OpenStars

Looks like a fantasy/dream home! :-D

Fair. Though that capability - e.g. the identical wikia software, implementing the MediaWiki protocol - already exists. Maybe federating it would somehow improve it, though it would also open it up to have greater vulnerabilities especially when non-scientists get involved, e.g. a w/article/conservative/vaccine vs. a w/article/real/vaccine. Scientists can handle these controversies, but people who do not have the base knowledge with which to properly understand, e.g. ivermectin, are not going to be able to distinguish between the truth vs. the lies.

So the people that would put it to the best use don't absolutely need it - sure it would be nice but peer-reviewed articles already exist - while the ones for whom it would be most damaging are almost certainly going to be the primary target audience.

First, a lot of people are indeed falling into solipsism. However, not everyone is, and not everything is "impossible". It is true that the barriers can sometimes be high, but they are never insurmountable - e.g., how hard would it be for someone to go get a medical degree? Okay, so that one is high, but there are other, much more low-hanging fruit! e.g. if a religious authority figure says that "nobody will die", and then a couple of months later, half the congregation dies, that does not need a decade's worth of study to figure out that the person "lied". Either knowingly or unknowingly.

Which brings me to point 2: if you can say the former phrase about lying unknowingly, then the definition of lying must be a bit broader than what you are using? People can be said to be "living a lie", as you said b/c they find out later - but perhaps even if they do not? Google's AI when I type in "lie" says:

used with reference to a situation involving deception or founded on a mistaken impression

So someone can be lying unknowingly if they pass on a statement that is itself a lie - and depending on the context, the punishment might not even be that much less severe, i.e. whenever the consequences are highly severe. But it varies with the level of "responsibility" aka the expectations set forth. Example: a nurse repeats word-for-word what they are told by a doctor to say - are they lying? Not really, especially if they are clear to attribute what is being done, in terms of merely "relaying" the message. The message itself may be a lie, but the person was clear, so is not a responsible agent for the deception, even if participating in it. But a doctor prescribing ivermectin on the other hand? They should have known better, and thereby for a person in such a position of responsibility to pass on improper information, may still constitute a "lie" in that case, even if an unknowing one - b/c they should have known. And if they did not know, then they should have found out. Others may need DECADES of study to catch up to them, but for a doctor who already knows the foundational framework, it is only a matter of a few hours to read some primary source material to catch up on exactly whether that drug is indicated in that scenario, and like what the side-effects are, etc.

In the above I had to make a major presumption here, in that someone did not pollute the various information streams that doctors have access to. Indeed if that were to happen, then it is possible for even doctors to, while passing on incorrect information, not be "lying" while doing so, in the same manner as a nurse. But I think at least that my former scenario is what happened during the pandemic? Someone started talking about using that horse drug, doing the work of a scientist except skipping the parts about actually doing proper testing, and so essentially doing unauthorized "human trial experiments" on actual, live human test subjects! :-( Perhaps they thought it was for the greater good even, like if people were going to die anyway then at least they could offer some protection? Except that's not even how that drug works under the most ideal conditions, thus doing so violates the most foundational and sacred oaths of the medical profession: to first do no harm. So then... it's a lie either way? Whether through nearly criminal ignorance or to fully criminal and unethical behavior. Tbf, not every "doctor" is a good one, BUT, in defense of my position, EVERY doctor (in the USA at least, and I thought in every part of the world?) MUST take the Hippocratic Oath. So it gets REALLY hard to defend such a person then, who either lied while taking it (in that they could not in fact manage to uphold those standards of integrity) or got lazy later on in terms of upholding it.

