Wikipedia Unveils 'Code Of Conduct' To Stem Misinformation (yahoo.com) 100
Wikipedia on Tuesday unveiled a "universal code of conduct" aimed at stemming abuse, misinformation and manipulation on the global online encyclopedia. From a report: The new code was released by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that administers Wikipedia, expanding on its existing policies to create a set of community standards to combat "negative behavior," according to a statement. The new policy aims to thwart efforts to distort and manipulate content on Wikipedia, the largest online encyclopedia which is managed largely by volunteers using "crowdsourced" information. "Our new universal code of conduct was developed for the new internet era, on the premise that we want our contributor communities to be positive, safe and healthy environments for everyone involved," said Katherine Maher, chief executive of the foundation.
"This code will be a binding document for anyone that participates in our projects providing a consistent enforcement process for dealing with harassment, abuse of power and deliberate attempts to manipulate facts." The 1,600-word code was developed with input from some 1,500 Wikipedia volunteers representing five continents and 30 languages, and includes clear definitions of harassment and unacceptable behavior. The code includes language aimed at preventing the abuse of power and influence to intimidate others, and the deliberate introduction of false or inaccurate content.
"This code will be a binding document for anyone that participates in our projects providing a consistent enforcement process for dealing with harassment, abuse of power and deliberate attempts to manipulate facts." The 1,600-word code was developed with input from some 1,500 Wikipedia volunteers representing five continents and 30 languages, and includes clear definitions of harassment and unacceptable behavior. The code includes language aimed at preventing the abuse of power and influence to intimidate others, and the deliberate introduction of false or inaccurate content.
So . . . (Score:1, Troll)
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Remember when the Gamergate article was repeatedly puppyguarded and filled with sources that were relying on hearsay and completely unverifiable accusa- oh wait it still is.
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Re:So . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Feelings ARE facts, to an increasing and increasingly loud minority. They don't understand the concept of "subjective truth".
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Feelings ARE facts, to an increasing and increasingly loud minority.
Are they minority? There must be something in the water, but this seems to be the worldview for an overwhelming majority of under-25.
Re: So . . . (Score:3)
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You mean objective truth right? (Score:3)
One interesting thing is that falsehood is easier to detect/verify than truth, which is elusive and controversial, and subject to disagreements on emphasis, because all stated truths (models of the world) leave stuff out necessarily.
The basic reason why it's easier to detect falsehood is that there are so many different ways to be false (different ways in which your stated model of the world differs from reality), including a whole bunch of obvious mechanisms of falsehood like
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The basic reason why it's easier to detect falsehood is that there are so many different ways to be false [...] including a whole bunch of obvious mechanisms of falsehood like logical fallacies,
That an argument is fallacious tells us absolutely NOTHING about the truth of the conclusion.
Take this very bad argument:
p1. Neil Armstrong can walk :. Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
p2. Neil Armstrong was on the moon
The argument I made is obviously fallacious. Does my bad argument mean that Neil Armstrong didn't walk on the moon? Of course not! In fact, every statement made in the argument is true.
The point: "Logical fallacy" doesn't "detect falsehood".
I understand that you're trying to help, but
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Please, leave formal logic to those of us with a formal education.
The vast majority of people championing corporate control of information have formal educations. People with formal educations wring their hands over climate change then hop on planes to Europe. People with formal educations claim there are 5,000 genders, and think increased immigration will result in higher wages for the working class.
No offense, but the riff-raff aren’t all that impressed with your formal educations.
Not to mention,
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Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence (or must be based on logically valid inference from claims supported by extraordinary evidence.)
Even mundane but extremely particular claims ("This person was here then, or this person did this because that" etc.) require some kind of valid evidence chain, which may include some valid logical inference in some parts of the chain for which there are not direct uncontroversial ob
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As it seems to have escaped you, the point (about fallacious arguments) is this: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
You should read your comment again. You say absolutely nothing of the sort.
Even mundane but extremely particular claims [...] require some kind of valid evidence chain
By some miracle, Kuhn and Popper never came up in your "education"? You write below:
and my education in formal logic, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, [...] is just fine, thanks.
