[HN Gopher] Wikipedia is 20
___________________________________________________________________
Wikipedia is 20
Author : kylebarron
Score : 669 points
Date : 2021-01-10 04:31 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| bluecloud1 wrote:
| I was one of the first administrators on one of the non-English
| versions and saw it grow from "this cannot possibly compete with
| Encyclopedia Britannica etc." to "OMG, what would the world do
| without Wikipedia?".
|
| I continue to be blown away by Wikipedia, and the fact that it
| not only works but continually gets better over time. Hats off to
| Wikipedia management and the fact they have stayed true to their
| mission.
|
| Please remember to continue to support them, through donations or
| any other means that you can!
| kantbtrue wrote:
| Wikipedia is my primary knowledge destination!
| kubanczyk wrote:
| It's a primary knowledge source for me, but occasionally a
| destination as well!
| de6u99er wrote:
| Strange, that nobody is shutting down WikiPedia.
|
| /s Just making fun of the dumb right
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I was originally enthusiastic about the 'wisdom of the crowds'
| and its potential. The Internet was a great experiment with
| unknown possibilities. I edited Wikipedia and talked about its
| potential.
|
| I was skeptical at the same time - it was an experiment, not a
| revelation. I used to tell people, 'I don't know how Wikipedia
| could work, but it seems to'. I'd apply 'The Cathedral and the
| Bizarre' concept to it, and 'with enough eyes, all bugs are
| shallow' (even though those ideas were intended for open source
| software).
|
| The 'wisdom of the crowds' depends on good faith from the members
| of the crowd. Otherwise you get the manipulation of the crowds
| and propaganda of the faux crowds. One serious concern I had was
| that, if economics predicts human behavior to some extent,
| Wikipedia could be a victim of its own success: The more readers
| and influence it had, the more likely people would try to use
| that power. I first saw it happening in 2006, in the page on the
| Duke University lacrosse team's sexual assault case. Many editors
| clearly engaged in rewriting history in order to advocate for the
| lacrosse players; many had names clearly asserting affinity for
| Duke U., such as 'bluedevil'. That seizure of power was highly
| disturbing; has Wikipedia developed better means to prevent it
| now?
|
| Of course, the focus on using the 'wisdom of the crowds' to
| manipulate has shifted to other platforms, such as Facebook and
| Twitter. I stopped using Wikipedia years ago, other than to
| lookup basic facts that have little significance to me. I use
| Britannica (or other expert sources), which IMHO is very good and
| often very well written. While there is some benefit to 'wisdom
| of the crowds', I never know if that's what I'm getting at
| Wikipedia. As for the expert approach,
|
| _In matters of science, the authority of thousands is not worth
| the humble reasoning of one single person._
| [deleted]
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Interesting question, how did the article end up?
|
| In general Wikipedia does have mechanisms to deal with this
| sort of thing, but admins don't always catch on early enough.
| arp242 wrote:
| It currently says that _" three men's lacrosse team members
| were falsely accused of rape"_, and that the prosecutor of
| the case was _" disbarred for "dishonesty, fraud, deceit and
| misrepresentation"_.
|
| So either there is a massive conspiracy, or those editors
| were perhaps not as unreasonable as the previous poster makes
| them out to be.
| olivermarks wrote:
| 2017 - 'Researchers found that 77 percent of Wikipedia articles
| are written by 1 percent of Wikipedia editors, and they think
| this is probably for the best.'
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-eli...
| jjice wrote:
| That's a damn strong Pareto distribution. Makes sense though.
| Those are an interesting and passionate few.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| There's a strong long-tail effect.
|
| Here's a 2015 essay that sets out to debunk the above 2017
| source.
|
| http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
| jjcon wrote:
| I'm confused - that article is from 2006 - how can it be used
| to debunk a 2017 study?
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Apologies, It's from 2006 even. I'm clearly getting old.
|
| The reason it can be used to debunk the 2017 study is
| because said study is working with an old idea that already
| existed in 2006.
|
| Aaron Swartz posits that at the very least you should not
| discount the importance of the long tail.
| jjcon wrote:
| > posits that at the very least you should not discount
| the importance of the long tail.
|
| thats not a debunking
| admiralspoo wrote:
| Its reputation is severely declining, especially on topics
| relating to current events, figures, or politics.
|
| It, however, remains excellent for technical knowledge.
| canofbars wrote:
| Wikipedia is not a place to catch up on the latest news or
| scandals as this stuff is usually hotly debated and often the
| truth isn't known for some time anyway. They usually do have
| pretty good summaries of the issues years after they have
| happened and all investigations / biases have finished.
|
| I use wikipedia several times daily and find the information to
| be super useful and seemingly accurate. I find the wikipedia
| information on chemicals and plants to be super useful.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Current events are so divisive and many times no one has a
| clear picture of what's happening that I can't see how someone
| objectively assesses a current event news outlet as lacking
| reputation without prior incidents.
| canofbars wrote:
| Someone on hacker news commented about how they started
| watching the news 2 weeks after it was broadcast and
| mentioned how a massive amount of the breaking news ended up
| being false when viewed later with the full set of
| information. It would probably be beneficial if wikipedia
| simply didn't allow brand new news that couldn't be solidly
| confirmed.
| 2sk21 wrote:
| Truly we need a low-pass filter to handle current events.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| This will invariably induce bias or render the debate too
| shallow to be productive, maybe even at a cost of
| manufacturing consent.
|
| Wikipedia already filters content, they only take more
| time. If you need some outlet with immediately curated
| information, I think you should look elsewhere, because
| this is not what wikipedia is for, the way I see it.
| 2sk21 wrote:
| We are actually in agreement! I probably did not express
| myself properly - I don't want current events to be
| covered by Wikipedia. A delay is preferable.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| But without characterizing what exactly "brand new" is, you
| could implement this prohibition without having the correct
| effect of maintaining veracity and consistency.
|
| And would you treat different events differently? Would you
| have to wait, for instance, for classified documents to be
| released so that you could say you have the bigger picture?
|
| I question if prohibition is really the right way to go.
| Wikipedia proved to be effective long term. Let them keep
| doing what is working. Maybe just warn the reader the
| subject or event is recent or currently developing and let
| the reader decide for himself whether to use that
| information or not.
| kyle_martin1 wrote:
| This. Wikipedia severely locks out content creators to provide
| balanced views on politics.
|
| It's no secret the current content creators lean towards one
| side of the isle.
| mhh__ wrote:
| What does balanced mean? It's supposed to be well-cited not
| balanced
| jjcon wrote:
| It has to be balanced and accurate. You can be 100%
| accurate and be incredibly misleading by omission or
| overemphasis.
|
| https://accountablejournalism.org/ethics-codes/guidelines-
| on...
| kortilla wrote:
| It means the Wikipedia article on Thalidomide can't leave
| out the section on all of the harm it caused, despite the
| rest being well-cited.
| mhh__ wrote:
| But all the citations are going to mention that or it's
| just another chemical.
|
| The average HN-er seems be more right wing than in most
| comment sections, so I was curious whether balanced means
| "fits my politics" or the more subtle "I'm only asking
| questions about the election"-ing on individual articles
| e.g. I could see the length of the Trump-Russia article
| annoying a few people here who seem to believe it's
| completely made up
| kortilla wrote:
| > But all the citations are going to mention that or it's
| just another chemical.
|
| No they aren't. All you need to do is cite all of the
| material that was used for its initial approval before
| they knew about the problems.
|
| Another example to help illustrate. The Boeing 737 MAX
| had a well-cited full article before the MCAS issues were
| known. Unbalanced moderation could just revert any future
| edits that tried to add in the issues.
|
| > The average HN-er seems be more right wing than in most
| comment sections
|
| Don't do this shit. It makes for such boring reading. All
| you're stating is that you have confirmation bias and
| don't like seeing ideas you disagree with. There are
| thousands of comments all over about how HN is right-
| wing, left-wing etc with no evidence beyond anecdotes.
|
| If it were biased right-wing the top comments on the
| Parler bands would not be lauding the decisions to ban
| them. If it were biased right wing, there wouldn't be so
| many articles about basic income, etc either.
| elliotec wrote:
| The goal isn't "balance" - it's accuracy. Turns out that's
| tough for some sides, particularly those that eschew reality,
| to follow or understand.
| jjcon wrote:
| You can be 100% accurate and be incredibly misleading by
| omission or overemphasis, that is what 'balance' is for and
| refers to.
|
| https://accountablejournalism.org/ethics-codes/guidelines-
| on...
| nsajko wrote:
| In Wikipedia parlance, this is called "due weight" and
| "neutral point of view".
| d2v wrote:
| Exactly. If you want to be fair and balanced, you only
| devote 66% of the article to globe cucks, and the rest to
| people who are actually rational.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2018/04/04/only-
| two-...
| d2v wrote:
| This. It's no secret that Wikipedia is run by globe-cucks.
| d2v wrote:
| I mean look at this, not even considering that _maybe_ the
| MSM is trying to trick us into thinking the earth is round.
| Patriots like you and I know the truth.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth
| Merman_Mike wrote:
| This is a current event that is extremely political:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_United_States_Capitol_pro...
|
| It cites 462 sources and the parts I read are at least as
| objective as any news outlet.
|
| I know that Wikipedia editors lean left. I'd be interested to
| see examples of this bias in Wiki entries though.
| jjcon wrote:
| One random example I ran across recently of note to HN crowd
| - the creator of Javscript and Brave, Founder of Mozilla
| Brendan Eich.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich
|
| Under known for it says, "Known for JavaScript, opposition to
| same-sex marriage"
|
| Really? I'm as gay as they come but this just gives me
| scarlet letter vibes. I sincerely doubt people know this guy
| for his work opposing ssm (of which there wasn't any, he was
| just opposed to it back in the day). People do know firefox,
| brave, mozilla etc though. In the talk page it is clear there
| are a couple editors with a vendetta against this guy or
| something.
|
| Maybe an example of personal bias more than a left/right
| thing but I still found it kinda weird.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Really? I'm as gay as they come but this just gives me
| scarlet letter vibes.
|
| I agree, I sure wouldn't want to be known for inventing
| JavaScript. And the name wasn't even his idea. How unfair!
| gregcoombe wrote:
| The Wikipedia page dedicates an entire section to
| explaining that comment, under "Appointment to CEO,
| controversy and resignation". He was forced out of the CEO
| position for this political view. It was a pretty
| significant news story, and I think they are right for
| including this as part of what he is known for
| (particularly outside the HN community).
| elliotec wrote:
| I mean, it's what he's known for. It was a very big deal
| when it was discovered that he opposed and donated against
| gay marriage. He resigned as CEO of Mozilla over it.
|
| Many people outside of internet communities like HN first
| learned his name when this all went down. Creator of JS
| wasn't as big a deal to most people at the time as CEO of a
| major non profit internet company opposing one of the
| biggest human rights issues of our time.
| varvar wrote:
| I think he is known for being the creator of Brave
| nowadays, and most likely that's how he will be
| remembered, thanks to the SJW-leftist overreaction to his
| rather insignificant donation of $1000, and his own
| subsequent creative output while working on Brave of
| course.
| esrauch wrote:
| I'm surprised by the claim that he's known for Brave and
| that Brave will be remembered.
|
| Outside of HN-types I don't think Brave is known
| literally at all, much less who is involved in the
| project.
| jjcon wrote:
| > as CEO of a major non profit internet company opposing
| one of the biggest human rights issues of our time.
|
| Obama, the president of the united states opposed same
| sex marriage at the time of the donations, as did most
| americans. I hardly fight it noteworthy considering how
| widespread it was.
| bawolff wrote:
| They are saying he's famous for it, not that other people
| did or did not do it, nor are they saying its a good or
| bad thing that he is famous for it.
|
| The world is an unfair place. Sometimes its hypocritical.
| Saying that he should not be famous for it has no bearing
| on whether or not he is actually famous for it.
| elliotec wrote:
| The thing of opposing same sex marriage itself isn't
| noteworthy. The fact it was widely discussed in the
| context of Brendan Eich particularly was noteworthy.
| Obama opposing that has nothing to do with what Brendan
| Eich is "known for" - Obama is known for plenty of
| things, lots of which are on his wikipedia page.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Lots of people opposed it at the time. That's pretty much
| required in order for it to be one of the biggest human
| rights issues at the time.
| jjcon wrote:
| Which is exactly my point
| godelzilla wrote:
| Lots of people were nazis too. Not worth mentioning on
| their Wikipedia?
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| I guess he's known for it in the sense that he made a $1000
| donation to support prop 8 and a bunch of people
| overreacted and he had to resign. Really, he's known for a
| specific controversy around gay marriage.
| d2v wrote:
| > SECTION 1. Title: This measure shall be known and may
| be cited as the "California Marriage Protection Act."
|
| > SECTION 2. Article I, Section 7.5 is added to the
| California Constitution, to read: Sec. 7.5. Only marriage
| between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in
| California.
|
| If you donate a dollar to supporting this you're probably
| a dick.
|
| Edit: You're definitely a dick if you donate a dollar to
| this. I tend to not be confident asserting when someone
| is or isn't a dick and add the word "probably"
| unnecessarily.
|
| Edit 2: I'm sorry for my earlier comments. To clarify, I
| also think it's overreacting when people oppose
| interracial marriage. I'm all for people supporting
| discrimination. People should be allowed to be shitty
| shitbags and anyone who thinks it's bad is overreacting.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition
| _8#...
