I don’t feel as strongly as he does but ever since watching I just don’t see much value in starting with Wikipedia when researching something. He also points out how a lot content creators default to referencing it. After realising how much of history or geography YouTube is just regurgitating Wikipedia articles, it kind of ruined those kinds of videos for me, and this was before AI. So now I try spend more time reading books or listening to audiobooks on a topics I’m interested instead.
Like I still use Wikipedia for unserious stuff or checking if a book I was recommended was widely criticised or something but that’s it really.
It’s also just not a good learning resource, like if you ever wanted to study a mathematics topic, wikipedia might be one of the worst resources. Like Wikipedia doesn’t profess to be a learning resource and more a overview resource but even the examples they use sometimes are just kind of unhelpful. Here’s an example on the Fourier Transform https://youtu.be/33y9FMIvcWY?si=ys8BwDu_4qa01jso
You can say that about Encyclopedia Brittanica or any of the old-school encyclopedias too. You can say that about the news desks at ABC, CBS, CNN, etc. You can say that about the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, etc.
I don't think people tend to blindly trust Wikipedia any more than they do for other sources of information. YouTube is full of garbage Wikipedia-regurgitating articles because Wikipedia is an easy, centralized source to scrape, not because of any level of trust they put in it.
I find this type of snap negative reaction boring, tiring, and unhelpful. It's disappointing that they often end up as top comments here. (Human psychology at work.)
My take: I expect that Wikipedia is more unbiased and a better reflection of reality then most -- maybe even all -- other sources of information on the Internet. On average! There are certainly crap articles, just like anywhere else.
I think it is true for all information we consume. One of the very important skills to learn in life is to think critically. Who wrote this? When? What would be their bias?
Text is written by humans (or now sometimes LLMs), and humans are imperfect (and LLMs are worth what they are worth).
Many times Wikipedia is more than enough, sometimes it is not. Nothing is perfect, and it is very important to understand it.
For traditional news media, editorial boards and author bias are much more consistent over time and across articles.
At the end of the day you’re gonna to consume information from somewhere, it’ll have shortcomings but you’re still better off knowing that going in.
On bias’ of authors: I actually think people fixate a bit too much on bias of an author to the point it’s a solely used as a speculative reason to dismiss something asuntrue. If the claims made by the author are consistent with other information and others trusted sources it’s just irrelevant. I feel people online to readily get hung up motivations and it’s sometimes a crotch for a readers inability to engage with ideas they find uncomfortable.
Like if a private company sponsors a study with a finding that aligns with their business interests, that actually doesn’t mean it’s false. It’s false if no one can reproduce their results. I mean you’d definitely want to verify other sources knowing this, but also researches have their own reputation to preserve as well. In reality the truth ends up being more boring than people anticipate.
But obviously it matters when claims can’t be verified or tested but I find online there’s an overemphasis of this online.
The media are often pretty bad at doing this: they will often make some kind of average on what is being said, like "the scientific consensus says that cigarettes are killing you, but a study sponsored by Philip Morris says that they are not, so... well we don't know". Where actually it should be pretty obvious that Philip Morris is extremely biased on that, and the scientific consensus is not.
Not every voice is worth the same. During covid, there was a tendency to relay all kinds of opinions, without making the difference between actual experts and non-experts. Sometimes even saying "this person is a doctor, so they know", which is wrong: being a doctor doesn't make you an expert on coronaviruses or epidemiology.
Whenever we get information, we should think about how much trust we can put into it, how biased the authors maybe (consciously or not), etc. Elon Musk saying that going to Mars can help humanity is not worth much. Because he is rich and successful does not make him right. Yet many people relay "Musk predicts that [...]", as some kind of truth.
Small typo though: I believe you meant "crutch" not "crotch" in:
> feel people online to readily get hung up motivations and it’s sometimes a crotch for a readers inability to engage with ideas they find uncomfortable.
Really? I'd think it would be the opposite. Wikipedia has always been decried by academics (and primary school teachers) as "not a real encyclopedia", without giving anywhere near as much of a critical eye toward other sources of information.
Sure, I think Wikipedia's reputation and public image has gotten better over the years, but that stigma of it being created and written by "unprofessional anonymous people" is still there to some extent.
