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Wikipedia Reaches Half a Million Articles
Faraaz Damji (frazzydee) writes "The English Wikipedia has reached 500,000 full-length articles. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia collaboratively edited by thousands of users worldwide, and the article count has been increasing every day. Thanks to all the users who make it happen, especially the ones who put in hours every day writing to make this invaluable resource that we all love."
Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union
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Wikipedia is a living example of how information demands to be free. This has already taken place for a long time in the scientific community, and wikipedia extends that idea to everyone on the internet.
One of the more interesting overviews of wikipedia, and wikis in general - something that you can send to someone non-tech-savvy who doesn't really understand the idea of a collaborative web page - can be found here:
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http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.htm
Basically, shows how the "Heavy Metal Umlaut" (heh) page at wikipedia has evolved over some time. Interesting stuff. Note: This is a flash movie, although when it comes up, if your browser window isn't tall enough, it'll probably just look like a web page. Scroll down for the play/stop/back controls.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
Wikipedia still has load balancing issues. The bandwidth and servers are there, they're just not being used correctly. It takes forever to get the server farm to open an HTTP session to load the main page.
Sorry, my karma just ran over your dogma.
As an ever-evolving, ever-accumulating storehouse of knowledge, the articles are never done and thus never "full-length." A more meaningful statistic might be the total number of words, cross-links, and articles. A nice measure of the incompleteness would be the number of red links denoting pages that have yet to have an entry.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Hi, I am Mathias Schindler, a German Wikipedian. I'm currently at the Wikipedia Booth at the Leipzig Book Fair (Hall 2, H 104).
Currently, around 40% of the book fair visitors I spoke to knew about wikipedia as such. At CeBIT last week, the figures went up to 85% of all the visitors.
Okay, a book fair visitor is not Joe Sixpack from your local trailor park but I was surprised to that so many non-Wikipedians already know us.
Your mileage may vary....
Censor? I do not think that word means what you think it means.
You may disagree with an academic institution not allowing you to use a non-academic source in your work, but it is not censorship. Look it up in the wikipedia if you don't believe me.
For all of it's convenience, there's no assurance that what gets put into Wikipedia is true. The maintainers themselves admit this, and I think you'll be seeing a sactioned "verified" Wikipedia later this year.
Wikipedia is a fascinating experiment in public education. Its quality certainly debunks the myth that centralized authority is the only way to ensure that quality. But who decides the accuracy? If two people have very different definitions of a controversial subject, like "terrorists" vs. "freedom fighters" for a single guerilla group, which becomes "definitive"? Who decides whether unproven scientific theories, like early versions of string theory, are "science", or "pseudoscience"? If I post an article, clearly linked, reporting a new scientific discovery, are the "wikipeers" qualified to process the "peer review" that filters most scientific reports? Central editorial authority is certainly no guarantee of accuracy, but is P2P editorial even less accountable, even less reliable?
--
make install -not war
From the data table, 73% of English-language articles are over 0.5KB.
PimpMyMazda.com - Crazy mods to a 2002 Mazda Protege DX.
As a first order, to many people this would increase the professionalism and believeability of the information, but to those wanting to get to original sources, they would find the inaccuracies, and as interested people, would likely correct the misinformation.
At law school, I saw many talks on Wikipedia where people did this same thing - inserted misinformation and waited to see how long it took to get corrected. In their cases, usually it never got corrected until they corrected it themselves.
That's just a function of the openness of Wikipedia - it comes with the nature of the beast. What I think is the true strength of Wikipedia is that, since there is no central authority deciding what does and what does not deserve an article, many wonderful topics are being treated that never have been before in any encyclopedia - Heavy Metal Umlaut, for examle.
Here in Canada, everyone migrated from Google to Wikipedia a long time ago. At least in my High School, which hardly represents all of Canada, but it's amusing to see all the "gangstas" flipping through Wikipedia for their history assignments, even if it is only to copy+paste... but tho teachers already know about it as well so hah. Any ways, yeah... pretty popular where I'm from.