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| he's not a dick, he's just a christian
| d2v wrote:
| You're right. I forgot that christians and dicks are
| mutually exclusive.
| danielheath wrote:
| He lost his job at Mozilla as a result of it being
| widespread knowledge.
|
| It's an objective fact that he is known for it.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Just an anecdote, but those are the top 2 and only 2 things
| I know him for. Didn't know (or at least remember) that he
| created Brave or was involved with Mozilla. I'd be willing
| to bet that, indeed, those are the top 2 things he is known
| for.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Same for me. Definitely would be an interesting family
| fortunes/family feud question
| mvc wrote:
| It would have to be a special "software engineer" edition
| of family fortunes otherwise 99% of contestants wouldn't
| have a clue who he is.
| concordDance wrote:
| Yikes, yeah, that's a good example of bias. The main bias
| being describing a group doing something that only a tiny
| minority did. It's not as bad as saying things like "Muslims
| then bombed the world trade center", but it's still pretty
| bad.
|
| Based on the 50 minutes of raw footage I've seen, a
| description of "mostly peaceful" wouldn't be too far off.
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| It was even worse before. When I read it, the opening line
| suggested that all of the rioters collectively murdered that
| cop. I think that was a little too biased for wikipedia. Does
| anyone have the revision?
| ant6n wrote:
| ,,(...) Summoned by Trump,[25] thousands of supporters
| gathered in Washington, D.C., on January 5 and 6 to demand
| that Vice President Mike Pence and Congress reject Biden's
| victory.[26][27][28] The rioters quickly became extremely
| violent, assaulting a police officer who later died,
| erecting a gallows on the Capitol grounds, assaulting the
| press, and desiring to take hostage and harm lawmakers such
| as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Pence, the latter for
| refusing to invalidate Biden's victory.[29]"
| concordDance wrote:
| Yeah, a good example. Having seen 50 solid minutes of raw
| footage, describing it them as "extremely violent" is
| about as accurate as describing BLM protestors as
| criminals (e.g. it describes a very small minority).
| ant6n wrote:
| Huh. I was just posting the quote that gp referred to,
| supposedly implying that the mob as a whole killed a
| police officer. The text is not written like that, and
| overall pretty dry and factual. We can argue about the
| one adverb ,,extremely" in front of violent, but that's
| not even that much of a stretch (people died).
|
| An actually biased text would have used different words,
| like calling the mob a group of organized fascist
| insurgents intent on a coup d'etat, commanded to do so by
| Trump. Even that would still be arguably correct.
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| The revision he posted was not the one I was talking
| about. There was another revision that directly said the
| mob killed the officer.
| SoSoRoCoCo wrote:
| > I know that Wikipedia editors lean left.
|
| Reality leans left.
|
| FTFY.
|
| And before you all go downvote happy, just take a look at
| which direction culture has gone in the past 100 years. More
| conservative? Nope.
| toomim wrote:
| This might not be quite the examples you're looking for, but
| here's a study of Wikipedia's leftward bias from Harvard: htt
| ps://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/41946110/greenst...
| three_seagrass wrote:
| Are you sure? That article talks about how unbiased
| Wikipedia is:
|
| >Our study finds that crowd-based knowledge production does
| not result in articles with more biased than articles
| produced by experts when the crowd-based articles are
| substantially revised.
| jjcon wrote:
| > when the crowd-based articles are substantially
| revised.
|
| You literally just had to keep reading to find the cases
| where they do show bias
| arp242 wrote:
| It also mentions there a bias in both directions,
| depending on the topic. Plus, it only considers US
| viewpoints/political alignments, and not Canadian,
| British, Australian, or other countries.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| That's just saying that highly-trafficked, highly-edited
| articles are going to be less biased than articles with
| fewer contributors or sources. That... just makes sense,
| to me; the more visible or relevant an article, the more
| people (and potentially experts) will weigh in, and the
| more crowd consensus will drive out the more blatant
| biases.
| aaron695 wrote:
| > I know that Wikipedia editors lean left. I'd be interested
| to see examples of this bias in Wiki entries though.
|
| The removal of the website link to 8kun.top -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8chan (I have read the talk
| page, don't need it repeated)
|
| It's trivial to find left wing bias, the question is, is it
| getting worse?
|
| Two articles I would normally mention have recently removed
| their left wing bias -
|
| Split-Sleep has had it's page removed (Good)
|
| The Lucky iron fish now states it doesn't work (Good)
|
| Gell-Mann Amnesia has lost it's page (bad), to prove this is
| left wing bias you'd have to find equivalent articles. I'm
| not sure on this one.....
|
| > least as objective as any news outlet
|
| The internet is getting swamped with (two) decades of
| archived news and information and now it's splitting into
| camps. This is a weakness.
| elliotec wrote:
| What sources do you have on the decline of it's reputation?
| destxD wrote:
| Interestingly enough the talk page is quite good to learn about
| current events and see every view. Though it is obvious that
| some mods and admins have an agenda; to be honest I didn't even
| realize it till I saw the war over Kamala's wiki page, super
| shady stuff.
| creato wrote:
| What are you talking about? I just skimmed the Kamala Harris
| talk page and it's all bickering about trivial edits as far
| as I saw.
| destxD wrote:
| This was just before she announced her candidacy, I saw
| some interesting posts on Reddit. I can't say for certain
| what exactly happened but it was just super fishy.
|
| Some further reading : https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/
| comments/gni8t5/using_wi...
|
| https://theintercept.com/2020/07/02/kamala-harris-
| wikipedia/
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/hk6eo3/kamala_h
| a... (check other discussions also)
|
| I hope that gives a good starting point.
|
| PS: I don't have a horse in this race, I just know my trust
| in wikipedia was shaken.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| The moderation team constantly admonished the person
| making the edits, eventually ruling they had a conflict
| of interest and were not allowed to edit posts about
| Harris and some other politicians. They acted slower than
| fast paced politics, but ultimately seemed to do the
| right things.
| Bud wrote:
| Hard disagree. If anything I'd say its value and reputation for
| current events and politics are higher than ever.
|
| Please substantiate your unfair attack.
|
| Also: there's a typo in your comment. First word should be
| "Its", and not "It's".
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| I don't think its hard to believe. Trust in media is at
| record lows. Since Wikipedia just repeats what the mainstream
| media says via its policy of using "reliable secondary
| sources", then wouldn't it follow that trust in Wikipedia
| would follow?
| elliotec wrote:
| > Since Wikipedia just repeats what the mainstream media
| says
|
| Citation needed.
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| I mean, anyone who has ever edited wikipedia can tell
| you. If you restrict your sources to ABC, CBS, CNN, NYT
| and friends, your article is going to read like a
| mainstream media story. And as the media gets more and
| more hysterical that starts to reflect on the quality of
| their articles.
| elliotec wrote:
| > anyone who has ever edited wikipedia can tell you
|
| Citation needed. Come on. You're retorting request for
| data on an anecdote with "other people also have
| anecdotes"
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| Okay okay. If you want to know how wikipedia feels about
| different news sources, they have a very nice article
| about it. It's even color coded. Green is considered
| reliable. Red is considered unreliable.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/
| Per...
|
| So for instance, Wikipedia is seriously lacking in its
| cryptocurrency articles because you can't use coindesk or
| coin telegraph, even though they provide better coverage
| than CNBC and Bloomberg.
| [deleted]
| einpoklum wrote:
| Agreed. I recently learned its CEO has a rather shady past, see
| e.g. here:
|
| https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/11/meet-wikipedias-ayn-rand-...
|
| and I've always felt a strong pro-establishment bias on
| political matters. I can't say I'm an expert on Wikipedia in
| any way, but I wish the Wikimedia foundation as an organization
| would get some critical press coverage - at least as much as
| Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple etc (which is not
| enough).
| lazyjones wrote:
| Yep, it nicely demonstrates how much cooperating strangers can
| achieve in a few years... and how much of that is tarnished by
| petty political and ideological disputes these days, due to
| lack of ethical standards and education.
| justinzollars wrote:
| 100%. Wikipedia is an excellent recourse for anything non
| political, especially scientific and technical information.
| nsajko wrote:
| You're missing some crucial facts:
|
| * Politics (and similar stuff) can creep into any topic
|
| * It takes a lot of effort to verify a Wikipedia article and
| assess neutral point of view and other stuff. My point is
| that you won't know that you're reading a biased or hoax
| article while you're reading it.
| senkora wrote:
| It's not very good as a learning resource for mathematics.
|
| That's pretty minor, but it is the main point about Wikipedia
| that I wish were better (I know, I'm free to help out...).
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| This is slightly distressing -- I'm fascinated by a lot of
| complicated math concepts that are far above my
| comprehension level, and Wikipedia is high on the list of
| places I check.
|
| Do you have any suggestions of better sites to read?
| nerdponx wrote:
| It's a good _reference_ , though. Even the articles that
| are obviously copied and pasted from someone's homework
| tend to at least be useful places to find references.
| elliotec wrote:
| Why do you say that? Are there examples of inaccuracies in
| it's mathematics articles? What do you wish were better
| about it? What IS better than it?
| cyphar wrote:
| In order to understand most Wikipedia mathematics
| articles you need to already be well versed in the topic
| you're looking up. Even after finishing a Physics degree
| I struggle to understand the derivations of common
| physics equations because they use far more advanced
| concepts than necessary to demonstrate their point.
| elliotec wrote:
| So, should it have all the foundational build-ups to get
| to an understanding of the topic? I think that'd be
| amazing but quite difficult given it took you however
| many years to get that degree, and I can barely get a
| computer to do basic arithmetic for me.
| cyphar wrote:
| That's not my point. My point is that to understand a
| fairly rudimentary topic using only Wikipedia you already
| have to understand post-grad mathemarics concepts because
| the derivation and terminology is _needlessly_ contrived
| because the editors are usually post-grads writing as
| though the article is for other post-grads. There are
| countless examples but I 'm on my phone at the moment.
| elliotec wrote:
| Hmm. Maybe these post-grads are on their phone too
| writing about very complicated mathematics that to a
| post-grad might seem rudimentary.
|
| The beauty is that nothing prevents YOU from adding
| clarity to these "needlessly contrived" concepts... so
| what's stopping folks like you from contributing?
| cyphar wrote:
| I'd be far too worried about being incorrect when
| describing a derivation. I also studied physics not maths
| but the same goes for physics articles.
|
| I think post-docs are probably better suited for accurate
| explanations but at the same time they are (at least,
| fairly often) not as good at explaining a concept using a
| simpler framework.
|
| The other problem is that because different editors write
| maths articles, related concepts can use fairly different
| terminology or concepts with similar derivations use
| different derivations leading to possible confusion about
| how concepts are related.
| megameter wrote:
| It's not that the mathematics wiki articles are wrong,
| it's that they aren't particularly well organized to
| accommodate all skill levels. If you don't already know
| what concepts you're looking for it can be a jumble. That
| said, wiki plus textbook is better than either alone.
| elliotec wrote:
| What should they do differently?
| creato wrote:
| I can barely believe I'm reading this comment! Wikipedia is
| my first and almost always only stop whenever I want to
| learn something related to math.
| oooooooooooow wrote:
| Yes I had the same thought, then I guessed parent might
| be referring to how wiki doesn't present topics in a way
| that's easily digestible for someone approaching new
| topics in math, which I can get behind. It is an
| encyclopedia after all.
| e12e wrote:
| Sometimes the "simple English" version is better than the
| "full" English version - perhaps especially for
| mathematics.
| vmurthy wrote:
| I came here to post that simple wikipedia exists :) .
| Just to prove your point, have a look at the simple page
| for "Prime number" [0] and the regular page for the same
| [1]
|
| If I were just starting out with mathematics, I'd be
| rather intimidated by the regular page. I find the simple
| version to be the right start for any topic and then move
| on to the regular one.
|
| [0] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number
| qsort wrote:
| What do you think are the problems with the regular page?
|
| I just skimmed it, and it seems to me like high-school
| level math is more than enough to understand what the
| page is saying (at least superficially).
|
| I get the idea behind simple.wikipedia.org, but more
| often than not it's just a dumbed down version of the
| main article that uses worse English (which is obvious,
| since it presumably has less contributors than en.wiki,
| but that doesn't help your average reader)
| vmurthy wrote:
| @qsort: To give you an analogy, think of the "original"
| wikipedia article as the equivalent of an academic paper.
| It is absolutely the right level of detail for a
| particular audience (with references and links and even
| fancy language) whereas the simple wikipedia article is
| the equivalent of a NYT article introducing the same idea
| and probably going a bit deeper.
|
| As a further analogy, if I had to learn about Covid-19,
| I'd likely start with NYT (no affiliation) and then move
| onto Nature/Science/BMJ
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Happy birthday, Wikipedia.
|
| Agree though that on the rare occasion I skim an article falling
| within one of my areas of expertise, I'm usually left very
| disappointed, puzzled about the mindset of editors seeing
| themselves nevertheless as domain experts going by the
| authoritative tone of Wikipedia articles.
|
| The Gell-Mann amnesia effect makes me then appreciate articles
| out of my area of expertise again. That, and the fact that most
| sites when read in EU greet you with annoying cookie dialogs,
| something I wish search engines would indicate in advance in
| order for me to spare me visiting it (a turning away effect I
| wish was studied and quantified somewhere as it vastly changed my
| browsing habits).
| neilpanchal wrote:
| Take note: The interface hasn't changed much, a good thing.
| eruleman wrote:
| It's because lots of people are using Wikiwand extension
| (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wikiwand-
| wikipedia...).
| bawolff wrote:
| It would actually be interesting to know how common that
| extension is as a percentage of wikipedia views. I would bet
| less than 0.1%
| sq_ wrote:
| The popup cards when you mouse over an internal link that they
| added semi-recently are an awesome addition, though. Great
| melding of the old interface with a highly useful newer
| feature, in my opinion.
| op03 wrote:
| Most importantly it hasnt adopted the Like/Follower count based
| Reward system that lot of people in the tech world have
| mindlessly included all over the place.
|
| Try running any org with a Like and Follower count based reward
| system and check what surfaces and who pays a prices.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| StackOverflow was doing good until the Eternal September
| began. They also forgot to take into account changing "best
| practices"
| ignoranceprior wrote:
| The main changes were the switch from UseModWiki to MediaWiki
| (using the Monobook skin), and from Monobook to Vector.
