In the 2000s, in the tech world, the open source successes that were being talked about was always Apache and Linux.
When Wikipedia started gaining a bit of traction, everyone made fun of it. It was the butt of jokes in all the prime time comedy shows. And I always felt like telling the critics - "Don't you see what is happening? People all over the world are adding their own bits of knowledge and creating this huge thing way beyond what we've seen till now. It's cooperation on an international scale! By regular people! This is what the internet is all about. People, by the thousands, are contributing without asking for anything else in return. This is incredible! "
A few years later, Encyclopedia Britannica, stopped their print edition. A few years after that I read that Wikipedia had surpassed even that.
The amount of value Wikipedia brings to the world is incalculable.
And I'm very fortunate to be alive at a time where I can witness something at this scale. Something that transcends borders and boundaries. Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion. Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world.
If I want to look something up, I always check out wikipedia first. Its not always accurate, but its invariably a lot more accurate on most topics than random information across the web. Its also pretty easy to spot bad quality wiki articles once you get the gist of the site
Its amazing that wikipedia exists - there've been multiple hardcore attempts to kill it over the years for profit, but its still managing to go
Wikipedia is often the last on my goto resources to consult. The information is huge, but writing quality or style often irks me more than I can stand. I I always check Britannica first. If it's not there, then I move on.
Is there another public source for encyclopedia-type articles that is better for geopolitical content? For example, if I have a philosophy question I'll often consult the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy instead of Wikipedia.
If there isn't a more neutral public source -- if there are only sources with different biases, or if the better sources are behind paywalls -- then I think that Wikipedia is still doing pretty well even for contentious geopolitical topics.
Usually disputes are visible on the Talk page, regardless of whatever viewpoint may prevail in the main article. It can also be useful to jump back to years-old versions of articles, if there are recent world events that put the subject of the article in the news.
Apart from Wikipedia, speaking more generally, I think that articles with a strong editorial bias still provide useful information to an alert reader. I can read articles from Mother Jones, Newsmax, Russia Today, the BBC, Times of India, etc. and find different political and/or geopolitical slants to what is written about and how it is reported. I can also learn a lot even when I strongly disagree with the narrative thrust of what is reported. The key thing is to take any particular article or publication as only circumstantial evidence for an underlying reality, and to avoid falling into complacency even when (or especially when) the information you're reading aligns with what you already believe to be true.
Wikipedia is surely a formidable source of knowledge, but
> Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion.
You are romanticizing.
Wikipedia is a corporation, just like Work or University, and I personally assume anything corporate is being manipulated by the owners or the ruling oligarchy because they are structurally unreliable. This is especially veritable for Wikipedia. Create an account there and try to go deeper into the articles about politics, literature and war.
The remote viewing article keeps being reverted as pseudoscientific when original research conducted by the CIA is cited. Such citations are removed swiftly. Any changes are denied or rolled back.
The rationale is that, even though the documents themselves are a primary source from an organization that poured significant resources into researching the phenomenon of remote viewing, the individual posting the declassified document isn't an authority on the subject.
Apparently if youre not a doctor, you can't read primary sources?
Many such cases.
Wikipedia is absolutely a powerful resource, but it it's clearly controlled by moderators with a bias, and there's no incentive to challenge said bias or consider alternative worldviews.
nitpick: WMF (the org that develops and hosts Wikipedia and its related services like Wikimedia Commons) is a non-profit foundation, not the classic type of profit-driven corporation that your post implies.
> Wikipedia is a corporation, and I personally assume anything corporate is being manipulated by the owners or the ruling oligarchy because they are structurally unreliable.
Many articles are fine. I don't think you can equate this to all of Wikipedia automatically.
> It was Larry Sanger who chanced upon the critical concept of combining the three fundamental elements of Wikipedia, namely an encyclopedia, a wiki, and essentially unrestricted editorial access to the public during a dinner meeting with an old friend Ben Kovitz in January 2, 2001. Kovitz a computer programmer and introduced Sanger to Ward Cunningham's wiki, a web application which allows collaborative modification, extension or deletion of its content and structure. The name wiki has been derived from the Hawaiian term which meant quick. Sanger feeling that the wiki software would facilitate a good platform for an online encyclopedia web portal, proposed the concept to Wales to be applied to Nupedia. Wales intially skeptic about the idea decided to give it a try later.
> The credit for coining the term Wikipedia goes to Larry Sanger. He initially conceived the concept of a wiki-based encyclopedia project only as a means to accelerate Nupedia's slow growth. Larry Sanger served as the "chief organiser" of Wikipedia during its critical first year of growth and created and enforced many of the policies and strategy that made Wikipedia possible during its first formative year. Wikipedia turned out to contain 15,000 articles and upwards to 350 Wikipedians contributing on several topics by the end of 2001.
He may not be with the project now, but don't airbrush him out of history.
Without context, it looks like the interviewer was a jerk and ambushed him.
I've seen plenty of stalling like that on major news programs, and the interviewer always knows to move on (and possibly edit something in to provide context.)
---
That being said, "who started what" and "who had what idea" are silly topics to obsesses about. It always come down to who put the long-term work in. I think Wales was "in the right" to walk off; or at least say something like "I can't tell the story accurately, so please move on to a different question."
The interview started with the most mundane question "Who are you?", and the very first sentence of Wales is either a lie or misleading. The journalists asks for clarification (thats a journalists job, btw), and in his second sentence of the interview Wales insults the journalist. I'm pretty sure who is the jerk here.
It also was Wales who bought up the topic, not the journalist. If he considers it a stupid topic he does not want to talk about, why is it the very first thing he talks about?
Jimmy Wales has been poked at with the question of whether he should call himself a founder or specifically co-founder for a long time, by right-wingers who think Wikipedia is too woke, and want to irritate and discredit him as much as possible, and instead raise up his co-founder Larry Sanger. Sanger has right-wing views and a habit of accusing any article as biased that doesn't praise Trump and fundamentalist Christian values, and takes these as proof that Wikipedia has a left lean.
The interview Wales walked out of was for his book tour. I imagine it's the umpteenth interview that week with the same question asked for the same transparently bad-faith reasons, trying to bend the interview away from his book and into right-wing conspiracy theory land.
Wikipedia is literally a spin-off of a porn company.
From that point on, where it came from or who founded it is not so important. The question is how it acts today.
It is a highly-political organization supporting lot of “progressive” ideas, California-style. So if you like reading politically biased media it may be for you.
If you are seeking for a global view you better ask different LLMs for arguments and counter-arguments on a subject.
EDIT: a couple downvotes denying the influence of specific “Wikipedia ideology” and politics.
Take a chance to edit articles and you will see how tedious it is.
There is also a lot of legal censorship. Celebrities putting pressure on removing info, or lobbies, or say things that are illegal or very frowned upon (for example questioning homosexuality, or the impact of certain wars).
Sometime it is legality, ideology, politics, funding, pressure, etc.
It is tedious because you must edit with facts, not ideology.
But we now live in a world where people agree that ideology should be able to change facts.
> or the impact of certain wars
Exactly, like China wanting to completely censor anything regarding the Tiananmen Square protests.
> for example questioning homosexuality
I don't know what you have to question about this.
>If you are seeking for a global view you better ask different LLMs for arguments and counter-arguments on a subject.
All the LLM I've tested have a strong tendency to increase your echo chamber and not try to change your opinion on something.
>This is why you need to use different sources.
Only if deep down, you're ready to change your POV on something, otherwise you're just wasting time and ragebaiting yourself.
Although I admit, it can still be entertaining to read some news to discover how they're able to twist reality.
For the last part I agree with you, the LLMs tend to say what you like to hear. The echo chamber problem also exists, pushing them to say pros and cons is not perfect, but helps to make an opinion (and also "unaligned" models).
Facts are very skewed by the environment:
in the case you push too much in one direction that is too controversial or because the politicians disagree too much with you; there can be plenty of negative consequences:
- your website gets blocked, or you get publicly under pressure, or you lose donations, you lose grants, your payment providers blocks you, you lose audience, you can get a fine, you can go to jail, etc.
Many different options.
There is asymmetry here:
We disagree, you have one opinion, what happens if both of us fight for 10 months, 24/7 debating "what is the truth ?" on that topic.
- You have that energy and time (because it's your own page, or your mission where you are paid by your company, or because this topic is personally important to you, etc)
- I don't have time or that topic is not *that* important for me.
- Consequence: Your truth is going to win.
Sources are naturally going to be curated to support your view. At the end, the path of least resistance is to go with the flow.
The tricky part: there are also truths that cannot be sourced properly, but are still facts (ex: famous SV men still offering founders today investment against sex). Add on top of that, legal concerns, and it becomes a very difficult environment to navigate.
> It is tedious because you must edit with facts, not ideology.
Not just because you must edit with facts. If your opposition outnumbers you and/or they have more energy to spend than you, they can grind you down with bad-faith arguments and questions for clarification.
The way this goes is that they edit an article to insert their POV. You edit/revert it. They open a talk page discussion about the subject. Suppose their edit is "marine animals are generally considered cute throughout the world" with a reference to a paper by an organization in favor of seals. You revert it by saying this is NPOV. They open a talk page question asking where the organization has been declared to be partisan. Suppose you do research and find some such third-party statement that "the Foundation for Animal Aesthetics is organized by proponents of marine animals". Then they ask how this third party is accurate, or whether "organized by proponents" necessarily implies that they're biased.
This can go on more or less forever until someone gives up. The attack even has a name on Wikipedia itself: "civil POV pushing". It works because few Wikipedia admins are subject matter experts, so they police behavior (conduct) more than they police subject accuracy.
Civil POV pushers can thus keep their surface conduct unobjectionable while waiting for the one they are actioning against to either give up or to get angry enough to make a heated moment's conduct violation. It's essentially the wiki version of sealioning.
In short, a thousand "but is really two plus two equal to four?" will overcome a single "You bastard, it is four and you're deliberately trolling me", because the latter is a personal insult.
generally, when one makes a claim, one should be willing to provide some concrete evidence or proof to support that claim. Saying "see how tedious it is, bro" is not concrete proof, it's vague and it could have many different explanations.
Not that I expect much from folks who edits their comment to cry about fake internet point
Yup, there's a wonderful, presumably LLM generated, response to somebody explaining how trademark law actually works, the LLM response insists that explanation was all wrong and cites several US law cases. Most of the cases don't exist, the rest aren't about trademark law or anywhere close. But the LLM isn't supposed to say truths, it's a stochastic parrot, it makes what looks most plausible as a response. "Five" is a pretty plausible response to "What is two plus three?" but that's not because it added 2 + 3 = 5
"Five" is not merely "plausible". It is the uniquely correct answer, and it is what the model produces because the training corpus overwhelmingly associates "2 + 3" with "5" in truthful contexts.
And the stochastic parrot framing has a real problem here: if the mechanism reliably produces correct outputs for a class of problems, dismissing it as "just plausibility" rather than computation becomes a philosophical stance rather than a technical critique. The model learned patterns that encode the mathematical relationship. Whether you call that "understanding" or "statistical correlation" is a definitional argument, not an empirical one.
The legal citation example sounds about right. It is a genuine failure mode. But arithmetic is precisely where LLMs tend to succeed (at small scales) because there is no ambiguity in the training signal.
In everyday life, you cannot read 20 books about a topic about everything you are curious about, but you can ask 5 subject-experts (“the LLMs”) in 20 seconds
some of them who are going to check on some news websites (most are also biased)
Then you can ask for summaries of pros and cons, and make your own opinions.
Are they hallucinating ? Could be. Are they lying ? Could be. Have they been trained on what their masters said to say ? Could be.
But multiplying the amount of LLMs reduce the risk.
For example, if you ask DeepSeek, Gemini, Grok, Claude, GLM-4.7 or some models that have no guardrails, what they think about XXX, then perhaps there are interesting insights.
To further this, articles also have an edit history and talk page. Even if one disagrees with consensus building or suspects foul play and they're really trying to get to the bottom of something, all the info is there on Wikipedia!
If one just wants a friendly black box to tell them something they want to hear, AI is known to do that.
Right. Try clicking those sources, half the time there is zero relation to the sentence. LLMs just output what they want to say, and then sprinkle in what the web search found on random sentences.
And not just bottom of the barrel LLMs. Ask Claude about Intel PIN tools, it will merrily tell you that it "Has thread-safe APIs but performance issues were noted with multi-threaded tools like ThreadSanitizer" and then cite the Disney Pins blog and the DropoutStore "2025 Pin of the Month Bundle" as an inline source.
Enamel pins. That's the level of trust you should have when LLMs pretend to be citing a source.
Pffft hahaha. Looks like interviewer was inexperienced AND hit a touchy subject. It's like trying to have a casual conversation about dating with someone who's secretly gay.
Wow, thanks for the video actually. For a long time I felt he was complete jerk but I felt it was maybe biased propaganda. The mere fact he couldn't answer a basic question and explain for all those who don't know, but rather stormed out like a 4 year old child, only proves what I felt about him prior.
I'd say his lack of acknowledgment of Larry Sanger is actually quite useful, as it is a perfect and irrefutable example that Wikipedia has no qualms with omitting information and twisting the truth to serve a narrative.
> In late 2005, Wales edited his biographical entry on the English Wikipedia. Writer Rogers Cadenhead drew attention to logs showing that in his edits to the page, Wales had removed references to Sanger as the co-founder of Wikipedia.[53][54] Sanger commented that "having seen edits like this, it does seem that Jimmy is attempting to rewrite history. But this is a futile process because, in our brave new world of transparent activity and maximum communication, the truth will out."[20][55] Wales was also observed to have modified references to Bomis in a way that was characterized as downplaying the sexual nature of some of his former company's products.[16][20] Though Wales argued that his modifications were solely intended to improve the accuracy of the content,[20] he apologized for editing his biography, a practice generally discouraged on Wikipedia.[20][55]
>He may not be with the project now, but don't airbrush him out of history.
I don't want to defend Jimbo Wales (he's very touchy about the subject), but to be honest, even if he's a founder, Larry Sanger didn't contribute much to what Wikipedia today is.
Wikipedia itself says Larry Sanger "co-founded" Wikipedia, but I don't quite understand why. If you get into the details, he was Wales' employee at the time, and made initial version of Wikipedia while being paid as such. So I'm tentatively with Wales on that ATM.
> Employing someone doesn't let you pass off their achievements as your own.
