Maybe I can prompt an LLM to translate this flying div monstrosity into a flat page I can read.
25 Years of Wikipedia
11–20 of 498 posts
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#12This is cute, but kind of an example of Wikipedia's off-mission bloat. It irks me that they constantly fundraise when most of it is not needed for Wikipedia proper, but rather used for initiatives people know less about and may not fund if they knew.
I don't begrudge them the odd party, anniversary, meetup. And some of their subprojects are a great idea and could go much further -- it'd be fantastic to have a Wikipedia atlas, for example. The WikiMiniAtlas on geolocated articles is nice but it could be so much better. But as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER it's a huge concern that they're blowing money pretty much at the rate they get it, when they sh…
I made “Wikidata Atlas” several weeks ago. [1] [2]
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#13should have a fate similar to stackoverflow: less contributors, worse (or stale) content, less visits
I’ll be curious to see how true this turns out to be.
I stopped visiting SO frequently years ago, even before LLMs.
But I still visit Wikipedia. I often just want to read about X, vs. asking AI questions about X.
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#14[deleted]
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#15[flagged]
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#16Wikipedia is and continues to be the best thing that happened to the internet. A shining example of an open platform that works.
Except for their unnecessarily incessant fund raising.
There’s zero reason it should happen that often, and that intrusively.
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#17should have a fate similar to stackoverflow: less contributors, worse (or stale) content, less visits
I’ll be curious to see how true this turns out to be. I stopped visiting SO frequently years ago, even before LLMs. But I still visit Wikipedia. I often just want to read about X, vs. asking AI questions about X.
This. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, while some of the content needs to be updated periodically, it also has A LOT of content that will stay relevant pretty much forever.
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#18Slightly off topic, but now that long context machine translation is roughly on-par with humans: are there any official efforts from Wikipedia, to translate the "best" or "most complete" language version of each article to all other languages? I'd imagine that the effort of getting all languages up to the same standards are just an impossible one and people from "lower-resource" languages would benefit a lot.
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#19https://wikipedia25.org/en/the-first-day
> Founder Jimbo Wales on a challenge overcome
Aren't you forgetting someone, Jimmy? Your co-founder Larry Sanger, perhaps?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger
Let's check one of the citations from the History of Wikipedia page: https://www.mid-day.com/lifestyle/health-and-fitness/article...
> It was Larry Sanger who chanced upon the critical concept of combining the three fundamental elements of Wikipedia, namely an encyclopedia, a wiki, and essentially unrestricted editorial access to the public during a dinner meeting with an old friend Ben Kovitz in January 2, 2001. Kovitz a computer programmer and introduced Sanger to Ward Cunningham's wiki, a web application which allows collaborative modification, extension or deletion of its content and structure. The name wiki has been derived from the Hawaiian term which meant quick. Sanger feeling that the wiki software would facilitate a good platform for an online encyclopedia web portal, proposed the concept to Wales to be applied to Nupedia. Wales intially skeptic about the idea decided to give it a try later.
> The credit for coining the term Wikipedia goes to Larry Sanger. He initially conceived the concept of a wiki-based encyclopedia project only as a means to accelerate Nupedia's slow growth. Larry Sanger served as the "chief organiser" of Wikipedia during its critical first year of growth and created and enforced many of the policies and strategy that made Wikipedia possible during its first formative year. Wikipedia turned out to contain 15,000 articles and upwards to 350 Wikipedians contributing on several topics by the end of 2001.
He may not be with the project now, but don't airbrush him out of history.
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#20This is cute, but kind of an example of Wikipedia's off-mission bloat. It irks me that they constantly fundraise when most of it is not needed for Wikipedia proper, but rather used for initiatives people know less about and may not fund if they knew.
i feel like that's a bit silly, the other projects are listed on the donation page ( https://donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/FAQ ) and tbh you are unlikely to be donating to the wikimedia foundation without being aware of (at least some of?) the rest
I promise you that 99% of normal people have no idea what the Wikimedia foundation is and think that they're just donating to "fund Wikipedia".