the_last_pigeon
shiggy
it's look who it is
User ID: 62
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Not sure that Jan 6 impacted the Jan 5 runoffs too much, although I like the rest of your analysis.
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.
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
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.
Can you substantiate that claim about Fetterman's mental health? I think it's more likely that his mental capacity will be fine by next January and it's just his speech and hearing that look bad.
The Vice President of the Confederate States of America (via Wikipedia):
Our new government['s]...foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
Historian William C. Davis (Look Away pp. 97-98 via Wikipedia):
To the old Union they had said that the Federal power had no authority to interfere with slavery issues in a state. To their new nation they would declare that the state had no power to interfere with a federal protection of slavery. Of all the many testimonials to the fact that slavery, and not states' rights, really lay at the heart of their movement, this was the most eloquent of all.
I won't tell you Northerners fought "to free slaves" because that's as obviously wrong to me as it is to you. It's easy to reconcile the seeming inconsistency in Mr. Lincoln's thinking: the South seceded to preserve slavery, and the North took up arms in reaction. Perhaps the North didn't care about slavery, but that doesn't matter in evaluating the South's cause.
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
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.
Twitter dies for good in the next six months: 80% probability
By now you know that Elon gave staff a deadline of today (Thursday) to either commit to being "extremely hardcore" or leave (source). Unsurprisingly, most people - roughly 75%, according to some Internet rando - didn't take him up on this. Elon blinked and apparently people still have access.
That won't do much (WaPo):
“I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers,” a former employee said. "There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.”
But that's not even what I was going to write about, just what happened while I was composing the post. (Also let's put aside that he said "microservices are bloat" and then they killed the microservice serving SMS 2-factor login.)
To me, the biggest news is that he axed 80% of the 5500 contractors (source, Casey Newton, or someone with a premium account impersonating him I guess).
The contractors were responsible for things like moderation (source: what are they gonna do, use salaried employees?). If you don't have moderation for basic things like CSAM, you're boned. I know a thing or two about moderation, and if you let the Internet type into a text field, you get some dank shit. And crucially, you can't automate it away, because there's a human on the other side working to defeat whatever you're doing. I mean, the YouTube comment section probably has some of the most expensive automation on the planet working on it and the spam still gets worse every day, and I'm talking the obvious stuff like "HIT ME UP ON TELEGRAM <number>". The only thing that saves you is humans clicking buttons (and getting PTSD, but let's skip that for now). Google had 101k employees but 121k contractors as of March 2019, and that's what the contractors do, click buttons.
If you don't have moderation, you don't get the YouTube comments section, because they at least have contractors backed up by code (at the cost of many expensive engineer-years). You don't even get 4chan, because they at least have Those Who Do It For Free. You get some ungodly shithole most younger Internet users have never experienced. You're getting... the virtual equivalent of your local Greyhound terminal. Whatever happens to someone's chat room side project that gets posted to /b/. Sludge.
Twitter will have to either restrict posting to an unbearable degree or watch as the remaining users get tired of slurs in their replies and bounce.
Remember when Elon was just going to clean up the bots on Twitter?
(Reason for posting: I saw some takes elsewhere on this site that apparently Musk would lead Twitter to success or at least improve it or something, and disagreed.)
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".
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.
Other platforms won't feel the need to pay for Twitter traffic, because they don't depend on it. What this change will do is enrage users who find it useful or even financially necessary to link to other platforms.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Right, there had already been a considerable amount of circus.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Desire to vote and political knowledge are spectrums and, I'd assume, correlated. Everyone above a certain level of desire to vote does so. Get-out-the-vote efforts lower the level. Thus I'd figure the resulting voters are not going to vote at random, because their level of political knowledge is better than that; you'd have to reach pretty amazing levels of turnout before you hit people with little enough knowledge to vote randomly or otherwise in a hideously misinformed fashion.
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.
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
Some fella blames candidate quality:
To me, the most interesting dimension of the poll: Dems running an avg of 8 points ahead of Senate control preference (R+4 on average). Illustrates key dynamic of the race -- a favorable environment for Rs v. bad candidates -- and helps square with the national picture
The poll results in question (Oct. 2022 Times/Siena): percentage-wise, "which party should control the senate" is more Republican, but "which candidate am I voting for in my election" is more Democratic.
Not saying that's the explanation, but it's an explanation.
OK, so what's your solution to Jews being overrepresented in these institutions, assuming you think it's a problem? Actually, why do you think it's a problem? I would make this comment more high-effort by guessing answers to those questions but I don't think I have a good enough mental model to be using it for that yet.
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
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.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
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.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
8mo ago
The contention is that he knew he lost, and despite that he did all of the above. I don't personally know whether that's true, but the prosecutor thinks he can prove it.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Preliminary: I'm assuming (this being a gender discussion) that by "options other than traditional families", you mean gay/lesbian/trans parents, not single-parent households, which are obviously fucked.
Trans parents may be at higher risk of suicide, but that's covered by "let's not have parents who are suicide risks", and not related to them being trans specifically.
So we're left with "gay/lesbian/trans-not-a-suicide-risk parents". I claim they're just as fine. I offer two citations from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LGBT_parenting&oldid=1126262442#Research: this Australian Psychological Society literature review that cites a shitload of papers, and this amici in Obergefell. I find it unlikely that all of the papers cited therein are shit, but happy to spot-check a few.
Anyway, you also say the stigma is justified due to them being annoying. I am unaware of any ethical system that supports stigmatizing people because you find them annoying. Stigmatizing someone clearly does them more harm than any amount of "whining" could balance out. What's wrong with stigmatizing whining itself? Whining is pretty annoying. Also, you don't have to listen to them!
Moreover, I concur with @drmanhattan16 that you have no evidence that they have to whine. It is not an analytic truth. So, you have to demonstrate that there's something innate to the collective existence of non-traditional families that creates whining. I can't see any. But that's besides the point, because I've already established that whining isn't severe enough to justify stigmatizing them.
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.
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:
generally reliable
no consensus (= "we couldn't decide")
generally unreliable (= "usually don't use")
deprecated (= "never use")
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.
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