neutral and boring and well sourced
In a bit of a hyperenergetic rant, Hank Green spoke about Wikipedia and the Destruction of Trust. Hank says, “a community of a bunch of individual volunteers… has built the greatest resource of information the world has ever seen…” And tolerance.
“Elon Musk is like, ‘This is a disaster of a place’ Because, of course, it says things he doesn’t like about him. And so Elon is responding by creating Grokipedia, an AI-created version of Wikipedia… which is admittedly in the Creative Commons.
“It’s just worse in every way because it doesn’t have all of the amazing infrastructure behind it… Holding this community together and keeping it [maintained] on Wikipedia for decades is insane. It’s a miracle.”
Interestingly, Musk’s “anti-woke Wikipedia alternative,” which “aims to create a parallel version of the truth for the right wing,” shows up in this article, revealing what an intellectual fraud it is.
Hank Green: “The project of Wikipedia, being a a lovely little place on the internet, not a place to get outraged, not a place to get radicalized, not a place to make money, but just a place to learn things, to start someone’s journey into understanding in the world, and you can fall down that rabbit hole.”
Conversely, “’Musk does not have armies of people writing pages. What he does have is a sh!t-ton of GPUs,” the technology that underpins AI processing…
Community
“Because if Wikipedia is neutral and boring and well sourced, then that is a threat to their worldview and it’s a threat to their ability to define reality.” It is the anthesis of rage bait, Oxford’s Word of the Year.
“Wikipedia is a community of hundreds of thousands of editors…It’s globally accessible. It’s self-correcting. And I cannot emphasize this enough, boring. . And in the media landscape, designed to amplify the drama and the outrage and the conflict, the fact that Wikipedia is kind of boring is one of the most beautiful things about it. I love it. I want a place that’s not about trying to get views.” It is a social good.
I like Wikipedia. It has become a much better source of information. Back in 2005, there was a piece about the Presidential elections. It stated that the next one would be in 2007, which, of course, was inaccurate. I fixed it, and the correction stuck. I find far fewer of such egregious errors.
Here’s a 2024 article from a high school newspaper that is not wrong. “This issue of inaccurate information expands much more than just Wikipedia… That is why it’s strongly recommended that researchers using Wikipedia always check the sources at the bottom. They could lead to better information, if anything.” And I do use the footnotes regularly.
I even donated to Wikipedia in December 2025, possibly for the first time, because it’s useful and a social good.
Under attack
Rebecca Spiess wrote in the Boston Globe (paywall likely): Wikipedia is more important, and more vulnerable, than ever. The largest open repository of human knowledge is under attack.
“The secret sauce is the robust debate among the site’s editors — all volunteers — over the most important entries.
“In an excellent article in The Verge, writer Josh Dzieza explains just how intensely editors disagree: ‘By 2005, the pages where editors stipulated policy and debated articles were found to be growing faster than the articles themselves. Today, this administrative backend is at least five times the size of the encyclopedia it supports.'”
Moreover, “In its annual plan, Wikipedia this year identified the organization’s largest challenge: finding quality volunteers…
“In its most recent annual plan, the Wikimedia Foundation noted that its long-term sustainability largely hinges ‘on a steady influx of new users who contribute quality content and remain engaged.'”
“As algorithms continually work to build up our echo chambers, fact-checking procedures look increasingly quaint, and AI slop splashes all over the internet, Wikipedia is possibly the only fully unmonetized reality that still exists. There is no algorithm, sycophant AI machine, or advertiser trying to game this place.
“That’s why it matters so much.”
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Author: Roger
I'm a librarian. I hear music, even when it's not being played. I used to work at a comic book store, and it still informs my life. I won once on JEOPARDY! - ditto.
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