Great article, would highly recommend anyone with the time give it a full read through.
Wikipedia is incredibly valuable, and insanely well edited and put together, and we're all lucky to have something like it available for free.
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
800 points (99.0% liked)
Technology
75063 readers
2610 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
And their merch is 🔥, just saying.
Where are the [citation needed] stickers, though?
They used to sell those on the xkcd store and I was going to link to them but it seems the store is closed now.
There's a pretty good Citation Needed newsletter and podcast run by former Wikipedia Arbitrator Molly White that also has a store that of course has [citation needed] merch. The newsletter and podcast is pretty good, too; the Verge article even links to it.
load more comments
(1 replies)
CONTINUE READING WITH A VERGE SUBSCRIPTION AND SUCK MY FAT COCK
Thanks for encouraging to read the whole thing. That is a loooong article! But a great informative read. Took me a couple of sittings to read it all properly, well worth it!
I had no idea about so many of the challenges they’ve gone through & seemingly managed to fight back so many attempts to control & mask the content on more volatile subjects. Always had a lot of respect for the editors, but even more so now.
I do donate a small amount to them once or twice a year. I think I will try to increase my donations going forward knowing it might help with some of their legal fights.
Knowledge really is power, & we all deserve access to true knowledge, more now than ever it seems.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Boring is subjective.
For me, Wikipedia is a joyful wealth of knowledge & collective factual editing in one of the most responsible executions expected of such a format.
If we're being subjective; knowledge is hella fun, yo.
not everything has to be exciting, expanding, growing, "numbers go up" damnit.
Good science is boring, good politics is boring, good espionage is boring, good journalism is boring, good history is boring, good banking is boring, good business is boring. Entertainment serves us this pop view of the world...
But wikipedia is more valuable than all the LLM slop machines combined.
"When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all."
I would love some of those less exciting times.
May you live in exciting times
Is the worst curse
This is so true. These systems that provide the foundation to our daily existence should be all boing, because they should be always working well and never surprise us.
Then everybody would get the chance and energy to pursue excitement in their life’s meaningful parts: having interesting conversations with friends, passionate relationships with their partner, or finding excitement anywhere from horror movies to skydiving.
just reminding everyone, one donation to wikipedia will hurt leon's ego. if you want to help a free source of info with no ads, consider donating
Move the operations to Denmark. Florida is a fascist sinking state.
WMF has been headquartered in San Francisco since 2007, with chapters and data centers around the world. Not that California's in the US, but much better than Florida.
Not that California's in the US
I like your attitude!
[Citation needed]
California and West Coast separatism is most strongly advocated by Russian agents seeking to weaken the US.
I think everyone is in favour of weakening the US
Even the American president himself
load more comments
(1 replies)
I’m not Russian at all and I want to separate because all I get from the federal union is taxation without representation. I’m tired of subsidizing failed religious extremists. It’s abundantly clear that there is no rule of law at the federal level, and I would sooner die than bend the knee to a king.
Edit: and our homegrown Russian asset Jill Stein has never once mentioned balkanization. I just don’t believe your accusation, it doesn’t seem to be based in reality.
load more comments
(17 replies)
load more comments
(5 replies)
“One of the things I really love about Wikipedia is it forces you to have measured, emotionless conversations with people you disagree with in the name of trying to construct the accurate narrative,”
Yeah, I think what makes Wikipedia resilient is that you can’t just go there and say something subjective. You need to find the correct way to state the actual fact, even when it can have different interpretations. Cause that way, no group can contest it.
Or they'll just declare it non-notable and speedily delete it. They've lost so many newcomers to internal bullshit like that.
That's the resiliency part of it all. Resistance to change is the security.
It's not internal bullshits, it's whether there's enough neutral-schoursches-to-schoursche-its. That's all Notability's about.
It has a really bad name though, that guideline. I was a part of the editors who wanted to change it to "suitability" but there's the resiliency.
Oh no, I once had an article I contributed removed for exactly that, notability. Not sourcing or lack thereof. That was also the last time I ever contributed, obviously.
