Wikipedia Hits Million-Entry Mark

Sir Homer writes "The Wikimedia Foundation announced today the creation of the one millionth article in Wikipedia. Started in January 2001, Wikipedia is currently both the world's largest encyclopedia and fastest-growing, with articles under active development in over 100 languages. Nearly 2,500 new articles are added to Wikipedia each day, along with ten times that number of updates to existing articles. Wikipedia now ranks as one of the ten most popular reference sites on the Internet, according to Alexa.com. It is increasingly used as a resource by students, journalists, and anyone who needs a starting point for research. Wikipedia's rate of growth has continued to increase in recent months, and at its current pace Wikipedia will double in size again by next spring." stevejobsjr writes "Wikipedia needs our help. The Wikipedia project has no ads, and is run completely by volunteers. Still, it takes money to run such an amazing resource, and so they are running a fundraiser. The goal is to raise $50,000."

Comments

Yes

[RichardX]

But how much do we REALLY need to know about Klingon or memetics?

Woah, hold off with that "-1 troll", I'm joking - albeit semi-seriously. Wikipedia is a great resource, and so far seems to do a pretty good job of keeping itself in check by the sheer volume of people checking each other's work.. but there is also the risk of important aspects being missed, or errors creeping in unchecked, as highlighted in a previous slashdot story.

Still a great resource though, but one best used in conjunction with more traditional ones than as a replacement to them, IMO

Re:Yes

[makomk]

But how much do we REALLY need to know about Klingon or memetics?

Actually, I find it useful to have a reference work for all those things that are too geeky, obscure, or recent to be in proper encyclopedias. For the things I'm interested in, Wikipedia tends to be the best thing to use.

Re:Yes

[gowen]

Maybe you should give an actual example to give some substance to your concern.

You've greatly misinterpreted the original poster. It *looks* like he has some intelligent concerns, but from the superficiality of his comments, its pretty clear that he's more interested in getting a (+5 Not Completely Idiotic) near the top of the comments page.

Re:Yes

[hai.uchida]

Still a great resource though, but one best used in conjunction with more traditional ones than as a replacement to them, IMO

I don't think Wikipedia was ever meant to replace the traditional library. Its strength has always been in tracking popular culture and trends, cultures, pop artifacts and events that are recent and/or developing. The fact that Wikipedia is ever-changing is a good thing in that regard, because the topics it covers best are in the process of change too.

Re:Yes

[mandalayx]

But how much do we REALLY need to know about Klingon or memetics?

I'd venture to guess that there's more interest in Star Trek and meme theory in slashdot than your typical "important" things like how the king of england gets coronated. don't you think encyclopedias should have information on what you want to know?

the great part, of course, is that both slashdot geeks and history geeks profit because wikipedia covers so much--in sufficient detail.

Re:Yes

[Xetrov]

And what makes you trust the research of, say, Encyclopedia Britannica?

Back when I used to use encyclopedias on CD-ROM, often the topics I wanted to find out about had nothing, or maybe just a single paragraph.

With Wikipedia, if that was the case, after I had found some other resources, I could share my new found knowledge with the rest of humanity by submitting it to Wikipedia.

Re:Yes

[gowen]

But how much do we REALLY need to know about Klingon or memetics?

Or Carlsbad Caverns National Park, or Miles Davis or the Heavy metal umlaut or Buddhism or Elizabeth I or Horatio Nelson or....

Its far from perfect, but Wikipedia has come a long way from being the Encyclopedia That Slashdot Built...

Re:Yes

[RichardX]

Maybe you should give an actual example to give some substance to your concern.
ok then

Re:Yes

[RichardX]

I'm replying to my own post, because wow, I didn't expect that first line to generate so much heat... thou shalt not speak of Klingon or memetics in any less than revered tones, I guess

It was meant as a tongue in cheek line - and for what it's worth, I find memetics a very interesting subject, along with plenty of other geeky things (i'll.. uh.. pass on the Klingon though, thanks)

My point was simply that Wikipedia, by it's very nature, tends to lend itself to being extremely detailed in specific areas of interest that appeal to it's readership and contributor-ship (such as Klingon or memetics). That's not necessarily any bad thing, and in fact, you probably won't find any other encyclopedia anywhere with such a level of detail on some of the more obscure subjects in Wikipedia.. however, my main point (which I don't think I emphasised enough looking back on it) stands.. that Wikipedia is NOT a replacement to more traditional information resources, but a very good compliment to them

and as for the guy who said I was just going for a "+5 not completely stupid", feel free to mod me overrated if you want.. personally I don't think my first post should be at +5 either, but then I've long since given up on understanding /. moderators logic.. but at least it's better than another GNAA trollfest

Re:Yes

[bhima]

I guess it depends on the use: my Daughter uses it for homework, I use it on slashdot as reference. But it's not like we're using in court or anything. I guess journalists are at the biggest risk, but judging from some of the crap I see in print I don't suppose they care.

Re:Yes

[Jugalator]

Oh, I meant current stuff in it, thought you meant there were articles you weren't pleased with content-wise?

Yes, I read that article too and he brings up a good point of why you should use multiple sources. This is of course not limited to Wikipedia, though.

Re:Yes

[The Grassy Knoll]

Yes, but two things:

If you use the Random Page link, you very often get a place in the US, which makes me wonder how much of the wikipedia consists of these entries!

There used to be a mention in the Southern Sri Lanka page of the Mexican Staring Frog, which as any fuly kno is a fictional animal from South Park. I removed the reference, but how much more crud is there in there?

.

Re:Yes

[mAsterdam]

My point was simply that Wikipedia, by it's very nature, tends to lend itself to being extremely detailed in specific areas of interest that appeal to it's readership and contributor-ship.

s/Wikipedia/Slashdot/
s/Wikipedia/Telephone directory/
s/Wikipedia/the bible/

s/Wikipedia/any document/

Re:Yes

[Eloquence]

It's never been the encyclopedia that Slashdot built. Everything2 is. In fact, before there was Everything2, there was everything.slashdot.org. The code was created by some of the same people as Slashdot, and so was a content. For a while, Slashdot used to link to E2 articles using "[?]" links. Of course, unlike Wikipedia articles, you can't just start to improve them. Everything2 is a very geeky system that takes a long time to grok, with a complex, role-playing style experience model that hooks people.

Wikipedia started out as the progeny of Nupedia, a very serious, peer-reviewed encyclopedia which managed to produce all of two dozen articles. If you look at the Wayback Machine in July 2001, you will find that Wikipedia early on was actually quite philosophy-centric (in part because the original, full-time chief editor, Larry Sanger, is a philsopher).

Of course we have Slashdot readers among our editors, including myself. But we also have credentialed experts and amateurs from many different fields. We try to make it as easy as possible to join in, and many people who know nothing about computers do. If you (the reader, not the parent poster) know a way to make Wikipedia easier to use, please do not hesitate to submit a feature request.

We don't go around deleting articles on geeky subjects if they're well-written and encyclopedic. But Wikipedia never aimed exclusively at a nerdy audience and its editors were never made up exclusively of members of that audience.

Re:Yes

[Tetsugaku-San]

A little bit like the internet then?

Re:Yes

[ImaLamer]

For the things I'm interested in, Wikipedia tends to be the best thing to use.

This is where I agree and disagree.

Sure, Wikipedia can get you information on the stuff you're interested in.

The coolest thing is (IMHO) that you can find out about topics you never knew you had interests in. This is the cool thing about any wiki. The ability to link pages that have nothing to do with each other can open the reader's eyes to new topics.

I find myself browsing Wikipedia all day sometimes reading about things I care nothing about because it's cool to at least check it out.

Re:Yes

[gowen]

It's never been the encyclopedia that Slashdot built

Bollocks, mate. I was a wikipedian before you, and remember the days when it was Ayn Rand, the Jargon File, so don't patronise me with alternative histories.

Re:Yes

[Lt Cmdr Tuvok]

But how much do we REALLY need to know about Klingon or memetics?

The merits of memetics are not fully known to me, but you can be assured that any knowledge of Klingons will be most useful in the future, when humans will meet them personally. I believe the old human phrase, 'Know your enemy' is most applicable in this case.

Re:Yes

[quigonn]

In fact, I saw a major Austrian newspaper regularly refer to Wikipedia when it comes to explaining terms from the IT industry.

Re:Yes

[Dachannien]

Well, for looking up words like grok, Wiktionary is the way to go for me.

Re:Yes

[bhima]

Which one... oh wait, never mind, I only read one page of the Kleine Zeitung ;)

Re:Yes

[tony_gardner]

Traditional works have several advantages over wiki works.

1. Versioning: If I say I got something from the 1975 Encyclopaedia Brittanica, you can go and check that I got my reference right. Then you can check if the fact was right in that version. With wiki, if I say I got it from the 20.2.2002 wiki, simply finding out if I got the quote right can be a problem.

2. Continuity: Most books fix errors as the version number increases. There is no gaurantee of continuity in the wiki system.

3. Editorship: Most other sources have clear lines about which author is responsible for a whole article, and one person who is responsible for seeing that facts are preserved and false statements are reviewed. There is no clear line of responsibility in a wiki article.

These three things make wikipedia less reliable than other media (but no less reliable than any other website)

Re:Yes

[RWerp]

And what makes you trust the research of, say, Encyclopedia Britannica?

The fact that article writers have such magic letters like MSc, PhD or even Prof. before/after their names. Simply put, because Enc. Brit. is not written by just anyone with an internet connection, it is written by professionals who are responsible for what they write.

I would trust Wikipedia more if it had 'signed' articles, when I know who is to blame when the article is crap.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

According to one bundled with a Sound Blaster package many years ago Hinduism was "when the people of India started to revere the cow" or something slightly more inaccurate.

Re:Yes

[Eloquence]

When was the last time you read a story about Ayn Rand on Slashdot? The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, is an objectivist (highly active participant in the We the Living objectivism portal, check the Atlantis archive, also do a groups.google search), and so are many of his friends, therefore there was a strong libertarian/objectivist bent to Wikipedia articles in the early days. That has nothing to do with "the encyclopedia that Slashdot built" type nonsense. These people didn't come from Slashdot. These are the people that started Wikipedia.

The Jargon file was one of the early sets of data that was imported. This highlights a general problem with importing data, in that large sets of data imported from a single source may skew the overall impression of Wikipedia in one direction or another, without that impression necessarily being based on any real inherent bias. It's just like saying "Wikipedia is made of US census fans".

I've first edited Wikipedia articles about half a year after it started and am quite familiar with the project's history.

Re:Yes

[gowen]

I've first edited Wikipedia articles about half a year after it started and am quite familiar with the project's history.

I first edited wikipedia articles when it was the Nupedia chalkboard... so my familiarity with its history is first hand.

Re:Yes

[nanobug]

I just tried random page 10 times, and only one of them was a place. Not a very scientific test, but you probably did your test quite a while ago, when they had first loaded 30,000 places into Wikipedia. Things are different now.

Re:Yes

[ricotest]

Wikipedia has a policy on bots that, while largely negative, allows limited use of bots for certain things.

One example is that a whole bunch of articles from a 1911 dictionary were added. Another is that 30,000 US towns and cities were automatically added as stubs, with information being added later (basic information, such as state and population, were included I believe).

This might be useful: History of Wikipedia bots

30,000 is a chunk of 1 million, but not that large a chunk. You just might have been unlucky ;)

Re:Yes

[ricotest]

The ability to link pages that have nothing to do with each other can open the reader's eyes to new topics.

Wow, just like the rest of web!

That said, I do understand your point. Surfing Wikipedia is perhaps easier than surfing everything2 or the web in general because of the sheer number of links. Category links, related links, external links, and a whole bunch bunch of links in the article text. They do their best to keep articles interconnected.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless I remember incorrectly, they did import using a wikirobot few thousend articles about places in US from another database. Seems correct if you look at the charts.

Re:Yes

[ricotest]

I can't find anything that suggests that. Looking at the Recent Changes on the earliest archived copy of Wikipedia, there are a few Jargon File titles and that, but most of it is general in nature, from religion to biology and much wider. Maybe the Jargon File etc. were just ways to building up the article base harmlessly? I don't see anything wrong with that.

Re:Yes

[ricotest]

Exactly. Many journalists don't bother to research, or if they do they just search around for the first thing they find and use it. Articles are filled with erroneous details all the time. This will occur whether Wikipedia is around or not...

Re:Yes

[gowen]

You misunderstand. I was refering to the early days of wikipedia, where a large proportion of the articles were imports from the Jargon File. Its much better than that now (which is what I said).

Re:Yes

[pHatidic]

I wrote an article on kuro5hin about these issues yesterday and today it is on the front page. Have a look for yourself.

Re:Yes

[remahl]

Actually, the English Wikipedia contains only slightly more than 350,000 articles. So 30,000 + some added later is roughly 1/10th.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you care so much about stupid mod points?

Just speak your mind, and ignore the damn points.

Re:Yes

[Chuq]

1. Versioning: If I say I got something from the 1975 Encyclopaedia Brittanica, you can go and check that I got my reference right. Then you can check if the fact was right in that version. With wiki, if I say I got it from the 20.2.2002 wiki, simply finding out if I got the quote right can be a problem.

3. Editorship: Most other sources have clear lines about which author is responsible for a whole article, and one person who is responsible for seeing that facts are preserved and false statements are reviewed. There is no clear line of responsibility in a wiki article.

So far as these two issues go:
1. You can reference old versions of articles easily, such as this article on Ronald Reagan "frozen in time" on 3rd June this year.

3. Every edit made to an article is recorded - username if logged in, IP address if not. The IP's may be hard to track, but you can check a user's information page or contact them on their talk page.

Re:Yes

[bfields]

I guess it depends on the use: my Daughter uses it for homework, I use it on slashdot as reference. But it's not like we're using in court or anything. I guess journalists are at the biggest risk...

I think it's useful for the same thing a traditional encyclopedia is useful for: you can read it to get general background, or to sketch out your ideas, but when it comes to actually writing down an argument in detail you need to go to original sources for support. But there again Wikipedia or a good encyclopedia may be able to provide help by pointing you to good sources.

--Bruce Fields

Re:Yes

[TarlCabbot]

You have your off days. A couple of wweks ago, during a rare slow work period, I hit random a few time, and 6 out of 10 were of British nature, places, history, etc.

Tried again last week and today, seems more random.

Re:Yes

[ricotest]

Thanks for that point - yeah that does put a new light on it. Oh well, at least we can't add any more US cities to it since they're all covered, so it might balance out better with time.

Re:Yes

[tony_gardner]

Yes, but if "james brown is great" is changed to "john brown is great" sometime in the last 200 edits, how do I find the author? Not only that, how do I have any indication as to why it was changed? Was the fact verified wrong, changed out of spite or just a typographical error. None of these are fatal to wikipedia, but every small question as to whether the current version (and that's all that matters) is reliable is another nail in the coffin.

I would truly like to see wikipedia succeed, but I don't see that happening without an editorial system like that used at other encyclopaedias.

Re:Yes

[t7]

"...but there is also the risk of important aspects being missed, or errors creeping in unchecked, as highlighted in a previous slashdot story."

The article is discouraging if you wish to use the information found for research.

I believe a "known fact" system would help prevent issues like this.

When a statement, date, name, etc. is accepted as fact, it is marked as such. When it is changed a flag would be assigned suggesting the reader to look at the wiki's history and decide if the change was valid or not.

A system similar to this would help editors and readers alike find errors or inaccuracies much quicker.

Free iPods? Sure.

Re:Yes

[Captain Nitpick]

Actually, the English Wikipedia contains only slightly more than 350,000 articles. So 30,000 + some added later is roughly 1/10th.

At the time (late Augustish 2002), the Ram-bot stubs accounted for somewhere around 1/3 of all articles on the English Wikipedia.

Re:Yes

[goon america]

30,000 is a sizable chunk of the 350,000 articles in the English language that you and I use. The 1,000,000 refers to articles in every of the several dozen languages Wikipedia is offered in.

Re:Yes

[pHatidic]

Easy. Start with the 500th oldest edit. Check it if says James brown is great. If yes, go to edit 250. If yes again, go to 125. If no go to 375. Just keep splitting it down the middle and you will never have to look up more than 10 article versions to find out where the change happened. Even if you have no idea where this change occurred it shouldn't take more than 3 minutes to find out even with no formal system.

