It's concerning that more and more people are willing to ignore facts about reality if it conflicts with their ideology. I worry what it could mean for the passing on of hard-fought lessons as...
It's concerning that more and more people are willing to ignore facts about reality if it conflicts with their ideology.
I worry what it could mean for the passing on of hard-fought lessons as access to that information gets demonised. Knowledge about complex topics like how to make safe vaccines require time and effort, yet we're building a culture where knowledge can be secondary to your politics - and if fewer people will learn about them, those fields might start to decay.
The article raises some good points about nonsense shared by people like Musk, but it feels like the author is living in a progressive bubble and not realizing it. It glosses over the fact that...
The article raises some good points about nonsense shared by people like Musk, but it feels like the author is living in a progressive bubble and not realizing it. It glosses over the fact that there's a huge number of people (even more so outside of US) who dislike DEI policies and other social programmes listed in Wikipedia's budget for reasons that anyone can disagree with, but that are not conspiratorial or based on lies, or the fact that Wikipedia really is unreliable within some +- current political-adjacent topics and it is usually due to a too strong progressive bias.
I think that the bullshit that's cited in the article would never spread as far as it did if many people already did not have the opinion that Wikipedia has issues. In fact I think this is what tends to happen in general: non-progressives are not as stupid as many progressives often believe, and when they jump on a bandwagon seemingly started on nonsense, it's often because they feel they have platform to air their legitimate grievances.
Unfortunately people like Musk pushing bullshit on top of that for whatever political reason make it hard for everyone else to approach those grievances assuming good faith (because on the top there's obviously none) and trying to find reasonable solutions to them.
Though I feel compelled to say that I disagree with the following:
Musk betrays the same complete lack of understanding for how software companies work as when he acquired Twitter and claimed it would work just fine if he fired nearly everyone based on absurd evaluations of their productivity (it hasn’t).
Arguably, it has worked surprisingly well. IIRC any reliability problems were short, it's still working without technical issues (I only rarely use it, but it always worked for me much better than say Facebook) and any changes for the worse (censorship/lack thereof in different topics and problems with advertising as a result) were caused by Musk's content policies, not by any technical difficulties. What he did was crazy, but it worked and he would have been much deeper in the red if he didn't do it.
I have a hard time empathizing with people who feel that diversity initiatives, however misguided, are a bigger threat to the common good than actual fascism.
I have a hard time empathizing with people who feel that diversity initiatives, however misguided, are a bigger threat to the common good than actual fascism.
That may apply to Musk, but I don't think it applies to me or the people (who dislike DEI etc.) I'm talking about. edit: to play devil's advocate, I don't think it necessarily applies to what Musk...
That may apply to Musk, but I don't think it applies to me or the people (who dislike DEI etc.) I'm talking about.
edit: to play devil's advocate, I don't think it necessarily applies to what Musk says about the budget either, if we take him at face value: Wikipedia spends considerable percentage of its budget on things that are unnecessary for running wikipedia, therefore its budget is not as tight as the funding campaigns would suggest. The issue here is that the budget percentage going to "unnecessary" stuff is likely considerably lower than he says, but I don't see anything fascist about the reasoning itself.
As a person who works in the field, I’d expect that firing everyone will just result in the service never getting new features or being able to respond to security threats. If everyone did their...
As a person who works in the field, I’d expect that firing everyone will just result in the service never getting new features or being able to respond to security threats. If everyone did their job right, most operational burden should be automated.
It looks like Twitter has not launched anything Wikipedia-worthy since the acquisition, and two years is a short timeline to have zero days show up in one’s stack. I’m not sure what other people were expecting, but this is about what I figured would happen.
At least for me, it took months to be able to successfully click on a twitter link i’ve been sent and be able to consistently read the tweet. For a while, I’d just get thrown into an endless...
Arguably, it has worked surprisingly well.
At least for me, it took months to be able to successfully click on a twitter link i’ve been sent and be able to consistently read the tweet. For a while, I’d just get thrown into an endless loading loop whether I was signed out or not.
