Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

daggle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 353 posts

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#221

Post by DanBC »

whazzmaster wrote: post #29

I personally find Wikipedia semi-useful as an ultra-high level view of topics I want to refresh myself on or get interest in. I wouldn't cite it in any remotely academic or meaningful forum, but it's an amazingly broad repository of information. I hold this view mainly because a great friend of mine, a college associate professor, got sick of students explicitly violating his directive to avoid Wikipedia as a primary…

> I wouldn't cite it in any remotely academic or meaningful forum

Even wikipedia suggests you don't cite them, but use the cites given in the article.

That's why good quality citations are so important.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#222

Post by ordinary »

bane wrote: post #184
Dinoguy1000 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first example is a little dated; Wikipedia hasn't had one article per Pokemon since around 2007, at the latest, when they were all merged into a handful of lists. Since then, a small number have been spun back out into articles on individual species or evolutionary lines, but only after careful consideration and considerable effort put into finding sources and establishing notability.

His point absolutely sill stands. This http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulbasaur can have a page but a local, but very popular band cannot.

I checked up on it too. The more notable Pokemon (like Bulbasaur) still have a page to themselves, just like most major characters in popular TV shows[1][2][3]. Minor Pokemon are indeed collected into lists[4], just like the GP said.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kutner_%28House%29

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Hiatt

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Quinn

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_%2852%E2%8...

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#223

Post by InclinedPlane »

zbowling wrote: post #161
InclinedPlane wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The myth of wikipedia is that the people who run it are the people who are most responsible for creating its content. That is not the case and the ongoing friction between the community that effectively is wikipedia and the community that actually runs wikipedia is the single most likely cause for any future downfall of it.

This is backwards. I'm not an admin on wikipedia (but I do have admin revert and reviewer flags) but I do help "run" wikipedia only because I participate in it. I been vandal patroller for years. I follow the AfDs and other actions and contribute to actions in different wikiprojects. I can say for a fact that there is no clear line between any of the two camps. Admins don't have the time to push agendas. They are way…

It's not about agendas or conspiracies, it's about a disconnect between the people who make the big decisions and the people who are building wikipedia. Different perceptions and motivations can lead quite easily to people making decisions that are deleterious to the community and the wikipedia project, even if at every step they are acting in what they perceive to be good faith.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#224

Post by dextorious »

vacri wrote: post #210
Animus7 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I ask honestly: why should it be easy to participate? Because the alternative is massive systemic bias. This issue has been discussed to death and I won't argue anything here, but the point is that having a thick coat of process encourages a _certain kind_ of editor to participate in Wikipedia. Thus, proponents claim, the largest reference work on the internet is biased, in a very nonobvious way. This wouldn't be a…

The quality of technical articles on Wikipedia are second to none. Time and time again technical references have played out in personal and professional endeavours. They're clear and concise. You've got to accept that some topics, biographies for example, are inherently subjective and can't be purely objective. Wikipedia is the most rigorous source of 'truth' available to the masses, and the complaints of bias are ab…

"""The quality of technical articles on Wikipedia are second to none. """

You don't really read many quality technical books, do you?

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#225

Post by bobsoap »

modeless wrote: post #96
philwelch wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is a usability study of a scenario where a committed but novice domain expert has something to contribute to the Wikipedia process. The deleted article itself is just a MacGuffin.

His "contribution" was arguably wrong, his effort was minimal, and his attitude was poisonous. If you want an encyclopedia where the opinions of "domain experts" trump consensus, then use Citizendium.

What you're effectively saying is that contributions to Wikipedia should be reserved for people who are highly involved with Wikipedia already. Outsider? No chance. Why allow every peasant to add stuff, right?.

I derive this assumption from your statement that his contribution, effort and attitude was "wrong", "minimal", and "poisonous". I don't see any of that. I see a rant following a genuine effort to contribute, a contribution worth considering, and an attitude that started off with the best intent but got punched down in the process. Who wouldn't turn sour after such an experience? It's called cause and effect. Of couse you'll be pissed if something as ludicrous as this happens to you.

Unless you're so caught up in your little world of the 'inner circle' that you don't tolerate outsiders. Unfortunately, that's not how the world works. That's also not how Wikipedia is supposed to work, I hope. That doesn't sound like the spirit that Wikipedia tries to portray at all. It sounds like the exact opposite.

On your "consensus" argument: since when is a 7-6 vote a consensus? That's a nearly even split. Please.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#226

Post by philwelch »

DanBC wrote: post #219
wpietri wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under ideal circumstances, what contribution would you have wanted him to make?

Under ideal circumstances he would have "known" the article was great and really important; he would have heard it got deleted; he would have gone to wikipedia and found short simple clear advice about what is included and what isn't included. Preferably in one place. Then he would have realised that the article was not a good fit for Wikipedia, but he would have met some people who were not fucking wingnuts and who…

Also, messaging users and discussing pages should work more like messaging or discussion sites, and not exactly like a content page.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#227

Post by caf »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #194
caf wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is saying, among other things, that the editors who decided that the person was not notable did not have the domain-specific knowledge needed to enable them to do the research to make that determination.

Editors are specifically expected not to do that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research Wikipedia does not want to be a primary source. That's what Sullivan seems to have overlooked about why subject matter experts' opinions are not eagerly included—they haven't yet been vetted by any third party. Notability is defended by bringing citations, not complaints.

Finding citations is exactly the kind of research I was referring to. Original research is not at all the same thing.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#228

Post by iFire »

zbowling wrote: post #170
rospaya wrote: post #117

The bigger issue with Wikipedia is the bad UI and tons of bureaucracy that make everybody except hardcore users beware of editing.

We go out of our way on Wikipedia to make everyone feel welcome to edit anything. If someone makes a good faith mistake, more often or not, you are sent a welcome message fairly quickly by either a vandal patroller or an admin. New users will get hit up after their 2nd or 3rd edit with a Welcome message too. I have tools that help me help new users out quick in my dashboard. It's part of what I do. No body should fee…

If it fails once, why aren't we fixing it?

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#229

Post by prodigal_erik »

bdrocco wrote: post #41

I would suggest Wikipedia needs a 'second page' site to host these types of 'less than notable pages' and they be eligible to be promoted to the main site. But really I would just classify this as a #FirstWorldProblem

We have an entire web full of whatever unverifiable stuff anyone felt like writing. Why should Wikimedia beg for more resources to expend mirroring content that isn't reliable enough to contribute to their goals?

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#230

Post by mixmax »

knowtheory wrote: post #143
tptacek wrote: post #51

You can tell someone hasn't spent much time at AfD, the section of Wikipedia where people (anyone in the world, really) discuss whether articles should be deleted, by the outrage they express at the "arbitrariness" of Wikipedia's notability rules. Have you spent any time at AfD? Let me help you out: here's the AfD log for the week they killed "Jessie_Stricchiola": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_d…

The two rules you've outline are the primary reason i contribute very little to wikipedia. I can put together a well-sourced piece outlining the importance of a variety of subjects which i am indirectly involved in, and give a dispassionate description of its relevance to the community it serves and the world at large. Wikipedians, instead of saying "do that and have neutral 3rd parties check over your work", instead…

Last night Copenhagen Suborbitals put up a blog post (http://ing.dk/artikel/124393-mangelfulde-wikipedia-artikler - in Danish) mentioning that there was a lot of factual mistakes in their wikipedia article, and that morally they couldn't support editing the article themselves. They provided examples of the inaccuracies in the blogpost.

It's now up to an independent third-party to edit the wikipedia page to make it correct.

The pge is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Suborbitals

I think that's a pretty good way of doing it.

Post reply on HN