From bitter experience: if you have well established subject matter expertise on a topic, you should almost certainly not be writing Wikipedia articles about it. In Wikipedia's framing, you are a generator of primary and secondary sources. Wikipedia is a tertiary source: it is exclusively a roadmap to other, more authoritative sources. Instead of writing Wikipedia articles, write the articles Wikipedia will end up dr…
There was a sketching algo on wikipedia that was not well described. So I added 2 lines of python to illuminate what was intended by the roundabout description. Within an hour my edit was reverted with the terse comment - "Wikipedia is not a github." ! So I clicked on the editor to find who this rude person was. It was the professor who had invented that sketching algo.
I always always always prefer code to mathematical notation or descriptions. Maybe it’s because I was never formally taught notation whereas I use code everyday, but I often find that mathematical notation lacks sufficient context and explanation.
Ultimately I’m going to need to turn your algorithm into code anyways so let’s just cut out the middleman. That may not be a popular opinion with peer reviewers, though.
After an editor, who has edited millions of pages and seems to be a jack-of-all-trades, unjustifiably rejects your contribution on a topic where you have dozens of scientific articles published, the only conclusion is that the system is flawed. There's a need for a fundamental change in approach, probably to a system where censorship exists only in cases of clearly illegal content, and various opinions are allowed to…
> the only conclusion is that the system is flawed. There's a need for a fundamental change in approach
There are attempts of creating more "professional" electronic encyclopedia like Citizendium [1] and Scholarpedia [2] but it seems that such tasks are rather hard since Wikipedia solidified its position already, despite flaws
I consider Wikipedia to be the last standing wonder of the WWW (world wide web). - Google search results get worse every year. - Stackoverflow lies in ruins (albeit the ruins are still useful). - ICQ/Gtalk/AIM completely dead and all in silos now (Slack). - Twitter is dead. - Facebook is too annoying now. Google Maps is still amazing, but I consider that more a miracle of the internet as opposed to a miracle of the W…
>I just think it will die because everything else that was wonderful from 2009 or before already has Assuming this is true, what are the leading hypotheses? Regression to the mean? Eternal September? I know everyone likes to talk about "enshittification", but what is the actual mechanism? Since this is HN, someone's going to say "capitalism", but "capitalism" doesn't explain why Google search results get worse or Fac…
Oh that's easy. Dotcom Boom and Bust ended one era of the web right around 9/11, and you get a weird era between 2001 and the release of the iPhone where there's a lot of content posted on Newgrounds or flash game portals like Miniclip. An era where people still got information from Magazines and got demo discs, and people were discouraged from sharing their real name or personal information online instead of being required to provide it in order to create an account. Steve Jobs refused to put Flash support in the iPhone justifying it through security reasons but the real reason being it undermined the walled garden and iPhone app marketplace, and Android didn't think it would be worth it either, leading to even Adobe dropping support in 2011 ending that chapter of the internet entirely.
When 100% of your users access a website through a desktop computer you are going to design it one way. When half your users are mobile and half are desktop it's going to be designed a different way.
I consider Wikipedia to be the last standing wonder of the WWW (world wide web). - Google search results get worse every year. - Stackoverflow lies in ruins (albeit the ruins are still useful). - ICQ/Gtalk/AIM completely dead and all in silos now (Slack). - Twitter is dead. - Facebook is too annoying now. Google Maps is still amazing, but I consider that more a miracle of the internet as opposed to a miracle of the W…
>I just think it will die because everything else that was wonderful from 2009 or before already has Assuming this is true, what are the leading hypotheses? Regression to the mean? Eternal September? I know everyone likes to talk about "enshittification", but what is the actual mechanism? Since this is HN, someone's going to say "capitalism", but "capitalism" doesn't explain why Google search results get worse or Fac…
> capitalism
not dismissing other points your making or questions you're asking, but what happens with search results is a phenomenon that's more or less related to monopoly power - so as they (Google) control more, the classical theories behind capitalism no longer hold. For example, they provide worse search, but there is no close second. Even if there is a close second, that "other guy" is unable to afford the 60+ billion Google is paying to other companies to make them the default.