|
| https://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/?useskin=monobook
| whym wrote:
| Not to disagree, but the mobile web site brought a
| significantly different user experience (for example
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Ocean vs
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Ocean), and the mobile
| readership has been at least as large as the desktop for a long
| time. [1]
|
| [1]
| https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/reading/total...
| dannyw wrote:
| It's crazy how editing still hasn't improved much on mobile.
| Compare it with the desktop editor. I guess people don't
| really do much editing on mobile?
| elliotec wrote:
| I believe Wikipedia is not only the greatest and most perfect
| website to exist, but also one of the greatest accomplishments of
| humankind.
|
| I rarely use such strong, ostensibly hyperbolic language without
| sarcasm, but I couldn't be more sincere and genuine with that
| statement.
|
| It exemplifies the information age, and the "purpose" of the
| internet - networked information transfer. The design is simple
| and usable to an almost miraculous degree. The distributed
| sourcing of information with mind-blowing moderation is
| pioneering and of upmost respectability.
|
| Its ability to endure through the onslaught of addictive
| capitalist pressures and sheer ethical reasonableness is
| something very special, resisting ads for the sake and benefit of
| humanity, I almost want to cry just writing about it.
|
| I could say so much more, but what I want to get to is - Thank
| you Wikipedia. You have changed countless lives and spread
| unthinkable knowledge to unfathomable futures. Hard to believe
| it's only been 20 years, I can't imagine a universe without you.
|
| Please donate if you use Wikipedia. The world needs it.
| tech-historian wrote:
| A visual history of Wikipedia going back to 2001:
|
| https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/wikipedia-website
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Is there an easy way to download all of Wikipedia?
|
| I'm guessing it is one of the first things set up on Mars :)
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| https://www.kiwix.org/en/
|
| It's not very big if you leave out all the pictures. I've got
| it all on my phone.
| ly wrote:
| Yes, there is:
| https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mirroring_Wikimedia_projec...
| Uptrenda wrote:
| I really do hate Wikipedia and almost never use it. It's a
| collection of poorly spun word-salad stolen loosely from third-
| parties. And the aim isn't on quality but to satisfy the editors
| compulsive need to contribute to Wikipedia's ever-growing rat's
| nest of non-sense... just because. In every article there will
| always be a historical section probably about 3/4ths the articles
| width that you just skip over (it's useless.) Then, maybe if
| you're lucky there will be some notes of value.
|
| These notes are almost always useless for two reasons:
|
| 1. They are never detailed enough to do anything with.
|
| 2. They usually assume massive amounts of prior audience
| knowledge. To the point where said audience wouldn't need the
| website.
|
| So they have the unique distinction of being useless to both
| beginners and expert audiences (quite the feat if you think
| about.) In the end after you've realized whatever article you're
| reading is useless (mostly all of them) you'll leave and do what
| you should have done in the first place: your own research.
|
| I really do wish there was a way to block results in Google.
| Wikipedia and it's merry band of 13-yo editors would be the first
| to go.
| yborg wrote:
| -site:wikipedia.org
|
| Now you'll have to find something else to rant about on the
| Internet.
| elliotec wrote:
| Wow... really? This is shocking to me. Where do you typically
| get information about stuff that everyone else goes to
| Wikipedia for?
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I think it sometimes depends on the area you are looking for
| information in.
|
| In general an encyclopedia helps you solve the search paradox
| (That is: You can't find anything unless you already know
| something about it).
|
| * If you use it to find information about things you are
| already very familiar with, you'll be disappointed.
|
| * If you use it directly as a source for things you are not
| familiar with, you will be mislead.
|
| However, if you use your encyclopedia (Britannica , Wikipedia,
| Encarta) as a jumping off point to find search terms and
| sources, you'll find it to be most useful indeed.
|
| In short, an encyclopedia is more like a richer dictionary,
| rather than a primary source of truth. (it isn't called a
| tertiary source for nothing!)
| prionassembly wrote:
| Try Britannica or Encarta for "clique complex of a graph".
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Wikipedia feels so skeuomorphic now with single pages like a real
| Encyclopedia. Rather than having an "edit battle" over a single
| page and then having them always being locked down why don't we
| have an "Omnipedia" where people can just fork a page if there is
| a legitimate alternative angle on something? We have the
| technology, just need a clever UI for visually browsing the
| various forks and a way of preventing the forks from becoming
| duplicates of the same alternative.
| raindropm wrote:
| I used to read book while eating(it's my lifelong habit) now I
| replace it with Wikipedia. Learn something new here and there
| everyday(mostly old history stuff)
|
| Nothing beats its rabbit hole and its barebone-but-focused
| interface. It does not replace any in-depth source of any topic
| you want to learn, of course.
| matthewmorgan wrote:
| Plenty of subtle agenda-pushing on Wikipedia if you're paying
| attention
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Agenda-pushing is quite common on Wiki, especially around
| controversial areas. You can read all about it on the Talk page
| for each article. The hope is that it all balances out in the
| end, but this does become harder to guarantee as high-quality,
| reliable sources for some points of view are getting
| increasingly thin and hard to find, both online and offline.
| (I'm aware that Larry Sanger among others has complained about
| this development, but it _is_ a genuinely hard problem to solve
| as we can 't just get rid of all sourcing standards in the
| service of less-represented viewpoints.)
| barbacoa wrote:
| Subtle?
|
| Read the wiki page on hunter biden.
| [deleted]
| cortesoft wrote:
| I just read it, and am not sure how else it could be
| written... do you expect Wikipedia to treat unsubstantiated
| conspiracy theories as anything but that? Are they supposed
| to pretend a conspiracy theory is possible out of 'fairness'?
|
| Are you also upset that they don't have a section on the
| Earth page saying the world might be flat?
| elliotec wrote:
| "Fairness" is the enemy of accuracy in cases like this.
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| Oh, it's not even subtle. Here's a game you can play: compare
| an article with the same article in another language. If you
| don't speak another language then use google translate. You'll
| see where the agenda pushing is.
|
| Oh, and always read talk pages.
| [deleted]
| elliotec wrote:
| Any examples?
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| Sure.
|
| English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)
|
| Russian: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=ru&t
| l=en&u=htt...
| elliotec wrote:
| Fascinating.
|
| The most interesting thing of these differences is that
| they're saying the same thing,but the agenda is clear in
| that saying the same thing is more positive or negative
| depending on the language.
|
| Russian > Gab is an English-speaking social network . Gab
| is described as being tolerant of different patriotic
| groups [5] and a safe haven for communities that would be
| restricted or blocked on other social networks [6] . The
| Gab groups can be characterized as patriotic, white
| supremacist and alternative right [5] . The site allows
| each user to forward a message to 3000 other users, which
| are called "gebs" [7] . It has been revealed that Gab is
| generally a favorite platform for people with
| conservative, libertarian , patriotic views. [8]
|
| English > Gab is an American alt-tech social networking
| service known for its far-right and extremist
| userbase.[3][4][5][6] Widely described as a haven for
| extremists including neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and
| the alt-right, it has attracted users and groups who have
| been banned from other social networks.[7][8][18] Gab
| claims to promote free speech and individual liberty,
| though these statements have been criticized as being a
| shield for its alt-right and extremist
| ecosystem.[16][19][20] Antisemitism is prominent among
| the site's content, and the company itself has engaged in
| antisemitic commentary on Twitter.[22][23][24]
| Researchers have written that Gab has been "repeatedly
| linked to radicalization leading to real-world violent
| events".[25]
|
| Really interesting how language and national propaganda
| propagates through stuff like this.
| rfrey wrote:
| A translation to "nationalistic" instead of "patriotic"
| makes the difference less pronounced, although the point
| still stands.
| jfax wrote:
| There's nothing particularly fascinating about this.
| Different language articles will use a range of different
| language sources.
| teloli wrote:
| Not even that subtle. For instance, declaring that Taiwan is a
| country despite the fact that it isn't recognized as such by
| most of the world. That was such a big deal that it was met
| with triumph by Taiwanese media:
| https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3948149
|
| Don't get me wrong, I support the cause of Taiwanese
| independence, but facts are facts. I also think that the Basque
| Country should be independent, and yet it would be factually
| incorrect to claim that it's a country.
| ant6n wrote:
| The ,,cause of Taiwanese independence". That's a bit silly,
| since it's really the PRC that split off from China and
| Taiwan is the continuation of the old republic. Did Taiwan in
| the 70s, when other countries changed their ties to China to
| recognize the PRC but not Taiwan, on the pressure of the more
| powerful PRC, suddenly lose its Independence? All the
| complicated history and political issues you can read about
| on Wikipedia btw.
| teloli wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_independence_movement
| matkoniecz wrote:
| The clear difference is that (for now) Taiwan acts as a
| separate country while Basque is not doing this.
| nsajko wrote:
| An issue is that most well-meaning contributors very soon learn
| to keep off controversial pages, because it's simply not
| enjoyable to constantly fight over the content. The fact is:
| resolving disputes takes much time and usually the party with
| more time on their hands and more "meat-puppets" and allies
| wins. Also, making enemies from among the "editors" is both
| unpleasant and inconvenient for possible future efforts on
| Wikipedia.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| If the percentage of pages that are considered controversial
| grows every year... wouldn't that eventually mean every page
| will be controversial and thus not attract well-meaning
| contributors?
| arp242 wrote:
| The total amount of pages also grows every year.
| sien wrote:
| Here is an example for people asking for one.
|
| As an experiment I tried to get some fairly innocuous numbers
| into participation in Australia sport.
|
| There is a big survey done in Australia, the Ausplay survey:
|
| https://www.clearinghouseforsport.gov.au/
|
| They have extensive tables on adult participation.
|
| Two editors would not let this data into the sport in Australia
| article. The reason was fairly obvious, it shows that
| soccer/football is the most played team sport in Australia. Roy
| Morgan, a statistical agency also had similar figures. Some
| Australians don't like the fact that soccer/football is by far
| the most played team sport in Australia according to to the
| Ausplay Survey and Roy Morgan.
|
| There was much time spent in the talk pages spent asking these
| two what would be acceptable for quoting these sporting
| statistics. The answer was nothing.
|
| If you can't get fairly unobjectionable material like that into
| wikipedia what else is being blocked?
| globular-toast wrote:
| What do they want the most popular sport to be and why do
| they care?
| sien wrote:
| Not soccer.
|
| In Australia there are quite a few people who view soccer
| as 'wogball' and a foreign sport. Just as in the US some
| view soccer as not being American.
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| Here's the RFC in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tal
| k:Sport_in_Australia#RFC_on...
|
| As can be expected when you're told that "the reason was
| fairly obvious" and that reason is somewhat nefarious, that
| reason is not the one given by anybody involved. Instead,
| people took issue with the methodology used to gather the
| data.
|
| (I have no idea if that criticism is legitimate, nor do I
| have any other horse in this race, nor do I care the least
| bit about the popularity of horse racing in Australia which,
| yes, happens to be part of that debate.)
| sien wrote:
| Check out how they ignore that the suggestion that if they
| take issue with those statistics they should take issue
| with the statistics that were currently in the article,
| notably cricket playing figures from Cricket Australia
| which, while they might be worth including, should have
| cautionary notes on them.
|
| They didn't care about that.
| notRobot wrote:
| That's a pretty serious allegation, and you're going to have to
| elaborate on that.
| tw04 wrote:
| I thought it was pretty well known that Wikipedia has been
| gamed repeatedly over the years. From companies to
| individuals. Generally speaking in the LONG TERM, things get
| corrected. But they are definitely not perfect and their
| editors have bias whether intentional or not.
|
| https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wikipedia-paid-editing-pr-
| fac...
| barbacoa wrote:
| Here is a write-up on the subject.
|
| https://thecritic.co.uk/the-left-wing-bias-of-wikipedia/
| Bud wrote:
| This doesn't actually substantiate a left-wing bias on the
| part of Wikipedia. For instance, it's quite possible that
| right-wing editors have been disciplined or reversed more
| because they make more weak and tendentious edits that
| can't withstand scrutiny by someone in command of the
| facts.
|
| "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."
|
| --Stephen Colbert
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Glib statements by comedians are not a good foundation
| for truth seeking. They are however great at maintaining
| emotional protection over one's viewpoints.
| Bud wrote:
| I didn't intend to present Colbert's entertaining quote
| as a "foundation". More of a humorous aside. I apologize
| if my intent was unclear. :)
| [deleted]
| astrange wrote:
| It is? It seems kind of obvious to me. People who don't care
| about a topic are not going to edit the page about it.
| lovecg wrote:
| But that's sort of how the whole thing tends to work. If a
| topic is niche and one sided, you'll get your small filter
| bubble which doesn't really hurt anyone. If it's
| controversial, the writing will tend towards the careful
| middle. It's not perfect but works as well as anything its
| size could.
| GreenHeuristics wrote:
| > If it's controversial, the writing will tend towards
| the careful middle.
|
| No, it will tend towards the side of those who has the
| most admin rights and most time for reverts. They will
| have no interest in neutrality
| Bud wrote:
| Such as?
| epoch_100 wrote:
| I did some work [0] at the Stanford Internet Observatory that
| somewhat supports OP's claim. We found that while Wikipedia
| is generally very good at maintaining neutrality, some bad
| edits slip through the cracks.
|
| [0] https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/wikipedia-part-one
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| Some people believe "Neutral Point of View" means you are
| supposed to write articles about serial killers in such a way
| that reading them would have no impact on your willingness to
| let them marry your son.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| That's not what it means though. It just means that you
| write a statement in such a way that everyone agrees it is
| true.
|
| "the sky is green" , is obviously not likely to be accepted
| by many people.
|
| 'In his science fiction story foobarbaz written in 2002,
| John Smith asked: What if people said "The Sky Is Green"?'
| In this case, we can agree that the story is written, we
| can look it up in the library. (I made up the title in this
| case).
