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Gareth321 • today at 2:43 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

I'm pretty negative on Wikipedia so my reflex was, "good." Wikipedia taught me that history is written by the victors, and today, the victors are the owners of social and news media, and the editors and moderators of Wikipedia. I used to be heavily involved in a page I won't mention, and it was well cited and factually correct. For political reasons, moderators with higher standing than me gradually removed sections, edited them unfairly, and generally vandalised the page. All sanctioned by the Wikipedia process. I learned that my page was FAR from the only page where useful, factual information was removed and edited in dishonest ways for ideological reasons. I have no doubt it's happening all over the site for many reasons. Most people don't see the politics which goes on behind the scenes, and they don't understand how much this undermines the trust in the information. My trust in the site could not be any lower than it is. I trust the parametric knowledge inside LLMs more now.

Honestly, I think knowledge like this is going to organically synchronise with consensus nodes in the very near future. Think of Community Notes on X as a prototype. That doesn't mean everything will be 100% accurate at all times, but I have zero doubt that it will be infinitely better than Wikipedia.


Replies

anticrymactic • today at 3:54 PM

> a page I won't mention

Please mention the page along with your and the moderators edits together with your objective sources.

Wikipedia is changeable and documentation is the only thing that will lead to change. It is understandable that one grows tired from consistent "ideals>facts" that plague so many "moderated" spaces, but a small final effort by many with such experience can lay the foundation for fresh contributiors to built a better Wikipedia.

speedgoose • today at 3:37 PM

You won't mention the page, but could you give us a hint about what was the topic and the edit war about?

dionian • today at 3:06 PM

I have the exact same experience in my sphere of research. I found for things like Natural History they tend not to be editorialized so incredibly hard but if you look at anything geopolitics it's insanely bad unless you like the side that they are tilting things towards