Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Reaches 200,000 Articles
CanadaDave writes "The Wikipedia.org project to create a 'complete and accurate free content encyclopedia' has just surpassed 200,000 articles, an increase from 100,000 just 1 year ago. Join in on the celebrations. Some work has been done on predicting Wikipedia's growth and others are already planning for the 500,000 articles over all languages press release. In related news, the project has recently received $20,000 worth of Linux server equipment (9 machines) in hopes to improve performance of the site, which has been prone to downtime over the past year. The servers are being tested right now and will be up and running soon. The purchase was made possible by the many donations the Wikimedia project received in 2003."
Trolling is a art,
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I gotta go
:)
Not any more
which has been prone to downtime over the past year.
So we have:
Servers that are prone to downtime.
New servers not running yet.
Linked to on Slashdot
I don't see this turning out well.
As if slashdotting the site will help, if it has already had problems staying up.
I think you need to look up the meaning of 'begging the question'. It refers to circular reasoning.
slashdotted already? I'll donate a buck!
Never argue with an idiot, he'll just lower you to his level and beat you with experience.
What I have never understood is why some troll doesn't go to it and ruin everything? What prevents that?
I mean, I don't want to look up the War of 1812 and fine, "d00d, j00 b33n 0wnz3r3d". That would kinda suck.
Can anyone answer this?
As the digitization of our encyclopedias continues, millions of unemployed encyclopedia salespeople lament their poor career choice.
Considering that a Wiki is modifiable by anyone, I don't see how they can advertise that the Wikipedia is accurate with any degree of confidence.
Is this encyclopedia incomplete? I don't see a picture of cowboy neal under "handsome".
;)
I guess antonyms take up a lot of space.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
That is such a good website, gets more informative every day. It's amazing how quickly it has become a useful source of info. I'd like to see them get their search engine fixed, but the google thing that they're using in the meantime works just fine.
When I first came across wikis I thought that they'd be prone to vandalism, but it seems to work well. Anybody know why this is? Does all the good info get backed up? Are there full-time people who patrol it for trolls?
Drill baby drill - on Mars
While I love the spirit of openness for both source and encyclopedia knowledge, there are a couple of things that I've been wondering about here.
1. Will scholarly publications view this as a valid source of accurate information?
2. Once people realize there's a free encyclopedia out there that rivals expensive ones (I don't know Wikipedia well enough to know whether it lags, rivals, or surpasses, but I suspect that if it isn't already, it's only a matter of time until it's a serious contender), will they abandon the paid ones? If so, it'll be interesting to see the effects of abandoning our existing knowledge infrastructure.
I just started using wikipedia after seeing the wikipedia needs help article on slashdot.
It is a very handy resource for grabbing good information on almost anything quickly. I use it in conjunction with everything2 when I try to find quick bits of information on a subject.
So, since Ive never really dorked around with wikipedia, what makes it so great? What are some cool things that everyone should know about it?
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
Now, if Wikipedia had even just 2,000 entries that were worth reading, it might be more interesting. Considering the proliferation of useless entries on Wikipedia, this isn't all that important a milestone.
Too many entries are lacking in content, or filled with placeholders and outlines for future material that was never added.
- MaineCoon
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
German WP will hit 50.000 soon. And it's allready the second biggest wiki in the world, right before susning.nu
-- just a geek - trying to change the world
I have to admit I've only browsed Wikipedia a few times but the open nature of it seems like it would be rife with abuse. From what I understand there is moderation in place but how long before something like Wikipedia succombs to the trolls and such.
Getting the word out
Ok, question - has anyone outside of wikipedia actually noticed? I added a couple geek friendly Featured articles to the main page in anticipation of a slashdotting (for the record, my submission was shot down in 2 minutes flat). Raul654 08:04, Feb 2, 2004 (UTC)
Please don't - that would kill the second hand server that we are now using. Things are slow enough as it is. We should concentrate on the project-wide 500,000 press release instead. By the time we hit that milestone, the new server farm should be up and running. --mav 08:08, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)
OK, keep slashdot out.
(emphasis mine)
I contributed some articles to the site, but it was the retentive no-lifes that swarm that site which drove me away.
For example, check out the discussion on the 'Elizabeth Smart' article, when it recovers from the 'dotting. They went on for MONTHS, sometimes angrily debating whether the article should include "(Kidnap Victim)" in the title, so as to disambiguate the article from another Elizabeth Smart article. Somebody thought 'Kidnap Victim' was disrespectful, so he goes and changes the article title to "Elizabeth Smart (Media Sensation)". They argued about THAT for another month or so. Eventually they had to vote on the matter. I have never seen so much effort expended on so trivial an issue in my life... it was fascinating in a morbid sort of way.
The site is swarming with people with serious inabilities to play nice with others. Contribute if you want, but don't say I didn't warn you when the wiki weenies make you want to scream.
Aardvark
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Aardvark
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Tubulidentata
Family: Orycteropodidae
Genus: Orycteropus
Species: afer
Binomial name
Orycteropus afer
The aardvark (Orycteropus afer) is a medium-sized mammal native to Africa. The name comes from the Dutch for "earth pig", because early settlers from Europe thought it resembled a pig (although aardvarks are not closely related to pigs).