|
| NPOV and consensus intersect here: Consensus is reached
| when no-one disagrees, and NPOV is defined as a point of
| view that no one could possibly disagree with.
| firefoxd wrote:
| Don't mind me, just stealing this quote above.
|
| On a serious note, this is very well put. It's the nature
| of language to lean toward a direction.
| matthewmorgan wrote:
| My favourite at the moment is foreigners who change 'British'
| to English/Welsh/Scottish in an attempt to create division
| matthewmorgan wrote:
| The same type of person who is downvoting me now
| asiando wrote:
| You can look for any slightly controversial company and find
| that their wiki pages skimp on the details of such
| controversies and minimize them as _mostly resolved_
| kristopolous wrote:
| I remember going first in 2002, a lot of pages were just lists
| like all the popes or cereals by general mills.
|
| I thought "yeah right, who's going to write an article on like
| pope pius x and cheerios. nice project but not happening"
|
| It was the second time I had seen a wiki, the first was on
| vim.org where I changed something in 2001 or so because I just
| didn't believe the concept was real.
|
| I think I get in on the ground of a bunch of things but I'm just
| incredulous and not enthusiastic about them. Like all those
| bitcoins I didn't care about...
|
| It's a problem I should probably work on. I should be more
| excited about things. Just have to figure out how to get there.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| In grad school back in like 2007 I took a 2-credit class called
| "The History of Nuclear Enterprise" taught by one of those long
| white-haired Doc Brown type professors. The final project was for
| each of us to make Wikipedia pages describing some important
| topic that wasn't covered yet. I made one on the university's
| nuclear reactor which had just been shut down. I dug through many
| linear feet of archived info, scanning photos and collecting
| various info for the page. It was super rewarding. I was hooked.
|
| Variously since then I have gone deep into some fringe but
| important-to-some topic and found hard-to-find sources. I've
| found it effective to collect and present this information in
| Wikipedia pages.
|
| Like a few months ago I made the page for the Aircraft Reactor
| Experiment [1], the world's first molten salt-fueled nuclear
| reactor, built and operated with intent to make nuclear-powered
| long-range aircraft. I'm pretty proud of the page, and go back to
| use it somewhat regularly. Having the platform of Wikipedia
| inspires me to go the slight extra mile in personal research in a
| way that can be used by everyone.
|
| Thanks Wikipedia, for existing.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Reactor_Experiment
| canofbars wrote:
| I have never been able to find a wikipedia topic I could
| contribute to. The problem is the topics which don't have pages
| on wikipedia also don't tend to have a lot of referencable
| information on the internet.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Books are an acceptable reference, I assume offline magazines
| or newspapers too.
| ghaff wrote:
| In fact, they're valuable in that most editors won't use
| them. (That said, they're also sort of a quirk with respect
| to verifiability in that, as a practical matter, almost no
| one is actually check the citation of an obscure book or an
| old offline magazine.)
| wodenokoto wrote:
| How do you handle the notability requirement? Or are your
| topics too obscure for anyone to care?
| ghaff wrote:
| In my experience, notability probably isn't likely to be a
| big issue for an obscure topic that is well-referenced.
| (Although it's always a possibility given some of the
| Wikipedians out there.)
|
| It's generally more of a problem with people. In part this is
| because notability is so context-dependent. Every professor
| at a college or professional football player or senior
| executive at a large company is notable at some level. Most
| restaurants have been reviewed once or twice somewhere. But
| the amount of publicly available information about many of
| these things is probably fairly limited, especially from
| third parties.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| I think I'm a bit special in that in my field (nuclear
| power), many of the smartest people in the world worked hard
| with vast funding between 1940 and 1960. Later the field got
| less popular and most people with knowledge of that stuff
| died. But today lots of investors and technologists are
| digging back into it to help fight climate change. So there
| are all these absolute gems in huge technical reports that
| were declassified in the 1960s and 70s that people are keenly
| interested in understanding and cataloging.
| tim333 wrote:
| It can be quite fun also starting a page and watching it grow.
| I started the page for covid testing early in the pandemic with
| a pretty crappy stub and it's now got hundreds of edits from
| other people and a lot of info.
|
| Thanks also Wikipedia.
| jacquesm wrote:
| And as one of the readers of that page, thank you.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| Thanks, acidburnNSA, for existing :)
|
| We need (more) people like you.
| nt2h9uh238h wrote:
| Wikipedia is especially great for elderly as contributors IMHO:
| lots of experience, knowledge and time. Often they even are
| bored or lack a "sense of purpose" and community (social
| connections are the rarer the older we get). Wikipedia adds all
| that. If Wikipedia would tech-ipo as the likes of WeWork, it
| would probably be "The Purpose Company". Thank you.
|
| I'm from Germany (2nd biggest Wikipedia) and proud to say 50%+
| of my school and university education would not have been
| possible with excellent articles in BOTH english and german
| language. Often the english one was great, but the german one
| better (think WWII topics, german cars, ...) and vice versa
| (most of the cases hehe). And: it might be a good pointer for
| learning a language as well, reading about stuff you deeply
| care about.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/ZJkp6
| foofoo4u wrote:
| Of all the institutions on the web, Wikipedia has remained my #1
| most trusted source with the least sense of corruption.
| Remarkable, really. If we want to know how to restore the web, we
| may want to learn how Wikipedia has remained so reputable for so
| long and model it.
| throwawaybutwhy wrote:
| Congratulations to the hive of villainy, embezzlement, and
| political propaganda on incidentally creating the largest trove
| of human knowledge on the backs of unpaid and underappreciated
| editors.
| i_love_limes wrote:
| I'll add my own anecdote. I have donated to Wikipedia
| sporadically over the years, and they asked me to take part in a
| sort of round table interview / qualitative study.
|
| In a room of other _Wikipedia donators_ , maybe 1/3 of the people
| there didn't know that the information was entirely community
| driven, and when they learned, a handful of didn't think it was a
| good idea!
|
| It just shows how much Wikipedia is just taken for granted, when
| in reality so so much effort goes in to keeping it free, ad free,
| open, and accessible to everyone.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > maybe 1/3 of the people there didn't know that the
| information was entirely community driven
|
| Maybe because it's not entirely community driven. It is
| somewhat community driven.
| wintorez wrote:
| I think we can't overstate the deep impact Wikipedia had in the
| past 20 years. The initial idea was so counter-initiative. I
| thought it would fail due to vandalism. But despite that, it
| thrived, and somehow it became a great source of knowledge.
| jayflux wrote:
| I remember there was definitely a lot more vandalism back then,
| it just so happened that the number of volunteers started to
| outweigh the abusers by quite a bit.
|
| I think moderation tooling got better over the years: being
| able to revert edits quickly, tracking users/IPs known for
| vandalism, locking articles, reporting someone etc.
| globular-toast wrote:
| In my experience the vandalism was mainly due to people taken
| by the novelty of being able to edit the site. The vast
| majority isn't determined to sabotage the site and therefore
| it's easily overcome by determined maintainers.
|
| The ability to vandalise is actually an essential part of
| Wikipedia's success, in my opinion. Most users will not
| continue to vandalise and some will become valuable editors
| after seeing how easy it is to contribute and that their
| changes make a real and instant difference.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| Three aphorisms in honor of Wikipedia, greatest encyclopedia in
| world history, and its 20 years of free knowledge uncorrupted by
| advertising:
|
| * Wikipedia works in practice, but not in theory.
|
| * Wikipedia is the worst source of information, except for all
| the others.
|
| * Wikipedia: the Internet's greatest reason to feel a little bit
| optimistic about human nature.
| nsajko wrote:
| Here, I'll fix that for you:
|
| * Wikipedia works in theory, but not in practice (as soon as
| you scratch the surface). - The problem is that there are many
| good pages, but that just lulls one out of the necessary
| skepticism.
|
| * Try the Wikipedia sources that are hopefully on the bottom of
| each page instead. Also search on Stack Exchange and Reddit for
| book recommendations.
|
| * Wikipedia: the Internet's greatest reason to feel pessimistic
| about the state of disinformation and propaganda
|
| EDIT: my comment is definitely more substantive and thoughtful
| than the one it is responding to, so I would appreciate if the
| downvoters could likewise reply to this comment, in addition to
| down-voting it.
| concordDance wrote:
| Providing a link to further information, particularly on the
| disinformation, would help.
| bawolff wrote:
| Its snarky and unrelated to the point the original comment
| was making.
| jessriedel wrote:
| Having looked into it a bit, I've been severely disappointed
| that we have no good theory of why Wikipedia works. There are
| lots of putative explanations, but they all predict the
| successful existence of all sorts of collaborative projects
| that we don't actually see. Wikipedia is such a treasure, and
| it would be extremely valuable to know more about how it works
| so we can replicate aspects of it for other projects.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| http://wiki.c2.com/?WikiHistory
|
| Start here.
|
| * There's a variant on design patterns which you can call
| Community Patterns.
|
| * Some patterns are software design patterns
|
| * Some patterns describe Agile software development.
|
| * Some patterns describe how to run a wiki (and why)
|
| * Wikipedia originally adopted these patterns and extended
| them for its own policy.
|
| See also: http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyWikiWorks
|
| If you want a long thoughtful writeup, check this text by
| Aaron Swartz
|
| http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/wikiroads
|
| That's some baseline sources off the top of my head. There's
| a lot more written about this. It seems like there are
| several concepts working together that a lot of people find
| un-intuitive.
|
| * In the main, human beings are honest. In fact mathematics
| predicts it must be so. (Game theory)
|
| * Humans "automagically" cooperate if their numbers are small
| (under Dunbar's number), but fail to do so over that number.
|
| * If you can keep the number of cooperating people under
| control, you can take advantage of this.
|
| * Conversely, if something needs attention, the ability to
| rapidly recruit them to the point needing attention is
| paramount (see eg. smart mobs)
|
| Partly by accident, partly by design, wiki engines exploit
| the above 3 elements. At first approximation, as long as
| >>51% of users are honest, the wiki will continue to
| function. The measured value on operational wikis is
| something like 60-80%.
| jessriedel wrote:
| I've read a fair amount about the history of wikipedia.
| Giving me a dump of facts does not amount to an
| explanation, and I don't find the theories you give to
| actually be explanatory.
| uncomputation wrote:
| Something that cannot be overstated enough - but is going to
| be severely underrated - is the community. Wikipedia has
| countless pages on codes of conduct and its own internal rule
| system that are actually coming from the editors, from
| experience, rather than handed down by a lawyer. Wikipedia
| generally understands and accepts the messier sides of
| democratic editing: people get emotional, trolls, biases,
| arguments, etc. and it approaches it all with honesty,
| straightforwardness, and even humor.
|
| You can list all the philosophical, technical, or economic
| reasons you want (and surely those are important to consider)
| but in my mind the community of real, living humans with
| (yes) opinions but that have recourse and clarity to correct
| those is invaluable. I have never seen a community with such
| professionalism and due diligence (almost every single troll
| edit I have seen is immediately reverted) as Wikipedia
| editors.
|
| There is also something to be said about the "culture" where
| trolling is not rewarded. By and large, vandalizing Wikipedia
| is not "cool," people don't rejoice for it because I think
| everyone feels at least a little bit of attachment or debt to
| Wikipedia. It's helped us all learn more than we probably
| ever could before and been there through schoolwork, essays,
| reference reading, and general curiosity. It's such a special
| corner of the Internet and I think "replicating aspects of
| it" won't work, at least not the way you want. Wikipedia is a
| holistic being, it's a community of people, yet also a
| resource, and even a culture, so any similar project needs to
| do the genuinely hard, slow, and boring work (something
| Wikipedia embraces - that most of the process is routine
| grammatical fixes, meta cleanup, rewriting, etc. over
| genuinely adding increasingly more information) of
| cultivating those higher standards and community outreach.
| ardy42 wrote:
| You're correct that Wikipedia has the blatant vandalism
| problem more-or-less covered. However, I'm not so
| enthusiastic about he culture. In a lot of cases, it ends
| up being "obsessives, fight!" with the weapon of rules-
| lawyering, which is just exhausting for anyone who isn't an
| obsessive.
|
| The end-result is often OK, but often jumbled and
| confusing, and it often feels like getting taught a subject
| by someone who's just a year or two ahead of you. You
| definitely feel you can learn something, but the person
| teaching you doesn't necessarily have very good command of
| the material themselves.
|
| It's position in society is also weird. It has authority,
| but that authority can be abused. I once ran into a
| Wikipedian who had been busy for several years promoting a
| religious philosophy in a little neglected corner of
| Wikipedia, by gluing together little disconnected fragments
| to make a build up the wiki page for it. It was definitely
| badly done original research, but he successfully tapped
| the authority of Wikipedia.
| kortilla wrote:
| Sorry if it's obvious, but why don't people think Wikipedia
| should work in theory? Isn't it just tapping into the need to
| tell people things you know and feel good about how smart you
| are?
|
| Or is the concern not around how content is submitted but
| more around how disputes are resolved?
| goto11 wrote:
| I would have expected it to be destroyed by vandals,
| marketeers and trolls, and that nutcases and people with
| alternative facts would have crowded out actually
| knowledgeable people.
|
| For every person with a deep insight in a subject, there
| are fifty people who _think_ they have a deep insight, and
| it is hard to tell the difference from the outside.
|
| My concern was not that nobody would contribute, but that
| the wrong people would contribute.
|
| Also "neutral point of view" is impossible, as any writer
| knows.
|
| It is surprising and amazing the Wikipedia works so well.
| Although I'm sure they use a _lot_ of resources on
| combating trolls and manipulation.
| chalst wrote:
| Neutrality in context really means covering all the
| significant points of view that are supported by reliable
| sources. The tricky concepts are the notions of undue
| weight (you really can't document everything anyone has
| ever said about Aristotle, for instance), and where to
| draw the line on what sources are regarded as reliable.
