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

25 Years of Wikipedia

wikipedia25.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 498 posts

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#311

Post by wwweston »

weslleyskah wrote: post #187
thunderbong wrote: post #147

In the 2000s, in the tech world, the open source successes that were being talked about was always Apache and Linux. When Wikipedia started gaining a bit of traction, everyone made fun of it. It was the butt of jokes in all the prime time comedy shows. And I always felt like telling the critics - "Don't you see what is happening? People all over the world are adding their own bits of knowledge and creating this huge…

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, just like Work or University

“Work” and “University” are so wildly different as institutions that to use them this way makes it perfectly clear how little merit your point has.

It’s an empty character attack - possibly a reflection of your own - meant to appeal only to the worst despairing suspicions of others. It does nothing to illuminate specific dynamics of group knowledge negotiation.

Anyone who has participated knows there can be conflict and abuse — and more about how that’s addressed than someone throwing drive-by distrust.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#312

Post by whynotmaybe »

rvnx wrote: post #247
dc396 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's always doable to find or fabricate facts, and the truth wins based on the amount of energy, power and money that the person has. You appear to be using unusual definitions of "fact" and "truth", more akin to "assertions" and "vibe". I'll stick with the traditional definitions.

An example of (either fabricated, or just very convenient) facts: [1] https://patriotpolling.com/our-polls/f/greenland-supports-jo... According to an American poll that surveyed 416 people residing across Greenland on their support for joining the United States. 57.3% wants to join the US. [2] https://www.politico.eu/article/greenland-poll-mute-egede-do... According to a Danish poll (conducted through web interviews)…

You know that both can be true right ?

If I ask 10 people what they think of something and 60% says "no" and if I ask another 10 people and 90% says "yes" there's no relation between the 60% and the 90%, like at all.

Or as Homer said it "Anybody can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 40% of people know that."

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#313

Post by acdha »

FiveOhThree wrote: post #286
acdha wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If that was really their motive, they sure picked an odd way to express it by focusing their efforts on attacking one woman with very little power in the industry while ignoring the actual game media outlets and huge companies. It’s like claiming you’re an environmental activist but instead of even talking about Exxon you’re busy making death threats to the local pet store claiming their organic kibble isn’t really organic.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#314

Post by jacobolus »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #238
lostlogin wrote: post #215

Earlier 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.

I find math topics to be insufferable. They are written to be as theoretical as possible and borderline useless if you do not already know the topic at hand.

It's extremely difficult to write math articles for a general audience which are both accessible and accurate, and the number of excellent writers working on Wikipedia math articles is tiny.

Please get involved if you want to see improvement. There are some math articles which are excellent: readable, well illustrated, appropriately leveled, comprehensive; but there are many, many others which are dramatically underdeveloped, poorly sourced, unillustrated, confusing, too abstract, overloaded with formulas, etc.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#315

Post by jacobolus »

f1shy wrote: post #300
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find math topics to be insufferable. They are written to be as theoretical as possible and borderline useless if you do not already know the topic at hand.

Absolutely. I do not know the current status, so don’t kill me if now is much better, because is just an example from many. But take fourier series. I remember going into the article, and instead of starting with something lime “helps to decompose functions in sums of sin and cos”, started with “the forier transform is defined as (PUM the integral for with Euler formula) continues: is easy to show the integral conver…

The articles about Fourier series and Fourier transform currently begin with:

> A Fourier series is a series expansion of a periodic function into a sum of trigonometric functions. The Fourier series is an example of a trigonometric series. By expressing a function as a sum of sines and cosines, many problems involving the function become easier to analyze because trigonometric functions are well understood.

and

> In mathematics, the Fourier transform (FT) is an integral transform that takes a function as input, and outputs another function that describes the extent to which various frequencies are present in the original function. The output of the transform is a complex valued function of frequency. The term Fourier transform refers to both the mathematical operation and to this complex-valued function. When a distinction needs to be made, the output of the operation is sometimes called the frequency domain representation of the original function. The Fourier transform is analogous to decomposing the sound of a musical chord into the intensities of its constituent pitches.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#316

Post by weslleyskah »

wwweston wrote: post #311
weslleyskah wrote: post #187

Earlier 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, just like Work or University “Work” and “University” are so wildly different as institutions that to use them this way makes it perfectly clear how little merit your point has. It’s an empty character attack - possibly a reflection of your own - meant to appeal only to the worst despairing suspicions of others. It does nothing to illuminate specific dynamics of group knowledge negotiatio…

> "Work” and “University” are so wildly different as institutions that to use them this way makes it perfectly clear how little merit your point has.

