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The Wikipedians Who Make it Happen
Phoe6 writes "Many of us might have wondered who these crazy people are, spending lot of time at wikipedia and presenting us with such an invaluable information.
Wired has decided to give some credits to the most active wikipedians, in their article titled Wiki becomes a way of life"
Good to see that a few of these people are getting the recognition that they deserve!
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No, no, no....that's /. moderators.
About time people who did this got some praise. Damn fine work they do, and an invaluable source of info.
"(I'll) tell you how you know you're a Wikipedian," he said. "You read any nonfiction book from the index end first. (And you think)...
"...It's a good thing I don't have friends - then I wouldn't be able to do this!"
The coolest voice ever.
What do you mean? The article says 'Phoe6 writes' Why would CmdrTaco have specifically written this (I mean, it's not a dupe ;) )
??
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...Obsessive compulsive disorder
Wouldnt it be ironic, if the OCD wiki, was edited, relentlessly?
See, those Encyclopedists are just a cover for a political group that wants to take over the internet through the science of psychohistory. And they actually revealed their plans on their own website too, but say it's "fiction" to make it seem like a hoax! Brilliant.
page 1 of the article.
... not very nice.
The link in the post goes to page two for me
Wow -- great idea to slashdot such a wonderful server when we KNOW it has bandwidth problems already...
The article link goes to the second page of the article, someone please fix that.
I think Wikipedia is excellent. It is amazing how much care is put into it. However, I also find it extraordinarily frustrating. The latency of it renders it pratically unusable. I hope that Google's bandwidth can help this because as it is, I find I do not use the wikipedia because of the hrrible lag.
And before you flame on, I DID send a donation.
There is really nothing to prevent me from going into those submissions and editting my view of the facts. There is nothing preventing someone from taking the other viewpoint.
I am suprised that these entries aren't changing on a minute by minute basis. Everyone wants to write history from their viewpoint.
How long untill it becomes so big it's worth alot of money, some company buys it and goes "oh well, you gave it to us when you submitted it. It's a subscription fee now.."
I like muppets.
"Stacey Greenstein" is a man! How the heck do you do an interview then manage to go to press with the wrong pronouns in places? Too bad wired isn't a wiki.
Hey wired, good job on your homework!
While I appreciate the passion in these cases, a little word of advice for the (and would be) enthusiasts: be cautious about becoming an obsessive fixer on any of the wikis (be it Wikipedia, or any similar website.) The obsessive fixers are PITA, specifically, the ones who turn a blind eye towards opinion of others. Many flame wars have errupted on these websites, not all of them being constructive for the content.
Be there. Contribute. But learn to read what others have to say. Let wikis evolve the way they are supposed to be. It's a website.
..to the ladies and gents who do contribute to Wikipedia; I am grateful for thier work, as well as my 12 year old(especially on the Sunday before an assignment is due). I'd better get in the habit of contributing...=)
Blacker than my baby girl's stare. Black like the veil that the muslimina wear. Black like the planet that they fear...
I won't even start with the "dupe" stuff... can hardly blame you guys if wired.com is doing the same themselves. However, if you're going to have so many damn wikipedia articles, can't we at least get a wikipedia icon and category? You've done so for lamer subjects.
Not meaning to be critical, but the article cited does not explain who these crazy people are. I don't exactly know whom the article is targeting at an audience, in fact. It publish a list of usernames with the number of submissions, along with brief snippets about two specific users. I was hoping to learn more about the actual type of person who is contributing, demographically.
I realize this would have taken a lot of work and might even be impossible, but would have made a hell of a lot better article. :-) Easy for me to say, from the comfort of my office.
Currently hooked on AMP
... Rise of the Bots!
who is these crazy people are
/. !! ... ... ... No. Forget it. :)
Heck. Where's the [edit] link to correct the typo? Can't wait for the wiki version of
Hmm.
/.
wiki
Er
Talking about the beginning of Wikipedia, I realized that this was posted on slashdot. Not long ago, I discovered that a moderator on slashdot was named Samzenpus, who is the second cousin twice removed of Snagglepus
Well Snagglepus is famous for saying "Heavens to Mergatroid
Mergatroid was the sister of a guy in a band called Newcleus
The guy just happens to say, and I quote:
this song came out in the early eighties - a Paradox (how could a wiki exist in the eighties before wikis existed?). Cosmos, nucleus, wikis, it all makes sense now. Slashdot may look like an innocent little blog which slashdots servers from time to time, but they are in actuality trying to slashdot the universe
Now, how many places can honestly say that a Slashdotting is insignificant (ducking from CmdrTaco)?:-)
Love Wikipedia, and especially the folks who put the content together!
