Happy 10th Birthday To Wikipedia

Greg writes "Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, first launched on January 15, 2001. Today, the website is thus 10 years old. To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Wikipedia is hosting some 400 conferences and parties across the globe. In traditional Wikipedia style, the events are being organized by its community of users. After a decade of growth, Wikipedia is an important source of information for millions of topics and remains among the Internet's top 10 most visited sites. It has over 400 million readers each month and has a very small budget for a website its size: just $20 million. Almost all its revenue comes from donations. In its last fundraising push, the organization saw 500,000 users donate $16 million."

Comments

may it die soon

[FuckingNickName]

Wikipedia's done a lot to damage the 'net. It used to be that autonomous entities acting under often well-known editorial control would be first ports of call for various subjects, but now everyone wastes their time in the edit war game that is Wikipedia. It's the worst example of centralisation of Internet control - Facebook may be larger, but it is primarily an entertainment service. Google's flawed popularity ranking algorithm (does anyone remember when nerds used to point out that popular does not imply best?) always leads people to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia won't die, but we are at least progressively seeing fewer people take it seriously. May the next decade see it turn into something perceived as valuable to humanity as Facebook.

Re:may it die soon

[FuckingNickName]

You'll find a list of resources used to support the article, which is nowhere near the same as finding an unbiased, exhaustive list of resources recommended by known individuals with a reputation to maintain.

Re:may it die soon

[macshit]

Naw, you're completely wrong. Wikipedia isn't perfect, but it's very much a positive.

In areas where it "works" -- science, engineering, other technical subjects, reference information (e.g. documenting the stations of a country's rail networks) -- Wikipedia has vastly increased the consistency, coverage, and quality of easily-available information on a huge number of subjects. Prior to Wikipedia, even with a good search engine it was much less likely you'd find information on a particular subject, and if you found something, it was often very incomplete and of lower quality, or if high-quality, was often behind a paywall. What's on Wikipedia now is often a little less well-written than a professional reference would be, because of the multiple authors -- but that's in fact often not really a bad thing, because many wikipedia articles end up covering subjects in a way that's approachable to multiple levels of ability (e.g. they'll have sections targeted at experts, and easy examples for novices)

There are other references on technical subjects that are occasionally of higher quality than Wikipedia., but they're balkanized, often less complete even within their specialty simply because of the effort required to be complete, and far, far, more difficult to find in the first place (often the best way is through the references at the bottom of a corresponding Wikipedia page!). Of course these are useful as a sanity check or different of view for the corresponding information in Wikipedia, but Wikipedia's role, of binding together multiple subjects, and covering all the gritty details, is very valuable, and increases the usability and accessibility of these other sources (much as a traditional encyclopedia or survey might for more specialized sources).

Wikipedia is so useful for these technical subjects that I'm not sure what to think about people whining that "Wikipedia is crap!1!", other than they've never actually used it for anything other than looking up "George W Bush" and "abortion"...

Re:"a very small budget for a website"

[the linux geek]

For one of the most-used websites on the Internet, that budget is tiny.

Re:Important not not authoriative

[cheekyjohnson]

Wikipedia may be an important source but it's rarely 100% correct on any given subject.

I've seen plenty of articles that contained correct information. That said, it would be absurdly difficult for you to find a book/website that is 100% correct in every way.

I've seen shocking bias, inconsistancy, and lawyering on wikipedia and would not fully trust it for anything.

What's stopping you from fixing it?

10? Acts more like a 2-year-old.

[blair1q]

Shouting nonsense, throwing tantrums when you try to make it do the right thing, always trying to get more out of you.

Re:"a very small budget for a website"

[Urkki]

That revenue stream is tiny.

Can you imagine how much it'd be worth if it was ad-supported?

Zuck would be Jimbo's bitch.

Better yet, imagine if advertisers were allowed to buy space in the articles itself, and to buy removal of links to their competitors? Yearly bidding, highest bidder gets ownership of an article for a year (to improve it and make it more accurate, of course)

Re:Important not not authoriative

[shadowknot]

Not every time. I'm not interesting in getting into an edit war with someone trying to push an agenda.

Perhaps it's **you** who have an agenda... Who knows...

Truth is _everyone_ has an agenda in some way or another. The notion of absolute neutrality is a fallacy and anyone who claims to be 100% neutral is fooling themselves. Striving for neutrality is another issue and with such a large user base contributing there is always likely to be some bias on issues people really care about (which is almost everything) and there's very little you can do about it other than get your information from many sources in an attempt to triangulate the truth.

Re:Important not not authoriative

[syousef]

What's stopping you from fixing it?

Have you tried contributing lately? More hoops to jump through than a building permit. Chances are what you write will be removed even if you give good references. I use to contribute but I quickly came to the conclusion that I was wasting my time.

Re:"a very small budget for a website"

[MichaelSmith]

That revenue stream is tiny.

Can you imagine how much it'd be worth if it was ad-supported?

Zuck would be Jimbo's bitch.

Better yet, imagine if advertisers were allowed to buy space in the articles itself, and to buy removal of links to their competitors? Yearly bidding, highest bidder gets ownership of an article for a year (to improve it and make it more accurate, of course)

Then it would be worth almost nothing.

Re:Important not not authoriative

[maxwell demon]

What's stopping you from fixing it?

Other people on Wikipedia?

How to use Wikipedia

[drb226]

1. Look up an article on Wikipedia
2. Find the facts you were looking for
3. Check the sources for given facts, or Google for them if not present
4. Profit!!!!

Honestly, so many slashdotters crying about the suckiness of Wikipedia are just using it wrong. Wikipedia is not the source of all truth. (protip: neither is Britannica)

Debate about Wikipedia is too consumer-oriented

[blubadger]

You think that article X is [wrong] [incomprehensible] [incomplete]? So fix it yourself.

There's too much on X and not enough on Y? Go on then, write the Y article.

The editors are [self-serving] [elitist] [evil]? Come back and complain after you've done a thankless stint reverting vandalism.

Wikipedia is crazy not to take ads? Would you work for free in order for someone else to get paid?

The Wikipedia criticism industry is a pure product of the me-me-me consumer age. The marvel of Wikipedia is precisely that it is not a consumer product. It is about the producers and their astounding feat of working together, unremunerated, while sorting out their differences, to create an incredible body of written knowledge that didn't exist before.