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Aussie Tech-Focused Wiki Launched
daria42 writes "Wikipedia's great for some things — like looking up the in-depth history of 4chan, for example — but not great for others, such as finding out the micro-history of the technology sector in certain countries. That's why Australian technology publication Delimiter has launched a public wiki site purely focused on the Australian technology sector — its personalities, issues, companies, and events. Already the site has better coverage of some areas than Wikipedia, leading to the question of whether more such small wikis should be created for certain verticals."
Wikipedia's great for some things — like looking up the in-depth history of 4chan
That is what is wrong with Wikipedia.
Why not use the effort in creating articles in an entirely new wiki to instead improve or add articles for Wikipedia? Wikipedia as we know it today would be much less useful if broken up into thousands of subdomains.
It's Senator Conroys all the way down...
... and then they built the supercollider.
Aussie Tech-Focused Wikipedia Launched
No, it wasn't. Some business in Australia unconnected with the Wikimedia crowd decided to put up their own wiki (running MediaWiki, like half of the other wikis out there). Good for them.
Why didn't Slashdot cover it when Penny Arcade got their own Wikipedia ? Oh wait, it was because that didn't happen, the same way Australia didn't get their own Wikipedia for technology.
Anyhow, if someone's going to give the Land Down Under their own honest-to-goodness Wikipedia wiki, I think it should be about ways to get rid of invasive species. Any Aussies here? You've got what: rabbits, poisonous toads, some kind of insect, and.... what else?
coding is life
a dedicated wiki will always have better chances of attracting people with knowledge on a certain very specific subject, so yeah, it's a good idea. however, i'd like to see all such sites heavily integrated with and indexed by wikipedia itself, so that finding the information is easier.
weinersmith
If these people really are notable, even in a niche, and there are decent references to cite for their articles, Wikipedia will eventually create articles for them.
There are ways to keep a specialist encyclopedia ahead of Wikipedia's coverage of that specialty, but they usually involve having a lot of expert authors, and/or decades of previous work that's hard to replicate. For example, Wikipedia's coverage of classical Greek and Rome isn't as good as one of the massive multi-volume encyclopedia sets on the same subject, like the German-language Pauly-Wissowa. Are Australian tech personalities really a similar case?
Another way, of course, is to genuinely cover articles Wikipedia doesn't want. Maybe if they get into a lot of detail, a separate article for every product any company has ever produced, that will be possible. But is that enough of a niche?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Wow, you mean there's a wiki *besides* wikipedia, out there on the web? One that deals with a specialized topic in more detail than would be appropriate for wikipedia? That's amazing, a definite first, thanks a lot timothy!
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
I caught myself reading the articles in an Australian accent..
But isn't the internet really just thousands of sub domains? And it's useful right? Even the Wikipedia folks seem to think that it is okay to have many sources of "fact" see also links aka references at the end of each Wikipedia entry. Is this a Wikipedia issue or just a problem with somebody else calling their user create collection of "facts" a wiki? I like Wikipedia and appreciate when people add to it but refuse to limit myself when people choose to maintain their own website(s) even ones that happen to be structured as wikis.
>implying that's an in-depth history of 4chan
"the question of whether more such small Wikis should be created" And the answer would be 'yes'.
Wikipedia doesn't want full depth coverage of specific areas. Once they wanted to contain the "sum of human knowledge" (including catch rates for pokemon) but these days they want to be an online encyclopaedia based on reputable sources. They encourage you to go off and make your own wiki if you want to have deep coverage of a particular area.
For example the article on 4chan contains superficial background information. There is another entire wiki dedicated to the full history of 4chan and the memes it generates. The wikipedia article focuses on Project Chanology and /b/ because that is probably what got 4chan the most press coverage (which is what wikipedia admins like to base articles on, but hardly covers all knowledge of a subject).
