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Wikipedia is 20

economist.com

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Re: Wikipedia is 20

#231

Post by boomboomsubban »

canofbars wrote: post #225
acidburnNSA wrote: post #94

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…

I have never been able to find a wikipedia topic I could contribute to. The problem is the topics which don't have pages on wikipedia also don't tend to have a lot of referencable information on the internet.

Books are an acceptable reference, I assume offline magazines or newspapers too.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#232

Post by canofbars »

gchamonlive wrote: post #30
admiralspoo wrote: post #23

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

Current events are so divisive and many times no one has a clear picture of what's happening that I can't see how someone objectively assesses a current event news outlet as lacking reputation without prior incidents.

Someone on hacker news commented about how they started watching the news 2 weeks after it was broadcast and mentioned how a massive amount of the breaking news ended up being false when viewed later with the full set of information. It would probably be beneficial if wikipedia simply didn't allow brand new news that couldn't be solidly confirmed.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#233

Post by DanBC »

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.

If you want to understand suicide in the UK you need to know, at a minimum, about ONS, NCISH, Fingertips, and then coroners for England and Wales and whatever the equivalent is for Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Here's a list of links:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

https://sites.manchester.ac.uk/ncish/

https://fingertips.phe.org.uk/profile-group/mental-health/pr...

https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/guidance...

The best way to find out about these is to speak to someone who works in suicide prevention, so that would be people working for local authority suicide prevention partnership boards (they can have different names in different areas), or people working for NCISH or MASH or ONS, or people on Twitter. But if you can't do that you can sort of get some of the information from Wikipedia. It's a struggle though because the page is a poorly laid out mishmash of information, mostly written by people who don't understand the subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_Kingdom

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#234

Post by rayrag »

I've recently installed Wikipedia app on my tablet and I have to admit it's amazing, I prefer it over the web version. Cleaner look, customisable home page, tabs within app and especially ability to create lists of articles and saving them for offline use is something I've always wanted.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#235

Post by jjcon »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #164
jjcon wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused - that article is from 2006 - how can it be used to debunk a 2017 study?

Apologies, It's from 2006 even. I'm clearly getting old. The reason it can be used to debunk the 2017 study is because said study is working with an old idea that already existed in 2006. Aaron Swartz posits that at the very least you should not discount the importance of the long tail.

> posits that at the very least you should not discount the importance of the long tail.

thats not a debunking

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#237

Post by boomboomsubban »

destxD wrote: post #88
creato wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? I just skimmed the Kamala Harris talk page and it's all bickering about trivial edits as far as I saw.

This was just before she announced her candidacy, I saw some interesting posts on Reddit. I can't say for certain what exactly happened but it was just super fishy. Some further reading : https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/gni8t5/using_wi... https://theintercept.com/2020/07/02/kamala-harris-wikipedia/ https://old.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/hk6eo3/kamala_ha... (check other discussions also) I hope that…

The moderation team constantly admonished the person making the edits, eventually ruling they had a conflict of interest and were not allowed to edit posts about Harris and some other politicians. They acted slower than fast paced politics, but ultimately seemed to do the right things.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#240

Post by itsoktocry »

bawolff wrote: post #184
aikinai wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No kidding. I remember trying to find high quality educational content on the web before wikipedia. For certain subjects it existed, but it was few and far between, and of very mixed quality (how do you know how much trust to put on some geocitirs page)?

>(how do you know how much trust to put on some geocitirs page)

The same way you learn to "trust" anything, including Wikipedia - by verifying sources.

I love Wikipedia, but I don't blindly assume it to be the ground truth in anything (if such truth even exists), especially in the "long-tail" of subject matter.

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