Given your posts here, I can only assume that your "education" consisted entirely of reading internet forums and wikipedia. Your posts here have made that abundantly clear to those of us with an actual education.
I'm not trying to look down on you here. I'm telling you that you're working against your own cause. You don't do "science" any favors
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It almost seems you're advocating some kind of post-modern "whatever anyone says is valid cause they're a valuable human being" with a tinge of "don't hurt any body's feelings just to demonstrated your prowess with logic" political correctness thrown in.
But it's a little hard to decipher your point I have to admit. It's clear some t
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ok I finally read your manifesto.
It's not mine, and it's not a manifesto.
I can't really tell where you're coming from at all.
I've explained that. You're working against your own interests by spreading nonsense. You didn't seen to realize that, so I pointed it out. It looks like I've wasted my time.
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Things that would increase that doubt would be
1) uncovering of interest-ties (benefits to various parties) to having people believe the assertion.
2) Argumentation
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I don't think there's anything particularly nonsensical about what I've said here.
That's the problem.
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The only one who cares about this is you. I made the only point I wanted to make in my first reply here.
I have absolutely no idea what you want to accomplish with all this. What did you hope would happen?
Let it go, dude. You wrote something dumb. It happens to everyone. Take your lumps and move on. Harping on it doesn't make you look any better.
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No, I do mean subjective truth. What is true for you doesn't have to be true for me.
For example, the wavelength of a light source is an objective truth or fact. But the color we perceive is a subjective truth - it is subjective and can be different for different people, but it is a fact as well, it's not something that would depend on our mood or we could conciously control. We perceive it as an external truth, but it is actually subjective.
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I believe the bigger problem is that they don't recognize that there are some (fairly) objective truths too, like if you jump off that cliff (just you) you will certainly fall, or if you increase the CO2 and methane concentration in the atmosphere, the amount of absorption and reflection of radiation of various frequencies will change, and the Earth system will certainly heat up.
Also, given that we have very similar neural nets and hardware, and very similar optical sensors and
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the chances are high that those of us without colour-sensitive cell differences see colours as pretty much the same.
Interestingly, that is not the case. Men and women already have differences in colour perception, and along the edge cases, e.g. when blue turns into green on the spectrum, the point where a person says "this is more blue than green" vs. "this is more green than blue" shifts measurably between individuals.
Yes, most people will agree that RGB(1,0,0) is red. But that's the trivial case.
Re: So . . . (Score:3, Interesting)
You guys seriously need to look into how the brain works.
1. Most of the brain cannot tell imagined things from real things. (Proof: If you imagine eating a lemon rare enough, your mouth will water. Ditto for sexual feelings.)
2. Feeligs are actually really the basis or all logic and reason. (The secret is that it shouls not stop there.) Every rational thought starts with a feeling. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio can tell you all about it. (There are speeches on YouTube.)
2b. Since our brain's logic is fuzzy,
I forgot: (Score:2)
4. The brain is literally a bias machine. That is all it does and all it can do. (That's what tose weights in an artificial neural net are for.)
Neutrality would mean zero processing. And that is only possible if it never even entered your senses.
We just call that "neutral", which affirms what we already think.
Oh, and bonus fun fact: Mos of your childhood memories never happened.
Yes, *something* happened. But each instance of remebering it, re-processes it, adding bias based on everything related that you ex
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You guys seriously need to look into how the brain works.
Many of us did, that's how nerds function.
2. Feeligs are actually really the basis or all logic and reason.
That's wrong. Kahneman and Tversky et al. System One and System Two. What's true is that they are not strictly seperated in the brain and influence each other.
Since our brain's logic is fuzzy, we all decide, based on almost completely incomplete information. How would you even get out of bed otherwise, if you first had to have a peer-reviewed six sigma double-blind study if your feet will not fall through the floor?
System One - our system of fast decision making based on habits, intuition, shortcuts and heuristics.
