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Wikipedia is 20

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Re: Wikipedia is 20

#211

Post by mola »

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…

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.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#212

Post by hutzlibu »

aikinai wrote: post #162
in3d wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

"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.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#213

Post by ricardo81 »

mxcrossb wrote: post #43

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…

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.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#215

Post by RobertoG »

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…

>>"[..] 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.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#217

Post by hutzlibu »

goto11 wrote: post #208
kortilla wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 peop…

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.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#218

Post by notahacker »

sien wrote: post #57
throwawaysea wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" i…

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

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.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#219

Post by ant6n »

Acrobatic_Road wrote: post #83
Merman_Mike wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

„(...) 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]“

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#220

Post by globular-toast »

jayflux wrote: post #200
wintorez wrote: post #76

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.

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.

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