Some days ago I listened to this interview with Larry Sanger: https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-larry-sanger He is obviously very right in all his Wikipedia takes, but the solutions proposed are a waste of time, mostly because they will never be implemented, and it's the wrong focus to try to get the Wikipedia overlords to appease reasonableness, we should be building a decentralized encyclopedia instead. There was one really good proposal, though: he suggested that Wikipedia should allow more than one article for each topic to be created, since there may be different viewpoints about that same topic and it's better to let them speak independently than to try to reconcile them in the same article. That solution suffers from an analogous problem to this: Basically there is no way in practice for a single organization to decide how many articles will be created about each topic and what viewpoints are worth being represented, and then moderate the content inside each different article. A much better solution is to create an ecosystem of articles where anyone can publish, and then the tools for people to curate and point to their preferred ones, such that naturally the different viewpoints will be clustered around some articles curated by individuals with relative trust and no absolute authority. Readers would benefit enormously by being able to navigate between these different viewpoints and judge everything by themselves.
fiatjaf's avatar fiatjaf
This is very true and why the Nostr approach of having multiple servers (and clients talking to many of them simultaneously), each with their own rules and moderation policy, is the only way forward. View quoted note → See also: View quoted note → Bluesky and friends are pushing for a network with a single point-of-failure with regards to moderation, and, as Masnick used to know, that cannot end well.
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I came across a website some time ago that had this approach to articles written on the history / meaning of words. Anyone could submit their response. The name eludes me but it was simple and similar to your suggestion.
Agree, but then again I think wikipedia will loose influence to LLMs anyways 🤔 Maybe different RAG type AIs will sort through all data/articles about a topic and highlight sources it deems relevant for you?
A nostr wiki curated by each individual user’s Grapevine has been on my radar for a long time. For any given topic, Alice and Bob’s communities will probably mostly agree on the list of trusted authors and lists of relevant articles, but from time to time there will be controversial topics on which they may disagree in a big way. That’s just how it’s gotta be if we want to take freedom tech seriously. I wonder who will be the first to integrate @Vitor Pamplona's NIP-85: Trusted Assertions into a wiki? TAs are currently being published by my brainstorm instance at the link Vinney provided — beta testers are welcome!
I can imagine wikifreedia with drop menus for score adjustments and perspectives, from brainstorm in its current state. I could have my own & subscribe to other perspectives that I could apply at my choosing, using distance scores from a valued perspective to look for higher signal contradictions or validations to my own view.
Absolutely 💯 You’ll be able to look at wikis from the perspective of your grapevine, then switch to the perspective of someone else’s grapevine, then switch to the perspective of the list of nostr devs, or the list of people who live in some geographical region, or whatever other list you want - with those lists being curated by your grapevine. This is how it will work.
That solution suffers from an analogous problem to this: it assumes that the existing Wikipedia structure and governance could tolerate a pluralistic approach. In reality, the same centralized editorial culture that enforces a single neutral version would also heavily police which viewpoints are allowed to exist, which would bring us back to square one. Even if multiple articles were technically permitted, the gatekeepers would still decide which perspectives are legitimate and dissenting voices would likely be marginalized or deleted. The deeper issue isn’t the number of articles, it’s the power structure behind who controls the platform. Without decentralization, proposals like this just shift the bottleneck rather than remove it.
There are already multiple articles for each topic, each language represents a culture and a viewpoint, if you jump between languages you can get different visions of a same topic. For example, if you want information about catalan culture, you will get some relevant differences on some entries depending if you read the spanish or the catalan version.