I don’t know what the experience is like for actual “twitter users” though since I deleted my main account shortly into its decline.
Good to know - for me personally twitter was often broken when logged out, but I assumed Musk didn't care since (partially) closing it seemed to have been the goal anyway, strenghtened by...
Good to know - for me personally twitter was often broken when logged out, but I assumed Musk didn't care since (partially) closing it seemed to have been the goal anyway, strenghtened by preventing free LLM training. When looged in, it worked fine.
Do you have a deeper knowledge of what's in Wikipedia's budget? The article said those things aren't actually DEI, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they were just glossing over some of the...
there's a huge number of people...who dislike DEI policies and other social programmes listed in Wikipedia's budget
Do you have a deeper knowledge of what's in Wikipedia's budget? The article said those things aren't actually DEI, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they were just glossing over some of the details.
This is the official budget article where the one image comes from, you can click through all the categories and get some (though imo often not sufficient, devil is in the details) more detailed...
This is the official budget article where the one image comes from, you can click through all the categories and get some (though imo often not sufficient, devil is in the details) more detailed information on what they contain and why.
Sounds like it barely qualifies as DEi. The Equity bit seems to be mostly just about expanding coverage in other regions of the world because it's a global website, although there is coverage of...
Sounds like it barely qualifies as DEi. The Equity bit seems to be mostly just about expanding coverage in other regions of the world because it's a global website, although there is coverage of women, too, which I guess falls under DEI. Otherwise, the safety and inclusion portion is not DEI whatsoever, as far as I can tell.
There is a DEI programme that's actually called DEI within the Effectiveness section: I am not convinced that creating groups based on identity is the way to go in general. I also think that the...
Exemplary
There is a DEI programme that's actually called DEI within the Effectiveness section:
A key area of focus for the Global Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) team has been to invest in strong employee networks based on shared identities. [...] There are currently eight active groups: African ERG, South Asian ERG, LatinX ERG, Black ERG, Asian ERG, Women and Non-Binary ERG, Queer ERG, and Neurodivergent ERG.
I am not convinced that creating groups based on identity is the way to go in general. I also think that the whole LatinX thing again shows progressive bias because a large portion of latinos/latinas would not want to unite under that label, meaning it's likely not a group uniting people of certain identity, but a group uniting people of certain identity and ideology.
There are other issues that could be summed up as me not believing the Wikimedia foundation will be able to enact some of their "barely DEI" policies that seem good on the surface (increase participation in certain regions or ethnicities) without again creating more ideological bias.
Can't speak for others, but for me these things are very demotivating with regards to giving Wikipedia money. If I could choose to only give money to other, more crucial parts of the budget, I'd certainly reconsider.
Given the relevant percentages, if you give money it's mostly going to other, more crucial parts of the budget anyway. And if you're a significant donor, you can absolutely contact a nonprofit and...
Given the relevant percentages, if you give money it's mostly going to other, more crucial parts of the budget anyway. And if you're a significant donor, you can absolutely contact a nonprofit and make a conditional or restricted donation. If you want your $10k donation to be specifically for server costs, they will absolutely work with you to make that happen.
Excellent article. I normally don't have to patience to read articles this long on topics I'm only tangentially interested in, but this one kept me reading. I even read through all the footnotes...
Excellent article. I normally don't have to patience to read articles this long on topics I'm only tangentially interested in, but this one kept me reading. I even read through all the footnotes and followed up on some of the references. Overall, it's quality writing, regardless of the topic. The author is good and I think the fact that they are an editor on Wikipedia shows.
I find it mildly ironic that on the author's homepage, her only point of contact listed is her Twitter profile. Otherwise, my only comment on this link is really a question brought up by something...
I find it mildly ironic that on the author's homepage, her only point of contact listed is her Twitter profile.