Doesn't it? That's basically how tech companies work. You can tell he's written an initial version of Wikipedia, but founder is emphatically not an employee.
That's not how fame and credit for some novel thing is shared. The minds of two people were vital to its success, and we don't fold that into one because of business structure.
Larry Sanger is weird. He "founded Wikipedia" but hasn't actually been involved with it for decades.
"Right-Wing Perspectives" are not artificially suppressed to conform to a shadow-government's agenda, they are naturally suppressed because they tend not to align with logical interpretation of facts.
Neither Larry nor Jimbo "are" Wikipedia. Wikipedia's editors are Wikipedia, and if they collectively agree with any of Larry's policy ideas, they'll adopt them in time.
I used to glibly agree with what you said, because back in the early 2000s it was primarily the right-wing nutters being fed a diet of Fox News bullshit that were deranged from reality... "reality has a liberal bias", right? Remember the crackpot Conservapedia? But these days I find plenty of equal opportunity derangement from terrible news sources chasing clicks, promoting FOMO, anxiety and keeping their readers/viewers addicted. No political flavour of bullshit belongs on Wikipedia.
His nine theses are basically a how-to guide for replacing democratic consensus with culture war bullshit. He clearly wants to bend the process to match his perception of the world rather than update his understanding of the world to match the facts.
The process Wikipedia uses to produce articles that present facts with without editorializing has clearly worked fairly well. Obviously we have a more difficult time reaching consensus on contentious topics but in general the system works quite well.
The English intro talks a lot about medical advantages of the procedure: "reduced rates of sexually transmitted infections and urinary tract infections. This includes reducing the incidence of cancer-causing forms of human papillomavirus (HPV) and reducing HIV transmission among heterosexual men in high-risk populations by up to 60%; ... Neonatal circumcision decreases the risk of penile cancer.[14] ... Some medical organizations take the position that it carries prophylactic health benefits that outweigh the risks," and has one sentence of it being controversial worldwide "others hold that its medical benefits are not sufficient to justify it."
The German one has not a single sentence in the intro about advantages, but a whole paragraph on how it's controversial. "Die Zirkumzision als Routineeingriff ist besonders bei Minderjährigen umstritten, ... Von vielen Kinderschutzverbänden und einem Teil der Ärzteorganisationen wird die nicht medizinisch begründete Beschneidung abgelehnt, da sie den Körper irreversibel verändere und bei nicht einwilligungsfähigen Jungen nicht im Einklang mit Gesundheitsschutz und Kindeswohl stehe.[6] Im angelsächsischen Bereich gibt es schon länger eine gesellschaftliche Debatte zwischen Gruppen von Gegnern der Beschneidung („Intaktivisten“-Bewegung) und Befürwortern. Umstritten sind insbesondere medizinischer Nutzen und Risiken, bei Kindern auch ethische und rechtliche Aspekte sowie die Beurteilung im Hinblick auf die Menschenrechte, vor allem das Recht auf körperliche Unversehrtheit."
I'm not sure who's right, but it's hard to not see some bias here.
I love Wikipedia and think it's one of the greatest resources on the Internet, but there's absolutely a lot of bias in Wikipedia. Even within the same language, I think a lot of it has to do with how many people have or are contributing to a page, whether there's a recent event affecting it, how polarizing or political the subject, etc. But it's not hard to find examples of straight up opinions or very incomplete narratives.
I've also noticed huge differences between two different language versions of the same articles. (English/Spanish specifically). Sometimes they even feel independently written.
Of course, we should all do our part to improve these things when we spot them, if we're able.
It's impossible to write completely neutrally. Editorial decisions like what information to include or exclude, what sources to cite, what order to present information in, what illustrations to use cannot be avoided and inherently present some kind of narrative.
It also shows that it isn't perfectly organized, that it isn't an ideal model for knowledge aggregation. If it's ideal for it to be globally consistent, then it doesn't have that. If it's ideal for it to be adapted to different cultures, then it doesn't have that either, because the divisions are based only on language. However, Wikipedia it is really an amazing place, and it should continue to be preserved and improved.
On Twitter/X "for you" feed, I'm frequently served posts by handles that are openly hostile toward Wikipedia. The most often cited reason is excessive fundraising / bloat (previously it was bias). But in my opinion, whatever bloat the Wikipedia organization suffers from, it is still a better alternative than all the other ad/engagement driven platforms.
For a top-10 Internet website it's not "bloated" at all, if anything it's still running on a shoestring budget. And the fundraising ends up supporting a huge variety of technical improvements and less known "sister" projects that are instrumental in letting the community thrive and be relevant for the foreseeable future. Sure, you could keep the existing content online for a lot less than what they're asking for, but that's not what folks are looking for when they visit the site. Keeping a thriving community going takes a whole lot of effort especially in this day and age, where a vast majority of people just use the Internet for 100% casual entertainment, not productive activity.
It's a weird thing to hate on Wikipedia for since in general it's one of the cleaner sites I visit. The absolute garbage of the Fandom wikis shows just how bad it could be.
By now they should be sitting on a billion dollars that safely yields a forever self-funding annual income ($30m-$50m) that would pay for all of their necessary expenses. They would no longer require any donations. It's grotesque and wildly irresponsible how they're managing the organization. If LLMs become the center of knowledge resources going forward (which they will), Wikipedia's funding will decline as their traffic declines, and they'll collapse into a spiral of cut-backs, as they operate on a present structure that burns most of its financial capability annually (this opens them up to a shock to the system on inflection, which is happening now).
LLM's can't just be "the center of knowledge" on their own, they need to learn and be trained if they are to be useful. A whole lot of LLM knowledge comes from Wikipedia to begin with.
Tailwind docs are also the source of, duh, docs. People browse them way less and as a result Tailwind gets way less funding.
The problem is that Wikipedia should be set for life at this point, and they insist on rejecting that notion. There may be a future in which Wikipedia closes, and if that comes to pass it will due to wanton disregard for people's goodwill.
statements on wikipedia are summarized from sources, LLMs once trained on wikipedia to summarize, can then summarize on their own from the source material, and probably with less bias
I have been a fan of Wikipedia since I first learned about it, about six months after it launched. What a concept! Anyone can edit, citations are required, revisions are kept indefinitely. That's a recipe for building a clearinghouse of human knowledge with the power of iteration.
But I am also a non-fiction researcher/writer, and I experience some problems caused by Wikipedia:
1) I like to dig deep into historical stories--newspapers, archives, court records, FOIA requests--and I try to produce high quality, well-sourced articles about historic events. Inevitably, someone updates the Wikipedia article(s) to include new information I have surfaced, which exiles my article to the digital dustbin in favor of Wikipedia. Occasionally the Wikipedia editors cite my article in their updates, but much more often they just cite the sources that I cited, and skip over my contribution. It can be painful for my hard work to become irrelevant so rapidly.
2) Multiple of my writings have been plagiarized on Wikipedia by careless editors over the years, and I have been subsequently accused of plagiarizing from Wikipedia. That is unpleasant.
For a recent example, in 2006 I wrote an article about Doble Steam Cars[1]. A few months ago I had reason to visit the Doble steam car Wikipedia entry[2], and as I was reading, I realized that a large portion of the text was an uncanny, nearly verbatim copy of my article. I looked at the revision history, and found that a wiki editor had copied my text to revamp the article just a few months after I wrote mine in 2006. I visited /r/wikipedia and asked how to best handle this, and the Wikipedia editors there determined that it was indeed a violation, and they decided to revdelete almost 20 years of edits to purge the violation. It was quite something to behold.
To be clear, I am not happy that the huge revdelete resulted in so many lost subsequent good faith edits. But it's impressive that it was possible to roll it back so quickly and cleanly.
I can't be the only one who feels that Wikipedia's quality has really started to go downhill over the past 5 or so years. I've noticed more and more articles which read as ridiculously partisan, usually around subjects with any link to politics or current events.
That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the US, but I get the impression that the sites neutrality policies have gradually been chipped away by introducing concepts like "false balance" as an excuse to pick a side on an issue. I could easily see that causing the site to slowly decline like StackOverflow did, most people don't want to deal with agenda pushing.
Fortunately articles related to topics like science and history haven't been significantly damaged by this yet. Something to watch carefully.
There is pretty much no way this was ever not going to happen, given Wikipedia's position and structure. It is a massive repository of knowledge, that is consulted by millions if not billions of people around the world on a regular basis, that is (in theory) editable by anyone and that has articles on just about every conceivable topic, including many politically charged ones. There must be immense pressure to use it to propagate all kinds of narratives. Given all of that, I think it does as good a job as can be expected of remaining objective, but absolutely you need to be careful when reading articles on politically charged topics (which is true of all media).
Wikipedia was always insufficiently neutral about political or social topics. At a bare minimum, you need to check whether there are any highlighted controversies in the article talk page.
Do you have suggestion of better repository of knowledge gathering, which achieve better level of neutrality than Wikipedia on every matter it covers, or throw right into your face that the article doesn’t meet consensual neutral POV?
Wikipedia itself knows how much shit it's in. Every ongoing conflict and culture-war issue is a "contentious topic", which is Wikipedia code for "editors are at each others' throats"
> Q1: Why does this article state that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, even though this is heavily contested and neither the ICJ nor the ICC have issued a final judgment?
> A1: A September 2025 request for comment (RfC) decided to state, in Wikipedia's own voice, that it is a genocide. The current lead is the result of later discussion on the specific wording.
> I can't be the only one who feels that Wikipedia's quality has really started to go downhill over the past 5 or so years. I've noticed more and more articles which read as ridiculously partisan, usually around subjects with any link to politics or current events.
I would say this started over a decade ago. Otherwise I completely agree.
Oh dear, you need to learn about the GamerGate incident which started August 2012. All the extreme division and online manipulation through the collaborative creation of false narratives started right there, with that issue, before contaminating the entire political landscape.
It's the Eternal September of our generation, and it's not recognised enough as such. Before that, the internet was a different place.
> Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture
Okay, what the actual fuck? IIRC it was people whining about the absolute state of games journalism in the 2010's.
GamerGate was about ethics in games journalism roughly as much as the Arab Spring was about a street vendor having his cart confiscated.
That was their initial spark, but it kicked off a ding-dong battle for years. You could argue it's still going today, given places like /v/ and ResetEra are still fighting it, games like Dustborn and Concord are pilloried, and the "Sweet Baby Inc. detected" Steam curator exists to list games that have taken that company's advice.
GamerGate was about journalism in the same way that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was to protect the rights of ethnic Russian minorities in that country. The GamerGate people used ethics as an excuse because that sounds a lot more reasonable than “hate mob riled up by a bitter ex”, but it fell apart as soon as you looked at the evidence (e.g. they were most focused on attacking a developer over a relationship with someone who never reviewed her games), where they went for support (right-wing agitators with low journalistic ethics), and all of the real issues they ignored between huge gaming companies and the major media outlets.
The excuse was as believable as someone saying they were super concerned about ethics in tech journalism, but then never said a word about a huge tech company and spent all of their time badgering the Temple OS guy for sharing a meal with an OS News writer.
Well no, I was also around but not particularly interested at the time. This looks like a classic case of the media trying to close ranks and smear their critics.
I was also there, and I say it was very much not as Wikipedia describes it and the narrative is practically libelous. I would tell you to read as much of the archived back-room nonsense as I did (not just the talk page archives but internal Wikipedia government stuff), but even if could be unearthed this much later nobody deserves the trauma.
I was there as well. It was absolutely not as Wikipedia describes it. If the claim was that some people participating in GG did so because they were sexist, fair enough. That was true and unavoidable because you get crazies in every group. But that was not some kind of universal thing, such that Wikipedia should be describing the movement unambiguously as "misogynistic".
It absolutely matched the Wikipedia summary. There is a ton of evidence linked supporting each point: it was a hate mob from the moment Eron Gjoni decided his ex should be punished for breaking up with him.
The GamerGate article is probably the best example of Wikipedia's blatant political bias.
There are many biased articles out there, of course, but not many manage to misrepresent past events to such an extreme that it borders on comical. It reads like it was written by Zoe Quinn herself. Maybe it was.
Fun thing about that. Whenever someone starts going off about how Zoe Quinn was supposedly mistreated and how that supposedly launched a "right-wing backlash against feminism" and a "misogynistic online harassment campaign", quiz them about the "jilted boyfriend" (as they typically put it) who wrote the post that supposedly set everything off. With remarkable consistency, they don't know his name (Eron Gjoni) or anything about his far-left political views, and will refuse to say the name if you ask. They have never read the post and have no idea what it says, and will at most handwave at incredibly-biased third-hand summaries.
GG wasn't constrained to Gjoni, it was the reaction to his posting. One guy saying "I'm on this team" does not define the characteristics of the resulting events.
You miss the point. It's about those people being misinformed, unwilling to look into matters independently, and selective in the application of their supposed ideological principles.
Friendly reminder that we all have the power to improve this! Become an editor and If you come across a problematic article, you can make improvements, or even just flag it as needing work. I know this is not a small ask, and can feel discouraging if you see more issues than you have time to address or your edits are not accepted, but when you consider the relatively small number of editors and the huge number of readers (not to mention AI’s being built on it) it is likely one of the more significant differences you can make towards improving the greater problem polarization.
The impression I've had from trying to contribute in the past has been that some editors will fight tooth and nail to prevent changes to an article they effectively own. The maze of rules and regulations makes it far too easy to simply block changes by dragging everything through protracted resolution processes.
Even something as clear-cut as "the provided source doesn't support this claim at all" becomes an uphill struggle to correct. When it comes to anything related to politics this problem is also exaggerated by editors selectively opposing changes based on whether they apply a desired slant to the text.
I have a personal interest in getting fixes into Wikipedia. If you'll share here a couple of examples I can attempt a fix. Here are some stories of what I've done in the past where people mentioned that they've struggled with corrections (one says he was banned, another said his article was deleted, and the third said he couldn't get it corrected - I solved all of these):
One thing I should clarify is that Wikipedia's purpose is to aggregate the current general view on things. So even if you know something is true personally, you cannot put it in unless you can find a reliable place where someone has documented it. In the cases I have there I had to first find the appropriate backing references before I could make something happen so it's not a trivial fix. Getting Makoto Matsumoto in there took me many hours because I know only a tourist's amount of Japanese.
I've also edited controversial articles (the Mannheim stabbing, one of the George Floyd incident related convicts) successfully.
