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Wikipedia is 20

economist.com

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Re: Wikipedia is 20

#261

Post by tim333 »

zadokshi wrote: post #196
shepherdjerred wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is incredible. I find it frustrating when friends say it's unreliable/not to be trusted. Of course it's not perfect, but I've learned plenty enough from it to be well worth the trade-off

I think it deep da on your age. Some among us who are older remember what it used to be like when people were much less political and less activism was occurring. These days basic concrete facts are subject to debate.

Though most of the fake news anti vax type stuff is not on Wikipedia but spreads more through the likes of Facebook and Reddit. Wikipedia is pretty conservative about sources and evidence.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#262

Post by jacquesm »

tim333 wrote: post #260
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.

And as one of the readers of that page, thank you.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#263

Post by prionassembly »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #137
Uptrenda wrote: post #52

I really do hate Wikipedia and almost never use it. It's a collection of poorly spun word-salad stolen loosely from third-parties. And the aim isn't on quality but to satisfy the editors compulsive need to contribute to Wikipedia's ever-growing rat's nest of non-sense... just because. In every article there will always be a historical section probably about 3/4ths the articles width that you just skip over (it's usel…

I think it sometimes depends on the area you are looking for information in. In general an encyclopedia helps you solve the search paradox (That is: You can't find anything unless you already know something about it). * If you use it to find information about things you are already very familiar with, you'll be disappointed. * If you use it directly as a source for things you are not familiar with, you will be mislea…

Try Britannica or Encarta for “clique complex of a graph”.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#264

Post by 2sk21 »

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.

Truly we need a low-pass filter to handle current events.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#265

Post by simonh »

bawolff wrote: post #186
disown wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wikipedia is incredible. It's good for surface level stuff. The apolitical superficial knowledge is where wikipedia excels. > I find it frustrating when friends say it's unreliable/not to be trusted. In terms of depth and breadth of knowledge of topics, it is sorely lacking. And it is highly untrustworthy when it comes to anything remotely political/historical/economic/etc - which are ultimately all political. > Of…

> It's good for surface level stuff Almost like its trying to be an encyclopedia or something ;) If you go to wikipedia looking for a university level course in something, im not sure why you would expect that. As far as quality... its not perfect, but that's still a relative measure. Its generally significantly better than its competition in my experience.

Also it usually has excellent references to more in depth articles and sources if you do want to dig deeper.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#266

Post by tyingq »

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…

Wikipedia's page views, though, are relatively flat since 2016. I suspect, in large part, because of Google's move to expose Wikipedia content on Google pages, removing the need to follow any links to Wikipedia for many queries.

https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-pag...

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#267

Post by mFixman »

mxcrossb wrote: post #43

I just opened up google maps and zoomed in on a random town: Mt. Pleasant Iowa. If I search it on google, on the top of the page is a snippet from Wikipedia. The top result is a link to Wikipedia. The second is the actual town website. This is what I find fascinating about the project. We’re more interested in reading a secondary source compiled by random people, than the actual primary source! I think it says a lot…

Wikipedia is the best overall source of human-readable information.

The Mt Pleasant site talks about the frequency (but not date) of meetings from the parks and recreation department, while Wikipedia actually has the location and the reasons why the town is notable.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#268

Post by gchamonlive »

2sk21 wrote: post #264
canofbars wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Truly we need a low-pass filter to handle current events.

This will invariably induce bias or render the debate too shallow to be productive, maybe even at a cost of manufacturing consent.

Wikipedia already filters content, they only take more time. If you need some outlet with immediately curated information, I think you should look elsewhere, because this is not what wikipedia is for, the way I see it.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#269

Post by ghaff »

bawolff wrote: post #244
itsoktocry wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (how do you know how much trust to put on some geocitirs page) The same way you learn to "trust" anything, including Wikipedia - by verifying sources. I love Wikipedia, but I don't blindly assume it to be the ground truth in anything (if such truth even exists), especially in the "long-tail" of subject matter.

There's different levels of "trust". With Wikipedia i know roughly what i am getting. I can make an informed decision as to how much to trust it and how much to do further research depending on the application i need it for. After all, sometimes i just need knowledge with a decent chance of being true, where other times I need to be really sure. Wikipedia provides a relatively consistent experience (varrying somewhat…

There are fairly predictable quirks about Wikipedia:

- Articles in areas of math written in impenetrable jargon

- Encyclopedic articles about obscure, trivial subjects

- Stubs about relatively important individuals

- Tug-of-war entries about current events

- Random endless lists

- A lot of procedural fighting about original research, notability, etc.

But, as you say, a way to get pointers to or a quick take on a topic, it's pretty good. Am I going to take anything Wikipedia says to the bank without double-checking? Probably not. And, if you look deeply enough into some topics, you find a lot of circular references to some other single source of information. But overall, it's a good go-to reference.

Re: Wikipedia is 20

#270

Post by ghaff »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #231
canofbars wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never been able to find a wikipedia topic I could contribute to. The problem is the topics which don't have pages on wikipedia also don't tend to have a lot of referencable information on the internet.

Books are an acceptable reference, I assume offline magazines or newspapers too.

In fact, they're valuable in that most editors won't use them. (That said, they're also sort of a quirk with respect to verifiability in that, as a practical matter, almost no one is actually check the citation of an obscure book or an old offline magazine.)
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