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Wikipedia is 20

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351–360 of 391 posts

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#351
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is an example for people asking for one. As an experiment I tried to get some fairly innocuous numbers into participation in Australia sport. There is a big survey done in Australia, the Ausplay survey: https://www.clearinghouseforsport.gov.au/ They have extensive tables on adult participation. Two editors would not let this data into the sport in Australia article. The reason was fairly obvious, it shows that s…

What do they want the most popular sport to be and why do they care?

Not soccer.

In Australia there are quite a few people who view soccer as 'wogball' and a foreign sport. Just as in the US some view soccer as not being American.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#352

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…

> maybe 1/3 of the people there didn't know that the information was entirely community driven

Maybe because it's not entirely community driven. It is somewhat community driven.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#353
post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So when Panda came around, Google correctly rewarded Wikipedia with #1 rankings for over 50% of its terms (!!), and Jason Calacanis had to shut down Mahalo which got destroyed by Panda. For context, this is the type of content that Mahalo was producing to try to game SEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdNk1xmDpxo

Game how? Pretty girl says she will show how to mix a drink. Then proceeds to show how to mix a drink. Not ending world hunger or anything, but nothing deceitful here at least. Maybe I'm missing something

> Game how? Pretty girl says she will show how to mix a drink. Then proceeds to show how to mix a drink. Not ending world hunger or anything, but nothing deceitful here at least. Maybe I'm missing something

IIRC, those videos are pretty famous because the pretty girl was not actually any good at mixing drinks:

https://www.esquire.com/food-drink/drinks/a30172952/viral-ol...

> JaNee Nyberg Once Made the World’s Worst Old Fashioned. Jim Beam Just Gave Her a Shot at Redemption.

> The world’s worst Old Fashioned was made on a quiet summer morning in 2010, in a dot com startup’s shoddily decorated conference room in Santa Monica. Mahalo.com had hired JaNee Nyberg to host a series of 50 cocktail tutorial videos that they would then upload to their YouTube channel. In the series’ most infamous video, the actress, model, and part-time bartender slops together an Old Fashioned using no bitters, a giant orange wedge, a ton of ice, and an entire pint glass of bourbon. Now, everyone makes an Old Fashioned a little bit differently—here’s Esquire’s official recipe—but Nyberg’s way was definitely wrong and totally hilarious.

Here's that video: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xfhhjf

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#354

Three aphorisms in honor of Wikipedia, greatest encyclopedia in world history, and its 20 years of free knowledge uncorrupted by advertising: * Wikipedia works in practice, but not in theory. * Wikipedia is the worst source of information, except for all the others. * Wikipedia: the Internet’s greatest reason to feel a little bit optimistic about human nature.

Having looked into it a bit, I've been severely disappointed that we have no good theory of why Wikipedia works. There are lots of putative explanations, but they all predict the successful existence of all sorts of collaborative projects that we don't actually see. Wikipedia is such a treasure, and it would be extremely valuable to know more about how it works so we can replicate aspects of it for other projects.

Something that cannot be overstated enough - but is going to be severely underrated - is the community. Wikipedia has countless pages on codes of conduct and its own internal rule system that are actually coming from the editors, from experience, rather than handed down by a lawyer. Wikipedia generally understands and accepts the messier sides of democratic editing: people get emotional, trolls, biases, arguments, etc. and it approaches it all with honesty, straightforwardness, and even humor.

You can list all the philosophical, technical, or economic reasons you want (and surely those are important to consider) but in my mind the community of real, living humans with (yes) opinions but that have recourse and clarity to correct those is invaluable. I have never seen a community with such professionalism and due diligence (almost every single troll edit I have seen is immediately reverted) as Wikipedia editors.

There is also something to be said about the “culture” where trolling is not rewarded. By and large, vandalizing Wikipedia is not “cool,” people don’t rejoice for it because I think everyone feels at least a little bit of attachment or debt to Wikipedia. It’s helped us all learn more than we probably ever could before and been there through schoolwork, essays, reference reading, and general curiosity. It’s such a special corner of the Internet and I think “replicating aspects of it” won’t work, at least not the way you want. Wikipedia is a holistic being, it’s a community of people, yet also a resource, and even a culture, so any similar project needs to do the genuinely hard, slow, and boring work (something Wikipedia embraces - that most of the process is routine grammatical fixes, meta cleanup, rewriting, etc. over genuinely adding increasingly more information) of cultivating those higher standards and community outreach.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#355
Of all the institutions on the web, Wikipedia has remained my #1 most trusted source with the least sense of corruption. Remarkable, really. If we want to know how to restore the web, we may want to learn how Wikipedia has remained so reputable for so long and model it.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#356
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truly we need a low-pass filter to handle current events.

