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Wikipedia loses UK Safety Act challenge, worries it will have to verify user IDs (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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[–] 25 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

Coincidentally Wikipedia is the only website I can think of that I'd actually be remotely comfortable with having my identity.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Then you’re not thinking like someone who lives under authoritarians. Have you never gone on a Wikipedia journey following links and ended up on “gunpowder” or “list of dictators in the 21st century” or anything else that could get you painted as a “revolutionary” and locked away?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I'm generally more annoyed at how the early enthusiasm of participation on the site has died out in the face of paranoia and moderator mania. There are so many gaps in both the modern and historical backlog of citations and categorizations. But do I want to invest dozens of hours contributing to a site where a few admins are just going to tear all my work back out again on a bureaucratic technicality?

    It is a site that's alternatively being strangled to death by admins fearful of malicious actors and tore apart by wave after wave of sinister propagandists and hostile agents.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    And yet I’m sure you read it pretty regularly, and it’s a net good in your life. It’s easy to focus on the negatives and miss what an absolute treasure it still is.

    Edit: and it seems it’s been a while since you were a young student and have forgotten what that experience is like. You know many things now, but you didn’t start that way.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I’m sure you read it pretty regularly

    I've found it less and less capable of keeping up with current events. Enshittification truly comes for us all.

    It’s easy to focus on the negatives and miss what an absolute treasure it still is.

    As a historical artifact and a demonstration of the potential for open-sourced editing, it's a milestone. But we're clearly in the twilight of the Wikipedia era.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It’s never really been all that great about current events. That’s the cost of being “neutral” and letting everything settle into hindsight. However the vast majority of human knowledge isn’t current events. Even if Wikipedia were to never get updated again it is still extremely useful.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    However the vast majority of human knowledge isn’t current events.

    Broadly speaking, everything was a current event at some point. As Wikipedia calcifies, it loses the ability to capture and collate new information as it is produced.

    Even if Wikipedia were to never get updated again it is still extremely useful.

    In the same way as any dated encyclopedia, sure. I've got a copy of my dad's childhood encyclopedia, dated to 1954. Lots of interesting factoids in there, assuming your interest in the world is satisfied by an English speaking editor's ability to consolidate the information available to his firm at their publishing deadline.

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