The aardvark is the only surviving member of the family Orycteropodidae and of the order Tubulidentata. The aardvark was originally placed in the same genus as the South American anteaters because of superficial similarities which, it is now known, are the result of convergent evolution, not common ancestry. (For the same reason, aardvarks bear a striking first-glance resemblance to the marsupial bilbies and bandicoots of Australasia, which are not placental mammals at all.)
yes, it's a joke.
Yay.
More seriously, I think without getting all teary-eyed about it a person could point to this as a sign that the Open Source philosophy has been long overdue, awaiting communication infrastructure that is finally becoming mature. Who knows, maybe us hoomuns are becoming more mature, too... or at least we are when people are looking.
I can't wait to see the kind of things my daughter will enjoy as a matter of course. She's 1.5 years old now, and look at how much has happened in the last 10 years. Her college education is going to be interesting to say the least.
Any generalization is a stupid one.
The great thing about Wikipedia is that anyone can add, remove, or modify the content. This coupled with the fact that most people take information as fact without properly double checking can lead to some fun times.
For instance, in a taxonomy class I recently took, each person in the class had to write a report on the mallard duck. Well, just as a little social exercise, I decided to replace the content on the mallard duck Wiki page with that the content on the rat page.
When the reports were through being graded, the instructor gave us a rundown on the class performance. I just barely kept myself from bursting out in laughter as the instructor described his astonishment as he read a report that labeled the mallard as "a rodent commonly found dwelling in sewers and other vile areas."
God, that was funny!
YHBT, succa
YHL, you can not survive
HAND, punk.
Yeah, 200,000 entries, and it's almost as useless as E2's million 'nodes.'
YAY FOR WASTES OF TIME
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
It's "Encyclopedia Galactica"
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Ok, question - has anyone outside of wikipedia actually noticed? I added a couple geek friendly Featured articles to the main page in anticipation of a slashdotting (for the record, my submission was shot down in 2 minutes flat). Raul654 08:04, Feb 2, 2004 (UTC)
Please don't - that would kill the second hand server that we are now using. Things are slow enough as it is. We should concentrate on the project-wide 500,000 press release instead. By the time we hit that milestone, the new server farm should be up and running. --mav 08:08, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)
OK, keep slashdot out. For the benefit of the lazy, [here are the stats for the combined wikipedia projects. We're at 300,000 combined. Which means we're still looking at years before we hit a half-mill
it seems they forgot to take their own advice :) slashdotted, anyone?
Well, actually this is not something far in the future. Just try to add up all the article numbers from all the international wikipedia sisters. In 10 days (ETA), we will be celebrating our 50K-article count.
500K-worldwide is very close
If the section on Biochemistry were as in-depth as its section on Star Trek, that thing would be invaluable indeed. But since it isn't, I'm now forced by curiosity to spend my lunch hours jumping from 7 of 9 to the battle of Kittimur instead of finding the proper axes of a Michaelis-Menton plot..
I suspect it's actually more than 1 in 10.
Is this the part where we get to say wiki-wiki-wiki again?
wiki-wiki-wiki-wiki
Shut up!
wiki-wiki-wiki-wiki
Will OSDN be donating any equipment or money to Wikipedia for the effect of slashotting their servers? They seem to be falling all over the place.
I don't know the whole server story, but as far as I know, Wikipedia's current server farm is at least a generation older than it should be. My understanding is that new servers were put in place a few months ago, but they had severe hardware troubles. The site was pushed back onto older servers for the time being, and money was raised to buy the new server farm mentioned in this article.
The site's current servers have been slow on a regular basis for the last month. They were pretty much slashdotted even before this article popped up.
Encyclopedia Brittanica, once the the most prestigeous name in the business, fired its sales force a few years back and became entirely online subscription. I think Encarta forced it change its business model.
My main concern in turning to Wikipedia for information is that I don't know the source, and thus, my level of confidence in the accuracy and completeness of any given entry is low. Since there's no way to determine this, I'm wary of considering Wikipedia entries autoritative. In addition, there's really no one to "stand behind" the encyclopedia. That means that if there is an entry that's in error, there's likely no consequence. An example of this from my professional work is that as a tech writer, I frequently turn to 'ner resources to find quick answers to questions. However, I always refer to the Chicago Manual of Style for authroitative answers to grammar questions, where I believe that my answer itself will be in question. CMS is an accepted standard, that the University of Chicago Press stands behind. CMS undergoes extensive review and editing before publication. If there's an error or oversight, I expect them to correct it in the next version, and to lose credibility (and thus sales) if they do not. Certainly the idea of a free online encyclopedia is good, but without any way to gauge the authority of the sources, it's just not a sufficient reference.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Wikipedia is a very good idea, however, recently I've come across some problems.
:)
1) Edit wars: militant people will continue to insert bias and lies in some topics, and it is very hard to stop them. The system moves very slowly. I've had to deal with scientific skepticism, dealing with rather ill-informed people who think skeptics are out to destroy science.
2) The community politics: I questioned an admin's use of a personal photograph in his profile (professional photographs usually are copyrighted under the photographer, not the client), and I was threatened with being banned, accused of trolling (I was earlier warned not to call people a troll by the very same admin!), and personally attacked in chat, when I was following wikipedia policy to a T.
I think administration does need a little more bite when dealing with the problem users who insert bias into topics. Users like "Mr-Natural-Health" should be gagged on certain topics, at the very least.
