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Google gives Wikimedia millions

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Re: Google gives Wikimedia millions

#71

Post by tunesmith »

xref wrote: post #7

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…

I find it depressing every time I try to contribute. Most recently, there was an article on a popular TV show that was in its first season, where the very top level cast list gave away a spoiler for very late in the season, that completely changed the lives of some main characters. So if you ever check the WP article for the show during the first 8-10 episodes of the season (like I did), you're completely spoiled. It was unnecessary and also inconsistent with the cast descriptions from the show's marketing, and deleting the spoiler had no real negative informative impact, but when I tried to delete the spoiler (two words), it got rolled back with a scolding with a reference to wikipedia's spoiler policy of not protecting the audience from spoilers... which is normally sane, but completely overkill in that particular case.

I ended up asking, what if the WP entry for A New Hope gave away that very famous spoiler about Luke's father in the initial description and cast listing (it currently does not), and then I tried to delete the spoiler? Would the moderation policy roll back my change? He said yes, because of the same reason - WP does not protect audiences against spoilers. So I asked, well then why does the ANH WP article not have this spoiler? And he said, probably just because no one has made the edit yet.

Re: Google gives Wikimedia millions

#72

Post by commoner »

strken wrote: post #65
save_ferris wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 recently went to link a friend to the Landmark Forum Wikipedia page, and found that instead of a "Criticism" section it had a "Criticism and public option" section, which contained no allegations of cult-like behaviour until the last two paragraphs, but did contain a surprising number of denials. The talk and history page showed that any piece of actual criticism levelled at the totally-not-a-cult was removed more…

Landmark Worldwide has been a highly controversial subject on Wikipedia. There are 32 pages of discussions on the article's talk page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Landmark_Worldwide

To contribute to articles on controversial topics (such as politics and religion), Wikipedia recommends the following:

1) Edit the article with the changes you want to make.

2) If another editor disagrees with you, they will revert your edit.

3) After your edit is reverted, go to the talk page of the article and discuss the contents of your edit.

The key step is #3. Reverted edits are to be discussed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discus...

If you're unable to come to an agreement with other editors, you can use some form of dispute resolution. The most popular method is the "request for comment", in which all Wikipedia editors are invited to participate in a debate, and the results determine the state of the article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment

Your point of view won't always be the one that wins the debate, but Wikipedia editors are generally reasonable, and your arguments will be fairly heard.

Re: Google gives Wikimedia millions

#73

Post by circlefavshape »

Retric wrote: post #45
ardy42 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The admin / oversight is hit or miss to the extreme. Of course, there's no way they could formally audit every article. They're heavily reliant of some rando noticing something fishy in an obscure article and bringing it to their attention.

Wikipedia is still small enough to see every article reviewed. They don’t largely becase they funnel funding into other unrelated projects.

You're wrong on both counts here - nobody gets funded to review articles (it's done by volunteers), and there are nearly 6 million articles in English alone

Re: Google gives Wikimedia millions

#74

Post by zozbot123 »

commoner wrote: post #72
strken wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently went to link a friend to the Landmark Forum Wikipedia page, and found that instead of a "Criticism" section it had a "Criticism and public option" section, which contained no allegations of cult-like behaviour until the last two paragraphs, but did contain a surprising number of denials. The talk and history page showed that any piece of actual criticism levelled at the totally-not-a-cult was removed more…

Landmark Worldwide has been a highly controversial subject on Wikipedia. There are 32 pages of discussions on the article's talk page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Landmark_Worldwide To contribute to articles on controversial topics (such as politics and religion), Wikipedia recommends the following: 1) Edit the article with the changes you want to make. 2) If another editor disagrees with you, they will revert…

> To contribute to articles on controversial topics (such as politics and religion), Wikipedia recommends the following:

> 1) Edit the article with the changes you want to make.

> 2) If another editor disagrees with you, they will revert your edit.

> 3) After your edit is reverted, go to the talk page of the article and discuss the contents of your edit.