3. Almost all of what you know is hearsay. Hell, even if you read a study... what more than somebody telling you something is that? It's not like you and me verified that wone dies if one jumps off a skyscraper. ;)
A lot of what we read we can check against experiences and extrapolate. We know that it hurts if you fall, and the further you fall the more it hurts. It's obvious that if you fall too far you will die. The int
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It comes down to 'if you want to believe it, you are more likely to believe it.'.
That's why George C. Parker was able to 'sell' the Brooklyn Bridge, and Nigerian princes are able to get so much 'help', and cult leaders are able to convince their followers that aliens will be transporting them to Eden.
Not everybody will fall for the con, but there are plenty who want to believe.
Re:So . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
Duh, engaging in wrong think will get you unpersoned obviously. Just read your narrative pamphlet so you provide discourse that is inline with the agenda.
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Are you a racist?
Have you stopped beating your wife?
Does this apply to self appointed gate keepers. (Score:4, Interesting)
Or did someone's feelings get hurt again?
There is no perfect solution. (Score:5, Interesting)
ANY source of information that is widely trusted is automatically a target for propaganda and politically-charged misinformation. The more trusted it is, the more incentive everyone has to inject their political agendas (or just political biases) into it.
This, of course, reduces the trust level, which is bad for the business of whoever is hosting it. So they respond by doing stuff like this, to try and restore the trust level.
If they succeed in restoring trust, they also succeed in strengthening the incentives and raw numbers of people who have a keen interest in finding a way around the protections, to keep right on infecting the information with their politics.
This is a social problem, so technological solutions are going to flop in the end.
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In a recently-edited article, if there have been N edits in the last short-while, show all edits/diffs in the article's main page?
People may flood it with crap to make it unreadable. That would be another way of saying, "Wikipedia is not currently an unbiased source of information for this topic."
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I fully agree that this type of mechanisms happen. I would add though that in different situations different mechanisms dominate.
The NYTimes is an authoritative voice, so it attracts power which wants to control it. Now you might think the loss of trustworthiness might lead them to try to earn the trust again but this compromises the influence so often the preference is for other tools. You build a crowd who agree to consider each other trustworthy. In its crudest form you may buy it with bags of money, but
Re: Does this apply to self appointed gate keepers (Score:2)
#include
Link (Score:2)
Odd that there's no link to the actual code of contact.
A search gives me this: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wik... [wikimedia.org].
which links to this: https://foundation.wikimedia.o... [wikimedia.org]
which is a resolution that Wikipedia will adopt a code of conduct.
So, no, they didn't unveil a code of conduct. They announced a plan to come up with a code of conduct.
Re:Link (Score:5, Informative)
The current draft is https://meta.wikimedia.org/wik... [wikimedia.org]
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That's because you've infected yourself with "SJW" brainworms and it's destroying your ability to be rational. You might want to get that looked at.
Or maybe we've seen the effect that SJWs have on real people.
I have friends who are invested quite a lot in wikipedia and some free software projects. They've been exposed to that SJW bullshit so much that they now police their own language and behavior themselves, to the point of absurdity. And yet it achieved nothing of value, because it didn't make them any more tolerant or less sexist, racist or whateverist than they were before. But it gave SJWs influence.
And here lies the crux of it: you have good peo
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Yep, surprisingly sensible considering what I expected.
The worse part is the absolute lack of any mention about gatekeeping, where one or a few editors have de facto made an article their article, and will revert or alter to the point of irrelevance, any edit by other contributors.
That and the use of the word "wikimedian". Other than the fact that it is utter bullshit for companies and projects and organizations to invent words to describe their users/employees/contributors, the term isn't even defined.
Basi
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The announcement [wikimediafoundation.org] search for 'new code is' in that and it links to the text.
As with anything wiki it is in draft form, probably perpetually.
Will ignore all rules still apply? (Score:2)
I’ve been “banned” from Wikipedia for years, but I just use IAR to ignore said ban.
