Quote from him:
I assume good faith of everyone who has worked on this Gaza “genocide” article. At present, the lede and the overall presentation state, in Wikipedia’s voice, that Israel is committing genocide, although that claim is highly contested.
A neutral approach would begin with a formulation such as: “Multiple governments, NGOs, and legal bodies have described or rejected the characterization of Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.”
Respect for Jimmy Wales 📉📉
I’m actually glad that most of the other editors on the page are pushing back against him. Just because you created something cool or useful it does not mean your word is gospel!
Unfortunately he does have significant power within the wikimedia foundation (parent of wikipedia). He’s got a permanent seat on the board.
Thankfully wikipedia editors tend to act quite independently of wikimedia. But this sort of weighing opinion acting like they have sway on a controversial topic by Jimmy Wales (especially in the midst of wikipedia getting threats from the federal government), worries me a little that wikipedia may have its editorial independence under threat. (A talk page comment is still relatively minor, thankfully.)
wales says all kinds of things all the time. some good, some bad. but after all he is the libertarian who built wikipedia’s anarchistic processes and editorial independence, so i heavily doubt this’ll have any challenge to that independence
While it may look anarchist on the surface. Wikipedia is very much heirarchical and the power lies in few admins.
As an anarchist myself, and someone who has A LOT of edits on wikipedia, I wouldn’t call wikipedia anarchist. Crowdsourced, sure. Anarchist, no. The editor culture is no where near there.
If by hierarchical you mean the role of social capital, I feel like that’s how things would function in an anarchist society and I don’t see a better solution. If by hierarchical you mean the WMF, then I agree (hence anarchistic instead of anarchist).
I don’t think so, unless by “few” you mean a couple hundred.
This is why Wikipedia will remain a trusted source for a generation and Grokipedia will be a trivia question in 5 years. Even as people turn to LLMs for knowledge, the talk page and open history with all the old versions archived will make it a respected source of truth.
I think people who shit on Wikipedia for its limitations and cite that schools don’t let you use it for a report are just helping enable the dismantling of a shared reality in society.
GrokipediaNazipedia
He doesn’t claim that, he’s just chiming in with an opinion.
An opinion prompted by a awkward question in an interview and where he is abusing his position to insist the article needs to change to meet his arbitrary standard of not being considerate of governments that deny genocide.