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  • Hacker News
  • I guess Larry Sanger was right all along about experts vs amateurs?
    by sublinear
  • Something like Wikipedia is a wonderful idea in theory, but it's tough to defend when their policies allow factually incorrect content to remain just because it appears on a third-party source that the editors consider reliable. Most media sources contain a pretty high percentage of fake news and when this slop makes its way into Wikipedia that makes the problem even worse. Can we find a better solution?
    by nradov
  • Open knowledge systems like Wikipedia are not really defensible. Letting anybody edit any page is a great way to get AI and human slop everywhere. It makes it extremely easy to insert knowledge with dubious quality and sources.

    We need "open access" knowledge systems with known authors who are sponsored by non-profit and educational organizations and its their duty to defend their reputation.

    Humanity needs more openly accessible curated and factually checked information and "open to modify" systems are bad at in all.

    by okanat
  • Defense of open knowledge will appear when they attack the monopoly of Elsevier and other publishers through innovative systems for peer-evaluated papers, not by trying to resuscitate the body of the spook-filled Wikipedia.
    by skyzoidbroczky
  • What academics need to defend is wikipedia in latent space. Not walls of text that reflect the opinions of a few who have the time to edit that the rich and famous can optimize.

    That is why we are building latentpedia.org.

    by adsharma
  • Downvote away, but: Academics have a duty to explain their years of inaction while their students have wilted and faltered as a direct result of academics not understanding how to to be effective in the real world in which their students are expected to be productive members. Those that cant, teach, and teach ridiculous fallacies they personally subscribe to. Instead of real critical thinking they instilled a twisted sick worldview about social issues that has no connection to creating market value and being a good, supportive human. Wikipedia is the last concern of this rapidly imploding rightthink crumbling empire, on its last legs from those whose families bore the ultimate cost to get their kid a degree that is increasingly worthless.

    I propose our leadership cut funding and fine any program in the US where a professor is not actively working in their field at a minimum part-time. These people are so out of touch it is literally sickening when you think of all the negative downstream effects.

    by 4d4m
  • What on earth did we do before WP? I'm old enough to remember the olden days before WP existed and the practice of reading the news.

    I also remember the whispers and chatter outside of and around the 'papers. Those whispers etc would reinforce a later article.

    What is happening now with news ie top down dissemination of world events is not new but what is different today is the immediacy of commentary by the hoi poloi - you and me and who knows what from across the world ... and bots.

    I think we have to get to grips with the fact that an event happening within one corner of the world measuring an inch squared can rock up on the agenda of anyone, anywhere across the entire world.

    by gerdesj
  • > Just as academics must cite any AI-generated machine outputs they rely upon in their research and writing, they can also cite Wikipedia if they use it in their work. Doing so can highlight Wikipedia’s value to other academics as a source of knowledge and provide greater transparency in one’s research processes. Despite longstanding skepticism of Wikipedia among some scholars, citations to Wikipedia in academic journals appear to be increasing – even in high-impact publications in subject areas like the health sciences.

    As someone who's contributed to Wikipedia and seen how the sausage is made: that's stupid. Even Wikipedia itself considers wikis (including itself) to lack sufficient authority to be cited as a source.

    Such citations could be easily gamed (if you cite a particular change) or are useless (the content you cite may not be there in the future), and are obvious pathways to "citogenesis."

    by 10111001

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