And regardless, the kind of person who is going to watch Fox News or CNN without applying any critical thought to what they hear there... well, probably is going to do the same for Wikipedia pages, or any other source of information.
Things like PBS and Wikipedia might have biases, but idk if it's realistic to expect better.
I think a lot if ppl are rightly sceptical of traditional media, but I feel I see more people giving Wikipedia a pass or placing it on a higher pedestal as a resource than it should be at times.
Admittedly I think I would prefer Wikipedia to traditional media in most cases. Although that wasn’t really what I was getting at
I've seen plenty of their other content elsewhere. Maybe it doesn't resonate with non-Americans.
Then this rather small cohort of high precision people express frustrations without providing the context of accuracy against the masses preferred methods (TikTok, cable news, broadcast, truth social)
So now the water is muddled and people and Ais are mistrained because an "absolute scale" is not used when discussing accuracy.
It is useful for quickly looking up simple facts, and provides a list of sources.
The video makes some interesting criticisms. The lack of diversity is not surprising. Dominated by white, male, American's with time on their hands! how would have thought that? Its very obviously American dominated (at least the English version).
All in all, checking other sources to see if they lines up is a pain and labor intensive, never mind actually checking to see if the references are actually sound evidence.
Most people don't even have the reading level for full comprehension of a wiki article, let alone being able to discern the nuance of some aspects of the topic.
> Yeah perfect is the enemy of the good but imperfect is still imperfect.
This assumes perfection is attainable. I'd like to see your idea of a "perfect" book or article on some topic.
I would've gladly paid more in taxes to make Encyclopædia Britannica an international non-profit public service delivered in web form to all so long as each area were managed and curated with subject matter expert input.
holy heck there is so much wrong about this video. i can't believe "internet influencers" can just turn on their cameras and spew so much untruth without a care in the world...
comparatively wikipedia is imperfect, but much better than this kind of slop.
It’s been a while since I watched it but the thing I remember taking away was you can do a lot better than Wikipedia, and he encouraged people to spend more time looking at primary sources for deeper research, and points out how it’s the basis of a lot of slop on YouTube.
Not so sure about this; page titles change and redirects get removed. I'm thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Nex_Benedict where initial news articles and her obituary used her birth name, Dagny Benedict, but soon this name was scrubbed from the wikipedia page, as well as its talk page and redirects, on the policy of deadnames.
In the case of this person, they were not notable under their birth name. Unfortunately, their transgender status is the whole reason they’re notable, and the article clearly states that they are. I don’t need that person’s old name to understand the situation.
More info is usually better than less info, if you personally don't need to know something, that does not mean that that info should be removed.
If I'm proud of my name, you should include it. If I'm ashamed of my name, you should omit it, unless it's important context or information. You have to have a clear articulable reason above, it's a real detail.
This is strictly untrue for an Encyclopedia, which seeks to present only a summation of relevant and highly notable information about a person, making it far different than e.g. a biography.
None of them changed their name on purpose nor rejected it, the comparison is moot.
It's all very 1984-esque; I'm seeing shades of "We were never/always at war with Oceania/Eurasia".
This is revisionist history, and the scrubbing of previously correct but now incorrect "history" should be viewed with suspicion.
-----------------------------------------------------
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth.
This is a hilarious take.
There's little things less “1984-esque” than a small self-structured collective organization enforcing the preference of an individual on how they should be named.
It's the opposite of “a dictatorship imposing its views on individuals through propaganda”, it's a collective of people helping an individual, dead for not being as society wanted them to be, have their personal wish fulfilled even after death. People who want to dead name the victim, are the one who want to erase the individual to make it fit the mold of society, they are the totalitarian hivemind, they are the Tom Parsons of our reality.
Orwell being a lifelong anarchist socialist, there's very little doubt on which side he'd be in that debate.
I feel as if you're trying to inject a political motivation about the decision to omit that detail when a simpler one is better. If something of little note is offensive to the person you're talking about, it's disrespectful to them as a person, to their humanity, to mention it.
E.g. You would only mention someone was born, to parents who were avid members of the KKK, if and only if, their life story related in some way.
