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Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

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Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#51

Post by commoner »

ndnxhs wrote: post #27
flexie wrote: post #11

People come to Wikipedia to get an answer. Many users of Wikipedia are kids, or non-native English speakers for whom contributing is a challenge. Or laymen that don't know about the subject and naturally don't feel like they could contribute anything. Or people who simply don't know how to contribute. Or people visiting via mobiles where it's really difficult to research and contribute. If you adjust for all those us…

Wikipedia does a lot to prevent new users participating. The mediawiki software is very confusing and has a lot of different functionality crammed in to the same page edit tool that doesn't even make sense. I attemped to create a page about a slightly obscure file format with all the information I had found while developing with it. I linked to all the sources I found that helped me understand it and my submission wa…

The file format you tried to write about isn't notable enough to have its own article in Wikipedia. The notability guidelines are there to prevent people from writing about things that can't be verified by reliable sources, and it's a mechanism to help ensure that articles are accurate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability

While not every topic belongs on Wikipedia, there are a number of other places where your article would be appreciated:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Alternative_outlets

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#52

Post by ogrisel »

ndnxhs wrote: post #27
flexie wrote: post #11

People come to Wikipedia to get an answer. Many users of Wikipedia are kids, or non-native English speakers for whom contributing is a challenge. Or laymen that don't know about the subject and naturally don't feel like they could contribute anything. Or people who simply don't know how to contribute. Or people visiting via mobiles where it's really difficult to research and contribute. If you adjust for all those us…

Wikipedia does a lot to prevent new users participating. The mediawiki software is very confusing and has a lot of different functionality crammed in to the same page edit tool that doesn't even make sense. I attemped to create a page about a slightly obscure file format with all the information I had found while developing with it. I linked to all the sources I found that helped me understand it and my submission wa…

Putting a blog post would already be a positive contribution. Then reference it a bit, for instance by answering relevant questions on stackoverflow and linking to it to give more comprehensive details.

Over time your page will naturally get referenced by Google and other search engines.

Too bad it's not accepted in Wikipedia, but as long as the information is easily findable and organized as an easy to read and comprehensive enough reference, your work will be useful to many.

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#54

Post by agurk »

espressomachiat wrote: post #2

Exactly - within 30 minutes 20 people have upvoted but no one has commented.

Hah, as a long-time lurker when I saw that title I thought it was interesting and made a mental note to come back when there were comments. It didn't even cross my mind to comment on it - I wonder what causes the different perspective of those who do.

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#55

Post by segfaultbuserr »

buboard wrote: post #45
michaelt wrote: post #30

One of Wikipedia's power users, [...] Assuming he doesn't sleep or eat or anything else [...] that's still one edit every four minutes. When your hobby is replacing hyphens with en dashes [1] and removing errant newlines [2] I doubt it takes 4 minutes per page. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plymouth_Brethren... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Raymond_Ramazani_...

probably uses a bot

As the original Reddit thread pointed out, a fully-automatic edit system is required to use a separate bot account. Edits like this, is called a semi-automatic edit, or "cleanup tasks", or "maintenance". It includes adding proper categories, fixing links and typos, correcting some deprecated Mediawiki syntax and templates to standard code, etc. Editors can use mulitple tools to do this job, with a mouse click and proper regular expressions, you can edit a dozen of pages.

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#56

Post by rerx »

retSava wrote: post #29
flexie wrote: post #11

People come to Wikipedia to get an answer. Many users of Wikipedia are kids, or non-native English speakers for whom contributing is a challenge. Or laymen that don't know about the subject and naturally don't feel like they could contribute anything. Or people who simply don't know how to contribute. Or people visiting via mobiles where it's really difficult to research and contribute. If you adjust for all those us…

I'd say that many times, that's true of Swedish topics too. I wonder how well that fits with eg Wikipedia in other languages where English may not be so fluent though, eg German?

The German Wikipedia is large and sees a lot of activity. Articles about topics relating mostly to Germany, Austria or Switzerland are usually better than the English ones. Other articles are often somewhat biased towards a readership from those country, which is actually helpful if you live there.

Lower English language fluency in the general population, compared to the Netherlands or Scandinavia, supports this of course. But also the fact that German remains a scholarly language to this day (in the humanities but also in some branches of engineering).

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#57

Post by Juliate »

chrisco255 wrote: post #6
keithwhor wrote: post #4

Yes. Most of the content you watch on TV was written and acted by outliers. The products you use and consume were crafted, marketed and even distributed by outliers. First, when zoomed out, outliers in all possible tasks become more common — internet commenting is just a subset for silly folks like me. Secondly, the emergent human social fabric is built to recognize and amplify outspoken and / or talented outliers, v…

I still think it's surprising that there are so many lurkers who literally never engage in the discussion, considering the barriers to do so are so low.

lurking = reading.

Most people (who can) read. That's a lower effort (and most of the time sufficient) than writing.

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#59

Post by anc84 »

retSava wrote: post #29
flexie wrote: post #11

People come to Wikipedia to get an answer. Many users of Wikipedia are kids, or non-native English speakers for whom contributing is a challenge. Or laymen that don't know about the subject and naturally don't feel like they could contribute anything. Or people who simply don't know how to contribute. Or people visiting via mobiles where it's really difficult to research and contribute. If you adjust for all those us…

I'd say that many times, that's true of Swedish topics too. I wonder how well that fits with eg Wikipedia in other languages where English may not be so fluent though, eg German?

German wikipedia is plagued by the same
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