Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
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.
Are you adequate?
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.
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.
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.)
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.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
The days of solid sources for non-academic work are long gone. All we need is good enough, thats what Wikipedia is.
Open Source Sushi
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.
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.
Official GOD FAQ.
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.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
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.
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!
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...
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 I would say Wikiepdia has a better article on this subject as it says
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
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.
Can't a man live without a sig?