Others used web technology to create vast noise chambers of nothingness, deceit and paranoia.
Wikipedia shows that having a bit of faith in moral principles and affinity for the good side of humanity can readily turn technology into a force for good.
This puts to shame and exposes the shallowness and enormous wastefulness of most all other tech efforts out there.
Ofcourse with such dramatic success there are emergent challenges. Developing ground truth on divisive issues that tear humanity apart is highly non-trivial.
But the miracle stands and is asking from all of us to turn faith into science, find ways to replicate the essence of Wikipedia across all domains.
I believe that Wikipedia's key is that it's finite. It has a goal. Many of its pages are static, or evolve slowly. It wants to reach an end state that grows only at the edges, and only when there is new knowledge.
When it fails, pages get locked. Misbehavior is corrected by going to the last good state, not by trying to move forward.
Wikipedia succeeds by not being social media. It doesn't want engagement. It doesn't care if you leave. It enforces ego-less-ness by not showing you names; it doesn't want your contributions, especially not on general topics that people enjoy "debating".
That's hard to replicate elsewhere, because it has done that thing well. It's the go-to source for that kind of interaction.
There’s plenty of useful information on Wikipedia, but the biggest motivator that drives contributions to its generation and maintenance is the desire to control information. It creates a system for people to promote their own views as the truth (for whatever reason they have for doing that), and suppress all opposing views. Nearly everybody implicitly understands that this is the nature of the content on Wikipedia, that it is a repository for the biases (whether well informed or not) of the Wikipedia power-editors. Knowledge is incorporated into Wikipedia via a political process, not via merit or rigour (whether or not this process chooses to consider merit or rigour in any particular case). Having your edits included in Wikipedia is a way of exerting power over others, and considering that, it’s not a miracle at that it’s managed to attract an army of passionate contributors. There’s nothing miraculous about people passionately seeking power for themselves.
Wikipedia's success can, in my opinion, be directly attributed to its noncommercial nature, which is enabled by its "many reads, few writes" model.
Websites of that sort are much cheaper to run than more interactive web applications, and are therefore better suitable for a non-profit model. For the vast majority of user requests, you just serve a static page from a cache. I suspect that most requests don't even touch Wikipedia's PHP code or database.
The same is true for Hacker News (which entirely runs on one or two machines) and Stackoverflow, which runs on a dozen or so. Wikipedia is a lot bigger so the number of machines is probably somewhat bigger too, but it's still not comparable to social-media websites or even messaging apps like Signal.
> Wikipedia shows that having a bit of faith in moral principles and affinity for the good side of humanity can readily turn technology into a force for good.
I think it's more than "faith in principles". The principles of wikipedia wouldn't have mattered at all if it was taken over by trump stans in the early days. What makes Wikipedia great, in my opinion, is the same thing that made early open source great. There is no clout of fame, it's not a high octane competitive environment where people have to constantly posture to appear unmovable. It's a collection of weirdos all nerding out over collecting all the information. It's a bunch of librarians writing stuff for completely internally motivated reasons.
I don't get the impression that the people who edit Wikipedia really care about the readers at all. They allow us to enter the temple they built for themselves, but we aren't guests, we're just onlookers.
I agree that Wikipedia is one of the great success stories of the open Internet. Therefore, it is somewhat sad that Wales is being attacked from all sides in this thread.
I think it being non-profit is a powerful motivator for people to work on it for free. Unlike open-source projects by companies like Microsoft (random example), where I feel like I'm doing engineering for Microsoft for free if I commit code to one of their libraries.
I say this because I'm not sure what functionally is meant by "having a bit of faith in moral principles."
It might not be a miracle†, just the natural evolution of a system which does not run ads and refuses to run ads from the get-go. Even if the ads would have been "ethical ads" (no tracking and so on), they'd still ruin the experience. We can only imagine how search would have looked without ads. Without getting too political, in the 1950s/60s there was a brief moment of naïveté when it was thought that ads could be used for the good of all, that détournement [1] was actually a possibility. (Narrator: it wasn't)
Hence the miracle might be in having the courage not to run ads and not locking everything beyond a paywall, updating the phrase: build it, don't run ads/paywall it, they will come, it will be great.
Wikipedia, ahem, the Wikimedia Foundation, is also a money fire, begging for cash whilst being incredibly well funded, with most of those funds not directed to the expenses of the encyclopedia.