| canofbars wrote:
| Wikipedia has a bunch of power user tools that are not
| very clear to the average user. Power users also have the
| ability to lock hot topic pages so only other power users
| can touch them.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| I suspect it might have to do with the early adopters,
| who were not shitheads and as far as I learned, they are
| not soft on protecting their turf against vandals and
| other idiots. That created also lots of collateral damage
| and criticism, the loudest critic on wikipedis I usually
| hear is that they are too strict and eager on banning and
| locking articles.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > For every person with a deep insight in a subject,
| there are fifty people who think they have a deep
| insight, and it is hard to tell the difference from the
| outside.
|
| If it's hard to tell the difference from the outside, how
| do we know which one we got?
| jl6 wrote:
| For niche subjects, we don't.
|
| But for most subjects, rumours of objective truth's death
| have been greatly exaggerated.
|
| (Objective truth being another thing that doesn't exist
| in theory but does in practice).
| kortilla wrote:
| But it's trivial to revert edits that don't have valid
| citations. Tons of idiots do put shit in there all of the
| time but a pretty simple set of guidelines allows trivial
| reverts.
| jessriedel wrote:
| > Isn't it just tapping into the need to tell people things
| you know and feel good about how smart you are?
|
| As I said: this putative explanation predicts we would have
| all sorts of great free things that we don't have, e.g.,
| free reliable news, free trustworthy product reviews, good
| documentation for python libraries, etc., etc. Yes, it's
| possible to tell a bunch of just-so stories, but the number
| of free parameters you need always exceeds the amount of
| data explained.
| bawolff wrote:
| In the early days most people outside of wikipedia assumed
| that nobody would contribute to such a project without
| being compensated, that wikipedia is a communist pipe dream
| etc. The quote is meant as a play on the quote how
| communism works in theory but not in practise.
| kortilla wrote:
| Why would it be called a communist pipe dream? It's not
| mandated by the government and doesn't use tax revenue.
|
| Open source already existed and was thriving so I'm still
| not getting why there was any doubt. Seems like it would
| have just been FUD from the encyclopedia industry and
| people who didn't know about open source.
| ghaff wrote:
| Really just generally how Wikipedia works relatively well.
|
| And you're right. It's never been entirely clear why
| Wikipedia succeeded vs. others although there are various
| theories.[1] Certainly there have been failures: Goggle
| Knol and, at this point I think it's fair to say, Quora.
|
| [1] https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/10/the-contribution-
| conundrum...
| jl6 wrote:
| > Wikipedia works in practice, but not in theory.
|
| There could be a useful transferable lesson here. Any endeavour
| which has a really big risk attached to it (here, the risk of
| vandalism) can still be a success if you deploy sufficient
| mitigations, countermeasures and vigilance against that risk.
| bigpumpkin wrote:
| 10-20 years seem to be the right timeframe for long-term
| thinking. It is long enough that a kernel of an idea can become
| world changing in that time frame. Yet not so long that present
| people would have no ability to predict future trends.
| iamcreasy wrote:
| Do anybody has any hypothesis on why there hasn't been any
| successful Wikipedia copycat? I know Google attempted their
| variant called Knol(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol).
| canofbars wrote:
| Usually when you build a clone, you base it on fixing the
| problems of the original? What problems in wikipedia could a
| clone possibly fix since the main issues with wikipedia is
| getting people to agree on what should be included and I don't
| see how that could be solved.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| For example, a fork could make all articles into rabbit holes
| like: - really simple and short article
| - expanded version of the same article - even more
| expanded version - ...
|
| With an easy (contextual!) navigation up and down the stack.
|
| The benefit would be faster learning.
|
| The initial levels would be clearly marked that they contain
| simplifications to the point of being half-truths and the
| version that is 100% "honest" would be also clearly marked.
| (For the cases when the truth is so complex that it becomes
| clearly anti-educational. I don't mean
| controversial/political topics.)
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Because a clone would have to be significantly better to
| convince the community and users to switch.
|
| There simply was none. And it is a huge amount of work to try
| and as far as I know, mainly those people try this in
| seriousnes (and some success), who are not happy with wikipedia
| because they don't like alternative facts. So I think I have
| seen alt-right and esoteric wikipedia clones somewhere, but for
| some reason they have not wide success.
| nsajko wrote:
| One interesting thing with interesting implications regarding the
| (Wikimedia Foundation and its) Wikipedias is that getting to know
| them/it and how it functions is very involved.
|
| This is what I'm getting at: I tried to present some criticism of
| Wikipedia in this discussion. However, a lot of my comments are
| kind of vague because I failed to give specific examples.
| Consider why this is so:
|
| Discussing a specific example would require both some (sometimes
| rare) knowledge of the subject at hand and knowledge of the
| arcane processes through which a Wikipedia is governed and
| through which the disputes are resolved.
|
| This means that I would need to invest a lot of time explaining
| everything for someone to be able to understand the example, but,
| on the other hand, almost nobody (if not perhaps already a
| Wikipedian and familiar with the subject matter) would be willing
| to invest enough time to really understand the example and all
| the connected issues anyway.
|
| Thus substantial criticism of Wikipedia and its processes never
| gets to the public at large. I think that even most of
| Wikipedia's contributors hold little understanding of how
| Wikipedia actually works (socially) because the majority are very
| casual. And don't get me started on the incompetent contributors
| who meddle with articles and topics that they don't know enough
| about.
|
| Another issue is that Wikipedians probably won't want to
| associate their Wikipedia identity with their HN identity (and
| similar).
| bawolff wrote:
| Wait so your criticism of wikipedia is it is too complicated to
| understand and you can't effectively criticize wikipedia if you
| dont understand it?
|
| That's certainly a criticism i haven't heard before. I suppose
| in a way its true - wikipedia has its own culture, norms, etc,
| both written and unwritten, which can be hard to penetrate for
| an outsider (i would argue that WMF also struggles with that).
| But i think any large online community is going to have that.
| Heck, actual anthropologists have written actual books on the
| culture of debian, i dont see why wikipedia would be any less
| complicated.
|
| > Another issue is that Wikipedians probably won't want to
| associate their Wikipedia identity with their HN identity (and
| similar).
|
| And that is an issue because? [For the record my wikipedia
| username is the same as my HN username, and i know other people
| for which that is also true]
| throwawaysea wrote:
| I've been funding Wikipedia for years and use it several times
| daily. It has indeed grown into an amazing source of knowledge
| documenting this world. However there are insidious problems
| building up. For example, I've noticed that they are starting to
| encode a lot of biases into its articles, particularly on topics
| that are part of the political sphere. These articles often
| reflect a US progressive-left worldview rather than a balanced
| view that reflects differing opinions from multiple sides of the
| aisle. There is also a distinct Western and English cultural bias
| in how articles describe and frame other countries, other
| cultures, and other religions.
|
| I'm not sure what the fix is for these issues, but it does mean
| that I seek out opposing perspectives elsewhere when I read
| articles that concern such topics. It'll probably always be
| important for readers to seek multiple perspectives, including
| ones they disagree with, instead of blindly trusting Wikipedia to
| be correct. After all, it is written by humans.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Saying that (en.)wikipedia has a US progressive-left worldview
| is subtly misleading.
|
| Specifically en.wikipedia.org has a western (US/UK sphere of
| influence) worldview.
|
| This is because en.wikipedia is/can be edited by everyone who
| speaks English: not just the USA, not just regular English
| speaking countries, but also all those countries that teach
| children English as a second language, (and a not insignificant
| smattering of people who learn English outside of school too)
|
| When you compare countries around the world, The United States
| of America is said to lean rather right of center.
|
| Thus from a US perspective you would expect en.wikipedia to
| appear to indeed be a bit on the left.
|
| (this is not a comprehensive answer, but it does cover a lot of
| the ground)
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > When you compare countries around the world, The United
| States of America is said to lean rather right of center.
|
| I'm not sure that this is the case. Maybe with respect to
| English-speaking countries, the U.S. leans more capitalistic
| which some people would call "right". But U.S.
| society/worldview is nonetheless far more liberal, socially
| progressive and open to diverse views than _most_ countries
| around the world.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| So are you saying that the world has stood still, and that
| western thought in general and America in particular have
| not had any sort of positive influence on the world since
| 1776? ;-)
| fireattack wrote:
| I honestly don't understand what your satire is trying to
| say, and would agree with zozbot234's pretty straight
| forward reply: the US is probably lean right among
| Western countries, but compared to _all the countries_ in
| the world, it 's not. Most of Asian and African countries
| lean much more "right" compared to the US, as a starter.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Specifically -as a nearly trivial statement- en.wikipedia
| is predominantly edited by those people who can write in
| English.
|
| These can be:
|
| * Native speakers: From eg. USA, UK, Canada, New Zealand,
| Ireland.
|
| * People who speak English as a second language (which is
| most of the western world including western Europe)
|
| In general out of this set of countries, the USA tends to
| be fairly (economically) conservative and right-leaning.
| (Compare with eg. Netherlands, Norway, Germany, France,
| Canada, New Zealand, etc. )
|
| What makes you say that countries in eg. Asia are more
| right leaning than the USA? That surprises me a bit.
| fireattack wrote:
| Of out this set of countries, I agree; but she/he
| specifically quoted a sentence from your original
| comment, therefore I think his/her observation is fine.
|
| > What makes you say that countries in eg. Asia are more
| right leaning than the USA
|
| By living there most of my life.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Ah! Which country are you in, if I may ask? I'd like to
| look it up!
|
| (In return: I'm currently in Germany, Netherlands. These
| countries are considerably left of the USA in terms of eg
| socialized health care and education, views on woman's
| rights, and general permissiveness and openness to new
| ideas.)
|
| What do you consider right/left wing in this context, and
| how is the country you are in right wing? (Perhaps you're
| in Singapore or so?)
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I think I'd better explain the "1776" comment a bit
| better:
|
| America was not the only country to have a great
| revolution. Starting almost a century earlier, and (in
| part following america's example) up to this day, many
| countries have seen revolutions or reforms. The world has
| continued to evolve and grow.
|
| Americans are often taught of American exceptionalism,
| that an enlightened America is (was) alone in the dark.
|
| Perhaps (nearly) so in 1776; But the fact today is that
| America is no longer the only nation with a liberal world
| view, social progressiveness and openness to diverse
| views. Now many other nations stand beside it or even
| ahead of it. This is not a bad problem to have of course
| (or even a problem at all! )
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > These articles often reflect a US progressive-left worldview
| rather than a balanced view that reflects differing opinions
| from multiple sides of the aisle. There is also a distinct
| Western and English cultural bias in how articles describe and
| frame other countries, other cultures, and other religions.
|
| The problem is real as I've mentioned elsewhere, but it's
| overwhelmingly a _sourcing_ problem. There simply aren 't many
| sources about non-Western or traditionalist (as opposed to
| modern/progressive) worldviews.
| incompatible wrote:
| Conservatives have set up their own version at
| http://conservapedia.com/. I can understand why a lot of that
| material isn't found in Wikipedia.
| Bud wrote:
| Could you cite some examples that you feel are especially
| egregious?
|
| Have you tried to remedy this by editing any of those articles
| and backing up your edits with a solid factual argument?
| helloitsian wrote:
| What would be a good place to find one of these biases?
| lovecg wrote:
| Could you share an example of a biased article? I haven't
| really noticed that (at least for the visible, high profile
| articles) - the coverage has been as balanced as anywhere.
|
| Where it might get "extreme" is on niche topics that few people
| care about. For example I remember some articles associated
| with the whole "audiophile" scene were claiming some silly
| things without much evidence behind them, but that's pretty
| innocuous in my view.
| mattcwilson wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenting
| elliotec wrote:
| What about this article is biased?
| tgv wrote:
| I cannot judge if it's biased (in the way meant in this
| thread), but there is a rather weird statement right in
| the first section, "Factors that affect decisions":
|
| > In psychology, the parental investment theory suggests
| that basic differences between males and females in
| parental investment have great adaptive significance and
| lead to gender differences in mating propensities and
| preferences.[10]
|
| First, the reference is to a text book. That's not good.
| Second, the theory is not not widely accepted, and did
| receive criticism. It's certainly not an established
| fact. Third, the statement's prominent place, and lack of
| further qualification, suggests that human parents should
| take care of the amount care men and women invest in
| parenting, but that's not at all what the theory is
| about. The article linked explains that very clearly.
|
| Why it was placed there is a mystery, but it's not been a
| neutral, well-informed edit.
| hobofan wrote:
| > Second, the theory is not not widely accepted, and did
| receive criticism.
|
| Then contribute a link to that criticism? AFAIK that's
| the normal policy on widely criticized statements that
| are still popular enough that they should be mentioned.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| One example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism
| _conspiracy_th..., which is about a term called "Cultural
| Marxism" which has been used by some mainstream right-leaning
| people as well as some right-leaning extremists (particularly
| in the past). If you look at the article itself, it titles
| this article as a "conspiracy theory" and specifically
| features the conspiracy theory version of "Cultural Marxism"
| in its opening sentences. However, the term as commonly used
| in modern times, does not refer to that particular conspiracy
| theory but is more like a shorthand for leftist ideology that
| features collectivism, particularly when it infiltrates
| academic institutions (and not the notion of a coordinated
| mass conspiracy).
|
| From a quick Google search, I was able to find other articles
| that draw this distinction clearly (example
| https://spectator.us/whats-wrong-cultural-marxism/). However,
| the Wikipedia article doesn't draw this distinction well, and
| it seems intent on casting the phrase "Cultural Marxism" as
| racist, and so it features the worst interpretation of it. It
| sources articles that are also written primarily to repudiate
| right-wing political figures or intellectuals like Jordan
| Peterson. The related debate and edit wars are apparent when
| you look at the "Talk" page for this article: https://en.wiki
| pedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cultural_Marxism_conspira.... Note that
| the Talk page mentions the article is controversial, is in
| dispute, that there have been attempts to recruit editors to
| change the article, there have been circular sources
| introduced, and so forth.
