this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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But then again, you could say this about Lemmy and Reddit too.
Lemmy took 5 years to get to this point. Let's give this a few years and see how it turns out.
I am okay with bias in my social media.
Far less so in my encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is hilariously biased, especially on any politics or history topics.
here are extensive lists of complaints of bias, from both left- and right- wing alternatives:
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia
https://www.conservapedia.com/Wikipedia
...are these people writing about the same website?! 😂
They baited you by saying "wikipedia", but then they switched to what looks like the wikia software. Notice how they are from lemmygrad? I hope you get my point.
I can get why that user might have a pro-communist bias themself due to being from a pro-communist instance, but the articles they linked seemed to be an accurate enough representation of how the far left and far right see Wikipedia.
Maybe not completely accurate to how it really is in all aspects, but I don't really care enough about Wikipedia's biases to fact check each contradictory claim in each article. I barely use it as a point of reference anymore anyways. (Though I've found it tends to have a liberal bias, like both the articles stated. I seem to remember that during the past election, some sections of the articles about Trump or featuring him in some way used very emotionally charged language)
But accurate or not, I still find it hilarious to look at the articles side by side. One claims the articles are written mainly by teenagers and the unemployed and supports communism, and the other claims they're written mostly by privileged White men who hate communism.
The question was:
I was pointing out how no, they are not the same website. The name of "Wikipedia" was thus improper as it lacked precision, compared to something like "the wikia software, following the WikiMedia protocols" (or whatever it would be).
The content therefore has nothing whatsoever to do with the question, that was asking about the Wikipedia website.
And btw, none of this bodes well for the project imho. The front-end work is clearly lacking, as OP even admitted, but more importantly all of this discussion lacks the type of "precision" that usually goes into a Wikipedia article. Obviously any person or AI can copy the existing Wikipedia website's content, but if all of this is a reflection of what would go into that copy, then it looks to me like it will quickly fall behind.
I would have been much more likely to have read a blog post to read about the relevant issues relating to communism if it did not try to ride on Wikipedia's coattails and just stood all on its own. But... as you can guess, I would be more of a fan of articles that are precise in the terminology used rather than ones that are all over the place.
And keep in mind that b/c what is being discussed is a "federated" model, ANYONE, who writes with ANY degree of precision, from the highest to the lowest level, will be federated around to everywhere. At which point it will become too difficult to find worthwhile content, as opposed to it being in one central location. The entire point of an encyclopedia is to be a one-stop place to look things up?
Alternative takes on communism would have, imho at least, been more widely distributed if they were written on a blog website and linked to from the actual Wikipedia pages. If the Wikipedia is too restrictive then... I understand why that could not happen, but nevertheless it is still going to be a major impediment. Which is all the more reason why imprecise language, scattered throughout the entire world, does not offer much of a viable alternative to the great Wikipedia? But... prove me wrong, I guess!? :-D