• xoggy@programming.dev
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      8 hours ago

      Yes, I think that’s the scenario most commenters are missing; Wikipedia could evolve into something it’s not. Then what good are backups as they won’t capture the decades/centuries to come.

  • AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net
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    1 day ago

    You can’t kill Wikipedia. MediaWiki is free software. If hosting in the US proves to be too hostile, the foundation can either pack up and host elsewhere, and even if they don’t, anyone else can easily host their own Wikipedia as well.

  • agent_nycto@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    If you think Wikipedia is the only place that stores historical knowledge, please, start thinking about how much time you’re spending online.

    • LustyArgonian@lemmy.world
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      It is a modern library of Alexandria, free to all globally and community built. It’s genuinely an amazing surviving piece of the old internet. No one is saying it’s the only place, but it is vitally important and a huge deal if it goes away. Shame on you for downplaying that.

      • Bartsbigbugbag@lemmy.ml
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        9 hours ago

        Unfortunately it’s not exactly community built, but more like a class of chronically online editors control it and prevent heterodox views and ideas from being added entirely.

      • agent_nycto@lemmy.world
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        I’m not trying to downplay it, but to say it’s the be all and end all of all historical knowledge is factually incorrect and myopic.

  • antlion@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 days ago

    They don’t need or want to kill Wikipedia. They just need to heavily edit it. Kind of a dream come true for those pushing a narrative.

      • antlion@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 days ago

        It’s already happened, and is still happening. So is it dead? Or maybe it’s been a half-aware zombie all along.

          • antlion@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            2 days ago

            One example:

            https://pierrekorymedicalmusings.com/p/the-fdas-relentless-persecution-of-0e4

            From what I can gather this urine salt treatment has actually cured many terminally ill cancer patients. Medical journals refuse to acknowledge it because he didn’t give a placebo to patients (which would be unethical because they would die). Because the treatment is based on multiple compounds in the salt, it cannot be isolated, patented, and profited from. So it must be discredited and buried. Plus if it really works as well as it seems to, it would warrant further research funding into drinking urine, and possibly home remedies. Nip it in the bud.

            • LustyArgonian@lemmy.world
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              In a recent post, I tried to introduce a conceptual tool which I (as humorously and self-deprecatingly as possible) named after myself. In brief, “The Kory Scale” (TKS) is based on the hypothesis that the more a new or existing medical therapy is attacked in a coordinated, sustained fashion by the medical establishment and media, the more likely the treatment is both highly effective and safe.

              Okay, starting off with a made up fallacy is always a bad sign in science FYI… And so is going off that bad fallacy with more fallacies for 10 paragraphs.

              Before I go further, I just want to celebrate that “there is a new Sheriff in town,” given my friend and colleague RFK Jr. is now the Secretary of Health and Human Services

              LOL of course, that actually is pretty consistent w your pyramid conspiracies

              Although I am not a criminologist, my understanding from movies and news reports

              LOL

              Let me just say straight off that I know little about anti-neoplaston therapy outside of what I learned in the documentary

              LOL

              The exact incidence and magnitude of effectiveness is thus unknown to me but I argue that based on its score on TKS

              Please note that “TKS” is a made up thing by the writer, where if the scientific community doesnt like it, then it’s real/better by the ampunt they dislike it. It’s literally a vulnerable narcissist’s main thinking error. This is a vulnerable narcissist.

              Let’s just move on to the claims you’re making:

              https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burzynski_Clinic

              The compounds are not licensed as drugs but are instead sold and administered as part of clinical trials at the Burzynski Clinic and the Burzynski Research Institute.

              Burzynski has since produced the compounds synthetically.

              The Burzynski Clinic is a clinic selling an unproven cancer treatment, which has been characterized as harmful quackery.[1] It was founded in 1976 and is located in Houston, Texas, in the United States. It offers a form of chemotherapy originally called “antineoplaston therapy” devised by the clinic’s founder Stanislaw Burzynski in the 1970s. Antineoplaston is Burzynski’s term for a group of urine-derived peptides, peptide derivatives, and mixtures. There is no accepted scientific evidence of benefit from antineoplaston combinations for various diseases, and the Clinic’s claimed successes have not been replicated by independent researchers.

