311–320 of 391 posts
Not anyone could edit the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Ford was researching earth for 15 years and an editor cut his submission down to "mostly harmless"...
> https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Ford_Prefect#Work_on_the...
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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.judici…
I hate to be that guy , but if the content on Wikipedia is wrong, why not fix it? Unlike other profit-driven community sites (cough, Fandom, cough) you'll actually be helping other people.
And that's Wikipedia working as intended. If you're unfortunate you'll run up against someone who i) doesn't know anything at all about the topic, ii) has misunderstood some poorly reported document, and iii) has more free time than you. It's exhausting dealing with these people and I simply have better things to do with my time.
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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.
Maybe this will be the hidden drawback of the current work to improve talk pages -- all the wikidrama will become more visible to the world!
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I hate to be that guy , but if the content on Wikipedia is wrong, why not fix it? Unlike other profit-driven community sites (cough, Fandom, cough) you'll actually be helping other people.
It's not possible to fix information on Wikipedia by using primary sources (the Judiciary website, the ONS data, the NCISH reports), you have to use secondary sources such as newspaper reports. Since newspapers get this stuff wrong too wikipedia will only allow incorrect information. And that's Wikipedia working as intended. If you're unfortunate you'll run up against someone who i) doesn't know anything at all about…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_usin...
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Once you have 150 million inbound links, the strategy choices are easy - focus on content quality! But you have to remember what Day 1 was looking like: a tiny community, no inbound links, and a fair amount of other encyclopedia competitors trying to attract authors. Now the strategy choices are quite interesting - at the beginning of a startup you have just enough energy/runway to "kill it" in one area. Which one do…
What were the competitors in the early days?
Interpedia, TDEP, Everything2, h2g2, TheInfo, Nupedia, GNE
[1] https://mako.cc/academic/hill-almost_wikipedia-DRAFT.pdf
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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
Nice! Didn't know about such a rule. Maybe in legitimate cases, it'd already help if Wikipedia underlined links, so you can see if it's one or multiple links.
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…
Jason Calcanis, such a that guy. Wikipedia is a fascinating story of well earned success and growth without the reigns of vc dominating its trajectory. I imagine they have had a lot of tricky decision making. I’m curious what their process has been (as someone who uses Wikipedia but really doesn’t know things are running behind the scenes).
However, the Foundation is very hands-off about the content of wikis, which tend to run on "consensus"[0] with the editing-community for that wiki. That establishes the policies for the wiki, and often influences the technical decision-making for specific wikis. Also, the Foundation writes mediawiki extensions for a bunch of non-core behavior, but the individual wiki communities take a strong hand in whether they're enabled for that wiki. It's why the WYSIWYG editing environment (VisualEditor) is so inconsistently available between wikis, for instance.
Some wiki communities have a fairly fraught relationship with the Foundation, generally if they feel like they're being pushed into things. There have been controversies about things like the Foundation banning abusive users project-wide, or Foundation employees editing wikis from their staff-affiliated accounts. It's generally very inside-baseball though, and if you're outside the community it's hard to hear about.
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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…
If it’s hard to tell the difference from the outside, how do we know which one we got?
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.
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 qu…
My point is - you could very much do very well back in those days regardless of your content quality (which consequently trended down and gave rise to content farms). It's only in the last 10 years (and particularly starting in 2014 based on my experience with my own content) that the content quality became a true proxy for ranking, and vice versa.
As a side note, these days, you still have SEO conferences, but the stuff you learn there is so diversified that people have started calling it content marketing and other names. The perhaps most useful gathering is SEOktoberfest, it's invite only and they admit only 30 attendees. Never been there, but I've heard it's worth the six grand that it costs to get in as a first-time attendee (I am not affiliated with it in any shape or form).