Otherwise you're trying to introduce some preexisting bias that doesn't belong. In this example, if this person left their community to fight racism. The information about the set of likes reasons they got involved, are worth the bias of introducing the assumptions you're reasonably allowed to make about their parents.
If they find that religion offensive, and spent their life exclusively on epidemiology, it's wrong to include that detail, true or not.
Then, do consider the "political" aspect, that has led to the deadname policy that Wikipedia has. Many people, who for their own cultural reasons, want to disrespect someone, will refuse to address or refer to some individual the way they want to be. That behavior is no different from calling some one fuckface, and refusing to address them differently. You've selected something they find offensive, in order to bully and harass them, needlessly. Given that toxic reality, for cases like this, it's better to defer to not mentioning the name they were given at birth, because that detail might be used against them. Again, there might be some stronger reason you would want to include it. But it's better to err on the side of respecting the individual.
The secind option used to be the norm on wikipedia even 15 years ago, but Anti-trans activists using dead-naming as a slur against trans people triggered the shift from the second option to the first.
As usual assholes are why we can't have nice things.
Calling somebody with his former name and mentioning his former name in a Wikipedia page are two completely different things. Using the fact that the former is seen as rude by some to avoid the second is in my opinion just an example of the level of extremism of the pro-trans activists.
But if in fact it made sense, shouldn't we completely remove any reference of the previous name also from the pages of people like Yusuf Islam [1] or Muhammad Ali [2] ?
The victim of a crime was not notable before their name change.
Many of these women are not really known under those names, but somehow, they're still listed on their wiki pages.
Same for stage names, people don't use stage name because they want to escape their former name, they use stage names because it's cool.
And when people use a pseudonym and want to keep their real identity secret for personal reasons, their name doesn't appear on Wikipedia, and nobody is ever complaining about that! It's as if people were obsessed by trans people in particular…
> It's as if people were obsessed by trans people in particular…
Yet, they keep every other name on wikipedia, especially if we're talking about peoples legal names, except if the person was trans for some reason. Wikipedia is the one making exceptions here for one group in particular.
It's incredible that in a discussion about brutal violence against a child, the child victim is being painted as the "extremist"!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Biog...
Strong “Don't contradict my opinions with facts” vibe.
Except when people keep vandalizing Wikipedia renaming people there with their dead name. And yes it happens over and over and over again.
Because the most active extremists on the topic are by far the anti-trans crowd. (And it's not even close, there are trans people assaulted every week, sometimes going as far as murder this is extremism).
And again, Wikipedia keeps mentioning the former name when it's necessary (look for Bradley Manning on Wikipedia, the page redirects to Chelsea Manning but the old name is state because it's important).
> because we use to call a person who will always have hairs on his face as "male".
We may not have solved the question, "what is a woman," but you have brilliantly solved the question, "what is a man": a human with eyebrows.
If your words can be reversed so easily it means that you have no idea but a pure propaganda instead. Famous anti-white-straight-man-ism seems as a dangerous thing to me, so I oppose this unfamous Davos-protracted diversity woke ideology.
Can you define "woke?"
If you need me to repeat - I will repeat: I am not antigayist and I am not anti-transist.
Woke is essentually anti-nationalism and anti-white-suppremacism.
Writing someone was called XYZ, is not calling the person by that name again. It is just stating a historic fact.
For a transgender person, I may have known them before they transitioned for example and may not necessarily be familiar with their new name, that's a reason off the top of my head that it would be relevant to me but not necessarily you.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't any presentation of information prepared by humans, information wherein someone else decided which facts were relevant? The only way around this I can think of is personal performance of all experimentation in human history from first principles. Unfortunately you will probably need to learn those first principles through reading things written by other humans.
I couldn't agree more, it's wrong to decide what facts someone else is allowed to know. Please tell me the most embarrassing details of your life?
Perhaps there's nuance and different standards we can apply when talking about individuals, especially individuals who have been bullied or abused? Than the standards we apply when a powerful group is trying to cover up a violent attack against another?
> For a transgender person, I may have known them before they transitioned for example and may not necessarily be familiar with their new name, that's a reason off the top of my head that it would be relevant to me but not necessarily you.
I have a very hard time understanding this example, you're concerned that you, who knew this person but only knew their older name, won't be able to find thier wikipedia page via searching for their old name? Which is true because their old name isn't listed on the page itself?
