Infogalactic, Vox Day’s new online encyclopedia, begins life today as a copy of the Wikipedia that, with the aid of volunteer editors, will be developed into multiple versions of the material which will let users select their preferred perspective and automatically see the version of the subject page that is closest to it based on a series of algorithms utilizing three variables, Relativity, Reliability, and Notability.
Day explains, “This means a supporter of Hillary Clinton will see a different version of the current Donald Trump page than a Donald Trump supporter will, as both users will see the version of the page that was most recently edited by editors with perspective ratings similar to his own.”
Day gave these reasons for doing the project:
Conceived as a next-generation replacement for Wikipedia, the troubled online encyclopedia, Infogalactic is a dynamic fork of Wikipedia that is designed to supplant its predecessor by addressing the problems of bias, vandalism, harassment, abuse, and inaccuracy that have plagued the Wikimedia Foundation’s flagship project for years.
“Every notable public figure who has a page devoted to them knows very well what an inaccurate nightmare Wikipedia is,” said Vox Day, Lead Designer of Infogalactic, a computer game designer and bestselling philosopher. “The page about me there has had everything from my place of birth to the number of times I’ve been married wrong. And that’s not even counting the outright abuse, such as when Wikipedians replaced the entire page with a definition of a sexually-transmitted disease or with a string of obscenities.”…
He asserts, “This isn’t Conservapedia 2.0 and we aren’t replacing Wikipedia’s admins with their conservative equivalent, we are making the function of thought police irrelevant through technology. Our design philosophy is based on the idea that only the user has the right to define what his reality is.”
When the project was announced at Vox Popoli, readers demanded immediate changes to distinguish Infogalactic’s article about the Gamergate controversy from the version in the Wikipedia, which Day provided.
Compare the two approaches. Wikipedia’s article about the Gamergate controversy begins:
The Gamergate controversy concerns issues of sexism and progressivism in video game culture, stemming from a harassment campaign conducted primarily through the use of the Twitter hashtag #GamerGate. Gamergate is used as a blanket term for the controversy, the harassment campaign and actions of those participating in it, and the loosely organized movement that emerged from the hashtag.
Beginning in August 2014, Gamergate targeted several women in the video game industry, including game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu, as well as feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian. After a former boyfriend of Quinn wrote a lengthy disparaging blog post about her, other people falsely accused her of entering a relationship with a journalist in exchange for positive coverage and threatened her with assault and murder. Those endorsing the blog post and spreading such accusations against Quinn organized themselves under the Twitter hashtag #Gamergate, as well as on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels and websites such as Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan. Harassment campaigns against Quinn and others were coordinated through these forums and included doxing, threats of rape, and death threats. Many of those organizing under the Gamergate hashtag argue that they are campaigning against political correctness and poor journalistic ethics in the video game industry. Many commentators dismissed Gamergate’s purported concerns with ethics and condemned its misogynistic behavior.
Infogalactic’s revision now says this about the Gamergate controversy:
GamerGate is the name given to an ongoing consumer movement in the video game industry that began in August 2014 with concerns about the corruption of video game journalism after a series of coordinated attacks on the gaming community by game journalists. In a period of two weeks,4chan purged the majority of its 45 moderators for being sympathetic to gamers, a dozen simultaneous “Gamers are Dead” articles were published on the same day by Ars Technica, Gamasutra, The Guardian, The Financial Post, Jezebel, and other sites. The #gamergate hash tag was popularized by actor Adam Baldwin and was adopted as a title for the loosely affiliated group by adherents as well as opponents.
Beginning in August 2014, Gamergate targeted several women in the video game industry, including game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu, and cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian. After a former boyfriend of Quinn wrote a lengthy blog post describing their relationship and her involvement with other men, she was accused of entering a sexual relationship with a journalist in exchange for positive coverage.. Those endorsing the blog post and spreading such accusations against Quinn organized themselves under the Twitter hashtag #Gamergate, as well as on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels and websites such as Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan. Many of those organizing under the Gamergate hashtag argue that they are campaigning against political correctness and poor journalistic ethics in the video game industry. Most commentators dismissed Gamergate’s purported concerns with ethics and condemned what they claimed to be its misogynistic behavior.
