Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wikipedia is 20

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 391 posts

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#241

Post by bawolff »

aerosmile wrote: post #141
nsajko wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Add to that a surprisingly under-the-radar company culture which has avoided any major blow ups despite its community wielding so much leverage over the world's education and having to make a lot of difficult calls on a daily basis. There's been and still is plenty of controversy regarding both the Wikimedia Foundation and its relationship to the community of volunteers. In fact I'd say the whole thing's kind of ro…

I am aware of many of their issues, especially on smaller international sites. But even so, on a risk-adjusted basis I think they've managed to avoid more drama than other teams would have pulled off given the environment they are in.

That is interesting. As someone who used to work for the wikimedia foundation, it felt like there was a constant stream of drama. I guess when you are in the middle of it, it feels more intense than it actually is.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#242

Post by hobofan »

tgv wrote: post #178
elliotec wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 referenc…

> Second, the theory is not not widely accepted, and did receive criticism.

Then contribute a link to that criticism? AFAIK that's the normal policy on widely criticized statements that are still popular enough that they should be mentioned.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#243

Post by not_knuth »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #35
HDMI_Cable wrote: post #2

One reason Wikipedia was able to grow so quickly was because of its scale. Instead of relying on a few posh journal editors like Britannica, anyone could contribute. And while you have edge cases of people trolling and some misinformation, you also have a much larger labour pool of people dedicated to helping, not for a paycheque, but their own personal reasons.

> One reason Wikipedia was able to grow so quickly was because of its scale. I've carefully studied all three definitions of "scale" my dictionary offers up, and come to the conclusion that this sentence either means absolutely nothing ("It is big because it is big"), or something really strange ("Wikipedia grew because of its plate-like skin coverings").

The last millenium called and they want their prescriptivists back.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#244

Post by bawolff »

itsoktocry wrote: post #240
bawolff wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's different levels of "trust". With Wikipedia i know roughly what i am getting. I can make an informed decision as to how much to trust it and how much to do further research depending on the application i need it for. After all, sometimes i just need knowledge with a decent chance of being true, where other times I need to be really sure. Wikipedia provides a relatively consistent experience (varrying somewhat with how obscure a page is). Random geocities sites do not give me that consistency, so I cannot make an informed guess as to how correct the page is.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#246

Post by varjag »

itsoktocry wrote: post #240
bawolff wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With Wikipedia, you very soon develop a sense of gauging maturity of the article just from a quick glance. More often than not, the editors would even put maturity warnings for you.

If something looks dubious you can even dive into revision list to spot the problems.

This is more than can be said for nearly any other source out there.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#247

Post by matkoniecz »

teloli wrote: post #120
matthewmorgan wrote: post #8

Plenty of subtle agenda-pushing on Wikipedia if you're paying attention

Not even that subtle. For instance, declaring that Taiwan is a country despite the fact that it isn’t recognized as such by most of the world. That was such a big deal that it was met with triumph by Taiwanese media: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3948149 Don’t get me wrong, I support the cause of Taiwanese independence, but facts are facts. I also think that the Basque Country should be independent, and yet i…

The clear difference is that (for now) Taiwan acts as a separate country while Basque is not doing this.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#248

Post by lima »

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…

> Add to that a surprisingly under-the-radar company culture which has avoided any major blow ups despite its community wielding so much leverage over the world's education and having to make a lot of difficult calls on a daily basis.

That's because Wikimedia Foundation is quietly focusing on the tech and keeping the site up and running while mostly letting the community govern itself.

The few times the Foundation tried to override the community, it didn't go well.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#249

Post by qsort »

vmurthy wrote: post #117
e12e wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes the "simple English" version is better than the "full" English version - perhaps especially for mathematics.

I came here to post that simple wikipedia exists :) . Just to prove your point, have a look at the simple page for "Prime number" [0] and the regular page for the same [1] If I were just starting out with mathematics, I'd be rather intimidated by the regular page. I find the simple version to be the right start for any topic and then move on to the regular one. [0] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number [1] h…

What do you think are the problems with the regular page?

I just skimmed it, and it seems to me like high-school level math is more than enough to understand what the page is saying (at least superficially).

I get the idea behind simple.wikipedia.org, but more often than not it's just a dumbed down version of the main article that uses worse English (which is obvious, since it presumably has less contributors than en.wiki, but that doesn't help your average reader)

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#250

Post by i_love_limes »

I'll add my own anecdote. I have donated to Wikipedia sporadically over the years, and they asked me to take part in a sort of round table interview / qualitative study.

In a room of other Wikipedia donators, maybe 1/3 of the people there didn't know that the information was entirely community driven, and when they learned, a handful of didn't think it was a good idea!

It just shows how much Wikipedia is just taken for granted, when in reality so so much effort goes in to keeping it free, ad free, open, and accessible to everyone.

Post reply on HN