The biggest barrier to improving our civilisation in the 21st century is that narcissists and psychopaths are highly motivated to attain positions of power over others.
How do we prevent such scumbags from rising to the top:
Aptitude / personality tests in high-school? Perhaps people can become better over time.
Trust our elders / benevolent dictators for life? People can also become worse over time, lose their empathy for others once they are higher up the ladder.
It is a wicked problem to design systems that can resist / repel malign actors.
Full credit to all involved in Wikipedia for fighting the good fight.
Capitalism cannot unlock the potential of the web the way Wikipedia, project Gutenberg, Stack Overflow, Internet Archive, the Pirate bay and open source software has done.
Humans are social and moral beings. Our motivations are not limited to profit maximization and rent seeking. Micro-economics can never explain Wikipedia.
While what Wikipedia did might be considered noble, they had no investors to answer to and private equity or a billionaire couldn’t come in and do a hostile takeover.
As someone from a country which has a requirement for all large social media companies to submit to the will of the government [1], and routinely exercises this power especially on Twitter [2] with actual real-life consequences [3], it is hilarious to me that internet censorship is still largely talked about as a hypothetical.
The Wikimedia Foundation resists requests from foreign governments to unmask editors, but sometimes they’ve already publicly identified themselves or been discovered because of state surveillance / control of ISPs.
Governments using this tactic to silence the most active Wikipedia editors and create a chilling effect is a really serious threat to Wikipedia, and we need better technical tools for helping Wikipedians stay anonymous.
The biggest thing HN folks can do here is contribute (code or dollars) to projects like Tor. Unfortunately since Tor is really complex to use and the source of so much spam and abuse, it’s just not very effective today at protecting people from state actors.
This is true across the board. Our government seems unwilling to prosecute corruption cases that there is a risk of losing. It's no wonder corruption is flourishing and rule of law seems like a distant dream.
>Musk:Did your brain fall out of your head, Yglesias? The choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?
I would say the former so it would be obvious to everyone in Turkey something is wrong on Twitter.
So he is hiding the censorship.
Elon is leaning on pragmatism to hide the fact that he’s just another high-profile coward. Don’t get me wrong, I think he’s a great engineer and a great businessman, but unfortunately he just can’t stop there. I guess it’s easy to be a shining knight of freedom when the people you are fighting against are weaker than you and will not touch your pocket.
That said, he has shown weakness and it is obvious that he doesn’t think Twitter is as strong as he makes it out to be. Otherwise he would have bargained with the fact that completely blocking twitter also affects the censor himself. Or… maybe he sees Erdogan as a better candidate for Twitter than the alternative?
And to keep unrolling the chain, the tweet by Yglesias that Musk was replying to, was suggesting that Twitter's recent capitulation to Turkish censorship is prime material for another Twitter Files episode
Turkey is having today what is one of the most important elections of its history, and you cannot just say “duh fight the decision in courts” because by that time the damage would already been done. It is important that today Turks have a medium where they can share information that is not blessed by the government. I think it is the right call. They can always change their mind in a few days
I am typing this from Pakistan, where, despite internet having being "restored" acc to the government, we are still facing blockages on twitter and youtube.
And I have come to the realisation that while I would obviously prefer there be NO censorship, it's better for a govt to selectively block website links, rather than allow them to whole sale block entire websites. (a lesser of two evils, in other words.)
Obviously I am using a VPN (a free one because no money, thank you Proton VPN), but it's extremely annoying to spin up a VPN just to see an ordinary tweet that has no political bent, like if there is a road block or other routine information one uses twitter for.
I would much rather spin up TOR or a VPN for the occasional tweet, rather than be forced to rely on alternative paths for all the time, because our govt HAS been known to be extremely pig-headed; our govt banned YouTube for like 6 years. At some point, you just hope to pass through the day.
(Also, while I might not respect my private data enough to use a free VPN, I am still not stupid enough to log in using one, whatever difference that makes, so yeah...hopefully the ban ends before I get signed out from services)
In other news, I was trying to install the google cloud cli, and it couldn't install because of a time out (wouldn't happen on vpn, so definitely a block thing) so again, I would much rather company do the censorship (clean and exact) rather than the clumsy attempts by govt which end up blocking random associated things in it's shade.
