Cory Doctorow has a word for the phenomenon: enshittification.

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I’d take their answers over yours because they’re a well-known lawyers group who is super-into privacy rights activism and they even are saying that they are compiling instances of so-called “troll pages” on German Wikipedia so that they can file a complaint to the relevant DPAs one day.

In this context I think you need to be mindful of the argument from ignorance fallacy; just because something has not happened or has not been proven either way, doesn’t mean that it’s not going to happen in the future.

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Except for those publicly visible sock-shaming and investigations pages, mark my words they’re going to be their Achilles heels one day. I’ve already asked some GDPR lawyers about it a long time ago and they agreed with me on that.

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What I’m not seeing is any suggestion of a solution. Wikipedia has a slew of rigorous mechanisms to allow for community moderation, resolution/stoppage of edit wars, and well documented escalation paths. It has flaws, and it is a work of volunteers with inherent biases, hence the systems to address them. Instead of curating a list of deficiencies, it may be more effective to start building a list of potential solutions to the deficiencies at hand. If you were to take the existing model of Wikipedia, it’s rules, it’s moderation… What would you change to improve it? And more importantly, how?

Good question. One good approach would be to create as many Wikipedia alternatives as you can, which is actually doable through newly released ibis.wiki. There’s also Encycla, Justapedia and Namu.wiki to pick from, although because of Google is putting it high up in their search results, almost all earlier alternatives failed to get off the ground and gather enough momentum.

Cory Doctorow’s theory of enshittification can be applied to this one. According to him there are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labor. Normally the first and the third one would be sufficient but as I see that Wikipedia has entered a terminal phase with those sexual scandals and so on, which would cause the Internet to turn against Wikipedia overnight, all the constraints would therefore have to be activated in this case. A likely result would entail Wikipedia liquidating and getting absorbed into more better, successor encyclopedic organizations, like how the League of Nations folded into the United Nations at the end of WWII.

Please feel free to read this Reddit page which collects or summarizes a list of scandals and issues on Wikipedia.

The systemic toxicity issues in Wikipedia, many of which aren’t even remotely related to Israel-Palestinian conflict, are increasingly looking like their Achilles heels.

They would have to delete their “sockpuppet investigations” pages and so on first before they can move there, otherwise they would violate GDPR.

Look at how cute you’re trying to deflect and gaslight away from the fact that you’re not reacting well to the hard truth that Wikipedia is not a “magical platform” after all, especially by committing so-called “psychological projection”.

One of the main point of the comparison is the parallel between churches in the 50’s and Wikipedia of today; you would’ve been summarily dismissed as an “atheistic commie bent on destroying the country” if you lift a finger against churches in the era, especially at the height of McCarthyism. The same is happening to critics of Wikipedia today, with people like you dismissing them as “far-right obscurantists bent on destroying knowledge”, which is the essence of strawman fallacy.

You clearly displayed your naivete right there when you summarily dismiss accounts which are solely used to expose any scandals in any companies or organizations as “narrow minded”; are you ten? Perhaps you should go sit at the kids table and cry a river there.

You would’ve said the same thing against victims of priest sexual abuses if you were a regular citizen in the 50’s or so.

You would’ve said the same about Apple and so on if this was the late 2000s.

By the way, there should be a second Internet Archive because currently the original one is getting under siege from copyright lawsuits, and unlike the WMF they’re running on budget money. In contrast to Wikipedia, I found the people there are kind and nice.

What are people supposed to think?

Stop thinking about Wikipedia as a “magical platform” and start thinking it as just another institution which are prone to human errors. It’s because of Google that Wikipedia has become a suffocating monopoly which escaped consequences every time somebody wants to vibe check it, until now.

You said no nuance? Now this is indeed no nuance as the so-called magical platform has hidden ableist biases against topics related to neurodivergent people as well.

That’s right. The other day I had shared a PDF document on this sub that is a court document, regarding serial harassment and stalking incidents done by some toxic editors against an academic on Hebrew Wikipedia. Unfortunately I had removed it with the help of a mod because the document, which is publicly hosted on Wikimedia Foundation’s governance website, contains unredacted personal information.

Has that been the reason you hate Wikipedia this whole time, they’re too honest about genocide?

With all due respect, the pro-Palestinian side has been griping about Wikipedia as well. You’re clearly trying to pigeonhole people so that you can dismiss all the concerns that the so-called “magical platform” has a ton of issues after all.

Perfect sometimes is the enemy of good. At least the issues on Wikipedia are finally being taken seriously after years of neglect.

Gee, why would conservative billionaires be against free and available information to the masses?

This is a false dichotomy pigeonholing fallacy. Many critics do support Wikipedia as a concept, however they are pissed off by how toxic editors have captured the levers of power on Wikipedia and corrupted it. It’s probably better for the knowledge market to consist of multiple platform instead of a single, suffocating monopoly, and there are already real efforts in addressing it, such as ibis.wiki.

Cory Doctorow’s thesis on enshittification fits right in this case.

The Detroit News has syndicated the content in case you can’t get past the paywall. Have a nice day.

I interpret this as a systemic issue (procedure, they) which happens regularly or always (procedure, anyone). It makes me imagine a wiki page “Vandalism cases on wikipedia” containing a table of cases with date, article, edit, and IP/account, existing for months or years frequented by wikipedia mods and admins.

That’s right! That’s exactly the format they used in these procedures, which sometimes branch over onto “sockpuppet investigations” casepages. The other day I approached an Europe-based digital rights lawyers group and they agreed with the assessment that these pages do indeed constitute violations of General Data Protection Regulation. The only problem is that they have to find a victim who’s willing to be a complainant in order to initiate a formal complaint.

A few months ago the Italian data protection authority ruled that Wikipedia isn’t exempt from the privacy regulation in some way.