shamino wrote on 2020-07-28, 12:49:The story of the modern internet has been consolidation to a few web sites that each have a monopoly within their own domain. W […]
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The story of the modern internet has been consolidation to a few web sites that each have a monopoly within their own domain. Wikipedia is an example of that.
dr_st wrote on 2020-07-28, 05:59:
Wikipedia is awesome, but it has it's issues. Overzealous "protectors" who automatically revert any edit that is not up to some imaginary, arbitrary standard (often existing solely in their view) without so much as offering any constructive explanation on what this standard is - is one problem that plagues certain domains. Then you either have to go hunt for "guidelines" on a number of contradicting WP pages, or go into a flat-out edit war with them, which in both cases is just a waste of your time, and so why would you even bother?
And so the viewpoint of 1-3 "enthusiastic" people tends to dominate what the world will read about any given subject.
I think it was healthier when anybody could post a website describing their own view, and people would see it and read it. Of course the quality varied, but readers had the opportunity to judge that for themselves instead of letting somebody else judge it for them. No particular website or organization had "the final word", nor should they in my opinion. I have a deep mistrust of centralized authority.
Coming up - independent discussion forums fall into obscurity, replaced with Facebook.
+∞. 👏🏼
As for Wikipedia: there's nothing wrong with the *idea* of a free and crowd-sourced repository of information about everything. But as usual with any sort of progress we get the same old story - great on paper, and would be the perfect thing in an ideal world, but then it runs head-on into human nature. You get herds and cliques, turf wars, ego pettiness, POV-pushing (wikipedia's "NPOV" policy has more holes in it than swiss cheese), political and commercial exploitation (paid editing is perfectly tolerated if it's disclosed, and often undetected when it's not disclosed), etc. - you name it.
A more specific issue is what gets defined as "notable sources", regardless of the fact that anyone's standard of "notability" has nothing to do with value. To take just a random sample of my own areas of interests (music, computing, history) - I can't even count the times I've mentally facepalmed over the unmitigated crap that gets peddled on WP, meticulously cited and referenced of course, as a result of this single factor. I'd trust "original research" (ever heard a worse pejorative?) from a *knowledgeable* person before I even dream of touching 80% of the sources that qualify as "notable".
There's also a specific type of selection bias, where the sources that actually get used are those that are easily available and accessible today. Especially with subjects dating from before the internet age, the number and quality of *contemporary* references is shockingly low, because nobody bothers - even when such things are available, say, on the Internet Archive with some digging. What you get is a distorted picture, which only grows more distorted with time, or what I call "creeping revisionism". Nobody intends for that to happen, mind you, but it simply does. Comes with the territory.
Even with all of that said - you could argue that this shouldn't be a problem, because there are always better sources. But when something comes at zero cost, most people are going to treat it as if it's *worth* nothing, and that goes for knowledge and information too. Wikipedia is the easiest and most accessible source of them all, and the great majority of people are simply going to stop there, and not take the extra effort of checking anywhere else. Paradoxically, there's more free information out there than there's ever been before in human history, but the net effect on the transmission of knowledge might even be negative.
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