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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."
Happy Birthday! Happy Birthday to you!!!
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Not notable.
Futurist Traditionalism
[citation-needed] ;)
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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.
What's their source on the age of Wikipedia? A Wikipedia article?!
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
...I'm going to trust whoever might show up and express an interest, because I'm no damned élitist.
just $20 million
Uh. Yeah. That's a really small budget . . . ?
Her Majesty The Queen
Buckingham Palace
London SW1A 1AA
United Kingdom
Is that sufficient payment?
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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?
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Grumpalopes. Hit reply on the wrong post.
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Two tenth birthdays in one week - that's impressive!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Her Majesty The Queen
Buckingham Palace
London SW1A 1AA
United Kingdom
Is that sufficient royalty payment?
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Right after seeing these issues, you clicked the Edit button and corrected them, yes?
Not every time. I'm not interesting in getting into an edit war with someone trying to push an agenda.
What's their source on the age of Wikipedia? A Wikipedia article?!
I read that, in the last six months, the Wikipedia's age has tripled.
#DeleteChrome
I don't have to puke everytime I visit wikipedia anymore, Mr HappyFace is gone and I hope he won't make another appearance.
I've encountered plenty of bias and inaccuracies over the years, but it's often a good starting point along with Google.
What makes it a real pain in the ass is the ridiculous bureaucracy that has developed over the years. It's treated as a god-given truth, to be enforced by a swarm of rabid followers with a need to prove something to the world.
Shouting nonsense, throwing tantrums when you try to make it do the right thing, always trying to get more out of you.
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...
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
FTFY.
Wikipedia isn't important. Without it, Google would get you the data
In fact, without Wikipedia, Google would probably be even more useful than it is, as people link to things themselves from their pages instead of just letting Wikipedia do it. That would push up Google pagerank for real informational pages, making them show up sooner above all the linkspam.
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.
Sure. 90% correct would do fine but you can't be sure if any article really is 10% or 100% correct without doing a whole load of research. If I'm doing that kind of research anyway what use is wikipedia? Sure it's great on subjects You know nothing about because any knowledge will be an improvement.
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?
Edit wars and editors pushing an agenda. Administrators who go off the deep end at anything they perceive as a 'personal attack'.
And spelling and grammer nazi's who revert entire passages for one misspelling. And a lack of time and frankly interest in dealing with their bureaucracy.
Did I mention administrators who delete new pages without even trying to read or improve them?
And the assumption that if you don't react to something within a few minutes you agree with it.
Updating even small details can become a huge time drain.
Man, the way you talk about it, it almost sounds like it lives up to the standards of our national media.
This space available.
The 10th Birthday of Wikipedia
- Introduction
- History of Wikipedia
- In Animé
- In Manga
- In Graphic Novels
- In Western Animation
- External Links
Anybody have a blurry, grainy cell phone camera to take a shot of the main page?
My main gripe with the site is that tends to be content weighted towards hero worship of currently popular entertainers, athletes and other celebrities. Some articles read like they were written by a publicist's or agent's office and others by obsessed fans.
I saw the giant banner at the top of the page. Good thing people donated - thereby ensuring that they don't need to move to an ad-supported model - adding giant banners at the top.
The irony.
Due to recent edits on wikipedia, wikipedia is today, in fact, having it's 250th anniversary.
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.
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.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Sir,
My name is Jimmy Wales. Ten years ago not a lot of people believed a second-rate day trader turned pornographer would be able to follow the Rand dream by exploiting thousands of people across the Internet into wasting their time writing a successful web site for him, the only purpose of which was to further his fame and bank account.
At that time it would have been silly to suggest that antisocial twenty-somethings would spend months - sometimes years - warring over some irrelevant fact to establish their bias in an atrociously written article covering some topic related to their political belief or esoteric interest. I would have been laughed at if I'd have suggested that people across the world wouldn't consider me bordering on racially exploitative if I suggested that people should donate toward this project to help the "child in Africa".
But it's 2011, guys, and, fuck me! I did it.
So, if you learnt just a little bit about how a lack of scruples and a solid cult of personality can earn a creepy middle aged man world-wide fame while diminishing the usefulness the world's most important information medium, why not donate at least £5/$5/€5? After all, if I can do it, maybe you can. Let me sell you a drop of the most pathological corruption of the capitalist dream. And that's why you're really donating, isn't it?
Sincerely,
Jimmy Wales
Sole Founder
Wikipedia.org
You just described encyclopedias in general.
Where can I sign up for your newsletter?
Free Manning, jail Obama.
Correction,
Feli[citation needed]!
