Goldman's use of ODP as an example is really funny; all the ODP employees left for other projects within Netscape & AOL soon after ODP was acquired. And that's why it went downhill.
Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)
21–30 of 52 posts
Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)
#22It's useful to read this to get an idea of the magnitude of the problem WP faced even in 2006, when it already had huge traction. Wikipedia is an amazing achievement, maybe even up there in the leaderboard of western civilization, and the fact that they managed to do it despite an active decentralized motivated adversary (the forces of vanispamcruftisement) is just one aspect of that.
on WP, some whole articles are carefully crafted artworks of spam, where vanispamcruftisement movement learned the encylopedia language and you never notice. One day someone will write "vanispamcruftisement manifesto" , why spam is a positive moment of western civilization. Spam techniques of once become mainstream ad types with non-relevance diminished and design improved and cost increased. Many social media are fl…
Examples?
Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
"torrent of pointless, trivial content that readers have to sift through to find the real stuff" I don't think people page through online encyclopedias that way. I'm not notable, if I had a wikipedia page I don't think it would link from any page that actually exists today. How could that ever bother you? I don't think you'd come across it unless you googled my name and it took you to my wikipedia page in which case…
I used to hit the [random] link and know I'd get something interesting. Now, not so much. I'll get a tiny stub of something programmaticly dragged in from some huge database - a town name with maybe some population figure and location; an obscure politician with party affiliation and birthdate. For people who enjoy gnoming these kind of articles are tedious - what's the point of correcting a comma if no-one is likely…
How hard would it be to reprogram the random button to only hit pages in the top X00,000 or with at least Y words?
Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
on WP, some whole articles are carefully crafted artworks of spam, where vanispamcruftisement movement learned the encylopedia language and you never notice. One day someone will write "vanispamcruftisement manifesto" , why spam is a positive moment of western civilization. Spam techniques of once become mainstream ad types with non-relevance diminished and design improved and cost increased. Many social media are fl…
Examples?
I don't have them to hand, but I've certainly come across WP articles where it was pretty clear somebody just entered a company's sales-brochure more or less directly... (and if I was marketing director at a company, I'd definitely try to have a presence on Wikipedia of some sort).
This isn't a diss against WP though. I've found such questionable articles to be very rare, and despite Wikipedia's flaws, it's an amazing, amazing, site, one of the best things on the web, by far, and maybe even more astonishingly, one of the few major sites that isn't commercial. I find it indispensable in my everyday life (and donate money regularly)...
Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
on WP, some whole articles are carefully crafted artworks of spam, where vanispamcruftisement movement learned the encylopedia language and you never notice. One day someone will write "vanispamcruftisement manifesto" , why spam is a positive moment of western civilization. Spam techniques of once become mainstream ad types with non-relevance diminished and design improved and cost increased. Many social media are fl…
Examples?
I am a supporter, fan and casual editor of Wikipedia. That's definitely one of the grandiose achievements of Internet. Simple spams and scams are excluded from Wikipedia but smart spams are created daily. I really see a lot of examples. Check articles, pages for many semi to non-famous people, companies or products. What belongs to Wikipedia and what doesn't, has always been a problem. Wikipedia is much less strict than any encyclopedia - and I find it good indeed.
Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed I wasn't endorsing the link, just put it there for completeness. FWIW I think the formula to beat wikipedia is obvious: mirror it, get rid of notability, get rid of anonymity and hire the most prolific editors. It would require a huge investment of course but I'm shocked it hasn't happened yet. I mean you could kill Facebook with the same site.
> FWIW I think the formula to beat wikipedia is obvious: mirror it, get rid of notability, get rid of anonymity and hire the most prolific editors. I would mirror the 100,000 most important articles. I'd then fact check them vigorously. Emphasis would be on truth, not verifiability. I'd keep anonymity, but I'd throw out the Wiki - editing would be done by paid employees from "suggested improvements" made by visitors.…
There's no reason the ideas aren't compatible. I'm all for having different editing standards for the top X articles (senior edits can freely edit, edits from plebes have to wait Y hours or be ok'd) and the less notable articles.
If you wanted to run with the FB idea you could even have special privileges for the "confirmed user" for certain parts of their own bio page. If I don't know you and go to your page I see a wiki bio and whatever anyone has added. If we're wiki-friends I see all that plus your anything in your wikifriends area (pictures, whatever).
My theory on getting rid of notability is you'd have say Z million people come and make webpages for themselves and their friends and family. They'd learn the edit tools and process. And so you'd get an organic growth effect in both natural users and editors.
And of course the big incentive is that we're cutting good editors in on some adsense sharing, idk base it on some function of how substantive an edit is, how long it lasts and how popular the page is.
Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)
#27Anonymous editing is a real problem for Wikipedia. There are already numerous "edit wars" by anonymous editors - mostly on ideological/political issues, but also celebrity people changing articles about them to remove criticism, for example. These abuses/debates will likely continue to get worse. That's why we at phdtree wiki project ( http://phdtree.org/ ) don't allow anonymous editing. What Wikipedia needs is a goo…
HN's karma system is awful.
Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Examples?
I don't have them to hand, but I've certainly come across WP articles where it was pretty clear somebody just entered a company's sales-brochure more or less directly... (and if I was marketing director at a company, I'd definitely try to have a presence on Wikipedia of some sort). This isn't a diss against WP though. I've found such questionable articles to be very rare, and despite Wikipedia's flaws, it's an amazin…
Just one example would be useful.
Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't have them to hand, but I've certainly come across WP articles where it was pretty clear somebody just entered a company's sales-brochure more or less directly... (and if I was marketing director at a company, I'd definitely try to have a presence on Wikipedia of some sort). This isn't a diss against WP though. I've found such questionable articles to be very rare, and despite Wikipedia's flaws, it's an amazin…
Just one example would be useful.
It happens.
It's usually found and fixed - either deleted or made more neutral. Sometimes the new editors are welcomed to the project and given help with COI. They're told about the licencing problems of just copying content from a corporate website. Sometimes they're bashed by vandal patrolling twinkle users. (Does that still happen? I think WP made efforts to stop it from happening.)
Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
"torrent of pointless, trivial content that readers have to sift through to find the real stuff" I don't think people page through online encyclopedias that way. I'm not notable, if I had a wikipedia page I don't think it would link from any page that actually exists today. How could that ever bother you? I don't think you'd come across it unless you googled my name and it took you to my wikipedia page in which case…
I used to hit the [random] link and know I'd get something interesting. Now, not so much. I'll get a tiny stub of something programmaticly dragged in from some huge database - a town name with maybe some population figure and location; an obscure politician with party affiliation and birthdate. For people who enjoy gnoming these kind of articles are tedious - what's the point of correcting a comma if no-one is likely…
Supporting the random button isn't what I'd call anywhere near the top 10 most important functions an encyclopedia of any kind ought to provide. Serendipity is useful in a library or a bookstore, but when you open a book, the bibliomancy becomes avant garde art at best.