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

Wikipedia is 20

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 391 posts

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#251

Post by dannyw »

whym wrote: post #20
neilpanchal wrote: post #6

Take note: The interface hasn't changed much, a good thing.

Not to disagree, but the mobile web site brought a significantly different user experience (for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Ocean vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Ocean ), and the mobile readership has been at least as large as the desktop for a long time. [1] [1] https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/reading/total...

It's crazy how editing still hasn't improved much on mobile. Compare it with the desktop editor. I guess people don't really do much editing on mobile?

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#252

Post by aembleton »

sharkweek wrote: post #18

Ah good stuff - I love Wikipedia more than almost any other non-living thing that has been created in my lifetime. If you had told me the idea as a pitch 20 years ago I would have assumed you were capital I insane for thinking it would work. It was pretty fresh when I was in college and I remember my professors all being pretty explicit about not using it as a source. Thought I had figured out the world’s biggest lif…

I remember when it came out, I think I read about it on Slashdot. I dismissed it at the time as a utopian ideal that would never work in the real world.

I'm glad I was proven wrong.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#253

Post by howlgarnish »

RobertoG wrote: post #215
aerosmile wrote: post #40

I am surprised that the comments haven't mentioned the role of SEO in Wikipedia's growth and defensibility. Wikipedia's habit of deep interlinking helped it rank back in the early aughts when the SEO rules were rather simple. Add to that the subdomain-driven localization strategy and many other moves that were considered SEO best practices back in those years when the on-page factors used to matter. But that was just…

>>"[..] cared deeply about the content quality and also resisted to run ads [..]" Do I remember wrong? because I remember they (the Wikipedia organization) were going to run ads at some point but it was strongly rejected by the community. I think there was even some fork because of that.

I don't think Wikipedia ever seriously considered running ads, but Wikitravel did fork over this, and the ad-free fork (Wikivoyage) eventually joined Wikipedia's parent Wikimedia.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#254

Post by arp242 »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #132
wolverine876 wrote: post #49

I was originally enthusiastic about the 'wisdom of the crowds' and its potential. The Internet was a great experiment with unknown possibilities. I edited Wikipedia and talked about its potential. I was skeptical at the same time - it was an experiment, not a revelation. I used to tell people, 'I don't know how Wikipedia could work, but it seems to'. I'd apply 'The Cathedral and the Bizarre' concept to it, and 'with…

Interesting question, how did the article end up? In general Wikipedia does have mechanisms to deal with this sort of thing, but admins don't always catch on early enough.

It currently says that "three men's lacrosse team members were falsely accused of rape", and that the prosecutor of the case was "disbarred for "dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation".

So either there is a massive conspiracy, or those editors were perhaps not as unreasonable as the previous poster makes them out to be.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#255

Post by skeeter2020 »

aerosmile wrote: post #40

I am surprised that the comments haven't mentioned the role of SEO in Wikipedia's growth and defensibility. Wikipedia's habit of deep interlinking helped it rank back in the early aughts when the SEO rules were rather simple. Add to that the subdomain-driven localization strategy and many other moves that were considered SEO best practices back in those years when the on-page factors used to matter. But that was just…

You've got it backwards; they didn't "kill it" on SEO by making good content, good content was rewarded with high ranking search results. Even this is questionable now that google et al purposely present just enough of wikipedia's content directly in the search results to discourage you from leaving google. So in the end they (a) display ads and (b) don't get the revenue. THis is a win?

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#256

Post by boringg »

aerosmile wrote: post #40

I am surprised that the comments haven't mentioned the role of SEO in Wikipedia's growth and defensibility. Wikipedia's habit of deep interlinking helped it rank back in the early aughts when the SEO rules were rather simple. Add to that the subdomain-driven localization strategy and many other moves that were considered SEO best practices back in those years when the on-page factors used to matter. But that was just…

Jason Calcanis, such a that guy.

Wikipedia is a fascinating story of well earned success and growth without the reigns of vc dominating its trajectory. I imagine they have had a lot of tricky decision making. I’m curious what their process has been (as someone who uses Wikipedia but really doesn’t know things are running behind the scenes).

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#257

Post by arp242 »

jjcon wrote: post #156
three_seagrass wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? That article talks about how unbiased Wikipedia is: >Our study finds that crowd-based knowledge production does not result in articles with more biased than articles produced by experts when the crowd-based articles are substantially revised.

> when the crowd-based articles are substantially revised. You literally just had to keep reading to find the cases where they do show bias

It also mentions there a bias in both directions, depending on the topic. Plus, it only considers US viewpoints/political alignments, and not Canadian, British, Australian, or other countries.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#258

Post by gchamonlive »

canofbars wrote: post #232
gchamonlive wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current events are so divisive and many times no one has a clear picture of what's happening that I can't see how someone objectively assesses a current event news outlet as lacking reputation without prior incidents.

Someone on hacker news commented about how they started watching the news 2 weeks after it was broadcast and mentioned how a massive amount of the breaking news ended up being false when viewed later with the full set of information. It would probably be beneficial if wikipedia simply didn't allow brand new news that couldn't be solidly confirmed.

But without characterizing what exactly "brand new" is, you could implement this prohibition without having the correct effect of maintaining veracity and consistency.

And would you treat different events differently? Would you have to wait, for instance, for classified documents to be released so that you could say you have the bigger picture?

I question if prohibition is really the right way to go. Wikipedia proved to be effective long term. Let them keep doing what is working. Maybe just warn the reader the subject or event is recent or currently developing and let the reader decide for himself whether to use that information or not.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#259

Post by mhh__ »

kortilla wrote: post #176
mhh__ wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does balanced mean? It's supposed to be well-cited not balanced

It means the Wikipedia article on Thalidomide can’t leave out the section on all of the harm it caused, despite the rest being well-cited.

But all the citations are going to mention that or it's just another chemical.

The average HN-er seems be more right wing than in most comment sections, so I was curious whether balanced means "fits my politics" or the more subtle "I'm only asking questions about the election"-ing on individual articles e.g. I could see the length of the Trump-Russia article annoying a few people here who seem to believe it's completely made up

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#260

Post by tim333 »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #94

In grad school back in like 2007 I took a 2-credit class called "The History of Nuclear Enterprise" taught by one of those long white-haired Doc Brown type professors. The final project was for each of us to make Wikipedia pages describing some important topic that wasn't covered yet. I made one on the university's nuclear reactor which had just been shut down. I dug through many linear feet of archived info, scannin…

It can be quite fun also starting a page and watching it grow. I started the page for covid testing early in the pandemic with a pretty crappy stub and it's now got hundreds of edits from other people and a lot of info.

Thanks also Wikipedia.

Post reply on HN