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Meet the 36 People Who Run Wikipedia
blastboy writes By pretty much any logic, Wikipedia shouldn't work: A vast website, built on the labor of volunteers, with very few tangible rewards and a fairly weird hierarchy. From the article: "The stewards would prefer to go unnoticed. Only one has ever had any real fame—Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales served as a steward from 2006 to 2009. They operate above the fray, giving and taking user privileges and intervening in matters that lower-ranking editors can’t handle. You can summon them for emergencies in the Wikimedia Stewards IRC chat room by typing '!steward.' Their secrecy has a certain irony, given the very public product they manage, but perhaps it’s emblematic of Wikimedia as a whole. When your foundational value is that 'every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge,' hierarchies become a necessary evil."
HI,
While focused on an academic audience of organizational scholars, I have a friend who was a Steward and has written an ethnographic book about Wikipedia:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/searc...
If you are more interested in accessible information he's also written an editorial regarding Wikipedia for Slate:
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
Wikipedia shows that productive non-market egalitarian collaboration on a very wide scale is possible.
Peace to huts! War to palaces!
At least on the English Wikipedia. There are a few times when actually make decisions, but by and large they are just the "key-holders" and implement decisions made by the community or by higher-up functionaries.
* Yes I know, it's the administrators who are usually considered the janitors on the Wiki.
Citation Needed or GTFO
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
We keep acting like it is a bad thing, but it does have value. Well-organized hierarchies and react quickly. I would fully expect Wikipedia to be run by a well-organized group. Otherwise it wouldn't be as consistent as it is. Frankly, it is a bit of a miracle just how high the quality is across the board.
And because nobody pays attention to the stewards, they're not held accountable.
Whether it's the inevitability of your contribution being superseded and "overriden" eventually, or your efforts being reverted instantly (on controversial topics where the editor has an existing predisposition), one really should go into it knowing that their addition will likely be discarded one way or another.
For me personally, that means finding other venues in which to attempt to contribute--Slashdot's historical sister site Everything2, regardless of Wikipedia ultimately "winning" in popularity, actually continues to look better and better over time in that respect...
By all the evidence, it doesn't.
Utter pile of shitcuntitude & buttsnottery.
Such things also tend to work -- it's what our society is built upon.
The two actually have very little to do with each other.
They have in common all that matters for the point being made, which is that it's surprising that unpaid, unorganised contributors can make something worthwhile, even in the face of vandals/trolls, and on a limited budget.
Wikipedia's imperfections are not relevant here.
>"...your foundational value is that 'every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge'"...
Hah. If I could only count the number of factually correct pages that have disappeared over the years for failure to be "relevant" or "sufficiently important" or whatever metric they use, I'd be counting pretty damn high. Care about a regionally famous indie band from the mid 90's to the point that you'll carefully assemble what little information is out there about them? Too bad, gone in a blink, as if archive.org were complete and searchable for that stuff.
I've just never understood why something true should be excluded there.
Time and again people surface to tell us just how unjust Wikipedia's editing is, how unfair their Stewards are, how biased and whatnot it is... While staying deliberately vague and nonsensical. Point to an article that is biased, unjust and wrong and let's see it for ourselves or STFU!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Citations needed.
From Wikipedia's Statement of Principles:
Newcomers are always to be welcomed. There must be no cabal, there must be no elites, there must be no hierarchy or structure which gets in the way of this openness to newcomers.
Personally, I lost interest in contributing to it a few years ago when the sort of constructive, well intended stuff I had always contributed began to get reverted on a regular basis. I still contribute occasionally, but only things that are still unlikely to be reverted, that is, minor cleanups of articles that nobody (else) reads.
There are more than 36 bullies on Wikipedia.
Sounds like the Roman Catholic Church. Possibly without the sex.
Not only are they not relevant here, but they compare very well to traditionally respected organizations like Encyclopedia Britannica.
I actually believe you're more likely to find bias and agenda at EB than at Wikipedia, which is rather amazing considering Wiki is free and crowd-sourced.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yeah, I tried Wikipedia. Uploaded things like rare book covers. 100% public domain stuff. Had them deleted. Computer storage is infinite and free, but the powers that be at Wikipedia delete anything and everything that anyone contributes.