Also of interest, Infogalactic has replaced the well-known Five Pillars of Wikipedia with its own Seven Canons™:
- Infogalactic does not define reality.
- Infogalactic is written from an objective point of view.
- Infogalactic is free content.
- No griefing.
- Play nice and play fair.
- Rules are guidelines for users, not chew toys for lawyers.
- Facts are facts.
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Don’t Canon 1 and Canon 2 contradict each other?
Let the children play.
Errrr, just how is Wikipedia troubled? is he conflating Wikipedia with Wikileaks which is a separate undertaking? And is he really stupid enough to think he can create an alternative to somethings that has over five million pages just in the English version?
MemoryAlpha has *just* forty thousand and its been around for over a decade.
The old Green Man Review which I run had roughly twenty thousand pages before we moved to WordPress and that took twenty years.
Fuck, this man is simply insane.
Our design philosophy is based on the idea that only the user has the right to define what his reality is.
As opposed to, say, the actual reality found in the actual real world.
Hmm, maybe someone ought to submit Mr Beale’s name for the Nobel Physics Prize. After all, he just invented the multiverse!
Mike, the link for Infogalactic says: This item might not exist or is no longer available.
This is the link for the Main Page.
Thanks for catching that. Appertain away!
I’m moderately impressed that he’s thought about the funding aspect and has declared upfront that people can “buy” senior admin roles/privileges, albeit apparently under some sort of supervision from other admins, sorry, Galaxians. (What is this, some variant of Scientology?) Mind you,
does suggest that this hasn’t really been thought through at all.
The page with the list of “Relativity” is a hoot.
Canons 1 and 7 absolutely contradict each other, which is probably why they appear at either end of the spectrum. In a way, the canons encompass the “reality” of the entire endeavor.
Mr. Day is late to the party, however, as this concept has existed for centuries. It’s called “fiction.”
Is Castalia boring him already? I guess someone really needs a cross between encyclopedia dramatica and (yes!) conservapedia, written in the usual incisive style of consummate howler monkey on meth.
I wonder if this sounds like a racketeer’s lovely screech only to me:
But… A subjective opinion is not the same as an objective fact.
Now matter how much I try and wrap my mind around what those words mean, the result is also ways the same:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/eOJ32gNM0qc/hqdefault.jpg
ARISTOTLE! RHETORIC!
@Cat Eldridge
As far as I can tell, he’s going to do it by lifting Wiki’s content wholesale so his writers can put their own discoloration on it. I checked Infographic’s version of the page on Z for Zachariah (which I contributed to on Wiki and feel rather proud of) and found it was lifted verbatim.
I suppose I should be glad they didn’t keep the earlier version in which frigid Ann Burden was the true villain of the book…
Wikipedia doesn’t claim to define reality either; its goal is to adequately describe reality, which is a rather different thing.
Jayn says As far as I can tell, he’s going to do it by lifting Wiki’s content wholesale so his writers can put their own discoloration on it. I checked Infographic’s version of the page on Z for Zachariah (which I contributed to on Wiki and feel rather proud of) and found it was lifted verbatim.
Still not a viable model as he’ll need to strip the code and put in new code, copy other pages that a given page links to and do the same , redo graphic links and… Even at Green Man Review, moving one page from the old html version to the WordPress version takes up to ten minutes a page as all of the code, links and graphics need to checked and updated.
No way he’ll have enough staff to do this.
If he was capable of that, he wouldn’t use the shitty blogtool he is using now.
So, Vox Day and his cohorts are trying to do something IMPORTANT?
Well, that’s my cue to ignore whatever the hell they’re up to…(yawn!)
::thinks back to Day’s attempt earlier to come up with a crowdsourced
ideological enemies listbad EssJayDubyas::::remembers how it fell apart once his mental midget minions got to it, and turned into an ideological enemies list, plus People Who Were Mean to Me::
….
::grabs popcorn::
I didn’t think it was possible to create a source that has less credibility than Breitbart or Infowars, but Beale has proved that it is.