Otherwise, my only comment on this link is really a question brought up by something in the comments. She is on the Wikipedia board for mobile. I've always wondered why, if a site can take a desktop link and serve you a mobile page, it doesn't just keep the original link and serve the mobile page based on your browser. This way, a desktop user wouldn't have to deal with clicking on a mobile link and the mobile user would still get their proper page. Just something that has always seemed like a stupid implementation for such a big site.
I was a bit surprised considering Molly is an advocate for having your own website as an online presence - having looked, I guess it's a limitation of the publishing software she's using. The name...
I find it mildly ironic that on the author's homepage, her only point of contact listed is her Twitter profile
I was a bit surprised considering Molly is an advocate for having your own website as an online presence - having looked, I guess it's a limitation of the publishing software she's using. The name on that page does link to her website.
While the article is good and helped teach me a lot about how Wikipedia handles source quality and some high-scrutiny topics, this is mostly an article responding to Elon Musk who I'm personally...
While the article is good and helped teach me a lot about how Wikipedia handles source quality and some high-scrutiny topics, this is mostly an article responding to Elon Musk who I'm personally tired of reading about. Just a heads up for anyone else in a similar boat.
Considering that both the post title and the article title contain Musk's name, I think your warning is probably superfluous. ETA: the post is also tagged with "Elon Musk," so people with his name...
Considering that both the post title and the article title contain Musk's name, I think your warning is probably superfluous.
ETA: the post is also tagged with "Elon Musk," so people with his name filtered won't even see the link. If you're that tired of hearing of him I suggest you learn how to set up topic filters.
I'm generally fine with articles along the lines of "Musk said something dumb, here's a long educational article on the topic." This one just felt more Elon Musk centric than usual.
I'm generally fine with articles along the lines of "Musk said something dumb, here's a long educational article on the topic." This one just felt more Elon Musk centric than usual.
It's concerning that more and more people are willing to ignore facts about reality if it conflicts with their ideology.
I worry what it could mean for the passing on of hard-fought lessons as access to that information gets demonised. Knowledge about complex topics like how to make safe vaccines require time and effort, yet we're building a culture where knowledge can be secondary to your politics - and if fewer people will learn about them, those fields might start to decay.
The article raises some good points about nonsense shared by people like Musk, but it feels like the author is living in a progressive bubble and not realizing it. It glosses over the fact that there's a huge number of people (even more so outside of US) who dislike DEI policies and other social programmes listed in Wikipedia's budget for reasons that anyone can disagree with, but that are not conspiratorial or based on lies, or the fact that Wikipedia really is unreliable within some +- current political-adjacent topics and it is usually due to a too strong progressive bias.
I think that the bullshit that's cited in the article would never spread as far as it did if many people already did not have the opinion that Wikipedia has issues. In fact I think this is what tends to happen in general: non-progressives are not as stupid as many progressives often believe, and when they jump on a bandwagon seemingly started on nonsense, it's often because they feel they have platform to air their legitimate grievances.
Unfortunately people like Musk pushing bullshit on top of that for whatever political reason make it hard for everyone else to approach those grievances assuming good faith (because on the top there's obviously none) and trying to find reasonable solutions to them.
Though I feel compelled to say that I disagree with the following:
Arguably, it has worked surprisingly well. IIRC any reliability problems were short, it's still working without technical issues (I only rarely use it, but it always worked for me much better than say Facebook) and any changes for the worse (censorship/lack thereof in different topics and problems with advertising as a result) were caused by Musk's content policies, not by any technical difficulties. What he did was crazy, but it worked and he would have been much deeper in the red if he didn't do it.
I have a hard time empathizing with people who feel that diversity initiatives, however misguided, are a bigger threat to the common good than actual fascism.
That may apply to Musk, but I don't think it applies to me or the people (who dislike DEI etc.) I'm talking about.
edit: to play devil's advocate, I don't think it necessarily applies to what Musk says about the budget either, if we take him at face value: Wikipedia spends considerable percentage of its budget on things that are unnecessary for running wikipedia, therefore its budget is not as tight as the funding campaigns would suggest. The issue here is that the budget percentage going to "unnecessary" stuff is likely considerably lower than he says, but I don't see anything fascist about the reasoning itself.