One thing though, it get's damn slow sometimes.
Wikipedia should either hook up with google on some webserving or
Google should grab a nightly dump and set up pedia.google.com
Ignore the idiotic slashdot articles about google trying to take things over and lock things up. Wikipedia is licensed to prevent that, but also to allow sharing, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed they take google up on their hosting offer sooner rather then later.
Good luck!
why is there no article about slashdotters who make it happen? :_(
Instead we are seen as this kind of human wave that takes down websites.
Maybe it's more eligatarian this way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
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It's both.
After all, they are more verbose than the average Wikipedian -- enough to be a Wikipedian and a half.
Which of course brings up the question, if a Wikipedian and a half can write an article and a half in a day and a half, how many Wikipedians are needed to write six articles in six days?
People should use caution when trusting info from there due to the fact that anyone can slip a bit of misinformation in there without anyone noticing for months or years.
Your comment is utter bullshit, as anybody can verify by looking at the actual page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Eagle_Scouts
Also, there is no "they".
From the article: "Wikipedia is ... democratizing knowledge on a massive scale,"
So...if Wikipedia had been around way back when... the "world-is-flat" crowd would have edited out the silly "world-is-round" guy, right?
This is what keeps me from giving Wikipedia much credibility.
I know all publications are in danger of being biased by the writer. However, I can decide to place my trust on that one writer or entity. With Wikipedia, there's no way to know past agendas or the like.
Why is this comment being moderated up? A quick glance at the article's history shows that "Charles Manson" has never been added except for today, and has never been removed.
Quite some time back, mopeds in India used to be called "wikis" or "vickys". I have no clue why, for i haven't seen a moped brand with the same name. This usage has also stopped of late, and most such mopeds are simply called mopeds or scootys.
A moped, in the Indian context, is a 2-wheeled motorized vehicle, usually with a 50cc engine, with a top speed of perhaps 50kmph, and with a mileage that would put any hybrid vehicle to shame (over 100km per litre). It also has a strange design. It looks like a motorbike on an Atkins diet, and yet has pedals like a bicycle.
Anyway, just thought i'd share as the name "wiki" reminded me of this antiquated motorbike that thinks it's a bicycle.
According to WikiPedia, we should question why this story got accepted. from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot
The Slashdot editors are sometimes accused of posting (and even preferring) stories that are, themselves, thinly-disguised trolls, which encourage large numbers of postings in response, and of accepting kickbacks to post certain stories.
He appears to be on the page now. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Eagle_Scouts)
*sigh* back to work...
I keep adding "Charles Manson" to the page "list of eagle scouts" (...), and it keeps getting removed.
:-)
I see your point. But that would still be much harder and would take you *much* more time to have such an information added to a regular, old-school-paper-version encyclopedia, you know.
No entries on Wikipedia can truly be trusted.
Er... that sounds slightly exaggerated, right?
The problem with Slashdot memes is that YOU INSENSITIVE CLOD!
...we just bitch about other people's efforts...
Another interesting article on Wiki at Wired, The Book Stops Here, discusses some interesting points regarding the difference between Wikipedia and other more traditional encyclopedias.
The article sheds a light on the interesting "power structure" of wikipedia, i.e. some users have the power to "lock" pages that are changed to often and so on.
One would think that at some stage, a more Linux like "patch accepted/rejected" system would be beneficial. It could be a two tier system, "This article was accepted by Someone" and "This is a new article and hasn't been reviewed". It would be an attepmt to get the best of both worlds, the respectability of traditional encyclopedias and the variety and width of an online wiki.
Treo + Kaffi = Traffi
..."you also take a completely anally-retentive attitude to anything you see written on a computer screen, and have an irrestisible compulsion to comment on it, despite your comment being completely surplus to requirements"
What these Wikipedians do not realize is that they are pioneers (I'm hesitant to use the term "revolutionary soldiers") in the realm of knowledge gathering, preservation, and updating. And it is this capability to "instantaneously update", which Wikipedia has over paper-copy encyclopedias, that is the most precious characteristics about it.
The first edition of Encyclopedia Britannica came out in 1768; Wikipedia first appeared in 2001; in terms of readership, we know who is kicking whose butt.
Sun and Fun
It looks like the article was edited by a pesistant vandal, (Sistertina), from a brief look at the edit history. These edits were also reverted (restored to the original version), fairly quickly, as they removed everyone from the list. If there are other edits removing Charles Manson, that don't seem to be by the same person, please post links to the edit history. If not, this looks to be more a case of one isolated idiot, rather than sytematic bias.
