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25 Years of Wikipedia

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Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#381

Post by ryan_lane »

GuinansEyebrows wrote: post #223
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 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 think this deserves more than a nitpick. WMF also doesn't dictate the actions of the volunteer community, and neither does the board. The content of Wikipedia is fully volunteer created and maintained, and admin actions are also handled by the volunteer community.

The foundation is there to provide technical, legal, and community support. In some cases this is funding for community events, in other cases, this includes funding towards making the editor community more diverse. In most cases, though, it's keeping a staff of folks that maintain and improve the software, and defend the project legally.

So, no Wikipedia isn't a corporation. It's more of a commune.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#382

Post by ryan_lane »

amiga386 wrote: post #19

https://wikipedia25.org/en/the-first-day > Founder Jimbo Wales on a challenge overcome Aren't you forgetting someone, Jimmy? Your co-founder Larry Sanger, perhaps? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger Let's check one of the citations from the History of Wikipedia page: https://www.mid-day.com/lifestyle/health-and-fitness/article... > It was Larry Sanger who chanced upon the critical concept of combining the thr…

> Your co-founder Larry Sanger, perhaps?

Who left extremely early on in the project, went to create a poorly conceived and failed competitor, then spent the next 23ish years shitting on Wikipedia? Why does he deserve any credit?

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#383

Post by ryan_lane »

amiga386 wrote: post #45
GaryBluto wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say his lack of acknowledgment of Larry Sanger is actually quite useful, as it is a perfect and irrefutable example that Wikipedia has no qualms with omitting information and twisting the truth to serve a narrative.

Wikimedia, maybe, but Wikipedia itself acknowledges it in the lead paragraph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia > Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales > Most notably, he co-founded Wikipedia Wikipedia shows integrity even when its co-founder does not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales#Co-founder_status_... > In late 2005, Wales edited his biographical…

Jimmy Wales isn't Wikimedia. He's the co-founder of Wikipedia, and an honorary board member. He doesn't serve any official capacity.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#384

Post by zahlman »

acdha wrote: post #370
zahlman wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even he later admitted that the original claims were fictitious No, he did not. And nobody was claiming that Grayson reviewed Quinn's games beyond like a day or two of confusion, and none of the arguments made relied on that being the case. > what they perceived as unfair privileges for women in the gaming industry than anything about journalism. This is a false dichotomy. The entire point was that the journalism h…

> No, he did not Those were his words, I’m not sure why you’d expect your assertion to be more credible. > nobody was claiming that Grayson reviewed Quinn's games beyond like a day or two of confusion They spent a year lying about her “unethical” actions justifying all of the abuse, and it all traced back to that foundational lie.

> Those were his words

No, they aren't. They're your interpretation of Boston Magazine's spin (and it's really, really obvious purely from the style of the prose that it's a complete hit piece that chose its conclusion ahead of time). The article provides no evidence of any such words. Because there is no such evidence, because he said nothing of the sort.

> They spent a year lying about her “unethical” actions justifying all of the abuse

That is, again, objectively not what happened. Any claims WRT Quinn were evidenced, and were also irrelevant to the large majority of what was going on. (What was actually going on, not what sources like the ones you prefer chose to focus on.)

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#385

Post by ultrablack »

sophacles wrote: post #327
wwweston wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“atlanticist” - the culture of the enlightenment and the good that’s come from it. Wikipedia does hold ideals, that access to knowledge is a net good, that people can cooperate both in contribution and review without a dominating magisterial authority. That rational dialogue and qualification and refinement is possible, and that it’s possible to correct for bias, and see the difference between bias and agenda. Like t…

No. One can beleive in the enlightenment ideals without placing north america, europe, and the relations between them as the most important thing. For example - one could argue (quite successfully) that the US and Europe propping up dictators in south america and middle east to secure easy access to oil against the wishes and election results of those nations is opposed to many enlightenment ideals, but it is still a…

Slave trade was not a product of the enlightenment. That idea is 1000s of years old.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#386

Post by weslleyskah »

ryan_lane wrote: post #381
GuinansEyebrows wrote: post #223

Earlier 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 think this deserves more than a nitpick. WMF also doesn't dictate the actions of the volunteer community, and neither does the board. The content of Wikipedia is fully volunteer created and maintained, and admin actions are also handled by the volunteer community. The foundation is there to provide technical, legal, and community support. In some cases this is funding for community events, in other cases, this incl…

I think I should have used the word 'entity', but commune is better since the body of editors are so diverse. But they sure have oligarchies.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#387

Post by amiga386 »

ryan_lane wrote: post #382
amiga386 wrote: post #19

https://wikipedia25.org/en/the-first-day > Founder Jimbo Wales on a challenge overcome Aren't you forgetting someone, Jimmy? Your co-founder Larry Sanger, perhaps? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger Let's check one of the citations from the History of Wikipedia page: https://www.mid-day.com/lifestyle/health-and-fitness/article... > It was Larry Sanger who chanced upon the critical concept of combining the thr…

> Your co-founder Larry Sanger, perhaps? Who left extremely early on in the project, went to create a poorly conceived and failed competitor, then spent the next 23ish years shitting on Wikipedia? Why does he deserve any credit?

Because he co-founded it, duh. Even if your father abandons your family on your second birthday, to start another family, he's still your dad, no matter how much you hate him.

This website purports to tell us how Wikipedia came to be, 25 years ago. Why not tell it honestly?

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#388

Post by guelo »

hbn wrote: post #329
defjm wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you provide an example article from Wikipedia for such bias? PS: I had to look up „atlanticist“, did this on Wikipedia. (giggle!)

I know sometime around Trump's first presidency, in Bill Clinton's Wikipedia entry, under the Impeachment section they added in a picture of Trump and Clinton shaking hands, apropos of nothing in the surrounding text. I just checked and it's still there.

So what?

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#389

Post by Anthony-G »

hit8run wrote: post #280

https://grokipedia.com

I hadn’t heard of Grokipedia so based on the positive comments in this thread, I thought I’d try it out – only to discover that its search feature sucks.

I’ve just finished watching a HBO TV show on Blu-Ray called “The Night of” so I tried searching for it on Grokipedia. It failed to find an article about the TV series in the first 60 search results (regardless of whether I used double quotes or appended the words “TV” or “series”). After multiple attempts, I gave up.

On the other hand, when I typed the three words into Wikipedia’s search, the TV show was the second search result.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#390

Post by qingcharles »

l7l wrote: post #171

Every time I try to contribute, I get censored by some gatekeeper. It feels as open and inviting nowadays as StackOverflow.

It's getting really hard now. I've been editing since day one. Recently I had awful trouble getting a new article accepted. I gave up for some months and came back and it was accepted first time.

Apparently you can pay a high-ranking Wikipedia editor to massage your article into the site. I know a Hollywood producer who paid to get himself listed.

What amazes me most, though, is that I still find new subjects to write about that don't exist yet on Wikipedia.

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