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
www.bankrate.com Has you covered already.
I check there money market accounts weekly if not daily, and always have my money in on of the top 5 banks on there MMA list. Currently the best rate is 3.25%. Great for people who don't have a lot of money and don't know how long its going to be there.
MMAs are more liquid than CDs and, if you look at the rates, actually provide a better rate of return unless you are willing to lock your money away for a year or more in a CD and often requiring at least 5 or 10 thousand dollars for a CD.
Also to all the paypal users out there, the money market fund they have is only pulling 2.4% and its uninsured. Move your money out of paypal as quickly as possible to a bank with better returns.
Paypal will draw from your bank account if you don't have enough funds, so you might as well keep them in a place where they earn more interest.
Britannica? Be kind. I grew up trying to read cover to cover the leather-bound editions my parents bought for me (I share your bias), and while today I scoff at anything in written form that's less than 5,000 words, I firmly believe Wikipedia is an excellent resource.
I get access to Brittanica's website through my SBC account. The books are just a few feet from me. That said, I've rarely bothered with either when I needed some information. Put another way, Wikipedia is just too easy. And for any subject that doesn't age well (anything technology related, for example), Wikipedia shines.
On the other hand, If I'm looking to read an extended on an obscure subject, then maybe I'll reach for the appropriate volume and pour myself a drink of something that does age well. Or I'll buy book on the subject and skip Britannica altogther.
The only thing I havent' found online for which I insist on authoritative information are dictionary lookups. The rubbish found on dictionary.com, Webster's, etc. is a poor substitute for owning some form the OED to browse.
You know, it's shitty that you got modded down as Flamebait. Because I occasionally see posts like this and I immediately wonder how and where they happen. I've made several thousand edits, and have had someone revert them perhaps once or twice. Maybe this means I'm in line with the groupthink over there, but more likely it's that I make a lot of copyediting and nitpicking edits, not controversial ones.
I strongly urge you to show me the diffs where you got reverted. If you don't know how to do that, tell me the date and the article name and a vague idea of what you contributed (or, better, the username you used if you were logged in), and I'll have a look.
A lot of new editors do get reverted, because a lot of them write "GOATSE ROCKZORZ" on Ollie North's article to feel the power of "do you mean that when I hit submit, it's immediately visible to everyone?!".
Now, I'm not saying that's what you did. And if a good edit got reverted, I want to know about it, because I believe in the project and it pisses me off when that happens. So... show me the edits, or at least the way to them.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Go to wikipedia everyday and add ONE fact, correct ONE misspelling, or add ONE reference. Don't make more than one change per article per day. Don't make any change you can't back up with a quote (in other words, no opinions, no original research). Provide the reference with your fact. Use EDIT to see how things are done, like the use of brackets for linking.
You will get hooked. You will love making a difference.
Once you learn your way around the place, throw away anything I just said you you don't like.
If you are afraid of making a mistake, do everything anonomously.
Wikipedia may look open and mutable at first, but it is not. Most people learn this the hard way, get discouraged and stop contributing to wiki encyclopedias altogether. I am/was very involved in Wikipedia over the past year, and say this from experience. Hopefully the painful frustration around this discovery will not prevent people from contributing to wiki encyclopedia's other than Wikipedia. Unfortunately, most people begin getting frustrated, think they can beat the system, then disappear from Wikipedia and every other wiki encyclopedia altogether, which is unfortunate. Even Wikipedia administrators like w:User:172 and w:User:secretlondon have been badgered off of Wikipedia, not to mention a host of users.
While Wikipedia itself will always be the way it is, articles are licensed under the GFDL, which is one positive thing. Unfortunately, most of the articles are garbage. Even the well-written articles have other people come in later and introduce the same bias you can find in the corporate media. It is like gold surrounded by dung. If I transfer a Wikipedia article to another wiki, I almost always use an old version of it, before people came in and started modifying it.
