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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."
For instance, over 200,000 articles in German
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
All special users link not working....
Guess they weren't all that special eh.
"So there he is, risen from the dead. Like that fella, E. T." - Father Ted Crilly
Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
192,584 of those are related to David Hasselhoff, of which 29,219 are related to Knight Rider.
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.
Worldbook or Encarta? Those two have gone down hill fast. I rember when it was free. Now at school we can only use those two because they censor wikipedia :(
Probably the moderator uses . instead of ,
So he read it as 500.
How widely is it known? I bet a good number of people know Google or Yahoo or MSN once mentioned...question is: If one went to the street and asked the ordinary Joe Six Pack about Wikipedia I doubt there would be more than 1% who have even heard of it. In Toronto where I am now, people seem to think that the world is just made of the big players in every field. Just made a call to a university lecturer here...he's never used Wikipedia and does not even know what goes on at its site! Liking up with Google might help here.
"Wikipedia is a living example of how information demands to be free. "
SSN#:
LET ME OUT! I CAN'T BREATH!
... about wikipedia is not necessarily the number of articles or the quality (and it can be disputed that the quality is both good and bad), is that on top of the fact that to search and read the articles is free, they will also allow you to download the entire database, which i think is impressive in our information driven economy.
loganavatar.com
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:
l
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.
And then one day Wikipedia will go through puberty and finally become WIKIPEDIA GALACTICA, with 10^17 entries, even more stubs and peer-reviewed by not just individuals, but meta-moderated by civilizations..."We who became one", "We who survived" and, of course, "Humanity".
A better question is: How accurate is it?
As the old saying goes, "Just because you've been doing it for 30 years, doesn't mean you've been doing it right all those years".
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.
I suggest we mark people like him trolls... that's technically not offtopic, as it has to do with the article. Just my $0.198. Either way, I figure it's worth sacrificing some karma in order tell you all this. Common Sense(tm) people! Use it!
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
I don't know about spam, but none of these are "Stubs". As per TFA: Wikipedia currently has 501783 articles. That number excludes discussion pages, articles without links to other articles, very short ("stub") articles and pages about Wikipedia. Including these, we have 1405147 pages.
Hi, I am Mathias Schindler, a German Wikipedian. I'm currently at the Wikipedia Booth at the Leipzig Book Fair (Hall 2, H 104).
Currently, around 40% of the book fair visitors I spoke to knew about wikipedia as such. At CeBIT last week, the figures went up to 85% of all the visitors.
Okay, a book fair visitor is not Joe Sixpack from your local trailor park but I was surprised to that so many non-Wikipedians already know us.
Your mileage may vary....
Do we welcome our new Soviet History overlords, or do we cower in fear at their knowledge?
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Brittanica's articles can be book length, with illustrations. So what counts as a "full length" article in the Wikipedia?
Wikidata is in the works. It will take some development time, though.
Invaluable resource? Hardly. I thought I had met every single last closed-minded person when I went to university, but I was wrong. The remaining group went on to author 'articles' for Wikipedia. I'd be interested in discovering how you didn't find it helpful. Besides, if you can't admire it for it's quality of information with it even being open source, then maybe you can see how it worries companies like M$ who have products like CrapCarta. I for one welcome our Wikipedian overlords (I only hope that they continue to get along with our GPL and Google overlords).
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
Read the Press Release
Oh no you haven't.
Now, if you had provided verifiable sources, I might have believed you. But I suspect you are too lazy to do what you claim.
From the data table, 73% of English-language articles are over 0.5KB.
PimpMyMazda.com - Crazy mods to a 2002 Mazda Protege DX.
Firstly, unlike a lot of people on this discussion board, I commend Wikipedia; I think it's a great resource, and I use it all the time for research, even yesterday. What amazes me is that despite the fact that it is open for edit by anyone, it hasn't fallen apart. One would think that a single DDoS attack that involves mass editing Wikipedia's articles would be easy to achieve, but then again I'm not completely familiar with the inner workings, and I'm sure they have more than enough protective measures to prevent such an attack (i.e. the ability to lock the articles in the event of obvious attempts to degrade the sincerity of the article, like they did with President Bush's article before the elections).
