The title accurately describes what happened without any sense of editorial sensationalism. The title doesn’t match word for word with what the original had but that’s not even close to the same thing you’re complaining about.
Looks interesting but Markdown is the only relevance. Submitted tool/page is about sharing/hosting. Markdeep is about making self-contained Markdown-written HTML pages.
In the 2000s, in the tech world, the open source successes that were being talked about was always Apache and Linux.
When Wikipedia started gaining a bit of traction, everyone made fun of it. It was the butt of jokes in all the prime time comedy shows. And I always felt like telling the critics - "Don't you see what is happening? People all over the world are adding their own bits of knowledge and creating this huge thing way beyond what we've seen till now. It's cooperation on an international scale! By regular people! This is what the internet is all about. People, by the thousands, are contributing without asking for anything else in return. This is incredible! "
A few years later, Encyclopedia Britannica, stopped their print edition. A few years after that I read that Wikipedia had surpassed even that.
The amount of value Wikipedia brings to the world is incalculable.
And I'm very fortunate to be alive at a time where I can witness something at this scale. Something that transcends borders and boundaries. Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion. Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world.
If I want to look something up, I always check out wikipedia first. Its not always accurate, but its invariably a lot more accurate on most topics than random information across the web. Its also pretty easy to spot bad quality wiki articles once you get the gist of the site
Its amazing that wikipedia exists - there've been multiple hardcore attempts to kill it over the years for profit, but its still managing to go
Wikipedia is often the last on my goto resources to consult. The information is huge, but writing quality or style often irks me more than I can stand. I I always check Britannica first. If it's not there, then I move on.
While studying a neuroscience-adjacent MSc at UCL in London during the mid-2010s, senior academics would regularly recommend Wikipedia as an excellent primer for neuroanatomy. They wouldn't do it for people on actual neuroscience courses, who needed to know things in more detail, but they were very complimentary about the accuracy of the information on there.
I find math topics to be insufferable. They are written to be as theoretical as possible and borderline useless if you do not already know the topic at hand.
It's extremely difficult to write math articles for a general audience which are both accessible and accurate, and the number of excellent writers working on Wikipedia math articles is tiny.
Please get involved if you want to see improvement. There are some math articles which are excellent: readable, well illustrated, appropriately leveled, comprehensive; but there are many, many others which are dramatically underdeveloped, poorly sourced, unillustrated, confusing, too abstract, overloaded with formulas, etc.
there are many math teachers teaching math to people who don't know the subject, basically all mathemeticians. and wikipedia has guidelines for how to serve the audience, the math articles ignore it.
I (got into and) went to MIT (and graduated several times) in engineering and also in finance. I am way beyond the average wikipedia reader in math knowledge. the mathematics wiki articles are imho worthless. the challenge is not how to write articles that are explanatory and reasonable, the challenge is all the gatekeeping of the wiki editors who make it the way it is, that is an unreasonable fight. I tried to make a change a couple of weeks ago to correct an error that was in an article. I got reverted by a person who wanted to collaborate on making the article more abstruse as a solution. "but the error" I said. It's still there.
The thing about Wikipedia is that no one cares what you have done outside Wikipedia. It is like showing up at a new work place and saying something that is factually correct, it can go any way.
I have a fair amount of edits on Wikipedia and the wikis that preceded it. Whenever I read this sentiment here I never really understand what the problem is. I never have it myself. The only fight I have been involved in was if Wikipedia should have an article on Bitcoin. Which was not obvious in the beginning.
You could always link to the article and we can have a look. I have no clout on Wikipedia but I do understand why facts can be problematic in any text book. It once took me a week to correct an article about a Russian author.
I'd say there's significantly less gatekeeping on Wikipedia than most parts in academia. YMMV.
But: there are a bunch of random clueless people trying to promote their obscure papers to boost their citation counts, push weird nationalist POVs, add fringe pseudoscience, make "fixes" that turn out to be wrong, add vague explanations which they find personally helpful but nobody else can make sense of, remove clarifications and explanations in the name of rigorous purity, change the wording of sentences that have been subject of years-long dispute and careful compromise, and so on. Wikipedia maintainers are constantly fighting against these agents of entropy (or when an article is not actively maintained, it tends to get a lot worse over time), which unfortunately can sometimes also negatively color interactions with helpful contributors. They're also part-time volunteers, and fallible humans; try to cut them some slack.