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Not to mention the 5th pillar - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Horse, barn, door. (Score:1)
Re:tl;dr (Score:4, Funny)
Re: tl;dr (Score:2)
Now imagine if you had actually checked those Sources(TM) for validity! Then we would've had to reboot you too! ^^
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So feel free to point any mistakes in my thinking or facts, but don't bother yelling accusations of *ism at
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Hate to break it to you, but once the smoke escapes, no amount of rebooting will help.
Surprising? Nah. (Score:4, Insightful)
Wikipedia has pretty much always been useless for anything even slightly political.
If you're looking for something hard and factual, like perhaps information about Lenses [wikipedia.org], it's a fine resource to use as a starting point. For anything that might have a political or moral dimension to it, not so much. Everyone should know that by now.
Alternate viewpoints to the party line have been banished for as long as I can remember.
Re: Surprising? Nah. (Score:2)
No, it's completely useless for most scientific topics too. Especially mathematical ones.
Because it's written in a way that you can only understand it, if you already know it.
E.g. math is usually a big dump of un-googleable formulas with barely typeable special characters, and zero explanation whatsoever, how it came to be, what the idea behind it was, etc. And I'd bet you money the writer did not know either, and wasn't even aware that what he knew was not actually *understanding* it.
For comparison, check
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Visually vs textually, I imagine is an important difference in conveying complex information.
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Wait are you saying the California fires (Score:2, Funny)
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Of course not. They were started by the Death Star of David.
Citation Sources and Other Problems (Score:5, Insightful)
The other issue with their system is that users were able to stake out some kind of ownership over articles. To some degree it's understandable why this is the case due to the possibility of easy vandalism of anything on Wikipedia, but it resulted in a bunch of petty tyrants who will revert changes for arbitrary reasons or even because they've come to believe they're some kind of expert on the subject matter. Since anyone with some degree of authority to stop that kind of abuse doesn't want to spend their time dealing with internet slap fights and because there would be such an endless number of them to deal with, it's little surprise that the problems persist because having to deal with idiots arguing about things you don't care about is draining and it isn't like the person being asked to arbitrate some dispute is any more of an expert or in a position to determine who's correct.
They could probably stop a lot of the petty bullshit that occurs by separating out the content from the presentation. I've seen a lot of edits get rejected that didn't change the information, but merely rephrased the wording to make things more clear. Why some people take these kind of improvements as some kind of attack against them I'll never know, but this was probably the most frustrating thing I ever had to deal with. I haven't bothered doing any editing in over a decade now because I found that it just wasn't worth my time. Why bother trying to improve something when some petty asshole will just revert your changes and no amount of arguments or citations will convince them otherwise.
Maybe things have changed over the years, or perhaps they've just gotten worse and most of the people who might spend a little bit of time trying to add to or make improvements to an article have just quit.
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Nothing has changed. Indeed, it's only gotten worse.
Like you, I gave up on serious editing many years ago. I'll occasionally fix a typo in some minor article, but I stay well away otherwise.
Wikipedia is incapable of functioning on the terms it sets for itself. You cannot have a truly serious and defini
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The experts give up and leave; they have better things to do with their time than argue with pseudo-experts who refuse to have it any other way but their own.
Alas, the experts also weren't interested in the the Citizendium project either, an old Wikipedia-competitor that, back in the day, wanted to be the experts-driven alternative. Turns out experts don't really care about writing encyclopedic entries unless it's for something like Encyclopedia Britannica, which is prestigious and therefore looks good in one's CV. Hence, the very few articles that were available there all had a tenth of the content the corresponding Wikipedia entry had, and most everything simp
Fluff (Score:1)
Nobody cares. The experiment has failed. (Score:2, Insightful)
Wikipedia has proven that "that anyone can edit" was deluded, a long time ago.
And while I mostly agree with what is written on the site, I realize that's just because it mostly matches my own natural bias, that by its very definition is a inherent property of any neural net, like my brain.
The problem is, that Wikipedia is centralized. And that those in control, are not only not aware of that realization... they violently and aggressively reject it.
