I LOVE Wikipedia, I think it’s one of the best websites of the internet.

But the fact is that Wikipedia has many flaws:

  • Editing became very hard on Wikipedia based on the amount of rules to respect
  • Wikipedia is biased, many cultures and minorities are not well represented among editors and pages.
  • Wikipedia is a dependence, I can’t imagine Wikipedia disappear, I think it already changed the way people see knowledge, not as something fixed anymore, but as something dynamic that changes and evolve.
  • Wikipedia ‘sources admission’ are also very… Weird. Because you can be a professional in a special field, it doesn’t mean your contribution will be accepted, just because your source is not coming from a ‘reliable source’, even if YOU are this reliable source.

There are other problems as well, but I think those are the most important ones.

What do you think about it? If you could change anything or everything to Wikipedia, what would you do?

  • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml
    10·
    4 years ago

    You may be interested in these articles:

    https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/11/meet-wikipedias-ayn-rand-loving-founder-and-wikimedia-foundations-regime-change-operative-ceo/

    https://medium.com/@kamy1/racist-wikipedia-da005c564d13

    We also have a work in progress at prolewiki: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia, with more sources in the references tab.

    Wikipedia was designed to be all you listed and more. One thing they didn’t touch on in those two articles (IIRC, it’s been a while since I read them) is that Wikipedia doesn’t allow primary sources, but that just means you need someone to cite you. If a newspaper publishes your story, then you can cite yourself through that paper. Likewise if you write an opinion piece. There was kind of a scandal a few months ago when we found out several journalists got their stories fed straight from the CIA or NSA, and pretty much printed whatever these agencies told them to print. This is an example of a primary source that can make its way on Wikipedia for the benefit of the CIA. And of course there’s all the disallowed sources such as the Grayzone, just because they printed a couple unflattering stories on Wikipedia (such as the one linked above).

    Anyway, I doubt much can be salvaged from Wikipedia. If the foundation or Jimmy Wales wanted to save it, they would remove all administrators and create new policies. It requires uprooting the whole establishment at wikipedia. Wales is aware of these issues and clearly doesn’t care about them, so I don’t see wikipedia changing any time soon.

    However, projects such as prolewiki and other wikis aim to build their own base of knowledge free from wikipedia. While they still depend on wikimedia software, I think this is a step in the right direction so as to break away from wikipedia’s monopoly.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
      6·
      4 years ago

      That 2-part grayzone article is a great intro for why wikimedia cannot be trusted when it comes to politics or anything that goes against its pro-US bias.