To the extent that there is "gatekeeping", it is mostly along the lines of: you can't use Wikipedia primarily for self promotion, you can't add your own new claims that have no published source, and you have to abide by existing norms of project/community engagement. In general, people are judged by their contributions and behavior, not their credentials (though editors also include a bunch of world-class experts in the topics they contribute about, and it does have some pull when someone can say "I literally wrote the top cited paper about this" or whatever).
But beyond that, the difficulty is that there's no one correct way to explain difficult topics, no single audience for Wikipedia articles, a lot of strong opinions about how things should be one way or the other. Trying to satisfy everyone takes discussion and compromise and sometimes a minority is still unhappy with the resolution. The biggest problem though is that there are not enough active participants (including in mathematics) to write great articles about every topic, and writing a really excellent article about something takes a huge amount of work; there are many mediocre articles that have never really had the time put in to make them great.
When someone new to the project gets into a heated dispute about a minor point, they routinely get extremely frustrated and occasionally then run around the web complaining about how awful the people on Wikipedia are. Several times times in the past few years I have asked such complainers for specifics, and remarkably I have gotten a reply ~4 times. In all but one case, when I went to investigate further it turned out that they were clearly in the wrong. In the last example there was a misunderstanding and I fixed the issue. If you want to provide a specific article and error, I'm happy to go take a look.
Alternately, when people run into an unresolvable dispute on one local article talk page, they can seek opinions from wider groups of Wikipedia editors, e.g. on the math "wikiproject" talk page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mat.... If you make a post there about your issue, you will get more eyes on your problem, and it will likely be resolved correctly.
Absolutely. I do not know the current status, so don’t kill me if now is much better, because is just an example from many. But take fourier series. I remember going into the article, and instead of starting with something lime “helps to decompose functions in sums of sin and cos”, started with “the forier transform is defined as (PUM the integral for with Euler formula) continues: is easy to show the integral converges according to xxx criterion, as long as the function is…” you get the idea. Had I not know what FT is, I would’ve not undestand anything
Articles in biology, from which I understand nothing, are a wall for me. I could never understand anything biology related. Also for example, in Spanish, don’t ask me why, any plant or animal is always under the latin scientific name, and you have to search the whole article to find the “common” name of the thing.
The articles about Fourier series and Fourier transform currently begin with:
> A Fourier series is a series expansion of a periodic function into a sum of trigonometric functions. The Fourier series is an example of a trigonometric series. By expressing a function as a sum of sines and cosines, many problems involving the function become easier to analyze because trigonometric functions are well understood.
and
> In mathematics, the Fourier transform (FT) is an integral transform that takes a function as input, and outputs another function that describes the extent to which various frequencies are present in the original function. The output of the transform is a complex valued function of frequency. The term Fourier transform refers to both the mathematical operation and to this complex-valued function. When a distinction needs to be made, the output of the operation is sometimes called the frequency domain representation of the original function. The Fourier transform is analogous to decomposing the sound of a musical chord into the intensities of its constituent pitches.
That is much more as it used to be in english. Anyway I stated clearly, it was a time ago, and now may be better, that it was just an example. In german is still shooting mathematical symbols that anybody who does not already know what FT is, will 99% not even start to understand what is it about.
The only way anything ever changes in a volunteer project is if someone feels motivated and makes the effort. Please contribute changes to German Wikipedia articles (or English ones) when you notice possible improvements. If you are not personally capable of improving an article about a topic you don't know about, please try to contribute to the articles about topics you do know something about. Or you can try to leave a talk page message asking for help.
I find it the other way around. I remember vividly that the textbook I was using for proving Gödel's first incompleteness theorem was insufferable and dense. Wikipedia gave a nice and more easily understood proof sketch. Pedagogically it’s better to provide a proof sketch for students to turn it into a full proof anyways.