Also what I find interesting is that in October of 2002 there was a surge of new articles and activity according to their statistics page. Anyone know what triggered this?
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
I'd be interested in discovering how you didn't find it helpful.
I find it unhelpful due to the very nature of wiki's and websites in general. I've used wikipedia articles in academic papers (any why not, they're usually more current than other competing resources), but have been burned by markers who actually look up the content (as I would want them to do anyway!), and the content has changed.
I know it's better that way, but often times the content changes just enough to offer a slightly biased slant on things. That slant is what irks the markers. They question the value of an encyclopedia entry that isn't "closed-source" and as they would have you believe "free of bias".
Now, that still doesn't explain why I think the great guys and gals over at Wikipedia are closed-minded. It's an observation that more often than not, correct additions to articles are moderated into oblivion until someone higher up points out that the information was in fact correct. No problem; I understand that the internet is all about dynamic content, and that sometimes we mess up.
with well over 25% factually correct!
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Some even became Anonymous Cowards on /.
Search for "cow" on wikipedia. Of course you will find a blurb that a cow is a female of the bovine family. It also says:
COW is also an acronym for copy-on-write, a technique in computer science
I mean come on! There are a zillion acronyms for the word cow.
Wikipedia is edited by too many techy people and this could hurt its reputation.
Here's a wikipedia article involving slashdot. Karma_Whore
Some info on what Karma Whore's goals are. Karma Whore has three stated purposes: to post information about a topic that everyone already knows; to link to wikipedia, because wikipedia pwns
Oh damn, now I'm in a loop
Business Voyeur
But how can this Wikipedia thing exist if it is not listed in Encyclopedia Britannica, which, since its authors say is better, must surely be the authoritative guide to everything?
I love Wikipedia because it is a free alternative to the traditional profit driven, elitist, and biased encyclopedia publishers. All information publishing is biased. I'd rather, as a reader, take my chances with a self policed large community than an annointed elite set of encyclopedia writers.
The web, in general, is great for breaking up monopolistic control of information. This is why the web has been so successful at tearing down the old travel industry system of information brokers. The next to go will be car purchasing, real estate, and tyrannical governments like China and Iran.
Wikipedia isn't an example of information wanting to be free, it's an example of groupthink spinning out of control. Has it changed dramatically in the last few months? I may return if it has, but if not it's just another example of a failed ideology.
Self-promotion...
My partner and I do a site about sharing creativity, and we've just finished converting all the stuff we've written into a Wiki (using MediaWiki). We can't write about everything ourselves, so we're hoping that making it a Wiki will get us a bit of help from other people. If anyone's interested, it's here...
http://pigpog.com/wiki/
So far, it's got a bit about playing guitar, a few articles on productivity and GTD, and a couple of reviews of things, but we'd love to see it grow to cover lots more things - writing, blogging, photography, drawing, painting, music, etc.
PigPog.
What was that link again?
> Have fun with wiki everybody.
Could you please buy me an encyclopedia i could use instead?
Many of you were probably already aware Wikipedia had reached 500,000 articles. What may be of even more interest to many Slashdot readers though is that the Wikimedia project that runs Wikipedia and other sites desperately needs more people to help run the site. Both to develop the software and administer the servers. The growth of Wikipedia is phenomenal and traffic is increasing at a rapid pace. However, without proper planning, the system will not be able to keep up with demand. The site gets over 80 million hits a day, so it would certainly be an interesting project to work on from a technical standpoint. Oh, and did I forget to say it runs on Linux?
The other thing Wikipedia needs most is better referencing of facts. The only criticism left of Wikipedia is the percieved lack of reliability. The best (only?) way to combat this is to cite individual facts to the most authoritative source available. With that Wikipedia can be more reliable than any other single source available. Not perfect, because someone can dispute any fact, but Wikipedia might be able to be the best out there at it. There is certainly a lot of work going on in this area, but also many who write on Wikipedia fail to see the writing on the wall and reallize this really is the only valid criticism left. I for one am promoting work on a list of Wikipedia's otherwise best articles that do not cite their sources properly. If you want to contribute to something, researching and citing facts in these articles could be one of the most valuable things you could do.
