We honestly need to end the myth that Wikipedia is some impenetrable white tower.

It’s a perpetual two-edged conversation. On the one end, you’ve got reactionaries doggedly insisting the existence of Wikipedia is an attack on their personal reputations and a warehouse for far-left ultra-communist radical propaganda. On the other, you’ve got a very naked western bias to articles (thanks to a preponderance of western editors) and this creeping pay-to-play model of participation that enthusiasts and supporters simply refuse to acknowledge.

The utility of the site is such that nobody is really excited about ignoring it and replacing it is a herculean effort even would-be trillionaires haven’t managed. So the fight continues to be over degrees of control in editing existing articles and publishing new ones.

It isn’t a White Tower, but Wikipedia has become - like it or not - a system of record with an implicit amount of reflexive trust that hundreds of millions of people have learned to adopt. You can’t cynically reject its contents any more than you can naively accept them.

You think people break into the Louvre but can’t touch Wikipedia?

I think there are enough copies of the Mona Lisa such that we wouldn’t need to question what it looks like if the original was stolen.

In the same way, there are so many backups and mirrors and third-party logs of Wikipedia that we can very clearly see what is being changed and by whom. It is valuable in large part because it is so easily auditable. That’s not to say its infallible, but you can at least point to what you disagree with and challenge it piecemeal. This isn’t like a Grok AI or Conservapedia, where the preponderance is a black box of bullshit.

That’s what the “Talk” section functionally does. People can (and do) check it when an article has lots of frequent heavy editing. And a lot of these edits do get rolled back as they’re exposed, as Wikipedia admins are reasonably good at keeping the propaganda generically pro-western rather than nakedly for-profit or regionally partisan.

At the same time, Wales is a self-proclaimed libertarian who is constantly putting his hand out to keep the website funded and operational. I have to assume there’s a certain degree of self-dealing happening in the background just to keep the site from getting the kind of abuse suffered by Internet Archive or Anna’s Archive.

Where is the ambient horizon lighting coming from in the right-side of the picture?

The nature of reality is such that you can believe a very silly thing and have it impact your life in no meaningful way. People have been wrong about the nature of the universe for millennia and continued to get by. The oddball who believes in native moonlight and stargates isn’t going to benefit tangibly for being correct or suffer tangibly for his misbelief. In many cases - thanks to the proliferation of internet subcommunity echo-chambers - they may actually suffer (socially) for reconciling their beliefs with reality if they can’t bring their friends along for the ride.

But, again, when they have extremely limited influence over their surroundings (this guy is not, presumably, running an astronomy lab or charged with funding improvements to municipal mass transit) their zany beliefs don’t really matter. Correctness doesn’t benefit them and incorrectness is more fun.

My friend is adamant that 30 years ago the “real” Sun was orange but got replaced with a white LED.

I would be curious to know where he thinks the LED is plugged in. Also, why this particular LED is so fucking hot.

Don’t be a tankie.

The Socialist Fraternal Kiss

People on Lemmy hate when you know any amount of history

Real Inbox Zero hour, who up?

They tried to warn us.

We didn’t listen

“I smelled your burning incense and assumed you’d be into this Hindu flag”

This feels more like “Both Sides” centrism.

Any suggestion that there’s something questionable or unreliable about the American democratic process is a trick by the Republican Party to suppress liberal voter enthusiasm. And if you mention it you are helping the Republicans win. Also Russia.

If you’re still in line, stay in line. Our elections are secure. The midterms is winnable if you vote in it. Shut up and do what we tell you or you’re an enemy.

Schools with good public transit are a real blessing. I remember living off campus at UT Austin and missing more than a few classes due to the miserable bus schedule. A big chunk of that was the result of the bumper to bumper traffic through central Austin. But it’s a problem the city/state knew existed for decades and refused to address.

Commuter schools are even worse. They straight up don’t provide student housing, then get mad when you need student parking.

The real secret to wealth. Just have a back line into the Fed Credit Window.

Any dipshit can become a billionaire while paying the prime rate on unlimited borrowed money

Would solve a lot of problems.

I’m fully willing to believe Elon Musk will officially become a trillionaire, go on a bender, get lost, and be homeless for - like - a week.

It’s Cold War propaganda.

Literally “Animal Farm” in a single sentence.