the_last_pigeon
shiggy
it's look who it is
User ID: 62
It should not remain online. Several communities I'm in have people with KF threads on them, and having a thread dedicated to you is a pretty poor experience. The culture of KF is sick and malicious (citation: suicide counter).
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Not a bug or suggestion, just being thankful - being able to view precise upvote/downvote numbers, and thread-view numbers, is a big quality-of-life improvement.
I appreciate the forecast and explanation. I disagree with removing votes, but only weakly. Votes reflect (among other things, and poorly) the effort level of a post, and thus showing higher-voted comments first improves the reading experience of the site. Votes aren't necessary for an echo chamber: ideological conformity can be enforced with social pressure (by getting lots of disagreeing replies). Without votes, we'd rely on mods more heavily to police low-effort comments. (Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, I suppose. Informally, most votes on the current CW thread look like the sort of votes you're trying to avoid.)
Other sites have various technical bodges that I hope might suffice instead of removing votes entirely. Hacker News and Lobste.rs require a fair amount of karma (500 for HN) to unlock downvotes, and Lobste.rs requires reasons to be selected from a menu for downvotes on posts. Furthermore, HN prevents you from downvoting direct replies to your comments or comments more than 24 hours old, and has a minimum score of -4 (beyond which downvotes don't change the score). Slashdot's M2 system offers a different route, perhaps one far too baroque for current Internet users. For an even wilder idea, maybe we could cap comment scores at +1/-1, and have all scores start at 0? Anyway, I think, but can't justify, that voting and tree structure go hand-in-hand, and I worry about removing one but not the other.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Yeah, the pipeline's going to be tricky.
I support crosslinking. Prior art for that would be the weird "imageboard federation" of ~2019 involving, say, https://trashchan.xyz/boards.html (sorry for blowing up the spot?). We could try finding friendly Lemmy instances, although that might be tough.
The Vault is good. Maybe it should come with a cover page linking directly to some of the more accessible/popular ones?
We could try more traditional things like having events or competitions, or other easy on-ramps into the community. That would pair with analyzing existing larger communities we could advertise in. Just like (he said, perhaps descending into self-parody) some scientist once said there's a farmer somewhere in Africa who would do his job twice as well, there are definitely people on Facebook (or even more cursed and corporate venues, like the clocksite) who have no idea any of this exists but would be better contributors and participants than me. The fun part is getting them here.
Wikipedia is deciding whether to discourage use of Fox News as a source in articles specifically for politics and science. As usual, please do not comment there unless you know your way around a Wikipedia discussion and can participate while following community standards.
In context: Wikipedia periodically holds discussions about the reliability of sources. It has a five-level ranking system for sources:
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generally reliable
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no consensus (= "we couldn't decide")
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generally unreliable (= "usually don't use")
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deprecated (= "never use")
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blacklisted (= "never use", enforced in the wiki software)
The current discussion is about Fox News when it talks about the two topics of politics and science - for those topics, it is currently listed as "no consensus". For other topics, it is "generally reliable", and that status is not up for discussion here. Fox's talk shows are also listed separately as "deprecated" (= "never use"), and that status is also not up for discussion. There are 23 prior discussions listed about the reliability of Fox News for politics and science, starting in 2009 (although there may be more). This is the latest one.
Why this is relevant here: Wikipedia is a widely-used reference on the Internet (top ten websites globally, by number of visits) and Fox News is a well-known news source. The debate on whether Fox News is a reliable source for science and politics is thus likely to be of interest on this website.
Moving to the discussion itself: many points were raised of varying quality. There's quite a bit of back-and-forth and it's certainly not one-sided.
My take: while Fox is certainly useful for presenting facts that other sources don't, it's made factually incorrect claims that remain uncorrected. Those would make it difficult to use as the only source for a claim, and if you can't do that, what's the point. It can still be used for research while writing articles, like every other website on the Internet. As for the incorrect claims, various editors compiled lists of these; here's an 18-item list. I checked a few. Some were weak; some were worrying. For example, item 10 quotes from this Fox article: "PolitiFact appears to be shielding President Biden and Vice President Harris from criticism over their past rhetoric expressing distrust in the coronavirus vaccine during the Trump administration". Here's the PolitiFact page. It shows that "expressing distrust in the coronavirus vaccine during the Trump administration" is a misleading construction: Biden and Harris repeatedly emphasize that they would take a vaccine approved by public health professionals, but would not trust the sole word of Trump. Fox phrases it as during the administration, they expressed distrust in the vaccine, in general, but this is simply not what they did. Why that's bad: one could write a sentence in an article with that claim, and cite it to the Fox article, and that would be incorrect. The Fox article was published July 2021 and has not been corrected.
My take, part 2: The optics might not be great, but at least Fox still counts as reliable for everything but politics and science. I don't think they're managing the optics enough. Of course, it's a decentralized and anti-hierarchical community, so the odds they'd organically do something like that are low.
