Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Reaches 100,000th Article
An anonymous reader writes "'Wikipedia, a community-built multilingual encyclopedia, is announcing that the English edition of the project has reached a milestone of 100,000 articles in development. In addition, the project itself has celebrated its two-year anniversary on January 15. But not just the English version has grown impressively: More than 37,000 articles are now being worked on in the non-English editions of Wikipedia.' Read the press release for more information or visit the website to enlighten yourself! It's great to see that this interactive project works; at least I don't have to boot into Windows to use Encarta anymore!"
I've spent hours browsing topics on that site, and remain constantly amazed at the depth and breadth of knowledge on it.
For amusement, look up "slashdot" on it. You will find more history and amusement than you remembered ever living through yourself.
It even covers the troll era, with entries on Natalie Portman, grits, whatnot (I dare not type too many examples lest I be lameness filtered).
fifth sigma, inc.
One would think that educational institutions would snatch something like this up in a heartbeat (same goes for the GPL version of education documents and reference material). Or is it that the maturity of the project isnt near what standard university requirements yet is the hold up?
We don't need an "overrated" so much as we need a "you completely missed the parent's point, dumbass..."
Does anyone know how they make sure all the submissions are accurate?
...
from their FAQs
Since anyone can edit any page, why would I give any credence to anything I read here?
We operate on the idea that many eyeballs make all errors shallow. Wikipedia is, self-consciously, an experiment in public collaboration quite unlike any print or online encyclopedia, and therefore it will be difficult to project the results, in terms of their credibility, until the project is farther along. But even then, you'll have to judge the results based on the articles themselves, rather than the credentials of their writers (which is itself often an unreliable way to determine credibility).
Some people think Wikipedia will give Britannica a run for its money. m:Making fun of Britannica.
Some people have plans for peer review or article certification systems to work on top of Wikipedia. We'll be sure to point them out if and when any get up and running.
Is the quality as high as when they started? I went there when they were first mentioned on slashdot. The quality control process they described was very impressive but also daunting for anyone wanting to contribute. If they've reached the 100k article threshold with the same quality control it is world-class resource.
Jason
ProfQuotes
It states things like "Infarct refers to the artery being plugged or clogged up", where it actually is the death of tissue cause by a lack of oxygen. Things like that restrict it's use severly. I think I'll stick with peer reviewed articles for the moment. Universities tend to have libraries full of them.
Hmmm. I spent quite a few years working on Encarta. Try looking up some typical 8th grade subjects like Walt Whitman.
R efArticle. aspx?refid=761570898
Here's Encarta's article:
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpages/
vs. the Wikipedia article: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitman%2C_Walt
You decide what you want your 8th grader to use as a reference.
Try The 'Earth Edition' of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, it has a vast array of well-written articles.
The approach they take regarding peer review is interesting. There are two types of guide entry - edited and unedited. The edited guide is a collection of peer reviewed and edited articles, and likely to be more accurate and readable. The unedited guide entries are just anything, really. Could be total nonsense.
Anyway you should check it out, it is a good site and has a much better community aspect than Wikipedia or Everything2. In a sense it is more like Fark or Slashdot, only more friendly.
I've used wikipedia on several occasions and have even contributed a few articles relating to my university, city, and province. What an excellent project!
The breadth is pretty good. I've looked up things from world history to technical (modern day). I'd have to say the technical entries are stronger than the historical ones.
I worry a bit about historical inaccuracies, political leanings, bias etc. but then again all that stuff exists in any other published work out there. Maybe this thing we create together, with peer review and editing is no worse (bias-wise) than a collection of documents from a publisher?
You're a peer, you reviewed it, you found a problem. Why didn't you correct it?
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
But the sheer simplicity of this solution, especially if you are starting from available documentation, should, as I have long advocated, make it useful for a lot more than a GPL Encyclopedia.
Espen
Wikipedia has been "slashdotted", July 26, 2001.
Oops, looks like that one will have to get updated.
I got my set of Britannicas for fourty cents per volume at a thrift store.
People are throwing out their classic paper encyclopedias.