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
the lack of so called citations required
There's actually a very good reason for this.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
90% correct would do fine but you can't be sure if any article really is 10% or 100% correct without doing a whole load of research.
It's the same for everything else.
If I'm doing that kind of research anyway what use is wikipedia?
A place where other people can benefit from your research.
As for the rest of your post, I admit that I'm not sure how often such things happen, so I can't really comment on that.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Other people on Wikipedia?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
My main gripe with the site is that tends to be content weighted towards hero worship of currently popular entertainers, athletes and other celebrities. Some articles read like they were written by a publicist's or agent's office and others by obsessed fans.
Maybe that is because they were written by a publicist's or agent's office, or by obsessed fans.
Remember, everyone can write an article, and most articles are written by people who particularly care about the subject, i.e. in this case the celebrity. Now who cares about celebrities? Well, usually either those who live from them (publicists, agents) or those who are fans of them.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
What's their source on the age of Wikipedia? A Wikipedia article?!
I read that, in the last six months, the Wikipedia's age has tripled.
In that case, Wikipedia must be nine months now.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
What's stopping you from fixing it?
The mods/editors?
I have anonymously edited once or twice some obscure article of wikipedia (articles from Mexico and Spanish based stuff) which get "undone" after a couple of days just because some mod does not agree with the truth ... or "just because".
After doing it several times it gets tyring and you just give up... wikipedia is just the encyclopedia of the hundred few to choose to spend their majority of time working the "politics" of such site.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
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.
Yes, but even Star Trek contains correct information on plenty of things. That doesn't make it authoritative.
Historically, encyclopaedias relied on experts for their information (yes, I know, they were put together by editors, not the experts themself). With Wikipedia, just about anybody can contribute and the information stays there and incorrect information stays there until somebody who knows the correct information a) stumbles upon the incorrect information, b) cares enough to correct the incorrect information, and c) actually takes the time to correct it.
I'm not saying that Wikipedia is bad or unusable, but most research papers exclude it from being a valid source, at least directly. Where it really shines, though is if the article has real footnotes (not just links to other Wikipedia pages). Then the actual sources can be reviewed.
Wikipedia needs two types of articles. The current "it may be accurate, it may not, so use at your own risk" and one that has some sort of impramtur authenticating its accuracy.
90% correct would do fine but you can't be sure if any article really is 10% or 100% correct without doing a whole load of research.
It's the same for everything else.
If I'm doing that kind of research anyway what use is wikipedia?
A place where other people can benefit from your research.
As for the rest of your post, I admit that I'm not sure how often such things happen, so I can't really comment on that.
The problem is that we are not discussing "everything else" but only Wikipedia. And if the poster actually put his/her research on Wikipedia or updated an inaccurate page, it wouldn't matter, there still is no way of knowing if it is accurate or not (although citations help tremendously).
Wikipedia is to legitimate research what blogging is to legitimate journalism. Both provide interesting reads, but where one requires accountability, the other only suggests it.
What's stopping you from fixing it?
Primarily, lack of persistence to "fight" the trolls who have nothing better to do with their lives than to squat their pet articles to "preserve and protect" their versions of the articles forever.
[ This article does not cite any references or sources ]
[ Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed (January 2011) ]
[ This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. The talk page may contain suggestions (January 2011) ]
Wikipedia is 10 years old [citation needed]. 10 years helping students to do copy&paste thinking they would get good marks at school [1]. 10 years of Creative Commons content [citation needed].
So, happy [citation needed] birthday Wikipedia!
References
____________
[1] Common sense. At least in Portugal.
[ This article is a stub. Please help Wikipedia by improving it ]
http://gbl08ma.com
i have history as my hobby and i do a lot of reading. before, it was quite burdensome. finding the right subject article, finding it in right detail. then, needing to get more detail on a sub-section and having to go all through that over and over again with horrible half assed results from google, altavista, yahoo searches etc, enthusiast forums this that.
wikipedia changed it for me. sufficient detail on each article, sufficient detail in each of the relevant topics you can go into from in-site links, at whatever level of depth you want, and, if you need much more, i could just check the references and do lengthy, in-concise, academic reading from those references.
i had had devoured much more topics and subjects on world history in just 2-3 years than i did in the preceding 15 years, even using my university's library back then. (to the extent of reading francis drake's journals from his own book).
yeah, so i thank wikipedia. i thank everyone who had contributed to it. from heart. thank you.
note : on biases, trolling, this that - if one does not have the mental prowess to discern biases, s/he shouldnt be reading anything that is publicized in the first place. EVERYthing has biases, including encyclopedia britannica, and larousse. criticizing wikipedia for biased articles, is bullshit of the first order.