Wikipedia wants you to write encyclopedia articles. They don't just want an infodump of "non-encyclopaedic" information. If you do the latter they will tell you to take you "non-notable fancruft" to another wiki.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
Isn't that was wikia does? It lets people set up specific wikis on specific subjects that cover things in more depth than would be allowed by wikipedia due to article notability standards?
That's kind of a duh statement.
I am become
Probably would have been roughly as effective to publish an article in a major mag or popular blog saying "Hey, we need more coverage in wikipedia, please contribute."
Why is this worse? Because the small wikis don't have the infrastructure. Financial, technical, and human resources- the volunteers who have spent years figuring out the best available way to do stuff, Etc. etc.
On the plus side, something relatively obscure gets shuffled off into its own wiki. I only wish the same could be said of all the extensive articles on various fictional universes...
Please help metamoderate.
There's also the fact that wikipedia removes anything "not notable." What is "not notable" is usually whatever a bunch of wikipedia bureaucrats decide. Wikipedia, being run by your traditional fatnerd, is more likely to label this sort of stuff as "not notable" as opposed to something they would find notable (like the made-up histories of individual Final Fantasy characters or the stats of pokemon characters).
Well, of course those smaller (in scope) sites should be created. Again, it is necessary to understand that an encyclopedia, online or otherwise, is meant to be a starting point for inquiries, not the be-all and end-all of knowledge for all time.
Already the site has better coverage of some areas than Wikipedia, leading to the question of whether more such small Wikis should be created for certain verticals.
Wikipedia aims to be a general encyclopedia, larger and more thorough than any print encyclopedia to be sure, but it's still a general reference. Of course more specific references should be created. It's not like this is a new idea: search Amazon for books titled Encyclopedia of... and you'll find thousands, many (though probably not most) of which are serious scholarly works.
Excepting mathematics and the sciences, which are arguably applicable to the whole of human experience in one way or another, practically every other area of human knowledge has a highly specialized audience to one degree or another. Every last possible detail about pre-1947 aircraft engines, for example, might be of great interest to aerospace historians and engineers, but it's probably not of much interest to anyone else. Or an encyclopedic reference to every last town in Ohio might be hugely interesting to Ohioans and genealogists, and at least occasionally significant to broader research, but again, of limited interest to the general public. Unless Wikipedia (and its donors) are prepared to maintain a comprehensive reference to the entire body of human knowledge, specialist references are unavoidable.
Finally, the quality of the articles in those specialist references might be higher than in Wikipedia. Every field has sloppy researchers and trolls, of course, but a relatively specialized field probably has a smaller proportion of both than would be attracted to a general reference, within certain limits, e.g., one could reasonably expect a wiki devoted to quaternions to have better writers and fewer trolls than AbortionPedia.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
The problem is, if something is not notable in the USA, then it is not notable for Wikipedia at all.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
I already use http://asianmediawiki.com for anything related to asian movies and dramas. Way better than wikipedia or imdb for that matter in that realm.
I find wikiporono.org more helpful than wikipedias porn portal.
I want a wiki that contains a coredump of all human knowledge, notable or not. I'd get stuck in even worse wikiloops.
You know about some obscure film that was a knockoff of batman produced by 2 Chileans and a Russian in Azerbaijan in 1974?
BRING IT ON. I want to know the life story of the three producer/director/actors as well. What the name of their third cat was. What brand of cigarettes they smoked. Everything is notable.
Sent from my PDP-11
Despite all the whining about slashdot "editors", I'd rather have them pick stories, rather than these PR marketing bullshit submitted.
I really hate to use such language, but "slashdot" has a brand value. Don't destory it.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
8 Pages, and 3 of them are test entries, and two are one-liners. Extremely slow news day? :\
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
yep.
damn those ex-government monopolies holding back innovation.
although tbf, since Telstra is over 100 years, you'd expect that their page would be a bit longer.
Looks like delimiter have some work on their hands...
Wait! Whats a sig?
This isn't even newsworthy in Australia, so how the heck is this newsworthy on Slashdot?
