Wikipedia is shit

[robinson]

In a November 2015 interview with Zachary Schwartz for Vice, Sanger expanded on his experiences with trolls on Wikipedia during the site's initial growth: "It was kind of stressful. I think it stressed out my wife more than me. The idea that there were people who were abusing me online just bothered her greatly." Sanger equated the trolls with modern-day social justice warriors.


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger

More at link

[robinson]

Spoiler:

Wikipedia used as source for maximum lulz

[robinson]

In an unrelated matter

Mods on Wikipedia actually have the power to put you in the cornfield

Not just pretend

[Doctor X]

Impossible.

It is not your mirror.

鏡よ鏡 正直割れたいか?
「いらないお前いらない」
鏡よ鏡 正直過ぎるだろう!
「聞こえないふり」

– J.D.

[robinson]

Topic inspired by Larry Sanger, who I follow on Twitter

While I knew Wikipedia had turned to a woke shit show back in 2010, he is actively working on doing something about it

(Citation needed)

“ 'Nobody should trust Wikipedia,' its co-founder warns: Larry Sanger says site has been taken over by left-wing 'volunteers' who write off sources that don't fit their agenda as fake news”

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... warns.html

[robinson]

Because the SC is not Wikipedia

I can post a primary source

“ If you MUST read Wikipedia...don't send them your traffic. Read it on EncycloReader. We grab pages in real time, so it's always up-to-date. Here's how (on your computer, not phone):”

https://twitter.com/lsanger/status/1548 ... TCgxBH-iqg

[robinson]

https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikiped ... ly-biased/


Wikipedia’s “NPOV” is dead.1 The original policy long since forgotten, Wikipedia no longer has an effective neutrality policy. There is a rewritten policy, but it endorses the utterly bankrupt canard that journalists should avoid what they call “false balance.”2 The notion that we should avoid “false balance” is directly contradictory to the original neutrality policy. As a result, even as journalists turn to opinion and activism, Wikipedia now touts controversial points of view on politics, religion, and science

[robinson]

If the Dunning-Kruger effect was real, Wikipedia would be the best example of it

Hard at work

[Doctor X]

月の兎は星を見ていた

– J.D.

[robinson]

ドクターXは馬鹿だ

[Doctor X]

いつか光に向かう 逆さまの蝶 君と髪を切る 鏡の中

– J.D.

[robinson]

蝴蝶倒置到光明有一日喺鏡度剪掉你嘅頭髮

[Doctor X]

ここは仮縫い

– J.D.

[robinson]

The SC benefits from its obscurity

[robinson]

I need attention

– J.D.

[Doctor X]

踊って

– J.D.

[robinson]

There are so many fucked up people (and things, literally things) posting and deleting shit on Wikipedia, it’s sort of mind blowing

I don’t know what is the more fucked shit there anymore

There is the maniac mod/admin shitshow

The 17 year old mod/admin shitshow

And the bot shitshow

From a computer POV the bots would be the most insane shit of all

There are bots running on Wikipedia, doing shit with out end

The insane part? The person in charge of the bots hasn’t logged in to Wikipedia for three years

One bot alone has done over three million edits, and the person who “is responsible” for the bot doesn’t log on anymore

Might actually be dead

Why is this insane? The bot is a killer bot

While the maniac person who has admin powers can delete 311,000 articles in the last few years, they are nothing compared to the bot

It sounds like something made up for a sci-fi story

But it’s not

[robinson]

The reasoning behind it is logical


To police every last edit made would be onerous, actually impossible, so they created bots and let people run them

But they never put in a failsafe in case the person died (or just said “fuck it” and stopped logging in, same thing actually)

So you go all these bots running with nobody watching them

No bot reviews a bot edit

When you have a constant increase in edits/articles, and a shrinking base of human editors, and a never ending bot army, it’s a shitshow

[Doctor X]

探そう 夢のカケラ拾い集め
切なくても 今なら探せるだろう
めくるめく 毎日の形変えて
切なくても 確かな今を感じよう

– J.D.

[Ben Trovado]

Well, I can't argue with that.

[robinson]

探そう 夢のカケラ拾い集め
切なくても 今なら探せるだろう
めくるめく 毎日の形変えて
切なくても 確かな今を感じよう

https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/hitom ... n/japanese

He's not even trying, just copypasta

[robinson]

だから私はめったに彼の文章を読むことはありません 彼らはしばしば彼のものではなく、彼が盗んだものです 他の靴下やトロールのように、彼は人間でさえありません

[robinson]

For great justice

While glossing over Wikipedia's Amphetamine article, I came across the following enormously-insightful contraindication:

The weight loss sometimes associated with amphetamine use may also cause the contraceptive cap or diaphragm to be less effective as it will not fit as well.

The train of thought here is godlike:

amphetamine ingestion>>anorectic effects>>weight loss>>cervical eccentricity(?)>>poorly-fitting diaphragm>>accidental pregnancy

Aristotle would be in awe. (not really, he would bitch slap you instead)

I tracked down the origin of this claim. The sentence made it into the article from a UK website called We Care the Children (sic), a site apparently dedicated to responsible fucking. But said website didn't author the contraindication. The sentence occurs 9 times on the internet and first appeared on 9 June 2000 in an Indonesian medical listserv, apparently as a translation of a 20th century Indonesian birth-control pamphlet.

This is in an article on the 2nd most important psychoactive chemical on Earth. And call me crazy, but I'd contraindicate Amp to patients with a history of addiction WAY before contraindicating it to sexually-active females of breeding age who use antiquated contraceptives. But addictive predisposition is nowhere in the Contraindications section).

Though I'm poking fun at this, it's not an innocuous issue. It extends to Wikipedia in general. I don't need to mention that it's the first resource that non-experts turn to on any given topic. It is easily more influential than any well-versed specialist in any particular field.

What's worse is that its internal politics favor people with too much time on their hands (read unemployed) who have sedulously stockpiled an array of Wikipedia's merit badges. Case in point: look up any benzodiazepine article and track down the edits and commentary made by user Literaturegeek, who states he is an addiction counselor.

This person has hijacked every benzo article and festooned them with garrulous, non-specific and dubiously sourced anti-drug propaganda. I concede that benzos can be extremely addictive, but they are also (IMHO) the most effective biological treatment for the spectrum of anxiety disorders.

Yet user Literaturegeek methodically reverts any changes to his edits and has been the initiator of many editing wars (some of which make for very entertaining reading on the articles' discussion pages. So what we have is a biased non-expert becoming the English-speaking world's foremost authority on benzodiazepines.

Literaturegeek is still going strong.

https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec/en.wikipe ... raturegeek

[robinson]

それは2009年からのコピー&ペーストです それは医者Xで時間になります 誰も彼とコミュニケーションをとることさえ気にしな