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,
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.
With a thousand eyes, all bugs/errors/vandalism/junk is shallow... There's always someone watching out for junk. There's a Recent Changes page which shows all edits made, so one can monitor from there.
They do. All the time. Then, within a couple seconds, a non-troll reverts it. Check the edit history of the Hitler article some time. :-)
There are a few things that reduce the trolling.
First, trolling on Wikipedia is no fun since the system allows it. There is no sport, no hacking. It just seems stupid.
Second, many people can see the troll and all of them are allowed to correct it by restoring a former version of the post. So anybody can fight the troll.
Finally, the administrators of wikipedia can lock some pages and forbid edition by trolls (by blocking their IP address).
As you can see, Wikipedia is not defenseless !
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.
Yeah, everything is backed up. If a troll goes in and screws up a page, all it takes is one person to click "revert", and its fixed again. The effort it takes to ruin a page is actually greater than that it takes to restore it. Not to mention that trolls are outnumbered like a million to one. Its really just not worth someones time to bother mucking with Wikipedia. One person, or even a group of people, simply can't weild the same power as the collective whole does. So its not very appealing to trolls. Their "work" will be erased within minutes and viewed by almost no one. No point for them, especially when there are much easier places to peddle their smut.
Yep... I'd say at any given time there's 5-6 people looking out for vandalism. Also, people who do it regularly tend to get temporarily blocked from editing; this happens dozens of times a day, actually. Unlike slashdot, because anyone can edit anything, the junk seems to get cleaned up quite quickly.
I know that you know this, but I'm just clarifying for the benefit of the slashdot community...
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.e.g. Geography (Social and political views.. )
Socio Political historical events
No brainer here , History is always written by victors, so any other version would be deemed inaccurate and propoganda.
How about a non-christian writing about christ , bible ? or a non muslim writing about koran ? Can they be un-biased ? Or for that matter a christian writing about christ and a muslim wring about koran ?Can they be unbiased.
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.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Ummm... No, you didn't. No rats in any of the revisions.
a rd &action=history
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Mall
The problem with Wikipedia is not trolling. It's people who don't know as much as they think they do correcting other people's arguments. It's the majority view winning out over the correct one.
Don't get me wrong - I love wikipedia,it's fun to read and fun to contribute to. But never, ever confuse it being a reliable source, since by its nature it reflects the majority belief. Open sourcing code is one thing: if it works, it works. Open sourcing knowledge is riskier: it's not hard to imagine a world where most wikipedia users were creationists. Would you trust the evolution article then?
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.