The Shining light of Wikipedia and other disappointments | Hacker News Reader

The Shining light of Wikipedia and other disappointments

wikipediawehaveaproblem.com

33 pointshoofish38 comments

Reading between the lines, this appears to be someone who has tried to alter Wikipedia to support fringe scientists & alt-medicine gurus like Rupert Sheldrake and Deepak Chopra. So I all a bit skeptical of his motives.

Does anyone know the other side of the story?

I saw that too, mixed in with likely legit criticism of the possibility of editors abusing their power in the community and possibly too much orthodoxy squashing less popular views, is the fact that they want there to be more prominence for ideas that don't hold up to scientific scrutiny - and worse, can create confusion among lay people about what constitutes a valid scientific theory.

where specifically do you see that? It is detailed and mentioned both on Wikipedia itself and the website that the focus was on non controversial biographical information and had nothing to do with the ideas or the theories.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Rome_Viharo

This is addressed here: http://wikipediawehaveaproblem.com/2015/11/how-rational-wiki...

Viharo only quotes the RW article's preamble. The body of the article is more than ample in providing detail and citations to back itself up.

are you actually defending the RW article? It's obvious hatch job. The rationalwiki article references itself when it says "Viharo has a persecution complex.." and states that the entire site is a conspiracy theory and no evidence has been found for harassment"...with no reference what so ever.

Where do you see any evidence of the author trying to alter Wikipedia to promote fringe science?

You list RationalWiki as the "other side of the story", yet did you note that article was written by the same editors he encountered on Wikipedia?

If you spend more time on the site, you will see that the case study involved intentional patience and only focused on non controversial biographical information.

You appear to suggest that the context of the biographies the author was editing on means he was promoting or editing false or misleading information, and therefore perhaps deserved the treatment.

I asked for the other side of the story. RationalWiki appears to fit that bill. I made no judgments on the merits of either side of the squabble. I trust the readers of HN are capable of forming their own judgements based on available evidence.

you specifically said "who has tried to alter Wikipedia to support fringe scientists & alt-medicine gurus"

That narrative is from RationalWiki, and is misinformation. This is very clearly detailed on the website.

It isn't, though. I suspect you have only read Viharo's defense, which, tellingly, doesn't link to his RW article. It simply quotes from the preamble. The rest of the article expands significantly on it and cites his own words from Wikipedia talk pages.

again, you're misinformed. it links DIRECTLY to the RW article, and that article is mentioned in many pages on WWHP. It links to comments made on talk pages out of context, read the actual links to WP pages and you will see.

I wrote a blog post about the guy behind this website. He claims to be some sort of expert who tried to "study" editor interactions on Wikipedia. He's actually a social media & SEO marketing guy in California who likes to troll skeptics and science people online in his spare time. I analyzed the editing history of the articles involved in this blog post, and show that he is not in any way serious in his interactions on Wikipedia. https://skeptools.wordpress.com/2014/04/16/nothere-wikipedia...

Wikipedia is fine if you look up something less controversial like proton decay, but as soon as article has multiple points of view, there is a fight to establish the 'dominant narrative'. Articles that have any arbitration measures applied or in semi-protection shouldn't be trusted: if there are huge talk page archives its also a sign the topic has multiple points of view which Wikipedia can't express. Neutral point of view(Wiki policy) with controversial topics often leads to one-sided articles where the side which 'won the article' controls completely the content, which is massaged to fit the NPOV policy without adding anything from opponents.

This is a problem for sure, but consider the alternative. We could include all viewpoints. This means we put "the universe originated with a big bang and humans evolved from apes" next to "an invisible being created the world and humans 8000 years ago", "AIDS is caused by HIV" next to "AIDS is caused by vaccines and can be cured by ear candling", "the Holocaust killed 10 million plus people" next to "the Holocaust is a Jewish conspiracy to gain sympathy so they can take over the banking system". It's true that for some topics, including only the dominant view glosses over substantial evidence, but we can't ignore the fact that dominant viewpoints are often dominant because the non-dominant viewpoints have no basis in reality.

These contrasting views are documented in Wikipedia as conspiracy theories(holocaust denial, HIV denial) and creationism, wikipedia is fine with it. What i talk about are single articles where there is no other view elsewhere: the only expression of that topic belongs in a single article. It doesn't require to seek political articles to find obvious bias. Lets take for example 0.999... ; its contained in single article, there is only a brief mention of opposing view in skepticism section, but if you look at the talk pages you'll see its more controversial than it sounds and the opposing view is silenced.