|
| That's just one example, but if you dig deep enough into any
| topic that has a left- and right- perspective and a Wikipedia
| article, you'll find the same. Wikipedia is, in my view,
| developing a US-centric English-centric left-leaning bias.
| All that said, I still love Wikipedia and will continue to
| use it everyday. I just worry that like all human-centric
| institutions, it is itself a target, a theater of battle in
| the on-going ideological wars.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The article about the conspiracy theory has a
| disambiguating note pointing to "Marxist cultural analysis"
| as a more common term for the non-conspiratorial use of
| "Cultural Marxism". The remaining question is whether the
| conspiratorial use is significant/common enough that it
| deserves to be treated as the "default", and that's an
| editorial question that could be argued from either side.
| It's an uncomfortable situation to be sure, but there's no
| _blatant_ political bias here.
| mattcwilson wrote:
| Check the sources cited in this particular sentence:
|
| Scholarly analysis of the conspiracy theory has concluded
| that it has no basis in fact and is not based on any
| actual intellectual tendency.[5][7]
| zozbot234 wrote:
| I'm not sure what your point is. That sentence is
| entirely correct _with reference to the conspiracy
| theory_ - there 's no actual conspiracy or "intellectual
| tendency" to conspire along the posited lines. Marxist
| cultural analysis is a rather different animal; to be
| sure, there _are_ genuinely weird interactions between it
| and e.g. radical Maoist politics /worldviews which push
| some proponents of either towards an ideological extreme
| that's somewhat reminiscent of the 'Cultural Marxist'
| claims ("Destroy the Four Olds!") - but even then, that's
| a random/contingent political equilibrium; not a willful
| conspiracy or even a well-defined "intellectual
| tendency".
| tgv wrote:
| I think the point is that these articles don't prove
| anything of the kind. The first one "examines the ways in
| which Cultural Marxism has moved from the 'fringe' to the
| 'mainstream'", paying "particular attention to the
| localised use of the conspiracy in the 'Safe Schools'
| controversy of 2016-2017, whereby Cultural Marxist tropes
| were imbued with local concerns about sexuality and
| gender issues". The second one "argues that "Cultural
| Marxism" is an antisemitic conspiracy theory", focusing
| "on three of the main proponents", and shows that it
| "misrepresents the Frankfurt School's ideas and
| influence", the latter not being obvious from a quick
| reading.
| sien wrote:
| It's interesting to contrast that with the article on
| Neoliberalism.
|
| Both are terms that are generally used to disparage views
| of others. Except for the new 'Neoliberal' clique who are
| centre left most people described as Neoliberals don't
| describe themselves that way. Just as what many right of
| centre would term as 'Cultural Marxists' wouldn't describe
| themselves that way.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
| notahacker wrote:
| I'm not a fan of the label 'neoliberalism' (outside of IR
| theory where it's well-defined and different) and think
| it's often a marker for poor quality partisan analysis,
| but the fact is it's simply prepending a 'neo' in front
| of the well established and broad classical liberal
| school of thought to distinguish it from the colloquial
| US use of 'liberal' to mean 'left wing'. And most of the
| people referred to wouldn't argue with the idea their
| ideas are in the ideological tradition of Adam Smith,
| even as they take great issue with some of the nonsense
| written about their motives and ideals and argue a label
| so broad that the entire EU political project _and most
| of its opponents_ falls into it isn 't particularly
| useful for understanding politics or economics.
|
| That's quite different from referring to the other side
| of a debate on sexuality as 'Cultural Marxism', despite
| Marx having had zero interest in sexuality, many self-
| proclaimed Marxist states having conservative policies on
| it and few people on that side of the debate having any
| interest in Marx. At best, you could argue right wingers
| describing their culture war opponents as Marxists are
| trying to invoke the spirit of Joe McCarthy rather than
| Lyndon LaRouche's ridiculous Frankfurt School conspiracy
| theory and literal Nazi origins of the term.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| My feeling is that "neoliberalism" is a term with a
| greater degree of academic formality behind it, as well
| as consensus in terms of definition. I don't think it was
| originally pejorative, although it has come to be used as
| an insult, in the same way "Boomer" has. The term
| "Cultural Marxists" is probably pejorative to those it
| targets, although I've seen its use as a shorthand for a
| collection of ideas the right finds disagreeable, rather
| than a pejorative. It's a term that feels self-describing
| and immediately obvious to those who use it, but it does
| not have an academic foundation like "neoliberal" does.
| And its definition has varied over time, which is the
| cause of the current lack of consensus on what it refers
| to. As a result, each political side I think uses the
| definition that most favors their own ideological bias.
| aerosmile wrote:
| I am surprised that the comments haven't mentioned the role of
| SEO in Wikipedia's growth and defensibility.
|
| Wikipedia's habit of deep interlinking helped it rank back in the
| early aughts when the SEO rules were rather simple. Add to that
| the subdomain-driven localization strategy and many other moves
| that were considered SEO best practices back in those years when
| the on-page factors used to matter.
|
| But that was just the start. Wikipedia killed it in SEO when it
| was easy to do so, but it also did one other thing that most SEO-
| driven sites (eg: About) didn't do correctly - it cared deeply
| about the content quality and also resisted to run ads (anyone
| remember Jason Calacanis' articles on how they are leaving $100m
| on the table? See [1]). So when Panda came around, Google
| correctly rewarded Wikipedia with #1 rankings for over 50% of its
| terms (!!), and Jason Calacanis had to shut down Mahalo which got
| destroyed by Panda.
|
| Wikipedia's dominance continues because it's basically impossible
| to overcome its lead in inbound links and domain authority. Add
| to that a surprisingly under-the-radar company culture which has
| avoided any major blow ups despite its community wielding so much
| leverage over the world's education and having to make a lot of
| difficult calls on a daily basis.
|
| Well done.
|
| [1] https://calacanis.com/2006/10/28/wikipedia-leaves-100m-on-
| th...
| [deleted]
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| You've got it backwards; they didn't "kill it" on SEO by making
| good content, good content was rewarded with high ranking
| search results. Even this is questionable now that google et al
| purposely present just enough of wikipedia's content directly
| in the search results to discourage you from leaving google. So
| in the end they (a) display ads and (b) don't get the revenue.
| THis is a win?
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Wikipedia does not display ads.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| If you mention some site is good in SEO it generally implies
| that compared to content quality, it gets better ranking in
| search engine. Here what you are saying is the quality is
| better and it is a good thing that SEO is same as have good
| quality content.
| tyingq wrote:
| Wikipedia's page views, though, are relatively flat since 2016.
| I suspect, in large part, because of Google's move to expose
| Wikipedia content on Google pages, removing the need to follow
| any links to Wikipedia for many queries.
|
| https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-pag...
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Google doesn't reliably put Wikipedia links in the results
| anymore because they're filling the first page with revenue
| generators.
| capital_guy wrote:
| This is definitely the reason. Whereas wikipedia is always
| top of duckduckgo results.
| boringg wrote:
| Jason Calcanis, such a that guy.
|
| Wikipedia is a fascinating story of well earned success and
| growth without the reigns of vc dominating its trajectory. I
| imagine they have had a lot of tricky decision making. I'm
| curious what their process has been (as someone who uses
| Wikipedia but really doesn't know things are running behind the
| scenes).
| kemayo wrote:
| It's sort of complicated -- there's an ideological nonprofit
| called the Wikimedia Foundation that hosts all the various
| WikiProjects and maintains the software that's used (mostly
| mediawiki and some associated services). When you see those
| banner ads on wikis for donations, that's who you're donating
| to.
|
| However, the Foundation is very hands-off about the _content_
| of wikis, which tend to run on "consensus"[0] with the
| editing-community for that wiki. That establishes the
| policies for the wiki, and often influences the technical
| decision-making for specific wikis. Also, the Foundation
| writes mediawiki extensions for a bunch of non-core behavior,
| but the individual wiki communities take a strong hand in
| whether they're enabled for that wiki. It's why the WYSIWYG
| editing environment (VisualEditor) is so inconsistently
| available between wikis, for instance.
|
| Some wiki communities have a fairly fraught relationship with
| the Foundation, generally if they feel like they're being
| pushed into things. There have been controversies about
| things like the Foundation banning abusive users project-
| wide, or Foundation employees editing wikis from their staff-
| affiliated accounts. It's generally very inside-baseball
| though, and if you're outside the community it's hard to hear
| about.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consensus
| chrisbolt wrote:
| > So when Panda came around, Google correctly rewarded
| Wikipedia with #1 rankings for over 50% of its terms (!!), and
| Jason Calacanis had to shut down Mahalo which got destroyed by
| Panda.
|
| For context, this is the type of content that Mahalo was
| producing to try to game SEO:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdNk1xmDpxo
| progre wrote:
| Game how? Pretty girl says she will show how to mix a drink.
| Then proceeds to show how to mix a drink. Not ending world
| hunger or anything, but nothing deceitful here at least.
| Maybe I'm missing something
| ardy42 wrote:
| > Game how? Pretty girl says she will show how to mix a
| drink. Then proceeds to show how to mix a drink. Not ending
| world hunger or anything, but nothing deceitful here at
| least. Maybe I'm missing something
|
| IIRC, those videos are pretty famous because the pretty
| girl was not actually any good at mixing drinks:
|
| https://www.esquire.com/food-drink/drinks/a30172952/viral-
| ol...
|
| > JaNee Nyberg Once Made the World's Worst Old Fashioned.
| Jim Beam Just Gave Her a Shot at Redemption.
|
| > The world's worst Old Fashioned was made on a quiet
| summer morning in 2010, in a dot com startup's shoddily
| decorated conference room in Santa Monica. Mahalo.com had
| hired JaNee Nyberg to host a series of 50 cocktail tutorial
| videos that they would then upload to their YouTube
| channel. In the series' most infamous video, the actress,
| model, and part-time bartender slops together an Old
| Fashioned using no bitters, a giant orange wedge, a ton of
| ice, and an entire pint glass of bourbon. Now, everyone
| makes an Old Fashioned a little bit differently--here's
| Esquire's official recipe--but Nyberg's way was definitely
| wrong and totally hilarious.
|
| Here's that video: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xfhhjf
| leetcrew wrote:
| it's not awful, it's just not very high quality content.
| the instructions are more or less correct, but she does a
| lot of triggering things in the video, like not measuring
| the whiskey at all. if I ordered a mint julep in a bar and
| the bartender made it the way she does, I would not order
| one at that bar again. if it was expensive, I might ask for
| my money back or a simpler drink.
|
| compare with this video on the same drink:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTKC9Ht4Erg
|
| the guy explains why he does things the way he does them
| and why you might do it differently depending on your
| tastes. unlike the first, this video manages to be more
| informative than simply reading its script as text.
| progre wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not saying it's amazing content, I just fail to
| see how this is "gaming SEO"
| leetcrew wrote:
| you might accuse them of clickbaiting by using an
| attractive woman instead of someone who knows how to make
| a proper drink, but yeah I don't really see this as
| "gaming SEO" per se.
|
| edit: I have now spent entirely too much time researching
| these videos and I feel bad for criticizing her.
| apparently she was an actual bartender but had to make a
| hundred of these videos in two days without any of the
| proper tools or even a script.
| https://punchdrink.com/articles/where-is-she-now-janee-
| mahal...
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Feels like people would rather see the pretty girl.
| That's just giving people what they want.
| progre wrote:
| Went back an read the comments on that video. Youtube
| comments are gold sometimes.
|
| Edit: Watched a few more. I get the impression that
| theese videos are actually made as gags. She says various
| measurements for the alcohol (like 2 ounces) but
| consistently just tops up the whole pint glass.
|
| Edit 2: I may need to reevaluate the "not SEO gaming"
| stance.
| leetcrew wrote:
| I also went back to watch some more and I really hope
| you're right about them being gags. the old fashioned
| video is more like a "how not to" guide: gross cherries,
| muddling a whole orange slice with peel (wtf), spilling
| the drink everywhere in a needless mixing step, etc.
| creato wrote:
| It is somehow sad that "caring about content quality" is
| considered SEO and not just making a good website.
|
| I think more than half the things you mentioned are only good
| SEO because search engines want to send people to websites they
| will like reading. I think when that is the case, we should be
| crediting people for making good websites, not good SEO.
| pvorb wrote:
| Yes, I believe that Wikipedia and its authors never put much
| thought into SEO. They just think about how to best structure
| the information and make heavy use of links, which also
| happens to be a good strategy for SEO.
|
| The Google search rank algorithms changed a lot more than the
| overall structure of a good Wikipedia article in the last 20
| years.
| aerosmile wrote:
| Have you ever encountered on Wikipedia a sentence like
| this:
|
| "...because a <a>blue</a> <a>whale</a> did..."
|
| rather than
|
| "...because a <a>blue whale</a> did..."
|
| Obviously, the latter version would have been more useful,
| and I find it difficult to believe that a human being would
| have made such a mistake. Don't get me wrong - such
| instances are rare, but they do happen and are an indicator
| that not all links are generated manually. I don't know
| what they are using today (if anything), but as someone
| else pointed out, in the early days they used UseModWiki to
| ensure a high level of deep interlinking. We can argue that
| this was done to improve the UX, but the level of ambition
| that went into it signals that they also saw it as a
| strategic move (and they would have been right to assume
| that - 20 years ago, a highly interlinked site was likely
| the best bang for the buck in SEO when it came to how to
| prioritize your time and resources).
| germanier wrote:
| There are actual humans placing such links to the point
| that there is an explicit rule against doing that
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS:SEAOFBLUE
| pvorb wrote:
| Nice! Didn't know about such a rule.
|
| Maybe in legitimate cases, it'd already help if Wikipedia
| underlined links, so you can see if it's one or multiple
| links.
