i found this via https://www.thefp.com/p/i-founded-wikipedia-heres-how-to

i need a premium account to comment on that article, so let me post my comment here

Once upon a time, there was an institution that was trusted by the public as an impartial and reliable source of information. Then things changed. The institution still claimed to be impartial. Its leaders still repeated the same mantras about the truth and trustworthiness, but the information it provided grew steadily more ideological. The change became impossible to ignore—and the public started to ask: Does this institution deserve our trust?

If this story sounds familiar, it’s because it could describe so many of the institutions that we once relied on to bring us information. In fact, it might just be the story of our times. This crisis of trustworthiness is the skeleton key to understanding so much of the turbulence and disorder in public life today.

It’s certainly the story of The New York Times, NPR, and countless other media organizations. It’s the story of all too many institutions in medicine and public health.

It’s also the story of Wikipedia.

probably the biggest example of this story is the catholic church...

Wikipedia has an article titled “Yahweh.” I am a Christian, and I consider Yahweh to be the name of my God.

the religion of Christianity started as a small group of rebels, but then (as the group became larger) this opposition ("trend") was integrated into the empire, and from then on, it was just another controlled opposition, publicly giving hope to the small people (slaves), but privately controlled by the empire.

"you have owners. they own you." -- george carlin

There are two common types of blocks that I object to: the partisan and the petty.

my wikipedia account (Milahu) was permabanned in year 2024, because i have "insulted" other editors (i called them "stupid"), and the ban log says "Apparently he has no desire to contribute to the encyclopedia" in other words "he is just a troll", because their definition of "contribute" is "he follows our orders"

here is my edit, which was later removed as "vandalism"

https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Diskussion:Liste_von_Justizirrt%C3%BCmern_in_der_deutschen_Rechtsprechung&oldid=240510827#Michael_Ballweg

translation:

Michael Ballweg was innocently held in pretrial detention for 279 days, apparently for political reasons, because Michael Ballweg was an organizer of the Querdenker protests against the coronavirus dictatorship. As a pretext for the pretrial detention, the prosecutor constructed a “flight risk,” but the confiscation of valuables and the pretrial detention obviously served as an attack against the Querdenker protests.

See also: Michael Ballweg#Strafprozess (where, unfortunately, only mainstream sources are cited, which protect the regime with their opinion journalism).

[...]

But I'll spare myself the edit in the article, because also Wikipedia is ruled by idiots who abuse their power like any centralized structure. (Hate me cos im honest.)

[...]

The fact that Wikipedia only allows sources to be cited that have been approved by the Ministry of Truth only confirms my statement that “also Wikipedia is ruled by idiots who abuse their power like any centralized structure.”

my radically simple analysis of all these problems is that "all large organizations are evil", so the actual problem here is that wikipedia is "too large".

the same analysis applies to "our" culture in general: every "too large" state automatically devolves into this disgusting "dictatorship of pacifism", always followed by overpopulation, degeneration, and collapse.

a similar observation was made by the youtuber Tilman Knechtel in his slogan "Trau keinem Promi" (trust no celebrities), because there is a "magic line" when people become "too famous" (too large), then they are offered a choice: either they "sell their soul" (become a controlled opposition) and work for the empire (give false hope to the slaves), or they continue their real opposition and get sabotaged and punished by the empire.

so the actual problem here is that wikipedia is "too large"

see also: The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond

so the obvious solution is some peer-to-peer network, but as they say, "peer-to-peer is hard"... (what they actually mean by that is, most of our problems are not technical but social problems.)

two building blocks for such a peer-to-peer network are: tribalism = efficient teamwork in tribes of 150 people (https://github.com/milahu/alchi), and a generic voting and tagging system (https://github.com/milahu/p2p-killerapp/blob/main/doc/2025-09-04.generic-tagging-and-voting-system.md#prompt-1)

i am collecting possible solutions in my p2p-killerapp repo: https://github.com/milahu/p2p-killerapp

i am documenting abuse of power in my hate-maintainers repo: https://github.com/milahu/hate-maintainers-censored (more people should do that!)

38:20 solution to fix all this?<br /> efficient selforganization. decentralization. tribalism. actual antifascism.<br /> see my book:<br /> Pallas. Who are my friends. Group composition by personality type

Crazy how open everybody is. In my country, if people spoke this freely about drugs use, the police would raid their homes and put them in jail.

actually that is what is called a sane country

"sane countries" would ban only the actual bad drugs: alcohol, tobacco, fentanyl, methadone, oxycodone, krokodil, all chemotherapy drugs for cancer, all vaccines, pasteurized milk, ... also, all legal drugs would have zero taxes for the next 1 million years to say "sorry for our war on drugs".

but well, "sane" is a very subjective thing: my paradise is your hell. thats why we need tribalism: every tribe has his own rules, and if i dont like my tribe, i can move to a different tribe. tribalism aka "small countries"

utopia. tribalism. such pacifist utopias only work in limited small spaces = islands.<br /> but in unlimited large spaces = continents, permanent tribal warfare is required to keep tribes small.<br /> so paradise on earth fails because people want "peace" and "order"<br /> while subconsciously, everything goes to shit, and the warfare moves to psychological warfare

Thank you. Steve, for raising the alarm on this catastrophe! One minor comment. It should be QC'ed, not QA'ed. Quality control is done first. Quality Assurance (QA) comes after QC. QA is basically checking the calculations and the test results in the batch records. I worked in QC and QA for big pharma for decades. I tried to warn people in early 2021 that there's no way the quality control testing could be done at warp speed. Nobody listened to me despite my decades of experience in big pharma!

"warp speed" sounds fancy, plus "its an emergency, we have no time"...

it really was just an intelligence test, a global-scale exploit of trust in authorities. (and lets be honest, stupid people deserve to die.)

problem is, they (elites, military, industry) seem to go for actual forced vaccinations, which would be an escalation from psychological warfare to actual warfare against the 95% "useless eaters".

personally, i would prefer if they would globally legalize serial murder and assault rifles, then "we the people" would solve the overpopulation. (because: serial murder is the only alternative to mass murder.) but they are scared that we would also kill the wrong people (their servants because they are evil or stupid). (anyone crying about depopulation should suggest better solutions. denying overpopulation is just another failed intelligence test.)

isolated nor learned in an isolated fashion, but hang together in a network of ideas, or “latticework of mental models” (Munger, 1994), it becomes easier to make sense of new information. That makes it easier not only to learn and remember, but also to retrieve the information later in the moment and context it is needed.

Our natural memories are limited in their capacities, but it becomes easier to remember facts when they've got an association to other things in our minds. The building of mental models makes it easier to acquire and remember new information. The down side is that it may make it harder to dramatically change those mental models and re-associate knowledge to them without additional amounts of work.

The mental work involved here may be one of the reasons for some cognitive biases and the reason why people are more apt to stay stuck in their mental ruts. An example would be not changing their minds about ideas of racism and inequality, both because it's easier to keep their pre-existing ideas and biases than to do the necessary work to change their minds. Similar things come into play with respect to tribalism and political party identifications as well.

This could be an interesting area to explore more deeply. Connect with George Lakoff.

Francis Fukuyama is still fermenting in my reading pile, but I wonder how he covers these political transitions?

I'm curious about descriptions of the law and punishment practiced in these societies. Was there more sense of restorative justice?

@DFRLab. (2020). Op-Ed: How Brexit tribalism has influenced attitudes toward COVID-19 in Britain. Medium. https://medium.com/dfrlab/op-ed-how-brexit-tribalism-has-influenced-attitudes-toward-covid-19-in-britain-16a983a56929

"Last" in the sense of a big, modern threat. We're still facing the threats of tribalism, which apparently have a strong pull.

The game theory of things tends to pull the society apart, particularly when it is easier to see who is paying what. If the richer end feels they're paying more than their fair share, this can tend to break things down.

I suspect that Francis Fukuyama has a bit to say about this in how democratic societies built themselves up over time. Similarly one of his adherents Jonah Goldberg provides some related arguments about tribalism tending to tear democracies down when we revert back to a more primitive viewpoint instead of being able to trust the larger governmental structures of a democracy.