I don't find that very compelling, did you mean something different?
Then don't read an encyclopedia, because the entire raison d'être of that medium is about distilling “broadly useful” facts about the world, with no pretense of exhaustiveness.
Then reading Wikipedia probably isn't a great idea.
Its really not very different from a Wikipedia article using an author's pseudonym mentioning their real name.
Should all Wikipedia articles on people omit information that the subject of the article does not want mentioned? Even if they find it distressing?
No it doesn't. Googling or searching on Wikipedia for either name yields the same page.
Wikipedia isn't a database of private information on individuals. On most celebrities pages you won't find their infidelities record either, unless it has some historical relevance.
> Its really not very different from a Wikipedia article using an author's pseudonym mentioning their real name.
In fact, when an author made it publicly clear that they didn't want their real name be known, Wikipedia usually respect their choice (until their real name stops being private information and gets historical relevance).
And somehow anti-trans activists seem to care much less. How surprising, really.
Just to clarify, I think you mistook the order of the first option and the second option? I was confused by this statement
And then you have to ponder the relevance with whether or not publishing may cause harm.
Let's take an example, unrelated to the topic: why aren't the addresses of stars, or the identification number of billionaires personal jets, listed on Wikipedia? Because it's not relevant, and can be harmful.
And it's the same thing for trans people's name. Most of the time, their birth name is irrelevant and can even be harmful. But sometimes, when it's important, the name will still be there, with the redirection and all, see https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning
And, by the way, this isn't a Wikipedia thing, this is how press right works! Newspapers get sued all the time for mentioning irrelevant personal information about people, and lose.
Any information which is relevant to the subject of article and brings clarity should not be censored, ideally.
Also if you could understand what I'm saying, you would realise I'm not asking to put birth names of every trans person with a wikipedia article in their article. Because it's not relevant.
You keep mentioning "harm" but never exactly describe what harm? What more harm can you imagine for a person who committed suicide due to bullying?
Because they weren't behaving as their surrounding wanted them to. The reason was given in the article. You don't need to know the birth certificate name of that kid to talk about that.
In fact, the very people asking the most loudly for using this name are the crowd that bullied them alive.
There was already discussion on the talk page, "Should Nex's given name be included?" with consensus of "no." That discussion was archived, but you can see it here [0].
From what I can see, the word "Dagny" has been retroactively redacted from all history of the page and its talk page.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Death_of_Nex...
If this doesn't sound 1984-esque I don't know what does.
We're discussing a FOSS website that many people use.
There's quite literally nothing stopping you from making "unwoke" Wikipedia or whatever. You probably could even get Elon Musk to signal boost it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie...
EDIT: On further inspecting the page history, this definitely looks intentional, or at least is a controversial page.
Here are some of the things you can get banned for:
- Having a too large fraction of your edits be reverts.
- Updating raw references to <ref cite> references (without changing the contents of the reference).
- Saying something on a forum that could be construed as telling people to edit a particular article in a particular way.
The Arb Com doesn't have to open up a public discussion about the matter. They can simply pronounce judgment in private and ban you. There's no prior notice, no representation, and no independent appeal. For a "supreme court", that's quite a low bar.
Everything people are upset over in this thread is explained clearly in the BLP section on privacy, the gender identity section of the Manual of Style [2], and this essay on gender identity [3].
This particular example is completely clear-cut. Sources didn't cover them at all under any previous names because they're only known from one event. Someone who isn't transgender would be covered the exact same way. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a gossip rag.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_livin...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Biog...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Gender_identity
News articles did cover Benedict under the name Dagny.
As far as policies go, this page should be titled "Suicide of Nex Benedict" according to this policy [0], yet the talk on that subject ended with "closed with no consensus to move." [1]
This does speak to the selective application and selective enforcement of policies on Wikipedia. But I was most concerned to learn about how scrubbing the histories of pages is official policy itself.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Choosing_article_tit...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Death_of_Nex_Benedict/Arc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Biog...
Most recently hijacked by the Qatar dictatorship: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/16/pr-firm-p...
News, influencers, Wikipedia, almost all information we consume nowadays is intentional. And not even getting into billions poured into American colleges by the same people.
