In an online landscape characterised by doom and division, it stands out: a huge, collective endeavour based on voluntarism and cooperation, with an underlying vision that’s unapologetically utopian – to build “a world where every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge”. It has weathered teething troubles (such as a “joke” edit that suggested a loyal aide to Robert F Kennedy was in fact involved in his and his brother’s assassinations) to become a place in which civility and neutrality are the guiding stars, and levels of accuracy match those of academic textbooks.
Wales’s new book, The Seven Rules of Trust, is an attempt to distil the secrets of its success. They include things such as having a strong, clear, positive purpose (the slogan “Wikipedia is an encyclopedia” is a surprisingly powerful reminder that keeps editors honest); assuming good faith and being courteous; refraining from taking sides and being radically transparent.
These past few years – since 2017 according to some – has seen a determined attepmpt to take over Wikipedia and trun it into an ideologically biased place.
Not because the particular left that are doing this are uniquely awful people but because any centre of power – and whoo, boy, isn’t a definer of the truth a centre of power – will be taken over by those who desire power. It’s inescapable. That’s why don’t have centres of power.
“Not because the particular left that are doing this are uniquely awful people…“
…though they are.
That’s why don’t have centres of power.
Eh? That vague nostrum could have fallen from the lips of Hypnotits himself!
There will always be centres of power, just as societies will always be stratified and the sun rises in the east each morning and…
and the sun rises in the east each morning and…
That just brought a smile to my face.
when I was on a project in Jo’burg Mrs BiND came down for a couple of weeks. I had to work her first day there and I left her in bed. The first thing she said when I got back was:
”the sun goes the wrong way”, much to me bemusement.
It took a while for me to get from her she didn’t mean it rises in the west but that it passes through the northern sky rather than the summer sky in the northern hemisphere.
As part of the process I learned that shadows also go the wrong way in the southern hemisphere.
The joys of being married to a landscape artist.
A good example of the corrupting power of WP was when the great TV composer Ronnie Hazelhurst died. Lazy hacks writing his obituary were all gulled by the same spoof entry stating that he wrote SClub7’s hits.
Sepp ‘Bellend’ Blatter: https://www.theregister.com/2010/07/14/blatter_order/
Wrongipaedia has always been shit. The only use for it is as a list of references to hopefully more accurate data.
The only reason for using Wikipedia was basic information like, what’s the population of Ecuador? Now a basic google search will get you that.
CIA Fact Book
Don’t know if that’s downloadable now or became a “service”. Invaluable for country data.
But always 5 to 7 years out of date.
Yeah. But at least it’ll be the same Ecuador the Ecuadorans live in.
Personally, I prefer my stats to “mature” for a while. Would you have confidence in current official UK GDP & population numbers?
Wikipedia has since inception been ideologically biased. Profits are donated to woke causes.
Quite some time ago it was suggested not to trust W on anything that could be remotely political. For example, if you look up Rush Limbaugh, probably safe to trust the year of birth & death, but not much else.
I’ve used Wokeypedia for years but I don’t remember its ever being a usefully disinterested source on anything politically contentious. Which means I doubt it on other topics too, because who knows what biased nutcase has strong racist feelings about – say – grey squirrels?
Wikipedia has always been a political haven for lefty causes but its editors were open and notorious in their efforts to rewrite history to support the Climate Change Narrative, You could watch any entry that went against the Left’s Revealed Climate Truth be edited til unrecognizable, or simply removed entirely. Even its straightforward basic facts were subject to manipulation in service to the Narrative. Like an early manifestation of Chat GPT.
That’s actually John Derbyshire’s revision of his second law. But good all the same. (The original, from memory, “Assume every organisation is led by the enemies of the orgnaisation’s goal” or some such)
Gamecock can play that game. Derbyshire got it from John O’Sullivan’s first law.
There is actually more. O’Sullivan and Conquest knew each other. Derbyshire was a contemporary, and likely knew them. He surely knew of them. That Derbyshire credited the 2nd law to Conquest, even though it was O’Sullivan who published it, tells me that Derbyshire considered it Conquest’s idea, that O’Sullivan got it from Conquest.