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The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

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Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#281

Post by tommorris »

gojomo wrote: post #68
HnNoPassMailer wrote: post #38

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction > Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, written collaboratively by the people who use it. There's the problem. Wikipedia should stop being an encyclopedia and start being Wikipedia.

Indeed, the strict 'encyclopedic' standard that got Wikipedia this far, as a defense against lots of problems, is now itself a damaging constraint. I'll soon be launching a reference site called Thunkpedia which loosens the 'encyclopedic' standard, but adds other constraints in its place. There's a video about my motivations, and a sneak peek of its interface, at http://thunkpedia.org . More discussion is at the proj…

I've been looking forward to adding to the list of unsuccessful inclusionist Wikipedia forks.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#282

Post by whazzmaster »

scarmig wrote: post #42
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…

You should, and we should. I would question, though, whether that's particular to Wikipedia. You should take everything you read with a colossal grain of salt. Even if it's written in a printed encyclopedia, a textbook, or an article.

That is true, understanding what makes Wikipedia susceptible to biased thinking, scamming, or propaganda widens your view to understand that newspaper articles, government press releases, and technology journalism (to name only a few) are also to be taken with a grain of salt.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#283

Post by jarek »

bane wrote: post #185
mikeleeorg wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I ask honestly: why should it be easy to participate? I agree with you, though I've also experienced the encouragement to participate as nowarninglabel has: >> When I meet wikipedia people here in SF, they say, "Get involved!" Then, when I have tried to get involved, I get endless bureaucracy and everything eventually deleted. I think this is where the frustration stems. Wikipedia, understandably, wants participati…

"It wants, and needs, _quality_ participation" I think the word/phrase you are likely looking for is "fanatic dedication".

If knowing the fairly simple rules of the site you are participating in counts as fanatic dedication, I weep for the internet.

Do you feel one has to be fanatically dedicated to HN to know why "reply" links don't always appear right away?

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#284

Post by potatolicious »

_delirium wrote: post #195
bane wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A popular band can, if there are good sources for the information. Regardless of what other policy exists, having written a number of band articles, I've found that to be more or less the one de-facto rule: cite thy sources, preferably to sources that seem relatively legit (musicological books or journal articles good; newspapers and magazines ok; the band's own website ok but not as the only source; "personal commun…

I think his point still stands - and this plays into the "systemic bias" point that other posters here have made. The issue here is not that citations are required (they ought to be, otherwise how can we ascertain truthfulness?), but rather it's heavily biased towards certain types of citations.

A poster mentioned elsewhere in this thread that Wikipedia's articles on animal husbandry are laughably incorrect, to the point where children can spot the errors. If someone knowledgeable in the field were to come in and try to correct this nonsense, what exactly would they cite?

Academic journals? Because information on animal husbandry is a frequent subject of academic debate. Newspapers and magazines? Surely a smash hit topic there.

This is why Wikipedia's quality is highly correlated to how well this subject is documented online. Physics, math, and computer science? These articles are top notch - because information is widely available online already, just begging for a Wikipedia editor to cite it.

Anything that isn't common online? Fuggetaboutit. Worse, anything that isn't the regular subject of newspapers and magazines?

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#285

Post by _delirium »

potatolicious wrote: post #284
_delirium wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A popular band can, if there are good sources for the information. Regardless of what other policy exists, having written a number of band articles, I've found that to be more or less the one de-facto rule: cite thy sources, preferably to sources that seem relatively legit (musicological books or journal articles good; newspapers and magazines ok; the band's own website ok but not as the only source; "personal commun…

I think his point still stands - and this plays into the "systemic bias" point that other posters here have made. The issue here is not that citations are required (they ought to be, otherwise how can we ascertain truthfulness?), but rather it's heavily biased towards certain types of citations. A poster mentioned elsewhere in this thread that Wikipedia's articles on animal husbandry are laughably incorrect, to the p…

Sure, people cite online stuff more, because people are lazy. But I haven't seen any bias against people who do cite books. That's mostly what I cite, since I write articles while I'm working my way through books, citing the book in the process. People seem to actually welcome it, if anything. I've added some information not previously available online that way about some archaeological sites, Greek wines, old AI systems, and a few other things. I've gotten only positive comments from doing that, which makes it extra-weird that people say Wikipedia is so unfriendly to contributors. No bureaucracy or acronyms or anything; just a few paragraphs with a citation to a book or two, click save, done.