A "wiki for Australian technology" already exists in a way, though mostly focused on the internet: it's the Whirlpool.net Wiki. Brilliant resource.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Surely Whirlpool's wiki is an 'Aussie tech-focused wikipedia', and it's already got thousands of mature articles, e.g.
A series of articles on working in IT industry in Australia:
http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/?tag=it_telco
A comprehensive guide to PC parts, prices and specs:
http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/?tag=rmp_sg_whirlpoolpcs
Telstra is early '90s. Telecom was the '70s. Before that it was part of PMG. Maybe Australia Post kept the early history.
I'm much more inclined towards dumping my archives and knowledge of the Australian computer industry, especially from the 1980s when I was in the loop with many key players, into something like this than trying to make more than the most minor edits to Wikipedia itself.
For some time I've been saying it would be best if Wikipedia could connect relatively seamlessly with specialised wikis where each local or narrow community could manage their own authentication process.
If I could find some way of better covering living expenses short of selling my soul to assist somebody else's agenda, I could easily spend a hopefully longish retirement working mostly on similar projects. The only problem is that I'm sitting on at least half a dozen other areas where I have more again that should be made available and I doubt Aubrey de Grey is going to keep me alive long enough to get them all done.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Wikipedia would have this, and lots of other content, if there wasn't those guys who are known as The Deletionists who pretty much delete every article which isn't controversial mess. Non-controversial topics don't have many people keeping a close eye on them, and when they get flagged for deletion, nobody really notices that before too late.
"Australian technology, what's that? Never heard, DELETE!"
Why not just update Wikipedia.org with this information? Whats the point, other than media whoring, of starting another project with exactly the same goal focused over a smaller area? Oh yeah... the media whoring and publicity...
I was editing on the Creatures Wiki in late 2004, and launched WikiFur in July 2005 - in part, because Wikipedia didn't want detailed articles on that particular topic. You're a little late to the party, but welcome. :-)
You can't really conclude that. That'd be more to do with the fact that the site is less than 12 hours 'old', so not many users have written entries for it yet (and for that matter, there aren't many users yet).
The tech sector in Australia is no smaller or bigger than in any other similar sized country AFAIK. Most of it is dominated by the usual multinational suspects (MS, IBM, Oracle, HP, Novell etc.) but there are a few Australian companies that are fairly substantial in size (although these are primarily consulting firms rather than hardware/software development companies ... most of those get to a certain size then get bought out by one of aforementioned large multinationals).
The telco/ISP area is interesting though. Companies like Internode, iiNet/Westnet, TPG etc. are Australian-grown and have become rather successful and large. Actually come to think of it, there aren't many foreign companies that have come here and done that well in that sector - Optus (Singtel) and foreign mobile operators like Vodafone and Virgin are about it.
DILLIGAF?
AC
"You can't really conclude that. That'd be more to do with the fact that the site is less than 12 hours 'old', so not many users have written entries for it yet.."
In another 12 hours, access will be blocked by the moron govt. because somebody cited too much from a copyrighted handbook or manual.
Wow, this is NEWS! I am sure there is a Wiki with more furry-related information than Wikipedia, too. Do I care? No. Does it appear on /.? No. And a good thing, also.
I concur, we need a wikipedia like tool dumb down to a myspace/geocites level
This exists. It used to be called Wikicities and is now called Wikia. Essentially it's a set of wikis for everything that won't fit in an encyclopedia. And I recommend it for any vertical that can stand the ads.
When you get right down to it, what we are seeing here is basically the same thing we saw that came out of stack overflow. Jeff Atwood and co realised that sites like yahoo answers were a good idea but once you included all people into the debate about something very particular you basically get a mess of /b/arstards cloggin up the system. And that is how you got stack overflow.
I always thought Stack Overflow was created out of frustration with ExpertS-exChange's paywall.
The Swiss have their own army, but what languages do they speak? German, Italian, and French, not "Swiss". (Romansh with only 1 percent of speakers doesn't count.)