That being the literal premise of the project, it's the outcome you'd have expected.
Are you saying people aren't allowed to be upset with an action if you announce it beforehand?
Questions like these always make me think of Dwight Schrute speeding towards a sales call that Andy Bernard is closing out from under him, screaming into his phone "are you saying you INVENTED PAPER?". I'm not saying I invented paper. You can be upset with anything you like. I'm not the upset police. But if the thing you're upset about (20 years later!) is the premise of the what is probably the single most successful project on the Internet, it's going to be hard to take the concern too seriously.
To some degree you see this pattern repeated over and over anytime you have an organization gain any sort of longevity. A culture develops to create a power structure that favors those who have devoted a large portion of their personal identity to the success of the organization. This culture serves as a moat against anyone who would integrate themselves within the organization and attempt drastic changes that would…
I agree. Is there any way to "inoculate" organisation to prevent this failure mode?
check and balances
actively encouraging structures made up of almost-competing interests that sum towards a common goal helps guide our individual competitive natures towards accomplishing larger-than-one projects
picture a bunch of sticks leaning against each other; individually they'd fall, but their combined vector gives the total structure strength
From bitter experience: if you have well established subject matter expertise on a topic, you should almost certainly not be writing Wikipedia articles about it. In Wikipedia's framing, you are a generator of primary and secondary sources. Wikipedia is a tertiary source: it is exclusively a roadmap to other, more authoritative sources. Instead of writing Wikipedia articles, write the articles Wikipedia will end up dr…
There was a sketching algo on wikipedia that was not well described. So I added 2 lines of python to illuminate what was intended by the roundabout description. Within an hour my edit was reverted with the terse comment - "Wikipedia is not a github." ! So I clicked on the editor to find who this rude person was. It was the professor who had invented that sketching algo.
This is a great story. Do you remember the name of the page? It'd be funny to track it down in the page history.
The system almost certainly doesn't address the primary problem, which is that a small group of people consider a page or topic to be their personal fiefdom and they're experts at snowballing people with the most obscure wikipedia policies. A shining example of this would be the page for Alcoholics Anonymous, which has a small legion of accounts 'defending' it. The accounts espouse, vocally, a victimhood complex - th…
Could you point me to any sources that discuss how the program "has no basis in science"? They have a section on effectiveness citing a few studies and the Cochrane review. I'm not well-equipped to determine if that's conclusive, of course. Is there overwhelming evidence to the contrary? As someone else pointed out, there is a section on thirteenth stepping. Do you find it insufficient, or is it a recent addition..?…
> Could you point me to any sources that discuss how the program "has no basis in science"?
Do you know anything about it? The primary source I'd cite would be their own literature. It doesn't claim to be based in science. Sobriety is only possible by giving up your ego and embracing a higher power.
To some degree you see this pattern repeated over and over anytime you have an organization gain any sort of longevity. A culture develops to create a power structure that favors those who have devoted a large portion of their personal identity to the success of the organization. This culture serves as a moat against anyone who would integrate themselves within the organization and attempt drastic changes that would…
> A culture develops to create a power structure that favors those who have devoted a large portion of their personal identity to the success of the organization. This culture serves as a moat against anyone who would integrate themselves within the organization and attempt drastic changes that would disrupt the existing power balance or pose an existential threat to the organization. That pretty much directly descri…
Seems like Wikipedia should change their policy to say "be bold for trivial edits only" then. In fact, if they would just say "you're only allowed to make serious changes if you're part of the elite cabal of senior editors who have devoted their lives to memorizing our volumes of policy" instead of continuing to call itself "the free encyclopedia anyone can edit", we wouldn't be having this discussion; people would a…
but if "free encyclopedia anyone could edit" was literally true, wikipedia would make itself almost worthless in very little time.
Exactly, these people are doing the valuable work of screening the crackpots, for no pay - and the only cost is that they'll also build an impregnable fortress to prevent almost anyone from ever changing anything unless they feel very strong with it and can traverse challenge social and organizational obstacle courses. This keeps the rate of change at a nice, steady, manageable trickle.