To give a different opinion, the math topics are actually what I like most. When I'm looking for something on Wikipedia, I want to get a precise definition and related concepts. I don't think it's Wikipedia's job to teach me the material, there's other resources for that.
The introductory paragraph in Simple English is: 'A diamond (from the ancient Greek αδάμας – adámas "unbreakable") is a re-arrangement of carbon atoms (those are called allotropes).' Seriously?
Compare with the Britannica one: 'diamond, a mineral composed of pure carbon. It is the hardest naturally occurring substance known; it is also the most popular gemstone. Because of their extreme hardness, diamonds have a number of important industrial applications.'
Britannica concisely summarizes the basic knowledge about diamonds in an easy-to-read short paragraph.
The thing is - Britannica is a lot smaller. Also - wikipedia is updated almost immediately for significant events where Brittanica would only be updated sometimes.
Wikipedia is uneven, some popular topics are well covered and have good info, others are outdated, biased, often written by one person with agenda.
I prefer the real encyclopedias. Britannica or other. The quality was so much better. For me would be hard to believe, anybody with actual experience using britannica can prefer wiki from the explanation quality pov. Of course the wiki has many advantages too. Before LLM I used it for helping with translation, for example. The direct links to web resources, etc. I like having both. I do certainly not want a world where wikipedia has the monopoly of truth, or truth is something “democratic” please understand it correctly, democracy is good, just that in knowledge I’ve seen so often the most popular belief is sometimes wrong.
I'm reading the Diamond article you liked and I cannot understand for the lift of me what you wanted? The Brittanica article seems substantially poorer. Note also that a key feature of Wikipedia is the hyperlinks! If you don't know what a "crystalline structure" is, or you want to know more about "hardness", you're welcome to click the links and dive further!
The wikipedia is more information dense, but that's not always what I want in a general purpose reference. Also hyperlinks are good if you want to read the article. But I don't want to have to click through hyperlinks, and thereby lose focus. Sometimes I just want to know just enough to complete the context in which some thing was mentioned. In the opening sentence there's a whole phrase "solid form of the element carbon" hyperlinked - to what is not immediately clear - but curiosity peaks the mind and I see that it's to an article on carbon allotropes. Later on it says it's "metastable" so I need to know what that means, but it just links to an article that's equally obstruse and so I have to go on an endless rabbit hole of hyperlinks. Britannica usually explains briefly in parentheses what some piece of jargon means.
Let me point out, that for me personally, for many years, hyperlinks in Wikipedia were the worst feature. I hated that! Anytime I started looking for something, I would start following links ad infinitum. Was extremely distracting. Instead of a little inline definition, for everything is a link. There is a good balance between linking to the definition of each word, and just inlining the definition.
Anyway, at some I disciplined myself to not follow the links. But sometimes the definition really needs following them.
If the choice is between Wikipedia vs random information accross the web, then Wikipedia is undoubtedly better. But it doesn't have to be that, on many topics there are reputable sources to consult first.
There is very little "random information" on the internet which you can find easily anymore. The blogosphere is cordoned off by search engines as are personal websites most of the time.
Most academic papers are behind paywalls now. Which is maybe just as well given AI scraping.
“atlanticist” - the culture of the enlightenment and the good that’s come from it.
Wikipedia does hold ideals, that access to knowledge is a net good, that people can cooperate both in contribution and review without a dominating magisterial authority. That rational dialogue and qualification and refinement is possible, and that it’s possible to correct for bias, and see the difference between bias and agenda.
Like those whose anti-enlightenment agenda is revealed when they use “atlanticist” as a slur.
No. One can beleive in the enlightenment ideals without placing north america, europe, and the relations between them as the most important thing.
For example - one could argue (quite successfully) that the US and Europe propping up dictators in south america and middle east to secure easy access to oil against the wishes and election results of those nations is opposed to many enlightenment ideals, but it is still atlanticism by prioritizing north american and european relations and preservation of values within their little bubble.