Re:Yes

[jdavidb]

If it were significant enough to become a national park, it would seem significant enough to be listed in an encyclopedia. Next-to-last time I was at Carlsbad they were telling us about research in newly unsealed chambers in the caverns containing microorganisms that apparently processed raw minerals, all in the absence of light. They were postulating these things could be at the bottom of a radically different food chain.

This most recent time, though, all we did was take pictures.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a source of consternation for the original maintainer Larry Sanger that wikipedia was getting filled with pop-culture entries that many felt would diminish the respectability of the project. I don't know about respectability, but in the sense that it's become filled with near-totally incosequential crap, his worst fears have been realized.

I personally think he was mostly wrong. The video game console entries have been extremely helpful, and most anything is "inconsequential" to someone. someday "today" is going to be "50 years ago today", and the extremely detailed context for pop culture referenced in Wikipedia is going to be a fantastic "primary source" reference. In the long term, many many parts of wikipedia are going to become authoritative on pop culture in the current era.

Re:Yes

[Patik]

Or Carlsbad Caverns National Park, or Miles Davis or the Heavy metal umlaut or Buddhism or Elizabeth I or Horatio Nelson or....

Are you saying those are worthless entries? Besides the heavy metal umlaut, those are all pretty important, especially Buddhism which is a major world religion.

Re:Yes

[Carnildo]

One example is that a whole bunch of articles from a 1911 dictionary were added.

It was the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica -- the last encyclopedia to fall into the public domain.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

:There used to be a mention in the Southern Sri Lanka page of the Mexican Staring Frog, which as any fuly kno is a fictional animal from South :Park. I removed the reference, but how much more crud is there in there?

That's a much bigger problem actually, when you get a little used article and a group intentionally introducing false information. Just look at Persians and Turks fighting over Azerbaijan, Russians trying to hijack Ukrainian history, random vandals pooping over articles related to Armenina &c, &c, &c.

Re:Yes

[Linux is shit]

That's a really convoluted way of finding something. And you need to take into account the really long time it takes for wikipedia to serve a page.

Re:Yes

[Brandybuck]

...or the Heavy metal umlaut...

I think you just proved his point

Re:Yes

[Cato]

Kings get crowned, not 'coronated'. If this was a Wiki I could correct your post directly, of course...

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

s/it's/its/

Re:Yes

[kundor]

Dude, ever clicked the history link? You can find exactly when a change occured, who made it, and what reason they provided. In other words, everything you're asking for.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations, you just won the 2004 award for "Completely missing the point in an astoundingly stupid way."

Re:Yes

[quigonn]

Der Standard.

Re:Yes

[Patik]

Then explain it to me.

Re:Yes

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

And what makes you trust the research of, say, Encyclopedia Britannica?

The fact that their articles are generallly written by experts in the relevant topic, who sign their name to it, and reviewed by a number of other experts.

Hell, Britannica is the encyclopedia that, when they wanted an article on Phenomenology, they commissioned Husserl.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

You just might have been unlucky

No, he's right. I contribute to Wikipedia. I have my bookmark set to the random page generator, and far too often I get a city/town or county. It's really sad, 'cause it ruins what would otherwise be a GREAT feature for people who need a "homepage" setting for their browsers.

Re:Yes

[ricotest]

There's a setting that lets you prevent viewing bot edits, as I'm sure you know. Would be neat if you could also block bot-created stories. I assume random page already filters out stubs/sub-stubs, but I haven't used it all that much.

Of course, the article database is available freely, so one could just extract a list of topics, somehow remove all US cities, and then rig up a PHP script to redirect to a random Wikipedia entry from the list. It wouldn't be hard at all ... I may try it, because the 'homepage' idea sounds interesting.

Re:Yes

[smagruder]

Oftentimes, Wikipedia articles are indeed written by people who are very knowledgeable of the topic in the article, virtually sign their name to it, and end up being responsible for most of the subsequent edits (and making sure others don't add incorrect material). It's a matter of people taking their pet subjects, making articles out of them, and then continuing to nurture them over time. This approach sounds as good to me as what you describe for traditional encyclopedias.

Re:Yes

[ta bu shi da yu]

Funnily enough, I've started a page that tries to more local Sydney content: WikiProject Sydney.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

None of those are purporting to be an encyclopedia.

So what?

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

I think the quality of the articles matter more than the mass. A smaller number of good, well-edited articles on topics that people actually care about would be better.

The worst part of the whole thing is how Wikipedia is gradually making so many Google searches useless. More and more i find myself typing some term into Google, and getting back a number of "reference" sites that simply grab all the content from Wikipedia and slap advertisements on. Sometimes the whole first page of Google results is like this recently. Aaargh.

Re:So what?

[log2.0]

You just came up for an idea google could use to make searching more efficient.

Think about it: Google want to differentiate themselves as the best search (I think they are ATM). This is another way for them to succeed! Filter out copies of Wikipedia/Other copiable sites....

Re:So what?

[gowen]

how Wikipedia is gradually making so many Google searches useless... a number of "reference" sites that simply grab all the content from Wikipedia and slap advertisements on.

And for this you blame wikipedia? That's like blaming Led Zeppelin for the existence of Motley Crue and hair metal.

Re:So what?

[dr15]

If you just want to read and blindly believe what you're told, Wikipedia isn't for you.

But, anyone really interested usually knows a lot of the subject before checking the new information. He knows rather well what would be the possible answers, and usually what is the probable answer.

If the encyclopedia told you the Chinese eat only 30 Bic Mac Meals a day, you'd probably never believe, or you'd begin to check the other facts which could cause such an unbelievable result.

By the way, I don't personally believe there's any importance if someone completely without previous knowledge gets a singular fact right or wrong. The real and valuable learning isn't just asking the authorities.

Re:So what?

[mandalayx]

A smaller number of good, well-edited articles on topics that people actually care about would be better.

they already exist on wikipedia.

want more? it takes a while to get to a million. maybe you can help...

Re:So what?

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

And for this you blame wikipedia?

Indirectly, yes. It's an unintended bad consequence of a grossly bad project.

Re:So what?

[bhima]

well... they did have long hair... maybe hair spray tech just wasn't up to it back then ;)

Re:So what?

[gowen]

Well, have you tried searching with -wikipedia in your search terms???

Fool.

Re:So what?

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

If you just want to read and blindly believe what you're told, Wikipedia isn't for you.

How am I supposed in general to judge the content of an article that I consulted precisely because I know hardly anything of the topic at hand?

At any rate, inaccuracies are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to low quality in Wikipedia. Far worse are omissions (it is possible to write something that says nothing but truths, but leaves out crucial bits that result in crass misinterpretation), and just plain bad writing and organization. There are countless Wikipedia articles that look like a dozen persons just wrote adjacent paragraphs independently of each other (because, in fact, the "article" came to exist in exactly that way!).

But, anyone really interested usually knows a lot of the subject before checking the new information.

So I guess if I don't know anything about topic X, I'm just screwed, because anything I ever come across about X will require me to know X already to understand it. (Sounds like my job, but what the hell.)

Re:So what?

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

Some of the sites that copy the content do not attribute it. And, it's hard to predict when a search will get you a bunch of Wikipedia redistributors anyway. The process is: (a) submit search, (b) see a whole page of identical results full of wikipedia copy sites (and no wikipedia in the first page of results!), give the "-wikipedia", then you just get like 5 such sites.

Re:So what?

[Jugalator]

I think the quality of the articles matter more than the mass. A smaller number of good, well-edited articles on topics that people actually care about would be better.

Wow, that must be the understatement of the day.

You're saying that Wikipedia has a less-than-small number of good, well-edited articles? Come on...

Wikipedia has a huge number of well-written articles, but I agree with others that you should use multiple sources if doing some research. As usual. It's not like I write an essay based on Encyclopedia Britannica. :-)

Re:So what?

[dave1791]

Sounds like a good job for a Firefox plugin. Check the wikpedia search result and compare the paragraph bodies to other high score results. Add those that copy wikpedia paragraphs verbatim to a blacklist. Then conduct your searches with lots of -"whatever".

Re:So what?

[Threni]

I've tried searching Wikipedia. It sucks. I tried "efficient market" and got nothing. Eventually I found this page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient_market_hy po thesis

I notice this:

Wikipedia search is disabled for performance reasons

But that's incorrect, because searching for Efficient market hypothesis results in a find.

It's all a terrible mess. How are you supposed to use it as a serious tool when the searches are useless. Sure, hyperlinking from article to article is good, but it's no substitute.

Re:So what?

[gowen]

How are you supposed to use it as a serious tool when the searches are useless

If you want to search, use a search engine

Re:So what?

[Threni]

I do use Google to search for stuff, but in that case why bother to search just Wikipedia? It's not the best source of information on the web.

Re:So what?

[GerritHoll]

There is a large number of good, well-edited articles. Every day has a 'Featured article', about subjects like Cold fusion, Leonardo da Vinci, Asperger's Syndrome, Freemasonry, Ferdinand Magellan, Have I Got News For You, Byzantine Empiro, Bruno Kreisky, Hinduism, Typewriter, Trench warfare, among thousands of others. There really are a lot of articles with a very good article. Since I discovered Wikipedia, I check it first before Google when I'm searching for something.

Re:So what?

[gowen]

why bother to search just Wikipedia?

Well, the OP said they wanted to search wikipedia, so I showed them how. Why they want to do this, or whether they should, is of no interest to me.

Re:So what?

[Threni]

The OP is me, and I appreciate your help, and I'm not suggesting you do or should give a shit! I just think a non-searchable encyclopaedia is one of the more amusing concepts I've been exposed to this week!

Re:So what?

[ricotest]

I've also experienced this problem and I was really expecting Google to filter out near-identical pages already.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to wikipedia and look on the left side of the page. You will find a textbox with two buttons under it: "Go" and "Search". I promise.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy you're replying to has already stated that search doesn't work. Scroll up and you'll see. I promise.

Re:So what?

[cmpalmer]

Let's say, for the sake of arguement, that I *am* an intelligent person who understands the nature of Wilipedia and I look up a subject that I know next to nothing about.

I search and find an article that does indeed look like a dozen people contributed separate paragraphs and I decide that some of these people may not know what they are talking about.

So, I read them all, follow some links, and learn enough about the subject to do some separate research. So, Wikipedia has done its job admirably. Finally, if I am a good citizen, I go back and, if necessary, edit the page with any new or corrective information that I encountered and the world is a better place.

It's preferable to searching for something on Google and finding that the first 10 links are crappy autogenerated ad and spyware redirects and half of the other sites are full of misinformation. Google is wonderful, but you can't edit it and make it better if it doesn't return what you want.

Re:So what?

[Carthag]

The search field to the left is a simple title search, which is adequate in many cases. In case there's no title match, you're sent to a full text search. However, the wikipedia search that you mentioned was disabled is the full text search. It used to say that, but for some reason it doesn't right now.

Re:So what?

[Cska Sofia]

Mötley Crüe, you mean.

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Although you probably made that as a troll, it is a good anology. Slashdot is to news media what Wikipedia is to traditional encylopedias. Interesting, amusing, lots of trolls and insightful / informative people, but not to be taken too seriously because of the limitations of the format.

Who here has contributed?

[Kumkwat]

Just curious.

I think I'll have to wait a few years before I'm in a position to make a noteworthy contribution in my current field.

Re:Who here has contributed?

[6169]

That's not necessarily true. There is no requirement that the information must come from your own personal expertise.

If you see a stub and have the time to donate, you can add a summary using information gathered from another source. The information is already there--the point of the encyclopedia is to put it in a place and format where it is easily accessible.

Re:Who here has contributed?

[pijokela]

I just gave them 20 . Nothing eartshattering or "noteworthy", but that's my share. They aren't looking for Bill Gates here - give what you can.

Re:Who here has contributed?

[Kumkwat]

Hey good idea, for some reason that never really crossed my mind.

I guess I'm still under the impression that each article has been contributed by a expert in that field. But yeah as pointed out, its hardly an authoritative reference.

Re:Who here has contributed?

[RyoSaeba]

I'm a contributor on fr:, and there are *many* ways to contribute, even if it's not your field of expertise.

You can:
* correct typos
* reformulate obscure sentences
* fix invalid links (ie correct [[SlashDot]] => [[Slashdot]]
* translate articles from other languages (i translated from en: the history of a country i didn't even know :))
* send patches for the software, MediaWiki

Re:Who here has contributed?

[ImaLamer]

I've contributed, but it's easy.

I don't be having the best grammar, or anything, but a simple edit here and there can really help.

Take for example a article about the city where I live. For most (or all) cities there are lists of famous people from that city. I noticed some obscure, but a few notable, people were left out. All I had to do was stick them in there with a few brackets around their names and Viola!

An easy way to get started is to look for stub articles and go from there. Many times the stub articles have related information already on Wikipedia. And many times the information can be gathered from the Internet and texts you already own. Grab a book of the shelf and write about the topic in your own words. See, you don't have to be the expert - people have already written volumes on most subjects.

Another way to get started with stub pages is to find a stub that has an official website. This article is a good example. Even biography stubs are good candidates for this considering most actors (for example) have their own web sites today. Earlier I noticed that Lou Rawls was a stub page. I simply put his official page as an "External Link" and listed it on "pages needing attention" with a note and link telling everyone that he has an official bio. While the page isn't beautiful at this point it is starting out.

One last way to start out is just by surfing around reading things your interested in. If you notice that "Star Wars" links to "Luke Skywalker" but not the other way around then you can fix that. If you notice a sentence misworded or a word spelled wrong you can fix that too.

I'd recommend creating a user name because this allows you to later on claim certain articles as your own. By this I mean; even though you aren't the expert now, you could be someday. Imagine adding that to your resume. "I've created 150 articles for the Internet's free encyclopedia project" or something to that effect. It can help explain what you've been doing between jobs. Looks like charity work almost.

Even input on Wikipedia's discussion pages can help. There are several articles that seemed weird or unclear to me and all I did was suggest another route. It's worked in a few cases. Sometimes editors just need another point of view.

Re:Who here has contributed?

[zoeblade]

I think I'll have to wait a few years before I'm in a position to make a noteworthy contribution in my current field.

I've contributed mainly small bits here and there, like grammatical fixes. These usually don't require that much knowledge of the particular topic the article's about, and if I'm not sure about a change I make, I make a note of that in the comment part so people can change it back if I've made a mistake. So far, that system seems to work pretty well.

Re:Who here has contributed?

[BenjyD]

I just contributed my bit. I knew that fancy university edumacashun would come in handy one day.

Re:Who here has contributed?

[scampiandchips]

i did a few articles about power engineering topics, such as Real, apparent and reactive power. Its easy and suprisingly satisfying.

Re:Who here has contributed?

[CvD]

I have contributed several articles. Sometime on subjects that interested me and I didn't find any good information on wikipedia. In other cases I saw an interesting documentary on Discovery or some other program on TV and wanted more information... also not finding it on wikipedia. I would then do the research myself and write the article.

These were articles that constituted a major change. I have done many many edits on various articles where I wikified terms and perhaps noticed an error or typo. Minor edits.

If you're looking to start out, a good place is the 'Dead end' pages. These are articles that have no outgoing links and need to be wikified. Armed with Google and 'site:en.wikipedia.org' in your searchbox you can find relevant words to link to in Wikipedia (the search in Wikipedia is quite slow usually - Google is a lot faster). Sometimes you will find an article that looks too professional. A bit of Googling will often verify that it is copy & pasted from another page with a copyright... then adding the page to the copyviolations list is another good way of contributing.

Re:Who here has contributed?

[nick0909]

I have added several topics as well as updated others in relation to emergency services. I find my weird mix of Comp Sci major and hobby of Search & Rescue allows me to be an expert (certified even) in all types of rescue and related equipment. Most poeple that work in emergency services fields aren't going to be big enough into tech to be offering info to the wiki, as I have noticed a lot of miss-information in these entries and have done my part to make it right. For example: Fire Engines and Fire Trucks are different types of vehicles, even if the Wikipedia said they were the same at one time.

It can work well, but sometimes I think there is just a little too much tech stuff and not enough general info, but thats just the nature of the delivery format.

Re:Who here has contributed?