Anyway that's my resume. Bring me the work you need done and once I've got a moment I'll see what I can do (no guarantees, I have a little baby to care for).
> One thing I should clarify is that Wikipedia's purpose is to aggregate the current general view on things. So even if you know something is true personally, you cannot put it in unless you can find a reliable place where someone has documented it. In the cases I have there I had to first find the appropriate backing references before I could make something happen so it's not a trivial fix.
This is where I would disagree, the model really doesn't work for politics and current events. In those topics Wikipedia may be better described as "The world according to a handful of (mostly US-based) news outlets". There's been a prolonged effort to deprecate sources, particularly those which lean to the right, so it's increasingly difficult to portray a neutral perspective reflecting multiple interpretations of the same topic. Instead excessive weight is given to what a majority of a select group of online sources say, and that's not necessarily trustworthy.
Most obviously it's a model which will fall flat when trying to document criticism of the press.
When you say you disagree, I assume you mean that you disagree that Wikipedia's approach is good. I don't think I was making that claim, however. I have no value position on Wikipedia's approach except that I appear to endorse it by participating. There are certainly true things that Wikipedia will not contain because they are insufficiently described in sources that Wikipedians find acceptable. But nonetheless that is Wikipedia's purpose: to find a list of sources that generally report fact, and to aggregate them.
Like any consensus-based thing it's pretty loose. It's unlikely that EN wikipedia had much of a position on the reliability of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, for instance.
As an example, when I resurrected the Makoto Matsumoto article, I mirrored it to my personal wiki[0] in case it is deleted from the original. Another loss I lament is that of Chinese Numbered Policies[1] which I think is a genuinely interesting list and a meaningful categorization that I will eventually re-create on my personal wiki.
I'm a Wikipedia inclusionist which means I want as many true things there as possible in a way that represents the truth as accurately as possible, but it's a collaborative effort and that means that sometimes I don't get what I want.
Any way, as you can see from my earlier experience, I seem to have a skill of getting facts into Wikipedia when others do not, and I have a personal desire to see them there as well. So if you want to list a couple of the examples you had trouble with I can see if I can help. I know you said "politics and current events", but hopefully there are non-emergent situations that you can describe because evolving situations require more attention than I'm able to apply at the moment. I will still try, though. As an example, the Salvadoran Gang Crackdown had some ridiculous language on it that I removed[3] that was clearly an attempt to insert a left-wing (as it is in the US) political slant.
To be clear, I have no affiliation with Wikipedia (beyond the fact that as an auto-confirmed user I have the user privilege to create articles without going through AfC). I just have a personal interest in fact recording[2].
I meant that I disagree that Wikipedia is really trying to give a general view of events. That might have been the original intention, but it's not what it's doing in practice.
It does all hinge on that important list of acceptable vs unacceptable sources. In the last few decades there's been an increasing trend for news outlets to take a political position and decline to report on stories which would damage that position, which becomes most obvious whenever the US holds an election.
I think the reality is that any group will develop certain norms for this. I have a personal interest in making sure that Wikipedia's norms don't diverge too far from fact, but even that is limited because I have other things in my life to do. I think it's probably the most accurate mainstream aggregator there is, which is valuable in its own sense, so if I can make it a little better with a little effort I will usually try. But I wouldn't say that this means it's anywhere near flawless.
Speaking of norms, the Hacker News community will flag and downvote any comments of mine that mention that our 10 month old did not receive the COVID-19 vaccine. I think that's clear evidence of some kind of political bias. But that's this community's norms. I don't care as much to convince them as I do to fix Wikipedia.
Anyway, I understand if your experience trying to correct Wikipedia might have been at a different time, so you may not recall right now, but if you ever recall, my email is in my profile. I collect a list of these things and when I have a spare moment I try to make some progress.
> When it comes to anything related to politics this problem is also exaggerated by editors selectively opposing changes based on whether they apply a desired slant to the text.
This is amplified by the fact that active editors socialize with each other heavily behind the scenes, and over a period of many years you end up with a core group that all desire to apply the same slant.
The trick these days is to calmly make your case on the talk page first for anything that might be even slightly controversial, before you attempt any editing. So if someone wants to "own" the article they have to engage on the same terms, or you can just point out the lack of opposition and make the edit yourself.
That's the thing though, expecting users to have a discussion over even minor changes is extremely off-putting for most potential editors.
I've also noticed that a few of these editors seem to be deliberately abrasive towards new users, perhaps with the hope that they'll break a rule by posting insults in frustration. The moment that happens those editors quickly run to the site administration and try to get said user banned. Wikipedia's policies are increasingly treated as a weapon to beat down dissent rather than a guide on how to contribute positively.
Utopian lionization that doesn't reflect reality or the bullshit. Unqualified people have the power to tell experts who were there that their contributions are insignificant, wrong, or that details don't matter. That's just stupid and pointless, and so less people contribute to hostile and idiotic half-assery.
I'll take curated information that is better and rigorous every time.
> Friendly reminder that we all have the power to improve this! Become an editor and If you come across a problematic article, you can make improvements, or even just flag it as needing work.
This works very well when there's a clear non-partisan issue with the text, like a logical inconsistency or the citation doesn't line up with the claim or the prose is just sloppy or unnatural.
If someone is trying to push biased sources, good luck.
The I-swear-it-isn't-a-cabal of highly-active editors knows policy better than you do, and they will continue to conveniently know policy better than you do no matter how much time you spend studying it. (And if you study it and then try to do your business anonymously, they will consider it suspicious that you know anything about policy and demand that you log in to your nonexistent long-standing account.) And that policy allows them to use highly biased sources because they are on they "reliable sources" list, except it isn't really a single list but rather some sources are restricted in applicability, unless it's one of them using it inappropriately. And the bias of those sources doesn't disqualify them as long as it's properly taken into consideration by whatever arcane rules, except this doesn't happen in practice and nobody will care if you point out them doing it, as long as it serves their purposes.
Meanwhile, the way sources get approved as reliable is generally that they agree with other reliable sources. Good luck trying to convince people that a source has become unreliable. You aren't going to be able to do it by pointing out things they've repeatedly objectively gotten wrong, for example. But they'll happily spend all day listing every article they can find that an ideologically opposed source has ever gotten wrong (according to them, no evidence necessary).
And it all leans in the same direction because the policy-makers all lean in the same direction. Because nobody who opposes them will survive in that social environment. There are entire web sites out there dedicated to cataloging absurd stuff they allowed their friends to get away with over years and years, just because of ideological agreement, where people who dispute a Wikipedia-established narrative on a politically charged topic will be summarily dismissed as trolls.
On top of that they will inject additional bias down to the level of individual word-choice level. They have layers and layers of policy surrounding, for example, when to use words like "killing", "murder", "assassination" and "genocide" (or "rioting" vs "unrest" vs "protest"); but if you compare article titles back and forth there is no consistency to it without the assumption of endemic political bias.
WP:NOTNEWS is, as far as I can tell, not a real policy at all, at least not if there's any possible way to use the news story to promote a narrative they like.
And if the article is about you, of course you aren't a reliable source. If the Wikipedians don't like you, and their preferred set of reliable sources don't like you, Wikipedia will just provide a positive feedback loop for everything mainstream media does to make you look bad. This will happen while they swear up and down that they are upholding WP:BLP.
I've been watching this stuff happen, and getting burned by it off and on, for years and years.
Man, I know what you are talking about through and through. Happens all the time on the political Right/Left pages, controversial authors of classical literature, WWII atrocities, and the list goes on. Scientific and Movie or Art articles are way better to discover interesting stuff.
The stalking, censorship, and unwillingness to contribute to topics deemed as "controversial" is unreal. People might not believe, but wikipedia truly is one hell of a cesspool.
Wikipedia is just too much bureaucracy for beginner editors nowadays. The whole baptism of fire that you need to undergo to be part of the oligarchy is just not worth the hassle.
this attitude is exactly why and how those "deranged redditor activists" (we're from the superior hacker news, of course, where there is no controversy or activists or differences in opinion) took and maintain control.
> That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the US,
Not really. The phenomenon exists in other languages Wikipedias. I think it is related to the fact that NGOs that "shape" political discourse and politicians have become "sensible" to the text in Wikipedia pages.
It is always good, when you read Wikipedia, to "follow the money", i.e. look at the sources, see if they make sense.
In the last 5 years, a lot of online platforms, HN also, are used by state actors to spread propaganda and Wikipedia is perfect for that because it presents itself as a "neutral" source.
There's a reason why historians tend to view anything more recent than 10-20 years ago as politics. If you don't want to get embroiled in political debates, stick to stuff old enough to be history. There's still politics there, but it's less raw.
Wikipedia doesn't restrict itself to topics that are older than ten years ago, so some of their material is necessarily going to be viewed as political.
e.g. Wikipedia has a stand-alone page on Elon Musk's Nazi salute[1].
{Edit: It's worth noting here that Wikipedia also maintains separate pages for things like Bill Clinton's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein[3].}
This particular page is very interesting because of the sheer amount of political blow-back it's caused for Wikipedia. If you're a Republican, this one page may be the biggest reason you might view Wikipedia as having become "ridiculously partisan". As a direct result of this page, and the refusal to remove or censor it, Musk is now taking aim at Wikipedia and calling for a boycott[2]. He also had his employees produce Grokipedia which, notably, does not include a page on his Nazi salute.
Musk may have had a public falling out with Trump, but he is still very much plugged into the Republican party. He's about to throw a lot of money at the mid-term elections. So, naturally, one hand washes the other and Wikipedia is on every good Republican's hit list. The kicker is that a lot of Republicans, who don't like Musk and think he's a Nazi/idiot, are going to feel a lot of Musk-instigated pressure from their own party to target Wikipedia.
This is the price Wikipedia pays for including recent events and refusing to bow to demands for censorship.
Is it radicalised to want even a basic premise of neutrality in an encyclopedia?
Despite not being particularly political, even I raise an eyebrow when an article opens with "____ is a <negative label>, <negative label>, <negative label> known for <controversial statement>"
> Is it radicalised to want even a basic premise of neutrality in an encyclopedia?
Facts are not neutral or "balanced".
And your whole phrasing smells of someone who doesn't want to be challenged with facts which are against you worldview, which is pretty much against the whole purpose of Wikipedia.
> Despite not being particularly political, even I raise an eyebrow when an article opens with "____ is a <negative label>, <negative label>, <negative label> known for <controversial statement>"
Without giving the actual example, there seems nothing wrong with this in general. Could be important, could be overrated. But at least I assume it's true, because wrong claims would be a valid problem.
I want an improvement upon "Encyclopedia Brittanica". If we have to have governments around the world fund a nonprofit educational equivalent of that, then I'm all for it but we can't keep depending upon a least-common denominator "central public knowledge repository" that's an improperly-managed, easily-manipulated, often incomplete and inaccurate mobacracy fed by largely unknown randos, enough of whom aren't doing so for honest purposes and too many are foolish/crazy/unreliable enough to curate and preserve worthwhile information consistently.
I've never seen an article like that, other than for people like Epstein, who are primarily famous for their crimes. I just went and checked the pages of some famous people where you might expect this kind of treatment if Wikipedia were indeed biased in the way people seem to think (like Donald Trump or Ted Cruz), and they're not like that.
There are a lot of comments in this thread talking about a strong bias in Wikipedia, but I don't see any examples. I have no doubt that there are some articles that are biased, particularly in less popular areas that get less attention, but overall, Wikipedia does a great job maintaining a neutral point of view in its articles.
I do get the impression that what people perceive as bias is often simply neutrality. If you think yourself the victim of an evil cabal of your political opponents, then a neutral description of the facts might seem like an attack.
To be honest I don't keep a list of examples, I usually raise an eyebrow and move on. It's typically on pages for smaller public figures where you get some extremely questionable descriptions.
It's also definitely a thing for contentious topics, a while back I tried to look up some info on the Gaza war and some of the pages were a complete battleground. I feel that there was a time when Wikipedia leaned away from using labels like "terrorist", but their modern policy seems to be that if you can find a bunch of news articles that say so then that's what the article should declare in Wikipedia's voice.
I mean... this is a very real phenomenon, but probably not in the way you're thinking of.
There are many simple statements of fact that, 15 or 20 years ago, were as universally uncontroversial as "the sky is blue", but today are considered radically controversial political opinions, and will get you banned for most online platforms if you dare utter them.
I always like to point people to Simple Wikipedia - https://simple.wikipedia.org/. You can also change the (lang).wikipedia.org URL to simple.wikipedia.org and a lot of the time you get a great, simple language explanation that's better for a quick overview of a topic than the regular page.
This is cute, but kind of an example of Wikipedia's off-mission bloat. It irks me that they constantly fundraise when most of it is not needed for Wikipedia proper, but rather used for initiatives people know less about and may not fund if they knew.
I don't begrudge them the odd party, anniversary, meetup.
And some of their subprojects are a great idea and could go much further -- it'd be fantastic to have a Wikipedia atlas, for example. The WikiMiniAtlas on geolocated articles is nice but it could be so much better.
But as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER it's a huge concern that they're blowing money pretty much at the rate they get it, when they should be saving it for the future, and be pickier and choosier about what they're funding at any given time.
That is a nice start, a rendering of GIS wikidata. Perhaps ask Wikimedia Foundation for funding :)
What I'd like to see is a more intimate marrying of OSM data and Wikipedia data. For example, if I go to zoom level 12 centred on London, UK on your page, there are about 80 text labels on the OSM layer itself. At minimum this is going to need OSM vector tiles. I'd expect to be able to click any of the OSM labels for the corresponding Wikipedia article, as well as adding in POIs for articles that don't have corresponding OSM links. And then you need OSM rendering style rules about which POIs you show at each zoom level, based on whether labels will run into each other or not.
The problem right now is that the WikiMiniAtlas treats all things, whether large areas or individual POIs, as POIs.
i feel like that's a bit silly, the other projects are listed on the donation page (https://donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/FAQ) and tbh you are unlikely to be donating to the wikimedia foundation without being aware of (at least some of?) the rest
I wonder whether the emergence of a single, true Wikipedia competitor would actually put an end to this never-ending fundraising criticism (since people could simply donate to the competitor as a form of protest)
Projects like Wikipedia never have meaningful competition, because the social dynamics invariably converge to a single platform eating everything else.
Wikipedia is already dead, they just don't know it yet. They'll get Stackoverflowed.
