OpenStars

I would naively think that as well - you would expand your alphabet of "symbols" to include both single letters and numbers and punctuation but also common words as well. It is still a lot of combinations to have to try though, even if less than each letter by itself.

The goal of academic research is to inform the best and brightest of the real information. For e.g. academic extensions to how nuclear power works, or for engineers to have a working basis to build a viable power plant, and so on.

The goal of an encyclopedia though is arguably different: to make people "feel" informed, without necessarily being so? Or at least to serve as a starting point for further studies, maybe?

Science marches ever onwards, and eventually that gets collected into textbooks, and even later into encyclopedias. Or maybe now we're working from a new model where it could skip that middle step? But science still seems leagues ahead of explanations to the masses, and whereas in science the infighting is purposeful and helpful (to a degree), the infighting of making something explainable in a clearer manner to more people is also purposeful and helpful, though federating seems to me to be giving up on making a centralized repository of knowledge, i.e. the very purpose of an "encyclopedia"?

Science reporting must be decentralized, but encyclopedias have a different purpose and so should not be, maybe? At least not at the level of Wikipedia.

The question was:

are these people writing about the same website?!

I was pointing out how no, they are not the same website. The name of "Wikipedia" was thus improper as it lacked precision, compared to something like "the wikia software, following the WikiMedia protocols" (or whatever it would be).

The content therefore has nothing whatsoever to do with the question, that was asking about the Wikipedia website.

And btw, none of this bodes well for the project imho. The front-end work is clearly lacking, as OP even admitted, but more importantly all of this discussion lacks the type of "precision" that usually goes into a Wikipedia article. Obviously any person or AI can copy the existing Wikipedia website's content, but if all of this is a reflection of what would go into that copy, then it looks to me like it will quickly fall behind.

I would have been much more likely to have read a blog post to read about the relevant issues relating to communism if it did not try to ride on Wikipedia's coattails and just stood all on its own. But... as you can guess, I would be more of a fan of articles that are precise in the terminology used rather than ones that are all over the place.

And keep in mind that b/c what is being discussed is a "federated" model, ANYONE, who writes with ANY degree of precision, from the highest to the lowest level, will be federated around to everywhere. At which point it will become too difficult to find worthwhile content, as opposed to it being in one central location. The entire point of an encyclopedia is to be a one-stop place to look things up?

Alternative takes on communism would have, imho at least, been more widely distributed if they were written on a blog website and linked to from the actual Wikipedia pages. If the Wikipedia is too restrictive then... I understand why that could not happen, but nevertheless it is still going to be a major impediment. Which is all the more reason why imprecise language, scattered throughout the entire world, does not offer much of a viable alternative to the great Wikipedia? But... prove me wrong, I guess!? :-D

Everyone has implicit biases. It takes a huge amount of effort to work past them and write content that is considered unbiased. The latter is a group effort to achieve consensus, which even in the hard sciences is often difficult, but Wikipedia has had fantastic successes there - e.g. look at any controversial subject (someone mentioned BP, and how half the page was about their "controversies", which does not say that they are true, nor false, but acknowledges that they exist all the same - most people, with the exclusion of the BP execs I am sure - would consider that to be a state that is unbiased).

In fact, the OP brings up a major source of bias to begin with: if someone wants to federate a blogging website, why would we even talk about it - just DO IT!:-) However, the name "Wikipedia" was mentioned b/c it is popular. This introduces a bias whereby the rest of the discussion will be predicated upon the lines of what Wikipedia is vs. what it is not. Even though the OP made it clear that "Wikipedia" is not the goal of that project at all. Even dragging its name into it has thus introduced a source of bias, rather than allowing everyone here to discuss the merits of this proposal on its own, as if made from scratch rather than a Wikipedia-clone ("good" connotations?) or Wikipedia-wanna-be ("bad" ones?) or Wikipedia-whatever.

I think you have 2 replies here that went to the wrong place - instead of to the person you likely aimed them at, they are to yourself. I just thought that you might like to know!:-)

I would dare say that the vast majority of the people on Lemmy are by no means "average". Not necessarily better or worse, but we do have biases: we seem to trend towards older IT professionals who will put up with all the website glitches, as compared to e.g. a normal tween that would not.