[Anonymous Coward]

And I thought slashdotters had no life... You wikipedia people are even more boring if that's how you spend your spare time!

Re:Who here has contributed?

[theoddball]

I couldn't agree more.

I TA'ed a survey CS course (concepts in computing kinda stuff) a while back. One of the assignments given to all the students was to go create a Wikipedia article on a topic they knew something about. So we (collectively) ended up with articles about high schools, small towns, and minor celebrities.

That information *is* relevant to people, if not a ton of them.

The greatest part? Out of those 100 kids, I'd say around half of them are still using/ contributing to wikipedia...and these are art history majors, english majors, philosophy kids...wikipedia's big enough to appeal to them all.

Re:Who here has contributed?

[wcrowe]

I have contributed several new articles, and added to some existing. For example: I found some articles on programming languages which were lacking example code. I created some of my own and posted it. Elsewhere, I noticed that there was a request for an article on the fictional word "ghoti". I created one. Interestingly enough, once I created the article, several other people came along and added to it.

Go to the requests page and see if you can find something you would like to contribute. Even a short "stub" article is better than nothing.

Re:Who here has contributed?

[j1m 5n0w]

I recently wrote the article on Byzantine Fault Tolerance. (Hope I got it right, anyone here want to critique my prose and technical understanding of the concept?)

Another fun thing to do is find articles for places near where you live that don't have pictures and add one. I did this for Cape Lookout. Not the best picture, but it works.

It seems like it would make a good high school project to have students add to the wikipedia article for their town. A lot of the town articles are stubs added by scripts from US census data, and lack history and other interesting details specific to each town.

-jim

Re:Who here has contributed?

[ImaLamer]

What do you do in your spare time?

Masterbation contributes to no one but yourself.

Re:Who here has contributed?

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

Take for example a article about the city where I live. For most (or all) cities there are lists of famous people from that city. I noticed some obscure, but a few notable, people were left out. All I had to do was stick them in there with a few brackets around their names and Viola!

And then the people from the next three towns in either direction of the road go and do the same, because you all claim to have been the birthplace of this famous person.

Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[User 956]

Wikipedia is not what many casual Web surfers think it is.

It's not the online version of an established, well-researched traditional encyclopedia. Instead, Wikipedia is a do-it-yourself encyclopedia, without any credentials. The Wikipedia is not an authoritative source. It even states this in their disclaimer on their Web site.

It's fairly easy toinsert misleading and false information into Wiki. Don't use it like as a replacement for an encyclopedia, or a properly vetted secondary source, unless you're an idiot.

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[gowen]

The Wikipedia is not an authoritative source.

Well, duh. Now then, I'd like you to tell me who is and authoritative source.

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[mind21_98]

There are no authorative sources, really. You should be consulting multiple sources, and if differences can't be reconciled, consider not using the sources that have problems. Trusting a source just because it's from a large company isn't a good idea.

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, duh. Now then, I'd like you to tell me who is and authoritative source.

Well, CBS might be a start.

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[mandalayx]

It's fairly easy toinsert misleading and false information into Wiki. Don't use it like as a replacement for an encyclopedia, or a properly vetted secondary source, unless you're an idiot.

It's also fairly easy to make corrections or readjust bias in wikipedia. I quote:

"Recent research by a team from IBM found that most vandalism suffered by Wikipedia had been repaired within five minutes. That's fast: 'We were surprised at how often we found vandalism, and then surprised again at how fast it was fixed,' says Martin]Wattenberg, a researcher in the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, in Cambridge, Mass." [7]

Is Wikipedia an encyclopedia? Let's go math-class style with the definition:

A comprehensive reference work containing articles on a wide range of subjects or on numerous aspects of a particular field, usually arranged alphabetically.

Apparently Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[Jugalator]

Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia

Hmm...

Here's the definition I'm using, which are you using?

Encyclopedia: The circle of arts and sciences; a comprehensive summary of knowledge, or of a branch of knowledge; esp., a work in which the various branches of science or art are discussed separately, and usually in alphabetical order; a cyclopedia.

It's from Merriam-Webster too, which should be in your opinion well-researced enough to be used as well?

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[Rolo Tomasi]

What a stupid comment. Do you really think a "normal" encyclopedia can't be wrong? At least with Wikipedia, articles are constantly checked and updated. I suppose the five year old encyclopedia on your bookshelf has more accurate info on, say, Iraq, huh? Also, Wikipedia articles have their references listed, so it's easy to verify the info.

Yes, Wikipedia is "do-it-yourself". And it's damn good. It ranks, IMHO, as one of the best general knowledge sources out there.

All your comment did was to present well known facts in an overly dramatic and inflammatory manner. You, sir, are a troll.

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[Chris Kamel]

Well my personal experience with it is that I usually find extremely valuable info with little if any mistakes..... The other day I got the Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2004, so that I have a "real" encyclopedia, to my amazement wikipedia was far more useful, apart from the couple of virtual tours and the interesting graphs and timeline there was nothing to distinguish the 3 CDs worth of encyclopedia, in fact I still turn to wikipedia each time I have something I wanna know more about.

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[ceeam]

If you think printed encyclopedias are authoritative source of the truth you have not seen soviet "encyclopedias" I suppose. Same is true, to a lesser degree though, for all the others. And anyway - what does a Brittanica or whatever in your local library tells about something like Al Qaeda or similar? How long would it take you to get to the said library, check it out, and get back? Do you really own and periodically update an encyclopedia held at your home?

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[One Childish N00b]

The grandparent is not a troll - Wikipedia themselves admit they are not an authoritive source - their articles are like the Slashdot polls; They're good to read if you have a general interest in a topic but if you're doing serious research, you want to look to a real encyclopaedia - User-editable resources are far too easily vandalised or skewed. While a normal encyclopaedia might be wrong, they're written by genuine researchers and knowledgable people, and aren't subject to people 'having a laugh' by inserting false information into it's database.

Call me old-fashioned, but I'd feel far more at home with a paper-copy encyclopaedia written by experts than I would with a bunch of globally-editable, easily vandalisable webpages.

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's fairly easy toinsert misleading and false information into Wiki.

I'll say. I loaded the front page a few weeks ago and this was what one of the "In the news" headlines was:

The former "USSR" nations reunify & invade Pearl Harbour, early reports tell of a Communist victory with Japan joining the cause & slapping G. Bush's nan. Experts hope that finally someone will screw the "USAiii" over with China pledging to nuke the f**k out of America.

Of course, it was gone by the time I hit reload, back to a proper story about more deaths in Iraq, but I did manage to save it.

Naturally, there's no way in hell I'm going to post a link to the proper copy I saved to my homepage on Slashdot of all places though. My ISP that provides my webspace would kill me. :-|

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[FinestLittleSpace]

The myth that Wikipedia is a plethora of incorrect knowledge is such a load of bullshit. In my school years, I reguarly found errors and anomalies in the textbooks, and kist count of the times I sat at home as a young kid and found factual errors in my encyclopedias & sceience books.

Wikipedia ISN'T gospel and certainly has quite a lot of errors, but to suggest that it's 'not authoritative' is a load of rubbish. In a printed encyclopeda (i.e. those pretentious brittanica things rich white middle class families seem to hav eon display), you depend on a select number of individuals to share their knowledge.

There's nothing to suggest that these people could be any more 'authoritative' than someone submitting on Wikipedia; Don't forget that the net is packed full of bored but highly intelligent 'geeks'... just read some of the more insightful/interesting slashdot comments in the sceintific articles & you'll see that the intellect of some people on the net surpasses that of the 'encyclopedia book writing' variety. Whatever suggests that the article in my brittanica encyclopedia WASN'T written by someone who knows less about the subject than myself, but has a good textbook to hand.

I'd never trust Wikipedia as being the absolute truth, but then again, as a kid & ever since, I've never trusted textbooks and the such to be 100% accurate.

Comments like yours are what gives - what is wholly a selfless project - a bad name for no really good reason. If they were intentionally creating their own little rift, i'd be annoyed, but it's all in the name of free information.

For someone like me who left education much MUCH erlier than I was ever advised to, but was always a very high scoring individual at school, I enjoy the resource because it means I can learn new things in my own time... not forgetting to use my head and check the validity of the content before I concrete it in my brain. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's learnt a lot of stuff just by clicking 'random page' a few times a day...

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[ceeam]

This filter tries to make Wikipedia more authoritative: http://l33t.0pointer.de/?skill=3&url=http%3A%2F%2F en.wikipedia.org

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[aussie_a]

Damn right. Here's an example on why sources (other then Wikipedia) are not authoritive.

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[magefile]

Off topic, but I can only get 2 colleges to come up on the site listed in your sig. Is it new?

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are no authorative sources, really.

That depends on the subject matter. The US Constitution is an authoritative document on US constitutional matters.

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia themselves admit they are not an authoritive source

Sure but would Brittanica claim to be an authoritative source either? Somehow I doubt it.

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm so sick of hearing this comment. Of course it's not a replacement for an encyclopaedia, no one's claiming it is! It works well in conjunction with traditional methods of finding information. Naturally, any information found there should be checked in multiple sources. But, the same goes for any source, not just Wikipedia!

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[Finuvir]

Google of course!

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[wcrowe]

Yes, be sure to always use an authoritative source for information... like CBS.

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[multimed]

They're good to read if you have a general interest in a topic but if you're doing serious research, you want to look to a real encyclopaedia -

If you're doing real research, you sure as hell shouldn't use an encyclopedia like Britannica or Encarthna or whatever either--you should use trade references that focus narrowly on the topic. But as a general reference for an unbelievably wide variety of topics, Wikipedia really is above and beyond the rest.

User-editable resources are far too easily vandalized or skewed.

This just gets old. Wikipedia has an excellent track record of catching and fixing these errors. There's no doubt that more errors are "published" than with a traditional encyclopedia. But there's also no doubt that more errors are found and fixed and much faster. While it's susceptible to the worse points of human nature, it also capitalizes heavily on the best points. Anyone who ignores either of these points is just plain wrong.

While a normal encyclopaedia might be wrong, they're written by genuine researchers and knowledgeable people

You really can't no that any more than you know that "experts" don't write most of the articles on Wikipedia. The whole fallacy of "experts" is tired anyway. Stupid is as stupid does. With Wikipedia, every article must stand up to scrutiny no matter what letters are after the author's name.

Nobody's claiming Wikipedia is perfect, but it's really good for a general reference. If nothing else, the fact that info is much more timely and the benefits of hyperlinks to other entries plus external resources and discussions IMO make it the best single place on the web to learn just about anything.

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[multimed]

Umm, you do realize that there's a tab called "history" for every article right?

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[IwantToKeepAnon]

> Well, CBS might be a start.

CBS: "Woops, you know that G.W. Bush story we reported ... we were just talking out our a$$!"

David Letterman did a fake promo for CBS news:
"Tonight we will air 9 real stories and 1
fake 1. Can you tell the difference?"

LOL.

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[mind21_98]

Yeah. There are something like 4800 colleges in the database altogether, but only two colleges with actual experiences so far. I hope to get a lot more though!

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[User 956]

YHABT. YHL. HAND.

Re:Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[thermopylae300]

"The Wikipedia is not an authoritative source. It even states this in their disclaimer on their Web site."

How can you site an unauthorative source? I don't believe you, therefore it may be an authoritative site... Therefore I may believe you, but now I don't beleive them, so...

How can I trust that they are authoritatively unauthorative?

Seriously though, I've easily learned more from Wikipedia than any site on the net, or any Encylopedia for that matter. I do take it with a grain of salt, but it is good to read information critically. Between Wikipedia and Slashdot my BS filter is well-honed.

Congrats to wikipedia.

[coupland]

Congrats to all the people of Wikipedia! Nowadays I spend a lot of time "surfing" Wikipedia -- I start on one subject and keep clicking interesting links until somehow I end up somewhere totally different and have a cursory grasp of at least a half dozen new subjects. This used to be a favourite passtime on the web many years back, but has since lost a lot of its appeal.

Despite a few criticisms from those who have to criticise everything, the fact is that Wikipedia is one of the best sources of information on the web. It's a great place to start the learning process, it's got a little something on virtually every topic, and it's FREE.

(That's free as in information, not free as in beer.)

Re:Congrats to wikipedia.

[makomk]

Congrats to all the people of Wikipedia! Nowadays I spend a lot of time "surfing" Wikipedia -- I start on one subject and keep clicking interesting links until somehow I end up somewhere totally different and have a cursory grasp of at least a half dozen new subjects. This used to be a favourite passtime on the web many years back, but has since lost a lot of its appeal.

You'd better watch out. Wikipedia surfing is highly addictive and will suck your productivity. I've got very little real work done since I discovered it. On the other hand, the romanization of Chinese is interesting.

Re:Congrats to wikipedia.

[LordK2002]

(That's free as in information, not free as in beer.)

Actually, it's both.

Re:Congrats to wikipedia.

[WegianWarrior]

...On the other hand, the romanization of Chinese is interesting.

Damn.. you had to get me started reading that and following links, did you =)? Still, I found this page after following a few doozen links, and the funny thing is that I wrote most of it... weird how seeminly unrelated subjects can somehow connect isn't it?

Re:Congrats to wikipedia.

[Donny Smith]

>> (That's free as in information, not free as in beer.)

>Actually, it's both.

Like anyone cares?

If I google around to find out date of birth of Albert Einstein, WTF do I care at what URL I find it?
"Wooo! This is dot-com site, maybe they're lying!"

Bah! "Free"...

"Beer-free": I spend 4-5 hours on the Net every day and I have never paid for any info* - at worst, I had to register for free. I think the majority of people spend less time on the Net than me and have even less need for paid info.

As for the other free (the non-beer free) - I can't even state my objection to that statement since it's so ludicrous - it doesn't mean shit!
And I don't believe that any of those authors has more altruistic motives than any author of commercial content. Total nonsense...

Here ya go:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/15/emerg ent_p eople_fail_to_impress/

* I did pay for pr0n site membership and that was a great investment. And last time I checked, Wikipedia didn't do pr0n.

Re:Congrats to wikipedia.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah , Wikipedia is good. Anyone tried to play those 'small world' games? I tried to get from United States Constitution to Methuselah. Did it in about 7 pages, but I know you can do it in less. With one million articles it should often be possible to connect any two different subjects.

Drunken.

Re:Congrats to wikipedia.

[Uncle Jimmy]

There's free beer at Wikipedia now?

How nice to be asked

[alnapp]

I use Wikipedia often and find it an excellant starting point for most questions and would actively encourage anyone else who does to help the fundraiser.
I like the fund raising approach as it will allow them to be useful and ad free.

Can you think of any other sites who might've benefited from this user friendly approach?

Re:How nice to be asked

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia JUST had a "please help us" fundraiser a few months ago to raise about $40,000 (this was on Slashdot, remember?). Now they already need another $50,000? I know it's a busy site, but how the hell can their costs run $15,000/mo?!

Re:How nice to be asked

[maxwell demon]

If you know how often their search is disabled due to server load, you know what they need the money for.

How much server power do you need to serve up to 700 requests per second ?

Re:How nice to be asked

[alnapp]

Well, assuming it was successful, I guess that just proves my point about it being a good way of raising cold hard cash.

If I donate, I'm donating because I think they're worth it and don't mind too much what they spend it on.

So which one is it?

[Ronald Dumsfeld]

What is the millionth article?

It might be something completely useless, but I'm in the habit of making myself a mine of useless information.

Re:So which one is it?

[ImaLamer]

What is the millionth article?

Doesn't matter, it's a stub.

(Seriously though, I tried finding this myself... the only thing I could find was New pages on wikipedia)

Re:So which one is it?

[RyoSaeba]

As there are >100 languages & databases, and (afaik) no central counter, pretty hard to know, unfortunately :)

Probably a stub, but who really cares? Stubs can grow pretty fast sometimes.

Re:So which one is it?

[timstarling]

The answer is we don't know. We really should have just picked one that was created around that time and declared it to be the millionth. Makes for a good story. The million figure is for all languages, and statistics for all languages are only updated periodically. When we passed 300,000 on the English Wikipedia alone, we had an IRC bot spitting out article counts every few seconds, and a continuously updated number on the wiki. Someone posted about 50 pre-prepared stubs on English Footballers just as the number came up. Nothing of that kind happened this time, to my knowledge.

