I think a lot people underestimate how arbitrary some editorial decisions on wikipedia can be. Yeah perfect is the enemy of the good but imperfect is still imperfect. Can’t say I’m a fan of jj mccullough‘s opinions on some stuff but his video on wikipedia is good <a href="https://youtu.be/-vmSFO1Zfo8?si=0mS24EVODwLrPJ3T" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/-vmSFO1Zfo8?si=0mS24EVODwLrPJ3T</a><p>I don’t feel as strongly as he does but ever since watching I just don’t see much value in starting with Wikipedia when researching something. He also points out how a lot content creators default to referencing it. After realising how much of history or geography YouTube is just regurgitating Wikipedia articles, it kind of ruined those kinds of videos for me, and this was before AI. So now I try spend more time reading books or listening to audiobooks on a topics I’m interested instead.<p>Like I still use Wikipedia for unserious stuff or checking if a book I was recommended was widely criticised or something but that’s it really.<p>It’s also just not a good learning resource, like if you ever wanted to study a mathematics topic, wikipedia might be one of the worst resources. Like Wikipedia doesn’t profess to be a learning resource and more a overview resource but even the examples they use sometimes are just kind of unhelpful. Here’s an example on the Fourier Transform <a href="https://youtu.be/33y9FMIvcWY?si=ys8BwDu_4qa01jso" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/33y9FMIvcWY?si=ys8BwDu_4qa01jso</a>
> I think a lot people underestimate how arbitrary some editorial decisions on wikipedia can be.<p>I think it is true for all information we consume. One of the very important skills to learn in life is to think critically. Who wrote this? When? What would be their bias?<p>Text is written by humans (or now sometimes LLMs), and humans are imperfect (and LLMs are worth what they are worth).<p>Many times Wikipedia is more than enough, sometimes it is not. Nothing is perfect, and it is very important to understand it.
I think people underestimate how arbitrary editorial decisions are for any media.<p>Things like PBS and Wikipedia might have biases, but idk if it's realistic to expect better.
Reading (the right) books is definitely the best way to learn about a topic, but its not great for quickly looking up random stuff. Books can spread misinformation too, from Malleus Maleficarum to Erich von Däniken.<p>It is useful for quickly looking up simple facts, and provides a list of sources.<p>The video makes some interesting criticisms. The lack of diversity is not surprising. Dominated by white, male, American's with time on their hands! how would have thought that? Its very obviously American dominated (at least the English version).
I once partly cross verify a virologist's lecture. He confused a brother of an important scientist who made an important discovery. I have no doubt that he knows what he's talking about when it comes to viruses.<p>All in all, checking other sources to see if they lines up is a pain and labor intensive, never mind actually checking to see if the references are actually sound evidence.
Spanish Wikipedia is dominated by folks from Spain, despite Spain being a minority of Spanish speakers.
> jj mccullough‘s opinions<p>holy heck there is so much wrong about this video. i can't believe "internet influencers" can just turn on their cameras and spew so much untruth without a care in the world...<p>comparatively wikipedia is imperfect, but much better than this kind of slop.
>just about every link to a Wikipedia page created in the past quarter-century still works<p>Not so sure about this; page titles change and redirects get removed. I'm thinking of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Nex_Benedict" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Nex_Benedict</a> where initial news articles and her obituary used her birth name, Dagny Benedict, but soon this name was scrubbed from the wikipedia page, as well as its talk page and redirects, on the policy of deadnames.
Wow, I would expect there would at least be a single mention of "born Dagny Benedict" somewhere at the beginning of the background section as is typical in other pages. If this is intentional, to omit this entirely seems like it unnecessarily politicizes the issue rather than documenting the history of a person.
You’re hitting the wrong aspect of the problem. You should use someone’s old name when it’s absolutely necessary, not as a matter of course. People change their name for a reason after all, and if their latest one suffices, let it be.<p>In the case of this person, they were not notable under their birth name. Unfortunately, their transgender status is the whole reason they’re notable, and the article clearly states that they are. I don’t need that person’s old name to understand the situation.
Pretty much every married woman (who changed/added to her last name) has her birth name written there, even if she was never notable/known as Knavs or Skłodowska.<p>More info is usually better than less info, if you personally don't need to know something, that does not mean that that info should be removed.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melania_Trump" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melania_Trump</a>
the current one is better, sounds like eggs benedict
It's Wikipedia. Change it. There is no "they", you can be an editor.
This is a naive take that belies the reality of pages with a lot of traffic, and is the reason why there can be controversial discussions in the talk pages. I know nothing about the history of this page, which is why I said "if it's intentional" regarding any deliberate scrubbing.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversies#Editing_restrictions" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie...</a><p>EDIT: On further inspecting the page history, this definitely looks intentional, or at least is a controversial page.
