Wikipedia is absolute garbage. If you ever read an article about something you were actually involved in you will realise how much of it and the media is just total made up tripe
The loss of prolific contributors in Wikipedia
21–30 of 44 posts
Re: The loss of prolific contributors in Wikipedia
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, had plenty of bespoke technical pages that explained some pretty involved network infrastructure from the 90s and various hardware families outside Cisco. The delete party would come in like locust and nuke all your work citing all forms of wikilaw. I just can't be bothered. Internet archive and EFF get my money each month. Not the wiki foundation.
Not to defend Wikipedia at all (and they certainly should not get your money), but, the solution that Wikipedia themselves would advocate is that you should publish those explanations on some site of your own, and Wikipedia could then cite it. That also means that the publications are under your control and yours alone and nobody can come in and delete them. It's pretty great that Wikipedia is a centralized source of…
> the solution that Wikipedia themselves would advocate is that you should publish those explanations on some site of your own, and Wikipedia could then cite it
The problem with "deletionism" is not lack of sources and citations. It's the fact some moderators don't want certain material there. Creating sources is not a guarantee you'll be able to add them back, quite the opposite.
In the past I've seen purges of all kinds of well-sourced material: law, electric engineering, literature, important CS/engineering figures. It's never because of lack of sources, it's always some subjective rule.
Actually, I've seen "the content is already available in another website, why do we need it here?" being be used as an argument against reinstating some very uncontroversial articles.
Re: The loss of prolific contributors in Wikipedia
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the abstract: > a major concern for not only the future of this platform but also for several industry-scale information retrieval systems such as Siri, Alexa which depend on Wikipedia as knowledge store. That doesn't imply that the paper is advocating for it, but given that Apple and Amazon now have built products on top Wikipedia, their bottom line depends on it. It's entirely reasonable to wonder if they woul…
> Of course, because their revenue depends on it, they probably would want more control. I don't think this follows. They could have all the control they wanted if they set up their own product, but their revenue doesn't depend on control, their revenue depends on the product being good. It would take a lot of work to make your own Wikipedia-alike; it would take a lot of work to even start with the current Wikipedia…
> their revenue depends on the product being good
Yes, and what happens when the content of Wikipedia, through neglect, gets out of date or (negligently or maliciously) wrong? Imagine the following:
User: "Siri, who is the president of North Macedonia?"
Siri: "Macedonia is a geographic and administrative region of Greece, in the southern Balkans"
Re: The loss of prolific contributors in Wikipedia
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to defend Wikipedia at all (and they certainly should not get your money), but, the solution that Wikipedia themselves would advocate is that you should publish those explanations on some site of your own, and Wikipedia could then cite it. That also means that the publications are under your control and yours alone and nobody can come in and delete them. It's pretty great that Wikipedia is a centralized source of…
> the solution that Wikipedia themselves would advocate is that you should publish those explanations on some site of your own, and Wikipedia could then cite it The problem with "deletionism" is not lack of sources and citations. It's the fact some moderators don't want certain material there. Creating sources is not a guarantee you'll be able to add them back, quite the opposite. In the past I've seen purges of all…
Do the sources even matter? I don't know how many articles I've read in the past that have had some very questionable "facts" so I check the source link and it's a dead link.
How does that work?
Re: The loss of prolific contributors in Wikipedia
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to defend Wikipedia at all (and they certainly should not get your money), but, the solution that Wikipedia themselves would advocate is that you should publish those explanations on some site of your own, and Wikipedia could then cite it. That also means that the publications are under your control and yours alone and nobody can come in and delete them. It's pretty great that Wikipedia is a centralized source of…
> the solution that Wikipedia themselves would advocate is that you should publish those explanations on some site of your own, and Wikipedia could then cite it The problem with "deletionism" is not lack of sources and citations. It's the fact some moderators don't want certain material there. Creating sources is not a guarantee you'll be able to add them back, quite the opposite. In the past I've seen purges of all…
My opinion is that it should be inclusionism and not deletionism. Include many thing as needing.
> Actually, I've seen "the content is already available in another website, why do we need it here?" being be used as an argument against reinstating some very uncontroversial articles.
Having it on Wikipedia is helpful. This way, you can find it in Wikipedia, can have a free license, mirrors (if there are any), can use MediaWiki API, and will have the wikitext you do not worry as much about the hostile JS/CSS and can also print out. And, you can also fix it if there is a mistake in the article, too.
They should also try to be neutral from corporate or other interests (although if there are multiple points of view about some subject, they can try to be included if you can avoid being biased, but in the total it should be neutral).
Re: The loss of prolific contributors in Wikipedia
#26Having contributed to the Danish Wikipedia, I was astounded by the arrogance and the accusations by the other contributors/mods. That was what made me not contribute anymore.
It is nothing short of astounding how small amounts of power corrupt otherwise intelligent people. Sometimes I despair at the state of democratic politics, but looking at the edit wars of Wikipedia, it could have been worse. So much pettiness for nothing.
I would definitely take wikipedia politics over american politics. Wikipedia has its problems, but nobody there is violently storming the whitehouse.
Re: The loss of prolific contributors in Wikipedia
#27Part of the problem is that philosophically, Wikipedia wants to pretend that contributors are "thin" interfaces for pure knowledge. That there is a well-defined set of "reliable sources" and all contributors have to do is summarize and create hyperlinks to them. Not surprising given the ~Objectivist philosophies of its creators.
What's the alternative? Acknowledge that there is no Truth, and sit down and cry? That may be technically more correct, but i fail to see how one can build an encyclopedia under that view.
Re: The loss of prolific contributors in Wikipedia
#28It was never and can never be sustainable to depend on a small number of super-contributors for a "crowd-sourced" knowledge store. Maybe the Wikimedia Foundation should focus more on attracting and keeping a broader range and number of contributors instead of curating few it considered "good".
Why not? That's how the rest of the world works. Almost every human endeavour forms a small world graph.
Re: The loss of prolific contributors in Wikipedia
#29There is plenty of room for more content but deletion focused contributors remove whole classes of articles and tend to turn off whole groups of contributors in the process. The biggest challenge for Wikipedia now is to find some way to tame the rise of deletion as a form of contribution.
The quality of a product is just as much about what it contains as what you leave out.
Deletionism vs inclusionism is a balance, and i don't know if wikipedia has the right balance, but i'm glad its not everything2. If "everything goes" content-wise, then you lose consistency and quality, which is a big part of what makes wikipedia great.
Re: The loss of prolific contributors in Wikipedia
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
that's been my impression as well. when I look at articles focused toward my field I struggle to figure out how I can contribute without needlessly adding complexity or excessive detail to--what amounts to--an encyclopedia entry. Wikipedia isn't done but a lot of the low hanging fruit has been plucked.
Historically underrepresented groups have entered the chat.
Well true, that's often not low hanging fruit, especially if its about historical figures from historically underrepresented groups, as you have to dig deeper to find information on them