And lets face it: for many topics, i.e. mathematics, history, etc. an old edition of Britannica is damned fine.
People go out and buy a CDROM version of Britannica and say 'why do we need these books.'
Ten years from now I will still have my Britannica set. Their CD-ROM won't access in whatever is the latest-greatest-shiney OS.
Sorry for being a curmudgeon, but it's things like traditional books in traditional libraries that are the basis of our cuture, that got us to the Moon.
25 posts, and already 4 alternative online encyclopedias have been mentioned. Isn't this a gigantic waste of effort?
The thing that makes Wikipedia a little different is that, once you've consulted other sources and come to your own balanced conclusions, you can edit the article to bring it more in line with accuracy and the project's Neutral Point of View goal/policy.
A malicious or unthinking person could skew it away, but so can you put it back on track.
In addition, as the 'pedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, you're welcome to republish a culled version that includes only 'known good' revisions of articles. There has been some talk of a semi-official project along these lines run by Wikipedia's former editor, Larry Sanger, but it hasn't been put into place yet.
Remember, Wikipedia is still very much under construction; it's only two years old and just getting the hang of walking around. There's no need to rush into driving yet. ;)
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
Their page on slashdotting already includes the following:
Wikipedia has been "slashdotted" on July 26, 2001 and January 22, 2003.
Talk about timely information!
If you're interested in publishing a dead-tree edition, we'd love to hear from you. ;)
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
I don't think you can speak that generally of Wikipedia -- the quality of articles ranges dramatically, but tends to improve with time (even then rather dramatically).
/talk page more than once, but the product has been more balanced and inclusive than anything I've seen on the subject.
I've written a few articles, contributed to others, and even replace one. One I'm very impressed with is the Vietnam War article. It has had contributions from many people with many different perspectives and experiences with that war -- veterans and peace activists and others. Emotions have run high in the
But there are lots of annoying little problems -- duplicate articles that need to be merged, different models of organizing and presenting the same information that are going to be a bear to reconcile.
Vandalism is a problem, but not as much as you might thing. I contributed to the "polyhedron" article by resurrecting it (somebody had replaced the text with "concave lenses are cool"). While I had it in front of me, I created a html table for presenting some of the data there.
This is not a project for those with overly huge egos -- at least, not if they're going to try to do much outside the project -- because, over time, others will come by and change your articles, whether a little or a lot.
For those looking for peer-review, keep in mind that there are connections between Wikipedia (which is rather wide open) and Nupedia (which is peer reviewed) in both directions.
I would recommend that everybody look it over and contribute whatever they want to to make it better. But don't expect it to make any other encyclopedia obsolete -- at least, not quite yet.
Everything Statistics
Nupedia is also o free collaborative encyclopedia, but uses rigourous peer review. Comparing Wikipedia and Nupedia, one can see that Wikipedia has articles on much more topics, while the quality is certainly comparable.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
I don't know - I am not completely certain that slashdot editors actually care about this: I mean, action speaks louder than words.
Now, I have to admit, maybe they are making progress on it and it's just not public yet... but disabling asian character posting (i was encoding in UTF-8, btw) in comments seem like a backward thing if it was going the "internationalizing" direction.
I sincerely hope that slashdot will be completely UTF-8 someday (it's not that hard, really)... Here's to hoping...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Your preferred reference...
Follow me
Ok, compare them now
Encarta:. aspx?refid=761570898
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpages/RefArticle
Wikipedia:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Whitman
I incorporated much of the biographical details from the Encarta article into Wikipedia, rewriting the information, of course. Notice also that the Wikipedia article has more cross-references. That being said, the article still needs work, and I would still give Encarta the edge on this topic. However, perhaps a Whitman fan or two will notice the page on Recent Changes and work on it. Maybe in a few days, Wikipedia's will be better.
Hmmm. I spent quite a few years working on Encarta.
The key words in this sentence are "quite a few years". Encarta has been around since 1993 and has the professional muscle that comes with being a Microsoft project. Also, MS bought the rights to the text of Funk and Wagnall's encyclopedia to start them off.