As a person who works in the field, I’d expect that firing everyone will just result in the service never getting new features or being able to respond to security threats. If everyone did their job right, most operational burden should be automated.
It looks like Twitter has not launched anything Wikipedia-worthy since the acquisition, and two years is a short timeline to have zero days show up in one’s stack. I’m not sure what other people were expecting, but this is about what I figured would happen.
At least for me, it took months to be able to successfully click on a twitter link i’ve been sent and be able to consistently read the tweet. For a while, I’d just get thrown into an endless loading loop whether I was signed out or not.
I don’t know what the experience is like for actual “twitter users” though since I deleted my main account shortly into its decline.
Good to know - for me personally twitter was often broken when logged out, but I assumed Musk didn't care since (partially) closing it seemed to have been the goal anyway, strenghtened by preventing free LLM training. When looged in, it worked fine.
Do you have a deeper knowledge of what's in Wikipedia's budget? The article said those things aren't actually DEI, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they were just glossing over some of the details.
This is the official budget article where the one image comes from, you can click through all the categories and get some (though imo often not sufficient, devil is in the details) more detailed information on what they contain and why.
Sounds like it barely qualifies as DEi. The Equity bit seems to be mostly just about expanding coverage in other regions of the world because it's a global website, although there is coverage of women, too, which I guess falls under DEI. Otherwise, the safety and inclusion portion is not DEI whatsoever, as far as I can tell.
There is a DEI programme that's actually called DEI within the Effectiveness section:
I am not convinced that creating groups based on identity is the way to go in general. I also think that the whole LatinX thing again shows progressive bias because a large portion of latinos/latinas would not want to unite under that label, meaning it's likely not a group uniting people of certain identity, but a group uniting people of certain identity and ideology.
There are other issues that could be summed up as me not believing the Wikimedia foundation will be able to enact some of their "barely DEI" policies that seem good on the surface (increase participation in certain regions or ethnicities) without again creating more ideological bias.
Can't speak for others, but for me these things are very demotivating with regards to giving Wikipedia money. If I could choose to only give money to other, more crucial parts of the budget, I'd certainly reconsider.
Given the relevant percentages, if you give money it's mostly going to other, more crucial parts of the budget anyway. And if you're a significant donor, you can absolutely contact a nonprofit and make a conditional or restricted donation. If you want your $10k donation to be specifically for server costs, they will absolutely work with you to make that happen.
Excellent article. I normally don't have to patience to read articles this long on topics I'm only tangentially interested in, but this one kept me reading. I even read through all the footnotes and followed up on some of the references. Overall, it's quality writing, regardless of the topic. The author is good and I think the fact that they are an editor on Wikipedia shows.
I find it mildly ironic that on the author's homepage, her only point of contact listed is her Twitter profile.
Otherwise, my only comment on this link is really a question brought up by something in the comments. She is on the Wikipedia board for mobile. I've always wondered why, if a site can take a desktop link and serve you a mobile page, it doesn't just keep the original link and serve the mobile page based on your browser. This way, a desktop user wouldn't have to deal with clicking on a mobile link and the mobile user would still get their proper page. Just something that has always seemed like a stupid implementation for such a big site.
I was a bit surprised considering Molly is an advocate for having your own website as an online presence - having looked, I guess it's a limitation of the publishing software she's using. The name on that page does link to her website.
While the article is good and helped teach me a lot about how Wikipedia handles source quality and some high-scrutiny topics, this is mostly an article responding to Elon Musk who I'm personally tired of reading about. Just a heads up for anyone else in a similar boat.
Considering that both the post title and the article title contain Musk's name, I think your warning is probably superfluous.
ETA: the post is also tagged with "Elon Musk," so people with his name filtered won't even see the link. If you're that tired of hearing of him I suggest you learn how to set up topic filters.
I'm generally fine with articles along the lines of "Musk said something dumb, here's a long educational article on the topic." This one just felt more Elon Musk centric than usual.