Oh, and a litle more information: The first time wikipedia hit 200,000, I believe, was due to many stub articles suddenly appearing. I wonder why
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
umm, Wikipedia intends to be "accurate".
Speaking as somebody who has contributed 100-plus articles and done scads of editing over the past year, I'm still not convinced Wikipedia is ever going to be a legitimate reference work. For all the obvious reasons (vandalism, lack of expertise, point-of-view flame wars) articles are suspect.
... and a lot of fun.
If nothing else, however, it is an interesting group-psychology experiment
This is exactly the kind of thing that makes the open source community so difficult for business types to understand. An excellent service hits the wall, and passes the hat. And it comes back with >$20k in it!
This is also why things like M$ wanting to compete with Google look so damned silly to us. We already have what we need, and we take care of our own.
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I use PayPal constantly, so I can't very well whine, but I do wish my contribution to Wiki hadn't been diluted by those fees. Almost $29k in US contributions, but almost $1.3k in PayPal fees!
Another problem. Those fees come up to just short of 4.5%. The PayPal fee structure says that at the worst, they should be skimming 2.9% plus 30c per transaction. Does this mean that many/most of Wiki's contributions are in small amounts?
30c is 6% of a $5 donation, but 3% of a $10 donation. I think the lesson is, if you're going to donate, the bigger the better -- unless you like subsidizing my use of PayPal's BillPay!
Should PayPal consider giving registered non-profits a break? Or is this admin overhead unavoidable with charitable causes?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Wiki is great. I mean *GREAT*. But it has limitations. Such as the file size for every entry.
I discovered this when I wanted to put on wiki my list of Earth Observation Remote Sensing Satellites. Such spreadsheets are NOT wiki-friendly. This, hopefully, will change with time.
Animoog.org
I guess antonyms take up a lot of space.
:-)
Not to mention Cowboy Neal
Thank you all for slashdotting the encyclopedia, as this is one of the better fact encyclopedias on the net (IMHO) I was doing searches for some information , and next thing I know Wikipedia stops responding. therefore i go to back to my home page (slashdot) and behold first news item, is an article on Wikipedia so thank you again for delaying my research.
It didn't take long for some to trot out the usual arguments about Wikipedia: "How do they keep out the trolls and kiddies?" etc.
Wikipedia has spent a lot of time outlining those very questions on their Replies to Common Objections page. Or, if all of you hose the very delicate servers, here's the Google cache version.
By the way, on the announcements page this morning, it was explicitly said, "Please, do not tell too many people about this, our current server cannot handle the extra load." So, uh, thanks all you Slashdotters... ^^;;;
RadicalBender.com
Wow, I can't tell if you were being serious, or a troll, or funny. The more I stared at this the more I started laughing. I still can't tell, though.
(FWIW, /. has lots of spammers and trolls trying to screw with it. Wikipedia doesn't, exactly because it doesn't make this some sort of perverse game. Try spamming Wikipedia, and you'll quickly see that it is not fun and there's no point to it.)
Bah! Everything2 has more than 449,000 articles and all in all, 921,175 nodes. It's not really a wiki but anyone with a (free) account can write anything. It has a voting system implemented to weed out the crappy/too short/too old/superseded/getting-to-know-you articles.
I donated $5.00 to Wikipedia but I donated $25.00 to E2.
All Hail Discordia. Hail Eris. Fnord.
Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. I highly recommend it. :-)
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
As the newly anointed Linux Thought Leader, I would like to interject that thoroughly slashdotting a site currently running slow because it has toasted hardware via an article praising same service for lining up currently offline servers to stop such things from happening is indicative of what is wrong with Slashdot today. And, yes, that is a run-on sentence.
Wikipedia may be the most important community project of the early 00's. It's high quality and very comprehensive. Way to go, Wikipedia!
"complete" yet added 100,000 articles last year, and planning on adding another 300,000 before the press release... doesn't sound very complete to me. Oh wait, maybe they're going by Microsoft's completion standards.
MediaWiki is also used by non-Wikimedia projects. Among the more interesting ones is Disinfopedia, an encyclopedia of propaganda, and Wikitravel, a travel guide. Star Trek fans will want to take a look at Memory Alpha.
Because of Wikipedia's constant server problems, MediaWiki has been refined to be very scalable. It caches almost everything and uses Livejournal's memcached to keep important data in memory. It also has support for Squid proxy servers. Aside from that MediaWiki comes with a huge set of features, many of which are found in few other wikis:
- section editing - edit not a whole page, but just a small subsection of it (great for large pages)
- automatic image rescaling
- LaTeX support for mathematic formulas
- message transclusion - create messages that can be used
- namespaces to separate article content, user pages, image descriptions and discussions; message notification for user-to-user messages
- plenty of query functions to examine the relationships between articles (articles which have many links to them but don't exist, articles which have no links to them, very long/short articles etc.)
More cool features are in the works, including a larger set of backends for rendering music, chemical formulas, chessboards etc. MediaWiki is always looking for new developers. Give it a try and join the mailing list to help out. There are other great wikis out there -- MoinMoin, Tiki, Zwiki, OddMuse etc. -- but I prefer MediaWiki because I find it the easiest to use, and most other wikis use the ugly CamelCaseSyntaxWhichMakesPagesHardToRead.They did manage to update "Janet Jackson" to include the Superbowl...
Screw cowboy neal, my picture's not there either.
