71–80 of 84 posts
Because read-only access won't be nearly as useful as allowing people to commit. I suppose setting a reasonable limit to uploads might help a lot (say 10mb a day -- that's a lot of text, after all).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is a concrete example? Many of the Wikipedia controversies I've read about have been related to political figures and events.
One example that comes to my mind is when author Philip Roth attempted to clarify the inspiration for his book The Human Stain. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/09/an-open-... The wikipedia entry for The Human Stain now contains a reference to the controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Stain#Anatole_Broyard...
But also, this is almost the textbook definition of "the thin end of the wedge". I didn't really start thinking about this until I started reading the comments here on HN (awesome!)
So wikipedia should be free. What else should be free? Who should pay? Someone needs to pay. Who should? Let's start grouping content on one side or another.
This is a very, very bad idea.
The answer, of course, is that it should all be free. Internet access should be a basic human right. It should be, it will be, it is only a matter of time.
But until it is, an endeavor like this is subverting net neutrality, disguised as something good, and that is just a terrible idea.
I want to love this idea. I want to love wikipedia. But before I can do that, I need to be able to use wikipedia. And by use, I don't mean consume - I mean, be a full participant in a collective online encyclopedia. This is currently not possible. Rather than explain or give examples, let me challenge you to start any new article, or make any decent sized edit to any article, and let's assume for the discussion that…
I've edited several articles, and created some. I just went ahead, created an account, and started trying to contribute.
I did have problems in the Spanish language Wikipedia, I created a page for the Finance Minister, and it got deleted twice for "self-promotion" until I managed to convince the guy that the person was, in fact, a relevant political figure in my country.
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Lorenzo
I also created and modified pages on the English Wikipedia, and I haven't had problems yet, for example the last one I created was the page of the owner of the company I work for (one of the world's richest):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayme_Garfinkel
I don't have a good knowledge of Wikipedia, I just copy a page I think is similar to the one I want to create and use it as a start.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is a concrete example? Many of the Wikipedia controversies I've read about have been related to political figures and events.
There are many examples. Attempts to make technical pages more accessible to a general audience have been shut down repeatedly and resulted in a separate Wikipedia entirely called "Simple English". Attempts to neutralize any page that anyone pays attention to results in the page's regular babysitters coming out and destroying it -- a normal person can't compete because these people are obsessive about the pages they…
I am somebody who goes to Wikipedia by default when looking up something, even if it's something technical, although I know that I won't get much use out of reading the article, and it is precisely for that reason.
It seems that the Wikipedia community has assumed that being able to write in "Standard English" means the articles can be as complex and technical as they wish.
I have often put myself in the mind of somebody who knows only, for example, basic networking, and tried to rewrite networking articles (or at least their introductions) to make it easier for them to understand the core concepts. Instead, the admins think it's wiser to have the first paragraph use a jargon word every other word since the reader can always click that word to be taken to its article.
It is also true that if you're going up against an admin's article/edit, their say is final and you've pretty much wasted your time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One example that comes to my mind is when author Philip Roth attempted to clarify the inspiration for his book The Human Stain. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/09/an-open-... The wikipedia entry for The Human Stain now contains a reference to the controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Stain#Anatole_Broyard...
Except Roth was full of shit on that. See: http://old.ironholds.org/?p=979
I remember hearing about the WikiReader [1] a few years back and thinking it would be great for this sort of use. It's basically a cheap handheld device with an LCD display and a local Wikipedia text-only cache that runs off of AAA batteries. Might be useful for delivering Wikipedia content to places where there's no cell phone infrastructure. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader
I want to love this idea. I want to love wikipedia. But before I can do that, I need to be able to use wikipedia. And by use, I don't mean consume - I mean, be a full participant in a collective online encyclopedia. This is currently not possible. Rather than explain or give examples, let me challenge you to start any new article, or make any decent sized edit to any article, and let's assume for the discussion that…
I see what you mean - Wikipedia essentially promotes oligopoly on knowledge. Relatively few privileged, old time crew, can enforce their views through bureaucratic like process. I am not sure that can be fixed though - what we can fix are which people get to be in charge of the article by some kind of peer voting mechanism where greater weight is given to academics who actually study the problem. To know which people…