The LLMs have already guaranteed their zombie end. The HN crowd will be comically delusional about it right up to the point where Wikimedia struggles to keep the lights on and has to fire 90% of its staff. There is no scenario where that outcome is avoided (some prominent billionaire will step in with a check as they get really desperate, but it won't change anything fundamental, likely a Sergey Brin type figure).
The LLMs will do to Wikipedia, what Wikipedia & Co. did to the physical encyclopedia business.
You don't have to entirely wipe out Wikipedia's traffic base to collapse Wikimedia. They have no financial strength what-so-ever, they burn everything they intake. Their de facto collapse will be extremely rapid and is coming soon. Watch for the rumbles in 2026-2027.
Wikipedia is not even in the game you are describing here. Wikipedia does not need billions of users clicking on ads to convince investors in yet another seed. They are an encyclopedia, and if fewer people will visit, they will still be an encyclopedia. Their costs are probably very strongly correlated with their number of visitors.
This. I'm really bothered by the almost cruel glee with which a lot of people respond to SO's downfall. Yeah, the moderation was needlessly aggressive. But it was successful at creating a huge repository of text-based knowledge which benefited LLMs greatly. If SO is gone, where will this come from for future programming languages, libraries, and tools?
This always feels to me like, an elephant in the room.
I’d love to read a knowledgeable roundup of current thought on this. I have a hard time understanding how, with the web becoming a morass of SEO and AI slop - with really no effort being put into to keeping it accurate - we’ll be able to train LLMs to the level we do today in the future.
You talk about news here like it's some irrefutable ether LLMs can tap into. Also I'd think newspapers and scientific papers cover extremely little of what the average person uses an LLM to search for.
Slightly off topic, but now that long context machine translation is roughly on-par with humans: are there any official efforts from Wikipedia, to translate the "best" or "most complete" language version of each article to all other languages? I'd imagine that the effort of getting all languages up to the same standards are just an impossible one and people from "lower-resource" languages would benefit a lot.
Not quite, the official in-development project wrt. this area is Abstract Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia which plans to develop a human-editable structural interlanguage for encyclopedic content that can then be automatically "rendered" to existing natural languages, as opposed to just starting from an existing "best or most complete" natural-language text.
This avoids the unreliability of existing "neural/ML" approaches, replacing them with something that might see contributions from bots as part of developing the support for specific content or languages (similar to what happens with Wikidata today) but can always be comprehensively understood by humans if need be.
At least using Irish as an example, the state of machine translation is still far far behind proper translation unfortunately and wouldn't be up to scratch
I think it's optimal for this to be done at read-time rather than write-time. En Wikipedia is the most comprehensive but there are many articles in language Wikipedias that are far more complete. Rather than attempting to keep these branches of knowledge in sync, it is probably better to have some mechanism to pull them all together when someone wants to read a synthesis.
You're not the first to have the idea. For languages that are only sparsely represented in the LLMs' training data, this has actually done a lot of damage. The LLMs spew out a bunch of hallucinations, and there aren't enough qualified human editors to review it, so the human record of that language itself becomes tainted.
In the last 2 years, Wikipdia's quality declined. For me this was evident when they suddenly changed the UI. The new UI is more annoying. Perhaps it is nicer for Average Joe people, but for powerusers it is just annoying to use now. But this is not the only problem: many articles have a low quality, or they are so complicated that Average Joe doesn't understand them, which is ironic considering the UI was most likely changed to appease Average Joe.
I am also displeased with the constant pop-up or slide-in widgets. This is a general curse for browsers that ublock origin prevented. I hate this. My browser should not allow for any such slide-in banner. I am never interested in anything written there - usually it is a "gimme more money", but even if it is not, I simply don't CARE what is written on it. Even python used this, on their homepage, where they are even so cheeky that you can not fully disable this thing, unless you block it with ublock origin.
I feel that too many websites fail the user now. Wikipedia does too. The intrinsic quality is still better than the AI slop spam that Google amplified world wide, while also ruining Google search, but the quality used to be better in the past, on Wikipedia.
> For me this was evident when they suddenly changed the UI. The new UI is more annoying.
In case you are unaware, if you're logged in, you can go into the user preferences and change the Appearance to one of the older themes, such as Vector Legacy (2010).
This. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, while some of the content needs to be updated periodically, it also has A LOT of content that will stay relevant pretty much forever.
If you do not know of a single Wikipedia article that you judge to be politically biased, then that says more about you and your gullibility than it does about me.
The point is not that Wikipedia is completely unbiased. That's an obvious impossibility - for any encyclopedia.
The point is that accusations of "noticeable bias on any topic that has political implications" is the kind of accusation made by someone simply trying to sow distrust in information, writ large. It's increasingly common.
Aside from AI, Wikipedia’s greatest upcoming challenge will be censorship as Western governments start to adopt various traits of Eastern dictatorships.
For all of its ubiquity, Wikipedia is a single fragile organization in an increasingly unstable political landscape.
I hope that efforts are being made to make sure that its content is not only being archived in many places, but also that the know-how to reboot Wikipedia's hosting from its dumps (software, infrastructure deployment and all) is being actively preserved by people independent of the organization.
Which includes a section about Wikipedia in the age of AI: New partnerships with tech companies support Wikipedia’s sustainability
> several companies — including Ecosia, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Pleias, and ProRata — became new Wikimedia Enterprise partners, joining existing partners such as Amazon, Google, and Meta.
It's really remarkable how, every single time Wikipedia comes up on HN, there's a bunch of comments about bias and such... and yet never a single example is ever linked.
Surely people don't think sources such as Mother Jones are more 'reliable' than The New York Post, Fox News, or The Heritage Foundation? Not a coincidence there.
Having such obvious biases does nothing but damage the Wikipedia brand, and at this point has me anticipating Ai replacements.
This is the comment on the Mother Jones entry:
"There is consensus that Mother Jones is generally reliable. Almost all editors consider Mother Jones a biased source, so its statements (particularly on political topics) may need to be attributed. Consider whether content from this publication constitutes due weight before citing it in an article."
They acknowledge it is a biased source and they make a distinction between reliability and bias. Not familiar with the publication.
To elaborate slightly, note that "reliable" is sort of Wikipedia jargon. When it applies to a news organization, it means that statements of fact are likely to be correct... or at least, not intentionally incorrect, because errors do happen. So a source can be reliable and biased at the same time, which means that if it says a thing happened you can largely trust that it really did happen... but any interpretation of that might be slanted, and so shouldn't be trusted.
The New York Post isn't "reliable" because it's a tabloid that doesn't care overmuch about fact-checking what it publishes (and, worse, has a history of just making stuff up sometimes). So the Wikipedia position is that you can't trust a citation to the NY Post without finding something else to corroborate it -- at which point you might as well just cite the corroborating reliable source instead.
Whereas Mother Jones will absolutely mostly publish articles which say good things about progressives and bad things about conservatives, but those things will all be true. Their bias comes in the form of selectively presenting these things -- they're unlikely to bother posting a "Ted Cruz just did a good thing" article -- and in their color commentary / opinion pieces, not in the form of just making things up.
> Surely people don't think sources such as Mother Jones are more 'reliable' than The New York Post, Fox News, or The Heritage Foundation?
That seems based on a premise that I don't grasp. Why is Mother Jones more or less reliable than those sources? Are those sources reliable in your opinion?
My impression is that you have a strong opinion and are assuming everyone shares it.
It's remarkable that Grokipedia has challenged Wikipedia so thoroughly, at only 80 days old with 25 years of Wikipedia.
You'd think a Wikipedia style encyclopedia, with high quality AI, allowing for transparent and responsive editing, versioning, verification, and validation of the entries would be cheered on by the HN crowd.
If Anthropic had released a Claudipedia, 99% of the people booing Grok would be swooning over it.
Wikipedia's failure modes, the persistent editorial and corporate bias and intellectual dishonesty, and the presence of demonstrably better tools will mean Wikipedia goes extinct, eventually. I don't think it makes it to 50 years as a meaningful participant in the world.
What does "challenged Wikipedia so thoroughly" mean?
(My impression is that Grokipedia was announced, everyone looked it and laughed because it was so obviously basically taking content from Wikipedia and making it worse, and since then it's largely been forgotten. But I haven't followed it closely and maybe that's all wrong.)
> the persistent editorial and corporate bias and intellectual dishonesty
Musk is explicitly partisan and has repeatedly manipulated Grok's output to suit his agenda. How could you possibly consider Grok a worthwhile alternative if you take issue with intellectual dishonesty and corporate bias?
Has it? I think to challenge you have to show some comparable usage numbers. Its certainly an impressive technical feat to have this AI-based wiki project, but does anyone actually use it?
I mean that genuinely. I don't know any usage numbers for Grok. Is it even 1% of Wiki? Is it 50%? Is it more?
It's consistently better in content quality, for everything that I've used it for. I've seen conversations complaining about it that effectively reek of either anti-Musk or anti-AI bias, and when I dig in, I haven't found any legitimate bad information or arbitrary bias in the articles themselves.
It's not yet as comprehensive, with ~6 million articles compared to Wikipedia's ~7 million, and the UI isn't as good, with a lot of polish and convenience and fun features in Wikipedia that are noticeably absent.
It's qualitatively better in significant ways, and when you compare and contrast articles for which there's a difference, you start to get a feel for the ways in which Wikipedia has failed.
Being anti-Musk is a shibboleth and article of faith for a lot of people, so they can't engage with anything he's involved in on an objective level. Grokipedia isn't used by as many people for that and other reasons. From the last couple months of using it, I've found it to be an objectively better tool.
I've gone in and made corrections in places I have knowledge of, and the process and transparency of those types of edits are awesome. It just works, no drama, no dealing with digital tinpot tyrants, and if there's evidence you're wrong about a thing, the bot will actually counter your suggestion and stick to its parameters and standards.
It's not perfect by any means, but it's a damn sight better than Wikipedia.
In the 2000s, in the tech world, the open source successes that were being talked about was always Apache and Linux.
When Wikipedia started gaining a bit of traction, everyone made fun of it. It was the butt of jokes in all the prime time comedy shows. And I always felt like telling the critics - "Don't you see what is happening? People all over the world are adding their own bits of knowledge and creating this huge thing way beyond what we've seen till now. It's cooperation on an international scale! By regular people! This is what the internet is all about. People, by the thousands, are contributing without asking for anything else in return. This is incredible! "
A few years later, Encyclopedia Britannica, stopped their print edition. A few years after that I read that Wikipedia had surpassed even that.
The amount of value Wikipedia brings to the world is incalculable.
And I'm very fortunate to be alive at a time where I can witness something at this scale. Something that transcends borders and boundaries. Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion. Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world.
Thank you, Wikipedia.
If I want to look something up, I always check out wikipedia first. Its not always accurate, but its invariably a lot more accurate on most topics than random information across the web. Its also pretty easy to spot bad quality wiki articles once you get the gist of the site
Its amazing that wikipedia exists - there've been multiple hardcore attempts to kill it over the years for profit, but its still managing to go
Wikipedia is often the last on my goto resources to consult. The information is huge, but writing quality or style often irks me more than I can stand. I I always check Britannica first. If it's not there, then I move on.
Does this relate to a particular domain or field? I find it so good, and on the rare occasion I’ve found something wrong, I’ve fixed it.
> Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion
Religion maybe, and Wikipedia is indeed pretty awesome for many topics, but politics is THE bad example here.
Much of the political - especially geopolitical - content on Wikipedia has a tremendous atlanticist bias.
Is there another public source for encyclopedia-type articles that is better for geopolitical content? For example, if I have a philosophy question I'll often consult the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy instead of Wikipedia.
If there isn't a more neutral public source -- if there are only sources with different biases, or if the better sources are behind paywalls -- then I think that Wikipedia is still doing pretty well even for contentious geopolitical topics.
Usually disputes are visible on the Talk page, regardless of whatever viewpoint may prevail in the main article. It can also be useful to jump back to years-old versions of articles, if there are recent world events that put the subject of the article in the news.
Apart from Wikipedia, speaking more generally, I think that articles with a strong editorial bias still provide useful information to an alert reader. I can read articles from Mother Jones, Newsmax, Russia Today, the BBC, Times of India, etc. and find different political and/or geopolitical slants to what is written about and how it is reported. I can also learn a lot even when I strongly disagree with the narrative thrust of what is reported. The key thing is to take any particular article or publication as only circumstantial evidence for an underlying reality, and to avoid falling into complacency even when (or especially when) the information you're reading aligns with what you already believe to be true.
Wikipedia is surely a formidable source of knowledge, but
> Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion.
You are romanticizing.
Wikipedia is a corporation, just like Work or University, and I personally assume anything corporate is being manipulated by the owners or the ruling oligarchy because they are structurally unreliable. This is especially veritable for Wikipedia. Create an account there and try to go deeper into the articles about politics, literature and war.
The remote viewing article keeps being reverted as pseudoscientific when original research conducted by the CIA is cited. Such citations are removed swiftly. Any changes are denied or rolled back.
The rationale is that, even though the documents themselves are a primary source from an organization that poured significant resources into researching the phenomenon of remote viewing, the individual posting the declassified document isn't an authority on the subject.
Apparently if youre not a doctor, you can't read primary sources?
Many such cases.
Wikipedia is absolutely a powerful resource, but it it's clearly controlled by moderators with a bias, and there's no incentive to challenge said bias or consider alternative worldviews.
I haven’t looked at the article in question, but is there enough material to make an article specifically about the CIA research programs?
> Wikipedia is a corporation
nitpick: WMF (the org that develops and hosts Wikipedia and its related services like Wikimedia Commons) is a non-profit foundation, not the classic type of profit-driven corporation that your post implies.
> Wikipedia is a corporation, and I personally assume anything corporate is being manipulated by the owners or the ruling oligarchy because they are structurally unreliable.
Many articles are fine. I don't think you can equate this to all of Wikipedia automatically.
https://wikipedia25.org/en/the-first-day
> Founder Jimbo Wales on a challenge overcome
Aren't you forgetting someone, Jimmy? Your co-founder Larry Sanger, perhaps?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger
Let's check one of the citations from the History of Wikipedia page: https://www.mid-day.com/lifestyle/health-and-fitness/article...