Did anyone else read that as:
'complete and accurate-free-content encyclopedia'?
I was becoming quite interested in looking at this Onion-esque encyclopedia...
This is not a sig.
Quantity:
Size of Wikipedia
A more detailed quantity comparison between Wikipedia, Encarta, and Britannica
Quality:
English Wikipedia Quality Survey
Wikipedia Quality Analysis
Projected growth:
Modelling Wikipedia's growth
Wikipedia wasn't supposed to be slashdotted they actually set up the servers. We discussed this on the mailing list to death. Daniel Ehrenberg, aka LDan
Slashdot
Slashdot effect
Slashdot trolling phenomena
Another interesting point of note:
According to Alexa (which is not always reliable), Wikipedia.org is now more popular than Slashdot.org.
If anyone wants to watch the Wikipedia Recent Announcements page automatically, feel free to point your favorite news aggregator to Wikipedia Recent Announcements RSS Feed which I generate from the web page. If you use Bloglines, click here for a preview or to subscribe.
"Luck is the residue of design" -- Branch Rickey
http://www.tutorgig.com/encyclopedia/index.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/encyclopedia/
http://explanation-guide.info/
All a bit outdated tho.
Can Wikipedia do an IMDB on us? Lots of people put plenty of time on the IMDB, with the understanding that it was an open, shared resource. One day we awoke to the news that the editors in the UK had sold out to Amazon and volunteers be damned...
For information on all three, you can even read h2g2's entry on E2, Wikipedia's entry on E2, Wikipedia's entry on h2g2, E2's entry on h2g2, E2's entry on Wikipedia, and h2g2's entry on Wikipedia.
Couldn't you guys wait a week before posting this. The hardware isn't properly set up yet. There will be a press release when the 500K mark is reached and hopefully the hardware will be ready by then. Sheesh. At least we'll be getting some testing on the hardware, hope nothing melts.
http://www.syfyportal.com/article.php?id=1274 :
:
'Battlestar Galactica' Gets Final Go
Author: Michael Hinman
Date: 01-31-2004
Source: SyFy Portal
In what looks like negotiations that went down to the wire, word has been received through several sources -- including two actors -- that Sci-Fi Channel is moving forward with a "Battlestar Galactica" series.
"To my huge relief, I got a call from (Los Angeles) at 1:30 a.m. London time telling me my option had just been picked up," actor Jamie Bamber (Apollo) told "BlueSpringsBelle."
"I was surprised since I called my agent just before going to bed, and the whole thing was still being hammered out."
The mini-series, written and executive produced by former "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" producer Ronald D. Moore, was the third-highest rated product in Sci-Fi Channel's history when it aired nearly two months ago. The mini-series was a backdoor pilot, that left the option open for a series. But a list of different factors -- including the cost of making the series -- played into the decision of whether or not Sci-Fi Channel was willing to move forward with the investment.
However, according to reports, Sci-Fi Channel gave an initial greenlight to open negotiations with crew and non-contracted cast in the middle of December. (original story). Moore confirmed that negotiations were ongoing to SyFy Portal on New Year's Eve (original story).
The main actors, including Bamber, had options in their contracts to go to a series if the cable channel picked it up. Those options were extended one month to Jan. 30 after negotiations with non-contracted workers continued longer than expected.
Aaron Douglas, who played Chief Tyrol in the mini-series, posted on the Media Blvd. message board that he also received word that his contract was picked up.
"They have ordered 13 episodes and it truly went down to the wire," Douglas said in his post. "They were negotiating with all the unions for the past few days, and earlier this afternoon, I got a call that it did not look good and that it probably would not go due to money. Then at 5:52, I got a call from Grace (Park) and she had just heard from her agent that her option had been exercised, meaning that they were intent on keeping her from doing something else. I then got a call from my agent, and he had been informed of the same. The deadline was literally 6 p.m. today for the actor contracts.
"So, there are 13 to start and Tyrol is in all 13 episodes."
According to Bamber, it was still unclear how many episodes had been ordered.
"As far as I know, they still have not decided when they will shoot, or even how many episodes other than a minimum of six," Bamber said. "That all has to be decided next week. They just went to the wire with the actors and their contracts. Every real detail is still up for grabs!"
The series will reportedly be the most expensive series Sci-Fi Channel has ever had to put together. And cost has been something that has dogged the franchise, ever since the original 1978 series, which ended up being too expensive for ABC to produce. However, with new technology, and a stronger focus on stories rather than special effects, it is expected that costs for "Galactica" can be kept down.
Sci-Fi Channel has not made an official announcement about this final go yet, but one is expected on Monday or Tuesday. The series will begin filming, possibly next month, in Vancouver, preparing for a fall release.
--
http://www.syfyportal.com/article.php?id=1270
Deal To Make Transformers Soon
Author: Michael Hinman
Date: 01-28-2004
Source: IGN Filmforce
A live-action Transformers movie is in the making, and there could be a final announcement on who is making the movie come February.
"The Transformers film that I am doing with To
You posted this about 2 seconds before I was going to accuse you of being the troll the admin accused you of being :) I saw the post, checked the parent to make sure you were you, and returned to harass you, and here you are disclaiming the offending post.
Spoilsport.
would be a great topic for ask-slashdot i think.
