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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.
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...
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.
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
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)?:-)
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.
...we just bitch about other people's efforts...
..."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
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
...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".
> 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 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.