Computer storage is not free and infinite. If they delete anything and everything that anyone contributed, it would be an empty site, and it's not.
Wikipedia is clear about not being a democracy (a statement that many Wikipedians seem to ignore) ... I don't want to be part of a system that pretends to be open but isn't.
Do i need to say more?
By Manuel De Landa: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
From wikipedia:
"Information researchers have estimated that the entire print collections of the Library of Congress represent roughly 10 terabytes of uncompressed textual data."
So it looks like you can store as much text as the Library of Congress on hardware costing well less than $1000. I'd call that essentially free. Given that it would also store all the text in 3000 lifetimes of typing I'd call that essentially infinite as well.
>While it would be nice to have information about everything, those that are paying the bills for storage, replication and transmission have decided that there has to be a line somewhere or the data set gets too large.
Well, they use that 'relevancy' idea, so only the storage matters- after all, if it's truly irrelevant, they don't transmit or duplicate it. I'm not sure I can approve of a system that deletes a Library of Congress to save $1k.
my mother still has her copy of the 1972 EB - 32 volumes of it in red hardcover. As a kid I'd sit there and read them cover to cover (don't ask). The *isms just bleeding out of those pages boggles the mind. Volumes 1 and 2 of the New World Children's Encyclopedia (which she also has) is even scarier.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
It seems more and more stories on /. are just native advertising. Digging through all the stories to find something interesting is like digging through an email account with no spam filters.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
yeah that's not the right place for rare book covers. Try archive.org or better yet, project gutenberg.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
ok, now scale that up to a monolithic database that gets queried 50 million times a day and we'll see how long your thousand Dollars worth of hardware lasts.
Even Enterprise-grade hardware is prone to failure. I know from experience that it's a full time job for just one person doing just one thing in a large datacentre (and ten Terabytes is a large static dataset), that one thing being swapping out dead hard drives.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
> I've just never understood why something true should be excluded there.
If anyone can post anything and nothing is excluded, you end up with the internet.
They are trying to build an encyclopedia, not the internet. Most of the comments on this page are true, but they don't belong in an encyclopedia.
I knew I couldn't be the only one. I liked the smell of the leather binding. Our set was the revised 14th edition when it was put out by the University of Chicago. It's one of the reasons I knew I wanted to go there even when I was 9 years old. That and because my parents had this cool book about Enrico Fermi (we were an Italian-American household) and I could imagine his nuclear reactor under the Stagg Field bleachers. Those books were lovely to hold. And smell. My parents were mostly uneducated, but they had this thing about making sure we had lots of books in the house. Big, serious books. We had the Harvard Classics, too. And my dad, a WWII vet with 2 years of high school, read every one of those.
You are welcome on my lawn.
regarding your last comment: I certainly agree, although wikipedia does contain valid references which themselves can and should be cited where relevant, as wikipedia is intended as a starting point for research, not an endpoint. I might be mirroring wikipedia for my own use, but I am making sure (via dummy runs with small datasets) that links to citations are transferred intact. I'm giving it the extreme end of use case, merging my own dataset and running analysis on what's likely to end up approaching 100GB text data and another few dozen GB (not including wikipedia's own) of images. ...and if my netbook doesn't gain sentience after that lot, old son, fair dinkum it'll be a miracle.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I knew I couldn't be the only one.
Count me in as a charter member of the "Weird Kids Club" as well. It's sad that more kids didn't then and don't now have more of a passion for learning just for its own sake.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
The only EB I had access to until now has been the 1911 edition. But that is full of British Imperial bias. Do newer editions finally mention the Raid on the Medway to De Ruyter's biography, for example?
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
No. Not by any logic. By a gut feeling and 'common' sense, then yes.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Of course, facts don't agree with your view, therefore the mechanism for delivering them is broken, and certainly not your view.
Hard-left my ass.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Probably, since that statements doesn't make any sense.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
36.... 36.... 36....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
now just drop in a tesla 'mysteries of the 3 6 9' and you've got a winner!