The page is protected, the general public can't edit it.<p>There was already discussion on the talk page, "Should Nex's given name be included?" with consensus of "no." That discussion was archived, but you can see it here [0].<p>From what I can see, the word "Dagny" has been retroactively redacted from all history of the page and its talk page.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Death_of_Nex_Benedict&oldid=1217222681" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Death_of_Nex...</a>
Not when someone with connections and better knowledge of the WP bylaws weaponizes the Arb Com against you.<p>Here are some of the things you can get banned for:<p>- Having a too large fraction of your edits be reverts.<p>- Updating raw references to <ref cite> references (without changing the contents of the reference).<p>- Saying something on a forum that could be construed as telling people to edit a particular article in a particular way.<p>The Arb Com doesn't have to open up a public discussion about the matter. They can simply pronounce judgment in private and ban you. There's no prior notice, no representation, and no independent appeal. For a "supreme court", that's quite a low bar.
There's a tricky ethical question here: if someone changed their name and ask for not being called their former name ever again, you can either ignore their will, which is rude, or chose to follow it but then you are doing a disservice to the public's understanding.<p>The secind option used to be the norm on wikipedia even 15 years ago, but Anti-trans activists using dead-naming as a slur against trans people triggered the shift from the second option to the first.<p>As usual assholes are why we can't have nice things.
> There's a tricky ethical question here: if someone changed their name and ask for not being called their former name ever again, you can either ignore their will, which is rude, or chose to follow it but then you are doing a disservice to the public's understanding.<p>Calling somebody with his former name and mentioning his former name in a Wikipedia page are two completely different things. Using the fact that the former is seen as rude by some to avoid the second is in my opinion just an example of the level of extremism of the pro-trans activists.<p>But if in fact it made sense, shouldn't we completely remove any reference of the previous name also from the pages of people like Yusuf Islam [1] or Muhammad Ali [2] ?<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Stevens" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Stevens</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Ali" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Ali</a>
Notability. Those two celebrities were known for a very long time under their old name. To prevent confusion, their old name is shown.<p>The victim of a crime was not notable before their name change.
Notability is subjective
In the Universe, yes. In the closed system of Wikipedia, no, it's a well defined term with clearly established criteria, tested over the years on thousands of Talk pages on controversial pages, of how to achieve consensus: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability</a>
Many married women are known under their husbands last names, from Maria Salomea Skłodowska, Betty Marion Ludden to Melanija Knavs. Some celebrities even use stage names, such as Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta.<p>Many of these women are not really known under those names, but somehow, they're still listed on their wiki pages.
> level of extremism of the pro-trans activists<p>What on earth are you talking about?
The use of the masculine pronoun here when we're referring to someone who transitioned from male kind of gives away that you're probably less concerned with searchability and preservation of history, and more concerned with promoting a transphobic agenda. I suppose it's possible you were using it as a generic pronoun, but in that case I would have expected "they." Am I wrong?
"if someone changed their name and ask for not being called their former name ever again"<p>Writing someone <i>was</i> called XYZ, is not calling the person by that name again. It is just stating a historic fact.
Its omitting information which seems antithetical to the whole point of Wikipedia. It makes it harder to find other sources of information on someone. it makes it harder to make connections between things you know.<p>Its really not very different from a Wikipedia article using an author's pseudonym mentioning their real name.<p>Should all Wikipedia articles on people omit information that the subject of the article does not want mentioned? Even if they find it distressing?
> The secind option used to be the norm on wikipedia even 15 years ago, but Anti-trans activists using dead-naming as a slur against trans people triggered the shift from the second option to the first.<p>Just to clarify, I think you mistook the order of the first option and the second option? I was confused by this statement
I don't think what should be neutral account of factual events should take into account if it would be rude to an individual.
these snowflakes who think the world revolves around them always ruin everything<p>always offended by something
Admittedly I do not know how much of a sensitive issue this is, but I find it surprising that the name given at birth is not mentioned anywhere on the Wikipedia page, even though in other cases of name change usually "Name (born Old Name)" is written.
This article is talking about Portal:Current Events on Wikipedia (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events</a>). The current events articles are fantastic! Normal newspaper articles are status updates. Current events articles synthesize news to present the current, comprehensive understanding about an event. It’s cool to monitor how current events articles evolve over time.
Grokipedia (<a href="https://grokipedia.com/" rel="nofollow">https://grokipedia.com/</a>) represents the most promising attempt in ages to build a genuinely bias-free online encyclopedia.<p>Ironically, trying it fairly requires you to first suspend your own biases regarding its owner.