Re:So which one is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the entire content of the article is, "Millionth post!"

before you ask

[mandalayx]

before you ask how wikipedia will *ever* work by allowing everybody to write, take a look at this quote:

According to a Wall Street Journal article from February 2004, researchers have found that there are frequent instances of vandalism at Wikipedia, but that these are often quickly resolved:

"Recent research by a team from IBM found that most vandalism suffered by Wikipedia had been repaired within five minutes. That's fast: 'We were surprised at how often we found vandalism, and then surprised again at how fast it was fixed,' says Martin]Wattenberg, a researcher in the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, in Cambridge, Mass." [7]

-source

Congrats to Wikipedia for the 1 millionth entry...and (less easily measured) even more interesting, deep, and thoughtful articles.

Re:before you ask

[zoeblade]

That article on leetspeak is interesting... what other fun toys are Google hiding?

Re:before you ask

[SilentChris]

"According to a Wall Street Journal article from February 2004, researchers have found that there are frequent instances of vandalism at Wikipedia, but that these are often quickly resolved"

It doesn't matter if the original articles aren't truthful. A number of times changes to an article (for example, adding "admins have full ability to delete articles" to the entry page for "Wikipedia") are reverted because they piss off the existing admins.

The final "unvandalised" page is what the admins want it to be, not the people.

Wikipedia is NOT an encyclopedia.

[poofyhairguy82]

I look at it this way. Sure Wikipedia is not the most dependable source out there. But for a generation that will believe anything on a REGULAR webpage, wikipedia is a God send. Its simply better than 99% of sources on the internet because it can be changed.

The days of solid sources for non-academic work are long gone. All we need is good enough, thats what Wikipedia is.

um.

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

It is hardly surprising to know that all of the vandalism that is *found* is fixed quickly.

The serious question is: how good is the quality of information in the typical wikipedia article? That's the question that you'll see all the fanatics avoid frantically, either by pretending to have answered it ("it gets better all the time"), by blaming the critic ("that's *your* fault for not spending 3 hours a week editing Wikipedia!"), or just saying something completely unrelated ("...whenever somebody notices obvious vandalism 5 minutes after the fact, they revert it right away").

Re:um.

[mandalayx]

The serious question is: how good is the quality of information in the typical wikipedia article?

How good? In many cases better than proprietary solutions. Some cases not as good. You're right, many many Wikipedia articles suck. I've seen many of them through stupid google searches.

Yet I think we all share some kind of open-source optimism that it's getting there.

Re:um.

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

How good? In many cases better than proprietary solutions.

And you arrived at this conclusion exactly how?

Oh, and please don't drag the tired list of errors in Britannica, and trot out the "we fixed those errors in Wikipedia!" party line. No comparable list of errors exists for Wikipedia-- because nobody's even *trying* to get any sort of metrics on how good or bad the content is.

Re:um.

[Jugalator]

And you arrived at this conclusion exactly how?

Probably by own experiences. Note he didn't say "in all cases, I know it's better than proprietary solutions". You can draw a conclusion like that if you often find very good articles (without lying when saying so), you know. :-)

Re:um.

[sensui]

Quality is more important than quantity in encyclopedia like reference. But there is no simple ways of voting down the articles that suck.

Another problem is I cannot cite Wikipedia in my reports or papers. I can certainly cite Britannica. And most schools have subscriptions to EB anyway.

Re:um.

[PenguiN42]

Oh, and please don't drag the tired list of errors in Britannica, and trot out the "we fixed those errors in Wikipedia!" party line. No comparable list of errors exists for Wikipedia

I tend to think that the burden of proof is on the wikipedia condemners to show that it's decidedly *worse* than proprietary solutions.

because nobody's even *trying* to get any sort of metrics on how good or bad the content is.

1) Do those metrics exist for traditional encyclopedias?

2) Why don't *you* try to make those metrics, if they're such a concern to you?

Re:um.

[macshit]

The serious question is: how good is the quality of information in the typical wikipedia article?

That's an extremely vague question, but as a humble sometime user, I'd say: quite excellent (judging from those entries I've seen about which I already know quite a bit).

Indeed, in my experience I'd say it's better on average than a traditional paper encyclopedia -- entries in the latter are typically pretty spartan for anything except most important (say) 1% (the sort to which they devote multiple pages). The wikipedia seems to have many more in-depth articles, and those on fast-moving technical subjects and the like are naturally a great deal more up-to-date than a traditional encyclopedia.

Re:um.

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

Probably by own experiences.

Wow. I would have never imagined it.

Re:um.

[PenguiN42]

How good? In many cases better than proprietary solutions.

And you arrived at this conclusion exactly how?

By noticing several cases in which the quality of a specific article in wikipedia is better than the quality of the same article in a traditional encyclopedia? The logic here really isn't that hard.

For example: if there was a list of errors in a traditional encyclopedia that were shown to be improved upon in wikipedia, this would demonstrate that "in many cases, wikipedia is better than proprietary solutions."

Oh, but then you spout this crap out:

Oh, and please don't drag the tired list of errors in Britannica, and trot out the "we fixed those errors in Wikipedia!" party line. No comparable list of errors exists for Wikipedia-- because nobody's even *trying* to get any sort of metrics on how good or bad the content is.

Beautiful debate tactic, there. Challenge a claim, then preemtively throw out evidence in very strong support of that claim, without actually describing why that evidence should be thrown out. Oh, but make sure to throw in prases such as "tired" "trot out" and "party line" to try to cover up your inability to reason. Finally, change the topic to a red herring about having a "comparable list" for wikipedia, which has nothing to do with the original claim.

Just beautiful.

I'd almost think this was a well crafted troll, if I believed that you had the mental capacity to pull it off as such.

Re:um.

[sharkdba]

Let's see here:

[Wikipedia is] In many cases better than proprietary solutions.

The regular /. statement praising open source.

Some cases not as good.

Now, you're putting into doubt what you just said earlier.

...many many Wikipedia articles suck

Now you just reinforced your 2nd statement and went totally opposite your first. So what you said is: "Wikipedia is better, sometimes not, and very often it's bad." In other words you covered the whole range of opinions about the subject ranging from it's the best to it sucks. And yet it was modded insightful. Could it be because your post tries to appeal to both proponents and opponents of Wikipedia?

A lot of criticism..

[VC]

A lot of people criticise wikipedia based on the idealistic notion that an encyclopedia should be well researched and not user editable.
But wikipedia just works, like capitalism. A case of bad in theory good in practice.
Im donating 10 quid.

Re:A lot of criticism..

[0x0d0a]

A case of bad in theory good in practice.

Broken theory.

Before you say ..

[Eloquence]

• .."why should I trust Wikipedia, it's written by random people"?
• .."there's been a successful experiment of inserting false information..."
• "the neutral point of view doesn't work"
• "it's just an encyclopedia .."

Please read this:

Wikipedia has now hit another quantitative milestone (we reached 500,000 articles in the same year). It is now clear that volunteers can build a free, structured information resource which rivals all such proprietary resources. This is an accomplishment of immense importance, but it is not the end goal.

Article review

Wikipedia is not perfect yet. But from day one, we've been thinking about and tinkering with quality control mechanisms. The one which is currently in active use is the Featured Article Candidates nomination process as well as the Votes for deletion negative equivalent. There's also a peer review page which is in active use.

These are just trial balloons. They're not the end product, the peer review process which we need. There's a WikiProject Fact and Reference Check formed to explore a review system centered around individual factual statements in an article. I have also proposed such a system. There's also an article rating system that is currently in the CVS version of MediaWiki, our free wiki software.

We are all aware of the problem, and we all know that we have to fix this problem before Wikipedia can be a trusted authority. Doing this kind of systematic quality review will require the same level of dedication and effort as creating the encyclopedia in the first place. But we will do it, and not too far from now you will read "1000 reviewed articles", "10000 reviewed articles" announcements, and so on. And this review will be more in-depth than the review process of any traditional encyclopedia, because it will be done by thousands of volunteers from all political and religious persuasions.

There will always be an unstable edition of Wikipedia where you can go to read the latest information, with a big caveat lector sign on the front door. But we will also build a stable edition which we will distribute to the entire planet.

Neutrality

The Neutral Point of View is our guiding principle. However, that does not mean that it is the only way to write articles. Because Wikipedia's content is free, you can take it and start a fork that is written using a different methodology.

There's Wikinfo, which presents a "sympathetic point of view" on the main article, and critical views on separate pages. There's Disinfopedia and dKosopedia, which makes use of some of our content and develop it from a political/progressive perspective.

We will support dynamic cross-project transclusion of our content so that it will be easy to set up a project fork with a different policy. Wikipedia will always be the largest knowledge repository, but if you want the "truth" from a particular point of view, you will be able to consult a resource that is written by people who share that point of view. You can start such a fork right now if you want to - just download the database and get going.

It's more than an encyclopedia

The Wikimedia Foundation currently operates Wikip

Re:Before you say ..

[tony_gardner]

So what you're saying is that wikipedia is good because it has the potential to be good some time in the future? I think that wikipedia does have its strengths, but the current version of wiki is not that version, so there's not much point in arguing the greatness of wiki is in its system, when what that system has currently produced is a large number of articles which are so short as to be scarcely worth the name, a large number of articles which include partially/wholly untrue sections and a small number of really great articles.

My gut feeling is that the split is about 50/40/10, but perhaps you have better information. Until the wikipedia consists largely of verified information, its value remains greatly diminished.

Re:Before you say ..

[PenguiN42]

what that system has currently produced is a large number of articles which are so short as to be scarcely worth the name, a large number of articles which include partially/wholly untrue sections and a small number of really great articles.

Two things:

1) A lot of the articles that are "so short as to be scarecely worth the name" are on topics that would never have been covered by a traditional encyclopedia. Such "stub" articles probably shouldn't be counted in an evaluation of Wikipedia's merit unless they are of a topic that definitely should be included in any encyclopedia.

2) It's true that a lot of articles have partially or wholly untrue sections -- but this is very true of traditional encyclopedias as well. If you're going to argue that wikipedia is not as good as a traditional encyclopedia, then you should hold it to the same standard as a traditional encyclopedia when making that judgement -- not to some theoretically perfect all-correct-information standard.

Until the wikipedia consists largely of verified information, its value remains greatly diminished.

Define "verified information." Thousands of people edit and verify the information on wikipedia every day. Compare, again, to a handful of writers and editors in a traditional encyclopedia. Why do people necessarily trust the later more?

Re:Before you say ..

[tony_gardner]

A lot of the articles that are "so short as to be scarecely worth the name" are on topics that would never have been covered by a traditional encyclopedia. Such "stub" articles probably shouldn't be counted in an evaluation of Wikipedia's merit unless they are of a topic that definitely should be included in any encyclopedia.

Where wikipedia says: There are 906538 total pages in the database. This includes "talk" pages, pages about Wikipedia, minimal "stub" pages, redirects, and others that probably don't qualify as articles. Excluding those, there are 352875 pages that are probably legitimate articles. There have been a total of 6752529 page edits since the software was upgraded (July 20, 2002). That comes to 7.45 average edits per page.

So wiki considers stubs, talks and redirects as articles. Which rather makes my point. In addition, there seems to be an average of between 10 and 30 edits to the legitimate articles. Is that even enough to get the broad facts right?

My point is that thousands of people make vague, unsubstantiated statements on wikipedia every day. That's not the same as hard facts, and its not valuable. I'm not saying that no article on wiki is a good as a traditional encyclopaedia, just that the vast majority currently are not, which is rather the point.

Re:Before you say ..

[WretchedHuman]

> the Wikimedia Commons (a media repository shared by all Wikimedia projects, currently in beta),

commoncontent.org? Having many Public Domain works is a Good Thing as long as the projects have plans for cross aggregation. I will more enthusiastically contribute if I know my contribution will be assimilated into other numerous works out there.

Re:Before you say ..

[PenguiN42]

So wiki considers stubs, talks and redirects as articles. Which rather makes my point.

You're pulling some sort of odd bait and switch here. Your point was that most of the material on wiki is stub-quality, and therefore that makes it less useful than a traditional encyclopedia. My response was that the vast majority of those stub and talk pages are things that'd never be in an encyclopedia to begin with. Your respose to that is that wikipedia includes stubs and talk pages in its article count? Forget bait-and-switch, this is just non-sequitur.

In addition, there seems to be an average of between 10 and 30 edits to the legitimate articles. Is that even enough to get the broad facts right?

I don't know, you tell me. It seems like the majority of pages *do* get the broad facts right.

My point is that thousands of people make vague, unsubstantiated statements on wikipedia every day. That's not the same as hard facts, and its not valuable. I'm not saying that no article on wiki is a good as a traditional encyclopaedia, just that the vast majority currently are not, which is rather the point.

You're saying all this without substantiating any of it, which is not very valuable.

Re:Before you say ..

[jdavidb]

There will always be an unstable edition of Wikipedia where you can go to read the latest information, with a big caveat lector sign on the front door. But we will also build a stable edition which we will distribute to the entire planet.

Wow; thanks for telling me about the impending review process. I had no idea. That makes Wikipedia even better! (And I was convinced we were doing fine without it. :) )

See you round the 'pedia!

Re:Before you say ..

[Brandybuck]

I think that wikipedia does have its strengths, but the current version of wiki is not that version

Obligatory Wikipediarian reply: "But it could be that version now if only you would start editing articles instead of must reading them. We can create a perfect world if only everyone would devote themselves to rooting out errors on Wikipedia. Join me as we all join hands and sing..."

Re:Before you say ..

[Brandybuck]

Why do people necessarily trust the later more?

Because the latter are university professors, practitioners in their field, and other acknowledged experts. But Wikipedia's writers and editors are UNKNOWN. They're anonymous surfers editing on a whim.

Geeks use Wikipedia the most. Geeks think they know everything. Geeks are opinionated. Thus we get opinionated know-it-alls editing the articles. The only reason Wikipedia isn't a pile of steaming dingo dung is because those same geeks prefer to edit articles about Heavy Metal Umlauts and Moe's Tavern.

Re:Before you say ..

[Brandybuck]

I just stumbled across an example of currently erroneous information on Wikipedia. I have to share this because people keep insisting it doesn't exist.

Cracker (socio-demographic) ...Another possible etymological origin for this term has to do with its inherent implication that Caucasions are often wealthier than people of other races in the US, and therefore either sell crack or consume it themselves.

WTF! I realize that this was only added today. But considering that it's was only my SECOND visit to Wikipedia today, that's pretty bad odds. Did the author just make this crap up?
Who put this entry in? Not a random user this time, but an actual account! This account has seems to concentrate on white nationalism, Dungeons and Dragons, and the illegal drug trade. He also requests people to contribute information on Nazi theology.

Why people continue to view Wikipedia as an authoritative source continues to elude me.

Your "Authortive source" has a disclaimer too"

[Anonymous Coward]

See this for discliamers from so called "Authoritive" source! NOW MOD THE PARENT FUCKING TROLL!

Congratulations.

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

The poster you respond to links to a piece on how somebody managed to vandalize a Wikipedia article really easily and go undetected, and you respond with a canned "vandalism in Wikipedia gets corrected quickly" response.

It's even worse, because the piece that the poster linked was written to debunk the sort of canned response that you offer. To rephrase the "discussion":

[Grandparent poster]: "Contrary to Wikipedia zealots' insistence that vandalism in Wikipedia is corrected almost instantly, I can demonstrate that it's really easy to do it in such a way that survives for many days."

[You]: "Vandalism in Wikipedia is corrected almost instantly!"

Re:Congratulations.

[mandalayx]

what are you talking about dude? his link doesn't even work.

Re:Congratulations.

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

There is such a thing as the Google cache. I read it a few days ago, anyway.

Then its your job to fix them!

[Anonymous Coward]

You see bad articles? List them on cleanup, Votes for deletion, peer review, requests for expansion and don't stop and until every last one is gone! Your help is much apprieciated!

Powered by PHP and MySQL - so they scale

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the other story here. The wiki engine is MediaWiki, written in PHP and requiring MySQL. The confession can be found here.

not strange but not linear growth

[presroi]

2500 articles is the current growth, not the overall average growth in the last three years.