I disagree. Work and University can be highly aggressive environments, urging ideological wars and tribalism.

> It’s an empty character attack - possibly a reflection of your own -

Well, this got personal very quickly.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#317

Post by jamespo »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #235
tux3 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Try clicking those sources, half the time there is zero relation to the sentence. LLMs just output what they want to say, and then sprinkle in what the web search found on random sentences. And not just bottom of the barrel LLMs. Ask Claude about Intel PIN tools, it will merrily tell you that it "Has thread-safe APIs but performance issues were noted with multi-threaded tools like ThreadSanitizer" and then cit…

Did I say not to check the sources? Or is that something you made up?

Ah so irrelevant / invalid sources are OK...

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#318

Post by jacobolus »

UebVar wrote: post #143
gwbas1c wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without context, it looks like the interviewer was a jerk and ambushed him. I've seen plenty of stalling like that on major news programs, and the interviewer always knows to move on (and possibly edit something in to provide context.) --- That being said, "who started what" and "who had what idea" are silly topics to obsesses about. It always come down to who put the long-term work in. I think Wales was "in the righ…

The interview started with the most mundane question "Who are you?", and the very first sentence of Wales is either a lie or misleading. The journalists asks for clarification (thats a journalists job, btw), and in his second sentence of the interview Wales insults the journalist. I'm pretty sure who is the jerk here. It also was Wales who bought up the topic, not the journalist. If he considers it a stupid topic he…

Sanger was originally hired to edit Nupedia, a web encyclopedia project with a strict peer review process, and only worked for Wales for about a year. Wikipedia was started as a side project (with Sanger contributing to the concept and some early organizing), but Wikipedia quickly became much more successful while Nupedia basically never got off the ground. My impression is that Sanger wanted to impose his own vision on Wikipedia, but couldn't because the community of volunteer editors disagreed, and when Wales stopped paying him as a full time Nupedia editor (Wales's company was tight on cash at that time), he stopped any involvement. This was long before most of the actual work of Wikipedia happened, and that should have been the end of the story.

But ever since, Sanger has been trash talking Wikipedia as a project and community ("broken beyond repair") and trying to undermine it. A few years later he started a competing project (which was predictably a total failure). For two decades he has been promoting himself as "cofounder of Wikipedia". Interviewer after interviewer asks the same lazy questions about the subject, without ever adding any new insight. (You can see that Sanger's ghost is chasing Wikipedia even into this discussion.)

It's beating a dead horse, and entirely off the topic of what the interview was supposed to be about. Answering the question clearly and accurately takes a lot of time and finesse, which is wasted on the interviewer and most of the audience. Wales clearly screwed up in that interview, but it's not hard to see where he's coming from, psychologically.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#319

Post by moffkalast »

jader201 wrote: post #16
dreslan wrote: post #10

Wikipedia is and continues to be the best thing that happened to the internet. A shining example of an open platform that works.

Except for their unnecessarily incessant fund raising. There’s zero reason it should happen that often, and that intrusively.

Eh out of all the nonprofits that incessantly fundraise, Wikipedia gets a pass the most. Nobody else can compete with their vast utility to just about everyone.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#320

Post by 12ian34 »

advisedwang wrote: post #296
wintermutestwin wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely is possible to write completely neutrally. All it takes is for the writer to be aware/honest of their biases and to have a goal of achieving a neutral perspective. Of course the goal of most writing is explicitly to not be neutral.

Take the example of circumcision. You could probably write a mere definition of circumcision neutrally, sure. But do you include cultural practices of circumcision? Do you include criticism? If so, how many column inches do you dedicate to either? Which comes first? That surely is going to determine whether the article appears to support or oppose, which is basically the issue in the comment above. But beyond that, d…

well said, reminds me of the Kuleshov Effect[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_effect

Post reply on HN