sources?
Many such cases.
Wikipedia is absolutely a powerful resource, but it it's clearly controlled by moderators with a bias, and there's no incentive to challenge said bias or consider alternative worldviews.
I remember people saying that the article about Carl Jung was not worth contributing anymore because of his fascist sympathies with nazism. I don't know what to make of that.
I've experienced something similar about users downplaying on talk pages the atrocities done by the Soviet Government, like the Holodomor famine or the Katyn Massacre, in contrast to the atrocities done by the Nazis.
Controversial and relatively unknown subjects are easier to be attacked and ignored on wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
Editors have biases. The best we can do is shine a spotlight on them.
People are opposed to this, of course. No one likes to be reminded of how they're limited - and people get really nasty when you accuse them of being a dishonest interlocutor.
I haven’t looked at the article in question, but is there enough material to make an article specifically about the CIA research programs?
The wikipedia remote viewing article directly points to "Stargate" right now
They have a bee in their bonnet about pseudoscience and paranormal subject matter. It has never dawned on some of them that you can take an interest in a subject without believing it, or endorsing it. As I said elsewhere, hoaxers and fraudsters are interesting figures in their own right.
With something like remote viewing, it is undeniable that the USA, USSR and PRC all conducted research into it during the Cold War, which is documented. Someone might be more interested in that fact than getting a "Here be dragons" warning.
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> Wikipedia is a corporation, and I personally assume anything corporate is being manipulated by the owners or the ruling oligarchy because they are structurally unreliable.
Many articles are fine. I don't think you can equate this to all of Wikipedia automatically.
Wikipedia is extremely biased and has a lot of deliberate misinformation, so I wouldn't trust it for anything except as a basic starting point for information gathering alongside a web search. Wikipedia's founder itself has denounced it for its bias.
There are so many issues with Wikipedia which most people do not discuss here. I have witnessed dozens of articles deleted by people who had no understanding of the subject in question. In one case, someone went around deleting articles on rugby union, because the teams were not professional (most of them aren't to this day and weren't officially into the 1990s.)
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