61–70 of 105 posts
Don't forget that Google once tried to kill Wikipedia with their own proprietary project ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol ). Really happy that was a failure.
Is it impossible to attempt to innovate in a space without being accused of trying to kill the space's current leader? (googler, but had never even heard of knol until now)
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What did you try to contribute? Last year I added an article about a musical ensemble. I followed the processes and it seemed to be fairly straightforward to get approved. (The ensemble had a bunch of articles written about them in the NYT).
I have marvelled at the quality of WPs music theory articles where I think different outlooks are well tolerated and accepted. 8 years ago I tried to fix WP philosophies entry on the concept of "Appeal to Nature" and was even joined by an experienced academic but our efforts[1] where removed by admin/users wishing to describe the topic as a kind of simple fallacious trope[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...
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Wikipedia has finite resources that cost money. So they have to restrict it to hosting articles that will have some level of audience.
You should go glance at their budget. Here's the latest annual financial statement: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/60/FY17-... They spent about 15x on staff as they did on internet hosting. They spend almost as much on travel as they do on internet hosting.
I used to contribute heavily to Wikipedia in 2007-08 and intermittently since, however recently it has become an absolute nightmare to contribute. Creating a missing article almost immediately is met with an admin nominating it for deletion for something like “notability”, the catch-all term for “I personally don’t care about this topic, and if it was important someone would have made it already.” If you survive dele…
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As Wikipedia became more popular, it also started attracting people and companies who try to use it for writing promotional articles on themselves with little to no basis in reality. The notability requirement helps ensure that articles are accurate and can be verified with trustworthy sources. A topic only needs 2 trustworthy sources for an article, and if it doesn't meet that bar, then the topic is probably better…
And also to scrub existing articles of certain details. A former coworker once told me about a stint he did working for a company that sold wikipedia edits. The founder was Brazilian and apparently their company was super popular with Central and South American politicians trying to scrub their pages of various financial scandals and other things unbecoming of a politician. I was shocked when he first told me about i…
I have no idea where I would even start if I wanted to fix that article. It's pretty ridiculous.
Don't forget that Google once tried to kill Wikipedia with their own proprietary project ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol ). Really happy that was a failure.
Wikipedia itself is of course just an iteration on Everything2. https://everything2.com/
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Apple doesn't contribute back? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18913408 > Apple employee spoke at a recent OSM conference. Yes, they use OSM data as well. In some countries more than others. Apple also has a fulltime staff working on OSM. https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/issues , https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/
Apple is replacing OSM and all other sources with its own private maps. https://www.justinobeirne.com/new-apple-maps/
Apple uses OSM data in many parts of the world where their own mapping efforts will likely never reach.
Mr O’Beirne’s articles are very US-centric.
Nearly All of Wikipedia Is Written By Just 1 Percent of Its Editors https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-...
I used to contribute heavily to Wikipedia in 2007-08 and intermittently since, however recently it has become an absolute nightmare to contribute. Creating a missing article almost immediately is met with an admin nominating it for deletion for something like “notability”, the catch-all term for “I personally don’t care about this topic, and if it was important someone would have made it already.” If you survive dele…
A lot of Google Assistant and Google search answers are from Wikipedia entries. So Us$3.1 million is very little investment for the returns they are getting.
There's a running joke that Google search is just a thin wikipedia wrapper.