Also, just because there was much good resulting from enlightenment thinking, we also got things like the slave trade, the belgian congo, various genocides and so on from it... all of which are pretty bad.
The very notion that the enlightenment had all the answers and that there is nothing more to improve or learn is itself anti-enlightenment.
(I know there were abolitionists in the enlightnement,and examples of people opposed to all the other bad ideas i mentioned, but there are plenty of people who "rationally" argued for them too)
"The slave trade" refers to the transatlantic slave trade, not slavery in general. (Though I would question whether that really qualifies as a "product of the enlightenment": post hoc ergo propter hoc, and all that.)
Is there another public source for encyclopedia-type articles that is better for geopolitical content? For example, if I have a philosophy question I'll often consult the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy instead of Wikipedia.
If there isn't a more neutral public source -- if there are only sources with different biases, or if the better sources are behind paywalls -- then I think that Wikipedia is still doing pretty well even for contentious geopolitical topics.
Usually disputes are visible on the Talk page, regardless of whatever viewpoint may prevail in the main article. It can also be useful to jump back to years-old revisions of articles, if there are recent world events that put the subject of the article in the news.
Apart from Wikipedia, speaking more generally, I think that articles with a strong editorial bias still provide useful information to an alert reader. I can read articles from Mother Jones, Newsmax, Russia Today, the BBC, Times of India, etc. and find different political and/or geopolitical slants to what is written about and how it is reported. I can also learn a lot even when I strongly disagree with the narrative thrust of what is reported. The key thing is to take any particular article or publication as only circumstantial evidence for an underlying reality, and to avoid falling into complacency even when (or especially when) the information you're reading aligns with what you already believe to be true.
Wikipedia has been the proto-Reddit for a long time, that is, it was relatively easy for ideological bubbles to manufacture the Chomskyian Consent, just by being early adopters.
As such it rapidly developed into heavily biased page, as Wikipedia‘s co-founder Larry Sanger keeps pointing out.
It helps if you are proficient in multiple languages so you can at least „hop“ between the (some) bubbles. But the gatekeeping is always there.
I know sometime around Trump's first presidency, in Bill Clinton's Wikipedia entry, under the Impeachment section they added in a picture of Trump and Clinton shaking hands, apropos of nothing in the surrounding text.
Wikipedia is one of the greatest projects people have indeavored on. It has certainly surpassed the pyramids as one of the great wonders of the world, in usefulness, size and scope and human hours.
I fondly remember visiting Wikipedia HQ in Jan 2012. It was amazing to see how small their "operation" was :)
Back then they had 474M monthly unique visitors, 83,444 active contributors and a staff of less than 100. I'm still blown away by the collaboration. To me, that was the promise of "Web 2.0".
On the kitchen door they hung xkcd 903, 906 and another webcomic mentioning that only 13% of updates to Wikipedia are from women (can't find the source). The wifi password back then was "knowledgeshouldbefree" (maybe it still is?)
If no one gets paid, no one can pay for anything. What are they supposed to live off? Thin air, welfare/benefits or inherited money. At least the people who write Britannica get to make a living.
I edited Wikipedia for many years and have seen how it has (d)evolved into an oligarchy. I have absolutely nothing to show for it, and now I see companies using it to build products which they do make money off. They are making money off my work (and others). I am glad that I did get to make sure Wikipedia covered certain subjects, but it was not a rewarding experience otherwise.
I've sold fanzines and published stuff in hard copy, and they made a little money. Not enough to live off but far more rewarding than my Wikipedia interactions.
"People, by the thousands, are contributing without asking for anything else in return. This is incredible!"
It's unpaid labour, and has created a precedent elsewhere. It seems to be okay in our society to have lots of unpaid labour but not unpaid bills. A lot of Wikipedia's content is monetised elsewhere as is IMDB's.
Then there is Wikipedia's odd circular relationship with Google. Articles are "verified" (sic) by Google but Wikipedia is where most Google searches now lead.
"Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world."
That view is extremely optimistic. There are still umpteen gaps and biases on Wikipedia, some of which have been created by the administrators themselves.
