At Age 25, Wikipedia Refuses to Evolve
spectrum.ieee.orgI think a much larger concern is that political activists have fully committed to using the open nature of Wikipedia to slant articles in their favoured direction. Unfortunately, the public and other consumers of Wikipedia have been slower to catch on, resulting in a slow poisoning of what was once accurate knowledge about the world.
Why is this a concern? Like either you have open sources of information that have distributed vulnerabilities or closed sources of information that have centralized vulnerabilities.
The risk that some articles are biased is way better than reading a corporate encyclopedia where all articles being biased. That’s open access, that’s a bottom up process. That’s “democracy” so to speak.
A thing I’ve noticed more and more recently, is that everyone talks about like small - open source, small towns, small business, but then decries the tradeoffs.
Like socialists basically saying Walmart is better than small business because they can use their efficiencies to pay better.
So much “fuck it, let’s do autocracy” because self-government is hard.
A few comments: - a "corporate" encyclopedia does not mean all articles are biased, but it does mean that you know who wrote it and you can use knowledge of the author's biases to inform your interpretation of the text - Walmart may be bad in all kinds of ways, but it's not at all comparable to autocracy
I'm not trying to argue that Wikipedia or any other source can meet some utopian ideal of objectivity, but I am concerned that the anonymity of Wikipedia allows it to be weaponized in new ways, and despite this, it retains a gloss of "community" and "grassroots" that was undoubtedly appropriate at one time, but probably isn't any more.
This would, IMO, be bad enough when humans were the main consumers - they could be mislead in subtle ways that influence their political opinions & actions, but at least it was possible for the affected humans to update their opinions with other sources. However if AI is treating Wikipedia as basically fact and encoding it within the model, then it's not clear how mistakes can be corrected or even noticed.
IMO a worse problem than collectivists arguing for Walmart is collectivists slowly whitewashing the murderous historical record of collectivist regimes.
Man, people are really trying to fast track the stupidifcation of the world.
“Why isn’t Wikipedia more like tik tok” is certainly a take.
At Age 25, Wikipedia Refuses to Evolve The digital commons champion faces a crisis of its own making
It's a fucking encyclopedia in HTML with revision control. The only crisis we have is the stupidity crisis pushing for change.