More funding.. More wiki lies.
Wikipedia is an MMORPG
111–120 of 121 posts
Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not an edit I made, but the final straw for me was a debate about the article name of the turkey (the animal) on the German wikipedia. The only commonly used name is "Truthahn" which refers to both the female and male animal if you are not being specific. But one especially vocal Wikipedian insists that in his ornithology book, the generic term is always the female term, so "Truthuhn" (with u). That sounds like "turk…
The non-expert with a beginners' textbook having strong opinions about the subject is everything that's wrong with places like wikipedia and reddit. I just hate it.
This applies to any internet discussion site that doesn’t list your entire background, which is basically every internet site. How many people do you think does the same thing in HN? I’d say it’s most of them.
There is no way to tell whether you are debating a child on the internet.
Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here’s one from Stack Overflow that annoyed me recently: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16023637/difference-betw... . The question is quite sane (there are these two similar options in GCC, how do they differ?), but it was closed as being “ambiguous”.
Closed as you say, but the question was still answered so what's the problem.
The problem is: what if it was closed before it got the answer? Closed questions can’t receive answers.
Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I once came across some Python code on Wikipedia which looked like: for i in range(n): a = [f(i) for i in range(q)] I was reading over it and got temporarily confused by the re-use of the variable "i" in the list comprehension so I edited it to something else in order to help the next person. Reverted without explanation. Another complaint I have about Wikipedia: There are certain people who are sometimes described i…
You not being a reliable source about yourself is an old Wikipedia rule. I think they are fans of the Brazil movie.
I guess the rule got changed at some point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-p...
Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> places like wikipedia and reddit. I just hate it. All human products have issues, but are there any superior alternatives at scale? Wikipedia is one of our civilization’s greatest achievements, isn’t it? It seems like the Library of Alexandria on steroids to me. Especially when combined with an internet archive. It’s funny to admit it, but Reddit is also quite an achievement due to the scalable human moderation mod…
> For research, name a better duo. A search engine and scihub? Wikipedia is useful for a high-level overview. For more info, you'll be clicking on the references a lot. No reason not to start with the sources.
>
> > For research, name a better duo.
> A search engine and scihub?
> Wikipedia is useful for a high-level overview. For more info, you'll be clicking on the references a lot. No reason not to start with the sources.
Ok, you got me there. I knew using "research" with no qualifier was going to get me into trouble. I should have said "general research."
I can't wait for Sci-Hub, or better, to become legal. The fact that is not legal is pretty embarrassing for our civilization.
Regarding the search engine, for a lot of general research adding "... reddit" often improves results in my experience. It's so weird how important that site turned out to be. Now if only it could make money without unneccesary features. I feel like we should buy reddit for the commons while we can :)
Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For research, name a better duo. A search engine and scihub? Wikipedia is useful for a high-level overview. For more info, you'll be clicking on the references a lot. No reason not to start with the sources.
> > > For research, name a better duo. > A search engine and scihub? > Wikipedia is useful for a high-level overview. For more info, you'll be clicking on the references a lot. No reason not to start with the sources. Ok, you got me there. I knew using "research" with no qualifier was going to get me into trouble. I should have said "general research." I can't wait for Sci-Hub, or better, to become legal. The fact th…
> The fact that is not legal is pretty embarrassing for our civilization.
Philosophically speaking sure, but practically it already works fine now.
I don’t think any judge is going to convict a researcher for bypassing these paywalls. if Elsevier and company will decide to prosecute, it will become a PR nightmare for them. Also likely to cause a legislative response which will undermine their ability to collect their profits. I don’t believe these people are stupid, I think they understand these consequences as well.
> adding "... reddit" often improves results in my experience
Interesting, will try next time. I have an account there for a few years, but wasn’t using it much.
Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG
#117Shameless plug: I recently wrote a Ruby gem to get/post Wikipedia articles from the command line. Then I can use my text editor to edit the articles which is faster than doing so in the browser. To install it: gem install wikian . To see how it works visit https://rubygems.org/gems/wikian .
That’s great! Which text editor do you use? How does wikian deal with edit conflicts?
I use Vim. Thanks for mentioning edit conflicts, I had overlooked that important feature. Will add it to the next version of Wikian by comparing timestamps of the local and most recent revisions.
Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG
#118I’d be grateful if, in this thread, anybody with an anecdote about how their perfectly fine edit was reverted by the evil career Wikipedians, could provide a link so we can judge for ourselves.
Not an edit I made, but the final straw for me was a debate about the article name of the turkey (the animal) on the German wikipedia. The only commonly used name is "Truthahn" which refers to both the female and male animal if you are not being specific. But one especially vocal Wikipedian insists that in his ornithology book, the generic term is always the female term, so "Truthuhn" (with u). That sounds like "turk…
I enjoy that in one paragraph you are upset about somebody using the technical name over the common name, and in the next paragraph you are upset people reverse your technical edits for what might be a more common notion from a beginner's textbook.
Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG
#119I’d be grateful if, in this thread, anybody with an anecdote about how their perfectly fine edit was reverted by the evil career Wikipedians, could provide a link so we can judge for ourselves.
I've been able to get some edits through only by making a blog post that had the text of what I needed to edit into the WP article so that I could reference it as a second-hand source -- thus doing the proper kind of rain dance to the WP bureaucrats. It seems most of the time the only way to get things to stick is find the right sort of rain dance the threats the loophole needles that make somebody not revert your changes.
Another ridiculous case I know about was where the leader of the team that factored RSA-230 updated the page with a reference to the announcement. It was reverted by an editor with the note "Wikipedia is not the venue to announce your own results." So WP went from having it listed as "factored" to "not factored so far" by the revert making it incorrect. The editor who reverted the change hadn't even bothered to check the cited source where the announcement was actually made. What even was the point of the revert? Why would somebody take time out of their day to make Wikipedia inaccurate over some perceived and misunderstood ceremony following to guidelines and process?
It's so much trouble to contribute it's just not worth it, I stopped contributing entirely about 6 years ago after a bunch of edits I wrote on a topic were merged with another one even though the two topics are different. After a few weeks of fighting I just gave up. Amazingly it was unmerged and most of my original text was returned, and then usefully updated by other contributors where it still lives.
Why bother?
Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG
#120I’d be grateful if, in this thread, anybody with an anecdote about how their perfectly fine edit was reverted by the evil career Wikipedians, could provide a link so we can judge for ourselves.
I've been able to get some edits through only by making a blog post that had the text of what I needed to edit into the WP article so that I could reference it as a second-hand source -- thus doing the proper kind of rain dance to the WP bureaucrats. It seems most of the time the only way to get things to stick is find the right sort of rain dance the threats the loophole needles that make somebody not revert your ch…
Without trying to be dismissive (I’m grateful for the examples), it looks like your first example was a simple workaround for the reasonable policy of having citable sources rather than hosting original research; your second example was unreverted within an hour and no lasting harm done; and your third example ended in a useful article with your contribution preserved.
In short it sounds like the process, while frustrating at times, is still somehow generating good outcomes.