Larry Sanger, one of Wikipedia’s cofounders, was banned from editing the site indefinitely after other editors determined he was canvassing, or in other words, calling on his followers off platform in order to influence Wikipedia’s content.
Sanger has spent more than a decade criticizing Wikipedia for what he claims is an ideological, left-wing bias on a variety of topics, and on X has framed this recent ban as further proof of everything that’s wrong with Wikipedia. The New York Post took that bait and last night published an article with the headline “Left-leaning Wikipedia blocked founder from editing site—after he campaigned to make it more balanced.”
Wikipedia editors obviously reject that framing and say that Sanger was banned for wielding his followers to sway discussion and decision making on Wikipedia. The discussion that led to the decision to ban Sanger concluded with what an editor called a “clear consensus” to ban Sanger.
It’s a little sad that he’s still messing with that site. It’s been years since I’ve used it for anything. It’s incomplete and heavily biased.
How is it biased? Biased towards truth? If you have proof of it lying or misrepresenting something, then you just have to prove it and I am sure they or you will be able to change it.
They will not let you change it. They gate keep who gets to edit things intensely.
For good reason, there is a lot of interest in implementing actual bias.
Israel/Palestine/Gaza is examples of this.
Do you have any examples of bias? Or wrong information?
Wikipedia is a great start point. You read the wiki, then check the references. Just like reading the news, you should never take one source at face value! Engage your ✨ CRITICAL THINKING ✨
Wikipedia is pointless. You can ask any AI your question and ask for sources. It’s more reliable than wikipedia.
Not sure if troll or…
…ok, I’ll bite. This is maybe the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. You know that Wikipedia comprises one of the largest publicly-accessible sets of meticulously-curated natural-language data on the planet, right? And so when you’re training up a new model, you’re naturally going to start with that massive, freely-available repository?
Every major AI model has been trained, at least partially, on Wikipedia. This insane viewpoint is essentially saying that you don’t think Wikipedia is reliable, but if some linear algebra chews it up for a few minutes, then it’s ok. You’re turning up your nose at tap water, but drinking your inside dog’s urine.
Do you know how many living people are unable to get probable lies about themselves removed from wikipedia? Wikipedia is barely better than just taking random reddit comments as truth.
Gonna need a source for that, boss–
Wikipedia’s intense scrutiny of sources and requirements for reliable citations are actually one of the reasons that Sanger started his malformed crusade.
If there’s actual, provable lies about a notable person in the encyclopedia, then there should be actual, provable truths to combat it; and any Wikipedia editor can update the article in question to correct the record. If an edit war emerges, a community discussion can take place wherein the person in question can have their say. Wikipedia isn’t the wild west, and any reasonable argument that it is died twenty years ago.
–but even if those two things weren’t true–it’s literally impossible to remove misinformation from AI models. I’m not saying that to be dramatic or overstate the problem. When a model is trained with misinformation, the misinformation becomes a part of the model; the entire corpus of everything it was trained on is baked into the neural network on a fundamental level, and humans can’t manipulate it manually. Which means you can’t remove any datapoint from the model without excising it from the training data and then retraining a whole new model.
So now not only are you drinking your dog’s urine, you’re claiming that the tap water is too yellow. Even if your assertion’s true, your alternative is demonstrably worse.
No, not necessarily. Lots of false info spreads around, including serious academic publications. People who publish books and articles don’t always do additional verification of the stuff they read elsewhere. And if nobody publishes something containing the correct version of the story, you as a WP editor don’t really have a reliable source that you can use against the existing ones. I’ve seen this happen multiple times. Wikipedia is nominally meant just to convey what the sources say, not do active research or provide you with the capital T Truth.
My source is a random internet post that says it’s a verified source and nobody else is allowed to edit it. Same as wikipedia.
Then contribute to it. Bring receipts and evidence. Those are the table stakes. Without that, you’ll get laughed out like the clown you are. You don’t bring hearsay and prejudice to an evidence fight.
Wikipedia has its problems, but ‘balance’ is not near the top of the list.
Biased how?
Reality has a well known liberal bias