this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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I don't think something like this exists yet(?), so it'll be cool to see how this will be like.
As an academic I love this. On Wikipedia there's actually fights among different expert disciplines going on. It is better to allow different instances operated by different discipline summarize knowledge from their own perspective.
To be fair, those are good faith arguments with the goal being to determine the real, objective truth. Hopefully.
That is not how this tool would be used, in the hands of people not trained in the art of socratic discourse. Just imagine how the situation in Gaza would end up being described.
Avoiding conflict is not always a useful aim.
I can respect your comment. The problem with Wikipedia's scholarly articlesI wanted to raise was that some group of researchers (or businesses) wash away others' views. In other times, mathematicians try to satisfy everyone from different disciplines, and write a very abstract article that covers everyone's view yet is too academic and hardly readable to most readers who actually need Wikipedia.
Which also means that marxist.wiki/article/communism will be completely different from libertarian.wiki/article/communism. I think I will take Wikipedia's attempt at impartiability over a "wikipedia" destined to just devolve into islands of "alternative facts"
Ik I'm late to the party, but I think this would be soooo much better than Wikipedia for finding useful information on niche or controversial topics.
Instead of being limited to Wikipedia's contributors and having to accommodate or guess their biases, and have a terrible, incomplete "controversies" section on every page, you could browse the same page across instances whose biases are much more explicit and see what each group determines is most important about the topic.
Instead of having to find a single mutually agreed upon article where each "faction" has their own set of issues with the content, you can now browse pages that each of those factions feel best represent their POV, and use the sum of them to form an opinion where no information is omitted.
Obviously lots of instances will have complete bullshit, but it's likely enough that you will find instances that have well-sourced material from a diverse breadth of viewpoints, and can pick an instance that federates to your preferred criteria for quality. Misinfo will exist regardless, and if they get it from a federated wiki, it will probably be at least marginally better quality or better cited than the Facebook or Reddit posts they were getting it from before.
It would be useful for the "what does X group think about Y" aspect alone.
There's also nothing stopping diverse, consensus-based instances from popping up. Or lots of niche academic instances with greater depth on their areas of expertise.
Reading the links in this post alone shows wikipedia is already one of those biased islands lol
And with this system you will definitely see other attempts at impartial wikis too.
But then again, you could say this about Lemmy and Reddit too.
Lemmy took 5 years to get to this point. Let's give this a few years and see how it turns out.
I am okay with bias in my social media.
Far less so in my encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is hilariously biased, especially on any politics or history topics.
here are extensive lists of complaints of bias, from both left- and right- wing alternatives:
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia
https://www.conservapedia.com/Wikipedia
...are these people writing about the same website?! 😂
They baited you by saying "wikipedia", but then they switched to what looks like the wikia software. Notice how they are from lemmygrad? I hope you get my point.
I can get why that user might have a pro-communist bias themself due to being from a pro-communist instance, but the articles they linked seemed to be an accurate enough representation of how the far left and far right see Wikipedia.
Maybe not completely accurate to how it really is in all aspects, but I don't really care enough about Wikipedia's biases to fact check each contradictory claim in each article. I barely use it as a point of reference anymore anyways. (Though I've found it tends to have a liberal bias, like both the articles stated. I seem to remember that during the past election, some sections of the articles about Trump or featuring him in some way used very emotionally charged language)
But accurate or not, I still find it hilarious to look at the articles side by side. One claims the articles are written mainly by teenagers and the unemployed and supports communism, and the other claims they're written mostly by privileged White men who hate communism.