This is a Lesson 101 on how to refute baseless arguments. Or maybe it is a 400-level class. It all comes down to recognizing mimicry of authenticity manipulated towards fringe ideas.
I like how the article adds weight to mainstream vs fringe. But it occurs to me that some ideas are given so little attention that there is no substantial basis of what is fringe and what is mainstream.
(Long time since I _attempted_ to create an article on Wikipedia, but the form of entries makes it clear) factual assertions must largely be supported by (some metric) of published sources. A fringe topic would by definition would have “so little attention”. So it stands to reason Wikipedia would need a _policy_ of supporting fringe in order to allow page creation.
In other words, fringe is what has few supporting references, but is otherwise noteworthy. With a number of notable exceptions.
That the ideas are given little attention is the substantial basis in determining that they are fringe.
If an idea is given a lot of attention, it might be mainstream or fringe, depending on how accepted it is. It might be getting a lot of negative attention, or it might just be getting a lot of attention right now. It might be transitioning from fringe to mainstream.
But if it is not getting any attention, or very little, then it is by definition fringe.
Compounding this is the aforementioned conundrum that when you fill out the gaps in "In 1987, $person met _____ in _____" with random but not implausible values you end up with a gazillion wrong assertions and (maybe) a very short list of accidentally correct ones. So even if a troll would like to tell the truth but enjoys peppering discussion threads with many low-effort comments just so someone will interact in whatever which way with them, none of their comments will likely be factually correct. It's like a multiple choice but it's not one out of four, it's one out of a billion answers, almost all of them wrong.
That is not true at all. The usefulness and value of many new things and discoveries is often immediately obvious. Even when the value is not immediately obvious, being a curiosity is more likely than being a fringe belief.
Fringe beliefs don't have evidence behind them, but progress does.
The idea that the earth is flat is a fringe belief. No evidence (that hasn't been disproven) exists to suggest that the earth is flat. What progress is being made by giving flat earth ideology equal footing? If any idea—even those with no evidence to support them—are published in authoritative texts as possible truths, then how can anyone trust those texts? If I convince enough people that the center of the earth is filled with spaghetti (of course it is, that's why the moon is made of cheese! To go on the spaghetti!) does that deserve equal footing on Wikipedia? Of course not.
That's tautologically false. For something to be considered "progress" it has to provably improve upon something. But if your belief is provably an improvement, it's not a belief anymore, but more of a fact.
What you actually meant to say is that all progress stems from the research and implementation sparkled by a fringe intuition. But even then, you can have progress without going too far from the current mainstream, so it's not really true anyway
Agreed. Fringe beliefs die when they are challenged, not when censored. Driving them underground makes them stronger if anything.
Policing fringe beliefs is dangerous. A free society must tolerate & even welcome such beliefs into the public sphere, not because they are good, but because the freedom to be wrong is the foundation of our ability to be right.
wikipedia's function as a general (as in not specialized) tertiary source isn't to filter out ideas or beliefs but to catalog and present them in a standardized(ish) format.
The rules are not "insufficient" in this regard in the same way that a flute is not an "insufficient" guitar; they aren't designed to "protect against" any topic that would otherwise qualify for a wiki article.
There's nothing unique to Wikipedia there though, that kind of thing has always happened. Anyone with a printing press is tempted to control the narrative. History is written by the victors, as it were.
Wikipedia rules are provably sufficient to produce the greatest and most useful reference work in human history. That's good enough for me.
Why should wikipedia protect itself from fringe, when it doesn't need to try to? If your fringe theory becomes the widely accepted one, it will naturally change the wording of the article, just based on sourcing alone.
These kinds of articles induce a feeling of deep hopelessness. Frankly, I can't understand how people managed to remain relatively sane for so long, given the circumstances. Being an abusive, smug, deceiving human being that tries to win arguments with rhetoric, maneuvering and logical fallacies is easy and looks good to others - look, they're crushing the other side! Taking it down requires dozens of paragraphs of instruction, and a single misstep is an almost instant loss, you have to have surgical precision. Worst of all, being right in those scenarios is extremely boring, and by the time you dismantle one of these claims, everyone's already looking the other way, towards the 17 new talking points that have spawned while you were methodically discussing the first one.
Why didn't their side win sooner? Perhaps 'being right' in the scientific sense has just been too beneficial for humans so far. But if that weakens, I fully expect humanity to go back to zealotry, superstition and undiscerning hatred, perhaps forever.
