All human advancement was created by nerds. Spears were invented by weaklings too slow to kill with their bare hands. Fire was tamed by the people who were scared of the dark
I think the post makes a point important in modern capitalism: people will create “value” for free because they can, they care, they want to, it’s a challenge. Capital and/or the threat of starvation is not actually always necessary for people to be “productive”. Ego, boredom, altruism, adventure, these are also traits of humanity besides survival and greed.
I don’t feel the need to correct anyone, EXCEPT when it comes to myths about date rape drugs. Most people still believe that roofies are the Rolls Royces of seduction, when in reality, chloroform remains The Gold Standard. Ever since our society began shunning manual labor back in The 1960s, shoving a chemical-soaked rag over the mouth and nose over the girl you fancy fell out of favor, despite the fact this remains the most effective way of charming her pants and underroos off
Could you specify? I’ve heard similar comments aimed against people not accepting Russian propaganda. But I imagine with the common user base, you would get some very anglocentric implicit bias just because that’s what they know.
That’s what it should’ve been. In reality anything even remotely political on it is heavily biased towards imperial core and NATO countries, and against their geopolitical rivals.
This happens partly because most of these “nerds” are also westerners and rate their own outlets as more reliable, thus enforcing western propaganda.
You bring up an interesting point. There are opposing opinions on everything if you go deep enough into the topic, even in STEM fields too.
It’d be interesting to see a Wikipedia that provides pages on the same topic that present each opinion. So the base/overview page on the topic states the summaries of each opinion with a link for further reading. Each opinion page states there are many opinions on the topic and it just presents one. Each page then suggests for further reading, view the base/overview page where the user can read about other opinions on the topic.
You are currently already living in a bourgeois dictatorship (getting to choose between two right-wing imperialists is not “democracy”, whatever that means).
If you’re in an imperial core country, this dictatorship prefers funding a genocide over meeting its own citizens’ needs.
Hell, the current CEO literally attended a US state department briefing in 2017 with a former CIA/NSA director and is currently on the advisory board for the CIA offshoot OTF.
It all goes out of the window as soon as politcal events are concerned, then it is just western naratives all over. With things as sources, good sources, multiple viewpoints all forgotten. What the west says is treated as gospel. While paid editors up to and including state actors rule the site. The system of nerds correcting each other is then used to prevent corrections.
You can alos check Prolewiki for more stuff: en.prolewiki.org/wiki/WikipediaIt’s written by communists so mind the specific lingo used. Quite a few interesting footnotes for anyone interested tho.
I realize autistic people often have trouble with tone and having people interpret things the way they meant it to come across – lord knows it took me took long enough to develop that skill – but good grief. I’m on the spectrum, and if I were a mod who had just read the comment in your screenshot, I’d’ve banned you too.
Now that you’ve explained you meant it in a positive way, I completely understand what you meant, but nothing in the comment you wrote makes it clear that you think of autism in a positive way or, in fact, as anything besides “lol nerd emoji”. The fact that you had just finished going on a seven paragraph infodump (I’m guessing) unfortunately does nothing to prove otherwise: an unfortunate number of undiagnosed autistic people spend their days getting into online fights, writing said seven paragraph comments, and calling anyone who disagrees with them autistic because they want to feel superior and “autistic” is a handy epithet. I don’t think anyone would argue these people should be welcome in our communities just because of autism they themselves don’t know about.
To be clear, I’m not saying that last statement applies to you. I’m saying if I didn’t know anything about you except that you had written the comment in that screenshot, I would have assumed it did and not given it a second thought. I can almost guarantee that’s what that mod did.
While that term is slowly but surely being reclaimed, and I’m glad that it is, at present, it still holds the status of “insult unless explicitly stated otherwise.” Now that you’ve told me what you meant, I can see where you were coming from, but as that comment was written, “spread some weaponized autism” implies you’re prepared to call anyone who disagrees with you a slur. Your comment seems to be saying “only an idiot autistic person would miss the sarcasm in this comment and bother to respond.” It’s not what you meant, but it’s how I (and no doubt plenty of other people) probably read it.
