71–80 of 87 posts
For those who think Wikipedia is right in defending Wikipedia Zero, could you please elaborate on how this will not impact the adoption of any alternative encyclopaedic website?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>No, Because it closes out competition to newer, better information. But that would only make sense if Wikipedia created some sort of insurmountable barrier for newer, better information. It doesn't. Newer, better information can reach people through Wikipedia with just as much ease (provided it fits Wiki's publishing standards) as it would through any other platform. For all intents and purposes, Wikipedia and other…
Wikipedia creates an enormous barrier to better information due to its size and scope, and its co-dependent relationship with Google. In many cases Wikipedia's information is substandard when compared to other sources, both in presentation and content. The wiki layout is useless for certain content types, such as video. For example, many people prefer to use imdb for movie information (which is also free to the end u…
Too silly to address.
> Wikipedia's medical information is unreliable and dangerous.
Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia not a DIY medical textbook. If you see dangerous information please feel free to edit it out — Wikipedia emphatically does not give medical advice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Medical_disclaimer).
> The wiki layout is useless for certain content types, such as video.
New-ish media viewer allows video playback fullscreen or inline, it's no youtube but unclear in which way you consider this useless.
> So giving free access to Wikipedia, over other sites is not actually in the public good at all. The answer is more competition.
Firstly Wikipedia Zero does not preclude, and indeed hasn't precluded, Facebook zero etc. Regarding competition, you know Wikipedia is CC-BY-SA right? You and everyone else has a right to fork the entire project, along with the mediawiki software...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. Rather than Internet.org giving free access to wikipedia and facebook, they should just give people 100mb free data and let them decide what is best for them.
This is different to giving free access to Wikipedia. You can download Gigabytes of Wikipedia articles every month without paying for it. A better alternative would be to enable users to choose, say, five domains that don't count. But then clever users choose one web proxy site and get all their internet for free...
We are not talking about broadband providers, but GSM/Edge internet on what is essentially feature phones.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is this critique useful? I've never seen a net neutrality advocate be opposed to competition. I also don't know a single net neutrality advocate who was in favor of letting the wide variety of early ISPs decay into the sad monopolistic situation we have now. All they're saying is that given that we no longer have an effective marketplace to reign in in the oligopoly in place, we need regulation to limit the harm.…
I just don't see much discussion around the topic; that may be because it's obvious for everyone inside the topic that it's unfixable, but as an outsider who lives in a very corrupt country (among the developed) but which nevertheless has plenty of broadband competition, I just find it very hard to believe that it almost requires a political revolution to increase competition in that market - or that at least that's…
In the 80s a judge broke up our national communications monopoly [1]. That came as the result of action starting in the 70s, when business regulation had some teeth. To aid that, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 created the notion of the Competitive Local Exchange Carrier [2], allowing local competition for phone service by forcing the local-monopoly phone companies to share their wires. But that came just as telephone service was starting to become irrelevant, and didn't touch the local monopolies of the cable companies.
Eventually, AT&T basically put itself back together [3]. And that happened because the climate for business regulation had shifted; anti-trust enforcement has now withered away to the point that it's ok with oligopoly and near-monopoly. Why? Well, I think that's partly a US shift to managerialist thinking, aided by billionaires funding plenty of think tanks and professorships that just happen to promote then notion that billionaires and their companies should be able to do as they please.
This is all compounded by the insane US campaign finance system, where we end up with legislators that are very strongly pro-money. There is a lot of talk about supporting "free markets", but very little interest in healthy markets, ones where competition is a meaningful check on the action of dominant players. We had a very competitive ISP market, but it's basically gone now, and surprisingly few mourn it.
So basically, the whole political tide of the last 30 years in the US has been away from the kinds of governmental interventions that would restore real competition in the broadband market. It's so bad that 20 states have laws against municipalities providing broadband to their own citizens. [4]
So yeah, I'm just not expecting meaningful pro-competition action in the next 10 years. Net neutrality, though, is an achievable short term goal, because that's basically defending the status quo.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_local_exchange_carr...
[3] Stephen Colbert sums it up here starting at 2:23: http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/eamlaf/bears---balls--...
