Slashdot Mirror
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!
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
You read a text book from the index end first!
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
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.
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.
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
Now, how many places can honestly say that a Slashdotting is insignificant (ducking from CmdrTaco)?:-)
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
...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
Coincidentally, that's also the /. HOWTO.
Overall it's highly overrated, but worth the price.
> 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
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