> It was Larry Sanger who chanced upon the critical concept of combining the three fundamental elements of Wikipedia, namely an encyclopedia, a wiki, and essentially unrestricted editorial access to the public during a dinner meeting with an old friend Ben Kovitz in January 2, 2001. Kovitz a computer programmer and introduced Sanger to Ward Cunningham's wiki, a web application which allows collaborative modification, extension or deletion of its content and structure. The name wiki has been derived from the Hawaiian term which meant quick. Sanger feeling that the wiki software would facilitate a good platform for an online encyclopedia web portal, proposed the concept to Wales to be applied to Nupedia. Wales intially skeptic about the idea decided to give it a try later.
> The credit for coining the term Wikipedia goes to Larry Sanger. He initially conceived the concept of a wiki-based encyclopedia project only as a means to accelerate Nupedia's slow growth. Larry Sanger served as the "chief organiser" of Wikipedia during its critical first year of growth and created and enforced many of the policies and strategy that made Wikipedia possible during its first formative year. Wikipedia turned out to contain 15,000 articles and upwards to 350 Wikipedians contributing on several topics by the end of 2001.
He may not be with the project now, but don't airbrush him out of history.
It's a very touchy subject for Wales. It caused him to walk out of an interview after 48 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uswRbWyt_pg
Without context, it looks like the interviewer was a jerk and ambushed him.
I've seen plenty of stalling like that on major news programs, and the interviewer always knows to move on (and possibly edit something in to provide context.)
---
That being said, "who started what" and "who had what idea" are silly topics to obsesses about. It always come down to who put the long-term work in. I think Wales was "in the right" to walk off; or at least say something like "I can't tell the story accurately, so please move on to a different question."
The interview started with the most mundane question "Who are you?", and the very first sentence of Wales is either a lie or misleading. The journalists asks for clarification (thats a journalists job, btw), and in his second sentence of the interview Wales insults the journalist. I'm pretty sure who is the jerk here.
It also was Wales who bought up the topic, not the journalist. If he considers it a stupid topic he does not want to talk about, why is it the very first thing he talks about?
>It always come down to who put the long-term work in.
Exactly. Kudo to the wikimedia community!
Oh. Wow. I had no idea Jimmy Wales was like that. Enlightening.
looks like interviewer asks question not in a good faith
It is a fair question, IMO. His reaction was childish.
There's context. Hank Green talked about it in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zi0ogvPfCA, but in short, paraphrasing, and adding my own thoughts:
Jimmy Wales has been poked at with the question of whether he should call himself a founder or specifically co-founder for a long time, by right-wingers who think Wikipedia is too woke, and want to irritate and discredit him as much as possible, and instead raise up his co-founder Larry Sanger. Sanger has right-wing views and a habit of accusing any article as biased that doesn't praise Trump and fundamentalist Christian values, and takes these as proof that Wikipedia has a left lean.
The interview Wales walked out of was for his book tour. I imagine it's the umpteenth interview that week with the same question asked for the same transparently bad-faith reasons, trying to bend the interview away from his book and into right-wing conspiracy theory land.
Ok, but Tilo Jung is the absolute opposite of right wing
Wikipedia is literally a spin-off of a porn company.
From that point on, where it came from or who founded it is not so important. The question is how it acts today.
It is a highly-political organization supporting lot of “progressive” ideas, California-style. So if you like reading politically biased media it may be for you.
If you are seeking for a global view you better ask different LLMs for arguments and counter-arguments on a subject.
EDIT: a couple downvotes denying the influence of specific “Wikipedia ideology” and politics.
Take a chance to edit articles and you will see how tedious it is.
There is also a lot of legal censorship. Celebrities putting pressure on removing info, or lobbies, or say things that are illegal or very frowned upon (for example questioning homosexuality, or the impact of certain wars).
Sometime it is legality, ideology, politics, funding, pressure, etc.
This is why you need to use different sources.
It is tedious because you must edit with facts, not ideology.
But we now live in a world where people agree that ideology should be able to change facts.
> or the impact of certain wars
Exactly, like China wanting to completely censor anything regarding the Tiananmen Square protests.
> for example questioning homosexuality
I don't know what you have to question about this.
>If you are seeking for a global view you better ask different LLMs for arguments and counter-arguments on a subject.
All the LLM I've tested have a strong tendency to increase your echo chamber and not try to change your opinion on something.
>This is why you need to use different sources.
Only if deep down, you're ready to change your POV on something, otherwise you're just wasting time and ragebaiting yourself. Although I admit, it can still be entertaining to read some news to discover how they're able to twist reality.
For the last part I agree with you, the LLMs tend to say what you like to hear. The echo chamber problem also exists, pushing them to say pros and cons is not perfect, but helps to make an opinion (and also "unaligned" models).
Facts are very skewed by the environment: in the case you push too much in one direction that is too controversial or because the politicians disagree too much with you; there can be plenty of negative consequences:
- your website gets blocked, or you get publicly under pressure, or you lose donations, you lose grants, your payment providers blocks you, you lose audience, you can get a fine, you can go to jail, etc.
Many different options.
There is asymmetry here:
Sources are naturally going to be curated to support your view. At the end, the path of least resistance is to go with the flow.The tricky part: there are also truths that cannot be sourced properly, but are still facts (ex: famous SV men still offering founders today investment against sex). Add on top of that, legal concerns, and it becomes a very difficult environment to navigate.
> It's always doable to find or fabricate facts, and the truth wins based on the amount of energy, power and money that the person has.
You appear to be using unusual definitions of "fact" and "truth", more akin to "assertions" and "vibe". I'll stick with the traditional definitions.
> It is tedious because you must edit with facts, not ideology.
Not just because you must edit with facts. If your opposition outnumbers you and/or they have more energy to spend than you, they can grind you down with bad-faith arguments and questions for clarification.
The way this goes is that they edit an article to insert their POV. You edit/revert it. They open a talk page discussion about the subject. Suppose their edit is "marine animals are generally considered cute throughout the world" with a reference to a paper by an organization in favor of seals. You revert it by saying this is NPOV. They open a talk page question asking where the organization has been declared to be partisan. Suppose you do research and find some such third-party statement that "the Foundation for Animal Aesthetics is organized by proponents of marine animals". Then they ask how this third party is accurate, or whether "organized by proponents" necessarily implies that they're biased.
This can go on more or less forever until someone gives up. The attack even has a name on Wikipedia itself: "civil POV pushing". It works because few Wikipedia admins are subject matter experts, so they police behavior (conduct) more than they police subject accuracy.
Civil POV pushers can thus keep their surface conduct unobjectionable while waiting for the one they are actioning against to either give up or to get angry enough to make a heated moment's conduct violation. It's essentially the wiki version of sealioning.
In short, a thousand "but is really two plus two equal to four?" will overcome a single "You bastard, it is four and you're deliberately trolling me", because the latter is a personal insult.
> This is why you need to use different sources.
This knife cuts both ways.
generally, when one makes a claim, one should be willing to provide some concrete evidence or proof to support that claim. Saying "see how tedious it is, bro" is not concrete proof, it's vague and it could have many different explanations.
Not that I expect much from folks who edits their comment to cry about fake internet point
Yes LLMs that don't disclose sources are much better.
The LLMs I use all supply references.
Indeed! Sometimes even more than actually exist!
I don't think LLMs can be faulted on their enthusiasm for supplying references.
Yup, there's a wonderful, presumably LLM generated, response to somebody explaining how trademark law actually works, the LLM response insists that explanation was all wrong and cites several US law cases. Most of the cases don't exist, the rest aren't about trademark law or anywhere close. But the LLM isn't supposed to say truths, it's a stochastic parrot, it makes what looks most plausible as a response. "Five" is a pretty plausible response to "What is two plus three?" but that's not because it added 2 + 3 = 5
"Five" is not merely "plausible". It is the uniquely correct answer, and it is what the model produces because the training corpus overwhelmingly associates "2 + 3" with "5" in truthful contexts.
And the stochastic parrot framing has a real problem here: if the mechanism reliably produces correct outputs for a class of problems, dismissing it as "just plausibility" rather than computation becomes a philosophical stance rather than a technical critique. The model learned patterns that encode the mathematical relationship. Whether you call that "understanding" or "statistical correlation" is a definitional argument, not an empirical one.
The legal citation example sounds about right. It is a genuine failure mode. But arithmetic is precisely where LLMs tend to succeed (at small scales) because there is no ambiguity in the training signal.
LLMs have their issues too.
In everyday life, you cannot read 20 books about a topic about everything you are curious about, but you can ask 5 subject-experts (“the LLMs”) in 20 seconds
some of them who are going to check on some news websites (most are also biased)
Then you can ask for summaries of pros and cons, and make your own opinions.
Are they hallucinating ? Could be. Are they lying ? Could be. Have they been trained on what their masters said to say ? Could be.
But multiplying the amount of LLMs reduce the risk.
For example, if you ask DeepSeek, Gemini, Grok, Claude, GLM-4.7 or some models that have no guardrails, what they think about XXX, then perhaps there are interesting insights.
This may shock you, but wikipedia provides multiple sources, it even links to them. Where do you think the LLMs are getting their data from?
To further this, articles also have an edit history and talk page. Even if one disagrees with consensus building or suspects foul play and they're really trying to get to the bottom of something, all the info is there on Wikipedia!
If one just wants a friendly black box to tell them something they want to hear, AI is known to do that.
LLMs disclose sources now.
Right. Try clicking those sources, half the time there is zero relation to the sentence. LLMs just output what they want to say, and then sprinkle in what the web search found on random sentences.
And not just bottom of the barrel LLMs. Ask Claude about Intel PIN tools, it will merrily tell you that it "Has thread-safe APIs but performance issues were noted with multi-threaded tools like ThreadSanitizer" and then cite the Disney Pins blog and the DropoutStore "2025 Pin of the Month Bundle" as an inline source.
Enamel pins. That's the level of trust you should have when LLMs pretend to be citing a source.
IMO Wales has been sitting on that chair for too long. He should retire.
It would also be better for Wikipedia to not have any "public face". I don't want fake-heroes; I want accurate, objective content.
Pffft hahaha. Looks like interviewer was inexperienced AND hit a touchy subject. It's like trying to have a casual conversation about dating with someone who's secretly gay.
Wow, thanks for the video actually. For a long time I felt he was complete jerk but I felt it was maybe biased propaganda. The mere fact he couldn't answer a basic question and explain for all those who don't know, but rather stormed out like a 4 year old child, only proves what I felt about him prior.
I'd say his lack of acknowledgment of Larry Sanger is actually quite useful, as it is a perfect and irrefutable example that Wikipedia has no qualms with omitting information and twisting the truth to serve a narrative.
Wikimedia, maybe, but Wikipedia itself acknowledges it in the lead paragraph:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
> Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales
> Most notably, he co-founded Wikipedia
Wikipedia shows integrity even when its co-founder does not:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales#Co-founder_status_...
> In late 2005, Wales edited his biographical entry on the English Wikipedia. Writer Rogers Cadenhead drew attention to logs showing that in his edits to the page, Wales had removed references to Sanger as the co-founder of Wikipedia.[53][54] Sanger commented that "having seen edits like this, it does seem that Jimmy is attempting to rewrite history. But this is a futile process because, in our brave new world of transparent activity and maximum communication, the truth will out."[20][55] Wales was also observed to have modified references to Bomis in a way that was characterized as downplaying the sexual nature of some of his former company's products.[16][20] Though Wales argued that his modifications were solely intended to improve the accuracy of the content,[20] he apologized for editing his biography, a practice generally discouraged on Wikipedia.[20][55]
>He may not be with the project now, but don't airbrush him out of history.
I don't want to defend Jimbo Wales (he's very touchy about the subject), but to be honest, even if he's a founder, Larry Sanger didn't contribute much to what Wikipedia today is.
Wikipedia itself says Larry Sanger "co-founded" Wikipedia, but I don't quite understand why. If you get into the details, he was Wales' employee at the time, and made initial version of Wikipedia while being paid as such. So I'm tentatively with Wales on that ATM.
Employing someone doesn't let you pass off their achievements as your own.
If Wales had anyone else, or had gone it alone, it's unlikely Wikipedia would be what it is today.
> Employing someone doesn't let you pass off their achievements as your own.
Doesn't it? That's basically how tech companies work. You can tell he's written an initial version of Wikipedia, but founder is emphatically not an employee.
That's not how fame and credit for some novel thing is shared. The minds of two people were vital to its success, and we don't fold that into one because of business structure.
Please tell the founders of various companies I've developed novel things for that my name should be at the top with theirs :p
Larry Sanger is weird. He "founded Wikipedia" but hasn't actually been involved with it for decades.
"Right-Wing Perspectives" are not artificially suppressed to conform to a shadow-government's agenda, they are naturally suppressed because they tend not to align with logical interpretation of facts.
Clearly there's no love lost between the two co-founders, but if either of them had been missing, Wikipedia wouldn't be what it is today.
Larry may have left the project, but sticks his oar in frequently, see for example the Nine Theses he posted to Wikipedia last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Nine_Theses
Neither Larry nor Jimbo "are" Wikipedia. Wikipedia's editors are Wikipedia, and if they collectively agree with any of Larry's policy ideas, they'll adopt them in time.
I used to glibly agree with what you said, because back in the early 2000s it was primarily the right-wing nutters being fed a diet of Fox News bullshit that were deranged from reality... "reality has a liberal bias", right? Remember the crackpot Conservapedia? But these days I find plenty of equal opportunity derangement from terrible news sources chasing clicks, promoting FOMO, anxiety and keeping their readers/viewers addicted. No political flavour of bullshit belongs on Wikipedia.
His nine theses are basically a how-to guide for replacing democratic consensus with culture war bullshit. He clearly wants to bend the process to match his perception of the world rather than update his understanding of the world to match the facts.
The process Wikipedia uses to produce articles that present facts with without editorializing has clearly worked fairly well. Obviously we have a more difficult time reaching consensus on contentious topics but in general the system works quite well.
I do believe that Wikipedia is one of the least biased sources out there, but there is definitely bias. Here is a concrete example. Compare the introduction paragraph of the English circumcision article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision) with the German one (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zirkumzision).
The English intro talks a lot about medical advantages of the procedure: "reduced rates of sexually transmitted infections and urinary tract infections. This includes reducing the incidence of cancer-causing forms of human papillomavirus (HPV) and reducing HIV transmission among heterosexual men in high-risk populations by up to 60%; ... Neonatal circumcision decreases the risk of penile cancer.[14] ... Some medical organizations take the position that it carries prophylactic health benefits that outweigh the risks," and has one sentence of it being controversial worldwide "others hold that its medical benefits are not sufficient to justify it."