Oh goodness, if wiki is news, then it's the most biased and easily editable news outside of Winston Smith and the Ministry of Truth.
> the most biased<p>Is it biased because it doesn't reflect your opinion or are the facts also biased?
Really? News coverage on Wikipedia is a lot more reliable than (say) Fox News. Breaking news events in particular get a <i>lot</i> of eyeballs and while you obviously can't take everything as gospel, genuinely wrong info is usually purged pretty quickly.
Wikipedia has long been hijacked to serve agendas. The “truth” is whatever the highest bidder wants it to be.<p>Most recently hijacked by the Qatar dictatorship: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/16/pr-firm-portland-accused-of-commissioning-favourable-changes-to-wikipedia-pages" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/16/pr-firm-p...</a><p>News, influencers, Wikipedia, almost all information we consume nowadays is intentional. And not even getting into billions poured into American colleges by the same people.
When I was working in the heart of conservative online media in West Palm Beach—nestled between Rush Limbaugh’s studio, Mar-a-Lago, and Newsmax—targeting Evangelical Christians in the Bible Belt, my salary (and the direction things eventually went) was being paid for by the Saudis. At the time, the propaganda was mostly “pro-oil” and “climate change is a hoax.” Around that same period, those same Saudis bought a 10% stake in Fox News and helped shape the narrative for millions of Christians who tune in and treat it like their main source of news.<p>So yeah, if you were ever curious where the profits go every time you fill up your car with gas… there.<p>I thought I was just building media websites. I didn’t even see the content until after six months. I put in my one month notice, finished what I was working on, and left. The amount of money they offered me to stay was ridiculous. I don’t blame people at Fox News for bending the knee and taking that Saudi money -- I just couldn’t make myself do it.<p>“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” A lot of people are going to spend eternity in hell for propaganda and lies.
Saudis are invested in a huge range of things in America. It has historical roots in the petrodollar. The basic deal of it that that they would only sell their oil in USD, which gave the USD a de facto backing after we defaulted in Bretton Woods (which was a de jure gold backing). That gave the USD a huge chunk of stability and in exchange we agreed to sell them weapons and broadly support them, while in exchange they were also asked to purchase US treasuries and assets with surplus revenues.<p>Over time this led to Saudis being involved in just about everything. For instance the biggest owner of 'old Twitter' under Dorsey was Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud. Needless to say the zeitgeist on old Twitter and Saudi Arabia have basically nothing in common, so you're probably seeing ideological motivation where the real motivation is generally just monetary. Not every country is conspiring to subvert other countries to their ideology.<p>Basically Saudia Arabia is filthy rich because of oil, but they fully understand that even if we continue burning oil until we run out, we <i>will</i> run out, within the lifetime of some people living today. So they have to migrate their economy away from oil and, on the timeline for such a revolutionary shift, they have very little time left. This is likely what MBS sees as what will define his legacy.
Looks like Prince Alwaleed bin Talal's ownership of Fox was between 5.5% to 7% during the two-decade period of 1997 ~ 2017. He divested during an anti-corruption purge.
> I don’t blame people at Fox News for bending the knee and taking that Saudi money<p>i do, and i judge people who take money to push harmful things. i don't see why this is bad.
They hate Muslims, but they love money and theocracy more, and Saudis are top of the world in both.
No wonder Terrorism is supported by oil money.
What level of moral compromise is acceptable in this world to take whatever money is offered? Presumably the job of hitman is unacceptable? Where's the line drawn?<p>Personally I'd say that lying to perpetuate a system that is leading to various populous parts of the world becoming uninhabitable is on the wrong side of that line.
There are agendas there, just like in every human endeavor, but it definitely hasn't been "hijacked", it's still by far the best single repository of human knowledge out there. If I had to choose one website to take with me to a desert island, it's an obvious choice.<p>We should keep talking about the issues and improving things, but don't throw out the baby with bathwater.
> We should keep talking about the issues and improving things, but don't throw out the baby with bathwater.<p>Yeah, I wonder what solution people propose that claim that Wikipedia is 'hijacked' or 'compromised' and pushing agendas?
While Wikipedia is not perfect, it is the best encyclopedia we currently have, mostly due to collective efforts and maintainers that care about the state of Wikipedia. I would even say that it is a good thing that there is this transparency, that states and capital are trying to influence Wikipedia because then you know that you may take some articles with a grain of salt or can actively push against it.
