this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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I don't think something like this exists yet(?), so it'll be cool to see how this will be like.
So like Fandom without the ads or miraheze, but fediverse-adapted
Promising...
That's exactly what i was thinking. It replace fandom.
Cheers to this new alternative together, fellow crab brother...
As an academic I love this. On Wikipedia there's actually fights among different expert disciplines going on. It is better to allow different instances operated by different discipline summarize knowledge from their own perspective.
To be fair, those are good faith arguments with the goal being to determine the real, objective truth. Hopefully.
That is not how this tool would be used, in the hands of people not trained in the art of socratic discourse. Just imagine how the situation in Gaza would end up being described.
Avoiding conflict is not always a useful aim.
I can respect your comment. The problem with Wikipedia's scholarly articlesI wanted to raise was that some group of researchers (or businesses) wash away others' views. In other times, mathematicians try to satisfy everyone from different disciplines, and write a very abstract article that covers everyone's view yet is too academic and hardly readable to most readers who actually need Wikipedia.
The goal of academic research is to inform the best and brightest of the real information. For e.g. academic extensions to how nuclear power works, or for engineers to have a working basis to build a viable power plant, and so on.
The goal of an encyclopedia though is arguably different: to make people "feel" informed, without necessarily being so? Or at least to serve as a starting point for further studies, maybe?
Science marches ever onwards, and eventually that gets collected into textbooks, and even later into encyclopedias. Or maybe now we're working from a new model where it could skip that middle step? But science still seems leagues ahead of explanations to the masses, and whereas in science the infighting is purposeful and helpful (to a degree), the infighting of making something explainable in a clearer manner to more people is also purposeful and helpful, though federating seems to me to be giving up on making a centralized repository of knowledge, i.e. the very purpose of an "encyclopedia"?
Science reporting must be decentralized, but encyclopedias have a different purpose and so should not be, maybe? At least not at the level of Wikipedia.
If you're correct, to me the usefulness of Wikipedia is actually different from that of encyclopedia, and the pattern I'm arguing goes against that.
Which also means that marxist.wiki/article/communism will be completely different from libertarian.wiki/article/communism. I think I will take Wikipedia's attempt at impartiability over a "wikipedia" destined to just devolve into islands of "alternative facts"
@Quacksalber @Alsephina Wikipedia is already filled with a LOT of fake information and biased
Are you of the opinion that people don't already use internet resources, libraries, interviews and other educational avenues to inform themselves? Many here seem to be needing an education on how to use Wikipedia responsively, they seem to think that one is unable to engage with a wikipedia article critically. I just checked the article for BP, as one of the blogs linked here claimed that over 44% of BP's wikipedia page was corporate speak. The 'controversies' section is one third to half the wikipedia page in length. As a jumping-off point for further study, it is perfectly adequate.
But then again, you could say this about Lemmy and Reddit too.
Lemmy took 5 years to get to this point. Let's give this a few years and see how it turns out.
I am okay with bias in my social media.
Far less so in my encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is hilariously biased, especially on any politics or history topics.
here are extensive lists of complaints of bias, from both left- and right- wing alternatives:
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia
https://www.conservapedia.com/Wikipedia
...are these people writing about the same website?! 😂
They baited you by saying "wikipedia", but then they switched to what looks like the wikia software. Notice how they are from lemmygrad? I hope you get my point.
I can get why that user might have a pro-communist bias themself due to being from a pro-communist instance, but the articles they linked seemed to be an accurate enough representation of how the far left and far right see Wikipedia.
Maybe not completely accurate to how it really is in all aspects, but I don't really care enough about Wikipedia's biases to fact check each contradictory claim in each article. I barely use it as a point of reference anymore anyways. (Though I've found it tends to have a liberal bias, like both the articles stated. I seem to remember that during the past election, some sections of the articles about Trump or featuring him in some way used very emotionally charged language)
But accurate or not, I still find it hilarious to look at the articles side by side. One claims the articles are written mainly by teenagers and the unemployed and supports communism, and the other claims they're written mostly by privileged White men who hate communism.
The question was:
I was pointing out how no, they are not the same website. The name of "Wikipedia" was thus improper as it lacked precision, compared to something like "the wikia software, following the WikiMedia protocols" (or whatever it would be).
The content therefore has nothing whatsoever to do with the question, that was asking about the Wikipedia website.
And btw, none of this bodes well for the project imho. The front-end work is clearly lacking, as OP even admitted, but more importantly all of this discussion lacks the type of "precision" that usually goes into a Wikipedia article. Obviously any person or AI can copy the existing Wikipedia website's content, but if all of this is a reflection of what would go into that copy, then it looks to me like it will quickly fall behind.
I would have been much more likely to have read a blog post to read about the relevant issues relating to communism if it did not try to ride on Wikipedia's coattails and just stood all on its own. But... as you can guess, I would be more of a fan of articles that are precise in the terminology used rather than ones that are all over the place.
And keep in mind that b/c what is being discussed is a "federated" model, ANYONE, who writes with ANY degree of precision, from the highest to the lowest level, will be federated around to everywhere. At which point it will become too difficult to find worthwhile content, as opposed to it being in one central location. The entire point of an encyclopedia is to be a one-stop place to look things up?
Alternative takes on communism would have, imho at least, been more widely distributed if they were written on a blog website and linked to from the actual Wikipedia pages. If the Wikipedia is too restrictive then... I understand why that could not happen, but nevertheless it is still going to be a major impediment. Which is all the more reason why imprecise language, scattered throughout the entire world, does not offer much of a viable alternative to the great Wikipedia? But... prove me wrong, I guess!? :-D
You won't find any encyclopedia (or anything really) you can use then since everything is biased towards something. Wikipedia has a massive neoliberal bias for example. And a heavily biased leadership as linked in this post.
I would love to read both a marxist.wiki/article/communism and a libertarian.wiki/article/communism - opinions are great, fine & dandy, but at the end of the day, I don't want a marxist/grasshopper vs. a libertarian/grasshopper, and I DEFINITELY do not want a conservative/vaccine vs. a liberal/vaccine each feeding misinformation from a slightly different and both-sides-incorrect approach. The enormous EFFORTS that go into finding neutral and balanced information are worthwhile, imho, as is having a central repository that would not need to be individually updated hundreds or thousands of times.
A mirroring/backup process would just as easily perform the same stated goal of preserving human knowledge - and these are already done. Arguably the federation model works best for social media, a bit less so I am told for Mastodon, but I think would not work well at all for an encyclopedia style.
But don't mind me, I am simply grieving the death of facts and reason over here... - the fact that we would even want to contemplate different "alternative (sets of) facts" at all means that we already have lost something that was once good. :-(
@OpenStars @Alsephina are you assuming that there is any writing free of bias?
Reading the links in this post alone will tell you wikipedia is already one of those biased islands lol