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| Some skins do, e.g. monobook: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/
| index.php?title=Hacker%20News&use...
| jessriedel wrote:
| Yea, if SEO is to have a useful meaning, it really out to be
| "changes you make to improve search ranking holding quality
| fixed".
| SilasX wrote:
| Equivalently, the challenge in running a search engine is to
| decrease the divergence between "what makes a website good"
| and "what makes us rank you higher".
| aerosmile wrote:
| SEO changed dramatically over the last 20 years. Thankfully,
| we are today exactly at a point that you described (it all
| started with Panda in 2011). As you'll see below, getting
| there was not just a technological challenge, but also one of
| fixing misaligned incentives.
|
| Prior to 2011, Google enjoyed a mutually beneficial
| relationship with content farms which splattered their pages
| with AdSense ads (and Google ranked them highly). Can you
| imagine how it must have sounded for the Panda engineers to
| pitch to Sergey and Larry that they wanted to replace all
| those highly monetized websites with Wikipedia?
|
| Matt Cutts commented that "with Panda, Google took a big
| enough revenue hit via some partners that Google actually
| needed to disclose Panda as a material impact on an earnings
| call. But I believe it was the right decision to launch
| Panda, both for the long-term trust of our users and for a
| better ecosystem for publishers."
| cdmckay wrote:
| For anyone wondering what Panda is:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda
|
| "Google Panda is a major change to Google's search results
| ranking algorithm that was first released in February 2011.
| The change aimed to lower the rank of "low-quality sites"
| or "thin sites", in particular "content farms", and return
| higher-quality sites near the top of the search results."
| somedude895 wrote:
| Yeah, looking at it from a purely SEO perspective always
| makes decisions look kinda shady, as in they're trying to
| game some algorithm in order to gain more exposure.
| Wikipedia's biggest SEO factor has to be the massive amount
| of backlinks it gets. Those are purely organic and happen
| simply because it is generally the best authority on most any
| topic. It's more of a testament to how genuinely good
| Google's algorithm has become rather than some masterplan by
| Wikipedia.
| aerosmile wrote:
| Once you have 150 million inbound links, the strategy
| choices are easy - focus on content quality! But you have
| to remember what Day 1 was looking like: a tiny community,
| no inbound links, and a fair amount of other encyclopedia
| competitors trying to attract authors. Now the strategy
| choices are quite interesting - at the beginning of a
| startup you have just enough energy/runway to "kill it" in
| one area. Which one do you focus on? Generating the world's
| best content alone without the heavy lifting they've done
| on deep interlinking and other SEO-friendly moves wouldn't
| have cut it.
| selestify wrote:
| What were the competitors in the early days?
| aerosmile wrote:
| Further down in the comments you'll find a research paper
| [1] that analyzed why Wikipedia succeeded where others
| failed. I am not sure I bought into the conclusion (which
| prompted my initial comment), but at least it has a
| comprehensive listing of all the main players at the
| time:
|
| Interpedia, TDEP, Everything2, h2g2, TheInfo, Nupedia,
| GNE
|
| [1] https://mako.cc/academic/hill-almost_wikipedia-
| DRAFT.pdf
| ghaff wrote:
| Thank you for posting that. It made me realize that I
| have the wrong citation in a footnote of a book I'm about
| to proof :-)
| Anthony-G wrote:
| Back in the early to mid 2000s, I learned web
| design/development by volunteering to create websites for
| charities/NGOs. In the process, I
|
| * ensured that the code (HTML and CSS, only basic non-AJAX,
| JavaScript) was standards-compliant (at the time, XHTML [1]
| was "the big thing")
|
| * implemented basic usability guidelines as advocated by
| Jakob Nielsen [2] in his _Alertbox_ newsletter and
|
| * followed Mark Pilgrim's suggestions in his _Dive Into
| Accessibility_
|
| Carrying out the above and simply focussing on quality
| content was enough to rank highly in Google's search engine
| results and I never had the need nor inclination to do any
| research into SEO. Back then the mantra in the web
| development books was that "content is king" - and Google
| reflected this philosophy. Sadly, the Web has changed a lot
| in the intervening years.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Nielsen_(usability_con
| su...
|
| 3. https://web.archive.org/web/20110927131211/http://diveinto
| ac...
| pimlottc wrote:
| For those who don't closely follow SEO, can you explain what
| Panda is/was?
| Digit-Al wrote:
| I know nothing about SEO either, but a quick search gives:
| https://moz.com/learn/seo/google-panda
| mola wrote:
| You mean they tried to make a useful site. During that period
| search engines were new, and people didn't yet start search
| result optimization hacking. Which meant ranking was still a
| good proxy for site quality and not for optimization hacking.
|
| The conscious choice to leave the money on the table is exactly
| the same. Instead of optimizing for cash value which is just a
| proxy for real value, wikipedia optimized for quality
| encyclopedic knowledge distribution.
| aerosmile wrote:
| I hate to disagree, but SEO as an industry was booming pretty
| early on. I remember going to a conference in 2001 that was
| massively popular. The type of stuff you'd learn there was
| pretty outrageous and very very black hat (so much so, that
| people sharing those tips were too self-conscious to reveal
| their identities, hence the term black hat).
|
| My point is - you could very much do very well back in those
| days regardless of your content quality (which consequently
| trended down and gave rise to content farms). It's only in
| the last 10 years (and particularly starting in 2014 based on
| my experience with my own content) that the content quality
| became a true proxy for ranking, and vice versa.
|
| As a side note, these days, you still have SEO conferences,
| but the stuff you learn there is so diversified that people
| have started calling it content marketing and other names.
| The perhaps most useful gathering is SEOktoberfest, it's
| invite only and they admit only 30 attendees. Never been
| there, but I've heard it's worth the six grand that it costs
| to get in as a first-time attendee (I am not affiliated with
| it in any shape or form).
| ghaff wrote:
| I agree. You go back 10 years and SEO was pretty much
| synonymous with black hat SEO.
|
| These days, there still are a fair number of mostly low
| quality content farms. But there's also high quality
| content marketing. The latter still definitely is aware of
| things like page views, how far people read through an
| article, what type of headlines seem to be most effective,
| and so forth. It starts with good content that readers are
| interested in though.
| bawolff wrote:
| I dont think they did any of those things because of SEO, but
| because it was the obvious way to do it.
|
| Deep interlinking - originally it used software called
| UseModWiki, which would automatically make a link if a page
| name existed for the word you just used.
|
| subdomains - if you want to make a separate site for each
| language, that is the onvious way to do it
|
| good content- why would anyone intentionally want to make a
| site with shitty content unless you are making $$$ off it (and
| wikipedia wasnt)
| in3d wrote:
| That's one version. Another version, that I know will go over
| very well here, is that some have invested a lot of money to
| bring high quality, accessibly-written off-line content by
| experts in the field to the Web, only for Wikipedia editors to
| poorly rewrite it in thousands of articles and rank over the
| original content in Google. And then Wikipedia started using
| non-follow links so the original sites got no benefit
| whatsoever.
| aikinai wrote:
| > high quality, accessibly-written off-line content by
| experts in the field to the Web
|
| Where is this content? It sounds like you're alluding to
| something obvious but I honestly have no idea, and would like
| to know where to find it if it does exist.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "Where is this content? "
|
| Scattered all over the web.
|
| I do agree with that point, that for most topics there
| exists better quality content elsewhere. But finding it and
| verifying, that it is not made up, is the reason I also use
| mainly wikipedia first for researching a new topic. And
| then proceed to more detailed pages, sometimes linked in
| wikipedia.
| bawolff wrote:
| No kidding. I remember trying to find high quality
| educational content on the web before wikipedia. For
| certain subjects it existed, but it was few and far
| between, and of very mixed quality (how do you know how
| much trust to put on some geocitirs page)?
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _(how do you know how much trust to put on some
| geocitirs page)_
|
| The same way you learn to "trust" anything, including
| Wikipedia - by verifying sources.
|
| I love Wikipedia, but I don't blindly assume it to be the
| ground truth in anything (if such truth even exists),
| especially in the "long-tail" of subject matter.
| bawolff wrote:
| There's different levels of "trust". With Wikipedia i
| know roughly what i am getting. I can make an informed
| decision as to how much to trust it and how much to do
| further research depending on the application i need it
| for. After all, sometimes i just need knowledge with a
| decent chance of being true, where other times I need to
| be really sure. Wikipedia provides a relatively
| consistent experience (varrying somewhat with how obscure
| a page is). Random geocities sites do not give me that
| consistency, so I cannot make an informed guess as to how
| correct the page is.
| ghaff wrote:
| There are fairly predictable quirks about Wikipedia:
|
| - Articles in areas of math written in impenetrable
| jargon
|
| - Encyclopedic articles about obscure, trivial subjects
|
| - Stubs about relatively important individuals
|
| - Tug-of-war entries about current events
|
| - Random endless lists
|
| - A lot of procedural fighting about original research,
| notability, etc.
|
| But, as you say, a way to get pointers to or a quick take
| on a topic, it's pretty good. Am I going to take anything
| Wikipedia says to the bank without double-checking?
| Probably not. And, if you look deeply enough into some
| topics, you find a lot of circular references to some
| other single source of information. But overall, it's a
| good go-to reference.
| varjag wrote:
| With Wikipedia, you very soon develop a sense of gauging
| maturity of the article just from a quick glance. More
| often than not, the editors would even put maturity
| warnings for you.
|
| If something looks dubious you can even dive into
| revision list to spot the problems.
|
| This is more than can be said for nearly any other source
| out there.
| DanBC wrote:
| If you want to understand suicide in the UK you need to
| know, at a minimum, about ONS, NCISH, Fingertips, and then
| coroners for England and Wales and whatever the equivalent
| is for Scotland and Northern Ireland.
|
| Here's a list of links:
|
| https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsd
| e...
|
| https://sites.manchester.ac.uk/ncish/
|
| https://fingertips.phe.org.uk/profile-group/mental-
| health/pr...
|
| https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-
| content/uploads/2013/09/guidance...
|
| The best way to find out about these is to speak to someone
| who works in suicide prevention, so that would be people
| working for local authority suicide prevention partnership
| boards (they can have different names in different areas),
| or people working for NCISH or MASH or ONS, or people on
| Twitter. But if you can't do that you can sort of get some
| of the information from Wikipedia. It's a struggle though
| because the page is a poorly laid out mishmash of
| information, mostly written by people who don't understand
| the subject.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_Kingdom
| iamacyborg wrote:
| I hate to be _that guy_ , but if the content on Wikipedia
| is wrong, why not fix it? Unlike other profit-driven
| community sites (cough, Fandom, cough) you'll actually be
| helping other people.
| DanBC wrote:
| It's not possible to fix information on Wikipedia by
| using primary sources (the Judiciary website, the ONS
| data, the NCISH reports), you have to use secondary
| sources such as newspaper reports. Since newspapers get
| this stuff wrong too wikipedia will only allow incorrect
| information.
|
| And that's Wikipedia working as intended. If you're
| unfortunate you'll run up against someone who i) doesn't
| know anything at all about the topic, ii) has
| misunderstood some poorly reported document, and iii) has
| more free time than you. It's _exhausting_ dealing with
| these people and I simply have better things to do with
| my time.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| That doesn't appear to be true, but you're right, getting
| into an argument with Wikipedians can be exhausting.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_u
| sin...
| in3d wrote:
| Well, that kind of shows the issue, right? I'm talking
| about what happened many years ago (nofollow links were
| added in 2005) - companies learned their lesson and
| wouldn't try to pay expert writers and editors for
| reference-type content for web use anymore. Here is content
| that's somewhat similar: encyclopedia.com.
|
| By the way, I think Google and its easily-gamed algorithms
| that rewarded regurgitated content and mega-sites is more
| to "blame" here than Wikipedia itself for how it went down.
| notahacker wrote:
| I find it often has the opposite problem. High quality,
| accessibly-written off-line content by experts in the field
| is synthesised on Wikipedia by someone with good
| understanding of the subject, but then other editors delete
| large swathes of it for not citing every line and replace it
| with considerably more dubious explanations of the subject
| sourced to news articles and partisan think tanks which put
| all their content online.
| froh wrote:
| What does "non-follow links" mean?
| in3d wrote:
| https://www.semrush.com/blog/linkbuilding-dofollow-vs-
| nofoll...
| nsajko wrote:
| I don't like Wikimedia nor the Wikipedias, but I don't get
| your point and I think you're incorrect (unless you're
| talking about Wikipedia's early days).
|
| The way Wikipedia should work is by sourcing verifiable facts
| from reputable sources, and copyright violations are not
| allowed. I don't understand to what are you referring with
| "high quality, accessibly-written off-line content"?
| Britannica isn't high-quality and journalism isn't written by
| experts in the field.
| in3d wrote:
| You're mistaken: rewriting content is not a copyright
| violation and is allowed. I'm not talking about Britannica
| but more in-depth content.
| lima wrote:
| > _Add to that a surprisingly under-the-radar company culture
| which has avoided any major blow ups despite its community
| wielding so much leverage over the world 's education and
| having to make a lot of difficult calls on a daily basis._
|
| That's because Wikimedia Foundation is quietly focusing on the
| tech and keeping the site up and running while mostly letting
| the community govern itself.
|
| The few times the Foundation tried to override the community,
| it didn't go well.
| RobertoG wrote:
| >>"[..] cared deeply about the content quality and also
| resisted to run ads [..]"
|
| Do I remember wrong? because I remember they (the Wikipedia
| organization) were going to run ads at some point but it was
| strongly rejected by the community. I think there was even some
| fork because of that.
| howlgarnish wrote:
| I don't think Wikipedia ever seriously considered running
| ads, but Wikitravel did fork over this, and the ad-free fork
| (Wikivoyage) eventually joined Wikipedia's parent Wikimedia.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| I'm not sure how it's done now, but Wikipedia had special
| promotion on Google ranking (which would have probably set
| lower manually if it would run ads, while people would stop
| comtributing content).
|
| That guy who wants to run ads on it sounds like a really evil
| person: he doesn't get it that Wikipedia changed the world
| already, it doesn't need to do ,,more good''.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| He's not evil, he just can't see past making money.