Please learn to use qualifiers and/or tone indicators, for the sake of your own reputation. If you’d said “Can’t wait for all my autistic friends to chime in with a seven paragraph sales pitch for their niche chat platform of choice” or even just replaced “weaponized autism” with “weaponized autism (affectionate)” and left the rest of the comment as is, I guarantee you’d have been fine.
I feel you,i had to learn to feel context (vibe) too, however, from my own experience i can tell that no qualifiers and explanations would prevent previous me from getting everything wrong
I get that you’re trying to use it in a positive way, but in my country that first word you used is a slur that has not even attempted to be reclaimed, so it instantly makes me start reading your comment with an ableist tone.
Now that I know you’re trying to frame it in a positive way, I can force myself to read your comment in a positive tone. But it’s difficult because the language chosen still makes me read it like you’re annoyed that autistic people will miss the sarcasm and take it too seriously.
Yes, I do, every time there’s seventeen exceptions on a statement that used to be simple. ‘This was their last album with this drummer, until he came back, except for this other time, before he left again.’ Just rewrite the damn sentence.
Wikipedia’s own list of its controversies - pay special attention here to the 2023 exposure of an administrator pretending to be a spanish folk singer as a sockpuppet of another administrator who was banned in 2015 for making “promotional edits”.
I want to be clear: i do not feel that wikipedia isn’t reliable. I can clearly observe that wikipedia is unreliable.
Info on Wikipedia shouldn’t be taken at face value, check the sources given! A lot of the examples you gave likely didn’t have any citation. The blame for misinformation partly lies with the people accepting information with no sources given. Also, any example of known misinformation just means that it has been caught and corrected. Everyone should know wikipedia is not right 100% of the time but it is always getting better. There millions of articles and I don’t think the examples you listed should lead anyone to believe it is overall unreliable. It is good however to not blindly put your trust in whatever you read from it, and if you do come across something that isn’t correct, you have the opportunity to fix it.
If you knew a person who shouldn’t be taken at face value and whose claims had to be verified, what word would you use to describe them? Would that word be reliable? Trustworthy?
Wikipedia isn’t a person though. It’s a website of articles that summarizes topics and ideally lists sources that contain the info within it. I agree a person that sounds like that is untrustworthy, but that doesn’t mean anything on the topic of wikipedia.
So, like, if you knew of a website which shouldn’t be taken at face value and whose claims had to be verified, what word would you use to describe it? would that word be reliable? Trustworthy?
It depends on the website. A Twitter post with no source? Untrustworthy. Wikipedia page with plenty of sources to back up the article? I would default to saying trustworthy, but of course I would still have to check the sources myself. Wikipedia is a tool. It connects you to outside sources of info. It has the reputation of being reliable enough to get trustworthy info in its summaries. As I’ve already stated before, mistakes have been made though.
You’re missing a lot of other points I’ve made. Let me ask you then what is a reliable source of information? You’re skepticism implies nothing is trustworthy if you have to verify information with various sources. Do you only trust what you can observe first hand?
I promise you, I am not missing any other point you have made. my intent with selectively quoting was to go ahead and knock the legs out from under all the other stuff that rests upon those two statements in order to save us the back and forth of big walls of text.
My skepticism absolutely does not imply that nothing is trustworthy when it has to be verified. It explicitly applies to a website (Wikipedia) which maintains an extensive record of ways in which it has been shown to be systematically untrustworthy.
Within the scope of this discussion, it’s not important what sources of information I would consider trustworthy, we’re only talking about Wikipedia, a source that has a long history of being untrustworthy. We are talking about Wikipedia because it is the subject of the ops post which compares it to the library of Alexandria.
So would you now agree with the original comment that said Wikipedia is not a reliable SOURCE of accurate information? It’s a great starting point and a potential resource that can be used as a bibliography of possible sources, but it’s never a good source itself. Even as a bibliography, you have to consider whether the available references for an article are biased – they don’t always paint a fair picture.
Yes I agree with that. I think there was an issue with establishing what “source” meant in the given context. I wouldn’t say the text of a single wikipedia article is a reliable source by itself, however that doesn’t discredit the reliability of accurate information on Wikipedia in my opinion. If you stripped a textbook of it’s listed citations and credited authors, then you can’t really verify the information in it either.