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.
Its as well because you'd have no real right to. True enough, wikimedia servers are US hosted and operated. However, Wikipedia which has no restrictions on who can edit and contribute articles is a globally developed encyclopedia.
Some of the most prolific English-language Wikipedia writers have english as their second language. They often provide the detailed bulk of an article and any spelling or grammar issues are sorted out gradually by other editors.
Indeed there at least 22 non-english language versions of Wikipedia, consisting of articles translated and written most probably by people from the countries where that language is predominant.
The Wikimedia project also recieves funding donations from across the world.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
24? Is that you?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
- Make sure every conceivable reference to POVs aligned with their own POV are included in every article -- referring to them of course as simply yet another POV (which takes up 90% of the article).
- Encumber, with the entire history of mankind's fallacies, those subjects they'd like to see suppressed while relegating the best current knowledge to minor subsections or even to separate "special" articles linked to from the primary subject. It's rather like writing about "Heat" and focusing on the history of ideas like "phlogiston" while leaving statistical mechanics to a special article such as "Heat as a statistical mechanical phenomenon".
- Enforce standards rigorously on POVs they want suppressed and relax standards consistently on POVs they want promoted.
In other words, they do pretty much what standard encyclopedias do only more so.Seastead this.
Agreed, its just like any other idiot that just wants some attention. Now, if he had provided some diffs to show actually having made those edits, then we would have something. If he had backed up edits with supposed sources, those sources are easy to check and easy to recheck with other sources. It may even last a little while if he had done it, but referencing makes it much easier to verify the facts, and those would eventually get weeded out.
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.
Seems to me that this guy is proving a point - one that the Wiki-zealots simply don't want to hear. Inaccurate information doesn't merely survive in the Wikipedia, it thrives.
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.
If you were really bragging, you'd have given just one example and defied us to find the rest.
You bore me.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
On behalf of compulsive readers of information on the Internet, I'd like to say: Thanks a lot, I waste more time on your site than anywhere else! I sit down and read some article, and before I know it, I've got another 8 tabs open with crosslinks to other Wikipedia articles, and another hour has come and gone.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
Wikimedia and Wikipedia are developed by a very international team. The two elected board members are actually from the U.K. and France. Volunteers come from all over the world.
... but the two-letter abbreviations are ISO 639 language names, not (an obsolete) ISO 3166 country code (which also are used as internet domain name suffixes). This is why the English wikipedia is en.wikipedia.org, not us, uk or au. Or nz, I suppose. Languages don't map nicely to countries; there are languages that span many countries (English), countries with more than one official language (Switzerland) and languages with no country (Esperanto).
In this case, "su" refers to the Sundanese language. You probably wanted to link to the Russian Wikipedia, with ISO-639-2 code 'ru'.
Happy to help!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The article about the violent fear you feel when you're unable to locate your miniscule wang is right here.
Happy to help!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
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.
500,000 full-length articles... with well over 25% factually correct!
Which makes it a LOT better than broadcast and print news media. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuff Mostly because it keeps popping up while I'm chatting with Trillian...
Well, really good articles are labeled featured articles and held up as examples of the best (the en) Wikipedia can produce. They can be fifteen (printed) pages or more; larger than that and they start spinning off sub-articles. (Like the ginormous collection of articles on WW2 which has summaries of the major facts, but links to a lot of more specific articles, which themselves link to sub-articles and so forth. This style is supposed to make it less daunting to go to an individual page, while still allowing for a lot---a lot---of detail.
There's also a discussion of article size that you might find helpful.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
That sounds pretty odd. Nothing like the Wikipedia I know. How about linking to the edits you made, and the user talk page where you were warned to quit it? Your comment is almost like an accusation, so some evidence would appropriate.
I always mod up spelling trolls.
Hah! In thinking of interesting but unlikely topics, I thought of lawn ornament and was surprised that it didn't exist in Wikipedia yet (with all the fun of pontificating on the tackiness of pink flamingos and gnomes), so I started it. Anyone with good photographs, please help!
stop it from happening? It's as easy as "Edit this page" ...
