Wikipedia is 20 • Hacker News Board

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#291

Post by kevin_thibedeau » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #266

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…

Wikipedia's page views, though, are relatively flat since 2016. I suspect, in large part, because of Google's move to expose Wikipedia content on Google pages, removing the need to follow any links to Wikipedia for many queries. https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-pag...

Google doesn't reliably put Wikipedia links in the results anymore because they're filling the first page with revenue generators.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#292

Post by godelzilla » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 4:50 PM UTC

jjcon wrote: post #109

tshaddox wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people opposed it at the time. That’s pretty much required in order for it to be one of the biggest human rights issues at the time.

Which is exactly my point

Lots of people were nazis too. Not worth mentioning on their Wikipedia?

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#293

Post by esrauch » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 4:55 PM UTC

varvar wrote: post #170

elliotec wrote: post #89

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…

I think he is known for being the creator of Brave nowadays, and most likely that's how he will be remembered, thanks to the SJW-leftist overreaction to his rather insignificant donation of $1000, and his own subsequent creative output while working on Brave of course.

I'm surprised by the claim that he's known for Brave and that Brave will be remembered.

Outside of HN-types I don't think Brave is known literally at all, much less who is involved in the project.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#294

Post by acidburnNSA » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

wodenokoto wrote: post #209

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…

How do you handle the notability requirement? Or are your topics too obscure for anyone to care?

I think I'm a bit special in that in my field (nuclear power), many of the smartest people in the world worked hard with vast funding between 1940 and 1960. Later the field got less popular and most people with knowledge of that stuff died. But today lots of investors and technologists are digging back into it to help fight climate change. So there are all these absolute gems in huge technical reports that were declassified in the 1960s and 70s that people are keenly interested in understanding and cataloging.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#295

Post by mch82 » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 5:06 PM UTC

Wikipedia is also amazing because the foundation publishes a lot of detail about engineering and technical operations on Wikitech (https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page). I’ve learned so much about DevOps just reading their docs and publicly released code. They also publish minutes of their Scrum of Scrums and Google Summer of Code projects. And they have historical info about key initiatives & growth. All worth exploring if you’re running a website/startup.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#296

Post by MichaelZuo » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

nsajko wrote: post #153

matthewmorgan wrote: post #8

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

An issue is that most well-meaning contributors very soon learn to keep off controversial pages, because it's simply not enjoyable to constantly fight over the content. The fact is: resolving disputes takes much time and usually the party with more time on their hands and more "meat-puppets" and allies wins. Also, making enemies from among the "editors" is both unpleasant and inconvenient for possible future efforts…

If the percentage of pages that are considered controversial grows every year... wouldn’t that eventually mean every page will be controversial and thus not attract well-meaning contributors?

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#297

Post by germanier » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 5:13 PM UTC

aerosmile wrote: post #285

pvorb wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I believe that Wikipedia and its authors never put much thought into SEO. They just think about how to best structure the information and make heavy use of links, which also happens to be a good strategy for SEO. The Google search rank algorithms changed a lot more than the overall structure of a good Wikipedia article in the last 20 years.

Have you ever encountered on Wikipedia a sentence like this: "...because a blue whale did..." rather than "...because a blue whale did..." Obviously, the latter version would have been more useful, and I find it difficult to believe that a human being would have made such a mistake. Don't get me wrong - such instances are rare, but they do happen and are an indicator that not all links are generated manually. I don't…

There are actual humans placing such links to the point that there is an explicit rule against doing that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS:SEAOFBLUE

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#298

Post by chalst » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 5:13 PM UTC

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…

Neutrality in context really means covering all the significant points of view that are supported by reliable sources. The tricky concepts are the notions of undue weight (you really can't document everything anyone has ever said about Aristotle, for instance), and where to draw the line on what sources are regarded as reliable.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#299

Post by luxuryballs » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 5:15 PM UTC

Wikipedia feels so skeuomorphic now with single pages like a real Encyclopedia. Rather than having an “edit battle” over a single page and then having them always being locked down why don’t we have an “Omnipedia” where people can just fork a page if there is a legitimate alternative angle on something? We have the technology, just need a clever UI for visually browsing the various forks and a way of preventing the forks from becoming duplicates of the same alternative.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#300

Post by luxuryballs » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 5:18 PM UTC

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #279

Wikipedia is a treasure. Everyone wants free access to information, well here it is. Put your money where your mouth is and donate.

Can’t donate in good conscience though because they do somewhat have a general tone and worldview that seems to be pervasive and heavily moderated. Wish there was a forkable version of Wikipedia so all views and angles can be allowed to co-exist, no need for a digital encyclopedia to be so skeuomorphic.