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Wikipedia is an MMORPG

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Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#71

Post by burntoutfire »

consumer451 wrote: post #70
HeadsUpHigh wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mod…

> Are there any superior alternatives at scale?

Pay tens of thousands of experts to work on the encyclopedia instead. The issue isn't scale, but the cost of the labor (which, in Wikipedia's case, is free - but in many cases you get the quality you paid for).

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#72

Post by sergioro »

sergioro wrote: post #42

Shameless plug: I recently wrote a Ruby gem to get/post Wikipedia articles from the command line. Then I can use my text editor to edit the articles which is faster than doing so in the browser. To install it: gem install wikian . To see how it works visit https://rubygems.org/gems/wikian .

*edit: delete "Shameless plug" from above comment

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#73

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

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.

True, that. The psychology of why they want to feel slighted totally defeats me though.

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#74

Post by boomlinde »

chki wrote: post #17
busterarm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scary when you consider that "winning" this game means you get to control the interpretation of facts.

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.

Bias is inherent to the Wikipedia model, at least if you view its content as simply facts. It's not so much a collection of facts as it is a collection of statements corroborated by published sources.

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#75

Post by lixtra »

alvarelle wrote: post #69
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…

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)

Linking your HN persona to your WP persona is something not everyone is happy to do just because some random guy demands it.

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#76

Post by jl6 »

ChrisKnott wrote: post #62
teddyh wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s because cases are rarely black-and-white and even legitimate grievances usually have at least some element of fault lying with the complainant, which undermines hyperbolic claims that the sky is falling at these websites.

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#77

Post by hirako2000 »

burntoutfire wrote: post #71
consumer451 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mod…

> Are there any superior alternatives at scale? Pay tens of thousands of experts to work on the encyclopedia instead. The issue isn't scale, but the cost of the labor (which, in Wikipedia's case, is free - but in many cases you get the quality you paid for).

This alternative has shown to produce inferior universal encyclopedia.

Encyclopedia Britanica was/is probably the most successful professional collection of knowledge, it's been superseded by Wikipedia over a decade ago.

Free contributor is a low expense for sure but what you get isn't necessarily lower value than paying contributors.

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#78

Post by saagarjha »

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.

This is the Wikipedia article of the high school I attended just a few years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monta_Vista_High_School. While I was there it had approximately ten times as much content, which I will readily admit was probably not entirely written by a third party but gave a fairly decent amount of information that to my knowledge was accurate. Some time recently it has been stripped entirely by a Wikipedian who seems to have made a policy to trim down articles like this one to essentially nothing and go through the list of notable graduates and decide for himself which ones “deserved” to be on there. Apparently “tons of people die in war” is a reason to remove a Navy SEAL who was awarded some sort of thing for bravery (I can’t judge military decorations very well, but he has a statue in the city park and such so I think it’s at least worth more thought than the edit summary indicates was given.) It’s difficult to feel these edits were done in good faith rather than a way to flex the rules by taking over an article and reducing it to a husk of its original self (rather than working to source the information that was missing citations, for example…)

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#79

Post by saagarjha »

ChrisKnott wrote: post #62
teddyh wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here’s one from Stack Overflow that annoyed me recently: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16023637/difference-betw.... The question is quite sane (there are these two similar options in GCC, how do they differ?), but it was closed as being “ambiguous”.

Re: Wikipedia is an MMORPG

#80

Post by burntoutfire »

hirako2000 wrote: post #77
burntoutfire wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are there any superior alternatives at scale? Pay tens of thousands of experts to work on the encyclopedia instead. The issue isn't scale, but the cost of the labor (which, in Wikipedia's case, is free - but in many cases you get the quality you paid for).

This alternative has shown to produce inferior universal encyclopedia. Encyclopedia Britanica was/is probably the most successful professional collection of knowledge, it's been superseded by Wikipedia over a decade ago. Free contributor is a low expense for sure but what you get isn't necessarily lower value than paying contributors.

Were the expert-produced entries in Britannica of lower quality/accuracy than in Wikipedia?
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