Every alternative to Wikipedia that I have seen so far is one that claims to be more truthful than the original, but in the end these are platforms that push agendas without the transparency and attempt to further obscure power relations under the pretext of truth.<p>Every alternative to Wikipedia will have to solve the problems that Wikipedia already has to be a better alternative. However, I do think these are fundamental unsolvable problems
and everyone who claims to have solved this is part of a power struggle over who defines what is considered true.
it absolutely has been. like every online community, Wikipedia is extremely vulnerable to the terminally online and/or the mentally ill, to whom everything is political. like clockwork, every remotely political article cites opinions only from a certain perspective, often quoting glorified nobodies to assert the narrative the '''editors''' want to present. dissenting opinions, no matter how overwhelmingly common among the real people, are mentioned in passing at best and often derisively.
Links to examples would go a long way.
> mentally ill<p>Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That Wikipedia has been co-opted by mentally ill people is an extraordinary claim. You should provide more than feelings.
If you can download the Talk pages and edit history, you probably have enough information to, on average, mostly be dealing with objective fact.
But by claiming one thing and doing the exact opposite (on a statistical quantitative basis), Wikipedia and all other western outlets have become just a front for propaganda which is also the reason why I don't believe in "Persecution of Uyghurs in China"<p>German Scholars Reveal Shocking TRUTH About China’s Xinjiang Province<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fp-MZsRhKM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fp-MZsRhKM</a>
I think for anything controversial we need a completely different model.<p>Officially wikipedia is NPOV but an especially contentious and murky political mudfight decides what counts as a "citeable" source and what doesnt and what counts as notable and what doesnt.<p>It also has an incredibly strong western bias.<p>Every government, corporation and billionaire pays somebody to participate in that fight as well, using every dirty trick they can.<p>Until we have a model that can sidestep these politics (which Wikipedia seemingly has no real desire to do) and aggregate sources objectively I think it will continue to suck.
I agree with the issues, but it definitely doesn't suck if compared to every single other massive endeavor out there. As I see it, it's like that quote about democracy - it's the worst way to attempt to catalogue human knowledge, except for all those other forms that have been tried.<p>> It also has an incredibly strong western bias.<p>What's the issue with that? Why shouldn't English Wikipedia have a strong Western bias? I've explored and participated in several other Wikipedias and other collaborative projects, and each is biased towards the worldviews common to the culture that its main editors come from. I don't think there's a way to have an encyclopedic project without any cultural bias at all (if such a platonic ideal could even be properly defined), and seeing how Western values include a significant focus on pluralism, freedom of expression and scientific inquiry, I think this situation is much better than the alternatives.
it's one crucial topic imo<p>internet altered the way society communicates and why, a lot of discussions now end up by "show me your sources" aka "what is the truth" and it's often centralized into some accepted source like wikipedia<p>where there simple single point of 'truth' like that before ?<p>my 2cents is that humans are not meant to live in one global absolute truth and we all lived in relative fuzzy reality before, it was slow and imperfect but not as easy to tamper with
Showing sources is not a bad thing. The harm is not questioning sources. A lot of people rely on poor sources. Whatever what the first result in Google historically, and now LLM summaries.
maybe my viewpoint is weird but i think this distorted human interactions on multiple domains.<p>of course we all wanted to communicate faithful information, but now any discussion turns into a religious difference, and the escape is of course "who has the truest source". people don't necessarily understand the content, they just defer the validity to an official third party, so basically we're back to zero.. but we're all debating everything now.<p>and it makes me think that locally, we chatting, was never meant to exchange rigorous information, but mostly to share opinions lightly, more emotional than rigorous and scientific
Not so long ago, the "truth" was mainly given by the priest or the mayor.
We still live in that fuzzy reality. Not much has changed.<p>It doesnt really matter if the whole world has access to the same information if the whole world trusts completely different sources.<p>For better or worse we trust those sources exclusively because of tribal affinity.<p>I doubt many people in the US could be persuaded to trust Global Times over the New York Times even if you could prove it had a better prediction track record. Wrong tribe.
I’m continually impressed by Wikipedia’s quality controls. In my experience people underestimate them.
> And not even getting into billions poured into American colleges by the same people.<p>What does this mean?
You need only to look at how many actual well credentialed doctors get their Wiki pages smeared with words like "misinformation spreader" for dissenting against covid narratives
I would love to see news sites copying at least some of the technology of wikipedia. First and foremost every article should be versioned and it should be easy to see diffs. Every version of a news article should have a permanent link to it. Why don‘t news agencies use git for example?
Also news articles should be written using a markup language that is easy to parse and easy to read by AI agents. Instead most of them still write articles in word and convert it from docx into HTML or PDF. That usually generates terrible documents that break accessibility.