Maybe this page will be useful to you. And there are of course Erik Zachte's amazing stats :)

Re:Strange maths..

[cakefool]

you think they got 2500 articles on day one? and day two? need I continue?

In maths, we call this nonlinear aggregation.

Honestly

(Yes I know, we don't)

Wikipedia is a great research tool...

[Venti]

... BUT, you absolutely CAN NOT use it for reference, especially for school purposes and stuff (well, in practise you can, and no one will care, but its not right). Not because the info can be inaccurate or plain wrong, but because the dynamic nature of Wikipedia. The content of the page you are referring to can be changed at any time by anybody, wich means that you could just as well refer to some random chalkboard at your school, wich happened to have some piece of information at some given time.

Re:Wikipedia is a great research tool...

[RyoSaeba]

Actually, you can use the History of an article, and pick a specific version. You then have the guarantee to always refer to this version, not the current one.

Re:Wikipedia is a great research tool...

[zoeblade]

The content of the page you are referring to can be changed at any time by anybody, wich means that you could just as well refer to some random chalkboard at your school, wich happened to have some piece of information at some given time.

OK, bring up an article on Wikipedia. Now click on the "history" tab at the top right hand corner of the page. You can bookmark or link to whichever version of the article you want to, without worrying that it will change.

Re:Wikipedia is a great research tool...

[Anonymous Coward]

(well, in practise you can, and no one will care, but its not right)

When I was writing a diploma on image transforms and desperately needed a source to tell me not only the math part, but also what the transforms are typically used for, Wikipedia saved me. I did tread through a couple dozen books and more than half the relevant web trying to find a more "credible" source, but Wikipedia simply was best. My profs apparently agreed, and nothing can be more "right" than that.

The only source error I ever found in my reearch was on an (otherwise informative) website. If that had been in Wikipedia, I'd have corrected the mistake. As it is, the mistake is still there to mislead people who don't refer to the (correct) Wikipedia article.

Re:Wikipedia is a great research tool...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is similar to references which refer to an internet page, or a PDF, or whatever pointed to by an URI. This is why you must have "Referenced: dd.mm.yyyy" or such displayed in your reference.

So, basically, whatever you refer to, unless it's printed material in wide circulation, it will be transitory. Especially so for digital information, unless there's some scheme like Wikipedia's History view.

Why don't they sell it on CDs/DVDs?

[ceeam]

Or do they? (I have not found).
At $15-25 a disc they could've get enough money to maintain it IMHO. It hurts me when I see free projects begging with the bowl. :(

Re:Why don't they sell it on CDs/DVDs?

[RyoSaeba]

There are plans for DVD versions. There are even WikiReader, german (for now) printed versions of some articles, sold for a low price.

Re:Why don't they sell it on CDs/DVDs?

[presroi]

Try this page for example. There is an english translation as well.

And, i might add, there are several other projects for CD/DVD distributions as well (all on meta.) HTH.

Re:Why don't they sell it on CDs/DVDs?

[ceeam]

Q: Does wikipedia project gets (its share of) money from those distributors?

Re:Why don't they sell it on CDs/DVDs?

[Shinglor]

A DVD would be obsolete the second it was created. It goes against the whole idea of Wikipedia.

Re:Why don't they sell it on CDs/DVDs?

[ceeam]

Yes, in the same way as a Linux distibution on CD is _always_ obsolete. Or even Windows' one for that matter. This does not make it useless though.

Re:Why don't they sell it on CDs/DVDs?

[presroi]

If they are using just the content under the terms of the GFDL, they don't have to share their revenue (and they don't share their business risk in losing a zillion dollars).

However, they shouldn't miss the opportunity to donate money to wikimedia.

Re:Why don't they sell it on CDs/DVDs?

[ricotest]

As soon as you read the article, it's theoretically obsolete as it could have been updated. As soon as you buy a PC it's not worth as much as you paid for it. It really doesn't change anything, and is certainly not a reason to stop a DVD coming out.

An invaluable resource

[nimid]

I've often turned to Wikipedia when I'm looking something up. It's indepth, it's interesting and it's checked by hundreds of people BUT at the back of my mind I always wonder if someone's deliberately tried to influence the information I'm looking up.

I'm friends with someone in marketing for a _large_ multi-national organisation and I know for a fact that they use upwards of 50 people in their marketing campaigns to visit websites to post innacurate information. "Buy product X. It's better than product Y. I've used it and it's true!"

Now translate that to Wikipedia and select something that you want to influence. "Windows LongDredgeUphillWarrior 2043 is the best due to it's powerful features - etc". How much would it cost you to hire 10 people to 'maintain' this information for a year?

The more popularity WikiP is the more likely this sort of disinformation will become.

Just my paranoia probably but the possibility for it is there. I realise other information sources are suceptible to this form of manipulation too but it's worth bearing it in mind when you're researching with WikiP as I know many assume the information is valid because it's checked by 'many eyeballs'!

Re:An invaluable resource

[bit01]

I'm friends with someone in marketing for a _large_ multi-national organisation and I know for a fact that they use upwards of 50 people in their marketing campaigns to visit websites to post innacurate information. "Buy product X. It's better than product Y. I've used it and it's true!"

If there actually were law "by the people, for the people" rather than company-bought law those 50 people would be doing time for fraud. Company astroturfers are just the organised crime of spam and the police should be prosecuting them. Yet another reason why people have no respect for the law, particularly IP law.

---

It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.

Re:An invaluable resource

[nimid]

I did a bit more asking around...

I found out that it's quite "common practice". Also, the 50 users are paid to "discuss" and "promote" the product. I don't believe there's ever any mention of astroturfing but it's heavily implied in the way bonuses are made and also from the supervisors who look after each team.

It's not right.

A product should be bought based on it's merits but how will you ever find out if it's worthy of your Dollars/Euros/Yuan/Dinars?

The worst aspect of this sort of marketing is that the very action of combating this is the very action that makes it so successful - vote with your wallet and buy the product that you hear is the best for the job...

Re:An invaluable resource

[PenguiN42]

Now translate that to Wikipedia and select something that you want to influence. "Windows LongDredgeUphillWarrior 2043 is the best due to it's powerful features - etc". How much would it cost you to hire 10 people to 'maintain' this information for a year?

Here's what would probably happen in wikipedia:

1) These people would post this article.
2) Most people using wikipedia would recognize it as violating NPOV (neutral point of view)
3) The people editing would change the article to be more NPOV.
4) The hired "maintainers" would change it back.
5) Other people on wikipedia would change it back again.
6) An "edit war" would ensue, with the page rapidly being edited back and forth.
7) Someone would bring the edit war to the attention of a moderator.
8) The moderator would lock the page -- and put a disclaimer at the top noting that it was locked -- until the cause for the edit war was hashed out between the participating parties
9) It would eventually be determined that one or more of the "Maintatiners" were putting in the NPOV material on purpose.
10) These "maintainers" would be banned (by ip address), and the article would be deleted or unlocked (depending on its usefulness as an article)
11) Repeat until all the "maintainers" are banned.

The system works because there are more "good guys" than "bad guys", effectively.

Re:An invaluable resource

[metasj]

Like the thousands of 'reviewers' who posted to online fora about how great "Alien vs. Predator" was.

Yes, fake contributors are a real problem. But they're not very bright; it's not the kind of job every little girl and boy aspires to have when they grow up. So when they can't just submit a comment and have it stick there, permanently -- but have to defend themselves against their opposition -- they tend to go away.

More troublesome than marketing shills are the zealots (in quasi-science, religion, politics, you name it) who refuse to believe anything but their adopted line, and feel that the world is conspiring against their point of view. They're not limited by the ROI on time invested in a flame war; to the contrary, they are invigorated by the prospect of decade-long struggles against the ignorance of the masses.

+sj+

Re:An invaluable resource

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

2) Most people using wikipedia would recognize it as violating NPOV (neutral point of view)

You're assuming too much. For example, you're assuming that anybody will notice. I've seen at least one article where exactly what the poster fears happens: a group of people with a political agenda come over and edit it to fit them. If the topic is obscure enough, they can get away with it quite easily.

4) The hired "maintainers" would change it back.

You're failing to take something into account: the "maintainers" have more time and resources to spend on a small set of articles than any other people involved. Multiply the number of maintainers, spread them out across all sorts of obscure topics, and make their distortions subtle enough, and you have an unsolveable problem in your hands.

Entering false information will be impossible soon

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a system under development where every edit must be reviewed by a sys-op first. Sys-ops are trusted members of the community who have made over 1,000 contributions to the community and have helped made a better place. False information vandal days are numbered. For now! WE NEED MORE PEOPLE MONITORING RECENT CHANGES! GET A TABBED WEB BROWSER and help review EVERY change. Then revert any vandalism! If you don't help, then you have NO RIGHT to complain!

Re:Strange maths..

[Bungopolis]

I believe the 2500 number refers to the current rate at which articles are being added. A lifetime average rate would be misleading; the current rate of growth (probably an average of the last 30 days or so) is more relevent to a report on Wikipedia as it stands today.

Are you Al Fastold or are you just quoting him?

[presroi]

In the latter case, please start to quote the passages which are not written by you.

Librarian: Don't use Wikipedia as source

It's not the online version of an established, well-researched traditional encyclopedia. Instead, Wikipedia is a do-it-yourself encyclopedia, without any credentials. [...] One of these skills is to evaluate the authority of any information source. The Wikipedia is not an authoritative source. It even states this in their disclaimer on their Web site." (quoting of Sue Stagnitta)

Journalist: Wikipedia is "outrageous," "repugnant" and dangerous"

and

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20040825/0238210. shtml

Actually, I like this Syracuse Post Standard-rant because it led into a quality check by Edward Felte.

Perhaps...

[nimid]

...they should make that $100,000...?

"Connection to server en.wikipedia.org failed (The server is not responding.)"

fundraiser

[Krafty Koder]

"Still, it takes money to run such an amazing resource, and so they are running a fundraiser. The goal is to raise $50,000." why dont they use Google Adsense?

Re:fundraiser

[nmnilsson]

I agree. They could even make the ads optional: "Would you would like to sponsor wikipedia by looking at some (unintrusive) ads? []yes/[]no" (saving the setting in a cookie) I'd watch them, even though I'm too cheap to actually send them any money.

Re:fundraiser

[Little Hamster]

Pity I don't have any moderator points at the moment, or I will mod up the parent. I've wondered about why wikipedia aren't using Google Adsense before. I wouldn't mind seeing unintrusive ads for such an excellent online resource.

Re:fundraiser

[aussie_a]

Why don't they stop submitting their site to slashdot? That should cut down on their bandwidth.

Re:fundraiser

[Carthag]

Quoth the parent poster; "Still, it takes money to run such an amazing resource, and so they are running a fundraiser. The goal is to raise $50,000." why dont they use Google Adsense?

According to About Wikipedia, they do not wish to use advertisements. I read elsewhere (which I of course can't find now) that this is partly because they want to appear as unbiased as possible.

Re:fundraiser

[WretchedHuman]

Something a lot of people forget with Ad Sense is that you cannot control the ads posted at your site.

Here's something I've personally seen. At a Science site taking about astrology and it's unscientific methods, most of the ads from Google were about Astrology software. Ironical and completely ridiculous. Yes, money is good. But, focus and consistency at a site is far more important.

Re:fundraiser

[Captain Nitpick]

Why don't they stop submitting their site to slashdot? That should cut down on their bandwidth.

Hmmm.

The really interesting pages...

[caluml]

The really interesting pages are the ones that have had to be protected due to vandalism or flame wars. Ie the ones that get people really annoyed/are controversial :)

Look right down at the bottom

Re:The really interesting pages...

[nettdata]

lol!

I love the entry for Richard Stallman:

Richard Stallman for the usual reasons (see the page edit history for, oh, 500 edits if you don't know what this means). -- Grunt ?? 23:13, 2004 Sep 20 (UTC)

Slashdot effect

[traffi]

A good thing about Wikipedia is that it has entries that won't make it to other more "respected" sources until much later. This is good for all sorts of cultural phenomenons, especially web/technical related.

An example is The Slashdot Effect.

If Wikipedia's entry for the Effect would suffer from it after being discussed here, the world would certainly implode in a puff of poetic logic would it not?

Re:Slashdot effect

[imsabbel]

Most interestingly, wikipedia is almost 100% slashdot resistent.
First, they have more traffic than slashdot to begin with. (By now, it should be A LOT MORE).
Second, they use a squid array to dynamically cache requests. Its a 3 layer system: Database->Apache->Squid. If a lot of traffic goes to the same article, the requests wont even reach the apaches... (and you would need A TON of people to overload the squids, because even at 80% caching efficiency 1000hits/s dont crash them)

You could try this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey. The Wikipedia's license allows this, on the condition that they give credit where credit is due. So, the result pages of yours either have the word 'wikipedia' in them or are breaking the law. Refine your search a bit by excluding all matches that have the word, and voila!

Here's a metric.

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

One misorganized article filled with half-truths and omissions, written by people who don't know better, overrides three well-written articles. Misinformation is far more costly than lack of information. This is one of the reasons that a real encyclopedia has far fewer articles than the Wikipedia-- because editing means not letting crap into the work.

Re:Here's a metric.

[at_18]

The main reasons a paper encyclopedia has far fewer articles than Wikipedia are manpower (you can only write so much without hiring thousands of writers) and paper costs and size (who wants a 300-volumes encyclopedia in their home?). CD-rom versions are often transcribed from the paper version or, if only digital, still suffer from limited manpower and limited availble space. Do you know that the complete Wikipedia is already too big to fit into a DVD?

Re:Here's a metric.

[Anonymous Coward]

But wikipedia was never meant to replace the encyclopedia britannica. If you want to know the oil production of all of the middle eastern countries for the last two decades, by all means, consult your local library!

On the other hand, if you're trying to research some obscure topic, wikipedia will give you an idea of where to start. Regardless of the fact that it might be filled with misinformation, it is still incredibly useful.

Know *how* to use the world around you... then, you can make the most of it.

Re:Here's a metric.

[Ponderoid]

The complete complete database dump of all prior versions in all languages is over 26 GB. But if you just want the current english version, it will fit nicely on a single CD-ROM, 358 MB. The current version of all languages is 842 MB, a bit too big to fit on a single CD-ROM but of course no problem for a DVD.

*** Ponder

Re:Here's a metric.

[Anonymous Coward]

You, of all people actually care about misinformation?!

Did you enter a coma which erased all past memories of your participation in Adequacy.org?

Re:Here's a metric.

[at_18]

The 358MB file you mention is only compressed text. Images and other binary files are a few gigabytes.

wikimedia for law school

[_critic]

I've been using the wikimedia software for briefing and note-taking at law school. It's perfect for the job. The syntax for links, outlining, highlighting, etc is simple and really perfect for the job. Not to mention the automatic toc, searches, etc . . .

I don't understand why anyone would use word, or oneNote for that matter (which a lot of my peers do). For my money (free!), wikimedia beats 'em all hands down.

Anyone else using this tech for school?

Re:wikimedia for law school

[4lex]

In the spanish wikipedia we have a little project called Wikipedia in the classrooms ("Wikipedia en las aulas"). If you could document a little better your experience, we would love to link to it and/or translate it. It could be useful to lots of people, couldn't it?

Re:wikimedia for law school

[goon america]

I use it for writing and organizing my own ideas on anything. It's such a better way or collecting and -- interlinking -- your thoughts.

That said, I wish I could use the same process with an Office suite -- ie, I really find myself wishing I had a "real" text editor rather than lamely plugging away into an html form. Doing something like a spreadsheet is possible, it's just dreadfully tedious. I wish someone would take OpenOffice and make it into OfficeWiki. You should really be able to use this to work with any kind of data other than straight ascii-html text.

Life Settled

[earthstar]

For a Peaceful life

{Linux + Gmail + Gbrowser(soon)+Gchat(?)+AMD+Wikipedia }- M$(ALL)=PEACE.

+ or - Slashdot.

It seem to miss a big one

[Anonymous Coward]

A collection of free content is great, but it seems to miss all the copyrighted stuffs, which are probably store most of the knowledge out there. Is this true or something I am missing?