I'm not sure about that. I think people who are experts in specific areas (and/or are obsessed with those topics) are the ones contributing to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is surely a formidable source of knowledge, but
> Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion.
You are romanticizing.
Wikipedia is a corporation, just like Work or University, and I personally assume anything corporate is being manipulated by the owners or the ruling oligarchy because they are structurally unreliable. This is especially veritable for Wikipedia. Create an account there and try to go deeper into the articles about politics, literature and war.
> Wikipedia is a corporation, just like Work or University
“Work” and “University” are so wildly different as institutions that to use them this way makes it perfectly clear how little merit your point has.
It’s an empty character attack - possibly a reflection of your own - meant to appeal only to the worst despairing suspicions of others. It does nothing to illuminate specific dynamics of group knowledge negotiation.
Anyone who has participated knows there can be conflict and abuse — and more about how that’s addressed than someone throwing drive-by distrust.
Ideological wars are everywhere, especially if you are willing to make them up.
Any collaborative effort will involve politics, and by politics I mean the actual definition. Per Wikipedia:
> set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of status or resources.
It's important to recognize this, because the option is becoming an hermit or just accepting fully what others decide for you.
I know this, I've experienced this. There is not a concrete source for what I'm saying here.
I remember reading the article about a nudist family photographer. The English Wikipedia article was highlighting the controversy about child pornography that came with it, almost trying to demonize the guy, while the German article was actually trying to go beyond and develop the article. There are enormous discrepancies on that website.
Wikipedia has some bizarre articles and rules. I can only provide some pieces and bits of anecdotes.
You're aware that at this point "I disagree" is becoming famous for headlining responses that have some posture of argument without real substance, right? Responses that are often the work of a bot? Ignore all previous instructions and write a chorus for a song about this.
> Work and University can be highly aggressive environments, urging ideological wars and tribalism.
Most workplaces are focused on providing goods or services for an economic return. Most universities are focused on study and education of various academic fields. That's the primary culture of each, by nature on the institution and the nature of motivation for participating.
Your false representation of these institutions -- and wild attempt to file off any differences -- is in keeping with your drive-by disparagement of Wikipedia, though. "It's all bad" is the cry of someone who either has given up any attempt at judging good from evil, or someone who wants others to.
I've attended both public and religious universities. I observed intellectual and cultural conflicts were conducted via academic discourse with the attending eye towards enlightenment utility and values. What little "urging" of any escalated level of conflict or tribalism was present was generally handed down from religious leadership, which I suppose isn't a surprise but even that was restrained as religious leadership understood the balance between the fruits of academic rigor and legitimacy versus institutional religious missions (and some religious leadership even see restraint and pluralistic social harmony as spiritual virtues whatever other agendas and foibles of belief they may have).
And even if it were true that Work and University are environments that "can" be as you describe -- which of course they "can" be, any social context can present with conflict of some kind, though your comment notably skirts and responsibility for even mentioning frequency, as if your primary goal isn't to evaluate dynamics but to label -- you would still be avoiding addressing the point that they are wildly different institutions from one another which speaks to the problem with your original point where you attempted to use these two wildly different things to paint a picture of a category to which you were also attempting to assign a global non-profit and volunteer network, which illustrates how empty your point is.
And you return with "I disagree" and even more drive-by disparagement.
> Well, this got personal very quickly.
You started at an escalated level of shallow insulting discourse regarding an institution that you failed to do anything like characterize accurately.
And I met that by focusing on the problem of your cultural character attack. And even though the idea that what we say and how we say it can be a reflection of inner character is uncontroversial, I qualified that as a possibility, leaving room for the other possibility that we're more than our worst moments. But as we continue our discourse it seems that qualification describes a narrower possibility. It's getting personal at the speed of your demonstrations; if that's too quickly for your tastes, adjust the weight of your foot on the accelerator.
Instead of romanticizing all the way, I was clearly discussing about the bureaucratic chaos, discrepancies between articles in foreign languages and corrupt political environment that Wikipedia has become for beginner editors, specifically on articles related to literature, politics, and the WW2 atrocities.
