I think I've agree with you on this one. Even on Wikipedia there's a ton of pages like SPI pages which can be indistinguishable from actual malicious doxxings.
Not to mention that there a whole load of #MeToo scandals which would doom Wikipedia if exposed to the media.
This needs to be talked by a lot! However per my experiences and those of others if you go to either the "front page of the internet" or Lemmy the competitor you'll get side-eyed and harassed by people who thinks that you're a "far-right obscurantist" for simply criticizing Wikipedia.
Yet when I (or others) are trying to raise the issue on certain Reddit communities in addition to Lemmy people there still prefer to bury their heads in the sand. Often they'll simply resort to personal attacks and so on just to avoid facing the fact that Wikipedia is not as infalliable as they think at all.
That's right. Often due process is skipped even if the blocks turn out to be errors or collateral damages later. It's not going to be 100% perfect at all because stylometries can be obfuscated (see https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7345380/) and there are tools like VNC and residential proxy applications to evade IP-based tracing and detection.
It's going to be a Achilles heel for Wikipedia one day, mark my words. Those LTA pages often contains a lot of personal information which would violate GDPR in Europe, at least based on what I've heard from NOYB so far. Some editors have expressed their concerns about this.
I read through like half of those, and they generally paint a picture of Wikipedia acting well in regards to external controversy, or (mostly robustly) responding to manipulation attempts.
One can look into Shira Klein and Jan Grabowski's report about how the Polish ultranationalists have distorted the Holocaust topic area on Wikipedia (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...) if they want to find a counterexample. To the best of my understandings so far, I think Icewhiz is a good guy, just that he doesn't have strong grasp about Wikipedia's guidelines, particularly regarding multiple accounts, and was the victim of sustained smear campaigns by Polish ultranationalists who were able to psychologically manipulate the admins into banning him in order to let their distortionist edits stick. Now he's an Emmanuel Goldstein figure for both the ultranationalists and the pro-Hamas editors who seek to deflect external scrutiny to their edits.
A month after that article was published (and shortly after the article was posted on Wikipedia), the Arbitration Committee opened a sua sponte case to review the topic area despite the substance of that article being "Icewhiz was right".[1] It resulted in bans of Icewhiz' enemies for distorting the Holocaust topic area. I think moderators on pretty much any other website would laugh and ignore an article like that as being whining from a user they banned.
I agree that Icewhiz is an Emmanuel Goldstein-like figure at this point who's used by pro-Hamas editors/ultranationalists. A bunch of those pro-Palestinian editors that loved to complain about Icewhiz to deflect from their own behaviour were topic-banned from Israel-Palestine area a few months ago in January.[2]
It's challenging to deal with the Israel-Palestine conflict on any website that allows for user contributions. There's astroturfing and nation-state backed influence operations from probably a dozen countries. I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia.
> I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia.
There's a survivorship bias in play here as we don't have a good other sample or more to compare to. After Wikipedia went big in the 2000s it was for a very long time a de-facto monopoly for people seeking out reference information on the Internet. Even Google's Knol project, which was intended to be a Wikipedia competitor, faltered after a few years. Same goes for Everipedia as well.
> There's a survivorship bias in play here as we don't have a good other sample or more to compare to.
It is not survivorship bias to point out that the survivor survived.
> Even Google's Knol project, which was intended to be a Wikipedia competitor, faltered after a few years.
Not “faltering after a few years” is part of “succesfully navigating that minefield”. If you fall out of the “race” no matter how good your policies would be otherwise you won’t be a reliable source of information. Because your can’t be if you no longer exists.
This is not a statement about what could have worked, this is a statement about what did work. And there survival is a necessary ingredient of success.
It is indeed a survivorship bias since we have no good other sample in the form of competitor to compare to, like how Pepsi is to Coca-Cola. Which part of my statement you find difficult to understand?
> Which part of my statement you find difficult to understand?
I understand your whole statement perfectly. It is just wrong. My understanding is not the problem here.
We are not comparing them to other samples. We say that out of the currently existing X they are the best.
Imagine a town with 3 bakeries. Lets call them A, B, and C. Bakery A gets shut down by the health deparment and B goes bankrupt. Then we can, rightfully and without survivorship bias, call C the best run bakery of the town. Because if you get shut down by the health department, or you go bankrupt then by definition you are not the best run bakery. (Obviously it is not a high praise with that kind of competitions, but they still are the best run bakery.)
Staying in the business is not some incidental part of “being the best run bakery”. It is a core component of it.
Imagine a marathon with 100 runners. Henry runs the fastest time, and 25 others do not finish. Some got lost, some had medical issues during the race. Is it survivorship bias to call Henry the fastest competitor in that race? Of course not. You need to finish the race to be even considered to be the fastest. Just because there are others who didn’t make it, doesn’t make him somehow not the fastest. Definietly doesn’t make calling him the fastest “survivorship bias”.
Finishing the race is a core component of “being the fastest finisher”.
Similarly in the case of wikipedia. If other similar sites stopped operating then they by definition did not “successfully navigated that minefield”. Their bakery is shut and they did not finish their marathon. That is the very definition of “not succesfully navigating that minefield”.
This is how rationalwiki defines survivorship bias: “Survivorship bias is a cognitive bias that occurs when focusing on entities that made it past a selection process, while overlooking those that didn't.”
We are not overlooking the failed attempts here. We are considering them.
Bakery A and B is worse run than C. And we know that because they got shut down.
The runners who did not finish the marathon are not faster than Henry. And we know that because they haven’t finished the marathon.
The abandoned community edited websites are worse at “successfully navigating that minefield” than the ones which are still operating. We know that because they are no longer operating. They were not overlooked.
What you are missing is that the “selection process” here is not some independent, and unrelated thing. The selection process is, at least in part, is what we are talking about. You cannot be considered the best run bakery unless you are running a bakery. You cannot be considered the fastest racer unless you finished the race. And your community edited website cannot be the one who most succesfully navigates a minefield unless you are navigating the minefield at all.
Please let me know if any of the above is unclear. Happy to go into details.
I think the goalpost is being moved. Your initial criteria was all about the resilency against state-sponsored disinformation attempts and the gaming of systems. For that criteria we don't have a comparable sample to look into when evaluating Wikipedia's.
By comparable, I'm meaning an alternative or competitor that had gained equal prominence as Wikipedia, in terms of Google search results, and the eyes of the whole world, again like what Pepsi is to Coca-Cola and vice versa. We would have something to compare to in terms of the criteria if Google has given their favoritism to one or more other platforms, instead of just Wikipedia.
> I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia.
I don't believe this is the case, the Israeli/Palestine are restricted to long-time contributors, so the articles are either messy and unmaintained due to lack of editors, or worse, edited only by members of influence campaigns who have scared away everyone else
That's right. They only survived because competitions were crushed out with both network effects, and the help of Google which reportedly prioritizes Wikipedia in search results while downranking any others which could challenge Wikipedia.
Not to mention that there a whole load of #MeToo scandals which would doom Wikipedia if exposed to the media.
https://www.reddit.com/r/JustWikipediaThings/wiki/scandals