In any case, Charles Manson is on the list now. I also notice no comment about keeping the list " nice for the kids" on the discussion page, was this in e-mail?
"wiki" has to be the dumbest name for any technology ever.
k i-wild west.
what makes it even more embarrasing that it appears to be named after the theme tune to the dreadful movie, Wild Wild West, starring Will Smith, who's tune went:
wiki-wild-wild
wiki-wiki-wild-wild
wiki-wiki-wi
(where wicki is a shortened form of "wicked")
somebody in a fit of madness decided that the "World Wide Web" was pretty "wicked" too, thus the "Wiki Wiki Web" was spawned.
This is a shame, as it embarrases me to point people to otherwise excellent sites such as wikipedia.
So I added to it what I could... and you know what? It felt GOOD! I hadn't really done anything worthwhile that week, and I felt that I made a great contribution to society!
So don't knock it til you try it. There's a great sense of accomplishment in giving knowledge to other people, even if it's something as trivial as finding the best burgers in town.
And now I see that someone took away my link to the best burgers in town. I'll fix that.
Berto
http://www.rotten.com/library/culture/eagle-scouts /
There is huge outcry whenever anyone tries to make an article "kid-safe", and for good reason. But no, don't trust Wikipedia alone -- same as you don't trust *any other single source* without double-checking. I find it to be less biased than conventional print media myself.
the editors of wiki had:
1. no axes to grind 2. committment to accuracy 3. no conflicting interests 4. credentials
Oh, and btw, using wikipedia as "source" is like saying something is true because your brother-in-law says it is (and he's a dr/atty/chemist/nobel laureate/cereal box prize winner/etc....). Not credible.
It's not an encylopedia, it's a editorial page on a multitude of subjects.
Not trying to goad anyone, just making an observation.
This sig requires top secret clearance.
...are the ones going around cleaning up other peoples messes. Occassionally I find it entertaining to drop into Wikipedia: Vandalism in progress and just look at the constant erosion of Wikipedia articles by schoolkids, dedicated trolls, the misinformed, or just the dogmatic.
To be honest though, it really shakes my confidence in Wikipedia articles, I mean how much is actually missed by the policemen? You've got multiple vandalisms from a few well known addresses, it's not a rare problem. A user doing one or two vandalisms in a bunch of legitimate edits is going to, on the whole, escape censure.
I really only trust articles which have been locked from editing as they have been validated repeatedly and are immune to the random vandalism that a little looked at page must inevitably gain.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
Actually someone has removed him now, but on the basis that he isn't a scout, and that Swirsky who added Charles, was an account 'Account created to troll Wikipedia with this slashdot comment [refering to the original comment]', as admitted on his/her user page.
No, I put that there as a post-it note.
...also includes Wikipedia content. It's usually pretty fast (and also linked from Google).
I posted a Wikinews story yesterday entitled "CIA Sending Suspects Overseas For 'Rendition'", which received almost 2000 hits due to being displayed on the front page of Google News for most of the day. This helps give Wikinews more readership, since they are not listed in Google News. Sadly, however, it does not result in increased discussion, since most people visiting from Google News are not people interested in posting comments.
Looking for political forums? Check out "The World Forum".
An approach like Wikipedia will arrive at a collection of definitions, explanations, theories etc. which are acceptable to a consensus of the community. It certainly allows for listing af alternatives, even "some crackpots think that...". But this is not where you look for radical innovation. Of course, some people will eventually consider it The Truth(tm).
What keeps me going is my inertia.
By someone, with an obsessive, compulsive, love of, commas, perhaps? ;-)
TwistedSquare is William F'n Shatner!
Laws are for people with no friends.
Wow, um, some people need to get a life.
Mods really don't have any power to censor. Just give you an up or down mod. Sure a lot of it is modding down dissenting opinions, but that's only because most of them can't tell the difference between a good argument and a poor one that supports their worldview or a poor argument and a good one that goes against their worldview. On the other hand, since people started pointing this out, mods have been modding up dissenting opinions and marking as flamebait common sentiments. It's a bit silly.
> To be honest though, it really shakes my confidence in Wikipedia articles, I mean how much is actually missed
> by the policemen?
It's a fact that the quality of Wikipedia will always be uneven -- but so is the quality of our general knowledge: we know some topics in far greater detail than others. This is due to the vagarities of human interest: some topics attract more people & resources than others.