Surely there must be books on animal husbandry that can be used to improve the articles? There has to be something, because I don't think Wikipedia should let you just cite "trust me, I know this". As a reader, I don't want to have to trust Wikipedia; I want Wikipedia to point me to somewhere where I can follow it up.

I do agree that there is a huge pile of stuff only covered in books that is under-covered on Wikipedia currently, due to nobody having gone to the library and dug up the information yet. It's got 3.8 million articles in English, but I think is not even halfway "done".

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#286

Post by pbhjpbhj »

nowarninglabel wrote: post #178
geraldalewis wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's extremely difficult to participate, I ask honestly: why should it be easy to participate? > and I don't want to need to spend a bunch at Wikipedia reading countless rules trying to figure that out You don't want to spend time contributing, you just want readers to accept your contribution? I hope I'm misreading your intent, as it sounds like you feel you're above the vetting process? I've made some modest cont…

Your attitude speaks to exactly what is wrong with Wikipedia. You seem to think it should be difficult to participate, such that only the elite who have busted their chops should be able to do so. If you wish to end up with a dead community (which is exactly what is happening, the number contributors is stabilizing not growing), then fine, but if you wish to actually expand the wealth of human knowledge available the…

>You seem to think it should be difficult to participate, such that only the elite who have busted their chops should be able to do so. //

Wherein "the elite" is anyone with internet access to Wikipedia and "busted their chops" means spent a few hours on Wikipedia reading how the editing and review processes work.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#287

Post by sethg »

b2spirit wrote: post #273
philwelch wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason is because deletion is one of the single biggest areans for status games. See, from the outside, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. And there's a community there to write an encyclopedia. Sensible, no? Actually, the community comes first and the encyclopedia is a side-effect. The community functions very politically, and very much like a game as well. The original intention might have been an encyclopedia with…

What are PvE and PvP?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_versus_environment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_versus_player

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#288

Post by xtracto »

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…

And IMHO all those items that were removed contained information of some kind.

I imagine the deletionism of wikipedia comes from the fact that it is very hard to pay the bills. But in my opinion, every piece of information (yes, even pages about fictional furry characters which clearly state that they are fictional and their context) should be preserved.

However, I think wikipedia in its current structure falls short to achieve such objective. A "distributed wikipedia" (where everybody can contribute disk space) would be the the natural step IMO.

Three things I will add to the current wikipedia 1. Distributed storage, process. 2. Completely avoid deletionism 3. Use Article rating (there is some rating going on, but no straightforward way to use it [like filtering pages with less than 4 stars).

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#289

Post by mangodrunk »

j_baker wrote: post #21
javert wrote: post #5

First of all, the author is wrong. Someone saying "Hey, I know that person, they're an expert on X," does not mean they belong in an encyclopedia. Furthermore, a sizeable group of people already had a discussion on whether the person meets Wikipedia's standards and decided that they do not. Now, the author feels entitled to barge in without learning anything about how Wikipedia actually works, and complain that it's…

Interesting. You point all the bad things the author did in regard to wikipedia's process, which I suppose is fair. But at the same time, you don't really make a compelling argument that the person in question doesn't belong in wikipedia. Should I take this to mean that the merits of the article in question are secondary to Wikipedia's processes?

I will take your comment as your ability to ignore all the comments showing how the article was correctly deleted.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#290

Post by kstenerud »

estel wrote: post #272
kstenerud wrote: post #70

What Wikipedia really needs is for a UI expert to step in and fix what is essentially a broken UI. Requesting a reinstatement of a deleted page in a properly designed UI should take no more than a couple of clicks and 1 minute of reading, tops. Navigating a twisted web of broken or confusing or incorrect links with walls of text at every step does not a good UI make. All of the UI frustrations the op experiences snow…

I definitely agree that Wikipedia has wide-spread and deeply seating UI issues; but I disagree that opening a review for the reinstatement of a deleted page should be a simple matter of a few clicks. If a lengthy discussion has already reached conclusion on a matter, having someone jump through a few hoops and provide a good reason to reopen that debate doesn't seem unreasonable.

All process related activities should be a simple matter of a few clicks, regardless of what that process is.

Making someone jump through hoops (beyond a simple warning page) as a deliberate policy is even worse than organically grown bureaucracy.

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