Which begs the next question: how can someone both "lie" and yet "not know that they are lying" at the same time? Admittedly this one is fairly complex in needing to dig deeper into human psychology. Or, I don't even think this is unique to humans, though it does seem far more developed in us than in animals. Let us switch scenarios b/c I think I have an easier one here. Let us say that a person has read the Christian Bible, and know for certain what the commandment by Jesus to "love one another" means - it means to be patient, and... you know what, let's just stop there. So when someone KNOWS that they have been COMMANDED to be patient, and yet they are NOT patient, but they still call themselves a "Christian" - that word means "follower of" btw - how then are they not "lying"? The answer, I believe, is that they are lying to themselves. Specifically, I am referring to cognitive dissonance: b/c our brains are complex enough that we utilize neural pathways that interconnect with one another without necessarily having to uphold one single, consistent Truth, it is fully possible for someone to both "know that they are lying", but also "not know that they are lying", at the same time. Such a person is usually LOUD in their condemnation of others who lie, and who e.g. are impatient, and yet they do not choose to see that they themselves are being thus. Hence the lie, b/c this is "knowing / willful misrepresentation of the Truth", the caveat being that here, only half of the cognitive processes are aware that it is a lie, while the other half act as if it is legit. These people will look you full in your face and claim that they are telling you the Truth. And that is the Truth. But it is also a lie.

2+2=4 | {2, 4} ∈ ℤ is a True statement? But if I say then that 2+2=2 | {2, 4} ∈ ℤ is also a True statement, is that a lie? What if I have no idea what those things ("numbers") mean? That gets back to that "accountability" issue from above - I really should know that, and all the more so if I am the one bringing them up? So acknowledging that and setting it aside, adding statements that are untrue converts a True statement into a False one. "There exists a True statement within this pair of statements" is True, but the overall pack of them is False. Hence, someone suffering from cognitive dissonance is guilty of telling a lie, to themselves. We all do it I am sure, it takes ENORMOUS efforts not to, especially when our culture is... well, as you mentioned, the way that it is. Though as we agreed: it is a descriptive statement to say that if and when that happens, those statements are still "lies", even if they are only partially known while partially unknown.

And all the more so when someone raises themselves up to become a (co-)leader of a nation - e.g. by voting. In that case, the statement that "they should have known" raises that specter, yet again, of responsibility: if they are going to chart the way forward for the entire nation - i.e. by depriving people of certain rights, like to medical care - then they should have thought deeper about the matter, and the excuse "but I did not know" does not work anymore. The reason it does not work anymore is b/c if you ever cross one of these people, they will cite this exact thing to you: YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER. It is the metric by which they judge - so it is not even me judging them, so much as acknowledging that this is the metric by which they judge themselves, and indeed by which we all judge our "leaders". At which point... they really should have known better, than to believe in a lie so hard that they actually vote on it, and all the more so when they do that in order to overturn the determinations of the people who actually DO know better - e.g. the doctors, who are aware that ivermectin is a horse drug, and if ever to be used in humans is only for extreme cases and for malaria, not covid and especially not as a preventative, and all the more so not as a substitute for a vaccine.

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.

Good points! Fwiw, though I've never met a roma person, I thought that one was more "cultural" than "ethnic", and also that it was a part of the culture (literally) to steal. That said, one should keep a solid eye on their belongings regardless of who else is around, so the "clutch" seems entirely unnecessary. Being aware is just good advice, though not making an obvious clutch is an "anti-racist" pattern that considers the feelings of the person that just stepped onto the bus, and I would strongly advocate for doing both actually.

One thing to add to your story though: you were willing to learn - but not everybody is. And if your racist parents, just to give an example, were to vote against women's healthcare, then their choices will lead to literal deaths, possibly even of your very girlfriend, like if a period went wrong one day but then doctors did not know what they were allowed vs. not allowed to do and she died as a result. At least, this is happening in America. This is not theoretical - this is ACTUALLY happening.

Russia may be feeding into the existing prejudices in the Western World - by making memes, making TV shows (like Tucker Carlson's, before he got booted out as a result of going too far), bribing politicians; and overall causing or at least inflaming or taking advantage of things like Brexit - but the people who make themselves into sheep and enact those wills... they bear some of the responsibility as well. As in, if they ever were fortunate to have your own experiences, then they would look back at how they voted decades ago and feel guilt. Assuming that they were still alive - which many of the anti-vaxxers are already not anymore. And they did not go down quietly: they took MANY others along with them too. They also prevented us from even so much as counting precisely how many there were, but from the excess death stats it was A LOT - in the USA we lost more people to covid than all the wars we've ever had combined (with the one exception of the immensely bloody civil war on our own soil, and even that number we've probably blown past by now?).

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 @[email protected] 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