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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."
Not notable.
Futurist Traditionalism
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.
For one of the most-used websites on the Internet, that budget is tiny.
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!
Her Majesty The Queen
Buckingham Palace
London SW1A 1AA
United Kingdom
Is that sufficient royalty payment?
This space unintentionally left blank.
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!!
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)
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
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!
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.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
Just like FB.
You can't handle the truth.
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, 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.
Historically, encyclopaedias relied on experts for their information (yes, I know, they were put together by editors, not the experts themself).
While this is true, that is what citations are for. Really, you shouldn't assume anything to be 100% correct, and no matter where you got your information from, you should double check it. This applies not only to Wikipedia, but to everything (when possible).
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
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. **
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.
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