[Isomorpheus]

Something doesn't need to be a 'well defined entity' to speak about it meaningfully. "Most Wikipedia articles are less than 20k words". Is that not a meaningful statement? "But, anyone can edit articles" What does that have to do with how Wikipedia is in 2020, 19 years into the project? Emergent tendencies exist.

> I would want to have an encyclopedia which compiles facts, rather than opinions. Am I missing something?

That 'fact' and 'opinion' aren't clean categories.

For anyone interested in reading more Wikipedia criticism, I recommend this essay by Jaron Lanier

https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-digital-maois...

[waltpad]

> Something doesn't need to be a 'well defined entity' to speak about it meaningfully.

True, what I meant is that the writer accuses Wikipedia of some sort of agenda, but it's not just one group of people, but many factions with opposite goals, including the one described in the meta pages. Although not being a well defined entity doesn't preclude discussing it, there are things that cannot be said about it because of that.

Another thing that the writer says is that Wikipedia failed, as if it reached an irrevocable state, but Wikipedia is all but in a well defined state (unless you count this as a well defined state, but then we might end up in a Russel paradox), it's content is constantly fluctuating, even if slowly so. When you speak of emergent tendencies, I find the idea compelling, but I wonder if this compatible with a constantly changing set of editors. And even if it is, perhaps this trend is like a disease, and at some point (like in evolutionary algorithms), a cure will emerge?

> That 'fact' and 'opinion' aren't clean categories.

Indeed, perhaps I was guilty of the same mistake as the writer? However, it is possible to find many pages with annotations criticizing the page content for lack of references or sources. I see that as an attempt to implement fact checking.

[Isomorpheus]

> When you speak of emergent tendencies, I find the idea compelling, but I wonder if this compatible with a constantly changing set of editors.

Crowds, for example, behave similarly even if you shuffle around who is in the crowd.

> However, it is possible to find many pages with annotations criticizing the page content for lack of references or sources. I see that as an attempt to implement fact checking.

You seem to be operating under the assumption that if we only threw more manpower at Wikipedia we could incrementally improve it to perfection. That seems implausible to me for various reasons.

From the essay I linked,

"A core belief of the wiki world is that whatever problems exist in the wiki will be incrementally corrected as the process unfolds. This is analogous to the claims of Hyper-Libertarians who put infinite faith in a free market, or the Hyper-Lefties who are somehow able to sit through consensus decision-making processes. In all these cases, it seems to me that empirical evidence has yielded mixed results. Sometimes loosely structured collective activities yield continuous improvements and sometimes they don't. Often we don't live long enough to find out. Later in this essay I'll point out what constraints make a collective smart. But first, it's important to not lose sight of values just because the question of whether a collective can be smart is so fascinating. Accuracy in a text is not enough. A desirable text is more than a collection of accurate references. It is also an expression of personality."

[waltpad]

> Crowds, for example, behave similarly even if you shuffle around who is in the crowd.

Indeed, but the issue is that the Wikipedia editors are not a crowd, it's a crowd of crowds. What's the behaviour of that? And can we compare this context with those used for whichever experiment was used to come to that claim I'm citing above.

> You seem to be operating under the assumption that if we only threw more manpower at Wikipedia we could incrementally improve it to perfection. That seems implausible to me for various reasons.

My idea actually was that overtime, editors would improve in their way of doing that task. However, admittedly, they would have to hang around long enough for this to happen. Maybe that's what "Hyper-Libertarians" have in mind as well? That by default humans are trying to get better at what they do, and thus the system can only improve?

> It is also an expression of personality.

That's a point I disagree with: I don't believe that an encyclopedia article should show personality, but quite the contrary. For me, an encyclopedia is something like a dictionary with a more in depth treatment of the topics. It is first and foremost a compilation of informations.