Your mileage may vary....
Your kilometerage may vary?
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
...is love, sweet love, no not just for one, but for eeeeeveryoooooone!!
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
Do not anthropomorphize my information!!!
Cheers,
Adolfo
If you mean that the topic of cows is too simple to warrant an encyclopedia entry about it, then I must disagree. I don't think there is any subject related to nature or human endeavour that is remotely "simple", except when glanced over by a passer-by. 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.
Well, Encyclopædia Britannica is listed in Wikipedia, which obviously makes EB some sort of child of Wikipedia. Since EB is unaware of its parentage, we can only assume it's some sort of poor orphan child, or... err... something less legitimate ;)
So, how would you like to find out what the acronym "COW" means then?
That's what Acronym Finder is for.
AF sort of functions like a wiki, too, by the way.
This is beside the point - niether bankrate.com (which does not really present cd rates in a usable form), or the much better money-rates.com or ibankdesign.com is the equivalent of open source, and it shows
I disagree with your financial analysis also, but that is another discussion.
Wikipedia isn't an example of information wanting to be free, it's an example of groupthink spinning out of control. Has it changed dramatically in the last few months? I may return if it has, but if not it's just another example of a failed ideology.
I think it's much more of an example of people not wanting to write a full anything anymore.
Not that there's anything wrong with being lazy, just sayin.
http://use.perl.org
For anyone who doesn't know about wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
I know this isn't exactly the proper place to discuss this.
Could you explain why i was wrong about the analysis?
Looking at the money-rates site, i would have to lock away my money for 6 months to get in the 3.25% apy range. And on most of the banks you do have to have 1k, 2k, 5k, or even 10k deposited.
While I have $5000+ from savings over my life it is what I live off of while I'm at school (daily expenses, parents, or more like loans, pay my tuition and rent) and so I cant lock away my money in a CD. It is needed daily (well monthly when I pay off my credit card bill, which I try to use all the time to build credit, don't worry I pay the bitch off each month)
And given that the interest rate on the MMAs have been rising steadily (as have CDs) wouldn't it be best to ride the wave jumping instead of getting a slightly higher rate now, but keeping it for 6 months when by then my MMA rate will have increased atleast 1% higher.
Gangs operate as gangs because the individuals are weak on their own. They have a _lot_ of incentive to make sure they dominate any place integrity might show its face. When you have people of integrity they generally stand as individuals and simply have too much to deal with in a world that protects weak individuals.
Seastead this.
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
But information wants to be anthropomorphized.
It makes it feel all warm and fuzzy.
There's a News@Nature.com about Wikipedia, which includes an interview with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. For those who aren't familiar with it, Nature is pretty much the most widely-read scholarly research journal out there.
I interviewed for a job with a law firm and one of them was talking about Wikipedia. When American lawyers catch onto something, you know you've penetrated the technophobosphere.
I went and wikified (added links to) your lawn ornament article. Sometimes you don't need to add photographs if you're linking to articles with good photographs.
I see claims every once in a while whenever a WP article appears on Slashdot. Yet, I've never seen a link to such changes so that people can look at your changes and validate your assertion that your changes are not crazy political trolling.
Can you please post a link to the changes you submitted, and if you can't do that, your username?
I would mod you up as funny, but it would create a space time paradox that would destroy the whole universe.
Cheers
Adolfo
All your base are belong to us - er well, half us, half wikipedia.
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
Puppies love David Hasselhoff. Wait... I got that wrong, didn't I? (SFW)
Okay, so a philosopher, a philologist, and a philatelist walk into a bar...
You might wish to amend that to "geeky". It was a good while before the Jewish meaning of "phylactery" was listed above the Dungeons and Dragons meaning (though it finally was changed last year). Somehow, I doubt most people looking in a Real Encyclopedia for "phylactery" are checking on the biological (necrological?) functions of an undead wizard.
c te ry
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phyla
(Check the history list.)