The German one has not a single sentence in the intro about advantages, but a whole paragraph on how it's controversial. "Die Zirkumzision als Routineeingriff ist besonders bei Minderjährigen umstritten, ... Von vielen Kinderschutzverbänden und einem Teil der Ärzteorganisationen wird die nicht medizinisch begründete Beschneidung abgelehnt, da sie den Körper irreversibel verändere und bei nicht einwilligungsfähigen Jungen nicht im Einklang mit Gesundheitsschutz und Kindeswohl stehe.[6] Im angelsächsischen Bereich gibt es schon länger eine gesellschaftliche Debatte zwischen Gruppen von Gegnern der Beschneidung („Intaktivisten“-Bewegung) und Befürwortern. Umstritten sind insbesondere medizinischer Nutzen und Risiken, bei Kindern auch ethische und rechtliche Aspekte sowie die Beurteilung im Hinblick auf die Menschenrechte, vor allem das Recht auf körperliche Unversehrtheit."
I'm not sure who's right, but it's hard to not see some bias here.
I love Wikipedia and think it's one of the greatest resources on the Internet, but there's absolutely a lot of bias in Wikipedia. Even within the same language, I think a lot of it has to do with how many people have or are contributing to a page, whether there's a recent event affecting it, how polarizing or political the subject, etc. But it's not hard to find examples of straight up opinions or very incomplete narratives.
I've also noticed huge differences between two different language versions of the same articles. (English/Spanish specifically). Sometimes they even feel independently written.
Of course, we should all do our part to improve these things when we spot them, if we're able.
It's impossible to write completely neutrally. Editorial decisions like what information to include or exclude, what sources to cite, what order to present information in, what illustrations to use cannot be avoided and inherently present some kind of narrative.
It also shows that it isn't perfectly organized, that it isn't an ideal model for knowledge aggregation. If it's ideal for it to be globally consistent, then it doesn't have that. If it's ideal for it to be adapted to different cultures, then it doesn't have that either, because the divisions are based only on language. However, Wikipedia it is really an amazing place, and it should continue to be preserved and improved.
Wikipedia is and continues to be the best thing that happened to the internet. A shining example of an open platform that works.
Except for their unnecessarily incessant fund raising.
There’s zero reason it should happen that often, and that intrusively.
On Twitter/X "for you" feed, I'm frequently served posts by handles that are openly hostile toward Wikipedia. The most often cited reason is excessive fundraising / bloat (previously it was bias). But in my opinion, whatever bloat the Wikipedia organization suffers from, it is still a better alternative than all the other ad/engagement driven platforms.
For a top-10 Internet website it's not "bloated" at all, if anything it's still running on a shoestring budget. And the fundraising ends up supporting a huge variety of technical improvements and less known "sister" projects that are instrumental in letting the community thrive and be relevant for the foreseeable future. Sure, you could keep the existing content online for a lot less than what they're asking for, but that's not what folks are looking for when they visit the site. Keeping a thriving community going takes a whole lot of effort especially in this day and age, where a vast majority of people just use the Internet for 100% casual entertainment, not productive activity.
It's a weird thing to hate on Wikipedia for since in general it's one of the cleaner sites I visit. The absolute garbage of the Fandom wikis shows just how bad it could be.
For your own sake, get out of Xitter.
There's a reason why nonprofits have fundraising events throughout the year instead once. Keep engagement going with donors is important.
Except for their unnecessarily incessant fund raising. [citation needed]
Fixed.
By now they should be sitting on a billion dollars that safely yields a forever self-funding annual income ($30m-$50m) that would pay for all of their necessary expenses. They would no longer require any donations. It's grotesque and wildly irresponsible how they're managing the organization. If LLMs become the center of knowledge resources going forward (which they will), Wikipedia's funding will decline as their traffic declines, and they'll collapse into a spiral of cut-backs, as they operate on a present structure that burns most of its financial capability annually (this opens them up to a shock to the system on inflection, which is happening now).
LLM's can't just be "the center of knowledge" on their own, they need to learn and be trained if they are to be useful. A whole lot of LLM knowledge comes from Wikipedia to begin with.
You go ahead an tell users that.
Tailwind docs are also the source of, duh, docs. People browse them way less and as a result Tailwind gets way less funding.
The problem is that Wikipedia should be set for life at this point, and they insist on rejecting that notion. There may be a future in which Wikipedia closes, and if that comes to pass it will due to wanton disregard for people's goodwill.
statements on wikipedia are summarized from sources, LLMs once trained on wikipedia to summarize, can then summarize on their own from the source material, and probably with less bias
I have been a fan of Wikipedia since I first learned about it, about six months after it launched. What a concept! Anyone can edit, citations are required, revisions are kept indefinitely. That's a recipe for building a clearinghouse of human knowledge with the power of iteration.
But I am also a non-fiction researcher/writer, and I experience some problems caused by Wikipedia:
1) I like to dig deep into historical stories--newspapers, archives, court records, FOIA requests--and I try to produce high quality, well-sourced articles about historic events. Inevitably, someone updates the Wikipedia article(s) to include new information I have surfaced, which exiles my article to the digital dustbin in favor of Wikipedia. Occasionally the Wikipedia editors cite my article in their updates, but much more often they just cite the sources that I cited, and skip over my contribution. It can be painful for my hard work to become irrelevant so rapidly.
2) Multiple of my writings have been plagiarized on Wikipedia by careless editors over the years, and I have been subsequently accused of plagiarizing from Wikipedia. That is unpleasant.
For a recent example, in 2006 I wrote an article about Doble Steam Cars[1]. A few months ago I had reason to visit the Doble steam car Wikipedia entry[2], and as I was reading, I realized that a large portion of the text was an uncanny, nearly verbatim copy of my article. I looked at the revision history, and found that a wiki editor had copied my text to revamp the article just a few months after I wrote mine in 2006. I visited /r/wikipedia and asked how to best handle this, and the Wikipedia editors there determined that it was indeed a violation, and they decided to revdelete almost 20 years of edits to purge the violation. It was quite something to behold.
To be clear, I am not happy that the huge revdelete resulted in so many lost subsequent good faith edits. But it's impressive that it was possible to roll it back so quickly and cleanly.
[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/the-last-great-steam-car/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doble_steam_car
I can't be the only one who feels that Wikipedia's quality has really started to go downhill over the past 5 or so years. I've noticed more and more articles which read as ridiculously partisan, usually around subjects with any link to politics or current events.
That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the US, but I get the impression that the sites neutrality policies have gradually been chipped away by introducing concepts like "false balance" as an excuse to pick a side on an issue. I could easily see that causing the site to slowly decline like StackOverflow did, most people don't want to deal with agenda pushing.
Fortunately articles related to topics like science and history haven't been significantly damaged by this yet. Something to watch carefully.
There is pretty much no way this was ever not going to happen, given Wikipedia's position and structure. It is a massive repository of knowledge, that is consulted by millions if not billions of people around the world on a regular basis, that is (in theory) editable by anyone and that has articles on just about every conceivable topic, including many politically charged ones. There must be immense pressure to use it to propagate all kinds of narratives. Given all of that, I think it does as good a job as can be expected of remaining objective, but absolutely you need to be careful when reading articles on politically charged topics (which is true of all media).
Wikipedia was always insufficiently neutral about political or social topics. At a bare minimum, you need to check whether there are any highlighted controversies in the article talk page.
Do you have suggestion of better repository of knowledge gathering, which achieve better level of neutrality than Wikipedia on every matter it covers, or throw right into your face that the article doesn’t meet consensual neutral POV?
Wikipedia itself knows how much shit it's in. Every ongoing conflict and culture-war issue is a "contentious topic", which is Wikipedia code for "editors are at each others' throats"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contentious_topics#L...
They have a giant pile of editors banned from topics until they can play nice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editing_restrictions...
But you do give a great tip: at minimum, check the talk page. If it's longer than the article itself, run away.
Some articles are so far gone, even the talk page is locked down like Fort Knox. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide
That page even has an FAQ!
> Q1: Why does this article state that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, even though this is heavily contested and neither the ICJ nor the ICC have issued a final judgment?
> A1: A September 2025 request for comment (RfC) decided to state, in Wikipedia's own voice, that it is a genocide. The current lead is the result of later discussion on the specific wording.
> I can't be the only one who feels that Wikipedia's quality has really started to go downhill over the past 5 or so years. I've noticed more and more articles which read as ridiculously partisan, usually around subjects with any link to politics or current events.
I would say this started over a decade ago. Otherwise I completely agree.
Oh dear, you need to learn about the GamerGate incident which started August 2012. All the extreme division and online manipulation through the collaborative creation of false narratives started right there, with that issue, before contaminating the entire political landscape.
It's the Eternal September of our generation, and it's not recognised enough as such. Before that, the internet was a different place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate
That was 2014, not 2012; and I was trying not to mention it.
[delayed]
> Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture
Okay, what the actual fuck? IIRC it was people whining about the absolute state of games journalism in the 2010's.
GamerGate was about ethics in games journalism roughly as much as the Arab Spring was about a street vendor having his cart confiscated.
That was their initial spark, but it kicked off a ding-dong battle for years. You could argue it's still going today, given places like /v/ and ResetEra are still fighting it, games like Dustborn and Concord are pilloried, and the "Sweet Baby Inc. detected" Steam curator exists to list games that have taken that company's advice.
GamerGate was about journalism in the same way that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was to protect the rights of ethnic Russian minorities in that country. The GamerGate people used ethics as an excuse because that sounds a lot more reasonable than “hate mob riled up by a bitter ex”, but it fell apart as soon as you looked at the evidence (e.g. they were most focused on attacking a developer over a relationship with someone who never reviewed her games), where they went for support (right-wing agitators with low journalistic ethics), and all of the real issues they ignored between huge gaming companies and the major media outlets.
The excuse was as believable as someone saying they were super concerned about ethics in tech journalism, but then never said a word about a huge tech company and spent all of their time badgering the Temple OS guy for sharing a meal with an OS News writer.
Basically Wikipedia has a failure point in which if media creates a narrative that's what passes as valid.
I was there, it was as Wikipedia describes it. Read the talk page.
Well no, I was also around but not particularly interested at the time. This looks like a classic case of the media trying to close ranks and smear their critics.
I was also there, and I say it was very much not as Wikipedia describes it and the narrative is practically libelous. I would tell you to read as much of the archived back-room nonsense as I did (not just the talk page archives but internal Wikipedia government stuff), but even if could be unearthed this much later nobody deserves the trauma.
I was there as well. It was absolutely not as Wikipedia describes it. If the claim was that some people participating in GG did so because they were sexist, fair enough. That was true and unavoidable because you get crazies in every group. But that was not some kind of universal thing, such that Wikipedia should be describing the movement unambiguously as "misogynistic".
It absolutely matched the Wikipedia summary. There is a ton of evidence linked supporting each point: it was a hate mob from the moment Eron Gjoni decided his ex should be punished for breaking up with him.
The GamerGate article is probably the best example of Wikipedia's blatant political bias.
There are many biased articles out there, of course, but not many manage to misrepresent past events to such an extreme that it borders on comical. It reads like it was written by Zoe Quinn herself. Maybe it was.
Sigh. Well, now that it's come up....
Fun thing about that. Whenever someone starts going off about how Zoe Quinn was supposedly mistreated and how that supposedly launched a "right-wing backlash against feminism" and a "misogynistic online harassment campaign", quiz them about the "jilted boyfriend" (as they typically put it) who wrote the post that supposedly set everything off. With remarkable consistency, they don't know his name (Eron Gjoni) or anything about his far-left political views, and will refuse to say the name if you ask. They have never read the post and have no idea what it says, and will at most handwave at incredibly-biased third-hand summaries.
I'm pretty sure I've even had this happen on HN.
GG wasn't constrained to Gjoni, it was the reaction to his posting. One guy saying "I'm on this team" does not define the characteristics of the resulting events.
You miss the point. It's about those people being misinformed, unwilling to look into matters independently, and selective in the application of their supposed ideological principles.
Example?
Friendly reminder that we all have the power to improve this! Become an editor and If you come across a problematic article, you can make improvements, or even just flag it as needing work. I know this is not a small ask, and can feel discouraging if you see more issues than you have time to address or your edits are not accepted, but when you consider the relatively small number of editors and the huge number of readers (not to mention AI’s being built on it) it is likely one of the more significant differences you can make towards improving the greater problem polarization.
The impression I've had from trying to contribute in the past has been that some editors will fight tooth and nail to prevent changes to an article they effectively own. The maze of rules and regulations makes it far too easy to simply block changes by dragging everything through protracted resolution processes.
Even something as clear-cut as "the provided source doesn't support this claim at all" becomes an uphill struggle to correct. When it comes to anything related to politics this problem is also exaggerated by editors selectively opposing changes based on whether they apply a desired slant to the text.
I have a personal interest in getting fixes into Wikipedia. If you'll share here a couple of examples I can attempt a fix. Here are some stories of what I've done in the past where people mentioned that they've struggled with corrections (one says he was banned, another said his article was deleted, and the third said he couldn't get it corrected - I solved all of these):
https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2024-10-17/Path_Depende...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40655989
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Weierstrass_function#Accu...
One thing I should clarify is that Wikipedia's purpose is to aggregate the current general view on things. So even if you know something is true personally, you cannot put it in unless you can find a reliable place where someone has documented it. In the cases I have there I had to first find the appropriate backing references before I could make something happen so it's not a trivial fix. Getting Makoto Matsumoto in there took me many hours because I know only a tourist's amount of Japanese.
I've also edited controversial articles (the Mannheim stabbing, one of the George Floyd incident related convicts) successfully.
Anyway that's my resume. Bring me the work you need done and once I've got a moment I'll see what I can do (no guarantees, I have a little baby to care for).
> One thing I should clarify is that Wikipedia's purpose is to aggregate the current general view on things. So even if you know something is true personally, you cannot put it in unless you can find a reliable place where someone has documented it. In the cases I have there I had to first find the appropriate backing references before I could make something happen so it's not a trivial fix.
This is where I would disagree, the model really doesn't work for politics and current events. In those topics Wikipedia may be better described as "The world according to a handful of (mostly US-based) news outlets". There's been a prolonged effort to deprecate sources, particularly those which lean to the right, so it's increasingly difficult to portray a neutral perspective reflecting multiple interpretations of the same topic. Instead excessive weight is given to what a majority of a select group of online sources say, and that's not necessarily trustworthy.