Re:It seem to miss a big one

[aussie_a]

Knowledge and information cannot be copyrighted (yet). If something's missing, it's because you haven't added it yet ;)

Fundraising slashdot effect

[tines]

I wonder if the fundraising will get a huge increase in donations due to slashdot or just plain bandwidth loss. A graph with donation / visitors would be nice for today.

Re:Awesome!

[ceeam]

Wow, you Japanese politicians have too much time on your hands I see. Why don't you entertain yourselves with war on terrorism or organize some more elections? :-)

Re:The question we're all asking...

[Anonymous Coward]

It was about GNAA and slashdot trolls
yes you can search for GNAA

a whole paragraph?

[feepcreature]

I know the feeling:

Back when I used to use encyclopedias on CD-ROM, often the topics I wanted to find out about had nothing, or maybe just a single paragraph.

It's not just CD-ROM encyclopedias... Two words:

Mostly harmless.

According to Alexa....

[CdBee]

Is this the same Alexa habitually detected by Spybot as the "Alexa related" link?

Re:According to Alexa....

[metasj]

The same one partnered with archive.org? Yes.

+sj+

Here we go again

[aussie_a]

You're beef seems to be wikipedia is not any good because it has some bad articles and it's impossible to know what article is good and what article is bad. Here's a tip. Don't use 1 source.

ANYONE who takes into account only 1 source is a moron, unless they don't truly care about accuracy.

Wikipedia is 1 source and anyone who uses it exclusively is a moron as all people who only take 1 source into account are either morons or very trusting. Let's take Hatshepsut for example.

The published historian Gardner claims that she was an overbearing mother who Thutmose III hated. For his proof he states the fact a lot of Hatshepsut's reliefs have been destroyed and replaced with other people and that this is obviously indicative of his pent up frustration and anger at her.

Gae Callendar (another published historian) says that this is completely false and that there's proof that the relief's were destroyed long after Thutmose III and that even if he DID do it, this was common practise amongst the Egyptian Pharoahs so it isn't indicative that he hated her, but was just following Egyptian tradition.

Gardner says that Hatshepsut wasn't a true Pharaoh because she didn't have enough military campaigns, Callendar says she was and that Gardner is just comparing her to the people that had the MOST military campaigns which is unfair and that she had more campaigns then other pharaohs and Gardner admits they're true Pharaohs.

Now I never read a book that laid out the information just as I did. I learnt all that by reading SEVERAL books. If I had only read 1 book I would have had an unbalanced viewpoint, such as the one evident in this page with the quote

(Unfortunately many were damaged or destroyed when someone - most likely Thuthmose III - tried to erase her name and image from every monument that may have had her name.)

Though this seems a little drastic, there was obviously bitter feelings against Hatshepsut.

I would say Wikiepdia has a better article on this subject as it says

The traditional belief among historians is that Thutmose III was responsible; however, researchers such as Charles Nims? and Peter Dorman? have examined these erasures and found that those which can be dated were done after year 42 of Thutmose's reign. As with many detail about Hatshepsut, historians have opposing views on who defaced her monuments.

congrats

[wikinerd]

Congratulations to Wikipedia! :) But I would (I do) focus more on quality rather than quantity. I would also focus more on the quality of the software used. I also start two wikis right now by using MediaWiki, which although needs lots of tuning and fixing (it seems Monobook is the only supported stylesheet) has shown its ability to handle with satisfactory success a big site. I plan to build my own software, but for now mediawiki does the job well. I would also strive to enable a more distributed wiki. One thing I don't like about Wikipedia is their inclusion of non-GFDL images. It is not a pure GNU resource as long as it allows "fair use" images. But aside these issues, Wikipedia is a good and useful resource, and it shows that small motivated teams of free individuals can achieve much better results than profit-driven MegaCorps (TM) with managers and CEOs :) I think this is the most important achievement of Wikipedia. Slashdotters may be interested to read this: http://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/free-encyclopedia. html

I want YOU to contribute

[aussie_a]

I've contributed (a pet-page of mine is the Hatshepsut page. I didn't create it, I haven't contributed the most, I've just enjoyed watching it grow and have contributed here and there :)). What I love is people who come in after me and fix my typo's, grammatical errors, wikify my content and generally just make my addition flow better. I do try my best, but I aint too good at it. So when someone comes along after me and fixes my contribution I appreciate it greatly. They don't need to know anything about the topic, just need to know English :)

Win $$$ using Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

Last week on the Oz version of who wants to be a millionaire, wikipedia was used via phone-a-friend for a substantial reward to the contestant (perhaps a wikipedia donation is in order).
FYI charolais is indeed a breed of cattle.

Re:Strange maths..

[QuantumG]

With gems like that, you should be posting to the wikipedia.

How many articles are stubs?

[galaga79]

The question is how many of the articles are complete and how many are stubs?

I've added about half a dozen articles to Wikipedia, but they are all stubs, on the basis that if start the ball rolling someone will run with it - yet nobody has after several weeks. Mind you, most of the articles concern Australian music festivals and authors.

On the same token, I've been impressed by the quality of the articles I have read on Wikipedia - for example the Russian hostage crisis, dust mites and so on.

Re:How many articles are stubs?

[ImaLamer]

A good idea would be to add articles to Pages needing attention if they are really needed (pages on authors for example). If they are biographies then add the bio stub to the end of the page. People often browse stubs looking for stuff to do.

(Author information can be found in most of their books too.)

Wikipedia helped me

[Lairdsville]

Wikipedia is a terrific medium for obscure and specialised information that would not be of interest to a publisher of a traditional encyclopedia.

As and example, my daughter was recently diagnosed with an extremely rare condition called Opsoclonus Myoclonus Syndrome. It only effects about 1 in 10,000,000 people per year, so you can imagine the difficulty we had finding information and medical practitioners who knew anything about it. I searched the Web and found lots of information and other people with the same condition, but it took a long time to find what I wanted and the information was fragmented and often very old, but eventually I knew more that any of the medical specialists we have been seeing. I wanted to share my knowledge, so I build my own web site, played with a blog, but then it hit me, Wikipedia! So created the OMS page and put all of the knowledge I had collected into it. My daughter will get better and we will forget the horrible episode, but the wikipedia page will live and grow and continue to help people long after I stop maintaining it.

This sort of information is only going to be accessed by small number of people, but it will be extremely valueable. Thanks Wikipedia!

Re:Wikipedia helped me

[Anonymous Coward]

On that linked page you might want to scan for "decifit" and change it to "deficit". I'd do it myself but am not confident in my knowledge of medical lingo.

Mentifex versus Wikipediam

[Mentifex]

En per aliquot annos fui contributor apud Wikipediam, at minimam habui satisfactionem, quia saepe scribunt ad hominem contra me -- scilicet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Artificial_intel ligence#Mentifex_article. Quare tristis incedo, dum affligit me inimicus?
Quid? Mea theoria mentis non satis est bona?
Sumne ego scientista vesanus?
Artificialis Intellectus Pro Te non est bonus liber de Singularitate?
Nonne valet aut recipitur amicabiliter apud eos independens scholasticus?
Nunc omnibus vobis volo unam rem dicere: satis habui de vestra stupidissima Wikipedia. Satis habui de vestro bello contra Arabiam. Cari Americani, vester Cocainista-in-Capite est inimicus et destructor humani generis. Si ille malefactor eligitur Praesidens in Novembre, me capiet suicidium.

because ads suck

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if the ads come from google, I still hate advertising of all forms.

I for one appreciate what they are trying to do by keeping their corner of the public domain free from the all-pervasive advertising that slowly creeps into more and more aspects of my daily life.

Not true, compare with communism instead.

[mowler2]

Wikipedia is acctually better compared with communism; everyone writes (if they want) articles on subejects they are intrested in without profit motives. At the same time everyone get their need for information satisfied.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need"

Wikipedia's cabal

[Anonymous Coward]

Novices may say that "anyone can edit" Wikipedia, but it's not that simple. Wikipedia is run by Jimbo Wales, who said that "[he] is not by any stretch of the mind leftist politically, philosophically or otherwise!", and "[m]any years ago, [he] was an Undergraduate and a huge fan of Ayn Rand....". The people he gave admin privileges are of a similar ilk, one prominent one is a Moonie, and they work together.

As far as entries on this or that, Wikipedia may be fine. As far as articles about history, news, or politics, there is a very heavy American bias, in fact it is basically a white collar American's view of the world encyclopedia.

For example, the entry for "East Germany" (before a friendly editor came across it) opened with: "East Germany, formally the German Democratic Republic (GDR), German Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), was a Communist satellite state of the former Soviet Union which, together with West Germany, existed from 1949 to 1990 in Germany." One wonders why it would be said on the East Germany page that it was a "satellite state of the former Soviet Union" and someone of that point of view would not say that West Germany was a satellite state of the USA.

It just presents a very upper middle class American view of the world. Muslims/Arabs/Middle Easterners are always in the wrong, the US and Israel is always right. All socialist countries, from the Eastern Europeans to the Chinese to Latin American ones and so forth, are all bad, while the US was spreading freedom and democracy around the world, from Vietnam to Chile. In fact, most of the history of countries comes from the CIA Factbook, the US State Department, or even the Overseas Private Investment Corporation like the "History of Colombia" article. That gives you an idea of what this history is grounded in.

Anyhow, it's become apparent to me and other people that this is just the way it is, and will be as long as Jimbo Wales runs it and his cabal controls it. There are alternative wikis out there such as Infoshop Open Wiki which is a wiki where a "people's history" of the world is beginning to be written. There are also other good wikis like Disinfopedia which deal with lobbyists, PACs, PR firms and so forth.

I think this is just something we learned after a long time on Wikipedia seeing how it was this way, and despite anyone supposedly being able to edit and a supposed neutral point of view policy, the inability of that to exist since there is a cabal of administrators trying to keep their point of view on top. If you want to read a history of the world not written by the US State Department, I suggest looking at the nascent efforts of Wikinfo, Disinfopedia, dKosopedia, Infoshop Open Wiki, and other alternative GFDL corpus access providers.

Re:Wikipedia's cabal

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

the entry for "East Germany" (before a friendly editor came across it) opened with: "foo"

I think you just destroyed your own case. If it has been corrected to be more world-centric then it is obviously not permanently biased, just written or copied from biased sources intially. Maybe it seems like a white, middle class american's view of the world because most of the contributors (to the english section) are white, middle class americans? This method might be enlightening to you.

Moderators...

[Hortensia Patel]

as any fule kno

Please moderate +1, Familiar With Molesworth

Re:Still Don't Trust It

[dncsky1530]

Yet you read the comments posted on board like slashdot?

Wikipedia has stated many times that is it not the end all and be all of information in the internet. It is a tool, it can give you vague information or very detailed, it's a great starting point for research. Print encyclopedias contain errors as well, mabey not as many as these open ones however the print versions can't be updated and added to cheaply.

Wikipedia could have a zillion entries and I still won't trust it.

It's hard to make a generalisation about a whole encyclopedia that contains over a million entries. Sure some of them are not 100% accurate, then correct it, or wait 5 minutes for the error to be fixed. When researching you have to check multiple sources or you are bound to get misleading information.

Come on ! give paypal ...

[dvaldenaire]

...the FAMOUS slashdot effect !!!

Re:Still Don't Trust It

[reallocate]

I read Slashdot. It's amusing. I don't trust Slashdot.

It isn't fair to compare errors in traditional publications with errors in Wikipedia. ("Print" has nothing to do with it. That's just a medium.)

Here's the point: Wikipedia is vulnerable to to deliberate falsification of content by its users and the reader has no assurance that any given entry has been vetted, corrected, and edited by competent professioals.

wiki and open source

[chrisranjana.com]

Kudos to wiki Kudos to open source Both rule !

Why no ads..?

[mantera]

How long can an expanding resource like wikipedia depend on donations? Wikipedia needs to start supporting itself and perhaps even a few other open source projects. Yes, I'd hate to see banners, but perhaps a few text ads won't annoy me as long as I know they are there to ensure wikipedia has the funds it needs to grow. As long as it's a not-for-profit organization, if it gathers too much money that it doesn't know what to do with, then just donate them to other open source efforts like mozilla.

Re:Why no ads..?

[Jon Chatow]

Please, be my guest, create a Wikipedia mirror funded by ads and donate some/all of the profit back to the Wikimedia Foundation, but it's been said time and again that we're not going to have adverts. The primary reason for this is that many/most of the major contributors would fork were adverts to be used (*cough*, es, *cough*). Also, we don't wish to appear biased towards a particular organisation/company/&c. which adverts would obviously suggest. Finally, if we had opt-in adverts, we would get barely any income - people who are opting to have adverts displayed are doing so conciously, without the desire to actually purchase anything, and so their eyeballs are worthless, or, at least, worth less than "normal" adverts.

Re:Why no ads..?

[intnsred]

How long can an expanding resource like wikipedia depend on donations?

Quite some time, actually. (See below thread on Wiki's libertarian backer.)

Hope it lasts

[Anonymous Coward]

What an amazing achievement. How long is it until we hear a /. story about it has been hijacked by some commercial interest, bought up by M$ or some swindlers along the line. How is the data that constitutes thousands of man hours work by volunteers protected?

Re:Awesome!

[PenguiN42]

Wikipedia's "stub" articles aside, traditional encyclopedias seem just as -- if not more -- likely to have errors / omissions as Wikipedia does. People always complain about its format and how "limiting" it is -- but no one has actually demonstrated that it's more limiting than a traditional encyclopedia.

It's like it's taken as an unquestionable assumption. Well I for one question it.

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

it is difficult to "demonstrate" Wikipedia's quality limitations as it is a subjective definition. But I know that I've used Wikipedia alot ever since it started, and I've had it demonstrated to me over and over again that Wikipedia is not to be taken too seriously. There are just too many mistakes and biased articles.

A pertinent URL

[Anonymous Coward]

How is the data that constitutes thousands of man hours work by volunteers protected?

Read it, it's all good. Enjoy.

Authorative Source? Soon!

[Famatra]

Wikipedia is currently working to reference all the facts on it. There is a project set up to do it also here Fact and Reference Check [wikipedia.org]. Here is a quote:

Not only can we make Wikipedia a more factual, a more reputable, source of information but perhaps the *most*. Imagine an article in which each *fact* is referenced with many academic text books, journals and websites! Wikipedia has the potential to be the *most* crossreferenced body of knowledge ever created, but to get there it needs help.

There isn't any reason why every fact couldn't be referenced making Wikipedia one of the most authoritative sources of information ever created.

There is still discussion on how best to do this so feel free to join up. Also feel free to encourage the people who write the Wikimedia program too add in this tab feature (don't encourage too hard though, they are volunteers :o) )

Libertarian slant to Wikipedia?

[intnsred]

Given that Jim Wales, the Wikipedia's millionaire founder, is a big Ayn Rand fan, has anyone detected a distinct pro-libertarian, anti-communist or anti-gov't spin to many Wikipedia articles?

I'm not saying that's good or bad (especially given our present PATRIOT Act-loving, big brotherish administration), I'm just curious if others have noticed any libertarian bias to the Wiki's articles?

Re:Libertarian slant to Wikipedia?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. See Wikipedia (Reds) (and other pages at the same site), Wikipedia Watch, English Wikipedia User Richardchilton, English Wikipedia User Secretlondon, etc.

Articles like "Measuring progress", "Genuine Progress Indicator" or "State services" are regularly sysop-vandalized or deleted, and activist groups like the "Legion of Trolls" or the "Wikipedia Red Faction" have been totally censored.

Re:Libertarian slant to Wikipedia?

[intnsred]

One of the reasons I asked was that I detected some distinct anti-tax/libertarian tones in the site. In particular, in the article entry about New Hampshire, the state where I live, I thought their initial paragraphs were quite biased and moreover, an odd way to "introduce" someone to the state.

I put in an edit on the entry. I made sure that the edit was so neutral and factual that it could offend no one, but I was surprised that the original article was put back into place. Nothing big, just a one-time edit; but it did make me wonder...

However, after reading some of the links that the Anonymous Coward posted in response to this thread, it is crystal clear that libertarian bias has been an issue for quite some time with the Wikipedia. Sadly, it's just not me.

As the links point out, there is a struggle about content from both the user-side of the wiki and internally within the wiki editors' group itself.

Re:Libertarian slant to Wikipedia?