/.ed their site anyways, or their 20thousan bucks are not live yet.
i am really interested to serve a huge demand portal/forum site, and am wondering how to enhance my infrastructure, and to make it as stable with some thousand bucks like the wikipedia guys are trying to do so.
unfortunately, i think slashdot just
any comments or hints or maybe someone gonna put up my question to ask-slashdot?
thanks.
Why not tell the truth: you meant to post the grandparent as AC, on the erroneous belief that it would be funny, but you forgot to check the "post as AC" box.
Then you posted this transparent lie in an effort to salvage your karma. Your brother couldn't have posted that while you were taking a bath because we all know that Slashdot posters don't bathe.
All your base are belong to us
Crushing by elephant
Extreme ironing
List of people known by one name
List of films by gory death scene
For more, see unusual articles and list of trivia lists.
It's GFDL, so even if the 'owners' go evil (which they won't) the data is freely distributable.
The database is free to download and use (a lot of third parties have done so and make their 'own' encyclopedias).
If something bad like imdb-selling happened, it just needs another generous person to host the database and software. Wikipedia can alway be resurrected.
So no.
ensure that this research includes a trip to wikipedia.
By the time a scholar checked a Wikipedia citation, it might have changed from the time another scholar cited it. You'd need some way to specify and retrieve a particular version of an article.
Academics might also object to citing works by anonymous contributors.
Is it just me, or does this sound a lot like the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy?
;-)
For those of you that don't recall -
I has many galactic treasures of information such as -
The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his throat
Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon: FORGET IT.
or, perhaps the most relevant entry for us:
Earth: Mostly Harmless.
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.
Perfect.
i love it. they list all the common troll types, with examples (scroll down to the bottom). that's seriously funny stuff. i can't believe someone actually spent the time to put all that together. i don't think Encarta would do that! cheers!
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
of sHu pAc! As you can tell from his post, his mastery of the English language is tenuous at best. Perhaps by reading Wikipedia he can learn correct English syntax, not to use run-on sentences, and the proper use of punctuation marks. God forbid that he should actually have to go the library and do his "research" using authoritative sources that might require a 6th-grade reading level instead of some random site on the internet. In conclusion, everyone please stop using Wikipedia, talking about Wikipedia, or encouraging others to visit Wikipedia; it might inconvenience sHu pAc, and we all know how whiny he gets.
is the oldest joke in the book. I was finding you annoying, but now I'm discovering just what a comic genius you are; I think we should keep you around for the entertainment value.
Add it in yourself.
:-p
That's the brilliance of a Wiki.
Changelog for the War of 1812 entry
This was actually a pretty good illustration of why Wikipedia works. It's easy to vandilize, but it's even easier to fix it again. Couple that with the fact that there's absolutely no challenge in trolling it and very few people end up trying to wreck it. There's no fun in it.
(Full disclosure - I'm one of the wikipedia admins)
:). It also has a 'watchlist' feature. You can mark an article so that every time it gets changed, you get notified. People tend to amass a group of articles they care about and observe closely. These articles tend to reject vandalism readily.
Wikipedia is resistant to blantant vandalism because it has a small group (the 172-odd admin plus some others) of people who spend way, way too much time on it. I should know - I'm one of them
A much more insideous phenomenon is persistant trollers who get into constant edit wars. As of late, it has been an escelating problem, but there is a group in the works that should have the authority to reject them.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
One note to anyone from Wikipedia reading this post. Please, do not try this on a day with SCO news, ok? Thanks!
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
The English Wikipedia has reached 200k articles, which means an hour of rejoicing for our English-speaking fellows. Most of wikipedia.org content is written in some other language, as there are now over 460k articles in wikipedia.org - 500k is not so far anymore.
Was that a 'complete and accurate *free content* encyclopedia'
or was that a 'complete and *accurate free* content encyclopedia'?
Just kidding everyone, I love wiki!!
I'm saying it's rather shockingly unlikely, and it's hilarious that you're trying to claim this. Invoking 'My brother did things as me while I was out' as a copout when you said something stupid is ... well, let's just say it's confirming everyone's opinion of you.
And no, I've never had that experience. I lock my screen. Unfailingly.
Note that the folks mentionned something about not telling Slashdot about this news item, in order to survive the day. Thanks for nothing again, /.!
;) Raul654 02:39, Feb 2, 2004 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Celebrating 200,000
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
And the prize for the 200,000th article on the English language Wikipedia goes to:
20:42, Feb 1, 2004 Neil Warnock (196 bytes) . . User:SimonMayer
Congratulations to all Wikipedians. Today is a great day.