              The clinic has been the focus of criticism primarily due to the way its antineoplaston therapy is promoted, the costs for people with cancer participating in trials of antineoplastons and problems with the way these trials are run. Legal cases have been brought as a result of the sale of the therapy without regulatory approval.

              Burzynski is also the president and founder of a pharmaceutical company, the Burzynski Research Institute, which manufactures his antineoplaston drugs.

              See the last line? Now tell me, how is he not ALSO PART of the Turf war your article is talking about?

              Reviewers of his scientific papers have disputed the design of the trials and scientific validity of the published results.[12][13][14]

              In February 2017, following lengthy hearings, the Texas Medical Board recommended Burzynski’s medical license be revoked, with the revocation suspended,[clarification needed] and a fine of $360,000 for billing irregularities and other violations.

              So it’s not just Wikipedia against him, but also medical boards. SO again, no issue with Wikipedia here, or science, he just is grifting people and you dont get what science even is (hint: it’s reproducible results).

              From A-10, antineoplaston AS2-1 was derived – a 4:1 mixture of phenylacetic acid and phenylacetylglutamine.[25] The Burzynski Clinic website states that the active ingredient of antineoplaston A10-I is phenylacetylglutamine

              So we know what it is, and it can indeed be synthesized (how else would the body make it, lol). We also already have people taking grains of thyroid, ovaries, adrenal glands, testes - and those organs are also used to make pharmaceuticals. Nothing stopping people from drinking pee or eating medically relevant foods.

              Further, you don’t always need a placebo for studies, you need a CONTROL group. Often the control group is given a placebo, but in this case, they could use other chemotherapy treatment as a control. They dont want to be more legitimate though, because their patients’ and their families would have better standing to sue them for lying/false advertising/snake oil. So no, it wasnt rejected for not having a placebo group and being too ethical to give cancer patients a placebo LOL

              From 1991 to 1995, the NCI initiated multiple phase II trials of antineoplastons. In 1995, after over $1 million had been spent on these trials, they were stopped due to fundamental conflicts between NCI investigators and Burzynski and his employees, notably around Burzynski’s insistence on approving all protocols in the NCI trial.

              The largest trial Burzynski registered was called CAN-1 and aimed to cover all clinic patients at that time. Jaffe wrote that CAN-1 was “a joke” of a clinical trial and explained the legal maneuvering:

              The CAN-1 protocol had almost two hundred patients in it and there were at least a dozen different types of cancers being treated. And since all the patients were already on treatment, there could not be any possibility of meaningful data coming out of the so-called clinical trial. It was all an artifice, a vehicle we and the FDA created to legally give the patients Burzynski’s treatment. The FDA wanted all of Burzynski’s patients to be on an IND [Investigational New Drug (IND) Application], so that’s what we did.

              The consensus among the professional community, as represented by the American Cancer Society[33] and Cancer Research UK[34] is that antineoplaston therapy is unproven, and the overall probability of the treatment turning out to be as claimed is low due to lack of credible mechanisms and the poor state of research after more than 35 years of investigation. Antineoplaston treatments have significant known side effects including severe neurotoxicity. Hypernatremia is also a significant risk given the high levels of sodium in antineoplaston infusions.

              Gee, I dont think Wikipedia is the issue lol my word

              The real cancer conspiracy is that corporations wont let us have Medicaid for All. That would detect cancer (and toxins) and allow us to class action sue companies for them. Cant sue if it was never detected. Thats why they find carcinogens and lead in kids’ products so much - their products dont have more lead in them, but kids all can be on Medicaid and that catches it. Flint, MI, water poisoning was detected by a kid on Medicaid.