Read radical news here
Actually Wikipedia started out with GFDL content. RMS even made a special exception in the new version of the GFDL to allow Wikipedia to switch to CC.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
wikipedia is just the encyclopedia of the hundred few to choose to spend their majority of time working the "politics" of such site.
This seems unfair. If you hang around the articles on hot button issues for Slashdotters, like gun stuff, iPads or climate change, I can imagine you see quite a bit of Wikipedia politics. But a lot of people are making small contributions across a huge number of less contentious articles. Take a look at the article history for J. J. Thomson. From June to December there were 433 edits, and the article got slightly better. Quite a lot of this was unsung work like reverting edits like "wats up peeps u know me" or "Hi im JOohnnnnnn". There is a lot of fixing going on, and I'm sure it is more than a few hundred people doing it.
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit
Really, when was the last time you edited a Wikipedia article via Tor or an anonymous proxy server? So, no, the "anyone" part needs to be changed since Wikipedia discriminates against users of those services, who can only edit when their proxy is fresh enough not to be included in the list of banned IPs. Yeah, I know, there's a reason behind the anti-open-proxy policy but, still, not everybody (who wishes to maintain their anonymity) can edit Wikipedia.
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)
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.
Wikipedia, all knowledge of the world at your fingertips, without advertising, ADs or banners....
Nohing more absolutely UNTRUE!
Each and every article of wikipedia visited (without storing the cookies) always has that one or another banner, most with the face of Jimmy Wales
- We need money
- Please donate
- We need more money
[here the average Joe gives up and goes to donate something, it's for a good cause]
- We still need money
- Thanks for the money
[at this point our friend Joe might think it's over with the banners..]
- More Thanks for the money
- Some other initiative of ourselves!
- Happy birthday to ourselves!
- Wikipedia 10 years!
- Wikipedia 10 years and one month!
- A personal message of Jimmy Wales: I have a new dog!
[ and so forth to the infinite, not to mention how the text of the banners is in a different language every time, based on the page visited]
The ironic part is that things are structured in a way that not even Adblock hides such banners, no filter seems to contain them.
Now, Jimmy, mate,
THANKS for Wikipedia, REALLY it is a GREAT thing you gave to the world, but...
1. It's ok, your beardy friendly face has been shown enough to the all world in all possible languages. You are a star!
2. You reached the financing target for 2010. New years new chances, but please give donors a bit fresh air without the banners.
3. "Wikipedia has no Advertisement": don't you think that's just a bit contradictory? Wikipedia itself is the most annoying advertiser I had on my browser in the past 10 years!
4. I give you 10 dollars if you take away all Wikipedia banners about Wikipedia for an entire Wikipedia month.
Wikithanks.
After I got into an edit war because some douchebag admin doesn't know the difference between affect and effect, and isn't willing to let anyone change his precious article... yeah, no.
Wikipedia has the nofollow attribute on all of its external links *, so the Google's pagerank would not be affected. **
How do you know this? Did you double check the information (something you should always do no matter where you get your information from)? My point is that you should always question the source of the information and verify its correctness. Although you can likely assume that information written by an expert is more likely to be correct, it is by no means infallible.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
That depends on how you define "correct". Even in mathematics texts, there can be typos. In addition, older texts will omit more current mathematical knowledge (e.g., all books listing "open problems in number theory" which predate Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem).
But I'd guess that the majority of "wrong" in such texts is in the attribution of the theorems which are used --- there's a huge number of math theorems which are attributed to the mathematicians who conjectured them rather than to the mathematicians who proved them, or to more famous mathematicians who are not the first mathematicians to have proven them.
If one raises the level of "pedantic" enough, I can imagine you might have a hard time to find those 10% of 100% "correct" mathematics texts.
The notion of absolute neutrality is a fallacy and anyone who claims to be 100% neutral is fooling themselves.
If you think that means that two messages are equally valid and worthwhile then you need your head examined.
I prefer the agenda of people who are doing their best to inform and enlighten me and make me aware of all the alternatives that they are aware of and think are worth knowing.
I detest people who have an agenda of maximizing their profit, regardless of the cost to me.
---
There are many corporate shills on social media sites like slashdot fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion. Make these scums' life hell.
Disclaimer: Whenever I state something in this reply to sound like absolute truth, please read it as "In an ideal world, they would do it like this".
Wikipedia has a big advantage over Google when looking for information on a given subject: The articles have been written to summarize all the important bits for quick and easy absorption. If you want to get a basic grasp of something you can use Wikipedia for a summary, and then the citations, references, footnotes etc. for deeper investigation.