Table of contents [showhide]
1 Useful Pages
2 Size matters
3 Getting the word out
1 Slashdot
Useful Pages
* In the true spitit of Wikipedia, I'd help Wikipedia by expanding it, but I don't know anything about football. fabiform | talk 02:06, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)
* For those who are interested, you might want to check out Wikipedia:Modelling Wikipedia's growth. Very interesting read. Raul654 02:18, Feb 2, 2004 (UTC)
Size matters
congrats! (and lets go on to 250,000...) TeunSpaans
Talk about shooting low. According to Modeling wikipedia's growth link, that should happen in June, 2004
The index of the print version of Encyclopedia Brittannica contains approximately 750,000 entries, if I remember correctly. That's about four times our present article count. How about that as a short-term goal? -- Seth Ilys 02:48, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)
If that is the case, we'd better rise more money to buy servers. -- Taku 02:58, Feb 2, 2004 (UTC)
That number seems high - 750,000. The whole set of print encyclopedias only has 65,000 entries, according to [1] Fuzheado 04:26, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Not right. The 2004 Encyclopedia Britannica has 65,000 articles. It may still very well have 750,000 entries in its index. --mav
I understand the distinction. I should have said 65,000 "articles" but didn't since Britannica calls them entries, not articles. Nevertheless, 750,000 "index entries" doesn't seem in sync with 65,000 articles. I'm no data mining expert, so I'd like to see a source for the "750,000." Fuzheado 05:05, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Just looked in one of my textbooks (Introduction to Reference Work, Katz, v. 1, p. 227) where I was recalling the stat from. Accoring to its comparison table for major encyclopeias; the 2000 print Brittannica has 790,000 index entries (I was off by 40,000). The largest article count it lists is the 2000 online Britannica at 83k. I assume those stats came (originally) from the publisher. Most of the index items listed in Britannica don't have dedicated entries of their own; they're people or places or concepts that might get one or two mentions in some other 500-1000 word article essay. We can create dedicated entries for each of those that aren't subordinate to any other topic or article. I felt it might be a useful comparison point, one it looks like we might reach (at present growth rates) in about two years (at about five years from Wikipedia's birth). -- Seth Ilys 07:57, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Thanks for the info. Yes, it would be interesting to try creating an automated index, but I suspect that Google and a search engine obviates the need for actually creating an exhaustive alphabetical list. It would be interesting nonetheless. -- Fuzheado 08:01, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Getting the word out
Ok, question - has anyone outside of wikipedia actually noticed? I added a couple geek friendly Featured articles to the main page in anticipation of a slashdotting (for the record, my submission was shot down in 2 minutes flat). Raul654 08:04, Feb 2, 2004 (UTC)
Please don't - that would kill the second hand server that we are now using. Things are slow enough as it is. We should concentrate on the project-wide 500,000 press release instead. By the time we hit that milestone, the new server farm should be up and running. --mav 08:08, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)
OK, keep slashdot out. For the
Semantics is the gravity of abstraction
- "doesn't sound much like a bee to me" .....
- "It's an aardvark, it's a bloody aardvark"
----------
Blackadder, trying to rewrite the first english dictionary (by Dr Johnson), which was toasted by Baldric (in the fireplace).
Other definitions:
a - doesn't really mean anything.
C - big blue wobbly thing.
dog - not a cat.
Bahaha. Thanks for going to check that. That was awesome.
"The Wikipedia.org project to create a 'complete and accurate free content encyclopedia'...
I don't mean to troll, but am I the only one who had to read this sentence several times before I understood what they meant?
Seriously, people, punctuation really does help.
(As a wikipedia admin): Lord Kenneth is a known Wikipedia troll. He's makes it a point to harass the wikipedia admins.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Thanks Jon,
s ize . I was
rather talking about "Article sizes", not multimedia files. Sorry for
the confusion. This said, Wikipedia is limited (as of today) by the
maximum size of articles and the format of articles.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Page_
Animoog.org
I think it's considered to be racist if you don't spell out the full word "Pakistani." Just saying "Paki" is considered to be a racist term.
They're at 200,000 articles and will celebrate large when half a million are present.
So how does this compare to a commerical offering? How many articles are there, say, in the Encyclopedia Brittanica?
Large numbers are usually impressive on sight; without context they mean little.
that was a quality flame
See? All of the sudden people are jumping up to delete my entry in *possible* copyright infringement and attack me and my credibility here.
It's rather sad they have to try to silence and discredit me instead of following proper procedures: That includes silencing me, trying to make me look stupid (including my damn brother, who's not involved in this mess), and calling me a troll.
Normally, I wouldn't care, but it's obvious they are trying to suck up for the admin and don't give a damn about possible copyright infringement or the policies.
If this is how wikipedia really works, then I suggest you DO NOT donate money. They don't deserve it if they treat honest users this way.
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
Wikipedia still refuses to work with some proxies that choose to optimize their caching by not transmitting the User-Agent header. And they don't even do the courtesy of explaining why; they just give a "Forbidden: You don't have permission to access / on this server." error and that's it.
RFCs require that when a cache passes User-Agent, it must cache received data such that a client requesting exactly the same URL, but with a different User-Agent string, cannot use that cached data. Think of it as combining the User-Agent string value and the URL string to get the index into the cache. So with that and the fact that so many clients have so many variant strings, including version numbers and build numbers, caching works very poorly unless User-Agent is removed from the request (which is valid to do, even though the RFCs recommend not doing so).
So to use Wikipedia I have to stop using the cache server, which because I'm stuck on a slow dialup, is a big performance hit.
The reason for this, as I've found out, is that some web crawlers that abuse the site (because they run so fast), are recognized by not using User-Agent. I think they could do better by recognizing abusive sites and just blocking their IP address for a while (or teergrubing them), regardless of whether they have User-Agent or not.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Gone, but not forgotten
thats all...I enjoy the content and think its a great tool. Just a wondering is all....
'Internet! Is that thing still around?' - Homer Simpson
here's the link
Normally I make sure not to feed the trolls, but I'll make an exception in this one case:
1) Are you an admin or wikipedia, or what?
Yes
2) If so, you can remove my link.
I did. You reverted.