And of course a common markup language for news articles would enable many applications. But I guess we will land on Mars before we can have something like that.
It's funny how every source of knowledge converges to the same thing: mass media. Telling you what to think and trying to influence your behaviour rather than trying to inform you.<p>Using facts, omitting facts or emphasising particular facts over others in order to mislead you. The scientific journals are now included with their anonymous editorials. Peer review is pretty much the same as fact-checking.<p>Contrast this with good fiction, which employs falsehoods to point towards the truth: truth which cannot easily be verified but which is our real bread and butter.
I’m going to reject the premise—this is not “news”, but “recent events”.
When there's some big ongoing thing in the news there'll be many articles on that same topic on news websites and sometimes you can't even find the original one that tells what actually happened. Wikipedia's article on it is usually a great summary
Although, due to Wikipedia's own policy, that it must cite other reliable sources, it can never be a source of first-hand news.
Comparing the same article in different languages sometimes gets very educational.
Is there an RSS version of the weekly newsletter about Wikipedia articles?
In the UK I would say most people are proud of the BBC^; many people I speak to are smug when comparing it to e.g. Fox News, CNBC, etc... I think this is a big mistake, and that the USA system is actually better.<p>It's impossible for one news source to be unbiased, and the delusion that it is unbiased is dangerous. If you truly believe a source is "the truth" and unbiased it allows you to switch off any critical thinking; the information bypasses any protections you have.<p>Much better to have many news sources where the bias is evident and the individual has to synthesise an opinion themselves (not claiming this is perfect by any means, but a perfect system does not exist).<p>It is obviously the case that Wikipedia is biased, and I think competition is a great thing. We would be better served by a market of options to use our own faculties than a false sense of comfort in a fake truth.<p>^though many are refusing to pay the (almost) legally mandatory "tv-license".
Some people seems to confuse, willingly or not, unbiased with targeting neutral point of view, free of any perspective.<p>We can step back from a debate and reports who's saying what, but this is still reporting ongoing debate. And still involving attention within its considerations, which do change our mental process as much as performative effects can go. That's as opposed to remain completely unaware the debate could be even be considered.<p>no one is going out of ontological constraints and brings absolute truth from transexistential considerations.
I agree we need multiple news sources, but the UK has multiple news sources. What the BBC adds is one with a different funding model so different biases. I do not think this works as well as it did historically.<p>As for unwillingness to pay the license fee, the biggest issue is the rise of streaming alternatives. It reduced the BBC from providing about half of available TV to being one among many providers so the license fee no longer feels like good value for money.<p>Its not mandatory. I have never owned a TV. If you do not watch broadcast TV or Iplayer you do not have to have a TV license.<p>I also think Capita's aggressive scare tactics in trying to get people to pay the license fee have created a lot of hostility towards the BBC.
No one who regularly watches biased news sources does so while acknowledging the constant bias. And I don’t think most people think the BBC is unbiased, it’s constantly attacked as having bias to both sides of the aisle ironically. The BBC is far from perfect but it’s in a different league to Fox News to the point that it feels disingenuous to suggest you’d be better off watching Fox News while telling yourself that you’re filtering out the bias.
BBC has very little credibility in the developing world
It seems a shame Weeklypedia doesn't have an RSS feed.
I prefer subject experts over Wikipedia.
Keep in mind that Wikipedia itself tells you that "Wikipedia is not a newspaper"<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:NOTNEWS&redirect=yes" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:NOTNEWS...</a><p>While having an "In the news" section on the front page
It clarifies exactly what that means. It doesn’t say that the information have to pass the test of time. Only that it is not a place of original reporting, unsourced gossip, etc.
Those two statements don't contradict each other.
Which is fine and not contradictory. It is not a newspaper (like HN) but it may overlap with some mainstream news (also like HN).
[flagged]
after 25 years wikipedia showed what it truly was created for, by selling the content for training. otherwise - okay, this was a cool project, perhaps we need better. like federated, crypto-signed articles that once collected together, @atproto style, produce the article with notable changes to it.
Their enterprise offering is more for fresh retrieval than training. For training, you can just download the free database dump — one you would inadvertently end up recreating if you were to use their enterprise APIs in a (pre-)training pipeline.
Context: <a href="https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/wikipedia-will-share-content-with-ai-firms-in-new-licensing-deals/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/wikipedia-will-share-cont...</a><p>tl;dr: Wikipedia is CC and has public APIs, but AI companies have recently started paying for "enterprise" high-speed access.<p>Notably, the enterprise program started in 2021 and Google has been paying since 2022.
You’re saying Wikipedia was created 25 years ago to sell its content to train LLMs that didn’t even exist?! I doubt it…