So yeah, if you were ever curious where the profits go every time you fill up your car with gas… there.
I thought I was just building media websites. I didn’t even see the content until after six months. I put in my one month notice, finished what I was working on, and left. The amount of money they offered me to stay was ridiculous. I don’t blame people at Fox News for bending the knee and taking that Saudi money -- I just couldn’t make myself do it.
“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” A lot of people are going to spend eternity in hell for propaganda and lies.
Over time this led to Saudis being involved in just about everything. For instance the biggest owner of 'old Twitter' under Dorsey was Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud. Needless to say the zeitgeist on old Twitter and Saudi Arabia have basically nothing in common, so you're probably seeing ideological motivation where the real motivation is generally just monetary. Not every country is conspiring to subvert other countries to their ideology.
Basically Saudia Arabia is filthy rich because of oil, but they fully understand that even if we continue burning oil until we run out, we will run out, within the lifetime of some people living today. So they have to migrate their economy away from oil and, on the timeline for such a revolutionary shift, they have very little time left. This is likely what MBS sees as what will define his legacy.
i do, and i judge people who take money to push harmful things. i don't see why this is bad.
I have a responsibility not to lie and kill, as commanded in the Bible. I also have a responsibility to tell people not to lie and kill, as commanded in the Bible.
At the same time, our understanding of the science of the mind, as described by Carol Dweck in "Mindset", is that people are not fixed and can change. That is why understanding, forgiveness, and redemption matter. They are essential for helping other people through the process of repentance -- the changing of a mindset.
"I understand why you took oil money from the royal family famous for murdering journalists; money is nice to have. However, I judge you for it and will not associate with you until you redeem yourself through seeking forgiveness and changing your behavior."
The need to belong is extraordinarily motivating. It became obvious that the cults leveraged the need in the individual to belong to a group by accepting the person without judgement first rather than attacking the person they are trying bring into their group pushing them away.
The leaders who understand that are winning.
Personally I'd say that lying to perpetuate a system that is leading to various populous parts of the world becoming uninhabitable is on the wrong side of that line.
i'm allowed to judge you based on who you take money from.
We should keep talking about the issues and improving things, but don't throw out the baby with bathwater.
Yeah, I wonder what solution people propose that claim that Wikipedia is 'hijacked' or 'compromised' and pushing agendas? While Wikipedia is not perfect, it is the best encyclopedia we currently have, mostly due to collective efforts and maintainers that care about the state of Wikipedia. I would even say that it is a good thing that there is this transparency, that states and capital are trying to influence Wikipedia because then you know that you may take some articles with a grain of salt or can actively push against it. Every alternative to Wikipedia that I have seen so far is one that claims to be more truthful than the original, but in the end these are platforms that push agendas without the transparency and attempt to further obscure power relations under the pretext of truth.
Every alternative to Wikipedia will have to solve the problems that Wikipedia already has to be a better alternative. However, I do think these are fundamental unsolvable problems and everyone who claims to have solved this is part of a power struggle over who defines what is considered true.
- Oppose the "Super Mario" effect: if admins do something ordinary users would get banned for, they get banned too, they don't just lose their admin title.
- Implement restrictions on Arb Com to make it worthy of its "supreme court" moniker. Provide prior notice, allow representation, access to evidence ahead of the case, and require the Arb Com to disclose the logic of any automated scripts they use for mass judging (e.g. counting proportion of edits being reverts, or that counts every change to a reference as "reference vandalism"). Grant defendants the ability to force the Committee's judgment to be disclosed to the public, with PII redacted if necessary.
- Require that precedent be recorded for unclear meta rules: what counts as a violation of e.g. canvassing? When do reversions become evidence or proof of "ownership"?
- Create an independent appeals body for Arb Com decisions. Like the Arb Com itself, the logic or source code for any scripts they use to aid their decisions, should be public. Ideally, choose the independent appeals body by different means than the Arb Com itself is chosen, e.g. by random selection of users with a certain activity level, independent of the ordinary admin track.
- Grant all users the right to be forgotten (courtesy vanishing), not just users in good standing, so that users bullied off the platform can remove their proverbial stockade.
