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25 Years of Wikipedia

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Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#431

Post by rand846633 »

phatfish wrote: post #371
shevy-java wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO Wales has been sitting on that chair for too long. He should retire. It would also be better for Wikipedia to not have any "public face". I don't want fake-heroes; I want accurate, objective content.

I think he plays a good role as a lightning rod for all the MAGA morons to attack, rather than going after contributors. It's better that Musk has a tantrum at Jimmy rather than doxing some poor editor on X. Sad that he has to play that role, but this is where we are at the moment.

Fair. Not sure if I agree or not, but an interesting perspective for sure. Would love to hear exactly why and how your comment is triggering people her..

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#432

Post by rand846633 »

joering2 wrote: post #109
mr_mitm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very touchy subject for Wales. It caused him to walk out of an interview after 48 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uswRbWyt_pg

Wow, thanks for the video actually. For a long time I felt he was complete jerk but I felt it was maybe biased propaganda. The mere fact he couldn't answer a basic question and explain for all those who don't know, but rather stormed out like a 4 year old child, only proves what I felt about him prior.

Your comment is a great example of someone deciding on a conclusion first, then backfilling a justification using minimal evidence—in this case, a single data point—to validate an existing suspicion or bias. With that standard, you can make virtually any public or semi-public figure look bad if you’re willing to cherry-pick a small enough slice of information.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#433

Post by rand846633 »

anal_reactor wrote: post #207
mr_mitm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very touchy subject for Wales. It caused him to walk out of an interview after 48 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uswRbWyt_pg

Pffft hahaha. Looks like interviewer was inexperienced AND hit a touchy subject. It's like trying to have a casual conversation about dating with someone who's secretly gay.

It’s the style of the interviewer. It works really well for Tilo in many cases at least. He is good as confusing and making you so uncomfortable that loos your media training. He does things that are questionable in normal life but meant more great fact finding. As we see, this does not always work. He has more or less made a career of bing a bit to close and a bit too unpleasant to the people who agree tho be interviewed.

What context may also have been lost is that the interview format is self described as somewhat naive and simple. I think the “who are you” question is his standard opening move. The interview series literally advertises to be for the “disinterested” sure you can hate it but you cannot feel tricked…

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#434

Post by amiga386 »

ryan_lane wrote: post #383
amiga386 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not saying Jimmy Wales is Wikimedia.

This promotional website is created by the Wikimedia Foundation (it says so in the About page), and "has no qualms with omitting information" (GGP's claim), as it fails to mention that Jimmy Wales is co-founder of Wikipedia alongside Larry Sanger. By contrast, Wikipedia does not omit this fact.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#435

Post by f1shy »

jacobolus wrote: post #315
f1shy wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In english is much better now... but:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier-Transformation

That is much more as it used to be in english. Anyway I stated clearly, it was a time ago, and now may be better, that it was just an example. In german is still shooting mathematical symbols that anybody who does not already know what FT is, will 99% not even start to understand what is it about.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#437

Post by nephihaha »

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…

"People, by the thousands, are contributing without asking for anything else in return. This is incredible!"

It's unpaid labour, and has created a precedent elsewhere. It seems to be okay in our society to have lots of unpaid labour but not unpaid bills. A lot of Wikipedia's content is monetised elsewhere as is IMDB's.

Then there is Wikipedia's odd circular relationship with Google. Articles are "verified" (sic) by Google but Wikipedia is where most Google searches now lead.

"Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world."

That view is extremely optimistic. There are still umpteen gaps and biases on Wikipedia, some of which have been created by the administrators themselves.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#438

Post by nephihaha »

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.

I agree with your comments on mathematics. The articles are seemingly accurate in that field, but not usable by laypeople.

The same principle applies to IPA transcriptions. I know some IPA but often find that it is less intelligible than the originals in some cases.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#439

Post by nephihaha »

oytis wrote: post #416
20k wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I want to look something up, I always check out wikipedia first. Its not always accurate, but its invariably a lot more accurate on most topics than random information across the web. Its also pretty easy to spot bad quality wiki articles once you get the gist of the site Its amazing that wikipedia exists - there've been multiple hardcore attempts to kill it over the years for profit, but its still managing to go

If the choice is between Wikipedia vs random information accross the web, then Wikipedia is undoubtedly better. But it doesn't have to be that, on many topics there are reputable sources to consult first.

There is very little "random information" on the internet which you can find easily anymore. The blogosphere is cordoned off by search engines as are personal websites most of the time.

Most academic papers are behind paywalls now. Which is maybe just as well given AI scraping.

Re: 25 Years of Wikipedia

#440

Post by nephihaha »

andruby wrote: post #412
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…

I fondly remember visiting Wikipedia HQ in Jan 2012. It was amazing to see how small their "operation" was :) Back then they had 474M monthly unique visitors, 83,444 active contributors and a staff of less than 100. I'm still blown away by the collaboration. To me, that was the promise of "Web 2.0". On the kitchen door they hung xkcd 903, 906 and another webcomic mentioning that only 13% of updates to Wikipedia are f…

Because they don't pay 99.9% of the people who effectively work for them.
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