[bawolff]

> It just feels like it's too big and there are too many interests that want to distort things. I was surprised to see some article recently removed effectively rewriting history and directing to some alternative version. I just checked again and it's been restored but it just seems like the wild west.

In fairness, this does mean the system is working.

[YZF]

Yeah- Maybe it's "eventually working". It's hard to trust when it seems so fluid. Maybe there needs to be some mechanics to make it harder to change. Something like being able to suggest changes/corrections but having those come out on some schedule after a review? (thinking software release process here). Quarterly Wikipedia releases? Creating some "core" of Wikipedia that is subject to tougher editorial standards?

Not sure.

[bawolff]

Its definitely an eventual consistency kind of model.

There was some attempts at change review (called "pending changes") that is used on very continous articles, but it never really scaled that well. I think its more popular on german wikipedia.

Wikipedia is so dominant that it has kind of smoothered all alternative models. Personally i feel like its kind of like democracy: the worst system except for all the other systems. All things are transient though, i'm sure eventually someone will come up with something superior that will take over, just like wikipedia took over from encyclopedia briticana.

[sedev]

> Personally i feel like its kind of like democracy: the worst system except for all the other systems.

It's exactly this, in large part because Wikipedia happens to also be a large-scale exercise in direct democracy.

[intended]

It will unnerve you to know, that this is the state of the art, and the information environment we run in, is incredibly fragile at the speeds at which it is moving.

It may also hearten you to know, that small, consistent actions like yours, make these collective systems run.

[Kim_Bruning]

Control theory (among others) says that a more rapid cycle actually often improves reliability and accuracy of a system. (If on average an iteration will converge on a set point/objective, then more/faster iterations will converge more rapidly, or become stable past some threshold). People keep trying to slow Wikipedia down though. They do succeed somewhat, and that actually hurts accuracy and engagement.

[II2II]

> It's hard to trust when it seems so fluid.

Perhaps we should trust it more because it is fluid and that fluidity is documented (see the history and talk tabs for any given article). Historically, reputable sources depended upon, to a very large degree, the authority of the author. The reader typically had little to no insight into what was generally agreed upon and where there was some debate. How the Wikipedia exposes that may be imperfect, but it is better than nothing.

[card_zero]

Mechanics like that exist for when warring over a page escalates. See the old essay (20 years old now!) "The Wrong Version": https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wrong_Version

[terribleperson]

Harder to change doesn't make it more or less correct, just means wrong information sticks around longer. Because revision history is kept and changes are instant, it's easy to fix bad changes. For topics that see extensive astroturfing, they can be restricted.

[JimDabell]

It’s worth remembering that the entire point of a wiki is that it’s quick and easy to make a change (the name means “quick” in Hawaiian). Being quick and easy to change was the defining quality of Wikipedia and its advantage over more rigid traditional encyclopaedias. These days editing Wikipedia seems like you have to fight bureaucracy and rules lawyering, and doesn’t seem very wiki-like at all.

[YZF]

But a review process can make it both harder to change and more correct. A delay in impacting the official version makes it harder for people to vandalize.

We do this in software all the time.

In software if there's a critical bug sometimes we accelerate a fix. We can have a process like that for "wrong information". But you'd think most articles about established topics should not see a lot of churn. Yes- Sometimes they find a new fossil that calls some preexisting science into question, but these are relatively rare events and we can deal with that e.g. by putting a note on the relevant topic while the new article gets worked on.

[thatguy0900]

Basically every other complaint in this thread is that editing is impossible because everything is reverted. Your issue seems like an impossible one to cleanly solve

[esseph]

"hard to trust when it seems to fluid"

This has nothing to do with the information itself, it has to do with human emotions and resistance to change.