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I loved Wikipedia.
If you ask me the greatest achievement of humankind, something to give to aliens as an example of the best we could be, Wikipedia would be my pick. It's a reasonable approximation of the sum total of human knowledge, available to all for free. It's a Wonder of the Modern World.
...which means that when I call what's happened to it "sacrilege", I'm not exaggerating. It always had a bit of a bias issue, but early on that seemed fixable, the mere result of not enough conservatives being there and/or some of their ideas being objectively false. No longer. Rightists are actively purged*, adding conservative-media sources gets you auto-reverted**, and right-coded ideas get lumped into "misinformation" articles. This shining beacon is smothered and perverted by its use as a club in the culture wars.
I don't know what to do about this. @The_Nybbler talks a lot about how the long march through the institutions won't work a second time; I might disagree with him in the general case, but in this specific instance I agree that Wikipedia's bureaucratic setup and independence from government make it extremely hard to change things from either below or above, and as noted it has gone to the extreme of having an outright ideological banning policy* which makes any form of organic change even harder. All I've done myself is quit making edits - something something, not perpetuating a corrupt system - and taken it off my homepage. But it's something I've been very upset about for a long time now, and I thought I'd share.
*Yes, I know it's not an official policy. I also know it's been cited by admins as cause for permabans, which makes that ring rather hollow.
**NB: I've seen someone refuse to include something on the grounds of (paraphrasing) "only conservatives thought this was newsworthy, and therefore there are no Reliable Sources to support the content".
Wikipedia will soon eat its own in a purity spiral.
People always remember that the left takes over organizations, but they forget what happens afterwards. They become the victims of their own successful take over. The information isn't as good. The place isn't as fun. A group of people that live off of being victims must find an oppressor.
Scott Alexander already had to go through a minor version of this with the NYT article. The article talked to an admin of wikipedia that had things to say about Scott Alexander, the NYT repeated those allegations, that wikipedia admin then went and edited the article about Scott to effectively cite himself saying things about Scott.
They barely turned it over when this bullshit became known within the wiki community. And the admin that did it? No punishments, no loss of admin status, not even a slap on the wrist as far as I know.
Scott is a heterodox leftist for the online world. But he is still very much a leftist in the real world compared to real voters. He is to the left of about 90-99% of the country on most issues.
They'll keep purging until it starts falling apart, and then they'll beg for and likely receive government funding to stay afloat.
So they'll eat their own, but then continue to operate mostly the same?
No, it won't operate mostly the same. New topics will be crappier and crappier.
There will be a point where (if its not there already) where people talk about 20XX wikipedia, and how it was so much than today's. And if you see an article edit after 20XX just ignore the edit and read the old stuff.
Wikipedia will trade on the remnants of their old reputation to gain funding.
Okay, but I guess the question is how crappy it can get before there is a viable alternative.
I think ChatGPT is rapidly becoming that alternative. Its politicization is probably the most important front in the culture war right now.
I think the pithy, obvious answer is likely the correct one: "The limit does not exist."
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Same way we use Google by appending Reddit to filter out SEO crap.
Someone will develop a tool that defaults Wikipedia to pre 20XX and those of us in the know will have a knowledge boost over the average none-tech informed person.
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Reminds me of the site we recently left...
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