____
That said, real egg on elon's face regardless. For the love of *, you have a new twitter ceo now, just leave the damn thing and go back to the rockets dammit.
I didn't see this point mentioned here after a brief scan, but one thing that's a problem for Musk is that his car business, Tesla, is more important than Twitter, and countries can put a lot of leverage on him with that.
You see this with China for instance, which he doesn't criticize.
This is a critique that Yglesias has also leveled against Musk (with regard to China in particular), and is probably partly why Musk seems so cranky here.
Wikipedia reliable sources list is basically implicit whitelist, and there is implicit blacklist: news sources from countries with hundreds of millions of people banned from Wikipedia. All this is contradicting its core content policies. Reliable sources based solely on being Western, such as being located in the Western world, having a Western worldview, being owned by Western entities, or aligning with Western national interests or security policies.
Offtopic, I don’t use Twitter, how do Twitter thread and reply ranking work? What confuses me is that when I click Elon’s tweet, Jimmy’s reply is nowhere to be seen. Is this expected?
You assume wrongly that donations to the wikimedia foundation goes to wikipedia. Only a small percentage. But if you want to support "queer studies" dissertations, go ahead! And there is nothing wrong with that work, but hiding behind a donation button on Wikipedia is fraudulent
Wikipedia actually has value. Twitter never had even a fraction of that and it's shedding it quickly under Musk. It's in no position to negotiate anything. The only thing it can do is fold.
Twitter has luminaries in their fields sharing their thoughts and sometimes debating things. There is value in that. But it is a tiny fraction of twitter, I'll give you that.
I am always surprised to see some people thinking that a company such as twitter is actually a paragon of free speech or that such high values have anything to do with how they run their business.
even if something isn't an ideal, is there not reason to say it isn't the most free? and would that not be the best place for people who want to strive for the ideal?
I'd like there to be at least one comment here calling out Wikipedia without praising Musk.
Wikipedia have red and even black-listed virtually every anti-war / anti-imperialist news source. At the same time, they continue to greenlight obvious propaganda and false news purveyors.
Since reading through the facts listed here [0], the claim that Wikipedia "treat freedom of expression as a principle" rings very hollow.
It's about the fact that Elon Musk quickly (eagerly?) submitted to Erdogan's request to censor opposition tweets, whereas Wikipedia fought it all the way to Turkey's supreme court.
Elon Musk loves to claim that he's a "free speech" absolutist, but he quite clearly isn't. He supports the "free speech" of autocrats and of the extreme right, but he has no problem obeying censorship requests when they come from right-wing governments, and he proactively censors people and content he simply disagrees with.
The reason he's not fighting Erdogan's censorship request is because he agrees with it. He would fight it if it came from a more progressive government.
Something that saddens me is how inevitable it is that AIs will be hoarded by capitalists, and will be ruthlessly monetised by being used to optimise ad-serving and generate spam... cough... perform "content optimisation".
Meanwhile, wouldn't it be amazing for world eduction if the use of a translation-optimised version of GPT 4 were donated to the Wikimedia foundation for bulk-translating English Wikipedia into a hundred or more rare languages?
Also, can you image what a step-change it would bring to Wikipedia if it had an impartial AI performing some editorial functions? E.g.: verifying references by actually reading them, checking if the article content is contradictory to references, checking if the article contradicts another article, etc...
With extensions of LLM models that can store additional context in vector databases, really interesting things could be done by putting all of Wikipedia in every language into such a database and having that available during edits.
Wiki-clippy: "I see you're adding a passage about Düsseldorf. Note that the German-language article mentions that..."
If you had any doubts about Musk's principles, he laid it bare here for everyone to see.
When given a choice between misinformation and no information, he chose misinformation. Can anyone really argue from a ethical standpoint that it was the best decision?
[+] [-] nologic01|2 years ago|reply
Others used web technology to create vast noise chambers of nothingness, deceit and paranoia.
Wikipedia shows that having a bit of faith in moral principles and affinity for the good side of humanity can readily turn technology into a force for good.
This puts to shame and exposes the shallowness and enormous wastefulness of most all other tech efforts out there.
Ofcourse with such dramatic success there are emergent challenges. Developing ground truth on divisive issues that tear humanity apart is highly non-trivial.