Wikipedia, on the other hand, is two years old (just a toddler!), is staffed by volunteers, and has only parts of public domain reference works (1923 and earlier, along with US government publications) to draw on (and they're often not much help). You would think that our Walt Whitman page would say "5r|ptK1ddi3 0wns j00!", but it doesn't. Wikipedia is quite amazing, and the quality is only improving.
Help us! When you compare a Wikipedia article to one from Encarta and find Wikipedia's lacking, do something about it! Pull the information from the Encarta article (and rewrite it!) and help build the world's largest copyleft encyclopedia.
Stephen Gilbert (who has lost his Slashdot password)
Yeah but do they have anything on Everything 2?
So what? Encarta has been around a lot longer than Wikipedia and has spent many tens of millions of dollars on development. Linux hasn't so hot either at 2 years old - but look at it now. Many Wikipedia articles, in fact, are already about as good or better than their M$ counterparts. One
example:
Encarta:
Lithium
Wikipedia: Lithium
It was already demonstrated with your above post that the Wikipedia article was fixed quickly. Just like free software: Many eyes and enough time makes all bugs shallow.
And when was the last time you were able to fix an error or add to an article in any encyclopedia? Wikipedia gives the power to the users instead of keeping all the power in the hands of a select few. Knowledge of the by the people and for the people.
--mav
I can't believe this hasn't been suggested before. I hope it is in the works.
I just checked, and the error has already been corrected.
Are you a professional fact checker and researcher or an amateur plagarist?
Hmmm. Have you stopped beating your wife yet? Actually, I'm an amateur fact checker and researcher. I'd go pro if someone paid me. I never plagarize.
Using information found in an encyclopedia article to improve another reference work is not plagerism, so long as you take only the facts and express them in your own words. And, if you've gone to university, you know that you don't have to cite information that can be found in any general reference, i.e. an encyclopedia.
The majority of articles in copyrighted encyclopedias are written by recognized subject matter experts. [...]
Often they are, particularly Brittanica. Wikipedia has a few experts, too, particulary in mathmatics and computer science. However, an interesting result of our little experiment is that some of our articles collaboratively are as good as those written by individual experts in other encyclopedias.
These encyclopedias have staffs of professional editors - not writers, editors - that modify the manuscript to conform to a style guide that sets an consistent tone and audience for the encyclopedia. The also have fact checkers that make sure that things like the height of Mt. Shasta, the birthdate of Mr. Whitman isn't typoed, etc.
Yes, this is very enlightening. I assure you that I factcheck my contributions to Wikipedia, and I do it very well. ;-) As for consistant style, we're not terribly worried about that yet. Give us a couple years.
Biographical or other factual articles are one thing. The mark of a good encyclopedia or any general reference work is balanced, "encyclopedic" level coverage of subjects such as, say, the Vietnam War, Malcolm X, Judaism, Christianity, or any host of similar subjects. [...]
Have you read any of these articles in Wikipedia? Obviously not. Check out the abortion article and then get back to me.
And there are disputed territories such as a certain island in the Sea of Japan claimed by both Korea and Japan.
Interestingly, South Korea disputes the very name "Sea of Japan", and actively lobbies the International Hydrological Society, along with well-known map-makers, to rename that body of water the East Sea. Of course, since I'm not a professional researcher, I have no business knowing this or putting it into an encyclopedia article.
Encarta bought the rights to F&W - a core set of 25K articles. They went through a 3 year article expansion push in the late 90s where much of that was updated and expanded to compete better against World Book, including purchasing the old Yearbooks from Compton's.
No, Encarta didn't do these things, as it is the name of an encyclopedia. Microsoft was the culprit. I didn't know about the Compton's yearbook purchase, though. When I get around to expanding the Encarta article on Wikipedia, I'll be sure to add that information... as soon as I confirm it using other sources.
I'd rather trust my 12 year old to the professional encyclopedias than any nutcase with a website (Google) or plagarists.
Yeah, given the choice between nutcases, plagarists and professional encyclopedias, I go with the last one, too. Fortunately, there are more options.
Well, my troll-disecting scalpel is getting a little dull. Ciao!