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.
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.)
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.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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
-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
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
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.
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...
"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
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.
Get your Unix fortune now!
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?
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...
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
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.
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.