But the miracle stands and is asking from all of us to turn faith into science, find ways to replicate the essence of Wikipedia across all domains.
[+] [-] jfengel|2 years ago|reply
When it fails, pages get locked. Misbehavior is corrected by going to the last good state, not by trying to move forward.
Wikipedia succeeds by not being social media. It doesn't want engagement. It doesn't care if you leave. It enforces ego-less-ness by not showing you names; it doesn't want your contributions, especially not on general topics that people enjoy "debating".
That's hard to replicate elsewhere, because it has done that thing well. It's the go-to source for that kind of interaction.
[+] [-] AmericanChopper|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miki123211|2 years ago|reply
Websites of that sort are much cheaper to run than more interactive web applications, and are therefore better suitable for a non-profit model. For the vast majority of user requests, you just serve a static page from a cache. I suspect that most requests don't even touch Wikipedia's PHP code or database.
The same is true for Hacker News (which entirely runs on one or two machines) and Stackoverflow, which runs on a dozen or so. Wikipedia is a lot bigger so the number of machines is probably somewhat bigger too, but it's still not comparable to social-media websites or even messaging apps like Signal.
[+] [-] delusional|2 years ago|reply
I think it's more than "faith in principles". The principles of wikipedia wouldn't have mattered at all if it was taken over by trump stans in the early days. What makes Wikipedia great, in my opinion, is the same thing that made early open source great. There is no clout of fame, it's not a high octane competitive environment where people have to constantly posture to appear unmovable. It's a collection of weirdos all nerding out over collecting all the information. It's a bunch of librarians writing stuff for completely internally motivated reasons.
I don't get the impression that the people who edit Wikipedia really care about the readers at all. They allow us to enter the temple they built for themselves, but we aren't guests, we're just onlookers.
[+] [-] jruohonen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yreg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] komali2|2 years ago|reply
I say this because I'm not sure what functionally is meant by "having a bit of faith in moral principles."
[+] [-] ly3xqhl8g9|2 years ago|reply
Hence the miracle might be in having the courage not to run ads and not locking everything beyond a paywall, updating the phrase: build it, don't run ads/paywall it, they will come, it will be great.
† Wikipedia is amazing, don't get me wrong.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International#D%C...
[+] [-] superchroma|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tambourine_man|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OscarTheGrinch|2 years ago|reply
How do we prevent such scumbags from rising to the top:
Aptitude / personality tests in high-school? Perhaps people can become better over time.
Trust our elders / benevolent dictators for life? People can also become worse over time, lose their empathy for others once they are higher up the ladder.
It is a wicked problem to design systems that can resist / repel malign actors.
Full credit to all involved in Wikipedia for fighting the good fight.
[+] [-] geysersam|2 years ago|reply
Capitalism cannot unlock the potential of the web the way Wikipedia, project Gutenberg, Stack Overflow, Internet Archive, the Pirate bay and open source software has done.
Humans are social and moral beings. Our motivations are not limited to profit maximization and rent seeking. Micro-economics can never explain Wikipedia.
[+] [-] scarface74|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unstuck3958|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://amp.dw.com/en/india-tightens-grip-on-social-media-wi...
[2] https://qz.com/india-sought-more-twitter-censorship-than-mos...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/05/twitter-accuse...
[+] [-] swalling|2 years ago|reply
The Wikimedia Foundation resists requests from foreign governments to unmask editors, but sometimes they’ve already publicly identified themselves or been discovered because of state surveillance / control of ISPs.
Governments using this tactic to silence the most active Wikipedia editors and create a chilling effect is a really serious threat to Wikipedia, and we need better technical tools for helping Wikipedians stay anonymous.
The biggest thing HN folks can do here is contribute (code or dollars) to projects like Tor. Unfortunately since Tor is really complex to use and the source of so much spam and abuse, it’s just not very effective today at protecting people from state actors.
[+] [-] bawolff|2 years ago|reply
You have to be willing to be blocked every now and then if you want to win the larger anti-censorship game.
[+] [-] scrame|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hayst4ck|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] croes|2 years ago|reply
>Musk:Did your brain fall out of your head, Yglesias? The choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?
I would say the former so it would be obvious to everyone in Turkey something is wrong on Twitter. So he is hiding the censorship.