[JimLane]

I took a quick scan of the edit history for New Hampshire and couldn't identify the specific edit you mention. It's certainly possible that it was an attack from a right-winger. In general, you're right that "there is a struggle about content" in many articles. As with many media, there are complaints about left-wing bias and about right-wing bias. One difference between Wikipedia and more centrally controlled media is that, with the diverse editing of Wikipedia articles, the biases don't necessarily all go in the same direction.

Re:Libertarian slant to Wikipedia?

[otis wildflower]

Given that Jim Wales, the Wikipedia's millionaire founder, is a big Ayn Rand fan, has anyone detected a distinct pro-libertarian, anti-communist or anti-gov't spin to many Wikipedia articles?

Whether there is or isn't is immaterial IMHO. The software is free. If you don't like the spin, edit the page, and be as prepared to defend your contribution as anyone else. Otherwise, take that free software and build your own.

However, I would definitely support adding features that would permit users to 'colorize' based on your (and/or the community's) trust of submitters, voting on partiality, etc...

You will never remove bias, but as long as there's a healthy mechanism for exposing and mitigating that bias through legitimate criticism I think you'll find that open content will actually end up _better_ than closed-source 'impartial' (read: written by pinko academics) reference material.

Re:Libertarian slant to Wikipedia?

[intnsred]

Think about what a typical encyclopedia says about a state in the first paragraph or two.

Typical entries are the state size/population, maybe when it came into the union, the state flower and/or nickname, things like that -- right?

Isn't rather odd that the Wikipedia includes in the very first paragraph about New Hampshire the sentence "There are no general sales or individual income taxes in New Hampshire, though the state does have meals, lodging, and other taxes"?

To me, that seems highly out of place for an encyclopedia's first paragraph.

I just made an edit to NH's entry and the only change I did was to cut that sentence out and to move it down to the bulleted list of other information, labelled "Miscellaneous information."

I think the tax line is much better to go down there, where they list such things as NH does not have a motorcycle helmet law, nor seatbelt law, nor mandatory kindergarden for children.

I won't bother questioning whether pointing out that NH doesn't have these laws is itself an indication of a libertarian leaning. Myself, I would point out NH's high average income or that many towns are still run on a true democratic basis via town meetings or something like that as misc. information. But after all, the lack of those laws is "miscellaneous information."

Re:Libertarian slant to Wikipedia?

[timstarling]

In the past, Jimmy was responsible for banning users, so perhaps you could argue that that gave him the ability to impose bias. But that task has now largely been delegated to the Arbitration Committee, and the money is now controlled by the Board of Trustees. Jimmy's donations were important to get the project off the ground, but Wikipedia is now primarily supported by donations from ordinary people like you or I. His editorial power is microscopic compared to the control a newspaper editor or "media mogul" has. Wikipedia is independent of corporate interests. It is controlled by the people.

Fact and Reference Project

[Famatra]

Good post Eloquence, you might want to help with this project here that does fact and referencing checks for Wikipedia.

There is already an example #2 of how a tab format might auto generate the quotations, and then people can fill in the sources. Click edit to see the tab structure currently based on comment tabs.

Tim Starling already knows about this, we'd just need a couple lines of code added to Wikimedia to make some custom tabs.

Citing Wikipedia

[PenguiN42]

Another problem is I cannot cite Wikipedia in my reports or papers. I can certainly cite Britannica. And most schools have subscriptions to EB anyway.

You can certainly cite wikipedia.... The key is to include the exact date and time you are viewing the article you are citing, as articles can change constantly. This works, because wikipedia keeps a history of all changes to the artilcle, so someone reading your paper could easily go back and look at the exact page you cited from.

In fact, this makes citing from wikipedia more reliable than citing from most web pages, as most web pages can also change consistantly but don't keep histories of the changes (and the Wayback Machine's coverage is sometimes spotty).

Anyway, when I went to school, citing from any encyclopedia was looked down on, as encyclopedias were meant to be introductions to a topic, and we were to do our research from more primary sources.

Re:Awesome!

[Soylent Moose]

After reading the comments on /. about Wikipedia, I thought it would be interesting to see what Wikipedia says about slashdot. It starts...

Slashdot (frequently abbreviated online as "/.") is a popular technology-oriented weblog, primarily consisting of short summaries of stories on other websites with links to the stories that support the editor's left wing and anti-american opinions, and provisions for readers to comment on the story.

"Anti-american," eh? Who knew...

Only on slashdot ...

[maxwell demon]

... the parent could be modded insightful.

Distribution of quality

[clap_hands]

I'm a Wikipedia fanatic, and in answer to your serious question, my guess is that something on the order of "almost all" of Wikipedia articles are quite naff -- this is based on lots of "Random page" expeditions. My view is that this will always be the case; there's always going to be some new emerging topic (e.g. pop culture) that will spawn hundreds of crappy stubs.

However, asking about the "typical" Wikipedia article is (strictly interpreted) asking the wrong question; a better question is to ask about how good Wikipedia is on the most frequently visited topics -- the 10% of articles that get 90% of the hits. In answer to this, my verdict would be "mediocre", but I'm quite picky.

The biggest gap in Wikipedia's mechanisms is (currently) a decent way to identify the good and bad articles; when this happens, it'll be a lot easier to map out quality sections (which undeniably exist).

speaking of which...

[interactive_civilian]

Oddly enough, that was missing from the Earth Wikipedia entry.

I took the liberty of updating it. Of course, if the general public decides that it isn't necessary then it will probably removed, but it is there at the moment.

:D

Re:speaking of which...

[Anonymous Coward]

Earth, also known as the Earth and Terra, is the planet on which we live, the third planet outward from the Sun.

Why does Wikipedia have to be so Earth-centric? As if the only people that bother to read it are Earthlings.

Re:speaking of which...

[Ponderoid]

Actually, the "mostly harmless" bit was already in the article, scroll to the bottom. Your change was quickly reverted.
*** Ponder

Re:speaking of which...

[Captain Nitpick]

Of course, if the general public decides that it isn't necessary then it will probably removed, but it is there at the moment.

"Thanks for experimenting with Wikipedia. Your test worked, and has now been removed."

Re:Still Don't Trust It

[Anonymous Coward]

All mediums are vulnerable to that. You can't trust anything as the "authoritative source": always use common sense!

My Biggest Complaint

[Relic of the Future]

My biggest complaint about Wikipedia is that I'm seeing a growing number of articles that seem to be written more to impress the authors peers than to inform.

For example, I was reading some articles about music theory the other day (something I kno^Kew nothing about), and it was *dense* like a brick. If the point of the articles were to educate, then they were failing; they were describing beginner-level information, but they were doing it in a way that goes over the heads of most beginers.

I've noticed the same thing happening to some articles I've helped with. I try to write in a way that's accessible to the layman, but then later some self-important expert comes by and adds extra minutiae that obfuscate the points of the article, extra un-explained un-linked vocabulary that confuses the reader, and meaningless tangents that distract from the focus.

It's hard to keep up (and so, I haven't been). But please, keep my words in mind when editing! Particularly if you wrote the bits on music theory. Remember, you're writing to educate BEGINERS, not to impress your peers with how much trivia and jargon you know.

Many eyeballs

[JimLane]

The strength of a project like Wikipedia is in the axiom "Given enough eyeballs, all errors are shallow" (expanded from Eric Raymond's original "all bugs are shallow").

Where are the eyeballs to find the errors? You can tell through the "Recent changes" link on each site. I look at http://www.infoshop.org/wiki/index.php/Special:Rec entchanges and I see, in the last week, a total of six edits by three different people. At this moment, a check of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges -- set to the default of showing the last 50 edits -- shows that those 50 edits accumulated in two minutes, thirty-four seconds. So, on which site is bias or factual error more likely to be corrected?

By the way, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, doesn't designate the administrators. They're chosen by the community. At any moment you can go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_fo r_adminship to see the current nominees and to cast your vote. There are currently 282 active admins (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_adm inistrators), rather large for an efficient cabal.

Wikipedia needs spell-check

[whyde]

Last week I found a simple speling error in the entry for Rosh Hashanah. After fixing that, I searched for pages with the same word mispelled the same way, and fixed four more.

It really was a brain-dead speling mistake, too, and a simple check presenting a list of possibly mispelled words before confirming a check-in would be a big help.

Re:Wikipedia needs spell-check

[haeger]

And naturally anyone who complains about someone elses spelling is bound to make a spelling misstake.

.haeger

Re:Wikipedia needs spell-check

[wcrowe]

Umm, you misspelled "misspelled" and "spelling". Maybe those weren't spelling errors after all.

Re:Wikipedia needs spell-check

[yodhe]

I really hope the word wasn't "spelling"....

Copyright issues might play a part

[SimoM]

[...] most of the history of countries comes from the CIA Factbook, the US State Department, or [...]

There is also another explanation, other than an intended bias, for why material from U.S. federal departments and agencies would be widely used in Wikipedia: U.S. federal documents and publications are in public domain and so excerpts from them can be included in Wikipedia articles without copyright worries.

Not my experience

[JimLane]

I'm a liberal Democrat (voted for Kucinich in the primary). I haven't detected any systematic spin of the type you describe. Some particular articles tend toward a right-wing point of view because right-wing editors have been more active on those articles. It would certainly be helpful if more people with a progressive orientation would become involved.

Jimmy Wales has essentially no involvement with article content. The systematic bias arises not from any one person's efforts but from demographics. For example, there's a certain amount of Americo-centrism just because so many editors are from the U.S. In addition, certain subject areas (computers, popular culture) tend to get more attention because Wikipedia attracts people interested in those things.

Re:Still Don't Trust It

[reallocate]

>>" All mediums are vulnerable to that."

To what? Enabling people with agendas other than accuracy and truth to alter content to further those agendas?

I can't do that in a newspaper, or a book, a TV progrtam, or in this website. But, I can certainly do it in Wikipedia.

The rather obvious fact that any publication can contain errors doesn't have anything to do with the equally obvious fact that Wikipedia is vulnerable to deliberate distortion in ways they are not.

It is also disingenuous to counter this by asserting that if I find a mistake on Wikipedia I have a responsibility to correct. First, I have no such responsibility. Second, if I'm doing research or asking questions, presumably I do not know enough about the subject to know the entry is wrong, much less to correct it.

Mods need off the crack.

[Anonymous Coward]

Post above parent post which made parent redundant and parent post were posted at the same fucking time. Asshats.

Where do they announce 1 million articles?

[joshv]

Nowhere in the linked articles can I find an announcement of the millionth article. In fact, the Wikipedia home page mentions 352860 articles - you'd think they'd update the number if it were one million.

Re:Where do they announce 1 million articles?

[JimLane]

There are separate Wikipedias for different language. You visited the main page for the English-language Wikipedia, the largest, which has 350,000+ entries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page). The occasion for the press release is that the total number of articles in all the different languages combined has just reached 1,000,000.

Calling Slashdot "anti-American"

[JimLane]

The Wikipedia article on Slashdot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot) was vandalized by an anonymous user who inserted the "left wing and anti-american" passage that you quote. That passage was in the article for all of two minutes before it was removed, according to the page history (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Slashd ot&action=history -- it was the edit at 16:40 UTC, reverted by user Fredrik at 16:42).

There's a good chance that the vandalism was by a Slashdotter who was curious to see how quickly garbage would be removed. This "experiment" has been done, people. Repeatedly. Please stop it. Blatant errors in articles that get lots of attention are corrected quickly. Subtle errors in obscure articles can linger for a long time. We know this. Vandalizing Wikipedia adds nothing to the sum of human knowledge.

Donation

[jhtrih]

It's kinda cheesy, but I did my bit and chipped in $10. If Wikipedia gets any faster as a result, I'll be happy.

Stubs.

[KevinDumpsCore]

> Wikipedia Hits Million-Entry Mark

...but sources reveal that 995,000 of those entries are just stubs.

Ob Quote:

[theoddball]

Dullard: someone who looks up a thing in the encyclopedia, turns directly to the entry, reads it, and then closes the book.
-------Philip Jose Farmer

...wikipedia: 10^6 ways to avoid being a dullard....

6th Grade Essays

[cmpalmer]

I haven't looked at Wikipedia for a long time. This weekend, my son was looking up state facts for a series of short essays and my wife was helping him. I checked in on them and found that they were almost exclusively using Wikipedia, so I looked over their shoulder to see how good the info was and I was surprised at how much Wikipedia has grown and matured since I last looked.

These were just short essays about "Why I would like to visit ...", so rigorous citations and fact checking weren't that important.

Re:Still Don't Trust It

[wcrowe]

...competent professioals.

Using your logic, I suggest you stay out of airplanes and always watch CBS news. The Wright brothers were not competent professionals; Dan Rather is.

Don't Panic

[tiraid]

The entry for /. in the Wikipedia: "Mostly Harmless"

WP vs thefreedictionary.com

[j_heisenberg]

I don't know if anyone else noticed. A couple of weeks ago, when you googled for terms featured prominently in WP, Google showed the same article on thefreedictionary.com (WP clone with - surprise - ads) much higher on the list than WP itself. Often, WP was hidden on page x>1. Makes for a nice conspiracy ;]

Re:WP vs thefreedictionary.com

[JimLane]

Wikipedia content is freely available. One consequence of that decision is that somebody with no connection to Wikipedia can set up a mirror site, grab our content, slap on ads, bury the required credit to Wikipedia way down at the bottom of the page, and use SEO tricks to get a higher Google listing. There are several other sites that do the same thing.

Re:WP vs thefreedictionary.com

[j_heisenberg]

Definitely... The conspiracy would have been something else: Google ranking down a site that has a no-ads policy. What good would it do for Google to have a wildly popular site without them?

Adding a couple of "parameters" to Google rank COULD do wonders - pure speculation though.

I can't be the only one who's thinking this

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone actually know what subject the one millionth article covered?

Slashdot needs sarcasm-check

[whyde]

Many thanks to those who have pointed out my deliberate spelling mistakes in my post. Also thanks to those who believe they should be moderated up. Quite curious.

<rant>
* Older audiophiles think analog sounds better because that's the way they trained their ears when they were growing up.
* Newer audiophiles think digital sounds better because that's the way they trained their ears when they were growing up.
* Slashdot posters think they shouldn't loose any points on they're college board exams because that's the way they typed there grammer in blogs and IM when they were growing up. Woot!
</rant>

If Slashdot had spell-check? (Score:-1, Obvious)

Thanks also to squid

[timstarling]

Anyone who complains about the slashdot effect obviously doesn't have a single P4 with 4 GB RAM acting as a squid accelerator cache. We've got three but my testing indicates one of them could have handled the entire media-generated over the last few days without slowing down.

Of course I should remember that our hats are in our hands. We constantly need to buy more database and apache hardware, but squids are great for anonymous page views.

Your post, in brief:

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

"If Wikipedia is wrong, it's the fault of the people consulting it."

Actually, to be faithful to your vocabulary, we should substitute "morons" for "people".

The problem with it is...

[Banner]

That there is no real fact checking or oversight of the correctness of any entries. Just because a lot of people believe something, it doesn't mean it's true or correct.

So given all of that, other than for humor potential, why would anyone use it? The information there is always suspect at best.

Re:The problem with it is...

[wassy121]

The problem with facts is that they are so subjective. Groupthink is here, wether you want to admit it or not. Whether it be the groupthink that evolution exists, or that god exists. History has previously been written solely by the winners. I like Wikipedia, because now the facts can be more "open source", with everyone able to fix the problems that are there. Facts by concensus is a much better system than facts by dictation.

Blaming the users, again.

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

The lesson that all these Wikipedians seem to be trying to teach me is that, if there is a problem with Wikipedia, it's *my* fault, not Wikipedia's.

I tend to think that the burden of proof is on the wikipedia condemners to show that it's decidedly *worse* than proprietary solutions.

I'm sorry, but it's Wikipedia that advertises itself as being better than real encyclopedias, on the supposed grounds that it allows anybody to create and edit articles at any time. That is a fantastic claim, one which requires a lot of evidence to be believed.

Re:Blaming the users, again.

[PenguiN42]

The lesson that all these Wikipedians seem to be trying to teach me is that, if there is a problem with Wikipedia, it's *my* fault, not Wikipedia's.

This statement has nothing to do with anything I wrote in the post to which you're replying.