[4] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-alr...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just don't see much discussion around the topic; that may be because it's obvious for everyone inside the topic that it's unfixable, but as an outsider who lives in a very corrupt country (among the developed) but which nevertheless has plenty of broadband competition, I just find it very hard to believe that it almost requires a political revolution to increase competition in that market - or that at least that's…
Yeah, there's a lot of history here, so I can see why it's mysterious to outsiders. But as somebody who has been following this since a teen, I believe a proposal of "let's increase competition" will go absolutely nowhere in the US. A very quick summary: In the 80s a judge broke up our national communications monopoly [1]. That came as the result of action starting in the 70s, when business regulation had some teeth.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia creates an enormous barrier to better information due to its size and scope, and its co-dependent relationship with Google. In many cases Wikipedia's information is substandard when compared to other sources, both in presentation and content. The wiki layout is useless for certain content types, such as video. For example, many people prefer to use imdb for movie information (which is also free to the end u…
> Wikipedia creates an enormous barrier to better information due to its size and scope, and its co-dependent relationship with Google. Too silly to address. > Wikipedia's medical information is unreliable and dangerous. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia not a DIY medical textbook. If you see dangerous information please feel free to edit it out — Wikipedia emphatically does not give medical advice ( https://en.wikipedia…
That disclaimer (hidden in the terms and conditions section) does not change the fact that many people do use Wikipedia for medical information. Each page that contains medical content should have its own disclaimer stating that the information contained in it has not been checked by doctors for accuracy and could have been changed by anyone at any time and could be incorrect. As this article points out [1]:
They discovered that 90% of the entries made statements that contradicted latest medical research. Lead author Dr Robert Hasty, of the Wallace School of Osteopathic Medicine in North Carolina, said: "While Wikipedia is a convenient tool for conducting research, from a public health standpoint patients should not use it as a primary resource because those articles do not go through the same peer-review process as medical journals."
>If you see dangerous information please feel free to edit it out
But how would I know if it's dangerous? I'm not a doctor. Your comment encapsulates the problem. You are asking me, a non-trained person, to make medical judgments on behalf of others.
When Google chooses Wikipedia pages to be the top result for medical queries, instead of peer-reviewed information then that is an enormous barrier to entry.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, Because it closes out competition to newer, better information.
>No, Because it closes out competition to newer, better information. But that would only make sense if Wikipedia created some sort of insurmountable barrier for newer, better information. It doesn't. Newer, better information can reach people through Wikipedia with just as much ease (provided it fits Wiki's publishing standards) as it would through any other platform. For all intents and purposes, Wikipedia and other…
Similarly, I may happen to trust Wikipedia itself, but the tactics it is using are very abusable to keep a for-profit's inferior loss-leader product on top.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, there's a lot of history here, so I can see why it's mysterious to outsiders. But as somebody who has been following this since a teen, I believe a proposal of "let's increase competition" will go absolutely nowhere in the US. A very quick summary: In the 80s a judge broke up our national communications monopoly [1]. That came as the result of action starting in the 70s, when business regulation had some teeth.…
I know all that history, though. But around here we went over a similar transition (single public carrier got broken up not that long ago), and it's hard to argue we're any less pro-money. I just don't find the argument that it's impossible that convincing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>No, Because it closes out competition to newer, better information. But that would only make sense if Wikipedia created some sort of insurmountable barrier for newer, better information. It doesn't. Newer, better information can reach people through Wikipedia with just as much ease (provided it fits Wiki's publishing standards) as it would through any other platform. For all intents and purposes, Wikipedia and other…
We do (and did) complain about Microsoft giving its browser away for free; in the end, we got lucky that there was a well-funded nonprofit (Mozilla) and another monopolistic company (Google) willing to put in the massive investment to compete in that market, but it took years. Similarly, I may happen to trust Wikipedia itself, but the tactics it is using are very abusable to keep a for-profit's inferior loss-leader p…
Suppose an NGO decided to provide expensive vaccines to children in Africa for free and enlisted the help of a local delivery company to ensure the vaccines reach as many people as possible, would you accuse them of trying to out-compete drug companies?
Why is Wikipedia different from this? They too are trying to provide an essential service (information) to people who could not afford it under normal circumstances. They are doing so without expectations of profit. Their tactics are in no way similar to those of Microsoft, purely because they are not competing in a market economy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>No, Because it closes out competition to newer, better information. But that would only make sense if Wikipedia created some sort of insurmountable barrier for newer, better information. It doesn't. Newer, better information can reach people through Wikipedia with just as much ease (provided it fits Wiki's publishing standards) as it would through any other platform. For all intents and purposes, Wikipedia and other…
Wikipedia creates an enormous barrier to better information due to its size and scope, and its co-dependent relationship with Google. In many cases Wikipedia's information is substandard when compared to other sources, both in presentation and content. The wiki layout is useless for certain content types, such as video. For example, many people prefer to use imdb for movie information (which is also free to the end u…
> There have also been several recent studies that say Wikipedia's medical information is unreliable and dangerous.
Nobody is going to use Wikipedia to diagnose diseases. But suppose I live in a country with a cholera problem and search for 'chronic diarrhea' on the web. Wikipedia will be able to point me to a few probable causes, and will give me some primary hints about what I'm supposed to do.
If there isn't a doctor nearby to tell me this, and there isn't a public library with a medical encyclopedia nearby, and I can't afford a PC with internet access, how else am I supposed to find out?