This same principle applies to fighting vandalism on Wikipedia. Articles that are importnat will be more closely watched for vandalism than those that are not. For example, if you wanted to write some nonsense about an imaginary or little-known village in Africa or South America, chances are that should it escape notice in the first day or two, this nonsense may persist for months or years. But then, if no one knows about this -- or cares -- what damage does it do?
This issue reminds me of the alleged practice of encyclopedia companies long ago, who would create articles about fictional cities or towns in order to catch illegal copying: if no one consults these articles, does it truly harm anyone?
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
Did you correct the errors you spotted, or do you just bitch and whine when "others didn't get it correct"?
It's hardly a task at all to edit the article to be correct. You don't have to login even...
The same carefulness applies to print media as well. Encyclopaedia Britannica is not pure fact, it has errors too. You cannot trust any source to be fully authoritative.
"Back when... the "world-is-flat" crowd"
When would that be? The greeks knew the world was round. What's more, they measured it pretty accurately.
http://octopus.gma.org/space1/nav_map.html
Where are the women?
Just go look at them and watch the edits and how they evolve. Some contentious topics do not have very good articles but others do. The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust article is an example of a very good one. Once good, neutrally written facts are in the article, that tends to stabalize it for the better. The only thing that drastically upsets that is vandalism or a staunch POV pusher. Vandalism is easy to fix, just revert the change. The same with the staunch POV pusher, but the long term answer there is to require them to cite reliable sources. With reliable sources backing up the facts in the article, the article can approach the most trusted resource and the most neutral possible. Think about it: why would you trust anything you read that does not cite its sources? Past experience and appearing legitimate and reasonable help, but if you really think about it, are not enough.
A thousand monkeys, typing on a thousand computers.....
...because I wrote most of that article :)
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I keep having to come up with new convincing alias identities so people won't think I do all the editing on my own.
Fixing vandalism is the easy part - 99 times out of 100, it requires an admin simply to click Rollback and occasionally to block the perpretrator. (about 4 clicks total). On the other hand, there are some very nasty clean up jobs (although, for good reason, I won't mention any specifics here) that require quite a bit more work -- 2-3 minutes per instance for an admin who knows the system well.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Most people with 0 edits in the last 30 seconds appear to have dropped in rank by a number of places approximately equal to 10% of their current rank, pretty much thoughout the list. In other words, if you don't post for 30 days, your editing rank drops by 10%. Or, to put it another way, for any given number of edits Np, the number of contributors who have done more edits than that goes up by 10% every 30 days or about 0.33% per day. Fascinating.
So that explains why every little town has a default page containing census data! I honestly thought somebody was going through and copying and pasting all the census data into Wikipedia by hand.
I must say I appreciate the Jack Kerouac reference in my hometown's article, though.
Did anyone else notice that the all of the top authors are male? If wikipedia subjects are spread across all fields (not just the largely male-centered science and technology fields), wouldn't you expect more of the top authors to be women? What can be done to get more women involved?
On paper Wikipedia is a wonderful idea and it has some good stuff in it. Yet in my experience, it is far from the democratic or scholarly endeavor that it purports to be.
While this is based on my experience with some edits and corrections that I did as an anonymous user, it was disheartening enough that I decided to stop wasting my time on it.
I discovered a number of factually incorrect statements on a technical article. I corrected those and wrote the corrections in clear and concise language. For each correction, I provided a solid reference, less than 10 minutes after my extensive corrections had been saved, they had been reverted back to their original state.
I figure that if people want to live in ignorance, why waste my time stopping them? Yet there are two things that bother me about Wikipedia:
1) A well-funded "think-tank" could hire a hundred people and have them work on wikipedia for one or two years. Their concerted effort would be enough to distort much of the already contributed materials and they could work in tandem under a veil of anonymity that would allow them to support each other in a way that democracy would appear to be at work.
2) If you read Kuhn, you'll realize that scientific breakthroughs, what he termed "scientific revolutions" often happen by breaking with the established dogma/doctrine/explanandum of the era. Wikipedia's focus on consensus-building and catering to lower-common denominator is bound to favor the common wisdom.
3) Ultimately, real researchers are paid good money for a reason. Getting published in the peer-reviewed journals in any discipline is not easy and ultimately it ensures a certain level of quality control, one which no doubt often brings other problems in its wake such as the fact that many journals also are run by a clique of insiders with an agenda, but even these biases are usually known and accounted for in academic circles.
4) Wikipedia is a fun and would succeed if it would just sell itself as a fun interesting social project. It can even be resourceful at times. Authorative or trustworthy, it is not.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
Does anyone know how to incorporate MediaWiki into PhpNuke as a module or block so that it ends up integrated into phpnuke?