Not very long ago I needed the population numbers of a series of countries. Rather than finding miles of census reports from each individual country, trying to find an English version, trying to find the one number I need, I just checked each country's Wikipedia page.
Was the number accurate? Maybe not to the most current census in some cases, but I didn't need to-the-minute accuracy, just a rough idea of how many people lived in each country, and that's not a number that normally fluctuates wildly from year to year.
Wikipedia has its uses over Google when it comes to quick facts.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Have you tried contributing lately?
Well, I have. And I've had pretty much no problems, no hoops to jump through. The worst response I've got was an 'unreferenced' message put on a new page I created. Which was quite accurate. I added one reference, and the page has seen no further problems.
Of course, the fact that it's still working pretty well isn't nearly as interesting as complaining about idiots reverting your changes, so carry on.
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.
What you say?
Just grab the nearest Bible, Torah or Koran! Mission accomplished!
Prosp long and liver.
You missed the point.
If there were no wikipedia, people wouldn't rely on wikipedia's reference links.
Each of those links would appear in thousands more pages, because they wouldn't be in the wikipedia at all, because it wouldn't exist.
Huge pagerank karma bump, and more informational links in Google searches.
Wikipedia is eroding Google's usefulness by aggregating those paths to the endpoint. And further by turning on the nofollow.
I bet you could have googled up a table with all of them in one place. 10-20% chance the table's in Wikipedia, more chance it's not. Oops. unit probability
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.
It would be good to think that it "works" at least in those areas --- but I'm afraid that's not true without qualification.
There are many technical and scientific topics where there are popular misconceptions around. In too many Wikipedia cases it is unfortunately the popular misconception that survives on Wikipedia.
In some cases, editors favor a popular but mistaken view, and even take down sound citation-supported posts, deleting good references to replace them with substandard material (supported by poor citations that occasionally are even journalistic hogwash).
They can do this within Wikipedia policies, because Wikipedia has a policy for "verifiability, not truth" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability. A journalistic hogwash print source can still be a perfectly "reliable" (in the Wikipedia sense) supporting citation to "verify" (in the Wikipedia sense) a popular misconception.
So when editors put in substandard references and delete better references, in support of edits pushing their preferred point of view, this false 'Verifiability' standard means there is nothing much in practice to stop them.
The Wikipedia "verifiability, not truth" standard is false because a verifiability that is 'not truth' is only a pseudo-verifiability. There's seemingly no policy that (with any reasonable force) facilitates and encourages exclusion of pseudo-verifiable but untrue material.
I would want to wish Wikipedia success in building a truthful and reliable encyclopedia, but the current pseudo-verifiability policy means that it can't even be moving in the right direction.
-wb-
This slide pretty much sums it up.
The Wikimedia Foundation is extremely efficient in its server operation.
It's only okay to have someone else present their selection of options to you if you are educated enough to understand what that means and see beyond the terms they present the arguments in. Unfortunately most people are never taught how to do that. Instead of wasting time with Religious Studies we should teach philosophy and methods of critical thinking.
If people just understood how to evaluate the morality of an action without simply forcefully comparing it to something they think of as related an absolutely good/bad we could progress a lot quicker. Take the legalisation of abortion; few people seem to understand the reason why it is considered regrettable but morally acceptable, they just hold that it is and parrot some vague stuff about freedom of choice.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's the same for everything else.
Not really, that's why I still read books and magazines. They are professionally edited and their accuracy and authenticity is attested to by their reputation. That is why Wikipedia requires you to cite them; there are no expert editors who can check and corroborate the information.
That creates a situation where an article can either contain factually incorrect information that has not been flagged up yet (lack of editorial oversight and peer review), or omit important information because no-one did the research and came up with enough supporting citations to get it in.
Articles go up on Wikipedia before they are adequately edited sometimes stay that way for years. At least with a book from a respected publisher you can be reasonably sure that they checked it. Wikipedia is fine for getting the basics and some leads to learn more, but it claims to be more than that so criticism is legitimate I feel.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Not really, that's why I still read books and magazines.
Ah, so books and magazines are infallible (no, but "professionally edited" ones may be assumed to be more likely to be correct, I guess). I see. Always double check your information. I've seen many articles that contained correct information (admittedly, they are usually the ones that provide citations, but that's why they are there).
but it claims to be more than that so criticism is legitimate I feel.
There's rarely such a thing as illegitimate criticism.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
There are no expert editors who can check and corroborate the information.
There are some. The really sad thing is that an expert with a PhD who has written countless well respected books has less say in an article in his field of expertise than someone with no real knowledge but more free time.
I'll bet real experts don't contribute because it's pretty sickening to see someone with little idea but good intentions trashing your hard work.