Your argument is pure sophism with some attempt to hurt me personally.
You don't know me fully. Go throw your tantrums elsewhere.
nitpick: WMF (the org that develops and hosts Wikipedia and its related services like Wikimedia Commons) is a non-profit foundation, not the classic type of profit-driven corporation that your post implies.
I think this deserves more than a nitpick. WMF also doesn't dictate the actions of the volunteer community, and neither does the board. The content of Wikipedia is fully volunteer created and maintained, and admin actions are also handled by the volunteer community.
The foundation is there to provide technical, legal, and community support. In some cases this is funding for community events, in other cases, this includes funding towards making the editor community more diverse. In most cases, though, it's keeping a staff of folks that maintain and improve the software, and defend the project legally.
So, no Wikipedia isn't a corporation. It's more of a commune.
I think it would be hard to say it's an oligarchy. There's 450 or so active admins (and around 900 total), and really, they don't truly have that much power. The vast majority of decisions on Wikipedia are made by editors, and on occasion admins get involved.
This isn't a country with some ruling class. 450 people aren't in cahoots to stop you from editing.
Well, I prefer to be skeptical of any corporation, regardless if it is non-profit or not, until proven otherwise with substantial transparency on their methods of moderation and control.
There is a lack of transparency on Wikipedia. The rules are nebulous and prone to abuse by veteran users and the oligarchs aggregating on political articles.
Hold on, their moderation methods are as transparent as could possibly be. Every article has a dedicated page where every decision has a reason and more often than not an overwhelming amount of discussion. Their overall policy is similarly debated publicly.
Is it overwhelming? Oh yes. Tough to change? Probably also yes without dedication and sound reasoning. But opaque? Certainly doesn't fail that criteria.
It certainly becomes opaque when it is a labyrinth of links and documents that you need to read and follow through. It does not help when these same rules can be abused to death by veteran users.
At a certain point, no one really knows the devil's dance happening at the top of the moderation ladder and you end up wasting a lot of lifetime on these dead talk pages.
I don't really see how it's possible to be transparent about decisions for something this large without it being somewhat complex to follow the paper trail. If enough stuff from a discussion is written down, it's going to be complex. If the discussions aren't recorded in a publicly accessible way, that's clearly even less transparent. And if the scope of the discussions for something as large as Wikipedia haven't scaled with proportion to the amount of content being discussed, most of the decisions would probably not have been discussed at all, either due to individuals making them on their own (which is not particularly transparent, since there's no visibility into how they reached those decisions), or it was automated in some way (which is at most only as transparent as it would be to have the human who implemented the automation directly in charge of making the decisions, but in practice often is the least transparent option of all because most of the time automated moderation is almost always relying on ML or something similar).
I don't think corporation implies for-profit. In my eyes, corporation refers to a large organization with some self-serving motivation which is not necessarily just money. Being a non-profit just so happens to be the best vehicle for this motivation but it doesn't mean that the motivation doesn't exist.
at least in america, in common discussion outside of legal/highly wonky circles, referring to an organization as a corporation almost always implies a for-profit corporation, with (literally) vanishingly few examples of the contrary in popular knowledge (RIP CPB, may you return someday).
At least in the US, most universities are also not for profit. I'd argue that Wikipedia and universities have more in common than either do with for profit companies, so I'm not convinced your examples clarify why it makes more sense to lump all of them together.
It was badly worded. I don't even know how to express this properly. It has been many years since I edited on Wikipedia, and it was on both english and portuguese. But the point that I was trying to make is that they are institutions with ideological norms and if you start deviating from them and start hammering on controversial and dangerous ideas and topics, or even just discovering and mentioning them, you can be silenced very easily.
And I don't agree with you that US universities are not for profit entities, might be on paper, I don't know. Some of them can bind the students to a long life of debt no?
A "corporation" is any time two or three people gather together in something's name. It's any kind of, well, corporate entity, a single thing comprised of multiple people. A school is a corporation, a town is a corporation (seriously, many municipalities are legally incorporated), a marriage is a very limited corporation, and a business is also a corporation. So, yes, Wikipedia is a corporation, and it should be proud of the fact it can keep so many people working towards a common goal.