Another odd one was Crown of Horns, a nasty piece of magical hardware, also from D&D.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_of_Horns
When Google first moved from dictionary.com to answers.com (which uses Wikipedia articles), if you typoed "Crown of Thorns" by dropping the T, you'd be offered a definition for the D&D artifact. Basically, typing ANY wikipedia article title (by accident or not) into Google would give you a definition for that, rather than the individual words or likely typos.
At almost 500K articles, there must have been a few real gems in there. And since I see a lot of Wikipedia names just redirect to other articles, that might've bumped the number of apparent articles up to well over 500K, increasing the likelihood of an incorrect definition if you typed just the right/wrong words in.
Now, I'll admit that the thought of some myopic old grandma-type looking for an article on Christianity or houseplants landing at an article about dark gods and soul-sucking artifacts is amusing, though it's not exactly how one wants to market oneself to the populace. (Wikipedia - give your granny a heart attack!)
Evidently oddities like that must have caused someone at Google to alter whatever pattern-matching search of answers.com the definition link uses, because now a lot more searches default to definitions of the individual words. So, in a way, Wikipedia's already proven that it can't be a Google information supplier without a filter in the way to chop out the worst/most technical/most geekly of articles.
You must be new here.
Evidently oddities like that must have caused someone at Google to alter whatever pattern-matching search of answers.com the definition link uses, because now a lot more searches default to definitions of the individual words.
As far as I can see, now the only definitions ever linked are for individual words.
It is too bad; it was really cool when they were also linking to definitions for combinations; almost all such linked definitions included a wikipedia article.
I like Wikipedia :)
In several cases, between all of the Wikipedia articles on semi-related topics, there's been more usefull information on Wikipedia itself than within all of the external sources for that topic.
stories/articles does /. have...?
That's amazing all these people speaking weird languages huh?
A small case study: Once I made a small addition to an article. It stayed there for a month, intact. Then people started to edit it to make it sound better in English. (I'm not a native English speaker.) But these people definitely didn't understand the topic, so soon my addition was modified to some better-sounding, but factually totally incorrect mess. When I realized this, I got angry, and trolled on the discussion page. I also corrected the mistakes. In an hour, some competent and nice person arrived. He verified my statements, improved my corrections' grammar, added some more material, thanked me for my help, and politely asked me not to indulge in personal attacks. It was really smooth and professional.
If your mileage varies, it means that sometimes it's high, and other times it's low. It doesn't remain constant.
But that's not how the phrase is usually used -- to warn that the mileage you get might not be the same as the mileage I get. In other words, that your mileage may DIFFER from mine.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
* Laura Branigan
* William Shatner
* Leonard Nimoy
* Giorgio Moroder
* Olivia Newton-John
FYI, Leonard Nimoy singing "Bilbo Baggins" can be found here.
And people bought William Shatner's songs? Does anyone recall him singing "Rocketman" and "Tambourine Man"?
"Hey MISter TAMbouRINE man
Play me a...SONG!"
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Why hasn't anyone mentioned Everything2 yet?
--Reverend Raven
Desperate days demand dire deeds.
I reciently went to a Wikipedia article which was just full of spam, and when I looked at the HTML source code I noticed that there were no rel="nofollow" or anything similar on any of the links. I belive that previously Wikipedia had this implemented, so why did they decide to stop doing it?
If the version you decide you want to cite to is the current one, don't link to it, because that link will go to whatever is current when someone else follows it. Instead, make a trivial non-vandalism edit to the version you want, like adding an extra blank space after the last sentence. The version you want is now no longer the current one and you can create a stable link to it. If you're a neatnik you can then go back and remove the superfluous blank space, but, even as a Wikipedian who hates vandalism, I wouldn't consider that necessary.
Indeed there at least 22 non-english language versions of Wikipedia....
Actually, according to this listing, there are versions of Wikipedia in 159 languages. That tally counts all languages with at least one article other than the Main Page. There are 90 that have at least 100 articles.
I've tried on no less than 7 occasions to make changes or additions to some rather innocuous pages only to return some moments later to a message telling me to stop defacing or trolling the site. I'm not talking about crazy political trolling or anything of that nature, merely additions of relevant links, changes to dates, spelling and grammar mistakes etc..