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| Well, the love of money is the root of all of evil...
| nsajko wrote:
| > Add to that a surprisingly under-the-radar company culture
| which has avoided any major blow ups despite its community
| wielding so much leverage over the world's education and having
| to make a lot of difficult calls on a daily basis.
|
| There's been and still is plenty of controversy regarding both
| the Wikimedia Foundation and its relationship to the community
| of volunteers. In fact I'd say the whole thing's kind of
| rotten, because of many complicated issues.
| aerosmile wrote:
| I am aware of many of their issues, especially on smaller
| international sites. But even so, on a risk-adjusted basis I
| think they've managed to avoid more drama than other teams
| would have pulled off given the environment they are in.
| bawolff wrote:
| That is interesting. As someone who used to work for the
| wikimedia foundation, it felt like there was a constant
| stream of drama. I guess when you are in the middle of it,
| it feels more intense than it actually is.
| kemayo wrote:
| I think it's that we get drama which is big _to us_ , but
| it rarely splashes outside the Foundation and the
| community to become common knowledge... and the dedicated
| community remains fairly insular.
|
| Maybe this will be the hidden drawback of the current
| work to improve talk pages -- all the wikidrama will
| become more visible to the world!
| bobthepanda wrote:
| There's also the matter of scale and money.
|
| Wikipedia drama generally seems to happen less often and
| affect fewer "big" personalities and their money, than
| say Youtube and Google giving their content creators
| whiplash over whatever the new policy change is.
| lord_murdoc wrote:
| great site.
| HDMI_Cable wrote:
| One reason Wikipedia was able to grow so quickly was because of
| its scale. Instead of relying on a few posh journal editors like
| Britannica, _anyone_ could contribute. And while you have edge
| cases of people trolling and some misinformation, you also have a
| much larger labour pool of people dedicated to helping, not for a
| paycheque, but their own personal reasons.
| ignoranceprior wrote:
| Wikipedia was originally intended to be a smaller sandbox area
| for Nupedia, the expert-authored encyclopedia from Bomis (Jimmy
| Wales's company). Of course, Wikipedia turned out to be much
| more successful.
|
| But there were other collaborative Internet encyclopedia
| projects that didn't do so well. Benjamin Mako Hill has a paper
| exploring what made Wikipedia succeed while the rest failed:
|
| https://mako.cc/academic/hill-almost_wikipedia-DRAFT.pdf
| HDMI_Cable wrote:
| Yeah, it seems to be some sort of snowball effect. If you're
| lucky and have a few initial users, then you can grow faster,
| acquire more users, and beat the competition.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| > you also have a much larger labour pool of people dedicated
| to helping, not for a paycheque, but their own personal
| reasons.
|
| This is often not true. There's a whole industry of W editors
| who charge corporations a monthly fee to guard their pages.
|
| It's supposed to be against the W ToS, but whenever foreign W
| editors are interviewed, they readily admit it (to gain more
| paying clients.)
|
| The "no paycheck" trope is almost as bad as saying ebay is
| about selling beanie babies.
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| > One reason Wikipedia was able to grow so quickly was because
| of its scale.
|
| I've carefully studied all three definitions of "scale" my
| dictionary offers up, and come to the conclusion that this
| sentence either means absolutely nothing ("It is big because it
| is big"), or something really strange ("Wikipedia grew because
| of its plate-like skin coverings").
| not_knuth wrote:
| The last millenium called and they want their prescriptivists
| back.
| HDMI_Cable wrote:
| Sorry, that was a bit unclear on my part. I was alluding to
| scale as in Wikipedia's massive pool of available editors
| being able to publish more content than competitors, thereby
| driving more traffic.
|
| (But of course, we all know that Wikipedia is run by the
| lizard people with the aforementioned plate-like skin
| coverings.)
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| So how did wikipedia get those editors?
|
| But maybe that's a trick question!
|
| Rather: What does Wikipedia consider to be its pool of
| editors?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Wikipedia is a treasure. Everyone wants free access to
| information, well here it is. Put your money where your mouth is
| and donate.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Can't donate in good conscience though because they do somewhat
| have a general tone and worldview that seems to be pervasive
| and heavily moderated. Wish there was a forkable version of
| Wikipedia so all views and angles can be allowed to co-exist,
| no need for a digital encyclopedia to be so skeuomorphic.
| ghaff wrote:
| You're basically describing Google Knol. What you end up with
| is a bunch of people publishing often self-promotional,
| biased, or just plain bad articles.
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| It is forkable, you can download the database dumps and
| import them into your own instance.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| I mean forkability as a first class feature built into the
| UI so you can easily browse the alternative or competing
| beliefs.
| marcod wrote:
| I'm sorry, but the intro of the article is wrong.
|
| Not anyone could edit the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Ford
| was researching earth for 15 years and an editor cut his
| submission down to "mostly harmless"...
|
| > https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Ford_Prefect#Work_on_the...
| yreg wrote:
| Well, that could happen to you on Wikipedia as well
| (WP:Notability)
| cabalamat wrote:
| I'm surprised that no-one has built an inclusionist alternative
| to Wikipedia. Wikipedia's emphasis on notability restricts what
| can be put there.
| diveanon wrote:
| I would like to see wikipedia move it's database to a
| decentralized model, something similar to a blockchain ledger.
|
| I would definitely consider contributing and donating to an
| effort that opened up it's content and moderation further.
| mxcrossb wrote:
| I just opened up google maps and zoomed in on a random town: Mt.
| Pleasant Iowa. If I search it on google, on the top of the page
| is a snippet from Wikipedia. The top result is a link to
| Wikipedia. The second is the actual town website.
|
| This is what I find fascinating about the project. We're more
| interested in reading a secondary source compiled by random
| people, than the actual primary source! I think it says a lot
| about the nice interface it has.
| canofbars wrote:
| I took a look at those two pages and they are not equivalent.
| Wikipedia lists out a bunch of facts, demographics, and
| important details on the area. The towns own site is not to
| focused on collecting facts but more on directing people in the
| area to info they would need like where to pay a parking ticket
| or what events are on. I couldn't even find most of the info on
| the wikipedia page on the towns own site.
| mFixman wrote:
| Wikipedia is the best overall source of human-readable
| information.
|
| The Mt Pleasant site talks about the frequency (but not date)
| of meetings from the parks and recreation department, while
| Wikipedia actually has the location and the reasons why the
| town is notable.
| renewiltord wrote:
| This is normal. What is exhaust data for the primary source is
| primary data for the secondary source.
|
| For data you always want to go to the guy for whom the data
| he's giving you is the thing he does.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Indeed. As great as wiki is (and it is, I use their data
| dumps), it's content at scale just like G is search and FB is
| for social. Scaled content. There has been a few occasions in
| search where I would've expected the local/primary sources to
| be favoured. Think if you said to someone 'give me a website
| where I could read more about X', wiki can be the lazy and
| probably correct answer.
| lilSebastian wrote:
| https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/scots_wikipedia_fake/
| rayrag wrote:
| I've recently installed Wikipedia app on my tablet and I have to
| admit it's amazing, I prefer it over the web version. Cleaner
| look, customisable home page, tabs within app and especially
| ability to create lists of articles and saving them for offline
| use is something I've always wanted.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| Is there an easy way to browse past versions of Wikipedia? I'm
| aware of the Wayback Machine, but that only works for a
| particular article.
|
| I ask because it's become increasingly obvious that articles are
| changed to fit the contemporary zeitgeist. Writers that died a
| century ago are recast into different people, depending on the
| popular ideology of the day. The choice of acceptable sources is
| also pretty disappointing. This problem is unique to the internet
| and doesn't exist with hardback encyclopedias; one can still buy
| a hardback set of Britannica circa 1900.
|
| Once 2050 comes around, I'd like to be able to read the 2010
| version of Wikipedia, not the one deemed acceptable by the powers
| that be.
| nsajko wrote:
| Every Wikipedia page has its history accessible through "View
| history".
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| Yes I meant if there's a way to view the entire site, not
| only specific pages.
| bawolff wrote:
| Not super easily, but the entire site can be downloaded
| from https://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html so you
| can make your own copy and do what you want (technically
| this is a little involved. File formats are not the most
| convinent)
|
| The full dumps include old versions of articles but there
| are also old dumps available at
| https://dumps.wikimedia.org/archive/
| sharkweek wrote:
| Ah good stuff - I love Wikipedia more than almost any other non-
| living _thing_ that has been created in my lifetime. If you had
| told me the idea as a pitch 20 years ago I would have assumed you
| were _capital I_ insane for thinking it would work.
|
| It was pretty fresh when I was in college and I remember my
| professors all being pretty explicit about not using it as a
| source. Thought I had figured out the world's biggest life hack
| when I started using the sources listed on Wikipedia as my
| sources for papers.
| Vanit wrote:
| Same here, Wikipedia sources were a great life hack for uni on
| easy mode.
| baby wrote:
| Same. I recently subscribed to donate 10$ each month. I urge
| everyone to do the same. Even 1$/month imo is enough, as long
| as you're contributing back!
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Wikipedia is incredible. I find it frustrating when friends say
| it's unreliable/not to be trusted.
|
| Of course it's not perfect, but I've learned plenty enough from
| it to be well worth the trade-off
| zadokshi wrote:
| I think it deep da on your age. Some among us who are older
| remember what it used to be like when people were much less
| political and less activism was occurring. These days basic
| concrete facts are subject to debate.
| tim333 wrote:
| Though most of the fake news anti vax type stuff is not on
| Wikipedia but spreads more through the likes of Facebook
| and Reddit. Wikipedia is pretty conservative about sources
| and evidence.
| zyemuzu wrote:
| Conservative in the traditional sense of the term, i.e. a
| longstanding mainstream source. If we're considering
| media companies as the source of the reference, ethics
| and impartiality simply no longer exist.
| disown wrote:
| > Wikipedia is incredible.
|
| It's good for surface level stuff. The apolitical superficial
| knowledge is where wikipedia excels.
|
| > I find it frustrating when friends say it's unreliable/not
| to be trusted.
|
| In terms of depth and breadth of knowledge of topics, it is
| sorely lacking. And it is highly untrustworthy when it comes
| to anything remotely political/historical/economic/etc -
| which are ultimately all political.
|
| > Of course it's not perfect, but I've learned plenty enough
| from it to be well worth the trade-off
|
| Definitely. It has it's uses like everything. But it is
| extremely flawed.
| nsajko wrote:
| Doesn't even have to be political. Moneyed interests and
| fanboys and cultists use Wikipedia for PR and similar all
| the time. See Falun Gong, for example.
|
| There are also groups of Wikipedia "editors" who coordinate
| off-wiki to influence its workings. (Sock-puppeting and
| meat-puppeting)
|
| Even if we disregarded all the malicious actors, harmful
| incompetence is rampant on Wikipedia.
|
| And I was just talking about the English Wikipedia here,
| there are many "small" Wikipedias which are much much
| worse.
| 70rd wrote:
| What's the issue with the page on Falun Gong?
| bawolff wrote:
| > It's good for surface level stuff
|
| Almost like its trying to be an encyclopedia or something
| ;)
|
| If you go to wikipedia looking for a university level
| course in something, im not sure why you would expect that.
|
| As far as quality... its not perfect, but that's still a
| relative measure. Its generally significantly better than
| its competition in my experience.
| simonh wrote:
| Also it usually has excellent references to more in depth
| articles and sources if you do want to dig deeper.
| leokennis wrote:
| It's an encyclopedia. For facts, it can by definition only
| touch the surface. For subjective debates and subjects
| (like politics) it can by definition only give a high level
| overview of the different points of view.
|
| Saying it's "extremely flawed" is like saying Superman is
| weak because he's vulnerable to Kryptonite.
| antibuddy wrote:
| You would be right, if Wikipedia would not cover the
| opinions/subjective topics as well. Nowadays it is often
| used as a column for some higher-up
| contributors/journalists.
|
| It is still valuable for the scientific topics and I
| would not call that superficial at all, but you need to
| be very critical of anything that goes further than that.
| And actually even for the scientific topics you need to
| be aware if PR is involved with the article, because then
| you have to take anything with a grain of salt as well.
| jedberg wrote:
| > I find it frustrating when friends say it's unreliable/not
| to be trusted.
|
| You should point them at some of the studies that show
| Wikipedia is more accurate than Encyclopedia Brittanica.
| hrafn wrote:
| It's worth reading Britannica's response to that study:
|
| https://corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response
| ....
|
| Wikipedia is riddled with far more and far deeper types of
| errors, I do edit Wikipedia daily but am quite
| disillusioned with it. Even articles on major topics can
| include made-up paragraphs that no one notices for years,
| errors caused by an editor's misunderstanding of what the
| source is actually saying, and errors that slowly
| accumulate through various editors' well meaning copy-
| editing.
| aembleton wrote:
| I remember when it came out, I think I read about it on
| Slashdot. I dismissed it at the time as a utopian ideal that
| would never work in the real world.
|
| I'm glad I was proven wrong.
| mch82 wrote:
| Wikipedia is also amazing because the foundation publishes a lot
| of detail about engineering and technical operations on Wikitech
| (https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page). I've learned so
| much about DevOps just reading their docs and publicly released
| code. They also publish minutes of their Scrum of Scrums and
| Google Summer of Code projects. And they have historical info
| about key initiatives & growth. All worth exploring if you're
| running a website/startup.
| moron4hire wrote:
| It's funny. We just showed our kids the Pixar movie "Monsters
| Inc", which I hadn't realized was also 20 years old until the
| movie ended and the info screen came up. I think of it as a
| contemporary movie, "not that old".
|
| But I think of Wikipedia as having always existed.
|
| Funny how memory works.
|
| Also, I've lived longer with Wikipedia than without.
|
| I guess I'm getting old.
| elliotec wrote:
| You're not alone. What a strange feeling.
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