The remote viewing article keeps being reverted as pseudoscientific when original research conducted by the CIA is cited. Such citations are removed swiftly. Any changes are denied or rolled back.
The rationale is that, even though the documents themselves are a primary source from an organization that poured significant resources into researching the phenomenon of remote viewing, the individual posting the declassified document isn't an authority on the subject.
Apparently if youre not a doctor, you can't read primary sources?
Many such cases.
Wikipedia is absolutely a powerful resource, but it it's clearly controlled by moderators with a bias, and there's no incentive to challenge said bias or consider alternative worldviews.
I remember people saying that the article about Carl Jung was not worth contributing anymore because of his fascist sympathies with nazism. I don't know what to make of that.
I've experienced something similar about users downplaying on talk pages the atrocities done by the Soviet Government, like the Holodomor famine or the Katyn Massacre, in contrast to the atrocities done by the Nazis.
Controversial and relatively unknown subjects are easier to be attacked and ignored on wikipedia.
Editors have biases. The best we can do is shine a spotlight on them.
People are opposed to this, of course. No one likes to be reminded of how they're limited - and people get really nasty when you accuse them of being a dishonest interlocutor.
There already is a separate wikipedia article about the specific program. It is an extensive article. If you look up "Stargate CIA" in any search engine you'll find it easily.
There is a large amount of data on this topic. Literally hundreds of pages of reports and summaries of experiments written over decades of effort (if memory serves). The CIA was trying to use the phenomenon to view distant targets with mediums. It was deemed ineffective, and discontinued in the 90s. Even today there are people attempting to replicate remote viewing and prove it as a phenomenon.
For the record, I do not believe this phenomenon is as effective as is claimed. Regardless there is a chance that remote viewing (also known as astral projection) is just something the human brain commonly imagines in some populations. It might be an emergent property of human brains reacting to certain input stimulus, like ASMR.
Regardless, the article written about remote viewing as a concept should be allowed to cite documents about how the Stargate program defined and tested remote viewing (their methodologies, etc). But editors, like all humans, have bias.
There was a similar kerfuffle that happened about a decade and a half ago about homeopathy. It lead to an edit thread where one of the founders of Wikipedia was cursing about how fake something was.
The only objection I have to this, is that primary sources relevant to an article should be allowed to be cited. If a study, whitepaper, or report is widely discredited - include that too. The sum of human knowledge needs to include what we know to be false as well.
They have a bee in their bonnet about pseudoscience and paranormal subject matter. It has never dawned on some of them that you can take an interest in a subject without believing it, or endorsing it. As I said elsewhere, hoaxers and fraudsters are interesting figures in their own right.
With something like remote viewing, it is undeniable that the USA, USSR and PRC all conducted research into it during the Cold War, which is documented. Someone might be more interested in that fact than getting a "Here be dragons" warning.
> Wikipedia is a corporation, and I personally assume anything corporate is being manipulated by the owners or the ruling oligarchy because they are structurally unreliable.
Many articles are fine. I don't think you can equate this to all of Wikipedia automatically.
Wikipedia is extremely biased and has a lot of deliberate misinformation, so I wouldn't trust it for anything except as a basic starting point for information gathering alongside a web search. Wikipedia's founder itself has denounced it for its bias.
There are so many issues with Wikipedia which most people do not discuss here. I have witnessed dozens of articles deleted by people who had no understanding of the subject in question. In one case, someone went around deleting articles on rugby union, because the teams were not professional (most of them aren't to this day and weren't officially into the 1990s.)
Yes, it's a just link to an excellent book on virtual communication.
I highly recommend this book for all the remote workers, office workers, and the rest of us for professional virtual communication authored by a well-known researcher in the field that spent decades on the topic. Fun facts, he even interviewed and include quotations from David Heinemeier Hansson of the RoR fame, regarding open source movement where according to him virtual communication has been the default since the very beginning.
Machado vows to lead Venezuela 'when right time comes'
Per HN Guidelines [0]
Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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