I've only done one edit on Wikipedia. It was just a simple formatting thing on a page I came across, where carriage returns in the source text interfered with the indentation of bulleted items. I edited it, and was surprised to see that the changes were immediately there. I was surprised that I didn't have to log in or anything, and that nobody had to review it before the changes were allowed.
Maybe it was a software bug that was giving you those errors. For a while, I kept getting barred from submitting comments on Slashdot because either "I or someone on my subnet" was trolling the site. I never did any trolling, I didn't have bad karma, or any posts modded down, so I found this confusing. They fixed that bug eventually, though. If you just received an automated message, that could have been exactly the same sort of thing that happened to you, but on Wikipedia.
It's really good that you've made some effort to contribute - if you come across that sort of thing when you've done nothing wrong, bring it to someone's attention on the site who could review the situation, because for all you know it could be a software error or some malicious users who got into the system to try and mess with it.
On the other hand, the satire of Wikipedia (Uncyclopedia) is only at 2700 articles. Guess information is easier to write than satire. (Ooor, it could be the few year starting period, the popularity, the sanity...)
Tired of legitimate data sources? Try UNCYCLOPEDIA
A couple of thoughts. Have you created a user account on Wikipedia? It's a very quick process, and it might help, depending on your situation.
Wikipedia normally tracks contributions by username. For anonymous editors, Wikipedia reports IP addresses. If you're on a computer network where a lot of machines share a single apparent IP address (a university campus or large corporate network behind a gateway machine), your edits might be lumped in with those of less...helpful contributors. If there is someone on your network who regularly defaces Wikipedia, then you might be getting burned for someone else's edits.
If you're editing as a logged-in user, I can't explain why you would meet such hostility. I've been contributing regularly for the last few months and the community seems to be generally very civil and constructive. As others have requested, could you point us to articles (ideally specific edits) that you've had problems with? If you've been the victim of a troll or vandal (Wikipedia has a few, but certainly not as many as Slashdot) then there are administrative procedures to intervene with problem editors.
~Idarubicin
There was an extensive discussion and vote about this. The view that prevailed (by 85 to 55 in the official vote tabulation) was that the attribute wouldn't be all that effective at stopping spam, that we could clean the spam links in the normal editing process, and that we could help out the good sites we referenced by boosting their Google ranking.
I was in the minority. I hope that some version of the attribute will be restored in the future. The comment on the vote says, 'More advanced heuristic use of rel="nofollow" is likely to come, when someone has the time to put in the effort to make it work.' Maybe someone reading this has the skills to help out.
In the meantime, if you see spam in a Wikipedia article, feel free to fix it. The "Edit this page" link is at the top, and the bottom, and the left margin. Be bold!
Anarchopedia - a general wiki with an anarchist bent (and run in an anarchic fashion)
Sorry for nitpicking, but surely "indervidualistic" is more accurate than "authoritarian", and "collaborative" or "communal" rather than "anarchic"?
>As far as I can see, now the only definitions
>ever linked are for individual words.
Not quite. To extend my previous example:
http://www.google.com/search?q=crown+of
or...
http://www.google.com/search?q=jus+soli
It seems that if it's a multiword phrase that has a (dead tree) dictionary entry, it's still linked as a phrase. Google seems to be using a standard dictionary as its Wikipedia/Answers.com filter.
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.
... it should be pointed out that Jimbo Wales and many of his "lieutenants", as you say (I wonder if they get bitchin' uniforms) voted to delete the GNAA article, and yet there it stays, because of community (sigh) consensus.
If everyone seems to disagree with you, have you ever considered the possibility that you might be, y'know, wrong? If you come to Wikipedia to push your POV, there'll be a fight over it. Says so on the box. I know it might be a really foreign concept, but not everyone agrees with you.
You might also be interested in WikiProject Countering Systemic Bias, which seeks to apply the same effort to articles on, say, the Lord's Resistance Army as they already do on the Ackermann function.
I'd like to think that folks like you would get further if you didn't have such an axe to grind.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca