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.
News is the main feed of new data and that can be an infinite incremental source of new information
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There’s zero reason it should happen that often, and that intrusively.
Fixed.
https://www.dailydot.com/news/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraisi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
They have no actual "product" to sell and no ads.
At the same time I imagine a huge amount of traffic, that has surely gotten much much worse with the AI "renaissance" we're going through.
They have staff, etc.. So what's the deal with all the wikipedia hate lately?
In 2025 they spend 184 million, and 2% was on hosting. Even several times that for salaries means that an absurd fraction is on non wikipedia items.
Software doesn't write itself, and improving the software for Wikipedia is where the lion-share of the budget is going.
That doesn't even get into less technical roles like legal or community outreach, which are very much spending for wikipedia.
Hosting is a small portion of the budget because its by far the cheapest part of running a major website. In many ways its also the easiest part to make cheap, simply by not using AWS.
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.
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.
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.
This won't work, and it would fail the same way as Semantic Web. Too much human labor needed.
If anything, the community is discussing stronger guidelines against inappropriate LLM use.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1124005/ai-wikip...
> 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.
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.
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.
If one just wants a friendly black box to tell them something they want to hear, AI is known to do that.
And not just bottom of the barrel LLMs. Ask Claude about Intel PIN tools, it will merrily tell you that it "Has thread-safe APIs but performance issues were noted with multi-threaded tools like ThreadSanitizer" and then cite the Disney Pins blog and the DropoutStore "2025 Pin of the Month Bundle" as an inline source.
Enamel pins. That's the level of trust you should have when LLMs pretend to be citing a source.
Or is that something you made up?
I don't think LLMs can be faulted on their enthusiasm for supplying references.
And the stochastic parrot framing has a real problem here: if the mechanism reliably produces correct outputs for a class of problems, dismissing it as "just plausibility" rather than computation becomes a philosophical stance rather than a technical critique. The model learned patterns that encode the mathematical relationship. Whether you call that "understanding" or "statistical correlation" is a definitional argument, not an empirical one.
The legal citation example sounds about right. It is a genuine failure mode. But arithmetic is precisely where LLMs tend to succeed (at small scales) because there is no ambiguity in the training signal.
But we now live in a world where people agree that ideology should be able to change facts.
> or the impact of certain wars
Exactly, like China wanting to completely censor anything regarding the Tiananmen Square protests.
> for example questioning homosexuality
I don't know what you have to question about this.
>If you are seeking for a global view you better ask different LLMs for arguments and counter-arguments on a subject.
All the LLM I've tested have a strong tendency to increase your echo chamber and not try to change your opinion on something.
>This is why you need to use different sources.
Only if deep down, you're ready to change your POV on something, otherwise you're just wasting time and ragebaiting yourself. Although I admit, it can still be entertaining to read some news to discover how they're able to twist reality.
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.
You appear to be using unusual definitions of "fact" and "truth", more akin to "assertions" and "vibe". I'll stick with the traditional definitions.
[1] https://patriotpolling.com/our-polls/f/greenland-supports-jo...
According to an American poll that surveyed 416 people residing across Greenland on their support for joining the United States.
57.3% wants to join the US.
According to a Danish poll (conducted through web interviews) among 497 selected citizens in Greenland.
85% do not want to join the US.
If I ask 10 people what they think of something and 60% says "no" and if I ask another 10 people and 90% says "yes" there's no relation between the 60% and the 90%, like at all.
Or as Homer said it "Anybody can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 40% of people know that."
My favorite is: "Numbers are fragile creatures, and if you can torture them enough, you can make them say whatever you want"
A "fabricated fact" (or "alternative fact" if you prefer) is an oxymoron. Actual truth, as opposed to a vibe or what people are basing their decisions on these days, is orthogonal to "the amount of energy, power and money that the person has." Deriving or identifying actual facts and truth is hard (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method) and always subject to change based on new data, so lots of people don't do it -- it's much easier to just make shit up and confirms biases.
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.
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&...
> In your link I don’t see Hasan white knights protecting their master from bad publicity
Yes, because it's not overt. Nobody says that when they're doing it. What's happening is claiming that the story is not notable so it can be removed because it's bad publicity for him:
> This is a nothing story and not encyclopedic.
> it seems to be "drama" amongst the terminally online
Then it turns out that it's notable because some sources are reporting it, but the editors make every effort to discount all of those sources:
> The Australian is noted as a center-right newssheet. I think there has been no rfc on it, but it seems an opinionated source.
> WP:NEWSWEEK has been noted to have had some quality decline according to RSP.
> WP:DEXERTO states not to use it for BLP and that its very tabloidy.
> WP:DAILYDOT also states its highly biased and opinionated. It seems rather tabloidy as well.
> See WP:TIMESOFINDIA but its not reliable enough for this
...and this is used as a reason to not even put a single-paragraph summary at the end of his article, despite the fact that the event is extremely notable as part of his career, and is exactly the information that someone reading the Wikipedia page would want to know.
> I see Hasan haters trying to bludgeon the change into the article by ignoring any objection and just reverting edits.
Yes, I see some of those people too. But, in response, the editors are reverting the changes and locking out the topic. An impartial editor concerned about the truth and curating a useful encyclopedia would not do that - they'd create new changes to remove specifically only the offending unsourced material and rewrite sourced material to be neutral.
> if this was so important then why hasn’t any major news outlet written about it
Along with the other sources listed in the talk page that the editors did their best to discount, The Guardian wrote about it - that certainly counts as a "major news outlet".
Nobody wants a ton of drama on Wikipedia, but this clearly surpasses the threshold of "drama" given that (1) it's still being discussed months afterwards (2) it has transcended the cultural circles around Hasan (which is the main metric for "drama") and (3) it's received reporting from many news outlets, including large and reliable ones like The Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/11/i-love-when-...
This knife cuts both ways.
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.
Thinking this is relevant is a very revealing position. It shines some very strong light on your ideological biases and, yes, your agenda, which I feel certain you will feel obligated to deny as a defensive measure. You are showing your hand in ways I don't think you realize.
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.
The interviewer is right to press on the basic facts and Wales was wrong to ragequit, especially since the exchange lasted less than 45 seconds(!)
I don't see this as a political victim issue: I can see Sanger as an asshole while also seeing Wales as weak.
Has Wales actually disputed the objective facts of the matter?
I did not take his comment to mean “it’s an opinion whether Sanger worked on Wikipedia from the beginning” but “it’s an opinion whether that qualifies him as a cofounder”.
> Wales could have said "I don't dispute the facts of that case. I see myself as the founder, but I won't argue against other interpretations. Lets move past it."
That is essentially what he said. He called himself the founder, then when the interviewer probed, said it’s a dumb question, then said he doesn’t care, then said the interviewer can frame it however he wants, then said again that he doesn’t care.
He said what you think he should’ve said. He just didn’t use your exact words.
> The interviewer is right to press on the basic facts and Wales was wrong to ragequit, especially since the exchange lasted less than 45 seconds(!)
What “basic facts” did he press on? I heard no facts or questions about facts. He used the word “facts” while pressing Wales specifically about calling himself the founder.
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.
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.
The case if Tilo is quite specific, his interview style uses methods that are effective and uncommon and in part extremely unpleasant, but super effective in making people a accidentally confess to him whilst forgetting all their media training.
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 can't imagine an interview not addressing a question that is so pertinent to Wales' notoriety. They literally cannot properly introduce him without confronting it! To say those interviewers are acting in "transparently bad-faith" comes across to me as plainly biased.
Sanger's politics don't change this, either. It might be the case that you have to concede on this to people you politically disagree with.
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.
A big piece of this is that “founder” is actually a very unusual title to use here. Normally someone would “create a product” and “found a company”. Wikipedia is not a company. It’s not even the name of the foundation. It’s a product.
It’s kind of like Steve Jobs saying he founded the iPhone.
> He didn't spend 25 years fostering and growing the foundation.
Which isn’t however relevant to the title “founder”.
I'm inclined to agree with you but there are plenty of examples of founders of products: Matt Mullenweg, Dries Buytaert
> Which isn’t however relevant to the title “founder”.
I think it establishes credence for the claim. If Sanger's contributions warrant being called Co-Founder, then so too do Jimmy Wales.
The core arguments are "you shouldn't claim to be founder of a product" and "claiming to be founder implies sole founder". This is why I say it breaks down to mincing words.
Fair, but I do think the distinction between the company and the product is relevant. Wales’s claim to be the sole founder of Wikipedia relies specifically on muddying these two notions.
My recollection is that Wales has claimed that Sanger doesn’t qualify as a founder because he was an employee. OK, except Wikipedia is not an employer. If Jimmy Wales qualifies as the founder of Wikipedia specifically because of his ownership in the company that initially funded it, then the other founders of Bomis would seem to also be Wikipedia cofounders.