Despite their own damn site containing articles, explaining
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For one, there are many topics (e.g. history, artistic canons, philosophy itself) which are not straightforward to formalize, and not really measurable much.
So you could make a sciencepedia maybe, but not as comprehensive an information resource as wikipedia.
But furthermore, whenever you try to apply logic to the real world, you are sent back to the problem of the validity of the referring terms/individuations; that i
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whenever you try to apply logic to the real world, you are sent back to the problem of the validity of the referring terms/individuations;
You studied philosophy,didn't you? Next you will be saying 2+2=5.
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We need a Wikipedia 2.0. With ONLY original research.
That was tried and failed. Check my comment above in the thread about the old Citizendium project.
Private club (Score:1)
WP:WRONGTHINK (Score:2)
Anyone cares to write a stub for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wrongthink [wikipedia.org] already?
Wikipedia will shrink much (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Engels
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript
etc
Wikipedia will be a very interesting S230 case (Score:2)
In many cases, S230 should not apply because Wikipedia editors act as quasi-official empoyees curating and approving user generated content, and that user generated content itself is presented as a product of Wikipedia to the public. It would be foolish of Twitter, Facebook, etc. to ever side with them in a S230 lawsuit because the fundamental differences in business model are night and day.
Given how often right wingers get their pages locked down by editors who won't allow even the subject themselves to ma
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(^^^Links to far-right shitheap with 'stop the steal' and anti-vaxx crap on front page).
Yeah dude, looks very 'objective'. Full of 'alternative facts'.
Sad.
What is misinformation anyway? (Score:3)
Misinformation is a deliberate distortion of objective truth as determined by scientific evidence. In the absence of evidence, cautious risk management should rule the day.
Unfortunately, many define misinformation as anything that disagrees with the Ministry of Truth....er....official sources. Consider covid19 - official sources told us the flu would be worse than covid19 (they were wrong), that masks were unnecessary and ineffective (they were wrong), and that HCQ was ineffective and dangerous (they were wrong). Anyone who disagreed with these supposedly authoritative statements was censored, banned, and ridiculed, and yet these officials have never been sanctioned even as they sacrificed hundreds of thousands of people out of their own ignorance.
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The problem with your analysis of official information is that it ignores a key fact of scientific knowledge, namely that it evolves as we learn more. Officials claiming that masks were ineffective were wrong in some absolute sense (involving hindsight), but were not wrong given what we knew about Covid at the time.
Now I will admit that the officials, and scientists in general, are pretty crap at emphasizing that what they are saying is simply what we know at that point in time, and may change as we lear
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Thats not true. Coronaviruses are part of a very broad collection of viruses that all behave in a similar way, such as how they spread. What evidence did the scientists have that wasnt the case for this specific virus? None! So why did they ignore what we know about coronaviruses and say masks were unnecessary?
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But Wisdom of Crowds.... (Score:2)
I wonder how long until they start paying experts to write, edit, or curate articles?
This will be fun (Score:1)
Let me guess (Score:2)
More acronyms, and faceless bodies of privileged editors who interpret and enforce them.
Wikipedia has strayed from it's mission... (Score:2)
Traditionally encyclopedias sought to publish facts. Not opinions, not politican spin. Facts. In the beginning the crowd sourced editing seemed to be a good thing. A self correcting mechanism of sorts and it worked pretty well for a while. Now with everything being politicized it is nearly impossible to tell truth from fiction.
Today's generation seem to feel that facts are optional in a debate. Facts have been replaced by feelings. Those on the Right tend to favor facts. Those on the Left tend to favor feel
WAAAH they're censoring (my agenda)!!11!! (Score:3)
Every last one of you need to SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Don't like what Wikipedia, is doing? Don't use it. Don't contribute to it, materially or intellectually. Let it die if it's going to die. If it doesn't die? Then I guess you're wrong.
all i know... (Score:1)
All I know is whenever I have tried to even mildly correct grossly biased statements, to merely objective ones, it has been immediately reversed by advocates. I don't see that improving.
Complete BOYCOT (Score:1)