              • antlion@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                There’s not really any conspiracy except one. Every billionaire and corporation seeks to profit above all other ethical considerations. I don’t know who’s correct regarding Burzynski, and I hope I’m never in a place to decide. But I don’t think it’s difficult for billionaires to brigade and rewrite any narrative that may profit them.

                Wikipedia is great, but I don’t think it should be viewed as trustworthy or definitive as a source. In the same way billionaire-owned news corporations cannot be trusted to tell the whole truth. Wikipedia is a great place to start, but we could all use more practice following to source material, and to some extent I think Wikipedia reduces critical thinking.

                • LustyArgonian@lemmy.world
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                  Chat GPT reduces critical thinking, because it can literally “think” for people. If someone isn’t a critical thinker, it’s not that they consume Wikipedia, it’s that they lack critical thinking skills. They will approach ANY TOPIC or writing the same, because they aren’t a critical thinker. Wikipedia is great and doesnt reduce critical thinking.

            • aubertlone@lemmy.world
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              You have actually got to be kidding me.

              This is pseudoscience… It does seem like they threw the book at him.

              But this stuff isn’t medicine man. I wouldn’t really call it effective at all. For Pete’s sake!!!

              Even the guy who wrote the article Pierre Koy. Talking holistic approaches to treat long COVID. Bro it’s so easy to tell how people are based on the shit they spew.

              Just remember people were taking ivermectin IVERMECTIN for COVID.

              Do you even hear what you’re saying? There’s no way we can prove what’s in the salt but it definitely works.

              Do you actually believe any of this stuff?? Dude just go ahead and drink the pee. Tell me how you feel I hope you don’t have cancer. I truly mean that

              • antlion@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                1 day ago

                I don’t believe anything because I haven’t had terminal cancer or the treatment. I’m guessing you haven’t either. It’s not about choosing a side. It’s an illustration of corporate interests controlling the narrative from scientific journals, to media, social media, and Wikipedia. It would be naive to believe they can’t or don’t edit Wikipedia.

              • antlion@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                1 day ago

                The pyramids in Egypt were dated by radiocarbon dating, but those dates only indicated that the pyramid structure was inhabited or used at that time - it says nothing of the construction date. Yet the pyramids have dates with no cited references on Wikipedia. What is so wrong with saying that we don’t know with any certainty how, when, or why the structures were built?

                • LustyArgonian@lemmy.world
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                  Yeah, I get what kind of guy you are now.

                  Everyone itt note: this guy is against Wikipedia and thinks these things. This is EXACTLY WHY we need Wikipedia. He would literally be smarter if he had never used social media and had only used Wikipedia random article generator.

                  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giza_pyramid_complex

                  All were built during the Fourth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt, between c. 2600 – c. 2500 BC

                  The Giza pyramid complex consists of the Great Pyramid (also known as the Pyramid of Cheops or Khufu and constructed c. 2580 – c. 2560 BC)

                  Tell me, what does the “c.” before those dates mean? It’s pretty explicitly an estimate. Have you ever bothered to click their source links for this info to understand why they got these dates?

                  https://aeraweb.org/

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Not only that, but MediaWiki is FOSS, and all existing content on all Wikimedia Foundation (except for a relative few kept on fair use grounds) is at most as restrictive as CC BY-SA 4.0. So you’d have whatever exists on Wikipedia currently (plus Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, etc., keeping in mind too that there are many Wikipedias besides English) plus the software that interacts with that data, other countries which haven’t fully descended into fascism, the members of the Wikimedia Foundation, a bunch of pissed-off editors, and a pissed-off public… I think a new, substantially similar non-profit would crop up in the UK etc., and very few things would have to change about the content that’s on the platform (where the UK has more restrictive speech laws).

    • RaoulDook@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I did already, tried the XOWA client to run a local copy on my PC. Wasn’t as easy as I hoped but it worked.