This is actually a bad idea. It's fine for garden-variety editing that you don't expect to raise controversy, but if you want to affect something controversial and not look like you're acting in bad faith, you absolutely need to go to the talk page first and propose your edit there. If no one replies after a few days, then you have cover to just make the change 'per the talk page' (and sometimes you do get reverted here - but now you can complain that they didn't act fairly by commenting on your proposal!), but most likely they will, and you'll get to hash out the wording on talk.

Re: Google gives Wikimedia millions

#75

Post by livatlantis »

dt_rsp wrote: post #66
phillc73 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia itself is of course just an iteration on Everything2. https://everything2.com/

A similar vintage, but slightly younger than everything1 was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H2g2 / https://www.h2g2.com/

Ha! Glad to see H2G2 come up. Lots of great moments there!

Re: Google gives Wikimedia millions

#76

Post by p49k »

Guereric wrote: post #17

Please change the source to this: https://blog.google/products/search/expanding-knowledge-acce...

Please don't - we should be linking to objective journalistic sources which provide analysis surrounding the decision, not one-sided puff pieces from the sources themselves which can present their actions in any light they wish and omit whatever relevant info they don't want presented.

Re: Google gives Wikimedia millions

#77

Post by commoner »

zozbot123 wrote: post #74
commoner wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Landmark Worldwide has been a highly controversial subject on Wikipedia. There are 32 pages of discussions on the article's talk page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Landmark_Worldwide To contribute to articles on controversial topics (such as politics and religion), Wikipedia recommends the following: 1) Edit the article with the changes you want to make. 2) If another editor disagrees with you, they will revert…

> To contribute to articles on controversial topics (such as politics and religion), Wikipedia recommends the following: > 1) Edit the article with the changes you want to make. > 2) If another editor disagrees with you, they will revert your edit. > 3) After your edit is reverted, go to the talk page of the article and discuss the contents of your edit. This is actually a bad idea. It's fine for garden-variety editi…

Yes, the 3-step process is not appropriate for every situation. As the page notes:

> It is ideally suited to disputes that involve only a small number of people, all of whom are interested in making progress.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discus...

Controversial edits in very popular articles will certainly require discussion and frequently involve requests for comment.

Re: Google gives Wikimedia millions

#78

Post by beaconstudios »

baroffoos wrote: post #23
starpilot wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia has finite resources that cost money. So they have to restrict it to hosting articles that will have some level of audience.

This is wrong. Low view articles cost essentially nothing to host. The whole of wikipedia can be stored for about $1 per month if all you care about is storage. Also rejected articles don't get deleted from the system they just get moved to the draft section which is hidden from search results.

> The whole of wikipedia can be stored for about $1 per month if all you care about is storage

Where can you store that amount of data for so cheap? Of course I'm assuming that you're including images in the size and not just raw text.

Re: Google gives Wikimedia millions

#79

Post by smittywerben »

chipperyman573 wrote: post #63
maxerickson wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly that's a lot lower than I would have expected. Internet hosting is very cheap and for a company like Wikimedia would basically come down to their bandwidth costs. But labor, especially skilled labor (like they're hiring) is very expensive. I would have expected it to be a lot higher.

If you want low go look at their earlier ('09-10) reports where it's $5 million expenses compared to $81 million today. They had ~2.6 million articles then, and ~5.6 million today. It's nothing abnormal to me and quite small still (esp sitting next to Google, Youtube, Facebook) but I appreciated how efficiently they ran with the help of volunteers.

Re: Google gives Wikimedia millions

#80

Post by agurk »

xref wrote: post #7

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…

After reading a lot about helicopters recently, I was reading the wikipedia page about them today, and found the description of how they are controlled if not wrong, then confusing. My first thought was to rewrite the section, but then I have also heard this opinion quite a lot now and it really put me off.

Looking at the talk page of one of the related articles [0] there was someone noting that "An expert that didn't cite the literature would be contributing original research, not verifiable information" which is forbidden on Wikipedia. This sounds like a reasonable principle, but if you look at the existing text it's barely cited. It's not clear then if replacing un-cited text would be appropriate, or if this principle would just be a tool used to resist change.

And even then, I've had correctly cited changes reverted in the past. So after that I ended up not making any changes, and that section remains - to me at least - confusing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Helicopter_f...

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