- Create a mechanism that forces rules to be refactored or reduced in scope. Just spitballing, one possible way might be to limit the growth of any given WP: page per unit time, require negative growth for some of them, or in some way reward editors who reduce their extent.
There may be fundamental unsolvable problems, but that doesn't mean the current system can't be improved.
Accuse the site of of exactly what you’re doing at this exact moment.
For example, this article goes over disinformation by polish nationalists on Holocaust related articles. There's a chart with 10 editors accounting for 50% of the edits and another chart that shows disproportionately citing authors that in reality are not academically are under-cited
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That Wikipedia has been co-opted by mentally ill people is an extraordinary claim. You should provide more than feelings.
* ASD is not a mental illness but it can produce quirky and obsessive behaviour.
Officially wikipedia is NPOV but an especially contentious and murky political mudfight decides what counts as a "citeable" source and what doesnt and what counts as notable and what doesnt.
It also has an incredibly strong western bias.
Every government, corporation and billionaire pays somebody to participate in that fight as well, using every dirty trick they can.
Until we have a model that can sidestep these politics (which Wikipedia seemingly has no real desire to do) and aggregate sources objectively I think it will continue to suck.
> It also has an incredibly strong western bias.
What's the issue with that? Why shouldn't English Wikipedia have a strong Western bias? I've explored and participated in several other Wikipedias and other collaborative projects, and each is biased towards the worldviews common to the culture that its main editors come from. I don't think there's a way to have an encyclopedic project without any cultural bias at all (if such a platonic ideal could even be properly defined), and seeing how Western values include a significant focus on pluralism, freedom of expression and scientific inquiry, I think this situation is much better than the alternatives.
Compared to what? I dont really see much aggregation being done at all on Wikipedia's scale.
>What's the issue with that?
It's supposed to be impartial and objective and it sells itself as such but if you see how the sausage is made it is patently the exact opposite.
>I don't think there's a way to have an encyclopedic project without any cultural bias at all
I think it's perfectly possible to have an encyclopedia which is more liberal about allowing more sources to be used and which provides tools and metadata about those sources and gives tools to the user allowing them to filter accordingly.
Whereas "Blessing" one group of sources and condemning another will inevitably turn it into a propaganda outlet for whomever controls it. You might think that this is the only way but that represents more of a failure of imagination than a lack of options.
German Scholars Reveal Shocking TRUTH About China’s Xinjiang Province
>...Uyghur terrorists killed dozens of Han Chinese in coordinated attacks from 2009 to 2016. These included the September 2009 Xinjiang unrest, the 2011 Hotan attack, the 2014 Kunming attack, the April 2014 Ürümqi attack, and the May 2014 Ürümqi attack. The attacks were conducted by Uyghur separatists, with some orchestrated by the Turkistan Islamic Party (a UN-designated terrorist organization)...
internet altered the way society communicates and why, a lot of discussions now end up by "show me your sources" aka "what is the truth" and it's often centralized into some accepted source like wikipedia
where there simple single point of 'truth' like that before ?
my 2cents is that humans are not meant to live in one global absolute truth and we all lived in relative fuzzy reality before, it was slow and imperfect but not as easy to tamper with
of course we all wanted to communicate faithful information, but now any discussion turns into a religious difference, and the escape is of course "who has the truest source". people don't necessarily understand the content, they just defer the validity to an official third party, so basically we're back to zero.. but we're all debating everything now.
and it makes me think that locally, we chatting, was never meant to exchange rigorous information, but mostly to share opinions lightly, more emotional than rigorous and scientific
It's kind of a shit show.
It doesnt really matter if the whole world has access to the same information if the whole world trusts completely different sources.
For better or worse we trust those sources exclusively because of tribal affinity.
I doubt many people in the US could be persuaded to trust Global Times over the New York Times even if you could prove it had a better prediction track record. Wrong tribe.
What does this mean?
Ok, to clarify:
> > And not even getting into billions poured into American colleges by the same people.
Which American colleges, by what people, and what does "being political" mean? Maybe I'm very ignorant of the USA, are these just known things to Americans?
It seems today that he was just wrong and used to make "dubious" clinical trials.