Most obviously it's a model which will fall flat when trying to document criticism of the press.
When you say you disagree, I assume you mean that you disagree that Wikipedia's approach is good. I don't think I was making that claim, however. I have no value position on Wikipedia's approach except that I appear to endorse it by participating. There are certainly true things that Wikipedia will not contain because they are insufficiently described in sources that Wikipedians find acceptable. But nonetheless that is Wikipedia's purpose: to find a list of sources that generally report fact, and to aggregate them.
Like any consensus-based thing it's pretty loose. It's unlikely that EN wikipedia had much of a position on the reliability of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, for instance.
As an example, when I resurrected the Makoto Matsumoto article, I mirrored it to my personal wiki[0] in case it is deleted from the original. Another loss I lament is that of Chinese Numbered Policies[1] which I think is a genuinely interesting list and a meaningful categorization that I will eventually re-create on my personal wiki.
I'm a Wikipedia inclusionist which means I want as many true things there as possible in a way that represents the truth as accurately as possible, but it's a collaborative effort and that means that sometimes I don't get what I want.
Any way, as you can see from my earlier experience, I seem to have a skill of getting facts into Wikipedia when others do not, and I have a personal desire to see them there as well. So if you want to list a couple of the examples you had trouble with I can see if I can help. I know you said "politics and current events", but hopefully there are non-emergent situations that you can describe because evolving situations require more attention than I'm able to apply at the moment. I will still try, though. As an example, the Salvadoran Gang Crackdown had some ridiculous language on it that I removed[3] that was clearly an attempt to insert a left-wing (as it is in the US) political slant.
To be clear, I have no affiliation with Wikipedia (beyond the fact that as an auto-confirmed user I have the user privilege to create articles without going through AfC). I just have a personal interest in fact recording[2].
0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Makoto_Matsumoto
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AArticles_for_delet...
2: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Observation_Dharma
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_c...
I meant that I disagree that Wikipedia is really trying to give a general view of events. That might have been the original intention, but it's not what it's doing in practice.
It does all hinge on that important list of acceptable vs unacceptable sources. In the last few decades there's been an increasing trend for news outlets to take a political position and decline to report on stories which would damage that position, which becomes most obvious whenever the US holds an election.
I think the reality is that any group will develop certain norms for this. I have a personal interest in making sure that Wikipedia's norms don't diverge too far from fact, but even that is limited because I have other things in my life to do. I think it's probably the most accurate mainstream aggregator there is, which is valuable in its own sense, so if I can make it a little better with a little effort I will usually try. But I wouldn't say that this means it's anywhere near flawless.
Speaking of norms, the Hacker News community will flag and downvote any comments of mine that mention that our 10 month old did not receive the COVID-19 vaccine. I think that's clear evidence of some kind of political bias. But that's this community's norms. I don't care as much to convince them as I do to fix Wikipedia.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46564106
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45717802 (this one was flagged but someone must have vouched for it)
Anyway, I understand if your experience trying to correct Wikipedia might have been at a different time, so you may not recall right now, but if you ever recall, my email is in my profile. I collect a list of these things and when I have a spare moment I try to make some progress.
> When it comes to anything related to politics this problem is also exaggerated by editors selectively opposing changes based on whether they apply a desired slant to the text.
This is amplified by the fact that active editors socialize with each other heavily behind the scenes, and over a period of many years you end up with a core group that all desire to apply the same slant.
The trick these days is to calmly make your case on the talk page first for anything that might be even slightly controversial, before you attempt any editing. So if someone wants to "own" the article they have to engage on the same terms, or you can just point out the lack of opposition and make the edit yourself.
That's the thing though, expecting users to have a discussion over even minor changes is extremely off-putting for most potential editors.
I've also noticed that a few of these editors seem to be deliberately abrasive towards new users, perhaps with the hope that they'll break a rule by posting insults in frustration. The moment that happens those editors quickly run to the site administration and try to get said user banned. Wikipedia's policies are increasingly treated as a weapon to beat down dissent rather than a guide on how to contribute positively.
Yep. Wikipedia editors too often resemble US police officers: stupid and drunk with power.
I gave them a fair shot a couple of times, but they're unreasonable and unmoved to listen to reason or experience they don't actually possess.
Utopian lionization that doesn't reflect reality or the bullshit. Unqualified people have the power to tell experts who were there that their contributions are insignificant, wrong, or that details don't matter. That's just stupid and pointless, and so less people contribute to hostile and idiotic half-assery.
I'll take curated information that is better and rigorous every time.
> Friendly reminder that we all have the power to improve this! Become an editor and If you come across a problematic article, you can make improvements, or even just flag it as needing work.
This works very well when there's a clear non-partisan issue with the text, like a logical inconsistency or the citation doesn't line up with the claim or the prose is just sloppy or unnatural.
If someone is trying to push biased sources, good luck.
The I-swear-it-isn't-a-cabal of highly-active editors knows policy better than you do, and they will continue to conveniently know policy better than you do no matter how much time you spend studying it. (And if you study it and then try to do your business anonymously, they will consider it suspicious that you know anything about policy and demand that you log in to your nonexistent long-standing account.) And that policy allows them to use highly biased sources because they are on they "reliable sources" list, except it isn't really a single list but rather some sources are restricted in applicability, unless it's one of them using it inappropriately. And the bias of those sources doesn't disqualify them as long as it's properly taken into consideration by whatever arcane rules, except this doesn't happen in practice and nobody will care if you point out them doing it, as long as it serves their purposes.
Meanwhile, the way sources get approved as reliable is generally that they agree with other reliable sources. Good luck trying to convince people that a source has become unreliable. You aren't going to be able to do it by pointing out things they've repeatedly objectively gotten wrong, for example. But they'll happily spend all day listing every article they can find that an ideologically opposed source has ever gotten wrong (according to them, no evidence necessary).
And it all leans in the same direction because the policy-makers all lean in the same direction. Because nobody who opposes them will survive in that social environment. There are entire web sites out there dedicated to cataloging absurd stuff they allowed their friends to get away with over years and years, just because of ideological agreement, where people who dispute a Wikipedia-established narrative on a politically charged topic will be summarily dismissed as trolls.
On top of that they will inject additional bias down to the level of individual word-choice level. They have layers and layers of policy surrounding, for example, when to use words like "killing", "murder", "assassination" and "genocide" (or "rioting" vs "unrest" vs "protest"); but if you compare article titles back and forth there is no consistency to it without the assumption of endemic political bias.
WP:NOTNEWS is, as far as I can tell, not a real policy at all, at least not if there's any possible way to use the news story to promote a narrative they like.
And if the article is about you, of course you aren't a reliable source. If the Wikipedians don't like you, and their preferred set of reliable sources don't like you, Wikipedia will just provide a positive feedback loop for everything mainstream media does to make you look bad. This will happen while they swear up and down that they are upholding WP:BLP.
I've been watching this stuff happen, and getting burned by it off and on, for years and years.
Man, I know what you are talking about through and through. Happens all the time on the political Right/Left pages, controversial authors of classical literature, WWII atrocities, and the list goes on. Scientific and Movie or Art articles are way better to discover interesting stuff.
The stalking, censorship, and unwillingness to contribute to topics deemed as "controversial" is unreal. People might not believe, but wikipedia truly is one hell of a cesspool.
Wikipedia is just too much bureaucracy for beginner editors nowadays. The whole baptism of fire that you need to undergo to be part of the oligarchy is just not worth the hassle.
I'm not going into an edit war with some deranged redditor activist.
this attitude is exactly why and how those "deranged redditor activists" (we're from the superior hacker news, of course, where there is no controversy or activists or differences in opinion) took and maintain control.
> That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the US,
Not really. The phenomenon exists in other languages Wikipedias. I think it is related to the fact that NGOs that "shape" political discourse and politicians have become "sensible" to the text in Wikipedia pages.
It is always good, when you read Wikipedia, to "follow the money", i.e. look at the sources, see if they make sense.
In the last 5 years, a lot of online platforms, HN also, are used by state actors to spread propaganda and Wikipedia is perfect for that because it presents itself as a "neutral" source.
There's a reason why historians tend to view anything more recent than 10-20 years ago as politics. If you don't want to get embroiled in political debates, stick to stuff old enough to be history. There's still politics there, but it's less raw.
Wikipedia doesn't restrict itself to topics that are older than ten years ago, so some of their material is necessarily going to be viewed as political.
e.g. Wikipedia has a stand-alone page on Elon Musk's Nazi salute[1].
{Edit: It's worth noting here that Wikipedia also maintains separate pages for things like Bill Clinton's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein[3].}
This particular page is very interesting because of the sheer amount of political blow-back it's caused for Wikipedia. If you're a Republican, this one page may be the biggest reason you might view Wikipedia as having become "ridiculously partisan". As a direct result of this page, and the refusal to remove or censor it, Musk is now taking aim at Wikipedia and calling for a boycott[2]. He also had his employees produce Grokipedia which, notably, does not include a page on his Nazi salute.
Musk may have had a public falling out with Trump, but he is still very much plugged into the Republican party. He's about to throw a lot of money at the mid-term elections. So, naturally, one hand washes the other and Wikipedia is on every good Republican's hit list. The kicker is that a lot of Republicans, who don't like Musk and think he's a Nazi/idiot, are going to feel a lot of Musk-instigated pressure from their own party to target Wikipedia.
This is the price Wikipedia pays for including recent events and refusing to bow to demands for censorship.
__________________
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy
[2]https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2025/01/29/why-elon...
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_Bill_Clinton_a...
Disclosure: I'm Canadian and am neither a Republican or a Democrat.
It’s more likely that you became more radicalized so what used to read as neutral seems partisan now.
Is it radicalised to want even a basic premise of neutrality in an encyclopedia?
Despite not being particularly political, even I raise an eyebrow when an article opens with "____ is a <negative label>, <negative label>, <negative label> known for <controversial statement>"
Please provide an example so we can evaluate what makes even someone as non-political and neutral as you raise an eyebrow.
> Is it radicalised to want even a basic premise of neutrality in an encyclopedia?
Facts are not neutral or "balanced".
And your whole phrasing smells of someone who doesn't want to be challenged with facts which are against you worldview, which is pretty much against the whole purpose of Wikipedia.
> Despite not being particularly political, even I raise an eyebrow when an article opens with "____ is a <negative label>, <negative label>, <negative label> known for <controversial statement>"
Without giving the actual example, there seems nothing wrong with this in general. Could be important, could be overrated. But at least I assume it's true, because wrong claims would be a valid problem.
Can you please provide an example?
I want an improvement upon "Encyclopedia Brittanica". If we have to have governments around the world fund a nonprofit educational equivalent of that, then I'm all for it but we can't keep depending upon a least-common denominator "central public knowledge repository" that's an improperly-managed, easily-manipulated, often incomplete and inaccurate mobacracy fed by largely unknown randos, enough of whom aren't doing so for honest purposes and too many are foolish/crazy/unreliable enough to curate and preserve worthwhile information consistently.
I've never seen an article like that, other than for people like Epstein, who are primarily famous for their crimes. I just went and checked the pages of some famous people where you might expect this kind of treatment if Wikipedia were indeed biased in the way people seem to think (like Donald Trump or Ted Cruz), and they're not like that.
There are a lot of comments in this thread talking about a strong bias in Wikipedia, but I don't see any examples. I have no doubt that there are some articles that are biased, particularly in less popular areas that get less attention, but overall, Wikipedia does a great job maintaining a neutral point of view in its articles.
I do get the impression that what people perceive as bias is often simply neutrality. If you think yourself the victim of an evil cabal of your political opponents, then a neutral description of the facts might seem like an attack.
To be honest I don't keep a list of examples, I usually raise an eyebrow and move on. It's typically on pages for smaller public figures where you get some extremely questionable descriptions.
It's also definitely a thing for contentious topics, a while back I tried to look up some info on the Gaza war and some of the pages were a complete battleground. I feel that there was a time when Wikipedia leaned away from using labels like "terrorist", but their modern policy seems to be that if you can find a bunch of news articles that say so then that's what the article should declare in Wikipedia's voice.
That’s not my perception at all, but if you find an article like that please change it!
That’s the beauty of wikipedia after all. I recently made my first contribution and it was a really smooth process.
I mean... this is a very real phenomenon, but probably not in the way you're thinking of.
There are many simple statements of fact that, 15 or 20 years ago, were as universally uncontroversial as "the sky is blue", but today are considered radically controversial political opinions, and will get you banned for most online platforms if you dare utter them.
I always like to point people to Simple Wikipedia - https://simple.wikipedia.org/. You can also change the (lang).wikipedia.org URL to simple.wikipedia.org and a lot of the time you get a great, simple language explanation that's better for a quick overview of a topic than the regular page.
This is cute, but kind of an example of Wikipedia's off-mission bloat. It irks me that they constantly fundraise when most of it is not needed for Wikipedia proper, but rather used for initiatives people know less about and may not fund if they knew.
I don't begrudge them the odd party, anniversary, meetup.
And some of their subprojects are a great idea and could go much further -- it'd be fantastic to have a Wikipedia atlas, for example. The WikiMiniAtlas on geolocated articles is nice but it could be so much better.
But as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER it's a huge concern that they're blowing money pretty much at the rate they get it, when they should be saving it for the future, and be pickier and choosier about what they're funding at any given time.
I made “Wikidata Atlas” several weeks ago. [1] [2]
[1] : https://wd-nearbyitem.toolforge.org/
[2] : https://rtnf.substack.com/p/wd-nearbyitem
That is a nice start, a rendering of GIS wikidata. Perhaps ask Wikimedia Foundation for funding :)
What I'd like to see is a more intimate marrying of OSM data and Wikipedia data. For example, if I go to zoom level 12 centred on London, UK on your page, there are about 80 text labels on the OSM layer itself. At minimum this is going to need OSM vector tiles. I'd expect to be able to click any of the OSM labels for the corresponding Wikipedia article, as well as adding in POIs for articles that don't have corresponding OSM links. And then you need OSM rendering style rules about which POIs you show at each zoom level, based on whether labels will run into each other or not.
The problem right now is that the WikiMiniAtlas treats all things, whether large areas or individual POIs, as POIs.
