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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: January 9th, 2024

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  • I use Blokada - but not the latest version since the company switched from the free open-source standalone app paradigm to a cloud-based continual paid subscription model. It seems like Blokada version 4 (obtained either from the company’s webpage or F-droid I forget which) blocks a heck of a lot more stuff than version 5 for some reason.

    On the other hand, it also noticeably heats up my phone if a not-well-behaved app (examples include Freemium games) continually resubmits queries over & over again every (or even multiple times a) second. You can block every request that it makes… but it can also keep making them so… at some point you may question whether the cost is worth it.

    This arguably relates more to “tracking” than actual advertisements, since there can only be a finite number of the latter but the former can happen all day every day even when the app is not running, if it decides to be aggressive about checking in with its home base. These days, even if you do pay for something, your data is STILL the actual “product” that is the reason the company is in business at all to obtain.:-(





  • Fair. Though that capability - e.g. the identical wikia software, implementing the MediaWiki protocol - already exists. Maybe federating it would somehow improve it, though it would also open it up to have greater vulnerabilities especially when non-scientists get involved, e.g. a w/article/conservative/vaccine vs. a w/article/real/vaccine. Scientists can handle these controversies, but people who do not have the base knowledge with which to properly understand, e.g. ivermectin, are not going to be able to distinguish between the truth vs. the lies.

    So the people that would put it to the best use don’t absolutely need it - sure it would be nice but peer-reviewed articles already exist - while the ones for whom it would be most damaging are almost certainly going to be the primary target audience.


  • The goal of academic research is to inform the best and brightest of the real information. For e.g. academic extensions to how nuclear power works, or for engineers to have a working basis to build a viable power plant, and so on.

    The goal of an encyclopedia though is arguably different: to make people “feel” informed, without necessarily being so? Or at least to serve as a starting point for further studies, maybe?

    Science marches ever onwards, and eventually that gets collected into textbooks, and even later into encyclopedias. Or maybe now we’re working from a new model where it could skip that middle step? But science still seems leagues ahead of explanations to the masses, and whereas in science the infighting is purposeful and helpful (to a degree), the infighting of making something explainable in a clearer manner to more people is also purposeful and helpful, though federating seems to me to be giving up on making a centralized repository of knowledge, i.e. the very purpose of an “encyclopedia”?

    Science reporting must be decentralized, but encyclopedias have a different purpose and so should not be, maybe? At least not at the level of Wikipedia.


  • The question was:

    are these people writing about the same website?!

    I was pointing out how no, they are not the same website. The name of “Wikipedia” was thus improper as it lacked precision, compared to something like “the wikia software, following the WikiMedia protocols” (or whatever it would be).

    The content therefore has nothing whatsoever to do with the question, that was asking about the Wikipedia website.

    And btw, none of this bodes well for the project imho. The front-end work is clearly lacking, as OP even admitted, but more importantly all of this discussion lacks the type of “precision” that usually goes into a Wikipedia article. Obviously any person or AI can copy the existing Wikipedia website’s content, but if all of this is a reflection of what would go into that copy, then it looks to me like it will quickly fall behind.

    I would have been much more likely to have read a blog post to read about the relevant issues relating to communism if it did not try to ride on Wikipedia’s coattails and just stood all on its own. But… as you can guess, I would be more of a fan of articles that are precise in the terminology used rather than ones that are all over the place.

    And keep in mind that b/c what is being discussed is a “federated” model, ANYONE, who writes with ANY degree of precision, from the highest to the lowest level, will be federated around to everywhere. At which point it will become too difficult to find worthwhile content, as opposed to it being in one central location. The entire point of an encyclopedia is to be a one-stop place to look things up?

    Alternative takes on communism would have, imho at least, been more widely distributed if they were written on a blog website and linked to from the actual Wikipedia pages. If the Wikipedia is too restrictive then… I understand why that could not happen, but nevertheless it is still going to be a major impediment. Which is all the more reason why imprecise language, scattered throughout the entire world, does not offer much of a viable alternative to the great Wikipedia? But… prove me wrong, I guess!? :-D


  • Everyone has implicit biases. It takes a huge amount of effort to work past them and write content that is considered unbiased. The latter is a group effort to achieve consensus, which even in the hard sciences is often difficult, but Wikipedia has had fantastic successes there - e.g. look at any controversial subject (someone mentioned BP, and how half the page was about their “controversies”, which does not say that they are true, nor false, but acknowledges that they exist all the same - most people, with the exclusion of the BP execs I am sure - would consider that to be a state that is unbiased).

    In fact, the OP brings up a major source of bias to begin with: if someone wants to federate a blogging website, why would we even talk about it - just DO IT!:-) However, the name “Wikipedia” was mentioned b/c it is popular. This introduces a bias whereby the rest of the discussion will be predicated upon the lines of what Wikipedia is vs. what it is not. Even though the OP made it clear that “Wikipedia” is not the goal of that project at all. Even dragging its name into it has thus introduced a source of bias, rather than allowing everyone here to discuss the merits of this proposal on its own, as if made from scratch rather than a Wikipedia-clone (“good” connotations?) or Wikipedia-wanna-be (“bad” ones?) or Wikipedia-whatever.