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Wikipedia is an MMORPG

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Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#61

Post by Talanes »

haunter wrote: post #11
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And just as some people somehow manage to play MMOs every waking hour of the day even as ordinary people would have e.g. a job and a family, so Wikipedia has editors who somehow manage to edit all day every day. I have been active in Wikipedia since shortly after its founding and I am quite familiar with all processes and standards, but I have had edits reverted simply because my edit history struck the obsessive edi…

My main problem that a lot of times I want to do a raid and not the game but the players won't let me do it. The game doesn't say you need this class or this item level, actually anyone can and encouraged to do it. But then you are there against the boss and another player turns up and kills it before you. "Sorry you not meant to kill this boss, this _our_ boss, go farm something else". Then you are locked out from t…

By definition, when you are in an instance, there shouldn't be another rando there to take the boss. What games are you playing?

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#62

Post by ChrisKnott »

teddyh wrote: post #58
jl6 wrote: post #52

I’d be grateful if, in this thread, anybody with an anecdote about how their perfectly fine edit was reverted by the evil career Wikipedians, could provide a link so we can judge for ourselves.

I always ask for this every time Wikipedia critics come telling their tales of woe. But as a rule they don’t provide it.

Also true of StackOverflow and "Google ignores my keywords" complaints. People almost never provide the examples, despite claiming it is a daily occurrence.

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#63

Post by moonbug »

captainmuon wrote: post #57
jl6 wrote: post #52

I’d be grateful if, in this thread, anybody with an anecdote about how their perfectly fine edit was reverted by the evil career Wikipedians, could provide a link so we can judge for ourselves.

Not an edit I made, but the final straw for me was a debate about the article name of the turkey (the animal) on the German wikipedia. The only commonly used name is "Truthahn" which refers to both the female and male animal if you are not being specific. But one especially vocal Wikipedian insists that in his ornithology book, the generic term is always the female term, so "Truthuhn" (with u). That sounds like "turk…

But as any good Wikipedian knows, technical correctness is the best sort of correctness.

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#64

Post by moonbug »

TheNorthman wrote: post #56
busterarm wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That just means they are enforcing their biases on the information. Winning doesn't mean they got it correct, just that they achieved control of the narrative. That's going to push the means of winning to editing towards the collective biases of the majority of wikipedia editors. Just consider the fact that at various times in our history that commonly accepted knowledge was that the Earth was flat, the Sun, Moon and…

That's just what encyclopedias are though, the collective mentality of it's editors, their ideology, so to speak. You were never free to just consume encyclopedias, they were always meant to be understood in the context of their creation. What makes Wikipedia different from its competitors is the sheer diversity of editors contributing.

fine, except that Wikipedia editors aren't diverse.

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#65

Post by busterarm »

TheNorthman wrote: post #56
busterarm wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That just means they are enforcing their biases on the information. Winning doesn't mean they got it correct, just that they achieved control of the narrative. That's going to push the means of winning to editing towards the collective biases of the majority of wikipedia editors. Just consider the fact that at various times in our history that commonly accepted knowledge was that the Earth was flat, the Sun, Moon and…

That's just what encyclopedias are though, the collective mentality of it's editors, their ideology, so to speak. You were never free to just consume encyclopedias, they were always meant to be understood in the context of their creation. What makes Wikipedia different from its competitors is the sheer diversity of editors contributing.

Encyclopedias usually have lots of competition, outside of niche areas.

Wikis sort of have this backwards. There's lots of competition in the niches but there's not much competition with Wikipedia itself. The risk is in it being a singular body of knowledge.

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#66

Post by chki »

busterarm wrote: post #54
chki wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but interestingly it's also somewhat calming because the "winners" tend to see winning as the goal. Maliciously changing facts is almost never their goal because Wikipedia itself is their main (maybe obsessive) focus. It might not be good for them but it's not that dangerous for us readers.

That just means they are enforcing their biases on the information. Winning doesn't mean they got it correct, just that they achieved control of the narrative. That's going to push the means of winning to editing towards the collective biases of the majority of wikipedia editors. Just consider the fact that at various times in our history that commonly accepted knowledge was that the Earth was flat, the Sun, Moon and…

Sure, that's a good point and I absolutely agree that Wikipedia will neither be unbiased nor always very accurate. My idea was simply to refute the statement that somebody actively controls the world's knowledge in intentionally malicious ways, which would imo be worse than unwillingly reproducing your own biases.

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#67

Post by yorwba »

captainmuon wrote: post #57
jl6 wrote: post #52

I’d be grateful if, in this thread, anybody with an anecdote about how their perfectly fine edit was reverted by the evil career Wikipedians, could provide a link so we can judge for ourselves.

Not an edit I made, but the final straw for me was a debate about the article name of the turkey (the animal) on the German wikipedia. The only commonly used name is "Truthahn" which refers to both the female and male animal if you are not being specific. But one especially vocal Wikipedian insists that in his ornithology book, the generic term is always the female term, so "Truthuhn" (with u). That sounds like "turk…

> I've also had many small edits on technical subjects (particle physics and supersymmetry) reversed by people who were self-professedly not experts,

I'm all for having experts determine the notation to be used in their respective fields...

> in his ornithology book, the generic term is always the female term, so "Truthuhn" (with u). That sounds like "turkeychicken" to the average German.

... but that also means deferring to ornithologists on the question of what birds are called, instead of relying on your lay understanding based on eating turkey meat. If chickens were named after their meat, they might be called "Hähnchen". But of course chickens are mostly kept for their eggs, so we end up with the opposite situation where the average person treats neuter "Huhn" as synonymous with female "Henne".

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#68

Post by belorn »

captainmuon wrote: post #57
jl6 wrote: post #52

I’d be grateful if, in this thread, anybody with an anecdote about how their perfectly fine edit was reverted by the evil career Wikipedians, could provide a link so we can judge for ourselves.

Not an edit I made, but the final straw for me was a debate about the article name of the turkey (the animal) on the German wikipedia. The only commonly used name is "Truthahn" which refers to both the female and male animal if you are not being specific. But one especially vocal Wikipedian insists that in his ornithology book, the generic term is always the female term, so "Truthuhn" (with u). That sounds like "turk…

When I discuss test driver development with a friend we often end up talking about the definition of a unit, what inherently defines a programming type, constraint, system tests, what it mean to allow a test drive the development, a class vs function vs data, exploratory programming, what should be tested vs not tested, if refactoring is likely or unlikely once we have a initial version running in production, what they think when using the word test vs what test might mean for me, and a bunch of side topics maybe related to programming.

Collaboration is hard even when two persons are paid to work for a common goal. An encyclopedia also encourage such debate over word definitions, and its only over the medium of writing, so it can very easy fall into arguments over words rather than productive collaboration that produce a working article. When that happen the easiest way out is to follow two rules: the assumption of good faith and an almost robotic approach to using what the majority of sources is using. It is not without reason why most of the issues in Wikipedia comes down to conflict resolution.

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#69

Post by alvarelle »

captainmuon wrote: post #57
jl6 wrote: post #52

I’d be grateful if, in this thread, anybody with an anecdote about how their perfectly fine edit was reverted by the evil career Wikipedians, could provide a link so we can judge for ourselves.

Not an edit I made, but the final straw for me was a debate about the article name of the turkey (the animal) on the German wikipedia. The only commonly used name is "Truthahn" which refers to both the female and male animal if you are not being specific. But one especially vocal Wikipedian insists that in his ornithology book, the generic term is always the female term, so "Truthuhn" (with u). That sounds like "turk…

I find it ironic that you answer to a comment asking for links, but you don't provide any. (Same for the other comments in this thread)

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#70

Post by consumer451 »

HeadsUpHigh wrote: post #59
captainmuon wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an edit I made, but the final straw for me was a debate about the article name of the turkey (the animal) on the German wikipedia. The only commonly used name is "Truthahn" which refers to both the female and male animal if you are not being specific. But one especially vocal Wikipedian insists that in his ornithology book, the generic term is always the female term, so "Truthuhn" (with u). That sounds like "turk…

The non-expert with a beginners' textbook having strong opinions about the subject is everything that's wrong with places like wikipedia and reddit. I just hate it.

> places like wikipedia and reddit. I just hate it.

All human products have issues, but are there any superior alternatives at scale?

Wikipedia is one of our civilization’s greatest achievements, isn’t it? It seems like the Library of Alexandria on steroids to me. Especially when combined with an internet archive.

It’s funny to admit it, but Reddit is also quite an achievement due to the scalable human moderation model and very useful hive mind.

For research, name a better duo.

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