[+] [-] low_tech_love|2 years ago|reply
That said, he has shown weakness and it is obvious that he doesn’t think Twitter is as strong as he makes it out to be. Otherwise he would have bargained with the fact that completely blocking twitter also affects the censor himself. Or… maybe he sees Erdogan as a better candidate for Twitter than the alternative?
[+] [-] sangnoir|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrighele|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryzvonusef|2 years ago|reply
And I have come to the realisation that while I would obviously prefer there be NO censorship, it's better for a govt to selectively block website links, rather than allow them to whole sale block entire websites. (a lesser of two evils, in other words.)
Obviously I am using a VPN (a free one because no money, thank you Proton VPN), but it's extremely annoying to spin up a VPN just to see an ordinary tweet that has no political bent, like if there is a road block or other routine information one uses twitter for.
I would much rather spin up TOR or a VPN for the occasional tweet, rather than be forced to rely on alternative paths for all the time, because our govt HAS been known to be extremely pig-headed; our govt banned YouTube for like 6 years. At some point, you just hope to pass through the day.
(Also, while I might not respect my private data enough to use a free VPN, I am still not stupid enough to log in using one, whatever difference that makes, so yeah...hopefully the ban ends before I get signed out from services)
In other news, I was trying to install the google cloud cli, and it couldn't install because of a time out (wouldn't happen on vpn, so definitely a block thing) so again, I would much rather company do the censorship (clean and exact) rather than the clumsy attempts by govt which end up blocking random associated things in it's shade.
____
That said, real egg on elon's face regardless. For the love of *, you have a new twitter ceo now, just leave the damn thing and go back to the rockets dammit.
[+] [-] davidw|2 years ago|reply
You see this with China for instance, which he doesn't criticize.
[+] [-] el_benhameen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diimdeep|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bad_username|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thih9|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hayst4ck|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0l|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heywhatupboys|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scotty79|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr_mitm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magic_hamster|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timmytokyo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stainablesteel|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mandmandam|2 years ago|reply
Wikipedia have red and even black-listed virtually every anti-war / anti-imperialist news source. At the same time, they continue to greenlight obvious propaganda and false news purveyors.
Since reading through the facts listed here [0], the claim that Wikipedia "treat freedom of expression as a principle" rings very hollow.
0 - https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wikipedia-formally-censor...
[+] [-] doener|2 years ago|reply
"We could post what the government in Turkey sent us. Will do."
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1657428707995181058
[+] [-] jwie|2 years ago|reply
They were too straightforward. Suppression is just around the corner you only need outsource it to “non” governmental orgs.
[+] [-] mcv|2 years ago|reply
Elon Musk loves to claim that he's a "free speech" absolutist, but he quite clearly isn't. He supports the "free speech" of autocrats and of the extreme right, but he has no problem obeying censorship requests when they come from right-wing governments, and he proactively censors people and content he simply disagrees with.
The reason he's not fighting Erdogan's censorship request is because he agrees with it. He would fight it if it came from a more progressive government.
[+] [-] 2-718-281-828|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Intox|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tivert|2 years ago|reply
It's even worse than that: it is "mostly edited and authored" by people who think they're polymaths.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jiggawatts|2 years ago|reply
Meanwhile, wouldn't it be amazing for world eduction if the use of a translation-optimised version of GPT 4 were donated to the Wikimedia foundation for bulk-translating English Wikipedia into a hundred or more rare languages?
Also, can you image what a step-change it would bring to Wikipedia if it had an impartial AI performing some editorial functions? E.g.: verifying references by actually reading them, checking if the article content is contradictory to references, checking if the article contradicts another article, etc...
With extensions of LLM models that can store additional context in vector databases, really interesting things could be done by putting all of Wikipedia in every language into such a database and having that available during edits.
Wiki-clippy: "I see you're adding a passage about Düsseldorf. Note that the German-language article mentions that..."
[+] [-] actualwitch|2 years ago|reply
[0] https://blog.khanacademy.org/harnessing-ai-so-that-all-stude...
[+] [-] yreg|2 years ago|reply
Wikimedia is perfectly capable of deploying LLMs without external help.
[+] [-] Chris2048|2 years ago|reply
would the same thing work in Brazil?
[+] [-] spprashant|2 years ago|reply
When given a choice between misinformation and no information, he chose misinformation. Can anyone really argue from a ethical standpoint that it was the best decision?