Why Conservatives Are Attacking ‘Wokepedia’

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• xxce2AAb@feddit.dk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  That’s hardly surprisingly behavior for a group that’s based part of its collective identity on distrust of subject matter experts.

  And I get it, I do. Experts are mighty inconvenient when you’re completely wrong about everything.

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  • displaced_city_mouse@midwest.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Every time I hear someone say something like, “Experts - what do they know?”, I want to reply, "Yeah, you’re right - now, when can I come by to fix your roof? I’m not a roofer - don’t know shit about roofing or construction, actually - but you don’t like experts, and I’m certainly not a roofing expert, just another ignorant monkey with a hammer and a lot of misplaced confidence in my abilities. "

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• tal@olio.cafe ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Sacks, the Trump administration’s AI czar and co-host of the conference, stopped Musk mid-answer. “Well, Elon, by the way, could you just publish that?” he asked. “Wikipedia is so biased, it’s a constant war.” He suggested that Musk create what he called “Grokipedia.”

  This past week, as the Wikipedia controversy reignited, Musk announced xAI would, in fact, offer up Grokipedia. Soon after, the Wikipedia page for Musk’s Grok was updated. The entry included a brief comparison to an effort almost 20 years earlier to create another Wikipedia alternative called Conservapedia.

  Yeah, my initial take is “Conservapedia was pretty much a disaster, and there’s a reason that people don’t use it”.

  Like, go to Conservapedia’s “evolution” article.

  https://www.conservapedia.com/Evolution

  Like, you’re going to have to create an entire alternate reality for people who have weird views on X, Y, or Z. And making it worse, there isn’t overlap among all those groups. Like, maybe you’re a young earth creationist, and you like that evolution article. But then maybe you don’t buy into chemtrails. It looks like Conservapedia doesn’t like chemtrails. So that’s gonna piss off the chemtrail people.

  There are lots of people on the right who are going to disagree with scientific consensus on something, but they don’t all have the same set of views.

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  • Midnitte@beehaw.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    He suggested that Musk create what he called “Grokipedia.”

    Would be a damn shame for people to make troll edits if he were to do so…

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    • FaceDeer@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      That happened to Conservapedia too. It's a poster child for Poe's Law, none of the editors over there really knows whether any of the other editors are true believer lunatics or highly creative trolls making up nonsense in the style of true believer lunatics. For all we know the true believers are a minority at this point and the whole thing is mostly trolling, there's no way to tell it apart from genuine lunacy.

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  • FaceDeer@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Reminds me of various old sayings, such as: "The truth is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." And "if you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."

    I don't necessarily believe in a purely objective reality, personally. I don't know for sure that there is some kind of platonic ideal structure of all things that exists apart from observers and always has and always will, it's a hard thing to figure out how to even start to prove. But there sure does seem like there is one, some kind of underlying pattern to reality that everyone who makes honest rigorous measurements seems to be measuring the same way. So if you just do straightforward science it seems like you automatically end up participating in a single common shared worldview.

    Whereas if you just make shit up based on your beliefs, you end up with a worldview that's divergent from everyone else who's also making shit up based on their beliefs.

    It gives an inherent advantage to the reality-based people. They end up working together and supporting each other even if they have absolutely no way to communicate with each other. Physicists doing experiments on opposite sides of the planet with no awareness of each other can produce results that, when they're later brought together, click into place as if the two of them had directly collaborated all their lives. It's awesome.

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    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I think one can take that even further. It’s possible that the fact that people who rely on truth and morality (which is a human constant if not a natural one) converge, is the whole reason either one has a place in our society. Almost all our instincts lead us away from them, otherwise.

      So do you believe in an objective reality, or not? You said a couple of opposite things there.

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  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It’s kind of a tale as old as time. If there’s a socially correct way to think, and at least two people, they’re inevitably going to disagree on which way that is at some point, and splinter into subfactions that hate each other.

    Lemmy has examples of this already.

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• lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  “What I can tell you is that over the years, conservatives, libertarians, were just pushed out,” Sanger said. “There is a whole…army of administrators, hundreds of them, who are constantly blocking people…that they have ideological disagreements with.”

  “Oh noes, people in Wokepedia aren’t willing to accept my opinion that gravity doesn’t work on Fridays!”

  “Wikipedia is losing its objectivity @jimmy_wales,” Musk posted in 2022.

  If you’re really, really invested on 2+2 being five, then 2+2=4 becomes “subjective”.

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  In my opinion Wikipedia being hosted in USA is a liability. Or even being hosted in a single place, whichever it is.

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  • Megaman_EXE@beehaw.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I find it reassuring that Wikipedia is doing it’s best to try and maintain truth and accountability. I agree they should be hosted in a different place.

    Side thought/my own ramblings here: Has there ever been hosting where the information is scattered across the world rather than one localized spot? That seems like it might be helpful, but I honestly don’t know enough about site hosting

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    • lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Side thought/my own ramblings here: Has there ever been hosting where the information is scattered across the world rather than one localized spot? That seems like it might be helpful, but I honestly don’t know enough about site hosting

      In a certain sense we are using a system like this, due to federation. I don’t think the exact same model would work well for Wikipedia, but it could try something similar.

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  • SL3wvmnas@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I agree about the liability part. My interest was piqued during the so called Twitter files, when reporting was something like the bosses of twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia sat in a weekly (or was it monthly?) meeting, where they were told what controversial topics to “tamp down” on. I found it very weird, especially since I cannot imagine how one “tamps down” on a wikipedia article?

    I think the much harder part is how would you go about democratising a website?

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