Slashdot Mirror
English Wikipedia Reaches 3 Million Articles
FunPika writes "It has taken more than eight years and the work of vast numbers of people around the world, but the English version of Wikipedia has finally amassed more than three million articles.
The site broke through the 3 million barrier early on Monday morning UK time, with the honors taken by a short article about Norwegian actor Beate Eriksen — a 48-year-old cast member of a popular local soap opera."
If that is the reason, than it sounds like what is needed is a method, perhaps some flavor of tagging, for indicating salience/likely level of admin attention. Have it sort of like those "no lifeguards on duty" signs. Sure, there aren't enough lifeguards to cover all possible swimming locations; but you don't coat all the beaches you can't watch with razor wire, you just let people know that nobody is even going to notice if they drown there.
On wikipedia, the same basic thing would apply. If you wander into a low interest/low traffic area, you'd have a little notice at the top of the page, telling you that this is a minimally trafficked article, and anybody could have scrawled anything on it, and nobody would notice.
With storage costs(particularly for minimally formatted text) so damn low, you don't save much by deleting(and you potentially lose something by doing so) which makes some means of organization that allows a compromise much more attractive.
I had the same experience trying to add up to date informaton in 2006. I needed cataract surgery, so the first place I went to satisfy my curiosity about it was wikipedia. My surgeon had told me about a new type of implant, an accomodating (ficusing) lens which wasn't mentioned in the article. I think my edits were erased in onl;y a few hours; they didn't even bother doing a google search. I tried to update it several time, without success. I stopped editing wikipedia then; it's a futile effort.
Interestingly, I mentioned that in a slashdot comment, and the accomodating IOL was added that day, and stayed.
Free Martian Whores!
I've mentioned the sad case of Pidgey before, but considering this milestone, I think it's worth bringing it up again.
Pidgey is a Pokemon. In February 2007, Pidgey had his own page at Wikipedia. You could go there and see a small template(since deleted) explaining to you what Pidgey is and various other pieces of information about him. It was objectively a useful resource.
Pidgey no longer has a page. Pidgey has a paragraph. A tragically short and dry affair devoid of even the most basic image. One can learn very little about Pidgey from reading it. And why is this? Why must Pidgey be so excised from the the site? Because he is a Pokemon? Does being a cartoon character or a children's toy or anything else automatically make something unworthy of a few kilobytes of page space on the the supposed repository of all the world's knowledge. The sad fact is that answer to that question is a resounding YES.
"A page for every Pokemon" was once used as a derogatory remark about Wikipedia. Evidently, enough faceless wikicrats took exception to this and decided to purge all mention of Pidgey and all the rest of the Pokemon, beyond the barest minimum of exposure, to make sure Wikipedia was regarded as a "professional" and "encyclopedic" resource. Pidgey and the Pokemon, and countless others have been subjected to the digital equivalent of a book burning by people who held an opinion that certain information was not "worthy" of archival. This from the same crowd of people who think that the Cloud Gate, Wood Badges, Ima Hogg and Books on the psychology of Est are all topics worthy enough to be Featured Articles. Compared to such worthies, perhaps Pidgey, merely part of a 5 billion dollar franchise, does fall a little short. But as short as all that?
Technology is improving, access to knowledge and the cost of providing it are plummeting; Yet Wikipedia's growth is slowing. Pidgey is merely a symptom of the underlying decay present in the online encyclopedia. His purge was less about practicalities than it was about running Wikipedia in a way at odds with it ostensibly free, open and inclusive nature. His fate was the result of all information on Wikipedia that falls under the baleful eyes of those editors with opinions and the power to exercise them.
Pidgey's was not the first page to be purged from Wikipedia, nor the most important. But it will not be the last, or the smallest.
May the Maths Be with you!
True, but I would argue that Ebonics is a more valid and complete language/dialect, being that it arose naturally.
I guess it's nonsense to call anything spoken by real people invalid or incomplete, but Tolkien was just crazy about languages. He spoke many, knew more and was highly interested in their structure. He just as much created the books around the language as the other way around, at least Sindarin for the elves. What he created is probably as natural as any real language, perhaps even more since it's shaped around one man's linguistic vision and not centuries of collected oddities that crop up.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings