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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

#71

Post by ndnxhs »

commoner wrote: post #51
ndnxhs wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 belon…

It is a very notable file format used by many devices and lots of software can read it. The only reason its hard to reference is because the company that develops it basically just publishes a C file with how to use it and everyone uses that to write their own implementations.

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

#72

Post by ndnxhs »

ogrisel wrote: post #52
ndnxhs wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

The problem with a blog post is others can't improve it to add more info or fix mistakes. The wiki format is perfect for this.

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

#74

Post by ndnxhs »

rerx wrote: post #47
ndnxhs wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I attemped to create a page about a slightly obscure file format with all the information I had found while developing with it. One of the core principles of Wikipedia is "No original research". Your proposed article sounds like it was just that. The Wikipedia editors would rather have you share that research in a blog post or similar.

Well all the info I have about it comes from a single source published by the developers of the format but apparently just one reference isn't good enough.

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

#75

Post by aasasd »

gurpreet- wrote: post #64

I suppose a related question is if every single person were to comment, would that be beneficial in any way? I personally think we'd get a lot of duplicate comments stating the same thing which would reduce the overall quality of the topic at hand. An example that proves this is Ebay's user reviews. You have a lot of people participating in reviews because it's a review system that works both ways, so it's in the bot…

There's no need to guess what it would look like―just go to /r/all posts on popular subreddits. 200 top-level comments, and people still add new ones with zero useful info and zero chance of being seen by more that a dozen others.

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

#76

Post by freeflight »

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.

The barriers only seem low to those people who've already passed them.

But I remember teenage me, over 20 years ago, being very reserved about writing online because I considered my grammar too bad and I didn't want to embarrass myself.

And back then there wasn't even anything social media, where blunders like that could lead straight back to "real" me, the whole idea still made me anxious.

Can't even begin to imagine how teenagers these days must feel with social media being literally everywhere and recording pretty much everything they write for the foreseeable future.

At least nowadays they have access to some pretty good grammar correction tools ;)

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

#77

Post by benj111 »

avenius wrote: post #17
chrisco255 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anecdata, but I'm a typical lurker. If I don't have something to contribute to a discussion, I stay silent. I think that goes for a lot of people. There's also the commitment angle - if you engage in a discussion, you're typically committed to follow up on the responses you get. That can be more of a time/attention commitment than people are interested in, and with the growing toxicity of online discourse a lot of pe…

I agree with your statement. It also adds a lot of bulk, with little substance if everyone chimes in with their own version of a post they agree with.

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

#78

Post by yesenadam »

DanBC wrote: post #62
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…

It's a problem for Wikipedia which says a central principle is that it's the enclyclopedia anyone can edit. That's clearly not true with Wikipedia's hostile to new users policies (even with the existance of "don't bite the newbies"). Even creating a username means you have to navigate the username policy, and the two admin boards (one RFC, one noticeboard) for usernames. There are two templates for usernames (and tem…

Really? Is that one of the main problems with wikipedia? Even in the top 20?!

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

#79

Post by jalfresi »

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.

I find it's mostly that posting a comment is very different from entering into discussion. There is a surprising amount of friction attached to entering into a discussion on the web, compared to just lobbing a comment onto a page (like I'm doing right now). Throw in point scoring to comments, and you've created a system that just doesn't appeal to the majority of people.

You get publicly scored on your contributions to the discussion. Most people are turned off by the idea of discussions being adversarial, point scoring, confrontational.

And in that respect, I consider the barriers to comment contribution to be very high indeed.

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

#80

Post by NeedMoreTea »

commoner wrote: post #68
DanBC wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a problem for Wikipedia which says a central principle is that it's the enclyclopedia anyone can edit. That's clearly not true with Wikipedia's hostile to new users policies (even with the existance of "don't bite the newbies"). Even creating a username means you have to navigate the username policy, and the two admin boards (one RFC, one noticeboard) for usernames. There are two templates for usernames (and tem…

The username policy is quite simple. A username: 1. Must represent a single person, not a company, organization, website, band, partnership, or other group of people 2. Must not be deceptive or impersonate someone else 3. Must not be unreasonably long 4. Must not be inflammatory or imply that you intend to troll If you create an account that doesn't meet this policy, an administrator will prevent you from editing unt…

So simple it's presented on a page with dozens of subsections. It should present a simple version like your 5 points and link to the longer version for the few outlier cases or rejections.

It's repeated for every single policy page - they are enormously long and complex for every single topic. There is nothing remotely like a friendly beginners guide to helping - be that fixing some poor language, or correcting a mistake. You have to plough through the meta Wikipedia policy encyclopedia and figure out what's relevant or not the hard way.

On my experience many moons ago, Wikipedia was one of the most hostile sites I've ever encountered for new users. I dread to think how a subject expert who isn't also an IT expert finds it.

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