3) However, I think you're an idiot for not letting the proper procedure take place.
Everyone, trolls included, is entitled to their opinion. You posted complaining that someone posting his own personal photo to his own page was copyright infringement. It was explained that it was a work for hire or covered by fair use (or both), and you were given time to comment further. You did not, so the objection was removed.
4) I couldn't give a damn if mav is an admin or not. Quit turning this into a little political-power game, and follow the damn policies.
The reason I post here it to prevent a known troll from smearing wikipedia's good name.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I totally agree. If I made a comment like your first one and got replies like you did I would get the hell out.
I wouldn't want to contribute to something just know I'm gonna get flamed for it (correct or not).
I certainly hope that the rest of Wikipedia isn't like this and that you've just had a bad experience.
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
It seems that Wikipedia is quite large compared to the other commercial offerings. For example, the article says that Encyclopedia Britannica's 2002 edition proudly proclaim they have over 85,000 articles and the Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, as having 51,000 article.
By the looks of it, there's still a lot of room to grow though.
I refer you to the Wiki page on thermodynamics. Apparently the first law is: The sum of heat flowing into a system and work done by the system is zero. Nonsense. The object might just get hot.
That particular nonsense has been corrected and modified a number of times. And it is not unique. Wiki needs a better editoral policy, or warn that it's data is unreliable.
Slashdot Trolling Phenomena is even in there!
... we didn't really consider a 'how to find child porn online' article really all that appropriate for an encyclopedia. So it was turned into an article ABOUT online child pornography, which is a little more appropriate. Oops, sorry.
Let's face it, as long as there is a human element involved, there will be difference of opinion , no matter what the topic is about. And editing out parts which you don't necessaryly agree to is censorship.
The mainstream Wikipedia user is one educated by MTV. Such viewers are decidedly egalitarian and internationalist, thus only superficial differences between peoples and cultures are acknowledged. These are the people who associate culture with cuisine and religious rituals, and little else.
Any articles dealing with history, politics, current events, or anything that could possibly involve the scenarios you mention are always framed from the viewpoint of a 20 something raised on MTV.
It should be possible to have different articles from the viewpoints of different people, rather than the accepted truth. Not only is this the fair method, it would provide a great insight into human thought, as well as persuasion and propaganda.
I worry greatly about our future world where there is only one viewpoint, especially when that viewpoint is perpetuated by the select few who control the major media outlets. Wikipedia should allow for the expression of unpopular ideas and history.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Just try to cite, say, Britannica at a level higher than high school and see how quickly you get laughed out of class.
That's because "hot grits down your pants" and "Natalie Portman naked and petrified" are separate catchphrases, just as "hot grits down your pants" and "all your base are belong to us" are separate catchphrases. Wikipedia rightly rejects any supposed connection between the topics. However, had you linked from Grits to Slashdot trolling phenomena, it might have stuck.
It would be very interesting to see where the most controversial topics are.. and quite doable too, just check where text is removed/added frequently would give you a subset that could be further checked manually..
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
I've recently started a Wikibook on training to pass the Linux Professional Institute certification for Level 1 Exam 101.
Check it out. Contribute if you like. My motivation in starting it in the first place was to learn enough to pass the exam myself, so any help would be greatly appreciated.
cheers!
minderaser
I think it is great that Wikipedia exists, that it is free and will forever be free. It is also great that /anyone/ can contribute. This is, IMO, a revolution in how information is presented, controlled and distributed and is in-line with the true intended nature of the World Wide Web.
/any/ error instantly is as easy as clicking "edit this page" and "Save".
Combining the wiki concept with free content also creates something that is far more radical than even free software; truly anybody can contribute. That idea is astounding - especially given the fact that Wikipedia is such a shocking success.
Wikipedia is absolute proof that, left alone, groups of people tend to work together to build magnificent things instead of tearing them down. Locking things down, on-the-other-hand, leads to stagnation and, if anything, temps people to break-in and make a mess of the place. Since it is trivial to vandalize Wikipedia, there is very little reward for the vandal; especially since repairing damage by vandals is easier than creating the vandalism in the first place.
All this tends to ensure that Wikipedia will, on average, improve over time and self-heal. Wikipedia is Linus' Law on steroids; given enough eyeballs reading Wikipedia, all bugs are shallow since fixing
What a wonderful concept!
-- mav
If they did, there would different articles for topics representing the viewpoints of different people.
They do have this. For example, see Morality and legality of abortion, which explains both pro-life and pro-choice viewpoints. If you find that an article under-represents a particular side of a debate, then you can edit the page, adding explanations of the points it neglects to cover. If you explain the points coherently, using politically correct language (e.g. "Pro-life advocates believe that ..."), then Wikipedia's editors (an "editor" is somebody who follows Recent Changes) will find your writing Insightful rather than Inciteful.
Seriously though, which proxy software are you using? I've used quite a few and I'm currently using Squid, and I've never seen the User-Agent dropped from requests. It's not generally a good idea since sites sometimes serve different content for different browsers (which makes a lot of sense concerning mobile devices).
Sorry for the emotionally loaded comparision, but that is akin to removing the figures about economic growth in Germany under Hitler simply because you think he is a SOB.
Not necessarily. The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, is incorporated in the United States. As of 2004, the United States government has chosen to censor erotic pictures of minors. I'll guess that given the Napster ruling, management has chosen not to do what could get the Foundation in trouble for aiding and abetting child pornographers.
