• pillow [she/her]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    teachers always had the angle that wikipedia is bad because the mere rabble editing it don’t have staid institutional reputation behind them. it was always obvious to everyone else, though, that wikipedia does a fine job of interpreting the sources. wikipedia is consistently useful as an aggregator of mainstream sources

    the only way to attack it I think is with vandalism. add incorrect information like slightly wrong dates, wrong distances to astronomical objects, and wrong molecular weights of chemicals; mix up physics theorems with subtly-incorrect contrapositives; replace working code with pseudocode that doesn’t quite handle the edge cases. make people as frustrated with wikipedia as they are with quora! then wikipedia will become irrelevant.

    it won’t change all of the liberalism that wikipedia was collecting in the first place, but

    • it’ll be harder to find anything at all so people will trust their lived experience more
    • it’ll be on more equal footing with weird fringe stuff in search results instead of being woven into a whole authoritative-sounding encyclopedic narrative
    • it won’t be laundered through wikipedia’s “community consensus” on reliable sources

    death to wikipedia

    • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      15
      ·
      1 year ago

      it was always obvious to everyone else, though, that wikipedia does a fine job of interpreting the sources

      Read an article on the PRC and this idea falls apart

    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      ·
      1 year ago

      I don’t think vandalism will do it and any concerted attempt to do so would inevitably be discovered and only reinforce people’s support for it.

      • pillow [she/her]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        1 year ago

        the hardcore editor dorks are a lost cause anyway so I’m not worried about them getting upset by putinbots trying to destroy democracy or whatever they think. to the mostly indifferent reading masses, it’s just quality steadily going down

        you might be right though that vandalism alone wouldn’t be enough. maybe if the quality of wikipedia declines enough then ai can start to supplant it as the go-to source for looking something up. it’s the same lib nonsense but at least people know to be skeptical of what they see in their google results. as it is people are bamboozled by mystifying “consensus” and “reputation” etc