Where we go from here: Editors are requesting that the discussion be "closed" by a neutral third-party editor (or panel of such editors), and that may happen sometime soon. Editors are still adding comments to the main discussion in the meantime. The "close" can be appealed to the community, but if the closer does a decent job this is unlikely.
My credentials: I've edited Wikipedia for a while. I usually don't touch the politics side much.
Anyone can start one of these discussions about a source at any time, although in practice you have to gauge community mood at least a little. The key question here is whether you can pick a sentence from an article within the given topic and be confident that it's factually correct, and that's what's being questioned for Fox's politics articles.
If someone managed to put together a big list for, say, the NYT, I'd like to see it and I'm sure the community would like to see it. I agree without reservations that all major news sources should be subject to the same level of scrutiny.
For what it's worth: BuzzFeed currently has the same "no consensus" rating as Fox, although honestly on the strength of far less well-attended discussions.
For what it's worth, part 2: A discussion on MSNBC was launched after the last big Fox News discussion, but nobody put in the same amount of effort to find instances of inaccuracies (only one person posted, and they posted a mistake in a headline, and it is known that headlines aren't written by the article authors and are thus junk - see WP:HEADLINE). Thus the discussion reaffirmed that MSNBC is unusable for opinion pieces, as all opinion pieces are, and is generally reliable most other times, with the caveat that they don't even have written reporting on their news site so it's a bit of a strange discussion to have. (They have lots of blogs, though, which are all not suitable for use by policy.) If someone came up with a similar list for another major news outlet, I'd expect it to be taken seriously. I can't immediately find any examples of someone dropping a large list in an RfC on a "famous" left-wing source, but there's plenty to look through on the main "source reliability" list.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
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Various imageboards. There are a ton. There are a group of federated imageboards indexed here that I don't browse but could be fun. Can't say much for the quality of discussion. I'm on /a/ and occasionally /n/. It's fun if you tune out ~80% of the stuff. Also the idea behind https://iro2.net/ has potential but the people are sorta trashy. At least you can quote in purple by putting the < the other way.
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IRC. See https://old.reddit.com/r/irc/comments/wipxz1/support_established_networks/.
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Private Discord servers. Just lurk /a/ for long enough.
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A couple of pretty active forums for special interests of mine: https://forums.puri.sm/ and https://www.chiefdelphi.com/.
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Hacker News and Lobsters. Although if anyone knows of smaller similar sites, let me know.
While I can appreciate where you're coming from, by no means can the linked discussion be described as having a monolithic point of view. It would look very different if Wikipedia's community were as polarized as you suggest.
And the easiest way to fix any other issues you see is to do it yourself or convince someone to. I would like to make a standing offer to anyone reading this, that I will coach you through fixing any "political lean" problem of the sort you're alluding to. (Of course, a writeup should get posted here during/afterwards.)
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
I wasn't around for GamerGate, so while I find that assertion highly plausible, I'd prefer to see an example linked here.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Would you like to work together to improve that article? I would enjoy seeing a "bunch of admins" get in the way. Let's start a new post for it, though. I hope our overlords would be OK with that, as it is sort of culture-war.
Knowingly using sources that are lying is straightforwardly stupid and I'd hope that both (1) no actual Wikipedia policy can be construed that way, and (2) no discussion has concluded that way. What you linked is an unofficial and unsanctioned interpretation of policy. From the box at the top:
This is an essay.... This page is not... one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.
I suppose that's on us, for bad signage. I'll certainly never argue that we're good at user interfaces :)
That said, a common criticism of Wikipedia is how it relies on existing sources rather than "the truth". This is an entirely valid criticism. It is a correct interpretation of policy that, as your essay says, Wikipedia would have advocated for a geocentric universe if it had existed back in the days when that was the mainstream viewpoint. In a sense, that's how it has to be. People fighting over truth itself doesn't make for a good encyclopedia, because verification of the results is many times harder.
See the full list of sources. Not only are all right-wing sources not listed fair game (even politically biased sources are explicitly allowed, see WP:PARTISAN), non-left-wing sources on that list listed as "generally reliable" include Reason, the WSJ, Deseret News, Financial Times, and Religion News Service. Non-left-wing sources listed as "no consensus", meaning they're usable based on context, include The Washington Times, The American Conservative, Washington Examiner, the Cato Institute, and National Review.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Time and effort estimate: not gonna sugarcoat it, probably high. Kiwi Farms is probably the single worst possible article to do this sort of experiment on, because it's on perhaps the single most poisoned and low-trust topic area on the website. Every Kiwi Farms user (dunno the demonym, don't care) from here to Sunday has probably had a go at the article at some point. I'm gonna say the best time to work on this article is not now. Maybe in a year. Happy to stick to the relatively calm (ha, ha) waters of American politics.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
That discussion ended in your desired outcome with the contested sentence being removed. The current text of the article (can't bother to check how long it's been there, but this is the tool you would use for that):
In filings made with the SEC in March 2018, Gab stated that its target market is "conservative, libertarian, nationalists, and populist internet users around the world" "who are seeking alternative news media platforms like Breitbart.com, DrudgeReport.com, Infowars.com".