Freebase has no notability criteria. Its only criteria is your data be in structured format, basically.
That, and you need to smoke crack first.
THIS is a wiki!
Seriously. Well, now there's like 19 or 20, but still: seriously.
I don't really have any complaint with this, but it's a teeny bit early to begin bragging about how much better than Wikipedia you are, eh?
http://www.delimiter.com.au/wiki/index.php?title=Neptune_Informatics - Look now they've been trolled, too. Rock.
Comment of the year
Apart from a bunch of data pages on locally prominent sports, Whirlpool is very much a now reference.
Delimiter seems to be aiming more for a sociological view of Australian IT.
For me the simple test was Microbee, the only locally developed computer which ever gained significant market share and which is prominent in Delimiter's wiki but absent from Whirlpool.
Clearly the publicity here is already doing some Delimiter good as there are already quite a few more pages and categories than when I looked a few hours ago, including one on Whirlpool.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
The first time I heard a sales guy use the term "verticals," I stopped him because I had no idea what that meant. He said that verticals are markets - health care, construction, etc. I said, "so a vertical is an industry?" Yep, he said.
I still hear the term a lot and think it's useless. To me, "vertical" implies a chain of processes leading towards a finished product. For example, the old railroad tycoons would get vertical monopolies by buying up the mines, the steel forges, the rail car manufacturers, etc, so that no competitor could threaten (or access) their supply of railroad ties and trains.
Competing businesses in the same field are not in the same "vertical" in that sense. It's easier for me to visualize them side by side.
But the main thing is, we already have a perfectly good word for this: "industry," or in certain contexts, "market." I'm preaching to the wrong crowd, I know, but please, let's avoid useless business jargon.
Wikipedia already links to zillions of external websites for deeper cover on a topic - why should a detailed history of the Australian tech industry be any different?
Whirlpool.net.au has had a wiki for quite some time, although if one may argue that the Whirlpool wiki software isn't like most, There's was (until recently) the JelTel wiki (jeltel are a reseller), which contained alot of information about the Australian ITT industry. OP needs to do his homework, or is spamming his own website?
In the highly interesting field of obscure martial arts we despaired. A pharmacist from Manchester kept deleting every bit of information we wrote. So we did this instead http://www.akban.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK
Hmmm. There is a lot of visual content out there begging to be tagged and used culturally. By insisting on copy righted media content Wikipedia ignores a treasure of video and other data.
I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK
"Already the site has better coverage of some areas than Wikipedia, leading to the question of whether more such small wikis should be created for certain verticals."
What? daria42, have you been under a rock? That question is already answered!
You might remember a Slashdot article quite a ways back that talked about Wikipedia deleting entire entries where no one could definitively argue if it was "notable" content. One of them was an article detailing the weapons technology used by the Space Marines in the Warhammer 40K universe. Well now you can just type "w40k wiki" into Google and the very first search result is Warhammer 40K Wiki. It not only solves the problem of proving notability, but you can be assured that everything of relevance to the W40K universe will not be rejected by Wikipedia's nazis and is available in a conveniently cross-referenced database maintained by people who cherish the material.
If you are the gaming type, you can put in a game's title and the word 'wiki' after it as the terms for a Google search. The more popular or more dedicated fanbase it has, the greater the probability a Wiki was started for it. Some great examples are the Fallout Wiki, Star Wars wiki aka the "Wookiepedia", Star Trek wiki, Final Fantasy wiki and the Tekken wiki.....which covers quite a few the passions of the Slashdot community.
Just so the history books understand my rant, the title used to be:
Aussie Tech-Focused Wikipedia Launched
...and now it's magically changed to
Aussie Tech-Focused Wiki Launched
See, there's no "Updated on date blah blah by timothy: line as there is in most updated slashdot articles.
Maybe Slashdot needs its own Wikiped... I mean, Wiki. Then we'd get version control for free!
coding is life