Hacker News Reader

Comment by VS1999 | Hacker News Reader

VS1999

I'm glad this covers the "canonization cycle" that's popular among news sites right now. The path to getting something declared as truth on wikipedia is to convince an unqualified journalist to uncritically repeat your claims, and now you can point to that as an official source. Often it goes even deeper if you try to track down a source on wikipedia and it's a reputable news site citing another, citing another, citing another, all the way down to the original source being some cooking blog. This means that unqualified bloggers and the tech company who host the infrastructure are the final arbiters of truth.

View on HN

What would you propose as an alternative to the current accepted sources system? In my mind there sadly isn't much of a choice. It means that Wikipedia is not so useful for charged political articles, and the number of articles achieving that status has continued to increase, but it also means it is generally good for technical and scientific articles as well as the more niche history articles that are more often written by subject experts than political wariors.

> What would you propose as an alternative to the current accepted sources system?

I propose journalists should do their own research like the old days, and directly talk to the people in question, then form their own conclusions and report that, instead of just regurgitating third-hand blogspam.

Perhaps I misread GP. I thought he took issue with the accepted sources system although he didn't say that explictly. I agree with you and GP that the so called trusted sources should be better.

Wikipedia should admit that "verifiability" matters because truth matters, and that they can't get away from making judgments on what's true. in particular, making judgments about which sources are truthy, as they do, is a judgment on what's true.

If something true and important can't be written on Wikipedia, that is actually a problem. If something false can be written on Wikipedia because a truthy source has said it, that's a huge problem.

Wikipedia should also acknowledge that a source can be trustworthy in some areas and not in others, and that e.g. someone posting evidence of their own statements is more trustworthy than a third party saying what they said.

In short, it's not hard imagining better policies. It's maybe hard to imagine getting them implemented in the most socially gamed institution on the internet.

Some news articles about kiwifarms might get a few minor details wrong. I've seen one mix up the timeline of the site's founding. But they describe the site's content accurately. The wikipedia article for kiwifarms seems fair to me.

Here are citations of actual things the site owner has said: https://old.reddit.com/r/keffals/comments/1bkp9my/proof_kf_h...

A post on r/keffals from a deleted user, truly the most unbiased and peer-reviewed of sources

They've spammed the same link at least six times here - it's all old stuff from at least a decade ago and when put into context is quite benign.

It's archived links to things the owner of the site has said. Instead of complaining about keffals, why don't you address the complains there.

Many others in this thread already have, particularly about how 90% of these supposed slights have occurred over a decade ago

This is related to citogenesis where Wikipedia moderators end up being the arbiters of truth. https://xkcd.com/978/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com