150m a year doesn’t seem that much, honestly. I know people think “oh, it’s just a website” but it takes a lot of work and money in salaries and infrastructure hosting to keep a web application as popular as Wikipedia up and running.
I used to work for them. It was weird and wonderful and I miss it and I don’t. Lots of mission driven folks working hard to keep things going getting very little respect. But a lot of respect. But sometimes none.
Iirc a lot of their budget is spent doing charity stuff. Encouraging contributions for tiny languages. Trying not to cave to Russia or the US or France. Trying to make it less of a boys club. Trying to get local organizations going.
I remember once they sent an email that said “if the French government asks you to delete this page please just delete it. It’s not worth going to jail. Someone outside of France will revert the delete.”
I wasn’t qualified for the work. No one was. But it was honest work.
Certainly, here are some notable instances involving French colonial forces:
Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962): This was a significant and violent decolonization conflict where Algerian nationalists sought independence from French colonial rule. The French military’s efforts to suppress the independence movement resulted in large numbers of casualties, including civilians. Tactics such as the use of torture, mass executions, and the creation of internment camps were reported. The exact number of Algerian casualties is disputed, but estimates suggest that the death toll could be in the range of hundreds of thousands.
The Madagascar Uprising (1947): In Madagascar, a nationalist uprising against French colonial rule was met with severe repression. French forces were accused of committing numerous atrocities in their effort to suppress the rebellion, including summary executions, village burnings, and torture. Estimates of the Malagasy deaths vary widely, with some suggesting that the number could be as high as 100,000.
Indochina War (1946–1954): This conflict in French Indochina, which includes modern-day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, was fought between French colonial forces and the Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, who sought independence. The war was marked by guerrilla warfare and significant civilian casualties, with both sides accused of atrocities. The use of forced labor, internment camps, and the bombing of civilian areas contributed to a high death toll.
These examples reflect the complex and often brutal nature of colonial rule and the struggle for independence. They involve a wide range of actions and policies implemented by French military and colonial authorities, which led to significant loss of life and suffering among the colonized populations.
i dont think anyone is ignoring that. the meme is talking about how it was built, not how it’s currently maintained. it definitely didn’t start off spending that much. all that spending is a consequence of it’s popularity, not the reason for it.
Some would say that most of the spending is based on greed. Individual salaries doubled to tripled in the last decade, with their head earning three quarters of a million now.
It was a tenth 15 years ago.
They started out right, like they all do. Then personal money catches up.
I think you should consider the opportunity cost of what they would be making elsewhere. Salaries need to be competitive, otherwise you are at the mercy of those who are willing to work for less and hope that the reason is benevolent.
That would make more sense if Wikipedia was a profit generating enterprise that needed to satisfy shareholders. It’s run like a charity through donations, though.
Fifteen other people sit on the board of trustees that oversees wikimedia. The only person on that board who gets paid is Jimmy.
I don’t buy that argument at all, it just doesn’t make any sense for a position like Wikipedia. Sure, if you’re in a highly competitive and specialised industry where connections and insider information matters I would get it, but just running a “simple” organisation like Wikipedia, no way.
Yes? And by simple I meant in the manner that it’s not a competitive company. They aren’t there to bring in the AI revolution or invent the next iPhone. Their primary goal is to just keep the servers running, not create record profits for shareholders.
High six figure salaries in general seems foreign to me. A core part of the nordic model is to limit wage gap between high education jobs and low education jobs, so the entire CEO wage structure in the US seems completely backwards.
You thinking a $750,000 salary for the CEO of one of the top ten visited websites in the world and arguably one of the most important knowledge resources we’ve probably ever created is ‘greed’ is pretty hilarious.
Thinking one guy deserves that much salary for the work of millions of volunteers over decades is what’s hilarious. Do you think those giant pleas that they post when they need money would be as convincing if they listed his salary?
That’s literally what the library of Alexandria was all about.
They told all of the nerds that the best nerd paper would get into their nerd building, and nerds traveled there from around the world and dedicated their lives to correcting and one-upping the other nerds.
I love the fallibility of humans and our consistency, it makes me much more comfortable to live in a world that seems comprehensible, because I know underneath all of it are like three dumb existential complacencies that any human part of the species can’t deny.
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