In the past these sycophants ran into hard limits of reality. Now that we are almost post scarcity on many things. It's easy for people to lose connection to science backed reality . In the past this would result in death or starvation or extreme suffering (simple things like saving food for winter pre industrial refrigeration). Now these people have EVERYTHING provided for them and an entire society that will bend over backward to make sure they have water roads etc..
It's quite literally spoiled children growing into spoiled adults. Raised to blthink whatever their current thoughts are the entire world and reality. See the rise of " affirmations" in new age woo stuff.
The first paragraph of the linked essay is as follows:
> It is unlikely that you will ever happen upon an editor who will argue that Wikipedia cannot claim that the Earth is not flat. But you may indeed encounter some...
From this, it is obvious that the essay is about people who claim Wikipedia can't claim the Earth is not flat, and how to respond to them.
None of these rules allow distinguishing "flat earth" nonsense from stuff that is just controversial. The real reason that Wikipedia can claim the Earth is not flat is that it's bloody obvious and only idiots think otherwise. I suppose they don't want to say that.
Maybe there's some truth to this article, but it doesn't address the history of people creating libelous content elsewhere, and then citing it on Wikipedia as truth. All you need to do to game Wikipedia is to create a few external stories, and then cross-cite them.
Very interesting to see "Technical Analysis" in this list. I'm no expert in the field, and TA always seemed like quackery to me, but I suspect many more people believe in it than for example Cryptozoology. I personally know someone who even took a course in TA, couldn't imagine anyone taking a course in looking for Bigfoot.
Technical Analysis is a bit of a mixed bag. Some parts are fairly mainstream like saying there's a bull market in tech stocks is essentially part of it. On the other hand a lot of it is like tea leaf reading.
Readit News
I like how the article adds weight to mainstream vs fringe. But it occurs to me that some ideas are given so little attention that there is no substantial basis of what is fringe and what is mainstream.
(Long time since I _attempted_ to create an article on Wikipedia, but the form of entries makes it clear) factual assertions must largely be supported by (some metric) of published sources. A fringe topic would by definition would have “so little attention”. So it stands to reason Wikipedia would need a _policy_ of supporting fringe in order to allow page creation.
In other words, fringe is what has few supporting references, but is otherwise noteworthy. With a number of notable exceptions.
If an idea is given a lot of attention, it might be mainstream or fringe, depending on how accepted it is. It might be getting a lot of negative attention, or it might just be getting a lot of attention right now. It might be transitioning from fringe to mainstream.
But if it is not getting any attention, or very little, then it is by definition fringe.
Deleted Comment
All progress starts out as a fringe belief.
That is not true at all. The usefulness and value of many new things and discoveries is often immediately obvious. Even when the value is not immediately obvious, being a curiosity is more likely than being a fringe belief.
Fringe beliefs don't have evidence behind them, but progress does.
There are an infinite number of falsehoods, and only one truth. If we let the lies in the truth becomes impossible to find in the pile of lies.
What you actually meant to say is that all progress stems from the research and implementation sparkled by a fringe intuition. But even then, you can have progress without going too far from the current mainstream, so it's not really true anyway
Policing fringe beliefs is dangerous. A free society must tolerate & even welcome such beliefs into the public sphere, not because they are good, but because the freedom to be wrong is the foundation of our ability to be right.
Dead Comment
The rules are not "insufficient" in this regard in the same way that a flute is not an "insufficient" guitar; they aren't designed to "protect against" any topic that would otherwise qualify for a wiki article.
Wikipedia rules are provably sufficient to produce the greatest and most useful reference work in human history. That's good enough for me.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Why didn't their side win sooner? Perhaps 'being right' in the scientific sense has just been too beneficial for humans so far. But if that weakens, I fully expect humanity to go back to zealotry, superstition and undiscerning hatred, perhaps forever.
It's quite literally spoiled children growing into spoiled adults. Raised to blthink whatever their current thoughts are the entire world and reality. See the rise of " affirmations" in new age woo stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth
This text explicitly and implicitly states that the Earth is not flat.
> It is unlikely that you will ever happen upon an editor who will argue that Wikipedia cannot claim that the Earth is not flat. But you may indeed encounter some...
From this, it is obvious that the essay is about people who claim Wikipedia can't claim the Earth is not flat, and how to respond to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_climate_change
https://slate.com/technology/2019/03/wikipedia-citogenesis-c...
https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/1c1uazj/why_did_...
An encyclopedia is slow. It has to be slow. It's good (beneficial) that it's slow.
And yes, it means that it is self-correcting, slowly
Thing is, if it was fast to self-correct -> it would generate more errors and it would leave the door opened to more errors.