Good wikis to check out are:
I urge you to contribute to these wiki's for historical, political, economic and other such subjects as Wikipedia is hopeless for these topics. The views reflect the owner's, which is as it almost always is. Thus, you will feel better building the new society within the shell of the old in these other places, where you will be part of a welcoming instead of hostile community. And of course, especially since Wikipedia uses the GNU FDL, continue to contribute to pages on the w:brontosaurus and such, but realize that Wikipedia will always have biased historical articles, and trying to fight it is pointless, the deck is stacked against you. We'll write our history on these wiki's, the conservatives will write theirs on Wikipedia and other wikis, and that's how it is.
Fixed. I didn't add all of them, but I added all that already have pages and then some.
Perhaps this isn't the answer you were looking, for but here is an independent audit of Britannica, showing errors that have been corrected in Wikipedia.
The point of the audit is not, I think, that Wikipedia is an authoritative source and Britannica is not. It is, rather, that if you think a source is infallible, or even vaguely infallible, you're fooling yourself.
Furthermore, Britannica doesn't have anything comparable to the Countering Systemic Bias project.
But you do have a point. I would like to see external audits of Wikipedia's featured articles versus their Britannica equivalents (though I doubt Britannica has an article about the heavy metal umlaut), and comparing that to an audit of random non-stub articles at least six months old versus their Britannica equivalents, and comparing that to an audit of random articles from the entire pool.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
However, there's plenty of bandwidth in the world, and there's plenty of people that will be willing to donate some of their bandwith to a project like wikipedia. I personally would have no problem serving 20% of my uplink permanently to it. There just no infrastructure to utilize the bandwith to serve pages. As far as I can see, editing pages needs to be centralized, but the serving and viewing of pages could in principle be decentralized and shared amongst the users. Grossly simplified: Wikipedia will run the tracker and redirect the request to an auxillary.
Given the dynamic nature of the Wikipedia, and the fact that it needs to serve webpages, not files, the technological hurdles are daunting, but some sort of shared load does seem to be needed in order to make the project long term sustainable. And with long term, I mean a few centuries.
A dairy farmer could probably right a book on cows, cow technology, cow behaviour, and how all that relates to his philosophy of life and why his kid is studying rocket science at university.
First, I think you mean "write", not "right".
Second, I have a book I inherited from my great-grandfather (a farmer). The book was published in 1944, and is called "Cowphilosophy". No joke. The subtitle is "The Art of Practical Dairy Practice". Inside the front cover, before the title page, is a page with some pictures of cows, and the text:
We Are Your Cows
We have to eat what you provide.
Drink what you give us.
Live where you put us.
We may be good cows or we may not.
We may be healthy, or we may not.
We may be comfortable or we may not.
We may be profitable, or we may not ---
So much depends on you, the dairyman.
THE FIRST REQUISITE OF A PROFITABLE DAIRY BUSINESS IS A GOOD DAIRYMAN!
(Strange but true. I love having that book on my shelf. I didn't grow up to be a farmer, though. I ended up getting a PhD in applied math. But I can always consult my Cowphilosophy book when I need some real wisdom.)
I tracked down an example.
a fe =off&c2coff=1&client=safari&rls=en-us&q=site%3Aen. wikipedia.org+user+%22paul+smith%22&btnG=Search
e au
Your name according to the blog on the website is Paul Smith, and searching for that in wikipedia user talk pages gives 9 hits, most of them bad (for you).
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=lang_en&s
You even gained a vote for deletion! Nice going!
What are you doing wrong, you ask? See this persons talk about you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Rennes-le-Cht
You actually wrote, inside an article:
"Message from Paul Smith: Guess what folks..."
This is what talk pages are for. The person who removed your commit moved it to the talk page, explained why, and even flagged the article as a non-neutral point of view for you.