Wikipedia is a problem for Musk/Trump. Not, as Musk says, because it's "woke." Because it's one of our last reliable tethers to a consensus reality. Therefore, an antidote to disinformation.
It's not making anyone money. It's not enshittified. Of course it's not perfect—it's an endeavor of imperfect cooperating humans. But it needs protection and support.
https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-takes-aim-wikipedia-fund-raising-editing-political-woke-2005742
@Konfettispaghetti @ErikJonker @monnier @RonSupportsYou @gleick of course they are always OK when the bias is for them. We are supposed to continue to support the system that is biased for the white men.
Women especially are supposed to provide free labor and support of a system that is for only white men.
We’re not doing that anymore.
@Konfettispaghetti @monnier @RonSupportsYou @gleick Anything can always become worse. Wikipedia itself, or its competitor.
We risk a hard fork of information and science. One for the reactionary right and one for the rest of us.
Can see the basic properties of CO2 being contested, for example. And any scientific breakthroughs made by women and non-whites.
@Konfettispaghetti From an anarchoframe, wikipedia suffers from what all hill orderings suffers from. Those on top cannot possibly govern in the interests of millions.
In the long run, we need to find orderings that enables more spread of power on the web. For instance let schools and libraries be the hubs of the web. We also need to design search engines to optimize for this kind of structure, think search.marginalia.nu.
@Konfettispaghetti @monnier @RonSupportsYou I'm not blind to this problem. I wrote about it a decade ago. It still exists.
@gleick @Konfettispaghetti @monnier @RonSupportsYou
There's an assumption amongst people that the only valid work here is writing new articles. During my time as an ed., I wrote few but tidied many. You rarely need to make controversial decisions or get flack doing this. Many articles will be riddled with things like paragraphs saying the same thing in different ways that need merging. Not to mention typos and the ever present need to provide links for things some think are controversial but dont want to fix themselves.
@Konfettispaghetti in Catalan language we have gender for writer, as for example. the masculine group doesn't accept tags with masculine and feminine word to it... i can't understand why an archivist would not want a tag to classify better.
@cg @monnier @RonSupportsYou @gleick Yeah, the gatekeeping against everyone who is not a cis white guy seems to be really bad in the German one. And the French Wikipedia has (had?) some really bad transphobic crap going on. (Not sure how that ended, I only heard about it from multiple French people on reddit when the Wiki higher ups tried to force a vote against respecting trans people's pronouns or whatever and made absurdly high restrictions for who can participate...)
Support Wikipedia folks, but don't do it blindly and call them out for their bulllshit.
@RonSupportsYou @cg @monnier @gleick I assure you the topics and lists involved in the discussions I know about were not "pages for their spouses" and I'm sure neither were the ones Christoph mentioned. Here is one famous example: https://www.sciencealert.com/in-may-wikipedia-rejected-an-entry-on-a-physics-nobel-laureate-because-she-wasn-t-famous-enough
But sure, just make up a fake argument nobody even brought up to feel good arguing against it, if that makes you happy. :)
Nobel Prize-winning scientist Donna Strickland did not have a Wikipedia page until she became a Nobel laureate, and earlier attempts to write a page for her were rejected because she was not famous enough.
Wikipedia is a problem for Musk/Trump. Not, as Musk says, because it's "woke." Because it's one of our last reliable tethers to a consensus reality. Therefore, an antidote to disinformation. It's not making anyone money. It's not enshittified. Of course it's not perfect—it's an endeavor of imperfect cooperating humans. But it needs protection and support. https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-takes-aim-wikipedia-fund-raising-editing-political-woke-2005742 #wikipedia
It's particularly concerning given the part of Project 2025 that takes aims at non-profits and seeks to give the government the authority to take away a non-profit's status due to "supporting terrorism" which is a term with no meaningful definition associated with it.
So if, for example, conservatives label a human rights movement like BLM "terrorist" and wikipedia simply doesn't host right-wing misinformation about the group the GOP could define that as "support for terrorist groups"
I didn't donate to The Wikipedia for years. Because I wrote so many articles for them and thought that was an unpleasant experience* in some ways and more than enough free labor for me.
But last year I relented and started a donation and this makes me think it was a good idea after all.
It's decent enough and THAT is becoming rare online.
It's the very best of milk for their matrices.
If it's not clear I think it's a good idea to donate to them if:
1. You use it.
2. You can.
3. You care at all if they continue to exist.
Now's a nice moment to start. It will bolster confidence in the face of these public attacks. You can always check in later when the winds shift and stop the donations later.
@futurebird @gleick I really wish I could!
Due to legislative issues in my country, it is not possible for Wikimedia Foundation to collect donations from here.
And we have a right-wing goverment with some Maga-symphatizers in power right now, too.. 😬
That's good. If they can get a boost in donations they could pad that a little more. It's nice that their finances are transparent, isn't it?
That's a decent endowment but not as much as it seems for one of the most popular websites on the internet in the whole world.
You've brought this up before, but I do not agree that we don't need to worry about the first and most common source that people use globally.
I don't think we should be that naive.
Right, people get salty about six figure salaries and the obscene reality is that that’s logarithmically closer to the poverty line than the income of most Fortune 500 CEOs.
I'm all for finding someone to do the job for maybe a third less. That's part of the oversight they live with and that's good.
Too many things have no such oversight.
Think of a 22 million dollar salary, and that dwarfed by stock options and who knows what else self dealing.
Why does the CEO need that much money at all. It's a non-profit (or supposed to be) that's money that can go back into the project. No Wikipedia DOES NOT need to beg for donations so the CEO can pay for his luxuries.
Florian
James Gleick
RonSupportsYou
Stefan Monnier
Parami
Konfetti 🎉🐳
Jurarigo
Erik Jonker
Maggie Maybe
saudonym
Björn
Social Justice Warrior🦍
Solar🌄Garden
ona [she/they]
Christoph G.
Sirana
Tjohnmax
Hannah Clover
HistoPol (#HP) 🏴 🇺🇸 🏴
Dark Phoenix 🇺🇦🇨🇦🇬🇱🇵🇦🇵🇸🏳️🌈
Kid Mania
contrasocial
AskPippa🇨🇦
myrmepropagandist
Supergrobi
Tim Richards
Jay
cobalt going beige today
Peter Brown
Toni Aittoniemi
Martin Rust
Jonathan Kamens 86 47
Michael Bacon
JM MD PhD
Simon Brooke
Maverynthia🌱