Molly White
@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io  ·  activity timestamp 6 days ago

This long read in The Verge does a remarkable job of describing how Wikipedia's editing community works, the project's strengths and weaknesses, and the threats it faces.

theverge.com/cs/features/71732

"In a time of misinformation, in a time of suppression, having this place where people can come and bring knowledge and share knowledge, that is a statement."
C. Scott Ananian (he/him)
@cscott@kolektiva.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 4 days ago
@molly0xfff here's my favorite line: "By 2005, the pages where editors stipulated policy and debated articles were found to be growing faster than the articles themselves. Today, this administrative backend is at least five times the size of the encyclopedia it supports."

I've always argued that the tools we build at the WMF sometimes are too focused on "encyclopedic content" and neglect the fact that the MediaWiki platform is used 5x more often for the meta-work of administering the project. Collaborative tools are important for organizing the work, even if they are not used directly to write the encyclopedic content.
Dr Daniel, Photon Shepherd🇸🇪🇦🇺
@DanielEriksson@mstdn.science replied  ·  activity timestamp 5 days ago
@molly0xfff thanks for sharing that!

This passage stood out to me:

"If the social platforms and language models that increasingly shape our understanding of the world are inscrutable black boxes, Wikipedia is the opposite, maybe the most legible, endlessly explainable information management system ever made. For any sentence, there is a source, and a reason that that source was used, and a reason for that reason."
Mu
@mu@mastodon.nz replied  ·  activity timestamp 5 days ago
@molly0xfff I tell you what, if there was one person I would *not* expect to accidentally create a solid, reliable, informative thing that would be a net benefit for humanity, it would be Jimmy Wales in the early 'aughts.

It took me a long time to warm up to it, and 90% of that was his personality.

I'm so glad that it got away from him, and that it has become one of the best things on the internet.

... He's probably still wondering how it happened...
Werawelt
@werawelt@social.tchncs.de replied  ·  activity timestamp 5 days ago
@molly0xfff

The internet is not breaking down.

It is the profit-oriented social media of billionaires that are breaking something on their platforms in order to exploit their users even better for their customers and increase their wealth.

The Fediverse – whose spirit also lives on in Wikipedia – is the best proof that there are other communities in the virtual world that operate on a bottom-up principle.

There are also self-operated blogs, homepages, and forums run by committed people on the internet.

The internet is OK but the platforms of billionaires are not OK.
jw
@justinw@mstdn.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 6 days ago
@molly0xfff I’m not really an AI person, and I don’t think the comparison is particularly fair, but I do remember how Wikipedia, and its supposed lack of veracious content, was once a joke. Like the idea that anyone could edit the site was seen as dangerous and foolhardy. Now it is lauded as an important repository. Feel like people are having the same feelings about AI right now. But again, they are very different things.