Example "average" lie (in my own addled mind): "Gurl puh-lease, you lookin' MIGHTY fine right about now!" (translation: bish please, you look like a dumpster fire wrapped in bacon, insteada puttin on makeup and pounds, you need to be going to the GYM!:-P) Or at least this is my impression based on Twitter and YouTube, though tbf I don't really look at either of them and what posts do make their way onto Lemmy (or Reddit before the collapse) may have been... slightly skewed? :-D

I used to just tell people. It... did not go over well:-P. After that I lied, for their sakes b/c they did not truly want to know.

Having read this over, fwiw I am definitively siding with @snooggums@midwest.social on this. Here is an illustration that I think will help:

Child 1: Hey, let's grab some cookies!

Child 2: Okay! (reaches for cookie but before they can grab one...)

Mother: Hey, what are you doing - you two are not eating cookies are you, hrm!?

Child 1: No mummy dearest (choose appropriate slang of choice here:-), we two are not eating cookies...

Question: did child 1 lie? Technically their statement is accurate according to the narrowest possible interpretation - they both were not eating cookies, yet, even though the intentions of them both were fairly blatantly obvious.

Communication among humans is not math - the meaning of a message requires interpretation from the multiple parties involved. And in particular the recipient is usually in possession of additional data than the sender - at the very least, once the sender chooses to send the message packet, then the receiver has obtained +1 message that prior to the sending did not yet exist between them (and which may contain additional data, such as "a sender exists" and "the sender was located in this direction, at the time of the sending").

Anyway the child KNOWS what the mother intended to ask, but deliberately and blatantly told an extremely skewed version of the truth that is SO distorted, SO unwieldy, SO twisted, that there is no doubt that the intention was to deceive. In a normal situation anyway - though ofc exceptions always exist e.g. an autistic child, or one who has suffered some form of brain damage that causes them to struggle with over-literal statements might somehow literally be confused what the intention of the mother was. But in a normal situation, the meaning is clear: the child lied.

Any judgement about that is ofc up to interpretation - maybe the mother is actually pleased at having taught her children to lie so well? :-P

And I for one appreciate so much that you do - take all the time that you need and I will know that the response will be all the better for it.:-)

This presumes that all people are informed. New people, by definition, are not that. Arguably their fault for (checks notes) getting on a social media site then?

I am saying that it is easy for a day-1 noob to feel "dunked on" based on this absolute rush of feedback, especially for e.g. someone on the wider Fediverse who was not even aware that hexbear was that way, so especially they had no chance to consent to that - no pop-up messages appeared, nothing really unless you hunt around dig and also scroll down to see it, underneath the community, they just saw a post and replied as normal but then WHABOOSH!

Also you did not explain how the person you were responding to was not merely "wrong" but rose to be fully "disingenuous". Sadly this is something I notice often with hexbear - the culture seems to value "fights", which ngl could be helpful if the goal were to use socratic discourse to achieve some end goal like Truth and/or Compassion, but far more often it looks to me, from the outside, like people who just enjoy fighting/dunking for its own sake.

You are free - and I will fight to the death for your rights to do precisely this - to do as you please, as it pertains to yourself, but when it crosses over to affect other people, then different rules come into play. Specifically, if people from hexbear will not control themselves, then that leaves others to have to do it for them - e.g. warn people what to expect from hexbear users. i.e., it is not "disingenuous" to say that hexbear users seem to be spoiling for a fight, if that is literally what happens.

I dunno, all I do is hit copy, then go to the website and hit paste, and that's pretty easy as well:-P.

I do need to step up my game for work though, b/c it keeps asking me a password multiple times a day so if I could rattle one off that would be better than having to open up my password manager and get it.

I mean, we do hold leadership to a different, higher standard, that much is true. But is this man not the foremost world-class expert authority aka leader of his own life at least? And if not him, irt to that super narrow niche, then who else would be considered the leader of his own life?

Imagine if you will a scenario of a Doctor on television, let us call him Oz, who gives patently false advice that literally gets people actually killed. It is not okay for the TV station to air whatever film was handed to them, but how does that absolve the responsibility of this Doctor Oz from his own measure of responsibility, one may even say culpability (or perhaps criminal liability?) in this whole affair?

Again, there is more than one way to be incorrect, and by extension they both were partners in this crime against journalistic integrity.