I'm sorry, but it's Wikipedia that advertises itself as being better than real encyclopedias, on the supposed grounds that it allows anybody to create and edit articles at any time.

Where do they advertize themselves as such?

That is a fantastic claim, one which requires a lot of evidence to be believed.

This is true. If anyone claimed that wikipedia is of a decidedly higher quality than traditional encyclopedias, then the burden of proof would be on them to demonstrate the claim.

Similarly, anyone who claims that wikipedia is *far below* the quality of traditional encyclopedias has the burden of proof on *them* to demonstrate the claim.

I would propose the following metric to determine the quality of "Wikipedia" vs traditional encyclopedias: First, create a list of "encyclopedic" topics, which are topics that the vast majority of "traditional" encyclopedias include articles on. Then, rate each encyclopedia (both traditional ones and Wikipedia) for each topic area based on completeness and accuracy.

The reason I propose this particular metric is due to the fact that most criticism of Wikipedia seems to be directed at so-called "stub" articles or obscure little bits of info that no real world encyclopedia would even mention, unfairly biasing things against wikipedia due to its wider scope. From what I've seen, wikipedia seems to cover the core "encyclopedic" range of topics quite well.

This is on my next to donate to list

[aardwolf204]

Last Christmas my G/F got me a Slashdot T-Shirt from Thinkgeek. (Yes I am a /.er with a GF) I wear it proudly (except on dupe days) and often times people ask me what the T-Shirt means and I get to share the wonderfulness that is Slashdot.

Today I donated to FireFox, actually I got one of the new T-Shirts and some stickers to put on my car but that counts right? It felt great. Sure it was a bit much for a T-Shirt, but I know that the profit is going to something I actually care about and I can only imagine how happy I will feel wearing that shirt around town, speaking the word of mozilla to all who ask about my shirt.

Next on my list to donate to is the EFF, and I think I get a nifty bumper sticker for that too.

I really want to donate to wikipedia, I use it all the time. I find myself getting bored, then researching something random on wikipedia, and an hour later I've got 50 tabs open in FireFox and I'm super happy. I just thought I would point out to everyone that Wikipedia has T-Shirts available at cafepress.com/wikipedia.

Ok, enjoy the rest of your day.

Re:Still Don't Trust It...Or a Mob

[reallocate]

Cute, but wrong and pointless.

The Wright brothers were, in fact, very competent engineers. Viewing them as amateur Midwestern bumpkins who stumbled their way to inventing the airplane is evidence of ignorance and bigotry.

As for Rather, well, competence does not imply perfection. Rather was, and is, a professional journalist, a profession with standards that puts this forum to shame.

In any case, you've neither addressed nor acknowledged my central point: Wikepedia enables the creation of deliberately false entries and cannot provide its readers any assurance that those lies will be eliminated.

That is entirely different from errors in other publications. If tomorrow's CBS Evening News makes a mistake, it will be because CBS and its staff made a mistake, not because someone snuck into the building and entered a deliberate lie into Rather's script. There's nothing preventing the equivalent in the Wikipedia.

an encyclopaedia designed to the reverse of that?

[midgley]

"My point was simply that Wikipedia, by it's very nature, tends to lend itself to being extremely detailed in specific areas of interest that appeal to it's readership and contributor-ship"

I'm struck by the concept of an encyclopaedia that is most detailed in areas that do not appeal to the {readers|people to whom it is hoped to distribute it}

There is actually quite a good point there, that rather than being about things you are not interested in but would be improved by reading, there is more merit in references about stuff you don't know well than that which you do.

But I still think it would be a very odd book that was made that way.

Re:Awesome!

[a whoabot]

Well i was recently reading the Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia article on the future of Communism. This is what it said in the last paragraph(paraphrase):

"The future of communism in the 21ist century lies in a backwards[actual word that used] country, China, whose priorties are not to foster worker's emancipation but capitalism, communism's supposedly sworn enemy."

And that pretty much sums up the entire section on communism. "Communism has no chance of ressurection." "Communism always depends on brutal dictatorships, because of its very nature it depends on them." Stuff like that through and through.

Layers - writing in them and software to do that

[midgley]

The canon of the (UK) National electronic Library for Health (NeLH) http://www.nelh.nhs.uk is that knowledge should be presented in layers.

First a headline - 30 second knowledge - with behind that a brief treatment, to be read in 5 minutes, and behind that a more detailed treatment - an hour's worth.

I wouldn't say it has been achieved, but the idea does inform some parts of the cloud.

I'm not sure what software exists to help people to write in that way, and it may be an actual lack with one consequence being rather monolithic articles that don't easily cater to a range of people.

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

what's your point? that all sounds accurate to me. if you so desperate to define yourself via an alternative political philisophy, I think the 21st century will be more about islamo-crap. you might want to start there. i don't know if there are any popular bands that are all "islamo" (like rage against the machine is all "commie" ish) but if you can just be patient, I am sure someone will have a product showing your unique self. an islamo poster for your room (to piss of dad) and maybe some islamo-crap patch for your backpack so everyone one the street (since they are all always staring at your unique self and wondering about you) can "get a piece" of your uniquesque self. Just hang on, Uniqua!

Re:Awesome!

[a whoabot]

My point is that traditional encyclopedias are not free from bias.

Personally, I loathe modern political philosophy in general. I really don't think politics are an interesting locus of activity nowadays. But keep on thinking that anyone who says...anything? is desperately trying to be "unique", and then spouting off about it on Slashdot, in a discussion about Wikipedia. It's just what you gotta do man. Keep on keeping on.

The NPOV policy, and a weakness in it

[JimLane]

All articles are supposed to be NPOV -- written from a neutral point of view. If someone wrote, "New Hampshire is the only state that doesn't oppress its citizens with income taxes or sales taxes," that insertion of an anti-tax POV would be changed by another editor. In fact, the page history shows that someone fixed a less biased version that read: "There are no general sales or individual income taxes, which fits with the state motto of 'Live free or die'."

One weakness in the policy, which you've discovered, is that people disagree about the importance of various neutrally stated facts. Some people would argue that the state's tax policy is more important, and more worthy of being mentioned in the introduction, than the fact that it's named for the English county of Hampshire. Many of the edit wars that occur are about how prominently to feature a particular fact, and about how much detail to provide on a particular aspect of the subject of the article. These issues are harder to deal with than just removing blatant biases. The overall pattern of such decisions will tend to reflect the outlook of the user group. It's still worth something to make sure that the information in the article, whether it's in the intro or further down, is NPOV. (Speaking as a liberal who favors progressive income taxes, I have no problem saying that it's not a bias to describe New Hampshire's tax system. The article should include that information, which some would consider praise and I'd consider a criticism!)

I agree with you that the article should discuss average income and the town meeting system. The latter point is covered at the "Town meeting" article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_meeting#New_Ham pshire) but something should be in the article on the state. If you, as a resident, are knowledgeable on the subject, please go ahead and edit either or both of those articles. This is how the knowledge base grows, with many people contributing what they know.

Test

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a test post

And I, for one

[Anonymous Coward]

wholeheartedly support you agenda, sir!

sincerely,

andy784@wp.pl

Re:Still Don't Trust It...Or a Mob

[wcrowe]

You know what, I started to write a substantial rebuttal, but decided to scratch that.

You're right. Obviously the only reason anyone would ever submit an article to the Wikipedia is to mislead you. Don't ever, ever, EVER read it.

Re:Still Don't Trust It...Or a Mob

[reallocate]

You're being deliberately trite and sarcastic. Typical.

But, for the record, I did not say the "only reason" to submit to Wikipedia is to mislead., I said Wikipedia enables the posting of entries intended to mislead. That, presumably, is not a terribly subtle distinction.

If I'm wrong, prove it. Does Wikipedia fact check content before it goes live?

Now that is a stupid sentiment.

[Banner]

Facts are NOT subjective. That's why they are FACTS.

That has to be the stupidest thing anyone has ever said. Let me guess, you're a liberal, right?

I hope you get to fly on a plane someday where it was built using 'subjective' facts. Then you can be 'subjectively' spread accross the countryside.

Your history is a little sketchy

[Stephen Gilbert]

Wikipedia was never the Nupedia Chalkboard. That was an entirely separate wiki that was started by Larry Sanger in July, 2001, about six months after Wikipedia, in an attempt to bring some of the advantages of a wiki to Nupedia. It didn't work. Larry's announcement has the historical details.

Oh dear this is amusing

[aussie_a]

this is actually a copy and paste from a post I made in the "Wikipedia != Authoritive" article a while back. It was an experiment to see if I could just post the same shit and still get modded insightful.

Oh well, you can mod this back down to oblivion now. I just wanted to see what would happen :)

CENSORSHIP of wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

ok can someone explain what all the fuss over deleting this page is?

Re:Still Don't Trust It...Or a Mob

[wcrowe]

If I'm wrong, prove it. Does Wikipedia fact check content before it goes live?

No, it does not, therefore you should NOT read it. It is, as you say, edited by a MOB. Nothing but evil can ever come of it. Stay away from Wiki. Get a bumper sticker for your vehicle that proudly proclaims that you do NOT read Wikipedia and encourage others not to do so. Everything on it is pure garbage.

You are right. Be proud of yourself. Be smug even.

That's a strawman.

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

Do you really think a "normal" encyclopedia can't be wrong? At least with Wikipedia, articles are constantly checked and updated.

Do you really think that real encyclopedias are not under constant revision?

Sometime during the 70's, my parents bought a World Book encyclopedia set. These encyclopedias were edited in a yearly basis; and the company also put out a yearbook each year, with (a) a summary of the developments over that year for major topics; (b) the new articles from that year's edition of the encyclopedia; (c) stickers for you to put in your edition, indicating a newer article available in the yearbook.

And your assertion that Wikipedia articles are constantly checked and updated is profoundly misleading. It's happening in a random fashion, and it's skewed towards an ill-defined set of the articles.

And of course, articles in a real encyclopedia have errors. But there's a fundamental difference here-- systematic review (while in Wikipedia it's haphazard), and accountability for errors (which Wikipedia doesn't offer).

That's wrong.

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

The problem is that the slogan is just plain wrong on many levels:

1. The "eyeballs" are not actually looking at every article with the same amount of attention.
2. Programming and expository writing can by no means be reduced to "finding bugs" or "finding errors". In particular, both require some form of design work. Multiplying the number of uncoordinated people sticking their hands into code or text results in less design. The reason why so many Wikipedia articles read like 6 paragraphs written by 6 different people without regard for acheiving a unified article is that, indeed, that's how the "article" was written.

Another resource at Wikipedia

[JimLane]

Every article has an associated Talk page. If you're interested in a particular assertion in the article, it's worth checking there. You may find that a seemingly innocuous sentence in the article is the result of extensive discussion between proponents of the competing views, and that the text is carefully crafted to be correct in everyone's eyes.

Then again, you may find absolutely nothing. It can be frustrating for the editor as well as for the reader. I sometimes find myself wondering whether an apparent error in the article is there because someone knew more than I do, or less. Not every edit is accompanied by an explanation, let alone a citation to a source. Making citation an absolute requirement, instead of a piece of advice, might make the articles more valuable, but would make it more difficult for people to contribute.

On Wikipedia Quality Control

[Eric119]

Apparently, Wikipedia will soon have a pretty neat article review system. If you go to the test wiki, you'll find an article review mechanism. There should be a "validate" link, where you can rate the article for things like factual accuracy and completeness, and some other categories. However, you can't validate anonymously; you need a username. (This, I presume, is to prevent abuse.)

Re:Still Don't Trust It...Or a Mob

[reallocate]

Deliberately ignorant, putting ideology before reality.

You're apparently incapable of a generating a serious response, but quite capable of making lame attempts at being smarmy.

Re:Still Don't Trust It...Or a Mob

[wcrowe]

Deliberately ignorant, putting ideology before reality.

Ignorant? If you would investigate Wikipedia for yourself you would find that the articles are as accurate as any textbook. If you submitted crap to an article you would find that there are, in fact, a number of "eyes" on your work, and the mistakes would be corrected quickly. That's the reality of the situation.

Yes, there is danger that incorrect information can make it into the encyclopedia. All I am saying is that incorrect information finds its way into all sorts of places, from CBS News, to the History Channel, to your child's textbook. Should we scrap those venues also? Should all of us be responsible for the primary research on any subject in which we have an interest?

All right, so you can't trust the Wikipedia. Who can you trust? Encyclopedia Britannica? A great resource, to be sure... provided you can afford to pay for it, and it actually has information on the topic you're researching. Here's an example: suppose I want to find information on the topic of sporting clays. I go to Encyclopedia Britannica online search on "sporting clays". What I get is 136 articles, some as obscure as "dog" and "War Hawk", and two short paragraphs on trap shooting and skeet shooting, which are similar sports, but not the same thing. After sifting through the choices, I know no more about sporting clays than I did when I began. Even if I paid for the encyclopedia. Now go to Wikipedia. Type in sporting clays and click GO. Now you know about sporting clays, what it is, how it's played, and where you can find more information on the subject (gosh, look who the ignorant bastard was who wrote it!).

Are there exceptions? I'm sure there are. You can probably find articles that have erroneous information in them in Wikipedia. Here's an idea, why don't you ask for your money back. Oh, that's right... it's free. Considering what you pay for it, it's a hell of a bargain.

Re:Still Don't Trust It...Or a Mob

[reallocate]

You still don't get it, perhaps deliberately.

I am not arguing that mistakes do not appear in other publications.

I am stating that Wikipedia enables the deliberate creation of deliberately false content and provides no assurance that any given piece of content will be factchecked and reviewed before or after publication.

That is akin to filling newspapers with lies and rumors gathered at the local bars, and waiting for the readers to call in with corrections.

I assume you can distinguish between mistakes and errors made as the result of improper research or bad judgment from mistakes and errors deliberately made in order to mislead and misinform.

Since you seem to like to bash on CBS, here's the difference: CBS was misled by the individual who created those bogus memos. Even after all their own review and factchecking, CBS went with the story. That was a mistake.

However, in Wikipedia-world, the person who created the fraudulent memos -- with the obvious intent to mislead and misinform -- would have published those lies and no one would have done any review or factchecking prior to publication. In fact, Wikipedia offers no guarantee that anyone will factcheck and review any content at all, before or after publication.

Those are clear, obviuos and important distinctions.

If content was reviewed and edited by people with the requisite skills and attitudes prior to publication on Wikipedia, I'd be more inclined to trust it. Until that happens, I won't.

Re:Still Don't Trust It...Or a Mob

[wcrowe]

If content was reviewed and edited by people with the requisite skills and attitudes prior to publication on Wikipedia, I'd be more inclined to trust it. Until that happens, I won't.

It has been my experience that everything I have submitted has been edited by others, within hours of the change. A submitter can also mark a page to be watched so that any changes to it or comments about it can be communicated. I think that inacurracies are much more likely on topics of a controversial nature (politics, religion, that sort of thing), but this problem will always rear its ugly head in these areas. Having said that, I am often surprised at how fair and objective articles are, given the nature of the Wiki.

Despite what you seem to think, I completely understand your problem about articles being published before they are reviewed. To that all I can say is that while it isn't perfect, it's the only way to do it. Otherwise, if the editing authority gets bogged down, or behind, or just plain bored, or gets hit by a bus, you don't have scores of writers submitting the same changes/additions over and over again.

I invite you to share some of your knowledge with the world via the Wikipedia. Why don't you pick a topic you know something about, but which there is not already an article, and write something. Start here.
You might find it educational and enjoyable.

Re:Still Don't Trust It...Or a Mob

[reallocate]

>>"...while it isn't perfect, it's the only way to do it. Otherwise, if the editing authority gets bogged down, or behind, or just plain bored, or gets hit by a bus..."

It isn't the only way to do it. Another way is to hire professionals and pay them to do the job. If they don't do the job, you fire them and hire someone else. That model has worked well for millenia. I doubt that Wikipedia, which represents an experiment in extending the open source software development model into, perhaps, inappropriate areas, is going to reverse that record.

The absence of pre-publication review by qualified individuals is a serious, perhaps fatal, flaw in Wikipedia.

The ideology represented by ventures like Wikipedia is not convincing enough to lure me into writing for free.

Why?

[ta bu shi da yu]

Don't you like reading about exploding whales?