It didn't help that a couple years later somebody else decided it was notable after all and created the article.
Notability is sourcing: Articles generally require significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the topic. They even made a catchy name for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_answer_to_life,_the_universe,_and_everything (well they borrowed it but you catch my drift). Even if every single claim is Verifiable, it will be deleted if there aren't enough secondary (independent of the topic) sources because it's dangerous and likely non-neutral to only hear the subject's view of themselves. Confusing Notability with something else is a pretty common pitfall for new article creators, so there's things like "Articles for creation" where you can submit article drafts for review and have conversations with the reviewer on what exactly is wrong with your article, as well as many other guides and forums like Help:Your first article, WP:Teahouse, and WP:Help desk.
It didn't help that a couple years later somebody else decided it was notable after all and created the article.
The essay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Too_soon is often cited to say "This might get the needed sourcing in a few years, but right no we can't tell, so it's better to create the article again when it has what's needed to align with our content guidelines rather than rush to make a misleading one right now." So either that's exactly what your situation was, or . I'd love to take a look at the article you're talking about.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Boring is ok for 95% of the things.
I'm sure beer pong is much more exciting than Wikipedia. At least you're numb from the drinking and laughing at your own stupidity, even though I do that while reading Wikipedia as well.
I hate to say it, but I don't think Wikipedia is as neutral or as open as it claims to be. Some of the article comments talk about there definitely being some bias against anonymous editors, even if they're correct.
I'm not sure if it was in that article or in another comment section, but someone said after Elon Musk did the Nazi salute at Trump's event, an anonymous user mentioned it and there was a big controversy. And a registered user took it down and berated them for it, and another registered user came along an added the salute info back in and it was fine. Or something like that.
I definitely still think Wikipedia is a net good. But it seems to me any time you have a centralised source of information, a small group of people will fight to control the narrative so they can spin it any which way they want. For example, on Reddit, my favorite band's unofficial subreddit is run by a guy who bans any fan cams of the events — unless they're his. So obviously he does fan cams so he can make ad money on YouTube, but he uses Reddit to block those of others to direct the traffic to his. I think Fandom (the shitty wiki site with all the ads) run a lot of gaming communities, again, to drive ad revenue. Lot of that shit going on. I mean, if they tried that on Lemmy, someone could just open a community on another instance and the users could then decide who they want to support.
Is Wikipedia susceptible to that kind of influence? Of course it is. And I worry about it being taken over by the wrong people. I don't think that has happened yet, but I've seen it happen on other sites.
To be clear, we should definitely support Wikipedia against the alt right, but we should also be cautious that they, and other bad actors, don't destroy its credibility from within. Yes, the alt right has their own Wikipedia (Conservapedia or something like that) but that's not good enough, they want ours to be theirs, too.
I don't see that in the comments and the article said user PickleG13 was the first person to add the salute information. You can also just go check at the Elon Musk article.
I’m not sure if it was in that article or in another comment section, but someone said
a small group of people will fight to control the narrative so they can spin it any which way they want.
Your source for your broad categorization and claims seems incredibly weak. "Someone said, somewhere, I'm not sure where I read it, though."
Wikipedia tracks anonymous contributions, too. You could check the Article and Article Discussion pages histories before making these claims, and before concluding from one comment that Wikipedia has the same systematic issues like Reddit or other closed-group moderated platforms.
As far as I see it, Wikipedia has a different depth and transparency on guidelines, requirements, open discussion, and actions. It has a lot of additional safeguards compared to something like Reddit. Admins are elected, not "first-come".
What I find much more plausible than "they didn't want to accept an anonymous contribution" is that the anonymous contributor may not have adequately sourced their claims and contributions. Even if they did, I find it much more likely that it may have been removed, then a discussion was done in the page discussion, and then it was added back.
Of course, instead of theorizing what happened in that case I could have checked Wikipedia too. But I also want to make a point about my general and systematic expectation of how Wikipedia works, which other platforms do not have.
load more comments
(6 replies)
Wow, that took me over an hour to read, totally worth it!
Edit: non-paywall link was added below.
Time for some encarta games
view more: next ›