One “very senior Wikimedian,” we are told, “came to think of the project as a ‘city built by Asperger’s.’ ”
If you get the paywall, it’s readable at http://archive.today/R2rnW
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TL;DR: This is largely a review/summary of The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia by Richard Cooke
Great article OP! First time I’d heard Wikipedia was in decline. I can’t see it ever going away.
Yes, the readership is not doing well. It won’t go away any time soon, but one day it might end up a ghost town. If everything develops linearly, which it might not.
Sounds like the only real problem is all those jackass “deletionists”…
If an article is so niche no one ever looks at it, then it eats up zero bandwidth. Just the data storage for a small text file.
Nothing should ever be deleted, there’s no fucking benefit to that
If they weren’t acting up, then activity dying down wouldn’t matter
It’s the biggest repository of human knowledge ever, it existing and being freely accessible to the planet is massive.
Wikipedia is and has always been shit. It’s where institutions go to write down their propaganda so it sounds authoritative. In fact it’s the precursor to AI in that sense. It’s credentialism all the way down. If something is said somewhere by anyone, then it becomes a source. Unless that source is not
approved ofinstalled by the powers that let wikipedia gracefully host its websites.If a page regarding a political or historical event isn’t under constant scrutiny, state actors and “trolls” will gradually alter it until it says nothing conclusive at all. Everything must be up in the air, everything must be “neutral” (when language itself is political…)
Also think about the incentives. You’re a government. You have people working full time to redact history. You CAN and you WILL threaten people who write the wrong version of history. This is not even hidden, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Wikipedia–U.S._government_conflicts
They can see it happening, they can document it happening, and they can’t do shit to change it because they’re not a peer to peer project. Like the fediverse for that matter, it’s all vulnerable to the same exact “a guy in a suit rang your doorbell because the server is on your premises” tactic.
So in conclusion, believing that “wikipedia good” and “AI bad” is an incredibly naive way to understand the world. Read up on Wittgenstein and Sapir-Whorf and tell me how this isn’t literally their theories being implemented.
The way it’s usually treated by laymen, as here, Sapir-Whorf theory is pseudoscience, and you’re not even really talking about language but about information. As for Wittgenstein, you’re grossly banalising his work.
This is not even hidden
Yeah. Really makes you think…