This will invariably induce bias or render the debate too shallow to be productive, maybe even at a cost of manufacturing consent. Wikipedia already filters content, they only take more time. If you need some outlet with immediately curated information, I think you should look elsewhere, because this is not what wikipedia is for, the way I see it.

We are actually in agreement! I probably did not express myself properly - I don't want current events to be covered by Wikipedia. A delay is preferable.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#357
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

„(...) Summoned by Trump,[25] thousands of supporters gathered in Washington, D.C., on January 5 and 6 to demand that Vice President Mike Pence and Congress reject Biden's victory.[26][27][28] The rioters quickly became extremely violent, assaulting a police officer who later died, erecting a gallows on the Capitol grounds, assaulting the press, and desiring to take hostage and harm lawmakers such as House Speaker Na…

Yeah, a good example. Having seen 50 solid minutes of raw footage, describing it them as "extremely violent" is about as accurate as describing BLM protestors as criminals (e.g. it describes a very small minority).

Huh. I was just posting the quote that gp referred to, supposedly implying that the mob as a whole killed a police officer. The text is not written like that, and overall pretty dry and factual. We can argue about the one adverb „extremely“ in front of violent, but that’s not even that much of a stretch (people died).

An actually biased text would have used different words, like calling the mob a group of organized fascist insurgents intent on a coup d‘etat, commanded to do so by Trump. Even that would still be arguably correct.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having looked into it a bit, I've been severely disappointed that we have no good theory of why Wikipedia works. There are lots of putative explanations, but they all predict the successful existence of all sorts of collaborative projects that we don't actually see. Wikipedia is such a treasure, and it would be extremely valuable to know more about how it works so we can replicate aspects of it for other projects.

Something that cannot be overstated enough - but is going to be severely underrated - is the community. Wikipedia has countless pages on codes of conduct and its own internal rule system that are actually coming from the editors, from experience, rather than handed down by a lawyer. Wikipedia generally understands and accepts the messier sides of democratic editing: people get emotional, trolls, biases, arguments, et…

You're correct that Wikipedia has the blatant vandalism problem more-or-less covered. However, I'm not so enthusiastic about he culture. In a lot of cases, it ends up being "obsessives, fight!" with the weapon of rules-lawyering, which is just exhausting for anyone who isn't an obsessive.

The end-result is often OK, but often jumbled and confusing, and it often feels like getting taught a subject by someone who's just a year or two ahead of you. You definitely feel you can learn something, but the person teaching you doesn't necessarily have very good command of the material themselves.

It's position in society is also weird. It has authority, but that authority can be abused. I once ran into a Wikipedian who had been busy for several years promoting a religious philosophy in a little neglected corner of Wikipedia, by gluing together little disconnected fragments to make a build up the wiki page for it. It was definitely badly done original research, but he successfully tapped the authority of Wikipedia.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#359
post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, a good example. Having seen 50 solid minutes of raw footage, describing it them as "extremely violent" is about as accurate as describing BLM protestors as criminals (e.g. it describes a very small minority).

Huh. I was just posting the quote that gp referred to, supposedly implying that the mob as a whole killed a police officer. The text is not written like that, and overall pretty dry and factual. We can argue about the one adverb „extremely“ in front of violent, but that’s not even that much of a stretch (people died). An actually biased text would have used different words, like calling the mob a group of organized f…

The revision he posted was not the one I was talking about. There was another revision that directly said the mob killed the officer.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#360
post #305
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 „cause of Taiwanese independence“. That’s a bit silly, since it’s really the PRC that split off from China and Taiwan is the continuation of the old republic. Did Taiwan in the 70s, when other countries changed their ties to China to recognize the PRC but not Taiwan, on the pressure of the more powerful PRC, suddenly lose its Independence? All the complicated history and political issues you can read about on Wik…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_independence_movement
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