Okay, but there's similar argument on vaccines and Obama's birth certificate; how do you propose to resolve that? Do you feel qualified to say that the minority opinion on 0.999 is more notable or sane than moon landing denials? On what basis?

Wikipedia is fine with all of these topics and has articles documenting them: Obama birth certificate has its own article,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_consp... Moon landing conspiracy theories article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing_conspiracy_theori... Vaccines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_controversies

I think you're conflating "documenting disproved conspiracy theories" with "presenting disproved conspiracy theories as alternative theories".

The vaccine controversies page, for example, notes that some people think vaccines cause autism, but also prominently quotes someone calling the vaccine-autism connection "perhaps, the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years". At no point does either the vaccine or vaccine controversies article deviate from the dominant viewpoint that vaccines do not cause autism.

This is very different from the numerous attempts to edit the page vaccines to say that vaccines cause autism. That is what we'd be allowing if we say that articles must present opposing viewpoints when there is controversy. Do you really want the vaccines page to present that as a valid viewpoint?

Wikipedia pretends to be neutral retelling of secondary sources("Verifiability, not Truth"). If Wikipedia was truly neutral it wouldn't need to adhere to "valid/dominant viewpoints" and pretend everything else doesn't exist. Basically, they claim to be neutral and unbiased while "dominant viewpoints" determine the content.

I agree. As I said upthread, that's a problem.

However, I'm saying, the alternative, where treating every viewpoint that exists as worthy of inclusion, is worse.

but those are not two mutually exclusive options. There is a difference between suppressing a minority voice (perspective) away from editing an article as opposed to INCLUDING a minority reference or fact in the article itself.

My argument is that many minority views (for example "vaccines cause autism") should be actively removed ("suppressed" in your words) from Wikipedia in favor of reality-based opinions. The only mechanism wikipedia has for choosing which minority opinions to remove is majority opinion (hopefully expert majority opinion). Wikipedia doesn't have a mechanism to include minority opinions without also including crazies.

Majority opinion isn't always right, but Wikipedia isn't well suited for solving that problem. This isn't speculation: it wasn't always this way, but the rules were made because people were flooding Wikipedia with all the insane things people believe. I've never been an active wikipedia contributor, but I've used the site long enough to remember this.

The site was having trouble loading for me. Here is an archive: http://archive.is/mOynr

I think blocking wikipediawehaveaproblem.com as a source is ok, but banning it from Jimmy's talk page is an entirely different kettle of fish.

it is not blocked as a source, it is blocked site wide from sharing on talk pages of any editor.

I wouldn't expect Wikipedia to accept "WikipediaSucks.com" as a source either.

It's a great website though

I wouldn't expect them to ban it from talk pages though.

I would if the posts are destructive, disruptive or spamy.

At first I would tend to ban the authors, but that would create precedent and effectively ban the posts not before long.

damn you scarey

that's only what they do here on HN

While Wikipedia is certainly not any more objective as a collective than any individual alone. It surely is tough to deal with confrontation and rejection emotional support. It's frustrating to eb the one who is wrong or being wronged. But it is most of all frustrating to be absolutely ignorant and Wikipedia is a great resource at providing educative insights, even if the editing process is severely laborious and the needed quality not always obvious or easily provided.

The issue is agenda based editing. While it is natural that people will disagree on context, that is not the problem, the problem is when you have agenda based editors who guard articles and suppress other viewpoints from any editing at all. That is what is happening on Wikipedia

> Jimbo Wales, in touting the value of overcoming fake news with his new WikiTribune, is without realizing it admitting to the utter corruption of the Wikipedia model.

The author makes this assertion and then quickly moves on. I don't follow it. Can anybody clarify how WikiTribune relates to the author's complaints of Wikipedia?

Sure, WikiTribune uses a soft wiki model in a way that insures reliable reporting. This requires a responsible paid staff while still keeping the collaboration of the outside community in tact.

Perspective seems clear and we'll reasoned to me. Until Wales is compared to Trump.

good point

> The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded resource limit. Please try again later.

Mirror anyone?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com