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25 Years of Wikipedia

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Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#231

Post by gowld »

amiga386 wrote: post #19

https://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 thr…

Does the OP site give anyone credit for anything, except crediting Jimmy Wales and "volunteers"?

A monument to vanity.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#232

Post by miduil »

My first "contributions" were 2004, I was 10 years old and supposed to write a text about Mozart. Somehow I noticed the edit button and started vandalizing the page, as I didn't understood what Wikipedia was meant to be. Some patient wikipedian kept reverting and reporting my IP addresses during that day. It's both incredible to see how old and young Wikipedia is, if we'd say there was a "World Wide Web Heritage" project, Wikipedia and the contributors are truly the first thing that comes to mind.

Wonderful website!

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#233

Post by jbki »

lostlogin wrote: post #215
jbki wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is often the last on my goto resources to consult. The information is huge, but writing quality or style often irks me more than I can stand. I I always check Britannica first. If it's not there, then I move on.

Does this relate to a particular domain or field? I find it so good, and on the rare occasion I’ve found something wrong, I’ve fixed it.

[dead]

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#234

Post by gowld »

oytis wrote: post #93
amiga386 wrote: post #19

https://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 thr…

Wikipedia itself says Larry Sanger "co-founded" Wikipedia, but I don't quite understand why. If you get into the details, he was Wales' employee at the time, and made initial version of Wikipedia while being paid as such. So I'm tentatively with Wales on that ATM.

"founder" is a weasel word that doesn't belong on Wikipedia.

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

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#235

Post by CamperBob2 »

tux3 wrote: post #94
CamperBob2 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs disclose sources now.

Right. Try clicking those sources, half the time there is zero relation to the sentence. LLMs just output what they want to say, and then sprinkle in what the web search found on random sentences. And not just bottom of the barrel LLMs. Ask Claude about Intel PIN tools, it will merrily tell you that it "Has thread-safe APIs but performance issues were noted with multi-threaded tools like ThreadSanitizer" and then cit…

Did I say not to check the sources?

Or is that something you made up?

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#236

Post by deknos »

rolfsen wrote: post #181
an_ko wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's context. Hank Green talked about it in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zi0ogvPfCA , but in short, paraphrasing, and adding my own thoughts: Jimmy Wales has been poked at with the question of whether he should call himself a founder or specifically co-founder for a long time, by right-wingers who think Wikipedia is too woke, and want to irritate and discredit him as much as possible, and instead raise up his…

Ok, but Tilo Jung is the absolute opposite of right wing

yes, but question can be done in different ways. and tilo jung always at least, not cared, if his questions are offensive... or trying to up the interviewed person

a group of people seems to think, that journalists should trip up people, like in interrogations, instead of being hard in the topic but nice in the tone.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#237

Post by FiveOhThree »

beloch wrote: post #175
FiveOhThree wrote: post #24

I can't be the only one who feels that Wikipedia's quality has really started to go downhill over the past 5 or so years. I've noticed more and more articles which read as ridiculously partisan, usually around subjects with any link to politics or current events. That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the US, but I get the impression that the sites neutrality policies have gradually been chipped awa…

There's a reason why historians tend to view anything more recent than 10-20 years ago as politics. If you don't want to get embroiled in political debates, stick to stuff old enough to be history. There's still politics there, but it's less raw. Wikipedia doesn't restrict itself to topics that are older than ten years ago, so some of their material is necessarily going to be viewed as political. e.g. Wikipedia has a…

I'm also not American so I'm not well-versed in this topic, but perhaps to raise the obvious:

Does Wikipedia really need a page running for thousands of words on Musk allegedly making a Nazi salute?

It's longer than some of the content on major historical figures, yet this is a subject that I'd be surprised to see mentioned again after a few years have passed.

Considering that the subject matter is highly sensitive and concerns a living person I'm surprised that such an article was allowed at all.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#238

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

lostlogin wrote: post #215
jbki wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is often the last on my goto resources to consult. The information is huge, but writing quality or style often irks me more than I can stand. I I always check Britannica first. If it's not there, then I move on.

Does this relate to a particular domain or field? I find it so good, and on the rare occasion I’ve found something wrong, I’ve fixed it.

I find math topics to be insufferable. They are written to be as theoretical as possible and borderline useless if you do not already know the topic at hand.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#239

Post by dpark »

gwbas1c wrote: post #123
mr_mitm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very touchy subject for Wales. It caused him to walk out of an interview after 48 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uswRbWyt_pg

Without context, it looks like the interviewer was a jerk and ambushed him. I've seen plenty of stalling like that on major news programs, and the interviewer always knows to move on (and possibly edit something in to provide context.) --- That being said, "who started what" and "who had what idea" are silly topics to obsesses about. It always come down to who put the long-term work in. I think Wales was "in the righ…

> That being said, "who started what" and "who had what idea" are silly topics to obsesses about. It always come down to who put the long-term work in.

So Wales can write Sanger out of the history of Wikipedia, despite evidence strongly showing that Sanger originated the idea, the name, the policies, and indeed that Sanger was the primary driving force for years. And everyone’s is supposed to accept this historical revision because who created it is a “silly topic”.

Is it also a silly topic when Wales claims credit? Or only when someone questions his assertion?

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#240

Post by Levitz »

FiveOhThree wrote: post #185
thunderfork wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was there, it was as Wikipedia describes it. Read the talk page. Edit: the replies to this comment demonstrate why this problem is intractable: people are very emotionally invested into their idea of how things unfolded, and outright reject other perspectives with little more than a "nuh-uh!".

Well no, I was also around but not particularly interested at the time. This looks like a classic case of the media trying to close ranks and smear their critics.

Funny enough, it would the movement stopped being about harassing women the moment the media stopped writing about it, advocates kept on going, criticizing ideological push into videogames to this day. At the same time by now both Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian have been shown to be grifters who really knew jackshit but how to play a crowd.
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