Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-01-16/Serendipity

This is another (urls are black listed) Kickstarter.com /projects/1699256938/the-vanamo-online-game-museum neat commercial project, that makes use (and provided) freely licensed images from Common about History of video games by c:User:Evan-Amos. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 13:01, 16 January 2023 (UTC)


 * Reminds me of this. AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 18:07, 16 January 2023 (UTC)


 * And Diderot's Encyclopédie, which modestly aimed to encapsulate all knowledge in a shelf of printed volumes, unfortunately running up against the rapid increase in technology of the industrial revolution... it got to 28 volumes (or 35, depending on what you choose to include) before the team gave up the struggle ... Chiswick Chap (talk) 11:05, 17 January 2023 (UTC)


 * One major, concerning issue that this raises tangentially, is how we go about preserving history with digital content when it is easier to modify and change it according to the political climate?   Our featured article on Ronald Reagan is a great example of this problem, as it reads like a hagiography written by conservative activists who present a highly selective and biased POV of the former president by moving all of the negative material to sub-articles that receive less attention than the primary subject. Print books, which aren’t subject to change as much, often highlight such negative material in the initial TOC, giving it added visibility.  Aside from this glaring example of bias on Wikipedia, how do we prevent our articles from deteriorating over time due to bad actors?  I would like to suggest that the increasing use of automated tools should be funded and employed to preserve the accuracy and authenticity of digital content for the future. It’s generally well known that bad actors will seek positions of authority within any online administration to try and promote their bias from within.  On Reddit, this is a huge problem with subs, which are often moderated by bad actors opposed to the content of the sub, or even more harmful, actively filter content that goes against their chosen narrative.  Sites like the Internet Archive act as a major bulwark against historical revisionism. In the US, we saw up close and personal how the Trump administration attempted to delete the concept of climate change from two major websites and filter out the word "carbon". The threat of all of featured content turning into biased Reagan hagiographies is real and omnipresent without more oversight. It may very well be the case that history can be preserved simply by printing out a newer, more accurate version of Wikipedia that is examined for historical inaccuracy and omissions by an AI of some kind.  Recently, Matthew G. Devost spoke about his experience at DEF CON seeing automated hacking tools in action, while historian Timothy Snyder discussed the Russian fascination with changing the history of the past.  It’s not a stretch to see how the two could come together to change Wikipedia pages and change the history of the past in subtle, unique ways. As a deterrent and a defensive strategy, Wikipedia should use more automated tools to detect and prevent this kind of information warfare in the first place.  It’s coming, whether we like it or not, so it’s best to prepare. Given how countries keep backsliding into authoritarianism, and as democracy declines around the world during a new Dark Ages, print editions of Wikipedia may end up saving humanity from itself.  Sadly, we cannot depend on digital content to record and preserve history from those who would use it against us. Viriditas (talk) 01:38, 18 January 2023 (UTC)