      Planning to get a couple of USBs stashed away with full copies of Wikipedia and the reader app for knowledge security. You can fit the whole thing with a working installation onto a 128GB USB or less. My install dir was about 69GB total.

      • jwmgregory@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        additionally not everyone considers to backup the actual software used to compress/decompress the data. that isn’t permanent either and could disappear as well, same as wikipedia rendering such backups useless.

        granted, it’s like, 10000x less likely than the already unlikely event of wikipedia being raptured. but the datahoarder mindset is better safe than sorry…

        • RaoulDook@lemmy.world
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          That’s a good point, that is possible but not absolutely certain. I could probably get a smaller version of the wikipedia dump to fit on a BD-R disc but not 69GB.

          USB drive or SD card archival might require a 6-month maintenance routine of inserting into a computer and verifying the files are still present etc.

  • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    I mean every historical source is full of one sided propaganda.

    Have you ever heard the phrase “history is written by winners”?

    What have keep history alive is not Wikipedia. Is the fact that multiple people from multiple POV write things down and we can find and read multiple sources.

    Don’t get me wrong, Wikipedia is great, but it’s not what keeps history more or less accurate. Take into account that Wikipedia is a sum up of other sources. In order to write to Wikipedia you must quote a primary source.

    And AI really doesn’t have much to do with anything here. Bad sources have existed forever, since Herodotus.

    • bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net
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      Wikipedia citing sources is exactly what keeps it accurate. Conflicting primary sources are both considered, and the discrepancies discussed.

        • LustyArgonian@lemmy.world
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          Yes, and Musk this year said he would defund and potentially disband (for being “terrorist orgs”) any nonprofit he didnt like. He was kind of meaning the ACLU at the time but it includes Wikipedia too potentially for the disbanding part

  • golden_zealot@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    I mean they can try to censor it but I really don’t see why the wikimedia foundation wouldn’t just move shop to a different country, or a different group just starts running a mirror of it. Like it might be down for a while, at which time we would have to use mirrors, but I can’t see any future where its just gone forever.

  • seeigel@feddit.org
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    Does it matter? History only matters if actions in the now are justified by interpretations of the past.

    Thanks to the internet, we have instant access to the experience of billions of people. All human experience is already there and doesn’t have to be approximated by history.

    • bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net
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      That’s a very uneducated take, and shows that you don’t understand how access to information can be changed, and modeled to elicit certain outcomes.

      Unbiased, well cited repositories of information are essential.

      • seeigel@feddit.org
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        I agree, for the way our societies are structured.

        My point is that we could organize us in a way that history could provide additional depth but that the essential decisions could be made as well without the knowlege of history.

        • bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net
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          That “could” is doing a lot of work for that premise. We are currently structured as an amalgam of disparate chains of systems interacting with each other in loosely defined ways.

          If you want to take the ability of sovereign entities to self determine, then sure we “could” organize in this other way.

          But we don’t have a god emperor of earth, so we will need to rely on this loose consensus instead of a dictated one.

          • seeigel@feddit.org
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            Why does it have to be dictated? People can freely organize in a democratic way.

            The problem is that people may join just because it is better, without fully supporting the respect towards others that is needed in such a system.

    • excral@feddit.org
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      And yet, despite having instant access to the Internet you write this utter bullshit. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

      • seeigel@feddit.org
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        The past doesn’t tell you what to do, especially not when your recordings of history are wrong. If you cannot trust your history, how are you going to make decisions?

    • InverseParallax@lemmy.world
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      22 hours ago

      The problem is:

      So many of those voices are idiots.

      So if you can get enough idiots to say something, it kind of becomes the truth.

      • seeigel@feddit.org
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        19 hours ago

        So we need software that enhances the voices of those who we want to hear.

        • InverseParallax@lemmy.world
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          15 hours ago

          Good luck with that, Ai is funded to do the opposite.

          Also, what we want to hear isn’t always what we should hear.

          Maga is hearing 100% what they want to hear, there is a large section of the country who want nothing more than to hate loudly and proudly.