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.
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.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
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.)
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?
Get the EULA T-shirt
-source
Congrats to Wikipedia for the 1 millionth entry...and (less easily measured) even more interesting, deep, and thoughtful articles.
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
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").
Are you adequate?
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
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!"
Are you adequate?
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!
... 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.
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.
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'!
A hundred and twenty characters ought to be enough for anyone...
Librarian: Don't use Wikipedia as source
Journalist: Wikipedia is "outrageous," "repugnant" and dangerous"
and
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20040825/0238210
Actually, I like this Syracuse Post Standard-rant because it led into a quality check by Edward Felte.
"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?
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
Get your own free personal location tracker
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?
Treo + Kaffi = Traffi
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.
Are you adequate?
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?
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.
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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:
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) )
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.
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.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
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.
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.
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.
Actually, the "mostly harmless" bit was already in the article, scroll to the bottom. Your change was quickly reverted.
*** Ponder
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.
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.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the