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Wikipedia is 20

economist.com

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Re: Wikipedia is 20

#171

Post by nsajko »

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).

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#172

Post by fireattack »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #160
zozbot234 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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? ;-)

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.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#173

Post by kortilla »

jessriedel wrote: post #92
libraryofbabel wrote: post #63

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.

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.

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?

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#174

Post by brendoelfrendo »

jjcon wrote: post #156
three_seagrass wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> when the crowd-based articles are substantially revised. You literally just had to keep reading to find the cases where they do show bias

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.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#175

Post by aerosmile »

creato wrote: post #72
aerosmile wrote: post #40

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…

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.

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."

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#176

Post by kortilla »

mhh__ wrote: post #87
kyle_martin1 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What does balanced mean? It's supposed to be well-cited not balanced

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.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#177

Post by somedude895 »

creato wrote: post #72
aerosmile wrote: post #40

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…

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.

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.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#178

Post by tgv »

elliotec wrote: post #111
mattcwilson wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenting

What about this article is biased?

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.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#179

Post by YetAnotherNick »

aerosmile wrote: post #40

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…

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.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#180

Post by pimlottc »

aerosmile wrote: post #40

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…

For those who don’t closely follow SEO, can you explain what Panda is/was?
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