On the other hand, if being a founder of Wikipedia actually means being instrumental in the creation of the product, then Sanger seems clearly a founder.
Mixing and matching across two different definitions to uniquely identify Wales alone seems very self-serving and inconsistent.
To be clear, I’m not really disputing anything you said here. Just kind of griping about Wales’s self serving definition of founder.
> I think it establishes credence for the claim. If Sanger's contributions warrant being called Co-Founder, then so too do Jimmy Wales.
I don’t know if anyone has claimed Wales should not be considered a cofounder. I think the general question is specifically whether he is the only founder. In this interview, he introduced himself as “the” founder.
I don't think that he was claiming to be sole-founder and I don't think claiming to be founder implies you're the sole founder. The choice of "the" over "a" though does have some implication, and his intentional choice to use "the" might have been to avoid broaching the subject of Sanger. It's clearly a touchy subject for him.
And at the same time if Steve Jobs or Bill Gates were introduced as the founders of their respective companies I personally wouldn't think much of it.
At the end of the day, the Wikipeida pages on Wikipedia and Sanger credit Sanger appropriately so the it's not as if Wales is exerting his will to erase Sanger or his contribution. He just gets pissy when you bring it up.
If Bill Gates called himself “the founder” of Microsoft, people would probably dismiss it as a slip of the tongue. For Wales, I don’t think it was a slip of the tongue at all. It’s an intentional choice. I don’t agree with his interpretation, but I also don’t think he’s obligated to rehash the topic in every single interview.
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.
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.
[...] For a long time [...]
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."
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?
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.
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.
Exactly. Kudo to the wikimedia community!
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?
In fact, journalists should be less deferential to every CEO. Those should be treated with the highest degree of scrutiny.
It would also be better for Wikipedia to not have any "public face". I don't want fake-heroes; I want accurate, objective content.
Sad that he has to play that role, but this is where we are at the moment.
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…
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]
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.
> 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.
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.
If Wales had anyone else, or had gone it alone, it's unlikely Wikipedia would be what it is today.
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.
A monument to vanity.
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.
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.
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?
This website purports to tell us how Wikipedia came to be, 25 years ago. Why not tell it honestly?
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.
Without Sanger, Wikipedia:
- wouldn't be called "Wikipedia"
- wouldn't be editable without first opening an account
- wouldn't have NPOV as a fundamental policy
In short, it wouldn't be Wikipedia.
The community he incubated grew and took Wikipedia onwards to what it is today, even if he disagrees with that direction and plugs his own massively less popular encyclopedia.
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".
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.
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.
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>"
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.
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.
That’s the beauty of wikipedia after all. I recently made my first contribution and it was a really smooth process.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold
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.
Keep in mind that stating a fact and dogwhistling are not the same thing.
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'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.
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.
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).
This is where I would disagree, the model really doesn't work for politics and current events. In those topics Wikipedia may be better described as "The world according to a handful of (mostly US-based) news outlets". There's been a prolonged effort to deprecate sources, particularly those which lean to the right, so it's increasingly difficult to portray a neutral perspective reflecting multiple interpretations of the same topic. Instead excessive weight is given to what a majority of a select group of online sources say, and that's not necessarily trustworthy.
Most obviously it's a model which will fall flat when trying to document criticism of the press.
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...
It does all hinge on that important list of acceptable vs unacceptable sources. In the last few decades there's been an increasing trend for news outlets to take a political position and decline to report on stories which would damage that position, which becomes most obvious whenever the US holds an election.
Speaking of norms, the Hacker News community will flag and downvote any comments of mine that mention that our 10 month old did not receive the COVID-19 vaccine. I think that's clear evidence of some kind of political bias. But that's this community's norms. I don't care as much to convince them as I do to fix Wikipedia.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46564106
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45717802 (this one was flagged but someone must have vouched for it)
Anyway, I understand if your experience trying to correct Wikipedia might have been at a different time, so you may not recall right now, but if you ever recall, my email is in my profile. I collect a list of these things and when I have a spare moment I try to make some progress.
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.
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.
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.
I'll take curated information that is better and rigorous every time.
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.
I would say this started over a decade ago. Otherwise I completely agree.
It's the Eternal September of our generation, and it's not recognised enough as such. Before that, the internet was a different place.
Okay, what the actual fuck? IIRC it was people whining about the absolute state of games journalism in the 2010's.