I've tried all the variant wikis and none of them fit the ticket. My customer is dead set on MediaWiki. I've googled and can't find anyone talking about doing such a thing.
I'm new to both but I can and have made both systems work independent of one another, it's getting them integrated that's busting my hump..
but you are no Wikipedian.
/.'ers who don't see nearly endless opportunities to relate "real" life to "Seinfeld", the reference)
(and, for
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
An example. Take Kung Fu. I don't know about you, but I find this to be far more useful and relevant than this.
As for E2's social aspect, the truth is that I'm not interested in their parties, chats and other social gatherings; when I want that I walk away from my computer.
I get the distinct impression that E2 noders see E2 as more of a lifestyle whereas Wikipedians see themselves as producing something. If E2 noders have a great community and enjoy spending hours on end on their site doing their thing, then thats great. But it won't necessarily result in something that is useful to the 99% of the world's population whom are not E2 noders.
Deutsche Welle has an article available in German here http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1510851,0 0.html/
Non german speakers can use their preferred machine language translator.
It's mostly a fluff piece, but good promotion for Wiki.
http://hughgordon.com/
Oh, man, I suppose Britannica should get out of the "fact" business then, too.
Just 'cause there's no real public review process for Britannica (which is fine; none is advertised) doesn't mean they're not full of holes.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_War This entry is longer than entries for, you know, real wars.
I've racked up over 10,000 edits last I checked. You'll notice that information is from December, 2004.
I might note though, that (almost) every one of those Wikipedians deserved to be credited. They really are the cream of the crop. Especially Daniel Mayer and David Gerard.
I say almost because Derek Ramsey (Ram-man) generated lots of useless and inaccurate stubs with his Rambot. He single handedly ruined the "Random page" link.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I add the applause to these people, even the odd article that I have added, which I'd do without too much care; people have gone back and corrected the grammar and spelling while leaving what I put there intact. The commitment of people to do such which has to be a tedious chore is commendable.
It appears you want a wiki that discusses the same topics you find discussed often on Slashdot. If you like Slashdot, and you like Wikipedia, then you might also enjoy the patterns wiki, the meatball wiki, or the infoanarchy wiki.
Many people will argue things as true, even if it's just their opinion or something they heard. That's why we have and need research and peer review.
Do you claim that Wikipedia lacks peer review? There are people with mild, possibly undiagnosed OCD who seem to have nothing better to do than watch for vandalism to go down the Recent Changes page.
Strange that people with better things to do would wade into the comments section. It's good to know the spirit of openness and two-way communication hasn't disappeared from all large websites.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
... where do I fit in on that taxonomy? I make a zillion janitorial changes (well, thirty-five hundred and counting as of last December) and occasionally create an article or two based on my own knowledge or quick research. I pick up loose ends that other people leave around. I fix others' dodgy markup. I tag images for copyright. I stardardize markup across articles in a category.
And images, too---I screenshot things, I scan things, I even take a few pictures here and there. But I'm not really good at writing in an encyclopedic way. So, which am I?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I need to get a life!
On the Slashdot/RSS thing, RSS is getting quite a reputaton for really unpleasant surge loads. Something we're factoring in to anything we doing relation to RSS, designing for caching. Not really a surprise if Slashdot has had to do some tweaking.
We were suffering a bit today from the combination of Slashdot, Wired News (Wikipedia Becomes a Way of Life) and Spiegel Online with an overloaded image server. Image server was bouncing around 100% utilization, kept some pages in the queue too long and that hurt overall apache capacity. We've seen far worse and we're getting rid of that bottleneck. As a temporary measure we've asked people to remove some pretty but not content images from a few places. Won't last long, though.
On the fund-raising side, the drive ended early after exceeding its $75,000 target. It's currently at around $95,000 probably with some data still to arrive, close to reaching $100,000, my initial thought of a target. Really good news for those of us doing the capacity and reliability work but it'll take a few months for it to be visible. Thanks to everyone here who helped!
Anyone who wants to spend a bit of money on another useful project might consider sending a bit to Freenode.net, the IRC host. Among other things they host our channels, including our offsite 24/7 IRC NOC and a superb MySQL channel, regularly inhabited by MySQL employees. Providing good service to lots of other open source projects.
Wikipedia is the source of invaluable information. See, for example, Ass to mouth article. Where would you find this information in Britannica?
Seriously, I'm afraid that the useful information in the encyclopedia is becoming buried among the garbage, if direct democracy model without any editorial board is used.
It's kind of obvious if you look at the admin comments on the vandalism in progress page. But that's in the process of being fixed already.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche