51–60 of 115 posts
I was thinking just yesterday whether wikipedia will ever change its design or if it is timeless (unless devices change radically). I don't remember any major changes, I guess there were gradual that I didn't notice?
The one of the recent iteration removed the symbol from the Klingon alphabet to be replaced by a Geʿez character, along with other changes.
The page is 2.5mb and took 18 seconds to fully load. Is that why they've been badgering us for donations for donations recently? (I am being facetious; I bloody love Wikipedia and do donate, but you think they'd be more careful about this sort of thing)
I pay monthly to wikipedia, I use it tens of times a day, it is a fantastic unparalleled resource - a real public good. Wikipedia is a proof of a utopian vision that infused the early web - ensuring public rights wins public contribution. Humanities collective knowledge is better distributed because of Wikipedia, a true wonder of the modern world. IMHO, we must treasure wikipedia as it is not clear it could happen ag…
I feel like wikipedia killed the web in a way. Anytime you search for something 95% of the time wikipedia is the first result and thus 99% of the time it is I go to it for information. What websites or innovations have we missed out on because of this?
Whoa - Wikipedia has been around more than half my life already? Good on them! It's one of the best things humanity has ever created. Hopefully they'll find a funding strategy that doesn't make them constantly feel like panhandlers. They provide uncountably huge value, yet I suspect with their current marketing, even very heavy readers rarely donate. EDIT: Sounds like they are working on it: https://15.wikipedia.org/…
I used to think it was the best thing humanity created. Lately, I see individuals, and companies carefully crafting pages to further their agenda. It could be PR, name recognition, or inaccurate information reguarding their cause. It could be as subtle as changing the definition of a neologism to singular, rather than plural. I ran across this recently. Someone wanted to promote their technospeck.whatever domain, but…
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This feels ungrammatical to me. I think "I find it perfectly cromulent." feels more correct. (I only comment because I'm amused to find I've heard "cromulent" used as a "real word" enough that my brain has intuited rules for its usage.)
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I feel like wikipedia killed the web in a way. Anytime you search for something 95% of the time wikipedia is the first result and thus 99% of the time it is I go to it for information. What websites or innovations have we missed out on because of this?
Indeed, it's too bad that libraries were created as well. Just think of how many other knowledge sharing techniques would have been developed in its place. I know some of the other contenders were "smoke signals", "bird whistles", the list would be longer but I refuse to accept readily accessible, free sources of knowledge. And the smoke signals have been strangely quiet as of late.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like wikipedia killed the web in a way. Anytime you search for something 95% of the time wikipedia is the first result and thus 99% of the time it is I go to it for information. What websites or innovations have we missed out on because of this?
Indeed, it's too bad that libraries were created as well. Just think of how many other knowledge sharing techniques would have been developed in its place. I know some of the other contenders were "smoke signals", "bird whistles", the list would be longer but I refuse to accept readily accessible, free sources of knowledge. And the smoke signals have been strangely quiet as of late.
The example I always use, the occasion when it first occurred to me, was a couple years ago when, for some reason, I decided I wanted to make a foam for a cocktail. Within 5 minutes, I had found a video on Youtube illustrating how, not to mention a dozen other sites documenting various techniques.
I imagined being back in the 1980s or 90s and confronting the same wild impulse. How would I have figured this out? Asked a couple people perhaps. Contemplate a trip to my local library. Maybe make a mental note to chat with a bartender next time I found myself at a cocktail bar. Probably just give up on the idea and go back to watching the A-Team.
This is a rather trivial example. But then consider the ease and dramatically lowered TTK where programming knowledge (via StackOverflow) or general knowledge (Wikipedia) is concerned. The internet itself cut the lag. But it was first Google, then Wikipedia, that turned TT#$&!%&@ (Time To me cursing that I have access to all this potentially useful information that I can't quite seem to reach) to TTK, Time To (real meaningful well-organized) Knowledge.
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Indeed, it's too bad that libraries were created as well. Just think of how many other knowledge sharing techniques would have been developed in its place. I know some of the other contenders were "smoke signals", "bird whistles", the list would be longer but I refuse to accept readily accessible, free sources of knowledge. And the smoke signals have been strangely quiet as of late.
In a library you get Bill O'Reilly and Howard Zinn and everyone in between. But on Wikipedia, you get the loudest and most obsessive voice.
This is not a matter of opinion. One such rule is that there is a procedure to go through for deleting pages - I've personally been victim to a now-ex admin who killed a page I was working on, completely bypassing the checks and balances that are supposed to be in place. (Said admin was later kicked off the site for bot editing without approval, but not for ignoring deletion procedure.)
The site's still quite valuable as long as you avoid politically charged topics (and run, don't walk, from the talk pages), but they are open to being forked if this continues.