Awww, that’s so cute. He’s providing a “Create Your Own Safe Space” tool for the masses who find reality to hard to deal with.
If it keeps the trolls busy, and away from File770, Wikipedia, and other real-world Internet venues, it’s a worthy undertaking.
A resource where you can find information to match your existing prejudices.
I… I think VD just invented the Internet.
Infogalactic: The internet of the internet.
I’m now engaged in an experiment: if I shake this idea hard enough, can I make a story idea fall out of it?
BGHilton:
Well, he “invented” a concept of Garry Trudeau‘s, anyhow.
Stick a fork in it, it’s dumb
I speak as an engineer and fan of SF. I neither praise nor condemn Mr. Day but simply comment here on his InfoGalactic project. I am not an investor, nor would I be. I have edited several pages to try it out. I find it of tentative interest.
A sidenote: Mr. Glyer perhaps inadvertently noted this project when he wrote many months ago about Mr. Day’s efforts to categorize beliefts on a political scale. Our good host is nothing if not observant.
Still not a viable model as he’ll need to strip the code and put in new code, copy other pages that a given page links to and do the same , redo graphic links and…
Yes. And they’ve done that. It’s a startlingly big job; you’d think copying Wikipedia would simply be a matter of downloading the site and republishing it, but unsurprisingly it turns out there’s a good deal more architectural complexity as the above quote begins to allude to. In particular the script and database design decisions are manifestly very complex.
As far as typical startup pitches go, his is better than most. It may well fail, but then most do. Like Mr. Brendan Eich’s Brave, he’s grasped some clever points on gamification and monetization of a common public resource, and people are free to ignore it or use it as they please.
(And they are free to fork InfoGalactic if they choose).
As an observer of a number of tech startups, I’m impressed with how much he’s done to date with quite modest funding. My crude estimate is that he’s been operating at roughly ten times the normal projected effectiveness in coding and deployment.
With no insult intended to Mr. Day, this last is very unlikely to be his own skills; he is a game designer, author, musician, terrible football player, literary critic and editor, neither a coder nor architect. It does speak well of his recruitment skills.
It’s also a real question as to how a variety of things will scale over time; it seems implausible he will keep up that level of efficiency as personnel are added.
It’s subjective, but as a very long-time (and still active) Wikipedia editor, I have found reversions and editwars have become all too commonplace. Whether Mr. Day’s effort can improve on the situation, I’ve no idea. Brief experimentation revealed to me that there were no issues posting negative things about alt-right shibboleths as long as they were factual. A low bar, granted, but an important one to pass.
As for the idea that some of the canons are self-contradictory, I find the suggested examples bizarre.
“Infogalactic does not define reality” and “Facts are facts” are not at all contradictory. As Mr. Day himself has commented, the LA Times polls have fairly consistently shown Mr. Donald Trump to be winning nationally in recent weeks. Most other credible polls (with occasional exceptions such as Rasmussen) have generally shown him to be losing nationally.
Attempting to define reality would be to state which candidate is definitively ahead at the moment. Citing a fact such as a significant majority of credible polls favour Mrs. Hillary Clinton today is just that. Fact. Similarly, citing the LA Times poll in Mr. Trump’s defense would be a fact, though a misleading one were it bereft of context.
For those who accuse Mr. Day of attempting to create a series of hugboxes for people from the far right to the far left, that seems a fair accusation. (It is worth noting he is yet to succeed in doing this; that will be a very impressive achievement if he pulls it off technically to scale.)
But that’s precisely what Fox News, NPR, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page have been for the last 10-20 years, and I speak as an avid fan of NPR, and the pre-Mr. Rupert Murdoch WSJ. (not so much Fox News or the Mr. Carlos Slim-era NY Times).
I am not American, though have spoken and written English from a very young age. If I have written improperly, I do apologize.
Best,
Seorae.
“Let’s make,sure no one has to encounter anything that doesn’t agree with what they already believe.”
Honestly, this sounds like both a prohibitive amount of work, and a really bad idea if it did work.
Lis Carey: Honestly, this sounds like both a prohibitive amount of work, and a really bad idea if it did work.
I’m all for it! I think of it as the metaphorical equivalent of the “virtual babysitter” — giving alt-right kids a DVD player and a bunch of children’s videos. And the Bonus is that I’m not worried about it rotting their brains, which are pretty much already a lost cause.
Seorae: I am not American, though have spoken and written English from a very young age. If I have written improperly, I do apologize.
I enjoyed your post, and found it well-reasoned and articulate (sadly, much more so than what I see from a lot of people who were born and raised in the U.S.).
I hope you’ll continue coming around to File770 and voicing your thoughts. 🙂
Oh that old thing – https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2016/10/05/vox-days-vanity-wikipedia/ 😉
I guess he isn’t making enough money or egoboo by ripping off his betters in writing and publishing… so he’s decided to go for money and egoboo by ripping off his betters at online-encyclopadia-ing?
The boy bores easily, doesn’t he? Wonder how long it’ll take him to get bored by this?
Still, as long as he needs his own safe space, as an SJW I can’t keep it from him. Bless his heart.
(And #1 and #7 contradict each other, so what — Puppies always contradict themselves. If they made sense, they wouldn’t be Puppies.)
@Seorae:
While I’ve only given this a cursory look so far, my impression is that what Day has done so far is, for the most part, simply a matter of downloading Wikipedia and republishing it.
Wikipedia provides links for downloading their entire database. My impression is that this is exactly what he’s done: Infogalactic looks like a rather out-of-the-box MediaWiki setup. Install the server software, download the database, and you’re most of the way there. The “Recent Changes” page on Day’s site shows you virtually everything that’s been added and changed, and it’s frankly not a whole lot: new template pages and then edits to articles which, shall we say, reflect a certain worldview. (The changes to Caitlyn Jenner’s entry include not only changing all pronouns from male to female and inserting the word “alleged” whenever gender transition is referenced, but going out of the way to add gendered references, e.g., “child” to “boy.”)
Other than that, there’s very little change evident. All the media content that isn’t new to Infogalactic, for instance, is still hosted on upload.wikimedia.org; when articles have Wikpedia-style “info blocks” like the top of Don Henley, the links still go to wikipedia.org. (You may also notice the Lua scripting error at the bottom of that page.)
So, you know, fascinating. I don’t see any evidence of new data that could be fed into the “algorithms utilizing three variables [of] relativity, reliability and notability” that would let Infogalactic select only information that would avoid puncturing a user’s filter bubble. That strikes me as requiring non-trivial modification to MediaWiki — you’d need to add new metadata to blocks of text indicating how it matched those variables, then new display code which only showed the relevant text. That’s theoretically doable, but if any work has been done along those lines it ain’t visible yet.
Also 172 Galaxians – which is close to the magic rabid number.
Seorae:
Which is a totally ridiculous statement unless:
* You know exactly how many people that are involved.
* You know exactly how long they have worked on this.
So does Teddy’s thing report that JCW won all five of the Hugo Awards he was up for?
@Seorae
Pull the other one mate, it’s got bells on
I don’t know you from Adam, but the above, and the rest of your post is setting of almost all my Early Sockpuppet Detection Systems.
Which is a totally ridiculous statement unless:
* You know exactly how many people that are involved.
* You know exactly how long they have worked on this.
We do know point two. Point one is more correctly, how much money has been expended. With the right people and tools, it is possible radically increase a team’s effectiveness.
Even one person can do so. I had to develop a significant web site solo in 2012. After developing a primitive demo using jQuery, I figured a production site would take a long time to develop, probably a year to emerge from beta to production. I did some research on alternatives, chose Angular (fortuitously, as it happens), and had a first customer using it in 5 months (and paying to do so), with more features than originally spec’ed. That time to live alone was over a 2x efficiency boost, minimum. Altogether, based on other factors, I estimate 5x.
@Vicki Rosenzweig Wikipedia doesn’t claim to define reality either; its goal is to adequately describe reality, which is a rather different thing.
“‘Wikipedia has only described the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”
Does anyone else remember Conservapedia?
