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Wikipedia is 20

economist.com

191–200 of 391 posts

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#191

Its reputation is severely declining, especially on topics relating to current events, figures, or politics. It, however, remains excellent for technical knowledge.

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.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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?)

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#193
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is…

> 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.

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.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#194
post #7

Take note: The interface hasn't changed much, a good thing.

It's because lots of people are using Wikiwand extension ( https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wikiwand-wikipedia... ).

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%

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#195
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).

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#196

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 lif…

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

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.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#197
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every Wikipedia page has its history accessible through "View history".

Yes I meant if there’s a way to view the entire site, not only specific pages.

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/

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#198
post #171

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 exampl…

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]

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#199

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, scannin…

Thanks, acidburnNSA, for existing :)

We need (more) people like you.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#200

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.

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.

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