While wikipedia is decent at giving overviews on some scientific and technical topics, but when there is a topic about something that is historical and/or any way politically or monetarily relevant there will be an edit war to change it to suit one interest groups wishes or anothers. It really is a cesspool of psyops, misinformation and articles to be basically corporate PR at certain topics, and that is just because google usually gives wikipedia articles as first or second result on any given subject and it’s a really cost effective way to propagandize people and doing it is really low cost. Now Russia just monopolizes the propaganda inside their own borders.
Wikis were invented as a way, and are a good solution when the goal is, to crowdsource objective facts about the world.
The great thing about a wiki is that as long as one person once added any given fact, it is in the wiki.
On all contentious issues, by definition there are not too few people wanting to write about them, but instead there are too many, so this is why wikis are just not a suitable mechanism for writing about anything contentious: they’re a solution to a nonexistent problem and there is no rational reason why truth about any given issue should be determined by “who has managed to edit the page last”.
The downside - and I’m in favour of wikis like Wikipedia - is that any yahoo or otherwise can also put misinformation in there, perhaps even in good faith, and that’s in the wiki forever too.
And those who comb through article histories will have to contend with both the truth (we hope, whether we like it or not) as well as the nonsense.
One other difficulty is Internet-based sources disappearing or re-formatting, breaking links from Wikipedia and other places. This is the reader’s reminder to donate to the Internet Archive if not Wikipedia itself, providing you can spare a little money to throw their way.
Speaking of the archive: Anyone know whether Russia blocks the archive or maintains their own equivalent?
While wikipedia is decent at giving overviews on some scientific and technical topics, but when there is a topic about something that is historical and/or any way politically or monetarily relevant there will be an edit war to change it to suit one interest groups wishes or anothers. It really is a cesspool of psyops, misinformation and articles to be basically corporate PR at certain topics, and that is just because google usually gives wikipedia articles as first or second result on any given subject and it’s a really cost effective way to propagandize people and doing it is really low cost. Now Russia just monopolizes the propaganda inside their own borders.
Wikis were invented as a way, and are a good solution when the goal is, to crowdsource objective facts about the world.
The great thing about a wiki is that as long as one person once added any given fact, it is in the wiki.
On all contentious issues, by definition there are not too few people wanting to write about them, but instead there are too many, so this is why wikis are just not a suitable mechanism for writing about anything contentious: they’re a solution to a nonexistent problem and there is no rational reason why truth about any given issue should be determined by “who has managed to edit the page last”.
The downside - and I’m in favour of wikis like Wikipedia - is that any yahoo or otherwise can also put misinformation in there, perhaps even in good faith, and that’s in the wiki forever too.
And those who comb through article histories will have to contend with both the truth (we hope, whether we like it or not) as well as the nonsense.
One other difficulty is Internet-based sources disappearing or re-formatting, breaking links from Wikipedia and other places. This is the reader’s reminder to donate to the Internet Archive if not Wikipedia itself, providing you can spare a little money to throw their way.
Speaking of the archive: Anyone know whether Russia blocks the archive or maintains their own equivalent?