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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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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.
...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...
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.
"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
That sometimes happens (e.g. the page on Dubya at the time of the last US election). When it does, the page gets locked for a while so people can cool off and focus instead on conveying facts and balanced opinions.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
That's like saying the same thing will happen to linux.
Wikipedia is GFDL. No one can close it.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
"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."
yep.
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
It's released under the GPL, so anyone caan bring back the free content for free.
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
That couldn't happen legally. The content on wikipedia has already been released into the commons. The copyright clearly states that derivative works must remain open. Wikipedia (or Wikimedia, or whoever) does not have exclusive control over the content, and thus have no legal ability to sell it to anyone else.
If any company tried to take control like that, someone else could just fork the content and offer it for free again.
Now, how many places can honestly say that a Slashdotting is insignificant (ducking from CmdrTaco)?:-)
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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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.
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...
This has the whole database (in bz2 format) at 538MB for current and 27GB for old. You can get the old in 1.9GB p i e c e s if you like, too, but 6 * 1.9 != 27, so something must be missing.
Anyone have a torrent of these?
..."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?
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
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".
So, about equal to many history and politics textbooks.
Wikipedia is a useful first source of information. Research for any project should include a wide variety and decent number of sources. Published encyclopedias are often riddled with errors and out-of-date information.
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
> 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
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.
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
Angela: No. 31. in the main namespace; No. 10. in all namespaces.
Morwen: No. 18. in the main namespace; No. 25. in all namespaces.
Jengod: No. 21. in the main namespace; No. 27 in all namespaces
Dysprosia: No. 24 in the main namespace; No. 32. in all namespaces
There are just four of the "top authors" ( 32 in the main namespace, UtherSRG's "ranking").
So, not all of the top authors are male.
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.