@JJ Thank you. You are likely too kind. I am unfamiliar with American fandom, but I have certainly periodically read File770 and enjoy it. I was intrigued that Mike also covered the IG launch
@Watts Allow me to deal with your strongest criticism (and one with which I agree wholeheartedly) first:
I don’t see any evidence of new data that could be fed into the “algorithms utilizing three variables [of] relativity, reliability and notability” that would let Infogalactic select only information that would avoid puncturing a user’s filter bubble
Yes. This will be a serious challenge for Mr. Day and his team. Based on what I have seen, I think it possible, but I would judge it at best a 50/50 proposition. In fairness, that is higher than I would assign to most teams. Equally, perhaps I’m overly optimistic.
(There is also the question: is a series of hugboxes for people a good thing in an educated democracy? What about a not-so-educated not-so-democracy?)
@Watts “simply a matter of downloading Wikipedia and republishing it.”
Certainly, however my point remains: that this is a much more complex process than it looks, something you seem to gloss over, and I see early stage scripting improvement that is both impressive and (granted) still insufficient. You’re correct on the [scripting] errors and one very major page was throwing serious errors until very recently. No doubt more still are.
They also (and I’m working from memory here on my way to dinner) have ported the database from (IIRC) MYSQL, likely to something Oracle would love. Not giant, but not as trivial as one would like.
I’ve looked closely at three proposals (and seen countless more) to replicate Wikipedia in some fashion that theoretically creates revenue. This is the best thought out, and the best executed to date. Perhaps, of course, that damns it with faint praise since most such proposals die a rapid death. It turns out to be a harder problem than it appears.
@Hampus
Which is a totally ridiculous statement unless:
* You know exactly how many people that are involved.
* You know exactly how long they have worked on this.
You are largely correct, though far too dogmatic. I need not know these numbers “exactly”, but, true, I need to know them at least roughly. I believe I do, and am posting in good faith without violating any NDAs.
I believe, with very high confidence, that I know each of these numbers to within 10-30%. That is sufficient for me to make the kind of engineering judgements I have spent my professional life doing.
Certainly it is possible his team is only 7 times as efficient, or 14 times as efficient as others intending to do the same thing would be. I will stand by my estimate of an order of magnitude, base 10. (It’s also a possibility I’m completely wrong, sure).
I will also note again that I do not think this has anything to do with Mr. Day’s skills as an architect or coder, and I think he will be sorely pressed to replicate this kind of efficiency moving forward.
@Watts As to the issue of Ms. Jenner’s pronouns, I find that quite interesting. Over on Breitbart’s (were we speaking of hugboxes above?) publication of the existence of this technical innovation, I recall seeing a gentlebeing complaining vociferously that it was false based precisely on the fact that Caitlin Jenner was referred to as ‘she’.
It would seem the edit-wars have begun for InfoGalactic.
@Snowcrash
Pull the other one mate, it’s got bells on
I don’t know you from Adam, but the above, and the rest of your post is setting of almost all my Early Sockpuppet Detection Systems.
I confess. I am the sockpuppet of Mike Glyer.
Or not.
Frankly, I don’t know you from Eve, and I don’t wish to. You are welcome to disagree with the content of my (2) posts. Watts has made a decent case (I don’t fully agree, but do agree on the future features portion) for very significant skepticism. (To put it kindly).
Hampus made an aggressive case for me talking out of my fundament. He is wrong, but perfectly reasonable in his arguments. And, sure it’s possible I’m wrong in the numbers I believe to be right and/or my judgement. Skepticism is a good thing.
You simply assert I am a sock puppet. There is no real defense against that other than to note that it is inherently simply a sneer that shuts down discussion.
I follow File770, I was very aware of the launch of Infogalactic as it’s an area that strongly piques my interest. Amongst the very first coverage of that launch was (surprise) here. I chose to comment.
I am no one’s sockpuppet, baby.
Thanks for the good comments (especially Watts and Hampus and JJ)
I particularly enjoy this entirely objective and restrained assessment:
If “facts are facts” why are people seeing different versions of this site that “does not define reality” and is “written from an objective point of view”? Why is virtually everything about this project directly at odds with its own tenets?
@rob_matic:
I particularly enjoy this entirely objective and restrained assessment:
My crude estimate is that he’s been operating at roughly ten times the normal projected effectiveness in coding and deployment.
Ah! Fair enough. If you’re unfamiliar with assessing software development I can see where you’d view that as wild over-the-top praise.
Nope. Software projects, sadly, range in about a 1-1000 times efficiency. Yes, you can get a billion dollar software project that delivers less than a million dollar one. (Look at some of the attempts of the various States and Canadian provinces to capture health care data and their expenditures. You can see a billion dollars wasted in one state, and a few million spent in a neighboring one.
It’s horrible, and very sad, considering all this money could have been spent on patient care.
The difference between a really talented team and a merely good team is amazing, and the difference between either of those and a mediocre team is more startling still.
The fact that I assess Mr. Day’s team as ten times more effective than a normal projection is simply saying they’re very capable. That’s all.
If I’d wanted to be effusive in praise (and lie), I’d have said they were 1000 times as good. They aren’t.
I’ve looked closely at 3 plans to replicate Wikipedia. (And seen many more).
He’s spent about a tenth what the next best plan cost, and achieved results about 4 months faster. Technically I should rate that as better than ten times. I’m not sure how you wish me to spin that. Would you like me to lie and say he’s horrible in my judgement?
I’m in agreement with Watts that there is as yet no evidence, no results, on further phases beyond simply replicating Wikipedia. (Watts and I disagree on the magnitude of that challenge, but we agree on what lies beyond).
I’ve repeatedly stated my skepticism of Mr. Day’s likely challenges on scaling. That’s the nature of having a good team that can exceed the norm: it rarely scales up.
If I’m a Vox Day Sockpuppet, I’m a very incompetent one. For what I say can be summarized as “I think what he’s done is pretty cool.” followed by “I am very skeptical that he can move further without a lot more money, and I’m not investing now or then.”:
Best to all
Seorae
NDAs? That would make you one of Beales failed little minions and remove any chance of gaining any credibility whatsoever.
As a Senior Software Developer and Architect, I can conclude that what you say is total mumbo jumbo.
There are four people involved on the technical side, including me. We decided to do it on January 26, 2016 and started looking into the matter then.
I think we may surprise you with our ability to develop to the roadmap without scaling up at all, because right now our only real challenge is the limitations imposed by the ridiculous tools available. We plan to replace them entirely in Phase Three.
Voxipedia: Dynamic Forking.
Can we expect a similar rate of accomplishment as at Alpenwolf (no progress since 2013)?
VD:
You can say whatever figures you want. You are simply not trustworthy in any way. And Aristotle to you.
Aww, I think it’s great that VD has nailed his colours to this particular mast. A successful Voxipedia displays a vanity project ripe for satire, and a failed Voxipedia is, well, a failure.
I’m eager to see if the editing will be up to the standards of Chapter(s) Five.
Checking the Encyclopedia Galactica entry for Homo Sapiens Sapiens, I note that the entry has been updated recently; the initial summary paragraph used to read:
Homo Sapiens Sapiens (location references): A pre-Interstellar technological species inhabiting a single planet. The species is known to be fond of creating complex rules systems and equally fond of breaking those rules.
It has now been replaced with –
Homo Sapiens Sapiens (location references): Idiots.
There’s lots of accompanying notes and a slew of prior changes indicative of an ideological fight among the page’s editors. The current entry suggests that the liberal leaning editors have won at least a temporary victory.
That would be nice. We’ve finished two games and have two more rapidly approaching completion. There is also a very high profile fifth game on which I’m doing some core design work that will be out very soon.
And yes, I’m very bad about bothering to update the website.
Third Law of SJW: SJWs always project. Because you know you are not trustworthy, you assume I am not. There are observably tens of thousands of my friends, readers, teammates, colleagues, and allies who disagree with you, an individual who has never met nor spoken nor worked with me.
In any case, the dates and numbers are accurate.
Looking closer at the page I mentioned earlier, I see its text is a carbon copy of Wiki but none of the links and references carried over. So thus far I’m not overwhelmed at the quality of the photocopying job.