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102 sats \ 1 reply \ @south_korea_ln 30 Sep \ on: Nine Theses on Wikipedia - Larry Sanger hyperlinks
Enable competing articles.
Neutrality is impossible to practice, if editors refuse to compromise—-and Wikipedia is now led by such uncompromising editors. As a result, a favored perspective has emerged: the narrow perspective of the Western ruling class, one that is “globalist,” academic, secular, and progressive (GASP). In fact, Wikipedia admits to a systemic bias, and other common views are marginalized, misrepresented, or excluded entirely. The problem is that genuine neutrality is impossible when one perspective enjoys such a monopoly on editorial legitimacy. I propose a natural solution: Wikipedia should permit multiple, competing articles written within explicitly declared frameworks, each aiming at neutrality within its own framework. That is how Wikipedia can become a genuinely open, global project.
(emphasis mine)
I like this proposal a lot. It'll be hard to define those frameworks other than within the limited scope of US-style left and right (then again, this binary thinking seems to start infecting the rest of the Western world, so maybe it's more representative than I want to admit), but it may be a good start. Or just allow for a continuum of frameworks, without actually trying to define each of them. Just plenty of articles in parallel on the same topic.
I only use Wikipedia for technical topics that are not too controversial, so this will probably not affect my personal use of the platform. But anything that can keep this amazing project alive, with wider support from people with different ideologies, I support it
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102 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 30 Sep
The trouble I have with Wikipedia is that their systems do not align with the WMF vision:
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.
and mission
The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.
For this vision to become real, you need much different software, that can have multiple concurrent subjective truths and not bias towards a single one (how else can one freely share. Also note how the mission statement doesn't include every single human being, but people.
I doubt that they really thought that vision through though, it sounds like a compromise where there is a hidden definition of every single human being and the sum of all knowledge that perhaps WMF themselves don't consciously have clear, and thus gives a lot of leeway in moderation.
Furthermore, I think that the vision is impossible, because the sum of all knowledge may very well include things judged by courts as slander and "hate speech", which they cannot host as long as they aren't fully decentralized without any legal entity.
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