No its not. Each time "Mostly Harmless" is put into our Earth article is it quickly removed.
--mav
Sure, one person could fork Wikipedia under the GNU Free Documentation License, but should Wikimedia Foundation go evil, it could always pull a Red Hat, forbidding redistribution without a thorough excision of the WIKIPEDIA(tm) trademark. (Red Hat has since eased those requirements on the "Fedora" distribution.)
It's there on Earth in fiction though ... =)
Apart of politics, I can make the same or similar comparison of Wikipedia against corporate sources in area of technology descriptions. Which articles about Linux would you trust: from MSDN or from Wikipedia?
Less is more !
Just to clarify the h2g2 situation slightly: anyone can post an article, it appears immediately, and nobody has the right to delete it (unless it breaks the House Rules - e.g. is offensive - and is officially moderated) - unlike e2, or to a certain extent wikipedia. The author can then edit it as much as they like (and nobody else can, unlike a wiki).
However, the encyclopedic part of the Guide is Edited - that is, an existing article must go through a period of Peer Review, be polished up, and finally re-added by the official editors as an Edited Guide Entry. It is then put into a category system, and becomes the officially definitive article on that topic.
Wikipedia announces that almost 12000 of the articles are completely accurate and authoritative, and the number of entries that have been updated with staggeringly inaccurate information by inebriated freshmen has been cut down by over 15% since 2002.
Why develop a free one?
e2 currently has 449,635 entries. With 74,307 users, and 200,096,109 hits.
But those numbers are boring. The point is, wikipedia users never go to parties where the top contributor does an impersonation of Richard Nixon playing Dance Dance Revolution. And that is what I look for out of my encyclopaedias.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
I have the feeling he's actually saying something interesting, but I have no bloody clue what the hell it is.
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
According to WP, anyway. I was previously unaware of this.
...Wonder how the hell they found out $FAMOUS_PERSON's username.
Wonder who else is running around in the slashdot shadows.
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
Not any more...:)
If you find an error, correct it and cite sources. If you have a disagreement, seek peer review using that wikipedia system to get assistance to deal with trolls or the ignorant.
You say:
That's because "hot grits down your pants" and "Natalie Portman naked and petrified" are separate catchphrases, just as "hot grits down your pants" and "all your base are belong to us" are separate catchphrases. Wikipedia rightly rejects any supposed connection between the topics. However, had you linked from Grits to Slashdot trolling phenomena, it might have stuck.
Wikipedia at "Slashdot trolling" says:
"Natalie Portman is a popular target for the affections of many Slashdot trolls. When referring to her, they frequently profess their endless love for a statue of the naked and petrified actress, preferably covered in hot grits. Naked and Petrified is now such an infamous troll that it virtually epitomises Slashdot trolling, and is often referred to and parodied in Slashdot comments. Other incarnations of the troll suggest that Natalie Portman pours hot grits into their underwear."
I don't want to know more about this. I already know more than is good for me.
You can do things on your side to save bandwith and resources.
If you don;t want something to be visisted you have all the power o close it, make it read only or throttl;e the number of requests it answers.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
They day Brittanica goes the way of the dodo we may lose all the content (the new owners/creditors may not be inclined to continue in the encyclopedia business).
With Wikipedia that is far more difficult since the contents is free and distributable (and even modifyable).
And how do you beat having many experts debating an article compared to one or two in traditional encyclopedias?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Think of your mother and slowly jerk it.
Why accuracy has to be money driven?
What about pride about a community project?
According to your logic all thye volunteer organizations out there are not as good as they could be because they are not money driven.
Sigh...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There's also a fairly new wikipaedia-like project to build a travelguide at Wikitravel.org. It's just got 1000 articles (and many of them far from complete), however, this is one cool project IMO.
It's a configuration option on Squid. You're caching poorly if you don't use it ... depending on how many different users you have using it. If all your users are using the same exact browser version, it won't matter. But if all your users are using different browsers, they won't be "hitting" each other's cached data, even if the data is identical (unless the cache violates RFCs). 99.999% of web sites work fine. Wikipedia and New Scientist are the only web sites I can recall which have the problem with lack of User-Agent. Everything else, including Slashdot, works fine when User-Agent is omitted. Several ISPs have switched to no User-Agent mode to improve their caching. The only catch anyone should ever see is a lack of customized HTML, and that's not considered a good web design practice anymore considering that modern web standards work excellent on all new browsers, and degrade gracefully on old browsers.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Well played.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Despite many valid criticisms of democracy throughout the ages, most notably Socrates and Plato in his book Republic, any attempt to express those views in Wikipedia are removed.
Interesting. If what you allege is true, I find it disappointing that Wikipedia censors the views of Socrates and Plato on democracy. Have you considered bringing up the issue on the talk page? What's your Wikipedia username so that I may research the causes of this edit war?
Apparently someone else added it back up again
Not someone else. You did!
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
There's no joy in it, because 1) you get no credit for your contribution, unless somebody takes the trouble to wade thru the diff files; 2) your article will be endlessly vandalized and trashed by cretins and ideologues; 3) your article will be deleted by someone in the clique of admins; 4) the servers are maddeningly slow and 5) you will eventually give up.
Sorry man, but that's pretty funny!
I wonder how much you have looked at wikipedia. It really is generally pretty good.