I've often found it's bare bone utilitarian and efficient design a breath of fresh air compared to most of what's online today. That, and their philosophy of being donation based to keep the lights on.
25 Years of Wikipedia
281–290 of 498 posts
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Wikipedia is a corporation nitpick: WMF (the org that develops and hosts Wikipedia and its related services like Wikimedia Commons) is a non-profit foundation, not the classic type of profit-driven corporation that your post implies.
I don't think corporation implies for-profit. In my eyes, corporation refers to a large organization with some self-serving motivation which is not necessarily just money. Being a non-profit just so happens to be the best vehicle for this motivation but it doesn't mean that the motivation doesn't exist.
at least in america, in common discussion outside of legal/highly wonky circles, referring to an organization as a corporation almost always implies a for-profit corporation, with (literally) vanishingly few examples of the contrary in popular knowledge (RIP CPB, may you return someday).
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh. Wow. I had no idea Jimmy Wales was like that. Enlightening.
There's context. Hank Green talked about it in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zi0ogvPfCA , but in short, paraphrasing, and adding my own thoughts: Jimmy Wales has been poked at with the question of whether he should call himself a founder or specifically co-founder for a long time, by right-wingers who think Wikipedia is too woke, and want to irritate and discredit him as much as possible, and instead raise up his…
> Jimmy Wales has been poked at with the question of whether he should call himself a founder or specifically co-founder
Not surprising! Are we setting aside how deceitful his answer his? Claiming all credit for a collaborative accomplishment -- which he does by adopting the "founder" title -- would rightfully provoke "poking" by interviewers. I can't imagine an interview not addressing a question that is so pertinent to Wales' notoriety. They literally cannot properly introduce him without confronting it! To say those interviewers are acting in "transparently bad-faith" comes across to me as plainly biased.
Sanger's politics don't change this, either. It might be the case that you have to concede on this to people you politically disagree with.
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does this relate to a particular domain or field? I find it so good, and on the rare occasion I’ve found something wrong, I’ve fixed it.
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I'm reading the Diamond article you liked and I cannot understand for the lift of me what you wanted? The Brittanica article seems substantially poorer. Note also that a key feature of Wikipedia is the hyperlinks! If you don't know what a "crystalline structure" is, or you want to know more about "hardness", you're welcome to click the links and dive further!
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except for their unnecessarily incessant fund raising. [citation needed] Fixed.
Its a widely known controversy https://www.dailydot.com/news/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraisi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
Sure I'm very familiar with the donation banners etc but still, how unnecessary are they really?
They have no actual "product" to sell and no ads.
At the same time I imagine a huge amount of traffic, that has surely gotten much much worse with the AI "renaissance" we're going through.
They have staff, etc.. So what's the deal with all the wikipedia hate lately?
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture Okay, what the actual fuck? IIRC it was people whining about the absolute state of games journalism in the 2010's.
GamerGate was about journalism in the same way that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was to protect the rights of ethnic Russian minorities in that country. The GamerGate people used ethics as an excuse because that sounds a lot more reasonable than “hate mob riled up by a bitter ex”, but it fell apart as soon as you looked at the evidence (e.g. they were most focused on attacking a developer over a relationship with…
Or, you know, people had long been unhappy with the poor state of game reviews and the incident in question prompted broad complaints. Rather than accept criticism the journalists in focus instead decided to use their platforms to smear their critics as a sexist hate mob.
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Any particular example you could provide to support this wild claim ?
I don't think it's particularly wild - Jimmy Wales talked about the pages to do with Gaza before he locked them due to his concerns: https://nypost.com/2025/11/03/business/wikipedia-co-founder-... or https://gizmodo.com/wikipedia-gaza-genocide-locked-200068099....
There are many others though. The 'Solana_(blockchain_platform)' page is mainly a hit piece. When I used to edit Wikipedia, an admin told me that the amount of developers was not a relevant measure for a blockchain platform (!) and that 'proof of history' (using verifiable delay functions to sync clocks then creating an equivalent of Time Division Multiple Access to coordinate a distributed system) was not real (!!). At the time, the introduction to the page was mainly focused on FTX (who invested in Solana Lab's 5th round) and Melania Trump (who launched a token on the platform, amongst many more well known/more liked people and orgs that had done things on Solana, eg Def Jam, Lollapalooza, Instagram, Stripe, Visa, etc) which apparently were not relevant.
Wikipedia's cofounder Larry Sanger has a list of many more.
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its a widely known controversy https://www.dailydot.com/news/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraisi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
Sure I'm very familiar with the donation banners etc but still, how unnecessary are they really? They have no actual "product" to sell and no ads. At the same time I imagine a huge amount of traffic, that has surely gotten much much worse with the AI "renaissance" we're going through. They have staff, etc.. So what's the deal with all the wikipedia hate lately?
The controversy is 95% of spending, including 90% of staff, is on things with no relation to wikipeida that few care about, with exponentially growing costs, which they imply is needed to keep the wiki alive despite how cheap it actually is to run.
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond ?
The introductory paragraph in Simple English is: 'A diamond (from the ancient Greek αδάμας – adámas "unbreakable") is a re-arrangement of carbon atoms (those are called allotropes).' Seriously? Compare with the Britannica one: 'diamond, a mineral composed of pure carbon. It is the hardest naturally occurring substance known; it is also the most popular gemstone. Because of their extreme hardness, diamonds have a numb…
I prefer the real encyclopedias. Britannica or other. The quality was so much better. For me would be hard to believe, anybody with actual experience using britannica can prefer wiki from the explanation quality pov. Of course the wiki has many advantages too. Before LLM I used it for helping with translation, for example. The direct links to web resources, etc. I like having both. I do certainly not want a world where wikipedia has the monopoly of truth, or truth is something “democratic” please understand it correctly, democracy is good, just that in knowledge I’ve seen so often the most popular belief is sometimes wrong.
Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia is surely a formidable source of knowledge, but > Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion. You are romanticizing. Wikipedia is a corporation, just like Work or University, and I personally assume anything corporate is being manipulated by the owners or the ruling oligarchy because they are structurally unreliable. This is especially veritable for Wikipedia. Create an account ther…
> Wikipedia is a corporation nitpick: WMF (the org that develops and hosts Wikipedia and its related services like Wikimedia Commons) is a non-profit foundation, not the classic type of profit-driven corporation that your post implies.
Well, I prefer to be skeptical of any corporation, regardless if it is non-profit or not, until proven otherwise with substantial transparency on their methods of moderation and control.
There is a lack of transparency on Wikipedia. The rules are nebulous and prone to abuse by veteran users and the oligarchs aggregating on political articles.