> As of 2025, 46 of Raoult's research publications have been retracted, and at least another 218 of his publications have received an expression of concern from their publishers, due to questions related to ethics approval for his studies.
Many people listened because he wasn't some youtuber doing his research, he was the head of the "Infectious and Tropical Emergent Diseases Research Unit" ad the Faculty of Medicine of Marseille.
I've watched one of his interviews where he stated that people survived in his unit with hydroxychloroquine and that he had numbers to prove it.
When you look at his credentials, and my.braincells.count(), it was hard to identify it as misinformation.
I would think that posting any particular person would descend in to a pointless argument over whether those claims are merited. Do you have some better reason to want a particular name?
It depends on its nature.
I don't disagree that weird bullshit occasionally happens on Wikipedia, but I have noticed that as soon as light is cast on it, it usually evaporates and a return to factual normality is established.
https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/history_news_articles/151... https://slate.com/technology/2023/04/how-wikipedia-covers-th...
I just can’t see existing news agencies doing this of their own volition. As Generating stories themselves is what keeps news agencies in business.
Unless they had a new competitor who had who kept running rings around them with all three features. But it’s going to come back to having better stories or better long form pieces (depending on the publications niche), as that’s ultimately why someone visits their site.
I could however see some 3rd party doing this like an extension that overlays someone’s site or acts as alternative presentation of their content.
Using facts, omitting facts or emphasising particular facts over others in order to mislead you. The scientific journals are now included with their anonymous editorials. Peer review is pretty much the same as fact-checking.
Contrast this with good fiction, which employs falsehoods to point towards the truth: truth which cannot easily be verified but which is our real bread and butter.
Is it biased because it doesn't reflect your opinion or are the facts also biased?
Fox is designed to promote Republican viewpoints and MSNBC to promote Democrat ones. They present little outside them and are usually telling the same small selection of stories from different angles.
This is fascinating, thanks for mentioning it!
It's impossible for one news source to be unbiased, and the delusion that it is unbiased is dangerous. If you truly believe a source is "the truth" and unbiased it allows you to switch off any critical thinking; the information bypasses any protections you have.
Much better to have many news sources where the bias is evident and the individual has to synthesise an opinion themselves (not claiming this is perfect by any means, but a perfect system does not exist).
It is obviously the case that Wikipedia is biased, and I think competition is a great thing. We would be better served by a market of options to use our own faculties than a false sense of comfort in a fake truth.
^though many are refusing to pay the (almost) legally mandatory "tv-license".
As for unwillingness to pay the license fee, the biggest issue is the rise of streaming alternatives. It reduced the BBC from providing about half of available TV to being one among many providers so the license fee no longer feels like good value for money.
Its not mandatory. I have never owned a TV. If you do not watch broadcast TV or Iplayer you do not have to have a TV license.
I also think Capita's aggressive scare tactics in trying to get people to pay the license fee have created a lot of hostility towards the BBC.
If you want to know who the UK is going to war with next, watch the BBC.
Their news is horrendously biased when it comes to the British royal family. They have an institutional bias against Scottish independence since it would cut 10% of their licence fee. (Their provision to areas outside the Home Countries is a disgrace and patronising.)
We can step back from a debate and reports who's saying what, but this is still reporting ongoing debate. And still involving attention within its considerations, which do change our mental process as much as performative effects can go. That's as opposed to remain completely unaware the debate could be even be considered.
no one is going out of ontological constraints and brings absolute truth from transexistential considerations.
Maybe to trustworthy propaganda, just like this website.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:NOTNEWS...
While having an "In the news" section on the front page
Ironically, trying it fairly requires you to first suspend your own biases regarding its owner.
"Unlike Wikipedia, Grokipedia centralizes its editing process. Users can submit suggested edits to Grokipedia, but instead of assigning a group of volunteer community editors to decide on the edits, xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, controls whether or not a certain edit is approved and implemented on the website."
So you could as well call it "Muskipedia"
If this looks like a "genuinely bias-free" page to you, I don't know what to tell you.
A random article in the "edit approved by Grok".
Genuinely bias-free my ass.
tl;dr: Wikipedia is CC and has public APIs, but AI companies have recently started paying for "enterprise" high-speed access.
Notably, the enterprise program started in 2021 and Google has been paying since 2022.