Thank you for this link, I was looking for something with that data in a clean format for some time!
i feel like that's a bit silly, the other projects are listed on the donation page (https://donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/FAQ) and tbh you are unlikely to be donating to the wikimedia foundation without being aware of (at least some of?) the rest
I promise you that 99% of normal people have no idea what the Wikimedia foundation is and think that they're just donating to "fund Wikipedia".
are normal people donating to wikipedia tho
And they have a huge endowment fund now too that more than covers the cost of Wikipedia...
I wonder whether the emergence of a single, true Wikipedia competitor would actually put an end to this never-ending fundraising criticism (since people could simply donate to the competitor as a form of protest)
Projects like Wikipedia never have meaningful competition, because the social dynamics invariably converge to a single platform eating everything else.
Wikipedia is already dead, they just don't know it yet. They'll get Stackoverflowed.
The LLMs have already guaranteed their zombie end. The HN crowd will be comically delusional about it right up to the point where Wikimedia struggles to keep the lights on and has to fire 90% of its staff. There is no scenario where that outcome is avoided (some prominent billionaire will step in with a check as they get really desperate, but it won't change anything fundamental, likely a Sergey Brin type figure).
The LLMs will do to Wikipedia, what Wikipedia & Co. did to the physical encyclopedia business.
You don't have to entirely wipe out Wikipedia's traffic base to collapse Wikimedia. They have no financial strength what-so-ever, they burn everything they intake. Their de facto collapse will be extremely rapid and is coming soon. Watch for the rumbles in 2026-2027.
Wikipedia is not even in the game you are describing here. Wikipedia does not need billions of users clicking on ads to convince investors in yet another seed. They are an encyclopedia, and if fewer people will visit, they will still be an encyclopedia. Their costs are probably very strongly correlated with their number of visitors.
SO was supposed to be much the same, though. I guess you really do have to get directly funded by users for the model to work.
If we kill all the platforms where content for training LLMs comes from, what do LLMs train on?
This. I'm really bothered by the almost cruel glee with which a lot of people respond to SO's downfall. Yeah, the moderation was needlessly aggressive. But it was successful at creating a huge repository of text-based knowledge which benefited LLMs greatly. If SO is gone, where will this come from for future programming languages, libraries, and tools?
This always feels to me like, an elephant in the room.
I’d love to read a knowledgeable roundup of current thought on this. I have a hard time understanding how, with the web becoming a morass of SEO and AI slop - with really no effort being put into to keeping it accurate - we’ll be able to train LLMs to the level we do today in the future.
Newspapers, scientific papers and soon, real-world interactions.
News is the main feed of new data and that can be an infinite incremental source of new information
You talk about news here like it's some irrefutable ether LLMs can tap into. Also I'd think newspapers and scientific papers cover extremely little of what the average person uses an LLM to search for.
Most people went to SO because they had to for their job. Most people go to Wikipedia because they want to, for curiosity and learning.
LLMs will use Wikipedia the same way humans use it
They, just like some newspapers, try to present themselves as neutral, not tied to any interest.
Like Hackernews, supposedly neutral.
The main issue with neutral people is that we do not know in which camp they are.
> The main issue with neutral people is that we do not know in which camp they are.
And that's a good thing, 'cause it means they're living to their standards.
Every time I try to contribute, I get censored by some gatekeeper. It feels as open and inviting nowadays as StackOverflow.
The people who built Wikipedia, technically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
25 years of ranking in the cash and yet constantly begging for money. It's a cushy gig for the employees.
Slightly off topic, but now that long context machine translation is roughly on-par with humans: are there any official efforts from Wikipedia, to translate the "best" or "most complete" language version of each article to all other languages? I'd imagine that the effort of getting all languages up to the same standards are just an impossible one and people from "lower-resource" languages would benefit a lot.
On enwiki there is a big problem with bad LLM edits at the moment, so it's probably not the right time for this idea.
If anything, the community is discussing stronger guidelines against inappropriate LLM use.
If people want AI-translated versions of Wikipedia articles from other languages, they can trivially request that from the AI themselves.
Not quite, the official in-development project wrt. this area is Abstract Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia which plans to develop a human-editable structural interlanguage for encyclopedic content that can then be automatically "rendered" to existing natural languages, as opposed to just starting from an existing "best or most complete" natural-language text.
This avoids the unreliability of existing "neural/ML" approaches, replacing them with something that might see contributions from bots as part of developing the support for specific content or languages (similar to what happens with Wikidata today) but can always be comprehensively understood by humans if need be.
At least using Irish as an example, the state of machine translation is still far far behind proper translation unfortunately and wouldn't be up to scratch
Yep exactly this, and some languages still haven't been fully digitised https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/a3369c56-abaa-4b67-a1...
I think it's optimal for this to be done at read-time rather than write-time. En Wikipedia is the most comprehensive but there are many articles in language Wikipedias that are far more complete. Rather than attempting to keep these branches of knowledge in sync, it is probably better to have some mechanism to pull them all together when someone wants to read a synthesis.
You're not the first to have the idea. For languages that are only sparsely represented in the LLMs' training data, this has actually done a lot of damage. The LLMs spew out a bunch of hallucinations, and there aren't enough qualified human editors to review it, so the human record of that language itself becomes tainted.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1124005/ai-wikip...
I'm noticing a distinct lack of Guy Standing sitting in the "Weird and wonderful Wikipedia" section.
In the last 2 years, Wikipdia's quality declined. For me this was evident when they suddenly changed the UI. The new UI is more annoying. Perhaps it is nicer for Average Joe people, but for powerusers it is just annoying to use now. But this is not the only problem: many articles have a low quality, or they are so complicated that Average Joe doesn't understand them, which is ironic considering the UI was most likely changed to appease Average Joe.
I am also displeased with the constant pop-up or slide-in widgets. This is a general curse for browsers that ublock origin prevented. I hate this. My browser should not allow for any such slide-in banner. I am never interested in anything written there - usually it is a "gimme more money", but even if it is not, I simply don't CARE what is written on it. Even python used this, on their homepage, where they are even so cheeky that you can not fully disable this thing, unless you block it with ublock origin.
I feel that too many websites fail the user now. Wikipedia does too. The intrinsic quality is still better than the AI slop spam that Google amplified world wide, while also ruining Google search, but the quality used to be better in the past, on Wikipedia.
> For me this was evident when they suddenly changed the UI. The new UI is more annoying.
In case you are unaware, if you're logged in, you can go into the user preferences and change the Appearance to one of the older themes, such as Vector Legacy (2010).
should have a fate similar to stackoverflow: less contributors, worse (or stale) content, less visits
I’ll be curious to see how true this turns out to be.
I stopped visiting SO frequently years ago, even before LLMs.
But I still visit Wikipedia. I often just want to read about X, vs. asking AI questions about X.
This. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, while some of the content needs to be updated periodically, it also has A LOT of content that will stay relevant pretty much forever.
According to their own stats (visible in the graph some folds down), it seems to have a fairly steady rate of edits. As for visits, it looks quite constant as well https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wik...
So activity is plateauing.
Despite everything we now know about Wikipedia, I still think it’s one of the better websites of the early 00s.
Wikipedia is overall excellent, and it has certainly brought enormous value to me throughout the years.
But it is noticeably biased on any topic that has political implications.
Can't wait for the specific examples
What for? To start a flame war? No one is going to get convinced one way or the other.
Which was why I just wanted to point out that while I think Wikipedia is a net good overall, it is not without blemishes.
> Makes claim.
> Is asked for evidence.
> Refuses.
Brilliant work. These kinds of posts should be bannable.
If you do not know of a single Wikipedia article that you judge to be politically biased, then that says more about you and your gullibility than it does about me.
The point is not that Wikipedia is completely unbiased. That's an obvious impossibility - for any encyclopedia.
The point is that accusations of "noticeable bias on any topic that has political implications" is the kind of accusation made by someone simply trying to sow distrust in information, writ large. It's increasingly common.
Being asked for an example or two isn't weird.
This kind of bias is a statistical measure; typically you can't prove or disprove it using a single sample.
It's about larger patterns, which things are talked about and (crucially) which are not. How much attention is given to things and not.
AI/LLM tech could be used to explore this.
History and many fields of science also have political implications, and you’ll find just as much editorial slant there, too
This would be the reality-based editorial slant, then? What are you proposing as an alternative?
“Reality-based” is rather smug, isn’t it?
Aside from AI, Wikipedia’s greatest upcoming challenge will be censorship as Western governments start to adopt various traits of Eastern dictatorships.
For all of its ubiquity, Wikipedia is a single fragile organization in an increasingly unstable political landscape.
I hope that efforts are being made to make sure that its content is not only being archived in many places, but also that the know-how to reboot Wikipedia's hosting from its dumps (software, infrastructure deployment and all) is being actively preserved by people independent of the organization.
Since we as a culture will be forgotten, a reminder that the catalan wikipedia was the 2nd one to have an article after the english version :)
Maybe I can prompt an LLM to translate this flying div monstrosity into a flat page I can read.
Buried in this mix of 25-year commemoration pages, the release they put out today:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2026/01/15/wikipedia-ce...
Which includes a section about Wikipedia in the age of AI: New partnerships with tech companies support Wikipedia’s sustainability
> several companies — including Ecosia, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Pleias, and ProRata — became new Wikimedia Enterprise partners, joining existing partners such as Amazon, Google, and Meta.
It's really remarkable how, every single time Wikipedia comes up on HN, there's a bunch of comments about bias and such... and yet never a single example is ever linked.
There are examples listed on this page and in many discussions.
The Wikipedia "reliability" list shows wild, almost laughable biases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
Surely people don't think sources such as Mother Jones are more 'reliable' than The New York Post, Fox News, or The Heritage Foundation? Not a coincidence there.
Having such obvious biases does nothing but damage the Wikipedia brand, and at this point has me anticipating Ai replacements.
This is the comment on the Mother Jones entry: "There is consensus that Mother Jones is generally reliable. Almost all editors consider Mother Jones a biased source, so its statements (particularly on political topics) may need to be attributed. Consider whether content from this publication constitutes due weight before citing it in an article."
They acknowledge it is a biased source and they make a distinction between reliability and bias. Not familiar with the publication.
To elaborate slightly, note that "reliable" is sort of Wikipedia jargon. When it applies to a news organization, it means that statements of fact are likely to be correct... or at least, not intentionally incorrect, because errors do happen. So a source can be reliable and biased at the same time, which means that if it says a thing happened you can largely trust that it really did happen... but any interpretation of that might be slanted, and so shouldn't be trusted.
The New York Post isn't "reliable" because it's a tabloid that doesn't care overmuch about fact-checking what it publishes (and, worse, has a history of just making stuff up sometimes). So the Wikipedia position is that you can't trust a citation to the NY Post without finding something else to corroborate it -- at which point you might as well just cite the corroborating reliable source instead.
Whereas Mother Jones will absolutely mostly publish articles which say good things about progressives and bad things about conservatives, but those things will all be true. Their bias comes in the form of selectively presenting these things -- they're unlikely to bother posting a "Ted Cruz just did a good thing" article -- and in their color commentary / opinion pieces, not in the form of just making things up.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
> Surely people don't think sources such as Mother Jones are more 'reliable' than The New York Post, Fox News, or The Heritage Foundation?
That seems based on a premise that I don't grasp. Why is Mother Jones more or less reliable than those sources? Are those sources reliable in your opinion?
My impression is that you have a strong opinion and are assuming everyone shares it.
It's remarkable that Grokipedia has challenged Wikipedia so thoroughly, at only 80 days old with 25 years of Wikipedia.
You'd think a Wikipedia style encyclopedia, with high quality AI, allowing for transparent and responsive editing, versioning, verification, and validation of the entries would be cheered on by the HN crowd.
If Anthropic had released a Claudipedia, 99% of the people booing Grok would be swooning over it.
Wikipedia's failure modes, the persistent editorial and corporate bias and intellectual dishonesty, and the presence of demonstrably better tools will mean Wikipedia goes extinct, eventually. I don't think it makes it to 50 years as a meaningful participant in the world.
What does "challenged Wikipedia so thoroughly" mean?
(My impression is that Grokipedia was announced, everyone looked it and laughed because it was so obviously basically taking content from Wikipedia and making it worse, and since then it's largely been forgotten. But I haven't followed it closely and maybe that's all wrong.)
This whole thread reeks of Grok astro and challenging Wikipedia. There are fair criticisms of Wikipedia, but I am smelling something fishy.
> It's remarkable that Grokipedia has challenged Wikipedia so thoroughly, at only 80 days old with 25 years of Wikipedia.
No?? In what world do you live?
Using Grokipedia would literally be asking for partisan propaganda, Musk doesn't even hide it
This comment is the first time that I have heard about Grokipedia.
> the persistent editorial and corporate bias and intellectual dishonesty
Musk is explicitly partisan and has repeatedly manipulated Grok's output to suit his agenda. How could you possibly consider Grok a worthwhile alternative if you take issue with intellectual dishonesty and corporate bias?
Has it? I think to challenge you have to show some comparable usage numbers. Its certainly an impressive technical feat to have this AI-based wiki project, but does anyone actually use it?
I mean that genuinely. I don't know any usage numbers for Grok. Is it even 1% of Wiki? Is it 50%? Is it more?
It's consistently better in content quality, for everything that I've used it for. I've seen conversations complaining about it that effectively reek of either anti-Musk or anti-AI bias, and when I dig in, I haven't found any legitimate bad information or arbitrary bias in the articles themselves.
It's not yet as comprehensive, with ~6 million articles compared to Wikipedia's ~7 million, and the UI isn't as good, with a lot of polish and convenience and fun features in Wikipedia that are noticeably absent.
It's qualitatively better in significant ways, and when you compare and contrast articles for which there's a difference, you start to get a feel for the ways in which Wikipedia has failed.
Being anti-Musk is a shibboleth and article of faith for a lot of people, so they can't engage with anything he's involved in on an objective level. Grokipedia isn't used by as many people for that and other reasons. From the last couple months of using it, I've found it to be an objectively better tool.
I've gone in and made corrections in places I have knowledge of, and the process and transparency of those types of edits are awesome. It just works, no drama, no dealing with digital tinpot tyrants, and if there's evidence you're wrong about a thing, the bot will actually counter your suggestion and stick to its parameters and standards.
It's not perfect by any means, but it's a damn sight better than Wikipedia.
There is nothing impressive about an AI slop Wikipedia rewrite by a radicalized eccentric billionaire.