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Wikipedia is 20

economist.com

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Re: Wikipedia is 20

#341

Post by ghaff »

luxuryballs wrote: post #300
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.

You're basically describing Google Knol. What you end up with is a bunch of people publishing often self-promotional, biased, or just plain bad articles.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#342

Post by vmurthy »

qsort wrote: post #249
vmurthy wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

@qsort: To give you an analogy, think of the "original" wikipedia article as the equivalent of an academic paper. It is absolutely the right level of detail for a particular audience (with references and links and even fancy language) whereas the simple wikipedia article is the equivalent of a NYT article introducing the same idea and probably going a bit deeper.

As a further analogy, if I had to learn about Covid-19, I'd likely start with NYT (no affiliation) and then move onto Nature/Science/BMJ

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#343

Post by bigpumpkin »

10-20 years seem to be the right timeframe for long-term thinking. It is long enough that a kernel of an idea can become world changing in that time frame. Yet not so long that present people would have no ability to predict future trends.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#344

Post by [deleted] »

wolverine876 wrote: post #49

I was originally enthusiastic about the 'wisdom of the crowds' and its potential. The Internet was a great experiment with unknown possibilities. I edited Wikipedia and talked about its potential. I was skeptical at the same time - it was an experiment, not a revelation. I used to tell people, 'I don't know how Wikipedia could work, but it seems to'. I'd apply 'The Cathedral and the Bizarre' concept to it, and 'with…

[deleted]

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#345

Post by kortilla »

mhh__ wrote: post #259
kortilla wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means the Wikipedia article on Thalidomide can’t leave out the section on all of the harm it caused, despite the rest being well-cited.

But all the citations are going to mention that or it's just another chemical. The average HN-er seems be more right wing than in most comment sections, so I was curious whether balanced means "fits my politics" or the more subtle "I'm only asking questions about the election"-ing on individual articles e.g. I could see the length of the Trump-Russia article annoying a few people here who seem to believe it's complet…

> But all the citations are going to mention that or it's just another chemical.

No they aren’t. All you need to do is cite all of the material that was used for its initial approval before they knew about the problems.

Another example to help illustrate. The Boeing 737 MAX had a well-cited full article before the MCAS issues were known. Unbalanced moderation could just revert any future edits that tried to add in the issues.

> The average HN-er seems be more right wing than in most comment sections

Don’t do this shit. It makes for such boring reading. All you’re stating is that you have confirmation bias and don’t like seeing ideas you disagree with. There are thousands of comments all over about how HN is right-wing, left-wing etc with no evidence beyond anecdotes.

If it were biased right-wing the top comments on the Parler bands would not be lauding the decisions to ban them. If it were biased right wing, there wouldn’t be so many articles about basic income, etc either.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#346

Post by kortilla »

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…

But it’s trivial to revert edits that don’t have valid citations. Tons of idiots do put shit in there all of the time but a pretty simple set of guidelines allows trivial reverts.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#347

Post by colinmhayes »

leetcrew wrote: post #332
progre wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm not saying it's amazing content, I just fail to see how this is "gaming SEO"

you might accuse them of clickbaiting by using an attractive woman instead of someone who knows how to make a proper drink, but yeah I don't really see this as "gaming SEO" per se. edit: I have now spent entirely too much time researching these videos and I feel bad for criticizing her. apparently she was an actual bartender but had to make a hundred of these videos in two days without any of the proper tools or even…

Feels like people would rather see the pretty girl. That's just giving people what they want.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#348

Post by kortilla »

bawolff wrote: post #187
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?

In the early days most people outside of wikipedia assumed that nobody would contribute to such a project without being compensated, that wikipedia is a communist pipe dream etc. The quote is meant as a play on the quote how communism works in theory but not in practise.

Why would it be called a communist pipe dream? It’s not mandated by the government and doesn’t use tax revenue.

Open source already existed and was thriving so I’m still not getting why there was any doubt. Seems like it would have just been FUD from the encyclopedia industry and people who didn’t know about open source.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#349

Post by arp242 »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #296
nsajko wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The total amount of pages also grows every year.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#350

Post by einpoklum »

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.

Agreed. I recently learned its CEO has a rather shady past, see e.g. here:

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/11/meet-wikipedias-ayn-rand-...

and I've always felt a strong pro-establishment bias on political matters. I can't say I'm an expert on Wikipedia in any way, but I wish the Wikimedia foundation as an organization would get some critical press coverage - at least as much as Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple etc (which is not enough).

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