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
I imagine there would be community support for such a proposal because those discussions are exhausting for everyone.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
I would be happy to specifically nix CNN talk shows in the same way that we already nix Fox talk shows and all opinion content in any medium (see WP:NEWSOPED, WP:NOROPED - parse, respectively as "NEWS section on OP-EDs" and "No Original Research section on OP-EDs").
For the other two, headlines have been banned for a while (WP:HEADLINE), and I'd imagine the bodies are more careful with their claims.
I would, in fact, love to see a list of claims for your preferred left-wing source (assuming the left-wing source is marked "generally reliable" on the big list). I'm sure one has been compiled somewhere already, but not in any of the few discussions on left-wing sources I spot-checked.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Any chance we could get "custom JS" in addition to the "custom CSS" tab on the site? Would be useful for doing personal interface improvements and such.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Context matters tremendously when determining the reliability of sources, and their appropriate use on Wikipedia. Sources which are generally unreliable may still be useful in some situations. For example, even extremely low-quality sources, such as social media, may sometimes be used as self-published sources for routine information about the subjects themselves. Conversely, some otherwise high-quality sources may not be reliable for highly technical subjects that fall well outside their normal areas of expertise, and even very high-quality sources may occasionally make errors, or retract pieces they have published in their entirety. Even considering content published by a single source, some may represent high-quality professional journalism, while other content may be merely opinion pieces, which mainly represent the personal views of the author, and depend on the author's personal reliability as a source. Be especially careful with sponsored content, because while it is usually unreliable as a source, it is designed to appear otherwise.
Consider also the weight of the claims you are supporting, which should be evaluated alongside the reliability of the sources cited. Mundane, uncontroversial details have the lowest burden of proof, while information related to biomedicine and living persons have the highest.
Like you, I wish the average Wikipedia editor cared more about those rules.
Even the existence of the list itself is controversial in the community, precisely for the reason you articulate: that it tempts people towards a simpler system that does damage when applied in the real world.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
While generally true, external temporary factors are in play from time to time, and in this case Kiwi Farms is both a current-ish news event as well as the target of some of the most dedicated trolls on the Internet.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Thank you for the kind words. I hope to stick around and post about "non-CW CW" topics here more in the future.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Would you not agree that "I'm going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE" merits a stronger noun than "criticism"? Perhaps "hatred"?
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Economically: There's a lot of money based on his personal brand, and he just dramatically reduced the value of the latter. I find it reasonable that the market would react accordingly.
Practically: "I'm going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE" (henceforth, "his words") aren't acceptable to - rough approximation - anyone, and he hasn't issued retractions or showed signs of backing down in any way (which would have been nice, I do like his music). The straightforward conclusion is thus that anyone would stop associating with him. Which includes people with a lot of money and power. Hence the reaction.
Morally: To misquote an old guy, his words lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value, so I don't know what he was expecting.
Regarding your "old 4chan trick": as a preamble, the fact that it's called an "old 4chan trick" tells me all I need to know about whether the people behind it were genuinely interested in collaboratively discovering truth through discussion (hint: hahaha; and to follow the rule on speaking plainly: not at all). Anyway:
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if white people had been persecuted since before the first Crusades in 1096, yes, I think the reaction might be similar
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if you go through Wikipedia on "Racism against Black Americans" and switch "black" and "white", and if the resulting text were historical fact, yes, if we lived in that world then again the reaction might be similar.
But we don't live in either of those two alternate realities.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
I must admit I'm not seeing the distinction, if you're intending any, between market response, market forces, market cost, etc.
What I mean to say is if someone says "I'm going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE", this will piss people off, and they'll stop doing business with that person. Which part of that do you think should not be happening?
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
It's a shame we don't have a way to see what the median person thinks about this (it's all just elite shunning and op-eds right now)
I would find it obvious that the median person agrees with the "elite shunning and op-eds". Can you explain the thought process that would lead a "median person" to a different conclusion?
As others have said, if Uber solves self-driving, that would also deliver most of the benefits of this proposal. Beyond that, you're putting roads in tunnels to use the surface more efficiently, which makes economic sense in some cases but not always.
There's the capacity thing too. I did some pencil math. The best subway lines in NYC run every three minutes. Each train carries about 1500 people, making it 30k people per hour. Meanwhile, the average highway carries 2000 cars per hour per lane. Assuming 1.2 people per car, you'd need 30k/(1.2*2000) = 12.5 lanes for the same capacity. (Did a little searching, most sources end up at about 10-15 for the number of lanes.) There's no room for 12.5 extra lanes under the streets of Manhattan, nor would any city planner opt for them unless the surface was extremely valuable.
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