Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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..
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.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
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).
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.
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.
That's not really true. I've personally written articles on obscure German politicians, for example, and gotten no pushback at all. If you write a decent stub, and include a few citations to reputable sources, nobody will even blink at it. The citations don't even have to be in English--- a cite to some mainstream German newspapers, or to the Neue Deutsche Biographie, is plenty.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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
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!"
I just found that there's a Wikipedia entry deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia despite the fact that this clearly isn't what you would normally consider encyclopedic material. I wonder why the deletionists didn't delete it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I think it's an ad for blinds, at least that's what Verticals are here.
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.
One of the major roadblocks is "NO ORIGINAL RESEARCH" doctrine.
If your sources are not quotable (say, you know some a traditional technique that was passed from father to son), if the sources are obscure (a photo with a name tag, in a school's yearbook, school already closed, yearbook in town's archives), if the sources are volatile (you write the article on a current event as you hear it reported over the radio), if the sources are inaccessible for wider public (you publish an article on ancient text in a dead language, and you publish a full translation you just made yourself, along with the original text), and so on and so on.
Generally, if you know something worthy of Wikipedia, you can't just publish it. You must either find a source or -create- one. And such "second hand wikis" are a good place for creating these sources.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
The problem is that Wikipedia accepts only stuff printed on paper as source (its not quite, but close enough), this makes it close to impossible in some regions to write content. Look at homebrew on consoles, you can find tons of information about it out there or just try it yourself, but you hardly find anything about it in the mainstream press or ever the gaming press. The best you can find is some rather useless generic talk that doesn't tell you more then "it exists". The reason for that is simply that the whole mainstream gaming press is simply in the pockets of the game industry, they simply don't want to spoil their connection to the game industry by doing in depth reporting on devices which can be used for piracy.
Another problem is simply that some things are outside the scope of a Wikipedia or non-notable. You can't get an detailed article about a minor character in a game into Wikipedia and neither can you get a complete game walkthrough into Wikipedia.
I find it quite annoying that Wikipedia just blocks this additional content instead of creating infrastructure for more niche kind of knowledge (say when you have "Monkey Island" also allow "Monkey Island/Walkthrough" and other detail information which doesn't need to follow the strict criteria of the main Wikipedia). But well, that's the way it is and thus you get tons of specialized Wikis out there and thus a fragmentation of the infrastructure.