#### what is #pivot_to_wiki ? #pivot_to_wiki is my proposal for a cultural shift in how we organize, curate, and engage with information. by utilizing Wiki formats, we can rely less on articles, video, and social media. our reliance on these is degrading our info environment and our politics. >[!quote]+ %% %% ![[about#^034b85]] >>[!info]- %% %% >>hey, you clicked the button. good choice. you get a cookie. this is where i show you how i'm able to pull the above section from another page by typing the following: >>``` >>[!quote]+ %% %% >>![[ ]] >>``` >sure, i could copy-paste 1 sentence, but this is all about showing what Wiki can do. i hope you have enjoyed your brief interaction with these collapsible callouts. ###### here's the basic rundown. - newspapers are suffering without billionaire subsidies - in age of LLMs and endless unverified social media bullshit, we need to be able to trace the sources of information, and not just for details and discourse that [Wikipedia](wikipedia.org) considers notable - social media and article-by-article journalism run up against a fixed constraint which is that people only have 24 hours in a day. "stream" forms of information must compete for an ever and ever smaller share of your total amount of attention. so they must become addictive and designed for you to glance at, get mad at, and move on to the next item - we, as consumers, have to demand that as much information as possible be converted to and represented in Wiki formats. a [Wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki), compared to a news publication, sorts information not by time but by topic. a Wiki prioritizes interlinkedness and organization and derives its value from those aspects. **the scope of any one wiki page should be the complete set of information regarding a topic, either written internally or linked externally** - journalism is an "elite" and "stream" structure. social media is a "mass" stream structure. wiki is a "semi-elite" and "semi-stream" structure - article-by-article journalism, as a business, must necessarily be written by a finite number of employees and derive its revenue from keeping readers informed on the **news** via clicks or subscriptions. **if it stops producing news (new information), it won't produce any revenue** - social media, as a business, has to attract a mass audience who constantly post to keep each other's attention. **if nobody posts, there's no business** > [! ] [@ankura](https://bsky.app/profile/ankura.bsky.social/post/3lsclo47vfs2i): "What a consumer of good journalism builds in their brain is a narrative structure of how the world works. In a world where most people can't or won't do that work, wiki works as it encodes explicit structure(s)." - when you see an article or social media thread, you should ask: why is this information in the format that it's in? is there value in the current format that a wiki couldn't add? (ex. a highly visual piece of content does in fact derive value from being in video format.) is the person who posted this trying to get clicks? sell a book? are they a lazy stenographer of the news and day-to-day political chatter? - [musk outright hates wikipedia.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Views_of_Elon_Musk#cite_note-Rascou%C3%ABt-Paz-2024-219) this should tell you something. - the information industry is pivoting to podcasts and short-form video and this is going to make things even worse than now unless we stop it >[!important] YOU ARE ALL CONTENT TO EXPERIENCE REALITY AT THE SPEED OF HEADLINES. *grow discontent!* - AI video is coming & the only way we're going to be able to refute this new rapid breed of bullshit is to be able to produce truth faster. - we may not be able to fact-check current events with these methods, but you can at least head off the possibility of "AI video makes politician say something" if that quote runs completely counter to their beliefs, as clearly established well-ahead of time via something more than social media